Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  And he slid his arms round her. Una sank forward against him, feeling her diminished weight as he supported it, as she’d felt the slightness of her own fingers, weighed in his when he took her hand. The solid warmth of his body was better than that of the fire, it sheltered her. She could not ask herself to step away; it was too much. She rested languidly in his arms, almost half asleep.

  Then at last she whispered, ‘Where is your wife?’

  She felt Marcus tense slightly. ‘She’s in Nionia, with her family.’

  Una hesitated. ‘Is she coming back?’

  He held her more tightly, willing her not to pull back. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I think so.’

  Una sighed, and put up her hand to stroke his face. ‘I couldn’t answer your letter,’ she whispered. ‘How could I? What was there to say if I couldn’t see you?’

  ‘You’re here with me now,’ he said firmly, and kissed her. Una became even more limp than before, her arms falling loose from his back, but her lips softened against his, parting in a soundless little gasp. Marcus held her up, half-carried her into the bedroom. They undressed and held each other, nothing more. Una lay warm against him, her fingers spread on his chest, asleep almost at once. Marcus dozed, though not being as exhausted as she, he could not quite relax; he kept waking to look searchingly at her pale, drained face. And he stayed very still, not wanting to wake her.

  But once her eyes flickered open, and he whispered, stroking her hair, ‘What will you do tomorrow? Is this the last time? Will you leave me again?’

  Una shut her eyes again with a small protesting moan. ‘I don’t know. How can I know? I can’t bear it.’ She turned over, kissing the base of his throat, hiding her face from him.

  [ XXVII ]

  HOLZARTA

  A week afterwards, Sulien visited the new, larger flat in the Field of Mars where Lal was staying with Delir and Ziye. As the doors of the lift opened on their floor, he was surprised to find Delir waiting on the other side, with a bag in his hand. He had an agitated, fidgety look; he rose almost onto tiptoe, and smiled up at Sulien, but in a bright disordered way as if he couldn’t quite see him clearly.

  He said hurriedly, ‘You’re here to see Lal. I never thanked you for getting her out of that place. I was hard on you when you were in Holzarta; forgive me. You’re not of our religion – well, nor is Ziye, what matters more is the kind of person you are. You’ve shown you’re capable of protecting her.’

  Sulien stared, and shuffled, trapped like a rat in the lift, feeling redness sweep across his face. ‘Well, ah, thank you, but …’ he stammered. ‘But I just came to – and anyway, with what happened with Dama, I couldn’t have got away alone, she helped me as much as I helped her.’

  Delir blinked and looked bewildered, and to Sulien’s intense relief the almost manic glint cleared from his eyes. ‘Of course. Well. You’re a good boy.’ He clapped Sulien on the shoulder as they changed places, Delir entering the lift.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Sulien, relieved by now that Delir was leaving.

  ‘I don’t want to go on scrounging off Marcus for ever. I had some friends who were keeping money for me before we scattered from Holzarta; it wasn’t possible to collect all of it. And one of them has an idea about a textiles venture I might get involved with. I have to catch a train.’

  He shut the door of the lift. But through the grille, Sulien could see his expression turn hollow, blank, as he sank out of sight.

  *

  The trees were just coming into leaf, scraps of piercing green crumpled and wet like the wings of newly-hatched moths. The damp air was full of birds – thrushes, blackbirds, woodlarks – shouting above the white blast of the river. Yet the Holzarta gorge seemed unutterably silent to Delir, as he climbed along it, upstream – silent on some dark, nerve-deep level of memory. What he had said to Sulien, as well as to Ziye and Lal, had been true. As he headed to Gaul he had convinced himself that this visit to the remains of the camp in the Pyrenees was only a whim he might perhaps allow himself, after he’d completed the serious work of reclaiming his money and speaking to Eonus about importing cloth. And so he had felt no need to tell anyone – it was too irrational and private to speak of. But now, wading his way through the undergrowth, he knew differently. This return had always been his reason for coming, and he was certain of what he was going to find.

  It took him a while to find the first ladder down to the hidden walkways. They had always been invisible below the edge of the low cliff until you were almost on top of them, and all the landmarks by which Delir had navigated had altered, fallen down or grown in the years since he’d been here. Now, when he found the ladder, the rungs were clogged with grass and brambles. Delir crouched and kicked away at the weeds until he was able to struggle down.

  He knew what the vigiles and time would have done, but still it clawed at him to see the ruin of the camp. The doors, even the walls of the cabins had been smashed in, the broken boards waterlogged and rotten. Young saplings were growing up through the fallen roofs of some of them. Lal’s paintings were still visible, but blurred with moss and decay.

  There was a thin wisp of blue smoke rising from a further turn of the path. Until now it had been hidden among the trees.

  Dama, hunched over his little fire, did not seem remotely surprised to see him. One corner of his mouth lifted in a joyless smile of greeting, while the rest of his pale face remained heavy, unresponsive, dead.

  ‘What did you come here for?’ he asked, calmly.

  Delir stared at him. Composed as Dama seemed, there was something exhausted, hunted about the crouched body, the eyes that were fixed and yet not focused on anything. Delir clung to this as a shred of hope. He answered softly, ‘So that you could tell me why you have done these terrible things.’

  Dama sighed. ‘You must have heard my reasons. What else do you think I can tell you? What other reasons would there be?’

  Delir shook his head. ‘Don’t you feel anything for those people? Any remorse?’

  Dama gazed at his damp campfire, or through it, a mile deep into the earth. ‘It doesn’t matter. What I feel.’

  ‘It does matter. And you must tell me.’

  ‘Won’t bring anybody back,’ said Dama tersely.

  ‘No. Nothing you can feel or do will ever be enough, that doesn’t excuse you from offering it.’

  Dama gave another mirthless half-smile. ‘Do soldiers feel regret for the lives they take?’

  Delir grimaced. ‘Soldiers aren’t the ones who start the wars.’

  ‘All right, then. The leaders. The emperors.’

  ‘What about them?’ snapped Delir. ‘How does anyone else’s wickedness justify anything you have done?’

  ‘If there’s wickedness in the world, maybe someone has to risk being wicked himself,’ whispered Dama. ‘Take it on, so that it can be cleaned away from the future. So that people will be spared.’

  Delir watched him coldly for a while. He said, quoting, ‘“How is it that a mortal can wish for another mortal the annihilation of his body, or of his soul, if he has sense enough to know that he himself is mortal?”’

  Dama slumped, his head drooping, his eyes hidden. He conceded, ‘I didn’t plan for the people on the passenger train to be killed. Not that it makes any difference. We did it. I did it, I am responsible.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Delir, edging closer to the fire. ‘I believe you do know that. I think you are sorry for it. Or why aren’t you with your people? What are you doing here, all by yourself? The vigiles will come here. It’s such an obvious place to try, no one would really expect you to be here. But they would have to look.’

  Dama looked up, smiling, a wide, frightening crack across his face. ‘Oh, they’ve been already. You know I can hide, I can get away, if I have to. I didn’t want them to find me. And people do what I want. Almost always. Except for a few.’

  Delir drew back a little, disconcerted. ‘I don’t think your life can have gone as you wanted,’ he said, quie
tly.

  Dama shook his head, first slowly, then more and more vehemently. ‘Not what I mean,’ he said. ‘But the things I want people to do … if I want them clearly enough – one at a time – they happen.’

  God help him, he’s mad, thought Delir. Gently, he ventured, ‘Did you want me to find you, then?’

  As before, Dama stared down into invisible subterranean space, without answering. Finally he glanced around at the ruined cabins and muttered sorrowfully, ‘Look at what they did to this place.’

  ‘They will find you. They’ll give you to the Nionians.’

  Dama nodded. ‘And then what will happen?’ he asked, a fractured lightness in his voice. ‘Will they finish the job?’ He lifted his wrists, then let them drop.

  Delir shuddered inwardly at the memory of the tortured young body, almost a corpse, he’d pulled down off the cross; the life he’d freed to do these things.

  ‘What are you going to do, Delir?’ continued Dama, a flicker of challenge bringing some life into the blank blue eyes. ‘Here I am. You’ve found me. Are you going to let me escape?’

  A fugitive, desperate feeling began to press on Delir, as if it were he who was the hunted criminal, trapped in a corner. There was no escape. He pulled himself up to answer grimly, ‘No. People have to be safe from you.’

  Dama said in a tiny wisp of a voice, ‘Maybe that’s true.’

  ‘You must give yourself up,’ said Delir.

  ‘To execution?’ murmured Dama, his eyes hooded again. ‘To that? ’

  ‘No,’ insisted Delir, fiercely, and fell silent, his fists and teeth clenched. ‘I will do it. I will keep you somewhere where you can’t harm anyone else. Where you can begin to redeem yourself.’

  Dama looked at him, startled and cynical. ‘What?’ he asked, blurting out a laugh, his hands trembling. ‘You’re going to lock me up somewhere and keep an eye on me – for ever?’

  Delir said, feeling as if the word were a cliff from which he was hurling himself, ‘Yes.’

  Dama stared, his mouth a little open. ‘How do you think you can do that?’

  ‘I will do it, and you will come with me willingly. Because it is your only chance.’

  A distant tenderness came into Dama’s face. ‘You’re twice my age.’

  ‘And you’ll outlive me?’ said Delir, strained and breathless. ‘Well, I hope by then, these terrible intentions will have left you.’

  Dama shook his head. ‘I had your daughter pushed into a van at gunpoint and locked up under the house,’ he said in a low, tense voice. ‘Why would you even think of doing this? What about her, and Ziye, anyway?’

  Delir let out a long, snagging sigh of distress. ‘I will write to them. I can send money. And I will see them again somehow. I can trust my wife and my daughter, and there are people I can trust to protect them. But how can I trust you? And where will your soul go if you die now?’

  Dama was silent. Then he said softly, ‘You can’t give up your whole life for me, Delir.’

  Delir said, ‘Somebody has to.’

  *

  The letter had arrived at noon. It was long, and at times incoherent with apologies, endearments and promises. It explained that Delir had forwarded to them two thirds of the money from Eonus. It told everything except, of course, where he had gone. Curled motionless in a chair, in the pretty living room of their flat, Lal read it over from the beginning again, turning the pages silently with slow, careful fingers. I’d only just got him back, Lal’s mind whimpered, groping for something to keep from being blown away into panic; she gripped hard onto the thought of the solitude in the farmhouse cellar, the escape with Sulien. She didn’t want to cope without her father, but the implicit claim of the letter was true; she could.

  Ziye was pacing rapidly back and forth across the floor, her face set. Abruptly, in furious mid-stride, she flicked the pages out of Lal’s hands and tossed them into the air.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Lal, in a low, reproachful voice, quietly retrieving them, refolding them carefully. The two women looked at each other, guarded and frightened, assessing each other. Both of them were thinking cagily: we are not mother and daughter. And Ziye was a stranger now; Lal had never seen her like this, uncontrolled, recklessly angry, weeping.

  ‘He’s betrayed us,’ said Ziye. ‘Abandoned us.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘What else would you call it?’

  ‘I can understand why he wants to save Dama.’

  Ziye stared at her in disbelief, which gave way to tired exasperation. ‘I can’t. Dama’s made his bed. What happens to him is not our problem. Why can’t Delir leave it at that?’

  ‘I can see why,’ repeated Lal, in a whisper.

  Ziye flung herself into a chair opposite Lal. She said drily, ‘Heaven help us. No doubting whose child you are. Next you’ll be telling me you want to let him keep it secret.’

  ‘No,’ said Lal. ‘We’ll have to tell Marcus. Only …’ She stiffened. ‘People won’t think too badly of him, will they? It’s not as if he’s joining Dama. He wouldn’t be punished – not much, anyway, would he?’

  ‘He’s got friends in high places,’ said Ziye grimly.

  ‘Then we’ll tell everyone. And they’ll find them.’

  And what would that mean, what would happen to Dama then? It was too awful to think of. Lal steadied herself again. One thing at a time. They could not possibly have the right to keep this hidden, she had to start with that.

  Ziye sighed. In a voice more like her own, she said, ‘I don’t believe that.’

  [ XXVIII ]

  ISLAND

  On bright days they could see the dark cliffs of the nearest island, looking close and clear in the cold grey-green sea. But they were five miles distant, and though there were a handful of caved-in stone houses on the hills beyond, there were no people left, except for the occasional visits of lobster fishers from islands closer to the Caledonian western coast. Delir could sometimes see their lights moving in the dark, across the sound. He had arranged by longdictor and letter for the fishermen to come out of their way every three weeks to deposit packs of flour, meat and powdered milk on the pale beach, in exchange for the bundles of money he left out on a stone. Some day he might leave a sealed letter beside it, for Ziye and Lal. He had put it about that a hermit had moved onto the island to spend his life under a vow of silence and isolation, never to be seen by anyone. It was almost true. He had some hope that they might even learn to live without these visits quite soon. There was so much red dulse in the shallow water to be boiled up, lobster and crab were so easy to catch on the boulders at the base of the cliffs. There were eggs, although not from chickens or ducks: as the spring went on the stacked cliffs were riotous with nesting guillemots and kittiwakes, screaming all day from the first hint of dawn. He had a pouch of wheat and barley seeds to plant later in the year. It might be possible to be forgotten. When it rained the little scrap of earth and rock seemed enclosed in immeasurable walls of opaque glass, so thick that from the sea outside the island must be as invisible to the world as the world was from its shores. The wind did its best to erase it. There were no trees.

  Best to think no further than the end of each day.

  The rough slopes and shoreline were Imperial with gold and purple: violets, saxifrage, tormentil. Seals lolled on the beach and cartwheeled blissfully in the water. The comical little puffins uttered plaintive creaks to one another on the rocks. On blue summery days, Delir thought it was a more beautiful place than either one of them deserved.

  They had spent the first few nights in a tent, ripped at and pounded by the wind, the first days clearing out and fixing plastic sheeting over the least dilapidated of the tiny abandoned cottages. Once it was stable enough to offer them some kind of shelter they began work scavenging from the carcasses of the other buildings, to rebuild the roof properly, and fill the holes in its walls. Delir was not certain the results would not crash in on them one day, but it kept out most of the rain. They burned p
eat to cook, and to keep warm. Delir fixed cradles for a heavy bar either side of the door, on the outside. On days when the fishermen’s boat was due, he locked Dama in.

  They did not speak much. Dama seemed to have retreated into an adolescent inarticulacy. He scarcely volunteered a word, answered most questions with monosyllables, though he did whatever he was told with tongue-tied promptness. At first Delir did not resist the silence. He was not sure he particularly wanted to talk to Dama, not yet.

  But later he began to worry. It was as if Dama were being hollowed out from within. On the clearest days he sat on the clifftops, staring west towards the discs of silver light that lay on the sea, the meadows buzzing with colour all around him, and he saw nothing. Delir was certain he saw nothing. There was a blindness, a deadness that seemed to claim a little more of him every day, like an infection, like the tide on the rocks. Delir tried to hope this was for the best – for the distant, incomplete best – this closing down, the forming of a pupa in which something new could take shape. How else should he be, now? Wasn’t it inevitable, and necessary, that Dama should suffer? Yet he began to fear that Dama’s point about the likely extent of his life was not true; one day he would simply stop moving, sit down nervelessly on the dense, salty grass and forget to eat, to drink, to breathe. Watching him up on the cliffs, Delir became aware too of how high they were, how sharp the rocks were below.

  There was nothing more he could do to keep Dama physically safe. But he tried to treat him with a little more gentleness, to give him some encouragement.

  ‘I think it is good that you are here,’ he said, one night, as they cooked cockles over the fire. Even huddled close to the flames, they could not quite drive the pervading damp of the day out of their clothes. ‘You did a good thing, agreeing to come.’