INCEPTIO (Roma Nova) (11 page)

XXVII

I watched PBS to keep up with EUS news, and sometimes dramas and talk shows, but a little less each day. Some days, I pressed the off button and threw the remote down on the table; much of it seemed irrelevant.

I mastered the Latin email system and contacted my boss at Bornes & Black. He was very understanding about what had happened and sent me his best wishes. Amanda and I kept to phone and text. God only knew how she’d react if she saw the Latin header to an email – probably figure I’d been kidnapped by foreign terrorists.

A letter arrived for me one morning, a regular pre-stamped envelope. It was from the IRS about undisclosed income. What the hell was that about? I had filed everything on time. I only had my regular pay cheque and the Brown Industries’ quarterly payment. And did it matter now?

I was fighting my way through the bureaucratic slush, trying to work out exactly what it meant, when the words started to lose their places on the page. I creased my eyes up to concentrate but couldn’t anchor the letters down to the paper. I looked up to see the walls shifting in waves around me. Nausea welled up. Pain gathered fast and stabbed my head. I dropped the letter and my legs collapsed at the same time. I sweated as I crawled to the bathroom. Overcome by the sourness rising in my throat, I threw up in the pan. Impossible to stand – my legs had turned to Jell-O. I opened my mouth to shout for help. Jaw too stiff to move. Only a throat gurgle. Nobody to hear me. Falling. Gone.

My head. Oh, my head hurt. Parched, I swallowed. Nettle burns in my throat. I was so cold. I gasped for breath. Tears slid out of the sides of my eyes. My hand ached so hard it was all pain. I heard a pouring noise. Someone tipped my head up, a firm hand supporting my neck. I drank a few sips of a cool, lemony fluid and went back to sleep.

When I woke later, I opened my eyes to see Faleria sitting by my bed, Sergia and Conrad standing behind her. His eyes looked enormous. A drip line was attached to my arm, and something beeped. I was in a hospital room. With a uniformed, and armed, guard at the door.

‘Slowly,’ Faleria said and took my hand. She wore disposable gloves. ‘Don’t try and talk. Just move your head, if you can.’

I nodded. The mush in my head wobbled in a big, slack bubble. My neck was made of concrete.

‘You’ve been poisoned, but you’re going to be all right. Gaia Memmia found you unconscious in your bathroom. She called the medics immediately.’ She paused, looking for my reaction, I guessed. ‘I need to ask you some questions. Are you up to it?’

I moved my head infinitesimally up and down. Everything swam in front of me. I ached from head to foot.

‘If you want to stop, close your eyes and we’ll go.’

I peered around and found Conrad again. My eyes refocused as he came over. His hand caressed my forehead, his thumb along my hairline. The dry plastic glove on his hand pulled on my skin, but I was so comforted by his touch.

‘The letter you received was impregnated with a chemical agent. It’s nearly always lethal. Any idea who would send you this?’ Faleria said.

I blinked.

‘Apologies for being brutal, but who inherits from you, if you die?’

I managed to shrug my shoulders an inch.

‘Do you have a will?’

I moved my head an inch left then right.

Faleria looked at Sergia who replied, ‘Her parents are dead, we know. No siblings.’ She glanced at Conrad. ‘Some of her father’s relations still live, don’t they?’

‘Some cousins in Nebraska,’ Conrad said, softly, but I still heard him. ‘We’ll check with Steven Smith, but they’re probably her legal heirs.’

The fiercely, ignorantly, patriotic Browns.

I shut my eyes and went to sleep.

I woke in the night, the headache a shadow, but my stomach ached. I fumbled for a drink. My arm wouldn’t lift my hand in the right direction. The guard slung his weapon across his back, the barrel projecting over his shoulder, and came over. Before he could get to me, Conrad appeared and waved the guard back. He lifted a plastic cup of water to my lips. I gulped it down, and another. He sat on the bed, his hand circling mine, his eyes glittering.

‘I thought I’d lost you.’ He bent his head, closed his eyes for a moment and then looked up. ‘Only Faleria giving me a direct order to stay in the building stopped me going outside and hunting Renschman down. But if I do nothing else in my life, I’ll kill that bastard next time I see him.’

When I woke next, I could turn my head enough to see blankets on the floor by my bed, crumpled, and a pillow, the centre indented where his head had been.

I insisted on seeing Gaia to thank her. She was as self-deprecating as usual, saying anybody would have done what she did.

Maybe.

The letter, printed on dime-store paper, had been impregnated with a persistent agent. Whoever touched it, or somebody affected by the poison, risked exposure. The return address on the EUSPS pre-paid envelope was fake. The inside had been coated with a thin layer of plastic. No fingerprints or DNA trace. But nobody doubted who had sent it.

The bone-chill of fear spread through me as Conrad sat by my bed telling me all this with a neutral voice, but burning eyes. Renschman had reached into the protective bubble of the legation to attack me. I shook at how vulnerable I was.

Irritation and pain followed this attack. I caught an armed guard detailed to accompany me everywhere. I knew this was well intentioned, but it annoyed me to have a permanent, if silent shadow. And I rowed with Conrad.

‘There’s an overt threat against you, so we’ll filter your post thoroughly before it gets anywhere near you,’ he said. ‘We have to take precautions. I don’t want to watch you nearly die again.’

‘It wasn’t a fun experience for me, either. But I’m not having my mail read by other people.’ I raised my chin.

‘Be reasonable. We can’t let anything through to you without checking.’

‘You’re not opening my mail. It’s private.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you have to compromise, just this once.’

‘No.’

We glared at each other; our first fight. I lay back in the bed, exhausted. But I wasn’t giving in.

He stomped off, shoulders set, slamming the door as he left the room.

I moved back into my apartment the next day with a full packet of drugs and fussed over by a worried medic and, of course, my guard. He insisted on looking around first before taking up station outside my door.

As I was being urged into bed by the medic, I saw a note in Conrad’s round black writing stuck to the top of a box of surgical gloves and masks.
Wear a set of these when opening your next fan letter. Please.

XXVIII

Gaia called next morning with a bunch of flowers, hesitant and saying she didn’t want to bother me if I wasn’t up to it. She would reschedule and wait until I asked for her. Suppressing the urge to wrap the flowers round her head for being so self-effacing, I insisted she sit down and accept my grateful thanks again.

After the breakthrough with Aelia, I had switched to Latin by default. I was determined to master it. I stumbled, but managed most things. Aelia was ruthless, in the way only adolescents can be, but endlessly funny. Gaia, in contrast, hated correcting me and kept falling back on English. She thought she was helping. I accepted it all passively now; this nervous woman had saved my life. I would always owe her and be happy to pay.

She gave me a kids’ history book that illustrated how Apulius and his four daughters had founded Roma Nova at the end of the fourth century. I laughed at the heroic little cartoon characters waving their swords around, but Gaia took it all seriously. Descended from the Julii and Flavians, both tough political families, according to Gaia, Apulius had married a Celt from Noricum. Although Romanised for several generations, women in her family made decisions, fought in battles and managed property. Her daughters had inherited her qualities in spadefuls.

When they headed north into the mountains fleeing religous persecution by Theodosius, the founders realised that, to survive, they had to make radical changes. So women took over social, economic and political life, and the men fought to ensure the colony survived. In the end, both sons and daughters put on armour and picked up blades in the struggle to defend their new homeland.

‘If a foreign man married into a woman’s family,’ Gaia said, ‘he followed the practice of born Roma Novans and took her name.’

‘Wait a minute. Non-Roma Novan men marrying in would have changed it, surely?’

‘Not at all. It’s well known that women transmit cultural values and cohesion in a society.’

‘They must have figured the threat was beyond serious to have decided that,’ I said.

‘Grim times, according to the records.’

The Roma Novans had toughed it out through centuries guarding their values, holding it all together. I was stunned but thrilled to have ancestors like these. Hundreds of years of surviving in these conditions made frontier America look like the class beginner.

‘Did the women get to choose who they married?’

She looked shocked. ‘Of course.’

‘So this is why I have my grandmother’s name. Who was my grandfather?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know. It’ll be in your family record books.’

‘Can’t you look it up in a public register?’

‘No, only if you have an appropriate access code.’

‘Aren’t all marriages recorded?’

‘Yes, but if your grandmother didn’t marry then there won’t be an open access record. I’ll check.’ She started tapping at the keyboard.

‘Hold up a minute, Gaia,’ I said while she scrolled down tables of information on the screen. ‘Are you saying my grandmother wasn’t married?’ She seemed so respectable.

Gaia stared back, uncomprehending. After a few seconds, her face cleared as if something had clicked. ‘I forgot American laws were restrictive. The eldest daughter always inherits. Contracted fathers are optional.’

Favonius was in his element. Sitting tall at the head of the table a week later, chin jutting out, eyes scanning the assembled mortals, he presided over the meeting as if he was in charge of Great War II.

‘It has become obvious that this covert unit is prepared to take desperate measures to maintain control of Brown Industries. Against all its own government’s proclaimed tenets, I might add. They seem to have added in a personal element.’ He looked at me, paused for a dramatic five seconds, and pasted an even more serious expression onto his face. ‘We are now at the beginning of July. The critical period ends on the tenth of August, Carina Mitela’s birthday. Thus we need to keep her alive and safe to that date.’

Nobody disagreed, especially me.

Favonius nodded at Sergia, one eyebrow raised in question.

‘I’ve made some informal enquiries via my contacts in the administration,’ she said, ‘but I’ve met a blank wall. Either the External Affairs Department don’t know about this group or they are pretending it doesn’t exist.’

She was cool under Favonius’s gaze. ‘However, I’ve discovered that Renschman served in the EUS Army. He was recruited at seventeen from a very tough neighbourhood.’ She consulted her el-pad. ‘Apparently, he was a marksman, technically excellent in special forces’ skills, but he failed almost all command and leadership tests which prevented him progressing beyond specialist grade. After he left, he worked on black ops for different agencies. I caught one possible reference from an FBI source, but he clammed up as soon as I asked about it.’ She glanced at me. ‘We know FBI personnel have been seconded to the unit. Special Agent O’Keefe is an example.’

‘Thank you, Sergia. Additional security, Major, at all times. Level 3.’

Not a shred of reaction crossed Faleria’s face, but she nodded at Favonius and rose to her feet, and the meeting broke up.

Outside, I felt dizzy, my legs wobbled and I fell into the empty secretary’s chair. My guard went over to the water cooler. I didn’t know whether it was the physical after-effects of the poison or the stress I was living under, but I hated these attacks of weakness. While I was taking some deep breaths, I glanced at the desk. The green commset light was on, but the volume indicator was turned down to minimum. I could hear Favonius’s and Sergia’s voices very faintly. The temptation was too much. I edged the volume key up.

‘Well, of course you can’t refuse.’ Sergia.

‘I won’t endanger my agreement with the External Affairs Department.’

‘Are you trying to sabotage your career? Old Tellus’ll have your hide.’

‘So we’ll sit it out until August. I won’t offend the Americans. Not after all my hard work.’

‘How much are they paying you?’ Sergia’s voice was cynical.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Favonius said, sounding huffy.

‘That much?’ Sergia laughed. ‘But what about the girl? She’s had a shitty time.’

‘She’ll be all right. Tough stock. The gallant captain will keep her amused.’

My guard came back with the water. I laid my finger against my lips to shush her.

‘Look, I’m not having that arrogant soldier boy and his stupid girlfriend endanger my career.’ I heard paper slapped down on a surface.

‘Very well, Favonius, but remember she’s a Mitela. If the countess gets the slightest hint you’re manipulating the situation, you’ll be out before you can take your next breath.’

‘Well, she won’t, will she?’

‘Not from me.’

I heard Sergia’s clothes rustle as she moved toward the door. I stabbed at the commset key and stood up, taking two strides away from the desk. I grabbed my water from the startled guard and took a gulp. As Sergia came through the door, I wiped my hand across my forehead and handed the cup back to the guard.

‘Yes, I’m much better now, thank you. Oh, Sergia? Is that you?’

She threw me a sharp look, but I smiled blandly back at her.

I called my grandmother that evening. Claudia had reported everything to her. She was concerned, but didn’t fuss.

‘And how do you feel now?’

‘Nearly there, I think. I’ve had some physical therapy and been swimming a few times. The doctor will discharge me at the end of the week.’

‘We must get you out of there as quickly as possible. I’ve told Claudia to push it along, but I understand there are political complications as well. Why are the Americans dragging their feet? They can’t possibly win.’

She looked impatient. Frustrated, I guessed, at not being able to do anything.

‘It’s a little tense, I have to admit,’ I said. ‘I suppose the legation is concerned to stay on good terms with the administration. I must be upsetting things for their everyday relationship.’

I was surprised to hear my respectable grandmother use the word she did. One of Aelia’s favourites. So Sergia was right. And Nonna would not hesitate to act.