Rome Burning (17 page)

Sulien stopped for a second, dithering. The building had fallen oddly still so that he was aware of the greenish paint on the wall and the dank carpet under his feet, and had time to ask himself in bewilderment, what is
happening?
He charged sideways into another corridor of flats, and shoved at the nearest door – they were still so high up, but perhaps if he could get to a window he could climb down somehow, or at least call for help. But the door did not open. Sulien left it and kicked desperately at the next one, then the next. None of them moved. So there was nothing he could do but run out to the stairs again, in the hope that perhaps he still had time to reach the floor below and try the same thing there.

But he did not have time. He got halfway down the next flight, and there they were, running to meet him. Two men – the one he’d seen before, going downstairs, and another, younger, holding a gun, levelled at Sulien’s chest. Time stuttered: Sulien heard the shattering of gunfire in the Sanctuary bedroom three years before, as though a soundproof door to the past had been flung open. At least back then he had understood why it was happening.

He stood on the stairs, breathless, dazed.

‘Just do as we say,’ the woman said, stepping down onto the landing behind him.

‘All right,’ said Sulien, in a friendly voice, stepping backwards towards her. ‘Fine.’

The four of them moved upwards, remaining for a couple of seconds in slow formation, the gun holding them fixed in relation to one another as if on rods radiating out from it, like a model of the solar system. Sulien felt his breathing slow a little; there was almost a feeling of calm, now he had no choice but to do what they said. He could think a little more clearly. ‘What’s this about?’ he asked the woman, in
the same pleasant tones, although he was unsurprised when she didn’t answer.

All right, he thought. Perhaps this was not too bad. Were they hoping to get a ransom for him? For he reasoned this could only be happening because he was friends with Marcus. In that case, he’d probably be all right. If they really were or had been slaves, he knew he could talk to them. They wouldn’t
want
to hurt him, he was sure of it. But then, they might not be slaves at all. They had known what to say to get him to come here, the shabby, desperate look of them might only be more stage-dressing. Then it struck him that, much worse, it might not be a question of money. They might be hoping to make Marcus
do
something, something about the war with Nionia, perhaps. Something to which Marcus could not consent.

Then the man who had the gun pushed forward sharply, wanting to get a proper hold on Sulien, with the weapon against his head or back – and Sulien moved at the same time; he sprang sideways and swung himself over the handrail, not down the shaft but over it, to the foot of the flight below.

They shouted a warning and then the gun went off, a great crack, a noise that drilled through the breastbone, and kicked a little jolted sound out of Sulien, even as he hit the ground.

He fell painfully, impact bludgeoning his heels, knees, the base of his spine; he got down the last few steps and round the corner more in a rolling continuation of the fall than anything more deliberate, dragged himself to his feet and plunged unsteadily on. The jump had happened in a blur, and he was shocked at having done it. If it had occurred to him consciously, surely he wouldn’t have done something so stupid – had he not just been thinking how he should act towards them, make them
like
him? But, amazingly, apparently it was not stupid, the shot hadn’t hit him, and at least he had a head-start.

His legs hammered downwards, evidently not broken, but still they felt like loose stacks of smashed bricks, tumbling. His head-start was only a flight and a half, and the others weren’t hurt, they were faster. He did not look back. He
skidded achingly on, but as the ground came closer he began to shout at himself silently, as if he might forget: the door at the bottom is locked. The door at the bottom is locked. For of course the man he’d seen must have done that, almost as soon as Sulien was inside. Not there. Something else.

He skidded around another landing and managed to gather himself enough to vault again over the banisters, more deliberately, landing better, although it still jarred through his bruised joints. At once he heard a heavy thud behind as one of his pursuers copied him.

The first floor. Instead of rounding again onto the final flight, Sulien ran through into the corridor of flats. It was darker here and, for a moment, although the three pursuers could be in no doubt where he had gone, he could look back and not see them. The illusion of completed escape was terrible. Again he rushed at a door, felt not so much frustration or rage as sad urgent disappointment when it would not give way. He heard them reach the landing outside the passage. He ducked along the passage to another door, pushed it. And this time it moved under his hands, wonderful thing, a miracle.

He pulled the door closed behind him and kept going forward, though unexpected nausea pinched at his throat. A filthy smell rose from an unrecognisable moist mess that had melted or dissolved over the floor and every disordered surface; his entrance caused ripplings and contractions in a carpet of insects. Some grey mice scattered from his feet. Sulien staggered a little. There was a pounding outside the room, and to either side of it – they were trying several doors at once. Sulien ploughed through the dirt, not straight to the window before him but into a rumpled bedroom to the side. He was hoping there might be a lock on this door, but there was not. The smell here was equally sharp but sourer, fusty. He pushed aside a cobwebby drift of sagging curtain and wrenched at the window, not even sure as yet what was outside – but the handles must have rusted and stiffened in however long it had been since the room had been used. He felt that it
would
open if he had even ten seconds to spend on it. Unwillingly – because the sound would reveal where he was – he swept up a little three-legged table and hurled
it through. He brushed at the teeth and scales of glass left sticking up around the sill, knowing he was bound to cut himself and somehow irritable about it. He grasped the sill and swung a leg out into space, and as he’d anticipated, pain whistled across his fingers, and he left a trail of blood on the ledge.

He heard them entering the room he’d just left.

His body dreaded a second fall, but there was no help for it, nothing to climb down. It was hard to get a decent hold on the sill with his hurt fingers, in so little time; his feet vainly scraped at the brick. He let himself drop, and rolled on the sudden pitiless concrete, groaning. Above they burst into the foul-smelling bedroom. As he rose, hobbling now, he saw that the small table he’d thrown was lying on the ground beside him with its top broken off, which seemed strange and surprising, like the blue sky and heat, that of course had been continuing all the time.

He was in a yard of patchy concrete. There was a skip in the far corner, another block of flats – were there people there? Would they see what was happening, would they help him? But he couldn’t run straight into an open space like that, making such a clear target of himself. He lurched along the base of the wall as fast as he could. There was a gate out. If it was locked and he had to try and climb it he was probably finished, but the place looked so derelict and ignored he hoped it wouldn’t be. The woman startled him by using his name again: ‘Sulien, I’m warning you,
stay where you are
.’ Then came another shot, bursting somewhere behind him.

He did not know what they did after that. Perhaps one of them followed him out of the window. The gate opened only into another empty little crevice of a street. But around the next corner there would be people, shops – good, explicable things. He was certain he could get that far.

He’d been away two hours by the time the vigiles took him back to the clinic. Aulus, one of his friends, found him going up the stairs and complained, ‘What was that? An extended lunch?’ Sulien would have told him everything at once, but Aulus was already hurrying away saying crossly,
‘Well, if you’re going to honour us with your presence, will you please come and
help
?’

‘Hang on,’ muttered Sulien, rather aggrieved.

He went to his surgery and commenced cleaning himself up. Already the knocks he’d received no longer hurt much. It had been hard to concentrate but waiting at the vigiles’ station he’d shut his eyes and tried to cancel the sites of pain scattered along his body. He hadn’t been badly injured, really. But he still felt faintly sick and cold, and there was a faint tremor continuing under his skin, although he had stopped shaking visibly. His clothes and hair were dusty, so he tried to brush them down. He washed his face and cleaned the cuts on his hands to make sure.

Varius came in while he was doing this, beginning angrily, ‘Sulien, it’s been two hours, what the hell are you …?’ But he stopped when he saw Sulien’s face. He asked quietly, ‘Are you all right?’

Sulien nodded

‘What happened?’

Sulien let out a long unsteady breath. ‘I don’t even
know
. Some people tried to …’ Abduct him? Kill him? What had they been trying to do? He shuddered again and mumbled through what had happened: the woman’s call; how he’d felt there was something wrong but had gone anyway; the gun. Varius, who’d sat down to listen, made a low, shocked sound. Sulien said, ‘I don’t know – I was thinking how the best thing I could do was just go along with they said, but instead I took off over the banisters. It was weird,’ he finished lamely.

Varius shook his head. ‘Sulien –
why
?’

Sulien told Varius what he’d thought. ‘It has to have been to get something out of Marcus. If it is that, you’d better look out too. We’re the easiest ones to get to.’

‘You’ve told the vigiles?’

‘Yes, for what that’s worth.’

This made Varius smile slightly – neither of them could muster more than a grudging trust in the vigiles, despite the purges that had cut mercilessly through both forces for months after Tulliola’s arrest. ‘You’d better tell Marcus too.’

‘Oh …’ said Sulien, somehow exhausted at the suggestion. ‘Later. Yes, I will, but later.’

‘You needn’t have come back in. You should have called me from the station. The woman definitely asked for you by name? She knew who you were?’

Sulien nodded.

‘Then you shouldn’t go straight home.’

‘No, probably not … I mean, I wasn’t going to.’

‘If you want, you can go to mine,’ offered Varius, willing himself past the slight reluctance to invite anyone into his flat. ‘Although if they’re looking for Marcus’ friends, I don’t know if that’ll help.’

‘No, I don’t think it would. And don’t worry about it, there are loads of people I could stay with. Maybe Tancorix. I’ll sort it out later. But I’m all right here.’

Varius frowned. ‘You don’t look up to anything except taking up space. Go somewhere you can have a drink or lie down. Don’t waste time proving points.’

‘It’s not that,’ mumbled Sulien, with an uneven, self-conscious grin. ‘Much more selfish. Everyone’s still at work. And I don’t want to be on my own.’

‘You do think they’ll come after you again?’

Sulien hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said unwillingly, and then, as if he could trample down such a possibility by talking over it, ‘Look, I was supposed to go with you to Veii anyway. I can still come. It’ll be fine. It won’t matter if you talk and I sit there and look stupid, will it?’

‘No,’ allowed Varius, finally. ‘Of course it won’t.’

*

They heard the factory before they saw it – a boiling stew of sound, which, as they approached through the increasingly drab streets, began to separate out and organise itself into a deep, volcanic, stamping throb, less like a heartbeat than like a giant, belligerent drum. But as they reached the gates the sounds thawed together again – not one but several hammer rhythms, overlapping as the repeated booms resounded against brick and concrete, while a meltwater of unremitting whirs and clacks flowed through everything, filling every chink. It never stopped; the slaves who maintained it
slept in shifts. Their barracks were rows of narrow wooden huts on the opposite side of the enclosure.

The factory was a jagged mass of auburn brick, the long, high buildings at its heart incongruously handsome. The complex was framed within a tall, bristling fence, and as the car passed through it, something seemed to change in the air – a shrillness, a choked tension that clamped down instantly, even before Varius and Sulien saw anyone. Then a tense line of gaunt, yellow-stained women jerked past, utterly silent, not looking at them or at one another.

There was a haze of hot dust in the air, a faint metallic smell, like blood, but fibrous and powdery. Varius got out of the car. The ground around him was transected with many small tramlines, like lines of stitches, connecting the cautiously-spaced, stumpy little buildings on the perimeter where the explosive materials were stored, to the huge and cavernous hangars from which the bleak din came.

The gates had been closed behind them and now the fence pressed on him as if it were touching him, as he had known it would. He tried to look through the fence rather than at it, refocusing his eyes to reduce the metal to a hanging grey blur over the street outside. It was controllable, but he could not shed the confined feeling altogether, which seemed weak and detestable when he was not one of those who couldn’t leave.