Rome Burning (51 page)

She swabbed wretchedly at her face, wiping her muddy hands on the leaves and on her clothes, and waded back onto the track. She had nothing but her stupid bag of makeup: it had been hanging on its long strap from her shoulder. She stood and gasped for breath and sobbed, trying to think of a good reason for going any particular way.

*

Marcus saw five or six low-bodied, honey-brown wild horses, roaming harmlessly along over the scanty brownish grass, dancing east, past his window and out of sight. They were the first change in this numb, bare, dun-coloured steppe land that he had seen for days, but they made a wrench of anger snag through his muscles, like an inward grimace. Since being taken from Bianjing, he had been kept from even seeing a longdictor, or a longvision. And outside,
change continued without him, things were happening of which he was allowed to know nothing. Even when a train was rushing through the Cazak expanse at three hundred miles an hour, the uniformity grew blinding: the eyes would quail at the absence of anything to focus on, the train’s flight would seem like a slack crawl, time dried out. Against towns or woods or mountains, the ten broad, dead straight silver strands of the Silk Road magnetway looked commanding and dominant, a brutal Roman taming of the earth. Here, enfeebled against the vast ground and the pale sky, the track was puny, almost poignant in its tentative attempt on the wilderness, like the extinct royal road of a dead civilisation, diminished to a line of loosened stones, leading to nowhere any more. Like what it would be, one day, for the grass seemed poised to quietly heal over and erase it.

Marcus beat the index finger of his right hand rapidly on the table, keeping up the rhythm for pitiless minutes, aware of a very small, spiteful pleasure at the annoyance the sound must be inflicting on the soldiers standing at the end of the carriage. He felt as if his skin were growing harder and tighter, turning metallic, squeezing ruthlessly on some encased and maddened thing that harried and burned inside, an awful, incandescent chemical change.

First the Imperial train had lingered for two days just inside the border of Sarmatia, its mirror-like sheen incongruous at a dismal little station of a black, scattered, coal-mining town, which it would normally have shot through obliviously, stranded in the void of landscape. The soldiers explained stolidly that they had their orders, they were waiting for someone of appropriate rank to escort him back into the Empire. Marcus gritted his teeth and refused to waste energy arguing. Then the magistrate of Roxelania had arrived on an eastbound train, a short, glumly self-important man, prone to saying things like, ‘Unfortunately my instructions are very clear.’ And: ‘I wish I had a choice, sir.’ Over the following days, by petty increments, the drab gratification the man was drawing from the power he held grew more and more glaring, as the train slid on for a few hundred miles west, and then turned slyly down what
Marcus thought must be an obsolete industrial line, perhaps serving an old copper foundry or a phosphate works, where it glided wearily to a stop.

‘Unfortunately we’re going to have to wait here, sir. The magnetway’s been damaged further west. Bad flooding.’

‘You got here all right,’ observed Marcus grimly, not with any hope of embarrassing the man into admitting the lie, but compelled to assert the fact that he did not accept it.

‘The weather is so changeable in my province.’

The train was appropriately well appointed: an additional, plainer carriage had been coupled behind those for the guards and the servants, to accommodate the magistrate. But in Marcus’ living quarters, the floors were carpeted in Bactrian crimson silks; the walls were tautly upholstered with rust-coloured, gold-stamped leather, or panelled with gold-seamed cedarwood, painted with laurel leaves. One car was divided by a silk-padded screen into a bedroom and a handsome compartment called his ‘study’. Here an ornate clock stood on a marble-topped desk, there was a gilded barometer on the wall, there were even photographs of the Imperial family including Marcus’ parents – but no writing materials. In the saloon car, where he now took his meals with the magistrate, the narrow ceiling was crammed with gilt-wreathed murals: a fleshy, bloody painting of Romulus and Remus at the founding of the walls of Rome arched over the dining table. The food served amidst this opulence was dire: daily heaps of indeterminate meat sludge that forced Marcus actually to notice what he was putting into his mouth. It proved, once again, that the delay was deliberate. They must have taken on a large quantity of supplies at the mining town: you would have to resort to compact, long-lasting, packeted food to sustain twenty-four people out here for this much time. He forced the stuff down anyway, watching the magistrate at the far end of the table, squeamishly prodding at it. It was a regular, unpleasant task or competition which he refused to fail. He was powerless enough as it was; he did not mean to let physical weakness add to that.

On the windows the eagle and the motto of the Empire obstructed the empty view. He could not be certain he would
even know if war had started. On the seventh morning after leaving Bianjing, when the brown horses had gone past, he wondered if it was possible they might live out their lives without being affected, whatever happened, without even witnessing any sign of what took place between Empires. There was a kind of comfort in thinking that they could.

On the first stationary day, hastily following Marcus out of the saloon car onto the little balcony that opened to the cool air, the magistrate said his instructions were that Marcus should not leave the train. Marcus slowed the furious impulse to slam his fist against something, striking his hand flat on the guard rail instead. He was as effectively confined by the featureless spread of space as he could have been by prison walls. He could not guess how far he would have to walk towards the frosty horizon to get out of sight.

He said, ‘Your instructions are your affair. They and you are nothing to me.’ He stepped briskly over the guard rail, jumped down onto the tough grass, and began walking fast. He heard the consternation and anger behind him but did not turn. If he went far enough they would have to use force to bring him back, have to risk hurting him, but just how willing or reluctant they were to do that would be some gauge of his own standing, of Drusus’ power. Not that he meant to push them to that for the sake of it. If he could just get away from their voices, if they let him walk the edge off this fury, he would have discovered something.

At his feet he noticed little pink and yellow papery flowers he had not seen from the train. The sky was a thin, distant blue. He thought of himself at sixteen, alone, setting out with nothing. And it felt as if he were looking back across decades, as if half a lifetime of doubt and division lay between him as he was now and something essential, pure. For the first time it came to him why the luxury in which he was being conveyed now made things more intolerable rather than less. It was as though they thought that he could not survive without it: as if they were transporting an exotic fish which must not be allowed to feel its captivity, must be kept in painstaking imitation of its natural habitat, or it would die. He thought, damn you all, I would manage out here, somehow. It’s more than you would.

He did not want to wander sheepishly back to the train, like a child returning from a sulk. He summoned one of the men, curtly ordered him to lend him his cloak and marched back ahead with the man shivering behind him.

So he won that round, but the magistrate had his revenge later. Most of the gorgeously bound books in the useless study seemed to have little purpose beyond decoration, but there was a set of atlases among them. That night, Marcus was sprawled bitterly at the marble desk with them, first poring over the subtle, vacant charts of the Cazak region of Sarmatia in an effort to pin down where he was, then turning to the different maps of Terranova and Tokogane, studying the distribution of gold and other minerals, fluctuations of climate and the courses of rivers. He could at least refresh what knowledge was available to him, he could insist to himself he would make use of it soon.

‘It’s getting late now, shouldn’t you be turning in, sir?’

It was not yet very late, Marcus was sure of that. The light had only left the sky a couple of hours since. He did not fully trust the porphyry clock at his side – sometimes he grew preoccupied with the idea that it was slow, or broken. It bothered him because it distorted his calculations of the time in Bianjing, or in Rome.

‘You really must go to bed, sir.’

Marcus stonily ignored him. He had good reason to defer lying down, filling his thoughts with the maps as long as possible, until he could be confident of complete exhaustion. The man disappeared for a while and then, as Marcus turned another page, the lights went out. The stars were suddenly huge and teeming outside. Marcus sat unmoving in the blackness, breathtaken with rage. He did not need to try the lamps in his sleeping compartment to know that the power had been turned off.

The magistrate said with satisfaction in the dark, ‘I wish I had a choice, but in these circumstances we must save our resources, sir.’

All day, he tried to avoid speculating about Una and Varius. And, during each day, he found to his own unease that he could do so: a cold success of the will that troubled him. But he had dreams, more detailed and vivid every night,
from which he would wake to a moment’s trembling, shattered relief, before the daylight knowledge of crisis broke in again. He dreamt he was in the back of a car Una was driving at wild speed through wind and sleet in the Pyrenees: he begged her to stop and she answered that she could not, the vehicle was moving malevolently by itself. And at that Marcus was no longer in the car, but standing in helpless safety on the snow outside, watching the car plunge from the road onto dark rocks. Or he saw her vanishing over the threshold into his parents’ beautiful Tusculum house, and knew that he could not reach her in time, the house was about to collapse and crush her. Or he was in the Palace and Faustus, healthy and authoritative again, was telling him Varius had been executed, or even more unbearable, had killed himself in custody. Faustus met Marcus’ distress with grave, statesmanlike sympathy at first, then by degrees grew accusing, and Marcus, who to begin with had forgotten why this was his fault, would remember with a shock of guilt that sometimes jarred him awake. Varius was almost always absent, always dead, while Una was alive but threatened, or dying before his eyes. Except that once, he twisted away in anguish from hearing the news, and the narrative of the dream broke off and began again on other terms, as dreams will, so that he found Varius in a room like his office in the slave clinic, sitting at a desk, slowly filling out columns of figures in a ledger, filing accounts.

‘Varius,’ Marcus said, faint with relief, though the texture of the dreamed air was cold and charged with horror. ‘I thought you were dead.’

‘No,’ said Varius calmly, distantly. ‘Not until tomorrow.’

‘Then you can’t stay here,’ Marcus said desperately, for Varius was concentrating impassively on his work and never looked at him. ‘Come on.’

‘It’s under way and can’t be altered,’ answered Varius, writing something down, with eerie, impersonal authority. He did not seem altogether human.

Marcus pleaded, ‘What about Una?’

‘They hanged her yesterday in Edo. Didn’t you know?’

*

The magistrate said, ‘We must discuss your interview with the Emperor. While we may be caught here for some time, still, if his health permits, you’ll be seeing him eventually. You must be clear in your mind as to what you’re going to say.’

Marcus flicked a sharp look at him. ‘Use that word to your inferiors or equals, not to me.’

The man lowered his eyes in awkward contrition, but murmured, ‘I’m afraid, sir, at this stage, you have no option but to give up the Imperial ring.’

Marcus looked coldly at the gold weight on the still-tapping finger. ‘It is still mine to give up. No one has taken it from me. I find that interesting.’

‘It’s a formality to go through,’ explained the magistrate.

‘I don’t think my cousin would weary himself with such formalities if he thought he could dispense with them.’

The magistrate drew back very slightly and glanced towards the guards at the end of the motionless carriage, and a small, self-appeasing smile briefly tightened his lips. It occurred to Marcus, with a new twinge of unease, that the man was reassuring himself of protection against physical attack.

He said softly, ‘I’m not going to speculate, sir, about how much you knew or didn’t know about your friends’ intentions. What part you had or didn’t have in the Emperor’s illness. It’s none of my business. But the Emperor knows you have been irretrievably compromised as Caesar by your association with people who had other interests at heart than the good of Rome. However innocent you may have been. Or felt yourself to be.’

‘Then my cooperation is of no importance.’

‘Regretfully, sir, I must remind you that you are not fully aware of the developing situation.’

Marcus grinned bitterly, but felt tension constrict closer, as though a rivet had been turned through another revolution. ‘No. I am not.’

The magistrate clicked his tongue mournfully, and hefted a case onto the desk. ‘I’ve been authorised to make certain points to you.’

Marcus looked at the case, trying to disguise his
apprehension. He said sardonically, ‘Now where has that arrived from?’

The final carriage of the train held the retinue’s vehicles – the grand imperial car that had carried Marcus out of Bianjing as well as sturdy military trucks. On two occasions the magistrate had been driven away from the train in one of these, bouncing over the grass, towards the main line of the magnetway. Marcus knew there must be longdictor stations dotted along its course and had guessed he was going to update his so-often-vaunted instructions. It was a mockery of the pretence the route was impassable if he had received anything more.