Rome Burning (61 page)

Then she was shocked again, because someone was sitting by her – had he just appeared or had he been there for hours? – a thin, apprehensive monk – she couldn’t understand what he was saying and she wished he wouldn’t talk
to her, it distracted her from her walking.

He had been there before, she thought, talking to someone. They must have been trying to decide what to do about her. There were government-run hospitals in the towns, they might take her there, and then the police would find her. This thought no longer concerned her very much. It seemed to her it would be impossibly difficult for anyone to move her; maybe she would be well again before they could manage it.

Then there was a cup of pungent, watery liquid, splashing at her mouth again, and the monk was speaking to her, reassuring her, sounding less anxious now. Lal choked, and perversely struggled a little, so that the bitter stuff trickled into her hair and pooled in her ears. And when she could not burrow away from him she made a resentful effort to understand what he was saying: ‘… looking for you. Here they are.’

Her head full of sullen weight, Lal looked up again, hoping it would be Delir and Ziye, half-remembering there was some reason why that was impossible. Two men, giant top-heavy pillars, stood there and swayed over her like masts at sea. One of them smiled down at her pityingly. They were Romans, with a black car waiting in the dusty yard behind them.

‘No, no, not with them!’ she cried. She was speaking Latin, only the men would understand what she was saying. ‘No,’ she managed, in Sinoan, and the monk only smiled and tried to soothe her. Panicked, Lal flung the blanket back, and scrambled to her feet. But at once the walls and ground crumpled weightlessly around her, as though everything were made of hot paper tossed into the air. When it all came to rest she was lying, bewildered, in someone’s arms, and then laid on a seat in the back of a car. She shivered and shut her eyes, which were too sore to keep open. The car had begun to move, she could feel every stone under the wheels. And she was still walking.

‘Hey, hey you. Can you tell me your name? Do you know where you are? See? She’s out of it.’

‘She’s quiet, anyway. Just leave her.’

‘Yeah, but what if she doesn’t even make it back to Jondum? Give her more of the stuff, she’s not going to be any use like this.’

‘And it’s going to be better if you make her overdose on that? We don’t know what’s in that bottle. She’s not due any more until tomorrow. Leave her.’

‘Sir.’

Lal groaned quietly in protest at all the talking, turning her head, hunting for a new place to lay her cheek on the seat. For a second the leather would be wonderfully cool on her skin, but then the growing heat in her flesh would melt into it and simmer up again, through the surface.

The car swerved as something tore past. There was a disapproving mutter in Sinoan, from the driver’s cab. But someone nearer moved sharply towards the windows, shoving past the rest.

‘Where’d that car come from? Ask him if he saw it before. Did anyone else see it before – around the temple?’

Murmurs of denial. ‘Do you think it’s following us, sir?’

‘I think I don’t want to see it again,’ said the one who seemed to be in charge.

An uneasy silence fell. Lal was grateful for it. It was unimaginable now that she’d ever been cold: a current was pushing through her, shaking the reluctant atoms of her body into glowing, crimson heat, flow upon flow of it. She rolled over vainly, panting, concentrating on something crucial that kept proving too difficult for her.

Then they were slowing down, it made everything drag like seasickness. ‘There’s a car across the road. I think it’s the same one.’

‘Tell him to reverse,’ the leader, the centurion, shouted urgently. ‘Don’t stop, don’t get any closer. Back,
now
.’

Then something punched at the car from underneath, with a great bubbling crack of sound. We’re going over a storm, thought Lal distractedly, before shaking the foamy nonsense in her brain away and gathering herself to think, exhaustingly: No. It was some kind of bomb.

The car choked and tripped to a stop. The Romans banged open the doors, dodged out into the sunlight, crouching against the vehicle’s flanks. Lal was dragged out and dropped abruptly onto the cracked tar surface of the empty road. Gunfire broke the air. Behind the back wheels, Lal lay on her side, at once curious and indifferent, busy with the molten pulses of heat. Her eyes stayed shut until suddenly, somewhere to her right and ahead, on the far side of the car, an explosion burst like an orange marigold, rocking the car and casting heavy lumps of stuff around on the road. The blast beneath the car had been nothing – the tap of a cat’s paw. Even far away and blazing as she was, she had to shrink back and cover her head. Someone shrieked and whimpered horribly. Lal moaned and turned heavily over again, away from it.

‘Lal,
Lal
.’ Someone gabbling on at her from the edges. She felt like crying. It was too much to spring these things on her and expect her to decipher them, with everything melting and burning. The gabbling at least changed to Latin, but remained more than she could cope with. ‘Are you hurt? Get up! Come here!’

Lal gave in and looked painfully across the road at Liuyin, who was lurking impossibly by the edge of the road, beckoning her. ‘Lal! Hurry!’

Lal shut her eyes and hours seemed to pass with him still apparently there and begging her to move. Finally she floundered a little way towards him, all her muscles wrenching and melting as she did so, and Liuyin grimaced and scrambled forward, awkwardly lifted and bundled her across the road, tugged her down into a ditch beside it. ‘Don’t
look. Don’t look at anything, Lal,’ he whispered, as another, smaller explosion opened itself ahead of the car. She could feel him trembling. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I should have tried harder. I shouldn’t have been angry with you. I didn’t know you’d be ill. But you’ll be all right.’

Someone called out, in Latin – but the soldiers all were silent. Liuyin hoisted her up onto the road again. A battered grey car swung round, in front of the fire and smoke, someone got out. For the moment Lal felt a composed, lucid interest in how the delirium was progressing, what it might come up with next. She wouldn’t claim it was all an hallucination – something must be happening, but surely it wasn’t this. The light was beautiful even as it hurt her: pure, like still water held in a bright globe of glass. Within it the fire looked cool, fine, and far off, threads of saffron in water, and the young man’s reddish hair glowed carnelian, wine-like. The blue of his eyes seemed scarcely natural, emitting their own light like gas flames. Lal was amazed at how far behind he seemed to have left the day-to-day unsettled pastiness she remembered. The light in the air or in her mind compelled radiance from his fierce, soft-featured face and he seemed almost not human enough to be ugly.

He said to Liuyin, ‘There – you’ve done more than you thought you could, haven’t you? Come on. I need you to drive now.’

Then Lal was lying half in his lap, in the back of the rubbish-strewn car, and he was murmuring to her, with a kind of soft urgent authority, ‘We’ve got you now. I’ll get you out of here – you’ll be safe.’

His arms were bare, which was not right – he would always have them covered. One supported her head, the other rested protectively over her, so that his wrist hung just inches from her blurred eyes, the skin stamped with the round scar of the cross.

‘You’re not here, Dama,’ she said, reasonably.

Dama-in-the-vision smiled at her fondly, regretfully. ‘That’s right, love. I’m not.’

*

Liuyin drove too fast, still trembling with the physical shock of the explosions and of what had happened to those men, at the sense of accelerating through a strange space alongside the tracks of his normal life. He knew at some future time he would not be able to believe what he had done and seen; for now it did not matter. Sometimes he struggled a little against the overwhelming imperative to do what the stranger wanted, but only in a helpless, fumbling way that felt as meaningless as the kickings of a hanged man – a rather ignoble failure to recognise inevitability. For now, of course everything was real,
of course
he was doing this. There was a kind of exhilaration in it, because it was right. And after all, he wasn’t quite unprepared, was he? Hadn’t he always wished to be part of some kind of story, some kind of drama, for something to happen? And now here he was.

It was only the stranger’s silence that was unnerving him now. Liuyin kept glancing at him, expecting some kind of instruction, but none came. The young man seemed wholly preoccupied with Lal – he was carefully bathing her face with water from a plastic bottle, deftly enough despite his damaged hands. The water would certainly be warm by now, but his look of sad, zealous tenderness was so strong that for a strange moment Liuyin caught himself wondering if he was somehow part of Lal’s family.

‘What happens now?’ Liuyin blurted at last, in Sinoan. He wasn’t sure quite how much of the language the other man understood, evidently some. He’d switched into it unexpectedly once or twice, just for a few words, usually at times when Liuyin’s resolve was fading.

‘I can’t take her with me,’ Dama said quietly. He was speaking Latin, but Liuyin didn’t struggle to understand: the longer they were together, the more everything Dama said seemed to carry a firm, lucid weight that went beyond the simple fact that his voice was very clear. ‘I don’t exactly go by public transport. She’s too ill.’

Of course, Dama couldn’t have anticipated Lal’s illness. Liuyin found it hard to remember that. Dama had found him after a few days’ searching and questioning around the Black Clothes Lane area, and he’d got the story of Lal’s call
for help out of him within minutes. He’d made Liuyin feel briefly worthless for what his response had been, then just as swiftly fired him up into this state of baffled daring. They’d reached Jingshan just after the Romans did, and they’d been following the car ever since. If they didn’t find Lal that way, at least they’d know the men hadn’t found her either. But from the moment of his first appearance – cornering Liuyin as he returned home from a painting lesson – Dama had given the impression that he was simply trying to carry out, as quickly as possible, something that was already certain.

But Liuyin was frightened for Lal now. ‘Could she die?’

‘No,’ said Dama instantly, with simple, flat conviction. His better, almost-normal left hand was under Lal’s head, and he would not move it; taking infinite pains not to disturb her, he managed with the three functioning fingers of his right to extract a little box from his pocket, remove the lid, and swallow down a couple of pills with a swig of the water. Liuyin had only seen him do this once before, far less openly. It seemed that either he preferred not to be seen taking them, or that he resisted resorting to them as long as he could, or both. He sighed with the anticipation of relief, and murmured, ‘I know where I’d want her to be. I know who’d get her there.’ He closed his eyes, as if this, unlike anything else in the journey, meant doing something he found hard to face. ‘Una will do it. Novius would, too.’ His mouth curled grudgingly at the second name. ‘But even without him … Una …’

‘You want to go to Bianjing?’

‘Near enough,’ said Dama.

*

There was no way back, and suddenly no way forward, as if he’d been moving up a flight of stairs that had fallen away both ahead of him and behind, leaving him stranded in empty space, an unstable column under Drusus’ feet, an awful drop below.

Could he get out? His slaves had already packed his belongings, he had been all but ready to leave. He knew Lal was found. It was less to work with than he would have liked, but it was something, and he had been waiting only for
word that the soldiers had transported her as far as Jondum for departure into the Empire. But since yesterday, after that news of success, there had been nothing, no response to his messages, silence that seemed in retrospect like a warning. The palace in the square, walled city felt like a glass box within a glass box.

But why should he have to run? He had as much authority as Marcus. No one could simply ignore that, could they? Perhaps they might divide the Empire into east and west between them, temporarily at least; such a split had been contemplated once or twice in the past. It would be enough for now; if he had that, and time, he could claim the whole in the end, he knew it.

But the guards who were stationed outside his quarters were marching away. Drusus, who had moved restlessly outside again, watched blankly for a second as they filed through the darkening gardens, before commanding them furiously to stop. But they did not, even when he roared it out again and added every threat he could think of. Only when he modified the order to a demand for an explanation, did one of them tell him, ‘Caesar’s ordered us to assemble outside the barracks, Your Highness.’

‘He doesn’t have any mandate for this,’ shouted Drusus, wanting to keep this hot, bracing anger flowing within him as long as possible. ‘We are to share power, that is the Emperor’s decision.
Equally
. Read the message for yourself if you don’t believe me!’

But really they did not believe him, and no evidence he could provide would make them. Marcus was here. If they knew nothing else, they knew that was Drusus’ failure. Marcus had the ring, and the soldiers were frightened of him. The absurdity of it struck Drusus as never before. Marcus was only one person, Drusus was only one person. The soldiers had nothing to fear from either of them beyond what they could be persuaded to do to each other. If they could only have trusted each other to see through the trick, they need not answer to anyone! Why didn’t they realise that?