Rome Burning (68 page)

At last the attendants opened the doors, and Noriko emerged onto the steps. At once ripplings and flashes of light, a roar of excitement from the crowd broke over her. Noriko swallowed, trying to keep her breath steady. She had attempted to prepare herself for this, but she had never in her life been exposed to so many people – such an unregimented, hooting, bulging mass. The Embassy seemed besieged with cameras. And within the lines of flower lamps that framed the
street, beyond the young Roman aristocrats who bore the broad silvered litter towards her, row after row of people came marching, pine torches burning in their hands, as if they had come to build a huge and terrible bonfire. So many of them, until the phalanx of fire stretched out of sight. From overhead, beams of light from the prowling volucers raked the ground and the rooftops. Every now and then the grinding noise of their wings would drown out the music of drums and flutes on the ground. Noriko could not restrain herself from glancing upwards, nervously. There were more cameras up there, she knew, and also more vigiles, scanning the roofs for possible assassins. Yet she did not feel protected.

Lady Aoi, a senior concubine of her father’s court, had travelled to Rome to act as a stand-in for Noriko’s mother. As the head of the procession approached, she took her place beside Noriko and closed her arms around her – very formally and lightly, so as to leave no impression on her clothes. Noriko folded her hands loosely over the older woman’s, trying not to feel any poignancy in this representation of a motherly embrace, as two of the men came up the steps, faces solemn and respectful, and made a ritual show of parting Aoi’s arms and wresting Noriko away. Roman marriage was supposed to begin with a pantomime abduction, a rape. There was more applause.

A pair of little boys, dressed in white and crowned with flowers, took her hands and led her onto the litter. They stood on each side of her, holding her arms, steadying themselves against the chased silver rails and supporting her, as the young men raised the litter up to shoulder height. The music, which had fallen silent as she descended the steps, resumed joyously, and the crowds echoed the singers, shouting something over and over: ‘Talassio!’ Noriko did not know what it meant. She gripped the little boys’ hands. The upwards swing was less frightening than she had expected, but her stomach remained weak with the feeling of precariousness, and it was more than the simple fear of falling from this height. As they carried her forwards, helpless over everyone’s heads, she thought: this is what they did to foreign captives, parading them through the streets.

The ranks of torchbearers parted to let her through, then joined behind her and followed, until the bridal litter reached the final line of flames, to lead the procession back the way it had come, through the central Fora, towards the Sacred Way and the Palace. As they progressed, the jostling hunger of the crowd for a glimpse of her only intensified, and yet it helped her to be what was required: passively regal, still. She was a triumphal prize on display, a religious relic, an Olympic torch. The road ahead was spread with rose petals: white and flame-yellow and red.

*

Without warning, and almost violently, Sulien turned on the longvision. Lal looked up, startled, for it had seemed totally taboo for either of them to watch any of the wedding. It had not occurred to them to part ways after leaving Una, and they had both withdrawn to Sulien’s flat without much discussion. Sulien had poured Lal some wine and for a while he made her talk about Sina and the journey from the Pyrenees that had taken her there. But with each hour the noise of celebration from the streets had intensified, and he had grown quieter, more obviously tense. He stood now, gazing at the screen, his face fraught with angry curiosity.

From the air, whenever the lights swept across her, the Princess was like a comet burning, the convoy of torch flames behind her like a trail of blazing particles. Her fire-coloured clothes had been made to keep Roman tradition, and the red Roman wedding girdle was tied under her breasts, crisscrossing her body to hang in a chain of square knots below the waist. But her head was encircled with Nionian flowers – yellow camellias, peonies and lotuses – and the layering of glossy silks, the long, pendant sleeves of her saffron dress were Nionian. A gold inner gown embroidered with cranes and irises showed at the throat and sleeves, the paler fabric above it patterned with overlapping fans. Three fine plaits of hair, bound with silver threads, studded with narcissi and orchids, fell on either side of her grave face. And under the wreath, and the gold headpiece that rose above it, she wore a double veil: a layer of heavy satin, hanging close around her body, that glowed a warm, burnished crimson through
the translucent silk above it. The long, drifting flow of amber gauze fell into a pool of delicately geometric points and folds on the litter, and haloed her as if she stood in the midst of a soft, beautiful explosion.

As the procession passed through the Septizonium, the view changed to the inside of the Palace lararium, darkly brilliant with gold, and to Marcus, standing waiting. Within the walls of the high apse stood the jumbled lines of ancestors and gods, carved in aspects from every reach of the Empire: spiders, swans, elephants, bulls, jaguars – as well as muscular men and women. They flaunted weapons, or lounged jadedly, or flexed claws and trunks. Assembled behind Marcus like a silent chorus, the idols seemed to exert a strange, expectant pressure on him. Marcus, dressed in the full ceremonial toga, seemed also marmoreal, timeless. His eyes met the camera with an expression meant to be read as confidence and serenity, but knowing him, Sulien could see the look of controlled anguish that underlay it, and felt a strong wrench of involuntary sympathy. He slammed the longvision off and said fiercely, ‘I wish we’d never met him.’

‘But this isn’t what he wants,’ protested Lal unhappily, feeling the tug of competing loyalties. ‘He must be miserable.’

‘Then he’d be better off too.’

‘He’d be dead, and you’d still be slaves,’ retorted Lal, and Sulien was silent. ‘Of course – I can see why you can’t be friends now,’ she added sadly.

Sulien sighed, leaning against the wall beside the long-vision, his head lowered. He was still staring into the dark screen. ‘I am his friend,’ he admitted, in a low, resigned voice. He poured more wine, and neither of them spoke for a while.

‘What will happen to her?’ murmured Sulien, at last, as if they’d never stopped talking of Una. ‘Wearing herself out in that place. She’ll kill herself if she goes on this way.’

‘No, no,’ said Lal, alarmed, and the more determined to hope for the best because of it. ‘I wish she’d have let us take her somewhere today, but she’s borne harder things than
this. She was a slave; she spent years and years planning to escape and she did it, didn’t she? And she saved you all on her own. She doesn’t give up. She couldn’t have done all that if she had.’

Sulien smiled, but lopsidedly. ‘Oh, if she decides she’s going to do something, she won’t stop, I know that. And I’d be sorry for anyone who got in her way. But she won’t care what it costs her, either. Back in London, she hadn’t seen me in seven years; she heard I’d been arrested and she decided she wasn’t going to let me die.’ He gave a little laugh of some kind; maybe it even was funny. ‘And here we both are – it worked. But she might have been killed – we might have been killed together, and as long as she’d done everything she could think of—’ he stopped for a second. But he’d as good as said it already, so he shrugged, and finished, ‘She wouldn’t have minded.’

Lal urged again, ‘No.’

‘She wouldn’t. She’d only have counted it a failure if she ended up alive and I didn’t. There were only ever one or two things she cared about – until him. She started changing then.’ He didn’t want to call his own feelings about Marcus any closer by using his name. ‘And now I think it’s worse. At least back then there was always something she
wanted
. To get out, to get me off that boat – to stay free, if only to spite anyone who ever wanted to make her a slave. Now … I’m afraid where it’ll end.’

Lal kept quiet and watched him, though she didn’t like the silence and had to struggle against the impulse to say almost anything, to keep telling him there was nothing to be feared. But he prompted her in the end, asking urgently, ‘Do you understand what I mean?’

Lal hesitated and admitted the truth, ‘It reminds me of Dama. Sometimes he was like that.’

Sulien recognised the comparison, and it did not comfort him. He remembered Dama’s remorseless determination on that last night they’d seen him, and that it had probably killed him. He agreed bleakly, picking up his drink, ‘Yes, like that.’

Lal looked at the blank longvision and said, ‘He might be watching this. He must know. I wonder what he thinks.’
And she did not notice, at first, that she said this as if fully certain that Dama was alive.

*

The young noblemen that bore the litter approached the lararium, and again the music stopped, for this was the most important moment of the bride’s journey; any jolt or stumbling as she was carried across the threshold meant bad luck. But they went through smoothly, and laid the litter down on the dark, glittering tiles. A group of women approached – all of them married, like the men who had borne the litter, there to guide the couple into marriage. Noriko stepped forward in the crowded silence.

Marcus came to meet her. Varius wasn’t far away, among the guests and representatives of the household who stood on either side of this empty, central space, but Marcus no longer had to suppress the nervous urge to glance at him. Faustus was watching from a chair, with Makaria beside him; only Drusus was missing. Marcus had seen to this simply by writing to him, ‘I am sorry to hear you are too unwell to attend my wedding,’ and dating the letter a week ahead of its actual dispatch. He duly received a letter that he was able to show Faustus – Drusus explaining with appropriate regret that he was too ill to come.

Ahead, Noriko was scarcely recognisable as the person with whom he’d spoken frankly in the Sinoan palace garden. She looked like a personified virtue in a poem. Perhaps he seemed no more like a solid human being himself. He didn’t, for now, feel any pity for her, and he ceased to feel any sorrow for himself. He was dazed and calm. Noriko seemed to float in her flame clothes. He knew exactly what he had to do, and it did not seem real.

On either side of him, an attendant carried a golden bowl, one filled with water, one with a long wick burning in a pool of oil. He and Noriko came face to face, and he heard his own voice saying clearly, ‘You are welcome.’ He took and offered her each bowl in turn, so that she might dip her fingertips in the water, pass them quickly through the fire, cupping the bowl in her hands before passing it away.

And then they joined hands, and the eldest of the women
bound them together. The touch seemed to break the trance Marcus had been in; he looked at Noriko, and thought he could see an answering shock in her face, as if they were both only now aware of what they were doing. They kissed lightly, their expressions hidden against each other’s face, and in the golden room around them, and in the Fora of Rome, and across the Empire, people began to clap and cheer.

*

Una had begun moving restlessly from room to room, wheeling and striding, her breath gathering speed on every turn. The noise outside went on and on – pounding drums and shrieks of drunken celebration, always fading mockingly and coming back. For some time she had felt, at least, secure in her capacity to block it out. But how long it continued – for so long that at last she gave a little cry of indignation and incredulity, and dropped into a chair, pressing her hands over her ears. If only there were some kind of distraction, something to do! There was nowhere she could bear to go; to sit and read was obviously impossible, and she wished, now, that she’d paced herself in cleaning the flat, left herself something to work on. She remembered some clothes that could be washed, went and dragged them out, dunked them in water. But by now she was gritting her teeth and shaking, and she could not keep her attention on what she was trying to do. She left the clothes floating, forgetting them instantly, and paced rapidly round the little flat again. Then, without any kind of premeditation or plan, she threw open her door and dashed out. She stood for a second on the landing, with her face against the wall, panting, her eyes screwed shut; and then another swell of the noise from below chased her on, and she ran headlong up the stairs, leaving her door gaping – it didn’t matter, she didn’t think of it. At the top she wrestled open the stiff metal door onto the creaking fire escape. A steel ladder, fixed to the wall of the building, led upwards – she must have seen it from the ground many times before without properly noticing it. She climbed up feverishly, feet almost stamping on the metal, and scrambled onto the roof.

The street parties below boomed on, the sound was only a little weaker than it had been downstairs in her flat. Yet somehow, there was a difference, the rooftop remained remote, solitary. Up here, the air was rough and chilly; Una’s clothes flapped, her hair flew around her face. She hugged herself, and walked slowly over to the far corner of the roof. It pointed south-east, towards the heart of the city. She climbed onto the low brick barrier at the edge, and sat down, her knees drawn up. Rome opened below her, the view far wider and clearer than she would have expected: she could see the blue dome of the temple of Liberty on the Via Flaminia, the illuminated towers on the Quirinal hill, even a distant glow she thought must be the Golden House. And as she looked towards the heart of the city, fireworks suddenly broke into the air. First only above the Palace, then sweeping outwards, all around her, everywhere. Roses and willow trees of coloured fire, gold javelins, scarlet palm leaves. And the jubilant shouts from the streets, which till now had been erratic and scattered, surged up to a steady united cry that built and built without breaking, applause pulsating under the din from the bursting air.