Rome Burning (69 page)

Una’s breath stuck in her throat and her body stiffened; she stared out, somehow shocked even now. She had at least, it seemed, expected some kind of release, for the suspense to end. But no release came, and the strain and the longing wore on. She lowered her head onto her arms, as over Rome, the sky burned.

*

In Transtiberina the noise lapped around Sulien’s building, and the blaze of light brightened the windows. Sulien said dully, ‘Well then, it’s over.’

Lal nodded, but her expression had become distant and clouded – it no longer connected with what was going on outside. Then suddenly her face cleared, her eyes widening with something almost like excitement. ‘Sulien,’ she said. ‘I did see Dama in Sina. He must have been there. I called Liuyin before, and he told me he couldn’t help me. Something had to change for him to come. And those men had found me. We were in a car. There was nothing Liuyin
could have done if he’d been by himself. And I remember it – it isn’t the same as the hallucinations. Dama was there. He saved me.’

*

Noriko was not part of the Palace celebrations for very long. The bride’s attendants led her through a short round of congratulations, before guiding her upstairs to the bedroom. After she had gone the party bubbled up bawdily, cheerfully lewd songs erupting here and there, gathering in confidence as the wine flowed. Marcus circulated dutifully, to have his health drunk, his back patted, and to submit to being nudged and laughed at. He might be all but Emperor, but it was still a wedding. Marcus bore it as long as he could keep a semblance of a smile on his face.

‘He’s keeping her waiting,’ Eudoxius observed genially, as Marcus passed him, prompting the men around him to utter wailing sounds of mock sympathy for Noriko.

For some small escape Marcus went over to Varius, who seemed, like himself, incongruously sober among the rest, even though he was drinking determinedly. There was a drawn, enduring look on his face. Marcus wondered if he was remembering his own marriage. He saw Marcus and observed, ‘It went well, anyway,’ and Marcus almost laughed. ‘You did well,’ Varius added quietly. ‘It was the right thing.’

Marcus nodded, and on impulse told him, ‘That letter – she never answered.’ He did not really want any spoken reply. He didn’t need to be reassured that Una was thinking of him, which was in any case not a consolation.

Some of the guests launched into a song about an insatiable woman wearing out all the men in Tarraco. Marcus decided he might as well get out. He threaded through the party for the grand atrium, towards the main stairs. Of course there would be a crescendo of knowing howls when they saw where he was going – better to just get that over with. ‘He’s going to lead his troops into Nionia!’ somebody yelled, to general laughter. Marcus climbed the stairs, accompanied by shouts of encouragement.

In an upper hall, Marcus exhaled, alone for the first time
that day. He could hear the repeated thuds of the fireworks outside. If Una was in Rome, she would hear them too. He slid his hands over his face and tried not to think of that. It occurred to him that he need not go to Noriko, at least not yet. But he thought of her waiting, surrounded by giggling strangers who would not leave her alone until they saw him. No, it was not fair to avoid her – and in a way, he genuinely felt he would rather see her than anyone else in the Golden House. They had today in common.

The doors to the bridal apartment were open, and a few of the women were standing outside, evidently looking out for him and chatting. They greeted Marcus with the same kind of jolly catcalls that had followed him up the stairs. Inside the room, the windows, ceiling, and the posts of the bed were heavily festooned with flowers, fruit and green branches. Gathered around Noriko, the other ladies made arch faces at her and kissed her maternally for a last time, and then withdrew, shutting the doors behind them. Marcus and Noriko stared at each other quietly as they heard their laughter fading down the passage.

Noriko was sitting stiffly on the edge of the bed. The women had undressed her as far as they could without touching the knotted girdle round the yellow dress, which was the bridegroom’s to untie. Her veil and wreath of flowers were gone, her feet bare, and her lovely hair fell smooth and loose around her. She looked up at him with a diffident, apprehensive smile. Marcus tried the words ‘
my wife
’ in his mind.

She asked politely, ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ he replied, quietly. ‘Are you very tired?’

‘Oh, a little.’

Marcus noted the way she looked at him, the tense way she held herself. Of course, they scarcely knew each other. But she had a more profound air of not knowing what to expect. He knew affairs outside marriage were commonplace at the Nionian court, although conducted in virtual secrecy, by complex and unspoken codes. But he had already suspected that the rules would be different for an unmarried princess, whose choice of lover could not help but carry political significance. He had hoped Noriko would not be a
virgin and now felt sure that she was. It made it seem even sadder to him that he did not want any of this to be happening, and he worried, too, about hurting her. He wished that Una was not the only woman he had ever slept with, then perhaps she would not be so sharply present to him in her absence now. She was, as he had written to her, never really out of his mind, but this was different, and worse. He could only begin with what he knew of Una’s body. It seemed a betrayal of them both.

He approached the bed slowly, saying, ‘Nothing has to happen now. If you’re tired, or you’d like to wait for a while …’

But Noriko stood up and came close to him. Her lips on his were even more flutteringly tentative than their first, ritual, public kiss, but her fingers were resolute as they took his hands and guided them down to the string of red knots. ‘We are married now. There is nothing to wait for.’

Marcus said nothing. He nodded, bowing his head against hers.

He unpicked the knots patiently, calm and expressionless, efficient because entirely focused on each one. He did not look up at her. Noriko gave a self-conscious little laugh when he finally pulled the long sash away, and let it fall. Marcus stepped back from her a little and briskly loosened the heavy folds of cloth around his own body, while Noriko plucked at the small fastenings on her gown that remained closed. Marcus, bare from the waist up, turned back to methodically undressing her. He lifted off the dress, and she stood there naked and brave, chin raised, summoning a hesitantly seductive smile. But she was trembling now, he could feel it when she touched him. Detached as he had been, it was a relief to feel tender towards her, to want to be kind. He smiled back, and stroked her arms and her long hair, which still fascinated him.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said to her. ‘Let’s just lie down for a while.’

So he took off the rest of his clothes, and they climbed naked into the bed, and lay still together, holding each other for comfort and warmth, as if the bed were a raft on a cold sea.

He felt Noriko relax slowly, and uncurl herself against him. Tired and unhappy as he was, with all his mind stained through with longing for somebody else, he had thought that to lie quietly beside her might be all that was possible tonight. Instead he was distantly annoyed at how quickly his body took over, as if it had nothing to do with him. He took Noriko in his arms, and bent over her, but the intimacy that a minute before he’d felt between them was gone. He kissed her, gently and minimally, caressed her in the same conscientious, sparing way. Noriko lay passively at first, then began trying uncertainly to reciprocate. She pressed her lips to his chest, ran her hand down his back, then slid it doubtfully round the curve of his hips towards his groin – attempts which remained tentative courtesies because Marcus did nothing to encourage her. Her flesh was smooth and warm, beautiful. He shivered a little, distracted with automatic excitement. It was not her fault that he felt he was scarcely even there. He scanned her face for signs of fear and lowered himself onto her, guiding her legs apart, and laid another blank kiss on her breast, as he began to press against and into her.

She gasped sharply and he whispered, ‘Am I hurting you?’

‘No,’ she insisted, determined, though her teeth were gritted.

And they did not speak any more. She kept her arms around him and Marcus moved carefully, impersonally within her, until he felt himself vanish gratefully into dark anonymity, where even the memory of Una slipped away from him and nothing mattered.

But later, when they’d edged apart, and she seemed to be asleep, Marcus felt dull, heavy wakefulness spreading through him like dirty water through the gutters of a town. He was not quite sure why he should feel so disgusted with himself, but the knowledge of loss intensified minute by minute until to lie in the bed beside Noriko was intolerable. He got up, threw on some clothes, and left the room, feeling some relief as he shut the door quietly behind him. He wandered the upper floors of the Palace, and slept only for
a few hours, much later, in a chair in a tower room, where he’d been looking out across Rome.

He did not return to bed all that night, so that long before dawn Noriko woke to find herself naked and alone in the strange bed, the flesh between her legs bloody and raw, and for the first time since leaving home for her wedding, she shed tears.

*

Cold and stiff, Una trod slowly down the stairs. She scoffed vaguely at her own stupidity at leaving the door open, even though she was entirely indifferent at the idea that something might have been stolen. Nothing had been. She should prepare some food – because it would pass twenty more minutes or so of this dreadful day, and because she had eaten almost nothing. She felt insubstantial and light-headed, quiveringly sick. But her stomach and throat clenched when she looked at what little food was in her kitchen and the idea of even cutting some bread exhausted her. She swallowed some wine without tasting it, trudged into her bedroom and lay down, without undressing, on top of the covers. The festivities in the streets had quietened a little, but she had no hope that they would stop before morning. The fireworks at least were almost over, although sometimes the isolated bullet crack or hiss of a cheap rocket going off in a nearby street made her start, her tense body feeling the noise like a physical blow. She did not even try to sleep. She tried only to rest; she tried, for a while, to be absent, which should have been possible. She’d done it often enough before.

Only a few yards from her bed, somebody knocked, hard, on the front door.

Una was jolted upright, as if the entire building had lurched forwards. Her blood buzzed with shock. It was not the sound itself, it was that the sound made no sense. It was true that each day, she had been trying to contain herself more within her own skull, to know and sense as little as possible of other people. And tonight, of all times, she had wanted that. But the space around her felt entirely empty;
she had not even the vaguest sense of a human presence nearer than the street. There was no one outside the door.

She had known only one person into whose thoughts she could not see at all, who could have caught her so completely by surprise.

She remained frozen on the bed, shaking, and was very close to believing that she couldn’t have heard it. She must after all have lapsed into sleep, into an odd, short dream that had shocked her awake.

The knock came again. And this time Una leapt up, flew out of the room, flung open the door.

Dama stood there. For an instant Una remained fixed in the doorway, staring at him with hard, accusatory disbelief, before stepping forward with a cry and throwing her arms around him.

Dama’s arms went round her slowly, lightly, so that she remembered with reeling bewilderment how rarely they’d touched in the past. He said simply, ‘Oh, I’ve missed you.’

Una tried to answer and was choked with crying. Her eyes had been dry for weeks, as the wedding approached; now she sobbed, helplessly.

Dama looked pained and sorry. The flat was so small that he found the tiny living room easily, where he sat her down, and tried to comfort her. He hushed her clumsily, took off his jacket saying, ‘You’re cold,’ and draped it over her. Then he vanished briefly to the kitchen and came back with glasses of both water and wine, having been unable to decide which would be better. Dizzily, Una laughed at them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have done this differently.’

‘Differently?’ repeated Una. ‘Where have you been? How could you? We thought you were dead.’

‘No, you didn’t. Not you,’ Dama said, quietly, certainly.

‘How could I know? I was never sure. Why did you just
go
like that?’

His face grew delicately harder and colder. ‘You knew I would,’ he said. ‘Once it was over. I told you that.’

Una pulled away from him and onto her feet, still unsteady and gasping for breath. ‘You didn’t care what we thought. You didn’t let us know you were alive. Were you as angry with me as that?’

Dama gazed sorrowfully up at her. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve had to be careful a long time. I’m still a criminal. Still a slave. There are still these.’

For the first time she began to take him in, to measure
how far he had changed, or remained the same. Now, because softened with concern for her, his variable face was unformed and odd-looking, ugly except in the glass clarity of the russet hair and bright blue eyes. He was clean-shaven, but otherwise so exactly as she remembered that it was unnerving, a mockery of the years since she had seen him. But he had now – as he never had when she had known him before – an air of quiet, resolute ease within his own body.