Rome Burning (7 page)

‘The Roman army acclaims you as Caesar and Regent, and implores the gods to grant you health and victory,’ said Salvius tersely. He bowed; an uncomfortable forward jerk of the shoulders, and sat back.

Glycon also bowed, and there was silence. Marcus sat, trying not to submit to the threatening dazed feeling, wondering what he was supposed to do with the box of scrolls and the fasces. Except where Salvius had said ‘Regent’ and not ‘Emperor’, the words were exactly those of a coronation, although that would never have happened in such furtive, pared-down haste. The gold laurel wreath was not there.

‘It will be altered later this evening,’ said Glycon, of the
ring. ‘It’s important that you do a broadcast quickly; you’ll need it to fit for that.’

‘Is it necessary that he wear it?’ asked Salvius, discontentedly. ‘He’s not taking the wreath. This is supposed to be temporary, isn’t it? Nominally at least.’

Marcus, again, suppressed a small jolt of shock.

‘It can be altered back again,’ said Glycon mildly.

Marcus did not want them to continue discussing him like another item of the insignia. He said, ‘Tell me about Nionia.’

*

Later, during a lull for food and wine, he slid into the seat beside Una, and they linked fingertips, covertly. But the captivated way she’d watched the ceremony had unsettled him a little. She said, ‘I couldn’t help it.’ Then, stealthily, afraid that she might be forbidden to touch it, she made a quick move to the table and seized upon the script of the oath with the same predatory fascination with which she’d listened to it. ‘I was thinking about agreement,’ she told him.

‘Agreement?’ echoed Marcus. He felt tired.

‘What changed when you said that? What do those words do? That man, Salvius, it’s as if he expected it to be a spell. But …’ She tapped the paper. ‘Nothing’s any different. Anyone could say this. We aren’t even in Rome. There’s hardly anyone here to hear you.’ Very softly, so that Salvius, Glycon and Makaria would not hear her, she recited: ‘I promise to govern Rome and her Empire.’ And she raised her face, faintly sardonic, as if waiting for something to happen. ‘It doesn’t mean anything when I say it. Why does it when you do? Only because it’s
agreed
to mean something. But who agreed to it, then? On one hand, very few people. But if consent is having the power to prevent it but allowing it to happen, then everyone …’

‘Oh,’ said Marcus. ‘I hope they give me a week before they start the revolution, this is enough for today.’ He too had wondered, what is this doing to me, what am I doing to myself?

‘And then there’s the army,’ added Una, looking at Salvius.

‘Don’t put ideas in his head,’ protested Marcus, with a forced laugh.

‘It will be all right. It will,’ she said. If she kissed him, she knew that Salvius would think him weak. She closed her hand over the finger that wore the loose gold ring, as if smoothing a small burn.

*

For a long time Marcus listened to Salvius neutrally, almost without speaking. But after only a few seconds of this quiet, Salvius was sure that if Marcus had any instinctive feeling of what was necessary, then there must have been some sign of it by now. He overheard Glycon giving Marcus the gist of Faustus’ conversation with Tadahito – as it were behind Salvius’ back – and felt conspired against. He found he was trying to pound agreement out of Marcus, or at least provoke him into declaring his own folly. His voice rose helplessly louder. It was like shouting into a ravine for a non-existent echo.

And the girl kept eavesdropping. Aside from his disapproval of her presence, he found the sense of a second, unacknowledged audience simply disconcerting. She and Marcus had separated strategically again, but they were still palpably in silent league and Salvius could not keep his eyes both on her and on Marcus at once. If, as of course he must, he ignored the girl and focused on Marcus, he could not conquer the feeling that he was exposed on the other flank. He almost felt that if he looked around at her quickly he would catch her with a pen in her hand, taking down critical notes, like some kind of inspector.

Marcus waited until the hard spots of light on the Golden House and the Colosseum became visible, and the patterns of Rome spread beneath them, in intricate grids like fanning columns of Sinoan characters. Then he said, ‘Salvius, I know what you want done. And I can see you’ve already guessed that I don’t agree with you; so that might as well be said. I’m not going to order any attack. I want to meet the Nionians. I think it could happen in Sina.’

He had spent a minute or two constructing this speech. He was fairly sure his voice balanced the warning that Salvius must not hector him any more with enough sorrow that they could not agree, but he hoped it did not sound absurd to use such a tone on someone so much older than him – and taller also, and not dressed, as Marcus still was, in loose informal clothes meant for hanging around by the sea.

Salvius swivelled his head, jaw-first, from side to side, stretching the neck muscles, as if preparing to shoulder his way through a hostile crowd or break down a door. He explained, carefully, heavily, ‘Of course you’re reluctant to take such a step – but so am I, I promise you. No one with any experience of war would ever want to start one without reason. But we have let them go too far already. If we don’t stop them now they are certain to go further. It’s unfortunate that we weren’t more decisive about this in the past, then perhaps you wouldn’t be in this position now. But you are.’ But he felt a kind of release that Marcus had spoken at last.

‘We’ve got the whole of the future to fight them,’ answered Marcus.

‘
No
,’ said Salvius categorically, but did not elaborate, so Marcus went on.

‘But we could never get back to here. Or even if we could, there’d be so many dead already.’

‘There are four hundred dead today,’ said Salvius desperately. ‘And if we hesitate after this, it won’t be forgotten. It isn’t only Nionia. Provinces could revolt. Think of what happened in Mexica; there’s always India. We are only strong if they know we’re strong, we’ve always relied on that.’

‘You make it sound as if we’ve always fought every possible war,’ said Marcus. ‘You know we haven’t. This is what I’m going to do.’

Salvius muttered, trying to make the best of it, ‘At least it gives us more time to prepare.’

‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘That is, of course you must do what you need to protect the people in the territory, but no more than that, not huge numbers of troops moving in.’

This time Salvius just stared at him, appalled.

‘Otherwise meeting them would be meaningless. They would mirror what we did. There’d be two armies looking at each other across the Wall, waiting. How could either we or Nionia believe they would walk away again? It would become inevitable. I’ve studied this …’

But no, he shouldn’t have said that, thought Una, and Marcus realised it himself at the same moment, and they couldn’t prevent their eyes from meeting, both of them knowing that he shouldn’t have justified himself at all, shouldn’t have reminded Salvius of the Athens Academy where Marcus had been only days before. Of course he didn’t have any experience of war, as Salvius had already implied. He was not even twenty years old.

Nevertheless, Salvius said nothing.

*

Una and Sulien watched Marcus’ broadcast together, sitting on the floor, ignoring their surroundings while the heavily beautiful apartments that would be Marcus’ opened out around them like a rich flower.

They’d locked themselves in, they didn’t exactly know why.

‘He looks different,’ said Sulien.

Una’s shoulders shifted upwards in a taut shrug, and didn’t lower again. ‘He knows what he’s doing. He’s all right.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Sulien, glancing at her cautiously and then back at the longvision. As casually as he could, he added, ‘How about you?’

Una’s gaze at the screen turned warningly blank, fixed. She said levelly, ‘Knew it was coming eventually.’

‘But not so soon. Not like this.’ He knew it was stupid to feel responsible. ‘I’m just … sorry.’

Una twitched her head and gave no answer beyond a faintly disapproving grunt.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Your
voice
,’ she answered unexpectedly. ‘What are they
doing
to you here?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my voice,’ said Sulien.

‘Yes there is. When I was last here you still sounded a little bit like you might be my brother. I come back and you’ve turned into a born and bred Roman.’

‘No I haven’t,’ he protested, the British note suddenly pushing to the surface of his voice. Una looked at him and felt her face slipping into a grin. He hardly thought about having grown up in a different country. If he remembered any other place as mattering to him it wouldn’t be London – it would be the camp in the Pyrenees, and the journey there. His accent had begun to change very early, the vowels and stresses moulding to the shape of the sounds around him as pliantly as wax, before he’d been in Rome even a year. But she knew two weeks spent talking to no one except her would have colonised his voice as completely as rennet in milk, except that the process would be entirely reversible.

‘Anyway, I can’t help it.’ Though it did seem embarrassing to be so malleable. ‘So what if I do sound Roman? I like it here.’

And yet it was almost not a question of liking Rome; he fitted it as easily as into air, so that it no longer really occurred to him whether he liked it or not.

Una considered him affectionately, but with mild wonder. ‘You’d like it anywhere.’

Travelling in or out of Rome, on the Appian or Ostian Way, the crosses by the roadside would still turn him sick and shaky, and his fingers would move involuntarily to the vulnerable skin of his wrist. But he wouldn’t have been safe from that in any Roman city.

Her own accent was the same as ever, although only out of a kind of tone-deafness, she thought, rather than any deliberate effort to keep it. But she was sometimes confused by a furtive nostalgia for Britain, for London, where she’d suffered so much. It was not that she’d ever been fond of the feel of the air there – different from anything she’d found on the European mainland – or the shape of the ground under the city; only that they’d imprinted themselves on her as being the essential state of things. There was no reason ever to go back. She and Sulien had no family except each other. (Although this was not true, their mother was presumably still alive, but Una never wanted to think of her, would have
dug the very idea of such a person out of her own memory if she could.)

And whenever she went into Rome she always drew herself up a little, combatively, as if wanting to remind the place that she was working under a truce with it, that was all.

They fell quiet again, watching the screen. Marcus alluded lightly to his parents, who had been loved. Una knew that there was very little he could say, nothing firm about Nionia because there was nothing certain yet. He could only look and talk and act as if it was all right, as if it was right that he should be there, making wordless promises with the rhythm of his voice and the expression on his face. He could not have been more than a few hundred yards away, but watching him on the screen, that was hard to believe. The ring, hastily narrowed as Glycon had promised, was steady and visible on his hand, and the purple robe that had been hung over the new formal clothes was very dark, almost black, made of rough dense silk that stood around him in carved folds, constructing his body into extra, illusionary height and breadth. His hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He could have been five or six years older than he really was, or else of no specific age – young in a burnished, lacquered-over way, not raw or susceptible. He was not wearing the gold wreath, but it lay symmetrically on the desk in front of him, in the very centre, so that his body rose above it, in a column.

Of course they had known Marcus’ face long before they met him. They could remember staring at him while he was asleep, that first night after finding him, that longvision face intruding into real life.

‘Well,’ said Sulien quietly. ‘This is what he was brought up for.’

But the difference in Marcus alarmed him. He felt almost as if it were something he had inflicted upon him

When he’d first gone into the room where Faustus lay, the gilded space had been crowded with what seemed to Sulien’s tired eyes a welter of important men, although some in fact were slaves, indistinguishable for a moment in the general shock from the secretaries, Palace doctors, and
even senators. More or less all of them were shouting at or around Sulien as he tried to concentrate, and they didn’t all obey him at once when he told them to leave; one he even pushed physically from the room. Once he was alone with Faustus, lying with his face slack, still uttering a long rustling snarl, Sulien had emptied his mind of everything but his job: salvage work, trying to save a life. But when that was done he’d felt as if he had a decision to make, as if he were about to do something terrible to Marcus – and to his sister.

Really it was no choice of his, all he had to do was report how things were: that Faustus was alive, but that if Glycon – who had brought him there – had thought that Sulien could immediately wipe the injury out of Faustus’ brain as if it had never been there, then he was wrong. But he had waited for a minute, as if hoping something else would happen, something to stop him, and he had watched Faustus with an attack of the too-acute pity that he often thought was a bad and amateurish feeling in any kind of physician. It was no good to get so bleeding-heart about things. In this case, for example, the pity for Faustus had become as intense and as indistinguishable from the idea of Marcus as if they were both mortally ill. He had left the room and said, ‘Yes, get him.’