Rome Burning (78 page)

They looked at each other. Sulien nodded.

‘Now?’ Lal suggested, hesitantly.

Sulien lifted the jug, trying the weight of it, and put it down again. He got up to make an exploratory turn around the room. ‘I don’t know. No, not yet. There’s no time to get in a fight with him; everyone’ll come running. I’ll have to just try and knock him out. I don’t think there’s anything here I can use.’

‘Have you done that to anyone before?’

‘No,’ said Sulien, continuing to prowl apprehensively around the cellar. Lal had crawled to the pipes running along the wall and was kneeling over them, heating her face. So that was how she had done it. He smiled.

She asked, ‘What can I do? Should I do something different?’

‘You’re doing fine.’ He climbed up the first couple of steps towards the door and then paused, turning back and looking down at her. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Throw your head back.’

Lal obeyed mechanically. ‘What am I doing?’

He came back over to the mattress. ‘Have you ever seen anyone have a seizure?’

She shook her head. His attempts to show her what to do, and hers to copy him, brought them both to the sharp edge of frantic laughter.

‘Not yet,’ he whispered to her, as they heard the door opening. ‘Like before.’

She shut her eyes and began again to breathe shallowly and fast. The man came down the steps, carrying a solid electric torch. Sulien held out his hand for it. ‘Thank you,’ he said, sternly.

He took the torch and made a show of scanning Lal’s face by its light, checking her pupils. He laid his hand over her forehead and made himself still and remote for a while, as if he were concentrating.

‘Well?’

Sulien looked up wearily. ‘I think I can get the fever to start coming down,’ he said guardedly. ‘But she’s dehydrated.’ He gestured to the fallen jug. ‘You’ve got to bring some more water. I just hope she can drink. You’re not going to set up a drip for me, are you?’

The man took the jug without protest, this time. But fetching water wouldn’t take long enough. Sulien added hastily, ‘And get a sponge or something. And she’d be better off with fresh sheets.’

The man looked irritable, and trudged off without answering. Sulien did not feel confident that he would do everything he’d been asked, but did not see how he could manufacture another opportunity. At best, they’d have only a few minutes, and they’d have to allow enough time for the man to get out of immediate earshot. Lal lay stiff on the mattress, staring up at him. Neither of them could speak.

Then Sulien rushed up to the door, shouting to the man outside, ‘I need help. Help me, she can’t breathe.’

He drew back, staring at the door with clenched fists. The second man came into the cellar, taking the time to lock himself in. Sulien had placed the torch on the ground near Lal’s feet, so that the face from which the horrible throttled sounds came was hidden in half darkness, and the motion of her jerking body seemed amplified by the violent shadow thrashing on the whitewashed wall. Urgently, Sulien beckoned the second man over, pulled him down to
crouch beside her. ‘She can’t breathe. You’ve got to hold her still while I …’

He was reaching for the torch as he spoke. He flinched a little as he touched it, but once it was in his hand, his reluctance seemed to drop coldly away and without hesitation he brought the butt of the torch down on the back of the man’s head. He fell face-forward onto Lal, who gave a little shriek of panic and revulsion, and scrambled away from under him. A few drops of blood had splashed onto her face.

‘Where’s the key?’ she gasped at once. Sulien didn’t move to help turn the man onto his back, until Lal was already struggling with his weight. Lal started searching through his pockets with shaking fingers. ‘I’ve got it,’ she said, her voice still high and fierce with shock.

Sulien remained stooping over the unconscious body, looking pale and sick. ‘I think he’ll be all right.’

‘It’s too bad if he’s not, we’ve got to
go
,’ she cried, dragging him by the arm towards the steps. She ran up to the door and unlocked it, pushing it open a crack. They could hear the blurred noise of multiple conversations from the kitchen and other rooms, treading feet. They peered out as best they could, but there was little choice except to push out, all but blindly; Lal locked the cellar door and they fled across the hall. It was only as they reached the front door, that they realised there had been no one there to stop them, not yet.

‘Where’s Una?’ whispered Sulien.

‘Upstairs somewhere,’ said Lal, distractedly, warily opening the door and looking out from the threshold across the darkening yard. She could see just a small number of silhouettes moving in the faint light, some around the chicken shed, herding the hens inside, others carrying crates of dishes towards the house. ‘Only a few of them have ever seen us,’ breathed Lal, craning towards the gates. ‘We can get there.’

But to her horror, Sulien was turning back, away from the doorway, towards the stairs.

‘They’re going to
find
us,’ hissed Lal, clutching at him. ‘That other man’s going to be back any second.’

‘I’ve got to get up there somehow. I’m not leaving Una here.’

‘Yes you are,’ said Lal, in a kind of stifled shout. ‘We get out and call the vigiles. That’s how we help her. Otherwise we all stay here.’

Sulien looked unhappily up the stairs. ‘When they realise we’ve gone—’

‘Dama won’t hurt her,’ said Lal, firmly, forgetting her worst thoughts. She gripped his hand with all the coercive force she had and slipped outside.

They began walking swiftly, not straight at the gates but obliquely across the concrete, towards one of the unlit sheds. Sulien picked up the handles of a wheelbarrow standing near the house and pushed it purposefully forward. At his side, Lal was instinctively skulking along, her head lowered, shoulders raised.

‘Don’t do that,’ Sulien murmured. ‘If we were just two people who lived here going to get something, we wouldn’t be keeping our heads down. You’d be talking to me.’

Lal, with an effort, forced her body into a more casual bearing. ‘I can’t think of anything to say,’ she whispered breathlessly. ‘For once.’

‘Tell me a joke,’ said Sulien.

They were halfway across the yard when they heard the shouts of panic and anger from the house. They swerved into the shadow of the old feed-store building, as people began to gush out of the farmhouse, and, in response, from the barn and cowsheds. They abandoned the wheelbarrow and ran along in the darkness behind the shed. They reached the gates. And there was someone there, a figure walking out of the dark on the fields, coming home to the farm. At first a sexless, featureless shadow; then an anonymous woman; a girl with one eye, one hand.

Sulien and Lal stopped, grasping each other’s hands. Bupe turned her head, an unsettling movement, for it gave the impression she was looking away, when really she was levelling her single gaze at them. She said nothing. Sulien opened his mouth to begin some kind of appeal and felt the words collapse on his breath, he could only stare at her. Her expression appeared impassive, grim.

It did not change as she stepped forward, and turned her head again, but this time so that Lal and Sulien, on the side of the scarred flesh where no eye was left, were invisible to her. And as if they were not there, she walked slowly past them towards the house, leaving them behind as they ran stumbling up the valley’s flank, away from the lights.

Una was stretched in the bed, her arms loosely spread, the blankets lying over her face like a layer of snow. Her bones hurt; her cold blood seeped slackly through her aching veins. There was a chill in her flesh that would not disperse, even in sleep. She dreamt she was lying face-up in a field of stones, staring into the snowflakes settling over her, and woke without realising it, expecting to look up at black sky, and orchards of bristling stars. Sulien and Lal had been gone for perhaps two hours. Outside the room was panicked turmoil, just barely restrained and ordered; she could hear doors banging, vehicles drawing up and speeding off. The evacuation was well under way. Una lay still, smiling under the sheet, into the dream-snow, with indistinct, sad triumph.

People were coming. She pushed the blankets away, heaved herself up on her elbows as the door was unlocked. Dama came in, with a heavyset man behind him.

She would have expected him to be luminous with rage and vengefulness. He seemed more fragile than that, his face tired.

‘You knew,’ he said to her, flatly. It was not a question, nor even exactly a reproach.

No one at the farm knew of the location of the other groups, or could have contacted him; it was not information to entrust to newcomers. Before now the farm’s inmates had often gone weeks or months without seeing him, or hearing his voice. But this time he had called the place almost as soon as he had reached Tarquinia. The tension that had its source in this room had followed him all the way there.

‘They’re gone,’ Una said. ‘It makes no difference if I go too. You don’t need to take me with you. Just leave me here.’

Dama stared bleakly at her. He could have done so had
Mazatl not, twice, come so near her. She might possibly know no more than Lal or Sulien, but there was no way such a safe ignorance could be proved. He thought it was likely that at the least, she knew about Tarquinia. ‘No,’ he answered curtly, and turned to Baro. ‘Get her up.’

Una swung her legs wearily out of the bed, and sat up. She made no protest as Baro picked up her wrists and fastened them together with thick tape, and she got to her feet docilely enough. But once standing she swayed and stumbled, so Baro caught her, and lifted her briskly into his arms. Una flinched into abrupt, violent life, twisting and struggling, disproportionately aghast at being held this way.

‘Don’t touch me. I can walk. I can’t run away, but I don’t need carrying.’

Baro would have ignored her, but Dama muttered, ‘Let her walk if she wants to.’

Baro let Una down, and shoved her along behind Dama, out of the room and downstairs. The dizziness had passed now, but she was out of breath almost at once, and her heart whirred painfully as Baro jostled her across the yard. But she did not again feel close to falling.

Already the farm was almost deserted; there could not have been more than thirty people left, and they were on the point of scattering. Dama had seen detailed evacuation plans conceived and fine-tuned before, with Delir in Holzarta; Una did not doubt that everyone here would be gone before the vigiles came, and most of them would not be caught.

They were heading towards the anonymous little car that had brought her here from Rome. Baro opened the door and pushed her in.

‘Don’t you want me to drive?’ asked Baro, as Dama slid in quickly behind the controls.

‘She’s with me,’ said Dama. Baro looked uncertain, shrugged, and ran off to join another group piling into a truck. Dama watched them leave. He was glad not to have to explain his need to keep Una with him, not to trust anyone else with her, for he could not have done so. He did not know what to do with her, but whatever decision to be
made was his concern, his business, and he would make it alone. He waited until the truck was gone, and began to drive. The familiar pain set in, from wrist to shoulder, his breath changed to accommodate it, pain and silence simplifying things.

Una lay in the seat beside him, exactly as Baro had let her drop, limp and unmoving. She murmured almost dreamily, ‘Where are you taking me?’

Dama cleared the drive and turned the car up into the woods. Una looked out at the darkness.

‘Have you decided?’ she continued in the same soft, far-off voice. ‘Are you going to do it?’

Dama frowned, and did not answer her. Una closed her eyes with a tired sigh and was so quiet and passive for a while that he wondered if she could have fallen asleep.

At last she spoke again, with more urgency. ‘Dama.’

‘What?’
snapped Dama, finally.

‘He’ll kill me,’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’ He made himself concentrate on the road.

‘The man you left with today. The one who was outside my door. He will. As soon as he can.’

Dama’s hands clenched on the control sticks of the car, as tight as the numbed fingers would go, locking the pain along his arms. He said fiercely, ‘He won’t touch you. He won’t disobey me.’

‘Won’t he?’ she asked drily, and Dama grimaced again. Una looked away at the trees. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking, Dama, or what you’re going to do. But with him it was very clear. And you can’t stay with me all the time.’

‘God help him if he comes near you. I’ll kill him.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Una. ‘He knows that. But he’ll still do it; he’ll do it for you, because you can’t.’

Suddenly the car stopped, jolting them both forward. Dama gave a little gasp, but remained gripping the controls, staring at the road, as if he had not noticed what had happened or did not know that it was he that had caused it. But then he let his hands fall into his lap, and slumped back, his eyes shut for a moment. ‘You should have come with me when I asked you to,’ he said, turning to gaze at her without
lifting his head. ‘You should have said yes, in the cave near Wolf Step. You’d have understood the task we face, you’d have been ready to do anything to see it done. You’d have stayed on my side.’