Rome Burning (19 page)

As the boom slammed against him and made his bones hum, Varius felt that he was going to be paralysed with shock – was even angry in advance with his failure to do anything. But in fact, he moved immediately, down between the files of bunks towards the door, shouting Sulien’s name. There was no answer, and when he called again he could barely hear himself over the rushing of the fire and the drumming of falling embers on the roof. He got halfway to the door and knew, suddenly, that he would not make it the rest of the way in time; the little comet that had set fire to the barracks had been flung from the shell-filling shops, the mortar factory. The two blasts so far were only like the first bubbles rising from the bottom of a heated pan of water. More would come, much worse, and any second now.

He grabbed the upright of the bunk beside him, pressed himself into the space between two beds, towards the wall furthest from what was coming. He got up onto the lower mattress, and then it came – a surging force that wiped all sound before it, mauled down the walls and the roof, and hurled him down on the fetid bed and pinned him there. The bed skidded back, driven hard against the wall, its foot mangling and sloping as the broken roof and the opposite row of bunks were rammed into it, cracking and tumbling.
Tangled barricades of smashed wood piled themselves up on either side. The bunk above jolted and collapsed down over him. Not one explosion but a pulsing string of them, unrolling over the ground. All the light crumpled up like paper.

He could hear nothing except a cold hollow humming, cupped in each ear. He might have been blind too; the blackness was solid and total. Varius elbowed at the stuff that lay over him, struggled up onto his knees, dragged on something, a long serrated spar. The remnants of the bunk bed had left him in a little triangular space, like a cave. The back wall of the shed seemed to be still intact, but on every other side he felt a dark mass of splinters and smashed boards. The spar was wedged fast and wouldn’t move. He fished around, loosened something – a slat from another bunk, a plank? – flung it down beside him on the bed like a prize.

He was at the bottom of a newly lit bonfire. He could feel the heat of the flames overhead, fluttering on the outer shell of the wreck. And he knew, feeling something like rough fingertips on his lungs, that the hollow where he crouched was filling with smoke. Varius’ head clouded, his limbs grew heavy. In a slow, sing-song voice it came to him gently: no one can blame anyone for getting killed in a
fire
. As if for future reference, as if it would be helpful to tell people, he noted that it was not as bad as you might think. Certainly he would have shrunk from it happening like this. Burning was the worst kind of pain, but, as it turned out, the smoke killed you before the flames did, and mercifully fast; soaking you up swiftly and cheerfully, like alcohol. Varius blinked good-humouredly in the blackness. He was coughing steadily as he worked, and his eyes streamed, but he did not mind that much. (The half-smashed frame of the bed was supporting what was left of the ceiling, the mass on either side more loosely packed. Varius clawed, pulled, kicked.) Yes, it was like getting drunk. Someone should tell people these things. And he was alone, he could do whatever he wanted. No one would know if he just lay here on the bed and waited. He had not even had to make the choice,
here it came: his so-much-belated death – out of nowhere, a free gift.

Was Sulien going to die too? Varius felt a great rush of drunken sorrow at the idea. No, no, no. He would be all right.

He threw another dusty lath down beside him. He had a little pile there now. As he scrabbled at it, the wreckage shuddered rhythmically – he felt rather than heard that the explosions were still beating out across the compound. Still marvelling at the extraordinary kindness of death by smoke, he kicked again as the next shiver came, and something overhead dislodged and shook free. There was a fall and clattering, a few bright flakes of orange fire dropped past in the dark, and he felt a little puff of real air, clean on the edge of his lungs. For the first time, as if a severe, prompting voice had said his name, Varius noticed with disbelief what he had been doing all this time, how hard he’d been fighting. His arms, straining against the bars of wood, ached with effort. Had he been knocked out when the walls first blew in, was it possible that he could have started trying to dig his way out even before he was properly conscious again? Because he could not remember beginning.

He thought with clearer alarm of Sulien in the next dormitory, the burst of gold fire. There was a little yellow blaze somewhere below and ahead of him now, where the sparks had fallen. It was eating away the air, but it let him see: he had cleared a gap in the thicket of ruined planking, crossed and hatched about though it was with fallen beams. He was aware now of the rage of his body, the horror of being trapped in this tiny and poisonous space. He forced himself bruisingly in among the shafts, reached and thrashed fiercely, feeling things shifting and cracking under and around him like dry bones. He got his knee onto what was left of the top bunk and pushed upwards again like a swimmer, A fragment fell aside and then his head and shoulders were in the daylight and the smoke-infected air.

Heat struck his face and blurred his sight. There was a wall of terrible light somewhere but he couldn’t look at it. He heaved his legs free, rolled and fell; and for the moment he hardly knew where he was, what he had pulled himself
out of or why there were smears of molten pain on his shins and hands – nothing, only the pitiless clutching of his lungs. Only that he would do anything to get one more breath.

He was lying between the burning remains of the barracks and the brick wall behind them. The coughing, perversely, was more painful in the air, as though sheets of sandpaper were working in and out of his chest. He rose onto his hands and knees, powerless as spasm after spasm scraped through his throat; he almost felt his lungs would be forced bloodily inside out, and he wouldn’t care – anything if the choking would stop. And it seemed to him only that he was getting used to it, not that it was really easing. Still, as if by mere chance, he felt one palm slap blindly against the wall and he made some kicking movement on the dusty ground that levered him somehow onto his feet.

What had he just done? The violence in his lungs – the burns shrilling on his hands – a few moments before he had been in no pain at all, by now he could have been past feeling anything. Then, why –? Not for his parents’ sake; though was it not chiefly for them that he’d knuckled down to each day of the last three years, that he’d done his utmost not to be tempted, to ignore every means of cancelling this unchosen stretch of his life? Yet he was guiltily aware that, there in the dark, if he’d remembered them at all it had been with the almost irritable thought that they would just have to put up with it. He’d had his chance, it had seemed
allowed
. After all this time trying to resign himself to captivity, there had been peaceful, effortless freedom, and what had he done with it? He was almost calmed by the touch of the wall beside him, by looking up and seeing the palisade of barbs overhead. He was not out of it yet, not by a long way.

He stumbled forward, pushing himself along against the wall, walking, after a fashion.

He croaked, ‘Sulien,’ and found that he could hear it, although even his own voice seemed to be happening outside a glass bubble in which his head was encased.

Well, he thought, if he had survived this far, Sulien must have done too, he must have got out of the collapsed barracks, probably some time before Varius had himself. The
section where Sulien had been did not even seem as badly blown in as the ruins he’d just escaped, a quarter or so of its roof was still in place, although pale smoke was swelling steadily above it. Perhaps Sulien was round on the other side – although Varius did feel a dim warning that this did not make much sense, lingering out in the open, in the scope of the blast.

And he saw it now, as he reached the corner of the ruined barracks: a gorgeous, livid pillar of fire, continually buttressed by round explosions, casting a glowing shower of burning shreds and metal hail, rising into the sky from where the heart of the factory had been. A dome of barely penetrable heat extended around it, even to where he stood, where it met and merged with the heat of the burning sheds. Something screamed out of it, ploughing a yellow trail into the sky above the city. Varius staggered. Had Proculus really said a thousand people? It was not possible. In the distance he saw a small flight of figures running, stumbling over the remains of the little tramlines, but no more than ten, and no one else, and he could not see where they went— black and white chutes of smoke rolled and glided across the ground, another powder store burst and perhaps felled them all, he didn’t know.

And he could not see Sulien. Bent double, he lurched into the glare with his arms crossed over his head, along the fractured front of the sheds and shouted again, but the curious certainty that Sulien was outside somewhere evaporated completely. For a stunned moment Varius stood lurching in the heat, panting, staring at the wreck. From here, the dormitory Sulien had entered looked worse than he’d thought – a stockade of trampled timbers and fire. The door was no longer a way in or out, only a bunch of flaming kindling, propped on the rest of the heap. He called hoarsely again and ran back round the building, knocking on the walls that still stood, and fell against the heating wood with another choking fit and a panicked feeling of helplessness. He shut his eyes as it occurred to him that even if Sulien were alive and conscious, he would be just as deafened as Varius was; they might both be shouting and not hearing each other.

There was a rain-water butt against the wall beside him. Varius fell towards it rather than walked, and hung over it, wondering if he could move it and douse the flames enough to get into the barracks. But there was nothing at the bottom but a few cupfuls of fly-blown slime, which made him utter a gasping cough that was almost a laugh and swear hollowly. Then, with something close to exasperation at the uselessness of it, thinking,
Might as well
, he climbed clumsily onto the edge of the barrel, teetered a little and hoisted himself up onto the roof, then crawled over to the skylight. He lay beside it for a moment, trying to get control of his protesting breath. White smoke was already seeping up around the window frame, and when he stamped it through, a pale, thick column exhaled itself from the space. He turned his face away from it, screwed shut his stinging eyes and climbed down.

The smoke had lost all its gentleness, it was like giant hands trying to hold his ribcage still. He felt the familiar haze growing in his head much faster this time, but not the vague addled pleasure at it. He’d lowered himself, as he’d hoped, on to the top of a relatively unscathed bunk. At this end the blast seemed to have tipped the whole row of bunks back and sideways, so that they were packed, tilting, against each other, like books placed untidily on a shelf. There was no way between them and it was only because the opposite row had been loosened and smashed that he managed to get down to the ground at all. Varius plunged down as fast as he could through the embrace of the smoke, on to some clear ground between the slanted uprights, sinking his face almost to the floor and gulping desperately at the air that was still there. It was amazing that there could still be such fierce light outside. It was so dark here that at once he saw the risk of being unable to find his way back to the skylight even if he had any time or chance to do so. And it was so loud, and the heat sent his burns, which for a minute or so he’d nearly forgotten, into infuriated tantrums of pain. He tried to console himself that perhaps that would keep him conscious a little longer. Grimacing, he began to feel his way along the ground in the dark, and then turned back, hesitated for a second, kicked off one of his shoes and left
it there at the foot of the bunk he’d climbed down. It was probably pointless and seemed such a ludicrous thing to do that again he smiled sourly, but he hoped that at least if he crawled back this way and felt it again he’d know he was under the skylight.

He crawled again along the remnants of the aisle, pushing aside or climbing over the hurdled planks. He patted around on the ground, calling, and nothing met his fingers except the sharp ends of split wood. Certainly if Sulien had been anywhere near the front wall then he was dead, Varius already knew that. And it was plain now that even if he was alive and trapped in the debris at the further end of the shed, in the kind of little cavity from which Varius had forced his way out, then Varius had no real chance of finding him, let alone digging him free, before the smoke carried away first his own strength and then his life. All he could hope for was that, in the blackness, Sulien might simply not have been able to find the skylights or a break in the roof. But he neither heard anyone answering his calls nor sensed any human movement in the dark. Then the space he was crawling along narrowed and his hands met a fence of slivers and beams which he could not move.

Varius felt sideways and slid himself into the tilted space between the bottom of two beds. There was a kind of cramped pathway here, under the packed bunks, roofed with the slats and edges of the beds, too low for him even to crawl on his hands and knees. Varius swivelled round and pulled himself along it. Only a few minutes could have passed since the explosion, and yet he felt as if he’d been doing this for days. Again he felt the lure of lying down alone in the privacy of this dark and narrow space. The confinement he dreaded so much in normal, day-lit life, seemed to welcome him forgivingly as if it had been waiting for him. And Gemella stepped lightly, casually into his mind, bringing the feeling he’d had sometimes in prison, that there was only a few inches between them, a barrier yielding as paper.