Rome Burning (35 page)

‘But your father would listen to you over the rest?’ pressed Marcus.

Again Tadahito seemed to hesitate, but differently this time, an embarrassed mischief in his face that Marcus could not understand. ‘Everything else being equal, perhaps, yes,’ he said, smiling as if at once amused and wary at the possibility of saying something tactless. ‘If he heard from the others that unfortunately I’d gone out of my mind, probably not.’

Marcus smiled, though he felt the usual Novian flicker of sensitivity at the mention of madness.

*

‘He is terribly young,’ said Lord Kato, disapprovingly. They were seated in an open summer house on the edge of the lake, auditory circlets on their brows. Tadahito’s discomfiture had been caused by the knowledge that no matter how far he walked with Marcus, they would never be out of earshot of Kato and the other lords. He wore a listening device, hidden in a tassel hanging on the breast of his tunic. It was simply easier than his trying to recount everything for discussion when this conversation was over, and furthermore Lord Kato was insistent on exploiting every opportunity to study his potential opponent.

‘So is our Prince,’ answered Lord Mimana.

Kato uttered a snort of dismissive agreement that shocked the others into murmurs of alarm.

‘The question is whether all this is a charade to occupy us while they prepare a further attack,’ said Lord Taira, after a scandalised pause, trying to steer the discussion away from any hint of criticism of the Imperial family.

‘I would say the boy was sincere about it,’ said Kato, in thoughtful, but mildly disappointed tones.

‘I wish I were as confident.’

‘It makes very little difference to the outcome, the war will certainly take place,’ said Kato. ‘Removing the border altogether—! Novius Caesar’s attitude is absurd and feeble, but I won’t at least accuse him of indecisiveness. I suppose he has been trained up fairly well, for times of peace anyway. But there is no substitute for experience. It’s just possible the war may harden him, but he plainly has an extraordinary aversion to it, and more likely he’ll be a disaster for them. Well, so much the better for us, but I wish that their Lord Salvius had come here. It would have been worth observing him.’

‘We none of us have experience of a war on such a scale as this would be,’ said Mimana restlessly.

‘I have governed Tokogane for eighteen years,’ said Kato, with sudden force. ‘And I am not going to give up an inch of it.’

‘Still, it does not belong to you,’ Lord Kiyowara reminded him. ‘And these are not our decisions to make—’

‘I have always known what we would face in the end; I am as prepared as anyone can be—’

‘The Emperor and his son plainly don’t want a war to take place unless all other possibilities have been exhausted, or we wouldn’t be here. We are not playing a game.’

‘Aren’t we?’ asked Kato, smiling.

‘Lord Kato,’ warned Kiyowara, his face locked in an agonised, meaningful grimace.

‘We can talk freely,’ said Kato, carelessly. He had swept a bronze instrument like a censer around the little bower as they entered it. ‘The foreigners’ surveillance devices are far cruder than ours, if there had been any I would certainly have found them.’ He was intensely interested in advancing technology; Yuuhigawa, his seat in Tokogane, was an obsessively modern city, more so even than Cynoto, and Kato’s investment and passion kept innovations churning out of it. That many of them were useful was undeniable, yet many of the other lords found Kato’s faith in them disproportionate.

‘It is nothing to do with that,’ lied Kiyowara, piously and loudly, earning a roll of the eyes from Kato. ‘I should always be disturbed by expressions that … could be construed as disloyal. Although I am sure you cannot have intended it so.’

It was not only the Romans and Sinoans he was worried about, as Kato must surely know: it was perfectly possible that Tadahito wished to spy on them as well as for them.

Kiyowara had phrased the reproof as tactfully as possible, yet he wouldn’t have been surprised if another man had grown angry. Yet Kato, for all his fierce unpredictability and outspokenness, could be almost preternaturally slow to take personal offence. He smiled again. ‘I believe His Majesty can look forward to victory over our enemies, that’s all,’ he said, without acrimony. ‘It’s strange if that’s disloyal.’

Lord Kiyowara sighed.

‘It makes you uneasy because you don’t have the same confidence,’ went on Kato, almost tenderly. ‘It’s true they have greater numbers. Fleets more volucers than we do.’ Naming these deficiencies so openly was itself enough to
make the others uneasy, but Kato seemed oblivious to it. ‘Still – I promise, it will all mean nothing.’

‘Of course strategy counts for more than brute strength,’ agreed Lord Kiyowara wearily.

‘Not just strategy,’ said Kato.

‘Oh,’ said Taira derisively. ‘These mythical weapons,’

This time Kato did bristle. ‘I have seen the first tests. There is nothing mythical about it. Another year and it will be ready for combat. And as you say, strategy is an important weapon, we could certainly hold our own that long; by that time we could have Rome in retreat already. And then, before there could be any chance of it developing into deadlock or the tide turning against us, we would strike with a force like an invisible hammer, a hammer to level armies and cities two hundred miles away. In the near future, explosives will be virtually obsolete! We will use them to prepare the ground, if that!’

‘I don’t mean to doubt you, Lord Kato,’ answered Taira drily. ‘And yet it seems to me that I have been hearing how this miraculous thing was on the brink of being ready for years.’

Kato sat, tight-lipped and incensed, as if at first he could not trust himself to speak. ‘When we are dealing with such new devices, my Lord, some failures are inevitable,’ he answered at last. ‘To have the technology perfect well in advance is a luxury we can rarely rely on. But when the call comes, when the need is real, my people will rise to it.’

Lord Mimana looked at his knees. Something about the way Kato had said ‘my people’ affected him uncomfortably, even if there was nothing logically wrong with it.

Tadahito and Marcus went on talking. That the lords had missed a section of the conversation was unimportant. Although it seemed unlikely anything else significant would be said, they were recording it – unaware that there was another listener, and that Tadahito had another reason for keeping Marcus so carefully to Nionian.

*

Una had expected to be ignored while the ceremony and the banquet went on; instead she had been entertained and
looked after for hours. She had watched a play, which she could not follow despite the little Latin synopsis someone had handed her, but which she enjoyed well enough because the actors wore glittering, architectural costumes, yet still managed to break into pyrotechnic bursts of acrobatics. She had been rowed out, shielded with parasols, in a painted boat on the square lake. She had been fed little steamed sweetmeats and handed cups of the leaf-infusion that had never become popular in the Roman Empire except in the most unconventionally fashionable circles, so that although Una had read of both Eastern powers’ devotion to it, she had never seen or tried it before. She was slightly disappointed. The golden liquid was barely distinguishable from hot water, hot water which just retained a scent like smoke, or woody earth, or subtle flowers. She had expected some stronger, more titillatingly exotic taste.

The Palace women who had been assigned to keep her company spoke only a little Latin; Una had learned a smattering of Sinoan in the camp in the Holzarta gorge, and some more from Marcus and his wealth of books, but it did not amount to much, and the few words she attempted evidently came out wrong, for they did not understand her. So they had been communicating by smiling, and it worked fairly well. But she had been politely smiling so long, carefully mimicking them, so as not to do anything too ridiculous. They fussed over her as if her outlandishness were entrancing and precious; they giggled, and Una tried dutifully to giggle along with them, feeling that their kittenishness was, at least in part, a deliberate mode of correct behaviour which she should, perhaps, also follow. But without language it was difficult, and although, when necessary, she could produce the kind of convincing display of gushing sweetness she had used when talking to Drusus, it did not come without effort. She could feel the women’s thoughts burring and rustling, loud and yet incomprehensible, although she did know that some of them found her appearance hilarious. They were very hospitable; they treated her as what they reasonably assumed she was, a nobly born concubine.

Even if she’d had the language, what terms could she have used to explain the difference, and what would they have thought if they knew where she’d really come from, the muck she’d scrambled through before she got to them?

She had enjoyed the novelty of it all. And yet, as it went on, she felt hard and heavy and out of place, like an angular stone, a lump of granite or flint dumped inexplicably on a bed of silk. They had been sent out to play like children. And the men had their own games and rituals, but finally they would begin to make the first tentative feints at unpicking the conflict between them. Did she want to be among them? Yes, but she was aware it was not a very reasonable wish; even if all barriers of sex and birth could be done away with, she was not yet nineteen – what right would she have? As much of a right as Marcus, it occurred to her, with just a trace of sourness, while she wished it would come to an end so that she could see him. A strange tension and rawness fluttered urgently over her skin and in her throat when she looked towards the gardens and the Emperor’s hall, as though she were itching to say something, yet did not know what.

But now at last she was alone, in the garden of the inner mansion Marcus had been given, the roofs of the Palace glowing icily around her in the warm, magnolia-stained air, and she relaxed again into almost untroubled happiness.

Marcus was looking for her. She had been impatient for his arrival, but she did not move or call out to him. It was suddenly lovely to extend the waiting, and she remained still, sitting upright and self-contained but basking, ready for him to find her.

She was sitting by the ornamental pond, looking at the reflections as if she hadn’t noticed his approach, but he knew that she was pretending, and that she knew he knew. Going along with the game, he stood still and watched her.

Since he’d come back to the Golden House to find what Drusus had done to her, every time they met after any separation he’d felt his pulse leap painfully, with dread rather than with desire, as if this were the last time he could expect to see her safe. Even when they were together and everything was fine, he had got into a habit of watching
her with furtive anxiety or distrust, as if she might be badly hurt in some way, even dying, without realising it, or without having told him.

Now again he felt an unreasoning flow of relief, as if something terrible might have happened to her, but finally, now she was so far from Rome and from Drusus, the gripping fear had gone. Yet it had left the sight of her sharpened. The familiarity of her face and body was not stripped away, but scoured, made luminous, so that it seemed wonderful that she was just the same. There were glossy lilies on the black surface of the pond at her feet. Once, days after their first grim meeting, cold and filthy, they’d smashed their way into an industrial greenhouse in a Gallic field; they had looked at each other across a shallow pool of farmed lilies, the first snags of attraction stinging between them as he noticed for the first time the grace of the wet limbs emerging from the damp cheap clothes. She was more beautiful now than she had been then; he could see with new, transparent exactness how beautiful she was in her silver dress.

She went on sitting there as if absorbed in watching the reflections in the pond, but she could not – or chose not to – prevent the pleased smile spreading slowly across her face.

Come on, then, look at me, thought Marcus, and still for a little longer she put it off, and at last raised her eyes to him innocently, as if she’d had no idea until now that he was there, although she was obviously holding back laughter, and to maintain the pretence he had to do the same.

Una went into his arms, close but brief; she looked into his face, but she did not kiss him, there was a continued pleasure in delay as well as a faint smart of suspicion that someone might be watching. She went past him, inside. There was so much red in the bedroom, lustrous red cabinets painted with gold, red glass lamps. The bed itself was like a little internal room, its pearwood walls carved with leaves reaching into a high fretted canopy over the low mattress.

‘Is there another city somewhere near here?’ asked Una. She shivered slightly; the cooling machines had stripped the air of heat with over-scrupulous vigour.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, kissing her. He gathered her back
into his arms, pushed her between the screens of the bed. She let herself fall back onto the embroidered cover, and lay stretched out, one hand resting drowsily on the pillow beside her, but her face and voice were as guilelessly thoughtful as if she simply had yet to notice his lips and hands warming her, his progress with her clothes.

‘It wouldn’t even be a separate city, really – just the ugly half of this one. For the cleaners to live in, butchers, the undertakers … It should be bigger than this place. And it can’t be far, but we didn’t see it. It could be on the other side of the Yellow River. But it must be somewhere – like a shadow …’