Rome Burning (43 page)

‘Fine,’ said Sulien, as if undaunted. The other boy’s presence seemed to be forcing his face and voice into an optimism that even he found faintly irritating in himself: he’d just explained how close the danger was and now he wanted to say that it wasn’t so bad. ‘Come with me, then.’

But he could not go home. He had only enough money in his wallet for perhaps a cheap meal and a couple of short tram journeys. He thought of friends, colleagues, girlfriends, and knew that any of them would have lent him a floor, a mattress or a side of the bed – and also that he could be tracked to any one of them effortlessly, in hardly more time than it would take him to reach them.

Una, Marcus, Varius – he wanted more than anything to be able to go to them for help, and also to be able to warn them. And they were thousands of miles east, and – so suddenly stripped of connections – he had no idea how to contact them.

Lord Kato knew that the Go-natoku Emperor could see him, but could not be certain whether or not he could see the Emperor. He had placed an unrolled den-ga screen on a lectern in his rooms, and stood before it with his head respectfully lowered, so that the limited information it offered him was further obscured. His vision was clearest on the dark floor as it stretched to the distant feet of the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the upright figure within it, veiled by the canopy above him. Two flat oval panels, standing on slender ebony stems, were placed in front of him, their carved wooden backs concealing the screens on which, if this were real, the Emperor would be watching Kato in full close-up. He was far off, sitting in shadow; if his lips moved, Kato could not see it. In fact he could see nothing stirring in the long, sparely decorated hall. It could be an old recording, it could even simply be a photograph, and the Emperor might in fact be anywhere – in his private rooms, in his gardens, even in his bath, and yet the clipped, measured voice spoke calmly, in the formal dialect of the court, loud in Kato’s ears – it was, as Kato struggled not to admit to himself – unnerving.

‘You still believe it can be deployed effectively?’ asked the hidden Emperor.

‘I will send you the pictures, Your Majesty. We tested it on one of the Kazanshotou islands in the East Sea. It levelled a forest in less than a second – too fast even for our eyes to make sense of it.’

‘But only on one occasion out of ten, I think?’

‘It is true,’ admitted Kato.

‘And I believe the attempts to avoid war are … proceeding well?’

‘It is all very well to find a form of words everyone can interpret to their own tastes and then persuade themselves they are agreeing.’

There was a pause, and then the Emperor said, sounding faintly amused, ‘So, we
are
finding such forms of words?’

Kato detached himself carefully; not being able to see his interlocutor, it was hard to keep in mind how important it was to control his own face. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘You may be right to be cautious, but still, you and the other lords have achieved more than many expected or hoped for. You should congratulate yourselves.’

Kato bowed, expressionless. He was aware that there was a tentative jubilance growing among both the Romans and the Nionians. Sometimes after long sessions Kato saw dishevelled gangs of them, senators and daimyo, out in the courtyards, without their interpreters, trying frivolously to learn each other’s languages, and laughing shrilly together like overtired children. Kato’s regard for the Roman prince had increased somewhat, having seen how despite his youth and softness he had managed to jolt several meetings past what might have been hopeless sticking points. And Kato had an eye on their Lord Varius too, quieter and more meticulous, who seemed to thrive on the sleeplessness and tension, walking from one fraught hall to another, vanishing into the haggling over marriage laws or integration of the police, or slavery, before emerging to lay out a possible solution, as clever and fragile as a folded paper bird. Kato had begun to think some sort of treaty might be inevitable. But some differences lay too deep to be reconciled. The agreement would do no more than render the opening of the war more complicated, for which Kato was prepared. But increasingly he saw that while everyone wallowed in this illusory fellow-feeling, he would lose Tokogane. They would establish some bastard hybrid council, and it would not include him. And moribund though it would be, he might never get his land back after it. For Tokogane was his. He could admit as much in the privacy of his mind.

And he pitied the Princess, abandoned in the chaos, as she would be.

‘What is it you would like from me, Lord Kato?’ enquired the Emperor, indulgently.

Kato looked at the solid ground below his feet, not at the screen. ‘We cannot correct the weapon’s faults without further resources,’ he said quietly.

There was again a short silence. ‘You are talking of course of many billion ryo.’

‘Yes, inevitably. But the work
must
be completed, Your Majesty; to spend less would be a false economy.’

‘We agreed to make no further preparations for war during the talks,’ remarked the Emperor.

‘We agreed only that there would be no movements of troops,’ said Kato. ‘We don’t know that they are not doing the same thing.’

Kato heard the Emperor’s breath expelled grimly. ‘I wish you to do nothing to risk the success of these talks,’ he said, emphatically. ‘I wish you to continue whole-heartedly. And I think it is time to proceed as concerns my daughter, as well.’

‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ said Kato heavily.

‘And in the meantime, in Tokogane,’ went on the Emperor, calmly, ‘your philosophers will have the funds they need.’

Kato lowered his face again, this time to keep it from showing an excess of delight.

‘I imagine they can resume, without you?’

‘Thanks to Your Majesty, they can now,’ said Kato.

*

‘Don’t you find the city beautiful?’ asked Princess Noriko, stiltedly, in Latin. An opera, largely ignored by the audience, was yowling onstage in the Palace theatre and she had just met Marcus for the first time.

Marcus agreed, of course. He was slightly bemused. Tadahito had entered the room a few minutes after him and headed for Marcus at once, saying cheerfully, ‘You must meet my sister.’ He led Marcus through the crowd and Varius, who, antisocially, was sitting alone and actually
watching the opera while the other guests milled around him, looked up sharply as they passed him, approaching a group of Nionian women, whom Marcus had not seen since that glimpse of long coloured hair and wigs between the screens on the first day, and whose presence in the theatre he hadn’t noticed until now.

All of them but one melted away as Tadahito, who had up until this moment seemed informal and relaxed, announced, in an oddly stately way, ‘The Princess Imperial, Noriko.’ And almost at once he too receded, leaving them together in a little lake of space, the shores of people just too distant to be reached, so they could not extricate themselves.

They smiled at each other.

‘What have you been doing all this time?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know any of the princesses were here.’

A blank, stricken look crossed her face and he realised that although her opening words in Latin had sounded close to perfect, it had been because she’d had time to construct something she knew how to say. He’d spoken too fast. He saw her processing what he’d said, before she mumbled something too hesitant and blurred to be understood, and then repeated more clearly, ‘There is only me.’

Unlike the other women’s, her dress was very Roman, dark turquoise with a gold sash wound round the torso, the skirt calf-length where the others all flowed to the ground, the sleeves narrow. The differences were not so great, nor his eye for women’s clothes so sharp that he pinned this down at the time, although he had a vague feeling that there was something incongruous about her appearance. He knew he wanted to stare at the floor-skimming, green-tipped hair, even – guiltily – to touch it.

‘My brother wanted me to come,’ she explained in a murmur. And she blushed. He didn’t know why.

‘I always wished I had brothers or sisters,’ said Marcus, rather helplessly. It occurred to him to wonder how old she was – he’d been thinking of her as his own age, or Una’s, but no, she must be four or five years older, and yet still so shy. Perhaps it was only the language.

There was another pause as she prepared the answer. ‘If you had, you may wish you are – you
might
wish you
were
an only child,’ she said laboriously, for the tenses were complicated, but she seemed pleased with her success once she had spoken, and relaxed slightly.

‘Your poor brother,’ said Marcus, teasing her.

‘Oh – no! I was thinking of childhood.’ There was a pause, and his eyes must after all have slid incredulously down the length of her hair, or flicked to that of one of the ladies-in-waiting beyond her, for her eyebrows lifted and suddenly she leant forward a little. ‘It
is
all real,’ she confided. ‘But, standing behind me, Lady Mizuki is wearing a wig.’

She smiled naturally, even a little flirtatiously, for the first time, and Marcus felt another furtive sizzle of enjoyment at her beauty. ‘Then – what’s her hair like underneath?’

‘Well, not as she would wish it to be, of course,’ said Noriko. She laughed, but then, ashamed of being catty, lowered her eyes. ‘Would I look very bizarre in Rome?’ she asked, in a quieter voice.

‘No. Striking. Beautiful, as of course you would anywhere,’ said Marcus, with formulaic gallantry, although he meant it too.

But she did not look up again, and once more the conversation stalled: she subsided into mystifying nervousness that fatally encumbered Marcus’ capacity to think of anything to say to her. And yet they remained stranded together, Marcus trying to support an increasingly dull and feeble conversation almost single-handedly. Then suddenly, Varius was at his side, saying urgently, ‘Caesar, there’s someone you need to speak to now. Forgive me, Princess.’

Thankfully, his entry seemed to cause the empty circle around Marcus and the Princess to collapse; the waiting women flowed in to receive Noriko, who gave Marcus a diffidently polite smile of farewell before turning back to them.

‘There isn’t anyone, is there?’ asked Marcus, following Varius to a safe distance.

‘I thought you needed an excuse,’ Varius muttered, glancing back over his shoulder.

‘Thanks. I didn’t make it too obvious, did I?’

‘No more than she did.’ Varius’ manner was odd: at once conspiratorial and evasive, distracted.

‘I did
like
her,’ said Marcus, feeling mildly defeated.

‘That’s good,’ said Varius, disappearing.

*

Noriko let out a sigh as her ladies surrounded her, safe for a while among her own people and language, but frustrated too. She wished she could have at least expressed herself more gracefully, that she could have been less pathetically timid with someone who was, after all, her junior. Still, the charge between them, brief and tenuous as it had been, would have pleased and reassured her, if she had not known about the Roman lady he was in love with.

She was surrounded by curious chatter. ‘He was lost as soon as he began talking to you, Madam!’ cried Lady Sakura, exaggerating enthusiasm either to disguise actual distaste for Marcus Novius, or in a real attempt to buck Noriko’s spirits. ‘I could see it in his face. Poor creature, how could he help it?’

‘Without effort,’ replied Noriko, tersely. ‘I don’t think he is in need of your compassion.’

‘No, not if you will love him in return, Lady,’ said Mizuki, smiling, but with a trace too much mockery in her tone.

‘But he was very respectful,’ said Tomoe.

‘No, more than that, he could not take his eyes off you. If …’ Sakura lowered her voice, ‘he
were
to be your husband, you could be sure of his devotion.’

‘I would say he looked at me with no more attention than was friendly or polite in a first meeting.’

‘But what did you talk about with him?’ persisted Sakura.

‘We had a very pleasant conversation and I have nothing whatever to say about it,’ Noriko answered crossly.

Dismayed they talked obediently of other things for a while. Later, when they had withdrawn a little from the party and were out on a verandah, Lord Kato approached her, his face full of sympathy. ‘You must be very anxious,’ he said gently.

‘Yes,’ she found she had said, despite herself.

‘I understand. If the marriage
does
go ahead, it will be a great ordeal for you of course, but I hope I can comfort
you a little. I will not allow you be stranded among them in the event of war. I will make sure you are rescued: a secret escort can be ready to remove you from the country at all times. And I hope your time away from us will not be long.’

‘Thank you,’ said Noriko, wanting to let out a wordless bark or roar of fury into his face.

*

Marcus did not see Varius again that night; he seemed to have left the party abruptly, without speaking to anyone. But the next morning, as Marcus left a meeting with Tadahito in one of the pavilions, Varius was there at the foot of the steps, waiting for him.