Rome Burning (49 page)

Lal was seated on the ground, using the bench beside her as a desk on which she had spread a sheet of paper, a writing brush, an inkstone, although she was not writing but sweeping the ink into smooth coils and swirls, lovingly deepening the black, keeping it wet and glossy for as long as possible, with no design at all, beyond some half-conscious wish that it were possible to draw the motion of the swallows – their movement, not the physical birds themselves. She had learned from Liuyin how to imitate, with obsessive, squinting precision, the exact brushstrokes of the old masters outlining a bird in flight or perched on a misty spray of leaves, themselves copies of copies. Beautiful, but stifling, finally.

She was too idly engrossed, and too glad of the illicit break from selling hybrid Roman–Sinoan snacks in Matho’s shop, to be genuinely angry at Liuyin’s lateness now, although every few minutes, looking around and still not seeing him, she reminded herself that she had every right to be, and should go. She should give up seeing him altogether, in fact, she could not keep responding to these tortured claims that he had something of desperate importance to tell her. He had been particularly agitated this time, it was true, and on the way to Lady Without Sorrows, she had wondered if it might be that his parents were pushing him into marriage. But she’d since decided this was giving too much credit to Liuyin’s histrionic urgency: probably it was only that he wanted her to read some book he’d found whose ill-starred hero and heroine mirrored their plight.

And then Liuyin was there, breathless, stuttering slightly, exclaiming, ‘Oh, you’re just sitting there drawing,’ with some hopeless, half-censorious emotion. His hands jagged up and down in distress. He was also seventeen, with a gentle, scholarly face, from which his occasional fits of
elegiac drama could be unexpected: ‘How can I apologise? Oh, if I’d come here too late and you had gone I couldn’t have borne it …’

Lal, entirely without malice, entirely without realising she was doing it, stopped listening to him. She left her face turned towards him in an expression of sympathetic enquiry while her attention streamed away, whisking accidentally three hundred miles towards the bright, sterile walls of Bianjing, searching for Una there, for Marcus – and questioning with guilty tentativeness: what was Sulien like, now?

‘I couldn’t get away sooner. I know my mother suspects. If my parents find out I’ve told you this they’re going to kill me. I’m not meant to know. My father must have known what I’d do. But I heard, he had instructions today from Bianjing. There’s been an assassination there. You must leave, you and your family. It’s starting this evening. They’re clamping down on all you people. I mean Romans.’

Lal blinked, as around the unexpected naming of Bianjing, the blur of distraught words suddenly hardened into horrifying order. ‘Wait –
what
?’

‘Wherever you go, you won’t forget me, will you?’ breathed Liuyin, taking hold of her shoulders.

‘No,’ said Lal, with mechanical, shocked compliance, not hearing herself. ‘I don’t understand—’

‘Yes you do,’ said Liuyin impatiently. ‘You’ve got to get away from here, there’s nothing else to understand. But you can’t tell anyone except your family, or the police will realise I told you and I don’t know what would happen. My father could lose his job.’

‘But what has it got to do with us?’ protested Lal. ‘
Who
has been assassinated?’

‘One of the Nionian lords, I think. It must have been a Roman who killed him. So, you see—’

‘And – you said this is happening
today
?’ It was strange that the few, useless words that came to her seemed to express little more than a mild alarm. Of course, in part it was simply that the news was too much, and too abrupt, to take in. It was also Liuyin: Lal could not join in lamentation with
him at their parting, and he seemed to leave no other way of even feeling panic, except in this muted, polite form.

‘Yes. Yes, it’s terrible. I suppose we will never see each other again. I don’t know what we’ve done to deserve this.’

‘But Bianjing is miles away. We’ve been here all this time and no one’s bothered. They’re really going after
everyone
? You are sure about this, Liuyin?’

‘Of course I’m sure! Do you know how I’ve been able to bear it, all this time when we’ve hardly seen each other? By telling myself that you are still
here
, that I am still in the same city as you. Do you think I would come here and tell you to leave Jiangning if I didn’t have to, if it wasn’t to save you?’

Lal wondered guiltily if there were any chance that he might, in fact, do that. ‘But you don’t think it could blow over?’

‘No!’

Lal could do nothing but stare at his earnest, self-consciously anguished face, and say weakly, ‘Well, thank you, Liuyin.’

‘There is no
need
to thank me.’

‘Well – goodbye …’

‘Wait. Kiss me,’ said Liuyin, wounded.

Because she was too stunned to question any instruction, and because it seemed the simplest way of concluding the conversation, and out of gratitude, Lal reeled obediently forward to give him an incongruous kiss. And ran, over the damp ground, into the warm soft chaos of Jiangning.

*

It was late afternoon, but within Jiangning’s double corridors of plane trees a dense, illusory twilight fell. The light from the driver’s cab went dark, and in the windowless rear of the narrow van, jounced among the sliding cases, Lal and her father Delir could only see each other as huddled, urgent shadows. They were driving north towards the bridge over the Long River, at an agonisingly ordinary speed.

Delir leant forward at the hatch in the van’s partition. ‘You want to go left at the end of this street.
Here
. What are you doing?’

‘There’s flooding along the Qinhuai, I’m not going that way,’ said Ziye shortly. Being Sinoan she was the only one who could risk visibility in the driver’s cab. She had covered her short hair with a scarf knotted under her chin, lending her handsome, scarred face a spuriously quaint look. But of course the scars were memorable, and it was unusual for a woman even to be allowed to learn to drive.

‘It’ll be twice as long this way. Are you certain?’

‘Didn’t you hear the rain last night? Where did you think all the water went?’

Delir let out a tense, unconvinced sigh. Presently he said, ‘Then it’s straight on.’

‘I
am
going straight on.’

The van sank into a traffic jam. Sitting crouched in a corner, clutching the little bag in her lap, Lal knocked the back of her head against the wall behind her. The argument parodied some safe, normal crisis, it felt agonisingly irrelevant to what was happening and yet it was not, an hour lost one way or the other really might be critical, and it was unbearable to listen to. She closed her eyes and tried, without even a second’s success, to disengage from the noise and the jolting, to meditate. She couldn’t even keep her eyelids down, let alone stop her attention from butting, like a moth against
this
: they had left nearly everything, there were checkpoints spread like landmines between them and the Nionian border, two thousand miles to go before the crossing into India after that.

But for a few minutes, flinging the bags into the van, a thrill of unseemly excitement had shimmered through her, that they were moving, that they were heading for home.

Finally there was quiet, as Ziye had begun stolidly ignoring Delir, who slumped back against the wall, his head bowed with a quickly controlled desperation. He said suddenly, ‘I am so sorry, Lal.’

Lal looked at him in surprise. She felt slightly responsible for the bad news, having been the one to run back and break it. She was still afraid, on top of everything else, that all this might be for nothing. And of course they had ignored Liuyin’s instruction not to warn any of the other Roman refugees. She could not think what it would mean for all
those people if he should turn out to have been wrong, or lying. And yet, when her father said that, she knew what he was sorry for. He had never been a slave, he had been an affluent Roman citizen when an eruption of compassionate fury, decisive as a stroke, had made him drag down a half-dead boy from a cross on the Aurelian Way, seven years ago. No one had forced him, as he had forced her, to go and live in driven, furtive insurrection against Rome’s cruelty, before she was old enough to understand what she was losing by it.

She did not think she could stand it if he said any of this. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, a little blankly.

‘We’ll go to Rome,’ he promised suddenly, rashly generous.

She smiled cautiously. ‘We’ve got to get a long way before that.’

‘Well, we will,’ he said.

The van began to move again, which was some comfort. In Holzarta they had been professional in their readiness for flight. They had tried to maintain this in Jiangning: three years with packed cases near the door, always light enough to carry easily, sometimes opened and checked, clothes added or replaced, false papers subtly adjusted by Lal. But sometimes, over three years, things were sneakingly borrowed too, packs of money raided when none of them could find work. And despite the stunned looks they continued to attract when they went far outside the Black Clothes quarter, they were so taken for granted there that caution of that kind had long come to feel more like superstition than anything, a ritual to turn aside bad spirits.

‘What have you got there?’ Delir asked her after a while, gesturing at the little red cloth bag she had in her lap.

Lal shrugged and muttered, ‘Some lip paint and perfume and stuff.’ To prompt him to laugh at her, which he did, she had struck a note of faint self-parody: young, sheepish. It was not really true to how she felt, although it was true enough that she hadn’t wanted to leave without the makeup. In the same light tone, she said, ‘It might help if I look nice. If we get caught.’

‘We won’t, we won’t get caught,’ he insisted softly.

Ziye manoeuvred the van grimly through Jiangning, the only one of them able to see the city they were leaving: Fuzi Miao bazaar, full of clothes and caged animals; prowed, fish-scaled roofs of loosening tiles above cramped whitewashed houses like the two-roomed building they’d left behind, with so much still there, exposed to thieves. Then the road ducked through grey, sprawling burrows of shacks, botched with sheets of plastic and steel. The Long River percolated through the city as through the cavities of a warm sponge, the pattern of the streets and markets interrupted by the slinkings of low, flower-lined canals. Then, on the edge of the city it insinuated and intruded, the most wretched of the slum buildings leaning over its floodwaters, suicidal. Then, as Ziye drove into the heavy light from under the deep shade of the planes, beneath the suspension bridge it became a sudden bulging sea, even the great barges and ferries looked balanced precariously on its rolling back, the men on sampans fragile as pond skaters. Then, as the road dodged away from it and the trunk of it was hidden over the horizon, it still soaked the countryside, welling up in rice fields, and green-polished lotus beds and swamp.

Ziye thought about fighting. That is, she became aware of her body beginning, without her consent, to think for her: measuring the remaining strength of her unpractised muscles, coldly priming skills too old to be eradicated. She endured the pain of trying to leave Sina now as if it were a passing attack of illness: the core of her life had been spent outside her country. There had never been any shortage of superfluous Sinoan children, especially girls; rural children who amassed like debts, crowding strained families and exhausting supplies of food. And if they could not be shifted off, on to a relative or employer, and did not die, they were sometimes bought up by dealers, who talked vaguely to the parents of a better life and shipped the children onto the Roman slave market, where the excess of unsupported humans neatly complemented a worsening shortage of labour. The difference for Ziye was the length of time that had passed between her removal from her village, and her entrance into the Roman Empire.

She had been nine when Huang had driven away with
her, huddled in a wailing knot with two older girls in the back of his truck. She was seventeen when at last she left him, a fluid, supple young athlete whose hands and feet could whir elegantly through space to crack bone, almost without effort. Huang had made some contacts in the Roman gladiatorial industry, and had had an idea to raise the value of girls. He had made a good profit out of Ziye herself in the end, she believed, but, from the three little girls he began with, and after eight years of training, he produced only one marketable gladiatrix. After a couple of years Rong and Mei, the other two, must have learned something, but they looked only exhausted and heartsick and ill. Having brutally washed his hands of them, Huang must have decided the experiment was too time-consuming and costly to repeat. That was, at least, probably the reason. After that, anxiously watching his youngest girl’s progress with her expensive teacher, he would, from time to time, pat her shoulder approvingly, almost like an uncle, if not like a father. When the time came and she was ready to go, as he put it, Huang had tears in his eyes. But whatever emotion that had been, it did not stop him: he sold her anyway. Ziye was, in one way, sharply aware of the betrayal. And yet it was also a graduation, the beginning of her career.

And for twenty-three years she had fought, wheeling across arenas in Roxelania, Ctesiphon, Tecesta and Rome. She fought in the Colosseum, where cameras swooped on tracks around the pitch and the gladiators cast circles of multiple shadows under the lights. They pitted Ziye against men, and she went to work with her usual fearless, passionate focus, utterly deaf to the noise the crowd made as they watched her. They saw a slim, unarmed, defenceless girl erupt like a firework, flicking blades, maces, nets out of her adversaries’ hands, and the sound Ziye did not hear was a sighing, pitching, splashing roar, a symphony of gasps, not just of shock but of adulation and lust. Wherever the lanistas took her, a torrent of starstruck lovers would seek her out, both men and women – she could take her pick. The only impossible choice was no one.