Rome Burning (5 page)

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Faustus bleakly.

‘In any case it hardly makes a difference. However today
began, the fact is that the Nionians have proved themselves a threat, and neither the Wall nor the treaty is strong enough to protect us. And this is not just a matter of our territory in the West, sir, it’s a question of whether we’re willing to let Nionia overtake us as an Imperial power. Because if not, this could be our last chance to stop it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Faustus—and could see that something had gone wrong; he hadn’t said it properly. He rose from his seat and tried again. ‘Just wait.’ He made for the hidden door because he felt it was the room that was wrong: the beautiful green room was so full of detail, and of the past, a minute or two anywhere else and he would be all right again. He reached the door, but fumbled at the familiar handles among the painted foliage.

‘Sir,’ Glycon was saying, coming towards him, his voice full of concern

Then abruptly the door opened, and before his foot could fall in the doorway the impact came; a huge, soundless thud, a detonation so total that he could not immediately tell that it was within the walls of his own skull, for it knocked half the floor away, so that he stepped off the remaining ground into dark air, and fell.

Una could bear the sun here, where the sea blunted it a little. She was sitting with her legs drawn up protectively into the square of shade under a paper parasol on the stones, the folds of her white swimming dress stiffening around her with salt water. The dark island dropped straight down into the water with no softening of its slope. Here beneath the water it hollowed into a deep bowl, green and purple-red with floating leaves, and also there were spherical dark anemones, blood- or jewel-like and faintly sinister, fixed to the rock. Sometimes she lifted one of the books beside her, although even in the shadow the sunlight turned the pages dazzling, sometimes she watched Marcus swimming. Her pale skin had not burnt, nor did it turn a clear brown as Marcus’ had; it only, very slowly, picked up what looked to her like a faint tinge of dust.

Marcus’ usually muted blond hair had been warmed to gold and amber-yellow, near the temples especially; the hair on his body had turned paler and brighter still. She knew that when he left the water, as his skin dried, it would look as if there was thin gold sand near this shore, instead of only rock.

They would probably never again be closer to being alone together than this: at a tactful distance out there were a few Praetorian boats buzzing in circles round the island, more at the tiny port, and Marcus’ cousin Makaria would have her own bodyguards at the vineyard, although Una was not planning to go there.

She looked out and everything shone, the water, Marcus’ wet hair and skin, and, subtle as smoke, a little silver drift of narrow fish, only visible when they turned and caught
the light. It was as if she were watching them fly; it hardly seemed natural to her that water could be so transparent – it looked less substantial almost than air, not dense enough to support either a fish or a man, and if it could it was barely within reason, almost a cheat, a joke, that she should be there to see it.

They were not far from the slave market at Delos.

The books scattered around her were history books, Cossus’
Rome and Nionia
, and the older works, the Livy and Plutarch that Marcus wanted her to read, hoping that they might make her a little more forgiving of Rome. She could read as fast as anyone else now, though always with a furtive, defiant tension somewhere under her ribs, a sullen fear that there was too much lost time to make up. Marcus and the other students in Athens were reading new things all the time. Knowing she felt like this Marcus had persuaded one of his own tutors from the Academy to visit her every week, but although he tried to hide it Una knew the tutor didn’t really understand what he was doing there, what the point was. And she had turned stiff, inarticulate, moody, so that he had not even thought her intelligent. She wasn’t preparing for anything, as Marcus was. She had told the tutor he might as well stop coming.

When she had been freed she had not, until it was done, paid much attention to the fact that her name was being altered. Someone, drawing up her freedwoman’s papers, had cobbled together a bit of Marcus’ name with her own to make up a citizen’s name: Noviana Una. She had never been Marcus’ slave, or a slave of any member of his family, but it sounded rather like that. She tried not to let this bother her. Of course it was much better than living with the name of anyone who had actually owned her, as would have been more usual, and, she told herself, she need not think of it as more than an official detail, not really a name at all. But she found she had to use it more often than she would have expected.

She knew that to look at her, it was not obvious, at least not at first, that she had ever been a slave. She was still very lean, but without the unhealthy look she realised she must have had once. She almost never curled her hair or wound it
up in plaited coils, she let it hang, as she always had, pale, rabbit’s-fur-coloured, straight over her shoulders; but it had been cut so that it always fell smoothly, and there was more of a shine on it now. She had good clothes, like the white dress lying now on the rocks, plain and narrow but graceful. She had jewellery, even. Marcus had given her some of these things: the necklace of pale green stones now in the pocket of her small bag (she kept checking it was safe there), but she had her own money. She was very stingy with it, partly because she had worked out that it would not be so very much if it had to last her whole life. And really the money was not all hers or her brother’s. Dama had done as much; if he was alive they should share it with him. Keeping a part of it for him was complicated; it comforted her fear that he was dead, but it held her in an odd state of suspense, missing him, but as much afraid as hopeful that she would have to see him again. But sometimes, as time passed and he was not found, saving the money for him began to feel more like an act of memorial than anything else. No one had found his body in the woods near the Sanctuary, but the guards there could have buried or dumped it before they either vanished or were arrested. Sometimes she thought it would be better to spend the money on something he would have liked.

But she had another, deeper-rooted motive for thrift. Even after three years, she had never relaxed completely: the paperwork that said no one could touch her, the physical ease of her life now – they were only to be trusted so far. She might suddenly need to escape, hide.

On the Aventine hill in Rome, not too far from the Palace or the shadowy streets in Transtiberina where her brother lived, she’d noticed a particular bath-house, an ineffective and fallow place, just popular enough for its clients to come and go anonymously, where the staff would be uninterested and unconcerned by a slightly strange request. Una had come here, eighteen months before, driven by fierce, compelling impulse – and yet, could it really be called an impulse when it had made her act so carefully? Inside the locker that she’d used a false name to rent, under innocent towels and a strigil, under a pile of nondescript clothes,
tidily rolled up and hidden in opaque little bottles meant for scented bathing-oil, were thick sheaves of cash: enough to get two or three people out of the country quickly. After Una had placed them there, she felt humiliated by what she had done. It seemed so furtive, so graceless, the dirty habit of a feral animal. She was, she thought, more like an urban fox, gnawing on rubbish out of a London bin, than a civilised woman. And she was ashamed of herself for keeping it secret from Marcus; it was unjust, when there was so little he could really hide from her. And yet she could not bring herself to tell him, or anyone, or to empty the locker; all this time later the stash was still there. Sometimes, without warning she would be struck by a lash of panic that it had been discovered, or that she had forgotten the code needed to retrieve it. Sometimes at night – but not often, not often at all – she lay in bed smoothing the sequence over, like a short string of Indian prayer-beads. She was glad there was nothing visible, no key that had to be hidden or could have been lost: only the code, shameful but safe, folded tightly in her brain, as if in silk.

No, she was not altogether a Roman citizen, in spite of the name. It was not only these guilty slave’s fixations; it was a matter of law too, although most of the differences were subtle enough. She could not vote, or stand for public office, but she was a woman and could not have done that anyway.

She could not marry a member of the aristocracy.

Marcus hovered easily in the water below her. Una looked at him with clear, brooding happiness and leant down, grasped his wet hand and dragged him upwards, giving needless help as he pulled himself out onto the rock beside her. He flicked open one of the books and Una said, ‘A lot of men killing each other.’

‘No, sometimes they stop and make speeches.’ He draped himself across her lap; the sun was drying his skin so fast that she didn’t mind the brief film of water he spread over hers. He smiled up and coaxed her: ‘Don’t go back to the house tonight. Don’t make me go on my own.’

The night before they’d slept in a little house Makaria owned near the harbour, but Marcus was visiting his cousin at the vineyard that evening.

‘It’s much better that I’m not there,’ said Una, with flat certainty. ‘I would make her uncomfortable.’

‘She should be grateful to you.’

‘Exactly.’

‘All right, but that wouldn’t last very long. A few minutes. Isn’t it worth it? I think she’d like you, if you actually talked. It might …’ He played diffidently with her fingers. ‘It might help.’

It was not exactly that Makaria or Faustus disapproved, or were particularly troubled by Marcus’ loving Una. On the contrary, they extended an easy, unspoken indulgence towards the two of them, based entirely on the assumption that, at an appropriate time, Marcus would get rid of her.

Una sighed. ‘But
I
don’t want to meet
her
. You
know
why. How can I be there? There are slaves.’

‘Not many,’ said Marcus, and went on hesitantly, unhappily, embarrassed by the argument before he offered it. ‘She doesn’t … They probably hardly even think of themselves as slaves.’

Una widened her eyes slightly, a strict, ascetic look. ‘Well, Sulien thought that. They’ll change their minds if they’re ever accused of a crime, or if your cousin dies or loses her money and they’re sold on.’

Marcus sat up beside her. ‘I
know
, you know I know. You could talk to her – maybe we could explain it to her.’

‘You want to take me to meet your cousin, and say, you remember this little vagrant I picked up, she’s going to explain why she doesn’t approve of your life – and then we will all sit down and have dinner.’

‘Oh,’ groaned Marcus, dropping his head against her shoulder in defeat. ‘Stop it, don’t talk like that.’ He kissed the shoulder blade, ran his lips across her back to the base of her neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Una, letting her body loosen, resting her head against his.

‘I’d like you to be there, that’s all.’

‘I know.’ She turned to kiss him. ‘It’s only a night.’ But it was one of the last nights before she left Greece.

She was sometimes with Marcus in Athens at the flat
near the Academy, sometimes with her brother Sulien in Rome. She did not exactly live anywhere.

She looked again across the lovely water and thought maybe Dama would want her to do something like go to Delos and see how many slaves she could buy. But it would be almost impossible to free them legally – should she just tell them to go wherever they liked, without any identity papers, with no certainty that they could live, that they wouldn’t be caught and punished? There was no longer anywhere that she knew of to send them; she didn’t know where Delir and the others had gone.

Was this only an excuse for doing nothing?

Her legs brushed against Marcus’, entangled idly. They watched a Praetorian boat drone by, the round-backed wave it carved lolling into the cove below them. When it had passed they folded together more greedily and regretfully, for if they had really been alone they could have climbed up the slope to find shade and smoother ground, to lie down and make love.

Then, out of its rhythm, they heard the noise of the boat again, scraping through the water, growing louder. They looked up to see the Praetorians closing on them and both tensed. It was not only Una who privately nursed the possibility of catastrophe and flight.

The boat turned to jog up and down in its own wake alongside the cove. The Praetorian lieutenant standing up in it, looking at Marcus, called out to him, ‘Sir, we’ve got to get you to Lady Novia’s house immediately.’

Marcus got to his feet. Una remained huddled, feeling exposed in the pale swimming dress, but the Praetorian officers were trying to gloss over her presence by pretending she was not there.

‘Why? Are you expecting something to happen here?’

‘No, sir. Rome needs to talk to you on the longdictor in twenty minutes, that’s all I know.’

Marcus nodded, silent at first, feeling apprehensive sickness gathering. ‘Let us get changed.’

The Praetorian pilot drove the boat obediently around the headland. Marcus stood still on the rock and Una said, ‘Of course I’ll come with you.’

‘Thank you.’ Marcus turned shut eyes to the blue bay. ‘Either it’s an attack on Rome, or it’s my uncle, isn’t it?’