Rome Burning (50 page)

At first, she was marketed as an exotic, lethal ingénue, a heroine. Then, later, as she grew older and acquired more
scars on her face, the impresarios who owned her turned her into a cropped-haired, implacable villainess whose eastern skills were barely natural, who did not need weapons to win a bout, or kill an opponent. By the time she was thirty-five her gladiatrix persona had even changed nationality – from Sinoan to Nionian – in order to amplify the hysteria of whooping, booing hatred she provoked when she walked out to face some young, blonde fighter with the crowd behind her. She had believed herself indifferent to this. She would do her job, the promoters would do theirs: what they called her or made her out to be had nothing to do with the privacy of the fight itself. And only as she felt her strength start to tire, her reflexes begin to slow, as she began to loathe the very texture of the injuries she inflicted even as she struck them into place, then gradually it began to tell upon her that in every day of her work, she was surrounded by thousands of people who hated her and wanted her to die. She was ready to retire, it was understood that she deserved it. Escape should not have been necessary.

What she’d earned over the years could have bought a whole troupe of gladiators at the price Huang had got for her. Sometimes she reflected with something between affection and scorn that Huang could have been a millionaire if he’d known how to manage her instead of selling her. But the company she belonged to had changed hands, and though her right to buy her own freedom was always assured, it kept receding: her value kept climbing, one pace ahead of what she had saved. She thought that surely as her performance declined, it would come to a standstill, but she did not wait meekly for that to happen: she pressed, angrily, for a date. The lanistas who ran the company hedged and quibbled. Only one more year, she was told at last, reasonably.

One more year. Ziye had gone back to her barracks and thought about this, and discovered with a chill that the feeling she had taken for anger seemed to be fear. Most combats between skilled gladiators were not to the death – that would have been an unconscionable waste. But over twenty-three years she had fought on more than enough special occasions, her opponents were all dead and she was still alive. She had burnt up more luck than she had a right
to. She was not as strong as she had been. One more year would kill her.

And they
wanted
it to. The final, best use they could get from her was not to accept her money and let her go, but to create a satisfying climax to the audience’s loathing of her, to feed her whole career, her whole
life
, to some rising star who would swallow it all and be strengthened by it. Whoever killed her would become, at a stroke, a gold mine, a new idol. It was like killing a dangerous animal and wearing its skin.

The news of Holzarta in the Pyrenees had come to her a year before, just as gossip from Galla, whom Ziye could not see or think of now without wondering if she would be the one to kill her – a young, fierce, ambitious gladiatrix, who had heard Holzarta whispered about by the slaves of a fan she’d been sleeping with. Ziye and Galla had been impartially curious, feeling casual pity for the poor souls who’d have to make use of the place. But neither of them had any interest then in a freedom that meant subterfuge and poverty and flight.

And even after this she kept spiralling round the idea as around a drain, in panicked hope of some way of saving the comfortable retirement she’d counted on. And yet she began to think of every arena in terms of distance from the Pyrenees. And then one day she was travelling towards the arena at Pompaelo, motionless in a traffic jam, on a bridge over the Tagus. After twenty-three years of professionalism, she hardly travelled in shackles: she had an expensive car to herself, a bouquet of orange roses wilting on the seat beside her, a bottle of wine, music she had chosen playing. But the doors were locked, and all the money she’d saved was far away. She was aware of the river below. She did not know how deep it was, or how fast-flowing. She might as well die in a way that did not profit anybody. It would be either death, or like death – she could only get out if she went as bare and poor as a corpse. The driver and a single bodyguard sat ahead.

It was the first time she’d attacked someone who was not a trained fighter. She was shocked by the messy simplicity of it, her own trembling and incompetence, despite
the fact that it was easy, really, and soon over. The car itself was harder – the locks opened not with a key but with a code she didn’t know, and in a moment someone would realise what was happening and stop her. She’d exhausted herself and sprayed her legs and feet with cuts kicking out the toughened glass, and then stood on the bridge, barely hesitating. She’d learned to swim thirty-five years ago, in Shandong province, in a reedy lake the Yellow River had left behind as it rampaged across the land. She thought of that, stepping into space.

During the three days after that, she’d grown more efficient at spontaneous, unstaged violence, since it was all she had to compensate for her almost complete ignorance of how to live in the world. She’d stolen money, clothes, kicked a man from a farmer’s four-wheeled mount, on which she burned across a few hundred miles of country, until the power gave out. But he was the last, she had touched no one afterwards. She had approached the mountains with certain resolutions. It was not that she wanted to change. She wanted to remain exactly as she was in that hour: calm, clean, and either empty as air or full like a cup of motionless water. She wanted, monastically, only to go on wanting nothing. So she would never fight again. She would never sleep with anyone again. She would never go home.

Already she had broken two of these. When she arrived in the camp, she had been the only woman there, and had had to deflect a lot of crude attention. But after she’d weathered most of that she’d found that Delir was pursuing her with courteous, dogged persistence, which to her bewilderment had worked on her in the end, even though however admirable Delir was, he was also a funny, dainty little man she could have knocked across a room with one hand. And that had brought her home to Sina, although she had always known that she could no more truly return to the aching, absent country in her mind than make herself nine years old again. Still, she had not fought again, since those days in Spain. But if the police caught them now, trying illicitly to cross the Long River towards Nionian territory, what would she do then?

Some minutes had passed in silence. Then Ziye
announced, ‘There’s an official-class car behind us. It’s missed a few chances to overtake.’

She pulled the van to a sudden crawl. Unspeaking, Lal and Delir drew closer towards the cab, away from the doors. Delir closed a hand on Lal’s shoulder, and she could feel the instinct in the tension of his arm: to push her further back, behind him, to hide her, even though there was nowhere further to go. And the very protectiveness of it seemed to reveal to her in one pitiless sweep how fragile he was: no taller than his daughter, more used up than he should have been at fifty, and less at home in this country than she was. For a moment she felt like crying.

Ziye watched the black polished shell slide by and ahead, scarlet curtains drawn, everyone within invisible. ‘It’s gone past. They might not want to make a move yet, I suppose.’

Delir sighed. ‘They would just stop us, surely. Why make such a song and dance of it?’

Ziye gave a half-convinced grunt. ‘We may as well talk about what we do if Mouli isn’t there.’

‘He’s worked there for twenty years, it’s only six months since I heard from him. Six months is nothing,’ said Delir, looking at Lal.

There was a government checkpoint near Wuhu, at the next bridge on the road south – even in the best of circumstances they would have been unable to cross there. There was a little quay a few miles west of the highway, on the edge of a village. Mouli had a small motorboat there, for fishing and some minor trade between riverside villages. He had helped a few of the former Roman slaves living in Sina who had decided, for whatever reason, to travel further south. But Delir himself had only ever met Mouli once, in what had been a fairly casual attempt to reinforce this length of the chain of promises and sympathy, and friends of friends of friends, that had once led back to the camp in the Pyrenees.

‘Delir. It doesn’t protect us just to assume everything will be all right.’

‘Well, then we pay someone else to get us across,’ said Delir, in exasperation. ‘What choice is there?’

‘We could wait until dark and steal a boat,’ said Lal, in a low, tentative voice.

Before Delir could respond Ziye said practically, ‘Yes, we can’t afford to throw money away on bribes, and we can’t afford to approach strangers. Not on this side of the border, anyway.’

Delir was silent for a second or two. Then he murmured, ‘Yes. You’re right. If Mouli is not there, we will have to do that.’ He had slumped back, his eyes downcast. Under his breath he said, ‘God in Heaven forgive us if it comes to that.’

Lal looked at his dark shape and knew that having once been well off, it was hard for him, even now, to believe things could be so desperate as to warrant stealing: he had chosen a life that led to this. The people that lived in the poor, tightly farmed countryside outside had not.

It was close to dusk already. In the back of the van, Lal could barely even see her father’s outline in the darkness. She lowered herself to the van’s floor, lying in a cramped, cat-like curl, the vibration of the wheels on the road throbbing through her bones.

Ziye left the motorway as the towers of the next suspension bridge rose in the purple air ahead, and the river spread again down across the horizon like a shivering expansion of the sky. She could see the red and white lamps of barges – points of light over feathery reflections in the water. She drove down towards them.

The ground was sticky under the wheels. Lal was beginning at last to retreat into a doze, and she felt the van cough to a stop with vague dismay: whatever came next was going to be harder. Ziye said, ‘All right. Shall we leave the van here?’

Delir leant forward again. ‘I can’t see. Where are we?’

‘A track. Can’t see anyone around. The quay’s just ahead. There are lights on.’ She tightened the scarf around her head. ‘I can go and see if he’s around. If he’s there it would save us having to go into the village. You should both stay hidden while I find him.’

‘I’m not such a sore thumb in the dark,’ said Delir, stretching briskly, smiling. ‘I’m not
blond
. I’ll come. I
remember Mouli’s face, at least.’ He groaned a little as he moved forwards, and his hand brushed Lal’s shoulder again. ‘Lal,’ he said softly. ‘Wait out of sight until we know it’s safe.’

Lal made a provisional uncurling movement, and lifted her head as he opened the door and jumped down.

Ziye and Delir started walking towards the river, exchanging a look, aware that they remained superficially angry with each other, knowing that it was unwarranted and that it would pass.

Then a dark, high van rolled up from the quay and two men jumped down in front of them. Someone said, in Sinoan of course, ‘Present your identity papers,’ before the torch-beam swept Delir’s face. At his side, he felt Ziye tense in a way he had never known before and yet recognised instantly: not simply fear, but preparation. And he had a split second in which to know what a defeat any kind of violence would be for her now.

Then more men emerged from the vehicle, and as Ziye counted them and saw the guns in their hands, she let her body relax, utterly certain that nothing it could do was of use. Some unfeeling part of her was even relieved.

Delir couldn’t understand what they were saying to him, couldn’t answer properly: his clumsy competence with Sinoan knocked all at once into pieces. Ziye tried, in a flat, reasonable voice, to translate for him, and they shouted for her to be silent, one of them threw a slap at her face which she blocked without thinking, and at that they bundled her to one side; they grabbed Delir and swung him away from her. Three of them headed for the van she and Delir had left, and Delir stared back towards where Lal was and couldn’t speak or think or pray, or even decide what to hope for –
don’t let them find her
, or
don’t let us be separated
…

Then they came out of the van without her and began swiping fiercely but uncertainly at the reeds, making Delir’s pulse hitch, like a fish hook through his heart. She had to be very, very near, she’d hear if he called to her, he could be sure where she was. What would happen to her if she were left behind with nothing, and here where someone must
surely have informed on them? What would they do if they found her?

But he couldn’t make a sound, until they came back and shoved at him again, ordered him to say whether there had been anyone else. He understood that, and whispered, ‘No.’

Lal crouched, paralysed, among slippery weeds. The air buzzed with insects; her right foot and half the hem of her dress were submerged in sticky, blood-warm water. She had dived so quickly, and so automatically into the swamp ground beside the track that she could scarcely remember doing it. She clasped her hands over her face and cried, shallowly at first, easing the pressure of panic and helplessness as she might have at any ordinary hurtful thing and broke into gulping, messy sobs of desperation only when she heard, without wanting to listen or bearing to look, the van moving away, the police vehicles following sternly behind. Her father and Ziye were there, somewhere, they were being carried back the way they had come, towards the highway; they were gone. An empty hush flooded everything for a moment, in which she could only hear herself snivelling and trying to tell herself that it was somehow all right. Then the quiet filled with the louder triumphant gloating of the mosquitoes and birds, barges hooting on the river, the roar of the road.