Rome Burning (77 page)

‘I mean it, Dama. The strikes in Nionian Terranova should have done it, but they haven’t. Nothing’s happening.
It’ll be a while before we can try anything new. On any reckoning these people you’re hanging onto are going to stay dangerous, at least until we succeed, and we’ve got no way of knowing when that’ll be.’

Dama felt his teeth clench. Mazatl didn’t know of Una’s ability, and so didn’t know that he had made this more true by coming here today. Yet it felt almost like an act of deliberate malice. Mazatl went on, brutally, ‘And if she keeps this up, she’ll be dead by then anyway. And as far as I can see, she’s asking for it. Why spin it out? And in the meantime there are the other two to worry about.’

Dama’s head was turned to the window; his eyes seemed unable to focus on anything close; he let his gaze push up through the transparent sky, at the white sun. He murmured, ‘No, Mazatl.’ And he knew that really he had no more to say, no argument that could stand up to his friend’s. But he found himself protesting, ‘Is it such a bad thing, to try and protect someone? Out of gratitude or – kindness? Is that so terrible?’

Mazatl made a discontented scoffing noise in his throat. But when he looked at Dama, it was with something close to compassion.

In the cellar, Lal was panicky with boredom and loneliness. Even Una’s phantom company seemed to have left her. Two nights ago she’d woken thinking she’d heard a voice that might have been Una’s, crying out, and a door slamming. And since then, there was no longer even any response when she knocked on the pipes herself. It frightened her to be left alone this way. Sometimes she found terrible conjectures going through her head. But they weren’t rational, she insisted to herself – they weren’t likely. It was being alone: thoughts seemed to go bad, like milk, when left for too long. Dama would not hurt Una; that much must be true.

She pestered everyone who came to bring anything or take anything away. ‘Oh, please don’t go. I’m not as horrible as you think – you don’t
know
what I’m like. Please just stay and talk to me.’ Most of them stoically ignored her; but a few, in the last couple of days, had mumbled apologies or asked if there was anything they could bring her. Today, at
breakfast, she’d even managed to lure a woman into a very short, banal conversation about the weather. But as she’d never yet seen the same person more than twice, she had little hope of achieving more than a tiny reprieve from the monolithic boredom of the day. It had almost goaded her into carrying out her plan already. She had held back because although it seemed she had been here an unendurably long time, it had not really been so many days since Sulien had warned Dama she might become ill. And there would be only one chance. Despondently she had calculated that it was almost certain no one was looking for them seriously yet. She had begun to make a few tentative friends in Rome aside from Una and Sulien, but no one who would be worried by not seeing her for a while. The staff at the clinic might have reported Sulien’s absence to the vigiles, but when the vigiles realised Una was missing too, and that Una had been Marcus’ lover, they would probably think Sulien had taken his sister out of Rome for the Imperial wedding, as indeed he’d tried to do. He should have called the clinic, but anxiety and thoughtlessness on his part would surely seem a more likely explanation than abduction at first.

A door closed upstairs. Lal picked one of the magazines off the floor, opened it, stared at words she could have recited by heart, and then hurled it across the room with a grunt of fury.

Then the pipes rang, with three loud, urgent blows.

Lal started, and leapt eagerly towards them. ‘What happened to you?’ she cried aloud, as she knocked her response.

As on the first day, Una mimicked the rhythm of Lal’s signal back to her. ‘I was worried,’ remarked Lal, settling down on the floor by the pipes, and striking them again. She laughed foolishly at herself for talking as if anyone could hear her.

But Una repeated the same sound once more, and then again, harder. For a second or two Lal thought Una was not trying to talk to her after all, but resuming her solitary protest. But then there was nothing until Lal reached out hesitantly to tap again. She had barely touched the pipes when Una pounded out the same beat again, violently.

Lal snatched her hand away as if the heat had burned her, unnerved. She sat still for a moment, looking uncertainly up at the ceiling. ‘What is it?’ she murmured, self-consciously. Would Una know what she had been planning? She had been rehearsing it diligently for days, laying the scene, adding new details – would Una have picked that up? The idea was at once hopeful and disconcerting. She rapped again, questioningly, and said, ‘Now? Today?’

There was an outburst of hammering from the pipes. Lal caught her breath.

Indecisively, she pressed her hand down on the hot metal, wincing. It was still possible that she was misunderstanding what Una was telling her, perhaps even that there was no message to be understood. Whatever had kept Una quiet all this time, by now she might be as desperate as Lal for a sign that someone was there.

But, before she had even finished this thought, her own words seemed to sound again, as if she had repeated them aloud without realising it, or as if someone had recorded them and was playing them back to her: ‘Now. Today.’

Lal heard herself let out a thin, maddened laugh. She felt as if her attention had been compelled back to those words, by a will that was not hers. The next instant, the fancied pressure on her thoughts was gone, and she had no way of telling if it had been more than a jitter of her mind; she knew that every day she was left alone her thoughts were less normal, less her own. But she began to get ready.

Some time around noon, a man came in with a tray of food. Lal looked up at him forlornly from the floor. She was sitting damp-skinned and shivering on the mattress, clutching a heap of blankets around herself, and whispering, ‘Please, stay, I’m not well. Please, it’s so cold.’

He looked at her in alarm, but withdrew without saying anything or coming near her. Lal remained poised on the mattress for almost an hour, in suspense, ready to carry on her performance if he came back, or sent anyone. But no one came. Lal had planned for this: indeed, they would have far more chance of escape at dusk. But now it was actually happening, she could not help growing agitated and tearful at the possibility that her simulated illness would meet
only indifference. And whatever chance Una had tried to tell her of was passing, it would be too late.

At last she flung down the blankets impatiently, and crept up the cellar steps to listen to the noise of the house. She wished, as she had wished many times, that there were a clock. She could not act more than a few minutes before someone came; the heat wouldn’t last long on her flesh. She sat hunched on the top step, for hours, chewing her lips and the skin around her fingernails in an agony of mingled anticipation and boredom, waiting to hear people gathering and crockery being moved.

Then she ran down the steps and dragged the sheet from the mattress over to the pipes, bundling it up against the heat along with her hastily stripped-off dress. She had a cup of water, already jammed against the heat and lukewarm. But that was not enough. She straightened a layer of the dress, draping it to protect her skin, and wrapped her palms around the pipes, and then pressed them to her cheeks. The last part was the hardest. She shifted onto her knees, forcing herself to grip the pipes again, twisting her face into a preparatory grimace, and lowered her forehead onto the hot metal, holding it there as long as she could.

They had left him a lamp, standing on the concrete floor just inside the garage doors. Sulien sat against the wall, waiting for someone to come for the empty plate, and watched a crane-fly bobbing jerkily through the dusty light. The food had always been reasonable, and Sulien tried to get as much deliberate pleasure out of it as he could, as it was about the only point of interest of the day. Like Lal, he made attempts to talk to the people who came, but he could not make himself appear as sweetly harmless as she could; they knew he’d tried to push and fight his way out twice, during the first couple of days. He tried to seem resigned and conciliatory now. He was waiting for Lal. But there was little he could do to prepare. It was possible that she had already tried and failed to convince their captors she was seriously ill. Even if not, he had no way of knowing what they would do.

The crane-fly seemed to sketch out a predictable pattern
as it flew back and forth: a kind of drunken pentangle. He was not yet so desperate as to feel actually fond of the few creatures he’d discovered in the garage, as he’d heard that prisoners grew to care for rats or moths that came into their cells, but he was bored enough to try and count them, and to place endless bets with himself as to which way the spider in the rear corner would build, or how long it would take a woodlouse to run across the floor. He was uncertain if the crane-fly could live on anything here, or if it was also trapped and would starve, or blunder into the cobweb. Its lumbering, angular flights seemed as purposeless as his watching it. It staggered through the air, apparently neither looking for food, nor trying to escape.

Then the doors opened. It was his last view of the outside for that day, and Sulien looked at the sky first. It was strangely doubled, the sheets of cloud on the horizon dark but lucidly blue, whitish space above them, as if a torn strip of a different day had been pasted roughly over the evening light. Then he glanced dully at the two men who stood there, expecting one to take the plate while the other remained poised to tackle him if he moved.

But they both came in and grabbed his arms, pulling him up. Instinctively, Sulien tensed and struggled, convinced that Dama had decided to have them killed after all. But one of the men shook him and said, ‘It’s your friend, that’s all. You need to come and help your friend. Don’t try anything.’

Sulien went quiet and docile immediately, but cast an anxious look back at the farmyard gates, as they led him towards the house. It had never been very likely, but he’d hoped it might be the other way round, that they might carry Lal to him. His senses strained in a kind of panic, he walked terrified that he was already failing, he wasn’t seeing his surroundings with the right clarity. There weren’t many people in the yard now; most of them should be eating, and it was growing dark. That much was good. But the farmhouse itself was clearly full. Sulien knew nothing of what the place was like inside, only that Lal was in a cellar. If the entrance to it was through the kitchen or any other room in continual use, there would probably be nothing he could do.

He glanced around as they hurried him into a hall – at the doors on either side of the stairs. The men led him past all of these, not to the back rooms ahead, as at first he thought, but to a narrow door under the stairs. A couple of people came out of the kitchen, and stared curiously at Sulien, as the men unlocked it. He thought they went away once he was ushered inside. So people might be going back and forth often, but perhaps not all the time.

Lal was sprawled across her mattress, hair spread over her hot, flushed face, shuddering and moaning. A jug lay dramatically overturned in a spreading puddle of water, beside one outflung hand. For a moment Sulien felt like smiling, until he heard the key turn in the lock, at the top of the steps. One of the men had come down into the cellar with him; the other was presumably standing guard outside the door. Lal glanced up at Sulien surreptitiously through her hair, but then shut her eyes again. For now, they had no way of communicating.

Sulien bent over her, checking her pulse and temperature. ‘Lal,’ he murmured, urgently. ‘Lal, it’s me. Can you talk to me?’ Lal, dutifully, only turned her head restlessly from side to side and did not respond. Sulien allowed the tense breath building inside him to escape, letting it sound like a sigh of concern, as he tried to think what to do. ‘I knew this would happen,’ he began, prevaricating. The pretence seemed, briefly, bizarre. He could feel his blood, the muscles of his face working treacherously to signal the truth. He fought to convince himself that Lal really was frighteningly ill. ‘Look at this place. Can you expect anyone to live down here?’ There was a single bulb over near the steps; it didn’t throw light very far. ‘It’s too dark in here. I’m going to need more light.’

‘I thought you could just touch people, and—’

‘If you wanted that, you should have brought me before,’ said Sulien, fiercely, trying to hector the man beyond the point of asking questions. He jolted to his feet and glared down at him, trying to make intimidating use of his height. ‘She could die because you left her like this. Get me some kind of light.’

The older man grimaced uncertainly, and still resisted. ‘I don’t know – maybe when Dama gets back.’

Dama was away, then. It was good news. Sulien hid a flash of optimism. ‘When will
that
be?’

‘Tomorrow morning, I think.’

‘That’ll be too late!’ cried Sulien. ‘You brought me here to help. Unless you want to explain that you let her die, get me what I need!’

Finally, the man shrugged and left. Sulien could see Lal listening as the door was unlocked, and locked again. He dropped with a sigh to sit on the ground beside her. ‘Hello,’ he said.

Lal pushed her hair away from her face. ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’

‘At least he does what you tell him. Is he the only one?’

‘There’s at least one more outside the door. And he’s the one with the key.’

‘Have to get him in here, then,’ said Lal.