INSURRECTIO

by Alison Morton

  We hugged and after a last, doubtful glance back, she turned and followed Atrius.

  ‘She’ll be all right, you know,’ Calavia said. ‘Atrius is very capable.’

  I hadn’t realised I was staring after them.

  ‘Okay, Lieutenant, we’ll wait until we see them reach the farmhouse. What about us?’

  ‘We’ll go a little further east. There’s a direct pass through, but up a rather steep hill.’

  Atrius and Quirinia made it to the farmhouse in twenty-five minutes. We watched the tiny figures walk along the verge of the road for another ten minutes almost out of our sight, then we continued east.

  Calavia’s idea of a steep hill was what I had expected – a nearly sheer climb. My legs trembled with the effort. I puffed up the steep slope almost on automatic, but was relieved to find myself not too far behind her. Or maybe she was being kind. But she was right. At the top, it came out just above Meintberg. A feeling of anticlimax and relief. We were already in New Austria, thank the gods.

  *

  Calavia and I reached the town ahead of Quirinia and Atrius. We sat in a bar, eating meat rolls, and savouring a beer. The early morning coffee drinkers gave us some strange looks but we ignored them. We’d earned it.

  ‘We have to push on to Vienna as soon as the others arrive – we can’t risk a snatch,’ I said. ‘Caius Tellus wouldn’t let an international frontier interfere with his intentions.’

  ‘Agreed. You and the consiliaria are far too tempting a target. In fact, you’ll have to have a guard even in Vienna.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I’m afraid I am. The colonel will bring you up to date when we get there.’

  ‘You keep hinting at this mysterious bringing-up-to-date, Pia. What exactly do you mean?’

  She looked away and was saved from answering by the appearance on the other side of the square by a forlorn, limping Quirinia leaning on Atrius’s arm.

  *

  After the drama of our struggle to leave Roma Nova, the remainder of our journey was prosaic: taxi to the nearest mainline station, then high-speed train into the centre of Vienna. Our Roma Novan solidi notes were accepted by the ticket office clerk without blinking an eyelid. I still had some gold solidi as a backup in a money belt I’d grabbed from my personal drawer in the foreign ministry. I’d given Volusenia three quarters of it to get Silvia out. Pia Calavia and Atrius had their field reserve of two hundred each but Quirinia had only her purse contents.

  ‘Did you export anything after the Families’ meeting?’ I asked her as we drove from the Vienna Hauptbahnhof to the safe house.

  ‘I buried the insignia and histories in a steel box under the summer house,’ she whispered. She glanced at the driver. She was right to be cautious; his sloppy appearance and casual driving style on the rain-washed roads didn’t give us much confidence. ‘When my mother told me years ago about the underground cellar there,’ she continued in a low voice, ‘I thought she was being dramatic. She told me not to be a fool, but to always be ready for the worst. How right she was.’ She looked straight ahead for a few seconds. ‘If you’re asking if I have anything to live on, I have some foreign investments I can sell, plus twenty thousand I managed to transfer here. Who knows how long it’ll have to last?’

  PART IV: RESCUE

  XXI

  Vienna was much as I’d remembered from my last visit. Elegant, charming facades, but brittle inside. In the courtyards of many great houses, the stone would be flaking, windows dulled, paint curling from surfaces. I’d seen one where the inner windows had been modernised with white plastic-framed double-glazing; money-saving, possibly ecological, but much more jarring than the shabby originals would have been. The Ringstraße had been salvaged by generous private donations and Vienna’s heritage status.

  Pity the equally shabby taxi we drove in hadn’t been renovated in the same way. It coughed and spluttered along the wide boulevards, its windscreen wipers smearing a mixture of rain and road grease across the glass. Quirinia and I exchanged looks when it shot through a red light. Atrius growled at the driver. We had no papers or passports. I shuddered at the thought of being picked up by the local police and deported back to Roma Nova.

  Like ancient Rome, historic Austria had been golden, imperial and wealthy. Vienna had been the undoubted intellectual, cultural and social centre of Europe. Since the Great War and its consequent loss of empire and reduction to a rump state, Neuösterreich had to rely on its mountains, national costumes and undoubted genius for hospitality to survive. Apart from hosting countless international conferences, Vienna had the dubious honour of being the political dissident and exile centre of Europe. And we’d just joined it.

  We stopped the taxi two streets away from the safe house and paid the driver off with no tip. We tramped through the rain, Atrius following the three of us with a thirty-metre gap. As we turned into the street where the house lay, Calavia split away from Quirinia, now limping badly, and me to double-back and check nobody was tracking us.

  At last, we stood in front of a two-storey, eighteenth-century Biedermeier town house, its arms at ninety degrees to each other and occupying the whole of a block in a quiet suburb. One of the arms housed a small bar and bijou restaurant on the ground floor. Opposite were a delicatessen, a coffee shop and patisserie. Very Viennese.

  ‘Looks as if it needs some work on it,’ Quirinia remarked, her accountant’s eyes scanning the building, ‘but the roof looks sound. How on earth did Colonel Volusenia get hold of it?’

  ‘It was a surrendered asset from a reformed embezzler, consiliaria,’ Pia answered. ‘He gave it up as a condition of being granted leave to return to Roma Nova. He’d fiddled some defence procurement contracts, so the magister militum’s department seized it and allocated it to the PGSF. The commander before Colonel Volusenia designated it as part of the Aquila fallback resources. The beauty is that we can get to the suburban station or onto the autobahn out of the city within minutes.’

  Calavia rang the bell at the side of the double doors. A couple of minutes went by without any response, so she thumped on the door, stepped back and stared up at the windows. On this dull, rainy October afternoon, a few lights were glowing at the upstairs windows. She raised her hand again, but before her knuckles touched the faded green paintwork, the door opened.

  ‘About time, too,’ she said and barged in. ‘We’re getting soaked out here.’

  We shuffled past the young woman who had opened the door into a large hallway complete with split staircase and tall windows. A middle-aged man leaning on a stick stood under a dull light. His face was bruised and his free hand bandaged, but I knew him straight away.

  ‘Numerus! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Major.’ He gave me a semi-bow. ‘I’m the logistics officer for this shambles of a fallback group.’ He snorted and waved the end of his stick around a few centimetres off the floor.

  ‘But you’ve been retired for years.’

  ‘Somehow, nobody rescinded my orders.’ He shrugged, but winced as his shoulders fell back. Numerus was as tough as Aquae Caesaris granite. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d shown he was affected by pain.

  ‘What in Hades happened to you?’

  ‘Some of the local toughs decided kicking a retired PGSF guard around would be fun. I’m sure they were nats. Luckily, Maxima arrived and helped me see them off, but as soon as she’d bandaged her old dad up, we packed up and ran for it here. She’s gone back to Roma Nova now, the silly tart. She’s been troublesome since she was a kid, so I hope she gives them hell.’

  I forgot about our wet clothes and studied my ex-comrade-in-arms. His face was grey and lined, and his eyes shone, not with pleasure, but with worry about his only daughter.

  ‘I’m relieved they got you out,’ he said after a few moments. ‘That bastard Tellus never forgave you for banging him up in that Pruss
ian prison.’ He looked straight at me. ‘You should have let me shoot him when we had him then.’

  ‘Numerus, you know I couldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘You always did have a too rigid sense of right and wrong.’ He ran his eyes over us. ‘Come on in, then, and we’ll find you all beds. And there’s somebody here who wants to talk to you urgently.’

  ‘Volusenia, I presume?’

  ‘No.’ He frowned. ‘Isn’t she with you?’

  My stomach fluttered. ‘No, she came on ahead with Silvia Apulia.’ I grabbed Numerus’s wrist. ‘Gods, don’t tell me they haven’t arrived!’

  ‘Not yet, but somebody else turned up this afternoon looking for you.’

  The figure was unmistakable; tall, tanned face, black curls. My heart thudded and I took a deep breath. My body knew him instantly even if my brain was half a second behind. No smile or word was necessary; Miklós reached forward and folded me gently into his arms, pressing me to him. I forgot everything except that I was safe again.

  *

  Numerus ushered us towards a door at the rear of the hall; the smell told me it was the kitchen before we walked into its warmth. Calavia drew me aside the minute we were through the door.

  ‘Nothing personal, consiliaria,’ she whispered, glancing over at Miklós, ‘but he’s a foreigner with a dubious background. He has no security clearance and no loyalty to Roma Nova. We should exclude him.’

  ‘You forget yourself, Lieutenant. That isn’t your decision.’

  ‘With respect, you’re allowing your personal feelings to rule your judgement,’ she retorted.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about, Calavia.’

  ‘Ladies.’ Numerus had come up behind us. ‘Do we have a problem?’

  ‘Him, the Hungarian.’ Calavia jerked her head in Miklós’s direction. ‘I know he’s the consiliaria’s friend, but in this situation, we can’t take any chances with security. Suppose he goes running to Caius Tellus?’

  As I opened my mouth to give her the full blast of what I thought of her accusation, Numerus touched my arm and gave me a warning glance.

  ‘He won’t,’ he said to Calavia. ‘I wouldn’t want to breach security myself in giving you every detail, Lieutenant, but his role in the Berlin operation against Tellus was pivotal.’ He looked her straight in the eyes. ‘You’d have been packing your school bag and worrying about your first teenage crush at the time, so you wouldn’t be expected to know.’

  No obvious reaction showed in her stance, but her eyes had flickered as if flinching internally. She turned away without saying a word.

  Quirinia, Atrius, Miklós and I clustered at one end of the large bench table in the kitchen with Numerus. Calavia joined us after a few minutes; she hunched over and frowned into her tea. A weak light from a conical shade gave little relief to the gloom. The smell of field stew and strong tea surrounded us. Over by the stove, people were stirring pans and cutting vegetables. The swish of stirring, the gentle roar of the gas flames and rhythmic chop-chop of vegetable knives were the only sounds.

  Numerus leant back in his seat and crossed his arms. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Silvia and Volusenia left two days ago, via a safe house,’ I said. ‘There was a van in the garage there, so they would have had a head start.’ I looked down at the table. ‘I should have stayed with them.’

  Nobody answered for a second. Quirinia covered the back of my hand. ‘You couldn’t possibly have known what would happen, Aurelia.’

  ‘We can’t automatically assume Caius has got Silvia Apulia,’ Numerus said. ‘He’d have paraded her all over the television if he had.’

  ‘Not until he’d terrified her enough to comply,’ I replied. ‘And she’s a tough little thing.’ I didn’t add ‘unlike her mother’. ‘If he has her, he’ll force her to marry him and his claim to power will be legitimised.’ My imagination ran into a dark place where Silvia was in Caius’s control. He’d make her life such a living hell she’d pray for death.

  ‘I can’t see Colonel Volusenia giving in easily,’ Calavia added. ‘She’d have died before she let anybody touch an Apulian.’

  ‘Why do you all assume Tellus will find her?’ Miklós’s voice interrupted. It was the first time he’d spoken. We all turned and stared at him.

  ‘You’ve seen how well this coup was executed, Miklós,’ I said. ‘Even Plico didn’t see it coming.’ I paused for a moment and closed my eyes. I would never see that grumpy, clever and honourable old tough again. I shook my head to dispel a grey lump of sorrow that threatened to settle in my head. He would have been the first to tell me to get a grip.

  ‘The only way that Caius Tellus could have been so efficient,’ I continued, ‘is by building up a wide network of dedicated local groups, recruited one by one. The individual group leader would report to a district leader, who’d be a member of a group in the next level up, and so on up the hierarchy. Classic revolution.’ I panned around the faces. ‘You can be sure he’s faxed Silvia and Volusenia’s descriptions to all of them. All it would take is for one member of one local group to spot the women and he’d have them. The chances against them staying undetected are minute.’

  ‘If they’re holed up somewhere in the countryside, they may find some sympathy,’ Calavia said, ‘or possibly help. The trouble is that if they’re too well hidden, but can’t move, we’ll never find them.’

  I looked round at the doleful, tense faces. ‘But you know we have no choice but to go back and look for them. Or give up our own lives in the attempt.’

  *

  We ate a plain supper in silence, everybody absorbed with her or his own thoughts. Not quite twenty others sat in the kitchen at benches or picked chairs off a dusty stack in what had been a ballroom. With such small numbers, huddling in the kitchen was more comforting. Numerus had organised people into four groups and allocated tasks and shifts. Once a centurion, always a centurion.

  ‘Gives them some kind of structure and purpose,’ he murmured to me as we stacked our dishes in the sink. ‘They’ve all done their national service, so they know how it works.’

  ‘Thank you, Numerus.’

  ‘Not a question of thanks, but of survival.’ He searched my face. ‘You know you can’t go yourself, don’t you? You’d be far too big a prize for Tellus.’

  ‘Don’t try and argue me out of it, old friend. It’s my duty.’

  ‘Sure it’s not your ego?’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Just a comment.’

  ‘You can keep that sort to yourself, if you please.’

  ‘I thought you might be motivated to stay here now.’ He glanced over at Miklós talking to an uncomfortable looking Calavia.

  ‘He’s more likely to want to come with me.’

  Numerus shrugged.

  Miklós stood and left the kitchen, so I waved Calavia over to join us.

  ‘So are there any rescue scenarios in the fallback plan?’ I asked.

  She exchanged glances with Numerus.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s one route in and another out from this side of the border, but we can’t be sure they are still intact,’ Calavia admitted. ‘They were set up with the scenario of foreign invasion. Nobody expected internal rebellion. The people providing the support might now belong to the Roman National Movement, so no longer sympathetic to us. We’ll have to check each one as we go.’

  Damn. People patriotic enough to be part of a national resistance movement against an invader could well be attracted by what looked like a movement that flourished on national pride, however spurious or illusory. This was becoming better and better. But there was no other option.

  ‘Realistically, how many people can we muster to take part in this mission?’ I asked her.

  ‘Atrius and myself, and there are a couple here on the activ
e reserve list that I recognise, but the rest, I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘Numerus?’

  ‘Two of the women have just finished their twenty years and there’s one young lad who’s just started the Officers’ Training School. He’s worried stiff about his classmates, so I’m not sure about his nerves. The rest of them are full-time civilians.’

  ‘Well, more than half a dozen of us would look suspicious.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s half-seven now. Get them all together for 20:00, in the ballroom, for a briefing, please, Numerus. We’ll just have to work with what we’ve got.’

  XXII

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’

  ‘I have to, Miklós. It’s my duty.’

  He sat cross-legged on his rolled out sleeping bag on the dirty floor of the room upstairs that Numerus had allocated us.

  ‘Stop fiddling with that plastic bag and sit here with me.’

  I thrust the towel, soap and toothbrush back into the bag so hard the thin plastic split and it all landed on the floor. Stuff it. I knelt down beside him.

  ‘Going back is all very noble,’ he said ‘but your man, Numerus, is right. If Tellus has the girl, he might not be showing her because he knows you will try to rescue her. And we both know he wants his revenge on you. You’ll be walking into a trap.’ He stroked my hair, a straggly mess, and tucked a curl behind my ear. He pulled me to him and I nestled against his chest; I could feel his heart beating and his arms held me secure and safe.

  ‘Don’t go.’ His warm breath on my face was so achingly familiar. I didn’t want to go anywhere at this moment.

  ‘Why have you come here, Miklós? I thought you’d left me for good.’

  ‘When the messenger from the post office knocked on my father’s farmhouse door with your telex, I could read the distress between the lines.’ He pressed my hands and folded them in his. ‘You’re a strong, no, a tough woman, Aurelia, sometimes a little wild, but inside, there’s a sensitive and vulnerable person hiding under that shell. I knew you would be hurting. You love Roma Nova more than anything.’