Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  She said his name again, and the claw-sharp catch of expectation was the same each time she repeated it; she couldn’t stop. She ran a hand up over his face, not gently, as if there were something there that could be wiped away. The sweep of her palm tipped his head back a little, and though she knew she’d caused the movement, it was stupidly arresting to her: it looked like a drowsy stirring out of sleep, as if his eyes were about to blink open. She took his face in both hands, shook it. Absurd. She did it again.

  No one was doing anything; even the men who had been cutting away the terrible length of steel that lay on Marcus’ legs were just standing there looking at her. Una turned on them, shaken by how furious she was. ‘Why have you stopped?’ She heard her voice as it would sound to another person, loud and raw and irrational; she tried to make it more controlled, but the mad voice babbled, ‘Please don’t stop, please do something, oh God—’

  They didn’t move. Someone said something.

  She made a sound that horrified her, because she had no warning it was coming, and because the meaning of it was unmistakable. Her hands moved over Marcus’ throat, chest, searching for something to put right. ‘Marcus, come on, you can’t— Marcus . . .’

  Then time crumpled in on itself again and now she was lying half-across him, her face buried into his neck. But this wasn’t an embrace, that wasn’t the point: if there was any life left to be detected, however faint, she must be close enough to find it. But she couldn’t feel anything except his chilly blood soaking her clothes and his broken ribs shifting beneath her; the weight of her body would have caused him agony, if—

  Sulien raced up the steps from the passage into the wet daylight and Una was lying among the wreckage covered in blood. So different – and so much worse than anything he’d expected – that cold crashed over him before the queasy slide from horror to relief to horror again as he understood.

  And Una jolted upright, her face lit with dreadful hope, crying, ‘Sulien! Sulien, do something, please, please . . .’

  ‘Oh, no,’ murmured Sulien helplessly, closing his eyes and not wanting to open them. Something in him curled up, went into hiding. He began weakly, ‘Una, I—’

  She had started crying raggedly, even as he opened his mouth, and before he could finish she was begging, almost in a scream, ‘Please try! Please just try!’

  Don’t do it, anything except that, Sulien warned himself. For his own sake he wanted to go to Marcus, touch him, make himself understand what had happened. But it would be better not to go near him if doing so would let Una convince herself there was any doubt. To pretend to try – which was all it could be – would be horrible, a betrayal of all three of them.

  But she kept pleading, and he couldn’t bear it, and a kind of shifty, two-faced optimism reared in his mind, that maybe he was somehow wrong, perhaps it wasn’t too late, even now . . .

  He couldn’t help himself. He stepped forward and knelt down beside Marcus, and at once Una sprang to her feet and stood back, out of his way, and it was easier to look at Marcus’ still face than to look at her, so he did that with the first spasm of true self-revulsion he’d ever felt in his life.

  Tears filled his eyes almost at once. He blinked and exhaled hard, laid a hand on Marcus’ chest for scarcely a second and pulled it back to drag his fist across his eyes.

  All right, he told himself, not realising he was mouthing the words, and closed his eyes. He rested his hand over Marcus’ heart again. Nothing, nothing. Sulien tried to make himself believe that if an electric flicker could only stir it – for the first time in what must be several minutes – there was enough blood left in its hollows or in the quiet veins to start flowing again . . .

  But there was not, and nothing happened, and he thought of pressing down brutally on Marcus’ chest just for the sake of doing something. The ribs were too badly broken, so, quickly, before he could think about it, he bent his head over Marcus and breathed into his mouth.

  The air sighed out passively, and he saw now that Marcus’ eyes were not quite closed; a motionless crescent of white and slate-blue showed under the eyelashes: a cold, faintly critical stare.

  One of the medics said quietly, ‘We’ve tried that.’

  Sulien knew that, and he tried again anyway, though he could barely manage a steady breath himself. The tears spilled out again and he lifted his face, letting his hand fall onto Marcus’ cheek in a glancing caress, and blurted, ‘Una, please, I’m sorry.’

  Una gasped in a scraping breath and Sulien braced himself to hear her pleading, or crying again. Instead, her body stiffened and her lips closed without releasing anything. She stopped crying, and her face emptied, slowly and utterly. Her eyes lowered slowly from Sulien’s face to Marcus’. Her hands, knotted in tight fists, fell slack. She turned away.

  Sulien sagged, shuddering, feeling a brief, desolate relief. For the first time he noticed the Imperial wreath lying beside Marcus’ head where it had fallen, and the ring loose on his finger. He turned to Makaria, slumped on one of the incongruously intact marble seats, her forehead resting on her hand, and she met his eyes in numb confirmation.

  Sulien looked back at Marcus and those gold things, and his throat burned; he pressed the heel of his hand into each eye. The wreath shouldn’t just lie there, he thought, and reached for it, first meaning to put it back on Marcus’ head – but it would have slipped off again when they lifted him. So instead he laid it on Marcus’ breast, and, as he let it go, he felt how strange it was that he should ever have touched it. It was heavier than he had expected.

  He stood up, wondering how he could be so tired after having done nothing at all.

  Makaria gestured, and the men began cutting through the metal rods again. She stopped Sulien as he started to pick his way towards Una and held something out.

  ‘Look,’ she said. She handed him a folded sheet of notepaper, dimpled with rainwater and coloured with blood.

  Sulien read disjointedly down to the pitiful scrawled signature, which made him shut his eyes and moan, ‘Oh, gods.’

  Una took it from him silently and stared at it for a few seconds, as if trying to make sense of a foreign language. Then she began to shake breathlessly and sob again, pressing one hand over the name for a second as if trying to feel Marcus in the writing. Then Sulien was reaching for her, imploring, ‘Don’t, please don’t—’ as she darted past him, back towards Marcus’ body.

  Una pulled roughly free of his hand as he caught at her shoulder, but came to a standstill a few feet from Marcus. ‘I wanted to look at him, that’s all,’ she said, in a flat, almost normal voice.

  She looked down to the paper in her hands and began straightening out the creases she had made. Stiffly she handed it back to Makaria. ‘Is this going to happen?’ she demanded. ‘Who’ll make this happen?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Makaria. ‘I’ll try. I will try.’

  Una’s mouth quirked bitterly, then her face went blank again.

  Sulien stammered, reluctantly, ‘Who’s—? Who’s going to be . . .?’

  ‘Salvius,’ said Makaria. ‘He said Salvius.’

  Sulien found that though he’d asked, for now he barely cared who the Emperor would be – except that to think of Marcus, lying there in agony and knowing what was coming, and still planning, for afterwards . . .

  There was a sharp whirr and a clang of metal as at last the vigiles finished cutting through the beam. Sulien watched as two of them strained to lift the remaining section and let it fall on the paving beside the body, the sound loud and ugly as it struck the stone. Una did not look, but flinched, hard.

  Makaria suggested quietly, ‘Perhaps you should go home.’ She added, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Sulien, reaching to put his arm round Una, who started moving briskly before he could touch her.

  He hurried after her. The cut-glass lamps in the passage had gone out, leaving dim emergency lighting coating the frescoed walls like disinfectant. Ahead, Una was a colo
urless shadow, walking unsteadily but very fast, her head down and her hair hanging forward. Even when Sulien caught up with her he couldn’t see her face.

  Without looking up she murmured, very quietly, ‘You ought to stay.’

  ‘What?’

  Una gestured blankly at the wall. ‘Could help people.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Sulien slowed, hampered by a moment of tired, half-incredulous guilt, then shook his head and strode on. ‘I’m not going to leave you alone.’

  ‘I’m better on my own,’ said Una in a chilly, remote voice.

  Sulien tried to stifle an unexpected and unreasoning sting of hurt.

  Una sighed, and he could see the effort when she turned her face towards him. More softly, she said, ‘I’ll meet you later.’

  ‘No, Una—’

  ‘I’ll wait for you at the bridge.’

  Sulien began to feel an urgent dread of letting her out of his sight. He was afraid to examine it too closely. ‘There are other doctors. Let’s just go home and—’ And what? he thought. What would they ever do?

  ‘You’re different. There’s too many people hurt.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Una said, still distant, but certain.

  Sulien felt strangely unnerved by this, as automatic trust, that of course she must be right about him, jostled alongside a disconcerted conviction that no, he’d been telling the plain truth: he didn’t care. But he couldn’t muster any argument that would stand up.

  ‘An hour,’ he said, unhappily. ‘I’m not— I won’t stay any longer than that.’

  Una said nothing, just walked even faster than before, and when they reached the gates and shuffled through the scrum of Praetorians and vigiles into the crowd beyond, he lost her immediately.

  In the ambulance, Drusus kicked into consciousness as if out of a nightmare. A bright crest of pain burned on his head, and more studs of pain were scattered across his back and along his arm. Gasping, he asked, ‘What happened to me?’

  Someone tried to hold him down, hushing him. ‘Try to keep still.’

  ‘I’m all right, somebody tell me—’

  ‘Let us make sure of that before we worry about anything else, all right, sir?’

  ‘No, I have to— I have to—’ He had a sense of electric urgency so strong it was almost terror, and it shouted in his throbbing head: Now, now! as he repeated, ‘What happened?’

  But he began to remember: an explosion overhead, a cataract of glass pouring in, like the understanding that had struck the very moment before: glass on the ground . . .

  He knew his left arm was broken, he recognised the sensation of bone grating on bone when he moved it. Something was wrong with his knee. His right hand came away from his face coated in half-clotted blood. His skin was cold. But he remembered the heat of the chamber beneath the temple, at Delphi.

  It could have been worse. He’d known worse.

  ‘My family?’ he asked, tentatively, hearing his voice shake. He was afraid, of not being ready, and he could recognise this as a terrible day, even if it meant the resurrection of his hopes.

  No one would tell him. But with this flood of adrenalin in his veins, Drusus began to think he already knew.

  [ II ]

  SUCCESSION

  Salvius and his family were also at the Games. His son Decimus was sitting beside him and when the bomb went off Salvius hurled himself down on top of the boy as instantaneously as if he’d been expecting it. Noise bulldozed across the Colosseum; his daughters’ screams were the closest, spraying forward on the explosion’s surge, and Salvius had reacted so fast it took him a moment to remember the orange flash somewhere on the left of his field of vision. He heard the roof groan, then a sequence of heavy impacts pounding across the arena, and he tensed over his son as shrapnel rattled down into the seats. Decimus felt sparrow-fragile against him, his heart racing beneath ribs narrower than Salvius’ fingers. Salvius shouted, ‘Stay down,’ as sharp fragments bounced from marble and brick and sprayed like handfuls of pebbles on his back.

  It slowed and stopped. Salvius raised himself, keeping Decimus down. His wife, curled on the paving next to him, was cautiously lifting her head, and Salvilla, their youngest girl, was clinging to her, beginning to cry. ‘Come on, you’re not hurt,’ he said gruffly, checking her over with a glance. Letting go of his son, he looked for his three elder daughters and their husbands, who had been seated behind him, calling, ‘Is anyone hurt?’

  No one had worse than shallow cuts. Salvius looked across the arena – and saw the wreck of the Imperial box, the devastation around it. ‘Gods above,’ he whispered.

  They were in the best seats, almost at the base of the terraces. Salvius looked back and up the slopes of seating to see the aisles over-flowing and a landslide of people bearing down on them. Around the shaft of rain that hung above the arena, the roof shuddered and strained. He pulled his wife and Salvilla to their feet and turned to his eldest son-in-law. ‘Into a line, quickly. Magnus, lead the women out, Fulvius and Albus on either side. I’ll be behind you.’

  The pressure was building on all sides as nobles and senators pushed and shoved, and Salvius, aware of the weapon at his side but not yet reaching for it, turned and snarled, ‘Are you Romans? Will you disgrace yourselves? Keep steady.’ He realised with a swell of mingled pride and exasperation that little Decimus was trying to struggle towards the back of the column, to Salvius’ side, face alight with the desire to prove himself. Salvius shoved him forward, growling, ‘With your mother.’

  The worst moment came when they were almost outside, the crowd oozing slowly through one of the archways, when he lost sight of Decimus beneath the heads of the mob, and he couldn’t hear any response above the din when he called his name. But when finally he reached the open air, the crowd pulsing around him, he saw the little column of his family, still moving ahead: all there, and together.

  Salvius scanned the sky and rooftops as his family hurried through. To his relief the rank of Patrician cars was still waiting at the Sacred Way entrance, behind the gathering ambulances and vigile vans. Salvius could see his driver standing outside their vehicle, staring in horror at the oncoming crowd. His expression lifted a little when he saw Salvius.

  Salvilla was still weeping and sniffing, but Salvia Prima already had an arm round her little sister and was murmuring, ‘Now, then, don’t give the swine the satisfaction. You’ll make everyone think it’s worse than it is.’

  ‘What about Philia and Lysander and Psyche?’ quavered Salvilla. The family had taken some of the household staff to the Games; of course they’d been seated in the uppermost tiers with the other slaves.

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ said Salvius firmly. ‘It will just take them a little longer to get out, that’s all.’

  ‘It was over the Imperial box,’ said Magnus, quietly.

  Salvius turned to watch a convoy of ambulances and Praetorian cars slide through the crowd and round the Colosseum, towards the private entrance the Imperial family used. He felt an unbidden rush of hope, followed by an immediate backwash of guilt. May they all be safe, he thought conscientiously.

  But he couldn’t believe that no one in that box had been hurt, and even at the best, there were steps that had to be taken at once, and it was clearly impossible the Emperor would be able to do so.

  He kissed his daughters briskly. ‘Go home as fast as you can,’ he said. ‘I have to get to work.’

  ‘Will there have to be martial law?’ asked Decimus passionately, climbing into the car.

  Salvius laughed. ‘In some form, probably. You be good.’

  *

  And minutes later, in the strategy room at the Palace, Salvius did indeed place all military units in the Empire on high alert, order curfews in all the major cities, cancel all public gatherings and start patrols in Rome’s streets and airspace. After he’d deployed infantry around the Palace, the Senate buildings and the various Fora, General Turnus asked uneasily, ‘Is it certain we
have the authority for this?’

  ‘If the Emperor is unhappy with anything, of course he will countermand it,’ answered Salvius, ignoring a moment of uncomfortable disingenuousness.

  From the other side of the room Memmius Quentin called out in a kind of frustrated howl, ‘Do we have any word on the Family yet?’

  And Glycon was suddenly at Salvius’ elbow. Salvius hadn’t noticed him enter the room; the cubicularius always moved so unobtrusively, even amid all this noise and motion. But up close he was unexpectedly dramatic, his face pale and damp-skinned, his limp hair dishevelled, his eyes bloodshot and sunken.

  He said thickly, without elaboration, ‘The Imperial Office.’

  Makaria was standing beside her father’s desk. Her arm was in a sling, and though the dust from the Colosseum had been washed from her face, her hair was still thick with it, and it was hard to imagine what her filthy clothes must have looked like when she had first put them on. Salvius was not sure whom he’d expected to find in the painted garden. She looked startling and ominous here, like the spirit of someone walled up alive. But she stood as upright as a soldier, and Salvius felt an odd stirring of pride, a faint, vicarious echo of what he’d felt for Decimus and Salvia outside the Colosseum.

  She cleared her throat, and said, ‘My father and my cousin— my cousin, Marcus, were killed today.’ And it was clear she was trying to keep her voice steady, but it twisted away from her and she had to catch her hand to her face.

  ‘Oh—!’ Salvius was simply and wholeheartedly horrified. He even had an immediate impulse to put his arms round her, which was unthinkable. ‘Madam, I’m so sorry—’