Una stifled a little start, which dragged an irritating twinge of premature remorse from him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, ‘I didn’t—’
‘Aren’t things bad enough for you yet? Or are they just not bad enough for me?’ Varius was impassively waiting this out, not interfering, and Sulien felt discomfited that this was happening in front of him, though it wasn’t enough to stop him: ‘Don’t you ever think of anyone else? It’s so fucking selfish!’
‘Look,’ said Una, irritably, guilty patience already beginning to evaporate, ‘do you want to know what I was doing or not?’
Sulien laughed, hard. ‘I don’t know if I do.’
He turned away a little, and Una sat down with an exasperated sigh. A sullen quiet fell between them. But Sulien had no realistic retreat available beyond silence, and so after a while Una sighed again and said, ‘The longvision’s near the station.’
‘I know.’
‘I didn’t think of it when I went out, all right? Or I would have said. But there was a train leaving when I got there . . . they don’t run that often and if I’d come back and told you first we might have had to wait till tomorrow. And by then it would be even more dangerous, with those pictures everywhere. I might not have had another chance.’
‘For what?’ groaned Sulien, resentful at having any response dragged out of him.
Una was already reaching into the bag; she set out a number of bottles of what seemed to be bathing oil on the table. ‘I had a locker in a bathhouse in the Aventine,’ she explained, quietly, ‘not in my real name, of course. That’s where I went.’ She fished inside the neck of one and drew out sheaves of money, twisted off the stopper of another bottle and pulled out more.
Sulien stared at the money, moved across and sat down opposite her almost without realising he was doing it. He whispered, ‘How long have you—?’
‘Two years,’ replied Una, ‘maybe two and a half.’
Sulien breathed out a wordless question, and Varius, coming over to the table, answered it: ‘In case this happened.’
Una’s face crumpled, and she shook her head. ‘Not this. Not this. In case we ever needed to leave, but I thought he’d be with us; I never meant in case he died . . .’
‘You never told me this,’ said Sulien, his voice still soft.
‘I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell him.’
‘Why not?’
‘If it wasn’t secret it wasn’t safe,’ said Una, mechanically, then blinked in distress and shook her head again. ‘I needed it. I couldn’t help it – I didn’t like it; I didn’t like the way I had to have it there. So I didn’t want anyone to know. And you would have said – he would have said – we’re safe now, you shouldn’t keep your money somewhere like that – shouldn’t have to do these things any more. And I don’t know, maybe then I wouldn’t have done it, or I would have got rid of it. And I needed it, even though I thought it was a stupid thing. I mean, I hoped it was.’ Her face went dull. She ran a thumb critically over the edge of a roll of notes. ‘I should have put more in,’ she said.
‘Well,’ muttered Sulien, after a moment, for want of anything else to say. ‘Well done.’
Una pushed her hair away from her face and straightened her back, one hand on the money. ‘Tadahito knows us,’ she said, looking from Sulien to Varius. ‘I think he would give us asylum . . . if we could make it there.’
Sulien felt a pang of vertigo at the distance and the otherness of Nionia, cringed away from imagining either the attempt or its success. ‘There’s got to be somewhere in the Empire, somewhere quiet we could—’
Una shook her head. ‘We’re the first thing Drusus thought of on the day he got everything he ever wanted.’
Incongruously, Varius laughed. When they looked at him, he said, ‘It sounds like true love, when you put it like that.’
‘Well, it means he’s not going to forget about us any time soon,’ said Una. ‘You know how much work it is staying hidden. And it’s not just us we have to worry about – there’s everyone who has ever had anything to do with us. Whoever owns this place. This way there’s only the journey, and then we wouldn’t have to hide any more. And I don’t think I can face more than that. Not a whole life . . .’
Once again strength seemed to leave her suddenly. She leant over the money on the table, sinking her head in her hands.
Varius pulled back the hand that lay nearest the money as if bowing out of a game of dice. ‘This is yours and Sulien’s,’ he said. ‘You’ll need all of it.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Varius!’ said Una, almost disgusted. ‘What do you think we are? It’s too late for any of us to just . . . Why didn’t you let them arrest Sulien – why did you even let us use the car – if you wanted that?’
‘It’s not only that,’ said Varius. ‘Just look at us: you can dye your hair, but we can’t any of us change our skin colour, can we? I’m more than ten years older than the pair of you. You don’t get many groups that look like us travelling across country – even back in Rome we’re not the most everyday set of people, are we? So whatever we do, we’ll have to separate.’
‘Not us,’ said Sulien, too fast even to think about it, glancing at Una who agreed, ‘No.’
‘No, not you two,’ said Varius, with a twitch of a smile, ‘but the three of us together, we’re too memorable. That’s why I should have stayed away. But I wanted to see you were safe, before . . . I wanted to see you.’
‘Well, you could travel on your own,’ said Sulien reluctantly, ‘but we could still – I mean, we could agree towns along the way where we could meet. Or just look each other up when we get there, I guess. If we’re going to do this.’
‘But I’m not,’ said Varius, and there was a surprising brightness in his face. ‘I don’t want to leave Rome. I’ll go where I have to, but I’m not giving up. I don’t have any kind of plan, and this is no place to start, but I’m still going to try and stop Drusus. Something has to come of everything Marcus did – and everything we did. I want to do something so that won’t be wasted.’
Sulien was touched and impressed by this. But as Una looked at Varius the sadness in her face only seemed to deepen and grow strangely gentle. She told him quietly, ‘It is wasted.’
Varius shook his head fiercely, his eyes wide and shining. ‘No. I don’t believe that. I won’t let it be.’
Una painted the remaining dye into Sulien’s hair and they studied the results with dissatisfaction. The change was less dramatic in his case, as his hair had been darker to begin with, but with that difference in colouring erased they looked more obviously like brother and sister than they had before. They were both startled to notice resemblances in the contours of their faces that seemed new, as if freshly stamped.
‘Hmm,’ said Una, running her fingers uneasily over her upper lip, as if she could tweak it into a different shape.
‘It’s a start. I’ll stop shaving for a while,’ said Sulien. ‘Your eyebrows look weird.’
Una shrugged. ‘I can’t use the dye on them; I haven’t got anything small enough to do it with.’
‘I didn’t mean just now,’ gibed Sulien, as a kind of experiment. Una did smile, but too slowly, having to work out what was required of her and how to do it. Not that he’d expected much more. ‘Lal might be able to make us new identity papers,’ he said, and then, ‘Una – maybe Varius is right, maybe there’s something we could do, something more than running away. Wouldn’t it be better? Don’t you want to?’ Almost under his breath, he added, ‘For Marcus . . .’
Una moved away. Varius was asleep again, the bedroll they’d found filling much of the floor. She stepped around him carefully, sat on the bed and subjected him to a faintly chilling appraisal, sympathetic but detached, certain.
‘He’s going to die,’ she said, quietly, so as not to wake him, such a sure, authoritative prognosis that Sulien’s gaze jumped to Varius with swift horror, as if expecting to see fatal injuries and blood seeping through the blanket
s.
‘He wanted to kill Drusus yesterday,’ continued Una, ‘what’s changed? What else can he try to do? Maybe now he’ll take a year over it, but it’ll come to the same thing. And so he’ll try, and they’ll kill him. And even if he could do it, what good would it do?’
‘No,’ said Sulien, confusedly, moving a little closer to Varius as if to shield him from something. ‘No. If that’s what he’s planning – well, Drusus would be gone, that’s—’
‘He wouldn’t be gone – not in a way that meant anything. It wouldn’t put right anything he’d begun. And Rome would fall in love with the memory of him, and who is there to follow? None of what we tried for – what we tried so hard for – will happen, anyway.’ She looked down at Varius again, who was lying with near-unnatural tidiness on his back, arms at his sides, composed and still. Her voice was almost a caress, regretful and final: ‘He just wants revenge for Marcus, and the right person isn’t even alive. And he doesn’t want to see . . . any of this. Soon he won’t have to.’
Sulien’s eyes recoiled from Varius, who seemed changed, as if Una had been chanting a spell over him, left fragile and not even older in any reassuring way, if you imagined him setting off to die at thirty-one or two, if you imagined looking back on it. He said, ‘Then we should . . . I’ll talk to him.’
‘Why? He knows what he wants. Leave him alone,’ said Una.
Sulien stared, waiting to see if that made any sense that didn’t horrify him. ‘No,’ he said.
And he tried, because he couldn’t stop seeing a kind of doomed halo around Varius now; he felt it like a low rumble in the air, all through the long night while Una shook and ground her teeth and cried in her sleep beside him. But in the morning, no matter how baldly he tried to say it, the point kept slipping out of his grasp. The trouble was that Varius did not have a definite plan to be talked out of or persuaded to change. He kept agreeing, almost cheerfully, that yes, targeting Drusus might be part of it, and of course it would be dangerous.
Sulien could only implore, as Varius moved away from him, ‘Please be careful, whatever you decide to do,’ which people must have said countless times since the beginning of the world without it ever doing any good.
But Varius turned back and looked at him and said, ‘Listen, your sister’s right,’ which seemed to Sulien a surprising admission for a moment, but that wasn’t what Varius meant: ‘We’re the first thing Drusus thought of. He doesn’t think it’s hopeless: he thinks we could accomplish something – otherwise we’d still be at home. I think we should have as good an opinion of ourselves as he does.’
We, he’d said, and Sulien felt another tug of willingness and hope. But he looked past Varius at Una, sitting pale and tense on the steps of the hut, remembered how she’d moaned in the night, ‘Please try,’ and thought he should be grateful she was willing not to fling herself alongside Varius, towards the risk.
[ IV ]
MANOEUVRES
Early in the morning, the soldiers broke open the doors and knocked down the barricades Makaria and Noriko had built within the chamber where Marcus’ body lay. Makaria stood facing them squarely, white with exhaustion but upright and rigid. One arm was tight around Noriko, pressing the dark head against her shoulder, and the other hand held a pistol, levelled at the incoming men.
‘My Lady,’ said the commander, edging towards her, ‘no more need for that now.’
‘Isn’t there?’ asked Makaria, tightly. She knew the man, of course, and blinked, trying to stow that recognition somewhere out of her way.
‘Lady,’ repeated the commander, carefully, ‘it’s been a bad enough night.’
‘Please,’ moaned Noriko, into Makaria’s taut shoulder, certain that if Makaria fired a shot into whatever half-formed order had been restored outside, it was as good as suicide. It might still be the right thing to do, but she couldn’t work that out; she could not muster anything but dread. She felt Makaria tense very subtly; the Praetorian might not have seen it, even as close as he was now.
Makaria placed the pistol crisply into his outstretched hand. ‘It has,’ she agreed. She folded her freed arm over Noriko, patting her in a brisk, stoical way, while closing her eyes in anguish and lowering her face to press her cheek against Noriko’s forehead. Noriko made a convulsive effort to straighten, to sustain a fair share of the embrace, not just to cower in Makaria’s arms.
Only when assured it was safe did Drusus limp in, leaning resentfully on a Praetorian’s shoulder. He looked from the fallen barricade to Marcus’ body, understanding they had not only been defending themselves. ‘What did you think I was going to do?’ he asked, disgusted. His arm and knee hurt almost enough to keep him from caring about anything else; he could not stay on his feet much longer, and a low panic was sneaking its way below the surface of his mind: he wasn’t sure how he would know when it was safe to lie down.
The two women clung to each other and stared at him, mute and hostile.
‘Let go of each other,’ insisted Drusus. He cast another uneasy look at Marcus’ body, which had changed subtly during the night, becoming impossible to mistake for a living person. He sincerely felt that Noriko and Makaria had violated the stillness of this place, stained what had happened here between Marcus and himself. He announced, louder than was necessary, wanting this action to be witnessed, yet angry that he was defending himself, ‘I will give him a funeral worthy of him – he will have all the honours fitting for a Novian.’
‘An Emperor,’ said Makaria, recklessly.
A scowl slammed across Drusus’ face. ‘I said get away from each other,’ he snapped. ‘Take the Princess to her rooms,’ he ordered the soldiers. ‘Lady Novia will come with me.’
At the head of a little escort of Praetorians, he led Makaria out to the main atrium of the Palace. Makaria believed he had brought her this way to warn or frighten her with the sight of Salvius’ corpse, still lying sprawled on the stairs, and the blood and broken glass everywhere. And she was afraid of being killed; it almost surprised her, after all she had witnessed and lost in the last twenty-four hours, how greedily eager she was to go on living. But she had heard the gunfire, and she had scrounged scraps of sleep in the same room as Marcus’ body. She had known Salvius must be dead, so there was no further shock in seeing it now. She looked at him briefly and sadly and then back at Drusus, holding herself reasonably steady, she thought. She was aware that bursting into tears and abasing herself might please him, might even save her, and in theory she was in favour of doing anything necessary. But she could not actually bring herself to it, even afraid as she was.
Drusus stopped at the foot of the stairs, looking at her for a while, as if waiting for something – a reaction from her, maybe, or some return of energy and excitement in himself. ‘You will remain in Rome to attend the funerals, because it is right that people see you there,’ he told her at last. ‘You will not leave your quarters at any other time. Then you will return to Siphnos, and you will stay there, unless I have you brought to me. And you will not receive any messages or visitors I have not approved.’
Makaria nodded coolly, as if this was only to be expected, although her eardrums were booming with her pulse and her fingertips tingled icily. ‘Let Noriko come with me, then,’ she said, unable to plead for that either, almost just suggesting it.
‘I am not going to leave her to your influence. You are not to be trusted,’ said Drusus in a low voice. ‘And if you have people you value back on that island of yours you will be careful how you behave during this time.’ He met her eyes. ‘You should consider yourself very lucky indeed.’
Makaria could not answer that, because she agreed with him. Later, hugging herself tearlessly in a chair in her locked room, she reflected that she had not said or done anything particularly clever, but at least she had forborne from thanking him. Heaven help her, but to be allowed to go home, and to be spared any further part in events, was, for now at least, an incredible privilege, a stroke of undeserved grace.
&nbs
p; But she could feel the folded edges of the letter she had helped Marcus write, hidden inside her clothes and prickling against her skin. Not a letter – it was his will, really. And if she could think of nothing else to do with it, she could at least plot how to keep it safe.
‘I want you to be able to contact me,’ said Varius. It was early evening, and they were on a small road through the fields outside Ardea, leading away into hot green hills. The lime-coloured lights of fireflies were pulsing on, off, on, through the grass: small optimistic signals. Una tried not to see them; they were part of the world’s dreadful avalanche of detail, which poured on, ignoring the gouged space in the world where Marcus had been.
They had persuaded Varius to accept a little of the money from the bathhouse locker, and they had each acquired a change of clothes. Varius and Sulien both had a few days’ growth of beard. Una had darkened and thickened her eyebrows with make-up, and the dye in her hair and Sulien’s had softened a little, looking less stark and artificial. For now, this was all they could do to disguise themselves, and it felt like very little to hide behind, a thin, shivering skin between themselves and the pictures of them glaring out of every forum, and the terrible things that by now they were said to have done.
Varius handed Una an advertising magazine he’d bought in the town. ‘I want to know that you’re safe. If you make it out of the Empire, you can put a notice in that.’ Una noticed with vague approval that he had not said when. Varius explained, ‘It’s got a message service. If you’re in trouble – if you need my help, you can use that and I’ll answer. I’ll look for the name L. Soterius. Make the cognomen Clarus if you’re all right, and Ater if something’s wrong.’
Una nodded, but it was difficult to concentrate on something she was so sure was not going to happen. Beside her, Sulien sucked in an unhappy breath.
Varius read their faces and said, ‘You’ll know if something’s happened to me – it’ll be on longvision.’
Savage City Page 11
