Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Much of the furniture had been cleared away. He found Noriko by the open doors to the balcony with her waiting women, all of them in that strange kneeling posture again, though this time their clothes were largely Roman in style. But quiet Nionian music was playing, and Noriko’s ladies were combing out her hair, trimming away tiny frayed sections of individual strands with slow, practised hands. All three women’s faces were still, as if in a shared trance of boredom and unhappiness. As they saw him their eyes widened and they all rose as hastily as their sheets of hair would allow. Drusus almost wished he could press a button to replay this response, it was so pretty, like the fanning tails of frightened pigeons.

  ‘I came to see how you are,’ he said.

  Noriko didn’t lift her eyes from the floor. Eventually she murmured, rather indistinctly, ‘I am well.’

  ‘Good,’ said Drusus. He gestured to the women, who looked from him to Noriko in startled dismay and then, reluctantly, left the room.

  Noriko cast a nervous glance after them but straightened her back and raised her head. ‘I’m glad you are here,’ she said resolutely. ‘I wished to speak to you.’

  Drusus nodded permission, while allowing himself a mild, sensuous pleasure in her proximity, only half attending to what she had to say.

  ‘I have not been allowed to leave these rooms,’ said Noriko, in a low voice, ‘because I was not there when . . . You have been making everyone think that my country . . .’ She took a small step back from him; the balcony was behind her and there was not much space into which she could move. ‘You have accused me, because I left the Colosseum . . .’ She glanced at the longvision, then said, ‘Are you going to put me on trial?’

  ‘Was there a signal of some kind?’ asked Drusus, kindly, almost as if he would be prepared to sympathise if she said there was. ‘Had you been warned beforehand?’

  ‘No!’ cried Noriko, ‘of course not! Why would I ever have come here, if—? He was my husband. Our marriage was supposed to bring peace. If I had known what would happen, I would have protected him; I would have prevented this.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ said Drusus, easily. ‘I’ll believe you had nothing to do with it.’

  Noriko blinked, baffled. ‘Thank you,’ she managed at last, her voice strained. ‘Then I would ask you to let me go home. I would like to . . . I would like to mourn for my husband there.’

  ‘You are at home,’ said Drusus. ‘You married into this family. You are part of it. Of course I cannot let you defect to our enemies in a time of war.’

  Noriko, who had retreated until her back was pressed right against the balustrade over the gardens, lifted her hands in a kind of cramped despair. ‘But I have no purpose here any more. You have made your people think I am a murderess; you are trying to destroy my country. How can I stay here?’

  ‘It’s true that it isn’t safe for you to be seen in public now. And it’s a shame you couldn’t come to the funeral, I know. I think the best thing is to let people forget you. It won’t take so long, believe me.’

  Noriko lowered her head again. ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  ‘I will protect you,’ said Drusus. He was leaning against the jamb of the balcony doors, not touching her at all.

  Cleomenes was walking back along the Tiber towards headquarters when a drunk stumbled into him and nearly fell at his feet. He dragged at Cleomenes’ jacket before lurching away towards a gang of other tramps on the bridge. Scowling, half-inclined to go after the man and arrest him for something or other, Cleomenes tugged his jacket straight – and found the folded sheet of paper that had been thrust beneath it. He opened it immediately with unthinking professional interest, and felt the blood light up in his cheeks like a neon hoarding.

  He screwed the paper up tight, buried it in his pocket. He spent the rest of the day feeling that his colleagues could read its contents on his face, that he would be forced to produce it and be arrested. He burnt it when he got home, disguising even that as part of an impromptu offering to the household gods, in case his wife should be endangered by knowing; in case, somehow, he was being watched here.

  After that, he meant to forget it, but fear that it would happen again, and gathering indignation at how he’d been compromised, sent him to an underpass outside a sprawling tram station in the Ciconiae just before midnight. It was a natural stop on his route home, although he’d had to manufacture a lot of unnecessary paperwork to explain why he was travelling so late, in case anyone was paying attention.

  ‘Damn you, don’t ever try anything like that again,’ he began at once. ‘You stay away from me, for both our sakes. Don’t you think they’re watching me? They know I was mixed up with you and those kids. They’re just waiting for something like this. The longdictor’s tapped, I’m sure of that. And they’re keeping me away from anything big at work – I know they’re checking I’m not poking into anything. Half the time I think they’re following me. Gods,’ he finished, deflated, as the sour yellowish light caught Varius’ face, ‘you look terrible.’

  ‘I’m supposed to,’ said Varius.

  ‘Got yourself beaten up?’ said Cleomenes, still with an air of harassed disapproval.

  ‘I’ve been in a fight,’ Varius corrected him, with mild, irrelevant pride. He’d found that a degree of violence was inescapable, living the way he was, and he felt he’d done reasonably well, considering.

  ‘Why don’t you just get out of the country while you still can, Varius?’ pleaded Cleomenes, ‘because it’s going to get harder, I’ll tell you that much. They’re bringing in these new identity papers; they’re tightening up all the borders – and it’s mostly because of you.’

  ‘I have things to do,’ said Varius.

  Cleomenes studied him curiously, and something, perhaps the way Varius held himself, prompted him to grasp Varius angrily, push him against the wall and pat down his clothes until he found the gun, strapped against his side.

  ‘Jove!’ He backed away until the width of the underpass was between them and looked nervously at the steps leading up to the dark street. ‘Don’t tell me what that’s for,’ he said adamantly.

  ‘You know, Cleomenes.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to forget I know. And that’s the only way I can help you. Gods, what are you expecting from me? Because I can’t— I can’t. I’ve got a kid now. Do you know what happened to Salvius’ family?’

  Varius nodded grimly. ‘Yes, I do. I went to his house. New people in there already. Everyone’s behaving as if Salvius was never there.’

  Cleomenes was slightly taken aback. ‘I don’t know if they’re expecting people not to notice . . .’

  Tiredness was pooling in the bruised hollows of Varius’ face, as if he was standing in an invisible rain. He shook his head. ‘They want people to know and not know at the same time.’

  ‘A terrible thing,’ muttered Cleomenes, uncomfortably, ‘all of this.’

  ‘But there’s nothing you can do about it?’ asked Varius lightly. ‘Are you sure that’s why you came here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cleomenes firmly, but added, ‘What did you want me to do?’

  Varius smiled. ‘You’ve already told me about the borders; and I think you’d have said if they knew where to look for my friends. Or me.’

  Cleomenes restrained himself from asking about Sulien and Una, despite his real concern for them. I won’t know anything more about this, he thought. ‘I’m thinking of leaving the vigiles anyway,’ he said gloomily, ‘getting away from this place. Maybe I should have done it years ago.’

  ‘Don’t do that, not yet. Just stay in touch with me, for now. Help me find a better way I can contact you.’

  ‘And then what? Pass you information? Feed them false leads?’

  Varius was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s not going to happen.’ But again, quite against his first intentions, he found himself qualifying this: ‘If you change your mind, I’ll help you get away. If you get yourse
lf into trouble . . . well, most likely there’ll be nothing I can do about it, but if there is, then I will. But I won’t help you with that—’ And he gestured at Varius’ side, where the gun was hidden.

  Varius said nothing.

  Wincing again at the state of him, Cleomenes finished gruffly, ‘Do you need money?’

  Varius shook his head. Una’s note had advised him to divide the money into caches and hide them around the city, not to keep much on him. He guessed that she had learned to do this herself, in London, years ago. Perhaps he was not quite so adept at finding hiding places; one hoard at least had been found and raided, but there was still a lot left. ‘I’m not as badly off as I look. I’ve got other reasons for this. But thank you.’

  After they parted, riding back towards the centre of Rome, Varius inked the words LOOKING FOR YOU ATHABIA onto the back of a seat on a late-night tram. He had begun to add such messages to the bare name in the last few weeks: ATHABIA WHERE ARE YOU? and, most importantly, ATHABIA MEET ME, TRAJAN’S FORUM. A pillar by the Clivus Cinnae; a shop wall in the Field of Mars; an arch on the western approach to Vatican Fields Station.

  He could not use the word Holzarta; that was too blatant; he was sure that would be remembered. Athabia, the name of the village where he’d sent Marcus, where Delir’s people had met him, was dangerous in itself, but it was the only possible point of reference between Delir, whom he had never met, and himself. He was trying to make it just ubiquitous enough that it would be glaringly conspicuous to someone who knew the name, while scarcely visible to anyone else.

  But he dared not put a date, or even a time, in case he’d gone too far and made anyone else curious, and he’d deliberately chosen a large, busy place where meeting anyone would inevitably be difficult. Even so, when he first went he half-expected to find every vigile officer in the city – or alternatively, every pimp looking for a client – waiting for him. He sat hunched in the corner of the forum, one of a row of beggars, and watched for someone trying not to look as if they were searching for someone; someone filtering cautiously through the crowd; someone who, like him, didn’t stray too far from the possible routes of escape.

  There were advantages to begging: it allowed him to sit and watch, excused him the duty of appearing to have somewhere to go. But beggars were city landmarks in their own minor way, and most of them had missing or withered limbs, blind eyes, cratered skulls. Varius, feeling self-conscious and absurd in having nothing wrong with him, had tipped half a bottle of methousia over his clothes and tried to cultivate a ravaged shake: a reason for being there that simultaneously repelled sympathetic attention. He was not given much money, and he remained nervous among the other residents of the streets; he thought they sensed something false about him, in the half-heartedness of his requests for change, in his caginess when he could not avoid speaking to them.

  His appearance was changing, deteriorating steadily, and that was, in one way, good. But it was not an adaptable disguise; it was inevitable that the vigiles would be vaguely conscious of him, and as time went on it would be harder to melt anonymously into the crowd.

  Indeed, from most perspectives, he was taking ridiculous risks. He had not told Cleomenes that sometimes he slept in a doorway just a hundred yards from the vigiles’ headquarters. Having thought, once, they won’t expect me to be so close, now he made a strategy of it. He followed Drusus to every public appearance, staying as close as he could get, studying the behaviour of the guards while watching for his chance. He got a foolhardy exhilaration from being right in front of them and getting away with it, though he knew this was not a feeling to be trusted.

  Sometimes it struck him that all this – skulking around the city, writing coded messages on walls and plotting to bring down the government– seemed like fairly unmistakable symptoms: cracked, he thought wisely, as if of someone else. Too much for him. Finished up a lunatic on the streets, let that be a lesson to you. But he did not take the idea seriously, he supposed, since whenever it occurred to him, it was with a little hiccough of amusement. He thought of Lucius, Marcus’ uncle, who had found safety and freedom in madness, and he laughed to himself, sitting on a mat of pages torn from the advertising magazine, under the colonnade in Trajan’s Forum.

  But of course, that brought his mind back to Marcus, whose death was a terrible light by which Varius saw anything he might try to do, any meaning he’d thought there was in living like this, scraped down to bare bone. And wherever he was, he would start moving, trying to outpace the loss and the guilt. After his release from prison, grieving for Gemella, he had walked through Rome like this for hours, busy and hunted, the pace wearing smooth the edge of his thoughts. He fell back into it now almost without thinking, but there was a difference: though he rarely picked a route in advance, he was not aimless, and he was more daring, traversing unfamiliar streets, and flights of steps, trespassing in gardens and on the roofs of tower-blocks. He was learning the city meticulously, like a language: the grammar and history, all its unexpected connections and odd possibilities. He longed to be able to make notes; it would have helped him think, but of course such a document would be far too great a liability. Instead he memorised the locations of unlocked service doors and scaffolds. Once the barriers had been cleared away and the Praetorians had gone, he would go back to the fora where Drusus had addressed the carefully managed crowd and study the buildings which overlooked the Rostra . . .

  He had to be careful around the Palace; he avoided the areas where he’d lived or worked, for fear of running into someone that he knew. Sometimes, though, he sometimes wished one of his parents would see him sitting in Trajan’s Forum; that somehow he’d be able to communicate something, just with a look. He felt wretched to think of them: they weren’t young, and he was so close, and doing nothing to comfort them, when they’d already been through enough on his account. But he could think of no way to contact them without putting them in worse danger. Their mail would be being read, their longdictor tapped, probably even their house bugged, in which case any implication that they had heard from him would be fatal. And what could he have said? He imagined a bald, one-line note: I am alive. He could hardly say he was safe, or that he would come back.

  And in the end he could only remind himself that they had the same unsatisfactory source of reassurance that he had when he worried for Una and Sulien: the longvision that repeated daily that they were all three still wanted, still not found.

  Varius revisited his Athabia messages sometimes, in his solitary patrols of the city, half-hoping he might find some reply scrawled beside them. He never had, but lately some of them had been scrubbed off. It might mean nothing.

  There was a woman sitting on a bench in Trajan’s Forum, whom he was sure he’d seen there before, doing precisely what she was doing now. He remembered the flowered headscarf, and the long dark hair escaping from it. Otherwise her clothes were unremarkable, if rather heavy for the weather. He hadn’t been looking for a woman, but he found himself watching her carefully. She had unfolded a large tourist’s map in front of her and seemed to be puzzling over it, but Varius could almost have sworn that she was scanning the forum from behind it. Certainly she had been holding it stiffly for a long time, without apparently making any progress towards finding whatever she was looking for.

  And now she had got up and was striding towards his corner. Varius gave no signal in response except to keep watching her, and to allow the dulled, vacant expression to slip off his face. A small thrill of paranoia went through him – she could be an agent for the vigiles; this could be the end of it – as she leaned forward to hand him a coin and hissed, ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Why are you doing it? What do you want?’

  Varius looked up without speaking, saw the scars under the thick make-up, the Sinoan features the scarf and the long wig obscured.

  She glanced around. ‘I’ll meet you on the corner of Vicus Blandianus,’ she muttered.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he agreed.

  ‘Was he some
one from the camp?’ asked Lal. They were standing close together by a skip against the wall, both watching the opening of the narrow street.

  ‘I didn’t recognise him,’ answered Ziye. ‘He could have been from before my time.’

  ‘I might know him, then.’

  ‘You were a little girl,’ said Ziye impatiently, looking at her, grimacing with guilty irritation. They’d been through this argument a number of times, but still she repeated, ‘You really shouldn’t be here. Please go and wait at home. Let me deal with it.’

  ‘I want to see who it is,’ repeated Lal. ‘It doesn’t sound like he’s with the vigiles.’

  The man rounded the corner into the narrow street and Ziye met him with a cold glare. ‘Well, we’re here,’ she said, as he approached. ‘Who are you?’

  He did look like a new arrival in Holzarta: battered and dirty, and moving rather gingerly. But Lal, staring at him and trying in her imagination to peel back the rough beard and dishevelled hair, to erase the faint swelling around his eye, said in a cautious whisper, ‘Varius.’

  Ziye looked him over again to confirm it and sighed. ‘I see.’

  It had begun to rain. They retreated to a little caupona in the Subura, squalid enough for Varius to enter unremarked. They sat hunched distrustfully over beakers of rough red wine and kept their voices low beneath the deep, harsh music of a hydraulis, blaring over the speakers.

  ‘What are you thinking, writing those things all over town? If anyone just looks up that name, if they followed you—’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t have any other way to contact you.’

  ‘We have only come to tell you to stop,’ said Ziye.

  ‘No we haven’t,’ contradicted Lal, quietly, looking at him. ‘You want help with something.’

  ‘I want to stop Drusus,’ said Varius.

  Ziye snorted bleakly, but Lal said at once, ‘What can we do?’

  ‘You mean kill him,’ said Ziye, and without exactly being shocked at this, Lal felt suddenly as if the conversation had slipped out of reality into a scene from a longvision play, or a dream; it was just not possible that they could be sitting there discussing such a thing.