Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘Delir had a whole network of people who were against slavery – who were prepared to help slaves,’ he said. ‘There must have been hundreds; people like that aren’t going to support Drusus. If they helped you, perhaps they would help me. I want to know who they are.’

  Ziye shook her head. ‘What do you think they can do? Most of them used to be slaves themselves. Don’t you think if any of them had any power, things would have been different? That’s why we needed Marcus.’

  Varius flinched. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but if there are people who are willing to try to help, then I need to know. I have to think about what would happen afterwards . . . if I were successful . . .’

  Ziye looked at him, grimly pursing her lips, and thought, as Una had, He’s not planning to live very long. She said wearily, ‘Delir won’t be very eager to interfere again, not after Dama.’

  It was hard to imagine Delir being eager to do anything: his despair and guilt filled their one room like many stacks of heavy boxes. Ziye had barely forgiven him herself, for leaving them – she did not even particularly want to, but did not seem to want to leave him either. It was dreadful to see him like this.

  ‘I’ll talk to him about it,’ promised Lal, and it still felt as if she were watching a character in a play, but one she hoped was involved in a particular story, heading towards a good ending. ‘And if I can help you—’ to assassinate the Emperor, she finished to herself, dazed, and shivered at the thought that it was not impossible, for Dama had done it.

  ‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ retorted Ziye.

  ‘Well, I could make more identity papers,’ said Lal. ‘I know these new ones are going to be more difficult, but I can try.’

  ‘Could you make other things?’ asked Varius instantly. ‘Security passes, things like that?’

  ‘Perhaps – I don’t know if I could get the materials.’ She looked down at the stained tabletop and added diffidently, ‘Sulien and Una aren’t with you, are they?’

  ‘No. And it’s better if I don’t tell you where they’ve gone.’

  ‘I could have made papers for them,’ she said sadly.

  ‘They wanted to leave as fast as they could,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know if papers would help them, the way they’ll be living for a while.’

  Lal had not really expected otherwise, but it had been difficult not to hope the messages sown across the city might mean she would see them again.

  ‘You were a gladiatrix, weren’t you?’ Varius asked Ziye. ‘Didn’t you fight at the Colosseum? I think I remember hearing about it when I was a student. Though you weren’t called Ziye, then.’

  To Lal’s surprise, the look on Ziye’s face was almost one of nostalgia, even though her body had stiffened slightly and her fingers had tightened on her cup. ‘Hm, yes. That was a long time ago.’

  ‘How well do you remember it?’

  ‘The match?’

  ‘The Colosseum – the way it works. The parts below the arena . . .’

  Ziye, staring at him with eyebrows raised, her mouth half-open, shook her head incredulously.

  ‘They’ll open it again, eventually. And he’ll be there.’

  ‘And you really think that after what happened there you’ll be able to get in and’ – despite the scathing conviction in her voice she hesitated for a moment, then retreated to euphemism – ‘do anything?’

  ‘It’s just information,’ said Varius, shrugging. ‘Information is never wasted.’

  Ziye snorted, a brief, desperate laugh. ‘So, really you are just trying to further your education.’

  Varius laughed too. ‘That’s it, yes.’

  ‘Well, I used to teach!’ said Ziye, with the same hopeless amusement.

  ‘Then come with me. I’m going there now.’

  Ziye stopped laughing. ‘You must be insane,’ she said flatly.

  ‘We’ll be as safe there as here,’ said Varius.

  It had been almost two months since the explosion. Two cranes scissored in the sky above the scaffolding bracing the side of the Colosseum. Most of the entrances were closed, but on the south side a milling line of visitors was allowed into a cordoned-off section of the stands to lay flowers, or light incense, at a temporary shrine to Faustus, who had, like most of his ancestors, been declared a god.

  The shrine looked pitiful to Lal; the flowers were not being cleared away often enough and the fresh ones were scattered between limp heaps of plastic wrapping and rotting stems. She was glad Marcus hadn’t been given the same honour.

  In the arena, the wreckage was gone, and the remains of the roof had been stabilised, but the work seemed to be moving slowly: the break still yawned open overhead, wider than before, as sections had fallen or been taken down.

  Varius had resumed his alcoholic, shuffling gait. Lal and Ziye tried to give the impression they were standing close to him only by chance, speaking to him only to urge him to go away.

  ‘Well,’ muttered Ziye, fatalistically, eyeing the few bored Praetorians manning the cordons, ‘there are two levels underground. Most of the prisoners’ cells are on the lowest floor, there, you see where the lift-shafts come up? Most of the gladiators stay at the Ludus Magnus, of course; there’s a tunnel underground connecting to it over there, and there’s a waiting area before we’d come in through the east gate. There’s another tunnel leading off to the vivarium, where they keep the arena hounds and any other animals they’ve got for the show. There’s an emergency clinic on the other side, near the Victory Gate. And there’s a morgue. I don’t see the use of this.’

  ‘What about storerooms?’ asked Varius. But his gaze was pulled across the arena towards what remained of the Imperial box, now stripped down to a bare platform above the stands, and all three of them fell silent.

  ‘Do you know how I recognised you?’ whispered Lal. ‘It wasn’t from what’s on the longvision now; it was from when Marcus was with us in Holzarta and they were using you to try and trap him. They were saying all these things about you, and they showed this picture of you, and I remember he said to me that even if you’d tell him to stay, he had to go back for you.’

  Varius lowered his head, pulling in a sharp breath, which caught in his chest. He said, ‘I wish I’d been here.’

  Lal looked up at the broad tract of sky above the box, wet as on the day the glass that framed it had been broken. She said, ‘You’re here now.’

  From a redoubt above a beach south of Moulmein, Tadahito and his brothers looked out through field-glasses over the Bay of Bengala as rockets curved like quick lines of bright stitching across the sky. Between the destroyers and beyond the smoke the giant hovercraft carriers crawled like black slugs. They had taken the Angaman Islands just the day before.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ breathed Prince Takanari, but the volucer he had been watching darting and stabbing at the destroyers burst apart in a gust of fire, while the hoverships still squatted there on the sea.

  The redoubt shook as the launchers fired again and distant explosions flashed on the water. Beside the princes, Lord Daw was trembling with grief and shame. ‘Your Highnesses, I wish I could have shown you something better than this,’ he said, close to tears.

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ murmured Tadahito.

  ‘It isn’t over yet,’ offered Prince Kaneharu, awkwardly soothing. Tadahito could tell he was deeply embarrassed by the governor’s distress, almost more concerned with that than with the losing battle out at sea. Kaneharu and Takanari were both nineteen, not twins, but born to different mothers in the same year. This was the first time either of them had left Nionia.

  Down on the beach another missile punched into the ground, the noise bruising their ears, even from here.

  ‘You must leave,’ said Lord Daw wretchedly.

  ‘No, no,’ said Takanari, almost stammering with urgency, ‘we came here to help defend Bamashu. We can bring in more airpower, we can fight—’

  ‘Brother,’ warned Tadahito quietly. He bowed to Lord Daw. ‘Unfortun
ately you are right. I’m sorry.’

  There was no way to dignify the hurry into the volucer. Tadahito tried to pretend he did not feel the shame of it, as the others too obviously did. The aircraft swung north for a moment so that they caught sight once more of the Roman ships, already much closer to the ploughed-up beach, hurling fire towards the shore as a drove of Nionian volucers plunged forward to meet them – then the princes were over quiet green rice fields and forest, safe.

  ‘We shouldn’t leave them,’ said Takanari in a low voice.

  ‘I know,’ said Tadahito, ‘but we would be killed along with those poor people. And our lives are not our own.’

  ‘But we’re not going to just abandon Bamashu?’ protested Kaneharu. He was full brother to Noriko and the earnest gravity in his face at present brought out the resemblance. Tadahito noticed it with a tug of anxiety and regret. All three of them were largely avoiding speaking about her.

  ‘We just have,’ said Tadahito, and they both looked devastated. They were only a little younger than Marcus had been, and there were fewer than five years between them and Tadahito himself, but they seemed to Tadahito far too young to be there. It was as if the death of his closest peer on the Roman side had aged him, somehow jolted him up a generation.

  ‘For now,’ he added, chiefly to comfort them, but he looked down at the countryside they were leaving and thought grimly of the weapon Kato had not lived to see perfected.

  [ V ]

  BORDERS

  Una took an experimental step off the river-bank. A fine layer of snow crunched under her boots, but beneath that the ice already felt solid, hard as the earth under the frozen grass behind her. Ahead, broad veins of black water, cold enough to stop a heart in a minute, still carved between the floes of greyer, looser ice, heaving lumps of it down the Rha. But it would all be white soon, land and sky and water one clean, colourless plain. It was impossible to believe, as the wind from the steppe scoured her face, that back in Rome it was only autumn, and might even still be warm. Una’s memory spasmed; there were muscles in the mind she had to keep tightening to hold the months in focus, or else the shock would strike, new and raw, and the last thing she would remember seeing was Marcus’ dead face, or Dama, horrified and luminous in the rain, or both at once. None of it can have happened yet, she thought, taking another little step, holding in the impulse to race forward, seize Dama again, to kill him, stop him, undo it all. Not unless I’m too slow, if I’m not strong enough . . .

  She shook her head hard, which did nothing to shift the thwarted urgency, or the weariness that dragged at her, and didn’t get her moving back onto the bank and on her way. Except that after a while she found she was somehow doing it anyway. Maybe I really did knock my head harder than I thought, she thought, mouth twisting, feeling the smile hang oddly on her face, like something caught on a nail.

  She’d left the car behind a screen of frozen trees, not far away. As she approached it, she saw something strange in the sky: a pale sphere with a faint, silvery sheen to it, drifting high on the wind. A balloon. Then two or three more, floating north and west, then a loose, silent string of them, bowling across the sky like huge bubbles, or mercury drops. It was difficult to judge how far away they were, and how large – she guessed at least six feet across. She knew they must be something to do with the war, but were they surveillance devices, weapons, some kind of experiment? These possibilities occurred to her unprompted, and she made no effort to sort and choose between them; she could scarcely even summon much interest in which side they belonged to. They were eerie and beautiful, like multiple untethered moons, and once the milky sky swallowed them again, Una almost forgot she had seen them.

  She took off her clumsy gloves as she climbed inside the car and the controls stung her hands with cold. Una gripped harder, gritting her teeth, until the action and the pain reminded her of Dama again. It had been riding as a passenger in Dama’s car the year before that had finally prompted her to learn to drive. The grey car whined warningly; it had been bought as cheaply and secretly as possible, just inside Venedia: it wasn’t made for this tyrannical cold, though it had brought them two thousand miles, all the way to the edge of Sarmatia without having to cross a border. They’d slipped from Italy into Rhaetia, and Rhaetia into Germania easily enough, but by the time they approached Venedia things had changed, there was little free traffic on unwatched roads, and there were patrols out in the woods; the vigiles were even building fences. They’d had to slow down, feeling their way. And now they were waiting for the river to harden, erasing the border between Venedia and Sarmatia.

  Una was the only thing moving over the snow, and the thick clothes padded her in another layer of anonymity; she could be anyone, from a distance even her sex was not obvious. The whiteness around her might have come from the old daydreams with which she had always quieted herself when very angry or unhappy. Now, unfolded out across the real landscape, the emptiness still drew her, but it unnerved her too. She felt watched and exposed as well as hidden – a dark, punishable word on a white page. Driving past a distant cluster of cottages, bleached with snow and barely visible against the sky, she felt a muted tug of longing – for they looked so safe, so ignored by the world. But a pair of strangers would meet a blaze of attention, and though the vigiles could never patrol every inch of the freezing river, all the obvious crossings, the port cities and bridges were bristling with them, manning new barriers and checking the papers of anything that moved.

  So she drove instead into the outskirts of a drab, medium-sized town twenty miles or so west of the Rha. Perhaps even this dismal place was too small, its population too sparse to offer any shelter. The streets were almost empty, greying ice-sludge giving way to fresh stretches of undisturbed snow. Everything seemed to be shut up, closed either for the winter or for good. The sight of Sulien, waiting for her by the tram station, dismayed her: How obvious, how wrong for the place he looked. He was slouched, in a transparent attempt to disguise his too-well-documented height, and though he was as heavily wrapped-up as she was, he seemed more persecuted by the cold. He was stamping from foot to foot, his breath extravagantly white in the air, and shivering visibly, even from here.

  He collapsed into the seat beside her, folding himself awkwardly to sink down as low as he could. He didn’t speak as she drove out of the town again, just lay there shuddering morosely, waiting to warm up. Finally he moaned something that ended ‘—hate this fucking place—!’

  ‘You all right?’ inquired Una briskly.

  Sulien huffed a loud, miserable breath and thrust a torn sheet of paper onto her lap.

  She glanced down: their pictures, and red print howling Who’s standing next to YOU? Be vigilant – especially if you live near a border! The reward had been raised again. That was almost all. There had been quite a complicated narrative at one point, but gradually the details had dropped away, and once the effort to buckle mismatched facts together had relaxed, the case against them seemed somehow the more compelling. There was a fierce complicity implied now between the reader and the authority that addressed them, growing stronger as the number of words had shrunk. Only a few remained now, like ‘murder’, ‘treason’ and, sometimes, ‘witch’.

  Una shrugged, resigned. ‘Many of them?’

  ‘Well, too many to pull down the lot.’

  ‘We can try somewhere further back if you want. Or we can sleep in the car again tonight.’

  ‘Gods, no,’ interrupted Sulien fervently, cringing from the memory of lying cramped and shivering beneath every blanket and piece of clothing they possessed, while the snow piled down on the roof. They’d never been more than half-asleep, but in the morning they were so dazed with cold they could scarcely wake.

  ‘And we’re going to need people who know the ice.’

  ‘Well, there’s only one guest house that I can find that’s open. I think most of them shut for winter. And I don’t think there’s anyone else staying there, so they’re going to ask what I’m doing
here, that’s for sure.’ He sighed, looking at the crumpled poster again. ‘You really don’t think they know we’re here?’

  ‘No. It’s just a border thing, like it says. But this is why we need not to be seen together.’ And why she’d been scouting another town about fifteen miles away.

  Sulien nodded grudgingly. ‘If I’m not there and something happens . . .’

  ‘Then at least they won’t get both of us,’ said Una.

  Sulien’s face looked pinched and hurt, not only from the cold, or even the fear of capture.

  ‘You’ve just got to get used to it,’ Una advised. ‘That’s not you they’re talking about. It’s someone else.’

  Sulien laughed humourlessly. ‘Well, he looks a lot like me.’ He rubbed his jaw – the beard was quite dense and full now – and muttered, ‘Me the way I’m supposed to look, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, you look fine – how can you still care?’ exclaimed Una, even though she knew. The sheer cold was gradually eroding Sulien’s stubborn resentment of the beard, but he still clung on to the scrap of vanity as best he could, as if to give it up would be a kind of defeat.

  Sulien managed a short-lived grin. The shivering had steadied to a spasmodic judder, but it hadn’t really stopped. They were out in the bare countryside now, and the emptiness leaned in on them again, like a pack of eavesdroppers in a crowded train. There was nowhere to go, and nowhere to hide. A single car heading towards them reduced them both to silence, which lasted well after it had passed.

  ‘Have you got somewhere to stay?’ Sulien asked at last.

  ‘I think so. Same kind of place – you were right; hardly anything’s open.’

  ‘So,’ began Sulien, ‘what are you doing here in this frozen shit-hole all alone, young woman? And what accent is that? And is that car really yours? And don’t you know you should be careful by yourself?’ He’d put on a different, slightly jocular voice, but towards the end he slipped out of it into stark worry. A girl alone and out of place was even surer to draw attention than he was, and they’d be lucky if that was all.