Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Una shifted her grip on the controls, softened the set of her shoulders and widened her eyes, regarding the road ahead with a look of humble sincerity and wistfulness. ‘Well, I’m from Fennia, but my grandfather was born near here,’ she said. ‘Oh, he was a character! He used to tell these stories—! So I’ve always felt like this was home in a way, you know? I’ve got cousins down in Gelonus – I’ve got a new job there, teaching – but it doesn’t start for another two weeks and my landlady needed my room back, so I thought, this was my chance to see what it’s like here, to see Grandpa’s home—’

  ‘But it’s like nothing,’ objected Sulien, looking out resentfully at the snow.

  ‘Oh, yes, I wish I could have seen it in the summer!’ agreed Una enthusiastically, practically cooing now. “It was the countryside Grandpa really loved, the fields in the sunshine – they must be beautiful, aren’t they? And the Rha too? But oh, he had his stories about winter too – he even said when the Rha was frozen he used to drive right across the ice to Sarmatia – you don’t think that could really be true, do you?’ She looked at Sulien as if he could answer, eyes comically agape with innocent incredulity.

  Sulien shook his head and laughed, and felt an odd little pang of happiness, taut with the anticipation of its own end. He was sure of the change that was due on Una’s face now, the act dropped, and something more gone with it. He looked away, not wanting to see the white, calcified exhaustion, how much older she’d look. Every time they faced another border, the effort stirred up some life in her, but not only did it not last, it left her more depleted than before.

  He tried not to think about it, in case she could feel his thoughts as extra weight. ‘We need new tyres on this thing if it’s going any further,’ he said after a while, to break the silence.

  ‘You don’t sound like a Roman any more,’ Una remarked suddenly. ‘You sound like me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sulien, taken aback, trying to recall the vowels and stresses of the words he’d just pronounced. He felt as if something between them was reinforced, and at the same time, there was a confused sense of loss. ‘Well . . . it doesn’t make much difference; they’ve never said anything about our accents . . .’

  ‘I knew it would happen if you were stuck with me long enough. You should try and pick up the accent here,’ suggested Una distantly. ‘It’s a talent, really. You should use it.’

  ‘Smugglers do it,’ said the landlady, unsmilingly. ‘And they go through, sometimes. Serves them right.’

  They were sitting close to the stove in the kitchen, the one reliably warm room in the guest house. The air outside huffed and sucked at the dusty shutters, so that they groaned against their fastenings then banged in their frames, and ribbons of cold floated through the room. It was only early evening, but it had barely got light all that day.

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t a smuggler!’ said Una, hitching up her eyebrows in artificial shock. ‘No, no, he was a little wild, but . . . oh no! There was a girl he liked on the other side.’ She felt she was getting dangerously close to overacting, making this character too much the caricature she’d sketched for Sulien. But she had hoped that a display of naïveté would prompt the woman to linger on the subject without the need for too many direct questions, and in any case, she had no more subtlety to give to this. She could still devise the lies needed to probe and parry, but her body, her face resisted, ached at each false word and gesture.

  ‘If you say so,’ sniffed the woman. ‘It would take more than that to get me trying it. You can see it’s not the same colour all over – darker here and lighter there; that’s where there’s thinner parts and thicker parts. I,’ she repeated with stern satisfaction, ‘would not try it.’

  Una made herself assess the effect she was having; the landlady had already begun to find her slightly irritating, and – still a long way beneath that – to sense something unplaceably strange or wrong about her. But she was bored and sullenly curious in her deserted guest-house, whose grimy, flaking rooms sobbed and groaned to themselves as the wind punched at the walls, so she talked to Una all the same. Her name, there on the taverna’s sign, was Vituriga, though she had not invited Una to use it. She was a large, raw-boned woman in her late fifties, and she had that same air of embattled fatalism as everyone Una had seen in this town. Maybe in summer it was different.

  ‘Are you coming down with something?’ she demanded abruptly, like an accusation. ‘You don’t look very well. And you got up very late today.’

  Una dragged her mouth into a smile, barely suppressing the trembling behind it. She’d dreamt of Marcus again the night before, the worst kind of dream, worse than the ones in which he was always dying. They had been in a library and Marcus was reaching for a history book and urging her to read it. He was excited, animated, and Una said, ‘Of course I’ll read a book you wrote,’ although the book was old when she looked at it, battered and waterstained, and Marcus wasn’t handling it carefully; pages were shifting loose. There was nothing strange about his presence at first; it was some time before Una remembered and clutched him whispering, ‘You can’t imagine what it was like. You can’t.’ And she knew it was a dream as his arms closed round her and she woke under the dusty blankets in the cold room, pressing her face against the flat pillow to stifle the wail butting against her teeth, longing for morning not to happen.

  For a moment she had such a strong impulse to smash her cup against the woman’s face that she couldn’t speak, then she said, ‘Well, I’m sure they’re going to keep me busy down in Gelonus, might as well get my lie-ins while I can.’

  ‘You don’t look up to it. I hope it’s not infectious,’ said the landlady, sourly.

  ‘I hitched here,’ said Sulien, shrugging, ‘looking for work, doing a bit of everything.’ He was trying to mould his accent to those around him as Una had advised, feeling foolish, afraid a conscious effort might wreck this knack she insisted he had. He didn’t know whether or not it was working; at least no one had said anything so far. He knew he was better at lying than he had once been, yet he still felt not only faintly amazed but distressed when he said these things and people believed them, didn’t see who he really was.

  The patrons of the small bar were all male, and Sulien was by far the youngest there. It occurred to him, with a twist of unease, that he’d scarcely seen a man close to his own age since arriving in town.

  ‘There aren’t any jobs,’ scoffed a man with heavy eyebrows and a face chapped red by the cold. ‘Lads round here, they used to go into the factories, but now those places all run on slaves. They’ve got a load of Nionians in from Terranova.’

  Sulien, stricken, felt his face drop and tried to adapt it into a sympathetic nod. Oh, Marcus, he thought. He took a swig of his drink, trying not to wince at the unfamiliar taste of fermented milk and sugar – the wine was shockingly expensive – and let his gaze sink to hide his eyes. For a moment he thought of Varius too, and wondered if he still believed there was anything to be salvaged from all that sacrifice and work.

  ‘There is work,’ said another man, sharply. Sulien turned to him with a questioning look but the man didn’t smile back. He was looking him over critically. ‘They could use a young man like you in the army.’

  Sulien spread his hands. ‘Oh, I think they’re better off without me. I’m not cut out for that,’ he said, lazing back in his chair with a self-deprecatory grin, trying to look the picture of fecklessness.

  Three days before they’d fled down the first side-road they could find to get away from a long convoy of military trucks heading towards Gelonus and the border, like them.

  The man muttered something in a proud, censorious hiss; all Sulien caught was, ‘—my son—’

  The other men sighed and grunted uncomfortably, and Sulien paid for more drinks to smooth the mood and tried to ease the conversation round to fishing on the Rha, and the places where the ice was thickest.

  It wasn’t a dream that woke Una that night. She lay still, frozen with the usual dread
of daylight, listening for the next swell of a noise she couldn’t quite remember. It wasn’t morning, she understood first, with relief. The sound couldn’t have been thunder in this cold, she realised next. And there was no rain, and the wind had dropped.

  The next explosion must have been some distance away, for it sounded strangely soft, a padded beat on a kettledrum, or heavy feet pacing up carpeted stairs. She closed her eyes for a moment, then there was a much louder boom, the shriek of windows bursting, the long howl of some alarm.

  Dama, out of reach, too far ahead at the Colosseum. The sound of what he had done ploughing up the air . . .

  How widely are they falling? thought Una as the room shivered, on this one town, into the bare land around it, as far as the scattered villages, the next town, Sulien? She grasped the thought, using it to force herself to move; she swung grimly out of bed, hissing at the cold, and groped for her coat, thrust her feet into her shoes.

  The landlady, barefoot and wearing only her nightgown, came running along the landing and clutched at Una briefly before racing down the stairs and flinging open the door to the street. Then she shrank back, and for a bizarre moment that seemed longer than it could really have been, Una watched her running back and forth between the door and the foot of the stairs repeating mechanically, ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no,’ before sinking into a keening heap on the floor.

  Una moved past her, into the flood of cold air, and closed the door most of the way. She peered out through the gap. At first she saw nothing, though she could smell something burning nearby, felt a velvety strand of smoke slide over her freezing skin. Raised voices sounded from further up the street; she heard unsteady, sliding footsteps on the icy road. But there was barely any light outside, and the sky was black and silent, unstirred by the beat of volucer wings—

  Then sound struck again, like a crack parting the dark air, and fire lit up the street. Una was jolted back, clutching at the doorframe, her head ringing, but she had seen the red light break in reflected crescents on two silvery globes hanging low in the air: the balloons were sinking to earth like dandelion seeds, gently planting their loads of explosives on rooftops and vehicles, and the frozen ground.

  Una retreated, teeth chattering, unsure if she was shaking from the cold or a belated flood of adrenalin. How far? she thought again, and wanted to hurtle out to the car and speed to Sulien. Steady now, she told herself: stupid to go running under a bomb when she had no solid reason to think he was in worse trouble than she was. And with a jab of spite at herself, she thought: and what could you do if he is?

  ‘Come on,’ she said to the landlady, ‘not here.’ She dragged the woman by her elbow, and hurried her back into the kitchen. The guest house was quivering from the impacts around it, but it was still larger and sturdier than most of the other buildings on the street. She doubted they’d do better to search for shelter outside.

  She thought there must be a larder in the kitchen, though she hadn’t seen the door opened before, and yes, here it was: on the side of the house that faced away from the wind, and the one high window was very small; it would have to do. There were boxes and heavy jars of some kind under a counter, and Una began dragging them out of the way. The landlady had recovered enough to help a little. Una left her and ran impatiently back to the front door.

  Fire was spilling from a hole in the roof of the house at the end of the street, and by its light she could see that a wall of an upper room had been removed with strange neatness, as if a curtain had been raised. And there were more people outside now, gasping and staggering around. A young woman gripping the hand of a girl of about six had come to a dazed stop near the guest-house; another child was clamped awkwardly to her hip, and all three were in the same rushed, half-dressed state as Una herself. There was a smear of blood on the woman’s cheek and she was looking about, her face taut with bewilderment.

  ‘In here,’ Una called to them.

  There wasn’t room to shut the larder door with all five of them packed in. Bottles were rattling overhead, and they had the singed taste of the air in their mouths. The larder was cold; they needed the shared warmth of their cramped bodies. And slowly the other two women started to talk, swapping terse condemnations of the Nionians before moving on to a far more ordinary conversation about unreliable handy-men, distracting each other. But now she had nothing more to do but wait, Una began to find the closeness oppressive, as if surfaces of her self were being ground away by the contact.

  Somewhere several streets away, just at the limit of what she could sense, someone was trapped under a weight of wood and fire. It came abruptly, a flaring of incredulous red inside her skull: someone else’s skin burning, someone else who couldn’t breathe. Una stiffened and turned her head away, making a swift, brutal effort not to see or hear it any more, but for a moment she seemed to have lost the knack of disentangling herself, wasn’t safe within herself in time as the mind in the distance collapsed away, with an awful quiver of relief, peace.

  Oh, God, please— Una thought.

  There was no reason for it to end at daylight, and no way to be certain it had stopped. There was no squad of aircraft overhead that might be shot down or have to fly home, only the currents in the air.

  But when it had been quiet for half an hour or so, they emerged stiffly to find glass and melted snow sprayed across the discoloured carpets. It was still dark outside, the alarm still sounding. The landlady tried the lights while Una was almost pleased to find the longdictor dead, as it gave her the excuse she needed: ‘I’m going to find a working longdictor; I have to talk to my family.’

  ‘They won’t be worried yet, you’ll just wake them up,’ protested the landlady dolefully, and Una could see she’d hoped for help with the damage.

  ‘I have to talk to them,’ insisted Una, hurrying up the stairs to finish dressing, not listening to the woman from the street who was trying to thank her.

  Dawn was just filtering like a pale sediment into the winter sky, as she drove. She saw a few dark craters spoiling the snow on the steppe-land, and there were more vehicles on the road, more people to see her. But on the face of it, the other town seemed unscathed, though all its lights were out. Una relaxed a little. It was hours before the time at which she and Sulien had agreed to meet. She could just drive past his guest house, she thought, make sure the roof was still on. She wouldn’t even have to see him to know he was safe. But before she reached the first turn off the main road through the town, there he was, striding along the roadside, scanning the traffic. The moment he saw the car he flung a long arm into the air and started waving urgently, as if she wouldn’t have noticed him.

  ‘People can see you,’ she hissed furiously as he tumbled into the car, gripped her arm. But he wasn’t listening, he was examining her as if she might be missing a limb; the fact that she was here and snapping at him not enough to reassure him yet.

  He let go and hunched over in the seat, breathing out fiercely, and Una thought, with a dull pulse of remorse and exhaustion, I have to do better, I have to. She said, ‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Didn’t get any sleep, that’s all. None of them landed here?’

  Sulien shook his head. ‘We heard them. But the power’s out. And the longdictors.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Was it bad?’

  ‘No. No,’ insisted Una, with all the softness she could muster, ‘just noise.’

  ‘Have you heard about Bamaria?’ Sulien asked, a sore, anxious scratch in his voice. ‘It’s gone. We’ve— The Romans have taken it.’

  That was where they had been heading: the sliver of Nionian territory closest to the eastern tip of the Empire. The first place, they’d thought, where they could walk into a magistrate’s office or a Samurae hall and state their real names.

  ‘Oh,’ Una said, blankly.

  Sulien waited for something more. When she only turned the car out towards the steppe again, he found himself prompting almost shrilly, ‘So what are we going to do?’ and felt ashamed immediately af
terwards; he had a mind of his own, so why was he behaving as if, even now, she should settle everything for them both? He hadn’t meant that – but she should have had something to say, surely; she should have started dissecting what it meant to them.

  ‘We need the maps,’ he supplied, anxiously. It didn’t matter, after all, which one of them said these things, as long as they were said. ‘We need to work out how far the money will go.’

  Una gave him a taut parody of a smile and said, ‘All right.’

  The dark tracks of water had frozen over in the night, streaks of a fine greyish film of ice, like seams in unpolished marble. Another few days and they could probably walk across, thought Sulien, while Una searched dutifully for the sheaf of maps in the drawer under the seat.

  ‘Maybe they’ll say more about what’s happening there when the power’s back on,’ he said, dubiously. ‘Where the . . . the front is. But I don’t know. Well, we were going to have to go through Sinoan territory anyway, so I suppose we can just try and . . . go round it? Or we keep going east instead of south, go straight across, I guess. I know we’ve got problems in Sina too, but if it’s that or walk onto a battlefield . . . Or . . . well, we could give up on getting to Nionia.’

  Una shrugged. She wasn’t looking at the maps, or at him. She gestured at Sarmatia, on the far side of the river, though there was nothing to distinguish the pale slopes from the bank on which they stood. It was as if they had reached a barrier of mirror-glass. ‘Look. That’s less than a mile away. And from what people say it’s going to be two weeks before we can even get that far. Anything could have happened by then.’

  ‘No – we can’t just head into nothing and hope it works out,’ Sulien persisted, hearing in the obstinate stresses of his own voice a replica of something she might have said.