Just to hear his voice almost sabotaged Sulien: he gulped for air and shook, and here were more inexcusable minutes passing in which he wasn’t doing anything.
It took him a few false starts, but he dialled the code and Varius answered at once. ‘Yes?’ he said warily, and then, as Sulien struggled and failed to answer, ‘Where are you?’ Sulien’s voice continued to stick like a wrong key jammed in a lock.
‘Not that I think anyone’s listening,’ said Varius quietly, ‘but I’m not going to say your name. Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ managed Sulien at last, ‘I’m here – I’m in Issedoneum. I’m coming back. Can you help me? I have to get back.’ There was a pause and Sulien shouted into it with abrupt violence, ‘I’m not leaving her there! I’m not going on by myself. Don’t you dare tell me that.’
Another pause. ‘All right,’ Varius answered, evenly.
‘Sorry. Thank you for . . . oh gods, thank you for even answering. I’m sorry.’
‘Are you safe for the moment?’ asked Varius.
‘I don’t know. More or less. There’s no one around just now. Yes.’
‘Do you still have money?’
‘Yes. Half of what we had left. But I don’t know what— I think I’m about two hundred miles from the border with Persia, but I don’t think I can get a car again, and trains are too dangerous. I’ve been getting trams and walking the last few days. It’s too slow.’
‘Can I contact you where you are now?’
Sulien looked around unsteadily. ‘Not really, it’s very public. I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long.’
‘All right, will you be able to call me again in three hours? But don’t try and keep moving – I can tell from here you need to eat and rest.’
Sulien mumbled something incoherent that was not quite assent.
Varius said gently, ‘Three hours won’t make any difference.’
Delir could not have owned the atlases very long, having come from Sina with almost nothing, but he had saved them from the family’s flat and now his fingers moved over the thick, beautiful pages with unthinking love, searching out Issedoneum. He said, ‘Yes, I have friends in Rhagae. They will help.’ There was an agitated, manic haste about him that Varius hadn’t seen before, but he sounded completely certain.
‘Would they go across the border for him?’
Delir grimaced. ‘I doubt it.’
‘But they could take him across the province, to Tauris or Urmia?’
Varius had contributed most of the contents of Eudoxius’ crate to Lal as well as financing more supplies, and now her forgery equipment – bottles, brushes, the autoscribe and a lumpen copypress, and sheets of paper, plastic and metal – took over one corner of the cellar. A small array of papers and security passes in various stages of completion was spread across the desk, on top of newssheets gloating over the plans for Una’s trial. Lal was leaning back from her work, kneading her sore eyes, unruly hair splayed around a pale, underslept face.
‘You are doing so well with these,’ Delir said, hurrying to supply praise like a fuel.
‘I don’t know – I need a picture of him, obviously—’
Varius stared at the newssheets on the desk and said dully, ‘Why couldn’t they just finish it when they found her?’
‘Can’t you see why?’ asked Ziye. ‘Drusus has built her up too much for that. They tell stories like this in the arena, they make the crowd love one fighter and hate another, but you don’t work people up like that and then show them nothing, you don’t say it all ended offstage. People want to see her. Then when it’s over, and they’ve watched it all, they’re all part of it; they can’t place the blame on Drusus alone; they can’t easily change their mind. They won’t be able to say it isn’t what they wanted.’
‘Better for her and Sulien if they’d shot her at once,’ Varius muttered.
Lal looked appalled, but it was Delir who said, ‘Don’t say that. Whatever the reason, she’s still alive, and something may happen, we may be able to do something. There must be some hope in that.’
‘I said I’d help them, so I will,’ said Varius. ‘If he can get himself into Persia, your friends can take him all the way across it. If he could go by magnetway for the rest of the journey . . .’
‘But he needs papers for that. And I need his picture,’ repeated Lal. ‘I need more time to finish.’
‘Do you have one of those for yourself, Lal? And could you work on Sulien’s while you were travelling?’
Lal’s face changed, becoming at once sombre and bright. ‘Yes, I have one. I could go and meet him. Yes, I could bring him back here.’
‘What, alone? No,’ protested Delir instantly.
Ziye said bitterly, ‘Why shouldn’t she go where she chooses, if she’s in the mood to go off saving people? You did.’
‘Ziye,’ said Lal.
‘What should I say?’ cried Delir. ‘“Yes, I have no right to stop you, so go and get yourself arrested like that poor girl?” Please don’t do this, not after everything else.’
‘Don’t you think I’ve been in worse danger than this?’ replied Lal quietly. ‘And don’t you remember what Una and Sulien have done for me? What’s a train ride compared with that? Of course I’m going.’
Sulien wished Varius had talked for longer, that he had not been so reluctant to go into any detail. He’d given Sulien a Persian longdictor code, for once he was over the border, and said, ‘One of us will bring you the rest of the way,’ which had to mean he’d found Delir, and that there was more than one friend waiting for him back in Rome. But it would have been good to hear Varius actually say that; it would have made it tangible. And though he knew how hollow it would be if Varius told him Una probably hadn’t been harmed, might still be saved, still he desperately wanted to hear someone say it anyway.
He thought about heading for the tracks again. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a risk here; the checks might be less stringent than further east. But even so, the closer he came to the Persian border, the more vigiles would be patrolling the line.
He walked along the cold quayside. The longdictor chambers were clustered next to a seaside amusement arcade, all shut up for the winter except for one or two brave food-stalls; beyond there were rows of moored pleasure-boats, sealed up like bobbing sarcophagi. For a moment Sulien thought wildly of stealing one of the smaller boats, but the next moment he was jeering at himself: what, and pilot it two hundred miles? But perhaps he could hide himself on board a vessel heading the right way, as Una had done for him all those years ago – there had to be ferries, even in winter. But he couldn’t do the same things Una could, and in any case, how would he get to shore safely? He could hardly swim for it, not in water as cold as this must be, or wade up the beach fully dressed and expect no one to notice.
What was left that he had not already tried or thought of?
He’d pared down his belongings to nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the rolls of cash, hidden in his pockets and in his boots. Sulien began mentally to count it out: yes, it would be stretched thin, but if it had been imaginable to carry on alone, it would have been enough to carry him to Nionian or Sinoan territory . . .
If it could have taken him two or three thousand miles, surely it was enough to vault him across just a couple of hundred miles now?
He remembered Marcus at the caupona in Wolf Step: young, defenceless, no money in his pockets, but wielding an air of privilege like a weapon, scaring a pack of black marketeer thugs into a panic, giving orders and expecting them to be obeyed, refusing to explain himself . . .
I haven’t done that, Sulien thought. I haven’t tried being rich.
[ VII ]
COLLABORATION
Noriko had never seen Una free. In the Nionian quarters at the palace in Bianjing she had been a been a prisoner no one had sought or expected, someone of high but complicated status, to be treated like a guest, at least while the uncertainty lasted. Noriko remembered her dressed i
n silk, crouched in a chair like a bird of prey on a branch, extending a tense authority over the space she was held in. Noriko knew it would not be like that now, but that was the image in her mind as the car passed through the prison gates. Praetorians walked on either side of her, and the prisoners she passed in the yard were herded rapidly away as she approached. But they saw her, and they knew who she was, or at least recognised her as Nionian, and they had begun to jeer and spit before the guards could hurry her inside. The prison guards themselves glowered and bristled as they looked at her; no one else had even spoken to her. A Roman warship had been sunk in the Promethean Sea two days before.
A female warder shut the door of the starkly lit interview room and lugubriously pulled out a chair for her. Noriko ignored it, staring. Una was sitting waiting for her, chained by her wrists to the edge of the high metal-topped table; Noriko saw the cast on her wrist and the slumped posture first – Una’s head was down, as it had been the first time Noriko had seen her, but now her lank hair had been sawn off at jaw-level, and pale brown roots showed above the fading dye. Then she looked up and Noriko saw the deep purple-black stain printed with strange neatness onto one eye like an official stamp, and the bruises and scrapes mottled across the rest of her face.
Noriko felt at once faint and electric with rage. So she had been lied to; she had humiliated herself for nothing. She wanted to sweep Una up and plough through the building like a hurricane and deposit her hundreds of miles from these barbarians’ reach. She said thickly, ‘You were not supposed to be hurt.’
Una smiled with one corner of her mouth and gestured at her face with an air of weary apology. ‘Most of it’s from when I fell off the train.’
‘Most of it?’
‘They wanted to know where Varius was.’ Una looked down, picked with swollen fingertips at the edge of the cast, adding mildly, ‘I told them the truth. He came with us as far as Germania. I don’t know where he went after that.’
Noriko dropped into the chair almost involuntarily; her legs were shaking.
Una glanced up at her again. ‘No one’s touched me since then. Thank you.’
‘You should not have to thank anyone,’ said Noriko.
Una fidgeted with the cast again and laughed. ‘Why do you think they put this thing on me? It’s ridiculous!’
‘I wish—’ began Noriko, and stopped herself, conscious that she did not want the stolid wardress to hear her wishes, which were in any case self-evident and would not help.
‘How are you?’ asked Una quietly.
‘Oh—!’ Noriko parted her hands a little, at the strangeness of being asked by someone in Una’s physical state, and the difficulty of answering. ‘He wants to marry me.’
Una did not speak, did not repeat the warning she had given Noriko a year and a half before, but they looked at each other, and Una extended her better hand a little across the table. Noriko slid her own forward to meet it, an overlap rather than a grip.
‘One day people will come to their senses,’ said Noriko, hearing it come out shriller and more desperate than she had meant.
Una nodded, slowly, without any certainty, but accepting the sentiment. She asked, ‘They haven’t found my brother, have they?’
Noriko shook her head, and Una smiled again. She looked almost relaxed, almost peaceful, thought Noriko, though neither of those words could be the right one.
‘Listen,’ said Noriko, ‘Marcus had something – a hat, made of blue wool. You gave it to him, I think?’
Una tensed. ‘He told you that?’
‘No. I do not think he meant me to see it. But I did see it. And it was not like anything else he had. It did not look like something a prince would own. But I could tell it was important. And I could tell . . .’ Una would not like to think about Noriko’s life with Marcus, she thought, and hurried past the memory of it. ‘It is in the coffin with him.’
No tears came into Una’s eyes, but they went wide, and she trembled. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
‘Time’s nearly up,’ announced the wardress at the door. ‘One more minute.’
‘Oh, this is unbearable,’ Noriko exclaimed in impulsive Nionian, which made the woman’s expression of aggrieved distaste deepen. She amended in Latin, ‘No, a little longer – please.’ She realised the woman thought she had said something obscene, and wished she had.
Una leaned forward. ‘Can you come again?’
‘I do not know. I doubt it. I will try.’
Una’s eyes slid towards the wardress and back, and Noriko knew there was something she wanted to say without letting the woman understand.
‘I don’t want it to be in the arena,’ she remarked, her voice almost offhand, though now there was that sharpness and tension in her face that Noriko remembered; it had scarcely shown before.
As she felt herself grow cold, Noriko tried to convince herself she had briefly fumbled the Latin, had not been concentrating hard enough. She said, ‘What?’
‘It’s not the dogs,’ said Una, ‘or whatever other way they’ll do it – well, of course it is that too. But all those people watching . . . I hate thinking about it.’
‘The dogs?’ repeated Noriko stupidly.
‘If I could be alone,’ said Una, in a low voice, ‘if there was no one there, it would be easier.’ She’d raised her hands, furtively, meaningfully, towards her throat.
And Noriko understood what she was being asked for: a drug, a blade, if she could find any way of providing it.
‘That’s it,’ said the woman curtly. ‘She’ll go back to her cell now.’
‘I will try to come back,’ promised Noriko unsteadily.
The wardress had opened the door and guards began crowding into the room.
Noriko wanted to defy them all somehow, and as she stood up she bowed her head and said formally, ‘Lady Noviana.’
Una grinned. ‘I think you can call me Una now.’
Noriko let them lead her to the doorway; stopped there. ‘I hope you will meet him in a better life,’ she said.
Cleomenes had a good enough reason for being in the prison; he’d been spinning out an interview with a gangster he’d put away last year. Now he was loitering in the hall through which he thought the Princess would leave, making conversation with a warder and hoping no one would wonder why he didn’t go away.
Between the fuss over the Imperial wedding the year before and the Roman boys dying out on the Promethean Sea he felt a mild thrill despite himself when he saw her coming, at once starstruck and slightly defensive. He found himself a little disappointed she was wearing such unexotic Roman clothes and had all that hair piled up in a large dark knot on the back of her head, though he could see the good sense in it from her perspective.
‘My Lady,’ he said, showing his papers, ‘Commander Diodorus Cleomenes. Could I have a word?’
The Princess already looked strained and besieged among her guards. Now she froze and looked up at Cleomenes with the kind of expression he was more used to seeing on cornered shoplifters.
‘It’s all right, boys, I won’t be a minute,’ Cleomenes said to the Praetorians. He was afraid to think what might happen if this got back to his superiors, but he was hoping there was no reason these men should think to mention it to anyone. He was just a senior member of the vigiles as far they were concerned.
The Princess followed him reluctantly into an ante-room and stood looking down at her clasped hands.
‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘What did she say?’
‘I saw her so briefly,’ she replied politely, looking away.
‘Have they hurt her much?’
‘She is fortunate to receive Roman justice,’ avowed Noriko virtuously, though with what must have been a restrained lash of irony.
‘Madam, we’ve only got a few minutes. There’s plainly something you’re worried about telling me. Listen’ – he looked around and lowered his voice to a hiss – ‘you can trust me. Didn’t your husband ever tell you what happened back in ’57?
When they had him locked up in the Sanctuary at Tivoli? I was there. So was she.’
‘How interesting,’ said Noriko, through teeth that were clenched tight with evident panic.
Cleomenes lost patience. ‘Damn it, woman, it’s not a trick! I’m not trying to trap you! I’m taking a huge risk myself in talking to you. Will you pull yourself together and talk to me?’
Noriko’s mouth dropped slightly open. She remarked, ‘You cannot speak to me like that,’ and then she began to laugh in a brittle, desperate way that made Cleomenes fear she’d burst into tears next.
‘I can’t go near her myself,’ he said more gently. ‘All I’m asking is how she is.’
To his relief Noriko controlled herself. ‘You are concerned for her?’
‘Her and others. Yes.’
Sulien knew how he needed to look, but he couldn’t walk into an expensive shop dressed in travelling clothes he hadn’t changed in three days and try to kit himself out like a nobleman. He would have to heave his way up through the classes in stages, a self-made man’s career compressed into a single afternoon. But trying to rehearse it in thought made him feel cold and faint as if with vertigo—
No, no, just start doing it, he told himself, start doing it now.
The market reminded him painfully of the one in Tolosa where they had met Marcus, and the little stall with green curtains behind which he and Una had been almost safe. Sulien shook away the association and went to work. First, he bought a secondhand set of plain, formal clothes, as good as he could find in the quarter of an hour he had allowed himself. He was half-convinced that even the contrast between the new clothes and those he was wearing would be striking and suspicious – worse, he felt as if desperation was scrawled all over him. He was taken aback when a figure at the edge of his vision turned out to be himself in a mirror, looking quite ordinary and undramatic – very pale, eyes hollow and lips tight, if you looked closely at them – but still just himself, just a man in a city, not some misshapen creature in human clothes roaming about loose. No one had demanded he explain himself – why should they?
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