Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  He went on to the city baths. For the last few days he’d made do with bottles of water and packs of wipes to make himself look passably normal, but he needed to be cleaner than that now, and he needed a place to change. Hurried as his bath was, his body basked gratefully in the heat, without his permission. This didn’t feel like an acceptable use of time, even though it was necessary, even though he knew he couldn’t leave for Persia before tomorrow.

  She’s not dead, and they’re not going to kill her today, he thought. Anything else can be fixed, yes, it can. But these promises to himself made his heart race and trip instead of calming him, and he tried to stop making them.

  He walked out in the faintly musty new clothes with his hair combed neatly back from his forehead and tried to carry himself differently, to keep his head up. He started towards the better clothes shops up in the centre—

  No, wait, not that yet. By the time he reached them he’d already need to seem like a rich man on some long business trip, and the costume he needed for that went beyond clothes. He’d seen a place in the market selling reasonably impressive luggage sets, but – this was like some stupid logic puzzle that had to be completed in the right order – they’d have to have something in them so they wouldn’t feel empty when handled.

  He found a set of encyclopedias in a bookshop a few streets away from the market. ‘Oh, this is just what I’m looking for,’ he volunteered to an indifferent assistant, stuttering a little. ‘My— My father collects this kind of thing.’ Was that plausible? Were they obviously not what a collector would want? ‘Getting them around is the only trouble . . . Do you think someone could help me carry them down to the market near the docks? I was going to need to buy some extra cases anyway.’

  So he went back to the market, chose a pair of grandiose suitcases made of burgundy leather, almost too bulky for him to carry around himself even when empty, and loaded them with the books, padding the gaps with the clothes he’d been wearing before.

  They were hiring out slave workers near the docks, extra hands for loading and unloading the cargo ships and fishing boats, for building jobs up in the town, and to fetch and carry for travellers like himself. They might all be nominally for sale, though no one looked to be buying; the dealers saw Sulien coming and visibly brightened. They gestured for the slaves slouching on the low stage to stand up straight while calling to him, ‘Need a porter, sir? Looking for a bodyguard while you’re in town? Sir, very good value assistance for you, sir!’

  Most of the slaves were men, and Sulien’s age or older, with their skills and prices marked on signs hanging round their necks. But Sulien cringed at the sight of a couple of pitiful girls, fourteen at most, sitting hunched on the edge of the platform. I can’t, he thought as he approached, and remembered thinking the same thing sitting beside the fare-car driver, before he’d done . . . whatever he had done. Well then.

  His mind wouldn’t stop keening to itself, but he strode up briskly and managed to put on a good show of studying the line of slaves. ‘Yes, I need a couple of decent porters for the afternoon,’ he said quietly to the nearest dealer, trying to make his voice sound firm and confident, vaguely surprised when it worked.

  ‘Well, take your pick; they’re all of them strong enough. How about this one? Very reliable.’

  Sulien scanned the line again, and not just for the sake of realism. All the descriptions of him had mentioned his height. It might look less if he was one of a group of taller people, even if the others were slaves stooped under the weight of his book-filled cases.

  *

  ‘Hope that’s not too heavy for you,’ he said as he walked away with the two men he’d picked. Like a fool, as if the kind of person he was trying to be would have worried.

  One of the men looked mildly unnerved; the other grinned. Sulien was both baffled and helplessly grateful. ‘It won’t be that far,’ he added, despite scoffing despairingly at himself in his head.

  ‘Don’t you worry, sir, I’m used to it,’ said the man easily.

  Sulien nodded and made himself stare straight ahead until the impulse to explain that he had been a slave himself and to apologise had more or less worn off.

  He led his small entourage around the better shops selling readymade clothes – not that there was a great deal of choice here, nor that the clothes on offer were quite as well-made and fashionable as the increasingly fawning shop assistants seemed to think. Gradually, a garment at a time, he replaced almost everything he was wearing and let the assistants press expensive accessories on him – rings, and a silk neckcloth that cost almost as much as the rest of the outfit put together. Groomed and elegant now, his reflection seemed unconnected to him, like a figure painted on the glass.

  The grandest guest house he could find was a large, ambitious building with marble floors in the wide entrance hall. It was not old, but it had a slightly morose air about it, and inside the paint was peeling and the air cold. Sulien affected a faint swagger as he approached the desk, the two slaves heaving his luggage and shopping behind him.

  ‘I need a room for tonight,’ he announced at the desk, wondering if there should have been some loftier, more obnoxious way of saying it.

  ‘Do you need quarters for your slaves as well?’ asked the clerk.

  ‘They’re just hired men. Had to leave my valet back in Dahae. Damned inconvenient. Food poisoning or something.’

  They discussed what rooms were available, and at what price. Sulien asked for the best. He was just debating with himself when he should make his next move when the manager, probably curious, emerged from an office adjoining the lobby.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Sulien, as if it were an afterthought, glad he still had the slaves waiting behind him providing the right background, ‘I need to take the first ferry over to Tapuria tomorrow – you can sort out the tickets for me, can’t you?’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said the manager, ‘I’ll just need your identity papers,’

  ‘What, just to wander over to Tapuria?’ said Sulien incredulously, and sighed. ‘Gods above, this ridiculous war. This provincial mentality. We’re all Romans, aren’t we? It’s not as if I’m going anywhere serious.’ He sighed again and reached for the finely tooled wallet he’d bought twenty minutes ago. How much was enough? Fifty sesterces? Better make it a hundred. He wagged the folded notes with a long-suffering air. ‘Oh well, you can probably deal with it.’

  ‘You don’t have your papers on you, sir?’

  ‘My valet usually handles that sort of thing,’ said Sulien, shrugging, and slid the notes across the counter.

  The manager looked pious. ‘Well, I can’t make any promises, sir, but we’ll do our best for you.’ He took the money.

  Sulien wanted him to make a promise, and so for a moment disliked him intensely.

  He arranged for the slaves to come back the following morning. He tipped them and almost everyone else who came near him extravagantly; burning through his money was beginning to give him a thin, feverish pleasure.

  Left alone at last, he looked around the suite: it was slightly cold, and slightly faded, but this was by far the most comfortable space he’d been in in months. The soft carpet muffled his footsteps.

  He considered the longvision, but he couldn’t bear to look for news of Una now, and he couldn’t turn it on for noise or distraction, knowing that such reports must be happening. He sat on the bed, staring at the blank screen, and thought of crying, but someone would come to the door soon – the manager, to tell him whether or not he had done all this for nothing, or the vigiles, come to arrest him – and he didn’t want to be found in tears by any of them.

  There were always sounds in the prison: shouts and doors banging, and, for Una, the busy, wounded mutter of so many other minds, like heavy rain against a window, or as if the prison were a medicine chest on board a ship, and every prisoner a bottle rattling in its drawer.

  But for now, from minute to minute, the cell was quiet enough to let her rest, shoring up the stillness and
solitude within herself. I will always be grateful to Noriko for this, Una thought, and then considered what that meant now – ‘always’. Two, three weeks? Or perhaps longer, perhaps forever. Delir and Lal believed in Heaven, they would believe she had gone there. She thought, with a deep, hesitant thrill, of being unfolded like silk, out of her body and out of the world, pitched into an immensity in which neither she nor Marcus would be lost.

  Even two weeks seemed very long indeed, her sense of time had so loosened and changed.

  Sometimes she tried to think of Sulien – not of him now, but in that better time in the future, call it ten years, to be safe. His friends, his wife. She wouldn’t imagine them in much detail, because these must be real people that she would never meet, not characters she was inventing; she needed to leave space for them to fill. But perhaps if she thought of him, say, coming home from work, heading from one safe place to another, only briefly alone between—

  But no, it was not safe to think of him at all, because if none of it was going to happen, if he was racing away from that future instead of towards it, if right now . . . ? And how could peace and terror be wrapped up so close within each other, within this little room where she slept dreamlessly, where there was nothing to be done? She’d heard the guards talking, about the arena, or other ways it might happen – burning— Oh God, she was only human; she could not bear that much physical pain, not with people watching. No one was meant to be able to bear that. And Noriko wasn’t going to be able to come back and save her from it, she knew that really. Why should Drusus let her?

  There were people coming towards her cell – not just the usual guards, though they came in first after they unlocked the door. Una stood up, back against the wall, her shoulders raised, as Drusus walked into the room. He was wearing his uniform, the black cloth mournfully splendid, the gold at his shoulders and at his breast gleaming in the stark light.

  They stood separated by the width of the cell, staring at each other.

  ‘Everyone out,’ he said.

  The guards withdrew, closing but not locking the door behind them. Neither Una nor Drusus moved.

  Una tilted her head slowly, studying the uniform. She asked, ‘Does it make you feel brave, wearing that?’

  Drusus strode across the room, seized her shoulders and knocked her back once against the wall. ‘What are you? A slave? A whore, aren’t you? Weren’t you? It’s past time you remembered what you are for.’ He swung her round onto the bed, threw himself down on top of her. She was thinner, more weary now than that other time he’d been so close to her, struggling against her on the roof of the Palace, and this time she did not fight him. She felt like almost nothing between him and the thin mattress; she was vanishing underneath him, like bones in clay. He thought he would be glad that she was so weak, so incapable, but instead he felt as if somehow she were escaping from him, and he shook her, slammed himself against her, to try and pin her there.

  ‘What is to stop me?’ he demanded hoarsely, close to her face. ‘What is to stop me now?’

  Una had closed her eyes, gasping a little with the impact of his weight. She said, ‘Nothing.’ And then, raggedly, she began to laugh. She opened her eyes and looked into his. ‘Nothing. You can do anything you want with me; you’re going to kill me. And you’re still afraid of me. You’ll be afraid of me even after I’m dead.’

  Drusus didn’t mean to listen to her, or to stop; he meant to make it worse for her for laughing. But cold breathed through him and when he looked at her face it felt as if he were the one vanishing, as if she were lying on her back looking up at empty space. That strange mist of horror around her on that hot day in the garden of the Golden House a year and a half ago, that sense of being too close to something monstrous and wrong and deadly, it was here, shut in the room with him. He remembered the Sibyl’s warning coming unlocked in his mind the moment before the Colosseum roof erupted inwards – and he scrambled back from Una and off the bed, was on his feet before he could think what he was doing.

  ‘As if I could stand it with you. I don’t know what Marcus ever saw in you. Ugly thing.’

  Una sat up slowly, pulling her clothes straight. She had a slightly huddled, flinching posture now, her arms drawn in across her body. But she watched him, frowning, mouth a little open, and she looked strangely fascinated.

  He hadn’t liked her looking through him, as if he were nothing but a current of air, but this detached, inquisitive staring was no better. He didn’t want to move closer to her again, but he made himself do it to strike her across the face. The blow landed more half-heartedly than he had meant, but perhaps that was just as well; better if there were no bruises on her when she appeared in front of any cameras.

  Una did not react, other than to settle her gaze on a patch of wall away from him.

  He had not finished yet. He reached into an inner pocket of his tunic and held up a razor blade.

  Una’s eyes moved over it briefly with no change in expression.

  ‘Did you want this?’ Drusus asked. ‘The Princess went to some trouble, I think, trying to get hold of it. Now what reasons could she have, a lady like her, stealing such a strange thing, and all the while begging me to let her pay you another visit? I understand. She is soft-hearted. I forgive her. But you won’t see her again.’

  He went to the door, slapped on it once.

  ‘Get rid of this for me, would you?’ he said, handing the blade to the guard who came in response.

  ‘Are you finished, Sir?’ asked the man.

  Drusus turned back to Una. ‘No.’

  The door was closed again.

  ‘Have you seen the arena hounds?’ he asked. ‘You must have seen pictures, at least, but have you ever seen them at work? Have you thought how they came to exist? They used to set men against lions once, in the arenas. And they had tigers too – bigger than leopards, they were supposed to be, and they had different markings. I wish they could have managed to keep a few pairs alive, it must have been magnificent to see. But when they realised there were none left, so they began breeding dogs to try to make a substitute. It took years of experiments, countless failures . . . People who remembered lions wouldn’t have been impressed by a single dog, would they, however large it was? But imagine ten, or twenty of them, moving like one creature, one mind between them. They’re bred for pack instinct, as well as power. Of course they’re so inbred now that they don’t live very long; they go blind, and the size of them puts strain on the heart. But any one of them could kill you in a moment if it went for your throat. A pack of them could tear you apart in a second and there wouldn’t be anything worth watching. Perhaps that’s how it happens sometimes, in the provinces, with badly trained dogs, handlers who don’t know what they’re doing. But not here in Rome. Not in the Colosseum.’

  Una sank her attention into the white paint on the rough-plastered wall, away from him.

  ‘The hounds are released from the gates. All of them white, you can’t tell them apart – you can hardly see where one begins and another ends. They surround the criminal, and first they might bite a little, their claws might gash your skin, they’ll pass a few minutes that way. You’ll be bleeding, but you won’t be dying, not yet. Then they gather in a mass, and for a moment they’ll be . . . still. Then it’s almost like cattle stampeding: they’ll run the criminal down, charge over him. They’re heavy animals, and sometimes their weight breaks bones, but that won’t kill you. You’ll still be able to run – they will try to get you running. Then they’ll close in again, and now they might start tearing, ripping pieces off you: flesh from the thighs, the hands – sometimes with a woman, they’ll go for her breasts. But they know to pace it, they’ll fall back, then they’ll charge again. It should never take less than twenty minutes. Sometimes it can last as long as an hour.’

  Soon he would be gone, and she’d never have to see him again. He would be there in the Imperial Box, where Marcus had died, but she need not look at him. As for what he was saying, well, it was
not as if she hadn’t known it would be terrible, but it was not happening now; so she needed only to work not to let her body betray her; not breathe faster; to keep her hands from tightening on the edge of the bed, or on each other.

  ‘Princess Noriko has been appealing for you to be spared this,’ said Drusus quietly, ‘ever since I allowed her to see you, and all the more fervently since her attempts to cheat justice on your behalf were discovered. Finally I said to her, I will put it in her own hands. So, here I am. You can be executed like a Roman citizen, quickly, privately, if that’s what you choose. If you co-operate with the prosecution at your trial.’

  Una wanted to rest her head in her hands, or against the wall, but not while he was here. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to confess that you are a traitor to Rome.’

  ‘I won’t say I helped kill Marcus,’ said Una, dully. ‘I can’t say that.’

  ‘You can say you are guilty of giving help and comfort to Rome’s enemies. You can say you have attempted to defect to them. You can say you have conspired against the Emperor.’

  Una thought of the money she had put into Varius’ bag and reflected that that, at least, was true – though not the rightful Emperor, she added to herself, and then wondered wearily why she thought it worth bothering with the distinction. ‘What does it matter?’ she asked. ‘Why do you care what I say?’

  Drusus frowned, puzzled. ‘I want there to be no confusion. I want people to understand what they’re watching.’

  Despite herself, and even expecting to be struck for it, Una found herself staring at him again, bewildered and curious. She murmured, helplessly, ‘I can’t seem to understand you. The way you think . . .’

  Drusus shook his head, dismissing this. ‘Well, you know I’m telling you the truth, don’t you? You know this is a real offer. This is why I came. Don’t you think it’s fair?’