Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘But Lady Novia is accompanied, I hope?’ said Drusus rather sharply.

  ‘Yes, of course, your Majesty.’

  Drusus could have waited in the house while they fetched her, but he had been tense and restless enough even before being shut aboard the volucer and it was some relief to be on the move. Besides, he was curious to see how the restrictions he’d placed on Makaria were working. From the air he had seen that the streets of the few tiny villages on Siphnos looked empty, stunned into submission, and there were scarcely any boats pulled up on the beaches or moored in the little harbour. He was pleased to find as they drove across the island in one of the Praetorian cars that the houses were indeed dark and shuttered, the shops boarded up. But there were vigiles everywhere, saluting him as he passed along otherwise deserted roads.

  It struck him with vague wistfulness that this little island was perhaps the safest place in the world he could be, with hardly anyone left to threaten him, and all these guards to protect him. The next moment he remembered Salvius, dead on the staircase of the palace, and the feeling changed. Who would take his side against all these armed men if they should turn on him?

  A quiver wormed its way across his shoulders, and he tried to shake it off. This sense of siege was what he wanted Makaria to feel; he had no business feeling it himself, no matter what that deranged bitch of a girl had said on the longvision.

  ‘How many people are left here now?’ he asked the Praetorian driving the car, as they stopped at the edge of the grove.

  ‘Only about four hundred,’ the man said cheerfully.

  There had been almost two thousand. The islanders, Makaria of course excepted, had full freedom to leave, but they had to apply for special permission to return, which would almost never be granted. A single boat came once a month with supplies from the mainland, just barely enough to keep two small grocery stores on either side of the island intermittently in stock.

  But it was halfway through olive-harvesting season, and it seemed a good quarter of the remaining population had emptied into the island’s largest grove armed with poles, ladders and tarpaulins. A couple of his guards went off searching for Makaria – and even here Drusus was glad to see there were both Praetorians and vigiles standing between the trees, watching the villagers – who looked harassed and strained – and following Makaria, who was trundling over the rough ground on a battered farm-buggy, the carrier box at the back already laden with large tubs of olives.

  ‘No, no,’ she cried to a boy of about twelve who was poking half-heartedly at the branches of a tree on the edge of the field. ‘Hit it. Get the pole in there and strike downwards. Like this!’ And she jumped down from the buggy, seized the stick from him and began determinedly thrashing at the tree, expertly loosening a black rain of olives onto the canvas spread below.

  ‘I see you’re keeping busy,’ said Drusus.

  Makaria stiffened. She handed the stick to one of the lurking Praetorians rather than back to the boy, barking, ‘You’re twice his size, you do something useful for a change.’ She turned, brushing down faded overalls, and Drusus marvelled anew that she could be the daughter of an Emperor. And yet she looked like him, even now, lean and weathered as she was, her unkempt hair and greenish eyes almost exactly the same shade as his.

  She said curtly, ‘What do you want, Drusus?’

  The nearest harvesters were climbing down from the trees and laying down their sticks as they noticed Drusus, glancing uncertainly from him to Makaria, whispering among themselves, unsure what was expected of them. Some of them discreetly melted away into the trees. It was possible that many were not even sure who he was; they would barely have seen him on the longvision, for he had had the island’s cables cut as soon as Makaria arrived there, and no newssheets came in on the monthly boat. He had had the radio frequencies altered too, jamming broadcasts to Siphnos from across the Aegean.

  ‘First of all, I want you to remember your position,’ answered Drusus, ‘and mine.’ He gestured his guards towards her. The men seized her and pushed her to her knees.

  There was a hastily silenced cry of alarm from somewhere among the olive trees, then the surrounding harvesters also began dropping to their knees.

  Makaria sighed. ‘You are welcome here, your Majesty,’ she said dully, staring at the ground.

  Drusus looked down at her in silence for a while. ‘Very well, cousin, you can get up,’ he said at last, quietly, and moved closer to her. ‘I don’t mean for you to have to work like a farmhand,’ he murmured as she rose to her feet. ‘Surely four hundred people are sufficient to do these things for you?’

  ‘Someone needs to do it for them, Drusus,’ said Makaria. ‘We need every pair of hands we can get. And I won’t have anyone who stays here going hungry, or good farmland going to ruin.’ She reached up to strip a spray of olives by hand in one fierce tug. She flung the handful into one of tubs on her buggy. ‘How is your war?’

  ‘Oh, everything’s going very well,’ said Drusus. He took her arm companionably and they walked together back towards the road. ‘We’ve taken Bamaria, and we control much of the northwest of what used to be Nionian Terranova. We’ve had considerable success using poison gas.’

  He felt Makaria’s body clench and saw her lips tighten before she looked away.

  ‘Yet it’s still not over,’ she said at last.

  ‘It won’t be long. They’re weakening in Siam, and once we’re in a position to enter their Sinoan territory, Sina will start seeing sense and then it’ll be as good as over.’ He paused, and then remarked, as if casually, ‘That little whore Una has been on trial for treason. She was sentenced to the Colosseum a few days ago.’

  They were on a stretch of sandy road overlooking the sea. Makaria took a long breath and closed her eyes for a moment, then turned her head and gazed out patiently at the blue water, saying nothing.

  ‘Did you know?’ asked Drusus, scanning her face. ‘Who told you? You are not to receive information without my sanction.’

  ‘This might teach you that you cannot always control what people know,’ said Makaria.

  ‘Who told you?’

  Makaria continued to watch the horizon as if he wasn’t there.

  ‘Tell me,’ demanded Drusus.

  ‘A man from the village. He’s gone now,’ said Makaria, ‘on the ferry. I don’t know where he went, or who told him.’

  Drusus grimaced. ‘Then you know of these claims she made in court? We’ve been questioning the Praetorian who was there when Marcus died.’

  ‘He was a good officer,’ said Makaria softly. ‘He helped.’

  ‘Yes, yes, no doubt. Is it true, then, that there was a piece of paper?’

  ‘That?’ said Makaria, with a harsh, miserable snort. ‘You’ve come all this way over some nonsense I scribbled down to comfort him when he was dying? He wasn’t rational – he was in pain. I’d have said anything he wanted. I might just as well have sung him a song or told him a fairy story.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I have no idea. I had other things on my mind that day, or have you forgotten what it was like? Maybe I dropped it in the Colosseum, I don’t know. If you haven’t found it in my rooms in the Palace I’m sure it’s long gone.’

  Drusus had the house searched. He and Makaria sat stiffly drinking wine in the central hall, Makaria occasionally flinching and sighing while the Praetorians crashed from room to room. They opened the safe to expose jewels Makaria never wore, upended tables and chairs, emptied drawers and chests, dumped out boxes of papers from the library study and library, shook through the pages of every book. Drusus wondered uneasily about the practicality of searching the rest of the island, interrogating the villagers. Someone might know where it was; they would confess if they were frightened enough.

  And yet could his men ever hope to check every inch of an island that must cover thirty square miles? Even under watch, Makaria would not have needed much help to hide something her guards hadn’t known existed. And she mi
ght be telling the truth, and the paper might have been long since lost or destroyed.

  ‘What would you do if you found it? Even if you tore it up with your own hands, would it really make any difference?’ asked Makaria, exasperated. ‘I wouldn’t be scared of a scrap of notepaper if I were you. But if that girl’s put doubts in people’s head about you, I don’t know what you can do to get them out.’

  ‘The people have no doubts about me,’ said Drusus.

  A woman came out from one of the rooms, apparently driven into the open by the upheaval. Her long red dress was so plain that for a moment Drusus took her for a slave, but seeing him she dropped an unthinkingly aristocratic curtsey and he saw that there were tiny rubies in her ears and she wore a plain gold chain around her neck, very like one that Makaria wore herself. She was perhaps halfway between his age and Makaria’s. Unbound wiry black hair hung to her shoulders, and her black eyebrows and long Greek features gave her handsome face a slightly severe cast, at odds with her actual expression, which was self-conscious and faintly apologetic. Her skin was suntanned, her body solid and robustly graceful.

  ‘This must be Hypatia,’ he said. He had had no inkling of the woman’s existence until taking the throne and turning this sudden scrutiny on his cousin’s life, but the Praetorians had told him that not only did Hypatia share Makaria’s home now, she’d been living with her for the last ten years or more. Drusus extended a hand. ‘Come and sit down.’

  Hypatia obeyed, smiling apprehensively. She asked, ‘Will you be staying here tonight, your Majesty?’

  ‘I think so, yes,’ said Drusus.

  ‘Hypatia is— She manages my household and my accounts. I prefer to have a woman do it,’ announced Makaria, a little abruptly. She avoided looking at her friend.

  A Praetorian emerged from the aula and said, ‘Would you come to the longdictor, Sir?’

  Drusus came back into the room a minute later, and beamed at Makaria and Hypatia, who had remained sitting at a distance from each other, in oppressed silence. He announced, in wonder, ‘It’s extraordinary – we’ve got them both. The brother – Sulien – he as good as handed himself over. You’ll never believe how they caught him.’

  Now Makaria looked stricken. She tensed for a moment, as if to rise from her chair, before slumping back and biting off whatever appalled response had come to her lips. She took a grim swig of her wine while beginning to blink rapidly against tears.

  Drusus felt limp and dazzled with relief and gladness, all the tension he had felt over Una’s desperate posturing in front of the cameras and some pitiful scrawling of Marcus’ seemed suddenly silly. He said, ‘Well, the games will get the New Year off to a good start this time!’

  Makaria’s control broke and she stood up, banging down her glass on the table. ‘Drusus, what is wrong with you – how do you justify any of this? You must know how indefensible it is. Leo and Clodia? Salvius’ wife and children? These two now – did you want to be a tyrant? Una and Sulien were the ones who told the vigiles where to find Dama’s camp outside Rome; they did as much as anyone could to try and stop him. The boy tried to save Marcus’ life, I saw it. I don’t see how they could possibly be any threat to you now – and even if somehow they are, can you really believe this is right?’

  Drusus frowned, and then looked from Makaria to Hypatia and stared at her, watching a dark blush spread slowly across her face.

  He said softly to Makaria, ‘I told you, if you had people you care for here, to be careful.’

  Makaria sat down again, cowed, but still she moaned, almost to herself, ‘Can’t you explain it to me, just once?’

  ‘It’s necessity,’ said Drusus. His expression was very open and frank.

  ‘For whom is it necessary?’ said Makaria, feeling for a moment as if she might be on the brink of some discovery, for one or both of them: ‘For Rome, or for you?’

  But Drusus just blinked and shook his head, looking irritable and puzzled.

  Nevertheless, he let the search continue into the night. The guards were still ransacking the house when Makaria went to bed. She lay in the dark and cried quietly, remembering pressing a key into Sulien’s hand in a little study in the palace, hiding him from Drusus and giving him another year and a half to live. She felt disgraced by her helplessness now; she felt disgraced even by the proximity of Drusus’ blood to her own.

  The bedroom door eased open and Hypatia came running barefoot across the room and dived under the covers beside her.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ whispered Makaria, wiping her eyes. ‘Go back to your room – what if they find you’re not there and come looking for you?’

  ‘They’ve been over all the bedrooms already,’ said Hypatia, shifting closer and flinging an arm across Makaria’s waist. ‘They’re downstairs. They won’t come back.’

  Makaria’s body softened against Hypatia’s but she said, ‘You should go. You should leave on the next ferry. You heard what he said. It’s not safe for you to stay with me. I can’t do a thing to protect you and I couldn’t stand it if he hurt you.’

  ‘Why do you say these things when you know I won’t leave you?’ Hypatia reproached her, leaning over her and kissing her lips.

  Makaria seized hold of her in a kind of rage, impatiently gathering up her nightdress and pulling it off. They moved fiercely and yet with terrible caution, tense with the effort of keeping quiet, while part of Makaria’s mind reflected that it was one small, mildly ridiculous benefit of the constraints upon them that the secrecy and anguish renewed them as lovers; when they touched now it was earnest, dramatic, nothing of the companionable routine of ten years. Whispered declarations spouted from them when they were alone as if they were naïve, astonished girls, barely knowing the first thing about each other or themselves.

  They dared not sleep beside each other, but they couldn’t bring themselves to part yet. They lay there audaciously long, hearing the thuds and footsteps from below grow quieter and more intermittent.

  ‘If he found it—’ whispered Makaria.

  ‘He never will.’

  Makaria sighed. ‘I’m going to free the slaves we’ve got left as soon as he’s gone. Not that any of us here are very free now, but at least they’ll be able to leave. I can’t be the one to look after that piece of paper and not do that. Although I don’t know what it’s worth, just to keep it hidden, when I’m stuck here. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told him it didn’t mean anything. I should have told the truth. I’m a coward; I’m a hypocrite, I should have done everything differently. Oh, I hope Marcus can’t see what’s going to happen to those two – and I can’t help them, I can’t do anything.’

  Hypatia smoothed Makaria’s hair in silence for a while. At last she murmured hesitantly, afraid of making it worse, ‘At least . . . at least they’ll be together.’

  They wouldn’t let him stay in the same cell as Una, no matter how desperately he begged. The air down here felt stiffened and filthy, like a dried-out dishcloth: too thick to breathe, or to see through. Sometimes Sulien heard someone crying out and beating against a cell door and thought it was himself, and then realised dizzily that it must have been some other prisoner nearby – he was simply sitting, staring at the door, and couldn’t move even to flex out the cramp in his legs. The cell was too small for him to lie at full length. There was only a bench to sleep on, and since he’d been there they’d thrown a lump of bread in through the hatch in the door only twice – or was it three times? He thought that was fair, that was all right; you did not want to go out there rested or well-fed, you wanted your reserves to give out as quickly as possible.

  At first he’d shouted Una’s name – he wasn’t sure for how long. It was hard to keep track of time, which seemed to move in swerves and lunges and skips. There was one dull reddish light in the ceiling that blinked and flickered as the building shook, which was nearly constantly, with the pounding of feet in the stands above, the humming of machinery, fireworks, and the irregular thuds of whatever battles were goi
ng on out in the sunlight. It was as if the Colosseum were a gigantic vehicle, its hidden engine jolting and steaming, driving endlessly forward over stony ground – and yet, though he felt it through the bricks all the time, he could scarcely hear the sound from overhead, except when it stopped. The tunnels below ground seethed with their own noises: cages on wheels and trolleys carrying weapons or props rattled past the door of his cell, with guards, slaves and stage-hands always shouting to each other, and tannoys keeping a continual relay of summons and instructions: ‘Cleaners to corridor twelve,’ or ‘Medical attendants on standby at the Victory Bay,’ or ‘Provocateurs and katar fighters: this is your five-minute call.’ Only for a few hours at night was it almost quiet, which was both a relief and somehow worse at the same time: his senses glowed with exhausted release even as he shrank in horror from the renewed capacity to think clearly.

  But he did think about his life during this time. It took an effort – even now he disliked deliberately looking back; it frightened him. But he thought especially of the last four and a half years, since Una had saved him in London, and measured the worth of them, knew how glad he was he’d had them. And when he tried to imagine what this time would be like outside the Colosseum, knowing Una was alone inside, it seemed worse even than this, it really did. And when it happened, it couldn’t be as bad as crucifixion, it wouldn’t go on as long.

  But he wanted to say these things aloud, or something else, something better – to Una; he should have said them in the van, while there was still a chance. But how could he have let it come to this, how could he have failed so totally? And where was Una that even now, in the near-silence, either she couldn’t hear him calling or he couldn’t hear her answer?

  The smell of the place was as heavy in the air as the noise, and it throbbed and changed through the day: caustic detergent in the morning over an old unexpunged base of blood, sweat and animal excrement which swelled and bloomed as the hours passed, before slaves raced through the corridors again, dousing the floor and walls with disinfectant and subduing it.