Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  And sometimes he could hear the dogs barking.

  It could not be that he had done it for nothing, that each of them would go up to the arena separately, alone. It couldn’t be like that. Nothing could be that cruel.

  *

  When they came he was as overcome with physical incredulity as if he’d had no warning, no choice. He blurted, ‘No— Please—’ as they took hold of him, and as useless, as undignified as it was, he would have fought them if he could. But there was no strength in him; his arms swung weakly against their grip, his legs wouldn’t hold him up. They half-carried him, his feet skimming and stumbling along the floor, down a passage, up a flight of stairs. They had to jostle him past so many people as they reached the floor above – he could not take in a thing about what they were doing, only that there were so many. Then there was a new, acrid note of hot metal in the bloody daytime smell, and he turned his head to see a man, ludicrously clad in fancy-dress, with a black hood over a beaked mask, heating iron wands in a brazier. Sulien’s mind, reeling, supplied the purpose of the wands: to press against the bodies – his body – to be certain it was dead. He saw the black column of a lift-shaft descending to the crowded floor, the doors towards which they were taking him, and he began to shout again for Una.

  There was a downpour of sunlight as the doors opened, so bright it stunned him, and his eyelids winced shut with the blaze still printed upon the redness inside. And then the men holding him pushed and let go, and he was alone in the light. The doors were closing and he was crouched, gasping, on the platform as it began to rise. He couldn’t see, he could barely make out the sides of the lift-shaft sliding past, then he was rising from the hole like an animal smoked out from a burrow into the untempered noise he’d felt through the walls. Still blindfolded in light, he could not see the crowd in the stands; the sound could almost have been the roar of the sea or wind—

  And yet it could not; it was intolerably and unmistakably human.

  He called out, ‘Una.’ He could only just hear himself under the flood of voices.

  And yet he did hear her, answering, ‘Sulien.’

  He blinked, straining to force his eyelids open against the light. There was Una, turning, dazed, as she rose from another trapdoor on the other side of the arena, then she climbed up out of the shaft before the lift had stopped and came stumbling across the sand towards him.

  Sulien staggered into a clumsy run. The floor of the arena seemed to pitch underneath them; they could barely keep their balance long enough to reach each other.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, as they met.

  But his vision had cleared now and he could see the thousands of people making that noise, row upon row of them rising towards the ellipse of blue sky above the walls. His gaze stuck for a moment on the rebuilt Imperial box, shockingly close, and Drusus, a calm, alert figure sitting behind a screen of bullet-proof glass, watching. He could see the vanished wreckage and Marcus’ body at the same time.

  ‘Don’t look at them; you don’t have to see them. They’re not there,’ said Una, in a strange, stern, gabbling little voice, her cold hands closing hard on his arm and shoulder, fingertips boring in. ‘There’s just us.’

  So he looked at her instead, her face grey and haggard and her eyes red, but time dissolved between them; a fast-flowing stream carried him down, back to their childhood, back even beyond the reach of his memory, coursing fast over the years apart as if they had never happened.

  At some signal neither saw, with a soft breeze of indrawn breath around the stands, the crowd hushed. The gates at the end of the arena were opening.

  They couldn’t keep to their feet any longer, the shudders passing from one to the other as they held each other brought them down to their knees. Above them, part of the glass roof – the repairs were still not finished – was drawn over the arena, enough to bend and warm the sunlight as it passed through. The sand was hot, as if it were summer and they were by the sea.

  The hounds poured out from the gates.

  It was true: they were like a single creature, the spaces between them blurred by speed and a kind of bulky grace, for they moved more like a school of fish or a flock of starlings than a pack of dogs, all turning at an instant, the sun flashing white on their flanks. Their cries as they ran were unlike any baying of dogs Sulien had heard before, deep and rhythmic, almost chanting. The sand rose into a haze as they swept forward, following the curve of the arena and joining into a loop around them, a solid rampart of muscle and bone. They were larger than wolves, their massive forequarters disproportionate to the narrow waists and hips. The blunt, pale heads were almost earless, the eyes tiny, the red mouths gaping.

  Sulien bent his head over Una, one hand on the back of her head, pressing her against him. He breathed out, closing his eyes. He whispered, ‘It’s better than being alone, isn’t it?’

  He could feel that she was crying. But she said, ‘All right. It’s better.’

  The hounds plunged inwards, flinging themselves upon them.

  *

  Varius was standing in an aisle on the first level, above the first-class seats. He forced himself to watch as the hounds covered them, then turned away sharply, a sick hollow in his stomach, his fists painfully clenched, and strode quickly into one of the inner passages that circled the building. He hurried down the steps to the ground floor, to the rows of longdictors in one of the exitways. He entered the code for the vigiles.

  ‘My name’s Caius Varius Ischyrion,’ he said quietly to the man who answered. ‘All this time you’ve been searching for me and I’ve never left Rome. I’ve slept in the street outside your headquarters and you didn’t find me. I’m in the Colosseum now. I’ve placed bombs throughout the building. You have five minutes.’

  Sand filled Una’s mouth. The hounds crashed over them like a wave; she and Sulien were rolled across the ground, first tangled together, then tumbling apart, grasping at each other’s arms. Claws raked across her midriff, at her scalp. Hot, rotten breath puffed against her face as she choked and spat and tried to flounder closer to Sulien under the trampling feet. He was making the same flailing effort to stay beside her.

  Teeth fastened on her shoulder and held fast; the dog began to pull and worry at her flesh. The sound she made was not a scream – down here, in the rising fog of sand, she had no breath, there was no time – but more a strangled groan of effort as she strained not to lose her hold on Sulien’s arms, her skin tearing, her legs scraping on the sand, seeking for some purchase, until the dog shook her loose and towed her away from him.

  Sulien shouted for her and she twisted and kicked reflexively, even tried to punch or scratch at the thing with her free hand, but the teeth lodged in her flesh tightened and it hurt far too much. She hung limp as the animal ran, dragging her across the sand like a toy. Four or five of the dogs came running along with the one that held her, skipping over her trailing body, snapping almost playfully at her legs. She could see the sunburnt pink skin under the white hair, and a stripe of her own blood, dabbled over the ground.

  There was a ripple of laughter in the terraces, and despite every effort she could make to shut the crowd out of her consciousness, her eyes blurred with anger and misery. Her body was already gashed and torn, with pain running wild through it; her clothes were wet with blood and the horrible slaver of the things, and it had only just started, still so much of it left to go.

  Then the dog let go, dropping her face-down on the sand, and ran on. She rose onto her knees, pressing a hand to her shoulder, and turned clumsily to look back. She couldn’t even see Sulien under the rest of the pack. They seethed over him like water boiling in a pan.

  But the distance between the two groups of hounds could not hold for long. Moving again in that eerie unison, the creatures sprang away from Sulien and rushed at her. Instinctively she put up her arms to shield herself, but they flowed past her, making that ugly, cadenced cry as they met their fellows behind her. And there was Sulien, lying curled on the
ground, then rising lopsidedly and looking for her, blood streaking his arms and his hair.

  Behind her the hounds were gathered in a single mass, some of them pawing at the ground. Some muzzles and paws were stained red.

  ‘They will try to get you running,’ Drusus had said. She had believed she would not do that; there would be nothing to run towards. But she ran now, with the pack at her heels. It was such a small distance to cover, but they were so fast, and they caught her before she could reach Sulien, ran her down like a speeding car or a train. She felt the heavy clawed feet pounding over her back. She couldn’t lift any part of her body more than an inch before it was slammed down again.

  Sulien dragged himself onto his feet as they piled onto her. He ran forward, snatching up something from the sand almost without seeing it: a broken length of wood – the remains of some fight with javelins or staves – and struck at the heaving mob, weakly at first, and then with despairing force, stabbing down with the broken end. They parted a little as three of them turned on him, leaping up; he swung the shaft at them, sweeping it across their faces with all his strength, and incredibly, for an instant, they fell back, enough to let him wade between them towards his sister, still jabbing and hitting out.

  A hound latched onto him from behind and he staggered, but for another moment remained upright. He whirled the shaft again, though he didn’t connect with anything this time. Now he heard whoops of approval from the crowd, and a sigh of disappointment when the dogs brought him down. But he had fallen across Una, and he felt her arms close around his back.

  An alarm hooted from above the arena and a voice over the loudspeakers interrupted, announcing something, but the hounds were crushing the breath out of them with their sheer weight and Sulien couldn’t hear and didn’t care what it said.

  On an empty flight of stairs Varius pulled a handful of firecrackers from his pocket, lit them and flung them down onto the concrete, hurrying on before they went off. The series of reports were very loud, and though they sounded more like a burst of gunfire than like any kind of bomb, that was all it needed, and the Colosseum’s passageways magnified the sound, stirred it round the walls. As he passed the archways he’d seen that the spectators were already abandoning their seats, pushing anxiously, despite the calls from the Colosseum guards for calm and order. Now there were shrieks, and people began to run.

  He was dressed in his vigile uniform – of course descriptions of him wearing it had been all over the longvision and the newssheets, and going back to retrieve the jacket from the skip had been dangerous in itself – but there was nothing else for it, not in the absurdly limited time he had. And he was pretty sure that in the growing panic people were unlikely to see anything but the uniform when they looked at him.

  He left the Colosseum just as the first flock of vigile and Praetorian cars came shrieking down the Sacred Way. He crossed the Via Labicana towards the gladiators’ barracks at the Ludus Magnus. Here too, trainers, slaves and gladiators were in the process of evacuation and were standing in noisy throngs outside the open doors.

  ‘Let me through, please,’ he said firmly.

  Drusus rose from his chair and glanced instinctively up at the roof, alarmed and suspicious. ‘What is it?’ he asked the Praetorians who were trying to draw him away. ‘No, I command you to tell me what’s happened.’

  He had been leaning forward in his seat to watch as the lifts carried them up to the arena, his hands clenched under his chin, and yet at no point had he felt the renewal of elation he’d expected. He hadn’t liked watching them run towards each other like that, and as they crumpled to their knees with their arms round each other, something twisted and tightened in his chest. He’d blinked, and turned his eyes to the gates from which the hounds would emerge, but that physical sense of unease did not diminish. Partly it was the behaviour of the audience: yes, most of them were happily cheering for the hounds, laughing when a few of the brutes dragged the girl off to one side, but there were too many who were looking touched or saddened, or who covered their eyes – chiefly women, of course – but then the boy had started trying to fight, and the burst of applause had come from men too. He’d found himself wishing for the dogs to hurry and get it over with.

  ‘The vigiles have received a message from someone claiming to be Varius, who says he’s planted explosives in the building,’ said the Praetorian. ‘We must get you to safety, Sir.’

  Drusus looked down anxiously into the arena. Una and Sulien were now hidden under the heaving surfaces of the hounds’ backs. Then the animals shifted a little and he glimpsed a body lying still and bloody underneath – he could not even make out who it was. But he knew how this went, and he knew even a lot of blood didn’t necessarily mean much. Only a few minutes had passed; it was too soon for them to have died yet, unless the unrest had startled the dogs into losing control.

  ‘It’s a trick,’ he said, hesitantly, for he was not certain how far he meant it. He had said so often that they were all enemies of Rome, that there was no difference between them and Dama, but his mind seemed to dazzle and catch when he tried to remember exactly how it had begun.

  A stuttering boom rang loud in the corridors, and he flinched hard, remembering the last time, and that moment of awareness before the dark as the roof had shattered above him.

  ‘You really must come, your Majesty.’

  Drusus turned away towards the passage, but he said to the captain, ‘Make sure they’re dead.’

  Ziye fastened a respiratory mask over the lower part of her face; a cap already hid her hair. People were still pushing their way out of the section of seating closest to the gladiators’ gates, but the clothes she was wearing would have guarded her against questions or interference, even if the few last clusters of scared, jostling spectators had had any attention to spare. The plastic overalls were not quite the same as those the Colosseum’s morgue attendants wore, but they were passably close, and in any case, impeccably official-looking. Ziye strode briskly down the aisle and climbed over the railing above the arena. She crouched for a moment on the edge and jumped down.

  It was a long drop, but she landed in the arena as neatly as if she’d never left it, rolling deftly on the sand and springing back to her feet, even though her body was no longer that of a professional fighter and she felt her joints grumble in protest. Ignoring the tumult in the stands she looked up at the vault of space held within the Colosseum’s walls, and even though the hounds were a milky foam covering Una and Sulien just half the length of the arena away, even though she had meant never to walk this ground again, she felt comfortable, at home.

  A troop of dog-handlers had spilled out of the gates, carrying boards, goads and tranquilliser guns. They were trying to herd the hounds to safety, into the tunnel that ran beneath the Colosseum to the vivarium. They were all slaves; the dogs’ lives were worth more than theirs, and they were in panicky haste. Their whistles and calls were shrill and hurried and when Ziye looked at the hounds they seemed at best only temporarily distracted from their work. For the moment she could not see Una or Sulien at all.

  She heard another deep burst of sound bouncing round the loop of the walls: Lal or Delir, scattering more crackers under the feet of the crowd.

  There were more shrieks, and however strict their orders must have been, several of the slaves dropped their tools and ran. Ziye ran too, through the gladiators’ gate and down a ramp into the dark staging bay below. She could hear the panic and uproar roiling through the underground passages, but she couldn’t see it; there were boards like those the handlers carried blocking every way except one, to channel the hounds to and from the vivarium. She’d hoped she could snatch what she wanted from a shelf or a rack on the wall, but she did not see it in her first swift glance around and there was no time for a more thorough search. Instead, when another of the handlers came fleeing down the ramp, Ziye let him pass her, then closed in and jabbed an elbow into the small of his back. He crumpled backwards and she caught him with he
r right arm around his neck before he could make any sound. She squeezed with forearm and bicep on the arteries on either side of the jaw, counting as she felt the strength run out of him, dragging him back to lay him down in the shadows. And for a moment, even though she regretted this blemish on her promise to cleanse herself permanently of violence, she was almost sorry the crowd in the terraces had not witnessed this. It had been a good piece of work.

  The rubbish sacks stuffed with paper were still by the gates where he had left them; Varius swept them up and carried them inside. There were no vigiles – except himself, of course – in the Ludus Magnus yet. Gladiators and their managers and mistresses were still hurrying down from the barracks above. Every gate and door stood open.

  He passed through the colonnade, crossed the practice ground and moved into the tunnel through which the gladiators marched down into the innards of the Colosseum.

  For an instant the hounds froze, tense, their heavy paws flexing uncertainly. Then they began again to trample and scrape, but soon they stopped again and this time they skittered away, pouring and reforming like a drop of mercury, and Sulien dragged himself up, pulling Una with him, and tried to place himself between her and the dogs as the pack pivoted around them. He reached again for the broken javelin, which was half buried in the sand. It was harder to keep a grip on it; his hands were unsteady, and slippery with blood.

  ‘Sulien – don’t,’ moaned Una, ‘just let them do it.’ And Sulien didn’t know why he was trying to prolong this, but he couldn’t stop. The hounds made a feint inwards, playing, perhaps, and retreated for a moment when he brandished the staff at them. He hurled himself at them, shouting, and an image flashed across his memory: Una’s eyelids straining stubbornly open after he’d drugged her on the day of Marcus’ death, resisting for no good reason.