There was a stabbing pain in his back that felt strange for a second, but everything hurt anyway, all of it running together like splotches of ink. The hound in the lead reared up and he struck it across the chest. Something was happening in the arena, but blood kept dripping into his eyes, and in any case, the hounds were finished playing now and came charging back in earnest, effortlessly mowing them down, knocking Una away from him again. This time the onslaught passed in a numb blur, as if they were rushing right through him.
When it was over he tried to stand again, teetered upright for an instant, then toppled down onto his knees and couldn’t get his balance to rise a second time.
Una did not get up. She was lying on her back, her clothes shredded and scarlet, her eyes closed. Sulien floundered across the sand towards her, a cry bubbling out of him—But no, not yet, she was still breathing, and steadily, as if she were merely asleep. But he supposed she wouldn’t wake again now.
He wiped his face and looked around, and grasped for a moment that the stands were emptying and that the dogs had drawn off. But the understanding leaked away almost as soon as he had it – it didn’t matter what anyone else was doing; he could scarcely even keep his eyes open now. He was bewildered that he seemed to be fading so fast – yes, they were both covered in blood, but had either of them really lost so much, or been wounded so deeply yet? An annoying need to account for it fussed at his mind, and he frowned, fretfully turning over the only diagnosis that made any kind of sense: shock, lack of sleep and food . . . but still . . .
Of course it didn’t matter. Even the pain was almost finished with now; a deep wave of dizziness was rising to swallow it. Sulien let it suck him down to the sand beside Una, he let it drag his eyes shut, thankful.
The vigiles were spreading hastily through the basements of the Colosseum, scouring through its tunnels and cluttered recesses, trying to control and order the flow of stage hands, prison guards, medics, lighting and sound technicians. Varius moved among them in the dim underground light, scanning the walls as he walked by. Naturally, after so many years, Ziye had not been able to tell him the location of the fuse box. He could probably manage even without finding it, but darkness would help him. He didn’t see it as he passed between the lift-shafts on the upper floor, or at the bottom of the stairwell as he moved down to the level of the cells. But as he reached the guards’ workstation, a broad booth with a glazed partition opening on one side towards the cell-block, there it was, on the outer wall.
Varius looked around. He had to wait for a second until a vigile officer further down the passage had flung open a door to a storage room and barged inside. Varius opened the panel and examined the labels above the switches with hurried care – he didn’t want to take out everything. Then he flicked a firecracker into a corner and as it sounded, slammed off the switches.
Shouts of horror scattered through the blackness. Somewhere, something heavy crashed to the floor.
Varius had his torch ready in his hand. He switched it on, glanced at his watch, and went on towards the morgue.
At last, and as one, the hounds came surging away towards the handlers and the gates. Ziye flattened herself against the wall as they rushed by. She had already seized a low-slung trolley, designed for clearing away corpses and other rubbish from the arena; she tried to shield herself behind it now. She’d fought arena hounds once before, a novelty act, three of them, leaping and clawing like a triple-headed monster out of a myth, during a lean year when her troop was in Gaetulia and audiences were sparse. She was not going to do it again.
In all that empty space, the two crumpled bodies looked strangely unimportant. She could see how Sulien must have crawled his way to Una; he’d left a ploughed-up trail of reddened sand. Ziye bent and plucked out the tranquilliser dart she’d fired into his shoulder. The one that had hit Una lay in a shallow furrow in the sand beside her; it must have been knocked out of her flesh as she fell. So much the better; perhaps a little less of the drug would have entered her blood. Ziye sucked her teeth as she looked down at them, more worried about the load of sedative in the darts than any of the wounds on them. There had been no time to find out much about the tranquilliser, and it had had to be an identical dose for them both.
Well, even at the worst, it would be a better death than how the dogs would have finished them. She collected a third dart poking out of the sand a few feet away – she’d missed with her first shot – and hauled first Sulien, then Una, onto the trolley. With some difficulty she got it moving again, and it felt like a long way, dragging the thing across the sand, out in the open. But she was only taking the bodies to where they belonged. She shoved the trolley onto a scuffed square of metal near the northernmost peak of the arena’s curve: the lift-shaft that ran down to the morgue.
She could see vigiles breaking from the gates into the arena now, like some new gladiatorial act; they were heading towards her. Of course, the lifts could not be operated from above; she could do nothing but wait.
There had been no other executions that morning, and the morgue staff had already fled; the room was empty. Varius crossed it in two strides, dropping the rubbish sacks, hand at once outstretched towards the button that summoned the lift. He stood, jigging slightly from foot to foot and fidgeting with the switch on the torch as he waited. Some of the single-mindedness that had kept him calm so far had begun to evaporate; he could not stop his brain from cataloguing the worst possibilities behind the doors as the lift hummed its slow way down.
The morgue lay deep below the arena; the sunlight that reached the bottom of the shaft was weak and pallid. Ziye was standing over a shadowed, motionless heap. At once, Varius turned the beam of the torch downwards, bracing himself for the inevitable shock of red. ‘They’re alive,’ Ziye informed him crisply, steering the trolley into the room.
There was no time for anything more; they could hear rapid, heavy footsteps along the passage. Ziye covered the bodies – it was hard to think of them as living, as Una and Sulien – with a length of plastic sheeting, and Varius retreated into the thicker shadows at the back of the room.
A vigile officer opened the door and swept the light of a torch across Ziye’s masked face.
‘What are you doing still in here?’
Ziye shrugged. ‘Everyone’s overreacting. It’s like a bunker down here. I could barely hear it when it happened last time. I was going to take them to the incinerator first.’ She gestured down at the trolley and the vigile officer trained his light on its load. Varius’ attention was drawn to what must be Sulien’s hand, emerging from the plastic, intact fingers trailing on the floor of the morgue.
‘You’re sure they’re dead?’
Ziye snorted faintly. ‘Throats torn. Too much commotion up there; the dogs don’t like it.’
Varius had been edging his way silently along the back wall of the room. In the dark he had been unable to make out anything about the man until he was right behind him, except that he was about his own height and his voice sounded young. Close up he could see the insignia on the uniform, junior to the rank he had assumed himself; good. He pushed past, as if he’d only just come in through the door, and bent over the base of the trolley, lifting a corner of the sheeting and touching a bloody wrist, a throat, before the other man could get the idea of doing it himself. He thought he could feel a hidden, withdrawn life in the skin, even before he found a slow, tired pulse, felt a wisp of breath against his palm. His own heart kicked in tense sympathy.
He looked up and nodded. ‘Radio it through,’ he said, ‘I’ll handle things in here.’
The man nodded back and tramped out of the room. Varius’ heart gave another guarded leap.
‘Where are the bags?’ hissed Ziye, looking around at once for the rubbish sacks. Varius pulled them over, opened them both. There were handfuls of empty sacks on top of the paper that filled out each one.
Una and Sulien were so unwieldy, so awkward, as Ziye and Varius wrestled them into the sacks. It was such heavy,
irritating work that it felt oddly prosaic, like packaging up some complicated piece of furniture. They struggled, panting, preoccupied only with weight, and how to work the hinges of knees and elbows. But when it was almost done, each of them folded down inside the bags, only their heads still to be covered, they seemed to become human and themselves again, and Varius, lifting Una’s head to pull another of the bags down over it, looked down at her face with a sudden sting of recognition and renewed fear. He ripped a hole in the plastic near her mouth and thought nevertheless, they won’t be able to breathe; we’re suffocating them.
Then they piled the full sacks over them and stuffed a third bag with more of the plastic sheeting when that didn’t look like enough to hide the shape of the bundles underneath. Ziye went to the door and Varius studied their work for a moment by the torchlight: a trolley heaped with anonymous plastic sacks.
‘It’s clear,’ said Ziye.
He wheeled the trolley out of the room. He’d turned off his light; they made their way by the flickering beams of the vigiles’ torches. The paper-filled sacks were so light that Ziye had to walk alongside the trolley and keep a hand on the topmost bag to keep it from falling. It was as well to have her in the lead, Varius thought; in the dark he might have lost his bearings, lost time. Once they had gained the upper floor she marched ahead, unhesitating. They moved along, a cumbersome, purposeful shadow, bumping occasionally against a heap of props or one of the vigiles, who cursed and ran on.
They reached the tunnel out to the gladiators’ barracks. The flow of workers from within the Colosseum had almost given out. A few more vigiles went by, one with a pair of brown-and-white dogs which looked almost puppy-like, compared with the beasts in the arena. Varius kept the trolley close to the wall, didn’t walk too fast, and forced himself not to let his gaze drift past Ziye’s back towards the daylight ahead. Evidence, forensics, he repeated to himself silently, as if he might forget or fumble the words if he were asked for an explanation.
But they saw only a pair of officers out in the practice ground at the Ludus Magnus, and that at some distance, and no one asked them anything, not even when they walked the trolley out through the gates onto the street. Varius tightened his grip on the handles as his head grew light, and his skin was washed with sudden sweat, as if a fever were breaking. He glanced at Ziye, whose own skin looked pale and taut; he thought he could make out the lines of a grimace below the mask.
They turned off the Via Labicana down a broad shopping street, turned again into a quieter road almost choked with parked cars. It wasn’t empty; someone was backing out of a parking space, and further down stood a little group of nervous people who might have run here from the Colosseum for shelter. But their van was there, and nothing had happened to it. Ziye opened the doors and let down the ramp and the people from the Colosseum watched, vaguely interested in this manifestation of vigile business.
Ziye began to drive as, in the back of the van, Varius was throwing the stuffed sacks aside, tearing open the plastic to see the damage.
[ XI ]
NEW YEAR’S DAY
Perception came in bits and pieces: a sparse litter of unnecessary things, drifting in on the tide. Something tangled around his body; someone making a noise and demanding something; cold air on damp bare skin. Sulien did not even form the thought that none of this mattered; there was nothing of him left to think at all. But after a time, as the trickle of sensations crept on, he noticed himself turning his head away from the jostling, shouting person beside him, and it occurred to him that he was waking.
He whispered, ‘No,’ and felt his lips move and air, swelling his lungs.
‘Sulien,’ said Varius’ voice, sounding strained and exasperated, ‘come on: you have to help. I don’t know what I’m doing with this.’
The cry of the hounds throbbed in the air, and he wanted to bring up his arms to cover his head, but he could not move – he was afraid of being able to move, of consciousness taking hold in his body. He did not know, or want to know, why Varius was there.
He was not exactly in pain yet, except for the immense weight of his eyelids and the aching haze in his head, but he could feel the lines of his injuries marking out the parameters of his body, like preliminary strokes of a pen.
Varius shook him again, and began urgently rattling off the names of drugs so that Sulien had the impression, at once frightening and comforting, of having slid back five years, or ten years, from the moment of dying into Catavignus’ beautiful study in London, preparing for some exam . . .
. . . but his eyes tipped open, just for an instant, though he took in nothing of what he saw – and even if he’d wanted to, he could not have stopped his eyelids from dropping again at once. But the act of opening them was enough; at a stroke he lost any doubt that he was alive. Even as he collapsed back into sleep he knew, this time, that he’d wake again, and within minutes or seconds.
It was a little quieter, and he could smell antiseptic. Half-heartedly, Sulien opened his eyes. Varius was still beside him, but he was no longer shouting at him, he had turned away and was muttering feverishly, under his breath. He sounded barely sane. Sulien understood more or less where he was, that somehow Varius had got them out of the Colosseum. He didn’t know how it had been done, and couldn’t even begin to wonder. However it had happened, it was a mistake. He still could not think except in bewildered, aching spurts, but he was sure they would not get away; this was an extension, a repetition, of capture and death, not a true escape. The smallest touch of any other possibility stung like disinfectant on newly torn skin.
Now he was awake, of course he had to know what had happened to Una. He resented the uselessness of it, resented even the effort of lifting his head, but he looked around, and saw her lying in a mess of torn plastic sacks, patched with untidy clumps of bandages. The motion of the van shook her slightly, unresisted tremors which somehow displayed how still she was, so still that from here he couldn’t see the movement of her breath.
Sulien rolled sluggishly onto his side, and realised the worst of his own wounds had been cleaned and crudely dressed. There was a clutter of medical supplies scattered around them both: bloody bundles of gauze, bottles of saline, a pair of empty syringes.
Varius was kneeling between them, bending over Una, eyes wild, teeth clenched, looking back and forth between her face and what looked like a handwritten list of instructions, as if there might be some overlooked answer somewhere.
He turned, and Sulien dropped his eyes at once, because he could not look Varius in the face. He was heavy with bleak fury with him, and shame at it.
Varius raced through the list of drugs again: narcotics, antagonists. He was bristling with nervous energy; it was exhausting even to hear him. ‘You both had the same dose of the tranquilliser; there wasn’t anything we could do about that. Look, here.’ He pressed an empty dart into Sulien’s limp, indifferent hand. ‘And we were guessing with the antidote too – but you started waking up at once. You didn’t look like that, even before I gave you anything. But she—Nothing’s happening. Do we give her more, or would that—? Can you do something?’
‘I don’t want,’ began Sulien, dully. But even in his mind the words slithered away; he could not actually tell Varius how lumpishly ungrateful he felt, that he only wanted to let Una sleep, to lie down again himself.
He shifted closer to her. ‘Wake up, Una,’ he said, unhappily.
‘How are we doing? Where are we?’ shouted Varius to the front of the van, and Sulien realised he had not yet even wondered who was driving. He assumed, without thinking about it, that there were vigile cars already hounding the van along the unseen road, closing in ahead.
‘We’re on the Via Valeria, coming up to Carsioli,’ called Ziye. Her presence, along with almost everything else, was unfathomable to Sulien. He wondered where Lal was, and was glad she wasn’t here. But he was startled that they were so far out of Rome. How could the vigiles have allowed that?
Una was heavily uncons
cious still, and a slow, thick feeler of blood was creeping from under the bandaging at her shoulder. But her breath was already a little stronger than it had been. A second dose of the antidote would have woken her, even if Sulien hadn’t been there.
‘Will she be all right?’ demanded Varius.
‘Yes,’ said Sulien, without tone, still without looking at him.
Varius nodded, but didn’t display any obvious relief, just moved to the next matter with jarring swiftness. He tossed a bag of clothes at Sulien. ‘Get yourselves cleaned up enough to put these on,’ he said, scrambling towards the seats in the front.
Sulien pulled vaguely at the contents of the bag; but for now that would have to be enough, he couldn’t do anything but slump back against the side of the van, watching Una, but seeing the dogs’ red mouths gaping whenever his eyelids slipped shut. He thought of asking where Varius hoped to take them, but decided it would take too much effort, even if he had truly wanted to know.
Una’s eyes opened a little way and for a while remained fixed, without apparent surprise or pain, on the low ceiling. Then they turned slowly towards Sulien. Her face creased and she said, ‘It hurts.’
A knot of pain that had nothing to do with what the hounds had done to him tightened and locked in Sulien’s chest. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he thought, finding it oddly funny to be panicking over that now. But the same moment he had to brace himself as the van veered sharply, and his pulse went clashing in the bites and scrapes all over him and it was too much; he couldn’t stand any more of it. And it would have been over by now—It had been over . . .
Una reached out blindly, groaning, and dragged a torn sheet of the plastic sacking over her body, trying to hide or clothe herself. She looked around. ‘Varius?’ she croaked.
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