Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  There was a row of mansions and luxury inns on Canopus Street; some of them remained untouched, standing alongside hillocks and dunes of rubble. There was one that looked whole from the street, except for broken windows – the ruins crouching as if in embarrassment behind its marbled front. There was a ballroom that was cracked open to the pounding sky, half the ceiling and the back wall gone, like a stage set. Inside, on the walls, streaked with water and smoke, weightless dancers still glided, disappearing into blackened plaster and smashed brick. Here and there, glass crystals from shattered lamps cast small rainbows through the crumbled masonry. The room was littered with the broken remains of dozens of red velvet chairs, though a few remained perfect, standing delicately on their gilt legs over the weeds already beginning to rise from the cracked ground.

  Una and Varius scaled the remains of the building next door, climbed the crumpled railing into the walled garden. Mimosa and rhododendrons blazed around the huge reddish crater gouged among the beds. They picked their way around its rim and entered the ballroom through the gateway of felled bricks the bombs had opened up.

  At once Varius began silently counting the people waiting for them. Fifteen he already knew; there were – yes, thirty newcomers. Some of them were perched nervously on the surviving gilt chairs.

  This was why they had stayed: slaves were escaping through the holes smashed into Alexandria. The vigiles and the governor’s office knew it was happening, but like the outbreaks of looting, it was difficult to do much about it, when so many people roaming the ruins or packed into refugee camps and the new shanty towns on the banks of Lake Mareotis had lost their papers and their homes.

  ‘We’ll make this quick,’ he said, ‘then we’ll try and find some shelter like everyone else.’

  Some of them gasped when they recognised Una’s face from longvision or the posters; they crowded towards her. ‘It’s really true, it’s you,’ breathed a woman, with tears in her eyes. ‘Can I . . . ?’ She had already reached out a tentative hand to touch Una’s.

  Una smiled, and wrapped the woman in her arms. There was some applause, and even as the sky shrieked and a dusting of plaster drifted down from the remains of the ceiling, the heady mood climbed a little higher. Una, who felt, in fact, trapped and uncomfortable in the embrace, was half-ashamed of having succeeded in making it look natural. But it was needed. She was getting better at it.

  Varius went through the names of the fifteen they had met before, and led them off to one side. ‘You’ve done what we asked, some of you twice over now. Thank you. You know we’ve begun to place small groups of people in certain towns around the Mediterranean and Aegean. Each group begins with a single person. Their first task is to find a way to live in a strange place – that isn’t an easy thing to do. But most of you have escaped slavery in the last few weeks and you’ve managed to survive in this city with bombs raining down on your heads. We can provide advice, and money for the first week. Later they’ll need to be ready to receive the recruits we send to them, find likely places for them to work, and to live. We need more of those people.

  ‘And it’s time now to start this work in another city, in another province. We need a group of people to begin it. We know, from what you’ve done already, that we can trust you and that you’re capable. So we’re asking if any of you would undertake either of these missions.’

  ‘Which other city?’ asked one of them, a woman called Praxinoa.

  ‘We won’t spread that information beyond the ones who need it. I’m sure you can understand why. If you choose to do it—’

  Praxinoa nodded.

  ‘I’ll go somewhere else,’ said a man called Theon. He had been working with them for more than a month and had done more than they’d asked of him already. ‘Start what’s been going on here again. Yes.’

  Una was in the midst of the newcomers. ‘We need to know you,’ she said, ‘who you are, what skills you have, how far you’re prepared to go.’

  ‘—if you can trust us,’ a girl finished for her, an odd tightness in her voice, at once defensive and brimming with feeling. She held herself stiffly, her fists clenched.

  Una turned, letting her eyes rest on each face in turn. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I already know we can – I know each one of us here can trust each other.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ the girl said, in the same angry, half-choked voice, ‘and my name’s Thekla. And I want— I want to do something. But I don’t think I’ve got any skills. Aline said you want an army and we’re just . . . We’re women, and—’ A blush spread painfully over her face, as if the blood were spilling from a wound under the skin, ‘—we’re from a brothel, in Rhakotis.’

  Una looked at her quietly for a moment. ‘It’s women and older men we want most of all,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s going to be harder for young men to join us, now there’s conscription.’ There was a muffled weight of anxiety in that word every time she uttered or thought it, but for now, for these people, it would mean an opportunity.

  The thuds of the anti-aircraft guns at the port pulsed deep under the screams of the shells. She moved closer to Thekla. ‘We’ve all been bought and sold; our bodies have all been used, but we’re none of us going back. We are free. We’re free because we are standing here in an air-raid, and the vigiles can’t find us. And we’re free because of the rightful Emperor’s will. And we’re free because in our souls we always were. And soon everyone will see it.’

  They clapped again, and some of them shouted aloud, the noise drowned in the blasts in the air. Una was taken aback, even though she had been working with the words and the throb of the guns and the rhythm of the feeling in the room for it to happen; even though it had happened before. She hadn’t written anything down, but she had thought and planned what needed to be said, and she read, between shifts at the Library, or when the air-raids trapped her down in the vaults with the books. Usually she read histories, trying to understand how the empires had come to this point, but sometimes whatever happened to be left open on a desk: a translation of The Prometheia, a pile of fairy stories for children, Sappho. And sometimes, as she carried books from place to place, she could feel the patterns and flow of a voice running in her mind and pulling at her, like something once read or heard that she was trying to remember. But when she reached for it – for it was never quite within her grasp – the voice would become recognisable as her own, though altered, older, clearer, and the words were new.

  ‘Well, I’m not that old,’ said a man, ‘though maybe I seem it to you. But I’ll sign up for anything if it means getting out of here.’

  ‘It will mean that, either now or later,’ said Una, ‘but anyone who comes with us won’t be leaving danger behind. If all you want is to get out, there are simpler ways. But if you want more than that, this is what we ask of you, and it’s the same we asked of the people who brought you here. Find two more like you – there are thousands out there in this city, and each of you only need to find two. They’re hiding out in the camps by the lake. They’re freedmen who haven’t forgotten. And some of them have never been slaves. If they are angry enough, talk to them. Use your judgment: if someone might want to help, but isn’t strong enough now, or if they have duties they can’t leave, then don’t spread the risk to them. And keep yourselves as safe as you can – mind who’s listening. You don’t mention our names or this movement in the first conversation. We won’t meet here again. You report to a contact, who will lead you to the next meeting place. But you can find these people, and we will bring them with us. And we’ll change Rome.’

  She became weary and dispirited after it was over, when she and Varius were coughing as they hurried through the clouds of dust hanging over the streets. Instead of slowing her the fatigue made her stride along with unnecessary, self-punishing speed, but her eyes ached and she rubbed at them, complaining, ‘—and they’re nearly half what we have! Only a hundred people, after all this time. And four boats!’

  ‘But people keep coming,’ said Va
rius, ‘and in another month we’ll have three hundred.’

  The streets were coming back to life; people were beginning to emerge from cellars and shelters.

  Una sighed. ‘If only the money would go out and recruit more—’

  ‘Why aren’t you in uniform?’ an elderly man suddenly demanded of Varius, stopping dead in front of them.

  Varius gave a conciliatory smile. ‘Too old,’ he said, lightly. He was a few months short of thirty-two – for now, just outside the conscripted age range, though from the start there had been speculative gossip about whether it would be extended, and how soon.

  ‘You’re not too old to sign up,’ the man cried bitterly. ‘Coward!’

  Una was glaring at him murderously. Varius managed another tactful grimace and steered her on before she could say anything.

  ‘I haven’t had the letter yet,’ Sulien said, in response to the same question.

  ‘And he’s nearly blind!’ blurted Lal, and they barely managed to get out of earshot of the two sneering women who’d stopped them before breaking into giggles.

  ‘Self-righteous old cows,’ Lal whispered, still laughing.

  Sulien’s smile dropped faster than hers. They could see the brown haze of smoke and dust to the north, over the centre of the city. He and Lal had been relatively safe in one of the shanty towns that had sprung up among the reeds beside the lake. But they knew Una and Varius would have been above ground, rallying the new volunteers. He understood why they did it, and wished they would not.

  Lal looked at the smoke. ‘They’ll be all right,’ she said, and believed it completely. It was a strange symptom of living in a bombed city: the more people were killed, the more the survivors, horrified and exhausted as they were, felt assured of their own invulnerability, or at least of their own luck. It felt quite sensible and justified to extend this glow of belief to Una and Varius, who were, after all, more weathered in matters of survival now than most people.

  They walked back towards the city along a strand of the canal. The docks here and at Lake Mareotis had taken far less damage than those on the seafront. Varius’ little boat was safe so far, and Varius, Sulien and Una were still living in the flat nearby. Lal and her family had moved; the guest-house they had been staying in was still standing, but several houses on the same street had been razed that first night. Now they were in a house on the other side of the lake. It was small and ugly, but more space than they’d had in ages. Rents, at least, had come down.

  The vigiles were trying to patrol the official camps more stringently, though many of them had been funnelled off into the army, leaving the remainder harassed and overstretched. Still, Lal and Sulien were careful there, quietly visiting people who had either joined the group already or were known to sympathise, but scattering none of the leaflets they had spread into the camps’ unlicensed suburbs and the villages of tents and huts. The leaflets – deliberately printed in a watery ink on tissue-like paper that was almost guaranteed to fall apart within a fortnight – made no explicit exhortations, only repeated that Marcus had declared an end to slavery as he was dying. Lal and Sulien never put them directly into anyone’s hands, just left them lying around, where they might be found and perhaps talked about. They were good for allowing existing supporters to probe friends’ strength of feeling.

  There were leaflets and posters everywhere these days, even in the camps: the propaganda pamphlets the Nionian aircraft dropped over the city in between the bombs, urging in surprisingly garbled, sometimes rather comical Latin that Nionia was not Egypt’s enemy. And, always, the hectoring, wheedling appeals to Roman manhood to enlist at once.

  Sulien was well over six foot tall, and scars aside he was visibly healthy. He knew how increasingly exposed he was in the space the city’s young men were leaving behind. And though he had collected a number of different sets of identity papers from Lal, there was no way to hide what he was. No one would have believed he was younger than eighteen, and boys below the lower age limit were signing up anyway. If he’d let his beard grow again, he might have passed for twenty-five, but never for over thirty.

  And yet he did not worry about conscription. He was vaguely baffled and sorry that he could not feel the same anxious rage that Lal and Una felt on his behalf.

  ‘Well, they can say whatever they want,’ he said to Lal now, kicking at a soggy poster that lay crumpled at the canal’s edge, ‘but I’m exempted on the grounds of being dead.’

  A letter had already come to the flat, addressed to the occupant, instructing any men of the required age to report to a recruiting station. They had thrown it away, but Una remained pale and tight-lipped for hours, and had begun to talk about places he could go to hide. Sulien didn’t know why he was unable to take it seriously. In part, and like many young men at the time, he could not imagine himself going to war, just as no one in the city really believed they could die. But then he found it hard to think about himself at all – about his own future – as something distinct.

  He’d seen army convoys rolling out of the city, and the recruits in their new uniforms lined up in the forum, parading through the streets. Some looked bullish, excited by the waving crowds, others incredulous, terrified. Sulien felt a rush of sympathy for all of them – he was surprised at how strong it was, how it felt more real than almost anything.

  The flat was empty when they reached it. They rarely had it to themselves, so they pulled off their clothes and climbed into bed – they had survived another air-raid, and it seemed the only thing to do. The skylight window had been left closed and the room was sticky, embalmed in trapped sunlight, but Lal trembled as she lay down; tears prickled in her eyes as she kissed him. She understood her own body better now than at the beginning, and yet she could not get used to this. Every time it felt like charging headlong, enraptured, into unexplored, frightening space, even though he was so sweet and she knew there was nothing to be afraid of.

  ‘I love you,’ he murmured to her, not for the first time, and Lal, delighted, anguished, arched and pulled him down, pressed her mouth to his to stop him talking. These avowals became uncomplicated and precious in her memory when she was alone, but in the moment that they were said they racked her with contrary feelings. She was sure he was not lying, nor did she believe that he was mistaken. Sometimes she thought it was only a shadow in her own imagination. And the mere idea of losing him after everything made her gasp and cling, and drive her fingertips into his skin to pull him even closer.

  Occasionally she confused her apprehension with religious guilt, which was something she could at least find words for, and Sulien became quite animated and inventive in persuading her out of it.

  Sulien fell asleep for a little while afterwards. This was rare; usually they were more furtive, they made love hidden by the reeds beside the lake, or in a deserted bomb shelter, and then dressed quickly and carried on with the day’s business, behaving as if it were a secret, even though everyone must know. It was for Delir’s sake, chiefly, that they wished to preserve some sort of illusion that it might not be happening, even though far too much had passed for him to attempt any protest now. He would be happy if she and Sulien ever married, it occurred to Lal, and then she could not help but imagine what it would be like, if they did get married, back in Rome, some time after the war was over. If she was right to trust their plans, the end might not be so far off.

  Sulien began to talk in his sleep, tormented gibberish and moans. He shook, and raised a hand, perhaps to fend something off, perhaps pleading. Lal sat uncertainly stroking his hair, distressed and hesitant. ‘Sulien,’ she said at last and he sat up and stared at her with awful, unrecognising eyes for far too long. Then he sighed and lay down again, saying nothing.

  Lal moulded herself to his side, kissed his shoulder.

  He didn’t move; his eyes were shut. He might have been asleep again, except for the rhythm of his breathing.

  ‘Was it the Colosseum?’ she asked at last. She tugged unconsciously at the sheets,
pulling them higher over his chest. The scars were not disfiguring, but she hated the sight of them.

  Sulien frowned. ‘No,’ he said, dully, without opening his eyes. And then, ‘I can’t remember.’

  Then, at the end of April, squads of soldiers began to patrol the streets, knocking on doors rounding up the young men that were left. One evening Una saw it happen, a couple of dazed, stumbling boys dragged out of a block of flats. She stopped, almost dropping her bag, staring in horror, and involuntarily caught the eye of one of the soldiers as he dragged the boys towards a covered truck. If he would just have let them walk by themselves – it was clear enough that they were too frightened and too outnumbered to run away – but he wouldn’t let them keep on their feet for more than a second. He was only Sulien’s age, but he was hulking with indignation, far more truly disgusted with these boys than the job demanded. He was irritated by Una’s attention. What of it? his look growled at her. Una, who had not been so close to a soldier since the Colosseum, gripped her false identity papers in her pocket and blinked meekly before turning away, a mousy little assistant librarian hurrying home from work.

  She raced back, half expecting to see the same trucks standing outside the building by the canal. She already had Sulien virtually imprisoned in the flat. He had given up even trying to get a job; he no longer came to meetings, only occasionally slunk down to the refugee camps. Otherwise he barely went outside except onto the roof terrace, or to run to the bomb shelter.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, when she’d told what she’d seen, ‘we’ve been messing around with this long enough. You’re next out to Greece.’

  Varius, at least, caught the urgency at once. ‘It would only take three days to get him to Naxos. He could stay with Tenos and Isione.’