‘But it’s happening in Greece too,’ Sulien protested, ‘or at least it will be soon.’
‘When it happens there we’ll think of something else,’ said Una grimly. ‘Anyway, they can’t send troops out to every island.’
‘They’ll have the vigiles. And I’ll stand out anywhere.’
‘You’ll live in a cave or under a bed if that’s what it takes.’
Sulien laughed, even though it was clear she meant it.
Una hissed in frustration and studied him darkly, contemplating objects and stratagems she could use to injure him, endow him with a disqualifying limp, anything to make sure.
Sulien startled her by appearing to read her thoughts, as if, for a moment, he’d picked up her gift. ‘What do you want to do, shoot me in the foot? They’d know. They’ve got court-martials for that sort of thing. That’s how people get executed.’
‘Sulien,’ said Varius, ‘you sound as if you want to go.’
‘No, of course not,’ Sulien said, in mild surprise.
Una stared at him. Yes, he was telling the truth, there was no active desire, just a disconcerting absence of any strong feeling.
He finished vaguely, ‘But . . . it’s happening to everyone. There’s no point worrying about it.’
Una felt like shaking him, and instead dropped her face into her hands, kneading her eyes. She’d had little sleep lately, one late night of longdictor calls and discussions followed by another broken up by air strikes.
‘There is a point in worrying, and you’re letting us do it for you,’ said Varius sharply. ‘Can’t you understand what it would mean for Una – for all of us – if they take you away? Didn’t you hear how many men they lost down in Alodia? Why do you think they want so many more?’
Sulien looked stricken. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean it like that. I’ll go to Naxos. I’ll try and keep my head down. It’ll be all right.’
‘They’re not getting you,’ said Una, through clenched teeth.
Sulien looked at her in sympathy. ‘If it did happen,’ he said, hesitating, ‘I’d find a way to come back.’
‘Don’t talk about what you’d do if it happened!’
There was a short silence. Sulien said quietly, ‘I have to tell Lal.’
‘Do it now, then,’ said Varius.
‘What – tonight?’ Sulien asked, taken aback.
‘Those trucks were only a few streets away,’ said Una. ‘For God’s sake, it’s not as though we want soldiers finding the three of us together anyway.’
Sulien nodded reluctantly.
‘They’re probably checking ships up at the lock,’ said Una. It was increasingly hard to avoid inspections of one kind or another when sailing out of Alexandria: so many of the docks along the coast were now little more than charred scree on blackened beaches that the traffic on the canals had come under sharper and more suspicious scrutiny. The passage of a small private yacht was no longer unremarkable.
Varius reached for the identity papers he was currently using. ‘I’ll take the boat around the coast. I don’t think there’ll be any checks if you come out through Mareia, and if there is any trouble you could go round on the Via Eleusiniana. Meet me at Taposiris and we’ll go on from there. I’ll go now; you follow tonight if the Nionians give us the night off, otherwise early tomorrow morning.’
Sulien’s mouth twisted a little, into a distant, unhappy smile. ‘All this trouble,’ he muttered.
‘Well, at this point we’ve all caused a lot of trouble to each other,’ said Varius briskly, with some slight hope of flicking that expression off Sulien’s face. He was not successful.
Varius left, and it struck Una suddenly that they had made a mistake; she should have gone herself. It had not occurred to her to alter the arrangement at the time; the boat was Varius’, and she hadn’t wanted to let Sulien out of her sight before she had to. But she would not have been seen as a possible conscript.
‘Those boys I saw didn’t even look eighteen,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they don’t care any more if you’re a few years over or under. And everyone says they’re going to put it up to forty-five anyway.’
‘They’d think it was weird, though, a girl on her own in a boat, late at night,’ said Sulien. ‘They might have arrested you, or followed you—’ But he could manage, for Varius, some of the worry he hadn’t been able to muster for himself. Aside from the conscription squads, Varius was still known to be alive, still publicly sought, although lately there had been far less room for him in the news.
Sulien called Lal, who said, impulsively, ‘Let me come with you, then,’ as soon as he explained.
Sulien didn’t think to warn her of any difficulties, or ask if she was sure. ‘Yes, come,’ he said, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. ‘We’ll get jobs in a bar on the beach. And if we never have enough money for rent it won’t matter, we’ll just sleep on the sand. It’ll be summer soon.’ And he drifted pleasantly for a minute or so into the idea of it: Lal wrapped around him in the warm sea, lying beside him on a carpet of pine needles. But there was an ache suffusing it all, that he felt without consciously noticing it, just as he did not notice himself failing to concentrate properly as Lal talked of what she should pack and how soon she could reach him.
It felt natural to him that the call should be interrupted by air-raid sirens.
Despite their furtive operations among the ruins in other raids, there was no question of attempting to travel now. Private vehicles were banned from the roads during the attacks. At least for the rest of the night the risk of running into a conscription squad was done with; all they had to do now was survive the bombs.
The noise of the explosions paced heavily from the north towards their street, like a giant wading knee-deep through the houses, kicking up sprays of concrete and brick. They ran downstairs and up the street to the shelter, where they jostled in among fifty wan people crammed into a stark and increasingly rank-smelling concrete box beneath a junction. They picked their way through to a familiar corner of it, unrolled their blankets, claiming a strip of territory on the concrete floor, and lay down. Sometimes there were songs and jokes, and bottles of methousia passed around. But tonight people only sighed and coughed and quarrelled fitfully as the night boomed and splintered, all of them tired and frightened, but by now past the point of crying and praying for it to stop.
Sulien was close to the wall; he could feel it shiver. At first, nights in the bomb shelter – the windowless concrete, and certain elements of the smell – had reminded him unbearably of the cell under the Colosseum. Yet tonight, he felt strangely safe – or at least, calm. The shelter was so packed that there was scarcely an inch of space between himself and Una, who was lying rigidly on her side, a tense, jealous barrier between him and the rest. They didn’t talk, lay coaxing sleep without expecting it to come. He glanced at her once and saw her eyes were shut, but the set of her face remained determined and angry, her teeth clenched. Then there was some vague stir further out on the floor – people rearranging themselves, making room for someone – and Una shifted closer, and now he could feel her forehead butting against his arm.
The past bulged into the present again: they were lying side by side on warm, bloody sand, he was closing his eyes. For once, the memory of the Colosseum came without the usual ripples of panic, the usual desperation. He remembered painlessness, certainty.
It should have been impossible to sleep, but he did, and dreamt of nothing.
Varius had been stopped at the lock, but the soldiers on duty there had not been particularly belligerent, but scornfully amused at the excuses he offered, along with the papers that declared his age.
‘Well,’ said one, tossing the plastic wallet back to him after a cursory search of the cabin, ‘you have fun with your boat for the next couple of months, and then we’ll see you down in Alodia.’
He’d travelled perhaps five miles down the featureless coast when the bombing started. The echoes blared around the ship, off the pal
e rocks, the surface of the sea. Looking back he saw the sky on fire over Alexandria, the domes and towers outlined black against sheets of flame. The perverse sense of normality that insulated the city evaporated when one saw it from a distance; it was incredible that anyone could survive even one such night, that they could have been living there so long.
Very late, two or three hours before dawn, the sky grew quiet and Una and Sulien dragged themselves, shivering, to their feet, filed up the steps of the shelter, and staggered back towards the flat. They lurched speechlessly to their beds, unable to think of anything but collapse.
The noise seemed to burst upon them just seconds after they had lain down – in reality, almost an hour later. Una was closest to the sound; the flat had only one real bedroom and she slept on a fold-out bed in the living room. She sprang up, thinking confusedly of more bombs, her head filling with the noise, but when she realised what was happening, it was even worse. Sulien had just stumbled blinking into the room, and there were soldiers outside shouting for them to open the door – which they promptly broke down anyway.
For a moment it was the train in Iaxarteum, the van in Rome all over again. Still barely awake, Una and Sulien clutched at each other, backing away from the door. Then one of the soldiers announced something about conscription enforcement, and Sulien went still, realising that the men did not know who they were, only wanted him.
He rubbed his eyes, and put up a hand. ‘Let me get dressed,’ he said.
Una had understood what was happening a moment before. ‘No. No,’ she had been repeating, unheard by anybody. Now, making a decision, she ran forward to cling to the arm of one of the soldiers, begging in a much louder, clearer voice: ‘Please! Please, just give me a minute to say goodbye to my brother.’
‘Should have said that to him months ago,’ the man grunted, shaking her off.
‘He wanted to go before,’ she whimpered tragically, ‘he only stayed this long to look after me!’ Real desperation was driving the performance almost to the edge of parody. Tears – actually of shock and fury – trickled down her cheeks. But even without such embellishments she looked pale and vulnerable enough, and somehow younger than she really was, standing there barefoot in her nightdress, her eyes dark and huge. The soldiers shifted and glanced at one another, softened a little.
‘Well, go on,’ the leader said gruffly. ‘And get your clothes on.’
Una seized Sulien’s wrist and dragged him into the bedroom, almost slamming the door shut behind them.
Sulien leant back against the door, closing his eyes for a second, then looked at her, ready to talk. But Una wiped her eyes roughly on the back of her arm, strode across the room to fling open the shutters and said, ‘Get out of the window.’
Sulien stared, and sighed out an exhausted laugh. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.
Una ignored this. ‘We can get across to the roof terrace opposite and climb down,’ she said, a fierce, mad edge to her voice. She swept a couple of sets of identity papers and a bundle of cash into a bag and slung it on over her nightdress.
‘No, we can’t,’ said Sulien. He pulled on a pair of trousers under the loose tunic he’d been sleeping in, pushed bare feet into his shoes. ‘It’s a fifty-foot drop. And they’d see. They’d shoot us.’
Una ground her teeth and leaned out of the window, trying to judge the distance. ‘You think of something else, then.’
Sulien came forward to take hold of her shoulders. ‘Una,’ he said, ‘there isn’t anything else. You’re wasting the time we’ve got.’
Una turned, still not looking directly at him, scanning the room and raking through her brain, searching for some saving detail on which to hang an idea. But she began to shake, her breath coming in rough, angry gasps: she could find nothing.
‘We’ll get you out,’ she promised at last, her voice strangled.
‘What?’ Sulien shook his head, almost exasperated with her. ‘No.’
‘We’ve got out of worse.’
‘And how many times can we expect to get away with it? We’ve been running around under the vigiles’ noses practically asking for something to happen as it is. I don’t want you risking your life any more – or Varius risking his again, not over this. It’s not the Colosseum. Or a cross. It’s not certain death. And everyone else has to go. Why should I be any different?’
‘How can you ask that?’ said Una hoarsely, only just managing to restrain herself from shouting, ‘when you know how worthless, how stupid this war is? You know how hard Marcus tried to stop it – how hard we’re still trying. Have you forgotten who began it, and what he’s done to you? Do you think you’ve got some kind of duty? You were a slave for sixteen years! Why can’t you ever really believe that? What could you possibly owe that hasn’t already been taken from you?’
Sulien hesitated. ‘Of course I know all that,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got no choice, and anyway . . . However it started, I don’t want Rome to lose. There has to be something left, something that can get better. Or what use is everything we’ve been working for? And they’re sending other slaves.’
‘And they’ve got no right— it shouldn’t be happening! None of this should be happening!’
‘But it is happening,’ said Sulien.
Una opened her mouth again, but no more words came. She sat down, suddenly, on Varius’ bed.
Sulien sat beside her. ‘We’ve had bombs falling on us all night,’ he said. ‘We’ve got used to it. I don’t expect I’ll even notice the difference.’
‘I will,’ breathed Una, in a dazed, helpless whisper. ‘I will.’
‘There’s Drusus’ prophecy,’ he murmured. ‘If it’s true, and if it’s got anything to do with us – well, anything to do with me – then I’ll be all right. I’ll get back.’
Una shook her head. She said dully, ‘That can’t be right. Can’t be how it works.’
Sulien shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s something.’
Someone banged on the bedroom door. Sulien turned a little towards the noise, shifting away from her.
‘Wait—’ said Una.
But the soldiers shoved the door open, and Sulien rose to meet them. They gripped his arms, as if he’d been making an attempt to escape, and he let them. The leader barked, ‘Come on, you. Out.’
*
The building settled into silence again; in other rooms, people were unstiffening in their beds, going back to sleep. As if afraid of waking them, Una crept across the floor on light, careful feet, aimlessly moving from the broken door to the roof terrace steps and back. Then she turned out the lights and lowered herself quietly to the floor in the doorway between the bedroom and living room. She sat there in the dark, slack and still, barely feeling her back aching against the jamb, in a kind of comfortless, open-eyed sleep. She didn’t move until dawn began to thread through the shutters, when she crawled onto Sulien’s rumpled bed, and lay staring for another hour in a continuation of the same trance. Then Lal came rushing into the flat through the broken door and found her there. She pulled Una up into her arms, crying, as she realised what had happened.
Varius, already sure something was wrong, called early from Taposiris, and Lal answered the longdictor in tears. He scowled and swore, hurried down to the sea and went back.
He found Lal had heaved the door up from the floor and was standing on a stool with a screwdriver, trying to reattach it to its frame, tears still running down her face. Una was sitting upright and pale at the kitchen table, still in her nightdress. She began to cry briefly when she saw Varius, but then stopped, exclaiming wildly, ‘I know where he is; I know where they took him.’
‘Where?’ On the voyage back he had already been trying to think of some way to undo this, or at least to set his mind into the right frame for finding one.
‘A training camp near somewhere called Hibis. It’s in the desert, we can find out where—’
Una had spoken very little until now, had been able to give Lal only the barest outline of what h
ad happened. But she felt a little more real with Varius there, and started to hope again that Sulien had been wrong and they could find a way to bring him back. And as she began haltingly to recount the course of the night, she felt a touch of vicarious guilt, for Lal’s sake, aware that she was longing for any kind of verbal keepsake from Sulien, and that he had left none for her. For a moment Una almost convinced herself she could make something up; it seemed hardly dishonest – Sulien would have meant to say goodbye. She had no doubt he would have done so if he’d had a little more time to think.
But she was almost too sleep-starved and wretched to explain the bare truth; it was beyond her to add anything to it.
Sitting beside her at the table, Lal’s face grew hot with the effort of not asking, ‘Did he mention me? Didn’t he say anything at all?’ But in increments, it became obvious to her that if there had been anything, Una would not have kept it to herself so long.
It suddenly seemed childish and undignified to be crying, so she stopped.
Una rubbed her eyes. ‘I know he cares about you,’ she managed, ‘it was just all so fast. And we were so tired.’
Lal nodded, reasonably.
Una insisted again, ‘We can find him, we can get him out.’
Lal murmured, ‘But he didn’t want us to try and find him . . . ?’
Varius and Una were equally inclined to ignore what Sulien wanted. Una was due at work and refused to call in sick, despite Lal’s urging that she looked it. The Library had lost one of its lecture theatres, the roof of an observatory and many windows in the raids, and far fewer students slouched in its alcoves, but the main buildings and the collections within were almost unharmed. Una roamed among the shelves, hollow-eyed, almost incapable of following an index or a request form, yet she searched out copies of military records and maps and deposited them furtively on a desk in front of Varius, who sat with a notepad, and a stack of poetry books to disguise what he was really working on.
But as the day went on, Sulien’s prohibition, along with other things, began to corrode their sense of what was possible. There was no money – all that remained of what Eudoxius had given Varius was either spent or committed now. And the training camp, they established, was deep into the desert, connected only to a tiny oasis town by a single road that led nowhere else. There would be no cover of trees or buildings or traffic, nowhere to hide on either the approach or the departure. The dunes would be swarming with recruits on field exercises. Still, Una thought desperately, there must be some way of getting close.
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