Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Never, since they had met over Marcus’ body that first awful day, had she been in his presence without revulsion. Now it was so strong that she thought she’d be sick if she even touched the food. The room was huge, but it felt stifling, she could hardly breathe. There was a filthy texture to the air, a smell in it like the rusty stink of blood. When Drusus looked at her she wanted to writhe and struggle as if he were actually touching her again.

  If there was anything that made it a little easier to endure, it was that he looked almost more worn and ill-at-ease than she felt herself. His lips were tight, the flesh under his eyes was swollen and dark; occasionally a juddering twitch ran through him. He too barely ate. He lay there pouring glass after glass of wine down his throat, without any glimmer of visible pleasure – in that, or in the bruised woman who lay beside him, silently smiling.

  After that dinner, there was a partial respite. Drusus was often away: he was talking to scientists at test sites off the coast of Thule; he was addressing the troops before they left for Terranova or Ethiopia. He was hardly off the longvision these days. In his absence the restrictions surrounding Noriko eased slightly; Trunnia grew a little less thorough, left them alone for longer at a time. But the Praetorians were increasingly restless; even those who had always treated them with respect lapsed now into nonchalant rudeness. And some of them roamed around the palace like packs of feral dogs, they banged on the door when the women were locked inside, hooted and catcalled at them down corridors. Noriko kept her letter in her sleeve and waited.

  The three of them spent a lot of time in the gardens. Noriko disliked them – she thought the rigid lines were artless and oppressive – but they felt safer there. No one could approach across the plains of grass and gravel without being seen, and there were places like the aviary and the bower at the bottom of the sunken lawn where it was easier to hide without appearing to do so. And the air was warm now, the sky was blue and the grounds were so wide it was almost as if they were free.

  On a marble bench beside a fountain, a young woman sat staring at the roses, her hands folded in her lap, doing nothing at all. Her glossy black hair hung in a girlish plait down her back and her fair skin was carefully shaded by a broad straw hat. She looked almost childlike this way, and much less like Tullia. Almost by accident, Noriko met her eyes. The girl’s expression had been exactly the same every time Noriko had seen her, and each time it grew more unnerving. It was a look of sweet, serene composure, but with unfocused eyes, a doll-like, meaningless smile. Noriko could see it still in place, even from here.

  ‘Who is that?’ she asked

  Trunnia sighed, which was her usual response to anything any of them said. ‘Never you mind.’

  But Noriko didn’t need an answer. Seeing the girl now, without Drusus, and remembering how she’d been dressed the last time she had seen her, it was suddenly clear to her that this was a slave, someone who was kept elsewhere in the palace. Another of Drusus’ possessions.

  To her relief, Trunnia began to complain of the heat, and as there were a few distant guards in the gardens and no realistic way the three women could climb over the walls, eventually she left them alone.

  When she was gone Noriko and her ladies walked another furtive circuit of the walls, just in case there was some weak point they had not noticed before, but they were aware that even if there had been, they would not get far without help. They wandered despondently back along the avenue of umbrella pines and past the fountains. The girl was still there.

  This time Noriko led the others over towards her.

  It was a pretty scene, like an illustration of a sentimental song – the girl’s straw hat, the flowers. But as they came closer they could see that under the shade of her hat there were still those red and purple stains on her skin – more, in fact, than before. Her smile broadened slightly in greeting as she saw them coming, and then retracted to its usual state. Her lovely eyes were vacant, and not for the first time, Noriko wondered if that look of static sweetness was the effect of some drug, or a sign the girl had something wrong with her brain.

  She nodded kindly in response and asked, ‘What is your name?’

  The girl continued to smile, as if she did not know how to do anything else. And yet her eyelids moved in a faintly ironic flicker, and she gave a slight shrug. She said, ‘Amaryllis.’

  Her voice was pretty, too, but there was a flat, tinny quality to it, like a recorded announcement on a longdictor line. There was something wrong with the answer itself, too, something false or withheld.

  Noriko hesitated. ‘Is that your real name?’

  Amaryllis gave another little shrug. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She swung her legs slightly and added, ‘Isn’t it such a nice day?’

  Noriko tried to think of some safe way of probing deeper. ‘I saw you had bruises,’ she ventured. ‘I think . . . the Emperor hurt you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amaryllis, with solemn unconcern. She picked a flower and inspected it absently. ‘He has so much on his mind.’

  Perhaps she actually loves him, thought Noriko anxiously. Perhaps she’d rather do anything rather than cross him – or maybe she is too used to what he does to her. She glanced at Sakura and Tomoe.

  Tomoe gave a subtle shake of the head. They knew from Noriko’s agitated accounts of her evenings with Drusus who this was, and Amaryllis was far closer to Drusus than any furtive servant who’d been willing to whisper to them of escape and rebellion. To push this conversation beyond pleasantries was a new level of risk.

  Sometimes, nursing her letter and longing for home, Noriko consoled herself by thinking, we can lose nothing by trying. But that was not true: forced marriage or rape was not the worst they had to fear from Drusus. Noriko remembered Una in prison, the trial, the sentence. Even now she only half-believed Una and Sulien were truly alive – perhaps they’d escaped the Colosseum only as symbols, myths, while their bodies were torn to shreds, burned to ash.

  ‘Well, I was sorry to see it,’ she said, almost ready to leave it there.

  ‘But glad it wasn’t you,’ said Amaryllis, her voice as pleasant and impersonal as before, the sharp point inserted and withdrawn almost too fast to be felt.

  Noriko flinched, and yet the sting was the first signal of someone awake behind that inert, synthetic sweetness.

  ‘Then I suppose you have heard that he has’ – she grimaced – ‘done me the honour of choosing me as his intended wife. So I am grateful to know how he behaves when there is . . . so much on his mind.’

  ‘Yes, I know that’s what he wants. I wonder if it will happen,’ mused Amaryllis. ‘I wonder what he will do with me if it does.’

  The fixed smile no longer looked like a symptom of mental weakness to Noriko; it looked as if it had been held in place so long the muscles could no longer relax, as if it were nailed on.

  ‘Amaryllis,’ she said, aware she was mangling the foreign syllables – the name was almost impossible to pronounce – ‘If I could tell you— If I knew you would not tell him about this conversation—’

  ‘He doesn’t like me to talk,’ said Amaryllis mildly.

  Noriko sat down beside her on the bench. ‘We cannot bear it here. We are afraid all the time. We must try to leave.’

  Amaryllis did not seem surprised, but she examined the three of them and looked dubious. ‘All the way to Nionia?’

  ‘Perhaps we would not need to go so far. My brother has forces in northern Africa now.’

  ‘That’s still very far,’ said Amaryllis, ‘and right into the war. You might be killed.’

  ‘We might be killed here,’ said Noriko grimly. ‘There is someone who might help. I have written a letter to him, but we’re never allowed out – and I cannot let anyone know I even have pen and paper. I don’t know how to send it.’

  Amaryllis shrugged again. ‘I go out sometimes. He lets me go shopping, or to the theatre now. He didn’t let me before – he didn’t like people seeing me because of who I look like. But now he’s Emperor he d
oesn’t have to care what anyone thinks. Your letter – you have it with you?’ She held out her hand for it.

  Noriko was unreasonably shocked. ‘But then why do you ever come back? There must be some way you could run. At first we were not even allowed into the garden!’ Even as she said it she knew it wasn’t fair – she knew it would take more than merely stepping outside the gates. But after so long trapped in the Palace, the idea of being able to come and go seemed almost outrageous to her. For a moment she helplessly resented Amaryllis for failing to make better use of the privilege, for having it at all.

  ‘Oh, someone always comes with me,’ said Amaryllis, ‘and where could I go? I don’t have any money. I can’t do anything. And he told me that if I ever tried to run away he’d bring me back and cut up my face. I know he’d do it. Still, I used to think he might set me free one day. Sometimes he liked to say he would.’

  Her voice remained bafflingly calm and mild through this. Nonplussed, Noriko asked, ‘But – you would like to get away?’

  Amaryllis’ face underwent a sudden change. Her eyebrows rose, her lips drew apart and stiffened; she became almost ugly with incredulity. ‘I wonder what you think I am,’ she said, in a thickened, alien voice.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Noriko.

  ‘He knows he had to tell me what he’d do to me to keep me here. Even he thinks better of me than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Noriko, confused, and frightened, too, of how far she might have alienated Amaryllis. Perhaps the offer of help had been withdrawn – perhaps Amaryllis would even tell someone now.

  Amaryllis’ face rearranged itself gradually, a fleeting, contemptuous look at Noriko escaping through the pieces of calm as they settled back into place. She muttered to herself in an oddly lofty voice, ‘What can I expect?’

  Noriko hesitated again. She said, timidly, ‘If you come with us, perhaps – perhaps you have heard people saying that out there—?’

  ‘Una and Sulien and Varius,’ said Amaryllis instantly. ‘To go and join them. Yes, that is what I want.’ She held out her hand again for the letter.

  Sulien was holding a gun; Una was talking to him in a hurried, desperate whisper, begging him to— And then she was lying dead on the sand, her body soaked with blood and scattered with broken glass, though he had somehow missed the moment that it happened. He was only a short distance away, but he couldn’t reach her. He too was lying on the ground, and he could hardly move; he barely inched forward when he tried to pull himself close to her. And he could no longer remember why she had told him this must happen, how he could have done what she’d asked of him.

  Then the morning bell shrieked and Sulien lurched out of his bunk and began inserting himself into his uniform before he was truly awake, his hands already swift and practised, even though his heart was thudding to various frequencies of shock. The dream still felt solid, bits of it stuck to the sight of this huge stark room full of men, the noise of the bell drilling through them all.

  The mornings were the hardest times: when the reality of what he was becoming and where he was going was harshest, and most unfathomable. He was ten days away from passing out – this course of training lasted only a month, half the length it would have been at the start of the war. And he longed for Una and Varius and Lal, and to go back to a home that had not existed for almost a year.

  But the desert air was still and cool and quiet, the dawn grew on the horizon, pink and pale gold like a camellia tree. By the time they were pounding through the second mile of the morning run his head had cleared and he began to feel a contentment that was, by now, familiar. He was in the centre of the column and even though the pressure of the summer heat was building in the air and sweat was pooling in the small of his back, he felt almost weightless, held up by the closeness of the men around him.

  He knew the rest of the day would be gruelling. He would be still for barely a minute unless standing at attention, and there would be arbitrary outbursts of cruelty from the officers, because conscripts who’d had to be physically forced into the army were the lowest of all. But it would be simple. He didn’t mind the heat or the physical hardship or the tight framework of the rules. He felt relieved of identity. He found that though the centurions shouted at them about focus and concentration, it wasn’t true; he didn’t have to concentrate, not really. The effort that was constantly demanded didn’t come from the core of him, he could spare it easily, ungrudgingly. He could rest even while he struggled over obstacle courses, or lay propped on his elbows at the rifle range, anonymous amongst the other men. He had been glad when they stripped off his hair and made him look just like the rest of them.

  He felt strangely guilty sometimes when he thought of Una and Varius, because he was sure that they would never understand this. They would have hated every minute of this life so much that they must be imagining him suffering far more than he was.

  He didn’t expect friendship; he made no effort to learn names. He watched the other recruits with strong but utterly impersonal sympathy. He hoped, if he maintained this and if he stayed quiet, that he would be able to remain anonymous and overlooked himself. He tried not to talk unless he had to, even when they were left alone in the barracks. But of course, against his intentions, the men came into gradual, separate focus. There was Pas, who slept in the bunk above him and who was especially hard to ignore as he gravitated towards Sulien whenever possible. He’d lurk nervously around him, perhaps simply in the hope of hiding behind him. There was Dorion from Terenouthis, who whispered filthy jokes when they were both on guard duty in the middle of the night. There were some who were widely disliked, like Mysthes, who seemed almost wilfully incompetent, and had attracted a number of group punishments, and Sentheus, who was loud and violent, in too-obvious imitation of the centurion in charge of them. But Sulien felt the same sad, detached compassion for these too.

  Una and the others might have left Alexandria by now, but he thought they would be back sometimes to meet with the recruits they’d left behind; there was a chance they would be able to collect letters. So, like everyone else, Sulien wrote. He was vaguely amazed this was even allowed, and sorry that his words seemed so unsatisfactory – he wrote to all of them that he missed them and loved them and that the training was not too bad, and it was all true; he just couldn’t find the right way of saying it. The aliases he had to use for all of them made it harder – Archias to his dear Aethra, to Berenice . . . it was as if he was writing fiction.

  ‘Who’s Berenice?’ demanded Dorion, leaning against the bunk. Berenice was Lal; Sulien shook his head, saying nothing. Dorion was not deterred. ‘Is she fit? What are her tits like? Reckon she’d get them out for us if she was here?’

  Sulien went on writing his flat little sentences in silence, though his lips twitched towards a smile despite himself. For some time, Dorion continued noisily speculating, with increasing inventiveness, about Berenice’s preferences, and openness to experimentation. But at last he gave up on her and asked, ‘So you’ve got family back in Alex?’

  ‘My sister,’ said Sulien. He saw no reason to lie, not about this – that was part of the strange relief he felt in being here. There was little need to explain himself; the worst and hardest things could be simply omitted. All their pasts had been shrunk down to the size of playing cards or stamps or coins, things that could be casually displayed or hidden.

  ‘You’ve only got a sister?’

  Sulien nodded, not paying attention, but Dorion quietened and looked distressed. He lowered his eyes, and then murmured, ‘Was it an air-raid, or—?’

  Sulien was taken aback. The information had seemed so neutral to him. He felt as if he’d tricked Dorion out of unneeded sympathy, so rather than nodding and letting the subject drop, he found himself explaining, ‘No, no, my father died ages ago; I can hardly remember him.’ For a moment he found himself tempted to explain that he had not even known that the old man who owned their mother was his father until after his death, but he did hold hi
mself back from that. ‘And we—Well, we didn’t really grow up with my mother. We haven’t seen her in a long time. But yeah, she’s alive.’ Without knowing he was going to, and almost under his breath, he added, ‘We could even have half-brothers or sisters, I suppose.’

  Dorion still looked confused and sorry. ‘But back home . . . it’s just you and your sister?’

  ‘No,’ said Sulien, going back to his letter, ‘it’s not just us.’

  He did not elaborate and after a moment Dorion shrugged and grinned. ‘So. Is your sister fit?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sulien mildly, throwing a towel at him.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of scars,’ said Pas one day when they were washing off the coating of dust and sweat from the assault course. Pas was also from Alexandria. He was small, dark, a year or two younger than Sulien, and almost a foot shorter; he would have looked a child except for the permanent worry lines scratched into his forehead.

  Sulien glanced down at himself. He felt a small twitch of trepidation and yet here, where his body was just one of many interchangeable bodies, part of a mass of raw material, the marks on it seemed inconsequential. He said, ‘Car crash.’

  Pas’ eyes narrowed uncertainly. He looked away and asked, ‘Is that what you have those dreams about?’

  Sulien’s heart skipped, his pleasant sense of near-invisibility suddenly punctured. Every night he thought he was far too exhausted to dream, and he was almost always wrong. So he clenched his teeth hard when he lay down, and tried to will them to stay closed, clamped shut, even if he couldn’t keep the same pressure on the images that sprouted in his mind. Until now, no one had said anything. He knew his nightly attempts to control his body had some effect – he’d learned to sleep lying rigidly on his back, as if standing at attention – so he’d hoped it was working.