Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Noriko sighed, but she’d known it was inevitable. ‘We will start a new fashion when we go back home,’ she said as bravely as she could, trying hard not to contemplate how common everyone at court would think they looked.

  ‘We don’t have to cut it short,’ reasoned Tomoe, ‘only to here . . . or perhaps here—?’

  Cominia smiled and gave Noriko’s arm an encouraging little shake. ‘It’s all right! I’m a professional. You’re going to look lovely!’

  Noriko was trying to nerve herself to go first when Amaryllis broke in, ‘Do mine.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need anything quite so drastic, dear,’ said Cominia.

  Amaryllis’ expression remained bland, but she coiled all her hair around her fist and drew it tight, as if threatening to pull it out at the roots. ‘He wanted it like this. He made me wear it like her. He used to— He— I want it off me.’

  Cominia sat Amaryllis down in front of the dusty mirror and made a first, exploratory stroke with the scissors.

  ‘More than that!’ cried Amaryllis.

  At her own insistence, and to the quiet horror of the three Nionian women, Amaryllis ended up virtually bald.

  Noriko took her place in front of the mirror. She couldn’t help tears coming into her eyes when Cominia gathered her hair just below her shoulder blades and cut off more than four feet. And yet, although of course she knew that so much hair was heavy, still she was amazed by the lightness when she lifted her head: she felt as if she might rise through the stained ceiling and into the night air like a balloon, and float away south over the sea.

  Cominia set to work shaping and tidying what was left.

  Later, they examined the jewellery. ‘Some of it you might be better off hanging onto, just in case,’ said Cleomenes. ‘More portable than blocks of cash. But obviously you need money, and you can’t go around flashing this stuff everywhere. I know a fence back in Rome – that’s where I took the bracelet. Though you’re never going to get what they’re really worth.’

  ‘We are very grateful to you – whatever you think is right,’ said Noriko. And she laid aside an aster pendant made with sapphires, and another jewelled comb. In a lower voice she murmured to him, ‘Whatever you can get for these, please keep it.’

  Cleomenes let out a small, embarrassed sigh. ‘I don’t want you to do that. I’m Roman, and Rome should’ve— should’ve done right by you girls and it hasn’t, so—’

  ‘Please – for the risks you have taken. For your son.’

  Cleomenes’ pink face clashed even more extravagantly than usual with his hair. He couldn’t meet her eyes, but now he nodded.

  ‘I’ve got some clothes for you,’ said Cominia. ‘They’re not very nice clothes, I’m afraid, and . . .’ She paused, then went on, ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but it’s going to be a while before you’ll be able to get decent papers – if you can at all – and you’re going to have to explain being Nionian somehow. I’m really sorry, but it’s the only way. You’re going to have to pass as slaves – there are Nionian girls from out west on the market now . . .’

  It was hardly worse than their long imprisonment, or the loss of their hair, but the clothes were embarrassingly skimpy and lurid, and Noriko grimaced while Amaryllis, running a hand over her stubbly head, stared at them stony-faced.

  ‘I am sorry about this,’ said Cominia again.

  ‘No, no,’ Noriko said politely, trying to mean it, ‘thank you.’

  They stuffed the enormous lengths of cut hair into plastic bags; Cominia went over the floor with a little hand-held vacuum cleaner to make certain there was not a strand left. ‘Carpet could use it anyway,’ she muttered.

  And after that Cleomenes and Cominia gathered up Alexander and left them alone. ‘We’ll come back early tomorrow and get you down to the coast. They’ll be sending a couple of boats over for you—’

  ‘Then they really are building an army,’ whispered Noriko, feeling dizzy again.

  ‘More like a navy, from the sound of it. Mostly old men and girls,’ said Cleomenes. He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ he asked, with an air of vast resignation.

  There were only two beds; and Noriko couldn’t relax on the scratchy, faintly greasy sheets. She had never been so unguarded in her life, and she was acutely aware that all they had to protect them was a single flimsy locked door. And yet it was better than a centuria of Praetorians, and though she slept lightly and woke often, she felt safer in this squalid place than she had at any point in the last year inside the Palace.

  In the morning she lifted her head and saw Amaryllis sitting on the carpet in a square of sunlight, rigidly hugging herself and rocking gently. Her face was red, and swollen with tears, and she was quivering with the sweaty tremors that follow violent nausea. She was completely silent.

  Noriko slipped out of bed to kneel beside her; she touched her shoulder. ‘Amaryllis,’ she whispered gently.

  Amaryllis flinched away a little. ‘That’s not my name,’ she said, in a thick, angry voice. There was a long pause while Amaryllis rocked soundlessly, her mouth dragged into a kind of dreadful grin of pain. Then at last she lifted a hand to wipe at her face, which slowly relaxed.

  More clearly she said, ‘My name’s Maralah.’

  [ XV ]

  BATTLEFIELDS

  It was the first anniversary of Marcus’ death. Una and Varius had both retreated into themselves over the preceding weeks, speaking less and less, except of the most routine things. They were bracing themselves, shoring themselves up against what they knew was coming.

  The celebrations of remembrance were both inescapable and intolerable. There were speeches and parades, and Drusus’ pious face lifted bravely up towards the sky or downcast in contemplation on every longvision. It was like the endlessly publicised preparations for Marcus’ wedding with Noriko, but far worse. Una read in a newssheet that Drusus was unveiling a statue of Marcus in Rome and was incoherent with rage and grief for hours afterwards.

  They were no longer living in Alexandria. They travelled around the coast from one secret group of former slaves to another, sleeping on the ship when there was no bed or floor space free. They wanted to be far away from people – and from the longvision – on the day itself, so the night before they sailed out from the coast of Crete and hid the Ananke beside a tiny outpost of rock in the Aegean.

  In the morning the sea and sky were like blue lacquer on glass. It was a beautiful day and Una lay curled in the cabin trying not to exist until it was over.

  She had never known her own birthday; she thought it fell somewhere in the first part of the year. It must be past by now, and she must be the age Marcus had been. She thought – she knew how usual a thought it was – that she would be carried further and further past him until one day she would be old, and he would always be twenty, always the same.

  She shook her head, a little surprised she was thinking in such terms: it was hardly certain – or even particularly likely – that she would live to be old. And yet it was possible; there were hundreds of them now, ranked and waiting around the Mediterranean: she could feel the force of all those people building, like the pressure rising in the summer air. She could see their fleet on the open sea. But afterwards . . .

  At last the cabin grew too hot and stifling for her to continue hiding under the bedclothes, so she went up to join Varius on the deck. He was lying in the sun with his eyes closed, yet he did not look as if he were merely sunbathing, or asleep; every line of his body was tense and his lips tight. He, too, was concentrating on enduring.

  Una sat down a little distance from him, gazing down at the wavering white reflection of the Ananke in the blue water.

  ‘Do you have dreams he’s still alive?’ she asked him after a while.

  ‘Dreams where I see him,’ murmured Varius, ‘but it’s always as if he’s come back for a little while. I don’t forget what happened.’

  Una sighed. ‘I do.’

  Varius nodded, without opening his eyes. ‘That’
s worse. Sometimes I still dream Gemella’s alive, that it was all some kind of mistake. But not so often now.’

  ‘How do you think about Gemella now?’ asked Una, tentatively. ‘Do you think she’s still . . . anywhere?’

  ‘Sometimes I’m sure she is – sometimes it’s as if she’s right there.’ He extended a hand, fingertips stroking lightly through the space beside him, and smiled, and a surprising sweetness spread briefly across his face. But it was only for a second. ‘And other times I think there’s nothing; she’s gone. But even then—’ His face tensed, he was, she could see, reluctant to continue, but at last he said, ‘Back at the Academy I was more interested in politics than philosophy, but I remember some of the philosophers used to say that every moment exists forever – that time is an illusion. And if that’s true, then Gemella— Her life isn’t gone. It’s still happening, somewhere. And it can’t be touched, or lost, and I’m still there with her, even if I – if what I am now – can’t get back to her.’

  Una leant her head against the gunwale; she thought of the moments in which she felt Marcus’ death was for ever present, always happening, and wondered if she could ever think of the rest of his life like that.

  ‘I only knew him for four years,’ she said. ‘If we win, if we ever go back to some kind of normal life, I don’t want to go back to how I was – how I would have been if I’d never— if he— What if one day it’s all just a— an episode? If it’s as if it was someone else who loved him—?’

  Varius was quiet for a while, then he opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘Do you really think that could happen?’ he asked.

  Una let out a long breath, and felt tears run suddenly from her eyes. ‘I suppose not. No.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s going to be an end, Una, even if we win. There’ll be enough work for ten lifetimes. You wouldn’t be able to give it up if you tried.’ He pulled himself up, and smiled at her. ‘That’s not a bad thing.’

  The remains of the Great Wall of Terranova were still visible from above: a broad, crumpled stripe broken by a bright curl of the Sanga River. They were flying northwest over Enkono, or Mohavia, or whatever they were calling it now.

  The sun was rising beneath them in a flattened pool of light. The ground was almost like another sky: bare, reddish, smoke-stained, huge. The air above it was thick with bullets and fire.

  Sulien stood a few men back from the hatch at the rear of the volucer, trying to keep his feet as the aircraft swerved. The noise was deafening, and yet his own pulse seemed to him to be roaring almost as loud. He couldn’t even guess how many Nionian fighters were in the sky with them, but it looked like thousands; from here it was almost impossible to believe that anyone was going to reach the ground alive. They were all heavy with equipment and armour; moulded plates fastened to their torsos and arms, close-fitting helmets on their heads, shields strapped awkwardly to their left sides – but such defences were pitiful against this mauling sky.

  Well, this is going to be over fast, Sulien thought, trying to be wryly resigned in order to get himself past the total disbelief as the last man in front of him dropped away. And in his turn he approached the screaming threshold, and stepped out, and was lost in the clawing air.

  Someone who might have been him kept count of the seconds. He pulled on the cord and for an instant he was – impossibly – falling upwards, breath shocked out of him, before the square black canopy steadied. And somewhere in those first dreadful seconds, in helpless flight between the bullets, he was shot through with blind, terrified elation. The air tore away a cry from his lips, inaudible even to himself in the blast.

  He tried to steady himself, and looked down to see the colours of the landscape emerging, beneath his dangling feet: the red-ridged earth bristling with grey scrub, light cresting the dry hills.

  Ten miles upriver from the ruins of the Wall the Sanga cut through dark cliffs and the city of Aregaya rose up the hillside on both sides of the canyon, the grid of blue and green roofs abrupt and unnatural against the desert. The caged river glittered under the bridges the 6th Arcansan Legion was fighting to recapture, and at least one was down already. Smoke was rising from both sides of the gorge.

  Gunfire whipped a string of pendent soldiers out of the sky some way ahead and below of Sulien, their parachutes twisting and withering, and he turned his head away. He shut his eyes – but not for long; the rush of noise and sensation was even more overwhelming in the dark. Everything around him was hurtling so fast except for the earth, which came dawdling up to meet him. Oh, come on, come on, he pleaded to it. He could hardly bring himself to try to steer his descent – it was one thing to consign himself passively to the danger, but so much harder to propel himself deliberately into the fire – when every direction looked murderous.

  He was coming down onto a sandy plain already spotted with craters and black parachutes, between a crooked range of dark mountains and a huddle of low hills. To the east, towards the mountains, he saw a dark mass on the earth – a dense expanse of darker brush, he thought at first, but as he floated lower he saw that it was moving. It flowed and separated, and for an instant he wondered if it was a disordered unit of enemy forces. But then further down he realised that a herd of panicked bufali were charging across the edge of the battlefield. He saw a small explosion spurt in the midst of them, scattering the nearest animals, sending the main body of them surging the other way.

  The city vanished over the horizon and the ground swung up at an unnatural angle and tripped him; he fell onto his side, breathing hard, as his parachute collapsed lazily over a bulbous cactus. He’d landed in a shallow runnel between mounds of red rocks and for the moment he could see only grey bushes dotted with yellow flowers, nothing else. The terrible noise continued above him like some strange kind of weather, but down here the air was hot and still, and felt strangely undisturbed. It was as if he’d fallen out of the war.

  But then bullets raked past him. He slammed his shield upright into the sandy earth and crouched behind it, breathless, frantically pulling open catches, dragging his gun free of its fastenings, trying to get out of his harness. He couldn’t see where the volley had come from, but he fired back blindly, then scrambled away into the cover of a low spur of rock where he stopped for a moment and finished adjusting the rest of his kit. He was shocked to see that there were several white scuffs on the shield already, a long narrow streak left by a bullet; jagged marks of flying shrapnel that must have hit while he was still in the air.

  Sulien clambered up onto flat ground, where what was left of the 33rd Anasasian Legion continued to rain gently out of the sky around him. He was relieved not to be alone any longer. He wondered if any of them knew what they were doing. A few months ago Rome had controlled both Enkono and Sorasanmyaku; now the Nionians had cut Roman reinforcement lines and stranded a section of Roman forces to the north. Sulien’s cohort was supposed to be capturing a junction outside the city, enclosing Aregaya while reopening the roads to the north and east. How would they know if it was working?

  He’d checked his compass, and although he might not be exactly sure of the distance, he knew Aregaya was ahead. The sun was rising over the jagged hills ahead. He squinted through the powdery haze of churned dust thickening the air. At least he was used to sand and heat. Perhaps sending troops trained in Egypt to Terranova wasn’t quite as stupid as he’d thought.

  He met the eyes of another Roman soldier through the sagebrush and they converged as they crept forward, meeting in the cover of a low brake of shrubs, where they put their shields together into a narrow fence and exchanged shaky, half-sane grins. Sulien recognised the other soldier, Hanno, from his own centuria, though he didn’t know him well – the lanky dark boy was from Aravacia, he thought.

  ‘You’re the decanus of your octet, aren’t you?’ whispered Hanno.

  Sulien nodded; technically he was in command of eight men. Pas and Dorion were among them and had been in the line behind him in the volucer – by request, rather than c
oincidence. The theory went that close-knit octets were more effective. It didn’t count for much on the battlefield even if they were with him, for nothing if he couldn’t find them. Or if they were all dead.

  ‘I can’t see an officer anywhere,’ said Hanno.

  ‘We’ll just have to make it a bit further north on our own,’ Sulien said. He pointed, and at that moment there was a blast and a spray of red soil fifty yards or so ahead. Dreadful high screams sawed through the air for several long seconds afterwards, then stopped abruptly. Sulien gritted his teeth.

  Another private came scuttling across the sand to join them. He collapsed onto his knees, shaking, his shield lying loose and useless at his side, ‘Fucking mines!’ he said wildly, ‘they never said there’d be fucking mines! We haven’t got engineers, all the tanks are over east – I suppose they want us to just fucking wade through them . . . we haven’t got a fucking prayer!’

  Keeping his own shield braced, Sulien gripped the other man’s arm, accepting that for the present he was at least marginally in charge. ‘Calm down. You have to calm down. You’re all right. Get your shield up.’ He gestured the newcomer into position behind himself and Hanno. With this third shield facing backwards, the three of them were relatively enclosed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Hanno.

  ‘Caerellius,’ answered the stranger fretfully.

  ‘It’s not mines,’ said Hanno, ‘they’ve sprayed the place with those bomblet things. I saw them falling.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘We’ve got a chance of seeing them, at least,’ said Sulien. ‘And there can’t be as many.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Sulien ignored him and rose cautiously so he could peer through his shield, first across the plain towards the hidden guns, then at the ground directly ahead of them. He had Hanno hold up both their shields, with Caerellius’ horizontal across them both, raising the transparent wall to five feet and leaving him free, if more exposed, behind it.