Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Ziye had grown increasingly tense and taciturn ever since the public declaration. She was surprised that the invasion of her country should matter so much to her now, when she had spent most of her life outside Sina and had few fond memories of it, and when she had already lived through more than a year of war, and months under Nionian bombs. Nevertheless, she winced at the news of what was happening on Sina’s western borders. Maracanda and Luntai had fallen almost at once, and apparently without much effort on the Roman Army’s part, despite how far they were now extended. And she now had a triple reason to worry about what people saw when they looked at her scarred face: that she could be mistaken for Nionian, that she could be recognised as Sinoan, and that she could be known as herself.

  She fidgeted with the list of longdictor codes. ‘I appreciate these girls need help,’ she muttered, ‘but the vigiles need only one good lead on them and they’ll fall right on top of us.’

  ‘Ah, we have no choice. What else can we do? Who else can they turn to?’ said Delir.

  ‘I owe Noriko whatever help I can give her; she protected me when I was in prison. What they would have done to me if not for her . . . And she was Marcus’ wife.’ Una spoke evenly, with almost no betrayal of feeling, except a pause after the last word. ‘But she can help us too, where Tadahito’s concerned. If she’s with us, that means passage into Alodia or Ethiopia, or wherever Tadahito is now. It means an audience with him – we can’t lose that chance.’

  Noriko and the other women were being passed from one group of partisans to the next across the Mediterranean; they should be somewhere off the west coast of the Peloponnese by now. And yet there had been no acknowledgement on the news that they was missing. It was strange. For once Varius found himself wishing for hysterical headlines in the newssheets, and photographs continually splashed across the longvision. Not that he was surprised by the silence – it would have been acutely embarrassing for Drusus to admit that Marcus’ widow had defected from right under his nose. But it must also be that he still hoped to find her, and was wary of alerting Nionia that she was free and in need of help. Varius was almost sure that any intelligence agency worthy of the name must have learned the truth regardless, and in that case Nionian agents must already be in Roman territory, looking for her. But certainty would have been a relief.

  ‘Well, this is no use anyway,’ said Ziye, pulling off the headset. ‘I have been through all of these. Varius, you might as well admit you have forgotten this code. We should wait and see what Mouli can do, or concentrate on finding Liuyin.’

  ‘I know Zhu Li; it would be far better to talk to him direct,’ said Varius, irritated, ‘and I know I can’t be more than a couple of figures out. Unless it’s already too late to get through . . .’

  He finished dialling as he spoke, and got another dead line. He gritted his teeth and rubbed between his eyes. Lal put her head down on a stack of printer paper.

  ‘Perhaps we should all get out of this room for a while,’ suggested Delir.

  *

  It was late, but the light was only just starting to leave the sky. The air-raids had grown more sporadic since June, and though Tamiathis had never been as heavily bombarded as Alexandria, Una and Lal did not get very far from the little print shop before they came to a field of rubble stretching the width of several streets. Children played stubbornly on the heaps; a few untouched palm trees were still standing here and there, and weeds were beginning to grow among the stones.

  ‘Here,’ said Lal, taking the letter from her pocket and holding it out, ‘you read it.’

  Una took it with slight reluctance. Sulien’s letters made him seem almost more absent. The words were always like him and yet there was an opacity behind them that was not; it was unnerving to hear his voice in her head and yet be so unsure of what he was really thinking. The occasional censored lines that lay across the page like bars made it worse – it was so easy to imagine that they contained something precious, something that had been stolen from them.

  This letter was very like the ones she had received herself: most of it was an impersonal chronicle of the soldiers’ training – marching, hand-to-hand, weapons training – with brief glimpses of Sulien in the reassurances that strung the letter together, that it was really not so bad. Near the end there was one small flicker of life, and a detail that was new to Una: ‘Dorion is trying to read over my shoulder now, making an idiot of himself and distracting me. Now he’s asking me about you. I’m glad you can’t hear what he’s saying. Hmm . . . right, you’re never meeting him.’

  It ended, ‘Please be careful, always. Look after yourself, and look after the others when you can. You know how Aethra and Heraius can be: try not to let them get too obsessed – not that there’s much anyone can do to stop them. I do love you, Berenice.’

  ‘I hate that stupid name. I wish I’d never chosen it,’ said Lal. ‘And there’s been nothing since his training finished. What do I care what happened months ago in some camp? I want to know where he is now. All these weeks he’s been fighting somewhere, and this is all we have!’

  Una wished Lal would stop radiating the thought that perhaps he was dead, had been dead all this time, with such intensity – it was hard to block it out. ‘No news is good news,’ she said, tightly.

  ‘Oh, Una,’ cried Lal, ‘you know how he was even before he went – he was only just starting to be himself again. Even if he— Even if nothing happens, what will he be like when he comes back? He’s already been through enough . . . he shouldn’t be out there, he just shouldn’t – what will it do to him?’ She flung her arms impulsively around Una and said, ‘He needs us— I want him back here so much!’

  Una could find nothing to say in response. She could not weakly add, ‘So do I.’ She couldn’t explain that her own fear for Sulien had no such gradations, no details; it was a single, huge, solid block: she was afraid he would die. Only that; anything else she would think about when she saw him. But she and Lal sat together, side by side and silent, on a heap of fallen bricks, until an air-raid siren started to cry out into the dark blue sky.

  Sulien raced along what was left of the street. There was a tiny stir at the corner of a house ahead of him, barely a dark flicker on the edge of his vision, but he registered the upward swing of the barrel of a gun and crouched behind his shield and fired. The figure darted back and Sulien launched himself into a run. Ahead of him a flight of concrete steps led up to nothing. He’d have better cover beside it; he thought he might get a clearer shot—

  They had been over this ground before, they’d fought for these streets and apparently won, and yet here they were again. Sulien could picture the row of blown-out shops around the corner where the gunman was hiding, having blasted some of those buildings open himself the week before. It was only here, in the northern districts of the city, that some remnants of the Nionian forces still had any kind of foothold, and though the Romans were prising them out it was slow and repetitive and bloody. At least this was not as bad as the first time – only small-arms fire now, and not so much of it. Cerinthus and Isidorus had been hurt back in the little square a block behind them, where they’d been pinned down for almost an hour that morning, but they would live, not like poor Flaccus, blown apart by a mortar in that first assault. He had survived for several horrible minutes afterwards, out in the open where no one could get to him. Sulien thought he’d have gone mad listening to his screaming, if he hadn’t had Dorion there – Dorion, who’d been shaking with dry, gagging sobs behind their shields, but at least he was someone else to concentrate on. Sulien had kept up a desperate onslaught of talk at him – babbling about Alexandria and Rome and he hardly remembered what; it didn’t matter what anyone said at a time like that – until Flaccus fell silent and the volucers swept in. He didn’t know what he would have done if he had been able to get close to Flaccus.

  Sulien’s centuria was down to forty-six men now, though most of the dead had fallen that first day, out on the plain. The octet he was lea
ding now was a compound of two broken halves, but Pas was there, hurrying along the other side of the street with Petreius. He’d had a week’s rest in the base; his wound had, of course, healed well. He had been sick the first time he’d shot an enemy whose face he could see, and Sulien had had to scoop him up off the rubble, and pull him along, muttering to him urgently, ‘Later, later.’

  Now Pas and Petreius moved across the shattered paving to join him by the steps; Gavros was leading in another octet in from the east, towards the gunman’s street. Sulien’s radio buzzed: ‘We’ve got the west street covered. Are you ready to go?’

  ‘Confirm that,’ said Sulien, beckoning his men. The two octets probed the entrance of the street with a couple of volleys, then they closed into a solid rampart and charged forward. Bullets rattled on the roof of shields above Sulien’s head, but now the rest of the centuria were sweeping in from all points of the crossroads and the Nionian militiamen on the ground were trapped between the closing walls of the Romans’ shields.

  This time their intelligence was correct, and they found the weapons cache behind a false wall in a cellar. The soldiers helped themselves to ammunition, grenades and pistols, but there wasn’t a suitable truck in the area to carry the heavier weapons, so they cleared out with their spoils and let a volucer bring down the building in another eruption of black smoke. The city air never seemed clear of it.

  Sulien tried to feel some sort of satisfaction that the number of weapons in play had been reduced; they’d killed five men this morning but surely saved at least as many lives – someone’s life must have been saved, maybe Dorion’s, or his own, or some of the hollow-eyed women he’d seen filling buckets of water at the standpipe in Yomogiu District.

  They all breathed shallowly in Aregaya, trying not to inhale the stench that enveloped the city. Everyone tried to pretend it was just the sewage that had seeped up from overwhelmed septic tanks in the east, and the uncollected rubbish in the streets. But there was that other smell laced through it, strangely mild as it entered the nostrils, before the foulness of it squeezed the back of the throat and roiled the stomach. There were bodies rotting under the rubble, and still unburied out on the plain.

  They scarcely saw living civilians as they crashed in and out of deserted rooms and chased masked men from block to block. Sulien was grateful that so many of the city’s inhabitants were out of the way of their guns and grenades, but their absence seemed as quietly accusatory as the expressionless looks or forced smiles they met in the few markets and shops that were still opening. Sometimes the tidiness of a bedroom with a smashed-in door or the rows of little indoors slippers in the school they were using as a barracks were almost as bad as the terrified family they found cowering under a table and the shouting mothers carrying bloodied children to the hospital.

  Sulien hoped they’d move out of the city soon.

  After the raid, the remains of Sulien’s centuria returned to the base. A few of the men began throwing a ball around the schoolyard while Sulien sat on the steps of the little temple at the heart of the compound, spraying a coating of silicon finish onto his battered shield.

  Gracilis, one of the senior centurions of the cohort, approached Sulien. ‘Private Archias?’

  Sulien jumped to his feet. ‘Sir.’

  ‘You’re fourth centuria, yes? The decanus of your octet?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The centurion squinted at him, and rubbed wearily at the flaking sunburn on his forehead. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ Sulien said, automatically telling the truth, and then worried he’d made a mistake – he couldn’t remember the right answer for ‘Archias’. Some of the identity papers Lal had given him made him a year or two older or younger.

  Gracilis sighed and grimaced in apparent dejection, which unsettled Sulien further. ‘Right,’ he said heavily, ‘you can read, can’t you?’

  Bewildered, Sulien nodded.

  ‘And you led an assault on a gun emplacement out at the west junction.’

  ‘Well— I— Sort of, sir.’ It was difficult to think very clearly about anything he’d done that day, though not because he’d forgotten anything. The memories were sharp and bright: he remembered surging out of the crater and across the sand, hurling the grenade, and yet he felt as if he’d never had any real choice, never been any less helpless than when twirling downwards under his parachute. The battle had simply happened, like a tide, tossing around the thousands of Roman and Nionian men on the plain like pebbles. Saving Pas had been the only decision that seemed to have been his to make.

  ‘Yes,’ he finished, when he realised this vagueness wasn’t adequate.

  Gracilis looked irritated. ‘Take command of your centuria, then.’

  Sulien gaped. ‘What, sir?’ For a moment he really expected Gracilis to laugh or realise he’d made a mistake. ‘But I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to do it,’ said the centurion, with a sour smile. ‘And the ninth cohort’s rather short of likely candidates, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Your centuria – there are only – what, forty of you left?’

  ‘Forty-six – but there’ll be replacements coming,’ said Sulien, ‘won’t there?’

  Gracilis stared at him, then blinked, revealing a great depth of fatigue. He patted Sulien bleakly on the arm. ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant.’

  ‘“Lieutenant”—!’ protested Sulien.

  ‘That’ll be your formal rank; but of course you’ll be acting as centurion until replacements get here,’ remarked Gracilis, with another ironic twitch of an eyebrow, and walked off.

  Sulien took one stride down the steps in an astounded impulse to go and tell Pas or Dorion, which almost instantly shrivelled into dread of telling anyone. Instead he sat down again and resumed applying the silicon coating as if nothing had happened, except that he buffed the shield with ferocious energy and his teeth were gritted against a surge of heat that came rushing into his face. He wondered if he could have got Gracilis to make the announcement for him – no, he supposed that must be his first job – but how was he supposed to do it? He felt idiotic even thinking about it. He wondered if they would laugh at him, and then thought that with almost half the centuria already dead it wasn’t funny.

  It barely mattered who was in command now – that was the point. Sulien laid down the shield on the steps. A whole centuria of raw recruits: a single shovelful of fuel, hurled into the army’s engine. They were there to carry the campaign forward a little way as they were consumed, not to survive. They were half-spent already. That was why he would do.

  The ball sailed over towards the temple steps and one of the boys yelled, ‘Shouter!’ and Sulien got up to kick it back to them, then stood watching them as they resumed play. Someone had accepted their deaths already. He didn’t like the idea of taking responsibility for any group larger than an octet, and he didn’t expect to be very good at it, but at least he had not, would not do that.

  He came down the steps towards the other soldiers. ‘Petreius,’ he said, ‘tell the other decani I need to see them here. I’ve got some news.’

  Varius heard the air-raid siren from across the city. He’d been visiting Phanias, one of the leaders of the local recruits. The Tamiathis effort needed more money, and they were struggling to cope with an unexpected influx of volunteers.

  Like Varius, Phanias had never been a slave. He was a reticent, anonymous little accountant in his fifties who was invisibly seething with violent disgust at the war. He had a conscripted son in Alodia. ‘It’s been building ever since Patara,’ he told Varius, ‘but I think it’s Sina too.’

  ‘I think so too. People are getting sick of this war now.’

  ‘It’s good, I know, but it’s getting hard to check everyone out properly – and harder to keep them quiet. It worries me how easily some of them are finding us.’

  ‘Then it might be time we go out of business in Tamiathis,’ said Varius. ‘Tell the leaders to get their group
s together. Una can come and speak to them all; she’ll know if we need to worry about any of them. And we’ll start moving them north over the next ten days.’

  He was heading back when the sirens sounded. Ahead of him a pair of women walking together and a man carrying a briefcase quickened their pace and Varius too began to walk faster, calculating he probably did not need to look for shelter yet, could probably get back to Delir and Ziye’s if he hurried.

  The sky was a deep indigo tonight, veined with light where flares broke across it. There were only a few aircraft up there; compared with the long, methodical poundings Alexandria had taken, this attack felt almost offhand, a casual sweep across the city, leaving great tracts of air and ground untouched.

  But it was coming close: there was a familiar shudder in the ground, and someone ran past him. Varius glanced upwards irritably, wondering whether he would do better to try to make his way back to Phanias’ building or to keep going, following the few other people in the street who looked as if they knew where the nearest bomb shelter was.

  He ran with the rest. He felt the air churn and twist, and shrapnel clattered on the road behind him. He ducked closer to the wall as someone started shouting, ‘Get under here, under here!’ and he saw there was an office block just a little way ahead with steps running up to a raised entrance; the women were already cowering underneath them. But the howling swept in towards him and the tremors drilled through his body. Oh, I don’t have time for this, Varius thought crossly, before the roar overtook him, a blast of pressure slammed him to the ground, and something tore across his back as he fell.

  Everything continued to boom and shake around him. There was a roar of falling bricks somewhere nearby, and he covered his head, but the collapse must have happened in the next street, for nothing else struck him. Varius lay still for another moment, breathless and dazed, waiting apprehensively for his body to make sense of what had happened to it.