Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  He lifted his head, and the pain bit hard enough to make him gasp, but he could move, and he wasn’t losing consciousness. There was another boom, further away, and a high chorus of car and fire alarms filled the air as the bombers receded. Varius struggled to push himself up onto bruised knees, and someone came running from the office block steps to help him: the man who’d been carrying the briefcase. There was a woman, too, who slung Varius’ arm over her shoulders, and between them they dragged him towards the shelter of the steps.

  ‘I’m all right, I can stand up,’ he said, feeling a little better now he was upright. Someone was screaming behind them, further along the street, and Varius looked back to see someone lying motionless on the ground, and another figure reeling about, shrieking. The man leaned Varius against the steps, patted his shoulder, then raced off towards them. Varius watched, impressed. He couldn’t bring himself to go and help, and he wondered if he was being unnecessarily feeble. He wasn’t in so much pain, and didn’t think he was even bleeding all that seriously.

  ‘Someone’s calling an ambulance,’ the woman assured him, mopping inexpertly at his back with someone’s scarf.

  Varius nodded, but didn’t say anything. He was fairly sure he didn’t need one, and was hoping for a chance to slip away before he drew any more attention to himself. He twisted, gingerly, and put a hand to his back. Blood coated his palm and he pulled his hand away sharply. It was too dark to see anything else, even if he’d been able to look at the wounds.

  The woman left him and ran after the businessman towards the fallen figure. Varius rested a little longer, trying to gather his strength to start walking. He found he was slightly dizzy after all, but he decided it was probably from the impact of the fall rather than whatever was wrong with his back, and it didn’t seem to be getting worse, so he straightened, and set off back towards Phanias’ house.

  It couldn’t be more than half a mile; he’d barely noticed the walk just minutes ago. By the time he’d turned the corner into the next street he was hobbling like an old man; the gashes like a weight strapped to his back. He could feel them flex and pull with each step, the fabric of his tunic dragging stickily at patches of drying blood. He had to stop and prop himself against a wall, panting as the torn flesh throbbed, an ugly muddle of cold and heat. Wandering off by himself seemed less than clever now, and Varius looked around for a public longdictor, though he was sure he hadn’t seen one on the way out, and all he could see were shuttered shops. He swore under his breath, because this was such a stupid thing to happen, such an annoying waste of time.

  He groaned and limped on, hoping no one would notice the blood, or how awkwardly he was walking – if Phanias was right and their operations here were pushing too close to the surface, then this was a dangerous place to make himself conspicuous. But it was not only that; he felt oddly embarrassed by his injuries. There was something unseemly about being out in public in this state.

  Phanias’ house was still there. Varius had begun to worry that it might have been hit. He rang the bell and leaned against the little portico, resisting the temptation to close his eyes. Phanias opened the door and exclaimed in shock.

  ‘Shrapnel,’ said Varius, a little shakily, ‘but I think it’s just . . . cuts. Not deep.’

  Phanias hauled him into the small kitchen, sat him on a stool and sucked his teeth discouragingly as he inspected his back. Varius noticed the spattered trail of red blots he was leaving on the tiles and felt again, pointlessly embarrassed.

  ‘You need a hospital.’

  Varius grimaced. ‘We’ve got a medical kit back at Delir’s,’ he said. ‘If you can just get me back there—’

  ‘You’re all ripped up, we can’t just stick a bandage on it. And whatever hit you, it’s probably filthy.’ Phanias poked, very squeamishly, at a point a little above the small of his back, and Varius hissed. ‘And this one here looks deeper to me. You’ve got good papers, money, haven’t you?’

  Varius nodded wearily.

  ‘Well, look, it’s not all bad; make them give you a note. That’ll stop anyone trying to send you off to the front line for a bit now, won’t it?’

  ‘Can you call the others for me?’ asked Varius, dropping his head into his hands.

  ‘I’ll try, but you know how the longdictor lines are after these things.’ Phanias searched around for something clean to use as a temporary dressing, eventually settling on an ungainly wad of torn-up bedsheets, which he fastened to Varius’ back with duct tape. Then he drove him to hospital.

  Tamiathis’ only hospital had lost a wing in an earlier raid, and Phanias had to drive over a uneven ramp laid over a crater to reach the gates. The casualty room and the lobby outside it were crowded with hollow-eyed people, many of them, like Varius, bound in makeshift bandages. When a group of medics rushed someone on a stretcher through the doors at the far end of the room, Varius saw that the corridor beyond was lined with beds. An exhausted-looking nurse glanced him over and told him to wait.

  They hadn’t managed to contact the others before leaving. At least one of the longdictors in the hospital lobby was working, but there was a crowd around that too. Phanias hovered for a while, but gave up when two men broke into a loud argument over whose turn it was.

  For an hour Varius hunched and shifted on a plastic chair, searching vainly for a position that was tolerable, until a couple next to him who had been eyeing him guiltily for a while offered him their seats to lie across. The man had a possible broken arm; the woman waiting with him wasn’t hurt. Varius couldn’t put up a convincing show of reluctance.

  After that he persuaded Phanias to go home – there was nowhere for him to sit, and nothing for him to do. Varius lay on his side watching the flies lurching back and forth above him under the fluorescent light. There was a feverish, grubby heat in the room from so many bodies packed so close, but slowly, as midnight passed, the sighing crowd began to thin out and he wondered if he could make it to the longdictor now. He willed himself to stand up; he wasn’t paralysed, and he knew Una and the others would be worried. There was no excuse for just lying here. But his back blazed and his head was aching too, now, and he let minute after minute pass and still he couldn’t move.

  Somewhere in the corridor full of beds a child began howling. There was a smeared puddle of blood by the doors to the lobby, and a sour, foetid smell swelled beneath a fading layer of antiseptic. He remembered the slave-clinic he’d run back in Rome, and began making censorious comparisons: I would never have let it get this bad. He regretted the thought almost at once, but it was too late, the memory had released a longing he hadn’t felt in a long time. All this year he’d missed Marcus, he’d missed his parents, but strangely, he had not really missed safety and ordinary comfort, and the expectation these things would continue.

  He closed his eyes. If he could lie perfectly still, he might even be able to sleep.

  He was vaguely aware of people advancing across the floor, but didn’t see any reason to look up until he heard Delir, standing right above him, saying, ‘Oh, thank God!’

  Varius prised open his eyelids and saw Una was there too, a little behind Delir, quiet and staring, still while Delir started bustling around him. Varius tried to sit up and Delir, alarmed, put out his hands to stop him. ‘No, no, for heaven’s sake, lie down! No one has seen you yet? Do you need a drink of water?’

  He tried to look at Varius’ back, and Varius was grateful for Phanias’ dressing, that there was little to see.

  Una closed and opened her eyes in a slow, exhausted blink, and then resumed staring at him, breathing hard, but otherwise motionless. Varius had known they would worry, but he had not imagined Delir would be so effusively relieved, or that Una would look quite so shattered. Delir even patted his head, as unselfconsciously as if Varius were a small child, prompting him to suppress a puff of touched, embarrassed laughter.

  ‘I’ll call the others; they won’t sleep until they know you’re safe,’ said Delir, and hurried off towards the l
obby.

  Una dropped suddenly into a crouch beside Varius, one hand lying alongside his on the scuffed plastic chair. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said at last in a low, bleak mutter.

  ‘I know,’ answered Varius softly.

  A nurse called a name and a boy clutching a bloody towel to his head stood up and staggered past Una, who shifted slightly out of the way without taking her eyes off Varius.

  ‘You may as well go back,’ he said. ‘it’ll be a few hours yet, and I’m not . . . it’s not as if I’m—’

  Una shook her head – a single, emphatic jerk.

  ‘You know it’s a bad idea, being seen together somewhere like this—’ he started.

  ‘No one’s paying attention,’ said Una dully. ‘Delir can go back.’

  He’d shut his eyes, but he opened them again because he could feel her still looking at him – staring in the sad, unblinking, unapologetic way an animal might stare.

  Varius a little unsettled, managed a laugh. ‘Well, don’t look at me like that. It’s a nuisance, that’s all.’

  Abruptly a tear slipped down Una’s face.

  ‘Oh . . .’ he said, distressed, ‘oh don’t—’

  Una looked away, her expression unchanging. At last she bent to him and whispered, ‘Lal talked to Zhu Li’s office.’ There was a catch in her voice, as if this were bad news. ‘One of the codes you tried before, it worked.’

  Varius smiled wearily. ‘There. I knew it.’

  ‘They thought she was someone playing a prank.’

  ‘He’ll listen to me. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe we won’t be able to get through again,’ Una said, almost despairingly.

  Varius sighed, and let his eyes fall shut. ‘We’ll manage something.’

  Sulien was sitting slumped on the hot asphalt in the shade of a truck, leaning against the heavy tyre. He’d been up since dawn; extracting the cohort from the school had been far more complicated and tiring than he would ever have expected. Now they were assembled at the airbase to the west of the city, waiting while the rest of the cohorts rolled in. Some of the Roman troops were stationed here in the barracks the Nionians had once used; they were still loading pallets of bags and equipment into their vehicles. Sometimes Sulien scanned the sky nervously, but the base was bristling with batteries of guns, so he supposed they could fend off anything short of a missile strike. Besides, everything had been almost uncannily quiet for days. Pas was lying nearby on a bed of packing crates. The fourth centuria sprawled wherever they could, flattened with fatigue, waiting for the signal to leave Aregaya at last.

  ‘Lieutenant Archias,’ called Gracilis, brandishing a map, and Sulien hurried over to where he stood with a pair of senior centurions from another cohort.

  ‘Sixth Arcansan, slowing everything down . . . always the same,’ Gracilis complained quietly, surveying the movement of troops and vehicles. ‘No point in you sitting around looking decorative. You may as well take your centuria on ahead as far as—’ He looked at the map.

  ‘Shiomura,’ supplied one of the other centurions, pronouncing the Nionian syllables accurately, though with slow, mistrustful care.

  ‘Shiomura. Make sure the way’s as clear as it looks. There’s a side-road running more or less parallel, starting here’ – he pointed – ‘split up at the junction and cover both. But get out and come back if you encounter anything serious. We’ll need to know.’

  Sulien suppressed a resentful grimace. Go and see how many of you get blown up, he translated silently. He said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  Gracilis smiled. ‘Don’t look so worried, Lieutenant. All the air reports say it’s empty out there. You’ll only be double-checking.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Gracilis nodded, and let out another quiet sigh, ‘Look at that, Lieutenant,’ he murmured.

  Sulien followed his gaze towards a hangar on the corner of the field, and the thing emerging from it. It was a large vehicle, about the length of a train carriage, escorted by a squad of soldiers as it rolled forward slowly on the concrete and stopped, forty yards off. On its back it carried a heavy, complex structure, a miniature fortress all dark metal battlements and towers, and mounted above the mass of cylinders and rails was a long, narrow cone made up of smooth, overlapping plates. A pair of specialists swung up onto a small platform behind the cab of the vehicle, beneath the length of the cone, and began to work. Sulien was just close enough to see the panel of controls, where they seemed to be entering figures into small screens, adjusting dials. As they did so, the cone lifted smoothly from its bed, tilted and swivelled, and the round opening turned from point to point in space.

  Sulien sucked in a breath, and his skin crept; there was something horrible about that movement. It was as if the thing were a living creature, sniffing the air, searching for something. He supposed it could not go off by accident, and yet it felt reckless, letting it out among so many people. He wished he hadn’t seen it, that Gracilis hadn’t made him look, and yet the machine was compelling, and he couldn’t turn his eyes away from it. And as he watched the cone flared open, like a mouth, or a bindweed blossom, and then it opened wider still, stretching into a shallow disc, like a warning crest around a lizard’s neck.

  ‘What is that, sir?’

  One of the men at the controls did something and the shallow disc contracted again to a simple bore, almost like that of an ordinary cannon.

  ‘That,’ said Gracilis, ‘is an expensive piece of crap that doesn’t work properly.’

  ‘Gracilis!’ one of the other centurions reproached him. ‘They’ve fixed it – it works now.’

  ‘So we’re told,’ Gracilis answered dryly.

  The cone settled back into place and the specialists, apparently satisfied, climbed down from the little platform. Sulien felt the tension leave his muscles now the thing was still. The soldiers waiting on the concrete unfolded a light steel cover over the device, and a dust-coloured tarpaulin over that, and now it looked like any other military truck – and yet not quite: it was a little too large, and the base and the heavy wheels were too solid, giving away the disproportionate weight.

  ‘It’s the Onager, isn’t it?’ said Sulien, because they’d all heard the rumours, and Marcus and Una had told him about it too, before the war. ‘Does it . . . I heard some people saying it shakes everything apart like an earthquake, but then someone else said it doesn’t touch buildings or equipment, just kills everything living, even through walls.’

  ‘Either. Both. Makes you breakfast and gives you a hand-job,’ said Gracilis. ‘Supposedly if you set it to the right frequency it can do anything.’

  ‘I can’t see how something can kill people and leave everything else standing,’ said Sulien.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t, that’s the answer, isn’t it? They’ve got another one out in the Promethean Sea, and that’s as useless as this one.’

  The younger of the two other centurions glanced anxiously at him. ‘I’m not sure we should be talking so openly about this.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Gracilis. ‘He’s about to witness this momentous event, isn’t he? The final proof this thing has any business anywhere outside a laboratory.’

  ‘Don’t you listen to him,’ said the other centurion merrily to Sulien, ‘that’s what’s going to win us the war.’

  [ XVI ]

  TWO DESERTS

  A tired doctor dragged a few small shreds of metal out of Varius’ back and cleaned and sutured the wounds. It took a long time, and Varius was surprised and slightly unnerved not to have to pay for it. It was part of the war effort now, a nurse explained; there were too many people wounded by bombs. It was disconcerting to have to be grateful to Drusus in any way.

  The following day, after trying the code over and over again, he succeeded at last in reaching Zhu Li. He mildly enjoyed the drama of telling him, yes, it really was Caius Varius, and if his voice sounded a little rough it was only because he’d been blown up by Nionian bombs the night before.
/>   Zhu Li was gratifyingly shocked. ‘Terrible! Criminal!’

  Varius smiled. ‘But not entirely unprovoked. And Sina’s at war with Rome too now, of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zhu Li with heavy regret, ‘it’s all a kind of madness.’

  ‘It’s as Nionia’s ally you can help us now.’

  With some reluctance, because it went against all his instincts now, he told Zhu Li where they were, and that Noriko was hidden in a house on the edge of the desert outside Antipyrgos. ‘I know the cables are being cut, Grand Preceptor,’ he said, ‘but I am sure the Nionians still have means of communicating across the lines. If the Empress is willing to pass this information to them, we can arrange a time and a place to convey the Princess to their agents. All we would ask is for an audience with her brother.’

  That night, after many weeks when the news programmes had been too obsessed with Roman victories in Alodia or in the Promethean Sea even to mention him, there was an hour-long longvision feature about him. It went back even beyond his childhood, delving into the lives of his parents and grandparents, trying, the sombre presenter said, to trace the beginnings of his slide from apparent respectability into treason. It never speculated where he might be now, but it spent a good ten minutes discussing his family’s roots in Egypt. There were pictures of him at every stage of his life.

  Varius tried to be contemptuously amused by this, but in truth found it disturbing and painful: so many of those pictures must have been confiscated from his parents. And all the time, beneath the cushiony relief of the painkillers, he could feel the ache seeping from his back and all through his body. At first he tried to believe the antibiotics he’d been given were simply taking their time, but three days later he was shivering in the heat of an Egyptian August, and the wounds remained raw and swollen around the stitches.

  Una gritted her teeth. ‘You’re not well. And those pills aren’t doing anything.’