‘Yes,’ said Varius, hauling himself upright and fumbling for the letter from the hospital in Tamiathis. The air was thick, and heavy as sand, and just lifting his hands from his lap cost an effort. ‘I have a – a short-term deferment . . .’
‘He isn’t well,’ said Evadne, and the officer peered at Varius, grunted, and to Varius’ slight dismay said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ before he had even seen the letter.
He waved them through and Evadne drove on into Libya.
The farmland gave out as the highway rose on great pillars, wading deep into the pale sea of rolling dunes. The road skimmed a thousand feet above the desert floor, though in places the sand had climbed up hungrily towards it, drifting in steep, crescent-shaped ridges against the columns. Tank-like sand-ploughs crawled across these hills and valleys, and scoured the road itself, guarding the viaduct from the weight and flow of the desert.
There were broad, round bays at intervals along the highway where there were shops and charging stations. Two hundred miles into the desert, they stopped for Una to take over at the controls of the truck. Though she felt beaten with the heat, she was grateful for the chance to do something. She was so conscious of Varius, shifting restlessly in his seat, shivering, and she pushed over the speed limit, passing a cargo tram convoy with a container carrying a load of camels poking their gloomy heads through the bars. But otherwise the southbound carriageway was almost empty now. Most of the traffic was coming the other way, fleeing the advancing battle lines in Nubia and Gaetulia.
The sand turned amber as the sun began its descent, the sleepy human contours of the dunes sinking and smoothing out into an empty gold plain, scattered with dark rocks like lumps of ash which rose into pointed, charred black hills in the distance.
The highway soared eastwards towards Gaetulia, and Una led the truck spiralling down a junction, through Pharusium, then onto a road that was little more than a flattened, gritty channel in the sand.
The lack of any landmarks made Una anxious, especially now the sky was darkening; the road sometimes seemed as notional as a line of longitude on a map. And she was horrified when, after thirty miles, it thinned and disappeared altogether into miles of blank sand, even though the map had told her to expect it.
She drove uncertainly for a few hundred yards, then stopped the truck and began arguing with Evadne about the compass readings.
‘Well – it’s more or less over there,’ said Evadne, gesturing.
‘More or less isn’t good enough,’ insisted Una. She and Varius had learned to navigate together out on the sea, but Varius was slumped in heavy-eyed stupor against the window and the courses they had plotted had always been a few degrees away from perfect. Una had never quite understood what they were doing wrong, but it hadn’t mattered too much on the Mediterranean, and she had never misjudged so badly as not to recognise the island or port they were searching for when it appeared, however unexpectedly, over the horizon. But out here it would take only a small error to lead them miles from the meeting place, and she had been calculating grimly what such a mistake might cost them for hours, even before she’d noticed the sharpening edge to Varius’ breath.
‘Let me see,’ said Noriko, taking the compass, bending over the map. She worked sums under her breath. ‘We are heading a little too sharply south,’ she announced, confidently. ‘True north and magnetic north – they are not the same; you must adjust. I think ten more miles south-southeast, past those hills.’
Una gazed at her in surprise, and Noriko shrugged and coloured a little. She murmured, ‘My tutors at home . . .’
‘What it is to have a royal education,’ remarked Una, and looked away, sorry for the moment of veiled spite. But she was cut by the unexpected reminder of Marcus, and the funds of startling facts and skills he’d inherited along with his name, to spend as effortlessly as money. She had first resented and then loved all the things he had known, and now she found herself thinking miserably that Noriko and Marcus could have had a good marriage – she should have been more steadfast in keeping out of their way.
I’m not whoever I would have been if I hadn’t met you, Marcus’ voice interrupted fiercely in her memory. I love you, I only want you . . .
She let Noriko take over the controls, sat still beside Varius in the back. You could have done that, she told Marcus in her mind, as Noriko guided the truck carefully across the sand. You’d have steered us right.
Varius’ skin was scalding where her hand brushed against his. She didn’t know how the ache of Marcus’ absence and Varius’ closeness could both be so strong, without one cancelling out the other. She tried to clear both away.
Noriko drove them past a line of the dark hills, checked the compass again and stopped. The stretch of sand between the rock clusters was no different from any other; there was no landmark for other travellers to head towards.
They sprawled out of the truck. The air was still solid with heat, but at last there was a faint, scratchy breeze, and the sun was no longer scouring at their eyes and skin. Una stalked discontentedly around the vehicle and jumped up onto a spur of rock, trying to see further into the dark.
‘Where are they?’ she complained.
‘We’re early,’ said Noriko soothingly.
Varius had lurched off among the ridges to vomit. He stumbled back and crashed down onto his side on the sand. There was a steady pressure of pain at his back, but he was so relieved he could lie down, and that the nausea had receded, that he thought he felt almost well, just loaded down with exhaustion. The stars were out now, huge and close. They seemed to rock softly in the air; sometimes Varius thought he could feel them lapping against the desert and against his skin, like water.
Evadne draped a wet cloth over his forehead, but it felt as warm as blood. Tomoe and Sakura were talking somewhere nearby. Then Evadne was gone and Una was kneeling beside him, pressing another bottle of water into his hand. She murmured, ‘Perhaps I did something wrong, pulling the stitches out.’
Varius shook his head. ‘It’s the same as before.’ He put a hand, gingerly, to his back. There was a well of heat there, beneath the ribs. ‘I think . . . they didn’t clear everything out; whatever hit me, something went deeper, there’s something still in there . . .’
He closed his eyes, and so missed the look on Una’s face, but he felt her hand tighten and tremble on his. For the first time it occurred to him that she was afraid he was dying, and he dragged his eyelids open to look at her in surprise. ‘It’s all right, I’m not that bad,’ he said, and fell into confused, weightless sleep.
Noriko had changed out of the skimpy dress into the loose trousers and sleeveless tunic she’d been wearing before. She watched Varius with sympathy, but she was, for now, incapable of real worry, and confident he would soon recover. She was too happy even to fear the flight across the front. She sat cross-legged on the sand, trying to comb the sand out of her hair and gloating silently at how soon she would see her brothers, almost humming their names aloud to herself.
Una glanced at her across their heaped belongings and felt another blunt scrape of envy and loneliness.
Suddenly the comparison occurred to Noriko too. She looked across at Una and asked, ‘Is your brother in Tamiathis still?’
‘No,’ said Una, ‘he’s fighting the war.’
Noriko stared. ‘No,’ she said, as if the statement made no sense at all, or as if Sulien ought to have been able to explain his situation to somebody and claim an exemption. She lowered her eyes, sombre now. ‘Of course. I am sorry. How could he avoid it? But it seems so . . . wrong.’
‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Una, quietly, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms round them.
Noriko was silent, adding up the damage to Varius’ back, the bombs falling on Rome, Sulien’s absence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, at last.
‘You’ve had no part in any of this,’ Una said.
‘I was supposed to have a part in stopping it,’ said Noriko, sighing. ‘No,
I know Drusus began the war. Your brother would not be in danger if not for him. But we are the danger. Or part of it, at least.’ She smiled sadly at Una. ‘I will do anything I can to help.’
Varius woke later to find Una was shaking his arm, whispering urgently, ‘They’re here.’
Varius lifted his head with a groan and saw that Evadne and the truck were already gone, and two men were striding purposefully towards them. They were dressed in the light linen robes they’d seen as they drove through Pharusium, and Varius blinked in confusion when they bowed to Noriko and addressed her in Nionian. There was nothing he thought of as Nionian about their features, and they were both dark-skinned, the older of the two darker than Varius himself. From a distance, at least, they might have been taken for African, but close up, and having heard them speak, there was something about their features that was out of place here. It took a moment for him to realise that they were probably from Goshu or Palawa – one of Nionia’s southern possessions.
The older man was conferring with Noriko, Sakura and Tomoe. Sakura had begun to cry a little with excitement and the last pangs of homesickness. The other agent came and bent over Varius, studying him.
‘Can you walk?’ he asked suddenly, in Latin, and Varius recognised his voice: this was the agent he had spoken to on the longdictor.
Varius rubbed at his face. The fine sand crept everywhere, into their hair, nostrils, tear-ducts, the whorls of their ears. He felt as if it had worked its way under his skin.
‘Yes,’ he said, and he tried, clumsily, to rise.
The man frowned and heaved him unceremoniously to his feet, slung Varius’ arm over his shoulders and marched him off towards a gap in the rocky hills ahead. Once he was standing, Varius didn’t believe he really needed the man’s support, but he managed only a vague mumble of protest as the man hauled him along. And it did seem a very long walk across the sand, with Una pacing anxiously beside him, before they reached two camouflaged desert cars waiting for them in the shadow of the rocks. The Nionian women were escorted into the car ahead, and Varius worried hazily that he and Una would be left behind after all. But the pair of vehicles stayed close together, and Varius felt his throat tense with nausea again, and he forgot to think about it.
The Nionians’ cars were more agile than Evadne’s battered secondhand truck and skimmed very fast across the sand until they reached a shallow crater where a team of men were dragging the sand-coloured covers off a black volucer. It was a Roman military craft, and the men were dressed in Roman uniform, and for Varius the seasick sway of the world worsened when he heard them shouting to each other in Nionian.
Noriko and her ladies-in-waiting were already inside, dwarfed by armoured tabards and helmets. Tomoe sat drooping forward and covering her face, overwhelmed, while Sakura was still laughing and crying at once, and Noriko was turned towards the window, gazing out solemnly at the empty Roman sand.
There was armour for Varius and Una too, which Varius decided was not worth the effort of putting on. He collapsed onto a seat, once again almost paralysed with fatigue. But he’d barely shut his eyes before Una was grimly lifting his head and strapping the helmet on for him. ‘It won’t help, if anything hits us,’ he protested wearily.
She scowled and pressed the breastplate against his chest. ‘It would have helped if you’d been wearing something like that in Tamiathis.’ Her palm rested for a moment over his heart.
The volucer rose in a cloud of sand and for almost an hour they flew through utter emptiness, the sky black and silent, the desert rippling in the starlight below them like the bland upper surface of clouds. Then, as they approached the triple border point of Libya, Egypt and Nubia, they began to hear the grind of other machines in the sky around them, and then a low stutter of anti-aircraft fire. Specks of fire scattered like gold coins across the earth and sky.
The volucer shook and plunged, the five passengers gasping and clutching at each other as a flash of cold light broke over them. In the cockpit the pilot shouted something in urgent Nionian into his radio and banked sharply.
Una pressed against the juddering window, watching the flarings of light in the dark, wondering if Sulien were somewhere down there, on the ground.
[ XVII ]
SURIJIN
The palace at Axum was armoured against the summer heat in heavy stone; the hall was shadowy and cool. The Roman frescoes of fighting Olympians had already been painted over with a bright mural of people in robes advancing solemnly around the walls, their hands uplifted, their faces framed in yellow haloes. Una looked up at an arch above the heavy doors at the back of the room, where a man approached a burning tree standing on a crag against a circle of clouds. She didn’t know the story, but she thought she knew what it meant. ‘Please,’ she thought, gazing at it, her jaw tight with anticipation, as they waited for Tadahito.
The doors opened, and the Nionian princes appeared with the Ethiopian king.
The king wore military uniform, now: white and gold, in contrast to Drusus’ black. But Tadahito had never adopted it, although he’d been far closer to the front line than Drusus ever had. He was more simply dressed than when Una and Varius had seen him in Sina, but he was still elegant, the long patterned sleeves of his pale linen tunic tied back from his forearms, gold silk braid knotted over the sash at his waist. Noriko hesitated for a moment, staring at her brother across the length of the hall, conscious of her dusty clothes, her hair.
‘Noriko!’ said Kaneharu, his voice high and loud with simple delight, like a child’s.
Then Tadahito gave a choking cry and rushed forwards to wrap her in his arms, and they staggered together, both weeping.
Una smiled for Noriko’s sake, but wanly. The scenes of Sulien’s safe return that were forever trying to play themselves in her imagination always chilled her – he stepped through some door, off a train, but he came stained in emptiness that stayed on her like ink after the daydream ended. It was hard work, suppressing these dangerous little plays in her head, it couldn’t be sustained with one of them acted out in front of her.
Noriko stumbled from Tadahito’s arms to Kaneharu, and then Takanari. Kaneharu swung her off the floor, laughing, but for a moment Tadahito sobbed, making no attempt to restrain or disguise it. Then he wiped his eyes, and looked at Una and Varius. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and managed to pull a temporary scrap of formality across his face. ‘I know we need to talk; please allow us just a little time.’
He hurried away with his brothers and sister through the doors.
Varius looked at Una, murmured, ‘It might be less than a month – it might be days, before we bring him back.’
Una smiled again, unevenly, and wondered how much rested on this meeting.
King Salomon examined Una and Varius curiously, and Varius panted, ‘Your Majesty,’ and bowed shallowly, afraid of losing his balance or provoking the pain skulking in his muscles.
‘You are Varius Ischyrion and Noviana Una?’ Salomon asked. ‘You were both part of Leo the Younger’s circle.’
Una could tell that this comment, where it included her, carried a subtle load of prurient disapproval, but Salomon was at least gracious enough to try to disguise it.
‘He is the reason the Prince says I am too unforgiving to the Roman Empire. He says if Leo the Younger had lived he would have made it something different.’
Varius and Una glanced at each other and shifted a little closer together, the better to bear the thought of how things would have been different. But it seemed hopeful to them too, that Tadahito still talked with such regret of Marcus. Varius said, because it was simplest, ‘Yes, he would.’
The King gestured him towards a chair. ‘You should sit down, Varius Ischyrion. We were told you were ill. There are doctors waiting to see you.’
‘Thank you,’ Varius said, sitting down, still surprised and ashamed at being so visibly weak, ‘but I have to talk to the Prince first.’
Una watched him. ‘You have to let them look at you.’
>
‘After this.’
‘You can’t play around with this, Varius.’
‘I’m not – just another hour. I’ll be all right that long.’ And he did feel better than he had on the journey across the desert. He’d slept on the volucer, once they had dodged through the thickets of gunfire above the battlefields at the borders of Nubia. He’d been given tablets that had soaked up the worst of the pain and heat. But the air seemed to be slipping through the grasp of his lungs, and it was more than twenty-four hours since he’d been able to eat anything. He knew that once he lay down he wouldn’t be getting up again for a while.
The King left them, and they waited. Varius’ head throbbed heavily, but even with eyes shut, he was oddly attentive to Una’s footsteps, following her restless progress around the room as she paced and glared at the paintings.
At last Tadahito returned, alone. ‘It has been so long since I saw either of you,’ he said, ‘and I am sorry you are hurt, Varius. It has been a terrible time for everyone – and both of you more than most.’
‘Both empires have suffered greatly,’ agreed Varius carefully, ‘and now Sina is involved as well.’
‘If you want asylum in Nionia – anywhere in the Nionian Empire – of course it is yours,’ said Tadahito. ‘And Lady Noviana, you believe your brother is somewhere in Alodia or Nobatia? I wish I could promise his safety, after you brought me back my sister— But if by any chance he falls into our hands, of course I will ensure he is looked after.’
‘Thank you,’ said Una. ‘My brother and I did hope to ask you for asylum once. But we came here to discuss the end of the war.’
Tadahito’s expression – friendly and attentive – remained oddly fixed, while his body seemed to sag with weariness. He said politely, ‘I see.’
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