Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘This should have killed me, shouldn’t it?’ Pas went on, putting his hand to the blotchy scar on the side of his neck. He smiled lopsidedly. ‘It didn’t look worse than it was. I could feel it. And it’s not just me. Galeo was going to die of sunstroke. And Acilius should have lost his hand . . .’

  Sulien exhaled. ‘All right, Pas,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I’m Novianus Sulien.’

  ‘What?’ yelled Dorion, shockingly loud in that wasteland of corpses and dust, and hurled himself down off the roof of the truck to stare at Sulien’s face.

  ‘Well then,’ Pas said, shrugging. ‘If half of what those posters said was true . . . if you could get out of the Colosseum . . .’

  ‘Oh blind gods!’ Dorion exclaimed, and began to shake with shrill, breathless laughter.

  ‘Dorion,’ said Pas, ‘calm down.’ He strode grimly to the nearest truck, leant in over the driver’s corpse and tried the engine. ‘It’s still working,’ he called.

  Sulien gave Dorion’s shoulder a shake. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’ve worked with me all this time – you know everything they said about my sister and me wasn’t true. You know Drusus lies. He lied when he sent us here.’

  Dorion giggled a little more. ‘So you’re not a revolutionary maniac who wants to bring down the government?’

  ‘Well,’ admitted Sulien, ‘I am that a bit.’

  Dorion trembled and went still. ‘All right,’ he said, in an almost normal voice, though his eyes were still wide and unfocused, ‘fine.’

  [ XVIII ]

  ONAGER

  Sulien steered the Onager away from that place as fast as he could. His heart was beating almost painfully hard, but steadily, like a bell tolling. The dust was only a soft bloom on the blue sky now. They’d had to dismantle a horrible barricade of bodies and vehicles to get the Onager free, sweating and crying as they hauled corpses away from the back wheels of trucks, then down from their cabs, so that they could climb in and back each one away. At last Sulien threaded the bulk of the carrier through the obstacles and past the stricken convoy.

  Dorion sat hunched in the cab beside Sulien, sometimes shaking, rubbing his hands over his hair. ‘They’ll see us,’ he gabbled quietly, as much to himself as to Sulien, ‘they might not have seen us through the dust before, but now they will. From the air, or on the road . . . come on, Shouter, we’re not going to be able to get anywhere in this thing – where are we going to go?’

  ‘They’ve been pulling all their people a safe distance from that thing. They won’t get back for a while,’ answered Sulien, ‘and even if they do see us from the air, they’ll only think we’re one of theirs. What else is going to be alive down here?’

  Pas was driving close behind them in a smaller truck they’d scavenged from the battlefield. ‘There’s a city on the other side of those mountains,’ he said over the radio, ‘almost due east, seventy or eighty miles away.’

  ‘It’s too far,’ whispered Dorion.

  Sulien clenched his teeth. ‘We’ll have to get as close as we can.’

  Dorion relaxed, just a little, when they reached a pass up into the mountains and a bird sprang up from a clump of pines. Sulien gave a shaken laugh of relief too: it was so good to see things alive again.

  The weight of the Onager’s carrier began to tell. Sulien had never driven anything as heavy before; it had been hard enough down on the plains and across the shallow rises of the desert, but now the effort of guiding it round these narrow mountain roads wrenched at his already tense body, spilled nervous sweat from his skin. His hands gripped and slid on the controls. How ridiculous it would be if this ended with the Roman superweapon stuck between overhanging cliffs, he thought, or sliding off down a slope of shale, or stranded on a thread of road too narrow to let them turn back.

  After the murky russets and browns of the desert, the greens and silvers they were plunging into now seemed barely believable. A pale jade river in spate blasted along beside the road; a waterfall hung in white columns above a gorge. Sulien had forgotten water could move like that, so lavish and reckless. A lake gleamed blue in an urn-shaped crevasse. They passed into a thick forest, trees larger than anything Sulien had seen before, the dark-red trunks broad as tanks, the splaying roots like huge webbed feet.

  The scale of it all daunted them both. Sulien went on promising Dorion that they weren’t lost, that they could find their way to where they needed to be and then back to the others, but every time the road led them above the screens of trees, another immense field of domes and peaks opened ahead, against which even the Onager’s bulk seemed tiny. And they hadn’t even looked at its control panel yet. Even if it did work, they wouldn’t know what to do; they’d press some wrong button and destroy themselves and everything around them.

  Sometimes it was Dorion who reassured Sulien: ‘Oh, it can’t be that hard,’ he said, unsteadily, dragging himself upright from the curled position he’d been lying in. ‘They only needed geniuses to build the thing, not to fire it. Who did they make it for? Grunts like us.’

  The roads were hushed and empty. Sometimes they saw villages of low wooden cottages among the trees, and once they passed a pair of trappers, animal skins slung over their shoulders, who looked at them in the same horror with which Dorion and Sulien looked back. But no one spoke or aimed a gun at them, and so Sulien continued to man-handle the Onager onwards. Once volucers growled above them while the three of them were clustered around a map at the roadside, and for a moment Sulien was back in the Pyrenees with Una and Marcus, and tears filled his eyes again. He wiped them away without trying to hide that he’d been crying; it was too late for shame now. The others said nothing.

  They reached a thin loop of road above a sheer cliff of bare grey rock. Below them the mountains rolled down the sky to the east, and for the first time Sulien thought he could just see a soft colourless blur of level ground between two peaks. He pulled out his binoculars and stepped down from the cab. The air up here was cool and soft, a different substance from what they’d been breathing all these weeks. The sky was pale, the light just beginning to leak away. Sulien trained the binoculars on that small crescent of the true horizon, held between the mountains as if in a cup.

  ‘It’s there,’ he said.

  He had to turn up the magnification as far as it would go, and then he couldn’t hold the binoculars steady enough to pick out any details of the city; it was just a pale grey pattern of blocks and lines. He saw the glint of the evening sunlight on the flanks of volucers circling above it like gnats, but not even a pinprick of electric light. They would be afraid, of course, of Roman bombs. It was only a hundred and thirty miles or so from Yuuhigawa, the Tokaganean capital. Sulien thought of that first night of the war, watching rockets pour down onto Yuuhigawa on that screen in Aternum, and nights with Una in the air-raid shelter in Alexandria, and he lowered the binoculars with a tremor of longing and pity.

  ‘What’s it called?’ he asked Pas, who had the map.

  ‘Tamohara,’ answered Pas softly.

  Sulien stared across the mountains. He wanted the land itself to offer some sign, something to assure them that this was the right place, that they were not monstrously stupid, or evil.

  He didn’t think they had the strength or certainty to keep going much further. ‘We’ll try here,’ he said.

  With only three of them it took a long time just to drag off the Onager’s cover, and once it was clear, Dorion slumped with fatigue against the dark mass of coils and rails as if it were something as harmless as a sun-warmed brick wall.

  ‘It might not work at all,’ Sulien said, almost hopefully.

  But when he climbed into the control deck and tentatively pressed a switch above the main dials, the Onager rose as if with slow curiosity from its cradle, its black mouth spreading open as if to eat – or to vomit.

  The controls were not quite as simple as Dorion had hoped, but they were not completely unfathomable either. The Onager’s sensors had calibrated its own elevation
already; they spent some time breathlessly arguing over the map and the compass, trying to calculate that of the city. Finally Sulien entered the co-ordinates, and with a low whir like the buzz of a vast wasp, and with awful clarity of movement, the cone angled and swung towards that faint smudge on the horizon where however many thousands of people lived.

  And then he turned the dials so that the Onager drew its aim a little to the side, a few degrees closer back. And over and over again he looked from the map to the dials to the mouth of the Onager, trying to be sure its empty black gaze was fixed now on one of those distant peaks that framed the city.

  Sulien looked at the screen. Beside a simple model of the target drawn in lines of blue light, it blandly offered a range of possible depths and breadths and scales of impact. He knew, as he turned the dial upwards, that he was guessing what those figures meant.

  The Onager’s cone closed up again, narrowing to a long dark muzzle.

  Sulien gently lifted his hands from the control panel, afraid a careless movement now would undo the settings or worse.

  ‘Anyone else feel like being the one to do this?’ he offered, looking at the heavy lever set into the panel.

  The others glanced at each other, suddenly breathless. ‘Sorry,’ said Pas, stepping back.

  Delicately, as if the machine might break, Sulien took hold of the handle. Under his ribs, something was twisting so hard it was about to tear in half. He thought of Rome, terrible and beautiful, crashing through history; he thought of the Colosseum and of rooms where he had mistakenly felt safe, and he thought of Marcus. He pushed the handle to the top of its groove.

  The mountains screamed.

  The noise of the wave of pressure that burst from the Onager’s mouth was below hearing, but the treetops splintered as it ripped across the landscape and struck the far peak with a crack that throbbed through everything. Sulien felt his eardrums burst and tumbled down from the platform, wrapping his head in his arms, to join Pas and Dorion. They all cringed together on the ground, waiting for it to stop.

  Then Sulien raised watering eyes long enough to see the top of the peak split and crumble, and a great column of dust spiralled up as if a volcano had erupted. The shattered rock slid away and disappeared over the new, wounded horizon.

  The ground and air were still trembling with shock. Above them, birds were raising havoc in the air, their frantic calls muted by the ringing in their ears. Sulien was shaking almost too hard to find the city again through the binoculars, but before the dust spread across the distance and covered the horizon, he did see it. All he could tell was that it was still there.

  ‘I can’t hear,’ Dorion mumbled.

  ‘He can fix it,’ gasped Pas, ‘come on! We’ve got to get away from here.’

  They piled into the small truck and bounced away, leaving the Onager standing on the mountainside, still staring into the distance.

  *

  Tadahito stared at the laurel wreath carved into the footboard of his bed. The palace at Axum, with its huge red walls, was very different from what he always pictured when he thought of Rome, but inside it was impossible to forget this had once been a governor’s palace in a province of the Roman Empire. Salomon was busily trying to strip all that away and fill up the space with something new – so new as to seem raw, faintly unnerving, even, to Tadahito: a whole culture force-grown over less than two hundred years out of just a few scraps of belief and tradition the Romans had left untouched.

  For months Tadahito had barely slept more than two solid hours at a time. He could coax himself asleep, but he could not stay there. Now he lay there trying, for a little while at least, not to think about the war, not to dwell on Varius and Una’s horror at the end he planned for it. He reminded himself that Noriko was safe now; that this whole thing was nearly over. He would be able to resume his life, and the discussions of possible marriages the war had interrupted. But the usual hooks of tension remained lodged in his muscles and kept dragging him through dreams of ruined cities and poisoned children, and then out of sleep altogether.

  So although it was long before dawn, he was already awake when his chamberlain quietly entered his room.

  ‘What is it?’ he murmured. He wondered if Varius had died.

  Lord Morokata’s face was blurred by the curtain, but Tadahito could see how tense his posture was. Morokata answered, ‘The Romans appear to have deployed a Surijin-like device in Tokogane.’

  Tadahito sat up with a gasp, and the next moment had to suppress an impulse to let himself drop back onto the pillows in despair. They were not at the end of the war, then; the end had slipped away into a poisoned distance.

  It was a moment before he could even speak. ‘What was the target?’

  Morokata hesitated slightly. ‘It seems to have been Tomacho, in Sorasanmyaku, your Highness.’

  Tadahito did not notice the hint of equivocation. There was scarcely a city in the Nionian Empire he could not have placed almost instantly on a map; he was able to measure its proximity to Yuuhigawa at once. He surged out of bed and flung a robe over his nightclothes. He asked, ‘Is there anything left of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Morokata, ‘there was an avalanche, but the city was not significantly damaged at all. It may have been a misfire.’

  Dazed, Tadahito shook his head. ‘How could they miss?’

  *

  It was dark by the time they reached the radio bunker hidden on the western slopes of the mountains. Crowded inside the radio control room, Sulien’s centuria and their four Nionian prisoners sprawled on the floor or perched on desks as if in a disorderly classroom; their eyes were wide and forlorn. Asper had enlisted one of the prisoners into a game of dice. There was a mess of empty tins and packets on the floor, and a faintly gingery, meaty smell in the air: the Romans had discovered the base’s rations store. Sulien suddenly noticed how hungry he was.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Minius, as Sulien, Pas and Dorion lurched inside.

  ‘Oh, what isn’t?’ Dorion said, dropping cross-legged to the floor in exhaustion.

  The soldier with the tattooed face was hunched on the floor, his head down. Sulien crossed over to him. ‘You,’ he said, ‘you speak Latin; what’s your name?’

  The man ignored him, but Minius said, ‘He’s called Hidaka; that’s what the others say.’

  ‘Hidaka. You must have been taking orders from Yuuhigawa,’ said Sulien. ‘Get hold of the most senior person you can there and tell them they have to talk to me.’

  Hidaka said simply, miserably, ‘No. I will do nothing for you.’

  Sulien sighed and hoisted him forcibly to his feet. He steered him over to the banks of equipment. ‘You are going to give your people information that they will want. Someone almost destroyed Tamohara a couple of hours ago; tell them it was Novianus Sulien, and tell them I have to talk to the Crown Prince.’

  ‘Tamohara?’ repeated one of the other prisoners nervously, and Minius started and demanded, ‘It was who—? What happened out there?’

  Hidaka stared at Sulien for a moment, then sullenly turned to the desk and lifted a headset, muttering, ‘When they know you are here they will kill us all.’

  ‘Tell them the Onager’s still aimed at Tamohara and we have someone waiting to fire it again in twenty minutes if he doesn’t hear from us,’ said Pas.

  Sulien glanced at him. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘Say that.’

  ‘Why haven’t they found where it came from yet?’ asked Prince Kaneharu.

  ‘It’s dark,’ said Tadahito wearily. ‘There are hundreds of square miles to cover.’

  ‘There is nothing in the region that should have been capable of doing this,’ said Takanari, rubbing his eyes. ‘Not now . . .’

  Tadahito did not know how many times he had heard that phrase over the last hour; he had said it at least once himself. He was not sure what else anyone could say. Although the state room they were using as an operations centre was simmering with jittery activity, he found himself glumly suspect
ing its real purpose was to distract them from the fact that there was nothing they could do. They were too far away.

  But just as he thought that, Morokata looked up from a longdictor and said, ‘Your Highness,’ in a voice that quietened everyone.

  Tadahito turned to him, swallowing down a knot of apprehension in his throat.

  ‘We have an explanation for the situation,’ said Morokata, levelly. ‘A Roman general has captured one of our radio bases in the eastern Kosen Mountains. He’s using our own equipment to contact Yuuhigawa. He claims the blast was a warning shot’ – there was a rustle of breath sucked in or sharply expelled – ‘and he says he is ready to destroy Tomacho in less than a quarter of an hour.’

  There was a strangled silence. ‘Unless what?’ asked Tadahito.

  Takanari was leaning forward. ‘But this man is acting on his own?’

  ‘Not that we should necessarily allow ourselves to be held to ransom in this way, but he is demanding to speak to you, Your Highness,’ said Morokata. ‘And apparently he is adamant that you be told his name: it is Novianus Sulien.’

  ‘Novianus Sulien?’ repeated Tadahito, and blinked. For a moment he almost wondered if he were truly awake. He said, ‘He’s not a general.’

  Kaneharu’s mouth was slightly open, ‘Lady Noviana’s brother,’ he said. ‘How would he be able to do this?’

  ‘If you have one of these weapons, you don’t need an army to fire it,’ murmured Tadahito. ‘Clearly I have no choice but to talk to him. Arrange for the signal to be relayed here. And tell them not to attack until I have finished with him.’

  He found Noriko outside his rooms, wrapped in her parachute silk, her face still a little crumpled with sleep.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said to her, ‘go back to bed.’ He didn’t mean to lie to her; he wanted to keep all this from touching her. He wanted her to be resting peacefully before a morning when the war was almost won.