Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Varius’ hands copied hers, nudging fastenings open, and under her clothes he felt the warm patterns of claw- and toothmarks threaded and banded across her body; his fingers discovered a spool of fine ridges that ran down across her shoulder to her breast. He held her tighter, so sorry and so glad they were there, the living hum of her body ringing softly through the smooth and marked skin alike. He bent his lips to the scars, feeling he could lay down small protective wards, like plates of invisible armour, little seals of resolve that he would never let it happen again. And he remembered holding her face between his hands the day the wounds had been made, the urgency, the jolt of recognition.

  And at that the illusion or pretence that they were only dreaming or not themselves vanished and he was fully awake and incredulous, and bewildered, and angry with himself – with both of them. And he startled into a confused struggle where his intentions seemed to tangle and double back on themselves, so that when he meant to let go of her he clutched her more fiercely instead, rolled her underneath him, pulling aside her clothes and his own. And she met him with just as much panicked, grasping force: kissing harder, teeth and fingernails out, hands closing on each other’s hair. Whatever he was trying to say kept getting crushed breathlessly between them.

  But at last he remembered how to stop, and he dragged himself clear. He sat up and knelt there on the bed in the dark, gasping. The Ananke rose and fell, and he wished everything would keep still for a minute so that he could think.

  Una was still, naked on the bed beside him. Then she raised herself so that they were kneeling face to face, staring, though it was too dark to see more than each other’s shadowed outline, the faint liquid glint of each other’s eyes.

  ‘Una,’ he said, in a whisper, and his voice sounded questioning, lost.

  Tentatively, Una laid her face against the join of his neck and shoulder. He felt her sigh again, her breath skimming like a feather across his chest. Varius closed his arms around her, feeling a baffling prickle of tears in his eyes. And he thought that it was too late now anyway, and, surprised at how lovely a thought that was, he gathered her even closer, lifting her into his lap. They both trembled again as her legs parted around him, moving now with the slow rock of the sea, and when they fell together onto the bed again he found tears on her face too, tasted the salt on his lips.

  Varius woke and the cabin was full of light. He turned his head at once to look at Una because he had not forgotten for a moment. It was the memory, the excitement that had woken him. Una had moved a little away from him as they slept and was not touching him, though both her hands were extended across the covers towards him. He couldn’t see her face; it was hidden under her hair.

  He wanted to pull her back into his arms, but he was afraid of waking her, afraid to see regret flicker into focus on her face.

  He worried: because it was too ingrained a mental habit to stop now, almost deliberately trying to distract himself from the happiness buzzing and singing through him like a radio playing too loud. Almost two years after Gemella’s death he’d tried to love someone else, and he remembered how miserable he had made himself with guilt and stirred-up grief. Una might feel that now, and there would be nothing he could do to change it.

  But he didn’t feel that himself. He found he could think of Gemella, even with Una lying there beside him – not quite without pain, but without any sense of betrayal, and without disrupting the flow of happiness that kept thrumming through him, louder and louder no matter what he thought about.

  It was strange he could be so sure of something it had not occurred to him to want before.

  He lay there, anxious, smiling, waiting for her to open her eyes.

  [ XX ]

  NOVIANA, NOVIANUS

  The sky was as clear as they’d hoped, the breeze just strong enough to grind the black surface of the water to a fine glittering grain, like coal powder. A little ahead, the Carmenta’s lights led the way. The Ananke and the short trail of smaller boats that had joined them as they passed Milos sailed dark.

  In the western distance, towards Paros, a few red sparks shone, detached as stars. Even Una was uncertain at first whether they had anything to do with the small, jumbled assembly of fishing boats and motor dinghies creeping north among the Cyclades. But the distant vessels wandered eastwards, and closer together, and a white light flashed briefly in greeting. Pas, perched on the Ananke’s prow, raised an arm, but Una had already seen it. It meant that around those seeds of light a flotilla was growing.

  Then the Ananke sailed around the flank of Polyaigos and into the vanguard of a long advancing line of ships. Una’s hands tightened painfully on the ship’s controls. She felt little spikes of joy hammering in her chest. Suddenly it was just as she had imagined it: a rebel navy gathering at the heart of the Empire, ships full of free, stubborn men and women, sailing towards Siphnos.

  Behind the island’s steep wooded slopes, another hundred ships were closing in.

  Una steered as close to a beach on the western shore as she dared, drawing up alongside the Carmenta, whose lights winked out. Sulien was close beside her in the cockpit; Varius was at the anchor in the stern – he and Una were keeping a shy, cagey distance from each other just now. Lal and Ziye were crouched on the deck of an old fishing boat that had had no name, until Chaeremon had named it Alexandria. Una could see them, just twenty feet across the water.

  Varius dropped the anchor into the shallows and they waited. It was too late – in the night, and the war, and the gradual desertion of the island – for there to be any glint of electric lights showing now. Siphnos was blindfolded, while out on the sea the ships drew in towards it.

  Then a light flashed three times, high on the island’s north peak, then another, much closer, just above the beach.

  Una and Sulien looked at each other, and their breathing fell into rapid step. Scouts had already scaled the northeastern slopes, then: the first wave of fighters should be ringed around the little port that was Siphnos’ largest town.

  Varius was the first to climb down over the side into the water. It was autumn now, and he gasped at the chill. Una and Sulien dropped after him and ploughed through the dark water up to the beach. Underwater, Varius and Una managed a cold and fumbling clasp of hands. Ziye waded to shore hand-in-hand with Lal while Delir helped to drag a dinghy up onto the sand, not daring to let the motors sound yet.

  More than three hundred others came with them, mismatched weapons held high above the water as they stumbled on rocks and hurdled the low waves onto the beach. Their names banged in Una’s head.

  Bupe’s party had splashed onto the beach ahead of them. Thirty of them were crouched here on the sand, checking weapons, shaking water from their boots. Another twenty of the freed slaves who’d once fought for Dama would be landing at the western harbour.

  Bupe glanced at Una. ‘Sure that’s all you want?’

  Una was armed only with a wooden staff that had once been a rake. Many here tonight had spades, or lengths of pipe, or breadknives, rather than guns. Ziye had nothing at all. But even so they outnumbered the vigils, and they should still outgun them, provided they could keep reinforcements away from the island for long enough.

  ‘I’ll get by,’ she said.

  Bupe adjusted the grip of her prosthesis on her rifle with practised skill using fingers and teeth. The hooks had been customised to fit the stock. Her head was bare tonight, revealing the soft, rather childlike features untouched by the crumpled patch of bleached scar tissue.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘time to try.’

  They surged up the beach, through the dark olive groves, and on up the hill towards Makaria’s house.

  There were fewer guards now; the youngest and strongest had been channelled away into the war. The invaders poured through the streets of Siphnos’ villages, seeking out those who were left. The island’s emigrants had given them a rough description of a large house that had been requisitioned for barracks for the vigiles, and it wasn’t h
ard to find – there were few that size left that weren’t boarded up.

  They easily overwhelmed the single officer standing guard outside and flooded in. A few excited gunshots peppered windows and ceilings, but not flesh; there was no need; they had surrounded the sleeping vigiles before any of them could reach their own weapons. Now they set to work sorting and tying their prisoners into manageable roomfuls of trussed bundles, and settled in to wait.

  In a guard post outside gates of Makaria’s villa, one of the three Praetorians on the night shift reached instinctively for the button on the desk, and alarms began to shriek through the house and grounds, just as he realised that neither the twelve men stationed here, nor all the vigiles in the barracks, would possibly be enough. The others ran outside, though he could not begin to imagine what they planned to do. The sound of gunfire rattled the windows as he started to dial the longdictor code for the base in Athens, and as it connected, a gang forced their way through the door and crowded inside the little room. He dragged off the longdictor circlet and drew his pistol, but froze as a slim black girl with one bright eye and a gun in her truncated hands pushed in between the others, sauntering with casual grace.

  Gazing down the barrel of her gun, Bupe began to talk. ‘I’ve been practising a long time,’ she said, in a quiet, conversational voice. She had said this before, to people like him – security guards and night-watchmen and sometimes frightened slave-owners in their nightclothes, ‘but I’m still a terrible shot. You can see how I have . . . disadvantages.’ A bullet slammed into the plaster beside him. ‘There, you see? I was trying to hit you then. I was angry. But maybe that was unfair. I should give you a chance.’

  She swung the gun, without any appearance of attending to where it was pointing. The Praetorian let his own gun fall.

  ‘Call the mainland again,’ said Bupe, ‘say some drunk kids from Seriphos tried to land on the beach, but you’ve seen them off. Make it sound good. Convince me.’

  As Una had expected, her staff never connected with anything but air, but the mass of people bristled and snarled and heaved at the villa’s gates. From inside a handful of bullets punctured the crowd, and there were screams of pain and rage, and they pushed and slammed with greater ferocity against the bars.

  But no one had yet been killed here, she was sure of it.

  ‘Drop your weapons and you won’t be hurt.’ Through the loudspeaker, Varius’ voice was calm, implacable. ‘That is a promise. You cannot fight us and win.’

  Silence stretched between both sides, pulled tight, then the pressure against the gates built, steadier and heavier, as more people piled into the back of the crowd. For a moment Una was flattened painfully against the steel, and panic started to swell as her lungs constricted. Then the gates gave and the crowd swept into the garden.

  There were ten men, all backing away towards the villa, their hands raised, their guns scattered across the gravel drive in front of them.

  ‘There could be others,’ Una said. ‘Check every room.’

  The company spilled around the building, circling it like wolves. They were ready to hold anyone else out while they pushed for a way in. They beat at the doors, broke windows.

  Inside, Sulien and Pas charged up the stairs.

  Makaria elbowed her way out of bed after a breathless fight with her sheets. Once on her feet, she stood looking around in the dark, trembling at the howl of the alarm and the jolts of worse sounds, yet almost affronted by the absence of someone to explain them to her. Then, gathering herself, she flung open her door and raced across the landing looking for Hypatia.

  Halfway between their rooms, Hypatia met her, gasping, ‘Is it the Nionians?’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Makaria. ‘What would they want with us?’ But a gunshot boomed inside the house, and she remembered the besieged room in the Golden House where Marcus’ body had lain, Salvius’ corpse sprawled on the stairs. She knew so little of the progress of the war; if Nionia has taken Rome, she thought, with creaking slowness because it remained so nearly unthinkable, perhaps they would come to finish off the last of the Novii.

  If that was so, it was useless to think of escape for herself. She could not help but shrink in Hypatia’s arms for a moment, overpowered by the warmth of her skin, the scent of her hair – but no, she should concentrate on what might be possible for Hypatia while there was still time.

  But someone was already thundering up the stairs and Hypatia was dragging her back towards the bedroom they had once shared, hissing, ‘Lock the door!’

  ‘I should go and meet them,’ said Makaria dully, thinking again of Salvius, the fallen gun by his hand.

  ‘No!’

  Makaria straightened. ‘Go back to your room: barricade yourself in there until things quieten down—’

  But Hypatia wrestled her inside the bedroom and locked the door herself. Someone called out on the landing, ‘Lady Novia!’ It was – or at least it sounded like – a Roman voice. Makaria grimaced, and she and Hypatia searched each other’s eyes. The bewilderment was too much more to bear.

  Footsteps tramped closer and a fist thumped on the door. ‘Lady Novia, open the door. It’s me – it’s Sulien.’

  Makaria tried to breathe. She knew it couldn’t be Sulien, and she could not imagine any motive anyone could have for pretending. Pinned between these impossibilities, she could not move. It was Hypatia who finally, and seemingly out of sheer curiosity, went back and opened the door.

  If she hadn’t already heard him speak, Makaria might not have recognised him in the uniform and with the cropped hair, but that voice, along with the height— She took a step back towards a seat that wasn’t there, just managed not to fall. She croaked, ‘But you—? The arena— You’re alive—?’

  Sulien grinned crookedly. ‘People keep saying that to me lately,’ he said.

  Makaria stared at him, for another moment, feeling almost devastated with shock. But then, almost before she felt the pleasure to support it, an answering grin began pulling at her own lips. She ventured, ‘And your sister . . .?’

  ‘She’s outside,’ said Sulien, and Makaria gave a little snort of amazed laughter. ‘You’ve got to get your shoes on and come, now; there’s no time for anything else. There are clothes for you on the boat.’

  Makaria turned as readily towards her dressing room as if she’d expected this, primed with eagerness to escape. But she did ask, ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ corrected Hypatia.

  Sulien smiled again. ‘Rome, of course.’

  The boats were already beginning to scatter. Bupe’s fifty fighters would occupy Siphnos for another day, keeping the news of the raid locked up with the Praetorians and vigiles. And even if they failed, and volucers did sweep in, it would be impossible to pick Makaria off the face of the Aegean. The three fastest vessels they had were waiting along the string of islands leading north from Seriphos, and each one would carry her a little closer to Athens.

  Makaria managed another dazed smile at Sulien as he helped push the dinghy off the sand. ‘See you tomorrow, then,’ she said thinly.

  ‘It’s already today,’ answered Sulien, and Makaria trembled a little beside Hypatia, but the air was damp and she was only wearing a linen nightdress, so it might have been only the cold.

  It was too dark to see them climbing on board the Alexandria, but he watched the silhouette of the ship as she began to move, and saw its wake when it brushed the sand at his feet.

  He heard Una calling his name, her voice sharp with concern. Lal was sitting on a stone, breathing hard and shivering. Ziye was bent over her and Una standing with a hand on her shoulder. Sulien strode across to them in alarm, though he saw almost at once that Lal wasn’t hurt.

  ‘She killed one of them,’ Ziye explained.

  Sulien crouched in front of her. Her hands were freezing when he gathered them into his.

  Lal announced in a crumpled voice, ‘He was in the room in the dark— We were climbing in— He
was against the wall—’

  ‘Someone thought he’d make a last stand,’ explained Ziye, like a translator. ‘Nearly took her with him.’ She added, with subtle but evident pride, ‘She was so fast.’

  ‘Then you had to, Lal,’ murmured Sulien. ‘You had to.’

  ‘I don’t want my father to know—’

  ‘You think he’d rather you were dead? He’ll just be happy you’re safe.’

  Lal nodded jerkily, but her eyes remained wide and glassy. ‘I know, I know, but I . . .’ She looked at Una. ‘Am I the only one?’ she asked. ‘Did anyone else—? Did you—?’

  Una said, ‘If you did, I did, Lal – I brought you here. And I was afraid far worse might happen.’

  Lal’s cold fingers seemed to steady a little in Sulien’s hands. She said, ‘The way he looked—’

  ‘I know,’ said Sulien. For a moment he thought of telling her that he didn’t know how many people he’d killed in Mohavia, and then decided there was nothing in that fact to comfort anyone. He rocked her against him, in silence.

  ‘We have to move,’ said Una, at last.

  Lal let Sulien lead her onto the Ananke and fell heavily asleep, with Sulien curled around her on the narrow bunk. Una collapsed on the one opposite.

  Varius took the first turn at the helm. The moon and sky were brighter now, a paring of lemon-peel against the blue. The other boats slid away around him. The solitude between these bouts of communal effort was strange, bracing. He breathed in the quiet, and let his mind shuttle back and forth across this point in time, and found every thought entwined around Una, lying just a few feet below him in the dark.

  Long before his time was up, Una crept up onto the deck and wrapped her arms round him. She turned her face to his chest and found bare skin at his collarbone, pressed her lips there. He was, even now, surprised that she should be so eager to touch him, and somehow even more surprised by the feel of her breath on his skin, hungrily inhaling. He took her face in his hands and kissed her with much more ungentle force than he thought he’d meant, and for a moment entirely forgot about the controls of the boat as she pushed him into the pilot’s chair and surged over him. He gasped through his teeth against her cheekbone and struggled to be content with only kissing her, the inhibiting presence of the others below deck, the miles of distance to cover, and their clothes, all in the way.