Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  A wave caught the Ananke broadside, making it lurch. Varius struggled to his feet and reached in alarm to steady it and they laughed under their breath and, grudgingly, subsided. Standing beside him at the wheel, Una took his left hand and seemed absorbed in lifting and turning it over.

  Even now it was hard to keep his eyes on the sea. He gazed at her. Her lips were reddened from kissing him; she was tracing her thumb over the last joint of his forefinger with great care, as if it required delicate and painstaking study.

  Varius suffered another pang of disbelief that this was or ought to be happening. Sobering, or at least trying to, he began, ‘Una—’

  ‘Shh,’ Una said, lowering her lips thoughtfully to the place she’d been stroking.

  ‘I’m too old for you,’ he started.

  Una raised her eyebrows, unimpressed. ‘There’s no point saying something you just want me to talk you out of.’

  Varius stifled a little spurt of caught-out laughter. ‘Humour me.’

  Una sighed. ‘I feel older than I am,’ she offered.

  ‘But so do I.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Una, patiently, ‘how old do you feel?’

  Varius considered. ‘Fifty,’ he decided at last, hesitantly, and then felt embarrassed. Was that really true? He had always felt older, even as a child, and after Gemella’s death and the terrible weeks that had followed he had grown used to the idea that he was inwardly ageing faster than most people. But it had never occurred to him to come up with a number, and now, with Una looking at him with amused exasperation, he found himself wondering if the idea wasn’t rather silly.

  ‘Well, I feel fifty-five,’ said Una. ‘No, sixty. So that makes you an indiscretion I’m having.’

  Varius laughed and freed his hand to pull her closer to him.

  An hour and a half later Sulien rose carefully from Lal’s side for his shift. He was surprised to find Una and Varius both awake and on deck, but Una’s neutral look of innocent calm was so good he would not have suspected anything had Varius matched it. But Varius did not, quite – there was something subtly shifty about his expression and strained in his voice when he spoke. And Sulien was suddenly almost sure they had been holding hands as he came in – which was nothing unusual in itself, although now he thought of it, the frequency with which he’d seen them join hands was unusual for each of them – and he’d caught Varius in the nervous act of letting go.

  Sulien stopped in the cockpit doorway and looked them over. Una’s look of casual composure suddenly faltered badly. Her bottom lip folded under her teeth, her eyes flickered over Varius and trailed sheepishly away.

  Sulien folded his arms. ‘You’re a pair of sneaky bastards,’ he said.

  Rome had changed. Makaria was most appalled by the sight of the Forum, little more than a field of rubble now, and the Cestian Bridge had been smashed into the Tiber. One of the towers of the Golden House itself had been gouged open, and a third of the Septizonium, the band of gates that shielded the main entrance, was gone. But there were also shiny new growths of marble and steel, though none she saw was complete: the huge shell of a new basilica, rising three times as high as the Temple of Apollo which had been demolished to make way for it; two unjoined uprights of a triumphal arch to mark the conquest of Bamaria. But when Makaria descended, dazed, from the Athens– Rome Express, the first thing she saw – the first thing any traveller to Rome arriving at Vatican Fields would see – was a great cage of scaffolding rising from the forecourt, a massive human shape forming within it, one arm raised in greeting. The statue’s face was not yet recognisable but Makaria cringed, certain whose it was intended to be.

  But work on all these new monuments had been abandoned: the basilica gaped rooflessly into the rain, and there was not a single slave up among the pigeons in the scaffolding around the colossus.

  It was only early afternoon. Hypatia had not, in the end, been able to accompany her further than Athens, for there were no identity papers for her. After an hour of waiting, Makaria had been handed her own finished set of documents and, dressed in the well-made but nondescript clothes she’d been given aboard the Alexandria, she was bundled onto a train with a slightly embarrassed man who explained that he would be travelling as her husband.

  No one who checked her tickets or sat opposite her had looked twice at her. It was more than a year since she had appeared in public, and she had never been as fascinating to the cameras or producers of Imperial memorabilia as other members of her famous family.

  A woman called Evadne drove her to a flat in a bombed street off the Via Nomentana, where she was encouraged to sleep. Makaria managed to doze from time to time, but it wasn’t easy; she was aware of people gathering in the outer room, talking in lowered but urgent voices. She lay staring at the damp-stained ceiling, missing Hypatia, her heartbeat stammering at the scale of what they expected from her. And yet at the same time she felt oddly irrelevant to all this activity focused upon her. She’d been passed all this way across the Aegean to Athens, and then to Rome; she was like a weapon, or a coin, or a key in these people’s hands, something potentially powerful, but in itself inert.

  After a few hours someone knocked quietly on the door and when Makaria called an apprehensive greeting, Una stepped inside.

  The city was quiet, and darker than Makaria had ever known it. Cleared of the usual soup of electric light, the sky was shocking with stars. Makaria felt she had forgotten they were up there, over Rome too.

  They walked quietly, swiftly: at first just a small procession little more than twenty-strong. Then, from doorways and side roads, people began to fall in beside them, until there were hundreds of them, striding through the wet streets.

  ‘You’re certain he’s in there?’ whispered Makaria.

  Beside her, Una nodded, and Makaria’s breath twisted on itself again. ‘Even if— Even if— How can you be sure what will happen? You think people are going to listen to me, but I— I—’

  Una looked at her sharply, her face stern. ‘We raised an army for you; for months we’ve been risking our lives to bring you here. You have to be strong enough to get through tonight. You owe us that.’

  Sulien was more sympathetic. ‘You’ll be fine, Madam; we’re all here with you.’

  ‘But how are we going to get inside?’ Makaria protested helplessly.

  Una smiled then. ‘We’re already inside.’

  They reached the Appian Way. Beside them reared the dark Colosseum, erasing a band of sky, biting away the stars. Una and Sulien both slowed as they passed it; Sulien seemed to hunch, as if trying to disguise his height. Makaria saw them look at each other and at Varius as they left it behind.

  Then the road turned at the base of the hill and they looked up at the shattered wall of the Septizonium. Unexpectedly, a messy spill of loud music and laughter came splashing down the slope from it.

  Una stopped, and the rest of the column fell still too.

  ‘Go on alone,’ she said to Makaria. ‘Tell them.’

  Makaria stepped forward, her lips tight, as if into icy water.

  One of the guard stations at the gates had been destroyed, and the rubble was still piled beside the driveway. In the one that remained a shrill, panicky party seemed to be going on. A Praetorian stumbled out towards her and said, ‘Clear off, lady.’ He was not even pretending not to be drunk.

  ‘I am Lady Novia Faustina,’ said Makaria. ‘I have been away a long time, but I have come home now. I need to see my cousin.’

  The guard blinked, and he strained to focus on her face. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘I beg your pardon.’ And he frowned, worried. ‘Are you— Are you meant to be here?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Makaria simply. ‘I am.’

  The Praetorian reached in silence for his radio. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘sir!’

  It took a while for any answer to come – the music inside was too loud. Then, abruptly, it stopped, and the Praetorian sergeant came tramping out, and a dozen other guards came with h
im or wandered over from further inside the Palace precinct.

  ‘It’s Lady Novia, sir,’ said the first Praetorian.

  ‘I need to come in and see my cousin,’ Makaria repeated softly, to all of them. ‘With my friends.’

  In turn, the sergeant lifted his radio.

  ‘Yes,’ said Makaria, ‘tell the other Praetorians I have arrived. And they need do nothing – except that I would be grateful if someone could arrange for General Turnus to come to the Palace at once.’

  The sergeant shifted uncertainly. ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We can’t do that without authorisation.’

  ‘I am giving it to you,’ said Makaria. And she raised her arm, hoping its trembling was contained within her sleeve. The column of silent, grim-faced people advanced behind her.

  The Praetorians stiffened. ‘What is this?’ demanded the captain.

  And on the other side of the gates, from within the Palace itself, streams of people came pouring towards them and gathered into an assembly as stern and numerous as that on Makaria’s side: the Palace’s servants – the slaves Marcus had freed.

  The Praetorians looked back and forth between them, confounded. Some of them had raised their weapons, but didn’t know where to aim them.

  ‘We are coming inside,’ said Makaria, ‘to save Rome. Look at what these few bombs have done to it already. And they are nothing to what is coming, in three days’ time. But you don’t have to be afraid. You only need to open the gates.’

  Drusus was down in the prison cells under the Palace.

  He tried not to think of it that way: these were not cells any more. He had had some of the walls hastily knocked through and the heavy doors removed to make enough room for offices, strategy rooms, salons and a bedroom. He’d had beautiful furniture and paintings moved down from above. But there were still raw seams of brick where the dividing walls had been taken down, and those that remained were still coated in the old scratched, stark white paint. A subtle but smothering scent of masonry dust padded every room, with other damper, sharper smells layered underneath it. And there was never any daylight.

  He’d moved underground after the first bombs had struck Rome. When he was above ground now, he felt dizzy with terror, but down here the weight of the Palace seemed to crush him, and he could never forget what these rooms had been. He felt as if the prisoners had imprinted themselves on the air, recorded their voices in the brick. And if so, then his own frantic ghost was one of them – two years ago they had thrown him in here, after he’d tried and failed to kill Una with his own hands. Oh, if he’d just been a little faster, or more decisive, if he’d managed to smash her head hard enough just once against the stones. He tried not to remember, but he could still feel the placing of the locked door, and Varius staring at him from the outside – and Varius was outside, somewhere – they were all outside. Sometimes he felt he’d locked himself in that awful day.

  He would have to leave the Palace, leave Rome, settle somewhere safer. And yet it would look so wrong, it would be an admission of— of—

  He wouldn’t think it. But if he left, he knew he would lose something.

  He scratched the insect bites on his face, and bloodied his fingernails. His body was thrumming with tiredness, but it was still too early to go to bed, and in any case, every time he shut his eyes the lids sprang open as if in shock and his heartbeat kicked out in his chest, proving he would not be able to sleep, not yet. He needed to relax first, he thought. He was not going to try and work any more tonight. He tried to watch an old longvision play, but he felt unable to follow most of it, and such small tensions in the story that he did take in – lies and misunderstandings – made his chest grow painfully tight. But it was a long time before he could bring himself to turn it off, because in the quiet he could hear strange echoes sounding from within the Palace, or rumblings from within the earth beyond the walls. And his own breathing sounded so startlingly loud down here, and sometimes seemed to be coming from somewhere outside him, as if someone were standing close beside him all the time, panting for breath.

  He rang for a servant, and no one answered. Drusus did not notice at first, because he couldn’t think of anything he actually wanted, and rapidly forgot having sounded the bell. He wasn’t hungry; he didn’t want a woman. He even had to force the wine in his cup down his throat. The night before he’d tried filling the place with officers and popular gladiators and girls, and they’d laughed and chattered to each other while the music bounced thinly off the walls and he sat in silence among them wishing they would leave.

  But he wanted someone to come. He rang again.

  Tulliola, too, must have spent a night down here, before— Where, on these cracked tiles still there under his silk Bactrian rugs, had she dropped to the floor? Had she cried and battered the door, the way he had?

  He had been thinking more and more about Tulliola lately. It had got worse since Amaryllis and Noriko had disappeared, and the physical vividness of some of the memories astonished him – the smoothness of her hair in its coil; the warmth of her lips as he’d pushed the pin into her heart . . .

  He scratched at his face again, and he realised suddenly how many times his calls had gone unanswered. He took some relief in the itch of indignation. He rose from the chair in which he’d been slumped and went into the corridor to look for a servant.

  Then he heard footsteps, coursing towards the stairs, and part of him knew immediately who they were and what was going to happen. He’d been waiting for it for years. But he didn’t try to run until he saw them.

  He saw Varius first and, too late, he tried to think where the nearest gun was – back beside the chair he had left, probably out of reach, but perhaps—

  And before he could even turn, he saw Sulien, his face rigid with sadness and disgust. And beside him was Una. The names Drusus had tried to strip from them breathed in his ears: Noviana, Novianus.

  The newly come, no Novian but one. The newer branch of Novian stem. No Novian but another comes to ruin you. Save yourself from that, if you think you can.

  ‘I knew they lied to me,’ he said, on his breath, ‘I knew— I knew you weren’t dead.’

  And yet, if wraiths composed of crematoria smoke from beneath the Colosseum had crept in under the door, it could not have been more terrible to face them.

  He knew at once that the mass of people accompanying them were slaves. He was not even surprised to see faces he recognised among them, faces he’d seen hovering about his table or disappearing into passageways. For a fraction of a second the worst, most incomprehensible thing of all was the bald accusation of the Roman Army uniform Sulien was wearing.

  Then he did run, and they surged after him like a pack of hounds across the Colosseum’s floor, and he just made it inside the room he had left and closed the door. And in the moment he managed to hold it shut he thought he felt Una’s poisonous presence inside his head, watching his thoughts, and if he could have let go of the door he would have beaten and clawed at his skull to get it out, as it built and pushed, like this deadly human weight against the door.

  He couldn’t lock the door in time and he screamed as they smashed inside, lifted him like a wave, slammed him into the chair. Their hands loaded onto him, held him there.

  A woman with dark hair shorn close to the skull and Tulliola’s face hurled herself at him, howling, her voice splintering into sobs as her fist slammed into his throat, her nails ripped at his face. Then he recognised her, remembered her calm blank face on the pillow beneath him, and he began to gasp, ‘Please, please—’

  He couldn’t bear to die like this, torn to pieces in this cell, that face distorted in rage before him— No, he couldn’t die, the Sibyl had promised—

  ‘Maralah,’ said a low, clear voice – Varius? ‘We need him to live.’

  Even though he couldn’t guess what they meant to do to him instead, for a second relief thrilled through the anguish; yes, anything but dying, at any cost he wanted to live.

  Tulli
ola-Amaryllis turned sobbing into the arms of an older, fawn-skinned woman, who pulled her away from him.

  And then he could see all the way to the back of the room, and his cousin, Makaria, standing in the doorway. Her body was turned away, almost hidden by the door jamb, and she looked at him sidelong over her shoulder, as if she hated to watch at all, but had to.

  Your cousin against you, afterwards . . . Why had he thought the Sibyl, or the voice of the spirit speaking through her, meant the danger was Marcus? Even when she’d as good as promised him Marcus would die?

  He shouted Makaria’s name in rage and despair, and Makaria’s face buckled, but she didn’t move. And hands gripped his head and held it still as he looked from Una to Sulien and shrieked, ‘What are you going to do, then – what are you doing to me?’

  Were they already doing it?

  Sulien looked as if he could barely stand to come any closer, but step by slow step he advanced through the cramped mass of people towards the chair. And when he stopped in front of Drusus, he shut his eyes, both as if concentrating and as if to shield himself from something unbearable, and to Drusus’ terrified amazement a tear even pushed its way from beneath the lid. But Una’s eyes remained fixed on him as she crept up to Sulien’s side. Somewhere he heard dogs barking in a low chanted rhythm, pounding along with his heartbeat.

  Una leant closer to him and Sulien placed his hands reluctantly on Drusus’ shoulder, stroked his face.