Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

Makaria shook her head several times, and breathed deep before continuing, ‘My father was . . . he was killed outright. Marcus wasn’t. He— He . . . I put the ring and the wreath on him. He knew what was going on. He was Emperor. Marcus named you as his heir.’

  No shock of battle, no unexpected success had ever robbed Salvius so completely of himself. At first it was almost a mercy that he did not know what to do or say, because that kept him in place, looking at her gravely and quite unable to stir, when otherwise he might have been – what? Lifted into the air, while this riot of incredulous excitement and bafflement pealed through him and bells deafened him?

  It had reached and passed the point when he must respond and all he could manage was, cautiously, ‘You are quite sure . . . quite certain that was his intention?’

  ‘You don’t imagine I would hand away my family’s birthright if I were in any doubt?’

  ‘Were there other witnesses?’

  ‘Some of the guards. The medics. Yes.’

  Salvius felt the continued pulse of delight, utterly unseemly in the circumstances, throbbing through the ringing of something he refused to name as fear. It was not that he had any sense that he was not fitted to be Emperor, nor that he’d never contemplated it. For a long time he had believed he would do better than Faustus or Leo, or, in recent years, Marcus himself. As the crisis with Nionia drew in, he had nursed something between hope and dread that one day it might be necessary – justified – to take power himself. Only if it were justified, he had always told himself, uneasily; only if Rome were in danger and someone had to act. But that Marcus, who had fair reason not to like or trust him, should have given this to him, in the last moments of his life . . . What was he supposed to do, right now, stranded so far outside the margins of what he’d considered possible?

  And Faustus’ daughter was standing there in tears, and he thought of charming, ambitious, infuriating Leo, four years dead, and now his only son – the line gone, over.

  He said, ‘I would never have wanted this.’

  Makaria rolled her eyes and said with a damp, laughing snort somewhere in the back of her voice, ‘Salvius, spare me.’

  ‘Not like this,’ said Salvius softly.

  She struggled visibly against another spasm of crying and remarked, ‘I’m not altogether certain what happens next.’

  ‘Everything must be done properly,’ he said in a firm, reassuring tone. But what did that mean? There had been no such transition in more than two hundred years. He added, pressing any note of experiment or hesitation out of his voice, ‘I shall call a session of the Senate for tomorrow.’

  Makaria squared her shoulders. ‘Listen, Salvius. You know Marcus was no friend of yours; it must be obvious to you he named you only to keep my other cousin off the throne. And I don’t know yet how badly Drusus was hurt. I don’t think he’s dead. Marcus would want me to warn you: Drusus is very dangerous. You must secure your position. You must be careful.’

  Salvius remembered Drusus bloodied and piteous on the floor at Marcus’ feet with a vague after-twinge of distaste and disappointment. No substance to that man, he thought. And if Drusus wasn’t the leader Salvius had once hoped for, surely he wasn’t the monster Marcus had made out either. Nevertheless, Salvius could see that Drusus might be a threat in the coming months, if he garnered much support in the Senate, or worse, the army. If Drusus’ injuries were not so serious as to keep him away from the Senate tomorrow, Salvius would have to let him speak, but he could make sure the army knew at once who was the legitimate Emperor.

  He said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Makaria, brusquely unfolding something and holding it out to him.

  To be handed a crumpled, dirty sheet of notepaper seemed incongruous to Salvius, but he scanned it, and felt his eyebrows shift upwards as the words resolved themselves into outrageous sense. He said, entirely certain, ‘It’s impossible.’

  Makaria lifted it curtly from his fingers, folded it up again and tucked it out of sight. ‘Then I shall keep it for now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Salvius, at once relieved and mildly annoyed.

  Her mouth pulled into a stretched, miserable smile, and her eyes started filling again. ‘I have to . . . to see to my father. I suppose we will have to talk more later. You . . . Well, you can do whatever you want now.’

  Left alone, Salvius looked around at the calm splendour of the Imperial office and tried out the thought that it was his. He laid a hand cautiously on the desk and, breathlessly, guiltily, laughed. Decimus came into his mind again, this time as a future Emperor, and it brought another rush of elation and unease. Hastily he straightened his face and put the thought aside. Rome had been attacked, whether by Nionia, or by Roman anarchists, or some conspiracy of both; his first efforts must be to defend the Empire. He went back to the Strategy Room, and to work.

  In the doorway behind the doctor, from whom Drusus had at last succeeded in extracting the truth, a nurse with no good reason to be there was standing and crying. Drusus looked at her curiously, and felt water suddenly sliding out of his own eyes. He was startled, because he hadn’t consciously made any decision to do that – although it was good, it would look right. And a moment later he knew that this feeling was not crude excitement, nor hypocritical grief, but awe, breaking across him like a sunrise.

  ‘Where are they? Are they here?’ he whispered.

  ‘No . . . I am afraid they had passed away before they could be moved. They were taken back to the Palace, I am sure,’ the doctor said.

  ‘I must go there,’ Drusus said, standing up, and cursed as the movement dragged at the lines of stitches. His knee burned under his weight. He gasped and waited the pain out. As soon as it began to fade he pulled off the sling they’d put on his arm. ‘You have to help me. The people will need to see the Emperor strong at such a time.’

  The doctor blinked at the word ‘Emperor’ but said, ’You’re hurt, Sir, you’re not ready to leave.’

  ‘I’m not dying. It can wait.’ He ran his hand gingerly over his face and wished for a mirror. ‘You can put some kind of splint on my arm, so long as you can do it fast and it’s nothing that shows.’

  He had them call for a car, a couple of slaves and a change of clothes – formal, he specified, something like what he’d worn to the Colosseum – from his house on the Caelian Hill. He supposed he had better speak to his father, to let him know he was alive, and was both amused and angry to find that Lucius had no idea anything had happened. He rejected the wheelchair they tried to insist he use to get him to the lobby and hobbled there resentfully, panting through clenched teeth.

  The lobby was half-full of Praetorians. He had no idea where his own escort was, not that he was sorry to be away from them – they had all been Marcus’ spies. These soldiers looked awkward as Drusus came limping in among them, drawing up his wounded body to stand as tall as he could. As they shuffled uncomfortably, one of them, who must have been the squad leader, bowed and said softly, ‘Please accept our condolences, Sir.’

  Drusus took a breath, bracing himself for this first test, and looked the soldier calmly in the face as he corrected him, ‘Your Majesty.’

  There was a silence, and Drusus felt his heartbeat stammer in terror, and the man actually blushed and mumbled something inarticulate about Salvius before starting again, carefully, ‘We have been told that the late Emperor Marcus Novius chose General Salvius . . .’

  They all looked apprehensive; they were watching him to see what he would do; he was watching himself for the same thing. And he found that that there was no need to be angry or alarmed at all. He said, quite mildly, ‘Really?’ and turned away from them, back the way he had come. He caught the wrist of the nearest nurse and smiled at her, earnestly and sadly. ‘I need to see a longvision.’

  Part of Sulien was incredulous he’d stayed even this long, just because Una had told him to. Where was she? How could he have let her go off by herself? He pressed th
e torn edges of a wound together and thought, She won’t be there . . . She’s gone . . . she won’t be there. He could not seem to think anything else; sometimes the words came almost as a matter-of-fact observation, just one of those things; sometimes as a frantic shriek hurling against the walls of his skull. He forgot each injured person the moment he’d finished with them, wasn’t even sure how many there had been. Though he moved from one bleeding body to the next, and was dimly aware that for a moment at least he must have been able to concentrate on them, neither they nor their need of him seemed real. When he touched them, they were only solid enough to press the feel of Marcus’ cold skin deeper into his own.

  And though it felt as if it had been so much longer, the hour still wasn’t up. He knew that, and ran out of the Colosseum anyway.

  The rain had stopped and outside was a stunned, unnatural calm, the streets emptier than Sulien had ever seen them. Soldiers moved around quietly; a flight of pigeons scythed down over the street. He ran down the middle of the Sacred Way, past an oncoming Praetorian van that seemed to drift past slow as a pleasure-boat. He’d thought it would be better to find Una first and then go back for the trirota, but he was already too tired to sustain a good pace, instead pushing himself on breathlessly in painful fits and starts. For a moment he observed himself clinically, as if from a distance, as a living thing, warm and in motion and desperate. She’d said the bridge, and he’d assumed she meant the Sublician, but if she expected to go to her flat rather than his, then she would have gone to the Aemilian. The possibility of choosing the wrong one loomed like a disaster, though at no point did he name to himself what he feared might happen beyond repeating wretchedly, she won’t be there. Instead he found himself thinking of the door of the cell on the prison-ferry opening, Una’s impossible arrival, after seven years not knowing where she was. He didn’t like the idea of her waiting on a bridge at all.

  Beyond the Praetorian cordon around the Colosseum the streets were crowded again, but there were no cars moving; people were all on foot, slowly walking home. Sulien ploughed through onto the bridge, plunged restlessly back and forth, his breath catching jaggedly in his throat. He could see over most people’s heads, but he couldn’t find her, and he wasn’t going to because she wasn’t there—

  *

  ‘Sulien.’ Her voice was barely raised – she was just a few feet away, and lower than he’d thought to look.

  She was sitting on the pavement, her knees loosely drawn up and her back against the parapet, like the beggars crouched further along the bridge. One hand rose in pallid greeting. Somehow he’d forgotten that she was painted in Marcus’ blood, clothed in it.

  Sulien stared at her, feeling scoured, wiped blank with relief. He moved towards her and she levered herself up gracelessly and started walking away over the bridge.

  ‘There’s— The trirota’s back that way,’ said Sulien, apologetically.

  Una turned obediently and came back without comment. She gathered speed as she approached, overtook him without looking at him. As she did so he saw the stripe of dark blood on the back of her head – he might not have noticed it, realised it was her own, except she stumbled slightly as he saw it, swayed dizzily, and propped herself against the low wall of the bridge.

  ‘You hit your head.’ He was almost relieved to see it – something reparable. He reached out towards her, saying ‘Let me see.’

  Una swerved, throwing up one hand to bat away his, the motion strangely fluent, like a rehearsed dance step. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘You’re concussed,’ protested Sulien, after a moment’s baffled alarm, not managing to find a more helpful tone than exasperation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Una, a thin smear of sarcasm across a voice otherwise bare as a slab of metal, ‘and it’ll get better. What’s the point in . . .?’ But she let the sentence drop away unfinished, losing interest in it.

  ‘How’d it happen?’ Sulien insisted, thinking of the mass of people that had erupted out of the Colosseum over the hard ground.

  They had reached the east bank again. Una’s rapid, irregular march shuddered to a halt. She looked up at him, not for long, but for the first time since she’d understood Marcus was dead, and so horribly unguarded that Sulien didn’t want to look back at her; it was as if a knife had been dragged across her face.

  She said, ‘Dama.’

  For a moment he thought she was telling him what he already knew – who was responsible for the bomb – then, inwardly pleading that the answer would be no, he asked, ‘You saw him? He did this?’

  Una nodded jerkily, too hard, a slow, sticky spill of pain spreading through her head. She felt her arm rise, almost of its own accord, in a helpless gesture towards the Colosseum and heard herself beginning in a whimper, ‘I . . .’ I couldn’t stop him, she must have been going to say, and that struck her as the most redundant statement that could be imagined: as if her inability to stop Dama had not been amply demonstrated to everybody. Sulien clamped one enormously heavy hand on her shoulder, pivoting towards the Colosseum with a little gasp of rage.

  She whispered, shivering, ‘I think he’s dead,’ because she knew Sulien wanted to kill Dama. She knew it from the look on his face and the way his free hand had squeezed into a fist, not because she could hear him thinking it. Her mind was still clenched up, containing no thoughts but her own. If she closed her eyes it might almost be as if Sulien wasn’t there, if he would only let go of her and stop breathing so loudly.

  But instead Sulien dragged her off-balance against his chest, making her head ring and throb again. She thought, Haven’t I done enough for you already, can’t you just leave me alone? and said in a low, ugly rumble, ‘I said get off me, Sulien.’

  Neither of them had said anything more. Riding back over the bridge later, he thought he could just feel the movement of her breath at his back, her arms round his waist light and loose as a circle sketched in pencil. He drove as slowly as he could.

  As Drusus entered the Palace a group of servants hurried to meet him and tried to prop him up. His own slaves had done the same thing as he got out of the car, and as then, Drusus waved them all off, but he had to lean against the wall of the atrium to take the weight off his leg. He cradled his arm against his chest, anxious now that he looked vulnerable and there was nothing more he could do to disguise it. He gasped, ‘Where’s my cousin?’

  One of them said, ‘Come in and rest while I send someone to find her.’

  ‘No,’ panted Drusus, somehow reluctant to voice clearly what he meant, ‘no. Please.’ The servant looked startled and Drusus himself didn’t know why he sounded so diffident; he knew his only chance was to act fast and decisively. ‘Marcus. I have to see Marcus.’

  The room was dim, and incense was burning, the soft weight of amber and myrrh in the air sharpened by the resiny green scent of the branches of olive and laurel that lay around Marcus, over the robes of Imperial purple in which his body had been dressed. Of course there was no trace of blood or dust now. His pale hands were folded over the cloth-of-gold spread over his lower body. His smooth hair and the wreath resting on his breast gleamed dark gold in the half-light, and white roses and poppies shone like candle-flames against the dark silk and the green leaves. From this distance and in this light Drusus could not see the cuts on his cousin’s face; he could see only that Marcus looked tranquil, and Roman, and beautiful, and that feeling of reverence and rightness welled through him, pure and golden again. And yet the silent tableau looked strange to him too, for Marcus had not been laid on a bier but on a mat of pale silk on the floor, and Noriko was kneeling motionless beside him.

  He had met her for the first time just that morning, and had been struck at how Roman she had looked with her dark hair heaped up in curls, almost like Tulliola. And now she looked absolutely foreign, folded into that odd, composed posture on the floor, her loose hair combed out straight and falling over the long square sleeves of the pale Nionian gown she wore to spread and pool behind her.

  She
said quietly, ‘I hope I have done right for him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusus in a whisper from the doorway. He could not move into the room and disturb the depth of the hush, not yet, could not intrude the evidence of violence he carried in his own damaged body. ‘Everything is right.’

  She looked up quickly and stared at him for a few seconds, her expression stiffening a little. Drusus watched her face, interested by the change, though unconcerned with what it meant.

  ‘You are hurt too.’

  Drusus shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Noriko accepted this without reply. She slumped very slightly, her hair trailing forward over Marcus’ wrist.

  Drusus realised vaguely that the construction of this quiet, clean beauty must have been prolonged and difficult, and could only just have been finished. He asked, gently, ‘May I have a moment alone with him?’

  Noriko tensed again, crouching forward over Marcus’ body, but she said, ‘Of course.’ Looking down at Marcus’ face she laid one hand over his and gripped, quickly, biting her lip.

  Then she rose, and as she passed Drusus he said lightly, ‘You weren’t there, were you?’

  Noriko answered only with a polite bow of the head. But her sleeve brushed against him. She was trembling.

  Drusus did not move for a moment, letting the stillness flow back into the room. There was no one there to see him, but he had never been so conscious of what looked right. He advanced slowly, barely breathing, because it would have looked wrong to rush, to grab; he tried to suppress his limp, because it would have looked wrong to be awkward; he was solemn, because it would have looked wrong to be anything else. He was anxiously aware that he too would have to kneel down, and he was afraid he might not be able to do it without falling; certainly it would hurt.

  At Marcus’ side, after staring down in fascination for a moment, he braced himself and tried to lower himself to the floor. Pain lashed up his body like a snake and for a moment he lost all awareness of anything but the blind effort of forcing himself through it. He would not relinquish control to it. And, as he’d feared, he couldn’t hold himself up; he stumbled and instinctively put down his left hand so the broken bones took his weight and he crumpled sideways, barely saving himself from falling onto Marcus’ body. He hissed in frustration and shame and pulled himself up awkwardly onto his knees. Curled protectively over his arm, he let his breathing steady and the echoes of the cry he hadn’t been able to suppress die away.