Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘Oh come on, Sulien! It’s what, three thousand miles? We have to get across India – most likely we’ll be dead before we get near it! Why bother worrying about it now?’

  The wind scraped through the silence that fell between them, firing tiny flecks of ice against their faces, stinging like glass-dust. Sulien shivered and grimaced, and shifted between Una and the river, making a windbreak of himself. He said in a casual voice, ‘We’re not going to die.’

  ‘Rome could lose Bamaria,’ explained Una after a second. ‘Could lose the whole war by the time we get there. That’s all I mean.’

  Sulien dismissed an instinctive chill at being obliged to want Rome to lose a war.

  ‘We could stop,’ he suggested quietly. ‘I’m telling everyone I’m here looking for a job – I could get one. Or we could go back west, somewhere it’s not so cold.’

  For a moment her face seemed to twist and quiver, and though that cleared quickly, he could see a liquid sheen in her eyes – just a thin rim of reflected light below the irises, still a long way from spilling into tears. She said fiercely, ‘No. We will get there, we will, I promise. I’m just— I can’t think that far ahead.’

  All he could say was, ‘All right. One thing at a time.’

  Una had been wary of going back, expecting that by the time she returned, the town’s authorities would be busily manifest in the damaged streets, hanging tarpaulins over the broken windows, at least; and someone would be telling people what to do if it happened again, and where to go if their houses were uninhabitable. But everything looked almost as she had left it. At the top of the street the debris from the worst-hit house had been cleared aside, perhaps by the residents themselves, though she could see the windows were still gaping, and there were no lights in any of them. At the guest house, Vituriga the landlady was up a stepladder, struggling to nail a heavy square of old carpet behind the shutters.

  ‘Haven’t the vigiles done anything?’ Una asked, rather disgusted, although it was a relief not to have to worry about dodging them.

  The landlady snorted expressively. ‘The power’s still off, too.’

  ‘You can’t sleep here tonight,’ said Una, glancing around the house’s dark interior.

  She stepped down from the ladder and gave Una a speculative look. ‘I’ll have to go to my sister’s,’ she said heavily, plainly relishing neither that nor the prospect of refunding Una any of her money. ‘So you’ll be heading south now, I suppose.’

  As Una said, ‘Oh, but it’ll be all right here by tomorrow, won’t it?’ she realised with an itch of anger at herself what a strange thing that was to say; how unlikely it was that a stray tourist in this bleak place would even consider staying after a night like that. ‘Well, it’s not so bad, is it?’ she ploughed on, ‘and it’s a long way to Gelonus – and they’re not ready for me there yet. I don’t really want to go there before I have to. And I was hoping I might be able to find some of my grandfather’s friends.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  And Una saw what was coming and looked down, calculating.

  ‘Arite saw you with a young man in Sacaeum,’ announced the landlady.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Una twisted her hands shyly and kept her eyes on her shoes. ‘Well, yes, he’s just someone from home. It’s a funny thing, meeting him here . . .’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the landlady, raising her eyebrows.

  Una clenched her teeth behind a modest simper and nodded. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she mumbled. So the immediate problem was solved, Vituriga thought the young man was the reason Una was in no hurry to leave. And of course she was right.

  ‘I suppose he’s staying in the caupona there?’ Vituriga went on, reverting to melancholy contemplation of her house. ‘You might try there for tonight; they’ll have rooms free.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think my mother would like that,’ parried Una, though she did wonder for a moment if that would be the simplest course. But all those posters – ‘Be Vigilant . . . especially if you live near a border!’

  She turned from the landlady and wandered a little way down the street. A large, dishevelled family emerged from their home, dragging bags and cases and arguing miserably. The two little girls from the night before stared at Una from the window of a dilapidated car. At the far corner of the street, a group of people, most of them men, came into sight. For a second it was hard to place what was strange about them, then Una realised that they weren’t encased in padded clothing like everyone else, but were all dressed in identical sets of light work clothes. Some of them had blankets wrapped around themselves like cloaks or shawls, and they were hugging themselves, bent almost double under the weight of the cold. They huddled close together as they moved, either for warmth, or against possible attack. They were slaves.

  ‘From the factory,’ said Vituriga, coming after Una. ‘Nionians!’

  There were around ten in the group, only one of whom looked at all as if he might have been partly Nionian, but Una could feel sudden tension quiver through the street, as if an electric circuit had just been completed. The slaves seemed aware of it, hurrying along with heads lowered, sometimes flicking around hunted glances, but one of them, a short, cropped-haired young man, was plainly too angry and too desperate to care. Beckoning insistently to the others, though they were hanging back and hissing at him to stop, he moved towards an empty house, its windows dark and glassless like the rest, and pulled at the door.

  ‘Get out of there,’ shouted a man, erupting from the house opposite and racing across the street. Una started to run at the same moment. As she reached the little group, the man dragged the young slave away from the door before hurling him backwards, staggering and slipping on the ice that glazed the street.

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’ snarled the slave through blue lips, crouching to recover the blanket that had dropped from his shoulders. ‘Are we just supposed to sit there and die?’

  ‘Don’t, Batu, just leave it, please,’ urged one of the women frantically.

  But Batu ignored her, lurching forward, and the older man squared up to meet him, smirking grimly, for though the slave was young and well-muscled, he was shivering so fiercely that he couldn’t even curl his hands into fists. The rest were in no better state.

  Una moved between them as two of the others pulled Batu back.

  He gasped, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’

  ‘What’s happened?’ said Una. She had one arm outstretched, so that her fingertips were level with, but not touching, the older man’s chest, marking out the distance. He was perhaps only in his late thirties, despite the long creases in his face and his greying bristly hair. The family from the house next door to the taverna had wandered over now, and with them two other men who might have been the crease-faced one’s brothers; they had drawn up beside him, glancing between themselves, unsure what to do, even a little embarrassed, but ready for trouble.

  ‘You mind your own business, love,’ spat the first man viciously. But he didn’t move closer yet, or knock her hand aside.

  ‘Same as here,’ said the slave woman, meeting Una’s eyes warily. ‘The windows broke. There’s no heat. There’s nothing . . . no one’s come.’

  ‘They’re escaping and they’re robbing people’s houses,’ the man exclaimed shrilly. ‘I bet they’re loving this! I bet they were cheering those fucking things on last night! That one, anyway,’ he added, and made another lunge, this time towards the boy who looked a little Nionian, who’d been lurking with eyes lowered at the back of the group. His brothers moved with him, and the whole knot of people started shifting, Una squeezed in the middle of it, with the boy behind her, shouting, ‘Stop!’

  The young woman who’d sheltered with them the night before was dancing back and forth at the back of the group calling out, ‘Don’t hurt her – careful! Careful, you’re going to hurt her!’, sounding anxious, yet self-conscious, as if she couldn’t decide how serious this really was.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ Una repeated, her voice
descending gradually from a shout to a rhythmic whisper, keeping her eyes on the crease-faced man’s. ‘Come on, stop. Those bombs did enough damage. Leave it at that.’

  ‘Yeah, his pals!’ cried the man, bitterly, flinging a fist at the sky and pressing towards the boy again, but with less momentum this time.

  Batu mumbled, ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘He’s a slave. He’s already lost. He’s already been punished,’ said Una, louder. ‘No one’s staying out in this cold. Not them or anyone.’

  ‘Factory owners should sort them out,’ said one of the other men, half-heartedly.

  ‘Whoever runs this town should have got the power running and fixed the windows; they should have set up somewhere for people to stay. But they haven’t, have they? So we have to do something.’

  Most of the remaining inhabitants of the street seemed to have gathered now, around twenty people. Vituriga was staring at Una, frowning. This was certainly very unlike the diffident, ingenuous girl she’d been acting for the past few days. She cursed inwardly, wishing someone else was doing this, but it was too late to go back. She called out, ‘Who else doesn’t have a place to stay?’

  The town’s grimy baths hadn’t opened that day. When they found the man who ran them he was reluctant to unlock the doors at first, and even more reluctant to let them light the furnace, but these obstacles seemed almost too minor to trouble with by then, and Una marched over them with irritated ease. They dragged in blankets and mattresses; though the place was small for a public bath-house, still it had space enough to house twice as many people. The three main chambers were below ground, and the stained walls were thick. Una had first noticed the place when driving around the town harvesting details with which to bolster the story of her imaginary grandfather, finding the school he might have gone to, the boarded-up temple where he might have prayed. She had thought of going there to kill time and escape the gnawing cold; she had not done so partly from the usual fear of being recognised, but also from a dumb dread of physical comfort.

  ‘You’re not really going to stay there with all of them?’ asked Vituriga, who’d stubbornly followed Una.

  ‘Oh, well, it isn’t just the slaves; Mada and Leimeie and her little girls from up the street are going to be there as well. And I’m too tired to go looking for anywhere else now,’ said Una, truthfully, in a strained version of the sweet voice she usually assumed for the landlady, hearing how sharp and wrong it sounded.

  Inside, she tried to stay out of the arguments about food and who, if anyone, should provide it for the slaves. No one would die of starvation overnight, and she knew she must try to repair her camouflage, encourage them to start to forget about her. Even so, some of them obviously expected that she would at least propose something, and she found herself suggesting wearily, ‘Just buy as much as we all need and claim anything back from the factory owners.’

  The hypocaust warmed the chambers slowly. The slaves crouched or lay exhausted in the caldarium, their bodies pressed in a kind of bitter ecstasy to the heated floor. Una’s mind caught on a spike of memory: the tropical greenhouse in Gaul, and how grateful they’d been for the warmth then. And Marcus, by the pool of waterlilies, fumblingly asking her if she thought he would ever go mad.

  The foreign-looking boy sat on the floor in a niche in the tepidarium, head down, and spoke to no one. Una was sometimes conscious of words that coursed through and came apart in his mind, though she didn’t understand them. His whole self was concentrated in a single, shamed wish not to be noticed. Nevertheless she watched him from across the room for a while, then crouched closer to him and whispered, ‘Are you from Tokogane?’

  ‘He doesn’t speak much Latin,’ said Batu. ‘At least, he doesn’t speak much at all.’

  But the boy had understood, eyelids lifting quickly for a distrustful glance at her, lowering again at once.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Una said to him under her breath, feeling the scorch of stale adrenalin, seeing the street outside the Colosseum again, and herself running with blood in her hair, not fast enough.

  Later she lay close to the wall, in the vestibule of the tepidarium, with the other women, warmer than she’d been for weeks. But she dreamed of the Rha at night, and it was not freezing, but melting, and she and Sulien had to cross it anyway. First she was staggering thigh-deep through wet, grainy ice-slush, and Sulien was somewhere behind her in the dark, following close, though out of sight and silent. She thought she could feel the acid bite of the cold, and she knew it would kill them both, knew it made no sense for them to have held out this long. The water burnt on her flesh, and then down her throat – for now they were, impossibly, swimming, and Sulien was thrashing forward, tugging her through the channels of black water, between the slabs of ice.

  She meant to slip away as fast as possible in the morning, before anyone could renew interest in her, or ask to see her identity papers. But when she woke a bewildered team of quaestor’s contractors and a pair of vigiles had already arrived, trying to account for the missing slaves and the residents of the bombed-out street.

  ‘So who organised all this?’ asked one of them, brusquely, and the mother of the two little girls pointed at Una proudly and said, ‘She did.’

  When the wind let fall a single, stray floating bomb into Sacaeum it was broad daylight, and Sulien was in the back room of the little bar with the woman who ran the place, her back against the wall beside a rack of crates and her legs around his waist.

  She must have been ten years older than him, more, even, and it hadn’t occurred to him, at first, to find her attractive. The weather had already scuffed hard at her pale, thin skin, and left a pattern of folds around her eyes. Her lips were narrow and dry, with a disappointed droop to them, and they never quite closed over long front teeth. He’d gone back to the bar to eat; there had been only one other customer, who left before Sulien’s food arrived. When he’d first noticed how the woman kept looking at him, he was afraid it was because she had recognised his face – she’d stared at him pretty hard the first time he’d been there, too – and he bent his head over his meal, wondering what on earth he should do. Even when she stared at him meaningfully and smiled – a sly tug of her long lips which changed the droop into something languid and expressive – he still wasn’t certain he’d understood her, and was even a little embarrassed. But as she reached for his plate she trailed a hand along his arm and remarked, ‘You’re very handsome, aren’t you? I’m sure you know it.’

  And she grinned. He supposed she was too bored in this cold, ugly town to bother with shyness, or to care about the risk. And he was bored too, with nothing to do but wait for the river to freeze. More, it was as if, just by touching him, she’d pulled open a seam of desperation trapped under his skin for all these months. He looked up at her. Her hair was scraped back in a rough, lustreless bun, but wisps of it fell in sweet spirals around her brown, lemon-shaped eyes, and he noticed the delicacy of her long neck, the wide sweep of her cheekbones.

  Oh well, he thought, and pulled her into his lap to kiss her.

  ‘Have you got a husband’s going to walk in on us?’ he asked, hot against her cheek. ‘Because I really don’t need any more trouble.’

  She laughed roughly and said, ‘He’s in Sarmatia.’ And Sulien tried to feel at least a nominal twinge of guilt as he let her draw him through the door behind the counter before deciding there was only so much self-denial that could be expected of him at present.

  She didn’t ask him his name, so he didn’t have to give her his false one, and she kept saying, ‘You’re good, you’re lovely,’ as if she knew him, and had no doubt at all it was true.

  Sulien clutched her gratefully, gasping with something that was more like pain than anything. He said nothing himself.

  The bomb landed a few streets away just as he cried out against her breast. The bottles rattled and both of them yelped, and then after blinking at each other for a second, dissolved into confused and frightened laughter.

&
nbsp; Sulien said, ‘Well, that’s never happened before.’

  ‘Fucking Nionians,’ she said, hopping neatly to the ground.

  Sulien felt the chill settling back into his flesh. He started buttoning his clothes. ‘I’ll go and look.’

  ‘You can’t go outside! There could be more of them.’

  Sulien lingered, obligingly, and they waited and listened in a quiet that quickly became awkward, and Sulien began to remember the time he’d spent waiting in his rooms in Rome when the voice on the longvision had told him to, how much faster he should have moved then.

  The woman shrugged, restless too. ‘Well, maybe there’s no harm in having a look. At least they come down slowly, don’t they?’

  She straightened the collar of his coat by the door. ‘You be careful.’

  There was nothing in the sky now but snow, pushed slantwise by the wind as it fell into the black, reeking smoke disgorging along the street. The bomb had drifted down between the houses, landing on the roof of a parked van. What was left of it was still burning, a dirty red light muffled in the smoke.

  Someone shouted, uncertainly, ‘Is anyone hurt?’

  There was no answer. At first it seemed that no one had even been there to see the bomb fall. There were no shops or businesses on the street, just dark, narrow houses, some of which were boarded up. Sulien wasn’t sure at first who had shouted, then he saw a few people, half-hidden by the smoke, emerging cautiously from a side-treet, either returning after scattering from the balloon’s path or, like him, compelled to see what had happened.

  All the windows of the nearby houses and cars were broken, and an old trirota had been crumpled and knocked against a wall. But it was strangely quiet; no alarms had sounded, no one was screaming.

  A door opened, quite close to Sulien, and a woman tottered out and sat down at the roadside. Sulien bent down beside her, because anyone would have. She had broken a wrist, falling, and was scattered with little cuts from flying glass. She was pale, and giddy with shock. Nothing too bad, nothing to kill her. ‘There, you’re all right,’ crooned Sulien, warm with relief and guilt. ‘Was there anyone else inside?’