Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  All right, he thought, and his voice sounded shrill, even in his mind, so they know we’re in Sarmatia. It’s a big province; we’ll be out of it soon.

  He’d been living like this long enough to know what he should try to do. There was a large town, Boudinium, about ten miles off; he would try and filter through the outskirts, blend into the east-bound traffic. He would aim to put two hundred miles behind them tonight, make it to Roxelania if he could. There they’d leave the car in a city car park and make the next leg by train, or cargo-tram, if they had to.

  Una had sunk low in the seat beside him, her arms wrapped round herself, and sat with her head resting against the window, silent, shrunken.

  They were not safe, even without the vigiles’ headlights right behind them, and he had no idea where – if – they could sleep tonight . . . but twenty miles from Boudinium, Sulien’s heart had stopped striking so hard and fast against his ribs, and he no longer had to fight the shaking.

  For the first time since he’d taken over the controls, Una spoke. ‘Sulien.’ Her voice was like a little trail of dust.

  Sulien looked over at her.

  For a long while, Una said nothing more. He could see her lips slightly parted in the half-light, as if the words would neither come nor go away. At last she whispered, ‘I’ve been trying so hard, I swear . . .’

  ‘I know,’ he told her. ‘I know.’

  ‘I want to stop, so much.’

  Sulien sucked his breath through his teeth. He had offered her that only a few days ago, but now . . .

  ‘And we can’t,’ she said softly. ‘We couldn’t, even without this, because they’d find us, one day. Because it would always be too hard. And if we could stop, if I could, I feel like I’d just . . . end. Run out. Do you see? And you’re the only thing— You’re all I—’ The sentence seemed to jam on something, and she shook her head impatiently, as if to shift it free. ‘I want to see you all right. But I don’t know what we should do now. I don’t know how I can go on any further. Because . . . I don’t want to get there, not really.’ Her voice dropped again, almost to nothing. ‘Not at all.’

  Sulien adjusted the controls of the car, very carefully, as if the danger were still one of speed and sliding wheels. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘today’s been terrible. I know that. But you don’t need to do a thing now. I will do more – I’ll do everything, I promise. And we can make it there. And when we do, I know it won’t undo— It can’t undo what’s happened. But it will be better than this. And you’ll be able to rest.’

  He looked over at her, reached out to touch her shoulder, and saw the corner of her mouth twist up as if dragged by a wire.

  ‘I know how it sounds,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want it to get better.’

  ‘Una,’ began Sulien, baffled and frightened, fumbling to understand, ‘is it because it feels like it would be betraying Marcus, or – or forgetting him? Because you know he’d never want you to be so unhappy.’

  Una made a small sound, a dry, longing break in it. ‘No, he wouldn’t ever want that. No, it’s because . . . because it’s . . .’ She closed her eyes, then opened them again, a little surprised at finding a way to explain. ‘In the north, where the sea’s so cold, there are fishermen who think that if they fall in, it’s better if they can’t swim. Because it’ll just drag it out – make it harder . . . when they might as well go down fast.’

  Sulien thought of the terrible water they’d barely escaped, and her face, outlined in the fire as the car scythed across the ice. ‘Oh, Una,’ he said, squeezing her shoulder.

  Una shifted a little closer to him, but her eyes were motionless and unfocused under low eyelids, so that he had to flinch from the memory of Marcus’ dead face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Sulien said gently, desperately, ‘We’ve come all this way . . .’

  ‘. . . all this way,’ agreed Una, a slow, limping echo from somewhere far off.

  Later, Sulien found that the next three or four days had been wrung from his memory, leaving only watery tidemarks behind. He knew they had abandoned the car in Roxelania, that they must have travelled by cargo-trams or on freight-trains, while every public longvision they passed was shrilling in excitement at how two of the three outlaws were all but trapped; Rome was closing its teeth on them. He remembered shaving off his beard under a viaduct, and Una strapping a cushion under her clothes again before they entered some soot-stained town.

  But he couldn’t separate out one day from another, wasn’t even certain how many days it was – not that he wished to, or tried to remember. It was all fused together, and his mind slid seamlessly from Una, beside him in the car that night, to a freight depot in Iaxarteum, and the two of them running along beside the tracks.

  Sulien had checked the place the previous night, watching the trains lumbering east. But it had to be daylight for this; it was too cold at night, when the air blazed icily around the speeding trains, even though it was not so cold here as it had been at the Rha. They no longer cared whether they were carried north or southwards now: if they found themselves up in Scythia, they could try and cross the Sinoan border and be done with it – Rome would need to apply some pressure before the Sinoan police would make any active effort to look for them, and they might be able to bribe their way on towards Annam.

  When the vigiles found them, they were crouched among the tumbled crates and discarded reels on the embankment, waiting for an endlessly long line of rusting hopper-cars to pass by. On the other side, a goods-train was dawdling on the third set of tracks, the ladders and side doors of its square, upright cars practically inviting trespass. And it seemed in no hurry to move; it would be easy to board, safe.

  The train of hoppers shrieked as it began to gather speed, then Una said, with almost nothing but exhaustion in her voice, ‘They’re here,’ and the next moment Sulien heard dogs barking.

  They said nothing more as they rose and ran down the bank towards the tracks. Up close the hopper-train seemed so much faster. It was wrapped in a sheath of dirty, blasting air and the tracks howled under the deafening weight of it. Una and Sulien, pelting along the gravel beside it, couldn’t hear a thing the vigiles were shouting behind them, even if it would have made any difference. Sulien had a hand wrapped round Una’s arm and was trying to drag her with him because he was faster and could reach higher, and the possible handholds were already rushing by almost too fast even for him. It had to be now, now, no time to judge it better.

  He reached for the frame at the back of a car, grasped Una to him at the same moment and leapt.

  One foot trailed in space as he clutched at the frame, trying to swing both his own weight and hers inwards while the train seemed to try to shake them off its flanks like a huge animal. He could feel Una, straining to hold on, felt her weight swing to the side as she managed to close a hand on the rail. But her feet just scraped on the ledge at the hopper’s base, and he couldn’t get a better hold on her, couldn’t shift the arm he already had round her without letting go, couldn’t free his other hand—

  He knew she’d tried, he knew she hadn’t let herself fall.

  He felt her arms, rigid with effort, and her cold fingers, gripping the strap of his backpack, but her feet swept off the ledge and as he fought, shouting, against the force surging outside the train, he saw her face.

  And she smiled at him, a very small, wry twitch of the mouth, resigned and sorry and unbearable, as the flying air plucked her away and the train snatched him onwards, under the bridge into a hurtling current of blackness and noise.

  Una landed face-down in the gravel beside the tracks. Her body rang with the impact, but at a distance, the pain lost somewhere before it reached her, and she did not bother assessing how badly she was hurt. She lifted her head a little to watch the train whip past before letting it drop back onto the grit, shutting her eyes and breathing the scent of hot metal and tar and dust. Then she turned clumsily onto her back. The ground was solid and still beneath her, and as the train’s v
iolent wake subsided, the air cleared and cooled a little and a breeze from the steppe brushed soundlessly over the tracks. She could hear the dogs baying in excitement, very close now, and the men crunching over the stones. The sky was a faded blue. Una lay and breathed slowly, staring at it.

  [ VI ]

  BEGGING, BORROWING, STEALING

  The wet slopes of the embankment shone dark amber in the lamplight, and the Tiber sparked in the rain. Varius had built a tiny fire on the path that ran along the river, a tiny red glow in the darkness below the arches of the Cestian Bridge. This wasn’t territory he could expect to have to himself for long – he could see a little encampment of people crouched around a similar fire on the opposite bank – but for now it felt safe to him, a room closed off in walls of running water.

  He was surprised Delir was such a small man, scarcely taller than his own daughter, who walked beside him, next to Ziye. And Delir looked weak, and sick, dragging his whole self along like a crippled limb. Varius tried to dampen down pity without extinguishing it all together, as if Delir were one of the badly injured people he had seen at the slave-clinic. He needed to be able to work.

  Delir said, ‘You worked for Leo once. You sent Marcus to me. I am so sorry I didn’t protect him better.’

  From what Lal and Ziye had said, Varius had half-expected something like this, but he still didn’t like to hear it, and didn’t know quite how to reply. A little stiffly, he reached for Delir’s hand. ‘You protected him at the time,’ he muttered.

  ‘I understand what you want to do,’ Delir said, ‘and I can’t blame you for it. But what right have I to take any part? When if I had not been so – so arrogant – to think I knew better than two empires what to do with someone who—’

  Varius felt the name skirted round, excised.

  Lal burst out, ‘You don’t know what would have happened. He wouldn’t have let the vigiles catch him; he’d only have done it sooner if you hadn’t found him.’ There were tears in her eyes; Varius thought this was not the first time she had said this. She turned a beseeching look at Varius that seemed to beg him to make Delir believe it.

  Delir was murmuring, ‘I could have tricked him, perhaps, given him to the vigiles. I could even have . . .’ He swallowed. ‘He would have been executed if they had found him. I couldn’t bear to think of how it might be done. But his life was in my hands on that island. I didn’t want him to suffer – I could have made sure he didn’t.’

  ‘But you’d never have done that!’ exclaimed Lal, fiercely; ‘you can’t even say it now! What’s the use of blaming yourself for not doing something you just couldn’t do? You tried to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone – you gave up everything to do that. It isn’t fair.’

  Delir was silent, weathering this out as if Lal’s outburst had been a list of further accusations, rather than a defence of him.

  Ziye sat down cross-legged on the ground near him, but her face was turned towards the river.

  ‘You saved someone dangerous,’ said Varius, ‘and so did I. Marcus half-killed Drusus back in Sina. I was there, and I stopped him. If I had just left him there, Drusus would have been dead a year ago.’

  Delir shook his head, the gentle look on his face already insisting that it wasn’t the same thing at all.

  Ziye asked quietly, ‘Why did you stop him?’

  Varius sighed. ‘There would have been no way of hiding it. Faustus wouldn’t have forgiven him. Marcus might not have been executed, but at the very least he would have been disgraced. And he would never have become Emperor. And—’ He hesitated, tempted to stop there, but he was committed to the whole truth now. ‘I thought Marcus would never have been the same again, afterwards. He was afraid he was losing his mind. He would have been a murderer. I didn’t want that to happen to him, I didn’t want him to lose . . . who he was.’

  ‘And was any of that wrong?’ asked Delir.

  Varius looked down into the fire, silent.

  ‘And now you mean to do the same thing yourself,’ said Delir. ‘What about what it will do to you?’

  Varius felt vaguely exasperated. ‘It’s not likely to matter much. Look, do you need a promise that you’re still a good man before you’ll help me? I don’t think it would make much difference to you, not from me. We can’t put things back the way they should have been. But perhaps we can make things better than they are. That’s what I’m asking of you. You don’t have to help me kill anyone.’

  In a low, dubious voice Delir asked, ‘How?’

  ‘The succession,’ said Varius, also dropping his voice. ‘The only person who would have supported Leo or Marcus and might have a chance is Eudoxius. We left him in charge during the peace talks. He’s . . . well, he’s better than Drusus, anyway, and I’m pretty sure he’s not much in favour now. He was at the funeral, but there’s been no sign of him since; I don’t think he’s even in Rome. He has at least one place in the country, and I think there’s another one abroad somewhere. He’ll have to be ready; he needs to come back to Rome and start building support. I can’t find him by myself, and I can’t go near him even if I could. I can’t do anything that would make Drusus suspect him. There must have been someone in your network who’s got a job in government – it doesn’t even have to be an important one, but someone like that could find out where he is. And they should be able to contact him too – they’d have to be willing to take some risks, but—’

  ‘But I’ve seen Eudoxius on the longvision,’ said Ziye, interrupting, ‘and he couldn’t convince Rome to give up slavery, even if he wanted to. He seemed – well, nice . . . but he’s not a leader. And he’s an old man.’

  Varius lifted a hand and rubbed his matted hair, feeling a horrid quiver of helplessness and panic run through him. ‘I know – I do know. But can you think of anyone else? I can’t— I don’t know what else— I don’t know what else I can do—’

  Delir looked at him and said sadly, ‘Your life, too,’ as if adding Varius’ name to a mental list of thousands.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Varius said. And although taking stock of his own situation he could not see how this could be true, he meant it. He was cold and desolate and probably a little insane, but something in him remained more whole than he could account for. He said, ‘I’ll need an address now; I have to get a room, I suppose,’ and was astonished to feel a slight twinge of reluctance.

  ‘I can help you with that much,’ said Delir heavily. ‘We know people who won’t ask for identity papers – won’t ask too much of anything.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Varius. ‘And Eudoxius?’

  Delir and Ziye looked at one another.

  ‘There is someone,’ muttered Lal, almost to herself. ‘We can help.’ She met Varius’ eyes and he knew she would get him the information, even if Delir and Ziye refused.

  Delir admitted, ‘We had someone in Cappadocia, just an assistant to an assistant in the Governor’s office, or something like that. If he’s even still there . . .’

  Varius took a tiny room at the bottom of a crowded block on the northern edge of the city, and tried to spend as little time as possible actually inside it. It was good to have a bed and a place out of the rain, but being penned in so close to so many other people made him nervous. He hadn’t liked closed spaces ever since his time in prison; now it felt strange to be inside at all. He felt he needed to do something to make sense of his change in circumstances, should anyone be paying attention, so he tidied himself up – only a little – and acquired a case of cheap watches, jewellery and combs. He continued roaming around the city, still smelling of alcohol, making lacklustre efforts to sell his trinkets at tram-stations and outside temples, while he waited for word from Delir’s contact in Cappadocia, or from Eudoxius himself.

  Drusus addressed the people again after the fall of Bamaria, and Varius moved through the ecstatic crowd spread through all the Fora, trying not to listen to Drusus’ speech, or to the crowd that kept chanting, Novius, Novius . . .

  It was the fir
st time that the possibility occurred to Varius that nothing Drusus had begun could be stopped, that killing him now might only make him, in a sense, more powerful. For once he was almost relieved that he couldn’t get close enough.

  On public longvision he watched the news of the thousands of bombs floating like spores across the Empire, a handful drifting as close as Egypt and Asia Minor, and he listened to people talking. Despite their number the balloon bombs had killed few and done little serious damage, but everyone shuddered at the idea of silent weapons on the wind, and they celebrated fiercely when news came that a ship carrying them had been destroyed in the Arabian Sea. The fighting was still far off, but in Rome the war felt more real now.

  He was half-heartedly pestering tourists with his case of trinkets near a tram station on the Field of Mars one morning when he heard a satisfied voice saying, ‘Well, I just hope they don’t let them slip this time. That girl looks such a sly little bitch.’ Varius looked up with immediate foreboding to see that the government news-kiosk on the corner was doing brisker business than usual, and the people clustered around it had an alert, excited look.

  The advertising magazine came out that day too, so he bought both. Una and Sulien had just barely dodged arrest on the border between Venedia and Sarmatia. Varius started leafing urgently through the magazine, trying to think of something he could do if he should find their signal in it. He frowned at the page where it might have been, thinking, Run, run, as if he could propel some measure of strength or luck to them through the print. Later he found he’d wandered close to the temple of Isis and Serapis, and because they were the gods of his Egyptian ancestors and gods of death, he went and leaned his forehead against the temple’s outer wall, praying without belief, ‘Please, let these two go. Please, not them too.’

  *

  A few days later Varius was woken by insistent knocking on the door of his room. He lay still for a second of paralysed dread, long enough to realise that the sky was still black and it was very early indeed. Warily, he got up. The room was so small that he barely had to take a step to reach the door. But there was no one there when he opened it; he heard hurried footsteps receding towards the outside door. A large crate stood at his feet.