Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  Varius dragged the box inside, crouched beside it on the floor and looked it over with nonplussed paranoia before beginning to yank it open. The box was filled with secondhand office equipment – an autoscribe with a couple of ink cartridges, a longdictor, even a bundle of pens and a pair of scissors, all carefully padded in layers of shredded paper. There was a note, unsigned, which read, ‘For use in your endeavours. I regret I cannot be of further assistance.’ And there was a smaller box, right at the bottom of the crate, and the box was full of money.

  Varius sat on his heels, open-mouthed, staring at it, and then, for want of knowing what else to do, counted it. A hundred and fifty thousand sesterces.

  He panicked a little then. It was more than he could possibly distribute around the scattered hoards where he’d stored his money, and he was afraid both to leave it there and to take it with him. He stood dithering over it for a while, despairing over every possible hiding place and course of action, before finally packing the money up again and stowing it on top of the narrow cupboard.

  He knew 150,000 sesterces wasn’t much to Eudoxius. There had been no indication of whether he was even willing to return to Rome. Oh, it’s all right by him, so long as he doesn’t have to do anything; he’ll just sit in his country house and throw money at it! thought Varius, ungratefully. He made a hasty call to Delir and Ziye and by the time he reached the family’s pair of cellar rooms in the Subura, after an agitated morning ploughing round the city as normal with his case, he had driven himself to a pitch of perverse resentment.

  He told Delir, ‘It’s not money I want.’

  Delir stared for a second and said, ‘You stupid young man, of course you want money.’

  ‘It’s only four or five serious bribes,’ said Ziye, ‘and how else are you really going to get near Drusus?’

  And they were discussing means of keeping it reasonably safe when Lal came running into the cellar and said, ‘It’s Una.’

  *

  Una lay on the vibrating floor in the volucer, her wrists and ankles chained. She had not made a sound, nor any voluntary movement, since they’d hoisted her off the gravel, just hung limp in their arms. There was gritty blood on the side of her face and lip and bruises glowed along her body. She thought some of her ribs were cracked and her wrist was broken, nothing worse, but the soldiers weren’t sure how badly she was hurt, and therefore had been comparatively gentle with her, so far at least. She kept her eyes closed as the aircraft rose and roared west. She was telling herself a story, in images rather than in words, and she repeated and refined it, loading every moment of it with will, insisting that it be true.

  Sulien flies through the outskirts of Iaxarteum, the sparse city landscape shuttering past him in grey and black, wind already lashing the heat from him as he clings to the frame. He knows there are only minutes before the vigiles have the train stopped, before they’re there to intercept him. The train gathers speed, but then slows again as it approaches the point where the tracks diverge, fanning wide across the huge, colourless emptiness outside the town. The ground is still blurred when he looks down, but the sound of the train changes, he can feel it groan. I have to do it, I have to do it, he thinks, and lowers himself as much as he can, lets go. He rolls and bounces, comes to rest on rough dry ground. Perhaps for a moment he can’t move, the breath knocked out of him; when he manages to get to his feet, perhaps, on instinct, he starts stumbling back the way he has come.

  But there’s another train coasting this way, and he knows he has to get aboard. It’s a passenger train just out of Iaxarteum Main Station – the vigiles either haven’t thought or had time to have it shut down yet. It’s an older train, running on the same tracks as the freight trains, not hovering above the broad magnetway line that cuts between the others and stretches away to the east. It’ll soon be going much faster than the train of hoppers, but for now Sulien has a little more time to judge his moment. He grabs a rail or pipe, pulls himself up into the gap between the carriages, feet braced above the coupling. The buffers jump and judder below his feet, and when the train curves the gap narrows – the first time it happens, he thinks he’ll be crushed, but it never closes as tight as that; it always opens out again. Another train blasts by and the freezing air sucks and pummels at him; he has to grip tight and lean in towards the train to keep his footing, but he does, he does.

  He’s moving so fast he can’t think about anything else.

  He’s exposed and visible, out there on the side of the train. It won’t be long before someone sees him. When the train stops between stations, out on the steppe – one of those inexplicable breathing spaces in a journey – he jumps down, shaky and sick and longing to lie down in the scratchy grass, but he ducks under the body of the train, climbs up into the underframe, wedging himself against the truss-bars, spread-eagling himself over the wheelset. He’s hidden by the brake-cylinder, by the wheels themselves.

  He hugs a long strut and locks his hands round his wrists, gripping. He shuts his eyes so he won’t see the massive wheels turning right beside him, or the axle spinning over the juddering flow of the ground below. Sometimes stones or hard scraps of rubbish flick up from the tracks against his back; sometimes the whole structure swerves, swinging him closer to the wheels and the metal above him. It isn’t so cold under here, but the dark air is terrible. He feels as if he’s suffocating, and the noise drives into his skull like a chisel, but hours pass, carrying him further and further away.

  It’s so loud he can’t think about anything else.

  And now Una wanted to skip ahead to a time when Sulien had been in Nionia for some months, a year or more, picking up the language like another accent, and so much faster than he thought he could. He’d be working, helping people, as he always should have been. He would have friends – so many of them – and he’d tell them what had happened to his sister, and they would comfort him. He had been a slave, he’d so nearly been crucified, and it had seemed to rinse off him almost completely, almost at once. Only little traces, like that way of holding his wrist, had remained with him. He’d been without her for seven years, and however much he’d wanted her back, it hadn’t stopped him being bafflingly happy, then and afterwards. Sometimes it had outraged her that things that had left such rough, wrong, ugly edges on her had been softened or let slip by his kindly, unreliable memory. Now, lying on the metal floor, panic flared in her at the thought that perhaps it had always demanded more effort from him than either of them had realised. But even if this was the worst of all, even if he was so much more tired now, surely she could still trust this wouldn’t cripple or kill him. Given a while, he’d scrape together enough happiness to live on. He would get married, he would have children.

  But it was what happened now that mattered most, and she had to see him through it, even if only like this, by willing him to do the things that would save him. She saw him stumbling away from the train in darkness, at the edge of some town, crouched against a wall, clutching his head and gasping as the dizziness wore off. Now there would be nothing to deflect what had happened. She began to think of what she would have felt and done if it had been her – and no, she couldn’t bear it, she had to leave a small gap. A few minutes then, or however long was safe, until if someone was speaking to him, he’d be able to listen.

  If she could, what would she tell him?

  He knows what she’d tell him to do. ‘I don’t care what you say,’ he thinks in answer.

  Don’t argue, Sulien, says Una’s voice in his mind.

  Sulien shakes his head, ‘I’m going to get you back. I’m going to. I—’ At this point, he’s bound to be thinking this way.

  Well, I’m not going to watch you do something that stupid. I’m gone, I’m sorry, I tried. We both tried, and it happened anyway. Either you get out of this now or neither of us does.

  And it’s fine, Sulien, really it is. It will be in the end.

  ‘Don’t believe you.’

  Of course he can’t believe it, not yet. But
he’s cold and exhausted and hungry, and he must still have enough care for himself to want to look after those things. And beneath that there must be some particle of unrecognised trust that she’s right, that it’s worth guarding himself for a kinder time ahead.

  There’s some food and water in his pack – not much, but it’ll do. He’s got money too, they always carried half each. It might be better if he travelled through the night, didn’t waste the dark sleeping, but he’s probably already at the limit of what he can do without rest. He can’t walk into a guest-house tonight, even if he could find one – every town on a rail line or magnetway will be primed to watch for him, especially if he hasn’t had enough luck to be carried out of Sarmatia. But if he can find any kind of shelter at all – a culvert, a bush, a bit of corrugated iron propped against a wall – his clothes and the sleeping bag will keep him alive, even if he’s reached the snowy forest on the edge of Scythia rather than the deserts of the south. He has what he needs to survive, for now.

  Perhaps after all it’s best if he just goes to sleep. He accepts, at least, that there’s nothing he can do tonight but try and keep himself out of harm’s way. He walks as far he can from the tracks, finds somewhere hidden and lies down. Tomorrow he’ll do whatever he can to change his appearance and hurry on. And by then his sister will be so far out of reach that it will be clear to him which way he has to go.

  ‘Please, Sulien,’ murmured Una, once more, before her grip slid from the story and she fell away from it into soft, solitary dark, where she thought Marcus, and fell onwards, beyond thinking anything, into sleep.

  Sulien staggered across a rutted field, dragging his pack by the strap. He hadn’t made it far from the tracks before he toppled into a shallow ditch and stayed there. His bones still seemed to shake and bang with the motion of the train; his eardrums blared with its noise. He did not realise at first that a sound was emptying itself out of him: a long groan, almost a howl. He swallowed it back as he felt it, in case anyone heard and came looking – he must not allow himself to stop caring for these things. He pressed his face against the ground to stifle any more noise and gagged on the black dust that lined his throat. He heaved and sobbed, almost tearlessly, for only fitful spurts of water would come, loosening the grit in his eyes.

  Slowly sound returned and he could hear himself panting and spluttering into the coarse grass. He stopped.

  ‘Una,’ he said.

  The dry wind came scrubbing across the field. There was nothing else, not even a train passing, no one.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

  Almost as if she were really speaking to him, he heard Una’s voice answering that, and telling him what to do, sounding more impatient than anything.

  ‘Shut up,’ he said to her, and tried to get up. And it didn’t work; his limbs, even his height, felt alien and insubstantial; for an instant he was teetering somewhere unnaturally high before the ground and sky rolled horribly and he was down again, clinging on to the grasses as if he could have fallen even from here.

  He thought, I wish they’d taken us both.

  He did not wish that. He hadn’t jammed himself into that hellish space above the train’s wheels for so long to wish himself helpless now. He mumbled aloud, ‘I’m going to get you back. I’m coming.’

  First of all he had to know what had happened. Would they have shot her at once, there by the tracks? The fall itself might have killed her.

  Tears came more freely at that thought, but he sat up and dragged his pack open, his fingers slow and clumsy, and groped for the bottle of water inside. He stopped himself draining it at the last moment and used what was left to rinse as much of the grime as he could from his face and hands. He slicked his hair back from his forehead with the last of it, wishing he still had the beard or something more about himself that he could alter. He changed out of the clothes he’d be described as wearing, pulled up his hood.

  It occurred to him that the air was not so cold here, and the earth was sandy under the threadbare grass, and there was a surprising salt tang in the air. Until now if he’d given any thought to his location at all, it was only with the despairing conviction that he had no idea where he was. But he couldn’t have come far enough to have reached a true coast. He must be near the Hyrcanian or the Caspian Sea.

  At the edge of the field a dusty road ran parallel to the tracks, towards a faint yellowish glow in the dark sky. Sulien found some longer grass and hid his pack so he wouldn’t look like someone who had come far. He was grateful not to have to carry the weight as he made his way towards the light.

  It took him about half an hour to reach the centre of a fishing town on the shore of the inland sea. It seemed a prosperous place, even jaunty, compared with the disappointed towns in the north, but it was still quiet, and shut down for the night. Sulien passed through a little forum crowded with empty frames of market stalls and found the small public longvision was either turned off or broken. He swung a hand hard against the edge of one of the stalls and thought for an instant of Una’s arms filled with flakes of glass as the metal chimed out, dangerously loud. But though he retreated at once from the sound, a minute or two later he had forgotten why his hand hurt. He did nothing about it.

  He saw a pair of vigile vans standing near the gates of the town’s station and shied away.

  He found another longvision a little way beyond that, in a square where there were still some shops open. Sulien lurked at a corner. A few other people coming out of the shop glanced up at the screen as they passed, but there was no sound and Sulien had to wait through a long sequence of advertisements, during which he could feel whatever noise it was he’d made alone in the field building behind his ribs again. At last the news came on, and the jubilant tone of it was obvious, even in silence.

  He had been working so hard, all through that walk in the dark, to believe that she was still alive. Without thinking about it, he had expected at least a temporary relief if it were true. But he looked at the satisfied faces of the two state newscasters and he only felt sick.

  There were no pictures of Una. He’d thought he was hoping for a sight of her, but instead he found he was thankful for that much; he didn’t want to see her captured. There was some wobbling footage of a volucer, rising into the grey air, and a caption rolled across the screen saying they would have Una back in Rome by the following day, but there was nothing of what they were going to do to her, or when, or what was happening to her now. Perhaps if there had been sound . . .

  Then there was a parade of pictures, photographs and drawings, of his own face, shaven and bearded, and he began hurrying back the way he’d come, trembling a little. He did not look like the few coppery-skinned, broad-cheekboned people he’d seen here. This wasn’t a large town where faces would be more varied, or where travellers from the west might be commonplace; he wouldn’t last a morning here. He had to get away at once, though he didn’t think he was capable of another journey like the one that was still resounding through his body. He was tired enough to feel a black froth of dreams breaking against his eyelids whenever he blinked. He wouldn’t be able to hold himself in place; he’d be shaken out of consciousness, smashed across the tracks. And even apart from that, and even if he could be sure of dodging the vigiles again, it wasn’t enough now to scramble aboard a train which could be heading almost anywhere.

  He passed the station again, on the far side of the street, and a fare-car stopped, dropping someone off. It lingered for a moment then moved on slowly, looking for another customer, the insignia of its provincial livery glinting dimly in the streetlight. Sulien eyed it, and an ugly spark of possibility fired in his mind. Without really believing he could be going to act on it, he started walking towards the car and tentatively, as if it were a gesture that might mean nothing, he lifted his hand.

  The car stopped beside him and the driver looked out at him, tired, innocent. He asked, ‘Where to?’

  Sulien stared at him for a second. ‘I think I got off my train a
t the wrong place,’ he said, hearing his own voice as toneless and unnatural. ‘What’s the next stop?’

  ‘Do you mean Socanda or Saramanna?’

  ‘Yes, Saramanna. That’s it,’ said Sulien woodenly, and climbed into the car beside him.

  The warmth of the car and the support of the seat were almost enough to put him to sleep at once, even while electricity prickled through his nerves, jolted open his eyes whenever they slipped closed. Back in Rome neither he nor Varius had known how to steal a car. Now he could see a way.

  ‘Not from round here?’ asked the man, with mild, amiable curiosity.

  ‘Venedia.’ Sulien glanced guardedly around the cab, taking in the identity documents lying on the car’s console, the cap on the man’s head. He had nothing he could use a weapon and there was little space to make a swing. Once they were outside the town he’d have to grab the man’s head and try and slam it against the window, do it again if the first blow didn’t stun him. If he struck too hard, he’d break the man’s skull.

  I can’t, he thought, his breath beginning to come faster and deeper. Sickness tightened in his stomach. He’d once had to knock someone out before, and it had shaken him then. But this man hadn’t done anything wrong, had only let someone into his car who might be about to murder him. And Sulien had committed himself as soon as he climbed inside – he couldn’t let himself be deposited at whatever town they were heading for, off his course and miles away from his belongings.

  But I don’t want to do it; it’s not fair, he pleaded inwardly. Not fair, when if he could have jumped a second earlier up onto that train— If he could have kept hold—