Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

The Prefect had vanished from the courtroom, leaving the clamour to rumble on until the lictors escorted him back to his seat on the platform.

  ‘Since the prisoner’s guilt is manifest and undisputed,’ announced the Prefect, ‘and since further interrogation is futile in the face of her recalcitrance and mendacity, this trial is at an end, and she is hereby condemned to the beasts. She will be returned to the prison in which she awaited trial—’

  ‘No,’ whispered Sulien, at last.

  And the knowledge that Sulien would soon insist that this merely altered the conditions of the rescue, which would work because it had to, made Varius ache with envy and pity.

  ‘—and thence to the Colosseum, where her execution will be publicly presented during the New Year’s Games.’

  Two startled-looking state newscasters appeared on the screen: ‘An early end to the trial, the Prefect having judged it pointless to continue!’ chattered one, in a bright, shrill tone.

  ‘For God’s sake, turn it off,’ said Delir, hollowly.

  Ziye gave Varius a heavy-eyed look and said, ‘That stupid girl.’

  Varius rubbed the space between his eyes, smiled without humour. ‘We should have known she’d do that.’

  Just as Varius had expected, Sulien fired up, more at their tone than what they’d said. ‘No,’ he started, ‘no, listen – this is how we thought things were a few days ago, we’ve already planned for this. All right, so we can’t get her coming out of the court. But the place on the Via Prenestina was better anyway, and now we’ve got until New Year’s Day – it means we’ve got more time to get it perfect.’ He stopped, a slow amazement brightening his face, and the resemblance to his sister sharpened, almost too close to the way she’d looked a moment before. ‘Everyone heard her,’ he said.

  Varius meant not to answer, to keep nodding along to anything Sulien might say rather than quarrel with him, for as long as this awful time lasted. But he couldn’t stop himself: ‘What use is that? They’ll never let anyone hear it again. It won’t mean anything to most people. It isn’t worth what she’s paying.’

  ‘She’s not going to pay anything!’ said Sulien, desperately, inevitably.

  Lal was beside him. ‘They can’t wipe it out of people’s heads. No one’s ever even heard Marcus was Emperor before now! People have to see it means something.’

  Varius had no heart to argue with them further. It made no difference to what he meant to do, that much was true. Perhaps they were even right. They both looked vivid and brittle, as if it would take far less than the whole weight of Rome to smash them to bits.

  Delir looked miserable, and yet there was a faded version of the same brightness about him. He said, ‘I am not sure it is very different from your own plan, Varius, is it? We have very few means of resistance.’

  Varius could neither deny the comparison nor stand to examine it closely. He said, ‘Well, it’s all right, Sulien, we won’t stop.’

  [ IX ]

  RESTRAINTS

  This was not the last night she had left, but it was the last night outside the walls of the Colosseum. They were moving her to the cells beneath in the morning. Una rose suddenly from the bed and marched to the door as if she expected to find it open, went back to the bed and sat with her arms wrapped round herself again. She had not pulled back the blankets, or closed her eyes: she didn’t want to sleep. The lights had been turned out hours ago. The blackness was tight around her.

  ‘Marcus,’ she said aloud.

  How long had it taken him to die? Twenty minutes, half an hour. Probably it would be no longer for her, whatever Drusus had said. It would feel longer than it really was, but still it was a very little time out of a whole life, or even a life that wasn’t whole. If Marcus had undergone that, she could too.

  ‘Marcus. Marcus,’ she said again, but barely even whispering now, mouthing the words into her hands, her fingers cupping her warm breath against her face. ‘I’m nearly there. I won’t be long now.’ She waited in the dark. ‘Come and meet me. Please, if you can, if it’s possible, come now. If you were here just for a second I could— I could . . .’ Her eyes were clenched shut, as tight as they would go, yet the tears leaked out at the corners. ‘Come on. Please. Please try. Please God, let him come. Marcus,’ she repeated, louder now, rougher, almost an accusation rather than a plea.

  She curled up stiffly on her side, trying to hold closed the soured wound she felt in her chest, a cold gully of poison running from her throat to her breastbone, she hoped the dogs would tear just there, and scrape it out of her quickly.

  It was strange how, as she looked into the camera lens and spoke, she had been so conscious of possessing, for a few seconds, the Empire’s attention: millions watching and listening to her, and yet it had not occurred to her to think that people she knew would be among them. She thought Varius would almost certainly have seen it. It would have hurt him, and yet somehow she felt a small, selfish comfort in thinking that for those seconds they had been in a kind of contact. Lal perhaps, maybe Delir and Ziye too: they must have watched at least part of the trial. Others she remembered from the camp: Tiro, Tobias, Helena. And Noriko would know that what she had worked so hard for had been thrown away.

  But she had to believe Sulien had not been near a longvision in days. He was somewhere in India by now, slumped in the back of a truck jolting down a pitted road from Methora to Palimbothra, or even out of the Empire already, entangled in a flow of Bamarian refugees in southern Sina, or in Siam, held for questioning in a cell like this one, not trusted yet, but safe.

  But he would find out, in the end; he would know what she had done.

  You wouldn’t have the strength to do the same thing again, she thought, watching herself from a distance with a certain disgust as she sobbed and writhed on the bed.

  Well, I had enough to do it once, she answered herself fiercely, and the tears stopped, though she continued to shake and gasp.

  I don’t regret it, she announced, breathless even in her mind. And she began to chant it to herself in silence: I don’t regret it, I don’t regret it, I don’t regret it. She was not precisely sure what it meant, now, to regret or not. But the rhythm of it calmed her for a while.

  It was a cold morning, barely grown into daylight, even though it was long past dawn. Standing on the first step of the fire-escape at the rear of the block of flats, Lal was almost at Sulien’s height, high enough to press her forehead against his. She wanted to kiss his lips again, but since they had stepped off the train in Rome certain ways of touching had become impossible, held in suspension.

  He too had been sentenced to the hounds in absentia, the day after the end of Una’s trial.

  Lal could not think what to say to him. There was nothing he would do differently if she told him to be careful; he knew well enough what the risks were already. She didn’t want to lift her hands from his shoulders.

  ‘We need to get ready now,’ he whispered at last, without moving.

  Lal nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘tell her I’ve missed her.’

  ‘You’ll see us both in three days,’ he said. ‘You can tell her.’

  ‘I know.’ I love you, she thought of adding; perhaps she would always regret it if she didn’t. But she did not think it would help him to hear it now. It would be a distraction; perhaps he would make a mistake and fail and it would all be her fault.

  She had thought she was managing to look reasonably cheerful and confident, but clearly she wasn’t, from the way he grinned at her and said, ‘We’re going to do it. I’ll be all right.’

  Lal put her hands to each side of his face, framing it, ‘See you soon, then,’ she said, and slung the pair of bags over her shoulder and began to run up the steps. You don’t believe it, she told herself, so why aren’t you trying to stop him?

  But strangely, she began to feel more hopeful the further away she was from him, and by the time she reached the roof she was not sure why success had seemed so impossible.

  Sulien looked ar
ound and stepped a little closer to the wall, then put on the uniform jacket over the tunic. He felt superstitiously for the bolt-cutters tucked inside it before buttoning it up, skimmed his hand lightly from the syringe in his pocket to Varius’ gun in the holster at his hip. He would not have to use it, he reassured himself, though that would be more for Cleomenes’ sake than his own. It was loaded, nevertheless.

  He walked out onto the main street. Varius, also dressed in vigile uniform, was waiting on the corner, calmly answering a passer-by’s request for directions. He’d shaved his beard the night before, and had tried briefly to salvage at least some of his hair before shearing that off too in frustration. He looked crisp and professional now – the best fit for this, really. Delir was too old and too short for the uniform, Sulien still too young. They walked together, two officers on patrol, chatting.

  They passed a van parked brazenly athwart the entrance to a tiny side-street. No one was much bothered by the blocked-off access, so far at least, and the van looked deserted; Ziye was hiding in the back.

  ‘Another two minutes,’ Varius said.

  Sulien looked back at the deserted upper reaches of the building, where Lal was waiting. ‘This is costing you so much money.’

  Varius smiled. ‘A return on your investment,’ he said, ‘or Una’s, anyway.’

  Up on the roof, Lal opened the first bag, looked at the heaps of bank notes inside and sighed, then gathered an experimental double handful and hurled it out above the street. She ducked out of sight, crouching at the edge to watch what happened. A few notes fluttered back around her and for a moment she was afraid too little of the cash would even reach the ground, or else that it would all tumble limply to the roadside, not into the traffic. But then a damp puff of wind caught it and she saw the money begin to drift and spread in the air like smoke. It scattered softly along the road. She rose cautiously, lifted the bag, swung it out and emptied the money into the air.

  The notes speckled the street, blowing into small heaps against walls and gutters like fallen leaves, sprinkled down onto people’s heads and shoulders. Pedestrians began to stoop for them at once, but at first the cars continued to stream past, oblivious. Then, as the flow of traffic stopped at a crossing, the crowd began to spill into the middle of the street, first only in one lane, then in both, and people began to get out of their cars. Another shower of money drifted down through the air. Delir, slowly circling the block in the oldest, cheapest car they’d been able to find, stopped in the middle of the road behind several other stationary vehicles, a few yards short of the side-street. He got out and started gathering up notes like everyone else, picking his way along the street, away from Varius and Sulien, who had retreated a little way around the corner.

  Then the first two outriders swept into the street and ran into the morass in a blaze of dying speed. For a few seconds they stood nonplussed astride their trirotas, then they began to weave between the abandoned cars. A slightly forlorn cry carried up the street to where Sulien and Varius stood: ‘Return to your vehicles!’

  There had been no way of knowing exactly what would happen when the money was thrown, and sometimes Sulien had only been able to imagine a riot. So far, at least, it was not like that. People cheerfully ignored each other even as they foraged alongside one another, busily scooping up the notes grazing along the paper trails the wind had laid between the cars, excited and intent, but not yet frenzied, no one seemed to have grabbed for anyone else’s spoils. They paid no attention to the vigiles shouting at them to clear the street.

  The second pair of outriders led the van into the street. It was a big, square-edged, lumbering vehicle which looked too large and belligerent for the transport of a single prisoner. She’s there, thought Sulien, hardly able to believe it even after all this planning. She’s right there.

  Lal tossed a last few handfuls of cash over the barrier and raced across the roof and down the fire escape. She hurried across two streets and down an alleyway, behind a hoarding and into the empty ground of a stalled building site Varius had found, the bare skeleton of an office block awaiting the money to clothe it in brick. She pulled off the hooded coat, gloves and loose trousers she was wearing and let down the bunched-up skirt of the dress she had on underneath. She stuffed the clothes into one of the bags before stepping back out onto the street. She walked as far as the Via Tiburtina, quickly, but stepping carefully, as if the ground was slippery under her feet. She boarded a tram towards Vatican Fields and managed to sit still and gaze blandly out at the city until the tram swung past the Colosseum, when she jerked her face away from the window hard enough to startle the person sitting next to her. She could no longer dodge the knowledge that either way it was done now; they had either succeeded or failed.

  Delir wandered past the prison van as it slid to an uncertain standstill, casually shedding the final package of money across the road behind it. It was far less than the bagfuls Lal had flung from the rooftop, but enough that the van was soon hemmed in by the scavengers. Traffic had begun to back up around each turning in any case as Delir slipped back into the bustling crowd and hurried back along the street towards Varius and Sulien.

  They watched him slip behind Ziye’s van and into the alley. He walked out briskly a few moments later, dressed like them in vigiles uniform, with the fluorescent jacket over the tunic.

  ‘I AM ORDERING YOU TO CLEAR THE AREA,’ bawled an officer, his voice vibrating with almost comical desperation.

  ‘Now, would you say?’ asked Delir quietly as he reached Varius and Sulien. ‘Yes,’ said Varius, ‘now.’

  The three of them spread out across the street. As they passed, Ziye backed her van along the pavement, opening the entrance to the side-street.

  Sulien spread his arms wide, standing like a fence across the way. ‘I can’t allow you through. Will you please go back the way you came,’ he droned flatly into an oncoming current of people.

  There were baffled groans. ‘Make up your minds!’ shouted someone.

  ‘It’s a safety procedure,’ claimed Delir implacably.

  A number of people ignored them and barged past, but there were enough who either stood and argued or obediently trudged back towards the van, churning the froth of people around it.

  But Sulien wasn’t really looking at them. It was difficult to keep his eyes away from the stranded van that held Una, but he dragged his gaze from it to the outriders. Varius and Delir were watching them too, waiting for them to wander further into the scrum. One was speaking into his radio.

  A few people had begun to climb back into their cars, clutching as much money as they could carry. But it made little difference; ahead of the van a small mob was rooting for blown notes under Delir’s car, which still sat, with a couple of others, obstinately in the middle of the road.

  Varius and Sulien glanced at each other and continued up the packed street, leaving Delir behind. In his pocket, Sulien’s fingers were tight around the vigile identity pass Lal had made for him, but the nearest officer just brandished his radio in frustration as he saw them coming and shouted, ‘What the hell is this?’

  Sulien stared flatly at the man’s healthy, ordinary face, looking for some sign of consciousness of what he was helping to do.

  ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ he made himself say, shrugging. ‘We need to get you through this now.’

  ‘You’re telling me!’ said the rider, irritably.

  ‘We’re going to move some of these vehicles out of the way manually,’ explained Varius. ‘We can’t wait for these people to get in the mood to come back to their cars. It’s going to get even worse before the support units can get here; the junction’s blocked up ahead.’

  Sulien thought Varius sounded a little too measured and deliberate for what the situation was supposed to be, but the man was still looking around incredulously at the chaos and did not seem to notice. ‘I guess,’ he said, anxiously.

  ‘It just needs a few feet that way and you could get through,’ Sulien said.


  ‘Let’s get the rest of your team over here,’ urged Varius. ‘We need more pairs of hands.’

  The three of them walked over to the van. Sulien’s pulse blared with each step closer; it seemed enough to shake the street. Una, Una, I’m here, I’m here.

  Varius tapped on the window. ‘We need help with this, we’ve got to push these cars over that way,’ said the outrider to the driver inside.

  ‘I’m Captain Soterius Ater, we’re with the Nomentan Cohort,’ said Varius, displaying his identity pass. ‘You need to be ready to take the first turning; whoever you’ve got in the back needs to come and help.’

  The driver was tense in his seat, but he didn’t hesitate. ‘Lads,’ he called, banging on the dividing wall of the van, ‘we’ve got a problem out here; come on.’

  And the doors opened at the back. Sulien leant against the side of the van, light-headed, looking away. If he walked around to the rear of the van he might have seen inside, but there was no way to do it that would look natural, and it was just as well. He was not sure the pretence would hold if he saw her.

  It would only have been for a second anyway; the men shut and locked the doors behind them – but Sulien had seen the set of keys at the driver’s waist, where Cleomenes had said it would be.

  Varius gestured the other outriders over, led them off towards the deserted cars. Four outriders and two guards. Sulien hung back, slipping round the corner of the van, hoping to be forgotten. Varius was alone in a knot of vigiles and Sulien’s throat tightened to see how precarious this looked. Ahead of them Delir’s fluorescent jacket glowed through the bustle. He was trying to herd people out of the way in earnest now.

  Varius and the vigiles spread around a pair of cars, took hold and began to lift.

  Sulien stepped forward, opened the passenger door of the van and swung up in beside the driver. The man looked at him in mild confusion and Sulien turned to face him, opening his mouth and taking a breath as if to explain, and drove the syringe through the man’s sleeve into his arm.