Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  The driver jolted in shock. Varius had made Sulien rehearse these dangerous seconds before the drug took effect, but he felt now that he had no need of practice. He had done this before, he remembered, and without a weapon of any kind. He grabbed the man’s hand as it moved for his gun and forced it down, slammed the muzzle of his own weapon against his ribs at the same time.

  He whispered, ‘You shut up and keep still and go to sleep, or I’ll kill you.’

  At last the man crumpled. Sulien had to cram him down awkwardly under the seat and climb over him, a performance that felt so conspicuous and ungainly it seemed too much to hope that everyone in the street, vigiles and civilians both, would still be too occupied with what they were doing to notice what has going on in the cab. But then he was in the driver’s seat, placing his hands lightly over the controls, and the street was still full of people looking at the ground.

  He had to sit and wait, sweating, while Varius and the others struggled to shift the cars. The breeze slapped a ten-sestertium note against the windscreen and Sulien watched it quiver there. Someone, reaching for it, might look inside; there was nothing to stop them.

  He drove forward, swift as possible past the panting vigiles and the displaced cars.

  Varius’ radio crackled as soon as the van began to move. ‘Ater,’ said Delir, in case the vigiles around Varius were listening, ‘I’ve got a young man unconscious here – might have been trampled.’

  ‘All right, stand by, I’m on my way,’ answered Varius, and took off as fast as he could towards Delir without breaking into a run as Sulien turned down the side-street. Behind him, Ziye rolled the second van back into position, blocking the way.

  Sulien stopped. The street was still as quiet and shadowed as it had been every time they’d scouted it. A little way ahead was the reason they’d chosen this point on the route to the Colosseum: a stairwell leading down to the kitchen door of an eating house for which Varius had handed over a month’s rent in cash. The keys were in Sulien’s pocket. There was a change of clothes for each of them waiting inside, and the main doors of the eating house opened onto a broader, busier street running at an angle to the Via Nomentana. There was a trirota standing ready at the front.

  ‘Sulien.’ Una’s voice was just inches behind him, high, breathless.

  He plucked the set of keys off the driver’s waist and stumbled out of the van, unlocked the doors.

  Una was seated on a metal bench at the back of the van, leaning forward, rigid against the restraints that held her. Her eyes were wide, her face racked with tension and shock, but her lips parted in a smile of incredulous excitement.

  ‘You weren’t meant to do this,’ she said, stammering, as he climbed inside, ‘you weren’t meant to come.’

  ‘That’s grateful, isn’t it?’ said Sulien, scrambling across to her, pulling out the bolt-cutters. There were no keys for the restraints on the bunch he held; they would have had copies waiting at the Colosseum.

  Una let her head drop against the wall behind her, gasping. ‘Hurry,’ she breathed.

  Her wrists were fixed together above her head, shackled to a bar on the wall. At first, crouched on the floor of the van at Una’s feet, Sulien noticed the position only with a hurried pang of indignation at the cruelty of it. He clipped through the chains that bound her feet together and tethered them to the floor easily enough, stood up to free her hands.

  But he saw now that the cuffs were heavier than anything on which he’d tested the bolt-cutters. He’d expected a length of chain between them, but instead they were joined by a thick, solid block of metal an inch wide. Even before he tried he knew that he couldn’t close the bolt-cutters on that, nor on the bolt that held them to the wall. And when he tried to cut through the cuffs themselves, he couldn’t get the blades between the metal and the cast on her wrist.

  They had known about the cast: Cleomenes had mentioned it, and they’d even seen it on the longvision. None of them had ever thought about it as an obstacle.

  Una arched back awkwardly, trying to see what he was doing.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Sulien, absurdly, trying to find a gap between the ratchet and the plaster by holding her wrist against the wall with one hand. Una slid forward to the edge of the seat, trying to give him more room to work.

  ‘Is that better?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but the points of the blades skidded uselessly on the surface of the cast, nipped at the outer edges of the cuff.

  He felt Una going slack, the hopeful tension draining out of her.

  ‘I’m doing it,’ he insisted. He shifted his grip on the handles, the plastic growing slippery in his hands now, trying to stifle the growing tremble in the muscles of his wrists and fingers. He rested a knee on the bench and repositioned the blades to chew at the plaster of the cast itself. Una flinched and hissed. In desperation he put the cutters to the block between the cuffs, but succeeded only in scoring shallow grooves on the metal.

  Una sighed, long and quiet. She said, ‘Sulien.’

  ‘Shut up.’ He struggled on, dragging, levering, fighting the urge to pound the head of the bolt-cutters against the joint of the cuffs, like a hammer. He couldn’t risk breaking them.

  Una said, slowly and reluctantly, ‘It’s not working.’

  ‘I can’t do this if you keep going on at me.’ He put the bolt-cutters to the other cuff and managed at last to chop through it, but that didn’t free her hand; the broken ring still stood rigidly around it. He’d have to cut out a section of the ratchet and the blades had twisted slightly now, and he’d made no progress on the cuff around the cast at all.

  ‘Sulien,’ said Una again, ‘there’s no time.’

  They’d calculated that he should have her out of the van within forty seconds, and it must have been twice, three times that by now. How could this not work, when everything else had, after he’d come so far? He took the gun from his hip and began slamming the butt of it against the bolt, loud, furious gasps coming through clenched teeth. He flung a couple of wild blows at the wall too, barely realising he was doing it.

  ‘Stop,’ Una was pleading, ‘Sulien, stop it. They’re coming— You’ve got to go.’

  ‘Get down,’ Sulien said, placing the point of the gun against the fixture.

  Una shouted, ‘No, don’t!’ But Sulien pushed her down and to the side, trying at once to force her head as far from her chained wrists as possible, and to lower his body over her, covering her. He turned his face away and fired.

  The bang seemed to come from everywhere at once. Una jerked and cried out and hot shocks of pain burst along his arm and in his side. Sulien grabbed for the cuffs to check them first, before even caring how badly he or Una might be hurt.

  The plate between the cuffs was scuffed and dented, that was all.

  The driver’s radio fizzled in the cab: ‘Castus. Please respond. Castus. Where are you?’

  The bullet had shattered on the metal, sending pieces ricocheting around the van. They were both bleeding, Una from her left hand and the side of her neck. Her cast was scorched, and a flake of metal was embedded in the plaster; the skin on her other wrist was red and burnt. Sulien stood there, gazing at the damage, blankly conscious that he could have killed them both. The word ‘lucky’ turned over in his mind with vast, clumsy weight. The gashes to his waist and forearm were bleeding freely and burned with a bright, lively pain. He felt, suddenly, how long it had been since he had really slept.

  Una said, ‘You can still help me.’

  He looked down at her. She stared at him, a clear look as inescapable as gravity, and he realised he was holding the gun just inches from her face.

  He could not speak even to say, ‘No.’ He shook his head, dizzily, and backed away, shutting his eyes.

  Una advised in a relentless whisper, ‘Just don’t think about it. And don’t look at me.’

  Without answering, Sulien shoved the gun back roughly into its holster and grabbed for the bolt-cutters again, sawed and levered at the
cuffs. He seized both her wrists, smearing his blood and hers over the metal and plaster, and dragged, crying now, as if sheer desperation would give him the strength to pull the shackles straight out of the wall. Una’s hands clenched, tried to wrest away from his. He knew he was hurting her, he didn’t care—

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  And his sinews gave way all at once, his hands dropped from the cuffs and he sank to his knees in front of her. He put his hands to her shoulder and her face and tried to answer. It should not have been difficult to explain something as simple and essential as the fact that he couldn’t kill her, ever, and it was unconscionable that she should ask. And yet as his eyes squeezed shut on an acid swell of tears, for a second he did picture himself doing it, and it did look possible. But he could do nothing now but cling to her and shake his head, unable to say a thing.

  Una was straining tight against the restraints again, trembling. She said in a rush, ‘All right, all right! You don’t have to. You don’t have to— I’ll be all right. But you can’t stay now, they’re coming.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ Sulien got out, finally tearing through the obstruction in his throat. ‘I’ll get you out of the Colosseum. I’ll come back.’

  Una’s jaw tightened and a tremor puckered through her, but her mouth tugged into a smile, and she nodded. ‘Fine. Just hurry.’

  He held her quickly, then lunged across the floor to push open the doors. The van Ziye had left as a barricade at the end was shifting, unseen hands pushing it aside, and there was a shriek of sirens from somewhere – the other end of the street. But if he was fast enough . . . He felt for the keys to the kitchen in his pocket.

  Una had said what she knew she had to, to get him to leave.

  He wiped his eyes. After the relative dark inside the van, the pale strip of sky above the street was strangely bright and soft, dappled with shadow. He thought of Lal, who would be hurrying through the city, thinking of him.

  He turned, slowly, and looked back at Una.

  Una stiffened. ‘Go on, run. For God’s sake, Sulien.’

  Sulien exhaled, and let his shoulders drop. He pulled the door of the van closed.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve left it too long. I won’t get away.’

  Una rose up, dragging against the cuffs, breathing hard, her face distorted and masklike with horror. ‘No.’

  Sulien sat down on the bench beside her. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘At least try, please at least fucking try,’ gasped Una. ‘You have to.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and put his arms round her. ‘I don’t.’

  Una had started crying at last. ‘Sulien – the one thing I could say I’d done – back in London – I saved you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sulien, ‘you did. So can’t you see why I can’t go?’

  Una drew her knees up close to her body, sobbing, a despairing huddle in his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, tears filling his own eyes again.

  She grew a little quieter, her face buried against his chest. They could hear the noise of vigile trirotas and cars screaming closer, and pounding feet on the cobbles outside. Unwillingly, Sulien drew the gun again and looked down at it, his other hand tightening hard on Una’s shoulder. ‘I should— I suppose I have to—’

  ‘And then yourself?’ asked Una, in a wrecked, accusing voice.

  He nodded. It wasn’t quite so hard to contemplate now.

  But perhaps even now he couldn’t really believe he would do it, for his hand was so heavy and sluggish, dragging the muzzle up through the resistant air towards her head, and Una just wept and shuddered against him, without urging him to hurry.

  And even knowing what it would mean for them both, he was relieved when the vigiles burst in through the doors and struck the gun out of his hand before he could fire.

  Varius sat with a pen and calculator in a corner of a packed cookhouse, pretending to study the files he’d spread on the table, filling columns with imaginary figures over an untouched plate of fritters. He had stuffed the vigile jacket and cap into a plastic bag and flung it into a skip, picked up the briefcase he’d hidden inside it. He’d finished changing his clothes in the bathroom of the cookhouse – it wouldn’t be very strange, even if anyone noticed; he could have been getting ready for a meeting or an interview. He was longing to move, to know what had happened – but the story wouldn’t have broken yet, and he had to be careful hanging around longvisions.

  He set out into the city, changing direction often. He took a fare car towards West Aventine Railway Station and went inside, then walked out through another set of doors heading north, towards the centre. The air felt strange on his clean, shaved jaw and scalp; the crowd felt different as it flowed around him. He realised that though he had a false name and forged papers ready to produce if need be, this was the first time in months he had not been in any definite disguise. The vigile uniform and the tramp’s haze of alcohol and dirt had both carried a story, and a warning. These bland, inexpressive business clothes said almost nothing; they were not unlike what he might have worn to work before any of this had happened. Someone tried to sell him something as he passed the Raudusculan Gate. It had been so long since that had happened that it shocked him, to have a stranger calling out, ‘How about you, sir – high-quality watches!’ It felt unnerving to be so unguarded, to have to trust that this was not what the vigiles would expect of him, and yet it made him carry himself differently, his head up, almost feeling as if he were just another professional hurrying briskly through an ordinary working day.

  Every time he came anywhere near a public longvision, of course he had to stop and look. Advertisements, dancers, a preview of a show. Varius forced himself to stride on, grimacing – what was taking so long? Perhaps it had worked, but they were going to cover it up – perhaps they didn’t want to admit they’d lost her. Then how would they account for her absence at the Colosseum? He began to think of possible answers, and tried to stop himself, superstitiously afraid of having any expectations at all. He had honed the plan into plausibility, all the while trying not to place any inward bet on the outcome. He had been afraid of pitching his hopes dangerously low, rather than too high, even so, when they were actually in the street, watching the money tumble down, he couldn’t help but see it was working. The vigiles hadn’t recognised or challenged any of them; Sulien was in the driver’s seat of the van – they were almost there.

  Once he heard sirens sweeping past, but he didn’t see the cars. He went south at last, to Remoria Station. Delir and Ziye had planned this stage, scattering after the attempt was made. They had agreed they must keep apart for the first few days at least; they would meet later, outside Naples. Varius already had his ticket in his pocket. He had no connections there, and it was almost as teeming with people of every colour and from every province of the Empire as Rome itself; he should not stand out.

  Then he looked up at the silent longvision screen above the station concourse and saw the news. For a moment it was as if there was a dam in his mind against which the words strained, as he tried to force them to mean something else.

  At first it said only that an attempt to rescue Una had been thwarted, and he tried to hope that they were already dead, that they’d both been shot, but he couldn’t; he didn’t mean it.

  They were both in the Colosseum cells. He remembered standing in the terraces with Lal and Ziye, months before, looking across the arena towards the place where Marcus had died. He saw Una’s face at the moment she’d condemned herself to die in the same place and felt a helpless flash of anger with her.

  What had it been? At what point after Sulien turned the van down the side-street had they failed, and was it something he might have seen and solved? He should never have agreed to help Sulien; he and Cleomenes should quietly have done whatever was necessary to get a dose of some fast-acting poison to Una. It would have been bearable to think of her dying like that, bearable at least compared to this. And Sulien woul
d have lived. At least one of them should – it was too much that the gale that had started blowing with Leo’s and Clodia’s deaths and had swept off Gemella and Marcus should have both of them too.

  He looked away from the screen; he mustn’t be noticed staring at it. He realised he was shaking, and gripping the handle of his case with convulsive force. He did not know how much might have shown on his face. He began to move.

  He was supposed to go to Naples whatever happened, once his part was done. But he realised that even though he had contemplated this, as the worst that could happen, he hadn’t really included it as a possibility in his plans. At least, he could not think he had truly conceived of riding out of Rome, knowingly leaving them to the dogs. In any case, he was already out of the station and hurrying down the steps.

  He couldn’t think of anything he could do in so little time. Was he planning only to be there to watch?

  The thought almost stopped him in midstep, winded. But he supposed he would do that, if nothing else: be present, bear witness.

  He went straight to the centre and took a room in a large, glossy businessmen’s mansio overlooking the Colosseum.

  [ X ]

  ARENA HOUNDS

  Makaria must have heard the volucer coming in low over the Aegean, must have known she could be the only possible reason for its approach, but she did not come to meet it. When Drusus landed in the yard behind her villa on the highest peak of the island, the only sign of life was a brood of hens, who flapped away in clumsy panic into the herb garden as the aircraft descended. A couple of bony goats bounded past too. Drusus had only visited his cousin on Siphnos once before, but he did not remember there being so much livestock so close to the house – which looked run down, greying and flaking in the bright winter sun. No slaves appeared from inside, but as they approached through the garden the leader of the heavy escort of Praetorian minders he had set around Makaria came around the corner of the house and told him everyone was down in the big olive grove in the valley.