Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘Then it can’t,’ interrupted Una.

  But he wasn’t listening. His face suddenly contorted, and he bowed forward as if caught by an attack of seasickness. He said again, ‘If it happens again . . .’

  She said more firmly, ‘We can’t let anything like that happen, ever again.’

  Sulien gave that ugly, hopeless smile again. ‘Yeah. The whole thing’s been a great way of teaching us to be more careful.’

  ‘No,’ said Una, ‘you’re right: we can’t go on as we were. It nearly killed us – it was killing us even before they caught me. He’s making the whole world poisonous, and we can’t live in it, and we can’t get away. The only thing we can do is try to change it.’

  Sulien said bleakly, ‘Yes. That sounds much easier.’

  ‘We can – he thinks we can. Drusus—’ She hesitated, wary of returning to the subject of her time in captivity, but this concerned him too closely to keep to herself. ‘Drusus came to see me in prison. You know there was a deal; that was how it happened.’

  Sulien was looking at her with alarmed, almost accusatory eyes, and he had stopped breathing at Drusus’ name.

  She sighed. ‘He just hit me a few times. And he talked about what it would be like in the Colosseum. And—’ There were words she just couldn’t say to him, even when she tried. ‘—he threw me on the bed, but he . . . he didn’t— He can hardly stand to be anywhere near me. You have to know how frightened he is, Sulien: he’s frightened of us both. And I know what he thinks we are. The Sibyl told him something in Delphi – I don’t know exactly what, not what the words were, anyway. But he thinks it meant he would become Emperor, and that if anyone could stop him, it would be us.’

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Sulien dully.

  ‘Yes,’ Una said, ‘I think in a way he is.’

  *

  The boat wasn’t new, and the previous owners had left a shelf-full of nautical charts and books. Varius spread out the maps on the benches and examined the books with slight apprehension. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I suppose I need to know a little more than how to go in a straight line before I attempt to go any further.’

  Una ran her hand over a scuffed place on the seat. ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

  ‘I painted it out,’ said Varius, ‘but it’s Ananke.’

  ‘I can steer,’ Una said, ‘and I remember a few things about docking, I think. I mean, nothing very much, but . . . Marcus hired a boat this kind of size a couple of years ago, when we were in Athens.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Varius softly, ‘yes. He talked about it.’

  They were alone on the deck; Sulien had given up shortly after Varius rose and returned to bed.

  Una smiled self-consciously. ‘I felt a bit like a traitor,’ she said, ‘I mean, the places that I came from – and all the slave auctions happening every moment, and there am I with the next Emperor, on the Aegean, just . . . floating. Decadent. But it was beautiful, being there with him.’

  Varius hesitated. ‘Can I ask something about the day he died?’ he asked carefully.

  Una nodded.

  But he could not quite look her in the eyes to talk of this. ‘You were there with him . . . ?’

  Una’s face puckered for a moment. ‘No. When I got there it was already too late.’ Her voice twisted on itself. ‘I wish more than anything—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Varius, angry with himself for asking, and miserable that Marcus hadn’t had that much comfort.

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry about anything – and he wasn’t alone, at least. Makaria was there with him. She wrote down what he wanted to say.’

  Varius succeeded in refilling the tank from the spare canisters of gas. ‘I think we can get as far as Corcyra on this, by the end of the day.’

  ‘Varius,’ said Una, sitting up, her voice charged with slightly feverish excitement, ‘we need to think what to do. I didn’t use to think there was anything, any point, but now . . . I mean, look what you’ve done. Why shouldn’t we be able to do more? I want to know everything you found out in Rome. We have to start to establish what’s possible.’

  Varius looked at her. Her face was alight with eagerness, but she looked so thin, so worn and battered. Already, where Sulien’s attention had been at work, the wounds that showed were closed over, and looked many days older than they were, but her skin was chalky where it was not dappled with bruises or striped with dried blood, and he could see a broad gouge on her scalp through her ragged hair. And there was still a glaze of tears in her eyes, and dark shadows beneath them.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘give yourself a little more time. Sulien needs it too.’

  Una sagged and looked down, fatigue showing even more sharply in the outlines of her face. ‘I know.’

  The following morning the three of sat round the chart table, Varius holding Una’s forearm steady, while Sulien cut the bloodstained cast from her wrist.

  They took a wobbling course along the coast to Corcyra, and didn’t realise how lucky they had been until the winter wind swung down from the north and raked up the sea, just as they pulled in to the first small marina they saw. They did not dare to sail at night in any case, but they were all conscious of how unprepared they were to handle a storm out on the open water.

  The harbour was almost deserted, the few other yachts there tightly battened down; no one was sailing for pleasure in this weather. Una and Sulien stayed hidden below deck, shivering as the cold advanced across the bay, while Varius went out in search of fuel and food. He came back excited and agitated.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, plunging down the steps into the cabin, extending a rain-battered newssheet, ‘it doesn’t make any sense. It just says there was a bomb scare – there’s nothing about you being alive, nothing about searching for you. It isn’t even the main story.’

  ‘What—? Do they still think we’re dead?’ asked Sulien, incredulously.

  ‘I never even hoped for that,’ said Varius. He frowned, and shook his head. ‘No, they can’t. It couldn’t hold that long, there weren’t any bodies – there are all kinds of things wrong. I knew they’d work it out; the question was when.’

  ‘But they did think we were dead, for a while,’ said Una. ‘And they told Drusus.’

  They stared down at the paper together. Abruptly, Varius laughed. ‘I could have spent a lot less money if I’d known that was going to happen.’

  ‘They’ll still keep looking for us,’ said Sulien. ‘If that’s what they’ve told him, they need to make it true. They can’t ever let him find out they lied to him.’

  There was another brief silence. ‘But it’ll be hard for them,’ said Una, gently. ‘Much harder – no one can help them unless they admit what they’re looking for, and they can’t let it spread, even within their own forces. They can’t alert the border guards, they can’t use longvision, or put up posters . . .’

  ‘They can tell whoever they want that they’re looking for you,’ said Sulien to Varius. ‘Maybe you’d better be the one who stays in the cabin now.’

  Varius sighed. ‘Then it might be wiser if—’

  ‘—if we separate again? No,’ said Una at once.

  ‘No,’ echoed Sulien, more quietly, but with dull, resigned force. He smiled, and it was still a sardonic curl of the lips, but he said, ‘You’re going to stop the war and bring down the Emperor. You don’t dump the recruits you’ve got.’ He lowered his head onto his arms, as if too tired to hold it up, and muttered, ‘Whatever you want to do, it’s going to take more than one person. And more than three.’

  The wind held them at Corcyra for another two days. On the evening that it dropped they steered eastwards round the coast and waited in the bay outside Corcyra City until after midnight, then they walked up into the town, with bundles in their arms.

  Sometimes Una would break into a run for a few steps, springing over puddles, testing her own body, and the cobbles beneath her feet, as if to walk on solid ground, not to pass through it or hurtle off it into
the dark sky, was some startling feat of acrobatics. It was so much, after subsisting on slices of sky and space; it was almost more than she could swallow, the yellow lights of the city, heaped like corn on the hill, and the turns and openings of the streets around her.

  But Sulien trudged along quietly at her side, his head down, and when he looked around it was with a tired, nearly indifferent incomprehension.

  ‘I’ll take the temple,’ said Varius as they came into the forum at the top of the hill. He disappeared into the street that ran alongside the temple while Una and Sulien went on to the Basilica, lurking in the shadows of its portico.

  Una looked around for witnesses or security cameras, but then put down the roll of paper and said, ‘Look, this might be such a mistake. There’s no getting away from it: we do this and they know we were here; they’ll be able to track us.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Sulien, ‘at least, maybe not for a while. I mean, the local vigiles think we’re dead, so why would they report it to anyone in Rome? And the words aren’t new. They’re out there already.’ But he spoke with that flat voice she was growing to hate, even when what he said was hopeful.

  He unrolled the first heavy sheet of paper, but Una put a hand on his wrist, stopping him. ‘Sulien. Decide if you want this. If you don’t—’

  ‘Why would I not want to stop someone who’s done these things to us?’ asked Sulien, with a faint hint of a mystified sneer.

  ‘Because you don’t think it’ll do any good. Because you don’t think it’s possible.’

  Sulien gazed heavily at the text on the paper, painstakingly stencilled in the waterproof paint they’d found on the boat. He shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Does it even matter what’s possible? We can try.’

  Una stared at him for a moment, then sighed and let go. ‘All right, then,’ she said. She bent for the can of glue and sprayed a coat of it onto the locked door of the Basilica, then stepped back as Sulien lifted the poster and pressed it into place.

  The words had come out a little skewed and smudged, but they were fierce and stark, the tall black letters straight enough to read:

  THE LAST ACT

  OF

  THE EMPEROR

  MARCUS NOVIUS FAUSTUS LEO

  WAS

  THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

  Tadahito could still smell the smoke as the propellors of the volucer stirred the air. The red walls of the Palace of Axum were pocked with bullet holes, but there was a small crowd on the steps waving palm fronds. Already statues had been felled and bronze eagles torn down, and one of those crosses stood before the gates, spilling a huge shadow across the steps. Unlike those he had seen back in Harar, it was made of dark wood and its lines were bare and plain. Tadahito thought it looked almost ready to be used for an execution. But the people on the steps were singing something strange and beautiful and elation suddenly swelled through him on its notes.

  ‘Welcome home, your Majesty,’ he said.

  King Salomon looked at him unsmiling, as if suspecting mockery of some kind. ‘It is Lord Jesus who has brought us home. And we welcome you.’

  Tadahito gave a polite nod.

  Salomon advanced towards the palace and the little crowd surged forward to try and touch him.

  Kaneharu was smiling broadly. ‘They will say this is when we began to win,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t start thinking like that yet,’ protested Takanari, ‘we must be sure we have control of the coast – Missiwa and Arsinoë. We should deploy a squadron to each of them before our flotillas arrive. And we must aim to have a presence on the other side of the border before the Romans have time to react.’ But he bounced slightly on the balls of his feet as he spoke; it was clear he was barely managing to keep himself from leaping around and crowing like a child. The first tests and responsibilities of their adulthood had been so immense – such a weight on all of them, with the terror of disgrace as well as the fear of defeat – all three of them looked at each other, then embraced impulsively.

  It was more than a thousand miles from here to the Mediterranean, and Rome was another thousand miles beyond that, but this was the first real victory they’d had, and they were closer to their sister than they had been in more than a year.

  [ XII ]

  ALEXANDRIA

  From a hundred miles away they had been able to see the Pharos at Alexandria; a bright mast on the horizon, spreading into a bruise of light where it pierced the clouds. In daylight, as they neared the harbour’s entrance, they could see the tower from which the light rose, with four sphinxes crouched at its base, and tall palm trees ranked along the causeway that connected it to the land. There was a strong wind sweeping across the coast and the sky was dull, but the obelisks and domes of the city cluttered densely along the shore, glinted here and there with black copper, glass and gold. The bay was crowded with freighters, ferries, military ships – far more than they’d ever seen in one place. They crept in cautiously towards the docks, as a flight of Roman volucers rasped southwards through the sky.

  ‘I should go over your scars,’ said Sulien. He hadn’t done so since the storm that had pummelled them for a terrifying night as they rounded the southern tip of the Peloponnese. They’d lost an anchor, and bent a propellor on the rocks as they tried to find shelter, and the engine kept overheating. But the ship limped on, and they’d left posters at Heraklion on Crete, and at the first town they’d come to on the Libyan coast. It was ten days since they’d left Italy.

  Una was at the controls of the ship. She shrank very slightly away. ‘They don’t hurt. It’s not worth it. You’ve done enough.’

  ‘You’ll have them for good if I leave them much longer.’

  Una raised her hand towards the pale streak that dipped out of her hair onto her forehead, the other mark at the corner of her jaw. ‘You can only really see these two, and the ones on my hands. No one’s going to know what they are; they could be from anything. And the rest . . . they’re all right. I don’t mind them.’

  Sulien ran his fingers over a triple band of scars running down his own forearm without looking at them. It was true they didn’t hurt any more, but he couldn’t forget for a second where each of them was; the memory of every strike of claws and teeth would be carved into the tissues, no matter what he did. He couldn’t imagine talking about them so casually, saying they were all right. Yet perhaps it would be unnerving to be without them, to have to look down at a body blandly denying anything had happened. He shook his sleeve down irritably and nudged Una aside to take the helm.

  Ziye and Delir had been talking quietly about the conquest of Ethiopia and what the Nionians were doing in the Red Sea, but as the train slid across Palaestina towards Africa, Lal thought impatiently that she didn’t care about the war at all; it was all too far off to be interesting. She surged restlessly around the little compartment, seething with nerves and uncomfortable joy. Sulien was like a continual shout in her ear, breaking into every thought; sometimes all her brain could manage was to hum his name over and over until it turned into a kind of blurred birdsong in the background of everything.

  She was tempted to interrogate Ziye again for details: how Sulien and Una had looked, what they had said when they first woke in the van, even though she knew there was nothing more to be told. They had been confused and bloody, they had barely spoken, by the time they reached the coast they had been able to walk. But they were alive, they were alive, and to the disbelief of all of them, no one seemed to know it. And yet, even now it had worked, it was terrible that rescue had depended on them being hurt badly enough that it should seem possible they had been killed, and it was terrible to imagine what those days must have been like under the Colosseum. And if she’d loved him already, it was that horrified effort of imagination, which had begun the moment she realised he had been captured, that had started this almost-madness, and torn little holes in her mind out of which everything else had leaked.

  They had spent a fortnight at Smyrna, hiding near the port in an othe
rwise empty guest-house owned by one of Delir’s old contacts, and every day Lal scoured the news and the weather reports, then wandered down to the docks to look anxiously out to sea. She had never seen the little ship Varius had bought, and though she knew that really it was a yacht with cabin space and even some kind of kitchen, sometimes, when a storm slammed against the coast, she pictured them freezing aboard a tiny lifeboat or clinging to a collapsing raft, or swallowed by the sea, and never found.

  Varius and Delir had agreed on a means of finding each other, should they all make it as far as Alexandria, but beyond that there had been too little time in those awful, sleepless days between Sulien’s arrest and the morning of the Games to make arrangements that would have let them communicate easily. Delir, Ziye and Lal had had a slower, heavier journey of it, conveying themselves overland with books and boxes from the basement in the Subura: Lal’s forgery and printing equipment and Varius’ money.

  One day in Smyrna, walking back from the docks, she turned her head to look at a jumble of posters on a hoarding, without realising why. Then she started and clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a yelp of shock and had to hurry on before she made herself even more conspicuous by standing and gaping at it.

  It said, ‘The last act of the Emperor Marcus Novius was the abolition of slavery,’ and it was not the only one. Two days later, in one of the streets running off the forum, she found a rough screenprint of a girl with ragged hair, her face upheld, her terrified eyes fixed on some invisible peak behind the viewer. Even without the roughly printed words stacked underneath, Lal could see it was supposed to be Una, as she’d looked on the longvision at the moment when she’d chosen the arena hounds.

  And then, a week later, when they thought it was safe to move on again, there was the graffiti she saw in a bathroom in the station in Ancyra, one fierce, hurried line: