Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  UNA AND SULIEN ALIVE AND FREE

  They reached Alexandria in the last week of January. The air was cool, but the sun was strong, and as they descended from the train, Lal cast a distracted look at her father and saw how harshly it shadowed the lines on his face and lit up the white in his hair. And he looked smaller and slighter than ever, and yet, at the moment, almost happy. ‘Really, this is the greatest of the Western cities, Lal, not Rome, not even Athens as it was,’ he announced grandly. He was the only one of them to have been there before, and began talking cheerfully about the Ptolemies, about the many expansions of the Library, about whether the best place to eat in the city would still be open after twenty years.

  But Lal, who usually felt a little flutter of excitement at entering any new city, couldn’t listen; she felt impatient with all the towers and gardens and eating houses for being in her way.

  She wanted to go straight to the Museion, because if the others were here, that was where Varius would have left instructions for finding them. But she could not go alone – women could not enter the Library unless accompanied by a man or furnished with a letter of introduction – and Ziye and Delir were intent upon finding a temporary home first, so they set off to the Jewish Quarter in search of somewhere to stay.

  Lal spent the evening almost speechless with the consciousness that Sulien might be less than a mile away, and the night trying uselessly to quieten the noise he made in her mind so she could sleep.

  The next morning they caught a tram across to the Museion. Alexandria was laid out in a formal lattice of streets, centred at the crossroads of two boulevards wider than any Lal had ever seen, each bearing seven loud and terrifying lanes of traffic through the heart of the city. But the Library had spilled haphazardly over its initial boundaries, and now reading rooms, book stacks, lecture theatres and printing presses were housed in buildings of many ages and styles: granite towers, halls with windows of cut alabaster, even a cluster of low bubbles of green glass. Students wandered the colonnades in dutiful groups behind their tutors, or sat sprawled on the steps outside the central hall. Its gates were framed in heavy pillars, the capitals vivid with malachite and cinnabar, and ram-headed sphinxes crouched within the portico. Inside, the ceiling of the lobby was a bright noon-blue studded with golden stars, with the gods and creatures of the constellations painted in pale, transparent lines around them. Busts of the great poets and scientists were placed around the walls, and the space was full of exclaiming tourists who wouldn’t stay quiet no matter what the frowning wardens did. Heavy double doors at the top of a steep flight of steps led to the Library itself; Delir showed the false papers Lal made for him, signed a declaration promising not to damage any of the books, and led them inside.

  The noise of the city dropped away with surprising abruptness, kept out by the thick walls and by the dense fortification of the books themselves. The shelves rose in ten tiers of galleries around the walls and lined alcoves and stairwells, and more books still were hidden in panelled cupboards and chests. The immense skylight above let in a soft light over the long tables that ran the length of the hall.

  Delir and Ziye at once adopted a feeble and quite excessive deference to the quietness, Lal thought; they tiptoed along, unreasonably slowly. So she hurried on ahead of them, light on the balls of her feet, almost running down the colonnade past the tables, through the Greek section, past Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, upstairs into the first gallery to find Roman History. She was looking for the first set of copies of Cossus’ Rome and Nionia on the open shelves. Varius would have left a longdictor code pencilled onto the thirtieth page of the fourth volume.

  She found the alcove, the shelf, the book, and as she reached for it, someone tapped her on the shoulder; she turned, startled, and saw Una, a stack of books held one-armed against her chest. She was smiling.

  Lal reminded herself just in time to stay quiet, but opened her mouth in a silent cry of delight, and embraced her.

  Delir and Ziye came into the alcove behind them, and Ziye reached out and lifted Una’s chin, saying nothing, and for a few moments they gazed at each other. Until then Lal had not even noticed the scars on Una’s face.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Una, ‘all of you.’

  Lal’s pleasure at seeing Una shifted suddenly into slight dismay, because she felt as if even normal people must be able to see how hopelessly her thoughts knotted and tangled around Sulien.

  She might as well just say it, then. ‘Is Sulien here?’

  Una’s smile faded a little, but she said, ‘He’s at home— I mean, where we’re staying, over in Rhakotis. He’ll be so happy to see you.’

  Lal stifled a little twitch of disappointment and looked around, wondering if Varius had accompanied Una instead. ‘But you’re not allowed in on your own . . .’

  ‘You are if you work here,’ said Una. She put down the stack of books on the table and returned a volume to its place on a shelf. ‘I wanted to work, and I knew you’d be coming. I can tell you how to get to our place, or I’ll show you, if you can wait an hour.’

  They waited for her. Lal tried to read, but she was too restless and so she crept around the upper galleries where there were fewer scholars to disturb, looking at the carvings on the pillars; she found a few abandoned sheets of notepaper and a pencil and passed a few minutes copying a face she found carved above a small window.

  Sometimes she looked down and saw Una, steering a little cart of books around a lower gallery, or alone in an alcove, standing reading a book for a little while before putting it away. It should not have been surprising that she looked better now than she had at the trial, but still Lal was struck at the change. She’d gained a little weight and her hair had faded almost to its natural colour. It was dragged into a cluster of small knots on the back of her head which disguised, in some measure, how short it had been cut. And yet it was not that, not really, nor even the altered brightness of her skin or eyes. There was an eagerness in her steps, an expectancy in the way she held herself. Lal thought of the poster in Smyrna; the desperation the artist had tried to reveal was gone, but something else, a stern force, seemed even stronger in her than it had before.

  *

  They were staying in a small holiday flat near the Canopic Docks, close to where the canal met Mareotis Lake. Lal saw an incongruous pile of ageing tourist magazines on a table near the door as Una let them in. The tiled room was almost bare. And Sulien was a long shadow coming down the steps from a little roof terrace.

  Lal’s flight of feeling towards him seemed to trip on something – a small dip of sorrow and doubt – but then she forgot it, for he was smiling broadly, and he pulled her into his arms. His name chimed deafeningly in her head, and tears filled her eyes.

  ‘I missed you so much,’ she whispered hoarsely.

  But when he repeated the same thing to her, the doubt came back again.

  Una had turned aside as they embraced, and looking back at her, Lal saw a crease of pain fading on her face . . .

  But it did fade, and she asked Sulien, ‘Where’s Varius?’

  ‘At the docks, worrying about the yacht.’

  But Varius opened the door almost as he said it and for a few minutes the flat was brimming over with jubilant noise as everyone embraced or clasped hands, and Lal saw that her father, too, was brushing tears from his eyes. They crowded onto the terrace, into the winter sunlight bright on a jumbled rooftop terrain of washing lines and longvision aerials. Sulien sat beside her with his hand wrapped round hers, just as when they were in the cellar back in Rome, watching the last moments of Una’s trial.

  Too much like that, she thought, when she looked at his taut, still-smiling face.

  Varius looked restless and preoccupied, and yet Lal thought he’d shed something along with the matted hair and beard, the vigile uniform. No, she thought, you would not have thought he had any reason to hide from anything.

  ‘Do you have any family here?’ she asked him, looking down across the canal towards
the lake.

  ‘Not in Alexandria. My grandparents moved to Rome when they were first married. I think I’ve got second cousins in Pelusium, but I’ve never met them.’

  ‘Maybe you should see them,’ remarked Sulien, oddly, in a low voice.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Varius, a little baffled, ‘of course I can’t. I couldn’t put them in that position.’

  ‘When all this ends, you should see them.’

  Delir said, ‘The money is safe. I made you another five thousand.’ He gave a modest shrug.

  ‘Thank you,’ Varius told him. ‘I’ve got to get at least some of the money back on the boat, too; it doesn’t really belong to me. I’ve used more than half of it now. And Eudoxius didn’t give it to me for any of this.’

  Una leaned back meditatively on the brick parapet, eyes closed against the sunlight. ‘I don’t think you should sell the boat yet,’ she said. ‘We might need it.’

  But Lal, Delir and Ziye all looked at one another, tensing. Delir grimaced and began reluctantly, ‘I don’t think you have heard. I’m so sorry, but Eudoxius—’

  Varius’ eyes widened. ‘What?’

  ‘It was about two weeks ago. You would have been at sea. It wasn’t in the news for long . . .’

  Varius sat down, his face changing colour, seeming to hollow out from within. Una moved across the terrace towards him. ‘Varius—’

  ‘I did this. I killed him,’ said Varius flatly, quietly.

  ‘No, no – it said natural causes,’ Lal protested.

  ‘You think that means anything? You think they ever told the truth about what happened to Salvius?’

  ‘Did they ever say anything about Salvius?’ asked Ziye.

  Varius looked up at her uncertainly, without answering.

  Una said, ‘If they knew he’d helped you, why would they hide it? Why would they miss the chance to keep anyone from helping you again? They’d put him on trial, seize his property. They’d make an example of him.’

  ‘He was old,’ agreed Ziye, briskly. ‘He had a heart attack. It’s unfortunate.’

  Varius exhaled, and lowered his head in something like a nod, but he still looked bitter. ‘Well, that’s that. It always was a stupid idea.’

  ‘Varius.’ Sulien didn’t move, and his voice was very quiet, but everyone else grew still as he spoke. ‘If you still want to try and kill Drusus, I’ll help you. I owe you that, I owe you – everything. But we’ll never see what comes of it. It’s not something you can survive. You’ve always known that. Is that still what you want?’

  There was a silence. Una was gazing at Sulien with a helpless expression, her lips tight, but she said nothing.

  Varius retracted a little under Sulien’s quiet, neutral scrutiny. Eventually he answered, ‘No. Of course not—Not just for the sake of it, not if all that happens is one of his generals takes over and everything carries on as it is now.’

  ‘But we can’t give up, can we?’ Una asked. ‘None of us want that. Something is possible; you’ve proved that. You found people who felt the same, you raised money – you saved us.’

  Varius said slowly, ‘There isn’t anyone else on our side who’d have even a chance of staying in power.’

  There was another pause, then Una said, ‘Yes, there is.’

  Night came on early. As the sun set Sulien and Lal were left alone on the roof terrace. They kissed at last, and Lal, ignoring the ache in her chest, thought, ‘I have never been so happy.’

  She was not blind; she could see how wan and far-off he was, the fadedness, but the fact of him there – alive, whole in her arms – had been so hard-won. She gripped his hands, feeding love and determination into him. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to pour herself into someone else this way, and when he did that for people who were hurt or sick, it worked.

  ‘There are these posters about you and Una in Smyrna and Ancyra,’ she told him. ‘Maybe they’re everywhere now.’

  ‘Our posters?’ he said, confused.

  ‘You’ve seen them?’

  He told her what they’d done at Corcyra, Crete and in Libya, and Lal explained what she’d seen. Sulien’s expression lit up with slow, incredulous excitement. ‘We hoped for that – well, hardly even hoped, but— And they’re different – they say different things?’

  And the news left a trace of brightness in his face for a time.

  ‘I can make better ones. We can print more of them,’ said Lal, eagerly, ‘hundreds of them.’

  Sulien’s smile remained, but it altered somehow. ‘At least it’d be something to do. Really I need to work, like Una. As if Varius hasn’t done enough without having to keep me as well. I did get a job last week, but I only lasted two days. I couldn’t— I couldn’t concentrate.’

  ‘But Sulien, if anyone ever had an excuse for being tired—! Even if everything had gone right the first time, even if they’d never done that to you, even if you’d never been—’ Her eyes blurred even to think of it and she found herself unable to name the Colosseum. ‘Even if you’d never been there.’

  Sulien nodded, passively.

  ‘When we saw on the news that they’d arrested you,’ she ventured, but he closed his eyes and Lal saw that perhaps it was a mistake to talk any more about those days, and yet she could not prevent herself, ‘we all came right back. Varius must have already told you. We didn’t even discuss it. We didn’t know how to find Varius at first, but I knew he would be there, I knew . . . So my father just went back to the place in the Subura and hoped he’d call. And we had so little time, but there was nothing we could do at first and I just . . . I never stopped thinking about you.’

  Sulien pressed her a little closer, but he was gazing past her at the cracked tiles on the parapet, his eyes empty, his brows contracted. For a while he hesitated.

  ‘I could have tried to get away on my own,’ he murmured, finally, ‘but I didn’t.’

  A chilly feeling came over Lal. She gazed up at him. ‘When? In the van?’ She had never known precisely what had gone wrong.

  ‘Yes. Before the vigiles came.’

  Lal glanced down the steps towards the flat. She hadn’t noticed how dark it was growing out here; the light was on in the kitchen now. She could just make out Una’s voice among the others.

  She supplied, ‘You couldn’t leave her.’

  Sulien’s voice was flat, definite. ‘No.’

  Lal tried to weigh the importance of this. What difference did it make – that it had happened at all, and that she knew it now? It scarcely counted as a real choice in the circumstances. Probably they would have caught him anyway, even if he’d tried to run, so it would all have turned out exactly the same.

  But for him it had meant giving up everything, and he meant her to understand that had included her. Would she ever have expected or hoped for anything different, if she’d known he would have to make such a choice?

  ‘Well, of course not,’ she said bravely, trying to prevent a catch in her voice.

  Absently, Sulien chafed one of her hands between his. He said, ‘I wish we could just go home.’

  Down in the kitchen, Delir had sketched a rough map of the Mediterranean. Una frowned down at it, trying to estimate the distances between the points she’d marked on it. She would look at the atlases in the Library tomorrow.

  ‘How many people would we need?’ she asked. Varius was leaning over the map beside her and instinctively she looked at him, even though it was as much a question for the others.

  Varius grimaced dubiously. ‘We’ll be thankful for whatever we can get. I suppose five or six hundred would have a chance, if we could find that many.’

  ‘Then we’ll bring a thousand,’ said Una. ‘The more we bring, the fewer shots will be fired when we arrive – on their side or ours. Before they know who we are, or what we want, they’ll know there are too many of us to fight.’

  ‘That would mean perhaps two hundred boats,’ said Varius. ‘None of this is going to be cheap. Or fast.’

  Un
a thought of a secret fleet of fishing boats, small yachts and speedboats, hidden in coves and harbours across the Mediterranean, gathering into an armada in the dark on the open sea. The excitement already flickering through her deepened and steadied into a feeling that was almost pride, almost as if it was already real.

  She turned to Delir. ‘You know how to do this,’ she said. ‘You’ve run a network of people; you know how to keep it hidden.’

  Lal and Sulien had come down from the terrace in silence. Sulien sat down at the bottom of the steps, leaning his head against the wall, listening, annexed to the conversation while remaining outside it. Lal hesitated for a moment, but then sat beside him.

  Delir sighed. ‘In the Pyrenees we had certain advantages,’ he said. ‘Even aside from not yet having made ourselves so very interesting to the government. The people there were Vascones; they didn’t consider themselves Roman. They didn’t even speak Latin. They tolerated us. I don’t believe there’s anywhere else like that in Europe, certainly nowhere that would be helpful to us.’

  ‘Still,’ said Varius, ‘small scattered groups along the coast, say no more than ten people in any one place . . . ships that stay on the move . . . That would be harder to detect than a single fixed base.’

  Una remarked softly, ‘I never used to think of myself as Roman.’

  ‘Never used to?’ asked Sulien, from the steps. ‘Do you mean you feel more like a good Roman girl after all this?’ The sarcasm had no edge, only a tired weight.

  Una looked down at the scars splayed across the backs of her hands, then over at her brother. ‘I don’t know. There were so many Romans who came to watch us being torn apart— I don’t know how I can say I’m a Roman after being a slave for all those years, and after that. But I don’t know what else to call myself. I don’t know any other language. We tried to get out, but it’s too far and too hard. We don’t even want to live anywhere else, do we? But now I think there are born citizens who don’t think of themselves as Romans any more easily than I do. I think there are thousands, maybe millions of people on our side, there always were, and that even with what I can do I didn’t see them. I didn’t count them. And I think there will be more.’