Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  But there was no way that did not carry a very strong risk of failure and death. I don’t want you risking your life any more, Sulien had said, or Varius risking his again . . .

  From an upper gallery she watched Varius as he sat frowning down at the pages, dark head propped on one long hand, trying to dismiss similar doubts. He looked tired and unhappy, and yet safe there in the book-lined alcove, as if the presence of so many printed words around him exerted a soft, protective force. Una wished with sudden and painful energy that it were true, and for a moment she tried to imagine how he would live if it were ever really over, if they won.

  But even if she had no scruples about risking herself or Varius, even if she didn’t care about the work they had begun, there was Sulien himself. He would be no likelier to survive a rescue attempt than the rest of them. There was no way to measure one danger against the other. Perhaps they would only wreck what chance of surviving the war he had.

  As evening fell they walked in silence along the cratered streets back towards Rhakotis. They both knew the truth; Varius was trying to think how to say it to her, so at last Una said it herself, stiffly: ‘We can’t do it.’

  Then she had to stop and lean against a wall splashed with recruitment posters. ‘He won’t come back, they’ll kill him, I know they will,’ she said, sobbing, ‘I always— I can’t— I can’t keep anyone—’

  And Varius, holding her, found himself rashly promising, I’m here, I’ll stay, no matter what happens.

  For those first days, despair possessed her like a physical illness. Her body ached; there was nothing on which she could concentrate; everything became unbearably sharp when lingered over. Helplessly, she saw Sulien bending over Marcus’ body and then, fleeing the memory in anguish, she thought of that first autumn in Gaul, five years before: she and Marcus and Sulien, all three of them in different ways still new to each other, in a necropolis outside Tolosa, in a forest on a mountainside. And she remembered Marcus’ old fears, which, at least, could never hurt him any more, and she wondered what it would take to send someone mad, if not the terrible strength of this ache to go back.

  And yet it was as if she were on a long rope, a leash that, while she whimpered and struggled, kept her within certain limits. Even at her worst, crying and cowering from the future on Sulien’s bed, she was aware of a very small part of herself standing back and keeping a stern, impatient watch. It was not a voice, there were no words, but it might have said: All right. You are allowed a certain amount of time for this. But then you must go on as you were.

  She began to hold meetings again. During a daytime raid she and Ziye broke open a couple of trucks transporting slaves to a market. Delir and Lal travelled east to Petra and came back with twelve hundred sesterces. They settled ten supporters in Aila – Theon and Praxinoa among them – to replicate the underground recruitment campaign they had led in Alexandria. And seven hundred miles south there was a Roman offensive outside Meroë that the longvision reporters said would be decisive, and a week later no one was certain whether it had ended, and what had changed. Sulien would be heading there soon, Una thought.

  Only a few of the growing band of volunteers knew where Una and Varius lived, or how to contact them directly. A man named Chaeremon, one of their first recruits in the city, was one of them, and one evening early in May he called the flat, sounding both anxious and excited. ‘I’ve been talking to young Thekla – she’s run into somebody interesting. Not trouble, as such, just more volunteers, but it worries me.’

  ‘Someone you don’t think we can trust?’ asked Varius.

  A short silence. ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that.’

  They met Chaeremon at the docks on the edge of the lake and walked a couple of miles along the western shore, then into the rough paths chopped and beaten through the reed beds. It was not summer yet, but there was a soft, overripe warmth in the evening air and the lake was purring with mosquitoes. Una wondered how long it would be before disease began to run out of control. Some of the city’s refugees were living on small boats in the shallow basins of the lake; on the land, lanes of duckboards lay over the increasingly marshy ground between the shelters. There were a few government-issue white tents, and many huts of thatched reed, and shacks cobbled together out of anything – plastic, sheets of wood, billowing flaps of colourful fabric. Thekla stood in a doorway of one of these, holding back a length of scarlet cloth pinned up as a curtain, looking out for them.

  Inside, a hot, red light filtered through the curtain. Four people were sitting on the ground, and a woman was standing waiting. She seemed young, from the light, agile posture of her body, the sheen of her dark skin, but her face was almost wholly obscured by a red scarf, and her arms were folded, rather combatively, against her chest.

  Una frowned; certain she had never seen this girl before and yet feeling strangely as if she ought to know her. Then the stranger said, ‘I’ve been searching for you,’ and unfolded her arms, revealing that one of them ended in a battered plastic socket fixed with a pair of crude hooks. The thumb of her remaining hand was missing too.

  She tilted her head a little, looking through her scarf at Varius, who started in amazement and said, ‘Bupe.’

  Bupe nodded, oddly formal. ‘I’m glad you are alive.’

  ‘Likewise,’ said Varius, though his surprise at seeing her was not wholly pleasant. She’d been almost a corpse when she’d been dumped at the Transtiberine slave-clinic two years before, burned and filthy, her hand blown away. Her face and body had been sprayed with fire by a detonator at the Veii Arms Factory, and she’d disappeared before Sulien had even finished treating her – to join Dama, as they had discovered much later.

  She turned her shrouded head to Una. ‘You’re Sulien’s sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard the squads have taken him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bupe nodded again, displacing the scarf enough to show a grimace of curt sympathy and regret. And there were edges of scars, extending from some terrible centre under the folds of cloth, but her visible eye was bright. ‘We lost some of our own to them too. I’m sorry he’s gone. I never thanked him for what he did for me.’

  But she had. Sulien had told Una about the last minutes of his escape with Lal from Dama’s compound near Rome, the burnt girl silently staring at them near the gates, then turning her blinded eye to shut out the sight of them and letting them pass.

  Dama felt suddenly close, a thickening in the texture of the warm air, an alteration of the light. Una’s chest grew tight, her skin prickled as if a blunt knife were running over it. She had to force herself to say his name. ‘You were at Dama’s farm.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bupe levelly. ‘I believed everything – almost everything – he told us then. Some of us tried to go on believing it, even after he was dead, even at the start of the war.’

  Una gritted her teeth.

  Bupe stared at her out of her red hood for some seconds. ‘But he didn’t tell us everything. And then you— What you said at your trial – no one chooses to die like that over something that isn’t true. So we could have had freedom without all this. And now slaves are being sent off to fight for Rome too. I don’t care how it happens now. I didn’t think Rome could be any more evil than it was. But it is – it is. I hate this Emperor, I will do anything I can to stop him. Have you heard what happened in Patara?’

  Varius and Una glanced at each other – they had not.

  ‘You will soon. Of course they are trying to keep the news from spreading, but it was too big. I know – I was there. We got some women and boys out of a workshop making clothes— We burned it afterwards, just a little place. But there was a big meatpacking factory close to it, and they must have heard about what we did there. And they must have heard about you, too, because the next day they wouldn’t touch the machines; they said they knew they were already free. Then when the supervisors tried to punish them, they smashed the place up. They fought their way out. And it spread –
slaves from everywhere, houses and factories and everywhere. Some shops got smashed, you know. But then they all came together in the forum, hundreds of them, I don’t know how many. They tried to take over the courthouse. They wanted to make the praetor say it, that they were free. You should have heard the noise we made – I was there – we frightened them, at least.’

  Her voice was vivid with anger and strange satisfaction. In quick, bright, flashes Una could see it – the furious, ecstatic faces, the rush at the courthouse doors – and she was torn between exhilaration and sick certainty of what must have followed. The uprising would have been put down bloodily. The people Bupe was talking about were dead.

  ‘Of course the vigiles came and started firing,’ said Bupe, calmly, chillingly. ‘Everyone must have expected that. It took a while. We got out before the worst of it. And they couldn’t shoot everyone. But later there were bodies all across the forum, and the blood— It pools in the gutters, and there’s the smell . . . You had to expect it, but afterwards . . . It went on, and got worse. Anywhere there was one of those posters up – any street anywhere near it, they went round all the houses and workshops and everywhere and took the slaves – all of them from some places, one or two from others, I couldn’t see any pattern to it, but most of them were people who had nothing to do with it. Even their owners couldn’t stop it. And they killed them. They hung some of them in the street. They even got out the crosses again and crucified them. They said the orders came straight from the Emperor. It was because of you. You can see that, can’t you? Because of what you are doing. And he will do it again.’

  Drusus and the men who had carried out his orders – they had murdered these people, Una thought, no one else. She had just time to think this, to cling to the thought like a rope, because there was a roaring in her ears and a cold wind seemed to fly around her, as if she were falling. She was ashamed of an impulse to look to Varius for reassurance, or for an understanding of shared guilt. But she could not have acted on it in any case, she could not move. She stood there rigidly staring.

  ‘They hate him in Patara now,’ said Bupe softly. ‘Even the citizens, even the slave owners: they hate the Emperor more than they hate the Nionians. Nionia never robbed them, or made the streets smell like that. More people will come to you because of it. Many of them are looking for you.’ She lifted her mutilated arms. ‘There are fifty with me. Even I can hold a gun. Do you want us?’

  [ XIV ]

  COMMILITII

  Noriko, daughter of the Go-natoku Emperor and wife of Marcus Novius Faustus Leo, to Diodorus Cleomenes, with polite greetings.

  You told me to trust you I know this is not what you meant. But I can think of no other. In his room here I have found letters of my husband I know you were most loyal to him and help him many time. My ladies and me we are in serious increasing danger. I can not write what will certainly happen soon if we do not escape from here. But you may imagine it is very bad. We are watched and forbidden everywhere it will be very hard even to get outside but I think we can do it. But if we have nowhere to go after that we will be lost.

  Here is this bracelet. Please sell it and I hope you can use the money because I am sure you will need it if you are willing to help. Perhaps for a car.

  Please for my husband’s sake I beg you to help us.

  Please forgive my poor Latin I am writing in haste.

  Noriko did not read the letter over; it was too embarrassing even to look at the frantic writing, the crumpled paper. She rolled it up despondently and hid it inside her sleeve. She had written it in bed by the dim glow of moonlight through the curtains, so as not to wake the maidservant sleeping in the little bed against the far wall. She was not allowed writing materials; even the notebooks in which she did Latin exercises had been taken away. But she was still free to wander the palace and gardens, and so, hidden in cushions and curtain hems around her bedroom, she had a secret store of hidden pens, swept off tabletops and desks when her minders were not looking. And no one had yet thought of confiscating the cases of old letters in the bureau where Marcus had written some of his private correspondence.

  She was not even sure what to do with the letter once she’d written it – how to get it out of the Palace, let alone as far as Cleomenes, whose address she didn’t know. She had found no letters from him, though his name had been mentioned in a couple of messages from Varius, and that had been enough to confirm to her that this was someone who would not betray her. All she could think to do, for now, was keep it on her, together with the bracelet, under her sleeve, waiting for an opportunity. The bracelet had been a present from Marcus; she had thought it would be easier for Cleomenes to sell a Western piece safely and discreetly. She had not worn the bracelet since Marcus’ death – or even very often before that – and yet, handling it and remembering him, she would have preferred to use one of the gifts from her family, for she had begun to feel she might see them again.

  While searching, she’d found drafts of desperate letters Marcus had written to Una, before and after their marriage. Noriko had clenched her teeth and looked away.

  Trunnia, the woman in charge of spying on them, must once have been a slave, and perhaps that was why she enjoyed her power over three foreign noblewomen so much now. Often, when Noriko and the others tried to talk to her, she made an irritable show of not being able to understand their accents. She complained to the other maids about their outlandish habits and histrionic moods in an audible half-whisper when Noriko, Sakura and Tomoe were in the next room. And she supervised the other servants when they went through all their belongings, after the incident with the razor.

  And yet among the servants there were potential allies. By now Noriko knew who some of them were – the girl who had whispered to Tomoe that Una and Sulien were alive; the liveried functionaries who opened doors on the lower floor; a young boy they sometimes saw polishing the banisters on the stairs nearest their rooms. But it was not easy to talk to them alone for any length of time.

  To her horror, Drusus summoned her to dinner once after the assault in her rooms. The page who came with the message was accompanied by a couple of baleful Praetorians, and Noriko was even more frightened now of being dragged in forcibly; she felt almost sure that once it began, the violence would surge to the height it had reached before.

  ‘My ladies-in-waiting will come with me,’ she said, when she could think of no safe way out. She didn’t want to leave Sakura and Tomoe, both for their sake and her own.

  ‘Just you,’ said one of the Praetorians, grinning. ‘Take them along and we’ll only have to bring them back.’

  Noriko recognised him with a shudder of anger and fear; he was one of the pair who had attacked Sakura. She bit her lip and acknowledged herself trapped. She was almost as afraid of being alone with the Praetorians as with Drusus, but she would not ask Sakura to go anywhere in this man’s company, even without the threat.

  While they waited outside she shut herself into her bedroom to dress, angrily, in the drabbest formal wear she could find. She talked briefly with Sakura and Tomoe; Tomoe suggested they lock and barricade themselves into the bath suite until she came back. Trunnia sighed and rolled her eyes, but did not try to stop them.

  Noriko marched down the palace corridors, her body barbed with tension. Behind her the two guards whispered and sniggered, in that disgusting way she remembered, but they did not speak to her directly, nor touch her. She walked quickly across the glittering floor and lay down stiffly on the couch opposite Drusus, ignoring the food.

  At least Drusus did not speak to her, though for long periods he stared at her, broodingly, from beneath lowered brows. There were, as usual, a couple of attractive women in evening dress lounging elegantly on the couch beside him – a young blonde who gamely kept up a stream of squeaky chatter across the otherwise silent table, and, clutched closer to Drusus, a girl about Noriko’s own age, wearing a white dress, with dark, velvety eyes and heaped-up black hair. Noriko still did not know who the women
were, or how Drusus procured them, but she had noticed that some of them recurred. The blonde was new, but that dark-haired one had been present more often than any of the others.

  The girl never spoke, and she looked like someone. Noriko had not placed it at once, because the resemblance was to someone she’d only seen in photographs, but now, in the white gown and with her hair dressed that way, the similarity was obscene: Lady Tullia, Faustus’ wife, the murderess, the one Drusus had killed. It was as if a ghost lay there, blinking and smiling at nothing across the table. Noriko’s skin crept at what the likeness meant. She wanted to keep her eyes lowered and away from Drusus, but they kept being drawn back towards the other woman, fascinated despite herself. Was it only a fancy, or did she herself look a little like both of them – Tullia, and this replica of her? The dark hair and light skin, something about the chin and the mouth – was it not possible that Drusus might see it that way?

  And usually Drusus did not touch the women much while Noriko was there, but this time, once he’d downed a few glasses of wine, he had the dark girl almost on her back, practically underneath him, right there in front of everyone, while the little blonde gritted her teeth and prattled on. But Noriko was sure this was for her benefit. He wanted her to watch as he ran his hand, almost clawing, from the girl’s waist to her breast. And he wanted her to see that the pale skin of the girl’s bare arms was striped with purplish bruises, with the fierce pressure of his fingers on her shoulder leaving no doubt how they had been made. Her mouth had a bruised, puffy look, and the upper lip was blotted with a red mark that might have been a bite. Noriko might have wondered that he was not ashamed to let her be seen in public, dressed up and marked like this, if she hadn’t been certain the other woman’s body was a message to her. He wanted her to imagine herself lying there, she thought, whether or not he knew that was what he meant by it. He was telling her it was not over; she was not safe.