Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

  He began hastily gathering up stones from the sand. ‘All right, brace,’ he said, and began flinging them over the barrier as if they were grenades, trying to place each one further ahead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Caerellius demanded shrilly.

  Sulien ducked behind the wall of shields on each impact, but nothing happened – at least, nothing immediately in front of them, though the noise never abated and the sand continued to lift in huge puffs all across the plain.

  Sulien took back his own shield and moved ahead of the others. ‘Single file, two shield-lengths apart,’ he said, ‘and try and stay in the tracks of the man in front of you. Watch your feet when you can.’

  He led the way, staying as low as he could, keeping his shield raised and angled against the storm of projectiles in the air. He almost forgot to worry about the bomblets; thick, relentless gunfire was sweeping across the desert from some invisible source and shells were bursting all around them. Roman gunners in the hills behind them were offering covering fire, but down here it was all one onslaught of sound and dust. Sulien still couldn’t see any enemy soldiers – there was no point in trying to shoot back.

  A parachute was draped across the ground in their path and something terrible lay half underneath it, a body smashed to pieces, still in the harness. Sulien almost tripped over it. Behind him, Caerellius gagged. They could see other small columns of men advancing through the thickening dust, though the brown haze blurred them all to shadows. They made slow progress, running a few yards, then dropping behind the cover of their shields to test the ground ahead with stones. They crossed a line of shattered pylons and stopped again. Sulien could barely see through his shield now; the clear surface was dappled with opaque white scars. He was amazed it had happened so fast; they’d barely been on the ground an hour. He wondered if one more direct hit would shatter it now.

  ‘Archias! Shouter!’

  Dorion was calling to him in a muted yell across the sand from behind another cone of blackened metal. He was with Gnatho, another man from their octet, and a pair of soldiers Sulien didn’t know.

  Sulien almost laughed aloud in delight at seeing him alive, and the relief left him clearer and steadier than before as a faint, lingering dizziness that he hadn’t even been conscious of went away. He gestured to Dorion to meet him further ahead, and a few minutes later the seven men congregated in a crater perhaps three-quarters of a mile north of where Sulien had landed.

  Dorion was still smiling when he reached them, but his eyes looked glassy. ‘Simalio’s dead,’ he said, ‘as soon as he touched the ground, poor bastard.’

  Sulien grimaced, shaken and yet ashamed for being relieved it wasn’t anyone he knew better. ‘The others?’

  ‘Thought I saw Petreius land all right somewhere over that way, ahead of me,’ said Dorion, waving an arm, ‘but I never caught up with him. I don’t know about the rest.’

  They looked at each other, both knowing they were thinking the same thing. ‘Pas—’ Sulien started.

  ‘Oh, you can’t expect the kid to even fall straight, he’s probably just . . . stuck watching the fireworks up in the mountains somewhere,’ said Dorion, though his smile had vanished.

  Sulien forced the thought of Pas away and they scrambled onwards towards Aregaya.

  The sun had climbed beyond the horizon. Sulien began to feel as if his head were being cooked within his helmet, and he struggled with the urge to pull it off. Sweat plastered his scalp and trickled into his eyes, welled underneath the plates on his chest. He swallowed scant mouthfuls of warm water from his flask as they huddled beneath their shields in yet another crater. Once they’d scattered as a barrage of shells slammed down almost on top of them, and as Sulien plunged into the sand with his shield over his head, he was still able to marvel at the scale of what was happening around him, and how few people it had taken to cause it.

  But perhaps that wasn’t quite true; the actions that had led to this had begun a long time before anyone on this field was born.

  He forgot both reflections almost at once, irritated and frightened that he’d let his attention wander even that much. He scrambled up painted red-brown, gritty with sweat and sand, but still unhurt, and certain their little group would not be whole when they gathered again. And he was right: Lanatus, one of the men who had joined them with Dorion, was gone, and Caerellius no longer shook or complained, just stumbled along staring emptily at the ground with wide, blank eyes.

  They were approaching the foothills of the Tosutoya Mountains, dry and brittle against the sky like heaps of stained gravel. They came to a small thread of a road, where a forlorn sign, just a little dented and tilted to one side, was still excitedly promoting something in pink and yellow Nionian characters above a corpse lying face-down in the sand. There were more bodies scattered before the barbed-wire rolls spread across the road, and tangled within it, but by now Roman rockets had broken through the line in several places. And here they finally encountered a centurion, firing from behind his shield in the shelter of a wretchedly low ridge of sand and directing a charge through the nearest breach.

  ‘Covering fire!’ he bellowed, gesturing furiously at the approaching infantrymen. He was scarcely audible over the throbbing noise of the guns and the ringing that was building within their ears. And at last they could see the main road, skimming between the rocky hills on concrete pillars and sand embankments, and the junction itself: eight lanes looping around each other, with a shadowed underpass at its centre. Sulien was distantly bewildered by how normal it looked, despite the thickets of barbed wire and the light-machine-gun emplacements perched up on the flyover, and the heavy domed fortifications dug into the ground all round it. The moulded concrete barriers, though pockmarked and fallen here and there, still looked new, and almost identical to those on Roman motorways.

  Sulien and his makeshift squad flung themselves down behind the ridge and began to fire up at the gun emplacements, over the heads of the Roman troops as they surged towards the gap and scrambled through. It was the first time since that first panicked moment on the ground that Sulien had fired a shot, and even now, supporting the stock of the gun against his shield, he felt he was not really trying to kill men, just adding a very little to the load of metal in the air. And part of him was comforted by that, and yet, now he could see where they were, he found he hated the gunners in their concrete shells hidden in those humps of earth. If they had been out in the same hot lethal air as the rest of them, he could have forgiven them. The ugliness and terror of the ground that lay behind them seemed to be building, pushing through him as if against a dam, trying to find a venting place. This anonymous release of fire didn’t seem enough.

  ‘Move through – get your shields up!’ shouted the centurion, pointing at Sulien’s group, and Sulien raised his battered shield in front of him, while the others lifted theirs above their heads. He led them forward.

  Huge, jarring strikes landed on his shield as he darted through the wire, and as he’d feared, the clear ceramic finally shattered and he was knocked over into a heap of bodies. At the time Sulien felt no horror; something clamped shut in his mind. Caerellius fell over him, and Dorion, thinking he was wounded, stooped under his own shield to drag Sulien forward. ‘No, I’m all right, keep going,’ Sulien shouted, though he could hardly hear himself over the noise. He expected Dorion to topple over dead on top of him at any moment

  But Dorion ran ahead. Sulien’s shield-arm was still ringing with the shock of the strikes. He thought it was broken, until he pulled it free of the loops and realised it was only badly bruised, stinging where crumbs of the ceramic had scratched the skin. Almost without thinking, he reached out and dragged a dead soldier’s shield over himself, then struggled up and ran on.

  On the other side the terrain offered them a little more shelter. Sulien plunged into the relative safety of a crater between the dunes and looked back, but he never saw the centurion follow them through the wire. He saw Hanno running closer, just a few s
trides from the crater’s edge, before bullets pierced his head and his chest at the same moment, and Sulien felt the shock light him up, like a spark to phosphorus, a strange energy that blazed through him. Unfelt tears ran from his eyes, but he felt incandescent, awake, and in no danger at all.

  ‘Hanno,’ said Dorion, in a thready voice as they huddled under the tortoiseshell of shields in the crater with the other leaderless men they had collected.

  ‘It was that gunpost up on the right,’ said Sulien fiercely, the guess becoming certainty as the words left his mouth, ‘they got him. We can take that.’ He pulled himself up against the crater’s edge, watching the play of gunfire across the ground. ‘They’re sweeping back and forth. Wait till they turn it the other way— Now!’

  And without hesitation he charged up out of the crater and across the ground. He saw Nionian soldiers aiming down at them from behind the barriers up on the road and shot two of them almost effortlessly; he seemed to have plenty of time in which to aim and fire. He hurled a grenade along the long trench that ran back from the rear of the gun emplacement, and felt a burst of overwhelming relief as the explosion lit the walls of the bunker from within. They leapt down into the trench as soon as the blast subsided, and Dorion ran up into the dugout, firing, but there was no sign of anyone left alive inside.

  Another flow of Roman soldiers poured through the gap in the wire towards the junction. As a file of them rushed past the gunpost one of them stopped and dropped down into the trench beside Sulien, gasping, ‘Archias!’

  This time Sulien felt too stunned to be happy. The blazing feeling that had carried him up to the emplacement was beginning to give way to numbness. He stared at Pas, trying to drag his mouth into a joking grin. He managed, ‘Where the hell’ve you been?’

  Pas gave a ragged little smile and gestured at the chaos behind them, and said breathlessly, ‘I don’t know . . .’

  Sulien put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a baffled little shake. Dorion emerged from the bunker, and, seeing Pas, gave a crow of triumph.

  A tesserarius ran up and crouched beside the trench. ‘You took this one out, lads? Good men. We’re going up onto the flyover. You get over there and clear them out from underneath it.’

  Sulien led them dodging over the uneven ground towards the underpass. Four or five men dashed out into the foothills on the other side of the junction, leaving the bodies of their fellows slumped beneath the pillars. Sulien’s party threw another few grenades into the recesses of the underpass to make sure.

  Now a heavier wave of Roman troops was coursing up the embankment, and the concrete hollows rumbled with the weight of what was happening overhead. Then a flight of volucers swooped north over the junction, scattering the hills beyond them with fire.

  ‘I think we’ve sort of got this done,’ said Dorion, looking around uncertainly.

  Pas frowned. ‘Don’t go saying things like that. Bad luck.’

  ‘I guess . . . We need to hold this position, in case they re-form over on the other side and try to come back through,’ said Sulien, trying not to look at the face of a dead Nionian soldier who was sitting slumped against one of the pillars. Privately he hoped someone would come and tell them what to do.

  As they retreated a little towards the southern entrance to the underpass, a troop of thirty shieldless Nionian soldiers surged over the barrier and came charging down the embankment towards the plain, firing wildly. Sulien marvelled: they were hopelessly unprotected – they must have known it was suicidal. They were all shouting the same word—

  And they were cut down in seconds. Sulien barely had time to lift his own gun before there was no one left to fire at.

  ‘Archias!’ shouted Dorion, behind him.

  Pas was on the ground, blood spurting thickly from the side of his neck.

  Dorion was already bending over him, trying to hold the wound closed, babbling, ‘Oh, shit . . . oh, you’ll be all right, you stupid little . . .’

  For a second Sulien stood blankly looking down at Pas, thinking, of course this was going to happen sooner or later. Then he pulled Dorion out of the way, took hold of Pas and dragged him deeper into the shelter of the pillars. He knelt over him, grimly pressing down with his bare hands on the wound. He said, ‘It’s not that bad.’

  The bullet had missed Pas’ windpipe, but it had torn open artery and muscle, and the blood was welling up between Sulien’s fingers, coating his hands red to the wrists. Pas was conscious but faint with pain and shock, his skin already paling. He stared up at Sulien, didn’t try to move or speak.

  Caerellius called for a medic, and then again, with more force, but no one seemed to hear.

  ‘Oh, come on, no,’ moaned Dorion, miserably raising both hands to his head.

  ‘He’s fine, it’s just a fucking scratch,’ Sulien said fiercely, ‘go and get a medic down here. The rest of you, keep covering that entrance up ahead.’ Dorion lingered, transfixed by the quantity of blood, until Sulien repeated, ‘Do it now, Dorion.’

  Dorion’s face contorted with distress and anger, but he obeyed, picking his way over the dead soldiers.

  Caerellius and Gnatho moved a little further along the underpass, their guns at the ready, but they kept glancing back over their shoulders at Sulien and Pas. At least they were in the shadows of the pillars, Sulien thought, and besides, there was nothing strange to see. He leaned down on the wound, pressing the edges together, letting his eyes close. Just stop, just stop, he thought to the blood, such a little thing to ask, for the torn fibres to close under the pressure of his hands, just enough to keep the blood inside. He’d leave the rest to the medics—

  Pas shuddered a little, opened and closed his mouth before managing, ‘Archias— What—?’

  Above them, up on the flyover, things were going quiet.

  ‘See,’ Sulien murmured to him, as the bleeding began to slow, ‘you just need a few stitches, that’s all. Shame it wasn’t worse, really; you’re not going home yet.’

  Pas blinked up at him and his forehead puckered, as if with puzzlement rather than with pain.

  Dorion, looking pallid and grim, came running back with the medic, but Pas saw them coming and lifted a shaky hand to show that he was still alive. ‘I think it looked worse than it was,’ Sulien muttered as the medic bent over Pas, who even tried to confirm it by making a move to sit up.

  Sulien let the medic get to work and drew back. He wanted to separate himself from what he’d done.

  There was still the sporadic thunder of mortars up in the hills, but the fighting on the junction itself seemed to have stopped. Now Sulien remembered that the bodies he’d fallen among in the breach in the wire had still been warm, that the expression on Hanno’s face had not even had time to change before he fell, that he was not certain how many people he had killed today. On one of the ramps leading up to the flyover another soldier was sitting on the crash-barrier with his head in his hands, and Sulien wanted to do that too, he wanted to drop to the ground and cry, or vomit or fall asleep. But there was this hard, bright glaze of wakefulness covering everything. He felt that he could keep hold of that, at least for now: he could stave off everything he’d seen and felt, stop it from hurting him beyond what he could stand, and for as long as he could do these things he must not stop. Later, he told the barrage of jagged new memories rattling through him, as he looked up at the smoke rising in the west over the captured city.

  ‘I am trying to reach Grand Preceptor Zhu Li,’ said Ziye, in Sinoan, into the longdictor.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ said the faraway crackling voice of the woman who had answered. She added cagily, as if afraid of being further taken in, ‘This is a dentist’s.’

  ‘Please wait,’ said Ziye. ‘Would you know the longdictor code for your local magistrates’ office?’

  But the line went dead, though whether because the woman had broken the connection or because a cable somewhere had been severed, there was no way to be sure.

  They were about a hundred miles west
of Alexandria, at Tamiathis, where Delir and Ziye had taken over a small printing and copying shop. It provided a thin stream of income, and the equipment was useful to Lal, but more importantly, it was a means of money-laundering.

  They were in the windowless back room now, among the reams of paper and binding machines, and Varius was on another longdictor, going through the same routine as Ziye. ‘I’m sorry, this must be the wrong code?’

  ‘No Latin,’ said the baffled voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Varius, sighing, and crossed out another line of symbols on the list in front of him. ‘I swear it’s one of these,’ he said, while the others groaned gently and Ziye’s lips tightened.

  A year before, Varius had spent weeks talking to Zhu Li and other officials, discussing the tortuous details for the Sinoan peace talks. He was sure that at least one of the longdictor codes must be lodged in his memory somewhere, and if only he could retrieve any one of them, a message could be passed to Jun Sen and on to Tadahito. It was painful now to think of that time, and all that had happened since, but Varius closed his eyes and tried again to will himself back into his office in the southwest tower of the Palace, with Rome spread outside the blue-tinted windows, a leather chair underneath him, and a constant burr of tense voices in the corridor outside his door. He moved his fingers over the longdictor’s keys without pressing them: it was there, the right sequence, he could so nearly see it—

  They were trying other routes too. At present Lal was silently rereading her last letter from Sulien, which Varius and Una had collected in Alexandria, but she had spent the afternoon calling old friends in Tianjin in an effort to trace Liuyin, the official’s son who had once been in love with her. Old connections of Delir’s had promised to search out possible contacts in the Sinoan Civil Service and get back to them, but they could not afford to wait; the lines were being cut. Varius tried another variation and got only static. Rome had declared war on Sina a fortnight before.