Una and Varius waited, tense, unable to understand what was being said. Noriko gestured for a pen and paper and Evadne seemed to rummage through every drawer and box in the tiny house, trying to find them for her.
Noriko anxiously twisted a strand of her tangled hair as she talked, until at last she switched off the longdictor and showed the set of coordinates she’d taken down. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘tomorrow night. They say it is past a town called Pharusium and then away from the road into the desert. They will find us there; they have a hidden volucer to take us across the lines.’ Her face brightened in slow, incredulous happiness. ‘My brothers are waiting,’ she said softly.
‘That’s a long way,’ said Evadne as Varius cleared a space among the dishes to unfold the map. ‘The girls’ll have to pass as slaves again.’
Una knew that would have to mean her too; it was better, if they had to explain themselves, that they fitted into two distinct categories. Evadne would have to accompany them into the Libyan desert; she and Varius could be business partners transporting four slave girls. She nodded. It was only one day, and they might well not be stopped at all; certainly no elaborate pretence would be required.
It was strange to think it how long it had been since she had actually been owned by anyone. She glanced at Maralah, for whom it had been just over a fortnight, the exultation and rage and numbness still raw. She could hardly believe that five years of freedom, however limited and fragile, separated them. Five years was not enough time to get used to it, she thought. Her own freedwoman’s rights had been taken away, and she had been unsurprised. But in the possible world that lay beyond Drusus, beyond the end of the war . . . She caught Maralah’s eye, and smiled at her.
And yet the journey ahead frightened her. Partly it was the thought of the desert itself – the heat here at its northern edge, by the sea, was at the limit of what she could stand, and it was late August, and Pharusium was more than three hundred miles further south. But it was also that Maralah was right, Evadne was right: it was almost time, and this drive into the heat was the beginning of the attempt, and they were doing it without Sulien.
‘You will come back, won’t you?’ Maralah asked her, suddenly, quietly. ‘You won’t leave us – you won’t go off and live in Nionia or somewhere?’
‘Of course I’ll come back,’ Una said, taken aback. ‘Well—I can’t promise we won’t get caught on the road, or shot down over Nubia, but if I’m alive I’ll come back.’
Maralah nodded, but her eyes slid away. ‘You’ve got friends on their side – the princess. And after everything – the arena, and everything – I could imagine you might just want to be safe.’
‘I won’t. We won’t,’ said Una, a little concerned that she had allowed herself to look too tired, too afraid or weak. She lifted her head, setting her jaw.
Varius managed to get a call through to Cleomenes. He and his family were safe, and he promised that he’d check on Varius’ parents – but it might take a day or two for the answer to come back, and they couldn’t wait.
Varius sat in silence by the longdictor for a while. Then he sighed and looked across the map at Una. ‘Well, what do you think? Get off the road and sneak across the border, or bluff it out at the crossing?’
‘Your stitches have to come out before we go anywhere,’ Una said sharply.
Varius was a little startled. ‘Oh. I suppose so. I hadn’t thought about that.’
Una folded her lips. She had known it was more on her mind than his, and felt a small glow of annoyance with him. It was a perversely comforting, straightforward feeling. ‘No. You hadn’t. And they should have come out yesterday or the day before, really.’
If he’d thought of it himself, he might have asked Evadne to do it, but now it would have to be her. Delir should have come, she thought. He could have done it. Sulien should be here, and then it wouldn’t need doing at all.
‘Let’s get it over with then,’ she said impatiently.
‘The light’s best outside,’ said Evadne as she poured boiling water over the smallest pair of scissors she had.
Una looked away for a second while Varius pulled off his tunic and sat down, and then she shook her head at herself and dragged up another stool behind him.
Noriko hovered, looking over Una’s shoulder at the wounds, sombre. ‘I didn’t know you were hurt,’ she said.
Varius looked up in an attempt at a shrug that ended in a wince, as Una made the first snip and pulled at the threads. ‘It’s nothing bad.’
‘But that was a bomb?’
Varius nodded – then tried to hold back a growl as another thread snagged as it pulled through the skin. Una murmured ‘Sorry,’ and laid a concerned hand flat on his bare shoulder. She lifted it away as soon as she realised she’d done it, but a jarring charge of unwanted happiness had already run along her nerves at the contact of his skin against hers. She gritted her teeth and went back to work with even greater care, though she was already working so delicately that she had to stifle little tremors of effort in her hands.
Noriko went back inside, not wanting to disturb Una, and as she found a quicker, surer rhythm, the rest of the first line of stitches came out more easily, Varius scarcely flinched and Una relaxed slightly. Neither of them spoke. But even though she touched him as sparingly as she could, still her fingertips picked up little specks of feeling, like motes of dust drifting through a shaft of light. She could almost persuade herself it was just a chance tangle of friendship and loss and the memory of the hours he’d been missing in Tamiathis . . .
She moved the scissors to the longer, twisted seam at the base of his ribs, where the little dark knots were cruder and deeper. Varius drew a breath through his teeth and she could feel him tensing against each tug. A little blood trickled over his skin, distressing her more than even she thought was reasonable.
‘It’s all right,’ said Varius, because she’d stopped. His voice was only a little roughened. ‘You’re doing fine.’
But it wasn’t right, she thought. He turned his head to smile at her, and she looked back, stinging with strange helplessness, the scissors hanging loose in her hand. The sun was low in the sky now, but still raking hot gold light across the cliffs, skimming and trembling through Evadne’s garden, breaking into slices of bright and dark in the fronds of the date palm, and all the light seemed to curve and gather round him, concentric to him. He was the one real, stable thing left. But he was bleeding, and another swell of chaos might carry him away from her at any moment.
‘Do you want me to take over?’ asked Evadne, watching from the doorway.
Una rose to her feet. ‘Yes.’
‘Why do we always get these jobs?’ complained Dorion. ‘Running out into the middle of nowhere on our own.’
‘Because he asks for them,’ Pas answered.
‘You hate us, do you, Archias? You want us to suffer?’ said Dorion dolefully. ‘Sir,’ he corrected himself.
‘Hate you? After all I do for you?’ Sulien said. And it was true, he was doing this for them: for at least a day they were away from the Onager, no longer part of the current carrying the Roman Army north. Ahead of their advance the bulk of the Nionian forces continued to melt back into the hills, leaving empty mining towns and deserted farms behind them, while small, agile assault teams goaded the Romans’ western flank, prodding them eastwards, and volleys of gunfire lashed at their volucers from the mountains that divided Enkono from Sorasanmyaku. There was something up there, the air reports said, a radio post hidden among the trees, directing attacks.
Sulien had volunteered to take his men and try to find the place as soon as he heard about it. Aesius, the cohort commander, had said, ‘It’s not worth detaching a whole centuria.’
‘Sir,’ Sulien had replied grimly, ‘we’re not a whole centuria.’ They were down to forty-three men now, after Astylus and Nelius had been killed in an ambush, and Merenda had been invalided back to Aregaya. Sulien still had nightmares – not unusual; now someone had t
o be thumped awake to stop him shouting whenever they managed to sleep – but he didn’t know when he’d stopped seeing the hounds, or Una dead; his dreams were full of the same explosions and blown-off limbs as everyone else’s.
But for now they were riding back a few miles towards Aregaya along the road they’d already taken, and then turning down towards the mountains. The heat-clogged air was as dense as ever, but Sulien was sitting on the outside of the truck, where the speed whipped up a little dry breeze. They passed a few bodies in a crater, untended crops withering under dry irrigation wheels, a roadside tea-house with its shutters smashed. But by the time they were a mile clear of the Onager he felt relief rise through him and the vast space around them began to feel comforting rather than intimidating. He felt both the Romans and the Nionians might forget their little group of vehicles altogether; surely there was enough bristly red ground and blue sky here to hide them from anyone’s notice. There were green woods up in the mountains, above the reach of the desert. He wished there were somewhere like Holzarta waiting up there, a hiding place he could take the fourth centuria to escape.
‘What’s that?’ said Caerellius suddenly, and Sulien stiffened, looking ahead for whatever Caerellius had seen or heard. But he could see nothing, and Caerellius just stared straight ahead, his mouth tight with disgust, his nostrils flaring.
Then Sulien caught the smell too; it washed across the little convoy and the whole centuria knew, at almost the same instant, what they were going to find on this road. It was the smell that pervaded Aregaya, but here it was stronger, more sustained, and it grew with every breath and with every turn of the wheels beneath them. They looked at each other.
‘Oh, shit,’ whispered Dorion.
They saw cars motionless on the road ahead, as if they were just running into a very long tailback of traffic, from roadworks, or an accident.
A sour eddy of the smell made Pas gag. Sulien tied a cloth around his own nose and mouth. Others were already doing the same: it was more of a ritual gesture than a practical one; it didn’t really keep much of the smell out, but it was something between them and what they were approaching. The drivers of the trucks needed no command from Sulien to move faster, they accelerated, compelled by awful curiosity. They knew what they had found, and they could not go on without seeing it.
A little closer, and they could see how many cars had swerved off the road or collided; others were neatly spaced on the asphalt, their doors standing open.
Sulien shouted for the drivers to halt when he saw the first bodies. They were face down, their limbs sprawled as if they had been running back this way when they were overtaken. There were more lying in the scorched grass on either side of the road, curled up or clinging to each other. Black hair fluttered in the hot breeze.
Sulien swung down from the truck and walked a little way along the road, one hand pressed to his face, treading softly, as if afraid of breaking the silence here.
He tried to keep his eyes half focused, to skim his gaze across the road, not settling. If he looked any closer, he knew he would start to pick out the children. The sun had dried flesh to darkened leather – was that what had dragged open so many mouths, or had they died that way, lips straining for air, or screaming? They lay half-fallen from the cars from which they’d tried to scramble free, or huddled underneath them, or slumped inside. There was a pale trail of powdery residue over everything, metal and asphalt and clothing and hair.
‘No one touch anything!’ Sulien called out.
But no one had thought of touching anything; they picked their way among the cars silently, for as long as they could before the smell set solid like concrete and held them back. The queue of dead extended as far along the road ahead as they could see.
Sulien tried to silence the part of his mind that handled numbers, tried not to guess a figure beyond ‘many’, but despite himself he knew that it was thousands. And he thought he knew where they’d come from: the vehicles were loaded high with cases, bundles, unsorted heaps of cooking pots, bedding, books, and some of it had come tumbling from roof-racks across the road. The things that belonged in the empty cupboards of Aregaya.
‘Maybe they did it themselves,’ suggested Dorion tentatively.
‘What?’ asked Sulien, dully incredulous.
‘I mean, the Nionians, for some kind of . . . to make it look like . . . I mean, maybe it wasn’t us,’ explained Dorion, stammering slightly.
Sulien blinked, and saw the red gaping mouths of the arena hounds. He saw the cross. Rage washed through him. ‘You think we wouldn’t do this?’ he demanded. ‘You think Romans wouldn’t? Where the hell have you been living, Dorion? Because I wish I could go there.’
‘Don’t yell at me,’ said Dorion, visibly shaking, ‘I never fucking wanted to come here.’ His voice broke, and he raised his hands to his eyes.
Sulien sighed. He was trembling too. He put his hand on Dorion’s shoulder.
‘What the fuck do we do?’ whispered Pas.
But there was nothing they could do. There were so many dead and so few of them that they couldn’t have begun to start burying them, even if they had dared to touch the poison that coated them. Sulien wanted some gesture of apology or respect, something, but even if he could have thought of anything, it would have turned obscene as they performed it, he knew that.
So they limped back to their trucks and carried on, rolling off the road in a long detour that took them miles further from the Roman lines than had been planned. The smell of the road chased them all the way to the mountains.
‘I’ve never been alone in a house before,’ said Maralah, standing in the doorway of the tiny white building on the cliff, the key in her hand. She looked at once fragile and dangerous, with her set, pale face and unblinking eyes.
Evadne rumpled her stubbly head fondly. ‘You’ll do all right. Just be careful with the stove. And don’t shoot anyone unless you’re sure you have to.’
Noriko hugged her, and Maralah clung to her with sudden fierceness. Then, with a long, keen look at Una, she drew inside.
Una, Noriko, Sakura and Tomoe were dressed in the flimsy, revealing clothes Cominia had provided, with cheap plastic jewellery bright at their wrists and ears. The fluttery blue sundress Una was wearing reminded her of the star-printed dress she’d worn the day of her escape, five years before. A sheer pink scarf veiled the worst of the scars on her shoulders and arms. The women eyed each other in resigned self-consciousness. Sakura kept trying to tug the little skirt she was wearing lower. Una’s lips were set in a familiar, stubborn line. But she avoided looking at Varius.
The truck was oven-like from the moment they climbed into it, and the thin tar-fibre dresses melded damply to the seats and their skin almost at once.
Varius took the controls of the car first, with Evadne beside him. His back had been painful all morning, but he assumed that was the price of having the stitches out late and unanaesthetised, and he expected it to fade. They lumbered along the gravelly track from the house onto the road towards Antipyrgos, following the course of the aqueduct as it marched across the land. Broad green bands of farmland striped the desert where pipes and channels carried the water down to the fields of lentils, beans and flax.
They barely spoke as the dry air rasped past the car, sitting listless with heat. Varius felt it gnaw at the flesh of his back, pool in his joints, sting his eyes. His heart began to flutter and tug in his chest as the arches of the aqueduct repeated monotonously alongside the truck; if it hadn’t been for the other traffic he would almost have wondered if they were moving at all.
‘Varius,’ said Una, her voice thin and taut.
‘What?’ Varius mumbled.
‘You have to stop the car.’
Varius had been driving mindlessly, too lost in the heat and the pain to notice either. He pulled over in a sandy lay-by and dragged himself out. He felt baffled by the rush of nausea that came on as he took a few steps into the breathless air, but he swallowed down most of a bo
ttle of water and it faded. The truck was too hot to touch, but he leant against it anyway. In the sunlight the other cars blazed like comets on the road, the air melting around them.
‘Maybe we should turn back,’ said Evadne, examining him, touching his forehead, ‘leave you with Maralah.’
‘Mmm.’ He didn’t have a strong opinion either way: the thought of going back to the little house and lying down in the shade was tantalising, but it would be a long, uncomfortable drive now whatever they decided.
‘No,’ said Una fiercely, ‘you’re staying with me. You’re coming. They’ll have doctors there.’
Varius rubbed his eyes and tried to shake himself out of his sluggishness. How could he care so little about the end to so much work and danger? ‘I have to be there to see Tadahito,’ he said. He climbed heavily into the passenger seat beside Evadne and closed his eyes.
There had been too little time to scout for a safe place to slip illicitly across the border between Tripolitania and Libya, and they would have lost time getting back to the main road anyway. They joined a long queue at the crossing south of Theon Limen, where ranks of stationary vehicles were stranded on the asphalt.
In the back, Tomoe passed around mirrors and cosmetics and the women began silently applying bright, heavy paint to their faces. Una joined in, painting a scarlet layer of disguise onto her lips. It was too hot to do it before the moment it was necessary.
At last they rolled up to the gate and a border guard peered at the papers Evadne handed him. From the back seat Una concentrated on him, readying herself to try to push his attention away from them if necessary, but he was bored and slow in the heat, with sweat dark under his arms and shiny on his forehead. ‘Your business in Libya?’ he asked.
‘We’ve got a buyer for these girls in Garama,’ said Evadne breezily.
Una and the other girls huddled sullenly together in the back, their hair falling forward over their lurid faces, but the officer only glanced in at them.
He strolled around the truck to Varius’ window, still studying his papers. ‘I see you’re of conscription age, sir. Do you have a statement of professional or medical exemption?’
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