Savage City

by Sophia McDougall

‘We had agreed on so much in Bianjing,’ said Varius, ‘a way of sharing power in Terranova and Tokogane. The wall was down. We were deliberately set on the path to war by a man who wanted both empires to destroy themselves and each other, who knew that in power Drusus would betray every effort we had made for peace. But without Drusus in the way, we believe something can be salvaged.’

  ‘How?’ said Tadahito, but it was scarcely a question, more a perfunctory courtesy. ‘How can anything be recovered of that time?’

  ‘We can remove Drusus from power,’ said Una. ‘We can install someone who would engage with Nionia under the same principles agreed in that treaty. We can prevent years of continued war. We are ready to do it now.’

  Varius began, ‘If you can be ready to declare a ceasefire—’

  ‘I am afraid that may not be possible,’ said Tadahito, delicately.

  There was a slight pause as Una considered the answer and saw that it was only a tactful softening of outright denial. She asked, slowly, ‘Why is it not possible?’

  Tadahito smiled, but Una was struck suddenly by how tired, how almost shrunken, he looked, how he had aged more than he should have in a single year, though perhaps that was true for all of them.

  ‘If you’d said this to me a year ago,’ he said, and there was a sharp crack in his voice, ‘but now it is not enough for the war to end. Too much has happened. We will accept nothing less than outright victory. I have spent more than a year of my life in this fight; I want to win.’

  There was silence. Varius tried to ignore the rattle of his heartbeat, the sudden chilly dousing of sweat. He said, laboriously, ‘That’s understandable. But with a leader capable of repairing— Let us at least explain what we plan to do—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me who is on the throne,’ Tadahito said, ‘not now.’

  Una looked from Varius’ drained face to the expression of distant pity on Tadahito’s and bit her lip. ‘But it is not as if agreement between our nations is unimaginable – we had it once. It could end now, the loss of life – Nionian lives—’

  ‘The war will end,’ said Tadahito softly, ‘and very soon. Not as you would wish, perhaps – not as any of us would wish. But it will end.’

  Una stared at him, and saw an army fallen in a desert, and a dry wave passing through a city, felling walls and towers. A word, spoken in his mind, with a dull, unhappy expectation of release and rest.

  Tadahito smiled again, regretfully. ‘I am sorry. I respect your efforts to rid yourselves of a tyrant, but there is nothing more I can discuss with you.’

  Sick as he was, Varius noticed that Una stopped breathing; that her gaze at Tadahito had grown fixed and rigid. ‘Una?’

  ‘Surijin,’ Una said, a soft hiss.

  Tadahito started sharply.

  Varius blinked aching eyelids. ‘What?’

  ‘The weapon,’ said Una, in a low voice, but very clearly, ‘they have already used it, against the Roman Army in Tokogane. He’s about to use it on Rome.’

  Tadahito’s eyes went wide with suspicion and shock, and he breathed, ‘How can you have heard—?’ He looked once round the room, as if for spies, then stared at her again, flushed with anger at himself for talking so openly. But his face relaxed into resignation almost at once. He might almost have said aloud that it was too late for it to make any difference.

  Varius tried to assemble the pieces of the calm, reasonable argument that were so nearly within his reach, but he could only croak out, pleading, ‘You can’t—’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Tadahito, bitterly. ‘Do you think your side would scruple to use such a weapon against us, if it had one? Do you know what they have done already? What else but Rome’s total subjugation will keep Nionia safe now?’

  Varius tried to focus his eyes on Tadahito’s swimming face, then dragged himself to his feet.

  ‘I cannot allow you to contact anyone in Rome,’ said Tadahito, but Varius barely heard him; the Prince was talking somewhere miles away, and tides and earthquakes were breaking up the space between. He did hear Una, calling his name, somehow flying after him across the distance while the painted men on the walls glowed and crowded close.

  Una reached him before he fell, and tried to hold him up. She sank to her knees under his weight, his head resting in her hands.

  The heat that had been coursing through him for days had been suddenly extinguished; now his skin was cold. His eyes were open; he looked around, confused at finding himself on the floor. ‘Una,’ he said, surprisingly clearly, ‘I need a longdictor. My parents— I have to get them out of Rome.’

  A small group of servants had gathered round them and Tadahito came hurrying over.

  ‘And Cleomenes – I have to—’ whispered Varius, and ran out of breath.

  ‘They are waiting for him in the infirmary. Take him there,’ said Tadahito sadly. He still spoke in Latin, for the servants’ sake.

  Varius struggled weakly for a moment as they lifted him and then went still, unconscious at last.

  Tadahito turned away, as if not to intrude any further. Still kneeling on the floor, trembling, Una called out fiercely, ‘Your Highness.’

  Tadahito stopped for a moment and turned his head a little, but he did not look at her.

  Sulien hadn’t touched the radio at his belt since they’d left the road. He would say it was broken if he had to. He didn’t want to talk to any Roman soldier outside the fourth centuria, especially not anyone senior to him, or anyone who had been here longer. He kept thinking of Gracilis, whom he had liked – had he known what was just outside the city? No, no, he couldn’t have done, Sulien was convinced of that. Gracilis would have said something; he would have acted differently.

  But he found it made little difference to persuade himself he could see a clear patch here or there in the stain spreading from that road of corpses.

  They’d left the trucks, hidden as best they could at the base of a rocky bluff in the foothills. They hardly spoke – the effort of walking through the heat provided some excuse for that, and some distraction from what they’d seen. They followed the course of a dried-up stream into the mountains, picking their way over the pale, cindery stone towards the cover of the dusty pines on the slopes above. They’d veered a long way off course and now they were lost. He hoped they could stay that way for a while. As long as it lasted they were just a small, demoralised crowd of young men wandering through the mountains, worn out, almost innocent. Sulien felt disgusted about continuing with his orders, even in this half-hearted, roundabout way. They passed a hollow in the white rock, barely deep enough to call a cave. If he’d been alone, perhaps he would have crawled inside and waited for the war to end around him. But he was not alone, and though they barely even looked at each other as they struggled up the mountainside, he was so grateful for the solid, tongue-tied presence of his men around him. And he repeated to himself – almost loudly and stubbornly enough to shut out any other thought – that they were going home one day, all of them, if he had anything to do with it.

  So eventually they would have to return to their legion, and in some state that did not invite immediate execution for disobedience or desertion.

  He divided them into five groups, and led an octet up a spur of rock onto a shallow ramp above the plain, dotted with pine shrubs. Looking across the flat spread of the valley towards the dark, salt-encrusted hills, it was clear enough where they were – only three or four miles from the chain of peaks marked on the map, and somewhere in there was the Nionian radio position he was supposed to take out.

  And then a strange shudder passed through the desert: a long drone, just below the reach of hearing, scraping through the air. The soldiers felt the rock stir under their feet; they felt it on their skin as a faint breeze with a flat, unnatural weight behind it. Dust lifted like a tablecloth from the ground below. For a moment Sulien thought he saw a ghostly blur of light in it, then he blinked and realised the shimmering was a trick of his eyes – the wave seemed to stir the fluid in t
hem too. He saw Minius and Asper, who were further down the slope, lurch as if the earth had turned to pitching water, and then he felt a wave of seasickness himself, and Dorion too bent over, pressing his hands to his head.

  It stopped just as abruptly, but now the plain and the far hills were hidden under a curtain of hanging dust, and the nausea lingered too.

  ‘Well,’ Sulien said, blackly. ‘It does work, after all.’

  Pas said listlessly, ‘That Onager-thing we’ve been dragging around.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sulien answered, and raised his voice to call to Minius and Asper, ‘Everyone all right?’ And they stumbled on, all of them faintly queasy and unsteady for a while.

  They knew they had just watched the infliction of a new and scarcely imaginable kind of force, and yet after what they had seen on the road, it meant little to them; Sulien felt as if the swell that had just rolled across the earth only confirmed something they had already found out. All he wondered was who was going to burn or bury all the dead that lay across Mohavia now.

  They came into a steep valley of taller, denser pines, though the slopes were disfigured with craters and burnt trees where the Roman bombers had tried to smash the command station by luck. Sulien’s group descended slowly, with another pair of octets spread along the slope to their left. It was very quiet, even their breathing and footsteps sounded hushed. The slash of sky above them had turned beige: the dust from the plain was muffling the air.

  Sulien remembered that frozen, breathless feeling, waiting in the hidden camp at Holzarta while the Roman soldiers roamed in the woods outside. He swallowed dryly with regret and doubt.

  The decanus of the second octet whistled and Sulien turned to see him pointing urgently at the peak above them. For a moment he could see only a line of trees before his eyes suddenly adjusted and the trunk of a tall pine became the metal column of a communications tower, painted like bark and bristling with green artificial branches. It was no wonder the air patrols had been unable to spot it from the air.

  Sulien signalled his men. They’d been carrying their shields on their backs; now they all quietly transferred them to their arms and readied their guns. Sulien switched on his radio to whisper instructions, and had his group crouch among the pines while the fourth and fifth octets progressed westwards along the valley so they could gradually descend the south slope and cross to the north. If there was anything at the bottom of the valley, they should have it almost surrounded.

  Sulien would have been surprised that they hadn’t already met resistance, except that it was almost routine now that the Nionians were never where they expected them to be. By now they would know the Onager had been used, of course, so they might have been ordered to retreat, or they might have fled.

  And Sulien was just beginning to wonder if they might be able to put the tower beyond use with grenades and leave without so much as seeing a Nionian soldier when a spray of bullets spurted from the shrubs on the slope opposite them and they had to take cover behind their shields to return fire.

  Sulien could make out only four men in the shadow of the pines, huddled under their own shell of round shields. Perhaps there were a few more down in the base of the valley, but the other half of his centuria was already descending the slope behind them, converging on them from both sides. ‘Tell them to stop firing!’ Sulien ordered Minius, who had that much Nionian. ‘Tell them to surrender; it’s ten against one, for fuck’s sake.’

  Minius shouted that across the ravine, but there was no break in fire. Sulien could still level his gun at the men and fire, though his finger was slow on the trigger, and he couldn’t bring himself to aim so deliberately as before. Nevertheless, whether it was his bullet or someone else’s, one of the Nionian soldiers toppled forward, and rolled down to lie splayed on the slope, braked by a clump of sagebrush.

  Another Nionian lobbed a grenade across the valley and as the Romans scattered, the remaining three broke out, running east along the incline of the valley. But one of them fell, wounded in the foot, and the Romans closed in around them, herding them down to the valley floor.

  Sulien skidded down to the stubby concrete building. It was camouflaged much more crudely than Holzarta had been, with dried branches and stones piled roughly across the roof. There were two soldiers on the ground outside it, one on his back with a hole in his chest, the other crouched over him and trying vainly to hold the blood inside him, though it was now only spilling out, no longer pumping.

  Dangerously, Sulien closed his eyes against the sight of them; for a moment he felt that if he blinked hard enough he could make the war go away, and transport himself back to any warm corner of the past, where he and Una and Marcus were safe. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently to the survivor, ‘he’s dead. Look, just put your hands up, all right? Up?’ He gestured with his gun, hoping his tone would convey enough of what he meant. Minius was still some distance behind him on the slope.

  The soldier’s teeth were clenched with desperation. He was young, like all of them, amber-skinned, with a broad, bony face and a sparse moustache on his lip. His hair was tightly knotted back, like most Nionian soldiers, but Sulien had not seen anything like the pattern of blue lines tattooed onto his cheeks before. He looked past Sulien at the mass of Romans approaching with the three other Nionian soldiers prisoners their midst. He leapt to his feet, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand, but he was swinging up to his own head before Sulien had even fully registered it was there. Sulien had no doubt he meant to do it and yet there was a moment’s incredulous hesitation before he pulled the trigger, in which Sulien read a wild, unacknowledged hope of being stopped— So he sprang forward and clubbed at the young man with his shield, knocking him to the ground and sending the gun flying. It was only then he remembered his own slowness to fire in the prison van, on the way to the Colosseum.

  ‘Fucking hell, sir, I almost shot you,’ said Asper, who’d cocked his own weapon the moment he saw the Nionian’s.

  ‘Never mind, no harm done,’ said Sulien, grimly, scooping the gun out of the soldier’s reach.

  The boy moaned and crawled back to his comrade’s body. He knelt there, covering his face and rocking gently. After a moment he bent forward and touched his forehead to the dead man’s. One of the other prisoners crouched beside him and laid a hand on his back.

  Sulien left an octet guarding the prisoners, and beckoned Pas and Asper to follow him. He warily pushed open the door of the station, and a shot smashed off the edge of his shield. Sulien sighed with fatigue and fired back, and was relieved to have hit the last enemy soldier in the place only with a ricochet, in the arm. After that the man mutely let them take his gun, and they pushed him outside to join the others.

  A couple of electric fans were still whirring in the control room, fluttering the edges of the maps pinned to the back wall, a spatter of blood across them now. The other walls were lined with desks loaded with radio equipment. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Sulien said for the second time that day, wondering if this was a trap, and the whole place was rigged.

  There was a door at the back of the room opening onto a tunnel dug into the hillside, where they found a generator room and a barracks with bunks for twenty people. They had two corpses, and four prisoners. Where were the others now?

  They went back outside and looked uneasily at the huddled captives. ‘What are we going to do with them?’ asked Pas.

  ‘Take them back,’ said Sulien. ‘We’ll get that tower down and smash up this stuff, and then take them back with us.’ He tried to sound convinced that this was a good idea, though he didn’t know what would happen to them. Probably someone would sell them as slaves. But at least they would be alive.

  And one day all the slaves would be free.

  ‘Take us back with you?’ repeated the tattooed soldier, in unexpected Latin, a thin, desperate note of laughter in his voice. ‘Where? Where do you have to go back to now?’

  One of the other prisoners hissed something, alarmed, but the soldier co
uld not be stopped. ‘Don’t you know your army is gone? It doesn’t matter what you do to us: we have the Surijin. Didn’t you see it, out there? We’ve won.’ He bent over the body again and moaned, ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead out there with the rest, where you belong?’

  All around him, the Roman soldiers went still, as they thought of that quiver that had raced through the earth and into their bones. Sulien felt the faint sickness twist again in his gut. He looked at his men’s wide eyes. They were all looking at him.

  He licked dry lips and adjusted the switches on his radio. ‘Ninth cohort, fourth centuria to command,’ he said, hoarsely. And said it again, and again. He turned away, because he couldn’t stand the others watching him while he pleaded, ‘Is anyone there?’

  The radio hissed softly, like the sighing of dust on the plain.

  ‘Tomorrow that is what we will do to Rome!’ crowed the soldier on the ground, in despairing triumph. ‘Then what will you do?’

  Noriko said, ‘But I lived in that city.’

  She had been given strange new clothes. There had been no way of acquiring anything from Nionia in time, and no one had wanted her to arrive in Cynoto dressed like a young Roman matron, so Tadahito’s valet had arranged for local seamstresses to make dresses out of parachute silk. The neat white costume had been made to something approximating Nionian style, though lighter and simpler than anything Noriko might have worn at home. The diamond patterns at the neckline were Ethiopian. Her hair was smoothed back over her shoulders. She did not feel she looked quite Roman or Nionian, or anything else; she and Tomoe and Sakura looked like the only inhabitants of a lonely new nation.

  Tadahito gave her a look of fierce, scared relief and gripped her hand, exclaiming, ‘Yes – as a prisoner, as a slave!’

  ‘Not when my husband was still alive.’ She supposed she had been a prisoner in a sense even then, but Marcus had been too.

  Tadahito was not listening. ‘We should never have sent you there.’

  Noriko remembered Drusus’ weight, both the physical horror of being forced down beneath him, and the daily burden of his presence in the palace. If Tadahito did what he said was already inevitable, then Drusus was only days away from death. But she thought of the quiet street where she had met Cleomenes, and the servants she had talked to in the palace, and she felt cold and breathless and lost.