But he could not quite say he was certain he was not sorry. And Una did not look as if she could agree, but she nodded.
He changed the subject. ‘How many people have you got now?’
Una smiled again, a cracked little fragment of a thing at first, but it built, steadied. She answered, ‘Two thousand and seventeen.’
Sulien grinned back. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that sounds like enough.’
The sun was setting in flags of red and blue cloud above the roofs of Axum. In the palace courtyard the volucer’s wings were already turning, stirring up a warm breeze.
‘You are sure you refuse my help?’ Tadahito said. He’d offered money, weapons, even aircraft.
Una said carefully, ‘You have helped us as much as we could ever ask, and we’re grateful. But we can’t take anything like that from you. If we let you pay for what we’re trying to do, Nionia would own it – we’d be fighting the war for you. We can’t do that. It has to be Roman.’
Tadahito looked unhappy, afraid he was making a mistake, and aware his part in this leave-taking was awkward. The Surijin’s cry hung silently in the air. Sulien and Pas were just as uneasy – they were fastidiously courteous and thankful, but they avoided looking at him when they could. They were still both dressed in their uniform, among the Nionian soldiers and the standing guard around the courtyard. There was still the memory of what they’d seen; there was still the threat.
You have a week, Tadahito had said. That’s all I can promise you, or Rome. By then events will have moved on and I will have to respond.
There was no time for the rest they all needed. Well, we’ll rest on the volucer, thought Una; we’ll rest after this is done. Only a day had passed since Sulien’s return, and Varius should have spent at least another day in bed – at least, aside from a few experimental walks up and down the corridor, Sulien had been able to convince him to stay there, until it was absolutely necessary to leave.
Still, just to see him on his feet, or making hurried calls, to Delir, Evadne, Theon and Praxinoa, made her dazed with relief, even if he still swayed sometimes, or subtly propped himself against columns or furniture. She kept herself out of his thoughts, but she could feel the course of them, moving with a clear, busy strength his body hadn’t quite regained yet. But it wasn’t enough; she kept wanting to touch him to be sure he was really there, and struggled not to extend any accidental brush of their hands.
Now he was leaning against the courtyard wall. Una, exasperated at herself for needing to do it, was rationing how often she allowed herself to look at him, but she was keenly aware of how he was standing, the exact placing of his right hand on the dark red stone.
She did not quite allow herself to notice that it was harder than ever to keep the blare of feeling turned down low because she was more hopeful, less guilty. It amazed her that he and everyone else could not hear it.
Noriko was standing with Tomoe and Sakura, her face as clear and serene as if the war were already over. Una smiled at her, sadly, because despite all the difficulty of bringing her here, she was sorry that Noriko could not come back with them across Nubia, and into the fight that was coming. They reached for each other’s hands.
‘Good luck,’ said Noriko.
‘I’ll write to you.’
Noriko smiled. ‘That’s not enough,’ she said. ‘When this is over, come and visit me.’
Lal set up a line of bottles out on the sand at the furthest extent of the headlights, crouched just in front of the car’s wheels, and commenced shooting. They had one gun between the three of them, and either she or Delir would be carrying it – Ziye had made it clear it would not be her. Delir, who had turned out to be a reasonable shot himself, flinched whenever Lal fired a round, but he was equally unhappy at the idea of her being unarmed.
‘You can’t see what you’re doing in this light,’ he said for want of a better reason to tell her to stop, despite the fact that she had hit three of the bottles already.
‘It’ll be dark on the night too,’ Ziye remarked.
‘I don’t like doing it either,’ muttered Lal irritably. It was true; the gun frightened her. But the very act of forcing her fingers steady so that she could squeeze the trigger and the kick of the weapon as she fired relieved some of the dark twists of pressure within her.
They had been waiting for more than an hour on this empty stretch of road and she was seething with impatience and excitement, and yet, though she could hardly understand the feeling, she was afraid of meeting Sulien too, even after all these red-raw months of missing him. There was part of her that wished she could simply take the knowledge he was safe and escape with it somewhere, into peace. I won’t be able to bear it, she thought. The story Varius had told Delir of Sulien’s return was too much, the wonder of it inflating the heated spaces in her brain already full of him. She wished his arrival could be more ordinary, to leave her a little more space to think and breathe. If she looked at him and saw that those blank patches in his gaze at her and in his letters had grown—
I want to think about guns and ships and identity papers and the paintings I’m going to do when all this is over, she thought sullenly, exploding a fourth bottle.
‘It’s a pity you don’t like it, really,’ mused Ziye, watching her calmly from her perch on a camp-stool by the car. ‘You’re good at it.’
‘You’re good at beating people up with your bare hands, but you don’t like doing it either,’ said Lal.
‘Not any more,’ Ziye agreed equably.
‘I can see them!’ Delir cried.
Lal sprang to her feet. Four people were coming up the track: Una, Varius, a slight, dark boy she didn’t know in Roman uniform, and— And there was Sulien, and her heart surged up, carved a trail of light through her like a firework. The weight of hundreds or thousands of bloody injuries even he could not repair fell away from her imagination; he was whole, perfect, and he looked overjoyed to see her.
He strode ahead of the others towards her and for an instant she thought, Don’t—
But then he took hold of her and swept her into a kiss, and he tasted of bruised sand and hot sky, and she forgot what had been worrying her. She loved him; all she had needed was for him to come back, for all six of them to be together. She laughed.
She had always found it difficult to picture him in uniform with his hair cropped; the thought of it had felt like a disfigurement; she was startled now at how natural it looked in reality.
‘This is Berenice,’ Sulien said to the other soldier, but before she had time to scowl at the name, he finished, ‘Lal, this is Pas.’
Delir patted Pas on the shoulder. He looked shy and overwhelmed in the midst of the noisy reunion happening around him. Delir was indignant when he heard how ill Varius had been, and shook his head in reproof. ‘I should have gone instead; I knew you weren’t well enough,’ he muttered.
‘I think I’d had it, wherever I was,’ said Varius cheerfully. ‘Hadn’t I, Sulien?’
Even with so much of her attention hopelessly tangled around Sulien, Lal noticed at once the look that spilled from Una when Varius’ back was turned. She was startled. Were the others tactfully pretending they didn’t see, or—? No, they really did not.
As they climbed into the car she twitched an eyebrow at Una. Una was silently horrified. Lal impressed herself with her own restraint in saying nothing.
It was almost dawn by the time they reached Tamiathis.
‘If I could just tell my mother I’m safe,’ murmured Pas, hesitantly. ‘She’s only forty miles away. I can’t believe that— I can’t believe I’m here.’
‘Not yet,’ said Una at once, ‘you can’t explain how you got here.’
‘It’ll be just a few more days,’ said Delir kindly.
Varius was stupefied, helpless with tiredness by now, and Ziye summarily assigned him Lal’s bed above the printing shop. She pulled down the shutters and produced piles of blankets and bedrolls.
‘A few more days!’ repeated L
al, dizzily, flinging herself down beside Una and hugging her. Sulien was in the storeroom with Pas. The separation chafed a little but with the warmth of his lips still stamped on hers it was bearable for now. There would be time for them later.
‘You’re not even frightened,’ said Una, wondering. Her voice sounded fragile in the dark.
‘No,’ said Lal, resolutely, and turned onto her side to face Una. ‘You can’t be – not now?’
Una stared up at the ceiling. ‘I’ve promised so many people so much,’ she said.
‘Well then,’ said Lal, ‘I’ll promise you it’s going to happen, I can feel it.’
But she woke less than an hour later, heart and breath jarred by Sulien’s voice raised in a hoarse shout from the next room, and the sound of a short, tangled struggle.
Una was awake too, lying tense beside her. Lal gave a small moan of distress and started up.
‘Wait,’ whispered Una.
On the other side of the door they could hear a low rumble of conversation: Sulien and Pas were talking. Even from here, she could hear Sulien’s breath steadying, growing quieter. Every now and then the names of people and cities she didn’t know floated through: Hanno, Gracilis, Aregaya.
Una could not stop thinking about everything that had to be done and everything that could go wrong, and yet here she was, in the printing shop stockroom, baffled at having nothing immediate to do.
Twenty longdictor calls had been made, in a code agreed months ago. She felt at once that the real meaning was being shouted out all the way to Rome, and that she could not understand it herself. Those simple conversations with a few trusted people: how could they really be confirming that hundreds of others were beginning to move?
Yet over the nine months since they had begun, she had at some point looked every one of these two thousand and seventeen people in the face. The thought smoothed her over with pride even while it made her shiver: What am I doing to these people? she thought incredulously – as good as murdering them, perhaps? Sometimes the sight of Sulien and Varius, the closeness of death just freshly washed off them both, stopped her breathing, leaving her frozen at the very thought of it.
Sulien was standing over Varius now, examining the charts of the Mediterranean and Aegean and trying to take in the finished contours of plans that had been barely formed when he’d left. Varius was going over the routes, humming quietly under his breath – not really a song, only a soft accompaniment to thinking. They’d tried to let him sleep longer than the rest of them, but he’d risen, groaning, and lurched downstairs into the stockroom when he heard them moving about. ‘Perhaps you should stay out of it,’ Una felt compelled to say to him, ‘meet us in Rome when it’s done.’
Varius turned an incredulous, aggrieved look at her. ‘After all this?’ he said, flatly.
‘Two days ago you were dying, Varius.’
‘He isn’t now,’ Sulien pointed out.
‘And when I woke up,’ said Varius, ‘everything had changed and I’d missed it. I’m not having that again, not now of all times.’ But he smiled then, with painful sweetness. ‘I’ll be there with you.’
Sulien said, ‘We all know what we’re in for, Una, and we’re all volunteers. We didn’t have even one cohort like that out in Mohavia.’
‘So I need to get round to Sabratha and pick up the Ananke,’ said Varius firmly, turning his attention back to the charts. The little ship was still in the cove by Evadne’s house.
‘We could do without it,’ Una suggested. ‘We can fit in with Phanias, or with Bupe in the Carmenta.’
‘But that wasn’t the plan,’ objected Varius, startled, and then stopped, considering it. He looked saddened.
Una smiled. ‘We need every ship we have,’ she corrected herself.
Sulien said, ‘I’ll come with you, Varius. I can keep an eye on you. You can’t drive four hundred miles and then sail a boat another two hundred miles, not alone.’
‘I was thinking you’d come, Una – you know the boat best,’ said Varius.
Una hesitated. It was ridiculous that the choice should feel so loaded: it was only one day to be without either or both of them.
Then Lal came in, having overheard the last part of the conversation, and settled it by appealing to Sulien, ‘Don’t leave again yet.’
‘We’ll meet you tomorrow outside Heraklion,’ Una told Sulien.
The small white house on the cliff was locked and empty. Una turned to face the bare sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon a fishing boat was already carrying Maralah and Evadne towards Rome.
She drew in a breath full of salt air and forgot to let it out; her body locked around it, teeth clamped tight.
‘After all this time,’ murmured Varius beside her, ‘I can’t believe we’re really doing this.’
‘I feel –’ began Una, so low she could barely hear herself. But a colder breeze scythed off the sea and cut off whatever the rest of the sentence had been, and she shivered.
‘It will be all right,’ said Varius almost as quietly. His hand knocked against hers, which was screwed into a fist, until it loosened and their fingers hooked around each other.
They steered the little inflatable dinghy out into the cove and climbed up onto the Ananke’s deck. Una caught Varius running an affectionate hand over the roof of the cabin, smiling as if he’d come home.
She sat down on one of the cockpit benches and smiled too. ‘You used to say this boat didn’t belong to you – she was just a resource for the cause, don’t you remember?’
‘Well,’ conceded Varius, ‘things are different now.’ And he stroked the Ananke again as if to console her, and looked at the sky. ‘It’s still light,’ he said. ‘We might as well take her up the coast – less to do tomorrow.’
Una groaned quietly. She had driven all the way along the coast of Egypt from Tamiathis, refusing to let Varius take over even briefly. But she dragged herself up and reached towards the controls.
Varius pushed her lightly away. ‘I’ll do it, Una.’
She looked at him anxiously, but his face was alert and he looked perfectly steady as he took the helm. She sank back onto the seat and a little of the tension in her body flowed out into the dark water beneath the bow as he steered the Ananke out onto the sea. Sometimes, after drooping closed, her eyelids would spring open in indeterminate panic, then as she found him still there at the helm, a shadowy figure as the dark settled around the ship, she would let her head drop back against the seat again, reassured.
But they were both so sodden with tiredness when at last they dropped anchor that Una felt they would leave an inky trail of it behind them as they climbed down into the cabin. Varius looked down at Una, standing by the bottom of the steps, and he wanted to say good night, or to promise her again that it would be all right, but with a defeated sigh at the sheer impossibility of speech, he embraced her instead.
Una put off the moment of lifting her head from his shoulder another moment, and then another, and then it seemed, to both of them, too tiring to move apart at all. Her eyelids had fallen shut again. They were almost asleep there on their feet, almost asleep as they sank down onto the same bed, and lay still.
A question, a wisp of doubt, rustled quietly in Varius’ mind as he stretched himself out on top of the tangled covers, but they were both so exhausted; all these hunted months had been so hard, and they had travelled so many miles together in this little boat, gone to bed night after night only a few feet apart in this cabin, so what did it matter if they fell asleep like this now? They were no longer holding one another, just lying side by side, and Una was already so still, her breath soft and even, and Varius himself was so close to the boundary of sleep himself he could hardly tell whether or not he’d crossed it yet. The sea lifted the Ananke and let it down, the rhythm steady, and sometimes Varius could feel a dream beginning to brim up out of the deeper wells of sleep: that they were no longer floating on the surface of the sea but underneath it, suspended together between the seabed and the air
, safely breathing the water, hidden.
Una too felt she was so nearly asleep the difference barely mattered; there was just one tense thread holding her to consciousness, and she lay waiting for it to break. This is all that I want, she told herself, feeling his pulse echo softly in her own flesh, almost overcoming the ache there. I don’t need anything else, just to lie here like this.
Whenever his eyes drifted open, Varius could see the surface of the water outside, dimly reflected on the ceiling above them – a net of light, trembling and breaking – and he was surprised that it had grown no brighter. He felt as if hours had passed, and yet it seemed natural that the night had stalled here, as if nothing would change again now, and they would always be floating here, always on the point of sleep.
Una shifted slightly, bringing up her hand so that it fell across his arm, her fingertips weightless on the edge of his chest.
Then, as if only by chance, as if they were lying passively in the flow of a current that lifted and turned them towards each other, their faces came together on the pillow. Their lips brushed together and caught.
Una sighed, and settled herself even closer, her slow, sleepy fingers stroking his arms, tracing over his closed eyes. Varius let his lips part and close against hers as if he was whispering in his sleep. And still it seemed to him that this was as separate from their real lives as a dream they would forget on waking, that they’d slipped out of the world. A faint shiver went through him when he felt her hand come to rest lightly on his waist under his tunic, but it was not enough to shock him back to himself, to make him ask what they were doing.
It was almost difficult to touch him, to push away the fabric over his skin when the boundaries of her own body were turning as vague as clouds. It was such a relief to kiss him; Una felt it was like letting out a held breath and gasping down air. It was so strong it made her blurred and soft, and she imagined she needed to soak up only a little more of it and then she would be able to stop. If he did not let her go, if he kept kissing her, just a little longer, that would be enough for the rest of her life.
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