Savage City (13 page)

‘I’ll find the key,’ he said to Varius, although Delir hadn’t been very clear about where it was supposed to be, and it was so dark, and maybe there wasn’t a key at all. Varius let him fumble around for a while, sitting passively in the back as if the journey wasn’t over yet, but then he climbed out of the car to join him, circling the cabin without speaking, patting along window ledges and on top of lintels. Sulien tried to ignore a pull of tension at leaving Una lying alone and out of his sight on the seat, even as close as she was.

‘Here,’ said Varius, finally. The key was under one of a stack of concrete bricks by the steps, left over from laying the foundations, perhaps.

The floor was coated with sand and the air smelled slightly stale, must tinged with salt. Sulien’s head skimmed against the ceiling and he could almost have touched the opposite walls with outstretched hands. There wasn’t any electric lighting, but Sulien found a gas lantern hanging by the door. There was a sink, and a tiny stove. Varius and Sulien carried Una in between them, clumsy now, and put
her down on what seemed to be the only bed. Sulien dropped the heap of things from his flat in the middle of the floor, dragged a flimsy folding chair across to beside the bed and sat there, his head tipped back against the wall.

Varius didn’t sit down. ‘I’ll get rid of the car.’

Sulien just nodded, too tired to ask any questions. But as Varius pushed open the door he began, ‘I haven’t thanked you—’

‘For killing that man?’ asked Varius, his voice uneven. His shoulders moved in something between a shrug and flinch, and he said gently, ‘Don’t.’

Sulien sat there as the noise of the car faded. The rhythm of the sea’s hiss matched Una’s quiet breath on the bed, steady, continuing. For a while he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about how hungry he was, but eventually he tipped himself wearily onto his knees to rummage through the bundle on the floor. He ate some bread, still crouched there, then got up and drank some water straight from the tap because he didn’t feel like looking for anything else.

Belatedly he realised that he did not know if Varius intended to come back, let alone how he would do it.

There must be at least a roll-up mattress or something, perhaps under the bed, or in one of the cupboards, but he only thought of that when he was already lying beside Una, awkwardly curled so his feet wouldn’t hang off the end of the bed, and by then he couldn’t have moved.

He came close to waking early, as dawn was pushing in callously through the skimpy curtains, but Una was still motionless at his back and he thought at once,
No
, and rolled over onto his face, burying himself wilfully in sleep, hiding.

Decimus understood what was happening; at least, he understood enough. They were under attack, and there hadn’t been enough time to evacuate. His mother and the slaves were still running from room to room grabbing clothes and crying, though his eldest sister and her husband had kissed him and run out to their car. But there was a tide of noise breaking against the villa’s gates, and then the lights of military trucks flooded the windows.

Salvilla shrieked and grabbed his hand, pulling him towards the back of the house.
But they’d have the house surrounded
. He tried to tell her that, but she didn’t listen, and so he pulled free and ran back into the atrium, darting through as the soldiers kicked in the door and burst into his father’s study. The chest where the guns were kept was
locked, but it had never been any secret where the key was, because his father trusted him. Decimus opened the chest, took out the pistol he’d used for target practice and loaded it. He’d never fired it at a person before, but that was what it was for, that was the point of learning how to use it. His father had made sure he understood that, even when he was firing toy guns at his friends. His hands shook a little, and they were damp around the wooden handgrip, which was strange, because he really wasn’t frightened. He hoped that would be completely clear. There was a strange ringing feeling instead, humming all through him as if his body were a metal bell. His senses were alive, leaving too little room to think, and no need.

He slipped back into the atrium, quietly, aimed at the head of the Praetorian who was wrestling his sister Secunda towards the door, and fired. The gun sounded louder than usual, fired indoors. His aim was perfect, and for a second he felt an eruption of triumph. But at the same time incomprehension hit him, more jarring than the noise of the shot, leaving him dizzy. It wasn’t so much the blood or the collapse – it was the man’s uniform; these were
Roman
soldiers he had to fight, who had come to kill them, not Nionians or separatists or even mutinying slaves, and if he was not on their side then there was no solid ground left on which to stand.

But all the same his hand had moved as if by itself, aiming the gun again, and he shot another of them, and before they could react, he’d dodged inside the doorway of the room through which Salvilla had fled, guarding the way. And he killed two more of them before they could get close enough to shoot him – the only one of the family to die in the house.

Climbing out of the car, Varius glanced up into the dark eye of a security camera and felt like staring straight at it, letting it take a good look at him. But of course that wasn’t how a man trying to hide would act, so he lowered his face and set off towards the port. There was no boat waiting for him, or any of them, but there could have been. The vigiles would find the car and the footage in a day or two, and if it wasn’t already over by then, they would waste some time thinking he, at least, and maybe all three of them, were somewhere across the water, anywhere.

The tideless sea lapped black beside Varius’ feet. All he had to do was work his way along its edge, no risk of getting lost, between the pale glow of the coastal road and the red and white lights of freighters and cruisers, pegged out along the horizon, sliding over.

Perhaps it was not guilt he felt over the Praetorian he’d killed; he might not have been thinking very clearly, but even so, his judgement of what would have happened to Sulien had been right. He supposed he would not have undone it. But he could feel, lodged within him, a splinter of the aching space into which the man had vanished, which had been too close and huge already.

He’d been walking for hours, and had left Ostia a long way behind now. The black sky was deeper, wider, without its tired, blank light. Sometimes Varius whispered as he walked, without realising he was doing it, half-formed, frantic apologies and pleas on the edge of his breath. And then he said, loud enough to hear himself this time, ‘Not you too.’ And hearing it he stopped, as if he’d caught himself doing something ridiculous, and it was not speaking into thin air, but walking along for however many miles in the middle of the night, as if there were somewhere he could get to that would be any better than here. So he sat down and let his eyes rest on the sea for a moment, but then even the dark water was too difficult to look at and he shut his eyes and lay back on the sand.

His body hurt, as if in a kind of protest against itself, blood and breath resisting their own healthy, unreasonable flow – a not entirely unfamiliar feeling. He asked, ‘What can I do now?’ – aloud or not, he didn’t know, but a whimper either way.

Something
, answered a whisper in his mind. Varius let the word repeat, a little stronger this time, and the voice was Gemella’s. And that was just imagination, he knew, not a reunion, nor really a message. And ‘something’ was not much of a resolution, and not a comfort at all. Still, he lay there, quiet and listening, almost as if there were something to hear.

Of course he heard only the sea scuffing at the sand, and himself, getting his breath back. He was more tired than he’d realised. He didn’t want to stand up. But after a while, and almost without knowing why, he did so, feeling sand scattering inside his clothes. And soon, as he walked through the morning, he grew too thirsty and too worn out to think at all, which made the long walk easier.

Una lurched through dreams and couldn’t wake from them, encased in warm, unyielding layers of sleep. She dreamed, not of Marcus, but of a hairless old man cowering in the dark beneath the dome of a cave, clutching her hand to his cracked brown scalp, pleading, ‘Comfort me, comfort me.’ Una struggled impotently to free herself, panting with terror, for she could not bear to hear him and her hand was trapped in his as if they were nailed together. But as she finally managed the horrified sound that awakened her, she forgot the dream instantly, and she knew the cry scraping out of her wasn’t for a nightmare but for Marcus, Marcus lying there with nothing moving behind his smashed ribs and his dried blood still all over her.

Almost before her eyes were open she had backed up against the headboard of the strange bed, clinging to it and screaming again in panic because she knew that she had been drugged, taken somewhere—

‘Shh, please, Una. Una! There are people here, they’ll hear you –
quiet
– quiet!’

Una let out another cry anyway, and then stopped, gasping, staring wildly at the terrible pale curtains, the sunlight on the wooden floor, at Sulien. He was kneeling beside her on the bed, hissing at her desperately, and his face was still crumpled with sleep and his hair was sticking up in ridiculous dandelion-like tufts. Una relaxed without realising it while her face settled into a disgusted scowl.

Sulien shuffled back from her and sat hunched on the far corner of the bed. Una swung her legs over the edge of the bed, facing away from
him, and began trying to deduce as much of what had happened with as little recourse to him as possible.

‘Had to get away,’ she concluded, in a low, grudging voice, trying to flatten any questioning note out of it.

Sulien confirmed quietly. ‘Yes.’

After a second’s silence, Una shrugged lopsidedly and muttered, ‘Oh well.’ It was not as though she had ever thought safety in Rome was guaranteed to last forever. But she heard Sulien make a little grunt – an incredulous, slightly pained sound – and she ignored it. She eyed the blue sky showing between the curtains, listened distrustfully to the sea and added, ‘West coast.’

Sulien sighed. ‘Lavinium.’

Una frowned, beginning to work out how he would have found this place, considering Delir, and then flicked that line of thought away, irritably – they were here now, it didn’t matter. She said heavily, ‘Salvius doesn’t have any reason to go after us. Drusus is Emperor.’

‘I don’t know how . . .’ began Sulien, almost apologetically.

Una’s shoulders rolled in a defeated slump. She looked down at her clothes and then contracted, as if shrinking from within them. She sank quietly back down onto the bed and curled on her side, pressing her face against the musty blanket. She whispered, ‘Everything we did . . .’

Sulien, very hesitantly, laid his hand over hers and Una’s one visible eye looked up at him blankly, as if bemused as to what he was doing. .

‘I have to get this off,’ she said in the same little voice, without moving.

Sulien nodded and stood up, looking for something to do. He started to talk, busily: ‘I’ve got some of your clothes; I think they’ll do for now. The water’s cold, but there’s a stove, I’ll—’

‘I can see there’s a stove,’ snapped Una, suddenly sitting up, then drooping again at once. ‘Just go outside.’

Sulien trailed a pale, doleful look back at her, and Una twitched in exasperation. Left alone, she sat for a moment longer, motionless on the edge of the bed, tensing like an athlete before a race. Yes, she could heat some water; there would be some kind of bowl or tub somewhere. But when she stood up she began yanking off her clothes at once, violently pulling open buttons and clasps, teeth clenched. A set of keys and the plastic wallet containing her identity papers skidded across the floor. The blood had soaked through to her underwear, to her
skin
: dark, mottled patches were flaking away. She couldn’t touch it; she couldn’t watch it turn liquid again on her skin, fall in drops on the floor to be wiped away. Una sobbed tearlessly, elbowing out of the last
loop of fabric and dropping into a crouch beside the heap of clothes, fists pressed against her face.

The morning was perversely beautiful, after the wet dinginess of the day before. There were still only a few people out on the beach. Sulien sat on the sand, unsettled by the warmth and the sparks of light on the sea, as wrong as the flush and glitter of fever. The sky was a brash, swaggering blue, and his flesh felt heavy and constrictive underneath it, like badly chosen clothes. He wondered where Varius was, and regretted that he had not come back; he wished someone older were there. The door of the hut banged open behind him and Una strode out, wearing one of his tunics which barely covered the rusty stains on her bare throat and legs. She marched past him without a look, down the beach, into the sea. Sulien started up nervously, dithering on the waterline as Una kept going – stamping forwards as if to settle an argument with someone waiting for her there in the water, a long way out.

She wanted a cold shock, to be suddenly out of her depth, but the water was warm and shallow, nothing like the Thames. While it was still barely up to her waist, Una threw herself forward impatiently and began to swim. She carved fiercely through the water, as fast as she could, trying to outpace what was floating off her skin. But her feet still trailed on the bottom when she put them down; she would have to go a long way further to reach deep water, out along the white trail of flaking light towards the horizon. She could feel the energy, coiled ready in her muscles. She ducked below the bright surface, arms wrapped round herself.
Oh, where are you?
she whispered into the water, and waited there, letting the pressure build in her head and chest towards a choice that she didn’t really have.