Savage City (22 page)

Una moved between them as two of the others pulled Batu back.

He gasped, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’

‘What’s happened?’ said Una. She had one arm outstretched, so that her fingertips were level with, but not touching, the older man’s chest, marking out the distance. He was perhaps only in his late thirties, despite the long creases in his face and his greying bristly hair. The family from the house next door to the taverna had wandered over now, and with them two other men who might have been the crease-faced one’s brothers; they had drawn up beside him, glancing between themselves, unsure what to do, even a little embarrassed, but ready for trouble.

‘You mind your own business, love,’ spat the first man viciously. But he didn’t move closer yet, or knock her hand aside.

‘Same as here,’ said the slave woman, meeting Una’s eyes warily. ‘The windows broke. There’s no heat. There’s nothing . . . no one’s come.’

‘They’re escaping and they’re robbing people’s houses,’ the man exclaimed shrilly. ‘I bet they’re loving this! I bet they were cheering those fucking things on last night! That one, anyway,’ he added, and made another lunge, this time towards the boy who looked a little Nionian, who’d been lurking with eyes lowered at the back of the group. His brothers moved with him, and the whole knot of people started shifting, Una squeezed in the middle of it, with the boy behind her, shouting, ‘Stop!’

The young woman who’d sheltered with them the night before was dancing back and forth at the back of the group calling out, ‘Don’t hurt her – careful! Careful, you’re going to hurt her!’, sounding anxious, yet self-conscious, as if she couldn’t decide how serious this really was.

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ Una repeated, her voice descending gradually from a shout to a rhythmic whisper, keeping her eyes on the crease-faced
man’s. ‘Come on, stop. Those bombs did enough damage. Leave it at that.’

‘Yeah,
his
pals!’ cried the man, bitterly, flinging a fist at the sky and pressing towards the boy again, but with less momentum this time.

Batu mumbled, ‘Leave him alone.’

‘He’s a slave. He’s already lost. He’s already been punished,’ said Una, louder. ‘No one’s staying out in this cold. Not them or anyone.’

‘Factory owners should sort them out,’ said one of the other men, half-heartedly.

‘Whoever runs this town should have got the power running and fixed the windows; they should have set up somewhere for people to stay. But they haven’t, have they? So we have to do something.’

Most of the remaining inhabitants of the street seemed to have gathered now, around twenty people. Vituriga was staring at Una, frowning. This was certainly very unlike the diffident, ingenuous girl she’d been acting for the past few days. She cursed inwardly, wishing someone else was doing this, but it was too late to go back. She called out, ‘Who else doesn’t have a place to stay?’

The town’s grimy baths hadn’t opened that day. When they found the man who ran them he was reluctant to unlock the doors at first, and even more reluctant to let them light the furnace, but these obstacles seemed almost too minor to trouble with by then, and Una marched over them with irritated ease. They dragged in blankets and mattresses; though the place was small for a public bath-house, still it had space enough to house twice as many people. The three main chambers were below ground, and the stained walls were thick. Una had first noticed the place when driving around the town harvesting details with which to bolster the story of her imaginary grandfather, finding the school he might have gone to, the boarded-up temple where he might have prayed. She had thought of going there to kill time and escape the gnawing cold; she had not done so partly from the usual fear of being recognised, but also from a dumb dread of physical comfort.

‘You’re not really going to stay there with all of them?’ asked Vituriga, who’d stubbornly followed Una.

‘Oh, well, it isn’t just the slaves; Mada and Leimeie and her little girls from up the street are going to be there as well. And I’m too tired to go looking for anywhere else now,’ said Una, truthfully, in a strained version of the sweet voice she usually assumed for the landlady, hearing how sharp and wrong it sounded.

Inside, she tried to stay out of the arguments about food and who, if anyone, should provide it for the slaves. No one would die of starvation
overnight, and she knew she must try to repair her camouflage, encourage them to start to forget about her. Even so, some of them obviously expected that she would at least propose something, and she found herself suggesting wearily, ‘Just buy as much as we all need and claim anything back from the factory owners.’

The hypocaust warmed the chambers slowly. The slaves crouched or lay exhausted in the caldarium, their bodies pressed in a kind of bitter ecstasy to the heated floor. Una’s mind caught on a spike of memory: the tropical greenhouse in Gaul, and how grateful they’d been for the warmth then. And Marcus, by the pool of waterlilies, fumblingly asking her if she thought he would ever go mad.

The foreign-looking boy sat on the floor in a niche in the tepidarium, head down, and spoke to no one. Una was sometimes conscious of words that coursed through and came apart in his mind, though she didn’t understand them. His whole self was concentrated in a single, shamed wish not to be noticed. Nevertheless she watched him from across the room for a while, then crouched closer to him and whispered, ‘Are you from Tokogane?’

‘He doesn’t speak much Latin,’ said Batu. ‘At least, he doesn’t speak much at all.’

But the boy had understood, eyelids lifting quickly for a distrustful glance at her, lowering again at once.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Una said to him under her breath, feeling the scorch of stale adrenalin, seeing the street outside the Colosseum again, and herself running with blood in her hair, not fast enough.

Later she lay close to the wall, in the vestibule of the tepidarium, with the other women, warmer than she’d been for weeks. But she dreamed of the Rha at night, and it was not freezing, but melting, and she and Sulien had to cross it anyway. First she was staggering thigh-deep through wet, grainy ice-slush, and Sulien was somewhere behind her in the dark, following close, though out of sight and silent. She thought she could feel the acid bite of the cold, and she knew it would kill them both, knew it made no sense for them to have held out this long. The water burnt on her flesh, and then down her throat – for now they were, impossibly, swimming, and Sulien was thrashing forward, tugging her through the channels of black water, between the slabs of ice.

She meant to slip away as fast as possible in the morning, before anyone could renew interest in her, or ask to see her identity papers. But when she woke a bewildered team of quaestor’s contractors and a pair of vigiles had already arrived, trying to account for the missing slaves and the residents of the bombed-out street.

‘So who organised all this?’ asked one of them, brusquely, and the mother of the two little girls pointed at Una proudly and said, ‘
She
did.’

When the wind let fall a single, stray floating bomb into Sacaeum it was broad daylight, and Sulien was in the back room of the little bar with the woman who ran the place, her back against the wall beside a rack of crates and her legs around his waist.

She must have been ten years older than him, more, even, and it hadn’t occurred to him, at first, to find her attractive. The weather had already scuffed hard at her pale, thin skin, and left a pattern of folds around her eyes. Her lips were narrow and dry, with a disappointed droop to them, and they never quite closed over long front teeth. He’d gone back to the bar to eat; there had been only one other customer, who left before Sulien’s food arrived. When he’d first noticed how the woman kept looking at him, he was afraid it was because she had recognised his face – she’d stared at him pretty hard the first time he’d been there, too – and he bent his head over his meal, wondering what on earth he should do. Even when she stared at him meaningfully and smiled – a sly tug of her long lips which changed the droop into something languid and expressive – he still wasn’t certain he’d understood her, and was even a little embarrassed. But as she reached for his plate she trailed a hand along his arm and remarked, ‘You’re very handsome, aren’t you? I’m sure you know it.’

And she grinned. He supposed she was too bored in this cold, ugly town to bother with shyness, or to care about the risk. And he was bored too, with nothing to do but wait for the river to freeze. More, it was as if, just by touching him, she’d pulled open a seam of desperation trapped under his skin for all these months. He looked up at her. Her hair was scraped back in a rough, lustreless bun, but wisps of it fell in sweet spirals around her brown, lemon-shaped eyes, and he noticed the delicacy of her long neck, the wide sweep of her cheekbones.

Oh well, he thought, and pulled her into his lap to kiss her.

‘Have you got a husband’s going to walk in on us?’ he asked, hot against her cheek. ‘Because I really don’t need any more trouble.’

She laughed roughly and said, ‘He’s in Sarmatia.’ And Sulien tried to feel at least a nominal twinge of guilt as he let her draw him through the door behind the counter before deciding there was only so much self-denial that could be expected of him at present.

She didn’t ask him his name, so he didn’t have to give her his false one, and she kept saying, ‘You’re good, you’re lovely,’ as if she knew him, and had no doubt at all it was true.

Sulien clutched her gratefully, gasping with something that was more like pain than anything. He said nothing himself.

The bomb landed a few streets away just as he cried out against her breast. The bottles rattled and both of them yelped, and then after blinking at each other for a second, dissolved into confused and frightened laughter.

Sulien said, ‘Well, that’s never happened before.’

‘Fucking Nionians,’ she said, hopping neatly to the ground.

Sulien felt the chill settling back into his flesh. He started buttoning his clothes. ‘I’ll go and look.’

‘You can’t go outside! There could be more of them.’

Sulien lingered, obligingly, and they waited and listened in a quiet that quickly became awkward, and Sulien began to remember the time he’d spent waiting in his rooms in Rome when the voice on the longvision had told him to, how much faster he should have moved then.

The woman shrugged, restless too. ‘Well, maybe there’s no harm in having a look. At least they come down slowly, don’t they?’

She straightened the collar of his coat by the door. ‘You be careful.’

There was nothing in the sky now but snow, pushed slantwise by the wind as it fell into the black, reeking smoke disgorging along the street. The bomb had drifted down between the houses, landing on the roof of a parked van. What was left of it was still burning, a dirty red light muffled in the smoke.

Someone shouted, uncertainly, ‘Is anyone hurt?’

There was no answer. At first it seemed that no one had even been there to see the bomb fall. There were no shops or businesses on the street, just dark, narrow houses, some of which were boarded up. Sulien wasn’t sure at first who had shouted, then he saw a few people, half-hidden by the smoke, emerging cautiously from a side-treet, either returning after scattering from the balloon’s path or, like him, compelled to see what had happened.

All the windows of the nearby houses and cars were broken, and an old trirota had been crumpled and knocked against a wall. But it was strangely quiet; no alarms had sounded, no one was screaming.

A door opened, quite close to Sulien, and a woman tottered out and sat down at the roadside. Sulien bent down beside her, because anyone would have. She had broken a wrist, falling, and was scattered with little cuts from flying glass. She was pale, and giddy with shock. Nothing too bad, nothing to kill her. ‘There, you’re all right,’ crooned Sulien, warm with relief and guilt. ‘Was there anyone else inside?’

She shook her head and asked indistinctly, ‘Are the vigiles coming?’

Sulien said, ‘Yes, they’re coming,’ and looked around urgently for someone else to take over before they appeared.

Thankfully a man Sulien thought he recognised from the bar came running up to them, asking, ‘Is she all right?’ and Sulien said, ‘You wait with her, I’m going to see if anyone else is hurt,’ before retreating with a hasty pat of the woman’s hand.

Another woman was calling in through a broken window, ‘Sarata, Sarata, are you in there?’ Sulien glanced at her uneasily as he went on down the street. It’s not so bad, he thought; nothing irreparable. He coughed as the wind flung a loop of rank smoke around him, and began to shiver again. He hunched over against a sudden gust of snow so fierce that for the next few steps he couldn’t see anything clearly but his boots, scraping through the grit and ice, but something was moving a little way ahead, and as the wind dropped again, Sulien looked up.

A boy, about eight years old, was leaning against the wall, silently pulling himself along one-handed. He stopped moving, and Sulien sprang forward, into a slithering run across the icy ground to catch the boy as he buckled.

Of course, this was why he had come. Of course he was needed. He must have tricked himself out of knowing it.

The boy let out a thin, outraged, hacking cry, like a baby’s.

Sulien repeated softly, ‘You’re all right, you’re all right,’ although this time it wasn’t true. He silently cursed to the same rhythm, and despite everything he knew he felt a stab of undiscriminating rage at the Nionians. Some part of the van had been blown in through the window and had hit the boy in the back, knocking him to the ground and smashing the shoulder blade, dragging the bone away from its ties, the broken edges tearing at the veins and arteries beneath.