Savage City (24 page)

She heard the bullets whisk around the car as it slipped and twisted, and they seemed merely annoying, not important. She hunched down, and hoped they would not hit the tyres. Down on the right, she saw Sulien fling himself forward a few yards and then turn back, shouting something that the wind whipped away. Then the car stuck on the ice again, and Una ground her teeth as she laboured to get it moving, and with a gush of cold air a bullet pierced the back window and bored into the seat beside her.

She couldn’t hear Sulien, but she could feel him as if he were still in the car with her, dragging at her, shouting ‘Come
on
, please, please—’

An explosion glowed on the ice, to the north, a brief roaring column of gold and white, and she felt the shock battering through the ice. Heavy drops of water began to rain down around the car, beating on the roof.

‘Get out!’ screamed Sulien hoarsely from the bank, churning the air in a frantic beckoning motion. ‘Run!’ Though he couldn’t see it from here, the ice must be rupturing, fissures racing to meet each other.

Another balloon was drifting over the river, and the vigiles had stopped firing and, like Sulien, were watching as it passed in sedate silence above the roof of the car and swept gently towards the western bank.

It touched its load to the ice, and it was almost unbearable when nothing happened. It bobbed like a toy. The wind dragged it along for a few yards, then scooped it up into the air again.

The car began to move, just sliding helplessly, jolted from its standstill by the echoing throb of the last blast. And though he thought, with complete clarity, ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ still Sulien tried to run back towards it.

The bomb sank to the ice again, and this time it erupted, a great spout of fire and water, and for a moment he saw Una’s face, looking straight at him, wild and inhuman in the fleeting light.

She wrenched at the car’s controls and the car accelerated to the right as behind her the ice splintered and gaped. The vigiles had fallen back from the tracts of black water opening in the heart of the river,
and Una hurled the listing car eastwards, towards the thicker ice near the edge of the Sarmatian bank; towards Sulien.

The car trundled quite slowly up onto the bank. Una got out, and stood there beside it, still.

Sulien pulled himself up the bank to her, shaking. Before he could speak, or touch her, she asked, quietly, ‘Can you drive for a while?’

This was a different province, and it might take a little time before the Sarmatian cohorts could react, but of course the Venedian vigiles must have alerted them, of course they were on their way. So Sulien just swallowed and nodded and swung into the driver’s seat and set off north. He took the smaller roads when he could find them, afraid of meeting the vigiles’ cars head-on.

All right, he thought, and his voice sounded shrill, even in his mind, so they know we’re in Sarmatia. It’s a big province; we’ll be out of it soon.

He’d been living like this long enough to know what he should try to do. There was a large town, Boudinium, about ten miles off; he would try and filter through the outskirts, blend into the east-bound traffic. He would aim to put two hundred miles behind them tonight, make it to Roxelania if he could. There they’d leave the car in a city car park and make the next leg by train, or cargo-tram, if they had to.

Una had sunk low in the seat beside him, her arms wrapped round herself, and sat with her head resting against the window, silent, shrunken.

They were not safe, even without the vigiles’ headlights right behind them, and he had no idea where –
if
– they could sleep tonight . . . but twenty miles from Boudinium, Sulien’s heart had stopped striking so hard and fast against his ribs, and he no longer had to fight the shaking.

For the first time since he’d taken over the controls, Una spoke. ‘Sulien.’ Her voice was like a little trail of dust.

Sulien looked over at her.

For a long while, Una said nothing more. He could see her lips slightly parted in the half-light, as if the words would neither come nor go away. At last she whispered, ‘I’ve been trying so hard, I swear . . .’

‘I know,’ he told her. ‘I know.’

‘I want to stop, so much.’

Sulien sucked his breath through his teeth. He had offered her that only a few days ago, but now . . .

‘And we can’t,’ she said softly. ‘We couldn’t, even without this, because they’d find us, one day. Because it would always be too hard.
And if we could stop, if
I
could, I feel like I’d just . . . end. Run out. Do you see? And you’re the only thing— You’re all I—’ The sentence seemed to jam on something, and she shook her head impatiently, as if to shift it free. ‘I want to see you all right. But I don’t know what we should do now. I don’t know how I can go on any further. Because . . . I don’t want to get there, not really.’ Her voice dropped again, almost to nothing. ‘Not at all.’

Sulien adjusted the controls of the car, very carefully, as if the danger were still one of speed and sliding wheels. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘today’s been terrible. I know that. But you don’t need to do a thing now. I will do more – I’ll do everything, I promise. And we
can
make it there. And when we do, I know it won’t undo— It can’t undo what’s happened. But it will be better than this. And you’ll be able to rest.’

He looked over at her, reached out to touch her shoulder, and saw the corner of her mouth twist up as if dragged by a wire.

‘I know how it sounds,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want it to get better.’

‘Una,’ began Sulien, baffled and frightened, fumbling to understand, ‘is it because it feels like it would be betraying Marcus, or – or forgetting him? Because you know he’d never want you to be so unhappy.’

Una made a small sound, a dry, longing break in it. ‘No, he wouldn’t ever want that. No, it’s because . . . because it’s . . .’ She closed her eyes, then opened them again, a little surprised at finding a way to explain. ‘In the north, where the sea’s so cold, there are fishermen who think that if they fall in, it’s better if they can’t swim. Because it’ll just drag it out – make it harder . . . when they might as well go down fast.’

Sulien thought of the terrible water they’d barely escaped, and her face, outlined in the fire as the car scythed across the ice. ‘Oh, Una,’ he said, squeezing her shoulder.

Una shifted a little closer to him, but her eyes were motionless and unfocused under low eyelids, so that he had to flinch from the memory of Marcus’ dead face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Sulien said gently, desperately, ‘We’ve come all this way . . .’

‘. . . all this way,’ agreed Una, a slow, limping echo from somewhere far off.

Later, Sulien found that the next three or four days had been wrung from his memory, leaving only watery tidemarks behind. He knew they had abandoned the car in Roxelania, that they must have travelled by cargo-trams or on freight-trains, while every public longvision they passed was shrilling in excitement at how two of the three outlaws were all but trapped; Rome was closing its teeth on them. He remembered shaving off his beard under a viaduct, and Una strapping a
cushion under her clothes again before they entered some soot-stained town.

But he couldn’t separate out one day from another, wasn’t even certain how many days it was – not that he wished to, or tried to remember. It was all fused together, and his mind slid seamlessly from Una, beside him in the car that night, to a freight depot in Iaxarteum, and the two of them running along beside the tracks.

Sulien had checked the place the previous night, watching the trains lumbering east. But it had to be daylight for this; it was too cold at night, when the air blazed icily around the speeding trains, even though it was not so cold here as it had been at the Rha. They no longer cared whether they were carried north or southwards now: if they found themselves up in Scythia, they could try and cross the Sinoan border and be done with it – Rome would need to apply some pressure before the Sinoan police would make any active effort to look for them, and they might be able to bribe their way on towards Annam.

When the vigiles found them, they were crouched among the tumbled crates and discarded reels on the embankment, waiting for an endlessly long line of rusting hopper-cars to pass by. On the other side, a goods-train was dawdling on the third set of tracks, the ladders and side doors of its square, upright cars practically inviting trespass. And it seemed in no hurry to move; it would be easy to board, safe.

The train of hoppers shrieked as it began to gather speed, then Una said, with almost nothing but exhaustion in her voice, ‘They’re here,’ and the next moment Sulien heard dogs barking.

They said nothing more as they rose and ran down the bank towards the tracks. Up close the hopper-train seemed so much faster. It was wrapped in a sheath of dirty, blasting air and the tracks howled under the deafening weight of it. Una and Sulien, pelting along the gravel beside it, couldn’t hear a thing the vigiles were shouting behind them, even if it would have made any difference. Sulien had a hand wrapped round Una’s arm and was trying to drag her with him because he was faster and could reach higher, and the possible handholds were already rushing by almost too fast even for him. It had to be now,
now
, no time to judge it better.

He reached for the frame at the back of a car, grasped Una to him at the same moment and leapt.

One foot trailed in space as he clutched at the frame, trying to swing both his own weight and hers inwards while the train seemed to try to shake them off its flanks like a huge animal. He could feel Una, straining to hold on, felt her weight swing to the side as she managed to close a hand on the rail. But her feet just scraped on the ledge at the
hopper’s base, and he couldn’t get a better hold on her, couldn’t shift the arm he already had round her without letting go, couldn’t free his other hand—

He knew she’d tried, he knew she hadn’t let herself fall.

He felt her arms, rigid with effort, and her cold fingers, gripping the strap of his backpack, but her feet swept off the ledge and as he fought, shouting, against the force surging outside the train, he saw her face.

And she smiled at him, a very small, wry twitch of the mouth, resigned and sorry and unbearable, as the flying air plucked her away and the train snatched him onwards, under the bridge into a hurtling current of blackness and noise.

Una landed face-down in the gravel beside the tracks. Her body rang with the impact, but at a distance, the pain lost somewhere before it reached her, and she did not bother assessing how badly she was hurt. She lifted her head a little to watch the train whip past before letting it drop back onto the grit, shutting her eyes and breathing the scent of hot metal and tar and dust. Then she turned clumsily onto her back. The ground was solid and still beneath her, and as the train’s violent wake subsided, the air cleared and cooled a little and a breeze from the steppe brushed soundlessly over the tracks. She could hear the dogs baying in excitement, very close now, and the men crunching over the stones. The sky was a faded blue. Una lay and breathed slowly, staring at it.

The wet slopes of the embankment shone dark amber in the lamplight, and the Tiber sparked in the rain. Varius had built a tiny fire on the path that ran along the river, a tiny red glow in the darkness below the arches of the Cestian Bridge. This wasn’t territory he could expect to have to himself for long – he could see a little encampment of people crouched around a similar fire on the opposite bank – but for now it felt safe to him, a room closed off in walls of running water.

He was surprised Delir was such a small man, scarcely taller than his own daughter, who walked beside him, next to Ziye. And Delir looked weak, and sick, dragging his whole self along like a crippled limb. Varius tried to dampen down pity without extinguishing it all together, as if Delir were one of the badly injured people he had seen at the slave-clinic. He needed to be able to work.

Delir said, ‘You worked for Leo once. You sent Marcus to me. I am so sorry I didn’t protect him better.’

From what Lal and Ziye had said, Varius had half-expected something like this, but he still didn’t like to hear it, and didn’t know quite how to reply. A little stiffly, he reached for Delir’s hand. ‘You protected him at the time,’ he muttered.

‘I understand what you want to do,’ Delir said, ‘and I can’t blame you for it. But what right have I to take any part? When if I had not been so – so
arrogant
– to think I knew better than two empires what to do with someone who—’

Varius felt the name skirted round, excised.

Lal burst out, ‘You don’t
know
what would have happened. He wouldn’t have let the vigiles catch him; he’d only have done it sooner if you hadn’t found him.’ There were tears in her eyes; Varius thought this was not the first time she had said this. She turned a beseeching look at Varius that seemed to beg him to make Delir believe it.

Delir was murmuring, ‘I could have tricked him, perhaps, given him
to the vigiles. I could even have . . .’ He swallowed. ‘He would have been executed if they had found him. I couldn’t bear to think of how it might be done. But his life was in my hands on that island. I didn’t want him to suffer – I could have made sure he didn’t.’