Savage City (29 page)

Una glanced up at her again. ‘No one’s touched me since then. Thank you.’

‘You should not have to thank anyone,’ said Noriko.

Una fidgeted with the cast again and laughed. ‘Why do you think they put this thing on me? It’s ridiculous!’

‘I wish—’ began Noriko, and stopped herself, conscious that she did not want the stolid wardress to hear her wishes, which were in any case self-evident and would not help.

‘How are you?’ asked Una quietly.

‘Oh—!’ Noriko parted her hands a little, at the strangeness of being asked by someone in Una’s physical state, and the difficulty of answering. ‘He wants to marry me.’

Una did not speak, did not repeat the warning she had given Noriko a year and a half before, but they looked at each other, and Una extended her better hand a little across the table. Noriko slid her own forward to meet it, an overlap rather than a grip.

‘One day people will come to their senses,’ said Noriko, hearing it come out shriller and more desperate than she had meant.

Una nodded, slowly, without any certainty, but accepting the sentiment. She asked, ‘They haven’t found my brother, have they?’

Noriko shook her head, and Una smiled again. She looked almost relaxed, almost peaceful, thought Noriko, though neither of those words could be the right one.

‘Listen,’ said Noriko, ‘Marcus had something – a hat, made of blue wool. You gave it to him, I think?’

Una tensed. ‘He told you that?’

‘No. I do not think he meant me to see it. But I did see it. And it was not like anything else he had. It did not look like something a prince would own. But I could tell it was important. And I could tell . . .’ Una
would not like to think about Noriko’s life with Marcus, she thought, and hurried past the memory of it. ‘It is in the coffin with him.’

No tears came into Una’s eyes, but they went wide, and she trembled. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

‘Time’s nearly up,’ announced the wardress at the door. ‘One more minute.’

‘Oh, this is unbearable,’ Noriko exclaimed in impulsive Nionian, which made the woman’s expression of aggrieved distaste deepen. She amended in Latin, ‘No, a little longer – please.’ She realised the woman thought she had said something obscene, and wished she had.

Una leaned forward. ‘Can you come again?’

‘I do not know. I doubt it. I will try.’

Una’s eyes slid towards the wardress and back, and Noriko knew there was something she wanted to say without letting the woman understand.

‘I don’t want it to be in the arena,’ she remarked, her voice almost offhand, though now there was that sharpness and tension in her face that Noriko remembered; it had scarcely shown before.

As she felt herself grow cold, Noriko tried to convince herself she had briefly fumbled the Latin, had not been concentrating hard enough. She said, ‘What?’

‘It’s not the dogs,’ said Una, ‘or whatever other way they’ll do it – well, of course it is that too. But all those people watching . . . I hate thinking about it.’

‘The dogs?’ repeated Noriko stupidly.

‘If I could be alone,’ said Una, in a low voice, ‘if there was no one there, it would be easier.’ She’d raised her hands, furtively, meaningfully, towards her throat.

And Noriko understood what she was being asked for: a drug, a blade, if she could find any way of providing it.

‘That’s it,’ said the woman curtly. ‘She’ll go back to her cell now.’

‘I will try to come back,’ promised Noriko unsteadily.

The wardress had opened the door and guards began crowding into the room.

Noriko wanted to defy them all somehow, and as she stood up she bowed her head and said formally, ‘Lady Noviana.’

Una grinned. ‘I think you can call me Una now.’

Noriko let them lead her to the doorway; stopped there. ‘I hope you will meet him in a better life,’ she said.

Cleomenes had a good enough reason for being in the prison; he’d been spinning out an interview with a gangster he’d put away last year.
Now he was loitering in the hall through which he thought the Princess would leave, making conversation with a warder and hoping no one would wonder why he didn’t go away.

Between the fuss over the Imperial wedding the year before and the Roman boys dying out on the Promethean Sea he felt a mild thrill despite himself when he saw her coming, at once starstruck and slightly defensive. He found himself a little disappointed she was wearing such unexotic Roman clothes and had all that hair piled up in a large dark knot on the back of her head, though he could see the good sense in it from her perspective.

‘My Lady,’ he said, showing his papers, ‘Commander Diodorus Cleomenes. Could I have a word?’

The Princess already looked strained and besieged among her guards. Now she froze and looked up at Cleomenes with the kind of expression he was more used to seeing on cornered shoplifters.

‘It’s all right, boys, I won’t be a minute,’ Cleomenes said to the Praetorians. He was afraid to think what might happen if this got back to his superiors, but he was hoping there was no reason these men should think to mention it to anyone. He was just a senior member of the vigiles as far they were concerned.

The Princess followed him reluctantly into an ante-room and stood looking down at her clasped hands.

‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘What did she say?’

‘I saw her so briefly,’ she replied politely, looking away.

‘Have they hurt her much?’

‘She is fortunate to receive Roman justice,’ avowed Noriko virtuously, though with what must have been a restrained lash of irony.

‘Madam, we’ve only got a few minutes. There’s plainly something you’re worried about telling me. Listen’ – he looked around and lowered his voice to a hiss – ‘you can trust me. Didn’t your husband ever tell you what happened back in ’57? When they had him locked up in the Sanctuary at Tivoli? I was there. So was she.’

‘How interesting,’ said Noriko, through teeth that were clenched tight with evident panic.

Cleomenes lost patience. ‘Damn it, woman, it’s not a trick! I’m not trying to trap you! I’m taking a huge risk myself in talking to you. Will you pull yourself together and talk to me?’

Noriko’s mouth dropped slightly open. She remarked, ‘You cannot speak to me like that,’ and then she began to laugh in a brittle, desperate way that made Cleomenes fear she’d burst into tears next.

‘I can’t go near her myself,’ he said more gently. ‘All I’m asking is how she is.’

To his relief Noriko controlled herself. ‘You are concerned for her?’

‘Her and others. Yes.’

Sulien knew how he needed to look, but he couldn’t walk into an expensive shop dressed in travelling clothes he hadn’t changed in three days and try to kit himself out like a nobleman. He would have to heave his way up through the classes in stages, a self-made man’s career compressed into a single afternoon. But trying to rehearse it in thought made him feel cold and faint as if with vertigo—

No, no, just start doing it, he told himself, start doing it now.

The market reminded him painfully of the one in Tolosa where they had met Marcus, and the little stall with green curtains behind which he and Una had been almost safe. Sulien shook away the association and went to work. First, he bought a secondhand set of plain, formal clothes, as good as he could find in the quarter of an hour he had allowed himself. He was half-convinced that even the contrast between the new clothes and those he was wearing would be striking and suspicious – worse, he felt as if desperation was scrawled all over him. He was taken aback when a figure at the edge of his vision turned out to be himself in a mirror, looking quite ordinary and undramatic – very pale, eyes hollow and lips tight, if you looked closely at them – but still just himself, just a man in a city, not some misshapen creature in human clothes roaming about loose. No one had demanded he explain himself – why should they?

He went on to the city baths. For the last few days he’d made do with bottles of water and packs of wipes to make himself look passably normal, but he needed to be cleaner than that now, and he needed a place to change. Hurried as his bath was, his body basked gratefully in the heat, without his permission. This didn’t feel like an acceptable use of time, even though it was necessary, even though he knew he couldn’t leave for Persia before tomorrow.

She’s not dead, and they’re not going to kill her today, he thought. Anything else can be fixed, yes, it can. But these promises to himself made his heart race and trip instead of calming him, and he tried to stop making them.

He walked out in the faintly musty new clothes with his hair combed neatly back from his forehead and tried to carry himself differently, to keep his head up. He started towards the better clothes shops up in the centre—

No, wait, not that yet. By the time he reached them he’d already need to seem like a rich man on some long business trip, and the costume he needed for that went beyond clothes. He’d seen a place in
the market selling reasonably impressive luggage sets, but – this was like some stupid logic puzzle that had to be completed in the right order – they’d have to have something in them so they wouldn’t feel empty when handled.

He found a set of encyclopedias in a bookshop a few streets away from the market. ‘Oh, this is just what I’m looking for,’ he volunteered to an indifferent assistant, stuttering a little. ‘My— My father collects this kind of thing.’ Was that plausible? Were they obviously not what a collector would want? ‘Getting them around is the only trouble . . . Do you think someone could help me carry them down to the market near the docks? I was going to need to buy some extra cases anyway.’

So he went back to the market, chose a pair of grandiose suitcases made of burgundy leather, almost too bulky for him to carry around himself even when empty, and loaded them with the books, padding the gaps with the clothes he’d been wearing before.

They were hiring out slave workers near the docks, extra hands for loading and unloading the cargo ships and fishing boats, for building jobs up in the town, and to fetch and carry for travellers like himself. They might all be nominally for sale, though no one looked to be buying; the dealers saw Sulien coming and visibly brightened. They gestured for the slaves slouching on the low stage to stand up straight while calling to him, ‘Need a porter, sir? Looking for a bodyguard while you’re in town? Sir, very good value assistance for you, sir!’

Most of the slaves were men, and Sulien’s age or older, with their skills and prices marked on signs hanging round their necks. But Sulien cringed at the sight of a couple of pitiful girls, fourteen at most, sitting hunched on the edge of the platform. I can’t, he thought as he approached, and remembered thinking the same thing sitting beside the fare-car driver, before he’d done . . . whatever he had done. Well then.

His mind wouldn’t stop keening to itself, but he strode up briskly and managed to put on a good show of studying the line of slaves. ‘Yes, I need a couple of decent porters for the afternoon,’ he said quietly to the nearest dealer, trying to make his voice sound firm and confident, vaguely surprised when it worked.

‘Well, take your pick; they’re all of them strong enough. How about this one? Very reliable.’

Sulien scanned the line again, and not just for the sake of realism. All the descriptions of him had mentioned his height. It might look less if he was one of a group of taller people, even if the others were slaves stooped under the weight of his book-filled cases.

*

‘Hope that’s not too heavy for you,’ he said as he walked away with the two men he’d picked. Like a fool, as if the kind of person he was trying to be would have worried.

One of the men looked mildly unnerved; the other grinned. Sulien was both baffled and helplessly grateful. ‘It won’t be that far,’ he added, despite scoffing despairingly at himself in his head.

‘Don’t you worry, sir, I’m used to it,’ said the man easily.

Sulien nodded and made himself stare straight ahead until the impulse to explain that he had been a slave himself and to apologise had more or less worn off.

He led his small entourage around the better shops selling readymade clothes – not that there was a great deal of choice here, nor that the clothes on offer were quite as well-made and fashionable as the increasingly fawning shop assistants seemed to think. Gradually, a garment at a time, he replaced almost everything he was wearing and let the assistants press expensive accessories on him – rings, and a silk neckcloth that cost almost as much as the rest of the outfit put together. Groomed and elegant now, his reflection seemed unconnected to him, like a figure painted on the glass.

The grandest guest house he could find was a large, ambitious building with marble floors in the wide entrance hall. It was not old, but it had a slightly morose air about it, and inside the paint was peeling and the air cold. Sulien affected a faint swagger as he approached the desk, the two slaves heaving his luggage and shopping behind him.

‘I need a room for tonight,’ he announced at the desk, wondering if there should have been some loftier, more obnoxious way of saying it.

‘Do you need quarters for your slaves as well?’ asked the clerk.

‘They’re just hired men. Had to leave my valet back in Dahae. Damned inconvenient. Food poisoning or something.’