Savage City (37 page)

Una had started crying at last. ‘Sulien – the one thing I could say I’d done – back in London – I saved you.’

‘Yes,’ said Sulien, ‘you did. So can’t you see why I can’t go?’

Una drew her knees up close to her body, sobbing, a despairing huddle in his arms.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, tears filling his own eyes again.

She grew a little quieter, her face buried against his chest. They could hear the noise of vigile trirotas and cars screaming closer, and pounding feet on the cobbles outside. Unwillingly, Sulien drew the gun again and looked down at it, his other hand tightening hard on Una’s shoulder. ‘I should— I suppose I have to—’

‘And then yourself?’ asked Una, in a wrecked, accusing voice.

He nodded. It wasn’t quite so hard to contemplate now.

But perhaps even now he couldn’t really believe he would do it, for his hand was so heavy and sluggish, dragging the muzzle up through the resistant air towards her head, and Una just wept and shuddered against him, without urging him to hurry.

And even knowing what it would mean for them both, he was relieved when the vigiles burst in through the doors and struck the gun out of his hand before he could fire.

Varius sat with a pen and calculator in a corner of a packed cookhouse, pretending to study the files he’d spread on the table, filling columns with imaginary figures over an untouched plate of fritters. He had stuffed the vigile jacket and cap into a plastic bag and flung it into a skip, picked up the briefcase he’d hidden inside it. He’d finished changing his clothes in the bathroom of the cookhouse – it wouldn’t be very strange, even if anyone noticed; he could have been getting ready for a meeting or an interview. He was longing to move, to know what had happened – but the story wouldn’t have broken yet, and he had to be careful hanging around longvisions.

He set out into the city, changing direction often. He took a fare car towards West Aventine Railway Station and went inside, then walked out through another set of doors heading north, towards the centre. The air felt strange on his clean, shaved jaw and scalp; the crowd felt different as it flowed around him. He realised that though he had a false name and forged papers ready to produce if need be, this was the first time in months he had not been in any definite disguise. The vigile uniform and the tramp’s haze of alcohol and dirt had both carried a story, and a warning. These bland, inexpressive business clothes said almost nothing; they were not unlike what he might have worn to work before any of this had happened. Someone tried to sell him something as he passed the Raudusculan Gate. It had been so long since that had happened that it shocked him, to have a stranger calling out, ‘How about you, sir – high-quality watches!’ It felt unnerving to be so unguarded, to have to trust that this was not what the vigiles would expect of him, and yet it made him carry himself differently, his head up, almost feeling as if he were just another professional hurrying briskly through an ordinary working day.

Every time he came anywhere near a public longvision, of course he had to stop and look. Advertisements, dancers, a preview of a show. Varius forced himself to stride on, grimacing – what was taking so long? Perhaps it had worked, but they were going to cover it up – perhaps they didn’t want to admit they’d lost her. Then how would
they account for her absence at the Colosseum? He began to think of possible answers, and tried to stop himself, superstitiously afraid of having any expectations at all. He had honed the plan into plausibility, all the while trying not to place any inward bet on the outcome. He had been afraid of pitching his hopes dangerously low, rather than too high, even so, when they were actually in the street, watching the money tumble down, he couldn’t help but see it was working. The vigiles hadn’t recognised or challenged any of them; Sulien was in the driver’s seat of the van – they were almost there.

Once he heard sirens sweeping past, but he didn’t see the cars. He went south at last, to Remoria Station. Delir and Ziye had planned this stage, scattering after the attempt was made. They had agreed they must keep apart for the first few days at least; they would meet later, outside Naples. Varius already had his ticket in his pocket. He had no connections there, and it was almost as teeming with people of every colour and from every province of the Empire as Rome itself; he should not stand out.

Then he looked up at the silent longvision screen above the station concourse and saw the news. For a moment it was as if there was a dam in his mind against which the words strained, as he tried to force them to mean something else.

At first it said only that an attempt to rescue Una had been thwarted, and he tried to hope that they were already dead, that they’d both been shot, but he couldn’t; he didn’t mean it.

They were both in the Colosseum cells. He remembered standing in the terraces with Lal and Ziye, months before, looking across the arena towards the place where Marcus had died. He saw Una’s face at the moment she’d condemned herself to die in the same place and felt a helpless flash of anger with her.

What had it been? At what point after Sulien turned the van down the side-street had they failed, and was it something he might have seen and solved? He should never have agreed to help Sulien; he and Cleomenes should quietly have done whatever was necessary to get a dose of some fast-acting poison to Una. It would have been bearable to think of her dying like that, bearable at least compared to this. And Sulien would have lived. At least one of them should – it was too much that the gale that had started blowing with Leo’s and Clodia’s deaths and had swept off Gemella and Marcus should have both of them too.

He looked away from the screen; he mustn’t be noticed staring at it. He realised he was shaking, and gripping the handle of his case with
convulsive force. He did not know how much might have shown on his face. He began to move.

He was supposed to go to Naples whatever happened, once his part was done. But he realised that even though he had contemplated this, as the worst that could happen, he hadn’t really included it as a possibility in his plans. At least, he could not think he had truly conceived of riding out of Rome, knowingly leaving them to the dogs. In any case, he was already out of the station and hurrying down the steps.

He couldn’t think of anything he could do in so little time. Was he planning only to be there to watch?

The thought almost stopped him in midstep, winded. But he supposed he would do that, if nothing else: be present, bear witness.

He went straight to the centre and took a room in a large, glossy businessmen’s
mansio
overlooking the Colosseum.

Makaria must have heard the volucer coming in low over the Aegean, must have known she could be the only possible reason for its approach, but she did not come to meet it. When Drusus landed in the yard behind her villa on the highest peak of the island, the only sign of life was a brood of hens, who flapped away in clumsy panic into the herb garden as the aircraft descended. A couple of bony goats bounded past too. Drusus had only visited his cousin on Siphnos once before, but he did not remember there being so much livestock so close to the house – which looked run down, greying and flaking in the bright winter sun. No slaves appeared from inside, but as they approached through the garden the leader of the heavy escort of Praetorian minders he had set around Makaria came around the corner of the house and told him everyone was down in the big olive grove in the valley.

‘But Lady Novia is accompanied, I hope?’ said Drusus rather sharply.

‘Yes, of course, your Majesty.’

Drusus could have waited in the house while they fetched her, but he had been tense and restless enough even before being shut aboard the volucer and it was some relief to be on the move. Besides, he was curious to see how the restrictions he’d placed on Makaria were working. From the air he had seen that the streets of the few tiny villages on Siphnos looked empty, stunned into submission, and there were scarcely any boats pulled up on the beaches or moored in the little harbour. He was pleased to find as they drove across the island in one of the Praetorian cars that the houses were indeed dark and shuttered, the shops boarded up. But there were vigiles everywhere, saluting him as he passed along otherwise deserted roads.

It struck him with vague wistfulness that this little island was perhaps the safest place in the world he could be, with hardly anyone left to threaten him, and all these guards to protect him. The next moment he remembered Salvius, dead on the staircase of the palace,
and the feeling changed. Who would take his side against all these armed men if they should turn on him?

A quiver wormed its way across his shoulders, and he tried to shake it off. This sense of siege was what he wanted Makaria to feel; he had no business feeling it himself, no matter what that deranged bitch of a girl had said on the longvision.

‘How many people are left here now?’ he asked the Praetorian driving the car, as they stopped at the edge of the grove.

‘Only about four hundred,’ the man said cheerfully.

There had been almost two thousand. The islanders, Makaria of course excepted, had full freedom to leave, but they had to apply for special permission to return, which would almost never be granted. A single boat came once a month with supplies from the mainland, just barely enough to keep two small grocery stores on either side of the island intermittently in stock.

But it was halfway through olive-harvesting season, and it seemed a good quarter of the remaining population had emptied into the island’s largest grove armed with poles, ladders and tarpaulins. A couple of his guards went off searching for Makaria – and even here Drusus was glad to see there were both Praetorians and vigiles standing between the trees, watching the villagers – who looked harassed and strained – and following Makaria, who was trundling over the rough ground on a battered farm-buggy, the carrier box at the back already laden with large tubs of olives.

‘No, no,’ she cried to a boy of about twelve who was poking half-heartedly at the branches of a tree on the edge of the field. ‘
Hit
it. Get the pole in there and strike downwards. Like this!’ And she jumped down from the buggy, seized the stick from him and began determinedly thrashing at the tree, expertly loosening a black rain of olives onto the canvas spread below.

‘I see you’re keeping busy,’ said Drusus.

Makaria stiffened. She handed the stick to one of the lurking Praetorians rather than back to the boy, barking, ‘You’re twice his size, you do something useful for a change.’ She turned, brushing down faded overalls, and Drusus marvelled anew that she could be the daughter of an Emperor. And yet she looked like him, even now, lean and weathered as she was, her unkempt hair and greenish eyes almost exactly the same shade as his.

She said curtly, ‘What do you want, Drusus?’

The nearest harvesters were climbing down from the trees and laying down their sticks as they noticed Drusus, glancing uncertainly from him to Makaria, whispering among themselves, unsure what was
expected of them. Some of them discreetly melted away into the trees. It was possible that many were not even sure who he was; they would barely have seen him on the longvision, for he had had the island’s cables cut as soon as Makaria arrived there, and no newssheets came in on the monthly boat. He had had the radio frequencies altered too, jamming broadcasts to Siphnos from across the Aegean.

‘First of all, I want you to remember your position,’ answered Drusus, ‘and mine.’ He gestured his guards towards her. The men seized her and pushed her to her knees.

There was a hastily silenced cry of alarm from somewhere among the olive trees, then the surrounding harvesters also began dropping to their knees.

Makaria sighed. ‘You are welcome here, your Majesty,’ she said dully, staring at the ground.

Drusus looked down at her in silence for a while. ‘Very well, cousin, you can get up,’ he said at last, quietly, and moved closer to her. ‘I don’t mean for you to have to work like a farmhand,’ he murmured as she rose to her feet. ‘Surely four hundred people are sufficient to do these things for you?’

‘Someone needs to do it for them, Drusus,’ said Makaria. ‘We need every pair of hands we can get. And I won’t have anyone who stays here going hungry, or good farmland going to ruin.’ She reached up to strip a spray of olives by hand in one fierce tug. She flung the handful into one of tubs on her buggy. ‘How is your war?’

‘Oh, everything’s going very well,’ said Drusus. He took her arm companionably and they walked together back towards the road. ‘We’ve taken Bamaria, and we control much of the northwest of what used to be Nionian Terranova. We’ve had considerable success using poison gas.’

He felt Makaria’s body clench and saw her lips tighten before she looked away.

‘Yet it’s still not over,’ she said at last.

‘It won’t be long. They’re weakening in Siam, and once we’re in a position to enter their Sinoan territory, Sina will start seeing sense and then it’ll be as good as over.’ He paused, and then remarked, as if casually, ‘That little whore Una has been on trial for treason. She was sentenced to the Colosseum a few days ago.’

They were on a stretch of sandy road overlooking the sea. Makaria took a long breath and closed her eyes for a moment, then turned her head and gazed out patiently at the blue water, saying nothing.