Savage City (44 page)

She was tempted to interrogate Ziye again for details: how Sulien and Una had looked, what they had said when they first woke in the van, even though she knew there was nothing more to be told. They had been confused and bloody, they had barely spoken, by the time they reached the coast they had been able to walk. But they were alive, they were alive, and to the disbelief of all of them, no one seemed to know it. And yet, even now it had worked, it was terrible that rescue had depended on them being hurt badly enough that it should seem possible they had been killed, and it was terrible to imagine what those days must have been like under the Colosseum. And if she’d loved him already, it was that horrified effort of imagination, which had begun the moment she realised he had been captured, that had started this almost-madness, and torn little holes in her mind out of which everything else had leaked.

They had spent a fortnight at Smyrna, hiding near the port in an otherwise empty guest-house owned by one of Delir’s old contacts, and every day Lal scoured the news and the weather reports, then wandered down to the docks to look anxiously out to sea. She had never seen the little ship Varius had bought, and though she knew that really it was a yacht with cabin space and even some kind of kitchen, sometimes, when a storm slammed against the coast, she pictured them freezing aboard a tiny lifeboat or clinging to a collapsing raft, or swallowed by the sea, and never found.

Varius and Delir had agreed on a means of finding each other, should they all make it as far as Alexandria, but beyond that there had been too little time in those awful, sleepless days between Sulien’s arrest
and the morning of the Games to make arrangements that would have let them communicate easily. Delir, Ziye and Lal had had a slower, heavier journey of it, conveying themselves overland with books and boxes from the basement in the Subura: Lal’s forgery and printing equipment and Varius’ money.

One day in Smyrna, walking back from the docks, she turned her head to look at a jumble of posters on a hoarding, without realising why. Then she started and clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a yelp of shock and had to hurry on before she made herself even more conspicuous by standing and gaping at it.

It said, ‘The last act of the Emperor Marcus Novius was the abolition of slavery,’ and it was not the only one. Two days later, in one of the streets running off the forum, she found a rough screenprint of a girl with ragged hair, her face upheld, her terrified eyes fixed on some invisible peak behind the viewer. Even without the roughly printed words stacked underneath, Lal could see it was supposed to be Una, as she’d looked on the longvision at the moment when she’d chosen the arena hounds.

And then, a week later, when they thought it was safe to move on again, there was the graffiti she saw in a bathroom in the station in Ancyra, one fierce, hurried line:

They reached Alexandria in the last week of January. The air was cool, but the sun was strong, and as they descended from the train, Lal cast a distracted look at her father and saw how harshly it shadowed the lines on his face and lit up the white in his hair. And he looked smaller and slighter than ever, and yet, at the moment, almost happy. ‘Really, this is the greatest of the Western cities, Lal, not Rome, not even Athens as it was,’ he announced grandly. He was the only one of them to have been there before, and began talking cheerfully about the Ptolemies, about the many expansions of the Library, about whether the best place to eat in the city would still be open after twenty years.

But Lal, who usually felt a little flutter of excitement at entering any new city, couldn’t listen; she felt impatient with all the towers and gardens and eating houses for being in her way.

She wanted to go straight to the Museion, because if the others were here, that was where Varius would have left instructions for finding them. But she could not go alone – women could not enter the Library unless accompanied by a man or furnished with a letter of introduction
– and Ziye and Delir were intent upon finding a temporary home first, so they set off to the Jewish Quarter in search of somewhere to stay.

Lal spent the evening almost speechless with the consciousness that Sulien might be less than a mile away, and the night trying uselessly to quieten the noise he made in her mind so she could sleep.

The next morning they caught a tram across to the Museion. Alexandria was laid out in a formal lattice of streets, centred at the crossroads of two boulevards wider than any Lal had ever seen, each bearing seven loud and terrifying lanes of traffic through the heart of the city. But the Library had spilled haphazardly over its initial boundaries, and now reading rooms, book stacks, lecture theatres and printing presses were housed in buildings of many ages and styles: granite towers, halls with windows of cut alabaster, even a cluster of low bubbles of green glass. Students wandered the colonnades in dutiful groups behind their tutors, or sat sprawled on the steps outside the central hall. Its gates were framed in heavy pillars, the capitals vivid with malachite and cinnabar, and ram-headed sphinxes crouched within the portico. Inside, the ceiling of the lobby was a bright noon-blue studded with golden stars, with the gods and creatures of the constellations painted in pale, transparent lines around them. Busts of the great poets and scientists were placed around the walls, and the space was full of exclaiming tourists who wouldn’t stay quiet no matter what the frowning wardens did. Heavy double doors at the top of a steep flight of steps led to the Library itself; Delir showed the false papers Lal made for him, signed a declaration promising not to damage any of the books, and led them inside.

The noise of the city dropped away with surprising abruptness, kept out by the thick walls and by the dense fortification of the books themselves. The shelves rose in ten tiers of galleries around the walls and lined alcoves and stairwells, and more books still were hidden in panelled cupboards and chests. The immense skylight above let in a soft light over the long tables that ran the length of the hall.

Delir and Ziye at once adopted a feeble and quite excessive deference to the quietness, Lal thought; they tiptoed along, unreasonably slowly. So she hurried on ahead of them, light on the balls of her feet, almost running down the colonnade past the tables, through the Greek section, past Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, upstairs into the first gallery to find Roman History. She was looking for the first set of copies of Cossus’
Rome and Nionia
on the open shelves. Varius would have left a longdictor code pencilled onto the thirtieth page of the fourth volume.

She found the alcove, the shelf, the book, and as she reached for it, someone tapped her on the shoulder; she turned, startled, and saw
Una, a stack of books held one-armed against her chest. She was smiling.

Lal reminded herself just in time to stay quiet, but opened her mouth in a silent cry of delight, and embraced her.

Delir and Ziye came into the alcove behind them, and Ziye reached out and lifted Una’s chin, saying nothing, and for a few moments they gazed at each other. Until then Lal had not even noticed the scars on Una’s face.

‘Thank you,’ whispered Una, ‘all of you.’

Lal’s pleasure at seeing Una shifted suddenly into slight dismay, because she felt as if even normal people must be able to see how hopelessly her thoughts knotted and tangled around Sulien.

She might as well just say it, then. ‘Is Sulien here?’

Una’s smile faded a little, but she said, ‘He’s at home— I mean, where we’re staying, over in Rhakotis. He’ll be so happy to see you.’

Lal stifled a little twitch of disappointment and looked around, wondering if Varius had accompanied Una instead. ‘But you’re not allowed in on your own . . .’

‘You are if you work here,’ said Una. She put down the stack of books on the table and returned a volume to its place on a shelf. ‘I wanted to work, and I knew you’d be coming. I can tell you how to get to our place, or I’ll show you, if you can wait an hour.’

They waited for her. Lal tried to read, but she was too restless and so she crept around the upper galleries where there were fewer scholars to disturb, looking at the carvings on the pillars; she found a few abandoned sheets of notepaper and a pencil and passed a few minutes copying a face she found carved above a small window.

Sometimes she looked down and saw Una, steering a little cart of books around a lower gallery, or alone in an alcove, standing reading a book for a little while before putting it away. It should not have been surprising that she looked better now than she had at the trial, but still Lal was struck at the change. She’d gained a little weight and her hair had faded almost to its natural colour. It was dragged into a cluster of small knots on the back of her head which disguised, in some measure, how short it had been cut. And yet it was not that, not really, nor even the altered brightness of her skin or eyes. There was an eagerness in her steps, an expectancy in the way she held herself. Lal thought of the poster in Smyrna; the desperation the artist had tried to reveal was gone, but something else, a stern force, seemed even stronger in her than it had before.

They were staying in a small holiday flat near the Canopic Docks, close to where the canal met Mareotis Lake. Lal saw an incongruous pile of ageing tourist magazines on a table near the door as Una let them in. The tiled room was almost bare. And Sulien was a long shadow coming down the steps from a little roof terrace.

Lal’s flight of feeling towards him seemed to trip on something – a small dip of sorrow and doubt – but then she forgot it, for he was smiling broadly, and he pulled her into his arms. His name chimed deafeningly in her head, and tears filled her eyes.

‘I missed you so much,’ she whispered hoarsely.

But when he repeated the same thing to her, the doubt came back again.

Una had turned aside as they embraced, and looking back at her, Lal saw a crease of pain fading on her face . . .

But it did fade, and she asked Sulien, ‘Where’s Varius?’

‘At the docks, worrying about the yacht.’

But Varius opened the door almost as he said it and for a few minutes the flat was brimming over with jubilant noise as everyone embraced or clasped hands, and Lal saw that her father, too, was brushing tears from his eyes. They crowded onto the terrace, into the winter sunlight bright on a jumbled rooftop terrain of washing lines and longvision aerials. Sulien sat beside her with his hand wrapped round hers, just as when they were in the cellar back in Rome, watching the last moments of Una’s trial.

Too much like that, she thought, when she looked at his taut, still-smiling face.

Varius looked restless and preoccupied, and yet Lal thought he’d shed something along with the matted hair and beard, the vigile uniform. No, she thought, you would not have thought he had any reason to hide from anything.

‘Do you have any family here?’ she asked him, looking down across the canal towards the lake.

‘Not in Alexandria. My grandparents moved to Rome when they were first married. I think I’ve got second cousins in Pelusium, but I’ve never met them.’

‘Maybe you should see them,’ remarked Sulien, oddly, in a low voice.

‘I can’t,’ said Varius, a little baffled, ‘of course I can’t. I couldn’t put them in that position.’

‘When all this ends, you should see them.’

Delir said, ‘The money is safe. I made you another five thousand.’ He gave a modest shrug.

‘Thank you,’ Varius told him. ‘I’ve got to get at least some of the money back on the boat, too; it doesn’t really belong to me. I’ve used more than half of it now. And Eudoxius didn’t give it to me for any of this.’

Una leaned back meditatively on the brick parapet, eyes closed against the sunlight. ‘I don’t think you should sell the boat yet,’ she said. ‘We might need it.’

But Lal, Delir and Ziye all looked at one another, tensing. Delir grimaced and began reluctantly, ‘I don’t think you have heard. I’m so sorry, but Eudoxius—’

Varius’ eyes widened. ‘What?’

‘It was about two weeks ago. You would have been at sea. It wasn’t in the news for long . . .’

Varius sat down, his face changing colour, seeming to hollow out from within. Una moved across the terrace towards him. ‘Varius—’

‘I did this. I killed him,’ said Varius flatly, quietly.

‘No, no – it said natural causes,’ Lal protested.

‘You think that means anything? You think they ever told the truth about what happened to Salvius?’

‘Did they ever say anything about Salvius?’ asked Ziye.

Varius looked up at her uncertainly, without answering.

Una said, ‘If they knew he’d helped you, why would they hide it? Why would they miss the chance to keep anyone from helping you again? They’d put him on trial, seize his property. They’d make an example of him.’

‘He was old,’ agreed Ziye, briskly. ‘He had a heart attack. It’s unfortunate.’

Varius exhaled, and lowered his head in something like a nod, but he still looked bitter. ‘Well, that’s that. It always was a stupid idea.’

‘Varius.’ Sulien didn’t move, and his voice was very quiet, but everyone else grew still as he spoke. ‘If you still want to try and kill Drusus, I’ll help you. I owe you that, I owe you – everything. But we’ll never see what comes of it. It’s not something you can survive. You’ve always known that. Is that still what you want?’