Savage City (45 page)

There was a silence. Una was gazing at Sulien with a helpless expression, her lips tight, but she said nothing.

Varius retracted a little under Sulien’s quiet, neutral scrutiny. Eventually he answered, ‘No. Of course not—Not just for the sake of it, not if all that happens is one of his generals takes over and everything carries on as it is now.’

‘But we can’t give up, can we?’ Una asked. ‘None of us want that.
Something
is possible; you’ve proved that. You found people who felt the same, you raised money – you
saved
us.’

Varius said slowly, ‘There isn’t anyone else on our side who’d have even a chance of staying in power.’

There was another pause, then Una said, ‘Yes, there is.’

Night came on early. As the sun set Sulien and Lal were left alone on the roof terrace. They kissed at last, and Lal, ignoring the ache in her chest, thought, ‘I have never been so happy.’

She was not blind; she could see how wan and far-off he was, the fadedness, but the fact of him there – alive, whole in her arms – had been so hard-won. She gripped his hands, feeding love and determination into him. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to pour herself into someone else this way, and when he did that for people who were hurt or sick, it worked.

‘There are these posters about you and Una in Smyrna and Ancyra,’ she told him. ‘Maybe they’re everywhere now.’

‘Our posters?’ he said, confused.

‘You’ve seen them?’

He told her what they’d done at Corcyra, Crete and in Libya, and Lal explained what she’d seen. Sulien’s expression lit up with slow, incredulous excitement. ‘We hoped for that – well, hardly even hoped, but— And they’re different – they say different things?’

And the news left a trace of brightness in his face for a time.

‘I can make better ones. We can print more of them,’ said Lal, eagerly, ‘hundreds of them.’

Sulien’s smile remained, but it altered somehow. ‘At least it’d be something to do. Really I need to work, like Una. As if Varius hasn’t done enough without having to keep me as well. I did get a job last week, but I only lasted two days. I couldn’t— I couldn’t concentrate.’

‘But Sulien, if anyone ever had an excuse for being tired—! Even if everything had gone right the first time, even if they’d never done that to you, even if you’d never been—’ Her eyes blurred even to think of it and she found herself unable to name the Colosseum. ‘Even if you’d never been there.’

Sulien nodded, passively.

‘When we saw on the news that they’d arrested you,’ she ventured, but he closed his eyes and Lal saw that perhaps it was a mistake to talk any more about those days, and yet she could not prevent herself, ‘we all came right back. Varius must have already told you. We didn’t even discuss it. We didn’t know how to find Varius at first, but I knew he
would be there, I knew . . . So my father just went back to the place in the Subura and hoped he’d call. And we had so little time, but there was nothing we could do at first and I just . . . I never stopped thinking about you.’

Sulien pressed her a little closer, but he was gazing past her at the cracked tiles on the parapet, his eyes empty, his brows contracted. For a while he hesitated.

‘I could have tried to get away on my own,’ he murmured, finally, ‘but I didn’t.’

A chilly feeling came over Lal. She gazed up at him. ‘When? In the van?’ She had never known precisely what had gone wrong.

‘Yes. Before the vigiles came.’

Lal glanced down the steps towards the flat. She hadn’t noticed how dark it was growing out here; the light was on in the kitchen now. She could just make out Una’s voice among the others.

She supplied, ‘You couldn’t leave her.’

Sulien’s voice was flat, definite. ‘No.’

Lal tried to weigh the importance of this. What difference did it make – that it had happened at all, and that she knew it now? It scarcely counted as a real choice in the circumstances. Probably they would have caught him anyway, even if he’d tried to run, so it would all have turned out exactly the same.

But for him it had meant giving up everything, and he meant her to understand that had included her. Would she ever have expected or hoped for anything different, if she’d known he would have to make such a choice?

‘Well, of course not,’ she said bravely, trying to prevent a catch in her voice.

Absently, Sulien chafed one of her hands between his. He said, ‘I wish we could just go home.’

Down in the kitchen, Delir had sketched a rough map of the Mediterranean. Una frowned down at it, trying to estimate the distances between the points she’d marked on it. She would look at the atlases in the Library tomorrow.

‘How many people would we need?’ she asked. Varius was leaning over the map beside her and instinctively she looked at him, even though it was as much a question for the others.

Varius grimaced dubiously. ‘We’ll be thankful for whatever we can get. I suppose five or six hundred would have a chance, if we could find that many.’

‘Then we’ll bring a thousand,’ said Una. ‘The more we bring, the
fewer shots will be fired when we arrive – on their side or ours. Before they know who we are, or what we want, they’ll know there are too many of us to fight.’

‘That would mean perhaps two hundred boats,’ said Varius. ‘None of this is going to be cheap. Or fast.’

Una thought of a secret fleet of fishing boats, small yachts and speedboats, hidden in coves and harbours across the Mediterranean, gathering into an armada in the dark on the open sea. The excitement already flickering through her deepened and steadied into a feeling that was almost pride, almost as if it was already real.

She turned to Delir. ‘You know how to do this,’ she said. ‘You’ve run a network of people; you know how to keep it hidden.’

Lal and Sulien had come down from the terrace in silence. Sulien sat down at the bottom of the steps, leaning his head against the wall, listening, annexed to the conversation while remaining outside it. Lal hesitated for a moment, but then sat beside him.

Delir sighed. ‘In the Pyrenees we had certain advantages,’ he said. ‘Even aside from not yet having made ourselves so very interesting to the government. The people there were Vascones; they didn’t consider themselves Roman. They didn’t even speak Latin. They tolerated us. I don’t believe there’s anywhere else like that in Europe, certainly nowhere that would be helpful to us.’

‘Still,’ said Varius, ‘small scattered groups along the coast, say no more than ten people in any one place . . . ships that stay on the move . . . That would be harder to detect than a single fixed base.’

Una remarked softly, ‘I never used to think of myself as Roman.’

‘Never used to?’ asked Sulien, from the steps. ‘Do you mean you feel more like a good Roman girl after all this?’ The sarcasm had no edge, only a tired weight.

Una looked down at the scars splayed across the backs of her hands, then over at her brother. ‘I don’t know. There were so many Romans who came to watch us being torn apart— I don’t know how I can say I’m a Roman after being a slave for all those years, and after that. But I don’t know what else to call myself. I don’t know any other language. We tried to get out, but it’s too far and too hard. We don’t even want to live anywhere else, do we? But now I think there are born citizens who don’t think of themselves as Romans any more easily than I do. I think there are thousands, maybe millions of people on our side, there always were, and that even with what I can do I didn’t see them. I didn’t count them. And I think there will be more.’

She remembered herself, at fifteen, striding across London, gusts of chilly rage whistling through her. She could still feel the same cold,
sharp air now. And she thought of the name she’d given in the courtroom in Rome, Noviana, the unchosen, double-edged addition that still tied her to Marcus. She wouldn’t give up either of them now, the rage or the name.

‘Nevertheless, what you’re talking about would take years,’ said Delir.

‘But years of work have already been done,’ said Una. ‘It’s been nine years since you began building a refuge for slaves. And it was years before that that Leo and Clodia started planning to abolish slavery. But it can’t have started with them either.’

Something reared up unexpectedly in her memory: the lawyer who was supposed to put on a show of defending her saying, perhaps we could never find any one person with whom it began. A small snag of laughter, defiant and bitter, caught in her throat. ‘And we couldn’t stop the war from happening, and Holzarta is gone. And Marcus is gone. And Leo and Clodia.’ Very briefly she hesitated. ‘And Gemella,’ she finished. Varius’ gaze, which had been on her, veered away towards the distance in sudden pain, and Una felt a pang of guilt, but then he looked back at her and she knew he was glad she hadn’t left out her name.

Una went on in a stronger voice, ‘But not all of the work is gone. Not all the slaves who escaped. Not all the connections between people who might never even have talked. We can build on what’s been done, whether we finish it now, or whether it’s someone else, further on.’

‘Your network of contacts,’ began Varius to Delir.

‘I think most of them just want to be left alone.’

‘Well, probably, but we can ask them,’ said Varius. ‘If they can even give us a few sesterces to do this, it will help.’

Ziye stood up and began pacing slowly and uneasily. ‘We will have to spend some of this money on weapons,’ she said. She sounded perfectly calm and pragmatic, but her lips were tight. ‘Or we will have to steal them, or be given them. You can talk of firing fewer shots, fine, but there will have to be guns in these people’s hands. There are always ways, of course.’

‘Like Dama,’ said Delir, a crack in his voice.

Ziye gave him a troubled, complex look. ‘Yes.’

Una opened her mouth to counter this and was taken aback when she could not speak. Dama ran ahead of her down the street outside the Colosseum, burning in the rainy air. It would always be almost within her reach to change it; he would always still be running; Marcus would always be right there, waiting for her; her hand would always be sweeping over his still face.

If she could cram all her memory of Dama into that one day, that would be simpler, and easier to bear than if she had to remember talking together, walking through the mountains towards Athabia – or worse, in Rome, when they were older, how he had stood at her door the night of Marcus’ wedding to Noriko, scores – hundreds of deaths already on his hands, and she’d thrown her arms round him.

She had to recede from the conversation for a while, could only sit there, biting her lip, waiting the memory out.

Ziye muttered, ‘I said I would never fight again.’

‘But you can keep to that if you want to,’ said Lal. ‘No one
has
to fight – I mean’ – she glanced around – ‘do they? There’s enough else to do.’

‘It’s not that simple. This is a promise I have already broken, at the Colosseum. Very well, I had skills and knowledge that were needed. Una and Sulien are alive because of it; it was worth it. But it is not honest to break it once because two lives are at stake and then not, when we’re talking of ending a war, removing a tyrant . . . But then, what kind of promise was it in the first place, to keep unless it became inconvenient? And even suppose I make my promises all over again, it makes no difference; whatever I do now with my own hands, I will be up to my neck in what you do. And that’s right; that’s as it must be. But we must be very sure of what we do.’ She stopped and smiled tautly. ‘No, I don’t think certainty is any measure. I imagine Dama must have been sure.’

‘We’re not Dama,’ said Sulien, distantly. ‘He wanted to start a war. We’re trying to stop one. I say we win.’

Una grew aware of Delir’s gentle, self-accusing attention. She raised her head to look at him and he reached across the table for her hand. ‘My dear, I’m so sorry. I am so sorry.’

‘I wish I could forget I ever knew him,’ said Una in a whisper.

‘Yes,’ agreed Delir, bleakly. ‘I wish that too.’

‘Well,’ Una murmured, ‘we can’t, ever, and I can’t— I can’t talk about him. So what do we do? I forgive you, if that’s worth anything . . .’

Lal got up from her place on the steps. ‘Look,’ she said impatiently, ‘we’ve got most of a plan – one that might not work – to make things better. It makes sense. Dama didn’t have anything like that; he just hoped that if he dragged everything down and raised enough chaos, something good would grow out of it by itself. At least, I suppose that’s what he hoped. And maybe it will, in the end – but it’s already costing far too much, and it’s slower and harder than it should ever have had to be. Nothing good that happens will be any thanks to him, so we don’t
have to be afraid of being part of it, or being like him. There was peace, back then. Marcus would have been Emperor; he would have abolished slavery. And now, between Dama and Drusus, I don’t see that things can get much worse, whatever we do.’

There was quiet again for a while. ‘And Drusus?’ said Ziye.

Sulien took a breath, and somehow again drew attention to himself even before he began to speak. ‘Something happened, when I was on my own in Sarmatia,’ he said, softly. ‘When I was trying to get home. I needed a car, and—

‘I think I did something. I don’t know what it meant.’