Savage City (49 page)

‘No, we can’t,’ said Sulien. He pulled on a pair of trousers under the loose tunic he’d been sleeping in, pushed bare feet into his shoes. ‘It’s a fifty-foot drop. And they’d see. They’d shoot us.’

Una ground her teeth and leaned out of the window, trying to judge the distance. ‘
You
think of something else, then.’

Sulien came forward to take hold of her shoulders. ‘Una,’ he said, ‘there isn’t anything else. You’re wasting the time we’ve got.’

Una turned, still not looking directly at him, scanning the room and raking through her brain, searching for some saving detail on which to hang an idea. But she began to shake, her breath coming in rough, angry gasps: she could find nothing.

‘We’ll get you out,’ she promised at last, her voice strangled.

‘What?’ Sulien shook his head, almost exasperated with her. ‘No.’

‘We’ve got out of worse.’

‘And how many times can we expect to get away with it? We’ve been running around under the vigiles’ noses practically asking for something to happen as it is. I don’t want you risking your life any more – or Varius risking his again, not over this. It’s not the Colosseum. Or a cross. It’s not certain death. And everyone else has to go. Why should I be any different?’

‘How can you ask that?’ said Una hoarsely, only just managing to restrain herself from shouting, ‘when you know how worthless, how stupid this war is? You know how hard Marcus tried to stop it – how hard we’re still trying. Have you forgotten who began it, and what he’s done to you? Do you think you’ve got some kind of duty? You were a slave for sixteen years! Why can’t you ever really believe that? What could you possibly owe that hasn’t already been taken from you?’

Sulien hesitated. ‘Of course I know all that,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got no choice, and anyway . . . However it started, I don’t want Rome to
lose
. There has to be something left, something that can get better. Or what use is everything we’ve been working for? And they’re sending other slaves.’

‘And they’ve got no right— it shouldn’t be happening! None of this should be happening!’

‘But it is happening,’ said Sulien.

Una opened her mouth again, but no more words came. She sat down, suddenly, on Varius’ bed.

Sulien sat beside her. ‘We’ve had bombs falling on us all night,’ he said. ‘We’ve got used to it. I don’t expect I’ll even notice the difference.’

‘
I
will,’ breathed Una, in a dazed, helpless whisper. ‘I will.’

‘There’s Drusus’ prophecy,’ he murmured. ‘If it’s true, and if it’s got anything to do with us – well, anything to do with me – then I’ll be all right. I’ll get back.’

Una shook her head. She said dully, ‘That can’t be right. Can’t be how it works.’

Sulien shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s something.’

Someone banged on the bedroom door. Sulien turned a little towards the noise, shifting away from her.

‘Wait—’ said Una.

But the soldiers shoved the door open, and Sulien rose to meet them. They gripped his arms, as if he’d been making an attempt to escape, and he let them. The leader barked, ‘Come on, you. Out.’

*

The building settled into silence again; in other rooms, people were unstiffening in their beds, going back to sleep. As if afraid of waking them, Una crept across the floor on light, careful feet, aimlessly moving from the broken door to the roof terrace steps and back. Then she turned out the lights and lowered herself quietly to the floor in the doorway between the bedroom and living room. She sat there in the dark, slack and still, barely feeling her back aching against the jamb, in a kind of comfortless, open-eyed sleep. She didn’t move until dawn began to thread through the shutters, when she crawled onto Sulien’s rumpled bed, and lay staring for another hour in a continuation of the same trance. Then Lal came rushing into the flat through the broken door and found her there. She pulled Una up into her arms, crying, as she realised what had happened.

Varius, already sure something was wrong, called early from Taposiris, and Lal answered the longdictor in tears. He scowled and swore, hurried down to the sea and went back.

He found Lal had heaved the door up from the floor and was standing on a stool with a screwdriver, trying to reattach it to its frame, tears still running down her face. Una was sitting upright and pale at the kitchen table, still in her nightdress. She began to cry briefly when she saw Varius, but then stopped, exclaiming wildly, ‘I know where he is; I know where they took him.’

‘Where?’ On the voyage back he had already been trying to think of some way to undo this, or at least to set his mind into the right frame for finding one.

‘A training camp near somewhere called Hibis. It’s in the desert, we can find out where—’

Una had spoken very little until now, had been able to give Lal only the barest outline of what had happened. But she felt a little more real with Varius there, and started to hope again that Sulien had been wrong and they could find a way to bring him back. And as she began haltingly to recount the course of the night, she felt a touch of vicarious guilt, for Lal’s sake, aware that she was longing for any kind of verbal keepsake from Sulien, and that he had left none for her. For a moment Una almost convinced herself she could make something up; it seemed hardly dishonest – Sulien would have meant to say goodbye. She had no doubt he would have done so if he’d had a little more time to think.

But she was almost too sleep-starved and wretched to explain the bare truth; it was beyond her to add anything to it.

Sitting beside her at the table, Lal’s face grew hot with the effort of
not asking, ‘Did he mention me? Didn’t he say anything at all?’ But in increments, it became obvious to her that if there had been anything, Una would not have kept it to herself so long.

It suddenly seemed childish and undignified to be crying, so she stopped.

Una rubbed her eyes. ‘I know he cares about you,’ she managed, ‘it was just all so fast. And we were so tired.’

Lal nodded, reasonably.

Una insisted again, ‘We can find him, we can get him out.’

Lal murmured, ‘But he didn’t want us to try and find him . . . ?’

Varius and Una were equally inclined to ignore what Sulien wanted. Una was due at work and refused to call in sick, despite Lal’s urging that she looked it. The Library had lost one of its lecture theatres, the roof of an observatory and many windows in the raids, and far fewer students slouched in its alcoves, but the main buildings and the collections within were almost unharmed. Una roamed among the shelves, hollow-eyed, almost incapable of following an index or a request form, yet she searched out copies of military records and maps and deposited them furtively on a desk in front of Varius, who sat with a notepad, and a stack of poetry books to disguise what he was really working on.

But as the day went on, Sulien’s prohibition, along with other things, began to corrode their sense of what was possible. There was no money – all that remained of what Eudoxius had given Varius was either spent or committed now. And the training camp, they established, was deep into the desert, connected only to a tiny oasis town by a single road that led nowhere else. There would be no cover of trees or buildings or traffic, nowhere to hide on either the approach or the departure. The dunes would be swarming with recruits on field exercises. Still, Una thought desperately, there must be some way of getting close.

But there was no way that did not carry a very strong risk of failure and death. I don’t want you risking your life any more, Sulien had said, or Varius risking his again . . .

From an upper gallery she watched Varius as he sat frowning down at the pages, dark head propped on one long hand, trying to dismiss similar doubts. He looked tired and unhappy, and yet safe there in the book-lined alcove, as if the presence of so many printed words around him exerted a soft, protective force. Una wished with sudden and painful energy that it were true, and for a moment she tried to imagine how he would live if it were ever really over, if they won.

But even if she had no scruples about risking herself or Varius,
even if she didn’t care about the work they had begun, there was Sulien himself. He would be no likelier to survive a rescue attempt than the rest of them. There was no way to measure one danger against the other. Perhaps they would only wreck what chance of surviving the war he had.

As evening fell they walked in silence along the cratered streets back towards Rhakotis. They both knew the truth; Varius was trying to think how to say it to her, so at last Una said it herself, stiffly: ‘We can’t do it.’

Then she had to stop and lean against a wall splashed with recruitment posters. ‘He won’t come back, they’ll kill him, I know they will,’ she said, sobbing, ‘I always— I can’t— I can’t
keep
anyone—’

And Varius, holding her, found himself rashly promising, I’m here, I’ll stay, no matter what happens.

For those first days, despair possessed her like a physical illness. Her body ached; there was nothing on which she could concentrate; everything became unbearably sharp when lingered over. Helplessly, she saw Sulien bending over Marcus’ body and then, fleeing the memory in anguish, she thought of that first autumn in Gaul, five years before: she and Marcus and Sulien, all three of them in different ways still new to each other, in a necropolis outside Tolosa, in a forest on a mountainside. And she remembered Marcus’ old fears, which, at least, could never hurt him any more, and she wondered what it would take to send someone mad, if not the terrible strength of this ache to go back.

And yet it was as if she were on a long rope, a leash that, while she whimpered and struggled, kept her within certain limits. Even at her worst, crying and cowering from the future on Sulien’s bed, she was aware of a very small part of herself standing back and keeping a stern, impatient watch. It was not a voice, there were no words, but it might have said: All right. You are allowed a certain amount of time for this. But then you must go on as you were.

She began to hold meetings again. During a daytime raid she and Ziye broke open a couple of trucks transporting slaves to a market. Delir and Lal travelled east to Petra and came back with twelve hundred sesterces. They settled ten supporters in Aila – Theon and Praxinoa among them – to replicate the underground recruitment campaign they had led in Alexandria. And seven hundred miles south there was a Roman offensive outside Meroë that the longvision reporters said would be decisive, and a week later no one was certain whether it had
ended, and what had changed. Sulien would be heading there soon, Una thought.

Only a few of the growing band of volunteers knew where Una and Varius lived, or how to contact them directly. A man named Chaeremon, one of their first recruits in the city, was one of them, and one evening early in May he called the flat, sounding both anxious and excited. ‘I’ve been talking to young Thekla – she’s run into somebody interesting. Not trouble, as such, just more volunteers, but it worries me.’

‘Someone you don’t think we can trust?’ asked Varius.

A short silence. ‘I wouldn’t exactly say that.’

They met Chaeremon at the docks on the edge of the lake and walked a couple of miles along the western shore, then into the rough paths chopped and beaten through the reed beds. It was not summer yet, but there was a soft, overripe warmth in the evening air and the lake was purring with mosquitoes. Una wondered how long it would be before disease began to run out of control. Some of the city’s refugees were living on small boats in the shallow basins of the lake; on the land, lanes of duckboards lay over the increasingly marshy ground between the shelters. There were a few government-issue white tents, and many huts of thatched reed, and shacks cobbled together out of anything – plastic, sheets of wood, billowing flaps of colourful fabric. Thekla stood in a doorway of one of these, holding back a length of scarlet cloth pinned up as a curtain, looking out for them.

Inside, a hot, red light filtered through the curtain. Four people were sitting on the ground, and a woman was standing waiting. She seemed young, from the light, agile posture of her body, the sheen of her dark skin, but her face was almost wholly obscured by a red scarf, and her arms were folded, rather combatively, against her chest.

Una frowned; certain she had never seen this girl before and yet feeling strangely as if she ought to know her. Then the stranger said, ‘I’ve been searching for you,’ and unfolded her arms, revealing that one of them ended in a battered plastic socket fixed with a pair of crude hooks. The thumb of her remaining hand was missing too.

She tilted her head a little, looking through her scarf at Varius, who started in amazement and said, ‘Bupe.’

Bupe nodded, oddly formal. ‘I’m glad you are alive.’

‘Likewise,’ said Varius, though his surprise at seeing her was not wholly pleasant. She’d been almost a corpse when she’d been dumped at the Transtiberine slave-clinic two years before, burned and filthy, her hand blown away. Her face and body had been sprayed with fire by
a detonator at the Veii Arms Factory, and she’d disappeared before Sulien had even finished treating her – to join Dama, as they had discovered much later.

She turned her shrouded head to Una. ‘You’re Sulien’s sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘I heard the squads have taken him.’

‘Yes.’