Savage City (5 page)

Something he should have made sure of, something forgotten and terrible scratched like a rat in a wall at the edge of his mind, requiring him to try, reluctantly, to remember.

Makaria, further away from him now, repeated his name: ‘Marcus. Marcus.’

From this approach, the Colosseum looked unscathed, but he’d seen ambulances and vigile vehicles swerving through cross-currents of a loose, complex mass of people spreading down the broad street, under the mirrory surfaces of the courts and temples of the Sacred Way, limping and pushing along in the rain.

They were turning back cars on the Sublician Bridge, but Sulien, half-guiltily, slid the trirota out of the choked traffic and between the tight-faced officers before they could decide it was worth stopping him. He swung straight from the saddle into a run, leaving the trirota by a Praetorian car at the end of the Sacred Way.

There was already a short, tidy line of corpses under plastic sheeting outside the Colosseum, and a rough cordon of vigile officers around it. Sulien ran up, feeling hastily in his pockets for identity papers, wishing he’d brought his pass from the clinic.

‘Move back, move back.’

‘My name’s Novianus Sulien; I—’

‘Move back,’ repeated the nearest officer, in a kind of blank, droned-out bark, not hearing anything.

‘No, I can
help
, my name’s Novianus Sulien. I’m a friend of Marcus Novius a—’

Under the helmet, the man’s face flinched into alertness, becoming individual and, briefly, naked with feeling. ‘Novianus Sulien?’ He let out his breath in a tense sigh that made Sulien’s stomach clench in apprehension. ‘Come with me.’ He seized Sulien’s arm and pulled him past the line, hurrying him towards the Colosseum as if he’d proposed running away rather than entering.

An aching quiver throbbed up through his bones, shaking the pain awake. Marcus couldn’t understand it for a while, then, distantly, he
connected the vibration to the sound of metal grinding and realised they had begun cutting through the beam pinning down his deadened legs. They’d fixed a tube in his arm and there was something cold pouring in. It was strange how intrusively close yet separate from him all this activity seemed, like hammering or laughter in an adjoining room.

And they were moving through the rubble behind him, lifting someone on a stretcher, carrying him away—

Horror raked into Marcus, almost indistinguishable from the physical pain. He stiffened and tried instinctively to brace a hand against the ground and lift himself, but everything was failing, his mouth was opening and failing to make a sound . . .

‘Give him something, he’s in pain,’ ordered Makaria wretchedly.

That was true enough, but it was worse, terrifying, that he couldn’t make himself understood. He rolled his head, trying to swallow, to get his throat to work, and managed to choke out some mangled approximation of the syllables he wanted, then, clearer, ‘Drusus. Drusus – is he alive?’

Makaria looked over her shoulder. Drusus had been lying under a crumpled panel of bullet-proof glass, but he had been irrelevant to her. She could not see him now, hidden between the men who were passing the stretcher down into the excavated passage, out of sight, but they were not moving as if they were handling a corpse.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘yes, I think maybe—’

Marcus tried to twist again, fighting uselessly against his unresponsive body. ‘Not him— Don’t let— Not Drusus.’

Makaria leant in between the medics, trying to hear. ‘What? What is it, Marcus?’

‘Succession.’

‘Oh, Marcus—’

He struggled to find a clear place in the pain and murkiness to think clearly, just for a few seconds. Varius, he wanted to say, and the thought of how shocked Varius would be, hearing that, made his lips twitch with bleak amusement. He thought, but you’d make a good Emperor, Varius. Except that he wouldn’t have the chance. Anyone Marcus named outside the remnants of the dynasty would need an existing stock of power and prominence to have any chance of holding the throne. Drusus had his name, and the nominal status as joint regent Faustus had given him. Salvius had the army. Varius had neither of these things, and Marcus would guarantee his murder just by saying his name.

He had scarcely any choice. It would be Drusus or Salvius.

‘Salvius,’ he croaked roughly. ‘Has to be.’

He wasn’t sure if Makaria answered that. His breathing sounded startlingly loud now, and he had no control over it any more; the pain from his broken ribs pulled through him with every breath, still violent and yet dissolving, splintering apart. So recognisable, this
tug
, like a word whose meaning he’d only briefly forgotten.

The dull juddering ground on. He wanted to curl up on his side, hiding from it, and he didn’t want Una to think he hadn’t resisted, that he wouldn’t have given anything or borne anything to see her again, if there had been any way, any strength left in him. He made another long effort to speak, and heard his voice stutter unexpectedly into motion, though he didn’t seem to have chosen the words: ‘I can’t— I’m sorry—’

‘You have nothing to be sorry for.’

Makaria’s voice, falling in from somewhere as remote as snow-flakes, but it wasn’t her he was talking to. He said, surprised at hearing himself again, ‘I tried.’ He could feel the hectic motion of the people crowding over him, their hands on him, and yet it was as if they were beating against an impenetrable surface to reach him, as if he’d slipped through the marble floor and they hadn’t realised it.

The pale oval of sky darkened, pulsed white, spread. An intense sweetness of relief overwhelmed him as even the pain finally shivered into nothing. He couldn’t breathe, and he was aware of his body straining desperately for the unreachable air, but oh, mercifully, the struggle barely touched him, did not hold him, although he was glad when it stopped. He couldn’t feel anyone near him any longer; no one else was there.

The world held, transparent as ice for another instant, before it thawed and broke – so easily, with such simplicity, that if any words had remained he would have called it beautiful.

No one noticed Una on the medics’ ladder until she had almost reached the top, scaling it in one breathless rush. Then the vigiles closed ranks at the parapet of the box, shouting, ‘Get down, get down!’ Two of them below rushed for her, one aiming a gun – and Una couldn’t take that in, it was just a little thing in the man’s hand. She clung onto the ladder, unable to explain herself, only stammering, ‘Please, please—’

Then Makaria appeared, filthy and exhausted, at the wall of the box. She raised a hand and ordered, ‘Let her through.’

Una didn’t know how she came to be on her hands and knees, bending over Marcus as if she’d been dropped there. Between the
ladder and here had been nothing except a kind of dazzled afterimage of Marcus on the far side of the ruined box, dead on the ground – but she hadn’t seen that, she didn’t remember it.

She said his name again, and the claw-sharp catch of expectation was the same each time she repeated it; she couldn’t stop. She ran a hand up over his face, not gently, as if there were something there that could be wiped away. The sweep of her palm tipped his head back a little, and though she knew she’d caused the movement, it was stupidly arresting to her: it looked like a drowsy stirring out of sleep, as if his eyes were about to blink open. She took his face in both hands, shook it.
Absurd
. She did it again.

No one was doing anything; even the men who had been cutting away the terrible length of steel that lay on Marcus’ legs were just standing there looking at her. Una turned on them, shaken by how furious she was. ‘Why have you stopped?’ She heard her voice as it would sound to another person, loud and raw and irrational; she tried to make it more controlled, but the mad voice babbled, ‘Please don’t stop, please do something, oh God—’

They didn’t move. Someone said something.

She made a sound that horrified her, because she had no warning it was coming, and because the meaning of it was unmistakable. Her hands moved over Marcus’ throat, chest, searching for something to put right. ‘Marcus, come on, you can’t— Marcus . . .’

Then time crumpled in on itself again and now she was lying half-across him, her face buried into his neck. But this wasn’t an embrace, that wasn’t the point: if there was any life left to be detected, however faint, she must be close enough to find it. But she couldn’t feel anything except his chilly blood soaking her clothes and his broken ribs shifting beneath her; the weight of her body would have caused him agony, if—

Sulien raced up the steps from the passage into the wet daylight and Una was lying among the wreckage covered in blood. So different – and so much worse than anything he’d expected – that cold crashed over him before the queasy slide from horror to relief to horror again as he understood.

And Una jolted upright, her face lit with dreadful hope, crying, ‘Sulien! Sulien, do something, please, please . . .’

‘Oh, no,’ murmured Sulien helplessly, closing his eyes and not wanting to open them. Something in him curled up, went into hiding. He began weakly, ‘Una, I—’

She had started crying raggedly, even as he opened his mouth, and
before he could finish she was begging, almost in a scream, ‘Please try! Please just
try
!’

Don’t do it, anything except that, Sulien warned himself. For his own sake he wanted to go to Marcus, touch him, make himself understand what had happened. But it would be better not to go near him if doing so would let Una convince herself there was any doubt. To
pretend
to try – which was all it could be – would be horrible, a betrayal of all three of them.

But she kept pleading, and he couldn’t bear it, and a kind of shifty, two-faced optimism reared in his mind, that maybe he was somehow wrong, perhaps it wasn’t too late, even now . . .

He couldn’t help himself. He stepped forward and knelt down beside Marcus, and at once Una sprang to her feet and stood back, out of his way, and it was easier to look at Marcus’ still face than to look at her, so he did that with the first spasm of true self-revulsion he’d ever felt in his life.

Tears filled his eyes almost at once. He blinked and exhaled hard, laid a hand on Marcus’ chest for scarcely a second and pulled it back to drag his fist across his eyes.

All right, he told himself, not realising he was mouthing the words, and closed his eyes. He rested his hand over Marcus’ heart again. Nothing, nothing. Sulien tried to make himself believe that if an electric flicker could only stir it – for the first time in what must be several minutes – there was enough blood left in its hollows or in the quiet veins to start flowing again . . .

But there was not, and nothing happened, and he thought of pressing down brutally on Marcus’ chest just for the sake of doing something. The ribs were too badly broken, so, quickly, before he could think about it, he bent his head over Marcus and breathed into his mouth.

The air sighed out passively, and he saw now that Marcus’ eyes were not quite closed; a motionless crescent of white and slate-blue showed under the eyelashes: a cold, faintly critical stare.

One of the medics said quietly, ‘We’ve tried that.’

Sulien knew that, and he tried again anyway, though he could barely manage a steady breath himself. The tears spilled out again and he lifted his face, letting his hand fall onto Marcus’ cheek in a glancing caress, and blurted, ‘Una, please, I’m sorry.’

Una gasped in a scraping breath and Sulien braced himself to hear her pleading, or crying again. Instead, her body stiffened and her lips closed without releasing anything. She stopped crying, and her face emptied, slowly and utterly. Her eyes lowered slowly from Sulien’s
face to Marcus’. Her hands, knotted in tight fists, fell slack. She turned away.

Sulien sagged, shuddering, feeling a brief, desolate relief. For the first time he noticed the Imperial wreath lying beside Marcus’ head where it had fallen, and the ring loose on his finger. He turned to Makaria, slumped on one of the incongruously intact marble seats, her forehead resting on her hand, and she met his eyes in numb confirmation.

Sulien looked back at Marcus and those gold things, and his throat burned; he pressed the heel of his hand into each eye. The wreath shouldn’t just lie there, he thought, and reached for it, first meaning to put it back on Marcus’ head – but it would have slipped off again when they lifted him. So instead he laid it on Marcus’ breast, and, as he let it go, he felt how strange it was that he should ever have touched it. It was heavier than he had expected.

He stood up, wondering how he could be so tired after having done nothing at all.

Makaria gestured, and the men began cutting through the metal rods again. She stopped Sulien as he started to pick his way towards Una and held something out.

‘Look,’ she said. She handed him a folded sheet of notepaper, dimpled with rainwater and coloured with blood.

Sulien read disjointedly down to the pitiful scrawled signature, which made him shut his eyes and moan, ‘Oh,
gods
.’

Una took it from him silently and stared at it for a few seconds, as if trying to make sense of a foreign language. Then she began to shake breathlessly and sob again, pressing one hand over the name for a second as if trying to feel Marcus in the writing. Then Sulien was reaching for her, imploring, ‘Don’t, please don’t—’ as she darted past him, back towards Marcus’ body.