Savage City (57 page)

As they retreated a little towards the southern entrance to the underpass, a troop of thirty shieldless Nionian soldiers surged over the
barrier and came charging down the embankment towards the plain, firing wildly. Sulien marvelled: they were hopelessly unprotected – they must have known it was suicidal. They were all shouting the same word—

And they were cut down in seconds. Sulien barely had time to lift his own gun before there was no one left to fire at.

‘Archias!’ shouted Dorion, behind him.

Pas was on the ground, blood spurting thickly from the side of his neck.

Dorion was already bending over him, trying to hold the wound closed, babbling, ‘Oh, shit . . . oh, you’ll be all right, you stupid little . . .’

For a second Sulien stood blankly looking down at Pas, thinking, of course this was going to happen sooner or later. Then he pulled Dorion out of the way, took hold of Pas and dragged him deeper into the shelter of the pillars. He knelt over him, grimly pressing down with his bare hands on the wound. He said, ‘It’s not that bad.’

The bullet had missed Pas’ windpipe, but it had torn open artery and muscle, and the blood was welling up between Sulien’s fingers, coating his hands red to the wrists. Pas was conscious but faint with pain and shock, his skin already paling. He stared up at Sulien, didn’t try to move or speak.

Caerellius called for a medic, and then again, with more force, but no one seemed to hear.

‘Oh, come on, no,’ moaned Dorion, miserably raising both hands to his head.

‘He’s fine, it’s just a fucking scratch,’ Sulien said fiercely, ‘go and get a medic down here. The rest of you, keep covering that entrance up ahead.’ Dorion lingered, transfixed by the quantity of blood, until Sulien repeated, ‘Do it now, Dorion.’

Dorion’s face contorted with distress and anger, but he obeyed, picking his way over the dead soldiers.

Caerellius and Gnatho moved a little further along the underpass, their guns at the ready, but they kept glancing back over their shoulders at Sulien and Pas. At least they were in the shadows of the pillars, Sulien thought, and besides, there was nothing strange to see. He leaned down on the wound, pressing the edges together, letting his eyes close. Just stop, just stop, he thought to the blood, such a little thing to ask, for the torn fibres to close under the pressure of his hands, just enough to keep the blood inside. He’d leave the rest to the medics—

Pas shuddered a little, opened and closed his mouth before managing, ‘Archias— What—?’

Above them, up on the flyover, things were going quiet.

‘See,’ Sulien murmured to him, as the bleeding began to slow, ‘you just need a few stitches, that’s all. Shame it wasn’t worse, really; you’re not going home yet.’

Pas blinked up at him and his forehead puckered, as if with puzzlement rather than with pain.

Dorion, looking pallid and grim, came running back with the medic, but Pas saw them coming and lifted a shaky hand to show that he was still alive. ‘I think it looked worse than it was,’ Sulien muttered as the medic bent over Pas, who even tried to confirm it by making a move to sit up.

Sulien let the medic get to work and drew back. He wanted to separate himself from what he’d done.

There was still the sporadic thunder of mortars up in the hills, but the fighting on the junction itself seemed to have stopped. Now Sulien remembered that the bodies he’d fallen among in the breach in the wire had still been warm, that the expression on Hanno’s face had not even had time to change before he fell, that he was not certain how many people he had killed today. On one of the ramps leading up to the flyover another soldier was sitting on the crash-barrier with his head in his hands, and Sulien wanted to do that too, he wanted to drop to the ground and cry, or vomit or fall asleep. But there was this hard, bright glaze of wakefulness covering everything. He felt that he could keep hold of that, at least for now: he could stave off everything he’d seen and felt, stop it from hurting him beyond what he could stand, and for as long as he could do these things he must not stop.
Later
, he told the barrage of jagged new memories rattling through him, as he looked up at the smoke rising in the west over the captured city.

‘I am trying to reach Grand Preceptor Zhu Li,’ said Ziye, in Sinoan, into the longdictor.

‘Is this a joke?’ said the faraway crackling voice of the woman who had answered. She added cagily, as if afraid of being further taken in, ‘This is a dentist’s.’

‘Please wait,’ said Ziye. ‘Would you know the longdictor code for your local magistrates’ office?’

But the line went dead, though whether because the woman had broken the connection or because a cable somewhere had been severed, there was no way to be sure.

They were about a hundred miles west of Alexandria, at Tamiathis,
where Delir and Ziye had taken over a small printing and copying shop. It provided a thin stream of income, and the equipment was useful to Lal, but more importantly, it was a means of money-laundering.

They were in the windowless back room now, among the reams of paper and binding machines, and Varius was on another longdictor, going through the same routine as Ziye. ‘I’m sorry, this must be the wrong code?’

‘No Latin,’ said the baffled voice on the other end of the line.

‘I’m sorry,’ repeated Varius, sighing, and crossed out another line of symbols on the list in front of him. ‘I swear it’s one of these,’ he said, while the others groaned gently and Ziye’s lips tightened.

A year before, Varius had spent weeks talking to Zhu Li and other officials, discussing the tortuous details for the Sinoan peace talks. He was sure that at least one of the longdictor codes must be lodged in his memory somewhere, and if only he could retrieve any one of them, a message could be passed to Jun Sen and on to Tadahito. It was painful now to think of that time, and all that had happened since, but Varius closed his eyes and tried again to will himself back into his office in the southwest tower of the Palace, with Rome spread outside the blue-tinted windows, a leather chair underneath him, and a constant burr of tense voices in the corridor outside his door. He moved his fingers over the longdictor’s keys without pressing them: it was there, the right sequence, he could so nearly see it—

They were trying other routes too. At present Lal was silently rereading her last letter from Sulien, which Varius and Una had collected in Alexandria, but she had spent the afternoon calling old friends in Tianjin in an effort to trace Liuyin, the official’s son who had once been in love with her. Old connections of Delir’s had promised to search out possible contacts in the Sinoan Civil Service and get back to them, but they could not afford to wait; the lines were being cut. Varius tried another variation and got only static. Rome had declared war on Sina a fortnight before.

Ziye had grown increasingly tense and taciturn ever since the public declaration. She was surprised that the invasion of her country should matter so much to her now, when she had spent most of her life outside Sina and had few fond memories of it, and when she had already lived through more than a year of war, and months under Nionian bombs. Nevertheless, she winced at the news of what was happening on Sina’s western borders. Maracanda and Luntai had fallen almost at once, and apparently without much effort on the Roman Army’s part, despite how far they were now extended. And she now had a triple reason to worry about what people saw when they looked
at her scarred face: that she could be mistaken for Nionian, that she could be recognised as Sinoan, and that she could be known as herself.

She fidgeted with the list of longdictor codes. ‘I appreciate these girls need help,’ she muttered, ‘but the vigiles need only one good lead on them and they’ll fall right on top of us.’

‘Ah, we have no choice. What else can we do? Who else can they turn to?’ said Delir.

‘I owe Noriko whatever help I can give her; she protected me when I was in prison. What they would have done to me if not for her . . . And she was Marcus’ wife.’ Una spoke evenly, with almost no betrayal of feeling, except a pause after the last word. ‘But she can help us too, where Tadahito’s concerned. If she’s with us, that means passage into Alodia or Ethiopia, or wherever Tadahito is now. It means an audience with him – we can’t lose that chance.’

Noriko and the other women were being passed from one group of partisans to the next across the Mediterranean; they should be somewhere off the west coast of the Peloponnese by now. And yet there had been no acknowledgement on the news that they was missing. It was strange. For once Varius found himself wishing for hysterical headlines in the newssheets, and photographs continually splashed across the longvision. Not that he was surprised by the silence – it would have been acutely embarrassing for Drusus to admit that Marcus’ widow had defected from right under his nose. But it must also be that he still hoped to find her, and was wary of alerting Nionia that she was free and in need of help. Varius was almost sure that any intelligence agency worthy of the name must have learned the truth regardless, and in that case Nionian agents must already be in Roman territory, looking for her. But certainty would have been a relief.

‘Well, this is no use anyway,’ said Ziye, pulling off the headset. ‘I have been through all of these. Varius, you might as well admit you have forgotten this code. We should wait and see what Mouli can do, or concentrate on finding Liuyin.’

‘I know Zhu Li; it would be far better to talk to him direct,’ said Varius, irritated, ‘and I know I can’t be more than a couple of figures out. Unless it’s already too late to get through . . .’

He finished dialling as he spoke, and got another dead line. He gritted his teeth and rubbed between his eyes. Lal put her head down on a stack of printer paper.

‘Perhaps we should all get out of this room for a while,’ suggested Delir.

*

It was late, but the light was only just starting to leave the sky. The air-raids had grown more sporadic since June, and though Tamiathis had never been as heavily bombarded as Alexandria, Una and Lal did not get very far from the little print shop before they came to a field of rubble stretching the width of several streets. Children played stubbornly on the heaps; a few untouched palm trees were still standing here and there, and weeds were beginning to grow among the stones.

‘Here,’ said Lal, taking the letter from her pocket and holding it out, ‘you read it.’

Una took it with slight reluctance. Sulien’s letters made him seem almost more absent. The words were always like him and yet there was an opacity behind them that was not; it was unnerving to hear his voice in her head and yet be so unsure of what he was really thinking. The occasional censored lines that lay across the page like bars made it worse – it was so easy to imagine that they contained something precious, something that had been stolen from them.

This letter was very like the ones she had received herself: most of it was an impersonal chronicle of the soldiers’ training – marching, hand-to-hand, weapons training – with brief glimpses of Sulien in the reassurances that strung the letter together, that it was really not so bad. Near the end there was one small flicker of life, and a detail that was new to Una: ‘Dorion is trying to read over my shoulder now, making an idiot of himself and distracting me. Now he’s asking me about you. I’m glad you can’t hear what he’s saying. Hmm . . . right, you’re never meeting him.’

It ended, ‘Please be careful, always. Look after yourself, and look after the others when you can. You know how Aethra and Heraius can be: try not to let them get too obsessed – not that there’s much anyone can do to stop them. I do love you, Berenice.’

‘I hate that stupid name. I wish I’d never chosen it,’ said Lal. ‘And there’s been nothing since his training finished. What do I care what happened months ago in some camp? I want to know where he is
now
. All these weeks he’s been fighting somewhere, and this is all we have!’

Una wished Lal would stop radiating the thought that perhaps he was dead, had been dead all this time, with such intensity – it was hard to block it out. ‘No news is good news,’ she said, tightly.

‘Oh, Una,’ cried Lal, ‘you know how he was even before he went – he was only just starting to be himself again. Even if he— Even if nothing happens, what will he be like when he comes back? He’s already been through enough . . . he shouldn’t be out there, he just shouldn’t – what will it do to him?’ She flung her arms impulsively around Una and said, ‘He needs us— I want him back here so much!’

Una could find nothing to say in response. She could not weakly add, ‘So do I.’ She couldn’t explain that her own fear for Sulien had no such gradations, no details; it was a single, huge, solid block: she was afraid he would die. Only that; anything else she would think about when she saw him. But she and Lal sat together, side by side and silent, on a heap of fallen bricks, until an air-raid siren started to cry out into the dark blue sky.

Sulien raced along what was left of the street. There was a tiny stir at the corner of a house ahead of him, barely a dark flicker on the edge of his vision, but he registered the upward swing of the barrel of a gun and crouched behind his shield and fired. The figure darted back and Sulien launched himself into a run. Ahead of him a flight of concrete steps led up to nothing. He’d have better cover beside it; he thought he might get a clearer shot—

They had been over this ground before, they’d fought for these streets and apparently won, and yet here they were again. Sulien could picture the row of blown-out shops around the corner where the gunman was hiding, having blasted some of those buildings open himself the week before. It was only here, in the northern districts of the city, that some remnants of the Nionian forces still had any kind of foothold, and though the Romans were prising them out it was slow and repetitive and bloody. At least this was not as bad as the first time – only small-arms fire now, and not so much of it. Cerinthus and Isidorus had been hurt back in the little square a block behind them, where they’d been pinned down for almost an hour that morning, but they would live, not like poor Flaccus, blown apart by a mortar in that first assault. He had survived for several horrible minutes afterwards, out in the open where no one could get to him. Sulien thought he’d have gone mad listening to his screaming, if he hadn’t had Dorion there – Dorion, who’d been shaking with dry, gagging sobs behind their shields, but at least he was someone else to concentrate on. Sulien had kept up a desperate onslaught of talk at him – babbling about Alexandria and Rome and he hardly remembered what; it didn’t matter what anyone said at a time like that – until Flaccus fell silent and the volucers swept in. He didn’t know what he would have done if he had been able to get close to Flaccus.