Savage City (58 page)

Sulien’s centuria was down to forty-six men now, though most of the dead had fallen that first day, out on the plain. The octet he was leading now was a compound of two broken halves, but Pas was there, hurrying along the other side of the street with Petreius. He’d had a week’s rest in the base; his wound had, of course, healed well. He had
been sick the first time he’d shot an enemy whose face he could see, and Sulien had had to scoop him up off the rubble, and pull him along, muttering to him urgently, ‘
Later, later
.’

Now Pas and Petreius moved across the shattered paving to join him by the steps; Gavros was leading in another octet in from the east, towards the gunman’s street. Sulien’s radio buzzed: ‘We’ve got the west street covered. Are you ready to go?’

‘Confirm that,’ said Sulien, beckoning his men. The two octets probed the entrance of the street with a couple of volleys, then they closed into a solid rampart and charged forward. Bullets rattled on the roof of shields above Sulien’s head, but now the rest of the centuria were sweeping in from all points of the crossroads and the Nionian militiamen on the ground were trapped between the closing walls of the Romans’ shields.

This time their intelligence was correct, and they found the weapons cache behind a false wall in a cellar. The soldiers helped themselves to ammunition, grenades and pistols, but there wasn’t a suitable truck in the area to carry the heavier weapons, so they cleared out with their spoils and let a volucer bring down the building in another eruption of black smoke. The city air never seemed clear of it.

Sulien tried to feel some sort of satisfaction that the number of weapons in play had been reduced; they’d killed five men this morning but surely saved at least as many lives –
someone’s
life must have been saved, maybe Dorion’s, or his own, or some of the hollow-eyed women he’d seen filling buckets of water at the standpipe in Yomogiu District.

They all breathed shallowly in Aregaya, trying not to inhale the stench that enveloped the city. Everyone tried to pretend it was just the sewage that had seeped up from overwhelmed septic tanks in the east, and the uncollected rubbish in the streets. But there was that other smell laced through it, strangely mild as it entered the nostrils, before the foulness of it squeezed the back of the throat and roiled the stomach. There were bodies rotting under the rubble, and still unburied out on the plain.

They scarcely saw living civilians as they crashed in and out of deserted rooms and chased masked men from block to block. Sulien was grateful that so many of the city’s inhabitants were out of the way of their guns and grenades, but their absence seemed as quietly accusatory as the expressionless looks or forced smiles they met in the few markets and shops that were still opening. Sometimes the tidiness of a bedroom with a smashed-in door or the rows of little indoors slippers in the school they were using as a barracks were almost as bad as the terrified family they found cowering under a
table and the shouting mothers carrying bloodied children to the hospital.

Sulien hoped they’d move out of the city soon.

After the raid, the remains of Sulien’s centuria returned to the base. A few of the men began throwing a ball around the schoolyard while Sulien sat on the steps of the little temple at the heart of the compound, spraying a coating of silicon finish onto his battered shield.

Gracilis, one of the senior centurions of the cohort, approached Sulien. ‘Private Archias?’

Sulien jumped to his feet. ‘Sir.’

‘You’re fourth centuria, yes? The decanus of your octet?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The centurion squinted at him, and rubbed wearily at the flaking sunburn on his forehead. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-one,’ Sulien said, automatically telling the truth, and then worried he’d made a mistake – he couldn’t remember the right answer for ‘Archias’. Some of the identity papers Lal had given him made him a year or two older or younger.

Gracilis sighed and grimaced in apparent dejection, which unsettled Sulien further. ‘Right,’ he said heavily, ‘you can read, can’t you?’

Bewildered, Sulien nodded.

‘And you led an assault on a gun emplacement out at the west junction.’

‘Well— I— Sort of, sir.’ It was difficult to think very clearly about anything he’d done that day, though not because he’d forgotten anything. The memories were sharp and bright: he remembered surging out of the crater and across the sand, hurling the grenade, and yet he felt as if he’d never had any real choice, never been any less helpless than when twirling downwards under his parachute. The battle had simply happened, like a tide, tossing around the thousands of Roman and Nionian men on the plain like pebbles. Saving Pas had been the only decision that seemed to have been his to make.

‘Yes,’ he finished, when he realised this vagueness wasn’t adequate.

Gracilis looked irritated. ‘Take command of your centuria, then.’

Sulien gaped. ‘What, sir?’ For a moment he really expected Gracilis to laugh or realise he’d made a mistake. ‘But I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.’

‘Somebody’s got to do it,’ said the centurion, with a sour smile. ‘And the ninth cohort’s rather short of likely candidates, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Your centuria – there are only – what, forty of you left?’

‘Forty-six – but there’ll be replacements coming,’ said Sulien, ‘won’t there?’

Gracilis stared at him, then blinked, revealing a great depth of fatigue. He patted Sulien bleakly on the arm. ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant.’

‘“Lieutenant”—!’ protested Sulien.

‘That’ll be your formal rank; but of course you’ll be acting as centurion until replacements get here,’ remarked Gracilis, with another ironic twitch of an eyebrow, and walked off.

Sulien took one stride down the steps in an astounded impulse to go and tell Pas or Dorion, which almost instantly shrivelled into dread of telling anyone. Instead he sat down again and resumed applying the silicon coating as if nothing had happened, except that he buffed the shield with ferocious energy and his teeth were gritted against a surge of heat that came rushing into his face. He wondered if he could have got Gracilis to make the announcement for him – no, he supposed that must be his first job – but how was he supposed to do it? He felt idiotic even thinking about it. He wondered if they would laugh at him, and then thought that with almost half the centuria already dead it wasn’t funny.

It barely mattered who was in command now – that was the point. Sulien laid down the shield on the steps. A whole centuria of raw recruits: a single shovelful of fuel, hurled into the army’s engine. They were there to carry the campaign forward a little way as they were consumed, not to survive. They were half-spent already. That was why he would do.

The ball sailed over towards the temple steps and one of the boys yelled, ‘Shouter!’ and Sulien got up to kick it back to them, then stood watching them as they resumed play. Someone had accepted their deaths already. He didn’t like the idea of taking responsibility for any group larger than an octet, and he didn’t expect to be very good at it, but at least he had not, would not do that.

He came down the steps towards the other soldiers. ‘Petreius,’ he said, ‘tell the other decani I need to see them here. I’ve got some news.’

Varius heard the air-raid siren from across the city. He’d been visiting Phanias, one of the leaders of the local recruits. The Tamiathis effort needed more money, and they were struggling to cope with an unexpected influx of volunteers.

Like Varius, Phanias had never been a slave. He was a reticent, anonymous little accountant in his fifties who was invisibly seething with violent disgust at the war. He had a conscripted son in Alodia.
‘It’s been building ever since Patara,’ he told Varius, ‘but I think it’s Sina too.’

‘I think so too. People are getting sick of this war now.’

‘It’s good, I know, but it’s getting hard to check everyone out properly – and harder to keep them quiet. It worries me how easily some of them are finding us.’

‘Then it might be time we go out of business in Tamiathis,’ said Varius. ‘Tell the leaders to get their groups together. Una can come and speak to them all; she’ll know if we need to worry about any of them. And we’ll start moving them north over the next ten days.’

He was heading back when the sirens sounded. Ahead of him a pair of women walking together and a man carrying a briefcase quickened their pace and Varius too began to walk faster, calculating he probably did not need to look for shelter yet, could probably get back to Delir and Ziye’s if he hurried.

The sky was a deep indigo tonight, veined with light where flares broke across it. There were only a few aircraft up there; compared with the long, methodical poundings Alexandria had taken, this attack felt almost offhand, a casual sweep across the city, leaving great tracts of air and ground untouched.

But it was coming close: there was a familiar shudder in the ground, and someone ran past him. Varius glanced upwards irritably, wondering whether he would do better to try to make his way back to Phanias’ building or to keep going, following the few other people in the street who looked as if they knew where the nearest bomb shelter was.

He ran with the rest. He felt the air churn and twist, and shrapnel clattered on the road behind him. He ducked closer to the wall as someone started shouting, ‘Get under here, under here!’ and he saw there was an office block just a little way ahead with steps running up to a raised entrance; the women were already cowering underneath them. But the howling swept in towards him and the tremors drilled through his body. Oh, I don’t have time for this, Varius thought crossly, before the roar overtook him, a blast of pressure slammed him to the ground, and something tore across his back as he fell.

Everything continued to boom and shake around him. There was a roar of falling bricks somewhere nearby, and he covered his head, but the collapse must have happened in the next street, for nothing else struck him. Varius lay still for another moment, breathless and dazed, waiting apprehensively for his body to make sense of what had happened to it.

He lifted his head, and the pain bit hard enough to make him gasp, but he could move, and he wasn’t losing consciousness. There was
another boom, further away, and a high chorus of car and fire alarms filled the air as the bombers receded. Varius struggled to push himself up onto bruised knees, and someone came running from the office block steps to help him: the man who’d been carrying the briefcase. There was a woman, too, who slung Varius’ arm over her shoulders, and between them they dragged him towards the shelter of the steps.

‘I’m all right, I can stand up,’ he said, feeling a little better now he was upright. Someone was screaming behind them, further along the street, and Varius looked back to see someone lying motionless on the ground, and another figure reeling about, shrieking. The man leaned Varius against the steps, patted his shoulder, then raced off towards them. Varius watched, impressed. He couldn’t bring himself to go and help, and he wondered if he was being unnecessarily feeble. He wasn’t in so much pain, and didn’t think he was even bleeding all that seriously.

‘Someone’s calling an ambulance,’ the woman assured him, mopping inexpertly at his back with someone’s scarf.

Varius nodded, but didn’t say anything. He was fairly sure he didn’t need one, and was hoping for a chance to slip away before he drew any more attention to himself. He twisted, gingerly, and put a hand to his back. Blood coated his palm and he pulled his hand away sharply. It was too dark to see anything else, even if he’d been able to look at the wounds.

The woman left him and ran after the businessman towards the fallen figure. Varius rested a little longer, trying to gather his strength to start walking. He found he was slightly dizzy after all, but he decided it was probably from the impact of the fall rather than whatever was wrong with his back, and it didn’t seem to be getting worse, so he straightened, and set off back towards Phanias’ house.

It couldn’t be more than half a mile; he’d barely noticed the walk just minutes ago. By the time he’d turned the corner into the next street he was hobbling like an old man; the gashes like a weight strapped to his back. He could feel them flex and pull with each step, the fabric of his tunic dragging stickily at patches of drying blood. He had to stop and prop himself against a wall, panting as the torn flesh throbbed, an ugly muddle of cold and heat. Wandering off by himself seemed less than clever now, and Varius looked around for a public longdictor, though he was sure he hadn’t seen one on the way out, and all he could see were shuttered shops. He swore under his breath, because this was such a stupid thing to happen, such an annoying waste of time.

He groaned and limped on, hoping no one would notice the blood, or
how awkwardly he was walking – if Phanias was right and their operations here were pushing too close to the surface, then this was a dangerous place to make himself conspicuous. But it was not only that; he felt oddly embarrassed by his injuries. There was something unseemly about being out in public in this state.

Phanias’ house was still there. Varius had begun to worry that it might have been hit. He rang the bell and leaned against the little portico, resisting the temptation to close his eyes. Phanias opened the door and exclaimed in shock.

‘Shrapnel,’ said Varius, a little shakily, ‘but I think it’s just . . . cuts. Not deep.’

Phanias hauled him into the small kitchen, sat him on a stool and sucked his teeth discouragingly as he inspected his back. Varius noticed the spattered trail of red blots he was leaving on the tiles and felt again, pointlessly embarrassed.