Savage City (65 page)

Dangerously, Sulien closed his eyes against the sight of them; for a moment he felt that if he blinked hard enough he could make the war go away, and transport himself back to any warm corner of the past, where he and Una and Marcus were safe. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently to the survivor, ‘he’s dead. Look, just put your hands up, all right? Up?’ He gestured with his gun, hoping his tone would convey enough of what he meant. Minius was still some distance behind him on the slope.

The soldier’s teeth were clenched with desperation. He was young, like all of them, amber-skinned, with a broad, bony face and a sparse moustache on his lip. His hair was tightly knotted back, like most Nionian soldiers, but Sulien had not seen anything like the pattern of blue lines tattooed onto his cheeks before. He looked past Sulien at the mass of Romans approaching with the three other Nionian soldiers prisoners their midst. He leapt to his feet, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand, but he was swinging up to his own head before Sulien had even fully registered it was there. Sulien had no doubt he meant to
do it and yet there was a moment’s incredulous hesitation before he pulled the trigger, in which Sulien read a wild, unacknowledged hope of being stopped— So he sprang forward and clubbed at the young man with his shield, knocking him to the ground and sending the gun flying. It was only then he remembered his own slowness to fire in the prison van, on the way to the Colosseum.

‘Fucking hell, sir, I almost shot you,’ said Asper, who’d cocked his own weapon the moment he saw the Nionian’s.

‘Never mind, no harm done,’ said Sulien, grimly, scooping the gun out of the soldier’s reach.

The boy moaned and crawled back to his comrade’s body. He knelt there, covering his face and rocking gently. After a moment he bent forward and touched his forehead to the dead man’s. One of the other prisoners crouched beside him and laid a hand on his back.

Sulien left an octet guarding the prisoners, and beckoned Pas and Asper to follow him. He warily pushed open the door of the station, and a shot smashed off the edge of his shield. Sulien sighed with fatigue and fired back, and was relieved to have hit the last enemy soldier in the place only with a ricochet, in the arm. After that the man mutely let them take his gun, and they pushed him outside to join the others.

A couple of electric fans were still whirring in the control room, fluttering the edges of the maps pinned to the back wall, a spatter of blood across them now. The other walls were lined with desks loaded with radio equipment. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Sulien said for the second time that day, wondering if this was a trap, and the whole place was rigged.

There was a door at the back of the room opening onto a tunnel dug into the hillside, where they found a generator room and a barracks with bunks for twenty people. They had two corpses, and four prisoners. Where were the others now?

They went back outside and looked uneasily at the huddled captives. ‘What are we going to do with them?’ asked Pas.

‘Take them back,’ said Sulien. ‘We’ll get that tower down and smash up this stuff, and then take them back with us.’ He tried to sound convinced that this was a good idea, though he didn’t know what would happen to them. Probably someone would sell them as slaves. But at least they would be alive.

And one day all the slaves would be free.

‘Take us back with you?’ repeated the tattooed soldier, in unexpected Latin, a thin, desperate note of laughter in his voice. ‘Where? Where do you have to go back to now?’

One of the other prisoners hissed something, alarmed, but the soldier could not be stopped. ‘Don’t you know your army is gone? It doesn’t matter what you do to us: we have the Surijin. Didn’t you see it, out there? We’ve won.’ He bent over the body again and moaned, ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you dead out there with the rest, where you belong?’

All around him, the Roman soldiers went still, as they thought of that quiver that had raced through the earth and into their bones. Sulien felt the faint sickness twist again in his gut. He looked at his men’s wide eyes. They were all looking at him.

He licked dry lips and adjusted the switches on his radio. ‘Ninth cohort, fourth centuria to command,’ he said, hoarsely. And said it again, and again. He turned away, because he couldn’t stand the others watching him while he pleaded, ‘Is anyone there?’

The radio hissed softly, like the sighing of dust on the plain.

‘Tomorrow that is what we will do to Rome!’ crowed the soldier on the ground, in despairing triumph. ‘Then what will you do?’

Noriko said, ‘But I lived in that city.’

She had been given strange new clothes. There had been no way of acquiring anything from Nionia in time, and no one had wanted her to arrive in Cynoto dressed like a young Roman matron, so Tadahito’s valet had arranged for local seamstresses to make dresses out of parachute silk. The neat white costume had been made to something approximating Nionian style, though lighter and simpler than anything Noriko might have worn at home. The diamond patterns at the neckline were Ethiopian. Her hair was smoothed back over her shoulders. She did not feel she looked quite Roman or Nionian, or anything else; she and Tomoe and Sakura looked like the only inhabitants of a lonely new nation.

Tadahito gave her a look of fierce, scared relief and gripped her hand, exclaiming, ‘Yes – as a prisoner, as a slave!’

‘Not when my husband was still alive.’ She supposed she had been a prisoner in a sense even then, but Marcus had been too.

Tadahito was not listening. ‘We should never have sent you there.’

Noriko remembered Drusus’ weight, both the physical horror of being forced down beneath him, and the daily burden of his presence in the palace. If Tadahito did what he said was already inevitable, then Drusus was only days away from death. But she thought of the quiet street where she had met Cleomenes, and the servants she had talked to in the palace, and she felt cold and breathless and lost.

‘Some of the people who helped me are still there,’ she said. ‘They
risked their lives for me. Cleomenes and Cominia. They have a little boy.’

Tadahito looked young and panicked. His hair was a little disordered, the knot at the back of his head askew. He said, ‘Parts of the city may be unaffected. I’m following our father’s wishes. There were children in Yuuhigawa and Aregaya too.’ The sentences clattered oddly together like misaligned tiles.

‘But this! So
many
, Tadahito!’

‘I know,’ said Tadahito miserably, ‘I know – but it will save just as many lives, in the end. People die in war, Noriko; better if it brings an end to all of this. How can I let it go on and on, when we can stop it? And then we will go home.’

Noriko seemed to wheel away from herself in a moment of vertigo. She could believe that hundreds of thousands of people, millions, even, were about to die in Rome. It was this conversation she could not believe was happening. She looked at her brother. She could not think of him as so incalculably dangerous. She felt as if the decision were a ghost, a conscious and malignant being, pushing itself into the world through Tadahito as if through a door. And through her father too, through Drusus. To get away from them all, she left the room.

There had been no need to move Varius out of the palace, for the best equipment in Axum was already there. Noriko passed two doctors, one Nionian and one Ethiopian, talking in unpractised, frustrated Latin in an anteroom as she approached the door of the medical room.

Varius was grey and motionless in the bed. Una was not there. Noriko did not look at Varius at any length; she was unnerved by the crank and whir of the machine doing the breathing for him. She already knew that the surgeons had cut a tiny splinter of shrapnel and a patch of poisoned tissue out of his back. She knew that despite this, his body’s systems were continuing to fail.

She walked on along the passage, peering into dusty, empty rooms that still looked like some forgotten part of the Golden House in Rome. She called quietly, ‘Una?’ because she could not believe Una would have gone far.

She heard a low crash somewhere over a soft mumble of machinery and hurried towards it.

A heavy door at the bottom of a small flight of stairs opened into a small laundry room. A dryer was whirring and the air was warm and crackly with dust. A bench was overturned on the floor and Una was standing over it, panting, her face running with tears.

She turned as Noriko opened the door and said wildly, ‘I can’t go on looking at him like that. I love him.’

She took a few helpless paces around the little room.

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Noriko quietly.

Una sighed, and wiped uselessly at her eyes. She managed to twist her mouth for an instant into a self-mocking smile. She said, ‘No, nor does he.’

Noriko was flicking through memories, searching for signs she had missed. Yes: Una’s agitation as she took out the stitches. Noriko wished she had known it before; she would have been pleased and hopeful, she thought, even if Varius knew nothing about it yet. And the idea of them happy together half-convinced her that there must, somehow or other, be more hope for Varius than anyone seemed to believe. She began impulsively, ‘Oh, but if he recovers—’

Una said, flatly, ‘He won’t recover,’ and then gasped and shook again. When she could speak she said, ‘I did find a longdictor, but I can’t get a line to Rome or Tamiathis or anywhere. I have to try again. But I don’t want— I can’t— Who’s going to explain this to his family?’

Noriko waited in silence while Una continued to stumble restlessly around the room. ‘I don’t understand how,’ Una muttered, ‘I always thought I’d never— And I still feel the same about Marcus—’ And Marcus’ name twisted more tears out of her. ‘Sulien could save him— Sulien’s dead, perhaps, already—’

She sat down on a crate against the wall and hugged herself, and seemed to Noriko’s eyes to dwindle to perhaps a twelve-year-old’s size. She was no longer sobbing or shaking, but tears still spilled heavily from her eyes, which were wide open and staring into an invisible distance. She whispered, ‘What can I
do
?’

‘They don’t have the right medicines here. I will take Varius back to Cynoto,’ said Noriko. ‘He will have the best possible care.’

Una looked up at her, and her wet eyes seemed unnaturally magnified. She protested, ‘But they can’t move him – it’s too dangerous—’

‘But he is in such danger already. Surely even a small chance is worthwhile.’

Finally the tears stopped, and Una said, in a clearer voice, ‘You’re right.’ But she slumped heavily against the wall ‘Then I won’t be with him,’ she murmured after a long silence. ‘I wasn’t there when Marcus died.’

She shut her eyes and looked, for a moment, as if she would never get up again. But then she did rise, and wiped hard at her wet face again before bending to right the fallen bench, then trudged out of the little laundry.

Noriko stopped her at the door of Varius’ room. ‘You must come too. Please. I can’t leave you alone here. I am sure it would be better for Varius if you stayed with him. And if . . . if the worst happens, then you must let me help you. I could find somewhere for you where at least you can have peace. I know you would never be happy at court in Nionia, but . . . perhaps I will not spend so much time at court now myself. There is a house in Yamagata, by a lake. It belonged to my mother’s family. I have not been there in years, but it is very beautiful. Very quiet. We could stay there for a while. Please think about it before you decide. Of course I know it is not what you planned. But now—’ She shuddered over the thought of what was about to happen to Rome, couldn’t put it into words. ‘I think it will all be over soon,’ she whispered.

‘It isn’t over,’ said Una. ‘No, it won’t be over.’ Her voice was nearly toneless, but it had steadied. And when she looked at Noriko she even smiled. ‘You’re so kind. And I wish you weren’t going so far away. But I promised Maralah – I promised them all. I have to go back. Whatever happens, I have to go back to my people.’

She put her arms round Noriko for a moment, and then turned and pushed open the door. Before it swung closed, Noriko saw her drop into the chair beside Varius.

Sometimes, Varius was aware of himself dying. He tried to gasp for air, horrified by the tube in his mouth, which he felt was suffocating him rather than helping him breathe. He opened his eyes and strained to keep them open, though the light stung like a slap of seawater. But he couldn’t match the huge force weighing on his eyelids, his lungs, his heart, that pushed him down into the boiling dark. He recognised it from five years before, when he had bitten down on the poison outside the Palace in Rome. He made another exhausting effort – he saw Una’s face – and he could remember how it had been back then, trying to find his way into death, like running your hands over a wall in the dark, searching for the door.

No, not now, he thought, trying to hold the door closed this time. No, I can’t. Not without even knowing.

The dust was still sinking back to earth when they reached the plain; they drove into a brown fog of it through which leafless trees and shrubs emerged like starved prisoners turned loose across the desert. Everything was the same colour.

It can’t be true, Sulien had said. Not everyone can be dead.

He’d taken Pas and Dorion with him. Back at the base in the
mountains, they had given up trying to reach anyone on the Roman side with their own radios and started experimenting with the more powerful Nionian equipment. He’d left Minius in charge, still trying.