Savage City (69 page)

Una was waiting on the steps above the courtyard, her hair whipped about by the downblast from the wings. Her face was upturned, her body rigid with urgency and tension. But Sulien released a breath and, just for a moment, let himself sink comfortably into the seat. She would not look like that if Varius had just died.

Flinching a little at the sight of the huge, ugly cross standing for some unfathomable reason outside the palace gates, he jumped down onto the paving before the volucer was fully settled on the ground and ran up the steps to Una. She did not take a step towards him; she remained fixed in place, waiting, too gripped with expectation to move, but as he reached her at last she lifted her arms with a stifled cry.

Her bones seemed to click and grate when he put his arms around her, as if over these last months they had been shaken or dragged a little out of true, but she held onto him with almost bruising strength, then pulled back and stared at him, speechless but dry-eyed, while Sulien was crying again a little, barely noticing it.

‘Varius,’ he said, and Una led him into the palace at a run.

Something had changed, and it worried Varius that he couldn’t make out what it was. His throat felt scraped and sore – something had been pulled out of it. There was still a stripe of pain along his back. His lips were cracked and dry. There was a reason for these things, almost in reach, but there was something else that was more urgent, something harder to understand, and yet simpler,
better
. . .

He drew in a soft, easy breath, and the air felt clear and rich as music as it filled his lungs. And then it occurred to him that the last thing he had known was that that he had been battering out his strength against the vast weight piled on him, and now it was gone. He seemed to float incredulously above the place where it had held him down.

He might almost have thought he had died, that this was what it was like, except that when he moved, he could still feel the residue of pain, diffused through his muscles. And someone was holding his hand, and had been for a long time. Varius rediscovered the light pressure of cool fingers folded round his with drowsy happiness. He remembered, dimly, how hard he’d had to work for each heartbeat; it had been so good to feel that someone was there.

He opened his eyes, and saw Una standing over him with a tall,
tired, sunbeaten young soldier in a dusty uniform beside her. Both of them were staring at him as if he were doing something remarkable.

Varius smiled vaguely at them both and found his eyelids sliding shut again.

Then he realised who he’d seen, and without quite being able to open his eyes again, he smiled more broadly and said, ‘You’re alive.’

They both laughed. Sulien said, ‘Well, you were the idiot who forgot how to breathe.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Varius said peaceably, and they laughed again, though when he lifted his eyelids again he saw how Una’s smile kept falling apart.

‘Don’t say sorry,’ she said, ‘just don’t do that again, ever—’

It was Una’s hand holding his, of course. Varius was not at all surprised by this, and yet he stared at her with calm wonder, hardly knowing why, until at last she blinked nervously and looked away. He tightened his own fingers on hers.

His jaw was rough with stubble, snagging on the pillow when he turned his head. ‘What day is it?’ he asked, and then lifted his head sharply, horrified. ‘Rome—’

‘It hasn’t happened,’ said Una quickly. ‘Sulien stopped it. Sulien and Noriko.’

‘How?’ asked Varius, and looked back to Sulien. The burst of shocked energy had been too sudden, and exhaustion welled back as it lagged away. He croaked, ‘How are you here?’

And they began telling him, and Varius was frustrated when he realised there was nothing he could do to keep himself from falling asleep before he had understood anything after Sulien began, ‘We were in the desert . . .’

Una and Sulien went into one of the ante-rooms further down the passage. Except for the small laundry room that Una had run to three days before, there was nowhere more private to go; there was a bedroom for her somewhere in the palace, but she had never let anyone show her the way there and didn’t know where it was.

She tried to say something, but it collapsed into a sigh and she sagged against a wall and let herself slide down it until she was sitting on the polished floor. Sulien ignored the bloated velvet furniture and sat down cross-legged in front of her. They did nothing but look at each other with rickety smiles that ached and shouldn’t have lasted, but somehow held up.

Sulien said, ‘You look more tired than him
or
me.’ Una’s hair was
matted, her skin dull. There were bruise-coloured bulges under her eyes.

‘You haven’t looked in a mirror yet then,’ said Una. Her nose twitched with a tired pretence of disapproval. ‘And you need a bath.’

‘You’re hardly one to talk, you know.’

Una exhaled a silent laugh, and then slumped even more heavily. She rubbed a hand over her face and resumed gazing at him, the ripple of the smile gone now, only the tiredness and sadness clear as glass beneath. ‘Oh, Sulien—’ was all she could say for a long time. And then, very quietly, ‘I wish you’d never had to go.’

‘But I did have to, didn’t I?’ Sulien closed his eyes as every spurt of gunfire and blood, the scream of the Onager and the fields of the dead jarred through him. And he thought of his last sight of his men, being marched away along the valley, and took a heavy breath full of his promise to bring them all home. And he looked at Una and could tell she had felt at least some of this; she was leaning towards him, her eyes wide and black and, for her, unusually soft. ‘I wish it had never happened,’ he said, with a little thump of his fist against the marble floor, ‘of course I wish that. But since it did, I don’t think I’m sorry I was there.’

But he could not quite say he was certain he was not sorry. And Una did not look as if she could agree, but she nodded.

He changed the subject. ‘How many people have you got now?’

Una smiled again, a cracked little fragment of a thing at first, but it built, steadied. She answered, ‘Two thousand and seventeen.’

Sulien grinned back. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that sounds like enough.’

The sun was setting in flags of red and blue cloud above the roofs of Axum. In the palace courtyard the volucer’s wings were already turning, stirring up a warm breeze.

‘You are sure you refuse my help?’ Tadahito said. He’d offered money, weapons, even aircraft.

Una said carefully, ‘You have helped us as much as we could ever ask, and we’re grateful. But we can’t take anything like that from you. If we let you pay for what we’re trying to do, Nionia would own it – we’d be fighting the war for you. We can’t do that. It has to be Roman.’

Tadahito looked unhappy, afraid he was making a mistake, and aware his part in this leave-taking was awkward. The Surijin’s cry hung silently in the air. Sulien and Pas were just as uneasy – they were fastidiously courteous and thankful, but they avoided looking at him when they could. They were still both dressed in their uniform, among the Nionian soldiers and the standing guard around the courtyard.
There was still the memory of what they’d seen; there was still the threat.

You have a week, Tadahito had said. That’s all I can promise you, or Rome. By then events will have moved on and I will have to respond.

There was no time for the rest they all needed. Well, we’ll rest on the volucer, thought Una; we’ll rest after this is done. Only a day had passed since Sulien’s return, and Varius should have spent at least another day in bed – at least, aside from a few experimental walks up and down the corridor, Sulien had been able to convince him to stay there, until it was absolutely necessary to leave.

Still, just to see him on his feet, or making hurried calls, to Delir, Evadne, Theon and Praxinoa, made her dazed with relief, even if he still swayed sometimes, or subtly propped himself against columns or furniture. She kept herself out of his thoughts, but she could feel the course of them, moving with a clear, busy strength his body hadn’t quite regained yet. But it wasn’t enough; she kept wanting to touch him to be sure he was really there, and struggled not to extend any accidental brush of their hands.

Now he was leaning against the courtyard wall. Una, exasperated at herself for needing to do it, was rationing how often she allowed herself to look at him, but she was keenly aware of how he was standing, the exact placing of his right hand on the dark red stone.

She did not quite allow herself to notice that it was harder than ever to keep the blare of feeling turned down low because she was more hopeful, less guilty. It amazed her that he and everyone else could not hear it.

Noriko was standing with Tomoe and Sakura, her face as clear and serene as if the war were already over. Una smiled at her, sadly, because despite all the difficulty of bringing her here, she was sorry that Noriko could not come back with them across Nubia, and into the fight that was coming. They reached for each other’s hands.

‘Good luck,’ said Noriko.

‘I’ll write to you.’

Noriko smiled. ‘That’s not enough,’ she said. ‘When this is over, come and visit me.’

Lal set up a line of bottles out on the sand at the furthest extent of the headlights, crouched just in front of the car’s wheels, and commenced shooting. They had one gun between the three of them, and either she or Delir would be carrying it – Ziye had made it clear it would not be her. Delir, who had turned out to be a reasonable shot himself,
flinched whenever Lal fired a round, but he was equally unhappy at the idea of her being unarmed.

‘You can’t see what you’re doing in this light,’ he said for want of a better reason to tell her to stop, despite the fact that she had hit three of the bottles already.

‘It’ll be dark on the night too,’ Ziye remarked.

‘I don’t like doing it either,’ muttered Lal irritably. It was true; the gun frightened her. But the very act of forcing her fingers steady so that she could squeeze the trigger and the kick of the weapon as she fired relieved some of the dark twists of pressure within her.

They had been waiting for more than an hour on this empty stretch of road and she was seething with impatience and excitement, and yet, though she could hardly understand the feeling, she was afraid of meeting Sulien too, even after all these red-raw months of missing him. There was part of her that wished she could simply take the knowledge he was safe and escape with it somewhere, into peace. I won’t be able to bear it, she thought. The story Varius had told Delir of Sulien’s return was too much, the wonder of it inflating the heated spaces in her brain already full of him. She wished his arrival could be more ordinary, to leave her a little more space to think and breathe. If she looked at him and saw that those blank patches in his gaze at her and in his letters had grown—

I want to think about guns and ships and identity papers and the paintings I’m going to do when all this is over, she thought sullenly, exploding a fourth bottle.

‘It’s a pity you don’t like it, really,’ mused Ziye, watching her calmly from her perch on a camp-stool by the car. ‘You’re good at it.’

‘You’re good at beating people up with your bare hands, but you don’t like doing it either,’ said Lal.

‘Not any more,’ Ziye agreed equably.

‘I can see them!’ Delir cried.

Lal sprang to her feet. Four people were coming up the track: Una, Varius, a slight, dark boy she didn’t know in Roman uniform, and— And there was Sulien, and her heart surged up, carved a trail of light through her like a firework. The weight of hundreds or thousands of bloody injuries even he could not repair fell away from her imagination; he was whole, perfect, and he looked overjoyed to see her.

He strode ahead of the others towards her and for an instant she thought,
Don’t
—

But then he took hold of her and swept her into a kiss, and he tasted of bruised sand and hot sky, and she forgot what had been worrying
her. She loved him; all she had needed was for him to come back, for all six of them to be together. She laughed.

She had always found it difficult to picture him in uniform with his hair cropped; the thought of it had felt like a disfigurement; she was startled now at how natural it looked in reality.

‘This is Berenice,’ Sulien said to the other soldier, but before she had time to scowl at the name, he finished, ‘Lal, this is Pas.’

Delir patted Pas on the shoulder. He looked shy and overwhelmed in the midst of the noisy reunion happening around him. Delir was indignant when he heard how ill Varius had been, and shook his head in reproof. ‘I should have gone instead; I knew you weren’t well enough,’ he muttered.

‘I think I’d had it, wherever I was,’ said Varius cheerfully. ‘Hadn’t I, Sulien?’

Even with so much of her attention hopelessly tangled around Sulien, Lal noticed at once the look that spilled from Una when Varius’ back was turned. She was startled. Were the others tactfully pretending they didn’t see, or—? No, they really did not.

As they climbed into the car she twitched an eyebrow at Una. Una was silently horrified. Lal impressed herself with her own restraint in saying nothing.

It was almost dawn by the time they reached Tamiathis.

‘If I could just tell my mother I’m safe,’ murmured Pas, hesitantly. ‘She’s only forty miles away. I can’t believe that— I can’t believe I’m here.’