Savage City (32 page)

Sulien sat down, as speechless as if he’d been winded. He put his head into his hands. Beside him Lal laid a cold hand on his arm, Delir whispered something, a fragment of a prayer. But Ziye looked at the ground in a motion like a nod, her mouth grim, and Varius was watching him with grave, unsurprised sympathy, clearly having heard this already.

He’d been in Rome for only a few hours; there were four days left until Una’s trial, and he was grateful that no one had yet tried to tell him to stop and rest. Ziye and Delir had been waiting at the cellar in the Subura. Varius had arrived shortly afterwards, Cleomenes unexpectedly with him.

Outside the cellar the dark city felt comfortably familiar, and that was jarring and awful – almost as if Rome had been waiting for them all these months, knowing they could never have got away, they would always have been forced back.

Cleomenes continued almost sheepishly: ‘Seems she was worried about there being people around, watching it happen. She said she could face it better alone.’

‘Alone,’ Sulien heard himself repeating in a low, unfamiliar voice, somehow muffled, as if he had water in his ears. ‘What do we do?’ he moaned, into the black airlessness which had knotted itself around him.

He saw Varius and Cleomenes exchange a glance, and then Varius said softly, ‘What she wants.’

Sulien started up, and then Lal was dragging on his arm, pulling him back, and Ziye was on her feet in a tense, ready stance. He was surprised; he hadn’t exactly had the idea of hitting Varius; he didn’t know what he’d been going to do. He gasped, ‘No. No. Shut up.’

‘Sulien,’ began Varius again quietly, his expression more sincere and kind than Sulien could stand.

‘No. I’m not
killing
her. She doesn’t know what she wants; she’s not in her right mind. She wasn’t even before this, you know that, you know why. Just because
you
tried . . .’

A small acknowledging flinch pulled, very briefly, across Varius’ face.

Ziye said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve seen what happens when they use arenas for executions—’

‘Don’t,’ Sulien begged her, ‘don’t tell me about that.’

‘In that situation, wouldn’t anyone want the same thing?’ asked Varius.

‘Not if they could get out.’ His voice was coming to pieces. ‘Varius, please, you said you’d help.’

Varius sighed, and looked a little less certain. ‘Look— Of course, if there’s any possible way. But if there’s not—’

‘There is! There has to be.’

‘What if we lose the chance to do even this for her? What if you both end up in the Colosseum? I can’t let that happen.’

Sulien swallowed, rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘All right, maybe we can’t get into the prison, but they’ve got to move her when the trial starts.’ He looked at Cleomenes. ‘You could find out how they’re transporting her, couldn’t you? And the route they’ll take? If we could get the van to stop somehow, I mean, if there was an accident or a crowd of people in the street—’

‘There won’t just be a van; there’ll be outriders on trirotas at the least, and they’ll all be armed,’ Cleomenes said, ‘and they won’t just lead the van into traffic and stand around scratching their heads.’

Lal said tentatively, ‘Sulien and I were thinking on the train . . . maybe we could get vigile uniforms? I’ve got some vigile passes almost finished for Varius already.’

‘How would that help? They’ll have a team already assigned to do
this; they’ll all be from the same force. A uniform isn’t going to stop people noticing you didn’t work with them yesterday.’

‘It wouldn’t have to be like that,’ Varius said, in a detached, neutral voice, frowning into space. Cleomenes looked at him, raised his eyebrows, and Varius spread his hands. ‘I’m not saying it can work, but they –
we
– wouldn’t have to pass ourselves off as part of the escort. In theory that shouldn’t be a problem.’

Ziye said, ‘But this can’t be done in four days.’

‘But we’ve got longer than that,’ protested Sulien, ‘we must have. Surely they won’t just— They won’t— Not that same day? The trial’ll go on for a little while – they’ll need to move her back and forth . . .’

‘They’ll probably keep her in the cells at the Basilica until it’s over,’ said Cleomenes

‘Well then, when it’s over, when they take her back to the prison, or . . . or to the Colosseum . . .’

Cleomenes was silent for a while, looking down at the floor. ‘All right, so somehow you stop the van,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s a driver, a couple of guards inside it. What about them?’

‘I’ll kill them,’ said Sulien at once, thickly.

Cleomenes nodded, as if this was what he’d expected to hear. ‘Suppose you can. What would that make me if I helped you do it? They’re just vigiles, they joined to try and make things a little better, like me. It’s not their fault.’

Sulien, choking on a furious attempt to answer, drew a little unexpected hope when Varius broke in heatedly, ‘If they’re taking a nineteen-year-old girl to be torn apart by dogs, I’m not worried what happens to them either.’

‘That’s not fair, you know that’s not what it’s like – what are they supposed to do?’

‘Refuse to do it,’ answered Varius. ‘You would, wouldn’t you? Why else are you here?’

‘Oh, come on – and what if they’re just taking her to court?’

Sulien said fiercely, ‘It’s the same thing and you know it.’

Delir said, ‘You can’t go around killing people in the middle of the street.’

‘But it’s all right for them to kill my sister!’ cried Sulien.

‘It’s not only a question of what’s right or wrong; I do not think it will work,’ said Delir firmly. ‘There would be too much noise, and they will have guns of their own, as Cleomenes says. We must think of something else.’

Cleomenes shuffled uncomfortably on his bench. They were all silent again.

Ziye got up and began unpacking a bedroll from inside a chest. ‘You’ll need to sleep here, won’t you?’

‘What?’ Sulien was startled; sleeping was such a distant consideration.

‘It’s late. I should get home,’ announced Cleomenes.

‘No,’ said Sulien, panic rising again, ‘please! I’m sorry if I— We can work something out if we keep going,
please
.’

‘Sulien, if there’s a way to do this, we’re not going to have it by tomorrow,’ said Varius.

‘But we’ve hardly got anywhere,’ said Sulien, feeling raw pressure building behind his eyes, and in his throat.

Ziye came close to him. ‘This is enough for now, and more than you think. I don’t think you know how tired you are.’ She put her hands on his shoulders, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. ‘You cannot make good plans or prepare yourself well in this state. You can believe me: I know something about being ready for a fight. You’ll be surprised how things can come clear, if you let them.’

Varius left shortly after Cleomenes, promising to return the next morning, promising not to stop thinking.

Delir had a little pot of sleeping pills, new, perhaps bought specially for him. Sulien only noticed after he had accepted one how Ziye and Delir had altered what must be their usual sleeping arrangements around him. Ziye had quietly taken Lal off into the other room, leaving Sulien and Delir together, Delir taking what was probably Lal’s bed. Sulien felt a flutter of guilty amusement before the pill began to work. He slid confusedly into sleep, from which he awoke in the dark, his throat raw from shouting, to find Delir crouched beside him, shaking his shoulder and lying softly, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’

Tadahito’s eye was caught by the machine-guns, fanned out into a circle, like a sun, and fixed to the wall. They were of Nionian make and though glossy, not new. He felt slightly unnerved, and yet it was encouraging too, a reminder of the foundation upon which he had come to build. They were waiting for the King.

Beside him Kaneharu sighed softly. It had been a relief to be outside, travelling down through the mountains to Harar, after three weeks in a submarine crawling across the Indian Ocean, swaddled in such boredom that it had been hard to believe that above their heads a war was still going on. But here in Independent Ethiopia, the craters in the roads and the flocks of children picking across the rubble made it feel closer, even though these were the scars of other conflicts. And it was not only the occasional battles with the Romans or with the Nobatae
or Luo that had left these scars and gouges on Harar. The kingdom had only one unshifting border, the hard line to the north where the Roman Empire cut Ethiopian lands in two. South of that line Africa might be outside the rule of any empire, but Rome’s weight still lay upon it, throttling trade and deepening the famines that had raked through the horn of Africa over the past half-century.

As the princes had travelled through the city they had seen the remains of the old Roman monuments, slowly being stripped down for building materials, which were as scarce as everything else.

The palace itself was small, and built cheaply – no marble or glass trappings here – but it was new, and extravagant in shape, with its clusters of painted domes. The Princes were waiting with their retainers in a small state room overlooking a garden of dried-out roses. The King was apparently at prayers.

Tadahito suspected this might simply be the King’s way of showing them he was not particularly keen to see them, but when at last the servants opened the door and Salomon the Sixth appeared, there was a distant look on his face that took a little time to fade away.

Marcus Kebede’s claim of descent from the old Imperial house of Axum was, in Tadahito’s view, somewhat far-fetched. The last of the dynasty had lingered on as a puppet monarchy under the Romans for centuries, but when the wave of uprisings against Roman rule in Africa had reached Ethiopia, Roman troops had taken them from the capital and probably slaughtered them; at any rate, they had never been seen again. Kebede’s claim of Solomonic blood rested on stories of secret marriages and baby princes being smuggled away by nurse-maids, but whatever the truth of his ancestry, he had emerged out of a cycle of civil wars twenty-one years before and assembled the splintered, petty kingdoms the Empire had left behind into Independent Ethiopia.

Now he was in his fifties, a short, bespectacled, thickset man. Around his neck hung a silver pendant, a complex lattice of diamond-shaped holes with a circle of rays flaring from the centre so that its shape – a cross – was scarcely recognisable.

He gestured to the servants who proffered little glasses of yellow honey-wine. He smiled. ‘Your Highnesses, I am very glad you are here,’ he said, but as the solemn, dreamy look that had lingered from his prayers faded, an uneasy combination of affability and wariness replaced it. His eyes were cool behind his small spectacles.

‘I wish we were meeting in times of peace,’ said Tadahito.

The King’s eyes tightened dubiously, and yet he leaned forward in
apparent sympathy. ‘You wasted a lot of time trying to deal with the Romans and now they’ve turned on you – they’ve as good as broken you in Siam, haven’t they? You cannot deal with them – they’re all like this, vicious, evil. This madman they have leading them now—’

Tadahito sighed, thinking of all those months of work, of Noriko. ‘Things would have been different if Leo the Younger had lived.’

‘If there was anything good in him it would have perished one way or another. Goodness dies rather easily in this world, but especially in Rome,’ said King Salomon, with an air of finality, and his fingers strayed briefly to the pendant round his neck.

They were both speaking Latin. Even now, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Romans had left, it was a first language for many Ethiopians – although the King prided himself on not being one of them, and spoke with a strong, unabashed accent that Tadahito found hard to understand at first. It was strange, Tadahito thought, to be discussing a mutual enemy in his own language.

‘Well, we hope we can strengthen the bonds between our nations,’ ventured Kaneharu, sipping cautiously at the honey-wine. They had already discovered that the sweetness masked how strong it was.

The restrained scepticism lurking in the King’s expression finally surfaced. ‘
Bonds
,’ he said. ‘You sell us weapons; we pay for them. You sell them to the Luo and to the Nobatae too. This is not a special favour, not charity; it is a normal, everyday arrangement. I am not sure there is anything here that needs to be made stronger.’

‘With our help you could unite your kingdom. You could take back Axum – the ancient capital,’ urged Tadahito. ‘And with your help we can defeat Rome.’

The King looked away. ‘Your Highnesses, let us speak plainly: you are
losing
, and if your vast Empire cannot hold itself up, I do not think my poor kingdom can support you. I am sorry for you, but not so sorry I wish to fall with you.’

‘May we show you what we propose?’ asked Tadahito, softly. One of his retainers opened a scroll case and unrolled a folding den-ga screen on which a glowing map of the world appeared.

The King lifted his eyebrows a little and Tadahito felt suddenly embarrassed. Even in Rome they did not have these flexible screens yet; it looked both gauche and ostentatious here, as if it existed only to make a point. They could have done this just as well with paper.

He put his unease to one side and continued, ‘Of course Rome’s forces are fully engaged in Tokogane and in Asia. They will not interpret a small uprising in their Ethiopian territory as a serious threat; they will expect the regional government to deal with it. We would
need you to commit Ethiopian troops, to disguise our presence here as long as possible, but we will arm them, and our Samurae forces will reinforce them. The submarine that brought us here is already inside the Gulf of Avalites; two more will arrive within days. From here Axum is within range of our missiles, and so are these cities on the coast of Arabia’ – he indicated their positions on the illuminated map – ‘and when our combined forces are poised outside Axum, we will launch them. Nothing the Romans have in the region should be adequate to defend it – or Ocelis, or Eudaemon. We will take command of the Deire Strait. We will trap Roman shipping in the Red Sea. And we will have made an incision deep into Roman territory. The Mediterranean provinces will no longer be safe from us. Egypt, Cyprus – Rome itself will not be safe.’