Savage City (61 page)

Evadne would not be home yet; she worked across the bay at the desalination plant. Her little house was a square, stark white block on the cliff top, its shabbiness bleached away in the downpour of sunlight. There was a garden beside it planted with onions and melons, and a sapling date palm. Tomoe was weeding while Sakura sat in the shade of the house, a radio on the step beside her. Noriko glanced at the garden with pride, because they had worked on it every day for the past week and in even that short time they had made it larger and better. There were still limits to where they could safely go and what they could do, but they had been able to do that, and Evadne might make a little extra money selling some of the produce next year, if she was still there.

Noriko’s smile faded a little, as she considered everything that might prevent that. Every morning and evening Evadne crossed the bay in a little boat, part of the secret navy, whose battered flagship Una and Varius had just sailed into the cove.

‘Evadne says you’re almost ready – you almost have enough people,’ whispered Maralah to Una and Varius.

‘More than I hoped for,’ said Una. ‘We still have to find out if it’s enough.’

They could scarcely all fit into the little house, so they gathered in the shade outside with Sakura, listening to the radio.

‘The warships responsible for the recent attacks on the Eternal City
of Rome have been sunk in the Mediterranean, the Department of Information revealed today,’ said a stern male voice. ‘A spokesman for the Emperor praised the resilience of the citizens of Rome and urged them to remain steadfast. We will not be cowed . . .’

The mood of cheerful reunion evaporated. Una watched Varius, who was leaning against the whitewashed wall, his face set in that look of neutral attention that she knew was just as likely to indicate dread as real calm. Sometimes she could feel them both thinking the same things, even though she tried not to.

There had been rumours for weeks that Nionian ships had finally broken in the through the Strait of Gaditanum, that hovercraft were skimming north across the Petraean Peninsula, that a submarine had made it through the Pharaonic Canal. They never trusted the news until someone they knew confirmed it, but it was probably true that the ships had been destroyed – they wouldn’t last long in the Mediterranean, even now. The strikes could not have been that heavy, not compared with what Alexandria had endured, but bombs were finally falling on Rome. Varius’ parents were there, he hadn’t seen or spoken to them in more than a year.

‘Has anyone heard,’ asked Varius, ‘which areas of Rome . . .?’

Tomoe looked up. ‘They say Janiculum, Vatican, Aventine.’

Varius sighed.

‘We can call Cleomenes,’ Una murmured to him. ‘He’ll be able to find out about your family.’

‘If he’s alive himself,’ said Varius flatly.

They could not call him yet; they were waiting for Delir to call with instructions from the Nionians, or for contact from the Nionian agents themselves.

‘I wonder,’ said Noriko in a low, reluctant voice, ‘if the reason this is happening now . . . If, as long as my brother knew I was in Rome . . .’

She was guiltily hoping someone would contradict the idea, but Una only gave her a bleak look and said, ‘We need to see him.’

Evadne arrived and distracted them from the longdictor and the radio, lifting the despondent atmosphere. She had been a housekeeper to a wealthy family in Sabratha, freed as she reached the end of her childbearing years, with a fairly generous gift of money, but her four children were still slaves. One girl was still serving the same family; she didn’t know where the others were.

Nevertheless she was firmly, purposefully cheerful. ‘I saw your yacht in the cove,’ she said to Una and Varius. ‘Almost time now.’

She began cooking, with Noriko helping, her eyes streaming as she clumsily, doggedly, chopped an onion. Evadne opened a drawer
and twitched aside a cloth to show a gun lying among the spoons. ‘I have been teaching Maralah this too.’

Maralah nodded fiercely again. ‘I know there might not be much time left,’ she said, ‘but I will be ready, I promise.’

‘I think you’re ready,’ said Una, carefully. ‘You matter much more than the gun.’

Maralah did not smile, she never did, but her eyes widened a little and a gratified quiver ran over her face.

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Evadne, covering the gun again and patting Maralah’s arm. She grinned at Varius. ‘Look at this place: six women and just you! I should have brought Thraso and Elius, but we would all be sitting in each other’s laps. How outnumbered you must feel.’

‘It’s tough,’ agreed Varius, smiling.

They were crammed in wherever they could find space to sit down, eating the spicy vegetable stew, when at last the longdictor sounded. Varius was closest, and snatched up the circlet. ‘Is this a bad time to call?’ inquired a tense, faintly accented voice.

They’d suggested the code and countersign to Zhu Li. ‘Not bad, just late,’ Varius replied.

‘Let me speak to the Princess at once,’ demanded the voice fiercely.

‘We haven’t kidnapped her,’ said Varius, a little irritated.

He handed the longdictor to Noriko, who hastily finished her mouthful before answering in Nionian.

Una and Varius waited, tense, unable to understand what was being said. Noriko gestured for a pen and paper and Evadne seemed to rummage through every drawer and box in the tiny house, trying to find them for her.

Noriko anxiously twisted a strand of her tangled hair as she talked, until at last she switched off the longdictor and showed the set of coordinates she’d taken down. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘tomorrow night. They say it is past a town called Pharusium and then away from the road into the desert. They will find us there; they have a hidden volucer to take us across the lines.’ Her face brightened in slow, incredulous happiness. ‘My brothers are waiting,’ she said softly.

‘That’s a long way,’ said Evadne as Varius cleared a space among the dishes to unfold the map. ‘The girls’ll have to pass as slaves again.’

Una knew that would have to mean her too; it was better, if they had to explain themselves, that they fitted into two distinct categories. Evadne would have to accompany them into the Libyan desert; she and Varius could be business partners transporting four slave girls. She nodded. It was only one day, and they might well not be stopped at all; certainly no elaborate pretence would be required.

It was strange to think it how long it had been since she had actually been owned by anyone. She glanced at Maralah, for whom it had been just over a fortnight, the exultation and rage and numbness still raw. She could hardly believe that five years of freedom, however limited and fragile, separated them. Five years was not enough time to get used to it, she thought. Her own freedwoman’s rights had been taken away, and she had been unsurprised. But in the possible world that lay beyond Drusus, beyond the end of the war . . . She caught Maralah’s eye, and smiled at her.

And yet the journey ahead frightened her. Partly it was the thought of the desert itself – the heat here at its northern edge, by the sea, was at the limit of what she could stand, and it was late August, and Pharusium was more than three hundred miles further south. But it was also that Maralah was right, Evadne was right: it was almost time, and this drive into the heat was the beginning of the attempt, and they were doing it without Sulien.

‘You will come back, won’t you?’ Maralah asked her, suddenly, quietly. ‘You won’t leave us – you won’t go off and live in Nionia or somewhere?’

‘Of course I’ll come back,’ Una said, taken aback. ‘Well—I can’t promise we won’t get caught on the road, or shot down over Nubia, but if I’m alive I’ll come back.’

Maralah nodded, but her eyes slid away. ‘You’ve got friends on their side – the princess. And after everything – the arena, and everything – I could imagine you might just want to be safe.’

‘I won’t. We won’t,’ said Una, a little concerned that she had allowed herself to look too tired, too afraid or weak. She lifted her head, setting her jaw.

Varius managed to get a call through to Cleomenes. He and his family were safe, and he promised that he’d check on Varius’ parents – but it might take a day or two for the answer to come back, and they couldn’t wait.

Varius sat in silence by the longdictor for a while. Then he sighed and looked across the map at Una. ‘Well, what do you think? Get off the road and sneak across the border, or bluff it out at the crossing?’

‘Your stitches have to come out before we go anywhere,’ Una said sharply.

Varius was a little startled. ‘Oh. I suppose so. I hadn’t thought about that.’

Una folded her lips. She had known it was more on her mind than his, and felt a small glow of annoyance with him. It was a perversely
comforting, straightforward feeling. ‘No. You hadn’t. And they should have come out yesterday or the day before, really.’

If he’d thought of it himself, he might have asked Evadne to do it, but now it would have to be her. Delir should have come, she thought. He could have done it. Sulien should be here, and then it wouldn’t need doing at all.

‘Let’s get it over with then,’ she said impatiently.

‘The light’s best outside,’ said Evadne as she poured boiling water over the smallest pair of scissors she had.

Una looked away for a second while Varius pulled off his tunic and sat down, and then she shook her head at herself and dragged up another stool behind him.

Noriko hovered, looking over Una’s shoulder at the wounds, sombre. ‘I didn’t know you were hurt,’ she said.

Varius looked up in an attempt at a shrug that ended in a wince, as Una made the first snip and pulled at the threads. ‘It’s nothing bad.’

‘But that was a bomb?’

Varius nodded – then tried to hold back a growl as another thread snagged as it pulled through the skin. Una murmured ‘Sorry,’ and laid a concerned hand flat on his bare shoulder. She lifted it away as soon as she realised she’d done it, but a jarring charge of unwanted happiness had already run along her nerves at the contact of his skin against hers. She gritted her teeth and went back to work with even greater care, though she was already working so delicately that she had to stifle little tremors of effort in her hands.

Noriko went back inside, not wanting to disturb Una, and as she found a quicker, surer rhythm, the rest of the first line of stitches came out more easily, Varius scarcely flinched and Una relaxed slightly. Neither of them spoke. But even though she touched him as sparingly as she could, still her fingertips picked up little specks of feeling, like motes of dust drifting through a shaft of light. She could almost persuade herself it was just a chance tangle of friendship and loss and the memory of the hours he’d been missing in Tamiathis . . .

She moved the scissors to the longer, twisted seam at the base of his ribs, where the little dark knots were cruder and deeper. Varius drew a breath through his teeth and she could feel him tensing against each tug. A little blood trickled over his skin, distressing her more than even she thought was reasonable.

‘It’s all right,’ said Varius, because she’d stopped. His voice was only a little roughened. ‘You’re doing fine.’

But it wasn’t right, she thought. He turned his head to smile at her, and she looked back, stinging with strange helplessness, the scissors
hanging loose in her hand. The sun was low in the sky now, but still raking hot gold light across the cliffs, skimming and trembling through Evadne’s garden, breaking into slices of bright and dark in the fronds of the date palm, and all the light seemed to curve and gather round him, concentric to him. He was the one real, stable thing left. But he was bleeding, and another swell of chaos might carry him away from her at any moment.

‘Do you want me to take over?’ asked Evadne, watching from the doorway.

Una rose to her feet. ‘Yes.’

‘Why do we always get these jobs?’ complained Dorion. ‘Running out into the middle of nowhere on our own.’

‘Because he asks for them,’ Pas answered.

‘You hate us, do you, Archias? You want us to suffer?’ said Dorion dolefully. ‘Sir,’ he corrected himself.

‘Hate you? After all I do for you?’ Sulien said. And it was true, he was doing this for them: for at least a day they were away from the Onager, no longer part of the current carrying the Roman Army north. Ahead of their advance the bulk of the Nionian forces continued to melt back into the hills, leaving empty mining towns and deserted farms behind them, while small, agile assault teams goaded the Romans’ western flank, prodding them eastwards, and volleys of gunfire lashed at their volucers from the mountains that divided Enkono from Sorasanmyaku. There was something up there, the air reports said, a radio post hidden among the trees, directing attacks.

Sulien had volunteered to take his men and try to find the place as soon as he heard about it. Aesius, the cohort commander, had said, ‘It’s not worth detaching a whole centuria.’

‘Sir,’ Sulien had replied grimly, ‘we’re
not
a whole centuria.’ They were down to forty-three men now, after Astylus and Nelius had been killed in an ambush, and Merenda had been invalided back to Aregaya. Sulien still had nightmares – not unusual; now someone had to be thumped awake to stop him shouting whenever they managed to sleep – but he didn’t know when he’d stopped seeing the hounds, or Una dead; his dreams were full of the same explosions and blown-off limbs as everyone else’s.