Savage City (66 page)

Sulien slowed the truck because it seemed that slow mounds had sprouted like knee-high molehills across the ground ahead, littering the surface of the road. He wondered for a moment how the Surijin had had that effect, and then saw the soft, grass-like clumps of hair, the hard curve of horn, and realised that the hillocks were the bodies of bufali, painted into the landscape by the dust.

He braked. ‘I don’t know if I can—’ he began, and stopped. They hadn’t spoken in a long time; it was as if he couldn’t remember how. He let his head droop forwards, put up a hand to cover his shut eyes. ‘Do we have to see this?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘Do we have to see this too?’

Neither Pas nor Dorion answered for a long time, though Dorion slung an arm round him and pressed his forehead against his shoulder.

‘We’ve come this far,’ said Pas at last, hollowly. ‘And there might be someone left. Maybe in the hills.’

Sulien sighed and pushed the truck on, slowly, into the haze of dust, trying to weave around the dead bufali, though he rolled over at least one of them.

It turned out there were only a few more miles to go.

On the road to the mountains, and in the pine valley before the battle, there had been at least the constant buzz and chirp of insects. He only realised it now that even that sound was gone.

The bodies looked as if they had been modelled out of the dust that covered them, or as if they were growing out of it like roots. It was like a preliminary burial, both kind and ruthless: blurring away pain and identity – the contours of faces and hands strangely meaningless without colour. There were a few hundred, here at the back of the convoy. No one seemed to have had time even to try to run, like the refugees on the road from Aregaya. He might have been able to guess more about how they had died if he had looked more closely, but he didn’t.

Some of the trucks had crashed and overturned, of course; something had caught fire and burned itself out, leaving a faint scent of smoke in the air. But it was strange how intact so many the vehicles were. Nearer the front of the convoy, some tyres had burst and a few windscreens were cracked, but not all of them. Inside, the bodies were bare of the covering of dust. Sulien glimpsed blood through a window and at that he stopped the truck.

Pas was crying. Sulien hugged him for a while in silence then opened
the door and swung himself up onto the roof of the cab. He didn’t want to step down onto this ground.

He had a better view up here than he’d wanted. He turned dizzy, swayed a little. He dragged off his helmet, which now seemed pointless, let it fall, and sat down. He started to think of Gracilis, of the boys he’d watched playing pelota, but every thought tripped and interrupted itself and ended in the same moan:
I can’t, I can’t
.

Dorion climbed up to join him, then Pas. They huddled close to each other, the only three living things for miles.

‘Round those hills . . .’ suggested Dorion hopelessly. ‘The other legions . . .’

Sulien shook his head. ‘If there was anyone, they’d be here.’

He didn’t know what he would have done, how he would have been able to go on breathing if he hadn’t been able to feel somebody else doing it, if somebody’s back hadn’t been warm against his side. And yet he felt frightened of what the other two might say. Please, he thought, don’t ask me what we should do now.

But neither of them did. Dorion said, ‘And they’re going to do this to Rome?’ speaking quietly and weakly and with as little expression as if they were talking about some successful public works project.

‘He said that,’ Sulien answered, in the same slow helplessly neutral tone.

‘I never really thought that could happen.’

‘No,’ agreed Sulien. After a minute or so he added, ‘I lived there.’

‘In Rome? I thought you were from Alex?’

‘I lived in Rome before that.’ He closed his eyes. ‘A while ago.’

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Dorion.

Sulien shuddered as people he knew in Rome began to crowd into his mind as if for shelter there: everyone at the clinic, everyone in his old building, Tancorix and all the singers and actors he knew through her. Tancorix and Cleomenes both had children . . . and again the line of thought cut out. He lay down on the warm metal roof, as if in imitation of all the soldiers on the ground. The dust was trying to blend them in with the rest; he could feel it settling over them; once he wiped a hand across his face and it came away filthy. He didn’t feel as if they would ever move, or anyone would ever find them here.

And still some idiotic part of himself that insisted on ignoring what was around them chirped,
But this can’t really happen to Rome. Something will happen to stop it
.

And then it occurred to him that when he’d been on his feet, he’d seen what he thought was the Onager, further back along the convoy.
He thought, idly, it might still work, if it ever did work. We could take it somewhere and . . .

No, he couldn’t finish that thought either.

Una would be making decisions by now, at least insisting that they move. He wished drowsily that she was there to do it. He couldn’t picture her the last time he’d seen her very well, when she’d been crying and banging open windows; instead he thought of her sitting beside him on the deck of the
Ananke
, making plans in which he’d never wholly believed, and rallying escaped slaves from piles of rubble in Alexandria. He felt oddly confident she was alive, though usually remembering those he’d left behind was tangled in thoughts of air-raids and arrest and executions. He was not even afraid that she might be in Rome. It had been so long since he’d been able to write to her. What will she do with her ships and her army now? he wondered. And will even she understand about all this when I see her?

It made no sense to think he would see her ever again. He couldn’t imagine what would happen next, but it would hardly be a ferry home.

His radio buzzed. For another moment he lay still, staring up at the clearing sky, and couldn’t bring himself even to lift his hand to answer – but he knew it was Minius, back at the Nionian radio base, and he thought distantly: I got them out of this, at least; I didn’t know I was doing it, but I saved them.

‘Are you there, sir?’ said Minius.

‘Yes,’ Sulien said dully.

‘Did you find them? It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it’s true.’

‘Yes,’ repeated Minius. His voice was strangely wry, helpless laughter lurking in it somewhere. ‘That’s what they told us. We’ve been trying the stuff here like you said, and we did get through to a base back in Aregaya. They’re pulling out of there as fast as they can. They think there’s some attack coming from the west, Sinoan troops landing at Tipaea, so—’

‘They didn’t have any useful ideas?’ asked Sulien with a listless mixture of hope and sarcasm.

‘They said the Nionians will probably find us pretty soon . . . they said no one can get to us. And we can’t really get to them . . . or anyone.’

Sulien listened, unsurprised.

‘They said we could die free like Romans,’ said Minius, and paused. ‘I think they meant before the Nionians get here.’

‘What?’ said Sulien, shocked into alertness, sitting upright. ‘Well, we’re not doing that. You can tell everyone they’re fucking not to.’
He stopped, suddenly frightened, ‘Are you all all right? No one . . . would’ve done it already?’

‘No,’ said Minius, ‘no, no one’s done that.’

‘Well, good. Of course not. You’re not stupid. You’ve got look-outs posted, haven’t you? Well, move if you have to, otherwise hold out there as long as you can, and we’ll be back later.’ He clipped the radio back on his belt and looked, this time without turning faint or flinching, at the devastation. Something will happen to stop it, he thought again, and slid down from the roof.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Obediently Pas climbed down, but once on the ground he collapsed limply against the truck and leant there. ‘And do what?’ he asked.

‘The Onager’s back there. We’re going to take it and show the Nionians we’ve got one too.’

Dorion didn’t move. He looked down at Sulien from the roof of the cab, his legs dangling. ‘I’m too tired for this,’ he said quietly.

‘What, you’d rather stay here? Get down here, Dorion. It’s not as if things can get any worse.’

‘They can’t? Well, our side could execute us for stealing it, which I admit probably won’t be a problem,’ said Dorion, with a croak in his voice, his mouth skewed into a despairing little smile. ‘And when the Nionians find us with it, they’ll be even more pissed off with us than they would be anyway.’ He drooped suddenly, and put his head into his hands. ‘And what do you want to do, find a Nionian town and destroy it? I’m not going to do that, I don’t care if you think they’ve got it coming or whatever, I just can’t. I’ve had enough – sounds like our whole army has. Why should we be any different?’

‘No,’ said Sulien, ‘I’m not saying that’s what we should do. I want to get their attention. That’s really what these weapons do. You don’t have to— You don’t have to do
this
.’ He gestured at the devastation around them. ‘Then, perhaps if I talk to them—’

‘You want to talk to the Nionians?’ said Dorion, in disbelief.

‘I might be able to.’

Dorion stared. ‘You’ve really lost it, Archias,’ he said pityingly, and sagged again with exhaustion. ‘The thing’s probably broken now anyway.’

Pas was still slumped against the truck, but his eyes were grave and steady on Sulien’s face.

‘Do we get to go home at the end of this?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sulien. ‘If it works, if anyone will listen . . . I think we might be prisoners for a while, Pas, even if we’re lucky. We don’t know what’s going on out there in the world. But the war’s going
to end – if we can maybe change the way it ends, we might get home one day. It’s better than just waiting here or putting our guns in our mouths, isn’t it?’

Pas nodded. ‘Archias,’ he said softly, ‘Shouter . . . I’ll come with you if you want, if you’ll tell us first who you really are.’

‘What?’ Dorion muttered drearily from the top of truck, while Sulien stiffened. He returned Pas’ gaze in silence.

‘This should have killed me, shouldn’t it?’ Pas went on, putting his hand to the blotchy scar on the side of his neck. He smiled lopsidedly. ‘It didn’t look worse than it was. I could feel it. And it’s not just me. Galeo was going to die of sunstroke. And Acilius should have lost his hand . . .’

Sulien exhaled. ‘All right, Pas,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I’m Novianus Sulien.’

‘What?’ yelled Dorion, shockingly loud in that wasteland of corpses and dust, and hurled himself down off the roof of the truck to stare at Sulien’s face.

‘Well then,’ Pas said, shrugging. ‘If half of what those posters said was true . . . if you could get out of the Colosseum . . .’

‘
Oh blind gods
!’ Dorion exclaimed, and began to shake with shrill, breathless laughter.

‘Dorion,’ said Pas, ‘calm down.’ He strode grimly to the nearest truck, leant in over the driver’s corpse and tried the engine. ‘It’s still working,’ he called.

Sulien gave Dorion’s shoulder a shake. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’ve worked with me all this time – you know everything they said about my sister and me wasn’t true. You know Drusus lies. He lied when he sent us here.’

Dorion giggled a little more. ‘So you’re
not
a revolutionary maniac who wants to bring down the government?’

‘Well,’ admitted Sulien, ‘I am that a bit.’

Dorion trembled and went still. ‘All right,’ he said, in an almost normal voice, though his eyes were still wide and unfocused, ‘fine.’

Sulien steered the Onager away from that place as fast as he could. His heart was beating almost painfully hard, but steadily, like a bell tolling. The dust was only a soft bloom on the blue sky now. They’d had to dismantle a horrible barricade of bodies and vehicles to get the Onager free, sweating and crying as they hauled corpses away from the back wheels of trucks, then down from their cabs, so that they could climb in and back each one away. At last Sulien threaded the bulk of the carrier through the obstacles and past the stricken convoy.

Dorion sat hunched in the cab beside Sulien, sometimes shaking, rubbing his hands over his hair. ‘They’ll see us,’ he gabbled quietly, as much to himself as to Sulien, ‘they might not have seen us through the dust before, but now they will. From the air, or on the road . . . come on, Shouter, we’re not going to be able to get anywhere in this thing – where are we going to go?’

‘They’ve been pulling all their people a safe distance from that thing. They won’t get back for a while,’ answered Sulien, ‘and even if they do see us from the air, they’ll only think we’re one of theirs. What else is going to be alive down here?’

Pas was driving close behind them in a smaller truck they’d scavenged from the battlefield. ‘There’s a city on the other side of those mountains,’ he said over the radio, ‘almost due east, seventy or eighty miles away.’

‘It’s too far,’ whispered Dorion.

Sulien clenched his teeth. ‘We’ll have to get as close as we can.’

Dorion relaxed, just a little, when they reached a pass up into the mountains and a bird sprang up from a clump of pines. Sulien gave a shaken laugh of relief too: it was so good to see things alive again.