Savage City (9 page)

Una was on the floor when he came back this time, clenched in an agonised knot. She jolted up warily as he drew near. Sulien knelt beside her and started laying things out – tweezers, dressings, a bowl of boiled water. He brought a lamp over from beside the bed. He began, unable to help a slightly too jaunty, slightly exaggerated professional manner: ‘Let’s start with your hands, then. At least you didn’t break any bones.’ He pushed the wet, tattered sleeve further up her arm to get it out of the way and put a wad of wet gauze into her left hand. ‘You clean it up so we can see what we’re doing.’

Una’s taut shoulders relaxed slightly and she said, ‘Thank you.’

Sulien sighed, and stabbed the syringe he’d hidden from her into her arm, pushed her over onto her side and held her down without too much difficulty as he finished pressing the fluid in.

She scrambled up as soon as he let go, gasping, outraged.

Sulien slumped back against the foot of the bed and just watched her, waiting.

‘What—? What have you done?’ she demanded, incredulous.

Sulien didn’t even bother to answer immediately; he felt boundlessly exhausted, and he couldn’t see much point in a conversation now. ‘You know what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘You need it.’

Una knocked the bowl over as she headed for the door, casting about clumsily for some kind of impossible escape from the encroaching softness that was already pulling the ground away, dragging at her eyelids, weighting her limbs. ‘You lying bastard,’ she said thickly.

Sulien looked up at her with weary patience that made her nerves ring with betrayal, and then rose slowly to his feet, in obvious preparation to catch her when the drug had completed its work, on the correct assumption that she wasn’t going to lie down of her own accord. She had a furious impulse to see if she couldn’t reach the top of the stairs before he could get to her, and was even more maddened by the thin tether of self-control that kept her from trying. ‘You and Dama,’ she gasped, ‘knocking me out—’

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Sulien.

Una glared at him, and muttered bitterly and accurately, ‘No you’re not,’ and toppled forward.

The relief was so strong as to make everything, even Una’s fall, look slow and languid. Sulien caught her awkwardly but easily enough and brought her down onto the bed so that they were sitting side by side, Una propped against him, her head limp on his shoulder. He sat there, his arm around her, staring at a knot in the wood of a wardrobe standing against the opposite wall, and could not move. He didn’t want to look at Una; he wished there were a way of getting out of the room without having to do that again.

‘Marcus,’ he said aloud, into the quiet room, ‘please.’

He eased Una around and down onto the bed. Her eyelids strained half-open and she made a cramped, angry motion, as if to raise herself, before her hands fell helplessly still and her face smoothed again. Sulien watched in bewilderment, almost a kind of admiration. She couldn’t possibly want to be awake, so what was this effort for? Could anyone be as vengefully perverse as that, even Una?

He went out and refilled the bowl with water, picked up the rest of the things from the clinic and got to work on her arms. It was good to have the tweezers and scalpel to slide out the glass slivers, though he didn’t need the suture kit to close the skin. But it took a long, messy time, longer because he was dizzy with tiredness now. And there was still the injury to her head.

She looked as if she’d been murdered. He hated to think of her sleeping in the blood, waking up to this tomorrow, but the idea of
undressing his sister, having already drugged her unconscious, made him squeamish. Maybe if another girl did it? He tried to think through all the girls and women he knew nearby. Lal was the right person, really – Una might not mind so much if it was Lal. She had looked after Lal when she was ill; there would be a kind of reciprocity. But of course he couldn’t ask Lal; he could not call her back to the very same flat in which he had been trying to coax her to give up her virginity only a few hours ago, and where now there was blood everywhere. And Lal would have her own family to deal with when they heard this. He wondered if they knew yet that Marcus was dead, whether they’d guessed it from what was on the longvision; if you could, if you hadn’t been there.

To his own surprise, for it was years since even the idea of her had occurred to him, he found himself thinking angrily that their mother was probably still somewhere in London; there was no reason to think she was dead. Perhaps she had been watching the Games on longvision and had seen the explosion. She would not know it had anything to do with her children. She was doing something right at this moment and it wasn’t looking after her daughter, or helping him. He tried, more aggressively than wistfully, to pull up a single solid memory of her, and could not find anything there. What was wrong with him? How was it that he had always forgotten so much? In what little he could remember from that time, Una was always the only other person there. He had accidentally knocked her down the stairs – he had been so horrified; her hair had been full of blood then, too.

He rubbed away the new tears that came at that thought. He had to decide what to do about Una’s clothes. Una wouldn’t want them to be taken off, however Sulien went about it. It would be a second intrusion after what he’d already done with the needle. There was no vital reason to force anything more on her.

So he cleaned the last traces of blood off her arms and her face, and tried to get as much as he could out of her hair, then dragged a blanket up to her chin, as much to cover up the mess as to keep her warm.

Of course, there was a lot of blood on his own clothes – Una’s and Marcus’ and any number of strangers’, all mixed and all over him.

There was a communal bathing block under his building. Sulien skipped most of the stages of a good bath and headed straight for the warm fountain in the centre of the caldarium. He tried not to look at the reddened water as it ran off him. Scrubbing his hair, he set to working out in his mind how to be organised and systematic now: how to clear up the smear on the wall where Una had leant, and the crescent of blood drops between the window and the bed, collect the
broken glass; in what order he would do these things. It was how Una would have acted in his position. But the plan unravelled into unexpectedly strong irritation that she’d broken the window, which was his, after all, and now he’d have to get it fixed. Back in the flat, he got only as far as sweeping the bloody glass into a little heap by the wall before wandering back into the kitchen and forgetting about it.

He poured a drink and let the longvision play, not watching it. He found himself wondering again who would know what had happened, who else would be beginning to grieve for somebody. He thought of Varius then, with a sting of sympathetic pain, and decided that someone from the Palace would have told him by now, surely.

And suddenly it occurred to him that it might not be a question of telling Varius; he might have been there himself, might have been hurt, or killed.

He groaned quietly, in protest. No, Varius wouldn’t have wanted to go to the Games, he reasoned. Except that he was Marcus’ advisor, his friend – perhaps he’d kept him company. He might have been carried out of the box before Sulien arrived. Or perhaps he would not have been in the box itself, but somewhere nearby . . .

Sulien knocked back the rest of his drink, and called Varius’ flat. He fidgeted as he waited, half-hoping that Varius would not answer, because he did not know what he was going to say if he did.

Varius did not answer. Sulien left it for a few restless minutes and tried again. This time the line was busy, as it was on all his attempts afterwards. He was reassured at first, before he realised it might be that others were trying to reach Varius too. He closed his eyes and thought longingly,
I don’t have to do anything more today. I can’t
.

But he wasn’t going to get away with that; he couldn’t shut out the possibility that Varius, who had dragged him out of the fire at Veii, might need his help as badly as Marcus had, and Sulien was, again, leaving it too late. And even if he was safe, Sulien was growing increasingly certain that he should be the one to tell him about Marcus – or at least
say
something to him, be there for a while, if Varius had already heard.

Hesitantly, he picked up the longdictor circlet again, tried Varius once more, just in case, and then called Tancorix. She sounded frightened and excitable. ‘Sulien! Are you all right, have you heard about the Colosseum? Calliope was there and—’

‘Yes,’ interrupted Sulien baldly. ‘Marcus died.’

There was a confused pause. ‘Marcus Novius?’

At least she would not be personally hurt; she had never met Marcus. So Sulien did not listen to whatever she said next but rested
through it, just waiting for her to finish speaking. ‘Can you come here?’ he asked. ‘I have to go somewhere and I can’t leave Una alone.’

The basilica housing the Department of Information was only a couple of hundred yards from the gates of the Palace, closer still to the Colosseum. Drusus’ car pulled up outside and he said to one of his slaves, ‘Go ahead and tell them the Emperor is coming.’

He closed his eyes, feeling fear thrill through him once more, heady and pure and almost sweet, like a ringing high note of a song. Here again he might be on the point of walking into humiliation, failure – perhaps even death, if Salvius had discovered where he was and what he was doing. He had walked out of the Palace as soon as the wreath was on his head, pausing only to study himself with elation and unease in a mirror he passed. But they had bowed, everyone who saw him – just servants, but it meant that he did not look an impostor, he did not look ridiculous. It meant that people could understand he was showing them the truth.

His slaves opened the doors for him. The atrium was full of startled, uncertain people, hastily gathered, some still hurrying in at the back, and they all bowed at the sight of him. He saw bewilderment and shock on many of their faces as they bent forward. But they did it, regardless. Drusus felt their attention flow into his bloodstream like a painkiller and held himself up straight with greater ease.

He said, ‘If you were not already aware of what has happened today, of what Rome has lost, then my presence here must make it all too plain. I wish I were meeting you in other circumstances. But we must show the cowards who did this how strong we remain. I need a longvision crew at once. And I need you to be ready to clear the airwaves.’

Varius witnessed nothing stranger than heavy traffic as he drove back into Rome. He didn’t speak to anyone on the way into his flat, could see nothing from his window but rain over the Aventine streets. He had stood in the rain at Gemella’s grave for some time, but his drenched clothes had partly dried in the car. He flicked on the longvision while he tried to decide whether it was still worth changing, but did not really look at it for a while. Militantly cheerful music and a voice droning on about the patriotism and commitment of the women dancing to it filled the flat and Varius only noticed the message on the screen when the sound had grown irritating enough for him to make the effort to turn it off.

An incident at the Colosseum. Salvius had called a session of the
Senate. Varius felt his waterlogged clothes suddenly icy and heavy on his skin, even before he’d made conscious sense of what he was reading.

There was a scale of possibility, and a number of plausible culprits, but he already knew the nature of what had happened.
Not Marcus
, he thought fervently, knowing that it was; it had to be: Salvius would not be calling sessions of the Senate if either Marcus or Faustus were in any position to do the same thing.

He might only be hurt – only seriously hurt—

Already he was entering the code for the Palace into the longdictor. For a long while he could not get any answer at all, swearing and pleading into the longdictor’s oblivious buzz. The lines must be jammed. He tried a different code, and this time managed to speak briefly to a shaken young man in the Palace main exchange who was unable to tell him anything more than what was being repeated on the longvision, and whose attempt to put Varius through to Glycon’s office produced only a dead connection.

Somewhere outside he heard the siren of a military vehicle, a muffled loudspeaker. He thought, whatever has happened, perhaps it is Salvius’ work; perhaps this is a coup. For a moment he hoped passionately that it was, because it was possible in that case that Marcus might not have been physically harmed, at least not yet, and perhaps something could still be done.

The next moment he was frightened at having even thought that, as if hoping inadvertently for the wrong thing could wreck any chance of good news. He tried again, and this time managed to extract the information that members of the Imperial family had been injured, someone had been taken to hospital . . . Then there was another long period of standstill which suddenly he could no longer tolerate, and he tugged off the longdictor circlet and rushed out of the flat.

As he started down the last flight of stairs, he saw Sulien entering the lobby below. He stopped dead as Sulien looked up at him tremulously. He was taking a breath to try and say something, and his eyes were red, his skin white and blotchy. It could not have been more obvious what had happened.

Sulien had no idea what he looked like, and so he was unnerved when Varius took one look at him, said, ‘
No
,’ and sat down on the staircase, staring straight ahead, one hand still tight on the banister.