Savage City (14 page)

So she came up and saw that Sulien was standing exactly where she’d left him, featureless in the light, but the tension obvious from here.

She swam back.

Sulien came back into the hut later and found her dressed in the clothes he’d brought for her, sitting on the floor by a bowl of water, staring at the heap of bloody cloth.

‘I can’t remember how you did it,’ she remarked.

Sulien leaned over and poked the place on her arm where he’d jabbed in the needle, finding that this time he felt neither like apologising nor
justifying it. Una flinched and glowered. She said very clearly, ‘You can’t ever do that to me again.’

‘I wasn’t planning to.’

Una raised her head, deliberately meeting his eyes. ‘I mean it.’

Sulien looked back without giving any further guarantee of compliance.
And what if I do
, he felt tempted to ask, despite what had happened,
what if you’re in that state again?
But he held back, or did not quite dare, and if there was a specific threat, she didn’t say what it was.

They stared at each other, neither promising anything.

‘All right,’ Una said finally, shrugging again. But she studied the web of pink lines on her arms, which might have been a month old, might never have been deep. ‘I can’t remember doing this.’

‘Would you want to?’ asked Sulien, wondering.

‘Yes,’ said Una instantly, with such unqualified stubbornness that Sulien let out a little puff of laughter, startling himself.

But Una’s gaze had already slipped back to Marcus’ blood, her face softening into helplessness.

Sulien bent down and began to pick up and fold the clothes. ‘I think we should burn these,’ he said quietly. Una nodded, a pale flicker of gratitude crossing her face.

He was searching for something unremarkable in which to bundle the clothes so the stains were hidden, when Una stiffened, lifting her head sharply to stare at the door, a look of incredulous attention on her face. She whispered, ‘Varius . . .?’

She got to her feet. Sulien froze for an instant, and then hurled open the door.

Varius was stumbling heavily up the steps, eyes barely open, scarcely able to lift his feet from one step to the next. Sulien started forward on a strange little thrill of relief and dismay, reaching to help him. Varius speechlessly accepted Sulien as a convenient upright surface from which to push his way forward, staggered to the sink and began gulping water, gasping between swallows.

‘I thought you weren’t coming back!’ cried Sulien.

‘I shouldn’t have, really,’ said Varius, collapsing onto the edge of the bed and leaning his forehead against his wet hands.

‘Where did you—?’

‘Ostia.’

‘That’s twenty miles!’

Varius made a sort of laugh deep in his throat, as if to say yes, it certainly was.

‘Varius,’ said Una again. Sulien heard the shake in her voice and
saw that the shock of Varius’ appearance had been enough to jolt her back almost to the point of tears. She took a step towards Varius, who looked up at her, raising an almost identical look of desolation to meet hers, compassion the only shade of difference.

He reached and took hold of her hand and Una gripped back with brief, surprising force, then drew away and walked out of the cabin.

Sulien located the remaining bread, lying amidst a pile of other things from the night before. ‘Here,’ he said.

Varius took it slowly, but he’d noticed the bundle of clothes Sulien had put down.

Sulien was already too familiar with that arrested look, the failure to turn the eyes to anything else.

‘Need to get rid of that,’ Varius said, neutrally.

‘We’re going to burn it. Look, I thought we could do it . . . properly. Do you want to come with us? We were going to do it now, but we could wait for you—’

Varius understood what Sulien was offering: not just the disposal of evidence but a kind of funeral. But it seemed so pitiful, to be reduced to that, a camp fire on a beach, like children with a dead pet. ‘No,’ he said, rather coldly, moving away a little.

Sulien left him alone and went after Una.

They made the fire in the stretch of pine wood between the beach and the road, away from the holidaymakers beginning to emerge onto the sand. Una felt, in a marginal way, pleased at how straightforwardly and smoothly they worked on this together, choosing the space, sweeping it clear and level, setting out a circular hearth of stones, collecting a heap of sticks. They handed things from one to the other quietly, speaking only to issue and accept small instructions – ‘break that one, put it there’ – as if this were a practised, daily routine. Well, it almost had been once; Una laid the last piece of kindling, watched Sulien light it and drove her fingers into the dust at the memory of the three of them, crouched by fires lit for warmth in other woods.

They sat on the sandy ground and watched: the wood caught easily enough, but the clothes burned slowly, drenching black, flaking red. Una, otherwise unmoving, worried a fistful of sand until the fire rose higher and the clothes began to fall into unrecognisability. A few dark scraps floated away into the warm air. She’d unthinkingly stuffed her freedwoman’s identity papers into the pocket of the clothes she was wearing now; she pulled them out and unfolded them. She studied the summary of her rights around her own mistrustful face, read out the name ‘Noviana Una’ aloud, in a rough, experimental voice, and flicked
the papers quickly into the fire. She looked over at Sulien, who reached for his own papers and laid them beside hers, as carefully as the heat would allow.

They tried to hide it, afterwards, swept the sand back into place, scattered the stones. There were more people on the beach now, children galloping in and out of the surf, and adults standing in dazed clusters outside the cabins, unsure what to do. The news was still spreading. Una shrank from the sight of them and fled towards the hut. Varius had left the door slightly open; Sulien peered in and saw him lying with his arm over his face against the light, and crept back, carefully.

‘We’re going to eat something now,’ he told Una firmly, forestalling resistance, but she only nodded dully. She had retreated into the corner of space between the pile of bricks and the wall of the hut, leaning her head against the warming concrete. Sulien, fighting off a pang of unease, left her there, found a stall at the base of the road leading up to the town and bought a bag of greasy little fried cakes.

‘We should use what we have first. Don’t go and buy things we don’t need,’ complained Una when he came back.

‘Well, Varius is asleep in there,’ said Sulien, as if that made entry into the hut and the preparation of food physically impossible, ‘and we’re not going to live or die on ten denarii.’

‘It adds up. And it isn’t only the money, it’s people seeing you. We’ll have to . . . we’ll have to—’ And the multitude of things they would have to do swelled in her mind without form or order, turning her dizzy, and she couldn’t speak.

‘Eat,’ supplied Sulien.

Doggedly Una obeyed, and to avoid being coaxed through every mouthful she forced down everything he handed her, though what little hunger she’d been aware of disappeared almost once.

‘You’d better tell me everything that happened,’ she said at last, screwing up the empty bag.

She listened to the first part of it without any comment, only grimaced a little to think how helpless she had been, put down and passed about and collected like a suitcase. But when he came to the arrest and Varius’ intervention she lifted her head to stare at him in quiet shock, then cast a distressed glance towards the cabin and Varius. ‘Those bastards,’ she muttered. ‘I can’t . . .’

Sulien could only remind her softly, ‘We got away.’

‘We don’t even know what he wants!’ exclaimed Una with abrupt force.

‘I thought it was pretty clear what he wants,’ said Sulien grimly.

‘But it’s not. Is it just us three? And is it the same for all of us? Is it anyone who’s close to Marcus, or . . .’ Her voice sank, grew tentative: ‘He used to . . . He hates me, because I was the one who found out about him, I told Marcus what he’d done . . .’

Sulien tightened his mouth uneasily, feeling the conversation tilt towards something he didn’t want spoken, even considered. ‘Why does it matter? He’s after us; we get out of the way. That much isn’t complicated.’

‘It does matter,’ argued Una. ‘We might be able to guess how far he’ll chase us, and for how long. And if we knew whether he was targeting one of us more than the others, we might have some kind of options.’

Sulien scowled. ‘Well, we don’t know. And it doesn’t matter.’

Una looked away. ‘How do you get to the town?’ she asked, after a pause. ‘We need a longvision. See how bad it is.’

‘Fine,’ said Sulien. ‘Let’s go.’

Una shook her head dubiously. ‘I don’t know. If they’re showing pictures of us together in the forum . . . then we shouldn’t be there at the same time.’ Sulien’s mouth pulled sideways, and Una sighed. ‘Or you can go and I’ll stay! Either way, I’ll be back here. I’m not going to just . . . You seem to think I’m going to vanish. I won’t.’

‘You still don’t remember what happened yesterday?’ muttered Sulien, with a quick, faintly barbed look down at her arms.

Una scowled and moved in an angry jerk, as if she were about to spring up, but she didn’t complete it, and her face gradually slipped back into such bleakness that Sulien regretted saying anything. She folded her arms. ‘No more of that,’ she said. ‘Had my fun. Anyway, you can’t spend every second with me and there are things that need doing. I might as well make a start.’

Later, when he was striding down the strip of gambling halls looking for her, Sulien found that there were indeed pictures of the three of them showing regularly on Lavinium’s public longvisions. He couldn’t ask anyone if they’d seen her. Varius, who had rolled off the bed groaning just when Sulien was on the point of waking him, was searching the north side of the town, though with an air of humouring him. He hadn’t appeared very concerned, which might have been just because he was too tired and numb to worry much about anything.

And when, after an hour and a half of this, Sulien went back to check the hut and found her there, he felt for a second of almost joyous fury that he wished she hadn’t come back, that he wanted nothing more to do with her. He might have shouted it at her, except for the distracting
shock of her appearance. Her hair was wet again, and a different colour – a much darker brown than its natural pale dun. Much of the mess had been cleared away and a couple of plastic bags were spread over the small table, on which stood a pot of dye beside a pan of water, spreading a chemical reek into the air. She’d plainly tried to be careful but there was a faint purplish stain banded around her hairline, and dark smears on the plastic and on her fingertips. A bag she hadn’t had before hung from a chair.

‘Sorry,’ she said, as Sulien entered and drew in a loud, indignant breath and tried to decide what to do with it.

Varius was back too, sitting with his legs stretched out on the bed and his back against the wall, eyes half closed. He and Una had a silent air of sad companionship that incensed Sulien even more.

‘For fuck’s sake—’ Sulien knocked a hand, half by accident, into the too-close wall.

Una stifled a little start, which dragged an irritating twinge of premature remorse from him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, ‘I didn’t—’

‘Aren’t things bad enough for you yet? Or are they just not bad enough for me?’ Varius was impassively waiting this out, not interfering, and Sulien felt discomfited that this was happening in front of him, though it wasn’t enough to stop him: ‘Don’t you ever think of anyone else? It’s so fucking selfish!’

‘Look,’ said Una, irritably, guilty patience already beginning to evaporate, ‘do you want to know what I was doing or not?’

Sulien laughed, hard. ‘I don’t know if I do.’

He turned away a little, and Una sat down with an exasperated sigh. A sullen quiet fell between them. But Sulien had no realistic retreat available beyond silence, and so after a while Una sighed again and said, ‘The longvision’s near the station.’

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t think of it when I went out, all right? Or I would have said. But there was a train leaving when I got there . . . they don’t run that often and if I’d come back and told you first we might have had to wait till tomorrow. And by then it would be even more dangerous, with those pictures everywhere. I might not have had another chance.’

‘For what?’ groaned Sulien, resentful at having any response dragged out of him.

Una was already reaching into the bag; she set out a number of bottles of what seemed to be bathing oil on the table. ‘I had a locker in a bathhouse in the Aventine,’ she explained, quietly, ‘not in my real name, of course. That’s where I went.’ She fished inside the neck of
one and drew out sheaves of money, twisted off the stopper of another bottle and pulled out more.

Sulien stared at the money, moved across and sat down opposite her almost without realising he was doing it. He whispered, ‘How long have you—?’

‘Two years,’ replied Una, ‘maybe two and a half.’

Sulien breathed out a wordless question, and Varius, coming over to the table, answered it: ‘In case this happened.’