Savage City (18 page)

Cleomenes was slightly taken aback. ‘I don’t know if they’re expecting people not to notice . . .’

Tiredness was pooling in the bruised hollows of Varius’ face, as if he was standing in an invisible rain. He shook his head. ‘They want people to know and not know at the same time.’

‘A terrible thing,’ muttered Cleomenes, uncomfortably, ‘all of this.’

‘But there’s nothing you can do about it?’ asked Varius lightly. ‘Are you sure that’s why you came here?’

‘Yes,’ said Cleomenes firmly, but added, ‘What did you want me to do?’

Varius smiled. ‘You’ve already told me about the borders; and I think you’d have said if they knew where to look for my friends. Or me.’

Cleomenes restrained himself from asking about Sulien and Una, despite his real concern for them.
I won’t know anything more about this
, he thought. ‘I’m thinking of leaving the vigiles anyway,’ he said gloomily, ‘getting away from this place. Maybe I should have done it years ago.’

‘Don’t do that, not yet. Just stay in touch with me, for now. Help me find a better way I can contact you.’

‘And then what? Pass you information? Feed them false leads?’

Varius was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s not going to happen.’ But again, quite against his first intentions, he found himself qualifying this: ‘If you change your mind, I’ll help you get away. If you get yourself into trouble . . . well, most likely there’ll be nothing I can do about it, but if there is, then I will. But I won’t help you with that—’ And he gestured at Varius’ side, where the gun was hidden.

Varius said nothing.

Wincing again at the state of him, Cleomenes finished gruffly, ‘Do you need money?’

Varius shook his head. Una’s note had advised him to divide the money into caches and hide them around the city, not to keep much on him. He guessed that she had learned to do this herself, in London, years ago. Perhaps he was not quite so adept at finding hiding places; one hoard at least had been found and raided, but there was still a lot left. ‘I’m not as badly off as I look. I’ve got other reasons for this. But thank you.’

After they parted, riding back towards the centre of Rome, Varius inked the words LOOKING FOR YOU ATHABIA onto the back of a seat on a late-night tram. He had begun to add such messages to the bare name in the last few weeks: ATHABIA WHERE ARE YOU? and, most importantly, ATHABIA MEET ME, TRAJAN’S FORUM. A pillar
by the Clivus Cinnae; a shop wall in the Field of Mars; an arch on the western approach to Vatican Fields Station.

He could not use the word Holzarta; that was too blatant; he was sure that would be remembered. Athabia, the name of the village where he’d sent Marcus, where Delir’s people had met him, was dangerous in itself, but it was the only possible point of reference between Delir, whom he had never met, and himself. He was trying to make it just ubiquitous enough that it would be glaringly conspicuous to someone who knew the name, while scarcely visible to anyone else.

But he dared not put a date, or even a time, in case he’d gone too far and made anyone else curious, and he’d deliberately chosen a large, busy place where meeting anyone would inevitably be difficult. Even so, when he first went he half-expected to find every vigile officer in the city – or alternatively, every pimp looking for a client – waiting for him. He sat hunched in the corner of the forum, one of a row of beggars, and watched for someone trying not to look as if they were searching for someone; someone filtering cautiously through the crowd; someone who, like him, didn’t stray too far from the possible routes of escape.

There were advantages to begging: it allowed him to sit and watch, excused him the duty of appearing to have somewhere to go. But beggars were city landmarks in their own minor way, and most of them had missing or withered limbs, blind eyes, cratered skulls. Varius, feeling self-conscious and absurd in having nothing wrong with him, had tipped half a bottle of methousia over his clothes and tried to cultivate a ravaged shake: a reason for being there that simultaneously repelled sympathetic attention. He was not given much money, and he remained nervous among the other residents of the streets; he thought they sensed something false about him, in the half-heartedness of his requests for change, in his caginess when he could not avoid speaking to them.

His appearance was changing, deteriorating steadily, and that was, in one way, good. But it was not an adaptable disguise; it was inevitable that the vigiles would be vaguely conscious of him, and as time went on it would be harder to melt anonymously into the crowd.

Indeed, from most perspectives, he was taking ridiculous risks. He had not told Cleomenes that sometimes he slept in a doorway just a hundred yards from the vigiles’ headquarters. Having thought, once,
they won’t expect me to be so close
, now he made a strategy of it. He followed Drusus to every public appearance, staying as close as he could get, studying the behaviour of the guards while watching for his chance. He got a foolhardy exhilaration from being right in front of
them and getting away with it, though he knew this was not a feeling to be trusted.

Sometimes it struck him that all this – skulking around the city, writing coded messages on walls and plotting to bring down the government– seemed like fairly unmistakable symptoms:
cracked
, he thought wisely, as if of someone else.
Too much for him. Finished up a lunatic on the streets, let that be a lesson to you
. But he did not take the idea seriously, he supposed, since whenever it occurred to him, it was with a little hiccough of amusement. He thought of Lucius, Marcus’ uncle, who had found safety and freedom in madness, and he laughed to himself, sitting on a mat of pages torn from the advertising magazine, under the colonnade in Trajan’s Forum.

But of course, that brought his mind back to Marcus, whose death was a terrible light by which Varius saw anything he might try to do, any meaning he’d thought there was in living like this, scraped down to bare bone. And wherever he was, he would start moving, trying to outpace the loss and the guilt. After his release from prison, grieving for Gemella, he had walked through Rome like this for hours, busy and hunted, the pace wearing smooth the edge of his thoughts. He fell back into it now almost without thinking, but there was a difference: though he rarely picked a route in advance, he was not aimless, and he was more daring, traversing unfamiliar streets, and flights of steps, trespassing in gardens and on the roofs of tower-blocks. He was learning the city meticulously, like a language: the grammar and history, all its unexpected connections and odd possibilities. He longed to be able to make notes; it would have helped him think, but of course such a document would be far too great a liability. Instead he memorised the locations of unlocked service doors and scaffolds. Once the barriers had been cleared away and the Praetorians had gone, he would go back to the fora where Drusus had addressed the carefully managed crowd and study the buildings which overlooked the Rostra . . .

He had to be careful around the Palace; he avoided the areas where he’d lived or worked, for fear of running into someone that he knew. Sometimes, though, he sometimes wished one of his parents would see him sitting in Trajan’s Forum; that somehow he’d be able to communicate something, just with a look. He felt wretched to think of them: they weren’t young, and he was so close, and doing nothing to comfort them, when they’d already been through enough on his account. But he could think of no way to contact them without putting them in worse danger. Their mail would be being read, their longdictor tapped, probably even their house bugged, in which case any implication that they had heard from him would be fatal. And what
could he have said? He imagined a bald, one-line note:
I am alive
. He could hardly say he was safe, or that he would come back.

And in the end he could only remind himself that they had the same unsatisfactory source of reassurance that he had when he worried for Una and Sulien: the longvision that repeated daily that they were all three still wanted, still not found.

Varius revisited his
Athabia
messages sometimes, in his solitary patrols of the city, half-hoping he might find some reply scrawled beside them. He never had, but lately some of them had been scrubbed off. It might mean nothing.

There was a woman sitting on a bench in Trajan’s Forum, whom he was sure he’d seen there before, doing precisely what she was doing now. He remembered the flowered headscarf, and the long dark hair escaping from it. Otherwise her clothes were unremarkable, if rather heavy for the weather. He hadn’t been looking for a woman, but he found himself watching her carefully. She had unfolded a large tourist’s map in front of her and seemed to be puzzling over it, but Varius could almost have sworn that she was scanning the forum from behind it. Certainly she had been holding it stiffly for a long time, without apparently making any progress towards finding whatever she was looking for.

And now she had got up and was striding towards his corner. Varius gave no signal in response except to keep watching her, and to allow the dulled, vacant expression to slip off his face. A small thrill of paranoia went through him – she could be an agent for the vigiles; this could be the end of it – as she leaned forward to hand him a coin and hissed, ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Why are you doing it? What do you want?’

Varius looked up without speaking, saw the scars under the thick make-up, the Sinoan features the scarf and the long wig obscured.

She glanced around. ‘I’ll meet you on the corner of Vicus Blandianus,’ she muttered.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he agreed.

‘Was he someone from the camp?’ asked Lal. They were standing close together by a skip against the wall, both watching the opening of the narrow street.

‘I didn’t recognise him,’ answered Ziye. ‘He could have been from before my time.’

‘I might know him, then.’

‘You were a little girl,’ said Ziye impatiently, looking at her, grimacing with guilty irritation. They’d been through this argument a
number of times, but still she repeated, ‘You really shouldn’t be here. Please go and wait at home. Let me deal with it.’

‘I want to see who it is,’ repeated Lal. ‘It doesn’t sound like he’s with the vigiles.’

The man rounded the corner into the narrow street and Ziye met him with a cold glare. ‘Well, we’re here,’ she said, as he approached. ‘Who are you?’

He did look like a new arrival in Holzarta: battered and dirty, and moving rather gingerly. But Lal, staring at him and trying in her imagination to peel back the rough beard and dishevelled hair, to erase the faint swelling around his eye, said in a cautious whisper, ‘Varius.’

Ziye looked him over again to confirm it and sighed. ‘I see.’

It had begun to rain. They retreated to a little caupona in the Subura, squalid enough for Varius to enter unremarked. They sat hunched distrustfully over beakers of rough red wine and kept their voices low beneath the deep, harsh music of a hydraulis, blaring over the speakers.

‘What are you thinking, writing those things all over town? If anyone just looks up that name, if they followed you—’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t have any other way to contact you.’

‘We have only come to tell you to stop,’ said Ziye.

‘No we haven’t,’ contradicted Lal, quietly, looking at him. ‘You want help with something.’

‘I want to stop Drusus,’ said Varius.

Ziye snorted bleakly, but Lal said at once, ‘What can we do?’

‘You mean kill him,’ said Ziye, and without exactly being shocked at this, Lal felt suddenly as if the conversation had slipped out of reality into a scene from a longvision play, or a dream; it was just not possible that they could be sitting there discussing such a thing.

‘Delir had a whole network of people who were against slavery – who were prepared to help slaves,’ he said. ‘There must have been hundreds; people like that aren’t going to support Drusus. If they helped you, perhaps they would help me. I want to know who they are.’

Ziye shook her head. ‘What do you think they can do? Most of them used to be slaves themselves. Don’t you think if any of them had any power, things would have been different? That’s why we needed Marcus.’

Varius flinched. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but if there are people who are
willing to try to help, then I need to know. I have to think about what would happen afterwards . . . if I were successful . . .’

Ziye looked at him, grimly pursing her lips, and thought, as Una had,
He’s not planning to live very long
. She said wearily, ‘Delir won’t be very eager to interfere again, not after Dama.’

It was hard to imagine Delir being eager to do anything: his despair and guilt filled their one room like many stacks of heavy boxes. Ziye had barely forgiven him herself, for leaving them – she did not even particularly want to, but did not seem to want to leave him either. It was dreadful to see him like this.

‘I’ll talk to him about it,’ promised Lal, and it still felt as if she were watching a character in a play, but one she hoped was involved in a particular story, heading towards a good ending. ‘And if I can help you—’
to assassinate the Emperor
, she finished to herself, dazed, and shivered at the thought that it was not impossible, for Dama had done it.

‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ retorted Ziye.

‘Well, I could make more identity papers,’ said Lal. ‘I know these new ones are going to be more difficult, but I can try.’