Savage City (21 page)

‘Come on,’ she said to the landlady, ‘not here.’ She dragged the woman by her elbow, and hurried her back into the kitchen. The guest house was quivering from the impacts around it, but it was still larger and sturdier than most of the other buildings on the street. She doubted they’d do better to search for shelter outside.

She thought there must be a larder in the kitchen, though she hadn’t
seen the door opened before, and yes, here it was: on the side of the house that faced away from the wind, and the one high window was very small; it would have to do. There were boxes and heavy jars of some kind under a counter, and Una began dragging them out of the way. The landlady had recovered enough to help a little. Una left her and ran impatiently back to the front door.

Fire was spilling from a hole in the roof of the house at the end of the street, and by its light she could see that a wall of an upper room had been removed with strange neatness, as if a curtain had been raised. And there were more people outside now, gasping and staggering around. A young woman gripping the hand of a girl of about six had come to a dazed stop near the guest-house; another child was clamped awkwardly to her hip, and all three were in the same rushed, half-dressed state as Una herself. There was a smear of blood on the woman’s cheek and she was looking about, her face taut with bewilderment.

‘In here,’ Una called to them.

There wasn’t room to shut the larder door with all five of them packed in. Bottles were rattling overhead, and they had the singed taste of the air in their mouths. The larder was cold; they needed the shared warmth of their cramped bodies. And slowly the other two women started to talk, swapping terse condemnations of the Nionians before moving on to a far more ordinary conversation about unreliable handy-men, distracting each other. But now she had nothing more to do but wait, Una began to find the closeness oppressive, as if surfaces of her self were being ground away by the contact.

Somewhere several streets away, just at the limit of what she could sense, someone was trapped under a weight of wood and fire. It came abruptly, a flaring of incredulous red inside her skull: someone else’s skin burning, someone else who couldn’t breathe. Una stiffened and turned her head away, making a swift, brutal effort not to see or hear it any more, but for a moment she seemed to have lost the knack of disentangling herself, wasn’t safe within herself in time as the mind in the distance collapsed away, with an awful quiver of relief, peace.

Oh, God, please
— Una thought.

There was no reason for it to end at daylight, and no way to be certain it had stopped. There was no squad of aircraft overhead that might be shot down or have to fly home, only the currents in the air.

But when it had been quiet for half an hour or so, they emerged stiffly to find glass and melted snow sprayed across the discoloured carpets. It was still dark outside, the alarm still sounding. The landlady tried the lights while Una was almost pleased to find the
longdictor dead, as it gave her the excuse she needed: ‘I’m going to find a working longdictor; I have to talk to my family.’

‘They won’t be worried yet, you’ll just wake them up,’ protested the landlady dolefully, and Una could see she’d hoped for help with the damage.

‘I have to talk to them,’ insisted Una, hurrying up the stairs to finish dressing, not listening to the woman from the street who was trying to thank her.

Dawn was just filtering like a pale sediment into the winter sky, as she drove. She saw a few dark craters spoiling the snow on the steppe-land, and there were more vehicles on the road, more people to see her. But on the face of it, the other town seemed unscathed, though all its lights were out. Una relaxed a little. It was hours before the time at which she and Sulien had agreed to meet. She could just drive past his guest house, she thought, make sure the roof was still on. She wouldn’t even have to see him to know he was safe. But before she reached the first turn off the main road through the town, there he was, striding along the roadside, scanning the traffic. The moment he saw the car he flung a long arm into the air and started waving urgently, as if she wouldn’t have noticed him.

‘People can see you,’ she hissed furiously as he tumbled into the car, gripped her arm. But he wasn’t listening, he was examining her as if she might be missing a limb; the fact that she was here and snapping at him not enough to reassure him yet.

He let go and hunched over in the seat, breathing out fiercely, and Una thought, with a dull pulse of remorse and exhaustion, I have to do better, I have to. She said, ‘I’m fine. I’m fine. Didn’t get any sleep, that’s all. None of them landed here?’

Sulien shook his head. ‘We heard them. But the power’s out. And the longdictors.’

‘I know.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘No. No,’ insisted Una, with all the softness she could muster, ‘just noise.’

‘Have you heard about Bamaria?’ Sulien asked, a sore, anxious scratch in his voice. ‘It’s gone. We’ve— The Romans have taken it.’

That was where they had been heading: the sliver of Nionian territory closest to the eastern tip of the Empire. The first place, they’d thought, where they could walk into a magistrate’s office or a Samurae hall and state their real names.

‘Oh,’ Una said, blankly.

Sulien waited for something more. When she only turned the car out towards the steppe again, he found himself prompting almost shrilly, ‘So what are we going to do?’ and felt ashamed immediately afterwards; he had a mind of his own, so why was he behaving as if, even now, she should settle everything for them both? He hadn’t meant that – but she should have had something to say, surely; she should have started dissecting what it meant to them.

‘We need the maps,’ he supplied, anxiously. It didn’t matter, after all, which one of them said these things, as long as they were said. ‘We need to work out how far the money will go.’

Una gave him a taut parody of a smile and said, ‘All right.’

The dark tracks of water had frozen over in the night, streaks of a fine greyish film of ice, like seams in unpolished marble. Another few days and they could probably walk across, thought Sulien, while Una searched dutifully for the sheaf of maps in the drawer under the seat.

‘Maybe they’ll say more about what’s happening there when the power’s back on,’ he said, dubiously. ‘Where the . . . the front is. But I don’t know. Well, we were going to have to go through Sinoan territory anyway, so I suppose we can just try and . . . go round it? Or we keep going east instead of south, go straight across, I guess. I know we’ve got problems in Sina too, but if it’s that or walk onto a battlefield . . . Or . . . well, we could give up on getting to Nionia.’

Una shrugged. She wasn’t looking at the maps, or at him. She gestured at Sarmatia, on the far side of the river, though there was nothing to distinguish the pale slopes from the bank on which they stood. It was as if they had reached a barrier of mirror-glass. ‘Look. That’s less than a mile away. And from what people say it’s going to be two weeks before we can even get that far. Anything could have happened by then.’

‘No – we can’t just head into nothing and hope it works out,’ Sulien persisted, hearing in the obstinate stresses of his own voice a replica of something she might have said.

‘Oh come on, Sulien! It’s what, three thousand miles? We have to get across
India
– most likely we’ll be dead before we get near it! Why bother worrying about it now?’

The wind scraped through the silence that fell between them, firing tiny flecks of ice against their faces, stinging like glass-dust. Sulien shivered and grimaced, and shifted between Una and the river, making a windbreak of himself. He said in a casual voice, ‘We’re not going to die.’

‘Rome could lose Bamaria,’ explained Una after a second. ‘Could lose the whole war by the time we get there. That’s all I mean.’

Sulien dismissed an instinctive chill at being obliged to want Rome to lose a war.

‘We could stop,’ he suggested quietly. ‘I’m telling everyone I’m here looking for a job – I could get one. Or we could go back west, somewhere it’s not so cold.’

For a moment her face seemed to twist and quiver, and though that cleared quickly, he could see a liquid sheen in her eyes – just a thin rim of reflected light below the irises, still a long way from spilling into tears. She said fiercely, ‘No. We will get there, we
will
, I promise. I’m just— I can’t think that far ahead.’

All he could say was, ‘All right. One thing at a time.’

Una had been wary of going back, expecting that by the time she returned, the town’s authorities would be busily manifest in the damaged streets, hanging tarpaulins over the broken windows, at least; and someone would be telling people what to do if it happened again, and where to go if their houses were uninhabitable. But everything looked almost as she had left it. At the top of the street the debris from the worst-hit house had been cleared aside, perhaps by the residents themselves, though she could see the windows were still gaping, and there were no lights in any of them. At the guest house, Vituriga the landlady was up a stepladder, struggling to nail a heavy square of old carpet behind the shutters.

‘Haven’t the vigiles done anything?’ Una asked, rather disgusted, although it was a relief not to have to worry about dodging them.

The landlady snorted expressively. ‘The power’s still off, too.’

‘You can’t sleep here tonight,’ said Una, glancing around the house’s dark interior.

She stepped down from the ladder and gave Una a speculative look. ‘I’ll have to go to my sister’s,’ she said heavily, plainly relishing neither that nor the prospect of refunding Una any of her money. ‘So you’ll be heading south now, I suppose.’

As Una said, ‘Oh, but it’ll be all right here by tomorrow, won’t it?’ she realised with an itch of anger at herself what a strange thing that was to say; how unlikely it was that a stray tourist in this bleak place would even consider staying after a night like that. ‘Well, it’s not so bad, is it?’ she ploughed on, ‘and it’s a long way to Gelonus – and they’re not ready for me there yet. I don’t really want to go there before I have to. And I was hoping I might be able to find some of my grandfather’s friends.’

‘Hmm.’

And Una saw what was coming and looked down, calculating.

‘Arite saw you with a young man in Sacaeum,’ announced the landlady.

‘Oh . . .’ Una twisted her hands shyly and kept her eyes on her shoes. ‘Well, yes, he’s just someone from home. It’s a funny thing, meeting him here . . .’

‘Oh yes?’ said the landlady, raising her eyebrows.

Una clenched her teeth behind a modest simper and nodded. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she mumbled. So the immediate problem was solved, Vituriga thought the young man was the reason Una was in no hurry to leave. And of course she was right.

‘I suppose he’s staying in the caupona there?’ Vituriga went on, reverting to melancholy contemplation of her house. ‘You might try there for tonight; they’ll have rooms free.’

‘Oh, I don’t think my mother would like that,’ parried Una, though she did wonder for a moment if that would be the simplest course. But all those posters – ‘Be Vigilant . . . especially if you live near a border!’

She turned from the landlady and wandered a little way down the street. A large, dishevelled family emerged from their home, dragging bags and cases and arguing miserably. The two little girls from the night before stared at Una from the window of a dilapidated car. At the far corner of the street, a group of people, most of them men, came into sight. For a second it was hard to place what was strange about them, then Una realised that they weren’t encased in padded clothing like everyone else, but were all dressed in identical sets of light work clothes. Some of them had blankets wrapped around themselves like cloaks or shawls, and they were hugging themselves, bent almost double under the weight of the cold. They huddled close together as they moved, either for warmth, or against possible attack. They were slaves.

‘From the factory,’ said Vituriga, coming after Una. ‘Nionians!’

There were around ten in the group, only one of whom looked at all as if he might have been partly Nionian, but Una could feel sudden tension quiver through the street, as if an electric circuit had just been completed. The slaves seemed aware of it, hurrying along with heads lowered, sometimes flicking around hunted glances, but one of them, a short, cropped-haired young man, was plainly too angry and too desperate to care. Beckoning insistently to the others, though they were hanging back and hissing at him to stop, he moved towards an empty house, its windows dark and glassless like the rest, and pulled at the door.

‘Get out of there,’ shouted a man, erupting from the house opposite and racing across the street. Una started to run at the same moment.
As she reached the little group, the man dragged the young slave away from the door before hurling him backwards, staggering and slipping on the ice that glazed the street.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ snarled the slave through blue lips, crouching to recover the blanket that had dropped from his shoulders. ‘Are we just supposed to sit there and die?’

‘Don’t, Batu, just leave it, please,’ urged one of the women frantically.

But Batu ignored her, lurching forward, and the older man squared up to meet him, smirking grimly, for though the slave was young and well-muscled, he was shivering so fiercely that he couldn’t even curl his hands into fists. The rest were in no better state.