Savage City (25 page)

‘But you’d never have done that!’ exclaimed Lal, fiercely; ‘you can’t even say it now! What’s the use of blaming yourself for not doing something you just couldn’t do? You tried to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone – you gave up everything to do that. It isn’t fair.’

Delir was silent, weathering this out as if Lal’s outburst had been a list of further accusations, rather than a defence of him.

Ziye sat down cross-legged on the ground near him, but her face was turned towards the river.

‘You saved someone dangerous,’ said Varius, ‘and so did I. Marcus half-killed Drusus back in Sina. I was there, and I stopped him. If I had just left him there, Drusus would have been dead a year ago.’

Delir shook his head, the gentle look on his face already insisting that it wasn’t the same thing at all.

Ziye asked quietly, ‘Why did you stop him?’

Varius sighed. ‘There would have been no way of hiding it. Faustus wouldn’t have forgiven him. Marcus might not have been executed, but at the very least he would have been disgraced. And he would never have become Emperor. And—’ He hesitated, tempted to stop there, but he was committed to the whole truth now. ‘I thought Marcus would never have been the same again, afterwards. He was afraid he was losing his mind. He would have been a murderer. I didn’t want that to happen to him, I didn’t want him to lose . . . who he was.’

‘And was any of that wrong?’ asked Delir.

Varius looked down into the fire, silent.

‘And now you mean to do the same thing yourself,’ said Delir. ‘What about what it will do to you?’

Varius felt vaguely exasperated. ‘It’s not likely to matter much. Look, do you need a promise that you’re still a good man before you’ll help me? I don’t think it would make much difference to you, not from me. We can’t put things back the way they should have been. But perhaps we can make things better than they are. That’s what I’m asking of you. You don’t have to help me kill anyone.’

In a low, dubious voice Delir asked, ‘How?’

‘The succession,’ said Varius, also dropping his voice. ‘The only person who would have supported Leo or Marcus and might have a chance is Eudoxius. We left him in charge during the peace talks. He’s . . . well, he’s better than Drusus, anyway, and I’m pretty sure he’s not much in favour now. He was at the funeral, but there’s been
no sign of him since; I don’t think he’s even in Rome. He has at least one place in the country, and I think there’s another one abroad somewhere. He’ll have to be ready; he needs to come back to Rome and start building support. I can’t find him by myself, and I can’t go near him even if I could. I can’t do anything that would make Drusus suspect him. There must have been someone in your network who’s got a job in government – it doesn’t even have to be an important one, but someone like that could find out where he is. And they should be able to contact him too – they’d have to be willing to take some risks, but—’

‘But I’ve seen Eudoxius on the longvision,’ said Ziye, interrupting, ‘and he couldn’t convince Rome to give up slavery, even if he wanted to. He seemed – well, nice . . . but he’s not a leader. And he’s an old man.’

Varius lifted a hand and rubbed his matted hair, feeling a horrid quiver of helplessness and panic run through him. ‘I know – I do know. But can you think of anyone else? I can’t— I don’t know what else— I don’t know what else I can do—’

Delir looked at him and said sadly, ‘Your life, too,’ as if adding Varius’ name to a mental list of thousands.

‘I’m all right,’ Varius said. And although taking stock of his own situation he could not see how this could be true, he meant it. He was cold and desolate and probably a little insane, but something in him remained more whole than he could account for. He said, ‘I’ll need an address now; I have to get a room, I suppose,’ and was astonished to feel a slight twinge of reluctance.

‘I can help you with that much,’ said Delir heavily. ‘We know people who won’t ask for identity papers – won’t ask too much of anything.’

‘Thank you,’ said Varius. ‘And Eudoxius?’

Delir and Ziye looked at one another.

‘There is someone,’ muttered Lal, almost to herself. ‘We
can
help.’ She met Varius’ eyes and he knew she would get him the information, even if Delir and Ziye refused.

Delir admitted, ‘We had someone in Cappadocia, just an assistant to an assistant in the Governor’s office, or something like that. If he’s even still there . . .’

Varius took a tiny room at the bottom of a crowded block on the northern edge of the city, and tried to spend as little time as possible actually inside it. It was good to have a bed and a place out of the rain, but being penned in so close to so many other people made him nervous. He hadn’t liked closed spaces ever since his time in prison;
now it felt strange to be inside at all. He felt he needed to do something to make sense of his change in circumstances, should anyone be paying attention, so he tidied himself up – only a little – and acquired a case of cheap watches, jewellery and combs. He continued roaming around the city, still smelling of alcohol, making lacklustre efforts to sell his trinkets at tram-stations and outside temples, while he waited for word from Delir’s contact in Cappadocia, or from Eudoxius himself.

Drusus addressed the people again after the fall of Bamaria, and Varius moved through the ecstatic crowd spread through all the Fora, trying not to listen to Drusus’ speech, or to the crowd that kept chanting,
Novius, Novius
. . .

It was the first time that the possibility occurred to Varius that nothing Drusus had begun could be stopped, that killing him now might only make him, in a sense, more powerful. For once he was almost relieved that he couldn’t get close enough.

On public longvision he watched the news of the thousands of bombs floating like spores across the Empire, a handful drifting as close as Egypt and Asia Minor, and he listened to people talking. Despite their number the balloon bombs had killed few and done little serious damage, but everyone shuddered at the idea of silent weapons on the wind, and they celebrated fiercely when news came that a ship carrying them had been destroyed in the Arabian Sea. The fighting was still far off, but in Rome the war felt more real now.

He was half-heartedly pestering tourists with his case of trinkets near a tram station on the Field of Mars one morning when he heard a satisfied voice saying, ‘Well, I just hope they don’t let them slip this time. That girl looks such a sly little bitch.’ Varius looked up with immediate foreboding to see that the government news-kiosk on the corner was doing brisker business than usual, and the people clustered around it had an alert, excited look.

The advertising magazine came out that day too, so he bought both. Una and Sulien had just barely dodged arrest on the border between Venedia and Sarmatia. Varius started leafing urgently through the magazine, trying to think of something he could do if he should find their signal in it. He frowned at the page where it might have been, thinking,
Run, run
, as if he could propel some measure of strength or luck to them through the print. Later he found he’d wandered close to the temple of Isis and Serapis, and because they were the gods of his Egyptian ancestors and gods of death, he went and leaned his forehead against the temple’s outer wall, praying without belief, ‘Please, let these two go. Please, not them too.’

*

A few days later Varius was woken by insistent knocking on the door of his room. He lay still for a second of paralysed dread, long enough to realise that the sky was still black and it was very early indeed. Warily, he got up. The room was so small that he barely had to take a step to reach the door. But there was no one there when he opened it; he heard hurried footsteps receding towards the outside door. A large crate stood at his feet.

Varius dragged the box inside, crouched beside it on the floor and looked it over with nonplussed paranoia before beginning to yank it open. The box was filled with secondhand office equipment – an autoscribe with a couple of ink cartridges, a longdictor, even a bundle of pens and a pair of scissors, all carefully padded in layers of shredded paper. There was a note, unsigned, which read, ‘For use in your endeavours. I regret I cannot be of further assistance.’ And there was a smaller box, right at the bottom of the crate, and the box was full of money.

Varius sat on his heels, open-mouthed, staring at it, and then, for want of knowing what else to do, counted it. A hundred and fifty thousand sesterces.

He panicked a little then. It was more than he could possibly distribute around the scattered hoards where he’d stored his money, and he was afraid both to leave it there and to take it with him. He stood dithering over it for a while, despairing over every possible hiding place and course of action, before finally packing the money up again and stowing it on top of the narrow cupboard.

He knew 150,000 sesterces wasn’t much to Eudoxius. There had been no indication of whether he was even willing to return to Rome. Oh, it’s all right by him, so long as he doesn’t have to do anything; he’ll just sit in his country house and throw money at it! thought Varius, ungratefully. He made a hasty call to Delir and Ziye and by the time he reached the family’s pair of cellar rooms in the Subura, after an agitated morning ploughing round the city as normal with his case, he had driven himself to a pitch of perverse resentment.

He told Delir, ‘It’s not money I want.’

Delir stared for a second and said, ‘You stupid young man, of course you want money.’

‘It’s only four or five serious bribes,’ said Ziye, ‘and how else are you really going to get near Drusus?’

And they were discussing means of keeping it reasonably safe when Lal came running into the cellar and said, ‘It’s Una.’

*

Una lay on the vibrating floor in the volucer, her wrists and ankles chained. She had not made a sound, nor any voluntary movement, since they’d hoisted her off the gravel, just hung limp in their arms. There was gritty blood on the side of her face and lip and bruises glowed along her body. She thought some of her ribs were cracked and her wrist was broken, nothing worse, but the soldiers weren’t sure how badly she was hurt, and therefore had been comparatively gentle with her, so far at least. She kept her eyes closed as the aircraft rose and roared west. She was telling herself a story, in images rather than in words, and she repeated and refined it, loading every moment of it with will, insisting that it be true.

Sulien flies through the outskirts of Iaxarteum, the sparse city landscape shuttering past him in grey and black, wind already lashing the heat from him as he clings to the frame. He knows there are only minutes before the vigiles have the train stopped, before they’re there to intercept him. The train gathers speed, but then slows again as it approaches the point where the tracks diverge, fanning wide across the huge, colourless emptiness outside the town. The ground is still blurred when he looks down, but the sound of the train changes, he can feel it groan. I have to do it, I have to do it, he thinks, and lowers himself as much as he can, lets go. He rolls and bounces, comes to rest on rough dry ground. Perhaps for a moment he can’t move, the breath knocked out of him; when he manages to get to his feet, perhaps, on instinct, he starts stumbling back the way he has come
.

But there’s another train coasting this way, and he knows he has to get aboard. It’s a passenger train just out of Iaxarteum Main Station – the vigiles either haven’t thought or had time to have it shut down yet. It’s an older train, running on the same tracks as the freight trains, not hovering above the broad magnetway line that cuts between the others and stretches away to the east. It’ll soon be going much faster than the train of hoppers, but for now Sulien has a little more time to judge his moment. He grabs a rail or pipe, pulls himself up into the gap between the carriages, feet braced above the coupling. The buffers jump and judder below his feet, and when the train curves the gap narrows – the first time it happens, he thinks he’ll be crushed, but it never closes as tight as that; it always opens out again. Another train blasts by and the freezing air sucks and pummels at him; he has to grip tight and lean in towards the train to keep his footing, but he does, he does
.

He’s moving so fast he can’t think about anything else
.

He’s exposed and visible, out there on the side of the train. It won’t
be long before someone sees him. When the train stops between stations, out on the steppe – one of those inexplicable breathing spaces in a journey – he jumps down, shaky and sick and longing to lie down in the scratchy grass, but he ducks under the body of the train, climbs up into the underframe, wedging himself against the truss-bars, spread-eagling himself over the wheelset. He’s hidden by the brake-cylinder, by the wheels themselves
.

He hugs a long strut and locks his hands round his wrists, gripping. He shuts his eyes so he won’t see the massive wheels turning right beside him, or the axle spinning over the juddering flow of the ground below. Sometimes stones or hard scraps of rubbish flick up from the tracks against his back; sometimes the whole structure swerves, swinging him closer to the wheels and the metal above him. It isn’t so cold under here, but the dark air is terrible. He feels as if he’s suffocating, and the noise drives into his skull like a chisel, but hours pass, carrying him further and further away
.

It’s so loud he can’t think about anything else
.