Savage City (28 page)

She searched for an acceptable reply and then murmured, ‘I think it is a natural weakness in me. You would understand if I were unwilling to watch another woman being hurt at length, in front of me? If I could not stand the sight of even an animal’s blood? I have met her. I know her face. Unfortunately I can still imagine it very clearly. So for me it would be as if I had to watch all the time.’

‘And do you think an Emperor should be just as squeamish?’

Noriko raised her eyes from the table at last to look at him. ‘I hope you may show compassion to
me
. I am asking you to think of me, not of her. You have been so kind to me; please be kind one more time.’

Drusus’ eyebrows lifted, and he said, ‘You didn’t seem to be so impressed with me a minute ago.’

Noriko rose, briefly closing her fists as she walked around the table and knelt beside his couch. ‘I regret any moment in which I have not shown you proper gratitude. I am the daughter of your enemy; you might have placed me where she is, I know that. And instead you have protected me. So I know how capable you are of kindness. I would not ask for any more from you if I could help myself. I know I cannot persuade you to spare her life. But please, let her be treated well while she is in prison. Let her at least be treated decently. Otherwise I cannot bear it— I will have no peace, I will be ill, I know it—’

She let tears trickle out of her eyes, lifting her face so he could see them. It was easy enough to cry for Una and for herself, but she fought to keep her features smooth as she wept, which was harder.

‘Oh, Jove,’ said Drusus, exasperated, though he bent his face closer to hers. ‘Very well, I’ll tell them to keep their hands off her, will that do?’

Noriko sniffed and snivelled and whispered, ‘May I see her?’

‘What? No. I think you should be satisfied with my word,’ said Drusus.

‘But I shall be so afraid they have not obeyed you. Perhaps they might think you did not mean it. Please. Unless I can see for myself that she is unhurt, it will always be on my mind, I will be always afraid . . .’

Drusus reached out gently and wiped the tears from her cheek. His face was strangely soft and wistful. Noriko froze, not even breathing. His fingertips traced their way to her mouth, slid over and between her lips.

Later, she flung herself down on her bed, letting out a stifled scream of disgust and fury into the bedclothes.

Tomoe curled up on the bed beside her, offering comfort; stealing some for herself.

‘We can’t stay in this place,’ Noriko said to her.

Sulien lurched into one of the longdictor chambers down at the port and toppled onto the bench there, trying to steady himself enough to dial the code. What little rest he’d had over the last twenty-four hours had been on trams or out in the open, screened against the daylight by saxaul trees. He’d taken a room for the night in Dahae, but it had hardly been worth the risk, for he couldn’t really sleep. He’d had three days to wait until the magazine came out, and the couple of hundred miles he’d covered, moving south along the coast, seemed like less, creeping along on the spot in a salt-crusted landscape that didn’t change.

He was unreasonably shaken that there actually were a couple of real replies to his advertisement, but then there was Varius, grim and guarded: ‘I saw your notice. You can reach me on this code.’

Just to hear his voice almost sabotaged Sulien: he gulped for air and shook, and here were more inexcusable minutes passing in which he wasn’t doing anything.

It took him a few false starts, but he dialled the code and Varius answered at once. ‘Yes?’ he said warily, and then, as Sulien struggled and failed to answer, ‘Where are you?’ Sulien’s voice continued to stick like a wrong key jammed in a lock.

‘Not that I think anyone’s listening,’ said Varius quietly, ‘but I’m not going to say your name. Are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ managed Sulien at last, ‘I’m here – I’m in Issedoneum. I’m coming back. Can you help me? I have to get back.’ There was a pause
and Sulien shouted into it with abrupt violence, ‘I’m not leaving her there! I’m not going on by myself. Don’t you dare tell me that.’

Another pause. ‘All right,’ Varius answered, evenly.

‘Sorry. Thank you for . . . oh gods, thank you for even answering. I’m sorry.’

‘Are you safe for the moment?’ asked Varius.

‘I don’t know. More or less. There’s no one around just now. Yes.’

‘Do you still have money?’

‘Yes. Half of what we had left. But I don’t know what— I think I’m about two hundred miles from the border with Persia, but I don’t think I can get a car again, and trains are too dangerous. I’ve been getting trams and walking the last few days. It’s too slow.’

‘Can I contact you where you are now?’

Sulien looked around unsteadily. ‘Not really, it’s very public. I don’t want to stay in the same place for too long.’

‘All right, will you be able to call me again in three hours? But don’t try and keep moving – I can tell from here you need to eat and rest.’

Sulien mumbled something incoherent that was not quite assent.

Varius said gently, ‘Three hours won’t make any difference.’

Delir could not have owned the atlases very long, having come from Sina with almost nothing, but he had saved them from the family’s flat and now his fingers moved over the thick, beautiful pages with unthinking love, searching out Issedoneum. He said, ‘Yes, I have friends in Rhagae. They will help.’ There was an agitated, manic haste about him that Varius hadn’t seen before, but he sounded completely certain.

‘Would they go across the border for him?’

Delir grimaced. ‘I doubt it.’

‘But they could take him across the province, to Tauris or Urmia?’

Varius had contributed most of the contents of Eudoxius’ crate to Lal as well as financing more supplies, and now her forgery equipment – bottles, brushes, the autoscribe and a lumpen copypress, and sheets of paper, plastic and metal – took over one corner of the cellar. A small array of papers and security passes in various stages of completion was spread across the desk, on top of newssheets gloating over the plans for Una’s trial. Lal was leaning back from her work, kneading her sore eyes, unruly hair splayed around a pale, underslept face.

‘You are doing so well with these,’ Delir said, hurrying to supply praise like a fuel.

‘I don’t know – I need a picture of him, obviously—’

Varius stared at the newssheets on the desk and said dully, ‘Why couldn’t they just finish it when they found her?’

‘Can’t you see why?’ asked Ziye. ‘Drusus has built her up too much for that. They tell stories like this in the arena, they make the crowd love one fighter and hate another, but you don’t work people up like that and then show them nothing, you don’t say it all ended offstage. People want to see her. Then when it’s over, and they’ve watched it all, they’re all part of it; they can’t place the blame on Drusus alone; they can’t easily change their mind. They won’t be able to say it isn’t what they wanted.’

‘Better for her and Sulien if they’d shot her at once,’ Varius muttered.

Lal looked appalled, but it was Delir who said, ‘Don’t say that. Whatever the reason, she’s still alive, and something may happen, we may be able to do something. There must be some hope in that.’

‘I said I’d help them, so I will,’ said Varius. ‘If he can get himself into Persia, your friends can take him all the way across it. If he could go by magnetway for the rest of the journey . . .’

‘But he needs papers for that. And I need his picture,’ repeated Lal. ‘I need more time to finish.’

‘Do you have one of those for yourself, Lal? And could you work on Sulien’s while you were travelling?’

Lal’s face changed, becoming at once sombre and bright. ‘Yes, I have one. I could go and meet him. Yes, I could bring him back here.’

‘What, alone? No,’ protested Delir instantly.

Ziye said bitterly, ‘Why shouldn’t she go where she chooses, if she’s in the mood to go off saving people? You did.’

‘Ziye,’ said Lal.

‘What should I say?’ cried Delir. ‘“Yes, I have no right to stop you, so go and get yourself arrested like that poor girl?” Please don’t do this, not after everything else.’

‘Don’t you think I’ve been in worse danger than this?’ replied Lal quietly. ‘And don’t you remember what Una and Sulien have done for me? What’s a train ride compared with that? Of course I’m going.’

Sulien wished Varius had talked for longer, that he had not been so reluctant to go into any detail. He’d given Sulien a Persian longdictor code, for once he was over the border, and said, ‘One of us will bring you the rest of the way,’ which had to mean he’d found Delir, and that there was more than one friend waiting for him back in Rome. But it would have been good to hear Varius actually say that; it would have made it tangible. And though he knew how hollow it would be if
Varius told him Una probably hadn’t been harmed, might still be saved, still he desperately wanted to hear someone say it anyway.

He thought about heading for the tracks again. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a risk here; the checks might be less stringent than further east. But even so, the closer he came to the Persian border, the more vigiles would be patrolling the line.

He walked along the cold quayside. The longdictor chambers were clustered next to a seaside amusement arcade, all shut up for the winter except for one or two brave food-stalls; beyond there were rows of moored pleasure-boats, sealed up like bobbing sarcophagi. For a moment Sulien thought wildly of stealing one of the smaller boats, but the next moment he was jeering at himself: what, and pilot it two hundred miles? But perhaps he could hide himself on board a vessel heading the right way, as Una had done for him all those years ago – there had to be ferries, even in winter. But he couldn’t do the same things Una could, and in any case, how would he get to shore safely? He could hardly swim for it, not in water as cold as this must be, or wade up the beach fully dressed and expect no one to notice.

What was left that he had not already tried or thought of?

He’d pared down his belongings to nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the rolls of cash, hidden in his pockets and in his boots. Sulien began mentally to count it out: yes, it would be stretched thin, but if it had been imaginable to carry on alone, it would have been enough to carry him to Nionian or Sinoan territory . . .

If it could have taken him two or three thousand miles, surely it was enough to vault him across just a couple of hundred miles now?

He remembered Marcus at the caupona in Wolf Step: young, defenceless, no money in his pockets, but wielding an air of privilege like a weapon, scaring a pack of black marketeer thugs into a panic, giving orders and expecting them to be obeyed, refusing to explain himself . . .

I haven’t done that, Sulien thought. I haven’t tried being rich.

Noriko had never seen Una free. In the Nionian quarters at the palace in Bianjing she had been a been a prisoner no one had sought or expected, someone of high but complicated status, to be treated like a guest, at least while the uncertainty lasted. Noriko remembered her dressed in silk, crouched in a chair like a bird of prey on a branch, extending a tense authority over the space she was held in. Noriko knew it would not be like that now, but that was the image in her mind as the car passed through the prison gates. Praetorians walked on either side of her, and the prisoners she passed in the yard were herded rapidly away as she approached. But they saw her, and they knew who she was, or at least recognised her as Nionian, and they had begun to jeer and spit before the guards could hurry her inside. The prison guards themselves glowered and bristled as they looked at her; no one else had even spoken to her. A Roman warship had been sunk in the Promethean Sea two days before.

A female warder shut the door of the starkly lit interview room and lugubriously pulled out a chair for her. Noriko ignored it, staring. Una was sitting waiting for her, chained by her wrists to the edge of the high metal-topped table; Noriko saw the cast on her wrist and the slumped posture first – Una’s head was down, as it had been the first time Noriko had seen her, but now her lank hair had been sawn off at jaw-level, and pale brown roots showed above the fading dye. Then she looked up and Noriko saw the deep purple-black stain printed with strange neatness onto one eye like an official stamp, and the bruises and scrapes mottled across the rest of her face.

Noriko felt at once faint and electric with rage. So she had been lied to; she had humiliated herself for nothing. She wanted to sweep Una up and plough through the building like a hurricane and deposit her
hundreds of miles from these barbarians’ reach. She said thickly, ‘You were not supposed to be hurt.’

Una smiled with one corner of her mouth and gestured at her face with an air of weary apology. ‘Most of it’s from when I fell off the train.’

‘Most of it?’

‘They wanted to know where Varius was.’ Una looked down, picked with swollen fingertips at the edge of the cast, adding mildly, ‘I told them the truth. He came with us as far as Germania. I don’t know where he went after that.’

Noriko dropped into the chair almost involuntarily; her legs were shaking.