Savage City (33 page)

King Salomon watched, frowning, as the screen showed a fleet of warships and submarines moving up the Red Sea, haloes illustrating the range of their missiles blossoming around them. It looked like a game for children.

‘And even if this is possible,’ he asked, ‘then what? A new Nionian Empire in Africa? Not here.’

‘You would retain sovereignty over your kingdom, of course,’ Tadahito said. ‘It would be essential for us to operate within and across your borders. We would have to establish bases, for the duration of the war. But this would be a strategic arrangement, nothing more; we would take no part in any internal matters. It would not be permanent.’

The King peered at the screen again, and laughed. ‘Well, of course – you would not walk up and say to my face, “Please give us your country?”’

‘You have our word,’ said Takanari, prompting a short roll of the eyes from the King.

‘We are not in a position to make expansions into Africa,’ said Tadahito. ‘We want to drain resources from Rome; we want to gain time, not territory. Roman counterattacks will come, of course, but we will defend our allies now and we will reward them later – because if we can only hold out now, we will win. We have a weapon – we call it Surijin. It is nearly perfected. We need only to stay in the war long enough to use it.’

‘What’s that thing they all wear?’ asked Takanari later, gesturing at his chest. Many members of Salomon’s court were wearing variations of the same symbol round their necks.

‘You should not come here without learning something of the culture,’ said Kaneharu. ‘We had time enough on the boat.’

‘It’s a stylised cross. The method of execution.’ Tadahito explained.

There was a pause and Takanari grimaced. ‘They make jewellery of something like that? That’s grotesque.’ Crucifixion was still sometimes practised in Nionia.

‘It will help us,’ said Tadahito.

‘Why?’

‘Because it commemorates the death of their principal holy man,’ said Tadahito, ‘who was killed by the Romans.’

‘Well if they come down the Via Didiana, there’s this empty block overlooking it here. And there’s a one-way street leading off it here, to the Via Atia. But I’m not sure it’s busy enough round there for this to work,’ murmured Varius, pushing aside the crumpled lists and half-plotted timetables to make room for the street map. ‘But there’s a building further along where you can get up the fire escape.’

They were in Varius’ cupboard of a room, and Sulien was very thankful Varius was there, for whenever he was absent, Sulien felt an irrational grind of paranoia that perhaps he was out buying poison for Cleomenes to smuggle to Una. Or maybe it would be Ziye, or Cleomenes might do it alone, and make sure none of this went any further. Una had asked; what was there to stop them, if they thought it was right?

But Cleomenes had sent them to a supplier of vigile kit in the Horrea Galbae, and three sets of uniforms, bought with Varius’ money, were folded in a bag under the table at Delir’s. Sulien had been astonished that you could just walk in and order vigiles’ caps and tunics as if they were any other suit of clothes. Delir did not like having them in the flat, but there was work still to be done on them; they needed brass on the collars and badges on the caps, and those were more difficult to come by. Cleomenes had brought one of his old uniforms, they’d spread the genuine insignia between them and fill the gaps with braid and military emblems from flea markets. There was a fluorescent jacket to cover the deficiencies of whichever tunic was least persuasive.

Varius tore off a fresh sheet of paper and began making yet another list, a refinement of the one before, working quickly through the points that were already established: the characteristics the site of interception must have, the items they still had to acquire, numbered schedules of action for each of them.

‘What about the side-street?’ asked Sulien.

Varius shut his eyes as if trying to transmit himself there. ‘Back walls, not many windows. There’s a gate into a courtyard off the back
of a caupona, where they put the bins out. That’s a possibility, I suppose.’

Sulien smiled a little. ‘How can you just
know
that?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been walking around a lot,’ said Varius.

There were times when Sulien thought the rough beard and matted hair looked ridiculous on Varius; the careful, diligent civil servant was so evident underneath. But put him back in the office now and perhaps it would be the other way round: however you dressed him, he would remain a profoundly, comfortingly strange man.

‘We need to time the journey from the Basilica to the prison and from the prison to the Colosseum,’ Varius went on, ‘and between all these points along the way. They’ll clear the streets, so we’ll do it at night when there’s less traffic.’

It was the first day of Una’s trial. Sulien’s was beginning in his absence in some other court, but without him there it lacked all the drama howling around Una, and along with the rest of the empire, Sulien and Varius were not much interested in it. For now Varius’ unreliable secondhand longvision was turned against the wall. They’d had the idea that they could work through it, not waste time tormenting themselves over how she looked and what was said about her. Cleomenes could tell them anything crucial later. But Sulien felt each minute like a small weight placed upon the last. And as it edged past noon, Varius too fell quiet, his pen slowing on the page, until they were both sitting in silence, doing nothing but watching the clock.

‘This won’t work,’ Varius said at last, reaching out to turn the longvision round. ‘We have to see it.’

For a moment they thought they had the wrong time or the wrong channel, because a man’s face filled the screen and he was talking fiercely, straight to camera, and not about Una but about the war: ‘—on both our eastern and western borders, our soldiers are risking their lives, while our enemies in their weakness and fear snatch at what chances they can to scatter death and outrage in our provinces. And it is in this context that the seriousness of this case, this charge of treason against Rome and conspiracy against the Emperor, must be considered—’

It was the Praetorian Prefect in charge of the court, they realised.

Then they brought her in. An eager, hostile surge of noise erupted from the spectators in the gallery and the lictors moved forward, knocking their maces on the floor to quieten them. Sulien felt his lungs tighten, as if that awful sound had somehow drawn air out of the room.

Una gave the camera a quick, self-conscious glance. Sulien, shocked
when he saw her hacked-off hair, fought to stop himself from thinking how it had been done and by whom. There was something strange about her skin; for a moment he thought she was ill, then he remembered he’d seen her look like that before – the first time they’d seen each other since they were children – waxy make-up over bruises.

Her wrists and ankles were chained. As the two of them had limped eastwards from border to border, Sulien had thought that she’d begun to look older than she was. Now, between the heavyset men, she looked painfully young, younger than she’d ever seemed to him. Nevertheless, she was composed, and in a way he had expected that, he knew she wouldn’t let them drag her in weeping and cowering. But this was not the exhausted, hopelessly enduring calm he’d watched soaking through her like a bleach as they drove away from the Rha into Sarmatia. She looked alert, and rather bemused. Her face quivered for a moment as she was led to a chair at the centre of the court, where she had to face the ranks of spectators directly. But as she sat down she seemed to recover herself, and then she lowered her eyes and shed any expression at all.

‘I am Noviana Una,’ she said, when told to give her name, laying slight but perceptible stress on the first part of it.

There was a stir in the court and a lean compact man in his fifties sprang up from his seat and cried out, ‘Sir, that name was a privilege extended to her on emancipation. Her rights as a freedwoman have been revoked; she is no longer entitled to bear it. She has no right to a trial at all; only the monstrous scale of her treachery, the fact that the entire Roman people are her victims, dictate that her crimes be examined in public, rather than that she be sent straight to the beasts as she deserves.’

Sulien tried to swallow away the dryness in his throat. Varius looked sick too, and said, ‘That’s Hirtius.’

The name sounded dimly familiar to Sulien, he was famous for prosecuting . . . someone. He shook his head. It made no difference who he was. Convulsively he pulled the map closer, to get back to work again, for the reassurance of being active. But he couldn’t look away from the longvision, or turn it off.

‘We have not yet begun,’ said the prefect. He asked Una, ‘Do you acknowledge this confession?’ An attendant had passed him a document several pages long; others were handing out copies to the panel of senators seated around him on the platform.

‘Yes,’ said Una, and did not speak again for the rest of the sessions that day.

Hirtius stepped forward with a rolling flex of the shoulders, a swivel
of the neck, an athlete’s final warm-up. In a loud, confident voice, he began to speak again: ‘Prefect, senators, you will find in those pages a catalogue of crimes you might expect it would take a Spartacus a lifetime to achieve. Instead, what do you see before you? A young girl, who at first sight you might think incapable of conceiving such vicious thoughts and harbouring such depraved feelings. Perhaps your first instinct is to pity her. Yet that soft-heartedness, though most fitting to her age and sex, is alien to her nature and wasted upon her. She herself admits that in her earliest years she was infected by, and gave herself utterly to, an unnatural will to undermine, betray and destroy the security of Rome. She was a slave, and yet escape from her legal owners was not enough for her. The privilege of lawful freedom was not enough for her. So great was her desire for power, and so strong her malicious influence upon others, that she insinuated herself into the highest reaches of legitimate authority. She was a friend and supporter of Dama, the leader of that infamous group of anarchist slaves and arsonists, the tools Nionia used to cause such destruction – I will not say untold destruction, judges, for indeed it
must
be told: every loss of property and life must here be named and remembered.

‘And no one here can have forgotten what came of it. The Colosseum stands barely a stone’s throw from where we sit; the walls that witnessed the assassination of the late Emperor Titus and his nephew, Marcus Novius, are not yet whole. Finally, she was arrested in the act of attempting to defect to Nionia, in a time of war.’

Sulien and Varius, horridly transfixed through all this, both started as the longdictor emitted a long chirrup. After eyeing it distrustfully for another second Varius lifted the circlet as if it might carry disease and said in that same wary voice Sulien had heard in the longdictor chamber in Issedoneum, ‘Yes?’

Sulien rose anxiously to his feet as he recognised Cleomenes’ voice, muffled as it was on the other end of the line. ‘Are you watching it?’

‘Yes,’ answered Varius.

Cleomenes said something Sulien couldn’t make out. Varius closed his eyes and sat down heavily on the bed, bowing his head and exhaling with what Sulien recognised, after a moment’s nervous confusion, as relief. He could see his shoulders sink as tension dropped away from them.

‘What? What is it?’

‘Thank you,’ said Varius into the longdictor, before turning it off. He reached to slam off the longvision and looked up at Sulien. ‘They’re not sending her to the Colosseum, whatever Hirtius says. Cleomenes says the confession’s part of a deal.’

Sulien couldn’t feel any great relief in this himself, and found it excessive in Varius. ‘Well then, what—?’

Varius sighed again, and straightened, became still. ‘It would be a firing squad,’ he said.

‘I don’t care how they want to do it,’ Sulien said violently, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

Varius paused, then released the breath he’d taken without saying anything. He nodded.

‘But this means we’ve got less time We would have had until the Games for the Saturnalia, if they— If it’s not at the Colosseum then they won’t have to wait for anything, they could finish the trial by the end of the week and then . . . and there’ll only be one journey we can intercept.’

‘We’ll have only one chance anyway,’ said Varius. ‘And in another two days we’ll be as ready as we’re going to get.’

Sulien nodded and sat down on the bed. Sweaty, feverish weariness poured through him as the spurt of panic ebbed away. His own feelings seemed hard to follow now; Varius was right, it could hardly be bad news that the Colosseum was no longer waiting for her; he should be at least a little glad, shouldn’t he? She was not sitting there in the chamber in the Basilica Noviana right at this moment, anticipating
that
death, waiting for the hounds to tear her to pieces.

At least he wouldn’t have to worry about Varius buying poison any more; that was something.

It was a bright winter day. As they had hurried her first into the van, and then down the steps into the cell beneath the Basilica, she had felt the open air on her skin, warm compared with the grinding cold of those weeks in Venedia and Sarmatia. At first it had been terrible to face the people in the gallery, feeling the first brunt of their excitement and anticipating their disappointment when they realised her death would not be played out in front of them at the Colosseum. But she could see past them now. In the high windows at the back of the court the sky shone blue. Una sat in her chair and kept her eyes on it.