Savage City (40 page)

A troop of dog-handlers had spilled out of the gates, carrying boards, goads and tranquilliser guns. They were trying to herd the hounds to safety, into the tunnel that ran beneath the Colosseum to the vivarium. They were all slaves; the dogs’ lives were worth more than theirs,
and they were in panicky haste. Their whistles and calls were shrill and hurried and when Ziye looked at the hounds they seemed at best only temporarily distracted from their work. For the moment she could not see Una or Sulien at all.

She heard another deep burst of sound bouncing round the loop of the walls: Lal or Delir, scattering more crackers under the feet of the crowd.

There were more shrieks, and however strict their orders must have been, several of the slaves dropped their tools and ran. Ziye ran too, through the gladiators’ gate and down a ramp into the dark staging bay below. She could hear the panic and uproar roiling through the underground passages, but she couldn’t see it; there were boards like those the handlers carried blocking every way except one, to channel the hounds to and from the vivarium. She’d hoped she could snatch what she wanted from a shelf or a rack on the wall, but she did not see it in her first swift glance around and there was no time for a more thorough search. Instead, when another of the handlers came fleeing down the ramp, Ziye let him pass her, then closed in and jabbed an elbow into the small of his back. He crumpled backwards and she caught him with her right arm around his neck before he could make any sound. She squeezed with forearm and bicep on the arteries on either side of the jaw, counting as she felt the strength run out of him, dragging him back to lay him down in the shadows. And for a moment, even though she regretted this blemish on her promise to cleanse herself permanently of violence, she was almost sorry the crowd in the terraces had not witnessed this. It had been a good piece of work.

The rubbish sacks stuffed with paper were still by the gates where he had left them; Varius swept them up and carried them inside. There were no vigiles – except himself, of course – in the Ludus Magnus yet. Gladiators and their managers and mistresses were still hurrying down from the barracks above. Every gate and door stood open.

He passed through the colonnade, crossed the practice ground and moved into the tunnel through which the gladiators marched down into the innards of the Colosseum.

For an instant the hounds froze, tense, their heavy paws flexing uncertainly. Then they began again to trample and scrape, but soon they stopped again and this time they skittered away, pouring and reforming like a drop of mercury, and Sulien dragged himself up, pulling Una with him, and tried to place himself between her and the dogs as the pack pivoted around them. He reached again for the broken
javelin, which was half buried in the sand. It was harder to keep a grip on it; his hands were unsteady, and slippery with blood.

‘Sulien – don’t,’ moaned Una, ‘just let them do it.’ And Sulien didn’t know why he was trying to prolong this, but he couldn’t stop. The hounds made a feint inwards, playing, perhaps, and retreated for a moment when he brandished the staff at them. He hurled himself at them, shouting, and an image flashed across his memory: Una’s eyelids straining stubbornly open after he’d drugged her on the day of Marcus’ death, resisting for no good reason.

There was a stabbing pain in his back that felt strange for a second, but everything hurt anyway, all of it running together like splotches of ink. The hound in the lead reared up and he struck it across the chest. Something was happening in the arena, but blood kept dripping into his eyes, and in any case, the hounds were finished playing now and came charging back in earnest, effortlessly mowing them down, knocking Una away from him again. This time the onslaught passed in a numb blur, as if they were rushing right through him.

When it was over he tried to stand again, teetered upright for an instant, then toppled down onto his knees and couldn’t get his balance to rise a second time.

Una did not get up. She was lying on her back, her clothes shredded and scarlet, her eyes closed. Sulien floundered across the sand towards her, a cry bubbling out of him—But no, not yet, she was still breathing, and steadily, as if she were merely asleep. But he supposed she wouldn’t wake again now.

He wiped his face and looked around, and grasped for a moment that the stands were emptying and that the dogs had drawn off. But the understanding leaked away almost as soon as he had it – it didn’t matter what anyone else was doing; he could scarcely even keep his eyes open now. He was bewildered that he seemed to be fading so fast – yes, they were both covered in blood, but had either of them really lost so much, or been wounded so deeply yet? An annoying need to account for it fussed at his mind, and he frowned, fretfully turning over the only diagnosis that made any kind of sense: shock, lack of sleep and food . . . but still . . .

Of course it didn’t matter. Even the pain was almost finished with now; a deep wave of dizziness was rising to swallow it. Sulien let it suck him down to the sand beside Una, he let it drag his eyes shut, thankful.

The vigiles were spreading hastily through the basements of the Colosseum, scouring through its tunnels and cluttered recesses,
trying to control and order the flow of stage hands, prison guards, medics, lighting and sound technicians. Varius moved among them in the dim underground light, scanning the walls as he walked by. Naturally, after so many years, Ziye had not been able to tell him the location of the fuse box. He could probably manage even without finding it, but darkness would help him. He didn’t see it as he passed between the lift-shafts on the upper floor, or at the bottom of the stairwell as he moved down to the level of the cells. But as he reached the guards’ workstation, a broad booth with a glazed partition opening on one side towards the cell-block, there it was, on the outer wall.

Varius looked around. He had to wait for a second until a vigile officer further down the passage had flung open a door to a storage room and barged inside. Varius opened the panel and examined the labels above the switches with hurried care – he didn’t want to take out everything. Then he flicked a firecracker into a corner and as it sounded, slammed off the switches.

Shouts of horror scattered through the blackness. Somewhere, something heavy crashed to the floor.

Varius had his torch ready in his hand. He switched it on, glanced at his watch, and went on towards the morgue.

At last, and as one, the hounds came surging away towards the handlers and the gates. Ziye flattened herself against the wall as they rushed by. She had already seized a low-slung trolley, designed for clearing away corpses and other rubbish from the arena; she tried to shield herself behind it now. She’d fought arena hounds once before, a novelty act, three of them, leaping and clawing like a triple-headed monster out of a myth, during a lean year when her troop was in Gaetulia and audiences were sparse. She was not going to do it again.

In all that empty space, the two crumpled bodies looked strangely unimportant. She could see how Sulien must have crawled his way to Una; he’d left a ploughed-up trail of reddened sand. Ziye bent and plucked out the tranquilliser dart she’d fired into his shoulder. The one that had hit Una lay in a shallow furrow in the sand beside her; it must have been knocked out of her flesh as she fell. So much the better; perhaps a little less of the drug would have entered her blood. Ziye sucked her teeth as she looked down at them, more worried about the load of sedative in the darts than any of the wounds on them. There had been no time to find out much about the tranquilliser, and it had had to be an identical dose for them both.

Well, even at the worst, it would be a better death than how the dogs would have finished them. She collected a third dart poking out of the
sand a few feet away – she’d missed with her first shot – and hauled first Sulien, then Una, onto the trolley. With some difficulty she got it moving again, and it felt like a long way, dragging the thing across the sand, out in the open. But she was only taking the bodies to where they belonged. She shoved the trolley onto a scuffed square of metal near the northernmost peak of the arena’s curve: the lift-shaft that ran down to the morgue.

She could see vigiles breaking from the gates into the arena now, like some new gladiatorial act; they were heading towards her. Of course, the lifts could not be operated from above; she could do nothing but wait.

There had been no other executions that morning, and the morgue staff had already fled; the room was empty. Varius crossed it in two strides, dropping the rubbish sacks, hand at once outstretched towards the button that summoned the lift. He stood, jigging slightly from foot to foot and fidgeting with the switch on the torch as he waited. Some of the single-mindedness that had kept him calm so far had begun to evaporate; he could not stop his brain from cataloguing the worst possibilities behind the doors as the lift hummed its slow way down.

The morgue lay deep below the arena; the sunlight that reached the bottom of the shaft was weak and pallid. Ziye was standing over a shadowed, motionless heap. At once, Varius turned the beam of the torch downwards, bracing himself for the inevitable shock of red. ‘They’re alive,’ Ziye informed him crisply, steering the trolley into the room.

There was no time for anything more; they could hear rapid, heavy footsteps along the passage. Ziye covered the bodies – it was hard to think of them as living, as Una and Sulien – with a length of plastic sheeting, and Varius retreated into the thicker shadows at the back of the room.

A vigile officer opened the door and swept the light of a torch across Ziye’s masked face.

‘What are you doing still in here?’

Ziye shrugged. ‘Everyone’s overreacting. It’s like a bunker down here. I could barely hear it when it happened last time. I was going to take them to the incinerator first.’ She gestured down at the trolley and the vigile officer trained his light on its load. Varius’ attention was drawn to what must be Sulien’s hand, emerging from the plastic, intact fingers trailing on the floor of the morgue.

‘You’re sure they’re dead?’

Ziye snorted faintly. ‘Throats torn. Too much commotion up there; the dogs don’t like it.’

Varius had been edging his way silently along the back wall of the room. In the dark he had been unable to make out anything about the man until he was right behind him, except that he was about his own height and his voice sounded young. Close up he could see the insignia on the uniform, junior to the rank he had assumed himself; good. He pushed past, as if he’d only just come in through the door, and bent over the base of the trolley, lifting a corner of the sheeting and touching a bloody wrist, a throat, before the other man could get the idea of doing it himself. He thought he could feel a hidden, withdrawn life in the skin, even before he found a slow, tired pulse, felt a wisp of breath against his palm. His own heart kicked in tense sympathy.

He looked up and nodded. ‘Radio it through,’ he said, ‘I’ll handle things in here.’

The man nodded back and tramped out of the room. Varius’ heart gave another guarded leap.

‘Where are the bags?’ hissed Ziye, looking around at once for the rubbish sacks. Varius pulled them over, opened them both. There were handfuls of empty sacks on top of the paper that filled out each one.

Una and Sulien were so unwieldy, so awkward, as Ziye and Varius wrestled them into the sacks. It was such heavy, irritating work that it felt oddly prosaic, like packaging up some complicated piece of furniture. They struggled, panting, preoccupied only with weight, and how to work the hinges of knees and elbows. But when it was almost done, each of them folded down inside the bags, only their heads still to be covered, they seemed to become human and themselves again, and Varius, lifting Una’s head to pull another of the bags down over it, looked down at her face with a sudden sting of recognition and renewed fear. He ripped a hole in the plastic near her mouth and thought nevertheless, they won’t be able to breathe; we’re suffocating them.

Then they piled the full sacks over them and stuffed a third bag with more of the plastic sheeting when that didn’t look like enough to hide the shape of the bundles underneath. Ziye went to the door and Varius studied their work for a moment by the torchlight: a trolley heaped with anonymous plastic sacks.

‘It’s clear,’ said Ziye.

He wheeled the trolley out of the room. He’d turned off his light; they made their way by the flickering beams of the vigiles’ torches. The paper-filled sacks were so light that Ziye had to walk alongside the
trolley and keep a hand on the topmost bag to keep it from falling. It was as well to have her in the lead, Varius thought; in the dark he might have lost his bearings, lost time. Once they had gained the upper floor she marched ahead, unhesitating. They moved along, a cumbersome, purposeful shadow, bumping occasionally against a heap of props or one of the vigiles, who cursed and ran on.

They reached the tunnel out to the gladiators’ barracks. The flow of workers from within the Colosseum had almost given out. A few more vigiles went by, one with a pair of brown-and-white dogs which looked almost puppy-like, compared with the beasts in the arena. Varius kept the trolley close to the wall, didn’t walk too fast, and forced himself not to let his gaze drift past Ziye’s back towards the daylight ahead. Evidence, forensics, he repeated to himself silently, as if he might forget or fumble the words if he were asked for an explanation.

But they saw only a pair of officers out in the practice ground at the Ludus Magnus, and that at some distance, and no one asked them anything, not even when they walked the trolley out through the gates onto the street. Varius tightened his grip on the handles as his head grew light, and his skin was washed with sudden sweat, as if a fever were breaking. He glanced at Ziye, whose own skin looked pale and taut; he thought he could make out the lines of a grimace below the mask.