Savage City (50 page)

Bupe nodded again, displacing the scarf enough to show a grimace of curt sympathy and regret. And there were edges of scars, extending from some terrible centre under the folds of cloth, but her visible eye was bright. ‘We lost some of our own to them too. I’m sorry he’s gone. I never thanked him for what he did for me.’

But she had. Sulien had told Una about the last minutes of his escape with Lal from Dama’s compound near Rome, the burnt girl silently staring at them near the gates, then turning her blinded eye to shut out the sight of them and letting them pass.

Dama felt suddenly close, a thickening in the texture of the warm air, an alteration of the light. Una’s chest grew tight, her skin prickled as if a blunt knife were running over it. She had to force herself to say his name. ‘You were at Dama’s farm.’

‘Yes,’ said Bupe levelly. ‘I believed everything – almost everything – he told us then. Some of us tried to go on believing it, even after he was dead, even at the start of the war.’

Una gritted her teeth.

Bupe stared at her out of her red hood for some seconds. ‘But he didn’t tell us everything. And then you— What you said at your trial – no one chooses to die like that over something that isn’t true. So we could have had freedom without all this. And now slaves are being sent off to fight for Rome too. I don’t care how it happens now. I didn’t think Rome could be any more evil than it was. But it is – it is. I hate this Emperor, I will do anything I can to stop him. Have you heard what happened in Patara?’

Varius and Una glanced at each other – they had not.

‘You will soon. Of course they are trying to keep the news from spreading, but it was too big. I know – I was there. We got some women and boys out of a workshop making clothes— We burned it afterwards, just a little place. But there was a big meatpacking factory close to it, and they must have heard about what we did there. And they must have heard about you, too, because the next day they wouldn’t touch the machines; they said they knew they were already free. Then when the supervisors tried to punish them, they smashed the place up. They fought their way out. And it spread – slaves from
everywhere, houses and factories and everywhere. Some shops got smashed, you know. But then they all came together in the forum, hundreds of them, I don’t know how many. They tried to take over the courthouse. They wanted to make the praetor say it, that they were free. You should have heard the noise we made – I was there – we frightened them, at least.’

Her voice was vivid with anger and strange satisfaction. In quick, bright, flashes Una could see it – the furious, ecstatic faces, the rush at the courthouse doors – and she was torn between exhilaration and sick certainty of what must have followed. The uprising would have been put down bloodily. The people Bupe was talking about were dead.

‘Of course the vigiles came and started firing,’ said Bupe, calmly, chillingly. ‘Everyone must have expected that. It took a while. We got out before the worst of it. And they couldn’t shoot everyone. But later there were bodies all across the forum, and the blood— It pools in the gutters, and there’s the smell . . . You had to expect it, but afterwards . . . It went on, and got worse. Anywhere there was one of those posters up – any street anywhere near it, they went round all the houses and workshops and everywhere and took the slaves – all of them from some places, one or two from others, I couldn’t see any pattern to it, but most of them were people who had nothing to do with it. Even their owners couldn’t stop it. And they killed them. They hung some of them in the street. They even got out the crosses again and crucified them. They said the orders came straight from the Emperor. It was because of you. You can see that, can’t you? Because of what you are doing. And he will do it again.’

Drusus and the men who had carried out his orders – they had murdered these people, Una thought, no one else. She had just time to think this, to cling to the thought like a rope, because there was a roaring in her ears and a cold wind seemed to fly around her, as if she were falling. She was ashamed of an impulse to look to Varius for reassurance, or for an understanding of shared guilt. But she could not have acted on it in any case, she could not move. She stood there rigidly staring.

‘They hate him in Patara now,’ said Bupe softly. ‘Even the citizens, even the slave owners: they hate the Emperor more than they hate the Nionians. Nionia never robbed them, or made the streets smell like that. More people will come to you because of it. Many of them are looking for you.’ She lifted her mutilated arms. ‘There are fifty with me. Even I can hold a gun. Do you want us?’

Noriko, daughter of the Go-natoku Emperor and wife of Marcus Novius Faustus Leo, to Diodorus Cleomenes, with polite greetings.

You told me to trust you I know this is not what you meant. But I can think of no other. In his room here I have found letters of my husband I know you were most loyal to him and help him many time. My ladies and me we are in serious increasing danger. I can not write what will certainly happen soon if we do not escape from here. But you may imagine it is very bad. We are watched and forbidden everywhere it will be very hard even to get outside but I think we can do it. But if we have nowhere to go after that we will be lost.

Here is this bracelet. Please sell it and I hope you can use the money because I am sure you will need it if you are willing to help. Perhaps for a car.

Please for my husband’s sake I beg you to help us.

Please forgive my poor Latin I am writing in haste.

Noriko did not read the letter over; it was too embarrassing even to look at the frantic writing, the crumpled paper. She rolled it up despondently and hid it inside her sleeve. She had written it in bed by the dim glow of moonlight through the curtains, so as not to wake the maidservant sleeping in the little bed against the far wall. She was not allowed writing materials; even the notebooks in which she did Latin exercises had been taken away. But she was still free to wander the palace and gardens, and so, hidden in cushions and curtain hems around her bedroom, she had a secret store of hidden pens, swept off tabletops and desks when her minders were not looking. And no one had yet thought of confiscating the cases of old letters in the bureau where Marcus had written some of his private correspondence.

She was not even sure what to do with the letter once she’d written it – how to get it out of the Palace, let alone as far as Cleomenes, whose
address she didn’t know. She had found no letters from him, though his name had been mentioned in a couple of messages from Varius, and that had been enough to confirm to her that this was someone who would not betray her. All she could think to do, for now, was keep it on her, together with the bracelet, under her sleeve, waiting for an opportunity. The bracelet had been a present from Marcus; she had thought it would be easier for Cleomenes to sell a Western piece safely and discreetly. She had not worn the bracelet since Marcus’ death – or even very often before that – and yet, handling it and remembering him, she would have preferred to use one of the gifts from her family, for she had begun to feel she might see them again.

While searching, she’d found drafts of desperate letters Marcus had written to Una, before and after their marriage. Noriko had clenched her teeth and looked away.

Trunnia, the woman in charge of spying on them, must once have been a slave, and perhaps that was why she enjoyed her power over three foreign noblewomen so much now. Often, when Noriko and the others tried to talk to her, she made an irritable show of not being able to understand their accents. She complained to the other maids about their outlandish habits and histrionic moods in an audible half-whisper when Noriko, Sakura and Tomoe were in the next room. And she supervised the other servants when they went through all their belongings, after the incident with the razor.

And yet among the servants there were potential allies. By now Noriko knew who some of them were – the girl who had whispered to Tomoe that Una and Sulien were alive; the liveried functionaries who opened doors on the lower floor; a young boy they sometimes saw polishing the banisters on the stairs nearest their rooms. But it was not easy to talk to them alone for any length of time.

To her horror, Drusus summoned her to dinner once after the assault in her rooms. The page who came with the message was accompanied by a couple of baleful Praetorians, and Noriko was even more frightened now of being dragged in forcibly; she felt almost sure that once it began, the violence would surge to the height it had reached before.

‘My ladies-in-waiting will come with me,’ she said, when she could think of no safe way out. She didn’t want to leave Sakura and Tomoe, both for their sake and her own.

‘Just you,’ said one of the Praetorians, grinning. ‘Take them along and we’ll only have to bring them back.’

Noriko recognised him with a shudder of anger and fear; he was one of the pair who had attacked Sakura. She bit her lip and acknowledged
herself trapped. She was almost as afraid of being alone with the Praetorians as with Drusus, but she would not ask Sakura to go anywhere in this man’s company, even without the threat.

While they waited outside she shut herself into her bedroom to dress, angrily, in the drabbest formal wear she could find. She talked briefly with Sakura and Tomoe; Tomoe suggested they lock and barricade themselves into the bath suite until she came back. Trunnia sighed and rolled her eyes, but did not try to stop them.

Noriko marched down the palace corridors, her body barbed with tension. Behind her the two guards whispered and sniggered, in that disgusting way she remembered, but they did not speak to her directly, nor touch her. She walked quickly across the glittering floor and lay down stiffly on the couch opposite Drusus, ignoring the food.

At least Drusus did not speak to her, though for long periods he stared at her, broodingly, from beneath lowered brows. There were, as usual, a couple of attractive women in evening dress lounging elegantly on the couch beside him – a young blonde who gamely kept up a stream of squeaky chatter across the otherwise silent table, and, clutched closer to Drusus, a girl about Noriko’s own age, wearing a white dress, with dark, velvety eyes and heaped-up black hair. Noriko still did not know who the women were, or how Drusus procured them, but she had noticed that some of them recurred. The blonde was new, but that dark-haired one had been present more often than any of the others.

The girl never spoke, and she looked like someone. Noriko had not placed it at once, because the resemblance was to someone she’d only seen in photographs, but now, in the white gown and with her hair dressed that way, the similarity was obscene: Lady Tullia, Faustus’ wife, the murderess, the one Drusus had killed. It was as if a ghost lay there, blinking and smiling at nothing across the table. Noriko’s skin crept at what the likeness meant. She wanted to keep her eyes lowered and away from Drusus, but they kept being drawn back towards the other woman, fascinated despite herself. Was it only a fancy, or did she herself look a little like both of them – Tullia, and this replica of her? The dark hair and light skin, something about the chin and the mouth – was it not possible that Drusus might see it that way?

And usually Drusus did not touch the women much while Noriko was there, but this time, once he’d downed a few glasses of wine, he had the dark girl almost on her back, practically underneath him, right there in front of everyone, while the little blonde gritted her teeth and prattled on. But Noriko was sure this was for her benefit. He wanted her to watch as he ran his hand, almost clawing, from the girl’s waist
to her breast. And he wanted her to see that the pale skin of the girl’s bare arms was striped with purplish bruises, with the fierce pressure of his fingers on her shoulder leaving no doubt how they had been made. Her mouth had a bruised, puffy look, and the upper lip was blotted with a red mark that might have been a bite. Noriko might have wondered that he was not ashamed to let her be seen in public, dressed up and marked like this, if she hadn’t been certain the other woman’s body was a message to her. He wanted her to imagine herself lying there, she thought, whether or not he knew that was what he meant by it. He was telling her it was not over; she was not safe.

Never, since they had met over Marcus’ body that first awful day, had she been in his presence without revulsion. Now it was so strong that she thought she’d be sick if she even touched the food. The room was huge, but it felt stifling, she could hardly breathe. There was a filthy texture to the air, a smell in it like the rusty stink of blood. When Drusus looked at her she wanted to writhe and struggle as if he were actually touching her again.

If there was anything that made it a little easier to endure, it was that he looked almost more worn and ill-at-ease than she felt herself. His lips were tight, the flesh under his eyes was swollen and dark; occasionally a juddering twitch ran through him. He too barely ate. He lay there pouring glass after glass of wine down his throat, without any glimmer of visible pleasure – in that, or in the bruised woman who lay beside him, silently smiling.

After that dinner, there was a partial respite. Drusus was often away: he was talking to scientists at test sites off the coast of Thule; he was addressing the troops before they left for Terranova or Ethiopia. He was hardly off the longvision these days. In his absence the restrictions surrounding Noriko eased slightly; Trunnia grew a little less thorough, left them alone for longer at a time. But the Praetorians were increasingly restless; even those who had always treated them with respect lapsed now into nonchalant rudeness. And some of them roamed around the palace like packs of feral dogs, they banged on the door when the women were locked inside, hooted and catcalled at them down corridors. Noriko kept her letter in her sleeve and waited.