Savage City (52 page)

‘My sister,’ said Sulien. He saw no reason to lie, not about this – that was part of the strange relief he felt in being here. There was little need to explain himself; the worst and hardest things could be simply omitted. All their pasts had been shrunk down to the size of playing cards or stamps or coins, things that could be casually displayed or hidden.

‘You’ve only got a sister?’

Sulien nodded, not paying attention, but Dorion quietened and looked distressed. He lowered his eyes, and then murmured, ‘Was it an air-raid, or—?’

Sulien was taken aback. The information had seemed so neutral to him. He felt as if he’d tricked Dorion out of unneeded sympathy, so rather than nodding and letting the subject drop, he found himself explaining, ‘No, no, my father died ages ago; I can hardly remember him.’ For a moment he found himself tempted to explain that he had not even known that the old man who owned their mother was his father until after his death, but he did hold himself back from that. ‘And we—Well, we didn’t really grow up with my mother. We haven’t seen her in a long time. But yeah, she’s alive.’ Without knowing he was going to, and almost under his breath, he added, ‘We could even have half-brothers or sisters, I suppose.’

Dorion still looked confused and sorry. ‘But back home . . . it’s just you and your sister?’

‘No,’ said Sulien, going back to his letter, ‘it’s not just us.’

He did not elaborate and after a moment Dorion shrugged and grinned. ‘So. Is your sister fit?’

‘Shut up,’ said Sulien mildly, throwing a towel at him.

‘You’ve got a lot of scars,’ said Pas one day when they were washing off the coating of dust and sweat from the assault course. Pas was also from Alexandria. He was small, dark, a year or two younger than Sulien, and almost a foot shorter; he would have looked a child except for the permanent worry lines scratched into his forehead.

Sulien glanced down at himself. He felt a small twitch of trepidation
and yet here, where his body was just one of many interchangeable bodies, part of a mass of raw material, the marks on it seemed inconsequential. He said, ‘Car crash.’

Pas’ eyes narrowed uncertainly. He looked away and asked, ‘Is that what you have those dreams about?’

Sulien’s heart skipped, his pleasant sense of near-invisibility suddenly punctured. Every night he thought he was far too exhausted to dream, and he was almost always wrong. So he clenched his teeth hard when he lay down, and tried to will them to stay closed, clamped shut, even if he couldn’t keep the same pressure on the images that sprouted in his mind. Until now, no one had said anything. He knew his nightly attempts to control his body had some effect – he’d learned to sleep lying rigidly on his back, as if standing at attention – so he’d hoped it was working.

Did he talk when he was dreaming? He avoided Pas’ eyes, afraid to ask. ‘Sorry if I wake you up or anything,’ he said, as casually as he could. ‘It just’ – he searched for some suitably offhand explanation but couldn’t find one – ‘happens,’ he finished lamely.

Pas shrugged. ‘It’s no worse than Ennius snoring,’ he said. He glanced again at the patterns of blotches and claw marks on Sulien’s skin. He said, ‘Must have been bad.’

Sulien reached to turn off the water. He said, ‘Could have been worse.’

They all had bruises from hurling themselves down onto earth or concrete or at each other; from rifle butts; from the centurions’ fists. Sulien ached constantly, and lines of fire burned along his limbs, forging new muscle. He had never been able to run like this, or lift his own weight so easily, so many times. He was a better shot than he had expected to be, too – not exceptional, but good enough that he was left alone.

But Pas struggled. His small body contained a certain wiry stamina; his attention, unlike Sulien’s, never wandered, and he never forgot anything he was told, but he had to work so much harder than the rest of them to keep up. His face grew more and more pinched as the end of their training approached, as their exercises came to resemble actual fighting. They charged down trenches, driving their bayonets into slumped manikins in enemy uniform; they spent a day flinging grenades from behind barricades and Pas threw as straight as anyone else, but flinched helplessly at every blast.

‘I think we’re all going to get killed,’ he muttered to Sulien, a week short of the end, after a day of fieldcraft training; Sulien was double-checking the guy-ropes of the tent they’d just pitched on the sand.

‘Oh fucking shut up,’ said Dorion brightly.

‘It’s a statistical likelihood,’ said Pas. He had a tight, defiant little grin on his face, but his hands were shaking. None of them had any doubt where they were heading: south, into Nubia, to the Alodian front.

‘It is not,’ said Dorion. ‘You’ll get something blown off on the first day and get shipped home, don’t you worry. You’ve got all sorts of parts you can easily spare.’

As always, Dorion’s voice carried; Sentheus came swaggering across from his tent. ‘Is he bitching again?’ he asked, prodding at Pas. ‘Have we really not knocked that out of him yet?’

Dorion grimaced. ‘He’s bitching at us, not you, and we can handle it. Piss off, Sentheus.’

Sentheus gave a loud, flat laugh of affected incredulity. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Are you trying to impress your little girlfriend there, Dorion? You think you can talk to me like that? You haven’t been paying attention if you think you can talk to me like that.’

‘You’re not a fucking centurion yet,’ said Dorion. ‘You’re still low enough to be told to piss off; now piss off.’

Sentheus pushed him hard, grabbed his arms and doubled him over, trying to force him to the ground, to drive a knee into his stomach. Dorion managed to wrench an arm free and punch at Sentheus’ chest. They lurched and staggered back and forth, and Sulien could see they would knock out one of the tent-pegs or worse in a moment.

‘Oh leave it,’ said Justus, by the next tent. ‘Save it for the Nionians.’

Without any feeling other than mild annoyance, Sulien stood up and levered the two of them apart. He shoved Sentheus to one side and more or less lifted Dorion off the ground and deposited him a few paces away. For a moment both Dorion and Sentheus dithered, panting and glowering at each other across Sulien, considering whether or not to rush at each other again. Then Sentheus slunk back – but there was Pas, who’d receded quietly to the other side of the tent. Sentheus gave him an impulsive shove that sent him tripping over the guy-ropes, then kicked at his side when he was sprawled on the sand.

Sulien crossed over to Sentheus and quickly, simply, felled him to the ground. He knew what he wanted – Sentheus to be down and to know he was beaten – and he moved with complete confidence in his ability to do it. It was almost as easy as pushing buttons on a keypad.

He hoisted Pas up, waited until Sentheus had retreated with a muttered, ‘Fuck you, Archias,’ and went back to setting out his kit inside the tent. But something nagged him for hours afterwards. He tried to shake it off, rather than examine it, but later, when he was
crouched in a hollow in the dunes in the darkness during a simulated night raid, it occurred to him that it wasn’t a feeling, it was a lack of feeling. It was the realisation that the training had worked. He feared for Pas, whose eyes were already haunted after only stabbing sandbags and throwing grenades at sand, who was not, nor ever would, be ready in the same way. And yet he envied him a little too, for not compromising, for not allowing himself to be changed. Still, it was Pas who made him realise, on the day that it was done and they were soldiers in scarlet dress uniforms waiting to parade out, that his old self wasn’t lost completely.

‘This is it, Shouter,’ Pas said.

‘What?’ Sulien was baffled for a moment, then, as he realised it was some kind of nickname, he feared it was to do with his nightmares – he’d been louder than he thought.

‘Dorion’s been calling you that. Because you don’t talk,’ said Pas patiently.

Sulien was disproportionately shocked. He had wanted to make no impression, not to be noticed at all, and he’d chosen quietness as a deliberate strategy. To be noticed for being quiet hadn’t occurred to him as a possibility. And as he’d felt ashamed of extracting sympathy from Dorion under what had felt like false pretences, now he felt embarrassed at having misrepresented himself to Pas – even though he knew it was ridiculous, considering his false name and history and the continuing danger of discovery. And suddenly the life that had seemed cut down and diminished ever since the Colosseum rose within this new, hardened body: he was Sulien, not Archias, nor any of these other names he’d dragged around since Marcus’ death. And he looked at the man Pas had seen and thought, No, that’s not what I’m like at all.

‘I do talk,’ he said, and after that it became true.

‘Surprise coming up for you boys,’ said a centurion, strolling into the barracks as they finished straightening the white sashes across their chests. Pas groaned in near-silence, imagining some last impromptu ordeal. But Sulien knew that couldn’t be right, they wouldn’t be spoiling these uniforms – which they would not be keeping either; the army was consuming too many men these days to keep the old rituals intact.

Dorion was already pulling at his collar. ‘It’s so fucking hot,’ he complained, ‘who’s even going to see us like this?’

‘Some general with nothing to do,’ said Sulien.

Their shields, which they would keep, were ranked against the back
wall of the barracks; pillars of transparent bulletproof ceramic, the Imperial Eagle spreading black wings across the centre of each. They were already warm from the desert heat, and they blazed glassily as the soldiers marched with them out into the sun. At the head of the phalanx, the signifer held up the standard, a silver hand in a circle of laurel, and behind him, a drummer began to play. At the centurion’s signal they began to beat their rifles upright against the shields until the rhythm throbbed through the air and through their bones. They processed out – six new centuria – towards the parade ground.

Effortlessly, Sulien marched and turned, raised and lowered his shield and gun to the centurion’s shouted commands. It was so automatic that his mind was free to wonder that this was really happening. He thought of Una and the others, and with every cadenced step forward it was harder to believe he would ever be able to find his way back to them. He wondered if anyone really would send word back to Alexandria if he was killed. Sometimes he imagined Una still searching or waiting, years after the war was over, and the only thing that was worse was to think that no one would send him such a letter if anything happened to her. It would not even be on the news – if they found her, the vigiles would have to kill her in secret. It could have happened already.

But through even these thoughts the beat of the drum kept him steady.

They marched into three long rows and stood waiting for inspection, and Sulien noticed that a number of vehicles in Praetorian livery were standing on the concrete near the end of the column – and then he saw that Praetorian soldiers were everywhere, spread finely but at regular intervals across the perimeter of the parade ground, around the small speaker’s platform, a cluster of them beside a small open car with the Eagle emblazoned on its black flanks. There were a few civilians with longvision cameras at the base of the platform, too.

Sulien thought, It can’t be.

But the car began to move slowly down the line of soldiers, and Drusus was standing upright in the back, in his black uniform, his arm raised.

‘Hail Caesar!’ shouted the signifier, lifting the standard.

‘HAIL CAESAR!’ the soldiers roared in response. Sulien opened his mouth and made the shape of the words, but couldn’t have given them any sound if he’d wanted to.

The car approached, and he was startled at how instinctively his hand flexed on his rifle – but of course it was unloaded, precisely as a safeguard against such impulses. They would not let the Emperor out
in front of a pack of armed boys, many of them conscripts, with only a month’s training behind them. There was nothing he could do. He extended his right arm in a salute with terrible amusement and anger.

Drusus drove past, and looked right at him.

Drusus felt the usual reliable pleasure as the soldiers shouted and saluted him. It should have been stronger today, when for the first time in months he’d had good news. So, although he was still suffering from lack of sleep, and a constant slight nausea his doctors couldn’t seem to do anything about, he persuaded himself that it
was
better; that he could feel the swerve of history turning back the right way, and these young recruits the first witnesses of it. As always, he was glad of his uniform: it made him feel as if he were one of them – or rather, as if they were part of him, as if he contained and magnified them. But as the car carried him past the row of stiffly raised arms and impassive faces, he felt an unaccountable jolt, as if the car had passed over a split in the asphalt, and a chill within him. His skin itched – the desert flies had bitten him here and there and he had to stifle the instinct to scratch at his face. That would not have looked right.

He ascended the small stage and as he looked down the soldiers saluted again. But now he felt their cold, fixed stare as somehow accusing. It was as if their raised arms were pointing at him.

He stuttered a little as he began to speak. ‘I am proud to be here with you as you enter into this most honoured brotherhood of any Empire,’ he said. ‘And on this day it is a special privilege to be able to tell you that thanks to the courage of your comrades in Alodia, the assault on Meroë has been repelled and the enemy is in retreat. We maintain control of the Nile; we are regaining control of the sea. The Nionian way of lawlessness and treachery cannot stand; we will extend the mantle of Roman peace across the world; we will prevail. Today, as Roman soldiers, you continue this great struggle against evil. Rome thanks you for your courage and your sacrifice.’