Savage City (62 page)

But for now they were riding back a few miles towards Aregaya along the road they’d already taken, and then turning down towards the mountains. The heat-clogged air was as dense as ever, but Sulien was sitting on the outside of the truck, where the speed whipped up a little dry breeze. They passed a few bodies in a crater, untended crops
withering under dry irrigation wheels, a roadside tea-house with its shutters smashed. But by the time they were a mile clear of the Onager he felt relief rise through him and the vast space around them began to feel comforting rather than intimidating. He felt both the Romans and the Nionians might forget their little group of vehicles altogether; surely there was enough bristly red ground and blue sky here to hide them from anyone’s notice. There were green woods up in the mountains, above the reach of the desert. He wished there were somewhere like Holzarta waiting up there, a hiding place he could take the fourth centuria to escape.

‘What’s that?’ said Caerellius suddenly, and Sulien stiffened, looking ahead for whatever Caerellius had seen or heard. But he could see nothing, and Caerellius just stared straight ahead, his mouth tight with disgust, his nostrils flaring.

Then Sulien caught the smell too; it washed across the little convoy and the whole centuria knew, at almost the same instant, what they were going to find on this road. It was the smell that pervaded Aregaya, but here it was stronger, more sustained, and it grew with every breath and with every turn of the wheels beneath them. They looked at each other.

‘Oh,
shit
,’ whispered Dorion.

They saw cars motionless on the road ahead, as if they were just running into a very long tailback of traffic, from roadworks, or an accident.

A sour eddy of the smell made Pas gag. Sulien tied a cloth around his own nose and mouth. Others were already doing the same: it was more of a ritual gesture than a practical one; it didn’t really keep much of the smell out, but it was something between them and what they were approaching. The drivers of the trucks needed no command from Sulien to move faster, they accelerated, compelled by awful curiosity. They knew what they had found, and they could not go on without seeing it.

A little closer, and they could see how many cars had swerved off the road or collided; others were neatly spaced on the asphalt, their doors standing open.

Sulien shouted for the drivers to halt when he saw the first bodies. They were face down, their limbs sprawled as if they had been running back this way when they were overtaken. There were more lying in the scorched grass on either side of the road, curled up or clinging to each other. Black hair fluttered in the hot breeze.

Sulien swung down from the truck and walked a little way along the
road, one hand pressed to his face, treading softly, as if afraid of breaking the silence here.

He tried to keep his eyes half focused, to skim his gaze across the road, not settling. If he looked any closer, he knew he would start to pick out the children. The sun had dried flesh to darkened leather – was that what had dragged open so many mouths, or had they died that way, lips straining for air, or screaming? They lay half-fallen from the cars from which they’d tried to scramble free, or huddled underneath them, or slumped inside. There was a pale trail of powdery residue over everything, metal and asphalt and clothing and hair.

‘No one touch anything!’ Sulien called out.

But no one had thought of touching anything; they picked their way among the cars silently, for as long as they could before the smell set solid like concrete and held them back. The queue of dead extended as far along the road ahead as they could see.

Sulien tried to silence the part of his mind that handled numbers, tried not to guess a figure beyond ‘many’, but despite himself he knew that it was thousands. And he thought he knew where they’d come from: the vehicles were loaded high with cases, bundles, unsorted heaps of cooking pots, bedding, books, and some of it had come tumbling from roof-racks across the road. The things that belonged in the empty cupboards of Aregaya.

‘Maybe they did it themselves,’ suggested Dorion tentatively.

‘What?’ asked Sulien, dully incredulous.

‘I mean, the Nionians, for some kind of . . . to make it look like . . . I mean, maybe it wasn’t us,’ explained Dorion, stammering slightly.

Sulien blinked, and saw the red gaping mouths of the arena hounds. He saw the cross. Rage washed through him. ‘You think we wouldn’t do this?’ he demanded. ‘You think Romans wouldn’t? Where the hell have you been living, Dorion? Because I wish I could go there.’

‘Don’t yell at me,’ said Dorion, visibly shaking, ‘I never fucking wanted to come here.’ His voice broke, and he raised his hands to his eyes.

Sulien sighed. He was trembling too. He put his hand on Dorion’s shoulder.

‘What the fuck do we do?’ whispered Pas.

But there was nothing they could do. There were so many dead and so few of them that they couldn’t have begun to start burying them, even if they had dared to touch the poison that coated them. Sulien wanted some gesture of apology or respect,
something
, but even if he could have thought of anything, it would have turned obscene as they performed it, he knew that.

So they limped back to their trucks and carried on, rolling off the road in a long detour that took them miles further from the Roman lines than had been planned. The smell of the road chased them all the way to the mountains.

‘I’ve never been alone in a house before,’ said Maralah, standing in the doorway of the tiny white building on the cliff, the key in her hand. She looked at once fragile and dangerous, with her set, pale face and unblinking eyes.

Evadne rumpled her stubbly head fondly. ‘You’ll do all right. Just be careful with the stove. And don’t shoot anyone unless you’re sure you have to.’

Noriko hugged her, and Maralah clung to her with sudden fierceness. Then, with a long, keen look at Una, she drew inside.

Una, Noriko, Sakura and Tomoe were dressed in the flimsy, revealing clothes Cominia had provided, with cheap plastic jewellery bright at their wrists and ears. The fluttery blue sundress Una was wearing reminded her of the star-printed dress she’d worn the day of her escape, five years before. A sheer pink scarf veiled the worst of the scars on her shoulders and arms. The women eyed each other in resigned self-consciousness. Sakura kept trying to tug the little skirt she was wearing lower. Una’s lips were set in a familiar, stubborn line. But she avoided looking at Varius.

The truck was oven-like from the moment they climbed into it, and the thin tar-fibre dresses melded damply to the seats and their skin almost at once.

Varius took the controls of the car first, with Evadne beside him. His back had been painful all morning, but he assumed that was the price of having the stitches out late and unanaesthetised, and he expected it to fade. They lumbered along the gravelly track from the house onto the road towards Antipyrgos, following the course of the aqueduct as it marched across the land. Broad green bands of farmland striped the desert where pipes and channels carried the water down to the fields of lentils, beans and flax.

They barely spoke as the dry air rasped past the car, sitting listless with heat. Varius felt it gnaw at the flesh of his back, pool in his joints, sting his eyes. His heart began to flutter and tug in his chest as the arches of the aqueduct repeated monotonously alongside the truck; if it hadn’t been for the other traffic he would almost have wondered if they were moving at all.

‘Varius,’ said Una, her voice thin and taut.

‘What?’ Varius mumbled.

‘You have to stop the car.’

Varius had been driving mindlessly, too lost in the heat and the pain to notice either. He pulled over in a sandy lay-by and dragged himself out. He felt baffled by the rush of nausea that came on as he took a few steps into the breathless air, but he swallowed down most of a bottle of water and it faded. The truck was too hot to touch, but he leant against it anyway. In the sunlight the other cars blazed like comets on the road, the air melting around them.

‘Maybe we should turn back,’ said Evadne, examining him, touching his forehead, ‘leave you with Maralah.’

‘Mmm.’ He didn’t have a strong opinion either way: the thought of going back to the little house and lying down in the shade was tantalising, but it would be a long, uncomfortable drive now whatever they decided.

‘No,’ said Una fiercely, ‘you’re staying with me. You’re coming. They’ll have doctors there.’

Varius rubbed his eyes and tried to shake himself out of his sluggishness. How could he care so little about the end to so much work and danger? ‘I have to be there to see Tadahito,’ he said. He climbed heavily into the passenger seat beside Evadne and closed his eyes.

There had been too little time to scout for a safe place to slip illicitly across the border between Tripolitania and Libya, and they would have lost time getting back to the main road anyway. They joined a long queue at the crossing south of Theon Limen, where ranks of stationary vehicles were stranded on the asphalt.

In the back, Tomoe passed around mirrors and cosmetics and the women began silently applying bright, heavy paint to their faces. Una joined in, painting a scarlet layer of disguise onto her lips. It was too hot to do it before the moment it was necessary.

At last they rolled up to the gate and a border guard peered at the papers Evadne handed him. From the back seat Una concentrated on him, readying herself to try to push his attention away from them if necessary, but he was bored and slow in the heat, with sweat dark under his arms and shiny on his forehead. ‘Your business in Libya?’ he asked.

‘We’ve got a buyer for these girls in Garama,’ said Evadne breezily.

Una and the other girls huddled sullenly together in the back, their hair falling forward over their lurid faces, but the officer only glanced in at them.

He strolled around the truck to Varius’ window, still studying his papers. ‘I see you’re of conscription age, sir. Do you have a statement of professional or medical exemption?’

‘Yes,’ said Varius, hauling himself upright and fumbling for the letter from the hospital in Tamiathis. The air was thick, and heavy as sand, and just lifting his hands from his lap cost an effort. ‘I have a – a short-term deferment . . .’

‘He isn’t well,’ said Evadne, and the officer peered at Varius, grunted, and to Varius’ slight dismay said, ‘Yeah, all right,’ before he had even seen the letter.

He waved them through and Evadne drove on into Libya.

The farmland gave out as the highway rose on great pillars, wading deep into the pale sea of rolling dunes. The road skimmed a thousand feet above the desert floor, though in places the sand had climbed up hungrily towards it, drifting in steep, crescent-shaped ridges against the columns. Tank-like sand-ploughs crawled across these hills and valleys, and scoured the road itself, guarding the viaduct from the weight and flow of the desert.

There were broad, round bays at intervals along the highway where there were shops and charging stations. Two hundred miles into the desert, they stopped for Una to take over at the controls of the truck. Though she felt beaten with the heat, she was grateful for the chance to do something. She was so conscious of Varius, shifting restlessly in his seat, shivering, and she pushed over the speed limit, passing a cargo tram convoy with a container carrying a load of camels poking their gloomy heads through the bars. But otherwise the southbound carriageway was almost empty now. Most of the traffic was coming the other way, fleeing the advancing battle lines in Nubia and Gaetulia.

The sand turned amber as the sun began its descent, the sleepy human contours of the dunes sinking and smoothing out into an empty gold plain, scattered with dark rocks like lumps of ash which rose into pointed, charred black hills in the distance.

The highway soared eastwards towards Gaetulia, and Una led the truck spiralling down a junction, through Pharusium, then onto a road that was little more than a flattened, gritty channel in the sand.

The lack of any landmarks made Una anxious, especially now the sky was darkening; the road sometimes seemed as notional as a line of longitude on a map. And she was horrified when, after thirty miles, it thinned and disappeared altogether into miles of blank sand, even though the map had told her to expect it.

She drove uncertainly for a few hundred yards, then stopped the truck and began arguing with Evadne about the compass readings.

‘Well – it’s more or less over there,’ said Evadne, gesturing.

‘More or less isn’t good enough,’ insisted Una. She and Varius had learned to navigate together out on the sea, but Varius was slumped in
heavy-eyed stupor against the window and the courses they had plotted had always been a few degrees away from perfect. Una had never quite understood what they were doing wrong, but it hadn’t mattered too much on the Mediterranean, and she had never misjudged so badly as not to recognise the island or port they were searching for when it appeared, however unexpectedly, over the horizon. But out here it would take only a small error to lead them miles from the meeting place, and she had been calculating grimly what such a mistake might cost them for hours, even before she’d noticed the sharpening edge to Varius’ breath.

‘Let me see,’ said Noriko, taking the compass, bending over the map. She worked sums under her breath. ‘We are heading a little too sharply south,’ she announced, confidently. ‘True north and magnetic north – they are not the same; you must adjust. I think ten more miles south-southeast, past those hills.’