Savage City (70 page)

‘Not yet,’ said Una at once, ‘you can’t explain how you got here.’

‘It’ll be just a few more days,’ said Delir kindly.

Varius was stupefied, helpless with tiredness by now, and Ziye summarily assigned him Lal’s bed above the printing shop. She pulled down the shutters and produced piles of blankets and bedrolls.

‘A few more days!’ repeated Lal, dizzily, flinging herself down beside Una and hugging her. Sulien was in the storeroom with Pas. The separation chafed a little but with the warmth of his lips still stamped on hers it was bearable for now. There would be time for them later.

‘You’re not even frightened,’ said Una, wondering. Her voice sounded fragile in the dark.

‘No,’ said Lal, resolutely, and turned onto her side to face Una. ‘You can’t be – not now?’

Una stared up at the ceiling. ‘I’ve promised so many people so much,’ she said.

‘Well then,’ said Lal, ‘I’ll promise you it’s going to happen, I can feel it.’

But she woke less than an hour later, heart and breath jarred by Sulien’s voice raised in a hoarse shout from the next room, and the sound of a short, tangled struggle.

Una was awake too, lying tense beside her. Lal gave a small moan of distress and started up.

‘Wait,’ whispered Una.

On the other side of the door they could hear a low rumble of conversation: Sulien and Pas were talking. Even from here, she could hear Sulien’s breath steadying, growing quieter. Every now and then the names of people and cities she didn’t know floated through: Hanno, Gracilis, Aregaya.

Una could not stop thinking about everything that had to be done and everything that could go wrong, and yet here she was, in the printing shop stockroom, baffled at having nothing immediate to do.

Twenty longdictor calls had been made, in a code agreed months ago. She felt at once that the real meaning was being shouted out all the way to Rome, and that she could not understand it herself. Those simple conversations with a few trusted people: how could they really be confirming that hundreds of others were beginning to move?

Yet over the nine months since they had begun, she had at some point looked every one of these two thousand and seventeen people in the face. The thought smoothed her over with pride even while it made her shiver: What am I doing to these people? she thought incredulously – as good as murdering them, perhaps? Sometimes the sight of Sulien and Varius, the closeness of death just freshly washed off them both, stopped her breathing, leaving her frozen at the very thought of it.

Sulien was standing over Varius now, examining the charts of the Mediterranean and Aegean and trying to take in the finished contours of plans that had been barely formed when he’d left. Varius was going over the routes, humming quietly under his breath – not really a song, only a soft accompaniment to thinking. They’d tried to let him sleep longer than the rest of them, but he’d risen, groaning, and lurched downstairs into the stockroom when he heard them moving about. ‘Perhaps you should stay out of it,’ Una felt compelled to say to him, ‘meet us in Rome when it’s done.’

Varius turned an incredulous, aggrieved look at her. ‘After all this?’ he said, flatly.

‘Two days ago you were
dying
, Varius.’

‘He isn’t now,’ Sulien pointed out.

‘And when I woke up,’ said Varius, ‘everything had changed and I’d missed it. I’m not having that again, not now of all times.’ But he smiled then, with painful sweetness. ‘I’ll be there with you.’

Sulien said, ‘We all know what we’re in for, Una, and we’re all volunteers. We didn’t have even one cohort like that out in Mohavia.’

‘So I need to get round to Sabratha and pick up the
Ananke
,’ said Varius firmly, turning his attention back to the charts. The little ship was still in the cove by Evadne’s house.

‘We could do without it,’ Una suggested. ‘We can fit in with Phanias, or with Bupe in the
Carmenta
.’

‘But that wasn’t the plan,’ objected Varius, startled, and then stopped, considering it. He looked saddened.

Una smiled. ‘We need every ship we have,’ she corrected herself.

Sulien said, ‘I’ll come with you, Varius. I can keep an eye on you. You can’t drive four hundred miles and then sail a boat another two hundred miles, not alone.’

‘I was thinking you’d come, Una – you know the boat best,’ said Varius.

Una hesitated. It was ridiculous that the choice should feel so loaded: it was only one day to be without either or both of them.

Then Lal came in, having overheard the last part of the conversation, and settled it by appealing to Sulien, ‘Don’t leave again yet.’

‘We’ll meet you tomorrow outside Heraklion,’ Una told Sulien.

The small white house on the cliff was locked and empty. Una turned to face the bare sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon a fishing boat was already carrying Maralah and Evadne towards Rome.

She drew in a breath full of salt air and forgot to let it out; her body locked around it, teeth clamped tight.

‘After all this time,’ murmured Varius beside her, ‘I can’t believe we’re really doing this.’

‘I feel –’ began Una, so low she could barely hear herself. But a colder breeze scythed off the sea and cut off whatever the rest of the sentence had been, and she shivered.

‘It will be all right,’ said Varius almost as quietly. His hand knocked against hers, which was screwed into a fist, until it loosened and their fingers hooked around each other.

They steered the little inflatable dinghy out into the cove and climbed up onto the
Ananke
’s deck. Una caught Varius running an
affectionate hand over the roof of the cabin, smiling as if he’d come home.

She sat down on one of the cockpit benches and smiled too. ‘You used to say this boat didn’t belong to you – she was just a resource for the cause, don’t you remember?’

‘Well,’ conceded Varius, ‘things are different now.’ And he stroked the
Ananke
again as if to console her, and looked at the sky. ‘It’s still light,’ he said. ‘We might as well take her up the coast – less to do tomorrow.’

Una groaned quietly. She had driven all the way along the coast of Egypt from Tamiathis, refusing to let Varius take over even briefly. But she dragged herself up and reached towards the controls.

Varius pushed her lightly away. ‘I’ll do it, Una.’

She looked at him anxiously, but his face was alert and he looked perfectly steady as he took the helm. She sank back onto the seat and a little of the tension in her body flowed out into the dark water beneath the bow as he steered the
Ananke
out onto the sea. Sometimes, after drooping closed, her eyelids would spring open in indeterminate panic, then as she found him still there at the helm, a shadowy figure as the dark settled around the ship, she would let her head drop back against the seat again, reassured.

But they were both so sodden with tiredness when at last they dropped anchor that Una felt they would leave an inky trail of it behind them as they climbed down into the cabin. Varius looked down at Una, standing by the bottom of the steps, and he wanted to say good night, or to promise her again that it would be all right, but with a defeated sigh at the sheer impossibility of speech, he embraced her instead.

Una put off the moment of lifting her head from his shoulder another moment, and then another, and then it seemed, to both of them, too tiring to move apart at all. Her eyelids had fallen shut again. They were almost asleep there on their feet, almost asleep as they sank down onto the same bed, and lay still.

A question, a wisp of doubt, rustled quietly in Varius’ mind as he stretched himself out on top of the tangled covers, but they were both so exhausted; all these hunted months had been so hard, and they had travelled so many miles together in this little boat, gone to bed night after night only a few feet apart in this cabin, so what did it matter if they fell asleep like this now? They were no longer holding one another, just lying side by side, and Una was already so still, her breath soft and even, and Varius himself was so close to the boundary of sleep himself he could hardly tell whether or not he’d crossed it yet.
The sea lifted the
Ananke
and let it down, the rhythm steady, and sometimes Varius could feel a dream beginning to brim up out of the deeper wells of sleep: that they were no longer floating on the surface of the sea but underneath it, suspended together between the seabed and the air, safely breathing the water, hidden.

Una too felt she was so nearly asleep the difference barely mattered; there was just one tense thread holding her to consciousness, and she lay waiting for it to break. This is all that I want, she told herself, feeling his pulse echo softly in her own flesh, almost overcoming the ache there. I don’t need anything else, just to lie here like this.

Whenever his eyes drifted open, Varius could see the surface of the water outside, dimly reflected on the ceiling above them – a net of light, trembling and breaking – and he was surprised that it had grown no brighter. He felt as if hours had passed, and yet it seemed natural that the night had stalled here, as if nothing would change again now, and they would always be floating here, always on the point of sleep.

Una shifted slightly, bringing up her hand so that it fell across his arm, her fingertips weightless on the edge of his chest.

Then, as if only by chance, as if they were lying passively in the flow of a current that lifted and turned them towards each other, their faces came together on the pillow. Their lips brushed together and caught.

Una sighed, and settled herself even closer, her slow, sleepy fingers stroking his arms, tracing over his closed eyes. Varius let his lips part and close against hers as if he was whispering in his sleep. And still it seemed to him that this was as separate from their real lives as a dream they would forget on waking, that they’d slipped out of the world. A faint shiver went through him when he felt her hand come to rest lightly on his waist under his tunic, but it was not enough to shock him back to himself, to make him ask what they were doing.

It was almost difficult to touch him, to push away the fabric over his skin when the boundaries of her own body were turning as vague as clouds. It was such a relief to kiss him; Una felt it was like letting out a held breath and gasping down air. It was so strong it made her blurred and soft, and she imagined she needed to soak up only a little more of it and then she would be able to stop. If he did not let her go, if he kept kissing her, just a little longer, that would be enough for the rest of her life.

Varius’ hands copied hers, nudging fastenings open, and under her clothes he felt the warm patterns of claw- and toothmarks threaded and banded across her body; his fingers discovered a spool of fine ridges that ran down across her shoulder to her breast. He held her tighter, so sorry and so glad they were there, the living hum of her body ringing
softly through the smooth and marked skin alike. He bent his lips to the scars, feeling he could lay down small protective wards, like plates of invisible armour, little seals of resolve that he would never let it happen again. And he remembered holding her face between his hands the day the wounds had been made, the urgency, the jolt of recognition.

And at that the illusion or pretence that they were only dreaming or not themselves vanished and he was fully awake and incredulous, and bewildered, and angry with himself – with both of them. And he startled into a confused struggle where his intentions seemed to tangle and double back on themselves, so that when he meant to let go of her he clutched her more fiercely instead, rolled her underneath him, pulling aside her clothes and his own. And she met him with just as much panicked, grasping force: kissing harder, teeth and fingernails out, hands closing on each other’s hair. Whatever he was trying to say kept getting crushed breathlessly between them.

But at last he remembered how to stop, and he dragged himself clear. He sat up and knelt there on the bed in the dark, gasping. The
Ananke
rose and fell, and he wished everything would keep still for a minute so that he could think.

Una was still, naked on the bed beside him. Then she raised herself so that they were kneeling face to face, staring, though it was too dark to see more than each other’s shadowed outline, the faint liquid glint of each other’s eyes.

‘Una,’ he said, in a whisper, and his voice sounded questioning, lost.

Tentatively, Una laid her face against the join of his neck and shoulder. He felt her sigh again, her breath skimming like a feather across his chest. Varius closed his arms around her, feeling a baffling prickle of tears in his eyes. And he thought that it was too late now anyway, and, surprised at how lovely a thought that was, he gathered her even closer, lifting her into his lap. They both trembled again as her legs parted around him, moving now with the slow rock of the sea, and when they fell together onto the bed again he found tears on her face too, tasted the salt on his lips.

Varius woke and the cabin was full of light. He turned his head at once to look at Una because he had not forgotten for a moment. It was the memory, the excitement that had woken him. Una had moved a little away from him as they slept and was not touching him, though both her hands were extended across the covers towards him. He couldn’t see her face; it was hidden under her hair.

He wanted to pull her back into his arms, but he was afraid of waking her, afraid to see regret flicker into focus on her face.