Savage City Page 17

  She shook her head and asked indistinctly, ‘Are the vigiles coming?’

  Sulien said, ‘Yes, they’re coming,’ and looked around urgently for someone else to take over before they appeared.

  Thankfully a man Sulien thought he recognised from the bar came running up to them, asking, ‘Is she all right?’ and Sulien said, ‘You wait with her, I’m going to see if anyone else is hurt,’ before retreating with a hasty pat of the woman’s hand.

  Another woman was calling in through a broken window, ‘Sarata, Sarata, are you in there?’ Sulien glanced at her uneasily as he went on down the street. It’s not so bad, he thought; nothing irreparable. He coughed as the wind flung a loop of rank smoke around him, and began to shiver again. He hunched over against a sudden gust of snow so fierce that for the next few steps he couldn’t see anything clearly but his boots, scraping through the grit and ice, but something was moving a little way ahead, and as the wind dropped again, Sulien looked up.

  A boy, about eight years old, was leaning against the wall, silently pulling himself along one-handed. He stopped moving, and Sulien sprang forward, into a slithering run across the icy ground to catch the boy as he buckled.

  Of course, this was why he had come. Of course he was needed. He must have tricked himself out of knowing it.

  The boy let out a thin, outraged, hacking cry, like a baby’s.

  Sulien repeated softly, ‘You’re all right, you’re all right,’ although this time it wasn’t true. He silently cursed to the same rhythm, and despite everything he knew he felt a stab of undiscriminating rage at the Nionians. Some part of the van had been blown in through the window and had hit the boy in the back, knocking him to the ground and smashing the shoulder blade, dragging the bone away from its ties, the broken edges tearing at the veins and arteries beneath.

  Sulien grimaced and looked around, both dreading that people were coming, and hoping for some kind of impossible help. He dragged off his coat and laid the child on it carefully, shuffling closer to a doorstep so he could prop the boy’s feet off the ground. ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked, afraid of the answer. His teeth were starting to chatter.

  The boy whimpered, ‘I want her. Want my mother . . .’ His eyelids drooped over huge, unfocused pupils.

  Sulien closed his own eyes, detesting himself for his moment of hesitation. If the medics were good, if they understood quickly enough what was wrong, a surgeon might be able to stop the bleeding inside. But the boy would lose the arm, even if he lived.

  He could see the way the broken pieces should fit together. He could see how the flesh and bone had been, just a moment before, whole and sound. However many posters there were of his face in this town, of course it made no difference. He murmured again, ‘You’re all right.’

  The bells of an ambulance or a fire engine sang somewhere, drawing close. A woman came hurtling down the street towards him, shrieking, and almost pounced onto the boy. Trying not to look her in the face Sulien mumbled, ‘Well, I . . . I don’t think he’s hurt so badly. I need to go and—’ And he withdrew with as much disguised haste as he could.

  As he turned he saw the woman from the bar, standing on the other side of the street still, watching him. Sulien swallowed, managed a sheepish smile at her and hurried past, hugging himself and thinking mechanically, ‘I’ve got to get home.’

  She caught up with him before he’d reached the next block. She was carrying his coat. ‘You don’t want to leave that,’ she said, ‘you look frozen already. And they’ve got him inside. He’ll be fine now, won’t he?’

  Sulien put on the coat in silence and then muttered, ‘He should be careful for a while, I think.’

  They walked on without speaking for a while. Sulien didn’t raise his eyes from the ground, but he could see her twisting her hands uncertainly. Then she said in a low voice, ‘I’ll tell that kid not to say anything.’

  Sulien breathed out a helpless laugh and looked at her. She had a faintly nervous half-smile, but she looked him in the eye. That’s it, he thought, we’re leaving now, whatever the ice is like. She added, ‘And I won’t say anything.’

  Sulien found nothing to say. Tiredness burrowed through him.

  She asked softly, ‘Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere?’

  Sulien sighed. ‘Can you let me use your longdictor first?’

  He had her drop him at the edge of Una’s town, though it would probably make little difference now if she saw where Una had been staying, or the two of them together. He hadn’t been into the town before, and he was dismayed to pass buildings without roofs and a blackened gap where a house should have stood. Una had given him directions to a disused temple of Magna Mater, a forlorn, squat little building, flaking boards wedged between the concrete columns. Sulien waited, shivering, in the courtyard, watching the snow erase his footprints.

  Una arrived late. She braked beside him with a bad-tempered jolt and asked, ‘Now what happened?’

  Sulien sighed and started loading his backpack into the car. Una climbed out to persist, ‘Someone drove you here? What’s going on?’

  ‘A woman from the caupona. She’s all right.’

  Una pursed her lips and fixed him with a searching glower that made him feel she was on the point of knowing everything that had happened, whether or not she was reading his thoughts.

  He looked away, feeling the shiftiness of it, and said, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Oh, Sulien!’ she groaned, leaning against the car and casting a disgusted glance skywards. ‘So much for not being noticed!’

  ‘Well, she already had noticed me, Una, and turning her down wasn’t going to make her forget. I can at least hope that wasn’t what was on her mind when we were—’

  Una, wincing, groaned again – partly sisterly revulsion, partly defeat.

  ‘Anyway, she’s trying to help.’

  ‘We can’t have help,’ said Una, flatly now.

  ‘She’s not why we have to leave. There was a bomb in the town, and there was this kid . . .’ He could not describe the boy’s injuries; his throat closed as he pictured them. He could feel at his core that same raw, frantic pressure the woman from the bar had uncovered in him, and his hands starting to shake with it, more than just juddering against the cold. ‘I had to,’ he said, fiercely. It was almost an apology. ‘I had to.’

  Still leaning against the car, Una had closed her eyes, and snow-flakes were settling on the lashes. She wasn’t quarrelling, he realised. She turned her head slowly to look at him and smiled. ‘Of course you did,’ she said. ‘I’ve been . . . getting myself noticed too.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Una croaked a little laugh and climbed back inside the car. ‘Telling people what to do.’

  He got in beside her. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you?’ he said, trying to tease.

  Una rested a warning hand on his wrist and said quietly, ‘Keep your hood up,’ because a vigile officer was walking up to them and signalling for them not to move.

  He came up on the driver’s side and Una dutifully opened the window. ‘You’re the young lady who’s been staying at Vituriga’s?’

  Una beamed out sweetly, pleased to see him. ‘Yes, I just wanted to show my friend the temple before I go – my grandfather used to come here.’

  Sulien, slumped low in the seat beside her, raised a hand in silent greeting, keeping his face in shadow. We do look different, he tried to reassure himself, feeling droplets of melting snow filtering uncomfortably through his beard to the skin beneath. As well as being a different colour, Una’s hair was shorter now than in the pictures, and he’d helped her chop a slightly uneven fringe into it.

  ‘There’s not much to look at,’ said the officer, glancing at the temple with the same woebegone manner which seemed to afflict everyone here when contemplating their hometown. But he wasn’t threatening; he seemed a little embarrassed to be bothering them. ‘Look, we just wanted to follow up some things from the other day . . .’

  ‘Oh, I
hope I didn’t cause any kind of trouble!’ exclaimed Una. ‘I just thought it would be sensible if we all got out of the snow. It wasn’t anything really.’

  ‘No, no. Well . . .’ Sulien could hear the impatience in his voice at this stupid, remote possibility he had to check, just in case. ‘Could I see your identity papers?’

  ‘Oh, of course!’ Una trilled eagerly, as if she’d been offered a treat. She began searching confidently in her pockets, gradually building a look of puzzled alarm. ‘Oh— I think I left them in the safe in the guest house— Oh thank goodness you stopped me! That would have been so awful! Look, I was just going to drop my friend back in Sacaeum – he’s going to be late – would you mind if I do that first and bring them round straight afterwards?’

  ‘Well— If we could just get it over with? It’s only round the corner.’

  Una didn’t hesitate. ‘Well, all right; why don’t you get in? I might as well give you a lift there.’

  Sulien clenched the hand the officer couldn’t see into a fist, closing his eyes.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the officer, slightly flustered, ‘you just drive on, I’ll meet you there in five minutes.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Una tightly, and drove away, not too fast, not yet.

  They looked at each other as they rounded the first corner. Una pounded a fist against the side of the car.

  ‘Five minutes,’ repeated Sulien, breathless.

  Una pushed down vengefully on the controls and the car skidded forwards, engine whining.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she remarked in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, not seeking a reply, as they broke through the last line of houses onto the sudden steppe outside.

  Sulien swung round in the seat to gaze backwards along the road. ‘He believed you. Maybe he won’t do anything . . .’ But really he expected the black vigile cars to appear on the road behind them; he was surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner.

  Una saw them too. She said, ‘Ha,’ a grim, one-syllable laugh, and forced the car faster.

  The air was growing opaque with snow, but just for an instant, Sulien thought he saw three shapes in the sky, borne low on the wind. The next moment the road between them and the vigiles was swallowed up, and Una, crouched close over the controls, pushed the car almost blindly into the whiteness.

  Her face was awful, bone-hard, barely blinking – that same dead-fox look she’d had the day of Marcus’ death, sitting in Sulien’s kitchen, gripping the edge of the table. Rather than look at her, Sulien knelt on the seat, peering back at the headlights ploughing out of the snow and the heavy flakes, whirling like a swarm of black flies in the beams. They came close enough to fill their car with a diffused, pale-gold light which faded as Una spurred forward, out of its reach. She almost missed the turning she’d been waiting for, but swerved roughly to the left and the car skidded free for a long stretch before Una could do a thing to control it.

  A van reared into visibility ahead of them, disappeared behind them, and for a few minutes, enclosed in the snow, Sulien saw no sign of the black cars, might almost have thought the vigiles had driven on south, or given up. But all those posters— Anyone could guess where they’d try to go.

  The light was going, but the snow began to clear a little as the frozen Rha spread out in front of them: a broad, ash-coloured seam between the ground and the pale sky. And the vigiles’ cars came plunging along the empty road behind them, accelerating now their quarry was in sight.

  ‘It’s too thin – we’ll have to run. We have to leave the car,’ Sulien said, his voice rising as Una showed no sign of slowing or turning onto the narrower road that ran along beside the river.

  Una stared straight ahead at the ice. ‘They’d just pick us off the other side. We wouldn’t make it half a mile,’ she said in a pragmatic voice that had nothing to do with the wild, frozen-over brightness in her eyes.

  ‘You’ll kill us! Stop!’ cried Sulien, and tried to grab for the controls, but somehow they were just clutching each other’s hands as Una charged the car off the road, down the bank and onto the ice.

  The car shot across the frozen surface like a bead of water across the top of a hot stove and swung right round in a wide, violent arc until they were facing back towards the bank they had left behind.

  The black cars stopped on the shore. The headlights flooded the ice.

  Though it hadn’t smashed at the first impact, Sulien could hear the ice creaking like old floorboards underneath them; he could feel it shifting, even through the body of the car.

  The vigiles were climbing out now, and an oddly listless voice, flattened even more by a loudspeaker, ordered, ‘Give yourselves up.’

  ‘Come on,’ panted Sulien, grabbing for the controls, but Una was already straining to move the wheels, which just spun uselessly on the spot.

  Four or five men were venturing down onto the ice on foot. Somewhere in the distance behind them, a deep, unmistakable boom growled low on the steppe. The vigiles stopped moving for a moment and scanned the sky.

  Sulien felt the tremor, slight but definite, running through the earth and into the ice. ‘Backwards – back, reverse it!’ he shouted.

  Una grappled with the controls and the car whined and spurted backwards, and they both felt the crack! beneath them, and the car jolted down an inch or two as it passed over the break—

  Una managed to drag the car the right way round, so that they were facing the Sarmatian bank again. She said, ‘Get out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get out – run to the other side. Less weight.’

  ‘Well, you get out!’

  ‘No,’ said Una, without looking at him, relaxing implacably into the seat.

  Without further protest, Sulien opened the door – then ran round, yanked open her own door and tried to drag her out. But Una shoved back at him, and the car swerved; Sulien was sure he could hear the swish of water under the wheels, and he was heavier than her: perhaps his weight was the crucial difference. Panicked, he slid away on the stinging ice.

  ‘Run!’ shouted Una again from inside the car as it went careening away to the side.

  He couldn’t run properly on the ice, but it felt solid enough that he didn’t feel in any imminent danger of falling through himself. But to his horror he saw the fissure their car had made had already widened to a dark gulf, growing rapidly as fragments broke off from either side, the damage spreading back, chasing the weight that had caused it. He loped forward, towards Sarmatia, but looking over his shoulder to keep the car in view, trying to haul it the right way with nothing but will.

  Perhaps he hadn’t been seen as he rolled out of the car; perhaps the vigiles still could not see him in the snow and the fading light, for they began firing, but not at him, at Una.

  The darker streaks: those were where the ice was thinner, Una remembered, and she tried to watch for them now. She steered the car a little upriver, where it might be stronger, and though she was conscious of working with all her strength to reach the further bank, all the while she seemed spread beyond her body, outside the car, coursing through the flying snow, with the black water burning cold under the ice.

  She heard the bullets whisk around the car as it slipped and twisted, and they seemed merely annoying, not important. She hunched down, and hoped they would not hit the tyres. Down on the right, she saw Sulien fling himself forward a few yards and then turn back, shouting something that the wind whipped away. Then the car stuck on the ice again, and Una ground her teeth as she laboured to get it moving, and with a gush of cold air a bullet pierced the back window and bored into the seat beside her.

  She couldn’t hear Sulien, but she could feel him as if he were still in the car with her, dragging at her, shouting ‘Come on, please, please—’

  An explosion glowed on the ice, to the north, a brief roaring column of gold and white, and she felt the shock battering through the ice. Heavy drops of water began to rain down around the car, beating on the roof.

  ‘Get out!’ screamed S
ulien hoarsely from the bank, churning the air in a frantic beckoning motion. ‘Run!’ Though he couldn’t see it from here, the ice must be rupturing, fissures racing to meet each other.

  Another balloon was drifting over the river, and the vigiles had stopped firing and, like Sulien, were watching as it passed in sedate silence above the roof of the car and swept gently towards the western bank.

  It touched its load to the ice, and it was almost unbearable when nothing happened. It bobbed like a toy. The wind dragged it along for a few yards, then scooped it up into the air again.

  The car began to move, just sliding helplessly, jolted from its standstill by the echoing throb of the last blast. And though he thought, with complete clarity, ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ still Sulien tried to run back towards it.

  The bomb sank to the ice again, and this time it erupted, a great spout of fire and water, and for a moment he saw Una’s face, looking straight at him, wild and inhuman in the fleeting light.

  She wrenched at the car’s controls and the car accelerated to the right as behind her the ice splintered and gaped. The vigiles had fallen back from the tracts of black water opening in the heart of the river, and Una hurled the listing car eastwards, towards the thicker ice near the edge of the Sarmatian bank; towards Sulien.

  The car trundled quite slowly up onto the bank. Una got out, and stood there beside it, still.

  Sulien pulled himself up the bank to her, shaking. Before he could speak, or touch her, she asked, quietly, ‘Can you drive for a while?’

  This was a different province, and it might take a little time before the Sarmatian cohorts could react, but of course the Venedian vigiles must have alerted them, of course they were on their way. So Sulien just swallowed and nodded and swung into the driver’s seat and set off north. He took the smaller roads when he could find them, afraid of meeting the vigiles’ cars head-on.