Savage City Read online

  ‘How would that help? They’ll have a team already assigned to do this; they’ll all be from the same force. A uniform isn’t going to stop people noticing you didn’t work with them yesterday.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be like that,’ Varius said, in a detached, neutral voice, frowning into space. Cleomenes looked at him, raised his eyebrows, and Varius spread his hands. ‘I’m not saying it can work, but they – we – wouldn’t have to pass ourselves off as part of the escort. In theory that shouldn’t be a problem.’

  Ziye said, ‘But this can’t be done in four days.’

  ‘But we’ve got longer than that,’ protested Sulien, ‘we must have. Surely they won’t just— They won’t— Not that same day? The trial’ll go on for a little while – they’ll need to move her back and forth . . .’

  ‘They’ll probably keep her in the cells at the Basilica until it’s over,’ said Cleomenes

  ‘Well then, when it’s over, when they take her back to the prison, or . . . or to the Colosseum . . .’

  Cleomenes was silent for a while, looking down at the floor. ‘All right, so somehow you stop the van,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s a driver, a couple of guards inside it. What about them?’

  ‘I’ll kill them,’ said Sulien at once, thickly.

  Cleomenes nodded, as if this was what he’d expected to hear. ‘Suppose you can. What would that make me if I helped you do it? They’re just vigiles, they joined to try and make things a little better, like me. It’s not their fault.’

  Sulien, choking on a furious attempt to answer, drew a little unexpected hope when Varius broke in heatedly, ‘If they’re taking a nineteen-year-old girl to be torn apart by dogs, I’m not worried what happens to them either.’

  ‘That’s not fair, you know that’s not what it’s like – what are they supposed to do?’

  ‘Refuse to do it,’ answered Varius. ‘You would, wouldn’t you? Why else are you here?’

  ‘Oh, come on – and what if they’re just taking her to court?’

  Sulien said fiercely, ‘It’s the same thing and you know it.’

  Delir said, ‘You can’t go around killing people in the middle of the street.’

  ‘But it’s all right for them to kill my sister!’ cried Sulien.

  ‘It’s not only a question of what’s right or wrong; I do not think it will work,’ said Delir firmly. ‘There would be too much noise, and they will have guns of their own, as Cleomenes says. We must think of something else.’

  Cleomenes shuffled uncomfortably on his bench. They were all silent again.

  Ziye got up and began unpacking a bedroll from inside a chest. ‘You’ll need to sleep here, won’t you?’

  ‘What?’ Sulien was startled; sleeping was such a distant consideration.

  ‘It’s late. I should get home,’ announced Cleomenes.

  ‘No,’ said Sulien, panic rising again, ‘please! I’m sorry if I— We can work something out if we keep going, please.’

  ‘Sulien, if there’s a way to do this, we’re not going to have it by tomorrow,’ said Varius.

  ‘But we’ve hardly got anywhere,’ said Sulien, feeling raw pressure building behind his eyes, and in his throat.

  Ziye came close to him. ‘This is enough for now, and more than you think. I don’t think you know how tired you are.’ She put her hands on his shoulders, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. ‘You cannot make good plans or prepare yourself well in this state. You can believe me: I know something about being ready for a fight. You’ll be surprised how things can come clear, if you let them.’

  Varius left shortly after Cleomenes, promising to return the next morning, promising not to stop thinking.

  Delir had a little pot of sleeping pills, new, perhaps bought specially for him. Sulien only noticed after he had accepted one how Ziye and Delir had altered what must be their usual sleeping arrangements around him. Ziye had quietly taken Lal off into the other room, leaving Sulien and Delir together, Delir taking what was probably Lal’s bed. Sulien felt a flutter of guilty amusement before the pill began to work. He slid confusedly into sleep, from which he awoke in the dark, his throat raw from shouting, to find Delir crouched beside him, shaking his shoulder and lying softly, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’

  Tadahito’s eye was caught by the machine-guns, fanned out into a circle, like a sun, and fixed to the wall. They were of Nionian make and though glossy, not new. He felt slightly unnerved, and yet it was encouraging too, a reminder of the foundation upon which he had come to build. They were waiting for the King.

  Beside him Kaneharu sighed softly. It had been a relief to be outside, travelling down through the mountains to Harar, after three weeks in a submarine crawling across the Indian Ocean, swaddled in such boredom that it had been hard to believe that above their heads a war was still going on. But here in Independent Ethiopia, the craters in the roads and the flocks of children picking across the rubble made it feel closer, even though these were the scars of other conflicts. And it was not only the occasional battles with the Romans or with the Nobatae or Luo that had left these scars and gouges on Harar. The kingdom had only one unshifting border, the hard line to the north where the Roman Empire cut Ethiopian lands in two. South of that line Africa might be outside the rule of any empire, but Rome’s weight still lay upon it, throttling trade and deepening the famines that had raked through the horn of Africa over the past half-century.

  As the princes had travelled through the city they had seen the remains of the old Roman monuments, slowly being stripped down for building materials, which were as scarce as everything else.

  The palace itself was small, and built cheaply – no marble or glass trappings here – but it was new, and extravagant in shape, with its clusters of painted domes. The Princes were waiting with their retainers in a small state room overlooking a garden of dried-out roses. The King was apparently at prayers.

  Tadahito suspected this might simply be the King’s way of showing them he was not particularly keen to see them, but when at last the servants opened the door and Salomon the Sixth appeared, there was a distant look on his face that took a little time to fade away.

  Marcus Kebede’s claim of descent from the old Imperial house of Axum was, in Tadahito’s view, somewhat far-fetched. The last of the dynasty had lingered on as a puppet monarchy under the Romans for centuries, but when the wave of uprisings against Roman rule in Africa had reached Ethiopia, Roman troops had taken them from the capital and probably slaughtered them; at any rate, they had never been seen again. Kebede’s claim of Solomonic blood rested on stories of secret marriages and baby princes being smuggled away by nurse-maids, but whatever the truth of his ancestry, he had emerged out of a cycle of civil wars twenty-one years before and assembled the splintered, petty kingdoms the Empire had left behind into Independent Ethiopia.

  Now he was in his fifties, a short, bespectacled, thickset man. Around his neck hung a silver pendant, a complex lattice of diamond-shaped holes with a circle of rays flaring from the centre so that its shape – a cross – was scarcely recognisable.

  He gestured to the servants who proffered little glasses of yellow honey-wine. He smiled. ‘Your Highnesses, I am very glad you are here,’ he said, but as the solemn, dreamy look that had lingered from his prayers faded, an uneasy combination of affability and wariness replaced it. His eyes were cool behind his small spectacles.

  ‘I wish we were meeting in times of peace,’ said Tadahito.

  The King’s eyes tightened dubiously, and yet he leaned forward in apparent sympathy. ‘You wasted a lot of time trying to deal with the Romans and now they’ve turned on you – they’ve as good as broken you in Siam, haven’t they? You cannot deal with them – they’re all like this, vicious, evil. This madman they have leading them now—’

  Tadahito sighed, thinking of all those months of work, of Noriko. ‘Things would have been different if Leo the Younger had lived.’

  ‘If there was anything good in h
im it would have perished one way or another. Goodness dies rather easily in this world, but especially in Rome,’ said King Salomon, with an air of finality, and his fingers strayed briefly to the pendant round his neck.

  They were both speaking Latin. Even now, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Romans had left, it was a first language for many Ethiopians – although the King prided himself on not being one of them, and spoke with a strong, unabashed accent that Tadahito found hard to understand at first. It was strange, Tadahito thought, to be discussing a mutual enemy in his own language.

  ‘Well, we hope we can strengthen the bonds between our nations,’ ventured Kaneharu, sipping cautiously at the honey-wine. They had already discovered that the sweetness masked how strong it was.

  The restrained scepticism lurking in the King’s expression finally surfaced. ‘Bonds,’ he said. ‘You sell us weapons; we pay for them. You sell them to the Luo and to the Nobatae too. This is not a special favour, not charity; it is a normal, everyday arrangement. I am not sure there is anything here that needs to be made stronger.’

  ‘With our help you could unite your kingdom. You could take back Axum – the ancient capital,’ urged Tadahito. ‘And with your help we can defeat Rome.’

  The King looked away. ‘Your Highnesses, let us speak plainly: you are losing, and if your vast Empire cannot hold itself up, I do not think my poor kingdom can support you. I am sorry for you, but not so sorry I wish to fall with you.’

  ‘May we show you what we propose?’ asked Tadahito, softly. One of his retainers opened a scroll case and unrolled a folding den-ga screen on which a glowing map of the world appeared.

  The King lifted his eyebrows a little and Tadahito felt suddenly embarrassed. Even in Rome they did not have these flexible screens yet; it looked both gauche and ostentatious here, as if it existed only to make a point. They could have done this just as well with paper.

  He put his unease to one side and continued, ‘Of course Rome’s forces are fully engaged in Tokogane and in Asia. They will not interpret a small uprising in their Ethiopian territory as a serious threat; they will expect the regional government to deal with it. We would need you to commit Ethiopian troops, to disguise our presence here as long as possible, but we will arm them, and our Samurae forces will reinforce them. The submarine that brought us here is already inside the Gulf of Avalites; two more will arrive within days. From here Axum is within range of our missiles, and so are these cities on the coast of Arabia’ – he indicated their positions on the illuminated map – ‘and when our combined forces are poised outside Axum, we will launch them. Nothing the Romans have in the region should be adequate to defend it – or Ocelis, or Eudaemon. We will take command of the Deire Strait. We will trap Roman shipping in the Red Sea. And we will have made an incision deep into Roman territory. The Mediterranean provinces will no longer be safe from us. Egypt, Cyprus – Rome itself will not be safe.’

  King Salomon watched, frowning, as the screen showed a fleet of warships and submarines moving up the Red Sea, haloes illustrating the range of their missiles blossoming around them. It looked like a game for children.

  ‘And even if this is possible,’ he asked, ‘then what? A new Nionian Empire in Africa? Not here.’

  ‘You would retain sovereignty over your kingdom, of course,’ Tadahito said. ‘It would be essential for us to operate within and across your borders. We would have to establish bases, for the duration of the war. But this would be a strategic arrangement, nothing more; we would take no part in any internal matters. It would not be permanent.’

  The King peered at the screen again, and laughed. ‘Well, of course – you would not walk up and say to my face, “Please give us your country?”’

  ‘You have our word,’ said Takanari, prompting a short roll of the eyes from the King.

  ‘We are not in a position to make expansions into Africa,’ said Tadahito. ‘We want to drain resources from Rome; we want to gain time, not territory. Roman counterattacks will come, of course, but we will defend our allies now and we will reward them later – because if we can only hold out now, we will win. We have a weapon – we call it Surijin. It is nearly perfected. We need only to stay in the war long enough to use it.’

  ‘What’s that thing they all wear?’ asked Takanari later, gesturing at his chest. Many members of Salomon’s court were wearing variations of the same symbol round their necks.

  ‘You should not come here without learning something of the culture,’ said Kaneharu. ‘We had time enough on the boat.’

  ‘It’s a stylised cross. The method of execution.’ Tadahito explained.

  There was a pause and Takanari grimaced. ‘They make jewellery of something like that? That’s grotesque.’ Crucifixion was still sometimes practised in Nionia.

  ‘It will help us,’ said Tadahito.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it commemorates the death of their principal holy man,’ said Tadahito, ‘who was killed by the Romans.’

  ‘Well if they come down the Via Didiana, there’s this empty block overlooking it here. And there’s a one-way street leading off it here, to the Via Atia. But I’m not sure it’s busy enough round there for this to work,’ murmured Varius, pushing aside the crumpled lists and half-plotted timetables to make room for the street map. ‘But there’s a building further along where you can get up the fire escape.’

  They were in Varius’ cupboard of a room, and Sulien was very thankful Varius was there, for whenever he was absent, Sulien felt an irrational grind of paranoia that perhaps he was out buying poison for Cleomenes to smuggle to Una. Or maybe it would be Ziye, or Cleomenes might do it alone, and make sure none of this went any further. Una had asked; what was there to stop them, if they thought it was right?

  But Cleomenes had sent them to a supplier of vigile kit in the Horrea Galbae, and three sets of uniforms, bought with Varius’ money, were folded in a bag under the table at Delir’s. Sulien had been astonished that you could just walk in and order vigiles’ caps and tunics as if they were any other suit of clothes. Delir did not like having them in the flat, but there was work still to be done on them; they needed brass on the collars and badges on the caps, and those were more difficult to come by. Cleomenes had brought one of his old uniforms, they’d spread the genuine insignia between them and fill the gaps with braid and military emblems from flea markets. There was a fluorescent jacket to cover the deficiencies of whichever tunic was least persuasive.

  Varius tore off a fresh sheet of paper and began making yet another list, a refinement of the one before, working quickly through the points that were already established: the characteristics the site of interception must have, the items they still had to acquire, numbered schedules of action for each of them.

  ‘What about the side-street?’ asked Sulien.

  Varius shut his eyes as if trying to transmit himself there. ‘Back walls, not many windows. There’s a gate into a courtyard off the back of a caupona, where they put the bins out. That’s a possibility, I suppose.’

  Sulien smiled a little. ‘How can you just know that?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been walking around a lot,’ said Varius.

  There were times when Sulien thought the rough beard and matted hair looked ridiculous on Varius; the careful, diligent civil servant was so evident underneath. But put him back in the office now and perhaps it would be the other way round: however you dressed him, he would remain a profoundly, comfortingly strange man.

  ‘We need to time the journey from the Basilica to the prison and from the prison to the Colosseum,’ Varius went on, ‘and between all these points along the way. They’ll clear the streets, so we’ll do it at night when there’s less traffic.’

  It was the first day of Una’s trial. Sulien’s was beginning in his absence in some other court, but without him there it lacked all the drama howling around Una, and along with the rest of the empire, Sulien and Varius were not much interested in it. For now Varius’ unrelia
ble secondhand longvision was turned against the wall. They’d had the idea that they could work through it, not waste time tormenting themselves over how she looked and what was said about her. Cleomenes could tell them anything crucial later. But Sulien felt each minute like a small weight placed upon the last. And as it edged past noon, Varius too fell quiet, his pen slowing on the page, until they were both sitting in silence, doing nothing but watching the clock.

  ‘This won’t work,’ Varius said at last, reaching out to turn the longvision round. ‘We have to see it.’

  For a moment they thought they had the wrong time or the wrong channel, because a man’s face filled the screen and he was talking fiercely, straight to camera, and not about Una but about the war: ‘—on both our eastern and western borders, our soldiers are risking their lives, while our enemies in their weakness and fear snatch at what chances they can to scatter death and outrage in our provinces. And it is in this context that the seriousness of this case, this charge of treason against Rome and conspiracy against the Emperor, must be considered—’

  It was the Praetorian Prefect in charge of the court, they realised.

  Then they brought her in. An eager, hostile surge of noise erupted from the spectators in the gallery and the lictors moved forward, knocking their maces on the floor to quieten them. Sulien felt his lungs tighten, as if that awful sound had somehow drawn air out of the room.

  Una gave the camera a quick, self-conscious glance. Sulien, shocked when he saw her hacked-off hair, fought to stop himself from thinking how it had been done and by whom. There was something strange about her skin; for a moment he thought she was ill, then he remembered he’d seen her look like that before – the first time they’d seen each other since they were children – waxy make-up over bruises.

  Her wrists and ankles were chained. As the two of them had limped eastwards from border to border, Sulien had thought that she’d begun to look older than she was. Now, between the heavyset men, she looked painfully young, younger than she’d ever seemed to him. Nevertheless, she was composed, and in a way he had expected that, he knew she wouldn’t let them drag her in weeping and cowering. But this was not the exhausted, hopelessly enduring calm he’d watched soaking through her like a bleach as they drove away from the Rha into Sarmatia. She looked alert, and rather bemused. Her face quivered for a moment as she was led to a chair at the centre of the court, where she had to face the ranks of spectators directly. But as she sat down she seemed to recover herself, and then she lowered her eyes and shed any expression at all.