Savage City by Sophia McDougall Page A

she stumbled slightly as he saw it, swayed dizzily, and propped herself against the low wall of the bridge.
    ‘You hit your head.’ He was almost relieved to see it – something reparable. He reached out towards her, saying ‘Let me see.’
    Una swerved, throwing up one hand to bat away his, the motion strangely fluent, like a rehearsed dance step. ‘Leave it.’
    ‘You’re concussed,’ protested Sulien, after a moment’s baffled alarm, not managing to find a more helpful tone than exasperation.
    ‘Yes,’ said Una, a thin smear of sarcasm across a voice otherwise bare as a slab of metal, ‘and it’ll get better. What’s the point in . . .?’ But she let the sentence drop away unfinished, losing interest in it.
    ‘How’d it happen?’ Sulien insisted, thinking of the mass of people that had erupted out of the Colosseum over the hard ground.
    They had reached the east bank again. Una’s rapid, irregular march shuddered to a halt. She looked up at him, not for long, but for the first time since she’d understood Marcus was dead, and so horribly unguarded that Sulien didn’t want to look back at her; it was as if a knife had been dragged across her face.
    She said, ‘Dama.’
    For a moment he thought she was telling him what he already knew – who was responsible for the bomb – then, inwardly pleading that the answer would be no, he asked, ‘You saw him? He did this?’
    Una nodded jerkily, too hard, a slow, sticky spill of pain spreading through her head. She felt her arm rise, almost of its own accord, in a helpless gesture towards the Colosseum and heard herself beginning in a whimper, ‘I . . .’
I couldn’t stop him
, she must have been going to say, and that struck her as the most redundant statement that could beimagined: as if her inability to stop Dama had not been amply demonstrated to everybody. Sulien clamped one enormously heavy hand on her shoulder, pivoting towards the Colosseum with a little gasp of rage.
    She whispered, shivering, ‘I think he’s dead,’ because she knew Sulien wanted to kill Dama. She knew it from the look on his face and the way his free hand had squeezed into a fist, not because she could hear him thinking it. Her mind was still clenched up, containing no thoughts but her own. If she closed her eyes it might almost be as if Sulien wasn’t there, if he would only let go of her and stop breathing so loudly.
    But instead Sulien dragged her off-balance against his chest, making her head ring and throb again. She thought,
Haven’t I done enough for you already, can’t you just leave me alone?
and said in a low, ugly rumble, ‘I said get off me, Sulien.’
    Neither of them had said anything more. Riding back over the bridge later, he thought he could just feel the movement of her breath at his back, her arms round his waist light and loose as a circle sketched in pencil. He drove as slowly as he could.
    As Drusus entered the Palace a group of servants hurried to meet him and tried to prop him up. His own slaves had done the same thing as he got out of the car, and as then, Drusus waved them all off, but he had to lean against the wall of the atrium to take the weight off his leg. He cradled his arm against his chest, anxious now that he looked vulnerable and there was nothing more he could do to disguise it. He gasped, ‘Where’s my cousin?’
    One of them said, ‘Come in and rest while I send someone to find her.’
    ‘No,’ panted Drusus, somehow reluctant to voice clearly what he meant, ‘no. Please.’ The servant looked startled and Drusus himself didn’t know why he sounded so diffident; he knew his only chance was to act fast and decisively. ‘Marcus. I have to see Marcus.’
    The room was dim, and incense was burning, the soft weight of amber and myrrh in the air sharpened by the resiny green scent of the branches of olive and laurel that lay around Marcus, over the robes of Imperial purple in which his body had been dressed. Of course there was no