“Fancy a drink?” Someone called from the platform.
“Nah,” came the reply. It was the drugged man speaking again. “This train terminates at Marble Arch.” He sniggered at his joke and repeated it. “Don’t you know mission’s been aborted? I guess that mean we just kill everyone who’s seen down here.”
On the platform, someone else gave a nasty laugh. “We don’t need no police to tell us it’s all gone tits up,” he said. “If we was in charge, there wouldn’t have been no Mozzie attack up there.” The argument grew cheerfully obscene, before turning to speculations of where the bikers had got their petrol. It was ended by a loud order from somewhere along the platform. Eyes shut, Jennifer lay still as the squeaking began again and vanished into the far tunnel. There was a distant crying of children, followed by three shots. After that, it was a matter of relaxed laughter from the soldiers on the platform, and the slow retreat—this time final—of their voices.
They lay in silence for what seemed another age. Then, long after the beating of his heart had slowed to something like normal, Michael twisted his face close to hers. “Get up,” he whispered. “How far do these tunnels go?”
“Miles and miles,” she said, her own voice sounding uncontrollably loud in the darkness. “They reach under the whole of London, and far outside.” He helped her up. She looked about for the source of the one light that had survived the mopping up. It was a torch that lay on the platform where the woman had been trying to save her now dead child.
“I don’t know,” she said again when he asked if it was safe to touch the rails. “They may be off. But I don’t know how the—the motivating force works down here.” A week before, in France with Count Robert, Jennifer had been telling herself on how well she was doing in Latin. It was something she’d been planning to urge as mitigation to her parents. But that was in a country where just about everything she needed to discuss had words that her father had taught her, or were in Lewis and Short, or that she’d been able to guess from their context. She’d never supposed she would need her Latin here in a London of technical miracles—certainly not at a time when she was still numb with fright.
“Stay there,” Michael said in a tired voice. Keeping his distance from the raised central rail he moved slowly to the platform. Once level with the abandoned torch, he stepped carefully over the rails until he could climb up. He got the torch and shone it along the platform. Except for the obvious scurrying of rats, all was now silent. Probably, every armed man was needed above for the work of killing and pacification. If she held her ragged breath and listened hard, Jennifer might have heard the faint crash of weaponry. Instead, she looked at Michael. He’d got clumsily onto the platform. Now he was down on his knees and trying not to drop forward onto the skeletons and the fresh bodies of the mother and child.
“Michael!” Not worrying if the power was on or off to the live rails, she stumbled forward. She got to him just as he fell onto his side and showed no sign of being able to get up.
Michael was aware of the hysterical girl who pulled at him. But he was most aware of how the glazed bricks along this tunnel were beginning to ripple like a canopy above the Hippodrome caught in a sudden wind. He knew there wasn’t enough light to see anything. He saw it, all the same, in a kind of grey flickering that must have been for him alone. And, keeping time with the rippling of the bricks, a dull roar surged and ebbed in his ears. He lay rigid on the paved floor and put all his fading will into not biting off his tongue. But, even as he accepted that this was the full seizure he’d been dreading for days, every muscle relaxed, and he felt the girl roll him onto his back, and saw her shine the light onto bloody hands where she’d clutched his left arm.
“Michael! Michael!” He tried to put up a hand to slap her face. But it was too early for that degree of control. It took all his concentration not to choke and splutter on the fizzy water she poured into his mouth. He managed to sit up. Though he could still see individual bricks seeming to project forward in every place where he wasn’t directly looking, the grey light was gone. He touched his left shoulder, and winced. He let the pain bring him fully back to his senses.
“It’s just a flesh wound,” he managed to say. “The soldier’s spear point missed the bone.” But the girl had him down again, and was peeling off his coat. He barely felt the bandaging of his arm. He thought of poor dead Simeon. “At all times,” the old man had repeatedly said, “an envoy of the Great Augustus shows no emotion but what is required to get his way.” The memory of that advice sent him into quiet laughter that was a welcome alternative to breaking down in tears at the thought of his uncle’s death. By the time he’d suffered the indignity of having his own face slapped, he was calm enough to sit up beside an elaborately twisted skeleton and play with the switch of the lamp. It had two light settings, he found, one of them bright, one rather dim. After shining it over the clean-picked skeleton beside him, and noting that the top of its head was missing, he chose the dimmer setting.
“Can you stand up?” the girl asked. He wasn’t sure that he could, but nodded. From deep inside the far tunnel, there was another faint crash of weaponry.
“Let’s get moving,” he said in a voice that still had no force. “And do keep your voice down,” he added in an effort to re-establish his own primacy. His voice failed. He clenched and unclenched the fist of his injured arm. The blade had gone right through, but it really was only a flesh wound. “I’m not so very good after all,” he said, his eyes filling with tears of shame. What would his father have said about this? Simeon would have understood. Tears, now of sadness, rolled down his cheek. “What use am I?” he asked between sobs. The girl’s answer was to get his good arm over her shoulders and pull him to his feet.
Chapter Twenty Five
“Unlace your shoes,” Michael advised. “If you take them off, you’ll never get them on again.” He leaned back on a metal bench and shone his torch at the sign that stretched along the far wall of the tunnel. He stared again at a picture of what looked like an Ephesus more completely ruined than he’d known it, and that did say Ephesus in Roman script. It was the only thing that had made sense at first in the jumble of images pasted opposite. He realised he was looking with too much interest at the almost naked woman who cavorted with a man in front of the ruins, and looked again at the sign. This deeper tunnel was flooded to their knees, and their splashing along it had left them soaked above their waists. The girl pushed her cloth shoes back on and helped him with the pronunciation of Mornington Crescent. She was quite a good teacher, he admitted. He’d begun his questions about her language to hide his continuing shame, and because even their low whispering was better than the solitude of these tunnels. They’d soon got into their subject, though, and he’d learned a great deal more about the language.
She leaned against him for warmth and perhaps for a sense of life to contrast with the mass of human decay that hadn’t been fully devoured by the rats. If she now fell asleep, he’d not be surprised. But there was more he had to know. He cleared his throat and thought of a question that wouldn’t lead her back to the matter of her probably dead parents. “You say it happened a year ago,” he prompted. “But can I ask you for a more sequential account of what happened? Of course, take your time. I appreciate Latin isn’t your first language, and that there are problems of terminology. But please do stay awake and tell me what really happened.”