Empress of the Seven Hills (36 page)

“Your loyal service is noted,” the Empress decreed with one of her judicial nods, and I took it for a cue and bolted. Not noticing, not noticing at all, the grin Sabina shot at me behind Plotina’s frown.

“More wine,” I said instead, and looked around for the cup-bearer.

“Not unless you promise you can keep your eyes off the legate’s wife.” Titus steered me behind an ivy-draped column, regarding me bluntly.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I snapped, “but I told her this morning that I was done with her.”

Titus raised his eyebrows. “Good,” he said at last, though his tone was peculiar. “I’d rather not see you dead and her exiled. Which could still happen, if the wrong person finds out what the two of you were up to this summer. Hadrian could kill you—adultery between a married woman and, if you will excuse me, a commoner is not taken lightly.”

“I suppose you could hump her all day and get away with it?” I snarled. “You bloody aristocrats all stick together, don’t you?”

“No, I couldn’t hump her all day, as you so colorfully put it, and I’ll tell you why. Because I served Hadrian for more than six months on that campaign, and I admire him. I wouldn’t dream of poaching the wife of a man I admired, no matter how much I wanted her. Not to mention the fact that he’s an odd cold fish who holds grudges. I wouldn’t want to cross him and neither should you, even if he wasn’t your
legate
.” Titus rolled his eyes. “Your legate’s wife—not one of your brighter ideas, Vercingetorix.”

“Shut up.”

His eyes danced. “I’ll bet she was the one who broke it off.”

“You’re looking awfully pleased about all this,” I accused.

“Yes, frankly. You got everything on this campaign, Vix—the glory, the eagle, the promotion, the Emperor’s favor. It’s a rather low feeling, but I can’t help a touch of satisfaction that you didn’t also end up getting the girl.”

I thought of Demetra, and shoved the thought away. “What, are you jealous? I didn’t think you were the sort.”

“I’m not jealous of the promotion and the glory, that’s for certain.” Titus surveyed me. “You already got wine all over my synthesis.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s get out of here,” my friend suggested. “Perhaps we should go
get drunk? I confess I’ve never been completely swacked before. Surely tonight’s the occasion for it. ‘Seize the night; trust as little as possible in tomorrow,’ as Horace would say.”

“I’ll get swacked, all right,” I promised. “But I’m staying right here.
She’s
not going to run me out of any good party.”

“Oh, good gods be damned,” I heard Titus swear as I lurched out into the crowd.

There was a lot of wine after that, and I wasn’t the only one swilling it down. It was a party I could have enjoyed, if I’d been in the mood to enjoy anything. The Emperor got drunk, as cheerfully as he did everything else, and at one point he saw me and clapped me on the shoulder and told the whole story of my fight with Decebalus to a rapt audience while I stood shifting from foot to foot. Half a dozen of his generals congratulated me after that, some of them men as rough spoken as I was, and at any other time I’d have hung on their every word. The Emperor’s Praetorian Prefect even gave me a nod of approval and I should have been flushing with pride because he was everything I wanted to be—a blunt-spoken soldier who had risen through the ranks and was now Trajan’s right-hand man. Instead I just grunted at him, and then grabbed another cup-bearer and told him that he’d better be within arm’s reach of me all night or I’d pound his nose through the back of his head.

“Don’t you want to leave now?” Titus asked hopefully.

“No.”

Slaves began trooping in with heaped platters—vast joints of roast ox, stuffed boar, goose cooked in its plumage. The Empress
gave a signal for the guests to take their places at the dining couches that had been arrayed in graceful semicircles about the room, but nobody was paying any attention. The Emperor just grabbed a wing of roast goose from the nearest platter going past, waving it to illustrate some story he was telling about the siege of Old Sarm, and the rest of the guests dragged the couches out of their semicircles and flopped on them any which way as they grabbed food from the passing platters. The Empress gave a patient sigh and withdrew as soon as the troupe of half-naked dancers came in. Trajan waved her out cheerfully and then grabbed the tallest of the male dancers to sit beside him.

My head was whirling, and the room’s heat stifled me. I yanked the wine flagon away from the startled cup-bearer and stumbled out of the noisy hall to the atrium. Torches had been lit in brackets around the walls but they’d mostly guttered out, and somehow I managed to fall in the little tiled pool at the atrium’s center. “Hell’s gates!”

I was wet head to toe, but I’d managed to save the wine flagon. Still sitting six inches deep in water, I tilted my head back and took a long drink. The stars sparkled coldly overhead through the open roof. My stars—or so I’d thought. Where were they leading me now?

“Do you realize you’re sitting in a pool of water, Vix?”

“Never occurred to me.” I drank again, blocking out the image of the figure in white approaching from the other end of the atrium.

Moonlight splashed across her face from the open roof. “Do you need a hand up?”

“Maybe I like it in here.” I splashed a wave of water at her, wetting her white hem.

“Gods,” she sighed, “but you’re a child sometimes.”

“I wasn’t a child when I was screwing you.” Tilting my head up at her.

“Go home, Vix. You’re drunk.”

“And you’re a bitch.”

She turned away, back toward the half-open doors where music and rowdy shouts eddied through. My hand shot out, seizing the hem of her dress, halting her.

“You said this morning you didn’t want to follow my stars, Lady. Fair enough. But at least I’ve got stars. What have you got? Following whatever looks
interesting
, as long as it’s forbidden? There’s a word for that, you know.” I bared my teeth up at her in something that might have been a smile. “They call it slumming.”

With the moonlight falling over her white dress she looked like
another marble column. “They should call it ‘duty,’ Vix. I’m not as free as you seem to think I am. Maybe I
would
rather stay with you; spend my life ‘slumming,’ as you call it. But I still have a duty to others. To Hadrian, who’s always been fair to me. To Rome, for giving me a good life. To the world—because if I get to spend my life seeing it, I should spend my life improving it too, in whatever way I can. I push my limits as far as I can, get away with as much adventure as I dare, but there’s still always duty waiting.” She looked at me, level. “When did you ever feel a duty to anything but yourself?”

“I have a duty to Trajan,” I shot back. “I owe everything to him—he’ll be the next Alexander, he’ll conquer the world, and it’s my duty to help him do it.”

“That’s rot, Vix.” Sabina’s voice was tart. “You’re in this for the adventure, and don’t try to pretend otherwise. If your duty to Trajan meant sitting behind a desk day after day, you’d be a lot less keen to serve him. Real duty means giving
up
the things you want. I’ve had to walk away from you twice, but you don’t hear me whining about it.”

“You’re all about patrician duty now, are you?” I spat. “Where was that the last few months you spent in my bed?”

“I didn’t hear you complaining, Vix. Not as long as you got what you wanted.”

“What about the next time
you
want it?” I rose, dripping all over but not feeling the cold at all. I was never cold in the middle of a fight. “What happens the next time you get the itch you can’t scratch? It won’t be me scratching it. I might be a stupid barbarian, but even stupid barbarians know better than to get burned three times.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid at all.” Her eyes had gone cool as those of a marble statue, and I felt a flick of savage satisfaction that I’d finally cracked that serene shell. “You’re clever enough to keep your options open. Tell me, did your girl take you back—the girl you kept here in town, the one Titus hinted about? You were quite careful not to tell me about her. Making sure you had something to come home to, in case I didn’t work out?”

“She’s beautiful,” I spat, forgetting for a moment that she was also dead. “She makes you look like week-old fruit at a village market.”

“Not beautiful enough to keep you faithful, apparently. Who says I’d hold you any longer? Are you angry I left, Vix? Or are you just angry because I left first?”

I picked up Sabina and dropped her in the pool. Water slopped over the tiled edges, splashing her shoulders, and her white skirts went floating about her wet knees as she stared up at me.

“Better enjoy it,” I said. “That’s the last time I ever get you wet.”

I turned and left her there, stamping back into the noise and music of the banquet, clawing my wet hair back. The bath and the fight had left me stone-cold sober again. A drunken tribune bumped me, staggering past, and I shoved him into a statue of a bathing nymph. The nymph crashed over, and the tribune hiccupped at me happily. Everyone looked happy. The Emperor lay sprawled on a couch with his arm around an adoring slave, pounding his free hand against his knee in time with the music. The lute players banged cheerfully at their instruments, sawing out filthy songs as half the soldiers roared along with the choruses and the other half lay passed out among the couch cushions. Even that bastard Hadrian looked as if he were enjoying himself as he watched a team of boy acrobats tumbling across the mosaics—though the enjoyment disappeared quickly enough as he looked at the door. He put down his wine cup and crossed the room quickly, brushing past me.

“Vibia Sabina, you look a mess.”

“An accident with a drunken soldier and an inconveniently placed fountain,” her voice came behind me from the hall’s entrance. I leaned one shoulder against a pillar, pretending to watch the acrobats but keeping Sabina in view at the corner of my eye. She looked very nonchalant and very, very wet.

Hadrian’s eyes flicked over her, and he moved to block the view of the rest of the guests. “That dress is indecent.”

“Really?” Sabina plucked at the white folds, half transparent now
with water and sticking to her brown limbs. “Surely not, since Plotina chose it. She’d never do anything so interesting as to be indecent.”

Hadrian blinked. “Are you drunk?”

Sabina laughed, her hair coming down her back in a wet tangle and her dress slipping off one shoulder. “Perhaps I should be. Everyone else is.”

“Go home at once!”

“I was going to, Hadrian. You really think I’m going to rejoin the party dripping wet?”

“I don’t know half of what you do anymore.” His voice was suddenly cold. “I heard a great many rumors about your behavior throughout this campaign. Normally I would pay no heed to vicious gossip, but when my Empress has to tell me you have a taste for the company of common soldiers—”

“I believe you’ve dipped a toe in those waters yourself, Hadrian.” Her voice was still light, teasing. “More than once these past months I came to your tent and found a handsome half-naked legionary waiting on your presence.”

“That is not the same!” He lowered his voice and I shifted from one foot to the other, still pretending to ogle the acrobats. “Discretion is all in such matters. It is hardly
discreet
for a Roman matron of senatorial birth to appear at an important occasion like this soaking wet and half naked for everyone to ogle! Or to seek out the company of common soldiers for amusement. My career is just beginning to bloom, and I cannot afford scandal. Plotina thinks—”

Sabina’s smile disappeared. “Yes, Dear Publius, let’s hear
all
about what Plotina thinks.”

“She thinks it is time you started behaving yourself. And so do I.”

I risked a glance at that. Hadrian and his wife stood nose to nose, unmoving, until Sabina took the wine cup out of Hadrian’s hand and drained it. “No more wine for you tonight, husband. It’s making you quite fanciful. I shall see you at home.”

She turned and disappeared back into the atrium, walking with
slow insolent grace. I could see the curve of her brown hip very clearly through the wet silk, the point of her shoulder…

“You will keep your eyes off my wife.” A cold voice stung me, and I saw Hadrian tall and icy before me. “I have observed it in the past, Aquilifer. She is not a whore for the likes of you to gawp at.”

“According to what you were hissing at her just now, she
is
a whore.” My mouth decided to jump in without consulting my brain first about whether it was a good idea. “And from the things I’ve heard around the Tenth, Legate, you aren’t far wrong. Lady Vibia Sabina, everyone knows she likes a rough—”

His broad palm crashed against my cheek. He had a hard hand for a man who had never fought in a real battle in his life; the blow sent me back against the wall. Incongruously I remembered watching him take down the stag in Dacia, how he had slain it with one sure blow of a javelin and then smiled at the blood that sprayed his foot.

I straightened, my cheek stinging. Tomorrow I’d be sporting a hand-shaped bruise. “That’s the first time you’ve struck me,” I said, and was surprised how quiet my voice came out. “There won’t be a second.”

“No?”

“No.”

I saw his fingers twitch at his side, and his bearded chin jerked up. I could see him itch to hit me again and felt my own fingers curl. The party was still roaring around us—the Emperor and his Praetorian Prefect were slamming back cups of unmixed wine in some uproarious drinking game—but I felt like I’d been placed in a ring of ice. There was nothing in the world but the bearded face looking back at me with cold, blazing eyes.

“Legate Hadrian, have you made plans for your journey to Pannonia?” A courteous voice slid between us. “Surely you will return to Rome first for the triumph. I’m certain it will be a splendid occasion.”

“Very splendid,” Hadrian said, eyes leaving mine for Titus, who stood attentive and polite at his elbow, and I wondered if I’d imagined it—that moment of sheer, clawing hatred.