Empress of the Seven Hills (46 page)

She shrugged, turning to lean her elbows on the balustrade overlooking the moon-silvered garden. The marble was cold through the shawl on her bare breast, and she longed to get out of the tight Antiochene dress. Did being degenerate have to be so uncomfortable? “This is good-bye, isn’t it?” she asked Titus. “I’m off to Antioch so soon, and you’re staying here in Rome.”

“I’ve got a bathhouse to finish,” he said lightly. “And my quaestor duties, of course.”

“You could have come on the invasion. Trajan wanted you for a post on his staff. Plotina and her pet legates pushed him into taking Hadrian, but the Emperor had his eye on you all along. Said he wanted
to drag you along on campaign, give you a bit more taste for warfare. Why didn’t you take him up on it?”

“Sand,” Titus said. “Bugs. Tribesmen trying to kill me. No, thank you. I’ll stick to my city payrolls and my architectural oversight.”

“You’re wasted as a quaestor. Trajan told me that too, you know. You didn’t take the staff post, but he’s still got plans for you.”

“I can’t think why. I was the least enthusiastic tribune on his staff in Dacia, and now I’m the most plodding quaestor in the city.”

“He says you have a good head on your shoulders. He also says you’re one of the few men in Rome outside the legions who gives him a straight answer when he wants one.” Sabina looked over her shoulder at Titus. “Maybe you’ll end up consul someday.”

“Gods forbid.” Titus leaned on the railing at her side, looking across the banks of night-furled flowers. “What a muck I’d make of it.”

Sabina wasn’t so sure. Titus had a quiet authority now, a gentle unflinching presence to go with his alert bearing and attentive gaze. Trajan thought a good deal of the rising young Titus Aurelius, and so did other notable men in Rome. Like her father.

“I’ll miss you when I go to Antioch.” Sabina felt a pang as she realized just how much. Titus had been such a constant friend since the day he’d walked into her life with a bunch of violets and a stammered marriage proposal. In Rome, in Dacia, in his letters during her time in Pannonia; he’d always been there. “I’ll write you, of course—I hope you won’t be too busy to dash out a line to me now and then? With all your new building expertise, I was hoping to get your advice on some cheap ways to shore up tenement buildings—the slums in Antioch are supposed to be even worse than the Subura in Rome, and if I’m going to be wintering there I might as well take a look about and see what I can do to help.”

“Write me as soon as you get your facts and figures, and we’ll put our heads together.”

They straightened, trading rueful looks, and Titus cast another glance over her. “I must say, you look stunning.”

“It’s not really an Antiochene dress,” she confessed. “I just had the dressmaker stitch up the most shocking thing I could think of.” She pulled her shawl closer about herself, feeling a self-consciousness that hadn’t touched her before Hadrian and Plotina.

“No, no.” Titus caught the edge of her shawl, tugging it back until it slipped off her shoulders to the floor. “Put yourself on display like that, and people have a right to look.”

“Do they?”

“Well, I intend to look my fill. Did you know that I love you?”

She cocked her head. “What?”

He leaned down and kissed her, his mouth gentle, parting her lips with unhurried care. His hand cupped the back of her neck, and he took his time.

“Oh, no,” Sabina said when he lifted his head.

“Not the response I was hoping for,” Titus murmured.

“Not the kiss. That was lovely. The other part.”

“The part where I said I loved you?” For all the weight behind them, his words came lightly. “Since the day we met, if you want to know. You were everything a sixteen-year-old boy could ever dream of, and he has seen nothing better yet.”

“I never guessed.” Sabina remembered all the nights in Dacia that she’d spent curled up in Vix’s lap and talking to Titus, and cringed inside. “Why me? I’m not really very lovable.”

“Vix loved you.”

“Hated me too, quite a lot of the time. I’m not very easy on the people who love me.”

“Oh, I’m not eating my heart out.” Titus’s voice in the shadows was airy. “‘If you would marry suitably, marry your equal,’ as Ovid would say. And we’ve never really been equals, have we? I’d have bored you senseless if we’d married.”

Maybe.
But Sabina felt a pang of loss at the thought. Married to Titus?
I wouldn’t be standing in a cold house in an uncomfortable dress
with a husband who hates me, that’s for certain.
“I’m sorry,” Sabina said again, but hardly knew what for.

Titus bent and kissed her again, once on the lips and once, briefly, on the slope of her bare breast. “Good night, Vibia Sabina.”

“Good night.”

She stood on the balustrade, watching as Titus sauntered off whistling through the darkened garden. He didn’t look back once, but Sabina watched until the darkness had swallowed him up.

When she turned, she saw Empress Plotina standing in the archway behind her, a look of cold loathing on her handsome marble face. “I saw you—” she began furiously.

“Oh, go get stuffed,” said Sabina, and stalked off.

VIX

“It’s like this, Centurion.” The grocer I’d been paying for the past few years to keep Demetra’s son shuffled from foot to foot, clearing his throat. “I can’t keep the boy no more. My wife’s gone, my own boys are going to live with their aunt, and she don’t have room for another, and—”

“You’re trying to drop this on me now?” I scowled. “I’m marching to Parthia in a fortnight!”

“I know.” The grocer cleared his throat. “I like the lad well enough, but I can’t keep him no more.”

I looked down at my charge. Seven years old now—I’d hardly recognized him when I stooped through the low door of the grocer’s shop in Mog. A handsome boy, tall for his age, with fair curly hair and an open, eager little face. He looked pale and shuttered now, standing between me and the grocer, head turning between us as our voices batted back and forth.

I folded my arms across my breastplate, looking down at him. “Can you fight?”

“No,” he whispered.

“Shoot a bow?”

“No.”

“Use a knife?”

“No.”

“Hell’s gates.” With all that curly hair and those eyelashes, he
looked like a girl. I looked back at the grocer. “Keep him another fortnight. I’ll find someone else to take him on before I march.”

I heard the boy’s breath catch when I turned away. But I was busy—very busy. I had a century to ready for war, and just a fortnight to do it.

“Vix, no,” Boil protested when I slung the belt and insignia of an
optio
at him across the little folding table where I now handled my century’s papers. “Bugger you, I don’t want to be
optio
! Everyone hates those weedy toads. Why do you have to pick on me?”

“Because you’re too stupid to cheat me, too cheerful to hate me, and too big to be pushed around,” I said briskly. “Just what I need. And it’s ‘Centurion’ now, you clod-pole. Get out of here and start checking the men’s weapons. I want a full report by morning of what’s missing.”

“All the luck,” Boil muttered, his broad Gallic face red as his cloak, and tramped out. None of my
contubernium
was particularly happy about my promotion, not after I made sure they all ended up in my new century. But I didn’t care if they were happy. I’d dreamed for years of having my own command, and I knew just what kind of men I wanted. I begged, I borrowed, I traded, I bribed the other centurions to get the best men out of their centuries and into mine before we had to march. “I’ll give you a week’s pay if I can have that big African of yours—what’s his name?”

“Africanus, and I’m not giving him to you. He’s worth three legionaries all on his own in a fight!”

“Is he worth three weeks’ pay? Think about it.”

“Aren’t you the go-getter,” the other centurions said sourly. They didn’t like me—I’d been passed straight up to the first cohort, when they’d had to claw their way up. Hard men, career men, most of them ten and twenty years my senior. I was the most junior of the lot, and I got every unpleasant duty they could shove on me, but I didn’t care. From the moment the three cohorts of men from the Tenth Fidelis started the long march from Mog to join the growing band of legions in the east, I felt a joyous, insistent little pulse inside, as if every beat
that pumped blood through my body was thumping to the rhythm of
now, now, now
.

I don’t remember much of that initial march. We set out of Mog at double speed, eager to join the fight, and we tumbled down every night too tired to spit. Centurions could pass their marches on horseback, but the last thing I needed was to get dumped on my head in front of the men who were supposed to obey me, respect me, but above all be in awe of me. I loaded myself up with pack and weapons, just like the rest of them, and set a killing pace. I heard them grumbling behind me the first day, but I just roared, “
Marching song!
I’ll have it loud, or I’ll have you all flogged!” and soon they were bawling out cadences about Parthians buggering sheep, and giving me sour looks. I ignored the looks, stifled the flutter of nervousness in my throat, whipped them into setting up camp that night, and had them take it all down when three of the tents looked sloppy. “Call that a camp?” I stood back, watching with benign ferocity as they began redoing everything to my satisfaction. “Do it again!”

“Picky bugger,” I heard a low voice grumble behind me as the men began erecting their tents for the third time. “Last month he was just one of us. He gets a pat on the back from the Emperor and he thinks that makes him a real centurion?”

It wasn’t much to go on, but I wanted everything settled right off. “You—front, now,” I snapped. The other legionaries had formed a rough circle around me before the man reluctantly stepped forward, and my heart sank. The grumbler was Julius, and my old friend’s eyes over his beaked Caesar nose were resentful and unfriendly.

So much the better,
I told myself brutally.
After today, the whole century will know you don’t make pets out of your former comrades.

“Let’s cut this short,” I said, pitching my voice loud and stamping down the dread in my stomach. Boil grimaced from the ring around us, knowing what was coming, but the rest just looked wary.

“What?” Julius’s voice was sullen, but there was an insolent edge to it. Of all the tentmates in my former
contubernium
, he’d been the most
resentful about my promotion—but I hadn’t thought him as resentful as this.

“That’s ‘What, Centurion,’” I barked. “We’re going to skip the part where you spend the next three days grumbling just loud enough for me to hear, Julius, and I pretend I’m deaf until you say something too rude to ignore, and then I have you beaten for insubordination. I’m just going to beat you tonight, and we’ll save everyone the time. Hit me back if you want; we used to share a tent and we’ve saved each other’s lives a few times, and I haven’t got the crest and the medals on now.”

I had to hit Julius twice before he started swinging. He took me around the middle in a boar’s rush—he was strong, shorter than I was but much burlier, and that was good: The other legionaries would like it better if I had to fight hard. I let my friend give me a bloody nose and waited till I saw the satisfaction spread across his face before I applied the arm lock my father had once used to teach me my place. Julius’s face went down into the mud, and hard.

“There,” I panted, getting up. “I don’t care we used to share a tent; I don’t care we used to fight side by side. I’m not going to hear one more word of complaint out of you for as long as you march in my century.” I picked up my lion skin and slung it around my shoulders. “And you, all of you—you know who I am? I’m the man who brought the Dacian king’s head to the Emperor. I’m the man who carried your eagle. And now I’m your centurion, you ragtag rat-bait turds, so step sharp and shut up.”

“What’s a turd?” Demetra’s son asked me when I retreated to my tent and bedroll.

“Something you should learn to say if you want people to stop thinking you’re a girl. Get me a rag?”

He fumbled in my pack, coming up with a bundle of old cloth I kept for bandages. “Did you plan that?”

I looked down at him, still wondering why he was here. Why I’d turned around in the grocer’s shop instead of leaving like I should have, and looked down at that pretty little face and said, “Get your things; you’re coming with me to Parthia.”

I shouldn’t have offered. I should have at least asked Mirah first, if she’d mind taking in another woman’s child with one of her own already on the way. I didn’t know much about wives yet, but that was probably the sort of thing women liked being consulted about. I probably should have told her Demetra’s son existed to begin with… But I’d been on my best behavior, courting Mirah and marrying her and learning to live with her, and the time had never seemed quite right to tell her I was paying to raise another woman’s son.

I should have planned in advance; done it better. But Mirah had already gone ahead to Antioch, and I couldn’t exactly wait for a reply. And that pretty little boy had been staring up at me with those huge brown eyes, and all I could think was that the world was going to munch him up and spit out his bones if someone didn’t toughen him up.

So here he was, cross-legged and bright-eyed on a bedroll of his own in my tent.

“Well?” he was pressing me eagerly. “You planned it! The fight an’ the speech an’—”

“Down to the last insult.” I pressed the wad of rags against my nose, mopping the blood and wondering if Julius would ever be my friend again.

Never mind. He wasn’t supposed to be my friend anymore—just one of my men.

“Why’d you do it?” Antinous was asking, curious. “They’re all angry and grumbly now.”

“But they won’t grumble tomorrow.”

“They don’t like you.”

“They don’t have to like me. They just have to respect me.”

“Don’t they?”

“Not yet. They won’t respect me till we win a fight or two, but that’s all right. I wouldn’t either, in their place.”