Empress of the Seven Hills (8 page)

“Hello, Vix.” Sabina looked up from her book without surprise. “Is my father here already? You must have had good roads. I suppose everyone else has commented on the black eye?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everyone else has commented on the damned black eye.”

“It is rather spectacular.” She uncurled from the couch, barefoot and bare-armed, light-brown hair hanging down her back. “Still, I won’t ask how you got it.”

“You should.” A reluctant smile was beating its way past my irritation. “It’s a thrilling tale. Robbers, thieves, dragons.”

“Dragons? How interesting.” Sabina rolled up her book. “I’d better go see my father. Nice to know you’ve joined the household, Vix.”

She drifted out just as her stepmother bustled in. “Give me those scrolls, Vix—I know he told you to hide them from me—”

I surrendered my armload with a salute and went to look for the steward, feeling suddenly more cheerful. “Where do I sleep?”

“You’ll share with one of the other guards. Do you realize you’ve got a black—”

“I know.”

SABINA

Sabina liked the terrace of the Baiae villa. On fine evenings she had the steward pull out the couches so dinner could be served outside, wrapped in warm summer breezes with the shadows lengthening across the tiles and the expanse of blue sea glittering beyond. She looked over the bowls of grapes sometimes and imagined that she was seeing all the way beyond the horizon to the great promontories at the mouth of the sea. Hadrian had been born in Hispania; he’d described those promontories to her with hands flying and eyes aglow. The Pillars of Hercules, salt spray flying about them, with the wide ocean and the wider world beyond.

“So wonderful to have a little vacation all together,” Calpurnia was saying, balancing little Linus against her arm as she tried to split a pomegranate one-handed. The last baby had given her a passion for oysters, but this time around it was pomegranate seeds. “Marcus, promise me you won’t go back to Rome for at least a month. You need the rest.”

Sabina nibbled absently on a strip of roast goose, eyes still on the horizon. What lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules? North, of course, lay Britannia. But what lay west? What lay
all
the way west? Hadrian didn’t know, and wasn’t much interested. “Wild places,” he’d said dismissively. “Why worry about the world’s wilderness, Vibia Sabina, when the civilized world has more than you could ever explore in a dozen lifetimes?”

“I can’t stay here all summer,” Sabina’s father was protesting. “I’m working on a new treatise.” So many senators, Sabina had often noticed, looked uneasy and vulnerable out of their togas, like turtles suddenly missing their shells. But her father, even when relaxed on the dining couch in a plain tunic with little Faustina curled under his arm, looked like an emperor.

“The treatise can wait,” Calpurnia was insisting. “We can all go to the sulfur pools; it’ll bake that foul city air right out of your lungs.” She pressed a pomegranate seed into his mouth with pink-stained fingers, stilling his protests.

“You know the rules, Father.” Sabina grinned. “One month here for every pomegranate seed you’ve eaten. Just like Proserpina and Pluto.”

“Oh, good, that’s one month.” Calpurnia plucked out more seeds. “Two, three, four—”

“And I thought it was a good idea to give my daughter a classical education,” Marcus shook his head.

“Father, you really should stay a while. Calpurnia feels so sick in the middle months, and she’s always better when you’re here.”

Marcus at once looked worried, taking his wife’s pomegranate-sticky hand. Calpurnia squeezed his fingers with no more than a twinkle of her lashes at Sabina, who hid her own smile in her cup. Her stepmother was approximately as frail as a mountain pony, but she and Sabina had long entered into a tacit conspiracy where any method from mild misdirection to outright lying was appropriate when it came to the care of the man they mutually adored.

“We’ll make a summer of it here, then,” Marcus was deciding. “The five of us. I’ll have time to start teaching Faustina—some Greek, some rhetoric—”

“Marcus, love, she’s barely five. What are you trying to prepare her for, a career in the Senate?”

“Mix the Greek verbs in with a good bedtime story and they’ll go down easy.” Marcus ruffled the little fair head under his arm.

“I like stories,” Faustina volunteered around a mouthful of roast
goose. “Father has the
best
stories. Like the one where the king got murdered in his bath! And the one where the prince had to kill his mother—”

“Greek tragedies, Marcus?” Calpurnia gave her husband a look that made Sabina giggle. “As
bedtime stories
?”

“Sanitized,” he hedged. “I leave out all the gory details…”

“You did not!” Sabina laughed. “At least not when you were telling them to me!”

“Did he tell you the one where the king gets ripped apart by all those lady wolves?” Faustina piped, bright-eyed. “Or the king who got boiled alive in a pot? All these dead kings, why does anybody want to be a king, anyway?”

“Wise child,” said Marcus. “Maybe we should try something lighter for this summer’s reading, Faustina.”

“How about the one where the women of Athens refuse to sleep with their husbands anymore?” Sabina suggested.

“There’s a thought.” Calpurnia rubbed her heavily rounded stomach.

“We’ll find a comedy to read together,” Marcus said hastily. “I’ll take the male parts, and Sabina can read the women’s—”

“Actually,” Sabina said idly, “I thought I might take my nurse for a chaperone and go back to Rome for the summer.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Calpurnia rescued her bowl of fruit before Linus could knock it over. “Rome in summer—it’ll be hotter than a furnace and smell worse than a sewer.”

“I know.” Sabina tilted a shoulder. “But if I get back to the city, I can avoid the suitors. They’re all coming to Baiae now on vacation, and they’ll be underfoot everywhere. Father, are there any oysters left?”

“They’d go away if you picked one,” Marcus pointed out.

“I intend to pick the whole dish.” Sabina scooped into the oysters.

“I meant if you picked a suitor. As you well know.”

“Who
are
you going to choose, Sabina?” Calpurnia took a little silver knife to split the skin on another pomegranate.

“I wonder,” Sabina said placidly.

“You are leaving it rather late, you know. Eighteen years old—there’s plenty who have a baby already by your age.”

“Trying to get rid of me?”

“Nonsense,” her father protested. “I’ve never been in favor of these young marriages. Eighteen is young enough.”

“Not too much longer before I choose.” Sabina cracked another oyster. “But I would like another month or two of peace. Tribune Hadrian has been very persistent.”

“I thought you liked Hadrian now. You talk for hours every time he visits.”

“He talks for hours, anyway,” Marcus shook his head, amused. “He does love the sound of his own voice.”

“I don’t mind,” Sabina said. “He’s quite interesting if I can get him talking about his travels. He’s been all over Hispania and Gaul—Father, can’t you just accept the next provincial governorship you get offered, so I could go somewhere interesting like Hispania or Gaul? Or Egypt—”

“I don’t know about Hadrian,” Calpurnia said doubtfully. “He’s very charming, to be sure—”

“Of course he’s charming to you,” Sabina said. “He thinks you’re the pearl of Roman womanhood.”

“Yes, and very nice of him to say so. I like a man who has a way with pretty compliments—”

“Do I sense a reproof?” Marcus wondered.

“—and Hadrian’s distinguished as well as charming, so he’s sure to have a fine career ahead of him.
But
—” Calpurnia held up a pink-stained finger, just like her husband when he pounced in the Senate with a legal loophole. “Hadrian comes with a mother-in-law.”

“His mother’s dead,” Sabina objected.

“But the Empress isn’t,” Calpurnia said ominously. “And she had the raising of him, more than his own mother did. Believe me, you do
not
want Empress Plotina for a mother-in-law.”

“So that’s why you married me?” Marcus laughed. “Not for pretty compliments, but because my mother was safely in her grave?”

“Oh, be serious, both of you.” Calpurnia captured little Linus’s plump fist and waved it for attention. “The last thing any young wife needs, Vibia Sabina, is her mother-in-law’s nose poked over her shoulder criticizing her housekeeping, her character, and her children.” Shuddering. “And Empress Plotina has a very long nose.”

“So, an interfering mother-in-law,” Sabina agreed. “Any other objections to Hadrian?”

“He has a far from spotless reputation. He’s keeping a singer in very luxurious lodgings on the Aventine, and—well, not in front of the children.” Calpurnia raised her eyebrows. “Not to mention that he’s eight years older than you.”

“You’re one to talk!” Sabina laughed. “How old was Father when you married him, Calpurnia? Sixty-three?”

“That’s different. Your father was settled, steady, and ready to marry; a man of twenty-six is not. And I was madly in love with your father, and you aren’t in love with Hadrian or anyone else as far as I can tell—”

“I’m too old for this bantering,” Marcus protested, and as Sabina had hoped, the discussion descended into lighthearted family teasing, and by the following afternoon she was loading her books and gowns into a palanquin for the journey back to Rome.

“Oh, dear,” she whispered to her father as one of the older heavyset guards tramped out with his spear to act as escort. “Do you suppose I could have Vix instead, Father? I want to go on a great many long walks this summer, and I always worry that Celsus will throw his back out if he has to do anything harder than lifting a wine cup… yes, that would be nice, thank you—” She hadn’t really decided what to do about Vix, but it would be good to have him on hand.

Just in case.

“Bliss,” Sabina said as she came into the quiet summer-dusked house on the Capitoline Hill, shaking the travel dust out of her dress. “No visitors, no family. All alone at last.” As much as she loved her father and Calpurnia and the children… well, all she seemed to crave
lately was quiet. Space. Time—to herself, to think, to decide. So many things to decide, it seemed lately.

“Fruit on the terrace, Quintus,” Sabina told her father’s steward. “After that, you may please yourself. Go to the races, go to the games, go to the taverns; we’re all free now.”

TITUS

Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus took a deep breath and looked his father in the eye. “Any advice?”

His father stared back, kindly but silent.

“I haven’t really done this before, you know,” Titus said. “Gone courting a girl, I mean. I called on her once before, but she wasn’t there. She’s back now, so I don’t really have any more excuses to dodge this. I could use a few tips.”

His father looked encouraging, but stayed silent. That was the problem when your father was dead, and all you had was a marble bust of him mounted on a plinth in the atrium.

Titus straightened his thin shoulders. “Well, wish me luck.”

He checked his toga for stains, rearranged the folds over his arm, tried vainly to smooth down the tuft of hair that kicked up on the back of his head no matter how short he told the barber to razor it. The last time he’d gone calling on Senator Norbanus’s daughter, he’d tried desperately to flatten his hair down with goose grease, and his grandfather had told him he looked like a Bithynian bum-boy. “No need to trick yourself out, lad! Your name will do the trick; her father and I are like brothers. I’ve already spoken to him; now all you have to do is charm the girl a bit.”

Titus sighed. His friends at school complained about tight-fisted fathers, unsympathetic uncles, demanding grandfathers. But Titus had a grandfather who thought he was perfect and a father who had
been
perfect and was now dead, and that was far harder to live up to. It was
absolutely no use telling his grandfather that an heiress related to the Emperor and courted by half of Rome was not going to be impressed by a boy of sixteen with nothing to boast but an armload of violets and six unpronounceable names. She’d probably laugh him right off her doorstep.

“You’re in luck today,” the broad-shouldered young guard told him. “She’s in the library. I’ll show you back.”

“Thank you for the advice about the violets,” Titus said, lengthening his stride to keep up with the guard’s long swaggering steps. He dearly wished for a little swagger himself.

“She likes sort of ordinary flowers instead of stiff fancy ones,” the guard answered. “I told that bugger Tribune Hadrian she goes mad for lilies, the big expensive ones, and now he sends so many she feeds them to the horses.” A chuckle. “She can’t stand the smell.”

“Tribune Hadrian?” Titus’s grandfather really thought he could win out over men like Tribune Hadrian with his distinguished voice and rising career and oceans of poise?
I’m sunk.

The guard clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Titus gulped, and marched into the library before his courage failed him.

Well. Vibia Sabina didn’t
look
like the kind of girl being courted by half of Rome. He’d met her before, even been introduced, but she’d been dressed up and quiet at her father’s side; a senator’s daughter just like any other. Now she was lying on the floor of the library on her stomach, hair hanging over one shoulder, crunching on an apple. She had maps spread out all around her, and she was apparently drawing a line across them with a stylus. She looked up at Titus, and he saw she had blue eyes.

“Oh no.” Her voice was mild. “Not another one.”

“Sorry?”

“I take it you’re a suitor? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. But I’m not really in the mood to be proposed to today.”

“I’m not in the mood to do any proposing,” Titus surprised himself
by saying just as frankly. “Why don’t you just turn me down now so I can go away?”

A dimple appeared by the corner of her mouth. “Shouldn’t I know whom I’m turning down first?”