Lady of the Eternal City (12 page)

I haven’t been caught yet
, the Empress thought grimly.
And for Annia’s sake, and my sister’s, and her husband’s, I never will be.

Vix was coming up the stone steps, helmet tucked under his arm. He threw an inky shadow across the wall, tall as a colossus. “What are you doing up here?”

“Seeing the wall.” She drew up her knees beneath her wolf skins, propping her folded arms on top. “I had to sit like a statue this afternoon during the formal presentation, while the Emperor got to clamber all over it. He can be adventurous”—Sabina pillowed her cheek on her folded arms—“but I have to look docile.”

“I haven’t met an empress yet who was docile.” Vix came to stand over her, looking out over the darkness north of the wall.

“Well, we need to give the appearance of docility, anyway.”

“You can’t even manage that, Lady.”

His voice coming down through the dark was dourly amused. Sabina tilted her head up at his craggy shape looming over her. “Why did you come tramping up after me?” she asked. “I’ve hardly seen hide or hair of you through all these months in Britannia.” And long before that, truth be told—he was forever busy with his guards, his slates and dispatches, his endless rides off to the various garrisons. And he never, ever stood guard at her back if he could help it.

“I’m avoiding you.” He spoke bluntly. “But I’m also avoiding the Emperor tonight, not to mention my wife. So if it’s a choice between rounding you up, going home to her, or guarding him, I’ll take you.”

“Why are you avoiding your wife?” Sabina had met Vix’s wife once or twice, in Antioch back at the informal court Emperor Trajan kept in the east between campaigns. A fiery creature, taller than Sabina, with a glint of amusement in her eye.

Vix grunted.

“Well,” Sabina said softly. “I am glad to have you here.”

She could feel the cameo in her hand, the carved edges etching into her palm. Annia’s small, carved profile. Hard to tell yet in a child’s unformed face—but Sabina thought she might grow up with Vix’s nose.

The Empress patted the stones beside her. “Sit.”

Annia’s father hesitated a moment, standing there in the battered lion skin across his armored shoulders, which the moon had bleached to the color of bone, and the lock of his hair that like his daughter’s never lay flat. Sabina remembered moving her hand over that lock of hair when they helped each other dress, that afternoon nearly five years ago on the barren hilltop in Selinus.

The day they had made Annia. Not that Vix knew that.

“So you’ve decided you want my company?” He sat down beside her on the stones, resting his elbows on his knees. “You’ve done a good job yourself of avoiding
me
, these past few years. Since you became Empress of Rome, anyway.”

“I didn’t avoid you because I got grand, Vix.” In fact she’d missed their old easy camaraderie desperately. They’d been lovers on and off since they’d both been eighteen, but even more than lovers they had been friends. “I thought it would be safer, keeping my distance. After . . .”

“Selinus?” he finished.

Sabina jumping up into Vix’s arms, mouths clashing and tasting salt tears, both of them bitter and sick with grief for the Emperor they had both loved. Vix’s mouth at her breast, consuming her, marking her as she breathed in his ear,
“Shut up and take me.”
“Yes,” Sabina admitted, pulling her furs closer. “Not the wisest thing we’ve ever done.”

It hadn’t been love, that savage coupling in the wild grass. Trajan had just died, and they had mourned him together, united in their dread that Hadrian would follow on the throne. Making something in that moment for which Hadrian would have destroyed them both; oh, how the gods must have been laughing!

“No harm came from it, at least.” Vix shrugged, and Sabina bit her own tongue, feeling the cameo’s edges again.

“No. No harm.” Her throat was getting thick, and she cast about for something else to say—something that didn’t catch her throat as though she were swallowing thorns. “Did you know, Hadrian’s spoken of making further reforms to the legion regulations? I told him he should consult with you.”

“I don’t want him to consult me. If he never says a word to me again, I’ll die happy.”

The sharpness in Vix’s voice made Sabina blink.

“I serve him,” Vix went on. “He’s got me there. That’s what happens when you’ve got a family—they’re the sword for someone like Hadrian to hold over you—”

They are
, Sabina thought.
Oh, they are!

“—but I’ll be damned if I help him. Not ever.”

“Isn’t it easier than fighting him?”

“Is that why you’re playing docile Empress all of a sudden?”

Sabina lifted her cheek off her furred knees, raising her head to catch his eyes directly. “Back on Selinus, we’d have done anything to keep Hadrian from taking the purple. But it happened. Like it or not, he
is
our Emperor. So shouldn’t we help him? Help him to do great things? I will, if I can.”

It was part of the promise she’d sworn to herself, telling Annia good-bye. “I’ll send you presents,” she had chattered inanely, just to say something that might get through Annia’s wary stare. All the while thinking,
I will give you more than presents, Annia Galeria Faustina. I will make this
world
over for you. I will make it safe, I will make it beautiful. I will make this Empire your haven. I am Empress of Rome, and I swear it.

“You want Hadrian to change?” Vix flung the words at her like stones. “He’s an evil, heartless bastard. He’ll never change.”

“Probably not.” He might never
be
a good man, but if he could just listen to her about the necessity of
acting
like one . . . “Even if it proves impossible, Vix, I think we shall have to try. Because we’ve seen mad emperors, you and I, mad ones and wicked ones, and I won’t let my husband go down that road.”

“He’s already down that road!” Vix snarled. “He paved that bloody road, and you want me to
help
?”

“What choice do we have?”

Vix let out a bitter bark of laughter, fingering the little medallion at his throat. A medallion of Mars, Sabina knew. It had always brought him luck. She wondered if he still had the silver earring she’d once given him as a lover’s token. That had brought him luck, too.

“So what do you mean to do, Vix? Leave Imperial service?” Sabina drew a finger down a fold of wolf fur over her knee, feeling a stab at the thought of losing Vix for good. Of course, he’d been lost to her a long time, long before he ever married his gingery wife. For all the heat that flared whenever he and Sabina drew close, they always ended up pricking each other in the end. Pricking till they both bled. They’d always had different stars to follow, and the draw of the stars had always been stronger than the draw of the flesh.

But Vix gone for good, not even seen in passing anymore with his lion skin and his infectious grin?

We have a daughter
, Sabina almost said.
I bore you a daughter, and she’s being raised by my sister and your oldest friend.
But it was no way to hold him.

“Will you leave?” she asked instead.

“No.” A harsh bark of a laugh. “I haven’t got the nerve to flee. Your husband saw to that.”

“Why?”

“He threatened me.” Even in the dark, she saw his throat move. “And he threatened my son.”

“What did he threaten?”

In anger Vix was always a storm of motion: pacing, striding, shouting. But now he was still as a boulder. “None of your business.”

Quietly Sabina asked, “Did he carry out any of those threats? Against you, or your son?”

“No.”

“You see? He
is
changing, at least in his actions if not his soul. Otherwise—”

Vix rose in a clatter of mail. He dropped his big hand across the back of her neck and raised her effortlessly, pulling her up against him, his fingers sliding around to circle her throat. His hand on her naked skin was as warm as though he’d been sitting by a roaring fire. Even in this cold northern place under the icy stars, Vix could never be cold. His blood ran hotter and faster than ordinary. But then, he’d never been ordinary, had he?

“Sabina.” He whispered her name. “Do not talk to me of how much
good
he can do.”

He released her, so abruptly she staggered. When she regained her balance, she saw her bodyguard—her perfect Imperial guard, her lifelong friend and sometime lover, the father of the child the world had no idea she’d ever borne—descending the steps toward the ground, almost running. Leaving her alone in the moonlight, on Hadrian’s wall.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

—MARCUS AURELIUS

VIX

A.D. 124, Winter
Hispania

The worst fight Mirah and I had in years, and it started over such a small thing. A letter!

I’d been reading the latest missive from my wife’s family out loud, Mirah hanging over my shoulder to look at the words she couldn’t read, and I broke off in the middle with a snort. “Sounds like Simon’s getting a rebellious streak.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” We were in Hispania by that time; the girls were asleep, and Mirah had let her hair down for the night so it gleamed in the firelight. “Uncle Simon always agreed with my cousins whenever they talked of liberating Judaea. He just doesn’t thump the table and bellow.” A smile. “They can be tiresome, I know.”

“Still—” I reread the bit about Simon, with whom I’d once shared a tent in the Tenth Fidelis as legionaries. “Simon, turning rebellious? He spent years
serving
Rome!”

“He regrets those years. He was a foolish boy craving adventure, and he paid for that with decades of his life. He’s lucky his family took him back, as long as he’d drifted away from the faith. He was a different man the moment he returned.”

“I’d rather have the man from my
contubernium
back than some fire-eyed spouter of liberty.” The dark-bearded man who’d welcomed me into the tent as a raw green recruit—there’s no friend like a friend from the days of war. “Fire-eyed spouters of liberty are all such bloody bores. Not to mention that they tend to die bloodily.”

“Maybe it won’t have to be bloody this time,” my wife said as I put down the letter to build up the fire. The winter nights in Hispania could be cold—I’d be glad when Hadrian’s entourage made the crossing to Africa in the spring. “Uncle Simon has high hopes of Emperor Hadrian,” Mirah went on. “He let Parthia and Armenia go when he saw it wasn’t practical keeping them. Maybe he’d let Judaea go, too.”

I laughed. “No.”

“Why?” Mirah challenged.

That was where Antinous would have jumped in: made some witty pun, gotten us smiling, then offered to fetch hot spiced wine. But he wasn’t here, so Mirah and I kept digging ourselves into the hole.

“Judaea’s been part of Rome a good deal longer than Parthia, Mirah. We had nothing invested in Parthia but dead legionaries.” I’d railed about the waste of those lives when Hadrian withdrew from our hard-won territories . . . But I’d been battle-sick and heart-sore, not in any mind to listen to the cool wisdom of knowing what was worth defending, and what would be a sinkhole for yet more dead friends.

Cool wisdom.
Was I defending Hadrian’s decisions now—a man who had threatened to mutilate my son and bugger me in front of my men?

Didn’t mean he wasn’t right about Parthia. I hated the man, but that didn’t make him stupid. “Judaea isn’t Parthia,” I said again. “Hadrian won’t give it up.”

“He will if there’s enough trouble in the region. He’s a coward.” She sounded derisive, and why shouldn’t she? I’d said far worse than that about the Emperor. “If we make Judaea not worth fighting for—”

“‘We’?” I raised my eyebrows.

“My entire family is in Bethar, Vix. My parents, my sisters, Uncle Simon—”

“And if they make trouble, who do you think will get sent to quash it?”

“Not you,” Mirah reassured. “Praetorians don’t dirty themselves in provincial struggles.”

She didn’t say it to sting. I knew she didn’t. I let some air out. “Boys I trained will be sent. Men I know.”

Her voice rose. “Then that’s the price.”

“It’s a fine thing to talk about price when you’re not the one paying it,” I shot back. “Rome’s given us a fine life—”

“But we aren’t
Roman
. Even you. The things you endured as a child—”

“I survived. And I don’t whine about it.”

“But you don’t try to
change
it either. If you could only—”

I heard a sniffle from the doorway. I looked over and saw two huge pairs of dark eyes—Dinah and Chaya, roused from their beds. We’d been louder than I thought.

“I’ll tuck them back in.” Mirah rose, pushing her loose hair back. “We shouldn’t be quarreling over this anyway.”

“Why?” I said. “Because we’ll wake the children, or because you’re right and I’m wrong and that’s an end to it?”

Either she didn’t hear me or she pretended she didn’t hear me, whisking away to put the girls back to bed. I looked down at the letter that had caused all the fuss, and I tossed it in the fire.

We slid between the bedcovers that night without saying a word. Mirah’s voice didn’t come until long after the lamp had been extinguished. “Is there something
wrong
, Vix? Ever since sending Antinous away . . .”

“There’s nothing,” I said, and rolled away from her.

But there’s no fooling a wife. Not a wife like mine, anyway. She curled against me, rubbing her hand across my chest. “Are you sure?”

I kissed her to silence her, pulling her over me, but I couldn’t make love to her that night, much as I ached for her. Because I was
lying
to her—because I’d never told her what Hadrian said to me in Britannia. If I had, she’d explode into rage on my behalf. And she’d ask one very simple question.

“How can you serve him?”

And the answer was,
Because he broke me
. And I’d die before I’d say it, so I turned away from her again on the pillow and gazed long and silent into the dark.

SABINA

Rome

“I made her laugh twice,” Sabina reported as she slipped from Faustina’s chamber to the atrium, and Titus’s worn face relaxed into one of the first smiles she’d seen since her visit began.

“I knew it would do her good to see you.” He took Sabina’s hand, squeezing it. “You’re very good to come all the way from Thrace.”

I’m not
good
at all
, Sabina thought.
Good
was to take a child with parentage that could never be revealed and raise it as your own knowing you might be executed if the truth were uncovered. That was
good
; that was a depth of good that could never be matched or repaid. Sabina did not count herself as
good
, not compared to her sister and her dearest friend. It was no more than common decency, surely, to rush to your little sister’s side upon learning she had lost her baby son to a fever. Sabina had dropped the letter half-read and ordered a trireme to carry her from warm spice-scented Thrace to cool marble Rome.

Little Marcus Galerius Aurelius Antoninus. Her nephew, whom she had never had the chance to meet. Lived no more than a year and a half, but he had put lines of grief around the eyes of Sabina’s little sister, and fresh gray in Titus’s hair. Sabina could see that very clearly, standing in the sunny light of the atrium as Titus talked of his son. “He looked like your father. That’s why we named him Marcus. Terribly wise eyes, for a baby! Annia claimed he understood every word we said . . .”

Sabina felt a pang of a different kind, hearing Annia’s name. The fever that took little Marcus hadn’t touched Annia, and Sabina felt a warped, shamed pang of relief that if a child had had to be taken to the doors of the underworld, it hadn’t been
her
child.

No
, she thought.
I may have sailed from Thrace to comfort my sister, but that doesn’t make me
good
. Not at all.

“Annia was a surprisingly good big sister,” Titus was saying, passing a hand over his hair. It was a gesture that belonged to a much older man, Sabina thought. Someone Servianus’s age. “She can’t cross a room without knocking something over, but she’d rock the baby so gently—”

“Titus.” Sabina cupped her brother-in-law’s worn cheek. “My dear, dear Titus, who’s looking after you while you’re looking after Annia and Faustina? How are
you
faring?”

“‘The life of the dead is retained in the memory of the living,’” he quoted. “According to Cicero, anyway. So my son will never die.”

“Cicero is generally a comfort in bad times,” Sabina agreed. Titus’s face twisted, and she reached up and drew his head down against her shoulder. They stood in the atrium for a moment, Sabina on tiptoe as Titus breathed unevenly against the stiff folds of her
stola
. When he straightened, his face was calm again.

“Will you be rejoining the Emperor in—where is he, Athens?”

A year and a half of traveling had covered many provinces. Dry Hispania, restless Parthia, beautiful Mauretania where Sabina had walked the crocodile pools of the great Iseum. “Hadrian’s hashed things out among the Parthians, thrown up a great many temples, inspected the legions, so it’s on to see the ruins of Troy next.” Sabina drew Titus’s hand through her arm, and they drifted out of the atrium down toward the gardens. Titus’s villa sat on the northeast edge of the city, almost in the country—beyond the garden walls rolled vineyards and lush summer hills. “I’ll try to catch the Imperial party before they sail back to Athens.”

Hadrian and Sabina had spent one of the early years of their marriage in Athens—it was a place her husband adored, arguing happily with bearded scholars while Sabina wandered sunburned and happy through the temples of Delphi. They’d meet each night tired and happy and spilling over with things to say to each other, Hadrian so excited he waved his arms to illustrate his points. That had been long ago, but in Hadrian’s ravenous delight to be back in the land he admired so much more than Rome, Sabina thought she could see traces of that bright-eyed young philosopher again. Just traces, but still . . .

Titus was looking sad. “I suppose you’ll be making sail soon.”

“I’m afraid so. Hadrian wasn’t pleased when I left him.”

“He likes having you at his side, then.”

“So it seems.” Hadrian didn’t always take her advice, but he was at least willing to hear it—and he had not had any more of those murderous lapses in temper in many months. A half-mad slave had set on him with a knife in Hispania, and rather than having the fellow tossed to the lions, Hadrian merely had him disarmed and taken away. “The fellow was clearly mad,” the Emperor mused. “I suppose a flogging will do for punishment, instead of execution.”

“Why not pardon him?” Sabina had dared to counter. “Send him to your physicians to be treated, and let word of your compassion spread.”

Hadrian had given a noncommittal
hmph
, but he had taken the suggestion. Progress indeed.

“The Emperor continues to ignore me.” Titus rippled a hand over the rosemary hedge. “Perhaps he will be content to let me live quietly and out of sight.”

“You are far too capable to live as quietly as you wish, Titus.”

“Capable? At the moment I do nothing but wrangle Servianus in the Senate. He has been good enough to call me ‘decently respectful for a mere boy.’ You know he wants to marry Annia to his grandson?”

“We’re not worrying about Annia’s future husband already, are we?” Sabina blinked. “Little Pedanius can’t be above eleven. I’m to bring him back to Mysia with me—Servianus battened down on me as soon as I arrived in Rome, droning on about how it’s time the Emperor’s great-nephew took his place at Hadrian’s side.”

Titus actually had a smile for her mimicry. “Well, Faustina doesn’t favor any talk of betrothal at such an age either. Servianus didn’t like that. ‘For a woman so light-minded and full of levity to impose her whims on the future of the Emperor’s heir—’”

Sabina thought of her sister, folding and refolding one of her son’s small blankets and trying valiantly to stop crying. “Let’s hope she’s full of levity again, and very soon.”

A child’s shriek interrupted them, and a pair of figures careened around the hedge. A tall boy, laughing and sun-bronzed, calling over his shoulder, “Come on, you can run faster than that!” Behind him came Annia, deadly serious as she pelted at his heels, and at the rear ran a black dog bouncing and barking. All three skidded to a halt, the boy running a hand over his tumbled hair, Annia scrubbing her hands down her dusty tunic and giving her father a sparkling grin.

“Lady.” The boy gave a graceful bow. More a young man than a boy, and a very handsome one: a young Adonis wearing a linen tunic and an infectious smile. “I apologize,” he said, nudging the dog back from Sabina’s skirts. “My tutors at the
paedogogium
would surely wash their hands of me if I bowled over the Empress of Rome. Or let my dog shed all over her hem—” He glared at the creature, which lolled its tongue and laughed up at him.

“This is Antinous.” Titus gave a cordial nod to the young Adonis. “Did you know our old friend Vercingetorix had a son?”

“No, I didn’t.” The things one learned about old lovers. Ever since that night on the wall in Britannia, Vix turned into a pillar whenever he entered Sabina’s presence: tall, granite, utterly mute.

“Titus Aurelius helped my father find a foster family for me, after my mother died,” Antinous explained. “Before my father had a home of his own into which he could take me—”

“Your mother was a lovely girl.” Titus smiled. “As often as I sat eating her lamb stew in those cold German nights when I was a tribune, I owed her son consideration once I learned he’d come to Rome. Annia brought him up to me at a party . . .”

“The first friend I made in the Eternal City!” Antinous tousled Annia’s hair in affection before giving a graceful bow to her father. “Thank you for your many kindnesses,
patronus
.” Sabina heard real warmth behind the formal words. “I’ve never known much about my mother. My father, well, he’s everything brave and kind, but he’s no wordsmith. All he could ever tell me was that my mother was Bithynian and beautiful, and he doesn’t even like saying that because then his wife scowls and asks
how
beautiful.”

“Most wives would,” Titus agreed as Sabina laughed. “That fiery wife of Vix’s—did he haul her with him to Thrace?”

“No,” Antinous said. “He wanted to, but after Hispania she decided she’d bring the girls back to Rome. Tired of going back and forth across the Empire like a message case, I suspect. But now my schooling’s done, she’s agreed I’ll go join my father wherever he’s accompanied the Emperor to next.” Antinous’s carved and handsome face glowed at the prospect of adventure, and Sabina gave a small internal sigh. When she’d been Antinous’s age, all she’d wanted to do was see the world. Now she’d seen most of it, from the wild places of the west to the hot places of the east—but the price for seeing all those horizons had been so much higher than she’d ever imagined.