Lady of the Eternal City (13 page)

Be careful what you wish for, Antinous
, she thought with a sudden tang in her mouth like a bite of iron.
What if you don’t get it? Or even worse, what if you do?
He looked eager and happy, bouncing on his feet to charge the future, and the Fates ate such youths and their dreams alive.

Listen to me
, she mocked.
Saying “at your age” as though I were an old woman.

But wasn’t she an old woman? You were old when your life was finished, surely, and at forty years old her life
was
finished. A child she could not acknowledge, a lover who would not acknowledge her, and nothing ahead but empty years in an empty bed, and endless empty smiles beside a man she had to keep from becoming a monster.

Well, there was a reason they called it duty instead of pleasure.

Handsome Antinous was talking on, looking down at Annia. “I’ll miss you especially, little monkey,” he said, and laughed as she tackled him in a massive hug.

Sabina smiled at the sight. “Join my entourage, Antinous,” she said on impulse. “I travel to rejoin the Emperor soon, and I always have room for one more page.”

Antinous hesitated. “My father thought I should avoid the Emperor. I, well, I didn’t make a very good impression when I first laid eyes on him.”

Sabina laughed. “You don’t think I see much of the Emperor myself, do you? Except for public functions, and I can certainly excuse you from those. And you’ll reach Greece quite a bit faster traveling on
my
trireme.”

Antinous’s face lit up. “Then thank you, Lady. I would be honored.”

“If I have to take little Pedanius Fuscus, I certainly don’t mind taking you.” Sabina stole one last glance to memorize the pattern of Annia’s latest freckles—
I must have another cameo made to take with me, she is growing so fast
—and turned away, Antinous falling in at her side. “What kind of impression
did
you make on the Emperor, there must be a story there . . .”

ANNIA

Rome

Marcus’s voice drifted up toward Annia. “What did you do
this
time?”

She poked her head out the window of her chamber, looking down on the garden path below where he stood with his armload of scrolls. “Nothing.”

“You don’t get locked into your room all day for nothing.” Marcus was a regular visitor to Annia’s house—every time his dreary mother had a headache (and she had more headaches than a hundred-headed hydra), he got dumped here and Annia had to entertain him. And that was impossible. He wouldn’t play
trigon
with the slave children (“My mother says they’d give me fleas”), he wouldn’t let Annia teach him to tumble or stand on his head (“My grandfather says I’d break my neck”), and he wouldn’t sneak rides on the chariot horses (“I don’t sneak”). What was Annia supposed to do with a visitor like that?

“I’m hungry,” she said instead, before Marcus could keep asking questions about why she was in trouble. “Can’t you steal me a honey cake?” Annia wasn’t to be allowed a single sweet until her punishment was done, and the smell of cakes was wafting clear from the
culina
.

“You’re not supposed to—”

“Just go steal me a cake! Antinous would.” Antinous wouldn’t even have to steal; the cooks would be blushing and pouring them into his hands.

But Marcus just looked up at her through curly dark lashes, disapproving. “What
did
you do this time?”

Annia blew out a rebellious breath, running her finger along the stone window ledge. “It was just Brine-Face again.”

Pedanius Fuscus, whom she saw almost as often as Marcus, and who at a brutish eleven was turning into the bane of life. A year ago he’d nearly drowned her in the atrium, holding her down in the central pool to make her stop calling him Brine-Face, and every time he hauled her up she’d spit it out through her teeth while coughing up water. He hadn’t gotten in trouble, of course. When his grandfather came along, Pedanius made it look like he was pulling her out of the pool and not pushing her in. Old Servianus had reprovingly told Annia (still coughing up water, as Pedanius gazed on virtuously) that she was behaving like a barbarian.

And two days ago had been something even worse.

“He said something awful,” Annia told Marcus briefly. “And I hit him. Brine-Face is off to Greece now, but I’m still supposed to stay in my room until I apologize to his grandfather, and I
won’t
.”

Her father had been angry with her, and that hurt. “Your mother is feeling quite fragile enough without your misbehavior,” he said shortly, and took Annia’s mother off to Baiae. “Just the two of us, Faustina,” Annia had heard him murmur into her beautiful hair. “We’ll look out at the sea and read poetry by the brazier—and perhaps make another son.”

And Annia’s eyes pricked because even if she had another brother someday, she wouldn’t stop hurting for the one who was gone. The brother she’d walked all over the house with his fat feet balanced on top of hers and his tiny fingers clinging to her thumbs.

The brother who was dead—and who Brine-Face had laughed at.

“What did he say?” Marcus asked as though he’d read her mind. He did that sometimes.

“He said the gods killed my brother because of me. Because I was already such a boy, there wasn’t room in the house for two.” A slow breath full of rage. “And then he
laughed
. That’s when I hit him.”

She hadn’t told anyone what Pedanius had said, even when her father demanded to know why she’d behaved so badly. She hadn’t wanted to see her mother cry again. So she was stuck in her chamber, in disgrace and craving honey cakes she couldn’t eat.

Marcus looked up at her, thoughtful. “Wait there.”

“Where are you going?” Annia called. He didn’t answer, just flapped a hand. He was back in a few moments, looking vaguely guilty. To Annia’s surprise, he reached for the vines along the wall under her window, and began to climb.

“You’ll fall,” Annia warned, but he kept coming. He was skinny but strong. Annia leaned down and extended a hand to pull him up onto the ledge, where he sat with feet dangling.

“Here.” He produced a handful of honey cakes from his tunic, only slightly squashed. “You’re right—you don’t deserve to be punished this time. Pedanius gets other people punished for what
he
does. He does the same thing to me, and everyone believes him.”

Annia grinned, dividing the cakes and handing Marcus half. “Can you be my brother?”

He smiled. He had thin cheeks, but his smile was nice. “Why?”

“I still want a brother,” Annia confessed around a mouthful of cake. “Very much.”

He considered that, nibbling much more politely. “I’d like being your father’s son. But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“If I were your brother I couldn’t marry you.”

Annia stared at him. He’d said that before, but it had been a long time ago, and it sounded just as stupid now as it had then. “What?”

“I’m going to marry you,” he said as if it were self-explanatory, still nibbling. “Once we’re old. Twelve or—wait!”

Annia got up from the window ledge.

“Wait, I’m coming in—”

Annia slammed the inside shutters with a howl of outrage, leaving him sitting on the ledge outside.

Marcus’s voice floated through the shutters, plaintive. “What did I
say
?”

VIX

I didn’t bother with Roman stoicism when Antinous arrived in Mysia. I grabbed my boy in a vast hug, crushing him against my breastplate. “Hell’s gates, did you fly all the way from Rome?” I’d hesitated about having Antinous join the Imperial entourage, considering why he’d left it in the first place—but it was so long since I’d seen him! I hadn’t admitted to anyone just how much I missed my son.

“I came by Imperial trireme.” Antinous pushed down the sleek black dog who bounced about our feet barking. “If Empress Sabina’s on board—down, boy!—the gods send nothing but fast winds.”

I pulled back enough to look him over. Nearly two years since I’d sent him packing to the
paedogogium
. He’d grown taller, but it was more than that. The last awkward lankiness of boyhood had given way to broad-shouldered, slim-hipped leanness; his childish freckles had been replaced by sun-bronzed silk-smooth skin; the uncertain fits and starts of motion had become lithe, well-trained grace. “Look at you,” I said. “I send a boy away to Rome, and you come back a man.”

He flushed. “You think so?”

“I know so.” We hadn’t marked Antinous’s manhood by any of the usual ceremonies, largely because Mirah and I couldn’t decide which to employ: the
toga virilis
where Roman youths marked the end of childhood by donning a toga for the first time, or the blessing by which Jewish boys announced their status as men. I’d argued for the
toga virilis
, and Mirah argued for the blessing, and neither had seemed quite right for our mismatched household where a Greek boy had been raised by a Jew and a barbarian.

Besides, I didn’t reckon manhood came from any ceremony. I’d marked myself a man when I made my first kill. At least my son had reached his manhood more gently than that. “You make many friends at the
paedogogium
?” I asked. “You weren’t one for details in your letters—”

Antinous ruffled a hand over his dark-honey curls. “I don’t have your knack for making friends. I hang back, and people think I’m haughty. Or I smile, and they think I’m fawning or flirting.”

I guessed it was that face of his that made it hard for him. When Antinous stood unsmiling he looked so marble-carved that people just gaped like he was a statue on a plinth. When he smiled, the marble statue came to such radiant life that people began stuttering. He wasn’t haughty and he wasn’t ingratiating, he was just
shy
sometimes; but a face like that didn’t allow him to be shy because it made men jealous and women ignite. I guessed it hadn’t been an easy two years for him in the ranks of all those spotty ambitious boys.

Antinous was prowling through my quarters with his dog at his heels, giving a hoot at the piles of slates on my desk and the dirty tunics I’d left on the floor. “You live worse than a beggar when you haven’t got a wife around to keep you tidy!”

I smiled. “How is Mirah?”

“Full of fire. Goes to the scribes every other day to dictate letters, for her mother and Uncle Simon and the rest of them in Judaea.”

“A great believer in letters, your mother.” Even out here on the edge of the Empire, Imperial messengers brought me a stack of missives every day: reports from my informers, updates from Prefect Turbo in Rome . . . and scrolls with Mirah’s words in a scribe’s neat script. She couldn’t write, but that didn’t stop her sending me letters.

“I thought she’d come with me,” Antinous was saying as he emptied his pack. “She made me read every letter you sent out loud, till it fell to bits. She misses you.”

“And I miss her,” I said briefly. “But she’s tired of traveling. The girls need a home to settle in.”

That was only part of it. It wasn’t even our prickly discussions about going to Judaea or freeing Judaea or whatever came in her uncle’s latest rants. A year ago when we were about to depart Hispania, I’d woken one cold morning to find Mirah weeping over her monthly blood—heavier than usual, and she insisted it must have been the beginnings of a child.

“Maybe,” I’d said, putting my arms around her. “We don’t know, do we? Far too early to be sure.” I’d been trying to comfort her, but she’d flared up at me.

“It
was
a child. It was, and it would have been a boy. One of our own—”

“Not that again—”

“—and for once someone would have looked at
my
son instead of Antinous!”

“Well, I’m not one of those arses who tosses a woman out if she can’t push out sons,” I’d said irritably. “So stop fretting. And quit bringing Antinous into it, because it’s not his fault we don’t have a boy of our own blood!”

Her blue eyes were bitter. “You love him more than your own blood.”

I’d picked up my helmet and greaves and slammed out. Gone through my day with a black scowl, and when I came back Mirah wound her arms around my waist and I murmured into her hair with the taste of guilt thick and sour on my tongue. Because I tried to hide it; I tried to keep it from her that Antinous was the one I loved most. Mirah thought it was because he was a boy, but it wasn’t that. I didn’t know what it was. I just knew that I loved him best—and Mirah knew it, too.

We hadn’t spoken another word about it, just fallen into each other’s arms with fierce kisses and patched things up that way, the best way. But when Hadrian’s entourage moved on from Hispania, that was when Mirah said quietly that she’d take the girls to Rome rather than accompany us east. And I hadn’t tried to stop her.

Antinous was looking at me quizzically. I forced a smile. I wasn’t about to tell him any of it—he loved Mirah like the mother he’d never known. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just—wondering when you grew out your hair, boy,” I improvised, and tousled his honey-colored curls. “You’ve got more hair than Empress Sabina. And how in God’s name did you end up in the middle of her entourage, anyway?”

“I met her at the household of Titus Aurelius, and she was kind enough to invite me. Took quite a liking to me, actually. Her chamberlain and her maids were seasick all through the crossing, so she taught me to play
latrunculi
. She beat me flat most of the time.” He gave a little whistle. “A mind like a general, Empress Sabina’s got.”

“A mind like a snake, more like.”

“Do you trust
anyone
?” he objected.

“No, and it’s kept me alive long enough to see gray in my hair.” Something that still surprised me, whenever I saw the wavering reflection in my shaving water. I was past forty: I had a son grown to manhood, and gray was beginning to salt my russet hair, and weatherbeaten lines had carved themselves about my eyes. Yet I felt no older than the boy standing before me with his sunny smile and his overflowing energy.

“Empress Sabina likes me,” Antinous was saying as he settled away the last of his belongings. “She says she’ll help me find a position at court, if I want one. Perhaps with the archivists—”