Lady of the Eternal City (18 page)

“My mother talks of her god’s infinite wonders. I wonder what she would say about all this . . . but she’d never come. Her god is too jealous. I think that’s why I can’t believe in him.”

And “Don’t worry for your Empress. My father is with her. He’d protect her against the hordes at Thermopylae if he had to.”

And “I know what I believe in now. This—peace and beauty and stars . . .”

The Emperor sighed, so Antinous knew he was awake. A question had been forming in him. It was time to speak it aloud. “What faces do you see, Caesar?” he asked quietly. “What faces make you so afraid?”

A long silence. Finally the Emperor spoke, his voice husky and cracked. “The faces in my Hades.”

“What is your Hades?”

“Pray you never know.”

Antinous turned his head a little so his cheek rested against the Emperor’s hair, and realized he wanted to press another kiss there.
I am happy
, Antinous thought wonderingly.
I am so happy.

The Emperor’s head turned too, tilting toward him. Antinous saw dark eyes gleaming like pieces of jet. Weary eyes, and lonely. So lonely his soul hurt.
Surrounded by crowds, and still so lonely
, Antinous thought. He understood that, even though his own loneliness was so different: the child waiting alone for a god in a lion skin to claim him; the boy playing alone among stray dogs because his sisters had their own games and their bond of blood; the student at the
paedogogium
who sat alone because he had no friends; the lone son who could not speak to his father about so many of the things that troubled him. Antinous was so often alone, in one way or another. Little Annia had seen that when she first laid eyes on him, observant young thing that she was.

You are never alone
, he thought, looking at the Emperor of Rome.
But you are still as lonely as I am.

Hadrian’s bearded lips brushed his, as tentatively as though he had never offered a kiss in his life. Antinous’s breath caught in his throat, the blood tingling in his veins. He threaded his hands through Hadrian’s curly hair, and he felt the Emperor’s wide strong hand cradling his cheek. Hadrian turned in Antinous’s arms, his hard chest against Antinous’s, and he could feel the thump of the Emperor’s heart. That hunter’s heart, which had probably beat calmly while facing down a maddened she-bear, was thrumming fast as a bird’s wings. Hadrian’s mouth was fierce against his, and Antinous fell into the kiss like he’d fallen into the whirl of
kykeon
. They sank down into the moss, twined together like vines, and Antinous set his lips at the hollow of Hadrian’s collarbone, kissing him with a tenderness that rose fierce and protective in his own throat. Who felt protective of an emperor, the lord of the world ringed by spears and safe from all danger? But Antinous felt it anyway, and he wrapped Hadrian in his arms and held him, murmured to him, opened to him under the welcoming moon.

VIX

Sabina was about to tell me something, but I laid my hand on her bare ankle and she went silent. Slowly I slid my hand along the curve of her leg, the rough hem of her robe pooling over my wrist as it pushed up. “What were you about to say?” I asked, and my voice was hoarse in my own ears.

She was silent. Her flesh was warm and smooth, and I could feel her breath coming uneven. My fingers found the saffron ribbon she’d tied about her leg above the knee, the mark of an acolyte like the matching ribbon at her wrist. I ran my fingertips along the taut band for a moment, and then I slid one finger beneath and slowly tugged it loose. I twined the bit of silk between my fingers, and it was still warm from her skin. “Hell’s gates,” I whispered. “Don’t tell me this isn’t witchcraft you’re working on me.”

She said nothing. I saw her biting her lip in the dark, and I remembered how cool and fresh those lips tasted, like water from the world’s purest spring. I gripped the loops of the ribbon in my fist, so hard they bit into my fingers.

Sabina lifted her hand, plucking the other saffron ribbon away from her wrist. She slid it about my neck, her fingers whispering over my skin, holding each end in a small hand as she tugged me down toward her on the moss. Tugged me toward her with nothing more than a frail strip of silk, and the whole slim coil of her body arched up toward me and her lips were just a hair’s distance from mine when I moved over her. I loosed my fist from the other ribbon’s loops and laid the band of silk across her throat, stretching it between my fists and pressing her back into the ground. Then I eased up until she was at arm’s length again, my fists sunk into the moss on either side of her head, the ribbon stretching taut between them across her supple throat.

“No,” I said thickly. “No.”

She still had me around the neck with her own length of silk. She could have tugged the ends again, brought me down full length against her, and she had to feel how hard I wanted it. All she had to do was tug, and I was trying to summon Mirah’s face to mind, keep myself from following that tug like a dog. They called me the Emperor’s dog, but really I was his wife’s. God help me.

Sabina let the ribbon slide away down my neck. “No,” she said, and I didn’t need to see her face to know she wore one of her wry smiles. “So much
no
.”

I released her. Stood up. She rose too, her bare arms gleaming like silver in the faint starlight. “You’ll be cold,” I said, and slid the lion skin from my shoulders so I could drape it about hers. Her small shoulders were wrapped for a moment inside the circle of my arms, and I lowered my head so I could press my lips briefly against the crown of her shorn head. “I’ve always loved that short hair.”

“Why do you think I keep it this way?”

It was nearly dawn as we made our silent way back to the temple. We had almost cleared the trees when I saw the honey-colored head of my son. He was sitting against a tree of his own, eyes closed either in sleep or in reverie, and I saw a darker head resting in his lap like a child’s.

Antinous opened his eyes and saw me, just as I saw that it was Hadrian who slept with his head in my son’s lap. The Emperor looked white and worn and innocent somehow, like a terrified child at last relaxed into slumber. “He was frightened,” Antinous said simply. “Something he saw under the
kykeon
.”

“Did it affect you as badly as it did him?” I asked, because it had been a night for dreams but also for nightmares—and I loved my son so much, I’d have slain every night terror in all the cups of
kykeon
in the world, just to keep his sleep serene.

Antinous smiled at me, and his smile was a dazzling thing, sweet and dazed and utterly beautiful. “I have dreamed and danced and marveled. And now I have wakened, and found the world is still a wondrous place.”

He’s still drunk
, I decided.

“Thank you for looking after the Emperor,” said Sabina, and the three of us raised the Emperor of Rome in his slumber. The hierophant was ringing his gong, and all around people stumbled to answer the call, wild-eyed and dazed. Persephone had been found; death defeated once again. There were only minor rites left over the next few days, and then the final trudge back to Athens.

The Mysteries of Eleusis were over.

ANTINOUS

Athens

Two days after the Mysteries ended, the Emperor summoned him.

Antinous had always found waiting an agony—waiting for his father to return from his latest war; waiting for Mirah to conceive that son who would have healed the little wound in her heart. Waiting usually meant time for doubt to grow, time for Antinous to convince himself that this was the war his father would never return from; that Mirah never would birth that son and would be giving Antinous that mournful, half-resentful smile for the rest of his life. But there were no doubts this time. Antinous knew the Emperor would summon him, and he waited those two days serene as a lotus floating on a pool.

It wasn’t lotuses he smelled now, but lemons—the delicate waft of lemon trees all around, as Antinous made his way through the grove where he had been told Hadrian waited. “I could delay a bit,” the Praetorian who had summoned him ventured. It was massive, square-built, red-faced Boil, who had been like an uncle to Antinous as long as he could remember. “I don’t like it, Caesar summoning you without Vix. I could say I couldn’t find you, wait till your father gets back from inspecting that cohort outside Athens—”

“That’s all right.”

“But—”

“Please?” Antinous said simply.

Boil sighed and let him go ahead into the lemon trees.

The Emperor sat on a marble bench reading from a wax tablet, staff propped beside him and three dogs panting happily about his feet. He did not look up as Antinous came to stand before him.

Boil’s footsteps retreated from the edge of the trees, leaving them entirely alone, and still Hadrian continued to read. Antinous’s black dog had put his hackles up at the Emperor’s hounds; Antinous bent and ran a hand over the pricked ears. “Hush, Caesar.”

Hadrian’s head jerked up, startled out of his deliberate silence. “I beg your pardon?”

“The dog,” Antinous explained. “His name is Caesar.”

“That is very nearly blasphemous.”

“My father named him. He said he’d like to be giving a Caesar the orders for once.”

A sharp glance. “Your father is rude.”

“He is,” Antinous agreed. Hadrian’s eyes were cold. The same eyes Antinous had seen when he first struck the Emperor. Cold enough to pierce Antinous’s serenity, but not shatter it.
I do fear you
, he thought.
I’m not stupid, after all.
No matter what had happened between them during the Mysteries, this man was dangerous. How could the Emperor of Rome not be? But he was also the man who had pressed a tender kiss between Antinous’s shoulder blades and murmured sweet, broken words in the dark.

From that moment, Antinous knew the Emperor would call for him again.
Because there is more to you than this cold and frightening face
and you let me see it
.

He returned that intimidating stare with a smile, and Hadrian’s eyes slid away. He tapped his stylus, and Antinous continued to look at him steadily, still smiling.

“Your name,” Hadrian said at last, brusque. “I have forgotten it.”

No, you haven’t.
This Emperor was famous for remembering the names of everyone he ever met, lowborn or high. “Antinous,” he replied gently.

“That’s right.” Hadrian made a mark on the wax tablet. Very much the master of the world today in his purple cloak, eyes hooded and aloof, hair gleaming in the dappled sunlight, his broad arms decked with gold bracelets. Confident and haughty; a man who looked like his own statues; not the same man who had ever wept in terror under a night sky. And yet he was. Antinous thought he could still feel the vibration of the Emperor’s heart against his own, as though they lay chest to chest instead of separated by a few feet of lemon-scented breeze.

“You made pleasant company in Eleusis.” The deep voice was careless. “You shall be appropriately rewarded.”

He tossed a purse at Antinous. A good few sesterces, Antinous judged from the weight. He let the purse fall through his fingers to the grass.

Hadrian glanced up from his tablet again. “You wish for more, boy? I do not overpay my whores.”

He said the word
whores
so sharply. It should have cut like a knife, but it did not.
Because you don’t mean it
, Antinous thought,
I know you don’t
. He wished he could stretch out a hand to the master of the world, but he knew he’d be rebuffed. “I want nothing from you, Caesar,” Antinous said, and reached out to the hunting dogs instead. “Nothing except your company.”

“I prefer variety in my bedmates.” Another mark on the wax tablet. “I already had you once. That was enough.”

Antinous almost laughed. Since the day he first started lengthening from a boy to a man—and even before that, truth be told—he’d seen his own face reflected in the gaze of men and women alike and recognized the answering flare for what it was. If there was anything Antinous had learned growing up, it was when he was desired. No one had
ever
wanted him just once. “Forgive me for contradicting you, Caesar, but you do want me again.”

The Emperor’s eyes narrowed. “You think that pretty face gives you leave to say whatever you please to your Emperor? Or that I cannot find another dozen boys just as handsome as you?”

“It wasn’t my face that drew you in Eleusis, Caesar,” Antinous said. “And it wasn’t your purple cloak that drew me.” What a rare thing that was, for either of them—because if there was anything Hadrian knew, surely it was the flare
he
saw in the faces of those who looked at him. For Antinous that flare was lust and for the Emperor it was ambition, but it was still the same kind of greed. Something they had in common, Antinous and the Emperor.

“What an innocent you are.” Hadrian did not make it sound like a compliment. “I knew exactly who you were in Eleusis, boy. I knew you were your father’s son Why do you think I bedded you? To insult him.”

“Ouch,” Antinous said, reflective. “That would hurt, Caesar. Except . . .”

“Except for
what
?”

“You said you didn’t remember my name.”

Silence stretched. Hadrian’s three dogs were pushing for Antinous’s pats, wagging their tails. His own small Caesar growled, and Antinous hushed him. The Caesar on the marble bench sat still as stone.

“Take your gold or not,” he said at last. “You are dismissed.”

Antinous straightened. “You know where to find me, when you are lonely again.”

“I am never lonely,” Hadrian snapped.

“Forgive me, but you are.” Antinous wanted to curve his hand around that bearded cheek, but the Emperor would probably strike him if he tried. Poor chained dog of a man, snapping at any hand outstretched in comfort. “You are so lonely you could die, Caesar. So am I, sometimes. But not at Eleusis, and not here. Not with you.”

Such a strange mix of feelings surged through him in place of that bleak loneliness. Tenderness: the urge to press a kiss between those scowling eyes. Protectiveness: the desire to massage the tension from those knotted shoulders. A dash of fear, looking at those iron-hammer fists and knowing how much they wanted to lash out.

And passion—sweet gods, passion to buckle the knees. Nothing Antinous had ever felt before: not with the giggling buxom girls of Rome, not with the lean boys of the
paedogogium
. Antinous looked at the Emperor through the dappled light of the lemon trees, and all he wanted was for those great fists to uncurl and tangle through his hair again—for that bearded mouth to claim his own.

“You are dismissed,” the Emperor said again, at last. “Take your gold and go.”

“I’m no whore,” Antinous said softly. “And you want me to stay.” He had never been so certain of anything in his life.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The Emperor rose, wincing as he put his weight to his half-healed leg.

Antinous put a hand out to steady him. “You’re hurting,” he said. “Lean on me.”

“I will not lean on you! If I wish for a companion, I will find someone more suitable. You’re nearly a grown man, too old to be whoring like a bum-boy.” Hadrian’s face had flushed with high color; he spat the words out like icicles. “Your father should have taught you better. I will point that out, when I tell him what his son has become.”

A frightened animal will hurt you. Antinous had learned that long ago, playing with strays in the street. The Emperor might look angry, but it was fear behind the anger—and his words hurt, but not for the reason Hadrian thought. They hurt because Antinous could see his father’s face, full of disbelief and rage, if he found out his son had fallen into the arms of an enemy.

Your enemy
, Antinous thought defiantly.
Not mine.
Not that his father had lied to him, telling all those dark tales of the Emperor—Vix seemed to believe every one. But Antinous looked at Hadrian, who hadn’t taken a step but somehow seemed to be standing closer, his chest heaving like a bellows and his eyes like desperate pits, and found he could not believe the stories. He did not
want
to believe them. This could not be a man who had blinded a slave or ordered executions for sport. This man couldn’t even look Antinous in the face, he seemed so afraid of what he might find there.

“Go,” the Emperor said for the third time, his voice hoarse. “Leave me.”

“No,” Antinous whispered, and reached for the Emperor’s hand. He felt it jerk under his touch: the hand of a hunter, callused from spears and reins rather than perfumed and soft as one would imagine an emperor’s hand. Those rough fingers were still balled into a fist as Antinous bent his head and kissed the Imperial ring.

The fist unclenched beneath his lips. The Emperor’s hand curved around Antinous’s cheek. An inarticulate sound came from Hadrian, a sigh and a stifled oath all at once. Antinous was the one to step closer, until they stood chest against chest just as they had in Eleusis. He fit his lips with infinite care to that clamped, trembling mouth. Hadrian’s lips opened under his with a groan, and then Antinous pulled the Emperor’s head against his shoulder as those hunter’s arms came hard about his waist.

“You are not a whore,” Hadrian said into Antinous’s tunic, the words blurred.

Antinous laughed.

“What?” At once the voice was angry. “Why do you laugh at me?”

“You do not apologize very often, do you?” Stroking the dark curls. “More contrition is called for, Caesar, when one slings such words as
whore
and
bum-boy
,” he said gently.

The Emperor’s jaw clenched, and Antinous saw the anger in his eyes. His grip about Antinous’s waist tightened, brutally hard as his kisses had been under the Greek moon. Antinous felt no fear at all, only an edge of excitement. He wanted to be held in those arms forever.

Then the anger was gone as though the Emperor had pulled a curtain over it. “I am sorry, Antinous.” His voice was stiff, but he had still said it.
Said my name
, Antinous thought, dizzy as though he had drunk a bucket of
kykeon
. He took the Emperor’s arm and drew it over his shoulder to support his injured side, and they wandered deeper into the grove of lemon trees. They left the dogs behind to frisk, and where the branches overhead laced the thickest, they stopped and spread out the Imperial purple cloak. Under the starlit oak it had been fast and rough and desperate, terror seeking safe harbor in comforting flesh. This was different. Hadrian lay almost helpless thanks to his half-healed leg, his mouth clamped so tight from fierce emotion that he could hardly speak, only look up at Antinous as though he had no idea what he wanted or how to ask for it. He looked terrified. So Antinous stretched over him and made love to his Emperor, slow and sunlit and tender, and through it all, Hadrian’s eyes watched him dazed and wondering.

“Caesar,” Antinous said afterward, just to say it. Because his heart was vibrating in his chest, and because the Emperor’s callused fingers were still linked tight through his own.

“I return to the Eternal City soon,” the Emperor said, staring up at the interlaced branches. “In the spring, once my travels in Greece are completed.”

“Do you?” Antinous caressed the rough knuckles with his thumb.

“You will accompany me back to Rome.” It was an order, not an invitation.

“Of course.” Antinous laughed. It had not occurred to him to doubt it.

“You will be assigned to my trireme, your father to the Empress’s.”

“Yes, Caesar.”

And for the whole long voyage back to Rome, once the sea lanes were open, it was blue sky and blue sea and a bed rocked by Neptune’s long swells and the rhythmic movement of the oars, and Antinous had never in all his life been so happy.

SABINA

A.D. 125, Spring
Rome

“What does he want?” Faustina’s voice was pitched low under the commotion of the Imperial box. “Why did he invite us?”

“He invited a great many people to watch the races, Faustina. It may mean nothing.” Sabina linked fingers with her sister behind cover of their fans.

Faustina’s eyes were pools of worry as she watched the newly returned Emperor in his throng of courtiers. “I thought he might have forgotten us, as long as he’s been away from Rome. But the way he
looked
at Titus, when the senators first presented themselves. Like he was thinking which piece went on which spear . . .”

“No spears,” Sabina said sternly before the panic in her sister’s voice could rise. “Don’t even think it. Hadrian has been
much
more good-natured ever since Eleusis.” She hadn’t traveled with her husband on the voyage back to Rome, but Sabina had reports from the Emperor’s trireme saying that he had never seemed so good-humored—and what was more, his cheer had
held
, even though he was back in the Eternal City, which he so disliked. “Perhaps he just wants to thank Titus for gilding the roof of the Pantheon.”

“Perhaps . . .”

Sabina followed her sister’s gaze. Titus had retreated to a quiet corner of the Imperial box, flanked by little Annia and her cousin Marcus. The children stared raptly at the sea of color and humanity in the Circus Maximus below: the raked sands, the flower petals raining down, as Titus pointed. “The largest arena for sport in the Empire—two hundred fifty thousand Romans! See the gold dolphins at the starting line? They tip their noses down, one to mark each lap . . .” Everyone else in the Imperial box was angling for the seat closest to the Emperor, but Titus’s attention was all for the children.