Lady of the Eternal City (38 page)

The Empress smiled. She slid off her couch and settled onto theirs, folding up her feet and leaning her head on Hadrian’s shoulder, reaching across him to match her fingers against Antinous’s. “Home is wherever the three of us sit, Antinous. So
home
will come back to Rome with us, won’t it?”

His voice was almost mute as he squeezed her hand. “As you say, Lady.”

VIX

When I found my son in the moonlight, he was trying not to weep.

The Nile at night is a sight that could bring anyone to tears. The danger that runs under the lazy surface during the day was sharper at night—the slap of the river’s currents against the barge’s hull came clearer in the dark, and the splash of the water warned of lurking crocodiles when you weren’t being lulled by sunlit water lilies floating so serene on top. But despite all the dangers, it’s the beauty of Egypt’s great river at night that cuts like a knife and brings tears to the eyes: the thousands and thousands of stars overhead; the silver fullness of the moon; the warmth of the autumn night that still felt like summer.

But I didn’t think it was beauty that brought my son to the brink of tears. Antinous sat at the stern of the barge, his feet dangling over the side like a child’s, his shoulders slumped in utter misery. Beside him, his black dog whined and wagged its tail.

I padded across the deck and sat down beside him. He gave a start, turning his face away and trying to hide the anguish in his eyes. “I didn’t see you there,” he said, and began to pointlessly rewind the white bandage about his thumb. He had sprained it on the lion hunt—his only injury, thanks to Hadrian.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked, and tousled the dog’s pointed ears.

“Thinking. Thinking of nothing very much.” His face was still turned away from me. “The Nile has so many legends attached to it. Anyone who throws themselves into the Nile will save the life of a loved one, did you know that?”

“Morbid.” Were we going to keep playing this game, the game we’d been playing all the way from Judaea? The game where we danced around each other’s bruised feelings, never saying anything important? Hell with that; my son was in
pain
. “Why are you so nearly weeping?”

He gave up pretending and bowed his head into his own hands, shoulders heaving. I sat, waiting. Most of the Imperial barge slept. The Emperor had moored his barge on the riverbank tonight, the rest of his flotilla clustered around him, and there had been music and merrymaking on the cushioned decks: a whole golden entourage laughing and throwing carved dice, watching the Emperor’s copper-skinned acrobats tumble to the beat of their drums.

But the Emperor had retired early, complaining of a headache, and the barge was quiet now except for the shuffle of the sailors as they moved about their duties. It was the hour my son and I usually met to talk if he wasn’t still attending in the Emperor’s bed . . . A good many nights I’d had to ponder that thought, waiting for him, but now he was here with me, not Hadrian.

“All right,” I said at last. “Let’s have it.”

Antinous was silent, his head still hanging low. He wore one of those Egyptian kilts that didn’t look nearly so well if you had a battle-scarred body, like I did, or if you ran to fat, like many of the courtiers. Antinous had covered the kilt with a pelt around his shoulders, the skin of the lion we had hunted in Cyrenaica. The Emperor had had the pelt tanned, and draped it around Antinous’s shoulders with his own proud hands.

“So?” I persisted. “What troubles you?”

Antinous looked at me over a fur-draped shoulder, and his eyes were sunken and miserable. “We go back to Rome soon,” he said starkly, “and I think it will be the end of me.”

I blinked. “Has someone
threatened
you?”

“Sweet gods, no.” He gave a hollow little laugh. “I wish they had.”

“Then what?”

He stared at the black water with its reflected stars. “Here,” he said, his voice halting, “it’s different. In the east, an emperor is free to climb all over everything without risking his dignity, an empress can paint her eyes and show her shoulders without being a harlot . . . and a man like me finds less condemnation.”

“Not everywhere in the east,” I said, thinking of the epithets I’d seen scrawled on alley walls in Bethar about the Emperor. “Not in Judaea.”

“Why do you think Hadrian hated Judaea?” An attempt at a smile. “He said later—‘If they’d wanted me to look kindly on their demands, they’d have thought twice about the things they said of you. They sullied your name. So I took away the name of their holy city.’”

I didn’t think that was advice that Simon and all the firebrands like him would find acceptable, once I went back to Bethar. “When
do
you go back to Rome?”

“A few months, and I’m already dreading it.” He took a ragged breath. “For every kind man like Titus Aurelius there’s another like old Servianus who looks at me like I’m filth. And for every one like Servianus, there are two more like that young bully Pedanius to spit on me openly if the Emperor isn’t watching. Hadrian shields me as much as he can—and Empress Sabina, what I’d do without her I don’t know.” A short laugh, and for a moment I saw real tenderness. “She’s like my Praetorian, standing guard and skewering anyone who even gives me a look.”

A queer feeling skewered
me
that moment. Sabina, looking out for my son. I’d resumed my old habit of avoiding her, which was a trick on an enclosed boat, even such a large one as this, but I’d done it. The closest I’d gotten was watching her enter the temple at Arsinoe from a distance, the only one in Hadrian’s entourage brave enough to feed the sacred crocodiles, pulling her Egyptian dress around her bare brown legs as she tossed the great beasts their wine-soaked honey cakes.

The black dog whined, butting Antinous’s shoulder and interrupting my bemused thoughts. Antinous scratched the dog behind one ear, struggling to keep his voice from breaking. “It’s bad enough what they’ll say of me in Rome. I could endure that. It’s what they’ll say of him, for debauching a man of my age and station. I’m twenty-four. There’s no pretending I’m seventeen and a fit age to do what I do, even if I keep my hair long to look like a bed-slave—”

I swallowed rage. My son, tarting himself up to look pretty when he was so much more—

“I could endure what they’ll say of me. I’m used to it. But what it means for him—Lucius Ceionius says—”

“Lucius is a prancing idiot,” I growled. Him and his twin slave girls and his pretty tunics.

“He’s a vain fool, but he’s right when he says that Hadrian will have to give me up.” Antinous stared at the water. “Once he returns to Rome, I’ll have to go.”

My heart thudded in my chest then. “What does the Emperor say?”

“I don’t even have to ask him.” My son was still as a statue. “He will die before he gives me up—I saw that at the lion hunt. So it will have to come from me. At some point when we go back to Rome, I’ll have to leave him. And sweet gods, Father, it’s going kill me.”

Father.
He’d finally called me that. My thudding heart nearly stopped altogether.

He wept silently, tears running down his carved cheeks like rain off a statue. The lion skin slid from his shoulders to the deck, and I put my arm around him, my throat thick.

“He can’t afford the kind of trouble I’ll bring him.” Antinous’s voice came stark through his tears. “He puts on a good show, but his health is getting nothing but worse. He’ll have his hands full just settling the succession when he gets home; he doesn’t need to face scheming from the Senate because I’ve blackened his name. I close my eyes and I see him
dying
—”

“Dying?” I said sharply. “How?” Under my knife on a lion hunt?

“I see the lightning striking him dead. The lion tearing his throat out . . .” Antinous raked a hand through all that curly hair. “He’s dodged death twice. What if the third time is a knife on the Senate floor, because of me?”

I couldn’t say my son was wrong to fear that. I couldn’t even say I wouldn’t rejoice if it happened. I paused, looking out over the river to the nearby bank and its pathetic settlement of mud huts.

“I have to give him up,” my son said bleakly. “It will break his heart, and it will break mine because I would rather be dead than be without him. But he’s my world. And I will not be the thing that brings him to ruin.”

“Turn around,” I said.

“What—”

“Turn around, boy.” He just stared at me with tracks of silver marking his face, so I went to kneel behind him, drawing the knife at my waist. I gathered the mass of curly honey-colored hair in my hand, and I sawed through it at the nape of the neck. He sat unmoving, crying the last of his tears away as I tossed the silky handful into the Nile and then trimmed the rest ragged and close to his head, short as my own. I sheathed the knife and came back to sit beside him, taking a deep breath.
Hear me
, I begged my son silently.
If you have ever listened in your life, listen to me now.

“Look at me, Antinous.”

He raised his eyes, no longer crying. Without that tangle of curls, he looked older. No less handsome, but harder around the edges. “You look like a man,” I said with all the vehemence I could summon. “Not a bed-slave. Not at all. God knows I wish you’d give the Emperor up and come home with me, but you’re a man grown and you make a man’s choices.”

His voice was low. “Father—”

“If you come back to Judaea with me, Antinous, I’ll sing the whole way. But if you go back to Rome with the Emperor, don’t go to them a painted catamite with curls, trying to look younger. Throw it in their faces. Let them see you a man to equal any other.”

“I can’t.” He began to shake his head.

“You can, if that’s what you want. Because you
are
a man to equal any other. And the Emperor will take any chance of danger to keep you by his side.” I seized my son’s lean bare shoulders. And said it. “Because he loves you.”

Antinous’s head jerked up, and I made myself look at him with steady eyes. Love: the thing I’d finally seen, that day on the lion hunt. Maybe Hadrian
had
only been caught by my son’s good looks, in the beginning. Maybe there
had
been a certain dark satisfaction in bedding the son of a bitter enemy. But when the Emperor of the known world flings himself under the claws of a man-killing lion, risks his own death so that a humble Bithynian boy escapes with nothing more than a sprained thumb . . . Hell’s gates, what else can you call that but love?

How the gods must be laughing. My enemy and my son, united as true as any set of lovers who ever lived. The thought of it still brought a bitter taste to my mouth, but I’d been wrestling with what I’d seen ever since Hadrian’s neck escaped my knife at the lion hunt. If I’d killed the bastard, I’d have lost my son forever.

What does it matter?
I’d thought bitterly, all the way up the Nile past the wonders of Gizeh and its pyramids, Arsinoe and its temples.
You’ll lose him anyway, the moment you go back to Bethar to fight.

Maybe not. Maybe he’d weigh his choices—Hadrian’s love, or Hadrian’s duty—and come with me, after all.

But it was his decision.

He looked up at me and he had tears in his eyes again. “I don’t know,” he whispered, and I bled for him. That’s what you do, when your children grow up and you can no longer slay their demons for them.

I seized his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Whatever you choose,” I whispered, “you are my son, Antinous.
My son.
True as blood. And I love you more than anything on this earth.” I pulled him into a hug. My son, who I hadn’t held since Bethar when we’d embraced more in anger and in grief than in hope. It was hope I felt now as I cupped the back of his head with my hand, as though he were just a small boy again, and he hugged me back so hard my ribs creaked.

My son.

“I gave you a terrible haircut, Narcissus,” I said as we broke apart, and the radiance of his smile almost made me break down in tears.

“Don’t call me Narcissus,” he said.

“Never again,” I promised, and I never did.

He smiled at me. A sweeter smile, all wistfulness in the moonlight. “Thank you, Father.”

I kissed him once on the brow and I left him, padding back across the deck toward the steps that would take me belowdecks.

I turned back just once before I went below, and I saw him gazing up at the stars: a lean silvered figure in his kilt and his cropped head, every long smooth line of him carved in the silver light.

My son.

ANTINOUS

Beside the moon-glossed Nile, Antinous drew a shaky breath. His heart hurt, torn open by too many tears and too much love. A good pain, clean as a knife slash that drained a festering wound.
I have my father back
, he thought, and the words brought such an agony of joy that he almost wept again.
I am my father’s son.

His head felt curiously light, and he ran a hand over the ragged chop his father had made of his hair.
Hadrian will like it.
He should go back to Hadrian’s bed, take him in his arms and whisper to him of Rome. Of serene days in the Emperor’s ever-expanding villa, where Hadrian would do nothing more taxing than begin the memoirs he was always talking about writing, and Antinous would sit at his side.

For how long?
he could not help thinking, and still felt a shiver of superstitious fear: Hadrian dead with a knife in his back.

But didn’t that fate wait in the shadows for every emperor, not just Publius Aelius Hadrian? For one reason or another, and usually far more sinister ones than love?

The Emperor will take any chance of danger to keep you by his side.
Antinous heard those words in his father’s voice.
Because he loves you.

Antinous took another long and shaky breath.
We will have years
, he thought.
I must believe that.
And even if it was not years, it was enough. Love that challenged lions and empires and death itself was enough, in whatever measure it graced a man’s life.

He raised his eyes to the heavenly sky, drinking it in. Would he ever see Hadrian and his father smile at each other? Probably not.