Lady of the Eternal City (6 page)

“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “I really don’t.”

I shrugged. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she slid off the sleeping couch and back into her clothes. “I’ll be back tonight,” I said, feeling helpless and defensive, resentful and aching all at once. “I’m glad you like the rooms.”

She gave me her little sideways smile as she tied up her hair. “I do like the rooms.”

But she’d like them better if they were in Judaea.

ANTINOUS

“They’re staring,” Chaya whispered, peeking around Antinous’s hip. “Those men!”

“Just ignore them, little monkey.” Antinous gave her hand a squeeze, smiling down at his sister. “Drunks at a wine shop will stare at anything.”

“They only stare if
you
are along with us,” Dinah said, skipping on his other side.

“Don’t be silly!” Antinous moved his sisters past the cluster of bleary-eyed drunks. Ex-legionaries by the look of them, with whores straddling their laps. He could hear a mutter as they passed—
Pretty, pretty; I’d ride that boy like a mule—

Antinous raised his voice, deliberately loud. “Shall we go back, girls? I’ll help you unpack!” But he could still hear the mutters behind, and lip-smacking noises.
Pretty, pretty . . .

Whenever Antinous saw his own face reflected in a bowl of water or his adopted mother’s small hand-glass, he stared at it in puzzlement. A face. The same face he’d always had. A straight nose; a chin just starting to prickle with a man’s beard; a mop of curly dark-blond hair. Just a face, and yet all his life it had made trouble. Other boys came at him fists raised because of that face, thinking that he was too pretty to know how to throw a punch (as if anyone raised by Vix would grow up not knowing how to fight!). Now that he was older, the other boys glared and accused Antinous of looking at their girls. Either way it meant he had no friends his own age. And strangers were no better. As long as Antinous could remember, he’d heard mutters when he passed by, just like the mutters from the wine shop. His very first clear memory was of a hard-faced woman in Germania, a neighbor who had taken him in when he was orphaned very young: “You’re a beauty, aren’t you?” Pinching his chin in sharp fingers. “Just like your mother. I can make a few coins off you someday.”

Antinous couldn’t remember his mother—just a vague impression of honey-colored hair like his own. He wondered if her face had made problems for her, too. If the thing the world called beauty was always more trouble than it was worth.

“Back already, Narcissus?” a voice hailed as Antinous and his sisters came round the corner. “I thought I told you to stay lost for the rest of the afternoon!”

“The girls got bored.” Antinous smiled at the tall figure standing with one shoulder jammed against the lintel. His second clear memory from childhood was of that same granite-hard figure in battered armor, looming in the doorway of the woman in Germania. Those shoulders in their lion skin had blocked out the sun, and Antinous had thought he was looking at a god.
Maybe I was.
The only reason that hard-faced woman hadn’t made any money off Antinous or his face was that Vercingetorix the Red had tossed him over one shoulder and snarled, “He’s coming with me.”

Dinah and Chaya released Antinous’s hands, flying to their father. Vix dropped a kiss on each dark head. “Inside. Your mother wants you.”

“Yes, Father,” they chorused, and that made Antinous sigh just a little. They were Vix’s daughters, blood of his blood, so of course they called him
Father
. “What do I call you?” Antinous had asked as a boy, paralyzed with shyness, knowing with all his heart what he
wanted
to call this godlike man who had rescued him.

But no. “You had a father, not that you knew him, and it wasn’t me,” the brisk reply had come. “So
Vix
will do.”

Antinous couldn’t remember the man who had sired him. All he had in the world was a tall centurion in a lion skin, and he loved that man more than life.
Father.
But he only called Vix that in his mind.

“Walk with me?” Vix asked. “There’s a decent bathhouse and gymnasium opposite the barracks, and I could use a sweat.”

Antinous hesitated. “Mirah won’t mind?”

“Why would she?”

Because she gets jealous
, Antinous thought. It was better when Vix wasn’t there—then she smiled when Antinous crouched down to play with the girls or helped hoist the laundry basket. “Not many boys know how to braid hair or bleach linen,” Mirah would say, as she’d been saying since Antinous was a little boy trying so hard to be the
best
son, the
best
brother. To earn his place. “You’re a gem among sons, Antinous!” She said it with such unconscious affection,
son
. But when Vix came home from his travels or his long guard shifts . . .

Well.
Jealous
wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t an envious bone in Mirah’s body; Antinous knew that. But he couldn’t help but notice that whenever he came into that laughing, shoulder-thumping embrace with his father, when the two of them teased and joked and got out swords to spar—well, Mirah looked sad. As though wondering why the God she prayed to so fervently hadn’t given her a son of her own for Vix to tease and spar with. A son who
could
call Vix “Father.”

“Your mother will be another hour at least moving all the furniture,” Vix was saying, oblivious to Antinous’s musing. “Best thing we can do is get out of her way. Why do women do that, anyway?” he wondered, swinging out of the doorway. “She’ll move every couch into a different room, then decide she liked it better the way it was!”

“Let’s run while we can,” Antinous agreed.

He slouched along easily at his father’s side, companionably silent. They were almost of a height, and Antinous almost as broad through the shoulder, but there the similarities stopped. Nobody whispered foul things on the street when he walked with Vix. His father moved with a ferocious swagger like a man who owned the earth. Antinous wondered sometimes if Vix had ever been unsure of anything—if he’d ever been Antinous’s age, wondering what the world held in store and what was his place in it.

Mostly Antinous thought the answer to that was
No
.

“Emperor Hadrian,” he asked finally. “Arriving soon?”

“Yes.” His father never had much to say about the man he served.

“And he’s traveling to Britannia afterward?”

A savage chuckle. “If he doesn’t drown on the crossing.”

Antinous let it drop. He’d never seen the Emperor except as an occasional distant figure on parade in a purple cloak, but he knew his father hated the man. Something to do with Emperor Trajan’s death, and his father’s transfer from his beloved Tenth Fidelis to the Praetorian Guard. Get Vix going, and he’d convince you Emperor Hadrian was responsible for every evil in the Empire.

“So,” Antinous asked. “You aren’t going to scold me about kissing the clerk’s wife on the boat, are you? Because Mirah already burned my ear off—”

Vix laughed. “Better she saw you kissing the clerk’s wife than the clerk.”

“Oh, he made a try at me, too.” Antinous squatted down on his heels, stretching a hand out to a dog skulking through the gutter. The poor thing looked half-starved. “Mirah just didn’t catch that part.”

“Good. You know how she’d be about the sin of it.”

“And you’re not?” Antinous whistled softly at the dog.
“Come here,
boy—”

“You’re sixteen! It’s your time to play. Not your fault if all the girls
and
the boys fall at your feet.”

Antinous had to admit there were advantages to having a face like his, even if it caused trouble. Around the age of fifteen, he’d started noticing that it was easy to get women’s attention—they sort of fell on him if he smiled. Men, too. The clerk’s wife had been soft and buxom in his arms; the clerk had been rough and demanding, and Antinous had enjoyed both. He gave another low whistle and the dog sniffed at his hand. “There,” Antinous crooned, feeding him a crust left over from the rolls he’d bought his sisters.

“You should have a dog,” his father decided.

“Mirah says she’s not running a menagerie so I can’t keep bringing home strays to patch up.” Wistfully Antinous managed to stroke the stray dog’s nose before it went dancing out of reach. “And you know how the girls are about fleas—”

“Bugger that! A boy needs a dog. After we get to Britannia, maybe. Bad enough having two little girls vomiting their way through the crossing without adding a vomiting dog.” Vix tousled his hair. “Let’s get ourselves to the gymnasium, and we’ll spar a few rounds, Narcissus.”

“Don’t call me that,” Antinous groused, but he liked the nickname, and his father knew it. Because Vix, unlike most people, valued what Antinous could
do
rather than what he looked like. He’d insisted from the first that Antinous learn to fight, learn to ride, learn the sword—had stood back, called corrections, picked Antinous up by the scruff of the neck when he fell down, praised him when he succeeded.
Made me useful
, Antinous thought.
Not just pretty.

Vix could call him Narcissus, but nobody else. Vix—unlike the drunks and their whores, the clerk and his wife—saw past his face.

“I want the spear this time,” Antinous said. “The spear has longer reach.”

“And a
gladius
has edge
and
point to kill your enemy. Practice with that.”

“Race you for it?” Antinous said, seeing the bathhouse with its attached gymnasium loom up ahead. “First to the door wins!” And he took off, feinting through the crowd like a shadow, knowing his father in all his armor and fur would never catch up.

“Bloody
cheat
!” he heard Vix howl behind him, laughing.

I love you, Father
, Antinous thought. But didn’t say it.

SABINA

Londinium

Sabina made huge sad eyes. “Please, Titus?”

“No,” her brother-in-law said. “You are my friend and my Empress, but this is too much to ask. Sit beside Servianus at dinner?”

At Titus’s side, Faustina shuddered.

“Surely you can’t object to our Emperor’s illustrious brother-in-law as a dinner companion,” Sabina said, straight-faced. “He’s the most virtuous man in Rome, after all.”

“He’s a crashing bore,” said Faustina. “He spent the last dinner party telling me about the declining standard of virtue among Roman wives.”

“While looking down your
stola
?” Sabina asked.

“No. He really is the most virtuous man in Rome.”

“And a man of no taste,” Titus decreed. “Virtue or not, no man of true discernment would fail to look down my wife’s
stola
.”

“If I put him beside Hadrian,” Sabina persisted, “he’ll drone all evening about Hadrian’s need to appoint an heir, and that puts Hadrian in a black humor for days. And since the Emperor and I will be taking the road for Vindolanda soon, and you two will be going back to Rome, I’ll have to bear all that black humor myself. So indulge me?”

Titus sighed. “Very well, I shall fall on the sword. Show me to Servianus’s couch.”

“And I’ll tackle the Emperor,” Faustina conceded. “Let’s see if I can’t coax him into a better mood, shall I?”

Sabina watched her sister’s smile turn from something steel-edged to something brilliant as she sallied into the triclinium: a column of sunshine-yellow silk with fine gold chains webbing her blond hair, and a swan-feather fan setting up a gentle flutter just like her lashes.
No one can dissemble like my little sister
, Sabina admired. You’d never guess that Faustina had once stared at Hadrian in utter terror that he would take her husband’s life. She was hanging on his every word as though they were the best of friends, and soon Hadrian was preening under her admiration and promising her a lavish gift as soon as her child was born.

Let it come easily
, Sabina thought, making a little prayer to the goddess of childbirth. Everything
seemed
to be going well so far—the voyage from Rome to Londinium hadn’t bothered Faustina or her swelling belly a jot. It was Titus who groaned and heaved over the trireme’s railing when they made the crossing, while Sabina stood at the prow with her sister, the wind blowing their cloaks flat over her own narrow form and Faustina’s rounding one, as they squinted over the banks of oars to see who would catch first sight of mysterious, mist-wrapped Britannia.

To be traveling again—Sabina’s whole mood felt lighter, the moment she stepped down from the trireme and smelled cool, mossy air that decidedly wasn’t Rome. Even traveling in the enormous entourage of slaves and chamberlains and courtiers that Hadrian felt appropriate to an empress’s station, she felt light enough to fly. Even in her husband’s company.

“Caesar,” Faustina was saying, beaming admiration like a lighthouse. “I do hope you have devoted some time in all this traveling to your poetry? I much admired the mourning hymns you wrote for Empress Plotina—”

“Perhaps I should write some verses for you,” Hadrian said, tucking Faustina’s hand into his arm. “Surely eyes as lovely as yours have inspired rhymes by the dozen. Tell me . . .”

“I believe,” Titus murmured, watching Hadrian escort Faustina to her dining couch, “that your husband is flirting with my wife.”

“He may not care for women in his bed, but he does like their flattery.” Sabina watched her sister flutter and coo. “And he always thought Faustina would make a better empress than me. In which he’s quite correct—any time I have to think ‘How would an empress behave?’ I just think, ‘How would my little sister do it?’ Gods know what I shall do when she’s not close enough to
ask
. Couldn’t you both just stay here in Britannia with me?”

“In all this mud?” Titus shuddered. “Give me a marble rostra and a brick forum over a glorious vista of forest, any day.” He led Sabina after Hadrian and Faustina. “Surely you’ll be back in Rome soon?”

“Who knows where Hadrian will want to go after Britannia? Though of course, he may not take me with him.” Sabina couldn’t help a slight frown. An empress’s entourage complicated her husband’s journeying considerably—Hadrian had already had to send Vix and a party of stewards and guards north, just to prepare for their arrival in Vindolanda in ten days’ time. If Hadrian decided to send her back to Rome when he continued on . . .

Well, at least she had this time in Britannia. The provincial governor had lent his large and gracious
domus
for the Emperor’s personal use, clearly anxious to prove that civilization thrived even on the edge of the Empire—the couches were draped in silver wolf pelts; a platter of sumptuous local oysters was being ushered out; the slaves were all matched redheads in embroidered linen. One, a handsome page boy with a silver wine decanter, stood in the far corner tittering softly with the lute player, and to Sabina’s amusement, he had to be nudged to fill the wine cups as the guests settled themselves. Hadrian gave the boy a glance, just to show that he had noticed. He noticed everything.

“Massilia!” Faustina was exclaiming. “Goodness, I cannot imagine. In Rome we all heard of your generosity in passing out donatives. And there was something about a wall, wasn’t there, when Caesar toured the northern border in Germania?”

“Yes.” Hadrian smiled, tossing an oyster shell to the mosaics. “You will see more walls soon enough—one of my many plans, for both Germania and Britannia.”

Titus smiled from his couch, and Hadrian’s eyes fixed on him with a sudden sharpening of attention.

“Do you laugh, Titus Aurelius?”

Sabina saw a sudden flash of worry cross her sister’s face. But Titus was entirely placid, returning the Emperor’s heavy-lidded gaze with a cheerful smile, as though he had never spent months in one of Hadrian’s cells under threat of death. “Why, yes, Caesar. I laugh at myself—if I were ever so unfortunate as to find myself at the northern edge of Germania, I would never stay long enough to build a wall. But I’m a dull, plodding sort of fellow with no imagination or ambition.”

“Are you.” Hadrian’s voice did not make it a question. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“Oh, look,” Sabina said brightly. “More oysters. And that dish with sow’s udders that you’re so fond of, Caesar. I ordered it especially to please you.”

Hadrian’s thoughtful gaze rested a moment longer on Titus, but at last his eyes shifted. “Thank you, Vibia Sabina. Most thoughtful.”

“In my day,” a deep voice rumbled from Titus’s far side, and Sabina knew without looking that it was Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus because Servianus prefaced most of his statements with
In my day
. “In my day, one did not eat so richly, even at an Imperial table.” Servianus shook his head: reputedly the most virtuous man in Rome, Imperial brother-in-law thanks to a long marriage with Hadrian’s colorless and little-liked elder sister, and such a vision of silvered wisdom in his old-fashioned synthesis that Sabina could not imagine he had ever been young. “It is such indulgence that ruins our Empire,” Servianus concluded, and gave a sniff at the dish of pheasant, sow’s udders, and ham in a pastry crust that had just been laid before the Emperor.

“Ham in a pastry crust is ruining the Empire?” Sabina couldn’t help saying. “Goodness.”

“No, it is indulgence that will be our ruin! Bread and vinegar, that would do us better. And serious discussion, not gossip and poetry.” Servianus cast a disapproving glance at Faustina, who was feeding tidbits to Hadrian’s hounds and listening admiringly to the verses the Emperor had composed when his favorite horse died. Better mourning verses, Sabina thought, than the ones he’d composed for the old Empress’s funeral. “The succession has not yet been settled; is that not more important than building walls? I have spoken with the Emperor many times about young Pedanius Fuscus, such a promising boy, yet the Emperor has not yet confirmed him as heir—”

“And why should I do so?” Hadrian interrupted, sounding much cooler than when he had addressed Faustina. “Because he is your grandson?”

“Because he is your great-nephew, Caesar.” Servianus sounded reproachful. “He carries the blood imperial!”

Hadrian snorted. “The blood imperial is no guarantor of genius.” The red-haired page boy whispering behind them with the lute player had let out a sudden titter at some murmured joke, and Hadrian sent a sharp glance. “Cease that, boy!” The page subsided.

Servianus gave a great
harrumph
. Everyone in Rome knew that he prided himself on speaking his mind, even to their feared and mercurial emperor. Many admired him for that, even if they found him tiresome. Sabina just found him a fool.
You don’t speak your mind to the Emperor because you lack fear
, she thought, looking on as her white-bearded guest prepared to pontificate.
You speak your mind because you think being the Imperial brother-in-law is all the shield you need. And someday, Hadrian will teach you differently.

“Emperor Augustus,” Servianus said ponderously, “adopted the young men of his own family as sons as well as heirs, training them in his image—”

“Yes,” Faustina murmured. “And didn’t
that
work out well.”

“Nevertheless—”

Hadrian was looking irked, Sabina saw. Everyone else kept silent, but Servianus went blathering on.
Shut up, you old idiot.

“If you would adopt young Pedanius Fuscus, Caesar, you would discover for yourself his worth. High spirited, healthy—”

“I will give the matter of an heir my attention,” Hadrian snapped. “In due course.”

The pretty page boy in the corner whistled softly. Not at them, Sabina noted—at a slave girl who had silently entered to refill the water jug.
To a slave boy, all this Imperial drama is nothing more than background noise.
But Hadrian heard the whistle and gave the boy another glance as Imperial secretary Suetonius came to the couch with a murmur. “Forgive me, Caesar, a dispatch from Rome . . .”

Hadrian broke the seal in a sharp movement, his bad mood expanding like a storm cloud, billowing almost visibly through the triclinium. Servianus wagged his head sadly. “In my day—”

“Even in your day,” Sabina said, “surely it was no courteous thing to pester one’s Emperor with trivia.”

“The matter of an Imperial heir is not
trivia
, Lady. A woman’s understanding—”

“I said the matter would be settled when I wish it settled.” Hadrian held out his cup to one side. “Wine.”

The red-haired page was still ogling the slave girl with her water jug.

“
Wine!
” the Emperor barked, and the boy looked startled. He scurried to the couch with another nervous titter.
Don’t laugh
, Sabina had time to think.
No one laughs in Hadrian’s presence unless he’s telling the joke
— But the thought was a mere flash, as Hadrian turned in a sudden motion and struck the boy. Not with a closed fist, but with the sharp stylus he had used to break the seal on Suetonius’s dispatch.

The slave screamed. The sound tore through the triclinium, cutting off Servianus’s droning and the soft rustle of the fans. Sabina saw blood splash, bright and shocking against the tiles. The boy doubled over, his scream dying off into a whimper. Sabina’s mind was still frozen on the sight of the red droplets falling so vividly on the mosaic tiles, but she found herself moving, off her couch and past Suetonius, who clutched his scrolls gray-faced. Sabina reached the slave boy, crouched beside him. “Let me see—” And she wished she could unsee, because his eye was ruined and blind, oozing onto his cheek. The other eye fixed with dulled horror on the Emperor, and Sabina felt the same horror on her own face when she looked at her husband.

Hadrian stared down at the moaning slave boy, and Sabina saw none of his usual masks. Just a strange blank excitement, and something in the bright gaze that heaved and shuddered like a subterranean creature trying to be born. She had seen the same look on his face four years ago, when he ordered Vix to bring him four heads—and on a few other occasions since then, which she mostly preferred not to think about.

The Emperor gave a small shiver and then he blinked, and as quickly as that, it was gone. He stretched out a hand in a curiously precise movement and dropped the bloodied stylus. Everyone watched it fall, and then Faustina’s hands flew to her mouth with a small sound of nausea and the thickened silence broke.

“You have an irritating laugh, young man,” Hadrian told the slave in an absent voice, “but I suppose it didn’t warrant blinding. What may I give you in compensation?”

“My eye,” the boy whimpered behind the wad of cloth Sabina was holding to his bleeding socket. “My
eye
—”

“You want your eye back? That, I’m afraid, is beyond even an emperor’s powers.” Hadrian snapped his fingers for Suetonius; he had to snap twice before the stunned secretary looked up. “Take him away.”

Sabina spoke without thinking. “Is that all?”

“Should there be more?” Hadrian looked puzzled. “I suppose his value has been decreased. I shall see that the governor is compensated for the damage of his property.”

The slave was led away, still hunched over and whimpering. He was perhaps sixteen, Sabina thought, and anger roiled low in her stomach. A rise of outrage that utterly swamped caution.

“Titus,” Sabina said, rising. “My sister appears to be feeling ill. Why don’t you escort her out? Servianus, perhaps you will accompany them.”

Servianus, too white-faced and appalled to say anything about how in
his
day no one blinded their slaves at dinner, went shuffling toward the doors. Titus needed no urging to put his arm around Faustina, who looked as though she were about to vomit. He sent a look of dire warning over her bowed head to Sabina, but she ignored it. “Leave us,” she said crisply to the rest of the petrified slaves.

Sabina waited until the Praetorians closed the doors, and then she turned to her husband, folding her arms across her breasts and surveying him. He was chewing on a handful of grapes, tossing every other one to the dog at his feet. “Do you intend to scold me, Vibia Sabina?” he said in the mild tone that usually meant trouble.