Lady of the Eternal City (60 page)

All of them
, Annia thought.

Pedanius thrashed a long time. Annia felt nausea rise like poison in her throat, but she never looked away, nor did anyone else. They all watched, until Pedanius stilled in the water. Until the guards turned him over, showing his vacant, water-bloated face, and the Emperor gave a great sob. “My star,” he whispered, “oh, my star!”

And Annia saw twilight’s first star reflected in the dead eyes of Antinous’s killer.

VIX

Rome was awash with rumor and revelation. The Emperor’s great-nephew had been executed. The Emperor’s brother-in-law had been arrested. The Empress of Rome was dead.

How I had wept, these past four days.

Four days—that was all it took for the word to spread through the Eternal City. And the reckoning was not nearly done yet. The city trembled, waiting for Hadrian’s vengeance, every goose-necked, pale-livered senator going to ground and waiting for the bodies to mount.

My eyes burned, and so did my heart.

It was a strange tribunal that gathered under the half-domed vault of the Canopus. In the center, the massive statue of Antinous, his curly head bowed, his marble lips curved in a smile, painted with such wondrous lifelike delicacy that he seemed ready to step off his flower-massed plinth. To one side of him stood five of us arrayed like judges. Titus, stern-faced in a purple-bordered toga; Faustina at his side, jeweled and silent. Another pair beside them, not so perfect yet in their control: my Annia and her Marcus, welded together at the hand. Marcus was hollow-eyed the way boys are when they first swing their swords to draw blood, and Annia was still too exhausted to jitter in place as was her wont.

And completing the tribunal, me. I’d been summoned by Imperial courier just the previous night, and here I stood, sword back at my waist and eyes sunken from grief.

Opposite us, on the other side of Antinous’s statue, stood one solitary figure between spear-braced Praetorians. The accused.

A beautiful morning. Mist hovered over the long stretch of the Canopus’s waterway, wreathing the marble nymphs who stretched away in two serene lines, their images doubled in the pool below. A pale winter sun already risen, promising a blue day—a cold day. The smell of Antinous’s lotuses rose rich and heady from their mass at his marble feet.

We waited.

The Emperor came slowly, and he came alone: a tall man, iron-haired, bearded, bent-shouldered, his toga tightly wrapped against the cold. My son’s black dog ghosted along at his heels. His once-strong arms were gaunt, his immobile face had sharp hollows, and even from a distance I could see the swollen joints of his hands. But as he halted and fixed us in his bottomless gaze, he had only to raise one finger and we all went to our knees before him.

All but Servianus, who stood as proud as though he had the whole Senate at his back and not a set of leveled spears. “Caesar—”

“Silence,” Hadrian said. No more than that, but the old man’s jaw snapped shut. Servianus, the most moral man in the Empire, who had incited his grandson to murder
my
son. I stared at his wizened face, and my hand clenched on the hilt of my sword.

We all rose, and Hadrian’s gaze traveled over his old rival. “You will follow your grandson to Hades within the day.”

Servianus bowed his head, tears springing to his eyes for the boy who had been drowned. I had no tears. I had already wept myself dry these nights past for those Pedanius Fuscus had harmed. Antinous. Sabina.

“But before you die, I will hear you speak.” Hadrian opened his hand in invitation.

The rheumy old lids opened again, slitted as an ancient tortoise, and I wondered if I would be called upon to force the confession from him. But his grandson was dead and his own life forfeit—he had nothing left but words, and he gave a faint shrug of acquiescence.

The Emperor saw it. “So. You meant to kill me?”

“Not you, Caesar. Lucius Ceionius. Your head was turned by a pretty profile, and you appointed a fool to the purple. I could not have that.”

“Lucius’s illness at the year’s beginning—poison?”

“Applied in the steam of his bathhouse. A poison that could be breathed—it destroys the flesh within the chest, over time. The effects mimic half a dozen chest ailments.”

“Not very effective, considering Lucius isn’t dead.”

Another shrug. “He went off to Pannonia before a second dose could be administered. Most of a year lost.”

“I assume you saw he got that second dose once he returned?”

“Yes. He will still die, Caesar—his physicians informed me not a month ago that he was coughing blood and would soon be confined to his bed. That vain, useless layabout will never wear the purple.”

“I regret his illness, but I am not altogether sorry he will not be Emperor. He was,” Hadrian acknowledged, “an overhasty choice on my part.”

“Yes, Caesar.” Servianus gave a little bow. They might have been two old men discussing the weather.

“Not that your grandson was much of a choice, either.” Now the Emperor’s voice had the whip-crack I knew so well. “And at some point, you finally got it through your ivory skull that I would never appoint him.”

“For a few missing teeth you would cast aside your own blood—”

“A few missing wits as well. Your grandson was bested four days ago by a boy half his size and a girl with fleet feet.” A nod to Marcus and Annia. Marcus looked somber. My daughter jutted her chin. The rumor was already spreading through Rome that Hadrian’s life had only been saved because the goddess Diana herself had run wild-haired from the heavens, blowing into his villa in a cloud of flame to bring him warning. I looked at Annia, and I could believe it.

“The girl is nothing but a whore,” Servianus snapped, his calm fraying. “And the boy attacked him most dishonorably!”

Marcus started to speak, but Hadrian gave another of those tiny gestures that silenced everyone. “Still,” he said, “the young whore and the dishonorable boy were not part of your plans, Servianus. You sought merely to dispose of me. More poison?”

“In the steam of your bath, as with Lucius. A much larger dose, to ensure faster results.” A disapproving glance at Marcus. “If you had not insisted on arguing Stoic philosophy with that boy all afternoon, you would have been in your bath and dead long before the whore arrived!”

“See, Verissimus?” Hadrian looked at the tall boy at Annia’s side. “Philosophy does have its uses.”

Marcus gazed stony-faced at Servianus. “Call her a whore again, and I will run you through as I did your grandson.”

“He can call me what he likes,” Annia said before either Servianus or the Emperor could answer. “We defeated him
and
his grandson.”

She had a glitter of pure contempt in her eye as she looked at the old man. Looked down at him, because my girl was tall as a goddess and now she held herself like one, exhausted as she was. I was used to seeing her swing between unconscious swagger and self-conscious awkwardness, confidence melting to uncertainty, exuberant motion to nervous stiffness. Not anymore. She stood tall and proud and still, and she had the assurance of an empress. My daughter, standing below the marble statue of my son. Strange that of all my children, the two who held my heart the tightest were the son I raised but didn’t sire, and the daughter I sired but didn’t raise.

Antinous was dead, but at least Annia was alive. Vibrantly alive, the girl whose bloodied feet had saved an emperor’s life.

“I had just entered my bathhouse and its poisoned fumes when the commotion outside began,” Hadrian said. “Had Annia Galeria Faustina been slower, I might be dead.” He accorded my daughter a nod, and my battered heart was glad. She nodded back.

The Emperor resumed his tribunal. “You were to kill me,” he said to Servianus. “Perhaps hoping to pass it off as a mere illness? That’s how I would do it. A frail old man succumbing to a winter cough is innocuous enough. And when the news spread to my shocked and grieving great-nephew, who received the message with my shocked and grieving widow—why, you would hoist your frail bones to the floor of the Senate to put forward that Lucius was far too ill from his life of depravities to don the purple. You would urge your fellow senators to appoint the Emperor’s closest living relation. Emperor Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.”

A calm nod from Servianus. “I serve the Empire.” His voice had the round tones of a formal oration. How often had the old bastard practiced this speech? He meant to give it, whether to a victorious Senate or to our tiny tribunal. “I serve the Eternal City. I only sought to remove a tyrant, a debauched madman who had dragged the morals of our illustrious past through the mud. I serve the Empire, as true heroes of Rome have done before, in my day.”

Hadrian shrugged. “I am certainly a tyrant, and I will not quibble at charges of debauchery or madness, either. I don’t take it amiss when an idealist tries to kill me.” A shake of his head. “But I’m old and ill, Servianus. I have only a year or two left, perhaps less. Why take the risk of murdering a man already dying?”

“Dying?” Servianus’s calm mask cracked for a moment to show true rage. “Do not talk to me of
dying
, Caesar. I have more than ninety years to my name! You would cling to life out of spite, just to see me in my grave first. I wanted to
see
my grandson take the purple, see it while I was still on this earth!”

A little silence fell. Titus broke it, speaking for the first time. Quiet words, because he did not need to orate to make you know their power. “You are a disgrace to Rome, Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus—in your day, or any other.”

Servianus bristled, absurdly offended, but Hadrian held up a hand. “We have one more point to discuss,” the Emperor said in a knife-edged whisper, and his whole body went rigid. “Antinous. Why did
you
want him dead? Your grandson had some petty grievance to nurse, but why were
you
so eager for the death of a good-hearted man? He was no threat to the Empire; he was not even a concubine who might have borne me a son to cut Pedanius out of the succession, so
why
?”

More silence. I heard the lonely trickle of water in the Canopus’s waterway, the caw of a raven. Antinous’s dog whined, looking up at the Emperor.

“Antinous was a blight,” Servianus said as though it were obvious. “I told my grandson that an honorable man would naturally seek to remove a blight from the honor of Rome.”

Hadrian’s eyes never shifted. “Is. That.
All?
”

The ancient face was seamed in malice. “He struck Pedanius. My grandson told me. That he-bitch struck the future Emperor of Rome like he was a dog, called him bully and child—”

“We
were
children.” Young Marcus spoke up, hard-faced. “Dear gods, that was
years
ago! The night after the Salian rituals when Antinous caught us fighting—”

“He did not have the right! He was nothing, and he dared strike my grandson!”

“You old snake.” I spoke without intending it, and Servianus’s eyes jerked toward me. “You had my son killed for
spite
?”

“Pedanius saw a chance in Egypt to avenge his honor.” Servianus drew himself up. “To strike the catamite over the head as he himself was once struck, and toss him into the Nile. And I thank the gods for it.”

There was another silence, this one broken by the Emperor. “Vercingetorix.” Looking at me. “Is there anything else you wish to ask? As Antinous’s father, it is your right.”

I unsheathed my
gladius
in one slow movement and came forward, my footsteps silent on the grass. “Tell me one thing,” I said harshly, and my blade was still edged with his grandson’s blood after young Marcus had returned it to me. “Did Pedanius tell you what my son was doing before he was knocked unconscious? What he looked like, standing at the railing of the barge?”

I had just left Antinous behind, that night. Had he been praying in the moment before his death? Weeping? Gazing into the water, measuring a jump? Because the guilt still scourged me: that my grief-haunted son had sought his own death.

Servianus shrugged. “Smiling,” he said indifferently. “Pedanius said he was gazing at the moon and smiling.”

Smiling.

I bowed my head, feeling tears in my eyes. Surely my son would not have been smiling at the moon if he was contemplating suicide. Surely.

He chose to fight grief. Not succumb to it. That was something.

It was enough.

Servianus spoke past me to Hadrian. “You’ll have your barbarian here take my head off, will you? What will the Senate have to say about that?”

“I do not care what they have to say,” Hadrian replied, and turned to me. “You are no longer my dog of war, Vercingetorix. I will spare you this duty, if you do not want it. But it is your right to carry out the sentence, should the prisoner fail.”

I let the word out like a scrape of metal on bone. “Yes.”

“So be it.” Hadrian stared ahead as blind as Justice with her shrouded eyes and her scales. I saw Titus looking on with a face like winter, saw Faustina swallow hard but stare without wincing, saw Marcus and Annia stretch their heads higher in the same unflinching gesture. Antinous gazed over all our heads, faintly smiling.
Oh, Antinous!

“Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus,” Hadrian said. “You are a killer and a traitor, but I will permit you to die as a Roman. Return to your cell, and you will be allowed to take your own life.” Servianus’s chin jerked. Hadrian looked at him directly. “But if you are not dead by sunset, I send Vercingetorix the Red to your cell. And his will be the last face you see on this earth before the ferryman carries your worthless soul to join your foul little grandson.”

Servianus looked at his Emperor. I’d wager anything I had that he would muster the nerve to open his own wrists, ninety or no. All I’d have to do at day’s end was collect his head, as I’d taken Simon’s head in Bethar. And as in Bethar, I’d bring the traitor’s head to my Emperor.

Echoes and echoes. The past is never truly done with us.

The senator known as the most moral man in Rome stared at Hadrian as the Praetorians took rough hold of his ancient elbows. “May you linger a long time, praying for death,” Servianus said, “but be unable to die.”

Hadrian inclined his head. “I am sure I shall.”

Then they were gone, a hunched shadow stumping away between his guards. He departed like a wisp of poisonous smoke, and in this pale pure dawn, I was relieved to sheathe my sword.

Titus had pulled a fold of his toga to cover his head, a sign of formal mourning. Faustina murmured a prayer. Young Marcus was white-faced but composed, his hand never releasing my daughter’s.
Marry Annia
, I thought.
Please marry her.