Mistress of Rome (22 page)

Rustling. Marcus smiled wearily.

“So yes, I remember that year. A year of greedy usurpers who murdered, rioted, and dragged Rome through hell. We look at Saturninus and wonder if he’s another Otho or Vitellius. We look around at Egypt and Spain and wonder if there are any more Othos or Vitelliuses out there, waiting to pounce. Some of us will start wondering how fast we can get out of Rome. Some of us will start wondering if we can cut deals with Saturninus. Some of us are wondering if we can play both sides and come out on top whoever wins. And I guarantee you”—his eyes drifted across the rows of senators—“that some of us are wondering if we can’t just let Domitian and Saturninus kill each other off, and grab the throne ourselves when they’re dead.”

One or two pairs of eyes flickered.

“But, wondering aside, none of us wants another Year of the Four Emperors, do we? Not I. I have a son to lose now, and a daughter, and if a dungeon cell turned my hair gray at thirty-three then imagine what it will do to me at fi fty-three.” Another ripple of muffled laughter. “Even those of you who secretly think you’d make a better Emperor than either Domitian or Saturninus—do you really want another war? I don’t think you do. Not when you count the cost.” Marcus’s voice rose suddenly, snapping out to the far reaches of the room. “But that’s what you’re giving us—war—every time you meet in frightened little groups and whisper about the wisdom of giving way. You pave the road for war, and I won’t have any part of it because
I—hate—giving—way
.” The eyes of Augustus the God bored through them all. “Not to an ambitious little runt like Saturninus. So until you’re ready to throw your undivided support behind Domitian—because undivided support is the only thing that quashes ambitious little runts with armies—until you’re ready to do that, fellow senators, I’m going home. I’m going home to see my daughter, and wonder if your bickering has doomed her to be spitted on a German pike.”

In utter silence Senator Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus limped out of the Senate.

 

F
ATHER?” Sabina tugged at Marcus’s hand. “What?” Her
palla
had fallen back, and he tugged it forward up over her hair. Even if the winter winds hadn’t been biting keenly around their faces, the altar of Minerva was a stern marble place. No one approached bareheaded.

“Why do the gods like
white
bulls better?”

The pontifex glared, leading the bull forward, and Marcus put a finger to his daughter’s lips. Laughter surged wildly in his middle. White bulls, white swans, white sows—why
did
the gods want their sacrifices white? With so many mothers praying for sons in Germania, on one side of the rebellion or the other, there was hardly a white animal left in Rome. Limping out of the Senate house, he’d gone straight to the market in search of a sacrificial beast, and paid an exorbitant sum for a scrawny bullock whose haunches wouldn’t have fed a family of five. “The gods just want blood, Sabina.”

The pontifex led the bull forward to the temple steps. Two more priests murmured prayers, and the bull threw up its nose at the stench. The steps were red-brown and sticky. Sabina looked nervous but she had asked to come—“I want to pray for ’Linus, too”—and he allowed her to hide her face in the folds of his toga as the knife descended. The bull bellowed, going to its knees, and Marcus came forward to bathe his hands in the stream of blood. “Minerva, protect my son,” he said. Confused images of the sturdy four-year-old guiltily confessing he had put a beetle in his mother’s wine cup, the boy bursting with pride in a brand-new Praetorian breastplate, the man writhing agonized under Lepida’s raking nails. “Minerva, goddess of soldiers. A thousand bulls, white or any other color, if you bring my son home safe.” Clasping his scarlet-gloved fingers as the priests chanted and the bull died. “Blood for blood.”

 

W
E’VE done what we can.” Commander Trajan shrugged. “Now we wait.”

Paulinus glanced sideways at his second-in-command: stocky, fit, square-shouldered, some twelve or thirteen years older than Paulinus, wearing his breastplate like a second skin. Trajan commanded the tautest and fiercest of the legionnaires in Lower Germania, and by rights he should have commanded the offensive against Saturninus. But Paulinus’s cousin Governor Lappius had insisted hysterically on appointing Paulinus unofficial commander of both legions, against all rules of military rank, and Paulinus—suddenly sober again after a month of wine and hazy self-recriminations—had not refused. He could not rejoice, not when civil war lay around the corner—but he could not halt the small voice in his head from singing,
Commander of two legions! Commander of two legions!
Not that Trajan had been happy about it.

“I need you,” Paulinus had said bluntly. “I don’t know this country, I don’t know your soldiers, and I don’t know the terrain. You’ll be my second.”

“Yes, Commander.” Stiffly. “I am happy to serve under you.”

“Bull,” Paulinus had said. “But can I still rely on you?”

Trajan’s forthright eyes surveyed him. “Are you a pansy like your cousin?” he sneered, and they had been friends instantly. Trajan had done much of the work on the town’s hasty defenses, advising Paulinus where the cohorts might best be placed—Paulinus’s main contribution had been to stop Trajan from throttling Lappius, who even now was crouched back in his crude wooden-walled palace and moaning.

They waited now on their horses, side by side, wrapped in heavy cloaks and breathing white into the frigid air. Before them stood the smart ranks of legionnaires, leaning on their shields and chatting among themselves.

“So why are you out in Germania instead of serving your cushy palace berth?” Trajan asked idly. “What’s your poison, Norbanus—women, family, or debts?”

Paulinus hesitated. “Women,” he said. “Family, too, come to think of it.”

“I’ll take a rebellious province and a horde of screaming Germans any day.”

“So would I.” Paulinus flipped a bit of his horse’s mane to the other side of its neck. Somehow, on the brink of battle, Lepida seemed very far away. He couldn’t picture her clearly, not here with the smell of snow and steel and mud in his nose and the chink of shields in his ears. It was a masculine smell; she had no place in it.

Trajan squinted up at the sky. “Sun’s breaking out.”

“Good.” A sunny day, a battle, an attempt to save the Empire from civil war . . . perhaps he’d even die, and then his father might be proud of him again.

A lathered horse skidded to a halt before him, spraying icy mud from its hooves. The scout tumbled off and saluted. “Commander, Saturninus has been spotted. The Eleventh and the Fourteenth march from the northwest.”

“Auxiliaries?” Trajan rapped out.

“No sign yet, sir.”

“Good.” Paulinus loosened his sword in its scabbard. “Deploy first division.”

Yes. A very good day to die.

“Advance!”

 

 

 

THE
shield formation had broken, Saturninus’s men leaving their disciplined rows for individual battles. The snow was scarlet and the battle raging. Paulinus sat tense and narrow-eyed, trying to take it all in. “Advancing on the south side?” he barked out as Trajan pulled up his squealing horse with a skid of hooves on slush.

“Holding ground.” With the reins doubled around his fist and a sword in his hand, Trajan looked like Mars come to earth. They had to shout over the cries of wounded men, the battle yells of victorious legionnaires, the thump of hooves and metallic clash of shields. “No sign of Saturninus.”

“He’s back there.” Paulinus pointed to a knoll by the riverbank. He could hardly keep still in his saddle. He dripped sweat inside his armor, wishing for Trajan’s calm, longing to charge in and fight as the legionnaires could. “Keeping well back.”

Trajan added a few choice comments about their enemy’s appearance, ancestry, and sexual tastes. Paulinus laughed grimly. Aides hovered, waiting to be deployed, but there were no orders to be given now. Just a hard slugging match.

The sun had broken through the clouds, and it beat down on the battleground in hard glittering rays. Under the onslaught of armored feet and sunlight, the grunts of battling men struggling back and forth with their armored shoulders locked fast against each other, the hard-packed snow was breaking down into slush. A legionnaire—Paulinus’s, Trajan’s, Saturninus’s, who could tell—slipped in the bloody slush and died screaming, fishhooked on another man’s
gladius
.

“Do you think we—”

A long bubbling howl cut him off. They both spun around toward the woods.

“Savages.” Trajan spat out strings of curses. “May they rot in Hades—”

Paulinus spurred his horse up a steep embankment, trampling the body of a legionnaire who had fallen with a spear through his eye in the battle’s first minutes. “Hades,” he echoed.

“What do they look like?” Trajan shouted up.

“Chatti, probably. A good eight hundred. Clubs, wolf skins, tattoos.” Paulinus raised his voice to his aide. “Sound the signal.”

The trumpets blew short blasts, and the legionnaires braced in their lines. The Chatti coursed down out of the trees like wolves, howling murder to their foreign gods. A champion at their forefront, waving a stolen Roman shield on which the unlucky legionnaire’s head had been mounted, screamed a challenge out to any man brave enough to approach. The tribesmen behind him took up the howl, crying for blood like a pack of wild animals run out from some arena of hell. A distant cheer went up among Saturninus’s men. Paulinus fingered his sword hilt, blood drumming in his veins. Closer they ran. Closer. Toward the frozen snake of the Rhine. Paulinus was done waiting—he’d charge into the thick of it and take their champion himself, mount the man’s head on his own shield and send him gibbering back to his demon hell . . .

“Minerva,” he murmured to the goddess of all battle strategy. “Be with us.”

His grip tightened. The howls assailed his ears as the dark swarm flooded over the frozen river.

Except—the river—

“Oh, gods,” he whispered. “Oh gods, yes!” Not Minerva, but Fortuna—Fortuna, goddess of luck, who had just passed over his head in a rustle of golden wings.

“What?” Trajan wheeled his horse, already looking back toward the battle.

The second wave of Germans surged out over the frozen river as Trajan surged up the embankment. Paulinus almost thought he could hear the ice creak—and then it broke. A cluster of Germans shrieked as they plunged into the frigid water.

“The sun,” said Trajan unbelievingly. “This crazy sun.” Howling abated as the Germans fell back. They regrouped. Sallied forward again. An entire shelf of ice fell away, and the front rank of savages disappeared into the Rhine. Even over the clash of battle they could hear the screams, the splashes, the sounds of drowning. The head mounted on the champion’s shield bobbed loose, grinning up at the sun as the champion himself drowned gurgling in his bearskin.

Paulinus whirled on his aide. “Sound the attack. Press Saturninus back against the hill.” His aides scattered, grinning, and trumpets began to bugle. Trajan let out a whoop. Paulinus leaned down from the saddle, plucked up a spear, hefted it.

Trajan grinned. “Shall we?”

 

Y
OU’RE alive!” Lappius mopped at his round face. He looked ten years older. All about him fluttered the slaves and the women, wide-eyed at the sight of the two grimy soldiers in their midst. “By Jove, if you’d died in this rebellion—Paulinus?”

“He’s dazed,” Trajan said over Paulinus’s head. “He made himself a hero.”

Paulinus blinked. He was alive. He didn’t quite believe it.

“—cut his way up the hill toward Saturninus himself—”

A party of Lappius’s young courtiers grinned at Paulinus, slapping him on the shoulder and mouthing congratulations. Paulinus looked through them in a fog, thinking of Saturninus. Just a soldier who wanted real work instead of cattle shows and sullen natives . . . He’d had some idea of killing Saturninus himself, but he came up the hill and found that the man had stabbed himself through the gut. He’d stared up at Paulinus, his eyes full of blood, dying slowly, and Paulinus drove a
gladius
through his heart to put him out of his agony. Trajan found Paulinus with his back to a tree and Saturninus’s severed head beside his hand.

“—The Fourteenth is slaughtered, and the Eleventh is running. They’ll be lucky to get off with decimation.”

He found himself wishing Saturninus had killed him instead. There was Lepida to face, now, and his father, and even the battle hadn’t restored anything. Everything was hard again. In the middle of the fight it had all been simple.

“—hunting down the last of the savages, but I’ll wager not one in ten got out of the Rhine—”

A fat woman in a pink
stola
moaned relief and fainted. The slaves fluttered ineffectually around her. Paulinus stared at her plump white legs until Trajan grabbed his arm and tugged him out again. The rest of the day—the rest of the week—moved by in a whirl. Trajan hunted down the rebellious legionnaires with relish. Saturninus’s hacked-apart body was publicly displayed outside the governor’s palace and left to rot: a warning to all other would-be usurpers. Everywhere Paulinus and Trajan rode, the citizens clapped and the legionnaires banged their shields. “Stop wincing,” Trajan grinned. “We’re heroes.”

“Will you stop saying that?” Paulinus growled.

“You’re a funny one, Norbanus. Most of us dream about being heroes.”

“You’re the hero. I’ll see you with a good post if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Me, a paper-pusher?” Trajan hooted. “I’m an army man, pure and simple. Let’s get drunk and look for whores. Boys or girls for you?”

“Girls,” Paulinus said hastily.

“Take my advice.” Trajan grinned again. “Girls may be prettier, but boys are less trouble. Don’t suppose you’d care to—”