Empress of the Seven Hills (56 page)

Juno understood.

“I’ll go to Trajan. Make that journey to Antioch after all, and right away. He’ll hear how I was slandered. He’ll believe
me
, not that interfering boy. I am his
wife
.”

Juno sympathized.

“You’ll help me, won’t you?” Plotina leaned her aching head against Juno’s marble skirts, spent and drained. “You’ll help me dispose of him?”

Juno would.

SABINA

“I thought your physicians told you to rest, Caesar.”

Trajan leaned back on his elbows against the couch cushions, and a slave refilled his goblet. “I am resting.”

“This is hardly what I would call peaceful,” Sabina said, amused. Trajan’s return from Hatra to Antioch had been marked by an immense banquet: visiting dignitaries in striped eastern robes, senators and governors in snowy togas, legates and tribunes in their armor. Trajan’s usual crush of wine, noise, cheer, and above all informality. No one was keeping to their couches, the dancers barely had a chance to finish their performance before being dragged off to join the party, and a pair of drunken legates had volunteered to carve up the roast ox with their swords. Trajan had laughed until Sabina had to pound him on the back.

“Gods’ bones, don’t you nag me now,” the Emperor warned as a team of lithe Parthian acrobats began their drumbeat-backed tumbling. “I’ll get enough of that when Plotina arrives.”

Sabina groaned. “She’s coming soon?”

“Took ship from Rome not long ago, and I hear there’s been fair winds.” Trajan waved a hand over the hilarity in the hall. “I’ll have to tone all of this down a bit while she’s here.”

“Else be scolded till your ears bleed,” Sabina agreed. “How long is she staying?”

“Not long, I wager. She doesn’t like the east—too dirty and exotic for my Plotina. She’ll stay long enough to make a few public appearances and give me two years’ worth of good advice, then take her leave. And in the time she’s here, little Sabina, you can refrain from needling her! I’ve got enough to fill my time without adding a houseful of quarreling women on top.”

“Yes, Caesar.” Sabina gave a meek little salute. “I suppose I can take two years of advice right along with you.”

“Not just the advice.” Trajan sounded gloomy. “Just you wait and see, she’ll want me to go back to Rome with her.”

“Why don’t you?” Sabina said it lightly.

“I’ve still got Hatra to crack, girl. A tough nut, that is. After that, I’ve a mind to head back into Mesopotamia and put out a few fires…”

Trajan arranged a plate of cheese and grapes into Hatra’s defenses, eating the enemy troops that had been killed in the siege, marching a chunk of bread through the city gates for the attack he was planning when he returned. Sabina watched him thoughtfully. She had not seen Trajan for more than a year, with her own journeys to Egypt and Greece and his dashing all over Parthia. He had lost weight; his arms were still powerful but the skin over them seemed loose and papery; and she thought she saw a tremor in his hands when he reached for another chunk of bread.

“Are you well, Caesar?” she asked quietly. “I heard you collapsed outside Hatra.”

“A man gets a little dizzy from the sun and everyone starts having the vapors,” Trajan complained. “I’m well enough.” He applauded the acrobats as they leaped down from their pyramid, and immediately called the handsomest of the tumblers over to his couch. Sabina slid discreetly away. Hadrian stood bearded and benign in a circle of senators beside a frieze of lascivious satyrs, a half-dozen hangers-on vying for his attention: He had been made governor of Syria recently (though he would have to pretend he hadn’t heard already when Plotina arrived to gloat with the news), and next year he would take another consulship. “Will you deign to accompany me to Syria?” he’d asked Sabina coldly this evening as they readied themselves for the banquet. “Or do you prefer to travel with your lovers?”

Do you really think I spend all my time bedding other men?
Sabina thought in exasperation. She’d gone back to Vindobona in Pannonia to check on the hospital she’d gotten funded there while Hadrian was governor; she’d spent a month tramping about the work site arguing about the need for more physicians—and did anyone believe her? No; all they wanted to hear about was her lovers. But she just said lightly, “I think I’ve had my fill of orgies for a while. Perversion is so dull, don’t you think?”

They had entered the hall together, Sabina’s fingertips barely brushing her husband’s arm and dropping away the minute they were through the carved double doors.
Syria
, she reminded herself, swirling the wine in her cup as she watched Hadrian disappear into a cloud of well-wishers. She’d never been to Syria before; surely it would be a fascinating journey… but somehow, Sabina found her thoughts turning more and more toward home lately. Her sister Faustina would be getting married soon:
“Hopefully I can bring the man I want up to scratch before I turn a hundred. Gods, he’s thick!”
Faustina’s choice of suitors wasn’t the only drama in the family; their brother Linus was begging to join the legions as a tribune, though he wasn’t even seventeen. And of course Father was getting frail these days—Calpurnia had finally persuaded him to retire from the Senate, and his latest letter had told of the treatise
he had just completed on the financial reorganization of Rome’s temples. Titus’s letters spoke of the splendid new baths, his supervision of the
alimenta
scheme and how it had pleased the Emperor…

“I believe I’m homesick,” Sabina mused aloud. After years of wandering too—how strange. Somehow, the thought of Syria held no charm at all.

“Talking to yourself?” A voice sounded behind her, so familiar it went straight to the pit of her stomach and resonated there warmly before she even thought of its owner’s name. “I always knew you were crazy, Lady Sabina.”

“You’re not the one to make accusations, Vercingetorix.” Sabina turned, smiling. “I heard about that night attack you made on Osrhoene. Eighty men taking on two hundred in the guard tower, in the pitch dark. Now
that
would be the act of a madman.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” The row of campaign tokens strung across his belt jingled, and his eyes flicked to her head. “Where’d your hair go?”

“I razored it all off in Egypt.” Sabina ruffled the short velvety brush of her hair, lopped from the middle of her back to within an inch of her scalp. “It’s so hot there, everyone shaves their heads and just wears wigs for formal occasions. After a while I decided I’d forgo the wigs too.”

“I like it.”

“Hadrian despises it.”

“Then I really like it.” Vix’s gray eyes flicked over Sabina briefly, from her deep-green silk dress to the band of jade around one ankle to the powdered malachite she’d used to line and wing her eyes. “You look well, Lady.”

If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have worn that one-breast dress I used to give Plotina fits.
“You look well too,” Sabina said. “Wearing armor at a party, though…”

“I’ve got duties to attend to after this. No point changing into a synthesis, not when the Emperor doesn’t care what his soldiers wear to dinner.”

“It suits you.” To say the least. From that brash boy with the inarticulate
glower to this: Vix’s russet head loomed a hand-span taller than any other man in the room; his feet were planted over an aggressive measure of space that dared anyone to encroach on it; his eyes moved keen and restless over the crowd, missing nothing. In his tattered lion skin and his spotless battered armor he looked broad and powerful, sunburned and deadly.
They should carve you in granite and put you on display in front of every legion recruiter in Rome
, Sabina thought.
They’ll fill the ranks in a heartbeat, just by telling envious boys that someday, maybe, they could be you.

“It’s just as well armor suits him.” The woman at Vix’s side broke the little silence. “I hardly ever see him in anything else.”

“I do apologize.” Sabina shifted her eyes to the woman. “I should have introduced myself. I am Vibia Sabina.”

“Mirah,” Vix said abruptly. “My wife.”

The hand that pressed Sabina’s looked small and capable. The woman had reddish hair, a good match for Vix’s. Taller than Sabina, with a smoke-blue gown and pearls swinging in her ears. “You have a fine husband, Mirah.”
Does he still snore like a saw going through a tree?

“I do have a fine husband.” A dimple flashed unexpectedly in Mirah’s chin. “Lady Vibia Sabina—the Emperor’s great-niece? Vix, you’re always talking about the Emperor but you never said you’d met the Imperial family too.”

“Long time ago,” Vix said at once. “Very long.”

Eight years, since they had last spoken face to face? At a party very much like this one, in fact. “Vix was a guard in my father’s house,” Sabina explained to Mirah, who was looking puzzled. “Long before he joined the Tenth.”

“I can’t imagine Vix without the Tenth.” Mirah’s smile turned a little stiff.

“Well, he was very young. Big feet, like a puppy. And always starting fights in the street.”

“I need to speak with you, Lady Sabina.” Vix spoke even more abruptly. “Now.”

“If you like.”

“No, alone.” He turned to his wife. “I won’t be long. Be on your guard—that flabby bastard in the toga over there has been eyeing you all night, and once you’re alone he’ll probably ask you to be his bedwarmer.”

“Be on
your
guard,” Mirah whispered back, almost inaudibly, but Sabina’s ear caught it. “Someone’s eyeing you for the same reason.” Sabina didn’t smile until Vix had stalked through the crowded banqueting hall to the atrium, moving people out of the way with a quirk of his lowered brows. As they reached the moonlit shadows outside, Sabina released the laugh she’d been holding in. “I like your Mirah. Ginger in the soul as well as the hair—and she’ll need it, if she married you. Do you have children?”

“Two. Girls.” Vix ran a hand through his hair, a gesture she’d forgotten but now it came back vividly. “I don’t want to talk about Mirah.”

“All right.” Sabina drifted past him toward the pool sunk in the floor, a glossy black square reflecting the half moon through the open roof above. It looked like the moon was trapped in the pool. A couple wandered out the other end of the atrium, giggling softly on their way to the gardens, but otherwise they were alone. “Last time we talked, it was in an atrium like this,” Sabina said. “Don’t toss me in the water this time, will you?”

Grudging amusement laced his voice. “You deserved it.”

“Maybe I did.” She turned, leaning against a slender carved pillar. “What is it, Vercingetorix?”

“The Emperor.” Vix folded his arms across his chest. “He listens to you?”

“He won’t let me divorce Hadrian.” Sabina traced one idle finger along the pillar. “But otherwise, yes. He listens to me.”

“You tried to divorce Hadrian?”

“It’s not important. The Emperor?”

“Yes. Well. I want you to talk to him.”

“You already have your legion, don’t you? Congratulations, by the way.”

“No—this isn’t about me. You don’t have to talk to him about me. I’m making my own way.” Vix’s face was mostly in shadow, but Sabina could see the worry that brought his brows together and tightened his jaw. More than worry—fear. “Persuade Trajan to go back to Rome.”

“What?”

“He collapsed during the siege at Hatra.” Vix spoke jerkily. “Six hours on a horse under the burning sun, the idiot—he fainted right out of his saddle. He was up again in a day, but he’s not the same, I see him getting tired and his hands shake—”

“I noticed that.”

“He’s ill. He won’t admit it; we barely persuaded him to abandon Hatra, and now he’s talking about leading the legions back down the Tigris. Another month of marching in the heat might kill him. He’s
sixty-three
.” Vix’s eyes pleaded with her. “The physician nags him, his guards nag him, I’m sure the Empress will nag him till his ears bleed once she gets here. Maybe you’ll have better luck. Make him go back to Rome, Sabina. Get him to sit in a cool garden and put his feet up. Get him to
rest
.”

Sabina tilted her head up at her old lover. “You love him, don’t you?”

“More than—” Vix raked a hand through his hair again. “Anything. More than Mirah. Even more than my girls, God help me.”

“Then I’ll talk to him.” Sabina touched the back of Vix’s hand, very lightly. “I love him too.”

TITUS

“Faustina?” Titus blinked at the familiar figure in pale blue, framed by the columns of the long hall of Trajan’s baths. “What are you doing here?”

“I called on you, and Ennia sent me here. She’s worried.” Faustina came forward, gesturing her maids to wait. “So am I, to be frank.”

Titus gestured at the walls of the baths rising around them. “You
know it’s almost done? The glazing isn’t finished, and the mosaics will need to be laid. One or two other things. But it’s near to completed.”

“What happened with the Empress?” Faustina demanded. “I know you went to the palace before she left for Antioch.”

“I did.”

“She left very suddenly too.”

“She did. Walk with me?”

Faustina tucked her hand into his arm, falling in at his side. Their footsteps echoed in the silence; Titus had let most of the workmen go early so he could wander the complex alone. The baths were at their best in the afternoon, the sunlight streaming in long bars through the high windows, making warm puddles on the marble and turning the water in the pools to shimmering liquid glass. Or rather it would, when the pools were filled.

“And?”
Faustina pressed, impatient. “Don’t torture me! You confronted her, didn’t you?”

Titus felt a smile breaking out. Faustina gave a shriek, flinging her arms around him, and he hugged her back. One of the few girls he didn’t have to bend in half at the waist to embrace.

“You idiot!” She pulled back, shaking him a little. “Bearding the Empress of Rome in her den, just to call her a thief—”

“I didn’t just call her a thief. I told her I’d keep her secret as long as she stopped.”

“As if that will work.” Faustina blew out a breath. “
Why
couldn’t you just let it go? It was just a building fund!”