Lady of the Eternal City (11 page)

“Perhaps I’m lonely.” He sounded thoughtful. “In a way, I think I’ve always been a little lonely.”

“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious. Because Annia couldn’t remember ever being lonely. She had her father telling her what an Ionian column was; her mother telling her what a good sister she was going to be when the baby arrived; the housekeeper telling her to stop climbing trees before she broke her neck; Marcus droning the latest verse from his tutor. There were too many people in Annia’s life ever to get lonely. “Why?” she asked again.

“I’m new to the
paedogogium
, only here a month, and everyone but me seems to know the career they hope to take. I don’t believe in my mother’s god or want my father’s career, and I can’t say that to either of them. I have more would-be lovers than I ever have friends. And I have no one to tell any of this to but”—touching the tip of Annia’s nose gently—“you. So I think I should know your name, little monkey.”

“Annia Galeria Faustina.”

“Antinous,” he said, and rose to give her a graceful bow, his fair hair shining in the lamplight.

“Don’t be lonely,” Annia instructed him. “Be my friend.” And she seized him by the hand and dragged him, laughing, to meet her father.

SABINA

Hadrian’s Wall

“What are you doing here, Vibia Sabina?” the Emperor asked.

“I wanted to see it by moonlight.”
Half the truth.

“It is quite a sight, isn’t it?” The Emperor came to stand beside Sabina, arms folded across his chest. He wore the legionary dress he affected when staying at any fort—Sabina had steered him gently, there, pointing out how the legions liked it, and she couldn’t deny it suited him, tall and imposing as he was. Sabina had a cloak of wolf pelts, soft gray fur pinned at the shoulder with a silver circle brooch, and she’d taken off her horrid braided wig. The muffled clank of their Praetorians came from behind as the guards shifted their feet, but in the soft blackness of the night it might have been just the Emperor and the Empress, looking at the white ribbon of the wall.

“Did it come out as you’d hoped?” There had been a lengthy ceremony this afternoon where the engineers had formally presented the short finished segment. Hadrian had clambered over everything, asked questions about everything, and finally pronounced himself pleased. But now he was frowning.

“I wish they could have built more.”

“You only gave them three months! Even just a mile or two of finished wall is impressive on that schedule.” A waxing moon swelled in the scatter of stars overhead, turning the grassy hills as dark as pitch—but flung across the stretch of black, a broad band of white stone gleamed. “That was a good idea to have it plastered and whitewashed. It looks twice as impressive.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

Sabina looked at him in surprise. She could not remember the last time he had called her “my dear.” Since the night in Londinium where she had advised him to wear the mask of a good man even if he could not be one, he seemed to have been regarding her rather closely, as though watching for signs of meddling.
Advice is one thing
, Sabina thought,
but given sparingly
. So she had stepped back and kept to her duties: attending the dedication of an altar to Neptune and another to Oceanus; presiding over the discharge ceremonies of old legionaries; keeping up her correspondence with Rome. Doing her duty, and doing it faultlessly. Hadrian gave no praise, but . . .

My dear.

“So—” Her husband rocked back on his heels, staring at the moon-drenched stretch of stone. “Do you think my wall is just a foolish expense, as so many others do?”

“On the contrary. You didn’t just build it to control trade across the border, or to give the legions something to do.”

“Didn’t I?”

“Publius Aelius Hadrian always has multiple motivations,” she teased, but very lightly. He used to like her teasing, but his skin was thinner as Emperor. “You want to be sure that later Emperors don’t undo this policy of yours.”

“And which policy would that be?”

“Your belief that the Empire is big enough as it stands.” She nodded out at the wall. “You said you wished to enclose our territories in borders, so future emperors will hesitate to go beyond. With something as permanent as this wall marking the boundary, they will not.”

“Most people consider it a fault, that I have no wish to go beyond.”

“Most people are fools. It was a bitter thing to force down everyone’s throat, giving up Syria and Parthia and the other territories Trajan conquered . . . but that didn’t mean it was wrong. We could never have held those territories. Even Trajan knew that, at the end.” She had loved her great-uncle, but his blind love of victory had to be counted a fault, at least when it led him to overreach. “Nobody wanted to hear you say the Empire was getting too big, but it was.”

Hadrian quirked a brow. “Are you flattering me, Vibia Sabina?”

“Is it flattery if it’s truth?” Perhaps it was both. Sabina rubbed a thumb along the band of the gold-and-iron ring Hadrian had put on her finger at their wedding: gold for flattery, soft but pretty; iron for truth, hard but strong—both were layered together in her ring and in her marriage, quite easily. “I didn’t like hearing you say you were undoing Trajan’s victories, either,” she found herself saying. “But now I’m proud of you.”

Hadrian preened just a little, and Sabina smiled, surprised to find how sincerely she meant it. She might not
like
her husband very much, but there were things she had always admired about him. “So, is it a journey to Hispania next?”

“Gaul first. I will build Empress Plotina a fitting temple at the city of her birthplace. After Gaul, Hispania. It is time I made an appearance in the province that reared me, and Hispania will prove a fitting launch to visit Africa and Mauretania.”

Africa.
Sabina caught her breath, envisioning huge dappled cats and tawny skies and the great Iseum that Cleopatra’s daughter had built in mourning for her lost Egypt . . .

Wait
, she told herself.
Wait.

“You are silent, Vibia Sabina.” Hadrian slanted a brow at her. “I’d expected to hear you pleading to come along.”

“Oh, I long to see Africa and Mauretania and all the rest,” Sabina said frankly. “But an empress cannot always have what she wants. I believe I could be of use to you in Africa; the system of grain dispersal there is something I’ve been looking into—but if you feel I would be more useful in Rome, then back to Rome I will go.” Sabina looked at him, matching his look of regal calm. “I go where you need me, Caesar.”

“That was not always your way.”

“It is, now.”

Hadrian regarded her, eyes glittering in the moonlight. “I meet tomorrow with my secretaries and my legates,” he said at last. “To discuss the next leg of our tour, and what matters must be seen to in each province. Attend, if you please. I would hear your opinions. And now, I will bid you good night.”

“Good night, my dear.”

He gave her a smile, a friendly smile, and she inclined her head in turn. He tramped off toward his quarters, his Praetorians clinking behind, and it wasn’t till he was gone and Sabina was left with her own guards that she allowed herself a small, soundless laugh.

“Lady?” one of her guards ventured. “Do you wish to return to your quarters?”

“Not one bit,” Sabina said. “Wait here.”

“Lady, a Praetorian’s duty—”

“Is to wait when his Empress tells him.” Sabina tossed the hem of her furred cloak over one arm. “Your Empress wants a closer look at the wall.”

Her footsteps quickened until she was skimming the frosty grass—how long had it been since she had the freedom to
run
anywhere? She reached the outer staircase that led to the top of the wall and took the steps two at a time, reaching the top in a final burst of breath. Skidding to a halt, she laughed up at the star-wheeling sky. “Gods,” she heard herself exclaiming aloud in wonder, “it’s glorious!”

The whitewashed stones drank the moonlight, bouncing it back so the wall was lit as bright as day. The fort on one side was just a collection of guttering lights, torches that glowed a sickly orange in comparison to the stark light of the stars, and to the north there was nothing but a sea of black and the whistling of trees. Someday, perhaps in five years or so, the wall would stretch out in both directions, an infinite gleaming line from horizon to horizon, but for now it was just an oasis in the night, the whiteness disappearing abruptly a mile in either direction. When Sabina looked down at her own hands, they looked like they’d turned to ice-white marble, and her wolf-skin cloak to pure gleaming silver. “Glorious,” she said again softly, and felt the beauty stab in her throat like pain.

There was another reason she’d wanted to be alone here, alone under the moon, and she slowly drew it out from under her cloak. A letter from her sister, along with a small package; both arrived this afternoon. Sabina opened the package first, and something small fell into her hand: a cameo of carved glass, showing an exquisitely etched profile white against blue. At the sight of that profile—a child’s short nose and stubborn chin, her unruly hair and the eyes that had been carved almost to glare . . . “Oh,” Sabina said softly, and her throat seized with pain of an altogether different kind. “Oh,” she said again, and her hands shook as she broke the seal on the letter.

Annia as she looks now
, her sister had written.
I shall have her carved again next year, if you are still away from Rome. This way you’ll always know what your niece looks like, no matter how long you’re gone on your travels!

Clever Faustina, always assuming letters might be read by outside eyes.
Niece.
Sabina had trained herself to use that word from the first day.

“You should hold her,” Faustina had said after the birth, coming to Sabina’s bedside with an armload of blankets. The villa was deep in the hills of Toscana, a quiet estate where Faustina’s mother had retired after widowhood—she’d welcomed them with open arms and a house emptied of slaves, acting as midwife herself so there would be no witness who could say the Empress of Rome had given birth. Faustina and her mother looked after everything, and afterward stood like two blond sentinels with a wailing bundle held between them.

“Even only once,” Sabina heard her stepmother say, “hold your daughter!”

Over the mass of blankets, Sabina had seen a dome of forehead like a rosy peach and a pair of furious waving fists, and she shut her eyes before she could see more. “My niece,” she said firmly, or as firmly as she could after being racked by two unending days of labor. “I have to think of her that way. Always, not one slip. Not if she’s to be safe. So take her away. Please.”

Niece.

Never
daughter
.

Think it
, Sabina thought, staring at Annia’s stubborn carved profile.
Let yourself think it, just once. There’s no one here on the wall but you.

Daughter. My daughter. Mine.

She found herself on her knees on the stones, head bowed, gulping for breath and gripping the tiny cameo so hard it hurt.

Astounding how easy it had been to fool everyone. Hadrian as the new Emperor had still been traveling in the east all year; in his absence, the court in Rome had not demanded Sabina’s attendance. Faustina had retired to her mother’s villa in the country for the final six months of her official confinement; Sabina had let it be known she would accompany her sister—and Faustina had returned to Rome a proud young mother, presenting her firstborn in the arms of its wet nurse to all her friends. “No one suspects?” Sabina had pressed, returning to Rome sometime after Faustina. Returning once she was sure her milk had dried up and her body returned to its narrow shape. “You’re certain no one suspects?”

“Not a one. I’ve been playing proud mother all over Rome.”

“Do people snicker?” Sabina had asked with a stab of shame so deep it was almost self-loathing. “Only seven months since you and Titus married—”

A graceful shrug that stirred Faustina’s ripples of blond hair. “If they snicker, they do it behind my back. And they aren’t precisely wrong, you know, if they think I have no morals. I don’t. I
would
have seduced Titus before the wedding, if I could have. I tried. He was too principled!”

Principled or not, people had snickered at Titus, too. Titus, who had extended his blessing on the plan from the cell where he’d been immured, and who had proceeded to claim Annia for his own once he came out of it. Dear gods, how much Sabina owed her best friend and her sister!

Sabina blinked her stinging eyes. She read the page of news Faustina had written her—Annia’s latest scrapes, breakages, adventures—and then she touched the cameo with one fingertip. “I miss you, little one,” she said softly. “I know you don’t miss me.” Annia had looked so wary, that afternoon she’d been brought to say good-bye.
The way I was staring, she probably thought I wanted to eat her.
Sabina hadn’t been able to
stop
staring. At those freckles, at those blue-gray eyes (
my eyes, you got my eyes
), at that unruly reddish hair (
your father’s hair, definitely
). Wondering what else Annia had inherited.

“You had grass stains on your knees,” she told the cameo, remembering so clearly. “Of course you did. My love for adventure and your father’s love for trouble? Of course you’re a girl with scabbed elbows and grass stains rather than a lapful of embroidery. You’d like it out here on the wall—I’d wrap you in this wolf-skin cloak and point up at the stars and tell you all the stories behind them . . .”

It was a good thing she’d been whispering to herself, because an annoyed male voice came through the dark then and interrupted her. “You aren’t supposed to be out here alone, Lady.”

“Vix.” Sabina looked over her shoulder, palming the cameo and letter back inside her cloak. “How does anyone as large as you manage to sneak up so silently?” she managed to say. Her heart was beating hard, as though she’d been caught doing something illicit.
Weren’t you?
the thought whispered.