Lady of the Eternal City (16 page)

Vix had already splashed out, water shedding off his broad shoulders, one hand on his
gladius
.
No assassins here
, Sabina wanted to tell him, but you might as well tell Vix to cease breathing as cease preparing for danger. Her heart squeezed, half in pain, half in exquisite pleasure.

“Empress Sabina!” Antinous called. He had her new acolyte’s robe ready, conscientious of his duties. “If you wish to change—”

“I do,” she called back, “I do.” The sodden curls of her wig felt twice as heavy as usual, and suddenly she wanted it all gone. She swept the wig off into the water, laughing as a wave carried it away like a mass of lumpy seaweed, then yanked out the brooches at her shoulders, gave them to the sea as an offering, and let the waves sweep her purple silks away. She floated in the water a moment, naked and weightless.
Free
, she thought.
How long has it been since I felt
that
?

An illusion, of course, even if a sweet one. The Empress of Rome was not free to walk naked out of the sea before the eyes of plebs, even for the Mysteries of Eleusis. Hadrian was already glaring, conscious of their Imperial dignity, so Sabina crossed one arm over her breasts as she rose from the water. Antinous tossed her new robe out, the wool unfurling on the snap of the sea breeze, and she managed to catch the bundle one-handed. She tugged it over her head, the plain undyed linen that marked her not an empress but just another worshipper, and lowered the hem modestly as she came out of the ocean. Her blistered feet stung, but it was a clean pain, and she curled her toes into the damp sand. The robe was shapeless, too big; the neck hole slid down one shoulder and she could feel the skirts flapping about her wet legs. Antinous held out a cloak to cover her goose-prickled arms, but she just stood a moment, ruffling a hand across the damp silk of her short hair and gazing at the sea. Empress Vibia Sabina: soaking wet, freezing cold, falsely but gloriously free.

“Lady?” Vix sounded impatient. Sabina tilted her chin over her naked shoulder and grinned at him. A wicked, carefree grin like the girl she’d once been, the girl she felt like instead of the somber marble-carved Empress.

“Yes, Tribune?”

He looked back at her a moment, the stone soldier as she’d become the marble Empress, and then he smiled as though he couldn’t resist any longer. A reluctant, invisible smile, more a movement of his eyes than his mouth. His gray gaze went over her, and the Empress of Rome knew why she was so happy.

“Put a cloak on,” Vix said finally. “You’ll die of cold.”

VIX

I’m under pain of death never to reveal what I saw at the Mysteries of Eleusis. There was an ear of wheat; I’ll leave it at that. But I didn’t even
hear
half their sacred words. I was too busy dreaming dreams.

“
What do you know about how to improve our legions?
” Hadrian had asked me on that long march along the Sacred Way.

Plenty
, I had thought.
Oh, plenty.
I’d hesitated, hating to give him anything, but the problem had been toying too long on the fringes of my own bored mind. I’d chattered to him under the moon, and he’d listened. The bastard had
listened
.

“A manual of standardized legionary regulations . . . Would you like to write it?”

It takes a great deal to startle me. I have fought in battles shield against shield; I have led night raids through country as dark and strange as Hades itself; I killed a Dacian king who had the strength of ten men. I had
never
been quite so startled as I was now.

Hell’s gates, yes, I wanted to write it!

The Mysteries of Eleusis take a full nine nights to complete, nine long nights under the waning of the full moon, and I went through those nights in a white-hot haze of inspiration.
A practical manual for the common legionary
, I mused as Hadrian went blindfolded to the priests who approached with torches and fans. Something to do with being purified by wind and fire—he twitched as the torch approached, but Sabina leaned forward and kissed the flames when it was her turn, moving too quickly to be burned.

No
, I thought, following behind Emperor and Empress alike as they presented a pair of piglets for sacrifice.
A practical manual for
all
soldiers of Rome.
Why limit it just to legionaries?

“I want to be initiated,” Antinous told me on the dusty toil back to Athens. All through the Mysteries, we’d be trudging back and forth along the Sacred Way. “I know you think it’s foolishness, and I know I’m only here to attend the Empress, but she’d let me take the rites if you will. I qualify under the rules—”

“As you please.”
A multiorganized system of training, not just the same formations and shield drills. Those fighters in Parthia were lethal—Parthian drill instructors . . . ?

Days of fasting and rest, allowing the tardy candidates to present themselves. Antinous taking his place among them, glowing under the blindfold. Sabina sleeping the sleep of the dead on the end of that second endless walk back to Athens; me tugging the wolf-skin cloak up over her shoulders against the cold.
Cold
, I thought.
Should be different slants for the eastern and the western legions; training in the cold versus training in the heat . . .

The fifth day. Sabina and Hadrian and the rest tying saffron ribbons about left leg and right hand as the mark of the newly purified. Sabina in her too-big robe, sliding the shapeless folds up so she could loop the ribbon around one narrow brown thigh . . . Another trudge to Eleusis, but I didn’t mind it somehow. It reminded me of the long marches under Trajan in Dacia, when Sabina had been a brown girl stealing away from her illustrious quarters to march beside me. We’d come full circle; here she was marching beside me again, and she was turning just as brown, freckles sprinkling her nose like flakes of gold. We crossed a narrow bridge on our march where old women waited to offer the ritual ribald jeers, mimicking the mortal women who had mocked Demeter in her journey. Sabina gave as good as she got, hauling out all the old legionary obscenities I’d ever taught her, and I even saw Hadrian’s mouth twitch when he heard his Empress tell a wizened old crone to go fuck a horse.

Entering the temple grounds at Eleusis, cups were passed filled with something dark and bitter called
kykeon
, but I was thinking of how I could improve the drill exercises for javelin throwing . . . Around me rose shrieks and cries as whatever was in the
kykeon
took hold, but I sat dreaming and the Mysteries of Eleusis passed me by untouched.

Or did they? Because by the sixth night, the Night of Torches, the serenity of the
mystai
was infecting even me. Maybe my thoughts were all of military matters rather than godly ones, but my voice had fallen just as silent, my eyes turned just as reverently to the sky and the waning moon. I found myself laughing like a child, and so did the others: Hadrian’s crutch slipped on a stone and tipped him splat into a puddle, and instead of looking vengeful and outraged, he looked at the mud down the front of his tunic and just said, “I look a sight, don’t I?” We all dared to laugh then, and when Hadrian called for my arm to support his lamed side, I didn’t quite recoil at his touch as I had ever since Britannia. My stomach growled at some point, and I realized I had not eaten in God knew how long. Food had not seemed important.

I’m happy
, I thought.
How long has it been since I’ve been happy?
Happy beyond some momentary flash of comfort when I held Mirah in my arms, or some thrum of physical satisfaction as I finished my sword drills or a good meal? Happy like this; a bone-deep and mindless contentment?

I couldn’t remember.

When twilight fell on the Night of Torches, Antinous put a hand on my arm as I picked up my breastplate. “Don’t,” he said. “It would offend the gods.” I padded out barefoot in a plain tunic, just like the rest of them. (Though I did toss my lion skin over one shoulder to hide my
gladius
. I wasn’t so far gone in happiness that I was about to go
completely
unarmed.)

Sabina had been trying to retie the acolyte’s ribbon about her wrist, but she looked up and gave me the same sparkling glance she’d given me on the edge of the sea with the water sliding down her naked shoulder. “Tie this for me?” Holding up her wrist with the ribbon coming loose, she glanced at my lion skin. “You look like Hercules.”

“You look about twenty,” I said, truthfully, because she could have been the girl in Dacia all over again. She was still trim as a spear, thanks to her lifelong habit of marching with legions and scrambling after adventure instead of staying at home breeding children and eating sweetmeats. And the shorn hair had an oddly boyish effect on her pointed little face. I suppose she had a few lines around the eyes, but at least she didn’t cake on powder trying to cover them up, like Balbilla.

“I feel old sometimes,” my Empress confessed, arching her back in a long stretch like a cat. “Old and used up.”

“Don’t look it to me,” I said. And then I glared at Antinous because he too was looking at her admiringly as she stretched.

The Night of Torches is the center of the Mysteries, which is probably why I didn’t understand a thing. I’m not sure anyone understood it, but maybe you weren’t supposed to—the priests were passing around a lot of that
kykeon
drink. Sabina said it was made of barley and pennyroyal, but I guessed there was more, some draught to confuse the senses, because as the stars came out and the rites began inside the temple, I heard cries of grief and terror among the
mystai
, and the rites weren’t at all terrifying. More like absurd. (A stalk of wheat? Really, that was supposed to be a mystery?) I didn’t drink any of the
kykeon
, but Hadrian shivered under its effects and I saw the black in Sabina’s eyes expanding to swallow the blue as the Mysteries advanced. Everyone stared and moaned, watching the priests, while I just sat with my mind wandering peacefully through shield drills.

There was some sort of play going on among the priestesses, and I don’t have to hide the details because I don’t remember them. But I glanced to one side and saw Sabina sitting with her narrow fingers linked about her knees; tears were sliding down her cheeks. “What is it?” I asked. On her other side Hadrian gave a great shudder, staring blind into the dark, and then he stumbled to his feet, chest heaving. “Caesar—”

“He is seeing the void,” Suetonius whispered. Suetonius, like me, had not imbibed. “Whatever it holds for him!”

“So beautiful,” Antinous murmured. He looked awed, as though gazing on something of unimaginable loveliness, but Hadrian wasn’t seeing anything so peaceable. He stared around wildly, every muscle quivering. The hierophant struck a great gong, and the whole crowd surged to its feet with a great cry.

Hadrian’s cry came loudest of all. His head jerked wildly from whatever dark visions danced before his eyes—and before I could rise, he was gone into the madness.

ANTINOUS

Later, Antinous thought that the
kykeon
must have given wings to his feet as well as his soul. Half a dozen men chased after the Emperor when he gave his great shout and fled the temple, but they soon fell behind and lost themselves in the shadows of the trees. Antinous skimmed behind as the Emperor panted and stumbled, never losing him for a moment. “Caesar,” Antinous called softly.

Hadrian jerked to a violent stop, staring about with glassy eyes, and then he gave a hoarse scream.
Why do you scream when the world is so beautiful?
Antinous wondered, his thoughts gliding as dreamy as silver fish through deep water. The world was stars overhead like a carpet of pearls; shadows all around like the warmest of cloaks; moss underfoot as plush-soft as a comforting bed. A place of wonders, and Antinous wanted to weep from the joy of it. He smiled instead, reaching out to touch the Emperor’s heaving shoulder, thinking as he did so that his own flesh seemed to sparkle in the moonlight. “There is nothing to fear here,” he said in the same soothing tone he had once used on the Emperor’s wounded dog. “Nothing at all.”

Hadrian’s fist lashed out, catching Antinous square on the chin and snapping his head back. He felt the blow as if from a distance; it did not hurt at all. “Well,” he conceded. “I did hit you once, Caesar, so I suppose we are now even.”

Hadrian gave another cry and fell to his knees, swatting at the air around him. “Back—all of you, back—” Publius Aelius Hadrian: ruler of the world, marble face of countless statues, crawling on hands and knees quaking in terror of a beautiful world. He looked like a cringing dog about to be beaten, and the sight stabbed Antinous to the heart. He squatted down beside the Emperor, stroking one burly shoulder just as he might have stroked a whimpering dog. Hadrian was ice-cold, drenched in sweat, and at Antinous’s touch he flinched violently. “Ssshh,” Antinous said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Get away—” That deep voice that had called the bear hunt with such splendid authority was hoarse from sobbing. “Faces, faces in the mirror—”

“Ssshh,” Antinous crooned again, smoothing his hand back and forth across that trembling back. They were quite alone beneath a great overarching oak that seemed to have tangled the moon in its branches. Other
mystai
flitted through the woods around them—he could see the flash of their torches. More than that, he could
feel
them; they were all part of the same moon-drenched dream. The Empress was lost in it too, crying just like her husband, but for something else.
Who knows what?
She would be safe; his father was with her. But the Emperor had no one here but Antinous. “Take my hand,” he told the Emperor.

Hadrian lashed out at him again, fists doubled. Antinous ducked this time. Even if the blow to his jaw hadn’t hurt, he knew it would in the morning—Emperor Hadrian had fists as hard as Mars; Antinous had seen that on the bear hunt when his hands had clenched and unclenched so helplessly, watching his dog bleed. He ducked those fists as they swung at him, came under the Emperor’s arm as Hadrian blundered at him snarling, and then Antinous laughed softly as he doubled the Emperor up from behind in a wrestler’s hold.