Lady of the Eternal City (31 page)

Sabina piled the towel into the arms of her little maid and went to sit beside Antinous. “The Emperor seems convinced it is a good omen. Why should we argue with him?”

“Because he won’t
see
.” Antinous’s head jerked up, and to her astonishment she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed. “It means ill for him, Lady. I’m sure of it.”

“But the Emperor wasn’t harmed.” She touched Antinous’s shoulder. “Not a scratch. What kind of ill omen is that?”

Antinous hesitated. “Perhaps it foretells his death.”

“The only times he’s ever been kept to his bed were when he broke his leg on a bear hunt—the hunt where he met
you
—and the hunt before this tour east where he broke his collarbone.”

“It wasn’t just his collarbone that summer, Lady—the reason he delayed this journey east. He had fevers all summer, and his joints pained him—”

Sabina felt her bath drape start to slide down her arm, and pushed it back up.

“He kept it quiet because he didn’t want anyone thinking he was growing weak.” Antinous’s voice rose. “He pushes himself too hard! This sprint up the mountain for a look off the top of the world, and those days marching with the legionaries just to prove he can keep up with the youngest of them—he won’t take care. Now it’s Jupiter himself sending omens, and he still won’t listen.” A ragged sigh. “The lightning didn’t kill him, but what if his own habits do?”

“Antinous.” She cupped his carved cheek in her hand. “He would not want you to worry so.”

“But I do.” His eyes were pools of anguish.
Hadrian does not deserve such love
, she couldn’t help thinking.
What has he done to earn such a treasure?

But Antinous had earned it—he had a soul made of love if Sabina had ever seen one. If he wanted peace of mind about his beloved, she would see he got it. “Take me to Hadrian. Now.”

Her husband was soaking in his private baths, muscled arms spread along the hot pool’s marble lip as the water lapped nearly to his shoulders, head tilted back and eyes closed against the wreathing steam. “Antinous,” he said without looking up. “The steam has me dizzy; I think I may need your arm to rise—”

“It’s not the heat making you dizzy,” Antinous said. “I’ve told the Empress.”

Hadrian’s eyes snapped open. He looked at Sabina, and she didn’t think it was bathhouse heat that put the slow flush into his cheeks.

Sabina folded her still-damp arms across her breasts. “Antinous is worried.”

“I’m a trifle singed by the lightning, but—”

“Please, Caesar?” Antinous pleaded. “Show her.”

Hadrian stared another moment, and then he rose slowly until the water lapped his hips. Trickles sluiced off his shoulders over the springy hair at his chest, along the muscled arms that could still down a boar with one strike—but he swayed as he rose; Sabina could see that. “See?” he said, defensive. “Perfectly well.”

“He has fevers.” Antinous sounded miserable. “He has one now, I’d say. Headaches come too, and aches in the joints. And his skin hardens in patches, and at its worst it’s so painful he can’t bear to feel cloth on it.”

“That was two years ago. The summer before we left Rome.”

“—and you were so dizzy you couldn’t sit a horse, which is why you postponed the journey east,” Antinous plowed onward—Antinous of the exquisite manners, overriding the Emperor. “You’re dizzy now, aren’t you? I can see you swaying—”

“No,” Hadrian snapped, even as Sabina saw he
was
unsteady in the water. “You are mistaken.”

“Perhaps I overstep,” Antinous said. “But I do it for your own good.”

Hadrian’s head jerked up, and Sabina saw the flash of anger in his eyes. She expected him to lash out, give Antinous a cut with that whip-sharp tongue, but he controlled himself. “Don’t fuss at me, my star,” he said gruffly, and reached for the strigil.

Antinous stepped down into the pool beside him, water floating his tunic around him. He touched the frown lines between Hadrian’s eyes, a gesture Sabina had seen before—usually it made Hadrian laugh, but now he just jerked away, still frowning. Antinous withdrew his hand, taking the strigil from the Emperor instead, and motioning him to hold out his arms. “I do worry,” he said, very quiet, and scraped down one muscled shoulder. “Perhaps too much.”

Hadrian melted at once, looking placating—
Hadrian
, placating. Sabina would never had believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. “The fever is nothing, Antinous, you can see for yourself! And my skin troubles me sometimes, but it’s just irritation from this eastern heat—”

“And if it gets worse? Hardened and rashed, as it did that summer in Rome?” Antinous drew the strigil down the Emperor’s muscled back, sounding mild but still very firm. “It got very bad then—don’t be defensive, Caesar; I know how much it troubled you!”

“Well, it’s not troubling me now.” Hadrian looked over his shoulder, cajoling for one of Antinous’s smiles, but the young man just gave him a steady look.

Sabina stepped forward then. “Antinous is right,” she said coolly. “You do push yourself too hard, Hadrian. If you wish to avoid fevers and vomiting and dizziness—in the desert heat, in the
summertime
, which is quite enough to make anyone ill—then you will take greater care of yourself.”

“I do not need minding!”

“You do, because when you are ill, you are short-tempered and you lash out at everything.” Sabina raised her eyebrows. “That incident in Parthia?”

Hadrian scowled. Settling disputes among the ever-quarreling easterners recently, he’d lost his temper when Parthia’s king mocked Rome’s lavish gifts by sending a few threadbare gold-embroidered cloaks. Hadrian had put the cloaks on three hundred condemned Parthian prisoners, and had them all sent to the arena and slaughtered. Sabina had been surprised; he’d all but given up the habit of petty vengeful gestures like that. If he had been in the grip of a fever and a headache at the time . . .

“Ill health is not good for your temper
or
your reputation for mercy,” Sabina continued, unfolding her arms. “So allow me to be firm with you, husband. Take greater care of yourself, or I will begin fussing over your health before the rest of the court until the rumors of your imminent demise spread back to Rome, and you are deluged with senators all panting to establish themselves your heir before you finally totter off to the underworld.”

Hadrian’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“She would.” Antinous gave Sabina a tiny smile over Hadrian’s shoulder. “And I’d aid her.”

Hadrian looked from Sabina to Antinous and back again, and let out a bark of angry laugher. “Hadrian Caesar,” he said, “ruler of the known world, marked by Jupiter himself with the gift of lightning, and yet I cannot rule over a wife and a lover?”

Sabina and Antinous looked at each other, and then back. “No,” they said in unison.

The Emperor had a glint in his eye that Sabina remembered from the days when his mask had been less firmly in place—days when the habits of bad temper and petty vengeful gestures had been common. But Antinous touched the frown lines between his eyes again, and this time when Hadrian laughed there was no angry edge. He captured Antinous’s hand and kissed it. “I yield, my star—I yield. Now for the love of all the gods, dry me off!”

He came splashing up the steps to stand on the mosaics, and Antinous splashed out too, relief all over his face as Sabina fetched a stack of towels. Hadrian spread his arms as Antinous dried him, and Sabina took a towel herself and stood on tiptoe to tousle Hadrian’s wet curls. “You go to Parthia next,” she asked, “to deal with all those administrators you’ve been ranting about, the ones you think are skimming profits?”

“They
are
skimming profits, and I’ll see them hanged for it.”

“Perhaps take a month to rest here first,” Sabina suggested, sliding the towel away from his hair.

“A few months,” Antinous said firmly, standing back with his own damp towel.

“I haven’t got the time—”

“Then stop being Emperor!”

Hadrian laughed again. “We’ll see,” he said, sliding an arm about Antinous and kissing him heartily. “We’ll see,” he said again at Sabina’s glare, and then astonishment wiped her mind clean as Hadrian bent his head and kissed her, too. His beard was scratchy against her face, and his lips warm.
The first kiss I’ve had in years
, she thought inconsequentially even as she clung to him. And it had been longer than years since a kiss had come from her husband.
Surely more than a decade.
Hadrian drew back, his lips leaving hers with a faint smile for her surprise, and Sabina turned her head to see Antinous smiling too, in that quiet way of his.

“I should go back to my desk,” Hadrian began, and both Sabina and Antinous exclaimed “
No!
” in the same breath, and suddenly they were all laughing, even Hadrian, as his empress took him by one wrist and his lover by the other, and they bore him across the bathhouse to the couch that lay behind air-thin curtains. “Pin him,” Sabina laughed, “you have to
force
him to rest!” And Antinous got the Emperor of Rome in an arm-hold and wrestled him efficiently to the wide white-draped couch.

“I surrender,” Hadrian groaned, more helpless with laughter than Sabina had ever seen him. He spread his arms wide, grinning, and Antinous burrowed into his chest on one side and Sabina on the other. “I should be working,” Hadrian complained. “I intend to make a good many reforms on the treatment of slaves in Rome, did you know that?”

“I did not know that, Caesar,” Sabina said.

“Antinous said it would please him.” A long kiss for Antinous, leading to another and then a third, but Hadrian left his arm about Sabina’s shoulders, and she curled against his heavy chest, warm and tingling from the heat of the bath, feeling the Emperor’s heartbeat under her cheek. She closed her eyes a moment, wondering when she had last felt so content, and when her lashes rose again she saw Antinous smiling at her across Hadrian’s chest, head tucked in the curve of Hadrian’s other shoulder. She lifted her hand and he matched his own to it, the long fingers overtopping hers.
Understand the Emperor or not
, Sabina thought,
we will keep him alive
. And she could swear the thought passed from her mind to Antinous through their fingers, because they squeezed at the same time.

Hadrian kissed Antinous again, with more heat this time, and Sabina laughed a little and sat up. “I think I shall leave you.” She bent and brushed her mouth across Hadrian’s in farewell, feeling the silent amusement curve his bearded lips against hers, and then she rose and drifted smiling through the curtains toward the bathhouse doors.

“Wait—” A quick footstep behind her, and she saw that Antinous had risen from the couch to follow, pulling the curtain momentarily between them and the Emperor. He gave one of his heart-catching smiles, and then he bent his head and kissed her once on each of her naked shoulders above the bath drape.

Sabina drew back with a startled smile. “What—”

“Don’t think that was pity,” Antinous said. “That was for me. Because I can see why my father cannot forget you, Lady—I see it very well.”

Sabina felt bemused and rueful, warm and astonished, and she could not stop a soft laugh.
The handsomest young man ever born finds me beautiful,
she thought, and gave a little push at his chest. “Go back to the Emperor, Antinous!”

A salute like a legionary. “Yes, Lady. And thank you—for everything.”

She watched them a moment through the thin curtains, shadowed by the dim lamplight. Antinous slipping down over Hadrian with tender haste, Hadrian’s strong hand pulling him close as their lips met again. Hadrian’s muscled arm curving about Antinous’s lean shoulder, Antinous dropping kisses one by one like pearls on a string along Hadrian’s throat. The murmured caresses, the soft laughter. Sabina felt a stab of wistful envy for their happiness.
They could travel the world alone and be happy
, she thought. Antinous with his black dog at his heels and Hadrian in his Imperial purple, a solitary pair dazed by their own bliss.

Hadrian does not deserve such love
, she had thought just a little while ago. Perhaps he did not. But it was still something her soul warmed to see. She smiled again and stole away.

The following morning, Hadrian bid her join them for fruit and bread and iced infusions of mulberry and honey, and he announced that he meant to make a desert caravan to Palmyra. “A journey in easy stages,” he said, answering Sabina’s stern look. “I had thought only to take the men of my court, but I believe I will take you, Vibia Sabina. To take charge of me, since I am inclined to run rough-shod over my star here.” A squeeze of Antinous’s fingers lying content in his own.

Sabina raised her cup. “To Palmyra,” she said. “Bride of the desert.”

“To Palmyra,” Hadrian agreed, raising his own cup, and Antinous did the same. “And then Judaea, eh?”

Her husband ruled long years, Sabina reflected later. But that year that followed their triple toast—that was the best one.

Before it all fell to ruin.

ANNIA

A.D. 130, Summer
Rome

“You aren’t wearing
that
, are you?” Ceionia Fabia wrinkled her perfect little nose. “It’s so short it’s improper. Everyone will see your ankles!”

Annia shrugged, looking down at her filmy blue hem. “I’m growing.” She was nearly as tall at twelve as Pedanius Fuscus was at seventeen. “And so what if people see my ankles? You’re always flashing
yours
for the boys!”

Ceionia was far too demure to bristle, but Annia could tell she wanted to. She was Annia’s age, smooth-haired and smooth-faced and unspeakably proper, and their respective mothers were always pushing them to be friends. Either girl could have said
that
was never going to happen, but since when did mothers listen to anything?

Ceionia turned away from Annia with a sniff. Her father, Lucius Ceionius, had gone east to dance attendance on the Emperor, so Ceionia had been corralled into Annia’s household for today’s festivities. Which Annia didn’t find festive at all: Brine-Face’s first walk to the Forum as a man of Rome.