Lady of the Eternal City (36 page)

“Who are you working a curse tablet on?”

“None of your business!”

They walked along in silence a little while. “It’s Pedanius, isn’t it?” Marcus asked, and stumbled again.

“Oh,
Hades
, just take my hand so you don’t trip and break your neck.”

“It isn’t proper for a man to take a woman’s hand unless a betrothal has been agreed on.” His warm fingers interlaced with hers. “But I think a breach in decorum is allowable in this case.”

“You’re not a man, anyway.” Annia knew she was being rude, but she couldn’t seem to stop snarling at everyone. “You’re still a boy.”

“But you’re a woman,” Marcus said. “Legally, you could be married.”

“Not at twelve. Nobody marries at twelve, even if it’s legal.”

“You still have the advantage over me. You’re already a woman, but I won’t be a man for another two years at least. So you don’t need to fear me.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Annia spat, and her eyes pricked again.

They walked along silently, the trees black and rustling overhead. “Here,” Annia said as they entered the grotto of the
nymphaeum
, and went to her knees beside the small cold well of the spring. She unwrapped the lead sheet of the curse tablet, fumbling for the nail.

“May I read it?” Marcus asked.

Annia looked at him a moment. Just a shadowy shape, but she’d know him anywhere by the attentive angle of his head, his relaxed stillness as he sat on his heels. She felt a lump in her throat, and she pushed the tablet at him.

He angled it under the faint starlight and read aloud, running a finger over the letters she had scratched into the lead. Annia hadn’t needed any help wording the curse—she remembered that quite well, from eavesdropping on Empress Sabina. “
To the goddesses Diana, Hecate, and Proserpina. I invoke you holy ones by your names to punish and destroy Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator for trying to take my virtue.
” A pause there. “
May he never prosper,
” Marcus kept on reading, and his voice had a note in it she hadn’t heard before. “
May he never advance, may he never become emperor, and may I be the instrument of his downfall. May it be so in your names.
”

Annia’s voice was rough. “Now you know.”

Marcus was looking at her, she could feel it. She looked down at the spring, splashing the cold water.

“Pedanius attacked you?” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“Was it at his manhood ceremony?”

“Yes.”

Marcus’s voice got even quieter. “Tried to take your virtue?” he asked. “Or did?”

“Tried,” she said, still splashing her hand in the spring, and somehow it all came out—running from Pedanius, having to get on her knees for him and tell him he’d be Caesar. That was the part that made her cheeks flush. Kicking him in the balls hadn’t made up for it, not at all.

Her voice trailed off once it was told. She didn’t want to look at Marcus.

There was a long inhale beside her. “Why didn’t you tell your father?” Marcus said at last. “He would have believed you.”

“Yes,” Annia acknowledged. “But he’d have to do something about it, wouldn’t he? So he’d go to Servianus, and Servianus would trumpet his grandson’s innocence all over Rome, and my father would be shamed. Maybe more than shamed—the Emperor might punish him, for daring to accuse his great-nephew. Emperor Hadrian already dislikes my father; I can’t give him any more reasons.” She’d thought about it for so many hours, from every angle.
I cannot tell anyone.

Except Marcus, whose eyes rested on her so steadily it was like a touch through the dark. “Annia,” he said, “why won’t you look at me?”

Because I’m ashamed!
She wanted to shout it at him, and she wanted to cry. She swallowed down the little catch in her throat and spoke with dull flatness. “Everybody from my mother to the housekeeper to
Brine-Face
said I shouldn’t go running about showing my ankles anymore, now that I was twelve and getting old enough to tempt men. I didn’t listen, and look what happened.”

“A virtuous man cannot be tempted to an evil act.” Marcus sounded thoughtful, but very certain. “Therefore, the sight of your ankles or your anything else makes no difference: in acting upon his lusts, Pedanius proved himself as a man of no virtue. Well, we already knew that, didn’t we?”

Annia stayed silent, turning that over. It sounded very well, but if this whole business came out to the world,
she’d
still be the one shamed. Not Pedanius. Annia knew that the way she knew dawn comes at the end of night.

“Pedanius is wrong about something else,” Marcus added.

“What’s that?”

“He said no one would marry you if he ruined you.” Marcus sounded matter-of-fact. “But even if you hadn’t fought him off—if he’d had his way—I’d still marry you.”

She gave a harsh little laugh. “You’re just saying that to be kind.”

“No.” His hand found hers in the dark. “I’m not.”

“Ruined girls don’t get husbands. Not good husbands like you, anyway.”

“You think I’d be a good husband?” he asked, diverted.

She shrugged. “You’re good at everything else, aren’t you? Greek verbs and
trigon
, rhetorics and declamation, even your sword drills. You’d be good at husbanding too.”

“Husbanding means the care and cultivation of plants,” he began.

“Don’t make me hit you,” she warned, and tried to yank her hand away. But he held on, his fingers knotted warmly through hers.

“Pedanius couldn’t take your virtue,” Marcus said, and his voice was serious again. “Your virtue is already in you—it’s in what
you
do, not what he does to you. I’d still want to marry you, no matter how he wronged you.”

Annia looked at him a moment, and then she leaned forward and kissed him. She couldn’t see as well in the shadows as he could; their noses bumped and she got his more of his chin than his lips. But it was still a kiss and she heard him inhale sharply. He smelled like ink and mint.

“I suppose you think that was improper,” she said, pulling back a little.

“Nothing about you is proper,” he said, and she could
hear
him smiling. “Maybe I’m going to be a good husband, Annia Galeria Faustina, but you’re going to make me a very bad wife.”

“Probably,” she agreed. She felt light inside for the first time since Brine-Face grabbed her by the hair and told her to get on her knees. Just telling Marcus things and seeing him listen in that quiet way—it seemed to let all the wrath and the shame out. Ever since Pedanius had left for Egypt, Annia had been weighed down by the ball of rage burning in her chest.

Not now.

“Let’s finish cursing this bastard,” Marcus went on, and she gave his hand a squeeze to hear him swear. It was the kind of habit Annia felt she should encourage. “Because he’s not going to be Emperor, even if he is Caesar’s great-nephew. I’ll hold him down in this spring till he drowns, first. I might just do that anyway.”

“No, I will,” Annia said. “I put it in the curse. I’m going to be the instrument of his downfall, remember?”

“Let me drive the nail into the tablet,” Marcus proposed. “That gives me a stake in it, too. If you don’t bring down Pedanius, I get a chance at him.”

“You said curses were wicked,” Annia said, just to tease.

“Oh, they are,” Marcus said. “And I’ll pray for his downfall. But if prayer doesn’t work, well, ‘if I cannot soften those above, I will provoke those below.’”

“You’re going to tell me who said that, aren’t you?”

“Virgil.” Taking the nail from her hand, Marcus stabbed it through the folded lead tablet. “There,” he said, and as he handed her the tablet, Annia heard that intensity in his voice again. “Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator will never be Emperor. And more than that, he’ll pay for attacking you. I swear it.”

“I swear it,” Annia echoed, and flung the tablet into the spring.

VIX

A.D. 130, Autumn
Cyrenaica

The Emperor was hunting lion, and all I could think of was my wife. The hunting chariots, the horses, the bustle of the vast Imperial hunting party—none of it seemed as real to me as Mirah’s blue eyes smiling at me as I told her I would join the Imperial cortège. Not because of Simon’s words to me, but because of hers.

“Hurry up, Vix!” Boil’s broad face was flushed with sunburn in Cyrenaica’s brutal heat. “Don’t you want to see the beast go down? It’s as big as the Nemean lion, so they say! Been ravaging the local villages—”

I didn’t care if the Emperor bagged his lion. He rode at the front of the hunt on his big black horse, Antinous a spot of blue on the horse beside him, and I heard Simon’s voice in a whisper on the desert wind.
See what our Caesar plans next for Judaea.

I didn’t know how well I’d done at that. I was no subtle-tongued spy; I stumbled through my inquiries about Judaea with a flaming face. But my son seized my labored hints just because they carried words between us, suspecting nothing. Maybe he spoke to the Emperor, but I knew already there would be no change in Hadrian’s plans for Judaea. Why should there be? He was an efficient bastard: He’d come to a troublesome province with a list of plans, he’d checked off every item on it, and he’d moved on. As far as he was concerned, Aelia Capitolina would rise over the ruins of Jerusalem, Greek-columned temples would crowd out the synagogues, and that was that.

And Simon, along with God knew how many men like him, would go on quietly counting the swords in those underground caches and training men to wield them, until someday there were enough of both.

“Caesar!” One of the huntsmen squatted beside a rocky outcropping. “Lion tracks. The beast has a paw big as a platter—” The whole party spurred ahead.

“What do you know?” I’d asked Mirah quietly the night Simon tried to recruit me, in the darkness of our bed where man and wife can murmur secrets unheard. And even so I whispered, because Simon’s plan for me still pulled a reflexive cry of
Treason!
from the deep lairs of my mind. “What do you know of your uncle’s . . . activities?”

“Nothing much. Nothing disastrous,” she whispered back. “If I were forced to tell.”

I felt a pulse of anger that Simon had entangled his favorite niece in such dangerous business. “How much is
nothing much
?”

“Enough.” She cupped my cheek in the dark. “Will you go to Egypt with Antinous, Vix? Do what Simon asks of you?”

“Why?” I wanted her answer for that question. Not Simon’s answer; hers. “Why do
you
want it of me?”

“Because I have watched you here for five years, and I see my husband in pain.” There had been tears in her eyes. “You are half-alive, struggling to balance between Rome and Judaea, and there can be no more balancing. Come to us. Come to us, and let it be
done
.”

My throat closed.

“Rome is a disease.” Mirah moved forward in our bed so her lips touched the hollow of my collarbone. I could feel the dampness of her lashes against my skin. “Cut it away from you, and you will be victorious.”

“Victorious over what?” I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of her hair. We’d touched less and less, over the past years—the fragrant softness of her flesh against me was making my heart race like a boy’s. “Why does going to Egypt with the Emperor even
matter
? You truly think I can turn him away from these plans of his for Judaea, through Antinous?”

She pulled away from me, just far enough so that our noses still brushed. “No.”

“Then why—”

“You have to prove yourself,” Mirah said. “Do this for my uncle Simon, and he’ll trust you. That’s where you’ll come back victorious. A man of Judaea at last.”

I gave a harsh laugh. “Prove myself trustworthy? He once trusted me enough to guard his shield arm!”

“Don’t judge him for growing hard, Vix. Hardness is what wins rebellions.” The word was out, hanging there in the dark.
Rebellion.
And in my thoughts, something like an eagle’s cry still shrieked,
T
reason!

“Besides, Uncle Simon is kind, too.” Mirah’s arm slipped about my waist under the blankets. “He’s giving you this chance to save Antinous, before you break with Rome. And you’ll succeed, I know it! You’ll bring Antinous home, and I
want
that, Vix. I want him to come to God, so he can come home to us. So he can grow a golden beard, fall in love with a beautiful girl, dance at our daughters’ weddings—”

My long resentment eased painfully in my chest when she said that.
You want him back, Mirah? Truly?

“—and you’ll stand by Simon when he takes arms against Rome,” Mirah went on. “Vercingetorix ben Masada, my warrior for God.” Kissing the center of my chest, she whispered in Latin.
“Judaea Victor.”

I cupped the back of her head, twining my hand through her hair. “You see all that?”

“I do.”

“When did you turn prophet?” I asked. But when had any of this happened, really? When had my friend turned from legionary to rebel? When had I turned from Praetorian to spy?

You have no more oath to Rome
, I reminded myself. If I had, it would have been different—Mirah would never have asked me to break a sworn oath. But I had no oath to betray. Hadrian had made sure of that.

She was right. I was half-alive and more than half-crushed in this eternal struggle between Rome and Judaea; between my past and my family.

Time to choose.

“I’ll go,” I said, and moved over Mirah in our marriage bed and kissed her. We’d spent too many nights lately lying back to back in the darkness, but that night I made love to my wife, and it was like the old days. It hadn’t been good between us since I’d stopped soldiering; that was the blunt truth. But now I’d be a warrior again, and for something better than the empty glory of Rome, and it was good.

“More tracks!” The cry of another huntsman broke my thoughts, and Mirah’s smooth phantom flesh shivered away until I felt only the rough mane of my borrowed gelding. The Emperor’s dogs were milling up ahead, and I saw Hadrian swing off his horse in an arc of purple cloak to peer at the ground. “The lion ate here!”

Just hearing his deep, self-satisfied voice made my blood begin a slow burn inside my veins. I hoped he wept tears of humiliation when Judaea went up in flames, when he was forced to give it up, forced to fail as he so rarely failed at anything. Because I didn’t intend to fail. If I was breaking with Rome, I’d take a whole province with me.

Golden wings flashed through my mind, and I blinked away the thought of the Tenth Fidelis’s eagle, so proud and unyielding in my hands. “If Judaea rebels,” I’d whispered to Mirah sometime during that last tender night, “the Tenth Fidelis will march to crush the unrest.”

“Then they’ll die,” she said quietly.

I tried to persuade myself that the Tenth could withstand any rebellious rabble . . . But men like Simon were not rabble. Men like Simon were trained and disciplined, and they understood very well how to fight Roman legionaries. “If the Tenth falls, so does her eagle.”

Mirah pressed herself against me. “They aren’t your men anymore,” she whispered. “Or your eagle. I know it will still hurt, Vix, but it’s the price. No one ever said cutting a disease out would be painless.”

No, indeed.

“May I have first hit on the lion, Great-Uncle?” a boy’s voice was saying eagerly. “I’m of the Imperial blood, I
should
have first strike after you—”

I looked at the Emperor’s great-nephew: sweating in the sun, full of his own importance. “He should have been a tribune in the Tenth,” I mused, still thinking of the legion’s eagle. “We’d have knocked the bumptiousness out of him.”

“Gods, yes,” Boil said with relish. “Then picked our teeth with his bones. Tribunes are bloody useless.”

“Most,” I admitted. “Not all. Titus Aurelius—”

“No, he wasn’t too proud for a patrician sprig.” Boil cocked a blond eyebrow at me. “Hard to remember what a grand man he is now, when he used to share our sour
posca
.”

I wondered what Titus would do, if he knew the decision I’d made. I saw his look of cool disapproval, the one that could shrivel gods on their thrones, and I blinked it away. Why should he disapprove? He’d do anything for his family, and I’d do anything for mine. Dinah and Chaya had stood to embrace me when I left for Egypt, and all the irritation I’d ever felt toward them when they fell into moody humors had blown away like chaff on the wind. Dinah was so beautiful, a coltish girl with a soft mouth made for smiles. Chaya had shy doelike eyes that would soon have suitors stumbling over themselves. I’d embraced them both fiercely, and Dinah had whispered in my ear, “Bring Antinous back, Father. I miss him.” And Chaya had whispered in my other ear, “I’m sorry I was too nervous to hug him.”

Antinous. He cantered ahead alongside the Emperor as the hounds gave voice. This was the first time I’d
seen
him at Hadrian’s side, except at a very great distance—he’d been so careful to keep us far apart. I could see his blue cloak flapping behind him, see how he rode loose and easy in the saddle with his horse on a long rein.
Could
I bring him back, as my family seemed to think? Conversations with my son had gotten easier, but only if I kept off the subject of Hadrian. Just let me call the Emperor a raping bastard or a silk-tunicked turd, and Antinous’s face hardened all over and the rest of the conversation was doomed. Maybe I’d have to choke him and throw him over a saddle, because I didn’t see any other way of prying him loose from this cushioned whore’s nest the Emperor had built around him.

I had to find a way. Because if I didn’t, if I went home alone and threw myself into Judaea’s struggles against Rome—well, there wasn’t any way back from that. The path behind me would be burned away, no track even for a loving son to follow.

Simon won’t care
, a little voice whispered.
Antinous is a lure, something to get you here in the first place. Doesn’t matter to Simon if you come back with the Emperor’s lover or not.

And some part of me suspected it wouldn’t really matter to Mirah, either.

I actually closed my eyes at that thought, trying to shut out the thing I didn’t want to think about my own wife. “What are you doing?” Boil laughed from his horse.

“Nothing,” I muttered, and scratched at my jaw. “This beard’s driving me mad, that’s all.” I’d left off shaving recently, thinking that if I was going to be a man of Judaea it was time I had the beard to match, and it was currently in the itchy stage.

I heard Hadrian’s deep laughter up ahead, saw him extend his ringed hand out to Antinous so my son had to lean half out of the saddle to link fingers. “First blow against the lion is mine,” Hadrian was calling out, ignoring his great-nephew’s frown, “but I leave the death blow to you, Osiris!” I saw Antinous lift the Emperor’s knuckles to his lips in thanks, and Hadrian smiled. He leaned forward in his own saddle to ruffle Antinous’s hair, just like he’d ruffle one of his dogs, and I felt a surge of black hatred rise like a spring in the middle of my belly.
Why couldn’t you have died on that mountain in Antioch, you bastard? Struck by lightning and cast down by your gods.

The dogs were giving voice more urgently, seething and whining. “Close,” the huntsmen muttered. “The lion’s close, they’ve got his scent—”

The beast came from nowhere, a great leap down from a craggy outcropping of rock to the dry ground beneath. It gathered itself proudly as the dogs yelped and circled, the huntsmen shouted, and some of the more timid courtiers shrieked. I nearly shrieked myself because the lion was enormous: longer from snarling fangs to the tip of its twitching tail than I was tall, with massive clawed paws and teeth that could have punched through iron. My old lion skin had been a tawny thing, but this beast was darker, its short mane near to black. It gave a great slash at the ground and roared, no fear in its glittering eyes, and I remembered that this dark creature was a man-killer.

The Emperor raised his spear and charged.

“That rash bastard,” Boil groaned. “Will he just wait for
once
—” Boil was already wheeling his horse along with the other Praetorians, and some part of me felt a nearly unstoppable urge to fall in protective formation alongside them. I reined back instead, my horse jostling that pretty-boy Lucius Ceionius, and I watched the Emperor. The lion screamed, making a lunge for Hadrian’s horse, and the stallion reared. Antinous let out a warning cry, circling with his own spear ready and his reins doubled about one taut fist, but Hadrian just spoke a quiet word to his panicked stallion, never taking his eyes off the lion. As the stallion’s hooves came down and the lion crouched to spring, the Emperor let fly with his spear.

In the breath of time it took the spear to fly, glittering in the sunlight and aimed for the lion’s massive side, I had time to remember another hunt. That one had been in Mysia, and the prey had been a bear, and the Emperor had speared the bear in the side too before he had become aware of a golden youth on the far side of the clearing . . .
Full circle
, I thought as Hadrian let out a shout of triumph, his spear spitting the lion in the ribs, and kicked his horse in a dash past the beast as it screamed in pain.

“For you!” he yelled at Antinous, and his teeth gleamed in the dark thicket of beard. “I’ve blooded him, my star, now he’s yours!” Antinous was already spurring forward, his eyes all taut focus and his spear like a streak of lightning ready to fly, but the lion, which had whirled to follow Hadrian, now whirled back, blood spilling like rubies from its side, and it flew forward with a great rake of its claws and another maddened roar. The dust billowed up, and by the time I’d kicked past Lucius, the horse was on its side and shrieking, haunch opened to the bone, and Antinous had tumbled free.

No. Not free. The fallen stallion had trapped his leg against the ground, pinned my son helpless.

The horse.
I shot the thought at the lion like a spear of my own.
Go for the horse, not my son
—but this monster was a killer of men, and it stalked toward Antinous with a snarl. Antinous, struggling to free his trapped leg, struggling to reach his spear, which had fallen a dozen feet away, and a wave of stark, blind terror swamped me.