Lady of the Eternal City (41 page)

“Antinous would want you to carry on as you were—”

“
But I don’t want to!
” Hadrian flung his wine cup across the room in a clatter of metal. The dog flattened his ears. “I don’t care if Rome burns. I’d light it on fire myself and lay it on Antinous’s tomb as a tribute. Burn it all with him.”

I wasn’t afraid. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I looked at the Emperor and I just repeated, “But he wouldn’t want that.”

“I know. Oh, I know. So I’ll build a city for him instead of burning an empire. But, gods—” Hadrian closed his eyes with a shudder. “I pray someone tries to kill me. I pray someone tries to plot against me. I pray someone makes
war
on me. Because it’s not in my nature to build and preserve, and gods know you’re aware of that even if Antinous never was. I have a black soul, and I feel like giving it free rein.”

I stared at him, at his set face and his pit-dark eyes and the fist clenching and unclenching in slow rhythm at his side, and dread mounted in me like a wall, brick by remorseless brick.

I pray someone makes war on me
.

Oh, no
, I thought.
No—

Hadrian moved unsteadily toward his chamber. His small
tablinum
, where I presume he curled up to sleep since my son occupied the bedchamber. “Need sleep,” Hadrian said not too clearly, and struck open the door. I paid no attention. I was echoing all over with dread.

I pray someone makes war on me.

Well, Hadrian was about to get his wish. But I didn’t think Simon would get
his
wish, for a free nation of the Jews.

Mirah had mocked Hadrian as a coward who didn’t fight. Simon judged him better, as a practical man who would not fight without good reason.
We make Judaea too much trouble, and he will let us go
, Simon had said. But that was when my son had been on hand to temper Hadrian’s darker urges.

I didn’t see the stone-faced madman in this room weighing practicalities if he heard Judaea was in open rebellion. I saw him burning the whole province to the ground.

You’re drunk
, I told myself.
You’re drunk, and your son is dead, and you’re seeing doom in every corner. That’s all.

“Vercingetorix,” Hadrian said, and my eyes jerked up to meet his. He hadn’t closed the door of his chamber yet; he stood swaying on his feet, but his gaze on me was steady. “What was your old legion? The one Trajan gave you, as commander?”

The dead legion
, I almost said. Because if rebels like Simon didn’t level the men of the Tenth, Hadrian would when he threw them into the fight. “The Tenth Fidelis,” I said instead, hoarsely. “Stationed in Judaea.”

“I give it back to you,” he said. “It’s yours, Legate.”

I was on my feet, and I didn’t know how I got there.
“What?”

“You aided me tonight.” His eyes were unblinking. “For that I owe you. I don’t like owing you. I’d rather hate you.”

“You can’t make me legate,” I said, dry-mouthed. “You stripped me of rank for debauching your
Empress
; the Senate won’t—”

“The Senate can piss down their own throats,” Hadrian said clearly. “And I don’t care if you bedded my Empress. I don’t care about anything. The Tenth is yours, Legate. Good night.”

He banged the door, going to his lonely couch and his oblivion, and I stood there in the stinking filth of the room and I began to laugh. Not because it was funny, although it was. Because would the bastard never stop screwing me over?

The Tenth is yours, Legate.
The doomed Tenth, stationed square in the middle of the firestorm that was about to erupt in Judaea. Africanus and the men who had bought me drinks and looked at me with such admiration. The eagle I had carried so proudly. All of them doomed, and I had just about wrestled myself to the conclusion that Mirah was right; that it was the price that had to be paid. For a province to be freed, men had to die.

Not my men.

They aren’t your men
, I thought.

They are now.

Not yet!
I screamed inside.
Turn the appointment down. Go home!

Too late. I could feel the tattoo on my arm burning, the crude X I’d inked just below my shoulder the day Trajan had given me the Tenth for my own. I’d felt it prickling every time I thought about the men of the Tenth dying in the streets of Jerusalem as they tried to hunt down rebels, prickling me in reproach—but I’d always been able to stamp it down. For Mirah. For Simon. For the girls.

Now it burned me.

Two different men had asked me to fight for them. Two brilliant, bearded men with deep-set eyes and ruthless visions of the future. One I loved, and my family stood on his side. One I hated, and my legionaries stood on
his
side. I didn’t know which man was right. I didn’t know anything anymore.

Except that my son was dead, and the Fates were cruel.

Hadrian had smashed almost everything in the room that could be smashed, but there was a polished silver mirror canted sideways against a wall, still intact. I righted it as my son’s dog watched me with anxious eyes, as I looked at my own reflection. My new beard had grown in since I left Judaea, and it was finally past the maddening itchy stage, thick and red-hued. Mirah would like it.

But I didn’t look like a man of Judaea, even with the beard. I didn’t look like a warrior for God. I looked like a soldier of Rome, and God help me, that was what I was.

“Legate Vercingetorix,” a familiar voice said behind me.

I turned. Sabina came slipping into the wrecked chamber, her eyes shadowed, the great bruise still showing along the side of her face where Hadrian had struck her away. “You overheard?” I said stupidly.

“Yes. Your promotion, and his plans for Antinous’s body.” She went to listen at the door of Hadrian’s bedchamber. There was an indistinct rumble of snores beginning, and her face softened. “He’ll sleep for hours now,” she said, and looked at me. “Thank you for helping him. I hope he helped you.”

I couldn’t answer that, so I gestured at the bruise on her face. “He hurt you,” I said, and heard the growl in my own voice.

“He didn’t mean to. He sobbed apologies into my lap afterward.”

“But he hurt you, and you still tend him?”

“At least I know how to handle him. The slaves aren’t really safe around him in these moods.”

“Sabina—”

“You have the Tenth Fidelis,” she said, calmly dismissing my pity. “I’m glad. The men will be safer when the fight comes, if you’re leading them.”

“There’s a fight coming, is there?”

“Isn’t there?”

Did she know about the unrest in Judaea? I thought she did. Sabina knew things like that. Hadrian and Antinous had been too dazed in their happiness to see much of anything going on around them, but Sabina had always been clear-eyed. She came toward me, running a fingertip over the Mars amulet at my neck. “That should keep you safe, if the Tenth comes to any trouble.”

“I don’t want to be safe.” My throat was full of thorns, the amulet like a weight about my neck. “Why didn’t I give it to Antinous? Then it would have kept
him
safe.”

Her voice was gentle. “It’s just a token.”

“A token.” All the tokens I’d gathered over my wandering life—from my father, from Trajan, from Mirah—even one from Sabina, long hidden away. “Why don’t I have a token from Antinous? Why didn’t I give one to him?
Why?
”

Sabina eyed me for a moment, and then she stood on tiptoe and untied the amulet’s cord from around my neck. I didn’t stop her. “Wait,” she said, pressing her fingertips against my chest, and carried the amulet to the room’s other door. She slipped inside, and I gagged at the smell. My golden son was in there, rotting. I wanted to scream. I wanted to die.

Sabina came back and she had something over her arm, I couldn’t see what with my wine-blurred, grief-blurred eyes. I felt her light touch as she draped something about my shoulders, and I felt the familiar weight of fur. “I burned my old lion skin,” I said. “I burned it in Judaea, when I vowed—” When I vowed I was turning my back on Rome for good.

“This is the pelt of the lion Hadrian slew in Cyrenaica.” She pinned it about my shoulders. “The one he killed to save Antinous. It will keep you safe, in place of your Mars amulet. And I laid the amulet with Antinous’s body. When he’s mummified I’ll see that it’s woven into the wrappings over his heart.” Her eyes were so clear. “Part of you, with him always.”

My eyes burned. The embrace of the lion’s fur felt like Antinous’s arms. I hunched into it like I’d been stabbed, my whole body shaking, and Sabina opened her arms. I dropped into them, crashing to my knees.

“Ssshhh,” Sabina said, fingers slipping through my hair, and her touch destroyed me. I gripped her, drowning, and I wept at last for my son.

Then I rose, and I wiped my eyes, and I went to war.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

—MARCUS AURELIUS

VIX

A.D. 131, Spring
Bethar

All my life, I’d wanted to ask my wife one question:
What do you see?
That girl Mirah had been, the girl who danced among the vines at Tu B’Av with sloe blossom braided in her bright hair, merry and light-footed and laughing, her blue eyes somehow only for me—what had she seen when she looked at me? I had always wondered.

She only laughed whenever I asked her, shaking her head in puzzlement. “I saw you, of course!”

Did she?

Because I knew what she saw when she ran to greet me in the small courtyard of our house in Bethar. I knew very well.

Somewhere on the journey between Egypt and Judaea, I shaved off my beard. I took it off in short brutal strokes of the knife, standing naked before a bowl of tepid water in some decrepit roadside inn. Then I attacked my russet hair with its graying streaks, taking it down to the bare scalp, and left my head bleeding in half a dozen places. I put aside the nondescript tunic and cloak I’d been traveling in, and put on for the first time my full regalia as legate. The breastplate, the sword belt, the scarlet cloak. The mementos I’d accumulated over my life, the ones I’d laid aside when I came to Judaea, reasoning that they had no part in my new life—I drew them out, one by one. The string of campaign tokens I’d won in Dacia and Parthia, strung once more across my breastplate. The gold ring engraved with the letters
PARTHICUS
, given to me from Emperor Trajan’s own hand, pushed once more into place on my first finger. Antinous’s lion skin, pinned about my shoulders. The blue scarf Mirah had been wearing when she survived the great earthquake in Antioch, stuffed under my shoulder plate with a caress of the worn cloth.

I looked bare and brutal, blood still trickling down my neck from the nicks in my shaved scalp. I looked like the man who had killed a rebel king in Dacia, who had clawed his way red-handed from legionary to aquilifer to centurion to tribune to legate. I looked like a man to be feared.

That was the man Mirah saw striding across her courtyard, his boots slapping harshly at the stone. She was watering the small orange trees in their pots, and her head turned at the sound, and for a moment she didn’t know her own husband. I hadn’t been able to tell her of my promotion by letter—during those long winter months I’d spent in Egypt at Hadrian’s side after my son’s death, I must have written and torn up the words a hundred times. She’d sent me greetings of her own, warm sympathies written in a scribe’s hand when she heard of Antinous’s death, and I had not been able to reply, not when I couldn’t tell her the whole truth. And now I wished I had found some way to do it, because she looked first alarmed and then puzzled as I took off my helmet and tucked it under one arm.

She took a step as though to embrace me, but my somber face stopped her in her tracks.

My voice was hoarse as I asked the question. “What do you see?”

“I see you,” she said, just as she had long ago.

“And who am I?”

“Vercingetorix ben Masada,” she said. “Warrior of God.” She looked at my armor and perhaps she thought I had earned a post with Hadrian so I could report on him. After all, I had left her so I could spy on the Romans.

But I had returned as one of them.

“Vercingetorix the Red,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Legate of the Tenth Fidelis.”

Mirah looked at my armor again, and a leaf drifted down past her head, that bright hair hidden away behind another blue scarf. The girl who had twirled and spun through the vines at Tu B’Av still had freckles that danced across her nose like flakes of gold.
What do you see?

My Roman son
, my father had said.

You are of Rome and your wife is of God
, my mother had said.

They knew me better than my wife did.

Mirah’s eyes crawled across my breastplate, rose to my shaved jaw and shaved head, and she read my expression for what it was. Her whole face convulsed. She put a hand to her mouth, her head shaking from side to side.

I took a step forward. She backed away from me, her head still shaking back and forth. “Mirah,” I said helplessly, but what could I say?
Mirah, I am lost here. Mirah, I am not born to run a wine shop or help free your province of the Jews. Mirah, I do not know what you see when you look at me, but see what is
there
: a man made to harvest the souls of Rome’s enemies.

And
Mirah, I love you
.

But I saw no love in her eyes that day, as I stood in my legate’s armor, in my Roman boots made for stamping on Judaea’s rebels. Her blue eyes filled as she stared at me, but not with tears. With revulsion.

She gave a swift lunging dart of her chin, and she spat at me. Her spittle landed on my polished breastplate. And though there were still so many bitter words to be said, so many things to be screamed and argued and wept, that was the moment when my heart broke.

SABINA

A.D. 131, Summer
Rome

The Empress of Rome went straight into her sister’s arms. She felt like a child in need of rocking, and though Faustina was the younger, she must have known that. She held Sabina tight, murmuring soothing wordless nonsense as she’d have done to Annia. And Sabina felt a man’s arms slide around them both, shielding them like a warm wall, and heard Titus’s quiet voice. “How bad is it, Sabina?”

“Oh—” She lifted her head to him, wiping at her eyes. “It is so much worse than you could imagine.”

He made no reply, only stepped closer. Sabina stood a moment, cocooned safely between her sister’s soft breast and Titus’s lean shoulder, their arms sheltering her from the world, from the curious eyes of the slaves. It felt like that moment in the bathhouse in Antioch with Hadrian and Antinous, the three of them standing wrapped together in such companionable affection.
Only Antinous and I were allied in fear for Hadrian
, she thought.
Hadrian and I never dreamed of ill fortune for Antinous.

She stepped back from her sister and her brother-in-law, giving a watery smile. “So much for the Empress’s grand return to the Eternal City,” she said, looking down at her travel-stained
stola
and ruined cloak. The seas had been ferocious all the way from Egypt, even the usually placid waters of the Tiber. Not a soul on Sabina’s ship had come off its decks less than hollow-faced and covered in grime. Summer was only beginning to turn to fall; the seas should still have been calm, but Sabina didn’t question the ill winds or the ill luck. There had been no good fortune at all since Antinous had died, and that was all there was to it.

“You’ve gotten thin,” Faustina scolded, pulling back to look her sister over. “Do you truly grieve so much for Antinous? He’s been gone nearly a year.”

“I will miss him always,” Sabina said, and the pang of grief stabbed her just as sharply as it had when she saw him lying in the Nile. The shock had gone, but not the grief. “But it’s not just Antinous. I miss my husband.”

“You’ve only been parted from him since he left Egypt for Syria—”

“Oh, I was missing him long before that.” Sabina felt her smile turn mirthless. “The moment they dragged Antinous out of the Nile, Hadrian was gone.”

The Hadrian she had grown accustomed to, anyway. The man who could be teased and scolded, who would debate new laws and Greek philosophy and architectural principles until dawn, the man with a smile never far from his face. That man was lost into a grief fathoms deeper than her own. He worked the days and nights round without caring for sleep, did his Imperial duties with savage precision, lashed his grief-gaunt body into vicious morning hunts followed by immobile public appearances followed by nights of feverish writing, writing, writing. “What are you writing?” Sabina had asked.

“The legacy of Antinous,” Hadrian responded. “A great city named Antinoöpolis erected on the bank where he fell—two colonnaded thoroughfares crossing at the center, with a shrine in his name. Yearly games to be held in his honor. Temples, epic verses, statues to be commissioned in every corner of the Empire—” The Emperor finally looked up, his gaze red-rimmed. “He will not be forgotten. His name and his face will live forever, I swear it. My legacy will be his.”

“What of Rome’s legacy?” Sabina had asked, stroking his hair.

Hadrian returned to his feverish writing, ignoring her touch. “Burn it all down, for all I care.”

Now, Titus steered her from the brightly painted atrium into the sunlight of a little walled garden, ordered cups of barley water, and dismissed the slaves. “So, the real news about the Emperor. Let’s hear it.”

Sabina cradled her cup. “What have you heard already?”

Titus looked up at the cloudless sky as if searching for tactful words. It was Faustina who said bluntly, “That he thinks his lover is a god.”

“True enough,” Sabina said. “By the time I left Hadrian’s entourage, Antinous’s worship was already spreading in the east. Hermopolis, Alexandria, Lykopolis—they all have temples. More are planned.”

Faustina sighed. “I’m not saying the boy wasn’t a gift from the heavens—we all know what a balm he was for the Emperor’s temper. But a Greek-blooded common-born boy worshipped like a Bacchus or a Mars?”

Sabina shrugged. “Perhaps he deserves to be deified. Certainly they believed so in Egypt—the river began to rise as soon as his body was taken from it, as if in homage.” And then there was Hadrian’s renewed and savage burst of good health.
Anyone who throws themselves into the Nile will save the life of a loved one . . .

There were already rumors that Hadrian had had his beloved sacrificed, a dark bargain with the gods for renewed health and long life.
Fools.

“Whether he deserved deification or no,” Titus said in austere tones, “a catamite has never before been entered into the realms of the divine. I say it not out of insult,” he added, noting Sabina’s frown, “but so you may imagine the Senate’s reaction.”

Sabina drew herself up in a flash of cold anger. “If it will assuage Hadrian’s grief to have his beloved remembered as Antinous the God rather than Antinous the Catamite, then the Senate may hiss like ganders.”

“You’ve got a glare that could crack marble,” Titus said, looking her over. “What an empress you’ve become, Vibia Sabina. I remember when you were a barefoot girl with your hair in your eyes, sprawled on the floor with a map.”

“And I remember a gawky boy who came to propose marriage to me.” Sabina looked at her brother-in-law: long, lean, quiet, commanding, with smile lines about his eyes and hands so still that their smallest gesture made illustrious men scurry. Titus Antoninus Pius, they were calling him now; one of Rome’s most honored sons, cheered by all. “How old were you then? Sixteen?”

“And now I’m well past forty.” Titus ran a hand through his hair, silvering about the ears. “And sometimes feel as old as Servianus.”

“Some parts of you are still just as active as they were at sixteen,” Faustina murmured. “What?” she said at her husband’s glance. “I meant your stomach, of course! You should see him fall on Alpine cheese,” she told Sabina. “It’s like lions falling on gladiators. Or Annia falling on her water flask when she comes back from her run—”

This time, the pang in Sabina’s chest was pleasure rather than pain. “Where is Annia, anyway? Running?”

“Of course.” Titus gave a fond shake of his head. “Though I restrict her to no more than four miles a day.”

“I long to see her.” See if her hair had darkened from pure red to Vix’s russet, see if she had grown out of her freckles . . . Sabina smiled involuntarily, and Titus and Faustina smiled back.
We three
, Sabina thought. All her life, it seemed, she had been one of three. As a girl it had been herself and Vix, forever tearing gaps in each other until Titus arrived to complete the triangle and cement the peace. Then there was herself and Hadrian, ever an ill-matched pair until Antinous came to make it three against the world. Now Antinous was gone, but there was still Titus and Faustina to complete a new trio.

One of three
, Sabina thought, looking at the way her sister’s hand twined with Titus’s.
Never one of
two
.

Their smiles all faded, as though her melancholy had crossed the table. Faustina sighed, and Titus’s fingers started to drum against the carved arm of his chair.

“Will Hadrian be satisfied with making Antinous a god?” Titus asked at last. “With founding him a city, holding games in his honor, endowing him with priesthoods?”

“He will never be satisfied again,” Sabina stated. “There will be more temples, more priesthoods, more cities renamed Antinoöpolis—”

“That will not please the Senate.”

“Then Hadrian will have their heads.”

“Can’t you stop him?” Faustina jabbed a pearl pin more deeply into the blond coils of her hair. “You have some influence, surely.”

“He pushes me away. He pushes us all away.”

Sabina had stayed at Hadrian’s side through it all—fits of weeping where he’d fling cups and furniture at the walls; feverish days of writing and planning. She’d stood at Hadrian’s side this spring in the new-rising Antinoöpolis, dispensed prizes to the victorious gladiators celebrating the games of Antinous in blood. She’d veiled herself in black when Antinous’s mummified body was released by the priests, and his soul sent into immortality. But Hadrian had turned to her afterward and said with blank exhaustion, “Go back to Rome, Vibia Sabina.”

“Let me stay to help you—”

“I go to Syria next,” Hadrian said, cutting her off with a sharp gesture. “To deal with Judaea. I mean to do bloody things there, things not fit for your eyes. Go home.”

And that had been that.

“So, Antinous’s influence is passed,” Titus said. “And for the moment, so has Sabina’s. Is there anyone else who can check the Emperor?”

Vix?
Sabina thought. Vix, who had spent most of the winter drinking wine with Hadrian, pouring him into bed at the end of the night whenever he fell soddenly unconscious, getting more and more impatient about departing to his precious Tenth Fidelis. You couldn’t say Vix had any influence over Hadrian, exactly, but Hadrian certainly let him get away with more than he allowed from anyone else.