Lady of the Eternal City (55 page)

Lucius Ceionius had gone off to Pannonia. “He’ll stay a few months longer than I planned,” Hadrian said, frowning over our last game of
latrunculi
. “Officially, because the Pannonian legions need further inspection. Unofficially, because he fell ill just before he left Rome. Collapsed with his lungs wheezing and bleeding, and the physicians say the colder northern air will do him good.”

I hoped he would die there. He might not have killed my boy, but he’d still
used
his death—tried to manipulate him into throwing himself from the barge.
May his lungs rot for that
, I thought, but it was dulled rage. I looked at Titus’s daughter sometimes, young Annia with her firestorm of hair and limbs, and Hell’s gates, but I couldn’t imagine ever having that much life in my veins again!

She was wretchedly unhappy, I could see that clear enough—disappointed over her betrothal to Lucius Ceionius’s snotty-nosed brat, or so Titus said. Annia didn’t get mopey in her wretchedness. She got vicious, spending her energy in lung-breaking sprints, and on the days I came to visit her father and he wasn’t there, I’d visit Annia instead, let her beg me for stories of the legion camps.

“I think I’d like traveling with the legions,” she decided one dusty afternoon, snagging the
trigon
ball from my long toss into the air. Her golden-haired little sister, Fadilla, had joined us to make a third, bouncing up and down—
me, me!
—as Annia arced the ball gently for her sister. “You’d always be on the move with a legion, always seeing something new.”

“Maybe you’ll see a legion someday,” I offered as Fadilla ran for the catch.

“Can you raise children in a legion camp? Because I like children and I intend to have a whole flock.” Fadilla took a tumble over a stone, and Annia veered off to raise her up. “You’re not going to cry, are you? That knee’s barely even bumped! Let me see—”

I smiled, watching how deftly she inspected the scraped knee, blowing kisses over it until Fadilla was giggling. If Annia wanted a flock of children, she’d be a good mother to them, and I said so.

“Lucky for me,” Annia snorted, “my future husband
is
a child.”

“I could marry him for you,” Fadilla volunteered, but even she looked dubious. “If he didn’t pick his nose all the time . . .”

I laughed. “No need to sacrifice yourself. I have absolutely no doubt your big sister will be able to ditch that little bastard without any help from you.”

Annia gave me her tilted grin, slinging the
trigon
ball aside. “Race you to the edge of the vineyard?”

“I’ll win!” Fadilla shouted, and took off in a streak of blond hair. Annia ran behind in exaggeratedly slow strides, and I heaved my grizzled bones into a lope in pursuit.

“Faster, Legate!” Annia shouted over her shoulder, and I put my head down and pretended to run faster. Everything about this girl made me smile: her swagger, her fast feet, her shining devotion to her little sister . . . Titus was lucky in his daughters. Far luckier than I had been.

My daughters. No letters from them, but I hadn’t expected any. I did get one stiff little note a few months ago from Mirah’s mother, telling me the dowries I’d settled on the girls had gotten a wine merchant for Dinah and some kind of scholar for Chaya. Good matches both, and I was glad.

“Down to the edge of the vineyard!” Annia shouted. “Or it doesn’t count!”

She was already twisting vine leaves into a wreath for Fadilla’s hair—“A crown for our victor!”—by the time I pulled up at the stone wall at the hill’s bottom. “Race back?” she suggested, bouncing on her toes, and Fadilla clamored agreement under her wreath.

“Allow me some time to die.” It was a hot day for spring; I put my hands on my knees and bent over wheezing.

“You’re old,” Annia scoffed, stretching down to touch her toes.

“Not too old to lay you over my knee and beat you, girl.”

“You’d never catch me!” Dancing out of reach. “At least take off that lion skin, I don’t see how you can go slogging about in
fur
—”

I made a swipe for her flying red braid and missed. “I’m used to it.” My one token of Antinous—I slept under it even in the growing heat, and sometimes it gave me dreams of his golden hair.
Don’t call me Narcissus . . .

I looked away from Titus’s daughters, hiding the bitterness that creased my eyes, and that was when I glanced over the wall marking the border of the vineyard. I’d never run all the way to the bottom, not this far. “I didn’t know there was another villa so close to yours.” Small but rambling; terraced gardens dropping down to a vineyard of its own that ran right along this one.

“The Empress’s villa,” Annia said. “She watches me go by on my morning run, if she’s there—I’ll generally run across our vineyard
and
hers.”

Fadilla bounced, waving a plump hand over her head. “There she is!”

I’d already spotted the distant figure in white, standing like a slim marble column on the terrace overlooking the gardens. It was too far away to see a face, to see anything distinguishing at all—but I still knew it was Sabina. I saw her arm rise, answering Fadilla’s wave. “I thought she stayed at the Emperor’s villa,” I heard myself saying.

“She comes here a good deal. Whenever the Emperor gets in a temper and tells her to stop nagging.” Annia snagged her little sister midbounce, replaiting Fadilla’s fraying braid. “They’re an odd pair. I used to think they hated each other, but sometimes I see them lock eyes and it’s like they’re reading each other’s minds.” Tying off the plait, she dropped a kiss on her sister’s head. “Shall we race back?”

“You two go,” I said, and swung over the wall and made my way toward the Empress of Rome.

She met me halfway, coming down through the terraced gardens. As she drew closer, I saw she was wearing one of the Egyptian-style sheaths she’d adopted in Alexandria, white linen tied between her breasts in some complicated knot that left her shoulders naked. Barefoot, bareheaded, coming to a halt before the orderly rows of vines. I halted too, wondering what she saw as her eyes traveled over me. Vercingetorix the Red, the man who had butchered Judaea? The brash ass of a boy who had once fought a duel to win her garnet earring? Or a grizzled legionary with gray-shot hair and a shoulder-load of bad dreams?

She smiled, crinkling the corners of her eyes, and I saw the girl I’d found in her father’s atrium, blinking up at me with those same blue eyes as her finger held her place in a scroll. “Hello,” she said.

I said just as simply, “Hello to you, my lady.”

*   *   *

We walked beside the rows of vines, and our words came slow and cautious. Bit like our aging selves, really. I had not seen her since our failed interrogation—what did we speak of, after a disappointment like that?

“I come here when I’m not required for Imperial functions,” she said, nodding out over her villa. “Or if Hadrian wants to be alone. More and more frequently, these days—he’s becoming a recluse.”

“So are you, by the looks of it.” Not so much as a page had approached the Empress out here with a dispatch or a visitor. Whenever I’d seen Sabina before, these months past, we had been insulated by marble and formality: her rank, Hadrian’s presence, slaves and hangers-on. This solitary silence wrapping the two of us away from the rest of the world was unsettling.

“I do live very quietly here,” Sabina said. “Just a few slaves and guards, and they know to keep their distance. I like it. I used to have an atrium crowded with petitioners, but the wives of dying emperors don’t have so many of those.”

I could not help asking. “You’ve not heard anything else, have you? From these informers of yours—if Lucius didn’t push Antinous, perhaps it could have been someone else?”

A mute shake of her head.

Of course not
, I thought, and wondered what I was doing here, walking beside her.

She made a tilting motion of her shoulders as though sliding the matter of Lucius and our failed accusations away. “Titus tells me you live in the Esquiline.” Speaking lightly. “I thought you must be returning to your family in Judaea.”

I could say it now without feeling the prick in my eyes. “I have no family anymore.”

A breath came beside me, but she didn’t ask. I knew she wouldn’t. Vibia Sabina, soul of tact. I told her anyway.

“My girls, married and gone. My wife, dead.”

“I am sorry,” she said quietly.

Another silence. She turned away into the vineyard, trailing between the vines to give me time to swallow my sadness, and I was grateful. A hawk winged overhead through the sunshine, and Sabina arched her neck to follow its flight.

“This is where Annia runs when she comes cutting through.” Sabina looked at me over her shoulder, a white shape moving down the orderly rows, bare toes curling into the earth. I followed the Empress into the vines, running my hand over the first tight buds of the unripe grapes to stop myself from tracking the sway of Sabina’s hips through sunlit linen. Those Egyptian shifts didn’t really hide anything. I remembered how she had slithered catlike under Lucius Ceionius, purring in his ear as she threatened his life and his balls.

I cleared my throat. “Yes, Annia’s a fast one. And fierce.”

“Very.” Sabina glanced over her shoulder at me, her gaze guarded. She’d lined her eyes in crushed lapis, and they looked enormous. “My sister tells me you’ve grown fond of her.”

“Of her and her sister both.” Though it was no real secret Annia was my favorite. “Maybe it’s because of my own daughters. I miss them, but at the same time . . .”

Sabina turned to face me. “What?”

I halted in the middle of the vineyard, staring down the row. “They’re
better
without me. I was a piss-poor father, and I ruined them, and Antinous too. Everything that comes from me—anything that isn’t blood and death, because those are the only things I’m good at—everything that comes from me gets ruined. Including all my children.”

A slow, silent breath from Sabina. “That’s—not—true,” she said slowly.

I gave a bitter little laugh. “Yes, it is.”

Her eyes lowered, then lifted back up. She took a breath. “It’s time I told you something.”

“What?”

She didn’t answer at once. The sun beat down, and I could feel a trickle of sweat making its way down my back under the heat of Antinous’s lion skin. She looked at me with her lapis-blue, lapis-lined eyes. “I don’t know how to begin, exactly.”

I raised my eyebrows.

She drew a gulp of a breath. “It’s Annia. She’s not Titus and Faustina’s daughter.”

I stared.

“She’s ours.”

Somewhere behind me, a bird exploded into the sky with a buffet of wings. “Ours?” I repeated dumbly, and my voice came out in a whisper.

“Yours.” Sabina rested her fingertips against my chest in supplication. “And mine.”

*   *   *

I could hear her voice explaining, the words spilling like they’d been upended from a jug corked for nearly twenty years. Explaining a deception wrought, a secret kept from the Emperor and the whole world—but it was all happening somewhere distant, the words coming fogged and half-heard to my ears.

I had another daughter.

Annia of the red braid and the ferocious scowl and the long, long limbs. Annia Galeria Faustina . . .

“Mine,” I whispered, “
Mine
—” There was no disbelief. The truth of it called to me in Annia herself, her freckles and her temper and her restless energy just like mine. The truth had called me from the day I met her, a savage little girl of seven cuffing blood off her lip and telling me she never cried. I’d loved what she was right then and there, and I loved the fleet young huntress she’d become who had been able to make a heartsick old soldier laugh.

My daughter
, I thought again, utterly stuck on that one precious, incredible thing. Somehow I was on my knees between the vines, gasping like I’d run a mile. The world swirled around me; sights, sounds, scents, so bright and beautiful when everything had been so gray and meaningless—

“Vix—” Sabina went to her knees too, seizing my hands, and her eyes were full of tears. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” My heart and mind all whirling. “Sorry—
why?
”

She bowed her shorn head, narrow fingers wrapping mine tight. “Sorry I never told you.”

Time was I’d have flung that apology right back in her face. Hated her for keeping yet more secrets, just as she’d kept Antinous’s love for Hadrian a secret. But what kind of secret-keeper had I ever been? The day I found Antinous with Hadrian, I flung the secret of Sabina’s long love for me in the Emperor’s face. What if I’d done even worse? What if I’d thrown Annia at Hadrian too? Would I have burned my youngest daughter’s life up in an emperor’s rage, just to hurt her mother, if I had known the truth?

I don’t know.

I don’t know, and I’m glad I never will know. Because there would be no way in this world or the next to make that right.

My hands tightened on Sabina’s until I could feel her rings pressing my skin. “You were right not to tell me.”

She laughed a little through the tears in her blue eyes. Blue to my gray—that was where Annia got the sword-steel flash in her gaze; in the combination of our eyes. The thought gave me exquisite pleasure. “It feels
good
to tell you.”

I’d have been half an empire away once Sabina realized I’d left a child in her belly. I was off rounding up Hadrian’s enemies for him as she shouldered everything alone. “Why didn’t you wash her out of you with some potion?” My voice was hoarse. “Hadrian’s temper back then, he would have killed you if he found out. It would have been safer.”

“Even when she was just a flutter inside me, I loved her,” Sabina said. “Because she is
ours
.”

My carefully hoarded numbness shattered all around me. My forehead dropped against Sabina’s shoulder, and I trembled all over as the world rushed at me, full of light and sound and color again. Different from the brief surge of life I’d felt when hunting for my son’s killer, because that surge of life had come on a red tide of rage. This—this was rebirth. I smelled rich earth and budding grapes, leaves and sunlight and the must of wine still contained on the stem. The tears that sprang to my eyes were a balm, sweet joy and sweet relief. That black certainty that everyone I touched was doomed—