Lady of the Eternal City (63 page)

“I think I should be on my feet for this,” Sabina said, and I set her down. Her hand slipped instantly into mine, and I admit I swallowed hard as we followed Hadrian into the dark corridor.

Light flared, orange and hungry. The rough stone walls were spaced with brackets, each holding a lamp in the shape of a screech owl, and Hadrian went down the row lighting each one. “I require light,” he said without turning. “I keep the horror of all horrors in this private hell of mine, and such things must be seen clearly.”

Sabina’s fingers tightened through mine, and I swallowed again. A stone chamber at the end of the passage, and two more lamps. Hadrian lit them, and there was a flare of reflected light that dazzled me for an instant. When my eyes cleared, I saw the Emperor’s Hades.

A stone chamber, empty but for a great chair of wrought ebony, its arms worked all over in tiny howling faces like damned souls writhing in Tartarus. The arms of that chair had been scratched and worn smooth and scratched again, as though Hadrian had clawed at them over the years and years he had sat in it. He sat in it now, his fingers too weak to claw anything, and he stared at his horror of horrors on the wall, clearly illuminated by the lamps.

A mirror.

A great mirror of polished silver, giving back to him his own face.

Sabina gasped.

“I sit here,” Hadrian said, “and I look on what I am. There is blackness in me, and I stare at it until I have beaten it back. Because you were right, Vibia Sabina. An emperor must be a good man if he is to stay upon his throne. I am not a good man, but I have worn the mask well enough. It would never stay on if I did not have a place to take it off in safety.”

I remembered the tales of screams issuing from behind these doors, screams and curses and sobs. I saw the Emperor, clawing at his hellish chair, sobbing hoarsely before a mirror.

“I came here twice as often when I had Antinous.” Hadrian’s voice was a monotone. “How hard I worked, burying the darkness for him. He was the light, and I’d come sit here in the dark.”

I didn’t want to touch that writhing chair, but my fingers found the high carved back and gripped hard. It was that or feel my knees buckle. I glanced at Sabina in the flickering light of the screech-owl lamps, and I saw tears running silently down her face.

“The gods are cruel,” Hadrian said, staring at his own ravaged face. “Antinous is gone, and I am still here. The monster in the dark.”

“You are not a monster,” Sabina said, and she slipped to her knees beside his chair, resting her tear-wet cheek against his gaunt hand. “And you are not alone.”

“I have always been alone,” Hadrian said. “An empty shell in a good man’s mask. You know why I truly chose young Marcus to succeed me? Because he does what I do. He agonizes to make himself a better man, and that is a good habit in an emperor. But he will not need a Hades to do it, because he already
is
a good man. I have never been anything but a monster.”

“Monsters cannot love.” My voice was hoarse. “And I know you loved my boy.”

“I destroyed your life.” The Emperor looked at me. “And yours”—looking down at Sabina. “And yet you are both still here.”

“We stay because you are a great man.” Sabina cupped his bearded cheek in her hand. “We stay because you are our Emperor. We stay because of love.”

“I am not worth love.”

“But I love you,” Sabina said quietly, and I saw she meant it. She loved me but she loved him too, and there was a tiny stubborn part of me that resented sharing her. Just as I had so long resented sharing my son’s love with this man, even if that was a far different kind of love.

“Antinous loved me,” Hadrian said as though he had heard the name in my thoughts. “Servianus and Pedanius took him from me, and for that I should have wanted blood. I should have staked them out in their dying agony for all Rome to shudder at. But I did not. I let Servianus take his own life, and I drowned Pedanius in the Nile’s waters as he drowned Antinous. They killed my star, and even that did not resurrect my appetite for blood.” He looked up at me, and there was a child’s bewilderment in his eyes. “Why?”

The words came from me slowly as I pieced them together. “Because . . . even if you were once a monster, you are no longer.” I thought of the man who had tired of bloodshed in Judaea; who had released me from the task of killing his enemies and turned himself instead to befriending me over a game board. “You have spent so many years pretending to be a good man, Caesar, that I think you have become one.”

His head fell, and his shoulders heaved. “I have tried,” he whispered. “Gods know I have tried!”

He was weeping, and Sabina was weeping too, her face buried in his arm. And I took a shaky breath and realized that the defiant knot of resentment in me was gone. So many years I had hated this man, hated him and then resented him even as I admired his achievements and acknowledged his love for my son. I had held on to that last stubborn core of ill will.

But he wept before me now in a dark cell, and I felt no more hatred. Sabina had spoken true. He was a great man. He was my Emperor. And in my way, I loved him too.

I went to my knees at his side. I took his thin, shaking hand between my own, and I gripped it fiercely. “I am glad that my son gave you joy,” I said. “I am proud to be your man. And until the ferryman comes for your soul, I swear I shall remain at your side.”

And he whispered, “No.”

“I swear it, I—”

“Take me from this place, Vercingetorix.” His hand curved around Sabina’s face. “Take us both from this place.”

I raised Hadrian from his chair, and then I raised Sabina. I supported them, one arm about Hadrian’s shoulders and the other about Sabina’s waist, and they leaned against me as I led the way out of this foul place. I led us back into the light, where Antinous’s dog looked up and wagged his tail. Hadrian straightened to lock his Hades behind him, as I supported Sabina against me before she could fall. She looked at Hadrian from the circle of my arms, and the silvery tear tracks still marked her face. “Wall up this place,” she said. “You have no more need of it.”

“I think you are right,” the Emperor said, and tossed the key into the winter-dry bushes. “My villa in Baiae has no Hades.”

“Let me come with you,” Sabina began, but Hadrian cut her off with another of those perfect gestures.

“No.”

“
Why?
” Sabina demanded fiercely. “Why?”

Hadrian looked at me, and somehow his words were in my mouth. “Because he no longer needs us.”

“You have spent your life safeguarding my body—” Hadrian spoke to me. “And
you
have spent your life safeguarding my soul.” To Sabina. “But death is the thing every man faces alone, even an emperor. I welcome it.”

I looked at him. In his Hades I had seen uncertainty on his face, and the ravages of grief, and a terrible doubt. Now I saw weariness, and God knows he looked as ill as a man could look. But his gaze was sure and steady.

Sabina was still arguing. “I cannot leave you to die alone!”

“Something tells me I will not,” he said, and he didn’t. I did go to Britannia, and I did take the legion by the wall—but before Titus took the purple as Emperor, there was the inevitable day when I was called back to a seaside villa in Baiae, and I stood my last watch as the man in the bed drew his final tortured breath.

Sabina’s head drooped, and Hadrian took a step toward her. I loosened my grip, and she went from my arms to his, resting her cheek against his broad chest. She stood between us, and I met his eyes over her head.

Persuade her
, he told me again.
Let the Empress die to the world, and be reborn nameless with you.

“I’ll think about it,” I answered aloud, with the edge of deliberate insolence that I knew had always made his teeth hurt. Just because I could—because soon I wouldn’t have him to torment on a daily basis, and that saddened me. “No promises.”

Sabina laughed a little, a watery sound as she lifted her head, and Hadrian sighed. “You will be the death of me,” he said, and it warmed me through to hear the faint irritation returning to his voice. Some things never changed. Until that deathbed day arrived—and it was coming, not eight months in the future—Hadrian would always find me irritating.

But that day was not yet. And we walked away into the twilight, Sabina and I on either side of the Emperor we served, her narrow head resting on his shoulder and my hand steadying his arm.

Publius Aelius Hadrian is counted today among the Five Good Emperors, his twenty-one-year reign the centerpiece of Rome’s golden age. His skills as an autocrat are undeniable: He was a visionary builder, a workaholic who made time to listen to even the lowest of his subjects, and a gifted soldier who understood the value of peace. He left Rome the legacy of a unified army, clearly defined borders, and codified laws. So why, during his lifetime, was he one of the most hated Emperors ever to wear the purple?

He had a dark side. The
Historia Augusta
records that he was “austere and genial, dignified and playful, dilatory and quick to act, niggardly and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.” Even disregarding the more unreliable sources, Hadrian comes through history as a man who dropped his closest friends when they were no longer useful; a know-it-all who had to be the best at everything; a paranoid who hid his murderously short fuse under surface mildness; a vindictive brooder who could nurse a grudge forever; and a lover of display who faked modesty because it looked better for the masses.

He seems to have understood his own faults, because he exercised great control through most of his reign, sating his energy and his temper in non-stop work and travel. He indulged in one bloodbath at the beginning of his rule, condemning four political rivals and then blaming his Praetorian Prefect for carrying out the executions against his wishes. The Senate refused to believe the orders weren’t his and never forgave their Emperor for forcing them to ratify the arrests.

Hadrian in his personal life is no less puzzling, his marriage to Vibia Sabina full of contradictions. Their alliance was contracted for purely political reasons: Hadrian preferred male lovers, and married Sabina for her Imperial connections. There is clear evidence of acrimony between husband and wife; Hadrian reportedly found Sabina “moody and difficult,” and she retorted that she would never bear him children because “they would harm the human race.” There was also the scandal in which Hadrian dismissed his Praetorian Prefect and Imperial Secretary Suetonius because they were “too informal” with the Empress. Did she break her marriage vows, or did she just lack respect for her Imperial dignity as Empress? No one knows. But if Hadrian found his wife difficult, maddeningly casual, and possibly unfaithful, why did he never divorce her? He had no real need for an empress, having no desire for children, and yet he never raised the possibility of setting Sabina aside even when she disgraced him. Their marriage clearly had tense periods, but it also had times of accord: Some of Hadrian’s writings refer to her as “my Sabina” with something like affection, and he frequently took her with him on his travels, as described by Greek heiress and amateur poet Julia Balbilla, whose atrociously bad verses written in Egypt still survive. Sabina and Hadrian’s best years ended on that trip down the Nile, with the death of a certain Bithynian boy.

Antinous was undoubtedly the love of Hadrian’s life. Had he been a woman, the romantic appeal of the lowborn beauty capturing the heart of an emperor would be a ballad for the ages, a real-life Cinderella story with a tragic ending to beat Romeo and Juliet. Besides Antinous’s Greek blood, nothing is recorded of his family or background. He was likely educated at the
paedogogium
to become a court attendant, but we don’t know exactly when he caught the Emperor’s eye. At some point, Hadrian’s lust for his beautiful bedmate flowered into genuine love, giving the Empire considerable embarrassment. Homosexual passion in Emperors was common, but open shows of adoration were considered distasteful, certainly for lowborn concubines who should be confined to the shadows and not flaunted as partners. There is also the possibility that Antinous’s age caused condemnation: We have no recorded birth date for him, but however much he was called a boy, his statues show a young man in his prime rather than a lanky teenager, and Hadrian had been condemned before (ironically!) for preferring mature men as lovers rather than adolescent boys. If Antinous was older than the accepted age bracket for homosexual liaisons, as I decided to show him, then it was a serious violation of the code of Roman manhood—but not everyone was horrified by the affair. Empress Sabina evidently approved of Antinous rather than being jealous of him, and the trio traveled together in complete accord. Antinous’s drowning on the Nile remains a mystery: accident, murder, or suicide? Who knows? Dark rumors swirled that Hadrian had his beloved sacrificed as an offering for renewed health, but the Emperor’s grief was all-consuming. In Antinous’s name he dedicated countless statues, multiple cities, and a religion that briefly rivaled Christianity. Hadrian also spiraled close to madness and stumbled into the worst disaster of his reign.

The Bar Kokhba revolt in Judaea was a genocide, a tragedy, and a catastrophic example of bad timing. Hadrian’s peace policy was famous: He disapproved of expansion for expansion’s sake and preferred to keep the peace within the Empire’s existing borders. Normally he was an expert at keeping his provinces contented, but Judaea had been simmering since Trajan’s reign, and finally boiled over into open rebellion shortly after Antinous’s death. The grief-maddened emperor was in no mood for compromise: He decided to simply stamp Judaea flat, and imported three of his best generals to do it (I slid Vix among them as commander of the fictional Tenth Fidelis). The fact that none of the generals was placed in overall control indicates that Hadrian was present in Judaea at least part of the time to supervise the war personally. The brilliant rebel leader Simon Bar Kokhba fought Rome for a bitter three years but finally met his end in Bethar. Little is known of his background; my conjecture that he spent years in the Roman legions is pure invention, but he certainly had an intimate knowledge of Roman fighting tactics and how to counter them. Even Hadrian was appalled at the cost of victory, finding himself unable to give the Senate the traditional greeting of “I and the legions are well” once he had seen the lists of the dead.

Hadrian’s assorted heirs make another batch of unlikely characters, but all are real historical figures. The Emperor had long been fighting ill health; he had recurring lapses of what was possibly erysipelas (an infection causing fevers, headaches, vomiting, and painful skin rashes), and when he began to suffer hemorrhages after the Bar Kokhba rebellion, Hadrian began looking for an heir. His great-nephew Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator was the obvious choice, but Hadrian evidently did not think highly of him (one source records he was “erotic and fond of gladiators”). Hadrian preferred the future Marcus Aurelius, the young Verissimus whose scholarly development the Emperor had been following since childhood, but the boy was too young. Hadrian settled on an interim Emperor in the form of Lucius Ceionius, a man whose influence wouldn’t challenge Marcus as he grew, since Lucius had little to recommend him except good looks, a love of other men’s wives, and a habit of dressing his pages as wind sprites. Ceionius was duly adopted by the emperor, his children tied to the Imperial family with the pair of betrothals described here, but the new heir soon succumbed to illness—probably tuberculosis, though of course there were rumors of poison. (Mercury inhalation, which I have implied, mimics the symptoms of tuberculosis.)

Realizing his heir’s ill health, Hadrian privately settled on a replacement: Titus, as I have called him in this story, though he would go down in history as Emperor Antoninus Pius. He was the perfect choice in Hadrian’s eyes: modest, wealthy, popular, unambitious; a peaceful politician who wouldn’t undo Hadrian’s anti-expansion policy, a rock of morality who could be counted on to guard the throne for the young Marcus Aurelius rather than murder him—and Antoninus Pius accepted with some reluctance after Lucius Ceionius’s lingering death. Hadrian had already, some months earlier, cleared the way for his intended successors with one more bloodbath, when the slighted Pedanius Fuscus launched a coup for the throne under the guidance of his grandfather Servianus. The plot’s details did not survive, nor did the plotters—Hadrian had both men executed, sealing his dire reputation with the Senate, who were profoundly shocked to see a man in his nineties forced to the sword. Servianus cursed Hadrian at the last, praying the Emperor would beg for death and be unable to die—and his prophecy came true. Hadrian died the following year after a long battle with what was probably heart disease.

I for one hope that this troubled but ultimately brilliant Emperor did not die alone, and thus placed Vix at his deathbed. Vix is a fictional character based on several very real men: Praetorian Prefect Marcius Turbo, whose incredible military career launched him from common legionary to Emperor’s bodyguard and right-hand man; Praetorian Prefect Septicius Clarus, who was dismissed for “intimacy” with Empress Sabina; Septimus Julius Severus, who spearheaded Hadrian’s war against Simon Bar Kokhba. Empress Vibia Sabina was not present at her husband’s deathbed; she reportedly predeceased Hadrian, but it’s unclear where, how, or even what year she died. (And how odd that is, considering she was first woman in Rome!) Rumor whispered that she was somehow killed in the same conspiracy that claimed the lives of Pedanius Fuscus and his grandfather, but we don’t know: Hadrian’s enigmatic Empress remains elusive to the end. In my mind, she slips off to another twenty years with Vix at the north of Britannia, walking the famous wall built by her husband.

Rome enjoyed twenty-three more years of peace under Antoninus Pius, who was beloved by the Senate and the people of Rome. He may have been intended as an interim emperor, but his rule was unexpectedly long and very prosperous. He lost his wife, Empress Faustina the Elder, several years after his accession to the purple, and mourned her deeply, refusing to remarry. He took one of his freedwomen, Galeria Lysistrata, as a mistress and devoted himself to his Empire, his family, and the training of his adopted heir.

Marcus Aurelius succeeded his adopted father and became famous as the last and greatest emperor of Rome’s golden age, combining the best qualities of the three men who preceded him: Antoninus Pius’s kind nature, Hadrian’s brilliant mind, Trajan’s military prowess. He had to wait a long time in the wings for his turn on the throne, but there is no evidence of jealousy between him and his predecessor. They had a warm working relationship, and Marcus wrote a loving paean of praise to the man he revered as father and father-in-law in his most famous philosophical work: his
Meditations.
To this day, Marcus’s collection of thoughts on Stoic philosophy, self-reflection, and man’s capacity for improvement are revered as some of the most important philosophical writings to come from the ancient world. Marcus himself emerges clearly as a philosopher striving to perfect his thoughts; a scholar who could be repeatedly, endearingly pedantic; a man of the mind not too proud to admit struggling with the sins of the flesh (he gives a great “whew” of relief that as a young man, he was able to resist the temptations of a pair of slaves called Benedictus and Theodota!) Marcus writes little, however, about his wife, Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger. Advanced as he was in his philosophical views, Marcus had conventional ideas about how women should behave, and given that his much-loved Empress flouted most of them, it’s possible that the great Stoic philosopher didn’t feel up to the challenge of explaining that conundrum to posterity.

Annia was evidently an assertive woman and a controversial empress. Her marriage to Marcus Aurelius was long and happy, producing five living children, but the Senate was forever accusing her of political intrigue and affairs with gladiators—standard Roman insults for any female who dared to be unconventional! By contrast, the Roman legions adored her: She took on the role of Imperial Army Wife, toting her children along on Marcus’s military campaigns and readily auctioning off her jewels when the troops needed payment. Annia’s popularity with the common soldiers earned her the unprecedented title of “Mother of the Camp,” and she was honored on more coins than any previous Empress in Rome’s history. Marcus Aurelius always staunchly defended his free-wheeling wife, refusing to divorce her and refusing to remarry after she died (the long-jilted Ceionia Fabia offered her hand and was met with a resounding
No
). Marcus Aurelius himself died five years later, and the Empire (in the words of Dio Cassius) “descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.”

As always, I have taken some liberties with historical record to serve the story. The Imperial family tree has been simplified: Hadrian’s sister and Sabina’s extended family are not mentioned, and Faustina became Sabina’s half-sister instead of her half-niece. We have no recorded birth date for Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger, but she was likely born some years later than the birth date given here (and of course, there is no mention that her parentage is anything illicit!). I have avoided any direct mention of Marcus’s age, but he was about three years younger than I have implied for the purpose of this novel. The line of prayer from the Salian ritual that he translates as “A kiss to grief” was not translated until the Renaissance, but I allowed Marcus to be a bit ahead of his time.

Hadrian’s execution of four political rivals at the beginning of his reign happened out of his sight, some weeks prior to his grand entrance into Rome—I moved the executions after his arrival to condense the timeline. Antoninus Pius was not under threat of execution with the other men; his inclusion as Hadrian’s rival and Trajan’s potential heir is my invention. A few details of Antoninus Pius’s career have been changed to suit the story: His service as a tribune (it isn’t known if he ever served in a Roman legion, though the office was a traditional rung on the ladder of the
cursus honorum
); the date of his consulship, which was moved a few years; his work on the rebuilt Pantheon; and his acquisition of the nickname
Pius
—historically he earned that appellation after Hadrian’s death, when he deified his predecessor over the Senate’s objections, and impressed them with his filial piety.