Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  My daughters were wrinkling their little noses and complaining about the dockyard stench, and I laughed. “We won’t be staying long.” Not in obscene and teeming Gesoriacum with its docks swarming with sailors and pickpockets; the air smelling of brine and unwashed bodies; the views over the rooftops all roiling ocean and the sails of triremes and somewhere beyond it, mist-bound Britannia. A fascinating sight any day, but today I just snugged my wife in to one side and led my family to their temporary home.

  “I like it,” Mirah decided, fists on hips as she looked through the atrium to the tiny wall fountain that managed to fill the little garden with a pleasant plashing sound. Antinous was loping through the atrium like a young colt, and the girls were squealing and squabbling over the little chamber they’d share. “Of course, I’ll have to cover that fresco—”

  “Later,” I said, and tossed her over one shoulder.

  “Put me down!” Mirah laughed, squirming against my grip. “Vix!”

  “Antinous,” I said, and pointed at the girls. “Take ’em out and keep ’em out till midafternoon.”

  “Done.” I heard his laughter as he steered the girls through the atrium, and I didn’t even wait for the door to thud closed before I was carrying my wife toward the bed.

  “Put me down,” she was saying, drumming her fist against my back. “This is very undignified!”

  “And you’re very disobedient. I should beat you.” I tipped Mirah into the middle of the wide sleeping couch. “Go on, scold me. You’re so pretty when you scold.”

  She dissolved into laughter and I dissolved into her, my tart and tender wife. My breastplate and greaves clattered down into a pile on the floor, her gown billowed down on top, and her russet hair came loose from its scarf in a warm banner. I kissed her and kissed her, moving over her, moving through her, and then I kissed her again because I had too many unkissed months to make up for. “Missed you,” I murmured into her mouth in the quiet that came after, her warm forehead still pressed against mine on the pillow. “Hell’s gates, but I missed you.”

  “Are you still sorry I insisted on coming to Gaul?” The ripple of laughter still came through her words, lazier now.

  “No,” I admitted. “Though I should be. You should have stayed in Rome, you and the girls.”

  “What, moldered there another eight months like we did when the Emperor dragged you all over Germania doing Prefect Clarus’s job . . .”

  “Someone has to.” The last Praetorian Prefect had been summarily fired after the four executions at the beginning of Hadrian’s reign—the Emperor had managed to dump most of the blame for those executions on him. “Your overhastiness in making the arrests caused great ill will in the Senate,” was how he put it, eyes dancing with amusement at the man’s astonishment, because after all, he’d done nothing but follow orders. His replacement, Prefect Clarus, was a wine sack, so I did all the work while that bloated prick enjoyed the rank.

  Mirah was still arguing. “Maybe the Emperor will station you back in Rome for the next leg of the journey? He could take Prefect Turbo with him instead.”

  “He trusts Turbo more than he trusts me. When it comes to leaving one of us out of sight for months, anyway.” Marcius Turbo was the other Praetorian Prefect—there are always two, largely so you can have one kill the other if someone gets too big for his boots. Turbo was a grizzled, matter-of-fact old soul as rough around the edges as I was; he had a mind for administration and he was practical enough to work directly with me once it was clear that his fellow Prefect was useless. Turbo handled the administrative duties in Rome while I handled the Emperor’s security when he traveled. It was a sensible arrangement, but I didn’t like it. For one thing, it took me away from Mirah, because I usually refused to take her along. “You should have stayed behind,” I grumbled, but couldn’t resist tracing a slow circle around the point of her shoulder. “You’d be safer.”

  “You really think the Emperor will concern himself with the likes of us?” She gave me one of those wifely looks, amused at my thickheadedness. “Just to keep you reined in?”

  “He likes keeping his thumb on people—even little people. I don’t want you anywhere near me if he gets in one of his moods.”

  “What moods?”

  “When he decides he wants to punish someone.” My stomach tightened at the thought of Hadrian’s idle, shining gaze turning on Mirah.

  “What does it matter if we’re under his eye or not? If the Emperor of Rome wants to find your family, he can find us!”

  “But I want you out of his sight.” An old argument, and I attempted to distract her by nuzzling her neck. But she remained undistracted. In fact, her eyes had a mutinous glitter that meant challenge.

  I lifted my lips from her throat and leveled a hard stare at her instead, the one that shriveled my centurions inside their breastplates. “Glare all you like, Mirah, but you and the children will keep to your own apartments as long as we travel together. You don’t visit my quarters in the Praetorian barracks, not ever. You’ll stay out of sight, and I’ll come to you when I can, just as I do in Rome when I’m not toddling along in the Emperor’s shadow.”

  She gave a scowl to match mine, turning on one side to face me. I ran my palm slowly over the slope of her hip, banded with alternating stripes of shadow from the shutters of the window. “Isn’t it good,” I persisted, letting my hand slide to her knee, “that I can at least afford to keep you separate?” It did pay well, the Praetorian Guard. “And I’ll be able to see you more often. Hadrian sent me ahead to make preparations—as soon as he arrives, I’ll press to make the crossing to Britannia to prepare again. I’ll stay ahead of him, lay preparations for his retinue wherever he goes, and let the centurions tramp around in his shadow for a change. It means I can arrange my own days,” I insisted, aware I was losing the argument though she wasn’t saying a word. “You know we might be going as far as northern Britannia, after Londinium? My mother and father settled near Vindolanda. Never mind you getting the chance to meet them, I haven’t seen them since I was eighteen—”

  “There are other places we could go, you know.” Mirah’s voice was noncommittal. “Besides Britannia.”

  My hand dropped from her hip.

  Her eyes met mine. “If you despise the Emperor so much, we could leave Rome altogether.”

  I groaned, flopping over on my back. “That again?”

  “You agreed you’d think about leaving the Emperor’s service,” Mirah persisted.

  “I have thought on it,” I mumbled. “I am thinking on it.”

  Mirah raised her eyebrows. “And?”

  “You think the Emperor will be accommodating if I tell him I feel like quitting my post?”

  “You’d find a way, Vix. You always find a way when you really want something.”

  I had no answer for her. My stouthearted wife had been born and raised in Rome, but she’d never uttered a word of complaint coming with me on my legion travels. She’d gone with me all over Parthia; had shared tents and wagons and cramped temporary apartments while I marched on Trajan’s eastern campaigns. She’d tipped spiders out of her wine and swept sand out of her sheets; she’d given birth once in a tent and once in the wreckage of an earthquake and raised her babies in the makeshift camps of the east, and now the rented rooms of the west—and I couldn’t blame her if she wanted a proper home. Somewhere I could share her bed nightly rather than creeping in every third day like I was visiting a whore; somewhere she could pray to her own God without being spit on by Romans who thought Jews mutilated babies. And when the last rebellion in Judaea had been put down and Mirah’s parents had decided to leave Rome for their home province, well, I suppose I couldn’t blame her that she’d set her sights on joining them.

  “I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking you to leave Trajan’s service.” She snuggled into my shoulder. “I know what he meant to you. But from everything I’ve he
ard about Emperor Hadrian, he’s a different sort of fish altogether.”

  I called him something fouler and more anatomically unlikely than a fish. Mirah smacked me whenever I swore where the children might be able to overhear, but not when we were alone. She’d probably store the curses up to use herself when she next broke a plate.

  “Don’t think you can change the subject by swearing, Vercingetorix. Trajan is gone. And we aren’t chained down by legionary pay anymore. We could travel in comfort and live well when we arrive in Judaea. My parents do, and Uncle Simon—you’ve read their letters. We don’t have to take farmland; I know you’re a city dweller down to your bones, but we can take a house like this one in Bethar.” Her voice softened. “All my family are there, and they love you like one of their own. Uncle Simon used to fight with you in the Tenth Fidelis; he’s told me all the stories how you’ve saved each other’s lives! So why don’t you want to join them?”

  I knew why, but I couldn’t tell her. I’d been a soldier since I was nineteen years old, and now I was past thirty-five, and I didn’t know how to do anything else. What would I be in Bethar, sitting about a house all day watching my children grow and my sword rust? A former gladiator, a failed bodyguard, a renegade legionary? A man with no master, no honor, no cause—a man with nothing at all.

  I sat up on the bed, ruffling a hand over my hair, and Mirah sat up too, molding her soft form against my back. Her voice was muted against my shoulder. “You despise the Emperor, Vix. So why are you so bent on serving him?”

  She wasn’t wrong. I’d happily watch Hadrian choke on his own blood.

  But Hell’s gates, I couldn’t let it happen on my watch.

  Look. It wasn’t much, being a palace guard, but it was what I had. Every Praetorian in the Guard braced instinctively when I passed by, because they knew I’d roast them over a slow fire if I caught them slacking. I’d told the whole Guard I’d turn them into men of Rome and not some choir of eunuchs, and I had. They called me a gutter-mouthed flogger who buggered goats, but it wasn’t my job to be liked. It was my job to be respected, and I was. Because I did my duty, and I did it well.

  “Do you even know how to fail?” I remember a girl teasing me once—the girl whose earring I still carried in my pack alongside Mirah’s blue scarf. She was right, that girl. I didn’t know how to fail. I didn’t know how to stop doing what I was so good at: guarding a man I hated, a man who understood me and used me against myself.

  But how could I tell Mirah that? How can you tell your wife that you need a master as much as you need her happiness? That she probably shouldn’t have married me at all, because she didn’t deserve to deal with all the dark worries I carried with me alongside my collection of good-luck tokens?

  So I gave her knuckles a kiss where her hands had twined around my shoulders, and rose. “I should be returning to duty.”

  Mirah let out her breath in a short rush, and I thought I heard her mutter something in Aramaic. “When does the Emperor arrive?”

  “God knows.” I shrugged into my tunic, slid into the armholes of my breastplate. “He’s summoning his bitch of an empress to join him first, so it might be as long as a month. He’s still reviewing legions in the south.”

  Mirah didn’t move. I focused on tying my sandals, adjusting my campaign tokens. I flung the battered lion skin across my shoulders, and I couldn’t help glancing up. She still sat in the middle of the bed, her russet hair tumbling down her naked back, her small capable hands linked around her drawn-up knees, looking at me. At once I became absorbed in readjusting the gladius at my side.

  “I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “I really don’t.”

  I shrugged. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she slid off the sleeping couch and back into her clothes. “I’ll be back tonight,” I said, feeling helpless and defensive, resentful and aching all at once. “I’m glad you like the rooms.”

  She gave me her little sideways smile as she tied up her hair. “I do like the rooms.”

  But she’d like them better if they were in Judaea.

  ANTINOUS

  “They’re staring,” Chaya whispered, peeking around Antinous’s hip. “Those men!”

  “Just ignore them, little monkey.” Antinous gave her hand a squeeze, smiling down at his sister. “Drunks at a wine shop will stare at anything.”

  “They only stare if you are along with us,” Dinah said, skipping on his other side.

  “Don’t be silly!” Antinous moved his sisters past the cluster of bleary-eyed drunks. Ex-legionaries by the look of them, with whores straddling their laps. He could hear a mutter as they passed—Pretty, pretty; I’d ride that boy like a mule—

  Antinous raised his voice, deliberately loud. “Shall we go back, girls? I’ll help you unpack!” But he could still hear the mutters behind, and lip-smacking noises. Pretty, pretty . . .

  Whenever Antinous saw his own face reflected in a bowl of water or his adopted mother’s small hand-glass, he stared at it in puzzlement. A face. The same face he’d always had. A straight nose; a chin just starting to prickle with a man’s beard; a mop of curly dark-blond hair. Just a face, and yet all his life it had made trouble. Other boys came at him fists raised because of that face, thinking that he was too pretty to know how to throw a punch (as if anyone raised by Vix would grow up not knowing how to fight!). Now that he was older, the other boys glared and accused Antinous of looking at their girls. Either way it meant he had no friends his own age. And strangers were no better. As long as Antinous could remember, he’d heard mutters when he passed by, just like the mutters from the wine shop. His very first clear memory was of a hard-faced woman in Germania, a neighbor who had taken him in when he was orphaned very young: “You’re a beauty, aren’t you?” Pinching his chin in sharp fingers. “Just like your mother. I can make a few coins off you someday.”

  Antinous couldn’t remember his mother—just a vague impression of honey-colored hair like his own. He wondered if her face had made problems for her, too. If the thing the world called beauty was always more trouble than it was worth.

  “Back already, Narcissus?” a voice hailed as Antinous and his sisters came round the corner. “I thought I told you to stay lost for the rest of the afternoon!”

  “The girls got bored.” Antinous smiled at the tall figure standing with one shoulder jammed against the lintel. His second clear memory from childhood was of that same granite-hard figure in battered armor, looming in the doorway of the woman in Germania. Those shoulders in their lion skin had blocked out the sun, and Antinous had thought he was looking at a god. Maybe I was. The only reason that hard-faced woman hadn’t made any money off Antinous or his face was that Vercingetorix the Red had tossed him over one shoulder and snarled, “He’s coming with me.”

  Dinah and Chaya released Antinous’s hands, flying to their father. Vix dropped a kiss on each dark head. “Inside. Your mother wants you.”

  “Yes, Father,” they chorused, and that made Antinous sigh just a little. They were Vix’s daughters, blood of his blood, so of course they called him Father. “What do I call you?” Antinous had asked as a boy, paralyzed with shyness, knowing with all his heart what he wanted to call this godlike man who had rescued him.

  But no. “You had a father, not that you knew him, and it wasn’t me,” the brisk reply had come. “So Vix will do.”

  Antinous couldn’t remember the man who had sired him. All he had in the world was a tall centurion in a lion skin, and he loved that man more than life. Father. But he only called Vix that in his mind.

  “Walk with me?” Vix asked. “There’s a decent bathhouse and gymnasium opposite the barracks, and I could use a sweat.”

  Antinous hesitated. “Mirah won’t mind?”

  “Why would she?”

  Because she gets jealous, Antinous thought. It was better when Vix wasn’t there—then she smiled when Antinous cro
uched down to play with the girls or helped hoist the laundry basket. “Not many boys know how to braid hair or bleach linen,” Mirah would say, as she’d been saying since Antinous was a little boy trying so hard to be the best son, the best brother. To earn his place. “You’re a gem among sons, Antinous!” She said it with such unconscious affection, son. But when Vix came home from his travels or his long guard shifts . . .

  Well. Jealous wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t an envious bone in Mirah’s body; Antinous knew that. But he couldn’t help but notice that whenever he came into that laughing, shoulder-thumping embrace with his father, when the two of them teased and joked and got out swords to spar—well, Mirah looked sad. As though wondering why the God she prayed to so fervently hadn’t given her a son of her own for Vix to tease and spar with. A son who could call Vix “Father.”

  “Your mother will be another hour at least moving all the furniture,” Vix was saying, oblivious to Antinous’s musing. “Best thing we can do is get out of her way. Why do women do that, anyway?” he wondered, swinging out of the doorway. “She’ll move every couch into a different room, then decide she liked it better the way it was!”

  “Let’s run while we can,” Antinous agreed.

  He slouched along easily at his father’s side, companionably silent. They were almost of a height, and Antinous almost as broad through the shoulder, but there the similarities stopped. Nobody whispered foul things on the street when he walked with Vix. His father moved with a ferocious swagger like a man who owned the earth. Antinous wondered sometimes if Vix had ever been unsure of anything—if he’d ever been Antinous’s age, wondering what the world held in store and what was his place in it.

  Mostly Antinous thought the answer to that was No.

  “Emperor Hadrian,” he asked finally. “Arriving soon?”

  “Yes.” His father never had much to say about the man he served.

  “And he’s traveling to Britannia afterward?”