Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “I could take your tongue.” Hadrian snapped his fingers at the dog at his feet; she rose with tail wagging, and he caressed the graying ears. “A silent Empress would be most desirable.”

  Sabina wanted to swallow, but her husband would certainly notice if her throat moved. “Let me offer you some advice, Hadrian, before you render me mute. You are going to die if you continue your reign as you have begun it.”

  Hadrian’s eyes crinkled in a sudden grin of genuine amusement. “How dramatic.”

  “There you go again.” Sabina flung up her hands. “Slinging threats one moment and laughing the next, like the flip of a coin. That’s the kind of thing that makes people nervous. Emperor Caligula and Emperor Domitian made people nervous too, the way their moods shifted. Look what happened to them!”

  A multitude of expressions chased over the Emperor’s face, as though he were trying to choose a reaction. Just let yourself be puzzled like a normal human being, Sabina thought in exasperation. But if Hadrian was undecided, well, at least it gave her time to keep talking.

  So Sabina kept talking, and fast. “Tell me something. What Emperors of the past do you admire?”

  “Augustus,” Hadrian replied automatically. “His administration, particularly. And Trajan, too, though those Parthian wars of his were foolishly unnecessary.”

  “Trajan and Augustus.” Sabina nodded. “Fine Emperors both. They did great things—”

  “Are you saying I have not?”

  “Of course you have.” Swiftly. “You’ve ordered temples repaired and more temples built; you’ve hosted games and given largesse; you’ve forgiven public debt. But what else do you plan to do in your reign? What will be your legacy?”

  Hadrian hesitated, still looking affronted at her bluntness. But no man can resist a chance to boast of his legacy, Sabina thought, even if only to a woman. “I mean to remake this Empire,” he said at last. “All of it.”

  Of course Hadrian would be grandiose—no small ambitions here. Sabina gave an encouraging tilt of her head, all eager willingness to be impressed.

  “Rome has become insular,” her husband said, and his words began to tumble as though he had been holding them inside for years. “A gaggle of bored senators who have never traveled farther than their summer villas, and they think themselves fit to pass judgment on matters in Gaul and Syria? No. Traveling is key. Augustus understood that; he traveled whenever health and time allowed, and so will I. I will see with my own eyes what needs to be done. I will understand my Empire before I attempt to govern it.”

  “And once you understand it?”

  “There are things I already understand.” Hadrian was off his couch, striding and gesturing. “First and foremost is that the Empire is big enough. We cannot forever be conquering, or this Empire will be nothing but a collection of sullen subjugated provinces around a marble hub. It is time to unite what we have. Roman law will be the whip, and Greek culture the light, unifying us within borders that I will mark so that no emperor who comes after me is tempted to expand beyond them.”

  He turned to stride back the other way, beginning to wave his arms in enthusiasm. An old habit, Sabina remembered—it had been so long since Hadrian allowed himself spontaneous enthusiasm about anything. “What else?” she prompted.

  “Our legions must be consolidated as well. I mean to fight no wars, but war always comes when an Emperor least expects it, and the legions must be ready. Kept fierce and fit—but not so much that they become restless and begin to make trouble. That is a knife’s edge to find and balance upon, but I mean to find it.” Striding faster. “I mean to raise temples and bridges and aqueducts throughout the provinces—I will have my whole Empire made beautiful, not just the Eternal City. And our laws, dear gods, but they need organization! We need to systematize the judgments and rulings that have been made over the years, and resolve the resulting inconsistencies—”

  Sabina felt a thrum of excitement run through her veins. This man, she thought, looking at Hadrian’s sparkling eyes and swift excitement, his enthusiasm and his energy and his waving hands, this man is an emperor worth having.

  A pity he could not be this man more often. Well, perhaps she could make him see that. If he didn’t take her eye out, or her tongue, for saying so.

  “Worthy plans,” she said, interrupting him full-flow. “Marvelous plans. And you will accomplish none of them, Hadrian, if you do not curb your dark side.”

  He stopped, startled. Startled was good. Startled kept him from reacting.

  “You wish to emulate Trajan and Augustus?” Sabina went on. “They were loved. They were good men—”

  “And I am not?”

  “Of course you are.” Sabina wasn’t mad enough to counsel the Emperor on what was goodness and what was evil; Hadrian frankly didn’t seem to understand the difference. But on the appearance of goodness . . . Well, if there was anything Hadrian understood, it was appearances. “You are a good man, but you cannot deny you have a temper—and that it gets the better of you sometimes. You have shown you can hand out executions without blinking, and you take a harmless boy’s eye out of sheer irritation. You strike fear into your subjects from the Senate on down.”

  “They should fear me,” Hadrian said, and his face was cold again. “So should you, Vibia Sabina.”

  Oh, I do. But she kept talking anyway, forcing her hands to lie quiet in her lap rather than fisting her gown into sweaty handfuls of silk. “I know what little regard you have for a woman’s opinion, Hadrian. My purpose as Empress is to look impeccable and wave at crowds. But I have the blood of Caesars in my veins: My great-uncle was an Emperor you admired, and my father could have been an Emperor too had history fallen out a little differently. I’ve observed the doings of Caesars all my life. And I can tell you that unless you control your temper—unless you put a better face on for your people—you will never accomplish any of the great things you plan. You will be dead on the floor with a blade in your back, because that is what happens when emperors make their people nervous.”

  “And what would calm their simple little minds?” Hadrian’s eyes lay on her like a pair of blades. “A pretense of placid temper? A few jokes and smiles? The mask of a good man?”

  “It would be a start,” Sabina said quietly.

  Hadrian regarded her, unblinking. She stared straight back, allowing the silence to fall. Let me not be dead for this, she thought, and felt her palms sweating.

  “You have been very presumptuous with me this evening, Vibia Sabina,” her husband said at last. “And I am done listening to a woman’s prattle. Leave me.”

  Gladly, she wanted to scream, even as she slid off the couch and made for the doors. But did you hear me? Did you hear anything?

  She had no idea. But she had to try one more time. Because she heard her sister’s voice on the other side of the doors, and Faustina’s words were indistinct but they had the high edge of fear.

  “Pretend mercy,” Sabina said, looking over her shoulder at her husband. “Pretend it, even if you cannot feel it—and start with my sister’s husband. Trajan might have thought about appointing him heir, but it didn’t happen, so stop eyeing him suspiciously. You got the purple, not Titus, and you have it in you to be a great Emperor. I want to see you put these grand plans of yours in place, Hadrian. I want to see that very much.”

  “You want to see me pretend?” Hadrian asked benignly. “I am pretending I am not angry with you. Leave before I change my mind.”

  VIX

  Vindolanda, Northern Britannia

  I suppose there isn’t a man in the Empire who doesn’t put on a mask from time to time—to fool his fellows, to shield his thoughts, to hide his anger or his heart. We all hide ourselves from time to time. Emperor Hadrian was the only man I knew who was always hiding—who had a series of masks so myriad you could go mad trying to figure if any of them was real.

  T
here was Scholarly Emperor. Hadrian put that one on most often over dinner, reclining on one elbow and gesturing with the cup of wine in his hand as he expounded on some point of Stoic philosophy or defended the artistic merits of Terence over Plautus. Scholarly Emperor liked to appear a modest man; he always demurred (initially) whenever the guests begged for his opinions or his poetry—but Scholarly Emperor got irate very quickly if the dinner guests weren’t won over instantly by his brilliant arguments. I got used to directing a pointed stare over the Emperor’s shoulder, from my post at the wall, to any guest who argued with him too long. “The man with forty legions to command is always right,” I told one guest bluntly, and the arse not only took my advice but stole that line for himself.

  Scholarly Emperor wasn’t far removed from Judicial Emperor. Judicial Emperor was a trifle more remote, the gestures restrained from eager intellectual enthusiasm to formal, marble calm. Hadrian became Judicial Emperor during his public audiences, or when he raised a hand for the cheering crowds. Judicial Emperor was godlike, remote; but I trusted him more than the others—at least he was always fair.

  Judicial Emperor relaxed to Sporting Emperor on hunts or rides. The long words contracted to casual slang, and the hand that waved a lecturing finger in support of some philosophical point converted into a fist gripped around the shaft of a hunting spear. Sporting Hadrian was a good deal less formal, but he had a vicious streak—he’d crack you across the head with that spear shaft if you got between him and his prey on a hunt.

  There were other masks Hadrian used from time to time. Mercurial Emperor, with a lightning-quick line of jabs that could turn cruel or funny or both depending on his target . . . He had made old Servianus go scarlet with humiliation recently, lashing him with a jeering epigram that mocked his last speech in the Senate. And there was Autocratic Emperor, who scowled and stamped and clearly thought his footsteps shook the heavens.

  But what in the name of all the gods was this new mask he had worn ever since coming from Londinium to Vindolanda? Who was this even-tempered man who dealt patiently with his petitioners, who teased me about my poor horsemanship, who graciously offered to read Suetonius’s latest treatise once it was finished?

  I had no idea, but I never trusted the bastard when he was this good-humored.

  “A wall,” he was saying now—standing a little ahead of me on the makeshift bridge over the river, looking very much the soldier today in a breastplate and a common legionary’s cloak. He had the usual brace of hounds at his heels, a bare minimum of guards, and a handful of pebbles he was slinging one by one into the rushing water. “A new bridge here, six or seven piers at least. It can provide the foundation for the wall. Stretching west”—and one pebble plopped into the fast-flowing river, disappearing west.

  “West,” I echoed. “How far, Caesar?”

  “Until it meets the sea.”

  I blinked, trading glances with my second-in-command, who looked as startled as I. “That’s eighty miles, Caesar!”

  Hadrian grinned, and it surprised me. Since when did he waste his smiles and his charm on someone like me? In his eyes I was for killing people, not idle conversation about building plans. “I can already see that wall,” he continued. “Quarried stone, with a clay and rubble core. At least twenty feet broad—maybe thirty. Fifteen high; that should be enough if I couple it with a ditch to the northern side.” Swift gestures. “Signaling turrets, guard posts with barracks for legionaries . . .”

  “How much will that cost?” I tried to calculate the sheer value of stone, of laborers, of cattle and wagons. I didn’t know if I could count that high. “And how long will it all take?”

  “Years,” he said, and tossed another stone in the water. “What of it?”

  “But why?” I couldn’t help asking, since he seemed in a mood to answer questions. “Who needs a wall here?”

  “Because this is Rome.” Stabbing a finger at the squelchy patch of ground on which we both stood. “That is not.” Stabbing a finger at the squelchy patch of ground just thirty feet—the width of a massive wall—away.

  I looked to the south: windswept moors, craggy hills, dappling clouds. I looked to the north: windswept moors, craggy hills, dappling clouds. “It all looks the same to me, Caesar.”

  “Ah, but it isn’t.” Hadrian glanced over his shoulder at me, and his eyes sparkled. Damn it, why was he so good-tempered lately?

  He turned, gesturing me to follow. “I ordered another wall built along the northern border when we were in Germania,” he said as I fell in beside him. “You remember?”

  “A timber wall, Caesar. Not a stone monstrosity like you’re planning here. You’ll need the whole Britannic fleet for hauling building materials. Probably all the garrison legions, too.”

  “Exactly. I want them busy. The legions here have been troublesome in the past. I’ll pour all their discontent into an eighty-mile wall.”

  “Have them conquer the north.” I jerked my chin toward the distant purple hills across the river. “That’ll soak up their discontent better than a wall. And you won’t need any boundary to tell you what’s Rome and what’s not, because it will all be Rome. The whole island.”

  “I don’t want the other half of the island, Tribune. Scrubby hills too steep to plow, even scrubbier cattle, and if we’re lucky, a few paltry silver mines. And a bloodbath to get it—if these miserable little tribesmen in southern Britannia are bad, the northerners are even worse. Fighting them on their own land, struggling for every square foot of bramble and thorns?”

  I traded another glance with my second. His name was Boil, a fair-skinned Gaul built like a siege tower who was the last of my old tent-brothers from the Tenth Fidelis, and we’d been brothers-in-arms long enough that I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. “A bloodbath for the other half of this island?” I said. “Sounds like our kind of fight, Caesar.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt you could do it, Tribune. If I gave you at least three legions. But at the end, we’d still have nothing but scrubby cattle, sullen slaves, and a few paltry silver mines.”

  I shrugged, surprised at the twinge of hope I’d felt when he said “three legions.” Stupid barbarian, he will never give you legions. “You’d still own the whole island, though. Not just the bottom part of it.”

  Hadrian laughed. “You don’t like half measures, do you?”

  “No, Caesar.”

  “Then put your Praetorians to aiding in the wall’s construction, and satisfy yourself by making it the most splendid wall anyone has ever seen. I’ll have a good segment built as a sample before I leave Britannia, as an example to spur them when we leave.”

  “At fifteen feet high and thirty feet across, even a short segment of wall will take months, Caesar.”

  But he wasn’t listening; he was striding ahead making plans with waves of both hands. It was my old friend Boil who said softly, “Looks like we’d better get used to this rain?”

  “Looks like.”

  It wasn’t just the prospect of the great wall that galvanized the Emperor’s energy in Vindolanda. He tore through the region like a fire, evaluating, gesticulating, ordering. I tramped along behind him, and his odd cheer didn’t break once.

  And that just made me and everyone else more nervous. Because consistency was never Hadrian’s strength, was it? We were far too used to the parade of masks.

  “I tell you this, Senators,” I heard that old windbag Servianus say to a cluster of the Emperor’s advisers, just before he decided he’d had enough of Britannia and went back to Rome. “In our Eternal City, the Emperor was much absorbed in small things. Now he strides upon a wider stage. If no one can know his mind, can anyone guess what he may do next, upon such a stage?”

  Nobody knew, but they all worried. They whispered of a slave boy in Londinium whose eye he had put out in a fit of temper. They whispered of a certain chamber he was rumored to keep in his ever-e
xpanding villa springing up just outside Rome, a chamber he called his Hades, and into which no one but the Emperor had ever been allowed to go. They whispered of what he might keep there, because sometimes laughter was heard and sometimes sobs. I didn’t know if I believed that rumor—I’d certainly never been inside.

  But . . .

  We were a full month in Vindolanda before I was able to make the day journey I’d wanted to make since the moment we’d arrived. The journey back up the road I’d last seen at age eighteen, when I first left my home for the Eternal City. It was a gray, blustery morning the day I finally turned off that muddy road and slid down from my horse.

  Mirah gave me one of those looks of wifely amusement, bright-eyed in the red cloak that brought out the color in her cheeks. “You’re nervous, Vercingetorix!”

  A little. My parents would find me so changed—what if they didn’t like what they saw? I didn’t altogether like what I saw in the mirror anymore, after all.

  My daughters squealed at the mud on the hillside, refusing to get down from their mule. “That’s girls for you,” Antinous groaned, but he led the mule along behind me. I slid my hand into Mirah’s as I climbed, and she gave my fingers a squeeze.

  I saw the crowning roof of a snug little villa. Cow byres behind; those were new. Things were prosperous, then. I swallowed and felt the quick pressure of Mirah’s fingers. Rich grass ran up the slope toward the house, and hedges flowered against the villa’s walls. My feet took me unthinkingly around the east wall, where I remembered there had been a meager excuse for a garden.

  There still was. Someone had put in a fruit tree, but it looked pinched and leafless, and the herbs in their pots weren’t much more than twigs. I smiled. He still wasn’t any good at gardening, then, the broad-shouldered man in a blue tunic who squatted among the herbs with a trowel.

  My feet were soundless on the grass, but the man whipped about before I got a step farther, dropping his trowel and drawing the dagger at his waist instead. He was up in a crouch and ready to face me in an eyeblink. And though his shoulders were bent and his hair entirely gray, his crisp secutor stance could have graced any arena in Rome. And had.