Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  HADRIAN’S LOVE

  It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

  —MARCUS AURELIUS

  CHAPTER 5

  VIX

  A.D. 124, Winter

  Hispania

  The worst fight Mirah and I had in years, and it started over such a small thing. A letter!

  I’d been reading the latest missive from my wife’s family out loud, Mirah hanging over my shoulder to look at the words she couldn’t read, and I broke off in the middle with a snort. “Sounds like Simon’s getting a rebellious streak.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” We were in Hispania by that time; the girls were asleep, and Mirah had let her hair down for the night so it gleamed in the firelight. “Uncle Simon always agreed with my cousins whenever they talked of liberating Judaea. He just doesn’t thump the table and bellow.” A smile. “They can be tiresome, I know.”

  “Still—” I reread the bit about Simon, with whom I’d once shared a tent in the Tenth Fidelis as legionaries. “Simon, turning rebellious? He spent years serving Rome!”

  “He regrets those years. He was a foolish boy craving adventure, and he paid for that with decades of his life. He’s lucky his family took him back, as long as he’d drifted away from the faith. He was a different man the moment he returned.”

  “I’d rather have the man from my contubernium back than some fire-eyed spouter of liberty.” The dark-bearded man who’d welcomed me into the tent as a raw green recruit—there’s no friend like a friend from the days of war. “Fire-eyed spouters of liberty are all such bloody bores. Not to mention that they tend to die bloodily.”

  “Maybe it won’t have to be bloody this time,” my wife said as I put down the letter to build up the fire. The winter nights in Hispania could be cold—I’d be glad when Hadrian’s entourage made the crossing to Africa in the spring. “Uncle Simon has high hopes of Emperor Hadrian,” Mirah went on. “He let Parthia and Armenia go when he saw it wasn’t practical keeping them. Maybe he’d let Judaea go, too.”

  I laughed. “No.”

  “Why?” Mirah challenged.

  That was where Antinous would have jumped in: made some witty pun, gotten us smiling, then offered to fetch hot spiced wine. But he wasn’t here, so Mirah and I kept digging ourselves into the hole.

  “Judaea’s been part of Rome a good deal longer than Parthia, Mirah. We had nothing invested in Parthia but dead legionaries.” I’d railed about the waste of those lives when Hadrian withdrew from our hard-won territories . . . But I’d been battle-sick and heart-sore, not in any mind to listen to the cool wisdom of knowing what was worth defending, and what would be a sinkhole for yet more dead friends.

  Cool wisdom. Was I defending Hadrian’s decisions now—a man who had threatened to mutilate my son and bugger me in front of my men?

  Didn’t mean he wasn’t right about Parthia. I hated the man, but that didn’t make him stupid. “Judaea isn’t Parthia,” I said again. “Hadrian won’t give it up.”

  “He will if there’s enough trouble in the region. He’s a coward.” She sounded derisive, and why shouldn’t she? I’d said far worse than that about the Emperor. “If we make Judaea not worth fighting for—”

  “‘We’?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “My entire family is in Bethar, Vix. My parents, my sisters, Uncle Simon—”

  “And if they make trouble, who do you think will get sent to quash it?”

  “Not you,” Mirah reassured. “Praetorians don’t dirty themselves in provincial struggles.”

  She didn’t say it to sting. I knew she didn’t. I let some air out. “Boys I trained will be sent. Men I know.”

  Her voice rose. “Then that’s the price.”

  “It’s a fine thing to talk about price when you’re not the one paying it,” I shot back. “Rome’s given us a fine life—”

  “But we aren’t Roman. Even you. The things you endured as a child—”

  “I survived. And I don’t whine about it.”

  “But you don’t try to change it either. If you could only—”

  I heard a sniffle from the doorway. I looked over and saw two huge pairs of dark eyes—Dinah and Chaya, roused from their beds. We’d been louder than I thought.

  “I’ll tuck them back in.” Mirah rose, pushing her loose hair back. “We shouldn’t be quarreling over this anyway.”

  “Why?” I said. “Because we’ll wake the children, or because you’re right and I’m wrong and that’s an end to it?”

  Either she didn’t hear me or she pretended she didn’t hear me, whisking away to put the girls back to bed. I looked down at the letter that had caused all the fuss, and I tossed it in the fire.

  We slid between the bedcovers that night without saying a word. Mirah’s voice didn’t come until long after the lamp had been extinguished. “Is there something wrong, Vix? Ever since sending Antinous away . . .”

  “There’s nothing,” I said, and rolled away from her.

  But there’s no fooling a wife. Not a wife like mine, anyway. She curled against me, rubbing her hand across my chest. “Are you sure?”

  I kissed her to silence her, pulling her over me, but I couldn’t make love to her that night, much as I ached for her. Because I was lying to her—because I’d never told her what Hadrian said to me in Britannia. If I had, she’d explode into rage on my behalf. And she’d ask one very simple question.

  “How can you serve him?”

  And the answer was, Because he broke me. And I’d die before I’d say it, so I turned away from her again on the pillow and gazed long and silent into the dark.

  SABINA

  Rome

  “I made her laugh twice,” Sabina reported as she slipped from Faustina’s chamber to the atrium, and Titus’s worn face relaxed into one of the first smiles she’d seen since her visit began.

  “I knew it would do her good to see you.” He took Sabina’s hand, squeezing it. “You’re very good to come all the way from Thrace.”

  I’m not good at all, Sabina thought. Good was to take a child with parentage that could never be revealed and raise it as your own knowing you might be executed if the truth were uncovered. That was good; that was a depth of good that could never be matched or repaid. Sabina did not count herself as good, not compared to her sister and her dearest friend. It was no more than common decency, surely, to rush to your little sister’s side upon learning she had lost her baby son to a fever. Sabina had dropped the letter half-read and ordered a trireme to carry her from warm spice-scented Thrace to cool marble Rome.

  Little Marcus Galerius Aurelius Antoninus. Her nephew, whom she had never had the chance to meet. Lived no more than a year and a half, but he had put lines of grief around the eyes of Sabina’s little sister, and fresh gray in Titus’s hair. Sabina could see that very clearly, standing in the sunny light of the atrium as Titus talked of his son. “He looked like your father. That’s why we named him Marcus. Terribly wise eyes, for a baby! Annia claimed he understood every word we said . . .”

  Sabina felt a pang of a different kind, hearing Annia’s name. The fever that took little Marcus hadn’t touched Annia, and Sabina felt a warped, shamed pang of relief that if a child had had to be taken to the doors of the underworld, it hadn’t been her child.

  No, she thought. I may have sailed from Thrace to comfort my sister, but that doesn’t make me good. Not at all.

  “Annia was a surprisingly good big sister,” Titus was saying, passing a hand over his hair. It was a gesture that belonged to a much older man, Sabina thought. Someone Servianus’s age. “She can’t cross a room without knocking something over, but she’d rock the baby so gently—”

  “Titus.” Sabina cupped her brother-in-law’s worn cheek. “My dear, dear Titus, who’s looking after you while you’re looking after Annia and Faustina? How are you faring
?”

  “‘The life of the dead is retained in the memory of the living,’” he quoted. “According to Cicero, anyway. So my son will never die.”

  “Cicero is generally a comfort in bad times,” Sabina agreed. Titus’s face twisted, and she reached up and drew his head down against her shoulder. They stood in the atrium for a moment, Sabina on tiptoe as Titus breathed unevenly against the stiff folds of her stola. When he straightened, his face was calm again.

  “Will you be rejoining the Emperor in—where is he, Athens?”

  A year and a half of traveling had covered many provinces. Dry Hispania, restless Parthia, beautiful Mauretania where Sabina had walked the crocodile pools of the great Iseum. “Hadrian’s hashed things out among the Parthians, thrown up a great many temples, inspected the legions, so it’s on to see the ruins of Troy next.” Sabina drew Titus’s hand through her arm, and they drifted out of the atrium down toward the gardens. Titus’s villa sat on the northeast edge of the city, almost in the country—beyond the garden walls rolled vineyards and lush summer hills. “I’ll try to catch the Imperial party before they sail back to Athens.”

  Hadrian and Sabina had spent one of the early years of their marriage in Athens—it was a place her husband adored, arguing happily with bearded scholars while Sabina wandered sunburned and happy through the temples of Delphi. They’d meet each night tired and happy and spilling over with things to say to each other, Hadrian so excited he waved his arms to illustrate his points. That had been long ago, but in Hadrian’s ravenous delight to be back in the land he admired so much more than Rome, Sabina thought she could see traces of that bright-eyed young philosopher again. Just traces, but still . . .

  Titus was looking sad. “I suppose you’ll be making sail soon.”

  “I’m afraid so. Hadrian wasn’t pleased when I left him.”

  “He likes having you at his side, then.”

  “So it seems.” Hadrian didn’t always take her advice, but he was at least willing to hear it—and he had not had any more of those murderous lapses in temper in many months. A half-mad slave had set on him with a knife in Hispania, and rather than having the fellow tossed to the lions, Hadrian merely had him disarmed and taken away. “The fellow was clearly mad,” the Emperor mused. “I suppose a flogging will do for punishment, instead of execution.”

  “Why not pardon him?” Sabina had dared to counter. “Send him to your physicians to be treated, and let word of your compassion spread.”

  Hadrian had given a noncommittal hmph, but he had taken the suggestion. Progress indeed.

  “The Emperor continues to ignore me.” Titus rippled a hand over the rosemary hedge. “Perhaps he will be content to let me live quietly and out of sight.”

  “You are far too capable to live as quietly as you wish, Titus.”

  “Capable? At the moment I do nothing but wrangle Servianus in the Senate. He has been good enough to call me ‘decently respectful for a mere boy.’ You know he wants to marry Annia to his grandson?”

  “We’re not worrying about Annia’s future husband already, are we?” Sabina blinked. “Little Pedanius can’t be above eleven. I’m to bring him back to Mysia with me—Servianus battened down on me as soon as I arrived in Rome, droning on about how it’s time the Emperor’s great-nephew took his place at Hadrian’s side.”

  Titus actually had a smile for her mimicry. “Well, Faustina doesn’t favor any talk of betrothal at such an age either. Servianus didn’t like that. ‘For a woman so light-minded and full of levity to impose her whims on the future of the Emperor’s heir—’”

  Sabina thought of her sister, folding and refolding one of her son’s small blankets and trying valiantly to stop crying. “Let’s hope she’s full of levity again, and very soon.”

  A child’s shriek interrupted them, and a pair of figures careened around the hedge. A tall boy, laughing and sun-bronzed, calling over his shoulder, “Come on, you can run faster than that!” Behind him came Annia, deadly serious as she pelted at his heels, and at the rear ran a black dog bouncing and barking. All three skidded to a halt, the boy running a hand over his tumbled hair, Annia scrubbing her hands down her dusty tunic and giving her father a sparkling grin.

  “Lady.” The boy gave a graceful bow. More a young man than a boy, and a very handsome one: a young Adonis wearing a linen tunic and an infectious smile. “I apologize,” he said, nudging the dog back from Sabina’s skirts. “My tutors at the paedogogium would surely wash their hands of me if I bowled over the Empress of Rome. Or let my dog shed all over her hem—” He glared at the creature, which lolled its tongue and laughed up at him.

  “This is Antinous.” Titus gave a cordial nod to the young Adonis. “Did you know our old friend Vercingetorix had a son?”

  “No, I didn’t.” The things one learned about old lovers. Ever since that night on the wall in Britannia, Vix turned into a pillar whenever he entered Sabina’s presence: tall, granite, utterly mute.

  “Titus Aurelius helped my father find a foster family for me, after my mother died,” Antinous explained. “Before my father had a home of his own into which he could take me—”

  “Your mother was a lovely girl.” Titus smiled. “As often as I sat eating her lamb stew in those cold German nights when I was a tribune, I owed her son consideration once I learned he’d come to Rome. Annia brought him up to me at a party . . .”

  “The first friend I made in the Eternal City!” Antinous tousled Annia’s hair in affection before giving a graceful bow to her father. “Thank you for your many kindnesses, patronus.” Sabina heard real warmth behind the formal words. “I’ve never known much about my mother. My father, well, he’s everything brave and kind, but he’s no wordsmith. All he could ever tell me was that my mother was Bithynian and beautiful, and he doesn’t even like saying that because then his wife scowls and asks how beautiful.”

  “Most wives would,” Titus agreed as Sabina laughed. “That fiery wife of Vix’s—did he haul her with him to Thrace?”

  “No,” Antinous said. “He wanted to, but after Hispania she decided she’d bring the girls back to Rome. Tired of going back and forth across the Empire like a message case, I suspect. But now my schooling’s done, she’s agreed I’ll go join my father wherever he’s accompanied the Emperor to next.” Antinous’s carved and handsome face glowed at the prospect of adventure, and Sabina gave a small internal sigh. When she’d been Antinous’s age, all she’d wanted to do was see the world. Now she’d seen most of it, from the wild places of the west to the hot places of the east—but the price for seeing all those horizons had been so much higher than she’d ever imagined.

  Be careful what you wish for, Antinous, she thought with a sudden tang in her mouth like a bite of iron. What if you don’t get it? Or even worse, what if you do? He looked eager and happy, bouncing on his feet to charge the future, and the Fates ate such youths and their dreams alive.

  Listen to me, she mocked. Saying “at your age” as though I were an old woman.

  But wasn’t she an old woman? You were old when your life was finished, surely, and at forty years old her life was finished. A child she could not acknowledge, a lover who would not acknowledge her, and nothing ahead but empty years in an empty bed, and endless empty smiles beside a man she had to keep from becoming a monster.

  Well, there was a reason they called it duty instead of pleasure.

  Handsome Antinous was talking on, looking down at Annia. “I’ll miss you especially, little monkey,” he said, and laughed as she tackled him in a massive hug.

  Sabina smiled at the sight. “Join my entourage, Antinous,” she said on impulse. “I travel to rejoin the Emperor soon, and I always have room for one more page.”

  Antinous hesitated. “My father thought I should avoid the Emperor. I, well, I didn’t make a very good impression when I first laid eyes on him.”

  Sabina laughed. “Y
ou don’t think I see much of the Emperor myself, do you? Except for public functions, and I can certainly excuse you from those. And you’ll reach Greece quite a bit faster traveling on my trireme.”

  Antinous’s face lit up. “Then thank you, Lady. I would be honored.”

  “If I have to take little Pedanius Fuscus, I certainly don’t mind taking you.” Sabina stole one last glance to memorize the pattern of Annia’s latest freckles—I must have another cameo made to take with me, she is growing so fast—and turned away, Antinous falling in at her side. “What kind of impression did you make on the Emperor, there must be a story there . . .”

  ANNIA

  Rome

  Marcus’s voice drifted up toward Annia. “What did you do this time?”

  She poked her head out the window of her chamber, looking down on the garden path below where he stood with his armload of scrolls. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t get locked into your room all day for nothing.” Marcus was a regular visitor to Annia’s house—every time his dreary mother had a headache (and she had more headaches than a hundred-headed hydra), he got dumped here and Annia had to entertain him. And that was impossible. He wouldn’t play trigon with the slave children (“My mother says they’d give me fleas”), he wouldn’t let Annia teach him to tumble or stand on his head (“My grandfather says I’d break my neck”), and he wouldn’t sneak rides on the chariot horses (“I don’t sneak”). What was Annia supposed to do with a visitor like that?

  “I’m hungry,” she said instead, before Marcus could keep asking questions about why she was in trouble. “Can’t you steal me a honey cake?” Annia wasn’t to be allowed a single sweet until her punishment was done, and the smell of cakes was wafting clear from the culina.

  “You’re not supposed to—”

  “Just go steal me a cake! Antinous would.” Antinous wouldn’t even have to steal; the cooks would be blushing and pouring them into his hands.