Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  Not yet, Antinous thought with a quick catch in his chest. Let’s follow the winds first, the winds that smell like sand and cinnamon. Follow them anywhere, just not Judaea!

  “Judaea,” Hadrian decided. “After Greece.”

  Then let Greece last forever, Antinous thought as his heart kicked. Because he was not ready to face his father. Not now.

  Maybe not ever.

  VIX

  Bethar

  There’s nothing worse than a girl who thinks she’s in love. Dinah was fourteen now, dreamy and dewy and mooning over the blacksmith’s boy from the south quarter of Bethar, and Chaya was sullen because she didn’t have a boy to moon over yet. I finally warned that if they didn’t stop their sighing and squabbling I’d strap them both. That sent them sniffling off to their chamber, making me think of a little red-haired girl boasting that she never cried, not ever, and Mirah went on calmly eating.

  “They’re young and filled with storms,” she said. “It means they’ll be ready to marry soon.” I could see my wife settling back in her chair, ready to discuss every eligible son-in-law in Bethar, and I pushed back from the table.

  “I’ll be gone a day or two.”

  Mirah brightened. “Are you going with Uncle Simon? He so wants to speak with you . . .”

  “No.” I paused. “I thought I’d go to Lydda. Thereabouts.”

  Her face fell. She knew what I wanted to see there. “It will only make you unhappy, Vix.”

  I cut her off. “What does Simon want to talk with me about?” My friend had been traveling lately, speaking vaguely of unnamed friends. I’d offered to come with him, but Simon looked at me a moment and then gave a noncommittal refusal. “Where’s he going this time?”

  Mirah gave me the same blank look her uncle had. “I don’t know.”

  I grunted, reaching for my gladius, and then I hesitated for a moment before I reached for my lion skin. I’d given off wearing it in Judaea—“You look like some pagan demigod,” Mirah scolded me—and besides, the pelt was old and patchy. Pathetic. But I set my jaw and flung it over one shoulder, and Mirah looked at it and set her cup down with a rattle.

  “Why are you going?” she said, low-voiced. “Why can’t you stay and talk about who the girls should marry, and if we should hire a new doorman for our gate with the streets getting so restless? Why won’t you stop pacing and scowling and wanting to revisit your legion days?” She spoke Aramaic, because she spoke it everywhere and that included speaking to me, even though I still thought and spoke and dreamed in Latin. And right now, it angered me. “Stay, Vix.”

  “I won’t be more than a night.” I heard Dinah and Chaya squabbling in the next room, and I raised my voice. “Hell’s gates, will you two stop mewling!” And I banged out of the house before either of them could start to weep in earnest.

  Girls in love. Is it any wonder I fled to visit my old legion, now that the Tenth Fidelis was stationed in Judaea?

  I kept my hand to the hilt of my gladius as I walked. I didn’t know what had changed in the last few years, but the heat seemed to linger in the streets, and it made throats scratchy and tempers sore. I saw more fights break out in my wine shop; I saw men clustering on street corners stabbing fingers at the air as they argued some point that I never heard because such conversations fell silent whenever I passed. Years ago when rebellion had roiled across Cyrene and Cyprus, Mirah had said that Romans looked at her with distrustful eyes and flung mud at her in the market. These days the Jews flung mud at me when my back was turned, at the man who still looked like a Roman with his shaved chin and his gladius, and I didn’t like to think what it meant.

  I didn’t know how to present myself at the legion’s winter quarters, so I gave some muttered story about an old veteran’s petition and plunged between the orderly rows of barracks, breathing in the familiar smell of a legion: leather and metal, sweat and horse dung. I pressed through, looking for the principia that sat at the core of any legion’s camp, and then I threaded the lines of petitioners to the shrine at the far end. I stepped behind the screen and I stopped because she was waiting for me.

  “Hello,” I said softly, and my hand rose of its own accord to caress her. The legion’s eagle, the most precious of her standards, a proud winged bird staring at me with fierce pride from her perch on the standard pole. “I carried you,” I told her, stroking the cool wings. “Do you remember your old aquilifer?”

  Of course she didn’t. I’d carried this same eagle in my hands, and I still carried her in my heart, but she stared out proud and uncaring. I was infinitely replaceable, just one of many beneath the wings she spread across the Empire. She didn’t serve me; I served her—and the moment I’d heard the Tenth Fidelis was coming from the Parthian border to be stationed in Judaea, I’d yearned to see her again. Maybe I’d thought it would cure me. But she just gave me her arrogant stare, lovely and unforgiving, and my hand fell away from her proud head. I pushed out of the shrine with my eyes blurred, and that was when an unbelieving voice called my name.

  “Vercingetorix?” Quick footsteps behind me, and I swiped a hasty hand across my eyes. “Vercingetorix the Red?”

  “What?” I said, turning, and it came out in a growl.

  “It is you, sir!” A centurion was coming toward me, a man with a broad dark face and an even broader grin. I fumbled for the name.

  “Africanus?”

  “That’s right.” To my surprise, he saluted. “You traded nearly a month’s pay to my centurion to get me into your century when you first made rank. The first thing you said to me was that I had a damned unoriginal name.”

  “I did say that.” He’d been a muscled youth then; now he had to be a man of forty with gray in his hair. When had we all started going gray?

  “I’m up for Primus Pilus soon,” he was saying proudly. “Like you, sir.”

  “No need to call me sir. I’m no legion man anymore. No Praetorian, either.”

  “We heard.” He gave a cheerful leer. “You couldn’t keep your hand out from under the Empress’s skirts, was that it?”

  I gave my best centurion’s glower and was pleased to see him brace just a bit. “I’m just here to see the eagle, since she was near.”

  “Then you’re still a legion man, sir. You should come to the barracks with me—there’s plenty who remember you!”

  “I haven’t set foot on Tenth territory in more than fifteen years.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “You made the jump from legionary to aquilifer,” he said as if explaining to an idiot. “Then centurion, then Primus Pilus, and then you’d have commanded the legion. Every boy who joins the Tenth Fidelis knows your name. ‘Vercingetorix the Red, the man who made it all the way from the ranks to the commander’s tent.’ They invoke you in their prayers, hoping for your luck.”

  “Tell them they don’t want my luck,” I managed to say through my astonishment. “I never got the legion, did I?”

  “You’d have had it if Trajan lived, bless his name.” Africanus shrugged. “You know we still train with gladiator drills, not just your old century but all of them? And the Emperor approved the use of Parthian drill instructors the way you were always pestering about, and there’s a regulation manual—”

  My lips were stiff. “There is?”

  He dragged me off with him, and there were men here who remembered my name, and boys who hadn’t been born when I left the Tenth but still looked at me as though they’d expected me to be eight feet tall. They begged for stories of my old fights, and asked about Judaea: “Is it true they cut the cocks off their baby boys? The Emperor says he’ll put a stop to that—”

  “Good luck.” I thought of Mirah’s firebrand cousins. “And they don’t cut the cocks off, they just take a slash at the skin—”

  “I’ve heard things are tense here,” Africanus said more seriously. “I’ve got a cousin somewhere in the Tenth Fra
tensis, and he says things are getting hot around Jerusalem’s ruins.”

  “When is Jerusalem anything but hot?” I thought of the men who quarreled on the street corners in Bethar, and shivered.

  I was borne off to the bathhouse where the steam and the sweat loosened tongues and the men asked what Empress Sabina was like under her skirts. “We’ve got a statue of her with the Emperor’s in the principia, and if she’s that stiff and stony in a bedroll—”

  “She’s not.”

  “Then what’s she like?”

  “Limber,” I said, and there was lewd jeering. None for Hadrian, though. “The Emperor will review us when he comes back from Greece,” Africanus said. “And he’ll not find us lacking. You should hear what the Third Augusta said of him; everything investigated down to the last tent. He wasn’t too proud to sleep and eat the way the legionaries did, either—”

  No condemnation in their voices; no contempt for the man who had followed Trajan. They were a fit and sun-bronzed lot, clearly busy and content, and my heart ached. “Hadrian’s a bastard,” I said harshly, but they just shrugged.

  “You screwed his wife. Sure, he’s got a pretty boy he’s buggering, but you can’t expect an emperor to look the other way when you shaft his wife, can you?”

  I stiffened, but if anyone remembered the little boy who had trotted after me on the Parthian campaigns, they didn’t connect him with the Emperor’s favorite.

  I rode back to Bethar on a tide of rude jokes and good wishes. When I approached with my wine-heavy head and my eagle-heavy heart, I saw Simon in the doorway, and I glowered.

  “So Mirah told you I went to see the Tenth? You should have come with me. I asked you to when they first arrived, and you spat on the ground!”

  “My niece,” he said, “didn’t tell me anything. But she’s been crying, and normally that means you’ve been an ass.”

  I was sore, snappish, and snarling, in no mood to be scolded. “I know you never wanted me to marry Mirah,” I snarled. “Hard to watch your favorite niece marry a man you used to whore with in your legion days; I understand that. But you don’t care to remember your legion days, Simon ben Cosiba, so I’ll be damned if I’ll have them held against me. Because I love your niece. I came here for her, and I’ve stayed here for her, and bugger you to Hades and gone if you spit at me. Because if it weren’t for Mirah, I’d take my swords and go back to the Tenth Fidelis in a heartbeat.”

  His voice was quiet. “Would you?”

  “I’m not like you, Simon. I’m not anything but a soldier. I never was.” My eyes stung, remembering the gleam of the eagle, the smell of the legion, the rough laughter and the familiar cameraderie. “Hell’s gates, but I miss it.”

  He turned to go. “Maybe you don’t have to miss it.”

  “The legion?”

  “No. Being a soldier.”

  I barked out a bitter laugh. “What exactly do you propose I do?”

  “You could still fight, Vix.” Simon glanced over his shoulder, eyes gleaming dark in his bearded face, and once again he reminded me oddly of Hadrian. “Just not for Rome.”

  CHAPTER 11

  ANTINOUS

  A.D. 128, Autumn

  Eleusis

  “Well, my star?” The smile in Hadrian’s voice came clearly through the blackness of Antinous’s closed eyes. “What did the kykeon show you this time?”

  Antinous opened his eyes to the light of dawn. His head rested in the Emperor’s lap, his lashes were tear-wet, and his mouth held a foul taste. He saw the massive tangling branches overhead of the oak tree—the same oak where he and Hadrian had lain together that first time at Eleusis. “Nothing,” he said slowly. “I saw . . . nothing.”

  “No starry visions?” Hadrian stroked a hand through Antinous’s hair.

  “No.” Antinous tried to swallow the sour taste on his tongue. Every muscle in his body hurt. “What did you see?”

  “No terrors,” the Emperor said softly. “Just your face.”

  I was the one to see terrors, Antinous thought, and his stomach roiled. How could that be? As soon as they had come to Athens for the winter, he had been every bit as eager as the Emperor to take the rites at Eleusis again. They had linked hands through the long night walks, washed each other’s hair in the sea, and Antinous had exploded in laughter watching the Emperor try to hold his sacrificial piglet still. They had found the oak that was their tree, drunk the kykeon out of a single cup, and Antinous had swallowed eagerly, ready for that soul-widening bliss he remembered so well.

  But this time there had been no starry void. There had been nothing but—blankness.

  “Well, we can’t catch the mind of the gods every time.” Hadrian shifted Antinous’s head off his lap with a kiss, already rising to return to the temple. “Better to dream of nothing than to dream of monstrous faces!”

  No. Nothing was not nothing. The nothing had been darkness; lonely, swirling, lightless emptiness. Far more terrifying than any loom of monstrous faces. Antinous sat up, squeezing his eyes shut, and it was there again, black and implacable, pressing in from all sides—

  Panic roared inside him, fast as a flame. He gagged, vomiting on hands and knees into the dry grass. Get out of me, he thought, his stomach jerking and heaving, and he did not know if he meant the darkness or the kykeon that had caused it. Sweet gods, get out of me!

  “Easy.” Hadrian steadied him, an arm about his shoulders. “You’re shaking,” he exclaimed, and pressed a hand to Antinous’s cheek. “And you’re ice-cold—”

  “I fear I have seen the future.” Antinous sat back on his heels, gasping as though he had sprinted a mile. His stomach still roiled, nauseated and voided, and his eyes burned. He didn’t want to blink. If his eyes closed even for a flash, the black could rush back in. “I have seen the future, and it is a dark one.”

  He feared the Emperor would blanch—gods knew, Hadrian was superstitious; he’d study star charts and seek out strange rituals and buy magic charms from the east to test if they worked. But he tended to choose the omens he wanted to believe and those he did not, and this morning he was evidently in too good a humor to want it spoiled by darkness of any kind. “My moody star, don’t borrow trouble!” Hadrian pulled Antinous’s head against his chest, sounding fond. “It was just a dream.”

  Antinous burrowed into the Emperor’s shoulder, trying to slow his racing heart. “You’re right,” he managed to say. “Just a dream.” A dream brought on by a cup of pennyroyal and barley and strange herbs.

  But he could not shake his foreboding, not for the rest of the rites at Eleusis, not for the serene winter they spent in Greece, not in the spring when they moved on to Ephesus. He would wake in the night under the comforting weight of Hadrian’s arm and see swirling black. The future, he would think. The future is empty.

  And then he would think, with increasing dread, Whose future?

  He did not get his answer until summer, when Hadrian took them all to Antioch and set his sights at once on the great flat peak rearing up to the southern horizon. “I always meant to climb Mount Casius. To make sacrifice to Jupiter at the temple, during the sunrise hour when the sun shows itself only to the mountain’s peak . . .”

  “Oh, gods,” Sabina had whispered to Antinous. “We’re going up the mountain at dawn, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” Antinous sighed. A dawn hike up a steep mountain—just the thing for a man with a tendency to fevers and joints that swelled!

  But Hadrian was breathing easily enough at the summit, gazing out over the mountain’s peak into the rolling gray mass of cloud. “One could see Jupiter himself from these heights!”

  Antinous looked at the Imperial entourage panting and staggering up the mountain track behind them in the cool predawn darkness. “I think you killed your court.”

  “That is merely a bonus,” Hadrian said, and they both laughed.

&nbs
p; All across the barren stone outcroppings of the summit, Hadrian’s courtiers were flinging themselves down. Empress Sabina was still on her feet, however, and Antinous came to offer her a water skin. She tipped it gratefully over the back of her neck, flushed rosy as a girl. “I used to be able to march at legion pace and never fall behind,” she complained. “I’ve grown soft and useless!”

  “Not useless, Lady.” He smiled. “Beautiful.”

  “Flatterer.” She put her hands to her back and stretched, lithe as a cat. “Good to see you smile, Antinous. You’ve been too solemn since the Mysteries.”

  His smile vanished, and he looked out at the swirling mass of clouds wrapping the peak. Gray, he told himself. Not black. It was no premonition; it was just cloud.

  “Caesar!” A white-robed priest descended from the peak-roofed temple crowning the mountain’s flat summit, and a flower-crowned bull had already been prepared, pawing at the stone. The rest of the Imperial entourage hastened into place as Hadrian strode forward, and Antinous heard a distant rumble of thunder as the priest effused. “—surely Caesar will strike a coin to commemorate his visit to our temple? Naturally we will erect a statue—”

  “And another to our divine Empress,” Antinous heard Lucius Ceionius proclaim. “Artemis, lady of the wild, as you were proclaimed in Aigeae! Carved as you stand here, I think.”

  “What, sweating and rumpled?” Sabina gave a low-voiced laugh, as Hadrian waved a hand in acceptance of the priest’s flattery.

  “Dewy and glorious,” Lucius corrected. “Far above petty mortal women who would fuss over such things as dust and blood. I can see you, ice-white Phrygian marble with a moonstone diadem upon your brow. I would dress myself as Apollo to match you, gold glory to your silver allure . . .”