Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  Amusement pierced Antinous’s formless foreboding for a moment, and he leaned down to murmur in the Empress’s ear. “Lucius is trying to seduce you.”

  “Since Eleusis,” she agreed. “Very flattering at my age. Though one has to wonder if he has gone mad. Does he forget what happened to the last men accused of being too informal with me?”

  “Perhaps the Emperor might be persuaded to look the other way?” Antinous said lightly, though he knew it unlikely. I’m not sure he would allow that even if I were the one to ask it. Which is a pity, because I think you need a lover, Lady.

  The Empress looked at him as though she knew what he was thinking. “Do you see me filling my bed with a man who theme-costumes his slaves and thinks the two finest things in life are beautiful clothes and other men’s wives?”

  “He might make you laugh.” Antinous rather liked Lucius, for all his vanities. He’ll actually speak with me, without looking down his nose or sneering. “And he’s right about one thing, Lady—you would make a very fine Artemis. Wild and laughing and always out of men’s reach.”

  Hadrian’s voice interrupted the priest, who was droning over the bull with its wreath of blossoms. “Shouldn’t we wait?” he demanded, eyes scanning the heaped dark clouds that still wrapped the mountain in near-night. “Surely the sacrifice must take place at the moment of dawn, when the temple is touched with the first rays of the sun—”

  “I assure Caesar that it is dawn.” The priest sounded nervous that he could not sweep the thunderheads away at the Emperor’s command. “The clouds but hide the light of the sun.”

  He began his chanting again, raising the sacrificial knife, and it all happened so quickly. A final peal of thunder, shockingly loud overhead—Sabina flung her hands over her head, crying out, but her cry was drowned in the great spine-ripping crack from the heavens, as a jagged shaft of blue-white light lanced from the clouds and struck.

  Antinous opened his eyes to a vista of swirling black cloud overhead, his ears ringing like anvils. This, he thought in a moment’s disjointed panic, and tasted kykeon sour and seductive on his tongue. This is what I saw. Swirling dark and swirling fear—

  The Empress’s voice broke through the ringing of his ears, then. Her voice, raised in fear as he had never heard it in his life. “Hadrian! Caesar!”

  Terror swept Antinous. Hadrian, he thought, sweet gods, no, no—and then the words were gone and there was nothing in his skull but a huge reverberating scream. He stumbled to his feet, everything in his vision lined by a nimbus of jerky light as though still limned in the moment when he’d seen the lightning strike—but even that strange jerkiness could not hide the horror of what he saw: the sacrificial bull lying stone dead upon the sacred rock, its garland of flowers gone stiff as its legs.

  And Hadrian flat on his back beside it, staring eyes gazing at the churning sky.

  No. No, it could not be this—it could not be death at dawn, darkness claiming his light. That could not be what the vision at Eleusis meant. My future, he had thought. It was my future, not Hadrian’s!

  Antinous realized he was shouting the Emperor’s name as he crashed to his knees beside the limp form. Sabina was already there, shaking Hadrian’s big shoulder—she looked up, trying to raise her voice, but he could hear nothing, feel nothing but his own terror. No, no, not him—still howling Hadrian’s name, as thunder rolled through the heavens and the lightning played and flashed like a mad god’s smiles.

  “Antinous!” Sabina’s hand cracked across his cheek, cutting him off mid-shout. He stared at her, chest heaving, still tasting the deadly promise of the kykeon.

  “Antinous, stop.” The Empress’s voice came quiet. “Don’t you see? He lives.”

  Antinous heard his own voice come in a cracked whisper. “He lives?” Hope burst in his chest as violent as a sun being born, and he looked from Sabina’s face to Hadrian’s.

  Take my life, Antinous offered the uncaring gods, looking at that beloved, bearded face. Take my life if you require a sacrifice—but spare his.

  Hadrian’s chest rose—fell—rose again. Antinous’s own chest hitched violently. Hadrian’s eyes fluttered in a slow blink, coming into focus. His lips moved, and Antinous knew the words. My star.

  He let his head drop against the Emperor’s chest in a silent gasp, as Hadrian began to laugh. He clasped the back of Antinous’s neck, sitting up, and Antinous felt the press of lips against his hair. He stayed where he was, on his knees on the bare rock, as Hadrian bounded to his feet still laughing. You live, he thought numbly. You live. He felt as though the heart had been torn from his chest and then stuffed roughly back in.

  The priest and the rest of the court began to fuss then, but Hadrian brushed them all away. His eyes sparkled, and he spread his arms to the heavens.

  “Hadrian Caesar salutes you!” he called to the gods, “Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain—” and as though in answer, thunder rolled again and the rain began to fall in sheets.

  SABINA

  The ringing in Sabina’s ears had more or less faded away by the time she came from her private baths at the palace in Antioch. Her maid was waiting with a clean bath drape, looking worried. “Don’t worry, the lightning didn’t strike me.” The girl smiled back; a little African no more than eleven whom Sabina had spotted when she came to watch the mud-brick walls rise. The girl had been trailing an engineer, half-starved and beaten and wearing the saffron robe of a whore, but she had something of Annia’s defiance in her chin. Sabina claimed the girl and, when the engineer protested, gave the order that he be flogged for so misusing his property. Hadrian had looked exasperated, but with a glance at Antinous’s watching face he said, “The Empress may please herself. The women of Rome are hers to govern, as the men are mine.”

  He has changed, she thought. And gave a prayer of thanks to the listening gods that he was not dead—not killed in the shaft of lightning like the bull. What would Rome be without Publius Aelius Hadrian?

  That thought chilled her bones. He had no named heir. If that lightning had taken his life, the throne would be empty, Sabina widowed and irrelevant, Antinous’s heart shattered in pieces . . . And very likely, the Empire in chaos. Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain, she thought. More like the bringer of peace.

  Long may he live to keep bringing it.

  “Antinous,” she said as she came into the atrium outside. “I thought you would be with the Emperor.”

  “He’s bathing.” Antinous sat at a marble bench, hands hanging between his knees. “In great high spirits.”

  “Well,” Sabina acknowledged, still toweling off her damp hair. “It was a rather dramatic morning. You will not be surprised to hear that Lucius Ceionius plans a costume of storm gray with his slave girls dressed to match as rain clouds.”

  She expected Antinous to laugh, perhaps tease again about Lucius trying to seduce her, but he didn’t even look up. “Do you count it as a good omen, Lady? The lightning striking so close to our Emperor as he makes sacrifice to the thunder god?”

  Sabina piled the towel into the arms of her little maid and went to sit beside Antinous. “The Emperor seems convinced it is a good omen. Why should we argue with him?”

  “Because he won’t see.” Antinous’s head jerked up, and to her astonishment she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed. “It means ill for him, Lady. I’m sure of it.”

  “But the Emperor wasn’t harmed.” She touched Antinous’s shoulder. “Not a scratch. What kind of ill omen is that?”

  Antinous hesitated. “Perhaps it foretells his death.”

  “The only times he’s ever been kept to his bed were when he broke his leg on a bear hunt—the hunt where he met you—and the hunt before this tour east where he broke his collarbone.”

  “It wasn’t just his collarbone that summer, Lady—the reason he delayed this journey east. He had fevers all summer, and his joints pained him—”

/>   Sabina felt her bath drape start to slide down her arm, and pushed it back up.

  “He kept it quiet because he didn’t want anyone thinking he was growing weak.” Antinous’s voice rose. “He pushes himself too hard! This sprint up the mountain for a look off the top of the world, and those days marching with the legionaries just to prove he can keep up with the youngest of them—he won’t take care. Now it’s Jupiter himself sending omens, and he still won’t listen.” A ragged sigh. “The lightning didn’t kill him, but what if his own habits do?”

  “Antinous.” She cupped his carved cheek in her hand. “He would not want you to worry so.”

  “But I do.” His eyes were pools of anguish. Hadrian does not deserve such love, she couldn’t help thinking. What has he done to earn such a treasure?

  But Antinous had earned it—he had a soul made of love if Sabina had ever seen one. If he wanted peace of mind about his beloved, she would see he got it. “Take me to Hadrian. Now.”

  Her husband was soaking in his private baths, muscled arms spread along the hot pool’s marble lip as the water lapped nearly to his shoulders, head tilted back and eyes closed against the wreathing steam. “Antinous,” he said without looking up. “The steam has me dizzy; I think I may need your arm to rise—”

  “It’s not the heat making you dizzy,” Antinous said. “I’ve told the Empress.”

  Hadrian’s eyes snapped open. He looked at Sabina, and she didn’t think it was bathhouse heat that put the slow flush into his cheeks.

  Sabina folded her still-damp arms across her breasts. “Antinous is worried.”

  “I’m a trifle singed by the lightning, but—”

  “Please, Caesar?” Antinous pleaded. “Show her.”

  Hadrian stared another moment, and then he rose slowly until the water lapped his hips. Trickles sluiced off his shoulders over the springy hair at his chest, along the muscled arms that could still down a boar with one strike—but he swayed as he rose; Sabina could see that. “See?” he said, defensive. “Perfectly well.”

  “He has fevers.” Antinous sounded miserable. “He has one now, I’d say. Headaches come too, and aches in the joints. And his skin hardens in patches, and at its worst it’s so painful he can’t bear to feel cloth on it.”

  “That was two years ago. The summer before we left Rome.”

  “—and you were so dizzy you couldn’t sit a horse, which is why you postponed the journey east,” Antinous plowed onward—Antinous of the exquisite manners, overriding the Emperor. “You’re dizzy now, aren’t you? I can see you swaying—”

  “No,” Hadrian snapped, even as Sabina saw he was unsteady in the water. “You are mistaken.”

  “Perhaps I overstep,” Antinous said. “But I do it for your own good.”

  Hadrian’s head jerked up, and Sabina saw the flash of anger in his eyes. She expected him to lash out, give Antinous a cut with that whip-sharp tongue, but he controlled himself. “Don’t fuss at me, my star,” he said gruffly, and reached for the strigil.

  Antinous stepped down into the pool beside him, water floating his tunic around him. He touched the frown lines between Hadrian’s eyes, a gesture Sabina had seen before—usually it made Hadrian laugh, but now he just jerked away, still frowning. Antinous withdrew his hand, taking the strigil from the Emperor instead, and motioning him to hold out his arms. “I do worry,” he said, very quiet, and scraped down one muscled shoulder. “Perhaps too much.”

  Hadrian melted at once, looking placating—Hadrian, placating. Sabina would never had believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. “The fever is nothing, Antinous, you can see for yourself! And my skin troubles me sometimes, but it’s just irritation from this eastern heat—”

  “And if it gets worse? Hardened and rashed, as it did that summer in Rome?” Antinous drew the strigil down the Emperor’s muscled back, sounding mild but still very firm. “It got very bad then—don’t be defensive, Caesar; I know how much it troubled you!”

  “Well, it’s not troubling me now.” Hadrian looked over his shoulder, cajoling for one of Antinous’s smiles, but the young man just gave him a steady look.

  Sabina stepped forward then. “Antinous is right,” she said coolly. “You do push yourself too hard, Hadrian. If you wish to avoid fevers and vomiting and dizziness—in the desert heat, in the summertime, which is quite enough to make anyone ill—then you will take greater care of yourself.”

  “I do not need minding!”

  “You do, because when you are ill, you are short-tempered and you lash out at everything.” Sabina raised her eyebrows. “That incident in Parthia?”

  Hadrian scowled. Settling disputes among the ever-quarreling easterners recently, he’d lost his temper when Parthia’s king mocked Rome’s lavish gifts by sending a few threadbare gold-embroidered cloaks. Hadrian had put the cloaks on three hundred condemned Parthian prisoners, and had them all sent to the arena and slaughtered. Sabina had been surprised; he’d all but given up the habit of petty vengeful gestures like that. If he had been in the grip of a fever and a headache at the time . . .

  “Ill health is not good for your temper or your reputation for mercy,” Sabina continued, unfolding her arms. “So allow me to be firm with you, husband. Take greater care of yourself, or I will begin fussing over your health before the rest of the court until the rumors of your imminent demise spread back to Rome, and you are deluged with senators all panting to establish themselves your heir before you finally totter off to the underworld.”

  Hadrian’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “She would.” Antinous gave Sabina a tiny smile over Hadrian’s shoulder. “And I’d aid her.”

  Hadrian looked from Sabina to Antinous and back again, and let out a bark of angry laugher. “Hadrian Caesar,” he said, “ruler of the known world, marked by Jupiter himself with the gift of lightning, and yet I cannot rule over a wife and a lover?”

  Sabina and Antinous looked at each other, and then back. “No,” they said in unison.

  The Emperor had a glint in his eye that Sabina remembered from the days when his mask had been less firmly in place—days when the habits of bad temper and petty vengeful gestures had been common. But Antinous touched the frown lines between his eyes again, and this time when Hadrian laughed there was no angry edge. He captured Antinous’s hand and kissed it. “I yield, my star—I yield. Now for the love of all the gods, dry me off!”

  He came splashing up the steps to stand on the mosaics, and Antinous splashed out too, relief all over his face as Sabina fetched a stack of towels. Hadrian spread his arms as Antinous dried him, and Sabina took a towel herself and stood on tiptoe to tousle Hadrian’s wet curls. “You go to Parthia next,” she asked, “to deal with all those administrators you’ve been ranting about, the ones you think are skimming profits?”

  “They are skimming profits, and I’ll see them hanged for it.”

  “Perhaps take a month to rest here first,” Sabina suggested, sliding the towel away from his hair.

  “A few months,” Antinous said firmly, standing back with his own damp towel.

  “I haven’t got the time—”

  “Then stop being Emperor!”

  Hadrian laughed again. “We’ll see,” he said, sliding an arm about Antinous and kissing him heartily. “We’ll see,” he said again at Sabina’s glare, and then astonishment wiped her mind clean as Hadrian bent his head and kissed her, too. His beard was scratchy against her face, and his lips warm. The first kiss I’ve had in years, she thought inconsequentially even as she clung to him. And it had been longer than years since a kiss had come from her husband. Surely more than a decade. Hadrian drew back, his lips leaving hers with a faint smile for her surprise, and Sabina turned her head to see Antinous smiling too, in that quiet way of his.

  “I should go back to my desk,” Hadrian began, and both Sabina and A
ntinous exclaimed “No!” in the same breath, and suddenly they were all laughing, even Hadrian, as his empress took him by one wrist and his lover by the other, and they bore him across the bathhouse to the couch that lay behind air-thin curtains. “Pin him,” Sabina laughed, “you have to force him to rest!” And Antinous got the Emperor of Rome in an arm-hold and wrestled him efficiently to the wide white-draped couch.

  “I surrender,” Hadrian groaned, more helpless with laughter than Sabina had ever seen him. He spread his arms wide, grinning, and Antinous burrowed into his chest on one side and Sabina on the other. “I should be working,” Hadrian complained. “I intend to make a good many reforms on the treatment of slaves in Rome, did you know that?”

  “I did not know that, Caesar,” Sabina said.

  “Antinous said it would please him.” A long kiss for Antinous, leading to another and then a third, but Hadrian left his arm about Sabina’s shoulders, and she curled against his heavy chest, warm and tingling from the heat of the bath, feeling the Emperor’s heartbeat under her cheek. She closed her eyes a moment, wondering when she had last felt so content, and when her lashes rose again she saw Antinous smiling at her across Hadrian’s chest, head tucked in the curve of Hadrian’s other shoulder. She lifted her hand and he matched his own to it, the long fingers overtopping hers. Understand the Emperor or not, Sabina thought, we will keep him alive. And she could swear the thought passed from her mind to Antinous through their fingers, because they squeezed at the same time.

  Hadrian kissed Antinous again, with more heat this time, and Sabina laughed a little and sat up. “I think I shall leave you.” She bent and brushed her mouth across Hadrian’s in farewell, feeling the silent amusement curve his bearded lips against hers, and then she rose and drifted smiling through the curtains toward the bathhouse doors.

  “Wait—” A quick footstep behind her, and she saw that Antinous had risen from the couch to follow, pulling the curtain momentarily between them and the Emperor. He gave one of his heart-catching smiles, and then he bent his head and kissed her once on each of her naked shoulders above the bath drape.