Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  Sabina drew back with a startled smile. “What—”

  “Don’t think that was pity,” Antinous said. “That was for me. Because I can see why my father cannot forget you, Lady—I see it very well.”

  Sabina felt bemused and rueful, warm and astonished, and she could not stop a soft laugh. The handsomest young man ever born finds me beautiful, she thought, and gave a little push at his chest. “Go back to the Emperor, Antinous!”

  A salute like a legionary. “Yes, Lady. And thank you—for everything.”

  She watched them a moment through the thin curtains, shadowed by the dim lamplight. Antinous slipping down over Hadrian with tender haste, Hadrian’s strong hand pulling him close as their lips met again. Hadrian’s muscled arm curving about Antinous’s lean shoulder, Antinous dropping kisses one by one like pearls on a string along Hadrian’s throat. The murmured caresses, the soft laughter. Sabina felt a stab of wistful envy for their happiness. They could travel the world alone and be happy, she thought. Antinous with his black dog at his heels and Hadrian in his Imperial purple, a solitary pair dazed by their own bliss.

  Hadrian does not deserve such love, she had thought just a little while ago. Perhaps he did not. But it was still something her soul warmed to see. She smiled again and stole away.

  The following morning, Hadrian bid her join them for fruit and bread and iced infusions of mulberry and honey, and he announced that he meant to make a desert caravan to Palmyra. “A journey in easy stages,” he said, answering Sabina’s stern look. “I had thought only to take the men of my court, but I believe I will take you, Vibia Sabina. To take charge of me, since I am inclined to run rough-shod over my star here.” A squeeze of Antinous’s fingers lying content in his own.

  Sabina raised her cup. “To Palmyra,” she said. “Bride of the desert.”

  “To Palmyra,” Hadrian agreed, raising his own cup, and Antinous did the same. “And then Judaea, eh?”

  Her husband ruled long years, Sabina reflected later. But that year that followed their triple toast—that was the best one.

  Before it all fell to ruin.

  ANNIA

  A.D. 130, Summer

  Rome

  “You aren’t wearing that, are you?” Ceionia Fabia wrinkled her perfect little nose. “It’s so short it’s improper. Everyone will see your ankles!”

  Annia shrugged, looking down at her filmy blue hem. “I’m growing.” She was nearly as tall at twelve as Pedanius Fuscus was at seventeen. “And so what if people see my ankles? You’re always flashing yours for the boys!”

  Ceionia was far too demure to bristle, but Annia could tell she wanted to. She was Annia’s age, smooth-haired and smooth-faced and unspeakably proper, and their respective mothers were always pushing them to be friends. Either girl could have said that was never going to happen, but since when did mothers listen to anything?

  Ceionia turned away from Annia with a sniff. Her father, Lucius Ceionius, had gone east to dance attendance on the Emperor, so Ceionia had been corralled into Annia’s household for today’s festivities. Which Annia didn’t find festive at all: Brine-Face’s first walk to the Forum as a man of Rome.

  The waiting crowd rippled, and Ceionia’s eyes flashed under her downcast lids. “Do you see Pedanius Fuscus yet?”

  “Get your ankles ready.”

  It was always an occasion when a boy donned the toga virilis for the first time. Everybody knew Servianus had pinned his hopes on the Emperor returning from the east to see Brine-Face become a man—“otherwise he’d have surely put on his toga at fourteen,” Ceionia whispered. But the Emperor had taken his entourage to Judaea rather than return to Rome, and so Brine-Face had his toga.

  Annia could just make him out across the heads of the crowd, his hair gleaming barley-brown in the morning sun. This morning he’d have put aside his childhood tunic, taken the bulla amulet from his neck, and hung it up for the household gods, and according to law, that made him a man. Annia didn’t understand why. Girls didn’t get a ceremony when they became women. All she’d gotten when she started her monthly bleeding was a demonstration with cloth pads and a warm hug from her mother, and a lecture from the housekeeper about not running around flashing her ankles for Marcus anymore. What was this obsession with ankles, anyway? She wished she could ask Marcus that—he was standing behind her now, not hearing Ceionia’s little kitten-claw digs—but Annia poked his elbow and instead asked, “Why aren’t you getting your toga virilis yet? You’re more a man than Brine-Face.”

  Marcus fingered the bulla about his neck, watching Pedanius strut past alongside his grandfather. “I don’t think I’m ready. I’d still rather stay up late reading than start my obligations as a man. I should be more resigned to my duty before I put the toga on, or I won’t do it the honor it deserves.”

  “Prig,” Annia teased, but thought Marcus could have done justice to a toga. Even in his boy’s tunic he was slender and strong, his face high-cheekboned and serious, like he could mount the Rostra at any moment and give a speech. But it was Brine-Face at the Rostra today, new toga gleaming in the sun, accepting his formal congratulations with an easy white grin, and getting a roar from the crowd.

  “He’ll be needing a wife soon,” Ceionia speculated. “Since he’ll be emperor someday . . .”

  “Says who?” Annia snorted.

  “Who else can the Emperor choose but his great-nephew?” Ceionia patted at her smooth hair, wound crownlike around her head. “Pedanius will need an empress.”

  “Not you. Empresses kill people”—remembering Aunt Sabina and her curse tablets—“and you can’t even kill a flea without squealing.”

  After Brine-Face’s ceremony, Servianus hosted a great feast and invited half of Rome. “Where are you going?” Marcus whispered as Annia slid behind her parents and began sidling toward the gardens.

  “No one will notice if I’m gone,” she whispered back. “My father only said I had to come, not that I had to stay.”

  “You should train for a lawyer,” Marcus disapproved.

  She thumped him on the arm. “Go sit with Ceionia. She’s angling to marry Brine-Face, but she’ll cast her lashes at you, too.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that. She’s pretty.”

  “Just like a boy,” Annia said, nettled, “getting his head turned by pretty.”

  “Not just pretty, properly behaved. A man likes that once in a while.”

  “You’re not a man yet!” Annia made a face as he disappeared into the triclinium. Now she really needed a run.

  Servianus was always extolling austerity, so of course his villa and gardens were some of the most sumptuous on the Palatine Hill. Annia reckoned there was a good half mile down the length of the sculpted terraces and back, and she took off at an easy speed, relishing the rich summer grass under her bare, flashing feet. Down to the gate, turn and back, and she let her strides lengthen. The trees flashed past and the wind tore at her hair; the soles of her feet stung and her blood pounded in her ears. She finished her third circuit at a flat sprint, skidding to a halt by her discarded sandals and sticking her head under the fountain’s spray. Raking a hand through her wet hair, she laughed aloud even though she was still gasping for breath.

  She remembered that soldier, the russet-haired one who had taught her how to run. Run till you throw up, he’d said. And if you still feel like hitting somebody after that, then it’s because they deserve to be hit. Annia hadn’t seen that soldier again—he’d left Rome, and there had been some sort of scandal her father refused to talk about. She wished he would come back, so she could thank him. Because the running helped. It helped everything.

  She could feel her heartbeat slowing, the contented tiredness leaking into her muscles. She looked down at herself, and saw happily that the blue dress was a sweaty wreck. She could go back in and her mother would make a great fuss—“Goodness, child, I must take you home!”
She said it scoldingly, but Annia never got punished. Not when it was a really boring party they were fleeing. She prepared her penitent face, scooping up her sandals.

  “What are you doing?”

  Annia looked up to see Pedanius Fuscus standing there, muscled arms folded across his chest. “Nothing.” She started to move past him, then hesitated. She knew what her father would want her to say, and if he were here he’d give her one of his quietly formidable gazes.

  “Congratulations,” she added with a bump of a curtsy. “Upon reaching your manhood, Pedanius Fuscus.”

  His hand caught her arm as she began to brush past. “Let me show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Over here.” He had a gleam of sweat on his upper lip, and she was close enough to see that his jaw was rough even if he was only seventeen. “Come on.”

  “No.” That was how silly princesses and nymphs got themselves abducted in the myths her nurse told her. Persephone, wandering off all by herself like an idiot, easy prey for Hades to snatch. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you,” Annia said, and yanked her arm free.

  But he grabbed again, and he shoved her back into the garden with both hands this time. “I’m a man now,” he said as she stumbled back against the fountain. “So you do what I say.”

  “Boy or man, you’re still just Brine-Face,” she retorted. “I’m going inside.”

  “No,” he said. And took a step toward her.

  Annia gave an insolent shrug, and then she whirled and bolted. “Catch me if you want me,” she mocked over one shoulder. Pedanius could never catch her. He was big and slow, weighed down in heavy folds of toga. She’d cruise ahead of him just long enough to hear him curse, and then she’d sprint off with a laugh.

  But Annia veered away from the terraced gardens, because that way was just one long open stretch and she’d never lose Brine-Face there. She didn’t know the gardens here as she did her own; she bolted laughing through a stone archway, leaped a small lily pond in one long vault, and then her laughter ended. Because she’d come into the stone enclosure of the nymphaeum with its quietly plashing water, and the nymphaeum was enclosed on three sides. She was already turning and gathering herself for another sprint, but Pedanius was in the entranceway, breathing hard, blocking her way entirely with his wide chest and planted feet. They were a long way from the noisy triclinium where her father laughed with his grandfather.

  Annia wasn’t afraid. It was just Brine-Face, after all. “Out of my way,” she said.

  He grinned. “No.”

  She feinted at one side, but he just batted a big arm, and all that training he boasted of with his sword instructors had done its work, because Annia went down with a crash, the whole side of her head ringing. The breath left her in a whoosh, and she felt Brine-Face’s big hand in her hair, yanking her up to her knees. Her whole body vibrated with shock as she looked up at him.

  “My grandfather says I can have a slave tonight,” Pedanius said. “Any one I want. He says it’s the other part of being a man, and that’s a joke, because I’ve been having slave girls for years. They aren’t any sport; they just lie there.”

  That was when Annia felt fear curling through her stomach in cold tendrils. She tried to jerk away, but Pedanius gave her hair a yank that sent sparkles of pain all over her scalp. “I wanted a proper whore,” he went on. “A courtesan with long legs who knows how to please a man, but my grandfather’s too cheap.”

  Annia clawed at the big hand in her hair, but her nails were too short and bitten to draw blood. Why didn’t I ever grow my nails out long like Ceionia? she thought wildly. I could rake his arm open to the bone!

  “Maybe it’s better this way.” Pedanius gave her head another hard shake. “I’d have to pay a whore, and I don’t have to pay you. I’m going to be Emperor, and you’re going to get on your knees and tell me so.”

  “I won’t,” she managed to say. But she was already on her knees, and she could see a bulge under his toga. Oh, Hades, she thought, and the word kept going around her head in circles. Hades, Hades, Hades—“I won’t!”

  “Yes, you will.” Pedanius grinned again. “Because I’m going to fuck you.”

  “I’ll kill you.” She hated how high and unsteady her voice came out. “My father will kill you!”

  Pedanius laughed. “You won’t dare tell him.”

  “I tell my father everything.” Yanking against his fist. “I’ll tell him you ruined me!”

  “I said I was going to fuck you, not ruin you.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” Pedanius looked nervous, but he looked giddy too, flushed and eager. He gave his hips a jerk. “I’d make you open your mouth and suck on it, but you’d just bite me like the little snake you are. And I can’t fuck you up the front without ruining you. So I’ll go up the back, like the Emperor takes that Bithynian he-bitch who dared call me a bully. And if you try to tell anyone, they’ll examine you and you’ll still be a virgin, and they’ll call you a liar.”

  You’re an idiot, she wanted to shriek. Like her father wouldn’t believe her if she came to him bleeding from anywhere. But she didn’t have any scorn to pour into her voice, just fear, and all she could manage was a whisper. “He’ll still believe me.”

  “But my grandfather won’t. He already thinks you’re a whore, the way you run around flashing your legs. If your father comes to him, he’ll just say you tempted me and then you’ll be ruined anyway without me fucking you at all. Not even stupid Marcus will marry you then.”

  Marcus. What she wouldn’t have given to see Marcus wander up to the nymphaeum—but he was inside, talking Stoicism with her father or flirting with Ceionia.

  “Say it.” Pedanius wagged her head side to side with his fisted hand in her hair. “Call me Caesar. Do that, and I won’t make it hurt too much.”

  Oh, Annia thought inanely, I think it’s going to hurt a lot. She hardly understood the things he was saying he’d do to her but she was certain they would be painful. She lashed out at the bulge under his toga, but he gave her a casual slap that rang Annia’s ears. Somehow that shocked her more than anything. Brine-Face, she kept thinking, this is Brine-Face. The boy who hit only when nobody was looking, who tattled to his grandfather whenever anyone hit back. Brine-Face, who she’d always found about as frightening as an oyster. Brine-Face, who was releasing her hair and stepping back out of reach.

  Annia tensed, still on her knees but gathering her toes under her so she could run. But there was nowhere to run.

  “Say it.” He pointed at her. “‘Caesar.’”

  She swallowed, still eyeing the bulge.

  “Say it!”

  She tasted bile. “Caesar.” The word was treason, and it tasted like ash.

  “Emperor Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.”

  “Emperor Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.”

  “That’s a start,” he crowed, still sounding like that strutting little boy she’d whacked with a mallet when she was four years old. What she would have given for a mallet, because he was hauling up the folds of his toga.

  “I’m not taking this off,” he informed her. As if she cared. “It should happen in the toga, because only men get to take virgins. Down on your hands and knees.”

  No. She was full of terror, but she pushed the word out. “No.”

  He grabbed her by the hair again, shoving her down on her hands and knees. She heard him behind her, hauling at his toga. Felt her own pounding blood, tasted rancid fear. She was trembling like it was the last lap of a sprint, one of her bad sprints where she was running out a red haze of temper. Only now there was nowhere to run.

  Annia felt his hand hauling up her skirts. Felt air on her naked thighs, and such a rush of shame she almost vomited. Felt him come closer, the brush of his toga against her spread legs. “You’re
ugly, but I like your legs,” he said, still sounding nervous but also excited. “Maybe I’ll take you in the front after all, if you promise to wrap those legs around me.”

  Annia squeezed her eyes tight shut, her heart hammering in her throat, and kicked behind her with one foot. A stiff kick like a donkey, the knee bent and the foot flexed hard. The angle, she thought desperately. It had to be just right—she’d been sizing it up as he forced her down. If she caught him wrong, he’d just swear and get on with it.

  She missed the groin. But Pedanius let out a yelp as Annia’s heel slammed into his ankle. He staggered, and Annia lunged out of reach, scrambling to her feet. She could hardly see through her flying hair, but Pedanius was on the ground clutching his ankle. He was still blocking the entrance of the nymphaeum, and she backed up to leap across him like she’d vaulted the little lily pond.

  But she couldn’t run away like that. She couldn’t.

  “Coward,” she hissed, and rage billowed up in her like a red monster. “You couldn’t fuck me if I was the last girl in the Empire!” The first time she’d ever used such a foul word, and it fed the rage like kindling to a fire. Maybe this was the ceremony that turned girls into women, rather than some idiotic ritual of putting on a bundle of chalked cloth. You became a woman the first day a man attacked your virtue. “You won’t ever be Emperor,” she said, “never.” And she cocked her head back and spat on him. Right on the folds of his new toga.

  He howled, swinging for her. As soon as his fists lashed out she stepped forward and stomped—stomped with her horn-hard foot, with all the strength of those long legs he’d admired, and which had run so many hard miles. Stomped right where the housekeeper had told her to stomp. “Right in the balls, little mistress. Kick a man there, and you can walk away at your leisure.”

  And she did. Walked calmly away from the nymphaeum, hair hanging lank and sweaty in her face, her vision still sheeted red and her blood roaring. Behind her Pedanius retched up a bellyful of wine between shrieks of agony, his new toga already stained where he had pissed himself. Annia felt queer and cold, triumphant and sick, and her face was blank as stone.