Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “You look like the sack of Troy,” her father said mildly as she came to his dining couch in the triclinium. Old Servianus clucked disapproval. Don’t say it, Annia thought, staring him down. Don’t you dare say, “In my day girls lay there obediently when boys fucked them up the back.” Or I’ll kick you in the balls, too.

  Her father was looking at her quizzically, and so was Marcus from his stool. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  Annia let out the last of the red rage in a long breath, and all she felt now was sick. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  CHAPTER 12

  VIX

  Bethar

  The message was so brief. Just a few words in a graceful hand, but they set my heart to pounding.

  Titus Aurelius was good enough to tell me you live in Bethar, Antinous had written. Would you welcome a visit?

  I looked up at the supercilious Imperial freedman who had delivered the scroll. I couldn’t speak, just nodded and carried the letter inside. Mirah was chopping turnips, and one glance at the way I stood tracing the signature with my thumb must have told her everything. Maybe she had prepared for this moment, since Hadrian and his entourage arrived in Judaea a few days ago. Because she took a deep breath and laid down her knife.

  “I know you love him. But if he is asking to visit us here, he cannot come. I cannot have him under this roof.”

  Anger flared in me. Mirah met it in my eyes, and her own were full of sorrow.

  “I’m sorry, Vix. But we cannot welcome him here.”

  She spoke in Aramaic. I replied in Latin. “He has a name, Mirah.”

  “I know.” She switched languages, placating me. “And I love Antinous. That has nothing to do with this, so don’t let us quarrel.”

  We had been quarreling lately, but so was the whole region. Bethar was a kettle on high boil, a pile of tinder so dry a single spark would have set it ablaze—but at the moment, I didn’t care. “If you love him, why won’t you see him?”

  “It’s our girls. Don’t you see? The Emperor’s catamite under the same roof as our daughters, just as they’re coming to marriageable age? What will that do for their reputations?”

  My voice rose. “Do not use that word.” I wouldn’t hear it from Simon and I was damned well not going to hear it from Mirah.

  “I don’t like that word either,” she sighed. “But the whole Empire knows what Antinous is. He rode on the Emperor’s right hand when Hadrian entered Judaea, didn’t he? Uncle Simon said he wore a purple cloak like a prince, with his hair curled like a woman!”

  “I don’t want to hear you call him a woman either, Mirah.” I hadn’t gone with the rest of the crowds to Jerusalem when Hadrian first came to make his inspection, but I’d heard plenty from those who had been there. Those few who knew about my son and pitied me silently. Nobody dared pity me openly.

  “I grieve for the boy he was.” Mirah reached for an onion. “But I can never approve of the man he’s become.”

  “He wrote to me. To us.” I pulled his words back toward me, pain spiking my throat. For the last year I’d been able to think of little but Antinous—ever since I heard Hadrian was at last coming to Judaea. Over and over again, I’d sat down with parchment and tried to write him, wondering if he could bear to see me after the words that had passed between us. Longing to see him, no matter what words he had said to me.

  And he’d written. Not four days after arriving in Judaea. My golden boy, reaching out for—what? My love? My forgiveness? My help? How would I ever know if I turned him away?

  “He wants to see me,” I heard myself saying. “And he’s my son.”

  Mirah went on chopping. “Once, maybe.”

  I felt that flash of hard anger again. “He’s still my son.” He would always be my son. His falling into Hadrian’s net didn’t change that. His falling into Hadrian’s net didn’t change that. His repudiating me as a father didn’t change that. The world’s opinion of him didn’t change that.

  Nothing would.

  “He’s not your son by blood, and thank God for it.” Mirah slid chopped turnips and onions alike into the stew pot, moving with her usual quick grace. “It would do our girls’ prospects no good at all to have a catamite for a blood brother—”

  “Do not call him that!” All in an instant, anger was boiling over into rage. “You raised him, Mirah! You raised him, and he loved you like a mother. And if I receive him here, you’ll smile when you see him.”

  “I can’t smile.” Her chin trembled. “Not at what he’s become. It breaks my heart, Vix.”

  And you are breaking mine. I wanted to cry and I wanted to hit her. Antinous was my son, but apparently he was no longer hers—and she didn’t seem to see why I was angry. She just looked at me with tender pity, as though I were a child failing to understand a hard truth.

  “It just condones what he’s done, if I smile and pretend nothing is wrong as he walks into my house—”

  I actually felt my hand lift at that. I brought it down in a hard slap against the wood of the table, and Mirah fell back from the look on my face.

  “This is my house,” I said in a hard voice. “And when my son comes through that door, you will smile for him. I don’t care if you have to fake it, but you will smile.”

  There were more bitter words said after that, but in the end I gave the Imperial freedman his reply, just one word long. Tomorrow.

  * * *

  Five years. Five years since I’d last seen him. He’d be twenty-four, but I kept seeing the boy I’d first taken in. The little boy who had pointed at my lion skin and crowed “Yion!”

  I don’t know what I expected when I opened my door to him. An oiled and painted bed-toy like the mocking rumors painted him? An embittered young man made old before his time? The child I remembered so well?

  Instead I saw a young god standing lightly at my gate in his plain white tunic and blue cloak, poised as though he had just alighted from a winged chariot. A man grown, lean-muscled and hard of jaw, his curls tied carelessly at the back of his neck and his brown eyes somber.

  I wanted to fall on him with open arms. But I couldn’t bear it if he recoiled, so I just gave a nod. “Welcome.”

  He nodded back. “Thank you.”

  Mirah and I had reached a ferociously fought-out compromise. She and the girls stood in the courtyard, a pretty trinity in an array of blue gowns, and Antinous smiled for the first time as he came to stand before them. “You look well,” he said to Mirah.

  Don’t be hard, I begged her silently. And her mouth curved as though she hadn’t meant it to, curved with a love that couldn’t possibly be false. But she didn’t move toward him.

  Antinous didn’t seem to expect it, because he turned to the girls, standing round-eyed and stiff as spears. “Dinah—sweet gods, you’re a vision. I always knew you’d be beautiful. And Chaya, I hope you’re not letting your sister have all the suitors!”

  My daughters just stood there, looking at each other nervously. They didn’t fully understand why their adopted brother was such a heated subject in our house—Mirah shielded them from salacious gossip—but they could sense their mother’s tension, and they pulled back like skittish kittens as Antinous moved to embrace them.

  “Girls,” I barked, but Antinous’s arms dropped before I could tell Dinah and Chaya to embrace their brother. His face was sad, and a little silence fell.

  “Come,” I said at last. “We’ll walk.”

  “All right.”

  “Wait,” said Mirah. Stepping forward, she touched Antinous’s cheek just once. She murmured something in formal Hebrew, a tongue I’d never mastered, but Antinous answered her in the same accents and a smile touched his lips.

  “What was that?” I asked as he followed me out of the gate into the busy street.

  “A blessing,” he said. “She blessed me.”

 
A blessing. It was more than I had hoped for, but I still didn’t know if I could forgive her for wanting to bar her door against him in the first place. Mirah and I had slept last night with our backs to each other.

  “She’ll bless me,” he said, “but she won’t have me in her house, will she?”

  I tried to find an excuse for his mother that was an honest one, but all I could say was, “Her God won’t allow it.”

  He shrugged, his face cool and hard. “I’m done apologizing.”

  We walked down the dusty street, skirting an ox cart. Antinous’s dog trotted at our heels, a lithe black shadow. He pricked his ears as a stray cat hissed at him, but Antinous snapped his fingers, and the dog bounded back between us. “The girls are beautiful,” Antinous said. “So tall. I somehow thought they’d still be four years old and begging for rides on my shoulders.”

  “They cry a lot.” I kicked a pebble out of my way. “Mirah says it means they’re becoming women.”

  “She never did have a son, then? I knew she always hoped.”

  “I think she believed coming to Bethar would be a blessing on her womb, but”—a shrug. “At least we’re in Judaea, now. She counts that blessing enough.”

  “And I’m sure she feels less a failure,” Antinous said, that edge in his voice again, “if she doesn’t have to look at me.”

  That stung me like a clip on the chin. I’d always hoped I’d kept it from him, Mirah’s tiny resentment. Apparently not.

  A cluster of bearded boys no older than Antinous broke off their fierce arguing to watch us go by with hostile eyes, and one of them made the sign against evil. “Don’t mind them,” I said. Ever since Hadrian’s arrival, you could hardly turn around in Bethar without seeing fists being shaken and voices raised in outrage. “They despise all Romans these days.”

  “I’m used to being despised,” he said lightly. “But why the glares for all Romans?”

  “Your master isn’t very popular in Judaea.” I refused to use his name. “We get word he’s planning to make circumcision punishable by death and rebuild Jerusalem as a Roman city with temples to Jupiter—he’s got Greek notions and Roman laws, and the people here don’t like either. If he goes through with all his plans, they’ll be burning his temples and shattering his statues.”

  “That won’t bother him.” Antinous clasped his hands at the small of his back, and it stabbed me. That old habit he still had, of walking like me. “He’s to rename Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, did you hear?”

  I thought of Mirah’s hothead cousins and their curses against Rome. Thought of the older men, the men like Simon who didn’t thunder and curse, but simmered and brooded. “Taking their city’s ancient name away and christening it after himself,” I said. “Does he think that’s going to go over well?”

  “He wants to see Rome united, all the provinces. Not by force of legions, but by light of common culture. Is it so wrong?”

  “Greek culture.” A culture of soft women and womanish men, as far as I was concerned, and Antinous’s current status didn’t exactly contradict me. “The Jews have their own way of doing things, you know that.”

  “So I’ve told him, but he’s got his own ideas.” He imitated Hadrian’s deep voice. “‘They can keep their own god and their own prayers, but when they’re mutilating their baby boys who are growing up to be my citizens, that’s where an emperor gets involved.’”

  His mimicry of Hadrian’s irritable cadences was perfect. I felt the urge to spit. “Don’t talk of him,” I said brusquely. “Not unless it’s to tell me you’ve come to your senses and crawled out of his bed.”

  “Then we won’t have much to talk about.” Antinous’s voice was mild, but I heard iron under it. “He’s my world.”

  I swung around on my son. “And what does he give you in return? The world holds you in contempt. A man of twenty-four still acting the woman for—”

  “Stop,” my son said quietly, and his tone brooked no argument. “Just—stop.”

  We both stopped, standing in the middle of Bethar’s dusty road. Antinous looked me in the eye, so handsome in his jewel-blue cloak that it speared me. Beauty like his wasn’t a blessing; it was a curse. “This was a mistake,” I said hoarsely, and turned to go back to my home.

  He caught my arm. “Do you still hate me?” he asked, and I heard the catch in his voice.

  “I hate him.” My voice scraped my throat like a blade. “Never you.”

  He sighed, relief pooling in his eyes. And as that question had tormented him, the question that tormented me came ripping out of my throat.

  “Did you mean what you said at his villa?” I couldn’t meet his eyes. “That you weren’t my son—all because I wouldn’t let you call me—”

  “No,” he said. “No. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Because you are my son.” I had known that almost all his life, felt it thrumming true in my bones—how had he not realized? “And you can always call me Father.”

  “Can I?” His voice was muted. “Or can I only call you Father if I leave him?”

  “Why can’t you leave him?” I heard myself imploring. “Leave that vicious madman and come home.”

  “This isn’t my home.” Antinous gestured around the streets of Bethar, the terraces rising upward in their walled ranks, the bustle of trade, the foreign chatter of Aramaic so different from Latin’s terse clip. “It will never be my home.”

  “It could be.” I would have gotten down on my knees in the street to beg him, but he looked so hard. So young, and so hard. “This could be your home. You could run the wine shop with me—”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “You tell me you’re happy here, running a wine shop and stagnating? Neither of us belongs here.”

  That stung me. My eyes slid away.

  “I have another idea,” Antinous said. “Come with me.”

  “What?”

  “We’re to leave Judaea soon for Egypt. Empress Sabina’s been there, but not Hadrian—”

  I felt a stab at how casually he used the Emperor’s name.

  “—we’re to go to Alexandria first, then take a barge up the Nile. Come with us!” Antinous was the one pleading now. “You belong with Romans. Not here among people who curse at the sight of you—”

  “The Emperor would have my head on a spike!”

  “No. He’s changed, I tell you—”

  “Snakes shed their skins, but it’s still the same snake underneath.”

  “—he wouldn’t acknowledge your presence, maybe, but he’d turn a blind eye. Let you travel with the Imperial party; it’s like a small city on the move. Join us.” He hesitated. “At least—for a time? Just a little while!”

  “Join that parasite court?” I said. “Hadrian thinks he can march into Judaea, spin a few edicts and laws that will have the people here rioting—”

  “Hadrian does nothing without consideration, nothing. You know how hard he works? The toll it takes on his health—”

  “He’ll leave everything here in turmoil, stir up the muck for people like me to wade in, and take you off for a jaunt up the Nile without a backward glance.” I felt the hatred boiling in me again. “And you tell me that maybe, just maybe, he’ll indulge his boy’s whim and let me come along for the ride? That’s supposed to make me give up my family and forgive everything?”

  “I just want to talk with you again.” Quietly. “Hadrian may never travel back to Judaea.”

  “Then we don’t have anything to talk about.” I drank him in, whole and healthy and stubborn, and I lingered on every detail because I’d probably never see him again. “Not as long as you’re the Emperor’s plaything.”

  “Sweet gods, but you can be a bastard,” Antinous said.

  We stared at each other. I could have left it there, but I reached out and I wrapped him in my arms. So strong, so tall, and yet all I could feel was th
e light weight of the little boy on my back, crowing, “Yion!”

  “Stay,” I said thickly. The black dog whined at our feet.

  “Come,” he said.

  And there really wasn’t much more to say than that.

  * * *

  The bathhouse in Bethar was sparsely attended. The people here didn’t approve of the Roman habit of social bathing, so there was no one to watch as Simon and I took over the empty gymnasium and squared up behind our wooden shields. A brief salute, and we went at each other in short stabbing thrusts: the legion drills we’d practiced for years. Simon didn’t ask what had happened with Antinous. He already knew, and not just because Mirah told her uncle everything. Simon seemed to know everything that happened in Bethar; in all of Judaea and the provinces around her, for that matter. “The Twelfth Deiotariana is poised to come from Egypt,” he’d say. “If there’s trouble, that is, when the Emperor departs.” And if you asked him how he knew what was happening in bloody Egypt, he’d just smile.

  “Another bout,” I said shortly after winning the first. Sparring was a physical release when I felt so emotion-roiled inside. Simon nodded, deep-set eyes glittering at me across the weed-threaded sand, and waded in. He might be well into his fifties, but he was still hard-bodied and fit, his drills as crisp as though he’d just come from the legion yesterday. I sometimes wondered why he kept himself fighting trim when he was so eager to forget everything else from the legion.

  He slipped inside my thrust, parrying. “So, your boy wants you to go to Egypt.”

  “I’d ask how you know that, but you know everything.”

  He made a jab of his own, cat-quick. “If I know everything, then what do you think I pray for?”

  My turn to parry. “You pray Jerusalem won’t be rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina.”