Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

“What else?”

  “That the Emperor will leave.”

  His next blow glanced off my shoulder. “I want more for Judaea than the Emperor’s absence.”

  I knew what he wanted, but I wasn’t going to say it. Saying it would have been treason for a Praetorian, or even just for a soldier of Rome. And habit died hard in me.

  “‘There shall step forth a star out of Jacob,’” Simon quoted, advancing on me, “‘and a scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite through the corners of Moab.’”

  My relief in the simple pleasure of sparring drained away. This was no longer simple. “What’s Moab?”

  “You’re a bad Jew, Vercingetorix.” Simon’s gladius flashed in a double strike. I parried the first, missed the second. “But the Lord our God can use bad Jews as well as good ones.”

  His sword tip rested at my throat. I felt suddenly very alert indeed.

  “Mirah told me Antinous looked at you with tears in his eyes,” Simon said as he lowered his blade and we raised our shields again. “As a straying son should look at a righteous father. I was a straying son. I strayed to the legions, but I found the path home.”

  Frustration was rising in me like a flooding sea. “What are you saying?”

  “Follow your boy to Egypt.” Simon’s face was somber. “You might still bring him back.”

  A lump rose in my throat, and I stepped out of our hypnotic thrust-and-parry. “You’re a busy man, Simon ben Cosiba. Traveling to Jerusalem, traveling to Lydda and Jericho and Jaffa. So why are you taking time from your afternoon to worry about a catamite?” I said the word harshly, because I knew he thought it. “Even if he is my son?”

  “A catamite with the Emperor’s ear.” Simon blew sand off the edge of his blade. “Perhaps he might be persuaded to drop a word in that ear.”

  “What kind of word?”

  “Leave Judaea for the Jews,” Simon whispered. “Or we take it for ourselves.”

  I laughed. “Sounds to me like it would suit you better if I didn’t retrieve my son from the Emperor’s bed.”

  A shrug. “Such whispers likely won’t work. According to my reports, Emperor Hadrian is a man of strong mind, unlikely to be swayed—”

  “Reports?”

  “—but everything should be tried, should it not? Everything peaceful.” Simon looked contemplative. “Before the alternative.”

  “All right.” I threw my gladius to the ground at his feet. “No more riddles. What are you planning? What are you doing?”

  Simon held up his sword. “A good blade,” he said. “There are smiths in Judaea who do nothing but forge weapons to supply Roman soldiers—and on the Emperor’s orders, any blade that fails to meet standards is returned.”

  “I’m going to kill you,” I warned, “if you don’t talk plainly.”

  “What if I told you those inferior blades returned to all those smiths aren’t scrapped?” Simon balanced his gladius against the sand, giving it a twirl so it spun on its point. “What if I told you they’re reworked in secret, made into blades fit for any soldier? And then they aren’t returned to the legions, but . . . hidden? Many, many thousands of them.”

  I stared at him. “Where would anyone hide so much weaponry?”

  “Underground caches, perhaps.” Simon smiled. “You’d be surprised how much of Judaea is hidden. Tunnels, passages, networks through the mountains. We have a history of being hunted. We know how to hide.”

  “You’re mad,” I whispered. “Rome’s legions would crush you.”

  “Would they?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. Because a fight through hidden city tunnels and mountain passes was not the kind of fight the legions trained for.

  Simon spun his gladius about on its point again. “Of course, I’m not talking seriously,” he said at last. “Just spinning clouds with an old friend.”

  “If I’m such an old friend, then why am I only hearing of this today?” My voice rose. “It takes years to build caches of discarded blades, and I’m only now—”

  “Because I don’t trust you,” Simon said harshly. “You married my niece and you’ve lived here five years, and you’ve got more reason to hate Rome and its Emperor than most of the men I do trust. But you still shave your chin and speak Latin like a Roman, so why should I trust you?”

  That hurt. I’d served Rome, yes—been loyal to her all my life, and I wouldn’t deny that this flood of news raised the hackles on my neck. But I served my family too, and my family’s people. Wasn’t that worth just as much? “If you don’t trust me, why tell me anything at all?”

  Simon stepped close, and I saw the glitter in his eyes again. “Go with your son to Egypt. See if he knows what Caesar plans for Judaea. Then knock your boy on the head if he won’t see the righteous path, drag him back to Bethar, and tell me what you’ve learned. Then maybe I’ll trust you.”

  I stared at him. “And what happens then?”

  “You get it all back. Have your son again. Be a soldier again. Fight a war again. But for God this time, not Rome.” Simon bent and scooped up my gladius, offering it to me hilt-first. “And who knows? God is just. Serve Him, and He might even grant you the chance to kill Hadrian.”

  Fine words.

  But it wasn’t Simon who made up my mind for me, for all his hypnotic speeches.

  It was Mirah.

  ANTINOUS

  It was a bad time to ask—Antinous could see that the moment he entered the room. Hadrian had one of his headaches; he was rubbing at his temple as he read his way through a scroll, and the groove between his brows was deep. Sabina sat at his side, sipping at her cup without speaking because she understood the pulse of the Emperor’s moods as well as Antinous, and she knew when to be silent. But Antinous could not be silent tonight.

  He came to Hadrian’s couch, and he spoke simply. “My father wishes to join us when we leave for Egypt.”

  A peculiar silence fell. Antinous could feel the coil of sudden bright energy in Empress Sabina, though she didn’t blink an eyelash; feel the hard watchfulness that spiked in Hadrian as his eyes traveled slowly—so slowly—from the scroll in his hand to meet Antinous’s gaze.

  Antinous cast his eyes to the floor. “With your permission, Caesar,” he said, and knelt. “I ask this.”

  He had asked it before—when they had come to Jerusalem, when he had whispered to Hadrian across their shared cushions that he would be going to Bethar to see his father. “What if he accepts my offer?” he had whispered. Hadrian had only given a knife-edged laugh and said, “He won’t.”

  But the message had come today, just four words in that brusque scribble Antinous knew so well. Four words to send joy springing through his blood like divine nectar.

  I will join you.

  Hadrian looked at his wife. Sabina touched one finger to his hand as if to urge restraint, then rose to leave, her eyes flashing a warning as she passed Antinous. He heard the doors close behind her.

  Hadrian erupted from his couch, scroll flying halfway across the room. He crossed the mosaics in three violent strides, jerking Antinous up from his knees. “Caesar,” Antinous breathed, and Hadrian’s mouth speared him. The Emperor’s fists clenched in his hair, so hard Antinous gasped in pain, and Hadrian drank that pain down, his teeth scoring Antinous’s lip brutally. Then his mouth and his hands both were gone, and he looked at Antinous with eyes remote and cold.

  “Keep him from my sight,” the Emperor said. “I do not wish to see him once, understand? Keep him from my sight.”

  “Thank you,” Antinous whispered. He tasted blood on his lip, and Hadrian raised a hand to touch it.

  “My poor star,” he said, and as fast as that, all anger was gone. “I am so sorry, I would not hurt you for the world”—and he said not one word more about Vix or any of the rest of it. It was only to Sabina that Antinous could talk of h
is father, and to her he babbled like a nervous bride.

  “I’ve made arrangements for him to stay with the Praetorians. He can be inconspicuous there; they won’t give him away to the rest of the court.” When the Imperial cortege was on the move between provinces, the off-duty Praetorians traveled in their own phalanx of wagons and horses. Hadrian and Antinous traveled far away, at the heart of the whole procession, Antinous on his bay colt beside the Empress’s palanquin, Hadrian either riding beside Antinous or lying with his head in Sabina’s lap whenever they could bully him into resting. Around them the insulation of guards, secretaries, body slaves, dogs, and courtiers. No, Hadrian should not lay eyes on Vix at all. “As long as they don’t see each other—”

  “And as long as I don’t,” the Empress said, sounding wry. “Because the Emperor will be watching me, that I know.”

  Antinous winced. “I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  That you could be as happy as I am, he thought. That the man I love would not be as unforgiving as a stone, when it comes to the thing that would make you happy. Hadrian had softened toward his wife—they laughed together now, teased each other, argued books, shared a couch while working—but he had not softened that much.

  “Wish for the moon,” Sabina said lightly. “Hadrian will try to pull it down from the heavens to hang about your neck, I’m sure.”

  He’d find that easier than what I just asked of him, Antinous thought, rumpling a hand through his hair. “I’m nervous,” he confessed. “We’re to depart in two days. What if he doesn’t come?”

  But Vix came, his pack over his shoulder just like the old days when he’d swing through the door back home from the latest war. He looked as hard and awkward as he had that day in Bethar when all they’d been able to do was stare at each other and bleed inside . . . But he was here.

  “Is he much changed?” Empress Sabina asked the next day. Looking very cool and remote about it all, holding her eyes closed so her little African maid could line her eyes with kohl against the sun’s heat—but she still asked.

  “He’s leaner, maybe. A bit more gray.” Antinous smiled. “No, not much changed.”

  Sabina kept her eyes closed. “And his wife?”

  “She’s in Bethar. I only saw her once. But she’s—harder.”

  So am I, Antinous thought. You didn’t spend five years gritting your teeth and keeping a smile nailed on while people called you a whore without getting a little harder around the edges. He had a little stony spot in his heart for Mirah, even after she’d given him her blessing. You blessed me, he thought, but you turned my sisters against me. Dinah and Chaya, who used to ride his shoulders, flinching away from him—sweet gods, but that had hurt! And it had been Mirah they looked at as they flinched, not Vix. I want my father back. Antinous sent the thought to his father’s wife. I will woo him back whether you like it or not, and then I will change Hadrian’s mind about hating him. I will do it if it takes me the rest of my life.

  “You look rather grim.” Empress Sabina looked up from her mirror, blinking kohl-rimmed eyes. “Does it worry you, having Vix here?”

  “It’s such a chance, that’s all.” Antinous smiled. “I don’t want to ruin it.”

  “You won’t. Egypt is a land of magic and healing—anything can happen there.”

  “Maybe Egypt will heal my father and me.” Antinous felt his smile disappear. “Maybe it will heal fate.”

  Sabina cocked her head. “Whose fate?”

  “Never mind.” Antinous still thought of the swirling blackness he’d seen at Eleusis; the terrible conviction of death on the mountaintop with the smell of lightning in the air. Hadrian’s death. “If Egypt is truly a place of healing, we must get the Emperor to see some of the native doctors in Alexandria. I don’t like the way his headaches are coming back . . .”

  Egypt. They approached it by the coastal road, from Gaza to Pelusium lying fortified and remote between the marshes of the Nile and the lapping blue waters of the sea. Shining Alexandria, the famous lighthouse piercing the blue dome of summer sky, the natives cheering their Emperor so wildly that Antinous was deafened for hours after. “Of course they cheer,” Lucius Ceionius said. “The Emperor here is not only emperor but Pharaoh. Pharaoh and God!”

  “What do they call the great-nephew of a pharaoh?” Pedanius Fuscus wanted to know. He’d joined the party at Alexandria in a toga so new and stiff it almost creaked, edging up to Hadrian whenever he saw a chance. “Does a pharaoh’s great-nephew get to be a god as well?” the young man asked hopefully.

  “He at least gets a statue,” Hadrian said, looking tolerant. There had been a statue to Pedanius Fuscus erected in Greece, Antinous remembered, a handsome marble boy carved optimistically to look like a young emperor. In the flesh he was no boy but a young man, burly and charming with a self-deprecating smile. “I suppose I should not hold it against him that I dislike his grandfather,” Hadrian had said, raising a brow over the latest nagging letter from Servianus. “The lad seems intelligent enough. Perhaps he will make a suitable heir, after all.”

  “I don’t like Pedanius Fuscus,” Antinous confessed, not to Hadrian but to Vix. Safe topics of conversation had to be saved up for those precious hours in the evening when he would leave Hadrian to his work or perhaps depart a banquet early, and go share a quiet cup of wine with his father in the Praetorian barracks. He’d have rather talked about Hadrian, about Empress Sabina, the people most important in his life, but his father could not hear either name without looking shuttered, and Antinous learned to speak of others. Pedanius Fuscus was a safe subject. “Mind you, he was only a boy when I saw him last. But he was trying to beat Titus Aurelius’s daughter into a pulp.”

  “What?” Vix lowered his cup, scowling. “That little bastard!”

  “I wouldn’t say he succeeded. She was going at him like a clawing whirlwind.” How old would little Annia be by now? Twelve, thirteen? “I suppose it prejudices me against him. Still, not all bullies grow up bad.”

  “I was a bully when I was young,” Vix admitted. “My father had to beat me to a pulp a few times before that lesson sank in.”

  “You never beat me to a pulp.”

  “Never had to, never wanted to.”

  “Maybe once,” Antinous said lightly, deliberately.

  Vix looked away to stroke the black dog’s ears. “Do you know if the Emperor plans to go back to Judaea?” The kind of abrupt change of conversation that happened if Antinous made even an oblique mention of Hadrian. Gently does it, Antinous thought, letting himself be steered to the rebuilding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and how the Jews were in uproar over the idea of having a temple of Jupiter built over their own altars. More safe subjects. He had learned not to nag Hadrian if he wanted to make his point—just talk mildly around the edge of the matter until things sank in. His father was just the same.

  More time, Antinous prayed. Give me more time. Because his father wasn’t happy in Judaea, no matter how much he talked of his wine shop and of Judaea’s unrest. He looked uneasy and somehow shamed when he spoke of those things—Antinous saw it every time. Don’t be in a rush to go back. Just give me time.

  Canopus next. The long stretch of water that Hadrian at once swore to re-create at his villa, here illuminated at night till it sparkled. The waterway was crowded by little gliding pleasure crafts bright with gilding and curtained with silk. Hadrian’s small barge lay moored beside the jetty, and the Emperor lounged on a pile of cushions, half-dozing against Antinous’s shoulder. Sabina sat cross-legged on Hadrian’s other side, perusing a scroll. “It promises to teach me to read hieroglyphs.” She frowned. “I have my doubts . . .”

  “Do you mean to go back to Judaea, Caesar?” Antinous was asking. Vix’s questions recently had made him curious. “After Egypt?”

  “Why should I?” Hadrian’s eyes were still closed. “I have achieved everything there I me
ant to. And there is no reason to go for pleasure, considering the province has nothing to offer but hot wind and stubborn people.”

  “We might see the rebuilding of Aelia Capitolina, Caesar.” Vix had mentioned how much opposition there was to the city’s new name. “Maybe let it stay named Jerusalem?” Antinous suggested.

  “A gesture of goodwill, eh?”

  Sabina frowned at her hieroglyphic scroll, turning it upside-down. “This is utterly useless. I can’t even tell which way the characters go . . .”

  “I’d rather talk about Cyrenaica than Judaea.” Hadrian waved a hand sleepily. “Did you hear there’s a huge lion ravaging the country there? We could mount a hunt, my Osiris.” He’d taken to calling Antinous his Osiris as well as his star, after the reborn god of the ancients.

  “I would very much like to see you hunt a lion, Great-Uncle,” Pedanius interjected. He’d been trying his best to cuddle up to one of the half-naked Egyptian courtesans, but Lucius Ceionius had floated past on his own pleasure craft and the girl took one look at his aquiline profile and hopped lithely from one boat to the other. “My grandfather says I throw a hunting spear almost as well as Caesar himself,” the Emperor’s great-nephew persisted, but Antinous put a finger to his lips, silencing him. The Emperor had dozed off.

  “Let him sleep.” Antinous stroked the Emperor’s hair. “He stays up half the night working; he may as well doze when he can.”

  “Of course.” Pedanius did his best to be polite to Antinous, but his gaze always slid away quickly. “Will you have me fetched when Caesar wakes, Aunt?” he asked Sabina. She was his great-aunt, at least by marriage, but he always called her aunt. Possibly to make the Imperial tie sound closer; possibly because he thought no woman wanted to be called Great-Anything. “I have so little chance to make an impression on him. Perhaps you might speak to him about letting me come on that lion hunt . . .”

  “Perhaps.” Sabina looked amused as Pedanius went clambering out of the little pleasure craft. “Probably looking for another courtesan,” she said to Antinous. “Shall we wish him better luck? He seems a nice boy. He’s polite to you, which makes me think better of him.”