Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  Polite to me when you or the Emperor watches, Antinous thought. But it was not his place to disparage the Imperial family, so he dropped a kiss on Hadrian’s temple where the pulse beat fast even in sleep, and changed the subject. “Stay with him, Lady? I want to walk.”

  Hadrian stirred but continued to doze as Antinous slid free, and Sabina tugged the Emperor’s slumbering head down on her own shoulder instead. Antinous meandered up the jetty, taking no particular course, just looking at the stars overhead and the warm glow of lamplight reflecting on the Canopus waterway. Beautiful, Antinous thought, and wondered why he felt melancholy. Egypt was everything he had been promised, a place of magic and healing. He had his father with him, and he had Hadrian; he was happy.

  The gods are jealous of happiness, Antinous thought. So they send melancholy thoughts and dark dreams. It was something to be borne, that was all. Payment for bliss.

  “Feeling wistful, boy?”

  He thought for a moment it was Vix, because his father called him boy when he was teasing, but Vix never drawled like that. Antinous turned to see Lucius Ceionius lounging against a pillar, all in matching shades of green tonight with a synthesis of sage-dyed silk and jade bracelets with slave girls in matching jade beads. “I thought you had a courtesan to entertain, Lucius.”

  “A pretty girl, but dull. I prefer women of intelligence as well as loveliness, and such are few.” Lucius joined him with a languid look out toward the Emperor’s barge. “You seem on cozy terms with Empress Sabina, young Osiris. What can I say to get her into my arms? I swear, the woman is impervious.”

  “You live dangerously.” Antinous laughed. “The Emperor’s wife—”

  “A collector of beauty must be willing to take risks.” A sigh. “She is older than I, but she carries it with such elegance . . .”

  “Give up,” Antinous advised. “Because I’m afraid she won’t have you.”

  “What a blow to one’s confidence.” Lucius shrugged, not looking too heartbroken. “Well, at least you’re honest. I shall be honest in turn, Antinous.”

  His attention sharpened. “Do you want to tell me I am a disgrace, a he-whore, a blot upon the morals of the Empire? Believe me”—a smile of steel-edged pleasantness—“I have heard it all before.”

  “Not at all.” The kohl-lined eyes crinkled. “I don’t care if the Emperor is mounting you. You’re lovely to look at, even to someone like me who doesn’t care for male flesh, and you’re more intelligent than people think. You’re even rather good for that uncertain Imperial temper of his. But how old are you—twenty?”

  Antinous spoke tightly. “Twenty-four. What of it?”

  “Ah . . . That’s worse than I thought, then. You look younger.” Giving a nod to the mop of curls Antinous had let grow long. “You were still a boy when you left Rome with the Emperor. On the edges, perhaps, but close enough to count. Not by the time we return to the Eternal City. If you think the disapproval was bad before, it’s nothing to what will be waiting when we return.”

  “I am used to scorn—”

  “Gods know you should be by now, but the scorn won’t be for you. It will be for the Emperor.” Lucius twisted a ring off his finger, admired it, decided it looked better on the other hand. “No one blamed him for humping a pretty boy, and if you were a slave or a native auxiliary or even a freedman, no one would care that you are twenty-four and still being fucked like a girl. But you’re a citizen, a free man of Rome. An emperor who debauches a grown freeborn citizen of Rome, no matter how far beneath him in birth . . .”

  Antinous let his voice grow cold. “There have always been men who formed bonds like ours.”

  “But not emperors. Emperors must uphold the moral principles of Rome, or at least the important ones. We don’t hold a great deal sacred in the Eternal City, but the dignity of every free Roman is something we do take seriously.”

  “No one will dare mock the Emperor—”

  “Not to his face. But behind his back, he will be denounced as a despoiler of Rome’s sacred morals. That’s how rumors against Nero and Caligula and Domitian started, you know. No one cared if they killed slaves or passed laws that made no sense. The denunciations started when they began either killing fellow senators or openly debauching Rome’s morals. Emperor Hadrian seems to have reconsidered the wisdom of executing men of the Senate House, considering he hasn’t done it for years, but the second?”

  Nero. Domitian. Caligula. Emperors who had ended their days dead on the tiles, blood splashed around them. Sweet gods, no. Anything but that. Antinous had always assumed that the burden of shame and humiliation lay on his shoulders alone—not on Hadrian’s. Never that.

  But now horror curled through his stomach with cold claws. Death: death in the dark at Eleusis, near-death on the mountaintop. Could death be waiting not in the dangers of the east, not in Hadrian’s unpredictable health, but in Rome? In the Eternal City, at the end of a knife?

  “Enjoy your travels,” Lucius said, and seemed to mean it. “Things are different in the east, aren’t they? I enjoy the freedom, and so should you. Because when we all return to Rome, the Emperor—for his own good, whether he knows it or not—will have to give you up.”

  ANNIA

  Rome

  Evil worked better in the dark of the moon, everybody knew that. Annia waited, watching the moon shrink, and at last the night came when the house was asleep and she could sneak from her bed into the moonless gardens.

  The voice called softly from the atrium behind her. “Where are you going?”

  Annia turned around. “Marcus, go away.”

  He came out from behind a pillar, dressed in a night tunic as she was, his hair rumpled. He was staying with them for a time; his dreary mother fancied herself ill again. “What are you doing awake?”

  “What are you doing awake?” she countered.

  “I’m an owl.”

  “You’re an owl?”

  “I’m always awake in the night. It’s a fault, really. People should be larks, rising and falling with the sun, but as soon as I go to bed I’m just lying there awake, thinking. So I come out and look at the stars, and imagine I’m running with them.” He pointed at the bundle in her hands. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. I’m just going out to the garden for a moment.”

  “Even on her own grounds, a woman should be properly attended so nothing can befall either her, or her reputation.” He came to her side. “What are you doing?”

  “Working a curse. Are you satisfied?” She flung it at him. “I’ve made a curse tablet, like Empress Sabina did once. And to seal a curse tablet, you have to drive a nail through the lead and either bury it or throw it in a spring. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to work some dark magic and then go back to bed.”

  She stamped off toward the nymphaeum at the end of the garden where there was a spring, choking back the hot tears that came to her eyes. The tears kept coming lately, but she refused to let them fall. I’m not wasting one drop of salt on Brine-Face, she thought viciously, and kicked a stone out of her way.

  She hadn’t been able to stop thinking of him, though. She couldn’t stop herself from brooding, going over it all in her mind, bitterly calculating what she should have done different. Maybe the curse tablet would settle that.

  Marcus fell in beside her. “Go away,” Annia said, and dashed at her eyes.

  “No,” he said, and stumbled in the dark. “Who did Empress Sabina work a curse tablet on?”

  “The old Empress. It worked, too.” Maybe Aunt Sabina had some barbarian in her too, just like Annia. The part of you that wasn’t content to let an enemy go, but instead had to make him pay.

  “Who are you working a curse tablet on?”

  “None of your business!”

  They walked along in silence a little while. “It’s Pedanius, isn’t it?” Marcus asked, and stumbled again.<
br />
  “Oh, Hades, just take my hand so you don’t trip and break your neck.”

  “It isn’t proper for a man to take a woman’s hand unless a betrothal has been agreed on.” His warm fingers interlaced with hers. “But I think a breach in decorum is allowable in this case.”

  “You’re not a man, anyway.” Annia knew she was being rude, but she couldn’t seem to stop snarling at everyone. “You’re still a boy.”

  “But you’re a woman,” Marcus said. “Legally, you could be married.”

  “Not at twelve. Nobody marries at twelve, even if it’s legal.”

  “You still have the advantage over me. You’re already a woman, but I won’t be a man for another two years at least. So you don’t need to fear me.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Annia spat, and her eyes pricked again.

  They walked along silently, the trees black and rustling overhead. “Here,” Annia said as they entered the grotto of the nymphaeum, and went to her knees beside the small cold well of the spring. She unwrapped the lead sheet of the curse tablet, fumbling for the nail.

  “May I read it?” Marcus asked.

  Annia looked at him a moment. Just a shadowy shape, but she’d know him anywhere by the attentive angle of his head, his relaxed stillness as he sat on his heels. She felt a lump in her throat, and she pushed the tablet at him.

  He angled it under the faint starlight and read aloud, running a finger over the letters she had scratched into the lead. Annia hadn’t needed any help wording the curse—she remembered that quite well, from eavesdropping on Empress Sabina. “To the goddesses Diana, Hecate, and Proserpina. I invoke you holy ones by your names to punish and destroy Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator for trying to take my virtue.” A pause there. “May he never prosper,” Marcus kept on reading, and his voice had a note in it she hadn’t heard before. “May he never advance, may he never become emperor, and may I be the instrument of his downfall. May it be so in your names.”

  Annia’s voice was rough. “Now you know.”

  Marcus was looking at her, she could feel it. She looked down at the spring, splashing the cold water.

  “Pedanius attacked you?” he said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it at his manhood ceremony?”

  “Yes.”

  Marcus’s voice got even quieter. “Tried to take your virtue?” he asked. “Or did?”

  “Tried,” she said, still splashing her hand in the spring, and somehow it all came out—running from Pedanius, having to get on her knees for him and tell him he’d be Caesar. That was the part that made her cheeks flush. Kicking him in the balls hadn’t made up for it, not at all.

  Her voice trailed off once it was told. She didn’t want to look at Marcus.

  There was a long inhale beside her. “Why didn’t you tell your father?” Marcus said at last. “He would have believed you.”

  “Yes,” Annia acknowledged. “But he’d have to do something about it, wouldn’t he? So he’d go to Servianus, and Servianus would trumpet his grandson’s innocence all over Rome, and my father would be shamed. Maybe more than shamed—the Emperor might punish him, for daring to accuse his great-nephew. Emperor Hadrian already dislikes my father; I can’t give him any more reasons.” She’d thought about it for so many hours, from every angle. I cannot tell anyone.

  Except Marcus, whose eyes rested on her so steadily it was like a touch through the dark. “Annia,” he said, “why won’t you look at me?”

  Because I’m ashamed! She wanted to shout it at him, and she wanted to cry. She swallowed down the little catch in her throat and spoke with dull flatness. “Everybody from my mother to the housekeeper to Brine-Face said I shouldn’t go running about showing my ankles anymore, now that I was twelve and getting old enough to tempt men. I didn’t listen, and look what happened.”

  “A virtuous man cannot be tempted to an evil act.” Marcus sounded thoughtful, but very certain. “Therefore, the sight of your ankles or your anything else makes no difference: in acting upon his lusts, Pedanius proved himself as a man of no virtue. Well, we already knew that, didn’t we?”

  Annia stayed silent, turning that over. It sounded very well, but if this whole business came out to the world, she’d still be the one shamed. Not Pedanius. Annia knew that the way she knew dawn comes at the end of night.

  “Pedanius is wrong about something else,” Marcus added.

  “What’s that?”

  “He said no one would marry you if he ruined you.” Marcus sounded matter-of-fact. “But even if you hadn’t fought him off—if he’d had his way—I’d still marry you.”

  She gave a harsh little laugh. “You’re just saying that to be kind.”

  “No.” His hand found hers in the dark. “I’m not.”

  “Ruined girls don’t get husbands. Not good husbands like you, anyway.”

  “You think I’d be a good husband?” he asked, diverted.

  She shrugged. “You’re good at everything else, aren’t you? Greek verbs and trigon, rhetorics and declamation, even your sword drills. You’d be good at husbanding too.”

  “Husbanding means the care and cultivation of plants,” he began.

  “Don’t make me hit you,” she warned, and tried to yank her hand away. But he held on, his fingers knotted warmly through hers.

  “Pedanius couldn’t take your virtue,” Marcus said, and his voice was serious again. “Your virtue is already in you—it’s in what you do, not what he does to you. I’d still want to marry you, no matter how he wronged you.”

  Annia looked at him a moment, and then she leaned forward and kissed him. She couldn’t see as well in the shadows as he could; their noses bumped and she got his more of his chin than his lips. But it was still a kiss and she heard him inhale sharply. He smelled like ink and mint.

  “I suppose you think that was improper,” she said, pulling back a little.

  “Nothing about you is proper,” he said, and she could hear him smiling. “Maybe I’m going to be a good husband, Annia Galeria Faustina, but you’re going to make me a very bad wife.”

  “Probably,” she agreed. She felt light inside for the first time since Brine-Face grabbed her by the hair and told her to get on her knees. Just telling Marcus things and seeing him listen in that quiet way—it seemed to let all the wrath and the shame out. Ever since Pedanius had left for Egypt, Annia had been weighed down by the ball of rage burning in her chest.

  Not now.

  “Let’s finish cursing this bastard,” Marcus went on, and she gave his hand a squeeze to hear him swear. It was the kind of habit Annia felt she should encourage. “Because he’s not going to be Emperor, even if he is Caesar’s great-nephew. I’ll hold him down in this spring till he drowns, first. I might just do that anyway.”

  “No, I will,” Annia said. “I put it in the curse. I’m going to be the instrument of his downfall, remember?”

  “Let me drive the nail into the tablet,” Marcus proposed. “That gives me a stake in it, too. If you don’t bring down Pedanius, I get a chance at him.”

  “You said curses were wicked,” Annia said, just to tease.

  “Oh, they are,” Marcus said. “And I’ll pray for his downfall. But if prayer doesn’t work, well, ‘if I cannot soften those above, I will provoke those below.’”

  “You’re going to tell me who said that, aren’t you?”

  “Virgil.” Taking the nail from her hand, Marcus stabbed it through the folded lead tablet. “There,” he said, and as he handed her the tablet, Annia heard that intensity in his voice again. “Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator will never be Emperor. And more than that, he’ll pay for attacking you. I swear it.”

  “I swear it,” Annia echoed, and flung the tablet into the spring.

  CHAPTER 13

  VIX

  A.D. 130, Autumn

>   Cyrenaica

  The Emperor was hunting lion, and all I could think of was my wife. The hunting chariots, the horses, the bustle of the vast Imperial hunting party—none of it seemed as real to me as Mirah’s blue eyes smiling at me as I told her I would join the Imperial cortège. Not because of Simon’s words to me, but because of hers.

  “Hurry up, Vix!” Boil’s broad face was flushed with sunburn in Cyrenaica’s brutal heat. “Don’t you want to see the beast go down? It’s as big as the Nemean lion, so they say! Been ravaging the local villages—”

  I didn’t care if the Emperor bagged his lion. He rode at the front of the hunt on his big black horse, Antinous a spot of blue on the horse beside him, and I heard Simon’s voice in a whisper on the desert wind. See what our Caesar plans next for Judaea.

  I didn’t know how well I’d done at that. I was no subtle-tongued spy; I stumbled through my inquiries about Judaea with a flaming face. But my son seized my labored hints just because they carried words between us, suspecting nothing. Maybe he spoke to the Emperor, but I knew already there would be no change in Hadrian’s plans for Judaea. Why should there be? He was an efficient bastard: He’d come to a troublesome province with a list of plans, he’d checked off every item on it, and he’d moved on. As far as he was concerned, Aelia Capitolina would rise over the ruins of Jerusalem, Greek-columned temples would crowd out the synagogues, and that was that.

  And Simon, along with God knew how many men like him, would go on quietly counting the swords in those underground caches and training men to wield them, until someday there were enough of both.

  “Caesar!” One of the huntsmen squatted beside a rocky outcropping. “Lion tracks. The beast has a paw big as a platter—” The whole party spurred ahead.

  “What do you know?” I’d asked Mirah quietly the night Simon tried to recruit me, in the darkness of our bed where man and wife can murmur secrets unheard. And even so I whispered, because Simon’s plan for me still pulled a reflexive cry of Treason! from the deep lairs of my mind. “What do you know of your uncle’s . . . activities?”