by Kate Quinn
“You can, if that’s what you want. Because you are a man to equal any other. And the Emperor will take any chance of danger to keep you by his side.” I seized my son’s lean bare shoulders. And said it. “Because he loves you.”
Antinous’s head jerked up, and I made myself look at him with steady eyes. Love: the thing I’d finally seen, that day on the lion hunt. Maybe Hadrian had only been caught by my son’s good looks, in the beginning. Maybe there had been a certain dark satisfaction in bedding the son of a bitter enemy. But when the Emperor of the known world flings himself under the claws of a man-killing lion, risks his own death so that a humble Bithynian boy escapes with nothing more than a sprained thumb . . . Hell’s gates, what else can you call that but love?
How the gods must be laughing. My enemy and my son, united as true as any set of lovers who ever lived. The thought of it still brought a bitter taste to my mouth, but I’d been wrestling with what I’d seen ever since Hadrian’s neck escaped my knife at the lion hunt. If I’d killed the bastard, I’d have lost my son forever.
What does it matter? I’d thought bitterly, all the way up the Nile past the wonders of Gizeh and its pyramids, Arsinoe and its temples. You’ll lose him anyway, the moment you go back to Bethar to fight.
Maybe not. Maybe he’d weigh his choices—Hadrian’s love, or Hadrian’s duty—and come with me, after all.
But it was his decision.
He looked up at me and he had tears in his eyes again. “I don’t know,” he whispered, and I bled for him. That’s what you do, when your children grow up and you can no longer slay their demons for them.
I seized his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Whatever you choose,” I whispered, “you are my son, Antinous. My son. True as blood. And I love you more than anything on this earth.” I pulled him into a hug. My son, who I hadn’t held since Bethar when we’d embraced more in anger and in grief than in hope. It was hope I felt now as I cupped the back of his head with my hand, as though he were just a small boy again, and he hugged me back so hard my ribs creaked.
My son.
“I gave you a terrible haircut, Narcissus,” I said as we broke apart, and the radiance of his smile almost made me break down in tears.
“Don’t call me Narcissus,” he said.
“Never again,” I promised, and I never did.
He smiled at me. A sweeter smile, all wistfulness in the moonlight. “Thank you, Father.”
I kissed him once on the brow and I left him, padding back across the deck toward the steps that would take me belowdecks.
I turned back just once before I went below, and I saw him gazing up at the stars: a lean silvered figure in his kilt and his cropped head, every long smooth line of him carved in the silver light.
My son.
ANTINOUS
Beside the moon-glossed Nile, Antinous drew a shaky breath. His heart hurt, torn open by too many tears and too much love. A good pain, clean as a knife slash that drained a festering wound. I have my father back, he thought, and the words brought such an agony of joy that he almost wept again. I am my father’s son.
His head felt curiously light, and he ran a hand over the ragged chop his father had made of his hair. Hadrian will like it. He should go back to Hadrian’s bed, take him in his arms and whisper to him of Rome. Of serene days in the Emperor’s ever-expanding villa, where Hadrian would do nothing more taxing than begin the memoirs he was always talking about writing, and Antinous would sit at his side.
For how long? he could not help thinking, and still felt a shiver of superstitious fear: Hadrian dead with a knife in his back.
But didn’t that fate wait in the shadows for every emperor, not just Publius Aelius Hadrian? For one reason or another, and usually far more sinister ones than love?
The Emperor will take any chance of danger to keep you by his side. Antinous heard those words in his father’s voice. Because he loves you.
Antinous took another long and shaky breath. We will have years, he thought. I must believe that. And even if it was not years, it was enough. Love that challenged lions and empires and death itself was enough, in whatever measure it graced a man’s life.
He raised his eyes to the heavenly sky, drinking it in. Would he ever see Hadrian and his father smile at each other? Probably not.
But a man could dream.
Antinous made a wish on the moon, the same moon he’d seen tangled in the tree branches at Eleusis on the night he’d first held Hadrian in his arms. He heard footsteps behind him and began to turn, when a blow to his head shattered the world, sent it flying around him like pieces of black glass.
Dark, he thought, too confused to be frightened. Swirling dark like he’d seen in the kykeon the second time. A dizzy moment as he felt himself being tugged, hoisted under the arms, lifted up. Then the dark was gone and the stars were rushing at him, reflected in the Nile.
So beautiful, Antinous had time to think. And then he was falling among the stars.
CHAPTER 14
SABINA
“Is Antinous with you?”
Hadrian stood at the threshold of Sabina’s chamber, barefoot and rumple-haired in his sleeping tunic as though he’d barely risen from his own bed. Sabina blinked, managed to unstick her eyes. “It is dawn,” she yawned, sitting up from her rumpled cushions. “Why in the name of all the gods would your lover be in my bed?”
“I thought the two of you might have tiptoed out again to watch the sun come up on the river. Otherwise he always wakes me when he rises.”
“We’re trying to get you to sleep more. It’s a dire plot we cooked up between us, I confess it.” Sabina swung her bare legs out of her sleeping couch, reaching for a robe she’d been given in Alexandria, embroidered all over in lapis-beaded eyes of Horus. “If he left your bed this morning and left you behind to sleep late, well, he’s just doing what the physician said was best for you, so don’t scold.”
Hadrian was already stamping off. Sabina smiled at her little African maid, who had come forward with a cold mint tisane, and the Empress was stirring it in its agate cup and wondering when they would reach the wonders of Thebes when a shout split the morning bustle.
Not a shout, Sabina realized. A scream.
She kept hold of her cup as she ran out on deck, her many-eyed robe rippling behind her, and she thought perhaps one of the sailors had fallen overboard and given a shout of alarm. Or someone had spotted a crocodile again—there was Julia Balbilla giving her fluttery shriek, standing at the gilded railing of the barge, pointing into the waters beside the bank.
“What?” Sabina laughed, coming up beside her. “Goodness, the crocodiles can’t harm a barge this size, it’s the hippopotami that go after boats—”
But it was no crocodile with its lidded reptilian eyes that Sabina saw in the Nile’s idle green swirls when she followed Balbilla’s gaze. It was a tangle of branches and dead leaves from a fallen tree on the bank just a few yards distant, a tangle of debris that the river hadn’t yet swept away. And among that clot of branches, limp and shockingly white, was a man’s hand.
“Oh, gods,” Balbilla said shakily. “Forgive me—I know peasants drown in the Nile every day, the currents are so fierce—but it startled me, that thing poking up from the water like it was beckoning to me—”
Sabina’s fingers suddenly opened and the agate cup tumbled from her hand to shatter on the deck at her bare feet. Ice crawled through her bones. “No,” she whispered. “No.”
That dead hand showed a flash of white against the dead leaves. A bandage wound neat around the thumb, the linen sodden from the water, but Sabina could remember Hadrian tying it off with his own hands. “We should be lucky you escaped the lion with nothing more than a sprained thumb, my star.”
Sabina found herself bent double, her head shaking violently back and forth. “No—” she said, “no—no—” So much no, and all t
he no in the world would do not one bit of good. Not against that dreadful sight. “No,” she wailed, and she went on screaming because she wanted to drown out the sounds of the boat around her, the cries of alarm and the cries of warning that were just beginning to burgeon. She wanted to drown out the world. But most of all she wanted to drown out the sound that Hadrian would make when he came up on deck in his tunic and his bare feet and his night-rumpled hair, when he heard her screaming, when he came half-alarmed and half-irked to her side at the barge’s gilded rail—
When he looked down and saw Antinous lying dead in the arms of the Nile.
* * *
It was no sound at all at first. The world had faded to utter silence in Sabina’s ears by the time Hadrian came beside her at the rail, half-running from belowdecks at the sound of the commotion. His hand rested beside hers on the railing, and she felt the heat of his swollen fingers. She looked up at her husband, his deep-set eyes that had already left her and were speeding swiftly across the water, and she had a mad urge to clap her hands over his eyes because as long as he didn’t see, then his world wouldn’t end.
But he saw, and she had time to feel the flex of those swollen fingers as they convulsed about the gilded rail. And there was still no sound, not a sound in the world except the Emperor vaulting over the side of the barge and landing with a great splash in the river. A moan went up from the watchers, seeing the currents seize their Emperor, and one of their Egyptian guides began to mutter prayers against the treacherous eddies of the Nile. No, Sabina could have told the guides, her wails trapped in her throat by now. The Nile has already claimed its sacrifice today. Hadrian was already swimming against the current, pulling himself through the water in strong scything strokes.
It seemed only a moment before Hadrian reached the tangle of dead branches and rotted leaves that leaned from the bank. He tore at the mess of it, and he was making a sound, his frozen silence gone. “Antinous—Antinous?” He sounded almost bemused. Rotted leaves and globs of mud spun through the green waters, splattered the Emperor’s face like blood splashing up from a mortal wound. Mortal wound, Sabina thought, mortal wound, and felt such a stab of agony through her body that she nearly cried out again. All as Hadrian tore at the leaves and kept asking “Antinous?” as though it were a question that had any kind of answer.
And then the white face appeared. When did he turn so white? Sabina thought. Antinous had been made of gold, a creature of sunlight and swift motion, but as he emerged from the grip of the branches that had trapped him against the bank, he looked to be made of marble instead. White and cold and smooth and wet, one hand thrown loose across his broad unmarked chest, the other with its sodden bandage trailing loose, fingers mooring the water . . . His profile like a drowned god’s, pale and peaceful, lashes gleaming like wet gold against his cheek, the strong column of his throat utterly unmoving.
“No,” Hadrian said, just as Sabina had. “No—” The limp golden head lolled against his shoulder, in the same place where Sabina had so often seen Antinous curl close under his Imperial lover’s arm, and Hadrian smoothed the cropped hair. Smoothed it over and over. When had Antinous cut his hair? “No,” the Emperor said, voice rising. “You have to wake, my star. Osiris woke after he was sunk in the Nile. You have to wake, too. Wake—” and he shook the corpse, but Antinous’s head flopped backward like a dead fish, and his eyelids slid back grotesquely to reveal blind staring eyes. Dead eyes, corpse eyes, and that was when Hadrian howled.
He howled like a beast, like a thing from behind the gates of Hades, and the howl would not end. It went on—and on—and on—as he rocked Antinous against him in the shallows of the Nile, rocked him and smoothed his hair and howled and howled and howled, and a recoil of horror went through the chorus of watchers around Sabina. Chorus, she thought. That’s what we are—the chorus to a Greek tragedy, and the last act is upon us and all we can do is react. She staggered away from the crowd, pushing through them, and the first person she saw through her swimming eyes was Vix. Vix, puzzled and alert, his russet hair gleaming in the morning sun, one foot still balanced on the top step where he’d come from belowdecks. Drawn, no doubt, by the Emperor’s animal howling, and his gray eyes were already going to the railing where the crowd milled and jabbered.
Vix had time to take two steps toward the commotion before Sabina slammed into him. She half-lunged and half-fell against his chest, her knees giving out, and Vix caught her just in time, his arm hard around her waist. “Hell’s gates—” he began, but Sabina’s hands were at his face, trying to cover his eyes.
“You can’t look”—she was weeping—“you can’t look, promise me you won’t look!” She hadn’t covered Hadrian’s eyes in time; Hadrian had seen and now he was making that terrible bestial cry. If she let Vix see, he was going to go utterly mad. “You can’t look,” she cried, and tried to cover his eyes, but he had seized her wrists and moved her bodily aside, sprinting for the railing, and this time there was no shocked silence. There was just a bellow like a bear who had been gored—“Antinous!”—and then another splash as Vix too vaulted over the side of the barge, making a neater dive into the waters than Hadrian, and Sabina bent over retching, her stomach turning itself inside out even as she wept. She heard the energetic splashing of Vix’s arms as he swam to join the Emperor in a few swift strokes. And then more shouting, “Let him breathe, Caesar, you bastard, he can’t breathe with you clutching him like that! He can’t breathe, Hell’s gates, he can’t breathe—” And then Vix just roared, a long wordless roar that went into a guttural sob, and Sabina staggered to her feet and fell against the railing in time to see Vix’s head drop and his arms convulse around his son’s still, white body, as Hadrian still made his animal howls into Antinous’s wet hair. The three heads together just above the water: Hadrian’s dark, Vix’s russet, and Antinous’s fair, a terrible tableau of agony against the lazy green ripples of the Nile.
Later she realized it couldn’t have happened that way. There were others in the water by that time—sailors in the swift little reed boats that had been lowered from the deck to assist; slaves swimming out with lines; Praetorians splashing toward the Emperor. But somehow all she saw was Vix and Hadrian cradling Antinous between them, and she bowed her head then on the railing and felt the great crack of something breaking inside.
“Gods,” someone said at Sabina’s elbow, and through the fog that unsteadied her eyes she saw Lucius Ceionius, looking stiff and uncomfortable. “Caesar weeps like a woman!”
Sabina gave him a ringing backhanded slap before she even realized she was moving. Lucius stared at her, openmouthed, the print of her hand rising scarlet on his cheek. She wanted to hit him again but the guards were shouting, and she pushed her way farther down the railing as Boil and the other Praetorians hauled the weeping Emperor limp and unresisting back on deck. He collapsed boneless to hands and knees, his breath coming in shallow pants, and he looked up slowly around him, and his eyes were blind. “Antinous?” he said. “Where is Antinous?” And Sabina felt a sob in her own throat, because there was hope in his eyes. Hope that this was nothing but a dream, a kykeon dream where nightmares became flesh. A dream that could be dispelled if only Antinous would come bounding up from belowdecks, laughing and gleaming and shaking his head at all the fuss.
But Antinous was being winched up to the deck in a loop of rope behind the Emperor. Vix climbed that railing first, soaking wet and granite-faced and utterly mute after his one guttural roar, and he pushed the helping hands away. Vix alone lifted Antinous over the railing, arms straining, cradling that long body against his chest as though it were a child’s.
“Antinous,” Hadrian whispered.
Vix laid Antinous on the deck. The Nile’s fierce currents had stripped that beautiful form naked, torn the kilt from his hips and the topaz ring from his left hand. Antinous was naked as an infant in his father’s arms, and Sabina saw Vix’s chest heave as he straightened those long limbs.
But Vix’s stone face never moved at all. He just bent forward and pressed his lips to that pale forehead. As a father would kiss a child after a nightmare, Sabina thought, and the stab of agony went through her again. Not Antinous, she howled inside. Anyone but him!
His little black dog came trotting up, whining somewhere in the back of its throat. He sniffed at his master hopefully, tail wagging, and that was when another howl came from Hadrian as he collapsed across Antinous’s unmoving chest, weeping and weeping as if he would flood the Nile with grief alone. Sabina stumbled, going to her knees beside him, her hands slipping through his curly hair. “Hadrian—” Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered the bathhouse in Antioch where she and her husband’s lover had lain in the curve of Hadrian’s arms, all three of them so happy. “Hadrian—”
But the eyes that found hers were tear-drowned and savage. “Get away from me,” he hissed, and her vision exploded into sparks as he slapped her away across the deck. Sabina heard a moan from the watching crowd, and through her unsteady eyes as she pushed herself up on one side, she saw the look in their eyes change. Not just shock or sadness as they watched their Emperor huddling over his lover’s body. Not just unease as they heard his cries rise up to the wheeling birds overhead.
Fear, Sabina thought, the whole side of her head ringing savagely from Hadrian’s hand. And she felt the same fear rise through her, clawing and choking, because the Emperor’s cries no longer sounded human at all.
VIX
I howled like a wolf when I found my son. Just once, shouting his name—but within my skull, the cry went on and on.
Antinous. When I closed my eyes, I saw the silvered figure I’d left on the stern of the barge last night, the boy who stood living and beautiful beneath the moon. Alive. Not that empty naked shell I helped pull from the Nile.
I remember nothing after that. The world went away from me. When it came back I was on my sleeping pallet in the barge quarters where the Praetorians slept, and I was alone. Alone and huddled, gasping for breath. I closed my eyes and Antinous smiled at me on the back of my eyelids. I made a strangled sound between my teeth, and the world went away again. It kept doing that. I came to myself once to realize I held my naked sword across my knees, clinging to it as Boil tried to wrest it away. I resisted, but he shouted for the other Praetorians, and then things tilted again and when I woke it was night and my hands were empty. I could see moonlight coming from somewhere, and I nearly went blundering up on deck to see if I could find Antinous at the stern with his shorn hair and his tender smile. But he wasn’t there; he was dead. He was dead, oh, my son was dead, and I could not weep.
