Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  He banged the door, going to his lonely couch and his oblivion, and I stood there in the stinking filth of the room and I began to laugh. Not because it was funny, although it was. Because would the bastard never stop screwing me over?

  The Tenth is yours, Legate. The doomed Tenth, stationed square in the middle of the firestorm that was about to erupt in Judaea. Africanus and the men who had bought me drinks and looked at me with such admiration. The eagle I had carried so proudly. All of them doomed, and I had just about wrestled myself to the conclusion that Mirah was right; that it was the price that had to be paid. For a province to be freed, men had to die.

  Not my men.

  They aren’t your men, I thought.

  They are now.

  Not yet! I screamed inside. Turn the appointment down. Go home!

  Too late. I could feel the tattoo on my arm burning, the crude X I’d inked just below my shoulder the day Trajan had given me the Tenth for my own. I’d felt it prickling every time I thought about the men of the Tenth dying in the streets of Jerusalem as they tried to hunt down rebels, prickling me in reproach—but I’d always been able to stamp it down. For Mirah. For Simon. For the girls.

  Now it burned me.

  Two different men had asked me to fight for them. Two brilliant, bearded men with deep-set eyes and ruthless visions of the future. One I loved, and my family stood on his side. One I hated, and my legionaries stood on his side. I didn’t know which man was right. I didn’t know anything anymore.

  Except that my son was dead, and the Fates were cruel.

  Hadrian had smashed almost everything in the room that could be smashed, but there was a polished silver mirror canted sideways against a wall, still intact. I righted it as my son’s dog watched me with anxious eyes, as I looked at my own reflection. My new beard had grown in since I left Judaea, and it was finally past the maddening itchy stage, thick and red-hued. Mirah would like it.

  But I didn’t look like a man of Judaea, even with the beard. I didn’t look like a warrior for God. I looked like a soldier of Rome, and God help me, that was what I was.

  “Legate Vercingetorix,” a familiar voice said behind me.

  I turned. Sabina came slipping into the wrecked chamber, her eyes shadowed, the great bruise still showing along the side of her face where Hadrian had struck her away. “You overheard?” I said stupidly.

  “Yes. Your promotion, and his plans for Antinous’s body.” She went to listen at the door of Hadrian’s bedchamber. There was an indistinct rumble of snores beginning, and her face softened. “He’ll sleep for hours now,” she said, and looked at me. “Thank you for helping him. I hope he helped you.”

  I couldn’t answer that, so I gestured at the bruise on her face. “He hurt you,” I said, and heard the growl in my own voice.

  “He didn’t mean to. He sobbed apologies into my lap afterward.”

  “But he hurt you, and you still tend him?”

  “At least I know how to handle him. The slaves aren’t really safe around him in these moods.”

  “Sabina—”

  “You have the Tenth Fidelis,” she said, calmly dismissing my pity. “I’m glad. The men will be safer when the fight comes, if you’re leading them.”

  “There’s a fight coming, is there?”

  “Isn’t there?”

  Did she know about the unrest in Judaea? I thought she did. Sabina knew things like that. Hadrian and Antinous had been too dazed in their happiness to see much of anything going on around them, but Sabina had always been clear-eyed. She came toward me, running a fingertip over the Mars amulet at my neck. “That should keep you safe, if the Tenth comes to any trouble.”

  “I don’t want to be safe.” My throat was full of thorns, the amulet like a weight about my neck. “Why didn’t I give it to Antinous? Then it would have kept him safe.”

  Her voice was gentle. “It’s just a token.”

  “A token.” All the tokens I’d gathered over my wandering life—from my father, from Trajan, from Mirah—even one from Sabina, long hidden away. “Why don’t I have a token from Antinous? Why didn’t I give one to him? Why?”

  Sabina eyed me for a moment, and then she stood on tiptoe and untied the amulet’s cord from around my neck. I didn’t stop her. “Wait,” she said, pressing her fingertips against my chest, and carried the amulet to the room’s other door. She slipped inside, and I gagged at the smell. My golden son was in there, rotting. I wanted to scream. I wanted to die.

  Sabina came back and she had something over her arm, I couldn’t see what with my wine-blurred, grief-blurred eyes. I felt her light touch as she draped something about my shoulders, and I felt the familiar weight of fur. “I burned my old lion skin,” I said. “I burned it in Judaea, when I vowed—” When I vowed I was turning my back on Rome for good.

  “This is the pelt of the lion Hadrian slew in Cyrenaica.” She pinned it about my shoulders. “The one he killed to save Antinous. It will keep you safe, in place of your Mars amulet. And I laid the amulet with Antinous’s body. When he’s mummified I’ll see that it’s woven into the wrappings over his heart.” Her eyes were so clear. “Part of you, with him always.”

  My eyes burned. The embrace of the lion’s fur felt like Antinous’s arms. I hunched into it like I’d been stabbed, my whole body shaking, and Sabina opened her arms. I dropped into them, crashing to my knees.

  “Ssshhh,” Sabina said, fingers slipping through my hair, and her touch destroyed me. I gripped her, drowning, and I wept at last for my son.

  Then I rose, and I wiped my eyes, and I went to war.

  HADRIAN’S VILLA

  Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

  —MARCUS AURELIUS

  CHAPTER 15

  VIX

  A.D. 131, Spring

  Bethar

  All my life, I’d wanted to ask my wife one question: What do you see? That girl Mirah had been, the girl who danced among the vines at Tu B’Av with sloe blossom braided in her bright hair, merry and light-footed and laughing, her blue eyes somehow only for me—what had she seen when she looked at me? I had always wondered.

  She only laughed whenever I asked her, shaking her head in puzzlement. “I saw you, of course!”

  Did she?

  Because I knew what she saw when she ran to greet me in the small courtyard of our house in Bethar. I knew very well.

  Somewhere on the journey between Egypt and Judaea, I shaved off my beard. I took it off in short brutal strokes of the knife, standing naked before a bowl of tepid water in some decrepit roadside inn. Then I attacked my russet hair with its graying streaks, taking it down to the bare scalp, and left my head bleeding in half a dozen places. I put aside the nondescript tunic and cloak I’d been traveling in, and put on for the first time my full regalia as legate. The breastplate, the sword belt, the scarlet cloak. The mementos I’d accumulated over my life, the ones I’d laid aside when I came to Judaea, reasoning that they had no part in my new life—I drew them out, one by one. The string of campaign tokens I’d won in Dacia and Parthia, strung once more across my breastplate. The gold ring engraved with the letters PARTHICUS, given to me from Emperor Trajan’s own hand, pushed once more into place on my first finger. Antinous’s lion skin, pinned about my shoulders. The blue scarf Mirah had been wearing when she survived the great earthquake in Antioch, stuffed under my shoulder plate with a caress of the worn cloth.

  I looked bare and brutal, blood still trickling down my neck from the nicks in my shaved scalp. I looked like the man who had killed a rebel king in Dacia, who had clawed his way red-handed from legionary to aquilifer to centurion to tribune to legate. I looked like a man to be feared.

  That was the man Mirah saw striding across her courtyard, his boots slapping harshly at the stone. She was watering the small orange trees in
their pots, and her head turned at the sound, and for a moment she didn’t know her own husband. I hadn’t been able to tell her of my promotion by letter—during those long winter months I’d spent in Egypt at Hadrian’s side after my son’s death, I must have written and torn up the words a hundred times. She’d sent me greetings of her own, warm sympathies written in a scribe’s hand when she heard of Antinous’s death, and I had not been able to reply, not when I couldn’t tell her the whole truth. And now I wished I had found some way to do it, because she looked first alarmed and then puzzled as I took off my helmet and tucked it under one arm.

  She took a step as though to embrace me, but my somber face stopped her in her tracks.

  My voice was hoarse as I asked the question. “What do you see?”

  “I see you,” she said, just as she had long ago.

  “And who am I?”

  “Vercingetorix ben Masada,” she said. “Warrior of God.” She looked at my armor and perhaps she thought I had earned a post with Hadrian so I could report on him. After all, I had left her so I could spy on the Romans.

  But I had returned as one of them.

  “Vercingetorix the Red,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Legate of the Tenth Fidelis.”

  Mirah looked at my armor again, and a leaf drifted down past her head, that bright hair hidden away behind another blue scarf. The girl who had twirled and spun through the vines at Tu B’Av still had freckles that danced across her nose like flakes of gold. What do you see?

  My Roman son, my father had said.

  You are of Rome and your wife is of God, my mother had said.

  They knew me better than my wife did.

  Mirah’s eyes crawled across my breastplate, rose to my shaved jaw and shaved head, and she read my expression for what it was. Her whole face convulsed. She put a hand to her mouth, her head shaking from side to side.

  I took a step forward. She backed away from me, her head still shaking back and forth. “Mirah,” I said helplessly, but what could I say? Mirah, I am lost here. Mirah, I am not born to run a wine shop or help free your province of the Jews. Mirah, I do not know what you see when you look at me, but see what is there: a man made to harvest the souls of Rome’s enemies.

  And Mirah, I love you.

  But I saw no love in her eyes that day, as I stood in my legate’s armor, in my Roman boots made for stamping on Judaea’s rebels. Her blue eyes filled as she stared at me, but not with tears. With revulsion.

  She gave a swift lunging dart of her chin, and she spat at me. Her spittle landed on my polished breastplate. And though there were still so many bitter words to be said, so many things to be screamed and argued and wept, that was the moment when my heart broke.

  SABINA

  A.D. 131, Summer

  Rome

  The Empress of Rome went straight into her sister’s arms. She felt like a child in need of rocking, and though Faustina was the younger, she must have known that. She held Sabina tight, murmuring soothing wordless nonsense as she’d have done to Annia. And Sabina felt a man’s arms slide around them both, shielding them like a warm wall, and heard Titus’s quiet voice. “How bad is it, Sabina?”

  “Oh—” She lifted her head to him, wiping at her eyes. “It is so much worse than you could imagine.”

  He made no reply, only stepped closer. Sabina stood a moment, cocooned safely between her sister’s soft breast and Titus’s lean shoulder, their arms sheltering her from the world, from the curious eyes of the slaves. It felt like that moment in the bathhouse in Antioch with Hadrian and Antinous, the three of them standing wrapped together in such companionable affection. Only Antinous and I were allied in fear for Hadrian, she thought. Hadrian and I never dreamed of ill fortune for Antinous.

  She stepped back from her sister and her brother-in-law, giving a watery smile. “So much for the Empress’s grand return to the Eternal City,” she said, looking down at her travel-stained stola and ruined cloak. The seas had been ferocious all the way from Egypt, even the usually placid waters of the Tiber. Not a soul on Sabina’s ship had come off its decks less than hollow-faced and covered in grime. Summer was only beginning to turn to fall; the seas should still have been calm, but Sabina didn’t question the ill winds or the ill luck. There had been no good fortune at all since Antinous had died, and that was all there was to it.

  “You’ve gotten thin,” Faustina scolded, pulling back to look her sister over. “Do you truly grieve so much for Antinous? He’s been gone nearly a year.”

  “I will miss him always,” Sabina said, and the pang of grief stabbed her just as sharply as it had when she saw him lying in the Nile. The shock had gone, but not the grief. “But it’s not just Antinous. I miss my husband.”

  “You’ve only been parted from him since he left Egypt for Syria—”

  “Oh, I was missing him long before that.” Sabina felt her smile turn mirthless. “The moment they dragged Antinous out of the Nile, Hadrian was gone.”

  The Hadrian she had grown accustomed to, anyway. The man who could be teased and scolded, who would debate new laws and Greek philosophy and architectural principles until dawn, the man with a smile never far from his face. That man was lost into a grief fathoms deeper than her own. He worked the days and nights round without caring for sleep, did his Imperial duties with savage precision, lashed his grief-gaunt body into vicious morning hunts followed by immobile public appearances followed by nights of feverish writing, writing, writing. “What are you writing?” Sabina had asked.

  “The legacy of Antinous,” Hadrian responded. “A great city named Antinoöpolis erected on the bank where he fell—two colonnaded thoroughfares crossing at the center, with a shrine in his name. Yearly games to be held in his honor. Temples, epic verses, statues to be commissioned in every corner of the Empire—” The Emperor finally looked up, his gaze red-rimmed. “He will not be forgotten. His name and his face will live forever, I swear it. My legacy will be his.”

  “What of Rome’s legacy?” Sabina had asked, stroking his hair.

  Hadrian returned to his feverish writing, ignoring her touch. “Burn it all down, for all I care.”

  Now, Titus steered her from the brightly painted atrium into the sunlight of a little walled garden, ordered cups of barley water, and dismissed the slaves. “So, the real news about the Emperor. Let’s hear it.”

  Sabina cradled her cup. “What have you heard already?”

  Titus looked up at the cloudless sky as if searching for tactful words. It was Faustina who said bluntly, “That he thinks his lover is a god.”

  “True enough,” Sabina said. “By the time I left Hadrian’s entourage, Antinous’s worship was already spreading in the east. Hermopolis, Alexandria, Lykopolis—they all have temples. More are planned.”

  Faustina sighed. “I’m not saying the boy wasn’t a gift from the heavens—we all know what a balm he was for the Emperor’s temper. But a Greek-blooded common-born boy worshipped like a Bacchus or a Mars?”

  Sabina shrugged. “Perhaps he deserves to be deified. Certainly they believed so in Egypt—the river began to rise as soon as his body was taken from it, as if in homage.” And then there was Hadrian’s renewed and savage burst of good health. Anyone who throws themselves into the Nile will save the life of a loved one . . .

  There were already rumors that Hadrian had had his beloved sacrificed, a dark bargain with the gods for renewed health and long life. Fools.

  “Whether he deserved deification or no,” Titus said in austere tones, “a catamite has never before been entered into the realms of the divine. I say it not out of insult,” he added, noting Sabina’s frown, “but so you may imagine the Senate’s reaction.”

  Sabina drew herself up in a flash of cold anger. “If it will assuage Hadrian’s grief to have his beloved remembered as Antinous the God rather than Antinous the Catamite, then the Senate may hiss like g
anders.”

  “You’ve got a glare that could crack marble,” Titus said, looking her over. “What an empress you’ve become, Vibia Sabina. I remember when you were a barefoot girl with your hair in your eyes, sprawled on the floor with a map.”

  “And I remember a gawky boy who came to propose marriage to me.” Sabina looked at her brother-in-law: long, lean, quiet, commanding, with smile lines about his eyes and hands so still that their smallest gesture made illustrious men scurry. Titus Antoninus Pius, they were calling him now; one of Rome’s most honored sons, cheered by all. “How old were you then? Sixteen?”

  “And now I’m well past forty.” Titus ran a hand through his hair, silvering about the ears. “And sometimes feel as old as Servianus.”

  “Some parts of you are still just as active as they were at sixteen,” Faustina murmured. “What?” she said at her husband’s glance. “I meant your stomach, of course! You should see him fall on Alpine cheese,” she told Sabina. “It’s like lions falling on gladiators. Or Annia falling on her water flask when she comes back from her run—”

  This time, the pang in Sabina’s chest was pleasure rather than pain. “Where is Annia, anyway? Running?”

  “Of course.” Titus gave a fond shake of his head. “Though I restrict her to no more than four miles a day.”

  “I long to see her.” See if her hair had darkened from pure red to Vix’s russet, see if she had grown out of her freckles . . . Sabina smiled involuntarily, and Titus and Faustina smiled back. We three, Sabina thought. All her life, it seemed, she had been one of three. As a girl it had been herself and Vix, forever tearing gaps in each other until Titus arrived to complete the triangle and cement the peace. Then there was herself and Hadrian, ever an ill-matched pair until Antinous came to make it three against the world. Now Antinous was gone, but there was still Titus and Faustina to complete a new trio.

  One of three, Sabina thought, looking at the way her sister’s hand twined with Titus’s. Never one of two.