Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “I am no longer your wife! I will not be the wife of a Roman tyrant—”

  I gave her a little shake, cutting her off. “You will always be my wife.” Because I miss you, I wanted to cry. Even like this, with you shouting and cursing my name, I miss you. “You hear me, Mirah? Until one or both of us is dead, you are my wife.”

  “Then I pray death comes to one of us.” She stared at me with tear-filled eyes, but she wasn’t crying from grief. My wife was crying because she hated me utterly. “Dear God, but I should have stabbed you while you slept long ago.”

  My broken heart spasmed in my chest. Oh, Mirah—I could see the girl in white, dancing at Tu B’Av. I could see her in every detail, right down to the smile in her blue eyes.

  “Then hate me,” I said. “As long as you survive.”

  * * *

  I returned to the Tenth to find a heap of hysterical dispatches. Towns were being seized openly along all the borders, and I had incoherent lists of the dead and even more incoherent reports of the rebellion’s leadership. “It’s said they cut off the little finger of one hand as a sign of loyalty to their leader. He’s not hiding anymore—sent signed dispatches all through the province, inciting rebellion. He goes by the name of Simon bar Kokhba.”

  My stomach sank as though it had been filled with lead, but was I surprised? Not really. “What does that mean?” I asked. “The name.”

  “Son of a star. He changed his name to match a prophecy. ‘There shall come forth a star out of Israel—’”

  Behind me, Boil sucked in a breath. He’d loved Simon too, in the old days in the ranks. Africanus gave a low whistle. “Sir, if this is your wife’s uncle, we should question her. Gently,” he added as my head whipped around.

  He meant that it would look bad for me, my wife being so close with the rebels. But I knew where my loyalty lay, and I wasn’t having Mirah questioned just to allay doubts. She had nothing to say to me, and I had nothing to prove.

  Simon ben Cosiba, turned Simon bar Kokhba. His men were soon moving through the narrow mountain passes, moving to cut us off. “Let them come!” one of my tribunes trumpeted. “We’ll show them what a Roman legion can do!”

  “They know what a Roman legion can do.” I looked at my officers. “We retreat. Now.”

  That was a march from the gates of Hell, looping north from Jerusalem with what felt like most of Judaea on our heels. I marched the men at double pace, marched them till they were tumbling down in the road, screamed at them to get up, ordered the centurions to lay on them with vine sticks until they got up and limped on bloody-soled.

  I lost a whole cohort at the rear when screaming rebels came out of the dark in fast-moving formation, came from the midnight black and massacred them before they had a chance to form ranks, and I lost another cohort over the following two nights in a pair of vicious dawn attacks. Over a thousand men, gone.

  Boil cursed and my tribunes pleaded with me to turn and stand ground, turn and fight, but if we did I’d have a whole legion of dead men. “Give the Twelfth time to get here,” I said, staggering from lack of sleep. “That’s when we fight.”

  But we ended up running clear to the border of Judaea, because the Twelfth didn’t even get halfway to Jerusalem before Simon and his nine-fingered rebels fell on them. Fell on them and slaughtered them to the last fucking man.

  Mirah’s words whispered to me: This time we’ve learned.

  We ended up wintering—where? I can’t remember. I had a single half-shattered legion; I could do nothing but fortify our camp and wait for the Emperor, praying we’d still be alive by the time he arrived.

  Black days.

  Hadrian was preparing to return to Rome, but it didn’t take him long to head for Antioch and summon me. “You look like every rebel in Judaea marched over your face on the way here,” was his greeting.

  I shrugged. I was winter-starved, ashen, taut, and feral; close to tears and just as close to fury. I walked straight across his chamber, helped myself to a cup of unwatered wine, tossed it down, and sat without permission. He had advisers there—commanders, Praetorians, the odd senator—and they looked at me as nervously as though a wolf had stalked into their warm enclave. “You don’t look too pretty yourself, Caesar,” I observed. He looked thin, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He sat still, none of his old restless gestures, and he had Antinous’s black dog across his lap. The animal never left his side.

  “Life feels like death,” he said, stroking the dog’s pointed ears, “without Antinous.”

  “That it does,” I agreed, and I saw his advisers shifting uncomfortably. Such grief is womanish, they were likely to say when Hadrian could not hear. I’d heard plenty such whispers on the barge back in Egypt, with Hadrian howling and weeping his nights away.

  I liked his grief. I still wept for my son, too, and I didn’t care if it made me womanish.

  “How bad is it?” Hadrian asked bluntly. “In Judaea.”

  “Bad,” I said, just as blunt. “They control all the territory south of Jerusalem and running along the sea. They’ve established it all as a free state, under Simon bar Kokhba.” I used the new name. Thought it might make him seem like a different man. So far it wasn’t working. “The Twelfth Deiotariana is gone. I lost a quarter of my legionaries just getting to Caesarea—”

  “Outrageous,” one of the senators harrumphed.

  I just gazed at him. “You try marching twenty hours straight with ten thousand well-armed nine-fingered lunatics on your heels every step of the way.”

  Hadrian lifted a hand before the senator could bristle. “What do you advise, Legate?”

  “Let it all go?” I suggested. “Let them keep their damned free state?”

  What Mirah prayed for, what Simon hoped for. Sometimes, even now, I dream about what would have happened if Hadrian had said yes. But—

  “No,” he said, and there was a glitter in those lifeless eyes. A fathomless black rage that would see the whole province burning like a pyre.

  So be it. I shrugged. “Then we take it all back.”

  “You think that’s so simple?” the new Praetorian Prefect drawled.

  “Simple, yes,” I said. “Easy, no. Move every man you can spare into the province and stamp until everything that hits back is gone. It’s hard to do, not hard to understand, you shit-brained wine-sack prick.”

  “See here—” he bristled, but Hadrian interrupted, eyes never shifting from me.

  “What will be required, to subdue Judaea?”

  “I’ll need new men in the Tenth. To replace my losses.” God, so many losses!

  “I’ll have the ranks filled with sailors and marines from my fleet, to make up the ranks until new legionaries can be conscripted. What else?”

  “At least eight more legions.” I braced myself for refusal. I needed those eight badly, but it was so much to ask for—even at the height of Trajan’s Parthian wars, had such a massive force ever been summoned for a single threat? Hadrian might very well laugh in my face.

  “Make it twelve legions,” he said. “What else?”

  “More commanders,” I rallied. “I can’t do it all, not something this size. We’ll need good competent men, not pride-stuffed peacocks thinking only of their own reputations.”

  “I’ll summon Sextus Julius Severus from Britannia. He’s my best. The governors of Syria and Arabia as well.”

  Someone else spoke up. “It’ll take time, assembling them—”

  “See it done,” Hadrian said, and that was how a whole war was charted: a few terse lines between two old enemies. I looked at the Emperor, and he looked at me. I remembered the hatred I’d felt when I found him with Antinous, when I ripped across the room roaring for his blood. I remembered the rage I’d felt when he gave me the Tenth back in his drunken haze of grief, setting me on the course that ruined things for good with Mirah. I remembered the rage
and the hate, but I couldn’t feel either. God knows I didn’t have any love for the bastard, and Hadrian had none for me either, but he trusted me utterly. All the facts and figures I’d gathered to beg my case today, and he hadn’t asked for a one. My opinion was enough, and the war was mine, and all with hardly a word being said. And I felt one last spasm of grief for Simon, because I could so easily have been his general instead, sitting at the right hand of my friend who was another bearded, brilliant, enigmatic man like Hadrian.

  But I was bound to the Emperor instead: two angry, aging men locked together in a shared grief.

  He held a hand out and I grasped it, feeling the strength of his grip as he felt mine. We looked at each other, hands locked not in enmity but in accord, and he dismissed me with a thought rather than a command. Bring me blood, Vercingetorix, I imagined him thinking.

  Gladly, Caesar.

  All through the war it was like that, the complicit silences. I swear I heard his orders before he ever voiced them, and he knew my actions before they were ever taken. I was his dog of war, and he let me off the leash. Black days, yes. But days with a strange bitter exhilaration, doing the job I knew how to do, and doing it so well. Love it or hate it—and mostly I hated it—I was made for this.

  Close to a year and a half it took to assemble the army we needed. Near to thirteen legions. Sextus Julius Severus arrived, and he grunted to meet me. “Heard of you,” he said, looking me up and down. “Nothing good.”

  “It’s all true,” I said, and I liked the man. God knows he was a brute; he thought nothing of tacking a villager up on a cross as an object lesson to a whole town, and his men would rape anything that had a hole in it. But he told foul cheerful jokes, and he bullied me to eat when I forgot, and I’d long since abandoned the whole puzzling conundrum of how a savage brute could also be a man to be liked. I was a brute myself, those three years. I drove my men hard, I handed out punishment freely, I gave the courageous no more praise than a nod and shamed the cowards as viciously as I knew how. I was Vercingetorix the Red, Hadrian’s dog, and I gave a dog’s howl inside at the river of blood I unleashed.

  “I have done what I can to see you all prepared.” Hadrian summoned all four of his commanders, but he spoke mostly to me. “I return to Rome. Tell me when it is ended.”

  “It’ll be over in a matter of months, Caesar,” Severus predicted. “How long does it take to put a pack of cockless Jewish bastards down in the gutter?”

  “A year,” I guessed. “A year at least.” Because I knew how Simon and his men would fight—and they did. They fought like gods, they fought like savages, they fought like fanatics. They fought like men I’d have been proud to call my own, like men with a cause worth dying for. Like men with a cause worth killing for, and my men died. So many!

  But we took our own price in blood. More than half a million Jews dead.

  I cannot believe that number. Surely there were never so many rebels in Judaea to begin with? And there were so many survivors, the ones who escaped the purges and the raids and the battles to fight us again. Surely five hundred eighty thousand dead cannot be right. On bad nights I sat up doing my figures, reviewing the lists of the dead over and over, trying to work out a better number. But there was no better number. Five hundred eighty thousand.

  We had thirteen legions divided among the four of us; we had four hammers made of steel-clad men, and we hammered at anything that moved. We hammered that land until it was nothing but bloody scraps. My war was a straight brutal drive south toward Jerusalem. If I found a village, I razed it to the ground. If I found a fortified town, I surrounded it and starved it into submission, and then I razed it to the ground. If I found rebels, I fought them and then I executed them. It was, God help me, the only way of winning this war.

  And I still didn’t know if we could win, because Simon’s rebels were the rock and sometimes my hammer broke against his rock. I lost a cohort and very nearly Boil along with them in a sudden attack just past Neapolis; he came staggering back on a half-dead horse, a bloody stump where his shield hand had been. Severus captured one of the rebellion’s leaders—not Simon; a holy man—and had him flayed, and a few days after that my first century and two others were razed and the rebels flayed all the centurions. Flayed men look all the same; just bloodied dolls. Without his shining dark skin I wouldn’t have recognized Africanus, but he lay atop the heap in his regalia. Chaya is a widow, I thought stupidly. But why would that matter to her?

  So many dead, but soldiers still touched my lion pelt as I passed, because somehow they believed I was lucky. “Vercingetorix the Red doesn’t lose,” I heard one of my centurions boasting to a newcomer. “Bastard’s got Fortuna herself at his back, cooing and spreading her legs for him whenever he wants.” Maybe he was right, because I didn’t take a scratch through that whole savage campaign, but what kind of luck was it that made sure I survived when so many of the men I loved died?

  Three years. Three years, and we appeared to be winning, if you could call such bloodily bought victories winning. Simon’s men were at last on the retreat, fighting like wolves. My legions were driving toward Jerusalem, my co-commanders veering to join me. One final convergence, driving the scattered remnants before us and leaving ash and blood in our wake, or at least that was how we planned it, though I was nowhere near so confident. Simon and his dream would not die easy. He will take us all with him, I thought. Or at least me.

  I wasn’t really surprised when I learned where Simon and the core of his fanatical nine-fingered heroes chose to make their stand.

  Where it all began, of course.

  Bethar.

  CHAPTER 16

  ANNIA

  A.D. 135, Spring

  Rome

  “Gladiatorial games,” Marcus declared, “are crass and vulgar and bring out the worst in man’s nature.”

  “How do you know?” Annia looked up at the great round shadow of the Colosseum rearing up before them, roaring noise to the sky as more and more plebs flooded eagerly through the entrances. “You’ve never been, either!”

  Marcus grabbed Annia by the elbow so the pair of slaves he’d insisted on bringing could clear a path. “Gladiatorial sport is doubly unsuitable for a woman’s eyes—”

  Annia let him lecture as they pressed inside behind the slaves. The day had dawned warm and heady: Veneralia, a spring day filled with rose garlands and sighing women. The day when the statue of Venus Verticordia would be taken from her temple, and a cluster of female attendants would bathe it and dress it in new finery. Those girls not at the temple were waving garlands and getting their stars read to see who they’d marry, and the boys got to ignore all the silliness and go enjoy themselves at the games. I wish I were a boy, Annia thought, and then hastily amended the wish for any gods who might be listening. If I can’t be a boy, can I at least be grown? A grown woman could just announce she was attending the games instead of the temple rites—a girl of seventeen had to resort to an absurd amount of sneaking.

  “Don’t worry, we won’t get caught,” Annia told Marcus, who was still muttering objections. The vast buzzing of the Colosseum’s throng rose around them as they climbed the marble tiers inside, as though they were rising through an immense beehive. “My parents are attending the rites—they think I have a headache, and my little sister is covering for me.” Annia didn’t like sneaking, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t good at it.

  “We’ll never get away with this,” Marcus groaned, but Annia stopped listening because they emerged into the vast oval of the Colosseum. An expanse of raked sand stretched below, and tiers of seats rose clear up to the sky where brilliant awnings offered shade from the delicate spring sun. So much bigger than she had imagined! Annia laughed, scarcely hearing herself over the roar of bets being shouted and bouts being called, and slung a happy arm about Marcus’s waist. “Let’s find a seat!”

  He shook off her arm as fast as possible, but t
ook her formally by the elbow afterward as though they were about to enter a palace. He was always doing that lately: flinching if she gave him a casual hug or tickled his ribs, then offering his arm whenever she came to a step. Like she had the plague and shouldn’t be touched, but was incapable of going up a flight of stairs. “Women shouldn’t sit with men at the games,” he was worrying now. “But that’s more the rule for well-born women, and you look like such a pleb in that dusty tunic, I don’t see anyone trying to separate us.”

  “Thank you,” Annia said as they beat a path to the seats his two slaves had found. “Thank you very much.”

  He shook his head at her sarcasm. He looked especially handsome when he was annoyed, Annia always thought—something about the way he squared his shoulders like a statue, and his eyes sparkled outrage. “He’s grown, hasn’t he?” Ceionia Fabia had whispered not long ago. Under those demure downcast lashes, she never missed a thing, especially if it was male and eligible. “Rather handsome . . .”

  He’s more than handsome, Annia thought, not that she’d ever tell Ceionia that. Marcus had shot up in height, one of the rare boys just as tall as Annia, and his face was strong and sunburned under its faint new stubble. He still wore the tunic and the bulla amulet—his grandfathers had absolutely Republic-era ideas about boys being given a toga too young—but he looked a man, not the skinny boy Annia had known all her life.

  A man who always seemed to be hectoring her lately, and that Annia didn’t find quite so charming.

  “I don’t see why you felt the games were more important than the Verticordia rites,” he was saying in that disapproving tone she now heard so often. People were surging to their feet, clapping and shouting for the opening speeches, but Marcus was oblivious. “You could have been chosen as one of the attendants to Venus today! Ceionia Fabia was chosen, and she felt deeply moved—”