by Kate Quinn
“Did she cast her lashes down and say, ‘I am not worthy of the great honor bestowed upon me’?” Annia fluttered her lids extravagantly.
“Ceionia Fabia is a girl of most appropriate behavior.”
“What you mean is that she’s pretty.”
“She is pretty.” Marcus gave an obedient clap as a team of rangy leopards came prowling onto the sand for the first of the wild-beast fights. “It’s not an opinion; it’s a verifiable fact.”
“She’s also hates me like a plague. Don’t tell me that’s not a verifiable fact.”
“No,” Marcus admitted. “She does dislike you. Because you have more suitors.”
Annia felt a flush mount in her cheeks, and kept her eyes on the arena where a herd of fleet gazelles had just been released for the leopards. She did have more suitors than any girl she knew. As soon as she’d turned fourteen, the men started to pay court. “You’re the Emperor’s niece by marriage,” Annia’s father had said, “and his approval will be required for any match you make. But I see no reason you may not have your choice within those boundaries.”
Annia shrugged. She was going to marry Marcus, of course. He’d proposed it long ago, and it had seemed silly at the time, but she’d had years to get used to the idea. He was clever and serious and good, even if he could be a prig, and she knew how to push him around a bit, which every woman agreed was essential in a husband. But Annia couldn’t marry Marcus until he was at least a few years older, so until then she had to be an obedient girl and put up with ridiculous men who pretended it was Annia and her reddish hair and her long lanky body they wanted, and not her dowry and her Imperial connections. It could have been funny, but Annia found it all a little depressing. A part of growing older that she did not enjoy.
The leopards were making short work of the gazelles, all that lithe, long-legged grace shredded into bloody heaps on the sand. “I don’t like this part,” she said, averting her eyes. Those poor, fast, graceful things.
“I don’t, either.” A bull was herded into the arena next, a bull with horns that had been sharpened and tipped in steel for a duel against a bear. “Was it Aemilius Scaurus I saw calling on you yesterday? Girls think he’s handsome.”
The bull rushed the bear, and Annia surrendered to the temptation to tease just a little. Maybe she intended to marry Marcus, but he didn’t need to know that yet. “Aemilius Scaurus is handsome,” she said primly. “It’s a verifiable fact.”
Marcus scowled. “You’re teasing again.”
“Don’t be so easy to tease,” Annia retorted, and she might have kept on, but then the bear made a swipe of its massive claws and tore the bull’s throat open. Much of the crowd seemed to find that hilarious. “Oh, Hades,” Annia said, and tried to ignore the queasy roll in her stomach. “I don’t like this part, either.”
Parades followed, and then the bestiarii, teams of animal fighters pitted against snarling striped cats . . . Annia was squirming sickly in the middle of all the cheering, wondering if it would be a mark of squeamishness to leave early, when she was arrested by a mutter of gossip from the seats behind her.
“—the boy’s late!” a man was saying drunkenly behind Annia. A deep voice, a rough Subura accent. “Can’t abide an emperor who misses his own games!”
“Boy’s not emperor yet.”
“He will be . . .”
Annia looked up toward the Imperial box and felt a lurch in her stomach. Pedanius Fuscus had just entered, giving a hoot of appreciation for the tigers dying in the arena. Pedanius Fuscus, taking his place on a golden chair.
“Didn’t you know?” Marcus asked. “He’s sponsor of the games today. His grandfather paid for everything, but officially today’s celebration is a gift to the city from Pedanius. With the Emperor in Judaea again, he’s the natural choice to take Hadrian’s place . . .”
Annia couldn’t stop looking: Servianus beaming with pride beside his treasured grandson, who had grown into a burly young man in his twenties, carrying the crisp folds of his toga in flawless pleats, raising his hand to the crowd. A roar went up for the perfect young prince with his easy smile, and Annia felt a surge of such acrid nausea that she had to put her head between her knees.
“I didn’t know it was still so bad for you.” Marcus’s voice was quiet, not reproving anymore. “Seeing him, I mean.”
“I don’t see him often.” Annia sat upright, forced herself to shrug. “He’s a man grown. Too busy for girls like me anymore, thank the gods.”
The midday executions were beginning, lines of shackled prisoners shoved out onto the sand. Normally Marcus would have been considering their plight and saying something about the nature of justice, but he was looking at Pedanius instead. “He can’t hurt you, you know—you shouldn’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid!” Annia’s head whipped up. “I’m angry, Marcus. Everyone looks at him like he’s the dawn, like he’s the whole promise of tomorrow wrapped up in an Imperial purple ribbon. Why don’t they see what he is?”
“Because most people only see what’s on the surface?”
Annia had always known that—just as she’d always known that most people didn’t want to know what you saw if you did look under the surface. But that didn’t make it any less maddening. “People are sheep.”
The first prisoner died swiftly, a bent-backed woman folding into the sand with a gladius through her throat. Pedanius was applauding up in his box, but desultorily. Slave executions were such dull entertainment, after all—half the crowd was chatting, and the other half getting up for a cup of wine. Annia ignored the laughter and the chatter, feeling her jaw set as she watched another prisoner fold up onto the sand. She didn’t want to watch them die; the sight made her ill, but someone in this arena should watch their lives end as if it mattered. She and Marcus watched it all in stark, sick silence, until the last tottering figure had fallen.
Why did I come here? Annia thought. Why?
The wailing of reed pipes came then as the bodies were raked away. Pedanius came forward to announce the comic acts that would finish the midday interval—an elephant that danced to lyre music, a tame pair of tigers that could be ridden by acrobats. Annia did not think she would ever laugh again.
Marcus was looking up at the Imperial box, some of the color back in his face now that the killing was done. “The Emperor hasn’t officially chosen Pedanius as heir yet,” he said as though trying to distract himself.
“But the Emperor hasn’t excluded him, either. And if he doesn’t bother picking anyone else, it might very well be Pedanius. Because he’s family.” Annia gave a bitter laugh. “So maybe we should make another curse tablet.”
“Maybe we should grow up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well—curse tablets? That’s a game for helpless children and slaves.”
“And women.” Like the woman who died first in the line of executions. “Women are helpless, too.” The Colosseum rocked with laughter for the capering elephant in the arena, but Annia’s stomach roiled bitterly. Pin all your impatience on growing up, she thought, and then you learn it gets no better when you’re grown.
Marcus was looking quizzical, and Annia fumbled for the right words. “Everybody’s helpless when they’re a child. But at least boys get to grow into men and become useful. Girls just grow into women, and they stay helpless forever.” Looking up at Pedanius Fuscus where he sat tossing coins to the elephant’s trainer. “He grows up and becomes powerful, and I just grow up and become—nothing. And all I can hope is that the bastard goes lion-hunting with the Emperor again, and the next lion eats him.”
It was one of Brine-Face’s favorite stories, now that he was back in Rome: telling, with becoming modesty, how his spear had finished the lion that had so nearly claimed the Emperor’s life. “Pedanius Fuscus hasn’t got the guts to kill a frog,” Annia had snorted, but no one liste
ned. She was just another useless girl growing up into a useless woman, and Brine-Face was the golden boy, the future Emperor.
The elephant lumbered out of the arena to a scatter of applause, and Marcus sent his slave boy off for barley water. “Do you want some food too?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“If you don’t want food, you shall at least have a wreath.” Marcus gestured for his slave girl. “Two myrtle crowns for Veneralia!”
He was trying to cheer her, Annia knew that, but she felt more mulish than cheered as the slave girl swayed off with a smile back over her shoulder at Marcus. “She’s flirting with you,” Annia observed.
He looked embarrassed. “I know.”
“Actually, I think your slave boy was too.” A fair-haired Greek who gave Marcus an open-lipped smile before going off for barley water.
“I know,” Marcus repeated.
“You’re blushing.” Annia surveyed him, forgetting for a moment about Pedanius up in his golden chair, laughing at the tame tigers in the arena. “Are you bedding one of your slaves? Which one?”
“Annia Galeria Faustina!” Marcus’s voice had long broken to a smooth tenor, but his words scaled up in a squeak, and he flushed. “You cannot possibly ask such things!”
“Well, are you?” The thought gave her a prick of jealousy, but she didn’t show it. Girls had to be pure as Vestals when they came to their wedding beds, but not boys. They could bed as many slaves as they wanted. “Tell me!”
Marcus ran a hand through his hair. “The boy is Theodotus and the girl is Benedicta, and they were given to me for my toga virilis ceremony next month. That is all.”
“Gifts to make you a man,” Annia said flatly. “Well. Brine-Face’s manhood present to himself was me, so I suppose yours are an improvement.”
Marcus stared stubbornly out at the arena, empty now that the tame tigers had been herded out. “I may not be a man yet, but I am old enough to know that it is unseemly to submit to some vulgar fit of passion.”
“Why?” Annia couldn’t help asking. He clearly wanted to, and that gave her a different kind of pang—because he’d never looked at Annia’s hips like he had the slave girl’s, with that flash of something hungry and hot. She gave her dusty dress a tug, feeling like a street urchin.
He sat for long moments with his lips clamped shut as the crowd roared for the upcoming gladiator bouts. Annia waited. Marcus could never resist the urge to pontificate, even if the topic was one to make his ears burn.
“Just because one has a passion doesn’t mean one should give in to it,” he burst out suddenly in that pedantic tone he still couldn’t shake when he was nervous. “It is a principle at the very core of Stoicism: control of one’s baser thoughts and emotions. Look at the way people still laugh about Antinous—because the Emperor didn’t control his passions at all. His love or his grief.”
“Anybody would grieve for Antinous.” Annia could see his statues all through Rome, and every one made her furious, because even the finest marble didn’t have life in it. Didn’t have that vivid laughing expression she remembered from the very last time she had ever seen him—the night he’d hauled Brine-Face off her and Marcus, and then cuffed him for spitting insults about the Emperor . . .
“But one’s passions should never gain control over one’s life.” The gladiators had begun their slow purple-cloaked parade around the arena, the crowd roaring and surging to their feet, but Marcus argued on, oblivious. “An emperor’s bedmate deified? That’s why people laugh when the Emperor isn’t listening.”
“They laugh because Antinous was a free man of Rome,” Annia pointed out. “But bedding a slave isn’t base. You could do it if you wanted to.” The slave girl was wending her way back with two myrtle wreaths over her arm, hips moving as fluid as a snake. Annia gave her dress another tug.
“Putting a pretty slave in a boy’s bed isn’t what makes him a man.” Marcus was the color of a pomegranate. “It takes more than a moment’s friction and sweat to do that.”
“What does make a man, then?” Annia crammed her myrtle wreath down over her unraveling braid.
“When I think of the man I want to be,” Marcus said seriously, “I look to your father. He said he would sponsor me when I put on my toga next month—if I could be a man like him . . .”
“He is wonderful,” Annia agreed. “Do you really put your toga on so soon?”
Trumpets blared as the gladiators disappeared below, and Marcus had to raise his voice to be heard. “My grandfather wanted to put off the ceremony until the Emperor returned, but he’s still sieging Bethar. Thank the gods. Emperor Hadrian terrifies me.”
“But all through his travels, he wanted those reports on your studies. He likes you.”
“I wish I knew why.” Marcus grimaced. “I know I’d never get through my first speech in a toga if I had him staring me down.”
“Well, now you don’t have to.” Annia grabbed hold of his hand, impulsive. This was the Marcus she liked best, not the one who preached about proper behavior. “If you get lost in your speech, just look for me.”
Marcus looked at her strangely. “Things will change, you know. When I’ve put my toga on, I can’t be running about with you anymore.”
Annia blinked. He’d dropped her hand like it was a dead frog. “Why?”
“After I’m a man, I won’t have time for such things.”
“You really can be insufferable, you know that?” Annia whipped her gaze back to the arena, clamping her teeth on more hot words. Two Thracians had been matched for the first bout, and everyone was shrieking for their favorite—she was damned well going to watch. Pedanius gave the signal to begin, looking lordly, and Annia wished she could see him on the arena sand. I wouldn’t be satisfied with first blood then, she thought. I’d put my thumb out for a death blow.
Most bouts only went to first blood, but there was one death that afternoon. A secutor with a heavy shield raked his blade across a trident fighter’s gut, and it should have been a shallow cut, but the man didn’t retreat fast enough. He fell with a scream, blood spilling through his fingers, and the secutor didn’t wait for the signal from the crowd. He made a fast thrust through the heart and then saluted his fallen opponent, full of somber pride, and the screaming crowd hushed a moment in reverence.
“I don’t like this,” Marcus said. “It’s barbaric.”
Annia watched the victor’s proud strut through the Gate of Life. Before now she’d stayed seated as the rest of the Colosseum stamped and roared, but now she found herself on her feet with everyone else, banging her hands together. “It’s terrible.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
She hadn’t realized she was. She looked down and realized her palms stung from clapping. “I don’t know. I don’t really like that I’m enjoying this part, but I am.” She tried to make sense of it as she sat down, watching another pair begin to circle each other. “I didn’t like the prisoner executions, or the animal bouts—it’s not like the animals or the prisoners have any chance. But the gladiators . . .”
“You’ll watch a gladiator die, but not a few gazelles? That makes no logical sense.”
“Well, most of the gladiators don’t die, do they?” The trident fighter below took the bout in a thrilling sweep of net, spilling his opponent to the ground and then raising a fist to the sky, giving his victory to the gods. “They’re brave,” Annia said, and felt a fierce thrill curl through her like a flame. “I like to see courage.”
“Most of them are slaves. Just as helpless as those prisoners earlier.”
Maybe, Annia thought. But at least the gladiators were dangerous. You couldn’t be utterly helpless if you had a sword in hand and the skill to use it. I wish I could use a sword. She curled a fist and imagined it, a blade like a natural extension of her arm.
“You’d be down there if you could, wouldn’t you?” M
arcus looked disgusted. “A gladiatrix with an Amazon helmet!”
“I would.” She leveled her imaginary gladius at Pedanius in the Imperial box, as though they faced each other across a stretch of bloody sand. “Annia the Amazon! Annia the Barbarian—”
Marcus snatched her arm down. “Must you make such a spectacle of yourself?”
She yanked away. “If I embarrass you so much, why are you here?”
“Duty,” Marcus bit out, and that stabbed. Annia looked back at the arena, ostentatiously sliding away from even the brush of his sleeve, and Marcus stared too. Brine-Face was shouting up in the Imperial box, myrtle wreath cocked over his head at a rakish angle.
“Look,” Marcus said at last. “I’m taking you home.”
“No.” She still didn’t look at him. “There’s another secutor fight. I think I like them best.” Maybe she’d lay a bet, too. Everyone around them was busy arguing odds.
“This isn’t proper for you to be seeing at all.” He took her hand, tugging her up.
“You’re not my father, Marcus Catilius Severus.” She pulled away. “No matter how hard you try.”
Marcus gave her a cold look. “I’ll leave Theodotus to see you home safely. I have more pressing matters at hand than watching men bleed and trying to get you to behave.”
“You’re a pompous ass,” Annia said.
“You’re a silly child,” he returned.
“And you’re not a man yet!” she shouted after him as he went stamping off down the marble steps, slave girl swaying along behind. Her and her hips. He’d probably give in to all those passions he was so proud of controlling, and take her to his bed. “Go ahead,” Annia muttered. “She’ll tell you you’re wonderful, and you’ll get even more pompous than you already are.”
Brine-Face was still whooping in his golden chair. I kicked you in the groin, Annia thought. I put you on the ground screaming. But what did that matter? She might have won the battle that day, but Brine-Face would still win their war. He would always win, because he was a man and because he was going to be Emperor.
