Mistress of Rome

by Kate Quinn

  In utter silence Senator Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus limped out of the Senate.

  FATHER?” Sabina tugged at Marcus’s hand. “What?” Her palla had fallen back, and he tugged it forward up over her hair. Even if the winter winds hadn’t been biting keenly around their faces, the altar of Minerva was a stern marble place. No one approached bareheaded.

  “Why do the gods like white bulls better?”

  The pontifex glared, leading the bull forward, and Marcus put a finger to his daughter’s lips. Laughter surged wildly in his middle. White bulls, white swans, white sows—why did the gods want their sacrifices white? With so many mothers praying for sons in Germania, on one side of the rebellion or the other, there was hardly a white animal left in Rome. Limping out of the Senate house, he’d gone straight to the market in search of a sacrificial beast, and paid an exorbitant sum for a scrawny bullock whose haunches wouldn’t have fed a family of five. “The gods just want blood, Sabina.”

  The pontifex led the bull forward to the temple steps. Two more priests murmured prayers, and the bull threw up its nose at the stench. The steps were red-brown and sticky. Sabina looked nervous but she had asked to come—“I want to pray for ’Linus, too”—and he allowed her to hide her face in the folds of his toga as the knife descended. The bull bellowed, going to its knees, and Marcus came forward to bathe his hands in the stream of blood. “Minerva, protect my son,” he said. Confused images of the sturdy four-year-old guiltily confessing he had put a beetle in his mother’s wine cup, the boy bursting with pride in a brand-new Praetorian breastplate, the man writhing agonized under Lepida’s raking nails. “Minerva, goddess of soldiers. A thousand bulls, white or any other color, if you bring my son home safe.” Clasping his scarlet-gloved fingers as the priests chanted and the bull died. “Blood for blood.”

  WE’VE done what we can.” Commander Trajan shrugged. “Now we wait.”

  Paulinus glanced sideways at his second-in-command: stocky, fit, square-shouldered, some twelve or thirteen years older than Paulinus, wearing his breastplate like a second skin. Trajan commanded the tautest and fiercest of the legionnaires in Lower Germania, and by rights he should have commanded the offensive against Saturninus. But Paulinus’s cousin Governor Lappius had insisted hysterically on appointing Paulinus unofficial commander of both legions, against all rules of military rank, and Paulinus—suddenly sober again after a month of wine and hazy self-recriminations—had not refused. He could not rejoice, not when civil war lay around the corner—but he could not halt the small voice in his head from singing, Commander of two legions! Commander of two legions! Not that Trajan had been happy about it.

  “I need you,” Paulinus had said bluntly. “I don’t know this country, I don’t know your soldiers, and I don’t know the terrain. You’ll be my second.”

  “Yes, Commander.” Stiffly. “I am happy to serve under you.”

  “Bull,” Paulinus had said. “But can I still rely on you?”

  Trajan’s forthright eyes surveyed him. “Are you a pansy like your cousin?” he sneered, and they had been friends instantly. Trajan had done much of the work on the town’s hasty defenses, advising Paulinus where the cohorts might best be placed—Paulinus’s main contribution had been to stop Trajan from throttling Lappius, who even now was crouched back in his crude wooden-walled palace and moaning.

  They waited now on their horses, side by side, wrapped in heavy cloaks and breathing white into the frigid air. Before them stood the smart ranks of legionnaires, leaning on their shields and chatting among themselves.

  “So why are you out in Germania instead of serving your cushy palace berth?” Trajan asked idly. “What’s your poison, Norbanus—women, family, or debts?”

  Paulinus hesitated. “Women,” he said. “Family, too, come to think of it.”

  “I’ll take a rebellious province and a horde of screaming Germans any day.”

  “So would I.” Paulinus flipped a bit of his horse’s mane to the other side of its neck. Somehow, on the brink of battle, Lepida seemed very far away. He couldn’t picture her clearly, not here with the smell of snow and steel and mud in his nose and the chink of shields in his ears. It was a masculine smell; she had no place in it.

  Trajan squinted up at the sky. “Sun’s breaking out.”

  “Good.” A sunny day, a battle, an attempt to save the Empire from civil war . . . perhaps he’d even die, and then his father might be proud of him again.

  A lathered horse skidded to a halt before him, spraying icy mud from its hooves. The scout tumbled off and saluted. “Commander, Saturninus has been spotted. The Eleventh and the Fourteenth march from the northwest.”

  “Auxiliaries?” Trajan rapped out.

  “No sign yet, sir.”

  “Good.” Paulinus loosened his sword in its scabbard. “Deploy first division.”

  Yes. A very good day to die.

  “Advance!”

  THE shield formation had broken, Saturninus’s men leaving their disciplined rows for individual battles. The snow was scarlet and the battle raging. Paulinus sat tense and narrow-eyed, trying to take it all in. “Advancing on the south side?” he barked out as Trajan pulled up his squealing horse with a skid of hooves on slush.

  “Holding ground.” With the reins doubled around his fist and a sword in his hand, Trajan looked like Mars come to earth. They had to shout over the cries of wounded men, the battle yells of victorious legionnaires, the thump of hooves and metallic clash of shields. “No sign of Saturninus.”

  “He’s back there.” Paulinus pointed to a knoll by the riverbank. He could hardly keep still in his saddle. He dripped sweat inside his armor, wishing for Trajan’s calm, longing to charge in and fight as the legionnaires could. “Keeping well back.”

  Trajan added a few choice comments about their enemy’s appearance, ancestry, and sexual tastes. Paulinus laughed grimly. Aides hovered, waiting to be deployed, but there were no orders to be given now. Just a hard slugging match.

  The sun had broken through the clouds, and it beat down on the battleground in hard glittering rays. Under the onslaught of armored feet and sunlight, the grunts of battling men struggling back and forth with their armored shoulders locked fast against each other, the hard-packed snow was breaking down into slush. A legionnaire—Paulinus’s, Trajan’s, Saturninus’s, who could tell—slipped in the bloody slush and died screaming, fishhooked on another man’s gladius.

  “Do you think we—”

  A long bubbling howl cut him off. They both spun around toward the woods.

  “Savages.” Trajan spat out strings of curses. “May they rot in Hades—”

  Paulinus spurred his horse up a steep embankment, trampling the body of a legionnaire who had fallen with a spear through his eye in the battle’s first minutes. “Hades,” he echoed.

  “What do they look like?” Trajan shouted up.

  “Chatti, probably. A good eight hundred. Clubs, wolf skins, tattoos.” Paulinus raised his voice to his aide. “Sound the signal.”

  The trumpets blew short blasts, and the legionnaires braced in their lines. The Chatti coursed down out of the trees like wolves, howling murder to their foreign gods. A champion at their forefront, waving a stolen Roman shield on which the unlucky legionnaire’s head had been mounted, screamed a challenge out to any man brave enough to approach. The tribesmen behind him took up the howl, crying for blood like a pack of wild animals run out from some arena of hell. A distant cheer went up among Saturninus’s men. Paulinus fingered his sword hilt, blood drumming in his veins. Closer they ran. Closer. Toward the frozen snake of the Rhine. Paulinus was done waiting—he’d charge into the thick of it and take their champion himself, mount the man’s head on his own shield and send him gibbering back to his demon hell . . .

  “Minerva,” he murmured to the goddess of all battle strategy. “Be with us.”

  His grip tightened. The howls assailed his ears as the dark swarm flooded over the frozen river.

  E
xcept—the river—

  “Oh, gods,” he whispered. “Oh gods, yes!” Not Minerva, but Fortuna—Fortuna, goddess of luck, who had just passed over his head in a rustle of golden wings.

  “What?” Trajan wheeled his horse, already looking back toward the battle.

  The second wave of Germans surged out over the frozen river as Trajan surged up the embankment. Paulinus almost thought he could hear the ice creak—and then it broke. A cluster of Germans shrieked as they plunged into the frigid water.

  “The sun,” said Trajan unbelievingly. “This crazy sun.” Howling abated as the Germans fell back. They regrouped. Sallied forward again. An entire shelf of ice fell away, and the front rank of savages disappeared into the Rhine. Even over the clash of battle they could hear the screams, the splashes, the sounds of drowning. The head mounted on the champion’s shield bobbed loose, grinning up at the sun as the champion himself drowned gurgling in his bearskin.

  Paulinus whirled on his aide. “Sound the attack. Press Saturninus back against the hill.” His aides scattered, grinning, and trumpets began to bugle. Trajan let out a whoop. Paulinus leaned down from the saddle, plucked up a spear, hefted it.

  Trajan grinned. “Shall we?”

  YOU’RE alive!” Lappius mopped at his round face. He looked ten years older. All about him fluttered the slaves and the women, wide-eyed at the sight of the two grimy soldiers in their midst. “By Jove, if you’d died in this rebellion—Paulinus?”

  “He’s dazed,” Trajan said over Paulinus’s head. “He made himself a hero.”

  Paulinus blinked. He was alive. He didn’t quite believe it.

  “—cut his way up the hill toward Saturninus himself—”

  A party of Lappius’s young courtiers grinned at Paulinus, slapping him on the shoulder and mouthing congratulations. Paulinus looked through them in a fog, thinking of Saturninus. Just a soldier who wanted real work instead of cattle shows and sullen natives . . . He’d had some idea of killing Saturninus himself, but he came up the hill and found that the man had stabbed himself through the gut. He’d stared up at Paulinus, his eyes full of blood, dying slowly, and Paulinus drove a gladius through his heart to put him out of his agony. Trajan found Paulinus with his back to a tree and Saturninus’s severed head beside his hand.

  “—The Fourteenth is slaughtered, and the Eleventh is running. They’ll be lucky to get off with decimation.”

  He found himself wishing Saturninus had killed him instead. There was Lepida to face, now, and his father, and even the battle hadn’t restored anything. Everything was hard again. In the middle of the fight it had all been simple.

  “—hunting down the last of the savages, but I’ll wager not one in ten got out of the Rhine—”

  A fat woman in a pink stola moaned relief and fainted. The slaves fluttered ineffectually around her. Paulinus stared at her plump white legs until Trajan grabbed his arm and tugged him out again. The rest of the day—the rest of the week—moved by in a whirl. Trajan hunted down the rebellious legionnaires with relish. Saturninus’s hacked-apart body was publicly displayed outside the governor’s palace and left to rot: a warning to all other would-be usurpers. Everywhere Paulinus and Trajan rode, the citizens clapped and the legionnaires banged their shields. “Stop wincing,” Trajan grinned. “We’re heroes.”

  “Will you stop saying that?” Paulinus growled.

  “You’re a funny one, Norbanus. Most of us dream about being heroes.”

  “You’re the hero. I’ll see you with a good post if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “Me, a paper-pusher?” Trajan hooted. “I’m an army man, pure and simple. Let’s get drunk and look for whores. Boys or girls for you?”

  “Girls,” Paulinus said hastily.

  “Take my advice.” Trajan grinned again. “Girls may be prettier, but boys are less trouble. Don’t suppose you’d care to—”

  “No, not my style.” Paulinus was used to the offer by now. Half his friends and most of his superior officers preferred boys or young soldiers to their wives.

  “Pity. Still want to get drunk?”

  “Gods, yes.”

  A letter arrived from Paulinus’s father, sent by fast courier. A single sheet of parchment, a single line of writing. “Well done, boy. Marcus.”

  “Hate me!” Paulinus shouted down at the letter. “Disown me! Don’t congratulate me!” He crumpled the letter up and threw it across the room. Then spent the next hour smoothing it out. Lepida wrote nothing.

  After a week, the Emperor marched in.

  “Norbanus, is it?” The famous Flavian gaze made Paulinus’s knees brace. He stared fixedly past the Emperor’s ear. “I know your father. You’ll join me for dinner in two hours.” He turned to Lappius. “Bring out the traitors. We’ll deal with them now.”

  “All of them, Lord and God?”

  “The officers. The legionnaires will be decimated; that can wait until morning. Prepare the officers for execution.” The Emperor’s purple cloak swirled as he took off briskly across the courtyard. Twelve Praetorians, six secretaries, a cluster of generals, a handful of slaves, and Lappius Norbanus trotted in his wake.

  “So that’s how a Caesar handles treachery.” Trajan whistled. “I like his style.”

  Paulinus lowered his voice. “He didn’t even hold trials.”

  “Who needs ’em? We know they’re guilty.” Trajan flicked a speck of mud off Paulinus’s shoulder. “Go spruce up, pretty boy. You’re having dinner with the world’s most powerful man.”

  The world’s most powerful man hardly looked up as Paulinus ducked into the Imperial presence and snapped off his sharpest salute. “Norbanus,” he said perfunctorily. “Sit. Eat. Camp food; I hate eating soft on campaign.”

  Paulinus sat, tangling his cloak around the stool legs, and helped himself diffidently. He ate for ten minutes in silence as the Emperor bolted his food, dictating a letter to a pair of secretaries between bites, and sifted rapidly through a heap of correspondence. The hard soldier’s bread and plain stew looked strange sitting on Lappius’s golden plates. Rather like Domitian himself, who sat on the silk cushions in the leather breastplate and rough tunic of a legionnaire and rapidly flipped through a dozen frayed old folders of paperwork. Paulinus eyed him covertly: the man his father had pronounced both a good general and a great administrator; the man who decimated entire legions and was kind to a mad niece; the man of whom great depravities were whispered and who had looked with interest on Lepida, and who now sat before him in a plain tent wearing less silk and gold braid than his own secretaries.

  The Imperial gaze flicked upward at that moment. Paulinus flushed and applied himself to his dinner. Too late.

  “So, Norbanus.” The Flavian voice dragged Paulinus’s eyes obediently upward. “You’re a tribune in my Praetorian guard.”

  “Yes, Caesar. I’ve been stationed in Brundisium.”

  “Mmm.” Domitian snapped for a secretary and dictated a quick postscript. “Centurion Densus’s command?”

  “Yes, Caesar.” Wondering how the Emperor had known that off the top of his head.

  “I know all my Praetorian commanders,” Domitian said as if he had read Paulinus’s mind. The Emperor had a broad ruddy face like an amiable shopkeeper, but Paulinus didn’t imagine that those black eyes missed much. “Your father is Senator Marcus Vibius Augustus Norbanus.”

  “Yes, Caesar.”

  “You are his only child?”

  “I have a sister. Four years old. She likes apricots.” Paulinus closed his eyes. “Why did I just say that?”

  “You’re nervous.” Unexpectedly the Emperor smiled. “We Caesars have that effect on people. Have some wine.”

  Paulinus sipped gratefully.

  “So. You weren’t stationed here in Germania?” Stamping various documents.

  “No, Caesar. I was on leave. My cousin Lappius appointed me commander of the legions over my objections.”

  “Your objections?” The black eyes probed.

&nbs
p; “I wasn’t a good choice. I knew nothing about Germania, or Saturninus and his legions. I could never have managed without the help of Legate Marcus Ulpius Trajan. I recommend him in the highest possible terms.”

  “He will be rewarded in due course. But you were in command.”

  “It wasn’t much of a battle. If the Rhine hadn’t thawed—”

  “I dislike the word if. ” The Emperor melted a stick of sealing wax in a candle flame. “If the Rhine hadn’t thawed—what of that? Fortuna favored you. You won.”

  “Just don’t expect me to do it again.” It popped out of Paulinus’s mouth. “Um. That is to say—”

  Domitian laughed. “Are you trying to get yourself punished rather than rewarded?”

  “No, Caesar.”

  “I hear you killed Saturninus yourself.” Secretaries went scrambling as Domitian tossed out a load of letters and scrolls.

  “He committed suicide.”

  “You could have claimed the credit. No one would have known.”

  Paulinus shrugged.

  “Spar with me sometime.” Abruptly. “I need the practice.”

  “Caesar?”

  “Yes, I know how to use a sword.” The pen wove in an elaborate parry before swooping down to sign a dispatch. “I’m dismally out of practice, since my sparring partners always allow me to win. An irritating habit. Would you allow me to win, Tribune Norbanus?”

  “. . . No . . .”

  “I thought not.” Domitian slid a hard thumb under a seal and rapidly scanned another letter. “So. You spared me the trouble of putting down Saturninus and his legions myself. For that I thank you.”

  “Thank you. I mean, you’re welcome. Caesar.”

  “It was not much of a rebellion, and I doubt it would have gone far. But you have saved me the trouble of subduing an angry province. And yet I cannot give you a triumph. Mutinies, even defeated ones, cannot be made much of.” Still scanning the letter. “Thus I find myself indebted to a man I cannot reward. How interesting.”