Empress of the Seven Hills

by Kate Quinn

  She’d wanted to smack Vix that day at the races a few weeks ago. Anyone with eyes in their head could see what he was supposed to be, and instead he wasted his time skulking around alleys, picking fights, and kissing the wrong girls.

  A deep voice sounded behind her. “Vibia Sabina.”

  “Publius Aelius Hadrian.” She turned, aping his formal tones just a little. “Wait, hold still!”

  “What?” he frowned, his broad hand twitching the folds of his toga.

  “Hand out—there. Raised up, declamatory. Now, hold it.” Sabina raised her voice. “Uncle Paris, come sketch him for your next statue. Perfect Roman Senator.”

  Hadrian dropped the declamatory hand. “I see you like a joke, Vibia Sabina.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He ignored the question, looking at Uncle Paris, whose eyes were trained on a minute crack in his marble block. “Uncle, you said?”

  “Another cousin, technically,” Sabina said. “Father’s related to half of Rome, and Calpurnia to the other half. Everyone’s my cousin.”

  Including the Emperor—and that, Sabina knew, was the reason Publius Aelius Hadrian stood, stilted and dutiful, trying to make conversation with a silly girl who liked a joke. Soon after Vinalia, he’d decided to start courting her. Sabina couldn’t decide if it was funny or exasperating. She’d never had a more reluctant suitor in her life.

  “You’ve received the gift I sent yesterday?” he said after another pause.

  “The stag from your hunt? Yes, my stepmother is very grateful. We’ll have venison for days.”

  “I will send more. I hunt weekly, but I do not need so much game for myself.”

  “Then why do you hunt weekly?” Sabina eyed his immaculate hands, his toga without so much as an ink spot. “I’d have thought hunting too dirty for you.”

  “On the contrary.”

  Another silence fell.

  “You’ve commissioned something, I suppose.” Hadrian gestured around the studio, boredom suppressed in every word. “A bust of your father?”

  “In a sense.” Sabina indicated the little figure in rosy marble: a man dropped to one knee, tendons corded through his arms and down his neck, one shoulder twisted under the weight of a perfect sphere.

  “Atlas. Bowed under the weight of the heavens.” Hadrian peered at the carved face, its noble nose and broad forehead, the mouth compressed in an agony of effort. “Is that your father’s face?”

  “Very good,” said Sabina. “It’s a surprise Calpurnia commissioned for him. Her way of reminding him not to work too hard.”

  “She is a fine wife,” Hadrian approved. “A pearl among women.”

  “After what my mother put him through, my father was due a pearl.”

  Hadrian cocked his head at that.

  Sabina gave a bland blink of her lashes. “You’ve come for a bust?”

  “Yes. A gift for the Emperor. I thought to have him carved as Aeneus.”

  “Better Alexander. Trajan would adore to conquer the world.”

  “Alexander then. The world at his feet.” Hadrian bent to examine the little Atlas again, and Sabina saw the light in his eyes. “Your uncle Paris, he must have studied the Polykleitos school of thought? Action and inaction, perfectly expressed here. Have you ever seen the Polykleitos Doryphorus? I’ve seen sketches, but—” Hadrian pulled himself up. “Forgive me, Vibia Sabina. Of course this is of no interest to—”

  “How do you know what interests me?” said Sabina. “You may have been showering me with flowers and dead deer for a few weeks now, but we’ve never had a single interesting conversation.”

  “Naturally a girl does not study the precepts of sculpture or—”

  “You’re much more interesting when you aren’t patronizing me,” Sabina said frankly. “You should try talking like a human being more often. So, what’s so special about the Polykleitos Doryphorus?”

  Hadrian looked down at her. For a moment Sabina thought he’d go back to boring pleasantries, but his hand reached out almost involuntarily and touched the little Atlas. “See the shift in the weight between the feet? Perfectly poised between motion and repose. The Greek sculptor Polykleitos found it was the finest way to express the beauty of the athletic form. His Doryphorus is the best example, but he had a very fine Hera in a temple in Argos, and a bronze Amazon in Ephesus—”

  “Surely you’re not a sculptor too?” Sabina looked at Hadrian’s large hands. Unscarred and soft, the nails smooth and uniform, not much like Uncle Paris’s chisel-roughened palms.

  “No, merely a dabbler in the arts,” Hadrian said with a modesty Sabina found suspect. “I make sketches, and architectural drawings—you can see the same principle in Greek architecture, you know. The Erechtheion caryatids, they don’t just serve as pillars! You can see a knee raised, as if they’re ready to step down off the plinth—”

  He was waving his arms now.

  “I’m going to build my own villa someday,” he told Sabina. “The perfect blend of Greek and Roman architectural principles. The grace and beauty of Greece—Corinthian columns, we’ve got nothing to match them—but backed up by the solidity of our Roman domes. I’ve made preliminary designs, but I need more study. A tour in Greece; I want to see the Acropolis, the temples. The Greeks have the finest temples in the world.”

  “According to you, the Greeks have the finest everything,” Sabina teased, but he was too absorbed to mind her joking now.

  “Not everything.” Decisive. “Rome has the finest government, the best engineering, the most perfect system of organization. But culture, that goes to Greece. Architecture, philosophy, dramatics—all we have to offer for dramatists are those dreary pantomime farces, nothing to stand against Sophocles and Euripides. And as for literature—”

  “Cicero,” said Sabina promptly. “Martial, Virgil—”

  Hadrian snorted. “Overrated.”

  “Surely not Virgil,” Sabina protested. “‘I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood—’”

  “Orotund and overpolished,” Hadrian snapped. “You want an accounting of Aeneas, you’d do better to study Ennius’s Annals. Good straightforward Roman prose—”

  “You will never win me away from Virgil. What about Cato?”

  “Cato I will grant you. He has a textbook on public speaking, sound basis in Greek rhetorical theory—”

  “Yes, I’ve read it.”

  “Have you? Extraordinary. What about his Origines…”

  Eventually, Uncle Paris’s voice broke into the discussion. “Go away, both of you,” he said without looking up from his chisels. “You’re distracting me.”

  Sabina realized they’d been talking loudly, enthusiastically, and for more than an hour. Hastily she bundled up the little figurine of Atlas. “We’re going, Uncle Paris.”

  “I’d meant to commission a bust of Emperor Trajan,” Hadrian recalled. “Carved as Alexander—”

  “Boring,” said Uncle Paris, and shut the door of his studio.

  “Don’t mind him,” Sabina said as they came out into the street. Her litter-bearers straightened hastily, having taken advantage of her absence to flirt with a cluster of slave girls on the way to the market. “Uncle Paris carves for himself, you know, not for his living. You’d better make your commission interesting, or he won’t take it.”

  “A true sculptor.” Hadrian fingered his short beard. “I envy such men. A great talent may be a burden, but it does lighten one of destiny. The talent is the destiny.”

  “I was thinking that myself, earlier,” said Sabina. “But you said it better. What’s your talent?”

  “I write poetry,” Hadrian confessed. “Elegies in the Greek style. And I have a certain skill for drawing, and I play the flute and the lyre. But I will never number among the great artists.”

  “Then you’ll have to find out your own destiny,” said Sabina. “Most of us do, I suppose.”

  “I already know what my destiny is,” Hadrian said matter-of-factly.r />
  She cocked her head, interested, but he had lifted a hand and summoned his own litter.

  “I fear I must leave you, Vibia Sabina—I would see you home, but I am to dine this evening with my sister and her husband Servianus.”

  “Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus?” Sabina asked. “I’ve met him.”

  “They say he is the most worthy man in Rome.”

  “I don’t like him either.”

  Hadrian laughed aloud, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. “What an interesting little thing you are,” he said, and Sabina no longer saw the sheen of boredom in his deep-set eyes.

  VIX

  I’ll admit I was nervous when I got a summons to Senator Norbanus’s house. “Hell,” I swore when I got the politely worded missive, handed over by a less polite slave. But I went. When a senator snapped his fingers in Rome, unemployed ex-slaves like me hopped like frogs.

  “I see you are doing well for yourself.” He eyed the silver chain about my neck, leaning back in his chair. Nothing had changed in the crowded study—the desk heaped with slates and tablets, the cheerful clutter, the shelves and shelves of scrolls. “Have you found any particular work as yet?”

  “Odds and ends, sir.”

  “I know what sort of odds and ends go on in that side of town. Not what your parents would hope for you, I’m sure.”

  An itch started to scratch between my shoulder blades, and I had to control the urge to twitch. Twitching looked guilty.

  “Sabina tells me you ran into a spot of trouble outside the Circus Maximus a few weeks ago.”

  Damn it. I should have known that girl wouldn’t be able to hold her tongue. “No trouble, sir,” I lied. “Nothing at all.”

  “She said you handily saw off a pack of drunken thieves.”

  “She exaggerates.”

  “Rarely.”

  His dark eyes regarded me, thoughtful, and I had the feeling he was seeing clear through to the inside of my skull. A good many aristocrats could do that look, but his took the prize. He knew about the thugs, he knew about me kissing his daughter; he knew all the things I would have liked to do to his daughter given a little more time and a flat spot, and Hell’s gates, Vercingetorix, this is not the time for any of those thoughts to be invading your thick head. I averted my eyes over the senator’s ear, fastening them on a bust of somebody who might have been an emperor or maybe just a philosopher, and hoped my face wasn’t reddening. Red faces looked guilty.

  “I would like to offer you a place in my household guards.” The offer came so abruptly, I just blinked. “This is a quiet household, but we have occasional need of a guard at the gate. You would have a room here at the villa, your meals, three new tunics a year. And a salary.” He quoted it—a generous one.

  I breathed easier. He’d hardly be making me any sort of offer if he knew—“Why, Senator? Must be plenty of old soldiers who’d serve you better. I’ve never done any bodyguarding.”

  “I remember a twelve-year-old boy who stabbed an emperor in defense of his mother,” said Senator Norbanus. “What was that, if not bodyguarding?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Six years. Endless, indeed.” His ink-stained fingers drummed the desk. “Bring a little of that verve to protecting my household, and I’ll be well pleased. I have an enemy or two who might be troublesome—not to kill me perhaps, but to prevent me from reaching the Senate house on the morning of some important vote. And my eldest daughter has a habit of wandering off to odd places. A strong arm at her back might be useful.”

  “Did she put you up to this?” I couldn’t help but ask. “Hiring me?”

  “No, Sabina’s gone to Baiae with her stepmother and the children.”

  I couldn’t help a twinge of disappointment. Sabina had put me off the night I kissed her, like a good girl should, but her finger had traced those deliberate circles on the back of the neck that had raised the hair on my arms—raised more than hair, truth be told, and that was not anything to be thinking about right now either. I shifted partway behind a handy chair.

  “—Sabina’s idea, taking Calpurnia to the coast for a while,” the senator had continued, unaware of me. “My wife is to have another child”—a smile lit his face, softening the harsh marble-carved lines out of all recognition—“and she’s often queasy in the early months, so Sabina suggested sea air.”

  He seemed to shake himself a little, looking back at me. “My idea, in any case, to offer you this position. It occurred to me that you stand some danger of becoming a thug. Your parents, I am sure, would not want that, and I do owe them a debt.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m no thug.”

  “You extort drunk boys in alleys for… what reason, then?”

  Maybe he did know more than I took him for. “It’s a living.”

  “Not much of one.”

  “Being a bodyguard isn’t much either.”

  “Consider it a stepping-stone. You will encounter interesting people in this house, people who might be able to help you. A bright young household officer might find a well-placed legate willing to sponsor him as a centurion.”

  “In return for services rendered,” I snickered. “No, thanks.”

  His mouth quirked. “That’s a danger, true. But there are benefits outweighing the dangers. Emperor Trajan always has his eye out for bright young warriors, and his officers are beginning to look for them too.”

  Emperor Trajan. Rumor in the wine shops had it he was heading back up north to Germania soon, to step once and for all on a rebellious king in Dacia who wore a lion skin. I wouldn’t mind seeing an emperor closer up than a box at the races. Maybe something would come of working here, something more than just the lodging and light work and regular pay… I thought of fine, flower-tangled hair flowing through my hands, but blinked that particular image back.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Excellent.” The senator poured a pale stream of wine into a goblet from a decanter at his elbow and pushed it toward me. “Welcome to the Norbanus household, Vercingetorix.”

  “Thank you, sir. Dominus.” I remembered the change just in time—I’d have to address him as master of the house, now that I’d joined the household.

  Steady pay or not, I didn’t really like calling anyone Master again.

  Spring fluttered toward a damp hot summer, and I slid into the Norbanus household like an eel into a mud bank. And I had it good.

  The work was light. There were only two other guards, both grizzled and graying, happy to dice in the cool garden while I headed off to escort the master to the Senate house. Senator Norbanus was a good master—he might be eagle-eyed over his scrolls, but he was absentminded as far as his household went. In the absence of his wife and children he was content to eat in his study, dropping crumbs unconcernedly on his wax tablets, or to take a packet of bread and cheese from the cook and limp down to the Capitoline Library, where he’d spend half the day in research. No beatings in this house; no slaves running away in the night or whipped for breaking a dish. I had a new cloak, thick enough to keep the summer rainstorms off my back. I had regular days off to go to the races or the games or the taverns or anywhere else I pleased. The hardest work I had to do was carry an armload of scrolls for Marcus Norbanus on his way to the Senate house.

  So why did I feel so bloody sour?

  “You’re so scowly, Vix,” the freckled slave girl giggled at me. Gaia, her name was, a Greek girl who’d grown up in the Norbanus household, and soon I was counting the freckles on more than her nose. She was buxom and giggly, a soft armful in the night, but I still lay there scowling up at the ceiling after she’d slipped out of my room with another sleepy giggle. And I’d go get drunk on my day off, drunk as I could, and come back with a head so sore even the senator didn’t offer me his usual absent “Good morning” on the way to the Senate house.

  Sabina and her stepmother stayed up in Baiae, and that made me sore too. I saw the letters her father wrote to them
both; he might have mentioned he had a new guard in the household, mightn’t he? And maybe she’d have come home a little sooner, hearing that, but she didn’t, and why should she? Rich girls, they probably all kissed pleb boys in alleys after a day at the races. Just a bit of spice for them, a cheap thrill before they married and got as fat and painted and plucked as their mothers.

  I wasn’t the only one looking for the daughter of the house. Hardly a day went by when some hopeful fellow in a toga didn’t turn up on the doorstep. Old or young, their faces all fell when I said she wasn’t there. “What’s she got that everyone wants?” I demanded of a patrician boy younger than me who had brought a bouquet of lilies and his brand-new toga to the door. “There’s plenty of senators’ daughters in Rome. Lots have got to be prettier than her, richer than her.”

  “But they don’t have her connections.” He was too young to be sniffy about talking to a guard. “She’s great-niece to the Emperor, or maybe a distant cousin. Anyway, she’s the closest unmarried woman of his family. My grandfather says if I land her, it’ll be a sure boost to my career.”

  He dropped his armload of flowers on a nearby table. A sprat of a boy, skinny as a bean, but he had a thin pleasant face and a rueful expression. He’d given me his name at the door, some impossibly long string, but all I remembered was Titus. “You’re young to be trying for a wife,” I couldn’t help observing.

  “Wasn’t my idea, believe me. My grandfather’s ill, and he’s starting to want me settled.” Titus or whatever his name was fiddled with the flowers. “He said I might have a chance—Grandfather’s great friends with her father, so he’s already dropped a few hints for me.”

  “Won’t do you any good,” I said. “She gets to pick her own husband.”

  “Well, I’m sunk.” He gestured down ruefully at his skinny frame. “Who’d pick me?”

  “You never know. Come back when she’s returned from Baiae.”

  “I will. Might as well practice this courtship business, even if I haven’t got a chance in the world. ‘No man by fearing reaches the top,’ as Syrus would say.” The boy picked up his armload of lilies and thrust them at me. “Give these to your girl instead.”