Empress of the Seven Hills

by Kate Quinn

  “Violets next time,” I advised. “Lady Sabina hates lilies.”

  I liked him, Titus whatever-his-name-was, and if I’d known then just how many times we were going to save each other’s lives I’d have paid more attention when I first met him. Yount Titus aside, however, the rest of Sabina’s suitors seemed like a supercilious lot. That fawning worm Tribune Hadrian came calling, and the heavy brows aligned over his nose when I told him he’d made the trip for nothing. “When will Lady Vibia Sabina return?” he deigned to ask.

  “Don’t know.” I hooked my thumbs into my belt. “You think she keeps me informed?”

  “Ah—” His eyes swept me, recognition flaring. “The boy from the races. You were rude.”

  “Still am,” I grinned.

  Hadrian regarded me with cool displeasure. “You need a good beating, boy,” he said. “I’ll see you get one someday.”

  “How will you manage that, sir?”

  “I am resourceful.” He swept out with a flare of purple-bordered toga, and I made a rude gesture at the stiff retreating back.

  I got into a different kind of fight the following week, just after my nineteenth birthday, on a warm damp morning when I celebrated my day off by being stupid and going to the Colosseum. I didn’t want to go, knew I’d hate it, but the other guards jeered at me for missing the Vestalia games, so I went. I watched spearmen die on leopard claws and leopards die on spears, and by the time the midday executions rolled around I was drunk. “Games’ve gone downhill since my day,” I belched as a line of shackled runaway slaves were brought out for brisk beheading. “I remember when the rules weren’t so damned strict. Then you’d really see the blood flow.”

  “What do you know?” the other guard jeered.

  “I fought down there, I’ll have you know.” I waved my mug down at the bloody sand where a guard was forcing a struggling man to kneel, and spilled my beer. “I’m the Young Barbarian.”

  “Who?”

  “The Young Barbarian,” I repeated, outraged. “Youngest ever to fight in the Colosseum! Youngest to fight a bout anyway—” There were plenty of children who died in the arena, heretics or escaped slaves or prisoners, but they didn’t get a sword to defend themselves. A few children huddled down there now, waiting in paralyzed terror beside their parents for the blade through the neck, and I averted my eyes. “Come on, you remember the Young Barbarian!”

  They looked at each other and jeered. “Sounds to me like you’re making it up. You weren’t never no gladiator!”

  I hit at them with the mug, and one of them hit back, and a fight broke out in our section of the stands—a free-for-all that got me thrown out before the main bouts, and I wasn’t too sorry about that. I staggered out with a spectacular black eye and a bleeding ear, puked in a gutter, then puked again as I heard the roar of the crowd rise up from the Colosseum and knew it for a signal that the gladiators had fallen on each other. Poor bastards, I thought, and my knees gave out and I sat down on the paved curb with my hands dangling between my knees. “No loitering,” a housewife admonished me, pausing to adjust the basket on her arm.

  “I’m the Young Barbarian,” I snarled at her. “You don’t want to get too close to me!”

  “Barbarian indeed,” she sniffed, and bustled off. Rainwater had gathered in the hole left by a missing stone between my feet, and I restlessly kicked at the puddle. Another roar went up from the great arena behind me, and I wondered if I should just become a gladiator again. At least the sentence wouldn’t be twenty-five years. There weren’t many gladiators who lasted as long as two years, much less twenty-five. A short life, but no questions about it—as a gladiator, you knew where you were. Fight or die.

  Nothing simple about life now. Years ahead of me, and no idea what to do with them… I fingered the little amulet on its leather lace about my neck. Just a simple brass medallion of Mars, the Roman god of war; the kind you find at any vendor’s stall ten for a copper. My father had given it to me the day I left for Rome. “You should have a proper Roman god to look after you,” he said dubiously, “if you’re going back to that hellhole.”

  “Did Mars keep you safe?” I’d asked. “All those fights in the Colosseum—”

  “Something did,” he shrugged, and looped the amulet around my neck. The medallion had a stern, scowling, helmeted face on it—Mars looked like a humorless bugger. I rubbed a thumb over the stern visage and looked up at the sky. “Any hints?” I called hopefully. “Gladiator? Legionary? Anything?”

  A drop of rain fell on my neck, and the skies opened. I sat there getting wet, trying to work out if it was an omen.

  “Fighting, Vix?” The steward eyed me with disapproval when I returned dripping to the house. “A guard with a black eye, it reflects badly on the master. Never mind, pack your things.”

  “Pack?” I swayed, tired and wet and still more than a little drunk.

  “Senator Norbanus is going to Baiae to join Lady Calpurnia. We leave tomorrow. You’ll be needed to help with the journey—”

  “What an admirable black eye,” Senator Norbanus remarked mildly in the morning. “Here, take these scrolls and load them into the litter. Pliny, hmm, I’d better take him. Some Martial, some Cato—can’t do without Catullus—”

  A jolting journey in an ox-drawn palanquin. Baiae. I’d never been there. Pretty little town. White marble, blue water, big houses. Women in towels, trotting back and forth from the famous sulfur baths. More patricians here than anything else. Even the prostitutes on the street corners in their saffron wigs looked uppity.

  “Marcus!” Lady Calpurnia came running out the front gates of the villa when the palanquin halted. She’d dressed up to greet her husband, all airy yellow silks and chunks of amber in gold settings, an elegant far cry from the cheerful housewife who wasn’t too proud to bake her own bread and gossip with her slaves. Those same slaves had told me Lady Calpurnia had been one of the richest heiresses in Rome—“Oh, she brought Dominus half of Tarracina and Toscana when they married!”—and this was the first time she looked it.

  “Good-looking, rich, and she loves you,” I breathed to Senator Norbanus as he limped toward his wife. “You fell on your feet bagging that one, Dominus. Any man in Rome would take her for her bread alone!”

  He gave me a familiar glance, half irritated and half amused, but didn’t rebuke me for insolence. He’d never have brought down an emperor six years ago if not for me—neither of us had planned it that way, but it happened, and the bond still stuck. He let me get away with more familiarity than I should have. And his irritation faded fast enough as Lady Calpurnia flung herself into his arms. In fact, he reminded me abruptly of my rough gladiator father, who cupped my mother’s face between his hands in just the same way.

  It’s not necessarily the beautiful girls that hook you good and tight. It’s the ones like Lady Calpurnia—the ones like my mother. One of those warm, quiet women starts loving you, and you’re sunk. Be warned.

  “Marcus, your eyes look squinty,” Lady Calpurnia was scolding gently. “Have you been reading by bad lamplight again? Vix, take those scrolls right back to the litter; my husband will not be doing any work in this villa—goodness, Vix, that’s quite an eye.”

  “I know,” I growled.

  “Hide the scrolls in my study,” Marcus said low-voiced when his wife turned her back, and I tramped dutifully into the house as little Faustina came running out through the gates to collect her own greeting from her father. A spacious spread-out villa—pools of water sunk under open roofs, porticoed halls with slender columns, mosaics of leaping fish and twining vines on the floors. The study was already occupied when I got there.

  “Hello, Vix.” Sabina looked up from her book without surprise. “Is my father here already? You must have had good roads. I suppose everyone else has commented on the black eye?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Everyone else has commented on the damned black eye.”

  “It is rather spectacular.” She uncurled from the couch, barefo
ot and bare-armed, light-brown hair hanging down her back. “Still, I won’t ask how you got it.”

  “You should.” A reluctant smile was beating its way past my irritation. “It’s a thrilling tale. Robbers, thieves, dragons.”

  “Dragons? How interesting.” Sabina rolled up her book. “I’d better go see my father. Nice to know you’ve joined the household, Vix.”

  She drifted out just as her stepmother bustled in. “Give me those scrolls, Vix—I know he told you to hide them from me—”

  I surrendered my armload with a salute and went to look for the steward, feeling suddenly more cheerful. “Where do I sleep?”

  “You’ll share with one of the other guards. Do you realize you’ve got a black—”

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER 4

  SABINA

  Sabina liked the terrace of the Baiae villa. On fine evenings she had the steward pull out the couches so dinner could be served outside, wrapped in warm summer breezes with the shadows lengthening across the tiles and the expanse of blue sea glittering beyond. She looked over the bowls of grapes sometimes and imagined that she was seeing all the way beyond the horizon to the great promontories at the mouth of the sea. Hadrian had been born in Hispania; he’d described those promontories to her with hands flying and eyes aglow. The Pillars of Hercules, salt spray flying about them, with the wide ocean and the wider world beyond.

  “So wonderful to have a little vacation all together,” Calpurnia was saying, balancing little Linus against her arm as she tried to split a pomegranate one-handed. The last baby had given her a passion for oysters, but this time around it was pomegranate seeds. “Marcus, promise me you won’t go back to Rome for at least a month. You need the rest.”

  Sabina nibbled absently on a strip of roast goose, eyes still on the horizon. What lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules? North, of course, lay Britannia. But what lay west? What lay all the way west? Hadrian didn’t know, and wasn’t much interested. “Wild places,” he’d said dismissively. “Why worry about the world’s wilderness, Vibia Sabina, when the civilized world has more than you could ever explore in a dozen lifetimes?”

  “I can’t stay here all summer,” Sabina’s father was protesting. “I’m working on a new treatise.” So many senators, Sabina had often noticed, looked uneasy and vulnerable out of their togas, like turtles suddenly missing their shells. But her father, even when relaxed on the dining couch in a plain tunic with little Faustina curled under his arm, looked like an emperor.

  “The treatise can wait,” Calpurnia was insisting. “We can all go to the sulfur pools; it’ll bake that foul city air right out of your lungs.” She pressed a pomegranate seed into his mouth with pink-stained fingers, stilling his protests.

  “You know the rules, Father.” Sabina grinned. “One month here for every pomegranate seed you’ve eaten. Just like Proserpina and Pluto.”

  “Oh, good, that’s one month.” Calpurnia plucked out more seeds. “Two, three, four—”

  “And I thought it was a good idea to give my daughter a classical education,” Marcus shook his head.

  “Father, you really should stay a while. Calpurnia feels so sick in the middle months, and she’s always better when you’re here.”

  Marcus at once looked worried, taking his wife’s pomegranate-sticky hand. Calpurnia squeezed his fingers with no more than a twinkle of her lashes at Sabina, who hid her own smile in her cup. Her stepmother was approximately as frail as a mountain pony, but she and Sabina had long entered into a tacit conspiracy where any method from mild misdirection to outright lying was appropriate when it came to the care of the man they mutually adored.

  “We’ll make a summer of it here, then,” Marcus was deciding. “The five of us. I’ll have time to start teaching Faustina—some Greek, some rhetoric—”

  “Marcus, love, she’s barely five. What are you trying to prepare her for, a career in the Senate?”

  “Mix the Greek verbs in with a good bedtime story and they’ll go down easy.” Marcus ruffled the little fair head under his arm.

  “I like stories,” Faustina volunteered around a mouthful of roast goose. “Father has the best stories. Like the one where the king got murdered in his bath! And the one where the prince had to kill his mother—”

  “Greek tragedies, Marcus?” Calpurnia gave her husband a look that made Sabina giggle. “As bedtime stories?”

  “Sanitized,” he hedged. “I leave out all the gory details…”

  “You did not!” Sabina laughed. “At least not when you were telling them to me!”

  “Did he tell you the one where the king gets ripped apart by all those lady wolves?” Faustina piped, bright-eyed. “Or the king who got boiled alive in a pot? All these dead kings, why does anybody want to be a king, anyway?”

  “Wise child,” said Marcus. “Maybe we should try something lighter for this summer’s reading, Faustina.”

  “How about the one where the women of Athens refuse to sleep with their husbands anymore?” Sabina suggested.

  “There’s a thought.” Calpurnia rubbed her heavily rounded stomach.

  “We’ll find a comedy to read together,” Marcus said hastily. “I’ll take the male parts, and Sabina can read the women’s—”

  “Actually,” Sabina said idly, “I thought I might take my nurse for a chaperone and go back to Rome for the summer.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Calpurnia rescued her bowl of fruit before Linus could knock it over. “Rome in summer—it’ll be hotter than a furnace and smell worse than a sewer.”

  “I know.” Sabina tilted a shoulder. “But if I get back to the city, I can avoid the suitors. They’re all coming to Baiae now on vacation, and they’ll be underfoot everywhere. Father, are there any oysters left?”

  “They’d go away if you picked one,” Marcus pointed out.

  “I intend to pick the whole dish.” Sabina scooped into the oysters.

  “I meant if you picked a suitor. As you well know.”

  “Who are you going to choose, Sabina?” Calpurnia took a little silver knife to split the skin on another pomegranate.

  “I wonder,” Sabina said placidly.

  “You are leaving it rather late, you know. Eighteen years old—there’s plenty who have a baby already by your age.”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “Nonsense,” her father protested. “I’ve never been in favor of these young marriages. Eighteen is young enough.”

  “Not too much longer before I choose.” Sabina cracked another oyster. “But I would like another month or two of peace. Tribune Hadrian has been very persistent.”

  “I thought you liked Hadrian now. You talk for hours every time he visits.”

  “He talks for hours, anyway,” Marcus shook his head, amused. “He does love the sound of his own voice.”

  “I don’t mind,” Sabina said. “He’s quite interesting if I can get him talking about his travels. He’s been all over Hispania and Gaul—Father, can’t you just accept the next provincial governorship you get offered, so I could go somewhere interesting like Hispania or Gaul? Or Egypt—”

  “I don’t know about Hadrian,” Calpurnia said doubtfully. “He’s very charming, to be sure—”

  “Of course he’s charming to you,” Sabina said. “He thinks you’re the pearl of Roman womanhood.”

  “Yes, and very nice of him to say so. I like a man who has a way with pretty compliments—”

  “Do I sense a reproof?” Marcus wondered.

  “—and Hadrian’s distinguished as well as charming, so he’s sure to have a fine career ahead of him. But—” Calpurnia held up a pink-stained finger, just like her husband when he pounced in the Senate with a legal loophole. “Hadrian comes with a mother-in-law.”

  “His mother’s dead,” Sabina objected.

  “But the Empress isn’t,” Calpurnia said ominously. “And she had the raising of him, more than his own mother did. Believe me, you do not want Empress Plotina f
or a mother-in-law.”

  “So that’s why you married me?” Marcus laughed. “Not for pretty compliments, but because my mother was safely in her grave?”

  “Oh, be serious, both of you.” Calpurnia captured little Linus’s plump fist and waved it for attention. “The last thing any young wife needs, Vibia Sabina, is her mother-in-law’s nose poked over her shoulder criticizing her housekeeping, her character, and her children.” Shuddering. “And Empress Plotina has a very long nose.”

  “So, an interfering mother-in-law,” Sabina agreed. “Any other objections to Hadrian?”

  “He has a far from spotless reputation. He’s keeping a singer in very luxurious lodgings on the Aventine, and—well, not in front of the children.” Calpurnia raised her eyebrows. “Not to mention that he’s eight years older than you.”

  “You’re one to talk!” Sabina laughed. “How old was Father when you married him, Calpurnia? Sixty-three?”

  “That’s different. Your father was settled, steady, and ready to marry; a man of twenty-six is not. And I was madly in love with your father, and you aren’t in love with Hadrian or anyone else as far as I can tell—”

  “I’m too old for this bantering,” Marcus protested, and as Sabina had hoped, the discussion descended into lighthearted family teasing, and by the following afternoon she was loading her books and gowns into a palanquin for the journey back to Rome.

  “Oh, dear,” she whispered to her father as one of the older heavyset guards tramped out with his spear to act as escort. “Do you suppose I could have Vix instead, Father? I want to go on a great many long walks this summer, and I always worry that Celsus will throw his back out if he has to do anything harder than lifting a wine cup… yes, that would be nice, thank you—” She hadn’t really decided what to do about Vix, but it would be good to have him on hand.

  Just in case.

  “Bliss,” Sabina said as she came into the quiet summer-dusked house on the Capitoline Hill, shaking the travel dust out of her dress. “No visitors, no family. All alone at last.” As much as she loved her father and Calpurnia and the children… well, all she seemed to crave lately was quiet. Space. Time—to herself, to think, to decide. So many things to decide, it seemed lately.