Empress of the Seven Hills

by Kate Quinn

  “Your room. Fewer questions if there’s blood. This way?”

  “Blood?” I felt like a squawking parrot, always a step behind and echoing everything she said. We were tiptoeing past the darkened kitchens now, toward my little chamber.

  “It’s my understanding there’s blood sometimes after this sort of thing,” she explained in a whisper. “The first time, anyway. Now, no one will ask any questions if there’s blood in your bed, since you’re always stumbling in with cuts and scrapes after getting into fights. But my bed? That’s just the kind of thing nosy slave girls are always looking for.”

  My head was spinning and not from the wine. “You’ve been—thinking this out, haven’t you?”

  “Of course I have. For quite a while, actually. Is this it?” She pointed at a narrow door.

  “Yes.” I’d left the shutter open inside my chamber, and light flickered on the wall from the guttering torch at the back gate outside as I drew her in. She laid her hands on my shoulders and walked me backward until the bed’s edge at my knees made me sit, and in a flash of torchlight I saw her smile, a slow delighted smile that crinkled her blue eyes. Amid the shock I’d been thinking sudden cautious thoughts about this good job I had, about Senator Norbanus and the penalties that would await me for touching his daughter, but everything fled after that smile. I pulled her into my lap and began kissing her again and her mouth opened sweetly under mine. “Why?” I muttered. “Why me?” Because this was more than I ever thought I’d get, more than I should get because girls like her just didn’t do this. “Why?”

  “Vix, can we talk later?” Her lips moved to my ear. “I’m a little nervous about this, after all, and I’d rather we got on with it.”

  I got on with it, because when you’re nineteen and you’ve got a girl pulling your head down and her skirts up, you stop asking questions. I gave up and laid her back on the narrow bed.

  “Be gentle,” I’d been told once. By my mother, of all people, after I’d gotten caught two years ago in a compromising position with a neighboring farmer’s daughter. My father growled and said he’d thrash me if I got anyone pregnant, but my mother gave me a little sound advice, and some of it was, “Be gentle with girls, especially if they’re new to it.” Not advice I’d ever had a chance to use, since the girl who’d yanked me headlong into the pleasures of the flesh had been a cheerful big-boned Brigantian three years my senior who had been dragging boys off to her favorite haystack for years, and the girls I’d had afterward were all in the same general mold. But somewhere in the soft dark with the flickering torchlight shadows, I remembered the part about being gentle, and I tried my best. Don’t know how well I did, because at one point Sabina took a deep sudden breath and gripped her lip in her teeth.

  I froze. “Did I hurt you?”

  “A bit,” she said, her voice beneath me incongruous in the dark. “But don’t stop, please.” She twined her arms about my neck, drawing me closer, and I kissed her again as I tried to remember to be slow, to be gentle, until the point when I forgot everything including her name and probably my own.

  Afterward we lay in a sweaty silence that might have been awkward, except that Sabina was never awkward. “Goodness,” she said, lacing her fingers comfortably through mine. “I think I can see what all the fuss is about.”

  “Sorry if you hurt. I didn’t mean—”

  “No, I’m just a bit sore. No blood, I think.” She sounded pleased. “And now I’ve got the hang of it, I’m sure I’ll be better next time.”

  “Next time?” I picked my head off the pillow.

  “Yes, please.” She snuggled her head against my shoulder. “If you don’t mind?”

  “No,” I laughed up into the dark, bemused. “Most girls don’t put it that way, though. You’re an odd one, Lady.”

  “I think you can call me Sabina now.”

  “Sabina.” I felt strange suddenly, despite the comfort of her body pressed against mine in the dark. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “What question?”

  “Why me? Why at all? Girls like you don’t go giving it up to a bodyguard.”

  She gave that chuckle low in her throat, the one I already knew I liked. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Don’t think so. Most well-born girls, they save everything for their husbands, or at least they’re supposed to. What’s your reason?”

  “Maybe it’s just you.” She twined herself over my chest in the dark to kiss me again. “You are rather lovable, Vix.” Her fine hair curtained my face, and I slid my hands over her smooth waist and forgot the question.

  Stupid boy. Vibia Sabina never did anything without a reason.

  CHAPTER 5

  SABINA

  What a pity, Sabina reflected, that Vix couldn’t lie.

  Oh, he could lie, but he was useless at it. His face flamed up till it looked as russet as his head, and after that he started hooking his thumbs into his belt and stammering. She’d nearly groaned aloud when she last saw him talking to her father.

  “Fine day, isn’t it?” Marcus had said absently as Vix came dashing up to the litter still tugging his sword belt into place. “Not so hot.”

  “No, Dominus.”

  Sabina had been loitering beside the litter after getting her own good-bye kiss and could clearly see the flush start to rise from Vix’s collar.

  “I understand you’ve had a wet summer? Pity for you my daughter was so insistent about staying in the city. Baiae was much more agreeable.”

  “We’ve kept busy,” Sabina had said, bland, and Vix threw her an appalled glance over Marcus’s head that nearly had her laughing aloud.

  “Good, good. Lend a limping old man a pair of strong arms, would you?”

  They had handed her father up into the litter, and Sabina hoped he would be too preoccupied with the upcoming business of the Senate to give a thought to his bodyguard’s apple-colored face.

  “Are you mad?” Vix hissed as the litter retreated down the street. “We’ll never get away with this, not now that they’re back from Baiae!”

  “Yes, we will.” She gave a blink of her lashes instead of a kiss. “I’ll be down tonight.”

  “A houseful of slaves, that suspicious old bag of a nurse who chaperones you—your stepmother sees everything—the senator, he knows everything!” Vix raked a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. “Someone’ll see, and then all hell will break loose.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sabina mused. “My father would be very disappointed in me, of course, but I doubt he’d flog me or exile me from the family.”

  “And what about me? I’m off to the galleys for deflowering a senator’s daughter—”

  “No, because we won’t get caught.” Vix might be a terrible liar, but that didn’t mean Sabina was. Hadn’t she grown up seeing her father work on his fellow senators in pursuit of some new law or edict, so expertly they didn’t even know they were being strummed like harps? Hadn’t she seen the effort that went into all that expert strumming, the preparation and care that backed all her father’s plays in the Senate?

  By comparison, a clandestine love affair was child’s play.

  “Well, not child’s play,” she explained that night as Vix let her through his door. She tossed herself down on the moonlit bed, crossing her arms behind her head to look up at him. “It just takes a certain amount of groundwork, that’s all. Like taking a few weeks to establish myself among the slaves as a bad sleeper—one regularly to be found slipping out of her room on a hot night to read in her father’s study.”

  “Have you been slipping out seeing someone else?” Vix scowled down at her, arms folded. “Like that skinny boy Titus you’re so taken with? Not that I understand why—”

  “Don’t be silly, Vix, I really was reading in my father’s study. You have to be caught a few times in innocent pastimes,” Sabina explained, “before you can move on to the guilty ones. Next, I made a habit of slipping down to the kitchens after these midnight reads to grab
a snack before going back to bed. The kitchens that are just a dozen feet or so from your door.”

  A grin was starting to tug at Vix’s mouth, but he refused to give in to it yet. “So?”

  “So, there is not one slave in this house who will blink at finding me out of my own bed at night, sneaking through the slave quarters toward the kitchens.”

  “It’s no guarantee,” Vix warned. “The wrong person at the wrong time—”

  “I’ve made an offering to Fortuna, to give us luck,” Sabina said. “And sacrificed a rather nice pearl bracelet for hard coin, in case we need to bribe a nosy slave.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” Vix gave in to the grin, unbuckling his sword and tossing it into one corner.

  “Why do you think it took me so long to come back from Baiae?” Sabina sat up and began taking the pins out of her hair. “You wouldn’t believe how much groundwork I had to lay. In the first place it took quite a few days planting clues so my father would offer you the bodyguard job—”

  “I thought that might be your idea.”

  “Of course it was, but he had to think it was his idea, and he’s quite clever so I had to take my time about it.” She shook her hair down around her shoulders. “Then I had to find out what I could do to prevent babies—”

  Vix coughed. “What?”

  “Babies, Vix. This is what causes them, or so I’m told. You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find out what worked. Calpurnia wants a dozen children so she doesn’t use anything, and she doesn’t have any of the more loose-moraled friends who might be informative. My mother must have known a useful trick or two… anyway, I finally had to consult some helpful whores. They recommended a sort of pessary from Egypt, supposed to be infallible—”

  Vix dived onto the bed, pinning her down. Sabina obliged him by struggling, and he forced her arms apart effortlessly. He kissed the space between her collarbones, his favorite spot, then followed his way up to her ear. “You’re a born schemer, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Sabina kissed him back for a while and then started to tell him about the rest of her scheming—she really felt quite smug when she thought how handily she’d managed everything, and wouldn’t have minded a little applause. That trip to the brothel for advice about babies had been hair-raising in some parts, though the whores themselves couldn’t have been more helpful once they realized she was there for information and not some exotic perversion. Nice girls, really, and after giving her a jar of that Egyptian pessary they’d added all kinds of helpful tips for her upcoming seduction, including one demonstration on a wooden flute that had been quite eye-opening. But Vix started to look uneasy when she talked about her scheming.

  “Do you realize what kind of trouble you could have landed yourself in?” He shifted his weight over her. “And how long have you been planning this, anyway?”

  Since the day you kissed me after the races. Though she hadn’t really made up her mind to take the final plunge until the day Titus had proposed to her. That sweet awkward boy with his unexpectedly steady eyes, saying something about wanting the one with all the wrong faults… it had resonated, somehow. And he complained that he could never think of anything original to say!

  But Sabina decided to keep that particular thought to herself and ducked back to Vix’s first question. “A very wise man once told me something about trouble.” She took his hand and plaited her narrow fingers with his big rough ones. “You get in trouble no matter what you do, so you might as well do everything you can.”

  “Who said that?” Vix cocked his head down at her.

  “Not Plato, that’s for sure.”

  “Sounds like something I’d say.”

  “You did say it, Vercingetorix. Years ago, when we met the first time.” She twined her arms about his neck. “I’ve never forgotten.”

  He shouted laughter then and grabbed her up so tight she could hardly breathe. “At least you know wisdom when you hear it.”

  “Blow out the lamp,” Sabina giggled when she got her breath back. “And let me try something—bear in mind, I’ve only seen this done on a flute…”

  VIX

  Sabina. Vibia Sabina.

  A pretty name. But I still had trouble using it, no matter how many times she slipped through my door, no matter how many times I held her warm and naked against me. Sabina. Even in the darkness of the night it still rolled awkwardly off my tongue.

  And Hell’s gates, there were a lot of nights.

  There’s nothing like being young and obsessed. There were prettier girls in the world than Sabina—overall I usually liked girls with more breast and fewer questions. But no other girl had ever dragged me to bed before and had her way with me. That was usually my line. But Sabina couldn’t get enough of me. Me, Vercingetorix, son of a slave and a gladiator, and soon I couldn’t get enough of her either. There were long hot damp days where I fidgeted at the gate through my guard duties, fidgeted through a dinner too hot and sticky for eating, fidgeted in my bed till the moon went up, and by the time the shadow slipped in and barred the door, half the blood in my veins would be smoking and I’d lunge across the room and pin her up against the wall. Afterward we’d stretch out and talk for hours, and that was something else new for me. I’d never done much talking to girls. Mostly under the blankets it was just giggling, and me trying to get out without being spotted by fathers or brothers. And it wasn’t like I had much to talk about. “You’re sweet, Vix,” the Brigantian girl who had broken me in once said. “But you’re not the brightest, are you?” I couldn’t say she was wrong, but Sabina had me talking anyway.

  “Brundisium,” she’d say, propping her chin up on her hand in the dark. “You grew up there, didn’t you? Tell me about it.”

  “Don’t you ever get sleepy?” I yawned.

  “Not when there’s things to be learned. You grew up so differently from me—tell me something that happened to you when you were a child. Something funny.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “When I was seven years old in Brundisium, a bald man in a toga collared me on the street and offered me oysters for dinner. I knew what he really wanted, but I wasn’t about to pass up free oysters.”

  “What happened?”

  “I went back to his house with him, and as soon as I was done stuffing myself he started edging his hand up my thigh. I took his first two fingers”—demonstrating—“and yanked in opposite directions. While he was screaming and leaping around in agony, I climbed out the window.”

  “This is a funny story?”

  “The way he rolled around on the floor cursing at me was funny. Served him right. I stole a very expensive vase on my way out the window too.”

  “You’re a savage.” Sabina’s eyes sparkled. “Tell me more.”

  “I stole anything that wasn’t nailed down from everybody I could find—sips of beer from the mugs in taverns, sweets from my master’s kitchens, coins from beggars. And when I was eight and my mother got sold to Rome, I ran away from my master to join her. I got all the way from Brundisium to Rome on my own, hitching rides on wagons and thieving food from vendors.”

  “Brundisium,” Sabina said, thoughtful. “I’d like to go there. Could take a ship to Greece after that. Hadrian’s always talking about Greece.”

  “Hadrian?” I turned on one side, tugging her into the crook of my chest. “Who cares what that gorbellied bootlicker thinks?”

  “He’s not a bootlicker,” Sabina laughed.

  “He laps at your heels hard enough,” I grumbled. “Why do you always take so many walks with him?”

  “Because if I start turning suitors away, people are going to look for a reason why. When you’re living a lie, Vix,” she instructed, “you have to give people something to look at so they don’t start looking anywhere else.”

  “Don’t have to make such a good show of it, though, do you?” I demanded. “Walking arm in arm, always putting your heads together over a book—”

  “Jeal
ous?” she teased.

  “No!”

  Maybe a little. Sabina didn’t seem to care a fig about any of her suitors except two: that shy patrician boy named Titus, who made her wrinkle her nose affectionately, and Tribune Hadrian. The skinny prat with the violets didn’t worry me—he was only sixteen, and he hardly had the courage on his visits to thrust some flowers at her and stammer a few shy compliments. Hadrian, now… he came to call at least twice a week, and he and Sabina would walk the gardens, his big head bent down toward hers. Talking, always talking, and Sabina’s little chin had the same attentive angle it did when she cocked it at me over the pillow at night.

  “I don’t see what there is to be jealous of,” Sabina pointed out, bumping her nose gently against mine. “You think Hadrian’s pouring pretty compliments into my ears? Last time we talked about architecture, and the time before that it was Greek philosophers, and before that it was the Eleusinian Mysteries.”

  “Exactly.” All things I didn’t know anything about.

  “Mostly he goes on about Greece,” Sabina continued, unruffled. “He keeps telling me Athens is the center of civilization, not Rome. He can go on quite a while about that. Behind his back, they call him the Greekling.”

  “I call him that boil-brained lout, and I’ll do it to his face.”

  She laughed softly in the dark. “I would like to see Athens. And Brundisium. A hundred other places.”

  “Rome’s big enough to keep you occupied.”

  “And why did you come back to Rome, Vix?” She cocked her head up against my shoulder, her blue eyes just dark pools in the night. “Your parents hated it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Rome made you a slave. Rome put you in an arena to fight for your life. Rome nearly killed you.”

  “That was all a madman’s fault. The madman’s gone now, so there’s no reason for me not to come back. My father didn’t want me to, but—”

  “Ah.”

  I scowled. “What, ah?”

  “Your father hated Rome, so you like it.”

  I shrugged. “A mountaintop in Brigantia might get a little small for us both. He’s a big man.”