Empress of the Seven Hills

by Kate Quinn

  “But there is, Caesar. I can show you on a map.” Titus shifted from foot to foot. “One of my legionaries discovered it on night sentry duty—where the pipes come out. Smash the pipes; cut off the water supply. Not an elegant solution, but the simplest. Once the Dacians get thirsty enough, they open their gates.”

  The Emperor frowned, but thoughtfully. “Get my engineers in here!” he called, and there was a flurry of activity. Titus stood in the middle of it all feeling oddly exhilarated. He’d had to scrape up every bit of courage he had to dare approach the Emperor directly with Vix’s mad plan.

  “What am I supposed to do, present it myself?” Vix had hooted. “They’ll never let a muddy-boots legionary like me in to see the Emperor of Rome. You’ll have to do it for me.”

  “Me? I can’t do that!”

  “You’ve talked to him before, haven’t you?”

  “In passing,” said Titus. “Once or twice. Not in depth. I don’t like talking in depth with emperors, or important people in general. They look at me and I start to stutter, and all in all it’s a scene I prefer to avoid.”

  “You take it to Hadrian and he’ll just take the credit,” Vix warned. “Then I’ll have to beat you bloody for giving that weasel a career boost on my idea. Be a man!”

  “You sound like my grandfather,” Titus winced, and the following day he’d put on his best armor, applied the parade plume to his helmet, scrubbed everything to a shine, and applied to see the Emperor. Who was now looking Titus over with a speculative eye.

  “What did you say your name was?” Trajan asked. “You’re one of Hadrian’s, aren’t you—the one who quotes?”

  “Yes,” Titus said, resigned. “I’m the one who quotes.”

  “Good to see you’ve got more in that head than epigrams. Not saying this plan of yours will work, mind, but it’s worth a try.”

  The tent was rapidly filling up now: aides spreading out maps, Trajan’s staff officers already debating hotly with each other, engineers spouting technicalities in that superior nasal drone all engineers seem to have… the Emperor’s quarters were confined to a tent as small and plain as any legionary’s; the interior furnished with nothing more than a makeshift desk, a bedroll, and a few spartan camp stools, but Trajan’s perpetual good cheer brightened any room.

  “Hadrian!” he called as Sabina’s husband came striding into the tent. “You’ve been keeping this Cicero-spouting young tribune from me. He shows promise.”

  Hadrian frowned. “I’m sorry if he disturbed you, Caesar—”

  “Not at all. This notion he has about the pipes works, and I may poach him off you for my own staff. Tell us again, lad—”

  “If it were that easy to cut off their water, we’d have done it already.” Hadrian began shaking his head before Titus was even finished. “It won’t work.”

  “It will work,” Titus found himself venturing to his own surprise. “We know they don’t have a water supply up there, not one that will supply the whole city. They rely on those pipes.”

  “Boy’s right,” one of the engineers grunted. “This place your legionary found, Tribune—he’s sure he’s seen where the pipes feed out? It’s not on our maps.”

  “You see?” Hadrian dismissed. “If they were accessible, we would have known.”

  “Not necessarily; the spot’s hidden. They took good care to keep it off our maps.” Titus edged forward, pointing to the maps. “Here, let me show you…”

  More muttering, more arguments and speculation and pessimistic grumbles, but the Emperor’s optimism had already risen to fill the tent. He was making plans now, striding up and down in his battered armor, arguing with his officers, and Titus was content to drift back to the back of the throng. Unnoticed, just as he liked it.

  Perhaps not quite unnoticed.

  “You should have come to me with your notion, Tribune.” Hadrian’s voice sounded at Titus’s shoulder, and it was distinctly cool.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Titus said. “I thought—I thought I might just get shot down, so why bother making you look a fool.”

  “But instead you look very clever. Doubtless what you wanted.”

  “No, sir… I don’t want much of anything. Just to get along in this world.”

  Hadrian cast him a disbelieving glance and moved off. “Caesar, perhaps I can draw your attention here on the map—my tribune and I had discussed the idea before, analyzing the weakness—”

  No one ever believes me when I say I don’t want much from the world, Titus thought. Hadrian, who wanted to rise to consul or even beyond… the Emperor, who wanted to conquer the whole world… Vix, who wanted his own army to help do it… Sabina, who wouldn’t be content until she’d crossed every sea and horizon the earth had to offer. So many movers and shakers, Titus thought, and in the middle of all those grand ambitions, me. With no ambitions at all.

  Except maybe to acquire a nickname someday besides “the fellow who quotes.”

  “Tribune,” Trajan said at last, tugging on his gauntlets, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, to be sure. Any epigrams for the occasion?”

  “‘My tongue is palsied,’” Titus found himself quoting. “‘Subtly hid fire creeps me through from limb to limb.’ Catullus said it about a woman, Caesar, but that’s how nervous I was trying to approach this tent.”

  Trajan laughed, giving Titus’s shoulder a thump of Imperial approval that buckled his knees, and his retinue were quick to laugh with him—though Hadrian gave only a token shadow of a smile.

  VIX

  “So tell me.” Sabina tilted her head up at me. The pipes were broken, and the days stretched out warm and idle again as the whole army waited for the Dacians to get thirsty. “Why do you dislike my husband so much? You must admit, he’s a very good legate.”

  I grunted but couldn’t really deny it. I might not like having Publius Aelius Hadrian as my commander, but he’d turned out better than I expected. He was even-handed, he didn’t overmanage the centurions, he enforced discipline but wasn’t a flogger. “He just models himself on the Emperor,” I said scornfully. “How much brilliance does it really take to look for the best there is and copy it?”

  “He does do that,” Sabina admitted. “He watches Trajan very carefully. Picked up the same habit of greeting all the men by name and clapping them on the shoulder in that friendly way. It’s a touch studied, but Hadrian’s always a little stiff when he’s first settling into a role.”

  “That’s all everything is to him. This role or that one.”

  “But he plays them all very well, you must admit. Why are you so set against him? He’s never done anything to you.”

  “He had thugs beat me up in an alley!”

  “You have thugs trying to beat you up in alleys every day. You never hold it against them.”

  “Well, he’s a supercilious lizard.”

  “Yes,” Sabina conceded, “but so what?”

  “See here, why are you defending him? Don’t you hate him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you don’t love him.” I groped for words. “So I thought—”

  “Love or hate, with nothing in between?” She cocked her head at me, amused. “Is that how it is for you?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Generally.”

  She chuckled. “My husband’s a bit more complicated than that. He’s not lovable, perhaps, but he’s interesting. We talk a great deal.”

  “About what?”

  “Greek poetry. Syrian architecture. Hunting lions. The declining condition of Roman literature. Why Egyptians worship cats. The Sibylline Books and what could possibly be written in them. How to play the flute. The mechanics of oratory. The possibility of taking a river journey down the Nile some springtime. Whether paving stones should be made rectangular or polygonal for maximum stress displacement. The best way to build a trireme…”

  “All right, all right,” I grumped. “You’re the best of friends.” I didn’t know what half those things she reeled off e
ven were.

  “Friends?” Sabina mused. “Mmm, no. Hadrian and I might be friendly enough, but we aren’t friends. He might have comrades, but he doesn’t really have friends. He doesn’t like people getting close.”

  “And that’s a nice husband?” I jeered.

  “He’s courteous, he’s considerate, and we have some decent conversations over the dinner table. That’s a good enough husband for me.”

  Allowable, I supposed—considering there wasn’t much between Hadrian and Sabina after dinner. It was the first thing I’d asked her. “Hadrian was more nervous on our wedding night than I was,” Sabina had chuckled, turning over on one side that first night in Dacia. “He’s had periodic affairs with married women, but I don’t think he’d ever had a virgin girl. What he assumed was a virgin girl, anyway… he was so relieved that I wasn’t crying and bleeding all over the place that we stayed up the rest of the night talking. All about the Iliad, if I remember correctly, and how we both thought Achilles was a muscle-bound idiot. And a week after the wedding, I had my own bedchamber on the other side of the house. Nocturnal visits between the two occur a few times a year. Whenever Plotina gets tired of nagging me about providing an heir, and nags him instead.”

  A few times a year. That wasn’t so bad.

  “You can enjoy all the dinner conversation you want,” I told her now, generously. “As long as there isn’t anything else.”

  “Thank you for your permission,” Sabina said. “I’ve been holding my breath.” She tugged my head down for a kiss, tracing the back of my neck in a slow circle. She could rouse a flutter in the pit of my stomach now, whenever she did that. I picked her up suddenly and bore her back into the tent, where Boil was stitching a new liner into his helmet. “Get out,” I told him around kissing Sabina.

  “You get to finish my helmet liner,” he warned, and got out.

  “Better make it quick,” Sabina murmured against my mouth as I tossed her down on my bedroll. “You’re due for drills in fifteen minutes, and that optio will stripe you if you’re late again.”

  “Bugger him.” And bugger bloody Hadrian too. I grinned as I kissed the curve of Sabina’s hip, thinking of the look on that supercilious bastard’s face if he could see me now. Of course if he saw us I’d probably have to kill him, but I wouldn’t mind that too much. Sling the body into the ditch and blame it on those Dacian sentries… and then I had Sabina all around me and I forgot about Hadrian. Forgot all about Old Sarm too, looming overhead in the dry, rainless days of summer and slowly dying of thirst.

  The friezes on Trajan’s monument make the Dacian surrender look like a simple thing. Gates open, and in you march in triumph. But it wasn’t so simple as that.

  The gates opened all right, and the legions were assembled cheering and scrambling into line. I jammed myself in between Philip and Simon, one sandal still half unlaced, my helmet perched on my head with the cheek pieces flapping, halfway through dressing in the dawn when I’d heard the triumphant blast of our trumpets. Philip was swearing in soft jubilant Greek, and Simon was whooping like a fiend. But the sun rose hot and messengers rode back and forth, and we stood shifting from foot to foot as demands were trotted up and down the mountain. It was full afternoon before a line of prisoners surrendered themselves and the legions ground their way up the winding mountain trek to the city—and before we’d got halfway up we saw smoke begin to billow into the sky in huge black waves, and realized that the Dacians had fired the city to keep us from sacking it. By that time Trajan was in no mood for mercy. “Where is your king?” he said harshly, and even all the way back in the legion’s second cohort I could hear the rasp in his voice.

  “Can you see him?” Philip breathed, shorter than me and craning over the helmet crest of the man before him. We stood arrayed before the temples, which had remained unfired although we coughed through watering eyes at the acrid smoke that drifted from the burning quarters of Old Sarm. “Their king shouldn’t be hard to find—I heard he wears a lion-skin cloak!”

  “He might have taken the cloak off, you idiot!”

  The Emperor’s voice snapped out again like a whip. “Where is he?”

  The captives glanced among themselves, muttering. “We’ll see about that,” the Emperor snarled, and in another moment his cavalry were stirring, vaulting onto horses.

  “Bastard must have escaped before they surrendered,” Simon muttered at my side.

  “No fight, then?” I said, disappointed, as the trumpets began to sound again.

  “They’ve surrendered! Of course there won’t be a fight.”

  “Oh.” I felt flattened somehow, and I wondered if the Emperor did too. He was staring up at the fortress, maybe remembering the sacked Roman garrisons with their skull idols staring from the niches where the legionary eagles had once preened. “If they burned their city, we can burn this,” the Emperor said curtly, and again we could all hear the snarl in his voice. “Destroy it.”

  Not long at all before more flames began licking at the sky. The Dacian warriors looked at them, and looked away.

  A few centuries were led into the smoldering city to beat down flames and crush any resistance, the rest of us left arrayed before the temples. Roman temples were square pillared things, roofed and grand, splendid houses for splendid gods, but the Dacians apparently worshipped in stone circles beneath the sky, gray lintels propped on each other and carved with runes. There was a vast flat circle of stones all tightly fitted together like a stone disc lying on the grass, and I watched Trajan vault off his horse and stride toward it with a face like a storm cloud. He snatched the standard pole from our aquilifer, leaving the startled man in his wake, and stormed out into the middle of the stone circle. He stood for a moment, breathing hard as if he’d forgotten what to do or what to say, and then without a word he slammed the Tenth’s pole into a gap between two stones, so our eagle glared proudly over the heathen circle.

  I felt a sting in my throat and realized I was screaming, along with thousands of others. Trajan raised a hand as if to quiet us, but we banged our javelins against our shields, and the grim look began to leave his face. He grinned like a boy, and our eyes streamed from the smoke that the wind had carried from the burning city to eddy around our splendid, arrogant eagle.

  The legion’s augurs came out then, to pronounce a lengthy benediction and proclaim Trajan the lord and conqueror of Sarmizegetusa, but we kept interrupting the droning prayers with more cheers and they kept flapping their hands at us. Pompous fools—who needed their benediction? Trajan became lord of Old Sarm when he jammed that eagle down on the stone circle. I could see Dacians—a woman with her arms about a baby, an old man, a boy a few years younger than Titus—watching with helpless, sullen hatred, but I had no thought for them. Only for my splendid Emperor.

  His bad temper had gone now. When the priests were done gabbling he looked up at the burning fortress and grimaced. “I’ll rebuild it,” he said to no one in particular. “More splendid than before, I promise.” He turned to us all, bellowing conversationally. “See your centurions for orders. Any of you poor buggers set for sentry duty, you’d better show up sober. The rest of you can have the night to yourselves—take what you want, if there’s anything still unburned and worth taking, but if any of you get caught with a Dacian woman who doesn’t look willing, I’ll have your cock off with a dull sword!”

  We roared again at that, javelins thumping. He raised a hand again, the smoky breeze stirring his short hair.

  “And tomorrow we go after that bloody king in his lion skin. I don’t care if he’s gone to hide in Hades!”

  Another roar.

  “Dismissed!”

  I contemplated going back down the mountain for Sabina—she’d be chafing to see something new after the monotony of the camp—but decided against it. Even with Trajan’s admonitions, and his centuries sweeping for mutinous Dacian soldiers, there would be violence tonight in Old Sarm. Women would be raped, sacks of loot would be gathered and fought over, slaves
would be taken, and for every Roman found dead in the street with a knife in his gut, there would be ten murdered Dacians. Better keep Sabina out of that—it might be too interesting even for her.

  Parts of Old Sarm had burned flat, but not all the fires laid by the frantic Dacian rebels had had time to catch hold. I left the looting to the others and wandered until I found a tavern still standing, on a street of buildings only slightly scorched. I dragged Philip with me, fleeced him at a game of dice, got fleeced back, and walked out with half my purse and a considerably clearer head than he. The streets were dark now, strange and winding instead of Rome’s angled lines, and I knew there were eyes watching my red cloak and crested helmet. I didn’t fancy a street fight on a swimming head, so I’d drunk sparingly at the tavern and felt half-disgusted with myself. Was this the start of turning into a cautious old man like the centurions, forever weighing the consequences of everything? My friends jeered at me, all roaring drunk themselves, but I still stopped at half a cup of strong Dacian ale and left the tavern early, thinking I’d get back to the camp for a night’s sleep if we were marching in the morning. Being cautious again—even worse, being responsible. But though I might not admit it to anyone else, I knew I’d far rather spend the night sleeping next to my girl than getting drunk in a tavern. At least in the morning I could look forward to making merciless fun of my moaning, puking brothers-in-arms.

  I crossed a narrow square in the general direction of the city gates. A clutch of legionaries bumped past me, whooping—the change of guard from the temple grounds where Trajan had sited the Tenth’s eagle. I caught a glow of something pale in the temple grounds, hesitated, then turned my course back toward the Dacian temples again. Sabina liked new gods, even the strange savage kind with horns and claws that Dacians worshipped—if I could tell her all about something new and interesting, she’d be more delighted than she’d ever be with a diamond necklace. My strange girl.

  The glow I’d seen from the dark street was the reflection of a three-quarter moon from the flat stone circle in the grass. The rings of standing stones and crude pillars had disappeared into the dark, but the circle reflected in the moonlight palely, and I looked up at the moon again and thought I could see that it would be right in line with the stone circle once it was at the top of the sky. “What’s that?” I asked, collaring a man in breeches and a sheepskin cloak who was hurrying past me with a glance at my sword. “The stone circle.”