Empress of the Seven Hills

by Kate Quinn

  “Vibia Sabina, you look a mess.”

  “An accident with a drunken soldier and an inconveniently placed fountain,” her voice came behind me from the hall’s entrance. I leaned one shoulder against a pillar, pretending to watch the acrobats but keeping Sabina in view at the corner of my eye. She looked very nonchalant and very, very wet.

  Hadrian’s eyes flicked over her, and he moved to block the view of the rest of the guests. “That dress is indecent.”

  “Really?” Sabina plucked at the white folds, half transparent now with water and sticking to her brown limbs. “Surely not, since Plotina chose it. She’d never do anything so interesting as to be indecent.”

  Hadrian blinked. “Are you drunk?”

  Sabina laughed, her hair coming down her back in a wet tangle and her dress slipping off one shoulder. “Perhaps I should be. Everyone else is.”

  “Go home at once!”

  “I was going to, Hadrian. You really think I’m going to rejoin the party dripping wet?”

  “I don’t know half of what you do anymore.” His voice was suddenly cold. “I heard a great many rumors about your behavior throughout this campaign. Normally I would pay no heed to vicious gossip, but when my Empress has to tell me you have a taste for the company of common soldiers—”

  “I believe you’ve dipped a toe in those waters yourself, Hadrian.” Her voice was still light, teasing. “More than once these past months I came to your tent and found a handsome half-naked legionary waiting on your presence.”

  “That is not the same!” He lowered his voice and I shifted from one foot to the other, still pretending to ogle the acrobats. “Discretion is all in such matters. It is hardly discreet for a Roman matron of senatorial birth to appear at an important occasion like this soaking wet and half naked for everyone to ogle! Or to seek out the company of common soldiers for amusement. My career is just beginning to bloom, and I cannot afford scandal. Plotina thinks—”

  Sabina’s smile disappeared. “Yes, Dear Publius, let’s hear all about what Plotina thinks.”

  “She thinks it is time you started behaving yourself. And so do I.”

  I risked a glance at that. Hadrian and his wife stood nose to nose, unmoving, until Sabina took the wine cup out of Hadrian’s hand and drained it. “No more wine for you tonight, husband. It’s making you quite fanciful. I shall see you at home.”

  She turned and disappeared back into the atrium, walking with slow insolent grace. I could see the curve of her brown hip very clearly through the wet silk, the point of her shoulder…

  “You will keep your eyes off my wife.” A cold voice stung me, and I saw Hadrian tall and icy before me. “I have observed it in the past, Aquilifer. She is not a whore for the likes of you to gawp at.”

  “According to what you were hissing at her just now, she is a whore.” My mouth decided to jump in without consulting my brain first about whether it was a good idea. “And from the things I’ve heard around the Tenth, Legate, you aren’t far wrong. Lady Vibia Sabina, everyone knows she likes a rough—”

  His broad palm crashed against my cheek. He had a hard hand for a man who had never fought in a real battle in his life; the blow sent me back against the wall. Incongruously I remembered watching him take down the stag in Dacia, how he had slain it with one sure blow of a javelin and then smiled at the blood that sprayed his foot.

  I straightened, my cheek stinging. Tomorrow I’d be sporting a hand-shaped bruise. “That’s the first time you’ve struck me,” I said, and was surprised how quiet my voice came out. “There won’t be a second.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  I saw his fingers twitch at his side, and his bearded chin jerked up. I could see him itch to hit me again and felt my own fingers curl. The party was still roaring around us—the Emperor and his Praetorian Prefect were slamming back cups of unmixed wine in some uproarious drinking game—but I felt like I’d been placed in a ring of ice. There was nothing in the world but the bearded face looking back at me with cold, blazing eyes.

  “Legate Hadrian, have you made plans for your journey to Pannonia?” A courteous voice slid between us. “Surely you will return to Rome first for the triumph. I’m certain it will be a splendid occasion.”

  “Very splendid,” Hadrian said, eyes leaving mine for Titus, who stood attentive and polite at his elbow, and I wondered if I’d imagined it—that moment of sheer, clawing hatred.

  I hadn’t imagined it.

  “If you will excuse us, Legate? The Emperor wants a word with our aquilifer.”

  “The Emperor may have him.”

  I blinked as Titus’s hand took my elbow and steered me away. “The Emperor wants to speak with me?”

  “Of course he doesn’t, you fool. I had to say something to remind your legate that you have Imperial favor. He looked ready to strangle you on the spot. Did he find out about his wife?”

  “No. It wasn’t that.” I looked down at my synthesis, stained with water and wine. “Sorry about your tunic.”

  “Forget the tunic. We’re leaving. Gods in hell, keeping you alive is a full-time job. I don’t know why I bother.” Titus grabbed his cloak from a sleepy slave girl and steered me back through the dark atrium. The moon had moved on overhead, and the little tiled pool under the open roof was now in black shadow.

  “I dropped Sabina in the water there,” I confided.

  “I don’t want to know why,” Titus groaned. “I suppose that’s why Hadrian wants to kill you?”

  “No. He just hates me.” My tongue felt heavy suddenly, and my feet heavier. I stumbled over the threshold, and Titus steadied me. “I may have to kill him,” I mused.

  “Shut up.”

  “In fact, I’m quite certain I’ll have to kill him.”

  “Shut up!”

  “It’s going to be him or me.” I felt that quite strongly. This morning when I’d marched into the city, I’d had a lover. I’d lost her. But I’d found something else.

  An enemy.

  A week later, calling myself all sorts of fool, I went back to the squalid tenement across from the rooms that had been Demetra’s.

  “You’re here again, are you?” the tired-looking woman greeted me shortly. “Aren’t you grand.”

  I’d worn my lion skin and breastplate, hoping to impress her if I needed to. “I’ve come about the boy. Demetra’s son.”

  “What about him?”

  “Let me see him.”

  She vanished into the second room. The one I stood in smelled of grease and stale food. Two children playing in the corner with a pile of sticks looked up at me, and I saw watery eyes, dingy hair, tunics spotted with food. Not much like Demetra’s little oasis of scrubbed cheer.

  The woman reappeared, with the boy in her arms. “Here he is.”

  I looked at him. He was bigger, nearly three years old now, wearing a dirty shapeless smock. He had his mother’s dark-honey hair in curls all over his little head, and I thought I could see the start of her beautiful bones under his round cheeks. He gazed at me silently.

  “He’s a looker, isn’t he?” the woman said. “He’ll be a beauty when he grows up.”

  She’d said that before, last week, and somehow it had preyed on me. Bothered me. “You’ll raise him?” I said.

  “Like my own.”

  Titus would have believed her. I’d finally told him of Demetra’s death, and my child’s, and his sympathy had been as warm as I feared. “Gods, Vix, I’m sorry. No wonder you’ve been in such a foul mood. What about her son, the little boy?”

  “A neighboring woman took him,” I’d grunted. “Got five children of her own already.”

  “That’s good,” Titus had relaxed. “A new family for the poor little sprat, if he has to lose his mother. Gods keep her soul, she was a good woman. She’ll be glad to know her son is well looked after.”

  Would he be well looked after? I gave the woman a hard stare and saw the way her eyes shifted sideways. I wasn’t Titus, believing
the good in everyone. I’d been raised a slave—and I knew what could happen to pretty little boys in the wrong hands. It might have happened to me, if I hadn’t had kind masters. If I hadn’t had a mother to shield me.

  Demetra’s boy, growing up in this sinkhole looking like her? He’d be dancing for dirty old men and bleeding from the arse by the time he was ten years old. I remembered the bald man who had offered me oysters and then tried to bugger me; how he’d screamed when I broke his fingers and ran.

  Demetra’s little boy looked up at me for the first time, tentatively.

  He’s not yours, something in my head whispered. Not your blood, not your responsibility. My responsibility had died. I’d gotten away clean.

  The boy pointed his chubby finger at the maned pelt over my head. “Yion!” he crowed. “Yion!”

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, and grabbed him out of that dirty cow’s arms.

  “Hey!” she squawked.

  “Hands off,” I snarled. “He’s coming with me.”

  “What, you’re going to raise him? You with the legion and all?”

  No, I was not bloody well going to raise him. What did I know about raising children? I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I just wasn’t leaving him here. He was a very solid little weight in my arms, not crying at all.

  “Yion,” he said, petting the tawny pelt over my head as I carried him out of that dingy greasy room.

  “Yion,” I agreed, swinging him around so he could ride my back. He crowed with delight, clinging to the lion’s mane. “You aren’t much trouble, are you? I can pay some nice family to look after you. Drop in every few months to check in.”

  “Yion,” he shouted happily.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said again, and started up the street.

  PART III

  PARTHIA

  CHAPTER 17

  Summer A. D. 113

  TITUS

  “Ennia!” Titus looked around for his housekeeper. “Ennia, my graceful Terpsichorean nymph of the matchless gaze—”

  “Never mind the pretty words, Dominus.” His skinny black-haired freedwoman crossed her arms over her breasts. “What do you need?”

  “Dinner for six, as soon as you can see it ready. I will be in your debt forever.”

  “Six?” Her gaze went from Titus to the armored figure with the dusty cloak and dustier russet hair, looming large and out of place in the narrow entry hall. The passage of three or four years had hardly changed Vix at all: a little browner, a little tougher, a little more weathered from the sun, but the same. “There’s more of him coming?” Ennia asked unenthusiastically.

  “No, just him, but he eats enough for five.”

  “Give me an hour.” She disappeared toward the little kitchen, yelling for the slaves.

  Vix was gazing around the small atrium: blue-tiled, modestly vaulted, narrow enough to cross in a few strides. “Can’t a quaestor’s salary buy something bigger than this? I thought you had a family villa taking up half the Palatine Hill.”

  “My grandfather retired there. I could stay with him if I liked, but I’m a man grown now—I’ve got a post, I’ve got some money of my own. No excuse to be living off my family, not with my mother gone and both my sisters married with their own households. So I took my own apartments.” Not large apartments; just a bedchamber, a study, and the atrium, which doubled to hold his occasional modest dinner parties. “It’s not much,” Titus said happily.

  “Seems to suit you,” Vix approved, looking Titus up and down. “That toga fits better than armor ever did. Quaestor now, eh? I got your last letter—”

  “No more marching, no more mud,” Titus relished. “Just good clean scheming and backstabbing.”

  Vix hissed and booed. “Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those cold political lizards like Hadrian!”

  “Not yet. Then again, ‘No man ever became thoroughly bad in one step.’”

  “Hell’s gates, I’ve missed you quoting at me. Cato?”

  “Juvenal. Why did you say Cato?”

  “Because half your quotes are Cato, you sod.”

  At Titus’s direction, Vix hauled two couches in from the study, one over each shoulder, and soon they were both plunging into plates of stuffed salmon, roast pork, new bread, and ripe peaches as Ennia bustled in and out with the dishes. “What brings you to Rome, anyway?” Titus asked belatedly, after Vix had finished inhaling half a shoulder of pork. “Did I forget to ask?”

  “Quarterly legion reports for the Emperor.” Vix washed the last mouthful of pork down with a swallow of wine. “The First Spear wanted me out from underfoot. Bastard hates the sight of me.”

  “What did you do now?”

  “I’m just after his job.” Matter-of-factly.

  “Then wash your hands between each dish instead of just plunging in.” Titus raised his eyebrows as Vix tore another hunk off the loaf of bread. “Because you’ll never make First Spear without a little civilization.”

  “I’ll have to make centurion first. Next spot that opens is mine, now I’ve reached thirty.”

  “Did Simon from your old contubernium ever make centurion? He was well old enough—”

  “No, he’s out of the Tenth now—retired back in Rome, if you can believe it…”

  That led to a discussion of all the Tenth’s news: the new legate—a flogger or a layabout? Julius—was he still claiming descent from the great Caesar? Boil—had he ever found a girl who didn’t leave him for the nearest flute player or tavernkeeper?

  I miss it, Titus realized. Not the life of the army; he could do without that. But the easy companionship of the men he’d known in Dacia—in politics there was nothing like it. Everyone was far too busy looking out for his own career. To have a friend here was to have someone who might cut you out in the next appointments for praetor.

  Ennia came bustling in then, surveying the picked-over detritus of plates and bones. “You weren’t joking, Dominus,” she commented. “He does eat for five.”

  She bent a slightly more approving gaze on Vix as she cleared the table, and Vix openly admired her as she swung out, the end of her black plait switching against her waist. “You like your housekeepers pretty.”

  Titus ran a hand through his hair, self-conscious. Ennia had been a freedwoman in his grandfather’s house—black-eyed, twenty-five years old, with a thin pretty face and a tart lash of a tongue—and when Titus had left to make his own living arrangements, he’d made her a certain offer. “It won’t be a large house to manage,” he told her. “Just a few slaves, enough to handle meals and laundry for a man on his own. But you’d be in charge, not just one of the crowd of freedmen in this house.”

  “Housekeeper,” she said in her brisk way. “Bedwarmer too, Dominus?”

  “Well, if you don’t mind. It’s not a condition of the job, but you’re very pretty.” A little shyly. “And I really would rather have that side of things settled… I haven’t got a wife yet, I don’t care for brothels, and I can’t really afford courtesans.”

  “I don’t hold with orgies, and I don’t service your friends.” She gave an emphatic scowl. “What’s the pay, Dominus?”

  He named a modest but reasonable salary. She sniffed. He raised the offer. She lifted her eyebrows.

  “I’m afraid that’s all I can afford,” he said firmly. “What if I throw in two new gowns a year and a present at Saturnalia?”

  “Done.” She nodded. “I’ll stay till you marry. That should see me enough to retire on.”

  Easy as that, he had acquired a mistress. “You don’t know much about women, do you?” she’d said, and undertaken his education with the same energy she took to reorganizing his household. Both Titus and the household had been happy for the improvement.

  “I thought you’d be married by now,” Vix was saying, unconsciously echoing Ennia. “Some pretty bit of fluff should have mounted your head on her wall.”

  “I came close last year. A legate’s daughter—she had red hair.”

 
“I like a redhead,” Vix whistled.

  “I do too, but Vibia Sabina warned me off her. She said to just look at the girl’s slaves, and did I want to see the same cowed expression looking back at me from my mirror.”

  Vix paused in the act of slicing a peach in half. “You still see Sabina?”

  “When she’s in Rome.” Which hadn’t been often, since Hadrian had taken his wife with him to Pannonia. Titus cored an apple with a little silver knife, feeling a thread of mischief uncoil. “She’s back in the city now, you know.” Casually.

  “Don’t care.” Vix scrubbed peach juice off his hands onto a napkin.

  “‘It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love,’” Titus remarked to the ceiling.

  “Don’t care, Cato.”

  “Catullus. In any case, Governor Hadrian came back from Pannonia, and she’s with him.”

  “Don’t care about Hadrian either. Just glad to have him out of my legion.”

  “Mmm. You’ve heard he’s consul now?” Last week Titus had accompanied the consul and his wife to the theatre; Hadrian had spent most of the play being pestered by messengers and secretaries, and it had been Titus and Sabina who put their heads together in a happy critique of the actors and the verse. Sabina might have come back from two years in Pannonia with an armload of native bracelets and woad painted around her eyes (at least whenever the Empress was there to be shocked by it), but the old friendship Titus had enjoyed over Dacia’s fires had not altered a whit. Perhaps I’m luckier than Vix.