Empress of the Seven Hills (21 page)

Not that he was still in love with her. If anything, he knew her far better than he had when he’d fallen head over heels at sixteen for a blue-eyed girl who’d been kind enough not to sneer at his very first attempt at a marriage proposal. She’d become someone to borrow books from; someone to take to the Campus Martius on the mornings her husband was busy; someone to share a couch with at dinner parties. Someone to make him secretly proud, when she glided along on
his
arm at the occasional social function. Somehow the other girls his grandfather kept trotting out as prospective wives looked flat, pallid, and passionless compared to Sabina.

No, he wasn’t in love with her. But until he found a girl just as captivating, why settle?

“So you’ve got a girl in Rome,” Vix was saying, oblivious. “Who cares? Have a girl here too. It’s not like they’re ever going to
meet
.”

“I won’t dignify that by arguing.” Titus felt a warm weight against his side, and looked down at the brown-eyed little boy with his curly hair. The child had retreated warily when Titus first entered, taking his carved wooden horse and edging back into a corner to watch, but now he blinked shyly up at his mother’s guest. “We were weeks on the road,” Titus accused Vix, “out to the edge of the Empire and back, saving each other’s lives—and you never told me you had a son! He’s what, two years old?”

“Oh, he’s not mine.” Vix mopped out his bowl with a scrap of bread. “His father was a clerk the legate brought over from Bithynia a few years back. The clerk brought Demetra and the boy with him from his village, but he died the first winter and left ’em alone. German winters aren’t for everyone.” Vix punched Titus’s arm, jostling the stew in his bowl. “Try not to cry when you get your first chilblains.”

“I’ll do my best.” Titus ruffled the little boy’s curls, the same dark-honey color of his mother’s. “Good of you to look after him, with no father in the world.”

“He’s not much trouble.”

“He shouldn’t be bothering you!” Demetra swooped down and bore her handsome son away, scolding in soft Greek.

“So what else did the legate say when you made your report?” Vix reached for the clay jug on the table. “They’ll mobilize the Tenth for sure; we’re the best legion outside Gaul, and closer too.” He still had mud on his boots from the endless riding of the past weeks, but he looked ready to throw his cloak over his shoulder and march for Dacia on the spot. “How long till we march, you think? Two weeks, maybe three—”

“More like three months,” Titus said, and sipped from his cup. Cold local mead rather than wine; rotgut stuff, but he’d have choked it down if it had been vinegar. He hadn’t felt so warm and welcomed since—well, since he’d come to Germania.

Vix sputtered. “Three
months
?”

“At least. I sit at the Senate a great deal—just listening at the back during public sessions when my grandfather speaks—and I hear a great many wranglings about the disposition of the legions.” Titus picked at the mud flaking off his tunic. “It will take time to mobilize everything, send for reinforcements, call in additional legions. At least three months, and more like four.”

“Mobilize?” Demetra said behind them, her brown eyes wide. “The Tenth, you mean—it’s going east, sir? To fight?”

“Nothing’s certain yet,” Titus reassured her.

“There had better be a fight this time,” Vix snorted. “Five years in the legions, and I haven’t had a single good battle! That first go-round Trajan had at the Dacians, when I was just out of training? The Dacians ran before the fight even started, damn them. How am I supposed to get a battlefield promotion to centurion when the buggers settle everything by treaty?”

“Why on earth would anyone want to be a centurion?” Titus asked. “Haven’t you seen how hard they have to work?”

“I want all of it,” Vix said unhesitatingly. “The work, the rank, the battles; campaign tokens, looted gold, and a triumph in Rome.”

“How grand,” said Titus, amused. “For myself, I’m just hoping to make it through my tribune posting without anyone else trying to kill me. After that a quiet post looking after census records or inspecting the occasional aqueduct.” With a quiet house in a garden, sturdy handsome children like Demetra’s boy, and a wife who wasn’t Sabina. Hard to fit Sabina into
any
fantasy of domestic bliss. Even in her own immaculate house in Rome, she’d never looked like a contented Roman matron. More like a cheerful but untidy guest who might float out the door at any moment and depart for the ends of the earth.

Well, no use musing.

“You might get that promotion to centurion,” Titus said. “Somehow I don’t think this go-round with the Dacians is going to end in a treaty. A few months before we move out, maybe, but—”

Demetra burst suddenly into tears, scooping up her son and running from the room.

Titus half rose as the door banged behind her. “What did I say?”

“Who knows? She cries when anyone talks about war. She cries whenever she thinks about me leaving. She cries when her bread doesn’t rise.” Vix mopped up the last of his stew, unconcerned. “She cries a lot.”

“Shouldn’t you go after her?”

“Why? Better to let her sob it off. I usually go sleep somewhere else for the night. There’s a redhead I like on the street behind the big theatre…”

SABINA

Two luxurious wagons had been provided for the wives of the officers traveling north—covered, cushioned, padded, and shuttered for maximum comfort. Within four days Sabina had the first wagon to herself and all the other wives found excuses to ride in the second.

“What on earth did you do to them?” Hadrian ducked his head as he entered.

“Left the shutters open so I could see out.” Sabina looked up from the nest she had made for herself: a cushion for her back, a fur over her knees, a dog at her feet, and a scroll in her lap. “Enjoying the fresh air is apparently a criminal offense. I might also have told a few stories about cannibal German tribesmen who burned women alive in wicker cages.”

“Did you have to do that?” Hadrian said mildly.

“After four days of listening to their complaints about disobedient children and thieving slaves? Never mind the German cannibals,
I
wanted to burn those wretched women alive in wicker cages.”

Hadrian gave his faint flick of a smile, stripping off his gloves and giving them to the dog to chew. He already wore his legate’s cloak and breastplate, and very handsome he looked in it too. “How’s my old lady here doing?” he asked, reaching down to stroke the gray-muzzled hound curled in the furs at Sabina’s feet. “She gets stiff in this cold—”

“Don’t worry, I’m taking good care of your favorite girl.” Hadrian had no great interest in the comforts of his slaves, but nothing was too much
for his dogs. He’d brought the whole pack with him to Germania, insisting there would be good hunting outside Moguntiacum, and they loped grinning and happy behind his big horse—all but the graying bitch who he insisted was too old to run the whole journey, and consequently rode in luxury with Sabina.
Most men would have had her knocked on the head as soon as she couldn’t hunt
, Sabina thought. But Hadrian stood tweaking fondly at the old dog’s ears as her tail thumped the furs, and every evening he brought her the choice bones from the evening’s meat. “I promise I’m looking after her,” Sabina reassured her husband. “Do you want breakfast? Looks like we’ve got a halt before the next river crossing.”

Outside the wagon, Sabina heard the cheerful bustle of their journeying party: the ox drovers swearing at their beasts; the young tribunes boasting and spurring their horses back and forth; the slaves dashing in search of food, cloaks, anything to keep their masters comfortable. The sky was gray and the road puddled, but their party of northbound officers, officials, and soldiers was cheerful and noisy. “Bread, honey, and grapes,” Sabina said as the slave entered and began laying the cups and plates. “Your usual.”

Hadrian’s breakfast had to be arranged just so—new-baked bread, the crust not too dark; grapes in a cluster (never a bowl); and just a thimble of honey. Exactly the same whether he was breakfasting at home in their house on the Palatine Hill, here on the road halfway between Rome and Moguntiacum, or anywhere in between. On the day he landed in Hades, Sabina thought with amusement, her husband would demand that Charon the Ferryman bring him his bread, his grapes, and his honey. Half the baggage on this lengthy northbound train of wagons and mules was Hadrian’s: the books he could not do without, the slaves essential for his comfort, the dogs and horses and bits of Greek sculpture… “And they say women pack too much!” Sabina teased him. “I was ready to leave with a trunk of clothes and a few books!”

“I may wish to see the world,” Hadrian said primly, “but not without my library.”

At least we
are
seeing the world now
, Sabina thought. With every slow,
ponderous creak of the wagon’s wheels, they were retreating farther and farther from Rome, from duty, from Plotina’s lecturing. Sabina had spent hours hanging out the window of the wagon, chilled to the bone but too fascinated to close the shutters, watching as tilled green fields and tidy vineyards slowly gave way to craggier rocks, deeper pines, darker shadows. Hadrian said they had passed into Raetia now, perhaps halfway to Moguntiacum and the legion that awaited him. Germania. What would it hold?

Hadrian made a face at the cup Sabina passed him as he settled on the bench opposite her. “What
is
this?”

“The local mead. I like it.”

He passed the cup back. “I’ll stick to Roman wine, thank you.”

Sabina took another swallow, unrolling a new section of her scroll. “Lucius Nystericus didn’t like the mead either, according to this.”

“Who’s Lucius Nystericus?” Hadrian sat reading through the correspondence that had already followed them from Rome. They hadn’t been two days on the road before messengers on lathered horses began appearing with letter cases.

“Lucius Nystericus was a legate who served here under Augustus. I found a copy of his diaries; thought it might have something useful on the region.”

“Anything interesting?” Hadrian reached out absently, scratching the dog’s belly as she rolled on her back.

“‘The natives are surly,’” Sabina read in a pompous bass. “‘But ferocious fighters.’”

“They do look surly. I noticed as soon as we crossed the mountains.” Hadrian’s hand on the dog’s belly slowed; she nosed him until he began to stroke again. “Let’s hope they’re not still ferocious. Leave the book out for me, will you?”

“Of course.” Sabina curled her feet up onto the bench, tucking the fur lap robes in closer. “Any letters in that pile of correspondence for me?”

“From the Empress—”

Sabina took the scroll with Plotina’s seal and tossed it out the window unopened. “Anything else?”

He slanted a disapproving brow but let it go. “A letter from your little sister, judging by the straggly handwriting. Perhaps I can leave you to it? The dogs flushed a stag in the woods earlier; magnificent rack of antlers, and since we’re paused for another hour—”

“Go hunt.” She waved him on. He dropped a perfunctory kiss on her cheek, and she felt the scrape of bristle. “You’re growing your beard again?” So many senators had mocked him in Rome that he’d finally shaved it. He’d been out of temper about that for a full week.

Hadrian passed a hand over the stubble. “I think it will pass in the provinces.”

“A beard suits you. Very philosophical.” And it hid the acne scars he’d acquired as a boy—the real reason he’d grown a beard in the first place.
You’re vainer than I am, husband.

He smiled, touched her hair in passing, and looked down at the dog. “What do you say, old lady? Can you manage a short sprint after a stag?”

The dog uncurled with a happy pant and trotted after him as he ducked out. Sabina waved after them, then finished her mead and handed the cup to a page hovering outside the wagon. A beautiful page; dark-haired and long-limbed and well-muscled; an Antiochene youth of perhaps twenty. Hadrian had not taken as many slaves on this journey as dogs, but somehow all the slaves he’d brought were male and beautiful.

“Domina, will you be wanting to visit the other ladies while the wagons are halted?”

“Gods, no,” Sabina said, going back to her book. The long-dead legate Lucius Nystericus had abandoned his complaining about the natives and was now reminiscing about his days stationed in Greece.

Maybe we should go back to Athens soon.
Hadrian would like that—he was already complaining about the air here in the north, so damp and heavy on the lungs. Very far from Greece’s violent white light and equally violent purple shades. But Sabina thought she might get to like the mists here, the deep stands of trees and the short days with their
mole-dark shadows.
Things to be learned here, and work to be done
, she thought, and tossed aside the useless scroll with its prim views on native mead and native women.
No matter what Lucius Nystericus says.

VIX

Moguntiacum was a different place with three and a half legions in it. Normally it was quiet enough—native women and children bustling through the markets in the daytime hours, taverns and brothels coming alive at night when the legionaries came off duty. Besides drinking and whoring there was a bridge over the Rhine, though what there was to do over the Rhine I didn’t know, and there was a shrine to some long-dead Roman prince that drew worshippers from all over Germania, and there was a playhouse that Demetra told me proudly was the largest north of the mountains. I told her I’d seen theatres three times as big in Rome, but she didn’t believe me. I’m not even sure she entirely believed in Rome. To Demetra, Rome was Elysium—it might exist somewhere, glittering and beautiful, but it had nothing to do with her.

Now, though, Mog wasn’t nearly so sleepy. It was full, crammed, bursting with soldiers. That bloody Dacian king was in full rebellion, and the Emperor had brought in more legions to deal with him properly.

“Three months,” Titus had said, and he’d been right after all—we were all the way through winter and into spring now with no sign of marching yet. Nor were the legions done pouring in—the Second Adiutrix had come first, swaggering and boasting that they’d take care of the king of Dacia without needing to stir us from our cozy fort; then the Fourth Flavia Felix came, swaggering and boasting of their lucky reputations without which nothing could be won, and just last week a division of the Sixth Ferrata had come as well, swaggering and boasting of their feats along the Rhine; and now there weren’t enough women to go around in Mog, and the girls who looked like my Demetra had to be careful when they went out.