Empress of the Seven Hills (28 page)

Trajan is gone now, long gone, and he has a column monument on the Quirinal Hill just north of the Forum Romanum. It’s a pillar of marble decorated with friezes depicting his various campaigns, including the Dacian campaign, and at least once a week I pay it a visit. I look at the friezes and I can see that Trajan’s army advanced in three columns, driving through Dacia toward the capital city of Sarmizegetusa. It’s easy to see on the frieze, but when you’re a common soldier all you see is the road at your feet and the sweaty sunburned neck of the man marching ahead of you. The road, the sting in the air, the road, the dust in your throat, the road, the ache in the feet and the small of the back, the road—nothing but the endless road. I had to go to the maps and the friezes to find out what I hadn’t known at the time, that Trajan’s first column had followed the path of the winding rivers, going from garrison to garrison, then joined with the second column, which had marched north through the valleys. They saw fighting, I heard from
the men who marched in those columns—hard and desperate fighting from bands of Dacian warriors who harried the outskirts of the march. But I marched with the third column, under Trajan, and I don’t remember any fighting.

I remember sunny days, drying the dew an hour after dawn and sending the dust up in white clouds under our hobnailed sandals. I remember the steep-sloped mountains furred with those tangy pines, falling abruptly into flat greenlands or glacial lakes. I remember Trajan’s red cloak as he rode, not safe behind his guards at the center of the column but spurring restlessly up and down the flanks with his eyes scanning the horizon.

There were villages destroyed in our wake, usually for giving aid to the rebels, but I don’t remember putting a torch to a single roof. I remember one girl with a red scarf over her hair and the huge liquid eyes all the Dacian women seemed to have, staring at us over the backs of her sheep as we marched by. Boil fell head over heels for another Dacian girl he met at a well, and brought her along with us for a few weeks. She shared the tent at night for a while, adding odd vegetables to our flat stews and teaching Sabina a few words of her own language, but the girl left Boil and went home after a week too many of long marches, and we ribbed Boil about it until he bellowed.

I remember watching the legion’s eagle, mesmerized, as it flashed in a shaft of sunlight. It rode proudly on a tall pole, carried by the aquilifer who marched along just as proudly in a lion-skin cloak. The eagle looked so regal and defiant, carried over the fields of alien grain, that I threw back my head and gave a shout of joy, and my centurion, the bastard, caned me across the shoulders with his staff as he rode past.

I remember my
contubernium
. Philip’s brown fingers endlessly rolling his dice, Boil carving a bracelet out of silky beech wood for his Dacian girl and then hurling it sullenly into a river when she left him, Simon trying to figure out which way was Jerusalem. My brothers. Not one of them alive now but me.

I remember Titus, who shouldn’t have been part of our
contubernium
because he was an overeducated sprat whose only ambition was to get home from this campaign and never go near a legion again. But he was one of us anyway, somehow, coming every few nights to our campfire after his duties to the legate were done, folding his long limbs inside his immaculate linens, telling wry stories of the other officers, telling the same stories over and over about Trajan because we couldn’t get enough of them. I remember the face he made the first time he tasted
posca
, the sour soldiers’ wine we got in rations. “What
is
this?”

“
Posca
,” I grinned. “Made from the finest vinegar in the Empire. It doubles excellently for cleaning wounds. Drink up!”

“Pour it in your helmet first,” Simon advised, “and soak your feet in it. Nothing better after a long march. A good foot bath in
posca
will peel off all the dead blistery stuff between your toes.”

“Surely you don’t drink it after that?” Titus said, horrified.

“You can strain it first if you’re fussy,” Boil allowed, and we all fell over howling as Titus poured his cup out into the earth.

I remember the first time I saw Hadrian dirty himself. The column had paused at the banks of a swollen river, and the surveyors were fussing with their maps about a ford that should have been there and wasn’t. I sat down in the road, easing my pack off with a groan and stretching my weary feet in their sandals, and most of the other legionaries did the same, but the tribunes cantered their horses into a nearby meadow, shouting and playing foolish games. One of them flushed a deer from the trees, a stag with antlers like a crown. Hadrian had been sitting his horse some distance apart, a smirk on that bearded face as he watched the antics, but as he saw the deer the smirk vanished. Taut concentration replaced it, and he snatched a javelin from the nearest legionary. In a heartbeat he’d spurred his horse beside the fleeing stag, and in another heartbeat he’d brought it down in one beautifully placed stroke to the heart. A dark jet of blood spurted over his foot, but he only blinked slowly, as if the kill had brought him down to earth from someplace distant—and then he smiled. “He loves hunting,” Sabina told me later. “Deer, boar, anything he can chase down on foot or horseback.
Strange, isn’t it? You wouldn’t take him for a hunter at all, since he loves animals and hates getting dirty.”

“He doesn’t love hunting at all,” I said. “He loves killing.” That’s another image that wakes me sometimes in the night: Hadrian with his javelin, smiling at the spray of blood on his foot. The blood was dark, but in my dreams it glows scarlet.

I remember Sabina.

Her fine hair in a braid that was always coming undone. Her fingers ruthlessly rubbing and yanking and kneading my feet after a twenty-mile march until all my muscles were jelly. Her endlessly repeated “That’s interesting” when Philip showed her how to palm dice, when Simon taught her the Hebrew prayer for bread, when Boil demonstrated how to scrub rust off a breastplate. Her short nose at first getting brown under the sun, and then getting freckled. I don’t know if she bribed her maid and her guards or just swore them to secrecy, but she spent her days marching in the hot sun beside the wagon that was supposed to carry her in isolated comfort, and more than half her nights in my tent, where my friends didn’t even realize she was their legate’s wife. Once a week she put on silk and ate dinner with the Emperor, and she looked elegant enough to put on a temple plinth and sacrifice goats to—but the rest of the time in her wool dress and sturdy sandals she could have been any other muddy capable woman who followed her man to the legions. I’d heard stories of goddesses who walked the earth in disguise, and no one knew them for who they were either. Maybe my girl had a little goddess in her.

I remember laughing at her. At the face she made when she first tasted barley soup boiled over a cook-fire in a helmet; at the time she performed a flawless set of legion parade maneuvers around the empty tent wearing nothing but that same helmet and a very serious expression. I remember admiring her too—for the uncomplaining way she bound up her blistered feet until they toughened to the marching; for all the times she loaded up her luxurious wagon with camp followers and their children so they could cross a ford in safety instead of struggling against the currents; for the fight she picked with the Tenth’s
senior medicus. The legion’s doctors didn’t like treating the legionary women or their children—“They aren’t supposed to be here anyway; we’re not wasting medical supplies on them!” Sabina reduced the senior medicus to a quivering heap and reported him to Hadrian for a flogging. After that, the legion women and their children got treated for fevers and broken bones just like the soldiers.

I remember making love to Sabina under the blankets of my bedroll in the darkness of the tent, trying to keep quiet, not always succeeding. Philip once threatened to throw a bucket of water over the pair of us so he could get some sleep. “Go fuck a horse,” Sabina advised him politely through the dark, and I laughed at that too, so hard I nearly died.

I remember Titus reminding me disapprovingly of Demetra, waiting for me back in Mog. “She’ll be getting big by now with
your
child,” he said in an icy voice, “and you didn’t wait even one day to replace her. Do you ever give her a single thought?”

“No,” I said honestly. “And don’t you dare tell Sabina about her either.” I tried to imagine Demetra, perhaps getting rounded in the belly by now as she kneaded never-ending lumps of bread dough and played with her little boy. Demetra with her queenly height and mass of honey-colored hair, so much more beautiful than Sabina with her slight body and little freckled face. I thought of Sabina, thoughtfully sounding out a new word of the strange Dacian language or reviling the
optio
in rough legionary slang, and I realized how much my beautiful, dutiful Demetra had bored me.

Who had time for guilt? It was summer; I had an emperor to serve and an enemy to kill; I had a long road to tire me by day and a lithe girl to tire me by night. That’s what I remember from those months of the Dacian march, not the broader strokes of policy and strategy. You want a campaign history? Go to Trajan’s column on the Quirinal Hill and read the goddamned friezes, frozen and colorless. The friezes might give you the facts, but they won’t show you how splendid Trajan was, how restless and godlike as he marched on foot beside his cheering men. The friezes won’t tell you the details, the little things that still
wake up an old soldier like me in the middle of the night and make him realize that it was the best part of his life.

It was late summer before we reached Sarmizegetusa. That, unfortunately, is where my memory gets very clear.

PLOTINA

A letter from Dear Publius!

Plotina ran her fingers along the raised imprint of the boy’s personal seal. His letters were far more infrequent than her own weekly missives, and of course they had to be. The distance was so great, the roads so unreliable, and after all he was a man of importance now with numberless duties to fill his time. Even the most devoted of sons must choose duty over their mothers.
Never let it be said that Pompeia Plotina was a clinging mother.
But he still found time to write, and in his own hand too. He knew what satisfaction it gave her to see his firm, perfect script. She had taught him that script herself, guiding his plump boyish fingers on the stylus. “Come along, girls,” she called to her household, who looked up surprised to see their Empress so cheerful. “With such a beautiful day, we will take our work outside.”

It wasn’t such a beautiful day, really—autumn in Rome, blustery and gray. And the gardens were not at their best, the lilies looking a trifle draggled and the roses in the brown and clothy stage. She would have to speak to the gardeners about that. But later. Plotina swept her dark-purple silks over the dry grass, choosing a little grotto where a marble bench invited the viewer to sit for a moment beside a softly trickling fountain, and gazed over the vista of the Imperial gardens dropping below. Her women settled gamely around her—slaves with baskets of sewing, freedwomen with her correspondence, little girls waiting to run her errands. “Silence, if you please,” Plotina called, and was pleased to see that they had already settled to their work in utter quiet. She had them well trained, but slaves, like dogs, needed constant reinforcement.
Without her sharp eye, they would dawdle and gossip over their sewing like hens scratching in the dirt. One last glance over her obedient household, and Plotina settled on her bench and opened the letter.

Yes, the dear boy was well. Working very hard, of course—he was too modest to say as much, but she knew the legion must be thriving under his leadership. Trajan, disappointingly, was still proving cool.

I can see you frown from clear across the Empire
, Dear Publius wrote,
but I’m afraid I have been reduced to getting drunk with the Emperor and his officers in the evenings. You will disapprove, and certainly I have no love for unmixed wine and war stories, but it appears the only way to converse with Trajan in ease.

Plotina did frown, but not at her Dear Publius. Trajan, such a far-sighted man in so many ways, but so blind about his own family. And still getting drunk and swapping dirty jokes with his men, as if he were a boy! Thank the gods Hadrian had gotten over
that
stage at a suitable age.

Your Imperial husband works hard
, Hadrian continued,
and is to be emulated in all things. No detail of the march escapes him, but he still makes time to consider matters in Rome. You know how enthusiastically he took up that
alimenta
scheme proposed by Vibia Sabina.

Another frown. Plotina still could not believe that Sabina had taken herself along on the Dacian campaign. A Roman woman, marching with an army? What notions had gotten into the girl’s empty head, to give her such an idea? Dear Publius had not been pleased, though of course he was too charitable to criticize. Plotina did it for him, in her own letters.
She
understood.

“Daughters-in-law,” she said to the plump Ethiopian woman whom she trusted with the Imperial household’s fine sewing. “So troublesome, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, Domina,” the woman said without looking up from her needle. The Empress, they all knew by now, did not encourage response from her slaves even when she addressed them directly. Plotina nodded approval, tugging her dark-purple
palla
closer about herself against the brisk autumn breeze.

Speaking of the
alimenta
scheme, Sabina wishes to make a contribution to help launch the program.

The idea, Plotina supposed grudgingly, had merit. Imperial funds offering yearly living allowances for orphaned freeborn children—all well and good. But it had hardly been little Sabina’s idea! Dear Publius had suggested a similar scheme to Trajan not two years ago, and been brushed off. Of course if it was
Sabina’s
idea, her husband couldn’t wait to endorse it. Anything for his little pet!