Empress of the Seven Hills (40 page)

I hadn’t exactly missed Rome during my ten years in Germania, but now I took a deep hungry whiff of city air. “Hello, you old bitch.” I
smelled pitch and ale and spiced meat, unwashed bodies and perfume and
life
.

“What’s that smell?” said the courier.

“She does stink, doesn’t she?” I said, cheerful. “Nowhere like it. I love this city.”

“Too hot,” the courier complained, and soon tramped off to find himself an inn. “Coming?” he called over his shoulder.

“No, I’ve got a call to pay.”

An old freedwoman in a headscarf answered my knock at her door, looking me dubiously up and down. “Yes, sir?”

I doffed my helmet, introducing myself, and halfway through my explanation her walnut face split in a semitoothless smile. “Of course, of course!” Ushering me into a tiled entry hall. “He’s been expecting you, just wait here—”

I didn’t have to wait long. “Hell’s gates,” I sputtered, fighting off a bear hug. “What happened to you, Simon?” I cast an eye over my former brother-in-arms, the first man to leave my old
contubernium
in retirement. Simon had grown a full curly beard, his hair was halfway to gray and covered with a cap, and he wore a tasseled cloak in the eastern fashion instead of the breastplate that had so long been a second skin on him. “Where’s the man who taught me to spar with my right hand?”

“Gone forever, and good riddance to him.” Simon dragged me out of the entry hall and into the house. I had a pleasant impression of a sunny open-roofed atrium, no different from any other Roman house, with orange trees in small tubs and broad carved doors leading to other airy rooms. People instantly began flooding through those doors, staring at me curiously.

“Didn’t think I’d see you so soon.” Simon thumped me on the shoulder, still grinning. “You must have just arrived!”

“Boil and Julius and Philip would eat me alive if I let another night pass without checking in on you.” I cast a glance around the growing crowd of people, seeing variations of Simon’s bearded face and dark eyes. “This is all your family?”

“Every one! This is my niece Mirah, that’s her brother Benjamin—” A pretty freckled girl came forward with a little black-haired boy, who Simon promptly tossed in the air. He patted the freckled girl’s cheek, saying something in Hebrew, and then switched back to Latin. “And my brother Isaac, his wife Hadassah, my cousins—” More names, more welcoming faces and words of greeting. I felt oddly wistful as I nodded to one friendly face after another. I wondered what my own sisters looked like: the one I’d seen only as a baby and the other one I’d never seen at all. I wondered if my father’s hair had gone entirely gray yet, or if my brother had grown up looking like me. I sent letters out to my family whenever there was a messenger going to Britannia, and even more rarely I got a crumpled letter back in my mother’s oddly elegant writing: Last I’d heard, life was still serene on their mountaintop, my father busy torturing his garden and teaching my brother how to spar, my sisters lengthening into coltish half-grown girls. Who knew when I’d see any of them again? There was more than a decade left on my term of service. By then, my mother might not be alive to welcome me home with kisses.

“Vercingetorix,” an older woman greeted me. “My Simon tells me much about you. You must join us tonight for Shabbat, of course. Simon says you are a Jew as well?” Her eyes lingered on the tattoo on my arm, a crude eagle with wings spread and beak open in a cry of triumph. I’d had her inked into my flesh after the Dacian triumph.

“My mother is a Jew,” I confessed, aware that a number of cousins and uncles were listening.

“Then so are you,” she said firmly, and that was that.

I think I expected something exotic from a Jewish household. Several legionaries I knew in the Tenth had served in Judaea, and they did a good deal of dark muttering about that hot place with its hot-tempered people—though I discounted the wilder rumors like the one that Jews cut the pricks off their baby boys as soon as they were born. Still, I’d expected something different, something eastern and exotic. But Simon’s family, once you got used to the sheer number of them,
seemed much like any other Roman family I’d dined with over the years. The house was the same, built around the hollow square of the atrium; the airy triclinium was the same with its stylized friezes of grapes and urns about the walls; the freedmen servants who took my cloak were the same. Perhaps more of the men were bearded, and the women tended to cover their hair with bright scarves, but otherwise they looked no different from any prosperous Roman family.

Still, I couldn’t help but see a division. I was shown to a place of honor at the table, but the various wizened aunts and grandmothers regarded me as if I’d come from another species, and the children stared like my head was sprouting antlers. A squirming little boy pointed at me and was quickly hushed by the pretty girl Simon had introduced as his niece. Her eyes met mine but dropped at once like any good girl’s. I hadn’t had much dealing with good girls in the past years, just the cheerful rough-voiced legion wives and the friendly German whores whose time I bought in Mog.

The couches were drawn up in an arch as at any common dinner party, though there were places for the children, which wouldn’t have happened in most Roman homes. Servants came around the couches with wine and platters of food; I started to reach for the bread, but Simon nudged me and I realized his mother was intoning some prayer in Hebrew and doing something ceremonial with candles. I bowed my head hastily, but the prayer was short.

There was fish, there was roast lamb, there was more wine. More prayers were uttered at intervals, and I half recognized the Hebrew words. For my sake the family spoke in Latin—and as the wine kept circulating, several of the younger nephews spoke more heatedly about Judaea and how she had been wronged by Rome. I wondered if Rome was so terrible, then why were they living here in such comfort, but Simon was nodding along with them and looking a bit more like the fierce fighter who’d been such a rock at my right side during drills.

The conversation turned to the possible rebuilding of Jerusalem, and I dipped a toe in the water. “You might get your chance,” I addressed
one of the bearded young nephews. “The Emperor will be taking himself to Parthia soon, so I doubt he’ll be much concerned with what anyone does in Judaea.”

“Oh?” The nephew looked pointedly at the eagle on my arm. “What has Parthia ever done to the Emperor, that it deserves invading?”

I couldn’t speak for Trajan, but I wanted to invade Parthia because I was bored. This didn’t seem the place to say so, however. I took another bite of roast lamb rather than answer.

“So now it’s Parthia that gets to fight off Rome.” One of the other nephews sloshed more wine into his cup, despite a quelling look from his mother. Apparently even good Jewish boys got drunk at the table and disappointed their mothers. “They’ll find out what that means. Masada, that’s what it means.”

I picked my head up sharply. Masada was a name I knew, and very well. There were sighs about the couches; Simon looked heavy and his pretty freckled niece made a gesture that reminded me sharply of my mother: a gesture to ward off sorrow.

“Masada was a tragedy,” Simon’s brother said ponderously from his position at the head of the table. “It is not to be mentioned at Shabbat.”

“It wasn’t just a tragedy,” I said.

They all looked at me. I took another bite of lamb, defiant.

“An entire city dead because of Rome.” The black-bearded nephew looked at me coldly. “Dead down to the last child. That isn’t a tragedy?”

“Not
just
a tragedy. It was a triumph too.”

“What would you know about it?”

“My mother was there.”

Silence spread out. I looked up from my lamb, around the frozen couches. “What?”

“No one survived,” Simon said finally. “No one. It’s known.”

“My mother survived.”

The silence deepened, and again I felt the line that separated me from them. Even the servant girls seemed frozen in place with their decanters and platters.

No one said a word, but their eyes never faltered. I pushed my platter away, leaning back on one elbow. I’d heard the story only once, when I was ten years old or so. My mother hadn’t told me, but I’d been playing behind the table where she sat talking softly with a friend. I remembered her words.

“Masada—it was strong. Stuffed full of Jewish rebels, of food and water. It held out a long time, sieged by Roman legions. The Romans couldn’t starve them out, so they built a great ramp up to the gates, and a siege tower. They used Jewish slaves to do it, so the rebels couldn’t throw down pitch and stones to kill them.”

Simon’s niece rose abruptly, picking up the little boy on her couch and putting him over one hip, beckoning to the other children. They trailed out and I paused for a moment. She returned and sank back down onto the couch. “Mirah,” her mother began. “This isn’t fit for your ears either—” But the girl darted her fierce eyes around the couches and looked back to me. I found my voice again. It came out very flat and tight.

“The Romans were celebrating below. They’d take the city in the morning, and they’d burn it, and they’d take all the rebels back to Rome in chains. To be sold for slaves.”

The black-bearded nephew spat.

“Inside Masada, the Jews met. All of them, men and women. My mother wasn’t there; she was only six years old. But she figured it out later, from what happened. Her father came home, and he talked for a long time with her mother in the bedroom. He came out, looking very white. There was a body behind him on the floor—”

My grandmother. I’d never thought of that before, somehow.

“He was crying. He told my mother and her sister to come to him like good girls, and my mother saw the knife in his hand and ran. Not before she saw her sister go to him—he couldn’t do it, so her sister took the knife and stabbed herself. She was fourteen.”

She’d have been my aunt, if she’d lived. Across the couches, the girl
named Mirah put a hand to her mouth. She was surely only a few years older than that dead girl had been.

“My mother ran to the next house,” I continued thickly. “But it was the same. In all the houses. By agreement—they all agreed, the men and the women—the fathers came home and destroyed anything they had of value… and killed their families. After that was done, the men met in the square, and drew lots. Ten men were chosen to kill the rest. They drew lots again, and one man killed the other nine. Then himself. So when the Romans came in, there weren’t any homes to plunder or any women to rape or any rebels to chain up and parade back to Rome. There was only a dead city, still full of food. The Jews left that, to prove they didn’t kill themselves out of starvation.” I looked around the couches. “They killed themselves out of defiance.”

“We hold suicide a sin,” the black-bearded nephew said. But the anger had leaked out of his voice.

“Which is why they drew lots for the killing,” I answered. “So only one man would have to kill himself.” Though I wondered how many had had to stab themselves, like my young aunt, when their fathers couldn’t do it. I imagined putting a sword to the throat of Demetra’s little son, his face turned up eagerly to mine, and I shuddered.

“It was still a sin,” the nephew said stubbornly. “They should have lived.”

“To be slaves?” I looked at him until he looked away. “My mother was a slave. Her and a handful of other children who somehow escaped. They all died young except her, and there were plenty of times afterward she wished she
had
died.” I looked around the table. “I was a slave too. It’s no life.”

Another silence. Beside me I could feel Simon’s tense body. I felt sorry for ruining his dinner. I never got anything right.

“Perhaps we’ve talked enough of this,” his mother said brightly. “It’s Shabbat.”

“We
should
talk of this because it’s Shabbat.” The freckled girl
named Mirah spoke up from the couch across from mine. Her voice was low and strong, though I could see tears in her eyes. “He’s right. Masada was a triumph.”

“Not exactly…”

“They died as they wanted, and Rome got no victory. Isn’t that a triumph?” Mirah looked at me. “What happened to your mother?”

“She won her freedom,” I said slowly, picking my words. “She’s on a mountaintop now, with my father, and more children besides me. She lives.”

“Then Masada lives too.” Mirah lifted her goblet, and I lifted mine. There was a moment of silence, and then Simon lifted his cup and said something in Hebrew. The words sounded harsh, but I looked over at him and saw his eyes glittering like brands.

Shabbat was over, but Simon’s family lingered afterward—and they lingered around me. Old women clutched my arm; the firebrand nephews pressed for more details of the Jewish defense; even Simon’s stern patriarchal brother gave my shoulder a squeeze. Simon’s mother had tears in her eyes as she invited me to join the family next week when they left for their villa outside Rome. No more of that polite space separating
me
from
them
.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered to Simon when I got a private moment. “Didn’t mean to spoil your Shabbat.”

“No,” he said fiercely. “You spoke well. Over ten years I’ve known you, Vix—I’ve never known any of that.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It was yesterday.”

My brows flew up at the heat in his voice.

“If Rome did that to your family,” my friend demanded passionately, “why in God’s name do you fight for Rome?”

“I’m no good for anything but fighting,” I said, uncomfortable. “For a man like me, it’s either the legions or the arena. And I’ll never be a gladiator again.”

Simon gazed into the dark atrium, and I didn’t think he was seeing
the orange trees. “Those poor bastards.” His voice was proud and savage. “They left the world on their own terms, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“What more can any of us want than that?”

I looked around the dark atrium, lit with warm yellow light from the lamps and sweetly scented from the potted orange trees. It seemed to me there was a lot more to want from life than
that
, but I knew better than to argue with Simon in these moods. I thought of going back to Mog, living in my barracks that smelled like sweaty leather and waiting for the Parthian invasion to happen, and felt tired.