Empress of the Seven Hills (51 page)

Boil made me sleep sometimes. I tumbled down on the ground in
my cloak and slept till I could rise and start digging again. My hands were two bloody slabs of meat. “We won’t find her, Centurion,” a big African who was one of my best fighters told me, and I ignored him.

On the morning of the third day, Boil found a foot.

A small high-arched foot and a trim ankle, peeking out from a heap of stones and fallen beams.

A lean Spaniard I’d had to flog last month for insubordination put a hand on my shoulder. I shook it off and fell on the pile of ruins, clawing the stones away. Two splinters ran under my thumbnail clear up to the knuckle, but the pain was distant.

Boil and the massive African grunted to shift a fallen beam, while I uncovered my wife’s little foot, then a shin gray with dust, a leg with a tattered woolen hem lying limp over the knee…

A voice sounded somewhere from the heap of fallen beams, weak but still waspish. “Took you long enough, husband.”

The wall had fallen, but the brick oven hadn’t. Mirah had grabbed up little Dinah and huddled against the oven, and then the roof had come down. The falling beams should have crushed them both, but two had fallen at an angle over the stove. A rain of stones had trapped Mirah’s ankle, but the beams and the oven had given her a tiny pocket of protected space. My men were cursing, yelling, straining to shift one of the beams, while I peered down through the gap I’d made in the stones. I could just see a strip of my wife’s hair, a section of bruised forehead.

“You’re hurt.” My heart knocked like a drum in my chest as I saw the blood. She had a broad smear of it across her cheek, dried dark brown.

“No,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That’s birth blood.”

“What?”

“I had a good knock from those beams. The baby started coming before the stones even settled.” Her head moved, and I saw my wife’s
eye glaring up at me through the gap. “You swore this one would be born in a house. I didn’t think I had to mention that the house should still be
standing
.”

“
Move faster!
” I screamed at my men.

“We’re fine, all three of us.” Mirah’s voice was tremulous, but it was also, God help me, cheerful. “I helped the midwife when my cousins had babies, so I knew how to tie off the cord…”

“Move! Move!”

A creaking squeal of timber, and the beam slid to one side. I jumped down where its end had rested, reached into the gap in a tumble of sliding shale, and lifted out my wife: filthy, bloody, tired, and smiling.

“Water,” she rasped, and then I crushed her against me. My heart was still hammering, and I still heard the screams in my head that had begun when I found her foot in the rubble. Then I realized the screams were real, and coming in angry wails from the pair of bundles in Mirah’s arms. One was Dinah, her swatch of black hair just visible over the shawl Mirah had wrapped her in. The other—

“We have another daughter.” Mirah gave me a screaming little bundle of limbs still covered in dried birth blood and inadequately swaddled in her mother’s blue shawl. “Thank God she came easy.”

I could hear my men whispering. “That’s a good omen, that is,” the Spaniard was nodding. “Born in blood and ruins, but still kicking. Just like us.” Boil shouted for someone to bring food, water, and bandages for the ankle Mirah held gingerly off the ground, and Antinous was off running before any of the men could jump to it. All I could do was hold her and tremble.

“I promised you’d have a midwife,” I told Mirah numbly. “I promised you’d have a bed—and proper food—”

“Well, there was food of a sort.” Mirah looked down at her round breasts. “My milk came in as soon as she was born, and then I could nurse them both.” She lowered her voice. “I even squeezed some out to drink myself. Two days without water, well, you do what you can. I
thought we could name her Chaya? It just means
alive
.” Mirah’s chin quivered for just an instant. “She could have died.”

“You all could have died,” I said, and felt tears sliding down my face. My wife, who had just been dug out of her own grave with a crying baby in each arm, ended up being the one to comfort me.

TITUS

Titus was just passing the long pool in the gardens of Senator Norbanus’s house when a wave rose up from the surface out of nowhere and splashed his sandals. He stopped, looking back at the water, but the surface sparkled innocently. He turned toward the house again, and another wave came up and wetted the hem of his toga. This time he heard a giggle.

“I thought I’d offended the fountain’s water nymph,” he said aloud. “But I’m fairly certain nymphs don’t giggle.”

“I think they do.” Faustina’s sleek blond head rose over the pool’s marble edge at his feet, and she grinned up at him. “Nymphs are very silly. All they ever do in myths is run around drinking with satyrs and periodically get turned into trees.”

“A fair point. Isn’t it a little cold for swimming?” Spring had arrived, but the sunlight was still thin on the new grass. “Nymphs can’t catch cold, but I believe senators’ daughters can.”

“I like it. The cold water’s like getting hit by lightning—afterward I get warm and sleepy and doze all afternoon.” Faustina cocked her head up at him. “You look very serious and official.”

“I’m afraid I’m in a very serious, official mood right now. Is your father inside?”

“Yes, but my mother will murder you if you disturb him. He isn’t feeling well, and she’s trying to get him to rest.”

Titus bit back a curse. Several days of pondering and wondering
before he’d decided to consult Senator Norbanus, and now he’d have to come back later.

“Is it important?” Faustina folded her wet arms along the pool’s marble edge.

“I don’t know. I was hoping he could tell me.” Titus shifted the armload of scrolls and tablets he’d toted along in one arm. Almost too much to carry alone, but he hadn’t wanted to trust them to a slave. “Something about the finances for the public baths.”

“What?”

“Nothing worth disturbing your swim for—”

“Financial irregularity?” Faustina said briskly.

“Well, yes.”

“Maybe I can help.” She climbed the marble steps of the pool, water shedding off her shoulders and dripping from the edge of her linen tunic: Venus rising from the waves. Of course Venus was usually naked, but Faustina’s tunic had been soaked into such clinging transparency that it didn’t really hide… anything. Titus coughed, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground as she strode unselfconsciously before him into the house. The little girl he’d carried home from Sabina’s wedding at age five had done quite a lot of growing up. He felt more comfortable when she picked up her discarded
palla
and swathed herself in it.

“So what have you got there?” Faustina sank into a chair in the atrium, indicating his armload of scrolls. “Let’s have a look.”

“I wouldn’t dream of boring a lovely girl with dull financial matters.”

“If not dull financial matters, it’ll be suitors with dull poetry,” Faustina warned. “I know which of the two I’d rather have.”

“I thought most girls liked being courted.”

“You’d think so.” Faustina sent a slave into the house for drinks. “I thought I’d love it. I remember all the men hanging around after Sabina, and I couldn’t wait till it was my turn. Now it is, and I find it’s boring. The old men drone politics at me, the young men drone war stories at me, and they all try to look down my dress.”

“You could try not to look quite so lovely,” Titus suggested. “Though that would take rather a lot of effort. Cut off your hair? Wear hemp tunics and soot? Black out a tooth?” He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it’s useless.”

“That’s why I like you, Titus.” Faustina tilted her head, delighted. “Any man can tell a woman she’s beautiful, but you’re clever enough to do it when her hair looks like a wet mop. Here, have some
mulsum
”—she tugged the nearest scroll out of his hand and replaced it with a cup of hot honeyed wine from the slave—“and I’ll have a look at your papers.”

Titus gave up and sat beside her. He didn’t have any other duties today, after all. And besides, Sabina’s last letter from Antioch had asked him to keep an eye on her little sister.
According to my father she’s got more suitors now than Helen of Troy, and I’d hate to see her follow in my footsteps and lose her head over someone impossible.
No danger there, from the look of things.

Faustina pulled her chair up beside Titus’s, pointing to a line of the scroll in her hand. “I assume there are receipts to match all these entries.”

“Yes, right here.” Titus pointed in turn, taking a sip of the warm honeyed wine. “Where did you get so good at numbers?”

“My mother taught Sabina and me to do the household accounts,” Faustina said absently. “Sabina didn’t apply herself much, but I did. What’s that tablet there?”

“Copies of orders made from a quarry. If you look here…”

Half an hour later, Faustina blew out a speculative breath and looked up. “Well,” she said, “you’re being cheated.”

Titus looked over the spread of scrolls, tablets, slates, and scribbled scraps now occupying the entire table. “I know.”

“I suppose
you’re
not being cheated, really,” Faustina amended. “But Trajan’s public baths are. Someone’s skimming off the building funds, and they’re skimming a
lot
.”

“I came to that conclusion myself last week,” Titus said, glum. “The
question is, who’s the thief, and what can I do about it. Because this isn’t some freedman lining his purse with a bit skimmed off the top.”

“It comes down to a question of access,” Faustina said. “Who has the reach for this kind of skimming?”

“I’ve looked into that matter all week, and I can tell you that not one of my underlings could be responsible for anything on this level. They simply don’t have the influence—I don’t have it myself.” Titus looked at Faustina in surprise. “Did your mother instruct you in the finer points of financial fraud as well as household accounts?”

“Of course. Slaves and freedmen are always trying to skim.” Faustina twisted her wet hair into a rope, pulling it over one shoulder. “Flour stolen from the storeroom or marble stolen from the quarry delivery; it’s all just money. And it seems to me that if you want to find your thief, you have two choices. Start looking up the ladder…”

“Or?”

“Or don’t. Because whoever’s stealing this much won’t want to stop, and if they’re higher up than you, it’s not someone you want angry.”

Titus thought of the bathhouse, its walls rising from the foundations now as gracefully as Faustina had risen from the pool. “I shall take it under advisement.”

They sat in silence for a while. Titus tapped a stylus slowly against the table. Faustina piled her wet hair on top of her head, the curved ends still sending drops of water sliding down her neck.

“You’re going to try to stop this anyway, aren’t you?” she said at last.

“Well, yes.” The Imperial household… Empress Plotina had hundreds of stewards and secretaries with oversight into official projects; any one of them might be using the Imperial name to help themselves. He said as much to Faustina.

“It’s a start.” Faustina took the stylus out of Titus’s hand, jabbing it through the knot of her wet hair to keep it in place. “Be careful, Titus.”

“The Empress will support me, I’m sure.” Only someone as relentlessly virtuous as Empress Plotina would understand Titus’s indignation in the first place, really.
Everyone steals from public works
, most
officials in Rome would be far more likely to scoff.
Everyone skims, everyone steals, everyone helps themselves. It’s the way of the world.

Maybe it is
, Titus thought.
But not on
my
project.

VIX

By the end of that year, Parthia was ours. Adenystrae, Babylon, Seleucia, Ctesiphon—one impossibly named city after another fell.

It’s getting very difficult to keep up with all these victories
, Titus wrote me in one of his letters.
I gather you’ve marched over Gaugamela, much like Alexander, and with much the same result. The Senate spends half its time these days just trying to figure out who all the players and heroes in this drama are. One of them, I’ve heard, is you. Congratulations on making First Spear.

I’d done it. First centurion in the Tenth Fidelis, and one of the youngest ever to achieve that rank. Maybe
the
youngest; I didn’t know. There were plenty who hated me for it, plenty who muttered that I’d never have risen so high and so fast if Trajan didn’t favor me, or if the camp fevers and the Parthians weren’t making so many vacancies among the ranks of the centurions. No fever or Parthian had managed to kill me yet, though, and so Trajan himself bypassed tradition and quite a few other candidates and made me First Spear of the Tenth Fidelis. The former First Spear had been transferred back to Rome, and he looked very sour as he handed his insignia to me. I’d be prefect of the camp next, and after that—well, maybe my impossible dream of commanding a legion wasn’t so out of reach after all.

“I’ll get it,” I told Mirah as she put the girls to bed in their little cot in the next room. “Two more years of this war, and I’ll get it.”

“God forbid the war end, then,” she said dryly, kissing both our daughters as she tucked the blanket around them. Both our girls were pink-skinned and dark-haired, having somehow missed the reddish hair of both their parents, and they looked like identical little rosebuds
squeezed together in sleep. “Pretty as pictures,” Mirah said, admiring our girls. “Goodness, I hope they don’t grow up as pretty as Antinous.”

“Why?” Antinous was almost ten now, growing like a young sapling, and what he was growing into was something arresting. The youthful pudginess was dropping away from his face and revealing starkly beautiful bones: a firmly modeled jaw, a carved nose like a god on a temple, cheekbones sharp enough to cut marble. I hadn’t been able to remember Demetra’s face for years, but it came back to me now every time I looked at her son.

“Because looks like his just mean trouble. You know at least three men have come up to me on the street and offered to
buy
him?” Mirah wrinkled her nose. “You wouldn’t believe what they offered. Or how hard they were slavering. I wanted to take a bath afterward.”