Lady of the Eternal City (17 page)

“Faces,” the Emperor was babbling, “in the mirror, dear gods, the
mirror
—”

“My grandfather taught me this hold,” Antinous told Hadrian, locking those sweat-drenched arms behind him. “When we were in Britannia. He used to be a gladiator, and he said you could follow this up with a nasty gouge and take a man’s eye out. I think I’ll just sit you down instead . . .”

Antinous kept talking, low and lulling, as he put his back to the great oak and slid down to the moss, taking Hadrian with him fighting all the way. “Don’t struggle, not much use fighting a hold taught by Arius the Barbarian himself . . . Calm yourself, Caesar. Calm. There are no faces. There are no faces, and you are safe.”

The Emperor went still all of a sudden inside Antinous’s locked arms. The muscles of his broad back were drawn stone-hard against Antinous’s chest. “Mirror,” he said hoarsely, still staring at nothing, and Antinous felt a great leap of pity. This man he had feared for so long in the abstract, a shadowy demon capable of anything—and then the bear hunt had come, and he had turned from a demon into a man, a man who could fling a spear better than anyone Antinous had ever seen, and then reduce himself to tears over a dog . . .

And now he wasn’t a demon or a god or even the Emperor of Rome anymore. Just a man in terror.

“Mirror,” Hadrian whispered again, and he trembled inside Antinous’s arm-lock and began to weep.

“Mirrors reflect good things too, you know.” Antinous risked letting go of the Emperor’s wrist, pausing to make sure he wouldn’t lash out again, then put a hand to the Emperor’s ice-sweated forehead and pulled it gently back, directing that glassy tear-dimmed gaze up at the sky. “Stars, see? The mirror is full of stars.”

“Stars,” the Emperor whispered in a cracked voice. Then his head fell against Antinous’s shoulder, and he wept like a child. His face was contorted in agony, utterly naked in its grief, and it gutted Antinous. He pressed his lips to the curly hair, feeling tears in his own eyes.

“You poor broken soul, how long has it been since you’ve wept?” His arms tightened around the Emperor, and he felt Hadrian’s tears slide warm and damp down his shoulder. He pressed another kiss to the Emperor’s forehead, as the stars wheeled and the world turned and his fellow
mystai
reveled. “Weep your eyes dry and be at peace, Caesar. You are safe with me.”

VIX

It was all chaos. Some of the acolytes cried out in terror like Hadrian; some were transfixed by rapture like Antinous. There was dancing and singing, wandering and fighting, and any of the revelers might have trampled Sabina to her death. Because as Hadrian bolted from the temple with Boil and Antinous and the rest of the Praetorians in pursuit, the Empress of Rome lay boneless and weeping on the temple floor. “Empress,” I snapped, shaking her by the shoulder.

“The world is so large,” Sabina wept. “So large and dark, and she is gone.”

“Oh, Hell’s gates.” I picked her up and threw her over one shoulder.

The
mystai
were fleeing in all directions, seizing torches, buffeting me as they spilled from the temple and ran for the trees. I carried Sabina out of harm’s way, deep into a dense little woods that I judged the
kykeon
-mad crowd would probably assume was full of demons. There I slung her down with her back against a tree, and squatted before her. “Sabina?”

“Tree,” she observed. “So much
tree
.”

“You’re flying higher than an arrow, aren’t you?” I looked around me for Suetonius or little Pedanius Fuscus or any of the others. They’d disappeared into the crowd, but they weren’t a Praetorian’s responsibility. Hadrian was, but Boil had called the other guards after him. I reckoned my old friend could keep the Emperor from trying to stab himself or take a flying leap off a cliff.

I sat down beside Sabina, my back against the same tree, the lion skin over my shoulder brushing her arm. At first I saw flashes of white as acolytes darted past, but eventually the sounds of revelry faded away. Maybe they’d charged back into the temple to moan and pray. I don’t know how long we sat there, but my mind was cool and empty again.

Sabina sat as I’d first placed her, hands limp in her lap, small head tilted back, looking up at the black waving branches overhead. “Dark,” she mused. “So much
dark
.”

“At least you’re not crying anymore.” I’d only seen her cry once, after Trajan died, weeping for our lost emperor and her lost freedom both. It had broken my heart. “What made you cry tonight?”

“The play.” Her voice was quiet, surprisingly lucid. “Didn’t you see it? Demeter searching for her lost daughter Persephone . . . I saw her, wandering in the dark, and whenever I tried to reach toward that beautiful red hair, she was gone.”

“Who? Persephone?”

“Persephone, Proserpina, Kore, Annia. She has so many names.”

“And that made you weep like your heart was breaking?”

“Yes.” She gave a single bitter laugh. “We’re all supposed to be searching for her—that’s why the priests gave out torches. We’re to search all night; and by morning they’ll ring another gong as a symbol of when she was found and returned to her mother.” A sigh. “The hierophant didn’t say what we’re supposed to do if we already know where Persephone is. Or if we know she’ll never be returned to her mother.”

“You’re still drunk,” I decided.

Her head turned, and her eyes caught mine. “Oh, Vix,” she mocked, but her tone was gentler. “So much
Vix
.”

“I’m not going to get any sense out of you tonight, am I?”

“Mmm.” She closed her eyes. “It feels a bit like when I was a child and I had fits of epilepsia. I feel my head contracting in about itself, and then the world goes flying away in shards. Only I’m still awake—if this were epilepsia, everything would go dark until I wake with a splitting headache.”

“Do you still have those fits?”

“Not since I was twelve.” She smiled. “You might have had something to do with that.”

So I had.

“Here comes the headache.” Sabina massaged her temples, watching the sky for a while, and then suddenly she rose and went to throw up into a distant bush. “That’s better,” she said, wiping her mouth as she came back. “I caught a glimpse of Balbilla—she’s torn her robe off to bare her breasts and is dancing in a Dionysian frenzy.”

I thought of my duty as a guard. “I suppose we should make sure she doesn’t dance off a ridgetop.”

“Why bother? She’s perfectly lucid.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because no woman lost in actual Dionysian revelry holds her stomach in quite that carefully as she revels.”

I laughed and offered Sabina my flask of barley water. She rinsed her mouth and then went prowling a little unsteadily among the bushes in the other direction and came back with a fistful of sprigs. “Wild mint,” she said, and began chewing on a handful of leaves. “So my breath doesn’t stupefy an ox.”

Some of the
kykeon
must have still lingered, because her legs gave out all at once and she flopped on her back on the moss. “What are you thinking about, Vercingetorix?”

“
Pila
drills,” I said honestly.

“Ah.” She smiled through the dark; I could hear it in her voice. “That manual Hadrian asked you to prepare with Suetonius.”

We hadn’t spoken so cordially to each other in a long time. I’d hardly spoken more than two sentences to her in years—since the wall in Britannia, where we’d stood under another moon like this one. A moon not quite round, but full of promise.

“You’re taking notes for your manual already, aren’t you?” she asked me. “Really, Vix. Millions have waxed lyrical about the Mysteries of Eleusis, and all you can do is scribble
pila
drills!”

“Suetonius said the same thing,” I admitted. “But he’s cross at me. This manual of mine will take him away from his latest treatise.”

“He’s writing a treatise? I shall make sure I sponsor it, so it does well.” Sabina linked her pale arms behind her head in the grass. “Is it like the treatises my father used to write?”

“Nothing like. Those were serious works. Suetonius, well, he’s got a mind like a gossip trap. The most rubbishy collection of rumors, omens, portents, and stories you’ve ever heard.” I grinned. “He’s very cross with me, thinking he’ll have to put his next book aside to take my notes on improved training regimens.”

“He’ll live.”

“Sabina . . .” I hesitated, winding my fingers around each other. “Why did Hadrian ask a common legionary to assist with legion reform? The Senate won’t like it.”

“He doesn’t care. Don’t you know him by now?”

“Nobody knows him.” I still felt that, very strongly. “And I still don’t know why he picked
me
.”

She turned on one side in the dark, propping her cheek on one hand. “Because he thinks you’re the best man to do it.”

“But he hates me.”

“You’re still useful. He never lets a little thing like hatred get in the way.”

“He threatened my children,” I said. “And he threatened to have me held down and then fuck me till I bled.”

A small breath in the dark. “Ah,” Sabina said quietly. “It sounds like him.”

I didn’t know why I’d told her—I hadn’t told
anyone
. It just came out of me like poison from a lanced wound. “He made it clear I was dirt,” I said. “That he could turn me into one of his bum-spreading whores if he wanted to. And now he hands me power.”

“And you’re flattered.” Sabina’s eyes were just a gleam in the inky shadows. “Aren’t you?”

I ruffled a hand across my hair. “Look, I don’t hate the bugger any less than I ever did. But these changes he wants to make?” I wrestled with my own words. “If I’d gotten the Tenth Fidelis, I’d have shaken everything up, trained the men my way. And I don’t have the Tenth Fidelis. But if the Emperor likes my notions of legion reform, every soldier in
Rome
will be trained my way. Do you know what that means?”

“It means you’ll do it,” Sabina said.

“God help me, yes.” I flopped on my own back beside her. “On the wall in Britannia, you told me he could be a great man. I didn’t believe you. And I’ll still say it—he’s not a
good
man, not by any means. Not like Trajan. But when he’s on a tear like this and out to change the world . . .”

“You can’t look away,” Sabina finished. “Because, as bad as he can be, you want to stick around and watch, just see what he’ll do next. Don’t you?”

No.
I dropped an arm across my own eyes.
Yes?

“So . . .” Sabina’s cool fingers touched my shoulder, slid down to my hand, and she tugged my arm away. “You’ll help him in this? Help him be the Emperor he can be?” Her fingertips glided like butterflies over my palm. “The way I asked you on the wall in Britannia?”

“Quit trying to seduce me into it.” I raised myself on one elbow opposite her, aiming a glare through the shadows. “I’ll help. All right? So don’t lie there looking so damned pleased with yourself.”

“How do you know how I look? It’s pitch dark.”

I always know how you look
, I almost said.
Always have. Always will.

I had a past that came before Mirah, and Sabina ran through that past like a blue ribbon, sinuous and maddening. Of any woman in my life who wasn’t my mother, I’d known Sabina the longest. We’d met as children inside the marble reaches of the Colosseum, a slave brat and a pearled doll, awkward and already fascinated with each other, and here we were more than thirty years later in a dark grove, a sleek empress and a battered guard. No longer awkward, maybe, but still fascinated with each other. I couldn’t deny that, not in this sacred place where the absurd but gripping truth of the Mysteries still held me fast. I knew Sabina better than any woman alive. I didn’t need to see her face, so close to mine in the dark, to know that her mouth was curved in a faint half smile, that her elegant shorn head was cocked toward me, and that her narrow fingers lay on the moss between us waiting to be touched.

I didn’t touch her. I’d betrayed Mirah once before in the arms of the Empress of Rome. Once was enough.

Sabina’s hand rose through the dark, and I felt her featherlight touch on the one piece of my hair that seemed to stick up no matter how short I razored it off. “Vix,” she said quietly. “How often do you think of Selinus?”

That barren isle where I’d lost Trajan, where Sabina and I had lain together for the last time, her mouth opening under mine like a budding flower. “Every day,” I whispered. Every day I thought of it, because that was how I stopped myself from lashing out at her husband when he needled me.
I had your wife, you bastard. How would that hurt your precious pride?
I didn’t say it but I thought it, every time he mocked me—only now he’d left off mocking me. Instead he asked my advice and valued what I said and gave me power, and I had to take pride in that.

But I’d still gotten into the habit of remembering how Sabina felt under me, the scent and the taste of her, and that was a bad habit to have. Because I knew exactly how she’d taste if I reached out through the dark and speared her mouth on mine as I’d done on Selinus.

“I think of it.” Her breath touched me, smelling of mint. “Every time I lay eyes on you, Vix.”

“Hell’s gates,” I whispered back. “What did we do on that hillside? What witchcraft did we
make
?” It was only grief that had pulled us together, so why had that one final time left her lingering in my blood like a poison?

“We did make something on that hillside, but it wasn’t witchcraft.” She took a breath. “Vix—”

ANTINOUS

Antinous could feel the
kykeon
seeping away. His mind stopped its dreamlike whirl up among the treetops, and his jaw began to hurt from where the Emperor had struck him, yet he felt no urge to move. He sat with his back to the tree and the Emperor of Rome inside the circle of his arms, and he gazed up at the sky. The world was still a place of miraculous beauty. He did not think he would ever see it any other way, ever again.

The Emperor had long ceased weeping, Antinous saw with a huge swell of tenderness. He had thought Hadrian would pull away, but the curly head still lay against his shoulder, and he had not pushed free of Antinous’s encircling arms. Hadrian’s whole terror-tautened body had relaxed to limpness, and he was silent as a tomb. Antinous did not mind. He spoke for the both of them, whatever the mood took him to say.