Lady of the Eternal City (27 page)

“Yes, Caesar. Thank you, Caesar.” Marcus bowed.

“And tell your grandfather I’m appointing you to the Salian priests,” the Emperor tossed over one shoulder. “It is quite an honor for a child of your age, but you’ve bored me enough this afternoon, so please don’t compose some elaborate speech of thanks.”

Marcus stared openmouthed. The Emperor disappeared inside his Hades, and Annia craned her neck. She got a bare glimpse of a rough passage of undressed stone, of more screech owl lamps, a flash of something that might have been silver . . .

“The Salii?” Marcus whispered.

Annia grinned. “You’re going to look silly. The Salii do all that dancing around in costume on festival days—”

Pedanius stared slit-eyed at Marcus. “The Salii?” he said at last. “My grandfather said
I
would be get that post.
Me.
”

“Maybe you would have,” Annia told Brine-Face. “But
you
just babbled like a coward in front of the Emperor. Marcus faced him down.”

VIX

Judaea

My mother had told me something back in Britannia that was beginning to haunt me. She’d been fingering her lyre as we watched Mirah plait flower chains for the girls, and my mother said, “I do hope you realized you married a Jew.”

“Why should that matter?” I blinked. “I’m a Jew, too. So are you.”

“Not really.” My mother gave a graceful shrug. “We were slaves, and slaves have neither God nor nation. We have nothing at all, and it gives us the power to choose where our home lies. And you may have been born to the chosen people, Vix, but that doesn’t mean you were ever
of
them. Your wife is.”

“She was born and raised in Rome, just the same as—”

“It doesn’t matter. Her heart lies in Judaea.”

“Is that your way of saying you don’t like her?” I asked wryly.

“Oh, I like her very much. She’s good for you. But she is of God and you are of Rome.”

“God and Rome get along well in enough in our house.”

My mother’s dark eyes studied me. “Good.”

“What did you choose?” I couldn’t help asking. “If you’re not much of a Jew, you’re certainly not a Roman either. Where’s your home?”

“It lies in your father.” The melody under her fingers stilled as her gaze rested on the burly figure spading earth in the garden—the figure who lifted his head to smile at her, as though he’d felt her eyes on him like a caress. “My home, my country, and my god together. As I am his.”

I’d been settled in Judaea for two years now . . . And those words were still echoing through my head.

Mirah had wept when we finally stepped off the ship onto Judaean soil: dropped the bundle she had been carrying and fell to her knees. “Thank you,” I heard her whisper, and she pulled the girls close to her sides and kissed their dark heads over and over until they began crying, too. As I stood there with my
gladius
and dagger in a bundle, feeling so very strange.

We settled in Bethar: a fortified farming town, terraced and prosperous, rising from the high country southwest of ruined Jerusalem. Mirah wept again as we came through the gates. “Home,” she said, pressing my hand, but I felt only strangeness. In Bethar’s pressing crowds, I had the only breastplate, the only shaven chin. I’d spent most of my life as one of many, a legionary among other legionaries, a guard among other guards—and now I was the one who stood out.

Mirah’s family held a great celebration to welcome us. Her mother roasted an entire calf, my wife was swallowed up in the eager arms of her aunts, and our girls were soon running through the garden with enough cousins to field a cohort. I leaned against the wall watching, and when Simon found me there, he switched from Aramaic to Latin.

“It passes.” He smiled when I looked at him in surprise. “The strangeness you’re feeling. It goes away.”

I swirled the wine in my cup. “How long did it take you?”

“A year to stop thinking in Latin. Two years to stop dreaming about the legions. Five before I stopped bristling whenever my cousins cursed the Emperor’s name.”

“Feel free to curse Hadrian,” I said. “But if you curse Trajan’s name, I’ll beat you to a paste.”

“Trajan, Hadrian.” Simon shrugged. “It’s all the same to me.”

“And you call yourself a legion man?” I said, outraged.

“Not anymore. All those years in the ranks?” He shrugged. “Wasted youth.”

I looked at him. A big man, first in my
contubernium
when I arrived fresh from my training; tough-grained and solid as the earth in his polished breastplate; his curls cropped close and his chin stubbled. He’d looked humorous, weathered, and competent, and I’d yearned to be just like him. He had the same expression now, hard and amused, but he wore a striped robe and a full beard and looked nothing like Simon the legion man. He was Simon ben Cosiba of Bethar, and I wondered if I knew him at all.

“Don’t worry,” he urged, seeing my expression. “It passes!”

“Maybe I don’t want it to,” I said. “Maybe I don’t want to stop thinking in Latin and dreaming about the legions.”

“That’s Rome talking,” he dismissed. “It’s like a poison dream, Vix. You stop taking the poison, and at first you crave it, but then you see it was making you weak all along. You’ll see.”

“Will I?”

“Rome made your son a whore,” he said, face darkening. “Think of that, when you start doubting. If it were my son, I’d have—”

I dropped my wine cup and grabbed Simon by the front of his striped robe. “Friend or not, I will tear your throat out if you use that word about him again.”

“Mirah said—”

“Mirah shouldn’t have gone telling you about my son’s shame, even if you are her favorite uncle. It’s not your business, Simon, so don’t you
ever
call him a whore.”

“Vix!” Mirah called across the little garden, her face glowing. “My mother says we can take a house nearby! There’s—” She stopped as she saw my spilled wine, my fist at Simon’s chest. “Vix, what are you—”

“It’s nothing,” Simon said, not taking his eyes from mine. “I spilled his wine, and now he’s threatening to dump mine over my head.”

I exhaled the rage, uncurling my fist from his robe. “That’s right.”

Mirah looked doubtful, but she took my arm and steered me away. Toward safer things.

We soon had a house with a walled garden and a small courtyard forever overflowing with laughter and chatter and cousins. “You’re a lucky man,” they told me, and yes, I was. I had a beautiful wife; I had two daughters who were starting to flower into young women; I had coin enough to support them in comfort and take my ease in my sunny courtyard. I knew men who did just that, men like Mirah’s father, who basked in grandchildren and books. “You could grow a beard,” Mirah teased me, “become a venerable patriarch!”

“What does a patriarch do?”

“Well, I don’t see you studying the sacred scrolls like my father.” She kissed me soundly. “There’s any number of trades you could take to fill your time. Perhaps buy a wine shop? There are other retired soldiers in Judaea—you could make a way station for them.”

“You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?” I couldn’t help asking.

“I know my husband isn’t the sort to lie idle.” A laugh. “But at least you could run a place where the war stories can be told in comfort!”

I did buy a wine shop, though I wasn’t much good at running it. What did I know about how to store wine and keep mice out of storerooms? The part I did best was toss out the rowdy drunks; everything else I left to a capable widow who could have run a naval fleet, never mind a wine shop, so I left her to it and soon the days were empty again. I made a stab at working leather, then—made my girls a pair of slippers apiece that fell apart on their first wearing. Wasn’t any good at working leather, or smithing, or any of the other pastimes Mirah suggested. I wasn’t any good at
peace
. And before I knew it, two years had passed and I was still dreaming of the legions. The legions and my mother’s noncommittal words.

I had letters from Titus, who gave me news of his own family—and of Antinous. Antinous, still the Emperor’s perfumed boy, and that stabbed like a fresh wound. I’d had some vague but vibrant hope that one day I’d turn around and see Antinous on my doorstep; free of Hadrian, free of everything. I’d have flung my arms about him with all the joy in the world . . . but I didn’t see him. I didn’t see my son, and maybe I never would. Why should he come back to me? I was a bitter, aging legionary with bloody hands and a cruel tongue; I’d failed at running a wine shop or even making a pair of shoes, and I’d failed my son. Why should Antinous give me any thought at all?

Two years, then approaching three. Dinah turned thirteen, fourteen, flowering into her monthly blood with Chaya starting right behind her as though she were too afraid to be left in childhood while her sister advanced ahead. “You’re women now,” Mirah told them, though the only difference their new status made was that Mirah stopped wearing her hair loose in the evenings the way I’d always liked it. “It’s not fitting in a mother of grown girls,” she said briskly, and she bustled about in dark gowns that hid her lithe slenderness and made her look like a dowager. She smiled at me tolerantly when I said that I missed seeing the fall of her russet hair at night, and I started going to my wine shop in the evenings. Simon met me there sometimes and I would see his eyes on me, shrewd and thoughtful. “Do you still dream of the legions?” he asked once.

“No.”

Simon held me in his gaze. He had eyes like Hadrian’s, bottomless and deep-socketed, and the beard was like Hadrian’s too, and his restless way of moving. Simon could intimidate people with that burning energy and those deep-set eyes, but I’d learned to lie under Hadrian’s gaze, and I stared back until my old friend shrugged.

“I told you it would pass.”

“You did,” I said. “Join me at the bathhouse tomorrow to spar?”

“No, I’ve my own affairs to handle.” I didn’t know what those affairs were. Simon was no patriarch to laze in the courtyard with scrolls and grandchildren.

I didn’t ask. I should have.

It was after he’d departed that I heard that the Emperor was to visit Judaea. Perhaps next year, maybe the one after that. “After he travels through Parthia.”

“Corrupt boy-fucker,” someone snickered from behind me, and I stood up and swung. God knows I’d called Hadrian worse, and to his face—but I swung my fists in his defense anyway, or maybe Antinous’s defense, and I broke a man’s jaw and his hand before the widow I employed managed to get her hissing imprecations through my rage. “It’s your shop,” she said, eyeing me with what I realized was dislike. “But you’ll never turn a profit if you beat the customers!”

I looked at the drinkers sitting at my tables. Two or three retired legionaries dicing in a corner, but the rest were men of Judaea, hard-eyed and hostile as they looked at me. I turned and slouched out, and behind I heard a soft, contemptuous mutter. “Romans and their fists!” I could have turned and started swinging again, but if I came home with skinned knuckles one more time, Mirah would just look at me in disappointment—or worse yet, indulgence. Or she wouldn’t notice at all, because she was wrapped in her prayers. So I sat down in the street outside with my back to a wall, stinging hands dangling useless between my knees. I couldn’t go home because my wife would be singing softly throughout the house, and the girls would be chattering in the Aramaic they spoke more than they spoke Latin. All three of them so happy, all of them
home
.

And I was so wretchedly lonely I sometimes thought it would kill me.

ANNIA

A.D. 128, Spring
Rome

“I look ridiculous,” Marcus said.

Annia propelled him along the passage. “Yes.”

“That’s all I am to you. A joke in a silly costume!”

“Just make my mother laugh, Marcus? She’s hardly so much as smiled yet. I thought maybe . . .” A gesture at Marcus’s ceremonial garb, which he’d donned for his first performance as one of the Salii. The leaping priests of Mars were supposed to be warriors of old, and the antique breastplate and the red cloak weren’t so bad, but the spiked helmet looked like a phallus, and the tunic was bloused and flounced and embroidered within an inch of its life. “Just make my mother laugh, and I’ll owe you a boon.” Any boon would be worth a smile from her mother, who was still recovering from childbed. The twins had come so hard, and the fever afterward had hit so swiftly.

She’s well now
, Annia thought, towing Marcus along again.
I just have to make her happy.

Annia’s mother
did
smile just a little as they came into her chamber and Marcus doffed his spiked headdress. “What have we here?” she exclaimed. “A leaping priest on the verge of his debut?”

“It’s a very great honor, my grandfather tells me,” Marcus sighed. “But nobody
understands
the ritual. Ovid wrote about it, and even he didn’t understand it.”

Annia rejoiced then, because her mother laughed outright. “Will you practice it for us, nevertheless? If I’m not to be at the festival—”

Marcus seized a tasseled cushion and struck a pose. “Imagine this is a shield fallen from the heavens during the reign of Numa Pompilius—”

“I’ll take the baby so you can clap,” Annia volunteered to her mother, settling the softly gurgling bundle against one arm the way the wet nurse had shown her. Marcus went through his ritual jigging with absolute gravitas, and by the end, Annia’s mother was helpless with laughter. “What does all that gibberish in the song even mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Marcus confessed, straightening. “Cicero attempted a translation and didn’t make much headway. There’s a line—a corrupted line, I think—that might mean ‘I shall be as a kiss to grief.’”

Annia’s mother looked at him a moment, and then suddenly pulled him into a hug. “And so you are,” she said softly. “So you are.”

Annia smiled down into the baby’s blankets. “Can I take Fadilla to the festival? I won’t drop her, I promise!”

“I’m sure you won’t, because you’re an excellent older sister. But Fadilla stays here.” Faustina took the little bundle back into her arms, another smile lighting her face. Aurelia Fadilla, Annia’s new baby sister, and thank the
gods
she was thriving. She’d been born first of twins, and the boy who followed lived only an hour.

That was why Annia’s mother had lain so quiet in her bed this past month.

“You really should be my brother, you know,” Annia told Marcus later. “My parents adore you.”

He looked exasperated. “I am not going to be your brother, and that is final!”

To Annia’s surprise, the rites of the Salii weren’t as ridiculous as she thought. She could pick out Marcus at once among the twelve identically garbed boys. The others were about as nimble as cows, but Marcus went at it with steady grace and a serious expression. He did everything like that, Annia thought, whether it was his lessons, a game of
trigon
, or an absurd religious ritual. “I want to do things well,” he’d explained to her. “Even if I don’t win.” Annia hadn’t seen the point of doing something well if you weren’t going to win, but maybe Marcus was right after all.

“Well done, young Verissimus!” the Emperor shouted down, able to applaud now that his arm was well out of its sling, and turned to Marcus’s beaming grandfather. “When I leave on my travels, send me word on how his studies progress. He shows promise.”

The Salii performed their leaping dances on each successive day, but it was the enormous final banquet at the Temple of Mars that everyone looked forward to. Marcus made a brief appearance, when the boy priests cast their wreaths to the banqueting couch that was supposed to belong to Mars himself (as if a god were going to just drop in for some wine and some roast parrot!), and Marcus’s wreath landed right around the brow of the god’s statue.

“You did that on purpose,” Annia said when he came sliding out into the garden.

“I didn’t, I swear!” Marcus took off the silly helmet, now that they were out of sight of all the feasting adults inside. “I hate being the center of attention. I felt silly.”

“You didn’t look it.” Annia made a jump at an overhanging tree branch, swinging from her hands.

He tilted his head at her. “Will you let go of that?”

“Why?” She grinned down at him. “I like being taller than you.” When she turned nine, Marcus had shot up in height suddenly, so his eyes were level with her own.

Marcus cleared his throat. “Annia, about that boon you owe me—”

“Watch out,” she groaned, seeing a familiar stocky figure come storming along the twilit path. “It’s Brine-Face.” She dropped down from the branch, but before she could even call out a good insult, Pedanius flattened Marcus with one punch.

“Get up!” he shouted, and his face was scarlet. “Get up, you prancing ass, you looked like a fool out there. You in your penis helmet—”

Oh, Hades.
Annia went for him, letting out a yell, but Brine-Face turned and shoved her so hard she tumbled off her feet. “Get up!” Pedanius tried to kick Marcus, but Marcus managed to roll out of the way, grabbing Pedanius’s foot. Brine-Face dropped a knee on Marcus’s chest and sent his fist smashing into Marcus’s face again, and Annia saw blood. “You took
my
place in the Salii, my grandfather said I’d have that place, and the Emperor gave it to
you
—”

Marcus’s fist shot upward, and he caught Brine-Face a good clip on the jaw. Annia cheered, scrambling up, but Pedanius just doubled up his own fist and swung again. “What’d you promise the Emperor, Bum-Boy? What’s he giving you next—”

Annia flung herself on her enemy’s back, locking her arms about his neck, and Marcus took the opportunity to plug a fist into Pedanius’s ribs. Pedanius yelled, and then he yelled again on a higher note when Annia sank her teeth into his ear. That was when she felt a strong hand at her neck.

“I don’t know who I should I be rescuing here,” an amused voice said. Annia looked up at Antinous, who was trying to look stern and failing as he hauled Annia off Brine-Face and then Brine-Face off Marcus. “Young Pedanius, you seem to be getting the worst of things.”

“I was not!”

“Were too,” Marcus mumbled around his bloody lip.

“I was beating you to a pulp, you sniveling—”

Annia lunged at Pedanius again. “You’re the one sniveling,” she yelled, as Antinous held her back. “Don’t you
dare
say we began it this time, you hit my cousin
first
—”

“He took my place,” Pedanius snarled, for once too incensed to try to shift the blame. “He took my place with the Emperor!”

“Easy—” Antinous had Annia by the neck of her dress, but she lashed out with a foot and got Brine-Face square in the knee.

“See?” Pedanius howled. “She’s a barbarian, she started it—”

“I did
not
start it!” Annia shrieked. “You’re always coming at Marcus and me, and someday I am going to make you
sorry
—”

“Calm down, Annia.” Antinous ignored the shouting, giving Pedanius a little shake. “I saw you go for them first, you little bully. It’s not how a man of Rome behaves, and you might not have your toga yet but you’re old enough to behave like a man.”

Annia exhaled furious vindication, but Pedanius just sneered. “
You’re
not a man at all, just the Emperor’s catamite. Filthy little Greek he likes to fuck—”

“Don’t you call him that!” Marcus shouted, and Annia pulled her foot back for another kick, but Antinous overrode them. His face was still and hard as a statue, and just as lovely.

“Call me what you like, boy,” he said quietly. “But do not insult the Emperor.”

“You don’t dare speak to me that way,” Pedanius bristled. “You’re a whore. And everybody knows he’ll throw you in the gutter with the other whores when you’re too much older, because he only wants young ones sucking his—”

“Go whine to your grandfather.” Antinous gave him a clip on the ear like swatting a dog, and Brine-Face stumbled back with a yelp. “Don’t insult the Emperor again, and leave off bullying children. Hear me, boy?”

Pedanius tried to draw himself up proudly as he scurried up the path, but Annia let out a derisive hoot. Antinous gave her a clip on the ear, too. “That’s enough out of you. Taunt a bully, and he’ll just come back for revenge.”

“Brine-Face always comes back anyway,” Annia stated.

Antinous looked rather amused at her grim tone. “Why is that?”

“Gods know,” Marcus said wearily. “I think it’s fated. Pedanius Fuscus against Annia and me—the Greeks against the Trojans—”

“Don’t be silly,” Annia snorted. “He hates us because
you
got to join the Salii, and I whacked his hand with a mallet. And because he’s a bullying coward.”

“I won’t argue about the bullying part,” Antinous agreed. “And I thought he always seemed a nice lad . . .”

“Everyone thinks that. He puts on a good show.” Annia turned to Marcus. “And if it’s Trojans against Greeks, at least make us the Greeks! The Greeks
win
!”

Marcus scowled, and Antinous laughed outright. “Hell’s gates,” he said, and shook his head. “I wouldn’t take on you two brawlers for all the gold in Egypt.”

“You’re going to Egypt with the Emperor, aren’t you?” Annia felt a wistful pang in her chest.

“Well, Numidia first. And Parthia, and Judaea. Then Egypt.” Antinous tucked a lock of her hair back behind her ear. “Shall I bring you back an obelisk?”

“You’d have to bring it in pieces,” Marcus said, ready to start dissecting the technical difficulties of transporting an obelisk. Annia just looked up at Antinous, standing there like a young god, his rich hair catching the lamplight.

“I’ll miss you,” she blurted out. Antinous coming to pay respects to her father and always taking time to toss a ball with Annia or teach her
latrunculi
 . . . Antinous helping her clean up the latest bowl she’d broken so no one would find the pieces . . . Antinous giving her a wink across the room at boring parties . . .

“You won’t miss me,” Antinous said lightly. “You’ll be too busy getting tall and beautiful, and when I come back you won’t even remember who I am.”

If I get tall and beautiful enough, can I marry you?
Annia thought. Not that Antinous would ever love anybody but the Emperor. Anybody could see that—it shone out of his face like sunlight.

“I won’t forget you,” she said instead. “No matter how long you’re gone.”

“And I’ll think of you every day, little brawler.” Antinous opened his arms to give her a hug. “The very first friend I ever made in Rome. I won’t forget that.”

Annia hugged him back fiercely. “Promise?”

“On the River Styx.” He bent down to kiss her cheek. Annia turned her head at the very last moment, so his lips brushed hers.

“Ha!” she crowed. “So you
do
kiss girls!”

“Only the most beautiful ones.” Antinous laughed again, a sound like a ripple of gold coins.

Marcus looked at Antinous, outraged. “You got my boon!”

Antinous gave Marcus a man-to-man nod. “She’ll get round to you,” he whispered. “Trust me—just wait a few years.” Annia poked her tongue out at them both, and Antinous grinned. “Come inside, you little gladiators, before you get in any more trouble.”

“
We undertake to be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten by rods
”—Annia chanted the gladiator oath, slinging one arm around Marcus and the other around Antinous—“
and to die by the sword!
”

“I have no intention of being burned by fire or bound in chains,” Marcus objected. “It sounds
most
uncomfortable . . . ”

ANTINOUS

“Not that one doesn’t appreciate an ecstatic welcome”—Empress Sabina looked out at the men and women of Carthage, cheering in the deluge of rain—“but what have we done to merit it?”

“There has been no rain to speak of in Carthage for nearly five years,” said Hadrian, and began to reel off the drought’s effect on various varieties of local crops. Of course he had all the facts at his fingertips, Antinous thought with a smile. There seemed to be nothing on earth the Emperor did not know, and yet he was always questing for more. More knowledge, more understanding, more insight—it enchanted Antinous. His own brain was uncomplicated as a cup of water by comparison, and yet it was to him that this restless, complex, insatiable mind kept returning.
You have earned the love of a man like this
, he reminded himself.
That is cause for pride—no matter what rude little boys like Pedanius Fuscus or condescending old men like his grandfather think.

The Imperial party had only just disembarked in Carthage when the sky opened. Crowds in Rome would have called it a bad omen, but the men and women of Carthage danced and called out Hadrian’s name.

Antinous couldn’t help it. He took off into the crowd with a whoop, seizing an aged matron by the hands and whirling her in a circle. She beamed and hung a garland about his neck; Antinous kissed her on both cheeks and then found his hands grabbed by a pair of little boys who stood with their mouths open under the rain like a pair of baby birds. He opened his mouth too, and the drops tasted like sweet, cool freedom. Freedom from Rome; from avid eyes; from disapproving stares and quivering nostrils and sneering voices calling him the Emperor’s he-bitch.

“Antinous!” Hadrian was shouldering through the crowd after him, half-alarmed and half-laughing as the Carthaginians started to hang garlands on him too. “Bringer of rain!” the call went up. “Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain!”

“They think I control the rain?” Hadrian asked later, half-amused and half-outraged. “Really. I design walls to contain the Empire; I entirely revitalize the legions; I erect so many new roads and temples that my footsteps might as well spring up marble columns the way Persephone’s were said to spring up flowers. And after all that, I am hailed for a cloudburst?”