Lady of the Eternal City (29 page)

“Do I?”

“Yes.” A breath. “You love him, Lady.”

The Empress of Rome gave a slow blink of her lashes, confirming nothing and denying nothing, but Antinous was used to seeing past these Imperial faces with their expressions like shields.

“I knew it even before he said those things about you, the night he discovered me with the Emperor.” Antinous shifted a little in his saddle. “You hide it well, Lady, but he was never one for concealing anything. His eyes used to follow you like a lion’s.”

She was silent a moment, looking away over the ranked legionaries, but Antinous saw the moment when she gave in to curiosity. “. . . Like a lion follows its prey?”

“No, that’s how he’d look at his wife. Hungry, a little wistful sometimes, like she was out of reach.” Poor Mirah, not even aware of her competition. “Vix watched you like a lion watches a lioness.”

“And how does a lion watch a lioness?” Sabina didn’t even try to pretend nonchalance this time.

“He doesn’t need to tend her, because she hunts her own prey. He doesn’t need to shield her, because she kills her own enemies. He doesn’t need to look for her, because she’s always at his side.” Antinous couldn’t help grinning. “And the mating is fierce.”

That earned him a cool glance that could have come straight from Hadrian. “You are impudent.”

“Apologies, Lady. I do not mean to be. I only see it because it is what I feel every day—but for Caesar.” Antinous picked up her small hand and kissed it, making enormous soulful eyes. “Forgive me?”

She laughed, rapping him over the head with her fan, and he found himself laughing too. He had never made friends easily—before Hadrian he mostly had lovers or would-be lovers, and after Hadrian he had those who despised him and those who sought to use him.

But I have a friend now
, he thought, looking at the Empress of Rome.
A true friend.
It warmed him as much as one of Hadrian’s kisses.

An enormous roar went up from the men of the Third Augusta: Hadrian had finished his speech. He stood fist raised, sunlight blazing off his breastplate, and then he bounded down among the men. They drew back a little, awed and still cheering, but he moved among them like a colossus. Teasing and joking and generally being irresistible, Antinous thought.

“Tell me—” Sabina began to descend from her carriage, and Antinous swung off his horse to hand her down. “Would Hadrian ever take Vix back, if you asked him?”

“He would do almost anything that I asked him.” Which was why he tried so hard to ask for nothing. “But even if I asked for my father to be allowed back, and the Emperor agreed, Vix wouldn’t come.”

“Still—why not ask? We’re to travel to Judaea at some point.”

“Oh . . .” Antinous ruffled a hand through his hair. “If we travel to Judaea, I think I will be far too terrified to see him.”

“Why?”

“Because what if he kicks me away?” Looking down at her, standing at his side and barely coming to his shoulder. “I’ll likely never travel to Judaea again, after all, and he’ll likely never leave it. If he spat on me there, it would be the end of all things.”

Empress Sabina said nothing. But she slipped her hand into his arm, and his sore heart eased. She was one of those rare people who was not afraid to let a silence fall, he thought, and he relaxed in the quiet comfort of her presence. By the time Hadrian bounded up, Antinous was able to offer a wholly sunny smile.

“Ha, I like a good speech!” Hadrian seized Antinous around the neck, kissing him heartily. “Shall I tell you something else, my star? I’ve just had word the Senate voted to give me the title of Pater Patriae.”

“What, again?” Antinous knew they’d voted to give him that all-illustrious title before. Very insincerely. “Do you mean to accept this time, Caesar?” It gave him a slightly wistful pang.
I miss my father so much, and my lover becomes father of all the world.
A sign from the gods, perhaps?

“You know, I think I shall.” Hadrian sounded delighted. “I don’t like titles I haven’t earned—Emperor Augustus turned down the title too, until he felt he merited the honor. But by now, I think I
have
earned it.”

Empress Sabina studied him, smiling. “I think you are right.”

Antinous looked at his ally, his friend, his lover’s wife, and wished he could give her—what?
Happiness? Freedom? My father’s love?
He tugged Hadrian’s head down instead, whispering in his ear.

The Emperor looked surprised. Antinous nodded. “That’s what I want,” he said firmly. Not something for himself. Something for Sabina.

Hadrian shrugged, turning back to his wife. “What if I made you Augusta at the same time as I become Pater Patriae, Vibia Sabina?”

She looked startled again—twice in one conversation, Antinous thought with glee. That had to be a record for the enigmatic Empress of Rome. “Me, Augusta? Have
I
earned it?” she asked, sounding wry.

Hadrian looked meditative, and Antinous didn’t nudge him this time. “I think you have,” he said. “Your work with the share farmers in Africa, bringing their complaints to my attention, and your advice on the border walls . . . My Augusta,” Hadrian repeated, sounding it out, then looked at Antinous. “My Augusta and my star. What else does a father of his people need?” He began moving toward his quarters, one arm about Antinous, Sabina gliding in their wake. “Where shall we go after Numidia, eh? Greece first, I think, but after that? I think Judaea . . .”

Not yet
, Antinous thought with a quick catch in his chest.
Let’s follow the winds first, the winds that smell like sand and cinnamon
.
Follow them anywhere, just not Judaea!

“Judaea,” Hadrian decided. “After Greece.”

Then let Greece last forever
, Antinous thought as his heart kicked. Because he was not ready to face his father. Not now.

Maybe not ever.

VIX

Bethar

There’s nothing worse than a girl who thinks she’s in love. Dinah was fourteen now, dreamy and dewy and mooning over the blacksmith’s boy from the south quarter of Bethar, and Chaya was sullen because she didn’t have a boy to moon over yet. I finally warned that if they didn’t stop their sighing and squabbling I’d strap them both. That sent them sniffling off to their chamber, making me think of a little red-haired girl boasting that she never cried, not ever, and Mirah went on calmly eating.

“They’re young and filled with storms,” she said. “It means they’ll be ready to marry soon.” I could see my wife settling back in her chair, ready to discuss every eligible son-in-law in Bethar, and I pushed back from the table.

“I’ll be gone a day or two.”

Mirah brightened. “Are you going with Uncle Simon? He so wants to speak with you . . .”

“No.” I paused. “I thought I’d go to Lydda. Thereabouts.”

Her face fell. She knew what I wanted to see there. “It will only make you unhappy, Vix.”

I cut her off. “What does Simon want to talk with me about?” My friend had been traveling lately, speaking vaguely of unnamed friends. I’d offered to come with him, but Simon looked at me a moment and then gave a noncommittal refusal. “Where’s he going this time?”

Mirah gave me the same blank look her uncle had. “I don’t know.”

I grunted, reaching for my
gladius
, and then I hesitated for a moment before I reached for my lion skin. I’d given off wearing it in Judaea—“You look like some pagan demigod,” Mirah scolded me—and besides, the pelt was old and patchy. Pathetic. But I set my jaw and flung it over one shoulder, and Mirah looked at it and set her cup down with a rattle.

“
Why
are you going?” she said, low-voiced. “Why can’t you stay and talk about who the girls should marry, and if we should hire a new doorman for our gate with the streets getting so restless? Why won’t you stop pacing and scowling and wanting to revisit your legion days?” She spoke Aramaic, because she spoke it everywhere and that included speaking to me, even though I still thought and spoke and dreamed in Latin. And right now, it angered me. “Stay, Vix.”

“I won’t be more than a night.” I heard Dinah and Chaya squabbling in the next room, and I raised my voice.
“Hell’s gates, will you two stop mewling!”
And I banged out of the house before either of them could start to weep in earnest.

Girls in love. Is it any wonder I fled to visit my old legion, now that the Tenth Fidelis was stationed in Judaea?

I kept my hand to the hilt of my
gladius
as I walked. I didn’t know what had changed in the last few years, but the heat seemed to linger in the streets, and it made throats scratchy and tempers sore. I saw more fights break out in my wine shop; I saw men clustering on street corners stabbing fingers at the air as they argued some point that I never heard because such conversations fell silent whenever I passed. Years ago when rebellion had roiled across Cyrene and Cyprus, Mirah had said that Romans looked at her with distrustful eyes and flung mud at her in the market. These days the Jews flung mud at me when my back was turned, at the man who still looked like a Roman with his shaved chin and his
gladius
, and I didn’t like to think what it meant.

I didn’t know how to present myself at the legion’s winter quarters, so I gave some muttered story about an old veteran’s petition and plunged between the orderly rows of barracks, breathing in the familiar smell of a legion: leather and metal, sweat and horse dung. I pressed through, looking for the
principia
that sat at the core of any legion’s camp, and then I threaded the lines of petitioners to the shrine at the far end. I stepped behind the screen and I stopped because she was waiting for me.

“Hello,” I said softly, and my hand rose of its own accord to caress her. The legion’s eagle, the most precious of her standards, a proud winged bird staring at me with fierce pride from her perch on the standard pole. “I carried you,” I told her, stroking the cool wings. “Do you remember your old aquilifer?”

Of course she didn’t. I’d carried this same eagle in my hands, and I still carried her in my heart, but she stared out proud and uncaring. I was infinitely replaceable, just one of many beneath the wings she spread across the Empire. She didn’t serve me; I served her—and the moment I’d heard the Tenth Fidelis was coming from the Parthian border to be stationed in Judaea, I’d yearned to see her again. Maybe I’d thought it would cure me. But she just gave me her arrogant stare, lovely and unforgiving, and my hand fell away from her proud head. I pushed out of the shrine with my eyes blurred, and that was when an unbelieving voice called my name.

“Vercingetorix?” Quick footsteps behind me, and I swiped a hasty hand across my eyes. “Vercingetorix the Red?”

“What?” I said, turning, and it came out in a growl.

“It
is
you, sir!” A centurion was coming toward me, a man with a broad dark face and an even broader grin. I fumbled for the name.

“Africanus?”

“That’s right.” To my surprise, he saluted. “You traded nearly a month’s pay to my centurion to get me into your century when you first made rank. The first thing you said to me was that I had a damned unoriginal name.”

“I did say that.” He’d been a muscled youth then; now he had to be a man of forty with gray in his hair. When had we all started going gray?

“I’m up for Primus Pilus soon,” he was saying proudly. “Like you, sir.”

“No need to call me
sir
. I’m no legion man anymore. No Praetorian, either.”

“We heard.” He gave a cheerful leer. “You couldn’t keep your hand out from under the Empress’s skirts, was that it?”

I gave my best centurion’s glower and was pleased to see him brace just a bit. “I’m just here to see the eagle, since she was near.”

“Then you’re still a legion man, sir. You should come to the barracks with me—there’s plenty who remember you!”

“I haven’t set foot on Tenth territory in more than fifteen years.”

He looked at me quizzically. “You made the jump from legionary to aquilifer,” he said as if explaining to an idiot. “Then centurion, then Primus Pilus, and then you’d have commanded the legion. Every boy who joins the Tenth Fidelis knows your name. ‘Vercingetorix the Red, the man who made it all the way from the ranks to the commander’s tent.’ They invoke you in their prayers, hoping for your luck.”

“Tell them they don’t want my luck,” I managed to say through my astonishment. “I never got the legion, did I?”

“You’d have had it if Trajan lived, bless his name.” Africanus shrugged. “You know we still train with gladiator drills, not just your old century but all of them? And the Emperor approved the use of Parthian drill instructors the way you were always pestering about, and there’s a regulation manual—”

My lips were stiff. “There is?”

He dragged me off with him, and there
were
men here who remembered my name, and boys who hadn’t been born when I left the Tenth but still looked at me as though they’d expected me to be eight feet tall. They begged for stories of my old fights, and asked about Judaea: “Is it true they cut the cocks off their baby boys? The Emperor says he’ll put a stop to that—”

“Good luck.” I thought of Mirah’s firebrand cousins. “And they don’t cut the cocks off, they just take a slash at the skin—”

“I’ve heard things are tense here,” Africanus said more seriously. “I’ve got a cousin somewhere in the Tenth Fratensis, and he says things are getting hot around Jerusalem’s ruins.”

“When is Jerusalem anything but hot?” I thought of the men who quarreled on the street corners in Bethar, and shivered.

I was borne off to the bathhouse where the steam and the sweat loosened tongues and the men asked what Empress Sabina was like under her skirts. “We’ve got a statue of her with the Emperor’s in the
principia
, and if she’s that stiff and stony in a bedroll—”

“She’s not.”

“Then what’s she like?”

“Limber,” I said, and there was lewd jeering. None for Hadrian, though. “The Emperor will review us when he comes back from Greece,” Africanus said. “And he’ll not find us lacking. You should hear what the Third Augusta said of him; everything investigated down to the last tent. He wasn’t too proud to sleep and eat the way the legionaries did, either—”