Lady of the Eternal City (3 page)

Hadrian’s gaze lingered a moment longer, and the whole room seemed to hold its breath.

“Well, if it is the Senate’s decree that these men should die,” Hadrian shrugged, “who am I to argue?”

Sabina’s breath froze. A shiver went through the whole room. Hadrian’s gaze passed over the rows of heads, and she saw a faint smile on his bearded lips.

“Execute them.”

Titus bowed his head then, inhaling a deep, slow breath. Vix looked like he had turned to stone. One of the other condemned men let out a cry, and the silence in the atrium broke. Vix’s fellow Praetorians shouldered forward to seize shackled wrists; the noise was rising, murmurs and cries mounting from the watching senators. Hadrian looked pleased at the commotion, one hand still toying with his dog’s floppy ear. Sabina knew if the prisoners began to scream, it would all slip away from her.

Quickly now, just as you planned.

She threaded away from Hadrian’s side, making for her sister. She linked an arm through Faustina’s and brought her forward, toward the Emperor’s chair. “Look as beseeching as you can,” she murmured. “And keep the baby from crying.” Faustina was rigid, her eyes screaming horror, but she nodded and tucked the baby’s soft head closer against her shoulder.

“Caesar,” Sabina said, speaking to pierce the din. “I beg a boon for my brother-in-law, Titus Aurelius. He has never seen his own daughter—surely you would allow him a farewell with your
niece
?” Underlining that last word. “Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger—had she been a boy, my brother-in-law would have named him in your honor.”

Hadrian frowned, but Vix’s hand snapped out and halted the Praetorians who held Titus by the arms. Sabina gave him a flash of her eyes in thanks as she brought Faustina to Titus’s side, turning with a swift gesture so everyone could see the picture they made: the poignant little family with their heads humbly bowed for an emperor’s mercy. Sabina could see the court ripple at the sight. Hadrian had insisted on an audience for this show of casual terror; well, she would use it.

“Your brother-in-law”—Sabina emphasized the
your
—“will obey the Emperor’s wishes in all things, Caesar. Even to the matter of offering his life. I do hope you will grant this small boon.”

Hadrian studied Titus a moment, and then his smile burst out like sunshine. Such a genuine smile, no one in its light could be anything but warmed. “Indeed,” he said, and rose to clap Titus upon the shoulder. “Brother-in-law! Congratulations upon your marriage to my wife’s sister. I had quite forgotten.”

Lie
, Sabina thought. Hadrian forgot nothing.

“The Senate has been hasty indeed, in condemning
you
,” Hadrian said. “Overhasty. Perhaps I should refuse them their way in this, eh?”

“Family is so important,” Sabina murmured, and refused to recoil as Hadrian’s gaze snapped to her.
Do not blink
, she thought, staring back at him, and felt sweat begin to roll down her spine.
Do not blink, and show no fear.

Faustina was quick to sink to her knees, looking graceful even with a squirming baby in arms. Titus followed suit, but he kept his gaze steady on the Emperor.

“You,” Hadrian said at last, carelessly, “I will spare. Rise, Titus Aurelius.”

Titus bent his head, perhaps to hide the tears Sabina saw spring to his eyes, and kissed the Imperial ring. There was an audible rustle through the atrium. Vix’s hand rose again, signaling his Praetorians, and he strode from the atrium with a hard face as the other four men in their shackles were dragged after him. The old general strode out with his head high, but one of the ex-consuls collapsed shaking and babbling and had to be hauled along by the elbows, his fingers twisted from the doorjamb with a snapping sound that echoed in Sabina’s ears like cracks of thunder.

But only four men would die today. Not five. And the man who had been spared was one of the wealthiest in Rome, as well as one of the best-liked. “Caesar is merciful,” Titus said as he rose, and Sabina heard only the faintest quiver in his voice.

“Caesar is always merciful,” the Emperor continued in the same affable tone.

Tell that to the four men you just sent to their deaths
, Sabina thought.

“Besides,” Hadrian continued to Titus just as affably, dropping his voice so only those nearest could hear, “if you prove inconvenient we can always execute you later. Do feel free to go, and acquaint yourself with my niece elsewhere. The sound of fretting children annoys me.”

He turned his back on Faustina’s wax-white face and Titus’s inaudible swallow, snapping his fingers for his stewards, his secretaries, his freedmen and attendants. “The meeting with the Arvals next? Yes, and the Senate tomorrow. After that . . .” He began flipping between the pile of wax tablets in a secretary’s arms; Sabina glanced at her sister and saw them retreat through the atrium without ceremony. “Quite a full calendar for the next month. Gladiatorial games . . . festivals . . . donatives . . . Really, why must an emperor’s early years be entirely taken up with public addresses and trivia?”

A few hours back in Rome, Sabina thought, and he was already bored with it. Travel had always been where her husband’s heart lay.
Perhaps I should encourage that.
Troublesome husbands were better kept occupied. Surely that went double for troublesome and occasionally murderous husbands. Sabina spared another glance behind her and saw a final flash of Faustina’s blue skirts. They were gone, all three of them, baby Annia’s angry cries fading to safety, and Sabina’s heart contracted violently and then began to beat again. Four men would die this day, and she grieved for them. But not her sister’s husband. Not her oldest friend.

I could not save them all.

“Caesar.” Vix had returned in his lion skin and his cuirass and his steel-gray gaze. “Are the condemned to be given the opportunity to take their own lives?”

“They are not.” The Emperor’s eyes lifted from his wax tablets. “Behead them.”

Vix did not move.

“Bring me their heads,” the Emperor said. “No less than an hour.”

“Four’s a good many necks, Caesar,” Vix said. “Can I have a day?”

Sabina felt a wild urge to laugh. Vix usually had that effect, making her laugh when she should have been weeping or weep when she should have been laughing. Maybe because he didn’t seem to know what fear was. Where other men faltered, Vix just went bashing on through, generally with that same contemptuous show of teeth he gave Hadrian now, his russet head thrown back and his scarred arms crossed over his breastplate.

Hadrian looked meditative. “Maybe I require five heads after all, not just four. I could add yours to the pile, Vercingetorix. No one who squawked at the execution of my brother-in-law would quibble at the addition of an ill-tempered, ill-bred guard.”

Vix’s grin disappeared. “Caesar,” he bit out, clipping the honorific off like an insult—and Sabina stepped forward fast, laying a hand on Hadrian’s sleeve.

“My dear,” she drawled. “Does it suit an emperor’s dignity, trading threats with a guard?”

Vix gave her a contemptuous glance. Hadrian considered her for a moment as well, and Sabina felt pinioned between two broad walls: two tall men vibrating with tension as though they might fly clawing at each other and crush her between them.

Hadrian’s gaze passed over Sabina’s head, meeting Vix’s eyes again. “Four heads,” he said, and his eyes had a blank, anticipatory shine. “One hour. Vibia Sabina, come with me.”

She felt the spike of ice through her throat again, but laid her fingers over his. “Of course.” His flesh had a stone coolness, as though the skin were only a thin coating over granite. She had forgotten it, that cold touch of his. He might have been absent from Rome only a year, but they had not touched flesh against flesh in far longer than that.

Hadrian led her a step or two across the atrium, away from Vix, who had gone to his bloody duty, and toward the pool in the center of the room under the open roof. Others still clustered, Praetorians and freedmen, slaves and courtiers, but none within earshot—and the Emperor stopped, bringing her about to face him. “Do not try to maneuver me, Vibia Sabina.”

Sabina kept her voice bland. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“Yes. You maneuvered me into pardoning your brother-in-law, and you are now attempting to turn my temper away from Vercingetorix.”

“I was thinking of your safety,” she managed to say. “And mine. Vix may be a savage, and gods know he’s as dense as a brick, but he has a strong sword. I never particularly wanted to be Empress, Hadrian, but I have no intention of being sent off to Hades by some madman with a knife because I don’t have a good protector at my back.”

Hadrian smiled faintly. “How blunt you are.”

“You used to like that about me.”

“Did I?”

“You used to like a great many things about me.” There had never been love between them, even in the earliest days of cool-headed courtship, but there had once been friendship. Sabina still missed that old camaraderie, when her husband had been an eager world traveler with a thirst to see everything the Empire had to offer.

Hadrian began to walk again, idly circling the pool, his hard hand bringing Sabina with him by the elbow. It seemed an apt moment for a few honeyed words, so Sabina sweetened her voice. “Thank you for sparing my brother-in-law’s life. It was kindly done.”

“No. It was done for a purpose.” Hadrian spoke prosaically. “Execute four men, demonstrate ruthlessness. Spare one, demonstrate mercy.”

“You’d already decided to spare Titus?” Maybe her desperate little tableau with Faustina had been entirely unnecessary. She felt a moment’s anger at the thought—all the racking of her brain these past months, trying to think of a way to extricate him from his fate.

“I had decided to spare
one
of them,” Hadrian corrected. “Your brother-in-law, I thought, might be best. The death of the legionary commander sends a message to any of my other generals who may prove overambitious; the deaths of the consuls gut the Senate and tell them not to cross me. Titus is a dullard of no particular ambition, and he is family. I assumed you would trot out some little plea for his life, and I decided in advance to grant it.” Hadrian looked down at her: capricious, amused, merry-eyed, cold. “Had I wanted him dead, his head would be in a basket regardless of your pretty pleading.”

“I see.”

“I hope you do. Don’t attempt to manage me in future.”

Sabina laid her challenge down, not flung at his feet like Vix’s but gently unsheathed and offered hilt-first. “Then what is it you
do
require of me, husband?”

His eyes went over her, considering. “You look well, you know. Most Imperial.” His gaze lingered on the purple draperies, the very proper wig over her shorn head. “You say you have no great wish to be Empress, but now that you are, I suppose we
should
have a chat about that.”

“Let’s do,” Sabina said sweetly. “Difficult to stay within your lines if I don’t know where you have drawn them.”

Secretaries, chamberlains, senators hovered, impatient for a moment of the Emperor’s time, but Hadrian kept them at bay with a glance. “I am told you spent much of this past year sulking in the country.”

“Plotina was only too happy to shove me out of the way, so I stayed with my sister and her mother. Faustina had a difficult confinement.”

Hadrian brushed that aside. “Your place was at the palace. Not in seclusion.” He paused, and Sabina’s pulse leaped.
He suspects, dear gods, he knows . . .

Hadrian spoke. “Were you dallying with a lover?”

Sabina couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing. Slightly hysterical laughter, but Hadrian didn’t seem to hear that. He just lifted his eyebrows.

“I assure you,” Sabina managed to say at last, with utter truthfulness, “I was not dallying with any lover.” Very,
very
far from it.

“Then what?”

“I don’t like Rome, Hadrian, and I don’t like the former Empress either. Why is it such a mystery that I wished to avoid both?”

His lips twitched, and he began to walk again. “That is, perhaps, fair.”

Sabina breathed a little easier, moving along at his side. She’d always been an excellent liar, but Hadrian’s ear for deceit was honed like a hunting dog’s nose for blood. She had absolutely no desire to test his instincts in any lengthy discussion about what she
had
been doing the previous year. “As you wish.”

“What I wish, now that I am returned to Rome, is that you confine yourself to your new duties as Empress. Do not seek to advise me, manage me, or embarrass me. In the past you’ve shown a tendency for all three. I have been indulgent.” His voice was calm. “No more.”

“I see.” She spoke steadily. “Wear purple and be silent, is that it?”

“Be chaste, as well. You may have had a lover or two in the past—”

“Come, Hadrian. I’m no harlot, and I never was.” Outrage pricked Sabina’s throat as though she’d swallowed a thorn.
A handful of discreet and fully acknowledged dalliances outside a marriage we both knew from the beginning would have no passion in it; just a handful compared to your endless parade of bedmates, and now
I
am the bed-hopping whore?

“You have been both discreet and moderate in your bedmates,” Hadrian allowed. Generous of him. “But now you are an emperor’s wife, and discretion is not enough. You are a symbol of Rome’s virtue. I was willing to turn a blind eye in the past, but an emperor cannot be made a fool of. Do I make myself plain?”

No use asking if Hadrian meant to give up his own bedmates: the strapping young slaves and handsome soldiers with whom he stocked his bed. “You make yourself very plain indeed, husband.”

He looked annoyed at her coolness. “A touch of gratitude would be appreciated. After all, at least I do not require heirs of you. I know how we would both dislike that prospect.”

“Quite.” It
was
something to be grateful for. They had not shared a bed in years—Sabina had known from the beginning of their courtship that Hadrian preferred male flesh, and it had not troubled her in the slightest. Hadrian had his men and she had her liberty; it had left them free to be friends instead. But they were no longer friends; she no longer had her liberty—and he still had his men.