Lady of the Eternal City (30 page)

No condemnation in their voices; no contempt for the man who had followed Trajan. They were a fit and sun-bronzed lot, clearly busy and content, and my heart ached. “Hadrian’s a bastard,” I said harshly, but they just shrugged.

“You screwed his wife. Sure, he’s got a pretty boy he’s buggering, but you can’t expect an emperor to look the other way when you shaft his wife, can you?”

I stiffened, but if anyone remembered the little boy who had trotted after me on the Parthian campaigns, they didn’t connect him with the Emperor’s favorite.

I rode back to Bethar on a tide of rude jokes and good wishes. When I approached with my wine-heavy head and my eagle-heavy heart, I saw Simon in the doorway, and I glowered.

“So Mirah told you I went to see the Tenth? You should have come with me. I
asked
you to when they first arrived, and you spat on the ground!”

“My niece,” he said, “didn’t tell me anything. But she’s been crying, and normally that means you’ve been an ass.”

I was sore, snappish, and snarling, in no mood to be scolded. “I know you never wanted me to marry Mirah,” I snarled. “Hard to watch your favorite niece marry a man you used to whore with in your legion days; I understand that. But you don’t care to remember your legion days, Simon ben Cosiba, so I’ll be damned if I’ll have them held against
me
. Because I love your niece. I came here for her, and I’ve
stayed
here for her, and bugger you to Hades and gone if you spit at me. Because if it weren’t for Mirah, I’d take my swords and go back to the Tenth Fidelis in a heartbeat.”

His voice was quiet. “Would you?”

“I’m not like you, Simon. I’m not anything but a soldier. I never was.” My eyes stung, remembering the gleam of the eagle, the smell of the legion, the rough laughter and the familiar cameraderie. “Hell’s gates, but I miss it.”

He turned to go. “Maybe you don’t have to miss it.”

“The legion?”

“No. Being a soldier.”

I barked out a bitter laugh. “What exactly do you propose I do?”

“You could still fight, Vix.” Simon glanced over his shoulder, eyes gleaming dark in his bearded face, and once again he reminded me oddly of Hadrian. “Just not for Rome.”

ANTINOUS

A.D. 128, Autumn
Eleusis

“Well, my star?” The smile in Hadrian’s voice came clearly through the blackness of Antinous’s closed eyes. “What did the
kykeon
show you this time?”

Antinous opened his eyes to the light of dawn. His head rested in the Emperor’s lap, his lashes were tear-wet, and his mouth held a foul taste. He saw the massive tangling branches overhead of the oak tree—the same oak where he and Hadrian had lain together that first time at Eleusis. “Nothing,” he said slowly. “I saw . . . nothing.”

“No starry visions?” Hadrian stroked a hand through Antinous’s hair.

“No.” Antinous tried to swallow the sour taste on his tongue. Every muscle in his body hurt. “What did you see?”

“No terrors,” the Emperor said softly. “Just your face.”

I was the one to see terrors
, Antinous thought, and his stomach roiled. How could that be? As soon as they had come to Athens for the winter, he had been every bit as eager as the Emperor to take the rites at Eleusis again. They had linked hands through the long night walks, washed each other’s hair in the sea, and Antinous had exploded in laughter watching the Emperor try to hold his sacrificial piglet still. They had found the oak that was their tree, drunk the
kykeon
out of a single cup, and Antinous had swallowed eagerly, ready for that soul-widening bliss he remembered so well.

But this time there had been no starry void. There had been nothing but—blankness.

“Well, we can’t catch the mind of the gods every time.” Hadrian shifted Antinous’s head off his lap with a kiss, already rising to return to the temple. “Better to dream of nothing than to dream of monstrous faces!”

No. Nothing was not
nothing
.
The nothing had been darkness; lonely, swirling, lightless emptiness. Far more terrifying than any loom of monstrous faces. Antinous sat up, squeezing his eyes shut, and it was there again, black and implacable, pressing in from all sides—

Panic roared inside him, fast as a flame. He gagged, vomiting on hands and knees into the dry grass.
Get out of me
, he thought, his stomach jerking and heaving, and he did not know if he meant the darkness or the
kykeon
that had caused it.
Sweet gods, get out of me!

“Easy.” Hadrian steadied him, an arm about his shoulders. “You’re shaking,” he exclaimed, and pressed a hand to Antinous’s cheek. “And you’re ice-cold—”

“I fear I have seen the future.” Antinous sat back on his heels, gasping as though he had sprinted a mile. His stomach still roiled, nauseated and voided, and his eyes burned. He didn’t want to blink. If his eyes closed even for a flash, the black could rush back in. “I have seen the future, and it is a dark one.”

He feared the Emperor would blanch—gods knew, Hadrian was superstitious; he’d study star charts and seek out strange rituals and buy magic charms from the east to test if they worked. But he tended to choose the omens he wanted to believe and those he did not, and this morning he was evidently in too good a humor to want it spoiled by darkness of any kind. “My moody star, don’t borrow trouble!” Hadrian pulled Antinous’s head against his chest, sounding fond. “It was just a dream.”

Antinous burrowed into the Emperor’s shoulder, trying to slow his racing heart. “You’re right,” he managed to say. “Just a dream.” A dream brought on by a cup of pennyroyal and barley and strange herbs.

But he could not shake his foreboding, not for the rest of the rites at Eleusis, not for the serene winter they spent in Greece, not in the spring when they moved on to Ephesus. He would wake in the night under the comforting weight of Hadrian’s arm and see swirling black.
The future
, he would think.
The future is empty.

And then he would think, with increasing dread,
Whose future?

He did not get his answer until summer, when Hadrian took them all to Antioch and set his sights at once on the great flat peak rearing up to the southern horizon. “I always meant to climb Mount Casius. To make sacrifice to Jupiter at the temple, during the sunrise hour when the sun shows itself only to the mountain’s peak . . .”

“Oh, gods,” Sabina had whispered to Antinous. “We’re going up the mountain at dawn, aren’t we?”

“We are,” Antinous sighed. A dawn hike up a steep mountain—just the thing for a man with a tendency to fevers and joints that swelled!

But Hadrian was breathing easily enough at the summit, gazing out over the mountain’s peak into the rolling gray mass of cloud. “One could see Jupiter himself from these heights!”

Antinous looked at the Imperial entourage panting and staggering up the mountain track behind them in the cool predawn darkness. “I think you killed your court.”

“That is merely a bonus,” Hadrian said, and they both laughed.

All across the barren stone outcroppings of the summit, Hadrian’s courtiers were flinging themselves down. Empress Sabina was still on her feet, however, and Antinous came to offer her a water skin. She tipped it gratefully over the back of her neck, flushed rosy as a girl. “I used to be able to march at legion pace and never fall behind,” she complained. “I’ve grown soft and useless!”

“Not useless, Lady.” He smiled. “Beautiful.”

“Flatterer.” She put her hands to her back and stretched, lithe as a cat. “Good to see you smile, Antinous. You’ve been too solemn since the Mysteries.”

His smile vanished, and he looked out at the swirling mass of clouds wrapping the peak.
Gray
, he told himself.
Not black.
It was no premonition; it was just cloud.

“Caesar!” A white-robed priest descended from the peak-roofed temple crowning the mountain’s flat summit, and a flower-crowned bull had already been prepared, pawing at the stone. The rest of the Imperial entourage hastened into place as Hadrian strode forward, and Antinous heard a distant rumble of thunder as the priest effused. “—surely Caesar will strike a coin to commemorate his visit to our temple? Naturally we will erect a statue—”

“And another to our divine Empress,” Antinous heard Lucius Ceionius proclaim. “Artemis, lady of the wild, as you were proclaimed in Aigeae! Carved as you stand here, I think.”

“What, sweating and rumpled?” Sabina gave a low-voiced laugh, as Hadrian waved a hand in acceptance of the priest’s flattery.

“Dewy and glorious,” Lucius corrected. “Far above petty mortal women who would fuss over such things as dust and blood. I can see you, ice-white Phrygian marble with a moonstone diadem upon your brow. I would dress myself as Apollo to match you, gold glory to your silver allure . . .”

Amusement pierced Antinous’s formless foreboding for a moment, and he leaned down to murmur in the Empress’s ear. “Lucius is trying to seduce you.”

“Since Eleusis,” she agreed. “Very flattering at my age. Though one has to wonder if he has gone mad. Does he forget what happened to the last men accused of being too
informal
with me?”

“Perhaps the Emperor might be persuaded to look the other way?” Antinous said lightly, though he knew it unlikely.
I’m not sure he would allow that even if I were the one to ask it. Which is a pity, because I think you need a lover, Lady.

The Empress looked at him as though she knew what he was thinking. “Do you see me filling my bed with a man who theme-costumes his slaves and thinks the two finest things in life are beautiful clothes and other men’s wives?”

“He might make you laugh.” Antinous rather liked Lucius, for all his vanities.
He’ll actually
speak
with me, without looking down his nose or sneering.
“And he’s right about one thing, Lady—you would make a very fine Artemis. Wild and laughing and always out of men’s reach.”

Hadrian’s voice interrupted the priest, who was droning over the bull with its wreath of blossoms. “Shouldn’t we wait?” he demanded, eyes scanning the heaped dark clouds that still wrapped the mountain in near-night. “Surely the sacrifice must take place at the moment of dawn, when the temple is touched with the first rays of the sun—”

“I assure Caesar that it
is
dawn.” The priest sounded nervous that he could not sweep the thunderheads away at the Emperor’s command. “The clouds but hide the light of the sun.”

He began his chanting again, raising the sacrificial knife, and it all happened so quickly. A final peal of thunder, shockingly loud overhead—Sabina flung her hands over her head, crying out, but her cry was drowned in the great spine-ripping
crack
from the heavens, as a jagged shaft of blue-white light lanced from the clouds and struck.

Antinous opened his eyes to a vista of swirling black cloud overhead, his ears ringing like anvils.
This
, he thought in a moment’s disjointed panic, and tasted
kykeon
sour and seductive on his tongue.
This is what I saw. Swirling dark and swirling fear—

The Empress’s voice broke through the ringing of his ears, then. Her voice, raised in fear as he had never heard it in his life. “Hadrian!
Caesar!
”

Terror swept Antinous.
Hadrian
, he thought,
sweet gods, no, no
—and then the words were gone and there was nothing in his skull but a huge reverberating scream. He stumbled to his feet, everything in his vision lined by a nimbus of jerky light as though still limned in the moment when he’d seen the lightning strike—but even that strange jerkiness could not hide the horror of what he saw: the sacrificial bull lying stone dead upon the sacred rock, its garland of flowers gone stiff as its legs.

And Hadrian flat on his back beside it, staring eyes gazing at the churning sky.

No.
No, it could not be this—it could not be death at dawn, darkness claiming his light. That could not be what the vision at Eleusis meant.
My future
, he had thought.
It was
my
future, not Hadrian’s!

Antinous realized he was shouting the Emperor’s name as he crashed to his knees beside the limp form. Sabina was already there, shaking Hadrian’s big shoulder—she looked up, trying to raise her voice, but he could hear nothing, feel nothing but his own terror.
No, no, not him
—still howling Hadrian’s name, as thunder rolled through the heavens and the lightning played and flashed like a mad god’s smiles.

“Antinous!”
Sabina’s hand cracked across his cheek, cutting him off mid-shout. He stared at her, chest heaving, still tasting the deadly promise of the
kykeon
.

“Antinous, stop.” The Empress’s voice came quiet. “Don’t you see? He lives.”

Antinous heard his own voice come in a cracked whisper. “He lives?” Hope burst in his chest as violent as a sun being born, and he looked from Sabina’s face to Hadrian’s.

Take my life
, Antinous offered the uncaring gods, looking at that beloved, bearded face.
Take my life if you require a sacrifice—but spare his.

Hadrian’s chest rose—fell—rose again. Antinous’s own chest hitched violently. Hadrian’s eyes fluttered in a slow blink, coming into focus. His lips moved, and Antinous knew the words.
My star.

He let his head drop against the Emperor’s chest in a silent gasp, as Hadrian began to laugh. He clasped the back of Antinous’s neck, sitting up, and Antinous felt the press of lips against his hair. He stayed where he was, on his knees on the bare rock, as Hadrian bounded to his feet still laughing.
You live
, he thought numbly.
You live.
He felt as though the heart had been torn from his chest and then stuffed roughly back in.

The priest and the rest of the court began to fuss then, but Hadrian brushed them all away. His eyes sparkled, and he spread his arms to the heavens.

“Hadrian Caesar salutes you!” he called to the gods, “Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain—” and as though in answer, thunder rolled again and the rain began to fall in sheets.

SABINA

The ringing in Sabina’s ears had more or less faded away by the time she came from her private baths at the palace in Antioch. Her maid was waiting with a clean bath drape, looking worried. “Don’t worry, the lightning didn’t strike
me
.” The girl smiled back; a little African no more than eleven whom Sabina had spotted when she came to watch the mud-brick walls rise. The girl had been trailing an engineer, half-starved and beaten and wearing the saffron robe of a whore, but she had something of Annia’s defiance in her chin. Sabina claimed the girl and, when the engineer protested, gave the order that he be flogged for so misusing his property. Hadrian had looked exasperated, but with a glance at Antinous’s watching face he said, “The Empress may please herself. The women of Rome are hers to govern, as the men are mine.”

He
has
changed
, she thought. And gave a prayer of thanks to the listening gods that he was not dead—not killed in the shaft of lightning like the bull. What would Rome be without Publius Aelius Hadrian?

That thought chilled her bones. He had no named heir. If that lightning had taken his life, the throne would be empty, Sabina widowed and irrelevant, Antinous’s heart shattered in pieces . . . And very likely, the Empire in chaos.
Hadrian Caesar, bringer of rain
, she thought.
More like the bringer of peace.

Long may he live to keep bringing it.

“Antinous,” she said as she came into the atrium outside. “I thought you would be with the Emperor.”

“He’s bathing.” Antinous sat at a marble bench, hands hanging between his knees. “In great high spirits.”

“Well,” Sabina acknowledged, still toweling off her damp hair. “It was a rather dramatic morning. You will not be surprised to hear that Lucius Ceionius plans a costume of storm gray with his slave girls dressed to match as rain clouds.”

She expected Antinous to laugh, perhaps tease again about Lucius trying to seduce her, but he didn’t even look up. “Do you count it as a good omen, Lady? The lightning striking so close to our Emperor as he makes sacrifice to the thunder god?”