Lady of the Eternal City (35 page)

Egypt. They approached it by the coastal road, from Gaza to Pelusium lying fortified and remote between the marshes of the Nile and the lapping blue waters of the sea. Shining Alexandria, the famous lighthouse piercing the blue dome of summer sky, the natives cheering their Emperor so wildly that Antinous was deafened for hours after. “Of course they cheer,” Lucius Ceionius said. “The Emperor here is not only emperor but Pharaoh. Pharaoh and God!”

“What do they call the great-nephew of a pharaoh?” Pedanius Fuscus wanted to know. He’d joined the party at Alexandria in a toga so new and stiff it almost creaked, edging up to Hadrian whenever he saw a chance. “Does a pharaoh’s great-nephew get to be a god as well?” the young man asked hopefully.

“He at least gets a statue,” Hadrian said, looking tolerant. There
had
been a statue to Pedanius Fuscus erected in Greece, Antinous remembered, a handsome marble boy carved optimistically to look like a young emperor. In the flesh he was no boy but a young man, burly and charming with a self-deprecating smile. “I suppose I should not hold it against him that I dislike his grandfather,” Hadrian had said, raising a brow over the latest nagging letter from Servianus. “The lad seems intelligent enough. Perhaps he will make a suitable heir, after all.”

“I don’t like Pedanius Fuscus,” Antinous confessed, not to Hadrian but to Vix. Safe topics of conversation had to be saved up for those precious hours in the evening when he would leave Hadrian to his work or perhaps depart a banquet early, and go share a quiet cup of wine with his father in the Praetorian barracks. He’d have rather talked about Hadrian, about Empress Sabina, the people most important in his life, but his father could not hear either name without looking shuttered, and Antinous learned to speak of others. Pedanius Fuscus was a safe subject. “Mind you, he was only a boy when I saw him last. But he was trying to beat Titus Aurelius’s daughter into a pulp.”

“What?” Vix lowered his cup, scowling. “That little bastard!”

“I wouldn’t say he succeeded. She was going at him like a clawing whirlwind.” How old would little Annia be by now? Twelve, thirteen? “I suppose it prejudices me against him. Still, not all bullies grow up bad.”

“I was a bully when I was young,” Vix admitted. “My father had to beat me to a pulp a few times before that lesson sank in.”

“You never beat me to a pulp.”

“Never had to, never wanted to.”

“Maybe once,” Antinous said lightly, deliberately.

Vix looked away to stroke the black dog’s ears. “Do you know if the Emperor plans to go back to Judaea?” The kind of abrupt change of conversation that happened if Antinous made even an oblique mention of Hadrian.
Gently does it
, Antinous thought, letting himself be steered to the rebuilding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina and how the Jews were in uproar over the idea of having a temple of Jupiter built over their own altars. More safe subjects. He had learned not to nag Hadrian if he wanted to make his point—just talk mildly around the edge of the matter until things sank in. His father was just the same.

More time
, Antinous prayed.
Give me more time.
Because his father wasn’t happy in Judaea, no matter how much he talked of his wine shop and of Judaea’s unrest. He looked uneasy and somehow shamed when he spoke of those things—Antinous saw it every time.
Don’t be in a rush to go back. Just give me time.

Canopus next. The long stretch of water that Hadrian at once swore to re-create at his villa, here illuminated at night till it sparkled. The waterway was crowded by little gliding pleasure crafts bright with gilding and curtained with silk. Hadrian’s small barge lay moored beside the jetty, and the Emperor lounged on a pile of cushions, half-dozing against Antinous’s shoulder. Sabina sat cross-legged on Hadrian’s other side, perusing a scroll. “It promises to teach me to read hieroglyphs.” She frowned. “I have my doubts . . .”

“Do you mean to go back to Judaea, Caesar?” Antinous was asking. Vix’s questions recently had made him curious. “After Egypt?”

“Why should I?” Hadrian’s eyes were still closed. “I have achieved everything there I meant to. And there is no reason to go for pleasure, considering the province has nothing to offer but hot wind and stubborn people.”

“We might see the rebuilding of Aelia Capitolina, Caesar.” Vix had mentioned how much opposition there was to the city’s new name. “Maybe let it stay named Jerusalem?” Antinous suggested.

“A gesture of goodwill, eh?”

Sabina frowned at her hieroglyphic scroll, turning it upside-down. “This is utterly useless. I can’t even tell which way the characters
go
 . . .”

“I’d rather talk about Cyrenaica than Judaea.” Hadrian waved a hand sleepily. “Did you hear there’s a huge lion ravaging the country there? We could mount a hunt, my Osiris.” He’d taken to calling Antinous his Osiris as well as his star, after the reborn god of the ancients.

“I would very much like to see you hunt a lion, Great-Uncle,” Pedanius interjected. He’d been trying his best to cuddle up to one of the half-naked Egyptian courtesans, but Lucius Ceionius had floated past on his own pleasure craft and the girl took one look at his aquiline profile and hopped lithely from one boat to the other. “My grandfather says I throw a hunting spear almost as well as Caesar himself,” the Emperor’s great-nephew persisted, but Antinous put a finger to his lips, silencing him. The Emperor had dozed off.

“Let him sleep.” Antinous stroked the Emperor’s hair. “He stays up half the night working; he may as well doze when he can.”

“Of course.” Pedanius did his best to be polite to Antinous, but his gaze always slid away quickly. “Will you have me fetched when Caesar wakes, Aunt?” he asked Sabina. She was his great-aunt, at least by marriage, but he always called her aunt. Possibly to make the Imperial tie sound closer; possibly because he thought no woman wanted to be called Great-Anything. “I have so little chance to make an impression on him. Perhaps you might speak to him about letting me come on that lion hunt . . .”

“Perhaps.” Sabina looked amused as Pedanius went clambering out of the little pleasure craft. “Probably looking for another courtesan,” she said to Antinous. “Shall we wish him better luck? He seems a nice boy. He’s polite to you, which makes me think better of him.”

Polite to me when you or the Emperor watches
, Antinous thought. But it was not his place to disparage the Imperial family, so he dropped a kiss on Hadrian’s temple where the pulse beat fast even in sleep, and changed the subject. “Stay with him, Lady? I want to walk.”

Hadrian stirred but continued to doze as Antinous slid free, and Sabina tugged the Emperor’s slumbering head down on her own shoulder instead. Antinous meandered up the jetty, taking no particular course, just looking at the stars overhead and the warm glow of lamplight reflecting on the Canopus waterway.
Beautiful
, Antinous thought, and wondered why he felt melancholy. Egypt was everything he had been promised, a place of magic and healing. He had his father with him, and he had Hadrian; he was
happy
.

The gods are jealous of happiness
, Antinous thought.
So they send melancholy thoughts and dark dreams.
It was something to be borne, that was all. Payment for bliss.

“Feeling wistful, boy?”

He thought for a moment it was Vix, because his father called him
boy
when he was teasing, but Vix never drawled like that. Antinous turned to see Lucius Ceionius lounging against a pillar, all in matching shades of green tonight with a synthesis of sage-dyed silk and jade bracelets with slave girls in matching jade beads. “I thought you had a courtesan to entertain, Lucius.”

“A pretty girl, but dull. I prefer women of intelligence as well as loveliness, and such are few.” Lucius joined him with a languid look out toward the Emperor’s barge. “You seem on cozy terms with Empress Sabina, young Osiris. What can I say to get her into my arms? I swear, the woman is impervious.”

“You live dangerously.” Antinous laughed. “The Emperor’s wife—”

“A collector of beauty must be willing to take risks.” A sigh. “She is older than I, but she carries it with
such
elegance . . .”

“Give up,” Antinous advised. “Because I’m afraid she won’t have you.”

“What a blow to one’s confidence.” Lucius shrugged, not looking too heartbroken. “Well, at least you’re honest. I shall be honest in turn, Antinous.”

His attention sharpened. “Do you want to tell me I am a disgrace, a he-whore, a blot upon the morals of the Empire? Believe me”—a smile of steel-edged pleasantness—“I have heard it all before.”

“Not at all.” The kohl-lined eyes crinkled. “I don’t care if the Emperor is mounting you. You’re lovely to look at, even to someone like me who doesn’t care for male flesh, and you’re more intelligent than people think. You’re even rather good for that uncertain Imperial temper of his. But how old are you—twenty?”

Antinous spoke tightly. “Twenty-four. What of it?”

“Ah . . . That’s worse than I thought, then. You look younger.” Giving a nod to the mop of curls Antinous had let grow long. “You were still a boy when you left Rome with the Emperor. On the edges, perhaps, but close enough to count. Not by the time we return to the Eternal City. If you think the disapproval was bad before, it’s nothing to what will be waiting when we return.”

“I am used to scorn—”

“Gods know you should be by now, but the scorn won’t be for you. It will be for the Emperor.” Lucius twisted a ring off his finger, admired it, decided it looked better on the other hand. “No one blamed him for humping a pretty boy, and if you were a slave or a native auxiliary or even a freedman, no one would care that you are twenty-four and still being fucked like a girl. But you’re a citizen, a free man of Rome. An emperor who debauches a grown freeborn citizen of Rome, no matter how far beneath him in birth . . .”

Antinous let his voice grow cold. “There have always been men who formed bonds like ours.”

“But not emperors. Emperors must uphold the moral principles of Rome, or at least the important ones. We don’t hold a great deal sacred in the Eternal City, but the dignity of every free Roman is something we
do
take seriously.”

“No one will dare mock the Emperor—”

“Not to his face. But behind his back, he will be denounced as a despoiler of Rome’s sacred morals. That’s how rumors against Nero and Caligula and Domitian started, you know. No one cared if they killed slaves or passed laws that made no sense. The denunciations started when they began either killing fellow senators or openly debauching Rome’s morals. Emperor Hadrian seems to have reconsidered the wisdom of executing men of the Senate House, considering he hasn’t done it for years, but the second?”

Nero. Domitian. Caligula.
Emperors who had ended their days dead on the tiles, blood splashed around them.
Sweet gods, no. Anything but that.
Antinous had always assumed that the burden of shame and humiliation lay on his shoulders alone—not on Hadrian’s. Never that.

But now horror curled through his stomach with cold claws. Death: death in the dark at Eleusis, near-death on the mountaintop. Could death be waiting not in the dangers of the east, not in Hadrian’s unpredictable health, but in
Rome
? In the Eternal City, at the end of a knife?

“Enjoy your travels,” Lucius said, and seemed to mean it. “Things are different in the east, aren’t they? I enjoy the freedom, and so should you. Because when we all return to Rome, the Emperor—for his own good, whether he knows it or not—will have to give you up.”

ANNIA

Rome

Evil worked better in the dark of the moon, everybody knew that. Annia waited, watching the moon shrink, and at last the night came when the house was asleep and she could sneak from her bed into the moonless gardens.

The voice called softly from the atrium behind her. “Where are you going?”

Annia turned around. “Marcus, go
away
.”

He came out from behind a pillar, dressed in a night tunic as she was, his hair rumpled. He was staying with them for a time; his dreary mother fancied herself ill again. “What are you doing awake?”

“What are
you
doing awake?” she countered.

“I’m an owl.”

“You’re an owl?”

“I’m always awake in the night. It’s a fault, really. People should be larks, rising and falling with the sun, but as soon as I go to bed I’m just lying there awake, thinking. So I come out and look at the stars, and imagine I’m running with them.” He pointed at the bundle in her hands. “What’s that?”

“Nothing. I’m just going out to the garden for a moment.”

“Even on her own grounds, a woman should be properly attended so nothing can befall either her, or her reputation.” He came to her side. “What are you doing?”

“Working a curse. Are you satisfied?” She flung it at him. “I’ve made a curse tablet, like Empress Sabina did once. And to seal a curse tablet, you have to drive a nail through the lead and either bury it or throw it in a spring. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to work some dark magic and then go back to bed.”

She stamped off toward the
nymphaeum
at the end of the garden where there was a spring, choking back the hot tears that came to her eyes. The tears kept coming lately, but she refused to let them fall.
I’m not wasting one drop of salt on Brine-Face
, she thought viciously, and kicked a stone out of her way.

She hadn’t been able to stop
thinking
of him, though. She couldn’t stop herself from brooding, going over it all in her mind, bitterly calculating what she should have done different. Maybe the curse tablet would settle that.

Marcus fell in beside her. “Go away,” Annia said, and dashed at her eyes.

“No,” he said, and stumbled in the dark. “Who did Empress Sabina work a curse tablet on?”

“The old Empress. It worked, too.” Maybe Aunt Sabina had some barbarian in her too, just like Annia. The part of you that wasn’t content to let an enemy go, but instead had to make him
pay
.