Lady of the Eternal City (37 page)

I was off my horse and unsheathing my dagger, pushing through the pack of yelping dogs, but I’d never get there fast enough. Never in this world. In one horrific flash I saw my son die under the lion’s claws, die as lion bait like a gladiator in the arena, like I should have died, oh God,
no
—

Antinous froze where he lay trapped, staring as his death came for him, wide-eyed as the little boy who had ridden my lion-furred shoulders. Another lion was coming for him now, claws raking, and I would never be there in time. But the scream that was just forming in my throat came roaring out of Hadrian instead.

I never saw a man make a leap like that in my life, the leap that the Emperor of Rome made as he vaulted off his horse very nearly over the stallion’s head, to land square on his feet between Antinous and the lion. Hadrian never stumbled, just cocked his arm, and I saw the muscles bunch clear across his back under his cloak as he hurled his second spear. The lion screamed again as the blade pierced its broad chest, and Hadrian was already flying forward, sword leaping from its scabbard. “
Caesar
—” Antinous shouted, not frozen anymore, trying to pull his leg free from the struggling horse, but Hadrian never looked back. He just slashed, opening another red wound across the lion’s huge shoulder, and another, and the lion batted him down with a rake of claws. He rolled, all purple cloak and dark curls and more blood unrolling across the packed earth like a royal carpet, and the Praetorians were muscling in, but the Emperor never looked at them either. He came up to one knee just as the lion flew at him, and somehow he was between those massive paws, letting out a lion’s roar of his own as he buried his
gladius
hilt-deep in the beast’s heart.

The lion collapsed atop the Emperor.

I was there a fraction of a heartbeat later, the guards a few steps behind me, all our frantic hands rolling the beast away. It was dying, the Emperor’s spear in its side still pulsing blood and the Emperor’s sword in its heart pulsing very little. Its eyes were dimming, its claws were still trying to find flesh to rend, but no one cared for the lion. The Emperor’s head lolled against my knee, loose, and my heart gave a great thump.
He’s dead
, I thought,
this time he’s dead
. And the shriek went up from one of the guards—“He’s dead!”—and I leaned closer to put my ear against his chest, feeling something wild and strange inside me that could have been hope. I put my head to the Emperor’s chest, and before I could hear anything I felt the whisper of his breath past my ear and felt another violent squeeze of my heart.

He lived.

But he doesn’t have to
, I thought. My hand with the dagger still clenched in it was under his head—all I had to do was rake it across the back of his neck, out of sight of the frantic Praetorians. They were shouting for cloaks, for physicians, for bandages—one small motion of my hand would never be noticed. The wound would look like a slash from the lion’s claws: Emperor Hadrian, struck down by a lion on a hunt. I could take my grieving son home with me, free from a madman’s clutches forever.

I could kill him
. I saw the slash in a heartbeat, felt exactly the degree of pressure the blade would need, how I could take off my cloak and slip it under the Emperor’s head as a cushion, and do it right then with the cloth hiding my dagger. “
God is just
,” Simon had told me.
“Serve Him, and He might even grant you the chance to kill Hadrian.”

Here it was. One stroke and I could save my son, kill a tyrant, and go home a hero to help liberate Judaea in the chaos of Rome’s falling. My son had fallen prey to the Emperor’s charm on one hunt—this hunt would see it done.

Full circle, indeed.

One stroke.

But—

But . . .

You saved my son
, I thought.
You saved my son when I could not.

“Hadrian,” a voice was screaming, “
Hadrian!
” And Antinous clawed his way past the guards, pushed them bodily aside, and fell on Hadrian’s broad chest. “No,” he was shouting, “no, not like this—”

I still could have done it. Half the Praetorians were trying to pull Antinous back, the rest were running for a physician, and no one was paying attention to me. I could still have done it.

But Hadrian’s eyes fluttered open, and they didn’t even see me. They were all for my son, one desperate glance, and when he saw Antinous’s face hovering over his own, I saw him squeeze his eyes shut, and I saw the tears that ran from the corners of his eyes into his hair. “Thank the gods,” he whispered, and he pushed himself unsteadily up to a sitting position. His neck, that strip of unarmored and vulnerable neck, glided away ghostlike from my hand, and he sat up to grab my son in a great bear hug. “My star,” he said unsteadily, “oh, my star—”

“I killed it!” a voice said triumphantly. “The lion, Great-Uncle, I finished it off!” Pedanius Fuscus, the Emperor’s great-nephew, standing over the lion, one foot posed carefully on its massive shoulder, his spear stabbed down into the beast’s throat. “It was still moving,” he explained, but no one was paying any attention to him. Antinous was sitting in the dust, tears running down his face.

“Caesar,” he said hoarsely. “You saved me—you shouldn’t have saved me, you—”

Hadrian rose, just as unsteady on his feet, and pulled my son up into his arms. They clung together, gripping each other tight, and I saw uncomfortable glances between the Praetorians and courtiers. I saw disgust, too, on more than one face. Young Pedanius Fuscus looked peevish, standing so artfully posed over the lion.

“Sweet gods, Caesar,” Antinous said, cradling the Emperor’s face in his hands. “Why did you jump in its way? It could have killed you—”

Hadrian’s voice was low, his mouth pressed against Antinous’s curls as he crushed my son against him. “I’d die in a lion’s mouth for you,” he murmured. “I’d die in its teeth and let the Empire burn after me, if it meant you lived.”

“No,” Antinous cried, and his eyes were wild. “That’s not how it works, I offered my life for
you
—”

“Shut up.” Such an expression on the Emperor’s face as he looked at my son: a relief so deep it bordered on agony. I knew that expression, because I’d worn it myself the day I’d thought Mirah lay crushed to death in the great earthquake of Antioch years ago. I’d thought her dead and then I’d heard her voice calling me, live and well. The relief had brought me to my knees with that same anguished look of joy Hadrian now wore.

Because I loved so deeply, and losing that love to death would have crushed me.

Hadrian and Antinous held each other for a long time after that, grappled chest against chest and still shaking, the lion dead beside them. And I watched them as my golden chance crumbled away, and with it all my hopes.

ANTINOUS

Egypt

“Now, this is absurd,” Hadrian said irritably. “Acclaimed in Carthage as a god because of a perfectly coincidental rainstorm—and here I am a
cursed
god because I cannot make the Nile rise?”

A chill ran through Antinous despite the heat that had collected under the canopy of the Imperial barge. “Don’t say that, Caesar—‘cursed.’”

“I
am
cursed,” Hadrian grumbled. “Cursed by Egyptian peasants who think I have merely to wave a hand, and then the river will rise and fertilize their wretched fields!”

“Give the Egyptians their superstitions, Caesar.” Empress Sabina sounded lazy, reclining with eyes closed on the next couch. “We Romans are no better, always peering at cow entrails to try to see Fate.”

“I gave the peasants here enough of a concession just delaying this trip up the Nile at all.” Hadrian glared about the deck of his gilded barge as if not pleased with the cushioned couches, the autumn breezes that flapped the striped silk canopy overhead, the green waters of the Nile slapping against the hull below. A far bigger craft than the little curtained vessel where they had floated in Canopus; almost a floating palace—but to Antinous it felt like a prison. Perhaps because in Canopus you could step off that little pleasure craft at any time. Here, all was at the mercy of the surrounding Nile, even the Emperor of Rome.

It gave Antinous the shivers, but he tried not to show it. He twined his fingers with Hadrian’s as the Emperor returned to his lapful of slates, stroking the swollen knuckles.
Ever since the lion hunt
, he thought—the swollen joints again, and those strange hardening pains returning to the flesh of his arms, and though Hadrian wouldn’t say he had a headache, he was rubbing at his temple with a frown. Antinous touched the line between his eyes to smooth it away, calling for cold barley water.

“Perhaps you should rest,” Empress Sabina said. Of course she had noticed the swollen fingers too, and the headache. But Hadrian only grunted, stylus tapping, and the Empress shrugged at Antinous as if to say,
We do what we can
.

I should do more
, Antinous thought. But he gave her a smile, lowering his lashes so she couldn’t see how the smile stopped short of his eyes.

The Empress stretched on her couch, propping her chin up for a look at the endless currents sliding past. In the barge’s wake, a whole array of secondary boats drifted along in a flotilla. “I love this river,” she observed. “Can we keep sailing forever?”

“It’s beautiful,” Antinous said honestly enough. The Nile seemed like a living thing, a green serpent sliding through the land, the ripples of the water almost lazy under the autumn sun, which still shimmered down with such fierce heat. It made for strange whimsical daydreams, but it made for black-fanged nightmares too, and Antinous hated this river no matter how beautiful it was. Because the dreamlike haze of heat and water, the blue lotuses and the liquid-eyed birds watching the barges slide past—they all hid danger. Look at a muddy log, and suddenly it blinked alien eyes and turned out to be a crocodile. Admire the innocent-looking hippopotamus fussing over her young in the shallows, and the guide from Alexandria laughed and said that the beast could sink their barge and everyone on it . . .

Danger here
, Antinous thought, and he tried to mock himself but the foreboding would not leave him. It sat in his bones, watching like the crocodiles. And why not? Twice Hadrian had narrowly dodged death—from a storm’s lightning, and from a lion’s claws.
What if there is a third time?

There would not be. Antinous told himself that fiercely. But he still wished they could leave this beautiful, treacherous river.

Lucius Ceionius was speaking, tickling the Empress’s ankles with a feather fan and saying something flattering about how if the Emperor was Pharaoh in Egypt, then she was First Wife. “Better than being any kind of goddess,” she said, nudging his hand away with her henna-patterned toes. “I wouldn’t dare proclaim myself a goddess on this river—it would eat you for being presumptuous; you can just feel it. First Wife is good enough.”

“And Antinous as First Concubine,” someone snickered almost inaudibly behind them. Hadrian was coughing in quick dry bursts—the cough was new, what did it mean?—and didn’t hear the muttered insult. Antinous did. He’d heard far worse, but it wasn’t the joke that hung and resonated in his mind. It was Lucius’s warning voice from Canopus.

If you think the disapproval was bad before, it’s nothing to what will be waiting when we return.

To Rome. Where there was also danger, just like this beautiful river—just danger of a different kind.
Because Hadrian will not give me up
, Antinous thought in stark honesty. He had seen that when his lover flung himself between Antinous and a lion.
And if he will not give me up, what will it cost him?

Hadrian was still coughing, and Antinous pushed the thoughts aside to thump him on the back. “Breathe, Caesar—”

“Cease worrying,” Hadrian said between coughs. “If I die on the Nile, at least I will be resurrected.”

“So the story goes,” Antinous temporized. “And then the river will rise—”

“The sacrifice works best if it’s a beautiful boy!” Lazily, Lucius snapped his fingers for wine from his slave girls, twin Greek beauties identical to the last freckle. His latest craze:
“I shall be served henceforth by nothing but twins!”
Antinous would have found it funny if the girls didn’t have such sad eyes over their permanently smiling mouths. “A boy’s life given to the Nile; I hear it’s an infallible spell for prosperity and health—”

“I am not throwing my beautiful boy into a river for
any
reward.” Hadrian pulled Antinous’s attention to the slate in his hand. “Tell me what you think of this, Osiris—an arch in Rome to commemorate our great lion hunt! The two of us, standing with our feet upon the lion’s mane . . .”

More glances from the courtiers, and this time the Emperor saw them too. Hadrian stared around him with a gaze of long challenge until every eye dropped to the deck.
An emperor’s bedmate carved upon an arch
, Antinous thought.
How that will shock Rome.
Only those of power and rectitude were relegated to triumphal marble.

“I’d rather not be put on an arch, Caesar; it wouldn’t be well looked on.” He saw the Imperial brows begin to draw together, and added, “And if you don’t care for that, well, you know how I hate sitting for sculptors.”

“Do it to please me, then?” Hadrian wheedled. “There, you have made your Pharaoh beg! Perhaps a statue of you as Osiris, too. I’ll commission both, as soon as we return to Rome.”

“Return?” Antinous looked up at him. “. . . When will that be, Caesar?”

Not yet
, he thought in a pang of pure fear.
Sweet gods, not yet!

But you were just praying to get off this river
, another voice mocked in his mind.
The gods were listening after all!

“We’ll go to Thebes, first, and Philae.” Hadrian was sketching again. More of his architectural jottings for the great villa outside Rome—at the rate he was designing additions and improvements, it would never be finished. “After that, it’s time to return home.”

Antinous looked from Hadrian to Empress Sabina. “Home,” he echoed, turning the topaz ring around his finger where Hadrian had placed it. Home was here, in the world enclosed between their three points. But how much longer would that go on? Rome’s scorn or the lash of the Fates who had already swiped twice at the Emperor—what would bring it to an end?