Lady of the Eternal City (44 page)

Three years. Three years, and we appeared to be winning, if you could call such bloodily bought victories
winning
. Simon’s men were at last on the retreat, fighting like wolves. My legions were driving toward Jerusalem, my co-commanders veering to join me. One final convergence, driving the scattered remnants before us and leaving ash and blood in our wake, or at least that was how we planned it, though I was nowhere near so confident. Simon and his dream would not die easy.
He will take us all with him
, I thought.
Or at least me.

I wasn’t really surprised when I learned where Simon and the core of his fanatical nine-fingered heroes chose to make their stand.

Where it all began, of course.

Bethar.

ANNIA

A.D. 135, Spring
Rome

“Gladiatorial games,” Marcus declared, “are crass and vulgar and bring out the worst in man’s nature.”

“How do you know?” Annia looked up at the great round shadow of the Colosseum rearing up before them, roaring noise to the sky as more and more plebs flooded eagerly through the entrances. “You’ve never been, either!”

Marcus grabbed Annia by the elbow so the pair of slaves he’d insisted on bringing could clear a path. “Gladiatorial sport is doubly unsuitable for a woman’s eyes—”

Annia let him lecture as they pressed inside behind the slaves. The day had dawned warm and heady: Veneralia, a spring day filled with rose garlands and sighing women. The day when the statue of Venus Verticordia would be taken from her temple, and a cluster of female attendants would bathe it and dress it in new finery. Those girls not at the temple were waving garlands and getting their stars read to see who they’d marry, and the boys got to ignore all the silliness and go enjoy themselves at the games.
I wish I were a boy
, Annia thought, and then hastily amended the wish for any gods who might be listening.
If I can’t be a boy, can I at least be grown?
A grown woman could just announce she was attending the games instead of the temple rites—a girl of seventeen had to resort to an absurd amount of sneaking.

“Don’t worry, we won’t get caught,” Annia told Marcus, who was still muttering objections. The vast buzzing of the Colosseum’s throng rose around them as they climbed the marble tiers inside, as though they were rising through an immense beehive. “My parents are attending the rites—they think I have a headache, and my little sister is covering for me.” Annia didn’t like sneaking, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t good at it.

“We’ll never get away with this,” Marcus groaned, but Annia stopped listening because they emerged into the vast oval of the Colosseum. An expanse of raked sand stretched below, and tiers of seats rose clear up to the sky where brilliant awnings offered shade from the delicate spring sun. So much bigger than she had imagined! Annia laughed, scarcely hearing herself over the roar of bets being shouted and bouts being called, and slung a happy arm about Marcus’s waist. “Let’s find a seat!”

He shook off her arm as fast as possible, but took her formally by the elbow afterward as though they were about to enter a palace. He was always doing that lately: flinching if she gave him a casual hug or tickled his ribs, then offering his arm whenever she came to a step. Like she had the plague and shouldn’t be touched, but was incapable of going up a flight of stairs. “Women shouldn’t sit with men at the games,” he was worrying now. “But that’s more the rule for well-born women, and you look like such a pleb in that dusty tunic, I don’t see anyone trying to separate us.”

“Thank you,” Annia said as they beat a path to the seats his two slaves had found. “Thank you very much.”

He shook his head at her sarcasm. He looked especially handsome when he was annoyed, Annia always thought—something about the way he squared his shoulders like a statue, and his eyes sparkled outrage. “He’s grown, hasn’t he?” Ceionia Fabia had whispered not long ago. Under those demure downcast lashes, she never missed a thing, especially if it was male and eligible. “Rather handsome . . .”

He’s more than handsome
, Annia thought, not that she’d ever tell Ceionia that. Marcus had shot up in height, one of the rare boys just as tall as Annia, and his face was strong and sunburned under its faint new stubble. He still wore the tunic and the
bulla
amulet—his grandfathers had absolutely Republic-era ideas about boys being given a toga too young—but he looked a man, not the skinny boy Annia had known all her life.

A man who always seemed to be hectoring her lately, and that Annia didn’t find quite so charming.

“I don’t see why you felt the games were more important than the Verticordia rites,” he was saying in that disapproving tone she now heard so often. People were surging to their feet, clapping and shouting for the opening speeches, but Marcus was oblivious. “You could have been chosen as one of the attendants to Venus today! Ceionia Fabia was chosen, and she felt deeply moved—”

“Did she cast her lashes down and say, ‘I am not worthy of the great honor bestowed upon me’?” Annia fluttered her lids extravagantly.

“Ceionia Fabia is a girl of most appropriate behavior.”

“What you mean is that she’s pretty.”

“She
is
pretty.” Marcus gave an obedient clap as a team of rangy leopards came prowling onto the sand for the first of the wild-beast fights. “It’s not an opinion; it’s a verifiable fact.”

“She’s also hates me like a plague. Don’t tell me that’s not a verifiable fact.”

“No,” Marcus admitted. “She does dislike you. Because you have more suitors.”

Annia felt a flush mount in her cheeks, and kept her eyes on the arena where a herd of fleet gazelles had just been released for the leopards. She
did
have more suitors than any girl she knew. As soon as she’d turned fourteen, the men started to pay court. “You’re the Emperor’s niece by marriage,” Annia’s father had said, “and his approval will be required for any match you make. But I see no reason you may not have your choice within those boundaries.”

Annia shrugged. She was going to marry Marcus, of course. He’d proposed it long ago, and it had seemed silly at the time, but she’d had years to get used to the idea. He was clever and serious and good, even if he could be a prig, and she knew how to push him around a bit, which every woman agreed was essential in a husband. But Annia couldn’t marry Marcus until he was at least a few years older, so until then she had to be an obedient girl and put up with ridiculous men who pretended it was Annia and her reddish hair and her long lanky body they wanted, and not her dowry and her Imperial connections. It could have been funny, but Annia found it all a little depressing. A part of growing older that she did
not
enjoy.

The leopards were making short work of the gazelles, all that lithe, long-legged grace shredded into bloody heaps on the sand. “I don’t like this part,” she said, averting her eyes. Those poor, fast, graceful things.

“I don’t, either.” A bull was herded into the arena next, a bull with horns that had been sharpened and tipped in steel for a duel against a bear. “Was it Aemilius Scaurus I saw calling on you yesterday? Girls think he’s handsome.”

The bull rushed the bear, and Annia surrendered to the temptation to tease just a little. Maybe she intended to marry Marcus, but he didn’t need to know that yet. “Aemilius Scaurus
is
handsome,” she said primly. “It’s a verifiable fact.”

Marcus scowled. “You’re teasing again.”

“Don’t be so easy to tease,” Annia retorted, and she might have kept on, but then the bear made a swipe of its massive claws and tore the bull’s throat open. Much of the crowd seemed to find that hilarious. “Oh,
Hades
,” Annia said, and tried to ignore the queasy roll in her stomach. “I don’t like this part, either.”

Parades followed, and then the
bestiarii
, teams of animal fighters pitted against snarling striped cats . . . Annia was squirming sickly in the middle of all the cheering, wondering if it would be a mark of squeamishness to leave early, when she was arrested by a mutter of gossip from the seats behind her.

“—the boy’s late!” a man was saying drunkenly behind Annia. A deep voice, a rough Subura accent. “Can’t abide an emperor who misses his own games!”

“Boy’s not emperor yet.”

“He will be . . .”

Annia looked up toward the Imperial box and felt a lurch in her stomach. Pedanius Fuscus had just entered, giving a hoot of appreciation for the tigers dying in the arena. Pedanius Fuscus, taking his place on a golden chair.

“Didn’t you know?” Marcus asked. “He’s sponsor of the games today. His grandfather paid for everything, but officially today’s celebration is a gift to the city from Pedanius. With the Emperor in Judaea again, he’s the natural choice to take Hadrian’s place . . .”

Annia couldn’t stop looking: Servianus beaming with pride beside his treasured grandson, who had grown into a burly young man in his twenties, carrying the crisp folds of his toga in flawless pleats, raising his hand to the crowd. A roar went up for the perfect young prince with his easy smile, and Annia felt a surge of such acrid nausea that she had to put her head between her knees.

“I didn’t know it was still so bad for you.” Marcus’s voice was quiet, not reproving anymore. “Seeing him, I mean.”

“I don’t see him often.” Annia sat upright, forced herself to shrug. “He’s a man grown. Too busy for girls like me anymore, thank the gods.”

The midday executions were beginning, lines of shackled prisoners shoved out onto the sand. Normally Marcus would have been considering their plight and saying something about the nature of justice, but he was looking at Pedanius instead. “He can’t hurt you, you know—you shouldn’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” Annia’s head whipped up. “I’m
angry
, Marcus. Everyone looks at him like he’s the dawn, like he’s the whole promise of tomorrow wrapped up in an Imperial purple ribbon. Why don’t they see what he is?”

“Because most people only see what’s on the surface?”

Annia had always known that—just as she’d always known that most people didn’t want to know what you saw if you
did
look under the surface. But that didn’t make it any less maddening. “People are sheep.”

The first prisoner died swiftly, a bent-backed woman folding into the sand with a
gladius
through her throat. Pedanius was applauding up in his box, but desultorily. Slave executions were such dull entertainment, after all—half the crowd was chatting, and the other half getting up for a cup of wine. Annia ignored the laughter and the chatter, feeling her jaw set as she watched another prisoner fold up onto the sand. She didn’t want to watch them die; the sight made her ill, but someone in this arena should watch their lives end as if it mattered. She and Marcus watched it all in stark, sick silence, until the last tottering figure had fallen.

Why did I come here?
Annia thought.
Why?

The wailing of reed pipes came then as the bodies were raked away. Pedanius came forward to announce the comic acts that would finish the midday interval—an elephant that danced to lyre music, a tame pair of tigers that could be ridden by acrobats. Annia did not think she would ever laugh again.

Marcus was looking up at the Imperial box, some of the color back in his face now that the killing was done. “The Emperor hasn’t
officially
chosen Pedanius as heir yet,” he said as though trying to distract himself.

“But the Emperor hasn’t excluded him, either. And if he doesn’t bother picking anyone else, it might very well
be
Pedanius. Because he’s family.” Annia gave a bitter laugh. “So maybe we should make another curse tablet.”

“Maybe we should grow up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well—curse tablets? That’s a game for helpless children and slaves.”

“And women.” Like the woman who died first in the line of executions. “Women are helpless, too.” The Colosseum rocked with laughter for the capering elephant in the arena, but Annia’s stomach roiled bitterly.
Pin all your impatience on growing up
, she thought,
and then you learn it gets no better when you’re grown.

Marcus was looking quizzical, and Annia fumbled for the right words. “Everybody’s helpless when they’re a child. But at least boys get to grow into men and become useful. Girls just grow into women, and they stay helpless forever.” Looking up at Pedanius Fuscus where he sat tossing coins to the elephant’s trainer. “He grows up and becomes powerful, and I just grow up and become—nothing. And all I can hope is that the bastard goes lion-hunting with the Emperor again, and the next lion eats him.”

It was one of Brine-Face’s favorite stories, now that he was back in Rome: telling, with becoming modesty, how his spear had finished the lion that had so nearly claimed the Emperor’s life. “Pedanius Fuscus hasn’t got the guts to kill a frog,” Annia had snorted, but no one listened. She was just another useless girl growing up into a useless woman, and Brine-Face was the golden boy, the future Emperor.

The elephant lumbered out of the arena to a scatter of applause, and Marcus sent his slave boy off for barley water. “Do you want some food too?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“If you don’t want food, you shall at least have a wreath.” Marcus gestured for his slave girl. “Two myrtle crowns for Veneralia!”

He was trying to cheer her, Annia knew that, but she felt more mulish than cheered as the slave girl swayed off with a smile back over her shoulder at Marcus. “She’s flirting with you,” Annia observed.

He looked embarrassed. “I know.”

“Actually, I think your slave boy was too.” A fair-haired Greek who gave Marcus an open-lipped smile before going off for barley water.

“I know,” Marcus repeated.

“You’re blushing.” Annia surveyed him, forgetting for a moment about Pedanius up in his golden chair, laughing at the tame tigers in the arena. “Are you bedding one of your slaves? Which one?”

“Annia Galeria Faustina!” Marcus’s voice had long broken to a smooth tenor, but his words scaled up in a squeak, and he flushed. “You cannot possibly ask such things!”

“Well, are you?” The thought gave her a prick of jealousy, but she didn’t show it. Girls had to be pure as Vestals when they came to their wedding beds, but not boys. They could bed as many slaves as they wanted. “Tell me!”

Marcus ran a hand through his hair. “The boy is Theodotus and the girl is Benedicta, and they were given to me for my
toga virilis
ceremony next month. That is all.”

“Gifts to make you a man,” Annia said flatly. “Well. Brine-Face’s manhood present to himself was me, so I suppose yours are an improvement.”

Marcus stared stubbornly out at the arena, empty now that the tame tigers had been herded out. “I may not be a man yet, but I am old enough to know that it is unseemly to submit to some vulgar fit of passion.”