Lady of the Eternal City (46 page)

A drawl greeted Sabina as she entered her own atrium unwinding the veil from her hair. “How many
In my days
did Servianus sprinkle on your visit?”

Sabina smiled at Lucius Ceionius, lounging in wait with his dazzling smile and glossy hair and gleaming beard. “Only six.”

“Six? How lucky you are. I called upon young Pedanius earlier this morning, and Servianus gave me a full fourteen.” Lucius shuddered. He was all shades of gold today in a spring-yellow tunic embroidered with topaz beads, flanked by a pair of identical blond slave boys in yellow-dyed wings like sun sprites.

Sabina’s African slave girl came to take her mistress’s
palla
; she was no longer a child but a lissome young woman, and Lucius eyed her idly. “Are you willing to sell that one? I could pair her with a delicious little Nubian of mine, ‘twin handmaidens of Pluto—’”

“She’s to marry a scribe of mine who is working to buy his freedom,” Sabina said. “When he does, I’ll free her as a gift to them both. So, no, you may not have her. What brings you here, Lucius?”

“Is your company not reason enough?” Lucius’s eyes swept approvingly over her
stola
of silver tissue, the silver loops about her wrists and toes, the fan of brilliant scarlet-dyed feathers, which she used to brush his hand away as he reached for hers.

“I think I am past the age for such flattery—especially for a man who has so many delicious little slave girls on hand.”

“Slave girls are but a rinse of barley water to cleanse the palate, Lady. Not a mature and complex wine to be savored.”

Sabina laughed outright, and he feigned hurt, hand on heart like a young swain. “Why do you mock? Have I not long been your admirer? You put the young wives of Rome to shame—I should know; I’ve had most of them. Subtlety is what I admire in a woman. Elegance. Intelligence—”

“Enough.” Sabina waved a hand, amused. “I still think you have a reason to call besides paying me compliments. Though I’m sure I don’t know what it could be—I’m Empress of nothing, living in an empty villa with a few polite slaves and aging cats while my husband slaughters Jews at the edge of the Empire.” Sabina added a silent prayer to that, the one she said every day.
Keep him safe. Keep him safe.
Always twice, because one “him” was her poor maddened husband and the other was the name that came blood-tinged from the battles of Judaea: the Emperor’s favorite commander, Vercingetorix the Red.

She banished both from her thoughts, waving Lucius to a seat beside the central pool as the African girl brought chilled mint infusions in silver cups. “What may I do for you?”

“Bluntly?” He gave a smile to make it charming instead of blunt. “Support me as Imperial heir.”

Sabina burst out laughing again. “Is that all?”

“Why not?” He grinned, not remotely offended. “Someone has to be heir. Why not me?”

“You have shiny hair, and great knowledge of wine and women.” Sabina tilted her head. “I think an emperor needs rather more.”

His smile shone out unwinking as a lamp. “What does that matter if the Emperor finds my other qualities more important?”

Sabina considered, tapping her fingers along the cup. “Is that your way of hinting that you have become my husband’s lover?” She knew he wasn’t, but she wanted to see his reaction.

“Gods, no!” He looked startled. “I’d be yours any day you asked me, my dear lady, but not the Emperor’s. I’m no Bithynian love slave!”

Her voice chilled. “I will not hear insults against Antinous.”

“Nor would I dream of offering any.” There was a bust of Antinous in rosy marble on the east side of Sabina’s atrium, placed directly opposite Hadrian’s where their stone eyes could easily find each other. Lucius wandered to the bust with its Greek fillet and curly hair and gave the aquiline stone nose a careless pat. “I liked Antinous. Most decorative, and rather more intelligent than one expected of a catamite—”

“This is not the way to seek my favor,” Sabina said crisply.

“But the Emperor’s favor is with me now.” Lucius wandered back, sinking onto Sabina’s couch this time. “Not as a bedmate, of course. No, no. I do but flirt, and make him laugh, and for a lonely aging man it is sufficient. Few people make him laugh these days. Am I wrong to hope his gratitude will stretch . . . far?”

Sabina regarded the glossy curls and shining eyes. True; during Hadrian’s time in Rome between sojourns in Judaea, she had seen Lucius at the Emperor’s side a great deal, forever laughing and making graceful witticisms. Maybe Hadrian
had
found a new favorite. “Then why are you not in Judaea?” she asked. “Making the Emperor laugh and incurring more gratitude?”

“It’s all blood and mud in Judaea.” A flick of the well-tended fingers. “No, I thought to stay here: the companion to welcome him back, a balm after all that bloodshed. And I use the time to obtain support from those who count.”

Sabina spread her arms at her empty atrium. “Do I look like I count for very much these days?”

“You have always counted.” Lucius captured her hand, his smile glittering and his eyes all cool speculation. “For all the Emperor’s periodic rages at your . . . hmm,
indiscretions
 . . . well, he’s never divorced you, has he? And at times, you’ve stood in very high favor indeed. You could again, with me as your ally.” His thumb brushed along her knuckles.

“Could I?” Sabina swirled the wine in her cup idly, alert to the last fingertip. “And how would you make an alliance with me? I have no daughter for you to take as your empress.” Not that he knew, anyway. “And I hardly think you will offer to wed me, no matter how much you like to flirt.”

“Oh, my wife will make an excellent empress, if a rather
duller
one than Rome is used to. And my children will find other advantageous marriages; I have one or two ideas there. For you?” Raising her hand to his lips. “I have in mind the role of adviser. You have advised two emperors already.” He turned her hand over, lips brushing the inside of her wrist. “Why not three?”

“Adviser? That sounds like the kind of role my husband promised Empress Plotina, Lucius. And he threw her away like a worn-out old slave.”

“Plotina was utterly useless,” Lucius dismissed. “A rigid old cow. You, my elegant lady, are somewhat more . . . supple.”

He took the cup from her hand and set it aside, drawing her into the curve of his arm. Sabina allowed herself to be drawn. Her skin was prickling all over with sudden attention, and not from Lucius’s smooth touch.

“Think on it, dear lady.” His breath feathered across her bare arm. “Those Jews cannot last much longer, and when they are done, the Emperor will return home and give some thought to the succession.” He bent his head, lips grazing the line of her shoulder. “Servianus is too old to serve as heir”—Lucius’s mouth brushed higher—“and his grandson might have been a possibility, but with those teeth knocked out he sounds a lisping fool. In the Senate House, he would be a laughingstock.” Nibbling along the line of her neck. “A laughingstock can never be Emperor.”

Sabina allowed him to tilt her head back. “Is that why you called upon Pedanius first thing this morning? To assess your competition?”

“Naturally.” Against Sabina’s jaw, Lucius’s mouth curved into a smile. “The boy is finished, whether he knows it or not.”

And who finished him?
Sabina thought as Lucius’s lips traced up to her ear. A pack of determined thugs venturing all the way into the Palatine to deliver a beating: bent on robbery, or hired by the man sitting opposite?

“Think on it, Lady?” Lucius asked, and then he kissed her. Sabina let him, partly because a man like Lucius thought kissing a woman was the best way to persuade her to anything, and partly because he was good at it.
It has been a very long time since a handsome man kissed me.
No woman in Rome would want to be Empress if they knew what a cold bed generally came with it.

“So,” Lucius murmured, withdrawing. “You will think on my offer?”

For a moment, Sabina toyed with the thought of allowing him to seduce her. Who knew what she might be able to get out of him over a pillow? And it would be pleasant work, judging from his kisses. But she felt no yearning at all as his smooth hand dropped away, and Sabina smiled faintly.
It seems time has made a loyal heart of me.
She knew the only man she wanted, and all she could do for him was offer a daily prayer of
Keep him safe
.

“I’ll think on everything you’ve said, Lucius.” She gave a little laugh as he brought her hand to his lips, to make him think a few caresses and some flattery had bought him everything he wanted. “I intend to think
very
hard indeed.”

Her ancient freedman had arrived before her golden guest was gone an hour. “Lady, there has been no news—”

She cut him off, no longer smiling in the slightest. “Tell me again what you found of Lucius Ceionius’s activities the night Antinous died.”

“Lucius Ceionius?” Casting rheumy eyes up to the inlaid ceiling. “By all reports, he was bedding down with two slave girls. Twins, of course.”

“Did you have the girls questioned?”

“I could not. He sold them immediately afterward.”

Sabina sat back. “Does that strike you as strange?”

“No, Lady. My reports say that the man is easily bored. He changes slaves as frequently as his tunics. Or his bedmates.”

“Find the girls,” Sabina said. “Find any slave he had on that barge.”

The freedman went so far as to blink. “That will be difficult, Lady. Even for me. To track a few slaves sold years ago, and far away in Egypt—it will take many months, if they can be tracked at all.”

“I have nothing but time. Cease all other inquiries but this one.”

“You believe Lucius Ceionius may be . . .” The freedman thought her a fool, she could tell. Sabina did not care. Her blood was sounding the alarm. Lucius: such a pretty, glossy fellow, hardly to be taken seriously . . . Except that he was just a step from the purple. All on the basis of a handsome profile, a few jests, an emperor’s loneliness.

Did you
create
that loneliness?
Sabina wondered.
Just so you could be the one to fill it?

I liked Antinous
, he had said. She did not think he was lying. But to have the purple within grasp, and all for a shove . . .

A shove. And perhaps a hired beating for yet another handsome boy barely into his twenties.

“Bring me news from Egypt,” she told her freedman fiercely. “I don’t care how long it takes. Just find it.”

VIX

A.D. 135, Autumn
Bethar

“Mirah is gone.”

I stared at Boil, just returned from Syria. He was gray, tired, thinner than the blocky, fair-haired Gaul I had known for so long, and he wore a leather cap over the healed stump of his shield arm. “What?”

“Gone. For three months.”

“Three
months
?” I repeated, and found myself shouting. “Why in hell’s gates am I only hearing about it now?”

“Your daughters said she’d sworn them to secrecy. And the guards didn’t dare tell you until they could find news of her. They thought you’d kill them.”

“I
will
kill them. One task, that’s all they had! How did she get away from—” But did it matter how Mirah had slipped my guards? She was a resourceful woman; intelligent; driven. Walls wouldn’t hold her, not if she was determined.

I didn’t bother asking where she’d go. She’d gone to join her family. Left the girls in safety, and for that I was glad, but she didn’t care anymore for her own safety. Not Mirah.

I squeezed my eyes shut. One more thing on top of this hellish siege, this desk of mine piled with reports and blades, with lists of wounded and lists of dead. “I’ll put out people to look for her. In Jerusalem, or . . .” I trailed off, and didn’t bother picking the thought back up. Boil just waited. A tribune with an armload of dispatches poked his head in, opening his mouth, then just backed out again.

“The siege,” Boil said at last. “Any progress?”

“Not much.”

Boil tried for a smile. “Not like Old Sarm, eh?” Sarmizegetusa; the fortress in Dacia where Trajan had laid siege many years ago. My first real campaign, and I’d made a name for myself in that siege, helping smash the city’s pipes so thirst would drive them to open their gates. I didn’t see the rebellion of Simon bar Kokhba and his men ending quite so easily.

“Been a long time since Dacia.” Boil turned to go, then hesitated. “You, me, Simon—even Hadrian. Same players, really. Just a different stage.”

He ducked out, shaking his head. I stared at the latest list of the dead, and then I shoved it aside and went to look out over my camp. The legions had dug in for the last fight: a small city of men clinging grimly to the dark earth of Judaea. Bethar loomed sullen and black over the ashy ground, just as Old Sarm had loomed over green hills.

Wars are colored things. That Dacian war was green and gold, all sunlight and forested slopes in my memory: an Emperor I revered at the head of a legion I loved; friends about me in the tent every night. Simon ribbing Boil mercilessly over that girl who had left him for a flute player; all of us laughing. Can a war be golden? I think it was, at least for me, though it probably wasn’t so sunlit as I like to remember.

And the war in Judaea? Black and scarlet. Blood and ash, from border to border of the province, nothing but blood and ash and bitterness, and Bethar piercing its heart like a thorn.

All through that summer and fall, we sieged Bethar. Hadrian stalking back and forth along our siege wall in his breastplate and purple cloak, graying head glinting like steel under the whirling clouds. Me pacing at his heels, right alongside my son’s dog. Outside the final stubborn problem of Bethar, the slaughter was mostly over—and all over Judaea, the survivors were being rounded up. Children and women for the most part, because the men of fighting age would have been killed and most of the elderly would have succumbed to famine and fever. So the rest came to me: children with the same huge terrified eyes Chaya had as a child when she screamed for fear of monsters in the dark; women with the kind of blank faces and limping steps that meant they’d been raped too many times to count. So many prisoners, the east would have drowned in them.