Lady of the Eternal City (50 page)

“There’s a reason civilized people water it.” The sky was swimming over my head, and I was definitely at the blurred stage of drunk now—but curiously, I no longer felt quite so much like falling on my
gladius
. I rolled my head at Annia. “So, this boy just became a man—”

“He thinks so.” Her gaze was looking just a bit glassy. A good girl like her wouldn’t have my tolerance for strong wine. I made a note to haul her back inside before she fell unconscious or I did, because then Faustina really would think I’d gotten her daughter drunk and ravished her. God help me then.

“So your friend Marcius—”

She giggled. “Marcus.”

“Right. Won’t look at you anymore, won’t visit.”

“He’s got more
important
things to do.” Annia slid down on her side, propping chin on elbow, and I saw the flash of hurt on her face.

“Suitor?” I guessed. “Not just friend?”

Her head jerked up and she glared. I raised my eyebrows. Finally she shrugged, taking another gulp of wine. “He always said he’d marry me someday. But we were just babies. He doesn’t want to anymore.”

“Yes, he does.”

“What?”

“You’re a clever girl, but you don’t have a man’s perspective.” It was the least I could offer after she’d succeeded in lifting my despair. “You want to know why your Marcus avoids you? Because he doesn’t trust himself to keep his hands off you.”

“Not Marcus. He’s a Stoic.” She had some trouble with the S. “He believes in controlling the passions of the body.”

He sounded a proper little prig to me. I let out a snort. “If there’s anything that’s all but impossible for a boy of sixteen or seventeen, it’s controlling
anything
when a girl like you is nearby.”

She laughed, and then she hiccupped. “I don’t think so. He models himself on my father!”

“You think your father didn’t feel the same at that age? He kept a mistress—that skinny housekeeper of yours, in fact.”

Annia dropped her cup.
“Galeria Lysistrata?”

“She had a different name, then. She took your mother’s appellation after they married, as a sign she wasn’t cross the affair was over. They all stayed good friends.”

Annia looked stunned.

“Young men take mistresses, or they visit whores, but good girls like you they can’t touch. So your friend Marcus stays away.” I looked at the jug and saw we’d killed most of it. “Just ask him. Watch his ears turn scarlet.”

“They do turn scarlet when he’s embarrassed.” Annia giggled, and her chin slid out of her hand. She held out her wine cup. “This disgusting wine is growing on me . . .”

“That means it’s time for you to go back to the house, Annia Galeria Faustina.”

I stood up a trifle unsteadily and hauled her to her feet. She staggered, hiccupping again, and I had to sneak her into her chamber and pour her into her sleeping couch. She slid almost instantly into sleep, and I stood looking down at her. She slept on her back, her feet twitching even in slumber. If her Marcius or Marcus or whatever his name wasn’t throwing himself at her feet, he was a fool.

I tucked a coverlet around her shoulders, a little awkwardly. I’d never tucked my own girls in, and I’d certainly never tucked my girls in when they were drunk. I wished I had.

Annia started to snore. I smiled a little, rustily, and then I padded out and headed for my own bed. I slept on my back too, and I could hear my own snores begin before I even dropped off—but curiously enough, I slept without dreaming. I didn’t stir till Titus and Faustina returned that night.

For the first evening since I’d arrived I didn’t stay in my chamber like a surly bear curled up for the winter, but tugged a fresh tunic over my head and went downstairs to join the bustle of welcome. Annia stood in the atrium, and Titus had paused unwinding his toga and cupped her cheek in his hand, turning her face toward the lamplight. “Annia,” he was exclaiming, “your eyes are red as fire. Are you ill?”

“Can you dim that lamp?” Annia winced, and massaged her head through a tumble of sleep-tousled hair. “Ow . . .”

“How was my triumph?” I said hastily. “You two look very fine!”

Titus was still looking at Annia. He looked at me, and when he spoke his voice was ominous. “Vercingetorix,” he said, “is my daughter
hungover
?”

I looked at Annia and she looked at me. A mistake, because she started to laugh. She had a raucous, rough-edged shout of a laugh, and the sound of it sent a grin spreading slowly over my face. She leaned against a pillar, shaking with laughter under her father’s disapproving eye, and I . . .

I felt those barbs of agony and guilt and accusation recede, just a little. Just enough to let me smile at the red-haired girl whose company had made my sleep dreamless.

There was the faintest quiver of mirth around Titus’s eyes, but his face remained stern. “Vix?”

Still smiling, I moved past him to where his wife stood tall and beautiful in midnight-colored silk and sapphires, her eyes as sparkling blue as the jewels. I seized her hands, and I bowed over them. “Faustina,” I said, and I put the smile away to give her every drop of honesty I had. “Your daughter is indeed hungover. She came to no harm, but it was my fault entirely, and I ask you not to punish her. I offer sincere apology.” A deep breath then. “I would apologize as well for hauling your husband away to a cell on your wedding night. I swear to you on the gates of Hell, I will die on a blade before I ever see harm come to your family—even if the Emperor himself stands in the way.”

I lowered my head and I kissed her astonished hands, sealing the oath. Because it
was
an oath—I’d never let the black fate that took my wife and daughters touch my friend’s. Never.

Then I moved past Annia, who was still laughing and wincing and rubbing her head all at once. I tousled her red hair in passing, and I headed for the bathhouse. I still felt sick and heartsore when I thought of Judaea and all that passed there . . . but I also felt like a bath and a shave.

ANNIA

A.D. 136, Autumn
Hadrian’s Villa

“Dear gods, what are you wearing?” Those were the first words out of Aunt Sabina’s mouth, when Annia alighted in the gardens of the Emperor’s villa.

“A dress.” Annia looked down at herself, feeling mulish and embarrassed all at once. “Mother said I was old enough to be choosing my own.”

“And you chose
that
?”

“Ceionia Fabia helped . . .” Ceionia always looked perfect, after all: a luscious little thing with her smooth hair and dimples, and she had condescended to lend Annia her expertise. “A girl with red hair must wear
nothing
but green. This shade, something pale. Girls our age must wear pale colors, or we look vulgar. And you have such a long face, you must balance it with curls on either side.” Ceionia patted her own hair, smoothed into a knot with just one curl dropping over her shoulder. “Goodness, our first party at the Emperor’s villa! My father says my little brother and I must be the picture of poise; he says the Emperor has
quite
the surprise planned for our family . . .”

Annia didn’t care what the Emperor planned. She only wanted to waylay Marcus and see if
any
of what Vercingetorix had said could possibly be true.

“I think Annia looks lovely,” her mother said loyally. “She’d look beautiful in anything.”

“Faustina, you’re a wonderful mother but a terrible liar,” the Empress of Rome retorted. “That sickly green makes Annia look like a month-old corpse, and if Ceionia sold her on it, then she’s a clever little tart who was trying to eliminate the competition.”

Should have known I’d get it wrong
, Annia thought dismally. She’d always prided herself on being a Spartan sort of girl, all steel and gravitas—it was embarrassing how much she simply wanted to look
pretty
, but the thought was there anyway.
I want to be pretty for once. I want Marcus to look at me.

Her Imperial aunt must have caught her expression, because she did a swift evaluation of the bustle behind her. The slaves were still dashing about with garlands of ivy and roses for the Emperor’s vast outdoor banquet; the festivities wouldn’t begin for the better part of an hour. “There’s time,” the Empress decided, and crooked a finger at her niece. “Come with me.”

Annia found herself whisked into a sumptuous windowed series of chambers that could only be the Empress’s private apartments. “My mother said that at my age, I really should know how to choose my own attire. But I don’t know
how
.”

“The trouble with your mother, may all the gods bless her, is that she looks marvelous in absolutely anything. So it never matters what she wears.” Aunt Sabina surveyed Annia with a critical eye. “Those like you and me with less in the way of raw goddesslike beauty must work a little harder.”

“But you’re beautiful too.” Her Imperial aunt had a midnight-blue gown embroidered with silver stars, and more stars strung about her neck and her hair and her ankles on loops of silver wire. She looked like a night sky and about as all-knowing.

“What a nice thing to hear, and at my age, too.” Aunt Sabina smiled. “But I assure you, it’s all illusion. You’ll learn to cast one, too. Ceionia has good cause to be jealous of you, if you only use what you have.”

“Definitely not green,” a tall African slave girl said, wrinkling her dark nose.

“No. That flame-colored silk I had as a present from the merchants in Alexandria . . .”

Annia felt herself whirled and stripped, pinned and discussed. “The gold sandals lacing up the shins? And gold bracelets, delicate ones, and a belt of gold cord—”

“I feel like a slave getting oiled up for the auction block,” she complained, and Aunt Sabina’s painted eyes held hers.

“That is what an empress feels like at times, my dear.”

“Really?” She cocked her head. Aunt Sabina with her oceans of poise and endless elegance?

“Oh, yes.” Her aunt sat Annia down on a carved ivory stool and with her own hands started to comb out the horrible ringlets. “Because an empress really
is
like a slave at an auction block—she stands there as crowds of people ogle her, and she stares over their heads with a fixed expression. An empress’s appearance is an Imperial duty. But you, on the other hand, wish to look beautiful tonight for a rather more personal reason, I think?”

Annia felt herself blushing, thinking of Vercingetorix the Red’s blunt words about boys of Marcus’s age.
“Good girls like you they can’t touch. So your friend Marcus stays away.”
Annia didn’t quite share his certainty, and before she could really summon the courage to ask him again, he’d moved on from their villa. Besides, you couldn’t really go up to a hero of Rome, to a
man
, and ask—

“What do you wear if you want to make someone seduce you?” Annia blurted out. And immediately wanted to die.

One of the slave girls lifted a hand to smother a giggle, but Aunt Sabina just looked thoughtful. “That depends,” she said. “Do you actually want to
be
seduced, or are you just hoping to raise the notion in his mind? Actual seduction is going to be rather difficult to achieve at a banquet this crowded.”

Annia felt herself going scarlet. “Just—raising the notion,” she whispered. Dear gods, let Aunt Sabina not ask who.

And she didn’t. Annia’s mother would have at least smiled knowingly, and her sister Fadilla would have clapped her hands and started reeling off names, but Aunt Sabina just fetched a little pot from one of the slave girls and sprinkled a pinch of something over Annia’s loosened hair, wavy from the ringlets but no longer bunched on either side of her face. “A combing of gold dust through your hair to make it gleam, I think,” she murmured. “And a pinch massaged into the skin . . . You’ll glimmer under the light, and no one will quite know why, but they’ll be drawn to you.” Pushing Annia straight when she strained for a glimpse in the glass. “Not yet, you aren’t finished.”

“Like a roast?” Annia muttered, still feeling her cheeks flame, but she was starting to get interested in the process despite herself. Finally Aunt Sabina tugged her to her feet, gesturing the maids to hold up a glass.

Annia stared at herself. “I don’t look—proper.”

“I thought you wanted to raise thoughts of seduction, not propriety,” Aunt Sabina pointed out. “And really, you aren’t showing any more flesh than prim little Ceionia.”

“But . . .” Fiery orange-red silk sluicing down her body, a webwork of gold covering her ankles and her bare arms, gold dust making a faint gleam at her eyelids and the hollows of her collarbone. Maybe it was too much. “I look like an eastern—something-or-other,” Annia fumbled. “Not like a Roman girl should. They’ll call me a harlot.”

“Let me tell you something, Annia Galeria Faustina.” Aunt Sabina tugged a strand of gold-dusted hair over Annia’s shoulder. “Don’t waste yourself worrying what the proper Roman girls say, because you will never look like them. You look
better
—a fire nymph and an Amazon rolled into one, and they know it. Maybe it’s all that running you’ve done, but you don’t mince when you enter a room, you
swagger
. So put those splendid shoulders back and swagger into that atrium like the goddess you are, and if anyone flings the word
harlot
at you, crush it under your heel like the nonsense it is. Because there is no man in Rome who would not choose you over boring little Ceionia and her properly folded hands.”

Aunt Sabina looked quite fierce suddenly, but did she have
tears
in her eyes? “Did they call you names when you were my age?” Annia found herself asking.

“My predecessor Empress Plotina loved to call me a whore,” Aunt Sabina said, and the shine in her eyes must have been a trick of the lamplight because now she had her usual expression of faint amusement. “But I never paid such barbs any attention, nor should you. So why don’t you be just a
little
scandalous and loop the end of your skirt up over one arm to show a flash of ankle? They’re splendid ankles; you should show them off.”

Annia was beginning to smile. “That will make Servianus hiss.”

Aunt Sabina tugged the gold-embroidered hem a little higher. “Good.”