Lady of the Eternal City (52 page)

Annia let her mother pluck and smooth at her wild locks. Hadrian was droning something about the future of Rome, looking tall and gaunt beside handsome Lucius Ceionius, who he was praising for his
great and honorable service to the Empire
. That was a joke, but nobody was laughing. Lucius just looked triumphant, standing there with his head thrown back and his eyes gleaming. His dumpy little wife stood beside Empress Sabina looking colorless and nervous next to all that sinuous starry flash, and his children too: Ceionia and her smooth hair, eyes demurely downcast, and her little brother Lucius, almost six years old and squirming at his sister’s side.
I want to have a boy like that
, Annia thought. She had always liked Ceionia’s little brother, a lively, wriggling sort of boy. He often asked Annia to help him hunt for bugs to put down his sister’s neck, and she never said no.
Marcus and I will have a son like that. Though no son of Marcus’s would ever pick his nose in public . . .

A ripple went through the crowd, bringing Annia out of her happy musing. “I cannot believe it,” she heard her father murmur, his lips not moving at all, but others didn’t have the control he did. Servianus was white and openmouthed with shock—and Aunt Sabina looked frozen.

“Lucius Ceionius?” Annia’s mother whispered. “As Imperial
heir
?”

“In replacement of the son the gods have not seen fit to give me,” the Emperor was saying in his fine deep voice, “he shall be known henceforth under the name Lucius Aelius Verus Caesar . . .”

The new heir gave a small nod to the crowd. A scatter of uncertain applause rose, but there still seemed to be more shock than anything. Annia didn’t think he looked much like an emperor, even if he had changed just for the announcement into an Imperial purple synthesis embroidered all over in little Roman eagles. A man who cared for nothing but fashionable clothes and other men’s wives—what kind of emperor was someone like that supposed to make?

She saw Pedanius Fuscus standing absolutely rigid with shock, white-faced and astounded as his grandfather, and a bolt of superb, glorious satisfaction shot through her.
You had no idea you were being shut out
, she thought, nearly bouncing on her toes in glee.
Neither of you!
And Marcus was right: Hadrian had not chosen an heir who lisped and spluttered through broken teeth, an heir who could not even mingle at a party anymore and look confident doing it. Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator was finished—and all because, in a way, he’d told a girl of twelve to get on her knees and call him Caesar.

Full circle.

“—and to bind his family all the more closely with my own,” Hadrian was saying, his eye going over the crowd as if to mark who was not smiling, “a pair of marriages. For his son—” Little Lucius was picking at a scab on his elbow, and his mother had to swat him. Annia stifled a giggle.

“—a betrothal to be sealed at once with my own niece, Annia Galeria Faustina.”

Annia’s head jerked up as all eyes in the atrium went to her.

“And for my heir’s daughter Ceionia Fabia—” Ceionia continued to stand with her eyes demurely fixed on the floor, but Annia could see her nostrils flare like a hunting dog that had just caught the scent. “—a betrothal to be sealed between herself and a young man most dear to my heart—”

No
, Annia thought.
No.
Because it wasn’t Pedanius—Pedanius had already been discarded.

“—and most vital to the future of my Empire—”

No!

The Emperor finished affably. “Marcus Catilius Severus.”

VIX

“Lucius Ceionius, eh?” I asked the Emperor when I next came to visit—something that had somehow (and I wasn’t sure how) become habit.

“Yes. Lucius Ceionius.” Hadrian slanted a warning brow, clearly not desiring my opinion on his recent choice of heir.

“Curious pick,” I said. What was a man like that going to do as Emperor: theme the Empire into coordinating colors? Dress the legionaries in eagle wings?
Not my legionaries.

“Lucius entertains me. For that alone, I’m inclined to reward him.” Hadrian moved a game piece on the board between us. “Since it’s so nakedly clear what he wants, he may as well have it. Your move.”

I shrugged, not really inclined to give the new heir any more thought. It was not my business anymore. I lived in a strange kind of suspension, isolated from the restless pulse of Roman life. I was still commander of the Tenth, but the Tenth was quiescent, refilling their depleted ranks and training the new men back in the east. Nothing required my presence—God knows, after all my drilling, they knew how to train new men. So I left everything to my seconds and remained in Rome.

What a strange time that was.

The Emperor had smiled when he heard me say so, the very first time I came to see him at his villa. “Why?”

“For so long”—I’d been fumbling to find the right words—“my life was tied to yours, Caesar. Smoothing your travels, guarding your back, waging your damned wars.” Hadrian’s will was my life; the pulse of my veins beating to the same rhythm as his. “Now, my life is my own.”

“So why did you answer my summons?” We’d been sitting in the tiny
tablinum
of his private moated villa inside the vast one, a space big enough for two men and a game of
latrunculi
if they didn’t mind having the board jammed tight between their knees. The same chambers he’d shared in solitude with my son, and part of me thought that if I just listened hard enough, I’d hear Antinous’s golden ripple of laughter. “Why did you agree to come see me if I no longer own you, Vercingetorix?” the Emperor wanted to know, and he sounded genuinely curious.

I turned the board’s one blue piece over in my hand. “Part of me thinks I’m cursed,” I heard myself saying. Not in rage, just in calm bitterness. “I can’t fail at war, but everything else I touch turns to shit. So if I’m going to spread my bad luck to anyone else—”

“It might as well be me?” Hadrian looked amused. “I assure you, I am quite as cursed as you are.”

He didn’t look well, that was certain. Thinner every time I visited him, frequently fever-flushed, sitting almost motionless because he hoarded his energy now for public appearances. “You look like Death,” I told him, two days after he chose Lucius Ceionius as heir, and he laughed outright.

“Clearly my wits are going the way of my health, because I find myself enjoying your rudeness these days. I hardly ever feel like ordering your tongue sliced out anymore.”

“I may be insolent, but I’m not boring. You’re bored these days, Caesar. That’s why you keep sending for me.”

“Are you bored too, in all this newfound peace?”

“I like boredom.”

I had long moved myself out of Titus’s sumptuous villa, taking rooms on the Esquiline. I didn’t want the official quarters I could have leveraged as legate—bare rented rooms were good enough for a lonely man with nothing in the world but a few useless mementos. Spent my days rising early, partly from habit and partly because of the dreams of Judaea, of Mirah, of Antinous floating in the Nile. I sweated through those dreams, went to the bathhouse and washed away the nightmares, and then I might spend the afternoon at the races or at the wine shops reminiscing with other soldiers. I pushed the pain and the rage back with slow, calm, clean routine. Visited Titus often, but he was a busy man; a happy man with a very full life. I was the one adrift.

So, I suppose, was Hadrian. Because he continued to send for me. I complained about that—“You realize that what with constantly trotting eighteen miles to your villa, Caesar, I had to buy a bloody horse?” But I kept coming.

A few hours a month passing conversation with the Emperor of Rome, and yet it was in the streets of Rome that I had to hear any news about him. He’d nearly died from a hemorrhage of blood, so the news went from the wine shop—no doubt that news was greeted with joy in the Senate, but in the streets I heard nothing but prayers for the Emperor’s health. The common Roman thought only of peace and prosperity, and Hadrian had given them nearly twenty years of both. He would be missed when he was gone, and that was an odd thing to admit about a man I had once hated so passionately. I could not really hate him any longer, perhaps because I was so numbed I could barely manage to feel anything.

Except a certain stubborn ball of resentment at my core whenever I looked over the
latrunculi
board at my dead son’s marble face, and wondered if Antinous would still be alive if he had never shared the Emperor’s bed. If he would have lived happier in obscurity, never driven to drop himself into the Nile and drown his grief.

“Tell me another story of Antinous,” Hadrian commanded, and I had the absurd image of Antinous himself as a boy, begging me for stories of heroes and gods. Hadrian had the same eager expression, and my resentment faded a little.

“You’ve heard every memory I have.” I moved one of my white pieces on the game board. Hadrian always played black, of course.

The Emperor moved my piece back. “Not that one! I’ll win in four moves. Slide it here”—demonstrating—“then tell me about the day you gave Antinous his first sword.”

I surrendered. “He was just a scrap of a thing, all curly hair and scraped elbows, and he’d been begging over a year for his own blade . . .”

That, of course, was the real reason the Emperor sought me, and why I went to him. To no one else could we speak so endlessly of Antinous.

Empress Sabina slipped in quietly at the end of my story, and I jerked a little in my recitation. The first time I’d seen her up close since Egypt, when I departed to Judaea and she to Rome. She was a jolt to my eyes, lithe as a spring flower in a pale yellow
stola
, her cropped head and narrow arms bare, and she carried a cup to Hadrian’s hand. “Drink,” she ordered the Emperor. “From your physicians.”

“They are useless, and so are their potions. I want to try that wise-woman who came to the villa with a good health charm—”

“She was a fraud. Drink, please.”

“Do not give me orders, Vibia Sabina,” Hadrian grumbled, but he drank as I sat there feeling awkward. Sabina’s eyes met mine, and I looked back at the
latrunculi
board. A moment later I heard her footsteps retreating.

“I really should have forced her to leave me,” the Emperor mused, moving another game piece. “When it comes to my health, she is an even worse bully than Antinous.”

I stared at the board, feeling an awkward flush heat my neck. It was inside this little moated villa that I’d dragged Sabina up against me in a vicious embrace and thrown our old intimacy in Hadrian’s face, in front of my son. She could have been dead that day because of me, dead at
his
hand—I didn’t want to sit here under a marble copy of my son’s face, listening to Hadrian complain about her as any man would complain about a wife who scolded him.

I had no idea if he felt any of his old rage that I had bedded her. He didn’t seem to—he seemed as numb to violent feelings as I—but who knew with a man like him? Who
ever
knew?

All I knew was that I did not think it wise to lay eyes on Vibia Sabina.

But I did, on and off as I continued to visit, because though gossip said she lived separate from the Emperor, she evidently visited often enough to tend him herself despite his army of physicians. She forced potions into his hands, she touched his forehead as though checking for fever—and Hadrian might give her fingers an absent squeeze when she excused herself. She never had a word for me. The last time we’d really spoken had been that day on the Nile a few years ago when I’d gotten the Tenth back and I’d wept in her arms. Now I saw her every month or so, and we didn’t speak at all.

Not until the year turned, well after Lucius Ceionius had been chosen as heir.

“I saw Servianus turned away at the gate.” Sabina spoke unexpectedly, interrupting our silent game as she came to mix Hadrian’s wine. “I suppose he’s come to harp again about the slight given to his overlooked grandson?”

Hadrian shrugged. “I have informed him my mind is made up. The boy is thoroughly unsuitable. He used to be quite charming, but after that beating he took, he is a figure of fun.”

“So is Lucius Ceionius, in a different way.” Sabina was turned away from us, stirring Hadrian’s cup, and her voice had a note that made me glance up despite my resolution not to look at her. She was gazing at the Emperor, and her eyes were oblique. “The silly costumes on his slaves, his ridiculous dinner parties . . . You might have considered other names besides his.”

“I would have chosen young Marcus Catilius Severus were he older,” Hadrian mused. “A brilliant mind and a humble soul; it’s a rare combination. But he’s too young. Pity.”

“So why not consider—”

“I do not wish to discuss it, Vibia Sabina. Lucius is my heir. I will be sending him to Pannonia soon, so that he may act as my deputy and receive the homage of the legions. That is an end to it.” Hadrian did not quite snap the words, but there was an edge to his voice that told me they’d had this discussion before. “Your move, Vercingetorix.”

Sabina retreated in silence. I moved my piece; Hadrian beat me in eight more exchanges, telling me how he had replaced the water in his moat around the villa with Nile water brought from the banks of Antinoöpolis—“It seemed appropriate to encircle myself in grief and love together.” No more was said of Lucius the future Emperor, and soon enough Hadrian began to doze and I slipped away over the wooden footbridge.

“Vix.”

I stopped, halfway through the peristyled tree-dotted courtyard that abutted the moated villa. Sabina drifted out from behind a massive statue of Neptune, wrapped against the last of winter’s chill in an ice-blue
palla
. She’d waited outside to catch me alone, and waited quite some time too. “Lady,” I said finally.

“I need your help. Walk with me.”

“Is that wise?” I could not tell what she was thinking.

“Hadrian no longer questions the company I keep.”

“Even me?”

“Even you.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her. I started to walk, winter-dry grass crunching underfoot, and she fell in beside me.
Go away, just go away.
I liked my life numb and uneventful. Nothing Sabina put her cool hands on stayed uneventful for long.

“What do you think of Lucius?” she asked.

Of all the things I thought she might have asked me, that would not have made my list. “I don’t think anything about him,” I said finally. “Don’t have to.”

We passed under another of the ever-present lemon trees, all but alone. “Most of Rome flocks around the rising sun rather than the setting,” Sabina said, noting my glance around the largely empty sprawl of grass and statues. “Lucius’s atrium is very full these days.”

“Stop doing that.”

“What?”

“Reading my mind.”

“I wish I could read minds,” she sighed. “If I could, I’d have the proof I need.”

“Proof? Of what?”

“That Hadrian has made a grave mistake.” She looked at me, breath rising in a white mist on the air. “And if his health continues to decline, he will die before he can correct it.”

“How do I help with that?
You
persuade him he’s made a mistake. You two look amicable enough these days.” I saw it, those small touches of her hand to his forehead or his lips to her knuckles in absent greeting. There was something like affection there, and that dumbfounded me. Affection, after everything that had passed between them?

It was not jealousy. It was incomprehension. It was also no business of mine, so I told myself not to think about it.

“Hadrian will not listen to me on this,” Sabina said. “He is tired and he only wants the matter settled. He chose an heir; now he’ll put the problem aside as solved and spend his days remembering Antinous.”

I heard the grief in her voice, lingering like perfume over that name. However I had wronged the Empress of Rome, she had loved my son.

But her voice when she spoke again was hard. “I want Lucius gone, and to be rid of him I need proof. That is why I need you. Help me question him.”

“Why do you need me for that?”

“I need answers. I’ll get them any way I can. If I don’t have your help, I’ll probably have to seduce him.” She looked at me, her gaze straight as a sword. “I’d rather have you.”

For what?
I almost asked, but I wasn’t getting sucked back into an empress’s games. Not again.

I lengthened my stride, leaving her behind me. “Seduce that buffoon if you want,” I threw over my shoulder. “I don’t care. None of this is my business.”

“It
is
your business.” Her voice fell behind me as she halted. “He killed your son.”

SABINA

“Lady—” Lucius’s steward greeted Sabina, but she sidestepped him, stalking to the atrium of the vast overdecorated house where the Imperial heir held court in a crowd of petitioners. The walls were lined with page boys in eagle-feathered wings—evidently the tableau of the day was Jupiter holding court in the heavens, for in the middle, the man her husband had chosen as heir reclined in a gray tunic embroidered in lightning bolts. And his smug face grinned out under a fillet of Imperial purple.

“Empress Sabina!” He came to her with outstretched arms, kissing her hand with the easy intimacy of a friend. Of a
family
member. “Naturally I am delighted—is the Emperor’s cough troubling him again? Do tell him I will call upon him, some business we must discuss before I depart for Pannonia—”

Sabina filled her lungs and said, “
Out
.” And glanced at the man hulking behind her in his most imposing armor. Vix had already seen Lucius’s Praetorians and was glaring them out of the room with a scowl like death. They looked to their master for orders, but he gave a light laugh and nodded.