Lady of the Eternal City (58 page)

The villa could have fallen down around me and I wouldn’t have heard. I ripped at the pile of cloth for more bandages, striking Annia away as she reached to help me. “Warn Hadrian,” I rapped out. “He has to be warned, he could be killed at any moment—”

“But Pedanius is
finished
. Even if he has a guard or slave bribed to kill the Emperor, we’ll know he was the one who—”

“He doesn’t know that!” I lifted Sabina’s limp form. The floor looked like a butcher’s yard. “You’re the only one who knows, and he thinks you’re a stupid girl who can be dealt with later. He didn’t know you’d come find me. If his man at the villa isn’t stopped, the Emperor dies.”

Hadrian
, Sabina had whispered.
Hadrian.
Maybe the last word I’d ever hear on her lips, and I had a spasm of hatred for the Emperor. He got everything, maybe even the last moment of Sabina’s life.

But if Hadrian died, God only knew what would happen. That bitter old bastard was all we had, the wall holding out the bloodshed like those white walls he built in Britannia to keep out the chaos.

“He’ll never believe me,” Annia was arguing, her voice rising in blind panic. “I’m just a child to him, you should be the one to warn him—”

“
Do you know how to bind a sword wound?
” I shouted.
“I stay with your mother!”

Annia didn’t even hear my slip of the tongue. She was shouting over me, “But the Emperor won’t listen to a word out of my mouth! If I had my father, if I had Marcus—” That was when my daughter stopped, blood draining from her face. “Oh gods, Marcus is
with
him. He went to give the Emperor his report as Prefect of the City—”

“Then he might die too.” I had Sabina in one arm, but I managed to unbuckle my sheathed
gladius
and slap it hilt-first into Annia’s hand. “Take this, get on my horse, and carry warning to the Emperor.
Make
him hear you.”

“Vix—” Annia took a step toward me, clutching my sword. A girl, just a girl in a blue dress, wide-eyed and bloody-kneed and so young. My daughter.

I rose fast and hard, so fast she recoiled from me. “
Annia
,” I roared, and her eyes flickered over the blood on my hands, the body lying limp at my feet.
“Annia, run!”

And Annia runs. So fast, just a streak of blue fading away from me, and I wonder,
Can she outrun death?
Because if she can’t, if she fails to carry the warning in time, an empire falls. You’d think the fate of the Eternal City would depend on someone like me, a warrior with bloody hands and a bloody sword. But it will rise or fall on a woman—and maybe it always does.

There are hoofbeats outside, and then I am alone. Alone with the woman I have loved all my life, more than my life. More than Rome, and she is white and waxen and slipping away from me. “Sabina,” I whisper, going to my knees in her blood and tearing at her bandages again. “Hell’s gates, do not leave me now.”

ANNIA

Eighteen miles
, Annia thought as she flew down the steps in her bare, bloodstained feet.
Eighteen miles to the Emperor’s villa.
An hour’s ride at a gallop—surely no more— She hauled herself into the saddle, slung Vix’s
gladius
across her back, and banged her heels into the mare.

She nearly fell off on the first lunging stride, clinging to handfuls of mane as the horse bolted down the road. Dear gods, why had she never learned to ride a horse? Because girls of good birth didn’t
ride
horses, they rode in litters or in covered palanquins with cushions, but why hadn’t she learned anyway? She’d never before been stopped from doing things just because they weren’t
done
. But she’d always preferred her own two feet to take her anywhere she wanted to go, not four hooves that bounced and jolted and sent her teeth crashing together with every rattling stride—

She reached the road, hooves ringing on stone rather than dirt. Eighteen miles down the road to the Emperor’s villa outside Tibur. Just eighteen miles.

Marcus
, she thought. Marcus who smelled of linen and ink, of wax for writing tablets and the mint he liked to chew. He’d have begun this morning with a mint infusion, worrying over his diction and his declamation as he went to make his report to the Emperor, never dreaming that the afternoon would bring horror and conspiracy and a lake of blood. Just as Annia had begun the morning with a lighthearted dash across the vineyard because her Imperial aunt wished to speak with her.

Whoever Pedanius had poised to strike at the Emperor—would they kill Marcus, too? She could see him lying limp like Empress Sabina, face gray-white as this winter sky, eyes glazed and dead—

No.
Annia flung the word at the Fates like a spear. No one would die today. Not Marcus, not the Emperor, not even Aunt Sabina lying so pale and blood-spent on the floor. Vix would fight off Charon the Ferryman himself if he came in his long black barge for the Empress, and Annia would save Marcus and Emperor Hadrian both.

Marcus.

No. Don’t think of him. Just the road ahead.

Marcus—

No. Road.

It was the road that brought her down. A rut between the stones that caught the mare’s hoof and sent her stumbling to her knees. Annia went flying as though she’d been fired from a bow. She was rolling as soon as she hit the ground, gasping with pain and gasping for breath.
Please
, she prayed, staggering to her feet and clutching for the
gladius
before it could slide from its scabbard,
please let the mare not be lamed!
And that was the prayer the gods decided to answer, because the mare most definitely wasn’t lamed; the mare had recovered her balance, veered off the road, and was now galloping across a field of weeds. Annia shouted, but the mare was headed for her stables or for Rome or for damned
Carthage
for all Annia knew, and she was going there far faster than even Annia could run. One flip of the tail and the mare disappeared into a line of scraggly trees.

And Annia looked all around her.

The winter road was utterly empty. Not a way station in sight—and there wouldn’t be one for twenty miles at least, because she remembered Marcus droning on about road systems and how each traveling station was spaced precisely a day’s journey apart. Not a farmhouse or a shack to be seen. Nothing at all, perhaps, between her and the Emperor’s villa but twelve miles of road. According to the mile markers, she had come only a third of the way.

She looked down at her bare feet. Long, strong, capable feet. Muddy, still splashed with the Empress’s dried blood. She stretched them, going up to her toes slowly and back down. “Twelve miles,” she said aloud. “Just my daily run.”

Three times over.

She shook her hair out of her eyes and began to run.

SABINA

Save me.

When Sabina was a child, she’d suffered from fits of epilepsia. “Like Julius Caesar,” her father had said, trying to cheer her, “so you see you’re in good company.” But the fits had not felt like a blessing. Her head would clamp, and her vision would shatter into a thousand pieces, and before the fog descended and her father tried to cushion her fall, she would have time for a silent cry of
Save me!

She had been stabbed through the breast. She remembered the blade going through her, very clearly—but this still felt more like a fit of epilepsia than a wound. The shattering of consciousness, the fog claiming her mind and her vision, the dimly felt panic as loving hands cushioned her.

Save me.

Someone
had
saved her—Sabina remembered that. She had not had a fit of epilepsia since she was twelve; she’d been cured by that oldest of remedies, a gladiator’s blood painted on her lips and on her temples. Vix’s blood, a boy gladiator freshly wounded from his first bout. Even when they were children, the Fates had tied their lives together. Vix had saved her.

Save me now, my love.

Her head hurt. How did her head hurt more than her torn and bleeding body? Hurt like the old fits, reality flying away in shards. Shards that would cut you if you tried to gather them; Sabina remembered that. Never stopped her from trying. You could see things in those shards, disjointed things, things that made sense if you could only remember them afterward. She never remembered.

Save me.

Disjointed images, and she didn’t know if they were dreams she saw or just flitting shards of glass. A riderless mare cantering over a field. Hadrian laughing—“Well put, young Verissimus! Tell me more”—while a bent figure in a toga looked disapproving; she knew that stoop-shouldered figure, who was it? But the image was gone. Emperor Domitian was dying in a room full of blood and moonstone, then it was Trajan gasping his last on a rocky island, and now it was Hadrian’s turn. But he couldn’t die yet; they had to warn him, and Sabina wanted to scream as she saw Hadrian’s fingers drumming against his chair and a man’s voice saying, “Some wine to take into your bathhouse, Caesar?”

“I will finish telling Marcus about my Parthian days, first—” came the absent response. And a gnarled hand cradled a vial under a fold of toga, but now that image was gone, too. A girl came next, a girl running like the wind, and she turned into Vix at thirteen, circling on arena sand. The boy Vix became the man, cradling her in his bloodied arms. “Sabina, Hell’s gates, don’t leave me now—”

Then save me
, she thought, but the world was going away.

ANNIA

Twelve miles. Twelve miles of hell.

Annia ran through the afternoon, legs flashing, hair flying. Ran too fast at first, her heart pumping panic and Marcus’s name pulsing through her with every step. She tried to pace herself, but her steps kept speeding until she was flying, sprinting down a line of winter-bare poplars. She might have sprinted herself blind and crippled but she tripped in a rut just like the mare, went down on her knees and scraped them both so badly the blood ran down her shins. She screamed, more from fury than from pain, and her galloping heart caught up with her and she vomited into the bone-white dust. Her stomach jerked until there was nothing left in it, and she screamed again, a challenge of pure rage to the Fates. “
Why?
” she shrieked, and the ravens went flying up from the leafless poplars, and there was no other answer. She swiped an arm across her soured mouth and started running again, and this time she paced the miles off one by one, baring her gritted teeth at every new marker.

A cart will come
, she thought at first.
A messenger.
She could see the messenger so clearly, an Imperial courier on a fleet horse, carrying a bag of those endless dispatches constantly being sent from Rome to the secluded Emperor. The messenger would halt at her hail, and the rest of the journey would disappear in a flash. But no courier stopped. She saw three that afternoon, galloping past on their fast horses, and she screamed at them but they didn’t stop.
Bastards
, she thought,
you oblivious bastards
, and kept running alone, Vix’s sheathed blade bouncing against her back. So few people traveled in this time of flat, short-lived days before Saturnalia. There was a wagon with a pair of drovers who whooped at the sight of her, but she flashed past before they could scramble down. After a while she stopped craning her eyes to see if there was anyone else on the road, because they were shades slipping into the past, choking on the dust from her flying feet.

Fourth mile marker. Mouth burning, but there was no water, not until Annia caught a glimpse of brackish puddles gleaming in a plowed field. She flung herself on them, drinking what little there was straight from the earth. Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger, daughter of one of the richest men in Rome, niece to the Emperor, drinking from a puddle. She looked down at herself, covered in mud as well as blood and dust, and kept running.

Six miles. Her feet were bleeding. Marcus’s name kept going through her like a sword, making a cadence she tried to pace her feet to. The pain had shifted from her feet to her knees, throbbing with every step.

Eight miles. Twice her usual run; another still to go.
I will never make it.
She knew that in her bones; she was weaving all over the road.
Don’t fall, you weak girl.
Her stomach roared, and she let herself hobble a few paces. Throat burned.
I will never make it.
She kept running.

Tenth mile marker. Something Vix had said over the Empress’s limp body.
I stay with your—
But Annia hurt too much to pull the rest of his words into her mind, and they went slipping away.

Eleventh mile.

The first buildings appearing—the turnoff toward the vast complex that was the Emperor’s villa. The outlying buildings; the Praetorian barracks, the slave quarters. Annia stopped, gasping, pain knifing down each thigh, hair lying in sodden strands across her sweat-soaked back. She’d long since stopped feeling the cold. How long had she been running?

Forever.
Forever and a day, and she still wasn’t there yet.

She lurched into motion again. The last mile, up the long terraced rise toward the crown of marble that was Hadrian’s massive domicile. The earth pulling on her feet with every step; a boulder sitting on each shoulder—oh gods, her
knees
—but the green of the gardens stretched ahead . . .

“You, girl!” An imperious freedman put out a hand, but Annia shoved past. She had run twelve miles in well under two hours, judging from the sun’s slant; she was not stopping now. The grounds ahead stretched flat, the killing incline finally leveling out, and she was suddenly flying. She aimed for the Emperor’s private quarters, that tiny islanded villa at the center of the whole nest of temples and gardens and audience chambers. That was where Marcus had said he was summoned to make his report. Her legs flashed beneath her, her feet screaming relief to be running on grass rather than stone, and she flung it all into this last sprint. Praetorians stood like pillars around the tiny moated villa, spear-heavy, frowning. “The Emperor,” Annia shouted with the last breath she had, “the
Emperor
—” She gathered herself for the wooden bridge spanning the moat, but a heavy hand seized her arm and brought her up in a violent yank. Sparkles of pain shot down her scalp as the guard seized her sweat-soaked hair and snapped her head back. “Where do you think you’re going, girl?”