Lady of the Eternal City (8 page)

“Oh, I don’t doubt you could do it, Tribune.
If
I gave you at least three legions. But at the end, we’d still have nothing but scrubby cattle, sullen slaves, and a few paltry silver mines.”

I shrugged, surprised at the twinge of hope I’d felt when he said “three legions.”
Stupid barbarian, he will never give you legions.
“You’d still own the whole island, though. Not just the bottom part of it.”

Hadrian laughed. “You don’t like half measures, do you?”

“No, Caesar.”

“Then put your Praetorians to aiding in the wall’s construction, and satisfy yourself by making it the most splendid wall anyone has ever seen. I’ll have a good segment built as a sample before I leave Britannia, as an example to spur them when we leave.”

“At fifteen feet high and thirty feet across, even a short segment of wall will take months, Caesar.”

But he wasn’t listening; he was striding ahead making plans with waves of both hands. It was my old friend Boil who said softly, “Looks like we’d better get used to this rain?”

“Looks like.”

It wasn’t just the prospect of the great wall that galvanized the Emperor’s energy in Vindolanda. He tore through the region like a fire, evaluating, gesticulating, ordering. I tramped along behind him, and his odd cheer didn’t break once.

And that just made me and everyone else more nervous. Because consistency was never Hadrian’s strength, was it? We were far too used to the parade of masks.

“I tell you this, Senators,” I heard that old windbag Servianus say to a cluster of the Emperor’s advisers, just before he decided he’d had enough of Britannia and went back to Rome. “In our Eternal City, the Emperor was much absorbed in small things. Now he strides upon a wider stage. If no one can know his mind, can anyone guess what he may do next, upon such a stage?”

Nobody knew, but they all worried. They whispered of a slave boy in Londinium whose eye he had put out in a fit of temper. They whispered of a certain chamber he was rumored to keep in his ever-expanding villa springing up just outside Rome, a chamber he called his Hades, and into which no one but the Emperor had ever been allowed to go. They whispered of what he might keep there, because sometimes laughter was heard and sometimes sobs. I didn’t know if I believed that rumor—I’d certainly never been inside.

But . . .

We were a full month in Vindolanda before I was able to make the day journey I’d wanted to make since the moment we’d arrived. The journey back up the road I’d last seen at age eighteen, when I first left my home for the Eternal City. It was a gray, blustery morning the day I finally turned off that muddy road and slid down from my horse.

Mirah gave me one of those looks of wifely amusement, bright-eyed in the red cloak that brought out the color in her cheeks. “You’re nervous, Vercingetorix!”

A little. My parents would find me so changed—what if they didn’t like what they saw? I didn’t altogether like what I saw in the mirror anymore, after all.

My daughters squealed at the mud on the hillside, refusing to get down from their mule. “That’s girls for you,” Antinous groaned, but he led the mule along behind me. I slid my hand into Mirah’s as I climbed, and she gave my fingers a squeeze.

I saw the crowning roof of a snug little villa. Cow byres behind; those were new. Things were prosperous, then. I swallowed and felt the quick pressure of Mirah’s fingers. Rich grass ran up the slope toward the house, and hedges flowered against the villa’s walls. My feet took me unthinkingly around the east wall, where I remembered there had been a meager excuse for a garden.

There still was. Someone had put in a fruit tree, but it looked pinched and leafless, and the herbs in their pots weren’t much more than twigs. I smiled. He still wasn’t any good at gardening, then, the broad-shouldered man in a blue tunic who squatted among the herbs with a trowel.

My feet were soundless on the grass, but the man whipped about before I got a step farther, dropping his trowel and drawing the dagger at his waist instead. He was up in a crouch and ready to face me in an eyeblink. And though his shoulders were bent and his hair entirely gray, his crisp
secutor
stance could have graced any arena in Rome. And had.

“You haven’t gotten slow with age,” I told my father. “But you still can’t garden worth a tribune’s arse.”

He dropped his dagger and I dropped Mirah’s hand to go to him. We’d neither of us admit it, my father and me, but when we came together in a thunderclap of an embrace, we were both crying.

*   *   *

It was downright frightening the way my mother and Mirah took to each other. It didn’t start quite smoothly—Mirah was unaccustomedly shy (anyone who knew my mother’s history would be), and there was a certain awkwardness when the children came forward. My mother took one look at my son as I introduced him and smiled warmly. “Antinous! Vix wrote that he called you Narcissus; you certainly deserve the name—”

Mirah looked just a little stiff, then. She stood between Dinah and Chaya, one arm about each, and I could see her arms tighten protectively. Our girls were pretty pink-cheeked little things, but it was Antinous everyone noticed first: his carved Bithynian face that broke into such a radiant smile, his lean-muscled height, his curling hair the color of dark honey . . . And my wife gave a sigh and a few pent-up tears, month after month, when she saw the evidence that her own belly hadn’t decided yet to produce a boy just as beautiful. She’d conceived our two girls easily, but Chaya’s birth had come very hard indeed, and my wife hadn’t quickened since.

My mother must have seen the little shadow of disappointment on Mirah’s face, because she turned with all her quiet warmth to the girls and clasped them against her. They were shy with strangers, but she addressed them fluidly in the language of the Jews, and Mirah smiled and replied in the same tongue. My mother had a low, melodious voice that could charm shy children and savage emperors in any language, and soon my daughters forgot their fear and my wife her diffidence, and all four of them were chattering away. “Vix!” Mirah exclaimed, switching out of Aramaic. “No wonder our girls are so dark-haired. They look like their grandmother!”

“I am officially old, if my firstborn has given me grandchildren,” my mother announced with a smile. “But do call me Thea, so I don’t feel quite so ancient!” She was only in her fifties, and barely looked it: a tall woman with threads of silver through dark hair, and in her red linen gown and tooled sandals she had the same serene elegance I remembered from the days she’d worn silks and pearls. My mother had been an emperor’s unwilling mistress, and the Fates had brought her here to this cozy villa on a hilltop in Britannia. Never mind how.

The conversation had changed to Aramaic again, and Antinous was warming cups of wine for Mirah and my mother so they wouldn’t have to get up. “I see you’ve raised this boy well,” my mother approved. “Do tell me . . .”

“Our women want to chatter,” my father announced. “Let them.”

We went wandering, my father and I. Past the garden and up the slope, to another wooded hill thick with flowers. “Apple trees,” he said, ducking under a branch. “Blooming very late, this year. I walk here every morning with the dogs.”

“When did you finally lose that old three-legged bitch of yours?”

“God love her, she lasted a long time. These are all her descendants.” Three puppies frisked at his heels: two curly-haired, one sleek and black. “Maybe your girls would like a pup?”

“Dinah hates fleas and Chaya’s afraid of getting bitten. But I promised Antinous a dog.”

We walked in silence a little ways, both grinning when we noticed I was walking just like him: hands clasped behind me at the small of my back. Antinous often walked that way, too, copying me since he was a boy, though his Bithynian blood gave him a liquid grace neither my father nor I could match. I had too much barbarian in me for grace, and so did my father, who stumped along as gnarled as a badger, his shoulders bent but still burly. He’d never been sure of his age, but he had to be past sixty, and unlike my mother, he looked older than his years. Well, he’d lived hard. The last few decades might have been easy, but the ones before had been all arena fights and blood and chains.

I showed him my campaign tokens; told a few stories of my campaigns. He told me of my younger brother and my three sisters; all grown. “Your brother’s a stonemason—he’ll be working on this wall of the Emperor’s, and right pleased about it. He never wanted the sword, not the way you did.” A quirk of his mouth. “They none of them gave me trouble the way you did.”

“I turned out all right, didn’t I?”

He turned and walked backward, appraising me. “Praetorian Prefect, eh?”

“Tribune. I do the Prefect’s job, because he’s an idiot, but he gets the title.” I shrugged. “It’s a pisser of a job.”

There was a certain wry sharpness in his voice. “I killed Romans, and you serve them.”

“I order them around! In fact, I’d have had a legion of my own to command if not for the Emperor.”

“And that’s an improvement? Romans made me fight, and now you’re fighting for them?” But the quirk of his mouth had more pride in it this time. “A legion of your own, how did you manage that?”

“The Tenth Fidelis was supposed to be mine.” My old legion. Emperor Trajan promised it to me at the end of the Parthian wars. Then Hadrian became Emperor, and you know the whole blasted rest of
that
. I told my father, briefly. “Hadrian’s a bastard,” I concluded.

“Most emperors are.” My father ducked around a sapling without looking.

“You’d have liked Trajan.” I’d wept like a baby at his death, and not because I was losing my legion. Trajan was the best man I’d ever known outside my father and maybe Titus Aurelius. “Emperor Hadrian, though . . .” I hesitated. “He’s my enemy.”

We’d reached the top of the hill, coming out from the flowering trees. There was a crumbling stone wall at the top, and my father leaned against it, folding his broad arms across his chest. “Tell me.”

I told him, all of it. The many masks, and the man behind them.

My father sounded noncommittal. “Anything good to be said for him?”

I thought of Hadrian’s rampant enthusiasm as he told me all about his wall. “He’s got vision, I won’t deny it. But what does that matter? He once threatened to have Mirah and the children killed if I didn’t do his bidding.”

A wordless rumble in my father’s chest, like a lion’s growl. I stared out over the hill.

“He threatened them,” I said. “And I let him. I still
serve
him.”

My father waited, scarred as an old oak, but not as yielding.

“Did he
break
me,” I managed to say, “or did Rome?”

“No one could break my son.” His reply came calmly. “Not the Young Barbarian.”

My old gladiator name. How foolish it sounded; so foolish I almost laughed. “Not so young anymore.”

“And grown more stubborn, not less.” My father looked at me. “Nobody’s broken you, boy. Not the Emperor, not anyone. You’re just biding your time, like I taught you to do in a fight.”

I felt my eyes sting. “If I’m just biding my time, why did I let him make me his tame dog?”

My father shrugged. “Why did I make so many kills in the arena?”

“You were a slave.” I rested my fists on the crumbling wall. “You had no choice.”

“Still felt like a black-souled bastard for doing it. You know how many I’ve killed? Men, unarmed prisoners, boys young enough to count as children. Women—there was one dressed like an Amazon. I still think about her. I’ve taken more lives than you, I’ll wager. They called me the Barbarian, and I earned it. But I didn’t
stay
the Barbarian, and you won’t stay anybody’s dog.”

I looked down at the wooded hills, seeing Hadrian’s bearded face. “Sometimes I think about killing him.”

“I don’t recommend it,” my father said, reflective. “It’s a lot of trouble, killing emperors.” He should know.

“Mirah wants us to leave Rome. I reckon I could, get far enough away from Hadrian to make it not worth the chase, but . . .”

“But you’ve never liked running.”

“No.”

“So what’s your plan? Keep taking everything he dishes out; smile and say ‘Thank you, Caesar’? I know you, boy. You’ll slip your leash someday, and then you’ll crack him open like an egg, and that’ll be the end of you.”

“I have ways of keeping my temper.” I smiled a little. “You see, I slept with his wife—”

My father nearly fell off the hilltop.
“What?”

“Empress Sabina. Five years ago, in Selinus after Emperor Trajan died. I had her right under Hadrian’s nose, and he never knew.” That’s what I thought of, every time he maddened me with his pompous jests or his whispered threats. It should have been the noble thought of Mirah and the children that held my temper in check, but I wasn’t so noble as all that. It was the thought of the Emperor’s supple wife lying under me that kept my jaw locked, no matter what the Emperor himself might be saying.
Your wife laced her arms around my neck and said, “Shut up and take me,”
I’d thought silently to Hadrian, so many times.
How does that feel, you bloodless bastard?

I’d never say it—it would be death to say it. But I
could
say it if I wanted to. And that helped.

“You always had more balls than brains, boy,” my father observed. “The Empress of
Rome
?”

“At least it helps me keep my temper, that memory.” Which was something, because otherwise I wasn’t proud of it: the one time I’d betrayed my wife. It had been from grief, not any great passion—Sabina and I had both been so ravaged by Trajan’s death, we hardly knew what we were doing—but I’d still done it. With a woman who had ignored me ever since.

“My foolish Roman son,” my father said, shaking his head, and we trailed down the flowered hill with the dogs loping between our feet.

ANNIA

Rome

Of all Annia’s cousins, Marcus Catilius Severus had to be the worst. He was about her age, maybe younger; he had curly dark hair; and he was more boring than a white-washed wall.

“What’s it made of?” he was asking, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked up at the huge dome of the half-completed Pantheon.