Empress of the Seven Hills

  “Where do beds come into it?” Sabina looked surprised. “She manages his household and gives him sensible advice; he runs the Empire and sleeps with strapping young soldiers. They get along very well.” She swung her silver sandals. “There aren’t many marriages like Calpurnia and my father, Vix. But there are a lot like Trajan and Plotina.”

  “He likes soldiers?” I raised my eyebrows. “Is that why you thought Trajan would like me? Because I don’t—”

  “No, you oaf! I thought he’d like you because except for the preferring-soldiers-in-bed part, you’re just like him.”

  “I’m an oaf, am I?” I lunged out and caught her around the waist, yanking her toward me. She still wore her elegant silver-gray dress, the one silver-and-garnet earring sparkling beside her throat.

  “You’re an oaf who fought a marvelous bout against an emperor, so you get the prize.” She tugged her earring loose and dropped it into my hand. “Those tribunes were fighting over it, though I’m not sure why. You beat them, so it’s yours.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Oh, I’m already yours,” she said lightly. “I do love you, Vix. Quite a lot, actually.”

  Unease squirmed in my stomach as I tried to think of a way out of that one. She’d never acted moony around me before, that was certain, but she did talk to me, and that made me suddenly cautious, considering the fact that my parents were always talking, back and forth about anything and everything, and they were linked up for life and probably death beyond. Sabina’s father and Lady Calpurnia were always talking too, come to think of it… Was it the talking that made what went on under the blankets more than just a giggle and a good time? Was that what pulled a man in too deep to get out?

  I didn’t know what to say; didn’t know what I thought or felt or wanted. Didn’t know much of anything, really, and I wondered again how I was going to get out of this, but then Sabina laughed a little and climbed on top of me for a kiss. I buried my hands in her smooth, piled hair and brought it tumbling down, and the moment disappeared.

  CHAPTER 7

  SABINA

  “Not too many more of these this year.” Sabina took a pomegranate from the old fruit-seller’s wrinkled hand, passing over a coin in return. “Thank you for saving me one, Xanthe.”

  “Of course, Lady,” the old woman beamed, bobbing a curtsy. Sabina moved on, holding the pomegranate to her nose. A little withered but still sweet.

  “You knew the woman’s name,” Hadrian observed at her elbow, offering her a little silver knife to split the skin as they walked.

  “Xanthe? Of course, I always buy fruit from her. It’s good to remember people’s names.”

  “Even commoners?”

  “Especially commoners.” Sabina levered the first seed out of the pomegranate and popped it into her mouth. “My father knows every one of his clients by name, and they’d do anything for him. And look at Emperor Trajan—he knows all his Praetorians and their families. He remembers the names the centurions give their horses.”

  “Yes.” Hadrian sounded thoughtful. “It does seem to work for him, doesn’t it?”

  The morning was cold and blustery, the sky gray and scowling above. Awnings and curtains flapped briskly all over the Forum Romanum, and harried shopkeepers swore as they battened down some unruly corner of cloth or chased a cap that the wind had tossed across the flagstones. Sabina led the way idly between the stalls and booths, well wrapped in a rose wool palla. Hadrian paced beside her, tall and calm in his snowy toga as he steered her around the wind-skimmed puddles, and a Norbanus household guard tramped dutifully behind. Not Vix—Sabina had been quite careful to ask for one of the other guards when Hadrian came calling and asked her if she wouldn’t enjoy a walk in the city. She didn’t want Vix’s eavesdropping ears straining to pick up every word this morning, or his black scowl boring into her every time Hadrian touched her elbow.

  “Wait, I’m going to buy this.” Sabina paused by a stuffed leather ball from another vendor’s display of goods, tossing it up and catching it. “Soft enough for Calpurnia’s baby to play with, once it’s born.”

  “A fine choice, Lady,” the shopkeeper said. “And perhaps a ring, to aid in cutting teeth?”

  “Yes, Linus had terrible trouble with his teeth…” Sabina scooped out another handful of pomegranate seeds, inquiring after the shopkeeper’s own children. She listened to a long story about the shopkeeper’s favorite daughter, who had begun to walk a full month earlier than expected, traded a recipe for easing sore gums—“my little brother would never have got through all his teething without oil of cloves”—and fished out more coins.

  “You do that very well,” Hadrian observed as they moved on and left the shopkeeper bowing and waving behind.

  “It’s not so difficult. Just act interested in people.”

  “People don’t interest me,” Hadrian confessed. “Unless they’re clever.”

  “I know that. I didn’t interest you either, until I proved I had a brain.” Sabina gave the package with the ball and teething ring to her guard to carry. “But you can pretend people are interesting, and they’ll like you for it.”

  “I don’t have your gift for that, Vibia Sabina.” Hadrian’s bearded lips curved. “For being—easy. With people of all stations.”

  “Start with learning their names,” Sabina advised. “Smiling when they greet you. Talking to them—you remember that amendment to the Lex Cornelia that my father proposed, the one about the corruption of public officials? He got the notion after talking to one of our freedmen who knew more about bribing officials than anyone alive. Slaves, freedmen, commoners—you underestimate them, and you shouldn’t. You can learn a great deal.”

  “Perhaps.” Hadrian’s close-cropped beard was a shade darker than his hair, but she could see little wiry glints of gold in it up close. “Or I could marry you, and you can charm the slaves and freedmen and commoners for me.”

  “And how high does that rank on my list of assets?”

  “Higher than your dowry, to be sure. Sesterces are common. Charm, less so.”

  Sabina sucked another pomegranate seed off her fingertip, tilting her head to admire the Temple of Concord’s streaked African marble. A harried-looking woman hastened past, trying to tether her palla, her shopping basket, and her two children in the restless wind. “Empress Plotina invited me to come to the palace yesterday. To help her with the household weaving.”

  “She’s very fond of you.”

  “She seemed rather put out with me, actually. I didn’t have a tight enough hand at the loom, my warp was uneven, and my dress was indecent because it had no sleeves. You were praised to the skies, however. Any conversation we had came round to you. Is it true you organized her garden into provinces when you were a child, and took turns being governor of each one? She says your filing system was impressive for an eleven-year-old. And there was the story about the wolf you killed on a hunt at fourteen, and how you slept under the pelt until it was bald—”

  Hadrian coughed embarrassment. “Did you hear the Empress is to be honored with the title of Augusta?” Hastily. “Such a great honor. Trajan tried to give her the title before, but she refused it. She said she would not be named Mother of Rome and honored by the Senate until she had earned it.”

  “I’m sure she did earn it.” Sabina tossed a pomegranate seed into the air, catching it neatly between her teeth. “I doubt I’d have been such a model empress if I’d married Trajan.”

  “You?” Hadrian halted. “Was there talk of a match when you were younger?”

  “Not precisely. But when Emperor Domitian died, the Empire was offered to my father—”

  “What?” Hadrian’s eyes flicked around them with appalled furtiveness. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “I spent a lot of my childhood listening at doors,” Sabina explained, digging out a few more jewel-like seeds. “Nobody ever told me anything, so I eavesdropped. You’d be surprised the things I heard… anyway, if my father had
become Emperor, he’d have adopted Trajan as heir and married him to me to solidify the alliance. So, Trajan could have been my husband instead of my favorite relative. But my father didn’t want to take the purple, so now Trajan’s naming Plotina as Augusta of Rome and you’re paying me court instead.”

  “Dear gods,” said Hadrian faintly. “I hope you don’t go around talking like this all the time.”

  “Not at all. I know how to keep my mouth shut. Anyway, I’m rather glad I didn’t end up empress. I used to dream of it now and then—most girls do—and I suppose in some ways it would be quite interesting. But it does tend to be a job one holds for life. And I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a palace under a diadem for all the rest of my days. Though Trajan would have made a good enough husband. I do adore him.”

  “These simple soldiers are easy to like.” Hadrian sounded grudging.

  “He’s more than that!” Sabina argued. “He’s so good at keeping the Senate in one hand and the legions in the other… he may look like a simple soldier, but a bluff legionary couldn’t do the balancing act he does.”

  “He should concern himself with the Empire’s administration rather than its expansion.” Hadrian’s voice took on the teacherish tone he often used when telling Sabina about Greek philosophers, whether or not she’d already read them. “He should begin a building program—temples, aqueducts, a new forum. I’ve told him a hundred times, but he ignores me.” A scowl. “He doesn’t care for my advice. Or for me. You saw that, the night of your family’s dinner party. When your bodyguard made me look a fool.” Hadrian’s face hardened briefly.

  “I don’t think Trajan dislikes you, exactly.” Sabina thought it best to keep the conversation well away from Vix. “He’s just warm-blooded. You’re cooler. Hot and cold don’t mix.” Like Vix and Hadrian… but I’m cool-blooded too, and Vix and I mix just fine.

  Better not to think of that, at the moment.

  “Anyway,” Sabina continued. “Even if Trajan doesn’t favor you, Empress Plotina does. And he listens to her. You may get your building program yet.”

  “And be too busy making this city beautiful ever to think about leaving it.” The words burst out of Hadrian like a flood of water from a broken dam. “Half my life I’ll spend debating in the Senate house, making speeches and overseeing officials and reviewing lists, and there’s so much in the world to see! The Nile in flood, and the Sibyl at Delphi, and those mist-covered mountains you told me about in Brigantia—” He was waving his arms again, the way he always did when enthusiasm ran away with him. “The temple of Artemis in Ephesus—the great forests in Dacia—”

  “Will you ever see them?” Sabina asked. “Plotina has so very many plans for your future…”

  “Yes, she does.” Hadrian worried at the corner of his thumbnail.

  They walked along in silence for a moment.

  “The Empress has high hopes for me.” Hadrian sounded guarded, and the wind tugged at the snowy folds of his toga. “I do try to oblige her. She had the raising of me, after all. I owe her a great deal.”

  “You owe her a great deal,” Sabina acknowledged. “Not everything.”

  They fell silent again. A Numidian slave girl swayed past with a basket balanced up on one shoulder, brushing off a sailor who leered at her from a wine shop. An astrologer with a frayed display of star charts gestured invitingly, crying out to the crowds, and Sabina paused. “Perhaps we should have your stars read. That would settle the question for you—if you put much faith in astrologers, that is.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “And you call yourself a man of reason,” she teased.

  “I had my stars read by Emperor Domitian’s astrologer Nessus, when I first put on the toga of a grown man.” Hadrian sounded thoughtful. “He gave me such a strange prediction, I hardly knew what to think… so I taught myself to read the stars, just to check him, and I kept getting the same prediction. Every time.”

  “Really?” Sabina cocked her head. “That’s what you meant in Uncle Paris’s studio that time, when you told me you already knew what your destiny was. What was your prediction?”

  “That no man would see more of the world than I. So I think Plotina is destined to be disappointed in her plans for my future.” Hadrian looked down at Sabina—not condescending, not teacherish, just a straight serious gaze with a core that burned. “You could come see the world with me.”

  Sabina held his gaze a moment, then looked down at her pomegranate. She should have counted the seeds as she ate… her fingers were stained as pink as a new dawn. “How many seeds do you think there are in a pomegranate?”

  “About six hundred,” Hadrian said promptly. It was the kind of thing he always knew.

  “And I ate more than two thirds,” she said. “So if we take Proserpina’s scale from the myth—one month of marriage with Pluto for every pomegranate seed she ate… I think that gives you and me more than thirty-five years to see the world together. Do you think that’s long enough?”

  VIX

  I couldn’t find Sabina in her room, or the library, or the atrium. I finally ran her down in the farthest part of the gardens, sitting on a marble bench before a fountain stilled for the winter, a pale-blue palla around her shoulders and a scroll half unrolled across her lap. I’d worked up a fairly good rage by that point, so I just stamped toward her and bellowed, “Hadrian?”

  “Hello, Vix.” She marked her place in the scroll with one finger, looking up. “You might have come sooner, you know. It’s cold down here, but I wanted to give you a place where you could shout all you liked.”

  I refused to be derailed. “You’re marrying Tribune Hadrian?” A goggle-eyed slave girl had given me the news when I returned from an errand to the Capitoline Library. “Hadrian. That prim fish-faced arse—”

  “He’s not really fish-faced,” Sabina mused. “The beard will take some getting used to, though.”

  “Why?” I shouted.

  “Well, I’m used to kissing you and you don’t have a beard, so I imagine it will feel strange at first—”

  I grabbed the scroll out of her hands, and heaved it into the fountain. The fountain was frozen, so it just bounced and unrolled. Not as dramatic as I would have liked.

  “I’m sorry, Vix.” Sabina rose, penitent. “I’m teasing you, and I shouldn’t. Yes, I’m going to marry Senator Hadrian. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Why shouldn’t—” Words failed me.

  “I have to marry somebody.” She was such a little thing, standing there in the cold winter sunshine with her hair hanging down her back like the first time I’d seen her. “What else am I going to do? Stay in my father’s house forever, reading and playing with Linus and Faustina? Be a Vestal Virgin? A bit late for either of those options. It’s time I married, and Hadrian will do as well as anyone. Better, even.”

  I found myself pacing back and forth in short steps along the length of the fountain, unable to keep still. “Why is that?”

  “He wants to travel, Vix. He says he’ll take me to Athens after the wedding, and Thebes, and maybe Egypt. Everywhere.” She looked around the garden as if she were already seeing the pyramids and the Greek temples, and the sleek-lined ships that would take her to see them. “Much better than some dull praetor who just wants children and dinner parties. We’ll leave Rome to the politicians and travel the world together.”

  “Not if that bitch of an empress has her way,” I threw back. “Empress Plotina, she’ll keep her thumb on you, all right. Checking up ten times a day, making sure you’re good enough for the boy she raised. You want to travel the world, you don’t go marrying some mother-ridden bastard who has to get permission from his mummy every time he leaves the city.”

  “I can handle Plotina,” Sabina said. “She isn’t half as clever as Domitian’s Empress, after all.”

  “And what about me?” I snarled. “What was I? Just a bit of fun?”

  “No, not just fun.” Sabina pulled the pale-blue palla closer around herself. “But what
did you think would happen, Vix? Were you going to marry me? It’s not even legal, patricians and plebeians. Even if it were, if I’d said I wanted to marry you, you’d get that shifty look you always get when you feel cornered, and you’d probably be gone by morning with your cloak under your arm. That’s why you left Britannia, isn’t it? Some girl wanted to marry you?”

  I ducked that one and shifted onto firmer ground. “You used me.”

  “For my enjoyment—just like you used me for yours.” Her voice was maddeningly calm. “Do you regret it?”

  “It’s the last enjoyment you’ll ever have.” I yanked her against me, one hand digging deep into her hair and the other roughly claiming her breasts. “You think you’ll get anything like this from Hadrian? It might shock you to know, Lady, but the only way you’ll ever interest him is from the back.” I spat it out at her, the conclusion I’d drawn the day I met Hadrian. “I’ve seen the bastard eyeing the slaves when he comes to call on you, and it isn’t the girls he likes to look at. I even got a glance or two myself, when I had my tunic off. Your Hadrian likes boys.”

  Sabina snorted. “I know that.”

  My hands dropped from her as I did my best not to look like a fish.

  “Of course I knew, Vix. Calpurnia told me early on that Hadrian keeps a lover: a boy singer, to be exact; twenty years old and much prettier than me.” Sabina seated herself on the marble bench again. “Why do you think she and my father were dubious about Hadrian as a suitor in the first place? They wanted me to find a husband who’d love me, give me children. But I don’t want children, and I don’t need love from a husband. Hadrian will take me traveling by day and leave me alone at night. We’ll be good friends, and that suits me well enough.”

  It dropped like a stone into my stomach, the answer to the question I’d been pondering on and off ever since the night a senator’s daughter had first dragged me into her bed. “That’s why it was me, wasn’t it? You picked me. Hadrian for a husband and me for a stud—”