Empress of the Seven Hills

  The centurion coughed, and I realized I’d missed my cue. Hastily I removed my helmet, bowing my head as he reached up.

  It was light—so light. Just a few twigs and leaves twisted into a wreath. It was too big, and I had to cock it back on my head or else have it slip over my ears. I felt it under my hand, the victory wreath I’d dreamed so many countless hours, and my solemnity cracked. I looked up, past the centurion to the Emperor, who stood in his breastplate and red cloak like any one of us soldiers, and I grinned at him.

  He grinned back, infectiously, and strode past the centurion who was still droning. “Give me that,” he ordered, and yanked the pelt from the hands of the hovering optio. “Quit smiling like a loon, boy, and bow your head. This is a serious moment, damn it.”

  I bowed my head, trying not to laugh, hearing chortles from the first few rows of legionaries who had overheard. Emperor Trajan swept the lion skin about my shoulders, the mane covering my laurel wreath, the yellowed fangs framing my forehead. He tied the paws across my chest, and I heard the claws click against my breastplate. I raised my hand to stop the pelt from slipping, and felt the coarse fur of the mane in my fingers. It smelled like dry grass and sunshine, like blood and sweat, and above all like a king who had died on a stone circle. Trajan had offered me a new pelt, but I’d refused.

  A pole was thrust into my left hand, and then the Emperor grasped my right. “Congratulations, Aquilifer,” he said, and spun me about toward the assembled legion. He raised my arm into the air, and the Tenth exploded.

  I saw Sabina, immaculate in green silk, applauding with the polite formality of any legate’s wife, but she had tears in her eyes. Hadrian stood at her side, my legate in the unpleasant flesh, putting his hands together exactly twice before he was done applauding. His bearded face was impassive as he stood there in a breastplate that had probably never been bloodied in its life. He’d opposed my elevation, I’d heard. The Emperor had been the one to override him.

  Cheers swamped me. The Emperor gripped my shoulders, looking as proud as my father would have, and kissed me soundly on both cheeks. He shouted something I couldn’t hear over the cheering and the banging of shields, and I looked up dizzily to see the eagle riding over my head, giving her imperious silent shriek. I wouldn’t have to carry a legionary’s pack anymore, just the eagle.

  My eagle.

  One of my better memories, that.

  TITUS

  “Lion skins are hot,” Vix complained as Titus slowed his horse to pace beside the new aquilifer. “I don’t know how the lions stand it.”

  “Barely raised to your new rank, and you’re already grousing.” Titus shook his head. “Honor is supposed to be the reward of virtue, you know.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Do you really care?”

  “No. But if I don’t ask you get hurt feelings.”

  Titus laughed, flipping a lock of his gelding’s mane back across its neck. He could feel sweat running down his neck even though it was barely noon. A cloudless blue dome of sky over a flat expanse of green and a dusty white ribbon of road, as if the world were celebrating along with the legion. Celebrating the fact that the Tenth Fidelis was going home.

  Mog, thought Titus. It had seemed such a backwater mud-hole when he first arrived, drab and charmless with its endless taverns and raucous theatres and half-paved streets. Now all he could think was, Real beds instead of bedrolls! Roast pork and grapes instead of barley broth and wormy biscuits! Clean linens instead of blankets with lice! Mog sounded like a paradise.

  The rest of the legion clearly thought so too, marching along double-pace and bawling out marching songs in tuneless good humor. The Emperor sang too, riding just ahead on a big black horse with his legates. Titus could hear his loud tuneless voice, joining into the marching song’s more obscene verses. “Everyone looks like they can taste that homecoming wine already,” Titus said. “From the Emperor on down.”

  “What they’re tasting is the hero’s welcome we’re all going to get,” Vix said with relish. “The girls will flop on their backs the moment they see us coming. Who doesn’t like a victorious hero?”

  “I think you have enough girls to contend with already, Slight.”

  “Just two!”

  “Does Sabina even know about Demetra, or—”

  “Oh, not Demetra. Sabina’s my first girl. She’s my second.” Vix glanced up the length of the standard pole to the eagle who paced the air serenely over his head. “Of the two, I think she’ll be the more demanding.”

  “And what about Demetra?” Titus gave a withering look from his horse’s height. “Her child will be born soon, you know. Your child.”

  “I’ll give her some money to take care of it.” Vix whistled between his teeth, cheerful. “She’ll find a new man soon enough afterward. No girl who looks like her will be lonely for long. You want to make her an offer? You’re a rising man now—Emperor’s tribune!”

  “I don’t really know what he promoted me for,” Titus confessed. “I just brought him that head. Not like I had anything to do with collecting it. Maybe it was a reward for not throwing up all over him when I handed it over? I admit, that took a fairly heroic effort.”

  Vix pushed the lion’s mane off his hair, looking at Trajan’s big armored figure on the black horse up ahead. “I’d die for that man in a heartbeat.” Frankly. “I think I love him.”

  “Quiet, or you’ll make Sabina jealous.”

  “Oh, she knows I love her too.”

  He said it so lightly, as if it were no great matter to love a girl and be loved in return. You’re the lucky one, Slight, Titus thought. And not for the lion skin and the victory wreath.

  “I thought it would be different,” Vix confided, shifting the standard pole to his other shoulder. “Like a fish getting caught—some girl finally gets her hooks into you. But this is easy. Like breathing.”

  “She makes it easy,” Titus said without thinking, and kicked himself. Stupid, stupid. But Vix hadn’t noticed his slip of the tongue.

  “She just held me that night after I killed Decebalus. Never said a word. Most of the time she’s talking nonstop, but she knows when to be quiet.” Vix hesitated, his confident swagger slowing a moment. “I still don’t know why—it was like getting hit in the gut, killing him. But I’ve killed men before and never thought twice about it.”

  “‘It is proper to learn even from an enemy,’” Titus quoted. “You’re not the first soldier to admire a man he has to kill. It’s been troubling men since first there was war, I imagine.”

  “If I’d been born in Dacia, I’d have been one of those men following him.” Vix fumbled for words, which Titus never heard him do. Vix’s words might lack eloquence, but they were always unhesitating. “It’s just an accident, isn’t it? Where we end up getting born? But it controls everything. Put my parents a few hundred miles northeast, and I’d have grown up with a round shield—and a beard—and I wouldn’t have ever fought in the Colosseum—and I’d likely be dead by that solar disc right now, next to my king.”

  “Did you do what he asked?” Titus asked. “Did you bury his left hand?”

  “Next to the disc, in the grass. With his ax.”

  One of the legates called for Titus then, and he steered his horse away back to the head of the column. But he still brought a wineskin to Vix’s fire sometimes when they made camp at night, as the weeks rolled on and the Tenth marched west. Dark pines were fading to open fields, and for the first time in what felt like months, Titus began to think of Rome.

  I’ll campaign for quaestor, he decided. Senator Norbanus said he’d put my name forward. Public works and festival organization; I’ll do that better than I ever led a scouting party. Perhaps he would get his own apartments in the city as well. Not too far from his grandfather, but a home of his own. A man’s home. He’d marched across the Empire, after all; he’d been to war; he had that first all-important line of “Tribune” on his list of accomplishments. For dreams as modest as m
ine, that puts me halfway up the ladder already. Maybe that was the good thing about dreaming on a small scale. Vix still had a ways to go if he wanted to lead a legion.

  “By the way,” Sabina announced halfway through Pannonia, perhaps a fortnight’s ride outside Moguntiacum. “I’m being sent ahead on to Mog. That wagon I haven’t sat in all summer takes me on ahead tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Vix looked down at her, sitting wrapped in the lion skin inside the circle of his arms.

  “Because Hadrian wants me to go ahead, to greet the Empress and help make arrangements for the triumphant return.” Sabina shuddered. “She’s come all the way north to Germania, just to meet him and Trajan. And to unload a whole summer’s worth of advice on me the moment we set eyes on each other. I wish I could just come skipping up behind the legion in my hobnailed sandals. Hopefully the shock would kill her.”

  “Hadrian too, and then we’re shut of them both.” Vix kissed her soundly. His eyes when he looked at her these days had a softer gleam than the old casual possessiveness, Titus thought. His hand twined automatically through hers whenever she came near, and his big thumb rubbed in a slow tender movement across the back of her knuckles…

  I need a girl, Titus decided. A nice mistress I can set up in that apartment in Rome. He could afford one on a quaestor’s salary. Someone pretty who didn’t mind boring quotes from Horace, and who could cook. Lamb stew…

  “Damn it,” Vix grumbled the following day, after Sabina had kissed him a very thorough good-bye in the morning and that afternoon been handed into her wagon with elegant formality by Hadrian to be sent on ahead—along with her escort of guards and slaves, who had gotten quite rich that summer for looking the other way and not guarding her. “I don’t like sleeping without her,” Vix complained. “The way her hair gets in my face. And the way she digs her elbow into my side every few hours and grumbles at me to for gods’ sake turn on my stomach and stop snoring—”

  “Get used to it, Slight, because this mad arrangement of yours can’t possibly go on in Mog.”

  “Why not?”

  Titus stared. “Do you have a death wish?”

  “My girl can sneak and lie with the best of them. We’ll manage.”

  “But Hadrian’s primed for a governorship now.” Titus had heard the news from the Emperor, helping to draft a list of future appointments. “Pannonia or Syria, somewhere far.”

  “She won’t stay with him forever.”

  Titus fell back on Seneca. “‘Is the gladiator formulating his attack in the arena?’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, don’t you ever plan ahead?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a plan. Sabina divorces Hadrian. I buy entrance to the equite class with her money. I get a wife with a little more polish than I’ve got. That helps me get ahead, get my promotion to centurion, move up the ladder, eventually get my legion.”

  “I see. And have you shared any of these plans of yours with the lady in question?”

  “Sabina lives in the present,” Vix dismissed. “I’m the one with my eye on the future.”

  “Somehow I doubt it will be as simple as you think, Slight.”

  “Why not?”

  Titus rolled his eyes. The Tenth rolled west.

  SABINA

  “You look very brown.” The Empress’s eyes swept Sabina up and down. “You should have taken more care with your sunshade. Come stand by me.”

  “Of course.” Sabina followed after the dark-blue-clad figure with the deep-set eyes and the severe swept-back plaits. Those elegant streaks of gray had advanced even farther into the Empress’s dark hair, but otherwise she looked in distressingly good form as she swept to the head of the temple. Not much of a temple—Jupiter’s shrine here in Mog wasn’t much more than a few steps up to a modest altar. “The monument of Drusus is much more splendid,” Germania’s governor had argued. “Surely a better site to welcome the legions.”

  But Empress Plotina had efficiently crushed that notion. “Jupiter’s hand delivered my husband to victory,” she decreed. “We welcome our legions back to his temple, and none other.” The governor had looked peevish, but it hardly mattered what he thought anymore—Plotina had taken charge of everything the moment she arrived in Mog.

  And after all, Sabina thought, wasn’t every army’s homecoming really about the women who welcomed them? The site didn’t matter at all in comparison. From the pillarlike Plotina in her dark blue and diadem to the legates’ wives who waited stout and dignified behind Sabina; from the centurions’ wives with their lively chatter standing in the next rank to the common women who lined the street below in their gaudy beads and packs of clutching children—they all had the same look. The anxious scanning of the horizon, the craning of the neck as they looked for their men to come home.

  Sabina wondered if Vix’s other woman was here today, the one he hadn’t told her about but had doubtless left behind in Mog when the legion marched. The one Titus had been almost visibly tempted to bring up.

  The Empress sounded disapproving as she looked Sabina over. “That dress is very bright.”

  “I’m so glad you like it.” Yellow silk, with a golden eagle pinning each shoulder. Bliss to wear soft silks again after a summer of scratchy wool. A great many things had been bliss, coming back to civilization. Sabina’s luxurious palanquin and speedy escort had taken her swiftly ahead from the Tenth to Hadrian’s quarters in Mog, and she’d had a week of much needed solitude. Sleeping late in a soft bed piled with furs, curling up to a breakfast of cold mulberry infusions and fresh fruit, soaking in the steaming hot pool of her bathhouse… Sabina’s slaves had exchanged glances as they shook out the fleas her clothes had inevitably acquired on the road, and the bathhouse attendants raised eyebrows over the calluses that had to be pumiced off Sabina’s feet, but no one had said a word. When the page bringing his mistress a stack of letters in the library yesterday found her crying silently into a scroll, he had left the letters and backed out with lowered eyes.

  Not too many tears, though. In the morning Sabina rose humming, lined her eyes in gold leaf, and thought smiling of Vix as she pinned her yellow silks into place with the eagle brooches.

  “That dress is too bright.” Empress Plotina’s deep voice made the decree like a judge. “You must change, Vibia Sabina.”

  “But I think I hear the legions approaching. Three and a half legions make a great deal of noise, don’t you think?”

  That got her a Look from the Empress of Rome, a Look Sabina hadn’t missed one bit during the last six months, but the roar had already begun in the distance, and a ripple spread outward through the women clustered in the street. More ripples, more murmurs, and suddenly a shriek of excitement sounded and Sabina didn’t have to be told the eagles had been sighted.

  This was nothing, she knew, compared to the triumph already being planned in Rome. “White bulls in sacrifice to Jupiter,” Plotina had ruled. “Black bulls to Minerva, more to Mars and Hades. Chariot races, gladiator bouts, perhaps a Colosseum reenactment of the final siege…” Trajan would ride along in a chariot with a laurel wreath over his head, his face daubed in celebratory red paint, and no doubt Vix and the other standard-bearers would be brought back to Rome too, to march with their eagles as millions screamed. But Sabina thought this was the real triumph, the triumph of the living coming back to their women, and the women screaming and waving pennants and barely restrained as the beaming, strutting soldiers swaggered back into Mog.

  Trajan led the parade in his red cloak, vaulting off his black horse like a boy and bounding up the steps of the Temple of Jupiter with a grin to split the sun. Plotina unbent enough to smile in return, extending her hands in welcome. He moved with shouts of greeting to the governor of Germania, to the other officials who stood hopeful for his attention. He barely contained himself as the priest droned a blessing and sacrificed a bull, and when he waved to the crowd the screams drowned the blessing. He picked Sabina up in a bear hug, smearing her with
bull’s blood, but she just laughed and kissed him on both cheeks and he dropped her into Hadrian’s arms with a shouted, “Here’s the man who’s been missing you, and after just a week too!”

  Sabina smiled as Hadrian righted her. “Hello again.”

  “Vibia Sabina.” He kissed her hand as formally as if they had not met for months—which they scarcely had. “You look considerably cleaner.”

  “Yes, I stayed days in the bathhouse when I got back to civilization. You look very splendid yourself.” His formal armor suited him, and he had dismounted his big horse with a flourish not one whit overdone. No one sat a horse as magnificently as her husband, not even the Emperor. Maybe it was because horses adored Hadrian—even now, the big stallion was nibbling at his sleeve. “I’ve missed you,” she said, and surprised herself by meaning it. They might have met once a day for a cup of wine or the occasional dinner, but their long conversations had withered away under his duties as legate and her hours with Vix.

  A crinkle of surprise showed between his brows, but it quickly smoothed out as Plotina came forward. “Dear Publius.” She kissed his forehead possessively. “It’s been too long.”

  “Much too long.” He took her arm. “Do I have you to thank for my new governorship?”

  “Of course, dear boy.” The Empress waved politely to the troops below, getting a swell of applause. “I’d hoped to get you Syria. You aren’t disappointed?”

  “Not at all. Pannonia will provide ample opportunities.”

  “Pannonia?” Sabina lifted her eyebrows, turning to Hadrian. “You didn’t tell me!”

  “Confirmed only yesterday,” Plotina said, sounding complacent. “Of course Publius must not leave until after the triumph in Rome. You must be at the Emperor’s side for that, he’ll have it no other way—”