Empress of the Seven Hills

  “I don’t recommend it,” Sabina advised. “After about three variations, group fornication gets tedious. What’s that, three lovers? There was also a soldier. My favorite of the four.” Better leave that story for another time—Sabina didn’t want to give her little sister the idea of seducing any household guards. One scandalous daughter in the family was quite enough. “Are you very shocked at me?”

  “No.” But Faustina blushed.

  “Even Calpurnia wasn’t always so matronly and respectable, you know,” Sabina pointed out. “She moved in with Father a full three weeks before they were married. That had all the old cats in Rome hissing.”

  “Mother?” Faustina marveled. “I suppose even old people broke rules when they were young.”

  “Calpurnia is hardly old—only forty-five, you know. Forty-five isn’t ancient!”

  “It’s primordial,” the girl of sixteen dismissed.

  “I suppose all mothers look old to their daughters,” Sabina conceded. “Except mine. But she was also the most notorious whore in Rome since Empress Messalina.”

  “Was she really?” Faustina wondered. “No one ever talks about your mother. Except the slaves, and from the way they whisper you’d think she was Medusa.”

  “She was worse than Medusa and Messalina. Combined. Why do you think everyone’s so eager to call me a whore? ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ that’s why.”

  “Four lovers in ten years does not make you a whore.” Firmly. “Not given Hadrian’s tastes.”

  “And what do you know about his tastes?”

  “I gossip with all the slaves. Yours too. The best way to keep informed.” Faustina hesitated. “Hadrian—does he mind? Those other men, I mean.”

  “He didn’t use to.” In their earlier years of marriage, he had never once questioned Sabina’s private life. As far as Hadrian was concerned, a wife who was discreet and brought no shame on her husband’s good name with an unexplained bastard or a public scandal could call her bed her own—and he hadn’t even insisted that she produce a few sons first, the way most husbands would. But after Dacia, the topic of discreet love affairs had somehow become sore. “Did you share your tent with common legionaries while we were on campaign?” he had said bluntly, two granite-carved lines suddenly bracketing his mouth. That had been the night of Trajan’s celebration in Mog, after he’d told her to start behaving herself and she’d stalked out in her wet dress. “A tribune or an officer, a man of your own stature—that is one thing, but low-born soldiers are beyond all propriety or shame. Did you?”

  “No,” Sabina had said, not lying. She had not shared her tent with anyone, after all; she’d slept away from it most nights. And never with more than one soldier. The key to telling good lies was telling as much truth as possible. Hadrian had turned away without comment and never mentioned the subject again.

  But maybe that’s when the questions started, Sabina thought. Where did you go? Whom did you see? Why did you smile?

  “So tell me again,” Faustina was saying. “I don’t like Hadrian, Father doesn’t like Hadrian, Emperor Trajan doesn’t like Hadrian—so why did you marry him? You could have had anybody.”

  “I’m not altogether sorry I did marry him.” Sabina rose, stretching in the steam. She kept her voice light. “We used to have such wonderful conversations. And even now, at least you can’t say life with Publius Aelius Hadrian is dull.”

  Faustina looked at her quizzically. “Is that all that matters?”

  Calpurnia bustled back into the room, cheeks glowing from the cold water of the pool in the next room. “Are you girls done with your gossip now? Sabina, if you’ve persuaded Faustina to either become a Vestal or elope with a gladiator, I’m going to be very cross with you.”

  “Not at all.” Faustina sounded demure. “Sabina’s given me some very useful advice about marriage. A girl should learn from her older sister, don’t you think?”

  “Not too much,” said Sabina. “So, you have suitors now? Tell me all about them…”

  They passed out of the steam of the caldarium into the next room, where they all stretched out on marble slabs and gestured for the bathhouse attendants. Sabina stretched on one side, looking at her half-sister as Faustina chattered under the masseuse’s dextrous fingers. “There’s one suitor I call the Dribbler, and there’s a praetor I used to call Pretty because, well, he is. But then he tried to kiss me, and by kiss me I mean stick his tongue so far down my throat I almost gagged, so now I call him the Gagger…” Maybe Faustina did look like a young Venus, but her dark eyes had a shrewd gleam like their father’s, and all that blond hair concealed a well of common sense just like Calpurnia’s. Faustina wouldn’t need help choosing a husband when the time came—she’d land on someone good, someone honest, someone without tricks and schemes, someone to value her.

  I should have been born like that, Sabina thought. Straightforward and sensible. Instead, I fall in love with brash ex-gladiators… and then leave them to marry cold stiff politicians with meddling would-be mothers.

  Hadrian wasn’t always like that, another part of her mind whispered.

  But she had no idea what had changed him.

  CHAPTER 18

  VIX

  No one tells you the depressing parts about getting older. Oh, I knew to expect gray hair and stooping shoulders by the time I hit the ancient age of fifty or so. But it seemed unfair that two cups of wine at age thirty could give me a pounding headache in the morning when at seventeen I could have slept off two jugs without a qualm. A whole clutch of blacksmiths were pounding an anvil chorus in my head the morning after my night of reminiscing with Titus, when I laced into my armor, added the ceremonial crest to my helmet, and dragged myself to the palace with the courier and his dispatches to see the Emperor.

  I hadn’t seen the Imperial palace for a very long time, and I can’t say I wanted to see it now. I’d spent some bad months there when I was thirteen as a kind of semivoluntary house guest (never mind why) and I’d have been just as happy never to see it again. But the marble corridors were cheerier than I remembered, or maybe it was just that the bustling slaves and freedmen and even the lines of petitioners didn’t wear terrified expressions anymore. “Name?” a supercilious freedman sniffed as the courier and I presented ourselves in the long hall.

  “Vercingetorix, aquilifer of the Tenth Fidelis of Moguntiacum, and courier.” I thumped my dispatch case, embossed with the legion’s seal. “Dispatches for the Emperor.”

  The freedman waited expectantly, but I didn’t press any coins into his hand so he sniffed again. “You’ll have to wait. There’s a considerable line ahead.”

  It was afternoon before we got in, and by then the anvil chorus in my head was thumping double-time. But I couldn’t help a grin as I saw the Emperor—brown, broad, dressed in an ink-spotted tunic, jotting figures on a tablet as a team of secretaries hovered about him. And damn me if he didn’t grin back.

  “Vercingetorix of the Tenth!” Trajan flung down his stylus. He remembered everyone’s names, even to the lowest soldiers—another reason the legionaries loved him. “Gods’ bones, aren’t you a centurion by now?”

  “When the next opening comes along, Caesar. Or so I’m told.”

  “Good, good. I told the legate to boost you up as soon as you were dry behind the ears. You’ll make a good centurion.”

  Would I? It was all I’d dreamed of for years—the side-to-side helmet crest, the embossed greaves, the sword worn on the other side because I’d no longer have to draw my weapon locked in formation. I’d ached for promotion ever since I’d first been made aquilifer, and now the thought made my palms sweat. Eighty men under my command. Would they have rude nicknames for me behind my back, call me a flogger or a pudding? Would they grumble when they saw me coming, or straighten eagerly? Brag me up among the other centuries, or make obscene gestures and spit?

  Never mind. Trajan thought I’d make a good centurion, and for him I’d become one. Even if I had to turn myself inside out
to do it. “I’m very grateful, Caesar,” I started to say, but he cut me off with a wave.

  “Nonsense, I need good officers. Especially now I’ve got my eye on Parthia. Want to come get it with me?”

  His eyes were warm and steady, impossible to look away from. “Just say the word, Caesar.”

  “Good, good. You’ve got dispatches? Let’s have ’em.” He broke the seals and began scanning lines rapidly. “Not too dull in Mog, I trust?”

  “Not too dull, Caesar.” I’d feared stagnating in the German mud once the Dacian campaign was done, but there had been just enough raids from the sullen Dacians over the past few years to keep things interesting. “I managed to get a few scars.”

  He insisted on seeing them, and I shoved back my sleeve to show off the broad weal where I’d taken a short spear through the arm two years before. Trajan admired it. “Good old Dacia. We’ll have to see if Parthia proves as much fun.”

  “Take the Tenth, Caesar. We’ll win it for you in six months.”

  He waved me out shortly afterward, telling me with a wink to take my time before heading back to Mog. “Take a month’s leave here in the city. I’ll have dispatches for the Tenth, eventually, and you might as well carry them back for me.”

  “Yes, Caesar.” I gave my sharpest salute and wheeled about, headache receded to a manageable throbbing. Trajan’s infectious enthusiasm was more reviving than a draught of cool water on a hot day.

  “Emperor’s pet,” the courier smirked as we made our way back through the hall crowded with its lines of petitioners. “That’s the real reason the legate agreed to let you go along on this delivery, you know—thought that if the Emperor had a chance to bugger you, he’d be quicker to grant that request for more engineers. Is he buggering you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not.” Everyone knew the Emperor liked handsome young men, and married to Old Stoneface Plotina, I couldn’t blame him.

  I could have been one of the Emperor’s more intimate friends, if I wanted. Right after I’d been made aquilifer, Trajan had paused one night in Dacia to give me his usual greeting as he headed back to his tent for bed and I headed the opposite direction with the eagle. He’d clapped me on the shoulder as he usually did, but his hand lingered a moment and he smiled a little and quirked one eyebrow in cheerful invitation. I’d had a hard time turning him away—not because I’d ever bedded a man or wanted to, not even because he was the Emperor and I feared what he’d do if I refused—but because I loved him so dearly as my Caesar and my general that I found it hard to refuse him anything. But I mumbled something about duties to attend to, sliding my shoulder out from under his hand, and he’d thumped me on the arm, not at all annoyed, and gone off to one of the many other young officers who happily shared his bed. Not all Emperors stayed so sanguine when you refused their whims—I remembered the last Emperor I’d attended in this palace, a cheerful and not very sane sort of person who liked to stick flies on pens. I didn’t care much for serving Rome, but it was all different—it was all right—as long as Trajan was at the helm.

  In truth, I wasn’t Trajan’s pet because I was special, or because I was unusual, or even because he liked my looks. I just happened to be the type he liked to have around him: an energetic young soldier who wanted nothing more out of life than a fast hard march and a fast hard fight at the end of it. The Emperor had hundreds of favorites like me, scattered through the legions and the Praetorians and the Empire. Even now I can always spot a Trajan man—an alertness in the eyes, a spring in the step, even now that we’re all mostly old and gray. A little extra shine that came from having served such an emperor.

  And now he’d given me a month’s leave.

  I stood in the shadow of the gate as I left the palace grounds and took a moment to look out over the teeming city. Last night I’d been too tired from the road, too eager for a meal and a friend’s company to pay attention to my homecoming, and this morning my head had been pounding too hard to absorb the city’s sights, but now I paused to take a look around the raucous streets. The buildings crowded me in, crammed so close together and leaning over the street—strange, after so many years of Germania’s muddy tracks and tree-choked horizons. I was sweating freely under a brass coin of a sun, and that was strange too. Midsummer in Mog was wet.

  I hadn’t exactly missed Rome during my ten years in Germania, but now I took a deep hungry whiff of city air. “Hello, you old bitch.” I smelled pitch and ale and spiced meat, unwashed bodies and perfume and life.

  “What’s that smell?” said the courier.

  “She does stink, doesn’t she?” I said, cheerful. “Nowhere like it. I love this city.”

  “Too hot,” the courier complained, and soon tramped off to find himself an inn. “Coming?” he called over his shoulder.

  “No, I’ve got a call to pay.”

  An old freedwoman in a headscarf answered my knock at her door, looking me dubiously up and down. “Yes, sir?”

  I doffed my helmet, introducing myself, and halfway through my explanation her walnut face split in a semitoothless smile. “Of course, of course!” Ushering me into a tiled entry hall. “He’s been expecting you, just wait here—”

  I didn’t have to wait long. “Hell’s gates,” I sputtered, fighting off a bear hug. “What happened to you, Simon?” I cast an eye over my former brother-in-arms, the first man to leave my old contubernium in retirement. Simon had grown a full curly beard, his hair was halfway to gray and covered with a cap, and he wore a tasseled cloak in the eastern fashion instead of the breastplate that had so long been a second skin on him. “Where’s the man who taught me to spar with my right hand?”

  “Gone forever, and good riddance to him.” Simon dragged me out of the entry hall and into the house. I had a pleasant impression of a sunny open-roofed atrium, no different from any other Roman house, with orange trees in small tubs and broad carved doors leading to other airy rooms. People instantly began flooding through those doors, staring at me curiously.

  “Didn’t think I’d see you so soon.” Simon thumped me on the shoulder, still grinning. “You must have just arrived!”

  “Boil and Julius and Philip would eat me alive if I let another night pass without checking in on you.” I cast a glance around the growing crowd of people, seeing variations of Simon’s bearded face and dark eyes. “This is all your family?”

  “Every one! This is my niece Mirah, that’s her brother Benjamin—” A pretty freckled girl came forward with a little black-haired boy, who Simon promptly tossed in the air. He patted the freckled girl’s cheek, saying something in Hebrew, and then switched back to Latin. “And my brother Isaac, his wife Hadassah, my cousins—” More names, more welcoming faces and words of greeting. I felt oddly wistful as I nodded to one friendly face after another. I wondered what my own sisters looked like: the one I’d seen only as a baby and the other one I’d never seen at all. I wondered if my father’s hair had gone entirely gray yet, or if my brother had grown up looking like me. I sent letters out to my family whenever there was a messenger going to Britannia, and even more rarely I got a crumpled letter back in my mother’s oddly elegant writing: Last I’d heard, life was still serene on their mountaintop, my father busy torturing his garden and teaching my brother how to spar, my sisters lengthening into coltish half-grown girls. Who knew when I’d see any of them again? There was more than a decade left on my term of service. By then, my mother might not be alive to welcome me home with kisses.

  “Vercingetorix,” an older woman greeted me. “My Simon tells me much about you. You must join us tonight for Shabbat, of course. Simon says you are a Jew as well?” Her eyes lingered on the tattoo on my arm, a crude eagle with wings spread and beak open in a cry of triumph. I’d had her inked into my flesh after the Dacian triumph.

  “My mother is a Jew,” I confessed, aware that a number of cousins and uncles were listening.

  “Then so
are you,” she said firmly, and that was that.

  I think I expected something exotic from a Jewish household. Several legionaries I knew in the Tenth had served in Judaea, and they did a good deal of dark muttering about that hot place with its hot-tempered people—though I discounted the wilder rumors like the one that Jews cut the pricks off their baby boys as soon as they were born. Still, I’d expected something different, something eastern and exotic. But Simon’s family, once you got used to the sheer number of them, seemed much like any other Roman family I’d dined with over the years. The house was the same, built around the hollow square of the atrium; the airy triclinium was the same with its stylized friezes of grapes and urns about the walls; the freedmen servants who took my cloak were the same. Perhaps more of the men were bearded, and the women tended to cover their hair with bright scarves, but otherwise they looked no different from any prosperous Roman family.

  Still, I couldn’t help but see a division. I was shown to a place of honor at the table, but the various wizened aunts and grandmothers regarded me as if I’d come from another species, and the children stared like my head was sprouting antlers. A squirming little boy pointed at me and was quickly hushed by the pretty girl Simon had introduced as his niece. Her eyes met mine but dropped at once like any good girl’s. I hadn’t had much dealing with good girls in the past years, just the cheerful rough-voiced legion wives and the friendly German whores whose time I bought in Mog.

  The couches were drawn up in an arch as at any common dinner party, though there were places for the children, which wouldn’t have happened in most Roman homes. Servants came around the couches with wine and platters of food; I started to reach for the bread, but Simon nudged me and I realized his mother was intoning some prayer in Hebrew and doing something ceremonial with candles. I bowed my head hastily, but the prayer was short.

  There was fish, there was roast lamb, there was more wine. More prayers were uttered at intervals, and I half recognized the Hebrew words. For my sake the family spoke in Latin—and as the wine kept circulating, several of the younger nephews spoke more heatedly about Judaea and how she had been wronged by Rome. I wondered if Rome was so terrible, then why were they living here in such comfort, but Simon was nodding along with them and looking a bit more like the fierce fighter who’d been such a rock at my right side during drills.