Empress of the Seven Hills

  “I always thought my task would be done once Dear Publius was consul,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “But it’s really just the beginning, isn’t it?” It was going to cost a great deal to ensure the post she had in mind for the Parthian invasion.

  She kept that in mind, when she had the praetor banished to Africa on a convenient pretext. Difficult, really—one never liked to think of exiles, dying alone, diseased, and destitute. Duty, Plotina reminded herself. No matter what some people liked to hint about meddling and kingmaking—people like former Empress Marcella—it was all for Rome.

  The next banishment was much easier. And the third hardly troubled her at all.

  SABINA

  Plotina’s voice was deep, Hadrian’s even deeper, and both were smug. The smugness wafted out of the triclinium in waves Sabina could almost see as she came down the stairs from her bedchamber. She paused a moment in the atrium, adjusting a lock of hair that had slipped its pins and listening to the conversation drifting through the half-opened doors.

  “Chief of the Emperor’s personal staff!” Inside the triclinium, Hadrian rolled the words with relish. “I’d hoped for a legion, but this is better.”

  “My dear Publius, I told you I would persuade the Emperor to give you something suitable.” Plotina’s low loud tones were accompanied by the chink of metal on metal as wine was poured. Emperor Trajan had dashed down to Ostia to review some promising troops, but the Empress had arrived for a private dinner to celebrate her protégé’s recent appointment. Private by Plotina’s standards, anyway: herself, Dear Publius, Sabina, Hadrian’s pallid sister whom he disliked and her boring husband Servianus whom he disliked even more, and twenty-two important men of Rome who would be required merely to look envious or promise Dear Publius their support.

  “Congratulations on your appointment,” a quieter voice asserted. Titus—Sabina was glad she’d been able to squeeze him into Plotina’s ironclad guest list. Considering what she was about to do, it would be good to have one friend in the crowd. “May I ask what your plans are for the supply lines?”

  But Plotina rode over Titus’s question. “My husband was stubborn, but several of his legates quite changed their minds and they persuaded him. Just as I told you they would. You must learn to trust me, dear boy.”

  “I will never doubt you again.” Hadrian’s tone was gallant. “Cakes?”

  “Not until Sabina arrives. Vibia Sabina!”

  “A moment,” Sabina called back, blotting her damp palms against her skirt.

  A brief inaudible grumble from Plotina, and then Sabina heard Hadrian’s voice again.

  “I hadn’t dared hope for a staff position.” Her husband sounded lazy, satisfied, doubtless leaning back on one elbow on the cushions of the dining couch.

  “Nonsense, my dear. Your organizational skills, your skill at managing subordinates—so wasted on just one legion. The Emperor may have the leadership of the army, but you will have the management.” Plotina sounded even smugger, if possible. Sabina wondered if the guests were rolling their eyes yet, or just resigning themselves to staying silent and getting drunk. “It would be no exaggeration, Dear Publius, to call you the second man in the Empire just now.”

  A maid hastening through the atrium with a tray of honeyed cakes caught sight of Sabina and stumbled. She rescued her balance and the platter, casting one astonished look over her shoulder at her mistress. Sabina laid a cautionary, conspiritorial finger to her lips and the maid gave a shake of her head and marched on into the triclinium.

  “We will leave for Antioch well in advance of the Emperor,” Hadrian continued from the other side of the door. “He will count on me to assemble the eastern legions for him.”

  “You should maintain a basis in Antioch for the duration of the invasion,” Plotina agreed. “Most convenient.”

  “Yes, and I’ve always wanted to see Antioch.” Hadrian’s voice turned musing. Once, Sabina thought, he might have launched into an excited diatribe about Antioch’s famous temples and colonnades, wondering how they compared to Rome’s. Now his voice was pompous as he said, “I’m sure we have much to bring the Antiochenes. One hears they have none of the Roman virtues, and serious discipline is nonexistent—”

  Sabina bent to fiddle needlessly with the lace on her sandal. Stop stalling, she told herself. A page boy paused with a decanter of barley water and gazed at his mistress for a wide-eyed moment before remembering himself.

  “One hears the Antiochenes are disagreeable company.” The Empress’s nose wrinkled almost audibly on the other side of the door. “Slippery characters. It’s the eastern influence, of course. The men are depraved, and the women are worse. You must take good care to safeguard Sabina’s reputation; you know how she relishes adventure in such places.”

  Oh, for gods’ sake. Sabina rose, lifted her chin, and strode toward the door.

  “I’m sure Sabina will be very useful to me,” Hadrian’s voice returned calmly. “We will have to maintain good relations with the Antiochenes, so I’m sure her particular brand of charm will not be wasted.”

  “I’ll do my best!” Sabina put on her most dazzling smile as she floated into the triclinium. “Plotina, Titus, everyone—how lovely to see you all.”

  Plotina froze in the act of reaching for a cake, as if she had been turned to stone inside her dark-blue stola. Titus’s eyebrows climbed slowly up his forehead. The other guests looked stunned. Hadrian, reclining on his own couch, had just lifted his cup to his lips when he glanced at Sabina to see what his guests were staring at. His mouthful of wine, Sabina was pleased to see, arced clear out across at least three feet of mosaic.

  “What,” he said when he had stopped coughing, “is that?”

  “You said we’ll need to maintain good relations with the Antiochenes.” Sabina blinked, innocent. “Don’t you like it? It’s the very latest fashion in Antioch. I always think it makes such a good impression to follow the local customs. Don’t you agree, Plotina?”

  The thunderstruck eyes of Hadrian, Plotina, Titus, and a score of Rome’s most important senators, legates, officers, and officials traveled in unison from the kohl Sabina had painted in winged lines about her eyes to the heavy gold earrings that brushed her bare shoulders, to the copper snake armband coiled about one elbow, to the gown so tightly cut that her maid had had to stitch it around her body. The dress left one breast completely bare, and Sabina had painted the nipple with henna to match the designs stenciled on her hands and feet. Plotina averted her eyes with a little gasp. Titus quickly lifted his cup and took a gulp—hiding, Sabina was certain, a grin.

  Hadrian’s voice was low. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “We can’t have the Antiochenes thinking we Romans don’t know their ways, can we?” Sabina explained sweetly, turning a circle so they could see from all angles. The view from the left was particularly jaw-dropping. “They’re going to love me, Hadrian. And isn’t that why you married me? Because I’m so good at charming people of all places and stations?”

  Hadrian opened his mouth. He closed it again. Plotina had flushed the color of a plum. “Vibia Sabina—” she began thunderously.

  Sabina moved toward them with the rippling little steps that were all her tight dress would allow, and saw Hadrian’s hovering secretary, the page boy with the wine, twelve servitors, and all twenty-four guests trying not to stare at her bare breast. She ignored them, reaching out to give Hadrian’s cheek a fond, wifely pat.

  “Darling, you’re going to be so proud of me!”

  “I’m sorry.” Sabina shook her head ruefully at Titus. “I invite you to a dinner party, and instead of a good meal all you get is a few stilted words and a lot of agonized silence.”

  “One of the more memorable dinner parties of my career, Sabina—long on scandal, if short on conversation.”

  She smiled. Hadrian stood rigid in the atrium, ushering out the last of his gleeful guests as Plotina murmured tortured courtesies at his side—but Sabina had seized T
itus by the hand as he made motions toward leaving and dragged him out to the garden. “Let’s at least say a proper good-bye. I know you’re not in a rush to head out and tell everyone in Rome about my degenerate morals.”

  “Isn’t that what you had in mind?” He eyed the dress, which she’d draped modestly with a shawl as soon as the dinner party limped to its conclusion and the rest of the guests were out of sight. “What are you up to, Vibia Sabina?”

  She shrugged, turning to lean her elbows on the balustrade overlooking the moon-silvered garden. The marble was cold through the shawl on her bare breast, and she longed to get out of the tight Antiochene dress. Did being degenerate have to be so uncomfortable? “This is good-bye, isn’t it?” she asked Titus. “I’m off to Antioch so soon, and you’re staying here in Rome.”

  “I’ve got a bathhouse to finish,” he said lightly. “And my quaestor duties, of course.”

  “You could have come on the invasion. Trajan wanted you for a post on his staff. Plotina and her pet legates pushed him into taking Hadrian, but the Emperor had his eye on you all along. Said he wanted to drag you along on campaign, give you a bit more taste for warfare. Why didn’t you take him up on it?”

  “Sand,” Titus said. “Bugs. Tribesmen trying to kill me. No, thank you. I’ll stick to my city payrolls and my architectural oversight.”

  “You’re wasted as a quaestor. Trajan told me that too, you know. You didn’t take the staff post, but he’s still got plans for you.”

  “I can’t think why. I was the least enthusiastic tribune on his staff in Dacia, and now I’m the most plodding quaestor in the city.”

  “He says you have a good head on your shoulders. He also says you’re one of the few men in Rome outside the legions who gives him a straight answer when he wants one.” Sabina looked over her shoulder at Titus. “Maybe you’ll end up consul someday.”

  “Gods forbid.” Titus leaned on the railing at her side, looking across the banks of night-furled flowers. “What a muck I’d make of it.”

  Sabina wasn’t so sure. Titus had a quiet authority now, a gentle unflinching presence to go with his alert bearing and attentive gaze. Trajan thought a good deal of the rising young Titus Aurelius, and so did other notable men in Rome. Like her father.

  “I’ll miss you when I go to Antioch.” Sabina felt a pang as she realized just how much. Titus had been such a constant friend since the day he’d walked into her life with a bunch of violets and a stammered marriage proposal. In Rome, in Dacia, in his letters during her time in Pannonia; he’d always been there. “I’ll write you, of course—I hope you won’t be too busy to dash out a line to me now and then? With all your new building expertise, I was hoping to get your advice on some cheap ways to shore up tenement buildings—the slums in Antioch are supposed to be even worse than the Subura in Rome, and if I’m going to be wintering there I might as well take a look about and see what I can do to help.”

  “Write me as soon as you get your facts and figures, and we’ll put our heads together.”

  They straightened, trading rueful looks, and Titus cast another glance over her. “I must say, you look stunning.”

  “It’s not really an Antiochene dress,” she confessed. “I just had the dressmaker stitch up the most shocking thing I could think of.” She pulled her shawl closer about herself, feeling a self-consciousness that hadn’t touched her before Hadrian and Plotina.

  “No, no.” Titus caught the edge of her shawl, tugging it back until it slipped off her shoulders to the floor. “Put yourself on display like that, and people have a right to look.”

  “Do they?”

  “Well, I intend to look my fill. Did you know that I love you?”

  She cocked her head. “What?”

  He leaned down and kissed her, his mouth gentle, parting her lips with unhurried care. His hand cupped the back of her neck, and he took his time.

  “Oh, no,” Sabina said when he lifted his head.

  “Not the response I was hoping for,” Titus murmured.

  “Not the kiss. That was lovely. The other part.”

  “The part where I said I loved you?” For all the weight behind them, his words came lightly. “Since the day we met, if you want to know. You were everything a sixteen-year-old boy could ever dream of, and he has seen nothing better yet.”

  “I never guessed.” Sabina remembered all the nights in Dacia that she’d spent curled up in Vix’s lap and talking to Titus, and cringed inside. “Why me? I’m not really very lovable.”

  “Vix loved you.”

  “Hated me too, quite a lot of the time. I’m not very easy on the people who love me.”

  “Oh, I’m not eating my heart out.” Titus’s voice in the shadows was airy. “‘If you would marry suitably, marry your equal,’ as Ovid would say. And we’ve never really been equals, have we? I’d have bored you senseless if we’d married.”

  Maybe. But Sabina felt a pang of loss at the thought. Married to Titus? I wouldn’t be standing in a cold house in an uncomfortable dress with a husband who hates me, that’s for certain. “I’m sorry,” Sabina said again, but hardly knew what for.

  Titus bent and kissed her again, once on the lips and once, briefly, on the slope of her bare breast. “Good night, Vibia Sabina.”

  “Good night.”

  She stood on the balustrade, watching as Titus sauntered off whistling through the darkened garden. He didn’t look back once, but Sabina watched until the darkness had swallowed him up.

  When she turned, she saw Empress Plotina standing in the archway behind her, a look of cold loathing on her handsome marble face. “I saw you—” she began furiously.

  “Oh, go get stuffed,” said Sabina, and stalked off.

  CHAPTER 21

  VIX

  “It’s like this, Centurion.” The grocer I’d been paying for the past few years to keep Demetra’s son shuffled from foot to foot, clearing his throat. “I can’t keep the boy no more. My wife’s gone, my own boys are going to live with their aunt, and she don’t have room for another, and—”

  “You’re trying to drop this on me now?” I scowled. “I’m marching to Parthia in a fortnight!”

  “I know.” The grocer cleared his throat. “I like the lad well enough, but I can’t keep him no more.”

  I looked down at my charge. Seven years old now—I’d hardly recognized him when I stooped through the low door of the grocer’s shop in Mog. A handsome boy, tall for his age, with fair curly hair and an open, eager little face. He looked pale and shuttered now, standing between me and the grocer, head turning between us as our voices batted back and forth.

  I folded my arms across my breastplate, looking down at him. “Can you fight?”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Shoot a bow?”

  “No.”

  “Use a knife?”

  “No.”

  “Hell’s gates.” With all that curly hair and those eyelashes, he looked like a girl. I looked back at the grocer. “Keep him another fortnight. I’ll find someone else to take him on before I march.”

  I heard the boy’s breath catch when I turned away. But I was busy—very busy. I had a century to ready for war, and just a fortnight to do it.

  “Vix, no,” Boil protested when I slung the belt and insignia of an optio at him across the little folding table where I now handled my century’s papers. “Bugger you, I don’t want to be optio! Everyone hates those weedy toads. Why do you have to pick on me?”

  “Because you’re too stupid to cheat me, too cheerful to hate me, and too big to be pushed around,” I said briskly. “Just what I need. And it’s ‘Centurion’ now, you clod-pole. Get out of here and start checking the men’s weapons. I want a full report by morning of what’s missing.”

  “All the luck,” Boil muttered, his broad Gallic face red as his cloak, and tramped out. None of my contubernium was particularly happy about my promotion, not after I made sure they all ended up in my new century. But I didn’t care if
they were happy. I’d dreamed for years of having my own command, and I knew just what kind of men I wanted. I begged, I borrowed, I traded, I bribed the other centurions to get the best men out of their centuries and into mine before we had to march. “I’ll give you a week’s pay if I can have that big African of yours—what’s his name?”

  “Africanus, and I’m not giving him to you. He’s worth three legionaries all on his own in a fight!”

  “Is he worth three weeks’ pay? Think about it.”

  “Aren’t you the go-getter,” the other centurions said sourly. They didn’t like me—I’d been passed straight up to the first cohort, when they’d had to claw their way up. Hard men, career men, most of them ten and twenty years my senior. I was the most junior of the lot, and I got every unpleasant duty they could shove on me, but I didn’t care. From the moment the three cohorts of men from the Tenth Fidelis started the long march from Mog to join the growing band of legions in the east, I felt a joyous, insistent little pulse inside, as if every beat that pumped blood through my body was thumping to the rhythm of now, now, now.

  I don’t remember much of that initial march. We set out of Mog at double speed, eager to join the fight, and we tumbled down every night too tired to spit. Centurions could pass their marches on horseback, but the last thing I needed was to get dumped on my head in front of the men who were supposed to obey me, respect me, but above all be in awe of me. I loaded myself up with pack and weapons, just like the rest of them, and set a killing pace. I heard them grumbling behind me the first day, but I just roared, “Marching song! I’ll have it loud, or I’ll have you all flogged!” and soon they were bawling out cadences about Parthians buggering sheep, and giving me sour looks. I ignored the looks, stifled the flutter of nervousness in my throat, whipped them into setting up camp that night, and had them take it all down when three of the tents looked sloppy. “Call that a camp?” I stood back, watching with benign ferocity as they began redoing everything to my satisfaction. “Do it again!”