Empress of the Seven Hills

  But things had smoothed over since that rocky introduction, and now Antinous was humming over my helmet with a polishing cloth as Mirah sang in the kitchen and I went rummaging for a needle to mend the torn liner in my helmet. “Where’s the thread?” I called.

  “Sewing things are in the basket by the chair,” Mirah said without looking up. “You know that.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m used to it.” My sandals now lived beneath the bed, just as my whetstones and polishing cloths lived beside the pile of sewing and my dirty tunics went to a woven basket at the bedside rather than to the floor. “I can’t find anything anymore,” I’d complained the first week of living together in Antioch.

  “You’ll learn,” said Mirah briskly. “Now, that frieze around the wall has to go.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s got dancing girls in it.”

  “They aren’t naked or anything.”

  “They’re people. You don’t have pictures or carvings of people in a house,” she explained, “only things, like vines and flowers and urns.”

  “Why not people?”

  “God doesn’t like images graven in his own likeness. One step from that,” she said darkly, “to worshipping idols, Vercingetorix of Masada.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I winced.

  “It’s true,” she insisted. “You’re Masada’s last son.”

  “And does the last son of Masada have to paint out the frieze?”

  “He does if he wants any peace. Not to mention dinner.”

  I painted over the images the next day. Philip, who had a talent for sketching when he wasn’t playing dice, drew some rather nice grapevines with urns and draped ribbons, and Mirah kissed him on both cheeks and stuffed him with roast goose. “You’re an ugly lout, Vix,” complained Philip, who had accepted my promotion far more gracefully than Julius. “So why do you always get such good women?”

  “I’m lucky,” I said, and meant it. Half the other centurions had wives, but most of them were either stout or pockmarked, and all of them nagged in voices like the trumpets that called us to formation. Mirah with her light step and lively glances and the neat blue scarf over her hair put them all to shame. She liked Antioch; she liked the legion; she’d liked the journey from Rome, and what hardships there were—spiders, tedious hours of travel, strange Antiochene customs—she attacked with a torrent of muttered curses and a cheerful rolling up of sleeves. “Take that, spiders,” she’d say with relish, wielding her broom till the dust flew. “Take that, sand!”

  “She’s looking forward to the march in spring?” Boil said unbelievingly.

  “So she says.” I couldn’t help sounding smug.

  “But centurions’ wives aren’t supposed to come along.”

  “This campaign isn’t like Dacia, stripped down to an army and a supply train. The Emperor’s got an entourage with him this time, for receiving all those Armenian kings. Laundresses, clerks, cooks, barbers, musicians—I got Mirah a place with the seamstresses. She and the boy will travel with the rest of the Imperial servants.”

  “Lucky bastard,” Philip grumbled again, but Boil nudged him. “Sorry, sir.”

  I waved it off, but felt wistful. Things were so different now for my old friends. Philip and Boil and a few others still occasionally came to visit during off-hours, to be stuffed with Mirah’s rich stews and trade jokes with me—Julius even started to come after a few months, making no reference to the beating I’d given him before the other men. But when we were all in armor on legion business they had to salute and call me by rank. And even around my table in the off-hours, they weren’t nearly so loose with their dirty jokes and their complaints about the other officers as they used to be.

  Why should they be? Titus wrote me in one of his long letters from Rome. For all they know, you entertain the other centurions with stories about your days in the ranks. No one entirely trusts a man who works his way up the ladder, Slight. Titus was a big man in Rome now—his grandfather had died at the end of the year, and even out in Antioch I’d heard rumors about the size of the fortune my friend had inherited. I’d have hit him up for a loan—my men’s pay came irregularly, and what was the use of having a rich friend if you couldn’t make use of him to tide you over the lean times?—but I’d heard from one of the Imperial secretaries that Trajan was planning on asking for a loan too, and I couldn’t go following in an emperor’s footsteps.

  Antinous bounced up and down before me, presenting my helmet proudly. “Good?”

  “Like a mirror.” I threw a jab at him and he slipped inside it, thumping my ribs with a little clenched fist just as I’d taught him. “Good.” I cuffed the side of his head with my other hand. “Keep your guard up, though.”

  “Like this?”

  “Chin down, or it’ll get clipped. And fold your fingers tighter, like this—”

  “No, no, like this.” Mirah demonstrated a clenched fist. “Thumb on the outside, Antinous. And don’t underestimate the impact of a good scratch with the fingernails either—it doesn’t all have to be punching.”

  “When did you learn how to fight?” I asked my wife, amused.

  “Eight boy cousins who all liked to tease, that’s how. And six girl cousins who liked to scratch.”

  “Let’s see if they taught you anything about grappling.” I lunged and took my wife around the waist. She shrieked and pummeled at my shoulders, and Antinous came in on her side and started in on my ribs with his little fists. “Two against one?” I yelped. “No fair!”

  Mirah giggled as I dropped her. “All right, all right, enough rough-housing. Go wash up, both of you, you’re all over dust!”

  “Better listen to her,” I told Antinous, man to man.

  “Women,” he agreed sagely, and dashed for the water basin.

  Scrubbed and clean, I took my place at the small table with Antinous on my other side as Mirah covered her head and began the first of the Shabbat prayers. The candles cast friendly yellow circles of light over the table, softening the rough wattle of the wall behind, giving a soft brilliance to Mirah’s eyes as she intoned the old, old words. I was learning to follow the Hebrew now, and so was Antinous. A Briton, a Greek, and a Jew, all saying Shabbat prayers around the table… I forked slabs of roast lamb onto the various plates when prayers were done, and Mirah ate heartily. No patrician nibbling for her. From time to time I saw her touch her rounding belly, saw her look at a gobbling Antinous and imagine how our boy would look at seven years old. I hooked my arm over the back of my chair and sipped at my mug of beer, looking around and liking what I saw. My table. My food. My wife. A boy who had somehow become my son. All in my home, earned by my sword.

  I liked that.

  Though even through that busy peaceful winter, I still heard the thrum in my blood: now, now, now.

  We marched on Armenia in the spring, and then we took it. We took it? Trajan took it. Mountainous country, the peaks steeper and stonier than the ones I’d seen in Dacia, falling to flat green lowlands. No tangy pines like I remembered around Old Sarm; just rushing rivers and narrow mountain passes hedged by rocky cliffs. Trajan swept through those passes with eighty thousand men, and at Elegeia I watched him hold court as one Armenian prince after another came to bend the knee and offer him fealty. One of the princes handed his diadem over with one of those complacent smirks you just itch to slap off with an open palm, fully expecting Trajan to put the crown back on his head with a nice little speech, but Trajan didn’t. He kicked the prince out, and I heard him protesting all the way down the hall outside, wanting to know what he’d done wrong. I could have told him: Trajan hated smirkers. He tossed the diadem to a steward and told him to melt it down for the jewels.

  The satrap afterward did better by making Trajan a gift, a horse that had been trained to kneel down as if it were bowing. Trajan applauded noisily, and then yelled, “Let the poor beast up; I’m not making the horses swear fealty too!” But Hadrian had the horse kneel over and over, contemplatin
g the long nose placed meekly at his feet. He left Elegeia after that and returned to Antioch to better manage the long supply lines already stringing out behind us. I hated that arrogant jolt-head, but I have to admit he did his job; I’ve never seen a campaign since where the food and supplies arrived so swiftly, so speedily, and so free of bugs.

  Sabina didn’t stay in Antioch, or so I heard. I hadn’t once laid eyes on her before she was gone again, flitting off to Egypt to see the spring floods from a Nile barge. “You should have seen Legate Hadrian’s face,” my First Spear whistled to the other centurions, the news overcoming his usual loftiness. “I was waiting in the anteroom with the supply figures when a maid comes in with the message—that wife of his didn’t send it till she was a day’s journey away, and she had the girl announce it out loud so he wouldn’t be able to yell. He didn’t say a word, just went back to dictating a letter. But the next day he took off hunting for a week and he must have slaughtered half the deer in the woods.” A shake of the head. “He’s a funny sort. Not one I’d want to cross.”

  “I’ve crossed him,” I said. “He hasn’t killed me yet.”

  “If you’re so invincible, I’ll recommend you and your century to join Lusius Quietus’s thrust up north,” First Spear shot back. “That’ll take the stuffing out of you.”

  “Yes, sir.” But my blood was singing. Armenia had fallen speedily, but there were still little fires of resistance, and Trajan had sent his fierce Berber horsemen to stamp out the flames. I wasn’t much for riding and neither were my eighty men, but I’d trained them for hard fast marches, and dear God, the time was now. My time was now. Trajan took Armenia that year, but I helped.

  “Quietus speaks highly of you,” the Emperor said during another inspection. “He usually hates us lowly foot soldiers, but he condescends to tell me that your men aren’t completely useless.”

  “I train them specially, Caesar.”

  “How?” Trajan’s eyes brightened; he waved off the pair of secretaries trying to get his attention with an armload of dispatches.

  “I take them out of formation, Caesar. I want them able to move through rough ground, fight independently, but still snap into a turtle or a wedge at a word.” I tried to find the words for what I tried so hard to get from my men. They didn’t like it, they complained about being asked to leave the safety of their formations—all legionaries hate change—but I had drilled them and drilled them this winter in Antioch, and now I was honing them among the rocks and rivers of Armenia. “I want them able to fight anything. Anywhere. Any way.”

  “Still bent on using that gladiator training of yours, eh?” My Emperor forgot nothing.

  “In its place, Caesar.”

  “I’ve still got that scar you gave me. Ten years ago?” He rolled up his sleeve to look at the faded pucker of purple, shaking his head at the graying hairs on his still-strong arm. “Gods’ bones, we’re getting old. I’ll send you out with Quietus again.”

  Out we went, on scouting missions, on foraging expeditions, on deadly strikes across rivers at night. My century and I were flicked out into the twisting mountain roads, sent scrambling across rocky hillocks, inching on our bellies through short summer grass, plunging through the rivers leaning on our shields to keep from being swept off our feet. I killed Armenians with narrow faces and fierce beards, I collected three more campaign tokens, and my men stopped grumbling when I told them to split out of formation into a dozen smaller darts that could thread an enemy block and hack it to pieces in seconds. They called me a hard bastard, but they jingled more campaign tokens than any other century in the Tenth detachment, and I moved up two ranks. The centurion above me got killed in a raid, and the one above him died of camp fever, and the Emperor jumped me over their empty places.

  “No more junior centurion!” Mirah crowed when I came to her that night. Her nimble needle had earned her a place among the Imperial servants, where she rode in a wagon with a clutch of other women, gossiping and mending endless piles of linen for the vast entourage Trajan managed to maintain on campaign. “How much do the other centurions hate you for jumping up the ladder so fast? I know your First Spear must have been delighted.”

  “Thrilled.” I put a pearl ring on her finger, holding her hand up to the light. “You like it? I took it off a fat captive prince.”

  “Very grand,” Mirah teased, admiring the ring. We had a tent now instead of the snug little apartment in Antioch, but Mirah just swept out the sand at night and shook the spiders out of the bedrolls and kept everything so neat I had no idea where anything was. “Where are the children?” I nuzzled Mirah’s neck.

  “Miriam’s keeping them for the night. Antinous carried the baby over himself—I will say, he’s a doting big brother. I didn’t think boys ever liked babies.”

  “He likes ours.” Our daughter, born a month early on our springtime march between Antioch and Elegeia, as if she couldn’t wait to join the world. Mirah had been disappointed she wasn’t a boy, but I was just relieved the baby had arrived without fuss. Besides, as soon as Mirah and I started having boys, there were going to be fights about some ghastly ceremony called a brit or a bris. However it was pronounced, no son of mine was going through it. “I’m not letting anyone strip the skin off my son’s cock!” I’d said in utter horror when Mirah explained the ritual to me. “Absolutely not!”

  “I don’t have to do that, do I?” Antinous asked uneasily.

  “Over my dead body,” I’d replied. “And that goes for the new baby too.”

  Mirah had pressed her lips together in a way I knew meant trouble. But Dinah had come along instead a few months ago, little Dinah with her swatch of dark hair and pink hands that were always screwed up in fists like infant copies of mine, and for now the argument about the brit was postponed.

  “If Dinah’s with Miriam for the night, let’s take advantage of it.” I bore my wife back down into the bedroll. “Now.”

  “We’ll have Miriam’s boy tomorrow,” Mirah warned me between kisses. “I promised, in return for her giving us tonight—”

  “Perfect. I’m out on a sweep tomorrow. Give us a kiss.”

  My men and I bagged a satrap on that sweep, traveling in a train of rich baggage down just the wrong sweep of road—and that was just the first big catch of my summer. By fall, Mirah owned a sapphire bracelet and a gold chain set with amethysts, Antinous had a short Syrian bow and a pair of ivory-hilted daggers, and little Dinah had a silver bracelet of her very own to teethe on.

  PLOTINA

  “My lady—” Plotina found her hand seized and repeatedly kissed. “I cannot thank you enough for your intervention. A goddess from the skies, traveling among mankind to spread her blessings—”

  “Senator, you flatter me.” Plotina extracted her fingers with difficulty. She hadn’t received so many kisses in her whole marriage.

  “A goddess,” the man went on, flushed to the top of his bald head. “I shall have my personal statue of Juno recarved with your own Imperial face. Juno stands before me now, in all her glory!”

  He shielded his face, as if radiance dazzled him. Plotina inclined her head graciously but did not wave him up from his knees. It was rather pleasant to be worshipped. “You will not forget that little favor I asked of you, Senator?”

  “Of course not! I shall tend to the matter myself, I assure you.”

  “Very good. And promptly, if you please.” Plotina drew a line through another name on her wax tablet. Trajan’s letters from the east still had distressingly little to say in praise of Dear Publius, but there were other men he praised to the skies. A certain Aulus Cornelius Palma was always being mentioned, held in high favor because of some past conquest he’d made among the Nabataean Arabs. Lucius Publilius Celsus’s name too had begun cropping up with great Imperial approval. It would hardly do for their stars to shine brighter than that of Dear Publius, would it?

  And when Plotina had learned of a certain renowned senator’s recent batch of failed investments, it had been al
l too easy. The offer of a dowry for his daughter and the rescue of his family home before it went under the hammer—he had not even blinked at the price Plotina named in return.

  “A little whispered slander,” she murmured. “Nothing too overt, mind. Just a word or two dropped to your colleagues over the next dinner party. Perhaps you’ll remember that young Palma seduced a Roman girl of good family, who killed herself when he refused to marry her. Or that former consul Celsus lined his purse out of his last appointment.” Just enough gossip to taint a man’s reputation among his peers. A man whispered as a lecher or a thief among his colleagues could never be presented as Imperial heir. “You know the kind of thing I mean? It’s for the good of Rome, you understand.”

  “Of course, Lady!”

  “You might add a word or two about former consul Servianus as well,” she added, musing. Dear Publius’s brother-in-law, and another name that cropped up regularly in Trajan’s letters. “Perhaps you’ll remember to murmur to one or two people that he’s a drunkard or a lecher in his private life?”

  “No one will believe it, Lady—Servianus, he’s the most virtuous man in Rome.”

  “Well, just the other two, then.” Good enough for a day’s work.

  The senator bowed out backward, still spilling compliments. Plotina put her wax tablet aside, giving a little pat to her hair, which now had the most dignified and flattering streaks of gray along the temples. “My face on a statue of Juno,” she said aloud. “I do hope you won’t be offended, dear sister?”

  Plotina didn’t have to go to the temple now to speak with Juno. Her sister goddess, she knew, attended her every word.

  CHAPTER 22

  Winter A.D. 114

  TITUS

  “Ennia?” Titus wandered into the atrium where Ennia was giving two slave girls a brisk tongue-lashing for dawdling over the laundry. “Have a look at this, and tell me I’m reading it right.”

  “You know I can’t read, Dominus.” She dismissed the girls with a flap, coming to squint at the scroll in his hand. “Is that the Imperial seal?”