Empress of the Seven Hills

  “It is.” Titus read the message again—brief and brisk, in a soldier’s scrawl. “By the Emperor’s own hand, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “All the way from Armenia?” Ennia looked impressed despite herself. “What’s he got to say?”

  “I’m being asked for a report on the baths. Also, my opinion is requested on various other official matters—why does he want my opinion, anyway? I haven’t got any ideas. Oh, and I’m being asked for a loan.”

  Ennia gave her raucous laugh. “Didn’t take long for the news to get out, did it, Dominus?”

  “I suppose not.” There had been more than one surprise to hit Titus after his grandfather’s death, but by far the greatest had been the terms of the will. His grandfather had left all his assets to Titus, and that had been expected; what had not been expected was just how extensive those assets were. “Who ever knew the old gentleman was so smart with his coppers, simple as he lived here at home?” Ennia had marveled. Titus had suddenly found himself the owner of a great many coppers, not to mention less tangible but no less profitable things such as silver mines, timber yards, properties in Ostia and Ravenna and Brundisium, villas in Baiae and Tivoli and Capri, a fleet of grain ships, a gladiator school, a block of tenement flats on the Esquiline Hill…

  It had not taken long, apparently, for news of Titus’s increased fortune to reach the other side of the Empire. Campaigning’s an expensive business, Trajan had written frankly in his big open scrawl. A loan from you would help see my men paid on time this winter, and I’d not forget the favor.

  “I suppose even emperors find themselves in debt,” Titus said, wandering back into his study. “Especially when running large armies. I’ll see to the loan right away.”

  “You’ll never get it back,” Ennia warned. “Emperors, they’re notorious. When they say loan, they mean give.”

  “‘All men cheerfully obey when worthy men rule,’” Titus quoted, scrawling himself a reminder to consult the steward in the morning. “Trajan can have my life if he likes; who am I to deny him my money?”

  “That’s a quick way to end up poor.”

  “Perhaps I shall. But loved.”

  “Better get a rich wife, the way you’re splashing it about,” Ennia muttered. “Speaking of which, the locusts arrive in half an hour, and two of them said they’re bringing their daughters.”

  “I believe they would prefer to be called guests rather than locusts, Ennia.” But Titus couldn’t help a sigh. “Daughters?”

  “And a niece.” Ominously.

  “Well, see if you can squeeze them in. Preferably not next to me.” Ever since the terms of his grandfather’s will had become common knowledge in Rome, there had been a sharp increase in Titus’s female guests. Colleagues who’d barely bothered attending his dinners were now not only begging to attend but bringing along hordes of unmarried women with them. Titus’s winter had been one long parade of sisters, daughters, granddaughters, nieces…

  “Should have married before the old gentleman died,” Ennia said, whisking a spare cloak off Titus’s chair and brushing it off vigorously. “Now you’re the biggest catch in Rome, and begging your pardon, Dominus, but I haven’t seen one girl yet who isn’t just a pretty little shark smelling blood in the water.”

  “There’s bound to be one or two who aren’t just out for the, er, blood.”

  “Keeping my eyes open, Dominus, believe me. I want to retire someday, you know. Running this big house all by myself—”

  “Quit your grumbling,” Titus chided. Ennia, he knew, had been ridiculously pleased when he asked her to stay on as his housekeeper.

  “Me?” she’d said, astounded. “I’d thought I’d help you move out of your apartments back to the family house, and that would be that. You’ll be needing a proper steward now.”

  “Like you couldn’t keep that big pile of marble in order,” he teased. After the mourning period was done, he’d moved back into his family home as was expected—but paterfamilias or not, it had felt strange to move through his grandfather’s halls as master. “I wouldn’t have anyone else to manage my household, Ennia.”

  “Thought you’d be getting rid of me.” She’d looked up at him shrewdly. “You’ve got coin now for the best fancy ladies in Rome, Dominus. No need for some housekeeper with a slum lord’s mouth. I know what I am.”

  “I know what you are too. And I know what you’re worth.” Titus had lifted her skinny wrist and slipped over it a heavy gold bracelet inlaid with garnet and carnelian flowers. The first really costly thing he’d ever bought, and he had to take a deep breath at the thought that such a purchase no longer cost a month’s worth of his yearly allowance. “I want to keep you, Ennia. Anyone makes you a better offer to join their household, I’ll double it.”

  “Hmm.” She eyed him, speculative.

  “Of course,” Titus added, “I’ll have to confirm the offer first.”

  She snorted, holding her arm up to admire the bracelet. “Perhaps I’d better stay on after all, Dominus. Else some snake of a girl will snap you up and make your life miserable.”

  “No chance of that with you on watch.” And Ennia kept his house, his slaves, and his guests in better order than he’d ever hoped. Not a girl passed through the hall who didn’t go through the gauntlet of her appraising up-and-down glance.

  “Half an hour,” Ennia reminded him again, and whisked out, yelling for the page boys to get the wine warmed before she warmed their backsides for them. Titus tipped back in his chair and read through the Emperor’s letter again. How are my baths progressing? Trajan had written after the request for a loan. I’ve a mind to put you in charge of my alimenta program as well; there’s been skimming there and I need someone honest to put a stop to it. Tell me what you think…

  Titus looked up from the letter at the bust of his grandfather. The formal death mask had been placed with ceremony in the entry hall, but here he had a less formal bust of the old man, carved with the familiar kindly glint in his eye. “Emperors asking me for advice,” he said. “Strange days, eh, Grandfather?” He still felt self-conscious giving the orders in his family’s house, sitting in judgment when his family’s clients brought their problems to him, signing his name with the authority of his family’s seal ring. He was no longer just “that fellow who quotes.” He was now the fellow who got personal letters from emperors. His sisters looked at him with respect now, instead of scolding him for his untidy hair and his absentmindedness. His opinions were no longer brushed aside in discussion but weighed with all seriousness. People bowed when he passed in the street.

  “Fancy that,” Titus told his grandfather, and went to greet his guests.

  VIX

  One year, just one year, and Armenia was gone.

  “All Rome will rejoice at such a victory,” one of the Tenth’s tribunes said pompously—a useless highborn twit whose voice was still breaking. “The day is ours!”

  “Easy there, sonny,” I admonished him, but the little squirt was right. All Rome was rejoicing when word went out that we had a new province, and with hardly a pause for breath or to celebrate the new year, we marched on Mesopotamia. Our first official foray into the Parthian Empire, and how we cheered when we saw those flat fertile lands stretched out between the vast fork of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

  A land in two colors: the flat sand of desert blushing into green beside the rivers; rocks and dunes turning to grassy pastures where goats grazed and nomad shepherds hastily collapsed their tents at the sight of the Roman eagles. A thousand tributaries threaded the land between the rivers, and our feet squelched from dawn to dusk as we crossed one ford after another. Trajan crossed every ford and bridge on foot beside us, bawling out bawdy marching songs, and I cuffed tears from my eyes to see him, so strong and sturdy at more than sixty years of age, making us younger men speed our steps, his iron-gray head bare under the sun. A good portion of the army was cuffing their eyes right along with me. There is no more sentimental creature in the world than th
e average Roman foot soldier.

  We trapped Mesopotamia in a vast fork that year, Lusius Quietus moving east and the Emperor west. I was on permanent loan to Quietus now; he liked my fast-marching men who could be counted on to keep up with his cavalry and could buttress an attack with one hard smash of a charge or lie in wait in the thick of night to jump out of the dark with screams and steel. Hard fights and heady days—this war was wine, it was song, it was a woman but with none of the complications.

  We lost Julius that summer in a night attack. I’d swept up a score of men to chase after what was left of a Mesopotamian cohort after we’d shattered their camp in the dead of night, and when I returned I found Julius lying on his back with a broken spear in his side and his eyes reflecting the moon. I wept, and Boil howled as he wrenched the spear from Julius’s side, and I held my optio as he beat his big fists against my shoulders in helpless rage. The two of us dug a grave for Julius with our own hands, ordering the other men back when they tried to help. We laid Julius in the fertile black earth on the bank of the Euphrates, and I buried him with two more campaign tokens that I stripped off my own breastplate in mark of the two enemies he’d taken down before the spear took his life. One of my best scouts was a stonemason’s son, and I had him carve a stone with Julius’s name. “Carve in that he was a descendant of the noble Julius Caesar.”

  “Was he?” My scout looked skeptical.

  “He was.”

  The whole century stood attention around Julius’s grave and one by one poured wine from their skins into the earth. Good men. They might not like me, but they liked my reputation, they liked bragging up their latest feats to the other soldiers, and they boasted there wasn’t a century in the whole Tenth who could do what we did. Whether they were lumped turtle formation in one vast shielded square or whipping through a phalanx of Mesopotamian soldiers in forty separate screaming pairs, there didn’t seem to be a fight my men could lose that year. They were the tip of the spear; they were hardness; they were death. Mesopotamia fell. I jumped up another rank.

  Now, now, now.

  We wintered in Antioch again at the end of that year. “Thank God,” Mirah said, having somehow managed to find us a tiny room of our own on the ground floor of a tall tenement building in the western quarter of the city. “Not that I don’t like a little adventure, and it is lovely seeing all this beautiful countryside before you and your locust band of soldiers move through and destroy it, but I’ll be happy to give birth to this baby in a bed and not a wagon.”

  “You’re bigger this time around, aren’t you? Well, not you,” I said hastily as my wife’s eyes shot daggers. “You’re slim as ever—look at those ankles! Just the baby, I mean. It’s bigger.” Mirah had quickened again when Dinah turned a year old, but I didn’t mind. Our daughter wasn’t much trouble: a placid baby who slept soundly at night and was even now cooing to herself and crawling around the hard-packed dirt floor with a crude little wooden horse Antinous had carved for her. At least I thought it was a horse. I’d been teaching him how to handle a knife and he might know how to stab someone with it, but he couldn’t whittle worth a damn. He sat frowning in the corner now, hacking bits of wood off a crude block. “What’s that going to be?” I asked him, sinking down on the edge of the bed. I’d spent so many months in bedrolls on hard ground, a mattress felt too soft for sleeping.

  “Don’t know.” He turned the block over, optimistic. “I could make blocks, for the new baby?”

  “You’re a gem, Antinous.” Mirah massaged the bulk under her apron. “Ooof, he’s kicking like a mule.”

  “Sounds like it hurts.” I winced.

  “Not a bit; it’s thrilling. Just means the baby will be big and strong.” She patted her stomach again, proudly. “Hannibal might be a good name for this one.”

  “I thought I’d name him after Trajan,” I suggested. “Or one of his names, anyway. Marcus Ulpius Trajan—”

  “No son of mine is being named Ulpius!” Mirah reached around her own bulk to unlace her shoes. Her belly might be up under her chin, but she carried it with all her usual quick energy. No graceless waddling for my wife: Heat, sand, spiders, and hardship hadn’t managed to slow her down, and neither did carrying a child.

  “What about Marcus, then?” I pulled her feet into my lap. “That’s not a bad name for a boy. And I knew another Marcus besides Trajan, a senator who gave me my start in the legions in the first place. That’s a good pair of men for any boy to be named after.”

  “I don’t know if I want to name a child of mine after a Roman emperor.” Mirah winced pleasurably as my fingers began to massage her little arched feet. “I know you adore Trajan, Vix, but have you even heard what’s happening outside Parthia?”

  “Of course I have. I get all Titus’s letters, don’t I, and he always knows everything going on.” Titus had some new public office back in Rome and was apparently much relied upon. The bugger had gone and gotten important on me, but his letters read just the same as ever. He still quoted philosophers I hadn’t read and told me I was a savage for drinking unwatered wine.

  “All this unrest with the Jews he talked about in his last letter,” Mirah was saying. “In Cyrenaica, Cyprus, Alexandria. Grumbling everywhere, and according to Titus, all Trajan does is send troops in to squash things.”

  “Stops the grumbling, doesn’t it?”

  “For now.” Mirah groaned as my thumbs pressed her heels. “All your precious Emperor wants is the rest of the world to stand still and not bother him so he can go conquering on till the end of time. That’s who you want our son to be?”

  “A man like Trajan? Yes.”

  “Trajan has his head in the sand, and so do you,” Mirah said. “You’re both living in a dream, out here on the edge of the world. People have their own troubles all over Rome. And even Trajan can’t squash trouble just by sending troops down to step on it.”

  “It’s worked so far.”

  Mirah gave me the one-sided flick of a smile that meant she thought I was a fool but would let me get away with it. I liked provoking that smile sometimes, just for fun.

  “We don’t have to name the baby after Trajan,” I conceded. “You’re the one pushing him out, so I reckon you can be the one to name him.” Maybe that would soften her up for the inevitable fight about the brit ceremony. I was all for tradition; Mirah and I kept Shabbat at the end of every week when I wasn’t away fighting, and I said the prayers with her for a half a dozen more religious festivals throughout the year. But ancient ceremony or no, nobody was getting anywhere near my son’s groin with a knife when he was only eight days old.

  Little Dinah abandoned her wooden horse and came crawling over, latching onto my sandal. I leaned down and lifted her up with one hand, balancing her on Mirah’s stomach. “Feel that, little girl? That’s your brother kicking.”

  “He’s trying to kick his way out,” Mirah complained happily. “Thank God this baby will be born in a bed.”

  As things turned out, it wasn’t.

  After the Saturnalia celebrations, I hauled my men up for drills. I bellowed at Boil for a while for letting the century get rusty just because we were wintered up, and then I let everyone pair off and go through their paces while I tossed Antinous my gladius. “Let’s see if you’re as rusty as the men,” I said. “Drill number five.”

  “Been practicing,” he assured me, and I stood back with folded arms and watched him swing through the patterns. His wide brown eyes were narrowed in concentration as he swung the sword. Too heavy a weapon for a boy his age, but he’d grow into it. I’d been even younger when my father started training me. Antinous was nine now, still pretty-faced, but he fought his good looks as hard as he could. He nurtured his scrapes devotedly, hoping they’d turn into scars, and he’d stolen my dagger so he could shear his curly hair down to a half inch. “Let’s see them call me a girl now,” he’d said, showing me his ragged scalp.

  “I must say, he’s gotten tougher,” Mirah approved. “He used to wilt like a p
lucked flower when the other children teased him for looking so pretty. Now he just starts swinging.”

  “You don’t mind mopping up his bloody noses and scraped knees?”

  “Of course not. It’s a hard world; every boy should know how to defend himself. Especially one who looks like that.”

  But Antinous didn’t really look much like a girl anymore. He was a skinny, scrappy, scabby-kneed little soldier who swung my sword like a veteran. “Again, twice as slow,” I called out. “You’re already fast, now we build your stamina—”

  That was when the ground started to swing under my feet. For a moment I wondered if I was drunk, but the other men were reeling too, and I heard shouts of alarm. The earth bucked and I dropped to my knees, hearing the splinter of glass somewhere. I clutched at the ground with both fists, trying to hang on to the cobbles, and my men were all doing the same. I heard the crash of masonry, of stones falling. It was an age before the ground stilled.

  “What,” I breathed, looking up, “was that?” At my side, Antinous was looking up cautiously. He’d dropped to the ground in a ball but kept a firm grip on my sword.

  “Just an earthquake,” one of my scouts volunteered. He was on his feet already, dusting his hands off. The rest of us stayed huddled where we were, staring warily at the ground. “The earth trembles. Quite common where I come from, near Pompeii. No one pays attention to them back home, unless it’s a big one.”

  “Not too comforting,” I shot back. “Considering that Pompeii’s just a heap of ash and rubble!” Warily I stood up. I wanted to stay down and possibly mutter a prayer or two, as little Antinous and half my men were doing, but a centurion had to set an example.

  Another roar of falling stone sounded. “Now the buildings start falling down,” the Pompeiian added cheerfully. “My father was a builder—he said earthquakes were always good for the building trade, since half the houses fall down and have to be rebuilt. Centurion, where are you going?”