Empress of the Seven Hills

I held a swallow of wine in my mouth until my teeth burned. Didn’t help. I swallowed.

  “What happened in Cyprus?” I heard the rustle of my wife’s skirts as she came closer. “You were gone more than a month; I thought it was only going to be—”

  “Takes time, digging graves.”

  Little Dinah peeked out from behind Mirah’s skirts, staring at me through a fringe of dark hair that had escaped its ribbon. I’d buried a little girl just her age. Her hair had been stiff with dried blood. No need for a ribbon.

  Mirah looked at me another long moment, then took Dinah by the hand and disappeared into the bedroom, Antinous trotting behind like a young deer. I looked around our lodgings: the usual scrubbed and cheerful domesticity that Mirah managed to impart to all our varied homes. A little frieze of leaves and vines about the door; a pot in the courtyard just outside the door where she grew a few herbs to flavor the soup; a clutter of the children’s toys on the floor. So ordinary. So wholesome. The whole scene was blurred from all the wine I’d drunk. Or maybe from tears.

  Mirah came back alone. She dropped to her knees before me, putting her eyes on a level with mine. “What happened?”

  “The Jews in Cyprus revolted.” My hand tightened around the cup. “By the time I arrived, it was already all over. Just the bodies to clean up.”

  She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh. Oh, God.”

  “No, I didn’t see much of Him over in Cyprus.”

  Mirah jumped to her feet and began to pace, arms folded tight about her neat sashed waist. “It’s everywhere.” Her voice was taut. “As soon as we came back to Antioch, I started to hear the rumors. In Alexandria they’re saying a hundred thousand Jews were slaughtered. And now in Cyprus—”

  “It wasn’t the Jews who were slaughtered in Cyprus.” I tossed off the last of the wine in my cup. “They did the slaughtering.”

  “Good,” said my wife.

  I stared at her. “Children,” I said finally. “Mothers, old women, old men—innocents. Slaughtered.”

  “The Romans are doing it to the innocents in Alexandria!” Mirah’s voice rose. “And in Mesopotamia—dear God, do you know who the Emperor sent to clean out the Jews there? That commander of yours, Lusius Quietus!”

  “Mirah—”

  “And do you know how he cleaned out the province? By killing every Jew he could get his hands on.” She gave a little blind shake of her head. “If what you say about Cyprus is true—well, at least they killed a few in return.”

  “They killed thousands, actually.” I rose from my chair. “You know how many I helped bury? There was one woman who looked like you. A little thing with reddish hair. She must have been pretty. Not that I could tell, after she’d been stripped, raped, and stabbed a few dozen times. Roman legionaries aren’t the only ones in the world who ravage and murder.”

  “And what will happen now, because of a few Roman citizens killed in Cyprus?” Her voice was shrill. “How many Jews get to die in return for one Roman woman?”

  “Oh, it was more than one,” I snarled. “And they couldn’t even tell me why they went on a killing frenzy. Why they woke up one morning and decided to kill off every neighbor they had who didn’t celebrate Shabbat at week’s end.”

  Mirah still stood hugging herself as if she were cold. “You don’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t.” I turned away from her. “I never will.”

  “Hundreds of years—” She spoke jerkily. “Being blamed every time a plague comes or a drought hits—being murdered or exiled or robbed of what we own every time a new emperor has a whim—”

  “None of that has ever happened to you,” I snapped, whirling around again. “You and your family, perfectly peaceful and prosperous and living in the thick of Rome for three generations—”

  “When it happens to one, it happens to all. Why do you think we remember Masada, Vix? Because they were our brothers. You should know that better than anyone!”

  “All I know is that I spent weeks and weeks digging graves.” I hurled my cup against the wall and it shattered. “And now I’ve got orders to go join Quietus in Mesopotamia and probably dig a few more.”

  “Graves for Jews this time. If there are any left in Mesopotamia.” Mirah bit her lip.

  “See for yourself. You’ll come with me this time, you and the children.”

  “No. I won’t go.”

  “I’m not leaving you in Antioch if Jews are being killed! With me you’ll be safe.”

  “You think I’ll trail after that butcher Quietus?” she shouted. “Have your supper ready every night after you come home from a day of rounding up Jewish rebels? I’m not going. I’m staying here, and so are my daughters.”

  “Your daughters? They’re mine too, and you’re my wife, and you’ll go where I tell you—”

  “I wouldn’t go with you on this campaign if you held a sword to my throat.”

  I nearly hit her. She saw it and she put her chin up, daring me. I stalked back to the wine and didn’t bother with a cup this time, just lifted the jug in both hands and swigged directly. From behind me I heard a stifled sob and Mirah’s light footsteps retreating into the bedroom. I didn’t turn, just took another long draught. I drank all the wine in the house that night, but it wasn’t enough. I still saw the graves in that sunny little island. Such a pretty place to hold such horrors.

  I woke the next day in bright afternoon, still huddled on the floor. My tongue had grown a coat of fur and a blacksmith was pounding sheet iron inside my skull, but someone had unlaced my sandals and dropped a blanket over me. I unpeeled one eye and saw my wife looking at me, perched neat and tidy on my chair, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her wide mouth had no smiles.

  “Urgh.” I closed the eye again.

  A pause, and I felt her narrow little fingers tangling with mine. She said nothing. I said nothing.

  I went back to my legion alone.

  Nothing went right after that.

  No sooner did I get back to the Tenth than the bad news started to hit. More revolts—Armenia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, all going up in flames. Every new-conquered territory that had seemed so quiet.

  “We’re overextended,” Boil told me bluntly. I’d made him a centurion in his own right as soon as I made First Spear; he ran his big fingers back and forth through the scarlet crest on his helmet as he gave me his report. “There’s a king making trouble in Armenia, and a legate got killed in Mesopotamia last week on a bad scrap of a fight. Too much territory to cover with seven legions.”

  “Well, we don’t have to cover all of it,” I said wearily. “Where’s the Tenth been dispatched?”

  Within twelve hours we were marching. Quietus, that fierce old Berber, greeted me with a hand clasp and a nod. “That your boy?” he demanded, nodding at Antinous, who had once again come along as my page. “Looks less like a girl than he used to.”

  Antinous beamed. He had a gladius of his own now, and a curved Syrian knife he used to hack his hair short whenever it got long enough to even think about curling. Last time he’d decided to shave Dinah and Chaya’s heads along with his own. “They wanted haircuts too,” Antinous explained, and Mirah shook a rueful head at the sight of our bald daughters and told me maybe I should take Antinous with me on campaign again. I took him, but I kept a close eye on him. Mirah was right; there were plenty in the legions who liked pretty boys, and even with the chopped hair and sunburned face, Antinous was disturbingly handsome. That was when I got him a gladius of his own and told him not to be shy about using it if he had to.

  “Can you swing that sword, boy?” Quietus growled at him, also noting the gladius. “Or is it just for show?”

  “Been swinging it since I was eight,” Antinous said proudly. “And Vix is teaching me how to hunt! I can already shoot a rabbit at fifty paces, and—”

  I cuffed him to keep still. Quietus just chuckled, and I wondered if Mirah had spoken the truth. If he’d really massacred every Jew in the province he
could find.

  I didn’t ask. Couldn’t ask.

  We took back Osrhoene, thanks to several nasty little fights and a nice bit of trickery I’d thought up (never mind what). Took a few other cities back too, but it was just a random spot of order in all the chaos. We rode along the Euphrates, and this time I felt eyes assessing us flatly from the reeds, eyes that wanted nothing better than to decorate the spot between my shoulder blades with a dagger hilt. I didn’t tumble into sleep half giddy on triumph, as I had when I first marched through this land.

  There was a battle late that year, a proper one outside Ctesiphon. The kind of battle I’d dreamed of when I was a boy, rank upon rank of soldiers lined up behind their shields, unbending, unbreaking, the wicked javelin points glistening in the sun. Trajan led us himself, and I saw his magnificent gray head from a distance and heard his Praetorians begging him to wear his helmet. I saw my men taut and eager and primed, and touched the amulet around my neck to mutter a quick prayer to the god of war, who in my mind’s eye still looked like my father. I muttered another prayer to Mirah’s god—the more divine protection before a fight, the better—and then I kicked off my horse and joined the line to fight on foot. I killed six or seven men that day, and those Parthians might part their hair with scented oils and paint kohl around their eyes, but they were savage fighters. I got pressed badly between three men who’d seen me shouting orders and figured that they would crumple my men by taking out their leader. Idiots, I thought irritably, my men would carry this fight straight on over my corpse. But the Parthians didn’t know that, and they pressed around me and I spitted one and thumped my shield boss into a second, but the third would have buried his curved sword in my neck if Philip on my right arm hadn’t whipped his javelin through the man’s throat. I saw the man look down at the bloody spearhead that had cored his Adam’s apple as he crumpled to the trampled ground, and I gave Philip one of those wordless panting battlefield nods that have more thanks in them than an hour of flowery speeches. He nodded back, and then he screamed because another curved Parthian sword had found the gap between his breastplate and backplate, and Philip was dead before the scream choked off in his throat. I screamed back, and everything slipped sideways at that point and later Boil had to tell me three times that the enemy fled—that we won. We won, or so I was told. My hands were gloved in blood up to the elbow after that battle, from hacking apart the Parthian who’d killed Philip, and that was when the men in the Tenth started calling me Vercingetorix the Red.

  Another series of lightning-fast marches once the year turned—how many miles of the Empire had I marched? More night marches, more scrappy little fights in squelching marshlands or arid desert sands. Not nearly enough nights in Antioch with Mirah. I came home after a few months’ absence, and little Chaya had no idea who I was. She cried and hid her face in her mother’s neck at the sight of me in my tall helmet.

  “She’ll get to know you again,” Mirah told me.

  “When? I leave tomorrow. The Emperor wants me in Hatra, and after that—”

  “Oh,” said my wife, her face blank.

  “It won’t be for long.” I tried to sound encouraging. “As soon as we take Hatra, I’ll be back here to Antioch.”

  “You said that after Seleucia.”

  “Well, you’re the one who insisted on staying here,” I said shortly.

  “They spit on me when I go to the market.” Her voice was expressionless. “They ask me if I eat dead babies, like the Jews who rebelled in Alexandria. I tell them there aren’t any Jews left alive in Alexandria to eat anything, much less babies. That’s usually when they spit on me.”

  “Mirah—”

  “I don’t take the girls out much. Who spits on little girls?” Her hand caressed Chaya’s cap of fine dark hair, finally grown out from Antinous’s ragged haircut. “Romans.”

  “Antiochenes,” I shot back.

  “They’re all Romans,” Mirah said wearily. “When can we go home, Vix?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and kissed her. She kissed me back, and the dimple by her mouth flickered, but later that night when she thought I’d gone to sleep I heard her crying. Long shuddering sobs racking the body she’d curled into a ball as far away on the bed as possible. God help me, I was glad to get away.

  TITUS

  “A girl to see you, Dominus.”

  “It’s not Lady Julia Statilia, is it?” A certain notorious young widow, a friend to Titus’s sisters, who had lately decided Titus would make her a splendid fourth husband. Titus wasn’t quite so keen on the idea. “Tell her I’m out. In fact, tell her I’ve gone to Africa, or maybe India. Which one’s farther away?”

  “It’s not that Gorgon at the door, Dominus.” Ennia’s voice sounded approving. “It’s Senator Norbanus’s daughter.”

  “Faustina?” Titus rose from his desk. “Show her in.”

  Sabina’s little sister swept in, trailing a freedman and a brace of maids, flushed pink as her gown from the summer heat of the street outside and looking very pleased with herself. “Tell me I’m wonderful.”

  “You’re wonderful,” Titus agreed.

  “Tell me I’m clever too. And brave.”

  “All those things, to be sure.” He bowed from behind his desk. “But why?”

  Faustina looked smug. “Because I’ve found your bathhouse thief for you!”

  “‘To accept a favor is to sell freedom,’” Titus murmured.

  “Syrus,” Faustina said, triumphant.

  “Syrus or Cyrus?”

  Her face fell. “There’s more than one?”

  “Never mind. Either way, I will take your favor and become your slave. Who’s my bathhouse thief?”

  Faustina turned to Ennia with a dazzling smile. “Ennia, isn’t it? Can you take my maids to the kitchens and see they get a cold drink? They’ve been very patient tramping after me all afternoon, and they deserve to sit down.”

  “Yes, Lady.” Titus’s housekeeper gave Faustina a speculative glance from piled blond hair to rose-pink hem. “Come along, girls.”

  Faustina turned back to Titus as the door of the study closed. “I promised Bassus we’d have privacy for this.”

  “Bassus?” Titus scrutinized the freedman who had edged into the room behind Faustina’s maids and now stood looking nervous and cornered. “Is this our thief?”

  The man looked indignant. “See here, Lady Faustina never said anything about being accused—”

  “No one’s accusing you of anything.” Faustina gave his shoulder a cajoling pat, leading him to a chair. “Just sit a moment, will you, while I talk to Titus Aurelius?”

  “I knew this would happen,” the man muttered. An Imperial freedman, Titus judged from the neat toga and ink-stained hands. A young secretary from Greece, perhaps, making a living off tidy handwriting and a knowledge of languages. “Open my mouth, and soon I’m the one with my hands nailed on a board for being a thief—why did I ever listen to you, Lady?” the man wailed.

  “No one’s nailing anyone’s hands anywhere,” Faustina soothed, and dragged Titus off to the opposite corner. “Try not to make him nervous,” she whispered. “I had a demon of a time getting him here at all.”

  “If he’s not our thief, then who is he?” Titus lowered his own voice.

  “Well.” Faustina cleared her throat as if preparing an oration. “We thought your thief might be a steward or official in the Imperial household, someone with access and oversight, but I knew you hadn’t had any luck finding out who.”

  “No, not much.” Every trail Titus had followed over the past months seemed to lead to a tablet that had just gone missing from the public archives, or a surveyor who had just been transferred to Africa. Or an official who went red-faced and tight-lipped and refused to say a word even after Titus offered gold. “I feel like keeping my head on my shoulders, thank you,” one fat little praetor had told Titus shortly, and left without waiting to be excused. The trail had gone inexplicably cold.

  “So,” Fausti
na said, off-hand, “I thought, why not go to the source?”

  Titus eyed her in growing trepidation. He looked at Bassus, then back to Faustina. “What did you do?”

  Ennia reappeared with a knock, making the freedman jump nervously in his chair. “Cold mulberry infusions,” she announced, handing Faustina three chilled goblets. “Make sure Dominus drinks his, Lady. Healthful on a hot day like this. Dominus, I’ve canceled your afternoon session with the Aurelii clients.”

  “You didn’t have to—”

  “Take all the time you need,” Ennia interrupted, and thumped out emphatically.

  “I like her.” Faustina looked after Titus’s housekeeper, speculative. “Is she your mistress?”

  Titus spluttered. “Now, really—”

  “What? I’m not shocked at all. Mother always said she wished my father had had the good sense to keep an in-house freedwoman for a mistress when he was in between wives. If he had, his house and his laundry might have been in a little better order when Mother moved in.” Faustina patted the immaculate folds of toga at Titus’s shoulder. “I can see Ennia keeps you and your house turned out in immaculate fashion.”

  “This is not a matter for discussion!”

  “Nothing interesting ever is.” Faustina handed a goblet to the nervous freedman with another reassuring pat, then brought the other back to Titus. “Here, drink your mulberries. Now, I go to the palace quite often—Empress Plotina invites me to the palace to help with the weaving, you see. Mostly to tell me which of my suitors I should choose, and hint how much she wishes I’d been the one to marry Hadrian instead of Sabina. Ugh, perish the thought. But last time she got called away for a moment, and I was alone in her rooms, and I just happened to see where she keeps her private accounts. Well,” Faustina amended, “I rummaged through her things until I found where she keeps her private accounts.”

  Titus choked on his drink. “You spied on the Empress of Rome?”

  “Spy is such an ugly word.” Faustina’s voice was airy. “Let’s just say that thanks to good fortune, an empty room, and some concerted snooping, I stumbled upon some interesting information in her files. You know she keeps records on everyone who works in the Imperial household?”