I remembered marching along with my lion skin hot in the sun and the eagle screaming silently over my head. I remembered shouting rude insults at Trajan along with the rest of the legionaries—an old tradition for the troops at a victorious general’s triumph. He’d seemed to know the insults were fond; his grin split the paint on his face, and he made encouraging waves to inspire us to new heights of vulgarity. The crowds pressing in on each side screamed so loud when they finally caught sight of him that I was deaf for the next three hours. A slave stood behind the Emperor murmuring in his ear: “You are only a man… you are only a man…” Another Roman custom for a triumphant general, and a custom I didn’t entirely understand; something about keeping a man humble even in his moment of victory. But I doubted the Emperor had heard one word that slave was muttering. He was too happy, too radiantly happy with his laurel wreath cocked back on his head at a boyish angle and his people shouting his name.
Romans are strange. Why on earth would anyone ever tell such a god that he was only a man?
The little room was stifling. Trajan’s officers stood crammed along the walls, spaced here and there by Praetorians who stood looking helpless because it was their job to keep the Emperor alive, but what could they do here to save him? His freedmen stood in frightened little clusters, and senators flocked together like whispering old hens. I was crammed somewhere at the back, the Emperor’s newest and most junior commander, but I could see over all the heads before me. The Empress sat on one side of the bed, rigid as ever in a wooden chair, one hand resting on her husband’s. Sabina had slipped from her chair to her knees on the bed’s other side; her cropped head leaned against Trajan’s deadened arm, her fingers ceaselessly stroking his motionless hand. Her eyes were closed, but when the Imperial physician tried to pin a blanket up over the window to block the fading light, her head whipped up and she snapped, “Leave it! He wants light.”
“The air is unhealthful—”
“I said leave it!”
Plotina drew a breath as if to remonstrate. Sabina’s furious eyes bored into her. Silence fell again. Just the shuffle of feet, an occasional cough—and above all, the terrible rasp of Trajan’s breathing. Coming slower now.
Slower.
“Clear the room,” Plotina ordered. “It’s unfitting for him to go to the gods in such a crowd.” Sabina began to argue with her, but the freedmen were already streaming out, and I trailed after them. I couldn’t watch—couldn’t look at that waxen figure on the bed, couldn’t bear to hear that slow rasp of breath, couldn’t bear to see my Emperor die. My Emperor, the man I’d followed to Dacia and Parthia and hell too if he’d asked it of me…
Half the soldiers were already weeping, unashamed. A handsome secretary stood outside the now-closed bedchamber door, bent nearly double, shoulders heaving. I just stumbled away, out of that nameless little house. Such a small place, too small and ordinary to contain the last breath of a man like Trajan. Why couldn’t he die on a battlefield? The last arrow of the last battle, while subduing the last enemy on the last unconquered province in the world? Why this dead and dusty little town full of ghosts?
I stumbled past a series of ruined shacks, over a road missing half its paving stones but still leading up a mild slope toward a temple now roofless and godless. A beautiful day, the sea sparkling distantly, the sun shining. Shouldn’t it be raining? Shouldn’t the skies weep when an emperor dies?
I lurched up the cracked mossy steps of the temple. A temple of Jupiter, maybe, or some unknown god. Now it was just a few crumbling columns on a mossy foundation. One of the columns seemed to come at me, hitting me in my wounded shoulder, and I leaned against it. Clutched it, my hands shaking against the stone. My shoulder burned. My eyes burned. Shouldn’t a soldier weep when his general dies?
I don’t know how long I stood there, trembling against the column. But I picked my head up, looking around me aimlessly, and I saw Sabina. Standing across the temple in the crumpled shift she’d worn day and night as she tended Trajan, dwarfed by the columns. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. I took a step toward her, another step, lurching like a drunk.
She opened her arms and I dropped into them, crashing to my knees. “He’s dying,” I said against her waist.
“Ssshh,” she said, her fingers running through my hair.
The first sob tore out of my throat. “He’s dying. He’s dying—”
“Hush, my love,” she whispered, just as she’d whispered to me in Dacia after I killed a king on a solar disc. I’d gripped her then, drowning, and she held me now as I drowned again, howling into her linen shift. Mirah would have tried to comfort me, told me not to weep, told me Trajan would go to the next world and be happy there. Sabina just held me. She sank down where she stood, sitting on a fallen column, and she gripped me tight as I sobbed into her lap like a heartbroken child.
My tears went eventually, but I stayed where I was, huddled numbly in the arms of a woman I used to love and used to hate. The sun set, the moon rose; warmth was gone and chill had replaced it. How could the world just go on as though nothing had changed? Everything was changing.
“Stand up, Vix. It’s getting cold.” Sabina tugged me to my feet with gentle hands. I stood there dumbly, an ox waiting for the sacrificial knife. I was a soldier of Rome; we didn’t go anywhere without orders. Who would give me my orders, once my general was dead?
“Come with me,” said Sabina, and I took her outstretched hand and followed her obediently. Those orders would do for now.
The house where Trajan—that house was still deathly quiet, a ring of Praetorians keeping the hovering onlookers at bay. Soldiers paced outside, some weeping, some white-faced, some blank with shock. They should be inside, I thought. Trajan belonged with his men in his last hour—not with his sour bitch of a wife, crouched like a vulture on her death watch.
Sabina skirted the crowds, leading me to another house that wasn’t much more than four crumbling stone walls and a roof. She got a bedroll from somewhere, laying it out with the expert neatness she still remembered from her days with the Tenth. She eased me into it, covered me up, took my hand in hers, and curled herself against the wall. She was still there when I woke in the morning.
Which was when we found out we had been locked inside.
PLOTINA
“Well done.” Plotina extended a gracious hand to the stocky Praetorian guard in his red-and-gold armor. “You were most convincing. You certainly fooled them all.”
“I don’t like fooling people, Lady.” The guard shifted from foot to foot, uneasy. “You’re sure it was necessary?”
“Essential.” Plotina gave her most reassuring smile. “Rome owes you a great debt, and so do I.”
“If you say so, Lady.”
“I do. And so would the Emperor.” Plotina picked up her husband’s cold hand and stroked it. “The former Emperor, that is. The new Emperor will thank you himself upon his arrival.”
“Yes, Lady.”
“You may go. Not a word, now.”
“No, Lady.” But the guard still looked uneasy as he tramped out; Plotina could see that. “I think I shall have to take care of him, don’t you?” she told her husband. “Perhaps a convenient fall from one of these rocky cliffs. What do you think?”
Trajan’s corpse lay silent. His flesh had a marble chill and his limbs had gone stiff, but the heaped blankets had concealed that quite artfully.
“Now, I hope you aren’t angry with me,” Plotina chided, sinking back onto the stool at her husband’s bedside. She didn’t bother lowering her voice—a few slaves lined the walls, waiting to be called upon, but they all knew she’d have them crucified if they ever spoke of what they’d seen in this room. “It’s just a tiny deception, husband. We’ll announce your death as soon as Dear Publius arrives from Antioch. For now, everyone can go on thinking you’re alive. It will make the transition much smoother, and you know how I always like to smooth things out for you.”
The Praetorian had done a good j
ob indeed. He had a gruff voice not unlike his Emperor’s; he had stood concealed in the shadows of the bed’s curtains and read the lines Plotina had given him. Plotina’s only task had been to chafe Trajan’s dead hand and shed a tear or two. The clerk who recorded the last wishes of Marcus Ulpius Trajan had been sitting well back, far too occupied with the importance of the moment, and the crowd of witnesses stood at a respectful distance in the dimly lit room. Plotina had only ushered them back into the bedchamber once she’d had everything made ready, and most had been weeping too hard to notice that the Emperor’s chest had not been rising and falling under the heap of carefully arranged blankets. Sabina would have noticed, but Sabina had been confined and kept out of the way.
“I didn’t hurt her, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Plotina told Trajan. “Just shut her away for a few days, until I could settle everything satisfactorily. I know you were fond of the girl, but you must admit she has a tendency to interfere. I couldn’t have that, now could I?”
Plotina paused a moment, frowning. That Girl with her indecent dresses and her tart tongue and her odd ideas of charity had Plotina’s own position now. First lady of Rome. Somehow it was the first time Plotina had considered the reality of it. That foul-mouthed little slut, taking my place?
Well, hardly. Little Sabina would have other duties, after all. And perhaps, somewhere, along the line, she could be quietly divorced. Her connection to Trajan had served its purpose, after all. Another girl could be found if necessary, someone more biddable. Her sister was a likely prospect, if the laws could be sufficiently bent…
Sabina had been kept safely away from the matter at hand. That was the important thing.
“It was quite funny, really,” Plotina assured her husband. “My little deception about your will, I mean. Like a mummer’s farce—you’d have laughed. And I did carry out your wishes, you know. You would have chosen Dear Publius as heir in the end. I know you were annoyed with me about my little efforts in that direction, but I knew what I was doing. If you’d simply let me explain, I’d have made you understand.”
Trajan’s drying lips were beginning to peel back from his teeth, as if he were snarling at her. Plotina reached out a hand to smooth his face. “Don’t growl, dear. I’m not angry with you anymore, in spite of the things you said to me in Antioch. It’s all worked out for the best.”
Really, it had. Juno’s hand, no doubt, reaching down to save her sister. Plotina had felt more frozen with every narrowing mile of water between the trireme and Rome. Disgrace, scandal, ostracism—would Trajan go so far as to divorce her, after all her hard work and initiative? On the word of that little snake Titus Aurelius, whose reward would apparently be Dear Publius’s birthright? What can I do, what can I do? Frozen panic had been giving way to pure terror when Juno acted. “You should be proud,” Plotina told her husband. “Only the queen of the heavens could strike down a god like you.”
A knock sounded at the door. Plotina started, then rose hastily and pulled the bed curtains to mask Trajan’s still body. “The Emperor is not to be disturbed.”
“I’m sorry, Lady.” A young secretary entered hesitantly, twisting a scroll between diffident hands. “I didn’t mean… how is he?”
“Resting now.” Plotina gave a brave, distant smile. “He pushed himself so hard, giving us his last wishes. I think it will not be long now.”
She had fed him an extra mix of sleeping draught at the end, just to make sure. A dicey business, really: giving him just enough to keep him unconscious but not kill him, and in the end—his real end, which had come in private just after she shooed everyone out—perhaps she’d given him a bit too much. Really, how tiring. One moment you’re trying to give a man a peaceful death, and the next you have to pretend he’s alive again!
“See, that’s where I’m confused, Lady,” the secretary was hedging. “It surprised me that the Emperor changed his mind. He dictated a letter to me—”
Plotina took the scroll from his hand before he could proffer it. “Did he, now.”
“Yes, his list of heirs for the Senate… as I said, it seemed odd he’d changed his mind.”
“A dying man often wanders in his last hours.” Swiftly she scanned the list of names. Celsus, Palma, Quietus, Nigrinus… oh, dear, something would be have to be done about all of them. Then she read the last name, and a bubble of pure joy rose in her chest.
Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus.
This time the name gave a thrill of satisfaction instead of hammering pains to her temples. Titus. Yes, something could definitely be done about him.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention.” Plotina turned her attention back to the secretary, barely remembering to hide her beam of happiness. “Phaedimus, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Lady.” His eyes were red-rimmed as he stared at the bed with its silent mound of blankets. A handsome young fellow. One of Trajan’s whores, no doubt.
Plotina smiled at him. “Guard!”
The stocky Praetorian entered again.
“Take this man outside and dispense with him.” Plotina rolled up the scroll again tightly, speaking very low so her words only reached the guard. “A cliff should do nicely. There’s a purse in it for you if it looks like suicide.”
The guard never blinked. “As you wish, Lady.”
Yes, she’d chosen well when she selected him. Loyal men, so rare these days. Pity he’d have to go over the cliff too, in a day or so.
“Lady?” The secretary looked more puzzled than alarmed as the Praetorian seized his arm. “What—”
Plotina dropped Trajan’s ridiculous letter and its ridiculous list of names into the brazier. It caught at once, flaring up in a bright arrow of flame.
“Lady, wait!”
“No one else is to enter,” she called after the guard as he dragged Phaedimus out. “I do not wish the Emperor’s last hours disturbed.”
The door thumped shut. Plotina dusted off her fingertips as the letter flared into ash, and turned back to her husband. “Titus Aurelius?” she chided. “Really, Trajan. Whatever were you thinking?”
His snarl had returned. Maybe he was trying to say he was sorry?
“Perhaps I should announce your death in the morning,” she told him, coming back to the bed. “Before you begin to—well, smell. We’ll have the funeral pyre here when Dear Publius arrives, and take your ashes back to Rome. I’ll see them interred under your triumphal column, my dear. The one recording all your Dacian victories.”
She sat beside his still body, leaning forward to brush a strand of iron-gray hair off his forehead. “Thirty years of marriage, and I’ve never seen you look happier than you did at that triumph. You were a wonder of a man, you know. You should have let me have children. We’d have birthed a race of gods.”
A yawn struck her. Goodness, could it be dark already? So exhausting, this whole business. When she returned to Rome, she would sleep for a week.
“You don’t mind if I rest now, do you?” Plotina asked her husband, curling up beside him on the nest of blankets. “We never did share a bed together, not even on the night of our wedding. So cold. You’re cold now, but I suppose one can’t have everything.”
Empress Pompeia Plotina put her head on her husband’s stiff shoulder and fell happily asleep.
CHAPTER 27
SABINA
Sabina stormed into the room Plotina had transformed into a study, and the former Empress bowed very low indeed at the sight of her. “My dear,” Trajan’s widow smiled. “I fear I have been neglecting you. So very busy, but of course that is no excuse, is it? You, after all, are the Empress of Rome now.”
Sabina did not stop to reflect on her new title, though it was the first time she had heard it. She just hit Plotina fast and hard across the face, not a dainty slap but a close-fisted hammer of a blow that she’d seen centurions deal out to disobedient soldiers. The impact sent a jolt of furious pleasure through her like a spear shaft. “You bitch,” she said, and ha
d to fight to keep her voice even. “You know Trajan would have rather died than have your precious Publius take the purple.”
As one, the slaves bolted out of the room without waiting to be dismissed.
“But Trajan is dead.” Plotina’s face remained serene, though one sallow cheek now glowed red. “And I am pleased to say he had a change of heart shortly before he went to the gods. He was able to dictate a letter to the Senate announcing his true choice.”
“Yes, the letter you signed. When did he ever have you sign anything for him before?”
“My dear, he was too weak to hold the pen.”
“Too weak? He was already dead! He died, and you dictated that letter for him!”
“An empress really shouldn’t put stock in such wild rumors.”
Sabina flung herself down into the nearest chair, crossing one leg over the other in the way that she knew irritated Plotina. “And this letter is your only proof?”
“Hardly.” Plotina seated herself behind the folding desk—Trajan’s desk, Trajan’s lamps and rugs and couches, transported from the trireme to this damp stony little room to give the Empress—the former Empress—all the comfort she required. “My husband verbally announced his intention to adopt Hadrian as his son and heir. There are witnesses.”
“I heard about them too. Standing well back in a darkened room while you wept over a corpse’s hand. If you really wanted witnesses, why wasn’t I allowed to be present?”
“I was told you were in bed with your latest lover. A legionary, I believe?”
Sabina laughed. “Is that the best you have? Me locked into a confined room, probably on your orders, where I spent the hours drying the tears of one of Trajan’s officers? Someone, by the way, who mourned his Emperor much more passionately than you seem to be doing.”