He smiled. “Annia, must you?”
He seized her around the waist again, but she slid free before he could kiss her. “Catch me,” she breathed, and those twelve miles and two fractured toes hadn’t stolen her speed after all. She ran like the wind, relishing the pain in her bandaged feet. It was a pain that meant victory, and for the rest of her life, Annia Galeria Faustina would feel that victorious ache come back at odd moments. When the twins were teething and she was walking up and down with a baby on each hip long after the nursemaids gave up—when she dozed by light of a lamp, waiting to see if the legions would come back victorious—when she finally persuaded her husband to give up his writing for the night and come to bed . . .
Shining moments—hopeful moments—that was when she’d wince and feel the ghostlike pain of her feet the day she ran them into blood, gritted her teeth, conquered the agony, and sprinted on. The day she saved an emperor, brought down an enemy, avenged a friend—and won Marcus for her own.
She laughed whenever she felt that reminder of pain. Laughed in triumph and in happiness, just the way she was laughing now as she sprinted off into the twilight with legs flashing and hair flying, future Emperor Marcus Aurelius chasing behind.
VIX
A day later, I stood under the massive statue of Antinous and watched the Emperor burn all records of Servianus and Pedanius’s plotting. The smoke rose, wreathing my son’s marble face, and I hoped those two were writhing under the whips of the Furies. Die, I told their shades. Fade into history—my son will live on.
“There.” The Emperor heaped the last scroll on the brazier. He looked thinner than ever outside the layers of his toga; just a collection of bones in a tunic of undyed wool. His only ornament was Antinous’s ring on one swollen finger.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“Write my memoirs. And poetry, of course. I scribbled a verse at dawn this morning that I think Antinous would have liked.”
“Let’s hear it,” I said, because he’d recite it whether I asked or not. Some things never changed, and Hadrian’s vanity was one of them.
“Little soul,” he quoted slowly, “you charming little wanderer,
My body’s guest and partner,
Where are you off to now?
Somewhere without color, savage and bare;
You’ll make no more of your jokes once you’re there.”
“I like it,” I said, and I did.
“It came from a dream of my star.” Stirring the crisping parchment in the brazier. “I saw his soul fluttering, the color of gold. Waiting for mine.”
I didn’t say it out loud because I knew he’d mock me—but I was thinking of writing my memoirs, too. The life of Vercingetorix the Red: soldier, and gladiator, and general who had traveled the length and breadth of the Empire, served three emperors, loved one empress and fathered another. Hadrian would preserve my son in his memoirs, god and beloved—but what of the others who had crossed Hadrian’s path and mine over the course of our long and complicated lives? What about Titus, friend and future Caesar? Young Marcus, Imperial heir and future son-in-law? And all those women, the women in blue: sinuous lapis-eyed Sabina, bitter-edged Mirah in her blue scarf, merry sapphire-decked Faustina, and fleet-footed Annia running in a bloodstained blue tunic to save the Empire?
If Hadrian will not tell their story, I suppose it will be up to me.
“You look tired, Caesar.” Sabina tilted her head at Hadrian as we rejoined her. She had insisted on coming back to the villa; I had insisted she was still too weak to be moved, and we both know who won that argument. She looked so white and drawn on her couch that my heart clenched. I thought I saw glints of silver in that silky cap of light brown hair where there hadn’t been any gray even days ago. But her blue eyes gleamed, and bundled in her silver wolf skins with my garnet earring swaying beside her throat, she still had the mischievous look of a child bundled for a snowstorm.
I settled beside her, putting my arms around her since Hadrian did not seem to take offense anymore. Even if he had, I could not have stopped holding her. I did not think I would ever be able to stop holding her. Sabina had become a part of me, flesh of my flesh during those long hours I spent cradling her in a drying pool of her own blood. A part of me I could not lose, and I had so nearly lost her! Those hours were the stuff of nightmare: rocking her limp form, talking to her, sobbing for her, praying over her. Knowing in that bleak hard core of me that if I lost Sabina I would have fallen on my own sword.
I had lost Antinous. Mirah. My girls. Simon, Boil, so many friends. But not Sabina. She nestled a little into my arms even as she was asking her husband, “Are you in pain?”
“Agony,” Hadrian said shortly. “My limbs swell, my heart throbs, and I wake at night gasping for breath.”
“You should rest.”
“I will rest when I am dead, and I am certain that will be soon.”
We might as well have been the only people left in this huge marbled place. The Imperial court had been banished the day of Servianus’s arrest and not yet called back; they clustered in Rome trading wild rumors. I supposed it would soon enough sort itself out. Hadrian seemed in no hurry, nor was I.
Hadrian was gazing around him at the massive grounds he had built, the smoke from his burning scrolls still curling up into the sky. “You know”—surveying the vast gardens, the huge colonnaded stretches of marble—“I think I shall leave this place. I meant it for my crowning achievement, but now it has the feel of a tomb.”
“Where will you go?” Sabina asked.
“Baiae, perhaps. The small villa by the sea—I can write poetry there, washed by the waves.” He smiled a little, and I imagined he was remembering the sea at Eleusis. Me on one side and Sabina on the other as we plunged into the cleansing ocean . . . And Antinous, tossing his salt-drenched hair out of his eyes and laughing.
“We will accompany you,” Sabina said, but the Emperor shook his head.
“I go alone.”
“Why?” she demanded, but Hadrian looked at me.
“Where would you go,” he asked, “if you could go anywhere?”
Britannia, I thought at once. I’d been thinking of Britannia a great deal lately. My parents had found peace there, and peace had bored me when I was young, but now I thought of the mists and the rains, the black silk sky pricked out with thousands of stars, the white ribbon of Hadrian’s great wall . . . And Titus had dangled a tempting proposition before me just yesterday. “You could take charge of the legion there, Slight. Keep the men fit; make repairs on the wall when needed; keep peace in the region. Think on it.”
I’d thought I was done with the legions, but maybe not. When my daughter was Empress, she’d need someone in that troublesome corner of the Empire to keep the peace. Since I’d already pacified the east, I might as well make sure of the west. Annia already had a far better and more civilized father to train her for the work that lay ahead here in Rome—but Rome could always be threatened by danger rising in the provinces. Who better to stop it than her barbarian of a second father, ready to march with his legion wherever she needed me?
I had been Hadrian’s watchdog for so many years. Now, perhaps, I could be my daughter’s.
I didn’t voice my thoughts, but Hadrian saw that I’d thought of something. “Go there,” he said, “wherever it is, and take my Sabina with you.”
The word broke from us both. “What?”
He looked mildly irked. “Must I make it an Imperial order? You, Vibia Sabina, will do as I ask for once and leave me. You, Vercingetorix, are to spend the rest of your days as Imperial guard keeping her safe.”
“I will not leave you to die alone,” Sabina stated, but Hadrian’s eyes just met mine over her head.
Persuade her.
God, but I wanted to! If I had my way, I’d take the woman I loved from this cesspit of a city to some distant, be
autiful place where no one on earth would recognize or search for the Empress of Rome, and keep her safe till the end of her days. The whole city still buzzed with the rumor that she’d been killed—I had half a notion to let them go right on thinking it, and take her for my own. Because what held us here in Rome? Our daughter was grown, soon to marry and launch into her future under the care of Titus and Faustina—and they in turn had an empire to lead until it was Annia and Marcus’s turn. That was their path. Perhaps the path for Sabina and me led to Hadrian’s wall, both of us hand in hand under the moon, gazing at those stars that had so long led us in opposite directions.
A trickle of smoke from the burning brazier had been threading its way up toward the sky, but now it was gone. Hadrian looked at the empty sky for a while, and then he turned back to Sabina and me. He said simply, “Have I ever shown you my Hades?”
We glanced at each other. “You have never shown anyone your Hades, Caesar.” Which had not stopped the Empire from gossiping about what happened there.
“Come.” He led the way, stiffly. I followed, carrying Sabina because she still had no strength to walk any distance, and Antinous’s ancient gray-muzzled dog creaked along behind his master. We descended stone steps to the black iron doors set below the ground. Hadrian unlocked them with a small iron key, flung them wide, and went in without turning to beckon us.
“I think I should be on my feet for this,” Sabina said, and I set her down. Her hand slipped instantly into mine, and I admit I swallowed hard as we followed Hadrian into the dark corridor.
Light flared, orange and hungry. The rough stone walls were spaced with brackets, each holding a lamp in the shape of a screech owl, and Hadrian went down the row lighting each one. “I require light,” he said without turning. “I keep the horror of all horrors in this private hell of mine, and such things must be seen clearly.”
Sabina’s fingers tightened through mine, and I swallowed again. A stone chamber at the end of the passage, and two more lamps. Hadrian lit them, and there was a flare of reflected light that dazzled me for an instant. When my eyes cleared, I saw the Emperor’s Hades.
A stone chamber, empty but for a great chair of wrought ebony, its arms worked all over in tiny howling faces like damned souls writhing in Tartarus. The arms of that chair had been scratched and worn smooth and scratched again, as though Hadrian had clawed at them over the years and years he had sat in it. He sat in it now, his fingers too weak to claw anything, and he stared at his horror of horrors on the wall, clearly illuminated by the lamps.
A mirror.
A great mirror of polished silver, giving back to him his own face.
Sabina gasped.
“I sit here,” Hadrian said, “and I look on what I am. There is blackness in me, and I stare at it until I have beaten it back. Because you were right, Vibia Sabina. An emperor must be a good man if he is to stay upon his throne. I am not a good man, but I have worn the mask well enough. It would never stay on if I did not have a place to take it off in safety.”
I remembered the tales of screams issuing from behind these doors, screams and curses and sobs. I saw the Emperor, clawing at his hellish chair, sobbing hoarsely before a mirror.
“I came here twice as often when I had Antinous.” Hadrian’s voice was a monotone. “How hard I worked, burying the darkness for him. He was the light, and I’d come sit here in the dark.”
I didn’t want to touch that writhing chair, but my fingers found the high carved back and gripped hard. It was that or feel my knees buckle. I glanced at Sabina in the flickering light of the screech-owl lamps, and I saw tears running silently down her face.
“The gods are cruel,” Hadrian said, staring at his own ravaged face. “Antinous is gone, and I am still here. The monster in the dark.”
“You are not a monster,” Sabina said, and she slipped to her knees beside his chair, resting her tear-wet cheek against his gaunt hand. “And you are not alone.”
“I have always been alone,” Hadrian said. “An empty shell in a good man’s mask. You know why I truly chose young Marcus to succeed me? Because he does what I do. He agonizes to make himself a better man, and that is a good habit in an emperor. But he will not need a Hades to do it, because he already is a good man. I have never been anything but a monster.”
“Monsters cannot love.” My voice was hoarse. “And I know you loved my boy.”
“I destroyed your life.” The Emperor looked at me. “And yours”—looking down at Sabina. “And yet you are both still here.”
“We stay because you are a great man.” Sabina cupped his bearded cheek in her hand. “We stay because you are our Emperor. We stay because of love.”
“I am not worth love.”
“But I love you,” Sabina said quietly, and I saw she meant it. She loved me but she loved him too, and there was a tiny stubborn part of me that resented sharing her. Just as I had so long resented sharing my son’s love with this man, even if that was a far different kind of love.
“Antinous loved me,” Hadrian said as though he had heard the name in my thoughts. “Servianus and Pedanius took him from me, and for that I should have wanted blood. I should have staked them out in their dying agony for all Rome to shudder at. But I did not. I let Servianus take his own life, and I drowned Pedanius in the Nile’s waters as he drowned Antinous. They killed my star, and even that did not resurrect my appetite for blood.” He looked up at me, and there was a child’s bewilderment in his eyes. “Why?”
The words came from me slowly as I pieced them together. “Because . . . even if you were once a monster, you are no longer.” I thought of the man who had tired of bloodshed in Judaea; who had released me from the task of killing his enemies and turned himself instead to befriending me over a game board. “You have spent so many years pretending to be a good man, Caesar, that I think you have become one.”
His head fell, and his shoulders heaved. “I have tried,” he whispered. “Gods know I have tried!”
He was weeping, and Sabina was weeping too, her face buried in his arm. And I took a shaky breath and realized that the defiant knot of resentment in me was gone. So many years I had hated this man, hated him and then resented him even as I admired his achievements and acknowledged his love for my son. I had held on to that last stubborn core of ill will.
But he wept before me now in a dark cell, and I felt no more hatred. Sabina had spoken true. He was a great man. He was my Emperor. And in my way, I loved him too.
I went to my knees at his side. I took his thin, shaking hand between my own, and I gripped it fiercely. “I am glad that my son gave you joy,” I said. “I am proud to be your man. And until the ferryman comes for your soul, I swear I shall remain at your side.”
And he whispered, “No.”
“I swear it, I—”
“Take me from this place, Vercingetorix.” His hand curved around Sabina’s face. “Take us both from this place.”
I raised Hadrian from his chair, and then I raised Sabina. I supported them, one arm about Hadrian’s shoulders and the other about Sabina’s waist, and they leaned against me as I led the way out of this foul place. I led us back into the light, where Antinous’s dog looked up and wagged his tail. Hadrian straightened to lock his Hades behind him, as I supported Sabina against me before she could fall. She looked at Hadrian from the circle of my arms, and the silvery tear tracks still marked her face. “Wall up this place,” she said. “You have no more need of it.”
“I think you are right,” the Emperor said, and tossed the key into the winter-dry bushes. “My villa in Baiae has no Hades.”
“Let me come with you,” Sabina began, but Hadrian cut her off with another of those perfect gestures.
“No.”
“Why?” Sabina demanded fiercely. “Why?”
Hadrian looked at me, and somehow his words were in my mouth. “Because he no longer needs
us.”
“You have spent your life safeguarding my body—” Hadrian spoke to me. “And you have spent your life safeguarding my soul.” To Sabina. “But death is the thing every man faces alone, even an emperor. I welcome it.”
I looked at him. In his Hades I had seen uncertainty on his face, and the ravages of grief, and a terrible doubt. Now I saw weariness, and God knows he looked as ill as a man could look. But his gaze was sure and steady.
Sabina was still arguing. “I cannot leave you to die alone!”
“Something tells me I will not,” he said, and he didn’t. I did go to Britannia, and I did take the legion by the wall—but before Titus took the purple as Emperor, there was the inevitable day when I was called back to a seaside villa in Baiae, and I stood my last watch as the man in the bed drew his final tortured breath.
Sabina’s head drooped, and Hadrian took a step toward her. I loosened my grip, and she went from my arms to his, resting her cheek against his broad chest. She stood between us, and I met his eyes over her head.
Persuade her, he told me again. Let the Empress die to the world, and be reborn nameless with you.
“I’ll think about it,” I answered aloud, with the edge of deliberate insolence that I knew had always made his teeth hurt. Just because I could—because soon I wouldn’t have him to torment on a daily basis, and that saddened me. “No promises.”
Sabina laughed a little, a watery sound as she lifted her head, and Hadrian sighed. “You will be the death of me,” he said, and it warmed me through to hear the faint irritation returning to his voice. Some things never changed. Until that deathbed day arrived—and it was coming, not eight months in the future—Hadrian would always find me irritating.
But that day was not yet. And we walked away into the twilight, Sabina and I on either side of the Emperor we served, her narrow head resting on his shoulder and my hand steadying his arm.
HISTORICAL NOTE