Empress of the Seven Hills (17 page)

“Tribune?” Sabina uncurled her legs from the couch. “Oh, no. Faustina, try on the Indian silk, it feels like water on your skin—I have to see something…”

Titus bowed as Sabina bounded downstairs and back into the atrium. “Vibia Sabina,” he said. Her onetime suitor had gone from a shy boy of sixteen to a tall young man of twenty-two, but he still had the same endless skinny limbs and peculiarly sweet smile. “‘Hail, beauteous nymph with eyes cerulean bright.’”

“But my eyes aren’t cerulean,” Sabina objected. “You’ve been reading Homeric hymns again, haven’t you?”

“I’m afraid so. I tend to reach for poetry when I’m stumped for words.” He gave an elaborate bow. “The sight of you usually does that to me.”

“Today I’m the one who’s stumped.” Sabina eyed his uniform: brand-new breastplate and red tunic, greaves and cloak and a helmet tucked under his arm with a stiff crest of plumes. “Your family finally made you do it, didn’t they?”

“I’m afraid so.” He saluted. “You see before you a tribune of the illustrious legions of Rome.”

Sabina sighed. “I told your grandfather you’d rather be eaten by wolves than join the legions! At Father’s last party—”

“Yes, well, other members of my family told him all about the benefits of military service in seasoning the young. Mostly those members who have not served in the legions themselves. ‘War is sweet for those who have not experienced it,’ as Pindaros would say.” Titus looked down at himself ruefully.

“My father was a tribune when he was your age,” Sabina consoled. “He said he got through it by keeping his mouth shut and his boots dry. Where are you stationed?”

“The Tenth Fidelis, in Germania. Some ghastly frontier town with a name I can’t even pronounce. I leave tomorrow, unfortunately.”

“Germania,” Sabina said enviously. “And you don’t even want to travel! I’d love to see Germania.”

“At least you saw Greece.”

“Not enough of it.” Sabina dreamed of Greece sometimes; the rocky cliffs, the blue seas, the sunlight with its peculiar brilliance. She and Hadrian had spent a year in Athens, where he had been appointed magistrate, and it had been everything he promised. Athens had clung like a white jewel to the dry cliffs, and she’d scrambled sunburned and happy among the temples in the sky while Hadrian hunted massively tusked Greek boar and joined fierce philosophical debates with bearded
men who looked far more like him than his fellow politicians in Rome. “You really are a Greekling,” she’d teased him, and he’d released a rare rueful laugh.

They’d planned to go on to Sparta, Corinth, Thessaly… but Plotina had written with news of some crisis back in Rome that required Dear Publius’s
immediate
attention, and that had been that.

Sabina banished the thought, waving Titus to a couch. “Sit down; tell me everything. We’ll have ourselves a good chat, if it’s the last one before you leave. How long does your stint in Germania last?”

“A year.” He managed to sit, his stiff new armor creaking.

“A year?” Sabina made a face. “Who’s going to take me to the theatre now when Hadrian’s busy working?”

“I think you’ll be able to find another escort.”

“Nobody who tells me my eyes are cerulean when they’re plain ordinary blue. You have to write me from Germania, tell me if the tribesmen really cook Romans over a bonfire they way they did in Emperor Augustus’s day—”

“I think I’m going back to the blue dress.” Faustina’s voice came from the door. “Red is not my color at
all
.”

Sabina took care not to laugh as her little sister paraded in for their inspection. The hitched-up red
stola
was already slipping down around Faustina’s feet, gold bracelets hung like shackles on her wrists, and she’d clearly gotten into Sabina’s rouge pots.

“I think you look very fine indeed,” Titus said gravely.

“I look all washed out and diseased,” Faustina said, but gave him a grin that wrinkled her little nose. “Hello, Titus.”

“Faustina’s going to marry Gaius Rupilius,” Sabina explained. “I thought I’d let her try on my dresses, since she’s going to be needing grown-up gowns very soon.”

“He won’t marry me if I don’t look pretty in red.” Faustina plucked at her skirt. “All brides wear red.”

“Try a rosier red.” Titus rested his still-bony elbows on his still-bony knees. “With those pink cheeks, you’ll be prettier than any bride alive.”

“As pretty as Sabina?”

“Now, I don’t know about that.” Titus rose, his new boots squeaking, and crossed the tiles to Faustina. He took her hand and raised it high, twirling her in a circle and giving her his most thoughtful frown. He had become a great favorite, not just with Sabina but with all her family—Sabina could hardly visit home anymore without finding Titus there: unashamedly begging Calpurnia for a taste of her fresh-baked bread, arguing books with Sabina’s father, romping with the boys in the garden… “You really should have married him,” Calpurnia had scolded Sabina.

“I’ll stick with the husband I’ve got, thank you.”

Titus was still twirling Faustina under his arm. “It’s true your big sister is very pretty, Annia Galeria Faustina,” he said, judicious. “I don’t think you’re going to be pretty when you grow up, though.”

Faustina stopped twirling. “I’m not?”

“No. You are going to be a true, genuine, undoubted, and undisputed beauty.” Titus bowed, kissing the plump little hand. “Helen of Troy had forty suitors, but you should beat her easily. Young Gaius Rupilius will have to fight off the other men lining up for your hand.”

Faustina danced over to the still pool of water in the center of the atrium, bending over to survey her own reflection. “You know,” she said as she straightened, “I think you’re right!”

“She’ll miss you when you go north to Germania,” Sabina told Titus as her little sister dashed upstairs; a little blond whirlwind leaving a trail of gilded sandals, silver belts, and the occasional pearl earring in her wake. “All of us will miss you. My father thinks very highly of you.”

“Goodness, why? I’m such a dullard.” Titus picked up his helmet. “I should be going.”

“You can’t stay? I want to tell you lots of horror stories about my father’s time as a tribune. Like the night when the centurions froze his only toga into a solid block of ice—”

“Tempting,” said Titus. “But I’ve still got to creak over to the Forum and see about my travel arrangements.”

“Or the time a hawk swooped down and stripped the feather crest off his helmet,” Sabina added brightly. “That’s a good story.”

“You are not being encouraging.”

“Or my older brother Paulinus; he had some stories from his tribune days. Like the time he got the maps mixed up and marched a whole cohort sixteen miles in the wrong direction…”

“I’m leaving now!”

“Cheer up.” Sabina stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “I’m sure it won’t be that bad.”

TITUS

It was.

“Any advice?” Titus asked his father.

His father stared back. Sympathetic, Titus thought. But unfortunately still just marble. A small hand-sized bust his grandfather had pressed into his pack the day he left to join the Tenth Fidelis. “To keep you on the right path, boy. You’ll do well as long as you remember your father and obey your legate.”

“Anything else?” Titus had asked hopefully.

“Try not to pick up the pox from any German whores.”

Titus rested his chin on his folded arms. Tribunes had their own quarters, as barren or as luxurious as their private allowances would supply, but he wouldn’t have minded sharing. At least it would have given him someone to talk to besides a bust. “‘Obey my legate,’” he told his father. “Not very useful advice. The legate doesn’t even know my name. I haven’t done a thing since I got here but watch clerks file records, and scrape the mud off my boots.”

The trouble, Titus decided, was that tribunes as a whole were utterly useless. The legionaries, now, those stamping swearing creatures with their swagger and their scars and their rough stubbled faces, they were frankly intimidating but undoubtedly useful. There didn’t seem to be
anything they couldn’t do, from fighting endless drills to marching endless miles to building endless additions on their crude German fort. Then there were the bustling clerks and quartermasters who apparently found it no strain at all to maintain, in the middle of a dank German forest, a camp large enough to hold three legions at once—useful fellows, no doubt about that. And then there were the centurions, mostly ex-legionaries risen from the ranks, even tougher and more terrifying than the men they commanded, and the prefect of the camp, who was built like a mountain and seemed to know all five thousand or more men in the legion by name, and then there was the legate who did a great deal of frowning and stamping and ordering about. But the tribunes?

“We’re nothing,” he told his father. “A handful of layabouts who are here only because our families bought us our posts. So we’re second to the legate, but everyone hops over us down to the camp prefect and the centurions. What are we good for? Sitting around playing dice and talking about the rain and waiting till we can go home with a stint of service on our records so we can get elected quaestor.”

Rain was dripping outside even now. Nothing stayed dry in the fort; the camp was a sea of mud half the time, and so were the half-paved streets of the town that had sprung up between the camp and the river. “Moguntiacum, it’s called.” Titus rolled the word off. “At least I can finally say it now—only took me a month. Mostly everyone calls it Mog. Not much of a place. Mostly it’s here to keep the legionaries in taverns and whores and all the other things that keep the men from mutiny during the cold months.”

Precious little for entertainment. No arena, no libraries, just taverns with never-ending dice games and a few wet and forlorn-looking shrines. “I don’t think Grandfather has to worry about the whores,” he told his father. “They all look so sullen, I wouldn’t dare make any of them an offer.” The only other women were legionary wives—the soldiers weren’t supposed to marry, but wives and mistresses found their way into the fort anyway: tough and terrifying creatures in hobnailed sandals who could have snapped Titus over one knee.

A year he would be stationed here, and just one month of it gone. A year in a wet dark place that sounded like a cough full of bile, without a good book or a pretty woman or a decent conversation to be had for five hundred miles. “‘The same night awaits us all,’” he quoted, but Horace wasn’t much comfort tonight.

A brisk tap sounded on the door. “Tribune!”

One of the legate’s aides greeted him, frowning over a wax tablet. “You’re the one who quotes, aren’t you?”

That should make you proud, Father
, Titus thought.
A whole month in the Tenth Fidelis, and I’ve already made a name for myself. I’m universally known as ‘the one who quotes.’
“That’s me,” he sighed.

“The legate wants a thorough report on the Dacian garrisons,” the aide went on. “A tribune, a centurion and
optio
, and double guards. You’re to go.”

“Me? The Dacian garrisons—you mean all the way across Pannonia?”

“That’s how you get to Dacia, yes,” the aide said irritably. “Tribune Celsus was supposed to lead the party, but he came down ill this morning.”

More like he doesn’t want to spend the next two weeks riding through the mud and getting shot at by Dacian bowmen.
“I’ve never been on a route march,” Titus hedged. “I’ve just come last month, I haven’t even left Mog yet—”

“Legate said it would be good for you. Suit up! They leave in an hour.”

“I’m supposed to
lead
them?”

“Just do what the centurion tells you.” The aide smirked. “You might make it back alive.”

“That’s what I love about the Tenth Fidelis,” Titus said. “Such humor and wit, such encouragement and support. So comforting to a newcomer like me.”

The aide was already hurrying away, shuffling another armload of wax tablets. “Enjoy the rain, Tribune!”

“Dacia’s a bad place,” Titus heard one of the legionaries whisper to another, the first week on the road. “Bad, and getting badder. That king of theirs, he wears a lion skin and he’s eight foot tall!”

“Ten,” another legionary disagreed. “Counting the horns.”

“You know what he does to Romans when he catches ’em? I heard the last scouting party came back without their heads!”

A hoot from behind Titus. “If they lost their heads, then they wouldn’t be coming back from anywhere, would they?”

“Just sayin’…”

Titus turned to look over one shoulder at the legionaries. Six of them, hulking and identical in their armor and muffling cloaks, faces so wrapped against the cold in scarves and helmets that he couldn’t tell them apart. A double guard, because Germania had been restless lately with Dacia looking troublesome again. Trajan had drubbed the Dacians into submission a few years back, but Titus knew the submission hadn’t lasted long. Already there were rumors of scouts picked off in Dacia, supply lines harassed, messengers shot at from the trees… but the six legionaries guarding Titus and the centurion on their expedition to the Dacian garrisons didn’t look worried. They laughed and they joked, they cursed and they sang filthy songs, and Titus envied them. At least they had someone to talk to. Whenever the scouting party stopped for the night at a way station, the legionaries put up their booted feet and passed around wineskins and dirty stories. Titus watched wistfully from his own table—alone, of course, because officers and legionaries didn’t mix on the road any more than they did in the fort. He couldn’t even take his father’s little bust out of his pack and talk to that. The men already despised him enough for his brand-new plumes and his soft hands and his utter uselessness; he wasn’t going to give them something else to jeer at by talking to a statue.