Empress of the Seven Hills (22 page)

“How many legions do we
need
?” I’d snarled to the rest of my
contubernium
one night when we were all out whoring. I’d dragged Titus along too, though he and my brothers-in-arms still regarded each other with wary bemusement. He was a tribune, after all, an officer even when off-duty, and they were my fellow soldiers, the four men with whom I bunked, slept, ate, trained, and fought. Usually a
contubernium
was made up of eight men, but we’d lost one to a Dacian spear thrust the year I entered the Tenth, and two more had died of camp fever last fall. The five of us left—Simon, Boil, Philip, Julius, and me—might as well have been brothers.

“Titus and I saw off three of those Dacian bastards,” I complained. “I don’t see why the Tenth can’t handle the rest, outnumbered or no.”

“Correction,” Titus murmured around his mug of beer. “You saw those three Dacians off. I just hung on and prayed.”

“It worked,” I pointed out. “We’re both still alive. Hey, why haven’t you grabbed yourself a girl? It’s why we came here.”

“I don’t really go whoring very much,” Titus said. He cut an odd figure in that dim smoky little room among my brothers-in-arms: sitting with one heel crossed over his knee, sipping his beer as if it were fine wine as Philip on his right side sat dicing with two half-naked whores, Boil on his left fumbled under the dress of the girl on his lap, and Julius across the table was halfway into his signature tall tale about being descended from Julius Caesar. “Besides, there aren’t enough women to go around with three and a half legions in town.” He gave a courteous nod to the various half-naked girls around him, and they all dimpled back. “I’m sure the girls are overworked enough as it is.”

“Too right,” grumbled the redhead in my lap—my favorite for the nights I didn’t spend with Demetra. “The men from the Sixth, they’re arrogant bastards. Worst tippers in Mog—”

“Them and their lion-head banners,” Simon sneered, cracking a nut between his mug and the table. “My sweet, why don’t you bring me some more of that mead, and then take a seat on my knee and share it with me—”

“Don’t you be sweet-talking me! You know what I cost, and I want coin in hand before I’m sitting on your knee or any other part of you—”

“I’m inclined to think well of the Sixth right now.” I draped an arm around my redhead’s neck, savoring the news I’d been waiting to drop all night. “Our centurion, in his infinite wisdom”—we all paused to spit and swear—“has decided that with the newest influx of our brothers from the Sixth Ferrata, the camp is becoming overly crowded—”

“We could have told him that!”

“Actually I did tell him that,” said Titus. “He didn’t listen to me either.”

“—and those men who have arrangements in town might lodge there, provided they pay for the privilege.” I tilted my chair back, smug. “So while you bastards are bunking with the Sixth and their lion-head banners, I’ll be snug in bed with Demetra.”

“Hey,” said my redhead, poking my shoulder.

“Don’t worry, love, I’ll have plenty of time for you.” I dragged her head down for a kiss. Simon pitched more nutshells at me. Julius, who liked to brag he was descended from the legendary Gaius Julius Caesar just because he had the same balding head and hook nose, made a rude gesture at me without coming up for air from his whore’s breasts. “You’ll be eating that swill from the legion cooks,” I told them with relish, “and I’ll wake up every morning to Demetra’s bread—”

“Where’s my javelin?” Philip asked his two giggling half-naked girls. Philip was a lean little Greek, small but quick, and the only time he didn’t have his dice in his hand was when he had his javelin, and when he had his javelin you prayed to whatever god you had that he wasn’t pointing it at you.

“You know where your javelin is, legionary!” his girls giggled. “Standing at attention like a proper little soldier, he is—”

“Of course you’re all welcome to come eat bread and roast pork whenever you like,” I concluded. “Didn’t I mention that part?”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Boil put down the knife he’d been preparing to whiff through my hair. “Tell her Boil’s coming tomorrow after sentry duty.”

“Boil, that’s an interesting name,” Titus said. “How did you get it?”

“Don’t ask,” I snickered as Boil scowled. He was the youngest of us at seventeen, a fair-haired Gaul as big as a stone outhouse, and when he’d first joined our
contubernium
he’d had a boil on his arse the size of an apple. In the legions you’ll be dead before you ever get rid of a nickname like that.

My redhead was scowling at me. “So that’s why you stay with that Greek girl. For the
food
?”

“Now, don’t be cross with me—”

“You can find another bed warmer, Vercingetorix,” she sniffed, and slid off my lap. “I think I’ll find myself a
gentleman
for a change.” She grabbed Titus’s hand and hauled him up from his chair. “Want to see if I’m red-haired all over, Tribune?”

“I wouldn’t dream of doubting a lady’s word,” he said politely. But she was already hauling him away.

“Didn’t have to poach mine, did you?” I called after him, but he just gave me a rueful look as the redhead yanked him upstairs.

“Serves you right,” Simon told me. Simon was senior man in my
contubernium
, a dark burly man of forty years or so, close to the end of his stint with the legion. He’d been the one to welcome me to the Tenth, when I first shipped north out of my training camp to Germania.

“Vercingetorix.” He’d looked me up and down in my creaky new armor and clean sandals. “From Gaul?”

“Britannia.”

He grunted and waved a hand at the lowest cot in the
contubernium
. “The recruits keep getting younger,” he muttered in Hebrew.

“And the veterans keep getting older,” I said back in the same language, and his heavy brows shot up.

“A Jew as well as a Briton?”

“No.” I lapsed out of Hebrew, which was rusty for me. “My mother was, that’s all.”

“Then you’re a Jew,” Simon said firmly.

“How’s that?”

“You’re a Jew if your mother is a Jew. That’s our law.”

“Why the mother?” I wondered. “Why not the father?”

“Because too many soldiers like us have marched through Judaea to make anyone too certain of their fathers,” Simon had grimaced. A good man to have on your shield arm.

Titus came down from my redhead’s room a few minutes later, looking mussed. “Done already?” I jeered. “Quick work. Admit it, she was your first!”

“No, I just thought I’d come tell you to go home without me,” he explained. “She’s giving me a whole night free.”

“I never get a night free,” Boil complained. “What’s your secret?”

“I said she had wine-dark lips. It’s from the
Odyssey
, sort of.”

“Poetry,” Philip mused. “Never tried that before. Have you got any more quotes handy?”

“I’ll have a list for you by tomorrow,” Titus promised over his shoulder as he dashed back up the stairs. They liked him after that, tribune or no.

A long impatient winter, though it passed faster and warmer with Demetra’s savory stews in my stomach and her long body in my bed. The other four in my
contubernium
came for dinner as often as they could get out of evening duty, and they got comfortable enough with Titus to start groaning openly whenever he quoted Cicero. Titus still made Demetra nervous, and so did Simon. “You’re sure he’s not a devil?” she whispered to me, watching him mutter his Hebrew prayers over his plate. “They say Jews mutilate their babies!” She cast an uneasy look at her little boy who tussled, solemn and absorbed, with his carved horse.

“Only their own babies, I think,” I said vaguely.

“But
Vix
—”

“Stop fussing!”

She bit her lip, and I bit mine too. Demetra had a harder time of it with so many more men in Mog, after all—a girl who looked like she did couldn’t even go to the market alone now without being harassed by off-duty legionaries. She’d tried to hide how relieved she was when I brought my pack to stay in her cozy little home, but she’d cried tears of relief the first time I’d tossed some drunken bastards from the Second
out on their heads when they came pounding on her door. She’d been so happy that night, she even let me love her on top of the blankets in the firelight where I could see how beautiful she was. Her hair rippled over my hands like a fall of honey, and I pulled her down to the bed on top of me. She put her arms about my neck, but she was so plainly uneasy that I laughed and tugged the blanket over us both. “Have it your way, prig.”

“I am not a prig! People don’t make love in plain view where I come from.”

“I’m a barbarian.” I growled and bit her shoulder. “We do things differently.”

“I know,” she giggled, and kissed me. An easy lovemaking—she lay still beneath me, smelling sweetly of fresh bread, and afterward she lay against my shoulder chattering of little things. The gossip she heard from the bakeshop, the rumors that the Dacian king had a lion’s mane and three horns, the new play coming to the theatre soon. She didn’t expect me to listen, and I didn’t, just dozed in the cradle of her hair. Dozed, and dreamed of glory.

Spring came muddy and early that year, none too soon because we were hearing more and more rumors of the Dacians massing in the east, and I hoped finally we might be marching. But our legate was ill, something quick and convenient that got him out of his post and back to Rome in a hurry where there were no more wars threatening. Wasn’t
that
fun, defending the Tenth’s reputation to the bastards in the Fourth and the Sixth and the Second, while their legates growled for war and ours went home to his house on the Tiber. But none of us was growling long, because the Emperor came.

PLOTINA

The House of the Vestal Virgins had been taken over by little girls. Hopping with excitement or round-eyed with awe, they clustered about
the long pillared atrium with its tranquil pools and double lane of statues, the bolder girls making cautious forays toward the five white-robed priestesses surveying the scene, the shyer ones clinging to their mothers’ skirts. But Plotina had no eye for the children.

“My dear, what a surprise!” She made a deep curtsy to the only woman in Rome who deserved her reverences. “I had no idea you were coming to see the new Vestal selected.”

“One of my sister’s many granddaughters is a candidate this year.” Domitia Longina, Emperor Domitian’s widow and former Empress of Rome, raised Plotina from her curtsy. “I came to support her.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, of course.” Plotina put an arm through her predecessor’s, and their respective pairs of Praetorians fell to a tactful distance behind them. The former Empress rarely came to Rome these days—after Emperor Domitian’s unfortunate assassination, she had retired to a private villa in Baiae, and made very few public appearances. “I had been planning to call upon you soon,” Plotina said. In fact, there was a matter Plotina dearly wished to discuss with her predecessor—and now, the opportunity had dropped itself in her lap.
Doubtless Juno arranged it just for me
, Plotina thought.
I must remind myself to have a cow sacrificed in thanks.

A little girl in a rose-colored smock ran up with a nosegay of violets and larkspur, looking confused about which Empress to give it to. Plotina made a demurring gesture, and the former Empress took it with a gracious nod. A tall woman, though not as tall as Plotina, with a calm, carved face and iron gray hair knotted demurely beneath a simple veil. She wore a plain pale-blue gown topped by a white wool
palla
, and not a jewel to be seen anywhere. A perfect picture of modesty, dignity, simplicity: Plotina had taken care to model herself in the same mold when she took the former Empress’s place.

“Which one is your candidate for sixth Vestal?” she asked as they resumed their slow stroll along the reflecting pool. “Your great-niece, you said?”

“Little Drusilla Cornelia.” The former Empress nodded to a blue-gowned
little girl holding hands with a beaming grandmother from whom she had clearly inherited her deep dimples. “I’m not certain I want her to win—a thirty-year vow of chastity is something I hesitate to wish on a nine-year-old girl—but no doubt it’s an honor to be considered.”

“The new candidates are most carefully selected when a Vestal retires,” Plotina assured her. “I attended to it myself this year, with the Emperor already gone to Germania. The Vestals, well, I don’t need to tell you the importance of picking a girl of
unblemished
moral character.” The six Vestal Virgins guarded Rome’s eternal hearth, after all. Rome’s morality, in a sense. “Not just any loose-kneed little giggler can fulfill such a task.”

“I don’t know about that. The best Vestal priestess I ever knew had a delightful giggle. And she wasn’t a virgin at all.”

Plotina blinked. A joke? But the former Empress’s face was calm, pensive. “My dear—may I call you Domitia?”

“I don’t go by that name anymore. Domitian conferred it on me; he fancied having a wife named after himself. Now he’s gone, I find I prefer the name I was born with.”

Impossible to read anything from her even voice. Certainly the former Empress always spoke respectfully in public of her dead husband, but one always heard whispers… the marriage had begun with a most scandalous elopement (while she had still been married to another man, no less!), and had not proceeded smoothly. Rumors of lovers, a divorce after a quarrel and then a speedy remarriage… and the rumor that would not die, the rumor that Emperor Domitian’s assassination had been hatched, planned, masterminded, and executed by his wife. The tall woman who now stood at Plotina’s side, sniffing at a rosebush.

Absurd, of course. Plotina of all people knew how people liked to tell tales about women in
their
position. Jealousy, not only of rank but of innate moral superiority. She had always discounted the rumors.

Though she did wonder why the former Empress never wore black for the husband she claimed to mourn.

“Marcella Longina of the Cornelii, I believe, is the name you were
born under?” Plotina asked brightly. “I can see why you prefer it. Fewer painful memories.”