Empress of the Seven Hills (29 page)

Sabina wishes to contribute one hundred thousand sesterces from her own private purse, to launch the
alimenta
program. I knew you would be pleased.

One hundred thousand sesterces? Plotina was not at all pleased with that. Oh, the girl might finally be interesting herself in some
respectable
charitable works for a change, rather than picking up whores out of slums and offering them jobs—but a token gesture would have been good enough. One hundred thousand sesterces; that was a quarter the fee a plebeian paid to be entered into the
equite
class! And this talk of her
private
funds. A wife had no private funds. That money belonged to Dear Publius, and he could hardly spare it. Public life was so expensive—the fees, the bribes, the public appearances, the entertainments.
She had far better spend that hundred thousand sesterces advancing Dear Publius’s career.

And of course the girl knew it. She did it only to irritate Plotina, whose advice she routinely snubbed, whose letters she ignored. Had she responded to even one of Plotina’s many letters since the beginning of the campaign, letters intended to guide and mold, to give advice where advice was due?

She had not.

Plotina exhaled sharply, looking up from Dear Publius’s letter. The little fountain splashed softly behind her, the double lane of cypress trees waved their bare black branches in the breeze, but the Empress of Rome took no pleasure in any of it. Her pleasure in the day had been spoiled.

“Niobe,” she snapped at the slave girl just holding up a piece of household cloth, “unpick that seam and do it again.”

“Yes, Domina.”

I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation
, Dear Publius wrote, and went on to other things. A lighthearted account of the hunting he had been able to do now that Sarmizegetusa had been reached and the legions encamped around it in siege. But Plotina put the letter away. A waste to read Dear Publius’s letters when she was in a bad mood. Besides, she had a better idea how to spend the afternoon…

The Empress of Rome sat still for half an hour longer, gazing at the spreading slope of the gardens, deep-purple
stola
blowing around her feet. The wind picked up, keen and cold, but none of her women complained, merely hunched deeper into their shawls and continued their work as she tapped her letter slowly against the bench.

“Fetch me my new undersecretary from Athens,” Plotina said at last. “Bassus, his name is? I wish to consult with him about this new
alimenta
program.”

Taking charge of the project herself would give her oversight, information, access.
I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation
, Dear Publius had written. And she would. Surely there were far better uses for a hundred thousand sesterces than the feeding of a lot of lazy runny-nosed children in the provinces?

No doubt former Empress Marcella would call it meddling. Plotina called it duty.

“Come along,” Plotina said cheerfully to her women, rising. “It’s far too cold to work outside. Why did none of you say so?”

“Yes, Domina,” her household muttered, and filed back into the palace in her wake.

SABINA

“You must not be riding much in your wagon,” Hadrian noted. “You’ve gotten very brown.”

Sabina looked down at her tanned arms. “Trajan likes it.”

“I don’t.”

Sabina knew what Hadrian didn’t like, and it wasn’t her tanned skin. It was the Emperor’s careless comment as he patted Sabina’s freckled cheek at the last dinner: “You’re taking to army life much better than that husband of yours, little Sabina.”

“He wasn’t mocking you,” she answered Hadrian directly. “Just ribbing a bit.”

“He has no cause to. I do my duties—I work three times as hard as any other legate in his army—”

“He knows that. He also knows you don’t care for campaigning, that’s all.”

“Soldiers,” her husband grumbled, shifting a pile of writing tablets. “All the same, Emperor to legionary. None of them has any use for a man who prefers a book to a sword!”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Sabina consoled her husband. As she had predicted to Vix, her path rarely crossed Hadrian’s more than once a day now. But she did like to drop in now and then in the evenings and share a few friendly words. Especially now that the legions were camped about Sarmizegetusa, locked in the most dull and frustrating kind of siege warfare. Which, to Sabina’s eye, looked a lot like plain waiting.

“—useless campaigns,” Hadrian was complaining. “Of course the Dacian rebellion has to be contained, but once the siege is over, Trajan’s talking about expanding the territory into Sarmatia. Sarmatia! How many years and how many millions of sesterces will that cost? These wars of expansion, they’re costly and mostly useless. Rome is large enough.”

“Oh, but we do love acquiring new provinces,” Sabina said. “And isn’t it better to keep all these legions busy rather than let them get bored and stir up trouble?”

“I’d keep them busy by other means.” The pen was tapping thoughtfully in Hadrian’s hand now. “A program of building, perhaps…”

“Trajan doesn’t want to build. He wants to be Alexander.”

Hadrian gave an uncharacteristic snort. “Every Emperor wants to be Alexander.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Dead at thirty-two with everything I built coming to pieces around my bier? No. I would settle for being—Hadrian.”

Sabina propped chin in hand. “And what’s that?”

His eyes gleamed. “Something the world has never seen.”

Sabina looked at her husband: his cropped beard, his heavy shoulders even more imposing in his breastplate, his hand restless and his eyes turned on some inner vision. What that vision might be, Sabina had no idea… but she sometimes wondered if her husband had been entirely truthful with her when he said all he wanted of the world was to travel it. He seemed to have other ideas too, ideas he didn’t share so readily. “A pity we’re stuck here until the siege is done,” she said lightly. “It’s such beautiful countryside in Dacia, I’d rather be exploring.”

The thoughtful gleam vanished, replaced by the fire of enthusiasm she liked so much better. “Gods, yes. I’ve never seen better hunting country! Wolves the size of bears; the dogs bagged a pair last week that might have been Romulus and Remus in the flesh. I’m having the pelts cured; they’ll cover my bed with tails to spare—”

“Legate.” A tribune entered, saluting and removing his helmet. Sabina saw it was Titus. “Dispatches from Rome. Shall I bring them in?”

“Yes, at once.” Hadrian gave a last sigh for the hunting fields of Dacia and returned to his writing tablet.

Sabina put her cup aside and rose. “Perhaps you will be good enough to escort me to my own tent, Tribune?”

Titus kept his eyes scrupulously away from her. “I would be pleased to do so, Lady.”

Hadrian gave an absent good night, and Sabina took Titus’s arm as they left. “Let’s stop at the stream first,” she said as soon as they were out of earshot. “I finally got Vix’s tunic off him for washing—it’s stiff enough from dirt to stand up all on its own.”

Titus exhaled a long breath but kept silent as she retrieved a bundle
of laundry from her wagon. Whatever disapproval he felt of her, he kept it to himself. After the look of blank shock on his face that first night, Sabina had found herself hoping, with an intensity that surprised her, that she wasn’t going to lose him for a friend. But he still came to share food and conversation at the
contubernium
fire in the evenings, and if he averted his eyes from her and Vix, it seemed to be from courtesy rather than disapproval.

They had reached the stream, a winding bend of silver gone purple in the twilight. A dozen soldiers and a few women were scrubbing out helmet liners and tunics on its banks, grousing good-naturedly about aching feet and sore backs. Some looked curiously at Titus in his pristine tribune’s armor, but none glanced twice at Sabina with her plaited hair and sheepskin cloak. Why would they? She could have been a slave or perhaps someone’s freedwoman maid; just another tough and seasoned woman who followed after the legions.

Over the organized sprawl of the camp loomed Sarmizegetusa, which the men had taken to calling Old Sarm. Sabina looked up above the trees at the Dacian capital: a jagged crag of rock spearing into the dusk, crowned by a fortress. The legions had let out a dusty cheer in the road when it first loomed in the distance, and Sabina had shaded her eyes with her hand for a closer look. Rome was geometrically built, ordered around forums and hills and capitols. The Dacians had built a city that climbed almost vertically up the mountain, peaked roofs and steep streets winding around stepped terraces, crowned on top by the massive fortress where the Dacian king was now holed up with his wild-haired, wild-eyed warriors. “We’ll have it down in rubble within the week,” the engineers had boasted, but Sabina was not surprised to see the army still here a month later with no real dents put into those mountain walls.

She shook off her fancies and dropped to her knees on the damp sand of the stream bank, rinsing Vix’s tunic in the chilly water. “I don’t see many legates’ wives doing laundry,” Titus observed. “Why not have your slaves do that for you? Unless you enjoy scrubbing dirt out of clothes.”

“No, not exactly.” Sabina rubbed at a stubborn mud stain. “But there isn’t much point in an adventure if you only do the fun parts, is there? Vix can’t ask a slave to polish his boots for him or repair his breastplate, so why should I? That just makes me a dabbler.”

“That settles it,” said Titus. “I do not have the heart of an adventurer.”

“You have the heart of a scholar,” Sabina offered.

“Oh, not even that. I’m thoroughly ordinary. But I don’t mind— ‘Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence.’”

“Seneca?”

He bowed assent. “I’m happy to leave the adventuring and questing to greater men than myself. I’ll be happy enough to get home from this campaign, and never worry again about keeping my tunics white.”

“Give them to me, and I’ll get them white for you.” Sabina wrung out Vix’s tunic, holding it up with some pride. “Laundry may not be the most interesting chore on earth, but I’ve gotten very good at it.”

In truth, it was all interesting. More than that—it was
fun
. Walking alongside the wagon drinking in the smell of the pines was fun. Helping a cursing clerk to whack a stubborn mule along the path with a switch was fun. Helping some legionary woman carry her children across a river ford, one on each hip, was fun, even when her sandals squelched for the next hour. Picking up the cheerfully obscene legionary patois that was almost a different language—that was fun too. Vix’s friends were fun: Philip, who had taught her to cheat at dice; Simon, who had cast suspicious glances when he heard her accent but since relented into gruff liking; Julius, who lied about everything and cheerfully accepted that Sabina was lying about a few things too; Boil, who had been head-hanging shy in her presence at first but now followed her around half-hoping she’d give up Vix and come be his woman instead.

And when the other legion women asked, “Which one’s yours?” Sabina could point at a tall warrior—russet-haired, sun-browned, restless, and grinning—and say casually, “That one’s mine.”

That was the most fun of all.

“I hope that’s all the mud.” She gave the tunic one last rinse, holding up the dripping weight of wet linen. “I can’t see it anymore, so it will have to do.”

The legion had bloomed into a forest of campfires, and a thousand smells rose up into the dark toward the distant stars: smoke and oil, roasting meat and drying wool, leather and sweat and manure and steel. Sabina breathed it in deep as she and Titus threaded their way through the maze of tents and fires.
Does my husband love the smell of a legion on the march?
She thought not. Emperor Trajan, though—yes, he loved it. And as much as Vix might complain about the Tenth and its centurions and its traditions and its smells, he loved it too.

“You stole my tunic,” Vix accused as she and Titus came into the glow of the
contubernium
’s campfire. “And now you’re running off with a tribune. You girls, always going for the officers.”

He sat cross-legged by the fire with his
gladius
across his knees. The firelight touched his hair from russet to gold, and the muscles leaped under the skin of his bare arms as he worked the whetstone back and forth. There was a trick to getting a sword sharp, Sabina knew by now. A small knife first, to scrape off any patches of rust, then a good hard session with a whetstone—long strokes for the cutting edge, small strokes to hone the point. Then oil to smooth the blade, tenderly rubbed in with a soft cloth. Anyone who thought men couldn’t tend babies, Sabina reflected as she settled beside Vix, hadn’t seen a legionary tend a sword.

“I brought wine,” Titus announced, holding up a skin. “Would I bring wine if I were running off with your girl?”

“Give me the wine, and you can have her.”

“Can I?” Titus asked. But Vix just put an arm around Sabina and snugged her in close beside him, kissing her temple.

“Where’s Simon and the others?” Sabina looked around the campfire.

“Boil and Philip have sentry duty tonight, poor buggers.” Vix picked up his whetstone again. “And Simon got picked out by the
optio
for
some additional scouting. We have the fire to ourselves.”
And later the tent
, his eyes gleamed at Sabina.
For once we can be as loud as we like.
Countless times sharing a bed, Sabina thought, and he could still clench her stomach up like a knot with one glance like that.

Titus gave a cough and poured out the wine into tin cups, and the three of them sat lazy in the fire’s leaping shadows. Or rather, Sabina and Titus sat lazy. Vix tapped one foot restlessly against a stone and griped about the siege.

“—more catapults,” he was arguing. “Build enough, and the gates’ll come down.”

“Build any more siege engines, and we’ll be out of trees.” Even in argument, Titus was mild. “For myself, I’d just
pay
to get those gates open. According to Cato, ‘No fort is so strong that it cannot be taken with money.’”