Empress of the Seven Hills (30 page)

“Cicero,” Sabina said lazily. “Cicero said that.” Titus’s literary references tended to elicit blank stares from Vix and his friends, but she could usually top him quote for quote.

“A night attack, maybe,” Vix was muttering, oblivious. He stared up at the black shape of Old Sarm where it reared with magnificent disdain over the surrounding detritus of camped legions, siege engines, and assault platforms. “Get a few picked men over those walls to open the gates…” He attacked his
gladius
again with the whetstone. Vix wasn’t really meant for waiting—a month’s worth of siege was a month too long, as far as he was concerned. Sabina came behind him and rose to her knees so she could knead at his shoulders, and his muttering broke off in a reluctant gasp. “Left shoulder, harder—I pulled something sparring today—”

“It’s always the left that knots up on you.” She dug her fingertips into the one particular muscle below the shoulder blade where he always carried the worst of his tension. “It’s never liked being demoted to shield arm.”

“They made such a fuss about fighting left-handed when I went to legion training, it was easier just to learn to fight with the right—ow!”

“Your left arm isn’t happy with it, that’s all I’m saying.” Sabina slipped a hand under the neck of his tunic, kneading the shoulder. His skin was warm under her fingers, but not from the campfire. Vix never needed a fire to keep warm. His flesh was always hot to the touch, as if the blood inside ran close to boiling.

He captured her fingers in his own, rough from the sword and oily from the polishing cloth, and gave them a quick squeeze as he continued his rant against the Dacians. “Get me over those walls with a rope—”

“I give up.” Sabina abandoned the massage. “There’ll be no relaxing you now. At least not till later, when I can get the clothes off you.” She crawled around to his other side, surveyed the sword lying across his knees, and stretched out to lay her head in Titus’s lap instead.

“—have those gates open,” Vix was still grumbling.

“Oh, Hades, give it a rest,” Titus said. “The city falls, or it doesn’t. Likely it matters very little.”

“What do you mean it matters very little? I didn’t waste a summer of my life marching through Dacia if all we’re going to do is march home with nothing show for it!”

“Who says you have nothing to show for it? It’s been a rather nice summer, full of fine weather and lovely scenery and vigorous exercise. It’s even convinced me of the occasional pleasures of army life.”

“Me too,” said Sabina, her head still in Titus’s lap. At the beginning she had been mortified to discover she could stand only an hour or two of marching before she had to climb back in the wagon to rest. She had rubbed her sore feet and bandaged her blisters and cursed at her own aching muscles, unable to believe how long and stolidly the legionaries could march—carrying weapons, armor, and heavy packs to boot. But slowly she felt her muscles strengthening as the campaign went on, and now she could walk all day on her tough new feet
and
have breath left over to sing a good dirty marching song. She sometimes made up obscene new verses and taught them to Vix and his friends.

“None of this is worth anything,” Vix was proclaiming at length,
“if we haven’t got a few heads on spikes to show for it at the end. What else did I join the legion for—the canings and the pay?”

“You really are a barbarian,” Sabina informed him.

“I concur,” Titus agreed. He had begun to stroke Sabina’s hair, very lightly, as if afraid she would brush him away. She closed her eyes instead, comfortable. “No need to do anything drastic about Sarmizegetusa, Vix—we know they haven’t got a water source up there; sooner or later they’ll get thirsty.”

“Not when they’ve got pipes to bring their water in.” Vix lobbed a new chunk of wood into the fire, sending another drift of sparks skyward toward the white sparks of stars in the sky.

“True, and there’s a heated discussion about those pipes every night in the Emperor’s tent. I stand in the back with message cases while he argues with all his legates.” Titus was still stroking Sabina’s hair—he had a lovely light touch.
His wife will be a lucky woman.
“Legate Hadrian wants to poison the water supply, but it’s unreliable, and the Emperor wondered if the pipes might be big enough for a few men to slip through and under the wall at night, but the diameter is too narrow—”

Vix threw back his head and laughed, tossing his sword in the air in an exuberant overhand toss and catching it again on the way down. Sabina’s heart squeezed, looking at him. “I love the Emperor,” Vix said, still laughing. “And I love you, Titus. But you think too much like nobles. Poison, night raids—think like a barbarian for once!
Break
the damn pipes!”

“Only possible if you know where they come out,” Titus said. “We don’t.”

Vix grinned. “But I do.”

TITUS

“You think we haven’t considered breaking the pipes, lad?” Emperor Trajan sounded kindly as he looked at Titus. “There’s no access.”

“But there is, Caesar. I can show you on a map.” Titus shifted from foot to foot. “One of my legionaries discovered it on night sentry duty—where the pipes come out. Smash the pipes; cut off the water supply. Not an elegant solution, but the simplest. Once the Dacians get thirsty enough, they open their gates.”

The Emperor frowned, but thoughtfully. “Get my engineers in here!” he called, and there was a flurry of activity. Titus stood in the middle of it all feeling oddly exhilarated. He’d had to scrape up every bit of courage he had to dare approach the Emperor directly with Vix’s mad plan.

“What am I supposed to do, present it myself?” Vix had hooted. “They’ll never let a muddy-boots legionary like me in to see the Emperor of Rome. You’ll have to do it for me.”

“Me? I can’t do that!”

“You’ve talked to him before, haven’t you?”

“In passing,” said Titus. “Once or twice.
Not
in depth. I don’t like talking in depth with emperors, or important people in general. They look at me and I start to stutter, and all in all it’s a scene I prefer to avoid.”

“You take it to Hadrian and he’ll just take the credit,” Vix warned. “Then I’ll have to beat you bloody for giving that weasel a career boost on
my
idea. Be a man!”

“You sound like my grandfather,” Titus winced, and the following day he’d put on his best armor, applied the parade plume to his helmet, scrubbed everything to a shine, and applied to see the Emperor. Who was now looking Titus over with a speculative eye.

“What did you say your name was?” Trajan asked. “You’re one of Hadrian’s, aren’t you—the one who quotes?”

“Yes,” Titus said, resigned. “I’m the one who quotes.”

“Good to see you’ve got more in that head than epigrams. Not saying this plan of yours will work, mind, but it’s worth a try.”

The tent was rapidly filling up now: aides spreading out maps, Trajan’s staff officers already debating hotly with each other, engineers spouting technicalities in that superior nasal drone all engineers seem to have… the Emperor’s quarters were confined to a tent as small and plain as any legionary’s; the interior furnished with nothing more than a makeshift desk, a bedroll, and a few spartan camp stools, but Trajan’s perpetual good cheer brightened any room.

“Hadrian!” he called as Sabina’s husband came striding into the tent. “You’ve been keeping this Cicero-spouting young tribune from me. He shows promise.”

Hadrian frowned. “I’m sorry if he disturbed you, Caesar—”

“Not at all. This notion he has about the pipes works, and I may poach him off you for my own staff. Tell us again, lad—”

“If it were that easy to cut off their water, we’d have done it already.” Hadrian began shaking his head before Titus was even finished. “It won’t work.”

“It
will
work,” Titus found himself venturing to his own surprise. “We know they don’t have a water supply up there, not one that will supply the whole city. They rely on those pipes.”

“Boy’s right,” one of the engineers grunted. “This place your legionary found, Tribune—he’s sure he’s seen where the pipes feed out? It’s not on our maps.”

“You see?” Hadrian dismissed. “If they were accessible, we would have known.”

“Not necessarily; the spot’s hidden. They took good care to keep it off our maps.” Titus edged forward, pointing to the maps. “Here, let me show you…”

More muttering, more arguments and speculation and pessimistic grumbles, but the Emperor’s optimism had already risen to fill the tent. He was making plans now, striding up and down in his battered armor, arguing with his officers, and Titus was content to drift back to the back of the throng. Unnoticed, just as he liked it.

Perhaps not quite unnoticed.

“You should have come to me with your notion, Tribune.” Hadrian’s voice sounded at Titus’s shoulder, and it was distinctly cool.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Titus said. “I thought—I thought I might just get shot down, so why bother making you look a fool.”

“But instead you look very clever. Doubtless what you wanted.”

“No, sir… I don’t want much of anything. Just to get along in this world.”

Hadrian cast him a disbelieving glance and moved off. “Caesar, perhaps I can draw your attention
here
on the map—my tribune and I had discussed the idea before, analyzing the weakness—”

No one ever believes me when I say I don’t want much from the world
, Titus thought. Hadrian, who wanted to rise to consul or even beyond… the Emperor, who wanted to conquer the whole world… Vix, who wanted his own army to help do it… Sabina, who wouldn’t be content until she’d crossed every sea and horizon the earth had to offer.
So many movers and shakers
, Titus thought,
and in the middle of all those grand ambitions, me
. With no ambitions at all.

Except maybe to acquire a nickname someday besides “the fellow who quotes.”

“Tribune,” Trajan said at last, tugging on his gauntlets, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, to be sure. Any epigrams for the occasion?”

“‘My tongue is palsied,’” Titus found himself quoting. “‘Subtly hid fire creeps me through from limb to limb.’ Catullus said it about a woman, Caesar, but that’s how nervous I was trying to approach this tent.”

Trajan laughed, giving Titus’s shoulder a thump of Imperial approval that buckled his knees, and his retinue were quick to laugh with him—though Hadrian gave only a token shadow of a smile.

VIX

“So tell me.” Sabina tilted her head up at me. The pipes were broken, and the days stretched out warm and idle again as the whole army waited for the Dacians to get thirsty. “Why
do
you dislike my husband so much? You must admit, he’s a very good legate.”

I grunted but couldn’t really deny it. I might not like having Publius Aelius Hadrian as my commander, but he’d turned out better than I expected. He was even-handed, he didn’t overmanage the centurions, he enforced discipline but wasn’t a flogger. “He just models himself on the Emperor,” I said scornfully. “How much brilliance does it really take to look for the best there is and copy it?”

“He does do that,” Sabina admitted. “He watches Trajan very carefully. Picked up the same habit of greeting all the men by name and clapping them on the shoulder in that friendly way. It’s a touch studied, but Hadrian’s always a little stiff when he’s first settling into a role.”

“That’s all everything is to him. This role or that one.”

“But he plays them all very well, you must admit. Why are you so set against him? He’s never done anything to you.”

“He had thugs beat me up in an alley!”

“You have thugs trying to beat you up in alleys every day. You never hold it against them.”

“Well, he’s a supercilious lizard.”

“Yes,” Sabina conceded, “but so what?”

“See here, why are you defending him? Don’t you hate him?”

“Of course not.”

“But you don’t love him.” I groped for words. “So I thought—”

“Love or hate, with nothing in between?” She cocked her head at me, amused. “Is that how it is for you?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Generally.”

She chuckled. “My husband’s a bit more complicated than that. He’s not lovable, perhaps, but he’s interesting. We talk a great deal.”

“About what?”

“Greek poetry. Syrian architecture. Hunting lions. The declining condition of Roman literature. Why Egyptians worship cats. The Sibylline Books and what could possibly be written in them. How to play the flute. The mechanics of oratory. The possibility of taking a river journey down the Nile some springtime. Whether paving stones should be made rectangular or polygonal for maximum stress displacement. The best way to build a trireme…”

“All right, all right,” I grumped. “You’re the best of friends.” I didn’t know what half those things she reeled off even were.

“Friends?” Sabina mused. “Mmm, no. Hadrian and I might be friendly enough, but we aren’t friends. He might have comrades, but he doesn’t really have
friends
. He doesn’t like people getting close.”

“And that’s a nice husband?” I jeered.

“He’s courteous, he’s considerate, and we have some decent conversations over the dinner table. That’s a good enough husband for me.”

Allowable, I supposed—considering there wasn’t much between Hadrian and Sabina
after
dinner. It was the first thing I’d asked her. “Hadrian was more nervous on our wedding night than I was,” Sabina had chuckled, turning over on one side that first night in Dacia. “He’s had periodic affairs with married women, but I don’t think he’d ever had a virgin girl. What he assumed was a virgin girl, anyway… he was so relieved that I wasn’t crying and bleeding all over the place that we stayed up the rest of the night talking. All about the
Iliad
, if I remember correctly, and how we both thought Achilles was a muscle-bound idiot. And a week after the wedding, I had my own bedchamber on the other side of the house. Nocturnal visits between the two occur a few times
a year. Whenever Plotina gets tired of nagging me about providing an heir, and nags him instead.”