Empress of the Seven Hills (32 page)

I’d learned to fight as a Roman with my right hand, keeping in formation, keeping behind the shield, keeping in line. Short jabbing strokes; the point beats the edge; everything that had been drilled into me during legionary training. But the left hand had been trained by a barbarian, by Rome’s greatest gladiator who also happened to be my father. The left hand had made my first kill when I was thirteen years old. The left hand recognized no rules, fought in no formations.
The point beats the edge
, the right hand knew.
Hell with that
, the left hand thought.

I touched the amulet about my neck that my father had given me, and then I tore my sword across the Dacian’s chest in a stroke that would have ripped him open throat to belly if not for the mail. He staggered back a moment and I was leaping with him, roaring that his mother was a whore, that his father was a bucket of scum, that I’d kill him in pieces and piss on his bones. I chopped the crest off his stolen helmet, I stabbed through his knee and left him hobbling, I took half his shield off and half the fingers of the hand along with it. He dropped the ax, but he didn’t plead, just stared at me stoically, and he’d been brave so I took his life in one fast stroke through the neck.

He fell at the same time as the second legionary. I spun just in time to see the man cry out, a spear below the edge of his breastplate. He fell, driven back across the grass by the man in the lion skin to the edge of the solar disc, and as I came forward I realized there were just the two of us left. Me and Lion Skin, silver under the moonlight.

He turned and saw me at the same moment, the standard pole in one hand and his ax in the other. I held my sword out, advancing, and he retreated with careful steps. The eagle still gleamed over his head.

To my surprise, he spoke. “You’re the one who raised the alarm.”
His Latin was good, barely accented. No wonder he’d been able to fool the sentries into thinking he was the Tenth’s aquilifer.

I pointed my sword at the eagle, blood still roaring in my ears. “Give her back,” I panted. “And the lion skin. They’re not yours.”

“The skin is mine. I speared the lion when I was twelve years old. My first kill.”

Something clicked inside my head. An aquilifer wasn’t the only man who wore a lion skin. I thought of the rumors I’d heard, rumors of a man ten feet tall who led armies against Rome and hid horns and a tail beneath a lion skin. “… You’re
him
. You’re the Dacian king.”

He stared at me, impassive. He was taller than I, which didn’t happen often, and he had a short black beard, a full mouth, an unyielding blade of a nose. The lion’s coarse mane mixed with his own coarse black hair, and the lion’s claws crossed over a broad chest. The eagle screamed silently overhead. My eagle, held in this lion’s paw.

“They said you went east,” I blurted.

He grunted. “I would have.”

“There must have been easier ways to get out!” But even as I said it, I wondered. An aquilifer went anywhere he pleased. The guards at Old Sarm’s gates would have taken one look at the eagle and maybe not bothered looking at the face under the lion skin as they waved the aquilifer through. He could have taken horses from the camp, stowed the eagle away, and ridden fast to Ranisstorium or anywhere else to renew his fight.

Not that the Tenth would have been part of that fight. A legion that lost its eagle was disgraced past any measure of redemption.

I raised my sword again, pointing at the eagle. “Give her back, and I’ll kill you fast.”

“Kings don’t die fast,” he said wearily. “They get marched back to Rome in chains, and then they die in your arenas. What do you call it, when you kill men there—the
games
?”

A tendril of uneasiness uncoiled in my stomach, and I pushed it down. “Give her back.”

He moved back again with the same care, taking a step up without looking onto the moon-bleached stone of the solar disc. “Stay back,” he said as I lunged forward. His ax was poised not at me, but over the eagle as he lowered the standard pole. “I can hack it to bits before you get near me.”

“Why?” I spat. “You’re finished.”

“More than you know.” He smiled, and I saw the effort it took. “But you took something of mine, didn’t you?”

I looked at the smoking fortress behind him. “I didn’t do that. I’m just—
here
. With the rest of my legion.”

“Why?”

“Why what? I get orders, and I march. It’s not complicated.”

“Do you even know my name?”

I’d heard it a hundred times, something strange that twisted the tongue. Something I’d never bothered to remember. What did it matter?

I looked at the eagle in his hand. My blood still pounded in my veins, begging for a fight, but my tongue might have been stone in my mouth. Why couldn’t Titus have been here to face this clever king? Titus could have talked him down in that soft voice; quoted something clever and moving about the nobility of surrender. But I wasn’t any good with words. Never had been.

We looked at each other, the Dacian king and I, and suddenly he sat, more falling than lowering himself. He gave a soft grunt and lowered the eagle to the stones, but took his ax with a warning look at me and poised it over the proud wing.

“All right, all right.” I lowered my own sword, sitting warily on the edge of the solar disc. The king pressed his free hand under his lion skin out of sight, the knuckles of the other hand clenching white on the ax haft. “Left-handed,” I said. “So am I.”

“I noticed. Pity. My son was never any good against left-handers.”

“Your son?”

He nodded at the man I’d killed, then at the other Dacian who lay
slumped in the grass with the dead legionary’s
gladius
buried in his throat. “Both of them.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. The wrong thing, and my eagle would be lying in two pieces. I saw a black shadow beneath him, spreading on the stones.

“What
is
your name?” I blurted suddenly.

“Decebalus.” His Latin was blurring.

“Good name.” It meant
strength of ten
. Better than
slightly
.

The shadow under him grew, creeping liquid-black toward the eagle.

“What gave us away?” Decebalus said. “What made you attack?”

“You called the eagle ‘it,’” I said. “To us, the eagle is always ‘her.’”

“Ah.” He lay down carefully on the stones, one hand still stuffed under the lion skin. I started to edge forward, but the ax in his other hand jerked up, and I froze. “Don’t test me, boy.”

I held up a hand, appeasing.

He looked up at the watching moon, now poised almost exactly overhead. “I was crowned here,” he said to no one in particular. “But at noon. Such a bright day. I was crowned at noon, and now I’ll die at midnight.”

“Give me the eagle,” I said.

He made an inarticulate sound through clenched teeth. Under the lion skin his fist clenched, and more glossy blood spilled across the stones. The eagle was drowning in it.

I rose, came toward him. His eyes rolled in his head. “Bury my sword hand.”

“The Emperor wants it,” I said helplessly. If the king himself wasn’t alive to be marched back to Rome, then Trajan had vowed to have the head for identification—and the hand that had been raised against Rome.

“Take him my right hand. He won’t—won’t know. Not many left-handers, eh?” He chuckled, and his teeth were black with blood. One of the lion’s paws flopped back, and I could see the horror of the wound beneath. The dead legionary had torn out half the king’s guts before going down himself.

Decebalus dropped the eagle, and it rattled with a clang against the stones of the solar disc. He hugged the ax against his chest a moment, then patted it and fumbled instead for the dagger at his belt. His teeth bared again like a skull, and I remembered the garrison he’d burned on the fringe of Dacia, the four sentries he’d left dead in the road, the men who had been tortured inside, and the skull that had been set up in the niche of the gate.

“You should have stayed here,” I said as he fumbled the dagger from his belt. “You should have minded your own business.”

In the end, his fingers wouldn’t close on the dagger’s hilt. He might have had the strength of ten once, but the river of blood had carried it all away. He looked at me, and I took the dagger from his hand. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what prayers the Dacians had for their dying warriors, so I just touched the amulet at my neck, given to me by another warrior who’d had the strength of ten too, in his day. I touched the amulet, and then I put my hand on the forehead of the dying king and I cut his throat.

“Vix?” Titus blinked at me, as I stumbled into the immaculate little tent my friend called his own. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting drunk up there in Old Sarm with the rest of the legion?”

“See that the Emperor gets this.” I dropped a bundle at Titus’s feet. A lion’s paw with bloody claws flopped limply over his sandal. He looked gingerly into the bundle and leaped back.

“This too.” I jammed the eagle’s standard pole into the ground. “Take care of her. She’s had a hard night.”

“Vix?”

“She needs cleaning,” I said, not too distinctly. “The eagle shouldn’t be all bloody like that.”

I stumbled out of Titus’s tent. My sword needed cleaning too; it was covered in gore from all the chopping, and my centurion would roast me for putting it back in the scabbard so filthy. But my hands were
shaking too much, and I swore and kept moving. Hardly anyone in the camp tonight—as Titus said, the rest of the legion was up getting drunk in Old Sarm except for a few unlucky ones posted as guards here below.

“Vix?”

Sabina stood before my
contubernium
tent with a water pail in one hand. She had a bundle of my tunics in the other—laundry. Of course. Laundry didn’t stop just because wars had been won, or kings had died. “You know you’re doing a hero’s laundry?” I said.

She lifted her brows, putting down the pail. “Am I?”

I spread my arms, grinning. “I’m a hero.” Why was the grin so hard to force? I’d killed the king of Dacia—I’d ended the war—I’d have a laurel crown for it, once the Emperor heard, and a string of medals for my belt, and why couldn’t I smile?

Sabina was regarding me with the same grave caution that I’d seen on Titus’s face.

“The Dacians have something called a solar disc,” I informed her, slinging my helmet aside. The helmet crashed into the water pail and upended it, but I paid no attention. “A solar disc—did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that.” She took a step closer.

“It’s something to do with measuring the sun, maybe the moon too. It’s round, and it’s all put together out of white stones fitted like tiles, and
why are you looking at me like that?
”

She opened her arms. I dropped into them, crashing to my knees. “Kings are crowned on solar discs,” I said into her waist.

“Ssshh,” she said, her fingers running through my hair.

My eyes were dry, but I was shaking. Head to toe I was shaking, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why. “Kings die on them too.”

“Hush, my love. Hush.”

I gripped her, drowning, and I loved her more than anything on this wide green earth.

VIX

“—selfless devotion to duty, risking his life not for gold but for the legion’s honor—”

Who was my centurion droning on about? Surely it couldn’t be me. I didn’t
get
compliments from centurions. I got nasty looks and the occasional caning.

“—attentive even off-duty to the treachery he saw before him, he reflected great credit upon himself in keeping with the highest traditions of—”

I shifted from one foot to the other, trying to keep my face solemn as the centurion droned on in his loud flat voice about all the good qualities I didn’t have. I was struck with a sudden image of Sabina strutting around a tent stark naked, swinging a rolled-up bedroll for a swagger stick as she imitated perfectly the centurion’s bellowing voice, his tone-deaf cadences, and his habit of adding a little sniff to the start of each new platitude.

“—killing two with his own hand, and one of those our greatest enemy, Decebalus himself.”
Sniff.
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from guffawing out loud and ruining the solemnity of the moment.

And it was a solemn moment. The whole legion had been arrayed, spit-polished and shined, the cohorts aligned with mathematical precision,
and all eyes fixed front. The centurions stood stiffly with their helmets beneath their arms; the tribunes yawned and fidgeted as only bored patrician boys could yawn and fidget—although Titus’s face was a beacon of pride behind them. I’d polished my breastplate till it gleamed, the stiff red horsehair crest stood up proudly from my helmet, and Sabina had flattened my spiky hair smooth with a few desperate applications of water and goose grease. “You’ll do the Tenth proud,” she’d judged, and my friends nodded agreement—Julius and Simon, Boil and Philip, who might still be my brothers-in-arms but who were no longer my
contubernium
.

The centurion coughed, and I realized I’d missed my cue. Hastily I removed my helmet, bowing my head as he reached up.

It was light—so light. Just a few twigs and leaves twisted into a wreath. It was too big, and I had to cock it back on my head or else have it slip over my ears. I felt it under my hand, the victory wreath I’d dreamed so many countless hours, and my solemnity cracked. I looked up, past the centurion to the Emperor, who stood in his breastplate and red cloak like any one of us soldiers, and I grinned at him.

He grinned back, infectiously, and strode past the centurion who was still droning. “Give me that,” he ordered, and yanked the pelt from the hands of the hovering
optio
. “Quit smiling like a loon, boy, and bow your head. This is a serious moment, damn it.”

I bowed my head, trying not to laugh, hearing chortles from the first few rows of legionaries who had overheard. Emperor Trajan swept the lion skin about my shoulders, the mane covering my laurel wreath, the yellowed fangs framing my forehead. He tied the paws across my chest, and I heard the claws click against my breastplate. I raised my hand to stop the pelt from slipping, and felt the coarse fur of the mane in my fingers. It smelled like dry grass and sunshine, like blood and sweat, and above all like a king who had died on a stone circle. Trajan had offered me a new pelt, but I’d refused.