Empress of the Seven Hills (35 page)

And no doubt Sabina would be gallivanting around Pannonia, checking out aqueducts for her father and seeing all the new horizons
she wanted. I hoped the Pannonians cooked her over a campfire and ate her.

Suddenly I felt absurd in the lion skin. I unknotted the paws about my neck and yanked the mane from my hair. I balled the pelt into my pack, and a handful of centurions brushed by me roaring a filthy drinking song, waving wineskins jubilantly overhead. I couldn’t even get drunk like them this afternoon—I had that bloody banquet tonight with the Emperor’s guests, and even if I didn’t care two shits for any of them, for
his
sake I’d have to be clean and on my best behavior. Besides, Sabina and her bastard husband would be there, and I’d rather have been cooked and eaten myself than have them think I slunk away. I’d come and stare at Sabina all night till she dropped
her
eyes for a change. Maybe I’d tell bloody Hadrian whose bedroll she’d been sleeping in the past six months while he thought she was in her own tent.

But I thought of Hadrian’s cold stare and didn’t want to cross it. Maybe the chances weren’t so good I’d ever be a centurion, but they’d drop to nothing if I told my commander I’d been mounting his wife.

I stood with my hands hanging at my sides in the middle of a celebrating city and felt like howling. That calculating little vixen. She’d burned me once, and had I learned? Stupid barbarian, tangling with a patrician girl. No more patrician girls for me. No more clever girls; no more adventurous dreaming girls or girls who talked my ear off deep into the night. Nice simple girls, that’s what I’d stick to from now on. Even stupid barbarians like me knew better than to get burned a third time.

Demetra.

I hadn’t thought of her in months, at least not for longer than it took to shove her right back out of mind, but now she filled my head. Her dark-honey hair, her gentle mouth, her slim body. Her wide brown eyes, always so admiring when they looked at me. Her sweet voice, when she chattered on and on about laundry and the market and the day’s baking…

Hell’s gates, she was beautiful, but she’d bored me.

I wondered if she’d had the baby yet. My child. It was six months since I’d last seen her. She might be swelled up like a melon, or maybe she’d have something small and screaming on the breast. Or maybe she’d seen sense and done something to empty her belly out before it got big at all.

Hadn’t I told Demetra I’d marry her when I came back?

I groaned aloud but kicked my feet into moving. Baby or no, I wasn’t getting married. Just because I’d gotten burned by a scheming patrician snake of a girl didn’t mean I was going to run right back to Demetra. I’d pay her a visit, take a dutiful look at the baby, leave her some money—maybe get a bounce in bed for old times’ sake…

The street looked no different than it had when I’d left. More riotous, with soldiers drinking or dicing or swaggering past every third door, but the same. I pulled my lion pelt back out of my pack and draped it over one arm. Demetra wouldn’t want to hear war stories, but she’d be impressed I made aquilifer. Her eyes would shine admiringly. Sabina never looked at me like that—she just looked at me like she
knew
me, right down to my bones, and that had been damned uncomfortable sometimes.

I didn’t want to think about Sabina.

“Who are you?”

I blinked at the face that answered my dutiful knock at the door of the bakehouse. An old woman’s face, thin and sour. “I’m looking for Demetra?”

“Never heard of her,” the old woman snapped. “No trollops here for soldiers, you be on your way!”

I jammed my foot in the door. “The girl who lived over the bakeshop—a Bithynian girl? Long blond hair?”

“That one died last week when she birthed,” the woman said. “Woman across took the child.”

She kicked my foot aside and slammed the door. I stared at the panels just inches from my nose, stunned.

“Aquilifer, fancy a drink?” a drunken voice shouted from a passing party of legionaries. “Heard you killed the Dacian king; is it true he had horns?”

I shoved through them, kicking blindly across the street. I hammered on the door of the tenement opposite Demetra’s. Another woman answered the door, tired and gray, a dirty child on one hip and another at her skirt. “Do I know you?” she asked, vague-eyed.

“Demetra,” I said. “Where’s Demetra?”

“That hag across the street didn’t tell you? She’s a worse neighbor than your girl, I’ll say.”

“Where’s Demetra?”
My heart thudded.

“Dead,” the woman said. “The baby came early. It happens.”

I winced. “The hag said you took it.”

“The baby? No, that died too. I took her other one, the little lad.”

“Was the baby a girl or a boy?” I’d never wanted it, hadn’t thought about it for months—but suddenly I had to know. I had to know if my child had been a son or a daughter.

“How should I know?” Indifferently. “I wasn’t there.”

Would I ever know? Did it even matter? Boy or girl, it was dead.

My firstborn.

I found myself wondering if it had had my reddish hair, or Demetra’s blond.

“I don’t much mind taking the other little ’un.” The woman bounced the child on her hip, and for the first time I noticed Demetra’s boy. “He’s quiet enough, and what’s one more when you’ve already got five? Besides, he might grow up as pretty as his mother, and that could be useful.”

I shoved some money at her and got the hell out of there.

PLOTINA

“I don’t mind telling you, my dear boy, that I shall be
ecstatic
to leave Germania,” Plotina confided to Dear Publius. “Crude, cold—and these
slave girls they sent to wait on me are all thumbs! Sticky thumbs at that; I’m sure they’d steal anything I turned my back on. You may go,” she added to the girl brushing her gown.

The flat-faced German maid left the Empress’s quarters, muttering darkly, and Plotina reached behind her own neck to fasten the clasp of her amethyst necklace. “Very regal,” Dear Publius approved from his corner where he sat keeping her company as she finished her dressing. “Very regal indeed.”

“I can hardly say the same for your wife. Did she use her sunshade once, marching through Dacia? Brown as that German slut who just left—”

“My dear lady.” Hadrian’s voice had a note of humorous warning as he pinched a crisp fold of his tunic into better alignment. “I know you disapprove of Sabina. But I do not, and surely that is what matters.”

“Disapprove,” Plotina sniffed. There was very little in Moguntiacum of which she
approved
. The town was dirty, the slaves insolent, and these quarters she had been assigned barely adequate for decent living. Rough walls, garishly colored cushions on the couches, and those German lamps that smoked day and night. She had brought her own modest luxuries—the polished steel mirror at her table, her little writing desk where she attended so much Imperial business; the appurtenances expected and due one of her position. But oh, how glad she would be to return to Rome! There was nothing about Moguntiacum that the Empress of Rome found pleasing.

Least of all the rumors she had uncovered—all right, the rumors she had made sure she uncovered—about Dear Publius’s little wife.

“So Vibia Sabina invited herself along on the campaign,” Dear Publius was saying. Lovely to see him in a dinner synthesis for once, handsome and formal and bearded, rather than the ever-present breastplate. Plotina sometimes thought herself doomed to spend her whole life surrounded by men in armor. “I admit I was displeased at the outset, but she did not inconvenience me. She may even have assisted me. She was useful in one or two matters—a problem with the supply officers she brought to the
Emperor’s attention, and another matter with my senior medicus. Trajan grew very fond of having her at his dinner table, and therefore me as well. And there is no doubt she enjoyed herself on the march.”

“Yes,” Plotina said significantly. “I hear she did.”

“What do you mean?”

Plotina raised her eyebrows, taking her time as she put on her amethyst earrings. Hadrian wandered up behind her, surveying his own reflection in her polished steel mirror.

“So good to have a proper barber again,” he murmured, fingering his beard. “One hates the feeling of stubble growing halfway down one’s neck, but Trajan lets these things slide on campaign, and it seems best to follow his example… I suppose you mean, my dear Plotina, that my wife took a lover during the campaign?”

“I’m surprised to hear you say it so lightly.”

Hadrian shrugged. “A wife can call her bed her own, as far as I am concerned, so long as she is discreet.”

“I raised you to think better than that,” Plotina said tartly. “But we will leave that matter for the moment. Discretion is all, you say? I don’t believe Vibia Sabina
was
discreet. I have heard disturbing rumors from slaves, from the legion’s aides, even from junior officers. The girl spent her evenings… well, I don’t like to say…”

“I think you had better not.” Hadrian glanced at the slave standing with a flagon of barley water in one corner, the other slave folding Plotina’s silks into their casket.

Plotina did not dismiss the slaves. She wanted them to spread a few whispers around. Not that one liked to see rumors circulate about a member of the Imperial family, but it was time to strip a little gleam off that adventurousness of Sabina’s that Hadrian found so charming.

Trajan too. It was Dear Publius he should be finding charming, not Sabina.

“Common soldiers,” Plotina said regretfully. “Legionaries. Those were Sabina’s… companions… during the march.”

Hadrian’s chin jerked. “She has always had a taste for making friends in low places, but—”

“More than friends this time, dear boy. I hate to be the bearer of bad news—” Not precisely true; oh, well. Plotina bent her head to twist a ring into place, hiding her satisfaction. “Your wife was seen once or twice looking
very
intimate with common legionaries. Rough men, of the lowest sort. I need hardly remind you what people would think if
that
got around Rome.”

Dear Publius stood quite still, turning his seal ring around and around his finger.

“I know how fond you are of your wife.” Plotina gave a final comprehensive glance into her mirror, pleased at the severe vision in Imperial purple who gazed back. Juno herself would approve. “But perhaps it’s time you brought little Sabina to heel?”

“You look very well.” Hadrian offered his arm, expressionless. “Shall we go in to the banquet?”

VIX

“Cheer up,” Titus implored as he dragged me toward the spill of lights and noise and music. “Don’t you want to enjoy the occasion? It’s your first Imperial banquet!”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “There was another banquet once where I tried to kill the Emperor.”

Titus blinked as we joined the line of guests waiting to be admitted. “You tried to kill Trajan?”

“Hell’s gates, no. Another Emperor. Crazy as a loon.”

“We’ve had a few of those. Are you making up stories again?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I can never tell when you’re joking. Don’t tug at that synthesis.”

“It’s too small.” I yanked at the fine white folds of the dinner tunic he’d lent me.

“Well, it’s the best I could do at short notice. Otherwise you’d have had to show up naked under that lion skin.”

“Bet that would make all these fine ladies sit up.”

The Imperial steward descended on us then, recognizing Titus’s name and rank, offering me a blander glance, and ushered us through. The finest villa in Mog wasn’t much compared to the ones I’d seen in Rome, but it had been commandeered for the Empress and her entourage when they arrived—and now it hosted the Emperor’s victory celebration. The floors might be crude stone instead of supple mosaics and the dining couches might be soldered metal instead of carved silver, but the Emperor stood in the center drinking and roaring campaign stories with his officers, and his happiness had spilled over everything and turned it to pure gold. The music was bright and the laughter from all those guests crowded around him was brighter, but everything looked off-color to my eyes. I could have taken Demetra to this, and she’d have put all these powdered patrician beauties to shame. I grabbed a goblet of wine from a pretty little half-naked cup-bearer who beamed at me as if she’d marched to defeat the Dacians too—but I couldn’t drink. There was a bubble in my throat, hard and unyielding.

“What?” Titus asked me. “You look grim all over again.”

Demetra’s dead
, I nearly told him.
My child with her.
But I didn’t. He’d have covered me with his warm sympathy, thinking that was why I couldn’t enjoy the banquet, and I couldn’t have borne it. He’d have thought I was grieving, and I couldn’t have taken credit for that. The bubble in my throat that wouldn’t burst?

It was… relief.

No child. No wife. Nothing to weigh me down or drain my purse or stop me from following my stars. Poor, dull, beautiful Demetra was dead, my child was dead, and what did I feel? Some sadness… but mostly a twisted, shamed relief.

What a bastard I was. No wonder Sabina hadn’t wanted to stay with me.

I’d seen her at once, as soon as I entered the room, but I didn’t look
at her. I forced my wine down and held out my goblet to another cup-bearer, who promptly filled it. A good wine, far better than the sour
posca
I’d had to drink on campaign, but who cared? “Let’s get drunk.”

“Better bow first to your hostess,” Titus advised, steering me toward the little dais where the Imperial couches had been laid. “Empress Plotina does not approve of drunkenness. One wonders if she approves of anything, to be honest.”

We pushed through the happy throng, and then Titus made a graceful speech of thanks to the Empress and I got away with jerking my head in a bow as the ladies stared at me in idle curiosity. Trajan’s wife in her severe purple
stola
, a clutch of legates’ wives—and Sabina, youngest of the women there, watching the crowd of guests as if she’d rather be whooping it up with the soldiers than sitting among all the disapproving old women who reclined so stiffly and properly on their couches. Maybe she’d gotten a taste for low fun in the time she’d marched with the Tenth. Her eyes drifted to me as Titus made his graceful introduction, and for a moment I just wanted to flee. But I hadn’t fled the fucking Dacians and I wasn’t going to flee any well-born whore, so I clamped my jaw tight and stared back at her as rudely as I knew how. No more flamboyant yellow like she’d worn at the parade—the Empress had clearly gotten hold of her and laced her into a white dress with a high draped neck. But she still didn’t look right in it, no more right than I looked stuffed into Titus’s synthesis. Her skin had gone dark gold from all the marching under Dacia’s summer sun, and her slim arms were brown and exotic against the prim white. I remembered all that golden skin spread out on my bedroll, and tasted hatred sour and metallic in my mouth. Probably just like the taste in the mouth of Trajan’s immaculate Empress, who was clearly thinking that a stuffy white dress and a stuffy linen synthesis hadn’t succeeded in changing either me or Sabina into anything she wanted at
her
dinner party.