Empress of the Seven Hills (37 page)

I hadn’t imagined it.

“If you will excuse us, Legate? The Emperor wants a word with our aquilifer.”

“The Emperor may have him.”

I blinked as Titus’s hand took my elbow and steered me away. “The Emperor wants to speak with me?”

“Of course he doesn’t, you fool. I had to say something to remind your legate that you have Imperial favor. He looked ready to strangle you on the spot. Did he find out about his wife?”

“No. It wasn’t that.” I looked down at my synthesis, stained with water and wine. “Sorry about your tunic.”

“Forget the tunic. We’re leaving. Gods in hell, keeping you alive is a full-time job. I don’t know why I bother.” Titus grabbed his cloak from a sleepy slave girl and steered me back through the dark atrium. The moon had moved on overhead, and the little tiled pool under the open roof was now in black shadow.

“I dropped Sabina in the water there,” I confided.

“I don’t want to know why,” Titus groaned. “I suppose that’s why Hadrian wants to kill you?”

“No. He just hates me.” My tongue felt heavy suddenly, and my feet heavier. I stumbled over the threshold, and Titus steadied me. “I may have to kill him,” I mused.

“Shut up.”

“In fact, I’m quite certain I’ll have to kill him.”

“Shut
up
!”

“It’s going to be him or me.” I felt that quite strongly. This morning when I’d marched into the city, I’d had a lover. I’d lost her. But I’d found something else.

An enemy.

A week later, calling myself all sorts of fool, I went back to the squalid tenement across from the rooms that had been Demetra’s.

“You’re here again, are you?” the tired-looking woman greeted me shortly. “Aren’t you grand.”

I’d worn my lion skin and breastplate, hoping to impress her if I needed to. “I’ve come about the boy. Demetra’s son.”

“What about him?”

“Let me see him.”

She vanished into the second room. The one I stood in smelled of grease and stale food. Two children playing in the corner with a pile of sticks looked up at me, and I saw watery eyes, dingy hair, tunics spotted with food. Not much like Demetra’s little oasis of scrubbed cheer.

The woman reappeared, with the boy in her arms. “Here he is.”

I looked at him. He was bigger, nearly three years old now, wearing a dirty shapeless smock. He had his mother’s dark-honey hair in curls all over his little head, and I thought I could see the start of her beautiful bones under his round cheeks. He gazed at me silently.

“He’s a looker, isn’t he?” the woman said. “He’ll be a beauty when he grows up.”

She’d said that before, last week, and somehow it had preyed on me. Bothered me. “You’ll raise him?” I said.

“Like my own.”

Titus would have believed her. I’d finally told him of Demetra’s death, and my child’s, and his sympathy had been as warm as I feared. “Gods, Vix, I’m sorry. No wonder you’ve been in such a foul mood. What about her son, the little boy?”

“A neighboring woman took him,” I’d grunted. “Got five children of her own already.”

“That’s good,” Titus had relaxed. “A new family for the poor little sprat, if he has to lose his mother. Gods keep her soul, she was a good woman. She’ll be glad to know her son is well looked after.”

Would
he be well looked after? I gave the woman a hard stare and saw the way her eyes shifted sideways. I wasn’t Titus, believing the good in everyone. I’d been raised a slave—and I knew what could happen to
pretty little boys in the wrong hands. It might have happened to me, if I hadn’t had kind masters. If I hadn’t had a mother to shield me.

Demetra’s boy, growing up in this sinkhole looking like her? He’d be dancing for dirty old men and bleeding from the arse by the time he was ten years old. I remembered the bald man who had offered me oysters and then tried to bugger me; how he’d screamed when I broke his fingers and ran.

Demetra’s little boy looked up at me for the first time, tentatively.

He’s not yours
, something in my head whispered.
Not your blood, not your responsibility.
My responsibility had died. I’d gotten away clean.

The boy pointed his chubby finger at the maned pelt over my head.
“Yion!”
he crowed.
“Yion!”

“Oh, fuck,” I said, and grabbed him out of that dirty cow’s arms.

“Hey!” she squawked.

“Hands off,” I snarled. “He’s coming with me.”

“What, you’re going to raise him? You with the legion and all?”

No, I was not bloody well going to
raise
him. What did I know about raising children? I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I just wasn’t leaving him here. He was a very solid little weight in my arms, not crying at all.

“Yion,” he said, petting the tawny pelt over my head as I carried him out of that dingy greasy room.

“Yion,” I agreed, swinging him around so he could ride my back. He crowed with delight, clinging to the lion’s mane. “You aren’t much trouble, are you? I can pay some nice family to look after you. Drop in every few months to check in.”

“
Yion
,” he shouted happily.

“Oh, fuck,” I said again, and started up the street.

Summer
A. D.
113

TITUS

“Ennia!” Titus looked around for his housekeeper. “Ennia, my graceful Terpsichorean nymph of the matchless gaze—”

“Never mind the pretty words, Dominus.” His skinny black-haired freedwoman crossed her arms over her breasts. “What do you need?”

“Dinner for six, as soon as you can see it ready. I will be in your debt forever.”

“Six?” Her gaze went from Titus to the armored figure with the dusty cloak and dustier russet hair, looming large and out of place in the narrow entry hall. The passage of three or four years had hardly changed Vix at all: a little browner, a little tougher, a little more weathered from the sun, but the same. “There’s more of him coming?” Ennia asked unenthusiastically.

“No, just him, but he eats enough for five.”

“Give me an hour.” She disappeared toward the little kitchen, yelling for the slaves.

Vix was gazing around the small atrium: blue-tiled, modestly vaulted, narrow enough to cross in a few strides. “Can’t a quaestor’s salary buy something bigger than this? I thought you had a family villa taking up half the Palatine Hill.”

“My grandfather retired there. I could stay with him if I liked, but I’m a man grown now—I’ve got a post, I’ve got some money of my own. No excuse to be living off my family, not with my mother gone and
both my sisters married with their own households. So I took my own apartments.” Not large apartments; just a bedchamber, a study, and the atrium, which doubled to hold his occasional modest dinner parties. “It’s not much,” Titus said happily.

“Seems to suit you,” Vix approved, looking Titus up and down. “That toga fits better than armor ever did. Quaestor now, eh? I got your last letter—”

“No more marching, no more mud,” Titus relished. “Just good clean scheming and backstabbing.”

Vix hissed and booed. “Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those cold political lizards like Hadrian!”

“Not yet. Then again, ‘No man ever became thoroughly bad in one step.’”

“Hell’s gates, I’ve missed you quoting at me. Cato?”

“Juvenal. Why did you say Cato?”

“Because half your quotes are Cato, you sod.”

At Titus’s direction, Vix hauled two couches in from the study, one over each shoulder, and soon they were both plunging into plates of stuffed salmon, roast pork, new bread, and ripe peaches as Ennia bustled in and out with the dishes. “What brings you to Rome, anyway?” Titus asked belatedly, after Vix had finished inhaling half a shoulder of pork. “Did I forget to ask?”

“Quarterly legion reports for the Emperor.” Vix washed the last mouthful of pork down with a swallow of wine. “The First Spear wanted me out from underfoot. Bastard hates the sight of me.”

“What did you do now?”

“I’m just after his job.” Matter-of-factly.

“Then wash your hands between each dish instead of just plunging in.” Titus raised his eyebrows as Vix tore another hunk off the loaf of bread. “Because you’ll never make First Spear without a little civilization.”

“I’ll have to make centurion first. Next spot that opens is mine, now I’ve reached thirty.”

“Did Simon from your old
contubernium
ever make centurion? He was well old enough—”

“No, he’s out of the Tenth now—retired back in Rome, if you can believe it…”

That led to a discussion of all the Tenth’s news: the new legate—a flogger or a layabout? Julius—was he still claiming descent from the great Caesar? Boil—had he ever found a girl who didn’t leave him for the nearest flute player or tavernkeeper?

I miss it
, Titus realized. Not the life of the army; he could do without that. But the easy companionship of the men he’d known in Dacia—in politics there was nothing like it. Everyone was far too busy looking out for his own career. To have a friend here was to have someone who might cut you out in the next appointments for praetor.

Ennia came bustling in then, surveying the picked-over detritus of plates and bones. “You weren’t joking, Dominus,” she commented. “He does eat for five.”

She bent a slightly more approving gaze on Vix as she cleared the table, and Vix openly admired her as she swung out, the end of her black plait switching against her waist. “You like your housekeepers pretty.”

Titus ran a hand through his hair, self-conscious. Ennia had been a freedwoman in his grandfather’s house—black-eyed, twenty-five years old, with a thin pretty face and a tart lash of a tongue—and when Titus had left to make his own living arrangements, he’d made her a certain offer. “It won’t be a large house to manage,” he told her. “Just a few slaves, enough to handle meals and laundry for a man on his own. But you’d be in charge, not just one of the crowd of freedmen in this house.”

“Housekeeper,” she said in her brisk way. “Bedwarmer too, Dominus?”

“Well, if you don’t mind. It’s not a condition of the job, but you’re very pretty.” A little shyly. “And I really would rather have that side of things settled… I haven’t got a wife yet, I don’t care for brothels, and I can’t really afford courtesans.”

“I don’t hold with orgies, and I don’t service your friends.” She gave an emphatic scowl. “What’s the pay, Dominus?”

He named a modest but reasonable salary. She sniffed. He raised the offer. She lifted her eyebrows.

“I’m afraid that’s all I can afford,” he said firmly. “What if I throw in two new gowns a year and a present at Saturnalia?”

“Done.” She nodded. “I’ll stay till you marry. That should see me enough to retire on.”

Easy as that, he had acquired a mistress. “You don’t know much about women, do you?” she’d said, and undertaken his education with the same energy she took to reorganizing his household. Both Titus and the household had been happy for the improvement.

“I thought you’d be married by now,” Vix was saying, unconsciously echoing Ennia. “Some pretty bit of fluff should have mounted your head on her wall.”

“I came close last year. A legate’s daughter—she had red hair.”

“I like a redhead,” Vix whistled.

“I do too, but Vibia Sabina warned me off her. She said to just look at the girl’s slaves, and did I want to see the same cowed expression looking back at me from my mirror.”

Vix paused in the act of slicing a peach in half. “You still see Sabina?”

“When she’s in Rome.” Which hadn’t been often, since Hadrian had taken his wife with him to Pannonia. Titus cored an apple with a little silver knife, feeling a thread of mischief uncoil. “She’s back in the city now, you know.” Casually.

“Don’t care.” Vix scrubbed peach juice off his hands onto a napkin.

“‘It is difficult to suddenly give up a long love,’” Titus remarked to the ceiling.

“Don’t care, Cato.”

“Catullus. In any case, Governor Hadrian came back from Pannonia, and she’s with him.”

“Don’t care about Hadrian either. Just glad to have him out of my legion.”

“Mmm. You’ve heard he’s consul now?” Last week Titus had accompanied the consul and his wife to the theatre; Hadrian had spent most of the play being pestered by messengers and secretaries, and it had been Titus and Sabina who put their heads together in a happy critique of the actors and the verse. Sabina might have come back from two years in Pannonia with an armload of native bracelets and woad painted around her eyes (at least whenever the Empress was there to be shocked by it), but the old friendship Titus had enjoyed over Dacia’s fires had not altered a whit.
Perhaps I’m luckier than Vix.

Vix had clearly done away with the subject of Hadrian and Sabina and was looking around the airy atrium again with the sky showing black through the open roof and the fountain still trickling gently in the corner. “All this domesticity,” he complained. “Give me a tent and a bedroll any day.”

“Really?” Titus regarded his friend. “I think you’re lying. You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“
The
look.” Titus saw that Ennia had her hands full lighting the lamps and rose to help her. It was full dark outside now, a noisy Roman night full of creaking cart wheels and yowling dogs and the occasional burst of passing laughter or patter of footsteps. Very different from Germania’s rustling trees and black silences—Titus remembered the suddenness of the contrast, when he’d first come back from the north. “You need a woman, Slight.”

“Always,” Vix agreed. “You know any good whores here in Rome? The ones I knew years back are likely gone by now—”

Ennia snorted into the lamps.

“You don’t need a whore,” said Titus. “You need a wife.”

“Legionaries can’t marry!”

“Officers can, and you’re one step from centurion,” Titus pointed
out. “Vercingetorix the cynical, a husband. Maybe a father too? You’ve had some practice, with that little sprat you adopted.”

Titus had been the one to help when Vix turned up on his doorstep after the Dacian campaign with his Bithynian beauty’s little boy clinging to his shoulders. “Help me find someone to raise him?” Vix had pleaded. “Hell’s gates, I’m no one to raise a child!”