Empress of the Seven Hills (59 page)

Trajan paid no attention. “Lusius Quietus for the third name—”

“The Senate will never choose a Berber, Caesar.” Sabina blinked. “Um… have you really thought about these names?”

“Of course I have, girl.” Trajan sounded waspish, if slurred. “Give
me a little credit! The Senate won’t choose any of them. Fools and hotheads and Berbers don’t get to be Emperor of Rome! The Senate will flick past all three with a shudder, and settle on the name I really want.”

“Ah.” Sabina raised her eyebrows. “Very cunning, Caesar. I always knew that simple soldier act of yours was a sham.”

Trajan tried to wink at her, but his eyelid just twitched. “They’ll pick Gaius Avidius Nigrinus. Solid fellow, honest. A safe pair of hands. Not much flair, but he’ll do.”

Sabina pondered. “But that’s only four names. Three impossible choices, and your real candidate. Who’s the fifth—former consul Servianus, maybe?”

“That old tortoise? Are you mad?”

“You’ve mentioned his name before. At a dinner party, you said he would make a fine candidate for—”

“I was drunk. No, my fifth name has to be my backup in case the Senate doesn’t choose Nigrinus. And that name is Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus.”

She nearly felt her jaw drop.
“Titus?”

“Why not? I’ve had my eye on him for a while. Quiet, conscientious, a hard worker. A fine old family; pots of money; and he did a fine job as quaestor. Not much liking for military matters, but he’s got courage—brought a nasty little matter to my attention recently, and I owe him for it. Rome owes him for it, truth be told.”

Sabina tried to collect her thoughts. Titus, forever claiming he’d never be anything more than a plodder, now a candidate for Emperor of Rome? “He’s very young, Caesar,” she ventured at last. “Surely the Senate wouldn’t approve a man under thirty-five to be Emperor?”

“They might,” Trajan rasped. “The idiots fell all over young Nero and young Caligula, didn’t they? They just might pick Titus if Nigrinus has too many rivals blocking his path. Or they might give Nigrinus the purple, but have him adopt Titus as his heir. Either way, he’s my backup plan. Not that I need a backup plan. I’ll be on my feet in a day or two,
and when I get back to Rome I’ll take the boy under my wing and see how he does with a little grooming. Give me five years to season him, and I’d pick him over Nigrinus any day.” Trajan’s chest heaved. “Gods, just five years. That’s all I ask.”

“Titus.” The more Sabina thought of the idea, the more she liked it. “He hasn’t an enemy in the world, I’ll say that. How many men can make that claim?” She thought inconsequentially of Vix, even now sitting somewhere outside with his head bowed and his fists clenched together. Vix, who bashed through life making one enemy after another… oh, gods, the cry that had torn out of him when Trajan fell!

“Plenty of spineless jellyfish don’t have enemies,” Trajan slurred. “Not many brave honest men, though. And I can think of at least one enemy young Titus
has
made, but it was on my behalf so I can’t complain. He’s my fifth name, anyway. Get Phaedimus for me to make it official. He’s my secretary of grants and promotions; he’ll know how to write it up.” Trajan’s chest heaved in another bout of coughing. “Damn me. I left this too long, didn’t I? Should have done it years ago.”

“You were too busy conquering the world,” Sabina said gently, and withdrew to thread her way through the crowds of restless idlers outside, all trying their best to peer into the Imperial sickroom. “The Emperor wishes to be alone,” Sabina said over and over, finally squeezing back inside and pushing the door shut. Phaedimus proved to be one of the Imperial freedmen—a handsome one, and from the way he fell to his knees by the bed and pressed his lips to Trajan’s hand, he’d been more to the Emperor than a secretary of grants and promotions. “Caesar—”

“Get out your pens, young man.” Trajan’s wasted fingers tweaked the lean cheek. “No more weeping. Take down a letter for me. ‘To the honorable senators of Rome’ or maybe ‘Most noble senators of Rome’—just do it up properly for me; you know how to flatter that pack of proud buggers by now…”

Phaedimus wrote neatly and rapidly, pen never pausing while the tears dripped down his face. Sabina helped Trajan sit up partway in
bed, supporting his deadened shoulder while he crookedly signed at the bottom.

“There.” He fell back, the pen dropping from his fingers. “You keep that for the time being, Phaedimus. Till I’ve broken the news to Plotina and the others. Tomorrow, maybe.” His voice trailed off. “Can’t face her hissing at me today… she’s already likely trying to poison me, angry as I made her in Antioch…”

Sabina couldn’t make out the rest of the mumbled words, but she leaned down to kiss Trajan’s forehead. “Rest now.” The skin under her lips was as dry as parchment, and cold to the touch.

Phaedimus looked at her with miserable swollen eyes as they passed out of the sickroom. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

Sabina eased the door closed. “Yes.”

VIX

I stood watching an emperor die, but somehow I couldn’t see him. My eyes couldn’t focus on that shrunken figure in the bed. I kept seeing him the way he’d looked during his triumph in Rome, after the Dacian campaign. Tall, godlike, standing like a colossus in his own chariot at the center of the parade, his face daubed with celebratory red paint and a wreath of laurel leaves crowning his head—I could see him so clearly, as if the triumph had happened last week instead of nearly a decade ago. The little room where an emperor lay dying was full of people, but I couldn’t see any of them. I was too busy remembering.

I remembered marching along with my lion skin hot in the sun and the eagle screaming silently over my head. I remembered shouting rude insults at Trajan along with the rest of the legionaries—an old tradition for the troops at a victorious general’s triumph. He’d seemed to know the insults were fond; his grin split the paint on his face, and he made encouraging waves to inspire us to new heights of vulgarity. The crowds
pressing in on each side screamed so loud when they finally caught sight of him that I was deaf for the next three hours. A slave stood behind the Emperor murmuring in his ear:
“You are only a man… you are only a man…”
Another Roman custom for a triumphant general, and a custom I didn’t entirely understand; something about keeping a man humble even in his moment of victory. But I doubted the Emperor had heard one word that slave was muttering. He was too happy, too radiantly happy with his laurel wreath cocked back on his head at a boyish angle and his people shouting his name.

Romans are strange. Why on earth would anyone ever tell such a god that he was only a man?

The little room was stifling. Trajan’s officers stood crammed along the walls, spaced here and there by Praetorians who stood looking helpless because it was their job to keep the Emperor alive, but what could they do here to save him? His freedmen stood in frightened little clusters, and senators flocked together like whispering old hens. I was crammed somewhere at the back, the Emperor’s newest and most junior commander, but I could see over all the heads before me. The Empress sat on one side of the bed, rigid as ever in a wooden chair, one hand resting on her husband’s. Sabina had slipped from her chair to her knees on the bed’s other side; her cropped head leaned against Trajan’s deadened arm, her fingers ceaselessly stroking his motionless hand. Her eyes were closed, but when the Imperial physician tried to pin a blanket up over the window to block the fading light, her head whipped up and she snapped, “Leave it! He wants light.”

“The air is unhealthful—”

“I said leave it!”

Plotina drew a breath as if to remonstrate. Sabina’s furious eyes bored into her. Silence fell again. Just the shuffle of feet, an occasional cough—and above all, the terrible rasp of Trajan’s breathing. Coming slower now.

Slower.

“Clear the room,” Plotina ordered. “It’s unfitting for him to go to the gods in such a crowd.” Sabina began to argue with her, but the freedmen were already streaming out, and I trailed after them. I couldn’t watch—couldn’t look at that waxen figure on the bed, couldn’t bear to hear that slow rasp of breath, couldn’t bear to see my Emperor die. My Emperor, the man I’d followed to Dacia and Parthia and hell too if he’d asked it of me…

Half the soldiers were already weeping, unashamed. A handsome secretary stood outside the now-closed bedchamber door, bent nearly double, shoulders heaving. I just stumbled away, out of that nameless little house. Such a small place, too small and ordinary to contain the last breath of a man like Trajan. Why couldn’t he die on a battlefield? The last arrow of the last battle, while subduing the last enemy on the last unconquered province in the world? Why this dead and dusty little town full of ghosts?

I stumbled past a series of ruined shacks, over a road missing half its paving stones but still leading up a mild slope toward a temple now roofless and godless. A beautiful day, the sea sparkling distantly, the sun shining. Shouldn’t it be raining? Shouldn’t the skies weep when an emperor dies?

I lurched up the cracked mossy steps of the temple. A temple of Jupiter, maybe, or some unknown god. Now it was just a few crumbling columns on a mossy foundation. One of the columns seemed to come at me, hitting me in my wounded shoulder, and I leaned against it. Clutched it, my hands shaking against the stone. My shoulder burned. My eyes burned. Shouldn’t a soldier weep when his general dies?

I don’t know how long I stood there, trembling against the column. But I picked my head up, looking around me aimlessly, and I saw Sabina. Standing across the temple in the crumpled shift she’d worn day and night as she tended Trajan, dwarfed by the columns. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. I took a step toward her, another step, lurching like a drunk.

She opened her arms and I dropped into them, crashing to my knees. “He’s dying,” I said against her waist.

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

The first sob tore out of my throat. “He’s dying. He’s
dying
—”

“Hush, my love,” she whispered, just as she’d whispered to me in Dacia after I killed a king on a solar disc. I’d gripped her then, drowning, and she held me now as I drowned again, howling into her linen shift. Mirah would have tried to comfort me, told me not to weep, told me Trajan would go to the next world and be happy there. Sabina just held me. She sank down where she stood, sitting on a fallen column, and she gripped me tight as I sobbed into her lap like a heartbroken child.

My tears went eventually, but I stayed where I was, huddled numbly in the arms of a woman I used to love and used to hate. The sun set, the moon rose; warmth was gone and chill had replaced it. How could the world just go on as though nothing had changed? Everything was changing.

“Stand up, Vix. It’s getting cold.” Sabina tugged me to my feet with gentle hands. I stood there dumbly, an ox waiting for the sacrificial knife. I was a soldier of Rome; we didn’t go anywhere without orders. Who would give me my orders, once my general was dead?

“Come with me,” said Sabina, and I took her outstretched hand and followed her obediently. Those orders would do for now.

The house where Trajan—
that house
was still deathly quiet, a ring of Praetorians keeping the hovering onlookers at bay. Soldiers paced outside, some weeping, some white-faced, some blank with shock.
They should be inside,
I thought. Trajan belonged with his men in his last hour—not with his sour bitch of a wife, crouched like a vulture on her death watch.

Sabina skirted the crowds, leading me to another house that wasn’t much more than four crumbling stone walls and a roof. She got a bedroll from somewhere, laying it out with the expert neatness she still remembered from her days with the Tenth. She eased me into it, covered
me up, took my hand in hers, and curled herself against the wall. She was still there when I woke in the morning.

Which was when we found out we had been locked inside.

PLOTINA

“Well done.” Plotina extended a gracious hand to the stocky Praetorian guard in his red-and-gold armor. “You were most convincing. You certainly fooled them all.”

“I don’t like fooling people, Lady.” The guard shifted from foot to foot, uneasy. “You’re sure it was necessary?”

“Essential.” Plotina gave her most reassuring smile. “Rome owes you a great debt, and so do I.”

“If you say so, Lady.”

“I do. And so would the Emperor.” Plotina picked up her husband’s cold hand and stroked it. “The former Emperor, that is. The new Emperor will thank you himself upon his arrival.”

“Yes, Lady.”

“You may go. Not a word, now.”

“No, Lady.” But the guard still looked uneasy as he tramped out; Plotina could see that. “I think I shall have to take care of him, don’t you?” she told her husband. “Perhaps a convenient fall from one of these rocky cliffs. What do you think?”

Trajan’s corpse lay silent. His flesh had a marble chill and his limbs had gone stiff, but the heaped blankets had concealed that quite artfully.

“Now, I hope you aren’t angry with me,” Plotina chided, sinking back onto the stool at her husband’s bedside. She didn’t bother lowering her voice—a few slaves lined the walls, waiting to be called upon, but they all knew she’d have them crucified if they ever spoke of what they’d seen in this room. “It’s just a
tiny
deception, husband. We’ll announce your death as soon as Dear Publius arrives from Antioch.
For now, everyone can go on thinking you’re alive. It will make the transition much smoother, and you know how I always like to smooth things out for you.”

The Praetorian had done a good job indeed. He had a gruff voice not unlike his Emperor’s; he had stood concealed in the shadows of the bed’s curtains and read the lines Plotina had given him. Plotina’s only task had been to chafe Trajan’s dead hand and shed a tear or two. The clerk who recorded the last wishes of Marcus Ulpius Trajan had been sitting well back, far too occupied with the importance of the moment, and the crowd of witnesses stood at a respectful distance in the dimly lit room. Plotina had only ushered them back into the bedchamber once she’d had everything made ready, and most had been weeping too hard to notice that the Emperor’s chest had not been rising and falling under the heap of carefully arranged blankets. Sabina would have noticed, but Sabina had been confined and kept out of the way.