Empress of the Seven Hills (6 page)

If you’d kept your hands off that dancer Trajan liked so much, you’d stand better with him today
, Plotina thought. What a debacle that had been! Trajan had been very cross about having his pet poached from under his nose, and in the end Plotina had had to pack that smooth-cheeked little whore off to a brothel in Ostia, just to keep the peace in her household. All young men had wild oats to sow, but couldn’t they be more careful about where they scattered the seeds? It was a thought Plotina kept to herself. There were things young men fondly thought their mothers did not know. Mothers always
did
know, of course, but if they were wise they kept their own counsel. And who was wiser than Plotina, who was not just the mother Dear Publius should have had, but the Mother of Rome?

“This marriage will be a start in the right direction,” she said instead. “Trajan likes Sabina, and if you marry her he’ll like you. So why don’t you go pay a visit on the Norbanus household this afternoon?”

“I suppose I could speak to her father.” Grudgingly. “Advance my prospects.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to address yourself to Sabina as well, my dear. Her father is letting her have some choice in her marriage.” Plotina exhaled. “What is this world coming to? He always was far too lenient a father.”

“I’ll take a firmer line with his grandsons, then.” Hadrian rose, kissing her hand. “You win, my lady. Senator Norbanus’s daughter it is.”

“Shave off that beard?” Plotina begged. “I’m sure no girl wishes to marry a hedge.”

SABINA

“It’s perfect.” Sabina looked down at the little figure in marble. “Uncle Paris, I don’t know how you do it.”

He took her thanks serenely, hardly bothering to look up from the new block of marble now occupying his worktable. Sabina wandered the studio, used to his silences. Long windows letting in a flood of pale gold morning sunshine, scraps of marble and stone dust everywhere—and shelves, rank on rank of shelves crammed full of marble pieces. A bust of Emperor Trajan, looking vigorous… a half-finished study of a nymph, exquisite arms and shoulders rising from a rough chunk of stone… a granite Hercules with his lion skin and club… Uncle Paris might be old now, his hair gone white and his eyes cloudy, but his hands with their chisel and mallet were clearly as steady as ever. He must have been quite a scandal when he was young—Sabina could well imagine the whispers.
A boy of good family sculpting marble like a common artisan? My dear, the shame of it!
But the family had gotten used to him by now, and left him alone with his marble and his gift for shaping it.

“I wish I had a talent,” Sabina confided to a suspicious-eyed bust of the old emperor Domitian. Even an awkward talent like sculpting marble, or Aunt Diana’s passion for training horses—it would still make life simpler. You’d
know
what the gods intended you to be. It was just a matter of clearing any obstacles out of the way, and getting on with it.

She’d wanted to smack Vix that day at the races a few weeks ago. Anyone with eyes in their head could see what he was supposed to be, and instead he wasted his time skulking around alleys, picking fights, and kissing the wrong girls.

A deep voice sounded behind her. “Vibia Sabina.”

“Publius Aelius Hadrian.” She turned, aping his formal tones just a little. “Wait, hold still!”

“What?” he frowned, his broad hand twitching the folds of his toga.

“Hand out—there. Raised up, declamatory. Now, hold it.” Sabina raised her voice. “Uncle Paris, come sketch him for your next statue.
Perfect Roman Senator
.”

Hadrian dropped the declamatory hand. “I see you like a joke, Vibia Sabina.”

“Don’t you?”

He ignored the question, looking at Uncle Paris, whose eyes were trained on a minute crack in his marble block. “Uncle, you said?”

“Another cousin, technically,” Sabina said. “Father’s related to half of Rome, and Calpurnia to the other half. Everyone’s my cousin.”

Including the Emperor—and that, Sabina knew, was the reason Publius Aelius Hadrian stood, stilted and dutiful, trying to make conversation with a silly girl who liked a joke. Soon after Vinalia, he’d decided to start courting her. Sabina couldn’t decide if it was funny or exasperating. She’d never had a more reluctant suitor in her life.

“You’ve received the gift I sent yesterday?” he said after another pause.

“The stag from your hunt? Yes, my stepmother is very grateful. We’ll have venison for days.”

“I will send more. I hunt weekly, but I do not need so much game for myself.”

“Then why do you hunt weekly?” Sabina eyed his immaculate hands, his toga without so much as an ink spot. “I’d have thought hunting too dirty for you.”

“On the contrary.”

Another silence fell.

“You’ve commissioned something, I suppose.” Hadrian gestured around the studio, boredom suppressed in every word. “A bust of your father?”

“In a sense.” Sabina indicated the little figure in rosy marble: a man dropped to one knee, tendons corded through his arms and down his neck, one shoulder twisted under the weight of a perfect sphere.

“Atlas. Bowed under the weight of the heavens.” Hadrian peered at the carved face, its noble nose and broad forehead, the mouth compressed in an agony of effort. “Is that your father’s face?”

“Very good,” said Sabina. “It’s a surprise Calpurnia commissioned for him. Her way of reminding him not to work too hard.”

“She is a fine wife,” Hadrian approved. “A pearl among women.”

“After what my mother put him through, my father was due a pearl.”

Hadrian cocked his head at that.

Sabina gave a bland blink of her lashes. “You’ve come for a bust?”

“Yes. A gift for the Emperor. I thought to have him carved as Aeneus.”

“Better Alexander. Trajan would adore to conquer the world.”

“Alexander then. The world at his feet.” Hadrian bent to examine the little Atlas again, and Sabina saw the light in his eyes. “Your uncle Paris, he must have studied the Polykleitos school of thought? Action and inaction, perfectly expressed here. Have you ever seen the Polykleitos
Doryphorus
? I’ve seen sketches, but—” Hadrian pulled himself up. “Forgive me, Vibia Sabina. Of course this is of no interest to—”

“How do you know what interests me?” said Sabina. “You may have been showering me with flowers and dead deer for a few weeks now, but we’ve never had a single interesting conversation.”

“Naturally a girl does not study the precepts of sculpture or—”

“You’re much more interesting when you aren’t patronizing me,” Sabina said frankly. “You should try talking like a human being more often. So, what’s so special about the Polykleitos
Doryphorus
?”

Hadrian looked down at her. For a moment Sabina thought he’d go back to boring pleasantries, but his hand reached out almost involuntarily and touched the little Atlas. “See the shift in the weight between the feet? Perfectly poised between motion and repose. The Greek sculptor Polykleitos found it was the finest way to express the beauty of the athletic form. His
Doryphorus
is the best example, but he had a very fine Hera in a temple in Argos, and a bronze Amazon in Ephesus—”

“Surely you’re not a sculptor too?” Sabina looked at Hadrian’s large hands. Unscarred and soft, the nails smooth and uniform, not much like Uncle Paris’s chisel-roughened palms.

“No, merely a dabbler in the arts,” Hadrian said with a modesty Sabina found suspect. “I make sketches, and architectural drawings—you can see the same principle in Greek architecture, you know. The Erechtheion caryatids, they don’t just serve as pillars! You can see a knee raised, as if they’re ready to step down off the plinth—”

He was waving his arms now.

“I’m going to build my own villa someday,” he told Sabina. “The perfect blend of Greek and Roman architectural principles. The grace and beauty of Greece—Corinthian columns, we’ve got nothing to match them—but backed up by the solidity of our Roman domes. I’ve made preliminary designs, but I need more study. A tour in Greece; I want to see the Acropolis, the temples. The Greeks have the finest temples in the world.”

“According to you, the Greeks have the finest everything,” Sabina teased, but he was too absorbed to mind her joking now.

“Not everything.” Decisive. “Rome has the finest government, the best engineering, the most perfect system of organization. But culture, that goes to Greece. Architecture, philosophy, dramatics—all we have to offer for dramatists are those dreary pantomime farces, nothing to stand against Sophocles and Euripides. And as for literature—”

“Cicero,” said Sabina promptly. “Martial, Virgil—”

Hadrian snorted. “Overrated.”

“Surely not Virgil,” Sabina protested. “‘
I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood—
’”

“Orotund and overpolished,” Hadrian snapped. “You want an accounting of Aeneas, you’d do better to study Ennius’s
Annals
. Good straightforward Roman prose—”

“You will never win me away from Virgil. What about Cato?”

“Cato I will grant you. He has a textbook on public speaking, sound basis in Greek rhetorical theory—”

“Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Have you? Extraordinary. What about his
Origines…”

Eventually, Uncle Paris’s voice broke into the discussion. “Go away, both of you,” he said without looking up from his chisels. “You’re distracting me.”

Sabina realized they’d been talking loudly, enthusiastically, and for more than an hour. Hastily she bundled up the little figurine of Atlas. “We’re going, Uncle Paris.”

“I’d meant to commission a bust of Emperor Trajan,” Hadrian recalled. “Carved as Alexander—”

“Boring,” said Uncle Paris, and shut the door of his studio.

“Don’t mind him,” Sabina said as they came out into the street. Her litter-bearers straightened hastily, having taken advantage of her absence to flirt with a cluster of slave girls on the way to the market. “Uncle Paris carves for himself, you know, not for his living. You’d better make your commission interesting, or he won’t take it.”

“A true sculptor.” Hadrian fingered his short beard. “I envy such men. A great talent may be a burden, but it does lighten one of destiny. The talent
is
the destiny.”

“I was thinking that myself, earlier,” said Sabina. “But you said it better. What’s your talent?”

“I write poetry,” Hadrian confessed. “Elegies in the Greek style. And I have a certain skill for drawing, and I play the flute and the lyre. But I will never number among the great artists.”

“Then you’ll have to find out your own destiny,” said Sabina. “Most of us do, I suppose.”

“I already know what my destiny is,” Hadrian said matter-of-factly.

She cocked her head, interested, but he had lifted a hand and summoned his own litter.

“I fear I must leave you, Vibia Sabina—I would see you home, but I am to dine this evening with my sister and her husband Servianus.”

“Lucius Julius Ursus Servianus?” Sabina asked. “I’ve met him.”

“They say he is the most worthy man in Rome.”

“I don’t like him either.”

Hadrian laughed aloud, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. “What an interesting little thing you are,” he said, and Sabina no longer saw the sheen of boredom in his deep-set eyes.

VIX

I’ll admit I was nervous when I got a summons to Senator Norbanus’s house. “Hell,” I swore when I got the politely worded missive, handed
over by a less polite slave. But I went. When a senator snapped his fingers in Rome, unemployed ex-slaves like me hopped like frogs.

“I see you are doing well for yourself.” He eyed the silver chain about my neck, leaning back in his chair. Nothing had changed in the crowded study—the desk heaped with slates and tablets, the cheerful clutter, the shelves and shelves of scrolls. “Have you found any particular work as yet?”

“Odds and ends, sir.”

“I know what sort of odds and ends go on in that side of town. Not what your parents would hope for you, I’m sure.”

An itch started to scratch between my shoulder blades, and I had to control the urge to twitch. Twitching looked guilty.

“Sabina tells me you ran into a spot of trouble outside the Circus Maximus a few weeks ago.”

Damn it.
I should have known that girl wouldn’t be able to hold her tongue. “No trouble, sir,” I lied. “Nothing at all.”

“She said you handily saw off a pack of drunken thieves.”

“She exaggerates.”

“Rarely.”

His dark eyes regarded me, thoughtful, and I had the feeling he was seeing clear through to the inside of my skull. A good many aristocrats could do that look, but his took the prize. He knew about the thugs, he knew about me kissing his daughter; he knew all the things I would have liked to do to his daughter given a little more time and a flat spot, and
Hell’s gates, Vercingetorix, this is not the time for any of those thoughts to be invading your thick head
. I averted my eyes over the senator’s ear, fastening them on a bust of somebody who might have been an emperor or maybe just a philosopher, and hoped my face wasn’t reddening. Red faces looked guilty.

“I would like to offer you a place in my household guards.” The offer came so abruptly, I just blinked. “This is a quiet household, but we have occasional need of a guard at the gate. You would have a room here at the villa, your meals, three new tunics a year. And a salary.” He quoted it—a generous one.

I breathed easier. He’d hardly be making me any sort of offer if he
knew—“Why, Senator? Must be plenty of old soldiers who’d serve you better. I’ve never done any bodyguarding.”

“I remember a twelve-year-old boy who stabbed an emperor in defense of his mother,” said Senator Norbanus. “What was that, if not bodyguarding?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Six years. Endless, indeed.” His ink-stained fingers drummed the desk. “Bring a little of that verve to protecting my household, and I’ll be well pleased. I have an enemy or two who might be troublesome—not to kill me perhaps, but to prevent me from reaching the Senate house on the morning of some important vote. And my eldest daughter has a habit of wandering off to odd places. A strong arm at her back might be useful.”