Empress of the Seven Hills (63 page)

“I guess we do,” said Sabina.

“Then what do we have to show for it?” I cried out. “What do
I
have to show for it?”

Sabina had no answer for that. Why would she? Aside from a few scars, all I had to show for a life of wandering and fighting were the odds and ends that had collected at the bottom of my pack. A father’s amulet. An emperor’s ring. A wife’s scarf. A lion’s pelt. A string of campaign tokens. A lover’s earring.

Not very much, when you came down to it.

I sat down on the other end of the ruined column, swinging my ridiculous new crested helmet by its ridiculous chin strap. Sabina wrapped her arms about her own knees, and we sat in silence for a while. Birds hopped among the abandoned columns, twittering impudently now that there were no indignant priests to chase them out. A bright blue morning, so beautiful.

“‘Empress of Rome,’” I said at last, tasting her new title. “Who’d have thought?”

She gave me a wan little half smile. “At the very least, it will be interesting.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Interesting or not, I’d trade it for another chance to go back to being eighteen and stay in my father’s house forever. Never get married at all.”

I should have stayed in her father’s house too. Stayed a bodyguard, never joined the legions. If I had, I’d still be living my uneventful life walking Senator Norbanus back and forth from the Capitoline Library, not sitting in a weed-choked temple at the arse-end of nowhere.

“Maybe my father can help.” Sabina’s voice was bleak, and her hands twined each other around her knees. “Perhaps he can challenge this mad charade Plotina put on to get Hadrian adopted…” She shook her head, as if arguing with herself. “Gods, I can’t go to my father. He’s so frail now.”

I thought of my own father. He’d be Trajan’s age by now, if he was even still alive. The last letter I’d managed to get from my mother had been more than two years ago; all had been well, but a great deal could happen in two years. Was he still rooting ineptly in his garden, with hair as gray as Trajan’s? Or had he too died gasping for breath in bed, before I’d ever had a chance to see him again? Suddenly I wanted to go home.

Brigantia. Was it even my home? Or did I have a home at all anymore?

What does it matter?
I thought. Wherever home was, Hadrian would never give me leave to go there. My father and mother would die, and I’d never see them again. Not since I was eighteen and I left with so many dreams of glory.

“All my life—” Sabina’s voice was ragged, and I realized she was weeping. I’d never seen her weep before, not once in all the years I’d known her. The tears slid down her still face and dripped off her little chin. “All my life I thought I could go adventuring, just because I wanted to. I could do my duty, do some good in the world, but I could have the life I wanted doing it. But that wasn’t true, was it? I got to go adventuring because my father let me, and then Hadrian let me, and then Trajan. Any of them could have stopped me anytime they liked, and now Hadrian
is
stopping me. No adventures for the Empress of Rome.”

I could think of endless times over the years when I’d ached to see that serene shell of hers cracked in half. See her weep, see her break. Now I was seeing it, and the only thing breaking was me.

She looked at me, her face white and wet and ravaged. “I never had any freedom at all, did I?”

“Most of us don’t,” I said.

“‘Vibia Sabina, Empress of the seven hills.’” She gave her new title a bitter twist. “When you come right down to it, an empress is just another wife. Nothing but that.”

I wondered if I’d ever see
my
wife again. Mirah’s reddish hair, her neat sashed waist, the way she gestured with her chin when her hands were full. My thumb found a tiny corner of the blue scarf tied under my greave, caressed the worn cloth. Why hadn’t I begged a transfer to a legion in Judaea, given Mirah the life of honor and respect she wanted as the wife of Masada’s last living heir?

I banished Mirah from my mind. I couldn’t think of her, not when I already hurt inside like I’d been gutted with a spear. “Maybe
Empress
only means
wife
,” I said to Sabina. “But
Praetorian
means
assassin
. That’s what I am now. I’m to stop off on my way back to Rome and kill all your husband’s enemies for him.”

“
All
his enemies?” Sabina’s voice was bitter. “That’s too long a list for one man. Even you.”

“His top five enemies, anyway.” I hadn’t gotten the list until this morning. Celsus and Palma, two former consuls. A former governor of Dacia. Lusius Quietus, my former cavalry commander… my heart had lurched when I read that, and then died entirely in my chest when I saw the final name.

Titus.

I remembered one of his absurd quotations, Ovid or maybe Juvenal; something Titus had trotted out to me once when I was gloomy over some failure.
Be patient, and tough
, he’d said with his gentle expression.
Someday this pain will be useful to you.

But how could
this
pain ever be useful? The pain of knowing I had to put a sword through the heart of the best man I’d ever known?

“Maybe I’ll just put a sword through my own heart instead,” I said aloud. “What I should have done when Trajan died.”

“The Empire would be poorer for it,” said Sabina. She rested her cheek on her folded arms, and we sat in silence again. I fingered my row of campaign tokens—the only item I’d officially been allowed to carry over to my new Praetorian armor. Campaign tokens won for territories that would now go back to the weeds and the wild men. I wasn’t supposed to wear my lion skin with the new armor, or any of the precious good-luck tokens from my wife or my father or Sabina. “Praetorians do not drape themselves in superstitious trash,” or so I’d already been told by the Praetorian whom Hadrian had assigned to brief me on my new duties. I’d hit him short and hard in the nose, and he’d howled. I suppose I was out of practice at being told what to do.

“I’ll need to go soon.” Sabina looked down the rocky path toward the abandoned harbor. Even from here, I could see the swarm of activity. “They’ll need me for my new duties. Namely standing like a statue and smiling. There’s a lot of that when you’re an empress. Though of course I’ll have many more important responsibilities once I reach Rome and am installed in the palace. Weaving the household cloth, for
example. Overseeing the slaves. Hosting Imperial dinner parties. Those are my duties now, Plotina says. Gods, did I underestimate her.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way to keep making the bitch miserable.”

“She also wants me to start whelping babies, but thank the gods, Hadrian isn’t so interested in that. He doesn’t seem to care about heirs, at least not from me.” A grimace. “Can you imagine a child of Hadrian’s inheriting the Empire? It would destroy the human race.”

“A child of yours too. Surely it wouldn’t be so bad as that.” Oh, Hell’s gates, my daughters—both of them so young, Dinah just three and Chaya barely out of babyhood, but they’d be Hadrian’s hold on me forever. Hostages to my good behavior, not that they knew it. Did they even know
me
? If I were to die now, would they remember their father at all?

“Maybe I should get myself pregnant,” Sabina was musing. “Hadrian would know it wasn’t his—he’d have to divorce me…”

“Don’t be stupid. He’d kill you rather than divorce you.”

“Yes, he hates being made a fool of.”

“Make a fool of him anyway.” My voice was savage. “Keep your head shaved, keep your pleb friends, keep hiring street urchins for your maids and wading barefoot in the Tiber and taking lovers who snicker at him over the pillow. Don’t turn into the wife he wants, some perfect marble-carved empress. Keep Rome laughing. Make him sorry he ever married you.”

“Excellent idea,” said Sabina. “Let’s start now.”

I looked at her. Her face was hard, mocking, a gleam of anger turning her eyes to blue ice.

“Want to help me?” she asked. “Help me make a fool out of him?”

Have you slept with my wife?
Hadrian whispered in my ear, and behind the whisper I heard the deadly hiss of steel. I gazed at the new Empress of Rome, and she gazed back.

I didn’t want her. God help me, I didn’t want her, I wanted my Mirah. But my hand was already stretching out, jerking Sabina up from the column, and my mouth was biting down on hers. She jumped up
into my arms, her legs clinging about my waist, kissing me ferociously as I yanked the clasps out of her stiff formal dress and ran my fingers through her short hair.

“Promise me you won’t grow your hair,” I murmured as I pressed her down into the weeds. “He hates the hair.”

“I promise.” She laced her fingers behind my neck, pulling me down into her. “Now shut up and take me.” No finesse, no tenderness—just rage.

And maybe friendship. Maybe all the lust and the love and my occasional bouts of hatred over the years had given us that.

Afterward I gave her a hand up, and she straightened her dress and put the blond wig back into place, and we stood for a moment looking down the slope of the hill to the beach. The trireme waited there, and a hundred Imperial retainers laying wood for an emperor’s funeral pyre, but I don’t think either of us saw it. I think we saw Rome—but not the Rome we knew. The new and dangerous Rome that awaited us.

I put my hand on Sabina’s shoulder. She reached up, lacing her fingers briefly with mine, and her mouth flicked wryly. Then she pulled the gold veil up over her hair and descended the path alone, going down to stand like a polite statue as the new Emperor was hailed on his way back to Rome. I stood with the other soldiers, and I still had tears left to weep after all as Trajan’s funeral pyre was lit. My Emperor. The new Emperor presided, his head ostentatiously bowed.

Have you slept with my wife?

Yes, Caesar
, I thought straight at him.
The day after you took my legion away and put a kill list in its place, I slept with your wife. And someday, I will watch you die.

Maybe I should have gone into astrology instead of soldiering, because that was another prophecy that ended up coming true. I didn’t get all the details right—I didn’t know yet that I’d gotten Sabina pregnant up on that hilltop full of ruins. But I would someday watch Hadrian die.

Never mind how.

I’ll tell you later.

Except for Vix and a few minor players, every character in
Empress of the Seven Hills
is a real person. Emperors Trajan and Hadrian, their wives Plotina and Sabina, Vix’s friends Titus and Simon, even Vix’s adopted son Antinous all existed in real life. Vix’s life and career are based on those of several notable soldiers of the day, especially a cavalry officer named Tiberius Claudius Maximus, who captured the dying Dacian king Decebalus and brought his head and right hand back to the Emperor, and one Marcius Turbo, who was promoted through the ranks on grit and bravery to end up Hadrian’s Praetorian Prefect. Vix is therefore guilty of stealing the credit for other men’s deeds, which I doubt would bother him at all. Not many common legionaries pulled off the kind of meteoric rise through the ranks that Vix does, but it was possible: Trajan’s many active years of campaigning meant heavy casualties among his officers and swift promotion for those who managed to stay alive. Battlefield promotions were frequently handed out for acts of bravery, and patronage was all: With the backing of the Emperor or some other powerful Roman, even a common legionary like Vix could dream of command.

Sabina’s adventures are not recorded by history, but what is recorded is a deep hostility between her and her husband. Hadrian, openly homosexual, married her for political ends but found her “moody and difficult.” In return, Sabina remarked publicly that she would never bear him children because they would harm the human race. The historical Sabina managed to travel a great deal, inviting herself along on
most of her husband’s wanderings, so she must have had some taste for adventure. Her level of freedom might be unusual, but it was not unheard of: Roman women had as much liberty as their husbands or fathers allowed them to have, and despite the traditional image of an iron-handed
paterfamilias,
ancient Rome had plenty of doting fathers (Cicero was notoriously indulgent to his daughter) and lenient husbands. Many Roman women traveled extensively in the provinces, bringing up their children in the Empire’s wild places while their husbands ruled as provincial governors or served in provincial military outposts, and the occasional adventurous woman got to see a military campaign firsthand. Emperor Augustus’s granddaughter Agrippina the Elder famously accompanied her husband’s army throughout all his wars, and I decided Sabina (and Mirah) might easily do the same. Sabina’s interest in good works would have been a traditional occupation for a well-connected woman; record exists of the huge contribution she made to Trajan’s
alimenta
scheme supporting Roman orphans. It’s not known if Sabina had affairs outside her barren marriage, but Hadrian later notoriously reprimanded and dismissed several men for being “too informal” with his wife—including one career soldier in the Praetorian Guard. We have no way of knowing if such a charge means Sabina took lovers or simply had a gift for informality in her friendships.

Empress Pompeia Plotina is another matter. I have probably been very unfair to Trajan’s wife, whom history records as a perfectly pleasant and conventional woman who did not meddle much in Imperial politics. But Trajan’s deathbed adoption of Hadrian was definitely a fishy affair, and a persistent rumor circulated at the time that Plotina had masterminded the whole thing. She had always made a pet out of Trajan’s ward Hadrian; she pushed his marriage to Sabina to tie him to the Imperial family, and she made no secret of her hopes that he would succeed her husband. Trajan awarded Hadrian considerable honors, but their relations were never very warm, and we don’t know if Trajan ever planned for Hadrian to succeed him. He did propose
sending the Senate a short list of candidates (though Titus, as a rising but young politician, would probably not have been on it) and he may have had his freedman Phaedimus write one up. But Plotina wrote a decree of adoption for Hadrian instead and signed it for her husband while he lay dying. Plotina’s elaborate pretense that Trajan was still alive so she could fake a deathbed adoption of Hadrian may sound like bad farce, but it’s another persistent rumor that comes down to us through the ages from Plotina’s contemporaries. I may have wronged Plotina by implying that she was either a madwoman or a thief—but ancient sources record that Trajan on his deathbed believed he might have been poisoned by someone in his inner circle, and that his secretary freedman Phaedimus died suddenly on the same day of Hadrian’s acclamation, as if someone wanted to silence him.