by Kate Quinn
“No, you only speak truth.” Even the first lady of Rome could unbend a trifle, now and then—it would only encourage loyalty. “What do you hear of the legions in Germania—are they being, ah, greedy bastards too?”
“There’s a whisper they proclaimed Governor Vitellius as Emperor. But it’s just a whisper, Lady.”
“I can’t believe they’d be such fools,” Cornelia said dismissively. Senator Vitellius, well, he was a fat drunk who cared for nothing but feasts and chariot racing. “He’d never make a real emperor.”
“Senator Piso will.” The words surprised her. “He’ll be a fine one, Lady. Good and steady.”
Cornelia smiled behind her fan. “I’m sure he is glad to have your approval.”
“No disrespect, Lady.” Densus swatted a swarm of shouting urchins away from the litter. “But Praetorians see everything. Yesterday it was Nero, today it’s Galba, tomorrow it will be Senator Piso. I know emperors. He’ll do us fine.”
Better not to underestimate a common soldier’s eyes, Cornelia decided. “I’m glad you think so, Densus.”
He smiled up at her, chestnut eyes friendly under the helmet’s crest of plumes, and Cornelia allowed him to take her arm when she alighted in the crowd before the shrine of Juno. A grand place in the Capitoline Temple, her statue as goddess of wives and mothers towering sternly beside the shrine of Jupiter. The steps thronged, as always, with women: young girls praying for luck in their forthcoming marriages, women far gone in pregnancy praying for an easy birth, matrons praying for grown sons and unruly daughters. Juno heard all.
Cornelia paid no attention to the murmurs this time, the ripple of speculation that greeted her emeralds and Praetorians. She just knelt, one among many, bowing her head.
Great Juno, an emperor must have a son and heir. Give me a son. Surely with Fortuna’s wheel spinning herself and Piso so high, they would find good luck in this as well?
Eight years married, and never a sign of a child. Never a miscarriage. Never even one week’s lateness with her monthly bleeding.
Cornelia stared up at the stern marble face. Oh, Juno. Just hear me.
The crush was thicker as the Praetorians beat a path back to the litter—curious women crowding close to see every detail of their future Empress: what she wore, how she carried myself, what she looked like. Cornelia did not find it quite so comforting as she had before. She sighed a little as Densus assisted her back into the litter.
He spoke unexpectedly. “Juno will answer your prayers, Lady.”
“Prayers?” Cornelia blinked.
“For—whatever you pray for. She’ll hear you.” He fell back before Cornelia could wonder if he knew what it was she prayed for so hard.
“—so big and golden, Marcella, you can’t imagine! And so strong—he can hump me while standing up and holding me in the air, it’s absolutely divine. He was shy at first, but I just kept asking for massages until he got the idea—”
“—settled in well to the Reds stables, though there was a bout of bad grain. I’m not ruling out poison, those Blues will try anything—”
“Both of you hurry up,” Marcella said, not troubling to hide her annoyance. Lollia on one arm droning about her pet stud, Diana on the other droning about her blasted Reds—between the two of them, it was a wonder she wasn’t dead from boredom. Dear Fortuna, didn’t her cousins have any unexpressed thoughts? “Hurry up! I want to get to the Domus Aurea.”
“—don’t know why you had to drag us away from the Campus Martius,” Diana complained. “I was watching the tribunes race their teams. Not one of them fit to drive a real race, of course—”
“—to put it in words Diana can understand, Thrax is an absolute stallion!” Lollia was bubbling, oblivious. “I suppose I shouldn’t be saying such things, Diana being unmarried and all, but surely you know the facts of life, my honey. Horses are always humping each other.”
“Maybe so,” Marcella snapped, “but at least they don’t talk about it.”
On this cold and breezy winter day, the sun lay hidden behind blustery gray clouds. Somewhere Marcella heard thunder. Not a good omen. But all the omens had been bad since the turn of the year this past week, starting with the day when Piso had been presented at the Praetorian barracks. The bull sacrificed by the priests had been diseased, the liver malformed, and the soldiers had muttered that it meant grave ill fortune. But Galba had shouted at them, and they’d quieted.
Or had they?
The anteroom of the Domus Aurea was filled, anxious, jammed: armored guards, courtiers in fine lawn and jewels, slaves looking edgy. Despite the uneasy quiver in her stomach, Marcella couldn’t help looking around at Nero’s famous golden house. A sumptuous palace with three hundred feasting rooms and a hundred sculpted acres of pleasure gardens; a place for intrigue, for beauty, for trysts and secrets while Emperor Nero had sat toying with his silver lute and watching over all: a genial and not entirely sane god.
“Is this the first time you’ve been here?” Lollia whispered as they were ushered into the triclinium. “Since . . . ?”
“Yes.” Marcella looked up at the fanciful ceiling: carved ivory with hidden shutters, built to revolve slowly and send a mist of perfume and rose petals down over the guests. Now it was still and unlit. “At least I’m not the only guest this time.” That night last spring she had been alone, and the slaves had gotten confused and loaded the ceiling with not one but three different kinds of perfume. Marcella left not only feeling like a whore, but smelling like one.
“Don’t go,” her sister had advised her, hearing of Nero’s invitation. “You can’t let him dishonor you, even if he is Emperor!”
“Just tell him you’re sick,” Lollia had said.
But what real options had those been? Marcella’s father had been dead by then, and Lucius had been gone on one of his many journeys. Gaius had been oblivious to everything except his new duties as paterfamilias. Tullia, for all her carping about womanly virtue, would have shoved any of her sisters-in-law into the Emperor’s bed with her own hands to secure Imperial favor. Marcella had seen no option but to grit her teeth, dress in her finest, and go to the palace.
A very different palace now. Dusty and cold, the mosaics and frescoes unlit by lamps, half the furniture stripped away and sold for Galba’s greedy economies, and the smell on the air was sweat rather than rose petals. Nero’s Golden House, golden no longer.
Even Lollia’s dreamy happiness evaporated as she looked at the forced smiles and tense eyes of the crowd around them. “What’s wrong with everyone?” she whispered.
“I imagine they already know what I noticed at the Campus Martius just now,” Marcella said. “That there are Praetorians massing.” She hadn’t liked the look of them: tight-bunched in their red-and-gold breastplates, gesturing fiercely at each other under the low gray sky.
“The Praetorians are always grumbling. What of it?”
“Perhaps they’re grumbling a little worse than usual.” Marcella thought of the latest rumor—that Piso had tried once again to get Galba to pay his soldiers their bounty, and been refused.
And then there were the slaves she’d seen at the Campus Martius. Wearing, Marcella was certain, Senator Otho’s badge.
The air was stifled from so many bodies in one room. Marcella cleared a path back to a niche where a jade-and-silver lamp had somehow avoided Galba’s auctioneers. The crowd swirled, and for a moment she saw Galba himself, wrinkled as a tortoise in his toga, Old Flaccid at one elbow and Piso at the other. Piso looked worried but stalwart; Cornelia clung to his arm with a crease showing between her dark brows—then the crowd swirled again and hid them.
Marcella felt a little tendril uncoil in her stomach—excitement this time, rather than unease. “Isn’t it rather thrilling?” she couldn’t help saying. “To be right in the thick of it all like this?” Not just forever stuck in the background, waiting for news.
“If I want thrills, I go to the races.” Diana looked out over the nervous crowd. “
I think it’s Senator Otho.”
“Otho isn’t here, Diana.”
“No, but he’s somewhere else. Causing trouble.”
Of course Marcella had long since arrived at that conclusion. Diana never sees anything unless it’s waved under her nose. They found a slave to bring some wine—passed a few more idle speculations—waited an agonizing, finger-tapping hour before the hysterical messenger brought the news.
The Praetorian Guard had proclaimed Otho as Emperor and were carrying him shoulder-high through the streets.
It was all a great confusion after that. Marcella tried to see everything, take note of everything, but for once her mental pen was overwhelmed. Too much was happening for notes.
She heard Galba’s voice snapping orders but couldn’t make out what he was saying. She saw Piso’s chalk-white face as he squared himself to go address the cohort of guards still here in the palace; he stumbled on the threshold, and his sturdy chestnut-haired centurion had to steady him. She saw a pair of young courtiers playing dice in the corner, calling for wine and laying loud wagers on how soon it would be before someone brought Otho’s head in on a spear. Clearest of all, she saw an old slave woman unconcernedly refilling the wine cups. And why not? Marcella thought, bemused. All this hysterical swapping of emperors has nothing to do with her, not when there are wine cups to be filled.Marcella stared at the woman until she placidly took herself out.
Cornelia came then, pressing through the crowd. She looked calm as a pillar in her fluted stola of smoke blue, lapis lazuli banding her throat and wrists, but her hand was moist and cold when she blindly found Marcella’s and grasped it tight. When did she last do that? Marcella thought. When she was ten years old, maybe, and Father came back from Gaul after two years and didn’t even bother trying to tell us apart.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cornelia was saying. “It could be dangerous—nothing to fear from Otho, of course, he’ll be in chains as soon as the Praetorians come to their senses. But with so much confusion in the palace, it isn’t proper for you to be here.” She gave a disapproving glance—even now, Marcella thought, her sister cared about the proprieties. “Marcella, did you even bring a slave for a chaperone? Considering that people still whisper about you and Nero—”
“Never mind the chaperone,” Marcella said impatiently. “You shouldn’t be here either.” The lamps were flickering now as purple twilight began to fall outside. She glanced through the window and saw lights at the gates of the Domus Aurea—torches, as the curious citizens of Rome came to watch. Two emperors at once, she thought. Better than a play! Come one, come all, come early, and get your seats for the show!
“They’ve sent emissaries to our other forces in the city.” Cornelia spoke rapidly, twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger. “And Piso spoke to the guards—they received him well, Centurion Densus told me,” she continued, pride in her voice. “He reminded them of the honor of the guards, how they have never betrayed their lawful Emperor for a usurper—”
“Well,” Marcella murmured, “you could call Galba a usurper too, you know.”
But Cornelia rushed on, unhearing. “—and he talked about shame, too, reminding them of their duty. I wish he hadn’t done that, but Galba thought it best if he shamed the guards into doing the right thing—and it doesn’t matter, Densus assured me the men received him well enough—”
“Cornelia—”
“And now some people are urging Galba to reinforce the palace and arm the slaves, in case there’s a fight, and others are urging him to go out and meet Otho head-on—”
“Cornelia, come home.” Lollia cut off her babbling. “Wait with us until it’s all safely over.”
“My place is with my husband.” Cornelia’s cold hand flinched in Marcella’s, and then she drew herself visibly together. “But truly, you should all—”
“Lollia!” Old Flaccid caught sight of his wife for the first time and started flapping his hands. “Go home at once—the idea of coming here now—”
“Oh, don’t hiss at me.” Lollia rolled her eyes. “It’s like being married to a gander—”
“I’ve just fetched a litter,” Cornelia said soothingly. The slaves were starting to get excited now, whispering in corners behind their hands, and none of them wanted to listen to her. But she was the Empress of Rome, or something very near to it, and when she clapped her hands they scattered obediently. Marcella had never felt prouder of her sister.
A gap in the babble drew Marcella’s eyes as Cornelia hastened them all out. Galba was tossing his toga aside, snarling at the hovering courtiers as his breastplate and greaves were brought forward.
“It looks like he’ll go out to meet them,” Marcella said.
“Yes.” Cornelia was pale now, but her voice was still composed.
“Do I have to leave?” Marcella begged. “Just when all the excitement is beginning? I may have written about history, but I’ve never seen it happen—”
“Out,” Cornelia ordered in the big-sister voice she had not used since they were small, and bundled Marcella into the hired litter after her cousins.
The bearers jolted below as they swung away from the palace, but none of them called down for a smoother pace. Lollia nibbled her nails anxiously, but Marcella couldn’t help peeking through the curtains and Diana peered over her shoulder. The light was purple with dusk, and after a while Marcella began seeing people—bakers, brewers, old soldiers, beggars and urchins, women with children clinging to their skirts—gathered along the street. Saying nothing, just watching silently. Though there was shouting in the distance.
“Turn ahead,” Marcella called down to the litter-bearers as the surge of shouting grew louder. “Avoid the Forum.”
But the crowds were pressing thicker, and they couldn’t turn anywhere. The litter lurched, lurched again, and then one end fell and Marcella spilled out, hip smacking painfully against the stones. Lollia fell against her legs with a sharp little scream, Diana scrambled more nimbly to her feet, and Marcella looked up to see the litter-bearers dashing away into the night. Several street urchins let out a cheer and leaped into the litter for a game, but the rest of the crowd was silent. Marcella saw eyes glittering like pieces of jet, assessing her, and fear leaped suddenly in her throat. She wore one of her plain pale gowns, and Diana had a dusty smock fit only for grubbing in a stable, but Lollia’s silks and pearls . . .
“Forget about trying to reach the house.” Diana hauled them both up with rough little hands. “We need shelter, and we need it now.”
“Yes,” Marcella agreed faintly. “Maybe this is enough excitement.”
But there was more shouting ahead, and torches being waved in the air, and the crowd was murmuring now, not words so much as a low ominous rumble. Marcella felt herself pushed forward, Lollia’s fingers latched to her elbow, and then Diana managed to yank them all up a rough step into a vestibule.
“Can you see?” Lollia craned her neck, eyes wide and white.
“Yes.” Marcella, far taller than either of her cousins, could see everything—she had a clear line of sight down into the end of the Forum, where a bald head bobbed over a hired chair in the torchlight. Galba’s wrinkled tortoise neck turned this way and that, and Marcella could even see his mouth opening as he shouted orders, but the crowd bore him along hysterically, hearing nothing. She saw Old Flaccid close at his side and looked for Piso, for Cornelia—but there was only Galba in his useless breastplate.
Hoofbeats. Marcella couldn’t hear where they were coming from, but suddenly mounted Praetorians were spilling into the square and surrounding Galba in his chair, and short swords waved overhead and the red plumes of crested helmets looked like smears of blood in the twilight. Galba’s arm thrashed as his chair overturned, and then the swords were rising and falling.
“Marcella!” Lollia was screaming, pulling at her arm. The crowd’s silence shattered; half of them were screaming and buffeting to get away, and half were screaming and pushing forward to see an
emperor get hacked to pieces. Marcella saw Lollia’s husband dragged from behind Galba’s fallen chair and stabbed through the gut as he shrieked for mercy.
Lollia gave a strangled whimper.
“Run!” Diana snarled, and gave such a yank to both their elbows that Lollia staggered halfway to her knees. Marcella steadied her, and suddenly they were all running. “The temple,” Marcella gasped, and suddenly the crowds were behind them and the round curve of the Temple of Vesta loomed ahead, impossibly serene, as they lunged up the steps to the sanctuary.
Silence inside, incredible silence. The flame crackled quietly in its eternal hearth, and the marble coolness of the temple was empty. Marcella skidded to a halt, feeling the breath burn in her lungs, and Lollia collapsed at the base of the nearest pillar. “He’s not dead,” she kept saying blankly. “He’s not dead.” Marcella didn’t bother answering her. The word kept throbbing in her own mind—dead, dead, the Emperor dead.
Oh, Fortuna, where was Cornelia?
Diana went to hammer on the inner sanctum and came back with a string of curses, flinging the hair out of her eyes with a savage hand. “We’re locked out. It looks like the Vestal Virgins have fled.”
“Wise,” Lollia said with blank calm. “They won’t stay virgins long if the Praetorians find their way in.”
“Nor will we,” Marcella said, looking around the temple. Just a few pillars to hide behind—no doors to bar and close.
“You can’t be much of a virgin by this time, unless your husband doesn’t know his job.” Lollia managed to stand, her red curls sticking to her temples with sweat although she still shivered violently.
“Well, I still don’t fancy being ravished by half a cohort of Praetorians,” Marcella retorted. “Does any of us have a knife, in case it gets to that?”
“I have one,” Diana volunteered, producing a neat little blade.
“You would,” Marcella said, somehow feeling irritated.
More shouting, and they all froze. The street below was empty, the crowd long scattered into the side alleys or gorging itself on the Forum’s hysteria, but there was shouting, and suddenly torches. A knot of Praetorians, and two figures before them, running and stumbling. It wasn’t dark yet—plenty of light to see who they were.