by Kate Quinn
“Domitia,” everyone echoed, applause rippling. Cornelia saw her sister’s eyes hunt around the room, panicky, and finally felt a twinge of pity. But Marcella was gone, back to the Imperial palace and the life she’d somehow earned for herself with her scheming, and Cornelia didn’t know her at all. This Marcella was a thousand years removed from the little girl who had nibbled cakes under a quilt with her big sister and giggled about the future. Just as well she had a new name. Marcella—her Marcella—might as well be dead.
The sun had started its descent now toward the atrium roof, and the wedding guests sprawled on their couches in happy idleness. Lollia had disappeared somewhere after taking little Flavia upstairs for a nap. Lollia’s grandfather was tipsy, in love with the whole world, the laurel wreath slipping more and more rakishly over his ear. A troop of dancers glided out to entertain everyone before the sweets course was brought in, and Cornelia just closed her eyes and leaned against Drusus’s shoulder, half asleep and entirely content. Something fluttered in her stomach—could the baby be starting to move already?
Then an earsplitting shriek tore the room in half.
The music died away. Cornelia opened her eyes, and they all looked around. Tullia was clutching the edge of the door leading toward the culina. Normally only slaves passed back and forth through that passage, but the slaves were all occupied with the sweet courses. Except for one freedman, tall and golden and quite familiar by now, who had Lollia pinned up against the wall and was kissing her passionately. Lollia’s hand twined through his hair, the plain ring gleaming on her fourth finger.
“Really, Tullia,” Lollia drawled over Thrax’s broad and suddenly immobile shoulder. “Don’t you knock?” She dragged the freedman’s head down for another kiss, and suddenly half the room was swept in giggles. Cornelia felt a bubble of laughter rising in her throat and clapped a hand hastily over her mouth. Drusus’s lips were twitching.
Tullia banged the door shut. “Dear,” Gaius said nervously, but she whipped up a hand to quiet the triclinium that was now astir with whispers and giggles. Cornelia clamped harder on the bubble in her throat, trying her best to be appalled. Shocking of Lollia. I am furious. Just furious. She coughed.
“That’s enough,” Tullia said, not shrieking but whispering. “I’ve tried my best. I’ve tried to bring morals to this family, but I’ve failed. Failed! I don’t think Juno herself could succeed. You’re all degenerates”—her bulging eyes swept Lollia’s grandfather with his tipsy laurel wreath—“and plebs”—glaring at Drusus—“and sluts”—looking at Diana.
“Why am I a slut?” Diana wondered.
“Now, now,” Gaius said, placating, but Tullia rounded on him.
“And you! I’m done with you! You and your degenerate uncontrollable family!” She yanked off her wedding ring and flung it at his feet, bosom heaving. “Done!”
Gaius opened his mouth. He closed it again. He turned scarlet. Wordlessly Cornelia handed him her cup of wine, and he drained it in one swallow.
“Well?” Tullia shrieked.
Gaius pointed at the door. “Get out,” he whispered.
Someone tittered. Tullia turned the color of a plum, and suddenly the whole room was roaring with laughter.
“Ohh—” Tullia’s mouth opened in a soundless shriek. She whirled and ran out of the room, gone forever if the gods were good, and Lollia’s grandfather was chortling and Diana was clapping, and Cornelia dropped her head against her new husband’s shoulder and laughed until her eyes watered.
“Here, brother.” Drusus refilled Gaius’s wine cup. “Have another.”
“Gods, yes,” said Gaius, and grabbed the whole decanter.
IT was near dusk by the time Diana could get away. The party was clearly going to run late and wild. Lollia and her freedman had long since disappeared; Cornelia lay with her head in Drusus’s lap as he ran a hand over her stomach and tried to feel the baby, which she insisted was moving; and Nessus the Imperial astrologer had managed to stay behind when Domitian’s entourage left and was happily telling fortunes. “No, no,” he clucked over the pink palm of Lollia’s grandfather, “don’t invest in Egyptian grain, they’re going to have some bad flooding next year. Silver mines in Gaul, that’s the thing—” The rest of the revelers, those still standing, were being led by Gaius, who had not gotten so drunk since becoming the dignified and responsible paterfamilias of the Cornelii.
“Diana,” he said vaguely, waving a wine cup at her as she took her leave. “Y’re very pretty, you know—always thought so—drive a chariot like a man, but v’ry pretty for all that. More wine! Stay and have a cup?” He patted the cushions beside him. “I might marry you, y’know—you wouldn’t fuss and scream at a chap, would you?”
“No,” said Diana, amused. “But I think you’ve had bad enough luck with wives without taking me on, Gaius.”
“I’ll take care of him.” Drusus grinned, rescuing Gaius’s wine cup just in time. “Duck out of here if you want, girl.”
A festival mood still ruled in the streets as Diana left the house and climbed into her litter. Every tavern spilled over with happy drinkers, and children ran waving bright ribbons in their fists and tossing each other Janus-headed coins. The Year of the Four Emperors, they were already calling it. Who knew if this new year might be the Year of Six Emperors, or Three Emperors—or maybe just One?
Emperor Vespasian was no doubt returning to the Domus Aurea even now for an Imperial banquet, just as tired and victorious as any winning team in the Circus Maximus. Diana wished Vespasian well. He’d entered the city behind his immaculate legions, wearing his armor like a second skin and driving a two-horse chariot with a skill Diana appreciated. His shrewd ruddy face was already familiar; she saw it every day in marble on her father’s worktable as he chiseled painstakingly at his bust of the new Emperor. “Still working on that one?” Diana had asked her father after the parade. He had carved his busts of Galba and Otho and Vitellius much more quickly.
“I can take my time with this one,” Paris said, his chisel making minute taps over Vespasian’s cheerful carved face. “Years, if necessary. This Emperor is going to last.”
“How do you know that?” Diana sat on the end of his worktable, swinging her feet.
“It’s all in the face. Humorous, you know, and an emperor needs humor.” A moment’s thought. “And a lot of legions.”
“If you say so.” She couldn’t help feeling a sad twinge for fat, drunk, convivial Vitellius, who had rooted for his team so uproariously . . . though he wouldn’t have been cheering today, watching the Anemoi win seven of eight heats and the Blues come in dead last every time. Their famous blood bays had been lost in the riots, and now they had only nags. Diana cackled with glee every time she thought of it.
The litter lurched to a halt after an interminable hour, and Diana climbed down. Her charioteer medallions caught a glint from the last rays of the sun—the Reds faction had struck a medallion in her own image after her Circus Maximus win, bearing the date and her profile, but she’d never wear that. It had pride of place over her bed, right beside her victory palm.
“I suppose you’ll never be happy watching the races now,” her cousins had teased her, not understanding. “Not now you’ve driven a race yourself!”
“Oh no,” Diana said serenely. She’d driven her four winds to victory once, and that was enough. No one laughed at her now when she trailed down to the stables in her silks; no one scoffed when the Anemoi pushed their red noses eagerly into her hands as if to say, Remember when we flew together? She had a withered palm branch in her bedchamber; she was a charioteer; and though the Anemoi would run hundreds more races, they would never run for any other driver the way they ran for her. Horses ran like that only once in a lifetime . . . or maybe twice. She smiled, thinking of how they’d flown under her hands during the riots. Maybe she had gotten to drive them for two races, at that. Nessus had been right after all.
So . . . now what?
She kilted her skirt thro
ugh her girdle, trotting up the long slope to Llyn’s villa and coming automatically to the stables. Normally he would be bedding the horses down by this time in the evening, but she didn’t find him among the stalls. “Llyn?” She came into the yard, shading her eyes against the sun and looking at the rail where he so often sat looking west toward Britannia. But he wasn’t there tonight.
She came up to the villa then, putting her head around the door and calling his name again. No answer. She hesitated a moment, thinking of the laws of guest-right, but finally entered. The villa was a sprawling pillared place, untidy but friendly. The black dog looked up at her entrance and then put his nose down again.
“Llyn?”
Two slaves stared at her but returned silently to their work. Diana passed them, coming to the atrium at the center of the house. No urns or columns, just a square of grass—and a stone in the middle instead of the usual pool. Some dark foreign stone, rough-hewn, flattened like an altar. From Britannia? Somehow she was sure of it.
Something rested on top, and she picked it up. One of Llyn’s bronze arm rings, carved with twining leaves and laughing faces. “Seems rather cheerful for you,” she’d said once, looking at the sinuous bronze curves. They’d been in the hayloft, sweat drying on naked skin, lying identically with hands clasped behind their heads. “I’d have expected swords and skulls.”
“It was my father’s,” he’d said. “He was lord of all chiefs, appointed by the Druids. Lord of war. Lord of death. A Druid gave him that”—touching the laughing, time-smoothed bronze faces—“to remind him he was lord of life, too. He gave it to me last year, when he died.”
The arm ring was still warm in her hands. Something lay under it, sitting on the rock—a wax-covered tablet; signed, notarized, quite official. “If anything happens to me,” Llyn had once told her, “my horses are yours.” But he’d lived in Rome long enough to appreciate the importance of the legalities, so he’d gone ahead and made it official. The horses, the barn, the house, the slaves—everything now belonged to her.
“Do you ever think of fleeing Rome?” Diana had asked him once in the hayloft, tracing an old puckered scar along his broad chest. “Going back to Britannia?”
“Yes.” A restless movement of the shoulder under her head. “But I took that oath. Emperor Claudius forced it out through my teeth, but I said the words.”
“Wouldn’t that be an oath worth breaking? Rather than putting a knife in your own heart a few years down the line.”
He stirred the ends of her hair with his fingers—long fingers, blunt-tipped and callused. “Oaths are the only thing that make men different from beasts.”
Diana sat down on the rough-hewn rock in the atrium, turning the bronze arm ring over. It lay heavy in her hands, and it smelled like him. “You smell like bronze,” she’d informed him the first time they’d ended up in the loft. “And hay.”
“You smell like horse,” he’d retorted, one of his big hands exploring the bare arc of her spine. He’d looked bemused, as if she still weren’t quite real to him—but he’d smiled too, ruefully, as if he couldn’t figure out how he’d ended up in a hayloft with a girl who wasn’t quite real, either.
It had been quite easy. They’d boosted each other into chariots and lifted each other out of crashes; they’d bandaged each other’s scrapes and massaged each other’s wrenched muscles; they’d drunk wine and shoveled manure and argued horse breeding. At some point lovemaking had slipped into the mix as well, with no more fuss than the rest of it.
The black dog came padding into the atrium, and Diana scratched behind his ears. “It’s been quite a year,” she said aloud. “Quite a year.” She’d said as much to Llyn last week, feeling the hay prickle against her bare legs and watching the sunlight coming in brilliant fingers through the cracks in the hayloft’s roof.
“A bad year.” He’d looked so sober that Diana leaned down and brushed her mouth lightly across his.
“I never met anyone who could brood like you,” she said. “Come on. We’ve got horses to feed.” He’d laughed, then—really laughed for the first time since she’d known him as they disentangled their tunics from the hay and helped each other dress. He’d put his hands around her waist and lifted her down from the sparkling dark of the loft, same as always, and with their shoulders brushing easily they went to feed the horses, arguing about whether a colt should be broken to a chariot at age three or age four.
That one raucous full-throated laugh . . . she’d remember that best, now that he was gone.
Diana looked up through the open roof of the atrium. The sky was a deep Imperial purple overhead, but toward the west—toward Britannia—there was still an orange streak of sun. She imagined him walking toward it, long strides eating up the ground, sword swinging beside one breech-clad leg. She wondered if he’d find Britannia unbearably changed; she wondered if he’d gone back to continue his father’s fight or only to die in peace—then she smiled a little and picked up the wax tablet again. Cornelia had a home and husband again; Lollia had peace and love; Marcella had power, though it had proved to be a two-edged sword. And Diana?
“I’m going to breed the best horses in Rome,” she said aloud, and it felt right. She’d had some thought of having Llyn at her side for that, but now it looked like it would just be Diana. That felt all right, too.
She rose, sliding the bronze ring with its laughing faces over her arm above the elbow. The black dog padded silently from the hall, falling in at her heels as she headed back out to the stables.
Epilogue
A.D. 81
IT was the first time in years that they all matched, Cornelia thought. The four Cornelias, all dressed alike again—but the whole city matched, because Emperor Titus was dead and every citizen in Rome wore black.
“Oh dear,” Cornelia murmured at the massive public funeral. “I had such high hopes of Titus.” So cheerful and energetic, so intelligent and forthright—and dead, after only two years of rule.
Cornelia’s youngest daughter leaned against her side, not quite sure what it was all about but needing comfort, and Cornelia leaned a cheek against her smooth chestnut hair. Drusus held the boys, one on each arm, and they persisted in waving at the Praetorians as if it was a parade.
“Everybody had high hopes of Titus.” Lollia shifted her baby to her other hip and craned for a better view. Little Flavia stood at her side—fifteen years old! Where did the time go? She was betrothed to the new Emperor’s cousin now, and a person of much importance, but she wasn’t too grand to carry the first of her golden-haired little half-brothers on her shoulders. Thrax stood behind, as always. Lollia’s husbands still tended to come and go—she’d racked up seven by the time her grandfather died, and after that declared she was on hiatus—but Thrax was as permanent as the weather. Roman society had long since stopped being shocked. “And now,” Lollia concluded gloomily, “we’ve got Domitian.”
Cheering through the crowds mounted like a wave. Domitian himself was approaching on a gray horse, armored like a general, a wreath tipped back over his head. Burlier now than the boy of nineteen who had carried off Marcella, but the deep-set black gaze was as inscrutable as ever as he smiled and waved to his new subjects. Every year that passed, people whispered more and more of his depravities.
“Isn’t anyone going to say it?” Diana looked back and forth between her cousins. She looked more exotic than ever now, face tanned dark gold against her pale hair after so many hours training her young colts under the midday sun. Distinguished men still turned up at her door, hoping that she’d marry one of them, but Cornelia had long since given up trying to push suitors at her. “We’re all thinking it, aren’t we? Marcella finally did it. She’s an empress.”
“God help us all.” Lollia touched the little gold cross hanging from her neck, a twin to the wooden one at Thrax’s throat. “There she is.”
Cornelia felt her throat tighten as she looked past Emperor Domitian to the woman in the gold litter. Marcella waved to the cro
wd with a cool hand, her smile empty and unchanging. My little sister. Though there was nothing of her little sister in that perfect marble-carved effigy. In twelve years, Cornelia hadn’t traded one word with Marcella beyond the required empty courtesies.
Cornelia reached for Drusus’s hand, and he gave it a comforting squeeze. Domitian passed out of sight with his Empress behind him, cheers following like a rumble of thunder. Eleventh Emperor of Rome.
His massive entourage followed. Cornelia’s eyes picked out the Imperial astrologer in his star-embroidered robes—his horoscope had predicted three girls and two boys for her and Drusus, which meant she had one daughter still to come. Well, if you believed in horoscopes . . . Diana waved irrepressibly at Marcus Norbanus, consul again this year. No one else could make a limp so distinguished.
“I wonder,” Drusus began, but fell silent. Cornelia didn’t ask him what he was wondering, and neither did her cousins—more her sisters now than the sister she had been born with. They were all wondering the same thing. They had all four of them stood together before the Temple of Vesta while a city tore itself apart, and it had left its mark. Ten peaceful years under Vespasian, two more peaceful years under Titus, but none of them could help thinking it when a new emperor came to power.
Will it last?
Diana shrugged her angular shoulders. “Come to the races today,” she suggested. “The Reds are forever.”
Unlike emperors.
Historical Note
Historically, Emperor Vespasian did not enter Rome until late in the year following his coup—but I couldn’t resist the temptation of letting the readers see the face of the man who finally ended the madness of the Year of the Four Emperors. Vespasian was shrewd, humorous, sensible, and intelligent, and his reign ushered in an era of much-needed peace for Rome. He was followed by his brilliant son Titus and eventually his second son, Domitian, who proved less popular—but that is a story for another book, one titled Mistress of Rome.