by Kate Quinn
“You haven’t gotten slow with age,” I told my father. “But you still can’t garden worth a tribune’s arse.”
He dropped his dagger and I dropped Mirah’s hand to go to him. We’d neither of us admit it, my father and me, but when we came together in a thunderclap of an embrace, we were both crying.
* * *
It was downright frightening the way my mother and Mirah took to each other. It didn’t start quite smoothly—Mirah was unaccustomedly shy (anyone who knew my mother’s history would be), and there was a certain awkwardness when the children came forward. My mother took one look at my son as I introduced him and smiled warmly. “Antinous! Vix wrote that he called you Narcissus; you certainly deserve the name—”
Mirah looked just a little stiff, then. She stood between Dinah and Chaya, one arm about each, and I could see her arms tighten protectively. Our girls were pretty pink-cheeked little things, but it was Antinous everyone noticed first: his carved Bithynian face that broke into such a radiant smile, his lean-muscled height, his curling hair the color of dark honey . . . And my wife gave a sigh and a few pent-up tears, month after month, when she saw the evidence that her own belly hadn’t decided yet to produce a boy just as beautiful. She’d conceived our two girls easily, but Chaya’s birth had come very hard indeed, and my wife hadn’t quickened since.
My mother must have seen the little shadow of disappointment on Mirah’s face, because she turned with all her quiet warmth to the girls and clasped them against her. They were shy with strangers, but she addressed them fluidly in the language of the Jews, and Mirah smiled and replied in the same tongue. My mother had a low, melodious voice that could charm shy children and savage emperors in any language, and soon my daughters forgot their fear and my wife her diffidence, and all four of them were chattering away. “Vix!” Mirah exclaimed, switching out of Aramaic. “No wonder our girls are so dark-haired. They look like their grandmother!”
“I am officially old, if my firstborn has given me grandchildren,” my mother announced with a smile. “But do call me Thea, so I don’t feel quite so ancient!” She was only in her fifties, and barely looked it: a tall woman with threads of silver through dark hair, and in her red linen gown and tooled sandals she had the same serene elegance I remembered from the days she’d worn silks and pearls. My mother had been an emperor’s unwilling mistress, and the Fates had brought her here to this cozy villa on a hilltop in Britannia. Never mind how.
The conversation had changed to Aramaic again, and Antinous was warming cups of wine for Mirah and my mother so they wouldn’t have to get up. “I see you’ve raised this boy well,” my mother approved. “Do tell me . . .”
“Our women want to chatter,” my father announced. “Let them.”
We went wandering, my father and I. Past the garden and up the slope, to another wooded hill thick with flowers. “Apple trees,” he said, ducking under a branch. “Blooming very late, this year. I walk here every morning with the dogs.”
“When did you finally lose that old three-legged bitch of yours?”
“God love her, she lasted a long time. These are all her descendants.” Three puppies frisked at his heels: two curly-haired, one sleek and black. “Maybe your girls would like a pup?”
“Dinah hates fleas and Chaya’s afraid of getting bitten. But I promised Antinous a dog.”
We walked in silence a little ways, both grinning when we noticed I was walking just like him: hands clasped behind me at the small of my back. Antinous often walked that way, too, copying me since he was a boy, though his Bithynian blood gave him a liquid grace neither my father nor I could match. I had too much barbarian in me for grace, and so did my father, who stumped along as gnarled as a badger, his shoulders bent but still burly. He’d never been sure of his age, but he had to be past sixty, and unlike my mother, he looked older than his years. Well, he’d lived hard. The last few decades might have been easy, but the ones before had been all arena fights and blood and chains.
I showed him my campaign tokens; told a few stories of my campaigns. He told me of my younger brother and my three sisters; all grown. “Your brother’s a stonemason—he’ll be working on this wall of the Emperor’s, and right pleased about it. He never wanted the sword, not the way you did.” A quirk of his mouth. “They none of them gave me trouble the way you did.”
“I turned out all right, didn’t I?”
He turned and walked backward, appraising me. “Praetorian Prefect, eh?”
“Tribune. I do the Prefect’s job, because he’s an idiot, but he gets the title.” I shrugged. “It’s a pisser of a job.”
There was a certain wry sharpness in his voice. “I killed Romans, and you serve them.”
“I order them around! In fact, I’d have had a legion of my own to command if not for the Emperor.”
“And that’s an improvement? Romans made me fight, and now you’re fighting for them?” But the quirk of his mouth had more pride in it this time. “A legion of your own, how did you manage that?”
“The Tenth Fidelis was supposed to be mine.” My old legion. Emperor Trajan promised it to me at the end of the Parthian wars. Then Hadrian became Emperor, and you know the whole blasted rest of that. I told my father, briefly. “Hadrian’s a bastard,” I concluded.
“Most emperors are.” My father ducked around a sapling without looking.
“You’d have liked Trajan.” I’d wept like a baby at his death, and not because I was losing my legion. Trajan was the best man I’d ever known outside my father and maybe Titus Aurelius. “Emperor Hadrian, though . . .” I hesitated. “He’s my enemy.”
We’d reached the top of the hill, coming out from the flowering trees. There was a crumbling stone wall at the top, and my father leaned against it, folding his broad arms across his chest. “Tell me.”
I told him, all of it. The many masks, and the man behind them.
My father sounded noncommittal. “Anything good to be said for him?”
I thought of Hadrian’s rampant enthusiasm as he told me all about his wall. “He’s got vision, I won’t deny it. But what does that matter? He once threatened to have Mirah and the children killed if I didn’t do his bidding.”
A wordless rumble in my father’s chest, like a lion’s growl. I stared out over the hill.
“He threatened them,” I said. “And I let him. I still serve him.”
My father waited, scarred as an old oak, but not as yielding.
“Did he break me,” I managed to say, “or did Rome?”
“No one could break my son.” His reply came calmly. “Not the Young Barbarian.”
My old gladiator name. How foolish it sounded; so foolish I almost laughed. “Not so young anymore.”
“And grown more stubborn, not less.” My father looked at me. “Nobody’s broken you, boy. Not the Emperor, not anyone. You’re just biding your time, like I taught you to do in a fight.”
I felt my eyes sting. “If I’m just biding my time, why did I let him make me his tame dog?”
My father shrugged. “Why did I make so many kills in the arena?”
“You were a slave.” I rested my fists on the crumbling wall. “You had no choice.”
“Still felt like a black-souled bastard for doing it. You know how many I’ve killed? Men, unarmed prisoners, boys young enough to count as children. Women—there was one dressed like an Amazon. I still think about her. I’ve taken more lives than you, I’ll wager. They called me the Barbarian, and I earned it. But I didn’t stay the Barbarian, and you won’t stay anybody’s dog.”
I looked down at the wooded hills, seeing Hadrian’s bearded face. “Sometimes I think about killing him.”
“I don’t recommend it,” my father said, reflective. “It’s a lot of trouble, killing emperors.” He should know.
“Mirah wants us to leave Rome. I reckon I could, get far enough aw
ay from Hadrian to make it not worth the chase, but . . .”
“But you’ve never liked running.”
“No.”
“So what’s your plan? Keep taking everything he dishes out; smile and say ‘Thank you, Caesar’? I know you, boy. You’ll slip your leash someday, and then you’ll crack him open like an egg, and that’ll be the end of you.”
“I have ways of keeping my temper.” I smiled a little. “You see, I slept with his wife—”
My father nearly fell off the hilltop. “What?”
“Empress Sabina. Five years ago, in Selinus after Emperor Trajan died. I had her right under Hadrian’s nose, and he never knew.” That’s what I thought of, every time he maddened me with his pompous jests or his whispered threats. It should have been the noble thought of Mirah and the children that held my temper in check, but I wasn’t so noble as all that. It was the thought of the Emperor’s supple wife lying under me that kept my jaw locked, no matter what the Emperor himself might be saying. Your wife laced her arms around my neck and said, “Shut up and take me,” I’d thought silently to Hadrian, so many times. How does that feel, you bloodless bastard?
I’d never say it—it would be death to say it. But I could say it if I wanted to. And that helped.
“You always had more balls than brains, boy,” my father observed. “The Empress of Rome?”
“At least it helps me keep my temper, that memory.” Which was something, because otherwise I wasn’t proud of it: the one time I’d betrayed my wife. It had been from grief, not any great passion—Sabina and I had both been so ravaged by Trajan’s death, we hardly knew what we were doing—but I’d still done it. With a woman who had ignored me ever since.
“My foolish Roman son,” my father said, shaking his head, and we trailed down the flowered hill with the dogs loping between our feet.
ANNIA
Rome
Of all Annia’s cousins, Marcus Catilius Severus had to be the worst. He was about her age, maybe younger; he had curly dark hair; and he was more boring than a white-washed wall.
“What’s it made of?” he was asking, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked up at the huge dome of the half-completed Pantheon.
“Poured concrete,” said Annia’s father, looking down at them both. “Coffered inside, with a central oculus. Do you know what an oculus is?”
Marcus nodded. “I study famous buildings,” he said, and sounded so pompous, Annia wanted to smack him. Show-off.
The building site for the great temple was deserted: all scaffolding and marble dust, littered stone-cutting tools and stray boards, drapes flapping in a wind that had gone cool now that summer was done. “I saw to it the workmen had a day’s rest, as hard as they worked to finish the dome’s exterior,” Annia’s father said as they approached the scaffolded portico—which took quite a long time, because everyone in Rome seemed to have a respectful greeting for her father as he passed by. “See the roof? If it were a bright day, you’d see the gilding flash. I told the Emperor I would finance all that gilding, Annia, so I reckoned you should see it. If just so you know why I can no longer afford to dower you.” A fond tweak to her ear.
“Thank you for inviting me along, sir.” Marcus marched as stiff as a little old man as they made their way inside, and Annia glowered at him. She adored these afternoons with her father, especially now that he had finally come back from Britannia. A good many fathers would have had only a curt nod for a daughter, but Annia’s father was always willing to snatch an hour or so from his endless petitioners and Senate gatherings just to take her to the theatre for a pantomime or the Campus Martius to watch the chariots dash. She didn’t want to share this precious time with boring Marcus, who had been shoved off on them because his mother had another headache. As if he were so smart, knowing what an oculus was. Annia knew what an oculus was too; it was a hole in the roof!
“Titus Aurelius,” a sonorous voice hailed from behind, and Annia groaned inside. Oh, Hades, not him! The only person in the world more boring than her cousin.
Old Servianus came ducking through the scaffolding, raising a gnarled hand. He’d come back from Britannia recently, declaring his bones too old for the northern climes. “What he really means is that the Emperor doesn’t take his advice on anything,” Annia’s mother had hooted, “so why bother freezing in Vindolanda just to be ignored!”
“I came to inspect the temple,” Servianus went on, and heaved a sigh. “Corinthian columns! The Emperor insisted. In my day a plain Doric column . . .” As he droned on, Annia looked at the boy on whom Servianus was leaning like a staff. He wore a plain tunic like Marcus’s, and the same bulla amulet about his neck all boys wore, but there wasn’t anything else the same. This boy was taller, fair haired and stocky, at least nine—he laughed when Marcus offered him a little bow.
“Fortuna smiles upon me,” Servianus concluded at last. “I wished to call upon you, Titus Aurelius, to discuss the uniting of our families—and here we stand united under the roof of all the gods! A good omen.”
Annia’s father sounded amused. “Our families uniting?”
“A marriage. My grandson, Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator”—a thump to the shoulder of the stocky fair-haired boy—“and your daughter.”
Annia’s eyes, which had begun to wander around the temple, snapped back to the stocky boy.
“My daughter is very young,” her father said mildly. “I hadn’t planned on marrying her off until she was, oh, at least eight years old. By ten she’d be too long in the tooth, of course. But eight seems a reasonable age.”
Servianus looked at him closely, but her father appeared perfectly serious. Only his eyes danced, the way they did when he laughed inside.
“A betrothal will suffice until they come of age.” Servianus waved a hand. “Settled now while the children are young and obedient—”
“Some more obedient than others,” her father murmured.
“In my day—”
“When was your day?” Annia piped up, even though she knew it was rude. Servianus reared back, and Annia’s father gave her that glance of quiet authority that could stop anyone dead in their tracks.
“Marcus,” he said, “why don’t you escort your cousins to see the portico?”
“Yes, sir.” Marcus rotated in place like a little legionary, and Annia found herself marched off on one side while Pedanius Fuscus slouched along on the other. They turned to face each other the moment they were outside among the scaffolding.
“Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Salinator,” he corrected. “That goes on the end of my name.”
“Doesn’t Salinator mean brine?” she asked. “Why are you Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Brine-Face?”
He looked irritated. “It means salt. One of my ancestors instituted the tax upon salt.”
Annia thought there were more impressive things to be remembered for. Brine-Face. “Married,” she said instead, dubious. “Us?”
He gave a shrug. “Your father’s the richest man in Rome. Or one of them. And my grandfather says I’ll need a rich wife.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to be Emperor.” Pedanius said it as a fact. “My grandmother was Emperor Hadrian’s sister, so I’m his great-nephew.” He gave her a long superior blink. “You should be honored. Ugly girl like you—”
Annia just stuck her tongue out, but Marcus burst into speech. “Don’t say that.” He’d been standing there framed between two scaffolded columns, his gaze turning back and forth between them, and his face was flushed with indignation. “She’s not ugly!”
Pedanius Fuscus laughed, and he swung himself up to sit on the lowest level of scaffolding. “I can say whatever I want. I’m the next Emperor. My grandfather tells me that every day.”
“‘A mouse does not rely on just one hole,’” Marcus said, lo
oking triumphant.
Annia and Pedanius both stared at him. “What’s that mean?” Pedanius asked, suspicious.
“It means, have another plan.”
Pedanius looked at him, feet swinging, eyes narrowed, already looking big and broad in his boy’s tunic. His sandaled foot lashed out and caught Marcus square in the chest, sending him stumbling.
“Apologize,” Pedanius said. “Or I’ll have you exiled someday.”
Marcus straightened. He looked down at his tunic and brushed at the muddy sandal print. He said nothing.
“Go on.” Pedanius grinned. “Apologize. Or maybe I’ll execute you once I’m Emperor.”
Marcus’s flush deepened. Annia started looking around. Her father and old Servianus were still inside the temple. All she could hear was the flap of drop cloths in the cold wind.
Pedanius hopped down from the scaffold and rested both hands on the column behind Marcus’s head, trapping him. “It’s treason to disobey the Emperor.”
Annia glanced down at the scattering of workman’s tools that had been left behind by some careless builder, and her eyes found a small wooden mallet. “It’s astounding what a good craftsman can accomplish with just a mallet,” her father had said once. She picked it up, hefted it, then brought it down in a sharp clip on Pedanius Fuscus’s hand where it rested on the column.
He yowled, snatching his hand back. Marcus let out a yelp too, probably from the yell right next to his ear. A few red drops landed bright in the pale stone dust under their feet as Pedanius danced up and down clutching his hand, and Annia saw that she’d broken his thumbnail in half.
Father had been right. It really was astounding, what you could accomplish with just a mallet. She tossed it to the floor at Pedanius’s feet. Marcus stared at her, wide-eyed, and so did her prospective husband. He was trying to stare daggers at her, but his eyes were too bright and wet to glare. He looked like he was about to start blubbering.