Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  My Emperor.

  My son.

  Surely I didn’t have time to see all that. Surely it could have been no more than a split second, the instant I kicked down the door and the instant their eyes flew to me. But I swear I had time to see Hadrian’s lips trace my son’s ear and see Antinous’s mouth turn and hunt for his, before Antinous’s head jerked up and he let out a cry at the sight of me. The cry went through me like a knife, and I lunged at the Emperor.

  Praetorians were the only men in Rome allowed to keep their swords in the Emperor’s presence, and I had mine now, the hilt of my gladius gripped in both hands. I was ripping across the room, roaring as I came, and Hadrian’s head snapped up, but he was empty-handed and would never be able to stop me. It was Antinous who stopped me, lunging from the bed with liquid speed. “Stop!” he shouted, and his shout broke into a sob as we collided and went down with a great crash.

  He struggled with me, wrestling for the gladius, and somewhere distant I heard the clatter of the wooden bridge across the little moat, the thudding footsteps as the other Praetorians came running. Antinous scrabbled for my sword and I struck him away, rolling to my feet. I stood at the foot of the bed with sword still tight-clenched in my fist and my chest heaving as Antinous drew himself up naked and vulnerable beside the sleeping couch. My eyes blurred, skittering past him to where Hadrian still lay.

  He leaned back deliberately against the cushions, folding his arms across his chest with slow precision. He must have called off the other Praetorians while Antinous and I were struggling, because I could hear them tramping back over that damned footbridge. My ears roared like waterfalls.

  “Well,” the Emperor said at last. “Apparently your son was mistaken, that you would be staying in the city tonight.”

  My eyes flew to Antinous. He flushed scarlet all over his naked skin: a young and defiled Apollo with the lyre lying broken at his feet. “How long?” I whispered.

  “I—”

  “How long?”

  His eyes filled with tears then. “Since Eleusis.”

  The better part of a year, and I’d never known. I’d never even suspected. “You hid this?” I asked, and my whisper cracked.

  Antinous’s voice was as broken as mine. “I already knew what you’d say.”

  “Not you. Him.” I pointed at Hadrian. “You hid this?” Why hadn’t Hadrian rubbed it in my face at once: the debauchery of my son?

  “Your son wished secrecy,” the Emperor said, still quite at ease.

  And I’d thought it was foolish overpainted Julia Balbilla buying Antinous gold chains. He had the chain about his neck, and another about his wrist. Chained like a bitch-hound, and used like one. As the Emperor had once threatened to chain and use me.

  My eyes went back to Hadrian. “Oh, you bastard,” I breathed, the words leaving my throat like a mouthful of glass shards. “You bloody-handed stone-hearted sick-minded bastard.”

  “Don’t,” Antinous whispered. “He didn’t—”

  My roar could have shattered stone. “HE MADE YOU HIS WHORE!”

  I came at the Emperor again, and this time I think I would have run him through. I would have opened him throat to groin, gelded him and made him eat his own cock, and then the Praetorians outside could have struck the head off my shoulders and mounted it on a spike. But Antinous flung himself between us again. “He didn’t force me, I came to him of my own—”

  “You stupid boy,” I snarled. Antinous still wrestled for the sword; I released my grip on it so he staggered back, and then I lashed him across the face and sent him stumbling. “Stupid boy,” I said as the gladius fell from his hand, and realized I was near weeping.

  A heavy hand spun me, and now it was me stumbling as Hadrian slammed me against the wall. I hadn’t even seen him leap up from the sleeping couch. “I will spill your guts across the floor with your own blade,” the Emperor said calmly, one arm braced across my throat and one foot braced on my sword hilt, “if you lay hand on Antinous again.”

  “Do not say his name!”

  “I’ll say it whenever I like.” He kicked my gladius across the room in a clatter of steel against marble. “Do not think you have the right to give orders here.”

  “I have every right!” I tried to swing at him but he swatted my fist away, his arm still sinking like an iron bar into my throat. “He’s my son,” I rasped, swinging again. “You think I’ll allow him to be turned into your toy?”

  “Sweet gods, Vix—” Antinous’s voice rose. “That’s not what I am!”

  “It’s all you’ll ever be in the eyes of the world. A boy who spreads his cheeks. And I’m not allowing it, not for one moment.” I looked at Antinous over the Emperor’s shoulder. “You’re my son, and I’m taking you from this murdering stink-pit whore-master if I have to drag you in chains.”

  “Did you adopt him?” Hadrian asked conversationally.

  It stopped me, and it stopped Antinous, who had begun half-hysterically to shout over me. “What?” I said, and my balled fist dropped.

  “It’s a legal matter.” The Emperor dropped his arm from my throat, stepping back to stand quite naked and at his ease. His eyes glittered. “Antinous is not your son by blood. So, did you adopt him formally?”

  “I—” Law? Who talked of such formalities? He’d been an orphan who needed shielding, so I’d taken him in. It had been as easy as that. “Your buggardly law doesn’t—”

  “No.” Antinous’s voice was hoarse, but he spoke clear. “No, he never adopted me formally.”

  “Then he is not entitled to the obedience a son owes a paterfamilias.” Hadrian spoke with cool logic, as if he were droning some point of legislation in the Senate. “Antinous is a grown man of legal age, without guardian, without father; a citizen of Rome. You may not drag him anywhere, Vercingetorix, in chains or otherwise.”

  “Spout law all you want,” I spat. “He’s my son.”

  “I’m not!” Antinous shouted, and he might as well have pinned me to the wall with a spear. “I’m not your son, Vix! You made that clear from the first day. I’d have called you Father, damn it. I worshipped you. But you weren’t having it. You wouldn’t let me call you by anything but your name. You never did. So why bother claiming me now? The only reason you care is because you fear what the world will think of you for raising a bum-boy.”

  “No—” My voice cracked. “Hell’s gates, no, I didn’t mean that—”

  “I’m not your son.” Antinous’s voice sank to a whisper, and that whisper sank hilt-deep into my heart. “I never was.”

  I stared at him. I stared and stared, looking at my boy. My boy. “Antinous—”

  “I stay here.” Antinous raised his chin; he came to stand at the Emperor’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with the one who needs me.”

  “Needs you?” I pushed away from the wall. I was shaking everywhere, and dear God—dear God, what had happened to my son? What poison had Hadrian whispered to him? “Is that how he got you into his bed, by playing your sympathy? He threatened once to fuck me, Antinous; spread-eagle me and use me like a bitch-hound if I didn’t bend to his will, and that’s who you want in your bed?”

  “I don’t believe you,” Antinous flung at me. “You’d say anything, you—”

  “I’m not lying!”

  Hadrian never blinked. “Don’t listen, Antinous. He’d say anything to turn you against me.”

  “You bastard,” I snarled. “You filthy—”

  “Get out,” said Antinous. Tears pooled in his eyes, but his voice was steely as a spear. “Get out, Vix, just—get out.”

  Children. Why does any man want them, whether they come to him by blood or by love? Either way, they cut your throat in the end. You’re a father with a defiled son, you have a father’s right to rescue him from a madman who will ruin him or kill him or both. It was the truest thing in the world. But he looked at
me with amber-brown eyes—the boy who wasn’t my son any longer—and he turned away from me. Walked to the side of a power-mad whoremongering liar. I looked at him, and I wanted to shake him, scream at him, beat him to a pulp. Call him fool, child, son. But the sight of him was killing me where I stood, ripping my chest further open with every breath.

  Burying my friends in Parthia, nearly losing Mirah in the great earthquake of Antioch, even losing Trajan—none of it had hurt like this.

  “Lie in his bed then.” My voice scraped. “You won’t stay there long. He’ll discard you like an old tunic once he’s bored with your arsehole, and find himself a new one just as tight.”

  Antinous flinched, but I dragged my eyes away from him to Hadrian. The Emperor, who had already dismissed me from attention and was shrugging into his tunic. “You will die screaming,” I said. “And that is a promise.”

  “You raised a hand against me,” Hadrian said pleasantly. “And you insulted Antinous. I’d nail you to a cross for that, but I will leave your fate to the son you just spat on.” He looked at my son. “Antinous?”

  My son turned his back on me. “Let him go,” he whispered. “Just—let him go.”

  I felt every word like another blade through my chest. “How much of this was about getting at me?” I asked the Emperor.

  Hadrian looked at Antinous, and he curved a hand around my son’s pure young face. “Nothing was about you,” he said, and kissed Antinous between the eyes. “You’re nothing.”

  I actually laughed. There’s a point, in rage or pain or both, when there’s nothing left but laughter. “You’re good,” I said. “Hell’s gates, but you’re good. You nearly had me convinced these past years, the way you play-acted the good man. I really thought you might be capable of change after all. Capable of . . . more. What a fool I was. Almost as much a fool as you’re making of my son.”

  Maybe I’d have stalked out then, exited this grotesque little tragedy like the bit player I was. Maybe I’d have grabbed for my sword and tried one last time to carve Hadrian’s heart out. But there was the incongruous sound of laughter outside, a woman’s laughter and a man’s too. “It can wait until tomorrow, Lady,” a voice was protesting. “The Emperor does not wish to be disturbed—”

  “Nonsense, the bridge is down, that means he’s free to be seen. This is too good to wait!”

  My Praetorians spoke in an uneasy unison mumble. “I wouldn’t go in, Lady—” But when did Sabina ever listen to anyone? Her light footsteps crossed the bridge, I heard her cooing briefly at the dogs, and then she came tripping into the chamber. She’d attended a funeral today; some ancient former consul whose death had merited fanfare and speeches—she still wore the same slim black gown she’d worn to the solemn procession; the same ebony circlet around her sleek shorn head. She was reading from a scroll in one hand and turning half over her shoulder to speak to Suetonius, who had followed her in, smiling.

  “Caesar,” she said with another laugh, still half-turned, “I’ve finally had a chance to read Suetonius’s treatise, The Twelve Caesars! It’s—”

  Sabina looked up from her scroll then at the scene frozen before her. Antinous still naked and gilded in the lamplight; the Emperor beside him with his rumpled hair and beard; me disarmed and broken with my sword across the room and my cloak half torn away. Sabina’s blue eyes swept over everything, and that was when the rage swamped me. Pure fire-red rage, drowning even the broken stabbing pieces of love and guilt, because I knew her face so well, better than any woman’s alive—hadn’t I told her that at Eleusis?—and there was no surprise on her face. Not one drop.

  You knew, I thought. Oh, you bitch. You knew.

  “Your husband is bedding my son,” I said, and was pleased at how level and conversational my voice came out. “But you knew that.”

  The ebony circlet about her hair glittered as she lowered her head a moment. “Vix,” she began softly.

  From the whirl of molten rage in my heart came perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done. But I was so far past sense, so far gone into wretchedness—all I wanted was to share this agony, dish back some of what that bastard of an emperor and his bitch of an empress had leveled on me. So, I didn’t think twice; didn’t think of Mirah, or the girls, or my own life. Just stretched my mouth into a taut, vicious grin and lashed out with the only weapon I had.

  “Don’t worry, Sabina. I’ll take an apology from you, as long as you get on your knees to make it.” My hand shot out; I gripped her arm and I yanked her up against me. “Of course, you’re used to going on your knees for me.”

  Sabina went stiff against me, as though she’d turned to stone. I looked over her head to Hadrian, and I ran a deliberate hand down his Empress’s hip. “Maybe you made my son your whore,” I said. “But your wife’s been my whore for years. How do you like that, Caesar?”

  Hadrian’s face didn’t move. But it hardened slowly, till he looked like one of the marble statues of himself that dotted this whole blasted villa.

  “I broke her in, as a matter of fact,” I taunted. “Long before you married her. Made her bleed, but she didn’t bleed long. She took to it like a duck to water. She was moaning under me three times a night in her father’s house. In Dacia too, after you were stupid enough to marry the bitch and think you were getting a virgin bride. You were my commander, the fine legate on his grand horse, and I was the common legionary fucking your wife half the night and spending the other half laughing at you. And the entire legion was laughing with me.”

  “Vix!” Sabina’s voice snapped like a whip as she wrenched herself away from me, but I was too far gone to stop.

  “You can tell him about Selinus, if you like.” I looked back at her. “You had a black dress that day too, in mourning for Trajan, and I had it up around your hips in no time. And Eleusis, let’s not forget Eleusis, he was off seducing my son while I was riding you among the trees—”

  “You lie!” she cried out. “Nothing happened in Eleusis, nothing—”

  I smiled. If Hadrian could lie, so could I. “What about the rest of it, Lady? Deny that, you deceitful bitch.”

  She was silent. Her gaze went to Hadrian, standing marble-faced with beasts raging in his deep-set eyes. To Antinous, white and shocked. Even to Suetonius, turned to a pillar at the doorway, still clutching his precious manuscript. Our gruesome tableau of fury and shame and pain.

  Hadrian’s foot was still resting on my gladius. Slowly he leaned down and took it up, and I just hoped he would run Sabina through first so I could see her bleed. His face quivered, the affable mask I’d seen him wear for so long utterly shattered, and I didn’t care. Let him kill me. I should have died with my emperor, Emperor Trajan—should have put a sword through my own breast and thrown myself on his funeral pyre rather than serve his monstrous successor.

  Antinous moved. Very slowly, he put two fingers on Hadrian’s fist, white-clenched about my gladius. Just two fingers, resting gently on the Emperor’s rage-heated skin.

  Hadrian shook his touch away. He raised the gladius, leveling the tip at my teeth. He’d ram it through my mouth, and I’d have time to feel my teeth splinter before the blade tore through the back of my skull.

  “Go ahead.” I spread my arms. “Kill me.”But Antinous sank to his knees. My son, on his knees before that man. My heart snapped then like an old twig.

  “Caesar,” he whispered, leaning his head against the Emperor’s knee. “Spare them. Please.”

  ANTINOUS

  It was done.

  It was done, and as soon as they were alone, Antinous crumpled to the floor. He folded his shaking arms about his head, shutting out the world and all its cruelty, and felt the sobs come. He sobbed like a child, rocking back and forth, naked and cold in a room that smelled of agony and shame.

  Father, he thought, oh, my father!

  But Vix was gone. And Vix had never been his father.

&
nbsp; Antinous had been the one to hold the Emperor when he sobbed at Eleusis. Now it was Hadrian’s strong arms that slid around him. “Oh, my star,” he said quietly. “Don’t waste your tears.”

  “I want my father,” Antinous wept. “I want my father.”

  “He does not want you.” The Emperor’s wide hand smoothed his hair. “But I do. Is that not enough?”

  Antinous felt the Emperor pulling him from his huddle against the floor, pulling him against a broad chest that smelled of Imperial purple dye and hunting dogs. Antinous sobbed his agony into that chest, Hadrian’s cheek against his hair, the Emperor apparently content to sit in the wreckage of his ruined bedchamber as long as Antinous had tears to shed.

  And he had many—for Vix, for Mirah, for his sisters. All lost to him.

  Everyone lost but Hadrian.

  “Oh, my star,” Hadrian said again, and kissed his swollen eyelids.

  “‘My star,’” Antinous echoed. His voice was hoarse with misery, but he had no more tears left to fall. “Why do you call me that, Hadrian?”

  The first time he had ever dared call the Emperor by name, much as he had always longed to. It had not seemed right, somehow—but from the kiss Hadrian pressed into his hair, perhaps the Emperor had been longing to hear it as much as Antinous had longed to say it. As much as he had longed to call Vix Father.

  “You talked of the stars, that night on Eleusis,” Hadrian said. “The stars in the sky, in all their beauty. But I saw only one star.” Another brush of the lips then, kissing away Antinous’s last tears, so tenderly. Hadrian was rarely tender; his passions were more likely to bruise and inflame than soothe or comfort. “I saw my star, and it was your face.”

  ANNIA

  Rome

  “Good aim.”

  Annia leaped to catch the trigon ball as it bounced off the garden wall, spinning to see who had spoken. A legionary, she thought, standing at the top of the garden steps—tall and weathered-looking in a well-worn breastplate, and he had a lion skin tossed about his shoulders. Russet hair, a shade or two darker than Annia’s, and gray eyes that looked at her curiously.