Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “Yes.” He snapped his swollen fingers for his dog to follow him. “Will you see that Lucius Ceionius joins us? After my Hades, I will need to laugh.”

  Sabina hesitated. Lucius Ceionius, she thought again, but Hadrian looked so terribly worn, visibly pulling his pride and his dignity around him. When I have proof, she thought, and rose. “I will summon Lucius.”

  “Thank you.” A nod, deeper than usual, and then his fingers slid away and he went stalking off along the still canal, dog trotting in his wake. Head bent beneath the fading light, but not defeated. Not yet.

  I will save you, Sabina thought. She plucked the lotus from behind her ear and twirled it between her fingers, feeling steady and serene and lighter than air. I will save you whether you wish to be saved or not. Call it Fate, call it love, call it my final duty as empress—but I will find proof that Antinous was murdered, and I will bring you back to life.

  Go free, Hadrian said.

  This felt like freedom to her.

  VIX

  Rome

  Blood, I thought, inhaling deeply. Sweat, dirt, marble . . . Stray dogs, frying meat, cheap perfume . . . “You old bitch,” I said aloud to the Eternal City. “I’d know you anywhere by your smell alone.”

  I was home, swaying and tired, heartsick and just a little water-sick too as I disembarked onto the docks. And smiled for the first time in what felt like months, because someone was waiting for me. A tall man in a spotless toga, graying elegantly about the temples but otherwise untouched by the passing years, giving me his quiet smile. “Hello, Slight,” said Titus Aurelius.

  “You bugger!” We clasped hands in a grip that left our fingers bruised, both of us pretending our eyes weren’t full of tears. Titus seemed to know without a word being spoken that I was lost in Rome, that I might have a legion but I no longer had a home, that I was slinking back to the Eternal City unheralded because I couldn’t bear the fuss people might have made over me. He led me back to his quiet villa on the edge of the city, where his wife eyed me as though I were a wild wolf but told me there were rooms readied where I could stay as long as I liked. I sank into that luxurious bed and prayed for numbness or death, whichever came first and ended my black dreams.

  I’d been staying in that villa ten days before I laid eyes on her. A delicious hot afternoon, the sky blue and cloudless overhead. A fine day to celebrate, and Rome was celebrating. Titus and Faustina had gone to join the hubbub, begging me along, but I declined. I took a jug of wine down to the little vineyard at the edge of the villa, halfway to drunk and aiming to get the rest of the way there by sundown. Out here I had no company but the budding vines, the birds wheeling overhead, and a moss-grown statue of Priapus, who leered over the vineyard with his huge jutting phallus. Randy old bastard. “Send a woman my way,” I said, toasting him. “Been a long time since I’ve had one.” How long? Months before Bethar fell, surely. Executions, siege walls, and cartloads of wretched slaves hadn’t really put me in the mood for bed-sport.

  Priapus sent me a woman, all right, but that donkey-pricked god had a sense of humor because the one he sent was hardly out of girlhood. She was just a spot of dark green speeding through the vines, and I squinted because I was halfway down the jug by that time and couldn’t really focus until she came skidding to a halt in front of me. “You look familiar,” she greeted me without preamble. “Who are you?”

  “A conquering hero,” I answered, “or so they tell me.”

  She evaluated me as she stretched the arch of first one bare foot and then the other. A tall girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with reddish hair stuck in sweat-damp tendrils to her neck. She wore a rough green tunic kilted up for running, showing a pair of hard and muddy feet. Not a pretty girl, but she looked like an Amazon: slim-hipped, broad-shouldered, long-legged, sweating, and fierce. “Are you Vercingetorix? The one staying with us?”

  “Us?”

  “I’m Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger.” The memory surfaced even as I heard the name—the memory of a little girl with a trigon ball and a bloody nose.

  “You’ve grown.” I ducked my head in the best bow that I could manage while sitting down. “And yes, I am Vercingetorix.”

  A huge grin broke over her face. “I’d have recognized you sooner if not for the hair!”

  “It’s growing back.” I had prickles of reddish stubble all over my head now that I’d stopped brutally razoring my scalp. “I’m surprised you remember meeting me. You were only seven or eight.”

  “You’re the one who started me running!” She bounced a little on her toes, as though ready to sprint off through the vines again. “It does help me keep my temper, you were right about that.” A lightning flash of a scowl. “Most of the time.”

  I tilted the jug, filling my cup. I was still stuck at the faint-blur stage of tipsy, and what I wanted was serious-blur. What I wanted was numb.

  “You’ve been staying with us near ten days.” Annia tilted her head. “Why haven’t I seen you before now?”

  “Because I’m avoiding people in general and your mother in particular.”

  “A conquering hero of Rome, terrified of my mother?” Annia bent down to touch her toes in a quick stretch. Always moving, this one. “You’re the terrifying one. The slave girls say you ravaged every third virgin in Judaea, and killed every second man.”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “I doubt it.” Annia flopped down cross-legged like a boy. “Why are you here?”

  “In Rome? Because the Emperor ordered it.” I took another long drink, holding the fiery wine in my mouth to feel the burn. I didn’t even know if the Tenth Fidelis was still mine. My orders when I was done finishing my sad business in Syria hadn’t been very extensive—return to Rome for the triumphs. Maybe afterward I’d be relieved of command. I didn’t really care.

  “No, I meant why are you here?” Annia twisted her sweat-damp hair into a rope, lifting it off her neck. “The triumph is going on right this moment. The chariots should be making their way to the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus—the whole city’s turned out to celebrate the victory over Judaea. They’ve turned out to celebrate you, you and the other commanders. So why are you getting drunk in a vineyard?”

  She had big blue-gray eyes with red lashes, like a sword blade with a fan of blood on it and every bit as piercing. I rotated the cup in my hand. “I declined the triumph.”

  “Why?”

  I gave a bark of a laugh. A triumph—the highest honor a soldier like me could ever dream of. I’d marched in a triumph behind Trajan, and I’d ached to stand where he stood: the victorious commander in his chariot laden with charms, his face daubed by red paint and his head crowned by a victory wreath; rose petals in his path and cheers deafening his ears.

  Well, today it could have been me. But I’d told Hadrian I’d rather be buggered with a rake.

  The Amazon was still waiting for her answer, and not too patiently either.

  “I want nothing,” I said at last around my blurring tongue, “except to forget every single thing I did in helping to crush that rebellion. Every death, every execution, every battle, every massacre. I won’t ever forget, but I’ll be damned if I celebrate it.”

  Annia pointed at my wine. “Can I have some? My mother won’t let me try unwatered wine.” She saw me hesitate. “If we’re talking about massacres, I’d like a drink.”

  “Can’t fault your logic.” I poured a measure of wine into the spare cup. “Just a sip,” I began, but she tossed it all down the way she’d seen me do it. A minimum of spluttering, too.

  “Ugh.” She passed the cup back. “Thank you. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to march in the triumph, but doesn’t that mean you’ll never be honored for the good things you did? It can’t all have been bad. My cousin Marcus says only those recorded are remembered—if you aren’t recorded in the triumph, no one will remember you were a hero in Judaea.”<
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  “Suits me fine if history forgets I was ever there. God knows I never will.” Another swig. I really had to be drunk by now, even if I didn’t feel it. Because I hadn’t talked this frankly even to Titus. “I lost everything I had in Judaea.”

  “What did you lose?” Annia flexed her muddy feet one at a time, the afternoon sun dappling her freckled skin.

  “My friends died. My wife died. My girls . . . are gone.” I drank again for Dinah and Chaya, another of my endless prayers for their happiness. “So you see”—I tried to muster some kind of smile for Annia that didn’t make her recoil with its bitterness—“you see why I’m damned if I’ll take a triumph celebrating everything I’ve lost, eh?”

  Annia considered that, regarding me with her sword-colored eyes. “But Judaea had to be subdued. We heard terrible stories, the atrocities. Well, nobody told them to me, but the slave girls get positively ghoulish when they think no one’s listening.”

  “There were bad things done,” I acknowledged. “On both sides. Tell it truthfully, maybe we didn’t have to put down Judaea. But they couldn’t have timed their rebellion for a worse moment. Hadrian had no mercy in him right then, not at the beginning.”

  “Because of Antinous?”

  “Did you know Antinous?”

  “I loved him.” She smiled, and both the smile and the words pierced me. But this was a sweet pain rather than a thorned one. “He always said I was the first friend he ever made in Rome. And he saved me and my cousin Marcus from getting beaten to a pulp by Brine-Face—”

  “Brine-Face?”

  “Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.” She drew out the last name scornfully. “The golden boy.”

  “No, he’s not.” The very thought offended me. Antinous was the golden boy, not that arrogant little prick. “Pedanius Fuscus is a sack of shit in a silk tunic.”

  “Oh, I like you.” Annia grinned and looked at the wine again. “Can I have some more of that?”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “Why, because I’ll get tipsy and then you’ll try to ravish me?”

  “No!” I said in horror.

  “Well, good. You couldn’t, anyway.” She tossed down another swig, slanting a brow at me in warning. “I know exactly where to kick you if you try.”

  I felt a smile tug at my lips, the first one I’d felt in quite some time. “So why aren’t you at the triumph?” Didn’t girls her age like the chance to dress in their finest, go out into the city, get admired? With Titus’s heaps of gold and her mother’s bloodlines, surely every young buck in the city was groveling at her feet.

  Annia grimaced, taking another sip of wine. “I’m avoiding my cousin Marcus. He’s become an utter ass ever since he put his toga on. He’ll spend the whole triumph dancing attendance on my father—hours and hours of seeing him nod like a donkey and pontificate like an old man. Ignoring me.”

  “Ignoring you, eh?” I tilted my wine cup at her, since she had the jug, and she filled me up. It soothed me somehow, talking of a girl’s innocent problems. “Why does he ignore you?”

  “Because he’s an ass? We’ve been playing together since I was four years old—he’d come toss a trigon ball with me, and we’d do lessons together, and we made a curse tablet—and the moment he put on a toga he turned into a bundle of starched laundry. He just looks down his nose at me and avoids me.” She grimaced, taking another swallow of wine. “This is disgusting.”

  “There’s a reason civilized people water it.” The sky was swimming over my head, and I was definitely at the blurred stage of drunk now—but curiously, I no longer felt quite so much like falling on my gladius. I rolled my head at Annia. “So, this boy just became a man—”

  “He thinks so.” Her gaze was looking just a bit glassy. A good girl like her wouldn’t have my tolerance for strong wine. I made a note to haul her back inside before she fell unconscious or I did, because then Faustina really would think I’d gotten her daughter drunk and ravished her. God help me then.

  “So your friend Marcius—”

  She giggled. “Marcus.”

  “Right. Won’t look at you anymore, won’t visit.”

  “He’s got more important things to do.” Annia slid down on her side, propping chin on elbow, and I saw the flash of hurt on her face.

  “Suitor?” I guessed. “Not just friend?”

  Her head jerked up and she glared. I raised my eyebrows. Finally she shrugged, taking another gulp of wine. “He always said he’d marry me someday. But we were just babies. He doesn’t want to anymore.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a clever girl, but you don’t have a man’s perspective.” It was the least I could offer after she’d succeeded in lifting my despair. “You want to know why your Marcus avoids you? Because he doesn’t trust himself to keep his hands off you.”

  “Not Marcus. He’s a Stoic.” She had some trouble with the S. “He believes in controlling the passions of the body.”

  He sounded a proper little prig to me. I let out a snort. “If there’s anything that’s all but impossible for a boy of sixteen or seventeen, it’s controlling anything when a girl like you is nearby.”

  She laughed, and then she hiccupped. “I don’t think so. He models himself on my father!”

  “You think your father didn’t feel the same at that age? He kept a mistress—that skinny housekeeper of yours, in fact.”

  Annia dropped her cup. “Galeria Lysistrata?”

  “She had a different name, then. She took your mother’s appellation after they married, as a sign she wasn’t cross the affair was over. They all stayed good friends.”

  Annia looked stunned.

  “Young men take mistresses, or they visit whores, but good girls like you they can’t touch. So your friend Marcus stays away.” I looked at the jug and saw we’d killed most of it. “Just ask him. Watch his ears turn scarlet.”

  “They do turn scarlet when he’s embarrassed.” Annia giggled, and her chin slid out of her hand. She held out her wine cup. “This disgusting wine is growing on me . . .”

  “That means it’s time for you to go back to the house, Annia Galeria Faustina.”

  I stood up a trifle unsteadily and hauled her to her feet. She staggered, hiccupping again, and I had to sneak her into her chamber and pour her into her sleeping couch. She slid almost instantly into sleep, and I stood looking down at her. She slept on her back, her feet twitching even in slumber. If her Marcius or Marcus or whatever his name wasn’t throwing himself at her feet, he was a fool.

  I tucked a coverlet around her shoulders, a little awkwardly. I’d never tucked my own girls in, and I’d certainly never tucked my girls in when they were drunk. I wished I had.

  Annia started to snore. I smiled a little, rustily, and then I padded out and headed for my own bed. I slept on my back too, and I could hear my own snores begin before I even dropped off—but curiously enough, I slept without dreaming. I didn’t stir till Titus and Faustina returned that night.

  For the first evening since I’d arrived I didn’t stay in my chamber like a surly bear curled up for the winter, but tugged a fresh tunic over my head and went downstairs to join the bustle of welcome. Annia stood in the atrium, and Titus had paused unwinding his toga and cupped her cheek in his hand, turning her face toward the lamplight. “Annia,” he was exclaiming, “your eyes are red as fire. Are you ill?”

  “Can you dim that lamp?” Annia winced, and massaged her head through a tumble of sleep-tousled hair. “Ow . . .”

  “How was my triumph?” I said hastily. “You two look very fine!”

  Titus was still looking at Annia. He looked at me, and when he spoke his voice was ominous. “Vercingetorix,” he said, “is my daughter hungover?”

  I looked at Annia and she looked at me. A mistake, because she started to laugh. She had
a raucous, rough-edged shout of a laugh, and the sound of it sent a grin spreading slowly over my face. She leaned against a pillar, shaking with laughter under her father’s disapproving eye, and I . . .

  I felt those barbs of agony and guilt and accusation recede, just a little. Just enough to let me smile at the red-haired girl whose company had made my sleep dreamless.

  There was the faintest quiver of mirth around Titus’s eyes, but his face remained stern. “Vix?”

  Still smiling, I moved past him to where his wife stood tall and beautiful in midnight-colored silk and sapphires, her eyes as sparkling blue as the jewels. I seized her hands, and I bowed over them. “Faustina,” I said, and I put the smile away to give her every drop of honesty I had. “Your daughter is indeed hungover. She came to no harm, but it was my fault entirely, and I ask you not to punish her. I offer sincere apology.” A deep breath then. “I would apologize as well for hauling your husband away to a cell on your wedding night. I swear to you on the gates of Hell, I will die on a blade before I ever see harm come to your family—even if the Emperor himself stands in the way.”

  I lowered my head and I kissed her astonished hands, sealing the oath. Because it was an oath—I’d never let the black fate that took my wife and daughters touch my friend’s. Never.

  Then I moved past Annia, who was still laughing and wincing and rubbing her head all at once. I tousled her red hair in passing, and I headed for the bathhouse. I still felt sick and heartsore when I thought of Judaea and all that passed there . . . but I also felt like a bath and a shave.

  ANNIA

  A.D. 136, Autumn

  Hadrian’s Villa

  “Dear gods, what are you wearing?” Those were the first words out of Aunt Sabina’s mouth, when Annia alighted in the gardens of the Emperor’s villa.

  “A dress.” Annia looked down at herself, feeling mulish and embarrassed all at once. “Mother said I was old enough to be choosing my own.”