Mistress of Rome

by Kate Quinn

  The moonlit road was empty now, and the night was cold. Marcus closed the window.

  “Do you require anything, Dominus?” The household steward hovered.

  “The truth.” Marcus turned. “How long?”

  “A few months.” The steward hesitated. He had been running the Norbanus household for twenty years, and Marcus knew his every expression. He gestured the man to go on. “I would have written, Dominus, but Lady Lepida threatened . . . the slaves are all afraid of her. She’s—not a kind mistress.”

  One more thing he had not known about his wife.

  “Good to have the young master in Germania, Dominus. He’ll get over it soon enough.”

  Would he? “Thank you, that will be all.”

  On the desk was the rough draft of Marcus’s new treatise, completed a week before he came home. Proposed improvements to the existing inheritance laws. Marcus unrolled the scroll until he reached the words he had proudly penned the night before.

  To my wife.

  A surprise for Lepida, who didn’t understand his treatises any better than Paulinus, but who had done a fine job pretending how much they meant to her.

  Marcus reached stiffly for a pen. He cut the nib down to a fine point and uncorked the ink. He scratched out the dedication in two precise lines. No scribbling. Scholars didn’t scribble. Scholars didn’t scribble and senators didn’t weep, so he set the scroll aside to dry and folded his hands.

  LEPIDA

  LEPIDA!” “Lady Lepida!”

  “You’re back!”

  I flung my arms out: the star guest at one of Lady Lollia Cornelia’s sensational dinner parties. “Darlings, it’s been desolate without you.”

  They hastened to assure me that it was Rome that had been desolate without me, and I wafted in on a wave of adulation. Ah, this was what I’d been missing: the parties, the suitors, the jewels, the gossip . . . I made three trysts that night. Kept two, left the third waiting. How much fun it would be to coax him back into good humor next time!

  “The Emperor has taken himself back to Dacia,” Marcus told me, not bothering to look up from his scrolls. “He’ll be gone a long time, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll find plenty to do until he comes back.” I swanned out just in time to see Sabina scurry behind a pillar. She avoided me these days. If I said a word to her she just stared back with huge eyes. How had I ever borne such a child?

  “She’s an utter idiot,” I shrugged to Aemilius Graccus over bedside wine. “Just like her father, really. What a pair.” I collapsed into laughter as he improvised a wicked little impromptu verse on the subject of my idiot husband and daughter. All Rome was laughing by the end of the week.

  “I’m fair game,” Marcus told me pleasantly. “Sabina is not. If I hear another verse about my daughter, I’ll have you in the courts regardless of what pretty stories you threaten to tell. Is that understood?”

  “Oh, yawn,” I drawled—but I kept Aemilius’s little versifications away from my daughter after that. Better not push Marcus too far.

  We dined weekly at the palace through that fall, but without Domitian’s powerful presence it wasn’t the same. The Empress was far too impeccable a hostess to be entertaining—oh, how I quivered when I saw her emeralds, though!—and Lady Julia was as silent and twitchy as Sabina. Grown ugly, too; wasted away into a positive stick. Hadn’t she once petitioned her uncle for permission to join the Vestal Virgins? Best place for her. What man would want her now? But the Vestals wouldn’t take widows, even Imperial ones. Pity.

  Oh, I was full of plans. I was back in Rome and life was good, and everything was falling into place exactly as I wanted it. This was what I’d been born for!

  THEA

  PAULINUS left Brundisium at the end of that October without a word to me—it wasn’t like him, but I took it with a shrug. Some crisis in the Praetorian barracks, maybe. He’d been very distant and preoccupied lately, hardly visiting me at all. Perhaps some crisis in the family—any family with Lepida Pollia was bound for havoc. Or perhaps Paulinus was tiring of me. That was all right, too. I liked him, but there were one or two other young tribunes already angling for my company. They embarrassed my master.

  “You’re a musician, child,” Praetor Larcius chided me. “An artist. You should have an audience, not—clients.”

  “I prefer to think of them as suitors, Dominus.” Having been a whore, and not so long ago, either, I knew the difference between a suitor and a client. Besides, I might not be able to choose the audiences I sang for, but I could at least choose the men who courted me, and it was something. Slaves have to make do with whatever choices life allows them. “What’s wrong with entertaining the occasional nice young officer?”

  “Yes, but you only entertain them if they give you expensive presents.”

  “I have a son to save for,” I shrugged.

  “But that kind of thing can give a singer a bad name.” Sighing.

  “You might be a slave, but that doesn’t mean you won’t want to marry someday.”

  “I don’t ever want to marry.” The law didn’t recognize slave marriages. Husbands and wives could be separated when a master died, and never see each other again.

  Larcius’s bright eyes saw through me. “What a cynic you are, child.”

  “Yes, I am, Dominus.” I dropped a kiss on his plump hand, feeling a little ashamed of my occasional flash of resentment. So there might be times I didn’t want to sing for his friends, times I just wanted to curl up with a book or take my son for a walk like an ordinary girl. I wasn’t an ordinary girl, I was a slave—and a slave lucky enough to have a very kind master.

  “Well, perhaps it’s best you don’t want to marry,” Larcius was saying. “I can’t think of a man anywhere who would marry you with that beastly child.”

  “What’s he done now?” My son was five years old, and he was a horror. An absolute horror, and he looked just like . . . never mind.

  Too late.

  A mistake, thinking about Arius, though it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. Wasn’t like getting torn apart with white-hot pincers anymore; no, the pincers were cold now. Instead of tearing, they just . . . probed.

  It was all the memories, I thought irritably as I bowed away from Larcius. The way they didn’t fade, not the least little bit. I could still remember the rough texture of his jaw. I could still remember his every scar, drawing my imaginary fingers over each puckered line. Arius kissing me, Arius bloody and shaken in the arena, Arius surprising me with his short deep-chested laugh. Arius, stamped into my bones.

  In my early days on the waterfront, all I’d thought about was getting a message back to Rome, to my lover. “I am in Brundisium; come and take me away.” But I hadn’t had money in those days, not enough to send a letter. Later on, when I had money and sent a wild passionate letter on the Via Appia north, I had no response. Weeks of waiting, breathless and heartbroken. No response. Why had I been surprised? Arius couldn’t read. Gallus sifted all his mail, and he had no reason to pass on any letter of mine. I’d softened his prize gladiator, made him human and that much more likely to die. Gallus had probably chuckled over my letter and then torn it to scraps.

  I wrote no more letters. What good would it do? Even if Arius somehow got one, he’d never be able to come to me. I’d never get to Rome, because Larcius loathed both the city and the stuck-up wife who spent his money in a vast house on the Aventine, and he’d made his nest in Brundisium instead. So I stayed in Brundisium, too, singing and smiling, entertaining the occasional nice young patrician, getting belated news of my lover’s fights and breathing easier every time he beat the impossible odds again.

  Forget him.

  That’s what I prayed every night, even now. Oh, God, let me forget. Let me forget. It’s easier that way. It’s easier to forget and stop the aching.

  But God, the cosmic joker, had said No. Never forget. Know everything about him, down to the bottom of his soul. Have the knowledge, when you can’t ha
ve him. Have the memories, when you can’t have him. Have a son with his smile, when you can’t have him.

  And He was just, because I’d known all along that to love a man more than God is to play with fire.

  APPALLING place, isn’t it?” Arius shrugged as Gallus twitched the curtains shut on the ox-drawn palanquin. He’d been to Germania before, during his first provincial tour after he’d sheared Lepida Pollia bald and Gallus had judged it wise to leave the city for a time. Five years later it looked the same: cold and crude and new. Wind-lashed huts clung to barren hillsides, and in the valleys the Roman towns looked bright and garish. Shackled tribesmen worked fields full of icy mud, turning flat accusing eyes on Arius when he passed.

  “They’re a sullen people, these Germans.” Gallus snuggled deeper into his furs. He had made such a killing on Arius’s last tour of the provinces that he had judged it time for another. “Absolute barbarians—just like you, dear boy. Don’t try to run away again, will you? I’ll shackle you if I have to.”

  Arius had tried running away, during that first tour. His face and his gladiator tattoo had given him away within five miles, and after that Gallus kept him watched whenever they left Italy. He didn’t try running anymore. Not much to run for.

  He fought four bouts through the arenas of Germania that winter, taking on champions in wolf skins and champions in horned helmets, and he left them all dead. After his bouts Gallus rented his presence out at dinner parties where he met governors and legates, charioteers and senators, painted patrician women who took him eagerly to bed and soft-eyed boy tribunes who tried to do the same. But he liked to duck out of the stifling banquet halls into the dark frosty gardens, looking up at the roof of stars that seemed much bigger and sharper than they ever did through the haze and smoke of Rome. Germania. Gaul a little to the left, and Britannia a little to the left of that.

  Agrippinensis. Not much of a city. A bout with a German, then a banquet at the crude new palace of Governor Lappius Norbanus. The walls might be wooden instead of marble, and the lamps might smoke from rough German oil, but there were oysters in wine sauces, lark tongues braised in herb butter, pastries stuffed with olives and cheeses . . . and mead from Britannia, cold and frothing and lethal. Arius swallowed it down, remembering his brothers getting roaring drunk on cold mead, and watched a great many young tribunes get roaring drunk on it, too, at the governor’s banquet. The governor’s young cousin, he saw with grim amusement, was drunkest of all. A Praetorian—those soft palace guards could never hold their wine.

  “I saw you fight today,” the Praetorian challenged. His face was flushed, his white lawn synthesis already wine-stained, eyes bright with hostility. “Left it a bit late, didn’t you?”

  “Still won.” Arius didn’t look up from his plate.

  “I wagered a hundred denarii on you. If you’d lost—”

  “By Jove, Paulinus.” Governor Lappius descended on his young cousin, all beaming smiles and false ringlets. “Don’t terrorize our guest. He’ll rip you to bits with his bare hands, and there’s not one of us who could stop him.” A wink at Arius. “Don’t mind my young cousin, Barbarian. Broken heart, you know.”

  “She could have written me,” Paulinus was muttering, swaying as the slaves helped him back to his own couch. “Not a bloody word—faithless cow—”

  “Poor Paulinus,” said the governor, amused. “I’d best send him to bed before Saturninus pounces on him. That’s Saturninus there”—importantly—“governor of Upper Germania, you know. He fancies boys, especially drunken pretty ones like Paulinus. He’ll be gone in another year anyway. Saturninus, that is.” Lappius adjusted his wig, chest swelling as his noble guests watched him chatting so cozily with Rome’s greatest gladiator. “Here’s a tidbit you won’t hear back in Rome, Barbarian. Saturninus will be dunned out of the governorship by year’s end! Domitian doesn’t like boy-fanciers, you see. Imagine that! A pretty youth’s better for buggering than any girl, and you’ll not find more than a handful of men in Rome who don’t agree with me, but for once our Emperor’s one of them. When I think of Emperor Nero and his boys! Well, it’s a new era, and men like Saturninus are certainly out in the cold.” Lappius pointed to a tall, balding, militarily erect patrician who sat frowning over his wine. “All he’s got to drown his sorrows in now are drunken young men like Paulinus! When he’s dunned out of the governorship and it’s all the news in Rome, Barbarian, tell them you heard it first from me—”

  “You think I care,” said Arius, “who governs any of your wretched provinces?”

  Lappius’s smile slipped, but he hitched it back into place. “Excellent,” he said brightly. “The dancers are ready. Lovely, aren’t they? Any of them are yours, of course, if you want them.”

  Arius returned to his mead, indifferently watching the lithe brown bodies writhing nude across the mosaics. From Agrippinensis to Taunus on the morrow. A Dumnonian champion awaited him, having publicly sworn he would send the Barbarian screaming to his gods. Arius half hoped he would.

  DECEMBER melted into January, marking a drunken, miserable winter for Paulinus. The drunkenness and misery vanished overnight when the news came roaring to his cousin’s palace: Governor Saturninus of Upper Germania had launched a revolt. He had proclaimed himself Emperor, and at the head of an army of legionnaires and tribesmen he was on his way to Agrippinensis.

  Thirteen

  UPPER Germania now!” Senator Scaurus murmured. “What’s next? Gaul? Spain?”

  More murmurs. Business had conducted itself as usual in the Senate House, the rebellion barely mentioned. Saturninus was dismissed as an upstart, a disappointed old soldier with a few blue-painted natives trailing in his wake. But more senators than usual had lingered after the conclusion of business, clustering together in the marble tiers as they nervously fingered the purple borders of their togas.

  “If Egypt goes then we’ll be blockaded—”

  “—and with the Emperor off in Dacia—”

  Scaurus’s voice again, low and panicky. “I say we negotiate with Saturninus now. Pacify him. Who knows what may happen? Do we want another year like the Year of the Four Emperors, senators falling to the wayside right and left because they sided with the wrong claimant? Do we—”

  “The Year of the Four Emperors.” The voice of the god Augustus’s grandson cut through the commotion like a knife. Eyes turned toward the gray-haired figure sitting some distance separate, drawing idle circles on the marble rail with a pen. “I wondered when someone would mention that. Twenty years ago, and still none of you can speak of it without quaking.”

  “Easy for you to say, Norbanus,” Scaurus snapped. “You don’t scrabble for your life like the rest of us when the heads start to roll. What do you know about quaking?”

  “I know that my son is in Lower Germania as we speak.” Marcus was still looking down at the pen. “I know that he has a touch of Imperial purple in his veins, just as I do. I know that Governor Lappius appointed him unofficial commander of Lower Germania’s legions—in deference to his name. Which means that when Saturninus makes his account of those who threaten him, Paulinus will head the list.”

  A little silence. Marcus Norbanus labored to his feet, old and tired in his senatorial toga, his face fallen into crumpled lines and his shoulder very stooped. But his voice still reverberated around the Senate, and everywhere the little clusters of frightened men turned toward him.

  “The Year of the Four Emperors. The year after Nero; the year of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian. Most of us remember it quite vividly. I certainly do. Galba confiscated our family estates, Otho sent my father a polite invitation to commit suicide, and Vitellius threw me in a cell where I spent three months nursing a dislocated shoulder, reading whatever books my few remaining friends could smuggle me and wondering if I would be assassinated. And when Vespasian marched in and decided I was harmless enough to be let out, I was verminous, orphaned, paupered, crippled, and alone—since most of my family had decided to divorce themse
lves from the ‘protection’ of my Imperial name.”

  Rustling. Marcus smiled wearily.

  “So yes, I remember that year. A year of greedy usurpers who murdered, rioted, and dragged Rome through hell. We look at Saturninus and wonder if he’s another Otho or Vitellius. We look around at Egypt and Spain and wonder if there are any more Othos or Vitelliuses out there, waiting to pounce. Some of us will start wondering how fast we can get out of Rome. Some of us will start wondering if we can cut deals with Saturninus. Some of us are wondering if we can play both sides and come out on top whoever wins. And I guarantee you”—his eyes drifted across the rows of senators—“that some of us are wondering if we can’t just let Domitian and Saturninus kill each other off, and grab the throne ourselves when they’re dead.”

  One or two pairs of eyes flickered.

  “But, wondering aside, none of us wants another Year of the Four Emperors, do we? Not I. I have a son to lose now, and a daughter, and if a dungeon cell turned my hair gray at thirty-three then imagine what it will do to me at fi fty-three.” Another ripple of muffled laughter. “Even those of you who secretly think you’d make a better Emperor than either Domitian or Saturninus—do you really want another war? I don’t think you do. Not when you count the cost.” Marcus’s voice rose suddenly, snapping out to the far reaches of the room. “But that’s what you’re giving us—war—every time you meet in frightened little groups and whisper about the wisdom of giving way. You pave the road for war, and I won’t have any part of it because I—hate—giving—way.” The eyes of Augustus the God bored through them all. “Not to an ambitious little runt like Saturninus. So until you’re ready to throw your undivided support behind Domitian—because undivided support is the only thing that quashes ambitious little runts with armies—until you’re ready to do that, fellow senators, I’m going home. I’m going home to see my daughter, and wonder if your bickering has doomed her to be spitted on a German pike.”