by Kate Quinn
I was sprinting for a horse, and Antinous was right on my heels.
The Emperor, I heard later, narrowly escaped dying. A roof caved in on him, but he managed to jump out of a window, though one of his visiting consuls was crushed by a falling beam. A great many others were killed too in the collapsed wreckage: dignitaries from Rome, Antiochene officials, visiting embassies. I heard screams from people trapped in their fallen houses, but I never stopped.
Until I rounded a corner and saw that nothing was left of the tenement where I’d left Mirah and our daughter but a heap of rubble.
SABINA
Sabina’s reed sandals made no sound on the path, but Hadrian spoke without turning to face her. “How did you like Egypt?”
“Beautiful.” She halted beside him where he stood in the shade of a laurel tree, hands clasped behind his back as he stared at the glassy surface of the little spring. “I took a barge down the Nile like Queen Cleopatra. And I stayed in Alexandria, Bubastis, Karnak—”
“Yes, Plotina sent me word of your… exploits.”
“For such a virtuous woman, Plotina has a fevered imagination.”
Hadrian’s eyes lifted from the pool at his feet and traveled deliberately over Sabina from top to toe. “Aren’t you cold?” He eyed the thin linen shift stopping well short of her ankles, the ankh pendant looped about her throat, the golden tan she’d picked up riding a camel to see the great pyramids where the old pharaohs had been buried.
“The cold feels lovely after Egypt.”
“You should still cover yourself like a decent woman. And what’s that?”
“This is Neferu.” Sabina scratched the slim neck of the cat in her arms. Hadrian’s ever-present pair of hunting hounds whined, and the cat stretched her elongated body and hissed at them. She had sleek dark fur, a haughty triangular face, and huge ears pierced with gold hoop earrings.
Hadrian ran a hand down Neferu’s long back; she purred and arched into his fingers. Horses and dogs adored Hadrian, Sabina had noticed often enough—she wasn’t surprised that cats did too. “I’ll never understand why the Egyptians put earrings on their cats,” he observed.
“Neferu’s a sacred cat. A gift from the priest at the Temple of Bastet when I stayed for the rites in Bubastis.”
Hadrian’s brows contracted. “More orgies and strange rituals?”
“Actually, I was trapped for two weeks when the Nile flooded unexpectedly, and I pitched in to help gather the harvest before it could spoil. The priests invited me to their rites afterward, in thanks.” Sabina lifted scornful brows. “And since when is any god you haven’t heard of automatically worshipped with an orgy? You didn’t use to be so provincial, Hadrian.”
He gave her a cold glance but returned his eyes to the spring. Sabina tickled Neferu’s chin, gazing about. The Gardens of Daphne were famous: a walled gorge a few miles from Antioch, studded with laurel and cypress groves even in the winter, artful cascades of water spilling between the sculpted banks. Sabina could hear soft voices and pattering footsteps as Antiochene couples idled the winding paths. But Hadrian stood alone, staring into the spring.
“The steward says you spend a great deal of time here,” she said. “The few hours you’re not working.”
He ignored her. “Will I go to Egypt someday?” he whispered, not to Sabina, and tossed a small coin into the spring. He crouched down, watching intently as the water’s calm surface rippled.
“So what is the all-seeing Castallian Fount telling you this time?” Sabina put just a touch of mockery into her voice.
“The ripples tell me I will visit Egypt.” Hadrian’s eyes never blinked as he watched the pool smooth to glass again. “But not for some years, which is a pity. I would like to see the Nile in flood. And I’ve long thought the style of their buildings interesting. The hypostyle hall I’ve heard about, in the Temple of Amun at Karnak—I may add such a hall to my villa, when I finally build it.”
He had not spoken so civilly to Sabina in more than a year. Then again, I’ve hardly spent more than two weeks of that year in his company. If her husband would rather sit hunched over his ambitions than travel the world, Sabina had no intention of following suit. She rather thought she might go to Epidaurus next. The Asclepeion was famous; people came from all over the world to be healed there of their ills. I could work in the dream hall with the sacred snakes; see if the priests are really bilking the pilgrims out of their money for false cures. If they are, I’ll write Trajan in a heartbeat and put a stop to it…
“I haven’t heard you talk about your villa in a long time,” Sabina said finally. If Hadrian could be civil, she was more than happy to follow suit. “Are you finally going to begin building?”
“When I have the funds. When I am Emperor.”
Sabina nudged away the hounds who were now sniffing at Neferu’s dangling tail. “Still nursing impossible hopes, I see.”
“Impossible?” Hadrian looked over his shoulder with that superior expression that always made her fingers itch. “The Castallian Fount assures me it is inevitable.”
“It’s a pool of water.” Sabina’s voice was blunt. “You are dreaming if you think Trajan will make you his heir.”
“What do you know about it? My efforts have been invaluable to his campaign; without me his legions would have no supplies—”
“Yes, and I’m sure he’ll give you a clap on the back and another consulship when he’s done. But not the Empire.”
“Plotina assures me—”
“Plotina isn’t here to whisper in Trajan’s ear. I am, though. Even off in Egypt, I wrote Trajan letters every month, and I’ll bet he reads mine with more pleasure than Plotina’s. Unlike her, I make him laugh. What do you think we laugh about? Or rather, who?”
Hadrian whipped about with his hunter’s speed, raising one hand. Neferu lifted her pointed face from Sabina’s arm and hissed.
“Hit me if you like,” Sabina said. “I’ll show Trajan the bruise. I’m to dine with him this evening. He invited me. Did he invite you?”
Hadrian lowered his hand. His face was expressionless. “You will regret this, Vibia Sabina.”
“When you’re Emperor?” Sabina turned, skirting the dogs, and glided away. “You talk to your puddle about that, and I’ll talk to the Emperor. Let’s see which of us has better luck.”
CHAPTER 23
VIX
It was two days before I found them.
I tore at the heap of stones with my bare hands. Boil pitched in silently beside me, his voice subdued as he organized my men into teams. They worked at my side, joining forces to shift some chunk of rock too big to move alone. Antinous mutely moved whatever stones were small enough for him to lift. I ignored them all, digging frantically through the heap of stone and wood and brick that had been a tenement building. Four stories had all come crashing down, and dear God, my Mirah had been on the bottom. I found the still and battered body of a woman, and my heart hammered, but it was an old woman; her hair only looked red because it was bloody. The woman’s daughters wailed, and I realized there were more people digging through the wreckage, neighbors of mine who had lived in the rooms above or beside me, looking for their buried families. All through the city, people were digging and calling for husbands, sisters, children. There were looters all through the city too, men combing the wreckage for valuables. I saw a young man eagerly searching the pockets of a woman with a crushed leg lying in the street—sifting through her clothes, ignoring her whimpers of agony. I came up silently behind the young man and snapped his neck between my hands. Antinous stared at me, but I couldn’t find a word to say.
Boil made me sleep sometimes. I tumbled down on the ground in my cloak and slept till I could rise and start digging again. My hands were two bloody slabs of meat. “We won’t find her, Centurion,” a big African who was one of my best fighters told me, and I ignored him.
On the morning of the third day, Boil found a foot.
A small high-arched foot and a trim ankle, pee
king out from a heap of stones and fallen beams.
A lean Spaniard I’d had to flog last month for insubordination put a hand on my shoulder. I shook it off and fell on the pile of ruins, clawing the stones away. Two splinters ran under my thumbnail clear up to the knuckle, but the pain was distant.
Boil and the massive African grunted to shift a fallen beam, while I uncovered my wife’s little foot, then a shin gray with dust, a leg with a tattered woolen hem lying limp over the knee…
A voice sounded somewhere from the heap of fallen beams, weak but still waspish. “Took you long enough, husband.”
The wall had fallen, but the brick oven hadn’t. Mirah had grabbed up little Dinah and huddled against the oven, and then the roof had come down. The falling beams should have crushed them both, but two had fallen at an angle over the stove. A rain of stones had trapped Mirah’s ankle, but the beams and the oven had given her a tiny pocket of protected space. My men were cursing, yelling, straining to shift one of the beams, while I peered down through the gap I’d made in the stones. I could just see a strip of my wife’s hair, a section of bruised forehead.
“You’re hurt.” My heart knocked like a drum in my chest as I saw the blood. She had a broad smear of it across her cheek, dried dark brown.
“No,” she said, her voice hoarse. “That’s birth blood.”
“What?”
“I had a good knock from those beams. The baby started coming before the stones even settled.” Her head moved, and I saw my wife’s eye glaring up at me through the gap. “You swore this one would be born in a house. I didn’t think I had to mention that the house should still be standing.”
“Move faster!” I screamed at my men.
“We’re fine, all three of us.” Mirah’s voice was tremulous, but it was also, God help me, cheerful. “I helped the midwife when my cousins had babies, so I knew how to tie off the cord…”
“Move! Move!”
A creaking squeal of timber, and the beam slid to one side. I jumped down where its end had rested, reached into the gap in a tumble of sliding shale, and lifted out my wife: filthy, bloody, tired, and smiling.
“Water,” she rasped, and then I crushed her against me. My heart was still hammering, and I still heard the screams in my head that had begun when I found her foot in the rubble. Then I realized the screams were real, and coming in angry wails from the pair of bundles in Mirah’s arms. One was Dinah, her swatch of black hair just visible over the shawl Mirah had wrapped her in. The other—
“We have another daughter.” Mirah gave me a screaming little bundle of limbs still covered in dried birth blood and inadequately swaddled in her mother’s blue shawl. “Thank God she came easy.”
I could hear my men whispering. “That’s a good omen, that is,” the Spaniard was nodding. “Born in blood and ruins, but still kicking. Just like us.” Boil shouted for someone to bring food, water, and bandages for the ankle Mirah held gingerly off the ground, and Antinous was off running before any of the men could jump to it. All I could do was hold her and tremble.
“I promised you’d have a midwife,” I told Mirah numbly. “I promised you’d have a bed—and proper food—”
“Well, there was food of a sort.” Mirah looked down at her round breasts. “My milk came in as soon as she was born, and then I could nurse them both.” She lowered her voice. “I even squeezed some out to drink myself. Two days without water, well, you do what you can. I thought we could name her Chaya? It just means alive.” Mirah’s chin quivered for just an instant. “She could have died.”
“You all could have died,” I said, and felt tears sliding down my face. My wife, who had just been dug out of her own grave with a crying baby in each arm, ended up being the one to comfort me.
TITUS
Titus was just passing the long pool in the gardens of Senator Norbanus’s house when a wave rose up from the surface out of nowhere and splashed his sandals. He stopped, looking back at the water, but the surface sparkled innocently. He turned toward the house again, and another wave came up and wetted the hem of his toga. This time he heard a giggle.
“I thought I’d offended the fountain’s water nymph,” he said aloud. “But I’m fairly certain nymphs don’t giggle.”
“I think they do.” Faustina’s sleek blond head rose over the pool’s marble edge at his feet, and she grinned up at him. “Nymphs are very silly. All they ever do in myths is run around drinking with satyrs and periodically get turned into trees.”
“A fair point. Isn’t it a little cold for swimming?” Spring had arrived, but the sunlight was still thin on the new grass. “Nymphs can’t catch cold, but I believe senators’ daughters can.”
“I like it. The cold water’s like getting hit by lightning—afterward I get warm and sleepy and doze all afternoon.” Faustina cocked her head up at him. “You look very serious and official.”
“I’m afraid I’m in a very serious, official mood right now. Is your father inside?”
“Yes, but my mother will murder you if you disturb him. He isn’t feeling well, and she’s trying to get him to rest.”
Titus bit back a curse. Several days of pondering and wondering before he’d decided to consult Senator Norbanus, and now he’d have to come back later.
“Is it important?” Faustina folded her wet arms along the pool’s marble edge.
“I don’t know. I was hoping he could tell me.” Titus shifted the armload of scrolls and tablets he’d toted along in one arm. Almost too much to carry alone, but he hadn’t wanted to trust them to a slave. “Something about the finances for the public baths.”
“What?”
“Nothing worth disturbing your swim for—”
“Financial irregularity?” Faustina said briskly.
“Well, yes.”
“Maybe I can help.” She climbed the marble steps of the pool, water shedding off her shoulders and dripping from the edge of her linen tunic: Venus rising from the waves. Of course Venus was usually naked, but Faustina’s tunic had been soaked into such clinging transparency that it didn’t really hide… anything. Titus coughed, keeping his eyes firmly on the ground as she strode unselfconsciously before him into the house. The little girl he’d carried home from Sabina’s wedding at age five had done quite a lot of growing up. He felt more comfortable when she picked up her discarded palla and swathed herself in it.
“So what have you got there?” Faustina sank into a chair in the atrium, indicating his armload of scrolls. “Let’s have a look.”
“I wouldn’t dream of boring a lovely girl with dull financial matters.”
“If not dull financial matters, it’ll be suitors with dull poetry,” Faustina warned. “I know which of the two I’d rather have.”
“I thought most girls liked being courted.”
“You’d think so.” Faustina sent a slave into the house for drinks. “I thought I’d love it. I remember all the men hanging around after Sabina, and I couldn’t wait till it was my turn. Now it is, and I find it’s boring. The old men drone politics at me, the young men drone war stories at me, and they all try to look down my dress.”
“You could try not to look quite so lovely,” Titus suggested. “Though that would take rather a lot of effort. Cut off your hair? Wear hemp tunics and soot? Black out a tooth?” He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it’s useless.”
“That’s why I like you, Titus.” Faustina tilted her head, delighted. “Any man can tell a woman she’s beautiful, but you’re clever enough to do it when her hair looks like a wet mop. Here, have some mulsum”—she tugged the nearest scroll out of his hand and replaced it with a cup of hot honeyed wine from the slave—“and I’ll have a look at your papers.”
Titus gave up and sat beside her. He didn’t have any other duties today, after all. And besides, Sabina’s last letter from Antioch had asked him to keep an eye on her little sister. According to my father she’s got more suitors now than Helen of Troy, and I’d hate to see her follow in my foot
steps and lose her head over someone impossible. No danger there, from the look of things.
Faustina pulled her chair up beside Titus’s, pointing to a line of the scroll in her hand. “I assume there are receipts to match all these entries.”
“Yes, right here.” Titus pointed in turn, taking a sip of the warm honeyed wine. “Where did you get so good at numbers?”
“My mother taught Sabina and me to do the household accounts,” Faustina said absently. “Sabina didn’t apply herself much, but I did. What’s that tablet there?”
“Copies of orders made from a quarry. If you look here…”
Half an hour later, Faustina blew out a speculative breath and looked up. “Well,” she said, “you’re being cheated.”
Titus looked over the spread of scrolls, tablets, slates, and scribbled scraps now occupying the entire table. “I know.”
“I suppose you’re not being cheated, really,” Faustina amended. “But Trajan’s public baths are. Someone’s skimming off the building funds, and they’re skimming a lot.”
“I came to that conclusion myself last week,” Titus said, glum. “The question is, who’s the thief, and what can I do about it. Because this isn’t some freedman lining his purse with a bit skimmed off the top.”
“It comes down to a question of access,” Faustina said. “Who has the reach for this kind of skimming?”
“I’ve looked into that matter all week, and I can tell you that not one of my underlings could be responsible for anything on this level. They simply don’t have the influence—I don’t have it myself.” Titus looked at Faustina in surprise. “Did your mother instruct you in the finer points of financial fraud as well as household accounts?”
“Of course. Slaves and freedmen are always trying to skim.” Faustina twisted her wet hair into a rope, pulling it over one shoulder. “Flour stolen from the storeroom or marble stolen from the quarry delivery; it’s all just money. And it seems to me that if you want to find your thief, you have two choices. Start looking up the ladder…”