She had not.
Plotina exhaled sharply, looking up from Dear Publius’s letter. The little fountain splashed softly behind her, the double lane of cypress trees waved their bare black branches in the breeze, but the Empress of Rome took no pleasure in any of it. Her pleasure in the day had been spoiled.
“Niobe,” she snapped at the slave girl just holding up a piece of household cloth, “unpick that seam and do it again.”
“Yes, Domina.”
I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation, Dear Publius wrote, and went on to other things. A lighthearted account of the hunting he had been able to do now that Sarmizegetusa had been reached and the legions encamped around it in siege. But Plotina put the letter away. A waste to read Dear Publius’s letters when she was in a bad mood. Besides, she had a better idea how to spend the afternoon…
The Empress of Rome sat still for half an hour longer, gazing at the spreading slope of the gardens, deep-purple stola blowing around her feet. The wind picked up, keen and cold, but none of her women complained, merely hunched deeper into their shawls and continued their work as she tapped her letter slowly against the bench.
“Fetch me my new undersecretary from Athens,” Plotina said at last. “Bassus, his name is? I wish to consult with him about this new alimenta program.”
Taking charge of the project herself would give her oversight, information, access. I trust you to make arrangements for Sabina’s donation, Dear Publius had written. And she would. Surely there were far better uses for a hundred thousand sesterces than the feeding of a lot of lazy runny-nosed children in the provinces?
No doubt former Empress Marcella would call it meddling. Plotina called it duty.
“Come along,” Plotina said cheerfully to her women, rising. “It’s far too cold to work outside. Why did none of you say so?”
“Yes, Domina,” her household muttered, and filed back into the palace in her wake.
SABINA
“You must not be riding much in your wagon,” Hadrian noted. “You’ve gotten very brown.”
Sabina looked down at her tanned arms. “Trajan likes it.”
“I don’t.”
Sabina knew what Hadrian didn’t like, and it wasn’t her tanned skin. It was the Emperor’s careless comment as he patted Sabina’s freckled cheek at the last dinner: “You’re taking to army life much better than that husband of yours, little Sabina.”
“He wasn’t mocking you,” she answered Hadrian directly. “Just ribbing a bit.”
“He has no cause to. I do my duties—I work three times as hard as any other legate in his army—”
“He knows that. He also knows you don’t care for campaigning, that’s all.”
“Soldiers,” her husband grumbled, shifting a pile of writing tablets. “All the same, Emperor to legionary. None of them has any use for a man who prefers a book to a sword!”
“Don’t take it so hard,” Sabina consoled her husband. As she had predicted to Vix, her path rarely crossed Hadrian’s more than once a day now. But she did like to drop in now and then in the evenings and share a few friendly words. Especially now that the legions were camped about Sarmizegetusa, locked in the most dull and frustrating kind of siege warfare. Which, to Sabina’s eye, looked a lot like plain waiting.
“—useless campaigns,” Hadrian was complaining. “Of course the Dacian rebellion has to be contained, but once the siege is over, Trajan’s talking about expanding the territory into Sarmatia. Sarmatia! How many years and how many millions of sesterces will that cost? These wars of expansion, they’re costly and mostly useless. Rome is large enough.”
“Oh, but we do love acquiring new provinces,” Sabina said. “And isn’t it better to keep all these legions busy rather than let them get bored and stir up trouble?”
“I’d keep them busy by other means.” The pen was tapping thoughtfully in Hadrian’s hand now. “A program of building, perhaps…”
“Trajan doesn’t want to build. He wants to be Alexander.”
Hadrian gave an uncharacteristic snort. “Every Emperor wants to be Alexander.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Dead at thirty-two with everything I built coming to pieces around my bier? No. I would settle for being—Hadrian.”
Sabina propped chin in hand. “And what’s that?”
His eyes gleamed. “Something the world has never seen.”
Sabina looked at her husband: his cropped beard, his heavy shoulders even more imposing in his breastplate, his hand restless and his eyes turned on some inner vision. What that vision might be, Sabina had no idea… but she sometimes wondered if her husband had been entirely truthful with her when he said all he wanted of the world was to travel it. He seemed to have other ideas too, ideas he didn’t share so readily. “A pity we’re stuck here until the siege is done,” she said lightly. “It’s such beautiful countryside in Dacia, I’d rather be exploring.”
The thoughtful gleam vanished, replaced by the fire of enthusiasm she liked so much better. “Gods, yes. I’ve never seen better hunting country! Wolves the size of bears; the dogs bagged a pair last week that might have been Romulus and Remus in the flesh. I’m having the pelts cured; they’ll cover my bed with tails to spare—”
“Legate.” A tribune entered, saluting and removing his helmet. Sabina saw it was Titus. “Dispatches from Rome. Shall I bring them in?”
“Yes, at once.” Hadrian gave a last sigh for the hunting fields of Dacia and returned to his writing tablet.
Sabina put her cup aside and rose. “Perhaps you will be good enough to escort me to my own tent, Tribune?”
Titus kept his eyes scrupulously away from her. “I would be pleased to do so, Lady.”
Hadrian gave an absent good night, and Sabina took Titus’s arm as they left. “Let’s stop at the stream first,” she said as soon as they were out of earshot. “I finally got Vix’s tunic off him for washing—it’s stiff enough from dirt to stand up all on its own.”
Titus exhaled a long breath but kept silent as she retrieved a bundle of laundry from her wagon. Whatever disapproval he felt of her, he kept it to himself. After the look of blank shock on his face that first night, Sabina had found herself hoping, with an intensity that surprised her, that she wasn’t going to lose him for a friend. But he still came to share food and conversation at the contubernium fire in the evenings, and if he averted his eyes from her and Vix, it seemed to be from courtesy rather than disapproval.
They had reached the stream, a winding bend of silver gone purple in the twilight. A dozen soldiers and a few women were scrubbing out helmet liners and tunics on its banks, grousing good-naturedly about aching feet and sore backs. Some looked curiously at Titus in his pristine tribune’s armor, but none glanced twice at Sabina with her plaited hair and sheepskin cloak. Why would they? She could have been a slave or perhaps someone’s freedwoman maid; just another tough and seasoned woman who followed after the legions.
Over the organized sprawl of the camp loomed Sarmizegetusa, which the men had taken to calling Old Sarm. Sabina looked up above the trees at the Dacian capital: a jagged crag of rock spearing into the dusk, crowned by a fortress. The legions had let out a dusty cheer in the road when it first loomed in the distance, and Sabina had shaded her eyes with her hand for a closer look. Rome was geometrically built, ordered around forums and hills and capitols. The Dacians had built a city that climbed almost vertically up the mountain, peaked roofs and steep streets winding around stepped terraces, crowned on top by the massive fortress where the Dacian king was now holed up with his wild-haired, wild-eyed warriors. “We’ll have it down in rubble within the week,” the engineers had boasted, but Sabina was not surprised to see the army still here a month later with no real dents put into those mountain walls.
She shook off her fancies and dropped to her knees on the damp sand of the stream bank, rinsing Vix’s tunic in the chilly water. “I don’t see many legates’ wives doing laundry,” Titus obser
ved. “Why not have your slaves do that for you? Unless you enjoy scrubbing dirt out of clothes.”
“No, not exactly.” Sabina rubbed at a stubborn mud stain. “But there isn’t much point in an adventure if you only do the fun parts, is there? Vix can’t ask a slave to polish his boots for him or repair his breastplate, so why should I? That just makes me a dabbler.”
“That settles it,” said Titus. “I do not have the heart of an adventurer.”
“You have the heart of a scholar,” Sabina offered.
“Oh, not even that. I’m thoroughly ordinary. But I don’t mind— ‘Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence.’”
“Seneca?”
He bowed assent. “I’m happy to leave the adventuring and questing to greater men than myself. I’ll be happy enough to get home from this campaign, and never worry again about keeping my tunics white.”
“Give them to me, and I’ll get them white for you.” Sabina wrung out Vix’s tunic, holding it up with some pride. “Laundry may not be the most interesting chore on earth, but I’ve gotten very good at it.”
In truth, it was all interesting. More than that—it was fun. Walking alongside the wagon drinking in the smell of the pines was fun. Helping a cursing clerk to whack a stubborn mule along the path with a switch was fun. Helping some legionary woman carry her children across a river ford, one on each hip, was fun, even when her sandals squelched for the next hour. Picking up the cheerfully obscene legionary patois that was almost a different language—that was fun too. Vix’s friends were fun: Philip, who had taught her to cheat at dice; Simon, who had cast suspicious glances when he heard her accent but since relented into gruff liking; Julius, who lied about everything and cheerfully accepted that Sabina was lying about a few things too; Boil, who had been head-hanging shy in her presence at first but now followed her around half-hoping she’d give up Vix and come be his woman instead.
And when the other legion women asked, “Which one’s yours?” Sabina could point at a tall warrior—russet-haired, sun-browned, restless, and grinning—and say casually, “That one’s mine.”
That was the most fun of all.
“I hope that’s all the mud.” She gave the tunic one last rinse, holding up the dripping weight of wet linen. “I can’t see it anymore, so it will have to do.”
The legion had bloomed into a forest of campfires, and a thousand smells rose up into the dark toward the distant stars: smoke and oil, roasting meat and drying wool, leather and sweat and manure and steel. Sabina breathed it in deep as she and Titus threaded their way through the maze of tents and fires. Does my husband love the smell of a legion on the march? She thought not. Emperor Trajan, though—yes, he loved it. And as much as Vix might complain about the Tenth and its centurions and its traditions and its smells, he loved it too.
“You stole my tunic,” Vix accused as she and Titus came into the glow of the contubernium’s campfire. “And now you’re running off with a tribune. You girls, always going for the officers.”
He sat cross-legged by the fire with his gladius across his knees. The firelight touched his hair from russet to gold, and the muscles leaped under the skin of his bare arms as he worked the whetstone back and forth. There was a trick to getting a sword sharp, Sabina knew by now. A small knife first, to scrape off any patches of rust, then a good hard session with a whetstone—long strokes for the cutting edge, small strokes to hone the point. Then oil to smooth the blade, tenderly rubbed in with a soft cloth. Anyone who thought men couldn’t tend babies, Sabina reflected as she settled beside Vix, hadn’t seen a legionary tend a sword.
“I brought wine,” Titus announced, holding up a skin. “Would I bring wine if I were running off with your girl?”
“Give me the wine, and you can have her.”
“Can I?” Titus asked. But Vix just put an arm around Sabina and snugged her in close beside him, kissing her temple.
“Where’s Simon and the others?” Sabina looked around the campfire.
“Boil and Philip have sentry duty tonight, poor buggers.” Vix picked up his whetstone again. “And Simon got picked out by the optio for some additional scouting. We have the fire to ourselves.” And later the tent, his eyes gleamed at Sabina. For once we can be as loud as we like. Countless times sharing a bed, Sabina thought, and he could still clench her stomach up like a knot with one glance like that.
Titus gave a cough and poured out the wine into tin cups, and the three of them sat lazy in the fire’s leaping shadows. Or rather, Sabina and Titus sat lazy. Vix tapped one foot restlessly against a stone and griped about the siege.
“—more catapults,” he was arguing. “Build enough, and the gates’ll come down.”
“Build any more siege engines, and we’ll be out of trees.” Even in argument, Titus was mild. “For myself, I’d just pay to get those gates open. According to Cato, ‘No fort is so strong that it cannot be taken with money.’”
“Cicero,” Sabina said lazily. “Cicero said that.” Titus’s literary references tended to elicit blank stares from Vix and his friends, but she could usually top him quote for quote.
“A night attack, maybe,” Vix was muttering, oblivious. He stared up at the black shape of Old Sarm where it reared with magnificent disdain over the surrounding detritus of camped legions, siege engines, and assault platforms. “Get a few picked men over those walls to open the gates…” He attacked his gladius again with the whetstone. Vix wasn’t really meant for waiting—a month’s worth of siege was a month too long, as far as he was concerned. Sabina came behind him and rose to her knees so she could knead at his shoulders, and his muttering broke off in a reluctant gasp. “Left shoulder, harder—I pulled something sparring today—”
“It’s always the left that knots up on you.” She dug her fingertips into the one particular muscle below the shoulder blade where he always carried the worst of his tension. “It’s never liked being demoted to shield arm.”
“They made such a fuss about fighting left-handed when I went to legion training, it was easier just to learn to fight with the right—ow!”
“Your left arm isn’t happy with it, that’s all I’m saying.” Sabina slipped a hand under the neck of his tunic, kneading the shoulder. His skin was warm under her fingers, but not from the campfire. Vix never needed a fire to keep warm. His flesh was always hot to the touch, as if the blood inside ran close to boiling.
He captured her fingers in his own, rough from the sword and oily from the polishing cloth, and gave them a quick squeeze as he continued his rant against the Dacians. “Get me over those walls with a rope—”
“I give up.” Sabina abandoned the massage. “There’ll be no relaxing you now. At least not till later, when I can get the clothes off you.” She crawled around to his other side, surveyed the sword lying across his knees, and stretched out to lay her head in Titus’s lap instead.
“—have those gates open,” Vix was still grumbling.
“Oh, Hades, give it a rest,” Titus said. “The city falls, or it doesn’t. Likely it matters very little.”
“What do you mean it matters very little? I didn’t waste a summer of my life marching through Dacia if all we’re going to do is march home with nothing show for it!”
“Who says you have nothing to show for it? It’s been a rather nice summer, full of fine weather and lovely scenery and vigorous exercise. It’s even convinced me of the occasional pleasures of army life.”
“Me too,” said Sabina, her head still in Titus’s lap. At the beginning she had been mortified to discover she could stand only an hour or two of marching before she had to climb back in the wagon to rest. She had rubbed her sore feet and bandaged her blisters and cursed at her own aching muscles, unable to believe how long and stolidly the legionaries could march—carrying weapons, armor, and heavy packs to boot. But slowly she felt her muscles strengthening as the campaign went on, and now she could walk all day on her tough new feet and have breath left over to sing a goo
d dirty marching song. She sometimes made up obscene new verses and taught them to Vix and his friends.
“None of this is worth anything,” Vix was proclaiming at length, “if we haven’t got a few heads on spikes to show for it at the end. What else did I join the legion for—the canings and the pay?”
“You really are a barbarian,” Sabina informed him.
“I concur,” Titus agreed. He had begun to stroke Sabina’s hair, very lightly, as if afraid she would brush him away. She closed her eyes instead, comfortable. “No need to do anything drastic about Sarmizegetusa, Vix—we know they haven’t got a water source up there; sooner or later they’ll get thirsty.”
“Not when they’ve got pipes to bring their water in.” Vix lobbed a new chunk of wood into the fire, sending another drift of sparks skyward toward the white sparks of stars in the sky.
“True, and there’s a heated discussion about those pipes every night in the Emperor’s tent. I stand in the back with message cases while he argues with all his legates.” Titus was still stroking Sabina’s hair—he had a lovely light touch. His wife will be a lucky woman. “Legate Hadrian wants to poison the water supply, but it’s unreliable, and the Emperor wondered if the pipes might be big enough for a few men to slip through and under the wall at night, but the diameter is too narrow—”
Vix threw back his head and laughed, tossing his sword in the air in an exuberant overhand toss and catching it again on the way down. Sabina’s heart squeezed, looking at him. “I love the Emperor,” Vix said, still laughing. “And I love you, Titus. But you think too much like nobles. Poison, night raids—think like a barbarian for once! Break the damn pipes!”
“Only possible if you know where they come out,” Titus said. “We don’t.”
Vix grinned. “But I do.”
CHAPTER 14
TITUS
“You think we haven’t considered breaking the pipes, lad?” Emperor Trajan sounded kindly as he looked at Titus. “There’s no access.”