“Bother my health.” Hadrian gave him a slanted look, warning him not to speak of it further before others. He had always projected such endless energy; he hadn’t wanted anyone but his physicians to know when his health troubled him. “You worry like a mother!”
“You never listened to your mother,” Empress Sabina interjected. “You just might listen to Antinous.”
“Promise me,” Antinous persisted, despite the unspoken warning. “Promise me you will not overstretch yourself?”
“A small promise.” Hadrian twined his brown hand about Antinous’s neck and kissed him, though the chamber was full of guards and courtiers. Antinous heard the Praetorians stir uncomfortably, but he made himself ignore it. You do not need the world or its approval, not as long as you have him.
Away from the Eternal City, at least they had a smaller and less openly disapproving audience. The Emperor had a skeleton entourage on this round of traveling. The young and adventurous of the court still scrambled to stay at his side—Antinous was amused to see flamboyant Lucius Ceionius declaring himself much taken with the glories of Carthage, acquiring triplet Nubian slave girls who followed him about dressed in nothing but gold anklets. But old Servianus and any number of worthies who usually fought to travel at the Emperor’s side had stayed in Rome.
Because of the Emperor’s whore, thought Antinous. No matter how often he told himself the insults didn’t matter, they still made him go rigid on the inside. Not just from pain, but from the effort it took not to flinch.
At least here the contempt was quieter. And whenever the eyebrows did rise—when Hadrian captured Antinous’s hand as they rode side by side, or received a deputation while lying with his head in Antinous’s lap—Empress Sabina fixed the starers with a cool gaze until the grimaces disappeared. May all the gods love her, Antinous thought, because I certainly do.
Carthage, and the lands around it. Long loops on horseback through that sparkling, never-ending rain. “A cut in taxation for those who would utilize all this outlying land,” Hadrian decided. “For those who cannot be urged to farm the outlands, there will work on the walls.”
“More walls?” Antinous asked. “You’re mad for walls, Caesar!”
“I intend to mark the borders of Numidia and Africa, just as I marked the border of Britannia and Germania. I’m reviewing the stone quarries; there should be abundant granite—”
“Have you considered using mud-bricks?” Empress Sabina perched on the edge of the table to peer at the plans. “Might fare better under this heat.”
“She’s right, Caesar,” Antinous was quick to chime in. Hadrian gave a blink, and Antinous held his gaze. How many times had he said it to his royal lover? Married to one of the most intelligent women I’ve yet to meet, and you’ve limited her to waving at crowds and sitting alone in a villa?
Not anymore. Antinous didn’t know what had made Hadrian decide to bring the Empress, but he was glad of it. I owe you so much, Lady, he thought, watching her slim fingers trace the map where Hadrian planned his wall. I will do what I can to pay it back.
“You may have a point, Vibia Sabina.” Hadrian said grudgingly, and tapped the map where she had traced a line. “Mud-bricks. I shall investigate.”
Sabina smiled her thanks behind Hadrian’s head, and Antinous dropped her a wink.
A sunny, rain-scented spring saw them through Carthage, and then the Imperial party moved on. The winds of Numidia smelled of sand and cinnamon, ruffling the hair and sparking the blood, taking breath from the lungs and firing the soul . . . It was on a sweltering day late in the month of Juno that Antinous and the Empress watched Hadrian make inspection of the legions.
“He’s something rather special to see, isn’t he?” Empress Sabina said. “I haven’t watched him address the legions before.”
“He’s a wonder,” Antinous said softly.
They both fell silent, watching: the Empress from her Imperial carriage, Antinous astride his bay colt at her window. For days they had watched the Third Augusta go through its paces, and the men stood in serried rows waiting their emperor’s verdict. And striding up and down before the men, Hadrian: huge and powerful in a spit-polished breastplate and greaves like any soldier in the field, his hands as callused as any that gripped a sword in the crowd below. And he was bellowing at them, not in rage but in fierce approval.
“Military exercises,” he shouted, “have their own rules, and if anything is added or subtracted from them, the exercise becomes too insignificant or too difficult—”
“I’ve heard that before,” Sabina said. “From who?”
Antinous’s stomach twisted. “Guess.”
“—and of all the difficult exercises,” Hadrian bellowed on, “the most difficult was the one you performed! Throwing the javelin in full battle dress.” He paused, eyes raking the crowd, and he gave a slow salute of his clenched fist. “I approve of your eagerness!”
The men were too well disciplined to cheer, but Antinous saw a fierce ripple go through them. Hadrian grinned, raking a hand back through his hair, and the resemblance tore Antinous’s heart in its similarity.
“Vix,” the Empress said slowly. “Vix said that, about the javelin exercises. At Eleusis . . .”
“Yes.”
Hadrian had moved on to single out a Spanish cohort, something to do with a wall reinforcing a new fortress. “A wall requiring much work, and you constructed it in not much longer a time than it takes to build a wall of turf!” Hadrian clapped their centurion on the shoulder, nearly flattening the man. Another of Vix’s gestures, Antinous thought, stomach still twisting knots in itself.
“I commend Catullinus, my legate! Because he directed you to this exercise, which took on the appearance of a real battle . . .” Hadrian went on striding up and down, overflowing restless energy, leaving men shuffling and beaming in his wake, and Antinous’s heart stabbed because it was his father all over. The blunt soldierly phrases instead of the scholarly metaphors; the striding and the bellowing and that stabbing gesture of the outstretched fist—
Vix to the life, Antinous thought, and his eyes stung.
“It must be a trifle odd,” the Empress mused, “seeing your lover turn into your father.”
Antinous gave a shaky little laugh. “I should be used to it, Lady. He does this whenever he addresses the legions.”
“Does he, now?”
“Yes. They eat it up.” The men weren’t quite cheering, but they were banging their spears softly against their shields to the rough cadence of Hadrian’s voice.
“However.” Hadrian stopped with a ferocious scowl, and the beating of spears stopped. “The cavalry skirmish did not please me. A cavalryman should ride across from cover and pursue with caution—”
The cavalrymen in question looked red-faced and determined, clearly ready to charge off and try again on the spot. Antinous had seen that expression too, in the Praetorians that his father had dressed down with that same benign ferocity. He had to look down at his horse’s mane again, biting fiercely on the inside of his cheek because he was not used to it, no matter how many times he watched Hadrian address the legions. I want my father, he thought, and the sight of his horse’s mane under his fingers went blurry.
“Hadrian must not realize he’s doing it,” Sabina said.
Antinous blinked his welling eyes. “Oh, he does.” How many times had Hadrian said it? I have no love for that crude lout who once dared call you a son, but he is the ideal Roman legionary made flesh. So when Hadrian addressed the legions, he looked to the legions’ best example of how to appear. All very logical, really. Except that it was like a spike through Antinous’s eyes, seeing his father appear like a mirage from nowhere.
Oh, Vix, Antinous thought with the familiar anguish sharp on his tongue. Do you think of me at all? Or did you finally get a son of your own blood from Mirah—a son to make you proud instead of shamed?
“Tell me . . .” The Empress interrupted Antinous’s bitter thoughts. He looked at her, running a finger along the ivory handle of her fan, and her face was somber. “Does Hadrian still hate your father?”
Do you find his name as painful to say as I do, Lady? Antinous thought. I think you do.
“The Emperor has learned from his example,” Antinous temporized. “His ideas—not just about how to present himself to the legions, but how to train them in peacetime, keep them occupied and fit.” The notes for the legionary manual that Vix had left behind: Hadrian had gone through them page by page in the days just after Vix stormed out, mocking every line—“The spelling, dear gods, was that barbarian utterly illiterate?” But he had had those notes compiled, documented, polished into the manual now distributed to legions across the Empire. A painful pride had risen in Antinous when he looked at that manual, wondering if Vix would ever know his enemy had made his dream real. “But yes, Lady—despite all that, Hadrian still hates him.”
“I suppose he would.” Empress Sabina was still staring down at her fan. “Hadrian doesn’t forget an insult.”
“I think he would forgive the insult to himself. But he will never forgive my father for insulting me.”
Sabina’s eyes lifted toward Antinous then. Her attention was like a weight. “Have you forgiven him?”
“Oh, yes.” Antinous felt another twist of pain go through him like a spear. If Vix were somehow transported here before him, he’d drop to his knees weeping and beg for his love. I would do anything to feel him thump my shoulder and call me “Narcissus” again. “But the Emperor doesn’t forgive those who offend me as easily as I do.”
“Is that why you don’t tell him half the insults you hear?” the Empress asked. “Don’t look startled, Antinous. I have ears—back in the Eternal City, Servianus never stopped going on about filthy catamites, and you never once mentioned it to Hadrian. Or those courtiers sniggering that you should join Lucius Ceionius when he dressed up as Jupiter, be his Ganymede with a gold cup—”
“I don’t tell him, because Hadrian would kill them,” Antinous said simply.
Sabina looked amused despite herself. “And here I thought you were utterly blind to his faults.”
“I know that he is a dangerous man.” Wasn’t that part of the appeal? The way Hadrian’s eyes glittered when he was angry, the way his fist curled slowly on the arm of his chair—it could send Antinous’s pulse racing as much as his smiles. The edge behind the charm, the power in those arms that held him so gently. “He’d kill on my behalf; I know that. And I love him, so it’s my duty to see he never does. Save others from him; save him from himself. That night with my father, he was a breath away from murder.” Sweet gods, but Antinous still had nightmares about that moment! He woke with a scream choked off in his throat, just at the moment when Hadrian swung that gladius and sent Vix’s head spinning to the tiles.
“But you were able to stop him,” Sabina said softly. “Whenever I dream of it, I wake up thanking the gods that you were there.”
Antinous was surprised. “You dream of that night too?”
“Oh, yes.”
He looked at her: as tanned as Hadrian from the Numidian sun, a dusting of freckles across her small nose, henna tattoos on her hands, and a patterned veil thrown over that elegant shorn head. “Tell me something, Lady,” he said, diffident. “Are we friends?”
“How can anyone resist being your friend?” The Empress smiled, which was not quite an answer. In her way she was as oblique as Hadrian. Another restless questing mind; definitely not the clear cup of water Antinous knew himself to be. Had you been born a man, would he have loved you instead of me? Antinous wondered.
Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps complicated questing minds needed cups of cool water in which to calm themselves. Needed uncomplicated sorts like Antinous. And my father.
Antinous was still glad Sabina had not been born a man.
“Forgive me for being presumptuous, Lady,” he dared to say, his voice gentle. “But you are lonely. I see it every day.”
She blinked, surprised. Perhaps because he had never said anything so intimate before. Antinous wondered how he dared now. Perhaps because the wear of traveling had ground away the stifling formality of Rome. Perhaps because she had become his ally, his lover’s wife so unexpectedly deciding to befriend him when she might easily have made his life miserable.
Or perhaps because they had danced in the rain at Carthage, and he had seen exactly what his father saw in her.
“You think me lonely?” Her eyebrows arched, very imperious, but Antinous was not intimidated anymore by imperious.
“I was lonely myself for so long,” he said. “I know the signs. And if you will forgive me for saying it,” he added, looking down at his horse’s mane, “you look even lonelier when anyone mentions Vix.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.” A breath. “You love him, Lady.”
The Empress of Rome gave a slow blink of her lashes, confirming nothing and denying nothing, but Antinous was used to seeing past these Imperial faces with their expressions like shields.
“I knew it even before he said those things about you, the night he discovered me with the Emperor.” Antinous shifted a little in his saddle. “You hide it well, Lady, but he was never one for concealing anything. His eyes used to follow you like a lion’s.”
She was silent a moment, looking away over the ranked legionaries, but Antinous saw the moment when she gave in to curiosity. “. . . Like a lion follows its prey?”
“No, that’s how he’d look at his wife. Hungry, a little wistful sometimes, like she was out of reach.” Poor Mirah, not even aware of her competition. “Vix watched you like a lion watches a lioness.”
“And how does a lion watch a lioness?” Sabina didn’t even try to pretend nonchalance this time.
“He doesn’t need to tend her, because she hunts her own prey. He doesn’t need to shield her, because she kills her own enemies. He doesn’t need to look for her, because she’s always at his side.” Antinous couldn’t help grinning. “And the mating is fierce.”
That earned him a cool glance that could have come straight from Hadrian. “You are impudent.”
“Apologies, Lady. I do not mean to be. I only see it because it is what I feel every day—but for Caesar.” Antinous picked up her small hand and kissed it, making enormous soulful eyes. “Forgive me?”
She laughed, rapping him over the head with her fan, and he found himself laughing too. He had never made friends easily—before Hadrian he mostly had lovers or would-be lovers, and after Hadrian he had those who despised him and those who sought to use him.
But I have a friend now, he thought, looking at the Empress of Rome. A true friend. It warmed him as much as one of Hadrian’s kisses.
An enormous roar went up from the men of the Third Augusta: Hadrian had finished his speech. He stood fist raised, sunlight blazing off his breastplate, and then he bounded down among the men. They drew back a little, awed and still cheering, but he moved among them like a colossus. Teasing and joking and generally being irresistible, Antinous thought.
“Tell me—” Sabina began to descend from her carriage, and Antinous swung off his horse to hand her down. “Would Hadrian ever take Vix back, if you asked him?”
“He would do almost anything that I asked him.” Which was why he tried so hard to ask for nothing. “But even if I asked for my father to be allowed back, and the Emperor agreed, Vix wouldn’t come.”
“Still—why not ask? We’re to travel to Judaea at some point.”
“Oh . . .” Antinous ruffled a hand through his hair. “If we travel to Judaea, I think I will be far too terrified to see him.”
“Why?”
“Because what if he kicks me away?” Looking down at her, standing at his side and barely coming to his shoulder. “I’ll likely n
ever travel to Judaea again, after all, and he’ll likely never leave it. If he spat on me there, it would be the end of all things.”
Empress Sabina said nothing. But she slipped her hand into his arm, and his sore heart eased. She was one of those rare people who was not afraid to let a silence fall, he thought, and he relaxed in the quiet comfort of her presence. By the time Hadrian bounded up, Antinous was able to offer a wholly sunny smile.
“Ha, I like a good speech!” Hadrian seized Antinous around the neck, kissing him heartily. “Shall I tell you something else, my star? I’ve just had word the Senate voted to give me the title of Pater Patriae.”
“What, again?” Antinous knew they’d voted to give him that all-illustrious title before. Very insincerely. “Do you mean to accept this time, Caesar?” It gave him a slightly wistful pang. I miss my father so much, and my lover becomes father of all the world. A sign from the gods, perhaps?
“You know, I think I shall.” Hadrian sounded delighted. “I don’t like titles I haven’t earned—Emperor Augustus turned down the title too, until he felt he merited the honor. But by now, I think I have earned it.”
Empress Sabina studied him, smiling. “I think you are right.”
Antinous looked at his ally, his friend, his lover’s wife, and wished he could give her—what? Happiness? Freedom? My father’s love? He tugged Hadrian’s head down instead, whispering in his ear.
The Emperor looked surprised. Antinous nodded. “That’s what I want,” he said firmly. Not something for himself. Something for Sabina.
Hadrian shrugged, turning back to his wife. “What if I made you Augusta at the same time as I become Pater Patriae, Vibia Sabina?”
She looked startled again—twice in one conversation, Antinous thought with glee. That had to be a record for the enigmatic Empress of Rome. “Me, Augusta? Have I earned it?” she asked, sounding wry.
Hadrian looked meditative, and Antinous didn’t nudge him this time. “I think you have,” he said. “Your work with the share farmers in Africa, bringing their complaints to my attention, and your advice on the border walls . . . My Augusta,” Hadrian repeated, sounding it out, then looked at Antinous. “My Augusta and my star. What else does a father of his people need?” He began moving toward his quarters, one arm about Antinous, Sabina gliding in their wake. “Where shall we go after Numidia, eh? Greece first, I think, but after that? I think Judaea . . .”