“Nothing much. Nothing disastrous,” she whispered back. “If I were forced to tell.”
I felt a pulse of anger that Simon had entangled his favorite niece in such dangerous business. “How much is nothing much?”
“Enough.” She cupped my cheek in the dark. “Will you go to Egypt with Antinous, Vix? Do what Simon asks of you?”
“Why?” I wanted her answer for that question. Not Simon’s answer; hers. “Why do you want it of me?”
“Because I have watched you here for five years, and I see my husband in pain.” There had been tears in her eyes. “You are half-alive, struggling to balance between Rome and Judaea, and there can be no more balancing. Come to us. Come to us, and let it be done.”
My throat closed.
“Rome is a disease.” Mirah moved forward in our bed so her lips touched the hollow of my collarbone. I could feel the dampness of her lashes against my skin. “Cut it away from you, and you will be victorious.”
“Victorious over what?” I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of her hair. We’d touched less and less, over the past years—the fragrant softness of her flesh against me was making my heart race like a boy’s. “Why does going to Egypt with the Emperor even matter? You truly think I can turn him away from these plans of his for Judaea, through Antinous?”
She pulled away from me, just far enough so that our noses still brushed. “No.”
“Then why—”
“You have to prove yourself,” Mirah said. “Do this for my uncle Simon, and he’ll trust you. That’s where you’ll come back victorious. A man of Judaea at last.”
I gave a harsh laugh. “Prove myself trustworthy? He once trusted me enough to guard his shield arm!”
“Don’t judge him for growing hard, Vix. Hardness is what wins rebellions.” The word was out, hanging there in the dark. Rebellion. And in my thoughts, something like an eagle’s cry still shrieked, Treason!
“Besides, Uncle Simon is kind, too.” Mirah’s arm slipped about my waist under the blankets. “He’s giving you this chance to save Antinous, before you break with Rome. And you’ll succeed, I know it! You’ll bring Antinous home, and I want that, Vix. I want him to come to God, so he can come home to us. So he can grow a golden beard, fall in love with a beautiful girl, dance at our daughters’ weddings—”
My long resentment eased painfully in my chest when she said that. You want him back, Mirah? Truly?
“—and you’ll stand by Simon when he takes arms against Rome,” Mirah went on. “Vercingetorix ben Masada, my warrior for God.” Kissing the center of my chest, she whispered in Latin. “Judaea Victor.”
I cupped the back of her head, twining my hand through her hair. “You see all that?”
“I do.”
“When did you turn prophet?” I asked. But when had any of this happened, really? When had my friend turned from legionary to rebel? When had I turned from Praetorian to spy?
You have no more oath to Rome, I reminded myself. If I had, it would have been different—Mirah would never have asked me to break a sworn oath. But I had no oath to betray. Hadrian had made sure of that.
She was right. I was half-alive and more than half-crushed in this eternal struggle between Rome and Judaea; between my past and my family.
Time to choose.
“I’ll go,” I said, and moved over Mirah in our marriage bed and kissed her. We’d spent too many nights lately lying back to back in the darkness, but that night I made love to my wife, and it was like the old days. It hadn’t been good between us since I’d stopped soldiering; that was the blunt truth. But now I’d be a warrior again, and for something better than the empty glory of Rome, and it was good.
“More tracks!” The cry of another huntsman broke my thoughts, and Mirah’s smooth phantom flesh shivered away until I felt only the rough mane of my borrowed gelding. The Emperor’s dogs were milling up ahead, and I saw Hadrian swing off his horse in an arc of purple cloak to peer at the ground. “The lion ate here!”
Just hearing his deep, self-satisfied voice made my blood begin a slow burn inside my veins. I hoped he wept tears of humiliation when Judaea went up in flames, when he was forced to give it up, forced to fail as he so rarely failed at anything. Because I didn’t intend to fail. If I was breaking with Rome, I’d take a whole province with me.
Golden wings flashed through my mind, and I blinked away the thought of the Tenth Fidelis’s eagle, so proud and unyielding in my hands. “If Judaea rebels,” I’d whispered to Mirah sometime during that last tender night, “the Tenth Fidelis will march to crush the unrest.”
“Then they’ll die,” she said quietly.
I tried to persuade myself that the Tenth could withstand any rebellious rabble . . . But men like Simon were not rabble. Men like Simon were trained and disciplined, and they understood very well how to fight Roman legionaries. “If the Tenth falls, so does her eagle.”
Mirah pressed herself against me. “They aren’t your men anymore,” she whispered. “Or your eagle. I know it will still hurt, Vix, but it’s the price. No one ever said cutting a disease out would be painless.”
No, indeed.
“May I have first hit on the lion, Great-Uncle?” a boy’s voice was saying eagerly. “I’m of the Imperial blood, I should have first strike after you—”
I looked at the Emperor’s great-nephew: sweating in the sun, full of his own importance. “He should have been a tribune in the Tenth,” I mused, still thinking of the legion’s eagle. “We’d have knocked the bumptiousness out of him.”
“Gods, yes,” Boil said with relish. “Then picked our teeth with his bones. Tribunes are bloody useless.”
“Most,” I admitted. “Not all. Titus Aurelius—”
“No, he wasn’t too proud for a patrician sprig.” Boil cocked a blond eyebrow at me. “Hard to remember what a grand man he is now, when he used to share our sour posca.”
I wondered what Titus would do, if he knew the decision I’d made. I saw his look of cool disapproval, the one that could shrivel gods on their thrones, and I blinked it away. Why should he disapprove? He’d do anything for his family, and I’d do anything for mine. Dinah and Chaya had stood to embrace me when I left for Egypt, and all the irritation I’d ever felt toward them when they fell into moody humors had blown away like chaff on the wind. Dinah was so beautiful, a coltish girl with a soft mouth made for smiles. Chaya had shy doelike eyes that would soon have suitors stumbling over themselves. I’d embraced them both fiercely, and Dinah had whispered in my ear, “Bring Antinous back, Father. I miss him.” And Chaya had whispered in my other ear, “I’m sorry I was too nervous to hug him.”
Antinous. He cantered ahead alongside the Emperor as the hounds gave voice. This was the first time I’d seen him at Hadrian’s side, except at a very great distance—he’d been so careful to keep us far apart. I could see his blue cloak flapping behind him, see how he rode loose and easy in the saddle with his horse on a long rein. Could I bring him back, as my family seemed to think? Conversations with my son had gotten easier, but only if I kept off the subject of Hadrian. Just let me call the Emperor a raping bastard or a silk-tunicked turd, and Antinous’s face hardened all over and the rest of the conversation was doomed. Maybe I’d have to choke him and throw him over a saddle, because I didn’t see any other way of prying him loose from this cushioned whore’s nest the Emperor had built around him.
I had to find a way. Because if I didn’t, if I went home alone and threw myself into Judaea’s struggles against Rome—well, there wasn’t any way back from that. The path behind me would be burned away, no track even for a loving son to follow.
Simon won’t care, a little voice whispered. Antinous is a lure, something to get you here in the first place. Doesn’t matter to Simon if you come back with the Emperor’s lover or not.
And some part of me suspected it wouldn’t rea
lly matter to Mirah, either.
I actually closed my eyes at that thought, trying to shut out the thing I didn’t want to think about my own wife. “What are you doing?” Boil laughed from his horse.
“Nothing,” I muttered, and scratched at my jaw. “This beard’s driving me mad, that’s all.” I’d left off shaving recently, thinking that if I was going to be a man of Judaea it was time I had the beard to match, and it was currently in the itchy stage.
I heard Hadrian’s deep laughter up ahead, saw him extend his ringed hand out to Antinous so my son had to lean half out of the saddle to link fingers. “First blow against the lion is mine,” Hadrian was calling out, ignoring his great-nephew’s frown, “but I leave the death blow to you, Osiris!” I saw Antinous lift the Emperor’s knuckles to his lips in thanks, and Hadrian smiled. He leaned forward in his own saddle to ruffle Antinous’s hair, just like he’d ruffle one of his dogs, and I felt a surge of black hatred rise like a spring in the middle of my belly. Why couldn’t you have died on that mountain in Antioch, you bastard? Struck by lightning and cast down by your gods.
The dogs were giving voice more urgently, seething and whining. “Close,” the huntsmen muttered. “The lion’s close, they’ve got his scent—”
The beast came from nowhere, a great leap down from a craggy outcropping of rock to the dry ground beneath. It gathered itself proudly as the dogs yelped and circled, the huntsmen shouted, and some of the more timid courtiers shrieked. I nearly shrieked myself because the lion was enormous: longer from snarling fangs to the tip of its twitching tail than I was tall, with massive clawed paws and teeth that could have punched through iron. My old lion skin had been a tawny thing, but this beast was darker, its short mane near to black. It gave a great slash at the ground and roared, no fear in its glittering eyes, and I remembered that this dark creature was a man-killer.
The Emperor raised his spear and charged.
“That rash bastard,” Boil groaned. “Will he just wait for once—” Boil was already wheeling his horse along with the other Praetorians, and some part of me felt a nearly unstoppable urge to fall in protective formation alongside them. I reined back instead, my horse jostling that pretty-boy Lucius Ceionius, and I watched the Emperor. The lion screamed, making a lunge for Hadrian’s horse, and the stallion reared. Antinous let out a warning cry, circling with his own spear ready and his reins doubled about one taut fist, but Hadrian just spoke a quiet word to his panicked stallion, never taking his eyes off the lion. As the stallion’s hooves came down and the lion crouched to spring, the Emperor let fly with his spear.
In the breath of time it took the spear to fly, glittering in the sunlight and aimed for the lion’s massive side, I had time to remember another hunt. That one had been in Mysia, and the prey had been a bear, and the Emperor had speared the bear in the side too before he had become aware of a golden youth on the far side of the clearing . . . Full circle, I thought as Hadrian let out a shout of triumph, his spear spitting the lion in the ribs, and kicked his horse in a dash past the beast as it screamed in pain.
“For you!” he yelled at Antinous, and his teeth gleamed in the dark thicket of beard. “I’ve blooded him, my star, now he’s yours!” Antinous was already spurring forward, his eyes all taut focus and his spear like a streak of lightning ready to fly, but the lion, which had whirled to follow Hadrian, now whirled back, blood spilling like rubies from its side, and it flew forward with a great rake of its claws and another maddened roar. The dust billowed up, and by the time I’d kicked past Lucius, the horse was on its side and shrieking, haunch opened to the bone, and Antinous had tumbled free.
No. Not free. The fallen stallion had trapped his leg against the ground, pinned my son helpless.
The horse. I shot the thought at the lion like a spear of my own. Go for the horse, not my son—but this monster was a killer of men, and it stalked toward Antinous with a snarl. Antinous, struggling to free his trapped leg, struggling to reach his spear, which had fallen a dozen feet away, and a wave of stark, blind terror swamped me.
I was off my horse and unsheathing my dagger, pushing through the pack of yelping dogs, but I’d never get there fast enough. Never in this world. In one horrific flash I saw my son die under the lion’s claws, die as lion bait like a gladiator in the arena, like I should have died, oh God, no—
Antinous froze where he lay trapped, staring as his death came for him, wide-eyed as the little boy who had ridden my lion-furred shoulders. Another lion was coming for him now, claws raking, and I would never be there in time. But the scream that was just forming in my throat came roaring out of Hadrian instead.
I never saw a man make a leap like that in my life, the leap that the Emperor of Rome made as he vaulted off his horse very nearly over the stallion’s head, to land square on his feet between Antinous and the lion. Hadrian never stumbled, just cocked his arm, and I saw the muscles bunch clear across his back under his cloak as he hurled his second spear. The lion screamed again as the blade pierced its broad chest, and Hadrian was already flying forward, sword leaping from its scabbard. “Caesar—” Antinous shouted, not frozen anymore, trying to pull his leg free from the struggling horse, but Hadrian never looked back. He just slashed, opening another red wound across the lion’s huge shoulder, and another, and the lion batted him down with a rake of claws. He rolled, all purple cloak and dark curls and more blood unrolling across the packed earth like a royal carpet, and the Praetorians were muscling in, but the Emperor never looked at them either. He came up to one knee just as the lion flew at him, and somehow he was between those massive paws, letting out a lion’s roar of his own as he buried his gladius hilt-deep in the beast’s heart.
The lion collapsed atop the Emperor.
I was there a fraction of a heartbeat later, the guards a few steps behind me, all our frantic hands rolling the beast away. It was dying, the Emperor’s spear in its side still pulsing blood and the Emperor’s sword in its heart pulsing very little. Its eyes were dimming, its claws were still trying to find flesh to rend, but no one cared for the lion. The Emperor’s head lolled against my knee, loose, and my heart gave a great thump. He’s dead, I thought, this time he’s dead. And the shriek went up from one of the guards—“He’s dead!”—and I leaned closer to put my ear against his chest, feeling something wild and strange inside me that could have been hope. I put my head to the Emperor’s chest, and before I could hear anything I felt the whisper of his breath past my ear and felt another violent squeeze of my heart.
He lived.
But he doesn’t have to, I thought. My hand with the dagger still clenched in it was under his head—all I had to do was rake it across the back of his neck, out of sight of the frantic Praetorians. They were shouting for cloaks, for physicians, for bandages—one small motion of my hand would never be noticed. The wound would look like a slash from the lion’s claws: Emperor Hadrian, struck down by a lion on a hunt. I could take my grieving son home with me, free from a madman’s clutches forever.
I could kill him. I saw the slash in a heartbeat, felt exactly the degree of pressure the blade would need, how I could take off my cloak and slip it under the Emperor’s head as a cushion, and do it right then with the cloth hiding my dagger. “God is just,” Simon had told me. “Serve Him, and He might even grant you the chance to kill Hadrian.”
Here it was. One stroke and I could save my son, kill a tyrant, and go home a hero to help liberate Judaea in the chaos of Rome’s falling. My son had fallen prey to the Emperor’s charm on one hunt—this hunt would see it done.
Full circle, indeed.
One stroke.
But—
But . . .
You saved my son, I thought. You saved my son when I could not.
“Hadrian,” a voice was screaming, “Hadrian!” And Antinous clawed his way past the guards, pushed them bodily aside, and fell on Hadrian’s broad chest. “No,” he was shouting,
“no, not like this—”
I still could have done it. Half the Praetorians were trying to pull Antinous back, the rest were running for a physician, and no one was paying attention to me. I could still have done it.
But Hadrian’s eyes fluttered open, and they didn’t even see me. They were all for my son, one desperate glance, and when he saw Antinous’s face hovering over his own, I saw him squeeze his eyes shut, and I saw the tears that ran from the corners of his eyes into his hair. “Thank the gods,” he whispered, and he pushed himself unsteadily up to a sitting position. His neck, that strip of unarmored and vulnerable neck, glided away ghostlike from my hand, and he sat up to grab my son in a great bear hug. “My star,” he said unsteadily, “oh, my star—”
“I killed it!” a voice said triumphantly. “The lion, Great-Uncle, I finished it off!” Pedanius Fuscus, the Emperor’s great-nephew, standing over the lion, one foot posed carefully on its massive shoulder, his spear stabbed down into the beast’s throat. “It was still moving,” he explained, but no one was paying any attention to him. Antinous was sitting in the dust, tears running down his face.
“Caesar,” he said hoarsely. “You saved me—you shouldn’t have saved me, you—”
Hadrian rose, just as unsteady on his feet, and pulled my son up into his arms. They clung together, gripping each other tight, and I saw uncomfortable glances between the Praetorians and courtiers. I saw disgust, too, on more than one face. Young Pedanius Fuscus looked peevish, standing so artfully posed over the lion.
“Sweet gods, Caesar,” Antinous said, cradling the Emperor’s face in his hands. “Why did you jump in its way? It could have killed you—”
Hadrian’s voice was low, his mouth pressed against Antinous’s curls as he crushed my son against him. “I’d die in a lion’s mouth for you,” he murmured. “I’d die in its teeth and let the Empire burn after me, if it meant you lived.”
“No,” Antinous cried, and his eyes were wild. “That’s not how it works, I offered my life for you—”