“Shut up.” Such an expression on the Emperor’s face as he looked at my son: a relief so deep it bordered on agony. I knew that expression, because I’d worn it myself the day I’d thought Mirah lay crushed to death in the great earthquake of Antioch years ago. I’d thought her dead and then I’d heard her voice calling me, live and well. The relief had brought me to my knees with that same anguished look of joy Hadrian now wore.
Because I loved so deeply, and losing that love to death would have crushed me.
Hadrian and Antinous held each other for a long time after that, grappled chest against chest and still shaking, the lion dead beside them. And I watched them as my golden chance crumbled away, and with it all my hopes.
ANTINOUS
Egypt
“Now, this is absurd,” Hadrian said irritably. “Acclaimed in Carthage as a god because of a perfectly coincidental rainstorm—and here I am a cursed god because I cannot make the Nile rise?”
A chill ran through Antinous despite the heat that had collected under the canopy of the Imperial barge. “Don’t say that, Caesar—‘cursed.’”
“I am cursed,” Hadrian grumbled. “Cursed by Egyptian peasants who think I have merely to wave a hand, and then the river will rise and fertilize their wretched fields!”
“Give the Egyptians their superstitions, Caesar.” Empress Sabina sounded lazy, reclining with eyes closed on the next couch. “We Romans are no better, always peering at cow entrails to try to see Fate.”
“I gave the peasants here enough of a concession just delaying this trip up the Nile at all.” Hadrian glared about the deck of his gilded barge as if not pleased with the cushioned couches, the autumn breezes that flapped the striped silk canopy overhead, the green waters of the Nile slapping against the hull below. A far bigger craft than the little curtained vessel where they had floated in Canopus; almost a floating palace—but to Antinous it felt like a prison. Perhaps because in Canopus you could step off that little pleasure craft at any time. Here, all was at the mercy of the surrounding Nile, even the Emperor of Rome.
It gave Antinous the shivers, but he tried not to show it. He twined his fingers with Hadrian’s as the Emperor returned to his lapful of slates, stroking the swollen knuckles. Ever since the lion hunt, he thought—the swollen joints again, and those strange hardening pains returning to the flesh of his arms, and though Hadrian wouldn’t say he had a headache, he was rubbing at his temple with a frown. Antinous touched the line between his eyes to smooth it away, calling for cold barley water.
“Perhaps you should rest,” Empress Sabina said. Of course she had noticed the swollen fingers too, and the headache. But Hadrian only grunted, stylus tapping, and the Empress shrugged at Antinous as if to say, We do what we can.
I should do more, Antinous thought. But he gave her a smile, lowering his lashes so she couldn’t see how the smile stopped short of his eyes.
The Empress stretched on her couch, propping her chin up for a look at the endless currents sliding past. In the barge’s wake, a whole array of secondary boats drifted along in a flotilla. “I love this river,” she observed. “Can we keep sailing forever?”
“It’s beautiful,” Antinous said honestly enough. The Nile seemed like a living thing, a green serpent sliding through the land, the ripples of the water almost lazy under the autumn sun, which still shimmered down with such fierce heat. It made for strange whimsical daydreams, but it made for black-fanged nightmares too, and Antinous hated this river no matter how beautiful it was. Because the dreamlike haze of heat and water, the blue lotuses and the liquid-eyed birds watching the barges slide past—they all hid danger. Look at a muddy log, and suddenly it blinked alien eyes and turned out to be a crocodile. Admire the innocent-looking hippopotamus fussing over her young in the shallows, and the guide from Alexandria laughed and said that the beast could sink their barge and everyone on it . . .
Danger here, Antinous thought, and he tried to mock himself but the foreboding would not leave him. It sat in his bones, watching like the crocodiles. And why not? Twice Hadrian had narrowly dodged death—from a storm’s lightning, and from a lion’s claws. What if there is a third time?
There would not be. Antinous told himself that fiercely. But he still wished they could leave this beautiful, treacherous river.
Lucius Ceionius was speaking, tickling the Empress’s ankles with a feather fan and saying something flattering about how if the Emperor was Pharaoh in Egypt, then she was First Wife. “Better than being any kind of goddess,” she said, nudging his hand away with her henna-patterned toes. “I wouldn’t dare proclaim myself a goddess on this river—it would eat you for being presumptuous; you can just feel it. First Wife is good enough.”
“And Antinous as First Concubine,” someone snickered almost inaudibly behind them. Hadrian was coughing in quick dry bursts—the cough was new, what did it mean?—and didn’t hear the muttered insult. Antinous did. He’d heard far worse, but it wasn’t the joke that hung and resonated in his mind. It was Lucius’s warning voice from Canopus.
If you think the disapproval was bad before, it’s nothing to what will be waiting when we return.
To Rome. Where there was also danger, just like this beautiful river—just danger of a different kind. Because Hadrian will not give me up, Antinous thought in stark honesty. He had seen that when his lover flung himself between Antinous and a lion. And if he will not give me up, what will it cost him?
Hadrian was still coughing, and Antinous pushed the thoughts aside to thump him on the back. “Breathe, Caesar—”
“Cease worrying,” Hadrian said between coughs. “If I die on the Nile, at least I will be resurrected.”
“So the story goes,” Antinous temporized. “And then the river will rise—”
“The sacrifice works best if it’s a beautiful boy!” Lazily, Lucius snapped his fingers for wine from his slave girls, twin Greek beauties identical to the last freckle. His latest craze: “I shall be served henceforth by nothing but twins!” Antinous would have found it funny if the girls didn’t have such sad eyes over their permanently smiling mouths. “A boy’s life given to the Nile; I hear it’s an infallible spell for prosperity and health—”
“I am not throwing my beautiful boy into a river for any reward.” Hadrian pulled Antinous’s attention to the slate in his hand. “Tell me what you think of this, Osiris—an arch in Rome to commemorate our great lion hunt! The two of us, standing with our feet upon the lion’s mane . . .”
More glances from the courtiers, and this time the Emperor saw them too. Hadrian stared around him with a gaze of long challenge until every eye dropped to the deck. An emperor’s bedmate carved upon an arch, Antinous thought. How that will shock Rome. Only those of power and rectitude were relegated to triumphal marble.
“I’d rather not be put on an arch, Caesar; it wouldn’t be well looked on.” He saw the Imperial brows begin to draw together, and added, “And if you don’t care for that, well, you know how I hate sitting for sculptors.”
“Do it to please me, then?” Hadrian wheedled. “There, you have made your Pharaoh beg! Perhaps a statue of you as Osiris, too. I’ll commission both, as soon as we return to Rome.”
“Return?” Antinous looked up at him. “. . . When will that be, Caesar?”
Not yet, he thought in a pang of pure fear. Sweet gods, not yet!
But you were just praying to get off this river, another voice mocked in his mind. The gods were listening after all!
“We’ll go to Thebes, first, and Philae.” Hadrian was sketching again. More of his architectural jottings for the great villa outside Rome—at the rate he was designing additions and improvements, it would never be finished. “After that, it’s time to return home.”
Antinous looked from Hadrian to Empress Sabina. “Home,” he echoed, turning the topaz ring around his finger where Hadrian had placed it. Home was here, in the
world enclosed between their three points. But how much longer would that go on? Rome’s scorn or the lash of the Fates who had already swiped twice at the Emperor—what would bring it to an end?
The Empress smiled. She slid off her couch and settled onto theirs, folding up her feet and leaning her head on Hadrian’s shoulder, reaching across him to match her fingers against Antinous’s. “Home is wherever the three of us sit, Antinous. So home will come back to Rome with us, won’t it?”
His voice was almost mute as he squeezed her hand. “As you say, Lady.”
VIX
When I found my son in the moonlight, he was trying not to weep.
The Nile at night is a sight that could bring anyone to tears. The danger that runs under the lazy surface during the day was sharper at night—the slap of the river’s currents against the barge’s hull came clearer in the dark, and the splash of the water warned of lurking crocodiles when you weren’t being lulled by sunlit water lilies floating so serene on top. But despite all the dangers, it’s the beauty of Egypt’s great river at night that cuts like a knife and brings tears to the eyes: the thousands and thousands of stars overhead; the silver fullness of the moon; the warmth of the autumn night that still felt like summer.
But I didn’t think it was beauty that brought my son to the brink of tears. Antinous sat at the stern of the barge, his feet dangling over the side like a child’s, his shoulders slumped in utter misery. Beside him, his black dog whined and wagged its tail.
I padded across the deck and sat down beside him. He gave a start, turning his face away and trying to hide the anguish in his eyes. “I didn’t see you there,” he said, and began to pointlessly rewind the white bandage about his thumb. He had sprained it on the lion hunt—his only injury, thanks to Hadrian.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked, and tousled the dog’s pointed ears.
“Thinking. Thinking of nothing very much.” His face was still turned away from me. “The Nile has so many legends attached to it. Anyone who throws themselves into the Nile will save the life of a loved one, did you know that?”
“Morbid.” Were we going to keep playing this game, the game we’d been playing all the way from Judaea? The game where we danced around each other’s bruised feelings, never saying anything important? Hell with that; my son was in pain. “Why are you so nearly weeping?”
He gave up pretending and bowed his head into his own hands, shoulders heaving. I sat, waiting. Most of the Imperial barge slept. The Emperor had moored his barge on the riverbank tonight, the rest of his flotilla clustered around him, and there had been music and merrymaking on the cushioned decks: a whole golden entourage laughing and throwing carved dice, watching the Emperor’s copper-skinned acrobats tumble to the beat of their drums.
But the Emperor had retired early, complaining of a headache, and the barge was quiet now except for the shuffle of the sailors as they moved about their duties. It was the hour my son and I usually met to talk if he wasn’t still attending in the Emperor’s bed . . . A good many nights I’d had to ponder that thought, waiting for him, but now he was here with me, not Hadrian.
“All right,” I said at last. “Let’s have it.”
Antinous was silent, his head still hanging low. He wore one of those Egyptian kilts that didn’t look nearly so well if you had a battle-scarred body, like I did, or if you ran to fat, like many of the courtiers. Antinous had covered the kilt with a pelt around his shoulders, the skin of the lion we had hunted in Cyrenaica. The Emperor had had the pelt tanned, and draped it around Antinous’s shoulders with his own proud hands.
“So?” I persisted. “What troubles you?”
Antinous looked at me over a fur-draped shoulder, and his eyes were sunken and miserable. “We go back to Rome soon,” he said starkly, “and I think it will be the end of me.”
I blinked. “Has someone threatened you?”
“Sweet gods, no.” He gave a hollow little laugh. “I wish they had.”
“Then what?”
He stared at the black water with its reflected stars. “Here,” he said, his voice halting, “it’s different. In the east, an emperor is free to climb all over everything without risking his dignity, an empress can paint her eyes and show her shoulders without being a harlot . . . and a man like me finds less condemnation.”
“Not everywhere in the east,” I said, thinking of the epithets I’d seen scrawled on alley walls in Bethar about the Emperor. “Not in Judaea.”
“Why do you think Hadrian hated Judaea?” An attempt at a smile. “He said later—‘If they’d wanted me to look kindly on their demands, they’d have thought twice about the things they said of you. They sullied your name. So I took away the name of their holy city.’”
I didn’t think that was advice that Simon and all the firebrands like him would find acceptable, once I went back to Bethar. “When do you go back to Rome?”
“A few months, and I’m already dreading it.” He took a ragged breath. “For every kind man like Titus Aurelius there’s another like old Servianus who looks at me like I’m filth. And for every one like Servianus, there are two more like that young bully Pedanius to spit on me openly if the Emperor isn’t watching. Hadrian shields me as much as he can—and Empress Sabina, what I’d do without her I don’t know.” A short laugh, and for a moment I saw real tenderness. “She’s like my Praetorian, standing guard and skewering anyone who even gives me a look.”
A queer feeling skewered me that moment. Sabina, looking out for my son. I’d resumed my old habit of avoiding her, which was a trick on an enclosed boat, even such a large one as this, but I’d done it. The closest I’d gotten was watching her enter the temple at Arsinoe from a distance, the only one in Hadrian’s entourage brave enough to feed the sacred crocodiles, pulling her Egyptian dress around her bare brown legs as she tossed the great beasts their wine-soaked honey cakes.
The black dog whined, butting Antinous’s shoulder and interrupting my bemused thoughts. Antinous scratched the dog behind one ear, struggling to keep his voice from breaking. “It’s bad enough what they’ll say of me in Rome. I could endure that. It’s what they’ll say of him, for debauching a man of my age and station. I’m twenty-four. There’s no pretending I’m seventeen and a fit age to do what I do, even if I keep my hair long to look like a bed-slave—”
I swallowed rage. My son, tarting himself up to look pretty when he was so much more—
“I could endure what they’ll say of me. I’m used to it. But what it means for him—Lucius Ceionius says—”
“Lucius is a prancing idiot,” I growled. Him and his twin slave girls and his pretty tunics.
“He’s a vain fool, but he’s right when he says that Hadrian will have to give me up.” Antinous stared at the water. “Once he returns to Rome, I’ll have to go.”
My heart thudded in my chest then. “What does the Emperor say?”
“I don’t even have to ask him.” My son was still as a statue. “He will die before he gives me up—I saw that at the lion hunt. So it will have to come from me. At some point when we go back to Rome, I’ll have to leave him. And sweet gods, Father, it’s going kill me.”
Father. He’d finally called me that. My thudding heart nearly stopped altogether.
He wept silently, tears running down his carved cheeks like rain off a statue. The lion skin slid from his shoulders to the deck, and I put my arm around him, my throat thick.
“He can’t afford the kind of trouble I’ll bring him.” Antinous’s voice came stark through his tears. “He puts on a good show, but his health is getting nothing but worse. He’ll have his hands full just settling the succession when he gets home; he doesn’t need to face scheming from the Senate because I’ve blackened his name. I close my eyes and I see him dying—”
“Dying?” I said sharply. “How?” Under my knife on a lion hunt?
“I see
the lightning striking him dead. The lion tearing his throat out . . .” Antinous raked a hand through all that curly hair. “He’s dodged death twice. What if the third time is a knife on the Senate floor, because of me?”
I couldn’t say my son was wrong to fear that. I couldn’t even say I wouldn’t rejoice if it happened. I paused, looking out over the river to the nearby bank and its pathetic settlement of mud huts.
“I have to give him up,” my son said bleakly. “It will break his heart, and it will break mine because I would rather be dead than be without him. But he’s my world. And I will not be the thing that brings him to ruin.”
“Turn around,” I said.
“What—”
“Turn around, boy.” He just stared at me with tracks of silver marking his face, so I went to kneel behind him, drawing the knife at my waist. I gathered the mass of curly honey-colored hair in my hand, and I sawed through it at the nape of the neck. He sat unmoving, crying the last of his tears away as I tossed the silky handful into the Nile and then trimmed the rest ragged and close to his head, short as my own. I sheathed the knife and came back to sit beside him, taking a deep breath. Hear me, I begged my son silently. If you have ever listened in your life, listen to me now.
“Look at me, Antinous.”
He raised his eyes, no longer crying. Without that tangle of curls, he looked older. No less handsome, but harder around the edges. “You look like a man,” I said with all the vehemence I could summon. “Not a bed-slave. Not at all. God knows I wish you’d give the Emperor up and come home with me, but you’re a man grown and you make a man’s choices.”
His voice was low. “Father—”
“If you come back to Judaea with me, Antinous, I’ll sing the whole way. But if you go back to Rome with the Emperor, don’t go to them a painted catamite with curls, trying to look younger. Throw it in their faces. Let them see you a man to equal any other.”
“I can’t.” He began to shake his head.