Their smiles all faded, as though her melancholy had crossed the table. Faustina sighed, and Titus’s fingers started to drum against the carved arm of his chair.
“Will Hadrian be satisfied with making Antinous a god?” Titus asked at last. “With founding him a city, holding games in his honor, endowing him with priesthoods?”
“He will never be satisfied again,” Sabina stated. “There will be more temples, more priesthoods, more cities renamed Antinoöpolis—”
“That will not please the Senate.”
“Then Hadrian will have their heads.”
“Can’t you stop him?” Faustina jabbed a pearl pin more deeply into the blond coils of her hair. “You have some influence, surely.”
“He pushes me away. He pushes us all away.”
Sabina had stayed at Hadrian’s side through it all—fits of weeping where he’d fling cups and furniture at the walls; feverish days of writing and planning. She’d stood at Hadrian’s side this spring in the new-rising Antinoöpolis, dispensed prizes to the victorious gladiators celebrating the games of Antinous in blood. She’d veiled herself in black when Antinous’s mummified body was released by the priests, and his soul sent into immortality. But Hadrian had turned to her afterward and said with blank exhaustion, “Go back to Rome, Vibia Sabina.”
“Let me stay to help you—”
“I go to Syria next,” Hadrian said, cutting her off with a sharp gesture. “To deal with Judaea. I mean to do bloody things there, things not fit for your eyes. Go home.”
And that had been that.
“So, Antinous’s influence is passed,” Titus said. “And for the moment, so has Sabina’s. Is there anyone else who can check the Emperor?”
Vix? Sabina thought. Vix, who had spent most of the winter drinking wine with Hadrian, pouring him into bed at the end of the night whenever he fell soddenly unconscious, getting more and more impatient about departing to his precious Tenth Fidelis. You couldn’t say Vix had any influence over Hadrian, exactly, but Hadrian certainly let him get away with more than he allowed from anyone else.
But Vix was gone, dismissed like Sabina herself when the Imperial party left for Syria—he’d flown like an eagle for Judaea, his new commander’s regalia slung across his saddle. “No,” Sabina said. “No, there’s no one. Lucius Ceionius hangs on Hadrian’s arm day and night, flattering and joking, but it’s nothing.” Lucius was just a pretty face. He could not replace Antinous, or do what Antinous had done for Hadrian.
“The Emperor,” Titus said, “is in danger of losing everything he has built. If he continues to anger the Senate, they will cross him in retaliation. And if he then begins to hand out executions—”
Faustina squeezed his hand fiercely. “Not you. I will not stand by again and watch you march into a cell!”
“I shan’t give the Emperor any cause to send me to one.” Titus smiled, giving her fingers a squeeze. “But someone must persuade Hadrian to leave off building temples to a lost lover, and come back to Rome. He should settle here, smooth some ruffled feathers, and for the love of all the gods, deal with the succession.”
“He doesn’t care who inherits the Empire,” Sabina said. “As long as it still resounds with Antinous’s name.”
“I hope he’s satisfied with Pedanius Fuscus, then, because the boy has been acclaimed all over the city since returning from Egypt, and the longer Hadrian goes without contradicting that—”
“Leave the matter of the succession for a moment,” Sabina said. “There is one thing that might bring Hadrian out of this cloud he’s in, and set him back to himself. And that’s vengeance.”
Rouse the worst side of his nature deliberately, she thought with a twist of her mouth for the irony of it. She’d spent so many years helping him suppress his temper, and now she wanted to inflame it. If anger will bring him out of this mad spiral of grief, then I’ll stoke him to a fury.
“Vengeance against whom?” Titus was asking. “Whatever poor slave catches his eye at the wrong time? The Jews, for refusing to allow a temple of Antinous in Jerusalem?”
“No.” Sabina finally released the suspicion that had been growing in her for months. “I cannot prove anything, but . . . what if Antinous did not drown by accident?”
Faustina and Titus exchanged glances. “You mean suicide?”
“No.” Sabina spoke tersely. “What if he was murdered?”
* * *
She left her sister and her brother-in-law feeling rather foolish. Faustina’s shudder had been instinctive—“I can’t bear to think someone might have heaved that gentle boy into a river like so much trash!”—but Titus’s arguments had been logical. “Before we cry murder, surely there must be a reason for it. Who would benefit from Antinous’s murder?” The answer to that would appear to be no one. Antinous had not had a real enemy in the world; he was either loved or despised, but even those who despised him as a womanish whore would not likely have risked Hadrian’s wrath to harm him. There was no value to killing him except perhaps to rid the Emperor’s reputation of an embarrassing blot, and who would risk Hadrian’s vengeance for something so insubstantial?
“It must have been suicide,” Titus concluded after his calm appraisal of the facts. “He feared the return to Rome. You yourself said he was gloomy in his last days. A moment’s despair may well have driven him to the irrevocable.”
“He had a bump on his skull . . .”
“And you say the physicians dismissed that. He might have struck his head on the railing of the barge as he fell.”
Sabina could not say that was wrong. Suicide was the logical answer—or at most, an accident.
But.
The following morning, an ancient freedman came tottering into her atrium: a Greek tightly wrapped in a long gown, head crowned with thinning white hair. He had a name, but nobody outside the Imperial family knew it.
He bowed very low before Sabina, who had donned Imperial purple and wig for once and sat on her couch with her spine straight as a spear. “You summoned me, Lady?”
Sabina lifted a hand to the roomful of slaves, attendants, hangers-on. “Leave us.” She waited until the room emptied, then spoke crisply. “When I was first made Empress, you came to me and said you had spies in every important household in Rome. Is that still true?”
He did not look at all surprised by her question. “It is.”
“Despite the fact that I have made little use of you, since I inherited you from my predecessor?”
“That makes no difference.” His tone was placid. “I was trained by old Emperor Domitian’s wife, and it was her belief that an empress must have her own sources of information. What she did with that information would be entirely her own affair, but Domitian’s Empress contended it was best to have it.” He gave a reminiscent sigh, as if remembering fondly the kind of use Domitian’s Empress had made of his information. “I have always been prepared to inform you, Lady, should you wish to be informed.”
Sabina rose. “I want every courtier, every freedman, every senator, and every slave who was present on the Imperial barge in Egypt a year ago investigated.”
The old man’s brows rose. “Investigated for . . . ?”
“Someone may have pushed the Emperor’s favorite to his death. I want to know for certain.”
“Few things in my arena of work are certain, Lady.”
“Understood. But if there are answers to be had, I want them.”
“Such searches prove expensive, Lady. The bribes alone for such a wide search—”
“My private purse as Empress is at your disposal. Let it be known there will be rewards for even the smallest piece of information.” Sabina gave a nod of dismissal. “Report to me, and only to me.”
The old freedman nodded, then doddered out looking frail and harmless. Sabina smoothed the folds of her stola, sitting again and calling for her stew
ard. One way or another, thought the Empress of Rome, I will know. And if you murdered Antinous, whoever you are, I will hunt you down.
VIX
A.D. 132, Summer
Judaea
When the storm clouds of revolt finally loomed on the horizon, I took one last journey from the Tenth Fidelis to the house in Bethar. The courtyard was full of abandoned furniture and half-filled boxes. “Going somewhere?” I said, and Mirah didn’t even look up.
“Get out.” She went on stuffing clothes into a pack.
“It’s my house.”
“Not anymore.” She had a point—I’d only spent a handful of nights here since returning from Egypt. It hadn’t taken long for the shouting, the tears, and the stubborn brick-wall madness of our entrenched and opposite positions to drive me to the Tenth Fidelis. I’d moved my meager possessions into the legate’s quarters.
I wanted to tell her how I’d missed her. The words were on my tongue, but Mirah glanced up, her hard gaze sliding past me to the four men at my back. Two were guards; the third was Africanus, dark-faced and lithe. The last was Boil, big and red-faced as ever, who I’d begged permission to yank from the Praetorian Guard and transfer to the Tenth as my second. Mirah showed no fear at the sight of them, just allowed her lip to curl and repeated, “Get out.”
I took a deep breath. “Where are the girls?” Hell’s gates, let me not be too late.
“They don’t want to see you.”
“I don’t care what they want. Where are they?”
“Gone,” Mirah flung at me, but she was lying. I caught sight of two pairs of liquid-dark eyes, watching fearfully from the shutters of the house.
My heart eased. “Where are you going?”
She said nothing, just jutted her jaw. She looked thinner.
“You go to Simon?” I persisted.
“Yes.” She threw the word down like a challenge.
“Where is he?”
She smiled, and it was the kind of smile she used to give me across a pillow. “I wouldn’t tell you that if your thugs there put a spear through me.”
I made myself shrug. “Doesn’t matter. He’s with the rebels, wherever they are. Underground, I reckon.” I ran a hand along the trunk of the little potted orange tree that stood beside the courtyard gate. It was high summer; the fruit was ripe and the smell came to my nose mellow and sweet. “We found the tunnel networks outside Jerusalem, Mirah.”
A faint widening of her eyes.
“Quite impressive,” I said. I’d set my engineers on the hunt the moment I took control of the Tenth, finding at least a few of the rebellion’s old hiding places: an infrastructure of tunnel complexes, of wine cellars and oil presses, new storehouses linked to ancient burial caves. And the chilling part was that the structures we’d found were abandoned, swept out, not so much as a rusted sword to be found. Whoever had used them had long moved on.
I’d have kept on looking, but then the Roman engineers hard at work raising a city called Aelia Capitolina over the ruins of Jerusalem had clumsily managed to collapse the ancient tomb of King Solomon in their efforts to lay foundations for a temple, and that was the flame that lit the tinder. I started to get dispatches of towns being seized somewhere near the border by Egypt. I’d wasted no time warning that ass of a provincial governor to summon the Twelfth Deiotariana to back us up—and I’d taken my four men to Bethar for Mirah and the girls.
“So the rebels are moving.” I took a step closer. “It doesn’t matter. You know they won’t catch my men unawares.”
“You won’t find anyone to fight, Legate.”
“I can always find someone to fight,” I said with complete truth. “If there’s anything you can say about me, Mirah, admit that I can always find a fight.”
“Not this time,” she said. “Uncle Simon trained with your legions, spent his youth learning what Rome has to teach. He won’t let it be wasted. He’ll run rings around you—”
“So he’s high in the rebellion’s leadership.” I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. Hell’s gates, but I didn’t want to face my friend across a field of blood.
Mirah laughed as though reading my mind, and it was a mirthless sound. “He’s not Simon ben Cosiba anymore, Vix. He is Simon bar Kokhba.”
“And what does that mean?”
“You’d know if you ever bothered to learn our language.” A shake of her head. “That should have told me something.”
I took a step closer. “How were you supposed to meet Simon?”
“You think I know? I join him in stages, and no man knows more than the next waypoint. We all made sure we knew nothing worth telling.” My wife stood there with her head thrown back, small and unflinching in the middle of the ransacked courtyard, her blue eyes glittering and her freckles standing out like a sprinkle of ginger across her upturned nose. Her lovely hair was wrapped tightly away and her face was thin and stony, but she was still beautiful to me. Everything became my Mirah: sloe-blossom wreaths and happy smiles; matronly headscarves and fanaticism.
“Take her,” I said quietly.
She didn’t struggle when one of my legionaries came and took her arm in a firm grip. She didn’t struggle until the other legionary went into the house and came back pushing my daughters in front of him, crying and clinging to each other. “Don’t touch them,” Mirah cried, but I paid no attention. I turned and strode out of the open gate, and my men dragged my family behind me.
There was one neglected shrine to Juno in Bethar. It had been defaced, scrawled with obscenities and stinking of piss. There was a turd sitting on the altar, but it didn’t matter, it was still a Roman altar, and I marched my daughters up to it. “Boil,” I barked. “Africanus.”
They already knew what to do. Boil stepped forward to Dinah’s side, and Africanus took his place beside Chaya.
“No,” Mirah shrieked, and it took both of my ox-built legionaries to hold her back, writhing and cursing, but I ignored her. I stood with a hand wrapped around Dinah’s arm on one side and Chaya’s on the other, while they married my officers. Ego tu Gaius, ego Gaia, the Roman vow for brides went. Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.
Mirah would never have said the words. She’d have glared murder and sealed her mouth like stone. Dinah gave one shake of her head, trembling all over, but I just gave her a fierce glare and she wilted, stammering through the vow. Boil slid an ill-fitting ring over her finger, murmuring his part—Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius—and then it was Chaya’s turn. She didn’t even need a glare from me; she hiccupped the words out between sobs, giving a whimper of terror as she dared look up at Africanus’s night-dark face.
There was no sacrifice, no ritual cake, no feast, no procession to the bridal home. But by Roman law, it was a wedding. “There,” I said over Mirah’s cries, and sent my daughters stumbling into the arms of their new husbands. “You’re Roman wives. The rebels won’t touch you because you’re daughters of a Jewish mother, and the Romans won’t touch you because you’re the wives of Roman officers.”
They didn’t seem to care for their newfound safety, weeping and clinging to each other, but it was the best I’d been able to devise. I’d seen Roman legionaries on the march through foreign lands, and there wasn’t a pretty native girl anywhere who would go untouched. Even the daughters of a citizen like me, if they were found with the rebels—well, there wasn’t any proof, was there, of who their father might be? But Roman wives with rings on their fingers and marriage contracts with their names—contracts I’d already had drawn up . . . It might be a paper shield, but even a paper shield was better than none. I’d arranged to have them taken clear out of Judaea into Syria, where there was a house waiting with a high wall and guards to man it, but I knew enough to make legal plans in case the rebellion spread as far as Syria.
I let the girls weep in each other’s arms. “Thank you,” I told my men, not that they had much choice in th
e matter, but being legate had its advantages. You’re getting married, and that’s an order. “I’m grateful,” I said, “but remember that if either of you lays a finger on my girls, you’re a dead man.” We’d already discussed this part, but it had to be clear. “When this revolt is over we’ll have a pair of divorces with no one the worse off. But if they tell me you deflowered them, I don’t care if it’s your husbandly right or not. I’ll geld you.”
They both gave me curt nods, Boil with a glare—he had been my friend since Dacia, after all. It had still needed to be said where the girls could hear it. I hoped it would give them some measure of comfort, but Chaya was sobbing hysterically, and Dinah held her in shaking arms. I could have wept for the distrust in my daughters’ huge dark eyes, but I hardened my heart. They could feel whatever they liked about me—it didn’t matter, as long as they were safe.
Mirah was still hurling curses at me like nails. I came toward her, gesturing at the legionaries to let her go, and she flew at me like a tigress. I let her get in one hard-fisted blow that snapped my head back, and then I seized her and held her at arm’s length, letting her fists flail uselessly. “They’re going away from here,” I said over her screaming, “and not to Simon. They’re sitting this war out in safety, and so are you.”
“I am not!” Mirah screamed. “You can’t stop me from going to my family, you can’t—”
“I can. You and the girls are going out of danger if I have to have you dragged every step of the way.” I had my doubts about leaving her with the girls—what if she tried to escape with them into the war-torn countryside?—but I was already tearing my daughters away from everything they knew. I couldn’t take their mother away as well; I’d just have to see they were all under guard. “After this whole doomed revolt is done, you can do as you like,” I told Mirah. “But until then, I’m locking you up and keeping you alive.”
“You think I’ll ever want to lay eyes on you again?” she cried, still struggling against my grip.
“Once the rebellion is over, Judaea will either be free or in ashes,” I said. “Frankly, I think the ashes. And when that happens, I’ll come back for you. I’ll always come back for you.”