“Something I don’t know. Something from his boyhood. Something good.” The Emperor stared at his plate. “I must hear something good today.”
I looked at my own plate. Something good? Was there anything good left in this world?
“Antinous had two mothers,” I said slowly. “The Bithynian girl who gave him both life and her beauty. And the woman who raised him, who bandaged his scraped knees and taught him to play gently with his sisters . . .”
The woman who resented him and loved him both.
Hadrian smiled. “That is a good memory.”
I picked a chunk of bread off my plate, throat thick, and heard myself saying a few rusty words of Hebrew, words I remembered Mirah saying many times.
“What words are those?” Hadrian asked, the flare of his endless curiosity lighting his eyes just for a moment.
“The Hebrew prayer for bread,” I said. “My wife taught it to Antinous.”
And I ate my punishment.
CHAPTER 17
VIX
My daughters.
I cannot think of them without wanting to weep, without seeing them as they stood that last afternoon in the courtyard of the house in Syria. The walled and guarded house that had been their prison, from which Mirah had fled and never returned.
My girls stood like a matched pair, arms about each other’s waists, not girls any longer but women grown. Dinah with her fall of shining hair, Chaya with her rosebud mouth, staring at me with identical dark eyes as I removed my helmet. They moved not one muscle to embrace me when I spread my arms. I ached as though my heart had been punched out of my chest, because all I wanted was to hold them. But they just stood, staring, as I lowered my burning eyes and stammered out the news that their mother was dead.
I’d vowed to tell Dinah and Chaya myself, to be there when they wept for their mother since I had been gone for so much of their young lives. But Dinah only fixed me with a stare like Mirah’s, a stare full of soul-devouring hatred, and said, “We know.”
She led her sister into the house, and they shut the door on me. If any tears came from those enormous eyes, I never saw them. I had always thought my girls petal-soft in their souls, but rebellion and loss had put steel in their spines. They knew that Roman law meant I could do as I wished with their futures: marry them off again to men of my choosing, haul them back to Rome to keep house for me, anything—but they turned their backs on me.
“I warned you,” Boil said quietly at my side. “Not to expect too much.”
“Would Dinah stay wed to you?” My one frail hope, grasping to take root in all this wreckage I’d made. Boil wasn’t a Jew, and he was older than my elder girl by some years, but he was such a good man, solid and kind and dependable as a rock. I had a sudden, desperate little vision of him taking Dinah back to Rome. Settling with her, raising children with her, somewhere I could visit now and then and at least see my daughter was happy.
“She hates me,” Boil said, and my hope died.
I found myself staring at my hands, roughened and raw, a soldier’s hands like any other, and yet everything that came from these hands turned black. The price I’d paid, maybe, for my legendary career: the common legionary rising to become hero of Rome. Severus and the other legates were already talking of the rose petals and honors to be heaped on us all.
My stomach clenched at the thought. I’d risen through the ranks like a gleaming star, trod a golden path that my men in the Tenth spoke of in hushed envy . . . But every person to love me paid the price.
Mirah. Antinous. My daughters, made into bitter crones before their time.
I tracked down Mirah’s mother—the sole survivor, from what I could find, of the warm and expansive family I’d married into. Once she’d been a rosy matriarch with laughing eyes who loved to scold me and stuff me with roast lamb. Now she was a bent-backed old woman, and the day Boil brought her to the house, she began to scream curses at me. I let her say it all, standing numb. But I had words of my own when she was done.
“Be a grandmother to my girls,” I said. “See them married to good men of their own choosing.” I couldn’t stay in Judaea—and if I tried, Dinah and Chaya might be dragged down with me as the daughters of a hated man. I knew what to say; I just had to close my eyes a moment before I could get it out.
“I’m returning to Rome.”
The arrangements were made in a matter of days. Money for the girls’ dowries, the dissolution of Dinah’s forced marriage. Mere days. I opened my arms to them both when I bid my last farewell, but they made no move toward me. I stepped forward and gathered them close anyway. Those slim bodies went rigid in my arms, and I wanted to howl because I remembered the rosy, radiant little girls who ran to the door for my kisses. Who clung to Mirah’s skirts sucking their thumbs. Who rode Antinous’s lean young shoulders.
“Live well,” I whispered to the last of my family. “Live happy.”
I prayed for that, as I turned from their unyielding faces and walked my Roman boots out of their young lives. My poor, blighted daughters.
I pray for them still.
SABINA
A.D. 136, Spring
Hadrian’s Villa
Sabina’s first glimpse of her husband after his final return from Judaea was of a bowed and solitary figure mirrored in a long pool. “Hadrian,” she called softly, but he did not lift his head.
She waved her attendants away and walked toward him, bare feet noiseless in the grass. Hadrian had re-created Canopus here, the floating golden city in Egypt where they had all dallied just before that doomed journey on the Nile . . . A long canal with a curved marble loggia at one end, at the other a temple with a great scalloped semi-dome. Everything a frame for the massive statue of Antinous, marble head bowed toward the bent figure of the Emperor hunched at his pedestal.
“Welcome home,” Sabina said.
Hadrian raised his eyes. Dear gods, such changes—his gaze so sunken, his hair almost entirely gray, his skin ashen. He is only sixty, Sabina thought. Just sixty, and he looks a hundred.
“Vibia Sabina.” His voice was deep as ever, but so listless. “I did not summon you.”
“If my husband returns home, my place is at his side.”
He did not reply, just reached up and stroked Antinous’s stone foot on its tall pedestal. “The priests say you arranged for his rites to go on through my absence.”
“I had offerings made every day.”
“Sacrifices?”
“No. Antinous wouldn’t have liked lambs slaughtered on his altar. I bring cups of that Nomentan wine that was his favorite, and I bring skinny old street dogs and promise him they’ll be fed. And I bring flowers.” She touched the bank of rosy blossoms massed at Antinous’s stone feet. “Especially these lotuses you had dedicated to him.”
“Thank you.” Hadrian touched a lotus, his swollen fingers caressing the petals. “A poet brought me the first of these, did you know? Claimed he found it at the site where Antinous and I hunted the lion in Cyrenaica, where it sprang up out of Antinous’s blood. Hence the rosy color.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I think it’s a second-rate piece of poetic drivel. But I still commissioned the poet to write a Homeric epic of the lion hunt. Most of the idiots I rule prefer second-rate drivel to genius any day, so a good second-rate Homeric epic should spread the name of my star far and wide.” Hadrian stared up at the statue. “I’ve had him carved so many times. Antinous as Hermes in winged sandals—as Dionysus in a crown of grape leaves—”
“Osiris in headcloth and kilt,” Sabina contributed. “I’m fond of that one.”
“But they all look somber.” Hadrian looked at her, eyes pleading. “Why can I not have him carved laughing?”
Sabina touched his hand where it still lay before the bank of lotuses. “Antinous’s most beautiful smiles were always for you. Keep them for
your memories, not for marble.”
“Laughing or grieving, the world will know his face.” Hadrian’s fingers clenched through hers. “He will spring up behind me, everywhere I go. His temples. His shrines. His face. Across the spread of my empire, he will be remembered.”
Sabina could feel a feverish heat radiating from Hadrian’s hand. His old rashes and fevers and aches, but far worse.
“There are other things to talk of besides Antinous, now that you are back.” She kept her tone gentle, returning the squeeze of his fingers. “You have conquered Judaea—”
“Syria Palestina.” The passion went out of Hadrian’s voice as soon as they left the subject of his dead lover. “There is no more land named Judaea. I have redrawn the borders and renamed the entire province.” A shrug. “The Jews will give Rome no more trouble, that I swear.”
“Future emperors will thank you.” But it was a bleak kind of victory. Sabina shivered inside her ice-blue palla. “You’re to celebrate a triumph, I hear?”
“My generals deserve it. They performed magnificently.”
Triumphal honors for Vix. He had always dreamed of that, as long as she had known him. She wondered if it would please him at all. Oh, Vix—and a stab of pure longing went through her. Strange how it did not diminish through the years. She had not seen him in so long, and now he would be back in Rome. But Sabina pushed the thought aside, giving Hadrian’s hand another gentle squeeze. “I look forward to presiding over the triumphs with you.”
“Lucius Ceionius will preside with us as well.”
Sabina glanced up sharply. Hadrian still sounded listless, and his eyes still rested on the lotuses. “Why?”
“He amuses me. Difficult to do, these days.”
“He is ambitious.” You do not know how ambitious.
“Does that matter? He tells me jokes and makes me smile. I need to laugh.”
Sabina hesitated. The words hesitated on her tongue: After Antinous died, Lucius sold every slave attending him on the barge in Egypt. Not just the girls who were his bedmates that night, but every single one. As though they might have something to tell about their master. That much she had been able to glean from her old freedman over the past months. “Trace them and buy them,” Sabina had ordered. “The twin girls especially. Send them to Rome.”
“It will take a great deal more time,” the freedman warned. But Sabina did not want to come to her husband with anything less than facts straight from the mouths of their source, and there were no facts yet. So she kept silent.
“Vibia Sabina,” Hadrian said, his tone formal now. “Preside with me at the triumphs. I see it as one of the final great public appearances I shall make. Afterward, you are free to do as you please.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have been my empress more than fifteen years.” Hadrian broke a lotus off its stem. “But I no longer require an empress. I have ruled longer than any emperor since Tiberius, and I do not think there is much time left for me.”
“May Caesar live forever,” Sabina intoned like a flattering poet, but Hadrian did not smile.
“I don’t want to live forever. Not without Him. I might wish to see Athens one more time, or my wall at the north of Britannia—it would have been pleasant to see how it looked when finished . . .” Hadrian looked briefly wistful, then shook his head. “But my traveling days are done. That bloodbath in Judaea was my final performance as the traveling emperor. So after the triumphs, I shall retire to my villa here among the statues of my beloved and write my memoirs. And you”—he tucked the lotus behind her ear—“may go free.”
Sabina felt her lips part. “You mean you wish to divorce me?” she managed to say over her suddenly racing heart.
“I will set you aside if that is what you wish.” His voice was still lifeless, but his hand lingered on her cheek. “Divorced or no, I mean you to take the rest of your life and do with it as you please. I am dying. You are not. I have used up your youth up in my service. Take the years you have left as your recompense. Travel, take lovers, remarry, do good works, bury yourself in seclusion in the provinces, run away with your barbarian ex-legionary if he still wants you . . . But please yourself.”
Sabina felt a thrumming in her heart like a pair of wings. Go free, the words echoed. Go free. And she saw herself walking the great wall in Britannia again, running this time, glorious under the moon. Vix at her side, perhaps—she could feel the touch of his hands so strongly against her skin that she shivered in a flash of utter longing.
Go free. No more prying eyes; no more wearisome, endless duty.
She looked up at Hadrian, his eyes holding hers. She remembered how he had kissed her in the bathhouse in Antioch, looking at her fondly instead of coldly. That had been the kindling of affection between them, all because of Antinous. In Hadrian’s savage moods after Antinous’s death, she had feared that affection utterly dead.
But he stood here now with his hand cupping her cheek, telling her to go free.
“What if I wished to stay with you?” Because she could not stop thinking of the look Antinous’s beautiful face would wear, if he knew she went dancing off to freedom and left Hadrian to the care of indifferent slaves, ambitious courtiers, and voracious Rome itself. “What if I wished to look after you?” she heard herself asking.
“Chain yourself to a useless invalid with a murderous temper?” Hadrian sat on the marble bench beneath Antinous’s statue, moving stiffly in his purple-bordered toga. “I would think you mad.”
Sabina sat beside him, claiming his hand between both of her own. Gently, because of his swollen knuckles. “We have sometimes been enemies, you and I, but we started out as friends. Remember? You wed me because I was Trajan’s great-niece, and I wed you because I wanted to see the world, but it was more than that. We’d stay up late arguing whether Ennius was superior to Virgil, and you took me with you to Pannonia when all your officers said a woman shouldn’t go . . .”
“And then I became Emperor.” Hadrian looked at her. “And I was not kind to you.”
“No,” Sabina acknowledged. “And I hated you. But Antinous came, and I loved him, and he loved you. And we became friends again, didn’t we?”
“What do we have now that Antinous is dead?” Hadrian sounded curious.
“Fate, perhaps.” Sabina gave a half smile. “You never divorced me no matter how much I angered you, and I never left you no matter how much I loved another. What does that tell you?”
He sounded very dry. “That my wife has turned seeress?”
“It tells me that the Fates twined your thread with mine, and made a great many knots. I do not think they would be pleased if we tried to cut those knots. And neither would Antinous.” She took a breath and reached up, stroking his worn, bearded cheek. “Thank you for my freedom, Hadrian. But I am going to stay. I am going to take care of you.”
His brows creased over his nose. Fond or not, he did not like to be contradicted. “You are a stubborn woman!”
“Always. But I can help you.” She smiled. “Because we are not done yet, you know. There is Rome’s future to settle.”
“I find it hard to care.” His gaze drifted out over the still water of the canal. “What have I done for her so far, Vibia Sabina?”
“How can you ask that?”
“I think it. Every night I think it.”
Sabina supposed every emperor must think such thoughts in dark hours of the soul. The ones humble enough to admit they could fail, anyway. Publius Aelius Hadrian, showing a drop of humility. She would never in all her life have imagined that.
He was still waiting for an answer.
“Remember the plans you laid out for me in Britannia? Your plan for Rome?” She listed them off on her fingers. “You wished to end the constant expansion of an Empire already quite unwieldy enough. You wished to ring that Empire in walls, so that all emperors of t
he future would know This is Rome, and go no farther. You wished to raise temples and columns through every province so the whole Empire would be left more beautiful than you found it. You wished to remake the legions and bring prosperity to your citizens, as a father does his children.” She folded her hands, enclosing within them Hadrian’s list of gifts to his people. “You have done all of that, husband. Hadrian Caesar, Father of Rome.”
“I slaughtered half a million of my children in Judaea.” His voice was harsh.
Sabina reached up to tug his head down, wondering if he would lash out at her as he had done when he grieved Antinous on the Nile.
But he did not. Perhaps those half-million deaths in Judaea had exhausted him, because her husband allowed his head to drop onto her shoulder, burying his face in the curve of her neck. His skin was hot against her throat, and his shoulders heaved under her circling arm.
“For better or worse, the business in Judaea is done.” Sabina rubbed his shoulder, back and forth as she’d soothe a trembling dog. “You still have work to do. At the very least, you must name an heir and begin preparing him for his duties.”
“I am tired,” Hadrian whispered. “So tired.”
“I will help you. As I’ve always done.” She kissed his forehead. “Even when we were enemies.”
They sat on the bench a long time. Peaceful, Sabina thought, and smiled. She never would have equated such a word with Hadrian.
He straightened at last, rising in a stiff movement. “Will you excuse me?” he said formally, his hand still resting in hers. “I have been a long time abroad . . . I will require a long stint in my Hades.”
She returned his gaze, asking the question she had long wondered. “What is in your Hades, Hadrian?”
“I would rather not say.” His gaze was straight for once, no ironic gleam or faint smile or any of his other masks. Just naked honesty. “You have retained a good opinion of me somehow, though I don’t understand why—I would not want to lose that good opinion now.”
“As you please.” She inclined her head. Perhaps she was never going to know what was in his Hades. If it was the price for truth between them, she was more than willing to pay it. “I will see you this evening, then?”