I Am Livia (49 page)

Julia clung to him, her cheek pressed to his chest. He stroked her hair. Drusus and Marcus quivered with excitement. Tiberius stood a little apart, but he was the one Tavius addressed. “I’m not sure the smaller galleys made a difference. Antony’s crews all came down with some fever or other. They were easy pickings. There are lucky accidents like that in war.”

“But the smaller galleys are better?”
Tiberius said.

“If the crews are trained to take advantage of their maneuverability,”
Tavius replied. Then he saw me. Our eyes met and held. For just a moment by some trick of the light or of my mind, I saw another being, not an imperator but an eighteen-year-old boy. “Tiberius asks very intelligent questions,” he said.

“He might have waited for you to sit down before he began asking them,” I said. “Welcome home.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I avoided the courtyard, coming in. It seems packed with people.”

“I’m afraid so. Senators. They keep coming. Almost the whole Senate is already here. I’m sure you want peace and quiet, but I couldn’t tell them to go away.”

“No,” he said. “Of course you couldn’t.” He gently detached himself from Julia and sat down on a couch. I could see he was glad to get off his feet. He looked at me. I saw something in his expression I did not expect to see. Tenderness? Longing?

“You can greet them tomorrow, after you’ve rested,” I said.

He shook his head. “No. That would be discourteous after they’ve come all the way from Rome. I’ll speak to them in a little while.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I was seasick through the whole voyage. The thought of food…” He grimaced.

“You must be thirsty, though.” I clapped my hands to summon a slave, and ordered him to bring water and wine.

“Later I’ll tell you stories about Alexandria,”
Tavius said to Julia. “But run along now.
Weren’t you having your lessons?”

She did not want to leave and remained motionless.

“Your father is tired,” I said. “All of you—go back to your tutor.”

Julia shot me an aggrieved look before she and the boys left the room.

I sat beside Tavius. The slave returned. I told him to set down his tray and dismissed him, then poured wine into the goblet. I added water, watched the rich purple of the wine fade to some indeterminate shade. As I did this, I was aware of
Tavius watching me. I knew just how he liked his wine mixed. The slave was new and would not have known.

I handed Tavius the goblet. I thought,
A man returns home from making himself master of the Roman empire, and he is tired and thirsty, just like any other man.

He seemed older. It was not a matter of lines etched into his face, but a subtle alteration in his manner. He raised his goblet to his lips and studied me over the rim as he drank. He paused and said, “The children all look taller and…different. It’s disconcerting how much they’ve changed. At least you look the same.” He drank some more, and then put down the cup.

The wine left a stain on his lips. I had the impulse to reach out with a finger and wipe it away, as I might have once. I thought of the two trees painted on the walls of the summer dining room, the ones with branches intertwined. Trees that had grown up so close together you could not disentangle them without chopping them to pieces.

How little I knew myself, really. How could I have failed to anticipate what I would feel?

And yet I still believed I could be separate. I had the strength to walk away.

For moments, we looked into each other’s eyes.
We were very grave. I thought of the burden he carried now. A burden like Atlas’s. He had sought it, and now he must endure the unrelenting weight of it. He guessed my thoughts and gave me a wintry smile. “Did you know that after Actium Cleopatra sent me a gold crown and a throne?”

“Did she send you a poisonous snake too?”

He laughed. “I knew you’d say that. The day I get tired of life, I’ll put on that crown.” His face sobered. “I won’t be a king, but I need some kind of title.”

I longed to touch him. I seemed to feel that longing in every pore of my skin. “Call yourself First Citizen.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“The leading member of the Senate used to have that title. First among equals. Everyone will be pleased.”

“First Citizen.” He considered. “Why didn’t I think of tha
t
?”

“You’ve had other things to think of.”

“Yes. And the truth is, traveling doesn’t agree with me. It fogs my brain.”

Lie down,
I thought.
Put your head in my lap. I see how tired you are. I want to watch you sleep.
“You must have seen many interesting sights,” I said.

“I saw Alexander the Great’s mummy. But that didn’t go so well. I touched his nose and it fell off.”

I smiled uncertainly, unsure if he was joking.

“His hair was almost the same color as mine, but he wore it long. He was about my height too. No one told me not to touch him.”

“The poor Alexandrians were probably too afraid of you to tell you.”

“Poor Alexandrians? Poor Alexander, with no nose.”
Then: “I won it all, Livia. I always knew I would. And I’m going to hold it.”

I nodded.

“I won’t be satisfied unless I give Rome the best government the world has ever seen. There will be peace, justice, and prosperity. I’ll work for those things as long as I have breath in my body.”

Yes, I believed that. I also knew how much blood he had shed for the sake of power. There was a fissure at the core of him, a split that ran right through his soul.

“I’ve been giving a lot of thought to our marriage,” he said.

“Oh? I’m surprised.” I felt a tightening in the pit of my stomach.

“You know better than to be surprised.” He looked away from me for the first time, got up and took a walk around the room, pacing. His limp was more pronounced than it had been before he left. “I like things settled one way or another.
Win or lose.”

“Not everything comes down to winning or losing,” I said.

“Being in some in-between state eats my guts out. Do you know why I stopped writing to you? Because I couldn’t make head or tail of the letters you wrote me back.
Were you deliberately toying with me?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you couldn’t decide if you still wanted to be my wife or not.” He shook his head. “You’re so contrary. But you wrote that you still loved me.”

When I was a girl, I imagined love was a kind of prize for virtuous behavior. That was how the philosophers described it. Love was a tribute that flowed naturally only to those with undivided spirits and pure hearts. It occurred to me now that it was something else, wilder and less comprehensible. An affinity of the soul? Even that did not encompass it.

Stop talking. Come here. I want to hold you.
I almost said those words, but I forced myself to keep silent. I imagined myself a free woman with clean hands.

“Well, you’ll have to decide now. I want no death of a thousand cuts to our marriage. Either come with me, and greet our guests, and we will begin again.” His voice hardened. “Or say no, and I will inform them that you and I have decided on an amicable divorce.”

“Amicable,” I said. I imagined being his friend and no more than that, and felt a tightening in my throat.

“I pay my debts. But think what you would be throwing away.”

“I am thinking of it,” I said.

He came and sat beside me again. He said in a low voice, as if he were telling me a secret, “You might want to consider this: I love you. I will love you until the end of my life. If you never bear me a child who lives, I will accept it. I will leave this empire to some other man’s son, rather than marry elsewhere and give you up.”

I drew in a sharp breath at that. These were words I had not expected to hear. I had thought him unwilling to sacrifice for me.
I will leave this empire to some other man’s son.
By his reckoning, he could make no greater sacrifice. I could see in his face how much it would cost him, and also that he was fully resolved to pay the price.

“There is nothing—except your word—that would ever make me give you up,” he said. “So put that in the balance. Also put in the balance what you owe Rome.”

“Rome,” I repeated.

“I will be a better ruler with you than without you.
When you think about it you will find you don’t doubt that for a moment. Do you?”

I raised my chin. “No.”

“See?” He smiled at me. His smile had a practiced charm. I could imagine him using that smile to seduce other women. Oh, I saw him clearly. And if I loved him, it was with knowledge, not with a girl’s heart fluttering. “Stay with me, and a hundred years from now, historians will ask this question—how could a man who fought like such a savage for preeminence, in the end become such a great, just, and merciful ruler? And the historians, being men, will never credit you. But who cares about them? What do historians ever accomplish? It will be a wonderful joke.
We’ll laugh about it together.” For just an instant, a stricken look, almost fear, flickered across his face. “We will,” he insisted. “We’ll laugh.” He rose and held out his hand to me.

And so finally, and for always, I chose.
Why did I make the choice I did? Because I loved once in my life and forever? Because I desired him still? Or maybe compassion governed me. I imagined him as he would be, alone on that pinnacle.
What would loneliness do to him? Yes, perhaps it was compassion. Or perhaps I heard the call of my own destiny.

I think it was all those things.

I rose. I did not take his hand. I kissed him on the lips. He gripped me in his arms and buried his face in the crook of my neck and heaved a sigh like a spent runner. I felt he might fall, and I was propping him up. But only for a moment. He straightened and smiled at me.
I win again,
his eyes said. He kissed me hungrily.

He took a step back and held out his hand again. I laid my hand on his. Then, together, we went to greet the Senate of Rome.

He never wore a crown, but for the rest of his life he governed Rome. There was peace at home and by and large in the empire, the Pax Romana—peace such as the world had never seen before. Commerce flourished, and so did poetry. People called it the Golden Age. It wasn’t that. It was not even that just Republic of which my father and other good men had dreamed. But it was far better than what had gone before, better than reasonable people even dared hope for, after the decades of blood.

In time, the Senate gave him a new name, Augustus, the revered one. They called him Father of His Country too, and named a month of the year Augustus in his honor.

I was the voice whispering in his ear that mercy could be strength. He more than once pardoned men who had sought to undo him, because I asked him to. I saw to it that no one could ever justly call him a bloody-handed tyrant.

I never bore him a child who lived. His daughter—we do not speak of her; it hurts too much to remember how she broke her father’s heart. His grandsons died young. Some whispered that I poisoned them, out of ambition for my own progeny. I shrugged off these tales. People like to tell lies about the great.

There was both happiness and pain in the years Tavius and I shared, but we were married in the fullest sense, and our tie was unbreakable. He had told me that where he grew up people married for life, and so it was with us. I do not look back without regrets. But I have never regretted the choice I made to remain Tavius’s wife.

Tiberius and Drusus became the leading generals of their generation. They did not fight other Romans, but battled foreign enemies on our empire’s borders. My Marcus, too, had an exemplary if less glorious military career.

Drusus died in Gaul, after a riding accident. It was the greatest sorrow of my life.

In the end, Tiberius was the only man qualified to follow after, take up the reins of government, and hold the empire together. Tavius adopted him, and in due time he inherited all. He rules Rome now—not as gently as I would like.

And that glorious Republic in which my father believed? Even the idea of it recedes. It recedes in memory; it recedes into some unimaginable future time.
We were not worthy of it.
We lost our way. The gods must judge us.