Mistress of Rome (28 page)

I tied my sandals, collected my lyre, and slipped into the hall. Behind me the lamplight outlined the Emperor’s harsh-cut nose, the half-folded eyelids that camouflaged the sharp Flavian gaze. The “bed-wrestling,” as he called it in his more jocular moods, was done. He was already busy with his scrolls.

An easy man? No. A likable man? Not even that.

But not a boring man.

I
was rarely summoned to the palace in the morning, but when the freedman knocked on my door after breakfast I didn’t argue. To my surprise I was shown not into the bedchamber but the tablinum, where my Imperial lover was half-hidden by a mountain of paperwork. “Come in,” he said, stamping his seal ring at the bottom of some document or other. “Close the door.”

The interview, where I received the first shock of the day, was brief and businesslike. A smirk hovered around the freedman’s mouth as he ushered me out, and I knew that soon everyone in Brundisium would be whispering that the Emperor had paid off his whore at last and what did you expect with a common singing Jew. I drew a fold of my veil over my head and hurried through the atrium, threading through a crowd of slaves and hangers-on. I bumped squarely into the second shock of the day—a shock wearing a ruby-red
stola
and smelling of musk.

“Watch where you’re going,” she snapped, and pushed past me.

“Lady Lepida?” I said.

“Yes, what?” She turned and looked at me for the first time. I pushed the veil off my face, and as her skin flushed a mottled red I felt an obscure gladness that I was wearing my new gown of spangled amber silk banded in gold around the hem.

“Thea?” Her eyes darted over the amber beads around my neck, the chunks of topaz in my ears, the inlaid gold circlet that caught up my hair. “What are you doing here?” I could see her mind whirling, fast as the wheels of the chariots around the circus.

“I’m working.” I made a vague gesture that showed off my gold rings. “What are you doing here in Brundisium?”

“Visiting my stepson—he’s just come south from Germania, not that it’s any of your business—”

“Oh, but Paulinus isn’t here just now.” I set my earrings dancing with a small toss of my head, feeling a swell of savage satisfaction in my middle. “Some business at the Praetorian barracks, no doubt. Come back tomorrow?”

“How do you know? What are you doing at the palace,
Athena
?” Lepida glared, groping for her calm. People about us were beginning to stare, and she lowered her voice. “Prefect Norbanus is a close personal friend of the Emperor’s, and if he hears how you’ve spoken to me—”

“Well, Paulinus is a close personal friend of mine, too. I’m sure he’ll forgive me.” I used my superior height to look down my nose at her, a trick that worked just as well now as it had in the past. Maybe a little better, since now my gown was just as fine as hers and my jewelry finer. “And the Emperor, well, he’ll forgive me anything these days. You weren’t hoping to see him? He’s very busy with the harbor plans just now. The pressures of his position are infinite.” I sighed, getting into the spirit of things. A stout matron in a plum silk
stola
looked at us, whispering behind a beringed hand to her husband. “Infinite pressure, but my poor darling bears up so well. Better luck tomorrow.” I turned on the heel of my gold-trimmed sandal as if ready to swirl past.

Her sharp-nailed little hand dug into my arm. “What do you mean? You don’t know the
Emperor
!”

“Oh, but I do. He’s devoted to me.” I smiled, planting every word like a dart and raising my well-trained voice to carry. A group of nearby lictors glanced over. “Hadn’t you heard? Athena, the Emperor’s new songbird? His new mistress?” I twirled, spinning my gold veils. “Me.”

Her face turned green. I’d never seen anyone’s face turn green before, and I watched with interest. Just like an unripe cheese. Lepida opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. I cut her off, loosing my last and biggest dart. Everyone in the atrium was staring now. “In fact, when the Emperor retreats to his villa in Tivoli for the summer, he’ll be taking me with him.
Alone.
”

I smiled again, fondly, into her gaping face. “Do feel free to call before I leave for Tivoli. We have so much to say to each other. Oh, and you needn’t feel embarrassed about calling on a common singer. I get so many distinguished visitors now . . . Have a lovely day, Lepida Pollia.”

A beautiful moment. Oh, what a beautiful, perfect moment. But as I proceeded out of the palace and down the street, glee gave way to puzzlement. The Emperor was taking me to Tivoli. Where he took no one.

Why?

“Time to pay me off?” I’d asked him crisply, threading my way through the usual bustle of slaves, pages, and secretaries in his tablinum. Perhaps if his farewell present was generous enough I could buy my freedom from Larcius . . .

“I’m not paying you off yet,” he said disinterestedly, sealing up a scroll and handing it to a slave. “I’m taking you to Tivoli for the summer. We leave in five days.”

I must have looked quite comical, standing there with my mouth open. He looked up in some irritation, but then he rose and walked around the desk toward me, his mouth flicking upward into one of its rare, charming smiles. “No, Athena, I rarely joke.” He picked up my hand, surprising me again. Outside of “bed-wrestling,” he rarely touched me. He lifted my fingers to his lips as if to kiss my hand, but then he leaned down quite suddenly and bit the side of my palm.

“Pack light.” Without missing a beat he resumed dictating to one of his secretaries, who gave me an awed look as I left the room in a daze and bumped into Lepida.

I blinked the image away, looking down at the little crescent of pink marks on the side of my palm. Barely visible in the sunlight.

Well. I really had better be getting home. If I was leaving for Tivoli in five days, I had a lot of preparations to make.

 

 

 

S
O what is a high-powered government official like Praetorian Prefect Norbanus doing escorting his master’s mistress to an assignation?” Athena teased. “I hope it’s not a demotion.”

Paulinus laughed. “I think I’m the only person the Emperor trusts to get you there without trying to seduce you,” he said cheerfully. In a smoke-blue
stola
with lapis lazuli combs holding her dark hair, reclining in an Imperial litter curtained in plum silk and borne by six impassive Nubians, Athena looked every bit an Emperor’s mistress. Paulinus felt a moment of faint envy—he’d enjoyed her company long before the Emperor, after all . . . not that Domitian knew that. He banished the thought, steering his horse up to the litter’s side. The road had been cleared before them, dew already drying. His cohort of Praetorians chattered easily behind, hoisting their spears across their shoulders and swearing amiably at the spring mud underfoot, glad as Paulinus was himself of a pleasant ride on a sunny blue morning.

“Since I’m off-limits now, you might as well call me Thea,” she said, fanning dust away from her face. “That’s my real name, after all.”

Paulinus blinked. “I didn’t know that.”

“Of course you didn’t. Men don’t talk to their mistresses. Only to their friends.”

“So the Emperor doesn’t talk to you?”

“Well,
he
does.” Athena—Thea—sounded reflective. “But he’s different, isn’t he?”

“He is,” Paulinus agreed.

“And he values you very highly.” Thea propped her elbow against the plum silk cushions. “You haven’t had many breaks from Dacia these past few years, have you?”

Paulinus shrugged, feeling the red plumes nod on his helmet. “I’m just a watchdog.”

Thea smiled, her lapis earrings swinging against her throat. “He uses you hard, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” Paulinus said seriously. “But it’s a great trust.”

“I suppose it is. Trusting you with his wars and his women . . . One doesn’t think of Emperors having friends, but he’s made a friend out of you, hasn’t he?”

“No.” Paulinus smiled down at his horse’s dappled neck. “You can’t be friends with a man like him.”

“Why?” Curiously.

“Oh, he’s just—” Paulinus fumbled for words. “If you could see him at the front, you’d understand. He’s not like those generals you see droning heroics over cups of warm wine and never getting close enough to smell it. He’s right there in the thick. The legionnaires, they’d do anything for him. He’s one of them. A soldier.”

Thea cocked her head. “People say he’s a god.”

“Maybe he is. If there’s any man on earth who’s a god, it’s him.” Paulinus looked sideways at her. “What do you think?”

“Oh, I’m a Jew,” she said lightly, fanning herself. “We only believe in the one God. Anyway, it’s strange to think of sharing a bed with a god, like Leda or Europa.”

“I—well, maybe it’s none of my business, but—” Paulinus felt himself reddening, and looked down at his horse’s mane.

“Paulinus.” The low, rich voice was amused. “I will never tell the Emperor that you used to visit me for anything more than my music.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking of.” Though it was something of a relief, no doubt about that. “It’s the rumors about him. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“. . . I see.”

“The rumors about his niece,” Paulinus burst out. “Filthy rumors, and he just snorts and says that gossip lives on no matter how many people you execute. But people shouldn’t talk about their Emperor that way. Just because he was kind to her—”

“Did you ever meet Lady Julia?”

“Not since I was a child. By the time I got my appointment as Prefect, she was living in Cremona, for her health. She was mad, you know—I saw the reports from the previous Prefect, who kept files on everyone in the palace. She went about muttering nonsense, starving herself, crawling off to the Temple of Vesta to try to sleep under the altar . . . Even when I knew her as a child she was strange. She’d scare herself to death with the things she dreamed up out of her head. She wasn’t—wasn’t
normal
, although I’d never tell the Emperor that. He won’t hear a word against her. He never had any children of his own, you see, so he took her as a daughter instead.”

“. . . But she died of an abortion, didn’t she?”

“No.” Paulinus remembered the private report he had read, the description from the doctor in Cremona who had afterward fled in fear of his life. “It was suicide—she cut her stomach open. She lingered, and the infection—. After that, people
would
say it was a botched abortion. My father was there; he tried to put the truth out, but who listens to the truth when lies are more interesting?”

A rather uncomfortable silence lapsed after that. Athena shifted on her cushions, rearranging the plum silk curtains to shield her face from the sun. “I saw your stepmother in the palace a few days ago, Paulinus.”

She’d sought to find a less awkward subject. Hardly her fault she’d found a
more
awkward one. “Lepida?”

“Yes. She said she was coming to see you.”

“Well, she didn’t.” Paulinus leaned down to brush a bit of dirt off his boot. “She’s—we’re not really on good terms. I see her sometimes, but . . .” He trailed off again.

“Personally,” Thea said in candid tones, “I’d rather be on good terms with a viper than Lepida Pollia.”

A mile or two of silence. Thea’s painted fan moved slowly back and forth.

“Lady Athena—Thea.” Paulinus felt his voice burst out of him.

“Have you ever been—well—I mean—have you ever—really
wanted
someone? Wanted them like water in the desert—even when you knew all their faults, every single one—and it didn’t matter?”

He saw a deep swell of pity in her eyes, and looked away. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ve wanted someone like that.”

“. . . How long did it take to forget?”

She shook her head slowly, the fan ceasing its motion. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t?”

“No . . . Maybe if I’d married and settled down, but—” A shrug. “You should marry, Paulinus.”

“Oh. Well, it’s not me. It’s—it’s my friend—Trajan’s his name—”

“Of course.”

He found it easier to ride ahead of the litter, after that, than meet her eyes.

G
IVEN Domitian’s taste for simple living, I was surprised at the beauty of his villa in Tivoli.

It was a jewel of white marble: colonnaded walkways and terraced gardens, urns of lilies and pools of quiet water, rippling mosaics and silver nymphs in niches. A luxurious and solitary hideaway tucked a mile or two from the exquisite town of Tivoli; a place where a man with no privacy could be alone. Domitian had arrived a day or two after me, and for once there were no crowds of courtiers or busy secretaries. Except for silent slaves, the Emperor of Rome and I were utterly alone. Strange.

“We’ll dine on the terrace,” he ordered me. “One hour.”

I dressed carefully in a pink-marbled room that might once have been Julia’s, choosing a plain white robe with a silver girdle under the breast, my hair hanging down my back and no jewelry but Larcius’s welded copper ring on one hand and a single massive pearl on the other. How nice to take a break from my careful performance toilettes. I pushed the rouge pots and fingernail varnish aside, and glided out to the terrace on bare feet. Two silver couches were drawn up beneath a shaded willow tree, underlaid by the rushing sound of the river below.