Empress of the Seven Hills (12 page)

“A word to your husband, then.” Plotina tightened her arm through Calpurnia’s, woman to woman. “It won’t take much, I’m sure. All Rome knows you can twist him around your little finger.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” Calpurnia’s voice cooled.

“It’s quite simple. You have only to make him take his daughter in hand.”

“I wouldn’t know how to
make
Marcus do anything, Empress. And I don’t wish to learn.”

It was not good manners to roll one’s eyes, but Plotina was tempted. Didn’t the woman know how the game was played? Men bellowed laughter at parties like this one, talking so importantly in the middle of the room, thinking they were making their laws. The women walked the edges of the room, letting them have the glory. Silent and respectful, of course, as was a wife’s duty. But it was also a wife’s duty to make sure the right decisions trickled down from all that masculine furor. Did such a thing need explaining?

Apparently to
some
.

“I’m sorry if Sabina is taking too long with her decision to suit either Hadrian or you, Empress.” Calpurnia’s voice was no more than polite now. “But her father is not inclined to rush her, and neither am I. If you will excuse me, I think I see my cook hopping about trying to get my attention. I do hope he hasn’t burned the snails.”

She threaded swiftly away through her guests, and Plotina stood gripping her cup of barley water beside a vine-veiled statue of Pan. She never should have trusted Marcus Norbanus’s wife to help Dear Publius—the woman was clearly nothing but a simple-minded little breeder.

Plotina raised a hand to her head and massaged her temple. A headache was definitely coming on, one of the bad ones that pressed in whenever people
thwarted
her. If people knew how much it hurt, they simply wouldn’t do it.

“Sabina!” Trajan gave a shout of welcome as a figure in silver drifted into the atrium. “Little Sabina, you’re late.”

“I hope you’ll forgive me, Caesar?” The girl bowed, then stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Of course not; I missed you.” He gave her a hug too, then stood back approvingly. “You’re a pretty thing, Vibia Sabina. I can see why half my officers want to marry you.”

They can’t have her
, Plotina wanted to spit.
She is for my Publius, does no one see that? For
my Publius.

Publius’s voice at her shoulder soothed her, so deep and cultured and authoritative. “I am hard-pressed to decide whether my Empress or my future wife looks the more beautiful this evening.”

“Flatterer.” Plotina offered her cheek to be kissed. That beard: He still hadn’t gotten rid of it, but he did look very distinguished in his fine linen synthesis, calm and handsome with a chased silver goblet in one hand and a seal ring glinting on one finger. He nodded to some acquaintance hailing him across the room but lingered at Plotina’s side.

“I must thank you, you know. You were right about Vibia Sabina—I see now she will be the perfect wife for me.” A smile gleamed in the close-cropped beard. “I should never have doubted your judgment.”

“Sometimes I doubt it myself.” Only to Dear Publius would she ever admit such a thing. The Mother of Rome must never have doubts. “I understand the girl is still stringing you along—I’d hoped to see it settled by now.”

“On the contrary. The delay gives me a chance to know her.” Hadrian looked across the room at Sabina, cornered between two tribunes and looking politely bored. “And I like what I see.”

“I don’t.” The girl would not get one word of approval out of Plotina until she became Dear Publius’s wife. Then she would be as a daughter,
but now she was a nuisance. “I don’t like the dress.” There wasn’t really anything to fault in the narrow silvery gray gown with its high neck, but somehow it looked…

“The word you want is
glamorous
.” Hadrian swirled the wine in his cup, thoughtful. “The other girls here tonight aimed merely for
pretty
. And in ten years or so they will look like their mothers—fat and overpainted. Not my Sabina.”

“How nice you’ve come to like her,” Plotina said tightly.

“I remember meeting that monstrous mother of hers once or twice,” Hadrian continued. “The woman was appalling, but one couldn’t deny she had style. She had a very effective way of gliding into a room… Vibia Sabina seems unlike her in most respects, but she does have style. Even better, she has a mind. Given a few years”—Hadrian lifted his cup in an appreciative toast—“she might be quite a collector’s item.”

“Hmph.” Plotina closed her eyes. Her temples were pounding now—the room was loud—and the guests were streaming into the triclinium to eat. “Take me in to dine,” she told Dear Publius, who at once offered his arm. “I must do my duty, even if I can’t eat a bite. I have
such
a headache.”

TITUS

Some discreet elbowing went on, Titus noticed, as the guests took their places on the dining couches to eat. Everyone wanted to be at the Emperor’s side on the couch of honor, heaped with silk pillows and draped with ivy. No one, on the other hand, seemed quite so eager to share cushions with the Empress. And a whole cluster of young men were jostling to eat beside Vibia Sabina. Tribune Hadrian claimed the place on her left, but Titus (by stepping firmly on a young aedile’s foot) managed to stake out the couch on her right. “Hello,” he said to her. “You look quite wonderful.” The girl he saw on his periodic shy visits, usually flopped in the library in a careless braid and a plain tunic, had
given way to a very sophisticated creature indeed: a gleaming nymph reclining on a silk-cushioned couch, her dress narrow and silvery and short enough to show her ankles, her hair brushed up very high and sleek. No jewels, not like the other girls decked out to glitter for the suitors—just one earring like the Egyptians wore, an elaborate silver earring that reached her shoulder and winked garnets. “I’m glad you didn’t look like this when I proposed to you,” Titus told her frankly. “I’d never have gotten the words out.”

Sabina laughed, but Tribune Hadrian on her other side just frowned. The first stream of slaves were entering with silver dishes, and the smells of roast pork and smoked oysters uncoiled in tantalizing whiffs. “Who are you, young man?”

“Titus Aurelius Fulvus Boionius—”

“Yes, I’ve heard of you. Of your father, rather. Shouldn’t you still be in school?” Tribune Hadrian turned his attention on Sabina, dismissing Titus altogether. “I’d hoped to continue our discussion on the architectural studies of Apollodorus, Vibia Sabina. I don’t care for his domes at all—”

Titus never got another word in after that. Hadrian claimed Sabina with an ease Titus envied.
Oh, to be twenty-six instead of sixteen. To be charming instead of shy.
To be a man of the world reclining easily at Sabina’s side like this; speaking with just the right blend of intelligence and humor; offering her the choice bites from each dish with just the right air of insouciance; knowing exactly how often to touch her wrist with one finger to draw a bubble of intimacy around their conversation.
Oh, to be Tribune Hadrian instead of Titus who should still be in school.

Titus shrugged ruefully and applied himself to his food. Until the day finally came when he was no longer inevitably the youngest fellow at the party, he supposed he was bound for a good deal of silent nodding while other men held forth. He ate his smoked oysters and spiced sea urchins and listened to the conversation flowing easily between the couches. It was Trajan responsible for that, Titus thought—he might be Emperor, but he clearly felt no need to monopolize the talk. He
urged others to speak as often as he did himself, and listened raptly to what they had to say. He even cast a kind eye over at Titus once and said, “Well, boy, you’re a quiet one. I knew your father; we were tribunes together a hundred years or so ago. You planning on a stint in the legions too, young Titus?”

Titus couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying. Mud? Marching? Fighting?
I’d rather be eaten by wolves.
But he couldn’t say that to his tall, well-built Emperor, vigorous and sun-browned in his plain tunic and short military haircut, the laugh lines radiating out from his eyes as he looked down so kindly at his least important guest. His Emperor, who at forty-nine could have been ten years younger and looked ready to leap off his couch at a moment’s notice and charge right into any fight that presented itself. “Caesar,” Titus said brightly, and Trajan laughed and addressed some question to Senator Norbanus. Titus had observed before that you could get through most conversations with powerful men simply by repeating their names (in varying inflections) and looking respectful. Thank the gods, no one else spoke to him in the course of the meal. Titus ate his oysters and sipped his wine, content to be ignored, and it wasn’t until the fruit and nuts had been cleared away that the fight broke out.

Titus had already left his couch, gone to watch the moon rise in the open roof of the atrium, but he heard the chorus of shouts and followed the noise out into the shadowed garden, where lamps had been lit along the pillars. One of the Norbanus household guards brushed past him, sword leaping halfway out of its scabbard, and Titus put a hand on his arm. “I think it’s just guests,” he said, eyeing the dark figures lurching and grappling across the raked paths. “Not thieves.”

Two of the Emperor’s young tribunes had quarreled over Sabina, it seemed, each claiming her silver earring as a favor, and in the process knocked over a vase full of orchids, and Emperor Trajan had taken them by the scruff of their necks like puppies and tossed them outside. “Settle it like soldiers,” he yelled after them. “Take it out on each other, not your hostess’s house! Lady Calpurnia, I apologize for my men—”
But Lady Calpurnia was laughing, and more guests were spilling out of the triclinium into the fresh-scented darkness of the garden to watch the two tribunes, who had drawn swords and sworn a good-natured bout to first blood. “And it had better just be a scratch,” the Emperor shouted at them, flinging himself down on a marble bench with his elbows on his knees. “I’ll need both you young sods when I go back to Dacia next year, so I won’t have you killing each other.”

Dacia?
Titus wondered.
Dear gods, I hope Grandfather doesn’t decide to send me to war.
He could hear the words now: “A stint of military service is most useful in toughening the young.” No use at all to protest if you were the young person in question who didn’t particularly want to be toughened.

More of the guests had gathered now. Titus could see Marcus Norbanus standing beside his daughter, amused, and Sabina rolling her eyes at her suitors, her single earring glinting. The tribunes fell on each other with loud shouts, but even to Titus’s eyes they were too drunk to make it much of a contest. Some noisy clacking back and forth, an awkward stumble or two, and then one managed more by luck than skill to knock his opponent’s blade to the ground. “I win,” he proclaimed, waving his sword unsteadily up at the night sky. “Lady Sabina, I claim my prize—your earring, a token of—
hic
—token of love—”

“Not for a display like that,” she teased. “I like my tokens going for some show of genuine skill, please. I’ve got a household guard here who could mince you up like tripe within half a minute.”

“Do not!” the tribune bristled. “I could—
hic
—take any common bodyguard—”

“Let’s see, shall we?” she said, and Titus wondered if he’d seen a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes as they scanned the crowd. And then she was saying, “Care to show these professional soldiers how it’s done, Vix?”

The young guard who had told Titus to bring violets instead of lilies never hesitated. He tossed off his cloak, swung his arms in a quick
limbering stretch, and was already unsheathing his sword as he shouldered his way through the drunken hoots of the crowd. “Don’t mind if I do, Lady.”

The tribune whooped and put up his sword. His friends applauded mockingly. Titus bent to pick up the guard’s fallen cloak, and by the time he straightened the tribune had been disarmed.

Titus blinked, brows shooting up.

“That wasn’t fair,” the tribune protested.

The guard—Vix, Sabina had called him—crooked a finger in invitation, and his smile gleamed like a knife’s edge. “Come again, then.”

“This is not a proper display for a dinner party,” Empress Plotina was complaining. No one listened to her.

Titus managed to follow the fight that time, what there was of it. Pass, counterpass, feint—and the blade was on the ground again.

“Who else?” The guard named Vix turned a circle, spreading his arms. “I’m just getting warm.” He was tall, confident, swaggering, barely breathing hard; the lamplight cut shadows over his bare muscled arms. “‘I sing of arms and a man at war,’” Titus quoted Virgil to himself, and looked down at his scrawny unimpressive self. No one was ever going to sing of
his
feats, that was for certain.

Three more tribunes came clamoring forward to try Vix. The first had a sword stroke or two Titus vaguely remembered from the advanced class of swordsmanship but still found himself disarmed on a backhand pass; the second was drunk and stood empty-handed in under a minute; the third made a duel of it. Guests clapped across the circle, calling encouragement as the two battled back and forth across a section of raked garden path. Titus thought he saw a place or two where Vix could have ended the fight, but the russet-haired guard didn’t bother. He moved loose and lazy across the ground, the sword an extension of his arm, and he was grinning ear to ear as he finally whipped the
gladius
about and clipped the blade from his opponent’s hand.

The tribunes and their friends were all grumbling, not too pleased to be humiliated by a household guard, but Titus burst into applause
and the rest of the guests followed suit, ready to be entertained by anything. Vix gave a grand flourish of a bow, and Titus saw him drop a wink at Sabina. Titus wondered how many years of his life he’d give to be able to swagger and preen for a girl like that. Ten seemed excessive, but five…

“Didn’t I tell you, Caesar?” Sabina’s amused voice. “He’s good, isn’t he?”