Empress of the Seven Hills (42 page)

I gave a half-smile, still watching the cart full of girls.

“Let’s hope this is Mirah’s last time dancing at Tu B’Av,” Simon’s
mother said, and I jumped a little guiltily. “Her third time! She could have had a husband at sixteen, but my son is lenient with her, and she keeps turning up her nose—”

I’d untangled a few of these family ties after a week. Mirah was Simon’s niece, nineteen years old, and she had a low soft voice and cooked a roast goose that melted in your mouth. “At least they’ll have a fair day for their dancing,” I said, looking up at the cloudless blue sky.

“And maybe you’ll find a wife here!” Simon’s mother teased me over her shoulder as she moved off. “Better a good Jewish girl who can cook than some little Roman hussy who sacrifices goats!”

I looked at the cart full of girls. Two of them caught my eye and immediately collapsed into giggles behind their hands. No doubt about it; I had been marked for the chase. Funny, that feeling usually made me itch to bolt for the hills. Not now.

Not much, anyway.

The cart pulled up with more squealing from the girls, and the men came forward to hand them down. The older women began unpacking hampers of food and more jugs of wine, fussing about whether there would be enough as mothers seemed to do the world over. A cluster of little girls too young to dance among the vines descended on the patient mules and began braiding ribbons into their manes.

“Vix, give me a hand down?” Mirah tilted her head at me from the wagon. I came forward and put my hands to her waist, lifting her down from the tailboard. She wore a fine white shift, and I could feel her skin warm and smooth through it.

“Why are all you girls in white?” I asked, and took my time releasing her.

“So no one can tell the rich from the poor.” Mirah put a hand on my shoulder to balance as she leaned down and stripped off her sandals. “It’s a day for love, not haggling over dowries.”

“That’s sensible.”

“I don’t know,” she said, thoughtful. “All the young men here have
known me forever. They know what I’m worth, regardless of what I’m wearing. But it’s a nice custom, anyway.”

Half the girls had let their hair loose, but Mirah wore a white scarf over her head. It suited her, but I still didn’t know what color her hair was.

She straightened, tossing her sandals into the wagon, and smiled up at me. Then she let out a piercing war whoop and dived into the vineyard. The other girls went giggling and squealing after her. Someone behind us began to play at pipes, and the little girls twirled wistfully as they watched their big sisters join hands among the vines and went ducking, dancing, swirling through the grapes. The men came up to watch the dancing with casual jests and intent eyes. “Pretty sight, aren’t they?” Simon said at my elbow.

“Pretty enough. Which one have you got your eye on?”

“Don’t know,” he said, though his eyes followed an olive-skinned girl with a gentle face.

I nudged him. “She’s pretty!”

“Well, I need a wife,” he said, a little self-conscious. “It’s time I started a family. I’m to get my land grant soon—I’m hoping for something in Judaea.” All legionaries who made it through their twenty-five years were rewarded with a packet of land somewhere in the Empire for farming. Though I’m not sure who had the idea that retired soldiers would make good farmers. I didn’t know a plow from a streetlamp, and as far as I knew, neither did Simon.

“So you’ll take your new wife and move to Judaea and spend your days plowing?” I hooted. “You’ve never even seen Judaea!”

“I don’t have to see it to love it,” Simon said intensely, and I let the matter drop.

The girls began whirling back, tossing grapes or flowers to the men who watched them, and I saw mothers nodding approval. A middle-aged man with gray shot through his beard stood watching Mirah greedily—his third wife had just died, I knew—and I felt the sudden
urge to pound him. A moment later he staggered and blinked as a cluster of grapes hit him in the chest, and Mirah ducked bright-eyed and innocent-faced back behind the vines.

I managed to catch Mirah’s eye, and her mouth quirked at me. Then she yanked the scarf off her hair and waved it over her head like a banner as she pelted down the vines. Her hair was braided with sloe blossom, and it was a bright chestnut. Like mine.

I didn’t know it before, but Jews got married under canopies. I stood under one myself a month later, when I married Mirah.

TITUS

“The
apodyterium
with changing shelves for clothes will be there.” Titus pointed to a team of workmen laying brick under the noon sun. “The
frigidarium
with the pool, here.” He pointed to another team of workmen pouring concrete and swearing. “The
laconicum
there—see the deeper trenches being dug? That’s for the kilns, to keep the steam hot. The
tepidarium
there, with massage tables and refreshments.” He turned to face his guests, feeling oddly nervous. “Well?”

Senator Marcus Norbanus and his younger daughter, Faustina, looked around them at the vast building site. Brick dust lay heavy in the air; workmen tramped past with shovels and loads of stone. The sound of hammers, axes, shuffling sandals, and muffled cursing filled the air. “I believe Emperor Trajan estimated three years to finish the baths when he proposed the project in the Senate?” Marcus drew a fold of his toga up over his gray head as a shield from the sun. “From the sight of all this, I’d estimate four.”

“At least,” Titus agreed. “And I’d guess five. Now’s the time to make changes in the design—after this it’s all set in stone, so to speak. I already know what Roman men want in a bathhouse: a gymnasium, a steam room to sweat off the exercise, and plenty of pretty slave girls for massages.”

“I don’t care if they’re pretty.” Marcus rubbed his crooked shoulder, rueful. “Not as long as their hands can take the aches out of these feeble old bones of mine.”

“You’re not feeble,” Faustina protested, giving her father’s arm a playful little shake. “You just play it up so people will underestimate you in the Senate!”

“Sshh,” Marcus hushed her. “Not too loud, please. I’ve got Ruricus’s claque convinced I doze off whenever the new road project comes up.”

“Knew I was right.” Faustina tossed her head, pleased, and turned back to Titus. “So why did you insist I come along?”

“To give me a woman’s opinion.” Titus bowed, flourishing his sun hat. “What do the women of Rome want in a bathhouse? These are going to be the greatest baths in the Empire; the voices of Rome’s women should be heard. As represented by you.”

“Me?” Faustina tilted her blond head at him. “Not my sister?”

“I did ask her, but I fear she was no help at all. She told me that the best bath she ever had was naked in a stream in Pannonia. I can provide a lot”—Titus waved an arm at the huge work site—“but not a stream in Pannonia.”

Faustina laughed. She looked like a sheaf of hyacinths in a crisp blue linen dress; taller and prettier than even Titus had anticipated when he’d predicted to her eleven-year-old self that she would grow up a beauty. “So let’s go see the greatest baths in Rome.”

“I may not be as feeble as some of my colleagues have been allowed to think,” Marcus announced, “but I am far too old to go scrambling over heaps of stone. Take my daughter, Titus, and I will sit here in the shade and ponder your architectural plans. You’ve got space here for a very nice archive, I think. Some of us would appreciate a bookshelf or two at the baths, not just racks of weights…”

Titus offered his arm to Faustina as the gray-haired bent-backed senator settled himself on a block of undressed granite. He didn’t know how he would have survived his first months as quaestor without the advice of Sabina’s father. His own grandfather was so frail now,
Titus hated to disturb him in the peace of retirement—but Senator Norbanus never seemed to mind giving a tactful piece of advice when Titus asked for it. “Gods, yes, the military payrolls are always in a snarl. But it will give you the best training in Rome when it comes to sniffing out new schemes of graft. And there are
always
new schemes of graft…”

Marcus waved him off, already deep into the architectural plans, and Titus offered his arm to Faustina. “Mind your step,” he warned as he led her about the work site. “There’s rubble everywhere. Not to mention staring stonemasons who haven’t seen anything as lovely as you up close in their whole lives. Now, here’s the gymnasium… the
lavatoria
, brass fittings for everything, even the flush handles… Phrygian marble in the entryway; Carrara marble is more famous, but I think the Phrygian has a better sheen when damp and these walls are going to be damp a good bit of the time… Five hundred lamps to light the
caldarium…”

He caught himself, realizing he was chattering. “Forgive me, I do go on about my work. A real quaestor doesn’t enjoy his work, or even do it if possible. He’s too busy scheming to be praetor.”

“I didn’t think building projects fell into a quaestor’s duties.” Faustina peered into the excavated hole that would soon, Titus assured her, be a pool tiled in blue with dolphin mosaics.

“Normally, this would be outside my duties. But Emperor Trajan set me to the job. I worked with the architects on his triumphal column for the Dacian campaigns, you see—he wanted someone who’d actually
been
to Dacia, who could tell the relief-carvers how everything really looked. Everyone else who fought in Dacia had important jobs by the time the column started going up, so the task fell to me. Trajan must have been happy with the result, because he set me to oversee some of the work on these baths next.”

“It sounds important.”

“Not terribly,” Titus confessed. “Mostly I keep Consul Hadrian
and the architect from killing each other. Hadrian oversees the project too, you see, and since he has a great interest in architecture he has a great many ideas how to improve the plans… he didn’t take it very kindly when the architect told him his domes looked like gourds. So I’m a kind of buffer state between them—like Pannonia between Germania and Dacia. I may get trampled on a lot, but I’m fairly essential if you want peace.”

Faustina was squinting at the foundations of the
apodyterium
. “What kind of brick are you using here?”

“From Tarracina.” He named the suppliers and factory.

“You’ve been given sun-baked bricks instead of kiln-fired,” Faustina said. “Buy brick from me instead.”

Titus blinked. “From you?”

“I own four brick factories,” Faustina explained. “Mother gave them to me for my dowry, but only if I learned something about how they operated. I know about brick. And those bricks have been baked in the sun instead of fired in a kiln. Water wears away sun-baked brick faster than fired brick, and there’s a lot of water in a bathhouse.”

Titus made a note. “Anything else?”

Faustina turned a circle in the partially excavated
apodyterium
, hands on hips. The sun shone momentarily through her thin blue dress, and Titus had to motion his workers not to stop and leer. “You’ve got shelves for people to leave their clothes when they change?”

“Yes, made of pine.”

“Alder would be better; it doesn’t rot when it gets wet. I’ve got a timber yard as part of my dowry too,” she said, forestalling his question. “And you should have pegs as well as shelves. Women would rather hang up their clothes than fold them.”

“They would?”

“Fold up a linen dress like this one,” Faustina offered a pinch of her skirt, “and you’ll need an iron to press it back out. No woman wants to leave a bathhouse in wrinkly clothes.”

“That is exactly why I wanted a woman’s opinion in the first place.” Titus made another note on his slate. “Anything else?”

“Every bathhouse in Rome has naked mermaids in the mosaics. Women don’t want to look at naked mermaids who have better breasts than we do. Keep the mermaids for the men’s gymnasium, and put something else in the room where women get massages. A sea god with a nice bare chest, for example.”

“No naked mermaids,” Titus promised. “Not in the best baths in the world.”

Faustina fanned brick dust away from her face, tilting her chin up at him. “This is important to you, isn’t it? Even if it isn’t strictly part of your duties.”

“I suppose a bathhouse isn’t really important in the great scheme of things.” Titus ran a hand over a half-erected wall, double-thick to contain the heat from the steam rooms. “But it will be the biggest baths in the world. Eight million units of water in the cistern. And when it’s done, with naked mermaids in the gymnasium and naked sea gods in the women’s
tepidarium
, with gardens and flowers stretching all around”—his eye could already see them spreading around the dusty arid work site like a green oasis in the middle of the city—“then they’ll be known as the Baths of Trajan, because he commissioned them to begin with. Or maybe the Baths of Apollodorus, because he designed them, or the Baths of Hadrian because he really does have good architectural opinions to contribute even if his domes look like gourds. So they won’t be my baths. But I’ll be able to look at them, and know I helped build them. Know that I helped make Rome beautiful.” Titus turned away from the imagined gardens. “That’s all I’d do, if I could. Make Rome beautiful.”

Faustina smiled at him from under her sunshade. “Then take me around again. Father said something about adding an archive, and I think you’ve got room on the eastern side. Maybe a library?”

“I fear your nose is getting pink.”

“Bother my nose! I want to make Rome beautiful too.”

SABINA

“Damn it,” the Emperor grumbled, “I hate theatre.”

“It’s
Phaedra
,” whispered Sabina.

“It’s some fool woman mooning all over her stepson and then wrecking his life. I’ve seen
that
happen, and it’s not art.” Trajan’s fingers drummed the arm of his chair. “It’s a bloody mess, and I do mean bloody.”

Empress Plotina turned to stare at them both, reproving. Trajan made a face like a guilty schoolboy, and Sabina made a point to laugh aloud. Plotina’s disapproving stare deepened, and then she turned her attention back to the stage where the actors declaimed through their masks. The Theatre of Marcellus’s tiered seats were crammed full, the plebs packed close in their woolen cloaks. Sabina could see the musicians sweating as they puffed and plucked at their instruments in the little
cavea
below the Imperial balcony.