I remember the first time I saw Hadrian dirty himself. The column had paused at the banks of a swollen river, and the surveyors were fussing with their maps about a ford that should have been there and wasn’t. I sat down in the road, easing my pack off with a groan and stretching my weary feet in their sandals, and most of the other legionaries did the same, but the tribunes cantered their horses into a nearby meadow, shouting and playing foolish games. One of them flushed a deer from the trees, a stag with antlers like a crown. Hadrian had been sitting his horse some distance apart, a smirk on that bearded face as he watched the antics, but as he saw the deer the smirk vanished. Taut concentration replaced it, and he snatched a javelin from the nearest legionary. In a heartbeat he’d spurred his horse beside the fleeing stag, and in another heartbeat he’d brought it down in one beautifully placed stroke to the heart. A dark jet of blood spurted over his foot, but he only blinked slowly, as if the kill had brought him down to earth from someplace distant—and then he smiled. “He loves hunting,” Sabina told me later. “Deer, boar, anything he can chase down on foot or horseback. Strange, isn’t it? You wouldn’t take him for a hunter at all, since he loves animals and hates getting dirty.”

“He doesn’t love hunting at all,” I said. “He loves killing.” That’s another image that wakes me sometimes in the night: Hadrian with his javelin, smiling at the spray of blood on his foot. The blood was dark, but in my dreams it glows scarlet.

I remember Sabina.