I heard a cry and whirled. As if from the end of a long tunnel of darkness I saw Trajan stagger, clutching at his suddenly dangling arm. He went to his knees, overturning the game board in a shower of carved pieces, and I saw the lips skin back from his teeth as he tried to stand. Get up, I thought, oh please, get up! But he fell. He fell.

Oh God, he fell.

SABINA

“You cannot see him, Vibia Sabina. He is resting.”

“He asked for me.” Sabina moved around Plotina. “So I’m going to him.”

“He would be better off resting.” Plotina drew herself up, more a granite pillar than ever in a charcoal-gray gown. The gray in her hair matched it, winging along her temples. “I do not permit it.”

Sabina smiled sweetly at the Empress of Rome. “Go fuck a horse,” she said with great precision, and shoved past Plotina into Trajan’s sickroom.

The window had no shutters, so the physicians had pinned a blanket over the sill to give darkness. The bed had had to be brought from the trireme and assembled. The floor was packed clay, and spiderwebs grew in the corners. No room for an emperor to die, Sabina thought.

“Don’t bustle around me, damn it.” The voice from the bed was hoarse, slurred. Trajan lay on his back, heaped with blankets despite the heat, and he batted a hand weakly at the physician trying to measure his pulse. “Is that little Sabina? Come here. The rest of you, out.”

The physician fell back obediently. His face as he passed Sabina was taut and sad, and the slaves who filed out behind him all looked as if they had been weeping. The Praetorian at the door kept repeatedly cuffing at his eyes.

“Take that blanket down. I want some light.”

“Of course.” Sabina dragged the blanket off the window. The harbor sparkled outside, impossibly blue under an even bluer sky. An abandoned harbor, though. The emperor’s ship had put into the nearest available port: empty, ruined Selinus, sacked in a long-ago war and never rebuilt. A few squatters nested in derelict buildings along with the crows, but there had been no one to greet the frantic Imperial entourage when Trajan had been carried off the ship to one of the few houses that still boasted an intact roof. Sabina could see the ruins of an old temple cresting the hills above, but for once she felt no urge to go exploring.

“Come here, girl,” Trajan rasped, and she came and knelt by the bed. He seemed to have shrunk in just two days, his cheeks hollowed, the skin of his hands loose and wattled, the corner of his mouth dragged down now in a permanent snarl. He could not move the right side of his body; every breath wheezed in his throat. Sabina took his hand between hers and felt no answering squeeze.