“You were too busy conquering the world,” Sabina said gently, and withdrew to thread her way through the crowds of restless idlers outside, all trying their best to peer into the Imperial sickroom. “The Emperor wishes to be alone,” Sabina said over and over, finally squeezing back inside and pushing the door shut. Phaedimus proved to be one of the Imperial freedmen—a handsome one, and from the way he fell to his knees by the bed and pressed his lips to Trajan’s hand, he’d been more to the Emperor than a secretary of grants and promotions. “Caesar—”

“Get out your pens, young man.” Trajan’s wasted fingers tweaked the lean cheek. “No more weeping. Take down a letter for me. ‘To the honorable senators of Rome’ or maybe ‘Most noble senators of Rome’—just do it up properly for me; you know how to flatter that pack of proud buggers by now…”

Phaedimus wrote neatly and rapidly, pen never pausing while the tears dripped down his face. Sabina helped Trajan sit up partway in bed, supporting his deadened shoulder while he crookedly signed at the bottom.

“There.” He fell back, the pen dropping from his fingers. “You keep that for the time being, Phaedimus. Till I’ve broken the news to Plotina and the others. Tomorrow, maybe.” His voice trailed off. “Can’t face her hissing at me today… she’s already likely trying to poison me, angry as I made her in Antioch…”

Sabina couldn’t make out the rest of the mumbled words, but she leaned down to kiss Trajan’s forehead. “Rest now.” The skin under her lips was as dry as parchment, and cold to the touch.

Phaedimus looked at her with miserable swollen eyes as they passed out of the sickroom. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

Sabina eased the door closed. “Yes.”

VIX

I stood watching an emperor die, but somehow I couldn’t see him. My eyes couldn’t focus on that shrunken figure in the bed. I kept seeing him the way he’d looked during his triumph in Rome, after the Dacian campaign. Tall, godlike, standing like a colossus in his own chariot at the center of the parade, his face daubed with celebratory red paint and a wreath of laurel leaves crowning his head—I could see him so clearly, as if the triumph had happened last week instead of nearly a decade ago. The little room where an emperor lay dying was full of people, but I couldn’t see any of them. I was too busy remembering.