I remembered marching along with my lion skin hot in the sun and the eagle screaming silently over my head. I remembered shouting rude insults at Trajan along with the rest of the legionaries—an old tradition for the troops at a victorious general’s triumph. He’d seemed to know the insults were fond; his grin split the paint on his face, and he made encouraging waves to inspire us to new heights of vulgarity. The crowds pressing in on each side screamed so loud when they finally caught sight of him that I was deaf for the next three hours. A slave stood behind the Emperor murmuring in his ear: “You are only a man… you are only a man…” Another Roman custom for a triumphant general, and a custom I didn’t entirely understand; something about keeping a man humble even in his moment of victory. But I doubted the Emperor had heard one word that slave was muttering. He was too happy, too radiantly happy with his laurel wreath cocked back on his head at a boyish angle and his people shouting his name.

Romans are strange. Why on earth would anyone ever tell such a god that he was only a man?

The little room was stifling. Trajan’s officers stood crammed along the walls, spaced here and there by Praetorians who stood looking helpless because it was their job to keep the Emperor alive, but what could they do here to save him? His freedmen stood in frightened little clusters, and senators flocked together like whispering old hens. I was crammed somewhere at the back, the Emperor’s newest and most junior commander, but I could see over all the heads before me. The Empress sat on one side of the bed, rigid as ever in a wooden chair, one hand resting on her husband’s. Sabina had slipped from her chair to her knees on the bed’s other side; her cropped head leaned against Trajan’s deadened arm, her fingers ceaselessly stroking his motionless hand. Her eyes were closed, but when the Imperial physician tried to pin a blanket up over the window to block the fading light, her head whipped up and she snapped, “Leave it! He wants light.”

“The air is unhealthful—”

“I said leave it!”

Plotina drew a breath as if to remonstrate. Sabina’s furious eyes bored into her. Silence fell again. Just the shuffle of feet, an occasional cough—and above all, the terrible rasp of Trajan’s breathing. Coming slower now.

Slower.