‘And that is why I beg your forgiveness,’ Rab was concluding. He fell to his knees. ‘I do not deserve it, just as I do not deserve this fine toga, which in your generosity you have seen fit to provide. Please, Honourable Governor, forgive me, if only so that I may spend the rest of my days singing your praises.’
Atia’s father paused dramatically. ‘You fail to mention my greatest mercy, Camel Man.’
Atia saw Rab’s eyes search the floor. She held her breath. ‘My nephew,’ said Rab at last. ‘In your mercy you released my young nephew. And for that I thank you, Honourable Governor.’
‘It was a pleasure to release the youth,’ said Atia’s father. ‘My guards followed him all the way to your home east of Bostra, just to ensure his safety. It is a fine home for one such as yourself. Two floors, a big garden. Beautiful acacia trees.’
Rab’s eyes flew open.
‘Oh, I know much about you, Rabbel, son of Junon,’ continued her father. ‘What I do not know is where your loyalties lie.’
Rab swayed on his knees, as if he had just received a blow. ‘Ah, with you, Honourable Governor,’ he said, recovering himself. ‘With you and with Rome.’
Atia’s stomach twisted into a knot. She had not prepared Rab for threats to his family. ‘Then you would not deny your Governor a request?’
‘I—’ Rab glanced at Atia. ‘I would do anything in my power to fulfil it.’
‘Tell me, have you heard of the Nabataean tax thieves?’
‘I have not.’
Atia’s father gave a theatrical harrumph and his guests tittered. ‘I find that hard to believe, Camel Man,’ he continued, ‘but since you claim ignorance, I will enlighten you. Every month for the past year, the caravan that conveys the Roman tax payment from Rekem to Bostra has been robbed along New Trajan’s Way. We believe the thieves are using the riches to fund the Nabataean rebels.’
‘Fools!’ cried someone from the audience.
‘Fools indeed, but as a result the rebel army has grown bolder,’ said Atia’s father. ‘Two Roman tax collectors were killed just last week. And we all know about the attack on the Rekem contubernium.’
There was a collective sigh. Just two months before, a squad of ten Roman soldiers had been killed on their way from Rekem to Bostra. ‘New Trajan’s Way is no longer secure,’ continued Atia’s father. ‘I assume you know the alternative routes, Camel Man? The locations of the water holes and such?’
‘I do,’ Rab said carefully.
‘Good. As a demonstration of your goodwill, I would like you to guide my daughter and a host of guards to Rekem. Departing tomorrow.’
Atia caught her breath. A journey to Rekem? In the middle of August?
‘I wish for you to convey a precious package to Legate Julianus, the commander of the legion stationed there,’ her father continued. ‘In addition, my daughter has some business with him.’
Atia felt every eye in the room settle on her. There was only one kind of business that could take place between the commander of a Roman legion and the daughter of a Roman governor: marriage.
There was a spate of hushed talk and Atia felt as if she were sinking into the floor. He had done it, then. Her father had selected her fourth husband and was sending her to him along with her precious dowry.
It would be a sine manu marriage—as they all had been—with her father retaining control over Atia and her dowry. Whoever her new husband was, Atia would be expected to submit to his every wish—at least until such time as her father determined the alliance of no further use.
Atia laboured to keep the emotion from her expression. She could tell her father was relishing this moment. He had given the bored patricians exactly what they craved. She could hear the gossip starting already—whispers about the meaning of the match, along with a smattering of comments on Atia’s advanced age, unfortunate nose and general plainness. She had never been more grateful for the effects of the tears.
Her father returned his attention to Rab. ‘You will guide my daughter and her armed escort and help ensure their safety from rebel attack. It is a dangerous mission, but it is how you may prove your loyalty to Rome.’
‘Yes, Governor,’ said Rab, his head bowed.
‘Good, now kiss my ring.’
Rab betrayed only the slightest hesitation as he bent to do the deed and kept his expression blank as Atia’s father pulled him close and whispered something in his ear. When Rab returned to standing, he appeared smaller somehow. Defeated. He had managed to get free of his first prison, but now he was obviously trapped inside a new one.
And this time, Atia was trapped with him—the man who had offered her his ghutrah and called her beautiful and tried to kiss her.
The man who had done all those things not out of desire, but in a desperate, futile effort to get himself free.
Chapter Six
The elephants. They haunted Rab’s dreams. Giant, fearsome creatures that stormed his restful hours in thundering armies, giving him no peace. He had never actually seen elephants, though he had heard them described by his father so often that he felt he knew them intimately. And he hated them.
When his father had returned from his first trade mission to India, he would not stop talking about the strange beasts. He said that they were as common as camels in that distant land and that they were larger and smarter and gentler than any other creature that walked the earth.
After Rab’s mother had died on the birthing bed, his father had made several more trips to India, though each time he returned he had seemed a little sadder. Speaking of India’s elephants was the only thing that seemed to cheer him. He had been so fascinated with the beasts that soon he had stopped saying India altogether and instead begun to say ‘the land of the elephants’ and finally just ‘the elephants.’
On the night his father took his own life, Rab had been dozing on the roof of the palace, gazing at the night sky. He and his new wife Babatha had had another argument and Rab had taken his comfort in a bottle of Nabataean wine and the company of the stars.
The memory gave him a chill. Had the warning trumpets not sounded when they did, he would likely have fallen asleep. He would have never seen the Roman legion marching into Rekem: five thousand men treading softly along its sacred way, their helmets gleaming in the moonlight.
If he had not heard the trumpets, he would have never sent orders to the head of the palace guard to surround the most important tombs and speed his family from the city. He would have never rushed into his father’s chamber to discover him sprawled on the floor, an empty bottle in his hand.
‘My son!’ his father had exclaimed. His eyes had been shot with blood and his limbs quivering.
‘Father, what have you done?’ Rab had asked, though the bottle’s purple paint told him everything he needed to know: His father had drunk atropa—the deadliest of poisons.
‘Forgive me, Son,’ his father had breathed. ‘We cannot beat them.’
‘We can draw them into the desert, can we not? Just as our forefathers did? The desert is our home. Our enemies are defenceless in it.’
‘It is we who are defenceless now.’ His father’s eyes had fluttered. ‘I have written a letter explaining all. You will find it in my tomb.’
‘Father, do not go. I do not understand. Please—’
‘The elephants, my son,’ his father had murmured. ‘The elephants.’
And then he was gone.
Rab never found the letter. By the time he’d been able to sneak into his father’s tomb, the Romans had taken everything. He and his sisters had travelled north to Bostra, where they had gone into hiding. Rab had grown out his hair and beard and thrown himself into recruiting the rebel army.
‘You must let go of your vengeful thoughts,’ his young wife had urged him. ‘The Romans are here to stay.’
And so he had divorced her. He no longer had a
ny patience for compromising Nabataeans, nor did he have any room left in his heart for love. There was only the relentless, all-consuming work of getting back what Rome had taken.
The elephants. Rab considered the phrase now as he watched their party’s leader—a towering Roman commander by the name of Plotius—berate a young soldier for the dull condition of his sword.
Could his father’s reference to elephants have meant the Romans themselves? They were certainly large and they stampeded all over the world. But that was where the comparison ended, for there was nothing gentle or particularly intelligent about the Romans.
And now Rab would be guiding them across his own homeland, aiding them in their business of colonisation. In other words, he would be helping them build what he had been working for thirteen years to destroy.
He watched another soldier place a large bag of onions atop the back of a donkey and saw the beast stumble. The bag added too much weight to the donkey’s load and the wrong kind of weight at that.
Rab caught the donkey’s eye and tried to convey his apologies. In response, the miserable beast let out a long, squealing bray.
They were Rab’s sentiments exactly. It was already mid-morning and the heat had grown fierce, yet their large party of ten donkeys and thirty soldiers still had not left the fort and even the Governor had abandoned them.
This was beyond madness. A journey from Bostra to Rekem in the middle of August?
Nobody travelled in the heat of August. Not the herders, who followed mountain pastures, nor the farmers, whose donkeys ploughed the lowland fields, nor the traders, who plied the desert routes in their caravans of thousands. Even the wild ibex knew better than to range during the month of August. Sensible creatures, they hovered in the shade near their water holes and waited for the more reasonable temperatures of autumn to arrive.
It was not the first part of the route that worried him. It would be hot, of course, but there would be some grazing for the donkeys through the rolling hills of the north and they would find supplies and relief in the towns and small villages that dotted the route.
Nay, it was not the first twenty days that would break them, it was the second twenty: the desert.
Rab imagined their large party trying to find shade. There were simply too many of them to fit beneath the thin overhangs that the badlands offered. He pictured their cumbersome group attempting to navigate a slot canyon in their heavy chain mail shirts, or struggle across a dune with their swords and shields.
That was when he noticed the donkey carriage. They could not possibly be thinking to bring it along. ‘We cannot bring a carriage,’ Rab told Plotius.
‘We can bring whatever we like,’ snapped the commander.
‘Why do we not employ camels for our journey?’ Rab asked.
‘Dirty beasts,’ Plotius scoffed. ‘Camels are for Arabs.’
Rab bit back his anger. ‘The donkeys are not suited to this kind of heat. They will expire of thirst.’ As will we all if we are not careful.
‘It is your job to lead us to Rekem,’ said Plotius, his fleshy jaw flexing. ‘Not to give advice. Understand?’
No, Rab did not understand—not when their very survival was at stake. ‘We should carry dates and nuts, not onions, and we should not travel at this time of day.’ Rab pointed to the sky. ‘You must respect the sun. Your own great Emperor Trajan was defeated by it.’
Plotius paused and Rab could see that the statement had had its intended effect. It was a scandal among Roman soldiers that the Emperor, whom they considered one of the greatest military leaders of all time, had died by fever resulting from exposure to sun.
‘Go to Hades,’ Plotius responded. He sent a string of spit on to Rab’s sandal, then strode away.
You fool, Rab thought, for even spit was something precious in the heat.
The soldiers were lifting their heavy rucksacks, preparing to depart. Rab peered into the crib of the carriage, expecting to see more ill-considered provisions. Instead he beheld the Governor’s daughter, gazing listlessly through a rift in the shade cloth. Her face was already a dangerous shade of red.
‘You must shield yourself from the sun,’ Rab told her. He moved to adjust the shade cloth and lowered his voice. ‘If you wish to survive this journey, you must listen to the story that the desert has to tell you. It will be your life...or your death.’
‘Please do not try to endear yourself by pretending you care about me,’ she replied, waving him away. ‘There is nothing I can do for you now.’
They were the first words she had uttered since she had called the guards on him the previous day and he was alarmed at how much they stung. But he should not have been so surprised. They merely underscored what he should have accepted from the beginning: that she was not his friend.
Of course she was not. He was Nabataean and she was Roman, or so she had so helpfully reminded him yesterday inside his cell. Not that he should have required any reminding. He hated Romans. They were unlike the Greek conquerors who had swept through Nabataean lands before them. Romans did not attempt to understand the peoples they conquered. They invaded kingdoms and bled them of their riches, then gifted their broken peoples with the title ‘citizen’ and expected their undying love.
Rab could see it happening already. There were now over two thousand Nabataeans in the Third Cyrenaica Legion based in Bostra and there was news the that the Twenty-Second Deiotariana based in Rekem had an equal number in its ranks. Many of Rab’s poorer friends now donned Roman armour and his landed friends wore Roman togas. They mixed with Roman settlers and married their daughters, abandoning their Nabataean gods and embracing Jupiter and Juno and the rest.
It was a disgrace. They were dishonourable men, at least in Rab’s mind—traitors to their people. A true Nabataean would never consider any kind of an alliance with a Roman. A true Nabataean would stay as far away from the Romans as he could possibly get.
In other words, he was not her friend, either.
Which was why he was finding it difficult to get the previous day’s events out of his mind, for she had helped him in a way that had seemed utterly selfless. Had she not guided him in the manner of his apology, he would have surely landed himself back in the cell. Or worse.
And there was the problem of her nearness. When he had pulled her up to face him in the bathhouse reception hall, it had felt as if he were standing before a woman he had known all his life. Against everything he knew and believed, he had found himself wanting to kiss her.
Though that was perhaps not the best way to describe the elemental yearning that had him sweating and trembling and swilling her scent.
And she had wanted to kiss him—he was almost certain of it. She had closed her eyes and parted her lips—those lush, welcoming lips—and then—
‘You, Camel Man, on the point,’ commanded Plotius. The soldiers were moving into position around the woman’s carriage, pushing Rab to the side.
Good. He did not wish to be near her. Nearness was dangerous. It scrambled his wits and made his body want things it should not. Besides, he suspected she was now betrothed. What other business could she possibly have with the Roman Legate at Rekem?
‘Take your places,’ Plotius called to the men. The armoured soldiers were donning their helmets and preparing to depart. Rab scanned the group in search of an augur or holy man, but failed to discover a one. ‘Will we not request the favour of the gods before we begin?’ he asked. ‘Will we offer them nothing?’
There was a long silence. The Roman woman sat up in her cart and sighed with annoyance. ‘Plotius?’ she barked. ‘Prepare a sacrifice for Janus.’
Rab watched Plotius remove his helmet and scan the fort in search of something to kill. But not even the pigeons would oblige him in this kind of heat. He stalked towards a donkey and rifled through its saddlebag, finally seizing on a large glass jar.
Plotius f
lashed the party a thick-lipped grin as he uncorked the container and pulled out three dead dormice dripping with vinegar. ‘Still fresh,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘They will have to suffice.’
Rab cringed as Plotius held the tiny corpses up to the heavens. What mockery of a sacrifice was this? Were Romans so blinded by their own dominion that they had ceased even to fear the gods? Plotius mumbled some incomprehensible thing, then placed the mice beside the road.
‘Leave the jar as well,’ said the woman. She reached into her pocket and produced several silver denarii. ‘And place these coins with it,’ she continued, ‘lest Janus think us stingy.’
With a roll of his eyes, Plotius placed the jar on the ground next to the corpses and tossed the coins upon the crude display. He gave the sky a defiant stare, then addressed his troops. ‘Let the infernal march begin,’ he said. ‘To Rekem!’
Suddenly the men were moving. They fell into position without effort, flowing around Rab as if he were a rock in the stream. They would march, it seemed, even without their guide to lead them.
Rab sent a quick prayer to Shay’ al-Qaum, the Nabataean god of caravans, and stepped silently past the mice, imagining their tiny corpses roasting in the sun all day. By evening they would draw the dogs, who would feast on their cooked flesh, then smash the fragile jar and consume their pickled companions as well.
Rab gazed out at the heavily armoured soldiers and realised that he was the only one who saw it—the suffering ahead of them. The first part of the route they would survive. The hills of the north had reliable water and there was never a town more than two days’ journey away. But as they journeyed further south the desert would begin to claim them: first their energy, then their water, then, finally, their minds.
The Romans did not understand. They would never understand. The desert in summer was a dog. And they were the dormice.
Chapter Seven
Atia never went looking for trouble, but trouble always seemed to find her. It had found her the day she was born, for she was supposed to have been a boy. It had found her the day of her first marriage, then the day of her second, then the day of her third. It had found her the day her father had ordered her newborn sister taken away to the dump and the day after that, when her mother had taken her own life and Atia had sought comfort for the first time in the tears of poppy.
Seduced by Her Rebel Warrior Page 6
