Avenger of Blood

by John Hagee

  After a couple of minutes, the apprentice veered off the road. The older man followed, and not knowing what else to do, Jacob did as well. Straight ahead he could see one of the huge tufa towers, a ladder propped against its side. The apprentice scrambled up the ladder and disappeared into an opening in the mountain.

  Jacob did not wait for an invitation. As soon as the second man was halfway up the ladder, Jacob started to climb. When he reached the top, the two locals yanked him inside.

  “Pull the ladder up behind you,” the apprentice ordered Jacob.

  The lad’s felt cap had skewed to the side during the chase, and now he reached up with a slender hand to remove it. A tumble of thick, chin-length raven hair fell out. All Jacob could do was stare openmouthed. The apprentice was not a young man, as Jacob had assumed from the costume, but a young woman. A woman with deeply bronzed, velvety skin, and lovely black eyes. Eyes that flashed in anger.

  “I said, pull up the ladder. Now! Do you want to get us killed?”

  Looking below, Jacob saw that the trader had almost reached the ladder. Jacob quickly pulled it inside, then he looked back at the intriguing woman. His frustration at the prospect of spending the winter in Cappadocia instantly vanished.

  If I’m lucky, he thought, spring will be late this year.

  20

  WHEN THE MAN HAD CAUGHT HIS BREATH, he propped the ladder against the interior wall of the cave house and unrolled a heavy drapery that had been fastened above the opening. As the curtain fell, Jacob got a final glimpse of the chief trader, hands on his hips, yelling something in a language Jacob didn’t recognize. The trader had used a mixture of Greek and Latin to conduct business, but he had evidently slipped back to his native tongue to send a stream of curses their way.

  The heavy drapery cast a shadow across the entry chamber, but an overhead ventilation shaft allowed light into the room. Jacob noticed stairs off to the left; straight ahead and to the right were arched passageways leading, Jacob presumed, to the main rooms of the house.

  After a moment the trader’s voice receded and the local man lifted the edge of the curtain to peek outside. “He’s leaving,” the man announced.

  The woman was clearly furious. She looked at Jacob with undisguised hostility, then turned on her companion. “What are we going to do with our uninvited guest?” she demanded with a jerk of her arm toward Jacob.

  “What we always do with guests,” the man said patiently. “Offer hospitality.” After a reproving glance at the woman, he turned to Jacob to offer an apology. “My niece is still angry about being cheated—”

  “I have every right to be!”

  “Yes, but what’s done is done,” the man told her, “and you can’t let it eat away at you.” He extended a hand to Jacob. “My name is Gregory. This is my niece, Livia, who is not usually so ill-mannered.”

  After he introduced himself, Jacob said, “I’m sorry to invade your home like this. I followed you by instinct—I didn’t know what else to do.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Why was that trader chasing you?”

  Jacob shrugged. “To rob me, I suppose. You said yourself they were thieves. They’d already made off with my horse.”

  That set Livia off again. “Thieves of the worst kind,” she grumbled. She couldn’t seem to stand still for very long, Jacob noticed. He watched her pace around the room with a long stride. Livia was taller than her uncle; in fact, she almost matched Jacob’s height of six feet. He’d never met a woman that tall, and he’d also never met one who wore her hair that short. It wasn’t cut so short as to look masculine, but it only fell a couple of inches below her ears. The ends cupped under and swung toward her chin as she walked back and forth, and Jacob found himself mesmerized by the sight. This Livia appeared to be a remarkable woman, and even though she’d shown him nothing but antagonism, he was intrigued.

  Gregory ushered them through the long passageway directly across from the entrance. “You’ll join us for a bit of refreshment,” he said to Jacob.

  The spacious room to which Gregory led them was sparsely but well furnished, and surprisingly light and airy. Two windows had been carved into the far wall, and there was a ventilation shaft overhead. It didn’t feel like a cave at all, Jacob thought. Certainly not like the caves on Devil’s Island. If he hadn’t had to climb up a ladder propped against a rocky surface to enter the home, he would not have believed they were inside one of the tufa cones jutting out from the earth.

  They sat on cushions around a low table, and over a cup of something hot and spicy to drink—Jacob thought it best not to inquire as to the contents—Gregory recounted the story of how the traders had swindled his niece. “Livia is a metalworker,” he said, “a very good one, and she also works with enamel. We sell her decorative objects—jewelry, trinket boxes, mirrors, and the like—both locally and to importers. Lately she’s done quite a bit of custom work for the Roman soldiers stationed here. The officers want engraving or inlaid work on their swords and armor.”

  “And horse trappings,” Livia added. “They take great pride in their horses and think nothing of spending a month’s wages for some bit of ornamentation.”

  She smiled for the first time, and the effect on Jacob was startling. She wasn’t beautiful in the conventional sense, but then this woman seemed to be unconventional in every way. Livia’s large eyes dominated her rather long face, but her mouth was wide and full, and when she smiled it balanced her features. Jacob briefly thought of his older sister and how jealous she would be. Naomi spent hours applying kohl and other cosmetics to try to get her eyes and lips to look as large and full as Livia’s were naturally.

  “But their horses are magnificent animals,” Livia said. “The best—and the breeders also make good clients.”

  The Romans maintained stud farms in the region to breed horses for their army, Gregory explained. “Katpatuka is the old Hittite name for Cappadocia. It means ‘land of the beautiful horses.’”

  Jacob filed that bit of information away; he would have to buy another horse now, and Livia’s association with the breeders might be helpful in negotiating a fair price.

  As Gregory went on to tell how Livia had recently started working with semi-precious stones, the smile vanished from her face. “It makes my work more costly to produce,” she said, “but fetches a much higher price, of course. For three years I’ve been using a small portion of my profits to buy stones, while I continued to perfect my technique. This summer I decided I was ready to make a major investment, but we had few caravans come through Caesarea with the kind of stones I was looking for. Until today.”

  Frowning, Livia set her cup down and commenced pacing again.

  “I was afraid to pass up the opportunity. With the snows arriving, I knew I wouldn’t have the chance to make a similar purchase for months. So I took the small inheritance my father left me as well as the profits I’d managed to save . . . and I bought stones.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she spat out her words. “That crafty old trader had exactly what I wanted. Carnelian, obsidian, nephrite, jasper—even amber and lapis. He spread the stones out for me on a velvet cloth, and I carefully picked the ones I wanted. Took my sweet time about it, too, because I was investing everything I had. Then Gregory haggled with the man until we settled on a price.”

  “Livia’s actually a better negotiator than I am,” Gregory said, “but a lot of the foreign traders won’t conduct business with a woman. That’s why she dresses the way she does when we’re dealing with a caravan.”

  “The locals don’t like it much either,” Livia said, a trace of bitterness in her voice, “but my work speaks for itself. They get used to doing business with a woman after a while.”

  “So what happened to the stones?” Jacob asked. “Were they really worthless, after all?” He was confused. She said she had inspected them carefully, but worthless was the word she had kept throwing at the trader when Jacob had encountered them in the road.

  “Oh, no. The ones
I saw were high quality—quite valuable. After we settled on a price, the trader collected all the stones I’d chosen and put them in a leather pouch. I watched him closely. But somehow when the money changed hands, he must have switched pouches on me. He must be very practiced at the swindle because I never saw the switch. But when I got home later and opened the pouch, the good stones weren’t in there. Just some cheap, inferior stones and a few glass beads.”

  “We went back to find the caravan,” Gregory said, “and discovered they had already left. We were able to track them down just outside of town, but the trader would not give us the stones we’d paid for, and he refused to refund the money.”

  Livia quit pacing and dropped to a cushion, her anger spent at least for the moment. “I feel so stupid. So very, very stupid. How could I have let myself be cheated like that?”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Jacob said, “I’m sure you weren’t his first victim, and you won’t be his last. The swarthy old man was a professional swindler . . . And I feel a little stupid myself.” Jacob removed the leather pouch from his belt and placed it on the table between them. “When you flung this in my direction, I risked my neck to recover it. I wanted to return the pouch you threw away, thinking you might have been acting hastily and would regret it later. But before I could give it to you, the trader started chasing me.”

  Livia left the pouch untouched on the table. “That was kind of you,” she said after an awkward pause. “But the contents are worthless. Compared to the jewels I paid for, anyway.”

  She tucked a strand of swinging hair behind her ear and Jacob noticed that her chin quivered. She was a strong woman, one who had just been cheated out of almost everything she had, but she was determined not to break down.

  “Something doesn’t make sense,” Jacob said. “Why would the trader want to fight me for some cheap stones and glass beads?”

  He recalled the scene and the startled look on the trader’s face when Jacob had picked up the pouch they’d both been scrambling for. “You won’t get away with this,” the man had said as he’d started to chase Jacob.

  Jacob opened the pouch now and spilled its contents onto the table. Livia gasped and her eyes grew huge at the sight. They really are amazing eyes, Jacob thought.

  “No wonder he was chasing you,” she cried. “Those are the stones I bought!” She scattered them across the table in excitement. “Look, Gregory. The amber—I told you it was the best I’d seen. The jasper, carnelian . . . it’s all here.”

  Gregory patted her hand delightedly, then turned to Jacob. “But how did this happen? How did you recover the stones?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jacob admitted. He thought for a moment. “I collided with the trader when we both reached for the pouch Livia had thrown. He must have had an identical pouch with the genuine stones inside his belt, and it probably fell out when we hit the ground. I must have managed to pick up that pouch and not the substitute he had pawned off on Livia. And when the trader realized that, he came after me.”

  “This calls for a celebration,” Gregory said. “And you must stay and join us, Jacob.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Livia said over and over. “How can I ever thank you?”

  Jacob resisted the urge to tell her that the radiant light in her beautiful black eyes was all the thanks he needed.

  Antony sat by his mother’s bedside, his knees on his elbows, head in his hands. He was tired, worried, and disappointed. Tomorrow he would probably be angry as well, but for the moment he couldn’t get beyond simple frustration.

  Helena’s eyes fluttered open for a moment. “Go to bed, Antony.” Her voice was not much more than a whisper and her eyes closed as soon as she’d spoken.

  Antony stayed where he was. It wasn’t bedtime—it wasn’t even dark yet—and he needed the reassurance of her presence, even though she was too ill to offer advice or comfort. His mother was sicker than he had realized. Helena was the source of his worry, but Rebecca had caused his disappointment, and Antony reflected on both as he sat in the companionable silence of his mother’s room.

  Peter had wanted to discuss a legal matter while they were in his office, and Rebecca had not waited in the warehouse as Antony had asked her to do. She had walked home by herself, which upset Antony; he did not want her walking across town unescorted.

  Then, when he returned to the villa, he found that Helena had sent for a carriage and Priscilla had packed their things. His first instinct had been to dismiss the carriage, and he wished now he had followed through with that. But Helena had been adamant, Rebecca had been grim faced and uncommunicative, and Priscilla had whined about wanting to go home. Antony had catered to his mother’s wishes and carried her outside.

  To take her mind off the painful carriage ride, Antony had tried to keep her talking. Helena loved to relay the household gossip, and she told him that Quintus had started spending time with Agatha. Antony surmised that his mother might have had something to do with that.

  He decided to ask about her disagreement with Rebecca then. But when he started to tell her about talking to Rebecca earlier, Helena had surprised him by starting to cry. “I’m so sorry,” his mother said. “I wanted to come home anyway, and I just couldn’t stay there anymore, knowing she thought my son wasn’t good enough for her.”

  By the time they arrived home, Antony had pieced together the gist of his mother’s conversation with Rebecca. It hadn’t been easy, because Helena was crying from physical and emotional distress, her fever was rising, and she never had been able to express her thoughts in a logical progression.

  Not good enough. That’s what Rebecca thought of him.

  Antony raised his head and looked over at his mother. She looked frail and feeble, and even while asleep her features were not peaceful. The light blanket covering her rose and fell with each labored breath. She was not resting comfortably, and he feared the pain would wake her soon; she never managed to sleep very long at a stretch.

  Not good enough. The woman he wanted to marry thought he wasn’t good enough.

  It was true that his family did not share the same social status as Rebecca’s, but few did, and why should that make a difference, anyway? It didn’t with the rest of her family: Peter and Jacob had treated him as an equal from the beginning. And it wasn’t as if Antony were poor. True, he would never be able to provide a palatial home like her father’s villa, but Antony had done well for himself and lived comfortably.

  The anger he had thought would not arrive until tomorrow took up early residence. Rebecca was wrong. He was worthy of her. If she thought otherwise, then she ought to have the gumption to say it to his face. And he intended to give her the opportunity to say it, right now.

  He went to find Calpurnia and asked her to stay by Helena’s bedside for a while, then he departed for Rebecca’s. Antony was a proud man. He would not beg. But he would speak his mind to Rebecca, then insist that she look him in the eye and tell him straight out what she felt. No more blushing and changing the subject or leaving the room. No more skirting the question with an “I’m never going to get married” answer.

  When he arrived at the villa, the steward told him that Rebecca was in the dining room, entertaining a visitor. “I’m sure she would want you to join them,” he said, leading the way across the atrium courtyard and into the main part of the house.

  Antony took one look at Rebecca’s visitor and knew who it was, even though he had never met the man. The tender look on her face as she reached up and pushed back a lock of his hair gave it away.

  It was Galen. The former fiancé. Only he didn’t look so “former” at the moment, and a knot twisted in Antony’s gut as he took in the picture.

  21

  LIVIA’S EXCITEMENT AT RECOVERING her investment was contagious, and for the first time in weeks Jacob relaxed and enjoyed himself. He also enjoyed two bowls of Gregory’s hearty mutton stew, while listening intently as Livia described her plans to use the semi-precious stones in her work.

/>   Jacob didn’t quite follow her detailed explanation of hammering and casting and enameling, but he certainly admired the end results when Gregory proudly showed off a piece of her jewelry. It was an intricate design of beaten copper overlaid with gold and brilliantly colored enamel. The necklace was bold and delicate at the same time, as contradictory and unusual, Jacob thought, as its designer.

  Livia not only created works of art, he learned, but she had also helped Gregory build the cave home. “The tufa is soft and easy to carve,” he told Jacob. “It took us about six weeks to excavate this room and my sleeping quarters. Later we carved out a room for Livia and also a workshop. The rooms are on several levels, all joined by passages and stairways.”

  Once they had moved away from the drafty opening, Jacob discovered the cave home was warm and cozy. He couldn’t quite say what it was that appealed to him about it, but he found the place inviting. Perhaps he simply found the young woman who lived here appealing, and that attraction rubbed off on the surroundings.

  She had an unconscious habit of tucking her hair behind her ears, he noticed. When she caught Jacob watching her, she explained her hairstyle. “I keep it short so it doesn’t fall over my face when I’m working. Even at this length, though, I’m constantly fiddling with it. I’d cut it off as short as a man’s if it wouldn’t scandalize Gregory.”

  “Well, it would,” her uncle said with a huff. “I make too many allowances for you as it is.”

  “You love indulging me,” she said, breaking into another broad smile, “and you know it.”

  Jacob relished the lively conversation as much as the food, and when they finished the meal, he realized that he hadn’t thought of Damian even once since he’d been in their home. He couldn’t avoid it, though, when the topic of conversation turned from Livia’s work to Jacob’s unexpected arrival.