The Better of Two Men

by JD Smith

‘When only one man holds breath will it end.’

  He grinned at her, wilder than Bamdad, causing more than uncertainty, beginning to drive fear into those present.

  ‘When your man has breathed his last, my King’s bed will be warm for you.’

  ‘Warm shit has never appealed to me,’ she replied in a rare moment of jest, a note of past flirtations. And I thought with frustration how she was unable to do that with me. My jealousy rippled. I knew that I was her half-brother, yet my feelings for her, my craving, remained.

  Qasir laughed again, only this time it was genuine and warm.

  ‘If you weren’t a woman you would be a man.’

  Zenobia nodded. ‘And if you were not a girl you would be a pig.’

  Beside the Tanukh general, Amr growled.

  ‘Let this be done with,’ Qasir said. ‘Then we can comfort you for your loss. I hear your husband can no longer straighten his back for the time he has spent bending to Rome’s rule.’

  Zenobia simply smiled.

  Blackness consumed the sky, clouds deep grey and stars blinking in between. The heat of the day still warmed.

  Teymour and Amr stepped toward one another and the area around them cleared. They unsheathed their swords and discarded their scabbards on the circle’s perimeter. Teymour held an expression of defiant confidence. He could not win, of that I was sure. His blood would soak the ground like rain, but his assured step and experience told me he would not die easily.

  He weighed his sword in his hand.

  Amr bared his teeth.

  The Tanukh cheered their warrior but our men stayed silent.

  ‘He will die,’ Zenobia said to me, unmoving.

  ‘Teymour? What then?’

  ‘He will go to the Otherworld as all warriors do. If I were to truly hate him for what he has done, for defying my father and turning his back, plotting against the man who loved him, then I would see him die without honour. Instead we watch as he meets his fate with sword in hand. He will feast with my father at the table of the gods and he will likely be forgiven his errors in this life.’

  ‘You think your father will forgive him?’ As I spoke, I knew Julius would. He was a kind man, a just general. That is what I loved about him; the even measures of emotion and thoughtfulness, honour and sincerity.

  ‘He forgave Odenathus enough to come here.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, wondering if that were true, or whether he simply saw an opportunity to bargain to see Zenobia sitting on the Palmyrene council, close to the ear of the King.

  The first clash of iron scraping against iron disturbed my thoughts. The heavy thump of Amr’s blade on Teymour’s shield rang. Moonlight flashed on their swords. Sweat ran down both men’s faces as they grunted with effort. Teymour moved as warriors of Palmyra move, with skill and swift movement. He took Amr’s first strikes on his shield and they circled one another. Teymour’s step was steady, his brow creased in concentration, mouth tight with determination.

  I did not draw breath, my chest tight and my sword-arm twitching to my own blade. The air grew suddenly cold, but I knew it was dread creeping over my skin, the anticipation of how this would end.

  Amr’s sword crashed into Teymour’s shield. He bared his teeth. He growled loud and long and he struck over and again, slicing and hacking, bludgeoning with steel and with strength. Teymour backed from him, took the brunt of each blow with his arm and shoulder, sparing his sword. His right knee began to buckle beneath the impact. And I looked on. He would break the tirade of this Tanukh warrior’s heavy metal and would meet him with his own blade. Of that I was sure.

  My breath caught in my throat. I dragged air into my lungs. I was willing Teymour on, I realised, wishing it to be over; wanting to take each strike myself. Itching to hold that sword for him and kill the warrior who had slain the man I had loved as a father. I almost retched with sickness. I was unable to order my thoughts, feeling events slither over and under and around me.

  ‘Amr will win,’ Zenobia said.

  ‘I understand,’ I replied, not looking at her.

  ‘You know why it must be.’

  ‘Because he has already betrayed your trust,’ I said. Julius’ letter, his suspicion that Teymour was no longer loyal, was enough for Zenobia. It had decided his fate. She was ruthless and clever enough never to give a second chance to a man she could not trust. He was lost to her. He was dead.

  My focus returned to Teymour. His short sword played fast. But the length of Amr’s blade meant that he could not get near. Teymour was calm in his defence; Amr grinning like a madman. He was a man who brought death with him. His bright eyes seemed to roll in his head. I watched.

  Did the gods watch? Did they shriek and clap and howl with glee as they looked on, willing favour to sway first one way, then another, listening to those gathered suck in sharp breaths, gasp as they saw these two men battle on Syrian soil?

  Zenobia, always beloved of the gods, must have known what pleasure she brought them with this match. And if the gods did not watch, they would stir soon enough with the clashing and scraping of steel.

  Amr brought his shield up, horizontal, hard edge level with his face, hoping to ram it home. But Teymour’s blade slid across the surface, gouging a deep track in the painted surface and then Amr’s face. Blood sheeted his cheek, mingled with grime and desperate sweat. Amr rammed the edge of his shield into Teymour’s chest. Winded, an involuntary moan left him. Then the dull sheen of Amr’s sword whipped round and crashed into the side of his head. Teymour’s eyes rolled and he fell back onto the dusty ground with a thud.

  I felt for my blade but Zenobia’s cool fingers on my arm checked me.

  ‘I will gouge your eyeballs from your skulls,’ Amr shouted at us. ‘I will cut out your tongues to save you the taste of my victory. I will piss on the bodies of your dead. I would skewer your balls on my knife if they were large enough …’

  Teymour gave a low, choked moan. Amr stepped up to him and drove his blade down into his throat.

  Julius’ beloved friend, a Bedouin warrior, a father of two children; the man I had known since I was thirteen, the soldier with whom I had sailed the Red Sea as I escaped slavery in Yemen, was dead.

  And I felt nothing but the vibration of the gods’ laughter.

  I stood beside Zenobia looking at the body of a coward and a traitor for what felt like an age and yet must only have been a moment or two. Zenobia gripped my wrist and pulled me backwards. She raised her other arm to the sky and I looked up to see at what she gestured.

  Nothing.

  Then rain.

  Hard, wooden shafts of rain.

  Arrows hummed through the night sky. In panic I tried to pull Zenobia back, against the walls and the shelter they might bring. Screams added to brief chaos, but Zenobia did not move. None of our warriors moved. I looked back to where Teymour lay. The bodies of Amr, Qasir and the Tanukh warriors fell to the ground around him like dolls tossed to the dirt.

  At Zenobia’s signal our archers had unleashed a shower of arrows on the enemy. And now they were dead, pitted with steel and flint tips, dotted with feathered shafts.

  ‘This was not what you agreed.’ I turned to her, on her perhaps, angry suddenly that she had gone against her word – against what I knew to be our plan. Zenobia had not always stood by her word, just as she had betrayed Emperor Valerian to Shapur. But now it unnerved me, angered me. Twice now she had gone against her word when I had thought to be her confidant. Did she distrust me as she had Teymour? Would my death be next? I shook myself, tried to let go my raging mind and suspicions.

  She pulled from my grasp and said: ‘They would not have left once Teymour was dead. You know this. They were ready to draw their swords.’

  I nodded reluctantly, not really knowing what to think. Both Amr and Teymour were dead now and I had supposed the grief strangling me would release its grip, but it had not. It felt the same, choking and unrelenting.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘The man Qasir put
forward as Amr was not Jadhima’s nephew.’

  ‘He was identified by our own man …’

  Zenobia shook her head. ‘No, he was not. He was not the man who fought Teymour. Amr was too precious to his uncle to risk matching him against one of ours.’ She nodded to the lifeless bodies on the ground. ‘He is not here.’

  My skin tightened as a cool breeze picked up. Torches were lit and our soldiers began clearing bodies in the orange glow. Only Teymour’s lifeless form remained, untouched, left where he had fallen. Zenobia walked over to where he lay.

  His dark hair was slick with oil and sweat and blood, and his determined eyes were glassy as they stared up at me.

  Zenobia knelt to him, kissed her fingers, and pressed them to his forehead.

  ‘Epulor puteus,’ she said. Dine well.

  She rose as Bamdad greeted us.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘Make sure our men are rewarded this night.’ She began to walk away and, without turning, added: ‘And burn the Tanukh ships.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Zabdas 290 AD – (Present Day)

  Antioch: the city of the damned. So full it has been of traitors and in turn those who would see their comeuppance. I look at it now as we approach and see a city that should not have stood through time. The walls are high and the mountains beyond higher still. I see Mareades running along the paths, weaving ever higher, the mark branded upon his forehead, and I see a man who knows no honour, who was subject to another man’s greed and in turn betrayed his city.

  I feel my own slave mark, always there, as I think of the freshly scorched skin on his forehead, his weeping at the knowledge of it. It was not the pain I remember most as hot metal welded to my flesh and ripped away layers leaving a raw and bloody mess, but the prison it denoted, the mark that would not fade either upon skin or inside of me. I was a slave and that can never be undone. Not until death, when fire burns all and a man is but ashes and the memories held by others.

  Samira walks with Bamdad, her arm linked with his, a sign of the bond they share. Even now, old and worn, he gains the affection of women as easily as a man might pick up fruit when hungry. He is a man with a large heart, empty but for the love of his brothers and my granddaughter. He calls her Rubetta, my ruby, my gem. I had no care for the name when he first leaned over her father’s arm and grinned down at her swaddled form and uttered the same words I once spoke of Vaballathus. That I would care for him no matter what.

  Samira catches my eye and her arm slides from Bamdad’s and she murmurs to him before coming to speak with me.

  ‘You look as if you wish to speak with me?’ she says.

  I did not, and yet now she is by my side I find I do.

  ‘What do you think of the tale of Zenobia thus far?’

  It intrigues me, her take on it. She is the first person to whom I have relived these events since the days in which they occurred.

  Samira appears caught for words. She knows not what to say, what to speak. She struggles to confess her thoughts.

  ‘Was Zenobia sure,’ she says finally, ‘of Teymour’s guilt? Did she truly believe that he, a friend to Julius, would betray him?’

  I sense in her eyes, their pleading and their doubt, that she does not believe.

  You want to see the good in everyone.

  Zenobia’s words to me ring in my ear now, speaking with my granddaughter, and I know them to be as true in her as they were to me.

  ‘Julius’ last letter stated the void between the two men. For every ounce of love I held for Julius, there was a pound of hatred for Teymour after I discovered his fate. We waited months to discover the identity of the man who cut Julius down; who bled him onto the shingle and sand and dirt of the land he called home. But neither Zenobia nor I had that person. We only had Teymour and his part in it all burned in my throat.’

  Samira says nothing for long moments. I squint into the sun and ponder whether I still think Teymour’s actions improper. Was it his fault? Time seems to ease blame, to make me wonder if the hatred was worth the crime. From everything the soldiers at the fort said when we arrived, he was guilty and I could think no different. He should have led the reserve. He failed to. I could never forgive him that, no matter the passage of time.

  Samira wraps her thin, pale hands around my muscular sun-dark arm and lets her head rest on my shoulder as we walk. It is a greater act of intimacy than the one she showed for Bamdad a few moments ago, and I take a secret pleasure in the bond I am rebuilding with my granddaughter. Too long have I travelled the Roman roads of Syria, hunting, searching, protecting the people of this dusty realm. Too distant have I been from my granddaughter. I have come to realise I should have been closer to her, not just in thought but in proximity. Vaballathus and I should have spent more time at home washing pots, hunting, fishing even though it is taboo. I should have picked her up out of the dirt when she fell as a youngster, brushed her down and set her on her way. Instead I buried my men and dragged crying women out of the dirt after they had been raped by Tanukh or Persians who dared to venture onto our sands.

  ‘Do you still miss him?’ Samira murmurs.

  Where once she spoke those questions enquiringly, I notice now an edge, as if she too misses the people I speak of, write about, remember; misses never meeting them or having memories of her own. There is a wistful quality to the breath departing her as she waits for me to answer. Perhaps she thinks how Julius is no longer simply Julius; but her great-grandfather, her family.

  I think of the day I first met Julius, when he tried to purchase me from my tyrant master, Firouz. The dockside chief refused the offer, but I stole away on Julius’ ship, bound for Syria. He took me home, accepted me into his house, his family, as if I were his own boy, and not simply a bastard born to his wife, Meskenit. And when he travelled south to fight the Tanukh, he secured both my place in the Palmyrene army and the King’s personal assurance of my safety.

  ‘I miss him every day,’ I reply, pulling my arm from Samira’s grip and wrapping it around her shoulders.

  ‘Do you still have the letter from Julius; his last correspondence with Zenobia?’

  ‘I do. I read it when we were in Palmyra and asked her if I could keep it; a slave to sentimentality. I have kept it throughout the years, safe in my pack. I have read it so many times it is barely intact, but even without it, I know the words, they are ingrained in my memory.’

  ‘I wish I had met him. So much has happened in your life; so many people you knew and yet I have never met.’

  ‘Indeed, there are many. And I shall tell you of them …’

  I am about to continue the tale when she pulls away from me. She stops walking, cocks her head to one side, and looks at me with a deep, playful frown.

  ‘You told Bamdad you had enough gold to clear any debts he might have, that you had become wealthy, but you never said how?’

  ‘Ah!’

  Her eyes widen, urging me to reveal the source. My face lifts in a repressed smirk as she nods her head urgently, beckoning.

  ‘All right. Patience. I will tell you.’

  We sit outside the city walls, sun warming my neck and face. Samira sits beside me, a pale grey scarf shading her head and face from the bright light. To my left I see Bamdad, gathering his courage, unsure if he can summon the will to enter the walls of his old home. The walls bear the marks of old sieges, like the scars upon my arms and legs and face.

  ‘Julius left you an inheritance?’ Samira says. ‘Even before our families were bound in marriage?’

  ‘He had a reasonable amount of wealth, so it would not have affected any inheritance he wished to leave others.’

  ‘How great a sum?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I say, smiling at her interest, her desire to know everything. ‘Love is not weighed in gold. The measure of wealth he left me has no relation to how much he cared.’

  ‘Of course it does.’

  ‘Do not be so naive, Samira,’ I say gently. ‘I thought you more
sensible than that.’

  She flushes and looks away. Does she think that leaving me more or less than he left Zenobia and Hebony would determine which of us he loved the most? I never saw it like that. I was grateful, I suppose, for anything and everything he gave me.

  ‘I do not know exactly what Julius intended when he left me a portion of his fortune. I was not his son, but Meskenit’s. Perhaps he considered me then one of his own, as I thought of him as a father. Or maybe he gave to me what he never gave to Meskenit: wealth beyond my dreams. Either way it was no consolation for my loss. In part it only served to worsen it. You see, I had coin, yet no idea what to do with it. I was reminded once more of my position in life, finding myself in a station I could no more live in than any other slave turned soldier. I knew no ambition when it came to fortune. Perhaps if I understood it more I would not have offended Bamdad. To give so great amount to one who has so little could be construed as foolish. Many people who learned of the inheritance thought so. And yet what pleased me most was that Zenobia was in complete agreement with his decision. My affection for her grew in part because of that. She had no need of the coin he gave to me, but she could have resented or disagreed with his decision in not leaving his whole wealth to his own blood-ties.’

  I see Bamdad walk away from our group, out from the walls in solitude.

  ‘Did he settle his debts?’ Samira asks, watching him too.

  ‘Bamdad? He settled those debts, but there were more.’

  I think back on the places we have been, glorious places, clusters of trade that he was so insistent we quickly depart.

  ‘There are towns he still refuses to go back to, and I can only assume it is because of people he owes money to even now.’

  ‘Has he ever been to Rome before?’

  ‘No. That is a journey you are both making for the first time.’

  She smiles, as if it pleases her to have a companion in this voyage we make.

  ‘I cannot wait to see it, to walk the same streets as emperors, to see the glorious colonnades.’

  ‘Dirty streets,’ I remind her. I have already warned her not to expect much of the city, the great capital of the Empire. Rome is a land of dreams and dreamers.