Seduced By Her Rebel Warrior
She turned and he knew her instantly. It was the woman—the one from the camel races. He would have recognised her anywhere—her soft curves, her auburn hair, her strong, determined nose, so like his late mother’s. Her shadowy profile sent a strange pang of nostalgia through him, though when she neared his cell and squatted low that nostalgia quickly transformed into an unexpected lust.
She pushed a water bag through the bars. ‘Drink,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘Water. You have been asleep for many hours.’
He sensed a lie lurking behind her words, but he was too thirsty to refuse her. As he reached for the bag, her fingers grazed his. He nearly recoiled: they were as frigid as a corpse’s.
‘You are very cold,’ he remarked. Without thinking, he removed his head tie and pulled off his long white head cover. ‘Wrap my ghutrah around yourself,’ he said, pushing the garment through the bars. ‘It will warm you.’
He seemed to have forgotten that she was Roman and thus did not deserve his charity. Still, her fingers had been terribly cold and her cheeks were bereft of colour.
She gave the voluminous white headscarf a long, suspicious stare. ‘It is just a head cover. It will not bite you,’ he said.
As a gesture of goodwill, Rab grasped the water bag she had offered him and took a long quaff. The liquid tasted vaguely of flowers.
He held out his ghutrah once again. ‘Come now, you are obviously cold.’
‘How could I be cold?’ she clipped. ‘It is the middle of August in Arabia, by all the vengeful gods.’
The absurdity of the comment struck them both at once and for a second their voices mingled in laughter, bouncing off the prison walls like two parts of a song.
Her lips returned to frowning. ‘I am not cold,’ she repeated. She sprang to her feet and placed her hands authoritatively on her hips.
‘Why do you gape?’ she asked.
‘I do not gape.’
‘You are most certainly gaping.’
‘Hmm,’ grumbled Rab and looked away. He reminded himself that it was folly to engage with Romans. Their manners were bad, their greed never ending and their moods as changeable as the desert winds. Romans were, in a word, savages, no matter how lovely their frowning lips and curving hips.
He returned the ghutrah to his head and fixed it into place with his head tie. He brushed the arms of his long grey robe and folded his legs beneath him. ‘Where am I?’
‘In a holding cell beneath the Roman fort at Bostra,’ she said, and when he did not respond, she added, ‘In the Roman Province of Arabia Petraea.’
‘Arabia Petraea,’ he echoed.
As if he needed reminding. Despite over a dozen years of Roman occupation, the words still tasted vile on his tongue. Whatever name she wished to call his homeland, to Rab it would always be the Kingdom of Nabataea, with its capital not of Bostra, but of Rekem, that great southern city of stone.
‘Why do you keep me here?’ he asked.
‘Do you not recall? Your camel injured the new Governor of Arabia—a man who happens to be my father.’
‘That man was the Governor?’
Curses, he should have guessed it. The bejewelled hand, the purple-trimmed toga, the imperious demeanour. Of all the confounded ill fortune.
‘It broke his leg,’ she said with indifference, ‘though the break has been splinted and we are told it will heal normally.’
‘I did not intend—’
‘It does not matter what you did or did not intend,’ she said. ‘What matters is what my father believes.’
‘And what does your father believe?’
‘That you commanded the kick.’
‘That is impossible. Where is my nephew?’ Rab started to stand, but his legs seemed to be growing weaker by the moment.
‘Why is it impossible?’ she asked.
‘Where is my nephew, by the gods?’ Rab demanded.
‘He is in another cell not far from here. Why is it impossible that you commanded the kick?’
‘Is he injured? Has he eaten?’
She pursed her lips together. ‘He has been treated in the exact same manner as you have. Now please answer my question. I am trying to help you.’
‘So you beat my nephew and hold him in a cell and tell me you are trying to help me? He is only eleven years old!’
‘I had nothing to do with your nephew’s beating or his captivity,’ she said. Then, in a whisper: ‘And I was able to sneak him a corner of bread.’
Rab paused, feeling a strange gratitude, then reminded himself that there was no room in this conversation for such a sentiment. ‘I demand that you release us both,’ he said.
She stiffened. ‘You are not in a position to make demands.’
‘And you are?’ Rab craned his neck to observe the empty hallway in which she stood. ‘You approach my cell all alone, a beautiful woman without any protection... On whose authority do you question me?’
She appeared confused. She glanced around the prison as if she believed him to be referring to someone else. ‘On my father’s authority, of course,’ she said at last.
He struggled once again to stand, but this time the effort made him dizzy. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No,’ she replied carefully. ‘Who are you?’
He bit his tongue. By the gods, what was wrong with him? Had he really almost revealed his identity? ‘I am my nephew’s only protector.’
‘And I am your only friend,’ she added.
‘Why do I find that difficult to believe?’
‘Just answer the question,’ she pressed. ‘Why is it impossible that you commanded the kick?’
‘Because a camel is incapable of learning such a command.’
‘My father will investigate the veracity of that claim. If it is a lie, you will lose your life.’
Savages, he thought. Every last one of them. He shook his head and studied the floor.
‘So it is a lie,’ she said.
‘Why does the Governor care whether the kick was commanded or not?’ he asked. Better she discover the second lie than the first.
‘It amuses my father to discover the truth,’ she replied. ‘And I can assure you that he always does.’
‘Does he not have more meaningful sources of amusement? Roads to build, riches to plunder, slaves to drive?’
She would not take the bait. ‘Your story must match your nephew’s.’
‘And what does my nephew claim happened?’
She looked away. ‘I cannot tell you that.’
‘I thought you said you were my friend.’
She sighed. ‘Everything you tell me I am obligated to tell my father. Now please, answer the question.’
Rab measured out his words. ‘Yes, it is possible for a camel to be trained to kick on command.’
‘And have you trained your camel in such a skill?’
Rab paused. ‘I have.’
He had not. He knew very little about training camels, in truth. Or racing them, for that matter. The camel races were simply a ruse—something to distract attention from Rab’s more important activities. Still, Zaidu loved the races and had been working with the camel for some months now on a variety of commands.
‘Did you order the kick?’ the woman demanded.
No, he did not, but he feared that Zaidu had. He needed to protect the boy. ‘I did.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Because your father pushed me,’ Rab explained. ‘I was merely defending myself against him. I was unaware of his identity.’ At least it was mostly the truth.
The woman nodded thoughtfully and seemed satisfied. ‘You may have just secured your nephew’s release. And saved your own life.’
‘Am I supposed to thank you?’ he slurred. His head had begun to spin. She did not answer him, though she was watching him like a shepherd observing a doomed sheep. All at once he understood why. ‘It was not just water you gave me, was it?’ His vision blurred.
‘No, it was not,’ she admitted.
‘And you are not my friend.’
‘No, I am not.’
Chapter Two
Atia stopped to smell the roses. They had been placed in a vase on the shelf outside her father’s tablinium by some well-meaning slave. She paused with her nose enveloped in petals. What a strange compulsion, she thought. She had stopped smelling flowers years ago—back when she had begun to count down the days until her own death.
She breathed deeply now and was rewarded with a sweet, subtle scent. Even more rewarding was the rose’s lavish hue—like the ruddy burn of the sun through smoke. It reminded her of the colour of the tie the camel man used to hold his ghutrah.
The ghutrah he had offered to keep her warm.
She had been so shocked by the gesture that she had not even been able to properly decline it. What prisoner offered to aid his own interrogator? Even more startling had been their reaction to the gesture: they had laughed together like thieves.
Laughter? It was another strangeness. She had hardly recognised her own voice. How many years had it been since she had laughed? Ten? Fifteen? Back before her mother had died and delight had still seemed possible.
Now, at the advanced age of thirty, Atia had learned to view delight as suspect. Obviously the camel man had been trying to endear himself to her—to trick her into trusting him.
Still, something in the way his dark, sun-flecked eyes had smiled down at her had made him seem sincere. Even now, as she thought back upon those eyes, it was as if they were warming her very thoughts.
She knew that warmth could not be trusted. And when he had called her beautiful? That had been a trick as well: a sly attempt at flattery designed to gain her sympathy.
Because beautiful she was not—not with the terrible protrusion occupying the middle of her face. Well dressed, yes. Properly coiffed and painted, certainly. Rich. Powerful. Connected. She was the daughter of a Roman Governor, by the gods—one of Emperor Hadrian’s most trusted men. But beautiful? It was a gift that Venus had declined to grant.
Still, there had been something resembling sincerity in the way the man had spoken the compliment. You approach my cell all alone, a beautiful woman without any protection... It was as if he were not talking about her, but some fantasy version of herself—a bold, attractive woman who explained herself to no one. It amused her to think of herself in such a way.
Then there had been the strangeness of his expression after he had spoken the compliment. The tight lips and pulsing jaw. The eyes narrowed dangerously in something resembling hunger. It was quite possibly the best imitation of desire she had ever seen.
Of course, what he really desired was to be released from his prison, just as all prisoners did. Still, he had spoken the words—a beautiful woman—and, however false, they had had the effect of buoying her spirit, such that she had caught herself smiling all afternoon and, apparently, stopping to smell roses.
‘Come forward,’ called her father from inside his office. Atia returned the rose to its vase and entered her father’s sparsely decorated tablinium, pausing before his sprawling ebony desk.
He appeared to be reviewing some official scroll. Beside him, a stony-faced scribe stood sentinel, his eyes flitting across the parchment in time with her father’s.
‘Sit down, Atia,’ he commanded without looking up. As she made her way to one of her father’s client chairs, she caught the gaze of her father’s first officer, Plotius, standing in a corner just behind the desk. The fleshy, thick-muscled military man took his time assessing Atia’s figure and Atia wasted none in volleying him a sneer. He replied with a just you wait look.
Seating herself, Atia nodded her gratitude at a boy operating a palm leaf in another corner of the room, though its small wind did little to alleviate the midday heat. It was August, after all—the sweltering month—and even the cool marble and high ceilings of her father’s villa were futile against the Arabian sun.
Trying to resist the heat was useless. In that way, it was much like her father himself.
‘You are looking well, Daughter,’ said her father, finally glancing up from his scroll. ‘Unusually so.’
Atia thought of the camel man and felt a small trickle of sweat trace a path down her cheek. ‘I should say the same, Father,’ she said. She glanced beneath the desk at his bandaged leg. ‘Only two days after your injury and you are already at work.’
‘The business of Empire waits for no man,’ he said. It was Emperor Hadrian’s favourite aphorism and her father recited it like a prayer.
‘A new prohibition?’ asked Atia, glancing at the scroll.
‘Execution warrants,’ he said, dipping his quill into a tub of ink.
Atia gulped a breath. ‘Which prisoners?’ There had been so many of them lately. Young men and old. Rich and poor. All Nabataeans—many of whom Atia had interrogated herself. They had been ripped from their homes under charges of collusion with the rebels, though Atia believed most of the men to be innocent.
‘We must clear out the holding cells,’ pronounced her father. ‘We will behead all prisoners who have been in captivity for more than a month.’
Atia’s throat felt dry. ‘You will not try them?’
‘Trials are expensive.’ The ink dripping from her father’s pen was like blood. ‘Besides, we must send a message to the populace.’
Atia pasted a smile on her face and gave a small nod. Later that afternoon, she would tip three drops of poppy tincture into her wine and try to purge the vision of a dozen innocent Nabataean heads on spikes in Bostra’s central square.
It was wrong. Nay, it was barbarous. To kill a man without trial? To take a human life just to send a message? The thought made Atia dizzy with despair. Her father’s method of government bore a strong resemblance to his method of war, yet Atia could do nothing to stop it.
Forty days, Atia thought suddenly. In only forty days she was supposed to die. She had been counting down the days since the age of twelve, when the exact day of her death had been foretold to her. For a long time she had feared the date, but had gradually come to look forward to it. If the prophecy was true, then in only forty days, she would no longer be complicit in her father’s wicked deeds. In the meantime, she only wished for a few drops of poppy tears to help her through.
‘I am also banning that silly scarf the men wear over their heads,’ her father said.
‘The ghutrah?’
‘It makes them all look the same. How will we find our rebels if we cannot tell one from the other?’
Atia thought of the camel man’s face: the round cheeks and liquid gaze; the eyes like big dark suns; the short black beard surrounding thick, sensuous lips; the bottom lip so much larger than the top—like the promise of abundance and its immediate fulfilment. She could have easily picked him out from among a hundred ghutrah-wearing men.
‘A clever strategy, Father,’ she said.
Her father scrawled his signature across the bottom of the scroll. ‘We are going to find every last one of these damned rebels and slaughter them where they stand,’ he said. ‘We will make Quietus’s massacre look like a child’s tantrum.’
Atia nodded and fought a wave of nausea. The Roman General Quietus had recently defeated an encampment of rebellious Jews in the adjacent province of Judea. According to rumour, he had taken over twenty thousand lives, including those of women and children.
‘We must strike fear in the hearts of all Nabataeans,’ her father explained. ‘They must understand that there is no resisting Rome.’
‘Yes, Father.’
Nor was there any resisting her father. To him, disagreement was a form of disloyalty, and disloyalty was meant to be punished. Once, Atia’s eldest sister had questioned her father’s actions and he had sent her to labour in a temple. When Atia’s second eldest sister had disgraced the familia through adultery, she had suffered twenty lashes. But those punishments were small in comparison with their mother’s. The one time she had questioned their father’s will, she had paid for it with her very life.
‘Now tell me,’ her father said. He was blowing gently on the ink of his signature. ‘What news of the Nabataean cameleers?’
Atia took a breath. ‘The boy claims that he commanded the kick, not his uncle.’
‘And his uncle, what did he say?’
‘That he commanded the kick, not the boy.’
‘You loosened the man’s tongue before discussing the matter?’
‘I gave him the poppy tears, yes.’
‘So he lied to protect the boy?’ asked her father. He lifted the scroll by its sides and passed it to the scribe.
Atia nodded. ‘An honourable thing to do.’
‘You sound as though you favour him,’ her father said, arching a brow.
‘I merely observe him,’ Atia said. She felt his gaze burrow into her.
‘Then you would agree that his physical conditioning does not match his vocation?’
Atia beat back a blush. The man’s lithe, muscular form brought to mind the hero Achilles—all taut muscle and long-limbed grace. Atia nodded.
‘Do you believe him to be a rebel?’ her father asked.
‘It is possible,’ said Atia, aware that any denial would betray bias, ‘though he seemed too concerned with the well-being of his nephew to harbour greater motives.’
‘You trust too easily, Atia, but that has always been one of your flaws.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘We must be vigilant if we wish to wipe out these rebels completely. Hadrian is depending on our success.’
Emperor Hadrian and Atia’s father had come from the same gens of Spanish immigrants, along with former Emperor Trajan. As Hadrian had risen through the political ranks he had elevated Atia’s father along with him and the two had become commanders together in Emperor Trajan’s Dacian campaigns.
When Emperor Trajan died and Hadrian took the purple, Atia’s father had worked tirelessly to make Hadrian’s enemies disappear.
As the news of the executions flooded into the dining rooms of Palatine Hill, Atia had been careful to appear surprised. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ she always replied.
But she knew who would do such a thing, for she had seen the bloodstains on her father’s toga and the black look in his eye as he sneaked through the kitchen late at night. And when she passed by his doorway in the darkest hours, he had spoken the names of the doomed in his sleep—four Senators, along with a handful of their closest men, executed without trial. Murdered.
‘I have some disappointing news,’ her father had told Atia towards the end of the killings. She had been sitting in one of his client chairs much like she was now, his large ebony desk sprawling before him like a black pool. ‘I am afraid your husband’s ambition became threatening to the Emperor.’
‘My husband?’
When her father retrieved her third husband’s finger from the drawer of his desk, she had carefully concealed her horror.
‘He was a traitor,’ her father had explained. He had tugged her late husband’s jade ring from its severed digit and held it in the air. Then he had placed the ring on his own finger. ‘He was disloyal. Unlike you, Atia.’
Loyalty. Utter, unquestioning loyalty. It was what Hadrian demanded of her father and what her father demanded of her. So when a rebellion erupted in Rome’s newest province of Arabia Petraea, Atia had gone along to aid her father however she could. Of course she had. Her father was Emperor Hadrian’s man and she was her father’s daughter.
Now her father studied her closely. ‘I sent for you, but you did not come straight away. Why?’
‘Father?’
‘You lingered outside this very tablinium before entering.’
‘Ah, yes. I was smelling the roses.’
Her father cocked his head. ‘I have never known you to enjoy the fragrance of flowers.’
‘I was simply wondering if Arabian roses smell differently than Roman ones,’ she stated, but he seemed not to hear her.
‘Is there anything else I need to know about the interrogation? Anything the man may have said? Think carefully.’
Atia paused. She did not wish to condemn the camel trainer, but if she tried to conceal the strange comment he had made, she would have to hope for the rest of her life that her father did not discover it. He began to tap his fingers gently against his desk. The green glint of her late husband’s ring caught Atia’s eye. Loyalty, she thought.
Utter and unquestioning.
‘He asked me if I knew who he was.’
Her father ceased his tapping. ‘And?’
‘And he quickly changed the subject, so I did not pursue it. Better he think I did not perceive the revelation.’
Her father sat back in his chair. ‘Perhaps I have taught you something after all,’ he said. He motioned to Commander Plotius and whispered something in the tribune’s ear. Atia felt the blood leaving her limbs. She knew that she had just condemned the camel man to some wicked punishment.
The man who had offered her his ghutrah and made her laugh.
The man who had called her beautiful.
‘Consider it done, Governor,’ said Plotius, who cut her a glance before marching from the office with terrifying purpose.
Four drops, she thought. She would put four poppy tears into her cup tonight, not just three.
‘Are preparations complete for tonight’s banquet?’ her father asked.
‘Yes, Father.’ She glanced briefly at his leg.
‘You doubt my fitness to attend?’
‘Not at all.’
‘The injury is nothing. The doctor says it will heal in a month.’
‘So you still plan to journey to Rekem in the autumn?’ she asked him, though all she could think of was the camel man. What would Plotius do to him? And what of the camel man’s young nephew? He was only eleven years old.
‘Of course I shall journey to Rekem in the autumn,’ said her father.
Rekem, located far to the south, was the most important city in the province. As the new Governor, her father owed it an official visit. ‘The business of Empire waits for no man,’ he added. ‘My injury changes nothing.’
‘And the camel man’s nephew?’ Atia asked with careful uninterest. ‘Shall I question him further?’
‘What you really wish to know is if I will release him,’ said her father.
Atia gave a shy nod. ‘Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself.’
‘You have always had a weakness for children. Understandable—since you were never able to produce your own.’
‘Yes, Father.’ She braced herself for what always followed.
‘If only your husbands had wanted you more.’ The rest of the statement he left unsaid, though it haunted the air like a ghost. If only you had been more desirable to them.
He closed his eyes and the silence spread out between them. ‘I will release the boy,’ he said at last.
‘You are merciful, Father.’
‘Merciful, yes, but not foolish. There is a condition.’
‘What condition?’
Her father’s face split with a jackal’s grin.
Chapter Three
‘He wishes for you to apologise,’ the woman said. Her voice was as smooth as a dune.
Rab coughed and attempted to sit up. ‘Excuse me, but what did you say?’ he asked. His head throbbed and his throat felt as if it had been stuffed with wool.
‘At the banquet tonight, my father wishes for you to apologise to him before his guests and to pledge your loyalty to Rome. He does you a great mercy.’
She had changed her tunic. In place of her simple white wool, she had now donned an elegant garment of flowing bronze linen. Worse, she had kohled her eyes and reddened her lips with the dregs of wine. She was the embodiment of loveliness, though her expression was grave, as if she were heedless of it.
‘You stare at me as if I am Medusa herself,’ she snapped. ‘Did you not hear what I just said?’