Seduced By Her Rebel Warrior

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 any 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.

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