Seduced By Her Rebel Warrior

‘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 (#u85ab3ff7-4d66-5940-be0d-c34aa7fb2cbd)

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 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.