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‘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 (#u85ab3ff7-4d66-5940-be0d-c34aa7fb2cbd)
‘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?’
Rab struggled to his feet. ‘You drugged me.’ It seemed she was drugging him still—with that cursed, silken voice.
‘I helped you sleep,’ she said.
‘A sleep of the dead.’
‘I gave you the gift of peace.’
He gripped the bars of his cell. ‘A strange way to describe a poppy haze.’
She tilted her head at him in that careless, haughty way of Romans, but he noticed a throbbing pulse in the side of her neck. Pulse, pulse, pulse. Was it possible that she felt it, too? This strange pull between them?
‘I was ordered to give you the poppy tears,’ she said. ‘I had no choice.’
Pulse, pulse, pulse. Her neck was pale, as was the rest of her. He imagined she spent most of her life indoors. She probably wasted hours each morning anointing herself with expensive oils and perfumes just like all Roman women of her station.
He imagined her seated at her makeup table gazing into her copper mirror. The vision should have angered him: it was the picture of Roman decadence. But instead he thought of her lovely auburn hair hanging at her shoulders—free of its ties and buns. He wondered how long it took her to comb.
He released his grip on the bars and ran his hand through his hair. What was wrong with him? He had every reason to doubt this woman and no reason at all to be imagining her at her makeup table.
‘The poppy tears dulled your rage,’ she explained.
He shook his head—which only increased its pounding—and tried to revive his indignation. ‘Drugging a man is no way to dull his rage. When the rage returns it is stronger than before.’
She shook her head, having none of it. ‘The drugging of prisoners is a common practice. It softens their tongues.’
