Seduced by Her Rebel Warrior

by Greta Gilbert

  Atia watched Plotius take down two men and saw Livius stab another. There was so much blood. It was pooling around the men’s feet and filling the air with its stench. So much death and for what?

  One of the rebels was making off with the Romans’ train of donkeys. Another had gathered what looked to be about a dozen swords. But they were no longer fighting—the Nabataeans were in retreat. They mounted their camels and bounded away into the terrible morning.

  The silence was punctuated by groans, the air polluted by the smell of fresh blood. Needles of horror were finally beginning to poke at Atia’s heart. The tears were wearing off, but not quickly enough.

  The flies. Where had they all come from? They were buzzing around the living and the dead. Of the living, there were only ten left. They threw down their swords and collapsed in the bloody sand.

  Nobody seemed to notice as Atia emerged from the water. She sat beside two men who were weeping into their hands. Atia envied them, for she wanted to cry. She wanted to feel anything besides this terrible numbness.

  The remaining men spent the next several hours gathering fuel for a pyre, then watched the dreadful black smoke carrying the fallen soldiers’ souls to the sky.

  The sun was low in the sky when at last Atia wept. She sat beside the smouldering embers and mourned the lives of men who had not deserved to die. And not just the Romans. She mourned for the dead Nabataeans, for she knew their suffering had turned them desperate.

  She wept and wept, and had never been more grateful for her own tears. They anchored her to what was true, reassuring her that there was right and wrong—and what she had just seen was very, very wrong.

  Images of the fighting haunted her mind. The senseless violence. The terrible chaos of it all. Over thirty men—Roman and Nabataean—had lost their lives in a matter of minutes. Thirty men who would never again laugh, or love, or gaze up at the night sky in wonder.

  Atia’s head throbbed. The sun burned down on the bronze landscape, but there was a new darkness everywhere she looked. Shadows and despair. Pain and waste. The world itself seemed to have changed.

  If only she had been in her right mind, she might have helped the Romans defend themselves. If only she could have delivered the shields, she might have prevented one of those men from meeting his death. But she had been too numb to do the right thing. She had been paralysed by the effect of the tears.

  She gazed down at the tiny half-empty bottle, which she somehow still held in her hand. ‘I hate you,’ she said. She squeezed with all her strength and the bottle burst open. The small shards sliced into her hand and the precious liquid spilled on to the ground.

  Pain. Perfect exquisite pain. It shot through her with terrifying efficiency. Opening her hand, she discovered a mess of blood and glass. She closed it again, just so she could make it worse. Pain. It seemed to invade her whole body. A deep aching awareness of what was true. Pain was not bad. It was necessary. And in that moment Atia knew that she would never allow herself to become numb again.

  ‘We must leave now,’ Rab announced. His face was ashen. He placed a final branch into the fire and cringed, and Atia wondered if he had been injured. ‘Gather your things,’ he told the remaining soldiers. ‘We must return to the hills.’

  Beside him, Plotius was stirring the ashes with his sword. ‘We will do no such thing.’

  ‘The rebels will return soon to collect their dead,’ Rab said to Plotius. ‘If we are still here when they arrive, they will finish us.’

  Plotius gazed into the flames. ‘Where were you, Camel Man?’ he asked. ‘When the rebels arrived?’

  ‘I was scouting in the hills behind camp,’ Rab said, turning to face Plotius.

  ‘A convenient time to go scouting,’ commented Plotius, glancing around at the other men.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ asked Rab. He stepped closer to Plotius. No, thought Atia. Do not provoke him.

  ‘How many rebels did you kill?’ asked Plotius. ‘Just curious.’

  ‘None,’ Rab said. He stood frozen before Plotius. His tall, muscular frame looked almost thin against Plotius’s thick, bulky mass.

  ‘Not a one? Why does that not surprise me?’ Plotius said. He pulled his sword from the flames and rested it on the ground.

  ‘I arrived rather late to the fight,’ said Rab through clenching teeth.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Plotius.

  ‘If you would like to accuse me of something, then do it,’ said Rab, retrieving his dagger from the sheath against his leg.

  ‘Stop this madness,’ Atia said. She lunged between the two men. ‘There will be no more fighting today, lest you would like to kill me as well.’

  Plotius hissed, but he sheathed his sword. ‘We are not returning to the cursed hills,’ he growled. ‘We will follow the shores of the Bitumen Lake and come what may.’

  ‘Certain death,’ said Rab. ‘The rebels will find you and they will kill you all.’

  ‘What makes you so certain?’ Plotius asked. He lifted aside a boulder to produce the small metal box that Atia’s father had given him. He held it aloft. ‘This box contains all the coin we need to make our way to Rekem. And in our current circumstances, I do not think the Governor will mind if we use it.’

  ‘Coin cannot keep you safe from rebels,’ Rab remarked.

  ‘Of course it can. We can buy whatever we need, including mercenaries.’ Plotius turned to address his men. ‘What say you, soldiers? Will you follow this slithering Arab back into the hills, or will you follow me along the shore and help me seek our revenge?’

  ‘Revenge!’ the soldiers shouted.

  There was only one man who did not shout. He sheathed his sword and stood by Rab’s side. Livius.

  ‘You betray me, Gaul,’ said Plotius.

  ‘My orders are to deliver the woman safely to Rekem,’ said Livius. ‘That is what I plan to do.’

  ‘Idiot!’ Plotius shouted. ‘The woman will come with me!’

  ‘Will she?’ asked Livius.

  Atia felt all the men’s eyes on her, but she could only keep staring into the flames.

  ‘Well, Atia?’ said Plotius. ‘Whom will you follow to Rekem? The man with weapons and coins and...medicine for what ails you, or the man with nothing?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  At last he had seen the shape of her demon. It was small and round and full of liquid and the day before the slaughter she had thrown it into the sea.

  He had seen the shape of the demon’s servant as well—a large, fleshy man who called himself a commander, though all he commanded was the gates of oblivion.

  Suddenly everything had made sense—her cold skin, her heavy lids and listless expression at the banquet. The difficulty she had had those first days on the trail. It was the tears of poppy.

  They were why she had gone to see Plotius all alone that night and were likely involved in the death of her mother. It was why she did not wish to speak of either subject with him.

  She used the medicine regularly, or so it seemed, though from what Rab knew about the tears, it was more correct to say that the tears used her.

  Though after the night he had saved her from Plotius, he remembered that she had ceased her trembling. Her eyes had grown brighter, her skin warmer, her steps strong and energetic. She had fought her craving for the medicine, it seemed—had slain the demon—and had transformed before Rab’s eyes.

  She had vanquished the tears and become a warrior.

  Now she was crouched over the spring, filling her water bag. When Rab approached, she hurriedly finished the task. She had been avoiding him like this ever since they had parted ways with Plotius and the others—a full three days now.

  The evening they set out, neither Atia, Livius nor Rab had been able to speak. They channelled all their energy into their march and fought to keep their despair at bay. Darkness had been heavy and they
had not got far. They made camp in silence. It was as if they were still trying to escape the battle.

  Tears had clouded Rab’s vision throughout the next day. He had recognised several of the fallen Nabataeans and could not get their faces out of his mind.

  They had died with honour—that was what Rab kept telling himself. They had died fighting for what was right.

  Still, nothing seemed right about what had happened that day and the thought of all those lifeless bodies lying on the ground filled Rab with a despair so powerful he had found it hard to concentrate.

  He had not been alone. Atia and Livius had been fighting their own grief. Livius had limped along on an injured knee, lost in thought, and Atia had wandered off during their noon rest—though not so far that Rab had not been able to hear her sobs.

  Rab fought to keep his attention on finding their route. The hills were no longer hills—they were canyons. They did not roll—they plunged. He searched his memory for the locations of the secret springs and the places of shade.

  But visions of the battle kept clouding his mind and the wound on his arm had begun to ache painfully. Sometimes he would arrive at the edge of a cliff or the bottom of a canyon and have no idea where he was.

  They had run out of provisions and become very, very hungry. ‘We shall come across a settlement soon,’ Rab reassured them that second day.

  In truth he was confused. They should have come upon the settlement already—at least according to his faltering memory. His arm had begun to ache and a worrisome fever heated his head.

  He was not alone. Livius’s injured knee seemed to be worsening as well. He limped along behind them, cringing in pain. It was Livius who finally broke the silence. ‘I believe the sun god is an indiscriminate tormentor,’ he said, ‘for he punishes the good souls and the bad with equal fury.’

  ‘Aye,’ Rab had said, grateful for the sound of Livius’s voice. ‘I wonder which type of soul is my own.’

  ‘I have been wondering about my own soul as well, Brother,’ he echoed.

  Rab had hoped that Atia would voice her response, but she only continued to watch her own feet. Surely it was her exhaustion that kept her silent. Grief coupled with hunger could steal a person’s strength.

  But deep in his soul he knew that it was none of that. On that third afternoon, as he gathered the spring water in his water bag and gently removed his robe, he admitted to himself that she did not speak because he had silenced her.

  He had called her ugly—a word he had regretted even as it had rolled off his tongue. She was not ugly, of course. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He loved her strong nose, whose unusual hump gave her a regal quality and played off her other elegant features: her mysterious dark eyes, her big, sensuous lips, her proud, high cheeks. She was utterly gorgeous to him—the furthest from ugly that a woman could get.

  What she had done to him had been ugly—that was all.

  Though perhaps ugly was not the correct term for it. It might have been more correct to say that what she had done had been destructive. She had taken what they had shared and tried to make it into nothing.

  Why did it matter to him at all? If anything, he should have been pleased at her attempt to put distance between them. He had violated his own code of honour by kissing her as he had done and he could hardly forgive himself for what had happened next.

  It was a travesty, really, how badly he had wanted her, a total breach of ethics how he had envisioned taking her right there, right in the middle of the stream.

  He had stopped himself, thank Dushara, knowing that he could never take his pleasure with a woman who did not know her own. Helping her discover that particular knowledge had been one of the most gratifying things he had ever done.

  But there was also no excuse for it. She was Roman—as Roman as they came, as it turned out. And yet he could still hear her quiet moans inside his mind, could feel the way her body had relaxed around him, trusting him, wanting him, how her desire had slowly transformed into her obvious pleasure. Even now, he could see the sheen of her skin in the rosy sunlight, feel her soft, urgent breaths, smell her scent. It was almost too much to bear.

  Kissing her alone had been a kind of revelation. Those lips. Those sweet, sultry lips. They were at once soft and demanding, naive and knowing, and so very warm and wet. They represented everything he stood against, yet he could have kissed those lips for a thousand years.

  But it was not just the kissing or the touching that had him feeling totally reprehensible. It was the bliss. The complete, terrifying bliss he had felt with their closeness.

  He had held her body against his and for the first time since the Romans had landed in his fair kingdom he had remembered what it was like to be happy.

  It was unacceptable, that happiness. Completely inappropriate for a man of his background and birth. The Romans had not ceased their conquest of Nabataea, after all. They continued to extract their booty and the Nabataeans continued to suffer.

  And she was Roman. Hence, Rab should have been relieved when she had splashed away to retrieve his coins. He should have let the insult serve as a reminder of who she was—and who she most definitely could never be.

  But instead, an arrow of pain had sliced through his gut. How could she do that to him? To them? How could she cheapen the precious thing that they had shared?

  You are ugly, he had said. He had likely said more, though he could not remember. All he could recall was how that arrow had caught fire inside him and how it had burned so viciously that the only thing he could do to alleviate the pain was to turn it around and aim it back at her.

  And that was what he had done. With the skill of a sagittarius, he had aimed that arrow right back at her heart.

  You are ugly. He had known immediately that the words had hit their target, for the colour had drained from her cheeks and the breath had gone out of her. She had actually stumbled backwards, as if having been hit by a real arrow, though instead of reaching out to steady herself, she had done something strange. She had lifted her hand to cover her nose.

  He had had days to consider that moment. Hours and hours to ponder why she had reacted that way. When he had called her ugly, he had been referring to her behaviour, yet she had immediately moved to conceal her nose. Her strong, unique, and, to Rab’s mind, rather sexy nose.

  Could it be that she considered that part of herself distasteful? When he had called her beautiful that day at the baths, he vaguely remembered she had concealed her nose then, too. Now that he thought of it, there had been numerous times she had covered her nose in his presence.

  Her behaviour was beginning to make a heartbreaking kind of sense. ‘I realise I am not attractive, but I believe we can come to some understanding.’ Those were the exact words she had used when offering Rab her coins. She had assumed that he found her distasteful—so much so that making love to her would be a kind of chore. No wonder she had presumed that he would not wish to see her face during the act of love.

  By the gods, what had he done? In calling her ugly, he had unknowingly said the most harmful thing he possibly could have. She had hurt him, that was true, but his retaliation had gone far beyond hurt. Ugly she was not and what they had shared that day in the stream had been the opposite of ugly.

  It had been...holy.

  He was tired of denying it. Lying there beside her in the sun, pressing himself against her so hard that their skin seemed to fuse, a strange new feeling had invaded him—a kind of rightness. Suddenly there was nothing more important in the world than pleasing the woman beside him and there would be nothing more terrible in the world than losing her.

  What had begun as a powerful attraction had become something different in those few glorious moments. Their lips had met and the sun had burned down and a kind of alchemical change had taken place within him. He did not just want her. He wanted to love her. If he de
nied it any more he might as well have been denying his own life.

  He needed to speak to her—to apologise for what he had said, to tell her what was in his heart. But three whole days had gone by without a word and he was beginning to wonder if she would ever speak to him again.

  He was pouring water on his wound when at long last she did. ‘Ack!’ she shouted. He nearly jumped out of his skin.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked, pointing at the oozing yellow fissure in the middle of his arm. She moved towards him, sniffing the air. ‘Rab, it does not smell good.’ She squatted at his side and studied the gash. ‘It festers.’ She searched his face. ‘You have lost your flush.’

  ‘It is just a small wound,’ said Rab.

  She pressed her hand against his forehead. ‘You feel very hot.’

  ‘I imagine we are all feeling a bit hot,’ he jested.

  Livius limped over to join them. Upon seeing Rab’s arm, he wretched. ‘Fires of Vesuvius, why did you not say anything?’

  ‘What good would it do to speak of it? We must reach Rekem above all else. And we must do so in nine days or my own family will be harmed.’

  Atia shot Livius a look. Their silence spoke what the two could not say aloud: There will be no reaching Rekem at all if you are dead.

  ‘How much further to the settlement you spoke of?’ Atia asked.

  There was no more reason to lie. ‘We should be there already. I fear it no longer exists.’

  ‘It must exist,’ said Atia. She slung her water bag across her back. ‘And I shall find it. Where will I encounter the next spring?’

  She was gazing out at the canyon with a fearsome determination.

  Rab tried to stand, but could not seem to gather the energy. ‘You cannot just go traipsing off into the desert alone.’

  ‘I most certainly can, for neither of you is in any shape to go on.’ She arranged her shawl atop her head like a turban. ‘If I have not returned in two days’ time, you must return to Bostra.’