Beloved (5 page)

He was an intelligent and educated man, who played a waiting game with the Romans. He was not yet strong enough to overcome the invader, but he did have plans. The child Zenobia’s angry accusation that he had become one of them had pleased him because
it meant that he had succeeded with his ruse. The Romans trusted him.

Reaching up, Odenathus adjusted the crown of Palmyra upon his head. It was a beautiful crown, all gold, formed in the shape of the fronds of the Palmyran palms indigenous to the city. It was, however, hot in weather like this. He sighed, and brushed away a tiny trickle of sweat that attempted to slip down the side of his face.

The governor’s trumpeters blew a fanfare, and the noisy crowds grew silent with anticipation. Then Antonius Porcius stood up, and walked to the edge of the dais. Solemnly, with a politician’s flair for the dramatic, he let his gaze play over the hushed crowds. Finally he spoke, his nasal voice surprisingly strong.

“Today the glory of Rome was tarnished. It was tarnished not by those who are native to her, but rather by those upon whom she so graciously conferred the prize of her citizenship! Rome will not tolerate this! Rome will not permit those whom we have sworn to protect to be abused by anyone! Rome will punish those who would break her laws—and the laws of Palmyra!”

He paused a moment to allow his words to sink in, and then he continued. “This morning, a wife of Zabaai ben Selim, great chief of the Bedawi, was viciously raped and slain within her very home! Another of this loyal man’s wives was also attacked and left for dead!”

A collective gasp arose from the assembled citizens of Palmyra, followed by a low ominous muttering.

Antonius Porcius held up his hands to quiet the anger of Palmyra. “There is more!” he cried loudly, and the crowd grew silent again. “The woman who survived has pushed her shame aside and has come forth to identify those who assaulted her and the poor slain one!”

His words had barely died out when the crowds of Palmyran citizens began to part to allow the camels of Zabaai ben Selim through to the official dais. The sight was both frightening and impressive.

The Bedawi chieftain led the group from atop his own black racing camel. Behind him rode his forty sons from the eldest, Akbar ben Zabaai, to the youngest, a boy of six who sat his own camel proudly and unafraid. Behind the Bedawi chief and his sons rode the other men of his tribe, followed by the walking and mourning women, who wailed a cadence of sorrow.

The camels stopped at the foot of the dais, and knelt in the
warm sand to allow their riders to dismount. To everyone’s surprise, one of the sons of Zabaai ben Selim turned out to be his only daughter, the beloved child, Zenobia. Flanked on either side by her father and Akbar ben Zabaai, she stood straight and stony-eyed before the Roman governor and Prince Odenathus.

“We have come for Roman justice, Antonius Porcius,” Zabaai ben Selim cried. His voice rang clear in the still afternoon.

“Rome hears your plea, and will answer you fairly, Zabaai ben Selim,” came the governor’s reply. “Lucius Octavius!”

“Sir?” The commanding tribune of the sixth legion stepped forward.

“Assemble your Alae!”

“Yes, sir!” came the brisk reply, and the tribune turned, shouting his commands as he did so. “Gaulish Alae to the front, ho!”

The one hundred twenty men of the cavalry from the Gallic provinces moved slowly forward, finally stopping and lining up in ten rows of twelve men each. Their horses shifted edgily, feeling the men’s nervousness. Zabaai ben Selim walked back to where the women of his tribe now stood silent, and led forth his chief wife, Tamar. Together, they moved along the rows of Roman horsemen, and Tamar’s strong voice was soon heard as she pointed a short brown finger at the guilty ones.

“That one! And that one! These two!”

Legionnaires of the sixth legion dragged the accused men down from their shying horses, and then before the governor. At the very end of the rows of cavalry Tamar stopped, and Zabaai felt a bone-shattering shudder go through her. Looking up, he encountered a pair of the coldest blue eyes he had ever seen, and a thin, cruel mouth that drew back in a mocking smile.

“It is he, my husband. It is the centurion who raped and killed Iris.”

Zabaai, looking into the knowing eyes of the Gaul, understood for a brief minute the terror and the shame that his sweet favorite wife must have felt in her last minutes. A fierce rage welled up within his breast, and with a wild cry of fury he pulled the centurion from his mount. In an instant his knife was at the man’s neck, edging a thin red line across his throat. Only Tamar’s insistent voice was able to stop her attacker’s immediate execution.

“No, my husband!
He must suffer as our Iris suffered! Do not, I beg you, grant him the blessing of a quick death! He does not deserve it.”

Through the red mists of his anger Zabaai felt a hand on his
hand, heard the plea of his wife, and lowered his weapon. His black eyes were suddenly filled with tears, and he turned away to hide them, using his sleeve to wipe the evidence of this weakness away so others might not see it. “Is that all of them, Tamar?” he asked her gruffly.

“Yes, my lord,” she answered him softly, wanting to take him into her arms and comfort him. If it had been a terrible ordeal for her, so had it been for him. He had lost the thing dearest to him in the entire world. He had lost sweet Iris, and Tamar knew that he would never again be the same. That, more than anything else, saddened her, for she loved him.

She slipped her hand into his and together they walked to the foot of the dais, where Zabaai said quietly, “My wife says that these are all of the guilty ones, Antonius Porcius.”

The Roman governor rose from his carved chair and came forward to the edge of the platform. His voice rang out over the crowd. “These men stand accused by their victim, whom they left for dead. Can one of them deny his part?” The governor looked at the guilty eight, who hung their heads, unable to face either Tamar or the others.

Antonius Porcius spoke again. “My judgment is final. These beasts will be crucified. Their centurion is now to be given to the Bedawi for torture and execution. The Roman Peace has prevailed.”

A dutiful round of cheers rose from the ranks, a greater cheer from the Palmyrans. Then several legionnaires of the sixth legion dragged forward the wooden crosses that had been brought to the site in anticipation of the punishment to be meted out. The guilty men were divested of their uniforms and stripped naked. They were then bound upon their crosses, which were lifted high and held by one group of soldiers as others pounded them into the sandy ground from atop ladders that had been raised to aid them.

The heat of the late afternoon was barely tolerable, but if the Gauls survived to noon the following day their agony would be exquisite, for spending a morning in the broiling sun of the Syrian desert would swell their tongues black. The wet rawhide strips binding their arms and their legs to the wooden crosses would dry, shrink, and then cut into their flesh, stopping the circulation of blood and bringing incredible pain as, unable to help themselves, the men would sag with their own great weight. Depending upon how physically fit they were, they would begin dying, and they would die by inches.

The cries of their centurion, Vinctus Sextus, would follow them into Hell, as he would be kept carefully alive until all of his men were gone. Before their frightened eyes he was even now being stripped preparatory to his torture.

It began simply enough. A stake was driven into the ground, and he was bound to it, his face against the wood, his back to the crowd. Zabaai ben Selim, a slender whip of horsehair in his hand, administered the first five blows. They were not heavy blows, but rather sharp, cutting lashes that gave exquisite pain. Tamar, weakened though she still was, was able to give the prisoner five blows. Then each of the sons of Zabaai ben Selim struck the Roman once. The last five blows were delivered by Zenobia, who wielded the whip surprisingly well for a child, it was thought by the crowd. In all, fifty-five stripes crossed Vinctus Sextus’s back, but the Gaul was a tough one, and not once did he cry out, although he remained conscious the entire time.

Zabaai ben Selim smiled grimly. There would be plenty of time for cries, and the Gaul would eventually beg for mercy just as Zabaai’s sweet Iris had been forced to beg. It would be many, many hours before Vinctus Sextus expired, and he would wish for death a thousand times before death finally came.

The beating over, the centurion was cut down and dragged across the hot sand to where a block had been set up. Beside the block of marble an open pot bubbled over a neat, leaping fire. Forced to kneel, Vinctus Sextus watched with the first dawning of horror as his hands were swiftly severed from his body before his cry of protest had faded away in the hot afternoon. “Not my hands!” he shrieked. “I am a soldier! I need my hands!” The wolfish faces of his captors grinned mockingly at him, and he realized that even if they should let him live he would be too maimed ever to do battle again.

He watched fascinated as the blood from his severed arteries arced red into the golden sand; but then he was dragged across the small distance to the boiling pot, and his severed stumps were plunged into the bubbling pitch to prevent his death from blood loss. His first real scream of agony tore through the spectators, who sighed with one breath, relieved that the centurion was finally feeling the pain he deserved.

A son of Zabaai gathered up from the sand the two hands, their fingers outstretched in protest, and the chief of the Bedawi smiled once again. “Never will those hands again be able to give pain,
Gaul,” he said. “We will take them into the desert where we will feed them to the jackals.”

Vinctus Sextus shuddered. The greatest fear of the men of his northern tribe was to be buried maimed. Without his hands he would be forced to wander in a netherworld that was neither earth nor the paradise of his own woodland gods. He was already condemned by the loss of his hands, yet he still fought on.

He was dragged back across the sand and staked flat upon his back, spread-eagle wide. Two women from the Street of the Prostitutes pushed through the crowd and presented themselves to Zabaai. One of them spoke. “We will help you, chief to the Bedawi, and we will ask nothing in return. Since coming to Palmyra, this man has injured several of our sisterhood, and until now we have had no recourse to justice.”

The woman was a tall brunette of mature years, and quite skillfully painted. The beautiful young girl who had come forth with her was no more than fourteen, a blue-eyed golden blonde from northern Greece. With no pretense of modesty the girl stripped off her pale-pink silk robe, and stood naked before the crowd. Her youthful body was pure perfection with marvelous globe-shaped white breasts, a slender waist, and generously shaped hips and thighs. A sigh rippled through the crowd.

With deliberate slowness the girl moved to stand behind Vinctus Sextus’s head. Gracefully she knelt and bent to brush his face first with one of her full breasts, then with the other. The man groaned with pure frustration as Zabaai’s deep voice taunted him, “What magnificent fruits, eh Gaul?”

Vinctus Sextus felt his fingers ache and twitch to grasp the tempting flesh rubbing against his face. Instinctively he struggled to move his bound arms. Too late he remembered that he no longer had any hands, and a curse rose to his lips.

Zabaai ben Selim’s youngest son, the six-year-old Hassan, had possession of the Gaul’s severed hands, and he danced mischievously about the bound man waving his trophies. Taking the hands, he placed them on the prostitute’s plump breasts, rubbing them lewdly while the crowd roared with laughter at the boy’s impishness. The centurion reverted to his native tongue, screaming, and it was obvious that he cursed the crowd, his fate, and anything else that came into his mind.

“He should be in appalling pain,” Antonius Porcius said to Prince Odenathus. “Why is he not?”

“The boiling pitch is mixed with a painkilling narcotic,” the
prince replied. “They did not wish him to die of the pain, and so they have eased it considerably.”

The governor nodded. “They are skillful torturers, the Bedawi. Should I ever need such men, I shall call upon them.”

The crowd ohed and ahed at each subtle torture. Fathers held their children on their shoulders for a better look. The two Roman legions and their auxiliaries stood silent, and at attention, but there were many white faces among them, especially those nearest the unfortunate Gaul. Antonius Porcius had already vomited discreetly into a silver basin held by his personal body servant.

As a final torture, Vinctus Sextus was tenderly bathed in warmed water that had been sweetened with honey and orange. Then each of the sons of Zabaai ben Selim emptied a small dish of black ants upon his helpless form. It was too much for even the hardened Gaul. He began to scream frantically, begging for mercy, begging that they kill him now. His big body writhed desperately in an effort to remove the tiny insects feeding upon his sweet-drenched body. Soon his screams grew weaker.

Realizing that the show was now over, the citizens of Palmyra stayed just long enough to see the Roman soldiers break the legs of the eight men who had been crucified, then began straggling back into the city proper, followed by the marching legions. The men of the sixth, and the ninth would consume a great deal of wine in the next several hours in a concerted effort to forget this afternoon.

His legs somewhat shaky, the Roman governor made his way from the dais and walked over to where Zabaai ben Selim stood with his sons and the girl child Zenobia.

“Are you satisfied with Roman justice, Chief of the Bedawi?” he demanded.

“I am satisfied. It will not return my sweet Iris to me, but at least she will be avenged with the deaths of these men.”

“Will you now leave on your winter trek?”

“We will stay here until the criminals are finally dead,” came the quiet reply. “Only then will justice be done. Their bodies will then accompany us into the desert to become carrion for the jackals and the vultures.”