Beloved (71 page)

Quick tears sprang to her eyes. “He is rejecting me, Marcus. He is rejecting his own mother! He has never forgiven me for Palmyra, and I doubt he ever will. My children are gone, and I am alone.”

“Your children are all alive, although they choose to live their own lives, beloved. Demi was found amid the ruins of the city, and has been nursed back to health by your brothers. He chooses to remain with the Bedawi. So the sons of Odenathus have survived despite all, and we have our daughter! The gods have taken away with one hand, it is true, but they have also given with the other.”

She cried then, weeping against his chest until her sorrow was finally purged. Then, sniffing loudly, she looked up at him. With a loving smile he kissed her on her nose, and she had to laugh softly, for it was the sort of thing a mischievous little boy would have done. “I love you,” he said, “and we are about to begin a new life. Put the past behind you, Zenobia. Only today and tomorrow matter.”

“Yes,” she said, “you are right, Marcus, and yet I cannot help but be sad. They were only little boys the last time I looked, and now suddenly they are grown men and they do not need me any longer.”

“I need you,” he answered her, “and our daughter needs you, and the son you will give me needs you!”

“I know, Marcus, but let me mourn my loss without guilt. Sometimes a woman needs time to mourn such a loss. I shall not die of grief, never fear.”

Sea Nymph
sailed past Vectis, and around the island’s headland into the harbor of Portus Adurni. Compared to the great harbors she had seen, this one was tiny, and yet it was a main port of entry for Roman Britain. Around them on the deck great activity was taking place as the ship’s sailors prepared for landing.

“Look!” Marcus pointed. “There is my brother, Aulus, come to meet us!”

“Your brother?
How did he know we were coming?”

“Sea Nymph
arrived on the Gaulish coast before we did. Before we left the ship at Massilia I had instructed Captain Paulus that he was to send a messenger ahead to Britain as soon as he reached Gaul. That is why Aulus is here.” He turned back to the rail and, grinning, shouted, “Aulus! You are getting fat!”

“And you are graying like an old man!” came back the laughing reply.

The ropes from the ship were thrown shoreward and made fast. The gangway was lowered, and Aulus Alexander Britainus rushed aboard to embrace his brother. There were tears in his blue eyes, although, to his older brother’s amusement, he quickly brushed them aside. Still, Marcus was touched. “Praise the gods you are safe!” Aulus said. “And our mother?”

“I have brought her to safety also,” Marcus replied.

The two broke apart and stood for a moment staring delightedly at each other. Then Aulus’s eyes swung about to light upon Zenobia, and he boldly assessed her. She stared back as coolly. Finally Aulus grinned in a boyish, impudent fashion.

“Is this Zenobia?” he demanded.

Marcus chuckled. “Yes, you overgrown roughneck, this is Zenobia, my wife. Zenobia, this is my charming but rude younger brother, Aulus.”

“Hail, brother!” Zenobia said, and then she mischievously embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks and pressing her beautiful bosom against his chest.

As her heady hyacinth scent rose up to assail him Aulus felt a quick stab of desire, and he gasped in surprise. Both Marcus and Zenobia laughed. “Whew!” chuckled the younger Alexander. “I
surrender, sister. You are more woman than I’m prepared to deal with, and I bow to my brother’s ability.”

“As well you should,” Zenobia teased him, and then she turned to her husband. “I will go and fetch Dagian. She will want to see this reprobate, I am sure.”

Aulus and Marcus both watched her go, and with a grin Aulus congratulated his older brother. “By the gods, she is a beauty! You’ll get a host of sons on her, brother!”

“Perhaps if we are fortunate, Aulus, but I will not endanger her life to insure my immortality. Zenobia and I are no longer children, though we be newly married. We already have a child, and if Mavia is all we ever have then I shall be satisfied.”

“But Zenobia’s daughter is the child of her late husband. That does not count.”

“Zenobia’s daughter is mine, brother.”

Aulus still did not understand, but then he saw the little girl exiting the main cabin of the ship, running toward them.

“Papa! Is this Britain? Are we here?”

Marcus swept her up in his arms, and Aulus gaped at the two heads so alike in color, the matching blue eyes, and the child’s nose and jaw, so like his and Marcus’s. “Mavia, this is your Uncle Aulus,” Marcus said matter-of-factly.

Mavia held out her arms to Aulus, and, charmed, he lifted her from her father’s grasp into his own. She kissed him sweetly. “How do you do, Uncle Aulus.”

“I do very well, little Mavia,” he said.

“Do you have a little girl like me?” she asked him.

“Indeed I do! Today you will start your journey to Salinae, where we have a fine villa. You have lots of little cousins awaiting your arrival, Mavia, and I promise you a very good time.”

Mavia clapped her hands gleefully. “Do you hear that, Papa! I have cousins who wait to play with me! I have never had any cousins before. I shall like this Britain! I know I shall!”

Aulus put her down, and she ran off, re-entering the cabin as Zenobia exited it.

“Your mother will be here shortly,” Zenobia said.

“What news of the emperor?” Marcus demanded.

“Which emperor? Aurelian is dead, assassinated outside of Byzantium. Tacitus reigns.”

“The old senator?”

“Yes. The army asked the senate to appoint him, as it could not agree upon a candidate.”

“Has there been any outcry over the disappearance of the queen?”

“None. I have not even heard she was missing. The Empress Ulpia, however, died, they say, at the very hour of Aurelian’s death.”

“Faithful Ulpia,” Zenobia said. “She will serve him as well in death as she did in life.”

“You are sure, Aulus? You are sure that there has been no mention of Zenobia at all?”

“None that I have heard, Marcus, and I am privy to accurate information.”

“We are safe then?” Zenobia queried him.

“Perhaps, beloved, but nonetheless I will take no chances.” He touched her face in an affectionate gesture, and then turned back to his brother. “Aulus, I wish to purchase from you the island off the southern coast that grandfather’s concubine brought him as her dowry.”

“It is yours, brother, but I will not take your gold. It is my wedding gift to you. What will you do with it?”

“We will live there, Aulus. There I believe Zenobia and I will be safe from any pursuit.”

“Yes,” Aulus agreed, “you will be safe, and I will help see to that. With the luck of the gods we will have plenty of time to prepare. First, however, you must come to Salinae so that Zenobia may meet the rest of the family.”

“I had thought to go immediately to the island,” Marcus said.

“With that
Roman
ship of yours, and its
Roman
crew? No, brother, I think not. When it returns to Rome, all the captain and crew can say is that you were brought to Portus Adurni. Past here they will be able to tell the authorities nothing. This land of ours may be an island, but it is a large island.
Our
own people will get you to your island, Marcus.”

“Aulus!”
Dagian hurried up to her son and kissed him. “Did I not tell you it was not my fate to die in a foreign land? I am home after all these years! I can scarcely believe it! Tell me how fares Eada and my grandchildren?”

He returned the kiss, and smilingly told her, “Both my wife and the children are all well. If you are ready, Mother, we shall begin our journey to Salinae.”

Dagian nodded happily and turned to Marcus, Zenobia, and Mavia. “We are going home, my children,” she said, and they were all unable to contain their joy.

Portus Adurni had not been particularly impressive, being more a village in size, though it had its baths and temple to Jupiter. The streets were hardened dirt and, Zenobia imagined, in winter a sea of mud. Although Rome’s influence was evident in the soldiers and the more prosperous citizens who affected Roman garb, these were outnumbered by tall, black-haired, light-eyed and fair-skinned men and women wearing their own colorful dress, including leg coverings for the men. She had stared openly, and was stared at in return.

Aulus Alexander Britainus had arranged that his brother’s entire family be transported by wagons the hundred fifteen miles from Portus Adurni to his villa outside the small town of Salinae. Salinae was located in a beautiful river valley surrounded by gentle hills near the border of the Ordovices tribesmen in Wales. Even the slaves rode in the wagons, for the Alexander brothers wanted quickly to put as much distance between themselves and the coast as possible. The farther away they moved from the coast the less strong the Roman influence—and government.

Zenobia insisted upon being given her own horse. She reveled in this freedom, the first she had had since Aurelian had taken her prisoner at Palmyra. The countryside was like nothing she had ever seen before. “It is so
green,”
she remarked several times almost to no one, and the brothers grinned over her head at each other.

She had always believed Palmyra the fairest thing upon the earth, but this green land with its orchards of pink and white blossoms, its fields of wild white daisies and purple yarrow, its rushing streams of clear water; it was all too much. The fields seemed to go on forever in their lushness; the hills rolled gently down to the valleys. Zenobia was falling more in love with the glorious countryside as each mile passed. Nonetheless she noticed a subtle change in her brother-in-law. The closer they came to the
village of Salinae where the Alexander villa was located, the less Roman he became, the trappings of the empire falling away from him easily. The morning of the day they were to arrive he appeared in a riding costume of a medium-blue knee-length tunica embroidered in gold thread around its lower edge and the long sleeves; deeper blue braccos, cross-gartered with bronze studded straps; and a dark-blue cloak fastened at the shoulder by a fibula.

“By the gods,” Marcus drawled, amused, “you’re affecting a Briton’s dress, little brother.”

“No, Marcus, I was affecting Roman dress in order to have easy access to the waterfront in Portus Adurni. I dress like a Briton because I am a Briton. My wife is a Briton, my children are British, and I live in Britain. I have never been a perfumed Roman.”

“Our father was Roman,” Marcus said in a tense voice.

“Our mother was not,” came the reply.

“You reject Rome, Aulus?”

“I do. We do not need the Romans here in Britain.”

Zenobia sighed. She might have been in Palmyra, and it might have been she who spoke, not Aulus. The Romans seemed to bring nothing but dissension with them. “Nothing changes,” she said quietly.

They turned to look at her, and Marcus realized what she was thinking. “It will not be like Palmyra,” he reassured her. “This is my brother’s way of being his own man.”

“Your brother is very much his own man,” Dagian said. “He did not want to tell you, Marcus, but we are so near to Salinae that now I must. Aulus is chief of the Salinae Dobunni. He was elected by the tribe when his uncles were killed in a fight with the Ordovices. It was just before he came to Rome at the time of your father’s death. Your cousins had not the leadership ability, and in fact it was they who put him forth to be elected.”

“So the elder brother, landless and now without power, must look to his younger sibling for succor,” Marcus said. Suddenly he laughed, seeing humor in the situation. “You had best let me retire to the island, Aulus. If I decide to stay at Salinae I shall overcome you and rule the Dobunni myself. Can you see me, my hair long, twin mustaches drooping mournfully, my body painted blue, leading a screaming charge into a legion?”

Aulus laughed back, imagining the picture his elegant elder brother had painted. “I shall indeed give you the island, brother. You are far too civilized to be Britainized!”

“Briton or Roman, Aulus, I care not. All I wish now is to live
in peace with Zenobia and our child. I have had enough of wars and intrigues!”

Aulus was sympathetic to his brother’s wishes. His own life had been strangely easy, he realized now that he looked back with more objectivity than he had ever had. He had known from the moment he had met Eada that she was the woman for him, and they were today the proud parents of six sons and two daughters.

Aulus Alexander Britainus felt an enormous burst of love for his older brother and his sister-in-law. They deserved peace, and they deserved happiness. He was going to try to see that they got both.

They had long passed through Corinium and Glevum, and now the houses of the village of Salinae came into view. It was a pretty place, its white houses having red-tiled roofs, each building or group of buildings walled in from the street. There was a market in the center of the town, but it was a small place and there were no public baths or temples in evidence. As they entered the village Zenobia could hear the cry being taken up, “The master is home! The master comes!”