Page 2 of Beloved

“Happy birthday, Zenobia!”

Zenobia bat Zabaai, now six, smiled happily back at her family.

She was a lovely child, tall for her age, with long unruly dark hair that her mother had coaxed into ringlets for this auspicious occasion, and shining silver-gray eyes.

Her simply draped white tunic with its pale blue silk rope belt set off her light golden skin.

Zabaai ben Selim swept his only daughter up into his arms, and gave her a resounding kiss.

“Don’t you want to know what your presents are, my precious one?”

Zenobia giggled and looked mischievously at her adored father.

“Of course I do, Papa, but Mama said I must not ask until they were offered.”

Zabaai ben Selim was unable to contain himself any longer. “Ali,”

he roared, “bring in my daughter’s birthday gift!”

Into the open courtyard of the house came her father’s favorite slave leading a dainty, prancing storm-gray mare, bridled in red leather with tinkling brass bells, and wearing a small matching saddle.

Zenobia was speechless with surprise and delight.

More than anything, she had wanted a fine Arab horse for her very own.

She had spent the last six months hinting at it none too gently to her father.

“Oh, Papa!”

she finally whispered.

“Then you like her?”

Zabaai ben Selim teased his beloved only daughter.

“Oh, yes! Yes, Papa! Yes!”

“Zabaai, you did not tell me!”

Iris looked worried.

“A horse? She is far too little.”

“Do not worry, my love.

The mare has been bred for docility, I promise you.”

Tamar put a gentle hand on Iris’s shoulder, and said in a low voice, “Don’t overprotect her, Iris.

You will do her no favor if you do.

Bedawi women are bred to be independent.”

“I want to ride her now!”

Zenobia cried, and Zabaai lifted his daughter up onto the mare’s back.

She sat proudly, as if she had been born to sit there.

“Come on, Akbar! I’ll race you!”

Zenobia challenged her father’s heir.

“I must get to my horse,”

he protested, amused.

“Well hurry!”

she fussed at him, and was quickly off through the courtyard door.

In the year in which she was eleven Zenobia decided she would not go on the winter trek with her family.

Palmyra had suddenly become a fascinating place to her.

How she loved the city with its beautiful covered and colonnaded streets, great temples and broad marble avenues, its wonderful shops and open-air markets, each with a different and distinct smell.

Leather tanning.

Perfumes being blended.

Wet wool being readied for weaving and dyeing.

The silk-dyeing vats.

The livestock.

The spices. Exotic foods of all kinds. She simply couldn’t bear to leave it again!

With stubborn resolve she had secreted herself when no one was looking, and now she hugged herself gleefully, convinced she would not be found.

“Zenobia!”

Tamar’s voice echoed sharply through the virtually empty house.

“Zen-o-bia! Where are you, child? Come now, you cannot hide from us any longer! The trek has already begun.”

“Zenobia, you are being foolish!”

Iris’s voice was becoming tinged with annoyance.

“Come to us at once!”

Under the great bed in her father’s bedchamber the child crouched, chuckling softly.

She would not spend the winter in the damned desert again this year.

The gods only knew she hated it! Miles and miles and miles of endless sand.

Long, boring days of blue skies, cloudless and as placid as pap.

She sniffed with distaste.

Then there were the goats.

While her very best friend, Julia Tullio, got to spend the whole delicious winter season in Palmyra going to the theater and to the games, she, Zenobia bat Zabaai, spent her winters herding a flock of dumb, smelly goats! It was embarrassing! The Bedawi measured a man’s wealth in the livestock he owned, which made Zenobia’s father an extremely wealthy man; but how she hated chasing those silly, temperamental goats all winter!

Only nights in the desert were interesting.

She loved it when the skies grew dark, and filled with crystalline stars, some so bright and so large that they seemed almost touchable.

Her father had taught her to read the stars, and she believed that as long as she could see them she would be able to find her way back to Palmyra from Hades itself.

“Ha, Zenobia! There you are!”

Tamar reached beneath the bed and pulled her out with strong fingers.

“No!”

Zenobia shouted furiously, struggling.

“I will not go! I hate the months away from Palmyra! I hate the desert!”

“Don’t be foolish,”

Tamar replied patiently.

“You are Bedawi, and the desert is our way.

Come along now, Zenobia.

There’s my good girl.”

Tamar raised her up.

The child pulled defiantly away from the older woman, her strangely adult eyes flashing.

“I am only half Bedawi, and even that half does not like the desert!”

Tamar had to laugh, for it was the truth and she could not really blame Zenobia.

She was young, and the city was exciting.

As Iris joined them, Zenobia flung herself at her pretty parent.

“I don’t want to go, Mama! Why can we not just stay here? The two of us? Papa will not mind.

The theater season is just beginning, and Julia says that a wonderful troupe of dancers and actors from Rome will be performing here this winter.”

“Our place is with your father, Zenobia.”

Iris never raised her soft voice, but there was no arguing with her tone.

She stroked her only child’s sleek dark head.

What a beauty the little one was turning out to be, and how much she loved her!

“Could I not stay with Julia? Her mama says it would be all right.

You don’t need me to herd the goats!”

Zenobia made one last desperate try.

“No, Zenobia,”

came the firm and quiet reply, but a tiny smile twitched at the corners of Iris’s mouth.

Poor Zenobia, she thought.

She knew just how her daughter felt, but she would say nothing, for she knew sympathy only encouraged rebellion.

Iris, too, disliked the desert, but never in all the years she had been Zabaai’s wife had she ever admitted it aloud.

It was part of her husband’s heritage, and when she had married him she had accepted it.

She held out her hand to her daughter.

“Come now, my dearest, let us go without further ado.

The others are already several miles ahead of us, and you know how I dislike galloping a camel.

It makes me sick if I must do it for too long. Come along.”

“Yes, Mama,”

Zenobia sighed, defeated.

The three had turned to go when they heard strange footsteps on the stairs outside the bedchamber door.

Tamar stiffened, sensing danger.

Then, pulling Zenobia from her mother, she pushed the girl down and back under the bed with its bright, red satin hangings.

“Stay there!”

she hissed urgently, “and whatever happens do not come out until I tell you! Do you understand? Do not come out until I call you!”

The door to the bedchamber was flung open before Zenobia could protest.

She could not see from her hiding place that the room had suddenly been invaded by a small party of Roman soldiers.

Tamar quickly stepped forward, saying, “Good morning, Centurion! How may I help you?”

The centurion eyed her boldly, thinking as he did so that she was a fine figure of a woman with her big, pillowy tits, and that she looked clean, and disease-free.

“Whose house is this?”

he demanded.

Tamar recognized his look.

She prayed she could stay calm.

“This is the house of Zabaai ben Selim, warrior chief of the Bedawi, Centurion.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am Tamar bat Hammid, senior wife to Zabaai ben Selim.

This other lady is my lord’s second wife, Iris bat Simon.”

“Why are you alone? Where are the servants?”

The centurion’s tone was arrogant.

“I can see that you are new to Palmyra, Centurion.

The Bedawi spend but half the year in Palmyra.

The other half we spend in the desert.

My husband left but a few minutes ago.

Iris and I were checking to be sure that everything was secure.

One cannot trust the slaves to see to it.”

She paused a moment, hoping he would be satisfied and let them go.

Seeing his intent still unchanged, she decided to attack.

“May I ask why you have entered this house, Centurion? It is not the policy of the Roman Army to enter private houses within a friendly city.

My husband is a well-respected citizen of this city, honored by all who know him.

He holds Roman citizenship, Centurion, and is personally acquainted with the governor.

I would also tell you that Zabaai ben Selim is cousin to this city’s ruler, Prince Odenathus.”

He did not look at her directly when he said, “The gates were wide open as we rode by, and since we saw that the house appeared to be deserted we came to check that robbers were not stripping the property of a Roman citizen.”

He was lying, and both of them knew it.

The gates had been firmly locked behind Zabaai when he had left.

Tamar was afraid, but she knew that to show fear would encourage these men in whatever mischief they were planning.

“As always,”

she said, her voice heavy with sincerity, “the Romans are the keepers of the peace.

I shall tell my lord Zabaai of your concern, Centurion.

He will be well pleased.”

She turned to Iris, who stood nervously behind her.

“Come, Iris.

We must hurry to meet our lord Zabaai.

Our camels are in the stable, Centurion.

Would one of your men be kind enough to fetch them for us?”

“How do I know that you are who you say you are?”

the centurion said.

“You might be thieves for all I know, and then I should be in trouble with my commanding officer.”

The ring of men was closing in about them.

“My lord Zabaai, his wives, and his entire family are well known to the Roman governor of this city,”

Tamar repeated threateningly.

She was very afraid now.

These, she realized, were not regular legionnaires.

These were auxiliaries, barbarians recruited from Gallic and Germanic tribes, noted for being pitiless, without mercy or respect for anything—including women.

“I am sure that you are both well known in the city,”

the centurion said insinuatingly, and the men with him laughed, their eyes hot.

His gaze bold and cruel, he reached out and pushed Tamar aside.

“I want a better look at you,”

he said to Iris, pulling her forward.

At first she looked at him unflinchingly, her blue-gray eyes scornful, but her heart was thumping violently against her ribs.

She felt as if she were staring death in the face.

The centurion let his hand caress her ash-blond hair almost lingeringly.

Slowly the hand wandered downward over her body, fondling her breasts.

“Centurion,”

she said in a quiet, strained voice, “not only am I wife to Zabaai ben Selim, but I am the only daughter of the great banker, Simon Titus of Alexandria.

Do not allow a simple rudeness to escalate into a serious crime.”

“You lie,”

he said pleasantly.

“You are a whore of Palmyra.”

“Centurion, do not do this thing,”

Iris said, her voice now trembling.

“Do you not have a wife, or a sister? Would you like it if someone did this thing to them?”

He looked at her dispassionately, and she saw no pity or mercy in his ice-blue eyes.

“It has been a long time since I have had a fair woman,”

he said, and then he pushed her back onto the bed.

Her instinct for survival made her attempt to rise, but he shoved her back brutally, and Iris’s control left her.

She screamed, totally terrified.

The centurion slapped her viciously with one hand, while ripping her gown and pushing it up to her belly with the other.

His knee jammed between her resisting thighs while she fought him, clawing at his face with her nails, maddened with fear, already ashamed of what was happening to her.

She had known no man but her loving, gentle husband.

She had known nothing but tenderness and kindness at his hands.

Iris had never imagined that a man could do this to a woman.

Even knowing it was useless, she continued to fight him because something deep within her refused to accept this horror; and the centurion in his fury at being thwarted, continued to strike her into submission.

Both her eyes were almost swollen shut when she felt him gain the advantage, and thrust with a cruel, burning pain into her resisting body. Her reason finally left her as he pounded against her again and again, conscious only of his own pleasure in subduing the woman.

“By the gods,”

he grunted, “this is the best piece of cunt I’ve fucked in months!”

Beneath the bed, hidden by the coverings, the child Zenobia squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

She was terrified by the strange sounds above, trembling and confused at hearing her mother begging in such a frightened voice.

Then her mother screamed, and she could no longer hear women’s voices, only men’s rough laughter, and words she didn’t comprehend.

Iris never heard them.

She never knew that she was mounted by not only the centurion, but half a dozen other men who patiently waited their turn to violate her now still body.

In the end the centurion raped her a second time, cursing when he came too quickly.

In his pique he cut her throat as one would butcher a helpless lamb, swiftly, bloodlessly.

Tamar, pulled down onto her back on the cool tile floor, her garments yanked over her head, fared little better than Iris; but Tamar knew enough not to fight back.

They left her still body for dead when the last man had finished sodomizing her, not even bothering to use the knife on her.

She lay barely breathing while the soldiers stripped the room of the few things left in it for most of its furnishings had gone with Zabaai ben Selim as they always did.

Terrified, she held her breath when they ripped the hangings from the bed, along with its coverlets.

She prayed to every god she could think of that in their greedy and lustful haste they would not see the child Zenobia.

Those fervent prayers were answered.

Her eyes met the terrified ones of the girl, and they warned Iris’s daughter not to move, to be as silent as the tomb.

It seemed like an eternity that she lay there upon her stomach on the cool tiles, her violated body aching unbearably.

She dared not even groan for fear they would realize that she was alive.

Finally, after searching through every room for valuables, the soldiers left the house of Zabaai ben Selim.

She heard their horses clattering noisily in the courtyard, and wondered why she had not heard them before.

Probably because they had led the animals in quietly so as not to surprise anyone left in the house.

At least she now knew that they were cavalry, and that would narrow her husband’s search for the guilty ones.

Certain that they were now alone, she moaned with pain and tried to sit up.

Zenobia scrambled from beneath the bed, her young face wet with tears, as she helped Tamar.

The child was pale, and still shaking.

She carefully avoided looking at the bed.

“Is my mother dead?”

Tamar nodded.

“Don’t look, child.”

“Why, Tamar? Why did they do it? You told them who you were? Why did they hurt you? Why did they kill my mother?”

Tamar spat out a broken tooth.

“You cannot tell the Romans anything,”

she said contemptuously, finally managing to sit up with Zenobia’s aid, her back against the bed.

Suddenly embarrassed by her disarray, she pulled down the skirts of her dalmatica, which were now ripped, torn, and stained by the soldiers’ leavings.

“I do not believe that they stole the camels, child.

Go to the stables, get one, and ride like the wind to your father.

Tell him what has happened! I cannot go, Zenobia.

I must wait here.”

“It is my fault,”

said Zenobia, tears welling up in her silvery eyes.

“My mother is dead! If I had not been such a child, if I had been ready to leave when everyone else was ready instead of hiding like a brat.”

She began to weep piteously.

Tamar sighed deeply.

She ached in every joint, and she wanted to scream at Zenobia that it was indeed her fault for delaying them so that the soldiers caught them unprotected.

Then she looked at the child’s face, woebegone at the loss of her mother.

“No, child,”

she said firmly, suddenly even believing it, “you must not blame yourself.

It was fate, the will of the gods.

Go now, and fetch your father.”

“Will you be all right?”

Zenobia sniffed anxiously.

“Bring me a pitcher of water, and I will survive.

Then you must go, but be careful.”

“I will leave by the back gate,”

Zenobia promised.

Tamar nodded wearily.

She suddenly felt very tired, and very, very old.

She would survive, if only to see those who had done this to her, and so wantonly murdered Iris, punished.

She sat in the midday heat after Zenobia left her, watching almost dispassionately as two large horseflies buzzed about Iris’s brutalized body.

Zenobia left the house, going by way of the kitchen garden to the stables where three impatient and cranky camels waited, chewing their cuds.

She felt nothing.

Neither grief, nor anger, nor fear.

She was numb with shock remembering her mother’s pleas for mercy.

Never had Zenobia heard Iris’s voice as it had sounded this day—begging and terrified.

The echo of it still rang in her ears, and she believed it would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Absently, she patted her own camel, an unusually mild-tempered blond beast.

Mounting it, she guided the animal through the back gate of her father’s house, after leaning down to unlatch the lock, and out onto the desert road.

The camel moved swiftly, taking bigger and bigger strides until it seemed to be flying just above the road.

Zenobia sat atop its back and firmly settled into the red leather saddle, her white linen chiton pulled up to leave her golden legs free to manipulate her mount, her agile mind racing.

Why had the men hurt her mother? She did not really understand at all, for she had never known anything but kindness and indulgence from the men in her life.

Her father and all of her older brothers spoiled her terribly, as did their close friends.

She knew that men sometimes beat their wives, for she was not entirely sheltered; but that was within the realm of the respectable.

Everyone said that a woman needed correction occasionally.

Still, she had never seen her father beat his wives, and her mother did not even know the men who had attacked her.

If Iris did not know them then why were they angry with her, and why did they hurt her, kill her? She simply could not understand.

Was brutality then a trait particular to the Romans alone? Was it some peculiar form of madness that afflicted them that made them turn on innocent strangers?

She goaded the camel to greater speed with her little heels, for ahead she could see the dust of her father’s caravan.

Soon she was passing the groups of families who made up their tribe.

All waved and called out to her in greeting as her camel galloped by them.

Their smiles were indulgent, for she was a great favorite with everyone in the tribe, and not simply because she was their leader’s daughter.

Zenobia bat Zabaai had always been a merry, kindly child.

At the head of the group she could see her father, and her eldest brother, Akbar.

She began to wave at them, to call out frantically, her young voice sounding hollow in her ears.

“Hola, little one!”

Akbar called in a teasing voice.

“Want to race that flea-bitten old nag against my champion?”

Then he saw her pinched and pale little face, and turning to his father cried out, “Father, something is wrong!”

The entire caravan was stopped and, dismounting his own camel, Zabaai lifted his young daughter down from hers.

A crowd began to gather about them.

“What is it, my flower?”

the chief of the Bedawi asked.

“Where are your mother and Tamar?”

“The Romans,”

Zenobia began.

“The Romans came, and Mother is dead, and Tamar is grievously hurt!”

“What?! What is it you say, Zenobia? The Romans are our friends.”

“The Romans have killed my mother!”

she screamed at him, her control finally gone, the hot tears beginning to pour in dirty runnels down her small face.

“Tamar hid me beneath the bed.

I could not see them, but I could hear them.

They did something to my mother that made her scream, and cry, and beg them for mercy! I never heard my mother beg! I never heard my mother beg, but they made her beg, and then they killed her! Tamar is so fearfully hurt she cannot even rise from the floor.

You must come home, Father! You must come home!”

Zabaai ben Selim felt his legs go weak beneath him.

He knew what had been done to his wives even if his innocent young daughter did not.

His only question was why? With a howl of outrage, pain, and grief he began to tear at his beard and his clothes.

Then, when the first onslaught of his anguish passed he began to give orders, and the caravan was quickly turned about.

However, Zabaai ben Selim, his elder sons, and his daughter did not wait for the others.

Remounting their camels, they quickly rode back along the desert road to the outskirts of Palmyra, where his house stood in the bright midday sun.

They rode so hard that the following caravan met their dust, which still hovered in the air, turning it yellow in the heat.

Tamar was but half-conscious when they arrived, and now Zenobia finally dared to look upon her mother’s violated body, gasping with horrified shock at what she saw.

Iris’s body was sprawled grotesquely upon the bed, her pale-blue dalmatic and her snowy interior tunic ripped away to expose her lovely breasts, which were bruised and bleeding.

There were great purple blotches on the insides of her milk-white thighs.

Her beautiful sweet face with the gray-blue eyes blackened and tightly shut in death, the tender, red mouth viciously savaged and bitten, was barely recognizable.

Those who had known her would have been horrified to see how battered her beauty was now.

“Mama!”

It was a cry torn from deep within Zenobia.

She stared in sorrow at her mother’s murdered body, unable to fully comprehend, now that she had looked, unwilling to believe that Iris was really dead.

“Take the child out,”

Zabaai commanded tersely to no one in particular.

“She should not have seen this! Take her away!”

“No!”

Zenobia whirled to defy her father, but she was shaking with shock and grief.