The ghutrah he had offered to keep her warm.
She had been so shocked by the gesture that she had not even been able to properly decline it. What prisoner offered to aid his own interrogator? Even more startling had been their reaction to the gesture: they had laughed together like thieves.
Laughter? It was another strangeness. She had hardly recognised her own voice. How many years had it been since she had laughed? Ten? Fifteen? Back before her mother had died and delight had still seemed possible.
Now, at the advanced age of thirty, Atia had learned to view delight as suspect. Obviously the camel man had been trying to endear himself to her—to trick her into trusting him.
Still, something in the way his dark, sun-flecked eyes had smiled down at her had made him seem sincere. Even now, as she thought back upon those eyes, it was as if they were warming her very thoughts.
She knew that warmth could not be trusted. And when he had called her beautiful? That had been a trick as well: a sly attempt at flattery designed to gain her sympathy.
Because beautiful she was not—not with the terrible protrusion occupying the middle of her face. Well dressed, yes. Properly coiffed and painted, certainly. Rich. Powerful. Connected. She was the daughter of a Roman Governor, by the gods—one of Emperor Hadrian’s most trusted men. But beautiful? It was a gift that Venus had declined to grant.
Still, there had been something resembling sincerity in the way the man had spoken the compliment. You approach my cell all alone, a beautiful woman without any protection... It was as if he were not talking about her, but some fantasy version of herself—a bold, attractive woman who explained herself to no one. It amused her to think of herself in such a way.
Then there had been the strangeness of his expression after he had spoken the compliment. The tight lips and pulsing jaw. The eyes narrowed dangerously in something resembling hunger. It was quite possibly the best imitation of desire she had ever seen.
Of course, what he really desired was to be released from his prison, just as all prisoners did. Still, he had spoken the words—a beautiful woman—and, however false, they had had the effect of buoying her spirit, such that she had caught herself smiling all afternoon and, apparently, stopping to smell roses.
‘Come forward,’ called her father from inside his office. Atia returned the rose to its vase and entered her father’s sparsely decorated tablinium, pausing before his sprawling ebony desk.
He appeared to be reviewing some official scroll. Beside him, a stony-faced scribe stood sentinel, his eyes flitting across the parchment in time with her father’s.
‘Sit down, Atia,’ he commanded without looking up. As she made her way to one of her father’s client chairs, she caught the gaze of her father’s first officer, Plotius, standing in a corner just behind the desk. The fleshy, thick-muscled military man took his time assessing Atia’s figure and Atia wasted none in volleying him a sneer. He replied with a just you wait look.
Seating herself, Atia nodded her gratitude at a boy operating a palm leaf in another corner of the room, though its small wind did little to alleviate the midday heat. It was August, after all—the sweltering month—and even the cool marble and high ceilings of her father’s villa were futile against the Arabian sun.
Trying to resist the heat was useless. In that way, it was much like her father himself.
‘You are looking well, Daughter,’ said her father, finally glancing up from his scroll. ‘Unusually so.’
Atia thought of the camel man and felt a small trickle of sweat trace a path down her cheek. ‘I should say the same, Father,’ she said. She glanced beneath the desk at his bandaged leg. ‘Only two days after your injury and you are already at work.’
‘The business of Empire waits for no man,’ he said. It was Emperor Hadrian’s favourite aphorism and her father recited it like a prayer.
‘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