“Aiiiiii!” came the collective cry of the other women as the infant began to appear between its mother’s legs. “Push, Iris! Push! Push!” Tamar encouraged her. Zabaai’s eldest wife, Tamar, told her to bear down, and she did. It would soon be over, and her child would at last be born. It was the custom of the Bedawi to spend the broiling summers in Palmyra, and so part of her dowry had been a fine house and gardens on the city’s edge.Ī terrible pain, far worse than any previous, ripped through her, and she bit down on her lip. They had been married within the month and then she had left the elegant comfort of her father’s Alexandrian house to live a life that found her wandering half the year across the Syrian deserts, and living the other half in the beautiful city of Palmyra. Nothing mattered but her love for this marvelous man, and so Simon Titus had reluctantly given his consent. It mattered not that any child she gave him would be unimportant in the line of inheritance. It mattered not to her that he was twenty-two years her senior or that he had another legal wife and several concubines. She had wanted Zabaai ben Selim, that hawk-visaged desert man with his piercing black eyes who in the space of one single moment had captured her soul with his own. Simon Titus gave his daughter her personal freedom, in the Roman manner. It had been a great impertinence on his part, for her father was not only one of the wealthiest men in Alexandria, he was also a direct descendant of Egypt’s last great queen, Cleopatra. Instead he had found his way out of the garden, sought out her father, and asked for her to wife. Her soft pink lips slightly parted with surprise, and her young breasts, heaving with emotions she had not known existed, aroused him. Their glances had met, and her lovely gray-blue eyes had widened at his fierce black gaze. He had been visiting her father’s house in Alexandria on business, and had by mistake wandered into the women’s garden.

In her semidelirium she remembered the day she had first seen him.

She bore her travail grimly, refusing to cry out, for to do so was a weakness of character in her mind, and she had not won Zabaai by weakness. Her slim white body was tense with the agony of her travail, wet with the perspiration of her effort and the intolerable summer weather. Within, a woman labored to bring forth her child. On the edge of the great oasis city of Palmyra, the house of the famous Bedawi warrior chief, Zabaai ben Selim, stood alone. The onyx sky was studded diamond-bright with stars, and all was very, very still, as if the earth itself was poised, waiting. Not a hint of a breeze stirred the fronds of the tall, stately date palms.

Beloved by bertrice small