The Barbarian (The Herod Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  "Cease your squawking," Father snarled.

  Baby James's small face puckered at Father’s harsh comment, and he wailed a complaint. Father's frown soured further.

  "Don't cry, my sunshine," she begged, her jaw and neck rigid from the stark fear gripping her. She patted her son's back and made shushing noises.

  Uncle Jacob and Aunt Sarah shuffled into the room, wiping the sleep from their eyes. Uncle Jacob wrinkled his nose. "What's all this noise about, Brother?"

  Father smoothed his dark blue robe. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you."

  "What's upset you, my dear?" Uncle Jacob asked. He had generously taken them in after Father left Jerusalem for Egypt to escape his enemies. Lydia had no idea what long-term plans Father had made for himself, but she was to become Uncle's second wife. Intermarriage between nieces and uncles, though frowned upon by most, was a common practice among the rulers of Israel. Lydia wouldn't dread the prospect nearly so much if she could keep her baby.

  She knelt at Uncle and Aunt's feet. They were her last hope. "I beg you to convince Father it is unjust to give James to that man's family."

  That man being her captor, Judas the Zealot, the criminal who had attacked Lydia's family while they traveled through Galilee, changing her life forever. Kadar and her brother-in-law Nathan had rescued her and killed the crazed bandit, but the nightmare hadn't ended there. Judas's family had gone to court and laid claim to her darling baby. Father refused to contest the matter.

  Uncle looked dumbfounded. Aunt Sarah's hostile gaze made Lydia shudder. Little James cried louder.

  Lydia grabbed Uncle Jacob's pudgy hand. "I will be a good, dutiful wife and give you many sons. Allow me to keep my baby and I'll never ask for another thing."

  "Oh... I don't think...ah...." Uncle stammered, then turned to Aunt. "The child is rightfully the father's. Don’t you agree, my dear?" In the normal way of things, children belonged to the father. If the man died, the child then belonged to the father's family.

  Lydia shot Aunt a pleading look. "Judas's actions were evil. He and his family have no right to my baby."

  The older woman's eyes locked onto Lydia's hand, still grasping her Uncle's. "The court ruled," Aunt said flatly. "Judas's family prevailed."

  Lydia pulled her hand back and curled her arms around James. "A baby needs its mother. Please tell them it's wrong to take my baby, Aunt. They'll listen to you." Aunt was the mother of eight. Surely her sympathies would rest with the child and what was best for him.

  Aunt frowned. "Your father told us you agreed to marry Judas."

  Lydia's heart sickened.

  Father looked down his pious nose. "Did I speak the truth, Daughter?"

  Lydia squeezed her eyes closed. "Yes, but—" Once again she searched for a way to excuse and explain what had happened during those confusing months of captivity. Lydia's throat constricted. "That crazed bandit would have forced marriage on me whether I agreed to it or not."

  Though true, it didn't ease her guilt. At first she had been terribly frightened of the zealots, especially of the man who led them. But Judas had another side. He had a way with words. His fiery preaching and scripture-laced speeches had enthralled her as much as it had his men. Judas's band of followers loved him. After he was finished speaking, they would sit around the fire for hours eating, talking, and laughing. The small caves of Upper Galilee soon became Lydia's only reality. Though forced to marry Judas, she soon did the unthinkable — she came to think of him as a true husband.

  The rustle of her father's robe drew near. "Did you practice your flirtatiousness on Judas the Zealot?"

  Lydia gasped.

  "You always were too rambunctious," Aunt accused.

  "Rambunctious?" Lydia could hear her rising hysteria, but was helpless to stop it. "I love to smile and laugh. How can that be wrong?"

  Father's lips pursed. "You draw undue attention to yourself, carrying on so."

  "I will be more demure," Lydia promised frantically.

  Uncle Jacob patted her shoulder. "Lydia is lively, but she means well. Our girls adore her. They love the new games she's taught them."

  Aunt Sarah's face tightened, accentuating the weary lines on her forty-year-old face.

  Lydia's compassion for Aunt grew every day. It must be terrible to suddenly find yourself competing against a much younger woman for your husband's affections. The dear woman had nothing to fear. Uncle was quite besotted with his wife. The couple couldn't be more in love, even after so many years. The problem was, fifty-one year old Jacob needed a male heir. After the birth of their eighth daughter, they decided it was time for new measures. And so Lydia was to marry her uncle in two days' time and provide him with a houseful of sons.

  She hated the pain and trouble it would cause. Like a cloud of locusts settling over a fruited field, her entrance into the marriage would chew away at her aunt’s and uncle's joy, and likely turn their love into a hollowed-out husk of what it had been. The destruction had already begun.

  Lydia grasped Aunt's hand. "Allow me to keep my baby and I will stay in my room. You will never have to look upon my face."

  "Hand the bastard child over," Father snapped.

  Lydia wrapped her body, cocoon-like, around James. "Please, don't take him," she begged.

  The pockmarked Egyptian pinned her elbows. "Give me the urchin."

  She hugged James to her chest and pressed her lips to his tiny, soft cheek. "We have no one to protect us. No one to save us." Her thoughts went to Kadar. She ached for him, and hated that a brave, beautiful man would die because of her.

  Brynhild spoke in her ear. "You're hurting the baby."

  Lydia became aware of James's muffled cries. She gasped and loosened her hold. Her babe was taken from her arms. Her vision blurred. Loud roaring filled her ears. She glimpsed a flash of blue robes and a white bundle disappearing through the door.

  She moaned and buried her face against her knees. Anguished sobs shook her. Grief and blackness consumed all.

  CHAPTER 3

  The hired guards pushed and dragged Kadar out of the villa. He glanced up at the canopy of stars overhead. Give me strength, mighty Thor. Allow me to die with honor. Help me take these fiends to the grave with me. And may they suffer in the Underworld.

  They passed the ladder propped against Lydia's window, now guarded by two men. The sound of inconsolable weeping spilled out. Her heartbreak cut him to the quick. He'd failed her. It made his imminent death all the more bitter.

  A loud shriek came from close by. The men hoisted their swords. Foul oaths filled the air.

  The tiger cat sprang from the shadows, bared small, sharp teeth, and hissed and spit.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, Kadar kicked the closest guard. The man’s leg broke with a satisfying crack, and he screamed and hit the ground. Amid the surprised shouts, Kadar turned sideways, lifted his leg high, and hammered the sole of his sandal into a face. Blood spurted from a broken nose. He roared triumphant. Regaining his balance, he shoved his shoulder into the next body in his path, then rammed his head into an exposed gut.

  A teeth-rattling blow to the skull knocked him to his knees. Staggering like a drunk, he climbed back to his feet. Swords poked into him from all sides. He sucked air into his starved lungs.

  The bald eunuch slave named Goda studied Kadar with a dark scowl. "Cease fighting or I will order these men to put you on the ground and cut off your pillar and stones."

  Kadar winced. The threat had extra force coming from a eunuch, a man who probably cherished the idea of having others join him in the unhappy ranks of the castrated. Kadar willed his muscles to relax and forced a smile to his face. "You know how to take the fight out of a man. I'll grant you that, eunuch."

  The man's hairless forehead wrinkled. "We'll see who will be laughing when this is over."

  "I will, eunuch. Because you never smile."

  The bald slave ignored the goad and trudged on. Kadar flexed his wrists, measuring the length of the fetters. He'd
make his next move at the river's edge.

  They reached the end of the lane. The eunuch turned left.

  "The Nile is the other way, fool," Kadar said, just to be a jackass.

  The eunuch stopped abruptly and turned to him. He narrowed his eyes at Kadar. "I have my own plans for you."

  "Plans?" Images of gory tortures and degrading punishments flashed through Kadar's mind.

  "It would be a waste to kill you." The eunuch gave Kadar a measuring look. "An oversized barbarian like you will draw a hefty sum on the slave market."

  Slave. Kadar's blood ran cold. He'd rather die. "If it's money you want, I can get it to you. But I—"

  "Save your breath," the eunuch said. "I have someone who will give me a good price now, and who is leaving Alexandria at first light. Simeon Onias will never know you didn’t die. And these guards and I will share a generous reward. It gives me great pleasure to imagine you sweating your last drops in an Egyptian copper mine."

  Kadar's temples throbbed like Thor's hammer. A slave. He was going to be a slave. He searched for some argument to save him from the humiliating fate.

  "What? No clever insults now?" the eunuch gloated.

  Kadar wanted to wring the man's scrawny neck. "Kill me and dump me in the river, as you were ordered, or I swear by the gods, I will come for you and I choke the life out of your miserable body."

  The bald man laughed. Kadar roared and lunged for the chortling fool. The eunuch backpedaled, tripped, and fell. Kadar bent over the cowering man and grabbed a fistful of rumpled tunic.

  A solid object struck the back of his head and the world went black.

  ***

  Western Sinai - Six Months Later

  Kadar took another step. The fine desert sands shifted underfoot, swallowing his sandal. The yellow glare of the sun burned cruelly on his bare head. He licked his parched lips and peered into the distance. Glaring white sand stretched endlessly. He'd heard tales of snow blindness. Maybe he was suffering from a desert version.

  A chill went through him. A chill? His brain was cooked, yet his skin felt cold and clammy. You didn't have to be a physician to know it was a bad sign. He lifted the clay water jar over his mouth and shook it. Nothing. Not a single drop.

  The donkey caravan he was trying to catch up to had left the copper mine a half day ahead of him. Though the likelihood of him catching up was low, he'd hoped to come across other travelers going either east or west—it didn't matter, so long as he escaped from Sabu Nakht's cruelty.

  Kadar reached for the black leather cord hanging around his neck, pulled his silver, hammer-shaped amulet from beneath his tunic, and ran his thumb over the embossed image of Thor. A gift from his father. He longed to experience the cold chill of a crisp autumn morning, to gaze upon vast fields of unbroken snow, and to lift his voice in a battle cry with his fellow Northmen.

  He'd know the gods had truly abandoned him if he was forced to breathe his last in this abominable wasteland.

  A shimmery outline wavered in the distance, then took form, revealing a line of camels. He tucked away the amulet, crouched down on his haunches, and shaded his head with the empty clay jar. The camels loped closer. Yellow tassels decorated the blue blankets covering the beasts' backs.

  Kadar pounded his thigh. "Thundering Thor!" Sabu Nakht had tracked him down. For the third time. Kadar's knotted calf muscles complained as he pushed to his feet.

  The camel drivers dragged their beasts to a halt, boxing Kadar in. Dust swirled up around them. Sour camel's breath spilled over his face, adding to his nausea.

  "I told you I'd make you pay if you tried to run away again," Sabu Nakht growled, sliding off his saddle.

  Kadar shrugged, pretending indifference. "Do what you have to."

  The steward's black, oiled hair clung to his shoulders, leaving mottled stains on his brown, striped tunic. "The champion Persian warrior will be here in three weeks."

  Not another fight. Kadar assumed fate had thrown her worst at him when he'd been sold into slavery, but no, the degradation hadn't stopped there. Kadar was Nakht's prize rooster in the overseer's godless cockfights, dueling other slaves in battles to the death, so Sabu Nakht could have the pleasure of betting and boasting against equally bloody-minded men.

  Nakht wagged his finger at Kadar. "How am I supposed to punish you and still leave you fit to fight?"

  Egyptians were a damnably strange lot. The man’s red-painted fingernails made it hard to take him seriously. Kadar rubbed his throbbing head. "I'm sure your fiendish mind will come up with some foul new evil."

  Nakht smiled.

  Kadar glared back. "Do me a favor and just kill me."

  The Egyptian sighed loudly. "Why do you bother to escape? I don't understand you. I give you beautiful women. You turn your nose up at them. I give you a room in my home. You refuse to use it. I offer you a life of leisure. You insist on working in the mines. What more do you want?"

  "I want you dead." Kadar would eat dog testicles before he accepted anything from the hand of the man who owned him. Owned him. Curse him.

  "You've just earned yourself a few more days in the pit. You should have kept your mouth shut."

  The pit. Kadar shuddered, and it wasn't because he'd been out in the sun too long. "The pit makes better company than you."

  Nakht clutched the cord attached to Kadar's amulet and yanked it free. "Let's see what you are willing to do to get your prize amulet back."

  Hate consumed what remained of Kadar's heart. "I will kill you before I crawl on my knees to you for anything!"

  It was good Kadar didn't know then it would take him six long years to make good on his oath.

  CHAPTER 4

  Alexandria, Egypt - Six Years Later

  The end of another Shabbat neared. Dread curled through Lydia. She sat on a low couch to the left of her uncle. Aunt Sarah sat to Uncle's right. Brynhild, the pear-shaped slave woman, cleared away the last of the dinner dishes.

  Excited chatter from Lydia's five youngest cousins echoed off the brightly painted walls of the dining hall in the heart of the villa. Wearing matching white tunics, and perched atop plump, pomegranate-colored pillows, the girls all had straight black hair and shining black eyes.

  "Tell us another story, Lydia," her youngest cousin begged. The others clapped and echoed her demand for a new story.

  Desperate to delay what couldn't be escaped, Lydia readily agreed. "I had a strange dream. Would you like to hear it?"

  Five glossy heads bobbed.

  Lydia pulled her shawl tighter and closed her eyes. "The dream began in Jerusalem. People were rushing through the streets, very afraid. My father, brother, and sister were with me. We were running. But I didn't know who or what we were trying to escape. I kept looking back, straining to see the evil, and I fell. My family disappeared, and I was frightened and alone. Then the dream shifted to a vast wheat field. I saw a man standing amid the waving stalks, his golden hair and white robes swirling about him. He shone so brightly I had to shade my eyes.

  "Was he an angel?" one of the girls asked.

  "Maybe he was an archangel," the youngest suggested.

  "Did he give you his name?" another asked.

  The vivid image...vision...dream—Lydia wasn't sure what to call it—replayed through her mind. A golden giant armed with a fiery sword stood guard over her precious baby, who was sleeping peacefully on a bed of blankets amid the vast wheat field.

  She didn't mention the part about baby James. The family never spoke of him. She suspected they'd forgotten her sweet boy even existed. No matter. She remembered and prayed for him every morning upon waking and each evening before going to sleep. Her sister Alexandra was neighbors with little James's grandmother. Alexandra sent letters regularly describing Lydia’s precious boy in great detail. He'd recently lost his first tooth. But in Lydia's dreams, he was always an infant.

  She swallowed back the ache thickening her throat. "The man didn't speak to me." He didn't need to. She recognized him. He
wasn't a spirit or an angel. He was the long-dead, blond-haired, blue-eyed barbarian Kadar. She tried not to think about him, since it always made her sad. But the memory of him persisted. Last night he'd come to her in a dream. What could it mean?

  She sighed too loudly.

  Uncle patted her hand. "You girls have tired our dear Lydia enough for one day." He turned toward Aunt. "You won't mind if we say goodnight now, will you, my dear?"

  Aunt's smile was so brittle, Lydia was surprised it didn’t shatter. "Of course not."

  Uncle Jacob heaved his heavy body off the couch. He held out his hand to Lydia. "Come, my dear wife."

  Wife. Her stomach lurched. Though they'd enacted this cruel scene every week for the last six years, she hadn't learned to stop hating it. At the close of every Shabbat her uncle called her "wife" and took her to bed. The rest of the time he addressed her as Lydia and slept with Aunt Sarah.

  Lydia forced her hand up. Uncle clasped it and, as always, he winked at Aunt Sarah and Lydia. "Perhaps our prayers will be heard tonight. Perhaps the Lord will finally bless us with a son."

  Aunt Sarah's eyes caught Lydia's and held. Resentment used to shine in the older woman's face, growing more and more intense as months passed into years and Lydia did not conceive a child. But a new emotion flickered across Aunt's countenance tonight. Pity. Aunt Sarah felt sorry for her. Lydia wanted to weep.

  Uncle Jacob led her out of the dining alcove and steered her down the long, wide corridor. Doughy fingers stroked over her hand. "You seem out of spirits, my dear."

  "I'm not feeling well."

  "I'll be quick tonight. I promise."

  "Thank you, Uncle."

  He chuckled. "You are supposed to call me Jacob or Husband. Remember?"

  "Aunt doesn't like me to."

  Uncle sighed and slowed. A sheepish look crossed his face. "Promise me you will never tell your aunt how much I enjoy lying with you. It would hurt her."

  Sadness scraped at her bones. "You have nothing to fear. I would never purposely hurt you or Aunt." She tried to pull her hand free. "I don't think I am ever going to give you a son. You should divorce me and remarry." She held her breath.