Beloved

© 1983

Prologue

The night was black and hot. Not a hint of a breeze stirred the fronds of the tall, stately date palms. The onyx sky was studded diamond-bright with stars, and all was very, very still, as if the earth itself was poised, waiting. On the edge of the great oasis city of Palmyra, the house of the famous Bedawi warrior chief, Zabaai ben Selim, stood alone. Within, a woman labored to bring forth her child.

Her slim white body was tense with the agony of her travail, wet with the perspiration of her effort and the intolerable summer weather. 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.

In her semidelirium she remembered the day she had first seen him. He had been visiting her father's house in Alexandria on business, and had by mistake wandered into the women's garden. Their glances had met, and her lovely gray-blue eyes had widened at his fierce black gaze. Her soft pink lips slightly parted with surprise, and her young breasts, heaving with emotions she had not known existed, aroused him. No word passed between them. He had not even asked her her name. Instead he had found his way out of the garden, sought out her father, and asked for her to wife. 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.

Simon Titus gave his daughter her personal freedom, in the Roman manner. What did she want, he had asked. 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. It mattered not to her that he was twenty-two years her senior or that he had another legal wife and several concubines. It mattered not that any child she gave him would be unimportant in the line of inheritance. Nothing mattered but her love for this marvelous man, and so Simon Titus had reluctantly given his consent.

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. 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.

A terrible pain, far worse than any previous, ripped through her, and she bit down on her lip. It would soon be over, and her child would at last be born. Zabaai's eldest wife, Tamar, told her to bear down, and she did.