“There, there; look there, Bath Zabbai!” replied the boy excitedly; “coming through the Damascus arch, and we thought him to be in Emesa.”
The girl’s glance followed his guiding finger, but even as she looked a clear trumpet peal rose above the din of the city, while from beneath a sculptured archway that spanned a colonnaded cross-street the bright April sun gleamed down upon the standard of Rome with its eagle crest and its S. P. Q. R. design beneath. There is a second trumpet peal, and swinging into the great Street of the Thousand Columns, at the head of his light-armed legionaries, rides the centurion Rufinus, lately advanced to the rank of tribune of one of the chief Roman cohorts in Syria. His coming, as Odhainat and even the young Bath Zabbai knew, meant a stricter supervision of the city, a re-enforcement of its garrison, and the assertion of the mastership of Rome over this far eastern province on the Persian frontier.
“But why should the coming of the Roman so trouble you, my Odhainat?” she asked. “We are neither Jew nor Christian that we should fear his wrath, but free Palmyreans who bend the knee neither to Roman nor Persian masters.”
“Who WILL bend the knee no longer, be it never so little, my cousin,” exclaimed the lad hotly, “as this very day would have shown had not this crafty Rufinus—may great Solomon’s genii dash him in the sea!—come with his cohort to mar our measures! Yet see—who cometh now?” he cried; and at once the attention of the young people was turned in the opposite direction as they saw, streaming out of the great fortress-like court-yard of the Temple of the Sun, another hurrying throng.
Then young Odhainat gave a cry of joy.
“See, Bath Zabbai; they come, they come”! he cried. “It is my father, Odhainat the esarkos,(1) with all the leaders and all the bowmen and spearmen of our fahdh armed and in readiness. This day will we fling off the Roman yoke and become the true and unconquered lords of Palmyra. And I, too, Must join them,” he added.
(1) The “head man,” or chief of the “fahdh,” or family.
But the young girl detained him. “Wait, cousin,” she said; “watch and wait. Our fahdh will scarce attempt so brave a deed to-day, with these new Roman soldiers in our gates. That were scarcely wise.”
But the boy broke out again. “So; they have seen each other,” he said; “both sides are pressing on!”
“True; and they will meet under this very portico,” said Bath Zabbai, and moved both by interest and desire this dark-eyed Syrian girl, to whom fear was never known, standing by her cousin’s side, looked down upon the tossing sea of spears and lances and glittering shields and helmets that swayed and surged in the street below.