"And scorn it for thyself?"
Aquila made no answer, but rode on in sulky silence.
"Perpol, it must be pleasant to be a queen," the woman observed with
an assumption of childishness in her voice.
"Peril's own habit!" Aquila declared.
"Peril! Fie! That is half the pleasure of this game of life. It is
tiresome to live any other way than hazardously."
"Thou shalt have pleasure enough in this journey thou art to take,"
Aquila declared a little threateningly.
The woman laughed. When Aquila spoke again, his voice was full of
concern.
"I was a fool for not forcing you to stay in Ascalon. You are
reckless--reckless!"
"It was that which made me attractive," the woman broke in, "to Nero,
to Vitellius and to you."
"Reckless and useless!" Aquila went on decisively. "Hear me, now; I
trifle no longer. Sometime to-night thou'lt leave us and journey to
Emmaus and inform Julian what has wrecked his plans, and send him with
despatch to Zorah. This thou wilt do, by all the Furies, or when I do
catch thee as I shall, since there is no other fool in Judea who will
undertake to feed thee, I shall leave the print of my displeasure on
thee from thy head to thy heel! Mark me!"
The woman laughed aloud, with such peculiar insolence and amusement
that one of the servants heard her and turned his head that way.
"Pah! What a timid villain thou art," the woman said, when the servant
looked away again. "How much better it would have been had Julian
fixed upon me as his confederate!"
"Not for Julian! You plot against him even now. But say what you will,
you go to Emmaus to-night, without fail. I have spoken!"
Aquila touched his horse and riding away from the woman came up beside
Costobarus who was gazing over the country through which they were
passing.
It was a great plain, advancing by benches and slopes to the edge of a
rocky shore. Without forests, spotted only with verdure, vast, barren,
exhausted with the constant production of fourteen centuries, it was a
cheerless sea-front at its best. To the west the wash of the tideless
Mediterranean tumbled along an unindented coast; to the east the
sallow stony earth went up and up, toward an ever receding sallow
horizon. Between lay humbled towns, wholly abandoned to the bats and
to the ignoble wild life of the Judean wilderness. There were no sheep
or cattle. Vespasian had passed that way and required the flocks of
the nation for the subsistence of his four legions. There were no
olive or fig groves. They had been the first to fall under the Roman
ax, for the policy of Roman warfare was that the first step in
subduing a rebellious province was to starve it. The vineyards had
suffered the same end. The enriched soil of these inclosures, made one
now with the wild at the leveling of their hedges, produced acres of
profitless weeds, green against the rising brown bosom of the
hill-fronts. Here and there were the fallen walls of isolated
homes--wastes of masonry already losing all domestic signs. There were
no gardens; it had been two seasons since the wheat and the barley had
been reaped last, and the seaboard of southern Judea, in the path of
Rome the destroyer, was a wilderness.