Free The Queen's Handmaid by Tracy L. Higley

kingship, so there is civil war in Judea. Herod fled Jerusalem under attack by Antigonus. He hopes to bring back troops from Rome to establish his family’s rule.”
    So, Jewish Antigonus and the Parthians against the Roman-backed Herod. Surely there was much more to all of it, but at least she understood why they undertook this trip to Rome.
    As if an omen, lightning streaked across the horizon, piercing the sea like a spear thrown from heaven. A heavy crack of thunder snapped on its heels.
    David eyed the swirling clouds. “We’d better go below.”
    Lydia nodded in relief.
    The other twenty or so who traveled with Herod were scattered across the large bowel of the ship, some seated on benches, others with their backs against the inner hull. Herod himself reclined on a low couch, attended by the same girl, Riva, who had been beside him in Cleopatra’s courtyard—a sharp-featured beauty a few years older than Lydia who followed Lydia’s entrance with David with narrowed eyes and tight lips.
    Over the course of the long day, David tried to distract her from her nausea with tales of each of their shipmates—some slaves, some servants, and several advisers. But the variable swells and valleys that rocked the ship united them all—tetrarch and slave alike bent over pots to empty their bellies.
    The day wore on, with the stench of salt and seawater, vomit and smoking oil, building in the hold. Waves crashed against the hull, and those below edged inward, as if the center were safe. In the oily torchlight, sweat-sheened faces, tinged green, shone in a ring of fear.
    Two days later no one had eaten. Sailors cursed and screamed above deck. Servants cried and Herod whined. They lay half prostrate in a heap, often thrown against each other intimately. Lydia’s clammy skin crawled at the human touch and she tasted nothing but salt.
    They would not reach Rome. Not in this weather. Already word had leaked downward from the crew that they had been blown off course in an easterly direction and now hoped only tofind land somewhere before the ship was torn to pieces. Cargo was jettisoned, two sailors were swept off the deck by waves, and all but one of the torches in the hold were extinguished.
    Herod’s favorite servant girl, Riva, mopped his sweaty brow, but she looked as though she would soon be unconscious.
    In the belly of the ship, Lydia lost her sense of time and place, tumbled backward into the black memory that always sucked away breath and hope, the cold and slimy pressure of river water wrapped around her little-girl body. She tore herself from the memory, back to the present, but it offered little hope.
    She sat upon the sack that contained Samuel’s precious scrolls, but what good would it do anyone at the bottom of the sea? She would fail in the last task he had given, the only way that remained to honor his memory, to deliver these scrolls. Lydia owed him that much and more, and yet she would fail.
    On the fourth day out from Alexandria, David began to sing.
    It was a quiet, mournful tune in the language of his people. Lydia clung to the sweet, high voice and the words she did not understand, as if they were an anchor. She curled into a ball on the sticky floor, her possessions tucked against her belly, closed her eyes to all but the sound of his voice, and wished for death.
    On the fifth day, they made landfall.
    Herod’s entourage stumbled onto the deck and then to the dock—blinking in the light, filthy and stinking, clutching at rails, at ropes, at each other.
    The island of Rhodes. A long way from Rome but solid ground.
    The boat-strewn port hugged the edge of a jewel-like sea—sapphire and turquoise and diamond. The famed colossal bronze statue lay fallow beside the harbor, broken at the knees for nearlytwo hundred years, a greenish shadow against the white stones of the harbor streets.
    The ship had limped into port, wind-torn and leaking. It would not put out again anytime soon. Herod was once again a