Healer of Carthage: A Novel (The Carthage Chronicles, Band 1) - Softcover

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Lynne Gentry has written for numerous publications. She is a professional acting coach, theater director, and playwright. Lynne is an inspirational speaker and dramatic performer who loves spending time with her family and medical therapy dog.

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Healer of Carthage

4

Carthage

LISBETH AWOKE DESPERATE FOR breath, gasping and sputtering as if she’d been submerged in water for a week. Her attempt to sit up sent jolts of pain through her branded palm. How long had she been out? She remembered falling through the cave floor, but how did she end up face-planted against cold stones that reeked of urine? Had bandits raided their camp? Knocked her unconscious?

Red sandals adorned with an ivory crescent on the strap stepped into her line of sight. “This one, Felicissimus? Or the one on the wall?”

From the nasal tenor of the voice she could tell the speaker was male, but the pounding in her temporal lobes garbled his dialect. What did it matter if he was Libyan, Egyptian, or Tunisian? She wasn’t alone. Help had come.

Lisbeth tried to lift her head.

A foot from behind came down hard upon her cheek. “And where do you think you’re going, whore?” The man towering over her spoke the same language she’d just heard. Her mind sorted through her repertoire of languages and landed on a form of Latin, words similar to the ones Aisa used to curse Nigel.

Lisbeth writhed beneath the pressure. Every bone in her body hurt. Bile burned the back of her throat. The foul taste of regurgitated lamb tortillas mingled with the metallic tang of blood in her mouth.

She freed an arm, made a fist, and hammered the foot grinding into her cheek.

Greater force from the shoe sole threatened to snap her jaw. “Bind this tiger.” Someone grabbed Lisbeth’s free wrist and held it while they yanked her other arm out from under her aching body. Before she could react, her hands were bound together. None of this made any sense.

“You’re gonna regret hurting me,” she ground out.

“I believe you’ve found a spirited one, Felicissimus.” Male. Condescending. Definitely speaking a more refined form of Aisa’s Latin. Maybe he would help, but then again, she couldn’t tell what was real or what was a head-trauma imagining.

“Make them let me go,” she pleaded between pressed lips.

“Inflict any more damage, and I won’t pay you a copper, old boy.” The cultured voice demanded respect. The foot was promptly removed.

Someone suddenly jerked Lisbeth to her feet and crushed her hands while cutting the bindings from her wrists. Freedom. Except for being held in place. That’s when she noticed the tall guy next to her. He had a shaved head and wore only a towel wrapped around his waist. She wondered what Craig would think of some half-naked guy manhandling her. Her fiancé was not nearly as sculpted as this brute, but he was wiry and fast. Craig could at least get in a couple of good punches if he were here. Wherever here was. Probably some godforsaken hole across the Egyptian border.

“Craig?” Lisbeth swayed, her balance as questionable as those dizzy homeless drunks who frequented the ER. “Papa?”

People she did not recognize spun in her blurry vision. A naked boy she guessed to be no older than ten. Two glassy-eyed women stripped to the waist. And three people dressed like toga-clad statues in Italian fountains.

“Where’s Papa?” Lisbeth dug her nails into the arm of the tall guy with an iron grip. “What have you done with my father?”

A barrel-shaped man wearing a white, king-size sheet trimmed with a crimson braid lifted her chin. “Wherever did you find this little Thracian, Felicissimus?” Bulging black eyes and a dough-ball face indicated the possibility that this guy had a thyroid problem. Jewels dripped from his thick neck. Fishy halitosis, symptomatic of chronic kidney failure, soured his breath. Definitely a cut above the TV rebels that tossed homemade grenades on the streets of Libya. “One of the best properties you’ve brought me in years.” He spun a wicked glance in the direction of a matronly woman draped in emerald silk and wearing a thin veil across the bottom half of her face.

“Think,” Lisbeth muttered to herself. “What happened? Am I dreaming?” She concentrated on regaining her focus. She surveyed the dank cell again. Her breath caught. How had she missed the chains that attached the wrists of the little boy and the half-naked women to the wall? “Wait until my father finds out you’ve taken me captive!”

Felicissimus, a slimeball with a dribble trail down the front of his dingy yellow dress, continued his conversation with the fishy dough-ball guy. Neither one of them seemed to understand English. Either that or neither was the least bit concerned about the accusations she yelled at the top of her lungs.

“I knew you’d like her, Aspasius. But if I can guarantee the quality of the treasure, does it really matter where I acquired it? Such a rare beauty was meant to grace the proconsul’s palace, would you not agree?”

The richly dressed guy in the sheet limped forward and grabbed Lisbeth’s chin. His fingers squeezed off her string of curses. While his globe-shaped eyes raked her body, he yanked her face from side to side. “Good teeth. Passable complexion.” His smile, more a pleased smirk, sent a jolt of alarm through Lisbeth’s tense body. “She is not to be exhibited in the common slave market.”

“Slave?” Lisbeth jerked her chin free and kicked him in the shins. “I’m not for sale, you sorry son of a—”

“Owww.” Aspasius grabbed his injury. “You little vixen.”

“Shall I have Metellus use the whip on her, proconsul?” Felicissimus nodded to the guy in the towel. In a flash, Metellus’s thick arm coiled around Lisbeth’s neck. “Or I have the iron hot if you want her ear pierced to break her spirit a bit.”

Lisbeth wrenched against the pressure closing off her air supply.

Aspasius held up his hand, his pointy-tooth grimace transforming his face into an angry weasel. “No additional marks. I want nothing to mar her beauty.” He leaned in close, his breath a nauseating combination of sardines and some sort of gastrological problem that made Lisbeth gag. “If you can give me some kind of assurance that she can learn the language of the empire well enough to at least follow commands, we have a deal.”

With any luck, the visual daggers she hurled in the dough ball’s direction would prick his pompous head and let the air out of those oversize jowls. Summoning her linguistic command, Lisbeth spat out, “I not only speak your foul tongue; I read it and write it.”

The room went silent.

“Beautiful and smart.” Aspasius stroked her hair with the back of his hand. He dragged his large signet ring across her face. “Intoxicating.”

The matronly brunette stepped forward. “Do we really need another slave?” Although the woman spoke to the proconsul, her kohl-rimmed eyes drilled holes into Lisbeth.

Aspasius turned and backhanded the woman, nearly knocking her out of her pearl-crusted sandals. “If you will not serve me, I’ll buy one who will.”

“Hey!” Lisbeth lunged. “What do you think you’re doing?” A strong arm reeled her in. “Leave her alone, you barbarian.”

The rigid woman righted herself without so much as a rub to the welt his ring had left upon her cheek. “May she bring down...