Agrippa's Daughter (25 page)

“Give him the dowry!” cried the Cohen or priest, who stood by in the name of his line.

“Thou takest what is best his, the doe of his flock, the virgin ewe, the unopened passage, the sweetness of the crotch, the host for thy manhood, the host for the parts where the covenant is reckoned.”

This section was in Hebrew, and Berenice began to fidget with irritation and impatience. Why all this nonsense about virginity? They were no longer in the desert, and neither was one old, grizzled, dirty sheik trading wives and dowries with another. She was hot. She wanted it over with.

“My dowry is little,” Shimeon said.

“Mine is in fullness,” said Agrippa.

Then Agrippa knelt and put his name on the contract, which was stretched out on the floor, a long scroll of parchment covered with archaic Hebrew. Then the patriarch knelt and put his name to it. It was rolled up. Berenice was escorted out to the bath, where she would be washed again, and Shimeon held out a great silver goblet for the wine to be poured. The goblet was passed around, and each man present drank from it, the women having gone away with Berenice to the bath. The old patriarch wept in joy, and he went to Agrippa and kissed him upon the mouth.

“Be blessed in your stewardship, my son,” he said. “Israel has a king both good and gentle, and my house is blessed with such a queen as we have not known since the days of Esther.”

Then lamps were lit on the tables under the terebinth tree, and the feasting began. Berenice watched from the window of the bride’s room—where she waited for Shimeon Bengamaliel, her husband.

Berenice had not been to Jerusalem since the death of her father, seven years before; and this time it was not to go into the city and focus upon herself the attention and delay and gossip consequent to her recent marriage, but only because the city lay on the road from Tiberias to Ezion Geber. She had been to Jerusalem as a child, and Shimeon had been there many times; and Shimeon could comprehend why she liked it so little. Jerusalem was a cold city. Unlike Tiberias or Caesarea, it had no parks, no groves of trees, no places where travelers could sit in the shade of growing things, no fountains, no gardens with shrubs and sculpture. It was a city of brick and stone, of flat slab and cobbled pavement. The great houses of the city sheltered themselves behind blank walls; they hid their warmth behind expressionless faces; they were defenses against hate and bloodletting, even as the city was in itself a series of defenses—perhaps the mightiest combination of natural and man-made defenses in all the ancient world, tier upon tier of wall and fortress mounting up to the height where the Temple itself stood, a tall, hard-edged building, whose sheer walls elicited awe rather than admiration.

Approaching the city from the west, so that they might go around it to the southern suburb where their destination, the House of Hakedron, stood, Berenice and Shimeon passed through the Valley of Hinnom. In other cities forms of garbage collection and disposal had been set up by Berenice’s father, Agrippa I, but such was the enormous size of Jerusalem and so quick its rate of growth and expansion and so violently independent its groupings, tribes, classes, and priestly sects, that no successful means of garbage disposal had ever been inaugurated. Instead, filth, refuse, and garbage were dumped into the Valley of Hinnom. Each day, thousands of animals and birds were brought to the Temple by pious Jews and offered to the priests for sacrifice. The animals were slaughtered and gutted, and there flowed from the Temple to the Valley of Hinnom an unending stream of baskets filled with the entrails of these offerings. The meat was sold by the priests—and eaten by them too—but when one or another of twenty-one ancient totemic taboos appeared in the entrails, the meat was discarded, as were the haunches of certain animals, the heads and feet of the birds, the feet of the animals with cloven hoofs, and the skins of those animals sold as meat without offering. All of this was dumped in Hinnom, as was the garbage of the city, the dead and unclean animals of the city, the night soil of much of the poorer population, and all too frequently the body of some poor devil dead of violence or disease and too forgotten or poor to have anyone who would purchase burial.

The road through this valley to the south suburb cut a considerable distance off the journey, and Berenice and Shimeon decided to go this way in spite of the horror of the place, which was frequently called Gehenna—so that they might reach shelter before sundown. Berenice, Shimeon, the huge Adam Benur, who accompanied them as armor-bearer and servant, and Gabo—all covered mouths and noses with cloths saturated in perfume; but smell was only part of this place. There were human creatures prowling in the mounds of flesh and garbage, wild dogs and jackals, hundreds of black vultures—and robbers and killers, the cast-out and excommunicated of the city. Mostly, as a result of the prevailing wind, the frightful odor was not smelled in Jerusalem; but there were times when the wind changed and covered the city with a hot effusion of horror. Now, for half an hour, Berenice and her party rode through this horror, and the only word spoken was by Shimeon, who said in a sort of desperation,

“Still, this high place above us is holy.”

They rode quickly there, and soon they had turned to the south of the city, where the air became sweet and the city hung in the last golden sunlight like an unreal thing, like a dream. The House of Hakedron, where they would stay the night, had its gate open, awaiting them, and they turned into the courtyard weary and relieved. Slaves, alert and waiting for them, seized their horses, helped them to dismount, and brought them foaming goblets of icy-cold wine and water—and beyond the slaves, at the door to the house itself, their hosts waited.

The head of the house was a strange and very old man, who called himself Ba’as Hacohen. He was enormously rich and powerful—as he would perforce have to be to maintain his great residence outside of and unprotected by the walls of Jerusalem—in a land where every kind of bandit and thief abounded—Jebusites, the decadent remnants of the ancients who had once occupied the city; Zealots, bitter, resentful as they hunted Romans and Egyptians; and the dreaded and terrible Sicarii, a murder-sect of the Zealots whom even the Zealots feared, conscienceless men who were professional assassins, who solved all problems with murder, and who, armed with Roman short-swords that they concealed under their dirty jackets, struck swiftly and silently. Along with these, the Edomites, Arab half-Jews, bitter and dispossessed, who would periodically raid out of the badlands to the south. No, life to the south of Jerusalem was not relished by ordinary people, but Ba’as Hacohen was far from ordinary.

For one thing, it was said that he was well over a hundred years old; and this was something that Berenice could believe, seeing the incredible network of wrinkles that covered his face, his skin like dried and ancient parchment; and to lend proof to his claim, there were four generations of his descendants waiting with him to greet the travelers. A thousand legends were told about this man, the Ba’as Adon, that he had once been high priest in the Temple, that he had been a captain of captains under Herod the Great, that once, dying, they brought him to Hillel the Good, who made a strange pact with the prophet Elijah, that the Ba’as Hacohen would live a year of atonement for every wrong he had done—but this of course was nonsense, legends, old wives’ tales. He was a great priestly prince, the Ba’as Adon, with much wealth in gold and silver and diamonds. The tale was told that he had ransacked the temple treasury once, carrying away his vast wealth under the wing and protection of Herod, or perhaps under Herod’s father, Antipater, which would have made him well over a hundred years; but the plain truth was that he had once held leases to copper mines near Elat and a monopoly of the tin trade with the Tyreans, who brought the tin from Cornwall in far-away Britain, and that shrewdly conducting this and other trade, he had piled up wealth in good measure. At one point in his life, while the Sage Hillel still lived, the Ba’as Adon had been converted to support of the House of Hillel, and in this he had never wavered. Now he received the grandson of his beloved teacher and rabbi as a guest in his house for the first time—and no effort was spared to make the occasion memorable.

A table was set to awe even Berenice. There were singers from Crete, dancers from the Ganges River, and a clever juggler from Alexandria. Over eighty men and women sat to table, for in the manner of the Hillelites, the sexes were mixed—and in the same manner, there was neither drunkenness nor overeating. The old man, sitting beside Berenice, wiped his eyes with his napkin, tried to control his emotion, and told her what it meant to his old heart to see the two houses of Herod and Hillel finally united.

“You have heard that I was high priest, my child—so it was, so it was, long, long ago and almost at the beginning of time, when Herod your great-grandfather was king over Israel—oh, the measure of his wickedness!—and the good and saintly Hillel was king over the hearts of good men. I knew them both, may they rest in peace, the evil with the good, for who but the Almighty ever truly knows of an absence of goodness? For sitting here now, in the long overdue twilight, I seem to sense the pattern of the Almighty’s working, the meaning of His design, may He forgive me and have mercy upon me, for He does not take kindly to our knowledge of His ways—yet I see a glimmer of the morning sun which, like Moses, was to be denied to me—a glimmer of brave and glorious future Israel—no, the whole world might know. For you, who is Queen Esther born again—you will sit with your husband on a throne mightier than any, any—I was talking of thrones, was I not—and the throne of Herod was four cubits tall, with cherubim for him to lay his hands upon—” His voice wandered away. In spite of the heat, he was wrapped in a striped woolen cloak, and he held it tightly around him, shivering a little—

In bed that night, Berenice clutched Shimeon, whispering to him that she was afraid. “So much afraid, Shimeon. The Angel of Death is in this house. I am afraid to fall asleep.”

But he soothed her, and at last she slept.

They took the road south from Jerusalem, their way being by Bethlehem to Hebron and from thence to Beersheba. But above Hebron, they passed through Betab, the tiny Benjaminite village where Gabo was born. She rode through with her face covered, for the air was dry as a shard and hot as fire. “Your birthplace,” Berenice reminded her, and Gabo said, “Curses on my birthplace. I never wanted to see this land again.” On their left lay the awful wilderness of Judea, with its stark and precipitous cliff faces, its slashed, ocher-colored wadis that were clefts into the belly of hell, at the bottom of which lay the Dead Salt Sea. The burning, dry air was filled with a powdery dust that forced its way into every wrinkle and fold of skin and eyes, and the travelers mostly rode with their faces covered and often with their eyes closed, leaving it to the small, nimble-footed Lebanese ponies who had carried them from Galilee to find their own way. For Berenice, every step of the way was discomfort and bodily indignity, the heat—so different from the green coolness of her native land—the dust, the great empty spaces of the badland rock desert, the sheer cliffs, the dust, the misery of the few tiny villages they passed through, the skinny goats seeking fodder where a lizard would starve to death, and always the imminence of danger. Yet it was what she wanted and what she had sought, and she would not complain. She had said that she would follow Shimeon to hell—and this was precisely what had occurred.

Below Hebron, in the Land of Idumea, they came across a camel caravan that had been attacked. The camels had been led away, except for one that was gutted and dead, but seven of the drivers lay dead along the road and the eighth moaned in agony and bled out his life. Shimeon dismounted and did what he could for the poor man, binding his wounds, stopping the flow of blood, and giving him water. They remained with him for an hour, until he died. The desert floor was too stony for burial, but Shimeon explained to Berenice that sooner or later—certainly in the next few days—the local people would find the bodies and bury them. Looking around the wasteland where they were, Berenice found it hard to conceive that there were local people of any kind. Her ancestors on the Herodian side of her bloodline were Idumeans, and she shivered to think that they had an origin in this rocky wasteland where no blade of grass grew.

They went on. In Beersheba, the local inn was a pesthole, stinking to the sky of urine and human and animal waste; so they passed it by and pitched a tent in the open. On a striped Bedouin blanket, Berenice lay in the arms of her husband, with the glittering, star-strewn desert sky like a bowl above them. She watched the lines of flame left by the meteorites and told Shimeon that each one marked a visit to earth from the Angel of Death, Malak Hamashhit, who always kept one corner of one eye fixed upon Jerusalem, for while it was necessary to bring death to the Gentiles as well, the Malak Hamashhit did not like the Jews to forget him even for a moment.

“Which only goes to prove,” she went on, “what a provoking race we are. Others desire a larger share of what is good, and we can’t rest unless we have the lion’s share of what is bad.”

“All very profound, my darling,” Shimeon agreed, “but I have seen too many die from too many earthly causes to put much stock in your Malak Hamashhit—who is no different from all the other kings of the underworld, Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, and so forth. As for those streaks up there, the Greeks teach that they are bits of burning iron falling from the sky, and when I was a student there, I saw one of those fragments—”

“You are too Greek and too rational for me.” He took her in his arms, and she said, “Except to come here. What is rational in that?”

The next day, they left the main road and took the track to the southeast that led to Ezion Geber. They left before dawn, but by midday it was too hot to travel, and they lay for shelter and rest in the shade of an overhanging rock crag. By midaftemoon they traveled again, and now they rode past the ruins of an ancient city of great size. Berenice wondered whether it might be the legendary Sodom, but Shimeon pointed out that those old cities that the Torah told about were far to the north. This might well be a forgotten city of the Amelekites or the Edomites.