Agrippa's Daughter (27 page)

“None to speak of,” Hamoser nodded, a studious man who was proud of his scholarship. “Esther is unquestionably apocryphal, a splendid invention called to life when Israel had need of her. But this—this thing of Queen Berenice—”

“How can you talk about me like that, myself sitting here?” Berenice cried. “Anyway, it’s nonsense that you talk!”

And she stalked out of the room in anger.

Yet somehow the slaves released at Ezion Geber had made their way to Jerusalem, and the word was in Jerusalem. Shimeon and Berenice had decided that they would not go into Jerusalem, switching from their former plan to spend a day or two in Berenice’s villa there, enjoying the good weather and the cool winds on the high places. Now, at Berenice’s urging, they were to pass by quickly and make straightaway for Galilee, but the word was before them and the road was packed with thousands of people. Curiosity brought Ventidius Cumanus, the new procurator, down from the city to invite them to be his guests at his palace in the city, and with him was a legion of the Romans, holding the crowd back from the road and cursing them in Latin. Berenice thanked him but explained that they had decided to return to Galilee. “Surely,” he said, gesturing at the crowd, “they don’t expect bread from you.” And added mockingly, “You are not planning to feed all of Jerusalem—or are you?” “Hardly,” Berenice replied flatly, and when the procurator wanted to know by what other virtue she was the beloved of the crowd, Berenice murmured the old proverb about short explanations being suited for fools. “I don’t think you are a fool, Procurator,” she said.

Later, Shimeon pointed out that she had taken a long chance in insulting the procurator.

“I hardly think he knew,” Berenice said. “He’s a fool and a wretched person. I will not mind my words with such people.”

“Yes,” Shimeon agreed, “I don’t suppose that you will—and for my part, I have married a most unusual woman. Don’t you think?”

“No more unusual than the man I married,” replied Berenice.

“I suppose,” Berenice said to Shimeon, after they were back in Tiberias, just the two of them alone, sprawled on the bed in her chamber, the same bed to which she as a patient had summoned her husband, “that I will get used to this sort of thing. It appears to run in my family, for my father also became a saint of sorts. He died for his trouble, and in short order. Do you suppose that is what fate has in store for me?”

“I hope not,” Shimeon smiled.

“Why do crowds have such short memories? Do you suppose they have really forgotten how much they hated me?”

“Did they hate you?” Shimeon wondered. “Or had they manufactured their own demon out of, the whole cloth? That’s the thing to know. You are someone, Berenice, my beloved—and I don’t know that there ever was anyone just like you. You did some remarkable things. You fed them. That alone is basic. They were hungry, and you fed them.”

“Out of pride and vanity,” she said indifferently.

“Yes?” She watched him as he studied her keenly; and she reflected that you never really knew about a man who was wise without being clever. “Perhaps,” he admitted. “Or perhaps not.”

“Yes and no,” she said, “which is spoken like a rabbi.”

“Oh? By the way, I noticed that Gabo is pregnant. Is she married? I never asked you.”

“She’s no more married than with previous pregnancies.”

“Then this isn’t the first?”

“The fourth,” Berenice told him.

“Really? What happens to the children?”

“Well, what should happen to them?” Berenice demanded with some asperity. “Don’t look at me like that. I did not eat them. They’re growing up like little animals in the corridors of this palace—which is a very large place.”

Shimeon breathed deeply and said, “I mentioned that you fed them. And then you went to the South with me. They were sick, and you healed them—”

“I find this kind of talk tiresome.”

“Of course,” Shimeon continued, “such an attitude on your part is a fraud. You don’t find it tiresome at all. I think you enjoy the role—and in good time, you will be all saint and forget that you were ever part devil at all.”

“And will you love me then, Shimeon?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Part Four

Berenice emerged from the entranceway to her palace and stood looking at the vista of hills, misty valleys, and blue sky. The view was excellent from here, and dramatic too; for immediately in front of her were the deep shadows cast by the looming structure of the Temple and its walled courts; and beyond that, the spread of height and distance. Her grandmother had chosen well to build a palace here, on the mighty, upthrust shoulder of Jerusalem. The very sense of the place renewed you, and Berenice could understand why, in the olden times, all of these high places were considered sacred to the gods—in the old, old times, when the people knew other gods besides Yaweh.

The air was clear, cool, and sweet as wine—as it so often was in the very early hours of the morning in Jerusalem. Rarely did the weather disappoint one here. It was almost fifteen years since she and Shimeon had taken to the habit of spending the warmest months of the year in Jerusalem, to escape the cloying heat of the lake bowl at Tiberias, and bit by bit she had come to love and feel this city. For all of its cold and forbidding aspect, its stone streets, stone walls, stone elevations, mighty stone staircases, and cobbled reads, it was a thing of purpose and emotion, alive in its own strange way. It was not soft and limpid and tropical, as was Tiberias, nor did it have any of the planned mathematical construction of Caesarea; it had grown almost at random through countless ages; its streets twisted and curled and tunneled. Walls paralleled walls; old walls and new walls, old cities and new cities; stone faces on stone faces, but no sculpture anywhere and very little color. Berenice could remember her first sight of Athens, the incredible, living, vibrating color of the city—walls of blue and yellow and green and hot red, but nowhere a bit of white stone, everything painted, every bit of sculpture painted so skillfully that frequently one would mistake sculptured stone for the living flesh. But here in Jerusalem stone was left unpainted, white limestone, gray granite, red and yellow marble, blue sandstone—vast, cold, natural faces of rock that were alive only when they caught the evening sunset or the morning sunrise. The whole city existed for a purpose, not as Rome existed to rule the world, not as Athens existed to excite the envy of the world and to weep for days that were no more, not as Alexandria existed to house the wealth or knowledge of the world—but for a purpose specific and singular, to support the Temple of Yaweh; and in some strange and intangible manner the city fulfilled its purpose. Even Shimeon, who never had felt too warmly toward Jerusalem, would admit that it was in a sense the footstool of the Almighty—and never did Berenice walk through its streets without some awareness of that.

And she loved to walk in its streets, dropping from level to level, or climbing toward the sky with that tightness of the chest, that panting for breath that was peculiar to Jerusalem. To walk in its streets each morning and each evening had become ritual for her and for Shimeon over the years. They enjoyed such walks, and as the years passed without any quickening in Berenice’s womb, without any pregnant life for the one man she had ever loved, both she and Shimeon substituted each other for the children they would not have. They moved closer and closer to each other, closer than they were aware of. When they walked, hand in hand, people looked at them and nodded. It was a familiar sight.

He would have been with her this morning, but the Sanhedrin had convened in emergency session at the moment of dawn, and a messenger had come for Shimeon while it was still dark. She woke to see him as a dark, shapeless figure in the night, and then to feel the touch of his kiss as he whispered to her that he must go. “With God—with the Almighty,” she said to him. They both knew what it presaged; his father, the old man, the patriarch of the House of Hillel had been dead a year now, and his brother Hillel was the head of the house. One or the other—Hillel or Shimeon, was in line for the curious title of
nashi,
which in ancient times had been translated as prince, but which now referred to the man elected to sit at the head of the council of seventy-one, or the Great Sanhedrin of Israel. His father—Shimeon’s father, Gamaliel—had been the first of the nashis; and now a war had been fought in the council between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel. Victory or defeat; or a laying aside of arms? Now they had convened again in the dark hours of the morning, and Berenice was left to walk alone.

Old Shupa, the doorkeeper, bowed to her and commented on the quality of the morning. “It will be a good morning for us,” he said—“or so I feel, lady.”

“God willing.” Berenice nodded.

A good morning, Berenice thought. So many mornings had been good mornings; and even with all the trouble on the land, they had been good years, easy years that slid away leaving only a good sense of warmth. Was she old? Was thirty-eight old? A hand went up to touch the underside of her chin. The flesh was firm there. A few additional pounds of weight covered her thighs and bust, but her body was still firm and strong, her breasts round and upright. In her dark moments—she had never cast them aside entirely—Shimeon would say, “Is that to fear, beloved, to grow old in the sight of the Almighty?” Then the magic of her youth was as simple as that, she told herself, and these were no thoughts for so clean and lovely a day as this. On such a day, one lives and tastes and smells, and she was so much alive today. She had known it the moment she awakened and had dressed herself in a shift of pale blue—the priestly color, the color she was entitled to wear for the blood of Aaron in her veins—and an overdress of mustard-yellow. Her red hair—still with no gray thread—was caught in a gold-netted coif on her head, adding to her height. The only jewel she wore was a diamond clasp upon her breast.

By the time Berenice had come to the edge of the great Upper City Market, with her great-grandfather’s palace binding the farther edge of it, and all around it the homes of the wealthy and fashionable and noble Judeans, the city was alive and stirring, and at least a dozen men and women had paused to greet her. Now, as she entered the Upper Market from one side, the morning relief of the Roman guard on its way to the temple area entered upon the other. There were twenty legionaries, a standard-bearer, an officer, and a musician of sorts who sounded periodic blasts upon a long, straight horn called a tuba. Of the many aspects of the Roman occupation hated by the Jews, the tuba was not least.

Berenice walked across the square as if the Roman detail did not exist, looking straight ahead of her; but midway she heard the centurion give a sharp order to halt and stand at attention; and then, leaving his detail in the middle of the square, he came to Berenice, who paused a moment; he bowed low, and he introduced himself as Casper Ventix, explaining that he had seen her three times and was so enchanted by her appearance that he could not resist this opportunity to make her acquaintance. He also could not resist the opportunity to drop the fact that he was related to Nero, the emperor—by marriage rather than by blood, and distantly, but nevertheless related. He was a young man, a few years less than thirty, good-looking in the dark Italian manner, and about three inches shorter than Berenice.

“You have made my acquaintance.” Berenice nodded coldly. He had addressed her in bad Aramaic; she replied in perfect Latin. He switched to Latin that was not nearly so good to explain that he was an admirer.

“And what do you admire?” Berenice asked. “There is so much to admire in Jerusalem—particularly our manners, which are rather formal. We do not press our presence upon strangers.”

She turned away from him then, and the young officer stood for a moment before he turned back to his men. They were grinning. He swore at them and barked his orders. “All in good time,” he said quietly to himself.

Berenice walked on toward the broad staircase that led from the Upper Market to the Lower City, past a stream of water-carriers and vendors of fresh vegetables and charcoal. A man who had been watching the whole encounter now crossed the square and fell into step beside her. He was a very tall, good-looking young man in his late twenties—large-boned, with a high-ridged hawk nose, a set of dark, narrow, and shrewd eyes, and a russet beard clipped close. He wore an ankle-length sleeveless robe of position, with a pale blue sash of fine silk, specifying to both his wealth and his priestly blood. A tiny symbolic dagger, hanging from his robe, attested to his military inclinations, while a six-pointed star upon the hilt reminded gently of his pretensions to royal blood. He was a man full of reminders and pretensions, and Berenice had met him upon two previous occasions—once as a guest in her house. He was a man of wit and brilliance, very young, but promising much in many directions. He was also, Berenice felt, frequently unbearable in his didactic certainties. His name was Joseph Benmattathias Hacohen; he had spent time in Rome; he spoke a fair Latin and wrote the language fluently, and when he wrote in Latin he styled himself Josephus.