Agrippa's Daughter (30 page)

“He thought I would offer him the money.”

“I suppose so.”

“Should I have?”

“And next time—and the time after that? You were right. He has no power over you. Well—we shall see. I am tired, Berenice—I feel old and tired tonight.”

“You are the nashi. We were celebrating,” she pleaded. “My husband is a prince over all of Israel—and don’t—be angry with me. Let me be proud.”

“I am not angry,” Shimeon said, “only very tired.”

In bed, she tried to hold him in her arms, but he turned away. She lay there sleepless, telling herself that all would be well when they left this place and went back to Galilee.

Berenice finally slept, but fitfully, and in the hour before dawn, she was awakened by Shimeon’s movements. He was already dressed, and by the time the first red edge of the morning sun topped the desert hills to the east of Jerusalem, his messengers were out calling for an assembly of the Great Sanhedrin. Berenice went to the kitchen, where a red-eyed, sleepy Gabo was scolding the servants, complaining that the milk was sour and telling a fruit vendor at the back door that she would see him crucified, did he ever again dare to sell her tainted figs. Dropping onto one of the benches at the long kitchen table, Berenice gave the orders for Shimeon’s breakfast. “Is there sour dough?” she asked. “I want him to have hot bread. And warm the milk for him, Gabo.” “It’s sour.” She brought Berenice a wooden tub of sour dough, and Berenice began to work and shape the bread. “Then find sweet milk. Where is the milk vendor?” “Dead, I hope,” Gabo snapped. “And the oven isn’t hot enough—unless he waits for the bread. Does he wait?” The cook, a hugely fat Jebusite, pleaded with Berenice that he was not master even in his own kitchen.

“I say the stove is hot enough,” he said. “But she—that one—that devil of darkness—”

“I’ll tear your gonads off, so help me! If you have any, you fat capon!” Gabo shrilled.

“Do you hear? Lady Berenice, do you hear? Is that the way to talk to a man in his own kitchen? Or is it my kitchen? That devil of Benjamin is destroying me. Destroying me. Give me the bread. You will have hot bread. I say so. I pledge so.”

Gabo spat in disgust and went for fresh milk. Berenice, bearing a platter of fruit, went to the breakfast room. The slaves were already at work in the great reception hall, cleaning away the debris and leavings of the celebration of the night before. As she passed, Berenice heard them talking. “Ten talents,” said one, and another corrected this, “Eight talents—I have it on authority.” “Seven, eight, ten talents—do you know what I would do with ten talents?” And another one, an older woman said, “Empty-headed fools—you’ll drink your own blood for the trouble that will come of this. Trouble. That’s what it means when the Romans ask for money.”

In the breakfast room, Berenice put the fruit on the sideboard and prepared the basin of water and the white linen towels for Shimeon’s hands. He came in a few minutes, held out his hands—why was she always surprised at the size of his hands, not the hands of a scholar or jurist, but the long-fingered, strong hands of a woodcutter?—and she laved them from a ewer. He said his blessing to the Almighty softly, “—who maketh the fruit to grow in the field—” She held out the linen and he dried his hands.

“About last night and the procurator’s demands,” she said. “I heard the slaves talking as I came in here, Shimeon. They were arguing about the amount.”

“What? How could they possibly know?”

“You know what slaves are.”

“I don’t want that out. It’s like pouring oil on the city and lighting it. I’ll talk to them.”

But as he left to do so, Berenice sighed and shook her head. It would not help. The word was out, and nothing could bottle it again.

By noon that day, the story of Gessius Florus and his demand was all over the city. The amount—as the story was related—varied from five talents to twenty-five talents; but consistently the story had him pleading his debts and obligations before Berenice and Shimeon. Berenice belonged to the people of Jerusalem, so far as they were concerned, and they were possessed of three singular things that were not to be duplicated elsewhere on earth, namely: Yaweh, His Temple, and the saintly Berenice. They had ceased even to think of a time when Berenice was perhaps not so saintly, and if there was an act of charity that Berenice was responsible for—and there were many—there were ten for the one that were added to the apocrypha, and which had no other basis than the fertile imaginations of the creative taletellers. After all, was it not an Esther come to life and walking among her own folk? So the very fact that Florus should dare whimper his demands to Berenice added fuel to the flames. Also, out of the reception had come a story of unspeakable insult offered to the queen—the Roman had laid his hand against her breast, openly and insultingly. What Roman? No one knew exactly, but obviously Florus. The stories were woven and unwoven, but the children were not content with stories.

By noon, the morning classes were over. The thousands of children who had crouched in the courtyards of the city’s synagogues while the teachers—Levites they were—paced back and forth, listening to the chanted verses of the Torah, listening for any variation in the pronunciation of the
holy tongue
, the ancient ritual Hebrew, punishing instantly and severely with a blow from the cedar wands they carried—these thousands of children were suddenly released and poured into the streets of Jerusalem. From six to thirteen years of age, they were bold, wiry, and insufferably insolent. They feared nothing and mocked everything that was not Jewish, and as they poured through the streets they whipped off their ritualistic stocking caps—the dashing cap that Judah Maccabeus first wore—held them out, and screeched, “Alms! Alms! Alms for Florus!” Thickening and mispronouncing the Latin word, which someone had supplied, the roar became “
Shtipem—Romus—Florus
!” They made it into a singsong cadence that was presently echoing from thousands of throats. And joining to the spirit of the occasion, adults began to drop copper coins and even a silver shekel or two into the outstretched hats. Once the game had turned into the reality, the aimlessly circulating swarm of children began a motion toward the Praetorium, which was in the Palace of Herod in the ancient quarter of Zion. Men and women laughingly joined the procession, which a few moments later poured into the great plaza of the Upper City Market. The fruit and vegetable and oil vendors there looked up questioningly, to be met with the cadenced cry:

“
Shtipem—Romus—Florus
!”

Across the plaza, the palace front was in the Greek style, a deep portico of fluted columns, dark in its shadow; and now, from that shadowed darkness, Florus emerged and stood at one end of the portico—and almost as if he materialized them magically, there appeared behind him a full maniple of legionaries, one hundred and twenty in full armor, carrying scutum and naked Spanish sword, but not pilum. And behind them, still in the shadow and invisible, stood a second supporting maniple.

It was at this moment that Berenice appeared at the head of the marble staircase that led from the market plaza to the Temple. She took in the scene with a single swift glance—the crowd of children and adults pouring across the plaza and halted suddenly by the clockwork precision of the maniple that marched forward from the portico; the crowds behind them, unaware, and forcing them forward; the sudden screams of women and children mingling with the derisive scream of “Alms for the Roman Florus!” At one side of the market plaza, across from where the vendors’ carts were stationed, there was a line of the finest villas in Jerusalem, magnificent homes of some of the oldest and most revered families in Judea, built thus to take advantage of the splendid view in the rear and from their roof tops. The afternoon sun struck the plaza just in front of these houses. Nursemaids were there sunning the infants of the houses; children played there; mothers watched them. Now these too churned into a screaming effort to escape the death that marched from the portico across the plaza. And from the end of the portico, Florus watched.

Berenice leaped down the stairs, keeping close to one wall to avoid the people streaming by her to escape; and then she was in the plaza and running toward Florus. But already the maniple had mixed with the children and the feckless adults who had joined them, and still children poured into the plaza. At least two or three thousand children were there already, churning in a screaming, terror-stricken mob—and into the center of it the maniple charged, the Spanish short-swords weaving like the warp and woof of a loom, the shriek of death all over, Jerusalem.

Behind the carts, Berenice raced across the plaza; she had not run like this since she was a child—and as she took the last few steps that brought her to where Florus stood, he was watching her and grinning. Her plea came through her gasping intake of breath:

“Stop it, Procurator—in God’s name, stop it!”

“Whose gods?” he smiled. “Yours? Mine?”

“They’re killing children!” she cried. “Children! Look there—infants! Do you make war on infants?”

The second maniple was marching out of the portico now.

“The more glory to Yaweh,” he yawned.

“Please, I beg you.”

“One begs on one’s knees—even queens.”

She could not hear him; he could not hear her—so great was the shriek of horror and terror that rose over the plaza.

“On one’s knees!” he shouted.

Weeping, she fell to her knees and embraced his legs. Behind the vendors’ carts, hundreds of people who had taken shelter watched this. Weeping themselves, they saw the woman they considered their queen and the queen of all Israel kneel and embrace the legs of the procurator and beg him for mercy.

Florus tasted it and rolled it on his tongue. He tasted it long and with pleasure. Casper Ventix, the young centurion had paused to watch. The second maniple was now killing—without passion, without zest, simply killing whatever was alive and in its way, killing as a machine kills.

“Centurion!” Florus shouted.

Ventix walked toward him slowly.

“Move when I call you!”

“I hear you, Procurator.”

“Where’s the Tubicen?”

“There—Procurator.” He pointed to the other end of the portico, where a man leaned on a five-foot-long trumpet.

“Have him sound the recall.”

“I hear and obey, Procurator,” he said, his voice lazy and buried in insolence—and just as slowly and lazily, he walked across the portico to where the Tubicen stood. A moment later, the recall echoed across the plaza.

Berenice rose. “Thank you, Procurator,” she said.

“Time enough later for payment,” Florus nodded, grinning. He was vastly pleased with himself. His was not the kind of mind that measures the future or weighs the consequences. He had revenged himself and turned the scream of Jewish mockery back upon itself and humbled a woman who despised him. He felt a sense of achievement.

Looking back, remembering, Berenice always had difficulty in piecing together that day—as did others; for it was an infamous day, a day of separation between past and future, a day when a furious sickness was born, if such hatred be a sickness. Joseph Benmattathias was in the Temple when the worst of this day took place. Being beyond question of priestly blood, he had certain privileges he was never loathe to exercise, and while the Great Sanhedrin debated in one room of the Temple, he made notes of their arguments and conclusions in another room, putting together bits of information, surmise, and gossip that was brought to him by the Levites. This was essential to his being; and he could no more refrain from the narration of existence than he could from breathing. If he had been a Greek, he would have already styled himself a historian, but among the Jews—who unreasonably demand that a historian be divinely inspired—he gave himself no titles and contented himself with an endless search for the actuality of event. People knew this; it was of his nature; and he questioned Berenice very carefully afterward, pointing out that such horror must be provoked. He strained himself to be objective and neutral.

“I saw so little,” Berenice replied. “I was pleading with Florus.”

“I know, I know. We all know. And he heeded you.”

“Did he? Or was he tired of the bloodshed—or afraid?”

“Oh, he heeded you. No question of that. He sounded the recall, and when the troops returned to barracks, he went with them. He will never again walk alone in the streets of Jerusalem—or with much less than a legion around him. But what did you do then?”

“I walked across the plaza,” Berenice told Joseph, frowning, trying to think beyond the stillness of the place. “It wasn’t still,” she said, “because people were screaming with pain. But it seems like stillness when I think about it.”

“Only the dead and wounded were there then?”

“In the center of the plaza,” Berenice said. “There were unwounded people—Jews I mean—at the sides, at the street openings, on the staircases, by the villas—but not in the center. There were only the dead and the dying, and they were like heaps of cloth, all over, all over—so many—”

Some things she would never forget. She would never forget that. She would see things far more horrible, far more terrible—but different. At her feet were three little children, two girls and a boy, their bellies split, their guts on the pavement. She walked, and the blood covered her toes—the pool of blood an inch deep and growing where there was a timeworn depression in the plaza, and the bodies lay here and there and everywhere. The Roman troops had been marvelously efficient, a mother dead with her child clutched in her arms, and then the child dispatched with a sword-thrust, as if life of any kind was an affront to the clockwork soldiers who had marched out of the portico, and in another place was a pile of bodies, seventeen in all, piled one on the other—and how had that happened? The wounded pleaded with her—

Shimeon found her kneeling by the side of a twelve-year-old boy, holding an artery together so that the flicker of life she had discovered in him should not go out. With needle and thread he sewed together the boy’s wound—and then as he went on, working with the other physicians, Berenice remained with him, helping, holding flesh together for him to stitch, tearing all of her overdress into bandages and much of her underdress, for the blood that covered her from head to foot was cloak enough for modesty. The plaza was full now. The evening shadows were lengthening, the looming Temple casting its darkness upon them, and men with torches lit the plaza so that the doctors could work and so that mothers and fathers could find their children among the dead—and so that whimpering children could find their mothers and fathers. Death played no favorites here. The rich and noble ladies who were of the bloodlines of David and Mattathias and Aaron and Herod had died alongside of the common Israelites and Jebusites of the city—and within sight of their own villas.