Agrippa's Daughter (34 page)

Sometimes Berenice felt pleasure at his lack of formality and at the curious respect and regard his people bore for him; but at other times, sensing the fear and loneliness that pervaded his existence, she felt an overwhelming sense of pity and sorrow. But now that had changed. What an act he had performed! How simply courageous it was! And how blindingly successful! Even Shimeon, who had never entirely respected Agrippa or overcome his concealed contempt for his background, even Shimeon looked at Agrippa with new eyes and new respect—as did the dozens of men and women who had come to Berenice’s palace to congratulate Agrippa, to embrace him and to acknowledge the fact that there was a king in Israel once again. Weeping like a child, Phineas, the Ba’as Hacohen embraced Agrippa and kissed him on the mouth and on both cheeks; and Anan Benanan, supposedly the wealthiest man in Jerusalem and once high priest, wept over Agrippa’s hand and, on one knee, pledged fealty to him, even though Benanan was a Judean and under no legal obligation to Agrippa. Caleb Barhoreb, that ugly and imperious little aristocrat, bowed before Agrippa, kissed his hand, and then proclaimed to all the company, “What a time this is, and what men are raised among us! Is it not the time that the Almighty promised us? For here before me is such a king over Israel as Hezekiah was, and under the same roof there is his sister, the blood of Mattathias with the blood of Herod, and spoken as a saint and loved as a mother by all Israel, and her husband, Shimeon, who is our nashi. Shall the hand of God write more clearly than when He makes Hillel’s own beloved grandson nashi over us and His disciple a king?”

Berenice pushed through the crowd and stopped him. Now she was afraid. “No, no,” she told Caleb, “you talk like a fool. It angers the Almighty when men talk like you are talking.” The little man was hurt, and she had to sooth him. “Ah, Caleb, I honor you and respect you—but honor must be calculated. The Almighty is jealous of honor accorded to others.” “That is not what Hillel taught.” “There are true things,” Berenice pleaded, “that are older than the things Hillel taught. Does your own bloodline teach you nothing? Do you think the God of Horeb is dead and only the God of Hillel lives?” She was choking and on the point of tears, and she tore free from the crowd, pushed through it and away—and then caught her husband’s glance. Shimeon was on the other side of the room, alone with Joseph Benmattathias.

She crossed to them, slowly and afraid, for her husband’s face was bereft of any triumph or joy, and his eyes were full of death.

“Tell her,” Shimeon said hoarsely to Joseph.

“My cousin, Aba,” Joseph Benmattathias said dully, “rode a horse to death here from Caesarea, so I have news that no one else has yet. In Caesarea, the pagans rose up against the Jews. The Roman troops did nothing. They had heard the news from here of the defeat in Jerusalem, and they lifted no hand to protect the Jews—who were without arms and defenseless and only a fifth of the population of the city—”

“I know how many Jews are in Caesarea,” Berenice burst out. “Tell me what happened there.”

“They closed the gates,” Joseph said, “and they began a slaughter, and they did not stop until every Jew in the city was dead. The Roman troops stood by and watched, and the pagans—”

“Pagans—pagans—what pagans?”

“Egyptians, Syrians, rabble, bastards of five nations who call themselves Greeks—you know Caesarea—”

“All the Jews?”

“Men—women—children—I think only my cousin escaped, because he was on the wall, and he watched from there, and then he dropped off the wall and stole a horse and got away. But he said that before he left, the streets were ankle-deep with blood—”

“O—my God, my God,” Berenice cried, and then she sank down on the floor with her face in her hands. Shimeon bent over and raised her in his arms, and with her in his arms he walked out of the room. Joseph remained to talk to the guests, who, having seen Berenice crumple to the floor, gathered around him now.

Each thing begets another, and there is no beginning and no end except for a single man or woman; and this was something that Berenice came to know. She could not find a beginning. She could not go back in time and say to herself, “Here or here or here did this begin.” What forces had brought her father, the great King Agrippa and the bosom and blood companion of the Emperor Claudius to the conclusion that Rome and Israel could not inhabit the same world? Whatever they were, the forces were there, and by now she had learned that they were implacable. She remembered how when she had first read Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, she was so hugely depressed by the sense of tragedy, of irreversibility that emanated from its pages. The Greeks understood and accepted that implacability of cause and effect, but the Jews resisted it. The Greek part of her education and training accepted the murder of her father. What alternative did Claudius have? The Jewish part regarded it with horror. In the plaza, when the children were being slaughtered, Florus had made a bargain with her. He would halt the slaughter and she would give her body to him, so that he could mount her with his little sagging pot belly and ride supreme over a queen of Israel. A Jew would comprehend her action, weighing it against the lives of the children she had saved; a Greek would not—nor did she feel better or worse that Florus was pinned down in the Palace of Herod; it made no difference; the children were saved. The implacable and inevitable had been set aside.

In this, the Jews were apart from all the world—in this defiance of all the tributes and implacabilities of fate; and possibly for this reason more than any other they were never tolerated, only hated or loved. Either the pagan turned Jewish, endured circumcision if a man, and embraced all that was Jewish—or the hatred of Jews became a chronic disease of his existence. The pagan lived in a world where defeat was accepted, where poverty and ignominy and slavery were accepted, where every turn and caprice of fate was accepted—and where every opportunity for lust, conquest, thievery, or enrichment was also accepted. For this, the Jew despised him; and knowing he was despised, he hated.

Hillel said love; and in Caesarea twenty thousand Jews perished in a single day. This hammered in her head; it tore at her head and beat at her skull. And it beat at the city too. Berenice could almost hear it, like a vast drumbeat pounding at the heart of the city—and the city became very quiet. The city wept. In any or every street of the city, you could hear the sound of tears.

The next morning, Berenice went up to the high roof tower of her palace—a pinnacle that rose above the temple court. Shimeon was already there, and when Berenice had joined him he said to her,

“I think they will try to take the temple enclave today.”

“Why?”

“They must control the city. We are at war with Rome.”

“Oh—no, no!” Berenice exclaimed. “Not from you—I will not hear that! Are my brother’s promises nothing? We said that we would go to Rome and make peace.”

“Too late,” Shimeon said softly but with profound sorrow.

“Why is it too late?”

“I have not declared war on Rome,” Shimeon said. “This city has—”

“The Sicarii!”

“You make too much of the Sicarii,” Shimeon said impatiently. “Not the Sicarii—but the Zealots, the House of Shammai—and that means more than half of Jerusalem.”

“How do you know? Have you counted? Have you asked? Have you gone to the people, to every one of them, and said to them—who are you for? For Hillel? Or for Shammai?”

“After Caesarea?”

“Do I ask you to do it? I only say that you have not done it—so how can you say who is for what? Of course Shammai moves. Shammai shouts! Shammai roars! Shammai has a sword in his hand. You see the sword—you respect it, you heed it. But Hillel—what is love to shout? There is no sword in the hand of Hillel.”

“My dear, good wife,” Shimeon said, “you have gone to places I have never been.”

“Why, Shimeon? You were my teacher. You were a physician—so it is with the sons of Hillel, they must learn to heal—and you healed. What has happened?”

“I don’t know,” Shimeon replied, “because it is happening. How can I tell you why or what the end will be? Look there!” He pointed to the street that paralleled the temple wall. “It’s happening, isn’t it? Can I stop it?”

She followed his hand with her eyes. “You’re the nashi, aren’t you?” And he said bitterly, “The nashi—yes.” They both stared now as the street filled with Sicarii bearing ladders. As the ladders were raised against the temple wall, another group of Sicarii dashed up the broad steps that led to the Temple, where one of the gates stood open.

Inside the walls, the temple guards leaned on their spears, and all was right with the world so far as they were concerned. In the Court of the Gentiles a deputation of sheep herders from Idumea moved slowly, gingerly, staring about them at this legendary wonder that they were finally seeing with their own eyes, and in the inner court a group of five priests argued and gestured. Shimeon cupped his hands and shouted. He had a strong, deep voice, and the sound of his shout was like a physical violence against Berenice’s ears. In the Temple, at least the sound if not the words was heard, and one of the priests pointed to Shimeon and Berenice. The others bowed, accepting this unusual means by which the nashi asked for attention. He shouted again, and the Levite guards bestirred themselves, and now the first of the Sicarii topped the wall, and one after another they straddled the wall, knife in hand, knife in teeth—and then they leaped down, inside of the temple compound. The Levite guards ran toward them, spears leveled, and now the other band of Sicarii poured in through the open gate. They raced across the court, screaming an awful war cry, their demeanor not that of men but of devils, their knives cutting at the air in anticipation of the flesh. The Idumeans turned to flee and then went down before the knives, beheaded, disemboweled. The Levites tried to rally, but they faced the madness of dedicated and monstrous fanaticism. They leveled spears against screaming men who impaled themselves, yet lived to kill the Levites who held the spears. Other Levites raced from the inner court, to go down under the weight of Sicarii leaping from the walls, and then the Sicarii poured into the inner court. The priests tried to escape, but the Sicarii cut them down, sliced flesh from their bones, disemboweled them. The Sicarii did not know these priests or have hatred for them or reason to destroy them; but the priests were alive, and the Sicarii were insane with the lust to kill and the need to kill. They existed to kill, and this was a moment in which the truth of their existence was revealed to them—and so they killed. They poured through the Temple, killing everything that moved. They cut down the Levite guards to the last man. They killed priests and they burst into the Holy of Holies, screaming out the name of God in the ecstasy of their madness, and from where he had attempted to hide himself they dragged out Hananiah, who had been high priest only a while ago, and they cut him to pieces there upon the Ark of the Lord.

Much of this Berenice saw, and more of it was told to her later; but she no longer reacted with shock—with all the outer adornments of horror. One thing had followed too quickly upon another; a kind of bleak desolation had begun to overlay her sense of compassion.

Twenty-four hours later, Jerusalem had been split in half—or in three parts, depending upon how you saw it. The temple complex on the eastern border of the city was held by the Sicarii, who straddled the walls and filled the night air with their keening prayers. The northern half, or Lower City, was held by the Zealots under the leadership of a man whose father had been hacked and sliced to death by the Sicarii. His name was Elaezar Benananias, a Zealot by conviction and thereby of the House of Shammai in belief and philosophy; but by birth out of the bloodline of Aaron and thus entitled to style himself, if he so desired, Adon Elaezar Benananias Hacohen; and thereby a prince of Israel out of the oldest bloodline on earth. In addition to this, he came of a family both wealthy and important—and his father had been high priest over Israel, Hananiah Hacohen. His father’s body, disemboweled and cut to ribbons, lay in the inner sanctuary of the Temple, and only bit by bit did the proof come to him that his allies, the Sicarii, had slain his father.

The southern half of Jerusalem, or Upper City, walled off from the rest of Jerusalem, a mighty fortress in its own right and containing Berenice’s palace and the Palace of the Herods, too, and most of the noble buildings of the city, was held by the nashi, Shimeon Bengamaliel. With him were four hundred and eighty-seven Levite spearmen, who had been in their barracks in the Maccabean Palace when the Sicarii attacked, and now these spearmen held both the double and triple gates that led from the Upper City in to the temple complex, and also the Xustus Bridge. The walls facing the Lower City were held by a hastily raised militia of about ten thousand men whose homes were in the Upper City—but how they would react if attacked by the Zealots and whether they would kill their fellow Jews to hold the Upper City from the Zealots remained to be seen. Shimeon himself was dubious, as were most of the members of the Great Sanhedrin, most of whom had made their way into the Upper City. After some discussion of the matter, Shimeon went to Agrippa, who was with Berenice on the roof of her palace. They had been doing nothing—simply sitting there through the hours and waiting. But for what they waited, Berenice did not know.

Without any preliminaries, Shimeon came to the point and told Agrippa that he wanted him to go down to the House of Hakedron and bring back with him into the Upper City the three thousand troops of the horse guard. “There is no problem yet,” Shimeon said. “I have checked at the Fountain Gate and at the Gate of the Essenes, and we hold both gates securely—and there are neither Zealots nor Sicarii in sight. I will send twenty of the Levites with you on horseback, and you can be back here with your troops before the sun sets.”

Agrippa shook his head, smiling bitterly. “No, Shimeon—you want soldiers, and you mistake me. My horse guards are no more soldiers than I am a valid and real king. We are both fakes. They have never fought anything, and they know less about fighting than I know about being a real king. Most of them are the spoiled children of wealthy Jewish families, and if the Sicarii should shout at them, they will not stop spurring their horses until they are back in Galilee.”