Agrippa's Daughter (36 page)

“As bad as that?” Shimeon asked, a note of helpless woe in his voice.

“Sit down, Shimeon. Tell me what the Zealot wanted—and tell me, does he know whether his father is alive or dead? Rumor has it that the Sicarii murdered the old man in the Temple, in the Holy of Holies on the altar of God.”

Shimeon pulled over a stool and seated himself, and, watching him, Berenice felt herself swell with grief and nostalgia. The way he moved, in that awkward manner of an overlarge man, and the awkwardness contradicted by the competence of those large, long-fingered, and beautiful hands. It occurred to her that never in her life had she seen anything as beautiful, as clever and dextrous as her husband’s hands—and she could close her eyes, if she would, and remember those hands over a decade and a half, hands that made love, cherished, caressed, healed, comforted, put together what was broken, smoothed away pain and stanched the flow of blood—and now the hands touched her knees gently:

“Berenice?”

She shook her head, hard and firmly. “No. We must talk about this, Shimeon.”

“All right,” he sighed. “We will talk about it.”

“I asked you about the rumor.”

“Elaezar heard it. He doesn’t know. Nothing from his father. The Sicarii still hold the Temple, and they will permit no one to enter the complex.”

“Why did he come to you, Shimeon?”

“To make common cause for the war and the defense of Jerusalem. Don’t misjudge him. He’s a brave and a dedicated man.”

“But not brave enough or dedicated enough to find a way for the Jews to live. His specialty is death. I must learn to bow down and worship those who are brave in the commission of death.”

“What a way to talk!”

“It’s the way I feel—so I talk that way. What else did he want?”

“He wants me to command,” Shimeon said abruptly.

She shook her head slowly, studying him, wondering—and realizing now that all things come to an end. “I don’t understand you, Shimeon. No—I don’t even think my guesses have any point.”

He reminded her bleakly that he had never known her to guess wrong. “You became a woman too late,” he said—and she realized it was the first deliberately cruel thing he had ever spoken to her. “I should have married a woman who was a woman, and if she were stupid as a cow, she would at least be what a woman should be.”

But now she couldn’t be angry; her heart was breaking for him, and she thought, “Poor Shimeon—poor Shimeon—in the end they bought you so cheaply—a shred of glory hanging on an old stick, and you walked out of the House of Hillel and closed the doors behind you, and never a look back.” But aloud she only said,

“And what does he mean, the Zealot, when he asks you to command?”

“To lead the people, the war, the defense of Jerusalem if it comes to the defense of Jerusalem.”

“I see. But you are not a soldier, Shimeon. You’re a physician.”

“I am nashi.”

“Yes, you are nashi. What else, Shimeon? I think you should tell me all. Will he place himself under your command?”

“What I said before was cruel and unnecessary,” Shimeon said.

“It was necessary to you, and it was not cruel to me, and I have no desire to talk about it, Shimeon.”

“You never forget and you never forgive.”

“My darling,” Berenice said, very gently, “there is nothing to forget and nothing to forgive you for. I asked you whether Elaezar would place himself under your command?”

“Yes, he agreed to.”

“All the Zealots, their secret armies, their hidden weapons?”

“Yes.”

“And the Sicarii?”

“We did not discuss the Sicarii.”

“Oh? Just in case the profession of murder should not be discarded?”

“No, damn you!” He shook his head grimly. “I am sorry, I am sorry.” He reached out his arms toward her.

“No, Shimeon—we can’t feel love and tenderness with our hands until we have talked about this and discovered whether there is any of love and tenderness remaining between us. I am not angry, and I don’t want you to be angry.”

“There were other things we talked about,” he sighed.

“Yes, of course,” she nodded. “And he must have made demands too.”

“Not so many. He wants Agrippa and the horse guards out of the city and back to Tiberias—which is just as well. They have served their purpose. He wants all Roman legionaries remaining in Jerusalem to leave, from both the Palace of Herod, on our side of the wall, and the Tower of Antonia in the Lower City. He wants Florus out of the city—well, that’s done—and that is about it. In return he will place the entire city and the entire Zealot force under my command. It is a gesture of great trust on his part, a surrender of power he already holds—”

“Unless he unites the people, no one holds any power,” Berenice interrupted. “So look at the entire picture before you make him your benefactor.”

“Why do you hate him so?”

“I don’t hate,” Berenice said. “I stopped hating many years ago, Shimeon. But this is a man who stands for death. I am against death, Shimeon.”

“All men die.”

“Yes, in their appointed time—even as I could die now in misery and shame, to hear you giving me the argument that all men die. Is that why you went into every pesthole between Antioch and Alexandria and risked your life—and mine, too, if the truth be told—to try to save the lives of people stricken and dying? Because all men die? God help me that I have lived to hear this!”

“Berenice, you twist the meaning of every word I say.”

“Do I? And if you accept and become a captain of armies—is that meaning twisted too? Have you accepted?”

“I told him that tomorrow I would give him my answer.”

“Shimeon?” She allowed herself to hope, and her voice shook with it.

“Yes?”

“Shimeon, leave with me today. If there are ten thousand or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand people here in the Upper City—and in the Lower City too who feel as we do, then let them come with us—and we will lead them out of the slavery of Shammai as Moses led his people out of the slavery of Egypt.” Her voice rose with excitement. “We can do it. And I can feed them—and offer them a place of refuge in Galilee. I have money enough for that—” And then, as she watched his face, her voice died away.

“You would reshape the whole world with dreams of goodness—”

“Common sense.”

“No. Such things are not done, Berenice.”

“But wars are.”

“It will not be the first war Israel fought for freedom and independence.”

“Yes, drag out all the war words, Shimeon. Comfort yourself with them. Remind me that two hundred years ago, the Maccabees threw off the yoke of the conqueror—or do I know it out of my own bloodline, for I am kin to Yannai the Great, who was spawned out of the line of Mattathias, and my great-grandfather was Herod the Great, who was spawned out of the bloodline of Antipater; and two more deliberate and terrible devils than these never ruled over any people. So I will not become enchanted with these new words of yours. I know the words that your grandfather Hillel spoke when he said, ‘Who diminishes himself diminishes me, and who diminishes another diminishes me. And when a man dies, a part of myself also dies, and as mankind is lessened, so is the Lord God Almighty lessened. For the death of one man is the death of all men, and the pain of one man is the pain of all men. And if prayer is an exultation of the Almighty, there is a higher exultation than any prayer, and that is the saving of a human life. For he who saves a human life performs the holiest work of God and he who takes a human life, whatsoever be the reason, circumstances or justification, denies God and degrades all men. And if a spear is a force and a sword is a force, they are nothing and less than nothing before the force of love. Love thy neighbor as thyself; there is the whole law, and all the rest is commentary.’ Or am I misquoting? Or have I learned poorly in the House of Hillel—learned the word life where death was intended?”

“Berenice, what do you want of me?” he pleaded.

“I want you to come with me away from here.”

“And desert my people?”

“And you don’t desert them when you take up the sword?”

“I am the nashi—and you want me to slink away, to hide myself?”

“I want you, my beloved, to do what is the hardest thing in the whole world for a man of character and decency to do—to state that you will not take up the sword—that you are the grandson of Hillel, and upon you the House of Hillel rests.”

Berenice watched Shimeon as he sat and stared at the floor, his shaggy, graying head supported by the palms of his big hands. Yet she knew what his decision would be, and when he told her, she nodded wordlessly. When he left her, she wept. Before nightfall, together with her brother, the horse soldiers and her maid Gabo, she left Jerusalem to return to Galilee.

In the weeks that followed, Berenice learned the details of what had transpired in Jerusalem—so far as Shimeon was concerned—after she had left. She learned how Menahem Benjudah Hacohen, the leader of the Sicarii, had a vision in which—as he put it—God made him high priest. It was thought that then he dressed himself in all the colorful and ancient vestments of the high priest and began the ceremonies of sacrifice in the Holy of Holies, within the Temple.

But exactly what went on in the temple complex, no one ever knew, for the Sicarii held the place. They threw over the walls, into the Lower City, the bodies of the priests and Levite temple guards whom they had murdered, among them the body of Elaezar’s father. It was not merely that these bodies—seven of them were of important and noble Jews of priestly descent—were obscenely and outrageously mutilated; but the treatment of the dead in such a manner, violating the injunction of immediate burial and casting the corpses into the street from a height, was so alien to Jewish thought and practice that within hours after it was done no voice could be found in Jerusalem to defend or apologize for the Sicarii.

The Sicarii alone were undisturbed in their righteous and pious self-justification. About half of them held the Temple. The rest pushed into the synagogues, shouldered the rabbis aside, and set about the conduct of the prayer, swaying and wailing as if over-taken by the prophetic seizure—or else they preached to a congregation that sat imprisoned by the threat of the naked, razor-sharp weapons they carried. They styled themselves as the voices of the House of Shammai; they referred to their leader, Menahem as the Prince of Righteousness who had set his face against the Evil One, the betrayer of Israel, the enemy of Yaweh—namely Hillel. To oppose them was to invite their anger and inflame their righteousness, and when irritated, they killed. During the ten days they held the temple complex, they murdered sixty-seven Jews on the streets of Jerusalem.

When Elaezar came back to Shimeon for the nashi’s answer, he, Elaezar had already learned of his father’s murder and had already seen his father’s body. Stony-faced, he demanded to know what Shimeon had decided.

“As you wish,” Shimeon nodded, “but with a single condition.”

“What condition?”

“I want the Sicarii destroyed,” Shimeon said, letting go of the last cord that bound him to the House of Hillel. “Root and branch, I want them dug out and cut down. I want no prisoners and no trials and no judges—but they must die as they live, by the sword. Every one of them.”

“Every one of them,” Elaezar agreed.

A few hours after this, the assault on the Temple began, and the very unexpectedness of the attack carried the place. So secure were they in their self-appointed role of judge and executioner over Israel that the Sicarii made no attempt to guard the walls with more than a token handful of men. As for the gates, once they were barred, the Sicarii forgot about them, simply taking it for granted that nothing could stir the mighty bronze and gold portals. But the temple gates gave under the first blow of a battering ram carried by a hundred Zealots, and at the same time, five hundred ladders were raised against the temple walls. Zealots swarmed into the area by the thousands, and the Sicarii were cut down almost before they knew what was upon them. As they lived they died—violently and without mercy, impaled on spears or cut to pieces by the swords of the furious Zealots.

Elaezar himself led the party into the Holy of Holies, and when all resistance had been cut down, Menahem alone was left, tall, lean, wildly impressive in his ancient vestments, the golden breastplate with its attached Urim and Thummim moving slightly as he breathed deeply. He faced the Zealots with one upraised arm, demanding,

“Who is responsible for this—to come here where I commune with the Lord God of Hosts?”

“I am,” Elaezar replied shortly. At that moment, Shimeon entered the Holy of Holies, and took his place alongside of Elaezar.

“You I see, Elaezar Hacohen!” Menahem cried. “But who is this Israelitish cur”—pointing to Shimeon—“who defiles this place?”

“Cut him down!” Shimeon shouted to the Zealots who were crouched around Menahem.

“I am the holy one!” Menahem screamed, flinging himself toward the altar, where the razor-sharp knife of sacrifice lay. “I am the preacher of righteousness, the hand of God, the keeper of His kingdom!” He whirled to face them, the knife in his hand, and the Zealots speared him as he stood thus, one spear driving through his golden breastplate, another spear transfixing him from behind and a third spear into his groin.

Yet he remained alive, staring with undiluted hatred at Shimeon and Elaezar until he died.

By nightfall of that day, all the Sicarii in Jerusalem were dead. They were hunted through the city like rats. Men, women, and children joined to drag them out of their hiding places. They were slain in cisterns, in sewers, and in the pulpits of the synagogues. They took refuge on roof tops, where they were spitted and feathered by the Jewish bowmen. They hid wherever there was cover—and wherever they hid, they were found.

It was during these hours that the remnants of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem were released by Shimeon’s orders and told to leave Jerusalem immediately and march to Caesarea. He was unaware of the fact that Elaezar had given orders that all the gates of the city be closed until the Sicarii were destroyed—and that he had assigned a hundred bowmen and a hundred spearmen to guard each gate. The Romans, released from the Palace of Herod and the Tower of Antonia, marched into the streets of a city that was tasting blood and half mad with hate. No sooner were they seen than the people closed in about them, with their bows and improvised spears. A rain of rocks came from every housetop. Covering themselves with their shields, the Romans raced in close order for the Valley Gate, leaving a trail of dead and wounded behind them—and at the gate they impaled themselves on the massed points of the spearmen. The Romans fought well and desperately, but by nightfall they as well as the Sicarii were dead.