Agrippa's Daughter (39 page)

“Will we find them south of here?” Berenice asked.

“In any case your chariots can outrun them. But the Romans have cleaned them out for the most part. Yet I would not go south of here if I could help it, Queen Berenice. You will see terrible things.”

“I must go,” she said.

They were on the road before sunrise, the Roman drivers muttering at the way the Jewish lady drove them. They had a long day’s journey before Jerusalem, and Berenice desired if possible to reach the city before nightfall. South from where they had spent the night, the road was in excellent condition for a stretch of over ten miles, and they covered that distance by sunrise—and then went on at a slower pace until an hour before midday, when they rested the horses. When they set out once again, the landscape had altered radically. This was grazing country, but Berenice saw no shepherds, no sheep, no goats. The land was bare, desolate, abandoned—and every tree had been felled, every olive tree, every fruit tree. Every house they passed here had been destroyed, either wholly or in part; whether it was a shepherd’s hut or some great country villa, it was seared with flame, collapsed, abandoned. Only in one place near the road, a stone fortress tower still stood, garrisoned by Romans, and here they were stopped and questioned. The centurion in command at this tower dispatched ten mounted men to accompany them, and with the Roman horsemen taking up the front and rear, they drove through the empty streets of Bethel, a town desolate and deserted, the stink of fire and decay hovering over it.

From Bethel to Jerusalem the land was deserted and desolate, the only movement Roman cavalry patrols. The fields were fallow, the houses in ruins and ashes, and the trees felled. Berenice saw swift, moving shapes that she mistook for dogs. “Jackals,” the driver said. “I saw them last year, lady. There are more now.”

As they came in sight of the high, walled rock of the city, Berenice understood why every tree within twenty miles of Jerusalem had been felled. At a distance of about eight hundred yards from the walls of the city the Romans had built their own wall. The outer walls of Jerusalem measured something over three and a half miles, the wall the Romans surrounded it with almost six miles—of rock, ditch, and palisade—miles of olive trees, trees that had taken a thousand years to reach their maturity, and now split and upended in a ditch. It was a terrible, awesome, and heartbreaking sight—overwhelming in concept, the wall marching over mountains and into deep valleys—and awful in all of its implications. There were forty-three gates in this wall, every one guarded. Not a dog, not a mouse could leave Jerusalem now.

Or enter Jerusalem either—unless the Romans willed it, as Berenice realized as her chariot drove onto the road the Romans had built on the outside of the wall. Already the sun had dropped below the hills, and now everything was in shadow, the Roman legionaries shadowed as they stared curiously at the tall, red-haired woman in the first chariot and the small, dark woman in the one that followed it, the wall throwing its long somber shadows, the legion camp with its shadowed streets—and only light upon the walls of the city above them, walls blazing brilliantly, the gold and white and blue Temple like a glittering torch in the last light of the setting sun.

Titus came to her—to the pavilion which he had prepared for her, a great tent the size of his own and divided by drapery flaps into four rooms. He had furnished it with what he could lay hands on—some couches, beds, chairs, a table, and two beautifully made Egyptian chests containing an assortment of jewels and dresses. Nothing in the tent was Jewish, and that, Berenice reflected, was very much like this most peculiar Roman. He must have sent to Egypt and Caesarea for the furnishings. Servants were waiting to provide for her comfort—water for a bath, rose water then to refresh her, fruit and bread and wine and cheese, simple food he had learned was her preference. He had, Berenice reflected, learned a tremendous lot concerning her. Like some Roman legate entering a new and unknown territory, he had been curious, thorough, and workmanlike.

Now he came to her, himself and alone and on foot, waiting a full three hours before he presumed to impose himself upon her. She lay on a couch, resting now, having bathed and changed her clothes and had a glass of wine. She had no desire for food. She told Titus to enter, and he passed through the flap and stood looking down at her in the light of the smoky lanterns the Romans used.

“You look rested, my lady, Berenice,” he said.

“Somewhat—yes.”

“Was everything provided for? I mean, I tried to anticipate your wants—as much as a man like myself can comprehend and anticipate the wants of a woman. Such a woman as you.”

“Everything,” Berenice replied.

“Well—I’m pleased. At least with that. Do I appear foolish? I mean, it seems to me that I stand here and mumble and make very little sense—”

She smiled now, thinking to herself how likable and utterly improbable this young man was, the first son of the Emperor of Rome and someday emperor himself if the fortunes of war spared him, yet as soft-spoken as if he had neither command nor power. She was also very tired, and when she realized that it was the first time she had actually smiled at him, she wondered at herself. Her whole being existed in the fact that she would soon see Shimeon, speak to him—and also in its reverse. Shimeon was dead, and she would never see him again.

“No—you make sense, and you have been kind and thoughtful,” Berenice said. “If I seem terse, it is because I am nervous and ill at ease—and I suppose a little sick with fear and anticipation.”

“I can understand that,” he nodded.

“Can you? Do you know—this man is my husband, if he lives. Regardless of what Joseph says.”

“I suspected as much.”

“Why?”

“I am interested in you—that is no secret. I ask questions. I would be a fool to rely entirely on Joseph. Wouldn’t I?”

“I have nothing to say about Joseph Benmattathias,” Berenice answered. “He is of no interest to me.”

“I think he’s in love with you,” Titus said, casting the stone to the water and watching the ripples.

“Titus Flavius,” Berenice said flatly, “the truth is that no one is in love with me, and in this cruel and awful moment, it is more of hurt than compliment. I am no young woman, regardless of what you may choose to think—but forty-two years old. That’s very old.”

“May all the gods forgive me if I have hurt you in any way!”

“Don’t talk that way—please. I am a Jew, and you are a Roman, and we are both of us here before Jerusalem. Whatever they are in there, whatever they have done, they are Jews.”

“Even if the man Bargiora speaks of is your husband?”

“Yes.”

“And I suppose nothing—no argument, no reasons can prevent you from going into Jerusalem.”

“You can prevent me,” Berenice said tiredly. “I am one woman—so you know that you can prevent me.”

“I spoke of arguments.”

“If you will allow me to, Titus Flavius, I want to go up to Jerusalem as soon as there is dawn light tomorrow.”

“I will not prevent you.”

“Thank you,” Berenice answered him. “You are a good man—I think a very good man—which only confuses me and troubles me. Sometimes I have also felt that I am a good person, and that too confuses me, and I suppose the final judgment on us will not be of ourselves but of such a man as Joseph Benmattathias. There was only one man in my life whom I loved and trusted, and I thank you with all my heart for allowing me to go to him.”

“And if you should be thanking me for allowing you to die with him?”

“If that must be—”

“I heard so much about you,” Titus said uncertainly, “and it was always in terms of a very complex and difficult woman. Then why do I find you direct and simple?”

Berenice shook her head, and then Titus left her. She was grateful for that, since she could no longer hold back her tears, and she had no desire to weep in front of him. She lay on the couch then, weeping, and presently she feel asleep. Gabo came in and covered her and removed her sandals and tucked the quilt under her feet against the chill of the night air—all the while clucking and complaining with annoyance. Berenice was never certain whether Gabo, who was now the mother of seven children, had come to tolerate her, endure her, or perhaps love her.

The hour before dawn, the trumpets sounding, the drums beating, and the rhythmical tread of thousands of leather boots falling into line, place, maniple, century, cohort, and legion. The noncommissioned officers shouting their orders, the ripple of Latin names in the roll call, the sharp, authoritative tread of the centurions, and then the single tread of one centurion to the tent entrance:

“Queen Berenice?”

She had been awake for hours, waiting—yet not to go to a funeral. She had dressed carefully, aware of herself, as ever—the underdress of pale blue and the overdress of blue only a few tints darker, and around her head, holding her still flaming hair, a simple gold band with the lion rampant of Judah. Whatever she was going to, let them see that no one had more right to the royal and sacred colors, or to the symbol of the royal house. Whatever her fate, she would not conceal her bloodlines nor deny them.

The centurion, a boy in his early twenties, caught his breath as she stepped outside of the tent. Like all others who shared the gossip of the camp, he had heard that his commander was enamored of an elderly Jewish lady. Now, seeing the elderly Jewish lady face to face, so early in the morning, he understood the nature of his commander’s entrapment.

“I am instructed to take you through the wall, Queen Berenice—you understand me? My Aramaic is very poor.”

“I speak Latin,” Berenice replied.

“Well, you do. If I may say so.”

“What is your name, young man?”

“Hermanius Bracus.”

“Then let us go, Hermanius Bracus.”

“If you should desire refreshment?”

“I need nothing, Hermanius Bracus. You were told to take me through your wall. Do so—please.”

His every instinct was to be courtly, yet all the small pieces of flirtation that he would have used with a Roman matron—and she was a matron, no matter how often he looked at her and caught his breath—fell flatly on the wall she had erected about herself. She could not be reached.

Or perhaps one would have to go back many years to reach her; for now, as they walked along the wall the Romans had erected, Berenice was thinking of the times she had been to Jerusalem—back to so long ago, when they bore her father’s casket here, and again when she and Shimeon came down from the North to go to the copper mines in the desert, and again and again, time after time, herself and Shimeon like companions who knew each other so intimately that each anticipated the thoughts of the other, and that was to be forever; but here was Shimeon like a dim vision already, and man’s memory and love was a fraud and a swindle.

These and other things she remembered, and as they walked the Roman soldiers stared at them silently—having been warned that the price of any jest, any insult, any coarse word flung at this woman might well be the speaker’s life. The first light of the morning sun touched the towers of the city, the tall spires of the Temple, and Berenice, looking past the crazily leaning Roman wall, remembered how she and Shimeon would greet the morning sun up there—on that height, where Yaweh’s eternal altar stood. She remembered other things, and said suddenly,

“Centurion, is Gessius Florus here with the army?”

“No, my lady, he is dead.”

“Oh? How did he die?”

“I don’t remember all the details,” the centurion said, “but it would seem to me that it was an attack of indigestion. Wasn’t he a short, fat man? A bit of a glutton—?”

With what ignominy were the mighty fallen, Berenice thought, and how little of nobility or grandeur was there in any of it! She had always had a sense of something sexually barren about men with swords, as if the tool of death in hand replaced the tool of life hanging limply and meaninglessly. Well, that was a woman’s thought, and so many women could not understand strutting. They all strutted now—these men of the sword, as if the presence of a beautiful woman among them poured forth a torrent of admiration in which they bathed. Even the young man beside her, with his polished armor and his fine white shoes and gloves, even he strutted in admiration.

She saw Joseph Benmattathias, tall, healthy, his hair combed, his short beard trimmed and curled, wearing a long blue robe embroidered in gold with a hem of six-pointed stars. A full head taller than the legionaries around him, slim and elegant, his presence broke in on Berenice’s reverie, and suddenly there was no meaning or purpose in anything—not in her being here and not in any foolish hope that Shimeon lived.

He bade her good morning, eying her keenly and setting aside any anticipated rebuff by saying, “I will not trouble you with my thoughts or advices at this moment, Queen Berenice. I know what ordeal confronts you. I am here simply to wish you well.” He spoke in Aramaic, and she realized that he did so to have her reply in Aramaic—if she were disposed to insult him or cut him down. Then the Roman soldiers would not understand and he would maintain face. She did not reply but walked on, marveling at the workings of the man’s mind, remembering that first time he had explained to her how a man might exist with one foot in each of two different and opposed camps. But in that he was no way so different from most men—and could not the same be said of Shimeon? But Shimeon struggled in the murk of events; he tore his heart out with each step he took, and because he was a man of compassion, every step of his existence was a betrayal of one sort or another. For Shimeon, life was impossible; every choice was of necessity the wrong choice, and his broad shoulders bore all the ridiculous luggage that the male of the species had devised, courage and honor and loyalty and devotion—only all of it inverted, and the courage was no courage, the loyalty to all that was unreasonable and unspeakable—

“Here, Queen Berenice.”

They were at the gate. A guard of legionaries stood there, and they opened the gate for Berenice and the centurion. He pointed to the space between the two walls, and, facing them, the Damascus Gate in the wall that her great-grandfather had built, and for the rebuilding of which—at least in part—her father had paid with his life. A few men on the walls—and nothing else, and nothing in the no-man’s-land between the two fortifications; and all of it in the deep shadow of early morning.