Agrippa's Daughter

by Fast, Howard

  “You’re old enough to dance a jig and make the music too,” Agrippa said sourly.

  Now, on the day Agrippa was to die, a year after the two of them together in the empty audience room, a year after he had burned smiling horror into the fragile, fluttering soul of a fifteen-year-old girl who had never known a man and covered her horror of men with a veneer of little-girl strutting and boasting—a year after all this that same girl had played with his vanity and used his vanity, coldly—as cold as most of her actions were now. Her brother saluted her as they strolled in the gardens after the breakfast. He was absolutely delighted, as he told her, and said to her, “Oh, I don’t hate him the way you do—not at all, but—”

  “Don’t you?” she interrupted. “Suppose you could kill him—”

  “What a thing to suppose!”

  “No, I don’t mean that—not that at all, brother; because we’re both civilized, aren’t we? I mean that somewhere in us, there is a germ of human decency—”

  “Where?” Agrippa grinned.

  “I don’t mean, kill him. But suppose you could interfere and prevent his death—would you?”

  “I don’t know,” her brother said slowly and thoughtfully.

  “There! And you say you don’t hate him?”

  “Not the way you do,” Agrippa protested. “I mean—why should I? It’s the difference between the son and the daughter, and if he’s never shown me any love, he’s never gone out of his way to be cruel to me.”

  “Because he’s indifferent.”

  “Perhaps,” Agrippa shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. But I love to see you handle him.”

  “Ah. I paid a price to learn that.”

  They paused in their stroll, and Agrippa turned to face his sister. “Why did you come here, Berenice?”

  “To get away from Herod,” she answered directly. “He’s beginning to fear me. I work at that, and it’s beginning to take hold. I have my own way—more and more—”

  “You know, I was going to say it before, Berenice. I mean, out of admiration, really—that in spite of all your gabbling about being a Hasmonean, there’s more of old Great-grandfather Herod in you than you care to acknowledge.”

  “How dare you!” she cried. “How dare you!”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t ever say that to me again. Ever!”

  “All right—never again,” Agrippa agreed amiably. “Change the subject. Are you going to that stupid play?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see these Greeks of yours. I want to see what’s so erotic about them.”

  “No. Truly—why?”

  Berenice shrugged.

  “It will be hot as the very devil. And the play is a bore—three hours of it, written by father’s dear friend, benefactor, and protector, the Emperor Claudius. Or ghost-written by some clever Greek. In any case, I am told that it’s an utter bore. A melodrama would have been bad enough. This is a comedy—out of stale jokes and heavy-handed scholastic wit. God save us. Why don’t we both go swimming?”

  “I told Gabo I would take her,” Berenice sighed.

  “Gabo?”

  “The little animal has never been in a theater. She pestered me until I agreed to take her.”

  “And that’s it?”

  Berenice shrugged.

  “You know,” her brother went on, “someday that hairy little toad will do you in. Those Benjaminites are all murderers—I wouldn’t have one near me. No, sir. Someday, she’ll take a notion to cut your throat.”

  “And a good thing,” Berenice nodded. “I’ve often had the same thought myself—but never enough guts to carry it off.”

  Cypros, Berenice’s mother, lay dying slowly, and through this day and many days afterward she would continue to die. Her skin was almost as white as the counterpane, and her face was full of the empty frustration that appeared to grip every member of the House of Herod when he or she faced death. For she was cousin to Agrippa, her husband, and like him the grandchild of Herod. Once she had been a stately and strong woman—as Berenice could recall—but now, dying, she was weak and petulant, and she pleaded with Berenice, who stood by her bedside,

  “Why doesn’t he come to see me? All day yesterday he didn’t come. Not once.”

  “Affairs of state,” Berenice said. “After all, it’s no small matter to be king over a realm like his.” She hated to lie and she was a poor liar; lies flattened her rich voice; anyone who knew her knew when she was engaging in this careless kind of lying. “He rushes around—here—there—”

  “Berenice, stop it!” her mother snapped.

  “All right. What shall I tell you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m dying. Doesn’t he care that I am dying? I am so alone and so afraid—”

  As young as she was, Berenice thought, “We are all dying—and who cares? Who can care?”

  “What will you do when I am gone?” Cypros cried plaintively. “What will all the children do?”

  “We are not children now, Mother,” said Berenice.

  “I know him, and I soften his blows. He doesn’t mean them. He rages and rants, and it means nothing, because inside he is like a saint. The people know it. They revere him. Don’t they?”

  “They revere him,” said Berenice.

  “Bring him to me, please,” Cypros begged Berenice, beginning to weep, the tears flowing across her waxen cheeks. “Bring him to me, Berenice. He has forgotten. It slipped his mind. But remind him, and then he will come to me.”

  Agrippa had declared the day a holiday, and there was a distribution of bread and wine. In Caesarea, in the year forty-four of our era, only about a quarter of the population were Jewish. They disdained to accept the charity of Agrippa; they barred the doors to their houses and shuttered their windows and turned their backs on a Jewish king who dedicated a day to pagan practices and a pagan emperor who was worshiped as a god. Later in the day, they would have a perfect causative relationship between Agrippa’s sin and his death—unperturbed by the fact that fifty-four years of variegated sinning preceding this day went unpunished by the Lord God. This was a culmination—which they accepted; although even this verdict was not accepted by the entire Jewish community. A good many of them considered Agrippa a good man and wept tears when he died—just as Jews all over Palestine rent their garments and wept when it became known that King Agrippa was no more. Thus in all justice it must be said that with Agrippa it was different than it had been with his grandfather Herod the Great. When Herod’s time came and he lay dying, all the Jews in Israel smiled and poured libations of thankfulness. Songs of rejoicing were sung, and the Jews poured into the streets of their cities to embrace each other with the news that Herod lay dying. In fact, hearing these things, Herod toyed with the notion of executing the one hundred most respected and beloved men in Israel, so that when he was carried to his tomb, there would be tears in the land. Fortunately, he died too soon to put that notion into operation.

  Agrippa knew that a king over Palestine ruled others than Jews—especially in cities the Romans had built, such as Caesarea, and if he provoked some of the Jews, by noontime the Greeks, Syrians, and Egyptians who lived in Caesarea were shouting his praises. The Gomesh-singers, survivors of the ancient cult in Philistia, were dancing through the streets, chanting choruses from the play, piping and wearing crowns of green leaves, drunk already; and from the windows of their room in the palace, Berenice and Gabo watched them. They were a lewd lot, the Gomesh-singers, the men pausing blatantly to urinate in full sight of the public, and the women dancing around the men, making lascivious gestures, baring their half-covered breasts and strutting erotically. The women wore stiff skirts and had their waists constricted very tightly under leather belts, in imitation of their ancestors who had come from ancient Crete in the half-forgotten past.

  Gabo was shocked. At the age of seventeen she was intimate with every conceivable vice and perversion and accepted all of it as a part of her enviro
nment; but this open pagan ritual, on the streets of a Palestinian city, was new to her. She turned from the window, clucking in indignation, and told Berenice that in Jerusalem or in Mizpah or any other Jewish city, these heathen abominations would be torn limb from limb.

  “Then you should be grateful that we are not in Jerusalem,” Berenice said. “In Jerusalem there is no theater, and if not for this celebration here, how would a wretched little animal like you ever see the inside of a theater?”

  “Is the theater like this?”

  Berenice shrugged. “It could be. And even more so. I remember a comedy of Afranius where the actors performed intercourse openly—on the stage.”

  “Oh!” cried Gabo. “Oh! How terrible!”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you see that it’s terrible? For a woman to subject herself to that—openly—”

  “Foolish girl,” Berenice said loftily, “no woman subjects herself to it. There are no women on the stage. The role of the woman is played by a man who wears woman’s clothes and a mask.”

  “No?” Gabo gasped.

  “Of course. You don’t think everyone is as silly and narrow about these matters as Jews.”

  “But two men—”

  “Yes, two men. You act as though this is new to you,” Berenice said impatiently. “It’s late, and I must dress.”

  “But openly—in sight of everyone—”

  “You are impossible,” Berenice snapped.

  “But, mistress,” Gabo insisted, “your brother, the noble Agrippa, spoke of the women in the company. What—”

  “Of course there are women. But not to appear on the stage. That wouldn’t be proper. They are there for the pleasure of the men in the company—”

  In time to come, in a tomorrow that was still many years away, Berenice would cease to mock at her father. She would come to understand that the “good” king is a thing that nature itself derides and deters—even as it would be a derision to all the natural laws of things for water to flow uphill. Her own people, the Jews, had suffered a thousand years of kings, and if one was wicked, the most cursory reading of history turned up another more wicked. And since iniquity is always unstable and risky, justice appears to be done in the end.

  “Woe unto thee!” cried the prophets to their rulers, and time proved the logic of their predictions. No one stood up against time, and the good had only to wait patiently for the evil to be overthrown. Of course, they had to survive the period of waiting, and that took considerable talent—but a talent in which Jews were already incredibly experienced.

  When Agrippa was struck down, the Jews gathered in the synagogues, not only to mourn the passing of a good king in the eyes of Israel, but to spell out the logic of God’s justice. For of all things that were dear to them, the implacable justice of God was dearest. Thus, they totaled the score: was not the theater an obscenity? And was not the prince of darkness, the Emperor Claudius of Rome, an obscenity? And was not the play he had written an obscenity? And were not the pagan players an obscenity? And was not the whole pagan city of Caesarea an obscenity? Proof begat proof, and if God forgave Agrippa much in his days of wickedness, He forgave him little in his days of holiness. For a contract made is not to be broken; and this was very much in the way of Jewish thought and very Jewish indeed.

  But Berenice had yet to face herself as a Jew, and as superstitious as she was, she knew better than to place the death of her father as God’s judgment. There were simply too many human beings who desired him dead, not wholly excluding herself and her brother. Yet there was no hatred in her today. She loved the kind of pagan holiday that turned into a citywide bacchanal, and she would dream of herself as a part of it, dancing in the streets, drunk with the wine of strangers, and giving herself with pleasure to what was no pleasure to her.

  In reality, sex was a frozen lump in her heart and her groin; she was a combination of the pagan permissiveness and the Jewish priggishness and puritanism, and a product of a world in which these two outlooks were at merciless war. The tension of the two tore her gut into shreds and froze the shreds, and in a world where there was no word, place, or explanation for frigidity, she existed quite naturally in the jumble of discordant parts that comprised her personality.

  When she faced her uncle, Herod of Chalcis, alone finally after the nightmare that was their wedding ceremony, she was rigid with horror, almost catatonic—a memory she deliberately evoked now in Caesarea as she dressed for the theater with Gabo’s help and listened to the singing and music from the streets outside. He was a fat man, her Uncle Herod, to whom her father had married her in his senseless act of senseless revenge, a tall, fat man, almost dropsical in the thickness of his limbs, and now wrapped in a red robe and naked underneath as he faced her.

  “Please—wait for tomorrow,” she had managed to whisper.

  He hardly knew her. Before their marriage, he had seen her three times, once when she was an infant months old, once when she was six, and again when she was ten. Now she had passed her fifteenth year, a grown woman, tall, wide-hipped, wide-shouldered, strange-looking, with her green eyes, her cat’s eyes, and her red hair—strange, but beautiful, if this kind of thing was to one’s taste. Fifty-two years old, Herod of Chalcis could not say truly whether she was or was not to his taste. He himself was an odd lot, graced with neither the bodily beauty nor the mental agility that marked the royal house of Israel. Subservient to the strong will of his brother, King Agrippa, he had agreed to the marriage. He did not enjoy the fact of being a widower, and of late he had become obsessed with the fear of impotence. While legend had it that a young virgin was proper medicine for the condition, surely youth was more important than virginity—and this niece of his was youthful indeed. Yet he was puzzled by the imploring terror in her eyes. He had been assured that she was deflowered and a practiced hand at the business of pleasing a man.

  And now she begged him to wait for tomorrow.

  Of course she was deceitful. He had asked a number of his brother’s close advisers what was their opinion of the Princess Berenice. Along with labels of lechery, slyness, and prevarication, they had all agreed that she was generally deceitful. Herod of Chalcis was the kind of fool who goes through life determined and satisfied that no one else will make a fool of him.

  He clutched Berenice in his arms. He was full of virility—throbbing with it. Impotence? He began to laugh with delight at his passion while he tore the clothes off his niece. He exhibited his own nakedness proudly, a fat, shapeless pile of a man, his own manhood protruding ridiculously from his folded layers of flesh, and when Berenice struggled screaming against him, he folded her under his great weight and size, enveloping her in his rolls of flesh, gasping and whimpering with his re-enforced masculine pride and delight—too carried away by his passion to have any sense of the girl under him—or what was happening to her.

  Only afterward he stared foolishly at the pool of blood on the floor where he had flung her. “Have you never known a man before?” he asked her. “I am the first, Berenice?” He was prepared to swell and preen himself over the fact that he had taken a virgin—that all unbeknownst he had found this pure jewel in a supposedly rotten apple—when he saw her eyes. The green was veiled, like shore water, dark and cloudy and full of such cold, malignant hatred that his naked skin prickled, a flush of heat pouring sweat on his icy back in a reaction of fear, almost panic.

  This, Berenice remembered now, remembered it all deliberately as she created for herself a fanciful role in the city’s holiday, a fantasy of sex and excitement and freedom that excited her yet left her cold and unmoved—

  The play was stiff, wooden, and quite dull, and nothing the company of Colophon Greeks were able to do could breathe any life into it. Two of the company spoke Latin poorly with an atrocious Ionian accent, and whenever one of these two had lines to speak, the audience roared with laughter and pelted him with fruit peelings and pits and bits of sausage. Even in a comedy, laughter at the wrong place can be destructive; a
nd though the play was contrived as a comedy, it was not particularly funny. Writing in his formal, scholastic manner, Claudius had borrowed freely—if indeed the play actually was from his own hand—and had pasted together a series of contrived incidents. In a mythical country, a child is born to the king’s wife. At precisely the same time, another child is born to the slave woman who tends the queen. Since the queen has no milk and a wet nurse is required, they choose the slave woman, and, of course, she switches the infants so that her own blood may come into the throne. It was an ancient plot, and onto it was grafted a series of equally ancient plots, which unfolded with tedious predictability.

  Berenice, with Gabo crouched at her feet, was seated toward the back of the royal pavilion, which contained places for about two dozen people in four terraces or steps, these of stone hollowed into the shape of chairs and cushioned for comfort. An awning stretched overhead provided shade. Only here and in the other pavilions was shade provided—otherwise the entire amphitheater lay open to the broiling rays of the midday sun. The emperor’s pavilion was the same size as the royal pavilion and provided comfortable seating for those Roman functionaries in Caesarea who desired to see the current play. Today, the Legate Germanicus Latus, a fat, bald, good-natured Italian, was there with his wife and his three daughters and half a dozen people of his suite. Situated on an angle from the royal pavilion, they were able to smile and nod at the royal party. Latus was in Palestine on a trade mission for the emperor, and it would hardly do for him to miss an opening performance of his master’s first theatrical effort. They were amply provided with buckets of iced wine, and they drank and smiled and bowed and stuffed themselves with fruit as the play went on.

  Berenice and Gabo shared the back row of their pavilion with Berenice’s brother, Agrippa, and a young palace page, Joseph Bennoch by name. In the row directly in front of them, three priests and a rather dubious woman of the court were seated. The next row was occupied by seneschals, advisers, more priests, and the palace steward. And in the front row, Agrippa sat with two young women he had favored lately. Two young men of good family shared seats to provide front and maintain the saintliness of the king’s recent reputation.