by Fast, Howard
“It is possible,” Berenice smiled.
“I can hardly credit it. You will forgive me if I do not stress the matter of condolences. I don’t imagine that you were too upset when the king died.”
“He was my father,” Berenice replied evenly.
“Of course. Of course. And I would be the last to belittle the bonds of blood. Nevertheless—”
He smiled and mopped his bare skull with a kerchief. His face was round and innocent as a child’s, his dark eyes open and frank.
“Nevertheless—we attempt to understand each other.”
“I always attempt to understand any representative of Rome’s first citizen.”
“Very nicely put, that,” Latus nodded. “Hot here—I don’t know how you Galileans stand the heat of these coastal places. I much prefer your green hills.”
“Thank you,” Berenice smiled. “I too prefer the hills of Galilee to the coastal plain. But my father was here—”
“And where he was, his loyal daughter was,” Latus nodded.
“If you wish to think of it in that way.”
“Ah—yes, I suppose that I do. Your Latin is excellent, Queen Berenice.”
“That’s hardly surprising, since I spent a year in Rome as a child. Not that I remember too much, but the language is formed. I also had a Latin tutor as well as a Greek tutor.”
“Amazing,” Latus nodded, clasping his hands around his fat, protruding stomach. “Utterly amazing—the more so to such an ignoramus as myself. How many languages do you have, my dear?”
“Latin and Greek,” Berenice replied dutifully, “and of course my native tongue, Aramaic. I also speak a little Egyptian—the patois—and naturally Hebrew, our holy tongue, in which our sacred books are written.”
“Five languages,” the Roman said, shaking his head in admiration. “A most astonishing woman, my dear. You don’t mind if I address you as ‘my dear.’ I do hope you don’t mind. I am fully aware of your rank as queen of Chalcis and as the first princess of the ancient Hasmonean blood, but I am also fifty-three years old, and it is difficult for me not to think of a young girl of sixteen as my daughter. I have three daughters, you know.”
“And I have a husband your age, as you also know,” Berenice said engagingly. “So I do feel very comfortable with you, and I don’t mind at all if you call me ‘my dear,’ or any other term that might strike your fancy.”
“As I would a daughter.”
“Naturally,” Berenice nodded.
“And I talk to you as I would to a daughter. You see, if you were my daughter, I would have to ask you why you disposed of the beaker of wine so quickly? It might have provided an interesting test.”
“An accident.” Berenice brushed the matter aside, as of no importance.
“Oh, no, no, no. Hardly an accident, my dear. Do you really think that I murdered your father?”
“The whole idea is monstrous,” Berenice replied. “However, the captain of my father’s guard, Enoch Benaron, has a short temper and an even shorter store of intelligence. He prefers action, as most stupid men do—and—”
“And a Roman legate might have been mistakenly killed. That would have been unfortunate.”
“God help us, yes,” Berenice whispered.
“But to you, my dear,” Latus went on, “why should it mean anything to you, the queen of Chalcis? Rome would have punished this place. The legions would come and Roman justice would have come with them. But what skin off your back, if I may ask?”
“You forget that I am a Jew,” Berenice said quietly.
“No. Oh no. That is something I never forget. No Jew allows anyone else ever to forget who he is.”
“And a Hasmonean,” Berenice added, nettled and trying to put down the Roman without revealing her irritation.
“Of course—but a moment ago, I reminded you of that. I am becoming quite an expert at Gentile-Jewish diplomacy, don’t you think?”
“I hardly think one has to be an expert. We are plain folk.”
“Oh no!” Latus burst into laughter. “Plain folk indeed, my dear! Never. You are frauds. Plain—no, you are complex to the point of bewilderment. You are all romantics, filled with illusions, and quite as dangerous as people with illusions can be. You worship a God who does not exist but who dwells in a temple that is empty, and you make virtue out of what is unpleasant and sin out of what is pleasant—and sages out of sixteen-year-old children who bear an international reputation for immorality and wantonness and proceed to behave like combinations of vestal virgins and Latin tribunes, and so help me, you do confuse a simple Italian peasant like myself. You confuse me no end. But I am beginning to adore you, and that is quite a dreadful thing when it happens to a fat, bald man in his fifties. Perhaps because I am a Roman, and thereby a little warier than your husband, I intend to discourage this tendency in myself. Do you hate me because you believe that I killed your father?”
“I don’t know who killed my father.”
“Well, have it that way then.”
“No, I don’t hate you at all,” Berenice said. “As a matter of fact, I find you very charming. Would you do something for me?”
“I am at your service,” he cried.
“Would you tell me whether the emperor will confirm my brother, Agrippa, as king over all the Jews and over their lands?”
“Ah—” He spread his thick, hamlike hands. “If the Jewish succession could go to a woman, I might answer that more easily.”
“But it can go only to a man,” Berenice said.
“Who knows, my dear? This morning, I sent a messenger to Rome. It will take him ten or eleven days to go, as much to return—and time for the emperor to ponder the question. In a month, we will know. Meanwhile, your brother is as much king as anyone—and you—what are you, my dear?”
“I wonder,” Berenice said thoughtfully.
One other matter of importance happened before the funeral procession left for Jerusalem. Enoch’s soldiers discovered the priest Phineas trying to leave the city disguised as an Egyptian bearer, a particularly nasty disguise for a Jewish priest—as Agrippa pointed out in informing his sister of the event.
“What about him?” Berenice asked.
“I want to crucify the bastard. Anyway, someone must be blamed and punished for the murder, and now that word is around that Phineas disguised himself as an Egyptian, there won’t be a shred of sympathy for him.”
“That makes sense,” Berenice agreed. “It’s always best when someone is punished for something. People stop talking and speculating. But don’t crucify him. Hang him.”
“Why?” Agrippa protested. “I hate his guts. He always was an informer, a sniveling bearer of tales, a miserable and worthless glutton—”
“I know, I know. But it doesn’t look too good for your first official act to be a crucifixion. It won’t sit well with the Pharisees. Also, Phineas did not murder father.”
“Then he’ll hang,” Agrippa shrugged.
“If you wish,” Berenice said indifferently.
Jerusalem was a strange interval. It remembered Berenice, and in that way it evoked her memory and was thereby sentient. It lived and waited, something she would be aware of for years to come; and in her memory, she saw it both from above and from below. It was not the first time she had been to Jerusalem, but it was the first time in four years, and four years ago she had been only twelve. She had been a child, and now she was a woman.
She saw the city floating in the air. Without support it floated, the City of God pressed up by His holy breath, and it gleamed like silver and gold in the light of the morning sun. Was there ever such a sight? She was walking with Agrippa behind the dying Cypros, who was carried in a litter at the head of the procession, and, of like mind, they paused and stared.
The city was in two places at once; it was both above them and below them, here and now and once long ago and yet to be. Berenice could look down over its walls, and yet the city hung suspended in the sky. For once she was wordles
s, for seeing this city, she also saw a part of herself that she had been unaware of.
As the funeral procession approached close to the gates of Jerusalem, the people poured forth to greet the last remains of their dead king. Four years he had been king over them, and four years he had, so far as they knew, obeyed the injunctions of the Holy Torah. What else he was, they neither knew nor cared; they understood only that the king of the Jews had passed away, and that this was a king who was like a saint.
So they rent their garments and poured dirt upon their heads. They cried out in grief—and then when they saw their queen lying in the litter, dying as all knew, and behind her, the brother and sister, Agrippa and Berenice, the living blood of the Maccabees, soon to be orphaned—when they saw all this, they silenced their cries of grief and stood and wept. More and more people came out of the city, hundreds and then thousands, and they stood, a wall of people along the road, weeping.
What prompted her to do it, she did not know, but now Berenice kicked off her sandals and walked barefoot in the dust. Seeing this, her brother did the same. She began to weep—not of her own volition, not out of grief or pain, but because the flow of emotion from the weeping thousands was so great she could not resist it. It made no difference that this rabble were the common glut of Jerusalem’s streets—the Yisroel, as differentiated from the Levites, the priesthood, and the princely and noble families who claimed this or that spoonful of the blood of David, Mattathias, or Aaron—she became one with them, her heart wracked with a misery all the worse because it was nameless and without sorrow.
Outside the gates of the city, the procession halted—and there, too, halted the crowd, stretching away and covering the whole saddle of the hill the road topped, for this was Herod’s Gate on the road from Samaria to Jericho, and the road to it only a dusty path off the main road. But it was Cypros’ wish to enter the city here rather than through the great Damascus Gate, for Agrippa was of the House of Herod and the blood of Herod. She lay dying, and it was not for her to think now of her grandfather’s sins. Let the same God punish Herod the Great who had made him king over Israel; but Herod’s name and hand were on a gate into the city, and it was fitting that they enter there and that his grandson’s body be symbolized there.
In front of the gate the high priest stood, the old man, Elionai, his snow-white beard falling to his waist, and he raised his arms for silence; and then when the silence came, he began to chant the prayer of mourning:
“Glorified and made holy be the mighty name of Jehovah, everywhere on this earth which He has created as He willed it to be. Let His kingdom come in your lifetime, in your days, and soon—and thus in the days of the whole House of Israel! Oh, say ye Amen!”
“Amen” rose up from the thousands of throats.
The Aramaic chant was taken up by other thousands who crowded the city walls now:
“From holy heaven, peace, and life—for us! For all of Israel! Then say ye Amen—”
In Jericho, deep down in the valley beyond the city, they heard the sound of that somber Amen.
Cypros remained in Jerusalem. She was dying, as she well knew, and she wanted to die there in Jerusalem where her last sight would be of the shining sun-drenched walls of the Temple. In any case, the climate at Jerusalem was cool and pleasant, far more comfortable and salubrious than the heat of the coastal plain; and certainly better than the oppressive heat on the shores of Lake Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee, where her home was. Part of the ancient palace of Simon Maccabeus was refurbished and furnished for her convenience, and there she was made as comfortable as possible, with her ladies to attend her. Berenice saw to these matters, not out of any sense of duty or affection, but because she had discovered that when she spoke or ordered or instructed, she was obeyed more readily than anyone else, including her brother—who was almost king of the Jews, Rome willing.
As for love of her mother or pity over her impending death, Berenice was devoid of both. Her father had been an impassable barrier to her mother, and Cypros herself had never successfully intervened to protect Berenice from the strong, violent, selfish man who had been her father. Although already in his tomb, Agrippa the elder remained alive in Berenice’s mind. She would awaken by night, whimpering and sweating, from a dream where she saw him and cringed before his will. She would see a man who resembled him on the street, and suddenly she would turn cold all over, her heart hammering with fear. How strange, she thought, that I should fear him more now that he is dead than I ever did when he was alive! Yet fear him she did—and she found herself avoiding Cypros, even to say farewell.
“Perhaps we should remain here with her?” Agrippa wondered. He had a certain affection for his mother. “We leave her and she dies—God won’t forgive us for that.”
“If you attempt to determine your actions by what God will or will not forgive you for, you will shortly go out of your mind. You will also betray everything the House of Herod has stood for,” Berenice told him caustically. “You happen to be king—at least until Claudius wills otherwise, and your place is in the palace at Tiberias.”
“I know,” Agrippa sighed. He was seventeen, at least five years younger than his sister’s sixteen.
“But do you know? I wonder. A government is not something you can carry around in a pouch. A government consists of lines of communication, ministers, ambassadors, an army, a navy, stewards, seneschals—and heaven knows what else—”
“God help me,” Agrippa protested, “I don’t know what to do or where to turn! Whom do I trust? They all come to me, morning, noon, and night, pleading for this and that post. They all want to advise me—and I hate and mistrust the lot of them. They were his men, and they hate me. If my brother was still alive, I’d be dead now—wouldn’t I?”
“I suppose you would,” Berenice nodded.
“Then whom to turn to?”
“Myself,” Berenice smiled, and as Agrippa continued to stare at her somberly, added, “or don’t you trust me?”
“You’re a girl—” Agrippa began.
“Ah, no—no, brother. Don’t make that mistake. I tell you, no one will make that mistake again. Never! Now will you listen to me?”
Agrippa nodded.
“Good. Now we are going to return to Tiberias—now. Do you understand? This place is too big, too complex, full of too many parties and currents and plots and counterplots. God help us if we get caught up in any of those! In Tiberias, we are home, and the government is there—your government. There is only one thing to do before we leave here.”
“And that?”
“The army. There are three thousand of the king’s troops here. I want you to dismiss every captain—immediately—the captains of the fifties and the captains of the hundreds and the captains of the thousands. Dismiss them. Thank them. Then tell them to go home, and the king’s favor with them. Give them some gold. But get rid of them, and that includes Benaron. All of them.”
Agrippa shook his head slowly.
“Why? Are you afraid?”
“I suppose so,” he replied miserably.
“Why? Why?”
“Damn it—look at me! They will. This boy, they’ll say—this empty-headed kid. They’re men. Some of them have been in the army a lifetime—”
“You’re king,” she interrupted, annoyed, provoked by his fear and his childishness. “Do you know what it means to be king?”
“Come with me,” he begged her. “I tell you I can’t do it alone—”
So Berenice went with him, stood beside him, and stared arrogantly at the bearded veterans who were told that their careers were over, that they were no longer a part of the armed forces of the king of the Jews.
Then she helped Agrippa to chose a new staff—very young men and Galileans for the most part. When she and her brother left Jerusalem the next day, the Jerusalem forces marched with them. Only the Levite temple guards remained to defend the city; but that troubled no one. The land was at peace.
The march of young King Agrippa a
nd his sister, Berenice, from Jerusalem through Samaria and up into Galilee and Tiberias was a sort of triumphal procession; for even though the land was in mourning for the dead king, it was a joyous occasion to see these two fair children, his son and daughter, both of them as tall and beautiful as ancient legends come to life, the boy so slim and straight, his new beard light as down upon his cheeks and wearing no jewels or mark of rank over his dark cloak of mourning but only the felt cap of the Hasmoneans to show his ancestry and his noble bloodline, and the girl so tall and fair, her auburn hair flaming in the sunlight, her green eyes knowing and seeing with a sense of maturity and judgment beyond her sixteen years. They were a royal pair that delighted the simple country people—so much so that they were prepared to forget that Berenice was married to their dead king’s despised brother, Herod of Chalcis.
And the reaction of these people in the little villages they passed through was equally gratifying to Berenice. She felt a sense of power, a sense of the necessity and purpose of her being and living and speaking and moving. For the first time, she began to value herself. She began to dream now of what might be when her brother, Agrippa, was confirmed in his kingship by the Romans—and more and more she became convinced that such confirmation would be forthcoming. Then no Herod of Chalcis would stand in her way—and for her and her brother nothing would be impossible.
As they marched into Samaria, Berenice remembered all she had heard of the hostility of the Samaritans and their hatred of the Jews. While they marched now with an army, still the Samaritans could have closed the gates of their cities and barred the doors of their houses. Quite to the contrary, the gates and doors were wide open, and the Samaritans came by the thousands to cheer the young king and his sister and to throw flowers in their path. Elijah, high priest of the Samaritans, appeared in person at the gates of the city of Samaria. Surrounded by his own Levites—according to his own designation—he called down the blessing of the Almighty upon Agrippa and Berenice, and invoked for their future glory and success the Holy Tetragrammaton, pronouncing the name of God Eyabe, in the Samaritan fashion. The influential Pharisees with Berenice and Agrippa whispered to them that not in the past decade had a Samaritan priest pronounced the name of God aloud in the hearing of a Jew. The worship of the Samaritans was ridden with magic and Ashtart-practices, and they regarded the Tetragrammaton as a magic force and entity unto itself.