by Fast, Howard
“Now, devil take me, what is this? What are you two up to? Open the gates! Do you hear me—open the gates!”
The commotion and shouting and nickering of the horses brought people running from everywhere in the city, and very shortly the walls were packed with the citizens of Tiberias, all of them grinning and enjoying a good show, and all of them suddenly partisan; for while they had no particular position concerning Herod of Chalcis, he was trying to enter their city, and they were naturally on the side of whoever was keeping him out.
His patience exhausted, Herod seized a spear from one of his horsemen and, reversing it, pounded with the butt end upon the gates, roaring,
“Open, do you hear me—you bitch! I come to do honor to my dead brother! Open!”
From the top of the wall Berenice regarded him impassively, and her brother said to her, “He’s likely to get a stroke if he carries on like that. I never realized what a fat and choleric old gentleman he is. He must be the very devil in bed, sister.”
Berenice made no reply to this, and Agrippa said,
“He makes me nervous with all that pounding and shouting.”
“When he excites himself, he tends to lose control,” Berenice nodded.
Suddenly, Herod flung the spear away from him and took several deep breaths. Then he said to his wife, “Very well, Berenice, I think this has gone far enough. Are you going to open the gates and let us come into the city?”
“I don’t think so,” Berenice answered.
“Why? Have you lost your senses?”
By now the children of the city, who were the natural keepers of the postern gates, had opened these small doors and poured out to scream their own insults at the column from Chalcis and to pelt the horses with pebbles. The armed guards shouted vituperation at the children, and the children gave it back two for one. Herod attempted to be heard above all this, but much of what he said, Berenice missed entirely. He spoke first about wifely duty.
“You should be ashamed to call me your wife,” Berenice said. “I’m young enough to be your granddaughter.”
“What?”
“Your granddaughter.”
“What about my granddaughter?”
“Go home. You bore me. You tire me.”
“Hire thee?”
“Tire me.”
The walls roared with laughter.
“My brother is dead. You cannot deny me the funeral blessing.”
“Mourn him at home.”
“What?”
“Go away!” the seventeen-year-old king shouted.
“You must obey me! You are my wife!” he shouted.
Yawning, Berenice turned away. “Come, brother,” she said to Agrippa. “I am tired of playing games with that fat old man.”
But Herod refused to return to Chalcis until he had been admitted to the city, and he said that if Berenice and Agrippa kept the gates closed against him, he would send envoys to Rome to plead his case with the Emperor Claudius himself. He made his camp on the shore of the lake, about half a mile from the city; and from the high windows of the palace, Berenice could see him standing before his striped tent and glaring at Tiberias.
She had never played with dolls, as other children do, or with a doll’s house or with any of the toys of childhood, for indeed her childhood came and went, leaving neither an interval of time nor memories. Now she played a wonderful, endlessly complex, and exciting game—the game of the force-behind-the-throne—with all the great area of Palestine as her toy. And indeed, it was, after Rome, the largest and richest land of the ancient world. Stretching from the desert in the south to what was once Phoenicia in the north, and including part of old Phoenicia and part of Iturea, it included Galilee, Bashan, Samaria, Judea, Idumea, and Peraea—with limited dominion beyond its borders over what was left of the ancient Trans-Jordanic peoples, the Edomites and the Moabites and the Ammonites. All of this vast area was placed under the scepter of the dead Agrippa by his friend, the Emperor of Rome. Now, with its population of twenty diverse and fractious peoples, it would have fragmented and torn itself to shreds overnight, were it not for the invisible but memorable power of Rome. The two strange children in Tiberias were less rulers than reminders.
But to Berenice, for this short interval, it appeared that she ruled, that she governed, that she moved the pawns of power. In almost every case of decision, her brother Agrippa did as she advised him to. All sorts of people—soldiers and merchants and priests and Bedouin chieftains and petty lords and archons of this city and that city and ethnarchs of this district and that district and rabbis and Levites—all of these flocked to Tiberias during the first days of Agrippa’s rule, and less to see the king than his beautiful, green-eyed sister who was already the most discussed woman in Israel.
Among these visitors was an Alexandrian Jew named Philo, and when Berenice heard that he was in the city, she ordered that he be presented to her immediately. There was brought to her then a tall, thin man of sixty-four years, his hair and beard snow-white, his eyes deep blue, a simple white robe as his costume, and his feet bare as a symbol of mourning. He smiled at her warmly and then bent and kissed her hand. Then she had a chair brought for him and a tray of fresh fruit and wines. He in turn could not take his eyes from her.
“Is this then,” he finally said, “the child who was brought to us in Alexandria—the frightened child who knew not what fate awaited her among the barbarians? Do you remember me, Berenice? I am Philo, who would have been your uncle had that poor lad, my nephew, lived. The Alabarch Alexander is my brother. Surely you remember?”
“Could I forget?” Berenice smiled. “And if I should forget—would not the whole world know? For who is there in the world who has not heard of Philo, who is for our time Plato and Socrates and Euripides too. You see, I am not entirely the ignorant little savage my reputation presents. I have not read everything you have written, but I have read the Metaphysics and The Journey and parts of the Persecutions—”
“No savage, my dear,” Philo said. “I knew a little girl who was charming beyond her realization. I find a woman of grace and beauty, of whom the whole world talks.”
“Of the monster Berenice!”
“Oh, no—no,” replied Philo. “There are no monsters in my world, my dear—only men and women striving with uncertainty and ignorance and driven and compelled to the actions they take. Men are poor judges, and if they judge what we call evil, they must also perforce judge what we call good. That is why when news came to us at Alexandria that the great King Agrippa was dead, it was decided that I would journey here to Tiberias and present the condolences of myself and my brother and the whole community of Jews at Alexandria to yourself and your brother. For even though death intervened, we are knit together by ties of betrothal. It was perhaps too boastful a dream that we entertained—that our house would be knit to the House of Herod and the House of Mattathias, to create for all the Jews such a royal family as the old Greeks dreamed about when they speculated on the role of the philosopher kings. Too boastful a dream, too vainglorious, I think; for who are we to say what the future will bring? But in any case, there are ties—and in Alexandria we wept for your father. The synagogues were full, and the whole people prayed to God that He be gentle and understanding with the soul of your royal father—such children are we that we ask God to be gentle.”
Berenice did not know how to answer him. His guileless face and his clear blue eyes rejected the polite commonplaces that she would ordinarily have spoken.
“My father,” she began—
“I know more of your father than you might imagine, Berenice, but I judge him within a context. There are many easier matters than to be king. Four years he ruled over Israel, and in those four years he allowed us our pride. Our pride is very important to us. So important that we accept the hatred and envy of millions rather than part with a shred of it.”
“Did he?” Berenice wondered. Awed at first at having the living legend of Jewish philosophy before her, this tall,
white-bearded Jew of Alexandria, who had the power of a prince without domain, whose family was reputed to be one of the three richest in all the world—awed at first, she was irritated now, provoked, and childishly unable to contain her irritation and annoyance. Somehow, she could accept praise of her father from others; not from this man. “I don’t think you knew him. Not at all.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you know who my husband is?”
“Herod of Chalcis,” Philo nodded.
“That’s my heritage from my father—”
“I know what you feel.”
“That and the blood of Herod.”
“There’s no curse in the blood of Herod, Berenice.”
“Please, leave me now,” she said to Philo. “My brother and I will both talk to you later. Now I am tired.”
He took his departure gracefully and without offense. When he had gone, Berenice covered her face with her hands, her body wracked with hard, dry sobs.
Philo remained four days in Tiberias, and during that time he was constantly with either Berenice or Agrippa. Both of them remembered those days, for it was the last time Philo came to Palestine. Three months after he returned to Alexandria, he was dead. But the memory of his being with her was a good thing for Berenice, the memory of his calm and his dispassionate view of events being an antidote to her depressions during the following years.
The very day after Philo left Tiberias, Vibius Marsus arrived. Vibius Marsus was proconsul of Syria, and at that time the most powerful and important representative of Rome in the Near East. From his headquarters in Damascus, he kept his finger on the pulse of the entire Jewish world—Marsus being one of those perceptive Romans who realized that in all of its history, Rome had faced only two real threats, two powers that might have destroyed her. The first was Carthage, and the second was Jerusalem. But just as Carthage was more than the single city, so was Jerusalem, and from Damascus to Alexandria there was no city in which the Jews were not the pivotal force, the nucleus of wealth, culture, and power. Recently Marsus had been to Rome, where the Emperor Claudius had said to him, “These Jews will eat us yet, Marsus.” “Unless they eat each other,” Marsus had replied. He was in Rome when news of Agrippa’s death reached that city, and the emperor had called him and had said to him, “The time has come for Jew to eat Jew, Marsus.” That same day Vibius Marsus left Rome, and twelve hours later he was on a fast galley bound for Palestine and Caesarea. In Caesarea, he spent a few hours talking to Germanicus Latus, and then Marsus set off for Tiberias, himself and his secretary and two Roman soldiers. He left behind him in Caesarea a man who had traveled with him all the way from Rome, a man called Cuspius Fadus.
So to Berenice these two events were connected. Philo went back to Alexandria and to his death, and Vibius Marsus came to Tiberias, riding on a large black horse, two mounted soldiers and his secretary behind him. Before he left, Philo bid Berenice farewell, telling her,
“My child, let Berenice judge Berenice.”
“What do you mean?” Berenice wanted to know.
“Think about it enough and you will realize what I mean. Have you ever tried to love?”
“Oh? Is it something you attempt, like jumping? Or do you study it, like Greek grammar?”
“I think both. Open your heart, Berenice. You have become a woman of great beauty and keen mind, and you are a queen of Israel. I think Israel has waited for a woman like yourself.”
“Why?” Berenice asked directly, irritated as always by poetic obscuration.
“I don’t know,” Philo replied slowly. “This is only something I feel.”
The Roman, Vibius Marsus, spoke flatly and his words were plain enough. He was the very opposite of Philo, a short, black-haired, dark-eyed and heavily muscled man of about fifty. His body was covered with thick, curling black hair, and, unlike a Greek or a Jew, he made no attempt to conceal this, either by shaving his limbs, or by long sleeves or high hose. He was one of those Romans who made a face and cult of simplicity, a brown, short-sleeved shirt, a leather kilt, and plain, heavy-duty army shoes. His hair was clipped short in the fashion of the time at Rome, and his shaved beard gave his broad face a blue sheen. His simple virtues did not, however, bespeak a Spartan existence, and he took for granted the banquet Agrippa served for him and the erotic dances by nude men and women that followed. He ate hugely, drank enough to get quite drunk, and in his drunkenness spun a parable for the edification of Agrippa and Berenice.
“A Jew, a Greek, a Roman, an Egyptian, and a Gaul were in a ship on the Mediterranean,” he told them thickly, “when a great storm arose. A very large storm, believe me. The Greek was the captain of the ship. The Jew was the supercargo. As captain, the Greek decided that the gods must be mollified and the ship lightened, and the Jew, even though he did not believe in the gods, agreed with the Greek. Knowing that a Roman recognizes his duty, the Greek pointed to the Roman, who shouted his praise of Caesar and leaped overboard. But still the ship was in danger, and now the Greek pointed to the Egyptian. Egyptians are exceedingly religious folk, with a great sense of justice. So the Egyptian cried out, Praise Pharaoh!—and overboard he went. Still the ship foundered, and now the Greek looked at the Gaul. The Gauls do proper reverence to the gods, and overboard he went, leaving just the Jew and the Greek. Well, now, the Greek cried out, the fools are dead. Let’s get this ship in to shore.”
Both Agrippa and Berenice laughed dutifully, but neither of them considered the story to be particularly funny.
“Jew and Greek,” muttered the proconsul. “I have governed Syria for a dozen years, but still I cannot afford parties like this one, food like this, girls like this—”
“Whatever girl you desire,” Agrippa said, “is yours. One girl or all of them—as your heart desires, Vibius Marsus.”
“I’m old enough to be your grandfather,” the proconsul said. “But you will give me girls, will you?”
“As you wish,” Agrippa nodded; but Vibius Marsus was staring at Berenice now. His stare, frank, sensual, and uninhibited, did not disturb her. Men had stared at her like that since her breasts budded, since the narrowing of her waist and the widening of her hips proclaimed the fact that she was becoming a woman, and she had survived the two or three post-puberty years of her life in contest and struggle with men. Blocked in so much of her relationship with men, she was driven by no compelling wants or desires; and most men, after their first reaction to her ruddy, green-eyed beauty, sensed the lack of warmth or desire. Vibius Marsus was too drunk to sense it now, and he told Agrippa plainly enough what he wanted.
The boy had to control himself and to struggle for such control, his dark face hardening and becoming like a Greek player’s mask over the somber holes of his eyes. That a Roman could fail to understand what it meant to bear the bloodlines of the Hasmonean and Herodian houses was possible, even natural; for in Berenice’s mind, the Romans were a mongrel race who substituted adoption for natural birth and wove out of the whole cloth a fiction of ancient family and descent that the whole world smiled at; but for a Roman diplomat to fail to realize what it meant to be a princess of the Jewish royal house, out of the oldest descent and people on earth—this was unforgivable. With anyone else, Agrippa’s dagger would have exacted proper payment, and he would have been justified; but no rules applied to the Romans—just as no custom or dignity was valued by them. Agrippa controlled himself, as so many other kings had controlled themselves when faced by Roman proconsuls; he ignored what was said; and he directed Marsus’ attention to one of the dancing girls.
“I spoke of your sister,” the Roman said.
“Did you?” Berenice asked in faultless Latin, her voice as sweet as honey and as cold as ice. “How very droll. You have an excellent sense of humor, Proconsul Marsus. I shall have an occasion soon to send a message to the Emperor Claudius, acknowledging his grief over my father’s death, and in that message I will be sure to convey the delicate and irreproachable sentiments with which you have honored me tonigh
t. I am sure the emperor will be amused.” Berenice rose then and added, “And now I am quite tired. I am sure you will forgive me if I retire.”
The following morning, Vibius Marsus asked for an appointment with Berenice. He made his request through ordinary channels—that is, his secretary requested it of Berenice’s secretary, and his name was entered on the calendar of her day. At about an hour before noon he entered the room where she received people who sought her out. She sat at a table with paper and pen in front of her. She wore a green shift with an overdress of russet brown and, quite deliberately, sandals with an inch of heel. As the Roman entered, Berenice rose, ignoring his protests, came around the table, and greeted him with warmth and charm, as if nothing at all had happened the evening before. In her heels, she was a full three inches taller than the Roman, a tall, coolly possessed, and arresting figure of a woman, her clothes hanging splendidly from her wide shoulders, her hair gathered on her head in the Greek fashion, and her rather large, high-bridged nose and wide mouth accenting her manner of pleasant aloofness. That she was only sixteen years old appeared as impossible to the Roman as it had appeared to so many others—and like so many others, sober now, he was abashed in her presence.