Agrippa's Daughter

by Fast, Howard

  A table was set to awe even Berenice. There were singers from Crete, dancers from the Ganges River, and a clever juggler from Alexandria. Over eighty men and women sat to table, for in the manner of the Hillelites, the sexes were mixed—and in the same manner, there was neither drunkenness nor overeating. The old man, sitting beside Berenice, wiped his eyes with his napkin, tried to control his emotion, and told her what it meant to his old heart to see the two houses of Herod and Hillel finally united.

  “You have heard that I was high priest, my child—so it was, so it was, long, long ago and almost at the beginning of time, when Herod your great-grandfather was king over Israel—oh, the measure of his wickedness!—and the good and saintly Hillel was king over the hearts of good men. I knew them both, may they rest in peace, the evil with the good, for who but the Almighty ever truly knows of an absence of goodness? For sitting here now, in the long overdue twilight, I seem to sense the pattern of the Almighty’s working, the meaning of His design, may He forgive me and have mercy upon me, for He does not take kindly to our knowledge of His ways—yet I see a glimmer of the morning sun which, like Moses, was to be denied to me—a glimmer of brave and glorious future Israel—no, the whole world might know. For you, who is Queen Esther born again—you will sit with your husband on a throne mightier than any, any—I was talking of thrones, was I not—and the throne of Herod was four cubits tall, with cherubim for him to lay his hands upon—” His voice wandered away. In spite of the heat, he was wrapped in a striped woolen cloak, and he held it tightly around him, shivering a little—

  In bed that night, Berenice clutched Shimeon, whispering to him that she was afraid. “So much afraid, Shimeon. The Angel of Death is in this house. I am afraid to fall asleep.”

  But he soothed her, and at last she slept.

  They took the road south from Jerusalem, their way being by Bethlehem to Hebron and from thence to Beersheba. But above Hebron, they passed through Betab, the tiny Benjaminite village where Gabo was born. She rode through with her face covered, for the air was dry as a shard and hot as fire. “Your birthplace,” Berenice reminded her, and Gabo said, “Curses on my birthplace. I never wanted to see this land again.” On their left lay the awful wilderness of Judea, with its stark and precipitous cliff faces, its slashed, ocher-colored wadis that were clefts into the belly of hell, at the bottom of which lay the Dead Salt Sea. The burning, dry air was filled with a powdery dust that forced its way into every wrinkle and fold of skin and eyes, and the travelers mostly rode with their faces covered and often with their eyes closed, leaving it to the small, nimble-footed Lebanese ponies who had carried them from Galilee to find their own way. For Berenice, every step of the way was discomfort and bodily indignity, the heat—so different from the green coolness of her native land—the dust, the great empty spaces of the badland rock desert, the sheer cliffs, the dust, the misery of the few tiny villages they passed through, the skinny goats seeking fodder where a lizard would starve to death, and always the imminence of danger. Yet it was what she wanted and what she had sought, and she would not complain. She had said that she would follow Shimeon to hell—and this was precisely what had occurred.

  Below Hebron, in the Land of Idumea, they came across a camel caravan that had been attacked. The camels had been led away, except for one that was gutted and dead, but seven of the drivers lay dead along the road and the eighth moaned in agony and bled out his life. Shimeon dismounted and did what he could for the poor man, binding his wounds, stopping the flow of blood, and giving him water. They remained with him for an hour, until he died. The desert floor was too stony for burial, but Shimeon explained to Berenice that sooner or later—certainly in the next few days—the local people would find the bodies and bury them. Looking around the wasteland where they were, Berenice found it hard to conceive that there were local people of any kind. Her ancestors on the Herodian side of her bloodline were Idumeans, and she shivered to think that they had an origin in this rocky wasteland where no blade of grass grew.

  They went on. In Beersheba, the local inn was a pesthole, stinking to the sky of urine and human and animal waste; so they passed it by and pitched a tent in the open. On a striped Bedouin blanket, Berenice lay in the arms of her husband, with the glittering, star-strewn desert sky like a bowl above them. She watched the lines of flame left by the meteorites and told Shimeon that each one marked a visit to earth from the Angel of Death, Malak Hamashhit, who always kept one corner of one eye fixed upon Jerusalem, for while it was necessary to bring death to the Gentiles as well, the Malak Hamashhit did not like the Jews to forget him even for a moment.

  “Which only goes to prove,” she went on, “what a provoking race we are. Others desire a larger share of what is good, and we can’t rest unless we have the lion’s share of what is bad.”

  “All very profound, my darling,” Shimeon agreed, “but I have seen too many die from too many earthly causes to put much stock in your Malak Hamashhit—who is no different from all the other kings of the underworld, Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, and so forth. As for those streaks up there, the Greeks teach that they are bits of burning iron falling from the sky, and when I was a student there, I saw one of those fragments—”

  “You are too Greek and too rational for me.” He took her in his arms, and she said, “Except to come here. What is rational in that?”

  The next day, they left the main road and took the track to the southeast that led to Ezion Geber. They left before dawn, but by midday it was too hot to travel, and they lay for shelter and rest in the shade of an overhanging rock crag. By midaftemoon they traveled again, and now they rode past the ruins of an ancient city of great size. Berenice wondered whether it might be the legendary Sodom, but Shimeon pointed out that those old cities that the Torah told about were far to the north. This might well be a forgotten city of the Amelekites or the Edomites.

  The day afterward they were halted and surrounded by a mixed band of Sicarii and Idumeans, about two dozen of them, well mounted and well armed. Shimeon warned Adam to make no hostile move. Neither he nor Adam had arms in sight. Berenice had a sudden wave of terror as the band of highwaymen came sweeping down on them, screaming and hooting; and she took great pride in the fact that Shimeon sat his horse calmly, waiting without any apparent alarm. Gabo began to scream and plead, but a sharp blow across her face by Berenice put an end to this. Berenice sensed that the situation had to be controlled—that if it got out of control it would be very dangerous for all of them, and she sat motionless while the robbers closed in on them, handled their horses and clothes and trapping.

  “Who are you and where from and where to?” their leader spat at Shimeon.

  “A physician, out of Galilee. This is my wife—and these two are our slaves.”

  Berenice, her hair hidden, her face covered with dust, provoked no recognition—nor was she apparently desirable, her frame too big and bony, the ridges of her face too marked. They were handled and questioned, and then the leader of the band complained to Shimeon of a wearing pain in his gut. Did he have purges with him?

  They dismounted, as did the robbers, and Adam unpacked Shimeon’s stock of medicine. Shimeon examined the man with the pain in the belly, and prescribed a mixture of dried hemp and dwa leaf, both to be burned and breathed as incense. As he told Berenice later, the man had a lump the size of a melon in his gut, a tumor that would kill him in no great time ahead. Another robber had a festering thigh wound, and Shimeon cleaned it and put a drain into it. He lanced boils, cleaned cankers, and cut away an ingrown toenail; and stifling her disgust at the filthy condition of the robbers—they never washed, and their odor was unbearable—Berenice managed to help him and work with him.

  He finished with the band, and they gave him three gold coins for his efforts—which he gravely accepted. The robbers guided them to a sheltered camping place, an abandoned building of stone—all that was left of an ancient fortress—and the following day, Berenice saw the slag heaps of Ezion Geber in the dist
ance.

  Many years after this, Titus, who was to be Emperor of Rome, asked Berenice what had moved Shimeon to go to Ezion Geber, and she replied simply that he had gone because there was no physician there and one was needed.

  “Why?” Titus insisted, and Berenice replied, “Because people were dying.” “But people die everywhere.” It was not to be explained. You are married and you take a bride to such a place; and afterward Berenice remembered this as a happy time, a strangely and improbably happy time. “We took our honeymoon in hell,” she said to her brother afterward. “I have married a very strange man indeed, but that does not change the fact that he is the man for me, the only man I have had any happiness from.”

  A hard-faced Jew, Smah Barachad, commanded the soldiers at Ezion Geber. There had been a hundred and twelve soldiers, but now fully half of them were dead. The overseers were Egypto-Arabs from the Sinai Peninsula, degraded and illiterate brutes who boasted in their slovenly Aramaic of some kind of bastard descent from the Tribe of Ken, and thereby from the mythical ancestor, Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses; but in all truth they were nameless bastards out of nowhere, sadistic, lustful the way animals are lustful, and utterly without mercy. There had been almost three hundred of them, but they too had been cut down by disease, as had been their brothel of women, slaves, cast-outs—anything they could lay hands on with name or shape of woman to it. But the worst toll the plague had taken was among the slaves—of whom there had been over six thousand. Now only two thousand were left.

  Berenice had never been to a mine before. She had seen field slaves and house slaves, but never these blind and twisted and fleshless mockeries of men that crawled each day like animals into their black tunnels, to emerge dragging baskets of copper ore, to return again, to die in their tunnels, to come out and thrash and twist and beat themselves in a lust for suicide but without the strength for suicide. They were naked, covered with a crust of filth, covered with their own feces dried and caked on them, elbow and knee black with festering callus, bearded, long-haired, bereft of language, whimpering and groaning instead of speaking—

  “Dogs,” said Smah Barachad. “Lazy, dirty dogs. Soon they’ll all be dead.” He was content with the situation and resented Shimeon’s presence there. He had first call on the property of the soldiers and overseers who died and a firm belief that he would outlive all of them. Eventually Shimeon and Adam Benur buried him. A plain young soldier, a boy with a hard stomach and a harder constitution, got his money.

  After the first night there, Shimeon said to Berenice, “You had better go back to the north with Gabo and Adam.”

  “Why?” Berenice asked him.

  “This is no place for you.”

  “For you?”

  Shimeon shrugged. “I must—”

  “Well, I don’t think you must,” Berenice interrupted. “You can’t cure anyone. None of you physicians can, and they will die anyway. But while you are here, I intend to remain here with you—and at least I will come to understand you. I don’t now.”

  “This will disgust you—”

  “I don’t disgust easily,” Berenice said.

  “And turn you against me.”

  “Not because you are noble,” Berenice smiled, “but only because you are stupid. It’s stupidity that I cannot abide.”

  Yet she bore everything else, and strangely enough, she was not unhappy. When Smah Barachad made advances toward her, she told him matter-of-factly that other men had died for the same thing and that forewarned was forearmed. He did not know who she was, but something in her unlikely green eyes convinced him that she was telling the truth. She got along with the worst as well as the best. The overseers she treated with haughty disdain and aloofness; the Jewish soldiers directly and with no affectation or flirtatiousness; and the slaves with a controlled pity and tenderness that was the constant amazement and wonder of Shimeon Bengamaliel. Perhaps even more amazed was Berenice, for she found herself doing things that would have been inconceivable—and no need to force herself, and no horror when she cradled the lice-ridden head of a dying slave against her breast, and no disgust at smells that would have sent her fainting once, smells and filth and the bony, hideous remnants of human bodies. Shimeon tried to keep her away from his work, and she said to him, “There’s no other alternative to madness here. If you lose me as a worker, then you lose a mistress too.” “You are a queen.” “Oh, you poor fool! Do you bring a queen here?” she demanded. He taught her then, and she learned how to dress wounds, how to clean open sores, how to set broken bones, and how to minister to the dying. She lost weight. The dry air dehydrated her, and though her youthful skin was stretched tight against her face bones, it retained its elasticity and vitality. In fact, all of her was vitality—a combination of spirit and strength such as Shimeon had never believed possible in a woman; and when Gabo came down with the same hellish disease that was raging in the mines, a flush at first, and then sores all over the body, and then raging fever and most often death, Berenice nursed her through, tended her as gently and carefully as she would have tended her own child.

  At night, she lay in Shimeon’s great arms, and she knew more happiness than she had ever known before. They remained forty-one days at Ezion Geber, until the plague had burned itself out. Smah Barachad, the hard-faced, hard-souled Jewish mercenary was not the only one who died there. Gabo recovered, but there in the desert they buried the big Galilean, Adam Benur. Berenice wept like a child. It was not hard now. Ezion Geber had been an education in grief; she had learned to weep as the world weeps.

  Dying, Adam Benur had named her and called her by title and position, while many others stood around and listened. This did not change things, for her identity was already suspected. She could not work here and keep her crown of red hair hidden, and with her red hair and pale green eyes she was as much a feature of the land as any mark of wood or stone. News has wings, and the word has wings. She was Berenice of the bread, which she had given to the poor and the hungry in Tiberias; and the slaves, who had learned to die without pleading, groveled before her and pleaded for life and freedom. She wept and turned to Shimeon:

  “What can I do?”

  “You must decide that, my beloved.”

  “There are half a million slaves in Israel. Did I do it? Did I enslave them? And where does the Torah say that this is wrong?”

  Shimeon shook his head.

  “Are there no slaves in the House of Hillel?” she cried.

  “There are—yes, God help me, there are, and this is the shape of the world, Berenice. We change the world a little, but slowly, slowly.”

  “Then what should I do? Tell me, Shimeon.”

  She was treating a slave who pleaded with her, and when she shook her head mutely, he took a sliver of stone he had concealed about his person and plunged it into his heart. He was only a boy—no more than fourteen or fifteen years old—a Jewish boy, as Berenice could see from his nakedness. He was skin and bones, as unkempt as an animal, and he had pleaded with her for life and freedom and accepted death instead.

  The owner of the mines, Salam Baryusuf, a very rich Idumean, made one of his rare visits to the mine. He came in rage with thirty soldiers, for word had come to him that there were people at his mine planting seeds of discontent among his slaves and overseers; but his rage passed away when he realized that two of the most famous people in Israel were facing him, and that they had been working for weeks to save the lives of his slaves and soldiers and overseers. In the face of Berenice, he became obsequious. He humbled himself, apologized for the conditions at the mine, explained that while these mines were fruitful in the ancient days of King Solomon, they had by now been worked to death. In fact, as he explained it, the mines were practically an institution for maintaining the lives of his slaves.

  “I will buy the mines from you,” Berenice said suddenly. “The mines and the slaves. Set me a price.”

  Shimeon was no less stunned than Baryusuf. The Idumean stroked his beard with a trembl
ing hand, muttered, calculated. It was true that the mines were worked out. They brought barely a profit, but did the Jewish woman know that? How could she? The other was a physician and out of the House of Hillel—and they were alien to all things practical. He asked for a million shekels. Berenice did not laugh. “You belittle me,” she said softly. “Perhaps you forget who I am. Have you heard about my anger?” The Idumean glanced about nervously. He knew that they had come here with a single male servant, whom they had buried already. He had his soldiers and his overseers. Why should he be afraid? Yet he was afraid, and he muttered that Berenice should make him an offer.

  “I will pay you ten thousand shekels,” she said.