Agrippa's Daughter

by Fast, Howard

  “Nashi,” she said softly to Shimeon. Agrippa and the Ba’as Hacohen moved away so that they could speak in privacy. “Nashi,” she said, “I used to dream that there would be a prince in Israel—not like the kings we remember but a prince like Gideon or Judah Benmattathias, and he would sit on a golden throne and rule with the wisdom of Solomon and the mercy and compassion of Hillel. Because I am really an unpleasant and proud woman who took great pleasure in the fact that she was once a queen. But queen of Chalcis is very little, believe me—this is different. You are nashi over Israel, and the Great Sanhedrin. I think that in all the world, a man could stand no higher.”

  He shook his head.

  “I speak the truth.”

  He shook his head again hopelessly.

  “Well, this is no farewell, my beloved. We will be together this evening in Jerusalem.”

  Then Berenice left with her brother. The gates of the wall that surrounded the House of Hakedron were open, and as Berenice and Agrippa walked through—on foot toward Jerusalem—the men who had met the night before gathered in the gateway to watch them. In the field where the horse troops were encamped, there was a flurry of motion as the soldiers pressed forward to look at the strange sight of the king of the Jews walking on foot with his sister, on the road that led from the House of Hakedron toward Jerusalem, and shepherds, too, stared with gaping mouths as they cleared the road of their sheep and goats. But there was no sound, no voice raised, and they walked on, the House of Hakedron dropping behind them and the mighty walls of the city looming up ahead.

  Here there were Sicarii stationed as outposts on the road, for the Sicarii held the gates to the city and manned the approaches. They stared at Berenice and Agrippa, and one or two of them took a step toward the pair—only to be halted by the disdainful green eyes of Berenice. Green eyes, red hair, blood-red dress and pale blue underdress—she walked like no woman they had ever seen—these lean and ragged desert assassins. Berenice had a good opportunity to see the Sicarii now, look at them, study them—and they were very much of a type. Unwashed, emitting the stale, dry odor of men who never washed, long of beard and hair, burnt brown, even black by the sun, they had the look of fanatics, the wild irresoluteness of madmen; and as she watched them, Berenice thought of the House of Hillel and the gentleness, the aura of love that seemed to hang over it there among the green and golden Galilean hills. The aura of hate here was equally strong. She said to her brother, “They are not seen by you, only by me.” “I hide behind your skirts, then.” “Brother, brother,” she said, “this is ours too, our unclean—for we have raised this up out of Israel as much as we raised up the House of Hillel. We will try to comprehend it before we fight it. There are three thousand of them here in Jerusalem. They hold the city, the approach, the gates—because they are the only ones here who know their minds, their aims and objectives.” “And what are their objectives?” “Death,” Berenice answered him.

  Two of the Sicarii barred their way. They wore their long knives openly now, two knives with crossed handles. They wanted no shields. Yaweh was their shield, they proclaimed. They put their hands on their knives as they barred the way, and from every direction people whose homes and work were outside of the city walls came running. The walls around the gate were equally crowded.

  “You know who we are,” Berenice said quietly.

  “But what you are?”

  “This is the king of the Jews, and I am his sister,” Berenice said. “I am also wife of the nashi. So this is what we are, and lay a hand upon us, assassin, and see how Jews will choose between the Sicarii and their king.”

  The Sicarii had waited too long, and the decision was made for them. In the old days, it had been said of Berenice that her eyes were not those of a human but of a devil; still now, in anger, her eyes were not something easy to face, and the Sicarii stood aside. Berenice and Agrippa walked on. By the time they stood before the city gates, a crowd of over a thousand people had gathered around. The Sicarii were in front of the gate, and they manned the towers above it; but there were more people than Sicarii; the walls were packed with people, and as those in the city threw up their questions, those on the walls shouted down:

  “It is the Queen Berenice and her brother, Agrippa.”

  From inside the walls, they shouted, “Open the gates!” The cry was taken up—by more and more, until it was a commanding roar heard quite clearly at the House of Hakedron. Meanwhile, the people in the crowd, poor people mostly, very poor people, shepherds and charcoal burners and peasants who scraped a living out of a few olive trees planted in the inhospitable soil, pressed closer, not daring to touch Agrippa, who stood tall and slender and silent, wearing a robe of the royal purple, beard and hair curled, and on his head a pale blue cap of Levi; but they were drawn toward Berenice as toward a magnet. A woman bolder than the others dropped on her knees by Berenice and kissed her hand. The woman wept, and the weeping became contagious. Other women picked up stones and hammered at the gates, and when the Sicarii tried to push the women away, they spat wildly in the faces of the assassins. Then the gates were unbolted and opened.

  The crowd opened up a path for Agrippa and Berenice, and they walked forward into the city. Berenice had decided that she would lead Agrippa up into the great plaza of the Upper Market—an area large enough to hold half the population of the city in a common assembly—and it was toward there that they now walked, through streets that were packed with people—not to see Agrippa, but to shout back to others, “It is Berenice—our queen. The queen of the Jews has come back to the city.” They pressed around her and followed her. Berenice had not realized the magnitude that her action in the plaza had taken on; but now they would have it that no child in the city was alive but by virtue of her plea to Florus. They wanted it that way. They needed her desperately, for all the skies had turned dark and dismal and were closing in upon them, and they needed the refuge of the mother. It was right and proper that she should be so tall and improbably beautiful and clad in the burning red that was an old and holy color, as it was right that her hair was red; for the red hair was as ancient as the Jewish memory. Who did not know that Aaron’s hair burned like fire? Moses himself had been touched by the red finger of God. “Let Levi be red,” said the Almighty, red with blood, with anger, with holy fanaticism—and among the temple guards, who were Levites, one in three was red, and as they came to the great open plaza of the Upper Market, the Levite guards leaned over the temple wall to watch, their burnished spearheads in a long line. Half of the population of the city was in the plaza now, and more were pressing to find the approaches, and each of the Sicarii was pinned by citizens of the city, pinned so tightly that knife and mind were impotent. From the roof tops of the two stone citadels where they were imprisoned, trapped and under siege, the remainder of the Roman cohorts also watched the enormous assembly come into being.

  Agrippa climbed onto a ledge of stone, and then bent to draw Berenice up after him. The hands were gentle, tender as they handed her up. The king and his sister were alone—no guards, no seneschals, no dragging servitors, handmen, handmaidens, no trappings—only the two of them with a quarter of a million people around them; and Berenice felt pride and contentment. If she did no more, it was still fitting that at least the line of Herod had achieved this, to stand alone and unprotected and secure among their own people.

  Agrippa raised his hands for silence, and Berenice felt her own heart tighten with anxiety. Could he do it, control this, make himself heard, find words for this vast throng?

  Silence came. Silence over everything, the upturned faces, the people packed on the roof tops, the guards lining the wall of the Temple, the trapped Romans in their stone redoubts.

  “I also honor my sister,” Agrippa said, “for she taught me the way of Hillel—”

  The silence was deeper. Jerusalem was not a place committed to the teachings of Hillel. Here Shammai the vengeful ruled, and out of every ten men in the crowd, eight were Zealots, passively or aggre
ssively.

  “—and so I came here,” he went on, speaking clearly and simply, “not to make war but to make peace. There have been great war chiefs who were kings in Israel. I am not one of them. I hate war and I hate death. I will go to the Romans, and I will be a voice for you, not to plead out of fear but out of the pride that was the soul and essence of Hillel. I think I can make peace and avert war. I think that perhaps I can put a finish to the terrible things that the procurators have done here in Jerusalem. I only plead with you for time and for patience. I think that Gessius Florus misjudged many things—you, your anger, the strength of his cohorts, and the patience of the Emperor Nero. I know the emperor, and he will hide his face in horror when he hears from my lips and from my sister’s lips and from the lips of Shimeon Bengamaliel, your nashi, what Florus unloosed here in Jerusalem. The Romans are not like us, but war with the Jews is the last thing they seek. Who would profit by such a war? Jerusalem would become, a tomb, Israel a place of death and woe; and will it comfort us when the mothers of Rome weep? There is no honor to be gained from such a war, not for us, not for the Romans. The Romans will move heaven and earth to avert such a war—and we, too, must spare no effort. In the Almighty’s name, I give you my sacred oath that I will make an honorable condition of peace, or I will die in the attempt. Will you believe me? Will you?”

  Silence again, so long and painful that it cut into Berenice’s heart like a knife.

  “Will you?” Agrippa cried, and this time the crowd roared,

  “Yes!”

  “Will you wait?”

  “Yes!”

  “Will you be patient?”

  “Yes!”

  Berenice was weeping. A dam had broken, and she stood before them now, her breast racked with sobs, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Why does the queen weep?”

  The question came from a thousand throats, a ripple and roar of sound. Why? Why? Berenice held up her arms for silence; still she could not control the weeping. She fought to find her voice and use it, and then she said, “For joy. Only for joy.” But not loud, and only the front ranks heard her. They passed the words back, and by repetition they became a thunder. “For joy.” Now there was no woman and few enough men in the great assembly who remained dry-eyed.

  For Berenice, personal gratification mingled with a mystical sense of fulfillment in terms of the covenant—the very ancient covenant that the Almighty Yaweh had made with Moses, the first of the prophets: that He, the Almighty, would bring to Israel the sponsorship of everlasting peace. And so from prophet to prophet it had been nurtured, had grown and matured into that simple statement, “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares.” Was this not it? Had not the lions of peace fought with the jackals of war and beat them down? And could this not be the beginning of the element of man—in which the saintliness of Hillel and his house would envelop the world? Was not a whole city delivered out of the maw of bloody vengeance?

  And this mystical knowledge of fulfillment mingled with the gratifying and personal triumph of her brother. In its own time, every slander, every canard had been preached about herself and her brother. Because his life had failed in terms of women, because his tall, powerful, and totally demanding father had left him a legacy of impotence that neither he nor anyone else in his time understood—because he could not marry as much as he might desire to marry—because of all these things and the murky cloud of obscurity in which they functioned, there was erected a structure of his relationship with his sister, which even her increasing presence as the mother of Israel failed entirely to dispel. Agrippa had grown into his middle years as a tall, thin, stooped, and very gentle man. His lack of ambition was balanced by a sense of pity—which turned into compassion as bit by bit he absorbed the teachings of Hillel. He was a strange king, one who fought no wars and made no enemies, a soft-spoken king who somehow had avoided all arguments and disputes. His adolescent boasting of his feats with women, his inane and childish drinking, his fits of senseless cruelty—so like his sister’s—all these had vanished by his twentieth birthday. He became an old man in his young years, and now, although he was only turned forty, he gave his subjects the impression of endless years of gray-streaked maturity. When he walked in the streets of his beloved Tiberias—of ten and alone and unguarded, for none bore him ill-will—his people greeted him simply as the Adon Agrippa.

  Sometimes Berenice felt pleasure at his lack of formality and at the curious respect and regard his people bore for him; but at other times, sensing the fear and loneliness that pervaded his existence, she felt an overwhelming sense of pity and sorrow. But now that had changed. What an act he had performed! How simply courageous it was! And how blindingly successful! Even Shimeon, who had never entirely respected Agrippa or overcome his concealed contempt for his background, even Shimeon looked at Agrippa with new eyes and new respect—as did the dozens of men and women who had come to Berenice’s palace to congratulate Agrippa, to embrace him and to acknowledge the fact that there was a king in Israel once again. Weeping like a child, Phineas, the Ba’as Hacohen embraced Agrippa and kissed him on the mouth and on both cheeks; and Anan Benanan, supposedly the wealthiest man in Jerusalem and once high priest, wept over Agrippa’s hand and, on one knee, pledged fealty to him, even though Benanan was a Judean and under no legal obligation to Agrippa. Caleb Barhoreb, that ugly and imperious little aristocrat, bowed before Agrippa, kissed his hand, and then proclaimed to all the company, “What a time this is, and what men are raised among us! Is it not the time that the Almighty promised us? For here before me is such a king over Israel as Hezekiah was, and under the same roof there is his sister, the blood of Mattathias with the blood of Herod, and spoken as a saint and loved as a mother by all Israel, and her husband, Shimeon, who is our nashi. Shall the hand of God write more clearly than when He makes Hillel’s own beloved grandson nashi over us and His disciple a king?”

  Berenice pushed through the crowd and stopped him. Now she was afraid. “No, no,” she told Caleb, “you talk like a fool. It angers the Almighty when men talk like you are talking.” The little man was hurt, and she had to sooth him. “Ah, Caleb, I honor you and respect you—but honor must be calculated. The Almighty is jealous of honor accorded to others.” “That is not what Hillel taught.” “There are true things,” Berenice pleaded, “that are older than the things Hillel taught. Does your own bloodline teach you nothing? Do you think the God of Horeb is dead and only the God of Hillel lives?” She was choking and on the point of tears, and she tore free from the crowd, pushed through it and away—and then caught her husband’s glance. Shimeon was on the other side of the room, alone with Joseph Benmattathias.

  She crossed to them, slowly and afraid, for her husband’s face was bereft of any triumph or joy, and his eyes were full of death.

  “Tell her,” Shimeon said hoarsely to Joseph.

  “My cousin, Aba,” Joseph Benmattathias said dully, “rode a horse to death here from Caesarea, so I have news that no one else has yet. In Caesarea, the pagans rose up against the Jews. The Roman troops did nothing. They had heard the news from here of the defeat in Jerusalem, and they lifted no hand to protect the Jews—who were without arms and defenseless and only a fifth of the population of the city—”

  “I know how many Jews are in Caesarea,” Berenice burst out. “Tell me what happened there.”

  “They closed the gates,” Joseph said, “and they began a slaughter, and they did not stop until every Jew in the city was dead. The Roman troops stood by and watched, and the pagans—”

  “Pagans—pagans—what pagans?”

  “Egyptians, Syrians, rabble, bastards of five nations who call themselves Greeks—you know Caesarea—”

  “All the Jews?”

  “Men—women—children—I think only my cousin escaped, because he was on the wall, and he watched from there, and then he dropped off the wall and stole a horse and got away. But he said that before he left, the streets were ankle-deep with blood�
��”

  “O—my God, my God,” Berenice cried, and then she sank down on the floor with her face in her hands. Shimeon bent over and raised her in his arms, and with her in his arms he walked out of the room. Joseph remained to talk to the guests, who, having seen Berenice crumple to the floor, gathered around him now.

  Each thing begets another, and there is no beginning and no end except for a single man or woman; and this was something that Berenice came to know. She could not find a beginning. She could not go back in time and say to herself, “Here or here or here did this begin.” What forces had brought her father, the great King Agrippa and the bosom and blood companion of the Emperor Claudius to the conclusion that Rome and Israel could not inhabit the same world? Whatever they were, the forces were there, and by now she had learned that they were implacable. She remembered how when she had first read Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, she was so hugely depressed by the sense of tragedy, of irreversibility that emanated from its pages. The Greeks understood and accepted that implacability of cause and effect, but the Jews resisted it. The Greek part of her education and training accepted the murder of her father. What alternative did Claudius have? The Jewish part regarded it with horror. In the plaza, when the children were being slaughtered, Florus had made a bargain with her. He would halt the slaughter and she would give her body to him, so that he could mount her with his little sagging pot belly and ride supreme over a queen of Israel. A Jew would comprehend her action, weighing it against the lives of the children she had saved; a Greek would not—nor did she feel better or worse that Florus was pinned down in the Palace of Herod; it made no difference; the children were saved. The implacable and inevitable had been set aside.