by Fast, Howard
“Even if the man Bargiora speaks of is your husband?”
“Yes.”
“And I suppose nothing—no argument, no reasons can prevent you from going into Jerusalem.”
“You can prevent me,” Berenice said tiredly. “I am one woman—so you know that you can prevent me.”
“I spoke of arguments.”
“If you will allow me to, Titus Flavius, I want to go up to Jerusalem as soon as there is dawn light tomorrow.”
“I will not prevent you.”
“Thank you,” Berenice answered him. “You are a good man—I think a very good man—which only confuses me and troubles me. Sometimes I have also felt that I am a good person, and that too confuses me, and I suppose the final judgment on us will not be of ourselves but of such a man as Joseph Benmattathias. There was only one man in my life whom I loved and trusted, and I thank you with all my heart for allowing me to go to him.”
“And if you should be thanking me for allowing you to die with him?”
“If that must be—”
“I heard so much about you,” Titus said uncertainly, “and it was always in terms of a very complex and difficult woman. Then why do I find you direct and simple?”
Berenice shook her head, and then Titus left her. She was grateful for that, since she could no longer hold back her tears, and she had no desire to weep in front of him. She lay on the couch then, weeping, and presently she feel asleep. Gabo came in and covered her and removed her sandals and tucked the quilt under her feet against the chill of the night air—all the while clucking and complaining with annoyance. Berenice was never certain whether Gabo, who was now the mother of seven children, had come to tolerate her, endure her, or perhaps love her.
The hour before dawn, the trumpets sounding, the drums beating, and the rhythmical tread of thousands of leather boots falling into line, place, maniple, century, cohort, and legion. The noncommissioned officers shouting their orders, the ripple of Latin names in the roll call, the sharp, authoritative tread of the centurions, and then the single tread of one centurion to the tent entrance:
“Queen Berenice?”
She had been awake for hours, waiting—yet not to go to a funeral. She had dressed carefully, aware of herself, as ever—the underdress of pale blue and the overdress of blue only a few tints darker, and around her head, holding her still flaming hair, a simple gold band with the lion rampant of Judah. Whatever she was going to, let them see that no one had more right to the royal and sacred colors, or to the symbol of the royal house. Whatever her fate, she would not conceal her bloodlines nor deny them.
The centurion, a boy in his early twenties, caught his breath as she stepped outside of the tent. Like all others who shared the gossip of the camp, he had heard that his commander was enamored of an elderly Jewish lady. Now, seeing the elderly Jewish lady face to face, so early in the morning, he understood the nature of his commander’s entrapment.
“I am instructed to take you through the wall, Queen Berenice—you understand me? My Aramaic is very poor.”
“I speak Latin,” Berenice replied.
“Well, you do. If I may say so.”
“What is your name, young man?”
“Hermanius Bracus.”
“Then let us go, Hermanius Bracus.”
“If you should desire refreshment?”
“I need nothing, Hermanius Bracus. You were told to take me through your wall. Do so—please.”
His every instinct was to be courtly, yet all the small pieces of flirtation that he would have used with a Roman matron—and she was a matron, no matter how often he looked at her and caught his breath—fell flatly on the wall she had erected about herself. She could not be reached.
Or perhaps one would have to go back many years to reach her; for now, as they walked along the wall the Romans had erected, Berenice was thinking of the times she had been to Jerusalem—back to so long ago, when they bore her father’s casket here, and again when she and Shimeon came down from the North to go to the copper mines in the desert, and again and again, time after time, herself and Shimeon like companions who knew each other so intimately that each anticipated the thoughts of the other, and that was to be forever; but here was Shimeon like a dim vision already, and man’s memory and love was a fraud and a swindle.
These and other things she remembered, and as they walked the Roman soldiers stared at them silently—having been warned that the price of any jest, any insult, any coarse word flung at this woman might well be the speaker’s life. The first light of the morning sun touched the towers of the city, the tall spires of the Temple, and Berenice, looking past the crazily leaning Roman wall, remembered how she and Shimeon would greet the morning sun up there—on that height, where Yaweh’s eternal altar stood. She remembered other things, and said suddenly,
“Centurion, is Gessius Florus here with the army?”
“No, my lady, he is dead.”
“Oh? How did he die?”
“I don’t remember all the details,” the centurion said, “but it would seem to me that it was an attack of indigestion. Wasn’t he a short, fat man? A bit of a glutton—?”
With what ignominy were the mighty fallen, Berenice thought, and how little of nobility or grandeur was there in any of it! She had always had a sense of something sexually barren about men with swords, as if the tool of death in hand replaced the tool of life hanging limply and meaninglessly. Well, that was a woman’s thought, and so many women could not understand strutting. They all strutted now—these men of the sword, as if the presence of a beautiful woman among them poured forth a torrent of admiration in which they bathed. Even the young man beside her, with his polished armor and his fine white shoes and gloves, even he strutted in admiration.
She saw Joseph Benmattathias, tall, healthy, his hair combed, his short beard trimmed and curled, wearing a long blue robe embroidered in gold with a hem of six-pointed stars. A full head taller than the legionaries around him, slim and elegant, his presence broke in on Berenice’s reverie, and suddenly there was no meaning or purpose in anything—not in her being here and not in any foolish hope that Shimeon lived.
He bade her good morning, eying her keenly and setting aside any anticipated rebuff by saying, “I will not trouble you with my thoughts or advices at this moment, Queen Berenice. I know what ordeal confronts you. I am here simply to wish you well.” He spoke in Aramaic, and she realized that he did so to have her reply in Aramaic—if she were disposed to insult him or cut him down. Then the Roman soldiers would not understand and he would maintain face. She did not reply but walked on, marveling at the workings of the man’s mind, remembering that first time he had explained to her how a man might exist with one foot in each of two different and opposed camps. But in that he was no way so different from most men—and could not the same be said of Shimeon? But Shimeon struggled in the murk of events; he tore his heart out with each step he took, and because he was a man of compassion, every step of his existence was a betrayal of one sort or another. For Shimeon, life was impossible; every choice was of necessity the wrong choice, and his broad shoulders bore all the ridiculous luggage that the male of the species had devised, courage and honor and loyalty and devotion—only all of it inverted, and the courage was no courage, the loyalty to all that was unreasonable and unspeakable—
“Here, Queen Berenice.”
They were at the gate. A guard of legionaries stood there, and they opened the gate for Berenice and the centurion. He pointed to the space between the two walls, and, facing them, the Damascus Gate in the wall that her great-grandfather had built, and for the rebuilding of which—at least in part—her father had paid with his life. A few men on the walls—and nothing else, and nothing in the no-man’s-land between the two fortifications; and all of it in the deep shadow of early morning.
“I must leave you here, and you must go on alone,” the centurion said, repeating by rote what he had been told, and wondering why, if his commander was so
enamored of this woman, he was not here. “That was their condition, that you come out of the wall alone and go across the space in between alone. I am sorry. But there is nothing between the walls to frighten you—”
“You need not worry about my fears, Centurion.”
“I meant that there is nothing Roman out there—but what there is from the Jews’ side, I don’t know. I am told not to question why you are—”
“Then don’t question why, Centurion. And now I thank you for your aid and courtesy.” With that, Berenice left him and walked on toward the gate to the city.
She did not look back, but she could not avoid looking ahead of her, and this small piece of road between the two walls was no pleasant place to walk. It had been fought over too much. Here the Idumeans had fought, and here the Sicarii had hacked down a party of men and women who attempted to flee the city. Here too, the Zealots had fought a pitched battle with four cohorts of legionaries, when the Romans first made their approach to the city—and here, eventually, the Romans would make their final assault on the city, pushing their great siege engines in front of them. But now, already, the road stank with death. There was no dust on this piece of road, for its surface was cemented with hundreds of gallons of blood; a black surface of dry blood that the vultures pecked at angrily, drawn by the smell and frustrated by the product. But there was better eating for the vultures in the rotten flesh that lay alongside the road, carcasses of horses and donkeys and camels, dead jackals, and dead men too—skeletons picked clean and others that bore half a coat of stinking flesh.
It required all of Berenice’s control not to retch, not to double over in a spasm of sick horror, not to cover her mouth and nose, not to race back to the protection of the Roman wall—but she knew that she was being watched, and she told herself, “I will not be afraid, and I will not let them see me shrink from any of this. This is the game of men. This is the pleasure they call war. I will not vomit and weep over what men do.”
More and more people appeared on the walls, until they were crowded with a solid rank of people as far as the eye could see in either direction. The Damascus Gate opened now to a crack of about two feet, and a man stepped through, a big, broad-shouldered man, with a cadaverous, bony face and a flaming scar down one cheek to his chin. He was dressed in full armor, brazen cuirass, arm pieces, brass greaves, and plumed Roman helmet, and he wore sword and dagger but carried no shield. Watching him, his manner, his fierce, bold strut, the fixed, stonelike expression on his face, Berenice guessed that he was Shimeon Bargiora, the leader of the city now—a war man who had no existence before the war, no existence that anyone knew of, no family, no youth, no past, even as he himself disrupted and wiped out his future. He was a creature of war. Some said he was of the Sicarii; others said that he was a Zealot; and still others held that he was an Idumean Bedouin; but identity as such made no difference. His identity was with death, and even when he stood still, he gave the effect of a man in violent motion, plunging; and hate was a part of this motion. He walked in an aura of hate that was almost noble in its defiance of everything.
He stood outside the gate, waiting for Berenice, and when she was almost up to him he nodded, so that the white plumes in his helmet swayed back and forth, and he said to her,
“You are the queen of Chalcis?”
“Yes.”
“Is it true that you are the wife—or were the wife of Shimeon Bengamaliel, who was the nashi?”
“I am his wife,” Berenice nodded. “Is he alive?”
“He’s alive, and I will take you to him. I am Shimeon Bargiora. I command the city.”
“I know who you are,” Berenice said.
“You know what you hear of me. Outside, talk is cheap—and the rumor mill never stops grinding.” His voice was harsh, grating, angry, and now that she was close to him, Berenice saw a tic in his cheek, just over the ugly scar. Without the scar, he would have been a handsome man, for all the high-boned, death’s-head quality of his face.
“I came here to see my husband,” Berenice said.
“I know that, lady. You came—and you will go. We are here. We are committed here.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Really—do you?” He stepped close to her, fingered the silk of her overdress, sniffed at its perfume. “Where did you bathe this morning, Queen Berenice? You smell like the flowers of Eden. Forgive me—that wall has ringed us around for months. We are starving to death inside, and dying of thirst too.”
“You said you would take me to my husband.”
“Ah! So I did.” And then, brusquely, “Come along!” And without more ado, he strode through the gate. She followed him. The sun was up now, blazing down with its rich morning heat, still tempered by the chill of the night air—that miraculous combination of heat and chill that made Jerusalem’s one of the finest climates in Palestine.
Inside the gates there was a circle of soldiers, well armed and well armored with Roman weapons and armor, and beyond them a silent crowd of people who were alive yet dead—this was Berenice’s first and immediate impression—living dead, people so thin, so emaciated that they had lost all resemblance to ordinary men and women and children, people who watched her out of sunken eyes and pleaded without words. They stayed back quietly, beyond the reach of the soldiers who fell in on either side of Bargiora and herself and marched with them. Other soldiers closed the gates behind them, while still more soldiers were dropping down from the walls, on ropes and wooden ladders, that they might see this legendary woman at close range—commenting about her hair and the look of her, “A hundred years old—the devil she is!” “And I tell you she’s a witch.” “A witch—a bitch, it’s all the same.” They were well fed, these soldiers, not fat but not skinny either, lean and tight but by no means emaciated.
Bargiora led Berenice toward the old wall and the Fish Gate, and when the people saw that she would be gone in a moment, one of them, a man, cried out and reminded her that she had fed the hungry once. “We die of hunger, Berenice!” he cried out, and a soldier shouted at him, “Then get on with it, and the sooner the better.”
“They don’t fight—they don’t eat,” Bargiora said shortly.
“Do you want the women to fight?”
“If a man fights, his wife eats. There is no Sanhedrin to sit in judgment and divide the few rotten baskets of bread that remain. There isn’t enough food for all. The fighting men must live.”
“Why?” Berenice asked quietly.
“To defend the city.”
“And then?”
“We live now—not then,” he snapped. “If your heart must bleed, my lady, why not let it bleed for these soldiers who will die for their God and their city—and for their holy Temple.”
“My heart bleeds,” she whispered. “It bleeds enough, Bargiora—so don’t tell me for whom.”
“People like you,” he began in anger and disgust and then shook his head and swallowed his words. “Come on, lady.”
They walked on. A woman sat on the street, and her husband lay there, his head on her lap, pillowed. But he was dead. She wept for him, but only the tears made a difference; she was as yellow and emaciated as he was. Three children sat naked in the street, their bellies swollen, their bones protruding. A woman crawled past on her hands and knees, half naked, her flat dugs hanging down before her, dragging on the ground as she forced the bony frame that had been her body to move. A man and a woman walked slowly, blindly, supporting each other.
“God in heaven,” cried Berenice, “let them live! Let them out of the city and I will see them fed. I swear it.”
“There are more important things than life.”
“What?”
“That house of God.” He pointed to the Temple.
“That house of God is empty,” Berenice whispered, and in sudden anger, Bargiora cried,
“Will you blaspheme? By Yaweh, I will see you—”
“What will you do, Bargiora?” she asked drily and nastily. “Tell me w
hat you will do, Bargiora. I came here by your word. I see you as a murderer—let me hear you as a liar!”
“No—I won’t lose my temper over you. No. You—you’re as much of a Jew as Titus.”
“Yes? And are you a Jew, Bargiora?”
He shook his head and clenched his lips—and whatever might have followed was interrupted by the appearance of a mongrel dog out of a gaping doorway—a yellow dog with a half-eaten human hand and forearm clenched in his teeth. When he saw the approaching group of soldiers, he paused warily, looking around him for an avenue of retreat. But already his way back into the door from which he had emerged was blocked. A soldier covered it as Bargiora cried,
“Get him! Kill him!”
Two of the soldiers hurled their javelins, but the yellow dog was an old hand at survival; he would have to be to remain alive after two years of siege. He watched the javelins and dodged them. Then the soldiers closed in, and the dog twisted, turned, and evaded. He dropped the arm in the process and suddenly darted away. Just as he seemed to be making good his escape, one of the soldiers picked up a cobble and threw it, catching the yellow dog on the side of the head and cracking his skull. In a moment, they were on him, and one of the soldiers had gutted the dog, ripped out its insides, hooked it onto his javelin, and continued to march with the carcass over his shoulder. “We eat meat tonight,” another said.
When Berenice stared in horror at Bargiora, he shrugged and said, “We have a dispensation. We fight in the Almighty’s name. Whatever will keep us alive is permitted.”
“Even what has eaten human flesh?”
“Remain with us for a while, my lady. You will become less discriminating, I assure you.”
They had passed into the Akra, climbing higher and higher, and now they entered the Upper City through the ancient Ephraim Gate. The gate itself, however, was new and improvised onto the charred remains of the old gate, and on either side the gate, the wall had been pounded down and subsequently repaired. As they entered the old City of Zion, Berenice had the feeling of a place already conquered—and, looking around her, she could feel almost concretely the despair and desolation of the place. In the Lower City, there were people—sick, starving, and enervated people, but people nevertheless—men and women and children; but here there were no women and no children. The men were soldiers, poorly armed but all with weapons and most of them near the gates and the temple area; as they proceeded into the Old City itself, there was no one, only the ruined houses, gaping walls, burned interiors and roofs—the great mansions and villas, gutted, ruined, ransacked, and looted as if the Romans had already been through this place and abandoned it. Only the Temple itself remained inviolate, shining in the morning sun.