Salome

by Beatrice Gormley

  “Father certainly doesn’t,” I agreed. Herodias laughed and rolled her eyes; my father’s disappointing way of life went without saying.

  “But aside from Junior,” she went on, “there’s Philip—do you remember Uncle Philip of Gaulanitis? He never even travels to Rome anymore because of the expense. Imagine, a client ruler going for years and years without visiting the Imperial City! Instead, Antipas says, Philip spends all his time traveling around his pathetic little realm—letting his subjects pester him with their concerns! How does he expect to keep his subjects in awe if he hobnobs with them?”

  Antipas, on the other hand, understood how to impress his subjects with showy ceremonies and fabulous banquets. He’d persuaded one of Rome’s finest cooks to join his court. Apparently, this cook’s baked fish was famous among the nobility all around the Mediterranean Sea.

  “But Antipas’s wife refuses to eat fish—can you imagine?” My mother giggled. “She’s from a desert kingdom, Nabatea. It was a purely political marriage.”

  I disliked my uncle for taking my mother’s company away, but beyond that, he made me nervous. Not that he paid much attention to me—he was all taken up with Herodias. But when he did notice me, I felt that he paid too much attention to me, just for a moment. The feeling was hard to explain even to myself. I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.

  Many times that winter Antipas escorted Herodias to the theater, and often they took me along. Why not?—they had a whole train with them already. There were Antipas’s bodyguards and courtiers and secretary, and slaves carrying drinks and snacks and cushions, and of course Antipas’s personal food taster. I suppose there were many people who would have liked to poison him. I almost wished they would.

  The youngest courtier was Simon, a son of one of Antipas’s many half sisters. He was related to me, too, distantly. I thought Simon was ridiculous, the way he dropped names of powerful people in Rome—even that of Sejanus, the Emperor’s regent. Simon seemed to think that he was being groomed for an important position in the Empire. At every opportunity he spoke up, trying to sound experienced and knowledgeable. Other times he would strike a noble pose, as if a sculptor were working on a statue of him.

  At the theater I sometimes ignored what was happening onstage and watched Antipas’s Greek secretary, a young man named Leander. He always carried a scroll, a note tablet, and a stylus in the folds of his draped pallium, or cloak. He had deep-set hazel eyes and curly brown hair, tied back with a headband, and he spoke with a cultured accent. Herodias said he was from Alexandria, across the sea in Egypt, where he’d studied with some important philosopher. (This was one of Herodias’s examples of how Antipas was willing to spend money to get the best of everything. My father, in contrast, was so stingy that he didn’t even keep a scribe but hired one from the library at the public baths.)

  Now and then Antipas would call Leander to his side and order him to come up with a fitting quotation from a Greek philosopher or to note down some insightful remark that Antipas had just made. Leander waited courteously on his master, but I thought it must be hard on an educated man to work as a mere secretary. Antipas seemed to enjoy keeping a pet philosopher at his beck and call, like a hunting dog. Herodias laughingly called Leander “our Socrates.”

  One time we went to see a Greek tragedy, but hardly anyone liked it. Antipas dozed off, his attendants whiled away the time by eating bunches of grapes and spitting out the seeds, and Herodias sighed through the long speeches. Antipas, awakening to one of her sighs, patted her hand. “A bit tedious, hmm? At my theater in Tiberias, they perform nothing but comedies.”

  Only Leander seemed intent on the play, mouthing the words along with the actors. At the end, all the characters were either dead or wished they were dead.

  What I remembered most about that tragedy, long afterward, was the masks. After the play, the chief actor came out front to talk with Antipas, his patron. He took his mask off and set it on the edge of the stage, where it seemed to stare at me. The mouth was open, wrenched down at the corners. The eyes, too, were wide open in agony.

  TWO

  AT THE JORDAN RIVER

  Far across the Mediterranean Sea from Rome, in the Jordan River Valley a few miles from Jericho, a different audience listened to a different speaker. The preacher’s brown hair and beard were long and wild. His tunic, stitched together from old grain sacks, was belted around his gaunt body with rawhide.

  “Brothers and sisters”—John’s voice rang out over the crowd—“I have lived in the wilderness long years, waiting for the Lord’s word to come to me. Now I bring you his message: Make a highway for the Lord!”

  Here, where a creek flowed into the Jordan, the riverbank formed a natural amphitheater. John’s listeners covered the slopes, crouching on the grass or leaning against sycamore trees. These people had little time to spare from scratching out a living, but still they were here. They were the women who hauled water from the village well to their homes every day, who might sell a few cheap clay cups in the market and then buy enough grain to feed their children one more week. They were the men who gathered at the city gates before dawn, hoping to be hired by a landowner for a day’s work in his vineyards.

  Pacing a flat boulder, his platform, John went on, “How do we make a highway? The prophet Isaiah says, ‘Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.’ This is how we will make a highway—for the Lord.”

  “A highway for the Lord,” the crowd murmured. They understood exactly what John was not saying: a highway for the Lord instead of for the hated Romans. Most of these men had been grabbed by a Roman soldier at some time or other and forced to fill in a ravine or scrape off the top of a hill for one of the Empire’s fine level roads, graded, paved, and clearly marked with milestones. Most of these women had trudged through the brush alongside a Roman highway. Peasants had to labor on road crews, but they were not allowed to walk on the Imperial roads.

  At the sight of so many people drinking in his words, John’s heart swelled. He would have obeyed the Lord’s calling whether anyone listened to him or not, but it was a great joy to see how they listened. This was what he’d been born for—to draw the people back to the Lord.

  In a corner of his mind, John was aware of the Roman soldier standing above the crowd, his crested helmet silhouetted against the sky. Elias, one of John’s disciples, kept casting him wary glances. But the soldier wasn’t listening to the preacher, John knew; he probably didn’t even understand the Aramaic John spoke. The soldier’s job was to watch the audience. If the crowd got unruly, he’d signal for backup troops.

  The first time John’s voice had boomed out over a crowd like this, he’d been startled. In the wilderness with the lizards and ravens, he’d gone for weeks without speaking at all. But now, letting his voice resound felt as natural as breathing. It was the Lord’s message, not John’s. It was the Lord’s power.

  “The Lord loves righteousness and justice!” John told his listeners. That was a quotation from a psalm written generations ago, but it was still true. It would always be true.

  “Yes!” shouted a man in the crowd. “Give us justice!” Hundreds of hopeful faces looked up to John.

  “In our land,” John went on, “there is a ruler who calls himself a Jew but lives like a Roman. He presumes to rule the Lord’s people—but he defiles the Law. He builds his city of marble and gold—on a Jewish graveyard. The Jews of Galilee can hardly find a place to live, but Antipas peoples his new city with foreigners. He raises graven images in the public square.”

  “Unclean,” muttered John’s audience. “Filthy pagan.” They knew exactly what kind of “graven images” John was talking about. The worst was the statue of the previous Roman emperor, the “divine” Augustus Caesar.

  The same man who’d spoken up before shouted, “Herod Antipas eats swine flesh!”

  “The Herods have Jewish blood on their hands,” John went on. “Antipas’s father called himself Herod th
e Great. Great—yes, at squeezing taxes from the farmers and fishermen in order to clothe himself in gold. Great at hunting down and butchering the righteous Jews who rose against him. Every luxurious palace of his, like the one at Macherus”—he waved a hand eastward—“squats on top of dungeons and torture chambers.”

  John’s audience knew the grisly stories about Herod the Great, and most of them had some personal connection with them. One of John’s own cousins had barely escaped being slaughtered at birth by Herod’s soldiers. Alarmed by a rumor that the new king of the Jews had been born in Bethlehem, King Herod ordered all the male babies in that town to be killed. To be on the safe side, his soldiers had massacred all the boys under two years of age.

  “Woe to the tyrants!” shouted the man who’d spoken before. Judging by his rough clothing and weathered face, he was probably a shepherd. It wasn’t surprising that most of the crowd were humble folk—shepherds, farmers, poor craftsmen. It was the ordinary people who were crushed by injustice.

  What was surprising was the number of well-dressed people among the peasants. John noticed two men in scribes’ robes in a comfortable spot under an oak tree. And there, at the edge of the pool formed by the creek, a wealthy woman leaned out of a litter. The scribes must be keeping an eye on John for the High Priest in Jerusalem. The woman was curious, no doubt. Well, he had a message for all of them.

  “Brothers and sisters,” cried John. “This is what the Lord commanded me: Call the people to repent. Tell them the kingdom of heaven is at hand. When they repent, baptize them.” His voice rang over the water like a trumpet. “Do you want to be right with the Lord? Hear what he asks of you. Repent! Turn from your sins! As the psalm says, ‘It is time for the Lord to act, for your law has been broken.’”

  “I repent!” responded a chorus of voices. “Lord, save us!”

  When John had finished preaching, he felt shaky and spent. He climbed down from the boulder to get out of the sun. As he waded toward the riverbank, a man splashed into the river, holding up the hem of his fine coat. “Rabbi!”

  The people near him drew back, and one woman spat at him. “Filthy tax collector!”

  The tax collector ignored everyone but John. “Rabbi—how can I repent?” His plump chin quivered.

  Elias looked at John as if expecting a signal to push the tax collector away, but John waited for the man to come closer. “Lord,” he murmured, “you want to save all your people.” He was deeply moved, and his eyes stung. How hungry even the tax collectors were for the word of the Lord! “Don’t collect any more than the legal rate,” he told the man. “If you’ve cheated anyone, pay them back.”

  The woman who’d spat at the tax collector gave a short, sour laugh. But the man, keeping his eyes on John, nodded humbly. “When you’ve lived in repentance for a month,” John went on, “you’ll be clean inside. Then come back here to be washed clean outside.”

  John started to wade forward again, but another man called out in a Syrian accent, “Rabbi, wait!” The wealthy woman’s litter swung around to meet him. The nearest of the four litter bearers went on, “Rabbi, can I ask you a question? My lady wants to know what she should do to repent.”

  Elias stepped in front of John, indignant that his tired master was being bothered. “Carry that litter away from here!” he told the servant. “The Rabbi has taken a vow not to speak to women. Besides—aren’t you from the accursed household of Herod Antipas?”

  John held up his hand. “Tell your mistress to share her riches with the poor,” he said to the litter bearer. “This will be pleasing to the Lord.” Elias was right: the Tetrarch’s insignia adorned the roof of the litter. But that was all the more miraculous, that the word of the Lord could reach into Antipas’s own household.

  THREE

  A SURPRISE PERFORMANCE

  In Rome the winter wore on, cold and rainy. “How much longer will Uncle Antipas stay here?” I asked Herodias. “Isn’t it hard to rule Galilee and Perea from so far away?”

  “He can’t go back there now because there’s no sailing on the Mediterranean until spring, silly,” said my mother. “And Antipas has a trusted steward in Galilee to mind his affairs. Steward Chuza sends him reports. Very detailed reports, in fact.” She rolled her eyes. “Chuza tells Antipas exactly how many stonemasons he hired to enlarge his prisons and exactly how he calculated the extra amount to tax the peasants in order to pay the stonemasons. Oh, such details!”

  Putting on an earnest expression, Herodias pretended to read from a tablet. “To my prince Herod Antipas, greetings. Some insignificant rabble-rousers from the hill country have been arrested and brought in for questioning. The tediously complete record of the interrogation is enclosed. Oh, and furthermore, my prince, the donkeys’ groom’s boy stubbed his toe yesterday….”

  January and February passed. At the Temple of Diana, the priestess paid special attention to me. The other girls found out that I was to ask the goddess about a calling, and they gave me respectful looks. (I didn’t explain that my mother was only pretending to let me try for a calling.) But Herodias seemed to notice me less and less—when she was home at all, for she was often gone with Antipas.

  One wet morning in March, Herodias and Antipas were in the reception room playing a board game. They might be there for hours, I knew. Gundi was in the kitchen, gossiping with Herodias’s maid, Iris.

  I wandered into the atrium, where rainwater trickled from the open roof into the pool. I was not supposed to be in the public parts of the house without Gundi, but no one was paying any attention. Besides, I thought, Herodias herself wasn’t behaving in such a seemly way for a married woman. Why should I worry about being proper?

  Antipas’s attendants chatted or tossed dice, as usual. All the attendants, that is, except for Leander, the secretary. The Greek sat hunched on a bench by himself, leaning away from the splashing water as he read a scroll.

  What could be in the scroll to make him forget everything around him? “What are you reading, secretary?”

  Startled, Leander looked up. His deep-set eyes focused on me as I sat down on the other end of the bench. He half got up, as if I were a lady, then seemed to decide that I was a child and sat down again. It made me smile, it was so clear what was going through his mind.

  “I’m reading Plato, miss. About the death of Socrates in Athens. Socrates was a—” He frowned, seeming to wonder if maybe I was a young lady after all. “Shouldn’t your chaperone be with you?”

  It was fun, teasing the Greek a little. I shrugged, as if to say I didn’t really need a chaperone. “Yes, but I didn’t want to bother her. Are you from Athens?”

  No, answered Leander, he was from Alexandria, in Egypt, where many Greeks had settled. “If it weren’t for my dying father’s request, I’d still be in Alexandria.” A note of homesickness crept into his voice as he stared into the gloomy corners of the atrium. “The sun would be shining…. I’d be sitting in the courtyard of the gymnasion, arguing with the other students, or we’d be listening to our teacher….”

  “What was your dying father’s request?” I asked. This was the most interesting conversation I’d had with anyone for months.

  But Leander glanced uneasily at the courtiers on the other side of the pool. “Really, miss—” He stood up and bowed. “I am sure your chaperone is looking for you.”

  I didn’t want to worry him too much, and I knew he’d be blamed if Herodias saw us talking alone. But then I thought of something important he could answer for me. “Just one more question—please?” I stood up, too, clasping my hands. “Do you know how much longer Uncle Antipas will stay in Rome?”

  Leander looked surprised that I seemed to care so much. “How much longer? Well, the winter’s more or less over, and the Tetrarch’s business here is almost done. He’s waiting mainly for the ship he hired to be refitted. It’s a cargo ship, meant to transport grain. So they’re building cabins on it, and then they’ll stock it with supplies for all of us.” He nodded around the atrium at t
he guards and courtiers. “That’ll take another week or so, I suppose.”

  What good news! “Thank you.” Giving him a big smile, I skipped out of the atrium.

  Only a week or so and Antipas would be gone! Then Herodias would spend time with me again. I’d share all the little things I’d been saving up to tell her, and she’d do an imitation of Antipas to make me laugh. The charmed circle would close around the two of us again.

  I expected that since Antipas was leaving Rome so soon, my mother would want to spend every moment with him. To my surprise, that very day she began to plan one of her elaborate drama afternoons.

  “Our last production, on my birthday, was such a great success,” said Herodias. She beamed at me. “The ladies said you danced like a nymph.”

  I felt warm with pride, but I said modestly, “Of course they liked the story of Demeter and Persephone. They’re all mothers.” The heroine of that myth is the devoted mother Demeter, goddess of grain and the harvest. Demeter is heartbroken when her daughter, Persephone, is stolen away by Pluto, god of the underworld.

  Acting out the myth, Herodias played the part of Demeter, wearing a stola as blue as the summer sky. She had me play the part of Persephone, while Gundi, wearing a black cloak and a frightening mask, played Pluto. Iris and the other servants stood in back by the musicians, chorusing, “Beware!” or, “Woe!” at the right times.

  The guests shed tears when Pluto dragged me off to the nether regions and my grieving mother searched the four corners of the earth for me. “Alas, the sky is gray,” chorused the maids. “Alas, the fruit trees wither.” The world was locked in barren winter, blighted by the goddess Demeter’s sorrow.

  Then the ladies wept again at the happy ending, when Persephone returns to the earth and her mother, bringing springtime. As the flute played a merry tune, I danced around our garden, scattering flowers. “Joy!” chorused the maids. “Joy,” muttered Gundi, lifting the heavy Pluto mask from her head.