I’d thought I’d closed my mind to anything my stepfather might say, but his words scraped like sand on a half-healed wound. As Uncle Agrippa added his own crude joke about how to mate with a female scorpion, I turned shakily to Philip. Philip was already on his feet, his face stony. Pulling me up from our dining couch, he made some excuse, and we left the hall.
Crossing the smaller garden to the guest suite, I sobbed, “I don’t want to be a scorpion. Please…”
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from Philip, but he paused by the fish pond and took my face in his hands. “Salome, listen. Here’s what I’m going to do for tonight. I’m declaring the guest suite a territory under the protection of Gaulanitis. We’ll spend the night there, safe from the evil vapors of this place. And then in the morning, we’ll be gone.”
I sniffled and gave a deep sigh. “Yes! I’ll jump onto the royal barge—the right barge this time.” Philip gave me a quizzical look. I’d explain to him later. “Anyway, I’ll stop crying now, I promise.”
The next day, the household gathered on the docks to wish Philip and me goodbye, good health, and long life. I thought of my two missing friends, Joanna and Leander. Philip’s barge pushed off from the docks, headed for the eastern shore of Lake Tiberias. The Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea and his wife, wearing their official purple robes, waved farewell to us from under an awning. I watched them shrink to two purple dots.
While Philip went forward to talk to the captain, I turned away from Antipas’s city. Shading my eyes, I gazed at the highlands on the far side of the lake. It would be good to leave the moist, thick climate of Tiberias, I thought, and get up into the hills. And I was eager to see the woodland shrine that Philip had told me about.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something yellow. For one eerie heartbeat, I thought Herodias had materialized right behind me. I screamed loud enough to bring Philip running from the other end of the barge.
And then I began to laugh. What I’d seen was indeed Herodias’s blond wig. But the face under the blond hair wasn’t my mother’s. It was a broad, red face.
“Gundi! You took your hair back.”
The stolen wig, still elaborately arranged as Herodias had worn it last night, didn’t quite cover Gundi’s gray hair. But Gundi looked as pleased as if she were the one who’d married a tetrarch. Her blue eyes almost disappeared in the crinkles of her smile.
AFTERWORD
Salome, daughter of Herodias, great-granddaughter of Herod the Great, was an actual historical person, but very few facts are known about her. One of those facts, sadly, is that Salome’s husband, Philip, died only a few years after they married. They had no children. The Roman Emperor—now Caligula—gave Philip’s territory to Salome’s uncle Agrippa. Salome married again, to another relative, Aristobolus of Chalcis in Syria. Her face in profile can be seen on a coin issued by Aristobolus.
As for Herod Antipas and Herodias, they were finally punished, in a roundabout way. The Nabatean king, angry with Antipas for rejecting his daughter, attacked Perea. He defeated Antipas’s troops and took some territory away from him. Since that territory actually belonged to the Roman Empire, the powers in Rome were not pleased with Antipas.
In AD 37, the Emperor Tiberius died, and Caligula inherited the throne. Herodias (apparently not understanding how disappointed the Imperial government was in her husband) urged Antipas to ask the new Emperor to make him king of all Judea. Instead, the Emperor decided to banish Antipas and Herodias to Gaul.
Caligula also appointed Agrippa, Herodias’s brother, as ruler of Herod the Great’s former kingdom of Greater Judea. Agrippa eventually died a horrible death in Caesarea, “eaten by worms,” as the Book of Acts puts it.
All my quotations from the Bible follow the Revised Standard Version, 1977, published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Published by Laurel-Leaf an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Beatrice Gormley
All rights reserved.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, New York, in 2007. This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:
Gormley, Beatrice.
Salome / by Beatrice Gormley.
p. cm.
Summary: Relates the life of a beautiful descendant of Herod the Great, and events leading up to her Dance of the Seven Veils, after which her cruel mother coerces her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, an innocent man, on a silver platter.
1. Salome (Biblical figure)—Juvenile fiction. [1. Salome (Biblical figure)—Fiction. 2. Herodias—Fiction. 3. Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee—Fiction. 4. Dance-Fiction. 5. Bible N.T.—History of Biblical events—Fiction. 6. Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C-284 A.D.-Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G6696Sal 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2006029197
RL: 6.1
September 2008
eISBN: 978-0-375-89212-7
v3.0
Salome Page 18