The Queen's Handmaid

by Tracy L. Higley

  “It seems we are to be attacked, Lydia.”

  The girl’s gaze flicked sideways, then back to her work. “Bad news, then, my lady?”

  “Perhaps you had an omen. You have been so glum today.”

  “It is Yom HaKippurim, my lady. A day to reflect on one’s guilt.”

  Mariamme tilted her head and examined Lydia. “But you are Egyptian. What do you care about a Judean holiday?”

  Lydia swept crumbs into the palm of her hand and deposited them on a tray. “I have reason to believe my mother was Jewish.”

  Mariamme sat upright. “Reason to believe? Do you not know who your mother was?”

  Lydia shook her head but continued her clearing of utensils.

  “Well then, I shall consider you my Jewish sister.” How had she never heard this? “Perhaps we should go to synagogue together for the closing prayers today. It is a good day to pray. We are in need of both forgiveness and protection.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Perhaps HaShem heard their prayers, for as the autumn leaves fell and the winter rains descended, the nationalist Pappas’s army was besieged by the Roman Macherus’s legions and never came closer than a Roman mile from the Herodian family home where the women waited daily in anxious expectation of attack. The news came sporadically—Herod had defeated rebels in Galilee in a night attack; he had been wounded in Jericho. The story came of a house collapsing only minutes after Herod and his prominent guests had left, a good omen in Herod’s mind. Then a series of savage raids in which Herod captured five towns and put more than two thousand captives to the sword in vengeance for his brother’s death. He was gaining support; his ranks were swelling with those who hated Antigonus and those who would throw their allegiance behind whomever was succeeding.

  And success was being parceled out to Herod. After an ambush set like highway robbers, Pappas’s nationalist force was annihilated and Pappas himself killed, his head cut off and sent to Pheroras in just recompense for their brother Joseph’s death. It had been a massively bloody battle, and only a blizzard prevented Herod from turning at once on Jerusalem, where Antigonus was nearly ready to surrender.

  Herod had predicted they would be in Jerusalem by spring, and when the countryside greened with new growth and the damp air freshened with the scent of almond blossoms, another letter arrived with news that was expected.

  The women gathered in the columned courtyard to hear it, and Mariamme listened to the reading with head high. She would not cry, not let her mother see the terror the words brought. It was her familial duty.

  Herod’s troops had been besieging Jerusalem for a month. He was confident the city would soon be his. As a show of confidence, he was coming to Samaria. Their five-year betrothal would finally be consummated. The wedding would show the entire country that he was to be their new king, married to the Hasmonean princess who united both lines of the feuding brothers in her blood.

  Mariamme put a hand to a green-and-gold-painted column to steady the dizziness that swept her vision and tumbled in her head. She felt like she was falling from the blood-red cliffs of Masada, still in the air, still intact, but watching the merciless ground rush up to claim her.

  “Prepare,” his letter instructed the four women living in constant hostility.

  “I am coming for my wife.”

  Seventeen

  It must be today.

  Lydia tightened the leather straps that held the precious scrolls to her chest, then shrugged into a stained tunic. She threw a mantle of drab brown around her shoulders and over her hair. Would she blend into the terrified city? One more girl combing the bloodied streets in search of crumbs for her family?

  Herod had taken Mariamme for his wife in Samaria, but he had brought them all here to Jerusalem, including his sister, Salome, and her new handmaid, Riva, to watch the siege that he and the Roman commander Sosius directed from their encampment outside the northern walls. Herod boasted that he attacked the city from the north where it was unprotected by ravines, in the same manner as Pompey some twenty-five years earlier. He would be equally successful, he declared.

  Lydia slipped from the tent before Mariamme awoke and called for her. David had his instructions and would provide her excuse. He had protested when she whispered her plan to “see the fighting firsthand” the night before.

  “They say the city will fall tomorrow, Lydia! After five months of siege, why must you get closer now?”

  Did she still not trust him with her secret? Had he not proven himself in nearly three years? He was a man of fifteen now, the uneven voice and gangly frame swallowed by depth and muscles. And she was a woman of twenty-one. Still with no husband or children.

  “Do not press me, David.” She turned away, disappeared into the tent where she slept on a mat outside Mariamme’s enclosure when Herod was in the field.

  This morning she ran, half bent, with darting glances between the shadows of the encampment. It was all so reminiscent of the first Yom HaKippurim in Judea, two years ago, when she had failed to reach the Temple.

  She would not fail again.

  It was a gift of Samuel’s God that Herod would take the city today, the Day of Atonement. She would follow on the heels of his soldiers, all the way to the Temple steps where she would finally be delivered of the scrolls that burned the flesh of her chest with their unknown messages of the future.

  Once clear of the camp, it was all open field. Every tree for miles had been savaged to erect siege towers or bundled into fascines—the large rolls of logs bridging ditches so battering rams could roll ever closer to the crumbling walls that Herod’s father, Antipater, raised years ago.

  The second, outer wall had fallen soon after Herod returned from Samaria, gleefully announcing his marriage to the Hasmonean princess, as if the wedding would convince the Jews within the city that he was their legitimate king. Perhaps some who had been on the fence fell to his side, but the Nationalist party dug in their heels, screaming that the Arab pig would never have their throne.

  Another few weeks and the first wall fell. But still the Temple and the Upper City held out, determined never to yield.

  Lydia drew up to get her bearings. The palace-fortress of Baris at the northwest corner of the Temple poked from the collapsed wall, dark stones streaked with mildewed age. Did Antigonus watch from the upper windows? Curse the sun as it leaped from the horizon on what could be his last day?

  The fighting would be bloodiest near the Temple. She could follow the troops over the wall, directly into the worst of it. Or she could circle and slip through the streets, with more time for strategy and caution. Approach the Temple from the south.

  Yes, the streets.

  She did not have long to wait. The sun poured an eastwest path of gold across the city. The ragtag Herodian soldiers screamed a war cry and swelled over the earthworks to scale the walls. Sosius’s legions followed, red-plumed helmets glinting cold and silver in the morning sun.

  The clash of swords and shrieks of defiance rang across the ramps. The pounding throb of thousands of feet on stone and earth. The acrid odor of tar fires.

  Head down and arms wrapped round her middle, Lydia scuttled behind the soldiers. She slid down a shallow ravine on the inside of the wall, hit bottom too hard, and fell forward into the dirt.

  No time to check for scrapes and bruises. She scrambled to her feet, wiped her sweaty hands against her tunic, and picked her way up the rocky incline into a street to the west of the Temple area.

  But the narrow streets were no safer. Already the legionaries swarmed the streets, hacking at any who appeared defiant.

  Lydia kept to the mud-brick walls, still shaded and cold. There were no open doors, no calls of welcome. But locked doors could not withstand the smash of a pilum’s shaft or the kick of a hobnailed boot.

  She hid behind pottery, dodged into alleys, huddled against doorways.

  She had been a fool to come the long way around to the Temple. Better to have pushed through the melee a
nd been done with it. Her mind shrieked at her to turn back, but her feet did not obey.

  The butchery advanced through the streets and houses, a steady drumbeat of death punctuated with screams of terror like cymbal clangs.

  The maze of streets confused and disoriented her. Lydia broke through to a small square and flung herself toward the rising sun.

  Everywhere, people ran and people screamed. Some bloody already, lurching and clutching at walls, searching for home and safety.

  A woman ran past, about Lydia’s age, one cheek slashed from lip to eye. Her gaze tumbled over Lydia without comprehension, without reason. Lydia gasped with pity.

  The siege fires were everywhere now. Smoke snaked upward from the city in a hundred columns of death, lives and homes reduced to ash. It burned her eyes and clogged her throat.

  Still, she followed the walls, hands worrying the stones she passed until her skin was roughed and cracked. The cry of a baby, unnaturally cut short, chilled the blood in her veins. In the next street, a wagon rolled across the stones, its bed in flames but wheels grinding onward, oblivious to its fate.

  Perhaps she was no better than the wagon. Still pushing toward the Temple, unknowing that she was already as good as dead.

  And the Chakkiym she was to meet on the steps of the Temple? If he were as loyal to Israel as Samuel was, would he not be defying the foreigners even now? Would he stand defenseless on the steps, waiting for her, while all around him his brothers fell to Roman swords?

  The certainty that he was already dead was like a stone in her chest.

  Why had she come? Three years she had been trying to rid herself of Samuel’s unwanted charge. Last year in Samaria, on the Day of Atonement, she had felt her failure keenly, even though there was no way she could have made the journey to Jerusalem alone. But this year was no better. If the Chakkiym was not already dead, surely she soon would be herself.

  The fighting grew fiercer the nearer she came to the Temple area. Its enclosure walls hid an enormous courtyard. The Temple itself soared above the walls, its face set toward the east. Sunlight glanced off gold and Lydia blinked against the glare, raised a hand to her brow.

  Bodies were everywhere. Romans, Jews, and Herod’s men alike littered the paving around the Temple walls. Blood pooled in cracks, ran like liquid mortar in tracks around the flat-hewn stones. Bashed heads, gored chests, lopped limbs. Lydia braced a hand against a nearby wall. She forced her gaze to the hills above the city, breathed through her mouth with deliberate measure. She could not afford to be sick.

  Even if she could force her way through to the Temple steps, she would be cut down where she stood.

  The Temple steps. Did Samuel mean the outer steps that led to the gate of the Temple enclosure? Or the steps of the Temple itself, somewhere beyond those walls? How had she not considered this question until now?

  She climbed the hill beside the Temple for a better view. The battle had an ebb and flow, and Lydia watched the tide from halfway up the Mount of Olives, her back to the gnarly trunk of an olive tree that had already been ancient when the Roman Pompey attacked more than two decades ago. She leaned her head against its sun-warmed strength and tried to calm her panicked heart.

  Olive trees were notoriously long-lived. How many battles had this one witnessed, here above the Temple? Had it seen the Temple desecrated by the Seleucid king’s offering of pigs over a century ago and cheered Judah Maccabee as he led his revolt? Three hundred years ago, when Alexander the Great conquered most of the world, had it mourned for the fall of Jerusalem? Nearly six hundred years ago, when Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Solomon’s Temple and carried away the best of Israel to Babylon, had this olive tree weathered even that? The history of Israel was a history of war, Samuel had taught her. Forever and always the enemies of Israel sought to control, suppress, annihilate. And yet she remained.

  And one day, Israel’s Messiah would appear and set all things right.

  Lydia put a hand to her chest for the thousandth time since she left the military camp, felt the outline of the scrolls strapped against her skin.

  The battle tide had taken its final turn. The cries of defiance were fading. The Roman ranks spread like a red stain across the plain around the Temple, up the steps and beyond the wall. From her perch on the hillside, Lydia could see into the massive courtyard within the enclosure, clogged with the bodies of the fallen.

  She trudged downward, her feet and heart heavy. Somewhere among that carnage she would find one Jew with a red-striped tallit, corded in red and blue. There was little sense in searching, but she must. She owed it to Samuel.

  The Romans were lining up in ranks by the time she reached the outskirts of the Temple area and sneaked along the edge of the battle site. Herod was not to be seen, but Sosius stalked back and forth in front of his legion, his face sheened with sweat and a purple-red slash of crusted blood across his left upper arm.

  A commotion behind Lydia—the buzz of a crowd moving as a unit—pushed her toward the Temple’s outer wall.

  A group of men, dressed in the fine robes of nobility and heads held high, strode across the paving stones from the direction of the palace-fortress of Baris. They seemed to form a circle as they moved, with one man enclosed within. Lydia stood on her toes, craned her neck for a better look.

  But in a moment the central figure’s identity became clear. In a rush that defied the imperious dignity of his escort, he broke from the circle, ran forward, and threw himself at the feet of Sosius, clutching the general’s boots, forehead to the stones.

  Antigonus. It could be no other.

  The king who had so long defied Herod’s attempt to take the kingdom Rome had already granted to him looked no fiercer than a common shepherd facing a mountain lion.

  Sosius laughed. He laughed. Kicked out at Antigonus’s face.

  The defeated king kept his head to the ground, no doubt waiting for the blow that would sever the head from his body.

  “Whom do we have here?” Sosius’s voice rang over the massed troops, the bloodied bodies, the walls and stones of the Temple of the One God. “This must be Antigone, eh?”

  As one, the legions laughed with him. Sosius’s use of the female version of the king’s name was a deliberate insult, though if Antigonus felt the slur, he showed no sign.

  Sosius jutted his chin toward a centurion. “Chain him. We’ll let Antony decide what to do with him.” He toed Antigonus’s shoulder. “Perhaps you’ll get to see Rome, Jew. Antony loves a good triumph, complete with a parade of prisoners.”

  Lydia found a spot on the ground, empty of body or blood, and waited. Cross-legged, back to the outer Temple wall, head bent, while Roman corpses were carted off for cremation and Jewish bodies were looted for what little they had.

  She could see the outer steps. A half-dozen bodies were strewn across them, hands reaching for the Temple gate, blood congealing in the sun as it passed overhead. None of them wore the sign of the Chakkiym.

  When the steps were in shadow and the crowds dispersed, she crept along the outer wall, through the open gate, and into the inner courtyard.

  She kept her eyes half closed to the slaughter, slitted only enough to pick her way around the fallen. If all was as it should be, would she even be permitted here? She wandered past the stone pool and the square altar, toward the steps at the base of the Temple building itself.

  Bodies, yes. But no Chakkiym.

  What did it mean?

  Had his striped tallit been lost in the battle? Or perhaps he never came, frightened by the fighting.

  Perhaps he did not exist, was only a passed-down legend clung to by old men in exile.

  She pressed a hand against her chest again. But these, the scrolls, they were real. Not legend.

  She sat again in the shadow of a column until the sun set once more on the Day of Atonement. No sacrifices had been offered. No High Priest to atone for the people’s sin, to release the scapegoat into the wilderness.

  What would Simon think
of today’s victory when he heard of it in Jericho? It had been a year since she had seen him in Samaria, but she often wondered about the soldier who seemed too angry to be serving the foreign governor whom Rome had declared king. Did he still dream of a free Israel? Still rebuff everyone with his brash arrogance?

  Lydia lifted her head to where the roofline of Antigonus’s palace could be seen beyond the Temple walls.

  It was to be her new home. Herod already had plans to renovate and expand the fortress, as he seemed to have for all of Judea.

  She would serve the queen within those walls, a few minutes’ walk from the Temple steps.

  “Next year in Jerusalem.”

  It was the line spoken at the end of every Yom HaKippurim service by Jews scattered around the world, separated from their homeland.

  Well, she had been this year in Jerusalem. But little good it had done.

  It grew dark and even more unsafe to find her way back to the camp. Lydia rose from the ground and began the long walk back, the scrolls as cold and stiff against her chest as her rigid limbs and her aching heart.

  Eighteen

  The plan was foolish from the start, and Lydia should have declined.

  But Alexandra’s demands on Mariamme became her daughter’s begging request of Lydia. In the cloying darkness of the predawn, she scurried at the tail end of the little group of four, through the underground tunnels and passageways of the palace.

  In spite of her large belly, Mariamme led them all on swift feet as though she spent all of her days traversing these tunnels. It was Lydia who liked to wander in quiet places to think. Had Mariamme practiced an escape? Alexandra followed, then Aristobulus, head and shoulders above the women.