Agrippa's Daughter (19 page)

And then, in midaftemoon, he came; and for all that she had steeled and lectured herself against it, Berenice burst out angrily,

“Where were you?”

He looked at her curiously, and then he shook his head.

“And what does that mean?” she demanded.

“Only that you have a vile temper.”

“Oh—how dare you?” she cried. “Devil take you—who do you think you are to talk to me like that!”

“I know who I am,” he answered gently. “Who you are, my lady, is another matter entirely—and perhaps something known to neither of us. You are beautiful beyond belief—but what does it signify? There must be a reflection of that beauty somewhere in your spirit, but if there is, you hide it well.”

She stared at him, tears welling into her eyes in spite of herself, suddenly at a loss for words; and then she walked over to her bed, dropped onto it, and said bleakly, “You didn’t have to say that to me. The whole world says it to me. You didn’t have to say it to me. I am sick. I am your patient, and you are a physician.”

“What do you mean, the whole world says it to you?” he asked softly.

“As if you don’t know what the world says—Berenice the monster, the murderer, the embodiment of evil—” Her voice trailed away, and she sat like a little girl, her hands limp in her lap.

“And are you all that, Berenice?”

“I can’t defend myself. I don’t know how.”

“But you know what you are?”

“No,” she replied woefully. “I don’t.”

He gave her no sympathy, and she did not know how to ask for any. In all her life, she had never asked for sympathy or quarter. He was kind and gentle in his motions and aloof. He took her pulse, felt her forehead, and gave her a small bottle of powder, a measure of which she was to take each day in water.

“You are much better today,” he told her gravely.

“What do you mean?”

“I only mean that you are better.”

“I need a physician. Can’t you see that I am ill?”

“I will come again tomorrow,” he said. “Meanwhile, I don’t want you to lie in bed. Go and walk in the garden. The gardens in this palace are beautiful. When you walk by on the street side, there is only the blank wall, but in here you have your own wonderland. You should be happy here.”

“You are so clever, Pharisee,” said Berenice. “Do you think there is happiness to be found in gardens? Or in anything else inside of a palace?”

“I wouldn’t know, my lady, having never lived in a palace. But to us who see the palace from the outside it is quite glamorous, you may be sure. Also, I no more enjoy your calling me Pharisee than you do my calling you Queen Berenice.”

“But you are a Pharisee,” Berenice said pettishly.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. I suppose you could say that we of the House of Hillel are close to the thinking of the Pharisees—still not so close as you might imagine. We are of our own, for what it is worth—”

“What is your own?”

“People come to us for our teaching—and if it is a matter of teaching, how can I explain it in a word? But you know my name—Shimeon Bengamaliel. Gamaliel, Shimeon, and Hillel—three generations of the names of our house; I bear two of them—”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she interrupted.

He shrugged. “I’ll come tomorrow.”

He left her frustrated and angered, but she obeyed him and walked in the gardens. The seneschals and stewards and ladies of the court came to congratulate her on her recovery—and she knew how they would go back to their own circles of gossip—“I saw her in the garden. Disturbed? Hardly, my dear. Nothing disturbs Berenice. If you had done away with your own father, not to mention the children, would anything disturb you?”—She nodded and smiled—“I don’t believe she was ever sick.”—She picked a pink blossom and put it in her hair.

Then they said, “Look at her—flowers in her hair.” And someone else, being told of it, would wonder why she did not dance. The dance of Berenice then, they decided, could replace the dance of death that they practiced in Tyre on suitable occasions.

But to this, Berenice was indifferent, being fascinated by a process within her. She recalled an instance as a child when she had watched a cocoon break open and the butterfly emerge, and she remembered that she had wondered then whether the cocoon has knowledge of what it might be. Childishly and sentimentally, she envisioned herself as the creature in the cocoon and enveloped herself in an aura of pleasure and well-being—and yet she was unaware that she loved a man; and when the whole of the next day passed without his putting in an appearance, her warmth cooled and her frustration fanned a rage that left no room for love. Another day, and he came in the morning, and her welcome to him was a harsh and imperious,

“Where were you yesterday?”

“A woman was dying. I eased her pain a little,” he said.

“A young woman? What sort of woman?”

“She’s dead.”

“Best for her. How dared you not to come?”

“You are something,” he sighed. “You are indeed.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“How would it help for me to try to tell you? How do you feel today?”

“I feel that I would like to see you hanged by your heels and drawn—drawn with your guts hanging out!”

“Oh?” He reached for her hand to take her pulse.

“I don’t need you!” she cried, pulling her hand away. “I don’t want you. I am cured. Get out of here!”

He stared at her for a while; then he shook his head and said to her, “There is so much hate that it baffles me. The Almighty favored you as few women are favored, a strong and healthy body, and great beauty, and a mind. I am told that you have a keen, a discerning mind. And with that, riches, position, power—yet out of it all, you distill only hatred.” He stood over her now as she sat on her couch. “Yes—I think you are cured, as cured as you will ever be, God help you.” He turned his back on her and walked from the room.

After a moment, she lay down on the couch and began to weep. Never before had she wept like this, her whole body wracked with sobs. Indeed, never before had she actually wept. It was a new accomplishment.

The weeks passed, and gradually the scandal created by the curious circumstances of Berenice’s marriage to Polemon and the subsequent annulment by the high priest ceased to be a prime topic of conversation in Jewish circles. Not that it was forgotten, but other matters pressed to the fore. Cuspius Fadus, the new procurator of Judea, demonstrated how little he understood Jews by forcing his way into the outer court of the Temple and demanding the custody of the high priest’s robes. It was an infantile plan for control of the Jews, and while Ishmael Barfabi might be corrupt in other matters, in the face of this pagan affront to his faith, he bared his breast, called his Levite spearmen to die by his side, and faced the Romans. Within hours, all of Jerusalem was up in arms, and every Jew had a weapon in hand, if no more than a knife or a club. In the face of overwhelming force, Fadus backed down but sent to Caesarea for his legions. Meanwhile, the more sober heads among the population of Jerusalem sent post-riders to Galilee for the young King Agrippa. Agrippa rode two horses to death to reach Jerusalem, where he argued, pleaded, promised, and cozened with the procurator. Fadus agreed to preserve the status quo until word came from Rome—to which city Agrippa had already sent a committee and a petition. Delighted with the way the young man had handled the situation, the Emperor Claudius supported him. Agrippa was invited by the priesthood to read from the Torah in the public assembly in Jerusalem, and for the occasion he chose Genesis 44:18, namely:

“Then Judah came near unto him and said, O my lord, let thy servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord’s ears, and let not thine anger burn against thy servant: for thou art even as Pharaoh.”

It was a brilliant choice, and if the masses of people in Jerusalem failed to comprehend this, nevertheless the educated people of the upper classes were delighted and hailed Agrippa as a young Solomon come to judgment. Hearing pleasant accolades bestowed upon him, he forgot his sister for the moment.

She, meanwhile, had her own problems and torments to deal with, and when she could stand it no longer, when her stomach was empty and aching with loneliness and want, she went to Oman Bensimon, the old seneschal to her brother the king, and said to him,

“Tell me of the House of Hillel, and where is it and what is it?”

The old man, no fool, studied her shrewdly, and put in his demurral almost legalistically, informing her that between the House of Herod and the House of Hillel, there was a gap as wide as the ocean and as deep as the pit of the Dead Sea.

“Is it blood debt?” Berenice asked. “Is it for blood let that there is blood due in payment?”

“Strangely enough, not at all,” answered old Bensimon. “For in all the generations of your house, my lady, no hand was ever raised against one of the House of Hillel. Not even by your royal great-grandfather Herod the Great. For it is told that when he lay dying, knowing that in all the world no man or woman or child would shed a tear for him, he called his advisers to him and asked how he could die and have all Israel weep for him? Ah, they answered, that is very simple indeed, for all you have to do, mighty king, is to have the Rabbi Hillel put to death when you feel your own death upon you. They were right. But do you know, Queen Berenice, he would not do this—”

“Why?” Berenice demanded. “Was he afraid of Hillel?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe that at all,” she said.

“No? Who knows?” the old man shrugged. “That was half a century ago—”

“And when Hillel died,” Berenice demanded, “did all of Israel weep?”

“Where there were Jews, they wept,” the old man replied softly.

“I don’t believe that Herod was afraid of him.”

“Who knows? Hillel was a saint. Kings fear saints.”

“That is nonsense,” Berenice declared. “There are no saints today. It is like the voice of God. The rabbis would tell me how God spoke to Moses, to Aaron and Joshua and Gideon and David—and all the others. But who has heard the voice of God today? Did Hillel hear the voice of God?”

“You would make me a student of Hillel,” the old man shrugged. “I am a seneschal in the House of Herod—so obviously not even an admirer of Hillel, and poorly informed, most poorly informed, Queen Berenice. But so far as my small knowledge goes—mostly hearsay—the Rabbi Hillel never claimed to have heard the voice of God.”

“Of course not. But still you haven’t told me why we are so apart.”

“Hillel and Herod are apart. That’s the way it is. Why is the mountain high and the sea low? Because the Almighty willed it to be so.”

“I resent your talking to me as if I were either a child or a halfwit,” Berenice said. “It is even possible that an old and trusted seneschal might regret making sport with me.”

“Ah, my lady,” pleaded the old man, “I beg your pardon. Humbly—but as God is my witness, what can I say to you? The House of Hillel is anathema to the House of Herod. Thus it has been; thus it will be. I did not make it so; it is simply the natural order of things.”

“I see. And tell me, Oman, where is their place?”

“Their place?”

“Their house, their seat—where does one go to find this House of Hillel? Or do they hide?”

“They don’t hide. Why should they hide? No one has ever raised a hand against them, not the kings or the Zealots or the Romans or the pagans—no, they have nothing to fear, and they live in peace. Not far from Tiberias, either. When you go out of the main gate and take the road to the sea, there is an hour’s walk, and then another road branching off to the right. Not a very good road, but ten or fifteen minutes of walking on it will bring you to the House of Hillel.”

“You appear to know the way very well indeed,” said Berenice.

“Ah—” The old man spread his arms. “One hears everything.”

In the old tales, it was said that this was the first time Berenice had walked upon the roads of Israel; but that is an effect-saying, and a good deal of nonsense too. Perhaps if Berenice had been a Judean princess, raised behind the walls of Herod’s palace in Jericho, which contained many of the features of an oriental seraglio, the story might have held some truth; but she had grown up in Galilee, where there were few great houses and fewer harems, where as a child she ran free as an animal in the forest and swam free as a fish in the lake, and where her Greek teachers made a fetish of the body in its use and function. So she was no stranger to the roads, which were not hard-surfaced and mathematically precise Roman highways but rather deeply rutted cart tracks and mountain trails.

She dressed for the road, plain leather sandals, a shift of white linen in a coarse peasant weave, and such a gray overdress as could be found on ten thousand women on any day in Galilee, and she set out by herself, telling no one where she was off to. She washed her face clean of any trace of paint, lip rouge, or eye shadow and bound her hair in a kerchief, so that none of its rich red color showed—and then there were only the green eyes to identify her. Yet with her hair hidden and her dress so plain and common, no one recognized her or bothered to give her a second glance of recognition—although many a man turned to look again at her face and to try to catch a bit more of ankle and leg than the long shift revealed. That was something else. She was another woman in the streets of Tiberias, taller than most and well worth a bit of scrutiny; but no more than that. She walked through the early morning crowds with a comfortable feeling of invisibility, and even the guards at the open gate, grinning with appreciation, made no more of her. As a princess, her particular crown was the red hair. She was “the red one.” She wore a crown of blood, as they would have it, and since people had seen her for the most part from a distance, they had seen only that.

She walked on. She had said to herself that an hour of walking would be nothing, but in time her legs became weary. She had been too long away from walking, too long away from exercise of any kind, and too long away from the road to remember the fine dust that soon covered her feet and laid its thin skin upon her hands and face too, so that when the sweat came, it grimed her. She didn’t care. The Princess Berenice, queen of Chalcis, was left behind. At least for the moment, she was free, and she breathed her freedom with pleasure as the life of the road eddied about her. This was the main road to the sea, and she had forgotten the life and motion and color of such a road. A camel caravan of plodding, stinking, loud-farting beasts passed her, its Arab drivers cursing and grunting as they prodded the stupid beasts. Again, a flock of sheep washed about her, one big ewe treading on her foot and causing her to cry out with pain. The shepherds, two long-boned and beardless boys of fourteen or so, grinned at her plight and were bold enough to try an obscene remark or two. An old woman heard them and went into the flock and after them with her stick, and the boys fled away, laughing. Again, a Roman party on horseback thundered by, on their way from Caesarea to their watering place on Semanhenitis, deliberately going into a gallop at the sight of a Jewish woman on the road; and then a cluster of Zealots, those grim and savage religious warriors of the northern hills, looking after the Romans with hatred, their hands on their knives and bows, their leader asking her,