Agrippa's Daughter (3 page)

“Foolish child,” he said. “Of course you know that the story is not true. An invention out of the whole cloth. The times have gone when angels descended to earth to intervene in the affairs of men. God leaves us to our own solutions, and the punishment is ours if we fail Him. But what interests me is that such a story should arise and get around. All over Chalcis, did you say?”

“If I heard it once, I heard it twenty times,” Berenice replied.

“I should think my brother would have written concerning it.”

“Only the very great take pleasure in the glory of others.”

“Oh?” He had forgotten entirely his earlier irritation. Now he smiled at the manner in which she complimented herself and himself, the two bracketed.

“May I pour your wine, Father?” Berenice’s brother asked brightly.

As the young Agrippa poured a goblet of wine for the older Agrippa, and then tasted it himself—for the king drank no wine that was not tasted by another—Berenice walked past the two fat priests, her back to the king for a moment, smiling at them scornfully, or, rather, grimacing at them the way a sixteen-year-old girl can grimace, and then turned to face her father. The king was further mollified by the fact that his son had acted as his taster. He looked with some pleasure now upon his two beautiful children, and, returning his look, Berenice said to herself,

“One day, my dear father, those fine green cat’s eyes of yours will be dead, seeing nothing—but my own cat’s eyes will be alive. Was it our dubious ancestor, King Solomon, who said that a live cat can look at a dead king—or was it a live dog?”

But her smile directed at her father was so sweet and gentle that he was moved to say, “Your thoughts, my dear daughter?”

“Love and admiration are easy in thought—harder in speech.”

“You’ve changed. Your months in Chalcis have improved you.”

“Yes.”

“A certain sweetness.”

“I feel it too,” she simpered.

“My brother’s influence.”

“But surely,” she agreed.

“You see how wise I was, foolish child.”

“So wise, yes,” and she added silently, “I wish you were dead, damn you forever.”

And he was before the day was over, causing Berenice to remember this incident and these thoughts; but in all truth causing her no more than a minimum of guilt.

“I have a remarkable memory,” she told her brother then. “I remember things very clearly.”

Until her first betrothal, Berenice paid little attention to her father, and he in turn took even less note of her. It might be said that he was absorbed. A young, handsome prince of the Herodian line, he was without realm except in a token sense, a tiny province of Galilee to substantiate his claims, but funds without limit. There were the endless attractions of Alexandria, Athens, and Rome for him to explore, and even simple, uninspired vice requires deadly concentration. That of course was before he became a saint. In his years of goodness—four of them, he had—he observed one day that Berenice, the child, had become a woman, that remarkable change that happens to young ladies at the age of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, or even twelve. She was between fourteen and fifteen when King Agrippa made his observation, finding her tall, full-breasted, wide-hipped, and even attractive in a strange, outlandish way, with her freckled face, her coppery skin, her red hair, and her gleaming green eyes.

“Time for her to be married,” Agrippa told his wife, Cypros.

“Time for her to have a little peace and pleasure first. She’s only a child,” Cypros retorted.

In his saintly stage at the time, Agrippa took a dim view of pleasure—which recalled his own past and the uneasiness that went with such recollection—and felt that Berenice was an object for his convenience and by no means for her own. However, when it came to the fact of marriage, it was not easy for Agrippa to make a choice. His one yardstick had become saintliness, and while there were good men in plenty in the ranks of Israel, he soon found that few of them were wellborn and even fewer were rich. If Agrippa was indifferent to the needs or desires of Berenice, he was by no means indifferent to her bloodlines; she could claim not only the Herodian and Hasmonean ancestry, but also the bloodline of King David and a trace of the Roman Julian Gens. There was the highest blood in Israel. Who could marry it?

His decision, finally, was for a weak and ailing boy of sixteen called Marcus Lysimachus. He was the youngest son of Alexander Lysimachus, alabarch of Alexandria. Outside of Palestine, in what was known as the Diaspora, the largest and wealthiest community of Jews was in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Here the Jews were a power unto themselves, inhabiting half the city, their houses the finest, their streets the broadest and grandest; and here, too, were their schools, colleges, their libraries, their theaters; and here lived not only the wealthiest merchants, but the most renowned scholars, poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Of these philosophers, one had become almost as famous as Plato in his own time; this was Philo—of whom it was said that not since Moses had a mortal man come so close to a knowledge of and understanding of God.

Howsoever he achieved in the realms of theology and philosophy, in materialistic terms, Philo was enormously wealthy and influential and a part of one of the great Jewish families of the time. His brother, Alexander Lysimachus, was the titular head of this family, and alabarch as well—a word which meant “governor”—and lord over all the Jews and many of the Gentiles living on the Egyptian delta. It was his son, Marcus, whom Agrippa chose as a husband for his daughter, Berenice.

There were other families possessed of worldly goods who would have been eager for an alliance with the House of Herod and a marriage to King Agrippa’s daughter, but the family of Lysimachus was saintly as well as rich. Philo’s wife went unadorned, not even a gold clasp on her dress when she could have covered herself with diamonds, and, when asked why, retorted, “What jewels can match my husband’s glory, which envelops me wherever I go.” It was one of those childish, apocryphal tales told wherever there were Jews, just as they said of Alexander’s wife that, secretly and covered with a cloak, she walked in the vile alleys to give charity to the beggars, and thus had sold all of her own jewels and the jewels of her sister-in-law as well. There was no need of the literal truth in such stories; the wealth of Lysimachus was such that he could feed all the beggars in Egypt and not have to pawn a jewel in the process; and such was their fame and power that after Agrippa had sent off his envoy, proposing a marriage between his daughter and Alexander’s son, he was filled with uncertainties and doubts.

After all, King Agrippa was fifty-two years old at that time, two years before this last day in his life, and he had been saintly for only two of the fifty-two. For the other half century, he had been exactly what you would expect from the grandson of King Herod the Great. And Jews still uttered a curse and an invocation against the devil when Herod the Great’s name was mentioned. So until he received a reply from Egypt, Agrippa reverted to being a surly, angry tyrant of a man.

In particular, he turned his anger against Berenice. He could anticipate precisely what would happen if Alexander Lysimachus rejected his proposal. Within weeks, the story would be all over the Roman Empire—how the king of the Jews had been scorned by the family of Lysimachus—and he would be held up to ridicule and become the butt of a new series of obscene stories.

Once Berenice ventured to speak to him unbidden, and he turned on her in fury and cried out, “Damn you filthy whelp—I ought to have you whipped, whipped and stoned!”

Since Berenice knew nothing at all of the preparation that had been undertaken, she was terrified and bewildered.

Finally, however, the answer came from Alexandria—penned in the fine, controlled hand of the alabarch himself. He was in receipt of the proposal of the most noble Agrippa, and he was highly conscious of what it meant to join one’s own blood with the noble blood of the Hasmoneans—those jewels in the Crown of Judah—

Here Agrippa noticed but endured the fact that no mention was made of the Idumean blood of Herod but only of the blood strain of Mariamne, the wife of Herod and descendant of Mattathias the Hasmonean, who fathered the five great Maccabeans. This could be taken as a calculated insult; but it could also and more intelligently be accepted as a piece of thoughtful diplomacy, a polite pretext for creating no impediments to what was proposed. Once Agrippa would have burst forth in anger; now he went on reading with scarcely a tremor.

—jewels which, he might suggest in all modesty, would not be dimmed in such an alliance. He had heard much of the wit and beauty of Berenice, of her fair skin and red hair—the royal and priestly red hair that through the generations had marked the Tribe of Levi and the House of Aaron—and he only hoped that she would not become impatient with his own son, good and gentle, but weak in body and given to illness—

Agrippa shrugged at this. A marriage was a marriage. Royal children were not like horses that you bought and sold and bred for strength and character.

Agrippa must understand, the alabarch went on—in all truth a gentle person himself—how much he loved his son, Marcus; and no words available to him would match the simple fact of bestowing his son in marriage to Berenice. No action either; but simply to indicate the love he knew he would bear for his daughter-in-law to be, he was sending King Agrippa a poor gift of two talents of gold and three of silver.

Even Agrippa was overwhelmed and awed by this princely—no kingly—sum, if indeed there were five kings in all the world who could gather such an amount together, much less be able to bestow it, not as a dowry but as a gesture of good will. Let him slight Agrippa’s Herodian ancestors; at that price, Agrippa would renounce all connection with Herod.

He was a gay Agrippa then, smiling and gay, the cup of his fulfillment running over. Passing by the room where he was communicating the news to her mother, Berenice saw him doing a little jig of joy. Many years would pass before Berenice would come to fully comprehend the wilderness of space, time, and culture that divided the Herodian family from the line of Lysimachus. To her understanding at the time, she was noble born and this Marcus was a commoner—and not for her life could she grasp the subtleties of status that had been conferred upon her father and mother. So, passing by the room, she was halted; and in her father’s command, there was a strange and disturbing note of tenderness:

“Berenice, my darling!”

She was not used to being addressed as darling. She halted warily at the doorway.

“Come in, darling,” said her mother.

She took a few hesitant steps into the room. At fourteen, she was possessed of more wariness than poise.

“Wonderful news,” her mother added, but a little less than overjoyed now that she was confronting her daughter—as if she suddenly realized that the child in front of her was a stranger.

“You are betrothed,” her father announced. “We have made an alliance with one of the great Jewish families of all the world. We honor them and they honor us—which is precisely how these things should be.”

Berenice heard, but nothing in her appearance changed, no expression on her face to replace the alert wariness. In her mind, she was dealing with what she had just heard, arranging the facts, gathering her own resources, such as they were. Vaguely and in the back of her being, there had been the knowledge that some day she would marry a man. Other knowledge went with that. Her brother, Agrippa, a year and a month older than she, was an able teacher—as were the slaves around the palace, who, in return for some small payment from her brother, would rut out a visual lesson in the perpetuation of the species. Her initial curiosity was wedded to distaste, but at no point in her life where curiosity could be satisfied did Berenice ever draw back. Many things motivated her, and not least among them the compulsion to know why, how, and when.

Now, her mother and father had devised a new twist to her fate—and since nothing else of their devising was particularly delightful, this did not fill her with anticipation. She waited.

“Of course I could have married you to some Gentile prince,” Agrippa went on. “I could have enlarged my realm by half again—but what then? I am the keeper of the Law. I stand before the people as a saint stands before them. Marry you to a Gentile? But you may believe me that Jewish princes don’t grow on trees—”

No muscle in Berenice’s face moved.

“You don’t seem very pleased.”

“Whom am I betrothed to?” she asked.

“Marcus Lysimachus, son of the Alabarch Alexander, nephew of Philo, and only one of the richest young men on earth—that’s all, only one of the richest—”

“I see,” Berenice said, still unmoved.

Later, Berenice’s mother, Cypros, said to her husband, “It seems a pity, such a child—”

“Child! The devil you say!” Agrippa retorted. “She’s no child, not by a long measure. I just pray to the Lord God that she’s a virgin.”

Berenice was a virgin. Her brother, Agrippa, three cousins, and a young Roman princeling had all done their best to deflower her; but under her soft skin were muscles like steel, and wide-shouldered and long-limbed as she was, she was stronger than any of them. When the learned physicians from Alexandria came to examine her, they clucked with approval—and Berenice lay upon her back, hating them and all other men on earth. They examined her vagina and discussed her, and since this was entirely a part of the times, not only in Palestine but in a hundred other countries, she resented this hardly at all, but did resent violently that these common swine should touch her or lay hands on any part of her. And thinking at the same time that had she indeed been deflowered, what a damned outcast she would have been, spat upon by her own father and derided by every sot and whore and slave in Israel—thinking of this possibility which she had avoided simply by physical strength and willful purpose, she composed a thematic list of things she would inflict upon Agrippa, her brother, and her cousins, and the Roman, if she ever saw him again. And that depended upon whether she ever saw Rome again, or whether she was intended for internment in Egypt, perpetual imprisonment behind the high garden walls of the home of an Alexandrian millionaire.