Agrippa's Daughter (32 page)

It was a strange scene that Berenice watched from the temple elevation. On the one hand, the thousand legionaries from Caesarea were moving at parade march toward the walls of Jerusalem—unaware that anything untoward was either happening or scheduled to happen. They had been summoned against the possibility of trouble in the city; but trouble in Jerusalem was a constant of the world they and their fathers and their grandfathers had inhabited. On the other hand, the four hundred legionaries inside of the city wall were racing toward the Damascus Gate, very well aware of trouble; and now there descended upon this group, from walls and housetops, a rain of rocks and bricks, slates, building stones, arrows, and javelins. On every roof top there in the low city where the working people, the water carriers, masons, carpenters, potters, and weavers lived, there was a cluster of men and boys, bows bent and loosed without hurry or fear, javelins poised and then discharged against a sheltering Roman shield ten feet below. The Romans tried to cover themselves with their big shields, but the rocks smashed the shields; the javelins pierced the shields; and the arrows sought out the flesh that showed. Faster and faster ran the Romans as their initial wariness turned to panic, and they left behind them a trail of the dead and dying, the four hundred becoming three hundred and then two hundred and then finally no more than forty or fifty bleeding men to make a half circle of their shields alongside the Damascus Gate, fighting desperately against the mass of Jews who slowly closed in around them.

The wild shouting out of the battle hysteria that had overtaken the Jews was picked up across the entire city and was heard by the two cohorts on the Antipatris Road—who were now approaching the city gate. Berenice could see, even at this distance, how their precise step began to falter, how the soldiers glanced from side to side, trying to assess the meaning of the noise from the city and the intent of the Jews who had been waiting to receive them and who were now closing in on them from either side. An officer on a white horse spurred down the road, shouting at the Jews and lashing at them with his whip. Berenice could not hear his words at this distance, but she could well imagine him ordering the Jews back with all the delicacy of language a Roman officer commands—and then someone threw a rock and the officer fell down from his horse. Half a dozen legionaries broke ranks to rescue him, and from the other side the Sicarii closed in, knives drawn, ripping aside the Roman shields and coming in close, body to body with their razor-sharp, deadly knives. The other officers raced their horses toward the front of the column, shouting for the gates to open. The column broke in two, the front half toward the gate on the double and the latter section cut off and surrounded by the Sicarii. Then the gates were open, and the head of the column plunged through and the latter half wrenched itself loose from the grasp of the Sicarii and ran wildly toward the gate, all order and discipline forgotten. Of the thousand in the two cohorts, about seven hundred managed to enter the gate—the rest lay dead and dying on and alongside the Antipatris Road.

Berenice was no stranger to scenes of violence; she lived in a time and place where violence was very much the order of the day, and only a few days before she had witnessed the slaughter in the Great Plaza. But this was new—this thing of standing calmly and safely on the high mount of the Temple and watching, through the clear and sparkling air, a desperate fight to the death taking place no more than a few thousand feet from where she stood, a beginning less than two thousand feet away and an ending no more than three hundred feet below her. From beginning to end, she watched all of it.

The Roman relief column, pouring through the gate, joined forces with the handful left of the group that had raced there from the Praetorium. The centurions shouted orders for discipline and for a reconstitution of the ranks; shields were raised; the Romans began to move—but they were adrift now in a sea of Jews. From all over the city Jews poured toward the Damascus Gate—and the Romans became an island in that shouting, enraged mob. The shout went up to the heavens and lay upon the city.

From the Damascus Gate to the Citadel of Antonia—a stone warehouse alongside the temple elevation and guarded by ten legionaries—was less than a quarter of a mile; but it took almost an hour for the Romans to fight their way there—and all along the twisting way their numbers dwindled. Almost two hundred reached this shelter—two hundred out of the original fourteen hundred, and this only by dint of discipline and desperation.

The royal horse troop had accompanied Agrippa on his ceremonial visit to Alexandria, and now they rode with him from Alexandria to Jerusalem. There were three thousand men in the horse troop, and in plain fact, aside from the Levite temple guards, whose ancestors had defended the Temple for hundreds of years, these three thousand horsemen were the only trained and disciplined body of professional soldiers in all of Israel. It is true that eight hundred Jews served the alabarch of Alexandria as an armed guard and that there was a city guard of four hundred in Chalcis, but the former were volunteer sons of good family and the latter a citizen service. A generation ago, the Emperor Claudius had disbanded all Jewish military forces, leaving only the ceremonial guard of horsemen for young Agrippa and the Levite temple guards, and there had been no armies in Israel since that time—except for the Roman legions of occupation. But this was less unnatural than it might seem, since Israel itself had changed over the past century, breaking out of the narrow confines of Judea and Galilee, until the Jewish lands and cities spread from Egypt to the Black Sea and along the coast of Africa even to within sight of Spain—lands and cities won not by conquest but for the first time by a combination of trade and the teachings of the saintly Hillel, by conversion and persuasion. Nor, during the twenty and more years of Agrippa’s kinghood, had his horsemen ever been in battle or performed more than police duties.

As in Alexandria, half of his troop were the sons of good families, younger sons, adventurous sons who enjoyed the peacock effect on women of a glittering brass cuirass and a fine helmet topped by white and blue plumes. After the Parthian fashion, they were heavily armed—short cavalry bow, sword and lance, and round bull-hide shield. They carried as their standard the golden lion of Judah on the pale blue background of Levi and they all rode white horses. They made a wonderful spectacle at parades and celebrations, but Agrippa was understandably doubtful over their usefulness in a war. In any case, considering what the news out of Jerusalem was, he decided not to lead his men into the city—where some accident might touch off an incident between them and the Zealots—but to stable them outside of the walls and enter Jerusalem by himself. Berenice, aware of the same danger, rode out from Jerusalem alone and met him half a dozen miles away, on the Bethlehem Road. It was a strange meeting, for Berenice, aching to be embraced by this man who had been father and mother as well as brother to her, had to restrain herself in the sight of the troops and kiss his hand most formally, saying with equal formality, “I welcome you, my royal brother, and may the Almighty visit you with fortune.” Then she told him that she had made arrangements with Phineas Ba’as Hacohen of the House of Hakedron to stable the horses; he would also provide a flatland where the troopers might pitch t6nts. From the Idumean shepherds south of Bethlehem, she had purchased fourteen hundred fat sheep—which would be ample to feed his men, even if their stay was a long one. At Hakedron, they had been baking bread for three days, and four thousand loaves were waiting. And she had purchased five hundred skins of wine at the market in Jerusalem.

Deeply impressed, Agrippa thanked her, but she said, “Yes, brother, I can work miracles with bread and meat, which money buys very easily—but not with the hearts of men. God help me, I am so afraid.”

“We will work it out,” Agrippa said.

“I don’t know. This isn’t Galilee, and this city is not Tiberias. Do you know what the Sicarii are?”

“I have seen something of their work.”

“Have you ever looked into the eyes of one of them? Do you think a Jewish madman is better than a Roman madman?”

“Anger blows off, like a punctured bag,” Agrippa said. “Florus did a terrible thing, and he paid the price for it. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That isn’t my doctrine, but there it is, and so the scales are balanced. Is Florus dead?”

“He’s very much alive,” Berenice said. “Locked up in the old Palace of Herod—the stone part—with a cohort or so of legionaries. The rest of them are in the tower of Antonia.”

“Good—then with him out of the way, we can calm down the hotheads. Water on fire—that’s what I say.”

Berenice shook her head hopelessly. Her brother had not the vaguest notion of what had transpired and what could transpire in Jerusalem.

Shimeon, pacing back and forth, shook his head and said that in his opinion, it would do no good for either Agrippa or Berenice to talk to the people of Jerusalem.

“Events move,” he said. “Things change, people change—cities change.”

They were met in the House of Hakedron, the king of the Jews in Galilee, his sister, the queen of Chalcis, and the nashi over all Israel, Shimeon Bengamaliel, who was the head of the Great Sanhedrin. With them, there was Phineas, the Ba’as Hacohen, who was head of the house now, and Joseph Bengorian, the Judean prince reputedly the wealthiest man in Judea, and Anan Benanan, who was once high priest, eloquent, a poet in his own right and blood kin to both the House of Herod and the House of Mattathias, and Gideon Benharmish, the old man who was the head of the House of Shlomo in Tiberias, and who had come down from Galilee to be with the king.

“What are you saying, Shimeon?” asked Benharmish. “Are you saying that these events cannot be reversed—?”

“By words?”

“Words, reason.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. But for Berenice and Agrippa to go in there—I don’t know how they feel about the king.”

“You think they would harm us?” Agrippa asked quietly. “Why, Shimeon—tell me. I know I haven’t been the best or the wisest king to rule over Jews, but I have been at least the first king to acknowledge the way of Hillel the Good. No man has been tortured or murdered by my order, and there is no terror where I rule. I walk in the streets of Tiberias like any other man, and if a Jew sees me, he nods and bids good morning to Agrippa Benagrippa. My armies have ravaged no lands—and if I rule without genius I also rule without hate.”

“You rule by virtue of Rome,” Shimeon said, halting suddenly and thrusting a finger at Agrippa. “There is the rub—because”—he flung his arm in the direction of Jerusalem now—“there is a city that nourishes itself with hatred of Rome.”

“Which leads us where?” Bengorian demanded.

“Face that, Shimeon,” said Benanan. “Hatred of Rome—that is a state of mind. We talk of something else, not simply a state of mind. We talk about twelve hundred Roman legionaries who were slain by our people in Jerusalem—”

Caleb Barhoreb limped into the room in time to hear the last of. this, and he denied the label “our people.” “Sicarii,” he growled. “They were murdered by the Sicarii.”

“No—we cannot use the word murder, not in the light of the slaughter of the children. That was murder—foul and unforgivable murder; but what followed was an act of hatred and revenge—and this is not”—turning to Shimeon—“this is not a city that ever embraced Hillel. This is a city of Shammai, and it is a city of the Sicarii because the people approve of the Sicarii and shelter them—not only because they fear them. And as for the death of the Roman soldiers, it was not only the Sicarii. Every hand was raised against them. I saw women, gentle, sweet women—Jewish women who would reverence the life of an insect—I saw such women bringing down legionaries with rocks.” Benanan paused and took a long breath. Then he continued,

“I don’t know, Shimeon, how they would react to the king. But I do know this—there is no Jew who would ever harm a hair upon Berenice’s head. Let them go into the city and plead. It’s a straw. But if we don’t grasp at straws—”

“We will be at war with Rome,” Benharmish finished. “I tell you, my friends, that we have made a profession of hating Rome—but what a luxury hate is. It is so hard to reason and to understand.”

They were looking at Berenice now, who had listened to all their talk and heard it ringing as hollow as a bell, and she said to them, reaching out for her brother Agrippa’s hand,

“The bitter truth of it is, as you gentlemen well know, that my brother and I rule over nothing except a shadow permitted by Rome. Yet that is not wholly the case. We rule over a cherished memory of the Jews, and howsoever we place ourselves we cannot cover over the fact that we bear the bloodlines of David and of Solomon Bendavid and of Mattathias and of Judah Benmattathias as well as those of Herod. If we have no power, we have at least an obligation, and we will not have anyone tell us whether or not we can enter a Jewish city. We will do so tomorrow, and without fear.”

That night, Berenice lay in bed in the room given to them at the House of Hakedron, sleepless and silent, as she had been silent through the evening—and almost at a point where she could bear it no longer when Shimeon spoke to her and asked her directly what lay between them.

“A wall I think,” Berenice said. “I never believed it could—”

“What makes it?”

“You do, Shimeon,” Berenice said.

“I love you. That’s all I can say, my beloved.”

Then she resisted him no more, but lay in his great arms, trying to find answers to all her fears and doubts in the strength of him, the smell and manhood of him.

In the morning, sunlight and the hot wind from the south. The House of Hakedron lay five hundred feet below the city wall, a thousand feet below the top elevation. Berenice said to Gabo, “I dress like a queen today.” Gabo was growing old all too quickly. She was always pregnant with someone’s child; she was petulant, sharp-tongued, and each year she took additional liberties. She flatly told Berenice that she was a fool. “You are no Judean. What do you know of the south?” “I know the kind of brown ape the south breeds. Namely, yourself. I should have boiled you in oil when I had a taste for such things.” To which Gabo replied, “Just as they all overdo your saintliness now, so do you overdo your wickedness. You never boiled anyone in oil, and I am not afraid of you, and why don’t we go back to Galilee?” “Oh, put out my clothes and stop chattering,” said Berenice.