Fifth Gospel (25 page)

THE DANCER

Her mother had always told Salome she was a creature conjured from a dream; created, essentially, not from blood, like a mere mortal, but from thin air shaped and moulded and sculpted into a pleasing likeness of Herodias.

The
sorceress, the performer of miracles, the wonder-worker, said that Salome’s father, Herod Philip, had contributed only a seed, while she had breathed life into a dead thing and without her, her mother assured her, nothing would have been made that was made. Salome therefore grew up thinking that her heart moved to the rhythm of her mother’s blood, that her thoughts were begotten from impulses in her mother’s will, and that her limbs were motivated by the tenor of her mother’s thoughts, and while she believed this, harmony ruled the universe.

On the day Salome’s body began to issue forth
, from its own free will, that individual substance that marks a girl a woman, the spell was broken. The woman inside the girl saw that she was made from blood after all, and she understood that Herodias had kept this from her. Afterwards Salome began, little by little, to shed her mother’s image, like a snake sheds its skin, and to dream herself a second birth. In so doing she discovered what her mother had not told her:

Salome was beautiful.
This was her first awakening. For she was possessed of those seven sought after attributes: luxurious hair, well shaped eyes, full bodied lips, breasts like moons, wide hips, rounded buttocks and shapely legs. And Herod Antipas, her stepfather had been the one to confirm it.

From the first
, Herod was the only man who dared to look at her. His fiery, lustful hunger had quickened a sense of womanliness, an urgency and a vitality that had seduced her. But an instinct told her that to be desired while remaining desire-less was a far more potent elixir. With such an elixir a woman could bewitch her image so deep into a man’s soul that it would be known beyond the annihilation of sleep…perhaps even beyond the extinction of death, making her eternal, immortal!

This was her second awakening.

With a new vehemence did Salome set about growing her talents, cultivating the power of her endowments, and educating the efficacy of her seductions. She contrived with calm purpose to learn the seven pagan dances, the hardest of them being an artifice of seduction so exacting that it had not mastered by many. Such a dance could make a woman’s body a messenger of lust and delectable provocation, a labyrinth of secret potions and concoctions and magic spells – the instrument of an immortal goddess and the undoing of the Tetrarch of Galilee.

For sport she
had set out to seduce her mother’s new husband, with the patient concentration of an artisan creating a box of tempting Jewels. Each gem was carefully shaped to attract the light and the eye and therefore the man. But that had been before John the Baptist.

That day at Ainon,
she had felt a great attraction for the tall man browned by the sun, muscular, strong and serious. When her mind, despoiled of its devices and enchantments, had listened to the voice of this attraction, it had discerned that it came not from those places where pleasure pulls and tugs, but from her very heart! The joy of discovering the feeling of love was, however, soon traded for fury, when she realised that the man who had quickened it was himself rejecting her as if she were filth.

After that, Herod moved them to t
he odious fortress of Machareus and she had applied herself during those endless, tedious days, to driving her stepfather to madness. But when news reached her that his guards were bringing John to the dungeons of Machareus in chains, in her soul was ignited her love afresh, and she had waited for an opportunity to go to him.

Now, as she slipped out of the citadel and made a way across the compound to the dungeons, she was full of a strange anticipation. She paid a guard handsomely
and he allowed her passage to the cell and left her alone with the man in chains. She took the ring of keys from a nail in the stone and went to a barrel of water and took a cup full. She would clean the sweat from his brow and the blood from the whippings on his arms and shoulders before releasing him.

After a moment of indecision, standing in the shadows
, she dared to come to him. To her eye he seemed less than he had been and yet that strange sensation now came over her again, not a thrill of ardour, not a pounding of her heart for the passion of her loins, but something tender. She would be his selfless, willing disciple.

Later
, she would wonder how she, a princess of Judea, could have bowed so low before such a man, but for now she was not thinking of herself, she was thinking only of the bond that existed between them, and how it had drawn her heart from its prison and changed its nature.

She set down the cup and contrived to kneel before him, to take the shackles from his hands and feet, but his eyes came suddenly open, arresting her movements. In them she saw no reflection of her warm-hearted
thoughts, only confusion and exhaustion and what more?

He said to her, ‘W
ho is this that looks upon me?’

She hesitated
and stood then in the light from the torches, so that he might see more clearly how she had changed. ‘I am the Hasmonean Princess, Salome. You met me at Ainon, but I am not as I was.’

Something moved the muscles of his face, something flickered in his eye – what w
as it?

‘Why are you come
, woman? Your presence profanes the chosen one of God! Do not touch me! Let me be!’ he said quickly, moving to get away from her.

This struck her a blow and she was assailed by incertitude. Could he be rejecting her again
, as an unsuitable, blemished and unworthy sacrifice? Surely the great prophet could see beyond what she had been to the creature of devotion that she had become? Her heart was numb. Her hands trembled. Her image of herself, having faded through selflessness, now floated away from her grasp. Soon she would disappear, having slipped through her own fingers!

She clung to the edges of her mind with the fingernails of hope, ‘How can I, a princess, profane a filthy criminal lying in chains?’

He looked at her, ‘Put on a veil and pour ashes over your head…seek forgiveness for your sins and offer up what you have made pure to God. Do not come to me, to tempt me with beauty of the flesh, Lilith! I am beyond temptation!’

‘I did not come to tempt you!’ she said
, with a flicker of anger in those magnificent eyes. ‘If I had come to tempt you, you would already have fallen victim to my wiles! I have come to gloat, to see how low is made the great man, the great prophet who does not see what is before his eyes! Perhaps, now that I see you my heart feels sympathy for your wretchedness, and I am of a mind to take away the chains, and to set you free!’

‘The freedom you offer is worse than these chains!’ he said to her, ‘It is a temptation to
iniquity!’ His eyes softened then and his voice grew gentle, but this gentleness cut more deep into her flesh than anger would have done, for he spoke like a priest, who, from a high place, looks down on a poor, simple creature, ‘Oh, Lilith! You also tempted Eve, and Eve tempted Adam and because he was weak and succumbed the world is now ravaged by sickness and death! I will not succumb to you! Leave me to my misery!’

He was discarding her
in the same way she discarded trinkets that did not please her. She had made a mistake and had lost herself for a moment, but not for always. If he did not value her pure offering of love then he was no prophet. He was just a man in a dungeon. How dare such a man, such a common man, treat her with disdain?

Anger
blazed in her eyes and furies howled for vengeance in her head and these combined with the spite, hate and revulsion she felt in her heart for herself. She spat her frustrated hopes at the ground and walked out of the stinking cell. Burning with abhorrence and shame for her stupidity she took herself to her bedchamber to scheme.

This was
her third awakening – a man’s desire for a woman might have the power to make her immortal, but a woman’s love for a man had the power to make her extinct!

For days she did not come out
of her bedchamber, taking all her meals in silence, searching in her mind for ways to redress the balance. Finally, the opportunity came, on the night of the Belshazzar-feast, the anniversary of the death of Herod the Great and her stepfather’s ascension to the Tetrarchy.

That night she took long to ready herself: bathing and dressing
, combing and primping until every inch of her was as polished smooth and inviting as silver. Herod’s vanity had given her the opportunity she had desired but had not been expecting so soon. And so it was with the cold, cruel heart of a woman scorned that she honed her finest asset, the instrument of pleasurable torture and delicious torment, towards achieving one end and one end alone.

Revenge!

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

I
n
the dungeons of Machareus sat John the Baptist in a pool of filth and excrement and rat dung. His tortured body, chained to the wall of rock, was so contorted that every muscle and sinew screamed with pain and his mind, having held tight to it-self these months, now began a slow unravelling.  He knew, therefore, that it was only a matter of time before those crawling things that lived in the corners of his cell would come to feed upon his carcass.

For a time he had kept tho
se dark things at bay, but recently Herod had come to him with news – John’s followers had returned with an answer to the question put to Jesus of Nazareth:

Are you the coming one? Or are we to await another?

According to the Tetrarch of Galilee Jesus of Nazareth had said that he was not a prophet or a king. That among those born of woman there was no greater prophet than John the Baptist and that blessed was he who was not ashamed of Jesus!

These had been painful words to hear! No tortures devised by Herod and his adulterous wife could have made
him suffer more. No pincers or knives, no fire could have caused his heart more sorrow, his mind more torment! And now those serpents and dragons, those malformed devils that lay hidden and hungry in the darkness came out, attracted to him by his doubt.

Herod’s stepdaughter, Salome
, had appeared in a dream and had stood before him with her emotions seething inside her. He knew the creature was not Salome but Lilith, an ancient feminine devil. Lilith, had come dressed in fineries, with her heart on her sleeve, but he knew that she was a shape-shifter and a temptress and that her desire was to take a man from his destiny and so he had sent her away and she had gone. But soon other devils had come in the guise of companions in the cold. In the black of night they came into his mind. In the black of day they stood before his eyes – those same eyes that had seen the Lamb of God in all His glory! How could these eyes have fallen so low and become so profane?

He could not remember if he had asked th
at question which had led to his madness –

Are you the coming one, the Olam Habba? Or shall we await another?

His mind, distorted and confused, unfed and tortured, could not recall the precise details
, and yet, there it was, there it was the answer, with its dread-cold breath on his cheeks.

A
voice came near his ear and hissed:

‘
Think of all those years in the wilderness, the fasting and meditation, the self-denials and sufferings…for what? Your scrap of a life has been marked by errors and you have led others to error thereby, for where is the Kingdom you proclaimed? Where is the Messiah you promised?’

Joh
n knew that he had seen Him with his very eyes! He had seen the spirit dove!

‘Ah
…was this not a fine dream? Was it not a fleeting reflection that, like a delusion in the desert, is uncaused by reality? Is this not a trick of the light, of the mind, of the soul that wallows in its own one-sided raptures? You are less than less, remember that! No more than a speck of a speck and nothing you have done has a meaning!’

What
a traitorous thought this was!

And yet…did he not himself say
aeons before, that he must decrease while that other increased? That he must be less than less, so as to make way for Christ, who would come after him and who would be more and more? For was He not greater for His outward meekness? Was He not more powerful for His outward powerlessness, more Godly for His outward manliness? What had Christ Jesus said? He searched in his arid mind until he found it:

Blessed is he who is not ashamed of the man Jesus.

He understood it!

For who could be ashamed
, who had seen what lay above, and below, and within him? Those who were ashamed that he was not a prophet or a king in outward ways, were only so because they had no faith to see the inner Greatness, the inner Power, the inner Godliness!

The dragons and demons and serpents, fearful of these thoughts, began to writhe and to uncoil and slither away from his soul
, repelled into the dark corners of other cells. And so it was that deep in the dungeons of Machareus John the Baptist fell into peace, while not far away, from the Palace of Herod, there came the sound of shouts, of wild revelry and drunken merriment wafting on the dark breezes that passed over the sea of death and into the valley of tribulation.

For it was the anniversary of the death of Herod the
Great and at this late midnight hour, Herod had run short of amusements to offer to his satiated guests.

And it was at this very moment that he called on Salome…to dance!