Mark Twain's Medieval Romance (10 page)

But Salome was a kitten. She had a little heart-shaped face and large and limpid brown eyes and she had learned how to use them.

“You are late, Jason,” she said reproachfully, “our treasure hunt is over. Only you have returned empty-handed.”

“You are wrong, Princess,” said Jason, leading me forward, “you told me to bring you a Hebrew Diana—and I have.”

“This is ridiculous!” Salome’s pink small lips were pouting. “You knew I meant a statue.”

“Did you, Princess? How could you? You know the Hebrews have made no images since the days of the Golden Calf. But it pleases you to demand the impossible of me.”

“If I do, it is because you think you are so clever! Right now you feel quite proud of yourself!”

“Proud, yes. But not conceited.” I felt my face burning as he held up my hand and slowly turned me around. “Praxiteles himself would be proud of the golden girl that I have brought.”

“All you Greeks seem to think of gold in connection with women!” The milk-white Salome seemed to resent my olive skin. “To call this little thing a Diana is ridiculous.”

“Let me go!” I struggled to free my wrist. “I despise every one of you!”

“No!” Jason’s strong hands gripped my elbows as he lifted me up on a bench. “I didn’t bring you here to be insulted! We’ll show this princess that her taste is as bad as her manners. Hold your head up—you are the High Priest’s daughter—you are as good as any of them!”

His voice was harsh, as though he were fighting a duel in which I was his weapon. I was trembling and overwrought, but I held up my head and tried to stare defiantly back at Salome, even though I was blinking back the tears.

“Observe the slender strength of her neck line!” he cried, as he snatched up a silver bow from the loot of the treasure hunt. “And have you noticed the supple gracefulness of her figure? Diana has come to life again!”

He fitted an arrow to the bow and placed it in my hands. The arrow was aimed straight at Salome. But she didn’t flinch. There was a brooding hatefulness in her eyes.

“There!” said Jason, stepping back as I held the pose. “Is she not even more lovely than Diana? Can any of you say that the Diana of Epheseus has half her beauty? Answer me!”

“Well, it seems to me—” lisped the Greek called Philo, with a nervous glance at Salome.

“I’m not asking Greeks!” snapped Jason. “I am asking the Romans! What do you say, Galba?”

It was clever of him. The Romans loved to show their disdainful independence of Herod’s provincial entourage. A slow grin spread over the youthful face of Galba. He passed his big hand over his close-cropped hair.

“By Jupiter! You’re right,” he said, “I have wasted incense before the statue of Ephesus, but I’d sacrifice my very sword and armor for the Diana we have here!”

All the other Roman officers were quick to agree with him. The courtiers chimed in too. I heard myself praised and complimented in a dozen accents, and my skin tingled with pleasure, just as it had flinched and trembled a few minutes before. It was glorious to be defended and admired.

And then I heard King Herod’s smooth chuckle and saw him coming across the courtyard, followed by you and Grandfather.

“By Aphrodite!” he said, “Jason, it seems that you have found a jewel in my threadbare little country. I am very pleased.”

I
DON’T REMEMBER
the rest of that day very clearly. All I remember is the horrible trip home. Grandfather Annas said that I had done something monstrous. It was a shameful thing for the daughter of the High Priest to pose as a pagan goddess before a throng of infidels.

I had little appetite for the dinner old Anna kept urging me to eat. She just can’t forget that I no longer need a nurse. I went up on the roof and gazed out through the twilight toward the Mount of Olives. A great sense of poignancy welled up in me. I felt so lonely that it hurt. Then I heard you behind me.

“My dear,” you said, “I know it is hard for you to believe but once, a long, long time ago, I was young too. I try to remember those times.”

“Yes, Father,” I replied looking out across the mystic Valley of Kidron.

You crossed the floor and stroked my hair. “We must have patience, Miriam,” you said, “the heroes of our nation have always been men of the spirit—men who combined courage with inspiration. In our bitterest days they come to us—these men who live gloriously close to God. There have always been such men.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“I do not know, child,” you answered musingly. “But people tell of certain men in Galilee—there is the oldtime ring of greatness in much that I have heard of them.”

Before you could go on, there was a pounding at the door and a voice: “Open in King Herod’s name!”

I think, for all your dignity, Father, you were as frightened as I was as we stood, close together in the passage, and heard the officer tell us that I was to become a lady-in-waiting to Salome, and go with the court to Herod’s winter palace at Tiberias.

No child knows how much it loves a parent until the time comes to leave home. Do you remember how melancholy the first autumn rains were when you took me to the Gennot Gate to join the royal caravan?

The trip was a lonely one. None of the women paid any attention to me. And I’d seen nothing of Jason. Shortly before dawn on the last day, I heard one of the camel men exclaim: “Tiberias!” and I poked my head through the curtains to get my first look at our destination.

It was a strange and wonderful sight that lay spread out before us in the fresh washed air of the morning. The sun was just breaking through the clouds beyond the solemn dome of Mount Tabor and the light flashed back from the Sea of Galilee—really only a large lake—as though from a silver shield.

As I watched, there was a thunder of hoofs and a chariot swept past—a chariot drawn by four deep-chested, black-maned Arabians. Jason held the reins. He wore a tight tunic of orange-colored leather and an orange cape streamed back from his shoulders. He was a flame flashing down from the hills upon the black city of Tiberias.

Later, I was glad to see that Herod’s palace wasn’t so gloomy once you were inside. The rooms were bright with rich hangings and imported marbles. I was given a pretty little chamber at one end of the women’s building. The King, himself, came with his royal housekeeper to see that I was comfortable. My only worry was that the balcony window could be reached from a nearby cedar. But, of course, I didn’t complain. The King might have thought I was silly.

Some of the dresses that had been provided for me were positively indecent. You could see right through them. The others made of heavier materials had their skirts split too far above the knee. I was glad old Anna had taught me to sew, and that I’d brought my needle kit. With a little work I could make some of them look modest.

I had plenty of time. Neither Salome nor the Queen ever sent for me. Day after day I had nothing to do except work on my dresses and try new ways of fixing my hair.

Some weeks later I found Jason seated beside me at the first of the King’s banquets. I suppose I shouldn’t say “seated.” The guests reclined on long couches placed by the banquet table. Jason lounged by my side. I wasn’t used to this fashion and was embarrassed.

But Jason made me feel at ease. He was smiling and very respectful. Even after the seventh course, when the wine was flowing much too freely and the party was getting a good deal worse than rowdy, he drank sparingly and never once touched me.

Salome didn’t drink much either. She reclined across the room from us, between her mother and stepfather. I felt a little disloyal and unpatriotic for noticing that the King was getting tipsy. He laughed too loud and kept whispering things into the Princess’s ear.

I would have thought that the Queen might have protected her daughter, but Herodias ignored her husband and kept her eyes fixed coldly on the entertainers, giving no encouragement to the suggestive dancers and their off-color songs. Though a member of the same mongrel clan as Herod, she conducted herself with the calm dignity of a Jewish matron.

Time and again I saw Salome’s brown eyes look appealingly across the room to Jason. She seemed to envy us. And in spite of the way she’d neglected me, I felt sorry for her.

“Never feel sorry for a beautiful woman,” replied Jason, when I mentioned this to him. “They know how to look out for themselves.”

“My! Haven’t you grown sophisticated and cynical!” I tried to speak mockingly, like one of the court ladies.

He turned to me and said, “I was born a slave but I might have been a prince—one of the rulers of the Roman world—if it hadn’t been for a woman even more beautiful than Salome.”

“A slave! You are teasing me! I don’t believe it!”

“Even though I was born a slave,” he said, “I am not a complete impostor. My father was a nobleman. He served on Marc Antony’s flagship at the Battle of Actium.”

“I don’t care who you are, Jason—you don’t have to tell me!”

He drank wine and stared morosely toward Salome. “My father became a slave and I was born in slavery because of the vanity of a woman. There was no reason for Cleopatra to be in that battle. Marc Antony begged her to stay ashore. But she was very brave as long as the enemy galleys were on the other side of the horizon and she knew she looked very pretty in her armor. She wanted to be a sea queen and inspire the men!”

Jason spat upon the pavement and exclaimed, “To think that such vanity could have changed the fate of the world! At the height of the battle Cleopatra’s ships turned and ran—and do you know why they ran?”

“I have heard that it was because Octavius who opposed her used his catapults to throw great glass globes filled with serpents and that when the globes broke on Cleopatra’s decks, she became terrorized of the serpents—”

“That’s not the real reason. Cleopatra wasn’t afraid of snakes. She deserted Antony because she suddenly decided that it would be safer to win Octavius with her charms than to meet him in battle. And because of her cowardice, Marc Antony killed himself and my father was captured and reduced to slavery. Octavius forced him to become a gladiator.”

He stopped abruptly as though he’d decided that he had talked enough. So this was the background of this seemingly gay man. He was the son of a slave and a gladiator.

Herodias was following her drunken husband from the room and Salome was picking her way among the sodden revelers toward the great arch that led to the moonlit gardens. She paused on the threshold and looked back toward us. And for the first time she was smiling.

“It is getting late,” Jason told me. “You bad better go to your room.”

There was nothing to do but obey him.

A
FTER THAT
it became apparent that the King had ordered Jason to be my escort at all court functions. But he didn’t obey very often. It was exasperating to have him send an excuse, accompanied by some rich present, at the last moment.

Once the young people got up an excursion, with a picnic lunch and chariots, to hear a country preacher who addressed a great multitude on Mount Tabor. This preacher was quite the rage. The people told marvelous tales about him and even the court circle regarded him as a new sensation. I wondered if he was one of the men of Galilee whom you had mentioned. But I never found out. Jason didn’t invite me, so I stayed with Salome and Herod and Herodias. After the scandal about the Baptist, they weren’t much interested in country preachers.

Some weeks later, when the moon was waning, Herod gave an elaborate fête in the palace gardens. The grounds were illuminated by Greek fire thrown into the waters of the fountains. The floating flames transformed the black basins into gigantic lamps, and in this flickering glare Italian contortionists and acrobats and tight-rope walkers performed.

At first I was shocked by their nakedness. But Jason, seated beside me in the shadows, said that instead of scorning the poor mountebanks, I should pity them. For all we knew, he said, these boys and girls might be the children of aristocrats, or even of the Emperor. In Rome, he told me, unwanted children were left out in the hills for the wolves to eat and sometimes these abandoned creatures were found by human wolves—vagabonds and criminals who took them home and trained them for strange and evil callings.

“I can’t understand your world,” I said. “It is a terrible place! No Jewish mother could abandon her babies to such a life. No matter how low she had fallen.”

“I know,” he whispered. “My mother couldn’t leave me out on the hill either—even though she tried to. It might have been better if she had.”

Somehow I knew that I must comfort this man in his terrible gnawing misery. It was what God had put me in the world for. I put my hands on his cheeks and kissed him.

Then he was on his feet, pulling me up to him. His strong arm was around me as he led me into the shadows. He was returning my kiss—on my lips, my throat, my shoulders—and his kisses were fierce and hard.

“Darling, oh, my darling!” I cried, clinging to him. “You needn’t be so fierce—so hurried—I will never run away from you—never!”

He paused and looked at me, and his arms were a tight circle around my body.

“Don’t you see?” I said. “You need never be lonely again, ever—it doesn’t matter what you’ve been—”

“You’re wrong! It’s the only thing that matters!” His arms grew slack and his voice was bitter. “I started as a piece of human garbage—left out on a Roman junk pile—and all my life has been a struggle to keep from going back there.”

The fierceness had gone out of him. He sank to the ground with his face turned toward the distant fountains, where the children’s bodies glittered above the flickering fire.

“I never knew my mother,” his words came moodily. “I hardly knew my father. The only clear memory I have of him is of one night—when I must have been about twelve. I was seated beside him at a great banquet in the barracks of the gladiators. The air was foul with the fumes of torches and there was a great deal of noise.

“Most of the gladiators were roaring drunk; guzzling liquor and gorging themselves until they vomited—trying to forget that they might die the next day. Others scarcely touched the heaping tables, because they hoped to be more fit in the arena. Some, too stupid or calloused to care what happened, tumbled on the floor with the slave women provided for their convenience.