Agrippa's Daughter (35 page)

“Still, they wear armor and they know how to hold a lance and stand in a straight line. That’s all I need. God help us if it comes to more than that, if Jew turns his sword against Jew.”

“And isn’t that precisely what will happen if Agrippa brings his horsemen into the city?” Berenice asked.

“No. No, I can’t believe it—”

“Then what future have you, Shimeon?” Berenice asked. “I ask you in all sincerity—and tell me, tell me truthfully—for what there still is between us, Shimeon.”

“Still is? No, Berenice, I love you with all my heart. I never loved you more.”

“And I love you—and we sit here talking like that, and the world comes to its end. Shimeon, what will you do?”

“Hold the Upper City as long as I can—and pray to the Almighty that Benananias comes to his senses. What else can I do?”

“What are his senses? What do you mean? Are we at war with Rome? And Florus—do we kill him or let him go? Will we have the blood of a procurator on our hands? That is something Rome never forgives.”

“I let him go,” Shimeon said tiredly. “I let him go two hours ago. I took him myself to the gate and put him to horse. He will reach Caesarea before the twenty thousand Jews are buried!” His voice rose. “Yes, Berenice—I am a man and a human being and a Jew, and I have violences and hates and passions—and I could have killed that lousy bastard with my own bare hands. But I didn’t. I let him go—”

His voice broke. He spread his arms hopelessly, and then Agrippa rose and said quite matter-of-factly, “I will go for my men, Shimeon. Understand me—you should have commanded me. I wish you had. I am king of sorts in Galilee, by the tolerance of Rome. But you are nashi because the Jews so made you, and by leave of no one—and my prince as well as Berenice’s. I don’t know what is wrong with us. We are being called upon for greatness. In the Bible, God speaks and man responds. God commanded Gideon to be great, and Gideon was great. I think that in the same way, He commands us, but I don’t know what His commands are and there is no greatness in me.” His shoulders were bent as he left them, and when he had gone, Shimeon said,

“It’s true. Where is greatness—in me? In Agrippa? In Elaezar and his Zealots? In those monsters—the Sicarii? In you, my wife, I see greatness. What shall I do? Shall I say, Shimeon is no longer nashi; make his wife nashi over you. Because she has greatness. Oh, what nonsense. But what should I do, Berenice?”

“Why do you ask me? You know what to do. Make peace—force it—command it! You are the nashi. No one will raise a hand against you. Be what you are, Shimeon the grandson of Hillel.”

“Too late,” Shimeon said.

“Why? Why?”

“I suppose,” Shimeon said, “I suppose because I have lost my faith in peace.”

Before dark, Agrippa led his three thousand horsemen into Jerusalem, and in the last rays of the setting sun the Zealots in the Lower City saw the long line of brazen breastplates, burnished helmets and long, iron-tipped lances parade on the walls of the Upper City. The people of the Upper City were encouraged by the magnificently armed young men, who made such a splendid sight as they rode up into the great plaza, and no one thought to speculate on the possibility that such handsome soldiers were perhaps the worst in the world. There were three thousand of them, and—apart from the few hundred Levites, indifferent soldiers at best, and the remnants of the Roman cohorts, trapped in their fortress towers—these three thousand were the only body of disciplined and professional soldiers in Jerusalem. Also, they wore body armor, which not one Jew in twenty possessed, and body armor always impressed civilian militia.

The Upper City housed the priesthood, the wealth, the merchants, the professionals and the bloodline nobility of Jerusalem. There were three quarters of the fine houses, the palaces, the great villas, the counting houses, the warehouses, the huge olive-oil cisterns, and the wine cisterns—the new schools, the synagogues, many of which were devoted to the teachings of Hillel, the theater and the great Maccabean Palace. At the same time, the population of the Upper City was much less than the population of the Lower City, fewer in numbers, less militant, and almost without those dedicated and fanatical fighting men who called themselves the Zealots. If it had come to a pitched battle between the Lower City and the Upper City, Shimeon had no doubt who would conquer. The Upper City might hold out against the Zealots for a week or five weeks; but sooner or later it would succumb, and if that were to happen, the blackest pages of Jewish history would be written, brother against brother, and father against son.

But it did not happen. A day went by, and then another day, and then a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh day—and then the Sabbath dawned. There was no attack, not even by the Sicarii. Zealots were posted on guard all the distance from the Valley Gate to the wall of the temple enclave, hard, somber men who fingered their terrible bows—those ancient Jewish weapons made of layers of laminated ram’s-horn—counted their arrows, sharpened their curved knives, but did nothing. Almost shoulder to shoulder they stood in a line half a mile long, and silently they faced the line of Galilean boys in their brazen armor—and silently, the horse guards faced them. On both sides the injunction was given that no words be uttered, no taunts, no jests, no curses—and both sides obeyed. Thousands of men and women and children of Jerusalem came and stood behind the Zealots, staring at the beautifully caparisoned Galileans, but no one was allowed to pass through the line of Zealots. And then it was the Sabbath.

Two hours after sunrise on the Sabbath, Elaezar Benananias, the leader of the Zealots and the titular head of the House of Shammai, pushed through the line of Zealots and walked to within twenty feet of the wall of the Upper City. He was dressed simply yet splendidly in a robe of pale blue, wide-sleeved and ankle-length, and he wore on his head the symbolic red stocking cap of the Maccabees; his costume almost identical with that one Menahem had worn to Berenice’s reception. For a while he stood in silence, arms akimbo, staring at the wall and at the Galileans who manned it; then he cupped his hands about his mouth and cried out:

“Up there—whoever commands, I would speak with him! I am Elaezar, captain of the Zealots!”

A few minutes, and then a tall young man came striding along the wall, stopped, facing Elaezar, and asked civilly enough what he could do for the captain of the Zealots?

“Go to the nashi and tell him it’s time we spoke to one another face to face, the way two Jews should, and an end to this nonsense of Jew against Jew. Tell him to open a postern for me, and I will go in to him and his home.”

“With how many guards?” the young officer demanded.

“Alone, I say. Now go to the nashi, because I will not stand here on the Almighty’s Sabbath and bicker with you.”

A little while later, the Demeter Postern—so-called because it was used in the old times by those who secretly worshiped the mother-god—was opened, and two of the splendidly armed Galilean troopers led Elaezar through to Berenice’s palace. A tremendous crowd had gathered from the Upper City to attempt to read something of their fate in Elaezar’s manner, but all they saw was the Zealot’s fascination with the horse soldier’s armor. Elaezar had become very armor-conscious during the past several weeks, and now he could not keep himself from fingering the cuirass of the man beside him to test its thickness and estimate its weight. There were any number of questions he would have liked to ask the young man, such as how it felt to wear the armor in intense heat and whether the weight of it had a debilitating effect—but the relationship of station hardly permitted it, and Elaezar walked along in silence.

At the palace, Elaezar was taken to a rather small room Berenice and Shimeon were both fond of and where they spent many hours. This room was open to a spacious balcony that could be closed off with cane blinds; but when the blinds were drawn open, the balcony commanded a magnificent view of the sere mountains and lonely wadis of the South. It was a noble view from a noble site, and enviously Elaezar admitted as much. Here a table covered with a white cloth had been spread with fruit and wine and sweet cakes and a loaf of bread wrapped in a napkin. Shimeon asked Elaezar to be seated, unwrapped the flat disk of bread, and said to the Zealot,

“Will you break bread with me—or do you come out of hatred?”

“If we are going to talk, Shimeon,” Elaezar replied, leaning forward and tearing a piece from the bread, “then let it be like two sensible adults and not like a pair of street urchins who decide that one of them is of the House of Shammai and the other of the House of Hillel. Shall we say that we are both of the House of Israel?” He bit into the bread then.

“I like that,” Shimeon nodded.

“The bread is good.”

Shimeon broke off a piece for Berenice and another for himself. “It’s the bread of life and not the bread of affliction,” Shimeon said as he poured wine for them. “Good bread and good wine—and love and companionship. That makes for a life that could be a good deal worse.”

“Well, Nashi,” Elaezar smiled, “I find it hard to disagree with that kind of thing. But I also find it difficult to talk about matters which we must discuss with a woman present.”

Berenice smiled at this, and he added, “Even so beautiful a woman as the queen.”

“She is my wife,” Shimeon said, “but more than that, my companion. We have been a long time together, dealing with this and that and some of it not unimportant—so it would be rather odd, wouldn’t it, if I were to ask her to leave us that we might discuss the future of a city with which she is very intimately related. Unlike you, Elaezar, I have no bloodline of any consequence; I am an Israelite and no more, and I know that since I am nashi and the grandson of Hillel as well, this sounds like inverted snobbery of the worst sort; but I only mention it to make a point. If you go from here, from this palace, you walk on the road of Jonathan past the Palace of Helena and the Palace of the Maccabees to the Palace of Herod alongside the wall rebuilt by Shimeon Benmattathias, the watchtower reared by Agrippa, the fountain given to the people by his wife, my wife’s mother—need I go on? What you have to say, say it here, and as you suggested before, we will all try to be sensible and adult.”

“All right,” the Zealot nodded. “I begin by saying this, Nashi—no wheat is made from flour, only bread. What is done is done, and there is no use bawling over it. Do you agree?”

“Well, that’s one of those questions, isn’t it?” Shimeon shrugged. “What do you want me to say? That there is no going back?”

“That we are at war with Rome.”

“Oh? My wife doesn’t think so.”

Elaezar looked at Berenice, who said, “I think, Elaezar Benananias, that as far as the House of Shammai is concerned, we have always been at war with Rome.”

“Perhaps—”

“I don’t think so. No—Rome doesn’t want war with the Jews.”

“Do you agree with the queen?” Elaezar asked Shimeon.

“No—not entirely,” Shimeon said. “I think we are at war. After what happened in Caesarea—well, I don’t know what else. If the Romans will not protect the Jews in Alexandria, in Damascus, in Sidon, in Tyre, and Antioch and Sardis and Tarsus—and in twenty other cities, then they will have to protect themselves, and that means the involvement of the Jewish lands, Idumea and Judea and Galilee—and Samaria, too, if the Samaritans should decide that they are Jews or at least closer to Israel than to Rome. But what such a war will come to, this I don’t know—except that if one half of Jerusalem fights the other half to the death, it will not have a chance to come to very much.”

“Now I tell you this,” Elaezar cried, driving a clenched fist into his open palm, “such a war must be fought—if not today, next year or in five years or in ten years—but this earth is too small for Israel and Rome. And what is Rome? A city? A nation? A pack of mongrel pagan bloodlines pretending to be a people—and not much more. I say that Israel is stronger than Rome, and I say that Israel will prevail!”

“And I say,” Berenice told them, rising, “that you are both talking nonsense—such incredible nonsense that it makes me sick to listen to you!”

Both men stood up to protest, but Berenice, her green eyes flashing, cowed them and informed them that she would say her piece, just as they had said theirs. “Because from here on, only the men will talk in Israel,” Berenice said. “And I will say what I must—and then I will go. But I tell you this—God help you!”

“I don’t think, Berenice—” Shimeon began.

“No—no, Shimeon—let me talk, and I will tell you something about Rome. This Rome which you have such contempt for as an adversary has a standing army of half a million men. In all Israel, the only force of trained soldiers, armed and armored, that exists is my brother’s troop of horse guards—three thousand of them. One Roman legion consists of twice that number, and at this moment ninety-four Roman legions are in existence. And do you know what a legionary is? He is enlisted for twenty years, and for twenty years he knows nothing but war—he drills for six hours every day. Will you invade Rome? Is that what you plan?”

“We are Jews, and this is our land, and here we will fight,” Elaezar said angrily.

“Naturally. And since Rome maintains a fleet of over seven hundred warships and Israel not one warship, even the thought of a Jewish invasion of Italy is a dream. But if you should wipe out every legion Rome possesses, as Hannibal came close to doing, still Rome would raise up half a million more men—but you are talking to each other as men, not as children. Then talk as men and give me leave to go!” And with that, Berenice angrily left them.

Later, when Shimeon entered her bedroom, he had to pass by Gabo who was filling chests with clothes; and in the bedroom he asked his wife whether this meant that she was going away.

“You called me your companion before in front of the Zealot,” Berenice said, “and I think that was the best thing anyone ever said about me—that a man like yourself and I could be not only lovers but companions who needed each other and leaned on each other. But what now, Shimeon? I can’t stay in this place. It is filled with the voices of death and violence, and if I remain here, I shall have to stuff up my ears or go mad.”