Agrippa's Daughter (4 page)

To Berenice, as to most Galilean Jews of her time—and she was a Galilean, firstly and basically—Egypt was less a geographical location than a moral abomination. All the glories of Alexandria, thrice repeated, the twin crowns of Judean and Greek culture, as it was put, impressed her not one whit. In so far as she knew, Egypt was the prison land, the abomination of abominations—the lowest step, whereas Rome was the highest; and she was being sold there for money; not to connect her with another royal bloodline, not to be the wife of some great king or prince—but to marry the son of a very rich man. The fact that her own morality was conditioned by Rome and the only slightly less refined practices of her native city, Tiberias, and was at best nothing to boast about, did nothing to change her attitude. It was an unsmiling, angry, hard-eyed princess that set off for Alexandria.

The alabarch of Alexandria had sent not only physicians and money, but a battalion of Greek troops, serving women, a great wheeled carriage for the Princess Berenice to ride in, wagonloads of gifts and twenty cavalrymen in shining brass armor as side riders. These cavalrymen were young Jewish boys of some of the best families in Alexandria, and while it was a great lark and treat for them to get a journey to distant Galilee at the expense of the alabarch, it was also a tribute to his influence that he was able to command them.

Though it was past the summer, the road down which they traveled from Tiberias to Caesarea, where they would take ship for Alexandria, was hot as the slope of a volcano, and inside the great covered carriage it was like a furnace. Berenice endured it long enough to get out of sight of Tiberias and for the procession to begin its climb out of the sunken pit of heat where the Sea of Galilee lay, and then she and Gabo climbed out of the wagon and leaped lightly to the ground. The Alexandrian serving women were afraid to follow her, and Berenice told them that they could suffocate and be damned so far as she was concerned. She herself was clad only in a white cotton undershift—cotton was more desirable, more expensive than silk then—and she kicked off her ornate sandals that she might walk comfortably barefoot.

At the sight of this, the alabarch’s seneschals, who were in charge of the party, spurred their donkeys up to Berenice, voiced their horror shrilly, and pleaded with her to follow the dictates of modesty by returning to her carriage. She told them, in no uncertain terms, to go soak their heads in the waters of Galilee.

“But, Princess,” they pleaded, “it is not fitting.”

“And who are you wretched scribes to tell me what is or is not fitting?”

“We beg you, out of consideration for our noble master.”

“I am less concerned for your noble master, as you put it,” Berenice replied, “than I am for this wretched slave girl of mine. Far less. She, at least, helps me to wash and dress, but for your noble master, I am merchandise to be bought or sold. Well, I have been purchased, and there are my obligations to your noble master. Now get out of my sight!”

Dumfounded at this kind of response from a young lady of fifteen years, the seneschals retreated, but they were hardly mollified by her attitude, and they sedulously entered in their journals those actions of hers during the ensuing trip that they considered worthy of the alabarch’s notice—which embraced almost all of her actions. Berenice was young enough to respond to handsome lads in brass armor, and the cavalrymen included some of the best-looking young Jews in Alexandria. They soon became her willing servants, admirers, suitors, and defenders; and for the time being she forgot her distaste for the opposite sex. Thus, the trip to Egypt turned out to be far more pleasant than she had ever imagined it might be.

But Egypt itself held none of the joys that might be anticipated in connection with a wedding or a bride. The great house of the alabarch was all that she could have expected, but the atmosphere was that of a tomb, and the man who greeted her was sunk in bereavement and despair. Berenice had steeled herself to despise all that she encountered in Egypt, but already, when she came to the palace of the alabarch, her adolescent arrogance had been dulled by the wide avenues, the splendid public buildings, and the magnificent monuments of Alexandria. Like all Greek cities, it gleamed with color, sang with the blues and greens and yellows and burning reds that covered every inch of stonework and brickwork; and through its boulevards swarmed the traffic of half a world—Romans and Greeks and Egyptians, black Nubians, hooded Arabians, Jews and Syrians and Gauls and Libyans and Parthians—a city so large and alive and. noisy that by comparison her family’s home seat of Tiberias was only a back-country village on the shore of an isolated highland lake.

So when she finally faced the alabarch, the edge had already been taken off her mettle, and she faced him soberly enough. She was well clad now, in silks and jewels, her hair gathered in a net of priceless pearls, her feet shod with golden sandals, and upon her rich red hair, a thin diadem with a lion rampant over a single ruby, this of gold, the lion of Judah, to seal her right to the Hasmonean blood and the Hasmonean line. Let it be Alexandria or Rome—still in all the world there was no bloodline as ancient as hers, no family so noble—who were kings when Rome was a village of mud and wattle huts. Perhaps the alabarch thought of this as he looked at her, no child this, but a woman of strange, almost bizarre beauty, thought of what might have been, wiping his eyes. He was a fine figure of a man, tall, wide-shouldered, erect, his beard white, his eyes piercing blue, as blue as the long robe he wore belted at the waist. He was a commanding figure with a commanding mind—a doer and leader, even as his brother Philo was a dreamer and a philosopher. His seneschals had come to him with their whining complaints of how she had behaved, what she had done, and he swept them away, crying out at them, “I care nothing for your damned spying! Bring the child to me!” So they had brought her to him, and now the Princess Berenice stood before him.

“My child, my daughter,” he said hoarsely, fighting for control of himself. Still, Berenice did not understand. No one had told her. But she sensed that she had come into Alexandria in the presence of some enormous tragedy—as the alabarch went on, “And beautiful beyond all my imagining. Ah, what might have been.” And as she stared at him, uncomprehendingly, “You see, my child, my son died this morning.”

Still Berenice stared at him.

“My son, Marcus, your betrothed—he died.”

And what was she in terms of all this? She didn’t know. Was she saved? Or had she fought a battle to absolutely no purpose, a battle which she would have to fight again? She didn’t know. And what was expected of her? Should she weep? Her husband to be was dead, but she had never seen him.

“Do you want to see him?” the alabarch asked gently.

“What is he asking me?” Berenice thought. “Do I want to see a corpse? Why should I want to see a corpse? I have seen corpses before. Why is this corpse any different?”

“If you are afraid, my dear?”

“Afraid?” she thought. “Afraid of what? Of a corpse? My dear man, you evidently have a strange notion of what it means to grow up as a princess of the House of Herod. I have seen men killed in front of my eyes. Yet I might confess that I have no desire to see this particular corpse. Absolutely none.”

But aloud she said nothing, only stared at the old man’s grief-stricken face, and then finally nodded.

“Follow me, Berenice, my dear,” he said.

She followed him through a number of rooms, past clusters of people who watched them in silence, and then into a candlelit bedchamber, where the body was stretched out upon the bed and where a woman in black knelt by the bedside, sobbing, one of the boy’s dead hands pressed against her cheek. Two girls lay crumpled at the foot of the bed, and they too were sobbing, and at least a dozen other people were in the room, priests and physicians and womenservants, but they stood well back from the bed.

In the course of her life, Berenice would see many dreadful and heartbreaking things—but nothing that touched her so deeply and poignantly as the sight of the boy’s mother with his dead hand pressed to her cheek. Why this was so, she did not know, but suddenly she was filled with nameless, meaningless grief of her own.

The alabarch led her to the bedside and uncovered his son’s face, and Berenice saw the white, bloodless countenance of what appeared to be no more than a child, a little boy carved in candle-wax—her husband to be, her bridegroom whom she would never address, never speak to, never touch, never kiss.

Suddenly, she was weeping. The alabarch’s wife rose, went over to Berenice and took her in her arms.

“No, don’t weep for him, my child,” she whispered.

But Berenice wept for herself …

And then, later, months later at Tiberias, Berenice had to repeat it all for her father—who was thinking mainly of one thing, would Alexander want the money back? In his questioning of Berenice, he persisted on the question of the mood and attitude of the alabarch.

“He loved his son,” Berenice said sullenly. “What shall I tell you about his attitude?”

“I don’t give two damns about how he felt about his son!” Agrippa snorted. “How did he feel about the money?”

“I don’t know how he felt about the money. And I don’t care,” Berenice said.

“Oh? You don’t care! Only enough money to buy a kingdom, but you don’t care! What do you care about? What did you care about during the weeks you stayed there?”

“Nothing,” Berenice muttered.

“Then why did you stay?”

“I told you why I stayed. Because they begged me to. Because they loved me and wanted me to stay.”

“Loved you? They never saw you before and they loved you? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I say you’re a liar!”

“Agrippa,” his wife begged him, “leave the child alone.”

“I say she’s a liar!” The king stormed, turning on his wife and demanding, “Is she or is she not a liar? Tell me that! Has she ever spoken the truth—since she was an infant? Ever?”

“Leave her be.”

“Yes? Three weeks in the alabarch’s house, and she never thought to ask him of the money?”

“No!” Berenice cried suddenly. “I do not think of money! I do not speak of money! I am a Hasmonean princess!”

“Oh!” cried Agrippa. “You tell that to me, your king, your father! I did not know you were a princess—a Hasmonean princess! Is that what they taught you in Alexandria?”

Berenice stared at him.

“And Herod’s blood? Did you sell it to the alabarch?”

“I threw it to the swine,” Berenice said deliberately—and then her father struck her, with all his strength across her face, so that she was flung back onto the floor, where she lay for a moment, bleeding from the nose. Then she pulled herself to her feet, turned her back on her mother and father, and left the room. She made no attempt to stanch the flow of blood from her nostrils, nor did she whimper or cry out.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Cypros told her husband. “There was no need for it—no reason.”

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, his tension broken, his frustration released, “it occurs to me that the alabarch does not expect the money to have been returned. He must have taken a fancy to our Berenice. She won’t be easily matched, now that she’s a virgin no longer.”

“How do you know?” his wife protested.

“How do I know? Don’t be a fool. I’m a man. The alabarch is a man. He takes my daughter into his house. He has given me a fortune. I keep the fortune. He seeks for the fountain of youth where all old lechers seek it—in a woman’s crotch. You know, my dear—I’d like to have the alabarch ask for his money. Damn me if I wouldn’t, and I would teach him something about respect for a royal virgin. But I don’t suppose anyone has to teach him anything. He knows that when you ride a new mare, you buy a saddle.”

The alabarch never asked for the money to be returned, and Agrippa became increasingly convinced that his analysis was correct. While the money tempered his anger toward Berenice, he regarded her as a particular and puzzling problem, and of this she became increasingly aware; for regardless of the size of a palace, it holds no secrets, from those who inhabit it. She would turn and see Agrippa staring at her, a brooding, faraway look in his eyes; and during those days, her brother said to her,

“So help me, Berenice, I do believe that he harbors lecherous designs toward you.”

“Since he’s your father,” Berenice replied, “nothing he harbored would surprise me.”

But she did not agree. He was in his saintly phase, and the years were catching up with him, and the look was not a look of lust. Berenice knew that. Love of money was crowding the love of women out of Agrippa’s personality—the former not only less physically demanding upon a middle-aged man, but far more acceptable in the eyes of the country’s population. Even a saint can be parsimonious, obeying King Solomon’s injunction to heed the ways of the ant; but promiscuity stands in poorly with holiness.

One day, outside the door of their chamber, Berenice overheard her mother and father talking. Her father was in the process of complaining,

“No—I can’t take the chance. Marry her off and then find out that she’s been deflowered? And then have her flung back into my face, with all the world to know that she’s a whore!”

“But you condemn her first,” Cypros protested.

“What else? Have I no eyes? Am I a fool?”

His voice was beginning to shake with rage, and Cypros said soothingly, “I did not say that you were a fool, Agrippa. I know that you think about problems very brilliantly. In fact, you are the wisest man I know. But sometimes—well, I mean that if you are so upset over whether Berenice is a virgin or not, why not have the physicians to attend her—”

“And have it all over Tiberias the next day and all over Israel in a week? Have you ever met a doctor you can trust to keep his mouth shut? They are worse gossips than old women.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Just leave it to me. I’ll think of something.”

He did. He summoned Berenice to his great, formal audience chamber and ordered them to be left alone. There was only one seat in the audience chamber, a polished wooden chair on a raised dais—where the king sat. He sat there now, clad—as he thought—simply in a white linen robe embroidered with gold thread, and on his head a golden skullcap—spun gold and silk—rather than a crown. He preferred it lately to a crown, and it was good for the street singers who cried his praise to let it be known that the king wore a skullcap as did any other Jew. In his years of piety he still allowed himself gold trappings—as a sign of royalty—but wore almost only white and on most occasions. In the face of that, and quite deliberately, Berenice wore a shift of lavender and an overdress of flaming orange. A slight smile of defiance on her face, she stood facing her father.