Agrippa's Daughter (9 page)

The following day, Gabo, Berenice’s body maid, attempted to run away. Berenice sent horsemen after her and had her brought back.

“The next time,” Berenice said to her, “you will feel the whip yourself, Gabo.”

Agrippa made no comment at all; but he looked at his sister strangely, as if he had not actually seen her before.

Gabo, weeping, crawled on her belly toward Berenice. The sight of her sickened Berenice. Gabo rubbed her face in the dust of the tent floor.

“Oh, stop that!” Berenice cried. “For heaven’s sake, look at yourself! You’re a sight, and not a pleasant one.”

“You are going to kill me,” Gabo whined.

“What?”

“You are going to kill me. I don’t want to die. What have I done that I should die?”

“Who said I am going to kill you?” Berenice demanded wearily.

“Everyone says so.”

“Oh? What do they say?”

“You will kill me—the way you killed Beneli.”

“Do they now,” Berenice whispered, rising and standing over the girl. “And what else do they say, Gabo?”

“Nothing else—”

“What else?”

“Nothing else. I swear to you, mistress. I swear—”

“Don’t swear! My anger is enough! Do you want God’s anger too?”

“No—no,” Gabo begged her.

“Then tell me the truth. What else do they say?”

“Must I tell you? You will tear my tongue out. Is that right? I don’t say these things. Others say them.”

“I know that,” Berenice said more gently. “I know that, foolish girl. No harm will come to you. I give you my royal word. Now tell me what else they say.”

“They say that you killed your husband, King Herod, and that is why he is not with you.”

“Ha! The fools! You saw my husband alive and well when we left Chalcis. Didn’t you?”

“I did, yes I did.”

“Do you tell them that?”

“They think I lie for you,” Gabo said.

“And what else?”

“I can’t—”

“Oh, but you will, Gabo,” said Berenice, “or I will be angry. Do you want me to be angry?”

“No, mistress. Oh no—I don’t want you to be angry. But what can I do? I am caught in the middle.”

“Just tell me the truth and no harm will come to you,” Berenice said coldly. “But no more of this. Get up off the ground and tell me the truth.”

Gabo rose to a sitting position and said, “They are saying that you killed your father, that you murdered him, so that your brother could be king—”

When the great procession of the young King Agrippa and his sister, his advisers, courtiers, and various and sundry appurtenances of his deceased father came finally into Galilee, Berenice felt at last a degree of peace. Here she would not be carried in a litter but walked in the dust of the road, seeing, feeling, remembering. Seemingly it was not a matter of months but lifetimes since she had been here; and as she climbed onto the high ridges where the cool, clean winds blew and where the air was sweetened by the delicious scent of the cedars, she felt that her heart would burst with joy. Joy or ecstasy of any kind was so infrequent in her existence, so strange to her, that the sense of it was overwhelming, almost terrifying, filling her with disturbing awarenesses and doubts and guilts that tore her ego into shreds. Barefoot, she walked with her head bent to hide the tears; and when she looked up and saw the blue distances of the land, the vista of mountains and more mountains and still more mountains, north to Lebanon and beyond, without boundary or measure, she wanted to cry aloud for the sheer joy of being alive. But that she could not do; even if she were alone, it would have been impossible to her; but she was not alone, and with every good thought there was another thought: that such and such was what they said of Berenice, queen of Chalcis, what they all said, the soldiers in their shining armor, the people of the king’s suite, the Galilean peasants who came running from their houses and villages to cheer the king, everyone, everyone. Even herself; she was the prisoner of herself, free only to despise herself.

Gabo awoke one night to hear her mistress sobbing. For hours Gabo lay awake, listening to the soft sobbing of Berenice.

Her brother told her that the family of Beneli would want blood money.

“Then give them blood money,” Berenice said. “I would give them nothing, but if you want to keep peace with them, give them blood money.”

“I’m king for three days, and already demands for blood money—”

“Do you know what Beneli did?” Berenice asked him.

“I know.”

“Then why the whimpers? Do you want me to go away? Do you want me back in Chalcis?”

His reaction was terror. He pleaded.

“All right,” she said.

“Don’t leave me, Berenice. You’re the only one who ever loved me—the only one I trust. You’re the only friend I have in the world. If you go away—”

“I’ll be with you as long as you need me,” she told him, irritated by his insistence.

“I can’t be king without you,” he said. “I won’t. King over the Jews—God help me, do you know what that is? I don’t want it. I’m not Herod. I’m not Agrippa either.”

“You are Agrippa,” she said gently. “Be tall and strong. And don’t be afraid.”

So she began the making of a crutch out of herself. It was true that she loved him. The two of them, brother and sister, had a strange mutual trust, a need for each other. In a way that only they understood, it was both of them against the whole world. Berenice was his mother. She had been his mother for as long as she could remember—

Galilee made her weep. Whenever she loved, there was hatred. She turned love into a barb to rake her own skin. But in Galilee she was also home.

Thus they finished their journey and came to Tiberias.

The Sea of Galilee, or the Lake of Gennesaret as it was called by some, or Lake Tiberias as it was called by others, was deep in a hollow of Galilee, deep in a pocket of the mountains, over six hundred feet below, sea level, the River Jordan flowing into it in the north and out of it in the south, and all around it the high, forested hills. As a result of the strange location of this lake and the cleft valleys through which the River Jordan entered and left it, weather conditions there were treacherous and unpredictable, with heavy, hot calms followed by wild windstorms that turned the placid surface of the lake into a raging inferno. In the summertime, the heat in the hollow lake valley could become so oppressive as to be unbearable; on the other hand, the winter weather was mild and delightful.

Perhaps it was this delightful winter climate, as well as the fact that for the past two hundred years a steady stream of Jews had left the dry valleys of their native Judea to settle among the mountains of Galilee, that had induced Herod-Antipas to build a city in Galilee that would be the capital of the Jewish state. For one thing, not only had the constant influx of Jews into Galilee turned it into the most populous area in Palestine—so far as Jews were concerned—but it was an area with a traditional and ancient love for the Hasmonean bloodline. It was there that the patriarch Mattathias and his five sons had fled at the inception of the Great Agrarian War of the Jews, two centuries before; there in Galilee he found shelter and hiding places, and when at last he liberated the Temple in Jerusalem and cleansed it, the entire Jewish population of Galilee left their homes and marched to Jerusalem to do honor to the Maccabees and to God. All of this population were participants in the war, and they were few enough to enter Jerusalem as a group; but since then, the population had increased perhaps a hundred times.

And for another thing, Herod-Antipas was the son of Herod the Great, and no son of Herod the Great could live in peace at Jerusalem, where every stone, every street, every building was a concrete reminder of the unspeakable cruelties and abominations of his father. In Galilee they were farther away, quicker to forget and forgive; so it was in Galilee, on the shores of Lake Tiberias, that Herod-Antipas built his city.

Ground had been broken for the city only three years before Berenice was born, and the walls and many of the streets and buildings were completed a year later. So when Berenice and her brother returned there from Jerusalem and Caesarea, the city of Tiberias was only eighteen years old; yet to Berenice it had been there always—her own always, for here she was born, and in Tiberias were the first things upon which her eyes had ever rested. Yet even though she knew no time when Tiberias had not been, she could remember that in her childhood scaffolding still stood around half of the buildings, and she could well remember the Greek architects and engineers who were everywhere around the half-completed palace—big, black-bearded men who swung her up in their arms, gently corrected her childish Greek, and fed her insatiable curiosity with bits and pieces of that incredible web of promontories, mountains, and islands that were the world of Greece. Tiberias was named for the Emperor of Rome, but it rose from the hand of Jew and Greek, and just as she learned to read and write, the child Berenice learned that the beauty and thought of the world was the product of Jew and Greek—the iron fist, the product of Rome.

As with so many Jewish children of that time, Greece was a wonderland and a fairyland, a land of all dreams, myths and possibilities for Berenice; and like other Jewish children, she knew that Jew and Spartan were blood brother to each other, the king of the Spartans bound to the king of the Jews in eternal fealty. Of course, both nations were vassal to Rome, and of ancient Sparta only a shadow remained, yet Berenice knew the story of the seven hundred Spartan mercenaries who had deserted the cause of the Syrian emperor during the Great Agrarian War and had gone over to the banner of Judah ben Mattathias the Maccabee; and how their commander, Laetus, and Judah had mixed blood and sworn eternal love and friendship. As the Greek engineers explained to the child Berenice, this put Lacedaemonian blood in her veins—mixed blood being as true and lasting as natural blood—and made her a princess of Sparta as well as Judea. They made a game of this, bowing and saluting her royally whenever they met her, and of course she giggled with delight; but sometimes the Greeks would turn somber, remembering too much, for Sparta was no more, as so much of Greece was no more.

But they built Herod-Antipas a noble city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. This they could do as no one else on earth could—certainly not the Jews, to whom the whole notion of building a city where an empty field had been before was incredible. The Jewish cities were as old as time. No one had built them; they had always been there, and when the first Jew set foot in Israel, there were cities already at Jerusalem, at Jericho, at Gibeon and Shechem and Bethlehem and all the other places where the Jewish cities stand. But here these Greek engineers, with four thousand Jewish and heathen workmen, laid out walls and streets and buildings and dug the foundations for all. In that digging, they uncovered an ancient graveyard, the burying place of some forgotten people who had lived here before Jew or Canaanite; but the Jewish workers threw down their tools and said that they were cursed and the city was cursed—thus to disturb the dead. Others said it was the eternal curse laid upon Herod the Great and all of his seed forever. Herod-Antipas had to go to Jerusalem and seek the intervention of the high priest before the work could go on. Though people continued to say that the city was an unclean place, Jews began to flock there even before the walls were completed. While its buildings were still cloaked in wooden scaffolds, Tiberias became a center of crafts and trade. There flocked the finest craftsmen and artists in Israel, Jew and Greek, and there, too, merchants and bankers and grain dealers and cloth dealers. The fish from the entire lake were smoked and salted and dried there and shipped everywhere, even to Rome. A major road was built north across the ridges to Chalcis; another major road south; and still a third road westward to the sea.

Nineteen years before, an empty pasture. Now, as Berenice had heard said, one need only wait at Tiberias and the whole world would come there and pass by.

In Tiberias, as in the other cities of Israel, the prophet was unmolested. Berenice’s great-grandfather Herod the Great had not, however, been one to honor custom; and he killed prophets with as little unease as he experienced with ordinary murders. However, his children and their children had made a point of assuring the inviolability of those whose speech was inspired. Not that these were true prophets; only time could tell who was true and who was false; but these lean, skin-clad men carried on a very old tradition. In the market places of the cities, they called down the wrath of God on the sinner, and they spelled out the sins of the mighty. One of them, Joshua by name, stood in the great central market place of Tiberias the day after young King Agrippa had returned to his city and denounced the king and his sister. Berenice in particular was his target. A large crowd gathered to hear his version of how she had whipped to death a young soldier of Israel, of her incest—so he alleged—with her brother Agrippa; of how she had mocked God in the Temple at Jerusalem; and of how in all likelihood she herself was responsible for the death of her father.

The accusations were brought to Berenice word by word, and she sat and pleaded for herself. “These things,” her brother said, “are nothing and less than nothing.”

“Stop him,” she begged her brother, but this he refused.

“No,” he said, “I will not raise my hand against a prophet. No.” They sat in the royal palace—yet isolated and more alone than ever before. In a curious sense, they were like two children as they wandered through the place, no one to fear now, no one to stop them, no one for them to account to. They were the masters.

At times, they were petulant as children. The city was governed in a practical sense by a council of ten elders, over whom there was an archon, Isaac Benabram, an old man who had worked with the original builders of the city. Now the council and the archon sat and waited for the king to address them; but Agrippa and Berenice played a game of losing themselves in the warren of the palace. The seneschals searched for the king, while he and his sister crept down a winding staircase to a little bathing pavilion on the shore of the lake. They had never known this pavilion existed. When darkness came, they plunged into the warm waters of the lake and swam a great distance out from the shore.