Agrippa's Daughter (2 page)

“—which, to my way of thinking, is a Tather disgusting fiction,” Agrippa said. “It’s perfectly natural, of course, that an emperor should be cock of the walk all over the place, but I think he should draw the line at plagiarism.”

“It’s no worse than taking the credit for victories he never won or for children he never birthed,” Berenice said.

“You know, you have a peculiar turn of mind, sister—but it is worse. Somehow it’s worse. Anyway, it’s not military history Claudius dreams of making. He’s a literary type, and somehow it is worse.”

“Why? The real author is paid, and handsomely, too—which reminds me that I am poverty-stricken. Can I borrow?”

“You cannot,” Agrippa answered firmly. “What do you spend your money on? Oh, look, Berenice, I don’t want to be a swine about it, but this is a company of very talented Greeks from Colophon. Their girls have a reputation that has had me licking my lips for ages. And money buys—”

“You’re an animal,” Berenice said.

“Oh, yes—and let me tell you this, sister—”

He cut off whatever he had intended to say. Berenice thought that her father, Agrippa the king, had entered behind her, but when she turned around to greet him, she saw that it was only two priests, Phineas and Aaron by name, fat, well-fed appurtenances to her father’s court. They were most eager at mealtime. They bowed from the waist, holding in their white robes, and then hurried to the buffet. They broke the hard, dry circles of bread into bowls and then poured wine on it to soften it, and while the bread soaked up the wine, they took the edge off their hunger with figs and dates, stuffing their mouths full of the sweet fruit while they mumbled their greetings in Aramaic.

In Latin, Berenice said to her brother, “Do you know what I should do if I were king?”

“What, sister?”

“Geld every priest.”

“Ahhah—and what makes you so sure that the fat little bastards know no Latin?”

“Look at them,” Berenice smiled.

They smiled back. They were eating the wine-soaked bread now, but pouring honey over it first.

“Holy child,” one of them managed to say to Berenice.

“Sacred child,” mumbled the other, through his mouthful of food, managing to eat and talk simultaneously—“delight of God.”

“Lovely creatures,” said Berenice in Latin.

They swallowed their food so suddenly they almost choked. They gulped, swallowed, and turned out the linings of their sleeves to wipe their lips. They straightened, donned unctuousness, and held themselves in what they conceived of as dignity. They faced the length of the lovely room where breakfast food was laid out, a long room with one side open to the sea and walled off from the gardens below by a delightfully wrought cedar railing. Their ears were keen. They heard the steps of the approaching king and his attendants, or perhaps the ring of arms.

Berenice’s father, Agrippa, was a bad man who had become a good man, an evil king who had become a saintly king; and like most converts to a new faith, he could become unbearable in its exercise, intolerable in his new persuasion. Taken by a fit of saintliness, he could proceed to make the existence of those around him more burdensome than ever it was when he pursued the ways of evil. Having become conscious of the ways of the world and the older folk who managed it at a very early age, Berenice, though only sixteen, could remember the nonsaintly Agrippa. In fact, she could remember quite clearly his return from Jerusalem to Tiberias immediately after the transition.

As she heard it told, it had happened thus: Three years before, during Succoth, the harvest festival, King Agrippa put in an appearance at Jerusalem. The move was a calculated one and not without elements of danger. Caligula, the mad and sadistic Emperor of Rome, had been murdered—an act of charity which called forth the gratitude of all the Mediterranean world—and the gentle and scholarly Claudius had been made emperor in his place. Like many civilized and educated Romans, Claudius was a Judophile—and a friend to Agrippa in the bargain. With a large and generous gesture, he added to Agrippa’s small holdings in Galilee and on the coast, the large territories of Samaria and Judea, recreating by that action the great, united Israel of old and making Agrippa king over all of Palestine. Once again a Jewish king ruled over the ancient as well as the current lands of the Jews.

It was in the flush of this great gift, this splendid accolade by the Emperor of Rome, that Agrippa and his advisers came to the conclusion that he, Agrippa, must go to Jerusalem and appear before the Jewish masses, and confront them and somehow win them. Easier said than done. Agrippa was king over the Jewish lands, which was quite different and much less than being king over the Jews. He was still an evil king, the man the child of a wild youth, the man scheming, devising, murdering, living like a Gentile, raising his children to speak as fluently in Greek and Latin as in the Aramaic—the people’s tongue in Israel—or the Hebrew, the holy tongue of the Book, of the Torah; raising them with the pagan ways and the pagan knowledge, contemptuous of the Law and what the Law meant to a Jew.

So it was no small thing for Agrippa to go to Jerusalem on the Feast of Succoth and to declare that he would take his place in front of the Temple, the Holy of Holies, and there, with the Torah in his arms, he would read as the Lord God Jehovah directed him to read, and let his fate and future be in the reading and in God’s will—for no Roman emperor could make him king over the Jews, but only the Jews themselves.

Yet Agrippa knew that God is kinder to those willing to do some spadework on their own, and thus he pored through the Torah until he found a passage to his taste. It was not to the taste of his advisers, however, and they wailed that he was thrusting his head into the open mouth of the lion, verily the Lion of Judah, for the passage was an incitement that the Jews could not ignore.

“Or its reverse,” Agrippa smiled. “Am I no Jew? Do I know nothing?”

It was the beginning of a reputation for courage as well as wisdom. Perhaps a million Jews were in Jerusalem for the Succoth, for the Feast of the Tabernacles—perhaps a million, perhaps half a million. Who knew? Who counted? But to Agrippa, king of the Jews, standing in front of the Temple, it was a revelation—more Jews than he had ever dreamed existed, a sea of Jewish faces in every direction as far as the eyes could reach, the temple courts filled with them, and Jews packed on the walls of the Temple and in the streets beyond and on the roof tops—and all of them waiting for him to speak.

He had selected Deuteronomy 18:15; and with specific reason, for if a good part of his blood strain was from the Hasmoneans, the blood of Mattathias, the father of Judah Maccabeus and of the line of kings he fathered, he also carried the blood of Herod the Idumean, Herod of the cursed memory; so what he did was no small thing. The parchment scroll of the Torah was open before him, and the priests had already unrolled it to Deuteronomy and the selection of his choice. Now they watched him carefully and thoughtfully, watched the crowd, too, as Agrippa read:

“Thou shalt definitely make him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou make king over thee—”

A consummate actor? a priest wondered. But even Agrippa could not have answered that truly. The evil Agrippa was becoming the saintly Agrippa. It was happening before the eyes of thousands of Jews, for the king’s voice broke, and the tears streamed down over his cheeks, and sobbing piteously, he cried out:

“One from among thy brethren shalt thou make king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, who is not thy brother—

“Thou mayest not,” Agrippa sobbed.

The first few ranks heard him. Perhaps a thousand heard him.

“What is he saying?”

“Why does he weep?”

“Who can hear?”

“What is he saying?”

The half a million voices of the crowd telegraphed, crisscrossed, back and forth, through the courts, through the streets, even down to the Lower City where the slaves and the unclean were gathered, the bearers of burdens, the camel drivers, the garbage collectors, the gravediggers and the ulcerated and the leprous—all of them united in that bond of curiosity that transcends everything, all of them pleading.

“What does the king say?”

From high above, from far away, from inside the walls of the Holy of Holies, from such a place as served them with death did they even touch its wall with one finger.

“He weeps.”

That made no sense. “Why does the king weep?”

“He is cursed with Idumean blood. He is cursed with the curse of Herod. So he weeps.”

Of course, that did make sense, even below, where the Idumean gravediggers and dung gatherers were gathered. But above, in the temple courtyard, where the king stood upon his platform with the scroll of the Torah open before him, the Jews facing him were moved and touched, and they cried out,

“No—no. You are our brother.”

“I am not worthy,” Agrippa wept.

“You are worthy. You are our brother.”

And that cry was taken up, by rank after rank, until it swept across the whole city and even the unclean, a mile away, were screaming, until their throats ached,

“You are our brother! You are our brother!”

Praise God, a king and a saint!

So had Berenice heard it told, when her father returned to his own city of Tiberias from Jerusalem, now not only king over Palestine but over the Jews as well.

At the open archway to the breakfast room, two soldiers in brass, both of them tall, large-boned, dull-faced Galileans, took up their positions on either side the doorway as Agrippa entered. Berenice studied him carefully—uncertain as to what his reaction to her presence would be. They were seeing each other now for the first time in six weeks, and he would be surprised. He had not known that she had decided to come to Caesarea, and she had arrived and gone to bed the evening before without seeing him. There would be no great flush of greeting or outpouring of emotion, but he might decide to be angry.

Berenice watched him for anger. She knew the signs. He was a large man, going to flesh and paunch in his middle years, a wide, heavy mouth under his small, trimmed beard, the nose red and swollen from too much wine and under his shaggy brows, the same translucent green eyes—implacable here—that were so extraordinary and captivating in Berenice. He swept the room with those eyes and they eliminated the priests as beyond notice or recognition, rested for a moment on his son, Agrippa, weighing him, accusing him, and then fixed on Berenice.

“Good morning, daughter,” the king said.

She smiled in greeting and bowed deeply—as they all were bowing and scraping. He was angry. His voice trembled, as always when rage began to mount in him—and in response, Berenice moved toward control. She was not alarmed. Once she would have been terribly alarmed, but not now.

“You’re a long way from Chalcis, daughter,” the king said.

“I had to come a long way to be with you,” she replied.

“And how am I to take that?”

“As a daughter’s love.”

“Oh?” He bridled his anger, watching her. Now he would trap her, he decided, and get to the bottom of this, whatever the bottom was. “Oh? And how did you leave Chalcis?”

“They talk of only one thing at Chalcis,” she shrugged.

“Yes?”

“Of the good and saintly king who rules over the Jews.”

He stared at her, frowning, and then shook his head. More and more, he sensed the growing maturity of her will and control. She could be lying now, mocking at him, deriding him—or telling the truth. The truth would be pleasant.

Berenice sensed now that even the. possibility of gossip at so small and unimportant a place as Chalcis about the goodness of Agrippa was terribly important. Goodness was a drug he had begun to take only four years ago, but now he was an addict. He existed for goodness; he would kill, plot, lie, and scheme to uphold it—and nothing would stand in the way of the saintliness he proposed for himself. Toward that end, he would believe the unbelievable.

“What do they say at Chalcis, daughter?” he asked, watching her as he moved toward the buffet of food and took a handful of raisins and dates. The others watched too. Her brother, Agrippa, was chuckling inwardly at her pose. The two priests made note of what she was doing and were amazed that the king could not see through it.

“They tell a story. It’s all over town. Everyone is telling it.”

“What story?”

“Oh—” Berenice shrugged diffidently. “Probably something you forgot a day after it happened. They say that you went out of Tiberias dressed as a common woodcutter, so that you might be among your people and feel them and know them, and presently you came to a woodcutter’s hut, and he was poor because the arthritis was in his hands and fingers, so you gave him two pieces of gold, enough to last a year, but did not reveal yourself. And so you did with two other poor woodcutters. But then—then you came to a hut where the woodcutter and all his family were stricken with leprosy—”

Berenice was inventing as she went along, fashioning the story in a mixture of skill and contempt; and faltering for the moment at what a king in disguise might do at a hut of lepers—the more so since their Hasmonean blood was the holy priest’s blood, and thus the injunction not to approach the unclean was strong upon them. The king was well aware of this, for since the beginning of his period of saintliness he had become stricter and stricter in his observance of the Law.

“Go on! Go on!” the king cried.

“Well—it was unclean, and even the ground all about for thirty paces in every direction was unclean, and who in the whole world does not know that the king of the Jews keeps the Law? So as you stood there, your heart breaking with pity, but with no way to approach these sick and abhorrent people, an angel came down from heaven, and took the gold and gave it to the lepers and said to you, Blessed art thou, Agrippa, beloved King—”

Her voice trailed away as she finished the story, staring at her father, the king, with wide-open eyes. Suddenly, her brother was overcome with fear, and the two priests waited with satisfaction for the king’s wrath to explode and destroy this arrogant, clever, and contemptuous princess, whom they hated so. But nothing exploded. Agrippa had stopped eating. He stood for a moment, the fruit in his hands, his eyes closed—and then he shook his head.