Agrippa's Daughter (40 page)

“I must leave you here, and you must go on alone,” the centurion said, repeating by rote what he had been told, and wondering why, if his commander was so enamored of this woman, he was not here. “That was their condition, that you come out of the wall alone and go across the space in between alone. I am sorry. But there is nothing between the walls to frighten you—”

“You need not worry about my fears, Centurion.”

“I meant that there is nothing Roman out there—but what there is from the Jews’ side, I don’t know. I am told not to question why you are—”

“Then don’t question why, Centurion. And now I thank you for your aid and courtesy.” With that, Berenice left him and walked on toward the gate to the city.

She did not look back, but she could not avoid looking ahead of her, and this small piece of road between the two walls was no pleasant place to walk. It had been fought over too much. Here the Idumeans had fought, and here the Sicarii had hacked down a party of men and women who attempted to flee the city. Here too, the Zealots had fought a pitched battle with four cohorts of legionaries, when the Romans first made their approach to the city—and here, eventually, the Romans would make their final assault on the city, pushing their great siege engines in front of them. But now, already, the road stank with death. There was no dust on this piece of road, for its surface was cemented with hundreds of gallons of blood; a black surface of dry blood that the vultures pecked at angrily, drawn by the smell and frustrated by the product. But there was better eating for the vultures in the rotten flesh that lay alongside the road, carcasses of horses and donkeys and camels, dead jackals, and dead men too—skeletons picked clean and others that bore half a coat of stinking flesh.

It required all of Berenice’s control not to retch, not to double over in a spasm of sick horror, not to cover her mouth and nose, not to race back to the protection of the Roman wall—but she knew that she was being watched, and she told herself, “I will not be afraid, and I will not let them see me shrink from any of this. This is the game of men. This is the pleasure they call war. I will not vomit and weep over what men do.”

More and more people appeared on the walls, until they were crowded with a solid rank of people as far as the eye could see in either direction. The Damascus Gate opened now to a crack of about two feet, and a man stepped through, a big, broad-shouldered man, with a cadaverous, bony face and a flaming scar down one cheek to his chin. He was dressed in full armor, brazen cuirass, arm pieces, brass greaves, and plumed Roman helmet, and he wore sword and dagger but carried no shield. Watching him, his manner, his fierce, bold strut, the fixed, stonelike expression on his face, Berenice guessed that he was Shimeon Bargiora, the leader of the city now—a war man who had no existence before the war, no existence that anyone knew of, no family, no youth, no past, even as he himself disrupted and wiped out his future. He was a creature of war. Some said he was of the Sicarii; others said that he was a Zealot; and still others held that he was an Idumean Bedouin; but identity as such made no difference. His identity was with death, and even when he stood still, he gave the effect of a man in violent motion, plunging; and hate was a part of this motion. He walked in an aura of hate that was almost noble in its defiance of everything.

He stood outside the gate, waiting for Berenice, and when she was almost up to him he nodded, so that the white plumes in his helmet swayed back and forth, and he said to her,

“You are the queen of Chalcis?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true that you are the wife—or were the wife of Shimeon Bengamaliel, who was the nashi?”

“I am his wife,” Berenice nodded. “Is he alive?”

“He’s alive, and I will take you to him. I am Shimeon Bargiora. I command the city.”

“I know who you are,” Berenice said.

“You know what you hear of me. Outside, talk is cheap—and the rumor mill never stops grinding.” His voice was harsh, grating, angry, and now that she was close to him, Berenice saw a tic in his cheek, just over the ugly scar. Without the scar, he would have been a handsome man, for all the high-boned, death’s-head quality of his face.

“I came here to see my husband,” Berenice said.

“I know that, lady. You came—and you will go. We are here. We are committed here.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Really—do you?” He stepped close to her, fingered the silk of her overdress, sniffed at its perfume. “Where did you bathe this morning, Queen Berenice? You smell like the flowers of Eden. Forgive me—that wall has ringed us around for months. We are starving to death inside, and dying of thirst too.”

“You said you would take me to my husband.”

“Ah! So I did.” And then, brusquely, “Come along!” And without more ado, he strode through the gate. She followed him. The sun was up now, blazing down with its rich morning heat, still tempered by the chill of the night air—that miraculous combination of heat and chill that made Jerusalem’s one of the finest climates in Palestine.

Inside the gates there was a circle of soldiers, well armed and well armored with Roman weapons and armor, and beyond them a silent crowd of people who were alive yet dead—this was Berenice’s first and immediate impression—living dead, people so thin, so emaciated that they had lost all resemblance to ordinary men and women and children, people who watched her out of sunken eyes and pleaded without words. They stayed back quietly, beyond the reach of the soldiers who fell in on either side of Bargiora and herself and marched with them. Other soldiers closed the gates behind them, while still more soldiers were dropping down from the walls, on ropes and wooden ladders, that they might see this legendary woman at close range—commenting about her hair and the look of her, “A hundred years old—the devil she is!” “And I tell you she’s a witch.” “A witch—a bitch, it’s all the same.” They were well fed, these soldiers, not fat but not skinny either, lean and tight but by no means emaciated.

Bargiora led Berenice toward the old wall and the Fish Gate, and when the people saw that she would be gone in a moment, one of them, a man, cried out and reminded her that she had fed the hungry once. “We die of hunger, Berenice!” he cried out, and a soldier shouted at him, “Then get on with it, and the sooner the better.”

“They don’t fight—they don’t eat,” Bargiora said shortly.

“Do you want the women to fight?”

“If a man fights, his wife eats. There is no Sanhedrin to sit in judgment and divide the few rotten baskets of bread that remain. There isn’t enough food for all. The fighting men must live.”

“Why?” Berenice asked quietly.

“To defend the city.”

“And then?”

“We live now—not then,” he snapped. “If your heart must bleed, my lady, why not let it bleed for these soldiers who will die for their God and their city—and for their holy Temple.”

“My heart bleeds,” she whispered. “It bleeds enough, Bargiora—so don’t tell me for whom.”

“People like you,” he began in anger and disgust and then shook his head and swallowed his words. “Come on, lady.”

They walked on. A woman sat on the street, and her husband lay there, his head on her lap, pillowed. But he was dead. She wept for him, but only the tears made a difference; she was as yellow and emaciated as he was. Three children sat naked in the street, their bellies swollen, their bones protruding. A woman crawled past on her hands and knees, half naked, her flat dugs hanging down before her, dragging on the ground as she forced the bony frame that had been her body to move. A man and a woman walked slowly, blindly, supporting each other.

“God in heaven,” cried Berenice, “let them live! Let them out of the city and I will see them fed. I swear it.”

“There are more important things than life.”

“What?”

“That house of God.” He pointed to the Temple.

“That house of God is empty,” Berenice whispered, and in sudden anger, Bargiora cried,

“Will you blaspheme? By Yaweh, I will see you—”

“What will you do, Bargiora?” she asked drily and nastily. “Tell me what you will do, Bargiora. I came here by your word. I see you as a murderer—let me hear you as a liar!”

“No—I won’t lose my temper over you. No. You—you’re as much of a Jew as Titus.”

“Yes? And are you a Jew, Bargiora?”

He shook his head and clenched his lips—and whatever might have followed was interrupted by the appearance of a mongrel dog out of a gaping doorway—a yellow dog with a half-eaten human hand and forearm clenched in his teeth. When he saw the approaching group of soldiers, he paused warily, looking around him for an avenue of retreat. But already his way back into the door from which he had emerged was blocked. A soldier covered it as Bargiora cried,

“Get him! Kill him!”

Two of the soldiers hurled their javelins, but the yellow dog was an old hand at survival; he would have to be to remain alive after two years of siege. He watched the javelins and dodged them. Then the soldiers closed in, and the dog twisted, turned, and evaded. He dropped the arm in the process and suddenly darted away. Just as he seemed to be making good his escape, one of the soldiers picked up a cobble and threw it, catching the yellow dog on the side of the head and cracking his skull. In a moment, they were on him, and one of the soldiers had gutted the dog, ripped out its insides, hooked it onto his javelin, and continued to march with the carcass over his shoulder. “We eat meat tonight,” another said.

When Berenice stared in horror at Bargiora, he shrugged and said, “We have a dispensation. We fight in the Almighty’s name. Whatever will keep us alive is permitted.”

“Even what has eaten human flesh?”

“Remain with us for a while, my lady. You will become less discriminating, I assure you.”

They had passed into the Akra, climbing higher and higher, and now they entered the Upper City through the ancient Ephraim Gate. The gate itself, however, was new and improvised onto the charred remains of the old gate, and on either side the gate, the wall had been pounded down and subsequently repaired. As they entered the old City of Zion, Berenice had the feeling of a place already conquered—and, looking around her, she could feel almost concretely the despair and desolation of the place. In the Lower City, there were people—sick, starving, and enervated people, but people nevertheless—men and women and children; but here there were no women and no children. The men were soldiers, poorly armed but all with weapons and most of them near the gates and the temple area; as they proceeded into the Old City itself, there was no one, only the ruined houses, gaping walls, burned interiors and roofs—the great mansions and villas, gutted, ruined, ransacked, and looted as if the Romans had already been through this place and abandoned it. Only the Temple itself remained inviolate, shining in the morning sun.

“Where are the people?” Berenice asked Bargiora, knowing what the answer must be.

“People? What people?”

“A hundred and fifty thousand people lived here in the Upper City,” Berenice said.

“Oh? That may be—and I will tell you that a good many still live here. They stay tight in their holes—just as a half a million more in the Lower City prefer the darkness of their bolted chambers to the good light of day.”

“Tell me, Bargiora—how many have died here in the city?”

“It’s war and people die.”

“How many have you murdered?”

“Now, damn you to hell, Berenice—I will not be spolcen to that way—not out of that sneering, aristocratic manner of yours. We have proved here that the aristocrat dies as easily as the common Israelite.”

“But the aristocrats got out of the city, didn’t they, and you’ve been practicing the way of death on others—on common Israelites and common Jebusites. How many, Bargiora? And how many are left?”

“More left than I can count, I tell you that. I have been most patient and most tolerant, my lady—”

“No,” said Berenice, “you don’t know the meaning of patience or tolerance. You need me, Bargiora—you need me a great deal, don’t you?”

The Palace of Herod was the prison, a great, looming, ugly pile of a building, tasteless, a long veranda of square pillars, a kind of parody of the Grecian style. Half the building had been destroyed in the inner-city fighting, but the fortress part of it, built out of mighty blocks of red stone, was untouched. How many memories it recalled to Berenice! When her father had been king he had held court in this building, which his grandfather had erected, and again from the steps of this building, Gessius Florus had directed the attack against the children, the slaughter in the plaza. There was nothing gentle or beautiful about this building—it was of the nature of the city, a city without parks or green places, a city of stone wherein for a thousand years one fortress had been built upon another, as if it had somehow been foredoomed to die as it was now dying, and forewarned of its impending doom.

“Here,” Bargiora said, pointing to it, “the Romans made their praetorium—but we drove them out just as we drove out the sniveling descendants of your great-grandfather, who built the place—”

“You didn’t drive me out,” Berenice said, “and when I left Jerusalem, I had never heard of the name Bargiora. And if you would know something about my husband, he is no aristocrat and never needed to boast a bloodline; for he was out of the blood of Hillel the Good, and that is something you would hardly understand.”

“I understand Hillel—which is simply another word for cowardice and treason—and believe me, my lady, when we have driven out the Romans, we will go up into Galilee and scourge it of Hillel as you scourge a house of rats. So now, close your trap and come with me. Your husband is in there.”

It took all his control to hide his fury now as he led Berenice into the building, his soldiers around him and other soldiers lighting the way with flaming torches. Berenice saw that all effort to maintain the building had been abandoned; it had not even been primitively cleaned for months and months. Filth and rubbish lay everywhere; the glass windows were smashed and the decorations had been torn down, whether by Jews or Romans she did not know. They went down two flights of stairs into the sub-cellar, where the dungeon was—and then along a passage where the air was thick and sickening with the smell of human defecation. There were the doors of the prison cells, and from behind each door the pleading and whimpering of lost souls. With each step it was more difficult for Berenice to control herself, and when at last they stopped in front of a door, put the key in the lock, and opened the door, she was numb with the effort of beating her body and mind into submission. The cell was black until the glare of the torches lit it, and then, by the light of the torches, she saw a man sitting on a wooden bench, covering his eyes with his hands to protect them from the light. He was naked except for a filthy loincloth; his body was covered with scabies and running sores; his hair was long, white, and tangled in a mass of lice, dirt, and excrement—as was his beard; and he muttered inanely against the light, “—blinding me with it—take it away. Or is the sun rising? That would be something, the sun rising in here—” Other words that were meaningless to Berenice, and as he muttered, spittle drooled from his lips.