Agrippa's Daughter (43 page)

“Why did we have no child, no flesh, no seed to be planted again?”

She found herself listening freshly, wonderingly to those piping voices, “And if I should offer a burnt sacrifice? But Hillel answered this pious man thus, Should you never offer a sacrifice and never speak a prayer and even deny the Almighty Himself, yet live with love and with charity, I tell you that you are keeping the Law—”

Did it have meaning? Or was this the ranting of haplessness and hopelessness? The children sat under the terebinth tree, and Jerusalem was dying. Each day word came from Jerusalem. Fifteen days after Titus had brought up his battering rams and opened the assault on the Wall of Herod, this northern wall of the city was breached. For four days after that, a terrible battle with no quarter asked and no quarter given raged in the streets of the Lower City—and finally the Zealots and the Sicarii, who had made common cause now, were driven across the Second Wall and into the Akra.

The reports were confused and very often contradictory. No one entered or left the city now, and the only information was what filtered through the Romans to their Egyptian and Greek and Samaritan camp followers and camp servants and then through them to the Jews. It was a time when information was not only passed on freely but bought and sold as well by Jews who were desperate to know the fate of friends and relatives in the city; and if there was no news, the sellers were ready enough to manufacture it out of the whole cloth. Thus the word came to Galilee that in the Lower City the Romans had put every man, woman, and child to the sword, that they had killed only the able-bodied men, that they had killed only the women and children, preserving the men for their triumph, that they had killed no one since every single soul had escaped to the shelter of the Akra and from there to the impregnable Upper City and the temple citadel, and that they had taken over twenty-five thousand prisoners. The last was closest to the truth, but it could not be verified.

The battle for Jerusalem went on, and the reports continued to seep into Galilee—and then came word that the Temple, the eternal and indestructible Temple of Yaweh, had been put to the torch and had burned to the ground—nothing being left of it but the scorched foundation stones. The defenders had retreated from the temple area into the Upper City, which they had sworn to defend to the death. Already almost a hundred thousand prisoners had been taken by Titus. The city was in flames, a pillar of smoke hanging over it so high and dense that it could be seen from as far away as Samaria—and red at night with the flames of the burning city. And still the Upper City was defended.

Then it was August, and word came that the Romans had breached the wall of the Upper City and had set it aflame. The end was now in sight.

And still, at the House of Hillel the sun rose and set each day over the unchanging and bucolic setting—and each day the children sat in the shade of the terebinth tree, intoning the sayings of the sage.

Jerusalem was dead. Barring Rome itself, the most populous, the most strongly defended, and the proudest city on all the earth had perished. The unconquerable had been conquered; even if it had destroyed itself, ripped out its own gut, and cut its own throat and bled itself until every street was a river of blood—still, if there were ten thousand left to defend its walls against a million, its conquest was no small feat. The Jew was dead, and wherever the Roman looked in all the earth, there was no one to oppose him. And with the city died Yaweh, the angry old God of the mountain, Yaweh of the tabernacle, Yaweh of the ark, Yaweh of the Temple—Yaweh who had plucked the noblest Jews down from their concept of an invisible and formless Eternal and had charged them, “I am Yaweh, your God, who brought you out of Egypt to be my own chosen people. I am the just God, the angry God, the God of fire and war, of thunder and lightning, of vengeance and memory, the God of Horeb, of all the high places and ancient beginnings, of the burnt offering, the flesh offering, the foreskin and the stink of the sacrifice, I am your God—and no other Gods will you have before me.” So He had charged them over a thousand years—but now no more. His Holy Temple lay in ashes and molten metal, and even His name—Yaweh—would gradually fall into disuse among a people who would seek Him in their homes, their hearts, and their synagogues, but no more on a hill in Judea. The Romans celebrated; twice had they been threatened by cities—once by Carthage and now by Jerusalem, and twice had they destroyed the cities that threatened them. They were full of pride.

And the Jews celebrated differently. They said the Kaddish, the ancient prayer for the dead. Wherever the news came, they gathered together, in homes and in synagogues, and they said the prayer for the dead. They said it at the House of Hillel. Berenice gathered with all the others under the terebinth tree, and as the setting sun touched the western hill, they spoke in unison, men and women and children, “Increase and make holy His mighty name in this world which is His creation as He willed it. May He build His kingdom in your lifetime, in your good days, in the lifetime of the House of Israel—quickly and soon.”

They said. Amen, and then they wept. The whole world was weeping, Berenice felt. It was one thing for a city to die; it was another thing for a city to murder itself. When the Rabbi Hillel Bengamaliel, leading the service, said to them, “The Zealots are dead. We will pray for them,” Berenice could abide it no longer. Many things she would do, because the only meaning life had for her was the meaning the House of Hillel had given to it, but she would not pray for the Zealots and she would not mourn for the House of Shammai.

She walked away, and no one tried to halt her. This at least was her privilege. She walked away and up the hillside to where Shimeon was buried. But again, as before, this brought her none of the peace or comfort she yearned for.

Agrippa came to the House of Hillel bringing three men with him. One was Anat Beradin, the wool merchant and onetime sponsor of Polemon, the king of Cilicia, who had died almost eight years ago. Beradin was old, past seventy, but dry and sound as a nut and alert, with clear eyes and a clear mind. The second of the three men was Gideon Benharmish, who was the head of the great House of Shlomo, who ruled over an empire of fishermen from Alexandria to Tarsus and whose ships with their Phoenician crews traded from Caesarea to Cornwall. And the third man was Jacobar Hacohen, that strange, round-faced, pale-eyed Jew of mysterious antecedents, who admitted to no paternal name yet insisted that three quarters of his bloodline was priestly, and who had once been the greatest Jewish banker in Jerusalem—and perhaps in the world. He had departed Jerusalem before the civil war broke out, being of the party of Hillel, and had withdrawn his resources too. He was a stony-faced, angular man, past sixty, with a haughty eagle’s beak of a nose. It was said that there was no city in the civilized world where he could not immediately command half a million shekels on demand.

These three men came with Agrippa to see Berenice. They were welcomed as all were welcomed who came to the House of Hillel; and then in the shade of the terebinth tree they were given food and fruit and cold wine—and then left alone with Berenice and her brother-in-law, Hillel. They had already offered their sympathies and condolences to Berenice, and now Jacobar Hacohen said to her,

“We must understand, hard though it may be, that a city has died—not a people, only a city. True, a great and ancient and holy city, but still only a city—”

“Only a city?” Berenice raised a brow. “Is it only a city that dies? I shed no tears over brick and stone or even over the Holy Temple, for we of Hillel are not taught that God is a thing that can live in a temple—or be worshiped there; but I was in Jerusalem while it was dying—I was there. I tell you, Jacobar, people died. Not a city.”

“If I express myself poorly—”

“No, no, no,” said Benharmish. “We must understand each other—because there is no disagreement. If we don’t mourn with every word, it is because the present necessity is not for mourning but for something else. May I say something about Jerusalem?”

“Please,” Berenice agreed. “Please. And if I appear churlish, it is only because I have been so long alone, with no companions except my grief.”

“We have all made companions of grief,” Beradin nodded.

“All right,” said Benharmish, “we will talk to the point of Jerusalem—not as priests or prophets, nor politically nor in judgment. We leave that to others. Specifically, we are men of affairs, and your brother, Agrippa, called us to him precisely because we are men of affairs. We have each of us been of some service to him in the past, and perhaps now, together, we can still effect something—”

“That is well put,” said Jacobar Hacohen. “Do you see, Queen Berenice? I am better with numbers than words, and you must not have a sense of indignation about me.”

“I have no sense of indignation about you,” she replied gently. “I was petulant, that’s all. I frequently am.” She touched Benharmish on the arm. “Go on, old friend.”

“All right. Now there is a situation in Jerusalem that we must approach as men of affairs. Mind you—there are no certainties in what I say, but I think my figures are realistic and make sense. Other figures are very unrealistic and make little sense. Firstly—what was the population inside the walls of Jerusalem when Titus began his direct attack on the city? A million? Nonsense! There never were a million souls in Jerusalem—not if they slept ten to a room could the city have held a million. I would guess that its normal population—if such a city as Jerusalem was has a normal population; and I put this in terms of the tens of thousands who constantly come and go—well, a normal population of four hundred thousand. Then it increased—well, say, to half a million when the civil war in the city began. During the civil war, a hundred thousand left—escaped or somehow made their way out of the city. During the two years of the civil war another hundred thousand perished from violence, disease, starvation—leaving three hundred thousand to a quarter of a million when the city was attacked. I think the lower figure is more nearly accurate—and of these I estimate that at least a hundred thousand perished in the fighting of the past few months, killed by the Romans most of them, and others by Bargiora—who is now a prisoner in the hands of the Romans. And what does this mean? It means that in his slave pens and in the slave pens of his Greek and Syrian dealers, Titus holds captive perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand Jews.”

He paused to let his words sink in, looking from face to face, and then continued softly, “Gentlemen and Queen Berenice—we Jews have been accused of arrogance to a fault, perhaps not without reason. We despise too many things that the pagans hold dear or sacred, but of the fact that we despise funerary cults—of this I have never been ashamed or apologetic. Since we came out of Egypt, fourteen hundred years ago, we have turned our eyes and our thoughts away from that accursed nation that is obsessed with the worship of death and the dead. We do not worship the dead—or feed them, or sacrifice to them, or brood over them. Our obligation is to the living—and only with the living are we concerned. Our problem is no longer those who perished in Jerusalem—but those who survived. Those are Jews who live and suffer. Each of us here had relatives in Jerusalem. Of the House of Shlomo, there were fourteen in Jerusalem, my youngest brother, his wife, my cousin and her husband, an old woman, a great-aunt, and children—the rest were children. How many are alive? I don’t know—but who is alive must be saved. They are our responsibility, and no others will lift a finger to help Jews. Do you agree?”

No one disagreed, and then Barharmish turned to Jacobar Hacohen and said, “You have thought about this?”

“A great deal,” Jacobar replied. “Last week, a slave was sold in the market at Tyre. Tyre is a very interesting and important market, for it provides immediate shipment by water to Italy, Africa, Phrygia, and the islands and mainland of Greece. Quick, cheap shipment. This particular slave was twenty-three years old, male, healthy, ungelded. He was bid and sold at the normal price—eight hundred and twenty sesterces. This, mind you, was a field slave with no house talents, no trade or cooking or ability for management or teaching. Illiterate. But quite strong, well fed, with all his teeth. Now our Jews will not be well fed and not so desirable and the market will be cluttered and very bad. So let us say, all things considered and including the fact that a good-looking woman fetches a very nice price indeed—well, let us say five hundred sesterces per person. To do the arithmetic quickly, averaging the price of a talent of silver at this moment in—if you wish, seven cities where markets are maintained—and calculating in the Attic talent, not the Judaic talent, then we have the possibility of purchasing fifty slaves for a talent-weight of silver. Or gold, as you see our potential—and over all—well, if I were to accept Benharmish’s estimation of the number of slaves, which I believe is somewhat inflated—we would require three thousand talents of money—gold or silver, that is an equation of the two metals; and that is providing that we can keep our intentions a secret and find sufficient trustworthy pagan front to bid at our behest—” His voice trailed away, and he shook his beaked, craggy head in sober doubt.

“You mean to buy the captives?” Berenice whispered.

It had taken on the air of a conspiracy, and Agrippa replied, talking as softly, “Exactly.”

“There is no such sum of money,” Hillel said sadly. “How I wish there were. It’s impossible.”

“Oh no—not at all,” Benharmish said flatly.

“You see, my dear Hillel,” Beradin explained, “you are right, and you are also wrong. If we were Romans, we could throw up our hands in despair and admit that such an amount is impossible to raise. I doubt whether Titus will realize anything on the slaves, once the dealers are through cheating him. He will have a great deal of loot, but only a fraction of it will accrue to him—and that sum will be at best less than a hundred talents. The Romans are poor merchants, poor businessmen. Essentially, they are looters—looters on a scale never known before; and in this is the seed of their ultimate fate. You cannot operate an empire on robbery as a first principle. Their knights, their merchants and businessmen, are always puzzled as how to make a distinction between trade and thievery. But when you are a thief, your profits flow to the fence who is your middleman, and the Roman nobility—as they seem to style themselves, proud as peacocks over a bloodline that goes back three generations—this nobility is always begging, always in poverty. No—they could hardly raise three thousand talents on short notice. They have not learned yet that if you buy a city and sell it at a nice profit, you do better than the robber who burns it and then attempts to loot the ashes. Like all who disdain commerce, they are inordinately greedy, and since they only consume, they have no credit.”