Agrippa's Daughter (6 page)

When she faced her uncle, Herod of Chalcis, alone finally after the nightmare that was their wedding ceremony, she was rigid with horror, almost catatonic—a memory she deliberately evoked now in Caesarea as she dressed for the theater with Gabo’s help and listened to the singing and music from the streets outside. He was a fat man, her Uncle Herod, to whom her father had married her in his senseless act of senseless revenge, a tall, fat man, almost dropsical in the thickness of his limbs, and now wrapped in a red robe and naked underneath as he faced her.

“Please—wait for tomorrow,” she had managed to whisper.

He hardly knew her. Before their marriage, he had seen her three times, once when she was an infant months old, once when she was six, and again when she was ten. Now she had passed her fifteenth year, a grown woman, tall, wide-hipped, wide-shouldered, strange-looking, with her green eyes, her cat’s eyes, and her red hair—strange, but beautiful, if this kind of thing was to one’s taste. Fifty-two years old, Herod of Chalcis could not say truly whether she was or was not to his taste. He himself was an odd lot, graced with neither the bodily beauty nor the mental agility that marked the royal house of Israel. Subservient to the strong will of his brother, King Agrippa, he had agreed to the marriage. He did not enjoy the fact of being a widower, and of late he had become obsessed with the fear of impotence. While legend had it that a young virgin was proper medicine for the condition, surely youth was more important than virginity—and this niece of his was youthful indeed. Yet he was puzzled by the imploring terror in her eyes. He had been assured that she was deflowered and a practiced hand at the business of pleasing a man.

And now she begged him to wait for tomorrow.

Of course she was deceitful. He had asked a number of his brother’s close advisers what was their opinion of the Princess Berenice. Along with labels of lechery, slyness, and prevarication, they had all agreed that she was generally deceitful. Herod of Chalcis was the kind of fool who goes through life determined and satisfied that no one else will make a fool of him.

He clutched Berenice in his arms. He was full of virility—throbbing with it. Impotence? He began to laugh with delight at his passion while he tore the clothes off his niece. He exhibited his own nakedness proudly, a fat, shapeless pile of a man, his own manhood protruding ridiculously from his folded layers of flesh, and when Berenice struggled screaming against him, he folded her under his great weight and size, enveloping her in his rolls of flesh, gasping and whimpering with his re-enforced masculine pride and delight—too carried away by his passion to have any sense of the girl under him—or what was happening to her.

Only afterward he stared foolishly at the pool of blood on the floor where he had flung her. “Have you never known a man before?” he asked her. “I am the first, Berenice?” He was prepared to swell and preen himself over the fact that he had taken a virgin—that all unbeknownst he had found this pure jewel in a supposedly rotten apple—when he saw her eyes. The green was veiled, like shore water, dark and cloudy and full of such cold, malignant hatred that his naked skin prickled, a flush of heat pouring sweat on his icy back in a reaction of fear, almost panic.

This, Berenice remembered now, remembered it all deliberately as she created for herself a fanciful role in the city’s holiday, a fantasy of sex and excitement and freedom that excited her yet left her cold and unmoved—

The play was stiff, wooden, and quite dull, and nothing the company of Colophon Greeks were able to do could breathe any life into it. Two of the company spoke Latin poorly with an atrocious Ionian accent, and whenever one of these two had lines to speak, the audience roared with laughter and pelted him with fruit peelings and pits and bits of sausage. Even in a comedy, laughter at the wrong place can be destructive; and though the play was contrived as a comedy, it was not particularly funny. Writing in his formal, scholastic manner, Claudius had borrowed freely—if indeed the play actually was from his own hand—and had pasted together a series of contrived incidents. In a mythical country, a child is born to the king’s wife. At precisely the same time, another child is born to the slave woman who tends the queen. Since the queen has no milk and a wet nurse is required, they choose the slave woman, and, of course, she switches the infants so that her own blood may come into the throne. It was an ancient plot, and onto it was grafted a series of equally ancient plots, which unfolded with tedious predictability.

Berenice, with Gabo crouched at her feet, was seated toward the back of the royal pavilion, which contained places for about two dozen people in four terraces or steps, these of stone hollowed into the shape of chairs and cushioned for comfort. An awning stretched overhead provided shade. Only here and in the other pavilions was shade provided—otherwise the entire amphitheater lay open to the broiling rays of the midday sun. The emperor’s pavilion was the same size as the royal pavilion and provided comfortable seating for those Roman functionaries in Caesarea who desired to see the current play. Today, the Legate Germanicus Latus, a fat, bald, good-natured Italian, was there with his wife and his three daughters and half a dozen people of his suite. Situated on an angle from the royal pavilion, they were able to smile and nod at the royal party. Latus was in Palestine on a trade mission for the emperor, and it would hardly do for him to miss an opening performance of his master’s first theatrical effort. They were amply provided with buckets of iced wine, and they drank and smiled and bowed and stuffed themselves with fruit as the play went on.

Berenice and Gabo shared the back row of their pavilion with Berenice’s brother, Agrippa, and a young palace page, Joseph Bennoch by name. In the row directly in front of them, three priests and a rather dubious woman of the court were seated. The next row was occupied by seneschals, advisers, more priests, and the palace steward. And in the front row, Agrippa sat with two young women he had favored lately. Two young men of good family shared seats to provide front and maintain the saintliness of the king’s recent reputation.

Had this not been a command performance, with Claudius’ reputation on stage, Berenice would have departed after a few minutes of the tedious nonsense. As it was, Agrippa had given orders that all gates to the theater be closed, and the audience, most of whom were not even provided with parasols against the sun, were forced to sit and endure—a situation to which only a minority objected. The others had come for a holiday and were ready to enjoy anything on the stage. They had brought baskets of food and bottles of wine, and they ate and drank and cheered the players and mocked them and screamed with applause or hissed with hatred—and became drunk and happy and occasionally violent, with no Jews present except the handful of quality in the pavilions—no Jews to look down their noses and despise the simple pleasures of plain people and thereby spoil their fun and fulfillment. The Syrians and Levantine Greeks and Egyptians and half-breed Philistines and Moabites and polyglot combinations of Persian, Parthian, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Jebusites, Samaritans, Italians, and even a sprinkling of Gauls, Spaniards, and Germans, Phoenician seamen, Edomite longshoremen—and so many others that a listing would be endless, Caesarea being perhaps the most cosmopolitan of all seaports—all of them rocked with pleasure, belched and farted at the actors, interrupted them, pelted them, and generally took advantage of what they sensed, even if they had not the taste to measure—that this was a bad and tedious play and that the Jewish noblemen in their gay pavilions would not interfere, so long as the horseplay remained within the bounds of semi-order, which meant anything less than a full-scale riot.

The heat increased as the play went on and with it Berenice’s irritation. Were it not for the fact that Gabo appeared to be absolutely enthralled as the story unfolded, Berenice would have defied her father and forced her way out through the guards. But she knew how long and eagerly Gabo had looked forward to this, and she decided to endure it to the end—a determination that made her glow with a sort of virtuous self-approval.

Her brother, wiping his brow, observed that while he perished of thirst, those Italian louts were drowning themselves in iced wine. He did not like Latus, whose low birth and business career—which had brought him to his present position, that of a very wealthy knight—he now recalled. “Trust his kind to have ice here,” he said angrily—and Berenice felt, at that moment, a sense of annoyance. She might have articulated it by specifying that if one desired to be as much of a snob as her brother was, he should arm himself with more wit. Young Agrippa had qualities, but he was not clever.

Staring at Germanicus Latus, Berenice caught his eye. He smiled at her. He had that Italian gift of honoring a beautiful woman—or, more to the point, of being able to make a sixteen-year-old girl aware of the fact that she was beautiful and very much a woman. He made motions to show how devastated he was at the distance that separated them, and Berenice, in response, made motions of great thirst. She did not have to repeat the suggestion. He spread his arms in pseudo-tragic apology and issued quick orders to his servants. Meanwhile, King Agrippa’s attention had been attracted, and Latus now made signs to beg his forgiveness. Now Berenice saw that her father had provided his own cool liquid refreshment. Only she and her brother, apparently, were not equipped to deal with their thirst.

Her brother sent Joseph Bennoch, the page, for the wine, which was in a glass beaker set in a wooden bucket of ice. The beaker was very large, holding at least a quart of liquid, and with the bucket and the ice made a weight under which the page staggered. As he brought it to their pavilion, Berenice’s father watched, and Germanicus Latus made signs that the king was to have the first drink. “Ice? Isn’t that ice in it? I thought I saw ice.”

Berenice dipped into the bucket, found a piece of ice, and held it dripping. Several of the guests in the pavilion gathered around, for ice was no common thing here in Caesarea in the heat, and some of them had never seen a chunk of ice before. Ice was cut during the winter months on the high lakes in Lebanon and then packed in sawdust, to be sold through the hot months at fantastic prices, so much so that it was called, in the Aramaic, the language of Palestine, the gold that melts.

“Throw it here, child,” Agrippa called in great good humor, his friends and advisers around him, and feeling more and more superior as he watched the Emperor Claudius’ inept play unfold. For many years, he had been a close friend of the emperor, and there is a particular satisfaction in observing the literary cropper of a close friend.

The people around Berenice stood aside, and she threw the piece of ice to her father, who caught it deftly, grinning across the seats at Latus. “Old devil! Trust you to find ice! No ice in Caesarea for the king, but let a Roman set up court there, and there’s ice and anything else he sets his mind to!”

Agrippa said this in Latin, a tongue he used as easily and readily as his native Aramaic, and the high-pitched, commanding tone of his voice drew the attention of the audience. The players paused in their scene, out of deference to the king, and Germanicus Latus shouted back,

“Which explains why we rule the earth, Your Majesty. I will find ice in Caesarea, water in the desert, and women of easy virtue in Jerusalem! Only command it!” The jest was not terribly witty, but it found its mark in the audience, sending those who understood Latin into peals of laughter and those who did not into a flurry of inquiry. King Agrippa smiled in appreciation. He did not think it worth the laughter, and in his present phase he had no desire to exhibit appreciation over a backhanded slur on Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, the king’s beautifully wrought silver cup had been handed to his son, young Agrippa, who had poured about a third of the beaker of wine into it.

Afterward, Berenice was able to recall much of the history of the king’s goblet during the next few moments. Out of the corner of her eye, she observed Agrippa the younger pouring the wine. He then handed the cup to the priest, Phineas, who started across the row of seats, only to be stopped by the king’s seneschal, Herod-Kophas by name, and a fourth or fifth cousin in the royal family. The seneschal did a complete turn, hiding the cup for a moment, and then passed it to a scribe, who handed it to one of the young women who sat alongside of Agrippa the king. She made as to drink from it, but with mock severity, Agrippa clutched her wrist, took the cup, and, forgetting in the excitement and pleasure of the moment the function and duty of his royal taster, drained half the cup in one great swallow.

Berenice was watching her father. She remembered being suddenly thirsty at that moment and half reaching out to touch her brother’s arm and ask him to pour a cup of the wine for her, perhaps mixing it with some ice and water. But her gesture was halted midway, for suddenly her father rose to his feet, holding the silver cup of wine in front of him in one trembling hand. A hoarse, wordless cry came from his throat, choked out, gasped out—and then a shriller, louder cry of rage and pain, and then the heavy silver cup dropped with a crash from his hand, the hand remaining outstretched, the fingers curled.

The two girls with him began to scream. The play had stopped, and players and audience were staring at the stricken king. Voices stilled; conversation halted; smiles and laughter disappeared. Here and there, people in the audience were rising to their feet—that they might see better.

The king was swaying, a thick, branchless oak uprooted. People rushed toward him, but with a sweep of his arms he thrust them away. He tried to speak, but his throat tightened and closed around the words, and then he fell down. A few minutes later he was dead.

In the turmoil that followed Berenice remained strangely cool, collected, and aloof. While others reacted with panic, fear, total confusion, or the desperation of self-preservation, she kept her wits and prevented the singular tragedy of the king’s death from turning into a much larger tragedy of riot and massacre. The role she played was a surprise, not only to others but to herself as well.