There would be one bright spot in the evening, too; sooner or later the priests were bound to mention the new taxes and the census; and there Herod would be on very sound ground. He could say, “Caesar gave that order; I had nothing to do with it. You should have sent a deputation to Rome if you had any valid objection.”
There was another comforting thought. On the last occasion when he entertained the Sanhedrin members, he’d been in the throes of his illness; ravenously hungry; the miserable meal had done nothing to appease the wolves gnawing in his belly and he had hardly been able to wait until the priests left and he could order another, better meal, knowing all the time that it would merely feed the wolves and strengthen them for tomorrow’s assault. Tonight he would be able to eat normally.
He was hardly inside the Palace when one of the stewards came bustling up to say that three travellers had arrived and humbly craved audience.
They were insistent and were waiting.
“From Rome?” Herod asked, instantly alert.
“No, my Lord, from the East. Only one of them speaks a recognisable tongue.”
The East ? Parthia?
“Who sent them? What credentials do they carry?”
“None, my lord.”
“You are sure of that?”
“Dumah questioned them and is certain they have no mission-except their own, which is a wish to see you, my lord.”
“Then why should they imagine that I should receive them? If I opened my door to every chance traveller I might as well be on show in the menagerie! Send them away.”
“My lord, Dumah did gather that a prince is concerned.”
Herod made a sound of exasperation. Antipater again. Women? Debts?
“Is one of these a merchant?”
“So Dumah thought. A black man; better dressed than the others, and the spokesman.”
Herod could guess what had happened. In one of their recent quarrels he had absolutely forbidden Antipater to obtain credit in any city
under his jurisdiction; he had a generous, a wildlygenerous allowance, and he must keep within it. But Antipater had simply taken advantage of the words ‘within my jurisdiction’ and had gone to the free cities of the Decapolis and there run up debts. Now a black-faced fellow, probably a freedman-and they were the sharpest traders in the world—had come, with two witnesses, to ask payment. And his daring to come showed how highly those citizens of the independent Greek cities valued themselves. Insolent upstarts I He was on the verge of saying that the men should be hustled off, roughly; then he remembered that the Decapolis was under Roman protection. The next thing he knew they’d be sending a deputation to Augustus complaining that Herod had no control over his own son.
He said, “Tell the Treasurer to deal with it, whatever it is,” and strode angrily along to his own apartments where the attendants waited to disrobe and dress him again. But his anger with Antipater had opened the old wound in his heart: his true sons, his real heirs, had been Mariamne’s sons, and they were dead. So was she. And the fact that he had been responsible for their deaths, planned and ordered the executions, did nothing to lesson his grief. A man with a rotting limb might be driven to cutting it off with his own knife, that he performed the operation himself would not lessen the pain, nor the loss.
Brusquely he waved aside those waiting to serve him and went to the high, bronze decorated door that separated his rooms from those of Mariamne.
Her sleeping chamber, a large room with a silver and ivory bed on a dais, was warmed by braziers that gave off sweet scent as well as warmth, and the air was also full of the scent of roses. A slave had already lighted many candles, at the sight of Herod, he scuttled away. The light shone on the flowers and on the dressing table with its silver mirror, its flasks and pots of rose-crystal, jade and alabaster; it was just as she had left it. Easy enough to delude oneself that this room’s occupant, a fastidious woman, superlatively served, had just been robed, had painted her face and dressed her hair and gone out of the room for a moment and would, in a moment, be back. His attitude towards his murdered wife was the most evident sign of that contradictory streak in Herod which those close to him had noted. He had loved her, distrusted her deeply, and had her killed. Immediately after he had given orders that her rooms were to be kept exactly as she had left them, that she was always to be spoken of as though she were alive. He had never cancelled the order for the daily delivery of roses; during rose-less seasons in Jerusalem they were brought from far places, cut in bud, wrapped in damp cotton fibre, transported by the swiftest means, and arranged. On any occasion when, alive, she would have shared a meal with him, her place was set; he visited her apartments once every day as a matter of routine, and frequently at other times when he was worried, puzzled, exultant, or sorry for himself. Often he spoke her name, a thing to which his courtiers and staff were accustomed but disconcerting to strangers.
There were some who worked in the Palace who were not so sure that the whole thing was a mere foible. When Herod called “Mariamne’ there was no answer but an echo; her wraith was never seen, but occasionally someone walking a hall or a corridor where there were no roses would become aware of the sweet scent which had been her favourite. Once a slave, dusting the table where Mariamne had been used to sit, beautifying beauty, had dropped and broke a glass phial and then reeled back, her hand to her face, screaming. Later she had a bruise to show to corroborate her story that she had been slapped. Night-watchmen, too, told uneasy stories of the behaviour of the hounds which made their rounds with them. Over the years the Palace had become a place where few men willingly walked alone after sunset.
Herod was as jealous of these hints that other people as well as himself were aware of her as he had been jealous of anyone who approached her when she was alive. He, the sceptic, the murderer, the extremely rational man, liked to believe, did believe, that somewhere she lived on, entirely his at last, understanding why he had done what he did, and full of sweet forgiveness and deeply concerned with his well-being. This imaginary Mariamne bore little resemblance to the haughty, intractable Asmodean princess whom he had married from
expediencyand who with a glance or the movement of a hand could convey her scorn of him, a half-breed upstart and usurper. In her lifetime she had never forgiven a misplaced word, much less a wrong, and when he had killed her brother, who was High Priest at the time, she had immediately turned to plotting, with her mother, the old Queen Alexandra, and then with Cleopatra of Egypt, another deadly enemy of his. Yet their life together had not been without its good moments; there had been times when his passion had seemed to evoke an answering passion in her; and it was around these rare and lovely times that he had built his fantasy, softening and changing the character of his love into what he would have wished her to be. He invariably came to this room and laid his problems before her; he sat on one particular couch, emptied his mind, called on her name and waited. He did so now.
“Mariamne!” he called; then he told her that he was angry with Antipater, stared at the nearest bowl of roses and waited.
To his attendants the waiting time seemed long; to Melchior, his nerves shredding with impatience, it seemed interminable. But finally Herod emerged, moving briskly, a slight, puzzled frown on his forehead.
“I’ve no time,” he said to the man who moved forward to begin the disrobing.
“Three strangers asked to see me. Run, tell Dumah I will receive them; in the small Silver Room. If they’ve gone, they’re to be followed and brought back. Run I’ To a second attendant he said, “Find Prince Archelaus and ask him to receive and entertain the High Priest and his staff until I can join them. I won’t keep them long.”
To yet a third he said, “I want no attendants at this interview.
That was unusual; when Herod received visitors he liked to do so in pomp, surrounded by his lords.
“With guards at the door, my Lord?”
After a second’s thought, Herod nodded. The room was called small because it was so compared with other audience chambers, but it was sixty feet long, and whatever these strangers had to tell him could not be overheard by the guards in the doorway.