“We shall see,” Melchior said noncommittally.
Caspar said, “I shall give this man no gifts; he is already decked like a kept woman, and he smells like one. Also he is ignorant. Water was not offered us. Nor food I’ All the time that the incomprehensible talk had been going on he had been watching Herod, and like many other men, far more sophisticated and experienced, had been deceived. Another dressed-up jewel-hung figurehead, with soft hands and nails trimmed like a woman’s, he had thought; no ally for a man like me. His thoughts had reverted to the wild men of the hills, of whom he had so far seen no sign at all.
“To wash, to eat, would have wasted more time,” Melchior said.
“Not if food and water had been offered, as they should have been, when we arrived. Of all that talk, I understood one word. Caesar Augustus, he said. What did he say of him?”
Melchior dredged up the remark, unimportant and therefore already half forgotten.
“Oh, he said that he held his throne by favour and that the one who follows him will be chosen, not born to rule. Which confirms what I said; this is not the place and we should not have come here. How long is he intending to keep us waiting?”
Caspar began to prowl about the room, noting the great urns of jaspar, the braziers exuding scent as well as heat, the marble troughs, the hanging baskets, filled with flowers, the silken draperies, the soft—he prodded them with a stiff finger-cushions in the silver chair. All familiar, all contemptible. Jexal all over again. The city rot, the city stink! He swung on his heel and turned to Melchior.
“Ask him one thing for me. How many rebels are there in the hills.”
“Three less than there were,” Melchior said with his thinsmile. He really must remember not to allow his exasperation with Caspar to show; but for him the camels would have been lost. Balthazar had his uses too; but Melchior wished once more that it had been possible for him to make the journey alone___ He began to twist his hands together, pulling at his fingers so that the joints gave off little brittle snapping sounds.
“They were not the true men,” Caspar said.
“They were I robbers, and witless ones at that.” His lips moved in a smile as 4 he remembered the speed and efficiency with which he had done the killing.
“I shall now count up to a hundred,” said Melchior who had spent his youth in an ordinary house and the rest of his life in a room twelve feet square and had no notion of the distances in palaces, ‘and then I shall leave. No information he can give is worth this delay. The star is my guide.” He began to count and had reached twenty when Herod came back.
Neither Melchior nor Balthazar noted any change in his appearance, but Caspar knew the symptoms of fear as well as any man alive. He saw that just at the base of Herod’s strong, arched nostrils there were tiny white patches as though fingers had pressed there and been withdrawn. He thought—Something has frightened him, and he is a man who might be dangerous when frightened. He changed his stance.
Herod had wasted no time. He had taken a short cut to the opposite side of the Palace, the side entered from a court in which there was nothing likely to offend the most fanatical Jew.
The room in which he always entertained members of the Sanhedrin was likewise void of anything offensive. The tiles on the floor were plain, the walls lined with cedarwood and undercoated, the candlesticks of solid, unchased silver. There were three low tables of green marble, arranged to make three sides of a square, and on the outer side of the tables were divans covered in green velvet. Herod had learned in Rome that the ideal number for an intimate dinner was nine; tonight there were six priests, himself and two government officials, both Jews and both from priestly families.
In Roman fashion, too, this dinner was beginning with wine and a selection of small delicacies at which early guests could nibble while awaiting later arrivals, but the wine was sweeter than any Roman of taste would have drunk before a meal, and the variety of titbits was limited because of the dietary rules.
The greetings on Herod’s side were a shade more cordial than usual because he had kept them waiting, and must keep them waiting again. Time mattered, but he must not appear hurried. So he sat down in the place which Archelaus had vacated and accepted the cup of wine which the boy, forestalling anyone else, poured, asking as he presented it, “May I go now? I have an engagement of my own.”
“Yes, go. I’m sorry you have been delayed. I apologise to you all for this delay. Three men arrived, unexpectedly. They are on their way to the Essenes at Quram.” That was a cunning touch. Mention the Essenes to an orthodox priest and he flinched as though touched by a red-hot iron. The Essenes lived apart, were celibate, owned nothing, everything being the property of the community, in many ways their beliefs and their ritual did not conform to the Law by which ordinary Jews lived; they claimed to be at once better informed and more holy than secular priests. Herod disliked them every bit as much as the High Priest did, but he had hit on the use of their name both as cover for his question and as a means of quelling before it arose any interest the priests might feel in his visitors.
“These three,” he said, having watched the effect of the word, ‘are argumentative amongst themselves; only one speaks Greek; they have no Latin, no Aramaic. So far as I can make out they are arguing about the Messiah and his prophesied birthplace.”
As he had aged the High Priest’s face had dropped into jowls below his jaw, small, well-filled pouches which at the word “Messiah’ seemed to fall lower and go limp. Other faces altered in other ways. They were all Jews, all, in theory at least, believers in the prophets and their prophecies, but the word inspired no welcome. Consternation rather. They were professional priests, very comfortably situated, enjoying less authority than they considered to be their due, but protected, respected, provided for, easily performing their set duties, happily collecting their set dues. The actual arrival, on earth, of the
promisedMessiah, the Son of God, could only disrupt their lives.
The High Priest recovered himself quickly. The mention of the Messiah, made by, of all people, Herod, had disconcerted him for a moment, but it was, he reflected, just the kind of thing which curious strangers, bound on a visit to an Essene community would wish to discuss. He said:
“The place, by tradition, is Bethlehem.” His voice took on the note of one who quotes, knowledgeably.
“And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda;
for out of thee shall come a governor that shall rule my people Israel.
That is the prophecy; does it settle the argument?”
Herod remembered the certainty with which the old man in the curious hat had said, “No more than ten or twelve miles from where I stand.” Now the High Priest had said the place was Bethlehem, the city of David. It was at this moment that the white patches made their appearance beside his nostrils and they were not, as Caspar was presently to suppose, the brand of fear, they were signs of a deadly determination.
He said lightly, “Armed with that information from the highest authority, they can go and argue with the Essenes.” He took a sip from his cup and set it down.
“I shall be with you before the first dish is served.” He rose and rustled away.
The priests began to talk amongst themselves, about the Essenes, and then, free of Archelaus’ presence, about Herod. Only one of them took no part in the conversation, but sat brooding.
He was a friend of Zacharias, had actually been on duty with him in the Temple when the older man had stiffened and stared and seemed to go into a cataleptic trance from which he had emerged completely dumb. Some time after that Zacharias’ wife, a woman far past child-bearing age, had become obviously pregnant, and in the previous midsummer, she had borne a son. On the eighth day after the birth the child had been circumcised and named, and Elkanah had been invited to be present at the joyful ceremony. And a very curious thing had happened. Everybody had taken it for granted that the boy should be named after his father, but when the moment came, Elisabeth, a very quiet and retiring woman, had suddenly raised her voice and said: “Not so; he shall be called John.”