King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (17 page)

“Why is the Commander of Fort Drusus not here to salute the King? Is everyone crazy in Caesarea ?”

“See that the injured men are put ashore first,” said Antipater, “and find someone to buy them fresh fruit, poor fellows.”

When this had been done and the surgeon arrived, Antipater went ashore himself. A sergeant of Herod’s bodyguard with a file of soldiers at his back now sauntered out from behind a building. He saluted Antipater and said : “Majesty, King Herod requires your presence in Jerusalem immediately ; you are to take the post-chaise without delay.”

The aides were astonished. Only a sergeant! One of them asked him : “Where is your commander? Why has he not come in person to welcome the King ?”

The sergeant answered : “My instructions, which are directly from the King, are to answer no questions and permit no delays. The post-chaise is ready for His Majesty yonder by the weighing-shed, and I am to accompany him to Jerusalem. I am also instructed to disarm His Majesty.”

“I carry no arms,” said Antipater.

“I am to search Your Majesty, nevertheless.”

“What of my staff ?”

“I have no instructions about your staff : they may please themselves whether they escort you on hired horses or whether they remain here.”

“Is my father the King in good health ?”

“Your Majesty will pardon me, but I am not permitted to answer questions of any sort.”

“First show me your warrant.”

The warrant was in order and Antipater permitted himself to be searched. Then he climbed into the chaise, and the cobs set off at a trot along the quay. The staff stood gaping after him, but presently the more loyal members set off on foot for the city, hired horses and rode in pursuit. Jerusalem lay twenty-five miles away inland.

Antipater arrived at the Palace unescorted except by the sergeant ; for Herod’s guards posted at the City gate had detained the members of his staff who had overtaken him. The sergeant handed him over to the head-porter, who admitted him with surly looks, saying nothing and giving him a most perfunctory salute. No one came forward to welcome him, and a young officer to whom he had once shown favour shrank away hurriedly at his approach and concealed himself behind a pillar.

With head erect, Antipater entered the tessellated Judgement Hall, where he was expected, the news of his arrival at Caesarea having been conveyed by smoke-signal some hours before. Herod, looking pale and thin, sat upon his throne, propped with cushions ; Varus in an ivory curule chair at his right hand. They had been settling a dispute about the grazing rights in Transjordania of certain Syrian nomads.

Antipater greeted them both with punctilio. A sudden silence fell as he walked the length of the hall, mounted the steps of the throne and made to embrace Herod.

Herod repelled him violently, turned his head away and cried : “The Lord confound you, you vile wretch, do not dare to touch me! Oh, Varus, is this not the perfect parricide? He treacherously plots my death, and then slobbers over me with kisses. Out of my sight, sirrah, and prepare your defence in the few hours that remain to you! You shall be tried to-morrow for your life, and the excellent Quinctilius Varus, who by a fortunate accident has arrived here to-day, is to be your judge.”

Antipater stood stupefied. He turned appealingly towards Varus, who answered him with a wooden look, then again towards his father, who would not meet his eye but shouted : “Begone, begone, I say !”

Antipater made him a deep reverence, and then addressed Varus :
“Your Excellency, I have not yet been acquainted with the charges against me ; how shall I prepare a defence ?”

“Doubtless the charge will be put in writing and handed to you within the hour.”

Herod bellowed : “No, Varus, no! By Hercules, no! If I acquaint him with the charges he will use his interest with the warders to secure false witnesses for his trial, and have time to concoct his devilish excuses.”

Varus answered mildly : “It is usual in criminal cases to give the accused sufficient time to prepare his defence.”

“This is no usual case. This is plain parricide.” Then he shouted at Antipater : “Why did you not make haste to return as I ordered? Where have you been all this long while since you left Antioch? You set off ten days before Varus, yet arrive four days after him. Have you been visiting your fellow-criminal Antiphilus in Egypt? No, no, do not reply, pray! Save your lies until to-morrow !”

Antipater spent the night under guard in the Palace prison and was forbidden to communicate with anybody. He presently called for the Scriptures, hoping to calm his mind by reading, and they brought him a tattered set of scrolls. The Book of Genesis happened to be rolled back to the chapter which concerns the destruction of Sodom. He began reading at random and the first text that caught his eye was this :

Escape for your life, look not behind you nor stay in the plain. Escape to the mountain lest you be consumed.

He sighed and thought : “The First Book of Moses, the nineteenth chapter and the seventeenth verse : ‘Escape for your life, look not behind you, lest you be consumed!’ The warning comes too late.” Suddenly a light shone through his mind and he remembered the groups of figures written on the back of his letters. They had begun with that very same series, I. 19. 17. He remembered them all without difficulty from having studied them so intently ; and now with trembling hands began to search the Scriptures and look up the remaining two quotations of the first series. The eighteenth book in the Jerusalem Canon was Job.

18. 18. 8. The eighteenth chapter of Job, the eighth verse. He found it :

He is cast into a net, he walks upon a snare.

12. 3. 27. The third chapter of the Second Book of Kings, the twenty-seventh verse. He found it :

Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned and offered him for a burned offering upon the wall.

The three texts comprised a warning not to walk into the snare that his father had set for him, but to escape for his life ; for his father intended to destroy him as pitilessly as the King of Moab had destroyed his eldest son. A warning that had come too late. He supposed the other message
to be of the same drift. But it was altogether different : it conveyed news.

Deuteronomy 24. 9 :

Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam by the way, after you were come forth out of Egypt.

II Samuel 11. 5 :

And the woman conceived and sent and told David : “I am with child.”

Joshua 15. 32 :

And Lebaoth and Shilhim and Ain and Rimmon.

Then Antipater began to weep, caught between joy and apprehension. Mary was with child and safe with her kinsfolk at Ain-Rimmon ; or was she still safe? Was it possible that Herod’s anger had been provoked by the discovery of their secret marriage? Had Mary’s secret perhaps been betrayed by one of the tented Rechabites who had carried her off? Had Herod arrested her and put her to the torture?

He prayed silently to his God that, whatever happened to himself, Mary might escape from the malice of his enemies and bear her child in safety. His love for her was like none other that he had ever experienced. He seemed at once her father, her child and her lover. No sooner had he joined hands with her at their marriage, and tasted the fragment of quince which she placed between his lips, than he felt suddenly enroyalled —enroyalled in the very sense that Simon had proposed. It was as though he had died to his old faded world and been instantly reborn to her new, glorious one. Her image, as he had seen her for the first time, remained fixed in his mind ; motionless and calm like the statue of a goddess. Her bridal robe was of white linen banded with blue, her mantle was cloth of gold edged with scarlet, her girdle of golden scallop-shells. Her silver shoes were curved like crescent moons ; a jewelled serpent was grasped in her hand. Her diadem twinkled with twelve clusters of diamonds above her calm sea-green eyes ; above her brow was the royal headband of Michal. Holiness emanated from her, and when she addressed him in the antique formula : “I am the Mother of Adam, I am the Mother of Salma, I have chosen you Caleb, Caleb of Mamre, to be my love”, he had trembled as with an ague.

Now he trembled again to think of her. Only the one meeting, the first and last, and before dawn of the same night she had returned to Lysia’s house ; and he had ridden off to Caesarea to take ship for Rome. He would barter a year of his life for a sight of her, or a word with her A year of his life Had he even a week of life left to enjoy?

And the child?

All that night, stretched on the stone floor in his purple cloak, he brooded on the child. Would it be a son? His heart told him so. When he fell asleep he had wonderful dreams, the glory of which still illuminated
his cell when the gaoler entered, an hour after dawn, bringing his breakfast : water in an earthenware jug and a crust of stale barley-bread.

“What have you there ?” asked Antipater, still half asleep.

“Bread of affliction and water of affliction until I come again.”

“Words of good omen! The prisoner to whom those words were first addressed was set free.”

“Was he so? Then I dare undertake that his crimes were less odious than yours.” He clanged the cell-door after him.

Antipater gave thanks to the Lord for a new day, washed his hands and began to eat. The spell of the dreams continued to hold him so that the water tasted like snow-cooled Lemnian wine, the bread like honey-cracknels. He spent the rest of the morning reading the Scriptures with a composed mind ; especially, the chapter in Genesis which concerns the delivery of Isaac from his father Abraham’s sacrificial knife gave him hope and comfort.

About noon he was again summoned to the Judgement Hall, known to the Jews as Gabbatha, or The Pavement. He found Varus and his father once more seated side by side, saluted them respectfully and abased himself as a suppliant at some distance from them, waiting to hear the charges read.

Herod stood up, waved a paper at him and cried : “It is absurd to go through the motions of a formal trial when I have evidence like this in my hand—a letter sent you by your accursed dam Doris, whom I have now divorced and banished. It was dispatched a month after you sailed, but my faithful servants in the police service intercepted it. She writes : ‘Remain in Rome, dear son. All is discovered. Throw yourself on Caesar’s protection.’ ”

He handed the letter to Varus, who observed dryly : “Queen Doris when she wrote this letter must have been suffering from some painful rheumatic complaint. It has the shakiness that is characteristic of confessions extorted by torture.”

Herod glared at Varus and bawled out between fits of wheezing : “It is the writing of a guilty woman who can hardly hold the pen for trembling. I trust, Excellency, that you will regard this evidence as conclusive and pronounce your verdict at once.”

“Your son is a Roman citizen, Majesty, and I fear that we cannot curtail proceedings in the way that you suggest—unless, of course, he cares to plead guilty to the charges against him—without grave offence to the Emperor.”

Antipater rose to his knees. “Father, I cannot plead guilty to charges that I have not heard. And I beg that you will not condemn me without a hearing. That my mother may have written to tell me ‘all is discovered’ should not be regarded as a proof either of my guilt or of her own. She may have temporarily lost her reason, which would account for the shakiness of her usually steady hand. It is even possible that the letter has been forged by someone who wishes to discredit us both.”

Herod interrupted him with cries of rage and lamentation, declaring that never had a kind father been so ill-used by his children, and that the worst ingrate of all was his eldest son Antipater. What care and love, honour and treasure he had lavished on him! And now this same Antipater vilely plotted to murder him in his old age, not content to wait until the dry knuckle-end of life that remained to him had been picked clean by the kites of Time. “And oh, the prodigious hypocrisy of the last years! How egregiously well he has pretended to watch over me, to proffer me sage advice, to dismiss unfaithful servants, to lighten my burden of business—all this only to strike me down in the end !” Then he laid the whole responsibility for the deaths of Alexander and Aristobulus on Antipater’s shoulders, accusing him of forging evidence, suborning witnesses and having been the power behind the prosecution. He now believed, he said—wiping his eyes and groaning—that the poor fellows had been innocent after all ; but he himself was not their murderer, it was Antipater. His false son Antipater, whose whole life might be summed up in the phrase “a mystery of evil”.

He buried his head on his hands and pretended to sob. At this, Nicolaus of Damascus, who had been counsel for the prosecution at the trial of Alexander and Aristobulus, and also at that of Sylleus, came forward and read out the charges. He was a small dry man with a twisted neck and sneering lips.

The first charge : that Antipater had complained to his mother Queen Doris, on such and such a date, that his father King Herod had lived too long and grew younger every day—that he himself would be grey-bearded before he succeeded him, too old to take pleasure in the sole possession of the kingdom.

The second : that in conversation with his uncle Pheroras, on approximately such and such a date, Antipater had called his father the King a “wild beast and murderer” and said “if we have but courage and the hands of men we shall be free to live our lives without fear”.

The third : that Antipater had sent to On-Heliopolis in Egypt for a deadly and subtle poison, which was brought back by one Antiphilus, a member of his staff, and secretly handed to his uncle Pheroras : and that this poison would have been administered to Herod by Pheroras—Antipater, having been sent to Rome by his father on urgent business, would have evaded suspicion—had he not hung back and destroyed all the poison but one small dose, which would be produced in Court.

The fourth : that Bathyllus, the freedman whom Antipater had sent back from Rome with dispatches to the King shortly after his arrival there, brought a new pottle of poison with him from Antipater to deliver to Pheroras, in case the other proved ineffective ; which poison had been seized and would also be produced in Court.