Джеймс Миченер - The Source

I tried the simmering liquid with my fingers and protested that the heat would kill him, but the doctors persisted, and Herod said, “If we have come this far, old friend, let us explore the heat,” and he was lowered into an oily furnace, and I was right. The heat was so tremendous that he fainted. His throat croaked and his eyes turned up in death. I shouted that the doctors were killing him, but they assured me, “The whitened eyes are a good sign,” and after some minutes in the scalding bath the disease-racked body of Herod was hauled out, and as the doctors predicted he revived. Temporarily he was improved by the experience, but after some days under the date palms of Callirhoe he worsened, and ordered, “Take me back to Jericho. I have some urgent business with my son Antipater.” And we returned across the landscape of death.

I last saw King Herod seven days ago. I described him to my wife, and when she heard of the hideous estate into which he had fallen she wept for our old friend. In size he was gross, laden with fat where once he had been lean and handsome. He was mostly bald and three of his front teeth had broken off without having been replaced. Sickness had spread through his entire body, and his legs were great stumps, half a cubit thick at the ankles. He could not eat without agony throughout his bowels, and a dreadful sickness had attacked his genitals, producing worms that lived in the mortified flesh. He had sores elsewhere in his body, but the worst of his affliction was that his stomach had turned permanently rotten and gave off such a stench that even his bodyguards had to be relieved at intervals lest they collapse from the smell. He was a man of seventy on whose dying body had been visited all the crimes of his former years: Mariamne was revenged in his horrible illness, and his sons, his mother-in-law, and his friends by the score and his subjects in their thousands. He was horrible beyond imagination, but he was a man who had been my friend, my benefactor, and when the others had fled I stayed with him, endeavoring to assuage his final hours.

“Herod,” I said boldly, “I am your oldest friend and I am no longer afraid. You can do me no harm that I have not done myself through working with you.”

“What do you mean?” he sputtered, raising himself on one elbow so that his foul breath, like a dozen privies stirred together, swept over me in repulsive force.

“I helped you drown young Aristobolus …”

“He was killed by strangling,” the wild king shouted. He could not remember that there had been two victims named Aristobolus—uncle and nephew. He had forgotten the first great crime.

“I stood by while Mariamne was killed …”

“No!” he protested, holding aloft his other hand. “Her ghost came here and I am forgiven!” He fell back on the bed, cackling like an idiot. “She has forgiven me, Myrmex! Her ghost comes no more. Oh, Mariamne!” He wept, and as his chest contracted, waves of incredibly putrid air reached me from the corruption of his body, and I was forced to withdraw from his bedside.

“Don’t leave me!” he pleaded. “You are the only friend I can trust.” He spoke with childish longing of the good days we had known together and asked me if I would accompany him again to the northern provinces. “The Galilee is the only part of my kingdom where people truly love me,” he whimpered. “I should like to see Makor again with you.” He recalled how he had started his march to the throne from my little town and asked me if it was still beautiful, with cool breezes coming down the wadi in the hot afternoons. “In Galilee I am still loved,” he told himself.

Seeing that the dying man clung to his perpetual wish to be loved, I decided to play upon this fancy to advance the cause for which I had come to seek him, and I said, “You will not be loved, Herod, if you proceed with your plans to kill Antipater.” My words revitalized him, as if only hate could activate that disintegrating body.

“My son is plotting against me,” he roared, rising to a sitting position. “It was his lies that caused me to put to death my other sons. Oh, Alexander and Aristobolus, my true and wonderful sons, why did I murder you so foully?” He fell back upon his cushions and for some moments wept for his vanished sons, but then his bitterness toward his living son returned and he cursed the young man most cruelly, charging him with crimes that were preposterous.

“Herod!” I reasoned with the insane man. “You know he could not have done these things. Release him and all Judaea will applaud you.”

“Do you think so?” He sought my reassurance that by such reprieve he might at last win the love of his subjects, and I was about to launch an inspired defense of Antipater, such a one as I had uttered years ago on behalf of Herod himself, but a soldier from the prison interrupted with the news that Antipater, prematurely advised that Herod was dead, was offering to bribe the guards into releasing him so that he might lay claim to the throne.

“Kill him,” the putrid man shouted from his deathbed, and a detachment of his guard marched off obediently, their short swords bared for the fifth member of the king’s family, and I recalled the bitter jest of Augustus: “I would rather be Herod’s swine than his family, for the pigs have a chance of living.”

“You foolish man!” I yelled. “The kingdom needs Antipater.”

“I don’t,” the old king shouted defiantly. His activity caused him to cough, great convulsions which filled the room with odors, and the ensuing pain affected his mind, for when the spasm ended he lay back exhausted. For a while he wept for the son who was being murdered at that moment, and several times he whispered the name of Mariamne. “Will she be waiting for me when I die?” he asked pathetically. Before I could reply he continued, “You were the lucky one, Myrmex, you and Shelomith.” He smiled at me as if I were his brother, and he saw with satisfaction the tears that came involuntarily to my eyes. “Are any women in the world so beautiful as the young Jewesses we knew? Cleopatra, Sebaste, I saw all the others but there was never one like Mariamne. Why was she taken from me?” He spoke of her as if she had been carried off by some unexpected illness for which he shared no responsibility; then, feeling himself threatened from a new quarter, he whispered to me, “Have you heard the rumors, Timon? That a true king of the Jews has been born?” When I could not respond to rumors which had not reached me, he called me closer to the bed and whispered in an even lower voice, “They say it was in Bethlehem. I’ve sent soldiers to investigate.”

There was nothing I could reply to this latest of his fears, so I remained silent, but of a sudden he rose, left his bed and with his great, stumpy feet puffed out like a corpse three days dead, moved about the room, clutching at imaginary shadows. “Why have the Jews hated me? Timon Myrmex, you’re married to one. You tell me. Why have the Jews hated me?” Spreading his legs far apart to lend himself balance, he stood before me in his nightclothes, shouting, “I’ve been a good king for the Jews. I brought peace and justice to their land. Think of the temple we built for them, but they treat me coldly. They call me the Idumaean and say I’m not a Jew. Myrmex, you know that my one desire has been to serve the Jews.” Clutching suddenly at my arm, lest he fall, he cried, “Shelomith loves me, doesn’t she?”

I assured him that she did, and he whimpered like an apprehensive boy, “She’s the only one who does.” Clutching me anew he confided, “You know that Mariamne never loved me. She held me in contempt … said I was no real king.” He looked about suspiciously and whispered, “I think she had a lover. A man who cut hair in the palace.”