M. Scott - The Coming of the King

‘By that time, your king will have departed for Antioch in Syria. I have given orders that one company of the garrison Guard might accompany him on his journey to safety. His sister, meanwhile, who is not a queen of Judaea, will suffer for her acts here. She will walk now back to the palace that was once hers to command. It will be instructive for the people of Jerusalem to see what has become of a woman they once held in respect.’

He turned and nodded beyond the door. ‘Do it.’

Three more men entered, led by Vilnius, chief of the garrison Guard. They were all Romans: Saulos would not trust anyone else with this.

Vilnius stood before the queen, and saluted. ‘Madam, you must disrobe.’

‘Here?’

Vilnius flushed. He may have been Roman, but he had been posted in Judaea for three decades. He must have known Berenice since she was a child; certainly he was old enough to be her father.

He said, ‘Only to your undershift. The emperor’s envoy requires that you walk barefoot in your shift to the palace. As a penance.’

The emperor’s envoy. Not a man of the Sanhedrin dared to murmur against the new, ungiven title.

Berenice turned her back on them and untied her robe. Her eyes were flat, unseeing, her fingers moved neatly. Her robe slipped free. Her undershift was of linen so fine it might have been silk and it hid nothing of her body. Men behind her shifted in silence; still they did not dare speak.

‘Penance?’ Berenice’s gaze was on Saulos and there was life in it; a challenge, and a question that Hypatia could not read.

He said, ‘A full penance. You will go with your hair shorn.’

‘Tell my people I do this for them, to prevent war,’ Berenice said, and bent her head, and Vilnius, with shaking hands, lifted the first of her tresses across the upturned blade of his knife. Black sheaves of hair fell like blighted corn across the floor.

Hypatia removed her shoes. Nobody asked for her clothing. Nobody touched her hair. There were limits to what even Saulos dared to do.

The road was hot and gritty and painful underfoot. Hypatia walked alongside Berenice, shoulder to shoulder, matching her pace for unflinching pace, providing solace and support and dignity.

Saulos did not come with them. They walked the first few dozen yards alone, with only stiff-backed Vilnius ahead and the retinue of his garrison guards about, but soon the city came alive as word spread of what was happening and men and women, young and old, War Party and Peace Party, gathered in their handfuls, in their hundreds, in their thousands, to line the route from the council hall past the old Hasmonean palace that was Saulos’ new headquarters to Herod’s new palace with its prison cells underground in the cellars.

They gathered by the same alchemy that drew iron to lode-stones and caused moths to die, dancing in the flames of a night-time fire. They came without care for their own safety, without understanding fully what it was they were watching, unsure even if they were there to support their queen, or harry her.

It was a Jerusalem crowd: inevitably, a stone was thrown, and then a few more. The guards moved closer and Hypatia welcomed them.

They reached the foot of the hill and turned a little south, down a long, broad road. The crowd filled the street now, leaving only a narrow channel along which they could walk. Chanting started, as it had in Caesarea, rising to a low, rolling boil, and within it the usual slanders of Herod and his lineage, cut with the War Party’s hatred of Rome.

Vilnius’ back was hard as stone. His guards loosened their swords in their sheaths. Hypatia began to wonder if they could run down some side street. Her feet might be cut to shreds but worse had happened in the past.

And then she felt a tug at her soul and the crowd parted a little and Kleopatra was there, and beside her, veiled and cowled that her black skin and ram’s-head hair might not stand out amongst the Hebrews, stood Iksahra, tight-lipped and tall. Her eyes promised murder and vengeance, all of it heaped on Saulos. Hypatia wanted to smile and could not. She nudged Berenice, and saw that she, too, had seen them.

Aloud, so that those nearest could hear, Hypatia said, ‘If your people knew that you chose this penance, to ask their god to keep the city safe from war, they would applaud you, not throw stones as they do.’

She did not have to shout; Iksahra had the best hearing of anyone she had met. She did not turn to look as they passed, but lifted her hand as if to smooth the hair from her face. On the edge of her vision, she saw the girl turn away. Iksahra had already gone.

The crowds did not part immediately, but within a hundred paces a sigh swept through them, carrying the rumour that the queen had taken a vow to walk barefoot in her shift, with her hair cropped close as a shorn sheep, to keep the city from war.

The stones stopped first, and then the shouting. There was silence then, because this was new to them: that the queen might be an object of veneration, not of loathing. Then, from nowhere, a young woman threw on to the road ahead a bunch of small, white, four-petalled flowers, of the kind that grew along the coast near Caesarea, and in the cultivated gardens about the city.

The bouquet fell in the dust in front of Vilnius. Without breaking stride, he stepped long across it, and so did not crush the flowers. His men, too, veered away from them and so they were whole when Hypatia picked them up. She gave them to Berenice, who held them to her nose — there was little scent, but it was the gesture that mattered — and smiled her thanks into the crowd.

It all happened in a moment, but it tipped the mood of the crowd to a place they had never been. A hundred paces later, the road was littered with white flowers so thickly that Vilnius could no longer step over them. Hypatia found herself walking on crushed petals, balm to her feet.

Soon after, palm leaves came, thrown with care across their path. They smoothed the road and made their walking effortless.

Berenice was a woman transformed. Made light by the day’s dry heat, her face glowed with a life of its own, claiming the sun. Her pace lengthened and quickened, so that she was floating forward, ever faster.

Hypatia touched her arm. ‘Slow,’ she said. ‘They love you, and Saulos is not so confident in his power that he can stop them. Smile now for your people as they call your name.’

Slowing, Berenice smiled for her people, who screamed her name as if she alone had the power to save them. Hypatia looked at the sun’s searing orb and the sky around it, and became aware of the mass of people, the scents of garlic, pepper, lemon.

She smelled something else, more raw, like the breath of a hound, or a hunting cat, and turned her head a fraction, and saw Iksahra again, close by. Hypatia caught her eye, nodded thanks, and made a single gesture, and saw it acknowledged.

‘Vilnius. May you tell me where we are to be taken?’ She spoke loudly enough for him to hear, which meant that those closest in the close-pressing crowd might hear also.

‘I regret you must go to the prisons, my lady. The ones beneath King Herod’s palace where no man can gain entry except he tunnel through solid stone.’ His response was from the parade ground; it rang across the furthest reaches of the crowd.

‘And no sun can gain entry either?’

‘I regret, no light at all, lady, except by candles.’

‘Then we must make our own light, and hope that the queen’s family may be allowed to visit her.’

Vilnius said nothing, only stiffened his shoulders further. When Hypatia dared look again towards the crowd, Iksahra and Kleopatra had both disappeared once again.

She walked on beside Berenice, over palm leaves, and her feet felt them as silk.