The Queen's Handmaid (19 page)

Lydia drew up to get her bearings. The palace-fortress of Baris at the northwest corner of the Temple poked from the collapsed wall, dark stones streaked with mildewed age. Did Antigonus watch from the upper windows? Curse the sun as it leaped from the horizon on what could be his last day?

The fighting would be bloodiest near the Temple. She could follow the troops over the wall, directly into the worst of it. Or she could circle and slip through the streets, with more time for strategy and caution. Approach the Temple from the south.

Yes, the streets.

She did not have long to wait. The sun poured an eastwest path of gold across the city. The ragtag Herodian soldiers screamed a war cry and swelled over the earthworks to scale the walls. Sosius’s legions followed, red-plumed helmets glinting cold and silver in the morning sun.

The clash of swords and shrieks of defiance rang across the ramps. The pounding throb of thousands of feet on stone and earth. The acrid odor of tar fires.

Head down and arms wrapped round her middle, Lydia scuttled behind the soldiers. She slid down a shallow ravine on the inside of the wall, hit bottom too hard, and fell forward into the dirt.

No time to check for scrapes and bruises. She scrambled to her feet, wiped her sweaty hands against her tunic, and picked her way up the rocky incline into a street to the west of the Temple area.

But the narrow streets were no safer. Already the legionaries swarmed the streets, hacking at any who appeared defiant.

Lydia kept to the mud-brick walls, still shaded and cold. There were no open doors, no calls of welcome. But locked doors could not withstand the smash of a
pilum
’s shaft or the kick of a hobnailed boot.

She hid behind pottery, dodged into alleys, huddled against doorways.

She had been a fool to come the long way around to the Temple. Better to have pushed through the melee and been done with it. Her mind shrieked at her to turn back, but her feet did not obey.

The butchery advanced through the streets and houses, a steady drumbeat of death punctuated with screams of terror like cymbal clangs.

The maze of streets confused and disoriented her. Lydia broke through to a small square and flung herself toward the rising sun.

Everywhere, people ran and people screamed. Some bloody already, lurching and clutching at walls, searching for home and safety.

A woman ran past, about Lydia’s age, one cheek slashed from lip to eye. Her gaze tumbled over Lydia without comprehension, without reason. Lydia gasped with pity.

The siege fires were everywhere now. Smoke snaked upward from the city in a hundred columns of death, lives and homes reduced to ash. It burned her eyes and clogged her throat.

Still, she followed the walls, hands worrying the stones she passed until her skin was roughed and cracked. The cry of a baby, unnaturally cut short, chilled the blood in her veins. In the next street, a wagon rolled across the stones, its bed in flames but wheels grinding onward, oblivious to its fate.

Perhaps she was no better than the wagon. Still pushing toward the Temple, unknowing that she was already as good as dead.

And the Chakkiym she was to meet on the steps of the Temple? If he were as loyal to Israel as Samuel was, would he not be defying the foreigners even now? Would he stand defenseless on the steps, waiting for her, while all around him his brothers fell to Roman swords?

The certainty that he was already dead was like a stone in her chest.

Why had she come? Three years she had been trying to rid herself of Samuel’s unwanted charge. Last year in Samaria, on the Day of Atonement, she had felt her failure keenly, even though there was no way she could have made the journey to Jerusalem alone. But this year was no better. If the Chakkiym was not already dead, surely she soon would be herself.

The fighting grew fiercer the nearer she came to the Temple area. Its enclosure walls hid an enormous courtyard. The Temple itself soared above the walls, its face set toward the east. Sunlight glanced off gold and Lydia blinked against the glare, raised a hand to her brow.

Bodies were everywhere. Romans, Jews, and Herod’s men alike littered the paving around the Temple walls. Blood pooled in cracks, ran like liquid mortar in tracks around the flat-hewn stones. Bashed heads, gored chests, lopped limbs. Lydia braced a hand against a nearby wall. She forced her gaze to the hills above the city, breathed through her mouth with deliberate measure. She could not afford to be sick.

Even if she could force her way through to the Temple steps, she would be cut down where she stood.

The
Temple
steps.
Did Samuel mean the outer steps that led to the gate of the Temple enclosure? Or the steps of the Temple itself, somewhere beyond those walls? How had she not considered this question until now?

She climbed the hill beside the Temple for a better view. The battle had an ebb and flow, and Lydia watched the tide from halfway up the Mount of Olives, her back to the gnarly trunk of an olive tree that had already been ancient when the Roman Pompey attacked more than two decades ago. She leaned her head against its sun-warmed strength and tried to calm her panicked heart.

Olive trees were notoriously long-lived. How many battles had this one witnessed, here above the Temple? Had it seen the Temple desecrated by the Seleucid king’s offering of pigs over a century ago and cheered Judah Maccabee as he led his revolt? Three hundred years ago, when Alexander the Great conquered most of the world, had it mourned for the fall of Jerusalem? Nearly six hundred years ago, when Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Solomon’s Temple and carried away the best of Israel to Babylon, had this olive tree weathered even that? The history of Israel was a history of war, Samuel had taught her. Forever and always the enemies of Israel sought to control, suppress, annihilate. And yet she remained.

And one day, Israel’s Messiah would appear and set all things right.

Lydia put a hand to her chest for the thousandth time since she left the military camp, felt the outline of the scrolls strapped against her skin.

The battle tide had taken its final turn. The cries of defiance were fading. The Roman ranks spread like a red stain across the
plain around the Temple, up the steps and beyond the wall. From her perch on the hillside, Lydia could see into the massive courtyard within the enclosure, clogged with the bodies of the fallen.

She trudged downward, her feet and heart heavy. Somewhere among that carnage she would find one Jew with a red-striped tallit, corded in red and blue. There was little sense in searching, but she must. She owed it to Samuel.

The Romans were lining up in ranks by the time she reached the outskirts of the Temple area and sneaked along the edge of the battle site. Herod was not to be seen, but Sosius stalked back and forth in front of his legion, his face sheened with sweat and a purple-red slash of crusted blood across his left upper arm.

A commotion behind Lydia—the buzz of a crowd moving as a unit—pushed her toward the Temple’s outer wall.

A group of men, dressed in the fine robes of nobility and heads held high, strode across the paving stones from the direction of the palace-fortress of Baris. They seemed to form a circle as they moved, with one man enclosed within. Lydia stood on her toes, craned her neck for a better look.

But in a moment the central figure’s identity became clear. In a rush that defied the imperious dignity of his escort, he broke from the circle, ran forward, and threw himself at the feet of Sosius, clutching the general’s boots, forehead to the stones.

Antigonus. It could be no other.

The king who had so long defied Herod’s attempt to take the kingdom Rome had already granted to him looked no fiercer than a common shepherd facing a mountain lion.

Sosius laughed. He
laughed.
Kicked out at Antigonus’s face.

The defeated king kept his head to the ground, no doubt waiting for the blow that would sever the head from his body.

“Whom do we have here?” Sosius’s voice rang over the massed troops, the bloodied bodies, the walls and stones of the Temple of the One God. “This must be
Antigone
, eh?”

As one, the legions laughed with him. Sosius’s use of the female version of the king’s name was a deliberate insult, though if Antigonus felt the slur, he showed no sign.

Sosius jutted his chin toward a centurion. “Chain him. We’ll let Antony decide what to do with him.” He toed Antigonus’s shoulder. “Perhaps you’ll get to see Rome, Jew. Antony loves a good triumph, complete with a parade of prisoners.”

Lydia found a spot on the ground, empty of body or blood, and waited. Cross-legged, back to the outer Temple wall, head bent, while Roman corpses were carted off for cremation and Jewish bodies were looted for what little they had.

She could see the outer steps. A half-dozen bodies were strewn across them, hands reaching for the Temple gate, blood congealing in the sun as it passed overhead. None of them wore the sign of the Chakkiym.

When the steps were in shadow and the crowds dispersed, she crept along the outer wall, through the open gate, and into the inner courtyard.

She kept her eyes half closed to the slaughter, slitted only enough to pick her way around the fallen. If all was as it should be, would she even be permitted here? She wandered past the stone pool and the square altar, toward the steps at the base of the Temple building itself.

Bodies, yes. But no Chakkiym.

What did it mean?

Had his striped tallit been lost in the battle? Or perhaps he never came, frightened by the fighting.

Perhaps he did not exist, was only a passed-down legend clung to by old men in exile.

She pressed a hand against her chest again. But these, the scrolls, they were real. Not legend.

She sat again in the shadow of a column until the sun set once more on the Day of Atonement. No sacrifices had been offered. No High Priest to atone for the people’s sin, to release the scapegoat into the wilderness.

What would Simon think of today’s victory when he heard of it in Jericho? It had been a year since she had seen him in Samaria, but she often wondered about the soldier who seemed too angry to be serving the foreign governor whom Rome had declared king. Did he still dream of a free Israel? Still rebuff everyone with his brash arrogance?

Lydia lifted her head to where the roofline of Antigonus’s palace could be seen beyond the Temple walls.

It was to be her new home. Herod already had plans to renovate and expand the fortress, as he seemed to have for all of Judea.

She would serve the queen within those walls, a few minutes’ walk from the Temple steps.

“Next year in Jerusalem.”

It was the line spoken at the end of every Yom HaKippurim service by Jews scattered around the world, separated from their homeland.

Well, she had been
this
year
in Jerusalem. But little good it had done.

It grew dark and even more unsafe to find her way back to the camp. Lydia rose from the ground and began the long walk back, the scrolls as cold and stiff against her chest as her rigid limbs and her aching heart.

Eighteen

T
he plan was foolish from the start, and Lydia should have declined.

But Alexandra’s demands on Mariamme became her daughter’s begging request of Lydia. In the cloying darkness of the predawn, she scurried at the tail end of the little group of four, through the underground tunnels and passageways of the palace.

In spite of her large belly, Mariamme led them all on swift feet as though she spent all of her days traversing these tunnels. It was Lydia who liked to wander in quiet places to think. Had Mariamme practiced an escape? Alexandra followed, then Aristobulus, head and shoulders above the women.

Lydia kept close behind the brother in the darkness. He had become a well-built, exceptionally handsome man of seventeen, one who had carved a place in Lydia’s heart, just as David had, despite her resistance. Their early-morning flight had everything to do with the hopes of a mother and daughter resting on his shoulders. The invitation to Egypt must be acted upon swiftly, if
they were to have help. Lydia feared for him, for the risk he took and the danger it entailed.

But more than the foolishness of this plan and the likelihood that they would all be caught, the pressure of the day bore down on her from beyond the stone walls. Yet another Yom HaKippurim had begun at sunset. When the day grew light, despite her hopelessness about the reason, Lydia had somewhere she needed to be. She had strapped the scrolls to her chest with their yearly bindings before leaving her chamber this morning. They itched against her skin in silent reminder. But her loyalty to Mariamme and Aristobulus would not allow her to abandon them.

The four reached the stable at the edge of the palace. Open to the north, the sky beyond was still snagged with a thousand cold stars like needle pricks in a dark canvas. A sudden snort and stamp of horses met their arrival. A single small torch bobbed in the open air beyond the stable and poked light between stalls, falling in splinters on dirty yellow straw and the glistening hides of horses.

“There he is.” Mariamme’s whisper was sharp, strained.

The torch became a man, rough-hewn like a stableman, with hair as matted as the straw. “Got ’em right here, my lady.”

He waved the torch in the direction of the grassy area beyond the stable. The outline of a wagon sprang into relief. And in the bed, two coffins. As arranged.

At the sight of the crude wooden boxes, Aristobulus sucked in a breath and squared his shoulders.

His mother cut off his protestation. “We’ll be fine, Ari. It won’t be long. We’ll clear the city walls within minutes, and within an hour it will be safe to emerge.” She grabbed at his arm. “Then to
Egypt! You have been invited by Marc Antony himself. Surely he will be swayed to our cause!”

Mariamme clutched his other arm. “Please, brother. I know it is a shameful thing for HaShem’s High Priest to be carted from the city like something unclean. But Mother is right. Cleopatra’s hatred for Herod surpasses even my own, I believe. She will convince Antony that you should be more than High Priest. You should be king.”