The Queen's Handmaid (28 page)

Exhausted from a day of tedious stitching, Lydia sought out the roof again, wrapped in a heavy mantle to ward off the chill. Standing at the roof’s edge, she rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck against the tightness that had built there through the day’s work.

From this height and in the darkness, only the beauty of the city could be seen. But Simon, and even Esther, had shown her otherwise. The city was suffering an agonizingly slow death, but it would not be defeated without one final fight. And she had a part to play in it, somehow.

It was not David who found her on the roof tonight but Simon. He eased to her side and studied the city in companionable silence. It was like they had known each other for many years, grown comfortable and familiar with each other’s unspoken thoughts.

After some minutes he sighed. “We have accomplished a great deal in a short time.”

He spoke of the palace project. But the words were true between them as well. A dangerous closeness was developing. Oddly, she no longer felt the suffocating tightness in her chest in his presence.

Dangerous, indeed.

She wrapped the mantle more tightly against the cold.

Seemingly without thought, Simon’s arm went around her shoulders and he pulled her to his warmth.

She closed her eyes with the forbidden pleasure of it and dared not move lest he realize what he had done and step away.

A sense of coming home enveloped her. But how could coming home also be so foreign? The tension in her neck and shoulders melted, the frayed and roughened edges of her spirit smoothed. She sighed and allowed her head to rest against his shoulder.

At the small gesture, his arm tightened around her and his face turned downward against the top of her head.

“Well, isn’t this interesting.”

Lydia jerked away from Simon and whirled.

Riva stood with perfect lips in an amused pout and skinny arms jutting out, hands on her hips. Behind her was her servant boy of the day, following like a pet.

“I had heard you were no longer serving Mariamme. It looks like I’ve discovered your new master.”

Heat raced from Lydia’s feet to her hairline, then drained
away. She fought against the pressure in her chest, which, though absent in Simon’s embrace, now came rushing back to remind her of why it never paid to get close to someone.

Riva’s admiring gaze fell on Simon, as though she would trade her servant boy for the palace manager in a heartbeat. But when she looked at Lydia, it was with only malice.

Riva would tell Mariamme what she had seen.

Of that, Lydia had no doubt.

Twenty-Five

M
ariamme could no longer stand the sight of her bedchamber.

For all its improvements under Lydia’s touch, it had still become a prison since she began her confinement. When the crumbs of her late breakfast were cleared and pale sunlight trickled through her window, she rose from the cushioned bed, waved off the slave girl who jumped from her seated place in the corner, and reached for a beige robe to cover her tunic.

“I am only going to take a little walk in the corridor, Despina. No need to raise the alarm.”

In truth, she had been thinking of Lydia, and of the strange pendant she wore, hidden under her clothes. It had been days since Mariamme promised her maidservant that she would question her mother.

She took the hall slowly, her eunuch, Leodes, following in her wake. There was no sense in arousing the attention of anyone else who would force her back to that odious bed.

Outside her mother’s chamber, Sohemus personally manned
his duty rather than one of his men. She passed him with only a meeting of the eyes, furtive and quick.

Alexandra was finishing her own breakfast when Mariamme wandered into her chamber. The nearly empty, colorless chamber her mother preferred. The contrast with her own was severe.

She looked up from the tray across her bed with surprise. “Mariamme! You should not be—”

“Oh, hush, Mother. I am well enough for a stroll down the hall.” She crossed slowly to her mother’s dressing table. “Look, I will sit down immediately.”

Alexandra’s lips puckered. “A little bored, are we?”

“Dreadfully.” She reached for the jewelry box, her movement casual, and opened the lid.

“Yes, well, it is only nature’s way of preparing you for the biggest battle of your life. You will see. Soon you will be longing for boredom.”

Mariamme hooked a finger around a string of ivory beads, lifted them from the box, and draped them around her neck. “Remember when I was a little girl and would beg to wear your jewelry?”

“And now you are to have a child of your own.” Alexandra swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Though of course we pray it is not a girl.”

A bird chirped outside the window, a single monotone that somehow sounded hopeless rather than cheerful. Mariamme dug deeper in the box until she spotted the bronze discs and pulled them out. “I always wished these had been made into pendants. What are they, Mother?”

Alexandra stood and brought the tray to her dressing table. “You look pale. Are you eating? Have an apple.”

Mariamme bit into the fruit obediently, if only to keep her
mother from being distracted by her refusal. The flesh was mushy and tasteless. She held up the discs again, a question in her eyes.

Alexandra took one in her hand and ran a finger over the raised embossing. “It is your great-grandfather’s royal seal.”

Mariamme pointed to a nearby chair. “Tell me a story, Mother. Relieve my boredom.”

Alexandra’s eyes narrowed. “And what story would you hear?”

Mariamme palmed the seal and held it to the window’s light. “What was he like, Alexander Janneus? And why do you have his seals?”

“He was a hard man, as I remember, but a strong one.”

A trait that had passed to his granddaughter.

“He was a conqueror, was he not? Took Gaza? And Egypt?”

Alexandra huffed. “You give him perhaps too much credit. The Gaza victory was a coup—it opened the Great Sea to the Nabatean trade routes and brought great revenue to Judea. And he did do a bit of maneuvering in Egypt. As I remember, he struck a false friendship with Ptolemy, Cleopatra’s grandfather, though he was really allying with Ptolemy’s mother against him.”

Mariamme took another bite of the apple. “What happened?”

“Ptolemy discovered the treachery and there was a brutal slaughter here.” She shook her head and inhaled deeply. “Not only troops, but a small village. Ptolemy’s soldiers strangled women and children, then boiled their bodies in cauldrons and ate them.”

Mariamme set the half-eaten apple aside, barely able to swallow the bite she had taken.

“Alexander Janneus returned to find those treacherous Pharisees aligned against him. Of course the noble families of the Sadducees backed him. It was the start of six years of civil war here.”

“And what of Ptolemy?”

Alexandra waved off the Egyptian ruler like a bothersome fly. “Oh, he was dead by the time our civil war ended. His son, Cleopatra’s father, was put on the throne of Egypt. And when he saw which way the war here was going, he understood he could not follow in his father’s footsteps.”

“Alexander took back Judea?”

She came and retrieved the disc from Mariamme’s hand. Her eyebrows lifted and she smiled. “Oh yes. And took his revenge. He was a man who knew how to intimidate his enemies.” She turned the two discs over in her palm and her voice was gleeful, triumphant. “I was only a little girl, but I remember it well. He had eight hundred rebels brought here to Jerusalem, forced them to watch as their wives and children had their throats cut, and then crucified the lot of them.”

She reached for the ivory beads at Mariamme’s throat.

Mariamme drew back as if struck.

Alexandra laughed and pinched Mariamme’s arm. “Don’t be so sensitive, dear. It was war.”

“And what of Egypt? Did he take revenge there as well?”

Alexandra shrugged and regained her seat. “There was no point in it. Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy, was ready for an alliance. His brother had been made king of the island of Cyprus, and Ptolemy knew Cyprus was too close to Judea, too tempting with all that lovely wood for shipbuilding. The two men agreed on a marriage treaty. My grandfather gave the king of Cyprus his daughter to wed.”

“His daughter!” Mariamme sat up. “I thought he only had two children—your father and uncle.”

“Ah yes. You would think that, since all of the history from
that point is about those two bickering brothers. But no, I had an aunt as well, married off at a young age to the king of Cyprus.”

Mariamme took it all in, tried to fit the pieces together in her mind, drawing the family lines and intersecting them with those of Egypt. So Cleopatra’s uncle had been married to Alexandra’s aunt. How strange that she had never known this.

“But you have not told me of the seals, Mother.”

Alexandra sighed. “Simply a bit of nostalgia, I suppose. My grandfather gave one to each of his children, your grandfather Hyrcanus and his troublesome brother, who was of course your other grandfather. When your father died and my father was exiled, I inherited them both.”

“But Hyrcanus has returned from exile. Does he not wish to have it back?”

Alexandra laughed, without humor. “My father’s mind did not return with him. He barely remembers what it means to be a priest.”

“What about the daughter—your father’s sister? Did she receive a seal as well?”

Her mother shrugged and set the seals on the dressing table. “I suppose. I don’t remember what came of her after she was married.” She clucked her tongue. “But enough of stories. If you are going to give this family an heir, you should return to your rest.”

Was she little more than a brood mare? But her thoughts strayed far away, to Egypt. The possible implications of her mother’s story were so astounding, she could not take them in.

A figure at the doorway started forward when she turned.

“Joseph.”

Salome’s husband-uncle had been watching her carefully
since Herod had been called to face Marc Antony in Syria. Herod must have given him the assignment. Hopefully Herod would not return, and old Joseph would forget.

“My lady, I must request that you return to your bedchamber. Your husband has no wish to see you overtired.”

She growled. “My husband cares only about the child I carry, Joseph.”

The old man shook his gray head, his watery eyes red-rimmed with age. “How can you say that, dear? I have seen the way he dotes on you. Why, he told me himself that he could never bear to be parted from you, in life or in death!”

Behind her, Alexandra’s chair scraped the floor and she circled Mariamme. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Joseph’s lips parted slightly at Alexandra’s approach.

How could the old fool be afraid of her mother when he was married to a witch like Salome?

“I—He gave clear instructions that Mariamme was to be kept safe in her chamber—”

“Yes?” Clearly there was more, and Alexandra was not going to let it go. “And what else?”

“I am certain he will return and all will be well.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Mariamme was standing now, a chill of dread seeping into her bones. After all their talk of Egypt, Joseph’s strange words reminded her of the Egyptians’ old practice.

“He cannot live without Mariamme, he says. Nor can he die without her. She is to join him in death if he does not return.”

Mariamme reached for the back of her chair, but her grasping hand found only empty air. A wave of nausea attacked and her legs trembled.

“What?” Alexandra’s shriek bounced from the chamber walls.

Mariamme found her chair at last and sank into it, breath coming in short gasps.

The tedium of her confinement evaporated like a mist. All her life she had been watching a violent play from the safety of the audience, but it was as if the play had suddenly shifted and enveloped her, making her part of the drama, part of the danger.

The Egyptians of old, before the Greek Ptolemies had come to rule, would bury wives and slaves with their dead pharaohs.

Images of Egypt, of Lydia and her pendant, of her mother’s unknown aunt married off to Cyprus with Alexander Janneus’s seal strung as a pendant around her neck, swam and blurred before her eyes.

Her chair lost its solid feeling, turned to water underneath her, and she melted with it toward the floor.

Lydia awoke early, washed at the jug and basin in the corner of the private chamber she had been given as Mariamme’s handmaid, and hurried toward the kitchens. She would venture into the city again today, this time alone, to find Rabbi Phineas who had spoken in the synagogue and ask him questions about the prophet Daniel’s writings. She dared a short prayer to the One God that Phineas would look favorably on her even though she was a woman and give her something that would help her find the Chakkiym.

The kitchens were buzzing already, the day’s cooking well under way. Even with Herod gone, there were always guests, and even when only the four women—Herod’s sister and wife and their mothers—were the only diners, a lavish meal would be spread.