The Queen's Handmaid (4 page)

How much longer could she fashion pots in stolen moments,
secreting away a few obols at a time, hoping to one day get free? Cleopatra’s jealousy spiraled faster than Lydia could spin pots.

She must find out what Samuel had kept hidden about her family.

And then she must leave the palace and find wherever it was she truly belonged.

Three

T
he palace halls were in an uproar.

Lydia pushed past clusters of servant girls, yapping like hens in a yard, and threaded through enough low-ranking guards to quell a riot.

Andromeda’s execution had fired panic in the chest of every servant. The girl’s virtues were praised, her shortcomings forgotten.

Cleopatra’s patience with her son’s whimpering ran out while Andromeda’s blood still ran along the stones, and Lydia had fled with the boy, tucked him into his bed with a kiss and a whispered promise to return later, then hurried to the kitchens to seek Banafrit.

Lydia breached the smoky room as the older woman snapped a thin reed against the bare legs of a servant. “Quit your gossip now, girl, and tend the lamps!”

Banafrit’s voice was pitched high and strained, the only evidence that the courtyard execution had affected her. Cleopatra valued the cook’s skills highly, but the respect did not go both
ways. The whipped girl ran past the kitchen slaves bent over their tables. Banafrit turned on Lydia with a scowl.

“I should think you would be hiding yourself in your chamber by now. Haven’t seen enough for one night, have we?”

“I must find Samuel. Did he come back here to wait for me?”

“Pah!” Banafrit waved a meaty hand and shoved past Lydia to poke a servant at the cook fire. “I’ve no idea where the man keeps himself. Why ask me? Isn’t he about his prayers or some such thing at this hour?”

Of course. She had lost track of the time. But surely he would be finished at the synagogue soon. He had seemed as eager to speak with her as she with him.

Lydia retraced her steps through the halls and avoided the questions tossed at her by servants curious to hear an eyewitness account of Andromeda. She squeezed up the narrow stairwell from the servants’ level, then took the wide steps at the back of the palace to the expansive second level and along the greenery-covered balcony. She crossed to its end, where it overlooked the city, only one story above the street level, down the length of Soma Street, to the Museum and Library of Alexandria.

From here she could see if Samuel returned to the palace from the stately synagogue of the numerous and respected Jews in the city. The night winds rocked boats in the harbor, slapping waves against their hulls, and across the half-moon of harbor water, high above the promontory, the bronze-reflected fires of Alexandria’s famed lighthouse sent a warning message across the sea to distant ships.

Lydia stood at the half wall and watched the street for the shiny pate of Samuel as he hurried back from his prayers. Torches bobbed through alleys and the wide Soma Street, reflecting from
the abundance of white marble buildings. The streets, like the harbor, led away to unknown destinations. Lydia had never been more than an hour’s walk from the palace. How many distant places the world contained.

She had been to the synagogue with Samuel often, taking in the lessons of the Jews’ One God, so different from the magical and mysterious Egyptian gods and the lecherous and angry Greek pantheon. The beauty of all of it interested her in an academic way, though she did not identify herself with any of them religiously since she did not belong to any of them.

Her coloring seemed to indicate both Greek and Egyptian bloodlines, so perhaps she was a mongrel—like the Greek-Egyptian god Serapis, manufactured by the Greek Ptolemies to unify their Egyptian realm.

There! There was Samuel. The fringed linen
tallit
he wore for prayers draped his shoulders and he bent, muttering to himself, but she would know that hunched walk from any distance, any height.

She ran past the potted junipers to the balcony entrance and then was down the staircase before Samuel had a chance to reach the palace arch. Her sandals slapped a rhythm on the stones as she ran, and she breathed a prayer of thanks that he was still at the base of the outer stairs when she caught him.

“Samuel!” Her whisper sounded harsh, seemed to echo against the relentless waves of the harbor.

He jerked his head toward her, his eyes large. “What has happened? Have they found you?”

“What?” Lydia followed his gaze left and right. “Who?”

“You are frightened.” He took her elbow, then led her from the
open staircase, past one of the sphinxes that guarded the stairs to the stone wall along the harbor.

She took a deep breath to control her voice. “Have you heard what she has done?”

At Samuel’s confused look, Lydia spilled the wretched tale.

“I must get out of this palace, Samuel. I know I shall be next. If you could see the way she looks at me—”

His fingers on her arm were like ice. “Why? Why should she look at you as any sort of threat?”

“I—I do not think she is threatened—only . . .” It seemed laughable to say the queen of Egypt should be jealous of her son’s nurse, so Lydia left off and shook her head. “She has executed her own family to protect her power. My death would not even give her pause.”

But he was distracted, her teacher, looking out over the water as if searching for a ship or one of those distant ports. “Yes. Yes, I think it is best that you go.”

“But I have not saved enough for a shop yet. I cannot support myself.” She shook his arm to regain his attention. “You said earlier that you needed to tell me something. Something about my family. Please, if I have a connection somewhere—anywhere—you must tell me so I can fall upon their mercy.”

“Family? What did I say of family?” His eyes had gone dark again.

Lydia leaned against the cold stone, suddenly tired and chilled. “You said it was something of my past. And my future.”

“Yes. Hmm, I suppose it is your family. Your
true
family.”

She bit her lip against the strange fear his words brought and tasted the sea and the salt in the air.

“Lydia, you must hear me carefully.” He held her forearms in his own cold grasp. “We may not have much time. I have reason to think that secrets I have kept for too long are coming to light. Secrets I should have told you years ago, before there was such danger.”

Lydia’s heart stuttered, but she did not pull away from his grasp. “Samuel, you are frightening me.”

“Yes, it is right to be frightened, to be careful. But you must listen.” He stared into her eyes, as though waiting.

She nodded, returned the intensity of his gaze.

“I have taught you and trained you in the ways of the Law and the Prophets for several years now, as I have many others in my lifetime. But you are the first one I trust, though you cannot seem to trust others yourself. But perhaps it was meant to be this way, that it would be you . . .” His look had drifted, his words fading as if he spoke only to himself.

Lydia squeezed his arms.

“And anyway,” he resumed as if he had not lost his place, “a woman would be far less suspected.”

“Suspected? Of what? Please, Samuel, you are making no sense!”

Footsteps echoed along the harbor wall, and Samuel sucked in a breath and pulled her into a huddle against the wall. A dockworker, late to his night duties, strolled past and nodded a greeting.

Samuel’s grasp around her shoulders relaxed only a notch. “I have no children, Lydia. You know this. And I should have. It was my duty and yet Abigail, she never conceived, and I gave up questioning God. And perhaps I gave up even the belief that it mattered if there was a son to inherit my calling and my duties, may HaShem forgive me.”

His words were coming in a rush now, and though she understood little, she would not stop him.

“When Abigail first sought you out, began to teach you her skill with the wheel, I thought she had only found the daughter we did not have, to pass on her potter’s art. But these last few years, I believed you could also be the son—” He shook his head violently, as if to dislodge unwanted memories.

“Twelve generations, Lydia. For twelve generations, from father to son the charge has been passed down, a sacred trust and duty not to be forgotten. And for much of that time, all was well. But then, when they were lost and my grandfather came to Alexandria as he was instructed, we lost touch with the others. And it all became like some nursery tale, the stuff of legend. Until tonight.” At this, he shuddered, and his eyes took on that hunted look once more.

She stroked his arms, as though to warm him. “Samuel, you must give me more details. I am not—”

“You are the one, Lydia.” His voice quivered. “After all this time and among all those scattered to search, you must be the one to return them.”

“Lydia!”

The sharp voice rang across the harbor wall, and both Lydia and Samuel startled and drew back.

“Lydia, you are wanted in the palace!” One of Cleopatra’s guards leaned over the wall. How had he thought to search for her out here?

Once again she would be pulled from Samuel before she made sense of his cryptic words. She bent her neck to meet the guard’s call. “What does she need? Is it Caesarion? Is he still afraid?”

The guard straightened and turned away, but not before she heard his answer.

“Not the queen. It is Herod who summons you.”

“What do you know of Judea, little Lydia?”

The governor sprawled upon a green-cushioned lounge in the opulent chamber Cleopatra had assigned. On either side of the couch, narrow windows taller than a man afforded a view of the marble city and the lofty lighthouse, and the gold silks that hung at the windows rippled in the night breeze like the skirts of a palace dancer. All of it—the glittering gold-painted frescoes and the colorful glazed pottery—was familiar since Lydia herself had been tasked with crafting the room into a beauty the governor would appreciate. But tonight the chamber was cold, too cold, and only a small brazier had been lit.

Lydia stood a few steps inside the door, hands fisted at her sides and heart racing. “I know a bit of Judean history, my lord. My . . . my friend Samuel, he is a Jew, though he has lived in Alexandria all his life and his family came from Susa.” She did not add that even after three hundred years of foreign rule by Seleucids, Greeks, and now Parthians, Samuel still called his homeland Persia. “But he has taught me of the Jewish holy books and the Jewish God and—” She bit back her rambling at the impatient wave of Herod’s hand.

“Religion, bah. I am talking about leadership. Politics.”

She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “Samuel has taught me of King David, of his royal line.” No, this was the wrong thing to say to an Idumean, not of Jewish birth, who had been chosen to rule.

Herod swung his legs over the side of the couch and leaned
his forearms on his knees. A nearby servant girl started forward as if to help him to his feet, though why a man not yet thirty-five needed assistance to stand, Lydia could not see. Herod ignored the girl and remained seated, eyes on Lydia.

“And what of my grandfather, Antipater, king of the Jews? Did your Samuel teach you of him?”

“No. I am sorry.” Lydia flexed her tight fingers, grown numb in the cold room and under scrutiny.

“All that brutal business with the Maccabees years ago?”

At the familiar reference, she nodded. Scraps of knowledge from Samuel there.

“Yes, well, the Maccabees freed Judea from the Seleucids and set up their Hasmonean dynasty. The Jews took over my Idumea and forced the Idumeans to convert, and nothing has been simple for my family since, though we have learned to make Rome our friend. Only a few years ago, Cleopatra’s dead lover, Julius Caesar, made my father chief procurator of Judea. Father gave my brother the prefecture of Jerusalem and myself the governorship of Galilee. Ever been to Galilee, Lydia?”

Why was he asking her these questions? Her stomach roiled with the memory of Andromeda. Did Cleopatra lurk somewhere in the shadows of the room, listening for Lydia to misspeak? She shook her head. “I have never left Alexandria.”

Herod got to his feet, unassisted despite the attendant’s lurch forward, and ambled to the window. He slid the silk aside with one finger and leaned against the open edge, his gaze lifting to the street of grand marble temples and, farther down, the Museum and the Library.

“Galilee is a region of dusty rocks and dustier people. A people with more sheep than wits.”

“Is your father not dead? Why retain the governorship of a region you seem to despise?”

Herod turned slowly, a smile creeping across his thick features.

Lydia studied the woven carpet beneath her feet. She had said too much.

“You see, that is why I have called you here. I saw it in you, down there in the courtyard. Bold enough to challenge Cleopatra. And now I see a quick mind—one familiar with the Jews.”

“My apologies, my lord. I spoke—”

“No, no.” Herod waved a hand and strolled toward her, his charming smile still fixed. “So you know a bit about politics after all. My father was assassinated three years ago. And that Jewish fox Antigonus was made High Priest by the interfering Parthians—yes, it is all quite a mess.”