The Book of Longings(41)

xxxii.


Eight days later, Herod Antipas summoned me to the palace to view the completed mosaic. I’d sworn never to return and begged to be excused, but Father refused my pleas. I feared defying him too strongly—I couldn’t risk ruining my newfound freedom. Already I’d made a fine new ink and, working through the mornings and sometimes at night, I’d completed my narratives of the women in the Scriptures who’d been raped. I’d bound them together with Tabitha’s story. I named them “The Tales of Terror.”

At midafternoon, my father accompanied me to the palace, making an uncommon effort at appeasement. Did I find the papyri he’d brought me to my liking? Was I pleased to have Phasaelis as a friend in the palace? Was I aware that while Herod Antipas was thought to be ruthless, he was kindly to those loyal to him?

I began to hear a noise in my head, a voice of warning. Something was not quite right.



* * *



? ? ?

ANTIPAS, PHASAELIS, AND MY FATHER gazed at the mosaic as if it had been dropped from heaven. I could barely bring myself to look at it. The tiny tiles replicated my face with near perfection. They shimmered in the dimness of the frigidarium, the lips seeming to part, the eyes blinking, a deception, a trick of light. I watched them watching it—Herod Antipas leering, his eyes hungry and salivating, and Phasaelis, too crafty not to see his lust. My father had placed himself between me and Antipas as if forming a barrier. Now and then, he patted the place between my shoulders, but rather than comforting me, his unctuous behavior added to my wariness.

“Your face is beautiful,” Phasaelis said. “I see that my husband thinks so, too.” Antipas’s philandering was well known, and so, too, was Phasaelis’s intolerance of it. In the Nabataean kingdom of her father, infidelity was regarded as a heinous disrespect to a wife.

“Leave us!” he bellowed at her.

She turned and addressed me so all could hear. “Be cautious. I know my husband well. But whatever happens, don’t fear, we shall still be friends.”

He shouted again, “Leave us!”

She walked out slowly, as if departing was her idea. I wanted to rush after her. Take me with you. Something treacherous had slipped into the room. I felt it on the back of my neck.

Antipas took my hand, resisting my tug to pull it away. He said, “I would have you for my concubine.”

I jerked my hand from him and stepped backward until the back of my knees collided with the stone bench that encircled the wall. I sank onto it. Concubine. The word slithered before me on the floor.

Father came and sat beside me, leaving Antipas to stand alone beside the mosaic, arms crossed over his belly. Father spoke in a low, groveling tone that was foreign to my ears. “Ana, daughter of mine, for you to be the concubine of the tetrarch is the best we can hope. You would be like a second wife.”

I turned narrowed eyes on him. “I would be what they whisper I am, a harlot.”

“A concubine is not a harlot. She is faithful to one man. She differs from a wife only in the status of her children.”

I realized he had agreed to this despicable notion already, yet he seemed to want my consent. He couldn’t risk me inflaming Antipas with my disgust and rejection. His status in the tetrarch’s court would surely be affected.

“Our fathers Abraham and Jacob had concubines that bore them children. King Saul and King Solomon kept concubines, as did Herod Antipas’s own father, King Herod. There is no shame in it.”

“There’s shame in it for me.”

Across the room, Antipas watched us. His eyes glowed yellow. A fat hawk judging his prey.

“I will not consent.”

“You must be reasonable,” he said, angering. “You are no longer marriageable. I can find no husband for you now that you are widowed and besmirched, but the tetrarch of all Galilee and Peraea will have you. You’ll live in the palace and be well cared for. Phasaelis has promised to befriend you, and Antipas has granted my request that you be allowed to read, write, and study to your content.”

I stared straight ahead.

“A concubine does not receive a bride price,” he went on. “Yet Antipas has agreed to pay the sum of two manehs. It shows your great worth. There will be a contract drawn to protect your rights.”

His patience exhausted, Antipas strode across the room and stood before me. “I’ve prepared a gift for you.” He motioned to his steward, Chuza, who brought a tray laden with a stack of ivory sheets like the one on which Phasaelis had sent her invitation. There were reed pens and vials of dyed inks—two green, one blue, three red. He was followed by a servant who carried a sloped lap desk made from red wood and carved with two dragons.

The sight of these things created both longing and nausea in me. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. “My answer is no.”

Antipas shouted at my father, “Why doesn’t she obey as women should?”

I leapt to my feet. “I will never submit,” I said. I looked at the lap desk and the tray bearing his gifts—all that beauty and bounty, and on impulse I picked up a single sheet of the ivory and slid it into the pocket inside my sleeve. “I take this as your parting gift to me,” I said, and turning, I fled the room.

Behind me, I heard Antipas shout, “Chuza! Bring her back.”