Three women sat cooped in the great fortress of Machærus, east of the Dead Sea, peeved that a war for world power had interfered with their own personal plans and petty intrigues. The rose-tinted mountains of Moab rose far to the east, tier on tier above the Desert, dyed in a mystic fire of cloud and light that might have been the abode of gods from eternity. North and south, you could have dropped a pebble from the turret, where the women sat, down precipice sheer as a wall twenty-five hundred feet. West, the clouds boiled a silver sea far below the Fort bastion on the blue and green of deep translucent waters. These waters are to-day known as the Dead Sea. At that time, they were called the Asphaltis Sea owing to the pungent burnt odor of petroleum and sulphur, that came up from their hot springs.
Safe as an eagle’s nest above the storm clouds perched the Fort on the mountain height, where rulers’ wives and daughters were housed from stress of war and raid, but angry as an eagle’s young were the strident voices of these pampered favorites of harem and court, that the blood of men flowing deep as the horses’ bridles over at the siege of Jerusalem, should be keeping these caged birds from the garden of joy in life.
The elder women rose petulantly and stood at the deep casement of the window in the open turret, where the breeze came up from the silver clouds lying below on the Sea. By the uncertain feeling out of her hands for the stone wall, it was apparent she was almost blind. Her hair lay lustrous black on her brow, but here and there a silver line showed she was past middle age, and the slight film across the pupils of her black eyes betrayed the cataract obscuring light.
“A curse on these seditious Judeans,” she protested, tapping her sandaled foot impatiently on the stone floor. “Rome gave them the best government they have ever had—justice, safety, forums, aqueducts, theaters, low taxes; and what have they returned to Rome for protection from enemies east and west? Rebellion for seventy years! First Herod the Great slew some brats in Bethlehem; and he must needs go mad with jealousy and strangle his Jewess wife, and be haunted ever after by her pale ghost in this accursed Fort! Then because I chose to love the Second Herod instead of his brother Philip, to whom I was sold as child, I must be taunted as a sinner of the streets by the little Hermit John; and my Lord Herod must turn soft because he loved the ragged madman’s ‘rough honest ways.’ Honest? I call it insolence and would have torn his tongue out if I could! What right have raving fanatics to pry open private lives? I got him prisoned in the dungeon here for two full years before I caught my Lord Herod in his cups and settled the Hermit’s mad impudence with the headman’s sword. . . .”
The two other women, who were yet in the flush of first youth, rose and joined the elder in the open window of the turret. One was short, with crafty laughing eyes and full voluptuous inviting lips, and the air of insolence in her beauty that could challenge life. The other was tall and slender with eyes that dreamed, but what or how they dreamed no soul outside her own deep thoughts could know.
“Then, Aunt,” pleaded the slenderer of the two, throwing an arm tenderly around the blind woman, “with your mad Hermit dead, why rage and bruise yourself against the past?”
“Little soft dreaming fool!” The blind woman petulantly threw the girl’s arm from her waist. “Have you forgotten when my Lord Herod’s first wife—that discarded rag of treachery, who could not hold the love I won—went back to her father, the King of Arabia, and roused all the tribes to attack us here, we lost? We lost, and I was blamed, and my Lord was banished first to the barbarians of the Danube and then to the savages of Spain, to whom I must go unless you can snare Titus, the Emperor’s son, over in the siege of Jerusalem there. Only you can save the last of Herod’s line—Bernice.”
The younger woman designated Bernice gazed deep in the silver clouds boiling above the Dead Sea.
“Much chance I have to snare Titus shut up here away from the warriors of Jerusalem; but if we Herod women must be played as pawns to win kingdoms, let us play pawn for the biggest prize of all—Rome.”
The elder woman had placed her elbows on the casement of the window and sank her face in her hands.