Was she living or dead? She was past caring. Let Fate do its worst. She looked up. Slowly she recognized one of the Palace chambers of Mariamne’s Tower; but whether the chambers were real or dream, she did not know. But seven months before, she and King Agrippa had fled from the threats of the populace beneath the Overhead Bridge to this very Tower. She had played in it as child, and wantoned in it as girl, and plotted in it as woman. She had drunk wine of life in that very Tower; and were these the lees of the wine, that at last would sting as a serpent? She sat up on her couch. Beside her stood the pale Roman soldier of the garrison and an aged Jewess. A mid-life man stood in the chamber door. An aged and venerable figure looked over her shoulder. One who seemed physician was pressing a brew to her lips.
“Who are these people?” she whispered faintly.
“Fear not, daughter,” gently answered the aged woman. “We are Nazarenes, followers of the Christ. It is no poison that Luke, the physician, would give you! He, too, is a follower of the Nazarene, though he is Greek. I am the mother of Mark, who has ever dwelt in Jerusalem. The aged apostle is Matthew, who used to gather taxes for the Romans.”
Then the instinct of fear, that haunted all the Herod blood and drove that blood from crime to crime, came over her awakening consciousness in a flood of memory; for had she not as girl stood on that Bridge between Temple and Palace when her own Herod kin had urged the Jewish mob to drag James, the crucified Christ’s kinsman, out to death by stone and spear? How she had laughed at the rabble then, and clapped her hands to see them hound the Nazarene preacher out from the Temple to his doom! And now that rabble, if they knew she was here, would tear her to pieces with bloody hands and throw her to the pavements for the dogs to lick her blood. And then the instinct of craft, that ran in her Herod blood, gave voice in question.
“Why do you call me daughter?” she whispered back.
And then she felt her hair which had fallen about her neck as she fled through the Aqueduct.
“Because Matthew, here, recognized you as King Agrippa’s sister. What word of the Roman Army? Will they win the last wall to-day? When we let down the baskets for food last night, the Zealots threw pitch bags and burned the ropes. We dare no longer venture out on the Palace parapet. They shoot fire arrows. And not one of us will leave the others. Whether we live, or whether we die, it is nothing, daughter! The Zealots may slay the body. They cannot slay the soul. But what tempted you to come through the Aqueduct, child? Is to-day the end?”
For answer, the silver trumpets blew from turret and tower, from hill and plain, from cavern and grotto. The group rushed from the chamber for the turret window.
“Bear my cot to the window,” she commanded, the old imperiousness of Princess and daughter of high priests surging back in her reviving consciousness.
Down sheer seventy feet from the turret window to the plain where the Roman Legions had mustered, they gazed—first Titus, the Emperor’s son, on a black stallion; then Trajan, his young officer, on a white horse; then her brother, King Agrippa, on a low Arab fawn-colored steed, all in trappings of brass with silver shields aslant the horses’ shoulders; then the standard bearers with the Roman eagle in gold; then the pikemen, clad in mail, with their long lances like fields of wheat; then the horsemen in darker mail with lances aslant like knives moving in rank; then the great engines of war that moved on wheels like erect walls; then the Macedonian mercenaries on foot, six and seven rank deep they wheeled and marched and countermarched; while one Josephus rode on a white charger up to the walls shouting out: “Why would they die and not surrender to the clemency of Rome?”