The cowed populace answered never a word, but the Zealots and swordsmen swarmed to the broad tops of the walls with hoots of derision. Stones rained down on the emissary for peace. They hissed his words with shameless insults, and bade the Romans not draw back in cowardice because this was Jewish Sabbath, but to come on and dare to try the third strong wall. When the peace emissary would have shouted again, those on the wall threw a naked dead body in his face.
The wild warrior blood of her Herod Arab ancestors surged through Bernice’s veins. She knew then the urge that had driven her through the Aqueduct. She could have leaped from the walls to join the Romans down there fighting in carnival of blood had she been man. Why had she been born woman—the tool—instead of man, the hand that wielded the tool? She knew she was a rebel against Fate; but had not Herod the Great been rebel, too, till he mastered Fate and made himself King? She tore her purple girdle from her waist and waved it at the conquerors from the turret window.
The Roman trumpets faded in fainter echo. The marchers and counter marchers encircled the city in a ring of swords. Bernice from the Tower saw that the hired Macedonian mercenaries had been thrust forward first. She knew what that meant—these were the swordsmen of the world paid in plunder—there would be no mercy. Those not slain would be sold as slaves, the men for the mines, the women—for what? Was this the Kingdom for which she grasped? A silence fell for a moment on the terrific confused clamor within the city. A melancholy wail of woe came up from the central valley between Temple and Palace, and some madman’s maniacal scream resounded from the parapets to the Tower—“Woe—woe—woe is Jerusalem! How is that great Babylon drunk with the blood of the prophets fallen! Jerusalem shall fall this day! There shall not be left one stone upon another.”
“Were not those the very words of our Lord, when you admired the beauty of the Temple?” asked Mark. “Peter bade me to put that in his Gospel of our Lord’s life.”
“So every disciple has related to me, and so I have written in His Life, for the Greek churches of Asia,” answered the physician, Luke.
“And we thought he had come to set up earthly kingdom in this Temple,” said the venerable Matthew. “And now we know it is a Kingdom not made with hands for which all Time has prepared, and this earthly kingdom shall vanish quite away for a New Heaven, and a New Earth. This is the passing of the Old. These are the birth pangs to the New. Let us read what the scrolls of the prophets have said.”
And the three Apostles withdrew to a circular brass table in the middle of the Tower. On the brass table were carved the signs of the zodiac and the time of day pointed by an arrow as the outer sun swung round; but the Princess Bernice had no thought for what the scrolls of the prophets might say. An ancient urge was in her blood, old as those stars from which the astrologers had cast the horoscope of fate in the signs of the Zodiac. Again Roman power with its cohorts in silver and its legions with spears like fields of waving grain seemed a realer realm than a shadow kingdom not made with hands adown long future ages. How could she serve the Emperor to bind his gratitude to give her foothold on the ladder up to this earthly Imperial Throne? She had said she would wade through the blood of the living or trample the putrid dead; and she had done both.
A lull fell like the silence between the crash of two monster ocean billows. It was almost eventide, the end of the Jewish Sabbath, and the mountains were folding them in purple mantles like royal kings at rest, when the voices of the others in the room behind caught her ear. Luke, the Greek doctor, was speaking and pointing to the signs of the zodiac.
“You thought He spoke of time when He spoke of eternity. Here is the zodiac of Egypt and Chaldea. Here is their prophecy, when the star brought the Persian magi to the Bethlehem manger.”
Bethlehem? She hated the very name of Bethlehem. Had not her Aunt Herodias often told her the evil destiny of the Herods dated from the massacre of infants there? Then she remembered that the door from the hideous horrors of the Aqueduct had only opened when she called out in the name of the Love of God. What was this new thing coming in the war of worlds for power? But the pageantry of life blotted the answer to that question, and she heard as in an unreal dream the reading of the ancient scrolls.