“I’ve never been more serious in my life, my dear child. I fully intend to keep my promise. Anything you want, a marble palace, a pleasure barge to rival Cleopatra’s, gold, precious gems, silks from the Orient, anything; it is yours but for you to name it ... after you have danced for the Tetrarch and his guests.”
“Very well, Sire.” The girl stood up. “I shall do my best to please the Tetrarch and his guests on his birthday. But, first, I must change my costume.” Herodias arose unsteadily to stand beside her. “Mother will help me dress.”
Claudia leaned to her right to whisper to Cornelius. The Tetrarch, absorbed in watching his wife and stepdaughter, would hardly have heard her had she spoken aloud. “It’s Herodias who’s told her to dance for him. She’s got some sort of scheme in mind, and I’m sure it hinges on that request. I wonder what it will be....”
Cornelius nodded. “Something, I would say, that bodes the Tetrarch no good. I’ll be interested myself to see what Salome will ask.”
A few minutes later Herodias reappeared in the doorway. She signaled to the leader of the musicians, and he went over to her; she talked with him a moment, and then, as he rejoined his group, she made her way around the couches to resume her place beside the Tetrarch. Immediately the leader raised his hand, and the musicians began to play.
“By the great Jove!” Cornelius, who had turned momentarily to reply to something Claudia had said, glanced back toward the doorway through which the Tetrarchess had returned. At his murmured exclamation Claudia looked in the same direction.
“By Bona Dea! what a transformation!” she exclaimed.
Salome was standing just inside the doorway. When she had left the chamber a few minutes ago she had been wearing a shimmering white silken stola, held at the waist by a wide girdle of interlaced narrow strips of green and gold, and golden sandals. Her raven-black hair had been combed back from a part in the center and bound in a loose knot at the back of her neck where it was held neatly in place by a net. Her hair, like her mother’s and Claudia’s, had been arranged in the style currently popular among Roman women of the equestrian class.
But now the girl, immobile and statuesque, stood stripped of every garment she had worn in leaving the chamber. At first glance the centurion thought Salome had returned completely in the nude, save for the few thin veils she had draped about her shoulders. But looking more closely, he saw that her loins were bound, though scantily, with a carefully folded flesh-colored veil. To the casual observer and certainly to the aging Tetrarch, the girl appeared to be standing before them divested of all her clothing. The brightly colored veils even heightened the illusion. She was barefoot, and her hair, freed from the restricting net and unbound, fell past firm, outthrust breasts almost to her slim waist in a tumbling dark cascade of curls. Salome looked as though, finding herself unclad, she had pushed her black tresses suddenly through a small wispish rainbow that had settled about her white shoulders and slipped downward to her dimpled knees.
“Her charms seem quite mature,” Cornelius whispered to Claudia, grinning.