Free Agrippa's Daughter by Howard Fast

thoughtfully.
    One other matter of importance happened before the funeral procession left for Jerusalem. Enoch’s soldiers discovered the priest Phineas trying to leave the city disguised as an Egyptian bearer, a particularly nasty disguise for a Jewish priest—as Agrippa pointed out in informing his sister of the event.
    “What about him?” Berenice asked.
    “I want to crucify the bastard. Anyway, someone must be blamed and punished for the murder, and now that word is around that Phineas disguised himself as an Egyptian, there won’t be a shred of sympathy for him.”
    “That makes sense,” Berenice agreed. “It’s always best when someone is punished for something. People stop talking and speculating. But don’t crucify him. Hang him.”
    “Why?” Agrippa protested. “I hate his guts. He always was an informer, a sniveling bearer of tales, a miserable and worthless glutton—”
    “I know, I know. But it doesn’t look too good for your first official act to be a crucifixion. It won’t sit well with the Pharisees. Also, Phineas did not murder father.”
    “Then he’ll hang,” Agrippa shrugged.
    “If you wish,” Berenice said indifferently.
    Jerusalem was a strange interval. It remembered Berenice, and in that way it evoked her memory and was thereby sentient. It lived and waited, something she would be aware of for years to come; and in her memory, she saw it both from above and from below. It was not the first time she had been to Jerusalem, but it was the first time in four years, and four years ago she had been only twelve. She had been a child, and now she was a woman.
    She saw the city floating in the air. Without support it floated, the City of God pressed up by His holy breath, and it gleamed like silver and gold in the light of the morning sun. Was there ever such a sight? She was walking with Agrippa behind the dying Cypros, who was carried in a litter at the head of the procession, and, of like mind, they paused and stared.
    The city was in two places at once; it was both above them and below them, here and now and once long ago and yet to be. Berenice could look down over its walls, and yet the city hung suspended in the sky. For once she was wordless, for seeing this city, she also saw a part of herself that she had been unaware of.
    As the funeral procession approached close to the gates of Jerusalem, the people poured forth to greet the last remains of their dead king. Four years he had been king over them, and four years he had, so far as they knew, obeyed the injunctions of the Holy Torah. What else he was, they neither knew nor cared; they understood only that the king of the Jews had passed away, and that this was a king who was like a saint.
    So they rent their garments and poured dirt upon their heads. They cried out in grief—and then when they saw their queen lying in the litter, dying as all knew, and behind her, the brother and sister, Agrippa and Berenice, the living blood of the Maccabees, soon to be orphaned—when they saw all this, they silenced their cries of grief and stood and wept. More and more people came out of the city, hundreds and then thousands, and they stood, a wall of people along the road, weeping.
    What prompted her to do it, she did not know, but now Berenice kicked off her sandals and walked barefoot in the dust. Seeing this, her brother did the same. She began to weep—not of her own volition, not out of grief or pain, but because the flow of emotion from the weeping thousands was so great she could not resist it. It made no difference that this rabble were the common glut of Jerusalem’s streets—the Yisroel, as differentiated from the Levites, the priesthood, and the princely and noble families who claimed this or that spoonful of the blood of David, Mattathias, or Aaron—she became one with them, her heart wracked with a misery all the worse because it was nameless and without sorrow.
    Outside the gates of the city, the procession halted—and