Free Salome by Beatrice Gormley Page B

the muddy ground with his arms twisted behind his back. His sleeveless coat had come off in the fight and his tunic had ripped, showing a scrawny back with shoulder blades and ribs standing out.
    As suddenly as it had begun, the bandit attack was over. We rode the guards’ horses across the river and waited in Antipas’s carriage while the servants dug our carriage out of the mud. The bandit attack had left me shaken, but Herodias recovered almost immediately. She entertained her husband with a lively telling of the incident, in which she bravely defended our lives, our honor, and our property. I was the clown in her story, needlessly handing over my earrings. Now they were gone, of course, trampled into the mud during the fight.
    Antipas laughed at Herodias’s story, but then a cold look came over his face. “This should never have happened. Chuza!” He leaned out the carriage window, where Chuza and Leander stood. “Summon the captain of the guards.”
    I thought my stepfather was going to punish the captain for leaving our carriage so poorly protected during the fording of the river. But Antipas and the captain quickly concluded that the caravan master was to blame, for overloading Herodias’s carriage. He would be dismissed as soon as the party reached Sepphoris. As for the bandit, Antipas decided not to execute him here and now, although that would have been the most convenient thing to do. “If I have a chance to interrogate him properly,” promised the captain, “he’ll tell us where to find the ones who got away.”
    “And if there’s any hint of a link to the rebels, I want to know about that,” said Antipas. “Or to the river preacher, John the Baptizer.”
    I didn’t see the bandit again, but I thought about him. His face at the carriage window stuck in my mind, only now I saw the fear in his glaring eyes. Maybe he’d never robbed a caravan before. I wished—a foolish wish, of course—that somehow I could have given him my earrings
before
the bandits attacked us.

NINE
    THE SILVER PLATTER

    Late in the afternoon of the second day, our caravan crested a ridge and paused at the Tetrarch’s order. Antipas beckoned as a guard handed Herodias and me down from our carriage. “Here, I’ll show you a city worth seeing.”
    From the height we gazed down at a lake about twice the size of Lake Sabazia, north of Rome, where we used to go for holidays. The city on the near shore gleamed in the mellow light. Herodias turned from that scene to her husband with shining eyes. “My prince! Tiberias must be the most beautiful city in the world. The magnificent building with the golden roof, splendid enough to house Zeus and Hera—is that a temple?”
    “That’s the palace,” said Antipas. “And look, in the central square, you can see a stone point above the roof of that smaller temple. That must be the obelisk I ordered; Chuza says it was delivered from Egypt while I was away. I got it for a public sundial, like the one in the Roman Forum.”
    “Queen” Herodias and her Bull gazed from each other to the city, well pleased. I felt lonely, with a tinge of panic. What did it matter to me how splendid Tiberias was? It wouldn’t be where
I
belonged. I yearned to be back in the Temple of Diana in Rome.
    At sunset we entered Tiberias, welcomed at the gates by ranks of important citizens. In the public square our procession paused in front of the obelisk, where Antipas stepped onto its base. Chuza handed Antipas a bag of coins, a herald blew his trumpet, and Antipas tossed money to the crowd of beggars below. “May the gods bless the most gracious Tetrarch!” they shouted, scrambling for the coins.
    Outside the palace, servants scattered petals in front of us as we climbed the front steps. Herodias was glowing again—scenes like this must have been what she had in mind when she married the Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea.
    Greeted by the housekeeper of the women’s quarters, Herodias asked to be taken to her