She looked at me evenly. ‘These men who stop you and fall at your feet, they do not see your soul, pairé, they see the spirit. The spirit is always perfect, do you see?’
I did not know what to say and she did not wait to for me to find my words, she began to tell her Gospel again. This time she spoke of the fortress of Machareus.
She said the name was Greek and that it meant sword. She said it was named thus by the Hasmonean King, Alexander Jannai because it occupied a narrow, craggy ridge that had once been thrown upwards, like a sword of bile, from out of the belly of the Moabite mountain range.
I could see that fortress with my mind’s eye, a giant of stone sitting upon the shoulders of cliffs and screes. It was situated, she told me, at the extreme southern end of Herod’s tetrarchy of Perea, and defended his borders with his Arabian counterparts. I wondered if it might not have been a little like ours, with walls that reached dizzying heights. I asked her if its storehouses and arsenals were large enough to stockpile weaponry and food to outlast long, protracted sieges.
‘Machareus was not a fortress like yours, pairé. To onlookers, it was an evil hound looking out a devil’s terrain: boulders and splintered rocks, ancient grottos and hot and cold sulphurous springs. From it one could see the cloud-topped summit where the Archangel Michael battled with Satan, and in the valleys below it, giant trees grew, whose fruits were used for casting spells and whose roots when powdered and drunk, were said to bestow power over the souls of men. Around about, caves penetrated deep, some to the centre of the earth itself, from whence had bubbled those terrible forces that so long ago had caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Such a place,’ she said, ‘was well suited as the primary home of Herod Antipas, and his demonic wife.’
‡
Herod had moved here after his illegal marriage, leaving his beloved palace at Tiberias for fear of war with his ex-wife’s father, Aretas. But he did not much like Machareus, for it was cold and dry and subject to violent winds and storms. Herodias, on the other hand, thoroughly approved of the stronghold, inspiring the vapours of death, blown upwards by the restless winds, as if these were the freshest breezes.
It had now been some time since Herod’s return from Jerusalem and his meeting with the Roman procurator. Three days earlier a sizeable portion of his army had returned from the river Jordan with John the Baptiser in chains and irons. Since then Herodias would not come out from her chamber, angered that Herod would not execute the man immediately. But Herod was obstinate. He would not be bullied and browbeaten and intimidated by a woman, and summoned up a stubborn will over which even Herodias was powerless. No, he was not about to do anything on a whim, at least not until he could discern what was more to his advantage: to have this upstart put to death, once and for all or to keep the man alive until he agreed to baptise him and cure him of the bondage of the wings of death. Even now, they hovered over him as he walked the halls of the fortress to his prisons. He could hear them flapping, suspended by the wind that rasped a song of lament over the edges of the mountains. He looked up and saw only the forlorn sky streaked with clouds, and he hurried his step.
The dungeons were meagrely lit and cavernous, and as he neared John’s cell, he saw him only as a shadow. A shadow restrained by shackles. A harmless shadow, he assured himself.
He had a guard light a torch and place it on a bracket nearby and ordered him to unlock and open the rusted iron gates that barred the cell. The cell was illumined and the way in unobstructed but he hesitated before the damp threshold. In this pause, occasioned by fear or excitement or both, he fell to observing the man.
He did not seem like a magician, he was sleeping in his filth like a dog, and yet, he was more than that, yes, more than that. The light played around him in a peculiar way, and Herod of a sudden sensed something unseen in it, but what? Not the shadow of a curse that made a man seem small, but rather, something uplifting that made him larger than he was!
There was certainly more to the man than met the eye, and this certainty frightened Herod and he was close to turning his heels when the Baptist groaned and changed position. The light, having fallen away from him, made all things seem different. No! Herod told himself with some relief, just a man after all – a trick of the torch. And yet the man was a prophet, he knew that much, at the very least.
He entered the cell.
The Baptiser raised his head, his beard and hair were matted and his skin was broken. In his eyes there was a flash of recognition.
‘Husband of the devil! Why come you here?’ his words flew out of his mouth like lashes from a whip and caused Herod to make a little backward jump to get away from them, and he nearly slipped on the oily grime at his feet. His more immediate impulse was to call for the guard, but his practical nature stepped in to prevent his anger from getting the better of his needs.