Fifth Gospel(88)
That day at Ainon, she had felt a great attraction for the tall man browned by the sun, muscular, strong and serious. When her mind, despoiled of its devices and enchantments, had listened to the voice of this attraction, it had discerned that it came not from those places where pleasure pulls and tugs, but from her very heart! The joy of discovering the feeling of love was, however, soon traded for fury, when she realised that the man who had quickened it was himself rejecting her as if she were filth.
After that, Herod moved them to the odious fortress of Machareus and she had applied herself during those endless, tedious days, to driving her stepfather to madness. But when news reached her that his guards were bringing John to the dungeons of Machareus in chains, in her soul was ignited her love afresh, and she had waited for an opportunity to go to him.
Now, as she slipped out of the citadel and made a way across the compound to the dungeons, she was full of a strange anticipation. She paid a guard handsomely and he allowed her passage to the cell and left her alone with the man in chains. She took the ring of keys from a nail in the stone and went to a barrel of water and took a cup full. She would clean the sweat from his brow and the blood from the whippings on his arms and shoulders before releasing him.
After a moment of indecision, standing in the shadows, she dared to come to him. To her eye he seemed less than he had been and yet that strange sensation now came over her again, not a thrill of ardour, not a pounding of her heart for the passion of her loins, but something tender. She would be his selfless, willing disciple.
Later, she would wonder how she, a princess of Judea, could have bowed so low before such a man, but for now she was not thinking of herself, she was thinking only of the bond that existed between them, and how it had drawn her heart from its prison and changed its nature.
She set down the cup and contrived to kneel before him, to take the shackles from his hands and feet, but his eyes came suddenly open, arresting her movements. In them she saw no reflection of her warm-hearted thoughts, only confusion and exhaustion and what more?
He said to her, ‘Who is this that looks upon me?’
She hesitated and stood then in the light from the torches, so that he might see more clearly how she had changed. ‘I am the Hasmonean Princess, Salome. You met me at Ainon, but I am not as I was.’
Something moved the muscles of his face, something flickered in his eye – what was it?
‘Why are you come, woman? Your presence profanes the chosen one of God! Do not touch me! Let me be!’ he said quickly, moving to get away from her.
This struck her a blow and she was assailed by incertitude. Could he be rejecting her again, as an unsuitable, blemished and unworthy sacrifice? Surely the great prophet could see beyond what she had been to the creature of devotion that she had become? Her heart was numb. Her hands trembled. Her image of herself, having faded through selflessness, now floated away from her grasp. Soon she would disappear, having slipped through her own fingers!
She clung to the edges of her mind with the fingernails of hope, ‘How can I, a princess, profane a filthy criminal lying in chains?’
He looked at her, ‘Put on a veil and pour ashes over your head…seek forgiveness for your sins and offer up what you have made pure to God. Do not come to me, to tempt me with beauty of the flesh, Lilith! I am beyond temptation!’
‘I did not come to tempt you!’ she said, with a flicker of anger in those magnificent eyes. ‘If I had come to tempt you, you would already have fallen victim to my wiles! I have come to gloat, to see how low is made the great man, the great prophet who does not see what is before his eyes! Perhaps, now that I see you my heart feels sympathy for your wretchedness, and I am of a mind to take away the chains, and to set you free!’
‘The freedom you offer is worse than these chains!’ he said to her, ‘It is a temptation to iniquity!’ His eyes softened then and his voice grew gentle, but this gentleness cut more deep into her flesh than anger would have done, for he spoke like a priest, who, from a high place, looks down on a poor, simple creature, ‘Oh, Lilith! You also tempted Eve, and Eve tempted Adam and because he was weak and succumbed the world is now ravaged by sickness and death! I will not succumb to you! Leave me to my misery!’
He was discarding her in the same way she discarded trinkets that did not please her. She had made a mistake and had lost herself for a moment, but not for always. If he did not value her pure offering of love then he was no prophet. He was just a man in a dungeon. How dare such a man, such a common man, treat her with disdain?
Anger blazed in her eyes and furies howled for vengeance in her head and these combined with the spite, hate and revulsion she felt in her heart for herself. She spat her frustrated hopes at the ground and walked out of the stinking cell. Burning with abhorrence and shame for her stupidity she took herself to her bedchamber to scheme.