Fifth Gospel(91)

Salome, dressed in a sheer gown made from layers of silken fabrics adorned with pearls from Greece, opals from Rome, and Chrysolites, Beryls, and Topaz from lands beyond maps, gave Herodias a flash of daughterly disdain, and made her kohl-rimmed eyes bat their gilded lids at Herod.

‘Dance?’ she said, ‘why should I dance?’

‘The night is sad, Salome…dance to please your father!’

‘I do not wish to please you for you are not my father!’

He turned to Herodias, ‘Wife! Your daughter does not love me, again! Tell her she must love me!’

‘Why should she love you?’ Herodias said, ‘your father was the son of a camel driver!’

Herod’s vermilion face shone like a blooded moon, ‘I order her to love me!’ he said, ‘Do you hear me, Salome, I order that you love me!’

The room broke out in uncertain laughter, and Herod laughed too, until the happiness of the audience was diminished, and he realised he must say something.

‘Come, Salome…dance your dance to amuse me, for I am not merry this night, my spirits are pale!’

‘Your spirits are drunk!’ she said to him.

‘Yes, I am drunk on wine from Cyprus!’ he staggered to his feet, and raised his empty glass. ‘I am full of fish from the Euphrates, and peacocks fed on almond milk! I am a king and I am drunk and being drunk I beg you…’ he doubled himself unsteadily, and brought his face close to Salome’s. Indicating how small it should be with a thumb and forefinger, he said, ‘One little dance?’

Before the girl could answer Herodias made time pause, and keeping herself inwardly still, imaged forth a thought from out of her very skeleton itself, which she breathed out into the air. This black thought remained wafting in the breeze until it was inspired by her daughter, into her soul, which had earlier been seeded with feelings of revenge.

The girl’s eyes changed of a sudden and seemed to do battle for a moment with the birth of the…idea. Her face fell sour, as if the taste of this new orphan child of her mind were not to her liking. Still, she could not prevent herself from saying, ‘…I can always be made to change my mind!’

A great silence fell. Even the music was paused waiting to hear what would come next.

Herodias felt Salome’s delight as all eyes turned to her.

‘If I dance, what will you give me?’

Herod was breathless now. ‘What will you have? By my oath I shall give you whatever you wish for, if you will dance a dance! And I am a man of my oath, as all men know, I pride myself in this – that I do as I say. So tell me, what shall it be?’

Salome stood and threw the veil from her hair, and called for a servant to remove her sandals. She clapped for music, drums, cymbals, flutes and as the song began, so did she begin to stir her body, moving her shoulders and her hips, contorting by degrees, more and more heatedly, agitating her rounded belly, contracting and gyrating all those warm, womanly muscles of pleasure, to the measure and cadence of the drums. Her eyes, big, black, liquid-some, promised to engulf the soul of her onlookers. Her hands caressed unseen lovers, her legs entwined around their thighs, her hips pressed against their insubstantial flesh, her lips kissed their airy form–until she was a dervish of silk and flesh and air and gesture.

A wave of yearning engulfed the room, hearts throbbed and pounded and pulsed in a communal ritual of eroticism, and then, of a sudden, the unthinkable happened.

Salome fell to the marble floor and called for the music to halt.

From this position, crouching like a tigress waiting to pounce, breathless, watchful, with her colour high in her face and her alabaster breasts heaving, and those thighs, shapely calves and turned ankles, caressing the cold floor, she said to Herod, ‘I will trade, the dance of seven veils, for the head of John the Baptist…on a silver platter!’

Herodias smiled inwardly. Immersed in victory, she watched her husband’s lecherous face, bloated and full of the blood of sexual tension, blanch.

‘But my dear…’ he stuttered, ‘this is not possible!’ He looked about him for encouragement from his chiefs and supporters, but it was too late, their faces were engorged with the heat of Salome’s seductions and like wolves their jaws were ready to snap. ‘He is a prophet! I cannot do it! I shall give you anything else, half my kingdom, anything at all! Name your pleasure…just do not ask me for the head of this man!’

‘I will ask it, for it is what I want!’

Herod looked to his wife and Herodias made a shrug.

He said to Salome, ‘He is a holy man…I shall not do it! Notwithstanding my oath, I shall not do it…ask me for some other thing, my little one, anything at all, and it shall be yours!’