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didn’t come. Not once.”
    “Affairs of state,” Berenice said. “After all, it’s no small matter to be king over a realm like his.” She hated to lie and she was a poor liar; lies flattened her rich voice; anyone who knew her knew when she was engaging in this careless kind of lying. “He rushes around—here—there—”
    “Berenice, stop it!” her mother snapped.
    “All right. What shall I tell you?”
    “I don’t know. I’m dying. Doesn’t he care that I am dying? I am so alone and so afraid—”
    As young as she was, Berenice thought, “We are all dying—and who cares? Who can care?”
    “What will you do when I am gone?” Cypros cried plaintively. “What will all the children do?”
    “We are not children now, Mother,” said Berenice.
    “I know him, and I soften his blows. He doesn’t mean them. He rages and rants, and it means nothing, because inside he is like a saint. The people know it. They revere him. Don’t they?”
    “They revere him,” said Berenice.
    “Bring him to me, please,” Cypros begged Berenice, beginning to weep, the tears flowing across her waxen cheeks. “Bring him to me, Berenice. He has forgotten. It slipped his mind. But remind him, and then he will come to me.”
    Agrippa had declared the day a holiday, and there was a distribution of bread and wine. In Caesarea, in the year forty-four of our era, only about a quarter of the population were Jewish. They disdained to accept the charity of Agrippa; they barred the doors to their houses and shuttered their windows and turned their backs on a Jewish king who dedicated a day to pagan practices and a pagan emperor who was worshiped as a god. Later in the day, they would have a perfect causative relationship between Agrippa’s sin and his death—unperturbed by the fact that fifty-four years of variegated sinning preceding this day went unpunished by the Lord God. This was a culmination—which they accepted; although even this verdict was not accepted by the entire Jewish community. A good many of them considered Agrippa a good man and wept tears when he died—just as Jews all over Palestine rent their garments and wept when it became known that King Agrippa was no more. Thus in all justice it must be said that with Agrippa it was different than it had been with his grandfather Herod the Great. When Herod’s time came and he lay dying, all the Jews in Israel smiled and poured libations of thankfulness. Songs of rejoicing were sung, and the Jews poured into the streets of their cities to embrace each other with the news that Herod lay dying. In fact, hearing these things, Herod toyed with the notion of executing the one hundred most respected and beloved men in Israel, so that when he was carried to his tomb, there would be tears in the land. Fortunately, he died too soon to put that notion into operation.
    Agrippa knew that a king over Palestine ruled others than Jews—especially in cities the Romans had built, such as Caesarea, and if he provoked some of the Jews, by noontime the Greeks, Syrians, and Egyptians who lived in Caesarea were shouting his praises. The Gomesh-singers, survivors of the ancient cult in Philistia, were dancing through the streets, chanting choruses from the play, piping and wearing crowns of green leaves, drunk already; and from the windows of their room in the palace, Berenice and Gabo watched them. They were a lewd lot, the Gomesh-singers, the men pausing blatantly to urinate in full sight of the public, and the women dancing around the men, making lascivious gestures, baring their half-covered breasts and strutting erotically. The women wore stiff skirts and had their waists constricted very tightly under leather belts, in imitation of their ancestors who had come from ancient Crete in the half-forgotten past.
    Gabo was shocked. At the age of seventeen she was intimate with every conceivable vice and perversion and accepted all of it as a part of her environment; but this open pagan