The Inquest

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  “As to the exact timing of such an enterprise, I could not really advise you,” Varro added. “Not being at Rome, not knowing the circumstance there…” His voice trailed off. What else could he tell her? He held out his hands for washing.

  Berenice bestirred herself, as if invigorated by a new thought. “Questor, you are absolutely right.” She nodded vigorously. “Yes, it would be too soon this year. Next year perhaps, when Caesar and Titus have come to grips with Rome and all the problems that beset her at present. You have a wise head on young shoulders. No wonder Licinius Mucianus and Gnaeus Collega have placed such trust in you.”

  Varro smiled, a little embarrassed. “Thank you, Your Majesty.” His eyes went to the beautiful servant as she poured water over his outstretched fingers with one hand and held a bowl beneath them with the other. He wanted to touch her, almost to convince himself that she was real; but he dare not.

  “The question is,” Berenice pondered, “how would one know when it was precisely the right time to go to Rome?” She looked over at Varro for further guidance, then followed his eyes to the servant in front of him. The queen smiled to herself. “Her name is Miriam,” she said.

  Varro’s eyes left the servant, and went to the queen. “Your Majesty?”

  “The slave. Her name is Miriam. A beauty, is she not?”

  “Well, yes, Your Majesty,” Varro replied with embarrassment. “I hadn’t really.

  “She is yours.”

  Varro blinked. “Er, I beg your Majesty’s pardon?”

  “The slave is a gift, from me, to you. In thanks for your kind advice here tonight.’

  Varro’s eyes flashed to the slave. Obviously disconcerted, Miriam would not look him in the eye. He returned his attention to the queen. “Your Majesty is very generous, but, I have no need of a female attendant. All in my party are male.”

  “I will not take no for an answer, questor.” With that, the queen beckoned Miriam. The slave hurried to the queen, and knelt so that Berenice could whisper something in her ear. As she listened, the slave nodded impassively.

  Beside Varro, Martius leant close. “Accept the queen’s gift, Julius,” he urged in a whisper. “It’s the diplomatic thing to do.”

  “It would be awkward, taking a female slave with us,” Varro whispered in return.

  “Be gracious, my friend, take the beauty. You can do what you like with her once we leave here: sell her, bed her, or drown her. Or…” He winked. “Give her to one of your friends.”

  “So, questor, Miriam shall be delivered to your camp tomorrow,” said the queen, as the slave, blank faced, straightened and resumed her duties. Berenice looked over to her chamberlain. “Arrange it, Bostar,” she instructed.

  “As Your Majesty commands,” the chamberlain formally replied.

  “Your Majesty is most generous,” said Varro, conceding to the queen’s wishes with a resigned sigh.

  “Now, questor, there is a favor that you can render me in return,” said Berenice.

  Varro was suddenly consumed with dread. What could she possibly want him to do now that he was in her debt? “Your Majesty?” he responded with trepidation.

  “It is clear to me that I need someone to be my eyes and ears at Rome, Varro. Someone with impeccable connections, someone who can send me messages alerting me to the appropriate time to apply to Caesar, or to set off for Rome, advising me when the atmosphere at Rome was right for either or both. I could not think of anyone better placed than a client of Licinius Mucianus. I want you to be my eyes and ears, Julius Varro.”

  “Ah.” He felt like an animal caught in a trap.

  “Neither Licinius Mucianus nor anyone close to him can know of our arrangement. It will be our little secret.” Berenice cast a cautionary eye to Martius and Crispus, to emphasize the need for confidentiality. “No one at Rome can know. No one!”

  Now Varro realized that this arrangement had been in the back of the queen’s mind all along. That was why she had excluded Venerius from the banquet; as nephew to Mucianus, he could not be permitted to know that Varro had been commissioned to be the queen’s spy in Caesar’s court, a spy whose role was to report on, among other things, Mucianus’ thoughts and actions. Whether Berenice had planned to entice him with the gift of one of her female slaves was debatable. Varro suspected that perhaps his own straying eyes had betrayed him and the perceptive queen had quickly seen an opportunity.

  “Say yes,’” Martius hissed to Varro from behind his hand.

  “Your Majesty…” Varro began, sounding conflicted.

  “I know that my lord Titus will be eternally grateful to you once he and I have been reunited,” said Berenice, eyeing him with a gaze which had become intense.

  It was now apparent to Varro that she had set her mind. He felt a jab in the ribs from Martius beside him, as his colleague reinforced his belief that Varro should agree to whatever the queen wanted. Varro reluctantly decided to accede to her request. The mention of Titus had been the final straw. If Titus and Berenice did reunite, sooner or later, Varro reasoned, then it might not go well for his family if a refusal to help the queen burdened his record. “Your Majesty, it will be my honor to do whatever I can for you….” He said it without enthusiasm, but he said it none the less, and meant it.

  The queen beamed. “Thank you, Varro. Thank you. You will not find me ungrateful.” She turned to her chamberlain. “Do you hear what the questor said, Bostar?”

  Bostar nodded gravely. “Your Majesty should be very pleased,” he said.

  With that the queen was ready to depart. Beckoning her maidservants, she said to her guests, “Please, my lords, enjoy the remainder of the banquet. I am tired, and will retire for the night.” When she came to her feet, the men did swiftly the same.

  “I bid you all a restful night.” She smiled Varro’s way. “I look forward to receiving illuminating correspondence from you at Rome in due course, questor.”

  And then, having achieved her objective for the evening, the queen departed.

  A trio of litters provided by the queen waited in a courtyard. Pedius the lictor and freedmen in the employ of the three Roman knights including Varro’s man Callidus quickly came to their feet as their masters descended toward them. Across the courtyard, a troop of dismounted cavalrymen of Crispus’ Vettonian command huddled in the gloom.

  As Crispus ordered the troopers to mount up, Martius took Varro aside.

  “For a moment there, Julius, I thought you would not agree to be her agent.”

  “What choice did I have, Marcus?” Varro sighed unhappily.

  “Just the same, I did briefly have a vision in my mind’s eye of an ax hovering above my neck. If the queen does resume her place in Titus’ bed, my friend, she will wield immense power beyond the bedroom, including the power to have our heads. If you had not agreed, you would have marked us all for destruction.”

  The three of them climbed into the litters. The cavalry troop went ahead at the walk, while, with torch bearers lighting the way and with Pedius preceding them, the litters passed through the little city to its northwestern gate, then out into the countryside and along the road a short distance to the camp of the Varro expedition. As they went, the thoughts of the three Romans were very different.

  Martius was thinking about the slave girl Miriam who was soon to become the questor’s property. In his estimation she truly was a head-turning beauty. Martius envied his superior; he would gladly have accepted a gift of one of the queen’s beauties.

  Crispus lapsed into despondency on the brief journey. The queen had left the banquet before he could recite a single poem. What an opportunity lost! To have recited before the famous Queen Berenice. After she had left them, Crispus had suggested to Varro that he might voice some of his works anyway, for their entertainment, but Martius had quickly spoken against the idea, and Crispus’ verse had never reached his lips. Stomping into his tent on the return to camp, Crispus ordered his servants to stand in front of him. He then proceeded to recite all t
he poems with which he had intended to regale Queen Berenice that night. He concluded the eighth poem two hours later.

  Varro returned to camp thinking neither of poetry nor of the bewitching beauty who had been gifted to him. His mind was troubled by his undertaking to the queen. It was dangerous to be a spy at the best of times, but to be a spy in matters of the heart, involving the emperor’s son and heir, this was doubly dangerous.

  IX

  THE ROAD TO NAZARETH

  Northern Galilee, Tetrarchy of Tracnonitis.

  April, A.D. 71

  The rhythmic tramp of marching feet on the flagstones attracted giggling children to the roadside to watch the Roman column pass. The expedition was leaving Caesarea Philippi. No one at Agrippa’s capital had come forward in response to Varro’s request for information, and both Agrippa and Berenice had politely declined invitations to dine with the questor at his camp. After several fruitless days, Varro had decided to move on.

  The party had been joined by Miriam, slave from the court of Queen Berenice. She had been delivered by Bostar the day following the dinner at Berenice s palace. The young woman wore a shrouding headscarf and veil, but all the same Varro found her presence unsettling, for himself and for his men. He had put Callidus in charge of her, and arranged a tent all her own. On the march, he decreed, she would ride a spare pack mule. Then on a Saturday, several days after Miriam arrived in camp, Callidus had come to say that she was refusing to leave her tent. It was the Sabbath, she said, the day of rest. Miriam was a Jew. In the light of this, Varro had decided to make Antiochus responsible for her; as a former Jew, he should know what customs she would need to observe.

  Predictably, Antiochus had objected. More than merely protesting that he was no nursemaid, he had said that he had abolished the day of rest for all Jews in Antioch and saw no reason why this slave should be treated any differently. Varro thought otherwise. He knew that Titus had even permitted the Jewish residents of cities he was besieging in Galilee to observe the Sabbath, ceasing operations on Saturdays to accommodate them. It had not altered events; Titus had inevitably triumphed. Equally, Varro saw nothing threatening or offensive in piety, and told Antiochus that Miriam could honor her Sabbath day as she saw fit. Antiochus had wanted to argue, claiming the girl would require special lamps and food prepared in a certain way. But Varro waved away the objections and told Antiochus to do what he could to accommodate the girl, warning him that he would be held personally responsible for Miriam’s welfare.

  Now, with the column well into its second hour on the road west and commencing to cross a bridge over the swift-flowing Jordan River, the girl was some distance behind the questor, covered from head to foot and riding at the rear of the freedmen on a mule led by a muleteer. From this point on, Varro vowed to himself, he would not think about Miriam until this mission was at an end. A sudden commotion behind Varro drew him from his thoughts and caused him to turn in the saddle, to see that Diocles the physician had tumbled from his horse. Suspicious of the cause, and preferring not to halt the column, Varro called to Martius. “Look to the physician, tribune,” and kept riding.

  Martius turned back, and as Diocles’ five attendants came running from the rear the tribune dismounted and strode to the doctor, who lay on his face at the roadside near the river. Pushing back the slaves as they panted onto the scene, Martius knelt beside Diocles. “Drunk!” the tribune spat with disgust when he rolled the fat physician onto his back and found him mumbling incoherently, his breath reeking of wine.

  Martius stood, looked at the river beside him, then called for Optio Silius and four men. As Silius and a quartet of legionaries came at the jog, men of the passing cavalcade looked down at the supine doctor with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and disgust.

  “Into the river with him!” Martius ordered when the soldiers arrived, pointing to a pond-like eddy beside the bank formed around the bridge’s piles by silt carried down from Mount Hermon by the fast-moving waters.

  The four legionaries lay aside their equipment, took an arm or a leg of the mumbling physician, and then threw Diocles into the Jordan River. He hit the water of the eddy horizontally, making a thunderous splash, then submerged. For a moment, it appeared that he would not resurface. Then his head appeared. Gasping for breath, floundering in panic, he spluttered frantically in Greek, “I drown! I drown!”

  Martius motioned to the soldiers, who slipped down the bank and went in after the physician. The eddy waters where he was struggling turned out to be no more than knee deep. Dragged to the riverside, Diocles lay on dry ground like a beached whale. Shaking his head, Martius stood on the bank glaring down at the sodden doctor. “You will not drink on this expedition, physician!” he called with tempered fury. “That was the questor’s directive, Diocles, and you will obey it. If I again find that you have flouted that order, I shall personally tie a thong around your penis and pull it tight. That will stop you drinking; you will never pass water again!”

  Laughter erupted from the soldiers standing around Diocles. As for the doctor himself, his dunking had sobered him somewhat, and his eyes now widened in terror at the tribune’s threat. Diocles groaned, knowing that Marcus Martius was not one to make idle threats; the doctor had seen the body of Fulvus the Vettonian cavalryman.

  Martius had not finished. He glared at the physician’s anxious servants. “As for you useless nitwits, I should be drowning the lot of you. Be aware; if I find that your master has touched another drop of wine, you fellows will have to become accustomed to passing water without a penis.” To emphasize his point, he patted his sheathed sword.

  The servants shrunk back from him with horror-stuck looks on their faces.

  “You have been warned!” Martius added, before swinging on his heel and striding back to his horse. As Martius was gathering the reins of his mount, Prefect Crispus came riding back to check on the doctor’s condition.

  “What is Diocles’ condition, tribune?” Crispus inquired with concern.

  “Wet,” Martius returned, motioning for one of the nearby soldiers to give him a boost up into his saddle. “Perhaps the Jordan will wash away his bad habits,” he said with a scowl in Crispus’ direction once he was up. Looking down at Diocles, now being helped up the bank, he called, “Optio, put the physician back in his saddle. We have dallied long enough.”

  “If he cannot stay on his horse, tribune?” Optio Silius asked. “What then?”

  “Tie him to the saddle if you must!”

  Eight miles due west along the Tyre road from Caesarea Philippi the column came to an intersection with the main north-south highway. North, the road led to Sidon and the coast. To the south lay Galilee. The column turned south. Ten miles on, the expedition camped beside the road for the night.

  Next day, the expedition passed along the lush upper Jordan River valley and entered northern Galilee, part of Agrippa’s realm. The countryside here was among the most fertile that Varro had ever come across. Stretching away either side of the river were trees of a variety the likes of which he had never before seen in the one place. Date palm plantations competed for space with walnut groves, while fig tree orchards stretched to the slopes of the Galilean Hills where olive trees and grape vines flourished.

  Like most members of Roman nobility, Varro had received a solid education in agricultural matters. He was expected to oversee the family’s estates, one at Capua in Campania, south of Rome, where he had been born, and several others near Forum Julii in southeastern Gaul. Part of his correspondence while stationed in Syria had been with his distant estate managers, covering everything from plantings and harvests to farm buildings and runaway slaves. How he wished he had an estate here in the Jordan basin. Varro turned to Pythagoras and Artimedes, who were riding not far behind him. “I would not have thought that palms and walnuts could grow in the same place,” he remarked. “Surely, one requires hot air, the other cold?”

  “The goddess Ceres has blessed this land,” Pythagoras commented sagely.

>   “A farmer I met in Caesarea Philippi, my lord,” Artimedes remarked, “told me that the fig trees and vines of this area produce fruit for fully ten months of the year. The Hebrew people certainly chose a bountiful place for themselves.”

  The column reached the town of Capernaum, on the northern shore of a body of fresh water in the shape of an inverted pear called Lake Tiberias by Romans and known as the Lake of Gennesaret to the Jewish people who had inhabited the region for centuries. More generally it was called the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum had been a major regional center when Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee, the base of a fishing fleet and a port for trading craft which plied between the towns fringing the lake, and the site of a customs station. It had also been the home of a squadron of light, fast warships, vessels with a single bank of oars and the task of combating lake pirates. Wherever there is commerce there are thieves, and just as the roads of Galilee had frequently been ravaged by bandits its lakes had attracted brigands in small boats who had plagued trading vessels. In earlier times too, Capernaum had been home to a force from King Agrippa’s army and to small detachments of Roman troops, mostly cavalry, under a centurion who had charge of the entire district.

  The Revolt had changed Capernaum. Because it had remained loyal to Agrippa and to Rome it had not suffered material damage in the fighting, unlike some towns and cities of the region which had gone over to the rebels and subsequently been besieged, overrun, looted and sometimes burned. Still, many of the Jews of the town had fled to the partisans or away from the Romans during the first year of the Revolt, and few had survived to return. Now, Capernaum was occupied by a mixture of Jew and non-Jew, some, refugees from the carnage in other places, others, opportunists who had come in search of a better living. There was a stone fortress in the town which Varro found occupied by a detachment of auxiliary cavalry of the Nervian Horse from Belgian Gaul and a cohort of Agrippa’s archers. The Nervian unit’s prefect was away at Caesarea.