The Jesus Novel. Chapter 14.
Herod Antipas was entertaining that night in honor of his birthday. He had invited the leading citizens throughout his tetrarchy to a great feast, hoping the celebration would make the remote villa at Machaeraeus more tolerable to Herodias. His hope was in vain.
“What joy can I find in men at table?” she said.
“But —”
“I’m not coming. I’ll be a wife to you again in Tiberius, not here.”
He would have liked to return to his capital city on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. The problem was John, and the difficulties involved in transporting him to Galilee. The people were convinced he was a prophet of God. Since his arrest, sympathizers had kept up a continual vigil outside the walls of the fortress. They were present day and night.
Though tonight, on his birthday, Herod was making an effort to forget them. Pillars lined all four sides of the great hall of Herod’s palatial villa. The pillars created a passageway around its perimeter and provided numerous places of ingress and egress for the scores of servants coming and going with huge casks of wine and carts burdened with rich food. There were exotic meats and fruits — and pastries built into great towers of ostentatious confection. Before the night was many hours old, wine and the juices of the meats had stained the lips and tunics of the host and his guests. They rested between courses as the dancers swept through the hall in a long, undulating line. Trailing long strips of gauzy fabric, the dancers entered from one side of the room and exited between two of the pillars on the other, then entered again from a third side. The faint percussion of cymbals, almost imperceptible at first, grew louder until it marked time for the weaving arms and the dancing feet.
A gauzy streamer encircled Antipas, brushing his clothes and hair, and he guffawed with boozy pleasure. A harp rippled, and the veils of the dancers dropped to the floor in rapid succession. The harp sounded again, and, beginning at the other end of the line, the robes dropped in sequence.
The dancers were all women, flowers woven into their long hair. Anklets and bracelets jingled on their bare legs and their upstretched arms as they advanced on the dais where Antipas reclined on his couch. Herod cackled with delighted anticipation, but the line broke just before it reached him, and the dancers fanned out through guests.
It was midway through the dance when Herod noticed Salome, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Herodias, standing at the edge of the banquet hall. She was dressed in white. One of her slim-fingered hands rested against a pillar, and her eyes were on the dancers.
Herod held up his goblet to his steward, Chuza, who had come from Tiberius to organize the feast. Chuza bent immediately to fill the goblet. Herod tossed back the wine and again extended his goblet. As Chuza refilled it, the lead dancer advanced on Herod, a taunting smile on her sculpted face. Her head shifted from one shoulder to the other in time to the beat of an unseen drum. Her long, bare arms moved in front of her body, weaving, reaching, as she mounted the dais. The percussion changed, becoming faster, lighter, and the dancer clasped her hands above her head, exposing her abdomen. Her hips gyrated wildly.
“Ooh,” called several of the guests, and the sound was followed by general laughter.
Herod groped with his goblet for the table and, not finding it, let the goblet fall to the floor. The dancer leaned backward to touch her hands to the floor and, pushing off with her foot, swung down off the dais.
Salome’s eyes stayed on Herod, whose face was flushed and perspiring. He beckoned to her, and she came to him.
She stood before him, slim and straight, like her mother in face, but only just developing in figure. Her eyes were large in her narrow face, innocent and fawnlike. For Herod, the music and the dancers and the laughter of his hundred guests faded into the background.
“You’re a dancer,” he said hoarsely.
She shook her head.
“Your mother tells me you’re quite good.”
A shy smile touched her lips.
“Dance for us on my birthday.”
Her head turned toward the hall, the men reclining on couches, the dancers just exiting through the pillars on the far side.
“Do this for me, and ask what you will of me in return,” Herod said.
Her eyes cut toward him. “Mother wouldn’t like it.”
“The devil with your mother. Herodias is a jealous old crow.”
Again the half-smile, not shy this time, but full of mystery. Herod rose from his couch. “Gentlemen,” he said, clapping his hands for their attention. “Salome, the daughter of my wife Herodias, is to dance for us this evening.”
There was applause, a few catcalls. Salome curtseyed, that enigmatic smile still playing about her lips.
“Salome?” Herod said. “Can you begin, or do you need some time for preparation?”
“A quarter-hour to get into my dancing costume.”
“Granted then. Granted!”
She departed, and he dropped back onto his couch and reached for his goblet. “Steward!” he said. “More wine.”
Actually, he didn’t feel quite well. Currents of indigestion roiled his bowels, and, when a burst of flatulence escaped him, it did so with a sound like a clap of thunder. Most ignored it, but there was scattered applause.
“There are few sights and sounds more revolting than those of men eating and drinking,” Herodias said, dropping down on the foot of Herod’s couch.
“Herodias!” Herod said, blinking at her in some alarm. “You came to my party.”
“I understand my daughter is to be on display this evening.”
“You said she was good. You should be proud of her.”
“Instead of being a jealous old crow?”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“I know what you meant.”
“Then she won’t be dancing? She has to dance. I’ve announced it. If she doesn’t dance, it will make me a fool.”
“I think your foolishness is something beyond Salome’s ability to augment or diminish,” Herodias said.
Herod’s face flushed dark. “If Salome won’t dance, then why are you here? You’ve said men disgust you.”
“I want to see how she does with an audience.”
“You mean . . .”
A drum beat started up, three long beats and two short, three long beats and two short. The crowd fell silent. A flute sounded, its song at first sedate, then increasingly frenzied. Herod, suddenly uneasy, felt his pulse quicken. A figure more geometric than human cartwheeled across the room and disappeared again on the other side. The percussion became metallic, the clash of weapon on shield. The flute was joined by another, then another. Salome came from the back of the room, flipping from hands to feet, hands to feet, her body a blur in the torchlight. She ended her run directly in front of the dais in a full split, her hands upraised. Her hair was pulled back from her face into a hard knot, and streaks of dark makeup marked her face. Though her garment was flesh-toned and form-fitting, the effect was more animalistic than feminine.
Salome rolled to her side and pushed up into a handstand, scissoring her legs forward and backward. When she dropped into a walk, she pawed twice at the ground before each step, lifting and dropping her shoulders in time to the music, her arms unnaturally stiff at her sides. At the end of the room, she turned and pointed at Herod, who still reclined on his dais. She swept her open palm back and forth as if striking him.
Her next run toward Herod culminated in a double flip, in which she drew her knees to her chest in the air and straightened in time to land on her feet on the dais itself. She repeated the slapping gesture, the breeze she generated stirring the very hair of Herod’s beard. She strutted first one way, then the other before his couch, her hands on her boyish hips. Herod’s tongue appeared briefly between dry lips.
Salome placed the instep of one tiny foot on Herod’s shoulder, and his chest constricted so that he found it impossible to breathe. Slowly, slowly, she lifted the slim leg so that the toes pointed toward the vaulted ceiling. She gripped her ankle and pirouetted slowly, her torso arched, her delicate ribs showing through her thin clothing.
For Herod the world ceased to exist but for the girl. The music of the dance was all of a piece with the movements of Salome. Time slowed as she jumped and turned and moved her arms. The torches themselves had ceased to flicker.
Herod started, aware, suddenly, that the music had stopped and the dance was over. Salome stood motionless before her audience, one foot in front of the other, her arms upraised. His face was wet with tears as he rose to his feet. He looked around as if lost, his eyes passing over his guests and servants, over Herodias, over Salome herself. Finally, he swept the wine and grapes from a silver tray and picked it up. He dropped heavily to one knee before Salome and presented her the tray. “Instruct me with what gems and precious metals I may adorn this tray. Ask what you will of me, and I will give it.”
The half-smile again touched her face, enigmatic and mocking. “Anything?” she asked as she took the tray.
“Anything you ask,” he said. “Up to half my kingdom.”
As he got to his feet, his guests began to shout, stamping their feet and pounding their tables in acclamation. Herodias gestured, and Salome went to her, bending her head to receive instruction. She went again to Herod, and he put an arm about her, raising his hand for silence.
“Well?” he said to her. “Tell me — tell all this audience — what it is you wish.”
She held out the tray to him. Only gradually did the crowd fall silent.
“I ask that you present the tray to me again,” she said.
“Yes?” he said. “Adorned with what?”
“Adorned with the head of one they call John the Baptizer.”
Herod felt he had been struck in the chest. The audience was silent. “Adorned with what?” he said again.
“Adorned with the head of John the Baptizer.”
All eyes were on him. He wet his lips and laughed, though the sound was tremulous, devoid of its usual heartiness. “Ask for something else,” he said. “A ransom in diamonds. Rubies, perhaps. Pearls.”
“I want the head of John the Baptizer.”
Herod shook his head, bewildered. Herodias stood, drawing his eyes. “Is the king not a man of his word?” she said.
The eyes of his guests were on him. He started to say something, but lost the sense of it as soon as he had begun to speak.
Herodias arched an eyebrow.
Herod cleared his throat.
“I repeat,” she said, stepping to Salome and resting a hand glittering with jewels on her thin shoulder. “Is the king not a man of his word?”
He grinned foolishly, shrugging his beefy shoulders. “Herodias,” he said pleadingly.
She shook her head and stepped off the dais, guiding Salome with her through the courtiers of Herod and the important men of Perea and Galilee.
Just as she had reached the far end of the room, Herod called to her. “Wait,” he said.
Herodias turned with Salome.
“All right,” he said.
“Yes?”
“As you ask, so let it be done,” he said.