Agrippa's Daughter by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

the pagan permissiveness and the Jewish priggishness and puritanism, and a product of a world in which these two outlooks were at merciless war. The tension of the two tore her gut into shreds and froze the shreds, and in a world where there was no word, place, or explanation for frigidity, she existed quite naturally in the jumble of discordant parts that comprised her personality.
    When she faced her uncle, Herod of Chalcis, alone finally after the nightmare that was their wedding ceremony, she was rigid with horror, almost catatonic—a memory she deliberately evoked now in Caesarea as she dressed for the theater with Gabo’s help and listened to the singing and music from the streets outside. He was a fat man, her Uncle Herod, to whom her father had married her in his senseless act of senseless revenge, a tall, fat man, almost dropsical in the thickness of his limbs, and now wrapped in a red robe and naked underneath as he faced her.
    “Please—wait for tomorrow,” she had managed to whisper.
    He hardly knew her. Before their marriage, he had seen her three times, once when she was an infant months old, once when she was six, and again when she was ten. Now she had passed her fifteenth year, a grown woman, tall, wide-hipped, wide-shouldered, strange-looking, with her green eyes, her cat’s eyes, and her red hair—strange, but beautiful, if this kind of thing was to one’s taste. Fifty-two years old, Herod of Chalcis could not say truly whether she was or was not to his taste. He himself was an odd lot, graced with neither the bodily beauty nor the mental agility that marked the royal house of Israel. Subservient to the strong will of his brother, King Agrippa, he had agreed to the marriage. He did not enjoy the fact of being a widower, and of late he had become obsessed with the fear of impotence. While legend had it that a young virgin was proper medicine for the condition, surely youth was more important than virginity—and this niece of his was youthful indeed. Yet he was puzzled by the imploring terror in her eyes. He had been assured that she was deflowered and a practiced hand at the business of pleasing a man.
    And now she begged him to wait for tomorrow.
    Of course she was deceitful. He had asked a number of his brother’s close advisers what was their opinion of the Princess Berenice. Along with labels of lechery, slyness, and prevarication, they had all agreed that she was generally deceitful. Herod of Chalcis was the kind of fool who goes through life determined and satisfied that no one else will make a fool of him.
    He clutched Berenice in his arms. He was full of virility—throbbing with it. Impotence? He began to laugh with delight at his passion while he tore the clothes off his niece. He exhibited his own nakedness proudly, a fat, shapeless pile of a man, his own manhood protruding ridiculously from his folded layers of flesh, and when Berenice struggled screaming against him, he folded her under his great weight and size, enveloping her in his rolls of flesh, gasping and whimpering with his re-enforced masculine pride and delight—too carried away by his passion to have any sense of the girl under him—or what was happening to her.
    Only afterward he stared foolishly at the pool of blood on the floor where he had flung her. “Have you never known a man before?” he asked her. “I am the first, Berenice?” He was prepared to swell and preen himself over the fact that he had taken a virgin—that all unbeknownst he had found this pure jewel in a supposedly rotten apple—when he saw her eyes. The green was veiled, like shore water, dark and cloudy and full of such cold, malignant hatred that his naked skin prickled, a flush of heat pouring sweat on his icy back in a reaction of fear, almost panic.
    This, Berenice remembered now, remembered it all deliberately as she created for herself a fanciful role in the city’s holiday, a fantasy of sex and excitement and freedom that excited her yet