“Three to one on Scarlet!”
Throughout the brand-new circus were
the eagerness, the gesticulations, shouts, and murmurs
of an impatient throng. On a ledge above the entrance
a man stood, a strip of silk extended in his finger-tips.
Beneath, on either side, were gates. About him
were series of ascending tiers, close-packed, and
brilliant with multicolored robes and parasols.
The sand of the track was very white: where the
sunlight fell it had the glitter of broken glass.
In the centre was a low wall; at one end were pillars
and seven great balls of wood; at the other, seven
dolphins, their tails in the air. The uproar
mounted in unequal vibrations, and stirred the pulse.
The air was heavy with odors, with the emanations of
the crowd, the cloy of myrrh. Through the exits
whiffs of garlic filtered from the kitchens below,
and with them, from the exterior arcades, came the
beat of timbrels, the click of castanets. Overhead
was a sky of troubled blue; beyond, a lake.
“They are off!”
The strip of silk had fluttered and
fallen, the gates flew open, there was a rumble of
wheels, a whirlwind of sand, a yell that deafened,
and four tornadoes burst upon the track.
They were shell-shaped, and before
each six horses tore abreast. Between the horses’
ears were swaying feathers; their manes had been dyed
clear pink, the forelocks puffed; and as they bounded,
the drivers, standing upright, had the skill to guide
but not the strength to curb. About their waists
the reins were tied; at the side a knife hung; from
the forehead the hair was shaven; and everything they
wore, the waistcoat, the short skirt, the ribbons,
was of one color, scarlet, yellow, emerald, or blue:
and this color, repeated on the car and on the harness,
distinguished them from those with whom they raced.
Already the cars had circled the hippodrome
four times. There were but three more rounds,
and Scarlet, which in the beginning had trailed applause
behind it as a torch trails smoke, lagged now a little
to the rear. Green was leading. Its leadership
did not seem to please; it was cursed at and abused,
threatened with naked fist; yet when for the sixth
time it turned the terminal pillar, a shout that held
the thunder of Atlas leaped abroad. Where the
yellow car, pursued by the blue, had been, was now
a mass of sickening agitation twelve fallen
horses kicking each other into pulp, the drivers brained
already; and down upon that barrier of blood and death
swept the scarlet car. In a second it veered and
passed; in that second a flash of steel had out the
reins, and, as the car swung round, the driver, released,
was tossed to the track. What then befell him
no one cared. Stable-men were busy there; the
car itself, unguided, continued vertiginously on its
course. If it had lagged before, there was no
lagging now. The hoofs that beat upon the ring
plunged with it through the din down upon Emerald,
and beyond it to the goal. And as the last dolphin
vanished and the seventh ball was removed, the palm
was granted, and the spectators shouted a salutation
to the giver of the games Herod Antipas,
tetrarch of Galilee.
He was superb, this Antipas.
His beard was like a lady’s fan. On his
cheeks was a touch of alkanet; his hair, powdered blue,
was encircled by a diadem set with gems. About
his shoulders was a mantle that had a broad purple
border; beneath it was a tunic of yellow silk.
Between the railing of the tribune in which he sat
one foot was visible, shod with badger’s skin,
dyed blood-red. He was superb, but his eyelids
drooped. He had a straight nose and a retreating
forehead, a physiognomy that was at once weak and
vicious. He looked melancholy; it may be that
he was bored. At the salutation, however, he
affected a smile, and motioned that the games should
continue. And as the signals, the dolphins and
the seven balls, appeared again, his thoughts, forsaking
the circus, went back to Rome.
Insecure in the hearts of his people,
uncertain even of the continued favor of the volatile
monster who was lounging then in his Caprian retreat,
it was with the idea of pleasing the one, of flattering
the other, that he had instituted the games.
For here in his brand-new Tiberias, a city which he
had built in a minute, whose colonnades and porticoes
he had bought ready-made in Rome, and had erected by
means of that magic which only the Romans possessed in
this capital of a parvenu was a mongrel rabble of
Greeks, Cypriotes, Egyptians, Cappadocians, Syrians,
and Jews, whose temper was uncertain, and whose rebellion
to be feared.
Annona et spectaculis indeed!
Antipas knew the dictum well; and with an uprising
in the yonderland, and a sedition under his feet, what
more could he do than quell the first with his mercenaries,
and disarm the second with his games? Tiberius,
whom he emulated, never deigned to appear at the hippodrome;
it was a way he had of showing his contempt for a nation.
Antipas might have imitated his sovereign in that,
only he was not sure that Tiberius would take the
compliment as it was meant. He might view such
abstention as the airs of a trumpery tetrarch, and
depose him there and then. He was irascible,
and when displeased there were dungeons at his command
which reopened with difficulty, and where existence
was not secure. Ah, that sausage of blood and
mud, how he feared and envied him! An emperor
now, a god hereafter, truly the dominion of this world
and a part of the next was a matter concerning which
fear and envy well might be.
And as Antipas’ vagabond fancy
roamed in and out through the possibilities of the
Caesar’s sway, unconsciously he thought of another
monster, the son of a priest of Ascalon, who had defied
the Sanhedrim, won Cleopatra, murdered the woman he
loved the most, conquered Judaea and found it too
small for his magnificence of that Herod
in fact, his own father, who gave to Jerusalem her
masterpiece of marble and gold, and meanwhile, drunk
with the dream of empire, had made himself successor
of Solomon, Sultan of Israel, King of the Jews, and
who, even as he died, had vomited death and crowns,
diadems and crucifixions.
It was through his legacy that Antipas
ruled. The kingdom had been sliced into three
parts, of one of which Augustus had made a province;
over another a brother whom he hated ruled; and he
had but this third part, the smallest yet surely the
most fair. Its unparalleled garden surrounded
him, and its eye, the lake, was just beyond.
In the amphitheatre the hills formed was a city of
pink and blue marble, of cupolas, porticoes, volutes,
bronze doors, and copper roofs. Along the fringe
of the shore were Choraizin and Bethsaida, purple
with pomegranates, Capharnahum, beloved for its honey,
and Magdala, scented with spice. The slopes and
intervales were very green where they were not yellow,
and there were terraces of grape, glittering cliffs,
and a sky of troubled blue, wadded with little gold-edged
clouds.
Yes, it was paradise, but it was not
monarchy. It was to that he aspired. As
he mused, a rancid-faced woman decked with paint and
ostrich-plumes snarled in his ear:
“What have you heard of Iohanan?”
And as with a gesture he signified
that he had heard nothing, she snarled again.
Antipas turned to her reflectively,
but it was of another that he thought the
brown-eyed bride that Arabia had given him, the lithe-limbed
princess of the desert whose heart had beaten on his
own, whom he had loved with all the strength of youth
and weakness, and whom he had deserted while at Rome
for his brother’s wife, his own niece, Herodias,
who snarled at his side.
Behind her were her women, and among
them was one who, as the cars swept by, turned her
head with that movement a flower has which a breeze
has stirred. Her eyes were sultry, darkened with
stibium; on her cheek was the pink of the sea-shell,
and her lips made one vermilion rhyme. The face
was oval and rather small; and though it was beautiful
as victory, the wonder of her eyes, which looked the
haunts of hope fulfilled, the wonder of her mouth,
which seemed to promise more than any mortal mouth
could give, were forgotten in her hair, which was
not orange nor flame, but a blending of both.
And now, as the cars passed, her thin nostrils quivered,
her hand rose as a bird does and fluttered with delight.
On the adjacent tiers were Greeks,
fat-calved Cypriotes, Cappadocians with flowers
painted on their skin, red Egyptians, Thracian mercenaries,
Galilean fishermen, and a group of Lydians in women’s
clothes.
On the tier just beyond was a man
gazing wistfully at the woman that sat behind Herodias.
He was tall and sinewy, handsome with the comeliness
of the East. His beard was full, unmarred at
the corners; his name was Judas. Now and then
he moistened his under lip, and a Thracian who sat
at his side heard him murmur “Mary” and
some words of Syro-Chaldaic which the Thracian did
not understand.
To him Mary paid no attention.
She had turned from the track. An officer had
entered the tetrarch’s tribune and addressed
the prince. Antipas started; Herodias colored
through her paint. The latter evidently was pleased.
“Iohanan!” she exclaimed.
“To Machaerus with him! You may believe
in fate and mathematics; I believe in the axe.”
And questioningly Herodias looked
at her husband, who avoided her look, yet signified
his assent to the command she had given.
The din continued. From the tier
beyond, Judas still gazed into the perils of Mary’s
eyes.
“Dear God,” he muttered,
in answer to an anterior thought, “it would be
the birthday of my life.”