The Deadliest Hate by June Trop

Author:June Trop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2015-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Early Monday Afternoon

THIS TIME PHOEBE let me wear the crimson, short-sleeved, ankle-length tunic. Humming merrily, she slipped it over my white, floor-length tunica interior, the one with the gold instita, and tied an embroidered sash firmly around my waist. But before declaring the ensemble suitable for the procurator’s reception, she checked that the instita hung just below the hemline of my tunic.

“You need to flaunt your layers, Miriam. The more the better,” she said as if I needed instruction on the rules of Roman fashion.

Next she plaited my hair and arranged the braids in a crown that she once again fixed in place with gold pins and dressed with the gold-threaded net. But when she brought out the calamistrum, I balked. We were already stifling in that airless cage of ours, thick with shadows even in the early afternoon, and choking on the stench from the stable yard. So she relented but only after a ragged breath and a theatrical sigh. Finally, she wrapped me in a freshly-fulled himation, fastened it at my shoulder with a fibula decorated with rubies, and pinned matching jewels to my ears.

“There!” she said, spinning me around and stepping back to admire the crimson waves swirling about my ankles.

Just then the puer knocked on our door to tell us the litter to carry me to the Upper Palace had arrived. As soon as I saw its polished fittings gleaming under the inn’s rippling flag, its elaborately festooned gold drapes tied back to its fluted posts, and its slightly-parted white sheers fluttering in the warm breeze, I recalled the one other time I’d been carried so elegantly. Two years ago, Binyamin and I took a final spin around Alexandria before he was to depart for Rome en route to Capua. I pretended then we were on a celebratory excursion rather than in the closing chapter of our shared history. And I fixed on pretending this time that I’d be rushing to a reception in honor of my betrothal to Judah rather than to a display of Roman profligacy and barbarity.

Two pedisequi and four bearers attended the litter. Their well-oiled caramel bodies were dressed in the palest blue Indian cotton tunics trimmed with a row of silver buttons across each shoulder. And their feet were clad in deerskin calcei, the many straps fastened with silver buckles that made a line of glitter up their powerful calves.

They led me through a veil of heat into a cabin redolent of roses, banked with brightly-colored, overstuffed cushions, and paneled with scenes of Odysseus when, on a makeshift raft, he was swept back through the Strait of Messina to face Charybdis. Settling in, I closed the sheers to filter the light, and then before I knew it, I was gliding through the aether. Eddies of freedmen, slaves, and idlers stopped to gape as the bearers loped south along the cardo toward the two-tiered palace.

Hector had taught me all about Caesarea’s two-tiered palace. Herod the Great built the Lower Palace on

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