Salome Read Free

seemed too far in the future to worry about. Now it was in the near future, and I shrank back from it.
             
    Only two days after his first visit, Uncle Antipas was back at our door. In the weeks to come, Herodias spent more and more time with him and less and less time with me. Each time he arrived, Antipas would ask for his brother, but my father was almost always out—at the baths, in the Forum, at the chariot races.
    It occurred to me that my father didn’t really want to see Antipas any more than Antipas really wanted to see Herod Junior. The two men didn’t have much in common. To start, they’d been born to different mothers. Herod Junior’s mother had been the daughter of the High Priest of Jerusalem, while Antipas’s mother was a Samaritan noblewoman.
    Worse, there was the matter of the inheritance. Before their father, old King Herod of Greater Judea, had died, Herod Junior was second in line to take the throne. Instead, Herod’s last will had divided his kingdom among three other sons: Archelaus, Philip, and Antipas.
    I couldn’t see what Herodias had in common with Antipas, either, but she continued to be entranced with him. These days, even when my mother spent time with me, she spent most of it talking about Antipas and his wonderful city, Tiberias. “Antipas is the
only
Herod brother who understands how to live in the grand style,” she said.
    “Father certainly doesn’t,” I agreed. Herodias laughed and rolled her eyes; my father’s disappointing way of life went without saying.
    “But aside from Junior,” she went on, “there’s Philip—do you remember Uncle Philip of Gaulanitis? He never even travels to Rome anymore because of the expense. Imagine, a client ruler going for years and years without visiting the Imperial City! Instead, Antipas says, Philip spends all his time traveling around his pathetic little realm—letting his subjects pester him with their concerns! How does he expect to keep his subjects in awe if he hobnobs with them?”
    Antipas, on the other hand, understood how to impress his subjects with showy ceremonies and fabulous banquets. He’d persuaded one of Rome’s finest cooks to join his court. Apparently, this cook’s baked fish was famous among the nobility all around the Mediterranean Sea.
    “But Antipas’s wife refuses to eat fish—can you imagine?” My mother giggled. “She’s from a desert kingdom, Nabatea. It was a purely political marriage.”
    I disliked my uncle for taking my mother’s company away, but beyond that, he made me nervous. Not that he paid much attention to me—he was all taken up with Herodias. But when he did notice me, I felt that he paid too much attention to me, just for a moment. The feeling was hard to explain even to myself. I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.
    Many times that winter Antipas escorted Herodias to the theater, and often they took me along. Why not?—they had a whole train with them already. There were Antipas’s bodyguards and courtiers and secretary, and slaves carrying drinks and snacks and cushions, and of course Antipas’s personal food taster. I suppose there were many people who would have liked to poison him. I almost wished they would.
    The youngest courtier was Simon, a son of one of Antipas’s many half sisters. He was related to me, too, distantly. I thought Simon was ridiculous, the way he dropped names of powerful people in Rome—even that of Sejanus, the Emperor’s regent. Simon seemed to think that he was being groomed for an important position in the Empire. At every opportunity he spoke up, trying to sound experienced and knowledgeable. Other times he would strike a noble pose, as if a sculptor were working on a statue of him.
    At the theater I sometimes ignored what was happening onstage and watched Antipas’s Greek secretary, a young man named Leander. He always carried a scroll, a note tablet, and a stylus in the folds of his draped pallium, or cloak. He