Uri broke out into a laugh.
“That wasn’t Antipas, but Agrippa!”
“That makes no difference — they’re both kings!”
“Well, he’s not king, only a tetrarch! He was granted only a quarter of the kingdom of Herod the Great…”
Sarah was not one to be satisfied.
“All right,” said Uri just to shut his mother up. “I’ll pay a visit later.”
Sarah then asked every day if he had seen the king yet. At first Uri replied that he had not had time, then later on that yes, he had tried but was not admitted. He did not think that one evening Sarah would confront him with the news that she had arranged it: Antipas would see him. Uri thought she must be getting soft in the head, but it transpired that she had kept on pestering Honoratus, having forced her way in to see him; the only thing he could do to get rid of her was to tell Sarah where her son could find Antipas.
“He’s staying on Palatine Hill,” said Sarah confidently. “You’re going there tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll go,” Uri agreed.
“I’ll go with you,” Sarah announced.
“Me too,” said Hagar, who by now was heavily pregnant.
“Your younger sister as well,” said Sarah.
Uri had a million other things on his mind and decided to leave it be: let them see that the tetrarch would have him kicked out, then at least they wouldn’t keep after him about it.
Sarah, excited and wearing clean clothes, woke him up at daybreak.
In front of the house, he sprinkled himself with water, made a short prayer, and breathed in deeply. Hagar was by then also standing in the doorway, and behind her the female apparition of Hermia, hair neatly combed and looking bewildered.
His mother pressed a clean tunic into his hands and insisted on his wearing his better pair of sandals.
They walked over the Jewish Bridge, the women in hushed silence.
At the far side of the Ponte Fabricius Hagar kneeled and, turning to the east, said a prayer. Uri could not understand why she had done this; he and the others stood waiting until she had finished.
“I’ve never gone to Rome before,” Hagar whispered. “I was giving my thanks to the Eternal One for allowing me to do so…”
Uri was amazed. His mother and sister did not leave Far Side all that often, but it never entered his head to think that his wife had never seen Rome proper.
Tears were rolling down Hagar’s face, which was no longer flat but plumped, swollen, marred by a tiny snub of a nose in its middle, a sight that moved Uri to pity.
“I’ll show you around Rome,” he said almost lovingly.
He chose to go by a very roundabout route to Palatine Hill to show them both the privation and wealth that existed in Rome: he set off north from the riverbank, near the theater of Marcellus, showed them the outside of the theater of Balbus, then they proceeded toward the Campus Martius. The women were unaffected by the sights of destitution, which they were familiar with in Far Side, but stood gazing for a long time at the massive edifices, as Uri told them which was which and what went on inside them. At the Diribitorium, the public voting hall on the Campus Martius, they were astounded to learn that the vast building had a single continuous roof. They dared not enter the rectangular Pantheon, being content to view it from outside, with Uri detailing how many statues of divinities it contained, those of Mars and Venus among many others, and that the vaulted ceiling was fashioned in imitation of the firmament. Inside the Pantheon was a statue of Caesar, and in the vestibule statues of Augustus and Agrippa. They listened incredulously; Sarah, looking suspiciously at her son, asked him how he happened to know so much.
“I’ve read about them,” Uri replied evasively.
Sarah was proud that a statue of the king of the Jews should be there amid the rest, and Uri was of two minds as to whether to point out that this Agrippa was not the king of the Jews but a good friend of Augustus’s. He decided it would be better to hold his tongue.
It emerged that none of the women had seen any of the forums, so to start with they went along the Forum of Augustus all the way to the Via Sacra; he did not show them the busy quarter of Subura, which was not fit for women’s eyes, and instead doubled back westward with his small female band to the old Forum. There the women marveled at how many colonnaded buildings from different eras were squeezed in next to one other; it was hard to fit between them. They shuddered at the Carcer on hearing that this was where condemned criminals were locked up. The Rostra was of no interest to them, even though Uri explained proudly that this had been enlarged not long ago, nor did the Curia impress them, and Uri found it impossible to distill into a few words what judges and lawyers occupied themselves with. He also showed them the gilded zero milestone, on the base of which the distances to the major imperial cities from Rome were graven, as measured in miles, which is to say units of eight-and-a-half stadia. The womenfolk wondered how far Jerusalem was, and though he bent down closer he could not find that figure inscribed. The women were horrified and felt affronted. Uri recounted that there was a similar stone in the marketplace in Athens which had been set up five centuries ago, but they were unmoved.
Uri then guided them to the stone-girt marker at the site where Julius Caesar had been assassinated. The place had been covered up with the stones of the Temple of Caesar by the Emperor Augustus, Caesar’s adopted son, so that no human should set eyes again on that shameful spot.
“So, it was here,” said Sarah portentously, and it was evident that she wanted to be moved.
“Who was he?” Hagar asked.
“The first emperor of Rome.”
“And he was assassinated?”
“Yes, murdered.”
“That’s not nice, is it? Who would do such a thing?”
Hagar was utterly bewildered.
“He would have died anyway in the time since then,” Uri tried to reassure her. “It happened a long time ago, about eighty years back.”
“Still!”
Uri mused whether to take them up with him onto Capitoline Hill, or show them the Temple of Jupiter and the Tarpeian Rock, over which those condemned to die were shoved, under it the one hundred Steps of Tears along which executioners would drag the corpses by meathook to be thrown into the Tiber, but then he decided that would only scare them stiff. If they had not yet woken up to the sort of city they were living in, then far be it from him to teach them.
Hagar made her way up Palatine Hill with considerable difficulty, panting as she clambered up, stopping frequently and using her forearm to mop the sweat off her face. Sarah, for her part, was angry, sure there was a gentler path up; why did they not go that way? She was unwilling to accept Uri’s explanation that along the easier route lay the gardens of the wealthy, one could not simply go across that way.
“Look, we’ll be at the top very soon,” said Uri. “There’s no need to hurry.”
He pointed out the Temple of Apollo and suggested they take a look inside, but they were afraid that Jews were not permitted to enter. Uri told them that this was where Augustus had held a celebrated assembly to which the ambassadors from Judaea and all the adult Jews then living in Rome, some eight thousand strong, had been invited; they had all gone into the temple. That was, of course, the occasion on which Augustus had divided up the empire of Herod the Great.
“Why wasn’t your father invited?” Sarah said indignantly.
“That was a long time ago, when my grandfather was still a slave and my father not even born, and since then assemblies were banned by Tiberius.”
Even so the women did not dare enter the Temple of Apollo.
It then occurred to Sarah to ask what they would do if the king — that was what she persisted in calling Antipas — had already left his home.