‘Thank you,’ he said to the maid, who bowed and hurried back to her dinner.
Satyrus didn’t know whether to knock or simply enter. So he paused, took three deep breaths, and rattled the beads that hung with the door curtain.
‘Come,’ Miriam said, more imperiously than he’d heard her speak to him.
Satyrus went in.
She was standing between two hampers; large wicker baskets — good, solid local work, available for a few obols in the market. One hamper was full.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
‘I came here with nothing,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘I don’t know where all this came from.’
Satyrus smiled. ‘I don’t think of you as acquisitive,’ he said.
She smiled back. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ she said, and then her smile vanished. ‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Miriam,’ he said, and stopped. The silence between them went on and on … uncomfortable, almost unanswerable.
Where is my love of the siege? he asked. In his head.
‘You are leaving,’ he said, perhaps more harshly than he intended.
‘You might at least have brought me a cup of wine, too,’ she said. She took a deep breath. ‘Yes — yes, I am leaving. Before we do each other a mischief.’
‘I love you,’ Satyrus said. There it was: the wrong thing, said the wrong way, at the wrong time.
She threw a length of linen cloth into a hamper — somewhat at random, he thought. ‘And I love you,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘It is not … material … to the problem.’
Satyrus sighed. ‘The problem that you are a Jew and I a gentile?’
‘You are a king and I am a foreign merchant’s daughter. You are a Hellene and I am not. You are a warrior — I have no time for war. Our … feelings are nothing but the products of a year of siege.’ She sighed. ‘I meant to slip away and spare us both this scene.’
Satyrus sat on her bed. ‘Perhaps I don’t want to be spared,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Satyrus. I have had time to think and …’
She had come close enough that all he had to do was stand and gather her in his arms.
So he did.
‘No!’ she said.
‘Really?’ he said. He let her go, so that they were standing, body to body, but he with his arms relaxed at his sides. ‘Really, no?’
She turned her head away, but her weight continued to rest against his hip.
He sighed. ‘Not only do I love you too much to allow you to slip away, but in addition, I will not allow you to pretend that this is my doing. If you say no again, I will walk away. And when I walk away — it will be away.’
‘Stop!’ she said.
‘No. I have come to say my piece, and I will say it. I, too, have had time to think. What I think is that in my kingdom, there are so many flavours of alien and barbarian that you can be whatever you like. Found a synagogue. Make me a Jew. So I say to you — stop making excuses. If you want me, you should have me. If you don’t want me — I will endure it. I will, almost without fail, find someone else to love — that is the way with men and women, as old Nestor says in the Iliad. But please don’t fool yourself with false piety. The gods do not expect us to sacrifice our transitory happiness for some artificial rule — I cannot believe it. What kind of god would make such a demand? I am sorry your father is dead, because alive, I might have brought him round, but dead, he is an insurmountable obstacle.’
Miriam nodded. She reached out and took the wine cup from his hand, and drank most of it. ‘When I left my husband,’ she said. Then she paused. ‘You know I had a husband,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I hated him. Not for some major sin — oh, he was older, and full of himself, but he didn’t beat me. He didn’t sleep with my handmaidens. He gave me money.’ She laughed. ‘He was handsome enough,’ she said. ‘But the thought of spending my life with him chilled my blood. I felt as if I was growing … smaller … every day. Less of a person. I wasn’t a person to him — I was a chattel, like his best bronze lamp and his largest warehouse. He only spoke of me as a conduit to my father. He would introduce me as “Ben Israel’s daughter” as if that was a title. He treated me with a dismissive condescension.’ She was shaking, and Satyrus stepped forward again and took her hands.
She stepped away and withdrew her hands.
‘I left him and fled to my father’s house. Remarkably, my mother would have none of me. But my father: he was … not understanding, but yet … on my side.’ She turned away. ‘My father, whose law I was breaking. My mother, who had probably suffered the same at the hands of my father.’
She drank off the rest of the wine.
‘I prayed for him to die. He came to the house and took me back — with the same condescension, as if I had left because I had some female brain fever.’ She couldn’t meet Satyrus’s eyes. ‘I prayed for him to die. And he died.’
Satyrus wished that there was more wine. He couldn’t say anything — that much he knew. Neither to comfort nor remonstrate.
There was turmoil elsewhere in the house. He heard a voice calling his name — it sounded as if it was Apollodorus. Satyrus.
Satyrus stood. ‘I must be briefer than I intended. Miriam, I am going to make war — to an end. The end. I intend to go to Lysimachos this morning and make him an offer of alliance — and then to back him and Ptolemy until the Antigonids are broken. I have asked your brother to serve. I would ask you to consider either going with your brother, or going to Olbia or Tanais to await the outcome.’
She raised her face. ‘I will never wait again,’ she said. ‘I will be an actor, not the audience.’ She stared at her hands. ‘That much I have learned.’
In her words, Satyrus heard reason to hope. ‘I am a bad man, asking you to come with me to an army camp …’
She shrugged. ‘I will consider it, Satyrus. Go. And if I run to Alexandria … not everyone lives in a play by Menander. If I choose you … Oh, Satyrus, I must give up my whole life to have you. Or I can run back to Alexandria, and all I lose is you. Do you understand?’
Satyrus!
‘All too well, my dear,’ he said. He took her in his arms. ‘Cowardice is easy, is it not? I, too, think, let her go. The Euxine is full of beautiful young women who will lie in my bed and give me children and not force me to think about my religion — who will bring me land, cities, even. Dowry, soldiers, horses, grain, perhaps even fame. That is easy. But you … you are the thing that is excellent. You are not easy. Merely … better.’
She smiled. ‘Your flattery, sir, is going to be my undoing. And such a very Greek concept.’
Satyrus!
‘I think-’ Satyrus had another argument to make.
‘I think you should shut up,’ Miriam said. She put her mouth on his and breathed his breath, twice, a kiss that sent peals of Zeus-sent lightning through his body, and then she was gone. She pushed him sharply away, and was back at her hampers.
‘Take the cup,’ she said. Her eyes were bright. ‘Wine is not what I need.’
He walked into the kitchen to find Phoibos remonstrating with Charmides. Curious: the man had protected him, on no real information.
‘Here I am, Charmides,’ he said.
‘Stratokles needs you,’ the young man said.
Satyrus hurried down the main hall and past the andron. On the porch, Stratokles and his Latin lieutenant, Lucius, stood with a third man.
‘Sorry to wake you, lord,’ Stratokles said. He sounded so smug that Satyrus knew that he was not sorry, nor did he think that Satyrus had been asleep.
‘It is nothing. What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘I have the citadel. I need your say-so to put Apollodorus and your marines in it. Time is of the essence.’ Stratokles looked at Apollodorus, who emerged from the lighted corridor to the dark of the portico, his hair shining under the temple lamp that hung in the arch.