No such luck. Little did I know that Hebrews had been, and would be forever, the most difficult of men to seduce!
It was all made clear with great grace and tact.
I considered all the slaves. Out of the question. First off were the galley slaves, among whom no great “Ben Hur” was chained, waiting for me to rescue him. They were just the dregs of the criminal poor, fastened Roman-style, so they would drown if the ship went down, and they were dying, as all galley slaves do from the monotony and the whip. It wasn’t a pleasant sight to go down into the hold of a galley ship and see those men bending their backs.
But my eyes were as cold as those of an American watching color television pictures of the starving babies of Africa, little black skeletons with big heads screaming for water. News Break, Commercial Break, Sound Bite, CNN now switches to Palestine: rock throwing, rubber bullets. Television blood.
The rest on board were boring sailors, and two old pious merchant Hebrews who stared at me as if I were a whore, or worse, and turned their heads whenever I came out on deck in my long tunic with my long hair swinging free.
Such a disgrace I must have seemed! But what a fool I was then, really, Irving in numbness, and how pleasant that voyage—all because true grief and rage had not yet taken hold of me. Things had happened too fast.
I gloated over my last glimpse of my Father dispatching those soldiers of Tiberius, those cheap assassins sent by a cowardly, indecisive Emperor. And the rest—I banished it from my mind affecting the attitude of the hardened Roman man or woman.
A modern Irish poet, Yeats, best characterizes the official Roman attitude towards failure and tragedy.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
There was never a Roman born who would not have agreed with that.
That was my stance—sole survivor of a great house, commanded by her Father to “live.” I didn’t dare to dwell on the fate of my brothers, their lovely wives, their little children. I couldn’t envision the slaughter of the children—little boys being run through by broadswords, or babies bashed against the wall. Oh, Rome, you and your bloody old wisdom. Be sure to kill the offspring. Kill the whole family!
Lying alone at night, I found myself amid more horrid blood dreams. They seemed fragments of a lost life, a lost land. Deep echoing vibrant tones of music dominated the dreams, as though someone were striking a gong, and others beside him beat solemnly on deep drums with soft coverings. I saw in a haze a world of stiff and flat alien paintings on the walls. Painted eyes around me. I drank blood! I drank it from a small shuddering human being, who knelt before me as if I were Mother Isis.
I woke to take the big jug of water by my bed and drink all of it down. I drank water to defy and satisfy this dream thirst. I was almost sick from drinking water.
I racked my mind. Had I ever had such dreams as a child?
No. And now these dreams had the heat of recollection! Of initiation into the doomed Temple of Isis, when it had been still the fashion. I had been intoxicated, and drenched in the blood of a bull, and dancing wildly in circles. My head was filled with the litanies of Isis. We were promised rebirth! “Never tell, never tell, never tell . . . ” How could an initiate tell anything of the rites, when you were so drunk you could hardly remember them?
Isis brought me memories now of lovely music of lyres, flutes, timbrels, of the high magical sound of the metal strings of the sistrum, which the Mother Herself held in her hand. There were only fleeting recollections of that naked blood dance, that night of rising into the stars, of seeing the scope of life in its cycles, of accepting perfectly just for a little while that the moon would always be changing, and the sun would set as it always rose. Embraces of other women. Soft cheeks and kissing and bodies rocking in unison. “Life, death, rebirth, it’s no series of miracles,” said the Priestess. “To understand it and accept it, that is the miracle. Make the miracle within your own breast.”
Surely we had not drunk blood! And the bull—it was a sacrifice only for the initiation. We did not bring helpless animals to her