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and be damned so far as she was concerned. She herself was clad only in a white cotton undershift—cotton was more desirable, more expensive than silk then—and she kicked off her ornate sandals that she might walk comfortably barefoot.
    At the sight of this, the alabarch’s seneschals, who were in charge of the party, spurred their donkeys up to Berenice, voiced their horror shrilly, and pleaded with her to follow the dictates of modesty by returning to her carriage. She told them, in no uncertain terms, to go soak their heads in the waters of Galilee.
    “But, Princess,” they pleaded, “it is not fitting.”
    “And who are you wretched scribes to tell me what is or is not fitting?”
    “We beg you, out of consideration for our noble master.”
    “I am less concerned for your noble master, as you put it,” Berenice replied, “than I am for this wretched slave girl of mine. Far less. She, at least, helps me to wash and dress, but for your noble master, I am merchandise to be bought or sold. Well, I have been purchased, and there are my obligations to your noble master. Now get out of my sight!”
    Dumfounded at this kind of response from a young lady of fifteen years, the seneschals retreated, but they were hardly mollified by her attitude, and they sedulously entered in their journals those actions of hers during the ensuing trip that they considered worthy of the alabarch’s notice—which embraced almost all of her actions. Berenice was young enough to respond to handsome lads in brass armor, and the cavalrymen included some of the best-looking young Jews in Alexandria. They soon became her willing servants, admirers, suitors, and defenders; and for the time being she forgot her distaste for the opposite sex. Thus, the trip to Egypt turned out to be far more pleasant than she had ever imagined it might be.
    But Egypt itself held none of the joys that might be anticipated in connection with a wedding or a bride. The great house of the alabarch was all that she could have expected, but the atmosphere was that of a tomb, and the man who greeted her was sunk in bereavement and despair. Berenice had steeled herself to despise all that she encountered in Egypt, but already, when she came to the palace of the alabarch, her adolescent arrogance had been dulled by the wide avenues, the splendid public buildings, and the magnificent monuments of Alexandria. Like all Greek cities, it gleamed with color, sang with the blues and greens and yellows and burning reds that covered every inch of stonework and brickwork; and through its boulevards swarmed the traffic of half a world—Romans and Greeks and Egyptians, black Nubians, hooded Arabians, Jews and Syrians and Gauls and Libyans and Parthians—a city so large and alive and. noisy that by comparison her family’s home seat of Tiberias was only a back-country village on the shore of an isolated highland lake.
    So when she finally faced the alabarch, the edge had already been taken off her mettle, and she faced him soberly enough. She was well clad now, in silks and jewels, her hair gathered in a net of priceless pearls, her feet shod with golden sandals, and upon her rich red hair, a thin diadem with a lion rampant over a single ruby, this of gold, the lion of Judah, to seal her right to the Hasmonean blood and the Hasmonean line. Let it be Alexandria or Rome—still in all the world there was no bloodline as ancient as hers, no family so noble—who were kings when Rome was a village of mud and wattle huts. Perhaps the alabarch thought of this as he looked at her, no child this, but a woman of strange, almost bizarre beauty, thought of what might have been, wiping his eyes. He was a fine figure of a man, tall, wide-shouldered, erect, his beard white, his eyes piercing blue, as blue as the long robe he wore belted at the waist. He was a commanding figure with a commanding mind—a doer and leader, even as his brother Philo was a dreamer and a philosopher. His seneschals