Chapter 33 #2
Here’s where the story turns, Titia. Mother died, and with her, my spirit.
I took a Nazirite vow, abstaining from wine and even shaving my head.
As is the custom, I wore no shoes and kept my nails untrimmed, and in this state, your uncle and I faced Judea’s Jewish rebellion.
You’ve never lived in Roma, my dear, so you will not know what it looks like when the Romans decide to display their power.
It’s terrifying, yet many Jews mistakenly thought they could somehow resist. A fool’s game.
What means did they possess against such an empire?
Here, her mother stopped. “It’s so much like the war,” she said, her voice husky. “What means did we possess against such an empire as the Germans?”
“That’s what they tell us in school, Mamma. History repeats.”
Zaneta sucked in a deep breath and forged on.
The scenes in the streets broke my heart.
Debased as I was, under the conditions of my vow, I sought audience with the procurator to plead their case.
I have never witnessed such atrocities before or since.
With my bare feet in pools of my people’s blood, I begged for his mercy.
Something in the soldiers hardened. I felt it when it happened, as if the whole room had gone cold.
One of them turned his eyes on me. What a sight I must have been, with my shorn head and tearstained cheeks.
No queen was I, to him. I fled then. It took me a full two days to stop trembling.
Mira’s mother lay the parchment in her lap and looked out at the horizon.
Mira sensed a shift in her. Something about Berenice’s words had resonated deeply.
In a sense, they were all kindred spirits, sharing their lineage, but this seemed to connect in a different way with her mother—a memory that Mira wasn’t privy to.
She wanted to probe but was afraid to break the spell.
Agrippa and I tried to persuade our people to comply, but they’d suffered immensely under the Romans.
Our own community hated us for trying to dissuade them, deemed us traitors and worse.
We had to flee finally when they burned our home, and from that point on, the Jewish people—those in my own community—set their hearts against me.
Say what you will, but we found sympathy with the Romans.
Not all of them were murderous beasts. So it happened that Agrippa and I were invited to a banquet, where we were decidedly in the minority.
Who do you think the man at the table’s head was?
Your father, Titia. That was the night we met.
I’d never before felt so enlivened by a presence, though he was at least ten years my junior.
I, a twice-widowed Jewish queen, fell in love with Titus, the very Roman ruler sent to suppress my people’s rebellion.
If you had seen him: blue eyes lit from within and shoulders chiseled from stone.
After the banquet, he sent for me, and I knew when the attendant knocked on my chamber door that I would go gladly.
The Jews hated us both for it. The Romans hated him for stooping to consort with me. Not even a year after Vespasian was installed, Titus—my Titus—helped sack Jerusalem and destroy the temple. How could one heart hold both complete sorrow and utter love at once? That was my lot. I was rent in two.
The last time I returned to Roma, Titus was under such pressure from the Roman public.
Our love fell to dust, and he sent me away.
That’s how, Titia, we ended up here, in exile, without family or fortune, but with all the time necessary for plying the sea’s gift, the very thing I’d wished for long before.
Titus couldn’t have guessed I carried you within me as I left.
Here, her mother grasped Mira’s hand and held it fiercely. She’d stopped several times while reading to catch her breath. To Mira’s astonishment, her mother wept openly, her words strangled as she read.
“What is it, Mamma? What’s upset you?”
“I wish I’d read this years ago,” she whispered. “I should’ve looked for the box. I had no idea her life held such things as mine.”
Mira nodded. “I know the war must have been impossibly hard.”
Zaneta looked at her then, her eyes full. “It’s not just that,” she said. She seemed about to say something else. Mira could see her lips trying to form words, but something still kept her from speaking them aloud.
“This last,” her mother said. “Let me read you this last part.”
My daughter, you were God’s final gift to me, my restoration. He allowed me to raise you in this place, surrounded by water, where the sea thread is plentiful. The weaving overflows from my grateful heart that our names and craft will go on, that my mother’s skill, and mine, continues through you.
You’ve learned all I have to teach you, and your fingers are deft at the loom.
I tell you the truth, Titia. Though this thread is precious and our weaving skill a gift, it will never be stronger or more precious than you.
Its gift has been to teach us daily, as we work at the loom, how immutable is the link between mother and daughter.
Should there come a day when the byssus disappears or no more hands are left to weave its magical golden threads, nothing can erase the love I carry for you, or that my own mother carried for me.
No destiny of vocation trumps that, my dearest. The spirit of it will live on as long as mothers have daughters.