| Hardly more than sixteen, slender but voluptuous, seductive in a diaphanous green gown with filigreed gold belt caught snug to her waist, she already understood her power. By birth a princess, by training she was a courtesan. Men ruled the world, but she would rule men. Her mother Herodias, who had left her father Herod Philip for his brother Herod Antipas, had taught her well. |
| Now Antipas himself was betrayed. At first he had reacted like everyone else, shocked, shaken. His heavy florid face, flushed with wine, had all at once gone white. He looked like a man I once saw who had just killed a child in a motor accidenthorrified, unbelieving. Strangely enough it never seemed to occur to me, as I stood there at the back of the hall, that I was twenty centuries before my own time, two thousand years before the invention of automobiles. |
| Don't ask me how I came to be there! I don't know myself, but there I was, then and there, as much as I am here and now. Of course it was impossible. Time flows forever forward, never back. You can't reverse time for two minutes, much less for two thousand years. |
| So at least I thought, until that night I stepped out of my own house and home for what I was certain would be the last time. The sleet was slashing viciously across the beam of my headlights as I drove down through town toward the river. The clock by the bank stood at two thirty-three past midnight, without another soul on the street to note it. I felt neither hope nor fear as I drove through the storm, but only a sick longing to get this over with as soon as possible. I wanted out, out of life, out of living, not just for a whileforever! Before the bridge I turned left downstream, watching for a certain bend in the river where I knew the water ran deep against the bank. |
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