Queen of the Jews by NL Herzenberg

Her parents didn’t know that in her room Shifrah was plotting the end of the marriage that hadn’t yet begun; that meals brought to her three times a day on a silver platter were eaten by her in bed; that she was becoming fat and sluggish from lying all day, and that she knew she was becoming fat and was satisfied with that, because Ptolemy, son of Abubus, would reject a fat bride, and she would be happy again, and she wouldn’t have the dream that came every three nights in which her bridegroom was instructing someone to murder her father and another voice was disagreeing with Ptolemy by proposing a more effective way of killing. There was no use telling Simon about it. She had tried telling him once, after the dream came the fifth time, and not only had he brushed her off without paying her any attention, but when she persisted in asking him not to give her away to the man who contemplated his murder, Simon sent his Essene to talk it over with her, visionary to visionary. The Essene, who spent his life in contemplation and therefore was an authority on spiritual matters, listened to her with barely concealed boredom and, when she finished, sighed and said that pubescent girls were known to have hysterical premonitions that revealed less about the future than about their own fears, and that Shifrah’s recurrent dream was no more than a reflection of her own uncertainty, which, understandable though it was, was not at all unusual. This uncertainty was something she had to deal with by telling herself that she was not the first girl to marry a man chosen by her father in the interests of the state, and that belonging to a ruling family had its drawbacks as well as its benefits, and as the benefits surely outweighed the drawbacks and her dream was the only drawback she could complain about, she was a lucky girl indeed.

On the day of the wedding, they broke down her door and forced her into a wedding gown that ripped at the seams because the tailor who had made it knew only her old dimensions, as did everyone, including her parents, whose surprise at seeing her flesh bulge out of the gown was matched only by dismay on the face of the groom. Yet his look was not a simple dismay: it was mixed with satisfaction, as though this was just 121