Herodias, on the other hand, apparently had recovered completely from the loss of presence suffered at the Tetrarch’s banquet. She spoke with her usual polished ease. “Soon you must visit us again at Tiberias, my dear,” she said to Claudia, as the Tetrarch’s caravan prepared to resume its journey, “and bring Longinus to protect you from our plundering zealots.” She smiled pertly. “Longinus, help her arrange it. Let’s try to get together in Jerusalem, perhaps during the Feast of Tabernacles.”
They had ridden at once to the inn, which sat at the edge of the road that led from the Jordan ford straight westward past Mount Gilboa to the Samaria highroad from Galilee.
“We will require two rooms,” Longinus told the proprietor, a beak-nosed Jew with an unkempt, wine-stained beard. “The manservant will wish to sleep near the horses; if there is a place in the stables....”
“Yes, soldier”—the innkeeper had observed immediately that his guest was wearing a Roman military uniform—“he can bed down comfortably there. And for you and your wife”—he paused, questioning, and Longinus nodded—“one of the larger chambers, yes, and for the maid a smaller one, adjoining yours, perhaps?”
“It will not be necessary that it adjoin ours; wherever you can conveniently place her will be satisfactory.”
So a small room down the narrow hallway from theirs had been assigned to Tullia, and now the maid had retired to it, and the manservant to a mat at the stable. Claudia and Longinus had supper and, fatigued from the journey down from Machaerus to the Jericho plain, they retired to their chamber.
Longinus, seated on a low stool, was unbuckling his sandals. “I do hope a caravan for Caesarea comes along soon,” he said. “I’m anxious to get there; I’m almost tempted to venture the journey on our own. But with so many of those zealots in the hills....”
“Then you have tired of me this quickly, you can’t wait to return me to the Procurator?” she asked innocently.
“I’m getting tired of returning you to the Procurator,” he said.
“And after every time with you I’m more loath to go back to him myself.” The mask of innocence was gone; she was entirely serious now. “Longinus, isn’t there something we can do, some solution? We simply can’t go on like this indefinitely.” She had finished undressing; walking over to the bed, she pulled down the cover, slid beneath it, and pulled it up to her chin. “By all the gods, Longinus, there must be a better fate for us. Surely the granddaughter of an Emperor, the stepdaughter of another Emperor....”
“But that’s exactly why there is a problem,” he interrupted. “If you were just a Roman equestrian, you wouldn’t have been forced to marry Pilate in the first place.” He kicked off one of his sandals and twisted about to face her. “Claudia, you could slip away from him and we could go away somewhere, but that would hardly be a solution, though for me certainly it would be a permanent one.” He smiled vapidly. “Also you could ask Tiberius—and that means, of course, Sejanus, too—to permit you to divorce him; I hardly think, however, that they would allow you to do it, and then the situation would be worse than it is now; they would watch us all the more and doubtless send us to separate far distance provinces, the gods only know where.” He considered a moment. “There’s the possibility, though—probability, I hope—that Pilate will soon do something that will so infuriate Sejanus that he will depose him as Procurator and perhaps banish him to another remote province. Then they might allow you to divorce him and marry me, provided we went off to Gaul or”—he shrugged—“Britannia or Hispania or some other faraway place. But I’m not sure of that.” He removed the other sandal and placed it beside the first one. “That is probably our best chance, Claudia, maybe our only one as long as Tiberius and Sejanus stay in power. But even then I can’t proceed too fast against Pilate, because then Sejanus would surely suspect that you and I....”
“But doesn’t he think already that you want to marry me?”
“At first he did, I suspect. But now I think he’s convinced that our interest in each other is ... well, a purely physical one. And Antipas, I’m sure, has the same notion.”
“Certainly Antipas isn’t likely to cause us trouble. He’s in enough trouble himself to keep occupied with his own affairs.”
“Yes. Between Sejanus and Aretas he’s likely to be very busy for the next few months. And that gets me back—after you started me on another tack—to why I’m so eager to be in Caesarea. I’ve got to get off a report to Sejanus. I want him to hear from me what happened at Machaerus before someone else gets the chance to tell him. He may think my dallying allowed Antipas to behead the Wilderness fellow, and also he may wonder why I didn’t prevent the trouble between Antipas and Aretas from coming to such an acute crisis. So I want to get my report off as quickly as possible, do you understand?”
“Yes, I do understand. You’re quite right, it’s very important. I wouldn’t be surprised if Antipas got into a war with Aretas because of Herodias. And that would bring the Roman legionaries into the fighting, of course, and surely Pilate would be drawn in, and you.”
“Very probably, yes. Certainly it would involve Pilate sooner or later. And, of course, the Legate Vitellius would be implicated. Sejanus will certainly call on him to defend Galilee should Aretas attack Antipas.”
“Then the Tetrarch’s marrying Herodias may ruin him ... and Pilate, too,” Claudia said thoughtfully. She lay, head back, watching him finish his preparations for bed.
“You sound as though you hope it will.”
She stretched herself seductively under the light covering. “Well?” Her quick smile revealed a suddenly changed mood. “But for tonight at least let’s think no more of Antipas or Pilate. Tomorrow perhaps there’ll be a caravan along, and we’ll be starting for Caesarea.” Gingerly she turned down the covering beside her and held out white, bare arms to him. “Hurry, Longinus,” she said softly. “The night is wasting.”
33
Well ahead of his caravan returning to the palace at Tiberias raced the startling and, to many, the highly provocative report of the Tetrarch’s beheading of John the Baptist in fulfillment of a rash promise made to his wife’s dancing daughter.
The delegation that had gone down to Machaerus to intercede for the prophet’s release had brought back the tragic news; quickly the story had spread to Jerusalem and to Ophel, the teeming Lower City into which countless poor were squalidly compressed, and beyond there on past the villages of Judaea and Samaria, all the way down into Galilee. Along the shores of the little sea and in many a huddle of modest homes, and here and there in the pretentious houses of the rich, Israelites were shaking their heads sadly and muttering imprecations upon the Idumaean ruler of Galilee and Peraea.
With the account of the Wilderness prophet’s execution went the story, too, of how King Aretas of Arabia had sent his couriers to Machaerus to threaten Herod Antipas with war because of the Tetrarch’s having divorced the King’s daughter and made her supplanter Herodias his Tetrarchess. Soon rumors began to spread that war with Aretas was imminent and that the Arabian ruler was likely any day to bring his army surging across the borders of Israel to punish his former son-in-law.
Even before the arrival at Caesarea of Claudia and Longinus, the stories from Machaerus had reached the Procurator Pontius Pilate. Their lateness, she explained to Pilate, had been unavoidable; they had waited to join a caravan journeying westward rather than risk the hazards of traveling with only two servants through a region frequented by robbers and zealot revolutionaries.
Pilate appeared to accept without reservation her explanation; he indicated in no way that he might be jealous of the centurion. His attitude exasperated Claudia all the more.
“He can’t be that stupid,” she fumed one day to Tullia, with whom she had long come to talk frankly and in utter confidence. “He surely knows about Longinus and me. Yet if he’s in the least bit jealous of the centurion, he’s careful not to let me know. It’s insulting, Tullia, his indifference to me. It’s humiliating. Why do you suppose he acts that way?”
“But you are the stepdaughter of the Emperor, Mistress. What could he do, even though he is the Procurator?”
“He could be a man!” Claudia snapped. “He could kill Longinus, or try to, and give me a lashing!”
The maid shook her head. “No, Mistress, not even a Procurator would dare lay a hand on you, or anyone for whom you held high regard.”
“But I’m his wife, Tullia.”
“Yes, but you are also the Emperor’s stepdaughter, Mistress.”
Immediately upon their return to Caesarea from Machaerus, Longinus had prepared a comprehensive report to Sejanus in which he related the unfortunate events that had come to such a dramatic climax at the Tetrarch’s birthday banquet. The message was dispatched to Rome on an Alexandrian grain ship that had paused for a day in the harbor at Caesarea.
In the several weeks that followed he saw little of Claudia. During that period he went on a mission for Sergius Paulus to Jerusalem and upon his return took command while Sergius was away at Antioch in response to a summons from the Legate Vitellius, who commanded the Roman forces in that entire eastern region. Sergius, Longinus was sure, had been ordered to Antioch because of the Arabian king’s threat to attack Herod Antipas. The Legate, he reasoned, was planning to have his forces ready for action in the event that Aretas should challenge Rome by sending his army against the Tetrarch. The centurion presumed that Vitellius had summoned all military leaders stationed in Galilee—and possibly even the Tetrarch himself—to meet him at Antioch. Longinus learned that his guesswork had been correct; the meeting had been held, and the Legate, Sergius said, had been blunt in his conversations with the Tetrarch.
Shortly after the Caesarea garrison commander resumed his post, a message from Senator Piso for his son arrived. It instructed Longinus to set out as quickly as he could for the glassworks. Production had decreased, and the quality of the ware being manufactured was deteriorating. Morale among the slaves, his father reported, seemed at its lowest point. Longinus was to do whatever might be necessary to speed up the plant’s production and improve the quality of the glassware. The Prefect, his father added, was in complete concurrence with these instructions. A fresh supply of slaves, said the senator, was being sent out to Phoenicia by the Prefect; the slaves were being shipped aboard a government trireme that was leaving Rome within a week after the vessel bearing this letter would sail for Joppa. Longinus, the letter suggested, might even go aboard this letter-bearing vessel when it put in at Caesarea.
Little had happened in Rome since his departure for Palestine, his father reported. The Emperor was still at Capri, and Sejanus was directing the government of the Empire. His mother sent her love; she was quite well, though of late she had been disturbed at the indisposition of her little Maltese dog. But the animal, thanks be to Jove and the patient ministrations of Longinus’ mother, was now recovered.
“Try to achieve as quickly as possible a new production record at the glassworks,” his father concluded. The Prefect was keeping an eye on the figures, and it would be good business to earn the Prefect’s early approval. “Don’t spare the slaves; they are the cheapest item in the operational cost; replacements can be made quickly available.”
His eyes scanned the letter, hardly seeing the words. Ever the patrician Romans, his parents ... his mother concerned with the indisposition of that pampered, silken-haired pet, his father thinking only of pleasing Sejanus and building up for the Prefect and himself more millions of sesterces. Don’t spare the slaves; the life of a slave is the cheapest item in the production of beautiful glassware for the tables of patrician Rome and Alexandria and Antioch and Athens. Work them until they fall dead, and heave them into the flaming furnaces.
Longinus thought of the old slave. What would Cornelius think of his father’s letter, his father’s philosophy? But Cornelius’ father, too, is of the equestrian class; perhaps he shares the views of Senator Piso. Cornelius, of course, would disapprove. He would say that men are not the cheapest items in the making of glassware or anything else. He would hold with the Galilean carpenter that every man, Roman senator or Gallic slave or black savage from Ethiopia, is a son of that jealous Yahweh of the Jews and possessor of an immortal spirit.
And I, suddenly thought Longinus, do I hold with my father or with Cornelius and the Galilean?
The day after Herod’s birthday banquet Cornelius had related to him in dramatic detail what he contended was the Galilean’s miraculous healing of Lucian, but Longinus had shrugged off his friend’s fervor with the observation that once more, as in the case of Chuza’s son, the clever carpenter from Nazareth had successfully judged the hour at which the fever would break.
Of course his urbane, affluent father, rather than his Jewish-influenced friend the centurion and the Galilean mystic, was right. Even without using a stylus and tablet one can prove that a slave is the cheapest of the several things involved in the making of fine glassware; his father’s statement to that effect was quickly demonstrable. And yet....
Longinus shrugged and put away the letter. The ship, he discovered some moments later, would be at the Caesarea port only long enough to load supplies and freight; it would sail for Tyre within four or five hours.
He packed quickly and sent his bags to the dock to be put aboard. Then he rushed to the Procurator’s Palace to tell Pilate and his wife good-by. Happily, the Procurator had gone out. But Longinus could have only a few minutes with Claudia.
“I won’t be up in Phoenicia long,” he reassured her. “It shouldn’t take many days before I get the operation of the plant reorganized. And even before I finish the task, if I find it takes longer than I now think it will, I may be able to board a vessel and come down here for a visit. Claudia, why couldn’t you arrange a journey”—his tone was eager—“over to Tiberias for another stay in the Tetrarch’s Palace? That is, if in the meantime”—his grin lightened the tenseness of the moment—“Aretas hasn’t driven him and Herodias away? But if they’re still around, well, then I could just by chance select that same time to visit Cornelius.”
When he could stay with her no longer she summoned the palace sedan-chair bearers and rode with him down to the dock. After he had embarked and the ship was moving across the harbor to gain the open sea beyond the long breakwater, she stepped again into the sedan chair and was borne to the palace.
34
But the biting, sharp winds of spring, sweeping down from the mountains of Judah across the lower Shefelah and the region of the coast, had subsided into the still and enervating heat of summer, and the Centurion Longinus had not yet returned to his post.
Nor had Claudia received any message from him. Sergius Paulus, too, had heard nothing, as she found when on several occasions she had discreetly inquired about the centurion. The Procurator’s wife began to wonder if Longinus had been recalled to Rome and sent away by Sejanus on a mission to some remote province of the Empire, perhaps even as far, the gods forbid, as Brittania.
Then one day in late summer Cornelius appeared at the Procurator’s Palace. Pilate, it happened, had ridden down the coast to Joppa; Claudia and the centurion could talk freely. Hardly were they seated on the terrace overlooking the Great Sea when she confronted him, eyes solemnly inquiring, her forehead wrinkled.
“Cornelius, what can have happened to Longinus? I haven’t had a word from him or concerning him since he left here for the glassworks so many weeks ago. I can’t understand....”
“You’ve no cause to be worried,” he interrupted, laughing. “He is still at the glassworks, or at any rate he was when I was there recently. He’s been working hard. The plant had deteriorated considerably; he said it required more work than he had anticipated to restore its operation to normal. He’s been hoping all along to get back to Caesarea to see you, but he just hasn’t had the opportunity. And he thought it best not to send any written messages; unfortunately, there’s been no one coming this way with whom he dared entrust a spoken one ... except for me, of course. He gave me a message for you, but I’ve been delayed getting here. He thinks you heard from him weeks ago.”
“And what was the message he sent?”
“Just what I’ve told you.” He grinned. “That he was well, working hard, and hoped he would soon be in position to return to Caesarea.”
“That was all?”
“Should there have been more?” His eyes were teasing. “Yes, he said to tell you that as far as he was concerned, nothing has changed. He’s still looking to the future. Is that the message you sought?”
“Yes, and expected. And should you see him before I do, you may tell him that my message to him is the same. But, Cornelius”—her expression suddenly was earnest, almost pained—“things move so slowly; the future seems so far ahead, and the waiting is so long.”
“Maybe not, Claudia. Maybe just around the turn of the road you’ll....”
“But I can see no turn.”
“The situation out here just now is so explosive that any moment could bring great changes,” he insisted, “and overnight the problem you and Longinus have could be solved. Pilate and Herod both could lose their favored positions and, conceivably, their heads. And speaking of Herod reminds me that I was to give you another message, too.”
“From whom, Herodias?”
“Yes.”
“She wants me to return with you to Tiberias?”
“No, not that. But she does want you to meet her in Jerusalem in October at the Feast of Tabernacles. Pilate undoubtedly will go again this year, and Herod too; after beheading the Wilderness prophet and possibly involving Galilee in a war with Aretas, Antipas will surely want to go up to the Temple to worship the Jewish Yahweh; it’s the only way left—aside from dropping Herodias—for him to strengthen himself with his subjects.” He paused and leaned forward, smiling. “I’ll have to take my century up to Jerusalem, Claudia, as I do on all such occasions when multitudes of Jews assemble there, and I’ll try to bring Longinus over to Tiberias to make the journey to Jerusalem with me. If you’ll promise to join us there, I’m sure I can promise you I’ll have the centurion with me when I come.”
35
Almost overnight Jerusalem had been transformed.
Through the long drought of the summer months the ancient city had grown more drab with the deepening of fine dust upon its houses, its public buildings, and even upon the resplendent Temple itself.
But now, with the coming of autumn and the annual great Feast of Tabernacles, Jerusalem had bloomed into a veritable forest of greenery. As far as Claudia could see from her perch high on a balcony of the Tower of Antonia—down into the adjoining Temple area, along the terraced rise of Mount Zion, southward to sweltering Ophel and beyond the always smoking gehenna of Hinnom’s vale to the bluffs above it on the Bethlehem road, and eastward past the Brook Kidron and the Garden of Gethsemane up the slope of the Mount of Olives—stretched an almost unbroken canopy of green boughs now beginning to wilt. Balconies, roof tops, the grounds about the Temple walls, every unfilled small plot of the cluttered soil of Jewry’s holy city, were covered with these improvised, temporary dwellings.
The Feast of Tabernacles, Tullia had explained to her mistress, was the Hebrew festival marking the end of the harvesting season and the early beginning of the rains. It was an occasion of national thanksgiving to Yahweh, one that commemorated the Israelites’ years of wandering in the desert wilderness where, after their escape from Egyptian bondage, under the leadership of their great law-giver Moses, they had dwelt in booths—they called them tabernacles—made of branches hastily woven together.
“And to this day,” Tullia had concluded, “in accordance with the instructions in our sacred writings, every Jew during the Feast of Tabernacles must leave his house and for eight days live in a hut made of the branches of pine or myrtle or olive or palm.” The festival occasion, she further pointed out, was one of rejoicing for Yahweh’s deliverance of His children from slavery and His establishment of them in their promised land. To honor Yahweh, the celebrants would offer sacrifices each day and follow a prescribed order of worship and praise and thanksgiving. These ceremonies, Tullia declared, were carried out in great dignity and with reverence. Nothing she had ever seen in Rome, the maid was certain, would excel them in pageantry.
“Mistress,” she pleaded, “why don’t you move from the Palace of the Herods for a day or two to the Procurator’s apartment in the Tower of Antonia? From there you could look down on the ceremonial rites being performed at the Temple, and no one would need know that you were watching. And though it would have no interest to you as a service of worship, it should prove entertaining in the same way that the theater in Rome is diverting.”
“It might be amusing at that,” Claudia had agreed. “And there’s nothing else to do in Jerusalem anyway. But how is it, Tullia,” she asked, and her expression clearly revealed her puzzlement, “that you know so much about these festival customs? Even if your forebears were Jewish, you were brought up in Rome, and surely you couldn’t have learned all this at the synagogue on Janiculum Hill.”
“But, Mistress, through the years I have read our sacred scriptures, and I have heard much talk of our laws and customs. And you must know that an Israelite, though he may never set foot in Israel, if he is a true child of the faith, is loyal to our one God.”
“I know little about Israelites or their Yahweh, and I care less about either”—she smiled—“except for you, and I have never considered you a Jew except perhaps by blood. But as for loyalty, by all the gods, little one, I know you are loyal to me, just as your mother was to mine. All this Yahweh and Temple business, though, confuses rather than interests me. To me it seems the sheerest nonsense. How could any being worthy of being called a god appreciate the sight of poor cattles’ throats being slit; how could he enjoy the smell of warm blood and broiling fat? Certainly it nauseates me.”
“I have wondered that myself, Mistress,” Tullia answered. “But I believe He is pleased because we are seeking to please Him, even though our form of worship may not be too pleasing. Do you understand me, Mistress?”
“Yes, but I believe still that your worship is nothing more than superstition, just as our worship of the innumerable Roman and Greek gods is superstition. But”—she reached over and gently pinched the slave girl’s cheek—“I’ll do as you suggest; I’ll venture to watch the ceremonial at the Temple, and you can tell me what they are doing.”
So they had gone up to Antonia and from the balcony had watched the busy movement of the priests and the assembled throngs, many of them pilgrims returned from every province in the Empire, as these earnest Israelites performed the traditional rites of the ancient festival of worship. On her first morning, Claudia had arisen early and had stepped out onto the balcony. The sun was just lifting above the Mount of Olives, but already the Temple was astir, and pilgrims in their many colored robes were swarming into the Court of the Gentiles, the nearer Court of the Women, and the other more sacred precincts permitted to them. In their hands they carried leafed branches.
Claudia stared in rapt fascination at the spectacle below. As she leaned out over the balcony, she scarcely heard Tullia’s footsteps approaching behind her.
“Good morning, Mistress.”
“Good morning,” Claudia replied, turning to greet the girl. She pointed downward. “You were right about this offering much in the way of entertainment. It’s nearly as good as our Roman games.”
Tullia laughed. “Who knows, perhaps you, too, Mistress, may become a convert to our ways.”
“Hardly.” Claudia shook her head with a wry smile. Then she turned and looked thoughtfully down again at the bustling crowds in the Temple courts. “There’s one thing in particular, you know, that I can’t understand about the Jewish religion, little one.” The half-smile had been replaced by a perplexed frown. “Unless I’m mistaken, the Jews contend that their Yahweh is all-powerful, that he’s the only god there is, and that he rules over all peoples; yet they call him the God of Israel and seem to believe that he has no interest in anyone else. Down there, for example”—she pointed toward the Temple—“there are signs warning foreigners not to enter, under pain of death, certain of the sacred places. How do the Jews explain that? It seems to me that they make their Yahweh a sort of tribal god, one having less authority even than our Jupiter. If Yahweh is the god of all the world, how can the Jews claim him as exclusively theirs? And on the other hand, if he is the god and father of all peoples, doesn’t that make all peoples brothers?” She shrugged. “I see little sense to ... all this.” She broke off with a quick sweep of her hand toward the procession of priests and pilgrims moving down the slope toward the waters of Siloam.
“They do say that such is the teaching of Jesus, that our Yahweh is the father of all peoples, even the pagans who have never heard of Him, that....”
“Jesus?”
“The Galilean. The carpenter, Mistress, of whom the Prophet John declared himself to be the forerunner, you know. He’s been teaching down there at the Temple; he came up from Galilee, though he wasn’t here at the beginning of the feast, it was said. The priests are bitter toward him, especially Annas and Caiaphas and the Temple leaders; they say he is corrupting our religion.”
“Hah! Annas and Caiaphas talk of corruption! I should think they wouldn’t have the nerve. But have you seen this Galilean, little one?”
“No, Mistress, but I should like to. They say he speaks with great charm and clarity.”
“By the gods, I would like to hear him myself. He’s the one, isn’t he, who Cornelius contends healed his little servant boy? Maybe we could prevail on him to do some other feats of magic.”
“But his followers, so I hear, deny that he works magic. They say he does such things of his own power and authority, as the Messiah of God.”
“So Cornelius believes, according to Longinus; he thinks the Galilean is a man-god and that he really healed the little boy, but Longinus wasn’t that naïve. I wish Longinus were here to see the carpenter and hear his discoursing; I’d like to know his opinion of the man.”
But Longinus was not in Jerusalem. Cornelius had failed in his promise to bring the centurion to the Feast of Tabernacles. Hardly a week before they were to leave Tiberias, Cornelius had received a message from Longinus saying that the Prefect Sejanus had sent him instructions to board ship at Tyre for Antioch, where he would have business with the Legate Vitellius. What the nature of the business was, Cornelius told Claudia, had not been revealed. Nor had Longinus indicated how long he would be away. Had she known he would not be in the Judaean capital, Claudia told her maid, she herself would have remained in the provincial capital on the coast. That would have given her two weeks of freedom from Pontius Pilate, at any rate, for Pilate, with a maniple of soldiers and a retinue of servants, had come up with her to the festival and would probably remain in Jerusalem until the final ceremonies were completed and all the withered booths had been removed.
In late afternoon the Procurator’s wife ate an early dinner, and as the sun dropped behind the western walls, she stood again with Tullia at the balcony’s parapet and looked down upon the animated movement within the Temple’s courts.
“See, Mistress!” Tullia pointed. “They all carry unlighted torches. It will be beautiful, the illumination of the Temple. This is the great event of the festival; it is called the ‘Joy of the Feast.’ When the sun goes down, a watchman on the western wall of the Temple will give the signal and the candelabra will be lighted. See how high they are, perhaps thirty cubits. The light from them will illuminate the whole Temple area. It will be like nothing you have seen, Mistress!”
“Yes, Bona Dea, I agree it will be different. And in Jerusalem, Tullia, you’re different. I do believe I’ve never before seen you so excited.”
The service began with a great company of priests and Levites alternating in the antiphonal chant of the Psalms and other sacred Hebrew scriptures. Then, as the shadows lengthened and the quick murk of descending night began to envelop the vast edifice and the thousands massed within it, one of the priests, bearing a long lighted taper, moved through the Court of the Priests and down the steps to the Court of the Women.
“Look, Mistress! See the priest carrying the lighted taper,” Tullia said, her enthusiasm mounting. “With it he will light the great candelabra.”
The advancing priest paused. “Arise, shine!” his voice suddenly rang out, “for thy Light is come! And the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!” Deliberately, with all eyes upon him, he lighted first the central candle in the great stand, and then as quickly as he could with the uplifted long taper he touched the flickering flame to each of the three on either side of the central one; when he had finished his task before the first great candelabrum, he crossed with measured tread to the other and lighted it. As he touched the last candle and the flame caught, a great welling up of excited, triumphant song was lifted to the two on the balcony above, one the pagan daughter of Roman emperors and the other, her slave maid, daughter of ancient and buffeted Israel.
“What does the song mean, Tullia?” Claudia asked. “It seems to have a tone of triumph, of victory. Yet how can the people of Israel boast of their victories, if that is what they are doing?”
“It is a song of triumph, Mistress,” she replied. “It speaks, like the Feast of Tabernacles itself does, of the days when our fathers were led by the God of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. The song recalls, like the flaming candelabra, the long and wearisome journey upward into the promised land when the pillar of cloud led by day and the pillar of fire by night. It is more of the lore of our people. But look! The procession of light is beginning! See the torches!”
First came the Levites. In procession they passed the flaming candelabra, and as each man came opposite the blazing, darting fire, he mounted the steps, lifted high his torch, and touched it to the flame. Soon the torches of the Levites, followed by those of the pilgrims, had transformed the entire mountain of the Temple into a blaze of fire.
For a long moment, silent, Claudia stood at the balcony’s parapet and studied the procession of torchbearers; their voices, raised in song, filled the night. “It’s amazing,” she said finally. “I’ve always thought that the Jewish religion had no joy in it; I thought it was the worship of a stern, vengeful, morose god who was quick to punish any violator of his strict and senseless laws, who demanded bloody sacrifices and fasting and permitted no indulgence in pleasures. But these Jews seem to be having a grand time, almost as though they were devotees of Isis or Moloch.”
“Yes, but without the orgies of Isis and Moloch,” Tullia explained. “Many persons who are not of our faith do have that opinion of the God of Israel. But we believe that although He is stern and demands that we uphold His laws, He is also a loving God who wants His people to be happy. Some will be dancing here as long as their torches burn, Mistress.”
“Well, you may stay out and watch them as long as you like, Tullia, but I’m going to bed.”
“One more thing, Mistress,” the slave girl asked. “If I may, I should like at sunrise tomorrow to slip down into the Temple courts for the early service.”
“Of course, little one,” Claudia smiled. “But be careful. And perhaps it would be best if you made no mention of being in the Procurator’s household.”
36
Faintly at first and from afar off the silvery notes of a trumpet floated into her bedchamber. As she seemed to rise slowly upward out of a deep cavern of slumber, she sensed a stirring beside her.
“The morning watch at Castra Praetoria,” he said, as in the dim light of breaking day he raised himself on an elbow to look into her face, “and I have early duty.”
“But, Longinus,” she began a murmured protest, “must you forever be leaving...?”
“Today is very important,” he went on, unheeding. “I must meet the Prefect there to begin our journey down to Capri for an audience with the Emperor. Sejanus is going to recommend that Tiberius recall Pontius Pilate and banish him to Gaul and then name me as Procurator. But you are not to go with him into banishment. Instead, you will marry me and....”
“By all the gods! Longinus! Oh, by the Bountiful Mother! So long have we waited....”
She sat up from her pillow. The light was seeping through the narrow window beyond the foot of the bed; the chamber was bursting now with the sound of trumpets. Sleepily, though she was fast coming awake, she felt for the centurion and sought to hold on to the dream, but she knew he was not there. And in a moment’s hush between the trumpetings she heard from the room adjoining hers, through the doorway connecting the chambers, the sonorous, heavy snoring of Pontius Pilate.
“Tullia!” she called, keeping her voice down. But the door to the maid’s smaller chamber on the side opposite the Procurator’s was open; she had hardly expected Tullia to be there. The trumpets below were calling Israel to the sunrise worship, and somewhere in the milling throng of Jerusalem dwellers and pilgrims was her devoted maid.
She pushed down the covering, swung her feet around to the floor, and stood up. Drawing her robe about her, she stepped into her sandals and tiptoed out onto the balcony. Down below in the Temple courts a few torches sputtered sporadically in the strengthening light, and several still burning in the two giant candelabra offered more twisting blue-black smoke than illumination.
But there was a glory in the east; behind the rounded crest of the Mount of Olives a giant hand spread fingers of orange and gold and salmon and pink, and as the aureole fanned out higher and wider and its vivid colors swam together in one blazing brightness, the sun ventured to peek above the hilltop. In that instant the golden dome of the Temple flamed, and the topmost stones around the city’s western wall caught fire.
A blast of trumpets, silvery, melodious, triumphant, saluted the sun’s rising. And then another, and another. Looking down into the Court of the Priests, from which the sound had come, Claudia saw two lavishly caparisoned priests, carrying trumpets and walking abreast, marching toward the lower Court of the Women. They were going down the steps between the two courts when suddenly they paused and, lifting their instruments to their lips, once again blew three blasts. Then they moved austerely down the remaining steps and into the court, where they paused and blew three blasts again.
“Can they be sun worshipers, by all the gods?” Claudia murmured as she watched the priests offering what appeared to be homage to the newly risen monarch of the heavens.
The two priests, pacing steadily eastward through the great Court of the Women, stopped near its center and once more blew sharp blasts and then, lowering their trumpets, marched straight toward the Beautiful Gate, the eastern entrance to the court. But before the huge portal they stopped and faced about, so that now their backs were toward the sun.
“Our fathers, who worshiped likewise in this place, turned their backs upon the sanctuary of the Lord and their faces to the sun,” they said in chorus, and the words came up distinctly to Claudia, who was able to understand their meaning though she could not comprehend their significance. “But our eyes are turned toward the Lord!”
“Then at least they do not worship the sun,” she said to herself, “although I look upon the sun as being more godlike than their puny spirit one god.”
She stood another moment watching the pageantry below; then her eyes swept beyond the Temple walls to survey the tabernacled city and the area outside its protective walls. Today, she remembered, would see the ending of the Jewish autumn festival, the Israelites’ traditional Feast of Tabernacles. And it was well that it should. Already the little green bough shelters were beginning to wilt in the October sun. The pageantry, too, must be losing its luster, even to the people of Israel.
... And Longinus could not come to Jerusalem....
Turning from the parapet, she crossed the balcony and entered her chamber. Taking off her robe, she slipped back into the inviting warmth of the bed.
37
The opening of the bedchamber door awakened Claudia; she sat up in bed.
“I’m sorry, Mistress,” Tullia said apologetically as she closed the door behind her. “I thought perhaps you had gone out.”
“It’s all right. I’ve slept enough. Those early trumpets awoke me, and I went out on the balcony and watched the services beginning. That was probably just a short while after you left. Then I came back to bed. But why have you returned so soon? Surely that water-pouring ceremony isn’t finished yet.” She paused and studied the slave maid. “By the gods, Tullia, something’s happened. I can see stars in your eyes. And you’re all out of breath; you’ve been running. Quickly, tell me, what is it?”
“Oh, Mistress,” Tullia burst out happily, “he’s down there! He’s down there right now, in the Court of the Gentiles. I ran back to tell you.”
“Longinus!” Claudia scrambled to her feet.
The stars dimmed. “I’m sorry, Mistress, I hadn’t meant to disappoint you. But yesterday you said you’d like to see him....”
“The Galilean?”
“Yes, Mistress, and he’s down there right now. Do you remember that woman who came with the Tetrarch Herod to Rome, the beautiful one called Mary of Magdala?”
“Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”
“I was in the Court of the Women, Mistress, during the early service, when I came upon her. I recognized her, and I knew she was a follower of the Galilean. So I asked her to tell me if he had come to the Feast. She said he had and that even then he was in the Court of the Gentiles over near the Shushan Gate; today, she said, he would be teaching there, no doubt as soon as the service of the water pouring is finished. Soon the procession will return from the Pool of Siloam; it may be that it’s already back. If you’d like to eat, Mistress, and then go down to the Court of the Gentiles....”
“But I need not eat just this minute, Tullia. We’ll go now. Here,” she said, holding out her robe, “help me get dressed. I really would like to see that man and hear him speak”—she smiled—“and witness any feats of magic he might be prevailed upon to perform.” But quickly her expression sobered. “Tullia, you’ll have to fix me so that no one would even dream he was looking at the Procurator’s wife.”
“Yes, Mistress, but a veil and simple stola will serve that purpose.”
Claudia peeked into the adjoining bedchamber. It was empty. “Pilate no doubt has gone to the Praetorium,” she said. “He needn’t know I’m going down into the Temple precincts.”
With Tullia’s aid, she dressed, and they descended to the ground level and went out through the great vaulted doorway on the south side of the Tower. A moment later the two women, heavily veiled, entered the Temple enclosure through the North Gate of Asuppim and headed toward the Soreg, a lacy latticework of carefully carved and interwoven stones four and a half feet high surrounding the Temple itself. From there they turned left and strode eastward through the vast Court of the Gentiles with its jam of worshipers and the idly curious.
“Mary said that he usually sits over there”—Tullia pointed toward the cloisters along the eastern wall of the Temple—“near the Shushan Gate.” The Shushan Gate was at the northern end of the wall, directly east of the Beautiful Gate. Steps led up from the Court of the Gentiles to the Chel, a corridor running between the Soreg and the walls of the Temple proper, in which sat the resplendent, great Shushan Gate. The Court of the Women, in turn, was several feet higher than the Chel. At the western end of the Court of the Women, centering the wall, was another large opening, the Gate of Nicanor, and directly west of this gate and on a still more uplifted platform, stood the Great Altar. A person at the Gate of Shushan could look above marble steps ascending from one court level to another to the priests performing their orders before this tremendous and imposing pyramidal altar of burnt offerings.
As Claudia and Tullia neared the eastern end of the Soreg they could see the Shushan Gate, but no group was knotted about it. They could look across the cloister and out through the gate to the rise of the Mount of Olives beyond the Brook Kidron far below. “He’s not there,” Tullia said, her tone revealing disappointment. “Perhaps he went with the procession to the Pool of Siloam and has not yet returned. Surely he will be here soon.”
But as they turned the corner to their left, the two women saw a motley throng pushed together in a half circle about the steps that led up to the Chel. “Maybe Jesus is there,” Tullia exclaimed, keeping her voice low, for now they were nearing the outer edge of this crowd. She turned to confront a lean and bearded tall Israelite. “We have just come here,” she said. “We wonder why all these people are gathered about. Is some rabbi expounding the law?”
“Yes, the Galilean whom some hold to be the Messiah of God. The priests and the scholars have been trying to confuse him, but he has thrown their words back into their teeth.”
They moved forward into the outer fringe of the group and eased their steps toward the man sitting before the Beautiful Gate until soon they had an unobstructed view of him. From where they stood they could also see through the wide portals of the Beautiful Gate across the Court of the Women and the Gate of Nicanor to the Great Altar, upon which the High Priest Caiaphas, with two other Temple dignitaries assisting him, had tipped the golden ewer of water from the Pool of Siloam as a libation to Yahweh. Many of those now listening to the discourse of the Galilean had been present for the ceremonies of the water pouring, including a small knot of lavishly robed Israelites whom Tullia immediately recognized as the men who had been attempting to confound Jesus with their hate-inspired but politely phrased questions.
Evidently one of these men, a stout Pharisee from the looks of his garb, had just so challenged the Galilean. But if Jesus was perturbed, he did not indicate it. He was speaking calmly, and his resonant but gentle Galilean Aramaic came clearly to them above the din of the cattle in the stalls along the northern cloisters. “He doesn’t speak with the fire and thunder of that Wilderness prophet,” Claudia observed in whispered comment. “He seems not to be the fanatical type, and I’m surprised. He’s handsome, too, and I’m even more surprised at that. I thought he would be another lean and burnt, arm-waving, shouting fanatic, one with a long messy beard, flaming eyes, and soiled clothing—a generally anemic look. But this one’s a strong fellow, though his manner’s gentle enough. Even so, there’s something odd about this. I wonder....”
But suddenly she stopped speaking, for the rabbi had raised his bronzed hand, long forefinger extended, to point to one of the Pharisees who had been questioning him. “You say that I am but testifying to myself and that therefore my testimony is invalid. But I say unto you, my brother, that my testimony is valid. Is it not written in the law that the testimony of two witnesses establishes the fact? Then my testimony is true, for I bear witness and likewise my Father that sent me bears witness. That makes two witnesses; that establishes the truthfulness of the testimony I have borne.”
“Who is this father of whom he speaks?” asked a man standing near the two women. “Is he not the son of a carpenter of Nazareth long dead? How then does he say that his father’s testimony corroborates his own?”
“He’s not speaking of his natural father,” another man standing near-by replied. “He means the God of Israel as his father.”
“But isn’t that blasphemy? How can a man call himself the son of Israel’s God?”
“But if indeed he is the Messiah....” The second man paused, his hand on the questioner’s arm, for Jesus had arisen and, turning, was pointing toward the high altar before the Holy of Holies. “Behold, I am the water of life! If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” The Galilean spoke in calm tones but with warmth of feeling, and in the pause that followed none of his hearers spoke. Again he pointed, this time toward the giant candelabra below the Gate of Nicanor in the Court of the Women; last night the great court and all the environs of the Temple had been ablaze with light from the candelabra and the hundreds of flaming torches. “I am the light of the world!” he declared. “He that follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life!”
Claudia nudged her maid. “What does he mean, Tullia?” she whispered.
“I’m not sure I know, Mistress,” the girl answered. “But I take it he’s using a kind of symbolism that the Jews can understand. He must be referring to the ceremony of water pouring and to last night’s illumination of the Temple.”
But the carping Pharisees and the other Temple leaders pretended likewise not to understand.
“The water of life, the light of the world. And your father being a witness to the truthfulness of the testimony you present. These things are incomprehensible to us,” one of them declared. “Rabbi, wasn’t your father a carpenter in Galilee? And where is he to support your witness? Isn’t he dead? How then can you say that you and your father make two witnesses? We have not seen your father, nor have we heard him speak.”
“You speak the truth when you say that you have not seen my Father.” His voice was calm, even gentle, but his eyes were filled with fire. “Neither have you seen me. For if you had seen me, you would likewise have seen my Father, for the Father is in me and I am in the Father. My Father and I are one.”
“Is he speaking of the God of Israel as his father?” A portly Pharisee near the two women had turned to speak with one of his colleagues. “Is that the meaning of his strange utterance?”
“I think so.”
“Blasphemy!” declared the questioner. “He makes himself one with God!”
But Jesus had heard.
“No,” he declared, looking the fat one full in the face. “Only truth. And if you knew me and were willing to live by my teaching, you would know the truth, and the truth would make you free. You would not walk in darkness, but in the light of the world, in the fullness of life.”
“But, Rabbi, we are free. We are children of Abraham. We are not slaves. How can you say that we would be made free? We have never been slaves to any man.”
“Any man who sins is a slave, and no slave is a son of the house; yet if the son of the house sets him free, he is no longer a slave.”
“But we are sons of Abraham. We are no bastards. We are the children of the God of Israel.”
Jesus leveled his forefinger at the protesting Pharisee. “No, you are not the sons of the Father; you are rather sons of the Evil One, for he is the enemy of truth and you likewise are its enemies.” His words were uttered in calmness, but they were emphatic, and his eyes flashed. “You will neither hear the truth nor comprehend it.”
“But, Rabbi, you must be mad.”
Jesus smiled, and Claudia, who had been watching him in complete fascination since her first sight of him, thought she detected a hint of restrained amusement in his dark eyes. “No,” he said, “I am not mad; I speak the truth, and whoever lives by the truth, my brother, will not even see death.”
“But haven’t all the fathers in ages before—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, all the righteous ones of old—haven’t they all met death? Then how can you say that others will not die?”
“I dare say, he is not speaking of physical death,” Tullia whispered. “It’s obvious he’s referring to the afterlife of the spirit. But these sniveling Pharisees don’t even want to understand him.”
Yet Jesus did not answer the Temple leader, for in the rear of the press about him a commotion had arisen and the Galilean had turned from the questioning Pharisee to look out over the heads of the people now craning their necks to see the cause of the tumult. The questioner and his little knot had turned, too; the Galilean’s inquisitor, Tullia surmised, was quite willing for the exchange to be ended, for he had not been faring well in matching wits and words with the tall one from Nazareth.
Tullia and Claudia, too, had twisted about to look eastward toward the sounds that so precipitately had disturbed the strangely inspiriting discourse and the carping questions of the Nazarene’s challengers. In that same instant they saw, out in front of the gate of Shushan, several coarse men half-dragging, half-carrying a bedraggled Jewish woman toward the throng ringed about Jesus. As the crowd opened a lane inward to the Galilean, the men rushed the poor creature toward him and savagely thrust her to the ground at his feet. A man who had been walking in the rear of the pitiful procession, whom Tullia took to be a minor Temple priest, stepped in front of Jesus.
“Rabbi, this woman has been taken in the act of adultery, in the very act, Rabbi, as the witnesses will testify. Now the law of Moses says that such a woman must be stoned.” He paused, and his eyes surveyed the half circle of intent, set faces. Along the rim heads nodded in agreement.
“Is that really the law of the Israelites?” Claudia whispered. “Stone to death a woman for such offense, by all the gods!”
“Yes, it’s the old Mosaic law, Mistress.”
“That is barbarous, Tullia. By all the gods, if I were a Jew, then they....” But she paused, for the man had turned back to question the Galilean. “You, however, Rabbi, have been teaching a new law. What would you say to her punishment? Must she be stoned in accordance with our ancient laws or not?”
Jesus was eying the poor woman, who had scrambled to her feet and was trying to smooth out her disordered robe. Frightened and humiliated, she kept her eyes on the ground; then, as the man finished his question and the suddenly quiet throng listened for the reply, she raised them and looked, with a mixture of defiance, contempt, and fright, at the tall bronzed man before her.
“But what can he say?” Claudia whispered. “Aren’t they trying to trap him into advocating violation of their laws?”
“Yes, Mistress. And they know, too, that they have no authority to stone anyone to death unless the person is first condemned by the Procurator. Either way, it’s a trap they’re trying to set.”
“Then I shall speak to Pilate....” She stopped; Tullia had laid a gently restraining hand on her arm, for Jesus had bent down suddenly and without offering to answer the Jew who had questioned him had begun to trace with extended forefinger certain markings in the dust of the marble pavement.
About him stood the silent crowd. Some seemed fearful of the horror they might soon be witnessing; others, their cold smiles attesting to their sadistic natures, were waiting expectantly to witness the woman’s death agonies; only a few solemn faces revealed concern and deep pity. But the little knot of Pharisees stood with arms folded across their rounded paunches; their smug smiles betrayed their confidence that at last, on the final day of the great festival, they had run to earth this annoying and dangerous young Galilean who had been so cleverly eluding them.
Then, raising his head, Jesus faced the man who had questioned him. “You have testified aright as to the law of our father Moses,” he said, his voice calm, deliberate. “The law of Moses commands that the woman ... and the man ... taken in adultery be stoned. But you ask me my interpretation of this law?”
“We do, Rabbi. What will you do with this woman?” The man looked about the semicircle of cold, hard faces, and one by one the Pharisees nodded approval of his questioning. “Rabbi, what is your law in this case?”