Part 16

“Did you hear what the servant said?” Claudia whispered to Longinus, as the Tetrarch twisted his heavy hulk the other way to watch the retreating fellow. “I wonder....”

“Yes, so do I. And I’m sure Herodias does, too.” He turned to speak to Cornelius on his right. “You heard the servant?” Cornelius nodded. “Sounds like more trouble for the Tetrarch, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Cornelius agreed. “This seems to be a bad night for the old fellow, a tough night, indeed.”

The representatives of the Arabian king were formally polite, rigidly reserved.

“It is no pleasant mission on which we have been sent here, O Tetrarch Herod,” the spokesman of the visiting Arabians announced, once they had been presented to Antipas, “and we regret that we must speak as we have been ordered to speak, Sire, and particularly that ears other than the Tetrarch’s will hear the message we have been commanded to bring you from His Majesty, King Aretas. But the Tetrarch has so ordered it, and we must obey.” He paused, and from the fold of his robe pulled forth a rolled document.

“Go on, speak,” Antipas told him. “The Tetrarch wishes on his birthday”—he affected a grim smile—“that nothing be withheld from his beloved wife and his guests. The Tetrarch is prepared to hear the King’s message.”

The man nodded, and unrolled the document. “Sire, I have here the King’s message to the Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. But would not the Tetrarch prefer to have it read to him privately and then later, if the Tetrarch might still wish it, have it read to this assembled group?”

“Read it, now. Go on with it. Let us all hear the King’s message.”

“Very well, Sire.” He bowed and then, shifting his position so that the light from the wall lamps fell more directly on the parchment, held it out from him and began to read. But when the stiffly formal greeting was concluded, he raised his eyes questioningly.

“Continue,” said the Tetrarch.

The man nodded, and once more his eyes returned to the out-held document. “‘King Aretas declares that the Tetrarch Herod Antipas in sending his faithful wife, the King’s beloved daughter, a bill of divorcement, after having deprived her of the honors and privileges of the Tetrarchess of Galilee and Peraea, which honors and privileges without right he conferred upon her successor, has grievously injured and insulted the King’s daughter, his royal house, and the person of the King himself.’”

Claudia gently squeezed Longinus’ hand beside hers on the couch, but she dared venture no whisper. Slyly, though, they both glanced toward Herodias who sat eying the Arabian, a malevolent, frozen smile on her plainly flushed face.

The reader looked up again, but only for an instant, and then resumed his reading of the Arabian ruler’s grievances. “‘Now, therefore’”—he cleared his throat—“‘King Aretas demands that the Tetrarch Herod Antipas seek to make what amends he can by providing certain reparations to King Aretas, the terms of which shall be agreed upon in conference of the Tetrarch and his ministers with the King’s ministers who bear this message. But King Aretas further demands that before such negotiations are entered into, the Tetrarch Herod Antipas must put away or reduce to second wife the woman he now calls Tetrarchess and restore to her rightful place as Tetrarchess and first wife the King’s beloved daughter. He further demands....’”

“‘_He_ demands!’ Everything is ‘_He_ demands’!” Herodias had sprung to her feet, her eyes blazing, her shaking finger extended across the table toward the suddenly interrupted Arabian. Now she turned fiercely upon the Tetrarch. “Didn’t you hear him, O Tetrarch? ‘_He_ demands!’ That old goat of Arabia demands of you, Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. He writes you an evil, insulting message abusing you and your wife, and you sit here calmly listening while that man reads it before these your guests and me your Tetrarchess....”

“But, my beloved Herodias”—Antipas clutched the table’s edge as he straggled to get to his feet—“these men are only the messengers of King Aretas. What you hear are not this man’s words, they are the King’s.”

“Of course I know that, Antipas; I am not entirely a fool. I know they are the King’s words, but don’t they say that Aretas has empowered these men to represent him in your negotiations over me? Over me, do you hear? Negotiations designed to force me from the palace in Tiberias, to return _her_....”

Gently Antipas caught his wife’s arm and tried to calm her, to get her to take her seat. “Of course not, my dear, of course you’ll not be sent away, you’ll never be supplanted....”

She jerked her arm free, turned upon him, eyes blazing now in utter fury. “Then send them back to her doting old father! Send them packing, Antipas!” She shook her finger under his nose. “Or else, by all the great and little gods, I myself will go away!”

Antipas faced the still shocked Arabian. “Perhaps you had best excuse yourself,” he said evenly. “Tomorrow, in the calm of our council chamber, we shall be able....”

“No!” shouted Herodias. “Let them leave tonight, immediately. I can abide their insulting presence here no longer!”

The Tetrarch, ignoring his wife’s outburst, beckoned to a servant hovering nearby. “Escort these men into a suitable chamber, and see that they are adequately provided for with our best food and wine,” he commanded, “and after they have dined, show them to their bedchambers. They must be in need of replenishment and rest after their arduous journey to Machaerus.” He bowed to the delegation’s leader. “We shall defer further consideration of the matter until the morning. We are all greatly fatigued and agitated.”

The servant stepped forward and bowed to the visitors. They in turn, without any further word from their spokesman, bowed to the Tetrarch and turned with the escorting servant to withdraw from the triclinium.

Herodias, seated now and apparently calm, twisted around to watch them depart. But when at the doorway Aretas’ spokesman glanced over his shoulder toward the Tetrarch, she suddenly grabbed the goblet beside her plate. “Go!” she screamed. “Go! Go!” With all her strength she hurled the goblet toward the man; it shattered on the wall near the door. As a servant came running to pick up the broken bits of glass, she sank to the couch, pulled up her sandaled feet, and, sobbing wildly, buried her face in the pillow.

Judaea

32

The Tetrarch’s caravan had reached the flatland where the narrow Plain of Esdraelon pushing eastward between Mount Gilboa and Little Hermon touched the Jordan valley. There Longinus and Claudia had taken leave of the returning group.

Cornelius had wanted to send a detail of guardsmen to escort them the remainder of the way to Caesarea. “You never know when one of these zealot gangs may come swooping down on you,” he had protested to Longinus. “And if the Emperor’s stepdaughter should be captured, with Senator Piso’s son, and held for ransom ... well, by Jove, Longinus, you can imagine the uproar there’d be in Rome.”

But Longinus had refused the offer. He had assured Cornelius that their little party, he, Claudia, and the two servants she had brought with her, would join the first caravan headed toward Caesarea; until one came along they would remain at the nearby inn.

Though the Tetrarch’s parting words had been polite, he had seemed deeply meditative, still mired in the haze of introspection into which the startling twist of his birthday celebration had plunged him. Nor had the results of his meeting the next day with the representatives of King Aretas enlivened him, for though he had yielded nothing to his former father-in-law’s demands, he knew that the Arabians had departed in a bitter mood that for him boded no good. That this unfortunate series of events was known to two Roman centurions and the Procurator’s wife, and particularly to Longinus, who had come to Machaerus on a mission from the Prefect Sejanus whose accomplishment had been so disastrously thwarted by the Tetrarch himself, made the situation all the more distressing.

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.