Part 20

Already the assailants in the defile of the road were fleeing. Some clambered up the steep sides of the little ravine that opened into the gulch of the roadway and disappeared into the sheltering boulders above; others ran down the road to the end of the canyon and turned eastward; several went the other way along the narrow trail and then turned off in the same direction the others had taken. But before they had all cleared the road, Bar Abbas and his companions on the boulders above, still clutching their spears, had dropped into the defile and without a glance toward their now liberated prisoners had scampered into the converging ravine.

Hardly had the burly Bar Abbas disappeared before the pursuing Romans were plunging into the boulders beside the road. In another moment several of them were peering down into the narrow roadway. In that same instant Cornelius, looking up, spied Decius. “Here!” the centurion called out. “Down that way!” He pointed. “Hurry!”

“Cornelius, by all the gods, you aren’t going to let them get away, are you!” screamed Herodias, having suddenly found her voice.

“But, my dear Herodias”—Antipas turned ponderously in his saddle to face his spouse—“certainly the centurion knows what....”

“Hah! The Tetrarch has come to life! He speaks, now that Bar Abbas and his revolutionaries have fled,” she observed sneeringly.

“Bar Abbas,” Cornelius said, ignoring the Tetrarchess and Herod, as Decius and several of his detachment clambered down into the road. “They pounced on us from the rocks there”—he pointed—“and had us disarmed. I was hoping you would hear the commotion.”

“They jumped us the same way, Centurion,” Decius said. “I think they killed two of our men. I left some men with them. We got several of the revolutionaries, though.”

“It’s a poor exchange. But get after him, Decius. Here, Galba, Licinius, Mallius”—Cornelius called out a half dozen of the men who had been in his detachment—“go with them; you saw Bar Abbas; you’ll know him.” Already the men were grabbing up their swords from the pile Bar Abbas’ men had left in their rush to get away. “They were headed east, toward the Wilderness. In a moment they’ll be running into Lucius on the flank over there. If he can turn them back, we’ll have them in a bag. But they may break through him. Stay after them, Decius; get that Bar Abbas, and try to take him alive.” He turned to another of his men. “Livius, take a detachment and go down the road; you saw where the revolutionaries turned off left. Marius, take your squad and go that way”—he pointed up the Jericho road toward Jerusalem—“and run down those that fled in that direction; you saw where they turned off. Follow them. And all of you be careful; we want no more ambushes.” He called out several more names. “You men stay here with me,” he said. “We’ll see that no harm comes to the Tetrarch and his lady.” He smiled wryly as he looked toward Herodias. “We almost didn’t do that awhile ago.” Then he turned again to Decius. “We’re moving out of this trap in here, though,” he said. “We’ll be up there a thousand paces. And hurry, men; it will soon be dark in those rocks.” He signaled for them to be off. “I want that Bar Abbas.”

Less than half an hour later Marius and his men returned. They were leading a manacled Israelite. “We saw only five men,” Marius reported. “Two of them we killed, and this one we cornered between two big rocks. The other two slipped away; we searched, but we’re sure they’re gone now. This fellow is a Galilean, named Gesmas, he says.”

“And you had nobody hurt?” Marius nodded. “Good. Keep a sharp eye on this fellow.” Cornelius pointed. “Livius is coming in. No prisoners, I believe.”

Livius reported that his men had killed or wounded several of the fleeing revolutionaries. He had had only one man cut slightly by an Israelite’s desperately wielded spear; the weapon had grazed the soldier’s shoulder. “We saw no signs of Lucius’ flanking file,” Livius revealed. “They must have been up ahead, and the revolutionaries we were pursuing must have slipped around their rear. They know this country; they simply disappeared like conies into those big rocks. But maybe Lucius intercepted some of those that Decius went after.”

“Look!” One of the Romans pointed. “There’s Decius.” Having moved up from the narrow defile through the boulders, they could see out on both sides of the road. “And he has two prisoners.”

“Yes. And one of them, by all the gods”—Cornelius was straining to see more clearly in the gathering dusk—“is Bar Abbas! Great Jove, he caught the big prize!”

The other Israelite, too, they discovered in a moment, was a much wanted revolutionary, one of Bar Abbas’ principal lieutenants, a Galilean named Dysmas.

Lucius had stayed out on the flank, Decius explained, to prevent any sudden desperate attempt of the Zealots to rescue their leader. They were still no doubt in the rocks back from the road, perhaps regrouping their scattered forces.

“From here into Jerusalem the road is clear, and they won’t be able to prepare any ambush.” The centurion called out four soldiers standing near him. “Go tell Lucius to come in nearer. We can move faster that way, and in the deepening darkness it will be safer for everybody. Tell him we’re starting at once for Jerusalem.” As they were leaving, he turned again to Decius. “See that the prisoners are bound securely, and manacle each one between two of our men. And box them in with guards. Give them no chance of getting away from us or being rescued.”

Herodias had been watching silently but with evident interest. “It seems to me, Centurion,” she observed petulantly, “that you could prevent either eventuality by executing these rebel scum right now.”

“I am a Roman soldier, Tetrarchess. These men have had no trial.”

She pointed to her silent spouse, glumly sitting his horse. “He is the Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. These revolutionaries are Galileans. He is the proper one to try them.”

“No, my dear Herodias,” Antipas spoke out. “This is neither the time nor the place to conduct any trial. Centurion, let us proceed with your plans to go on into Jerusalem.”

Herodias lifted her head haughtily, but she made no reply. As soon as the caravan re-formed and was ready for the march, Cornelius gave the command to move forward. Less than two hours later he led the Tetrarch and Tetrarchess through the gate and let them and their servants into the gloomy pile of the old Hasmonean Palace. From there he marched his century to the Fortress of Antonia, where he surrendered his three prisoners to the dungeon jailer, who locked them, still bound securely, in the darkness and squalor of one of the lowest-level cells.

When he had seen to the quartering of his men in their Antonia barracks, he climbed the stone stairway in the southwestern tower and walked along the corridor to the room he had been assigned in the officers’ quarters. He had decided he would have a steaming bath and put on fresh clothing before going down to the mess for a late evening meal.

The chamber, the centurion found, was close and warm. He pushed open the window; then he unbolted the door and walked out onto the balcony. Down below lights blazed in the Temple courts, and men scurried to and fro, already in a frenzy of Passover preparations.

40

Once again the household of Procurator Pontius Pilate was settled in the magnificent great Palace of the Herods; once again the ancient capital of Israel was teeming with countless Jews come up for the Feast of the Passover.

From every region and hamlet, almost from every home, in Judaea, Samaria, Peraea, and Galilee, from Antioch, Damascus, Tarsus, Alexandria, Memphis, and Cyrene, from Ephesus, Athens, and Corinth, from all provinces rimming the Great Sea, even to Rome and beyond, from the islands of Cyprus and Sardinia and Sicily and Crete and those numerous smaller ones dotting the Aegean, devout Israelites had swarmed into Jerusalem’s crowded narrow ways and squares before the gates.

Every Jewish home, whether pretentious stone residence crowning Mount Zion or squalid malodorous hovel burrowed beneath the city’s walls in noisome Ophel, was overflowing with pilgrim kinsmen returned for this greatest annual feast of Israel. For every person living in Jerusalem, Centurion Longinus casually estimated as he stood on Fortress Antonia’s balcony outside his chamber, perhaps ten pilgrims had squirmed themselves inside the walls of the old city. And countless other thousands had been unable to find living quarters within the walls. Throngs of Passover celebrants overflowed the slope downward to the Brook Kidron and up the eastern rise past Gethsemane to the summit of the Mount of Olives and as far as Bethany. To the south, beyond the ever smoldering fires of the refuse dumps in the Hinnom valley, and to the west, tents and brush arbors of Passover pilgrims dotted the untilled areas through which ran the Bethlehem road. Northward, too, though Longinus could not survey that section of Jerusalem and its environs because of the great tower at his back, and to his right over beyond the massive pile of the Palace of the Herods, for many furlongs past the Ephraim and Joppa Gates, thin curlings of grayish-white smoke spiraled upward from small fires over which Passover pilgrims were bending now in preparation of the evening meal.

Longinus had been quartered near the Centurion Cornelius, but he had hardly seen his friend. The night of Cornelius’ arrival from Galilee with the Tetrarch’s party and his three Zealot prisoners, they had talked briefly in the mess hall, but they were both weary from the traveling and soon retired to their beds. The next day Pontius Pilate, greatly pleased at the capture of the wily zealot chieftain, had ordered Cornelius to take his century and scour the rocks above the Jericho road into which the evening before the marauders had disappeared. He had commanded the centurion to ferret out every member of Bar Abbas’ band and either capture or kill him. “And follow them as far as Galilee if need be, Centurion,” the Procurator had instructed him. “Capture any you can, and bring them back here; we will crucify them during the Passover festival, and for the thousands of rebellious, stubborn Jews who will see them dying on the crosses it will be a salutary lesson. It may help them realize what fate awaits those who thus oppose Rome’s authority and power.”

Longinus wondered what success Cornelius was having. Evidently he had been forced to pursue the fleeing revolutionaries a long way, perhaps even as far as Galilee, where they might expect to find haven among kinsmen and friends. No doubt the attackers of the Tetrarch’s party had separated in their flight from the soldiers of Cornelius. It would be particularly difficult, virtually impossible, in fact, to round up all the revolutionaries Bar Abbas had been leading, Longinus felt. In all probability, he reasoned, a number of them had slipped into Jerusalem a few minutes after Cornelius had entered the city, perhaps even ahead of his caravan, and were now safely lost among the tens of thousands deluging the ancient capital.

Nor had Longinus had an opportunity thus far to spend any considerable time alone with Claudia. Though Pilate had been keeping close to his headquarters in the fortress during the day-time, he had been returning to the palace at night, and his bedchamber was beside Claudia’s and connected with it by a doorway. The Procurator, too, had issued orders for all officers not on active duty to be quickly available; Pilate seemed unusually restive. Longinus felt that Pilate was determined to prevent any small turmoil among the Jews from developing into a crisis whose handling by him might further jeopardize his standing with the Prefect Sejanus and the Emperor. With so many Jews congregated in Israel’s holy city on a festival occasion so characteristically Jewish and one that so emphasized the peculiarly nationalistic spirit of the Jews, the situation was always highly inflammable. A small spark, if not snuffed quickly, could blaze into a holocaust.

One such minor incident that had taken place on the first day of the Jewish week might have provided such a spark, had the principal actor in it been of a mind to cause trouble. And, strangely, without having known what he was seeing, Longinus had witnessed this small happening.

He had breakfasted early with several fellow officers and had come up to his chamber this particular morning, when, to enjoy a stirring of the already warming April air, he had stepped out onto the balcony. Down below him the Court of the Gentiles was a hive of bustling activity. Out beyond the eastern wall in the direction he happened to be looking the slopes were alive with pilgrims preparing for the great festival. But up on the balcony he was safe from the stir and seething and the interminable chattering of excited Jewry, and a gentle breeze fanned him. He sat on the wide stone railing of the rampart, and idly his gaze went down the nearer slope to the Brook Kidron and along the meandering road on the other side as it climbed past Gethsemane’s olive grove toward the hill’s summit.

It was then that he noticed a procession moving slowly but with evident enthusiasm downward over this road toward the city from the direction of Bethany. Immediately his interest was attracted to the motley parade. Above the harsh cries of the hawkers in the Temple courts, the quarrelsome tones of bargaining, and the dull lowing of the cattle in the stalls awaiting sacrificing on the Great Altar, Longinus could distinguish the screamed hosannas of this unrestrained movement of dancing, singing, joyous people. Many of them were waving green branches they must have torn from trees and shrubs along the roadside. Occasionally the centurion would catch sight of an erect, tall man astride a white donkey. He adjudged the man to be tall, because his feet were not far from the gravel of the road as he sat astride the beast. And then he would lose sight of the rider as the shouting celebrants swirled about him.

Some popular rabbi with his people coming up to Jerusalem for the Passover, Longinus surmised, as he watched the writhing column approach the Brook Kidron crossing. Soon it disappeared under the walls down near Dung Gate, but presently it emerged again into his sight; he followed its progress through the cavernous alleys of Ophel, sometimes seeing it crossing a narrow opening between huddled buildings but hearing without interruption its lively shouts and chantings, until it came into clearer view at a stairway in the street pushing upward along Mount Moriah toward the Temple now resplendent in the morning sunshine.

Inside the Court of the Gentiles, which the strange little caravan of one rider and his evidently unorganized but plainly joyous adherents had reached by coming in through the Gate Shalleketh, the tall man dismounted, and someone quickly led the little animal away. In another moment the shouting and hosannas had ceased, and soon the centurion lost the rider in the press of the Temple throng.

Later that day in crossing the Court of the Gentiles to go out through the Gate Shalleketh and onto the bridge over the Tyropoeon, which was the easiest way to Mount Zion from the fortress, Longinus learned that the man on the donkey was the rabbi from Galilee. Many of his followers had expected the rabbi, whose fame by now had spread throughout Judaea, to come into the precincts of the Temple, proclaim himself Yahweh’s Messiah and the ruler of the world, and call down legions of heavenly angels utterly to destroy every vestige of Rome’s dominion. Now these followers were deeply disappointed and utterly chagrined. The tall one from Galilee in whom they had put their trust, the one who would be Israel’s new David to deliver it from its mighty enemy, had failed them.

But what if this Jesus had really fancied himself a man ordained to lead his little nation in throwing off the yoke of Rome? What, reasoned the centurion, if he had been as visionary, as passionately though unwisely patriotic as countless other Jews assembled here in Rome for Israel’s great celebration? In this tense, highly inflammable atmosphere of Passover week in Jerusalem, with great numbers of his followers believing that he possessed supernatural authority and powers, the rabbi’s willingness to allow himself to be proclaimed Israel’s king would have resulted in fearful bloodshed. But this Jesus at the last moment had either lost his courage, or else he had never contemplated leadership of Israel except in some vague, religious sense that Cornelius perhaps would term spiritual. At any rate, Longinus concluded, the Galilean was no threat to Rome and of no concern to the Empire. In his report to Sejanus, he would make no mention of the rabbi, unless in some manner Pontius Pilate might become involved with the man from Galilee. He wondered if Pilate had even been informed of the little procession that had come to such an inglorious ending within the Temple court. He wondered if Pilate, in fact, in his harried administration of the affairs of Judaea had ever heard of this Jesus.

41

Claudia sat on a small stone bench facing one of the fountains in the garden of the Palace of the Herods. All about her the grass was a luxuriant green and the flower beds, fed, she had been told, with blood drained through subterranean pipes from the overflow of the Great Altar, were already ablaze with color. Birds skipped and twittered in the rich foliage, and now and then some venturing small animal would skitter across an open patch of bright sunshine to disappear beneath the branches of a flowering shrub. The bench, shaded by a gnarled great olive, was invitingly cool despite the day’s warmth and heaviness, and the gentle babble of the spraying water ordinarily would have lulled one sitting there into a mood of peaceful contemplation, if not pleasant slumber.

But this afternoon the wife of the Procurator felt neither peaceful nor pleasant. She watched the fountain’s waters lifting and arching and falling and draining away in an undeviating pattern of movement and allowed her own thoughts to wander with it.

_... There is the picture of my living. Like the water that is the thrust-along prisoner of the pump, or the ram which again and again lifts it and sends it spurting upward only to fall back and sink down and be forced up again, I am the prisoner of some malign power that pushes me along through a dull monotony of_ _days that I am powerless even to protest against; I am swirled about but held fast like that water in a routine of existence I dare not even challenge...._

She leaned forward with her head upon her hands and glared, hardly seeing it, at the captive, dancing water. How, by Bona Dea and all the good and gentle gods, the kind and happily ministering gods, how, by Pluto and all his evil soot-begrimed and blackened imps, could she escape the treadmill of this deadening monotony, this unending, bedeviling frustration? Granddaughter of the great god Augustus, stepdaughter of the great god Tiberius, granddaughter of the almost-great god Mark Antony and the great great goddess Cleopatra, wife of the mighty Procurator of Judaea, daughter through Augustus of Jove himself, princess of the blood....

“Bah!” She said it aloud. But there was nobody near-by in the garden. She sat back against the coolness of the stone. “By all the gods, why couldn’t I have been a wench serving tables in a tavern, a strumpet down in the Subura, and had my freedom!”

_... Why, by all the gods, can’t old Tiberius die? He’s past seventy now, and of what service is he to the Empire? And Sejanus, the old rake, must be past sixty. If someone would give the Prefect a neat sword thrust...._

She stood up and walked over to the fountain, held out her hands to the spraying water and lifted wet palms to her flushed cheeks. The afternoon was still and depressing. She raised her eyes and saw above the trees and the turreted nearest corner of the great palace rounded soft white puffs of clouds, like newly lifted fresh curds in a deeply blue overturned bowl. “A storm,” she said to herself, “one of those swiftly arrived, quickly gone, fierce Judaean storms. But it will clear the air of this blanket of heat, and it will serve to break for a while the monotony of another fruitless day.”

But she did not go inside. She sat down again and watched the gathering puffs of clouds. Never had she been afraid of storms, even ominous thunder and the swift, sharp streaks of lightning. She remembered that once in her early childhood when a governess had warned her against staying outdoors and running the risk of being struck by one of Jove’s hurled mighty bolts, she had remarked, “If old Jove is clever enough to strike me with a bolt outdoors, why can’t he throw one right through the roof and hit me while I’m inside? I don’t believe he can hit me whether I’m outside or inside.”

Her blasphemous words had woefully shocked the governess, but Claudia had never seen cause to retract them. One thing had led to another; from denying Jove’s power she had soon come to deny his very existence, and with his, the existence likewise of the entire pantheon of lesser gods and goddesses.

She was still seated on the bench when a palace servant came out to announce that a soldier had arrived from Fortress Antonia with a message for her.

“Then bring him here,” she instructed the servant. Could it be, she wondered, that the man is bringing a message from Longinus?

But the legionary had been sent to her by the Procurator. Pilate, he reported, would not be returning to the palace either for the evening meal or to spend the night. He begged to explain to his wife that he had had a very trying day and that he would be engaged until late in the evening. He had agreed to give an audience to the High Priest Caiaphas, and their meeting might well be extended into the night. He had decided, therefore, to forego the privilege and pleasure of dining with the Procuratoress; he would have supper in his quarters and after he had ended his long day’s duties would spend the remainder of the night there.

Her first thought was of getting a message to Longinus. She would write it, seal it fast, and send it by the legionary.

“Thank you,” she said to the soldier. “I shall want you to carry a message to the Fortress.” She stood up. “I’ll go inside and prepare it.” But would it be a discreet thing to do, sending a message to Longinus by this legionary? What if by chance it should fall into other hands, even Pilate’s? “No, there’s no need of my writing it,” she said. “Just tell the Procurator that I thank him for informing me and that I shall see him at his pleasure tomorrow.”

But she would find a way of notifying Longinus. Tullia. Of course. Tullia was one person upon whose loyalty and good judgment she could always depend. When Tullia returned, she would send her to Longinus.

A soft breeze had sprung up and was pushing the storm clouds gently away; the air had cooled; the storm seemed to have been averted for the day. Claudia rose from the bench and returned to her apartment in the palace.

When a few minutes later her maid returned, she was carrying a small wicker basket. “Mistress, I found these in one of the markets near the Temple,” she said, beaming as she held out the basket to Claudia. “I thought you might enjoy them.”

“Fresh figs? And so early?” She picked one up. “It really is a fresh one, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and I’ve washed them. You can eat it right now. I was surprised to find any this early, but the man explained that in some of the warm coves on the protected side of Olivet they often have figs ripening in early April.”