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.
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.”