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.”