On her return to Caesarea from the Feast of Tabernacles, Claudia learned from Sergius Paulus that Longinus had sailed for Rome. The message from the centurion to the commander of the Roman constabulary had been brought by a ship’s master who had sailed southward from the Antioch port of Seleucia shortly after Longinus had gone aboard a ship there for his voyage to the capital.

The message had been brief, the commander said; its purpose was to let him know that Longinus had been sent to Rome by the Legate Vitellius on what the legate must have considered an urgent mission, probably to the Prefect Sejanus.

“Longinus must have sailed from Seleucia on one of the last boats out,” Sergius observed. “From now until spring there’ll be few crossings; any ship attempting to make it will be braving the heavy winds.” He smiled wryly. “It must have been important business the legate was sending him on.”

Claudia suspected that Longinus was going to the capital to relay the legate’s report on the situation in Palestine. Particularly important, she knew, would be the question of whether or not King Aretas was planning to attack Herod and thereby involve the whole Palestinian region in war. But she had no direct message from the centurion.

Longinus was acting wisely, she realized, in sending her no written communication. He could hardly evolve any innocent appearing reason for writing her, and it would be impossible to send her such a message without Pilate’s learning about it, and possibly even the Prefect. And any message sent would of necessity be innocuous. But as the weeks pushed deeper and deeper into winter and no word of him came to her at all, she began to wonder if he would return to Palestine or if, the gods forbid, Sejanus might have sent him once more to Germania or Gaul or to some other post far remote from the now increasingly dreary Palestine.

Despite the fact that it was Herodias who had urged her to go up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, the two women had hardly seen one another during those days in Israel’s capital. Claudia recalled that even then the Tetrarchess had seemed somewhat reserved. And once when mention was made of the journey of Longinus to Antioch in response to the summons of the Legate Vitellius, Herodias had appeared to grow even more coldly formal. Perhaps the Tetrarchess suspected, Claudia thought at the time, that Longinus was reporting on Herod’s visit to Machaerus and the appearance there of the ambassadors from King Aretas, and even of her own bizarre conduct at the Tetrarch’s birthday banquet. Nor had Herodias, as they were preparing to leave Jerusalem, invited her to come to Tiberias.

And at the Feast neither she nor Pilate had seen Antipas. She wondered if perhaps he, too, might have suspected that Longinus was even then in Antioch reporting what he had seen and heard at Machaerus. But her failure to be honored by the Tetrarch in Jerusalem troubled her not at all. She had less respect for him, she confessed to herself, than she had for the Procurator. And she hoped that Longinus was finding opportunity for dropping some poisoned, if discreet, words into the ears of Sejanus concerning Pontius Pilate and his continuing difficulties with the Jews.

Nor was the Procurator’s administration of affairs in Judaea, as the winter advanced, serving to establish him in better favor with the people he was governing. Stubborn and unimaginative, he steadfastly refused either to learn anything or forget anything. Scorning his subordinate officials and refusing to give consideration to their counseling, fearful of his superiors, including the Legate Vitellius and particularly the Prefect Sejanus, Pilate provided no stable rule of Judaea; his administration vacillated from fierce oppression and arbitrary action to cowardly yielding to priestly demands. His tax gatherers, working through the despised publicans, those native hirelings of Rome whom the Israelites looked upon with loathing as traitors to Israel and Israel’s Yahweh, demanded and received exorbitant tribute in money and produce of the land; this did not add to the Procurator’s popularity among the Jews. Both the people and the Temple leaders were growing increasingly enraged.

The natural breach between the Procurator and the Tetrarch, too, was widening as the weeks went by; an incident at the Temple during one of the great festival occasions in which Pilate’s soldiers had slain a group of roistering Galileans had infuriated Herod Antipas. And Pilate’s effort to use Temple funds in the building of an aqueduct to bring water into Jerusalem had evoked the bitter animosity of the Temple leadership. On all sides, then, the Procurator, beginning with his flaunting of the Roman ensigns in Jerusalem shortly after his arrival in Judaea, had been strengthening rather than weakening the natural hostility the Israelites had for the representatives of conquering Rome.

All this Claudia had observed; she wondered how long this mounting burden of tension and hate could continue to build upon the broad shoulders of Pontius Pilate before inevitably it should topple him from the Procuratorship. The answer, she was confident, lay not in Judaea, but in Rome. Pilate would last only so long as he did not too greatly displease Sejanus. And from the moment the tribute from Judaea to Rome ... and Sejanus ... began to shrink, she reasoned, her spouse’s days as Procurator would be numbered.

... Perhaps Sejanus may have begun to suspect already that Pilate’s fingers have become sticky, that too large a proportion of the revenues are failing to reach Rome; perhaps he has revealed, or hinted, his suspicions to Longinus, and Longinus will tell me everything when he returns.

... If he does return. But surely he will be back in Caesarea when winter relents and calming weather permits the ships to resume their sailing. Surely he will arrive in time to go with us to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover....

Thinking one day of the coming Feast, she recalled her earlier visit with Tullia to the Temple. “Do you remember that last day of the Feast of Tabernacles?” she asked, turning to her slave maid. The girl nodded and smiled. “That Galilean,” Claudia continued, “your Messiah of the Jews, I wonder what has become of him. Do you suppose he’ll return to the Jewish capital for the Passover festival?”

“I would say so, Mistress,” Tullia answered. “Every devout Jew tries to go up for the Passover Feast. And certainly the Galilean is a devout Jew. Even though the Temple priests are bent on destroying him, I’m sure he will wish to go there to worship.”

“If he does, maybe we’ll have an opportunity to hear him again ... and perhaps this time he will perform some feat of magic.”

“But, Mistress, those who hold him to be the Messiah insist that he does not work magic; they declare he does his miracles of healing by the will of God.”

She smiled. “Well, however he does them—and even from you, little one, I’ve heard reports that he does—is no concern of mine. But should he come up to the Temple and perform some such feat, either by his own cleverness or with the aid of your Yahweh, I would like to be there when he did it.”

“But, Mistress, you saw him that day they dragged the woman before him....”

“Yes, but his saving her from that mob was not magic, little one. That was only the working of a quick intelligence and a good heart. But they say he can make lame persons walk again and blind persons see. And Cornelius, you remember, declared he healed his little servant boy, though Longinus thinks it was only a coincidence that the boy’s fever broke just at the same time the Galilean supposedly was curing him. Cornelius even believes that the carpenter once actually restored to life the son of a widow; he told me they were bearing the young man to the tomb when the Galilean happened along and brought him back to life. Of course, the boy may have been in a trance; certainly no sensible person can believe that he was really dead and then came back to life when the Galilean said some mysterious words and made some queer motions over him.” She paused and looked Tullia in the eyes. “Or do you, little one?”

“But if he is actually the son of our God....”

“Oh, you gullible Jews, even you, Tullia.” Her countenance revealed an amused tolerance. “And Cornelius. A soldier of Rome. But how, by all the gods, Tullia, can any present-day person of education and culture embrace such blatant superstition to believe that a man could come to earth as a god, even if he could believe that there are gods in the first place?”

But Tullia skillfully evaded answering the question. “If you saw him restore to life a man who you knew was dead, what would you say about him then, Mistress?”

“When I see him do that, little one, I’ll tell you then.”

Nevertheless, Claudia had not dismissed the Galilean from her thoughts, for that night she dreamed about him. It was a confused and illogical arrangement of stories she had heard about Jesus, interwoven with the experience she and Tullia had had that day at the Temple during the final exercises of the Feast of Tabernacles. In the dream she and Longinus had strolled with Cornelius down from the Tower of Antonia into the Court of the Gentiles. Rounding a corner of the Soreg, the three had come upon a throng ringed about the Galilean. They had pushed forward to the inner circle, and there, they had discovered on the stones of the court at the carpenter’s feet a crushed and bloody woman.

“Rabbi,” a burly fellow beside the woman was saying, “this woman is dead. We caught her in the act of adultery, and in accordance with the law of our father Moses we stoned her to death. I ask you, Rabbi, did not we do well in thus upholding the ancient law of Israel?”

“It is the law that the woman and the man taken in adultery be stoned to death,” the Galilean replied, and then his eyes flamed and his voice took on a new intensity, “but you who stoned her, were you without sins?” Then he lowered his eyes to the stones beside the dead woman and began with his forefinger to trace symbols in the dust. After a moment he stood up and, bending down, caught the stiffened body underneath his arms and raised it, unbending, until it stood upright.

“Remember,” said Cornelius, “she is dead, completely dead; see her mangled face, her crushed skull. Watch the Galilean.”

Jesus was steadying the rigid corpse with one hand. Now he raised his other hand to a position above her head and began to intone words that to Claudia were strange and utterly incomprehensible.

“Watch now,” said Cornelius. “Keep your eyes on him. And, remember, the woman is dead; there is no life in her, none.”

Incredulous, their eyes straining, they saw the stiffened limbs beginning to relax and the head bend forward slightly; the crushed bones of the shattered face rounded outward, the torn and bruised flesh smoothed, the clotted blood melted away, and the desecrated ghastly countenance was restored to a calm beauty; the woman, looking now into the serene face of the Galilean, smiled.

“By all the great gods ...” But Longinus hushed precipitately, for Jesus was speaking to the woman, now fully alert. “No man condemns you, my sister, and neither do I,” Jesus said, as he pointed toward her executioners, now slinking away toward the Gate of Shushan. “Go, and sin no more.”

Longinus turned now to the Procurator’s wife, and on his face she saw an expression of utter amazement. “But, Claudia, the woman was dead! Her head was crushed; her face was a bloody pulp. And now, look! She is walking away, around the corner of the Soreg! The Galilean, Claudia, he must be a god! By all the gods, Claudia, this man must be a god! He must be....”

But Longinus’ voice was fading, and he was receding, slipping away, and so were Cornelius and the Galilean and the woman....

Claudia opened her eyes; her chamber was flooded with light. She closed them again, trying to recapture the scene in the great court of the Temple. But the dream had fled. “Bona Dea,” she said aloud. “It was so real. That woman. And the Galilean. And Cornelius and Longinus. So vivid. Maybe”—the notion suddenly occurred to her—“I’m dreaming now, maybe I’m dreaming that I was dreaming.”

She sat up, swung her feet around to the floor, stretched and yawned. Then quickly she arose and crossing to the window, looked down at the ships in the harbor. Bright sunlight flashed from the hulls and the billowing sails. On the docks slaves struggled with casks and crates as they loaded and unloaded vessels. The world she was seeing was real; she stood looking through her window upon things tangible and comprehensible. The dream, with all its implications of the inscrutable, was gone, vanished.

But she was not to forget it entirely. One day Tullia revealed that while at the market place she had encountered some travelers from Galilee who had gone up to Jerusalem and were returning by way of Caesarea. On their journey, they told her, they had come upon the Galilean and several of his band in a hamlet in the mountains of Ephraim. Jesus had returned to Galilee from the Feast of Tabernacles, but after several weeks he had gone back for the Feast of Dedication. From Jerusalem he had retired into Peraea.

As Tullia related the story she had been told, her eyes began to shine. “While he was on the other side of the Jordan,” she went on, “he received a message from Bethany....”

“Bethany?”

“It’s a small village a few miles—a mile or so—just west of Jerusalem, Mistress.”

“What was the message?”

“Jesus had three friends who lived there, a man and his two sisters. While he was over beyond the Jordan he had word that the man was near death. So he and his band returned to Bethany. When they got there, they found that his friend had been dead four days.”

“And the Galilean brought him back to life?”

“Yes, Mistress! That’s what the travelers said.”

Claudia laughed. “Cornelius should have been there. No doubt, though, he’s already heard about it. And, of course, he believes the story.”

“But you don’t, Mistress?”

Claudia wasn’t sure that the servant woman was teasing. “No, Tullia, I don’t,” she replied. “Very probably this story has been repeated many times and has been added to by each teller. No doubt it was like the one Cornelius was telling about the widow’s son, or even the incident in which his own little slave boy was supposed to have been cured by the Galilean. Obviously, the man at Bethany was not dead; no doubt they thought he was....”

“But, Mistress, they said he had been in the tomb four days.”