The tall Galilean arose from the steps before the Beautiful Gate and bending over, caught the hand of the prostrate, frightened woman. “Neither do I condemn you, my sister,” he said gently, as he helped her to her feet and she lifted tearful, penitent eyes to him. “Go, and sin no more.”

“He is truly a good man, Tullia, a noble man of warm heart, a generous, forgiving, good man. But a god? No, little one.” They were watching the woman as she neared the corner of the Chel toward the Fortress of Antonia. “There are no gods.”

The woman went out of their sight around the Soreg. They turned to look again toward the Galilean at the marble steps.

But the steps had disappeared, and the Beautiful Gate, and beyond it the Great Altar. Only the man stood there, and his arms were bound behind him now, and where the Chel had been was the Procurator’s tribunal. Solemn but unafraid, he faced the judge. At his back the Temple leaders who a moment ago had dragged the poor woman before him were shouting execrations upon him and demanding of the Procurator his crucifixion. “Crucify him!” they were screaming. “Crucify him!”

And in the magistrate’s chair ... by the Great Mother, there was Pontius Pilate!

Pilate, his round face livid with anger, was remonstrating with the priests. “But shall I crucify your King? Shall I crucify the King of the Jews?”

Crucify Jesus of Galilee?

“No, Pilate! No! No!” She was running toward the Procurator to stand beside the Galilean. “No, my husband, have nothing to do with this good man!”

... But Pilate does not see me or hear me. Nor does the Galilean. Am I a disembodied spirit? But there are no spirits. Oh, Tullia. But Tullia neither hears nor sees me....

“Then take him yourselves and crucify him. His death be your responsibility.” Pilate was speaking again. “I am free of his blood.”

“No! No! No, Pilate! You are sending an innocent man to his death! You can never disavow responsibility! Oh, hear me, my husband! Hear me!”

But the Praetorium and its tribunal, the tall, bound Galilean, the railing priests and their blood-hungry supporters were suddenly vanished.

The great throne room of the Imperial Palace in Rome was strangely darkened. She could hear the voice of the Emperor, but she could hardly distinguish his features. Was he her stepfather Tiberius, incredibly old now, or a younger Emperor? The voice was somewhat strange, too. “You have failed miserably,” the voice was saying. “You have been rash and stubbornly determined to govern in accordance with your own whims, you have not only permitted, but you have, through your intemperate governing, created much turmoil and insurrection within your province; in short, your rule has been a travesty of Roman administration.” The voice paused. “But I shall not order you executed, as you deserve. Instead, I decree that you be banished, forthwith and forever....”

The voice had faded out as the light came up, and she saw standing with bowed head, old and bent and his once round face thinned and haggard and hopeless, Pontius Pilate.

“No! No! If you had only listened....”

But no one heard her, and the great chamber was dark, and not a sound came to her out of the stillness.

“Oh, by the Great Mother! By all the gods, great and small. Oh, Galilean!”

Now as she stood immobile and weightless in the blackness and silence, she began to sense a luminosity thinning the darkness below, and looking down she saw a great way off a point of light that spread and lifted and came up in ever widening circles to illuminate the heights about her. For she was standing on the summit of a great mountain, higher even than the sun-baked granite bluffs on which Machaerus sat above the Dead Sea, and far below she could discern the imprisoned, restless waters of a mountain-rimmed small lake.

Then, as she raised her eyes from the waters and looked across toward an opposite peak, she saw him. He stood, bent and shrunken and old with the weight of centuries, on a jagged thrust of rock that came out from the mountain to overhang the agitated surface of the lake. He was looking down at the waters; the light was reflected from a head completely bald, and it played on cheek bones guarding cheeks long sunken, so that his head even in life appeared to have dried away to a skull, and only long dewlaps hanging down showed signs of animation.

“No! No! It cannot be!”

But she knew it was, though Pontius Pilate had shriveled into a pitiful husk of the vain and pompous Procurator he had been.

In the same moment she heard voices, and looking around, she saw people on the slopes of the mountain, coming up, pushing outward, swelling, and growing until all the mountain was filled with people, and they were of all races and times and colors and tongues. But strangely enough, she could understand their words, Roman and Greek and Egyptian and the tongues of the yellow-haired sons of Germania and the dark-haired women of Gaul, and even the babblings of the barbarians in faraway Britannia, and the curious utterances of the many unborn strange peoples of places beyond the as yet uncharted seas. And each in his own way was saying what all the others were saying.

The man on the precipice appeared not to see or hear the people; he seemed preoccupied, fearful, oblivious of everything about him, and struggling with the burden of some monstrous inner distress. He raised his hands and held them before his face, and then it was that she saw they were red to the wrists with the color of blood freshly spilled; he rubbed them together, as though struggling fiercely to scrub the blood away; he lowered them as if to dip them in a basin, then lifted them again to study them, his bloodless face, in contrast to the hands, a shade of ashen horror.

But the frenzied washing had done no good; the hands shone fiery red. Despairing, Pilate dropped them to his sides and stepped to the very edge of the yawning gulf. “I didn’t know!” he cried. “By all the gods, I didn’t know.” He raised his cavernous face and with eyes wide looked into the void. “O God of the Jews”—his shrunken head swayed on the wrinkled neck—“had I but known. Had I but known....” His words whispered into silence, and he closed his eyes.

“Don’t! No! No!” she screamed. “No, don’t!”

She forced herself to look down.

Pilate’s lean frame was dropping, slowly turning and twisting, toward the angry waters; his bony arms and legs were thrust out stiffly from the shroud of his too large toga, which streamed above the plummeting body, flapping furiously in the wind. Rigid with horror, staring into the abyss, she saw the body strike, heard the sickening blob, and watched it gradually disappear.

But the waters would not grant oblivion. Angrily they flung the broken, thin body back to the surface, and to Claudia, watching in frozen fascination, it seemed to be twisting and eddying in continuous agitation above the seething waters. Looking more closely, her eyes rooted to the scene in morbid horror, she saw white arms thrust upward and hands still reddened, cleansed not one tint by their plunge into the watery depths. Now suddenly the hands seemed detached from the stiffening arms, and alive; like wounded rodents seeking haven in a dark fissure among the rocks, they were feeling their way along the ascending stony slope toward her, and in that dreadful instant there lifted to her also the babble of countless voices in many tongues blending once again into a swelling chorus. The light breaking slowly above the mountain showed the plain below and the steep rises teeming with a multitude drawn from all races and nations.

On the faces of some she read swift anger and deep hate, and their fists were lifted skyward and their voices raised in execrations; others revealed only indifference, and their words were but the prattled monotony of chanted creed; but here and there on the level and along the slopes she saw those whose words fitted without disharmony into the growing chorus but whose faces as they uttered them revealed sorrow, deep pity, and a forgiving spirit.

She closed her eyes against the vision of the myriad chanting faces, but she heard their voices and she understood their many tongues ... “Crucified by Pontius Pilate ... Crucified ... suffered under Pontius Pilate ... suffered ... suffered ... Pontius Pilate....”

“No! No!” She opened her eyes to see the mountain cleared of the people, the vision gone, the voices silenced. But there on the ledge at her feet, rubbing one against the other, endlessly, eternally, fruitlessly seeking to be cleansed, were the two gory, dismembered hands.

“No! Back! Back! Go back!” She whirled about to rid herself of the frightening apparition, and burying her face, eyes shut, against her crossed arms, she leaned down upon the cool hardness of the boulder beside her. “No! No!” she sobbed. “Get back! Go! Please go!” Would those hands, the horrible thought came suddenly to her, come closer? Would they attempt to exact vengeance upon her? Might they even now be creeping upon her to fasten cold, bloody fingers about her neck, to choke the life...?

“Get back! No! No!” she screamed, as she freed an arm to beat frantic fist against the stone. “Don’t touch me! Tullia! Longinus! Oh, Longinus....”

“Claudia! By great Jove!” The centurion, sitting up fully awake, shook her hard. “Claudia! Wake up, woman! Wake up! Come out of it! What on earth....”

She opened her eyes. “Longinus! Oh, by all the gods, it was terrible, terrible!” Nor was the terror completely dispelled; in her eyes, wide, staring, her fear still spoke. Her shoulders shook in an involuntary shudder.

He pulled her up into a sitting position and grasped her hand. “But it was only a nightmare, Claudia. You’re all right. You were just dreaming.” She blinked and ventured a thin smile. “You were screaming like a wild woman and beating the bed with your fist.” His excited concern gave way to a grin. “It must have been a bloodcurdling dream.”

“Oh, Longinus”—she clenched her eyelids tightly against the light streaming in through the window—“it was the most horrible dream I ever had, the most frightful thing anyone could imagine. I dreamed ... oh, it’s too horribly near; I can’t tell you now.” Still shaking, she turned to snuggle within the haven of his arms. “Bona Dea....”

A sudden light knocking on the door interrupted her. Tullia entered to ask softly if anything was wrong.

“It was only a nightmare, little one,” Claudia answered, leaning back on her pillow. “It was so vivid, so frightening. But I’m all right now. I’ll call you when I need you.”

“Was it about what I told you, Mistress, the Galilean?” Her question and tone of voice betrayed Tullia’s deep concern.

“Yes ... about him and Pilate; horrible, horrible. I....”

“Oh, Mistress, could it have been a message to you, a vision sent...?”

“From your Jewish Yahweh, perhaps?” Claudia affected an uneasy laugh. “No, it was a dream, little one, that’s all. Get back to your bed; you must still be weary.”

Claudia saw Longinus’ look of puzzlement. “Tullia returned late in the night from Bethany and reported that the High Priest had schemed the arrest of the rabbi of Galilee. She was afraid he might prevail on Pilate this morning to agree to the crucifixion of the Galilean.”

“Crucifixion? By all the gods, on what charge?”

“That he seeks to overthrow Rome.”

“The Galilean? But he’s no revolutionary. Surely Pilate knows that.”

“Yes, surely he must.” She frowned. “But you know how Pilate fears the High Priest and his Temple crowd, how he’s always afraid they’ll send reports to Sejanus.”

“And you dreamed that he had sent the Galilean to the cross?”

“Yes. It was all confused, all horrible.” She sat up precipitately and looked toward the window. “Bona Dea, it must be late. And Pilate begins his trials soon after daybreak. Mother Ceres, I do wonder....” She sprang from the bed and drew on her robe. “Tullia!” she called. “Fetch me a wax tablet and stylus! Hurry, little one! I must send Pilate a message.”