“The Galilean, is he...?”

“He’s dead,” the man answered before the fish merchant could complete his question. “He died just as the storm broke. This fish”—he pointed—“where was it caught?”

“No earlier than the day before yesterday, and fetched by fast cart from the Sea of Galilee. Good, fresh carp, perches, bream.” With grimy fingers he poked at now one and now another of his offerings. “The finest fish in Jerusalem, and the most weight for your money!”

Cornelius stepped away from the stall into the warmth of the freshly cleansed air. As he walked quickly along the road he could now see plainly revealed the three crosses and their inert, mutilated burdens. The pause in the fish market during the raging of the storm had given him time to catch his breath after racing over the cobblestones from the square in front of Antonia.

But why had he come on the run to the Hill of the Skull? Why had he come at all? Porcius had said that Jesus had already been nailed to the cross for several hours. Had the centurion hoped in some mysterious manner to save the Galilean, to get him down from the cross and revive him? Had he thought he might countermand Pilate’s judgment and sentence?

He hadn’t thought. He had acted on his emotions. He had wanted to see Jesus, to protest to Longinus, to scream out his denunciation of everyone who’d had a hand in this abominable act. He hadn’t reasoned any course of action. He had only come as fast as he could to the place of horrors, his whole being seething with resentment and anger and a terrible bitterness.

And now Jesus was dead. The good man who had done no man ill, who had done countless men good, who had restored Lucian, and Chuza’s son. Or had he really?

Would he be up there now, perhaps already dead on a Roman cross, if he had had the power to heal Chuza’s little boy, if he had been able by his own mighty will to rid Lucian of the fever that was consuming him? Would he?

Longinus had been right. Those “miracles” had been only remarkable coincidences. The Galilean wonder worker, the good man, the son of the Jews’ one god—Cornelius ventured to raise his head from the ascending path and look upward toward the central cross—was hanging spiked to a crossbeam, crumpled and lifeless, as dead, or soon to be, as those two revolutionaries who hung there with him. And Longinus, though unhappy that Pilate had required him to crucify an innocent man, would remind him that all along he had been right in denying that Jesus of Galilee had been anything more than a good man.

He found Longinus seated not far from the crosses on a low stone outcropping. His head was bent forward, cradled in his hands, and his eyes were fastened to the ground.

“I’ve been expecting you, Cornelius,” he said, looking up as his friend spoke. “I knew you would be coming.”

“We didn’t get into Jerusalem until a short time before the storm. As soon as I heard at Antonia, I came running; I was at the gate down there when the storm struck.”

“I knew you would come.” He shook his head slowly; his eyes were fixed, unseeing. “And I deserve everything you’re going to say.” He lifted his face, and Cornelius saw on it fear and sorrow and a great revulsion. “I’m undone, my friend.” He arose slowly to his feet, and his eyes, for an instant before he looked away, encompassed the crosses behind Cornelius.

“But, Longinus, you didn’t ... it was Pilate....” He reached out to put his hand on his comrade’s arm, but Longinus drew back, hand raised.

“No, Cornelius, Pilate condemned him, but I killed him! I, this hand. Look!” He held it before him and turned it slowly. “His blood! His innocent blood! I tortured to his slow death an innocent man, a good man, Cornelius, a perfect man, yes, and by all the gods, even more than a perfect man!”

“I’d thought that he was more, that perhaps he possessed powers no man could have, I’d hoped so; I’d hoped that he had called upon a supernatural power to heal Lucian. But would a god, would the son of the God, if there is one, my friend”—Cornelius’ countenance was darkly pained—“allow himself to be put to death, to accept the tortured death of the cross?”

“I know that my saying it sounds strange, Cornelius, but ever since this morning I’ve had the feeling that he was allowing himself to be crucified and that at any moment, if he had wished, he could have destroyed us all. Yet in the midst of his agonies, while we were spiking him to the crossbeam, he prayed to his god to forgive us. To forgive us, Centurion!” He shook his head sadly. “To forgive me. But I killed him. By all the gods, let me show you.”

They walked over to the foot of the center cross. The body of Jesus, naked except for a bloody loincloth, hung out from the upright at a grotesque angle, held by heavy spikes through the palms of the hands and supported by a narrow wedge between the legs. The head had slumped forward so that the twin points of his short beard splayed out across his chest. Other large spikes through his purpling feet held them to the upright.

“See?” Longinus pointed to a gaping wound from which blood and body fluid still dripped slowly. Blood had gushed forth when the wound was made, for below it the tortured flesh was wide streaked and the loincloth was gore-soaked; his blood had run down the length of one leg, and even as Cornelius stared, a crimson bead swelled at the end of the great toe and dropped to the bloodstained ground.

“But why this wound?” Cornelius asked. “Did you...?”

“Yes, it was my lance that did it. He must have been already dead, but I didn’t know. And I couldn’t bear for him to have to endure any more agony.”

“You did it in mercy, Longinus.”

“Yes, but I killed him, Cornelius. He’s dead, and I can never have his forgiveness. And I’m soiled, ruined, undone. I can never cleanse myself”—he studied his hands—“of this man’s death.” He lifted his eyes to stare at his friend. “Strange, Cornelius, but ... well you know what I’ve always thought of the gods, Roman, Greek, Jewish, any of them, and of the survival of the spirit or whatever you want to call it. And you know what I thought of”—he gazed a moment at the dead man stiffening above them—“him.... Well today I’ve been with him for several hours, long, terrible hours of torture for him, and for me, too.” He paused, trying painfully to choose his words. “Now I don’t know, Cornelius; I’m confused, my smug assurance is gone. I’m not sure any more. But he”—he looked up again—“by all the gods, Cornelius, he was!”

“Then you think now he may have been...?”

“If there are any gods, Cornelius”—he stared into the blood-drained face of the Galilean, and his voice was infinitely sad—“if there exists any being like the one your old Greek tutor spoke of, a good, all-wise, all-powerful one god, then this man must have been the son of that god.”