Judaea
32
The Tetrarch’s caravan had reached the flatland where the narrow Plain of Esdraelon pushing eastward between Mount Gilboa and Little Hermon touched the Jordan valley. There Longinus and Claudia had taken leave of the returning group.
Cornelius had wanted to send a detail of guardsmen to escort them the remainder of the way to Caesarea. “You never know when one of these zealot gangs may come swooping down on you,” he had protested to Longinus. “And if the Emperor’s stepdaughter should be captured, with Senator Piso’s son, and held for ransom ... well, by Jove, Longinus, you can imagine the uproar there’d be in Rome.”
But Longinus had refused the offer. He had assured Cornelius that their little party, he, Claudia, and the two servants she had brought with her, would join the first caravan headed toward Caesarea; until one came along they would remain at the nearby inn.
Though the Tetrarch’s parting words had been polite, he had seemed 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....”