She pointed to her silent spouse, glumly sitting his horse. “He is the Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. These revolutionaries are Galileans. He is the proper one to try them.”
“No, my dear Herodias,” Antipas spoke out. “This is neither the time nor the place to conduct any trial. Centurion, let us proceed with your plans to go on into Jerusalem.”
Herodias lifted her head haughtily, but she made no reply. As soon as the caravan re-formed and was ready for the march, Cornelius gave the command to move forward. Less than two hours later he led the Tetrarch and Tetrarchess through the gate and let them and their servants into the gloomy pile of the old Hasmonean Palace. From there he marched his century to the Fortress of Antonia, where he surrendered his three prisoners to the dungeon jailer, who locked them, still bound securely, in the darkness and squalor of one of the lowest-level cells.
When he had seen to the quartering of his men in their Antonia barracks, he climbed the stone stairway in the southwestern tower and walked along the corridor to the room he had been assigned in the officers’ quarters. He had decided he would have a steaming bath and put on fresh clothing before going down to the mess for a late evening meal.
The chamber, the centurion found, was close and warm. He pushed open the window; then he unbolted the door and walked out onto the balcony. Down below lights blazed in the Temple courts, and men scurried to and fro, already in a frenzy of Passover preparations.
40
Once again the household of Procurator Pontius Pilate was settled in the magnificent great Palace of the Herods; once again the ancient capital of Israel was teeming with countless Jews come up for the Feast of the Passover.
From every region and hamlet, almost from every home, in Judaea, Samaria, Peraea, and Galilee, from Antioch, Damascus, Tarsus, Alexandria, Memphis, and Cyrene, from Ephesus, Athens, and Corinth, from all provinces rimming the Great Sea, even to Rome and beyond, from the islands of Cyprus and Sardinia and Sicily and Crete and those numerous smaller ones dotting the Aegean, devout Israelites had swarmed into Jerusalem’s crowded narrow ways and squares before the gates.
Every Jewish home, whether pretentious stone residence crowning Mount Zion or squalid malodorous hovel burrowed beneath the city’s walls in noisome Ophel, was overflowing with pilgrim kinsmen returned for this greatest annual feast of Israel. For every person living in Jerusalem, Centurion Longinus casually estimated as he stood on Fortress Antonia’s balcony outside his chamber, perhaps ten pilgrims had squirmed themselves inside the walls of the old city. And countless other thousands had been unable to find living quarters within the walls. Throngs of Passover celebrants overflowed the slope downward to the Brook Kidron and up the eastern rise past Gethsemane to the summit of the Mount of Olives and as far as Bethany. To the south, beyond the ever smoldering fires of the refuse dumps in the Hinnom valley, and to the west, tents and brush arbors of Passover pilgrims dotted the untilled areas through which ran the Bethlehem road. Northward, too, though Longinus could not survey that section of Jerusalem and its environs because of the great tower at his back, and to his right over beyond the massive pile of the Palace of the Herods, for many furlongs past the Ephraim and Joppa Gates, thin curlings of grayish-white smoke spiraled upward from small fires over which Passover pilgrims were bending now in preparation of the evening meal.
Longinus had been quartered near the Centurion Cornelius, but he had hardly seen his friend. The night of Cornelius’ arrival from Galilee with the Tetrarch’s party and his three Zealot prisoners, they had talked briefly in the mess hall, but they were both weary from the traveling and soon retired to their beds. The next day Pontius Pilate, greatly pleased at the capture of the wily zealot chieftain, had ordered Cornelius to take his century and scour the rocks above the Jericho road into which the evening before the marauders had disappeared. He had commanded the centurion to ferret out every member of Bar Abbas’ band and either capture or kill him. “And follow them as far as Galilee if need be, Centurion,” the Procurator had instructed him. “Capture any you can, and bring them back here; we will crucify them during the Passover festival, and for the thousands of rebellious, stubborn Jews who will see them dying on the crosses it will be a salutary lesson. It may help them realize what fate awaits those who thus oppose Rome’s authority and power.”