“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.