“Why do you ask?” Cornelius inquired of the bent one. “Do you know the man?”
“Do I know him?” The old man chuckled. “Soldier, I come from Nazareth. Many’s the day I have worked with Joseph, that boy’s father, planing one end of a beam while he was shaping the other end. But Joseph’s dead now, been dead a long time. That boy there lives with his mother, the widow Mary.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a carpenter, too, like his father before him. And he’s a good boy and a hard-working boy, soldier. But Jesus ben Joseph the Messiah of Israel....” The old fellow, both hands braced on his gnarled stick, shook his head incredulously. “Soldier, my faith in that John the Baptizer is weakening. He must be”—he removed one hand from the stick and with bent forefinger tapped his forehead—“a little touched.”
Cornelius laughed. “I don’t know much about this Messiah business, but, I agree, he must be.” Then he turned to Mary. “Are you ready to go? I mustn’t let Herod get too far ahead. I’m responsible for his arriving in Tiberias, you know.”
They started retracing their way along the path to the road; where it joined the broader way, they turned southward. When a moment later they came out from behind a clump of shrubs grown up in an outcropping of small boulders, Cornelius glanced over his shoulder toward the ford and the throng. He caught Mary’s arm and pointed.
The haircloth mantle and the brown homespun robe had been thrown across small bushes at the river’s edge. In the center of the little stream, with the water up to their loincloths and their faces lifted heavenward, stood the gaunt Wilderness prophet and the tall bronzed young man from Nazareth.
12
The Procurator’s Palace sat high on a promontory overlooking the harbor at Caesarea. A marble-paved esplanade led from the cobblestoned street up to the palace, and on its west side facing the Great Sea an immense terrace of colored, polished stones went out from the peristylium.
In the days when King Herod, father of Antipas, determined to build here on the Palestinian coast a fabulous port city to honor his patron, the Emperor Augustus, the place was an insignificant town called by the unusual name of Strato’s Towers. Then there was virtually no harbor. But at tremendous cost in the lives of slaves and artisans and money wrung in taxes from his already poor subjects, Herod built of huge stones sunk in twenty fathoms of often rough water a tremendous mole that went out and around like a protecting arm to form a safe shelter for countless ships of every type.