“The morning watch at Castra Praetoria,” he said, as in the dim light of breaking day he raised himself on an elbow to look into her face, “and I have early duty.”
“But, Longinus,” she began a murmured protest, “must you forever be leaving...?”
“Today is very important,” he went on, unheeding. “I must meet the Prefect there to begin our journey down to Capri for an audience with the Emperor. Sejanus is going to recommend that Tiberius recall Pontius Pilate and banish him to Gaul and then name me as Procurator. But you are not to go with him into banishment. Instead, you will marry me and....”
“By all the gods! Longinus! Oh, by the Bountiful Mother! So long have we waited....”
She sat up from her pillow. The light was seeping through the narrow window beyond the foot of the bed; the chamber was bursting now with the sound of trumpets. Sleepily, though she was fast coming awake, she felt for the centurion and sought to hold on to the dream, but she knew he was not there. And in a moment’s hush between the trumpetings she heard from the room adjoining hers, through the doorway connecting the chambers, the sonorous, heavy snoring of Pontius Pilate.
“Tullia!” she called, keeping her voice down. But the door to the maid’s smaller chamber on the side opposite the Procurator’s was open; she had hardly expected Tullia to be there. The trumpets below were calling Israel to the sunrise worship, and somewhere in the milling throng of Jerusalem dwellers and pilgrims was her devoted maid.
She pushed down the covering, swung her feet around to the floor, and stood up. Drawing her robe about her, she stepped into her sandals and tiptoed out onto the balcony. Down below in the Temple courts a few torches sputtered sporadically in the strengthening light, and several still burning in the two giant candelabra offered more twisting blue-black smoke than illumination.
But there was a glory in the east; behind the rounded crest of the Mount of Olives a giant hand spread fingers of orange and gold and salmon and pink, and as the aureole fanned out higher and wider and its vivid colors swam together in one blazing brightness, the sun ventured to peek above the hilltop. In that instant the golden dome of the Temple flamed, and the topmost stones around the city’s western wall caught fire.