Caipha fell silent, and again the Procurator heard what sounded like the roar of the sea, rolling up to the very walls of Herod the Great’s garden.[113] This roar rose up from below to the feet and into the face of the Procurator. And behind his back, there, beyond the wings of the palace, could be heard disquieting trumpet signals, the heavy crunch of hundreds of feet, the clanking of iron – here the Procurator realized that the Roman infantry was already setting out in accordance with his order, hastening to the final parade before the deaths of the terrified rebels and villains.
“Do you hear, Procurator?” the High Priest repeated quietly. “Are you really going to try and tell me that all that” – the High Priest raised both arms, and the dark hood fell from his head – “was provoked by the pitiful villain Bar-rabban?”
The Procurator wiped his damp, cold forehead with the back of his wrist and looked down at the ground; then, screwing his eyes up at the sky, saw that the burning hot sphere was almost directly above his head and that Caipha’s shadow had shrunk away completely by the lion’s tail, and quietly and indifferently he said:
“It’s getting towards midday. We got carried away with our conversation, but in the mean time we do need to carry on.”
Having apologized to the High Priest in refined phrases, he asked him to take a seat on a bench in the shade of a magnolia and wait while he summoned the remaining people required for a final brief conference and gave one more order concerning the execution.
Caipha bowed politely, placing his hand upon his heart, and remained in the garden while Pilate returned to the balcony. There he ordered the waiting secretary to invite into the garden the legate of the legion, the tribune of the cohort, and also the two members of the Sanhedrin and the commander of the Temple guard, who were awaiting a summons on the lower terrace of the garden in a circular pavilion with a fountain. To this Pilate added that he would himself be coming out into the garden straight away too, then he withdrew into the interior of the palace.
While the secretary was convening the conference[114], the Procurator had a meeting in a room obscured from the sun by dark blinds with some sort of man whose face was half covered by a hood, though the rays of the sun could not possibly have troubled him inside the room. This meeting was extremely brief. The Procurator said a few quiet words to the man, after which the latter withdrew, while Pilate went through the colonnade into the garden.
There, in the presence of all those he had wished to see, the Procurator solemnly and drily confirmed that he was ratifying Yeshua Ha-Nozri’s death sentence, and he enquired officially of the members of the Sanhedrin as to which of the prisoners they would like to let live. On receiving the reply that it was Bar-rabban, the Procurator said:
“Very well,” and ordered the secretary to enter it in the minutes straight away, squeezed in his hand the clasp that the secretary had picked up from the sand and said solemnly: “It’s time!”
At this point all those present moved off down the broad marble steps between walls of roses giving off a heavy scent, descending lower and lower towards the palace wall, towards the gates leading out into a large, smoothly paved square, at the end of which could be seen the columns and statues of Yershalaim’s stadium.
As soon as the group had emerged from the garden into the square and gone up onto the extensive stone platform that dominated it, Pilate, looking around through narrowed eyelids, assessed the situation. The space he had just crossed – that is, the space between the palace wall and the platform – was empty, whereas in front of him Pilate could no longer see the square: it had been devoured by the crowd, which would have flooded both onto the platform itself and into the cleared space if a triple row of Sebastian’s soldiers to Pilate’s left hand and soldiers of the Ituraean Auxiliary Cohort to the right had not held it back.
And so Pilate went up onto the platform, squeezing the unnecessary clasp mechanically in his fist and squinting. The Procurator was squinting not because the sun was stinging his eyes, no! For some reason he did not want to see the group of condemned men who, as he knew very well, would be led up after him onto the platform in just a moment.
As soon as the white cloak with the crimson lining rose up on high on the stone cliff at the edge of the human sea, a wave of sound struck the unseeing Pilate’s ears: “Ha-a-a…” It began softly, rising somewhere in the distance near the hippodrome, then became thunderous and, after being sustained for several seconds, began to abate. “They’ve seen me,” thought the Procurator. Before the wave reached its lowest point, it unexpectedly began to develop again, and as it rolled, it rose higher than the first one, and on the second wave, just as the foam rages on a roller at sea, there raged a whistling and the individual moans of women, discernible through the thunder. “They’ve led them onto the platform…” thought Pilate, “and the moans are because a number of women were crushed when the crowd surged forward.”
He waited for a time, aware that no power could make the crowd fall quiet until it had exhaled all that had accumulated within it and fallen silent itself.
And when that moment came, the Procurator threw up his right arm, and the last sounds were expelled from the crowd.
Then Pilate gathered as much of the hot air as he could into his chest and shouted, and his cracked voice carried over thousands of heads:
“In the name of the Emperor Caesar!”
At this point his ears were struck several times by an abrupt iron cry – in the cohorts, tossing up their spears and insignia, the soldiers had cried out fearsomely:
“Hail, Caesar!”
Pilate threw back his head and turned it straight towards the sun. A green fire flared up beneath his eyelids, which made his brain ignite, and above the crowd flew hoarse Aramaic words:
“Four criminals, arrested in Yershalaim for murders, incitement to revolt[115] and assault on the laws and faith[116], are sentenced to a shameful punishment – hanging on posts! And this punishment will now be carried out on Bald Mountain! The names of the criminals are Dismas, Gestas, Bar-rabban and Ha-Nozri. Here they are before you!”
Pilate pointed to the right, not seeing any of the criminals, but knowing they were there, in the place they were required to be.
The crowd answered with a long hum, as though of surprise or relief. And when it had died away, Pilate continued:
“But only three of them will be executed, for, in accordance with the law and custom, in honour of the Feast of the Passover, one of the condemned men, chosen by the Lesser Sanhedrin and with the ratification of the Roman authorities, is to have his contemptible life restored to him by the magnanimous Emperor Caesar!”
Pilate shouted out the words, and at the same time listened to the way the humming was replaced by a great silence. Now not a sigh, not a rustling reached his ears, and there even came a moment when it seemed to Pilate that absolutely everything around him had vanished. The city he hated had died, and just he alone stood, scorched by the vertical rays, his face digging into the sky. Pilate continued to hold the silence, and then began shouting out:
“The name of the man who will now be released to freedom before you is…”
He paused once again, delaying the name, checking that he had said everything, because he knew the dead city would rise again after the lucky man’s name had been uttered, and no further words would be able to be heard.