The Master's Quilt Read Free

had on
several mornings the past four weeks: mouth dry, tongue swollen,
body drenched. And his eyes were filled with tears, as if he’d been
crying uncontrollably in his sleep. He groaned, then uttered a
silent curse. Hopefully, there was enough water on hand to quench
the fiery thirst raging in his throat.
    He glanced furtively at the heavens. His
dream had been so vivid that he fully expected to see both sun and
moon radiating in the crystal blue sky. Instead, the morning looked
normal and so perfectly ordinary that he wondered why he’d ever
been afraid.
     
    • • •
     
    At about the same time Joseph Caiaphas was
rubbing sleep from his eyes, a man of medium build, with a square
cut face and curly black hair pomaded with olive oil, paced the
floor of his Jerusalem residence. The Procurator Caesaris had
awakened hours before the sun began to rise hot and bright over the
city. Sleep had become a luxury of the past for Pontius Pilate.
    The man Rome had selected to govern Judea
wrestled yet again with his tortured conscience. He cringed in pain
as the pounding inside his head reached epic proportions. “It will
be a hot, dry summer,” he said aloud to the walls. He cursed the
day he was sent to this land forsaken by the gods and filled with
quarrelsome, rebellious Jews.
    He poured himself a flagon of wine and
greedily drank half of it down in one gulp. Unfortunately, the warm
blood-red liquid would only dull, not eliminate, his raging pain.
He watched the daylight carpet the city that had become his
nemesis. The desert heat steadily worked its way into his dark
skin. He grimaced as the prophetic words of Claudia, his wife,
beckoned to him, as they had done daily for the past month.
    “ The Hebrew priests have beguiled you,
Pontius,” she had said with defiance, on the eve of the trial.
“Beware, and touch not that man. . .for He is holy. Last night I
saw Him in a vision: He was walking on the waters; He was flying on
the wings of the winds. There was a mighty storm raging about Him.
He spoke to the tempest and to the fish of the lakes; all were
obedient to Him. Behold, the forest in Mt. Kellum flows with blood,
the statues of Caesar are filled with the filth of Gemoniae, the
columns of the Intercium have given way, and the sun is mourning
like a vestal in the tomb. Oh Pilate, evil awaits you if you will
not listen to the prayer of your wife!”
    He took another gulp of wine and pressed
trembling hands into tired, reddened eyes. His headaches grew worse
by the day. Why hadn’t he listened? What evil, indeed, awaited him? Gods protect me , he thought miserably and wished desperately
that he had never heard of Judea or Jesus of Nazareth.
    Suddenly, the throbbing behind his eyes
became so intense that he cried out, loud enough to wake his
servant, Antonius, who came running.
     
    • • •
     
    Not far away, another man, a Jew in his
mid-fifties, stood silently on one of the many balconies of the
Hasmonian Palace and admired the coral colored dawn. His
rectangular face was composed of deep-set eyes and a square chin
that supported taut, thin lips.
    Lost in thought, he barely heard the trumpet
blasts that saluted the sunrise. In each of the fourteen districts
of the city the Praetorian Guard were even now synchronizing the
water clocks., Throughout Jerusalem the elite of the Roman
citizenry were awakening, preparing to eat a breakfast of
wine-soaked bread, pullet, and fresh eggs.
    Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee, shared
with the beleaguered Roman Procurator—though for different reasons
and with different effect—a sense of frustration and impotence. He
was a man of action, as had been his father, Herod the Great, and
so his failure to maintain the momentum of the powerful political
apparatus the now dead patriarch had forged, disturbed him deeply.
He sighed heavily, remembering a recent conversation he had with
the one man he reviled most—the man who had usurped his father’s
authority. Even though he would