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“Oh, poor me!” snapped the second. “I guess I’ll just celebrate Passover at home with my wife and kids and
not risk my sorry ass!
”

“Hush!” the high priestess commanded, pulling her shawl more closely around her. “I’m trying to hear the teacher.”

“Who are you to order me to be silent?” the second man demanded. “He teaches every damn day! What exactly do you think you’re missing?”

“Don’t bother her, David,” muttered the first. “She’s a woman. If anything, she needs the rabbi’s teachings the most.”

Julia rose to her fullest stature, the one every priestess learned when she was only a neophyte. Throwing her shawl aside, she intoned,

“I am Julia Templa, High Priestess of the Temple of Isis and I command you to BE QUIET!”

Everyone turned and stared, but Julia didn’t flinch. She did, however, flush a little when Yeshua beckoned to her. Picking up her shawl, the high priestess shook it out, wrapped it back around her shoulders and made her way through the crowd to his side.

“Do you always cause a disturbance like that?”

Julia ducked her head. “I try not to, sir, but everyone habitually pays attention to a high priestess.”

Yeshua gave her a small smile and a quick, one-armed hug. “Try to keep it in and we’ll talk after.”

“Everyone pays attention to a high priestess, hmm? Even when she covers herself demurely like a countrywoman?” He gestured for her to follow and they strolled away from the crowd. “We wouldn’t have noticed you if you hadn’t spoken out.”

“I apologize, Sir. I was trying to hear your teachings, but the men in front of me were carrying on about your plans for this week.” Julia chanced a look into his eyes. “Were they telling the truth? Do you really plan to come into the city tomorrow on a pure white donkey?”

“I’m afraid it’s unavoidable,” Yeshua said with a sigh. “Personally, I’d rather walk into town like everyone else, retire to my room and share a quiet Passover with my friends. It’s James and John who think I need to make a big entrance.” He made an amused noise. “My friend Maggie calls them the Thunder Brothers.”

“‘Maggie’? That’s an unusual name.”

“It’s short for Mary Magdalene. There are too many Marys in my life…my mother, Mary of Bethany, Mary of Magdala. One night when we were in the hills, I complained about that and she came up with Maggie.”

She chuckled. “I don’t have anything so…charming. Everyone from the eldest priestess to the youngest supplicant calls me ‘Lady Julia’.”

“You’re not of Roman stock?”

“Oh, I am, but it was my grandmother who came from Rome. My full name is Gaia Julia Gregorii, but I prefer Julia Templa…it’s softer and more inviting. The three name structure is just so…is intimidating the right word?”

He gave her his shy smile and the high priestess felt the color rising in her cheeks.

“I will happily call you Julia if you will call me…Josh.”

This time, Julia laughed so hard that she tripped over a rock. Even flat on her butt in the dust, she couldn’t help laughing.

“
Josh?
The great rabbi Yeshua ben Miriam wants me to call him
Josh?
” She let out one last chuckle and gratefully accepted a hand up. “Aren’t I supposed to call you something more dignified? Something like…I don’t know…Jesus?”

“You can call me Jesus if you like. I like Josh because it doesn’t sound like a sneeze. Every time I hear ‘Yeshua’, I want to say—” He said something in Hebrew that roughly translated to, “Bless you; and may you have a long life.”

“May the blessings be returned upon you sevenfold and triple,” she replied.

“You know Hebrew?” he asked, switching back to Aramaic.

“A little. Growing up, we spoke Aramaic at home, but I had to learn Latin to speak to my
avia
and my tutors taught me that it was important to know Greek in order to read the ‘greatest works ever written’. Any Hebrew I know, I learned from the priestesses. We have three of Jewish descent.”

They walked and chatted for a while about innocuous things—where Josh had grown up, how Julia came to be a priestess, their differences in ministry. Finally, they arrived at a copse that must have been a mile or more from the gathering site and Josh sat down on a fallen log.

“Why have you come to me? Surely you haven’t given up on your own faith.”

“The Goddess has been good to me,” Julia acknowledged. “But I cannot let you enter Jerusalem without knowing who you are. Before the sun rises tomorrow, the Sanhedrin and the Roman prefect will know you are here. If ‘Yeshua ben Miriam’ is not heard among the stalls in the marketplace, the gossipmongers are failing in their duties.”

“If Pontius Pilatus and Caiaphas don’t already know I’m here, they’re asleep.”

“I understand the desire—nay, the
need
—to spread the word of your god, but you’re earning a reputation as a rabblerouser. Surely this procession into the city is unnecessary.”

“There are deeper forces at work here than you or anyone knows,” Josh said quietly, after a moment. “There are things I understand that my disciples never will.”

“So you’re saying this procession is necessary.”

“I’m saying that when I’m executed at the end of the week,
that
is what is necessary.”

Julia’s eyes widened. “If your life is in danger, then why are you staying? Shouldn’t you be making haste for some other land, perhaps one that Rome has not touched?”

“You and I know that death is inevitable. If I run from my fate, then I will enter the afterlife elsewhere,” he replied. “If I don’t let Pontius Pilatus execute me, then what? I drown in Lake Gennesaret? I die during a robbery in Tiberias? No. Better to meet my end in the way my Lord ordained than to stumble into death unprepared.”

Julia pursed her lips and subtly shook her head. She understood leaving for
Duat
after a life well lived, but this stoic acceptance of a foretold execution was unnerving. Part of her had no wish to be left here crying, so she took advantage of the sudden silence.

“I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me, rabbi.” She returned the favor and offered him a hand to rise. “Please let me know if there is anything we can do for you…we’re on the north wall, tucked away in the corner.”

“Easily the most spectacular thing I’ve ever seen!” exclaimed Aliyah.

“You haven’t seen enough in your short life, little one,” Ziva chided.

“It was more spectacular than I imagined,” Sabrina admitted. “All this for a simple rabbi?”

Aurelia and Julia had received patients all day, leaving the others to attend the procession as they wished. Only Tatiana had come back early, saying that the crowds were too much for her. The high priestess finished wrapping a merchant’s foot and sent him off.

“Tell me about it.”

“They were shouting
‘hoshana!’
and throwing palm leaves in front of his donkey.” Aliyah flopped down on a bench reserved for patients. “What does that even
mean?
”

“It’s a praise word,” Hadas explained as she began to help Aurelia put away supplies in anticipation of the afternoon rest. “Some think it means ‘save us’, but others say it may mean ‘savior’. Given the stories you tell about Yeshua, it’s probably the latter.”

“Did he wave?”

“As in a triumphal parade?” asked Claudia. “No, My Lady. I saw his disciples whisper to him as if they would have such a thing, but he only did it once or twice, and only at their urging.”

Julia sat down. “Yeshua’s disciples scare me. I wonder if they are not more at fault for the Sanhedrin’s anger than he is willing to see.”

Hadas and Aurelia looked at each other as the rest of the priestesses sat down around the room.

“What did the rabbi say?” asked Livia.

“Some, of course, I may not repeat,” the high priestess replied. “Yeshua—he told me to call him ‘Josh,’ but I will do so only in his presence—Yeshua told me how he felt called to the ministry at a young age. How he was certain, even as a boy, that he was supposed to spread the word of his god.

“I heard tell that he argued during the public teachings when he was younger,” said Ziva.

“That wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What is this all about?” Aurelia finally reclined on a bench. “Is he so magnificent a rabbi that he needs a celebration to accompany him into Jerusalem?”

Julia took a slow, deep breath and carefully avoided the gaze of the others. “Yeshua ben Miriam will be executed by the end of the week.”

That threw the other priestesses into an uproar.

“
What?
”

“I
knew
he was going to piss off Pilatus!”

“We have to do something!”

“Can you stop it?”

And on and on, until,

“My Lady,
say
something!”

The high priestess turned to Livia. “What would you have me say? I am not the Chief Priestess of the College of Vestals…I have no stay of execution.”

“Then call upon her!” Ziva demanded. “You saw him! You liked him! You would have him killed?”

“What happens when the prefect learns that I’ve spoken with the Chief Vestal?” Julia replied. “He’ll say that I influenced her decision and render it null and void. Yeshua would still die and all our effort would be for nothing!”

“How do you know he will die?” asked Aurelia. “Has Pilatus issued an arrest order?”

“That is one thing of which I may not speak,” the high priestess said. “There is no order yet, but there will be.”

The silence lengthened unbearably. It was Aurelia who spoke first.

“It is time to go to our rest. If we wait any longer, penitents will be pounding on our door at suppertime!”

The maiden found Julia in a tiny chapel in the furthest corner of the sanctuary. Barely enough room for two small benches, the chapel bore a niche with a statue of Athena, whom the priestesses had purified and re-blessed as the personification of Sekhmet. The high priestess didn’t come here often, but when she did, she preferred not to be disturbed.

“My Lady, I need to speak with you.”

“I will broach no more discussion on the subject.”

Livia stopped, confused. “That is not of what I speak.”

Julia sat back on one of the benches, but did not look at her lieutenant. “What, then?”

“We usually have a ceremony and banquet to counter Passover.”
The supplicants
especially
need one this year
was left unspoken.

“The other priestesses would have us celebrate the Night of Tears early.”

Livia considered this. The Night of Tears marked the time in which Isis was said to flood the Nile with her tears for the loss of Osiris. Unusually appropriate in light of the situation.

“Do you think the impending execution bothers them that much?”

The high priestess finally turned around. “Were you suddenly rendered deaf when they implored me to help? When I said that I could not intervene, they were practically on their knees, begging me to speak with the Chief Vestal.”

“Perhaps it is not the younger priestesses in which I should worry about indifference.”

“We will have a late supper,” Julia decided. “In the darkest hour, we will make our way to the reflecting pool, where we will celebrate our Lady in her aspect as moon goddess.”

“
Domina
Drusilla Claudia Tiberii requests an audience with the
Domina Templum
, one Gaia Julia Gregorii.”

Claudia and Sabrina were on duty that morning and looked at each other in confusion while the herald waited expectantly.

After a moment, Sabrina said, “D’you mean Lady Julia?”

“The
domina
says you call her as much.”

“Who is this
domina
that you serve?” asked Claudia.

The herald lowered his voice. “Claudia, wife of the prefect Pontius Pilatus!”

At that name, the priestess disappeared. The herald watched her go, then turned to Sabrina.

“I hope she’s going to find
Domina
Julia.”

Sabrina and the herald waited for several minutes in uneasy silence, until Aurelia appeared.

“Lady Julia will see you in the
per medjat
.”

“Of course.” He nodded and strolled away.

“Where’s Claudia?” Sabrina murmured.

“She said she didn’t feel comfortable with the prefect’s wife here. I set her to sorting out the acacia leaves and turning the plants. If by chance she finishes before one of us comes for her, I told her to take notes for Hadas.”

Domina
Claudia’s arrival was heralded by the clink of hobnailed sandals. Sabrina and Aurelia expected an imperious woman with a perpetual tilt to her nose, as if she would rather be anywhere but the temple. Instead, they received a petite, demure little thing who looked as if it had taken all her courage to sneak out of the house. The assistant healer stepped forward and confiscated the weapons of the soldiers who had accompanied their guest.

“No swords in the house of the Lady.” She produced half a dozen quarter staves. “Only these are permitted to our priestesses.”

Some of our ladies are proficient archers,
Aurelia thought,
but I don’t want you getting any ideas.

The guards followed Sabrina and Aurelia to the doors of the
per medjat
and Aurelia had to persuade them to stay outside. When the high priestess granted them admission, Aurelia was secretly pleased to see that she was reading a scroll written in Demotic, a language that the prefect’s wife surely did not know.

“May I present
Domina
Drusilla Claudia Tiberii?”

“Thank you, Aurelia.” Julia folded the scroll and laid it aside. “You may go.”

“I need to speak with you,” Claudia said in urgent Aramaic, before Aurelia was hardly out the door. “I had a dream.”

“Then I shall fetch Ziva.” The high priestess rose. “She is the best at interpreting dreams.”

“No!” The prefect’s wife put a hand on Julia’s arm. “It must be you.”

She raised an eyebrow and returned to her seat. “I will try my best, but I cannot assure you of anything.”