“And what harm in that?” I demanded, driven against my will to take the part of the fisherman.  “Have I not wine-guzzled a-plenty and passed strange nights in all the provinces?  The man is a man, and his ways are men’s ways, else am I a madman, which I here deny.”

Miriam shook her head as she spoke.

“He is not mad.  Worse, he is dangerous.  All Ebionism is dangerous.  He would destroy all things that are fixed.  He is a revolutionist.  He would destroy what little is left to us of the Jewish state and Temple.”

Here Pilate shook his head.

“He is not political.  I have had report of him.  He is a visionary.  There is no sedition in him.  He affirms the Roman tax even.”

“Still you do not understand,” Miriam persisted.  “It is not what he plans; it is the effect, if his plans are achieved, that makes him a revolutionist.  I doubt that he foresees the effect.  Yet is the man a plague, and, like any plague, should be stamped out.”

“From all that I have heard, he is a good-hearted, simple man with no evil in him,” I stated.

And thereat I told of the healing of the ten lepers I had witnessed in Samaria on my way through Jericho.

Pilate’s wife sat entranced at what I told.  Came to our ears distant shoutings and cries of some street crowd, and we knew the soldiers were keeping the streets cleared.

“And you believe this wonder, Lodbrog?” Pilate demanded.  “You believe that in the flash of an eye the festering sores departed from the lepers?”

“I saw them healed,” I replied.  “I followed them to make certain.  There was no leprosy in them.”

“But did you see them sore?—­before the healing?” Pilate insisted.

I shook my head.

“I was only told so,” I admitted.  “When I saw them afterward, they had all the seeming of men who had once been lepers.  They were in a daze.  There was one who sat in the sun and ever searched his body and stared and stared at the smooth flesh as if unable to believe his eyes.  He would not speak, nor look at aught else than his flesh, when I questioned him.  He was in a maze.  He sat there in the sun and stared and stated.”

Pilate smiled contemptuously, and I noted the quiet smile on Miriam’s face was equally contemptuous.  And Pilate’s wife sat as if a corpse, scarce breathing, her eyes wide and unseeing.

Spoke Ambivius:  “Caiaphas holds—­he told me but yesterday—­that the fisherman claims that he will bring God down on earth and make here a new kingdom over which God will rule—­”

“Which would mean the end of Roman rule,” I broke in.

“That is where Caiaphas and Hanan plot to embroil Rome,” Miriam explained.  “It is not true.  It is a lie they have made.”

Pilate nodded and asked: 

“Is there not somewhere in your ancient books a prophecy that the priests here twist into the intent of this fisherman’s mind?”