Testament by Nino Ricci

to make booths against the cold as if it were the Feast of Tabernacles, and there was such a celebratory mood in the square that night, with fires and singing, that you would not have known if you had stumbled upon us that we had come there in anger and in protest.
    It must have put a fright into Pilate, however, to look out from the palace windows the next morning and see the square taken over by our booths as though by a conquering army. Not long after sunrise he responded by calling out what seemed the whole of his legion, maybe some three thousand in all, who lined up practically
a testudo
in front of the palace ten rows deep, seeming fully prepared to march against us. Most of us were just coming to after the night’s festivities and we stared out bleary-eyed and hushed at thisapparition. But when half an hour had passed and still the soldiers had not moved against us, the crowd began to taunt them. Many of the soldiers were Samaritans, and understood perfectly well the abuse that was being hurled at them; and we would surely have descended into violence had the soldiers not been recalled as suddenly as they had been deployed, the bulk of them filing away into the palace courtyard and seemingly back to the garrison to leave only the nominal handful guarding the gates.
    None of us had any idea what to make of this apparent backing down. Pilate, having only just taken up his post, was an unknown quantity to us, and whether he was showing cowardice or benevolence in withdrawing his troops we couldn’t judge. But not long afterwards he sent his pages out among us to announce that he was prepared to come to terms, and that we should gather in the stadium so that he could comfortably address us. Such a feeling of elation went through the crowd then that no one thought to question the wisdom of letting ourselves be penned up like that, the whole crowd instead surging at once towards the stadium gates so that even those of us who might have resisted were swept along with the rest. Meanwhile the citizens of Caesarea, happy to have their square liberated, stood lined up in the streetside arcades to watch us pass as if we were prisoners being marched along in a triumph.
    At the stadium there was a handful of troops who directed us to the arena, into which the several thousand of us were crammed like so many sheep. Pilate had already taken his seat on the tribunal—he was smaller than I’d expected, and had that bearing, at once arrogant and defensive, of someone perpetually conscious of being of second rank. Itwas always hard to tell with that sort what excesses they would be prone to when given power. In this case, it was also unclear whether Pilate had acted on his own in setting up the standards, or on the express orders of Tiberius. The rumour was that he so hated the Jews he had been determined to put them in their place at once by rescinding the special privileges they had always enjoyed. But if that was the case and he had acted without Caesar’s sanction, then he was foolish enough to be a real danger to us.
    When we were all assembled, Pilate raised his hand and we fell silent. At that point there were only perhaps fifty soldiers visible in the stadium, most of them milling around the gates in what appeared to be a casual way and the rest stationed up near Pilate’s tribunal. But then on a nod from Pilate the gates were suddenly secured, leaving no exit, and an instant later there was a great rattle of armour while what seemed the entire contigent of troops that had beset us that morning suddenly poured out from the wings and into the stadium’s first rows to encircle us, the host of them planting themselves there with their hands on the hilts of their swords as if ready on the instant to leap over the barricade and massacre the lot of us. We all stood dumbfounded: even those of us who might have suspected Pilate’s intentions would never have believed he would consider resorting to such wholesale slaughter. Either