The Ironsmith

by Nicholas Guild

  While they waited to be served, Noah and Joshua talked quietly. “It is like staring at one’s reflection in a pond,” Joshua said. “The least breath of wind and it becomes unrecognizable. No wonder they seemed confused.”

  “But you made an impression—even on me.”

  “Did I?” Joshua seemed genuinely pleased. “Then can I number you among the saved?”

  “We’ll see.”

  This made Joshua laugh.

  When everyone had been attended to, Deborah came and sat down between the two men. She spoke briefly to Joshua and then turned to Noah. This, he told himself, was because he was the stranger.

  They talked of inconsequential matters, of the inconveniences of travel, of village life and whether it was to be preferred to life in the great cities, of the best way to cook leeks. Yet it seemed to him, in that moment, the most interesting and important conversation of his life.

  Was that because of Joshua’s sermon? He didn’t know. Still, Noah felt as if some closed place in his heart had suddenly been thrown open to the light.

  9

  Noah lingered in Capernaum for three more days, remaining for the Sabbath, during which Joshua preached in the house of prayer to a sullen audience. They took dinner that night at Deborah’s house, where there were no other guests. The three of them sat at a small, round table, their heads almost touching, like conspirators.

  “I have it in mind to visit the north,” Joshua said suddenly, as if the idea had just come into his mind.

  “That is an excellent idea,” Noah answered—he discovered, to his surprise, that he was almost angry. “Disappear into the villages. Lose yourself in places no one in Sepphoris has ever heard of.”

  Deborah said nothing, but the exchange caught her attention. She seemed perplexed.

  Joshua saw this and smiled.

  “My cousin seems to imagine I am in some danger of arrest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Tetrarch is afraid of him,” Noah said.

  Having spoken the words, Noah suddenly realized that they sounded like a jest. Perhaps the jest was that they were the truth.

  “But why would the Tetrarch be afraid?”

  “Why was he afraid of John the Baptist?”

  Still, she did not seem to understand. It was perhaps to rescue her from this confusion that Joshua once more picked up the thread of his original idea.

  “I will wipe the dust of Capernaum from my feet and search for a few more ready to listen to God’s message.”

  “If that message is anything like what I heard this morning, you will find few enough,” Noah said.

  Deborah was sufficiently shocked that she actually put her hand to her mouth, as if beseeching silence, but Joshua seemed amused.

  “They weren’t very responsive, were they.”

  “Fortunately for you.”

  Noah turned to their hostess and smiled. It was a perfectly unpremeditated gesture—for that instant he was unmindful of Joshua’s existence.

  Then he was recalled to himself.

  “I think the Sabbath prohibition against work was the only reason you weren’t taken outside and soundly thrashed,” he went on, seemingly concentrating his attention on the cup of wine he held in his left hand. “Peasants and fishermen generally have few enough possessions that they are not enthusiastic about being called upon to give them away to anyone. They grow suspicious, and with reason. Isn’t this what our masters, Antipas and his jackals, say to us all: ‘Divide your goods with me’?”

  “I do not think that God would accept the comparison.”

  “Doubtless not. But many of your listeners would.”

  “Yet…”

  It was Deborah who had spoken, and they both turned to her. Their attention seemed to embarrass her into silence.

  “Go on,” Joshua said quietly, as one would encourage a child’s first steps.

  “Pardon me.” Her eyes rested on Noah’s face for an instant, and then dropped. “Does not God command us to share with the poor? And is this not what the Master bids us do?”

  “The Master…?”

  Joshua threw back his head and laughed.

  “You see, Noah? This is how one gains a reputation for wisdom—by proclaiming the obvious. Apparently I have used it to great effect, since they will call me that.”

  * * *

  The next morning, as Deborah was finishing her breakfast, her servant girl announced that there was a man at the door.

  “It is the man who was here last night—not the Master, but his friend.”

  “Thank you, Hannah.”

  It was indeed Noah, and it was immediately clear to her that he was not at his ease.

  “Won’t you come in?” she asked him, standing just inside her doorway, smiling as sweetly as she knew how. “Have you eaten?”

  “No—yes.” He actually grinned with embarrassment. “I have had breakfast, thank you. I am going home … to Sepphoris. I just thought I would stop and say farewell.”

  It was obvious he had no intention of crossing her threshold, and she had no difficulty divining the reason. Although her acquaintance with him was slight, she could easily believe him to be the sort of man who would be delicate about the reputation of a young widow living alone.

  “Well, thank you.”

  They stood facing each other through a long moment of silence, and she began to suspect that he had intended something more than a mere visit of courtesy. But he would not speak. It puzzled her.

  “I hope you have an agreeable journey,” she said finally, simply because she could think of nothing else. “Sepphoris is a great distance, I hear.”

  “Not so far.” He smiled, with something like gratitude. “A good day’s walk. No more. I will dine with my sister this evening.”

  He glanced away, silent for a moment, and then said, quite suddenly, “I had thought of coming back in a few weeks’ time.”

  “Oh? Won’t the Master have left by then?”

  “It is not Joshua…” He shrugged and turned his eyes aside, seemingly at a loss.

  “Lady, I am like you—alone,” he went on, speaking with a careful deliberation that was almost like a rebuke. Almost, but not quite. “I lost my wife four years ago, and since then I have hardly thought of another. Grief gives way to numbness, which becomes nothing more than a habit.”

  He paused, apparently waiting for some response, but of course there was none. Deborah would not have known what answer to make. She could only listen, with stunned fascination. She was conscious of nothing except the man before her, and the rapid beating of her own heart.

  “And then I met you,” he went on. He smiled again, but it seemed a smile from which all hope had fled. “I would know you better.”

  Again he waited, and again she could say nothing. It was not in her power.

  “But I can see that I have offended you, for which I can only apologize. I will trouble you no longer.”

  Never, she thought, never in her life had she seen such sadness in a man’s eyes.

  He took a step backwards and then turned to go. He had almost reached the corner of the building, where he would turn and disappear, perhaps forever, when she found her voice.

  “No, wait … please.”

  He stopped and turned his head. There was nothing in his face except resignation, not even curiosity. It was the face he would wear while waiting for death.

  Suddenly she felt a flood of pity for him. She wanted to comfort him, to tell him she would do anything to make him happy, to see him smile again. But of course it was impossible to do any of these things, so she took a step down from her threshold stone, which brought her that one step closer to him.

  He did not move. He did not seem to understand.

  “When you come back…” she began, and then stopped. The difficulty was that words defined intention and, beyond the simple desire to keep him from departing out of her life, she had no idea what she intended.

  But she must say something.
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  “Where would you stay?”

  He smiled—he did smile. The hopelessness vanished. Or, perhaps more accurately, was translated into a certain wariness.

  And he took a step back toward her.

  “My good friend Ezra,” he said, “who keeps a tavern, and has decided to forgive me for being Joshua’s cousin, can doubtless be persuaded to furnish me with a bed.”

  The smile vanished, as if he felt it was out of place, or implied too much.

  “I would do nothing to compromise you, Lady. I have business dealings with men in the gentile cities to the east—Capernaum would make a convenient base from which to visit them.”

  His expression became faintly playful, the way it did sometimes when he argued with the Master.

  “I would turn up with a pack animal laden with my wares, and for a few months I would play at being the itinerant peddler.”

  He had thought it all out, it appeared. But, then, he would. It surprised her a little to discover how distinct was her impression of him. They had met only twice, and yet she believed that she understood his character. He was the sort of man she believed she could trust.

  Perhaps she had been paying more attention than she realized.

  “You have taken me by surprise,” she said, glancing away out of sheer embarrassment. “I can give you no encouragement. I need time to think. At this moment I have no idea…”

  “I understand that.” He took another step toward her, but only one. “I ask for nothing beyond the opportunity to know you better, and to have you know me better.”

  “I would know you better, Noah.”

  He smiled, and she realized it was the first time she had ever spoken his name.

  “Then we will see each other again, in a few weeks’ time.”

  * * *

  “What did he want?” Hannah asked. She was sixteen and had worked in the household since she was twelve. Like her mistress, she was utterly alone in the world, and her loyalty to Deborah had the absolute quality of a blood tie. The question was therefore not an impertinence.

  “Merely to say good-bye.”

  “I think he likes you.”

  “Really?” Deborah smiled, as if at an interesting but indifferent fact, and hoped she was not blushing. Her face felt hot, so probably she was. “The Master loves him, so he must be a good man. I would value his regard.”

  Hannah said nothing, but the expression on her face betrayed a suspicion that her mistress was not being entirely candid.

  “I have some accounts to go over,” Deborah announced, suddenly eager to get off the subject of Noah and his regard. “I will be in my bedroom.”

  Her bedroom was on the second floor and possessed of a balcony that faced onto a small kitchen garden surrounded by a wooden fence. The balcony was just large enough for a chair and a round table not much bigger than the lid of a cooking pot. Only one person could sit there comfortably, and during her husband’s lifetime the door to the balcony had always been kept closed. It had become, since his death, a kind of sanctuary.

  She disliked her bedroom, although she was rarely prepared to admit this to herself. Still, to this hour, after two years of widowhood, she found it disquieting, as if, at any moment, he might come in, with his heavy, I am master here manner that had always made her feel like an item of furniture.

  The balcony was her own. She could close the door to the bedroom and be in a place that had no associations with her married life.

  Because Deborah could not hide from herself that she had not loved her husband, and that awareness filled her with remorse. God commanded that a wife should obey her husband in all things, and should love him. She had obeyed him, but to love him was not in her power.

  She was fifteen at the time of her marriage. Her father, who was clerk to a tax collector, had wept when he told her. She was his only child and he loved her, but he was in debt. Bukkiah the fish merchant admired her, would take her without a dowry, and would provide her father with the money to pay his creditors. He had no choice.

  Her mother told her that to be poor and unmarried was the worst fate that could befall a woman. She said it was a daughter’s duty to submit to her parents’ will. Deborah submitted.

  But, as God willed, her submission was to no purpose. The wedding feast was hardly cleared away when there was an outbreak of fever, which claimed both her parents in the same day.

  Bukkiah was forty-two and a widower. His only son had died in childhood. He was not handsome and his conversation was without charm. Deborah found him coarse, but he was not brutal and treated her with decent respect. His respect increased when he discovered that her father had taught her to read and to do sums. He had an illiterate man’s respect for anyone who could “do letters,” as he called it, and such an accomplishment in a woman seemed to him almost magical. She kept his books and he listened to her advice in matters of business, although he did not like people to know. A man’s wife should not have such authority with him. And a man’s wife should not know how to read. Somehow it didn’t seem quite proper.

  Many women would have envied her. Her husband was tractable and rich. Yet this very consciousness of privilege only made Deborah more unhappy, since she reproached herself the more because she could not love him. He deserved his wife’s love, although he did not seem to notice its absence.

  She was his wife, and that was itself the problem. If she had been merely his servant she might have been reasonably content, but she was his wife.

  Perhaps twice a month he had need of her and she would submit. At first it hurt, but after a time she felt nothing—or almost nothing. She hated the touch of his hands on her breasts. She hated the weight of his body over her. It felt like being trapped in a cave.

  Yet, somehow, she had the sense that it might have been otherwise. The relations between husband and wife were supposed to be a pleasure for them both, and sometimes, even with Bukkiah, she had the sense that this might have been possible. But then he would be finished, and roll away, and fall asleep.

  And such had been married life, until the day he cut his thumb on a broken piece of iron that had somehow found its way into the belly of a fish he was gutting. The wound grew putrid and his hand and then his arm swelled up so that he could no longer bend his elbow. By the third day he could not rise from his bed. She nursed him without rest and listened as, in his delirium, he called out the name of his first wife. In the week of his illness she was closer to loving him than in all the years before, and when his life flickered out she sincerely mourned him.

  Almost nothing changed. The widow, who had come to understand the business at least as well as her husband, simply hired a few more men and things went on as before. Since Bukkiah’s death she had received a few offers to buy the business, but she had declined them. The work gave her something to do.

  And now, it appeared, she had a suitor.

  Noah was not the first. Since being alone, she had received two offers from local men, both politely but instantly refused. Noah was the first to whom she felt herself inclined to listen.

  She liked him. That was the difference.

  She could list to herself various reasons for liking him: He was intelligent and pious. The Master loved and trusted him. He seemed a man whose emotions one could take seriously. He was not handsome, but she liked his face. His hands seemed to combine great strength with an almost feminine dexterity. Did these account for her liking him?

  How long since he had declared himself? Not half an hour. In his walk from her door, he would hardly even have reached the main road. Yet the surprise was beginning to wear off.

  She had only to close her eyes and in imagination she was sitting beside him. He was speaking, not to her but to someone else. His attention was directed elsewhere, but she could feel the warmth of his body. The sound of his voice, its rhythm, the way the words would trail off at the end of a sentence, was more beguiling than any music. She wanted to touch him but did not quite dare.

  She was aware of
a great tenderness in herself. It was like nothing she had ever experienced.

  She forced her eyes open and looked around. She was sitting on her balcony. The morning sun was bright and came from over her left shoulder. Noah was gone, once more on the road back to Sepphoris.

  Instantly, she missed him.

  10

  “What could it be?” the priest asked, examining the mysterious object he held with the tips of his fingers, turning it this way and that. It was made of iron, so highly polished that it could almost have been silver, and about the length of his hand.

  “It is a pair of pliers. For pulling teeth.” Caleb was mildly irritated that the Lord Eleazar should express such interest in a trifle. “It was brought this morning by messenger, a gift from my informant, along with his report.”

  “Look at the hinge mechanism,” Eleazar said, with childlike delight. “Except that you cannot see it, can you. It almost appears as if there is no hinge. Your informant must be a very clever man.”

  “Yes, he is. Rather too clever, I suspect. His report is worthless.”

  With an air of reluctance, Eleazar set the pliers back down on his desk and accepted the single sheet of papyrus. The writing, he observed, was Greek.

  “‘Joshua bar Joseph has a negligible following, mostly women, to whom he preaches forgiveness of sins and the virtues of humility and charity. He believes that God will restore the world to its original perfection, for the enjoyment of which men must prepare themselves by purifying their hearts and practicing mercy and forbearance.’”

  He looked up at Caleb, who was standing respectfully to one side, and raised his eyebrows.

  “I can believe his following is negligible,” he said. “Such lofty sentiments are unlikely to attract much interest.

  “Then he goes on to write, ‘It is difficult to imagine in what light Your Excellency could regard such a person as of any danger to the state.’”

  “Joshua bar Joseph was a follower of the Baptist,” Caleb insisted. “He is doubtless proclaiming the same message of sedition.”

  “Your informant suggests otherwise.”

  “My informant is his kinsman. He has a motive for softening the truth.”