The Ironsmith

by Nicholas Guild

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, six or seven months ago. I would have to check my records.” Onesimus smiled indulgently. “You can tell him he is free to return whenever he likes. No one is looking for him. No one cares anything about a dead whore.”

  * * *

  “It’s an interesting story,” Priam said that night, over dinner. “A young man, possessed of wealth and leisure, disappears one day, leaving a dead prostitute behind him. Do you think he killed her.”

  Noah, who was thinking of something else, did not immediately answer.

  “Do you remember the way he put it?” He looked up, and the expression on his face suggested he had a bitter taste in his mouth. “‘No one cares anything about a dead whore.’ She was probably some poor farmer’s daughter, sold to a brothel keeper when she was ten years old. And after that her fate is of interest to no one.”

  “Your heart is too tender for your own good.” When he didn’t receive a response, Priam repeated his initial question. “Do you think he killed her?”

  “I doubt it. He doesn’t seem capable of it.”

  Then Noah seemed to disappear inside himself. He was concerned with quite a different mystery.

  “Judah bar Isaac disappears six months ago,” he began at last, “and then two months ago, he attaches himself to my cousin Joshua. That leaves four empty months.”

  “Where do you think he was?”

  “I don’t know,” Noah answered.

  It was the truth. He didn’t know. But he could hazard a guess.

  34

  On the long, winding way back from Nazareth, Joshua seemed a different person, as if the break with his family marked the beginning of some shift in the way he saw himself and his work. Everyone noticed it, even Simon, who was not a very acute man.

  Those who deceive, and thus live in dread of discovery, are perhaps quicker to discover changes in others, to anguish over their meaning, and to find the truth. It is the burden of such men to see clearly.

  Thus Judah was probably the first to understand that Joshua was struggling to accept his own isolation. Now, it seemed, he belonged only to God.

  The route they followed took them first east, as far as Beth Yerah, at the southern end of the Sea of Kinneret, and then north along the western shore. When they reached Tiberias, Joshua, to Judah’s intense relief, refused to enter the city, so a fisherman who had been attracted by his message took them around by water.

  Judah sat in the boat, gazing at the city that had once been his home, with a mingling of revulsion and nostalgia. Was Zebida still there, plying her trade? Had she forgotten him? Had she loved him, even a little? He could not disguise from himself that he missed her caresses.

  Everywhere Joshua preached the coming of God’s kingdom and the redemption of the land. God would soon set everything right for those who stood before Him with contrite hearts. Joshua made the world as it was seem like a prison. Soon, he said, soon all would be set free.

  Yet one could not avoid the impression that Joshua was growing impatient. Why did God stay His hand? What was He waiting for?

  And more and more—in private conversation, for it was not something at which he even hinted to the crowds that collected around him—the answer seemed to be, for Jerusalem during the Passover.

  But if the heavens opened, Judah often wondered, and God’s messenger came to judge the children of the earth, would he be cast into the fire like the nettles and weeds of Joshua’s parables? Judah seemed never to have a moment when he was free of fear. Fear of God, fear of Caleb, fear of not knowing where to find the truth.

  More than once he had made up his mind to go to Joshua and confess everything. He would tell him the whole story and beseech his mercy. But always his courage failed him.

  Did he really believe in Joshua’s message? He didn’t know. He believed in Joshua, in his goodness and his love of God, but he did not know if he could believe in the Kingdom. Perhaps he was just too empty a man to have faith in anything.

  And Caleb was real. Caleb was waiting—Caleb with his prison and his cross and his relentless conviction that he was the true servant of heaven’s will.

  So, with his divided heart, Judah could see quite clearly that the worm of doubt had found its home in Joshua. Doubt not about God or about the Kingdom, but about himself.

  The message was true, but was he, Joshua bar Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, really the messenger?

  When Judah first met him, he had rarely used the word prophet, and never applied it to himself. The Baptist was a “prophet” who spoke with an authority that was God’s gift to him. Joshua revered the Baptist and quoted him constantly: “John said” and “John taught us”—these words were always on his lips.

  Now he spoke less of John, although still with vast respect, and now openly referred to himself as a prophet. Often he would begin a teaching with “The Pharisees say thus, but I say…” Did he believe that he had assumed the Baptist’s mantle?

  Or was it more that he needed to believe it?

  Judah, the deceiver, understood that need, and felt compassion for Joshua.

  Perhaps only men like Caleb did not doubt.

  “I will be glad to see Capernaum again,” Simon told him, smiling companionably as they ate their dinner, leaning back against the hull of a damaged boat. “I haven’t seen my wife in two weeks and three days.”

  After an initial hostility to the Judean man from the city—the man who had once been rich—Simon appeared to have accepted Judah. That mattered, because Simon was closer to Joshua than anyone else. Joshua would sometimes laugh at Simon, and even mock him, but he trusted and confided in him. Simon had been the first to follow Joshua.

  Simon also did not doubt. He was a simple, straightforward Galilean, little given to subtlety. He was also, after Joshua, the leader, not only by seniority but by temperament. He would have been a good soldier, but God had made him a fisherman with a window in his heart open to heaven.

  “I wish Deborah was still there,” Judah answered. “She would feed us. We would eat meat.”

  “Well, now she is feeding the ironsmith.” Simon laughed, appreciating his own joke, if that was what it was. “At least we will eat lamb in Jerusalem,” he went on. “It’s something to look forward to. I always like the Passover in Jerusalem. What a place!”

  “I know,” said Judah. “I was born there. My father is a Levite in the Temple.”

  Simon looked at him as if dumbfounded, and Judah could only laugh.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not bragging. He cast me off, and with good reason.”

  “All men are sinful,” Simon told him, putting a thick hand on his shoulder. “God forgives us.”

  He was not sure why, but suddenly Judah found it necessary to close his eyes and struggle against the temptation to weep.

  He recovered, however, before Simon noticed anything.

  “I could use a jug of wine,” Judah said, glad there seemed to be no thickness in his voice.

  “A whole jug? Would you share it?” Simon laughed again, and his hand pounded on Judah’s shoulder good-naturedly.

  * * *

  What would his father think? Who would he choose, Joshua or Caleb? It was a question that haunted Judah’s mind like an evil spirit.

  For his father would be aware of Caleb’s history. He was a friend of Old Jacob and had doubtless heard all the circumstances of his son’s banishment. But would he say that Caleb had redeemed himself in the service of God?

  And what would he think of the peasant preacher, Joshua? Would he see a prophet or merely a carpenter turned agitator? Could he see the prophet, or would he be blinded by the calloused hands and the Galilean accent?

  In a nameless village less than a day’s walk from Tiberias, a woman who was subject to convulsions, so that she could hardly speak or walk, approached Joshua one morning, begging to be healed. Joshua knelt with her for almost two hours, his hand caressing the back of her head, their faces almost touching while she whispe
red her story to him and he told her of God’s limitless forgiveness if she truly repented her sins.

  She stayed close to him all the rest of the day, and her convulsions seemed to have left her. She was smiling and happy and at peace with herself. Whether, after they were gone, she was once more seized by her illness, Judah could not say, but for that day Joshua seemed to have worked a miracle.

  “I have seen him do such things before,” Simon told him. “He can drive away demons. It is a power he has from God.”

  But was it demons or simply grief that he drove away? Was it from God or merely in Joshua? And was it any less a wonder either way?

  Judah came to think that it was the power of Joshua’s goodness, an aura that seemed to surround him, and of his belief. Joshua had faith, and said himself that faith could do all things.

  If others had faith in him, anything was possible.

  And Judah could not help but conclude that it was some flaw in himself, a weakness of character, a moral cowardliness, that held him back from faith.

  I will believe when the heavens open and one like the son of man appears in power, but not before, he thought. Then it will be too late.

  * * *

  On the evening when they at last reached Capernaum, Joshua decided that he wished to withdraw for a few days of prayer and fasting. He struck out for an area north of the village, where there were thick stands of trees too far away to be worth the trouble of felling and where therefore he was sure of being alone.

  Thus the disciples were left to themselves and resumed their old patterns of life. Simon went fishing, and took Judah with him.

  For the next three days they rose before dawn and were on the water long before the sun showed itself over the eastern mountains. Fishing, it turned out, was hard work, and once there was a storm that nearly swamped their boat. They would come back in the late afternoon and gut their catch. Then Simon would haggle with the fish merchants and they would go back to Simon’s house for a hot meal and bed.

  These were perhaps the happiest three days of Judah’s life. He was busy all day long, and when the work was over he was too tired to think.

  Then, on the evening of the third day, Joshua returned. He gathered the disciples and they ate a meal together, and there was wine.

  And he explained to them everything that would happen.

  “God has made all things plain to me,” he said. “None of us will taste new wine before we have seen the coming of the Kingdom. Oh, how I long to be free of this wicked world!”

  John, ever the practical one, was counting on his fingers.

  “The grape harvest is in four months,” he said. He seemed disappointed.

  “I cannot believe God will wait so long,” Joshua replied, raising his hands with the palm outward, as if praying for deliverance. “Where would God reveal His will except in Jerusalem? When, if not during the Passover?”

  “Then He has revealed to you the time?” Simon asked.

  But Joshua shook his head.

  “The time is known only to the Father. But He will make His will known, and He will send His messenger. The dead will rise from their tombs and all mankind will be judged. The righteous will be gathered to God and the world will be returned to what it was before the first man learned sin.”

  No one seemed satisfied with this, but it was obvious that further questioning would be in vain. Joshua was in one of his ecstatic moods, when the only voice he heard was God’s.

  He disappeared again the next day, and his disciples, after waiting a few hours, once again went fishing. But the water was calm and the catch poor, so there was plenty of time, and nothing to think about except Joshua.

  “He has said as much before,” John said. “He expects this Passover to bring on the Kingdom. But he doesn’t know.”

  “Yet he believes,” Simon answered. “And that is enough for me.”

  “But is it enough for him?”

  John wiped the sweat from his face and stared up at the sun as if it had insulted him.

  “It is what makes him what he is, this belief in the mercy of God,” he went on. “That is why we follow and love him, because to be with him is to believe it, too. But he must believe it. He has no choice.”

  35

  “In accord with your orders, I had men watching the roads in and out of Nazareth. He left early the morning after the Sabbath, and a few hours later his wife and sister returned to the city. He was followed into Tiberias, where our agent turned him over to another and came back to Sepphoris to report.”

  Caleb’s confidential clerk, a thin, unhappy-looking man of about forty, stood before his master’s desk in the palace at Sepphoris.

  “And he is in Tiberias now?”

  “No. He and another man visited several merchants, and then the next day he came home. As soon as he was inside his door, our man came to me to report.”

  “And what did he discuss with these merchants?”

  “We don’t know that yet, but it is under investigation.” The clerk, whose name was Bildad, cocked his head a little to one side in a dismissive gesture. “It probably is innocent. He is frequently in Tiberias on business.”

  “How is his marriage faring?”

  Bildad, who had probably never had a sexual thought in his life, managed a condescending smile.

  “The reports indicate they seem to be very much in love.”

  “And less than a week after his wedding he travels to Tiberias, alone. It must have been very pressing business.” Caleb, whose instincts told him something dangerous had just occurred, shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “How soon do you expect the report on his activities?”

  “In the regular weekly dispatch, if the results seem unimportant. Anything worthy of attention will be sent by runner.”

  “Notify me as soon as there is anything.”

  Caleb made a dismissing gesture with his left hand and the clerk bowed his way out.

  Ever since the Tetrarch’s amnesty, Caleb had maintained a loose watch on Noah. He could not arrest him, yet neither could he afford to ignore him. Noah was a clever man—a dangerous man. A man like Noah, a man with a network of business contacts, with whom he carried on an energetic correspondence, was a natural spy. Caleb even suspected that he might have been the source of the information which Eleazar had used to frighten Antipas into submission.

  Fortunately he was also just a tradesman, with a tradesman’s view of the world. Probably it would never occur to him that his movements were being followed.

  It was the early afternoon and Caleb decided to leave his office and go visit the baths. With the new policy of peace, tranquility, and fatherly affection for the Tetrarch’s subjects, there was very little for him to do, and he was, consequently, bored. If he went home, his wife, who was also bored, would subject him to one of her temper tantrums, which at the moment he did not feel up to facing. It was far pleasanter to go to the baths.

  He had by then half persuaded himself that Bildad was right and that his suspicions about Noah were groundless. The man’s journey to Tiberias probably was just business—or perhaps, like so many others, he had discovered that marriage as a steady diet was intolerable. Boredom again. Caleb suspected he was inventing things with which to distract himself.

  He was just on the point of rising from his chair when his clerk returned.

  “The report from Tiberias came in,” Bildad said, flourishing a scroll. “I suspect it means nothing, but it is always best to err on the side of caution. He was making inquiries about a certain Judah bar Isaac.”

  Bildad handed him the scroll and, with admirable self-possession, Caleb managed to accept it without betraying his sense of shock. His hands did not even shake as he opened it.

  “Probably he was looking into the man’s credit,” Bildad said

  “Yes. Probably.”

  Caleb set the scroll down on his desk, as if dismissing it from existence, and forced himself to smile as he waved away his clerk.

  He might have
continued in his chair for as long as a quarter of an hour without once moving. He hardly knew what he felt. He seemed to feel nothing. It was as if his mind had frozen shut.

  Finally he became aware of something like a tear on the side of his nose. He reached up to wipe it away and discovered that he was sweating profusely. It was at that moment that he gave way to a rising panic.

  How had Noah ever guessed? Well, there was still nothing to connect Judah to himself.

  He was deceiving himself. Of course Noah had made the connection. He had made inquiries about one of Joshua bar Joseph’s disciples, and suspected … what? That the man was a spy. And who in Galilee would wish to spy on Joshua bar Joseph except the man who had originally recruited Noah to do just that?

  And if Noah knew, then by now, or very soon, Eleazar would know.

  There were individuals who were exempt from torture and arbitrary arrest, and certainly members of the Temple aristocracy were among them. Now Eleazar would know that he, Caleb bar Jacob, had kidnapped and held in prison a son of one of the three or four most important Levite families and then turned him loose to spy on a peasant agitator.

  At the time, when he had felt sure he could get away with it—when he had thought he could get away with anything—it had seemed like a bold stroke, but now Caleb could see it for what it was and always had been. Stupidly, insanely rash.

  He had provided Eleazar with the means to destroy him. He could almost feel the knife at his throat.

  He would run. He would find a horse and ride for Caesarea. He would take ship for … anywhere. He would make his way to Gaul or Spain. The world was a big place, and he would lose himself in it.

  How much money could he have in his hands within half an hour?

  His plans for escape were almost complete before he realized that they were pointless—and probably unnecessary. He was watched, even now. He had spies on Eleazar, so it followed that he, too, was being followed and observed. Eleazar could have him arrested at any time.

  Running was futile.