The Ironsmith (20 page)

A Greek once told him that some professions do not allow a man to be virtuous. He said some wise man among his people had written this long ago. It was true.

A potter makes jars, a farmer harvests wheat, a soldier kills. That is his work. He is given a sword when he finishes his training, and the sword defines him.

Some men could not bear the burden. They ran away. They tried to go back to their villages, or to melt into the city crowds, but armies everywhere made a point of hunting down deserters, so they were almost always caught. And deserters were crucified.

But sometimes they were granted a quicker death.

About a month after Matthias won his sword, a batch of six deserters was scheduled for death. Each one, with his hands bound behind his back, had a noose put round his neck, and the other end of the rope was tied to the back of a wagon. When the wagon started its journey to the execution grounds they had to trot to keep up. One prisoner fell down—perhaps deliberately, hoping that the rope would strangle him as he was dragged along—but they merely stopped the wagon, flogged him to his feet, and set off again. It was a good three miles to the abandoned stone quarry called “the place of crosses.”

The guard had to quick march to keep up with the wagon, but at least their hands were free. The guard consisted of twenty men. A few were still green. Matthias was one of these.

When they reached the execution ground—a barren place—the squad commander chose four of the prisoners, apparently at random, cut the leather straps that bound their hands, and told them to go sit down. The remaining two were stripped of their tunics.

“Now these boys, who wanted to run home to their mothers, will be allowed to provide a few of our new men with a chance to wet their swords,” the squad commander announced. “And don't feel sorry for them, because you'll be doing them a favor. They get to die quick, instead of after four or five days on the cross.”

He grabbed one of the condemned men by the arm and pushed him forward.

“You there,” he shouted, pointing with his free hand at the man standing beside Matthias, “Ebed, isn't it? Just step up here and kill him. You know how it's done.”

Ebed was only fifteen, and he looked more frightened than his victim as he drew his sword.

“Go on now. Finish him.” The squad commander pointed to a spot just under the prisoner's breastbone. “Right there.”

After a tentative stab, which did little more than break the skin, Ebed seemed to lose heart entirely.

“Come on, don't be such a coward! Kill him, or I'll have
you
up on a cross before you're an hour older. Kill him!”

After a second attempt the prisoner was on his knees and bleeding heavily, but still alive. Finally the squad commander jerked him back up on his feet. Then he took Ebed's hand in his and guided his sword point to the first wound.

“Now push! That's all you have to do, just push.”

It seemed to take forever, with the prisoner screaming in pain and fear, but at last he went down on one knee and then simply toppled over. He lay there, panting for breath, and then he was still.

“Ebed, I'll make sure you get twenty strokes for this. What a dog's dinner! Matthias, see if you can do better.”

Matthias had already decided that he wouldn't hesitate. To hesitate is to let fear seize you, so he didn't even wait for the next prisoner to be brought forward. He covered the distance in a few long strides, drawing his sword as he went. The prisoner simply watched him, as if he hardly knew what was happening.

In the last instant the prisoner snapped awake and tried to pull himself back, but Matthias's downward slash caught him in the throat. There was a great spray of blood. The man stared at Matthias in what seemed like disbelief, and then collapsed.

The squad commander had been standing a foot or so too close. He wiped some of the blood from his face and then looked at it on his hand. Then he nodded.

“A little messy,” he said calmly, “but I'm not complaining. At least someone here knows how to kill.”

They spent what was left of the morning watching the progress of the executions. As part of his punishment, Ebed was forced to help with the nailing. When all four men were up on their crosses, a guard was left to keep watch, and the rest of the soldiers were marched back to barracks. Ebed wept the whole way.

A week later, in the middle of the night, Ebed went into the toilet and slashed his wrists.

Brutality was the price of order. And of life. Those were the alternatives—kill or die.

And now Matthias found himself back at Gischala.

“Why couldn't the cursed man live in some other place?” he asked under his breath. He was thinking not of his mother but of topography.

Gischala was on a hill. There were only four trails to the summit, but from any direction it was not a steep climb, so the trails were more a convenience than a necessity. This meant that a man in fear of his life could flee in any direction.

So they would have to enter the village at night. They would have to surprise Reuel bar Omri in his bed—him and his two brothers—and either kill them or take them away before the villagers had time to organize any resistance.

Matthias sat on a rock at the edge of a grove of trees, contemplating the problem. The village was no more than two miles distant. He had ten men with him, and twelve horses, but the horses would never manage the trails up to Gischala at night. He would have to leave the horses, and two men to guard them. The rest of the men would enter the village from the south and east, since those trails offered the easiest ascent, and they would converge on the southern edge of the village. The climb would probably take about half an hour. They would carry oil lamps to light their ascent, an unavoidable risk. With any luck they would be on their way back down before more than a dozen people even knew they had been there.

It was late afternoon, so they would have a few more hours to rest before it was dark.

There were perhaps four hundred people in the village. Matthias knew many of their names and where they lived. He did not know Reuel bar Omri, but when he was a boy, visiting his cousins, there had been a man named Omri living four houses away from his uncle Jethro. It was a place to start.

He spoke to his men, drawing a map of the village in the dirt. All were dressed in peasant clothing, so if they were caught or killed people would assume they were merely bandits. They watched him with hungry, attentive faces. They were looking forward to the raid.

Keeping them focused on the task was always the most difficult part. They cared nothing about Reuel bar Omri and, indeed, for that he did not need them. They thought only of plunder and rape, and wetting their swords with blood. They were with him in case the alarm was raised and they had to fight their way out.

They were the accursed of God.

So also was he. He led these men and he was one of them. Matthias bar Abiud, son of a brute and a brute himself—murderer, kidnapper, torturer, drunk. The foul servant of a foul master. Matthias bar Abiud, who had killed his own father in the coldest of blood, had no illusions about himself.

He knew he would kill in Gischala tonight, and if he brought Reuel out alive it would only be to deliver him up to torture and death. He would do these things because it was the Lord Caleb's will, and the Lord Caleb was a devil.

Matthias, he now recognized, had begun his journey into darkness the moment he took that scythe handle out of the toolshed, and it had brought him here, to his mother's village, where he was about to do things that would have made her heart wither.

And there was no escape. God had cursed him for his sins.

It was always worst in the hours of waiting, before the thing was done, while it loomed in his imagination like a ghost. Matthias knew he would be all right again once they started up the trail. Doing evil was always easier than imagining it—or remembering it.

Reuel bar Omri was the last. Matthias and his men had raided five other villages within Galilee and had taken away eight prisoners. He had saved Gischala to the end because it was his mother's village and would for that reason be the worst.

And when it was over he would deliver Reuel to the Tetrarch's dungeon and then go out and find himself a whore and jar of wine and forget all this. He would drink until he could sleep with no dreams, until even waking would seem a dream. He would stay that way until the Lord Caleb had more work for him to do.

His consolations in life were whores and wine and the hope that death was extinction.

Matthias sat watching the sun set. There was a line of hills to the west, so the darkness came earlier in the valley. That darkness would cover their movements as they approached the trails up to Gischala, but they would need their lamps on the trails, and the light from them would alert anyone in the village who happened to look down.

So, before they made their ascent they would have to wait until everyone went to sleep.

When did that happen? First dinner, then prayers, then sleep. How long had it been, Matthias found himself wondering, since he had prayed? How long before that had God stopped listening?

There was nothing to do but wait, and no company except his own dark thoughts.

After a while, as the night began to take hold, he noticed a faint glow that seemed to cover the top of the hill like a fog. It was the light from the hearth fires, escaping through open windows and lighting the sky.

They would wait until the light had been gone for an hour. By the time they reached the village, everyone would be asleep.

For village people, sleep was a pleasure. They did not fear sleep the way Matthias did. They did not fear their dreams. You went to bed with a full belly, you went into your wife, if you had one, and you slept. A few hours before dawn the women woke up to start the fires, but until then no one stirred.

The glow from the hilltop did not so much flicker out as slowly collapse. People were shutting their windows against the night's cold. They were going to bed.

One more hour. The men watched their leader as they checked their weapons and filled their lamps with oil. They were impatient to begin. Matthias ignored them.

Finally it was time. Matthias stood up, drew his knife, and tested the point with his thumb. The blade was half a cubit long and carried an edge on both sides. For close work it was better than a sword.

“Let's go,” he said quietly. “You know what to do.”

The trails seemed steeper than Matthias remembered. He kept thinking that some old man might get out of bed to piss and see them. He kept waiting for that shout of alarm.

But it never came. They reached the summit and regrouped. The village was theirs.

Three men would stay and guard the escape route. Five would come with Matthias to Omri's house. He might need them.

They walked soundlessly through the village.

Suddenly, as they rounded a corner, a man came out of his doorway. He turned and faced Matthias, and then stopped. He was surprised but not afraid.

Matthias, who was almost close enough to touch him, did not hesitate. The knife was in his hand, carried low. He took a step forward and brought the knife up so that the point entered the man's left side, just below his rib cage. All that registered in the man's face was disbelief. He seemed to try to say something, but no sound escaped him, only a short, panting gasp. Matthias gave the knife a sharp twist and pulled it out. The man fell dead at his feet.

Matthias listened for a moment. If he had to he would enter the house and kill everyone he found, but nothing stirred within.

He stepped around the corpse and went on his way. It was several seconds before he realized that, in his youth, that house had belonged to his mother's brother.

Whom had he just killed? He struggled to put it out of his mind. He had no time now.

The house in which Omri had lived when Matthias was a boy was like all the others in the village, like all the peasant houses in Galilee—mud brick and just large enough to encompass two rooms, a kitchen and a sleeping room for the owner and his wife, and often their children. The door was made of wooden slats and probably had a crossbar on the inside, but in a village like this, who took the trouble to secure his door at night?

Matthias signaled to his men to wait outside, and then he pushed against the door with his hand. It moved soundlessly on its leather hinges.

Inside, embers were still glowing in the fire pit. Someone was sleeping on the floor, covered with a rough wool blanket. It was impossible to tell if this was a man or a woman.

Matthias knelt down beside the shape under the blanket. There was just light enough from the fire to see that it was a young man with a short black beard. He was lying on his side, deep asleep.

So be it. Matthias covered the man's mouth with his hand and pressed the point of his knife against his throat, just under the chin. The man's eyes popped open.

“If you struggle, I will kill you this instant.” Matthias whispered. “Do you understand?”

The man nodded, as vigorously as the knife point at his throat allowed.

“I am going to ask you some questions. You will answer them. If you cry out, you die. Do you understand?”

The man nodded.

“I will take my hand away now.”

He lifted his hand a little from the man's mouth. He made no outcry.

“Where is Reuel bar Omri?”

“In there.”

With his eyes the man indicated the door to the sleeping room. Matthias blessed his luck. Old Omri must have died and Reuel, as the eldest son, had inherited.

“Who are you?”

“His brother—Nereus.”

“There is another brother. Where is he?”

“Dead.”

This presented a problem. The Lord Caleb had spoken of three brothers. Reuel was the prize, but he had wanted all three. Now one was dead. Could he bring this one? How? Reuel was in the next room, and there was too much risk of waking someone. No. Nereus would have to stay.