The Ironsmith (28 page)

As if to demonstrate this, he gave Joshua back the wine jar.

For a long moment Joshua sat with the jar resting on his knee. He seemed lost in contemplation.

“Drink,” Noah told him, almost harshly. “Either drink or give it back.”

“Do you want to make me drunk?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because sometimes that is the best use one can make of wine. That is one reason why God in His mercy taught us how to make it.”

“When the time arrived, I simply could not bring myself to enter Deborah's house and smile on her happiness.” He took a swallow and then another. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do. It brings back the past—for me as well.”

Joshua nodded and handed him the jar.

“Do you remember, the night after we buried Rachel, how you and I went up on the roof of Uncle Benjamin's house and drank ourselves into oblivion?”

“Yes. We woke up the next morning with the sun in our faces.”

“I think you saved my life that night.” He put a hand on Noah's arm. “I don't know what my despair would have brought me to if you hadn't been there.”

“I understood how you felt. My own wife had been dead less than a month.”

“Did you love her?”

Noah took a swallow of wine, as if to help him clarify his response.

“Yes. I loved her. But not, I think, as you loved Rachel. I don't think I am capable of such intensity of feeling, and I am thankful for it.”

“Do you still think of her?”

“Yes. Sometimes, against my will. I have learned that is a pot best left unstirred.”

“I think of Rachel all the time.”

Noah shrugged, although in the gathering darkness the gesture was more likely felt than seen.

“You should let her go,” he said. “It is not possible or even desirable to forget, but one should recognize the will of God. The dead have left us.”

“And yet she has never left me.” Joshua tilted his head back in a way that suggested he was close to weeping. “I feel her presence. There are moments when she seems so near that I imagine I have but to glance around to see her smiling at me.”

Noah handed him back the jar, since it was clear he had need of it, but Joshua did not drink. The jar rested on the sand beside him.

You poor fool,
Noah thought, but did not say. It would have been a thousand times better if they could both have gotten fuddled with wine, but it was not going to happen.

And perhaps there was no escape, not even in drunkenness. Joshua, it seemed, was one of those who could not accept the permanence of misfortune. He had no gift for resignation.

“Even in God's kingdom she will not be my wife again,” Joshua announced suddenly. “Those who have passed through the grave will be purified of desire. Yet I do not regret this. She will still be herself. She will still be Rachel. I will see her again, and that will be enough.”

“God's kingdom,” Noah murmured, hardly even intending to be heard. Yes, of course. In a world full of death and injustice, where a Herod ruled and Rachel lay rotting in the earth, how could someone like Joshua help but believe that God would come to set everything right?

Noah picked up the wine jar and took a long swallow. The wind from the sea was growing cold.

 

22

Caleb sensed his danger the moment he received the Lord Eleazar's note. The First Minister was still in Tiberias—he had been there five days, which for him was an unusually long visit—and now Caleb's presence was requested: “The Tetrarch wishes you to attend him,” was all the note said. It had been brought by mounted courier and was not even signed, but Caleb recognized the long, precise, faintly slanting hand.

There was nothing to do except to go. Within half an hour Caleb was on his horse, with an escort of only two soldiers, and he reached the gates of Tiberias a full hour before sundown.

However, sundown brought the Sabbath, during which nothing could be done.

Caleb was accorded the use of a small house near the palace, and he went there now to wash and change. He was surprised to find his wife waiting there for him.

“Were you told I was coming?” he asked, experiencing a small thrill of anticipation. Michal was a beautiful woman, a fact which always impressed him anew whenever he saw her.

“No. I have been turned away.”

“What?”

“I have been banished from the Lady Herodias's presence,” she announced, with suitable emphasis, as if she had been accused of jesting.

“Why?”

She turned her gaze aside for a moment, seemingly gathering the strength to cope with such stupidity.

“No reason was given,” she said finally. “
I
was not at fault.” And then, as an afterthought, “Why are you here?”

“I was summoned.”

Michal covered her mouth with her hand and then slowly shook her head. But the conclusion was too obvious to deny.

“Then you have fallen from favor.”

Immediately, and without another word, she left him. There was a room in the house that she sometimes used when she wished to be alone. Caleb knew better than to follow her there.

So he was alone, with the Sabbath, that empty day, looming before him.

Caleb did not consider himself an impious man, so he felt uncomfortable when his wife did not appear for the lighting of the Sabbath candles. A servant woman performed that office, and Caleb recited the prayer, which he knew so well that the words almost spoke themselves.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe…”

The words were just collections of syllables, somehow pleasing to God. He had long since ceased to reflect on their meaning.

As he recited, his mind was clear. He knew Michal was right. He had fallen from favor. How Eleazar had achieved it, he had no inkling.

“Who has sanctified us with His commandments…”

He counted his alternatives. They did not make an impressive list.

“And commanded us to light the Sabbath candles.”

It was over, at last. A little ceremony he had performed hundreds of times, which lasted less than a minute, yet which, this Sabbath evening, had seemed to stretch on forever.

He was glad when he could be alone. He went to his bedroom, where the servants had already set out wine and bread for him. He was not hungry, but he drank the wine, searching for a means to dull the edge of his fear.

He lay down on the bed, thinking that somehow, sometime, sleep would come. He needed to sleep, but even this was denied him.

In the small hours of the morning, his wife came to him. She carried a candle, which softened her face, and she was wearing her nightdress. Probably she hadn't been able to sleep either.

“What will you do?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“What can I do?” He even laughed—he was beginning to regard his situation as, in certain lights, amusing. “I will see what the Tetrarch wants of me.”

“You could run.”

“Where? And if I did, what would they do to
you
? I can't run.”

She let her hand rest on his arm, and it occurred to him that perhaps that was what she had come to find out, whether he would simply disappear and leave her to the mercy of his enemies.

Apparently he had made the right answer, because she crawled into bed beside him.

Suddenly he was stiff with desire. Was this to be the seal on his pledge? He would make love to her and thus commit himself to face the Tetrarch's wrath? It seemed likely.

She had no doubt been kept awake, wondering how best to extricate herself from her husband's downfall, and this was what she had settled on.

Did it matter? He considered the question for an instant and then decided that no, it didn't.

It was a hope which years of experience could never quite extinguish, that somehow, someday, Michal would realize how much he loved her and feel some small regret at what she had wasted. Perhaps it could only happen after he was dead, but even that was something to hope for. He would stay now, and it was likely the Tetrarch would have him put to death, and then …

But no. Love was folly. Love was a trap from which there was no escape. Fool that he was, he didn't even want to escape.

He turned on his side and she began to shift herself, to crawl beneath him. When he went into her she let out a long, ragged breath. As he moved to his climax she began to moan and to claw at him. Probably it was all pretense. Probably she felt nothing. It didn't matter.

When it was over they lay together. She turned to him and let her small, fragile hand rest on his thigh. It was a delicious sensation.

And then he slept through until dawn.

He would never be able to remember how he got through that long Sabbath. After he had dressed and washed, and leaving Michal still asleep, he went down to the room he used as an office. All through the day he did not eat and only drank water.

When would the Tetrarch summon him, and what would he say? The first was difficult to answer and the second impossible. The one certainty was that the Tetrarch would try, was already trying, to break down his courage, and this was the one victory it was crucial to deny him. Antipas despised fear—probably because he was so consumed with it himself. Thus the one necessity was to hold himself together.

He felt fortunate, then, that the summons came about an hour after the Ceremony of the Four Blessings, which ended the Sabbath.

The Tetrarch, he was told, was in his garden, enjoying the night air, and wondered if the Lord Caleb would care to join him.

It turned out to be a short interview, and anticlimactic.

“Well, Caleb, my boy, I know you only meant to protect me, and I love you for your zeal, but this business with the Baptist and his followers has become dangerous. Eleazar says we need an interval of calm, and of course he's right. He's usually right. So I want you to stop the raids and let everyone go. I'm going to issue a general amnesty to celebrate the Lady Herodias's birthday—which won't be for a few months yet, but I'll issue the amnesty tomorrow—and all those fellows you have locked up can crawl back to their homes.

“Beyond this, I want you to remember that you take your orders from the First Minister. You are his servant as well as mine. You are to take no major steps without his approval. He'll have specific instructions for you when you get back to Sepphoris.

“Now, you keep your head down for a while and this wind will blow itself out. You've just been a little too full of yourself is all, but you're a good boy.

“Now go home and kiss your wife for me. You are dismissed.”

As he walked away, as he made his way through the corridors and reception halls, Caleb could hardly keep his legs under him. He kept expecting soldiers to appear out of nowhere and seize him.

He had found Antipas's manner toward him unnerving. The loving father reproves his son for making too much noise.

Except that Caleb knew how these games were played. He had heard of men who had left the Tetrarch's presence glowing from his praise and then had found themselves under arrest before they reached the main gate.

So it was with a sense of only conditional relief that he at last stood in front of his own front door, waiting for a servant to open it.

Instead, it was Michal.

“What happened?” she asked, clinging to the door frame as if she might otherwise collapse.

“I am here,” he answered with a shrug. “If by tomorrow morning I haven't been arrested, then we will go back to Sepphoris. If I am not arrested on the way, I will go back to work. How is it that you answered the door?”

“The servants have fled. As soon as the Sabbath was over, they vanished. I wonder how they could have known.”

“The servants always know.”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

Suddenly Caleb felt immensely weary. He no longer cared what happened to him, provided he could have a few hours of sleep.

“What did the Tetrarch say?”

Caleb made a vague, dismissive gesture with his left hand. “I have been chastised for being too zealous. I have been a naughty boy, but he loves me.”

“Then you are safe?”

“No.”

He found his bed and slept soundly for about four hours. Then, suddenly, he was stark awake. Had some noise alerted him? He listened. There was nothing. Gradually he began to relax. Only when his fear had lost its edge did he notice that he was alone.

Yes, of course. She had nothing more to gain from him, and she wouldn't care to be in the room if the guards came. It was safer to sleep somewhere else.

He sat up in his bed, thinking about Michal's shortcomings as a wife. It made a pleasant diversion from thinking about how close he had come to the abyss.

Michal was a beautiful woman, and her manner, when it suited her, was playfully seductive. When it did not suit her, she had the disposition of a shrew. Yet even when she plagued him, Caleb always felt a strong desire for her.

He had not known her long before he was prepared to sacrifice everything to possess her, and that was very nearly the way it had worked out.

In a sense, it was well they had had to leave Jerusalem. If one is to grow disillusioned with one's wife, it is perhaps better that this process take place among strangers. Caleb found it painful enough to imagine his friends' amusement at his plight—probably most of them had known he was making a catastrophic mistake—but it would have been unbearable to discover Michal's true nature and to see each step in that gradual revelation mirrored in the knowing smiles of every casual acquaintance. In Sepphoris, a week's journey from Jerusalem, he could comfort himself with the thought that, if his wife was empty, childish, selfish, and unbearably ill natured, at least he was aware of the fact before it became common knowledge.

Still, she was not always dreadful. When they were back in Sepphoris, and she had settled down a little, she would begin to feel the need to reaffirm her power over him, and for a week or so their bed would be a very warm and comfortable place.