The Ironsmith (37 page)

Noah was about to ask him what he meant, but he seemed so concentrated on his own thoughts that it would have been an intrusion.

But then Joshua saved him the trouble.

“This Passover will see great changes,” he said, almost as if speaking to himself. “And Jerusalem will be where they will begin.” Then he turned his head and smiled. “You don't believe me, do you.”

“I am like Grandfather. I don't know what to believe.”

“Did he talk to you about me?”

“Yes. He thinks you may be one of the pious, whom God loves.”

“Did he really say that?”

Noah could not help but be amused that Joshua was so pleased.

“Yes, he did.”

“Well then, in Jerusalem we will see if he was right.”

Suddenly Joshua climbed to his feet and then reached down to offer a hand to Noah. The two of them stood for a moment, looking at Sepphoris in the distance.

“Remember the summer Father and I spent working there?” Joshua shook his head, as if trying to clear his thoughts. “What was it we were building there?”

“The scaffolding for the baths. I remember I came along with you one day, just to see this great wonder.”

“How old were we? Seventeen?”

“I think so.”

“Father is so very sick now. And so afraid of death.”

“Has he spoken of it?”

“No. But for the first time he listens to me. I tell him of God's kingdom, and how want and death and unrighteousness will be banished, and he listens. I tell him to embrace repentance, and it is a measure of his fear that he listens. He wants to believe.”

“What is stopping him?”

“My brother, Little Joseph. Father favors him because he is the most like him. Jacob stands aside.”

As if from a single impulse, they both turned and started back toward Nazareth.

“If I could bring my father to God…” Joshua began, and then smiled and shook his head. It seemed beyond his power to finish the thought.

“Then it would heal the breach?”

“Then I might save them all.”

The path they took swung around a piece of rising ground and they came within sight of the road that ran south from Sepphoris. They saw a man coming toward them from the road, and almost immediately he raised his arm and waved.

“Look there,” Joshua said. “It's Judah, returned from the fleshpots of the city.”

The man started running toward them, and it was perhaps half a minute before Noah, who was not as farsighted as his cousin, could make out that in fact it was Judah.

He remembered Deborah's odd story about him, and his own answer: “
Perhaps it will all be explained when Judah comes back.
”

Suddenly he knew that it would not be.

By the time Judah was with them he was out of breath. He embraced Joshua and then quickly greeted Noah.

“I couldn't resist it,” he said at last. “I have been so long in the villages that I longed to feel cobblestones beneath my feet again. I drank wine and took a bath. It was glorious!”

Joshua laughed.

“Well, you came back. That is the main thing. I pray you will be brought to repentance.”

“Not yet! I enjoyed myself too much.”

As they walked, Judah regaled them with his adventures, none of which seemed to have involved breaking the commandments. It was a sketchy narrative, Noah observed to himself—not enough to fill three days. There were things he was leaving out.

“I hope, at least, you didn't have to sleep in the street,” Noah said.

“Oh no.”

Noah caught Judah's sideways glance, as if the disciple realized he had made a mistake.

“But perhaps you had some acquaintance you could stay with,” Noah continued.

“No. I know no one in Sepphoris.”

“Well, you do now.” Noah smiled benignly, for all that he felt as if a sliver of ice had pierced his heart. “Next time, you must make my house your own.”

Judah's thanks were just a shade exaggerated. He was relieved, and could not quite disguise it.

Joshua, of course, noticed nothing. Why should he? He had not heard Deborah's story, and he was not a man given to suspicion.

They walked back toward the village together. For the most part Noah kept silent, merely interjecting a word here and there. He was more interested in listening, and more in the way the conversation proceeded than in its content.

“I should have come back sooner,” Judah said, dropping his head in a show of repentance.

“Then why didn't you?”

“Perhaps because, until recently, I have lived all my life in cities. I feel comfortable with the crowds and the noise. I like buying a cup of wine at a stall, where the man who pours it looks not at me but at the coins I drop on his counter. With all its crush of people, one is somehow more alone in the city. I missed that.”

“Cities encourage one to be selfish. In cities humanity becomes a blur, just part of the background. We forget the love we owe to one another.”

“Yes. You are right. I have been selfish.”

“Perhaps it is man's nature to be selfish, just as it is God's nature to be loving and forgiving. The path to salvation is the path of learning how to be like God.”

“Yes. I am weak and sinful. I despair of salvation.”

“God will uplift you. You have merely to open your heart to Him and He will bring you to Himself.”

“I will try to be better. I won't drink wine again.”

This made Joshua laugh, and he put his arm on Judah's shoulders.

“No one asks such a sacrifice of you. Wine is God's gift to us and we should accept it with gratitude, knowing it belongs to Him and not to us. But drink it with your friends.”

So it went—the disciple accusing himself and the teacher opening the way to forgiveness. And it was impossible not to believe in the sincerity of Judah's repentance. He really seemed to believe that he had fallen into sin. He wished to be forgiven.

But there could be many sins besides drinking wine at a stall.

*   *   *

Noah, Abijah, and Sarah had agreed among themselves that they would leave for Sepphoris early enough to be back in the city by noon. Deborah would remain in Nazareth, with Joshua's family, until Noah came for her, the day following the next Sabbath.

The wedding would be celebrated in Grandfather's house.

But that meant that three days would intervene until Noah would see his betrothed again, and four before he could claim her. It seemed an eternity.

He wanted to see Deborah one last time before he left.

In theory, the betrothed couple were not supposed to keep company together between the betrothal ceremony and the wedding, but, given the conditions of everyday life, the prohibition was largely ignored. After all, Sarah and Abijah would be walking back to Sepphoris together. All that was required was that some pretext be found so that the meeting did not seem arranged.

So, when Noah returned to his grandfather's house and learned that Sarah was visiting Deborah, presumably at Joseph's house, Noah had merely to go and fetch Sarah.

He found the two women sitting together outside, on a wooden bench in the shade of an ancient fig tree. They looked so odd in their veils that he was relieved when they saw him and uncovered their faces.

“Good morning,” he said, and then, turning to his sister, added, “we will be leaving in less than an hour.”

It was all the hint Sarah needed. Doubtless she was looking forward to the walk home, when she could be with Abijah.

“I suppose I should go put my things together,” she said, and was gone.

Noah sat down beside Deborah and smiled.

“I hope this is the last time I shall have to construct an excuse for being alone with you,” he said. He glanced about, to make sure no one was near, and then kissed her.

When the kiss was finished she studied his face for a moment and asked, “What is wrong?”

“Does something have to be wrong?”

“I can see it in your face. You smile at me, but not with your eyes.”

It was a peculiar feeling to be understood so easily. He supposed he would get used to it. Perhaps getting used to it would be one of the pleasures of marriage.

“As it turns out, you were right about Judah.”

 

31

It had become a habit. Almost every afternoon, about an hour before sunset, Caleb went up to the roof of his house and looked out over the Galilean countryside. His servants, and even his wife, knew not to disturb him. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

These days his thoughts were not pleasant.

He drank wine—perhaps more than he should—and watched the wind play across the wheat fields. Galilee was an abundant land. To own even a small share of it was to be rich, and Caleb's share was not small. He owned several large farms and all the land surrounding some ten or twelve villages—he had lost count—and twice a year the rents poured in like spring rain.

Still, the view from his roof no longer comforted him. It simply reminded him of all he had to lose.

There was not a day, not an hour, when he was free from fear. Fear haunted him. Fear had become his second self.

But on his roof at least he could be alone with it.

Eleazar had the Tetrarch's ear. Eleazar had seen to it that Caleb would not be received in Tiberias—neither he nor his wife.

Since the beginning of her exile from court, Michal had spent her days writing long, pleading letters to the Lady Herodias, which went unanswered. Caleb knew, because he had had the letters intercepted. Most he burned, but a few of the more temperate and supplicating he allowed to reach their destination—the mighty of this world like to be fawned over, and it would not do to have the tetrarch's wife feel herself neglected.

Still, no answers came. Forgiveness and reinstatement were not to be expected. Eleazar had seen to that.

And Michal, after a series of indescribable tantrums, had at last decided that life in Sepphoris was not to be borne and announced that she intended a visit to her family in Jerusalem. And Caleb found he lacked the strength of character even to refuse his permission. She would go—he couldn't stop her. And if he tried, she might punish him by never coming back.

Marriage was an ordeal, a thousand tiny steps toward despair.

He could divorce her, simply end it. But then he would lose her entirely, and that would be infinitely worse.

This was one more injury the Lord Eleazar had done him.

And Eleazar, Caleb knew, would not be content with merely this. Eleazar meant, in the end, to destroy him. He would be arrested one day and made to vanish. No one would even know where he was buried.

But there was still a chance of survival. Still a chance that he would live to enjoy the income from his various estates. He merely had to demonstrate that Eleazar was wrong, that the Tetrarch really was hedged in by enemies, that the danger was real. Then Eleazar would fall, and Caleb would be safe.

To do that he needed to destroy Joshua bar Joseph.

But he had to be careful. Joshua had to be exposed as a threat to the state. Joshua had to suffer and die as an insurrectionist. But it could not happen in Galilee, and it could not happen at Caleb's hands.

The Romans had to do it, in Judea. Antipas would be suitably impressed if the Romans crucified Joshua.

“Are you sure he plans to be in Jerusalem for the Passover?” Caleb had asked Judah.

“Yes. He always goes. He stays with his cousin.”

The cousin being, of course, Noah bar Barachel, now attached to Eleazar. Well, provided the ironsmith didn't interfere, he could await his time.

Judah had quite a story to tell of his adventures with the peasant preacher. He had come out of the countryside more than half convinced that Joshua really was God's messenger.

“He is not a threat to anyone,” Judah told him. “He is a wise and good man. He teaches love, charity, and forgiveness. He says we should not resist evil, but overcome evil with good.”

“It is a question of what one defines as evil.” Caleb smiled indulgently and poured Judah another cup of wine. It was a particularly good vintage, but Judah, in his old life, had been accustomed to the best. “If one defines as evil the social order, that is sedition. And since the social order is ordained by God, and since we must all submit ourselves to the will of God, it is also a sin. Your peasant holy man is nothing more than a rebel disguised as a prophet.

“What does he tell you, this peasant prophet? What words does he use?”

“He says God will send one like the son of man to judge the world. He says this one will come in power and glory and establish God's kingdom.”

“‘God's kingdom.' Is that the phrase he used?”

“Yes.”

“This judge, he will be
like
the son of man, but not himself a son of man?”

“Yes.”

“So he does not mean himself? He does not mean a human being?”

“No.”

“An angel perhaps?”

“Perhaps. He does not say.”

“And who will rule, once the angel has rendered his judgment?”

“He does not say, except that the first shall be last and the last first.”

“I see.”

He really did see. It was all painfully clear.

A palace guard had found Judah huddled by a doorway—the same doorway through which he had been released from prison. It was evening, and the guard, who thought Judah was a beggar seeking a little shelter for the night, was about to drive him away with a kick when he said, “Inform the Lord Caleb that I am Judah bar Isaac.” So the guard told him to wait.

When Caleb, who happened still to be in his office, came down for a look, Judah was sitting with his arms wrapped around his legs, staring out like an owl. He looked up at Caleb as if trying to remember his face and then said, “Put me back in my cell.”

“Nothing awaits you there but death,” Caleb had answered him. “Do you remember the lower prison? Do you remember Uriah? Or perhaps you never knew his name. Uriah will make your death into an amusement lasting the whole afternoon. Do you want to suffer for hours and hours?”