The Ironsmith (5 page)

“So it was just another trick,” John said, his voice cracked like old leather. “I thought you might really have left me to die. I am disappointed in you.”

“Do you wish to die?”

It was a question Caleb had not expected to hear himself asking.

“No.” John shook his head, slowly, as if the joints in his neck ached. “I wish only to be the servant of God.”

“Then you fear death?”

“No.”

He raised his face toward Caleb, careful to avoid looking directly at the lamp. He smiled.

“Why should I fear death? It is simply the gateway to eternal life.”

Caleb turned on his heel and almost ran out of the cell.

*   *   *

It had become clear that no one was going to force the Baptist to his knees. There would be no abject surrender, no groveling at the Tetrarch's feet. A man who is not afraid of death has nothing else to fear.

Antipas would be disappointed. He enjoyed inspiring fear in others, perhaps because he was so afraid himself. And he was not a man who accepted disappointment easily.

But at least there were still the disciples. Caleb would begin making inquiries. The inquiries would lead to arrests. The very scale of the purge would demonstrate its necessity—and his own indispensability.

In the meantime, there was little more to be gained in this place. Caleb's notes on their conversations, suitably annotated, would be enough to convince the Tetrarch that John was dangerous and needed to be put to death.

He went back down to the prison and gave the order.

“Will you stay to see it done, Master?”

“No. I will come back in half an hour and examine the body.”

He spent the interval in the room that had been assigned to him, drinking perhaps more wine than was quite prudent. Caleb did not consider himself cruel. He simply didn't care. But he was still smarting under his defeat.

When he returned to the prison, the Baptist's corpse had been dragged out into the middle of the floor and was lying on its chest, with the head resting just next to the right shoulder. He clearly had not died where he lay, because there was very little blood. His chains had been removed.

Uriah was sitting on a bench, his head lowered and his elbows resting on his knees. His hands were caked with dried gore.

Caleb knelt down for a look. John's eyes were open and were still moist. The frayed condition of the wounds around the stump of the neck suggested that Uriah had used a knife and had cut from back to front.

Sever a man's throat and he dies within seconds. The Baptist had probably suffered for several minutes.

“Did you want to hear him scream?” Caleb asked, trying to keep the disgust out of his voice.

The executioner raised his head.

“I gave him ample time to know that he was dying.” Uriah lifted up his hands and stared at them, as if they had somehow failed him. His face reflected sullen disappointment. “He made no sound.”

 

3

Tiberias was a city of stone and brick, but the mortar that held it together was pride. Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea and son of the Great Herod, wanted for his capital a magnificent new city after the style of the Greeks, a city of columns, of porticos and statues, a city of marble, white as sea foam. He found a site by the Sea of Kinneret that ravished the eye, and so he razed the village that stood there and drove its people away. Then his builders set to work.

But when they began to dig, their spades and pickaxes brought up human bones. The place where Antipas intended his city to stand was revealed to be a graveyard.

Still, the Tetrarch would not be turned from his purpose. He built his city and named it for his patron, the emperor in Rome. And when pious men refused to live there—for how could those who feared God abide in a place made forever impure by the presence of the dead?—Antipas peopled Tiberias with foreigners and the poor, rounded up from the countryside like cattle and compelled to labor on the terraced waterfronts and the palaces of the great. Others, men of substance, were in the end given no choice but to move their homes and their families there. He would have all of Galilee bend to his will. The son of the Great Herod could do no less.

Eleazar bar Zadok, a priest of ancient lineage and the Tetrarch's First Minister, hated the city. He lived in Sepphoris, the old capital, a place of rough stone walls and narrow streets, where he had been born and where, like his father before him, he was warden. He traveled to Tiberias only when his duties required it, and always, when he returned home, his first act was to immerse himself in living water and thus be purified. Torah, he knew, did not require this of him. Rather, it was an expression of contempt, both for Tiberias and for the Tetrarch, whom in the privacy of his heart he despised.

Yet his attendance upon the Tetrarch required Eleazar to maintain a house in Tiberias. He had arrived there the afternoon before and had been pleased to discover that his son was in the city, having preceded him by only a few hours.

The lad was fifteen and, aside from a worthless nephew who lived in Sepphoris, was the last of Eleazar's blood. He had come up from Jerusalem, where he lived with his aunt, his late mother's sister, while he pursued his studies. Zadok, named for his father's father, would be home for a month. The prospect gave Eleazar much pleasure, as he dearly loved his son.

At dinner they carefully avoided any discussion of state affairs because knowledge of such matters was dangerous. This was why Zadok lived in Jerusalem—to keep him beyond the Tetrarch's reach.

But in the end they stumbled, over a piece of gossip.

“I heard before I left that they've arrested John the Baptist,” Zadok said casually. His father's silence made him glance up, and something unpleasant occurred to him.

“Did you know?” he asked, his tone just hinting at an accusation.

“No. I did not know. Who arrested him?”

“Well, if you didn't, it must have been the Romans.”

“I think not. John stayed away from the cities. The Romans wouldn't interest themselves in a desert preacher.”

Simply to distract himself, Eleazar picked up a piece of bread and began using it to stir his food around. Then he decided he had lost his appetite.

“Was there anything else?” he asked finally, pushing his plate away. “Is it known where he's being held?”

“No—nothing.”

Zadok seemed surprised and, indeed, a little frightened by his father's reaction. Eleazar smiled, trying to create the impression that this bit of news was interesting but no more.

“When did you hear about it?”

“I'm not sure. Four or five days ago, perhaps. I think.”

Eleazar changed the subject. He inquired after his son's studies and was favored with a disquisition on allegorical interpretations of the Psalms. He smiled and nodded, but in his mind he was making calculations.

Little more than a month ago, the Baptist had been the subject of discussion between Antipas and his First Minister. John had publicly declared the Tetrarch's marriage unclean in the sight of God—a proposition difficult to refute—and the Tetrarch had wanted to arrest him. Eleazar had warned against such a step, arguing that John would be more dangerous in prison, or dead, than alive and at liberty. When he bowed his way out of the audience, it was Eleazar's impression that he had carried his point.

Apparently not.

Why had he heard nothing of the Baptist's arrest? His subordinate Caleb maintained an excellent network of spies, so why had this information not reached him? Obviously because Caleb had not chosen to inform him.

Where
was
Caleb? Eleazar had neither seen nor heard from him in two weeks.

Assume that Zadok had heard about the arrest five days ago. How long would be the interval between that arrest and its being generally known in Jerusalem? A week? Less? So John had probably been in prison from ten days to perhaps two weeks.

Or, put another way, about the length of time that Caleb had been on his travels.

Eleazar could see quite clearly what must have happened. Without first seeking his consent, which would have been refused, Caleb had gained an audience with the Tetrarch, played upon his vanity and his fears, and obtained a warrant for the Baptist. Then he had disappeared to wherever John was being held.

Well, what else should he have expected? Treachery and cunning, along with a complete lack of shame, made up almost the whole of the man's character. They were what had first recommended him to the First Minister's service.

Eleazar could not help but recall the day he had found him, this child of the Levites, servants in the Temple for a thousand years, this outcast of a prominent family who had washed up in Tiberias like the tangles of wood and useless pieces of fishnet one found along the shore of the Sea of Kinneret. Truly Caleb had been adrift in those days, in debt and friendless. He had come to Eleazar's home in hopes that the Tetrarch's First Minister would intervene for him with his family. He had plainly admitted that he was desperate and, indeed, it was his very brashness in the face of ruin that had led Eleazar to believe he might be useful.

“Do you think that my intervention will be of use?” Eleazar had asked.

And Caleb had merely grinned and said, “No.”

“Then I will offer you something better.”

It was a simple enough assignment. One expected to be robbed a little by one's servants, but Eleazar had a clerk who seemed to be stealing more money than was quite decent. “Find out for me where he is spending it, and I will give you his place.”

Caleb had more than lived up to his expectations. Eight days later, when Eleazar had returned to Sepphoris, Caleb appeared at his door. He had it all. The clerk, it turned out, had a mistress with dreams of a luxurious retirement.

“It was a simple enough matter to track the clerk to his mistress—a prostitute, although the clerk appears not to know it. A few questions revealed that she was indeed expensive, and a few more revealed the name of the merchant with whom she deposited her earnings. I apologize, my lord, but I was obliged to use your name to bring the merchant to reason. He agreed to hold back the prostitute's money until he hears from me.

“I then went to that lady, explained the situation to her, and made her understand that she would never see a single coin of her money unless I had all the particulars. Fortunately she is of a businesslike disposition and keeps excellent records. Here is an accounting of everything she has received from your clerk.”

That afternoon Eleazar confronted his clerk, who tearfully admitted his indiscretions and begged for mercy. Eleazar contented himself with merely dismissing the man.

The next morning Caleb assumed his new position. His first advice was that the merchant be instructed to release all of the prostitute's money to her, including everything she had received from Eleazar's former clerk.

“It is in the nature of things, my lord, that many secrets worth knowing come in the way of such a lady. I suspect she will prove well worth every shekel.”

And thus Caleb began to assemble his network of agents and spies, through which he seemed, after a time, to know everything worth knowing about the undercurrents of affairs in Galilee. He quickly ceased to be merely a clerk and took over those aspects of rule which are distasteful but necessary, but that was how it had begun.

“What do you think, Father?”

Eleazar had just presence of mind enough to recall what his son had been saying. He smiled, and sensations of pleasure and sadness mingled in his heart. The boy was just at the threshold of manhood and already his ideas were marked with maturity and clarity of mind. He was the single blessing that had emerged from the marriage of two people destined in every other way to bring misery to each other.

“There is a general problem with allegory,” he began. “It is too flexible. That way the Scriptures can be made to mean whatever you like. Interpretation becomes a kind of game, requiring little beyond intellectual agility.”

Zadok seemed disappointed. His father reached across the table and touched him on the shoulder.

“God does not speak in riddles, my son. Yet if He did, I think you would be the one to solve them.”

*   *   *

Father and son would return home to Sepphoris together. They would travel by cart and Zadok would manage the horses, which would please him and make him feel that his father accepted him as a man.

But first Eleazar had to complete his business with Antipas, made now more urgent and more complicated by this affair of the Baptist.

Thus, after breakfast, the First Minister walked the hundred or so paces from his house to the Tetrarch's palace.

The palace was huge and had cost vast sums of money. Building seemed to be a passion with the Herodians, both father and son, but the Great Herod had built, in addition to bathhouses, theaters, and palaces, the Temple in Jerusalem, which might stand for all eternity as a tribute to God's glory. What had Antipas built besides cities in which no one wanted to live and palaces that were like gigantic toy boxes?

Yet a ruler must occupy himself somehow. A ruler's function was less to do anything than simply to be, to possess power, which was, thankfully, rarely used. A ruler collected taxes and quelled any opposition, for which purposes he had a few servants like Eleazar and, more importantly, an army. A ruler existed to be feared.

And, for the rest, Galilee could be trusted to look after itself. The villages were governed by ancient custom, and in Sepphoris Eleazar's father had organized committees of the leading citizens, who attended to necessary public services. They looked to Eleazar, as the city's warden, for patronage and direction, but for the most part they operated quite well on their own. There was little enough for the Tetrarch or his First Minister to do.

So it was probably best that Antipas concerned himself with domestic architecture, no matter how vulgar. It kept him out of mischief.