The Ironsmith

by Nicholas Guild

“Nothing to it.”

  He drew his sword and walked the few steps over to where Samson was hanging, still conscious, but very little more. Raetius positioned the point of his sword just inside the boy’s left collarbone and then drove it quickly down. Samson opened his eyes as if surprised, and blood poured out of his mouth.

  Raetius pulled his sword free and hunted around until he found a piece of cloth he could use to wipe it dry.

  “I shall have to give it a good cleaning when I get back to barracks,” he said, studying the blade, turning it this way and that in the late afternoon sun. “By the way, what was he to you, the young one?”

  “Nothing. Only a son of man, like you or I.”

  Raetius laughed. “You Jews are a queer lot.”

  * * *

  The crew finally had all three dead prisoners down. They cleaned the nails and put them away and tied the three crosspieces together with rope. They carried the bodies over to a great, gaping hole in the stone and threw them in.

  The smell from the hole was terrible. Noah stood on the edge, his eyes on Joshua’s corpse as it lay, about twenty feet down, among uncounted others in various stages of putrefaction.

  He began to recite the Prayer for the Dead. “In the world which will be renewed, He will give life to the dead and raise them to eternal life.…”

  It was simply impossible to go on. The words stuck in his throat. And he knew, in that moment, that Joshua had spoken the truth—that God truly had forsaken him.

  The sun was down, which meant that the Passover had begun. He had no idea when or how he left the Hill of Skulls, or where he went after that.

  It had long been dark when he found himself standing in front of the door to his cousin Baruch’s house. He could not go in, so he sat down outside. The memories of this terrible day clutched at his heart.

  This was where Deborah found him the next morning.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said, glancing at her and then quickly looking away. “I am defiled.”

  49

  “You have served God. Now your life is your own again. Go.”

  The words kept echoing in Judah’s head. Thus Caleb had dismissed him, as casually as he might have brushed the dust from his sleeve.

  “You have served God.” How? By destroying His prophet?

  The truth was, Judah no longer knew what to do with a life that was his own. He could have returned to Tiberias, but it never occurred to him to do so. He was now trapped in his own future, while everything that meant anything to him existed in an irretrievably lost past. And every moment of that future was and always would be stained by his betrayal.

  Of what value was such a life? Every hour was a burden.

  So he stayed in Jerusalem, simply because he could not summon the will to leave. He had money in his purse, but he slept in doorways. For a few days he drank wine, but he gave it up when he found it changed nothing. He ate only when the pangs of hunger began to distract him from the one idea that had come to fill his mind: atonement.

  “I know what they have done to you,” Joshua had said to him, even as they condemned him. “I forgive you.”

  But Judah knew he had committed a sin for which there was no forgiveness. When God’s kingdom came at last, there would be no place in it for him. All that was left was to confess his guilt and accept the punishment and the release of a shameful death.

  “A hanged man is accursed by God.” So it was written in Torah. So let it be.

  The Passover had ended and the city soon emptied of pilgrims. With their departure, Judah’s mind seemed to clarify. He took a room over a wineshop and began to compose a letter to his father.

  “I have come to understand that you were wise and just to discard me. I have turned away from my duty to God and to you. I have broken the commandments and have borne false witness against an innocent man and a servant of God, and thus have I turned my life into filth. All that remains to me is to accept my punishment as just. Yet I feel I must render some account to you of the trail of events which has led me to this.…”

  When he had finished the letter, he went to the house where he had been born and knocked on the door. A chamberlain answered, an old servant who knew him at once.

  “Put this into my father’s hands,” Judah told him, giving him the letter.

  Afterwards, his steps carried him to Gethsemane, where Joshua had prayed and where he had been arrested. Along the way, Judah passed through a marketplace, where he bought a coil of rope.

  * * *

  Joshua’s death ended many things. For some of his followers it ended all hope. Some did not wait for the end of the Passover but, escaping like thieves, set out on the road back to Galilee. Many drifted away soon after. Only Simon and John stayed in Jerusalem.

  Noah could not bring himself to see them. It was not out of anger. He simply could not bring himself to do it. So they turned to Deborah.

  “I ran away,” Simon told her. “I was afraid and hid myself.”

  “You could not have saved him.” She placed her hand on his head, and it was like a mother’s caress. “He would have understood your fear.”

  “He understood everything,” John said. “He foresaw his end. Do you remember what he said about men being broken like bread, and that it was all the will of God? If God brought him to the cross, it had to be for some purpose.”

  “But what purpose?” Simon shook his head. “If he knew he was soon to know death, he must have known why. I think we were unworthy of him. We heard him but we didn’t understand. It was all a riddle to which only he had the answer.”

  When they had left, Deborah went up to the room in Baruch’s house where Noah hid himself. He had not left it since the end of the Passover, when he had finally come in from the street. He sat on the floor, in a corner, as if trying to make himself as small as possible.

  “What did they say?” he asked her.

  “That Joshua’s death was for some reason that only he and God knew. It is all a riddle to them.”

  “A riddle?” Noah’s laughter was the bitterest sound she had ever heard. “God is the riddle. If He has some purpose or if He is merely toying with us, we can never know. Joshua thought he understood God’s purposes, and that error—that arrogance, that presumption—is why he died. This is all the lesson I can draw from it, that the only wisdom is to understand that we understand nothing.”

  “Joshua loved God,” Deborah said, she sat down beside him and took Noah’s hand in both of her own. “He trusted God. He called God his Father.”

  “Every Jew calls God his Father. It is simply part of the ritual of prayer.”

  “But Joshua truly believed it.”

  “I know.”

  Noah brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed it. It was the first time he had done that since coming back.

  “Joshua loved and trusted God,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse with emotion. “And that love and trust ended in the worst death a man can die.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  But Noah only shook his head.

  * * *

  “I could swear I saw him,” Simon told her. “It was near the Temple. He looked at me and smiled, and then he was gone.”

  Deborah made no reply. She merely poured him a cup of wine.

  “Is it possible he never died?”

  “Noah says he died. He was there.”

  “But men have been raised from the dead before. Elisha brought the Shunammite woman’s son back to life. Joshua once said that the coming of the Kingdom would be heralded by miracles, that the graves would give up their dead.”

  “‘One like the son of man will come, sent from heaven to judge the world.’ Isn’t that what he said?” John suddenly raised his hands, like someone who has finally seen the obvious. “How many times did he tell us that?”

  “We did not understand him while he was among us. But now he will reveal the truth to us.”

  They had come to say good-bye. It was the last morning before Noah and D
eborah were to begin the journey back to Galilee. Hannah and Hiram would accompany them and would be married as quickly as Hiram could establish a household. Abijah and Sarah had left the week before.

  Deborah was anxious to be at home. She had tried in vain to persuade Simon and John to come with them.

  “No.” Simon smiled and shook his head. “I’ve already sent for my wife. The answer, whatever it is, will only be revealed to us here in Jerusalem.”

  They still had never talked to Noah.

  “Why wouldn’t you see them?” Deborah asked him, once the walls of Jerusalem were no longer in sight. “They came every day, and what they really wanted was to see you.”

  “What they really wanted was to have you feed them breakfast and comfort them,” Noah answered. “It’s what I really want. It’s what every man who knows you really wants.”

  He could smile now, and make his loving little jokes. He still hadn’t gone into her since before Joshua was arrested, but Noah appeared to be mending.

  “They seem to think he’s come back.”

  “Come back?”

  “Yes. Simon told me he saw him.”

  “Whatever he saw, it wasn’t Joshua. Joshua is in a pit at Golgotha. By now there are probably twenty or thirty more corpses on top of him, but if you could pull him out, you wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “It’s terrible the way you say it.”

  “The reality was much more terrible.”

  They walked in silence for a time. Deborah did not need to look at her husband’s face to know that in his mind he was back there, seeing it all again. She could feel it in the tension of his arm.

  50

  The Lord Eleazar was also on his way home, to Sepphoris, having been detained in Jerusalem by business. Three days after the Passover he had received a brief note requesting an interview that afternoon. The note was from one Isaac bar Zedekiah, head of one of the more important Levite families. His name was known to Eleazar, having appeared in a number of recent reports which had attracted his attention. He was the father of Judah bar Isaac.

  Eleazar had written back, stating that he would be pleased to receive Isaac bar Zedekiah at the time indicated.

  Isaac was approaching seventy, Judah having been the last child of his second marriage. He was thin, with small, fretful eyes, and his hair and beard were iron gray. A servant showed him into Eleazar’s study, and Isaac sat down without waiting to be invited. In his hand was a sheet of papyrus. He could not seem to keep his feet still. It was obvious that he was in a state of considerable agitation.

  He refused the wine that was offered to him.

  “Then how may I serve you?” Eleazar inquired.

  “My son Judah’s body was discovered this morning at Gethsemane,” Isaac answered, his voice cracking, whether from grief or anger it was impossible to know. “He had hanged himself. I received this letter from him yesterday. I suggest you read it.”

  He thrust out the hand that held Judah’s letter. Eleazar accepted it and read.

  “My son was kidnapped, threatened with death, and abused,” the old man shouted, unable, it seemed, to wait upon Eleazar’s examination of the letter. “He was made to live among peasants and outlaws. His wits were turned. And all by this fellow Caleb. Your servant!”

  Eleazar refrained from replying, “and your kinsman.” Isaac was too important a man to be trifled with. Besides, Judah’s written confession was a sudden and unexpected gift from God.

  “Caleb has been of use to the Tetrarch,” Eleazar answered, without looking up from the letter. “I had no foreknowledge of this, and neither did the Lord Antipas.”

  “My son hanged himself! He embraced the most shameful of deaths. He must have been driven mad.”

  There were tears in the old man’s eyes. His hands were trembling. His grief was bitter.

  “He killed himself out of remorse,” Eleazar announced, looking up from the papyrus. “By his account he felt guilt over the execution of this Joshua, this prophet. As you say, the balance of his mind was probably disturbed, but there is a certain nobility in his death. He did not try to evade responsibility for what he had done. He passed sentence on himself.”

  “Yes. That is true.” Isaac bar Zedekiah closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps taking some comfort in the reflection. “And what he wrote to me was loving. If he did wrong, he was driven to it. Others are more guilty than he.”

  “I will see to it that they are punished.” Eleazar refolded the letter and held it up. “May I keep this, just for a time? I think the Tetrarch should see it. It shall be returned to you when justice is done.”

  The letter was in Eleazar’s possession when he passed under the gates of Tiberias. He held it in his hand when he entered the palace garden for his audience with Antipas.

  The Tetrarch was sitting on a white marble bench, scattering bread crumbs on the gravel walkway for little brown birds, which fled at Eleazar’s approach.

  “What is it, Minister?” he said. “You look grim as death.”

  “I think you should read this, my lord.”

  He held the papyrus out to his master, who took it, unfolded it and, after the most cursory of inspections, handed it back.

  “My eyes are not what they were. Tell me what it says.”

  Yes, of course. The letter was in Hebrew, which Antipas knew only haltingly. “Tell me what it says,” not “read it to me.” Naturally he would blame his eyesight.

  “It is a letter from a certain Judah bar Isaac to his father, written just before Judah took his own life. He hanged himself in Jerusalem.”

  “And what has any of this to do with us?” the Tetrarch inquired, with just a hint of suspicion in his voice.

  Eleazar told him the whole story, what the letter said, and what he had learned from his own inquiries, including the evidence of Michal. For once he had the Tetrarch’s full attention.

  “Caleb plotted the arrest and execution of this Joshua bar Joseph, a peasant preacher, using perjured testimony,” Eleazar concluded, “and for no other reason, my lord, except to ingratiate himself with you, to convince you that the Baptist’s followers really are a threat, that you therefore need his protection.

  “But this is nothing. It is a measure of his desperation, nothing more. But to achieve all this, he kidnapped and drove to suicide the son of an important Levite family. We are fortunate, my lord, that Isaac bar Zedekiah brought this letter to me and not to the high priest.”

  Antipas, who had sat motionless for some time, finally nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, laying emphasis on the word. “We want no trouble from that quarter.”

  Eleazar, who appeared at first not to have heard, was studying the pattern of the bread crumbs at his feet.

  “Precisely, my lord.”

  “What do you suggest should be done?”

  “What can be done?” Eleazar raised his head and smiled bleakly. “Isaac bar Zedekiah demands justice for his son. A life for a life.”

  Antipas shrugged. It was a heavy, ponderous gesture. Then he rose from the bench.

  “Minister, I leave this matter with you. I expect I will not hear the name of Caleb bar Jacob again.”

  “As you see fit, my lord.”

  * * *

  As this conversation was concluding, its subject was on the road from Jerusalem, just out of sight of the city walls. Caleb had been enjoying himself in the city, renewing acquaintances with people who acted as if he had never been away.

  He traveled with an escort of cavalry and Matthias, who walked behind Caleb’s wagon, his hands chained to an oxbow that he carried across his shoulders. Matthias would be detained in Sepphoris, there to await his death, and Caleb would then go on to Tiberias. He was looking forward to his conversation with the Tetrarch.

  And, to keep himself amused on the journey, Caleb sat in the back of his wagon, the curtains drawn aside, and taunted his prisoner.

  “Are you aware of the punishment for desertion? No? It is crucifixion. That is how
your friend Joshua died.”

  The weight of the oxbow on his neck meant that it required a special effort for Matthias to raise his head and look at his tormenter. He made the effort now. He wanted Caleb to see his face.

  “What do I not deserve, my lord, for the things I have done in your service? But God in His mercy has forgiven me, has spared me His wrath, so I have little enough to fear from you.”

  “‘Little enough’? You think so?”

  “Yes, my lord. Death and pain are little enough, for I will pass through them to everlasting life. God has redeemed me.”

  It was enough for the time being. Caleb drew the curtains closed, having decided he would take a nap. He would dream of his wife, who had been very affectionate of late and who had promised to join him in Tiberias.

  At walking pace, the road from Jerusalem to Sepphoris took seven days, with six nights in one or another of the villages along the way, which did a good business in accommodating pilgrims. It was an agreeable journey, particularly after one left the highlands, where the nights were cold.

  A man in chains, especially one as big as Matthias, excited a great deal of curiosity. Little children, sometimes accompanied by their parents, would approach him, sometimes with food and water, and ask him questions. At first the soldiers of Caleb’s escort shooed them away, but in the end they grew tired of it and left them alone.

  The common people did not assume, simply from the fact that a man was a prisoner, that he was evil, or had done anything really wrong, or was any different from themselves. Bandits were often popular heroes, and no one thought any less of Matthias when they were told he was a deserter.

  At night, Matthias was chained to a wagon axle and left outside, and the villagers would build a fire to keep off the cold and bear him company. He would tell them about his life and his many crimes and about how he had found forgiveness. He told them about Joshua and God’s kingdom. He told them about the mercy of God. He was not gifted as a preacher, but the fact that he had been condemned to death, and did not seem to be afraid, carried great weight.

  The soldiers sometimes came and listened, too. They liked Matthias, and Caleb was not a favorite. No one told Caleb what was going on.