The Ironsmith (22 page)

“Do it,” he told him. “Finish this.”

The officer trotted back to his men and said something to one of them, who pulled a mallet with an iron head out of a sack upon which he had been resting his feet.

The thing was done almost before one realized what was happening. The soldier broke Reuel's shinbones just below the knee, three blows to each leg. The pain registered in Reuel's face, but he made no sound.

“He'll be dead soon,” Caleb said quietly, as if offering consolation. “Have you seen enough?”

“More than enough.”

“Good. Then let's be on our way.”

Judah never spoke the whole way back to Sepphoris. He seemed dazed, or as if he were somewhere else. Perhaps he was. Perhaps, in his imagination, he had never left the execution ground, where he watched Reuel die one breath at a time.

That night he did not even try to sleep. All night, in the perfect darkness of his cell, he sat on the edge of his bed and tried to remember.

Did he remember Reuel? Perhaps he remembered that John had had a disciple whose two brothers accompanied him. He wasn't sure. Perhaps he remembered that the disciple's name had been Reuel. Perhaps. Probably. He wasn't sure.

If he remembered, then certainly he had betrayed Reuel. Under interrogation he had named every name that came into his head. It had had nothing to do with his will. The words came out of their own volition.

And yet the guilt was his. Before his very eyes, Reuel had suffered and died on the cross. Caleb said that he had betrayed the man. How could it not be so?

Sometime in the early hours after midnight, when time seemed to have stopped altogether, Judah's doubts withered, to be replaced with a sense of shame that was identical with certainty. He had handed a man over to death.

Yet Caleb had said, not once but many times, that all of this was in the service of God. Judah had heard the words without understanding them. Only now were they revealed as the truth.

The service of God. Perhaps that idea alone was enough to render life supportable. There was nothing else.

Judah put his hand up to his face and discovered that he had been weeping.

The service of God. He would never know, of course, that Caleb had lied to him.

 

17

Judah bar Isaac had hardly known what to think or feel when told that he was about to be released.

“You will be given clean clothes and money,” Caleb announced. “You will be allowed to bathe and to trim your beard. You will be allowed to purify yourself, for you will be acting as a useful servant of God. You will be under my protection on every step of your journey.”

Which of course meant that he would be watched. It was an understandable precaution, but unnecessary. Judah had not the slightest intention of betraying his cousin—for that was what he now knew him to be. If he did that, where could he hide, where could he go for safety? Caleb had already demonstrated that he had a long reach.

Besides, Judah did not want to. He had discovered himself in prison. He had had revealed to him his own utter unworthiness. And now God was putting his feet on the path to self-respect.

But even this was temporarily obscured by those first few giddy moments of freedom.

His cell had a window, which allowed him to know when the dawn broke. At first light he was given breakfast. Then, when he was washed and combed and dressed, Caleb came.

“You will leave by the main entrance, as befits an honest man. Then you will take the road north, until you reach a town called Capernaum. You will be looking for one Joshua bar Joseph, a preacher, a self-styled holy man who profanes the name of God among the poor and ignorant. If he is not in Capernaum, you will find him. You will attach yourself to this man—he is known to have followers, so it should not be difficult—and you will store in your memory everything he says and does. For the time being, you need concern yourself with nothing beyond.”

Judah would remember forever his walk down the palace steps, his first moments in the swirling crowds, the intoxication he felt at the chaotic mingling of a hundred human voices. After a quarter of an hour he had to go into a wineshop to steady himself. He recalled holding the coins in his hand, the pattern they made across his palm, the deep pleasure of counting them out in payment for a cup of something that was worse even than the wine in prison but seemed to flow through him like quicksilver.

Then he glanced about and found himself wondering which of those whose faces were half turned away would soon be reporting to Caleb that he had entered this shop, that he had drunk a cup of wine, that he had left hurriedly.

For he must be about his business. The leash was short.

He found he had to stop for rest many times that first day. Prison had taken away his strength. His legs ached and his breath came quickly. He was like a man recovering from an illness.

There were few travelers on the road. Judah walked on alone, letting his eyes run along the line of the horizon, and the vast emptiness filled him with fear. At times he found himself longing for the walls of his cell.

He stopped the first night at a nameless village and bought lodging and food for a single silver coin. His host shared a jar of beer with him. He was a man of about fifty, with heavy streaks of gray in his beard and a hard, peasant face.

“Come from the city?” he inquired, with a diffidence suggesting he was merely making conversation and had no desire to pry.

“Yes, this morning.”

“I hear it's a big place.”

“Have you never been there?”

“No.” The man shook his head. There was an absence of curiosity in the gesture that implied he could imagine no reason for going. Its wonders meant nothing to him.

“The countryside is better,” Judah said, without conviction.

His host nodded in agreement. The matter was settled—or, more accurately, had never really been in dispute.

“I came from Jerusalem,” Judah said.

“Ah, Jerusalem!” The man smiled, his face seeming to crack under the strain. “I was there once, for the Passover. Took the whole family. A week getting there, ten days in Jerusalem, a week coming back. What a time we had! I bought a lamb there and had it sacrificed in the Temple. What a place! I never guessed it was possible for men to make anything that big.”

“It was the work of many thousands. Herod had only just finished it when he died.”

“Who is Herod? A friend of yours?”

*   *   *

Judah arrived in Capernaum late the next day. He found an accommodating wineshop, where he ate dinner and was promised a bed for the night. The landlord was even able to give him information about the preacher Joshua bar Joseph.

“Oh him, yes.” He was a broad, tough-looking man, beginning to run to fat, as if from soft living. “He made a nuisance of himself around here for some time, but he's gone now. Good riddance!”

“Any idea where?” Judah offered a confiding smile. “I have business with him.”

“Well, if he owes you money, you'll never see it again. He's a ragged beggar. The women like him, though. My own wife…”

“Do you know which road he took when he left?”

A silver coin somehow found its way onto the table, and the landlord picked it up with his broad, clumsy fingers.

“North.”

“Thank you, Ezra.”

Judah spent the next day seeking more specific information and gradually began to form an impression of his quarry. Joshua bar Joseph did, in fact, have followers in Capernaum, and they were not simply a gaggle of hysterical women. They all believed him to be the instrument of God, and many were convinced he was the successor to John the Baptist. Even among those who did not subscribe to his teachings, no one spoke of him in terms that would suggest he was some half-crazed boor who believed that God spoke to him through his stomach. He was not mad, he was not ignorant, he was reported as being very far from stupid. Judah looked forward to meeting him.

But that was not to be in Capernaum.

The following morning Judah started north. At every town and little village, he inquired if there was any news of a prophet named Joshua who taught that the world was to be redeemed from sin. Sometimes people told him that “the Master” had stayed among them for a few days or a week and then moved on. Sometimes his questions were answered with incomprehension and mute suspicion.

Gradually he came to understand the pattern of Joshua's wanderings, which kept him away from the cities and was proceeding in a great arc that had already crossed over the tributaries of the Jordan River and would sweep back to Capernaum. It was a journey through places unknown to all except those who lived there. It was an embracing of obscurity, as if obscurity itself had become the only real virtue.

Judah was three weeks on the road before he found Joshua, just outside the village of Bethsaida, sitting under a tree with three other men, who appeared to be his followers, repairing the strap of one of his sandals. He seemed wholly absorbed in the task.

Joshua was a tall man, with long legs and arms, and his bearing, even as he concentrated on trimming a strip of leather, was impressive. There was that about him which commanded one's attention. Judah had no difficulty imagining him addressing a multitude of eager listeners.

But he was also, and obviously, a peasant. That was the great surprise. This fomenter of rebellion, this dangerous revolutionary, really was a village carpenter. To be suddenly confronted with this inescapable fact was in itself a kind of revelation.

“I have been a long time searching for you, Master.”

Joshua raised his eyes from his work and spent a moment studying the face of the man who stood before him. Then he smiled.

“I remember you,” he said. “You came to hear the Baptist, with a group of your city friends. It was like a street festival to them, to hear the madman from the desert preach.”

Judah felt the reproach and apparently looked it, because Joshua continued, “I remember you because you were the one who did not mock.”

“I was baptized.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And yet I slid back into my old life. I repented of my sins and then sinned again.”

The men who were with Joshua exchanged glances suggestive of a certain mistrust.

“Then you had not truly repented,” Joshua answered. “Repentance is not the impulse of a moment but a rebirth that changes everything. However, I will not reproach you, for it is an old story. The pull of worldly things is strong.”

He stood up and, when Judah approached him, threw an arm over his shoulder to embrace him.

“Well, if you have been searching for me, you have found me. Now, what do you want of me?”

Judah told him a story. It was not so much a lie as a recasting of the way he actually felt. The details were an invention, but the mood reflected his experiences over the last few months.

“The merchant who invested for me had losses and used my capital to cover them. Then he lost that and ran away. I found myself with little more than the money in my purse and the clothes I stood up in. My family could not help me. I was alone. I took this as a sign from God, a punishment for the empty life I had been leading.”

“It was not a punishment. It was a mercy. You have, by your own account, led a wicked life, and now you have been separated from the root cause of that wickedness: wealth, which, one way or another, was stolen from the poor.”

“You make me sound like a bandit.”

“A bandit robs because he must. If he steals from the rich he is merely taking back some part of what they have robbed from the poor. You were worse than any bandit.

“But God, in His wonderful compassion, has taken your money and left you your life, which you now have an opportunity to redeem. You are better off than your laughing friends who came down with you to the river to hear John. Very soon God will sweep the world clean of sin, and your friends will lose everything, including their lives. You are like a man released from prison.”

They were walking now back toward the village, which was like every other village Judah had been to on his search. The streets were dusty and the houses were made of mud brick. It was yet two hours before sunset, so most of the men were still in the fields. Children played their incomprehensible games, and women, when you saw them, were usually carrying water jugs to and from the village well.

Judah had lived all his previous life in cities, first Jerusalem and then Tiberias. In the cities, property was spoken of in the abstract—a man owned farms in Galilee, which produced a reliable income of so much per year. The farm was like a hen that lays an egg. The owner of the henhouse takes the egg from the nest. He commits no sin because, among other things, he prevents the world from being overrun with chickens.

The countryside was nothing like what Judah had imagined. People were poor in the midst of abundance. These were the peasants, whom he had been raised to regard with contempt and suspicion. Here, in their midst, a farm was not a mechanism as impersonal as a millstone, grinding out income; it was the very life of these people.

“
You are like a man released from prison.
”

The lie becomes a parable, and the parable points to a truth that transcends the facts the lie denies. It was perfectly possible to understand why Caleb saw this man as a danger.

“I would follow you, Master. I would attain salvation.”

And the peculiar thing, the truly puzzling thing, as Judah suddenly became aware, was that he did not know if he meant it or not.

Joshua was silent for a moment or two, and then he said, “We will be leaving here soon. You are welcome to come with us if you like. Along the way we may discover if your repentance is sincere.”

*   *   *

The next morning they were on the road, and in the middle of the afternoon they came into a village that seemed abandoned. There were not even any animals in sight, not even a dog. It was as wretched a place as Judah had ever beheld, with houses left unrepaired after the spring rains, amid a general atmosphere of dilapidation and neglect.