The Ironsmith (46 page)

Joshua listened to all this and then, finally, shook his head.

“I have no doubt that what you say is true. But a man can change.”

“Deborah saw him in Sepphoris, talking to Caleb,” said Noah. “He fears Caleb more than death.”

“What would you have me do?” Joshua asked.

“Send him away.” Noah could hardly believe that the suggestion needed to be made. “Part with him, or the day will come when he will betray you.”

“If I do that, if I turn my back to him, what chance will he have?”

“What chance will you have if you do not?”

“God has sent me to bring His children back to Him.” Joshua made a gesture with his left hand, which suggested his helplessness in the face of this obligation. “I cannot save Judah by abandoning him. I have no choice but to help him work out his salvation.”

Noah could only sigh with exasperation. It seemed that reasoning with God's prophet was a hopeless business.

“Then you are a dead man.”

 

38

On this trip to Jerusalem, Eleazar could not hide from himself the fact that he had brought the politician in him along. He had no choice.

Almost the last person he had seen in Sepphoris was the ironsmith, who had left a note at the house of Kenan bar Dathan requesting an audience. They had met there the next day, and Noah had astonished him by revealing not only the identity of Caleb's released prisoner but also a precise history of his kidnapping and of his movements since being set free.

“I will not inquire how you discovered all this,” Eleazar had told him, “but from the nature of your information, you clearly have a source very close to my servant Caleb.”

Unless he was mistaken, Noah managed an almost imperceptible nod.

“But I will ask if you know anything of this Judah's background,” Eleazar continued.

“He seems to be of a Levite family. He had been amply provided for, but he is in disgrace.”

“And naturally you do not know what his motives might be.”

“My lord, I have no window into the man's heart,” Noah told him, with perhaps just a touch of asperity. “But you would know better than I what pressures can be brought to bear on one in the Tetrarch's prisons. Caleb, whom you are pleased to call your servant, had several months in which to bend Judah to his will.”

“And your cousin the prophet is aware of what you have told me?”

“Oh yes. But he seeks the man's redemption.”

“Is he stupid, this cousin of yours?”

“No, my lord. His views on the matter are not so narrow as yours or mine. He is a true servant of God.”

“And you have come to believe that?”

“Yes, my lord. I have seen things the sight of which you have been spared.”

Eleazar had long since observed that Noah's deference was a mask for what, in another man, the Tetrarch's First Minister would have regarded as insolence. It was one of the reasons he both liked and trusted the ironsmith and was inclined to give him his way.

The Lord Eleazar smiled thinly.

“And what would you recommend I do about this Judah bar Isaac?”

“Recommend?” Noah shrugged his powerful shoulders. “I would not dream of such a presumption.”

In other words, he would leave the First Minister to ponder the matter out for himself.

*   *   *

Eleazar's initial impulse was to have Judah bar Isaac arrested, but he quickly dismissed the idea. If Caleb had some dark design, it was better to leave things as they were and hope the fool would overstep himself.

Noah's information about the mysterious prisoner was interesting, but its real usefulness lay in the future.

It was to prepare that future that Eleazar had come to Jerusalem a full two weeks before the Passover. Because Caleb's wife had family in Jerusalem—family who seemed more forgiving of scandal than Caleb's had proved to be. Or perhaps they were merely indifferent. From his knowledge of them, Eleazar was inclined to that view. In any case, Michal had been much with them of late.

By comparison with Tiberias, or even Sepphoris, Jerusalem was not a place in which a woman alone could find much amusement. The priesthood dominated social life, and everyone knew about Michal's divorce and almost instant remarriage—and could be counted on to draw the obvious conclusions. Michal would be an outcast in Jerusalem.

Yet here she was. She spent almost as much time in Jerusalem and she had previously in Tiberias. One could not help but wonder why.

Except, of course, that one knew.

There had long been rumors, the accuracy of which Eleazar had gone to some trouble to establish, about Michal and a certain Nahshon bar Elhanan, a handsome, wealthy, and not very bright young man who spoke Greek as his first language and whose family, all conveniently dead, came from Caesarea. He had arrived in Tiberias on a visit of pleasure two years previous and had never returned home. After Michal's dismissal from court, he had suddenly moved to Jerusalem.

They had not been discreet. Eleazar had witnesses to their meetings. He had the testimony of Nahshon's servants that Michal had, on several occasions, spent the night in his house.

He wondered if Caleb didn't possess a similar collection of evidence. Nahshon had to be stupid to lay with the wife of so dangerous a man.

Thus, his first morning in Jerusalem, before he began his customary round of social calls, even before he saw his son, Eleazar bar Zadok waited in the reception hall of the house of Michal's mother.

“I regret that the mistress is not yet awake,” a servant told him—a perfumed, prancing young man with an elegantly cut beard, who smiled and smirked as if privy to all the family secrets, which was possibly the case.

“I see no occasion to disturb the Lady Rahab,” Eleazar told him, “particularly since it is her daughter, the Lady Michal, I wish to see.”

The servant glanced aside, as if astonished that anyone could be so boorish, and then smiled.

“I am afraid the Lady Michal is also still asleep.”

“Then wake her.”

“Alas, it would prove impossible.…”

“Hardly impossible. Wake her. Be good enough to inform her that the Lord Eleazar wishes a private word.”

For a moment the servant seemed confused. Then he appeared to be preparing to say something, but exactly what would forever remain a mystery.

“Be about your business, boy.”

Eleazar wandered into one of the sitting rooms and found a chair. He anticipated a long wait, since, in his experience, women of questionable reputations tended to be most particular about their appearance.

He was happily disappointed, however. Not even a quarter of an hour had passed when the Lady Michal swept into the room. Her hair was a trifle disarrayed, which only added a becoming suggestion of voluptuousness to her face.

For an instant, Eleazar wondered what it must be like to make love to such a woman. Rather like handling a viper with a pretty skin, he decided.

“My lord,” she said breathlessly, “you do me honor.”

Eleazar did not rise from his chair. Neither did he smile.

“Fortunately, my lady, your honor is not my concern. I am here on business, so please be seated.”

The change in her expression was instantaneous, but she said nothing. Instead, she sat down in the chair to which Eleazar directed her with a languid gesture.

Was she frightened? It was difficult to know. Her emotions, perhaps, were in a state of precarious balance, capable of being tipped in any direction.

“How may I serve you, my lord?” she asked.

Good,
Eleazar thought.
She is assuming an air of humility, which only means that she has decided to wait and see.

“I have made up my mind to destroy your husband, Lady. The only question left is whether you will go down with him.”

Now, for the first time, Eleazar allowed himself to smile. The smile was almost kindly.

A moment passed, a silence that lasted through five or six beats of the heart, and then Michal moved uncomfortably in her chair.

“Are you threatening me, my lord?” she asked finally.

“Yes. With death. Do I have your attention, Lady?”

From the way she nodded, one could have imagined that the joints in her neck had frozen shut.

“You have been careless, Lady. I have more than sufficient evidence to bring an accusation of adultery against you, and you will recall that the penalty for adultery is death by stoning.”

He paused and waited for some reaction. There was none. Good. That could only mean that she was thoroughly frightened.

“Have you ever seen someone stoned to death?” he went on. “A crowd surrounds the victim. There is no escape. I
have
seen it. Afterwards, the woman's head looked like pulp. And here in Jerusalem the crowd would be huge and probably more than a little hysterical. When they have finished, I doubt if you would be even recognizably human.”

Michal did not move, and she made no sound. But tears were trickling down her face.

Eleazar was prepared to give her time.

“My husband…” she began at last. “My husband would never…”

“Your husband, if confronted with irrefutable evidence—evidence which, in the event of his refusal to act, will be made public—would have no choice but to accuse you. The Tetrarch will not be pleased, but that serves my purpose. It will weaken your husband and bring him another few steps closer to his ruin. So, as they lead you out to the execution ground, you can comfort yourself that your death will not have been in vain.”

She began to sob. Eleazar was disgusted by the performance. He merely waited for it to subside.

“Can you save me?” she asked finally. She had the cunning, at least, not to raise her eyes.

“Of course I can save you. That is not the question. The question is whether you would be more useful to me alive or dead. What do you think?”

She straightened herself up and tried to assume something like a dignified attitude.

“What can I expect if I help you?”

Their eyes met, and they found they understood each other perfectly.

“When your husband is dead, you will be a widow and I will have no interest in pursuing any accusations against you. And I will see to it that you inherit some part of Caleb's estate. You can marry Nahshon bar Elhanan, provided he is fool enough, and you can live anywhere you want. Jerusalem, Caesarea, anywhere. Except in Galilee. You would do well, I think, to take yourself off to the gentile lands. You might like Alexandria. I'm told it's charming.”

“What do I have to do?”

Eleazar smiled, not very nicely.

“First, I think it would be wise if, when your husband arrives in Jerusalem … which you expect, when?”

“Tonight.”

“Then tonight I think you should have a touching reunion. He will be staying at the Tetrarch's palace. You should join him there, and soften his heart to you as best you can.”

“That will not be difficult,” she said, obviously regaining her confidence.

“I'm delighted of hear it, because I want to know everything you can discover about where he goes, whom he sees, and what he does. I want to know what he thinks, if you can find that out as well. There is a woman named Talitha who will be part of your household. You may speak to her in Greek and she will understand nothing, but she will remember everything. Anything you tell her, I will know before you are many hours older. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Do you also understand that if I fail to find your information useful, or if you attempt to deceive me in any way, you will die under a shower of stones?”

“Yes.”

“Then our business is finished.”

Eleazar rose and, without even glancing at her, left the room.

Once he was outside, he was able to consider the interview with some satisfaction. Michal would certainly betray her husband, so the only remaining question was whether Caleb was sufficiently blinded by love or passion or whatever held him to that woman not to guess that she was now his bitterest enemy.

As he walked along, and as his steps took him into a more fashionable quarter of the city, Eleazar decided he might as well go on and visit his dead wife's mother, whom he detested but who lived close by. It was a necessary courtesy, best gotten through as quickly as possible.

Then he would have dinner with his son.

 

39

Even as Eleazar left Michal, her husband was entering Jerusalem's northern gate. Caleb had arrived as one more anonymous pilgrim in the vast crowds that clogged the roads into the city.

Eight years before, he had left through the same gate, and in that time he had never been back. The city was at once utterly strange and painfully familiar.

But it was always thus during the great feasts. Jerusalem became a different place as the mobs took possession of it. Every street was transformed into a remorseless current of strangers that dragged one helplessly along with it. And the noise was inhuman, like the rumblings of a storm.

But still, it was where Caleb had been born, where he had expected to live until he died, a servant of the Temple and of God.

After all these years, the sight of the place tormented him, like the recollection of lost love. Even the Greek-speaking tourists from cities too distant to be named, who came to the Holy City for the only time in their lives, were more welcome than he. He was the uninvited guest for whom there was no room at the table.

Later, when he had attended to business and was settled in the Tetrarch's palace, he would send a note to his wife, but he would not go to her family's house, because it was in the Levite district, where his own extensive family had their homes. There was always the chance that he would meet someone he had known from the old days, and that would be awkward. He did not want his father to know of his return.

Caleb was a wealthy man and a high officer of the Tetrarch's government, and yet to his father he was dead, cast off, as if he had never been born. He did not even know if the old man was still alive.