The Ironsmith (8 page)

“You will describe to me your relationship with the criminal John, called the Baptist. If you lie to me, if you suppress information, if you do not tell me the whole truth, then no one will ever know what happened to you.”

Judah lowered his head until it rested on his arms, and after a moment he began to make a whimpering sound.

In his mind, Caleb recited the letters of the Greek alphabet. That would be sufficient time.

“I will give you one more chance to answer. If you do not, I will forget you. The world will forget you. Tell me of the criminal John and your relationship to him.”

He hardly had time to finish the sentence before Judah cried, “
I only saw him once!
” And then, more calmly, “I only saw him once. Some friends thought it would be amusing to hear him speak. We listened, and then we left. I don't even remember what he said. It was a joke, a way to spend the afternoon. That was all.”

Caleb seemed to consider this. He stared into a dark corner, where there was nothing to see. He tapped his foot a few times against the floor. Then he turned and walked out of the cell. Even before Uriah slammed the door shut, he could hear the prisoner shouting, “No,
no
!”

“Tomorrow we won't give him anything to eat,” he said quietly, although there was no chance Judah would hear him over his own screaming.

Caleb decided he would give his kinsman three days—no, four—four days to consider the situation. It varied with the individual, but three or four days was the usual length of the journey into absolute despair.

Caleb decided he would work no more today. He would go to the baths and sweat out the stink of this place.

In truth he simply wanted to be out in the light. He wanted to be outside and to feel the heat of the sun on his face. Perhaps by the time he reached the baths his fear would have subsided into something tolerable.

In the prison the thought kept coming unbidden into his mind,
How long until I am in one of these cells, waiting upon the executioner's convenience?

Soldiers were already out in the countryside, arresting anyone suspected of being one of the Baptist's followers, but the Tetrarch was not a patient man.

And behind the Tetrarch, Caleb always saw the Lord Eleazar, whispering in his master's ear, biding his time until he could strike.

That moment was never far from his mind, that moment in the Tetrarch's garden when he had felt himself in the shadow of death's dark wings.

*   *   *

There was a room, just beyond the door to the upper prison, which Caleb used when interrogations had reached a certain stage. It was a quite ordinary room, with a desk and chair and a stool for the prisoner. There was even a small window, high up on the wall, which allowed, at certain times of the day, a shaft of light that seemed to rest on the floor like a physical object—one felt almost as if one could lean against it.

The ordinariness of the room was the point. It reminded the condemned that there still really was a world outside. Through the one window they could glimpse the sky.

For their next interview Caleb ordered that the prisoner be washed and given clean clothes. He was brought in and directed by gestures to the stool. No one had spoken to him in four days.

Caleb, who was sitting behind the desk, studied Judah's appearance. He looked exhausted, but there were no abrasions on his feet, so apparently he had been able to make it up the stairway without being dragged.

His expression was almost defiant, but Caleb knew from experience that this was a pretense that would shatter the instant it met any resistance.

“Tell me about the Baptist.”

“I know nothing.” The prisoner—it was somehow difficult to remember that he had a name—shook his head. “I saw him once. Hundreds of people went to see him.”

“Yet there were not hundreds who were baptized.” Allowing himself a tight smile, Caleb held up a scrap of papyrus. He could not, at the moment, remember what was written on it, and it did not matter. “You were baptized. That is our information.”

The prisoner, Judah bar Isaac, the scion of a family that had served the Temple since David's time, covered his eyes with his right hand.

“It was an impulse. I yielded to it. I don't know why.”

Caleb wanted to laugh. It had been an inspired guess, nothing more. The papyrus, now that he looked at it, contained this week's guard roster.

“So you admit that you were one of his followers. You admit that you lied in your first statement.”

“I admit that I was baptized.” Judah looked up over the edge of his hand, seeming to hide behind it. “John was very persuasive.”

“And why would you, a young man of wealth, popular and pleasure loving, why would you find John persuasive? That he should appeal to peasants and beggars, this I can understand. But why you?”

“I was growing tired of the life I led. John said that the sinful would find only misery, and I knew he was right.”

“Then you
were
a follower.”

Judah stared at him for a moment. He looked exhausted, as if the effort of explaining the obvious had worn him out.

“The pull of habit was too strong,” he said finally. Then he laughed. It was a short, despairing sound. “I found I could only be virtuous a little at a time. And, in the end, not even that.”

For a moment neither man spoke, the one because he perhaps realized that he had already said too much and the other because he was struggling to conceal his sense of triumph.

Caleb could sense it. Judah bar Isaac was on the verge of becoming his willing accomplice.

Judah was perfectly suited to the role he had been chosen to play—an aristocrat, cast off by his family, in search of redemption. He was all of these things in real life, so it was not a part he would need to learn. John's disciples might even remember him, the rich man from the city who was moved to accept baptism and reclaim God's favor. In any case, it would never occur to them that he was a spy.

Because it would serve no purpose simply to arrest and execute these people. Antipas had to be convinced that they formed a conspiracy against him, and for this Caleb needed witnesses and confessions. He needed people from within the group who were willing to denounce it.

But that end would never be gained by coercion. Judah had to be converted.

Fear, of course, had its role, since the final question was always the same: How did one deal with fear? The interrogator stripped away a man's defenses until he himself was the last defense. The prisoner came to live through his jailer. That process was an art.

And the key was always to find the weakness, the grain of self-doubt that lives in every man. Attack him from within and eventually he must surrender.

Judah bar Isaac had just revealed his weakness.

“Am I still in Galilee?”

The question was a surprise, and Caleb had to consider what answer to make. Or if he should answer at all. He decided it was the moment to give back a little.

“You are in Galilee.”

“I wondered. Yours is the only voice I have heard since … this started. You speak like a Judean.” He smiled, shyly, like a child. “Are you a Judean?”

“You will be returned to your cell now. Guard!”

Caleb saw the expression of terror in his cousin's eyes and felt a sense of relief. How close had Judah come to discovering his identity?

 

5

As he stood in the doorway of his house, looking down the street, which gradually descended into the lower city, Caleb was thinking about his breakfast. He fancied his stomach was troubling him.

In matters of food he was abstemious, but he wished to take pleasure in what little he did eat, and this morning the melon slice had been too ripe. His kitchen woman was, of course, Galilean and simply could not be made to understand that melon should be slightly crisp and not sweet to excess. It was the eternal problem of dealing with provincials.

The street was empty, but he knew he had only to walk a few minutes to be in the market district, where he would be surrounded by crowds, and he hated crowds. They made him uneasy.

It was possible, although unlikely, that he might be recognized, and a mob was capable of anything. Usually, when he went into the lower city, he took a few soldiers as an escort, but his business today was best achieved without calling attention to itself, so he was obliged to go alone.

And the Baptist had been dead two months. Probably few even remembered him.

Still, he felt vaguely giddy. He knew he was subject to fits of apprehension—it was, after all, endemic to his work—but he preferred to credit this morning's disturbance to his digestion.

Or to the fact that his wife had remained behind in Tiberias. It was the wise choice, since Michal's closeness to the Lady Herodias was useful, but a man cannot always be wise in matters touching on his wife. He missed her. He had been away from her too much of late. Even when she was in a filthy mood, when she screamed at the servants and threw things, he was glad to have her near him. It was torture to have her a day's journey away.

Or to homesickness. He did not hate Galilee, but it was not Judea. He missed Jerusalem.

Eight years ago he had not imagined he could ever miss the city of his birth. When his marriage had brought him into disgrace with his family, with little more in his purse than the title to a small farm in Galilee, his strongest emotion had been relief.

As it happened, Caleb never reached the farm. Tiberias was on his way, and Tiberias turned out to be an entertaining city. He sold the farm, without ever having set foot on it, for enough money, he estimated, to keep him in comfort for at least three years. In that time something would turn up. He had been born under a lucky star, so something always turned up.

But after a year, largely due to the extravagance of his new wife, he was near destitution.

Michal liked to watch the chariot races. She always insisted on the most expensive seats, the ones nearest the track—so near that, once, a clod of mud thrown up by the horses' hooves hit her in the breast, a mishap which left her strangely excited—and when the winners took their victory lap she would throw coins to them as they drove by. An afternoon at the races could turn into an expensive business, and in the winter months, when the weather was agreeable, she would want to go two or three times a week.

And she was always buying clothes and new sandals and little jeweled pins, which she claimed were presents for her family but which somehow collected in the drawers of a small cabinet she kept in their bedroom.

Once—just once—Caleb tried to persuade her to be less lavish in her expenditures, but the approach was met with scornful derision.

“I am the daughter of a Levite family and was never taught to acquire the habits of poverty. Do you expect me to live like a porter's wife?”

Then she turned her back to him and refused to speak to him or even look at him.

Caleb found he had no defense against this. Finally, he even tried to apologize, but she wouldn't hear him. This went on through most of the day.

At last, in the evening, when they were preparing for sleep, still turned halfway away from him, she opened her lips, speaking as if to some third person in the room.

“Perhaps I should return to Jerusalem,” she said. “I could live with my mother, as a widow. A husband who cannot support his wife might as well be dead.”

In bed, she wouldn't allow him to touch her.

This went on for several days and then, quite suddenly, she seemed to forget all about it. She was not affectionate, but at least she was civil.

Perhaps she thought he had learned his lesson, in which case she was right. As the contents of his purse dwindled, Caleb became increasingly desperate. He was less afraid of poverty, or even of death, than of losing Michal.

If he had not met the Lord Eleazar, there was no telling what he might have been driven to.

The First Minister had seen in him qualities he had not even realized he possessed. And now, perhaps inevitably, those very qualities, ambition and cunning, had brought Caleb into conflict with him.

And of late the Tetrarch had seemed to favor the servant over the master.

Did Eleazar feel the cool breath of the ax upon his neck? Who could say. His demeanor was unchanged, but that meant nothing. Eleazar was an unreadable man and as cold as a pond eel.

But Eleazar was also a wily man, as wily as he was inscrutable—a fact affirmed by his twenty years at the center of power.

Still, he could be brought down. Anyone could be brought down. It was the one immutable fact they all lived with, that haunted their dreams.

Caleb looked back at his house and decided, quite suddenly, that it no longer pleased him. It was too small and was in the wrong part of the palace district. The Lord Eleazar lived in a far larger house and owned perhaps another ten or twelve larger still. He even had houses in Tiberias and Jerusalem.

Perhaps in time, Caleb thought, all of these would be his. Perhaps they would all be part of his reward, after the Lord Eleazar had fallen, for having saved the Tetrarch from his subjects.

And he would stand in the reception hall on one of them and receive the submission of all the great men of Galilee.

It was a pleasant idea.

Caleb decided that he had lingered in the shade of his doorway longer than was consistent with dignity, and he stepped out into the street.

The sun was unusually hot for so early an hour, which contributed to his almost voluptuous sense of grievance. The heat, as it shimmered over the cobblestones, really was unbearable. Nothing but his sense of duty could have called him out into the glaring sunlight on such a day, and he looked forward to spending the rest of it at the baths.

But first he must wheedle an ironsmith into an insignificant act of treachery. Judah had let fall a name, which had led to another name, which had led …