The Ironsmith (59 page)

“God forgive me,” he whispered. But all he meant was “God save me from this.”

“God forgive me!” he repeated, screaming now. And then, as his heart filled with fear, leaving room for nothing else, the screams became merely screams, incoherent and meaningless.

All the while, Uriah sat on his bench, rocking with obscene laughter.

 

51

It was the spring, and the grass was long and green around the city walls. The children were running ahead and Deborah was calling something to them. He couldn't hear what she said because there was no sound in her voice. Young Joshua, their third son, looked back at her and laughed.

What was Deborah calling? Why couldn't he hear it?

“Uncle Noah. Wake up.”

He opened his eyes and was back in the present, where he was an old man, sitting beside his doorway in the morning sunlight, and Deborah had been dead for two years.

“Don't you want your breakfast?”

It was Merab, Hannah's girl. She had married one of Hiram's apprentices and they had moved to Nazareth. Nazareth was getting to be a town now, not a village, and there was plenty of work for an ironsmith.

Thus everything goes around and around. Benjamin comes back home to Nazareth and sets up his forge. He teaches his son Barachel, who moves to Sepphoris. Then Barachel's son Noah, when his father dies, comes back to Nazareth and learns his trade from his grandfather. Then he moves back to Sepphoris and teaches Hiram, who teaches Jediael, who moves to Nazareth and sets up his forge.

“No, I won't want any breakfast. I want a cup of wine.”

“It's too early for wine, Uncle Noah. Have your breakfast instead.”

“Oh very well.”

Around and around. And now Noah had come back to Nazareth to live out his last years in his grandfather's house, where he had been raised. After Deborah's death, the house in Sepphoris was haunted for him and, besides, his eldest son Berachel's family was growing and they needed the room.

But they all came to visit him—even widowed Sarah, still spry enough to walk the five miles to Nazareth. Family was the last remaining consolation.

Merab brought out a little tray and set it on the table to the left of his chair. She kept house and cooked for him. She and her husband were still struggling, and the money was welcome, but she was three months with child now, so other arrangements would soon have to be made.

Or perhaps not. Noah was an old man and gave very little thought to the future.

Breakfast was bread and lentils and beer. Noah ate slowly, drinking the beer, which was foul stuff, in little sips. When his breakfast was finished, he would pretend to fall asleep again so that Merab could slip back to her own house for a few hours. By these little stratagems does an old man hope to avoid becoming more of a nuisance than absolutely necessary.

Except that he actually did fall asleep again. He was awakened not my Merab but by a man making a noise as if to clear his throat.

“I apologize,” the man said first. “Did I awaken you?”

He was young, not much over twenty. He was also tall, with light brown hair, and he was speaking Greek, which meant that he was a stranger.

“It doesn't matter,” Noah answered, in Greek, which he had not even heard in ten years. He tried not to scowl—the young are so sensitive. “Very soon I will sleep forever. Do I know you?”

“No. I am from Antioch. But when I was a boy I met a friend of yours. Do you remember Matthias?”

“Yes.”

He had not seen Matthias since the year of Joshua's death. The sound of his name brought everything back, as if it had happened yesterday. It was very unpleasant.

“From the way you speak of him, I assume he is dead. How did he die?”

The young man from Antioch seemed taken aback.

“In his sleep. He was old.”

“Not as old as I am now.” Noah smiled. “But I am glad his death was gentle. Is that where he died, in Antioch?”

“Yes. But he will rise again when Jesus Christ returns.”

Noah sat quietly, his eyes cast down, as he tried to understand what this lad was talking about. Then it struck him.
Jesus
was the Greek for “Joshua.” Joshua the Anointed One. Was that still going on?

“So Matthias was a preacher?”

“Yes. He was our elder, the only one who had actually known our Lord in the flesh.”

“And your ‘Lord' was, I take it, this Jesus?”

“Yes. Our Savior, the Son of God.”

Noah could only shake his head. Then it occurred to him that Merab was nowhere about, and there was a jar of wine in the kitchen. Company was the perfect excuse.

“But I have forgotten my manners,” he said, standing up. “Please be good enough to sit down and I will bring us some refreshment.”

The wine was reasonably cool, and she hadn't cut it with more than three measures of water. Noah could hardly believe his luck.

He sat down again and poured two cups. The young man tasted the wine, apparently just to be polite, and then set his cup down again.

“Matthias spoke of you often,” he said. “He told us you were with the Lord Jesus when he died.”

“Joshua. His name was Joshua. By the way, what is your name?”

“Marcus. I am a Roman,” he answered, not without a hint of pride. “My father was posted to Antioch, and there my mother received the true faith.”

“I am pleased to meet you. I am Noah, as you know. And my cousin's name was Joshua. Say it.”

But Marcus the Roman knew not a syllable of Aramaic and could not get his tongue around it.

“I suppose I shall have to be content with ‘Jesus',” Noah said at last.

“I feel that I am on sacred ground,” Marcus said, giving the impression that he had not heard, “to be in the place where he grew to manhood.”

“We both did.”

Noah raised his arm and pointed to the house just opposite, across an open space of perhaps twenty paces.

“He was born in that house,” he said, as if the fact proved something important. “His younger brother's grandchildren live there still. Of course, none of them remember him.”

“But you remember him.”

“Oh yes.”

“Were you really with him when he died?”

“Yes. That day has lived in my memory ever since.”

“Then you will be able to tell me. What were his last words?”

For a moment Noah was silent. He had never revealed to anyone the despair that had gripped Joshua in his final moments. It would have seemed a betrayal.

“‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?'” he answered, in Aramaic.

“What does that mean?”

“He was asking for a drink of water.”

Marcus's disappointment was palpable. He didn't know what to say, so he changed the subject.

“What was he like when you knew him?”

“When I knew him?” Noah shrugged, and poured himself another cup of wine. “That would be his whole life, for we were born only a few days apart. We learned our letters together—he was cleverer than I. He loved God. It was a love that left little room for anyone else.”

“
Except for Rachel,
” he could have added, but he did not. It seemed to him that these people who called his childhood companion the Son of God had no claim to know the man of flesh and blood that Joshua had been, with his infirmities and his private sorrows.

Instead, Noah pointed to a line of hills, visible to the west over the rooftops of Nazareth. “Those hills are terraced, and covered with grape arbors,” he said. “On a dare, when we were seven years old, Joshua jumped down from one, and broke his arm. He thought God would hold him up. He was mistaken.”

But Marcus the Roman, the follower of Jesus the Christ, did not want to hear about broken arms. He wanted to hear about wondrous signs and miracles.

Noah was not able to satisfy him. “I saw him convert Matthias, which saved my life, but I suppose that was not, strictly speaking, a miracle. I heard stories from his disciples of miraculous cures, but I never witnessed one. I think he was a man like other men.”

“Then you did not accept his ministry?”

“In the end, no. We only know a true prophet by the truth of his prophecies. It has been more than forty years since Joshua died, and God's kingdom has never come.”

“Yet forty years is not so long.”

Noah smiled. “Joshua was not as patient as you seem to be.”

“Yet are we not living in the end times? Doesn't the destruction of the Temple prove that?”

For a long time Noah was not able to speak. His youngest boy, also named Joshua, had gone up to Jerusalem that Passover and had never returned. Noah could only assume that he had been trapped when the Romans laid siege to the city and had perished like so many others.
Please God,
he had prayed, so many times.
Please God I did not curse him when I named him after Joshua. Please God he died a quick death and did not suffer on the cross.

“The Temple was destroyed once before,” Noah said at last, fixing his gaze on this son of conquerors. “By the Babylonians. And now again by the Romans. God is silent.”

“And yet He raised His son from the dead, as a sign to us.”

“Did he?” Noah inquired, as in his mind he saw the fetid pit into which the Romans had thrown Joshua's corpse. “Did he indeed?”

“Many saw him, so it is said. He appeared to many.”

“He did not appear to me.”

“Why should he?” Marcus was almost angry now. “Why would he have appeared to one who denied him?”

All at once, in memory, Noah was a little boy just able to see the top of the Passover table, and his cousin Joshua grinned at him and then, suddenly, stole a fig and ran away.

Then, an old man again, he began to laugh. It was a hollow, scratchy sound, like coins being rattled in a wooden box. He had to wait until the fit was over before he could answer.

“Why, you ask? Because he would not have been able to resist it.”

*   *   *

Marcus left unsatisfied. He was on his way to Jerusalem, although it was impossible to say what he expected to find there. Jerusalem was a graveyard.

And Noah was left alone once more, with his wine and his memories.

All he had to do was close his eyes, and Deborah lived again. He could hear the sound of her voice. He could turn over the days of their life together like the pages of a book. He could remember passion, but love was stronger. Love did not die. Love was with him still.

His memories of his wife were a refuge. Better to remember her, a woman full of light, than all the darkness.

“That damned boy!”

Noah couldn't keep it at bay. It all came flooding back over him—Joshua's cruel death, his own dead son, the war.

Some things were at a remove. He could remember the feelings they had stirred, but not the things themselves. They were outside his experience.

The war, for instance, had not much touched Galilee. The war had been something far away. After the Romans tired of Antipas and sent him into exile, Galilee was ruled from Caesarea. But the prefects had confidence in the Lord Eleazar, and the people listened to him. He sided with the Romans, and Galilee remained quiet.

Eleazar had died in his bed before the siege of Jerusalem began. He was spared that, at least. And Galilee knew peace.

And now the Temple was a ruin.

But Noah did not have to imagine what had happened to Joshua those forty years ago. He had seen it. He had witnessed the intolerable suffering of that death. And now, whenever he thought of it, he saw Joshua with his son's face—the son who had been named for him.

Yet, through it all, God had remained silent.

Oh God,
Noah had asked, in the privacy of his heart,
Why did You not spare Joshua, who loved You as a child loves his father? Why did You not spare Your people? Why did You not spare my son? Why?

But there was never an answer. There was only silence. God had turned His face away.

There was nothing left to do but weep. In his old age, it was God's silence he could not forgive.

Then suddenly, though his tears, Noah realized that he was praying. The words came to his lips unbidden, almost against his will, for there was no choice. In all of blind creation, it was only to God that men could turn, in the fading hope that He might listen.

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe…”

 

F
ORGE
B
OOKS BY
N
ICHOLAS
G
UILD

Blood Ties

 

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

NICHOLAS GUILD
was born in Belmont, California, and attended Occidental College and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Clemson and Ohio State before turning full-time to writing fiction. He has published a dozen novels, several of which were international bestsellers, including
The Assyrian, Blood Star,
and
Angel
. Guild now lives in Frederick, Maryland. You can sign up for email updates
here
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