The Ironsmith by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page A

public services. They looked to Eleazar, as the city’s warden, for patronage and direction, but for the most part they operated quite well on their own. There was little enough for the Tetrarch or his First Minister to do.
    So it was probably best that Antipas concerned himself with domestic architecture, no matter how vulgar. It kept him out of mischief.
    The chamberlain bowed to him and then disappeared to announce his arrival, and Eleazar was left alone to wait.
    As he stood in the great reception hall, he had only to look about him, at the murals on the walls, scenes from pagan stories, full of wantonness and naked flesh, and at the white Greek columns and the polished marble floor, to feel himself in a foreign place, a dwelling unfit for men who feared God.
    But what could one expect from a man whose mother had been a Nabatean and whose great-grandfather—an Idumean, of all things—had probably been forced at sword point to accept Torah? Antipas himself had grown up in Rome.
    The Tetrarch’s family had risen to power in a mere three generations. They were, it seemed, the destiny Eleazar’s forebears had embraced for him. His grandfather, who had been a worldly man and saw no hope of prospering in Jerusalem, had accepted an offer of service from the Great Herod, who was then governor of Galilee. After the Roman senate had declared him king of the Jews, Herod showed favor to the family, who received land and honors. Eleazar’s father eventually came to lead the city administration of Sepphoris, the rewards for which were not contemptible.
    But then Herod, worn down by his years and his many crimes, had at last died. He left a will dividing his kingdom among his three surviving sons. Archelaus was to be king and to rule over Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. Antipas would have Galilee and Perea, and Philip the lands east of the Jordan. The emperor in Rome, however, refused Archelaus the title of king and named him “ethnarch,” ruler of the people. Antipas and Philip, since each was to receive a quarter of their father’s domain, would each be styled “Tetrarch.”
    Inevitably, the Great Herod’s death was followed by a rebellion—a feeble thing, restricted mainly to the countryside—but the Romans, acting on behalf of Herod’s sons, crushed it with astonishing ferocity, and Eleazar learned a lesson he was never to forget: resistance to authority led to chaos and death. God, for whatever reason, had made the Romans masters of the world, and the Romans had appointed Antipas, Herod’s son, master of Galilee. To defend this order of things was to do the will of God.
    But the order could be broken. The emperor could remove Antipas, as he had removed Antipas’s elder brother, Archelaus, who was judged too cruel and therefore a threat to good order and so, at a word from Rome, had been exiled to the wilderness of Europe. Judea, Samaria, and Idumea then became the Roman province of Palestine, governed from Caesarea by a prefect. No one ever heard from Archelaus again.
    Thus, like his father before him, Antipas owed all that he had, even his life, to the patronage of the Caesars. One mistake, one reason for the Romans to decide he was a liability, and he would join his brother, who had probably had his throat cut as soon as he arrived in Gaul.
    This Antipas understood quite well. He lived with the fear of it every moment of this life, and his fear made him cruel.
    So Eleazar served the Great Herod’s son because his father had served both father and son and because the alternative was rule by foreigners even more cruel than Antipas.
    In the world he knew, power was in a state of precarious balance, and it was his function to restrain Antipas from doing anything that might disturb that balance, lest Antipas destroy himself and surrender Galilee to the Romans.
    But Eleazar had no illusions. He was thin and careworn and already past forty. And his duty in life was to