Reign (6 page)

“I was told that I must leave by tomorrow,” Jezebel said. She hadn’t seen Ahab since the feast, and it had taken a good deal of skill to avoid him.

Eth-baal did not reply. The snake moved alongside his thigh, which was hidden under the bedclothes. He refused to acknowledge it.

“You don’t even know what you’re losing,” she said quietly, her voice barely a whisper. It roared in her ears.

“I lost everything that mattered years ago!” His chin moved as he spoke, but he would not look at her. The snake, however, watched him, growing very still near the fleshiest part of his thigh, hidden under the thin sheet. It began curling its body into a tight curved pattern. She felt the truth tightening up inside her, too, coiling, and her gut constricted violently, forcing words out in a spitting rush.

“The sacrifice of the beloved calls for a beloved child to die,” Jezebel said. “If you had loved me, Father, even a little, even the slightest hint, I could have died in her place. I would have done that for you. But you didn’t love me, and so I couldn’t die. It was you and Mother, your love, and your hatred of me, that doomed Temereh.”

“Get out!” he screamed, slapping the bed with his gnarled hand. The snake struck at once, sinking its fangs into his thigh. The king bent his head back, swallowing another scream. The snake released him and curled back onto the bed. Little pools of blood rose up on the sheet. Her father opened his mouth, gasping for air, looking at her with wild eyes. He tried to say something, but his words were caught in his fast-swelling throat. She thought he said, “Demon.” His frantic gaze went to the statue of Asherah on his bedside as if trying to tell Jezebel something. Reaching out, he knocked it to the floor and slid from the bed.

King Eth-baal collapsed onto the floor, and the servants scurried to claim him and nurse the wound. They glared at Jezebel. Though they had surely heard of her strange treatments, none had ever witnessed it.

“It’s an old Sumerian cure,” Jezebel said, her voice sounding hoarse and old. “I traded a royal stallion for the secret. The venom will have its full effect within the hour, and his joints will be freed from the arthritis. He will feel much better for a few weeks. But see to it he never does this more than once for every cycle of the moon, or the venom will kill him. And always feed the snake first so that she will not use her full strength. I leave them both in your care.”

Jezebel crossed the room and bent to kiss him on the cheek, like Temereh always used to do. Jezebel could be bold like that today, because she was leaving forever. He couldn’t hurt her anymore. She inhaled the air in the room to try and capture something of him to carry with her into the strange future. She didn’t smell him, though, but instead her sister and mother, something of the softness they once had. She pulled back with a frown, uncertain if it was some trick of his.

He was slipping away into unconsciousness as she walked out the door for the last time. But then, he had always been lost to her.

Ahab

Jezebel’s caravan would stretch further than the length of Israel’s capital city—this is what Omri had said in disgust. Ahab concurred, but said nothing. It was taking more than a hundred servants to prepare for her departure.

Omri left Phoenicia after the first army division headed for Samaria, taking five of Ahab’s favorite men with him. He intended to spite Ahab, but Ahab was thankful for a reprieve from Omri. He left two days after his father.

Ahab was riding with Obadiah and eight other men, plus several pack mules and two attendants for cooking and tending the animals. It was about an hour after they left the palace, when Ahab stopped to remove a rock from his horse’s hoof, that he turned and saw. The caravan of the princess numbered forty covered chariots.

Obadiah had stopped alongside him. “Most of them are for her priests.”

How much could he say, Ahab wondered, without revealing his inadequacies? “I had not realized her gods meant so much to her.”

Obadiah paused as if considering whether to add something painful to the conversation. Ahab waved him off. He did not need more trouble. He had assumed when he first entered Phoenicia that the princess he acquired would be willing, if not happy, to be married. He had not anticipated her wrath, although her resistance was strangely inspiring. Maybe this was what he had hated all along about this whole arrangement between the fathers; it was too easy. Ahab had grown up fighting. He needed to fight for this, too. It was an insult to just be given a wife. Ahab would win this one.

He looked forward to the battle.

He and his men had all been overwhelmed by Phoenicia, with those salacious women who were nothing like the Hebrew girls back home, and he wondered if any of the men felt relief, like he did, to be heading home. Phoenician dancers wore sheer veils and little else, and they gave themselves to men as a form of worship. So astonishing was the perversion that his men had not stopped pestering Ahab about his own experience, his first night with his princess.

“We envy you! She is so beautiful!” one of his men said. “We are surprised you have the strength for the trip home.”

All but Obadiah laughed. Obadiah had been silent and pale since he first entered Phoenicia. Ahab pondered why leaving did not relieve Obadiah of his secret burdens.

Ahab was content to let all conversation die away, though. He had a secret of his own; he had received nothing on his wedding night but a vicious bite to the hand. He had been ushered into a room reserved for special visitors, where two young girls had attempted to entertain him, and their efforts had begun with disrobing. It had angered him. Did Jezebel think he was a blind man who could be content with any woman? He shoved them from the room, ignoring their sharp cries of pain from his grip on their bare arms. Alone, he waited in the room until he was sure they had given up on returning, then wandered through the palace until he found his chamber. Once inside, he had not slept well, stirred by a restless confusion of guilt and frustration and relief.

On the far horizon ahead, he spotted the first fires of the evening, which meant that Omri and his men were done traveling for the day. Omri lacked the stamina of his son, Ahab realized with a start. Omri was getting old. Ahab had never believed that could happen, but now he suspected Omri wanted to travel ahead so Ahab would not see him weary and anxious to return home. Omri had wanted to see the marriage happen, even if the trip was hard for him. He seemed determined to keep up with everything unfolding in the kingdom, but Ahab had not understood. Now he did. Aging had forced Omri to acknowledge how fast everything else moved.

“Call it,” Ahab commanded to Obadiah. “We camp here tonight.” He would grant himself peace from his father at least.

The night air was pleasant, but a sheen of sweat covered his forehead. Ahab could feel it trickling down his chest as he walked back toward Jezebel’s caravan.

Jezebel’s covered chariots and litters had been brought to rest in two large half-circles. Each had a fire pit in the making; Jezebel’s servants were running about in the underbrush, looking for fuel sources, chattering among themselves in a language only they knew. Ahab called to them to warn them of vipers, and a few nodded at once in thanks. Judging from their dark skin, darker than even Jezebel’s, he guessed they were from the lands below Egypt. Some hurried back with dung, which made excellent fires, except for wolf dung, a lesson that Ahab had learned the hard way years ago. His father had beaten him for the mistake.

Ahab walked on, lifting leather straps and peeling back linen chariot veils, searching for his bride. Faces peered out at him from beneath folds of fabric draping over the litters, priests with painted eyes, expressionless, and servant girls with eyes rimmed red from tears. When he saw Mirra slip from a caravan, off on an errand of her own, he knew he had found Jezebel, too. A sudden rush of nerves made sweat stick, cold, to his back. He shivered and approached, his hand trembling as he reached for the veil, the same way it often shook on the eve of battle.

Jezebel was lying on cushions, alone. No servants remained after Mirra had gone out, a breach of security and protocol, but he suspected she might have commanded them to leave.

A feast had been spread at her feet, two great bowls of wine balancing on a tray of silver edged with inlaid pearls. Surrounding the tray were platters of fresh grapes and honey cakes and slivers of roasted lamb. It was not the food he usually ate when traveling. She traveled like a princess, even if she didn’t act like one.

Jezebel wore a long gown of threaded gold, a thousand tiny ropes woven together, which slipped loosely across her body and glittered in the air as she raised her hand to him, denying him entrance. He entered anyway, the veil falling behind him. She watched him with the stillness of a cat, as if judging the right moment to strike.

He refused to cower. Instead, willing himself to breathe deeply and slowly, he lowered himself to her side, brushing against her. She was thunder in his veins, his skin burning where it had touched her. She had bitten him and that had hurt, but this gentle accidental touch stung just as much. Obadiah once told him an old Hebrew legend, that Yahweh had created one being and then separated it into male and female, and set each on earth to find the other. When they did, they married, and marriage reunited the whole, completed Yahweh’s work again. Did others feel this too, when they found their missing one?

Ahab had not expected to rejoice over a bride, but flinching when he touched her was not what he had expected either. Omri would be thrilled to know his son was baffled by a woman. It would prove him right about Ahab. Ahab wondered if defending his own name was the real reason he wanted to win over Jezebel. Omri would know then that his son had done what Omri never could: make a woman happy.

“Israel gets port cities established by Phoenicia.” She began their very first conversation. “And access to the finest fleet in the world. Phoenicia will get access to the King’s Highway and all trade routes, even those that lead to Egypt.”

Ahab nodded. “My wife states the agreement well.”

Jezebel frowned, acknowledging the word
wife
as if it were an insult. “But I do not understand—what do you get?”

“I have concubines when I want them, a few lesser wives given as gifts. I don’t need another woman in my house. Few men do.”

He paused, acting uninterested, hoping she did not notice as he rubbed his palms on his thighs. He was sweating as if in a furnace.

She turned her head so that she could look him in the face. Her eyes blazed wide and then narrowed as she scrutinized him.
“What do you get?”
she repeated. It sounded like a threat.

Ahab’s mouth fell open as his mind stumbled through a few possible replies. He had never met a woman who spoke as if equal to a man. Maybe worshipping a goddess had this affect. If so, he didn’t know why men allowed it. Until he remembered the dancers. Men would allow a lot of back talk for those kinds of women.

“Did your father make an alliance with the elders?” she asked. “Or did you?”

“King Omri and King Eth-baal negotiated the terms themselves. I had no part in it,” he replied.

Her face fell, and she closed her eyes as if he had struck her. “I might have taken the throne of Phoenicia for myself. Now my greatest achievement will be to bear a son.” Sarcasm dripped from her mouth.

She lifted a wine bowl as if to hand it to him but instead tilted it and let it grow full at the rim, sorrow etched across her face, her eyes glittering with the red reflections of the wine. Ahab caught his breath, not moving. She was so beautiful. And he had no idea how to deal with her.

She tilted the bowl more with a slight bend of her wrist, and the wine trickled down and off the side, a small dark river staining the linens between them. She began to tilt it more, meaning to spill it all. Ahab reached out and caught her hand. Wine splashed between them, but he held the bowl, stopping her.

“Nothing good should ever be wasted,” he said.

She did not let go of the bowl. He pulled it to his mouth and drank what was left in one gulp. When she tossed the bowl to the side, he decided to kiss her and leaned in to her mouth.

Jezebel pushed him away. “I am not your prized breeding cow. I don’t even want children.”

“You were born a woman!” Ahab yelled. He regretted it at once, but he yelled again. “None of this is my doing! What do you want from me?”

“Get out,” Jezebel screamed. “Start with that.”

Ahab shook his head and stood to leave. He wished that Omri had listened to the dire, bitter warnings of Elijah, that nothing good would come from the marriage. Ahab now worried Elijah was right. A soldier had no business marrying a princess, even if he was technically a prince. Ahab wondered if it was easier to kill a man than it was to love a woman.

He had to get back to the men and discuss their last portion of the journey. They would be close to the capital city, Samaria, soon. Making a good entrance was important for Omri. He would be watching how Ahab entered the city with his bride. If she didn’t want him, she should at least have a desire for the kingdom itself, for what might be ahead.

With one hand on the veil, he turned back to face her. “When I was very young, about twelve or thirteen, I watched as my father slaughtered a thousand men. Maybe more. Maybe less. He was the greatest warrior in our army and like a god to me. I remember that the ground beneath my feet sank with the weight of so much blood. So I rose before dawn on the day after the battle and went out of our tent to collect stones. ‘What are you doing?’ my father asked when he found me. ‘I’m making a monument to you,’ I answered. It was the way of our people. My father pointed to the corpses that stretched far into the horizon in every direction. He couldn’t even lift his arms that morning, so sore was he from swinging his sword for hours. But he said, ‘There. They are my monument.’ I saw him clearly for the first time that morning. I saw that he was strong but blind. Death never built a monument. Stones do. I will build a mighty empire, Jezebel, and my queen will never be thought of as a breeding cow. She will be the most envied of all women.”