Great Lion of God (13 page)

The girl turned her head and saw the beast. He had begun to crouch for the charge upon her, and she faintly screamed and fell back. “Swim!” shouted Saul, almost beside himself. “To me! Now!”

Dacyl flung herself into the water, not removing the cloak she wore against the cool morning wind. Her clothing restrained her strokes; she twisted and turned in the water too slowly, and Saul dropped the basket of pomegranates and stepped into the water, himself. He had a confused thought that as rabies brought about a fear and dread of water the jackal would turn away. But Saul was hardly a few feet worn the bank when the animal hurled himself into the pool in pursuit of Dacyl. Now he was howling and choking in a frenzy and the horrid sounds echoed in the morning silence.

Saul clenched the jagged stone in his fist and began to swim toward Dacyl. He swam between her and the enraged beast, and the yellow head was like a mat of wool above the water. Saul kicked off his sandals and tore off his cloak and summoned all his strength to intercept the jackal and save Dacyl from a fatal bite. The water was chill and paralyzing, for the year was late. Saul saw Dacyl’s desperate white face above the water, and the long black floating of her hair and the entangling cloak and her threshing arms. She was whimpering and straining in her flight, and her eyes implored him for rescue.

Now he was between the jackal and the girl. “Swim faster!” he shouted, resolutely facing the tormented animal. “Reach the bank!” He had heard that the power of the human eye was feared by beasts and he fixed his eyes on the jackal and did not look again at Dacyl, whose gasping he heard behind him.

The jackal, however, had apparently not known that he was to fear the human eye, or he was too maddened. He halted briefly in the water, churning and snarling, and now his attention was fixed solely on Saul. The pool foamed about his struggling legs. Saul clearly saw the rabid glare in the jackal’s eyes and for a moment or two he felt renewed and shaking terror, for his own life was at stake. His legs appeared to have a life of their own, urging him to flee and save himself. But he could not abandon Dacyl; the thought did not even occur to him. His heart was one lump of straining fire in his chest.

The jackal hesitated. Saul was swimming between him and his first pursuit, and so was nearer. He half lifted himself in the water, howling, and launched himself at the youth. And at that instant Saul’s strong legs came down and encountered a rock in the water, on which he stood, and his whole sturdy body tightened itself for the attack and fear left him. His mind moved with amazing speed and order.

He waited until the jackal was almost upon him, jaws open and slavering, teeth blood-stained and snapping. Then he reached out swiftly, caught the animal by the throat with his left hand and struck him fiercely on the very top of the head with the jagged stone he still held. The sharp point sank between the wild eyes, deeply, and a hideous shriek of pain burst from the afflicted creature. He fought to release himself, as blood welled about the daggerlike point of stone. Saul shuddered with loathing at the sight and feel of him.

But he clung to the matted throat, tore out the stone and this time he plunged it directly into the right eye of the beast, turning and thrusting it with incredible strength. He felt it reach the soft and fevered brain, and now he clenched his teeth with renewed resolution, withdrew the stone again and drove it into the animal’s throat, just above his own hand, and again he turned and thrust with all the power he could produce. The water about him was stained with deadly scarlet in an instant, and the rising sun glittered on the cataract and on the pool, and Saul was bloodied.

Saul felt the dying animal relax and become limp, but again he thrust the stone into the left eye, using his last strength. The jackal sank below the surface of the water, slowly, in scarlet ripples, and died, its legs and body flaccid and drifting.

Saul, watching that sinking, shuddered again. He had never killed anything before. He could hear his own breath in the stillness, raucous and groaning. He retreated from the spot where the animal ad died, and he began to wash his arms and hands with clear water, for fear of the gouts of blood on them and the lethal saliva and any fleck of foam which might have been ejected onto his flesh.

Then he thought of Dacyl. He turned and began to swim to the bank. The slave girl had collapsed upon the warming earth in a huddle of wet clothing, her face stark and still as she watched Saul’s approach. She could not move. Even when he was beside her she could only stare up at him, as gray as death, her black eyes great in her face.

Saul said, “The beast is dead. The pool is poisoned. Poor Dacyl. It is all over. You must not be afraid now.”

Dacyl reached up dumbly for his hand and he took it and tried to warm it between his own cold and pouring hands. She was trying to speak. He bent tenderly to hear her.

“Hercules,” she said, and smiled dimly. “Perseus. Odysseus.”

Saul drew her quaking body to its feet and attempted to laugh. “It was nothing,” he said. “Could I abandon you?” He put his soldiers arms about her body, holding it tightly against him in a sudden frenzy of joy and love. “Do I not love you, my dear one?”

Water streamed from them, but their relief and their love warmed them, and the sun began to strike hotly on their bodies. Dacyl lifted one of Saul’s hands and humbly kissed it. Her wet black hair, as soft as silk, fell over his bared arm. At the touch of her lips Saul trembled again, and desire struck him like a knife. When the girl raised her head he sought her lips, not gently and pleasantly as during the months before, but with ardor and lust and passion. They were sweet against his, and moist and cool. They parted in surrender, and she wound her arms about his neck and pressed her body against his, murmuring he knew not what. He could feel her young breast against his chest, urgent and straining and taut. Instinctively he reached for her breast and held one in the cup of his immediately hot and exploring hand, and she murmured again, languidly, clinging to him.

He had never touched a woman’s breast before, and the feel of it in his hand drove him almost out of his mind. Together, still clinging, they fell on the warm bank among the tall and dusty grass, and the world became one deep drum of passion and incoherent sound and heat and delicious struggle. Above them the cataract sang and the sun brightened and golden dust floated in the air, and there was a wild sweet roaring in the youth’s ears.

Saul was totally lost. He obeyed the instincts of his flesh, and was caught up in inexplicable and overpowering sensation, agonizingly sweet yet terrible in its urgent intensity. He lay upon Dacyl and took her savagely, and she held him to her and gently bit his throat and moaned with delight and pleasure. Their bodies were as hot as flame, and like flame they merged together, and all about them was the scent of agitated grasses and flowers, and the singing of the water. Entwined, they were conscious of nothing but ecstasy. Saul felt the moving of Dacyl’s flesh under him, and each movement intensified his sensations and he could not know if they were pain or bliss. He felt her tongue licking his ear tenderly, and heard her moaning breath and felt her quickening movements. When the culmination arrived he thought, vaguely, that he had died in one explosion of rapture and that it was a death not to be rued for it was greater than life, like the bursting of a sun or a raining of stars.

His eyes were closed. Sweating and gasping, he lay upon the girl and it was some moments before he rolled from her body and lay beside her, overwhelmed with what he had experienced. He had no immediate thoughts. He had only memory of something of immense and incredible joy and transport, beyond which was nothing comparable.

Dacyl raised herself upon one elbow and looked down at him, smiling, her lips bright red and swollen, her drying hair warm on her naked shoulders and breast. He felt her movement and sluggishly opened his eyes, and he saw her face bent over him and it was more beautiful than he had ever known. Slowly he lifted his hand and touched her cheek, and she turned that cheek and kissed the palm of his hand. He heard a. deep chuckling in her white throat, of contentment and affection. One bare pale leg lay over one of his.

Then, like a cold fist hitting his heart he thought, “I have ruined and deflowered and raped and ravaged this innocent child, and I am accursed.”

“What is wrong, beloved?” asked Dacyl, alarmed at the pallor and rigidity of the face below hers.

He turned his head aside. He wanted to weep with despair and regret and shame that he had taken this pure one and had defiled her, and that she had submitted to his lust out of gratitude and because she was only a slave and so could not deny an urgent man. Truly, he was anathema in the sight of God and men, and how could he atone for his sin and his crime? Who could forgive him? He deserved an ignominous death.

Dacyl began to stroke the strong red crest of his hair, and his throat. “You are a veritable hero, beloved,” she said in her childish voice. “I am yours, forever. I am your slave, adorable one. Not even Venus had so puissant a protector and lover, strong beyond the strength of other men. How she must envy me, the pearl of Cyprus!” She kissed his cheek tenderly.

Above her head the sky had turned a flaming blue and the golden cataract gushed in liquid music and the pool was again the color of young lemons. The grass and moss were soft beneath them, and languor held them. But Saul suffered in his soul profoundly.

He said, “Forgive me, my dear one, forgive me if it is possible.”

Dacyl’s lustrous black eyes widened with astonishment above him. She bent to see him more clearly, as if incredulous that he had said these words. The metallic blue of his strange eyes were suffused with tears, and Dacyl was amazed.

“Forgive you!” she exclaimed. “It is you who should forgive me for placing you in jeopardy with my carelessness! Forgive you! I adore you, my hero, my Apollo, with hair like the sun and muscles armor! If life holds nothing more for me than this morning, I am grateful to all the gods that they permitted me to lie with you and comfort you and reward you.”

Saul tried to smile at this innocent childishness. He stroked the soft side of her throat with a gentle hand. “But I ravaged you, dear one. I took advantage of your distraught state. I have deflowered you, and who can restore your purity?”

Dacyl sat upright, and abruptly. She stared down at him in wonderment. Then after a long moment she began to smile, and it was a woman’s humorous smile and not a girl’s.

“Is that what troubles you, my foolish one?” she said with soothing affection. “Go to! I am seventeen years old, and am not a virgin. Surely, you did not believe me one!” She laughed with rich tenderness. “I have not been a virgin since I was twelve years old. I was bestowed on the overseer of my master’s estate at that age, and we are to be married. I am pledged to him by my mistress, the noble Fabiola, and we will then be given our freedom and an olive grove, and we will be content! But I will love you always, even when I see you no more.”

Stunned and stricken and dumb, Saul listened to that light and happy voice, and finally he understood. He had been thinking as a Jew, but this girl was a heathen and had been born and reared in an atmosphere alien to his knowledge, alien to his comprehension. To her, no sin had been committed. She had garnered pleasure as one chooses a bauble, for an hour’s gratification, and then forgotten, discarded. She lived and had her being in a hedonist society where everything was permitted, honor scorned, desecration a matter for laughter, adultery a moment’s mere satisfaction, fornication accepted, and lasciviousness a thing to be cultivated and pursued. She belonged to a world detested and feared by pious Jews, execrated by them, avoided by them, and she was no longer Dacyl, the innocent slave gill over whom he had wept in secret, but the “strange woman” whose lips were the portals to hell. Into the pit of her body he, Saul ben Hillel, had incontinently and precipitously fallen, and he was lost.

He was dirtied and corrupted beyond redemption. He was forsaken beyond hope, except that he devote his whole life to penance and remorse and repentance. God had averted His Face from him, and how could he atone in one short lifetime? He had lain with a harlot.

“What is it?” asked Dacyl, in consternation. She had sought to comfort and ease him. She had given herself to him in delight and love and gratitude, and he had given her the gift of enormous pleasure as she had also given it to him. Yet he lay on the grass below her with a face of bitter iron and despair.

Saul sat up, and she watched him with disbelief at his silence and his awful withdrawal. She watched him shake out his wet and wrinkled tunic. Why did he not speak, or smile? Why did he avoid her eves? How had she offended him? Of what grossness was she guilty? Alarmed and beseeching, she touched his knee with her hand, but he started away from her as from the touch of vileness and horror. He sprang to his feet. He looked about him wildly. Tears fell from his eyes.

Then, without speaking, he fled from her and was soon lost among the trees and the puzzled and frightened girl was alone, aimlessly and distractedly pondering in her mind this peculiar behavior of one she loved and had in some way mortally offended.

She saw the basket of pomegranates which he had brought her. She began to eat one and the red juice trickled down her chin. Then she laughed softly and shrugged and shook her head. Men were not to be understood by women. One day he would return to her. She looked down at her beautiful and naked body, and was pleased.

Saul never returned to that lovely spot and never thought of it again without aversion and loathing and shame. It haunted his life. Worse still, he acquired a disgust for women which remained with him. All female flesh, thereafter, was tainted by the scent of Dacyl in warm autumn grass, and the arms of women were the arms of pale serpents, unless they were virgins or honorable wives. Even then, they were suspect and always to be feared.

Hillel ben Borush visited Aristo in the freedman’s small but comfortable quarters.

“What ails my son, Aristo?” the anxious father asked. “He is silent and pallid and brooding. He loves you. Has he not confided in you, that we may help him?”