Reign
You who hesitate, cast aside all illusions.
Abba Kovner, “A First Attempt to Tell”
Contents
Sacrifice of the Beloved
886 B.C.
Jezebel held her sister by the shoulders at the edge of the fire pit. Priests surrounded her, dancing and calling to the goddess, their red robes stirring the dust, raising a filthy veil around them.
Jezebel’s feet slipped near the edge, but she caught herself. The swift movement jerked her sister’s limp head up, and Temereh opened her eyes. Jezebel stared at her reflection in the glazed orbs. Temereh’s pupils were now huge and black, fully dilated, the last muscles in her body that seemed able to work. Temereh was her identical twin. Together, they would have turned twelve years old in another month.
“What do you see?” Jezebel whispered against her will. She had to know. The sorcerer who had sold her the paralytic drug she had given her sister said that victims often saw the goddess Asherah just before death. The old man meant it as a word of comfort, seeing how distraught Jezebel was. He did not know that Jezebel’s grief was not for her sister, not for what had to be done. Not at all. Jezebel grieved instead for herself, for those years when she had been at the mercy of her sister.
The rising white smoke from the fire, burning bright far below, stung Jezebel’s eyes, making them water. She blinked hard to scare the tears away; Temereh must not think Jezebel wept for her death.
A confusing stench rose with the smoke, the foul tang of burning hair and sweet roasting meat. Jezebel’s heart beat faster.
Temereh’s face darkened into hatred, and her lips trembled. She made an odd gurgling noise, trying to spit in Jezebel’s face. Her mouth did not work. Jezebel watched, fascinated, then looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. No one else had drugged their sacrifices, though, so they were busy holding flailing children and dragging them to the edge. It still hurt that no one noticed her, not even now. But every family had to sacrifice one child, the most beloved one.
No adult moved to stop Jezebel or save her sister. All were consumed by their own sorrows. Jezebel hated them for that. No one would save Temereh or the other children being sacrificed. No one would stop Jezebel. Jezebel wanted this done, wanted Temereh to die. Temereh deserved to die, because she was the beloved child. But Jezebel wanted to be rescued from the burden of killing her.
Temereh’s eyes filled with the old familiar disdain. If Temerah saw the goddess (and Jezebel doubted she would), the miserable liar would keep it from her sister.
Sparks flew upward from a burning tunic as another child was tossed into the pit. Bright orange and yellow flames burst through the roiling white cloud. Heat boiled the skin under Jezebel’s fingernails.
It hurt.
Jezebel let her sister go.
Temereh’s face never lost its mask of hate as she fell. She didn’t scream, though. That was an insult to Jezebel, but then she remembered the drug. Temereh couldn’t have screamed. Jezebel sighed in disappointment.
Jezebel looked around as adults stumbled past her, their faces red and swollen from heat and tears. No one congratulated her. From the temple above them, Jezebel heard her father’s loud wail. He knew Temereh was dead. He was already mad with grief after their mother’s murder. And now, to lose his beloved daughter, to face life with only Jezebel at his side? She was a poor reflection of the child he loved, like a bronze mirror darkened by fire.
Jezebel knew how bitter tonight was for her father, a cruel demand from Baal and Asherah, the god and goddess he served as the highest priest in the Phoenician empire. Her father was powerful, but he wasn’t strong. Not strong enough to do this, the ultimate sacrifice required by the god and goddess. She had to be strong for him, even if he didn’t love her. Someday he might, if he saw how strong she could be.
Years of abuse at Temereh’s hands had given Jezebel that strength. Jezebel had stopped loving her sister long ago, and she learned the hard truth that to feel nothing was to be capable of anything.
The next week, Jezebel followed the priests as they set out to bury the bones from the fire pit. The sacrifice of the beloved was the most honorable sacrifice Baal and Asherah ever demanded, done only in times of great peril and uncertainty. But bones did not burn. Bones never burned. They could only be buried. She knew that from scavenging the trash heaps. She often found bones from the kitchens during her searches late at night, when she was hungry and dared not disturb anyone to care for her needs. Bones were not like the other kinds of trash.
If bones were not buried well, predators came. Six years ago, when Jezebel was five, she had rummaged along the beach where a group of sailors had held a bonfire before departing. No one watched over Jezebel; no one cared for her. She had no gifts, not like Temereh. In the womb, Temereh had sucked everything good from Jezebel and kept it for herself. Jezebel knew that whatever good she found in this world would be by accident, or wit. And the sailors had left good meat on the bones. Jezebel judged the carcass to be a leopard, because of the feline skull lying upright in the sand nearby. She had run her hand through the silky gray ash at the edge of the pit, selecting a delicate bone with plenty of meat and sinew left near the top ridge. She had just sat on her haunches to eat when a snub-nosed hyena with a torn ear wandered onto the beach. Its glittering eyes went to the bone she held, and it began to giggle. It wandered toward her, eyes sweeping side to side as it giggled softly. Jezebel dropped the bone and ran, but the hyena leaped the last distance between them and bit her, hard, on the calf. The bite took months to heal, and Jezebel never forgot the lesson. Bones had to be buried deep, or bad things came.
Now Jezebel was relieved to see the priests go deep inside a cave, dig a pit, and use plenty of dirt, with big rocks placed on top. Sometimes, she knew, they threw bones in the caves and did not bury them, especially if hungry children watched. So this burial was good, she thought. And these bones were useless to anyone, she told herself. There was no meat left.
She wished her legs would stop shaking. The king was dead, but Jezebel had given Baal and Asherah exactly what they had demanded. She had proven herself worthy.
1
Spring, Four Years Later
882 B.C.
Ahab
A lonely howl broke through the muffled noises, the grunts and clatter as twenty men ate their dinner. Prince Ahab looked up from his bowl, over the heads of the men sitting opposite him around the fire. In the distance he saw its eyes, caught in the moon’s light, watching him. It was only a feral dog.
Ahab couldn’t eat anyway. He set the metal bowl down between his legs with a grunt. Obadiah, his father’s administrator, was sitting on his left and glanced down at the bowl, then quickly away. Obadiah had planned just enough rations to get them into Phoenicia tomorrow, but he had counted on every man in the party having an appetite. Neither Obadiah nor Ahab ate much, though. Neither had wanted to go on this trip, and neither had to put their feelings into words. They had known each other since boyhood, and Ahab knew Obadiah dreaded the trip just as much as he did. Ahab wondered if this was what it felt like to be a prisoner of war, forced to march to a frightening, foreign destination. He wondered what she was thinking tonight, his intended bride; did she feel the same?
Tired of himself and this dread, Ahab picked up the bowl and walked into the darkness. The dog stood its ground, baring teeth as hair rose along its back. Ahab set the bowl down and backed away, startled when a litter of puppies burst from the undergrowth and rushed to the bowl before their mother. The dog’s luminous eyes met Ahab’s. They were too thin, those little ones. They had needed that meal badly. He hadn’t known she had starving puppies to feed. It frightened him. Even if he did something good, it might have unexpected impact. Obeying his father was honorable, but who knew what might come from it.
It’s what the old prophet Elijah had warned him about.
Obadiah stood and walked out to Ahab. Obadiah hadn’t touched his own dinner either and, seeing the dogs, turned on his heel, coming back with his food seconds later. He seemed shocked to see the stark outline of ribs along the puppies’ bodies. Obadiah knew only about life’s cruelty from the many scrolls he read and the stories he’d heard. Though they were about the same age, at seventeen summers, Ahab had already killed more men than Obadiah had ever met. The differences between them were stark.
Obadiah
was a Hebrew, a sinewy youth with bright green eyes and curly brown hair that he combed daily. He kept his robes clean and his face washed, although there were perpetual dark stains on his fingers and cuticles from the inkpots he used to keep the records. His speech was refined, each word well chosen, so that he was often mistaken for the son of the noble, instead of the son of a prostitute.
Ahab was not so refined. No one had ever mistaken him for a noble’s son, even though he was a prince. He looked like what he was: the son of a legendary murderer, King Omri. His mother had been an Egyptian, and his father, Omri, was a mercenary soldier of unknown breeding. Omri had taken part in a coup and won the crown of Israel. Neither Ahab nor Omri were Hebrew, though, and neither looked like royalty. Ahab had met eight kings in his life, when his father was hired to fight for them, and he knew that traditional princes put attention and effort into their appearance. But Ahab had been raised in military tents, encampments near whatever battlefield his father was on that season. He wore his coarse black hair long, like military men, keeping it pulled back and out of reach. He had dark eyes that startled people with their intensity, just as his father’s did. He knew his eyes gave the wrong impression, though. He was nothing like his father, not so fierce and cold. He did not like to watch men die.
He spoke very little around his father or around any older man. When he did speak, he had no distinct accent. He didn’t move his hands when he spoke, an old habit from the battlefield that helped him avoid attention, which added to the intensity others thought they saw in him. He had been too young to go into battle that first year his father had forced him along and had tried to keep very still as the arrows shrieked through the air outside his tent. The habit of stillness stuck.
Ahab and Obadiah watched the puppies eat, and then the mother stuck her muzzle into each bowl, licking the sides clean. She looked up at the men, then slunk back into the night, her brood following.
Obadiah used his foot to turn over a rock on the ground. A fat glistening spider scurried out, and Obadiah took a step back. Ahab crushed it with his sandal. Obadiah walked back to the fire, and Ahab looked at the dark horizon to the north. Tomorrow he would be in Phoenicia.
In two days he would meet his bride.
Obadiah
Despite everything he had read, the road to Phoenicia was surprisingly ill kept. For all their legendary knowledge, all their wealth and prestige, Phoenicians kept terrible roads. Obadiah worried that the stories he had read about the Phoenician empire might have been exaggerated. Roads this poor couldn’t lead to one of the wealthiest kingdoms on earth. The scouts had to move stones all morning to save the hooves of the animals. Tall green grasses sprouted in clumps right in the middle of the road. The land was infested too. Gnats flew into everyone’s eyes, even those of the donkeys and horses, and mosquitoes had left hot red welts on everyone’s arms and calves. Obadiah would not say it to any of the men he traveled with, but sleeping inside the Phoenician palace would offer him relief. Even if that palace symbolized the spiritual suicide of his own home, Israel.
Obadiah sighed as the donkey plodded steadily along. He understood the appeal of this marriage, at least when he put it into writing, in the Annals of the King. Phoenicians wanted trade with the southern kingdoms, including Israel and even Egypt. Israel wanted to sell crops and gain access to the greatest maritime fleet in the world. Phoenicians were legendary sailors and boasted the busiest ports with the best goods, but they couldn’t grow their own food. Their land, Obadiah had once read, was unsuitable. He understood the words in a new way now, patting his donkey as she tripped over another rock.
