Sunrise on the Mediterranean (70 page)

“In the Ark?”

“Yes!”

“Perhaps they live on the manna, the budded rod, I do not know the lives of fleas.”

Dadua split us up, to have us approach the site from all four directions. Cheftu and I were to scale the eastern side of the
mountain.

This was muddy and cold and completely unbelievable. RaEm was on the Temple Mount? “Why doesn’t God just blow her up?” I asked
Cheftu, huffing beside him. We had reached the edge of the plateau. The outer walls of the sacred enclosure were down, and
the Tabernacle itself had been dismantled, leaving only the two front pillars of the Ark.

Lightning flashed and illuminated the tableau. I heard Cheftu’s hiss. “
Mon Signeur!
Look at that! What is she doing?”

In place of the Tabernacle, the silver and gold shields were circled, angled toward the sky.

“Her blasphemy knows no bounds,” my husband said, shocked.

The Ark was the centerpiece of this very bizarre arrangement. The four poles used to carry it were cantilevered upward. What
on earth? I couldn’t imagine what her goal was.

RaEm stood slightly to the north of her contraption. All around her, Egyptian soldiers were shooting arrows into the air.
My first fear was that what would go up must come down, and how to avoid being speared from on high. Then I wondered what
she was doing.

Lightning struck closer.

She looked beautiful in a wild, wicked, witchy kind of way. She’d forsaken the kilt of Smenkhare for a white dress, no jewelry,
her shaved head gleaming in the rain-slicked night.

Lightning! RaEm had become obsessed with lightning, my sister, Cammy, had said. Nearly horizontal sheets of rain fell as we
crept up a goat’s path that led to the mesa. Egyptian soldiers stood steadfast, though their eyes were so wide with fear that
I could see the whites of them even in this patchy darkness.

Lightning was drawing closer, encircling us. What was she doing? Making the Ark some kind of giant lightning rod? “Oh, my
God,” I said in English.

Cheftu stopped and looked at me. “Chloe?”

RaEm had definitely used the powers of the Discovery Channel for evil.

“Tribesmen!” she said in best dramatic fashion. It was a good thing she’d learned Hebrew, because a translator would have
ruined the whole mood. “The fire drawn from the heavens tonight is at my command! My bidding!” The soldiers continued to shoot
arrows into the air. “Using the superior magic of Egypt,” she said, “I have constructed an altar to the gods of the desert,
the storm. Shaday himself is my slave.”

Thunder rumbled around us, drowning her words for a moment. The gathered tribesmen watched in awe. To them she really did
seem to have magic. Did anyone else, anyone with power, buy this story?

It was impressive, though. Very. “My demands are simple,” she said in best terrorism reasoning. “The gold I covet for the
box you treasure.”

“Why doesn’t she just take the box?” I whispered to Cheftu. After all, it was heavily gold-plated; it took a small army of
priests to move it.

“The box is nothing compared to the wealth of gold Dadua has hidden. We brought back hundreds of thousands of talents of gold
and silver. Wealth that would still be impressive in your day.”

Even with inflation?

RaEm continued her spiel. “This sole totem of your sole god will be blown to your god’s own throne room, by the power of the
gods of the air, the storm, by Ba’al’s own lightning.”

As if on cue, lightning struck the Mount. Everyone jumped. Static was crackling in the air. I felt my hair rising off my neck.
I looked at the poles, the shields, the Ark. “She’s going to get lightning to strike the Ark of the Covenant?” I realized
aloud.

How? Lightning rods were designed to absorb lightning, to draw it away from other things. Was she drawing the lightning— Suddenly
Cheftu jerked me out of the way, saving me from death. I looked down. Where I’d been standing, now there was an arrow, still
vibrating from the impact of hitting ground. I knelt beside it. Tiny golden wires hung in spirals from the haft, like Jewish
sidelocks.

Lightning and thunder struck almost in conjunction. “Chloe,” Cheftu said over the rising wind, “if that box is opened, cracked,
if a tiny crevice appears, it could be a disaster.”

“Why?” I asked, still coming to grips with the arrow. “Plague.”

I looked back at the Ark, sitting in the middle of the gold shields. “She has a better weapon than even she knows,” I muttered.

“The priests know this,” he said.

I chewed on my lip, trying desperately to recall eighth-grade science. “Gold is a conductor,” I said. “If lightning hits,
it will only blow or burn out that one thing it strikes. She can’t generate enough power for—”

“Do you see the wires?” Cheftu said, almost shouting now. I squinted through the rain. “They are connecting everything together,
from the shields to the poles to the box!”

“B’seder,”
I said. “Now, we have problems.” One hit by lightning, and if the force of the electricity didn’t melt the gold on the spot,
then it would transfer the power, eventually or ultimately, going into the box. “Wouldn’t the fleas be burned up in a strike?”
I asked, shifting my position.

“It takes only a few fleas, then the illness is in the animals, in the clothes and furnishings. The only riddance of black
death is to burn the dead and their belongings.”

RaEm was giving a list of all the gold she wanted: all the gold N’tan and Cheftu had brought back from the desert, from the
Mountain of God in Midian. Egyptian gold, RaEm claimed. She was right, but it was the gold the Egyptians had given the Israelites
when they were Apiru, on the eve of the Exodus.

Lightning stuck in the valley to the west of us. Had the storm cell moved away, then? Another volley of arrows went into the
air. The lightning would be returning. Somehow she was drawing it. A little bit of knowledge was a dangerous thing.

N’tan spoke from behind us. “What do you advise? What do the stones say?”

“They are dead in my hands,” Cheftu explained. “Too much static.”

“Take off your shoes,” N’tan said, gesturing to our feet. “This is the law on the Mount, dealing with Shaday and the Seat.”

Of course, because being barefoot would ground whoever touched the Ark or was within arcing distance. “We have to break the
circuit,” I said, eyeing the wires through the rain. And the many soldiers standing between us and it.

“How?”

He didn’t ask if it would happen, but how? “Do you believe me?” I was surprised.

N’tan wiped water off his face. “Fire strikes from the sky, it burns fields, homes, villages. I know what lightning can do.
Somehow she is summoning it. How will it affect the Seat, though?”

“Boom! The Ark is broken into a million pieces,” Cheftu said. There was no current translation for “explosion.”

“Then the fleas are out and the city is infected.”

Not to mention that the Ark would be blown to kingdom come. Was that why no one had ever found it? It had been incinerated?
If the plague were freed, if the Israelites were obliterated … What would that do to human history?

Where did we get the Ten Commandments without the Jews?

Where did we get the Bible, without the Jews?

Where would Jesus come from? Or Mohammed?

If this small tribe were wiped out, would I even exist? Would America? Einstein himself wouldn’t have been born.

Or Freud. There would be no Middle East peace knot—because there would be no Middle East. No Jews, no Christians, no Muslims.
Would we all worship the trees and sky and storms instead?

“You describe an—” N’tan’s words were interrupted by a massive lightning flash that seemed to last for minutes, though that
was impossible.

More darkness. Thunder closer. “You cannot destroy the House of our God!” Dadua shouted at RaEm from his perch on the southern
end of the Mount. “He is a mighty God! He will not allow it!”

Kudos on the faith angle, Dadua. But God had also made electricity, designed it to work under certain controls. All of those
controls were present and accounted for—and under the power of RaEm.

“I reign over the sky,” RaEm shouted back. “Your god is nothing! He cannot stand against me! You are nothing. You will regret
every word!”

Lightning struck behind RaEm, so close that we could see the lines of her body in silhouette. In a strange way the shields
and Ark seemed almost flowerlike, the stamen sticking out of the middle. A deadly flower, to be sure.

“Shall I break through the wire?” N’tan asked, preparing to run by the soldiers toward the Ark. The rain was letting up, though
lightning was returning. “Wait, she hasn’t completed the circuit yet,” I said, squinting. Sure enough, RaEm held two pieces
of wire in her hands. I pointed. “If she connects those,
ach
, well—”

“We are roasted?” N’tan supplied.

He didn’t wait, but ran. Quicksilver, two Egyptian soldiers attacked him, dropping him onto the muddy ground. We needed to
get past them. Cheftu looked at me. “No one else knows what to do,” I said, panicked.

Another few
giborim
raced for the center, only to be stopped by Egyptian soldiers. Having spied a slingshot in the waist sash of a tribesman,
I borrowed it, loaded it, and waited. “You’ve had your chance, fool!” RaEm shouted to Dadua.

“You’ll kill yourself also!” Dadua shouted back. “I AM beyond death!” she screamed, holding the wires above her head. The
storm cell was directly over us. Standing, I wound up the slingshot until I heard it whistling above my head. With a prayer,
I let go. The soldier before us dropped, clearing the path as Cheftu sprinted toward the Ark.

I was right behind him, my footsteps hesitating for a moment. I was in my own body; should anything happen to me, I had no
backup skin. I would torch my own. But if something weren’t done, the box would certainly blow, disease would definitely be
freed, and we would all die—except Cheftu and Dion—anyway.

Someone touched the back of my arm, sending an electric shock all the way through me. I jumped but didn’t slow.

Yoav raced for RaEm, sword drawn. That was a plan! As though it happened in slow motion, RaEm reached behind her, grabbed
a stick, and pointed it toward him. The much summoned lightning touched the metal-tipped end of the stick and shot into Yoav.

He fell to the ground, twitching still.

“You! Stop!”

The shout came in Egyptian. Cheftu turned, taking a wallop in the belly from the soldier. Two of them were on us. I ducked
the spear, kicking high at the next moment. The move caught the man in his chest, knocked him off balance. He raised the blade
to stab me, but I spun away, slipping in the mud.

Moments were lit up eerily as I turned back to my soldier. Blood poured from his throat as his head lolled to the side. He’d
been struck from behind. My arm was wrenched from its socket as I was thrown out of the way.

Lightning struck again. Nothing was audible over the sound of the now pouring rain. Through strobelike light I saw a man enter
the circle of shields and pull them apart. His hair rose, masses of black curls seeming to grow fuller in the seconds he stood
there, fighting the modern machinery RaEm had rigged.

She screamed, “Betrayer!” as the lightning struck.

It hit one of the poles, zipped down into the Ark, then out through another pole and around the circle of shields to where
Dion stood. It arched through his body, animating him like a marionette, then went into the ground.

Nothing blew. No freed plague.

Dion, for whatever reason, had saved the day.

“Kill them!” RaEm shrieked. I didn’t look to see whom she was talking about. I grabbed Cheftu’s arm and pulled him, staggering,
behind me. Arrows began zinging all over the place, these arrows aimed at people, not the sky. The
giborim
ran forward, brandishing their new Pelesti swords.

The clang of metal on metal battled for superiority against the raging storm.

Egyptian and Israelite fought on the Temple Mount. Cries, moans, and the clatter of war filled the already static air. But
with no arrows flying into the sky to draw the storm, it was passing over us quickly. Cheftu and N’tan were moving through
the fray, so I dodged and ducked to catch up with them. More priests seemed to materialize out of the fracas as the tribesmen
and Cheftu pulled the gold wire off the poles and the priests realigned them.

Other priests were rebuilding the tented Tabernacle, preventing further lightning strikes, protecting their most valuable
possession. RaEm hadn’t moved the Ark, she had simply torn down everything around it. They dismantled the shields and straightened
the Ark, the cherubim on the cover one multiwinged creature instead of two. I wouldn’t think about that. Statues didn’t move;
hence the phrase
as still as a statue.
I was dreaming. Hallucinating.

Dion lay on the ground, still. The Tabernacle was being restructured, the soldiers were fighting, and in the middle of it
all was Dion.

I hesitantly reached for his throat, waiting for a pulse. The sky lit up again and again, but as I counted, “One one thousand,
two one thousand, three one thousand,” all the way to eight, there was no thunder.

Dion opened his eyes, then gasped for breath. This time when the hair rose on the back of my neck it had nothing to do with
static in the air. “Where is RaEm?” he asked.

The bitch. “You tell me.”

He gasped. “Beneath the city. Caverns. Hiding.” I looked down at this man whose death I wouldn’t have mourned and realized
that he was never going to die. Neither was Cheftu. I left him and slipped through the battle, looking for the entrance to
the caverns. She wasn’t going to get away. Not again.