The fighting was bitter and terrible. The outnumbered Judean loyalists of King David drove into the heart of the wayward Israelite tribes, beguiled by the King’s son into open revolt. All day, they fought a confused, bloody skirmish. By nightfall, Absalom’s forces had broken and scattered across the countryside.
Just what had brought about their overwhelming victory was a matter of excited debate between the ten Gibborim, David’s elite warriors who had spearheaded the attack behind General Joab.
They talked around the fire as they broke their evening bread, stuffing their bellies with old Barzillai’s kine cheese, there being no game to be found.
“We’ve the craftiness of the King to thank for this victory,” Zalmon the Ahohite mumbled as he chewed. “Had he not secretly sent his man Hushai into Absalom’s council, the old wizard Ahithophel would surely have advised the prince to run us down as we fled Jerusalem.”
“Be careful when you mention Ahithophel, idiot!” hissed Elez the Paltite, who looked up just then from rubbing balm into a cut on his forearm. “You know the Wizard’s son, Eliam, fought for us today. I hear Ahithophel went home and hanged himself because he knew what David would do to him when Absalom failed.”
“What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t say with your mouth,” Zalmon admonished, waving Elez off. “Anyway, Eliam is loyal to David. He can’t help his father was a sorcerer or a traitor.”
“It was General Joab’s might that swung the day for us,” Naharai of Beeroth gasped, having just taken his lips from a bulging wineskin. “I was at the siege of Kinsali, when the army was threatening to desert, and Joab ordered himself slung over the wall. Ten days later, blood flowed under the city gate and Joab threw it open. The Amalekites thought Asmodeus was loose in their streets!”
“I’ve heard that story,” said Zalmon, shaking his head.
“No story,” Naharai insisted. “I was there.”
He raised the skin above his head.
“To Joab, a hero great enough to knock the rebels back across Jordan!”
Several raised their cups toward the General’s dark pavilion and roared their assent.
Gareb the Ithrite added, “And to we Gibborim, who played no small part!”
“To the Lord of Hosts,” said young Obed the archer solemnly.
“The Lord of Hosts!” they all agreed.
A figure stepped into the firelight. He was grim-garbed and odd-eyed, with a wild, white-flecked beard and a dented helm, testifying to the work he’d done that day. It was Eliam bar Ahithophel himself, the son of Prince Absalom’s old wizard.
Zalmon shot a hard look at Elez, who shrugged as if to say, As I told you.
“What if,” said Eliam, in the awkward silence, “it were none of those things?”
“What do you mean?” asked Naharai.
Eliam stared into the fire.
“Did any of you … see anything strange during the battle?”
“I saw an Israelite cleaved with an axe from his beard to his balls,” said one called Hiddai, laughing.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Eliam, his dark eyes lifting from the fire to look over their heads. “Where are the stars tonight?”
Naharai and the other Gibborim craned their necks to peer with mild interest at the night sky through the camp smoke. It was a black hole, lined with the bare branches of the trees that ringed the clearing.
“What are you talking about?”
“It is very dark,” said Eliam, after a moment. “Dark as the Olam ha-Tohu, the waters of chaos that preceded the first day.”
“As you say,” said Naharai, smirking.
“My father told me once that in Noah’s age, men heard the whispers of the Old Ones in their dreams and moved the great Even ha-Shetiya, the Foundation Stone with which the Lord had stoppered them up. The waters of chaos burst forth and flooded the earth, and many things that knew nothing of man were loosed.”
“The Old Ones?” Obed asked.
“Those that swam in the darkness before the light.”
“Blasphemy,” warned Joshaphat the Mishnite.
“Yes,” said Eliam quietly, turning from the fire. “But let us keep the fire burning. I’ll take first watch.”
He went off to gather fuel.
The men looked to each other.
Zalmon shrugged.
“Wizard’s son,” he whispered, rolling his eyes.
One by one, they sank to their bedrolls, exhausted.
“Zalmon,” Naharai asked.
Zalmon stirred, nearly asleep, already.
“Where are the stars tonight?”
Zalmon sleepily opened his eyes.
“It’s overcast,” he mumbled tiredly.
“Quit gabbling, you hens!” hissed Hezro the Carmelite. “In the morning, we hunt Absalom.”
Naharai laid his ear to the earth and watched the shadow of Eliam at the edge of camp, looking towards the woods and murmuring as if in prayer, in words he could not hear.
Morning came with the clink of iron and the rustle of canvas as Naharai and Zalmon pulled down the General’s tent. There was a faint, rank smell in the air. But for the rising of their fellows, none would have known the day. The sun was far above a cover of murky cloud, which hung heavy and low over all. The woods were filled with white mist. No birds sang.
Naharai noticed Eliam standing aloof and staring off into the woods. Perhaps he expected the routed Israelites to break from the cover of the mist and attack.
General Joab paced anxiously, tugging his black beard. He wore his dark-blue cloak, his polished bronze helm, and his bright corselet, one powerful hand on the hilt of his sickle sword.
“The General is eager to join the hunt,” Naharai observed.
“He’s going to kill Prince Absalom,” Zalmon muttered.
“David ordered his son spared,” Naharai reminded him.
“The King has commanded Joab not to kill before,” Zalmon shrugged. “But he is a vengeful man. Remember Abner?”
“Abner slew his brother!” Naharai exclaimed. “Joab loves and reveres David more than any man. He stayed our hands at Kinsali until the King arrived, though the victory was his alone – just so the city would bear David’s name and not his.”
“Didn’t Prince Absalom once burn Joab’s field because he was tardy in answering his summons? You think he’s forgotten that?”
They had finished folding the tent and now stood within a hand’s breadth of each other.
“David is the Lord’s king. Joab is David’s general. To speak against Joab is to speak against the Lord,” said Naharai.
“Your reasoning, such as it is, is clear, brother.”
“Good,” said Naharai, crouching down to heft the tent.
“But I wonder sometimes if the Prophet Samuel was right,” Zalmon mused. “Perhaps we Hebrews have no need of kings. Remember what he said?This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work ...’”
Naharai shoved the bundled tent into Zalmon’s arms.
“Put your ass to work and tie this,” he said.
Just then, young Obed came running into camp. He had been sent out before dawn to scour the wilderness for sign of the fugitive prince.
He ran straight to General Joab, and had to be given water because he could not summon his voice between sucking breaths.
“Speak. What news?” Joab demanded when water had flushed the redness from Obed’s beardless face and he straightened again.
By now, all the Gibborim were gathered around.
“General, I saw Prince Absalom,” Obed gasped, as if the news might have killed him had he held it longer. “He hangs in a tree not half a parasa from here.”
The archer was red-eyed and trembling, every muscle in his body taut as drawn bowstrings.
“What?” Joab said sharply, pulling Obed to his feet by his sheepskins. “Dead?”
Obed shook his head.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Explain yourself!”
“I found an empty camp and heard the step of a mule on the road. Prince Absalom was mounted on it. We saw each other at the same time. He kicked the mule and went off down the road, but then …”
“Then?” Joab pressed, pulling Obed closer, as if lessening the distance for the words to travel would bring the news sooner.
“I think his hair must have caught in the low branch of an oak. The mule went off without him.”
“You didn’t kill him?” he said to Obed.
“No, master.”
Joab smirked and released the young archer.
“He was alone?” asked Hezro. “No escort?”
“I saw no one,” said Obed.
“The King’s orders are clear, then,” Zalmon said, leaning on his spear. General Joab’s eyes met his. “We are to bring him alive to David.”
The General whirled away from Obed and stalked across the camp to his waiting chariot.
As they fell in marching order, Eliam went to Obed’s side.
The boy still shook. It seemed to Naharai more than exhaustion. Hadn’t he said the Prince was less than half a parasa down the road? Why would a youth like Obed be wasted by so short a sprint?
“Obed,” said Eliam, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Is that all you saw?”
Obed would not look Eliam in the face.
“Yes!” he stammered, standing up to march with the others. He swayed. Naharai reached out and caught him.
“What’s wrong?” Naharai asked, looking to both Obed and Eliam for an answer.
Obed only shook his head.
General Joab’s chariot rumbled out onto the road. Zalmon grabbed Naharai by the elbow.
“Let’s go, brother!”
The Gibborim ran through the dust of the General’s chariot.
The mist grew so thick that the world seemed half-made, a shadowy, angled place of oblong, grasping trees that sprouted from nothingness. The ground at their feet came into existence only to support them, then fell away behind them into a dreamy material soon forgotten. The smell of slow-rotting vegetation was stronger.
“What is this place?” Naharai asked.
“The Wood of Ephraim,” answered Eliam.
They began to see signs of the rebels’ flight. Weapons, armor, even torn clothing lay discarded in the road, as if the traitors had cast off all evidence of their infidelity.
They came across a man’s foot lying in the road, still in its sandal. The end was ragged and bloody, as if torn, not cut from the ankle.
“An amputation?” Naharai wondered.
“If it is, the Israelites have no surgeons among them,” said Zalmon. “Lions?”
“There are no flies,” Elez observed. “Yet, the blood is dry.”
“Keep moving,” urged Hezro.
“Do any of you remember the flood early in David’s reign?” Eliam asked, watching the trees closely at they left the grisly thing behind.
“I remember it,” said Naharai. “It was when the foundation for the Temple was dug. All the valley flooded for a month.”
“All but these hills of Gilead,” Eliam confirmed.
“Save your wind for the run!” Hezro called.
A little further on, they heard the clacking of branches and a man blubbering.
The horses of the General’s chariot began to buck and fight. Jeribai the driver halted them, allowing the Gibborim behind to catch up.
Among the many sharp and jagged shadows, one towered before them to the left of the road, a great, bare-limbed oak with weirdly pale bark and a host of wild branches that fanned out into the air in complex patterns, so far reaching that the tapering boughs disappeared in the mist.
In one thick bough that spread in an erratic arch across the left half of the road, a man dangled and fought like a fly in a wooden web.
Joab stepped from the chariot, spear in hand.
Naharai pressed forward with Zalmon. The others parted around the mad-eyed horses hopping in their harness.
At their approach, the aspect of the hanging man grew clear. The ostentatious purple cloak, better suited to the court than the battlefield, the handsome mail, the golden spangles adorning the thin, struggling arms, the rich, jewel-studded sandals ten feet off the ground.
Prince Absalom’s grimacing face was partly obscured in the tangle of branches and his own famously long and lustrous hair, which was drawn tightly across his eyes, likely a result of his own efforts to extricate himself.
They came to stand immediately below him in the road. Some of them smiled to see the unfortunate traitor so lucklessly suspended by the chief object of his own vanity.
Joab laughed aloud.
“It seems your pretty locks have caught you up, O Prince,” he remarked.
“Shall we pluck this persimmon down for you, General?” roared Ira ben Ikkesh.
“Let it ripen!” shouted Hezro.
“Yes!” laughed Gareb, “it’s yet too bitter for the General’s plate!”
“Perhaps we should leave it here to rot,” Elez suggested in all seriousness. “Or divide it amongst us.”
The laughter died down at that. All eyes went to Joab.
Naharai frowned.
“No,” said Joab. “We will cut him down.” He looked back at Zalmon. “The King’s orders are clear.”
“Yes master,” said Zalmon, nodding his approval and glancing at Naharai, who smiled broadly, vindicated.
Joab looked up at the Prince, kicking and whimpering in the branches.
“Don’t worry about sparing his lovely hair, men,” said Joab. “He left me once with a bare field because I didn’t come quickly enough when he called. Now we’ll leave him stubble-headed because he didn’t come running when his father bade him.”
Zalmon and two other men moved off the road, intending to scale the tree and hack through bough or hair.
Then Jeribai the charioteer called out from behind.
“Wait!”
The three Gibborim stopped and looked back.
Naharai felt a chill then, as something wet splashed his bare arm. He looked down to see a perfectly round spot of blood, followed quickly by another.
“Look to his face!” Jeribai urged, pointing up at Absalom, his eyes bugging.
The men on the road moved around to Jeribai’s vantage to get a better look. Naharai backed away, smearing the blood down his arm.
They saw that the spindly fingers of the tree branch were hooked into the corners of Absalom’s clenched mouth, which oozed blood.
For a moment, Naharai wondered why Absalom suffered the intrusion. A simple movement of his jaw could have easily dislodged the offending branches. But then he saw; they all saw. The tendons in his neck, the muscles in his jaw, were bunched in an effort to keep his teeth shut against the pull of some unknown force. There were ragged cuts in his lips. His breaths came out in terrified white puffs in the cold air. Before their eyes, his jaw wrenched open with a pop and he screamed.
Then, with a hiss, something snaked its way rapidly up the branch, faster than any serpent, snapping twigs and shedding a few brown, crackling leaves in its haste. White, shiny tubers circled up the base of every branch, converging on Absalom. They flowed down his throat, filling his gaping mouth with thick wood stuff, choking off his screaming.
The whole tree shuddered as if in ecstasy. A wet sucking sound came down to them. The slick tubers in his mouth quivered. The men staggered back at the perverse spectacle of the blindfolded prince dancing jerkily in the tree limbs. Something dark that was not blood filled the tubers spilling from his mouth, which were translucent enough to see the course it took back to the trunk of the great tree.
“Lord!” Naharai exclaimed. “What is it?”
Eliam looked about to answer when Joab commanded:
“Save the prince!”
Zalmon and the two other warriors at the edge of the road drew their swords and axes, and hesita
ted, unsure whether to pursue their earlier course and climb the tree to reach Absalom, or hew it down, instead.
“General!”
It was Eliam, now at Joab’s shoulder.
“It’s too late.”
Joab opened his mouth to protest, but then saw the weird wet stalks thrusting themselves further down Absalom’s throat, so far his neck bulged hideously outward beneath his chin.
He flipped the spear in his hand, drawing it back over his shoulder.
“No!” Naharai interrupted, pushing forward and grabbing Joab’s arm. “Remember the King’s edict!”
By now, word had reached King David that the battle had ended in victory and that his son had fled. If Absalom were killed, no one would believe Joab had not murdered him.
But the General was a bull and the strongest of them. With a mere shrug, Naharai clattered to the road.
Joab regained himself and cast the spear. It transfixed Prince Absalom through the chest, a killing blow. Yet still, the Prince thrashed and fought. His teeth ground loudly against the tubers, finally cracking off in his mouth under the strain.
“Spear!” Joab cried.
Jeribai took hold of one of the General’s spears and tossed it to Joab.
Joab ran Prince Absalom through a second time. The body lurched and sagged in the grip of the tree, blood spurting down the haft.
The flow of stuff from the corpse ceased. There was a sound like a cross between the groan of falling timber and a hysterical chittering.
Then, before their eyes, the branches entwined about the dead prince’s head moved.
The tubers retracted from the mouth as swiftly as they’d entered. The barbed, blood-dipped ends emerged thrashing, whip-like, as if in outrage at having had their repast swept prematurely from the table.
The branches over the road curled impossibly and heaved the corpse about by its head, battering four of the Gibborim aside. They fell sprawling.
Joab, Naharai and Eliam ducked the grisly bludgeon, drawing their weapons.
As the largest branch completed its swing, it released Absalom’s body. The cadaver turned limply in the air and crashed through the trees, vanishing in the brush and mist.
Then the limb returned in a great backswing, surprising Elhanan, who had rushed to help his fallen fellows, sweeping his legs out from under him. Jeribai the charioteer screamed as the bough made for him. The ends splayed like skeletal fingers and wrapped about his torso. The branch lifted him into the air and met with a second large limb, which entangled his legs. Then the two thick boughss sprang apart, as if they had been bent and fastened together as a snare. The charioteer was torn in two halves, his legs going one way, and his head and shoulders the other, leaving the rest to spill down on the confused men in a shower of blood and bouncing organs.
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