Sunrise on the Mediterranean

by Suzanne Frank

  One could get from the palace to the threshing floor, or from the well chamber to the marketplace. People had openings into their homes and shops of which even they were unaware.

  The two royals sat in the darkness, catching their breath before they explored the passageways in the palace. Dadua stored his wealth in the rock, Hiram said.

  “So you do this for the city,” RaEm said softly. “The Highway of Kings?”

  “Aye, I do. That and another reason.”

  “The scribe, Chavsha?” she guessed.

  “Aye.”

  RaEm scratched at her bound hair. “You never shared how you came to know him, want him with this consuming passion.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Nay.” It was silent for a while. Should she tell the enigmatic ruler that she had had “Chavsha” many times? That she had taken him first? She remembered the flash of Hiram’s furious black eyes when she’d mentioned an Egyptian scribe before. Better not. “We have time now.”

  Dion exhaled. “I met him when I was young.”

  “You are young yet,” RaEm said. “Were you a child?” His laugh was bittersweet. “In the deepest sense of the word, aye, I was a child. Cheftu, Chavsha, aii, he was such a man … such an impressive man.”

  Attractive, aye, RaEm thought. Gifted, certainly. But impressive? The man had no power, no throne, no gold. What could be so desirable? “But he was married?”

  Hiram was quiet again. RaEm prompted him. “It is a complex tale,” he said. “Nothing is as simple as it appears.”

  “This is something I can understand,” she said with a laugh.

  He looked at her. “Your face is quite familiar to me, though not with those eyes.”

  “Indeed?”

  “It was the face of my aunt, Sibylla. The same aunt who wedded Cheftu.”

  RaEm smiled. “Sibylla. You called me that before, though I did not recognize it was a name.”

  “That was when I knew that somehow you were no longer that green-eyed witch.”

  “Aii, are you referring to Cheftu’s wife?”

  “He likes green-eyed women, apparently. His new wife is the same.”

  She burst out laughing; he didn’t know that Chloe was still here? Was the man blind?

  “What makes you laugh, Pharaoh?” he asked. “If you tell me your secrets, then I will share mine,” RaEm offered. “However, if you choose not to, I will keep them to myself.”

  She felt his gaze on her face, then finally he spoke “We are tools for each other. There is no need for confidences.”

  You will be sorry for that, she thought. How easy I could make it for you to have your lover. “As you will it,” she said.

  “Shall we see Dadua’s treasure room now?”

  “HEARING, NOT SEEING,” N’tan continued. “That is how we are to live.”

  Was this true? I looked toward Cheftu, to see his reaction. His expression was frozen as he wrote, taking down the tzadik’s words.

  N’tan had our attention. “The first man and woman, where were they?” he asked.

  “In a garden.”

  “Ken. What happened at eve each day?”

  “Shaday would walk with them, talk to them.”

  “Ken. Your parents have taught you well the Sages’ words. Ach, so then what did the Sages say about how Shaday looked?” N’tan asked.

  We said nothing. There was no description of God in the Bible, I was fairly certain of that.

  “What does it say about his words?” N’tan asked after a moment.

  “His words created the world. Separated light from dark, the sea from the air,” Avgay’el answered.

  “Nachon. His words.” N’tan let this sink in for a while. I was no longer looking down on these ignorant soldiers; I didn’t get the point, either. “How did the Sages teach these words? How did they teach the first story of creation?”

  There was silence. “These stories have been taught only to those who know the letters, who can read. Why is this?”

  “Because letters and words are holy?” someone shouted, though hesitantly, from the rear.

  “Ken. So the stories are passed down, generation to generation, through remembering. Remembering exactly the words, memorizing them letter by letter so that nothing ever changes. Letter by letter.” Raising his hands in the air, he intoned “Bet, raysh alef, shin, yud, taf. Beresheth.”

  In the beginning … Were all these stories really handed down?

  Once, in a philosophy class, the professor had lined us up, then whispered something in one person’s ear. We passed the phrase from person to person, until we got to the end of the line. Then the last student announced what the verse was.

  It hadn’t changed hugely, but it was definitely different. This, he said, was just an example of how nothing written by a human can be infallible. Ever since then, I’d not believed in the Bible. I mean, it had been bunches of thousands of years. If we could mess up a sentence in five minutes through fifteen students, then who knows what the Bible had said originally?

  My mother and I had debated this very point when I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their phraseology was the same as the first, oldest version of the Bible. My mother remarked on this, while I scoffed. Who knew? I said.

  Needless to say, I was gnawing on my sandal now! If these first books were passed down letter for letter, there would be no cultural connotation to put on it. There would be no subtle substitution of one word for another, for instance “hill” instead of “mount,” that could result in a large difference.

  So the stories would be—at least in the Hebrew version—I swallowed audibly, basically infallible.

  N’tan stood still, solemn. For once he really did seem like a prophet of God. “We are to have no images of Shaday because we are to hear his words, trust his character, rely on belief. Not in our eyes, not in the crafts of our hands. We are created in his image.

  “He is not to be created in ours.”

  Raising his hands over the priests, wives, concubines, and giborim, N’tan intoned, “May el haShaday bless you and keep you. May he make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you. Sela.”

  We all said, “Sela.”

  CHAPTER 14

  RAEM COVETED. SHIELDS from Pelesti and Jebusi palaces adorned the walls. Incense holders, candles, lamps, all of gold and bronze, studded with gems and inscribed with silver and lapis, were flung into the room. Jewelry, painstakingly crafted and delicate, heavy and majestic, all of it was heaped into the chamber, in baskets. Jars of unguents, perfumes, powders, frankincense, myrrh, wrappers of salt and spices, all of it was stacked haphazardly against the walls.

  Hiram opened another room, a room of gold. This would save her people! This would save her throne! This could buy the loyalty of those priests in Waset. RaEm didn’t trust herself to touch anything or she would steal it all. Better for Dadua to give it to her. But it was Egyptian; it wouldn’t be stealing, it would be reclaiming. She saw yet another cartouche of Hatshepsut. Had these tribes ransacked the royal guard? Armor, all of it gold, chariot plating, even weapons inlaid with carnelian and jasper, turquoise and beryl, was Egyptian.

  How was this possible?

  “There are three more rooms,” Hiram said.

  “How much is all of this?” RaEm asked. “How much?”

  “How much is here?”

  Hiram sighed, rubbing his face. “Close to one hundred thousand talents of gold, maybe a million of silver? I cannot imagine how much bronze—there is so much it is not even kept here.”

  They walked back into the first room. RaEm looked at the shields on the wall, the trophies that every mountain prince and plains king took when they vanquished a city. There were at least sixty shields, all metal, most gold. Clews of gold and copper wire and cabling coiled on the floor like sleeping snakes. Boxes and jars, trays and salvers, of gold, silver, and bronze littered the floor.

  It was not beauty; it was gluttonous wealth on a scale she’d never imagined. Here, in this tiny kingd
om that no one had ever heard of.

  “Have you seen enough?” Hiram asked.

  She’d seen that there was more than enough. All she had to do was get it to Egypt.

  So all she had to do was … ?

  “The Seat? What about it?”

  “I know it is fashioned of heavy gold plate over acacia wood.”

  Her wrist was in his hand as they walked through utter blackness back to the tree. “It is their most sacred possession?”

  “It is.”

  “It shoots lightning and brings plague?”

  “It does.”

  “I want it all.”

  His fingers flexed around her wrist.

  THE NEXT DAY RAINS BEGAN to fall—the first rains of the season. Soft, gentle, almost like a shower instead of the pelting water I called rain. The women in my kitchen ran from their tasks into the courtyard and danced. They swayed their bodies, spinning and twirling, their faces raised skyward while they sang.

  “Your love, Shaday, pours from the heavens, your chesed is proclaimed from the skies. Your uprightness is unmovable like the mighty mountains, your justice is unfathomable as the Great Deep. You, el haShaday, preserve both man and beast. How priceless your unfailing chesed!”

  I’d never been in a place so saturated with song. They grew more enthusiastic as the rains grew stronger, linking arms and dancing in a circle. ’Sheva grabbed my arm, with the same focus and passion she had showed when discussing haMelekh. She pulled me into the group, slave and owner, tribeswoman and pagan, dancing, laughing—I didn’t even know why!

  But I finally saw the beauty in ’Sheva. She was a dancer. When she moved, her awkwardness, her large teeth, and her bug eyes faded away. She grew lissome, gilded. Her body seemed to have no bones, no joints. She seemed magical, otherworldly. Like water, she moved, ripple after ripple of motion smoothing up and down her body.

  Though she was a child, her hips knew seduction already.

  I was not the only one who saw it; but ’Sheva herself didn’t recognize her gift, her talent, the power that she would have over men one day, through her ability to dance.

  Later, as I was watching water flow through the courtyard from the portico, pouring grain as she ground, ’Sheva confessed she loved to dance in the downpour.

  “Whenever it rains, it seems like the Almighty is sending little footprints of joy on the earth.”

  I smothered my laughter—“footprints of joy”?—because she was serious. She actually looked happy.

  “Sometimes I dance while I bathe, pouring the water over my head and pretending it’s rain.”

  I nodded as I slowly added grain to the millstone.

  CHEFTU WASHED HIS BRUSHES, pondering the day, the night. Suddenly he felt himself being watched. Slowly he turned, masking his fear and dismay.

  “Greetings, scribe,” said the current Zakar Ba’al of Tsor; a former chieftain of Aztlan; the only man who had ever tried to seduce Cheftu, who had attempted to kill Chloe, and who had changed Cheftu’s life forever because of his love.

  “Dion.”

  “It’s been a thousand years. Still cannot forgive me?” A thousand years? Cheftu tried to keep the shock from his face. The elixir, then it worked? What could he ask, and what would give him away?

  “Nothing to say?”

  Cheftu licked dry lips. “What do you want? Why are you here?”

  Dion smiled. “I build. This is what I do, what my people do.”

  “The survivors of Aztlan?”

  “Ken, though not the eruption you recall. There was a later one, maybe”—he pondered a moment—“four hundred years ago? There is, sadly, nothing left save a smoking crescent shape.”

  Mon Dieu! That would have been the eruption during the time of the Exodus! The court magi were right.

  “It astounds me that we have not crossed paths before. Where have you been?”

  For Cheftu the past thousand years had not been measured in years, for he had slipped through them in an eye-blink. However, to tell Dion of the time travel, the portals, the stones, these things would be to present temptation to a man who succumbed each time. “I have been here and there,” he finally said.

  “As have I. Not many people enjoy the life we do, Cheftu.” Dion’s gaze was intent. “I was convinced you had died, though no wisewoman had ever been able to summon your shade. But there was no way for someone to vanish as completely. Not even rumor of you remained.” He frowned, picked up one of Cheftu’s pens. “Yet you appear here, so I know you must have been around. One cannot just appear and disappear from history, can one?”

  That’s exactly what one can do, Cheftu thought. Exactly. “Why the disguise?” he asked.

  Dion shrugged. “Hiram the king could not enjoy the simple life of a worker.”

  “Why the aging?”

  Dion stretched, unwinding the body of a man in his prime: broad shoulders, narrow waist, thick legs. “Hiram the builder has lived for many years. Eternal youth, I have learned, causes two reactions in people. Either they cower in fear at the unknown or they desire it so badly, they would kill to know how.”

  “You have had these experiences?”

  Dion nodded, then narrowed his gaze on Cheftu. “You speak as though we have not lived the same way. What secrets are you holding?”

  Cheftu forced himself to not look away. “No more than you, Dion.”

  The dark man reached forward and plucked a brush from Cheftu’s table. “I see you have found another green-eyed woman. Lovely creature.”

  He didn’t know Chloe was still alive. “She is,” Cheftu agreed calmly.

  Dion stepped closer. “What magic do you work? It’s been a thousand years and still I want you. I don’t care what you have done, how you have cast my aunt’s spirit from her body, or the demon you now let live there. I don’t care about the hundreds of green-eyed women you have had. All I want is you. For a thousand years, all I’ve wanted is you.”

  Cheftu stared into Dion’s eyes. He saw love in them, the selfsame love he saw in Chloe’s, so he knew Dion’s feelings were true. He saw lust, passion, and doorways to things he could not imagine. Dion had been a friend, a trusted ally, a man he’d respected and admired. At one point he would have given his life for this dark Greek.

  Until Dion had played a god in Cheftu’s life.

  In a moment of extreme terror and manipulation, he had given Cheftu an elixir purported to grant eternal life. It had returned Cheftu from near death and had intervened again and again.

  The slaves beat Cheftu harder because he healed faster. When he should have been dead on the island or in the desert, when he should have gone blind from staring into the sun for three days, when he should have been murdered by the brigands who beset them in the Arava, he was immune. The pain of abuse, the agony of wishing to die, the exquisiteness of torture, were all his with no surcease. And in the back of his mind, every day, was the realization that Chloe did not have the elixir.

  Childbirth could steal her away.

  She could drown, fall, be felled with a weapon, choke on a bone, and he would be eternally alone. “Nay,” he told Dion. “My answer hasn’t changed.”

  “Try it, Cheftu. Just let me touch you, see if you feel anything. Let me taste you—”

  “No.”

  “I can help you,” he said. “Gold, power, prestige, anything you want.”

  Cheftu stepped forward, his expression intent. Dion focused on his mouth. “Look into my eyes, Dion,” Cheftu said. “Hear these truths from my lips.”

  “It’s hard to concentrate when I want to kiss you.” Cheftu ground his teeth. “You would not understand the things I want. You do not know my soul, regardless of what you think. Nor do you own me, any part of me, for what you have done.” He stepped forward again, aggressive. Dion held his ground. Cheftu was sickened to realize this man was aroused. “My choice to deny you is because I love my wife. Were she, Shaday forbid, to be taken from me tomorrow, my choice would be the same. I love her, a woman whose
body is rich and capable of life, whose mind is fertile and challenging, whose spirit invigorates and embraces me.” He put his hand on Dion’s chest. “You. Do. Not.”

  Cheftu pushed Dion away, sending the man staggering back in surprise. “Do not corner me again, or lust after me, or think you have any hope with me. Not now, not ever. No.”

  He turned around, rewet his brush, and continued his dictation.

  “You will regret these words, Egyptian,” Dion said. And left.

  THE NEXT NIGHT BAFFLED ME. I thought I knew the Ten Commandments. Most Western law had come from these simple but binding pronouncements. I was all prepared to hear N’tan expound on adultery or murder, or lying, when he started in on festivals.

  Festivals?

  He discussed how the tribespeople were to remember Pesach and the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days. Then he said they were supposed to celebrate Shavu’ot, the Feast of Weeks, and Sukkot, the Feast of Ingathering— which we were currently enjoying. For these three feasts, the men of the tribes were to stand in Shaday’s presence.

  The next law, N’tan said, was simple. “Don’t cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

  That was it. Finito. Those were the laws of the tribesmen. A bunch of stuff about vacations, the no other god, the no image of god part, then some information about redeeming with blood … and a law not to cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. I had to fight myself to not scream, “What the hell is that about?” Instead I joined everyone else and said, “Sela.”

  We were walking home when I erupted, “Where are the Ten Commandments? I thought that is what you would be transcribing! The Commandments that N’tan recited, the ones he’s teaching the tribesmen, are not the ones I was taught. How about you?”

  “Given the difference in languages,” Cheftu started.

  “Lo. Even the difference in language can’t explain why there is no ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ ‘Thou shalt honor thy father and mother,’ ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ ”