Sunrise on the Mediterranean

by Suzanne Frank

  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.

  Pausing, I listened for foots
teps. None. No other breathing, just mine. Down I went, then farther twisting and turning, following the path. Beneath another man-made archway leading to a chamber. I’d walked through many, unsure if I were walking straight or in a circle. Did I know this room?

  Instead I stepped into another space, a different one than I’d thought. I wasn’t going in a circle. This place was a maze! I raised my oil lamp and looked around.

  From within this stone tangle I could hear the battle above. Had I heard something else? A whimper, perhaps? Rather than returning the way I’d come, I followed the sound through the walls, going farther and father back. Had Dion stumbled on all of this when he was quarrying for stone down here?

  I halted, listening. Had I heard a gasp, a moan? I walked a few steps farther. Yes! After turning a few more bends in this snarl of passages, I found her, crumpled on the floor. “RaEm?” I said.

  She turned toward me, and I fought the urge to vomit. She wasn’t going anywhere. Ever again. “My God,” I whispered.

  “He is your god,” she said, her voice hoarse. “He is your god and you are welcome to him, to your cold modern world and your—” She hissed in pain.

  “Save your curses,” I said. “You are—”

  “Dying. Yes, I know.”

  She’d been torched; the right side of her body was black, burned. Her hand had become a scorched claw, and she cradled the right side of her face in it. I was glad the light was so bad. Something was wrong, grotesquely so, with her face. “Why?” I asked, staring at her. “You were pharaoh of Egypt. How did you even become that?”

  “You know what they say,” she said in English. “You’re either born into money or you marry it.”

  “You married it?”

  “The brat Meryaten.”

  I hadn’t heard correctly—had I? “A girl?”

  She snorted. “Why does that amaze you so much?”

  “Because you are a woman? Or did she know? Are you a lesbian?”

  “I’m no fool! Of course she didn’t know.”

  “So you didn’t consummate the relationship?”

  “Of course I did.”

  My confused silence prompted her. “You are an idiot. She was an untried child. All I needed was to draw the curtains, extinguish the lights, and do what I would with her.”

  “Omigod.” I stared at her in shock.

  RaEm whimpered a little, swallowing her tears. “But then she killed herself, the weakling.”

  “I’m sorry.” Maybe I didn’t know the whole story. “That must have been very hard on you?” I said hesitantly.

  “It was. Akhenaten was despondent; everyone was so obsequious. It was a great nuisance.”

  “Why did she … ?”

  “She couldn’t get pregnant.” RaEm shrugged. “So she overdosed on a sleeping draught I kept. Which forced me”—she winced—“to pretend she had died of the plague.”

  Her story took a moment to sink in. “You are sick,” I whispered. My skin felt grimy just from being in her presence.

  She turned to me, one side of her face flawless and gorgeous, a face I had seen in the water mirror for a year; the other side ravaged, blistered, and peeling. She moved her hand, and I saw that yes, the other side of her face looked like an exit wound, covered in blood. “You are no different from I,” she said. “You would have done the same things, made the same choices. Your life was easier, which is why you stand there in judgment.”

  I stared into her face. “I wish you had a mirror, RaEm. Because this is the truth of you. Rotten to the core, hidden beneath a veneer of beauty.” I stood up. “There are no excuses. What made you think you could get away with it? You drove a child to suicide? You tried to blow up the Ark of the Covenant?”

  “Don’t forget the murders and whippings,” she said.

  “And you boast about it! What made you think you could do it? What put you above the laws of human decency?”

  “I always have.”

  I stepped back from her. “Avayra goreret avayra,” I murmured.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said, suddenly panicked.

  I retreated another step. “Please, not alone. I’m dying. Don’t let me die alone.” Another step away from her. “Did that child, Mary—”

  “Meryaten.”

  “Did she have someone hold her hand?”

  “You don’t understand—”

  Another step back. “Do you think—”

  “Please don’t leave, Chloe,” she pleaded. “Why should I stay?”

  “Don’t make me be alone, please.” She crawled after me, her burned body glistening in my lamplight. Couldn’t she feel that physical pain? She was frantic. “I’ll tell you where the portal is, just don’t leave me.”

  “You ruined my relationship with my parents,” I said. “Though I’m realizing now that was probably a prebreakfast act for you.”

  “It’s here, in these caverns,” she said. “My reputation, my sister, my company. Did you think of no one besides yourself?”

  “This is the day, did you know that? The twenty-third power is the ability to move through the portals. It is the compensation for being born on the unluckiest day of the year,” she said, dragging her body toward me.

  “You wrecked my military career. There is a warrant out for my arrest, should I return to the U.S. I have no modern future.”

  “When I was initiated as a priestess, they told me about this gift, but I didn’t understand. What power we have, Chloe!” She pulled herself another foot closer.

  “I can never go home,” I hissed bitterly. “I hate you.” RaEm fell with a whimper, crumpled onto her burned right side. Was she dead? I stepped forward, suddenly horrified at my behavior. I’d watched a human being die? I knelt at her side, holding my breath. She was dead?

  She whipped over, slapping me silly.

  I skidded back, but she was on me. Months of pretending at manhood had strengthened her, while kneading bread and carding wool had weakened me. A burned hand and whole hand were around my throat. “I will not die alone,” she said. I was choking; I was going to vomit looking at her, smelling her skin. “You mock me as they all did. They all pushed me away. Akhenaten, but I paid for his murder. Phaemon, whose body will never be found. Hiram, who betrayed me. And your god-loving Dadua, who spat out my kisses.”

  I fought against her hands, my hearing now humming as we struggled. Her skin was pebbled and stiff beneath my hand as I struggled to push her off me. She sat on my chest, too close to use my legs, too heavy to roll away. “I won’t die alone! I won’t!” she screamed. Beneath my hand, on her burned side, I felt a tear in the skin—I couldn’t see anymore, I felt the heat in my face as if it were going to explode. My hand on her burned side relaxed.

  Limpness was stealing through me. No more oxygen to my brain, I thought. I wonder how this fits into history.

  No! I was not going to die by RaEm.

  I gripped the edge of skin and pulled. She screamed as her epidermis peeled off like a glove. Blood spattered me as she howled, holding her arm. I rolled away and crawled for the door, gasping for breath. She grabbed my foot, and every ounce of self-preservation responded.

  I kicked her in the face, slamming the cartilage of her nose into her brain with a sickening crunch, and scrambled into the hallway, retching.

  I crawled farther, desperately wanting away from that room, her body. The shock hit and I collapsed into a ball, shuddering and terrified. My God, I’d just killed a human being, an earthling.

  When I opened my eyes later, I saw a blue spectral glow. Carved into the bedrock of Jerusalem was a portal. Shining beams of azure, turquoise, and robin’s-egg blue filtered around the room. RaEm had said it was tonight; possibly this was the only truth she’d ever told. Now was the choice to go? This was the compensation for being born on the unluckiest day of the year? To travel now? Now? I was too weak to move, too exhausted to care. Now was the time?

  I stared, hypnotizing myself, for hours or minutes, I didn’t know. I heard my nam
e, one of the many I’d come to own, bouncing through the limestone caverns.

  “Chloe, Chloe? Mon Dieu!”

  Then he was kneeling before me, sweaty but alive. Cheftu looked over his shoulder and swore. N’tan had halted in the doorway. “My people, for generations we have heard of this, to see it is …” He trailed off.

  “RaEm is—,” I croaked. “We know.”

  “I killed her.”

  “She was dying, chère.”

  “Dion?”

  Cheftu sighed. “Vanished.”

  There was something else, something niggling. “The Ark is okay?” My voice sounded awful from RaEm’s attempt to strangle me.

  “Sealed, the Tabernacle rebuilt around it.”

  Then it hit me again: the knowledge, the bizarre understanding I had of science. “Defuse the Ark,” I said.

  Cheftu glanced at the portal. “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a bomb, waiting to blow. The fleas could get out any time it’s opened, right?”

  N’tan nodded. “Then take them out.”

  “Tell me how,” the tzadik said.

  Cheftu and I spoke in symphony. “Remove the manna and the rod.”

  “Why do you say that?” I whispered, stunned. “Why do you say that?” he asked me. “It’s biological soup. The fleas have something to live on, so they stay and grow. Remove their food and they will die. Why did you say that?”

  “Because according to Holy Writ, when Solomon puts the Ark in his Temple, only the tablets remain inside.”

  It was silent. “Wheels within wheels,” I whispered hoarsely. N’tan slipped away as I stared at Cheftu.

  “It is the day,” Cheftu said, squeezing my hand.

  I looked over his shoulder at the deepening blue glow. “Do you want to?”

  He sighed. “It is a hard thing to choose. Here, we have everything.”

  “Yep. A home.”

  “More than that, chérie, each other.” He turned me around, facing him. “And the freedom to worship the One God. Never before have we known that.”