A Light on the Hill

by Connilyn Cossette

  As we stepped out of the cave, the first glimpse of sunlight barely gilded the summit above us. With Darek in the front, me in the middle, and Yuval behind, we began our descent down the slope, making toward the south to avoid the caravan. But before we’d walked more than ten paces away from the cave into the thick trees that covered the hillside, Darek stopped, his hand upraised to issue an order for us to stop as well. Back rigid, he scanned the dark tree line with a slow perusal that set my pulse racing. He’d heard, or perhaps sensed, something.

  “What’s happening?” I said, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck rising.

  Turning with eyes so wide that the sunlight refracted off them like a pool of water, he placed a finger on his lips, another order for silence. Then, with a slow, smooth movement, he drew his sword.

  The sound of Yuval’s sword slipping from its scabbard behind me brushed through the empty morning, eerie in such silence.

  A whoosh at my back, a loud growl, and the thud of bodies hitting the ground caused me to swing around, a scream building in my throat. A golden-brown animal sprawled across Yuval where he lay on the ground—a lioness, with teeth deep in Yuval’s shoulder.

  Darek pushed himself in front of me, his sword outstretched and one arm pressing me behind his body. I clung to the back of his tunic, gripping it in both hands. The lioness ignored us and shook her head, snarling, Yuval’s blood foaming around her teeth. His body jerked and flailed with her movements.

  “Do something!” I rasped to Darek.

  With a loud cry, he raised his sword to catch the lioness’s attention. As if surprised that a man would do such a thing, she released Yuval, who crumpled back to the ground, then swung her majestic head around toward us. Golden-orange eyes honed in on my protector as she took one step forward, whiskers twitching as she drew back her lips, exposing her bloodied teeth.

  Yuval moaned, and her predatory gaze cut back to him. No! She would snap his neck or rip out his throat if she latched hold of him again.

  Darek lifted his arms and spread his fingers wide. “Be intimidating. She can’t take all of us at once!” He shouted, brandishing his sword widely. “Yah! Move on!”

  Venturing out from behind him, I echoed his words as I waved my own arms into the air, fingers trembling as I did so. “Go away! Leave him alone!” I bellowed the words, and the sound of it echoed off the limestone cave walls behind the lioness, making the sound bounce back toward us. Switching her gaze between Darek, me, and the cave, she stepped forward, but we yelled at her again, waving our arms. I lifted to the balls of my feet, determined to appear as tall as possible.

  She took a step backward but sniffed the air again, drawn to the scent of Yuval’s blood. Her sides heaved as she huffed at us, her bony ribs highlighting her reason for the attack. Was she wavering? Or would hunger override her self-protective instincts?

  Taking advantage of her pause, Darek moved forward again, hollering and waving his arms, so I mirrored his movements. The lioness opened her mouth to let out a violent hiss, then spun around and disappeared into the forest.

  I ran to Yuval, calling his name. Darek stood over me, his sword still at the ready. “There could be more. Lionesses hunt in packs.”

  “But wouldn’t they have attacked together?”

  He nodded his head, looking perplexed. “I don’t understand why there would only be one.”

  Yuval’s shoulder was shredded to pieces, and his face a mess of bloody scratches and mud. I carefully laid my head on his chest and nearly shrilled out a praise when I felt his heart beat beneath my cheek. “He’s alive! Darek, we must get him help!”

  He kept his eyes roving along the tree line, not taking any chances that the lioness or her sisters might come back to make a meal of all of us. “Can you bind his wound? Stop the bleeding?”

  “I have nothing to wrap it in.” I swung my gaze across the horizon. Dotan, the Canaanite village, was farther away than I remembered, and the path down to it steep and rocky. But the caravan . . . “We will have to get help from them.” I pointed at the wagons and tents that had so terrified me earlier this morning. “It’s the only way to save him.”

  Darek just looked at me, surprise and trepidation on his face. “Are you sure? We may not walk away from such an encounter.”

  “I can’t let him die. He has repeatedly put my life ahead of his own. We must try. I remember enough of Jericho to help us pass as Canaanite, I hope.”

  “You understand that by stopping now and turning aside from our path, Raviv will without a doubt make it to Kedesh before us.”

  “I don’t care. I won’t let Yuval die.”

  After a momentary hesitation, one in which he searched my eyes with relentless intensity, he nodded. “He is losing a lot of blood. We must bind it or he won’t survive the move.”

  His silent stare conveyed his plain meaning. I did have something to bind Yuval’s wound—my headscarf. My stomach lurched, but I had no time to hesitate. Yuval’s face was pale and his breathing shallow. Reaching behind my head I unknotted the fabric, then unwound it from my face, once, twice before yanking the scarf from my head in a swift move that caused my long black hair to catch on the breeze and fall across my face in a tangled mess.

  Grateful for the reprieve from Darek’s full perusal, if only for a few more moments, I laid the scarf across Yuval’s shoulder. “Will you lift him?”

  Darek slipped his hands under Yuval’s back and shifted him so I was able to wind the headscarf around Yuval’s shoulder twice and then secure it with a tight knot. Although blood seeped along the sides of the scarf, the flow was noticeably less by the time I was finished. I released the breath I’d been holding onto.

  “Yuval, you must hold on,” I ordered the unconscious man. “What will my father do without you?”

  “We must go,” Darek said, his tone low and urgent, but gentle. “We’ll have to do our best to carry him between us.”

  Unable to stall any longer, I stood and ran my fingers through the straight hair that hung all the way down to my waist, allowing Darek full access to the scar that curled across my cheek, without meeting his gaze. My limbs felt like clay, and I folded my arms across my chest to prevent myself from covering my shame with my palm. The scar seemed to tingle, as if burning my skin all over again, but I could do nothing but allow him to see me as I truly was.

  In a move that felt like eternity, I lifted my eyes to meet his, bracing myself for the same repulsion I’d seen on his brother’s face, but instead of latching to the scar, his gaze seemed to be concentrated on my lips for a long, breathless moment.

  “Exquisite.” The word was barely a whisper, as if spoken to himself. And then that smile—my smile—edged upward, revealing a previously hidden indentation in one clean-shaven cheek, before suddenly faltering with a drop of his dark brows. “Are you certain of this?”

  I nodded, still reeling from his surprising reaction to my unveiling and from that one unexpected word he’d whispered. Had I only imagined it? “Absolutely certain. Let’s go.”

  “We must lift you,” Darek said as he moved into position with his arm beneath the unconscious man. “Can you help me here, my friend?”

  Yuval moaned as Darek and I pulled him to a sitting position, his hand flexing. “What is . . .” He moaned. “Where are we going?”

  “We are taking you to the trading caravan,” I said. “Can you walk?”

  Yuval muttered something unintelligible and his eyes fluttered twice, but as Darek lifted him, his legs seemed to cooperate.

  “You just took on a lion. You can do this,” Darek said as he adjusted Yuval’s weight against his side.

  “Leave me.” Yuval ground out through his teeth. “Moriyah needs . . . Kedesh.”

  “Do you really think that I would leave you to die on this mountain while I run off to save myself?” I said. “We are getting you to those traders, and I will do whatever needs to be done to get you help.”

  Yuval swiveled his head toward me, reveali
ng the scratches down the side of his face, scratches that barely missed his eye and rendered it swollen shut. With evident pain on his ruined face, he took in mine with his good eye. “You took off your veil?”

  “Saving you was more important.”

  He glanced down at my headscarf around his shoulder, soaked through with blood, and his jaw sagged. “Oh, Moriyah.”

  “It’s all right,” I assured him, and myself as well. “And I have a plan—but I will need you both to trust me.”

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  I called to the group of traders who’d come out of their camp to meet us, hands at the hilts of their swords and expressions wary. “My . . .” I stumbled over the term, but there was no other way. “My servant has been severely injured. We need medicine and water!” Although my language was similar to the Canaanite tongue, I’d been practicing the accent in my head for the entire walk, dredging up the memory of Rahab’s short, terse pattern of speech. I also concentrated on the regal way she’d held her body when she’d stood up to the soldiers in Jericho in order to save the lives of the Hebrew spies, and then my own. Today I would be Rahab. I would push aside Moriyah and be Rahab to save Yuval’s life.

  Blood was streaming from Yuval’s wounds again. My headscarf had helped for a while, but the long journey down the mountain had undone my efforts.

  As we approached the group of ten men, I realized they were indeed foreign traders. Egyptians, Midianites, Ethiopians, and others I could not distinguish between—a strange mixture of traveling companions.

  We must be a sight to behold, the three of us covered in blood and dirt. I imagined the kohl around my eyes must be streaked down my face, the product of tears and sweat.

  “Who are you?” An older Midianite stepped forward, disheveled iron-gray curls stirring in the morning breeze as he leaned on a walking stick.

  “My name is Moriel.” I’d come up with the transformation of my name to further disguise my Hebrew heritage. It wounded me to drop Yah from the end, for I loved that the Name was part of my own. But the Canaanites revered a god they’d named El, a stolen appellation from the true Elohim, Creator of All. “Please help us. A lioness ambushed us on the mountain.”

  “A lion?” he said, with a suspicious glance back at the way we’d come.

  “Yes, my servant’s shoulder is in pieces.” I hoped the tradition of hospitality, drummed into all Hebrews from birth, was part of these foreigners’ culture as well. If so, they would have no choice but to shelter us, feed us, and guard us from danger while in their midst.

  One of the Ethiopians stepped forward to speak to the Midianite with a deep voice and a strong accent. “Lilit will know what to do, Shuah.”

  After a long pause in which Shuah divided a long skeptical stare between Darek and me, he gestured toward Yuval. “All right, Binaim, go ahead and take him to her.”

  Darek allowed the men to shift Yuval’s weight from himself to Binaim and the other Ethiopian, who both wore short tunics with the most vivid stripes of color I’d ever seen. Darek walked close by my side, the very picture of a bodyguard protecting his mistress, as we had planned during our trek down the mountain. The men carried my father’s steward between them, using their long arms to cradle their barely conscious burden and their extraordinary height dwarfing him.

  The camp, disorganized and obviously hastily constructed before the storm, was a conglomeration of around twenty multicolored tents, trading wagons, four camels, and an assortment of donkeys and mules. A few children, with a variety of skin tones, slithered out of tents with inquisitive faces and wide eyes taking in the sight of three strangers in their midst.

  “Your slave is bad off,” said Shuah, who seemed to be in charge of this company, walking alongside me with a pronounced limp. “He’s been bleeding a long while, hasn’t he?”

  I nodded, glancing around at the rest of the assorted people who, like their children, watched us pass with evident curiosity. The scar on my cheek seemed to burn all over again beneath their scrutiny.

  “You from a temple then?” His eyes darted to the mark on my face.

  My stomach clenched tight at the assumption, and the meaning that went with it, but I lifted my chin and resurrected one of Rahab’s feisty expressions. “That was long ago. I own myself now. No one touches me without permission.” I left the warning hanging in the air and forced myself to glare at Shuah, ignoring the nausea that welled from the effort.

  The older Midianite lifted a callused palm. “We mean you no harm, my lady. Just surprised to see a priestess on her own.”

  “My men and I were traveling from Yaffa to Beit She’an,” I said, delivering the concocted story with a surprisingly smooth delivery. “I’ve heard it is the most well-fortified city left in Canaan, and I mean to stay until these Hebrews are pushed back into the desert where they belong.” I delivered the last statement with the flip of my wrist, an echo of Mishabel, the arrogant and black-hearted High Priestess who’d ordered the destruction of my face.

  Shuah chuckled, shaking his grizzled head. “You may be staying a long while in Beit She’an then. I doubt the Hebrews are leaving anytime soon.”

  “Oh?” I lifted my brows.

  “They control nearly all the area to the southeast of us here,” he pointed back toward the mountain we’d ascended. “And even leveled Hazor in the north. The rest of the Canaanite cities are building up their defenses and preparing for another wave of attacks.”

  “Do you think the Hebrews will come here?” I widened my eyes in feigned horror. “Surely they will leave us be on this side of the mountains.”

  “As long as the trade road is open between Damascus, Megiddo, and Egypt, I don’t care too much whose gold and silver crosses my palms. As you can see, there are traders from many countries among us.” He waved a dismissive hand toward the east. “Tribal squabbles and political dealings we leave to others.”

  When we reached a small tent on the far edge of the group, Binaim called out for Lilit. A stooped, wispy-haired woman shuffled out of the door flap.

  “This man has been attacked by a lioness,” Binaim said. “Can you help him?”

  The woman bunched her wrinkled face into a frown, pursing her thin lips. “A lion, you say?” She shuffled to Yuval, slung between the two tall Ethiopians. Craning her neck at a strange angle to peer up at him, she hummed a tuneless pattern to herself and then whispered something in a foreign tongue, before directing the men to bring Yuval inside.

  I followed, Darek ducking into the tent directly behind me. The overwhelming odor of incense and medicinal herbs provoked me to hold my breath; but even more pervasive was the stench of evil. Opposite the lone sleeping mat, across the back wall of the tent, was a large shrine with Ba’al and Ashtoreth at its center, surrounded by a bevy of gods and goddesses I had no name for. I’d never seen such a vast assortment of idols, all shapes and sizes, fashioned from wood, stone, and a variety of metals. A small clay altar crouched among the gods, bearing two human skulls and a pile of animal bones.

  What had we done? Was this old woman a medium of some sort? Surely such trophies of death could mean little else. I allowed myself one step backward, closer to Darek, who in turn placed a reassuring hand in the center of my back. I focused on its warmth instead of the chill that had taken up residence beneath my skin.

  The old woman ignored us, gesturing for the Ethiopians to lay Yuval on the sleeping mat. Squatting down, she unwrapped the linen I’d tied around his shoulder, still muttering in that strange language, then bound it back up in a surprising move.

  She rooted around in a wooden crate, lifting small covered pots and different pouches and fabric-wrapped items. “Ah. Here it is.” A brown seedpod with a yellowish crown lay atop the web of deep lines in her palm.

  “What’s that?” I asked, unfettered curiosity diving off my tongue.

  She did not turn. “Poppy. A flower from the far islands, brought from across the sea by ocean traders. It will banish the pain.” She
set about crushing the seedpod with a mortar and pestle and then prepared a tea from a pot of water that had been bubbling over the fire.

  “Lift him,” she ordered, with a jutting claw toward Darek.

  Darek and Binaim approached the bed, placing their hands beneath Yuval’s back and propping him forward. Yuval moaned, his head lolling backward. As tempted as I was to insist on tending to his comfort, it would make me seem more like a friend than a mistress. I curled my fingers into my palms and rooted myself to the spot as the old woman attempted to coax the tea past his lips.

  “Drink,” she urged.

  His bloody face twitched as she pressed the cup to his mouth, but he did not swallow and the liquid poured from the side of his mouth.

  “He must drink this,” Lilit said.

  “Yuval!” the command burst from my mouth with force. “Drink the tea!”

  His eyelids fluttered open, directing a heavy-lidded gaze toward me. My heart leapt at the way he’d responded, as if he’d heard me from wherever hazy place his mind had been.

  “Yuval!” I demanded again. “Drink!”

  To my surprise, when Lilit again placed the cup to his lips he leaned forward to accept it. Although it took a few tries to down the brown liquid, he swallowed it all before rolling his eyes back and retreating into a faint.

  Darek and Binaim laid Yuval back on the mat. Lilit set to work cleaning the wounds on his face and arms before once again removing my headscarf and applying a thick honey-herb poultice to his mangled shoulder. After knotting fresh bandages over the still-seeping injury, she twisted her neck toward me. “I’ve done all I can do.”

  Grief caught in my throat. “Is there no hope at all?”

  She shrugged one humped shoulder. “I am a healer and have gathered many medicines and spells from many lands, but what this man needs is a skilled physician.”