Between the Wild Branches

by Connilyn Cossette

  Gripped by curiosity, I braved a question, hoping the wine had dulled his usual razor-sharp acuity. “Why didn’t you?”

  Looking over my shoulder, as if somewhere behind me the answers were written on a wall, he bared his teeth, appearing more feral than I’d ever seen the man who was lauded as the most polished among the lords of Philistia.

  “The priests insisted. They divined through the entrails and visions that the only answer to stopping the plagues was to send the box back to the Hebrews. They swore over and over that the thing would be the end of Philistia if we did not return it.” He cursed, taking another drink. “All it did was embolden those filthy shepherds. Give them a reason to join together and find their backbones. If the other kings had listened to me instead of those fool priests, we would already have crushed them and their powerless One God.” He shook his head, eyes still tracking off to the side as he contemplated. Then he swung his gaze back to me. “Your uncle was Harrom, the High Priest, wasn’t he?”

  Even if my missing years were a mystery, my familial ties were not. Risi and I had lived at my uncle Harrom and aunt Jacame’s house from the time our father disappeared until the day we followed after the very Ark Nicaro was so angry about.

  “He was. He died in the plagues, along with most of his family.”

  “Harrom wouldn’t have stood for it,” he said. “He was a good man, your uncle. Far too wise to give in to the fear the other cowards did.”

  I had no idea what my uncle would have done when faced with the question of whether to send the Ark back to the Hebrews or not. He ignored me most of the time that we lived with his family, other than one time when he laid into me for breaking one of his precious statutes of Dagon in the family sanctuary while chasing after a ball, and another time when he’d threatened to choke the life from both my sister and Azuvah after I’d accidentally barged into a room where he’d cornered one of the kitchen maids. I’d left, of course, believing his warning. But I’d also searched out my aunt Jacame and told her I’d seen a rat in the very same room and so she’d ordered two of the male servants to go catch it. I didn’t know if my ruse helped the terrified young woman escape the lecher, but Harrom never did come after Risi or Azuvah. Instead, it was his son who ended up murdering the woman who’d cared for my sister and me as if we were her own.

  Spurred on by both the amount of wine flowing in his veins and his newfound trust in me, the king continued his rant. “But I will not make the same mistake I did when I was younger. I will find that box and I will watch it burn. The Hebrews will pay—both for what their so-called champion did to my father and for the destruction of my city.”

  It did not seem to matter that both of those things had happened long ago. Nicaro had not forgotten. No wonder he’d been so driven to take all the cities in the territory of Dan. Samson, the shofet of Israel who’d pulled the temple of Gaza down on Darume’s head, had been from the tribe of Dan. I could see now it was less about conquering the fertile lands of the shephelah and more about personal retribution.

  “But enough of this,” said Nicaro. “Tonight is for celebration, not talk of war.”

  With a lift of his bejeweled hand, his concubines slithered back from wherever they’d been hovering in wait. One sat on the floor beside the throne, draping herself across the king’s lap, another leaned against the wall beside it in a way that best displayed her ample figure, and a third sat beside me, slipping a bare arm around my shoulders, pressing herself against my side. Knowing Shoshana might be watching, the temptation to push the concubine away was fierce, but the king grinned down at the girl on his lap.

  “Patience, my lovelies,” said Nicaro, dragging a finger over the girl’s painted lips. “The wives will leave soon enough and then we can properly celebrate.”

  A flush of hot sickness rose in my gut, something I’d not experienced in many years of attending parties with the elite of Ashdod. I’d become immune to the debauchery. Blind to the escapades of men and women to whom marriage contracts meant little. And desensitized to the guilt that had hovered around the edges the first few months after I’d returned to Ashdod. But now, with the reminder of my life among the Hebrews standing across the room from me—a life with people who would be horrified by the things I’d both witnessed and taken part in—I was more than unsettled.

  “Don’t look so wounded, Lukio,” said Nicaro with a laugh echoed by the women surrounding the throne. “Mariada is known for retiring to her chambers early, like her mother. You won’t have to wait long to have your pick.” He waved a hand over the crowd, which included many slaves—including Shoshana.

  Nausea burned up my throat, and I pushed to my feet before I’d even made the decision to do so.

  Nicaro looked up at me with drunken confusion on his too-handsome face. Although fury was swirling through my body, I still knew my role and it was not to argue with the king of Ashdod over things Hebrews considered abhorrent but Philistines saw as perfectly normal. For the first time in ten years, I realized just how much influence Elazar and his family had on my standards of behavior, even if I’d pretended to have forgotten the lessons I’d learned in their household.

  Hoping he was too drunk to notice that my wine cup was in no way empty, I forced a grin and tilted it back and forth. “Drank my last few cups a little too fast. I’ll have to take a step outside for a moment.”

  Nicaro guffawed loudly and waved a hand at me. “Go on, then. Don’t get lost on your way back. We’ve stronger drink being prepared now. You won’t want to miss that.”

  I pushed out a chuckle. “Indeed, I do not.”

  However, I had no intention of returning. Nor of partaking in the bitter mixture of wine and herbs that separated a man from his own mind and numbed everything, including his good sense. I had no interest in falling into soft-edged visions of false peace tonight. Not only did I need to get Shoshana away from this hall before things spun out of control, but I’d also waited long enough to talk to her.

  As I turned away from the king and his concubines, I let my body sway, stumbling to the side as if I’d imbibed heavily all night. Even if he was beyond drunk, there was no use in giving Nicaro any reason to doubt my own inebriation. Hopefully he’d be distracted enough that my failure to return would go unnoticed.

  To add to the ruse, I stopped a few times on my way across the room, patting shoulders of various guests I barely knew, making jokes, and laughing too loudly. With a glance over my shoulder, I ensured that Mariada was well occupied with her sycophants before lurching toward the exit of the hall, where Shoshana had hidden herself in a shadow beside the doorway, her eyes on the floor. I wondered if she was trying to block out the filth around her or simply doing her best to avoid my stare.

  I acted as though I planned to stride right past a faceless, nameless slave and out of the room but then feigned a stumble and landed directly in front of Shoshana, curling my hand tighter around the shell I’d had tucked in my palm all night long, in hopes of this very opportunity.

  Her head shot up and her luminous hazel eyes went wide when she realized who was towering over her. But instead of the relief that I expected when she saw it was me and not some degenerate guest here to molest her, an expression of pure terror washed over the face of the girl who once had been my entire world.

  Eight

  Shoshana

  Lukio towered over me, making me all too aware of the overwhelming enormity of his frame. And although his brows drew together for a brief moment of seeming confusion, his expression hardened as he put out his hand, uncurling his palm to reveal a small white seashell dotted with brown spots.

  “I nearly slipped on this outside the palace.” His voice had deepened in the past years, making him even more of a stranger. “Most likely came from the beach I saw from the terrace the other night.”

  Stricken mute by both his all-consuming presence and such a bewildering statement, I pressed back farther against the wall. Had I been wrong to assure Mariada that Lukio would not hurt
her? Certainly, the man who’d spent the entire evening guzzling wine, laughing drunkenly, ogling the half-naked women around him, and practically licking the soles of the king’s sandals was not the same boy who’d shied away from most everyone back in Kiryat-Yearim, spent most of his time in the woods or with his animals, and comforted me in the hollow of our tree whenever my sorrows spilled over. This man was brutal, and he was a Philistine, through and through, right down to the jeweled ivory plugs that winked from his earlobes.

  His jaw ticked, his lips pressing so tightly they went pale. His gaze flickered away from me briefly, as if he were gauging whether anyone else was listening to his wine-driven nonsense. He stiffened when a slave whisked by us with a jug on his way into the hall but then his stare trapped me again.

  “So small, aren’t you, girl?” He looked down his nose at me in a mocking way. “No more than a tesi.”

  As I reeled from the Philistine word he’d just said and the realization that Lukio’s eyes were completely sober regardless of his show of drunkenness, he grabbed my hand and pressed the shell into my palm. “Take care of this, tonight, so no one else gets hurt.”

  And then, before I could even gather a response to the odd command or react to the way his slightest touch made my blood race, he was gone. Swaggering out of the room with an off-kilter stride that I was no longer fooled by.

  After the briefest of glances around the room, ensuring that no one had caught sight of the strange interchange between the champion of Ashdod and a slave-girl, I dropped my eyes again to the cool limestone tiles beneath my bare feet and remained in the shadows where I’d waited all evening for my mistress. Thankfully, she’d been so occupied by the group of friends that had seemed to double in the wake of the news of her marriage to the famous fighter that she’d not called for me once. I’d been left to pray that no one else noticed me and to torture myself with tiny glimpses of Lukio and his carousing.

  I’d been sick for hours as I watched him covertly from under my lashes. And with every moment that had passed, the hope that my friend still lived inside the brash and arrogant champion withered further.

  But then he’d called me a tesi and every conclusion I’d come to over this evening, and even before I’d encountered him up on the terrace the other night, was thrown into disarray as I was hit with the memory of the very first time he’d ever called me by that name.

  Only a few months after we’d been meeting on nights when I could get away from the house without notice and the moon was bright enough to illuminate our path, I’d stepped on a broken tree limb and sliced my foot open on a sharp edge. I’d done my best to hide it from Lukio, not wanting him to think me too young or cowardly to explore the woods with him at night. But when a gasp slipped past my lips after I stepped down too hard on the injury, Lukio spun around and caught me wincing in pain.

  “What’s wrong?” he’d said, deep concern in his fascinating brown and green eyes.

  “It’s only a scratch.” I’d limped forward, eager to follow him to the empty cave he’d said he found on the west side of the mountain.

  He bent to examine my foot. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I am fine,” I insisted, fearing that our romp tonight was indeed over and praying that Lukio wouldn’t think me an infant and refuse to meet me again.

  “Come,” he said, beckoning me to climb onto his back. “I’ll carry you home.”

  Folding my arms, I jutted out my chin. “I can make it on my own. I’m big enough.”

  His moonlit smile was crooked as he grinned up at me. “Of course you are. But you are still no more than a tesi, so carrying you will be easy.”

  “What’s a tesi?” I asked, eager to add another new Philistine word to the many he’d taught me over the past months.

  “The smallest unit of measure,” he said, holding up his thumb and forefinger with only a slight gap between. “But don’t worry. Even if on the outside you are no more than a tesi, you are big inside.”

  I’d grinned all the way home as I rode on his back, the first of many times I did so, and he’d called me Tesi from then on.

  What possible reason did he have for reminding me of the affectionate name he’d given me when we were children? I rolled the shell back and forth in my fingers as I attempted to line up the seams between what I knew for certain and what I’d guessed from watching him interact with his people.

  What was more than plain from his feigned drunkenness was that Lukio was skilled at pulling a mask over the truth. But less clear was why he had done so in the first place, especially only to hand me a shell and mumble something about the terrace where we’d encountered each other for the first time in ten years.

  I sucked in a breath as an idea tore through the wall of my confusion. A very dangerous one

  Was the shell he’d pressed into my hand a code, like the sycamore figs on my windowsill that had signaled our desire to meet whenever the moon was high and bright?

  My breaths came quicker as I unspooled all that he’d said in those brief moments and found that the message had not been all that difficult to decipher after all.

  I gripped the shell so tight that its sharp edges dug into my palm. Following my gut on this could be disastrous—either to my heart if I’d fabricated the entire thing, or to my position in the household if I was discovered skulking about in the night with Lukio. But even if he’d truly changed as much as I suspected, this may be my only chance to speak with him. And somehow I knew I would regret it if I did not seize the opportunity to hear what he had to say. Besides, I was nothing if not skilled at spiriting about the palace at night.

  Therefore, after waiting a painfully long span while my pulse thudded in my ears, I once again peered upward to ensure that no one in this room would take note of my disappearance. I must go now, for as much as Mariada seemed to be enjoying herself, she was nearly always one of the first to leave celebrations like this one. Hopefully, being the guest of honor would encourage her to stay later and take advantage of her newfound popularity among the young and wealthy of Ashdod.

  I swept my gaze over the crowd, and out of the many guests who were seated on stone benches, lounging on plush cushions, or chatting in groups, only one set of eyes met mine—the man Lukio had been having an intense conversation with earlier in the evening.

  When the balding man with the protruding belly had first approached Lukio, his demeanor had been full of confidence and his smile broad. But by the time Lukio walked away, seemingly cutting the man off mid-thought by the way his mouth gaped open, it was obvious that he was not simply one of Lukio’s many admirers. And from the scrutinizing way he was staring at me now, I had a suspicion that he had seen Lukio approach me earlier.

  Therefore, instead of dropping my eyes back to the floor as I was tempted to do, I continued my slow perusal of the guests, pretending to be searching out my mistress and unaffected by the strange man’s stare. By the time I allowed myself one last glance at the man across the room, he’d been drawn into conversation with another guest and was turned away from me. I took hold of the moment, slipped out of the grand hall, and headed for the far end of the palace.

  Thankful for my noiselessly bare feet and the deep shadows that cluttered the corridor between the lamps flickering in their wall niches, I padded my way up countless stairs until I was on the top level and made my way to the terrace where I’d listened to Lukio ask Mariada to be his wife while my insides turned to ash. The secluded spot was rarely used in the first place, and everyone, including the servants, were in the main hall for the celebration, so it truly was a perfect place for a secret meeting.

  If anyone knew the best locations in this palace to meet without being noticed, it was me. Galit, one of the other Hebrew women who served in this palace, had shown me all of them within the first few weeks of my arrival here, telling me that I should make it a priority to count the steps between Mariada’s room and every hiding place, especially the wine cellar where my friends and I met whenever one of us had
news to share, or on the rare holy days the five of us dared to come together and worship the One Who Sees.

  My heart crashing against my ribs in tandem with the rhythm of the insistent waves down on the rocky beach Lukio had mentioned, I slipped through the entrance to the terrace, only to find nothing but an empty table, a few chairs, and the quiet night air.

  Had I misinterpreted the entire exchange? Or had he merely been toying with me, relying on my fond memories to lead me on a fruitless search for someone who no longer existed? I didn’t know why he would do so, but in all honesty, I did not know Lukio anymore. The man I’d seen on the fighting grounds had been ruthless and bloodthirsty, without a shred of remorse for how he’d battered his Phoenician opponent in his quest to dominate the match. The man I’d seen with Mariada had been charming, polished, and focused solely on the beautiful woman before him. The man I’d watched across the room tonight had been ambitious, grasping, and immoral. None of those men were my Lukio. The boy whose friendship had been my salvation when I was young was gone, and it was foolish to hope for anything different. Annoyed with myself for allowing girlish notions to take hold of my imagination, I let out a breathy laugh as I turned toward the black ocean and leaned on the parapet, savoring the salty night breeze on my skin.

  It was rare that I had a moment to myself without someone in the palace demanding something of me, be that Mariada, other slaves, or even my friends who’d discovered I had little fear about delivering messages to faceless men in garden sheds. So instead of rushing back down to await my next order, I gave myself permission to lift my gaze to the thick scattering of stars overhead.