My steward, Fashev, pursed his lips, looking down.
“I’m sorry, my King.”
“And now,” I said, “I must go tramping through the wilderness to find someone who can talk to God, any god for that matter. Anyone willing to offer one little word. After all the nights I’ve gone without sleep, food, drink, all the wounds of my body and soul, all for my subjects, my Kingdom!”
“Yes, King,” said Flashev, holding out a cloak. I opened my arms and allowed him to draw up the sleeves, and a sigh tore through me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Not a single word of prophecy, a song or a dream. I can’t even find a witch when I need one.”
“But sire,” said Fasheve, “you banished all witches, under penalty of death. Witchcraft is a sin according to Moses.”
“I know the Law! And I know what I said. I would’ve expected someone to have the foresight to spare just one in case of need.”
I shook my head.
“Just trying to do the right thing. Just trying to stay in the favor of the One. I didn’t ask to be here, I remind Him. I didn’t ask to be made King. It was all his idea - and Samuel’s.” That was all I could say for several moments. The name turned in my stomach. I scanned the ceiling, the walls, suddenly afraid. As if by saying the name of the prophet, I had uttered an abomination.
I looked at the clothes spilling from the open trunk. “There,” I said, pointing to a bundle of cloth on the floor. “That turban. I’ll take it.”
“Very well, Lord.”
***
The night air was cold but there was a warmth in the breeze - a warmth that circled the body without penetrating the skin; sickened rather than cheered for it carried the smell of carrion and decay.
I trudged forward into the darkness. What a place: Endor. Time was I never would have set foot in a crust of a place like Endor. But there I was. King of a holy nation. With a God who had abandoned his people, for surely if God didn’t speak to the King, what of the people? They were all lost.
Most on my mind was the young man who made me feel like weeping, raging, taking my own life or his. There was a purity about him, a beauty. He was everything I could have been. And the world loved him. God loved him. He was using them all, using God even, to distract, to taunt me. I rubbed my temples. Hair was wet on my forehead, slipping from my turban. Saul has killed his thousands, but David his ten thousands. The song, the sickening song drove the headache.
God’s anointed should carry out the work of God without this madness.
I felt the mud pulling at the soft doeskin straps of my sandals. The sandals I had made. The gazelle I myself had slain. So fleet I was, to catch the animal. And I was virile. My wives moaned in my arms.
Ah, that gazelle - how awkwardly it had loped, blood spilling from its mouth, the supple hide rolling forward, the stuck arrow swinging with its gait. The beast was pregnant. Cook made a fine stew of those supple, unborn creatures.
I could almost taste the salt, in the dark of this God-forsaken journey. It was such a long way. I trudged onward; my men keeping their distance - Hezob ahead - and Fashev behind. A long way to go to find a witch.
At my feet was a black pall, a thin sheen of deep red that flowed over and through the muddy ruts. I looked to the sky. The moon had a red cast. An odd night. Surely I could inquire about it to the Chief Astrologer, had I not killed the Chief Astrologer.
Or rather, the other Saul had killed him. That other, younger me. An untested king bent on following every law, so sure of himself as the hand of God, to bless His chosen people. I remembered, as a young king kneeling on the frozen ground to chip and smash and hack the wooden face of an idol, hating it with every blow. It was the day I had cleansed my house. I found the idol in a servant’s things. I was then a man who could kneel in the gravel, though his knees bled, certain that the eyes of God rested upon his shoulders.
My face itched. My nerves were shot. It was the effect of the Philistine midnight raids, the knifings, the screams of men who had never in their lives screamed. My stomach clenched. I felt the fluids and biles. Oh, to have the strong, clean body of my youth. Back in those days when I did everything a king should.
The warm draft broke apart in the cold night air; sounds echoed in the distance. A scream. Some bird, with a voice that keened in agony, it should have been put to death, should have been wrung until its eyes popped.
I longed for the memories; the face of David, and my own boy, singing the stupid chants of women. I wished for music. Anything that might soothe.
“Hezob!” I called out. “What did you bring to drink?”
“Only water, my Lord.”
“Why?”
“You decreed so, my Lord. In voyages by night only water should be carried, lest stupor overtake the soldiers who’d die of cold.”
“Never mind the decree! Is there no one who can think of a King’s needs?”
As we went on, a tiny demon of a muscle tugged at my left eye. A twitch I had of late. I slapped it. The weariness. God has left me, so the people said. I could slap at flies that were not there.
The ground sloped as we marched, skirting Mount Tabor. We climbed. There was the dead bracken of winter; the wisps of clouds forming dirty shreds in the blackness. All was still. I had my flask at my side, but little was left to sip.
I couldn’t deny the feeling of being pursued like a dog. The stench again. Like the stench of death that surrounded Nob, which at the time was satisfying, so satisfying; which at the time told me I had done everything I could do, had severed every head of the traitorous priests who had harbored David. Priests in their wickedness, betraying their King, the hand of God in the world.
This stench was sour and sweet. Sickly. I pulled my dark plain cloak around me. The ground began to slope and we descended in the icy air; crackling layers covered the mud like unleavened bread.
A young woman opened the door to our party. She was Hermuth. Her eyes opened wide. It had been a long time since they’d seen visitors from the village. And they knew we were not villagers.
Hezob spoke.
“My master seeks your services.”
Hermuth held the door. Temborah stepped forward, having just returned from market. She examined us carefully. No, we weren’t from around there. Temborah bowed her head, buying a moment.
“I - I do not practice anymore,” she said. “Only when I was a child, apprenticed to my ill-fated grandmother. I could not help that.”
All this wait and decorum and deception, just for a word from spirits. I stepped forward.
“Never mind that,” I said. “You will help me. We need a medium.”
Temborah looked up, grey eyes like frozen pools. The color drained from her face. “Are you trying to destroy me?”
I shook my head.
“I promise you. No one will know of this.”
My mouth was dry.
Temborah shifted her weight, smoothed her dress. I would learn about it later: how, just then, she began to feel the presence of horror. Her feet were cold as stone. She felt thin and brittle, but nodded quietly.
“All right.”
She led us inside, offering her worn, red cushions. My men took their posts in the corners. I sat. I tried to assure her with a gentle smile.
“What is it you want?” she said.
“I am here to contact the Judge and Prophet, Samuel. I seek wisdom from him.”
Samuel? Temborah pursed her lips to taste the name. She turned fluidly, lit a punk from the fire; then lit the lamp, set it on a table. She’d done all this scores of times, she reminded herself. She would motion with her hands, speak the words of incanting, ask a question. There would be nudges. A heat or a chill, and a sigh or a smack of a tree branch. She would nod and interpret. But in the last few years the spirits did not visit, and neither did the villagers. The spirits turned their faces from her, leaving nothing to interpret. Not even the tick of an insect wing, or the glowing of an ember.
She looked down and saw that
her hands were trembling.
Indeed, her hands both dark and graceful were shaping mysterious figures. Her witch’s teeth, white as milk, appeared through a gaping hole in her lips, a remnant of her scarring. She had been treated poorly as a young bride.
I could not know it but my presence had reminded her of that time.
Temborah could see her fat husband, red-faced, chasing her through the yard. “What do you think you’re doing?” He gritted his teeth, seized her elbow, yanked her into the house, where he kicked at the fire she had made that morning, emptied her jars of unguents. He threw them at the walls and into her face. Her skin blazed hot and red. The humiliation. The pain. She stood against the wall of the house, immobile, screaming, her hair blazing, dripping like wax.
After that night, the Hebrews took her husband into their army, where the Philistines speared him.
Temborah looked down at the packed red dirt of her home and closed her eyes, pulling and kneading with her hands, the shapes that once would bring spirits. In this case, she thought to invent a voice for this Samuel. It would not be difficult. There was never an answer from the God.
I waited, dumb and still, my mind racing. And then came a horrible keening. I felt all my muscles seize up, like a man trying to run in a dream. My God, what was it?
“Hermuth!” Temborah called to the back of the house, behind the curtain. “Remove Zipporah to the shed. And you may go away for the day.”
The assistant scrambled outside.
As soon as it began, the noise stopped.
Temborah closed her eyes again. Her breathing stilled. Together we waited in the darkness with curtains drawn.
Years later, Temborah would tell me how something felt very wrong. Something was alive. Her stomach tightened. She felt herself disconnect from the world.
There was a cinder in the left wall; a cinder in the very place where her husband had flung sulfur and quicksilver into her face. A cinder where her husband had shoved her head against the mud bricks until her mouth had run with blood. A cinder, like a tiny worm, opening, glowing. Growing.
A sickness whirled in her stomach and she tried not to cry out. When she opened her eyes, the face of Ehluch stared at her - the round, glib chin in the curling beard, the small ears and piggy eyes.
“No!” She put her face in her hands, trying to catch her breath.
I watched her, stunned by the emotion.
“You see him?”
My voice cracked. I felt cold and dirty, and full of hope.
“Does he speak?”
I could no longer contain myself. I fell to the ground.
“My lord,” I said, to the place where Temborah was looking. “My lord! May the Almighty bless you!”
I spoke to silence, the quivering air.
And then a low, strangled voice, like a calf with a rope around its neck, or a maimed, deformed thing gurgling. The thing did not belong.
“Why?” it said.
My body went cold. I was blind to the sight. Samuel. To see and be seen. To witness the slow, slight smile, to hear the offer of atonement, a new chance, a new day. I would no longer be alone.
Temborah squinted and held herself back. Eluch was swallowed up in a bright flame, enveloped by a skin that peeled open to nothing. Now the presence before her was garbed in the robe of a holy man. She placed both hands upturned on her knees, bowed her head, saw her own palms reflected red in the light, their lines branched and broken. There was more at stake than her life. Always she had avoided the fate of the people in her adopted lands. Prophets did not come for such as she. They came for Kings.
I heard Temborah gasp as she sat upright. She turned to me. “You...you are Saul!”
There was fear in her eyes, but hate as well. After all, I was the one responsible for the killing of her grandmother. A trap, she thought. But then, she must have seen the whiteness in my face. The wildness of my eyes.
“Please!” I begged. “Let me hear the Prophet!”
The spirit stooped like an old man, and its robes trailed along the ground but did not quite touch it, like a skein of oil on the surface of the lake.
“I have done all that God has asked,” I offered to this presence. In my ears my voice sounded too young, like a whining boy. “But the prophets will not speak. God withholds his signs. The Philistines grow strong against me.”
Temborah drew her heels beneath her, sat back. This was not her husband. No. This was something the like of which she had never seen.
Again, the strangled wheeze. Like a snuffling animal beyond the grave.
“It does not avail you, Saul,” said the apparition. Only Temborah could see him and what she saw was a tall, diseased willow. The skin was white, peeling bark; long hairs fell thinly over head and brows. The thing had a knob for a nose, the stripped look of a calf’s skeleton. It smelled acrid like the poison white mushroom.
Temborah felt hot fluid rising in her throat.
“You have rebelled,” said Samuel. “To rebel is as the sin of witchcraft!”
I could not speak.
A few feet from me, Temborah’s flesh prickled. She was afraid and perplexed. Why was she not destroyed?
“But I slayed the Almelekites!” I managed. My voice grew louder, once I had mustered it. “I banished the witches!” I pounded the floor with my fist. It was all I could think of. How right I had been. How just. I looked toward the wall searching, because I could not see what the Witch of Endor saw.
And this, this was not any conjuring she had ever done. Yet it was so, a reminder of how she used to hear the miraculous whisperings of the deceased.
Samuel the Prophet sneered at me.
“You will die at the hand of the Philistines. You and your sins.”
Then he turned his back, and like a stick insect, slowly, limb by limb stepped down into a blackness, a liquid blackness roiling and spinning. Almost, Temborah could see him disintegrate into yellowed, withered bones, could follow a dark, thick ooze that boiled from the earth, pitted by flesh bits from the the myriad dead. A hand. A head spliced in half. A child’s head wedged in the mouth of a long-haired skeleton.
Temborah covered her eyes.
The candle went out.
I collapsed onto the floor, mouth open, but could make no sound. Temborah sat, holding the stub of the lantern’s candle.
“It appears your god hates both of us,” she said. She knelt and touched my hand.
“King.”
If I had been aware, perhaps I would have caught the tone of mockery. My servants were in the corner, blinking, staring wide-eyed. They looked at each other perhaps taking comfort in their mutual sickness.
“Sire?” whispered Flashev.
I did not move.
“King,” said Temborah. This time her voice was soft, but I did not answer. I have no recollection of those long hours in which my eyes did not see, my ears did not hear and my mind filled with the horror of the forsaken.
“King!” Temborah and the servants kept calling to me.
Finally, as if from far away, a soft, high sound opened my own throat.
Temborah shook her head. This she understood.
“You are undernourished, my lord. You are weak and need food.”
She took me by the arm and sat me upon the reed mats beside her table. Even then, how she needed my company!
“Eat.”
“Eat, eat!” said the men in unison.
She brought before me bread and veal. Roasted meat, so fresh. I ate like one in a dream. There was nothing to say. Afterward I stood, loosening the belt around my cloak. I nodded to my men. They followed me through the door into an afternoon of shadows.
I turned once, placed five silver coins on her door stone. Then we turned and strode away.
Alone in her house, Temborah sat numb. She broke off a chunk of the bread she had baked and chewed slowly.
I was dead within the week.
And then I returned to that hut, to my new and only friend, the one who would a
lways listen.
Psalm of the Second Body
By Catherynne Valente
Go, and bring the harlot, Shamhat, with you.
When the animals are drinking at the watering place
have her take off her robe and expose her sex.
When he sees her he will draw near to her,
and his animals, who grew with him in wildness,
will be alien to him.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
First Tablet
I am the first story ever told: the story of the harlot.
This story was always mine - pine boughs prickling at my breasts, cedar-smells exuding from my pores like a temple censer, the smooth curve of my forearms extended in the shadow-wood. I am not the prolegomena, I am the poem. I am the story before Gilgamesh, the verses scratched from the clay tablet to make room for him, and for the giant, the pastoral boar-ape, the coarse-bearded golem he loved.
But I had him first.
How he wished he could have done it! Laid out his body under Enkidu and sheared the hair from his body with a kiss! But he could not, he could only bluster and pray for it to happen, for a man to come with biceps as big as his. He called to me, in the depths of my temple, white in column and stair, he called me out of the city, beyond the sliver bolts and cedar slats of the Enlil Gate, he called me into the wild and the wold. Among my sisters who had grown with me in wildness, I prepared myself. I clothed myself in red veils; my nipples shone through the fabric like eyes, my sex throbbed in the crisp folds like a heart.
(The harlot has a second body,
which is like the first, but not the first.
The organs are bewildered:
the tongue is an ear which hears only gasps,
the small of the back is a tongue
which tastes the earth,
the belly is a mouth which gulps and chews.
She wears both bodies,
She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror Page 4