The Secret Book of Kings

by Yochi Brandes

  Eight

  Adoram returned to Jerusalem reassured and satisfied, while Hadad stayed in Ephraim another two weeks to help me make improvements to the training program for my soldiers. Before he left, he reminded me again of the great-grandchild I’d promised Grandmother. He advised me not to sink too deeply into work and to leave time and energy available for other pursuits. I thanked him with all my heart for his helpful advice and commented, as if as an aside, that it was too bad he didn’t live by it himself, as his wife, Eno, lived in Hatshepsut’s grand palace and only saw her dear husband once a month despite the fact that the Palace of Candles was so close to Solomon’s palace compound.

  Hadad’s expression told me that I’d touched a sore spot, and I regretted having brought up the subject.

  “She went back to Egypt.”

  “With her niece?”

  “Have you gone mad? If Hatshepsut left Solomon, a war would be liable to break out between Israel and Egypt. She’s the wife he most adores.”

  “You’ve been yearning for such a war.”

  “Not yet. First we need to put Shishak on the throne, then we can plan the liberation of Edom.”

  “Then why did Eno return to Egypt now?”

  “She wants to help our son, Genubath, put Shishak’s takeover into action.”

  “And she doesn’t care that her sister is the wife of Pharaoh Siamun?”

  “Eno is a smart woman. She’d rather help our son become the king of Edom than remain the sister-in-law of the king of Egypt.”

  “And you? I thought you wanted to be the king of Edom.”

  “I’m old already, and it’ll be many more years before we free Edom.”

  I gathered that his plan to become king of Edom would have remained unchanged had I agreed to work in concert with Shishak and seize the throne in Israel. Happily, he said nothing more on the subject, preferring to focus on my private life and showing great interest in the nature of my relationship with Elisheba. He was disappointed that I was a man only at work, while I remained a frightened, insecure child in my family relationships. For a moment, I thought about trying to subtly change the subject, but I knew that cheap ploys like that could succeed with ordinary people, but not with the man who pretended he could read the secrets of my heart, and who often succeeded in doing so.

  “She’s my sister,” I said, trying to dismiss him with my usual response.

  “Sisters are wonderful. Almost all the great kings of Egypt have taken their sisters as wives.”

  “I’m not a king, and I’m not an Egyptian. It isn’t really the practice among us Hebrews.”

  “You’re half an Egyptian and three-quarters of a king,” he laughed. “The mother of Ephraim, your ancient patriarch, was Egyptian, and your great-grandfather was a king.”

  “I could understand if you said I was half a king, but how did you get to three-quarters?”

  “Your great-grandfather counts as a quarter, and the other half is an advance on what you’ll become in the future.”

  “You’re very good at arithmetic,” I said, ending the debate. “As to prognostication, however, you leave something to be desired.”

  “Everything I predict for you will come true, you’ll see. In the meantime, you’d best stop working so hard and get to work on that great-grandchild you promised your grandmother.”

  * * *

  Indeed, work was my entire world. In addition to never-ending tax calculations and the weekly meetings with the elders of Ephraim, I also devoted time to regular tours of every city and village and to getting to know the simple people, who would tell me about their woes and inundate me with their love. But at the end of the day, I was alone. Sometimes I passed the nights chatting and laughing with the members of the Shiloh gang, but even such pleasant pastimes couldn’t take my mind off how lonely I was.

  Throughout the long period of time that had passed since my late-night visit with Elisheba, I had been trying to see her as little as possible. I made sure to visit Bilhah and Benaiah when I knew she wouldn’t be home, making up a different excuse every time to avoid celebrating Sabbaths and holidays with them. The tension between us remained as it was, and I’d grown used to it. My love for Mother was the best thing that had happened to me since my return to Ephraim, other than work, of course, and I was beginning to make my peace with the likelihood that she would always remain the one person I was close to in my life.

  On one of my regular visits to Zeredah, I was surprised to find Elisheba standing at the door. I asked with eyes downcast where Bilhah and Benaiah were, and she answered sadly that they had gone to the funeral of a fig gatherer’s baby boy, who had died in his sleep. Needless to say, the mere mention of that profession made me shudder. Elisheba saw the trembling in my hand and said with emotion that she knew what I’d gone through after Adoram freed the Shiloh murderer, and she added that she’d been wanting for some time to tell me that she admired my brave attempt to change the law and to protect women in their homes. I thanked her for what she had said, and I was about to return to Shechem, but she begged me to stay, saying with a shy smile that Mother had prepared my favorite lentil stew before she left, and it was waiting for me in the oven.

  We sat across from one another at opposite ends of the table, and so as not to allow my embarrassment to paralyze me, I chattered nonstop, not letting myself be silent for even a moment. Elisheba tried to focus, but I could tell that her thoughts were drifting elsewhere. For a few moments I concentrated on the stew I loved so much, warm and fresh as always. When I had finished eating, before I even had a chance to get up, Elisheba asked me if it was true what people were saying, that the unfortunate woman from Shiloh had been my lover.

  I wanted to confess it all, but my tears were strangling me. “I’m building a city to commemorate her name,” I said at last.

  She reached out from the other end of the table and laid her small fingers in my palm. “You don’t have to say anything more. I understand.”

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Where are you building this city?”

  My knees were shaking under the table. “North of Shechem.”

  She removed her hand from mine and got up to boil water. “Adoram allows you to build new cities?”

  I told myself that she had only stroked me the way that any sister strokes her brother. “Tirzah is being built on the ruins of an abandoned Hittite town,” I said, managing to restore my normal breathing and speak clearly. “If anyone complains, I can claim that it’s part of the restoration project of towns and villages that I’ve been conducting all over Ephraim.”

  Elisheba brought over a hot infusion of herbs and poured it into two clay mugs. “Your new tax plan is saving our land.” She returned to her seat at the other end of the table and carefully sipped her hot drink. “I’m so glad you accepted the position, and I regret the things I said to you that night.”

  I could see the little girl who used to listen to my stories every night: her fine eyebrows that had hardly thickened, her luminous pale skin, her perfect white teeth, the childish swell of her cheeks, her slanted almond eyes, the innocent but determined expression on her face, even that little spot on her nose, the one she hated so much, which made me want to cry with love.

  “Which things do you regret saying that night?”

  She got up from her chair and walked over to me. Without a word she was on top of me, taking my face in her hands. A moment later, her tongue was in my mouth.

  She kissed me with tenderness and with hunger. I heard her breath catch in her throat. I held her close with one arm and touched her body with my free hand. My fingers found their way under her dress and caressed the warm, soft skin of her back and her waist. I breathed in the scent of her hair, the taste of her lips, the whisper of her breath. I’d never been so happy in my life.

  Suddenly she jumped to her feet, weeping, and fled to the edge of the room. I looked at her in shock.

  “You love me, Elisheba.”

  “I mustn’t
love you.”

  “You may love me. You aren’t my sister.”

  She was sobbing loudly. Her hair clung to her wet cheeks, and her shoulders were shaking. The way she was gasping for breath was so painful for me that I stopped breathing myself.

  “Don’t you see, Shelomoam? Do you really not know why I mustn’t love you?”

  I furrowed my brow in confusion, not knowing what I was supposed to say.

  “I cannot be married to a king.”

  I blew out a long breath and tried to smile. “I won’t be king.”

  She shook her head and kept crying.

  I knelt down and placed my hand on my heart. “I’m willing to swear it.”

  “Don’t swear, Shelomoam.”

  I’d never seen her so determined in my life.

  “I want to swear, Elisheba.”

  “We mustn’t swear to things that aren’t in our control.”

  “Then what can I do to make you believe me?”

  She came closer and looked into my eyes. “Ask me why I can’t be married to a king.”

  Her clenched jaw gave her face a forceful look that I didn’t recognize.

  “Why can’t you be married to a king?”

  “I cannot share my husband with other women. Such a life would turn me into an embittered woman. I’m sure of it.”

  I got up and stood before her. “I will never take another wife.”

  She looked up at me. “If you become king, you will have no choice. Solomon has eight hundred already, David had dozens, even your grandfather had two.”

  I took both her hands and wrapped my fingers around them. “My grandfather had one wife his entire life.”

  “Ahinoam was his first wife, but then he took Rizpah daughter of Aiah as a second wife.”

  “I’m not talking about King Saul. He was my great-grandfather. My grandfather, Paltiel son of Laish, loved one woman his whole life. Only one. He waited for my grandmother for fourteen years, twice as long as Jacob waited for Rachel.”

  Her cheeks twitched. I leaned toward her and gathered her into my arms.

  “Most men have two wives and one mother,” I whispered. “I have two mothers, but only one wife.”

  Nine

  Our firstborn, Nadab, was born on a scorching hot summer day that kept the people in their homes and the midwives at their birthing stones. It was a good thing, because the birth was so quick that, had we needed to bring the midwife all the way from her home, our baby would have had to come into the world on his own. My memories of Bilhah’s difficult labor terrified me throughout the months of pregnancy, mostly because I worried that Elisheba would have trouble giving birth to a child of my seed, who might have inherited the great height and broad shoulders of the line of Saul. Indeed, when I held him in my arms I couldn’t understand how her narrow, delicate body had been able to give birth to such a large baby.

  We decided to name our children after members of the family of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, who were still the leaders both of us admired most. Elisheba liked the name Gershom, who was Moses’s firstborn, but I convinced her that Aaron’s eldest had a nicer name, and we even agreed that if we were blessed with more boys, we would call them Abijah, Eleazar, or Ithamar, after Aaron’s other three sons. Deep in my heart I knew that the beauty of the name Nadab wasn’t the true reason I preferred it to Gershom. Ever since we had made public the revised story of my birth, people had started comparing me to Moses, and I didn’t want to amplify the similarities between us by giving my son the same name he gave his.

  The story itself hadn’t been made up in order to aggrandize me, but because there was no other choice. I couldn’t marry Elisheba without some kind of explanation, so Grandmother’s scribes hurried to make up a new birth story for me that would put the minds of the people of Ephraim at ease and make it clear to them that she wasn’t my sister. Many aspects of the new story were true, but my connection to the lepers’ cave was completely left out and replaced with the story of a little basket floating along on the waters of the Jarkon river. According to the story, Bilhah was walking alone on the banks of the river one day when she was astonished to find a basket floating on the water, inside of which was a newborn baby, stained with blood. She fell in love at first sight with the baby and decided to adopt him, but since she was only fourteen and her husband only sixteen, she worried that her neighbors might decide to give the abandoned baby to some childless family, and so she pretended to have given birth to him on her own, in a carriage by the side of the road. The people of Zeredah were shocked to discover that this young woman from their town had suddenly given birth without anyone having known of her pregnancy, but the fact that she liked to wear loose-fitting dresses that blurred the outlines of her body gave them a satisfactory answer. They also told themselves that a young woman’s strong, firm belly sometimes remained quite flat all the way through the end of a pregnancy.

  My birth story spread quickly all through Ephraim, and it aroused wonder and veneration. “Our commissioner is the second Moses,” people said. Some of them winked at one another and whispered with delight that now all that was left was to wait and see who Pharaoh was.

  * * *

  After the marriage ceremony, I went back to live in my childhood home. I only came to the house of administration in Shechem once a week for my regular meeting with the elders of Ephraim. The rest of the week, I worked out of the small house of administration in Zeredah. The painful rift in my relationship with my adoptive parents had healed almost entirely, and the tension between us had dissipated. I knew I couldn’t ask Mother to live with us, but after Nadab was born I couldn’t help myself and begged her to leave the cave at least once to stand at my side during his circumcision ceremony.

  “The danger has not yet ended,” said Mother, “and now it has also passed to your son.”

  “Will he also have to wait eight-and-a-half years to see you?” I spat bitterly.

  She lowered her eyes. “Now we must be even more careful.”

  “It’s been more than twenty-five years. David son of Jesse is long dead, and no soldiers are looking for me.”

  “The new story they’re telling about you only makes the danger greater. The people of Ephraim are comparing you to Moses.”

  “That comparison is embarrassing, but how is it dangerous?”

  “Moses was hidden in the basket because the king found out that the savior of Israel was about to be born, and he wanted to kill him. I’m sure the scribes of the Palace of Candles didn’t consider this, but their story actually reveals the truth about the circumstances of your birth. The danger is now greater than ever. You must promise me that you will do everything possible to protect Nadab.”

  I realized that she had a point, but I wasn’t willing to raise my son the way I was raised. “My son won’t grow up surrounded by a thicket of secrets,” I declared.

  After the circumcision, I brought Nadab to her and placed him in her arms. She hugged him to her with steady hands and raised her head heavenward. “Thank you, God,” she whispered. “Now I will forgive all that You have done to me.”

  “For now, God only deserves partial forgiveness,” I said, trying not to reveal my emotions. “You should forgive Him in full only after you remove that mask from your face and breathe the outside air.”

  Mother’s ongoing imprisonment in the lepers’ cave was now the only dark cloud over my life. In spite of the terrible circumstances of my birth, which had robbed me of the chance to know my father and caused immeasurable suffering for my entire family, I felt like a lucky man. I was living with the love of my life, cultivating a warm and close relationship with my mother and with my adoptive parents, and I was a father to a healthy and handsome baby boy. There were hardships, of course, especially in my work—I wasn’t always able to find a solution to the poverty and suffering I encountered, but I dealt successfully with most problems and took pleasure in the love and admiration of the people of Ephraim, whom I considered to be my tribe-mates. “I’
m even stranger than I thought,” I told Elisheba when I found out that the Benjaminites had sent a delegation to Adoram asking him to appoint me their commissioner in place of the hated Shimei son of Ela. “I have two mothers and two tribes as well.”

  * * *

  When Nadab was six months old, I set out for the Palace of Candles to fulfill my promise. Elisheba was very excited at the prospect of meeting Grandmother, whom she thought of as a practically superhuman character. “Imagine if you suddenly had the chance to meet our matriarch Rachel,” she tried to explain. “That’s precisely how I feel.”

  On our way, we stopped in the land of Benjamin to receive final instructions from the spies of the Palace of Candles. I was so used to their being everywhere that I didn’t give the encounter any thought. When I’d returned to Ephraim six years earlier, I was astounded to find that Hadad’s secret loyalists had infiltrated the most sensitive positions in the house of administration. Bilhah also reminded me that as a child I once saw her smiling at one of the soldiers, and she explained that he had been the one who had delivered the money Grandmother sent us every month.

  We arrived at the meeting place, and I warmly embraced the four men who were there waiting for us. “Meet the Benjaminite thugs who almost cost me my leg,” I said to Elisheba.

  They laughed and patted little Nadab’s head. “Why didn’t you bring the horse with you? We miss him.”

  “Aner is old now. I only take him out on short rides.”

  I had expected our meeting to include having a meal together. I wanted to catch up with them and ask about Grandmother, but to my great sorrow it became clear to me that we would have to quickly disperse.

  “We mustn’t be seen together,” they said. “Adoram’s spies have been tracking you ever since you left Ephraim, and they’ll be here shortly.”

  Elisheba froze in horror. “Why is Adoram tracking us?”

  “The story of the basket reached Jerusalem and caused a commotion in the palace. The similarity to Moses was a mistake.”