by Cliff Graham
Benaiah winced as the physician began to massage the wounds with a pasty ointment. It burned. A few moments passed with the physician probing the wounds and testing his reflexes.
“Did a physician treat it before?” he asked. Benaiah nodded, embarrassed to admit it. Josheb smirked at him.
“Good,” the physician said. “There is infection, but if you lie still for a day or so, you should be ready. It will hurt, though. Hurt so badly you will want to die. Fool thing to do, chasing beasts.”
“Your speeches would inspire armies to victory,” Eleazar said to the man.
A new voice cut in. “At least we would not have to listen to the endless whining of all of you.” A new form had arrived next to the fire; a man with a loosely wrapped gray cloak. He took a seat next to Benaiah and gave him a glance.
“Word has it you attacked several lions by yourself. Did you even think about the rest of us? We need men right now.” The man turned his eyes to the fire again. Benaiah felt something in his chest flip. Steady it. Not now.
“I thought the children of priests were smart,” the man said, the hint of a smile on his lips.
“Usually they are, but with our friend Benaiah, something went wrong somewhere,” said Josheb, quick to speak before Benaiah could.
The physician wrapped the wounds on Benaiah’s arms and head. It really did hurt. He could not let these men see it, though.
The man continued. “David has been called to the tent of King Achish. We should hear something soon. Keep yourselves ready for my orders.”
He waited for a response, then rose and departed into the evening toward another campfire nearby.
“He’s a brave fighter on his own. Doesn’t need to prove anything. No one thinks less of him just because he is David’s nephew,” Benaiah said as he watched him leave.
“Joab hates losing control. He didn’t like that David sent you instead of him. Thought he should have been the one,” Shammah said, gnawing on a chunk of roasted goat dipped into a pouch full of olive oil—made for him, as Josheb had loudly and mockingly pointed out earlier, by his mother.
“If he had, he would be half digested in that lion’s belly right now. Can’t say I would miss him,” said Josheb.
Benaiah let it go. He would be annoyed with Joab later; he was too tired now. It was evening still, so he must not have been out for long. The camp was beside the trade route known as the Way of the Sea, near the base of a mountain range crowned by towering Mount Carmel on the far northern edge of Philistine lands. It was a day’s walk around the base of the mountain into the wide mouth of the Jezreel Valley. The other route into the Jezreel, and the one he suspected they would take, was through the pass by Megiddo to Shunem, only a few hours on the march. However the Philistine army chose to close in, it would be a dangerous breach into Israelite country. Benaiah heard a stream nearby. He could see the flicker of torches and watchtower fires of the town of Aphek in the distance.
Something nagged at Benaiah, something hidden in the back of his mind. Something that he should have been telling the Three. What was it? He felt like his mind was full of mud, his thoughts sluggish and inconsistent. The fever made him sweat. He remembered the lion, and the village with the shepherd and the dirty sheep. Other strange images surfaced: darkness and fire, and figures roaming the deep woods. None of it made sense to his exhausted mind, but it felt urgent.
“How has it been here with the Philistines?” he asked, trying to find something to focus on.
“Lovely,” said Josheb. “We get to walk behind them on the roads and inhale the dung from their pack donkeys and chariot horses. We get to camp along the bottom end of the stream so that all of their filth and waste floats past us, ruining our water. They even go out of their way to urinate in the water next to us while we’re filling up skins. Great bonding and camaraderie taking place.”
“Makes you wonder why we’re marching with them,” Eleazar said.
“David has a plan. He always does,” Shammah said.
“He needs to tell us that plan, then. It’s unfortunate enough to lose men from the northern tribes, but I’m not going to spear a fellow man of Judah,” said Josheb.
“Yahweh’s army has men from all of the tribes. Yahweh loves all of his people the same. They don’t deserve slaughter at the hands of uncircumcised Philistine sea-filth,” said Shammah.
“The Philistines can have the northern tribes,” replied Eleazar. He was the smallest of all of them, but the quickest on his feet, and his skill with small weapons was unequaled. He was a restless man, always wanting to move and take action, intolerant of the long hours of mindless speech-making that characterized war councils. Josheb joked that if David ordered Eleazar to attack Gath alone with a rock, he would do it just to avoid sitting still in a war council.
Benaiah sighed. Politics got them nowhere. If it had not been solved in centuries, they were not going to solve it tonight.
Josheb, always the peacemaker, changed the subject. “Speaking of the tribes, you arrived at an interesting time, my friend. We have more men coming from all over the land. Many have bows and slings, good scrapping fighters. There are even Benjamites.”
Benaiah actually turned his head toward Eleazar in surprise. “Saul’s tribe? They left him?”
“Yes. Good men, too. Said they were tired of how they were being treated, heard a man could make a lot of money out here with us.”
“Don’t forget the Gadites,” Eleazar said. “We gave them shields and spears when they requested them, and they know what they are doing. They even crossed the Jordan. Two weeks ago.”
“Impossible,” said Benaiah. “The Jordan is over its banks now.”
“You haven’t met these men yet. You’ll believe it about them. They look like the lions you just got done fighting.”
“What about the men from Manasseh who left Saul?” Benaiah asked.
“Philistines wouldn’t let them come,” said Josheb. “Thought they would have a change of heart and betray them in the fight because it’s close to their own land. David sent them back to wait for us outside of Gath. It’s a wonder we’re even here. I have no idea how David does it. He kills their best fighter and slaughters them by the thousand as a youth, and yet one of their kings trusts him enough to lead us to war with them. I wouldn’t trust us if I was a Philistine. There are a lot of suspicious characters in this camp. Shammah most of all.”
“The point is,” Eleazar said to Benaiah, “there are a lot more men here than before. Even some foreigners. You speak some of their languages, so I think David has his eye on you as their commander.”
Benaiah nodded. He was fading. His head swam with confusion and pain, but he tried to hide it. “I figured that would find me one day. Seems a little odd, though, that David trusts foreigners so much.” Even to himself, Benaiah’s voice sounded increasingly weak. “I thought the whole purpose of this was to get rid of them.”
“Only in our land,” Josheb said. “Beyond our borders he wants to make alliances. At least, alliances with those not named ‘Amalekite’ or ‘Moabite.’”
“Yahweh wanted Israel to purge the land of pagans. But Saul never did it. David will. David reads the Law,” said Shammah through another mouthful of roasted goat. Shammah ate all day and read the Law all night. Benaiah wondered when he would pull out one of his beloved raisin cakes, also made by his mother. Likely not until Josheb was gone.
“As long as that purging includes acquiring gold, then I’m happy,” said Josheb.
Benaiah felt himself being lulled by the conversation around him. Jokes, serious talk, then jokes again. Then there was silence, each man left to his own brooding.
The breeze felt good on his head. The bandages were wrapped tightly, but the physician had left enough gaps to let the dry air in. Night had come quietly while they’d spoken. The sky looked clearer than ever tonight, with not even wisps of cloud to ruin the display.
It was their way of handling the pressure, the laughter. Josheb knew it.
That was why he was the one they admired most. He was the funniest man in the army. He was also the deadliest. His spear had brought death to many desert bandits.
Although his thoughts were vague and foggy, Benaiah knew that, for all the Israelites in David’s band, the pressure they were feeling came from the same thing: they were marching with heathen Philistines against Israel, Yahweh’s chosen people. Something about it was so inherently wrong that surely Yahweh would send lightning to split open the earth to swallow them.
It was getting cold again. The fire crackled, and Eleazar stoked it. Benaiah loved the campfires at night on campaign. He loved the jokes. Loved the way a man could forget things and rest. The way he could bury heartache in the ash and coals.
His eyes drifted away from the flames, and he stared at the smoke rising to the stars, so bright tonight. He thought that perhaps the rain and snow had finally left for the season. It had surely surprised the armies. Kings went to war when they thought the bad weather had passed.
Sounds of men laughing were everywhere across the camp. A man at a fire behind them was telling another lewd story, to applause and laughter every few moments. Laughter could be counted on. No matter how many men may have died that day, there would always be laughter. Josheb would always find it for them.
A voice broke through the darkness at the edge of the firelight.
“He wants a meeting with us in the morning. Pack your things tonight. We will be leaving.” It was Joab.
“Leaving? Where?” asked Josheb.
“Our alliance is over. He will explain it more tomorrow. Tell your men that we move before daybreak.”
The young man disappeared again with a flippant wave of his hand. Benaiah despised his arrogance.
Then, suddenly, it all crashed back into his memory. The lion, the pit, the warriors battling one another in the snow … and the Amalekites. How had he forgotten? His face flushed with blood and shame at his delay. Had the lion’s claws raked his mind out?
“Amalekites are raiding in the hill country!” he all but shouted. “I killed nine of them, but one got away. There is a larger force somewhere.” The heads of the Three snapped toward him.
“Amalekites? How? They couldn’t possibly be ready for a campaign,” Josheb said as he stood.
“Might be mercenaries. They never stopped raiding the trade routes,” Benaiah replied. “They might be near Ziklag.”
The group went silent. Amalekites. Their families. It sank in deeply.
“There’s nothing we can do until morning.” Josheb began to walk out into the darkness for his turn to inspect the night watch. “Give your report to David in the morning. And try not to let the spiders and scorpions scare you, son of Jehoiada. I won’t hold you if you are afraid.”
The others dispersed from the fire as well, leaving Benaiah alone. He was angry at himself and his foggy mind that had forgotten about the threat in the south. He rose and set about finding a tent of his own. Perhaps the foreigners would become his company after all. Where were they from?
Sleep first.
NINE
Karak, the Amalekite chieftain, hidden by the poor light of dusk and by the wall of the waste ditch near Ziklag, watched and counted how long it took the night-shift guard to replace the other man. They were lazy and far too slow. By the time the first figure had departed the shadow of the gate, Karak could have moved twenty men through the entrance without a word of warning. He smiled. It had happened just this way last night too. In another hour there would be another rotation, and that was when they would strike.
By a stroke of luck, the watchmen at the city gate had foolishly left the massive doors open to allow the cool breeze from the desert through. In the narrow corridor just inside the gate, there was a series of sharp-angled walls one had to pass through to actually enter the city. The most important rule in the defense of towns was to never ever leave the gates open at night, not for any reason. And yet here they were, blessed by Baal or whichever local god had seen fit to assure that lazy men would be guarding the gates that night, men unfit to march to the north to war.
Ziklag was perched at the top of a round hill with barren slopes. The countryside surrounding the Philistine city rolled gently away in all directions. Though they were at the edge of the great Negev Desert, the hills of cooler lands sat to the east, and the Great Sea was only a two-day walk to the west. Ziklag served as both a town and a watchtower for this part of the trade routes. The guards would be able to see an enemy threat coming from a long distance.
Karak could make out the paths the women traveled to get water from the nearby creek bed. The scout had watched them the previous day and counted how many women fetched water. If each woman hauled water for one family group — and Philistine households could be large—then the number of women reported hauling water was a good indication of how many people were inside. The scout also reported, to the delight of the chieftain, that almost no men were seen either leaving or entering the town.
He looked to his left and checked the rows of soldiers lying still in the drainage ditch hewn from the side of the hill. The city’s refuse and waste water was thrown out near the gate and trickled along the very area they were waiting in. It would have been checked frequently by true soldiers—it was too obvious an ambush position—but the Philistines had sent all their best men north. Old men and worthless men guarded their cities. The old men were too tired to search the ditch; the worthless men, too lazy.
Next to him was his deputy, and next to the deputy was the Egyptian mercenary. Karak would have enjoyed the mercenary’s job more than his own. Able to fight and capture plunder and never having to obey a king. He suspected the man was a spy for the ruler of Egypt, but that did not matter to Karak. For now, he was a good fighter and a terrifying presence on the field, worth the gold.
The Egyptian was the greatest fighter Karak had ever seen; no man alive could stand with him in single combat. Not even the vaunted Hebrew warriors they had heard about in the legends. He would decide the fate of nations if he rose up from the ranks and taunted his opponent. No enemy king would have a warrior capable of meeting him.
The night watchman had settled at the entrance gate and was no longer visible, sitting in the shadows. The chieftain wondered if it was an old man, sleepy from the day, unable to see past twenty paces in the darkness. He was amazed again at how fortunate they were that all of the fighting men in the land were in the north.
His troops would move quickly. There were two hundred of them, with the rest of his army waiting in the hills above. They would be difficult to control. None of them had ever been formally trained in the movements of armies, preferring instead to attack small outposts from the backs of camels, swinging their blades across the throats of women and farmers. But they had been attentive to their training for this mission. The promise of gold and women made for good fighters, and the Philistines had both.
He had not wasted manpower and time raiding many Hebrew settlements. They were poor and not worth the effort. But the kings of Amalek wanted vengeance for Hebrew raids along the borderlands. There was said to be a significant Hebrew population living in Ziklag, and since it was the furthest outpost of the southern borderlands, Karak had decided it was worth taking. It would be the perfect way to finish their raiding. And if they were successful, they would have captured so much bounty that they would need to return to their own lands to deposit it all and sell the slaves.
The moon was extremely bright, checkering the land with black shadows from all of the objects in the desert. City walls gleamed. Karak imagined the nightly rituals going on behind the walls. Workmen were probably stoking fires to heat and forge iron, the mysterious metal that had only recently been seen in his lands. Merchants were wrapping up their goods from the day of bartering and selling, women were putting children to bed. The women. Philistine women did not resist like Hebrew women did. He thought of them and smiled.
An hour passed. The men were getting restless. A squad or two co
uld lie still for hours and never even breathe loudly. But large groups clustered together for long periods of time began whispering and complaining. It was like moving a herd of cattle.
Karak saw movement at the gate. Another watchman changing shifts. It was almost time. They would go at the end of the new man’s shift, when he was most tired and eager to get back to his warm bed. Better get them moving.
He looked at his deputy, who was lying in the ditch behind him and waiting for a command. The man nodded and moved down the line. Each commander would be given the order.
Karak looked at the Egyptian, lying next to him watching the city gates. The Egyptian looked back and nodded. The warrior only spoke a few words of their tongue, so Karak let him operate alone. If he fell, he fell. Karak wasn’t going to put him in command of others.
Karak pointed at himself and made a gesture as if he were about to charge. He then pointed at the Egyptian and tried to indicate that the man should go through the gate first when they approached. Karak planned to follow him through. The mercenary nodded slowly and looked back at the city. Karak hoped the man had understood. When they breached the walls, there would be enough confusion and disorder. Faced with an abundance of helpless women and treasure, Karak had no expectation that his men would maintain discipline. But that was all right. Their greed and lust would get the job done.
The Egyptian’s spear was enormous, larger than even his. Enormous like the man was enormous. He stood a full head and shoulders above the chieftain, who was larger than any other in the army. Dark muscles were tightly strung all over his body. He kept himself very clean, as if more concerned with dressing well than fighting, but he easily dispatched a dozen Amalekite warriors at a time when they sparred. His monstrous spear swung with such force that two soldiers had their lungs crushed through their armor during one contest.
The deputy had returned from alerting the officers, and now it was time to wait again. A thick bank of clouds was settled on the horizon, distantly visible as a gray wall. It had not moved much during the night, unfortunately for them, so their approach would be far too obvious in the moonlight.