The Secret Book of Kings: A Novel

by Yochi Brandes

  “The thought of following you blindly scares me. I know so little about you,” I mumbled as my resistance crumbled.

  His confident smile proved that he was already inside my head, knowing I would follow him anywhere. “You know a great deal about me, more than you need to.”

  “To make this decision, I need to understand more about this place.” I tried to maintain the appearance of a person who still had a choice.

  “About the Palace of Candles?”

  “And the Mad Princess.”

  His sigh of compassion sounded familiar, and I realized he sounded it whenever the Mad Princess was mentioned. “You don’t need me for that. Just take a walk around Jerusalem, stop the first man you see on the street, and ask him about her. Everyone knows the stories.”

  “I want to hear them from you.”

  “I’m tired, and you aren’t well. Your stomach has only received a small advance on what it’s owed, and the swelling in your leg is getting worse. We’ll eat a good meal, sleep for a few hours, and then we’ll have more energy for stories. But if you enter the Palace of Candles, you will be required to stay for at least a year. That is the law. Only servants and soldiers may enter.”

  “I’m not about to commit to spending a year in a place I know nothing about,” I said, taking pleasure in regaining control.

  “All right, you’ve convinced me.” I was no longer angry at myself for relishing his faint praise. “We’ll let the coachman go inside, and we’ll stay in the chariot telling stories of the Mad Princess. Did you know that she was the first wife of the previous king and the daughter of the first king? Of course you didn’t; you hadn’t even heard a thing about her before today. All right, kid, I’ll tell you everything from the beginning.”

  * * *

  My last day in Gibeah had made me detest the entire tribe of Benjamin, but I was still saddened to hear about the bitter fate of Israel’s first princess. Hadad spoke animatedly of her legendary beauty. It was said that she was one of the five people who were formed in the twilight of creation. When He created the world, God also decided to create several great wonders, including five people—two men and three women—who would be the most beautiful in all the world. All of them were descendants of Rachel and all were royalty, with the exception of Rachel herself, the matriarch of the line. The first was Rachel, beloved wife of Jacob, the father of Israel. The second was her eldest son, the great ruler of Egypt. The third was the first Hebrew king, a Benjaminite. The fourth was his daughter, the first Princess of Israel. And the fifth, also a daughter of Benjamin, is yet to be born. Legend has it that she will be named for the goddess Ishtar, will marry the king of the great empire, and will save her people from a terrible calamity that a descendant of the nation of Amalek will try to bring upon them.

  The beautiful princess had been given in marriage to a young warrior of Judah as a prize for the killing of a giant Philistine who’d been terrorizing the tribes of Israel. Her passionate love for her husband was also the stuff of legend. Love has always been considered a mighty force that helps men chose their mates, but here was a young woman, practically a girl, who had proven that women could also follow their hearts and choose their own husbands.

  But the beautiful princess’s great love could not save her marriage. Her father, the king, who was haunted by his demons, was jealous of his son-in-law and wanted to kill him, and the young man was forced to abandon her when he fled the palace. Only years later, after the king was dead, could she finally return to the arms of her beloved, and yet she bore no children. Her husband was crowned king and succeeded in all that he did, while she slowly faded away into bitterness, living her life in an isolated wing of the palace and taking no part in its society. Twenty years ago, shortly before her husband’s death, she lost her mind all at once at the height of a great celebration of the rain that had brought salvation from three hard years of drought. Following that attack of madness, she lost her ability to speak and began screaming at the top of her lungs and lighting candles in every corner of the palace. Her sanity has never returned. In the daytime she sits still as a statue, and at night, after sunset, she comes alive and fills the palace with hundreds of candles, screaming unintelligibly all the while. The most beautiful princess in the world thus became the Mad Princess, and the isolated wing where she lives became known as the Palace of Candles.

  * * *

  When I was a child, every little thing made me burst into tears, but for the last three years, ever since my first fight with Bilhah, I have shed tears for no one, not even for myself. Even that morning, when those Benjaminite thugs tore open my leg and stole my horse, I didn’t cry. I mustn’t cry. It’s the most foolish thing I could do. Someone who is impressed with my manliness will not appreciate my tears and is liable to regret choosing me.

  “Go ahead, cry,” he reassured me. “I cried, too, the first time I heard this story. Cry now, while you still have tears for the beautiful princess who lost her mind. If you decide to come with me, your tears will turn into contempt, then anger, and finally resentment. Her candles make the nights unbearable; her screaming can be heard throughout Jerusalem, and it haunts the sleep of little children. It’s no great honor to serve in the Palace of Candles. Soon, when the people of Jerusalem marvel at your fine uniform and ask you where you are stationed, you’ll find yourself evading the question, mumbling a few platitudes and avoiding any details. So, what do you say, kid? Do you want to go home?”

  “I have no home,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Good decision,” he said, pretending I had a choice in the matter. “Now, before we bring the chariot into the stable, take a peek outside and have a look at the Temple. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to do at that moment, but I knew I had to show some degree of interest. I drew the curtain and glanced out the window. What I saw so astounded me that I couldn’t look away.

  “Your temple is beautiful,” Hadad said, unable to hide his envy. “Much nicer than the great temple in Edom that we built for our god Qos.”

  The rage instilled in me by Bilhah returned full force, and I couldn’t suppress it. “It is not our temple.”

  “Not yours?” Hadad’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  I gazed at the proud lion etched into its chiseled stones. I tried not to think about the ox that had played such a major role in the stories of my childhood, but the words burst out of their own accord: “Our temple was destroyed.”

  Then, a moment later, against my will: “This is the temple of Judah.”

  Eleven

  My arrival at the Palace of Candles did not go as I had expected. Instead of getting to meet the Mad Princess and her soldiers and receiving the meal and bed I’d been promised, I found myself inside gigantic dark tunnels. I looked out the window of the racing chariot and saw a ghost town complete with houses and stables, barns and horses, wells and mills, even racetracks. Only two things were missing: sunshine and people.

  “Welcome to your new home,” Hadad announced festively, as if he were showing off a splendid hall.

  “This is the Palace of Candles?”

  “This is your own private training facility. The palace is right above us.”

  “I won’t be training with everyone else?”

  “You’ll be here by yourself.”

  I could barely drag my leg down the steps of the chariot. Hadad didn’t offer any help.

  “For how long?”

  “Until I say otherwise.”

  “Let me see the Mad Princess first.”

  “There’s nothing to see. Her decrepit body is nothing but an empty shell. Rather than wanting what you don’t need, you’d best focus all your energy on your training. We’ll give you some time to recover from your injury, and then we’ll get to work.”

  In a matter of days, I lost my sense of self and put my body and soul into the hands of a man who tortured me in every possible way. Until not long before, I’d taken pride
in my mysterious ability to make people follow me and do as I said, but now I blindly obeyed his every order. I would have jumped to my death without hesitation had he ordered me to do so.

  “I’m going to bury you alive.”

  Even outrageous statements like that merely floated past me calmly.

  “Now climb down to the bottom of the pit and stand absolutely still.” I could tell that even he was surprised by my indifference. “The servants are going to bury you up to your chest. You’ll only be able to move your arms.”

  “And if I refuse?” I said, only because I knew that he expected me to protest.

  “Whether or not you agree, you’ll be standing in that hole in just another moment.”

  For the first hours, I felt only a bone-chilling cold and a sense of numbness in my feet. The true horror began after a day.

  When I got out, my legs couldn’t carry me, but I knew I had defeated fear.

  Tortures were heaped upon me one after another, ceaselessly, each torment worse than the one before. I don’t know how I held on. I felt as though my body was no longer a part of me and that I was watching it from the outside. I drank bull urine, I was thrown off a galloping horse, I spent two days tied to the top of a tall pole, and worst of all, I was left locked in a barn with an enchanting foal who captured my heart and made me miss Aner even more deeply than I already did. I managed to resist hunger for almost a week before it took over my body and drove me mad. I crushed the foal’s skull with a rock and ate his hot flesh raw. I felt nothing other than satiation.

  My willpower didn’t come from bravery or ambition, nor from a thirst for revenge or a wish to visit my hometown as a soldier in the king’s army. I felt as though I were being reborn out of my own body, not bound to any womb by some eternal cord, without parents smothering me with their worries and oppressively demanding that I feel gratitude toward them, and, especially, without a distant sister who had until not long ago plagued my dreams and filled me with painful yearning. When I found out that she wasn’t my true sister, I stood naked before my forbidden desire, which had, in an instant, become a possibility and therefore ever more frightening. Only now, inside Hadad’s torture chamber, did I finally feel released of the menacing weight of it. My body no longer sent any pain signals, and my heart was emptied of all feeling. I didn’t long for any person or any thing, not even for Tirzah or Aner. Eating the flesh of that foal had erased whatever shards of personality were still left in me. It had made me feel powerful, but I took no joy in the feeling, as my emotions were gone completely.

  The days went by; I cannot say how many. Inside the dark tunnels I lost all track of time. Sowing and reaping, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day—all at once, the pulsations that had been part of my life’s blood were gone, and I didn’t even feel their absence. I knew that up above, in the Palace of Candles, the people were leisurely going about their business: the Mad Princess sits still all day and lights her candles at night, the dolled-up soldiers wear their elegant uniforms and play at their pointless formations and parades, and the skillful cooks prepare fine meals for all the denizens of the palace. But nothing of what was going on up above ever reached my ears. I couldn’t even hear the princess screaming.

  “Why don’t you ask me when all this is going to end?” Hadad asked me in a resentful tone after his servants had spent several hours whipping my naked back, never getting so much as a grunt out of me.

  “You can keep torturing me for the rest of my life.”

  “Is that what you call my training?”

  “Training includes fighting methods, hand-to-hand combat, and weapons instruction. But if you would rather call this torture ‘training,’ then so be it. Call it whatever you want.”

  “Soon we’ll be able to move to the next phase, and I’ll teach you all the things you’ve just listed.”

  “I don’t care what you teach me. As far as I’m concerned, we can keep playing this game until I breathe my last or you do, whichever comes first.”

  “What game are you talking about?”

  “The game you chose: you command, I obey.”

  “And if I commanded you to slaughter Aner?”

  “Send your servants to find him in the Land of Benjamin. Within five minutes of giving him back to me, you’ll have his head on a platter.”

  “And your lover?”

  My heart beat wildly for a moment, just as it had in my previous life, but I got ahold of myself and regained my composure. “Who?”

  “The pretty midwife from Shiloh. Don’t feign ignorance. You know that I know everything about you.”

  “I’m not feigning ignorance; the word ‘lover’ sounds so foreign to me that I forgot for a moment who it could be. Would I be able to slaughter Tirzah? I already told you: you command, I obey. Those are the rules of the game.”

  * * *

  One night I woke up, groggy and confused, to the sounds of shouting. I was lying on my bunk as usual, and I didn’t know what to think. Since arriving in the tunnels, I hadn’t encountered anyone but Hadad and his three servants, who’d spoken very little, and that only softly. I tried to connect the unusual sounds to things I knew from my previous life, but before I could reach any conclusions, dozens of young men stormed inside, calling out excitedly. In the pale light of the oil lamp I could see their stunned expressions as they spotted me watching them from my bunk. I asked myself whether I was surprised and discovered that the feeling of surprise had been lost along with the rest of my emotions.

  “Who are you?”

  “Soldiers of the Palace of Candles. And you?”

  “Ask your commander.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Ask your commander.”

  “Don’t you know how to talk?”

  “I actually do know how to talk, but I don’t know how to answer questions.”

  “Judging by the looks of you, you’d best not get too smart. It looks like you’ve taken quite a few beatings already.”

  I turned to face the soldier who had said that. I liked his red curls and the bright eyes that looked me over with curiosity. In my previous life, I would have been prepared to admit that he was the kind of person I would get along with, but at that moment I felt nothing but boredom.

  “You see this scar?” I asked, pulling up my gown to reveal my ankle. “It only recently healed. You’re welcome to start there. That way you won’t have to work so hard before you see blood.”

  “Thank you for bringing it to my attention,” he said with an amused smile. “I’ll use that crucial piece of information in due time. But for now, I’d rather take you up to the palace with your leg in one piece. Can you walk by yourself, or should we drag you?”

  “I have no will of my own. How hard is it for you to fathom something so simple?”

  The boys chuckled. All at once, as if at some invisible command, they raised my bunk to their shoulders and walked at a slow march through the dark tunnels. I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, and tried to relax my body and go back to my interrupted sleep, but before I had time to shut my eyes, I could see flickers of sunlight ahead of me.

  They put me down on the ground. I stared at the sun with my eyes wide open. It hurt badly, but I’d been through worse.

  “I’ve already gathered that you don’t mind injuring yourself,” the redheaded soldier said, standing in front of me and blocking out the sun. “But you’d be better off doing it gradually. If you start by going blind, what will be left for the end?”

  “What end?”

  “My name is Ithiel. Why don’t you tell us yours?”

  “Shelomoam,” I muttered. “Shelomoam, and that’s it. You had better not ask whose son and which tribe because I’ll give you no further answers. Now go see your commander and tell him you’ve found me. He won’t be too enthusiastic about your rescue mission.”

  But Hadad actually was enthusiastic. Or, more precisely, he burst into uproarious laughter that shook his fat body. I realized tha
t I hadn’t seen him laugh like that since we had ridden together to Jerusalem, ages ago.

  “Well done, soldiers. I didn’t believe you’d be able to find the tunnels.”

  I got the feeling that he was putting on an act, playing at some sort of strange game, but what kind of game it was remained a mystery to me. I stayed on my bunk, lying in the sun, and watched them from down below. I was having trouble seeing them clearly, but I could hear everything they said.