by Cliff Graham
“I carved that eagle,” I said, pointing up at the gateway image. She turned on me in surprise.
“That artist was you? We have often commented on the eagle above that gate. Wondering what slave forged it.”
“I am no slave. I am highly skilled and highly paid.” My foolish young man’s arrogance is shameful for me to think of now.
She smiled again as she looked up at me.
“Caleb of the Kenazzites, you have much to boast of. I expect you will put some of those earnings to use and offer my father a fair bride price.”
“You assume much.”
“I assume you like to look at me and be in my company. To continue to do so, you must pay for it, and far more than the wages of a wharf whore.”
She turned away and walked through the gate, which her servants closed behind her.
Women. There you have it.
We were married, of course. Yes, I paid the hefty bride price to her father, a shrewd little man who knew what she was worth but gave me just enough of a reduction in price to make it possible since he wanted to be able to tell the other nobles that it was his daughter married to the Gold of Honor winner.
Perhaps it was foolish. But I had to have her. That was that.
May Yahweh have mercy, that woman gave me joy. Her smile and speech made me drunk with love for her. I found myself looking for chances to skip my duties on the training pitches to be with her.
I went on long searches for various ornamentations for her hair or our home, spending all of my money on foolish woman’s things.
The kitchen maids she brought to our home cooked well. My friends in the guard noticed my fuller waist and poked at me and teased me relentlessly.
I loved watching her in a crowd, especially at the banquets held in the palace by Thutmose, his excuse for drinking wine with his men. He was restless between campaign seasons and loved the release of an elaborate party that must have cost the treasury untold fortunes.
Debauchery. All of it. Yahweh, purge me of the memory. But not of my memories of her.
Much has faded in those years, but I remember her walking through the crowds of soldiers and wives and nobility and carrying herself with exquisite dignity, making eye contact with me in subtle ways as she moved among the tapestries and cushions and drank from the golden goblets of the palace banquet halls, gathering the gossip and ensuring my name was on the tongues of everyone who mattered.
And I would take her home late at night and feast on her. She gave of herself willingly and eagerly, and together we knew the joy that comes from union.
She was, as Moses used to say, the wife of my youth. I took great pleasure in her and did my best to treat her kindly, and when I was away for the campaign seasons on the frontier, expanding the empire of Thutmose, I ensured that my letters were filled with professions of my devotion to her and my desire for her.
Her name? I have not mentioned it, perhaps because it is difficult for me. This memory is among the most anguishing to recall, Othniel, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Maia. Her name was Maia.
You wish to know what happened to her.
I will tell you, and then we will move on with my tale, leaving the past to be the past. Do not ask me of it again.
Several years into our life together I was given orders to go to the north and oversee the security of the building of a new palace for the king. Construction pits were havens for thieves and robbers waiting to club and steal a laborer’s wages. Slaves did not get wages, of course, but many of the workers were journeymen like me. If they were beaten and robbed by bandits, the palace would not be built in time. If the palace was not built in time, then the king would be displeased. And that would have been unthinkable.
The king declared that it would become our permanent home and desired for me to move my household there while the palace was being built. It would be located on the river island of Yebu far to the south, near the lands of Nubia and just downstream of the first cataract, traditionally the edge of our sunlit kingdom and bordering the barbaric and mysterious lands inland. Thutmose wished to spend a few years conquering farther south and exploring for more gold and jewel mines. This would be the base from which he could campaign for weeks and then afterward return to his harem and banquet hall to rest.
At this same time, Maia became large with child and gave birth to a boy.
I see the boy now. Curly, dark hair right from his first day. He loved to play with my Gold of Honor when it dangled from my neck, and touch my nose and chin whenever I held him. We named him Ramose. I adored him like nothing I had ever been given. My heart swelled for him and his beautiful mother, my joy enhanced because I had been permitted to take them with me to the new home.
We packed our modest home quickly after his birth, for we were to depart before the end of the week with the next caravan. We had slave women and a wet nurse for the boy. He screamed for his mother steadily through the entire process of loading our things into the oxcarts, and when Maia would tend to him, he would scream for me, then the wet nurse, then a slave woman, then Maia again, and it all went on so robustly that I nearly lost my sanity. Children do not care about a man’s plans!
Finally we departed our home. I was eager to move on from Memphis to experience new adventures. I had a young man’s wanderlust. Maia was spirited as well; she had never seen the lands outside of the city. Women had no need to travel anywhere but the markets and the temples.
“What kinds of men are the bandits?” she asked me as we rode away from the city. Ramose had fallen asleep, having exhausted all of his pleas.
“Some are workers who lost their trade and are desperate. Others are profiteers who organize wandering vagabonds into parties. The rest are nomads who strike from the desert.”
“Will we be safe?”
“Yes,” I answered. These types of questions had been asked of me many times in the past few days. Maia was like a child in her eagerness to experience this adventure.
I went for a walk after the fire was made. Maia oversaw the servants while they made bread and began roasting the desert hare we had snared that afternoon.
I climbed a slope nearby to admire the desert evening, to where the watchmen had taken up position. A ribbon of pink cloud hung in the west, dark purple in the east. The moon was a thin sliver. I tried to spot the point where it turned sharply again, but it was too far in the distance.
The guard on the first watch was one of my own.
“Do you have enough water for the night?” I asked him.
He nodded respectfully. “I was supplied, sir.”
“I will have some of the hare brought up for you to eat.”
“I am grateful, sir.”
“This is a dangerous land.”
He nodded, looking unsure of how to have a casual conversation with me. I noticed his eyes flickering from me to the edge of the wadi down below us.
“We campaigned here years ago. The savages were hard men. They will fight to the death if we encounter them.”
“I will be ready, sir.”
I clapped him on the shoulder and watched the sunset in silence with him. I searched every shadow, every crevice, every dark corner for movement.
Maia and my son were sitting next to the well. I remember that she was wrapping him in fresh cloths, and I could hear his cries piercing the camp even from where I stood.
My back was to the watchman. It was the mistake I would regret forever.
I heard the swish of his tunic as he leaped for me, and it was the only thing that saved my life. I did not even turn; instead I jumped forward desperately to avoid the blow I could feel coming, and the dagger he carried missed the top of my back where he swung it down but sliced into the flesh of my ribs, biting deep and hot. I caught myself with my hands and pushed off, rolling to my left, this time facing up at him and seeing him striking downward with the dagger, this time at my chest.
All I could do was raise my hand, and the blade punctured straig
ht through my palm, buried to the hilt in my hand.
I punched him in the face because he was off-balance from the strike. He missed my second swing and had his knees pinned against my torso to keep his profile low. He had been trained well. I had trained him.
I shoved my elbow into his neck to keep his face up and tried to withdraw the dagger still stuck in my palm, but he forced the arm down and pulled it out himself, swinging the blade at my neck.
I felt it slice deep into the muscles near my spine, but Yahweh spared me then, I do not know how, and it missed my breathing pipe and was only flesh-deep.
It was the movement I needed to regain my balance. I kicked my left leg high and hooked my knee around his neck, jerking downward until I had his face in the sand. I grappled for a nearby rock, raised it up and struck him on the jaw, breaking it with a soft crunch. In hate, I struck him again on the temple and tore away a piece of flesh, exposing his skull and spraying blood on my arm. And I only wanted to hit him again and again until that skull was crushed into pulp and my rage was satisfied.
I realized in that moment that this was not a random attack from a guard who had been paid to assassinate me but the beginning of a larger raid, for as I looked up I saw the hordes of Amalekites rising over the edge of the wadi and racing for our camp.
I had been the signal, I knew in an instant. The watchman knew I would come to check on him, and the chieftain of the Amalekites would be watching for him to attack me on this hill and then send his men in a flood to massacre us.
There were at least a thousand Amalekites attacking us. The largest army by far I had ever seen them assemble. We had but one hundred men, enough to hold off the usual bandit raids that occurred on the trade routes, but not nearly enough for the battle facing us.
Their chieftain was in the front. He had skulls dangling from his saddle, and I could hear them clacking against each other as he rode a war camel and cried out in an unearthly, guttural battle cry. Like all of their kind, his skin was splotched with hideous tattoos and carvings on his flesh. He had foot soldiers with pikes and scimitars, but those were not the weapons I saw that made me catch my breath in fright.
In front, tearing across the sand in golden blurs, were two black-maned lions.
Trained hunting lions were common to the royalty of Egypt. I had been with Pharaoh Thutmose when he had used them to run down gazelle in the desert. Raised from birth, they could be tamed. But you were never to give them man-flesh. Once they tasted it and realized how soft and tender and available it was, they turned on their masters violently. Thutmose had tried to use them in war once; the lions ate their handlers as soon as they were set loose.
But the Amalekites kept them chained and fed them man-flesh until their appetites craved only that. Then before a raid, they starved them for days. When it was time to attack, the lions somehow knew that the easiest flesh would be what their masters directed them to, and their hunger made them relentless killers.
Their heads hung low with their breath coming out in grunts, the hunting charge, as they rushed for the camp.
Amalekites were child sacrificers and raised their young to know only pillage and rape and destruction. They drank the blood of dead enemies to appease their war gods. They were the most wicked people ever to exist, more animal than man.
And I knew, even then, as I watched the barbarians with their war camels thundering over the sand toward our camp, the starving lions running the fastest in the front, that I was going to lose all that I cared about in this life.
I stood, the gashes from the dagger bleeding and biting me in pain, and stumbled down the hill toward Maia and the boy. My feet felt as heavy as baking stones.
“Maia! Maia!”
She looked up and saw me. Then she looked where I was pointing as I ran to her. She raised her hand to her mouth in terror.
I do not know what I thought I could do. We had soldiers, but they were outnumbered so vastly. My mind became confused as I ran. Where had they come from? How had they assembled so many so quickly? Was there a city of theirs nearby that we did not know of?
Maia snatched up Ramose, who was screaming as shrilly as before, and her instinct was to run to me. Screams and shouts came from the camp.
“To arms! Create a line!”
I was a good commander. I had chosen our camping ground well, on a hilltop where it could be defended from a raid such as this one. But again, there were too many, and we had no walls to protect us.
I glanced at the attackers. One of the lions had peeled away from the other when it spotted Maia running.
“Here, here!” I shouted as loud as I could, waving my arms at the lion. “To me! To me!”
The lion paid no attention to me but was focused only on the small woman running with her shrieking bundle.
It was the moment of ultimate helplessness. The power of my sword or the aim of my bow had abandoned me, and I was a shattered man even before I saw the animal leap into the air with its paws raised, its throat releasing the roar that still finds me in the darkest nights.
Every man was slaughtered but me. All the women who had been with us were raped and carried off for enslavement.
I lived only because they thought I was dead.
I threw myself at the lion as it was destroying my world and tried to get it to consume me as well. I beat it with stones and shoved my hands into its mouth to get it away from the bodies of my wife and son, but it would not release from them. You cannot imagine the power of those creatures.
I had no thought to rally my soldiers. They were dead men. I did not care. I only saw the fur of the creature covered in the blood of my family.
The lion finally did turn to me and swiped me with its powerful paw as I tried to put my hands into its mouth. It struck me on my head with the force of a war axe and sent me into oblivion, and I was swallowed in darkness.
I had the dream again.
A river of blood and a black ship that sailed through it. The descent into ever-deeper waters. The sounds and images of terror. I struggled to raise my arms and swim through it, but did not feel resistance like liquid normally provides. Only heaviness. Imprisonment. A dungeon of blood and cold fire.
The black ship sailed on, and I with it.
I awoke late that night. My vision was blurred as I gazed up at the stars. With every heartbeat I could feel bludgeons of pain in my head. Two thoughts emerged in the fog of my mind. One was that the cruel gods had preserved my life. The second was that Maia and Ramose were gone forever. Only a blood-soaked patch of earth remained.
I sat up. My throat burned for water, but I had no will anymore. No desire to even stand and search for the drink that would sustain me. I only wanted death.
“May Seth take you, Ra!” I shouted at the sky. The worst curse in Egypt, beseeching the foul god to have victory over the divine sun.
I gained my feet and wandered into the camp, looking for a blade to fall on. It was empty. Completely empty. No people. Empty tents flapped in the desert breeze. No other sounds.
The gore of the lion kills was everywhere, as was the gore of the Amalekites. I saw fragments of humans. That was all.
The Amalekites had taken all the weapons. I looked for anything sharp to gash myself with so that I would bleed out for good this time, but there was nothing.
Finally I was able to pull out a tent peg and walked back to where my wife and son had been devoured. I held it to my neck, feeling the jagged prick of bronze against my flesh, and took a deep breath.
One hard thrust and I would be with them in the underworld. We would stand before Osiris together and mock Ammit as he stood in the corner of the chamber waiting to consume our hearts. But the scale of Osiris would that our hearts were lighter than his feather and we would be permitted to pass into light.
I held it, ready. My muscles tensed.
And I could not do it. My beloved would go unavenged.
In this life, their killers walked the earth. I closed a portion of my soul forever a
s I sat there on the sand under the stars. In its place, an obsession was born. A desire to kill every single Amalekite I would ever encounter.
Hebrews and Amalekites are blood enemies, Othniel. Countless deaths of our people by their hand. As you hear my story, so there were and are many more who can testify of worse. Children murdered, women raped and killed.
For generations to come, our heroes will be those who have killed the most Amalekites. They will have tales written of them and songs composed of their deeds.
But in that moment, I cared nothing for Hebrews. I only wanted to fill the hole in me with Amalekite blood.
The king changed his mind about the palace. It was eventually built, and I assume it was used by other kings, but Thutmose never went there while I knew him. It was his right. He was the king. The affairs of his kingdom made my life trivial. What is the loss of one woman and child to a soldier?
I returned to Memphis a hollow man.
I flung myself at the enemy in the desert relentlessly. I volunteered for every dangerous mission and even resorted to begging Amalekites and Nubians or whoever we were fighting to slice at my neck, but my rage to kill them always overcame the gesture and I lived on.
Praises came. Adulation was mine. The nectar of my soul was the admiration of crowds and I drank it in. And I feasted on hate. I went for long runs in the desert at night, wearing nothing but my sword and sheath on my back and trying to blister and tear my feet because I needed to feel something, something that could satisfy the emptiness in my chest.
11
Defending the Widow
Othniel watched his uncle. The old man was staring at the ground. He grieved for him. To see one’s wife and son perish in such a way was . . .
He sighed. No more of this.
Othniel shuddered in the cold. Runoff had leaked into the tent and dampened his back, putting him in a foul mood, as he had to strip off his tunic and dry it next to the fire. He did not mind being wet, but he hated being cold and wet.
“All this talk of the desert is making me miss it,” Caleb huffed. “One thing I can promise you is that we never had trouble staying dry, and we never had to delay an attack because of the rain.”