Song of Songs

by Marc Graham

  “I thank you, Lady Remeg.” A young man, more simply dressed than the others, knelt before the dais, a fired clay tablet in his hands. “The ancient friendship between Tsur and Yisrael is—”

  “But what need has Tadua of our generosity in the grave?” the Queen of Tsur interrupted him. “How can our aid reach him in Sheol? What can we offer that his gods and his fathers cannot provide?”

  “My lady,” the young man said, his voice rich with the accent of Kenahn’s Habiru tribes, “King Yahtadua—”

  “Never fought my father’s enemies,” Remeg cut him off again, her voice sharp and crisp. “He never gave me a city. He probably still pukes up his nurse’s milk, so it will be some years before he is of any use to his gods, to his people, or to me.”

  The queen fixed the young man with a long, cold stare as though daring him to dispute her. When he’d stayed his tongue through a long, uncomfortable silence, Lady Remeg spoke again.

  “Yet for the love we bore Tadua,” she said, her tone now soft and warm, “for the duty we owe him, we shall consider the request of his widow and of his heir. Leave your message with our Keeper of Accounts. You shall have our decision in time.”

  The queen gave a dismissive gesture and indicated a man seated at a table to one side of the trading hall. Parchments and clay tablets stood in neat stacks upon the table. The scribe held out a withered hand and snapped his fingers at the messenger from Yisrael.

  The young man opened his mouth but then reconsidered. He bowed to the queen, nodded to her councillors, and handed his tablet to the scribe.

  “Tadua’s widow thinks to make demands of us?” Lady Remeg coolly observed when the messenger had departed. “She speaks of friendship as though she had raised the sword for Tsur, as though her son had defended our gates.”

  The men about the dais offered muted replies.

  “Draft our response,” Remeg told the scribe. “Tell this upstart queen that we will consider a gift of half the timber requested, but their return gift of grain and olives must be delivered first. Our foresters cannot work on empty stomachs.”

  “And the stone?” the scribe asked, looking up from his parchment. “The craftsmen?”

  “Are there not rocks in the hills of Yisrael?” Remeg demanded. “Let them scratch the earth for themselves. If any of our artisans wish to work in that wasteland, we will not stop them, nor will we supply them. Let her own gold and grain buy the skill she craves.”

  “And what of the—”

  “You know my will on this.” The queen spoke in a tone that brooked no dissent. “Draft our reply then read it to me before you inscribe it. What do you want?”

  The question met silence for the span of several heartbeats. Only when Yetzer noticed all eyes in the chamber turned his way did he realize the queen had spoken to him. He pushed himself off the cedar post he’d been leaning against, cleared his throat and approached the dais.

  “From Horemheb, Pharaoh of Kemet, I bring greetings.”

  “Kemet?” Remeg said with a grunt. “Pharaoh sends a bearded man rather than one of his hairless eunuchs?”

  Derisive laughter rumbled around the hall. Yetzer still wore the robes of a priest of Amun, but he’d not shaved his scalp or face since leaving the temple of Uaset several weeks before. Though mere stubble, the itchy growth gave him more the appearance of a Tsurian than a Kemeti, and he thanked Djehuti for that bit of forethought.

  “I bring Pharaoh’s greeting, Lady, but I come upon my own business, as a subject of Tsur. I am Yetzer, son of Huram, son of Tudu-Baal who was brother to my lady’s father Abi-Milku.”

  The laughter stilled and Remeg’s face turned sober. The queen slowly rose and descended from the dais. She cautiously studied Yetzer with sharp green eyes.

  “Is this the image of my kinsman?” She squinted as she placed her hands on Yetzer’s cheeks. “Is this Huram’s son?”

  “Even so,” Yetzer said. “I have returned to lay my father among his ancestors, to see after my mother, and to offer what service I may to my lady.”

  These last words were muted as the queen kissed Yetzer on both cheeks then pulled him into a tight embrace.

  “Rejoice with me, Brothers,” Remeg said to the assembled nobles. “For a lost ship of Tsur has returned safely to port.”

  “It was Ilban-Ay that made Huram a mason instead of a merchant,” Queen Remeg told Yetzer later, as they sat on the beach awaiting the tide’s retreat.

  Following his reception, the queen had joined Yetzer as he claimed his father’s body and ferried it to the burial ground on the mainland. Accompanied by a troop of servants and hired mourners, they’d removed the corpse from its cedar box and staked it, along with the clay jars that held Huram’s viscera, just above the low tide line. While the tidal flow covered the remains of Yetzer’s father, the servants stacked wood for a funeral pyre. Remeg shared with Yetzer a jar of wine and countless stories of her cousin Huram and their youthful adventures, of journeys by land and sea to the edges of the world.

  That island of Ilban-Ay lay far to the north of the Pillars of Melkart, which guarded the western gates of the Great Green Sea. The sailors of Tsur braved dangerous, years-long voyages to fetch from those distant shores the tin that made bronze of copper, along with ivory and waterproof pelts.

  “The priests there built a great stone circle,” Remeg continued. “Granite, mind you, not mere limestone or sandstone. As tall as four men and five times that across. As old as Kemet’s pyramids, and as perfect in its construction. If they could do that with tools of bone and flint and rock, your father decided there was no limit to what a real craftsman might be able to achieve.”

  The queen’s stories, more jars of wine, and platters of food sustained them through the long hours as the waters of the sea crept up the shoreline then retreated once more. When the tide dropped, Remeg and Yetzer recovered the water-logged body, the viscera having been lost to the sea.

  The lacquer used by Kemet’s mortuary priests proved mostly impervious to the water’s assault, but a few crabs managed to cut through the linen bands to the desiccated flesh beneath. Queen and craftsman gently shook off the creatures, which scuttled back to the lunging waves.

  Remeg commanded her servants to place the body upon the pyre, then she and Yetzer set torches to the pitch-soaked timbers. The fire quickly spread up and around the pyre, held back only by the moisture retained in the funeral bindings. Within a short time, the heat overcame even that, and the body traded its shroud of linen for one of flame.

  Fire leapt and danced and lapped at the swollen moon. Drums pounded, sistrums hissed, harps sang their lyrical melodies while servants swayed and spun before the pyre. The mourners sat on the border of firelight and darkness and scratched bloody trails across cheeks and breasts. The mournful song of their ululations joined the more festive music.

  When the flames had finished their feast, when only embers and sparks flew toward the heavens, Queen Remeg rose upon tottering legs and raised her bowl to the sky.

  “Hear me, Yam,” she called with a slurring tongue, “Inhabiter of the Deep. Hear me, Lord Hadad, Rider on the Clouds. We have entrusted to you the body of our friend and kinsman, Huram, son of Tudu-Baal, that wherever the sea meets the shore, wherever the wind blows, there the name of Huram shall be remembered.”

  The queen splashed wine toward the fire then drained her bowl. Yetzer staggered to his feet and copied the gesture. The beach shifted beneath him as he raised the bottom of his bowl toward the heavens. He fell to the sand on his backside, amid a chorus of cheers and laughter. His eye went unfocused and his eyelid fluttered.

  By the time Yetzer pried his eye back open, daylight shone upon the beach and a canopy fluttered above him. The cloth held out the sun’s assault, but the brilliant sky and flashes of light upon the waves sent lances of pain through his eye to the base of his neck. The tide crashed upon the shore as gulls screeched overhead.

  A churning in his belly overcame the ache in his head. Yetzer roll
ed over and pushed himself onto his knees. A spasm squeezed his stomach and several bowls’ worth of wine spilled onto the sand. The nausea left with the wine, but the pounding in his skull kept time with the crashing of the waves.

  “Drink this.”

  Yetzer squinted against the daylight to see Queen Remeg offering a small gourd bowl.

  “No more,” Yetzer said, waving a sand-encrusted hand in front of him.

  “Drink,” the queen insisted. “It’s only water.”

  Yetzer nodded and accepted the bowl. He raised it to his lips with unsteady hands. The cool water soothed his lips and tongue as he swirled it around his mouth. He spat and rinsed again before allowing a sip to carve out a path to his stomach. When he was sure his body would not rebel, he drank again and drained the bowl.

  Now able to look around without his head threatening to rupture, his eye settled on the smoking pile of scorched timbers that popped and hissed in the high tide. Men clad in thick leather aprons and gloves picked through the rubble. Occasionally, one of them would pull a slender, blackened object from the debris, rinse it in the surf, then place it in a tall, wide-mouthed jar set in the sand just above the tide line.

  “Come,” Lady Remeg said as she stood over Yetzer and offered him her hand. “Let us see your father to his rest.”

  She helped Yetzer to his feet. Another workman dashed from the waves, deposited his find in the jar, then resumed his search among the ashes. Yetzer followed Remeg toward the jar, but retreated a couple of steps. Resting in the sand was a skull, set atop a pelvic bone. Empty eye sockets stared toward the city across the channel, teeth set in a grim smile.

  The queen tugged Yetzer’s hand and he stepped closer to the jar. It had been nearly ten years since his father’s death, but a fresh wave of grief surged through him. Huram, so tall, so strong, so commanding in life, was reduced to a jumble of bone that weighed little more than the great stone maul he’d once used to ply his trade.

  Yetzer peered into the jar. The long arm and leg bones stood within the container, surrounded by jutting ribs and a collection of smaller bones. Recalling his studies in the Hall of the Body at Amun’s temple, Yetzer identified plate-like shoulder blades and knobby vertebrae among the bones of fingers and toes.

  Another worker dropped a few more scraps into the jar, and Yetzer looked up to see the rest of the men standing in a row.

  “Is it complete?” Remeg asked him.

  Yetzer looked more closely, estimated the number and types of bones, then nodded. The queen reached into a pocket of her robe, pulled out a handful of copper rings, and placed one into the outstretched hand of each of the workers. The men smiled and nodded their thanks, then hurried along the beach in the direction of the mainland village.

  “Let us give him rest,” Remeg said solemnly. She pointed to a steep mound higher up the beach where the tool chest Yetzer had brought from Pharaoh’s tomb rested beside a bucket of pitch and a short wooden shovel. Yetzer stooped down to retrieve the pelvis and skull.

  Blood rushed to his head. Stars flashed around the edges of his vision and a high-pitched whine flooded his ears. He fell to the sand upon hands and knees and found himself nose to nose socket with his father’s skull.

  Yetzer squeezed his eye closed to clear his vision. Behind his eyelid and through his empty left eye the skull transformed. Muscle, sinew, and flesh blossomed upon the soot-stained bone. Grinning teeth disappeared behind stern lips, and the empty sockets filled with penetrating green orbs.

  The enlivened head retreated enough for Yetzer to see his father completely restored, his lambskin apron about his waist, tools in his hands. Two figures stood beside him, shadowed and hazy as in a fog.

  Huram raised the maul in his right hand and pointed the chisel at Yetzer with his left. His lips parted in speech, but the ringing in Yetzer’s ears masked the words. A muscled arm swung the maul and struck the head of the chisel a mighty blow. The sound of the impact rang clear and bright and louder than a thousand trumpet blasts.

  Yetzer jerked back. His eye opened, vision and hearing instantly cleared. The charred skull sat before him, stark and lifeless. The queen again pulled Yetzer to his feet, making a small sound of reprimand. She left him wobbling, picked up the remaining bones and shoved them toward him. Still unsteady, Yetzer took them, nestled the pelvis among the bones in the jar, then crowned them with the skull.

  He picked up the jar and followed Remeg to the dune. She pointed at a wooden plug and the bucket of pitch. Yetzer understood she meant for him to seal the jar. He nodded and set the urn in the sand. Before closing the jar, he opened the tool chest and retrieved his father’s apron. Yetzer kissed the Udjat of Haru upon the lambskin, then rolled up the apron. He tucked it among Huram’s remains and sealed them away.

  The earth readily gave way to the shovel’s blade. Yetzer hadn’t dug far before he found another burial urn. He cleared a space beside it and settled his father’s remains next to the stranger who would be his last companion.

  Words fled Yetzer’s lips. It seemed he should say something, offer a blessing to send his father to his rest. In the place of benediction, his heart echoed with silence as the sands of this foreign homeland swallowed the vestiges of his past.

  40

  Yetzer

  Clouds filled the sky, low and rumbling. While the members of the caravan scrambled to set up their tents, Yetzer knelt alone atop a hill, sheltered from the pelting rain by the branches of an ancient walnut tree. A few of the caravanners, whom Yetzer had joined at Tsur, shouted and beckoned him to them, but he paid no heed. Instead, he laid his hands atop the lid of his father’s tool chest and raised his face to the sky.

  “I am Yetzer abi-Huram,” he shouted, “Beloved of Djehuti, Friend of Pharaoh, Adept of Amun. But I was born of the soil of Kenahn, and I have returned to the land of my fathers.”

  The sky flashed and thundered in response. His father had often spoken of the Kenahni gods’ sky dance. In Kemet, Yetzer had known only earthbound water, drawn from wells or the ever-flowing Iteru. He sometimes wondered if his father’s tales of water falling from the skies were meant to ensnare a boy’s imaginings. As the sky fell and the earth trembled with the gods’ power, it seemed Huram had been sparing in his stories.

  Yetzer grasped the lid of the chest more tightly. The box was made in the Kemeti fashion, inscribed with magical spells to guard the tools inside. Gold-leafed wooden statues of the vulture form of the goddess Mut and the falcon-god Khonsu spread their protecting wings over the lid. Between them, the gold inlay of the dot-and-circle symbol of the great god Amun shone with splendor. Yetzer invoked the gods’ aegis upon himself as well. Even as he whispered the silent prayer, Amun’s sign seemed to grow brighter. The hair on Yetzer’s arms and neck bristled as power filled the air. His heart went still, and even the muddy puddles were frozen with concentric ripples. Raindrops hung as from invisible threads. A cold rippling sensation rose up Yetzer’s spine and crawled over his scalp before the sky, the horizon, the world flashed white.

  What might have been a moment or a day later, Yetzer opened his eye to find himself upon the sodden ground beneath the tree’s smoldering branches. Half of the gnarled trunk hung drunkenly from raw, woody tendrils. Cold fire, liquid light danced across Mut’s and Khonsu’s wings and over Yetzer’s hands, a white nimbus that slowly faded from sight.

  Strong hands grasped him by the shoulders and helped him to sit up. Yetzer was slow to recognize Eliam, a Habiru merchant who had befriended him. The ringing in his ears blocked out the man’s speech, but Yetzer thought he recognized the word fool on the older man’s lips.

  When the storm passed and folk ventured out from their tents, many shared Eliam’s opinion. Marked by the gods, others claimed. Perhaps both. Yetzer knew only that he had stood before Baal Hadad, Rider on the Clouds. He had been rinsed of the taint of Kemet and the River Iteru, purified by water and fire to rise a son of Kenahn. He cut a length of wood from the lightning-split trunk to make a staff, a re
minder of the god’s blessing.

  A few days later, staff in hand, dressed in the striped woolen robe of Kenahn rather than the priestly linen of Kemet, he stood before the hill of Danu. In this northernmost town of Yisrael, Yetzer hoped to find his mother.

  At the heart of her tribe’s lands, the city stood in the shadows of Kenahn’s snow-tipped mountains where spring waters, snowmelt and frequent rains gathered to make the lands green. Here, too, met the trade routes of the Great Green Sea Road and the King’s Highway, which carried goods, armies, and wanderers among the world’s empires.

  “Safe journey,” Yetzer said as he clasped the merchant’s arm.

  “Havah smile upon you,” Eliam replied.

  Eliam, his son Abram, and a handful of travelers would be taking the southern road toward their homes in Yisrael, while others would take the eastern road to distant Subartu. Still others might venture to lands even farther removed, though Yetzer doubted the tales of golden temples set on mountains so high they pierced the sky.

  He took the reins of his donkey, laden with his tool chest, and led it up the winding road of Danu’s hill.

  “State your merchandise and your trade,” a man ordered him from behind a low table.

  “I am no trader. I am Yetzer abi-Huram, son of the widow Dvora of the tribe Naftali, clan of Yetzer.”

  The man’s rodent-like eyes narrowed to slits. “Dvora has no son. He died with his father in Kemet.”

  “True enough,” Yetzer said with a smile, then planted his hands on the table and leaned close to the man. “I got better. Where is my mother?”

  “I don’t know Dvora,” the man stammered.

  “You know of her dead husband and once-dead son, but you don’t know of her?” Yetzer brought his nose to within a finger’s breadth of the other man’s. “Where is she?”

  “Y-you must speak with Governor Rakem.”

  “Where?” Yetzer demanded.

  With a trembling hand, the man pointed through the gateway. “Beyond the courtyard, before the high place.”