David Ascendant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 7) (26 page)

The city of Gath was the earliest Philistine settlement in Canaan. It had a large urban populace on one hundred and twenty-five square miles of land. As the furthest inland stronghold, nearest the Valley of the Terebinth, it maintained a strong siege system that made it impregnable to hostile forces. The walls were thirty feet high, surrounded by a man-made siege trench and an earthen embankment called a “berm” that made approach to the walls by besiegers extremely difficult. It was guarded by a threefold entrance gate to the city, watched over by a regiment of Gittite warriors.

All this fortification would be useless against the six figures who rode their horses to the city entrance. They would not be besieging the walls, and they would not be fighting the army of Gittites. They were simply nomadic travelers on a personal quest. They did not hide themselves, because they were not recognizable to any human inhabitants.

They were archangels.

Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, Saraqael, Raguel, and Remiel walked their horses through the large Phoenician carved gates and into the city. They made no attempt to disguise themselves from the gods of the Philistines because they wanted the gods to know they had arrived.

They wanted a showdown.

They quartered their horses and found a tavern in which to gather, eat, and spread some gossip.

              • • • • •

“What are we going to do?” cried Molech. He trembled with fear and wished he was back in the Hinnom Valley playing with his children.

“Shut your disgusting mouth, mole,” spit Asherah. They stood in the large secret cavern carved out of the rock fifty feet beneath the temple of Dagon. Dagon and Ba’alzebul watched Asherah walk up to the rock wall where they had fastened Mikael’s body. Or rather, where they had fastened the parts of Mikael’s body.

When they had ambushed Mikael in the Valley of Hinnom, Ba’alzebul had fallen with him some two hundred feet to the valley floor where all Mikael’s bones had been shattered. Ba’alzebul was also incapacitated in the fall, but because he used Mikael’s body as a cushion, and because he had a much stronger bodily structure, he had healed more quickly and was ready for action.

But before Mikael could heal to move at all, they had him drawn and quartered. All four of his limbs were severed from his body, and he was beheaded. As an angel, he could not die, but this was surely a living hell as they pinned all his body parts spread out on the wall so he could look helplessly down upon them and their mockery.

Asherah looked into Mikael’s eyes.

He could not respond verbally because his head was severed from his voice box and lungs, which were separated from each other by about six feet, like a sick spread-out puzzle. But he could watch her and hear their discussion.

Ba’alzebul said, “The only time all of them came together like this was to take back the body of Moses from Mastema.”

Molech said, “I think they plan much more than retrieving the prince of Israel here. I think they came to bind us into the earth.”

“Of course, you idiot,” said Asherah.

“But why do they not hide themselves?” said Dagon.

Ba’alzebul said, “They want us to stand and fight.”

“And why not?” said Asherah. “We are in our stronghold, we are empowered by the Philistines.”

“We are confident,” added Ba’alzebul. “Presumptuous. So we will be reckless.”

“Exactly,” said Asherah. “If they can deliver this blow to us now, they will control all of Canaan. Which we cannot allow. So we will run.”

“Like cowards?” worried Dagon.

“Like insurgents,” said Asherah. “Look at the Amalekites. They were almost wiped out. But their few roaming hordes have become a terror to the Israelites, because they cannot be targeted in a specific location. They hit and they run, and Israel has nowhere to respond or retaliate. In our fortified Philistine cities, the archangels know exactly where we are, and what we are doing in our temples. And they can come get us whenever they want. Because they know where we are. As they do this very moment.”

The other gods nodded with understanding.

Asherah added, “It is time we become more mobile.”

              • • • • •

The cloudy, starless night hid well the six shadows that descended upon the temple of Dagon. The four guards were taken out easily and the six archangels slipped inside the large stone edifice of idolatry.

They made their way through the pillared hall with swords and battle axes drawn.

Within moments, they were through the sanctuary tunnel way and headed down into the cavern below the altar.

But the gods were gone.

“Deplorable,” said Uriel, gazing upon the dismembered body parts of his brother archangel on the wall.

They carefully took down the arms, legs, torso and head of Mikael and reattached them like a human anatomy puzzle.

Uriel said, “Why would they have left all of him here for us to find and heal?” Uriel remembered all too terribly when he had been decapitated by Anu in the primeval city of Uruk. Anu had kept Uriel’s head separated from his body so that the angel could not heal and fight them.

Gabriel said, “They must have wanted us to find him.”

Raphael said, “But they did not want us to follow them, as we would have, had they taken part of his body.” The angels had done so in the past when Ishtar had cut Gabriel in half and threw his legs into the Abyss.

“Which means we should follow them,” said Uriel. “But where?”

It would take some time for his organic tissue to reconnect, including his voice box. But Mikael could not wait for that healing. His hand wrote out on the sandy floor, “Ashkelon.”

Ashkelon was the Philistine port city on the coast eighteen miles west-southwest from Gath. The gods Dagon, Asherah, Ba’alzebul and Molech arrived there early afternoon the next day. They knew the time was short before the archangels would find them.

Ashkelon was the oldest and largest seaport in Canaan. As one of the cities of the Philistine pentapolis, it supported a thriving import and export maritime trade. Its populace, about fifteen thousand people, lived on one hundred and fifty acres, surrounded by a mile and a half of brick wall fifty feet high and fifteen feet thick
.

It was built on a large sandstone outcropping and included a large port. A long, manmade jetty about fifty feet wide and several hundred feet long functioned as a breakwater and housed a sea temple of Dagon on its outer edge. Departing and arriving ships could look upon the large, open-air rotunda encompassed by a ring of pillars and say their prayers to Dagon for protection on the seas or thanks for deliverance from the waves.

Inside that temple area, the four gods engaged in a sorcery ritual led by Asherah. She stood completely naked on the carcass of a lion and held two strangled ibexes, one in each hand. She wore large wings made of vulture’s feathers on her back and a gem-laden horned headdress of deity. She was enacting her identity as “lord of the animals.”

Dagon and Ba’alzebul moved to get a better look at her naked genitalia. They dreamed of pulling off another gang rape of her. Molech was unconcerned. He cared nothing for mature flesh.

Asherah writhed and spoke forth incantations facing the sea that stretched out before her.

Behind her stood a five foot high golden “tree of life” that was an iconic metal casting of a trunk with eight branches, four on each side.

Dagon wore his fishy lower part for the ceremony. He achieved this by cutting the body of a large dolphin in half and sewing the tail over his legs. It was cumbersome and he wished he had never adopted the persona.

It had been a week since their narrow escape from the archangels at Gath, and it was time for their plan to unfold.

The gods were on the cusp of completing their ritual when the archangels hit them.

They had swum across the wharf area and slipped up the rocks to assault the gods from behind.

All seven burst in through the pillared open-air sanctuary, swords flashing.

The gods drew their weapons.

Dagon stuck his sword into his lower fishy half and cut it off with a swipe. He would not be hampered in battle.

Everyone paused for a moment. The four gods stood facing off against the seven archangels, each waiting for the other to make a move.

The mightiest of Yahweh’s heavenly host were here to bind the Watcher gods who would be fighting for their eternities. This was going to be brutal.

An earthquake rattled the foundation of the temple. Everyone had to catch their balance. Dust and debris fell from the cracks in the stone above their heads.

Asherah and the gods smiled.

The archangels realized it had been no earthquake. That was an announcement of the arrival of something. Something very huge.

Something from the depths of the sea.

The water behind the gods suddenly exploded upward with the form of the seven headed sea dragon of chaos: Leviathan. It burst out of the water and leapt over the manmade jetty that housed the temple.

Mikael, now healed, joined his fellow archangels for the fight. He saw the huge four hundred foot long serpentine body fly past them through the air. It landed on the wharf side with a huge splash that drenched everyone in the temple. Its double tail followed, with a swipe at the architecture.

It smashed half the structure, wiping it into the water with the force. Gods and angels fell beneath the debris of the other half collapsing on top of them.

When the dust settled, pieces of stone began to move as the warriors of both sides pulled themselves out from under the ruins. Two of the angels, Remiel and Saraqael, had been pinned beneath too many tons of rocks to free themselves. It made the numbers more equal than they had anticipated. One of the gods, Asherah, had been swept into the water by the tidal wave of force that washed over them. Dagon was on the shoreline, picking himself up, bruised and battered, but in one piece.

Uriel and Gabriel, always synchronized with each other, immediately picked up their weapons and leapt down to the water’s edge to engage Dagon.

Six heads erupted from the water with fangs flashing and mouths roaring. On the neck of one of them was Asherah, riding it like a steed. She pointed down at the approaching form of Mikael. The monster focused on the angel as a target. The sound of gurgling from deep within its bowels warned Mikael. He had been caught by this attack before, at the beach of Mount Sapan. He was not going to let it happen again. He dove behind a huge boulder as a stream of fire poured out from the dragon head and blackened the entire area of stone.

Another head reached down and Dagon leapt onto it, pulled away before Uriel and Gabriel could reach him.

Ba’alzebul and Molech dashed headlong at the seven heads. Ba’alzebul’s muscular form launched an amazing thirty feet to catch one of the gaping jaws as it swung past the rocks of the beach. Molech was not so glorious. He could only make a good twenty feet. It was not enough to reach his target. He landed in the water in a belly flop.

Uriel and Gabriel could not help but look at each other, smirking.

One of the dragon heads reached down and picked Molech out of the water with its teeth and placed him on the back of another neck.

The head that Ba’alzebul had caught had a sword stuck in the roof of its mouth, the hilt sticking out of its head. It was Gabriel’s sword, from their confrontation at Sapan generations earlier. Ba’alzebul pulled it from the creature’s mouth and swung around to mount its neck. He raised the sword high in victory, as all seven heads plunged back into the deep, carrying its four riders away from the grasp of the angels.

Mikael stepped down to the shoreline to stand by Uriel and Gabriel as Raphael and Raguel helped the trapped angels get free from the rocks.

They looked out onto the frothing, swirling waters left behind by the exit of the gargantuan and its riders. There was no way the archangels could ever chase that chaos monster.

“You have to hand it to that Asherah,” said Uriel. “She is one goddess with chutzpah, taking her chances with enchanting Leviathan.”

Gabriel added, “And I thought Ashtart was gutsy.”

“Ashtart cut your gut in half back at Mount Hermon,” said Uriel wryly. “If I had not found your legs in the waters of the Abyss you would have been a paraplegic until the Resurrection.”

Gabriel countered, “And I believe it was my trumpet call that saved your rear end against Ashtart’s undead at the battle of Edrei.”

“A trumpet call that you said yourself you learned from my use of it with the shades of Sheol,” said Uriel.

Mikael interrupted, “Do we have to listen to your bickering until the end of days?”

The others joined them at the shoreline.

Mikael took command. “The gods are not cowards. They have escaped today, but they will return. We must be ready for them.” He looked at Uriel and Gabriel. “You two squabblers try to gather intelligence on where they went. They will be much harder to catch if they become guerilla fighters.”

Raguel said, “Mastema has left Assyria in the hands of another. I am needed there.”

“And I at Babylon,” said Remiel.

“Where did Mastema go?” asked Gabriel.

“To the Italian peninsula,” said Raguel.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” complained Uriel. “That is a backwater of small Latin villages with undeveloped agriculture. There is no earthly power for him there.”

“Maybe that is why he wants it,” said Raphael, the angel who barely spoke. “He can build from the bottom up, and he can engage in his nefarious purposes unmolested for centuries.”

Mikael said, “We need to focus on what is happening right now in front of us. I will return to Israel with Raphael. The Rephaim forces are building and the Sons of Rapha have not slackened their pace in hunting down the messiah king.”

Saraqael said, “I am called to Syria. That will be Israel’s next trouble, Mikael. They are amassing quite a strength up north.”

“Well then,” said Mikael, “let us call upon the name of Yahweh Elohim and ask for strength to face what is coming.”