Sunrise on the Mediterranean (61 page)

“S
HALL WE TRY AGAIN
? H.,” the note said.

RaEm shuddered, remembering how confused they had gotten in the tunnels last night, wandering like lost souls through the
pits of the afterlife. Then they had found themselves atop the whole city, looking down on the pitiful little sheds the tribesmen
built, from the position of their pathetic tent to their god.

RaEm didn’t blame their god for not coming to this city. It smelled like trees, there was no river, no richness to the air,
no refreshment for the eye. It was crowded and tall. Did she want to go back into the tunnels and see the gold? Aye, she needed
to. Any day now she would hear from Egypt. They would want to know how long the crown prince would be away on his “diplomatic
tour.”

Any day she would hear her beloved was dead.

She looked at the slave. “Tell your Zakar Ba’al that I will join him later.”

He bowed and left. Shivering in her linen shirt and kilt, RaEm stared out at the green trees, the brown hills, and the gray
sky. She had to get gold from Dadua, but how? Her finger traced the shape of her leg up her thigh to her seat of pleasure.
Sex had always worked before. In fact, she had entranced the pharaoh of Egypt. The king of a mudhill should be an easy task.

Except I don’t want him, RaEm thought, hiding her face in her linens. Why did Akhenaten send me away? Why did he make me choose?
As the first gentle shower fell on the foreign terrain of Tziyon, RaEm cried herself to sleep.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
we were all grouped in the sukkah again. We had eaten a little faster tonight, with less wine and conversation. N’tan rose,
tugging at his beard. “What was our downfall in the desert?” he asked us.

“We forsook Shaday!”

“We forgot who rescued us from the Egyptians!”

N’tan watched us. Apparently no one had gotten it right yet. “What did our forefathers do?”

“We made a graven image,” Dadua said.

N’tan glanced at the king. “
Ken
, we crafted an image of gold, called it our god. To it we attributed our salvation, our freedom. We made it with our hands.”

The artist in me perked up. This was always an interesting point in art history. Neither the Jews nor the Muslims went in
for reproductions of people or animals. Why was that?

N’tan paced a moment, tugging at his beard. “The Pelesti, they worship who?”

“Dagon, Ashterty.”

“
Ken.
The Amori, who do they worship?”

The men spat on the floor. “They serve Molekh.”

“
Ken.
What is Dagon ruler of?” the
tzadik
asked.

“The sea? Is that not why his manhood is made into a fish?” someone said.

“Perhaps he is fish to protect himself from Sodomi-style love!” The men laughed uproariously, then trailed off under N’tan’s
gaze.

I felt myself growing angry. They ridiculed what they didn’t know.
Then again, Chloe, Dagon is an idol, he’s not real, and he is depicted as a fish. Where is the cause for seriousness there?
Why would you grow offended?
I looked over at Cheftu, intently focused on his papyrus, his quill moving over the page.

“And Ashterty?” N’tan asked. “
Ach!
That lovely goddess fosters love,” the Klingon
gibori
said. “She makes the fields grow.” I recalled that someone had said he was from Hatti. They worshiped Ashterty there also.
How did he get here?

“So what if there is a drought?” N’tan asked. “No rain. What do the Pelesti and Amori do?”

“Ask for more, sacrifice more? Try to get the gods’ attention?” someone said.

“
Ken.
But do their gods control
haYam?
The rain? Can they decide to move or do something?” N’tan asked. There was a pause.

“Uh,
lo.”

“Why is that?”

“They are stone,” someone in the back said.

N’tan was standing before us, his eyes closed. He looked like a third-grade teacher whose students insisted Santa Claus would
come to the Christmas party. We weren’t getting it. Even with, or maybe especially with, a twentieth-century perspective,
I wasn’t understanding.

“
Ken.
Stone,” he said. “Then what is Shaday?”

It was quiet for a long time. What was he asking? What substance was God composed of? What kind of question was that? I looked
over to Cheftu. He was watching N’tan, a faint frown between his brows.

“Invisible,” Dadua finally said.

I was beginning to understand why he was king; he did know all the answers.

“Why are we forbidden to make an image of him?” N’tan asked.

“Because we don’t know what he looks like?” one of the female
gibori
said.

“
Lo.
Because we could only represent certain parts of him. Not the whole of him, so the image would be a lie,” N’tan explained.

“Why?” Cheftu asked. “Because it would be incomplete,” N’tan said. “What is Shaday?”

Well, if he were invisible, then maybe N’tan wasn’t looking for a composition question.

“Defender of Y’srael, our Yahwe war god,” Avgay’el said in her soft voice. She was weak, fragile, but she was sharp, apparently
in tune with God.

“
Nachon.
How would we make an image of that?” N’tan asked.

He was asking us to make an idol? Representing God as an image? Reverse psychology this early in history?

“Uh, a hand?” the answer came from the back.

N’tan shrugged. “So we worship a stone hand?”

They laughed, but it was uneasy, uncertain laughter. His point was coming clear.

“We could show him as master of Tziyon?” someone volunteered.

“How?”

A younger
gibori
stood up. He was trembling so that his side curls seemed to be dancing. “We could form him as a miniature of Har Mori’a?
Coated in gold.”

“A blob of gold would be our God?” someone else shouted in surprise. The boy blushed while his compatriots gibed at him.

“How about a symbol, some letters?” someone said. “Saying what?”

“His name,” came from the back, from the shadows. “We do not use his name,” N’tan said, peering into the darkness. “He is
God. To use his name would be to have power over him.”

“You claim he used a name when you confronted the Egyptians?” Cheftu said. How he could listen and write, I had no idea. But
he was right; that was the claim. RaEm, however, should have made it. She wasn’t here. I wondered if she expected us to deliver
her food to her tonight? She could just starve, I decided.

N’tan responded. “It is how we are to call him, it is the closest to a name we come. It is not his name, however. We do not
know it. We know only I AM.”

It fell completely silent. “There are two reasons we have no images of Shaday,” he said. “
Echad:
Because we cannot accurately or completely portray him. Not in letters, or in symbols, or through the finest craftsmanship.
Even the Seat of Mercy is merely the footstool of Shaday.” He held out his hand. “The second reason is more elemental. We
are to be a people who listen, not who see.”

“C
AN’T YOU HEAR THEM
?” Hiram asked. RaEm stifled a yawn. They had been crawling through the passageways beneath the city. It was rotted with tunnels
and paths made by the many peoples who had lived here before.

One could get from the palace to the threshing floor, or from the well chamber to the marketplace. People had openings into
their homes and shops of which even they were unaware.

The two royals sat in the darkness, catching their breath before they explored the passageways in the palace. Dadua stored
his wealth in the rock, Hiram said.

“So you do this for the city,” RaEm said softly. “The Highway of Kings?”

“Aye, I do. That and another reason.”

“The scribe, Chavsha?” she guessed.

“Aye.”

RaEm scratched at her bound hair. “You never shared how you came to know him, want him with this consuming passion.”

“I didn’t.”

“Nay.” It was silent for a while. Should she tell the enigmatic ruler that she had had “Chavsha” many times? That she had
taken him first? She remembered the flash of Hiram’s furious black eyes when she’d mentioned an Egyptian scribe before. Better
not. “We have time now.”

Dion exhaled. “I met him when I was young.”

“You are young yet,” RaEm said. “Were you a child?” His laugh was bittersweet. “In the deepest sense of the word, aye, I was
a child. Cheftu, Chavsha,
aii
, he was such a man … such an impressive man.”

Attractive, aye, RaEm thought. Gifted, certainly. But impressive? The man had no power, no throne, no gold. What could be
so desirable? “But he was married?”

Hiram was quiet again. RaEm prompted him. “It is a complex tale,” he said. “Nothing is as simple as it appears.”

“This is something I can understand,” she said with a laugh.

He looked at her. “Your face is quite familiar to me, though not with those eyes.”

“Indeed?”

“It was the face of my aunt, Sibylla. The same aunt who wedded Cheftu.”

RaEm smiled. “Sibylla. You called me that before, though I did not recognize it was a name.”

“That was when I knew that somehow you were no longer that green-eyed witch.”

“
Aii
, are you referring to Cheftu’s wife?”

“He likes green-eyed women, apparently. His new wife is the same.”

She burst out laughing; he didn’t know that Chloe was still here? Was the man blind?

“What makes you laugh, Pharaoh?” he asked. “If you tell me your secrets, then I will share mine,” RaEm offered. “However,
if you choose not to, I will keep them to myself.”

She felt his gaze on her face, then finally he spoke “We are tools for each other. There is no need for confidences.”

You will be sorry for that, she thought. How easy I could make it for you to have your lover. “As you will it,” she said.

“Shall we see Dadua’s treasure room now?”

“H
EARING, NOT SEEING
,” N’tan continued. “That is how we are to live.”

Was this true? I looked toward Cheftu, to see his reaction. His expression was frozen as he wrote, taking down the
tzadik
’s words.

N’tan had our attention. “The first man and woman, where were they?” he asked.

“In a garden.”

“
Ken.
What happened at eve each day?”

“Shaday would walk with them, talk to them.”

“
Ken.
Your parents have taught you well the Sages’ words.
Ach
, so then what did the Sages say about how Shaday looked?” N’tan asked.

We said nothing. There was no description of God in the Bible, I was fairly certain of that.

“What does it say about his words?” N’tan asked after a moment.

“His words created the world. Separated light from dark, the sea from the air,” Avgay’el answered.

“
Nachon.
His words.” N’tan let this sink in for a while. I was no longer looking down on these ignorant soldiers; I didn’t get the
point, either. “How did the Sages teach these words? How did they teach the first story of creation?”

There was silence. “These stories have been taught only to those who know the letters, who can read. Why is this?”