“Does it matter?” he wondered. “You’re a woman, I’m a man. We are together in the gardens of your love goddess. Worship her with me.”
Her fingers caught his thick hair and held his head motionless above her belly. “You are wise with the wisdom of Solomon, as you say. To get what you want you tempt me with my own religious beliefs. Ah, but you! Isn’t it a sin for you to forsake Yahweh in order to slake your desire in the body of a Phoenician girl?”
“I am a prince,” he told her.
Her strength was as nothing against his heavily muscled frame. She was further weakened by laughter. Fingers tangled in his hair, she drew his mouth to the pouting nipples of her breasts, held him to his devotions while her hips squirmed lazily.
“As you say, you are a prince. And I—what shall I be after this night?”
“What greater rank can you have than that of goddess?”
A sullen roar seemed to be his answer. It came from the direction of the royal harbor. The woman drew strength from it, half sitting up and listening with her head tilted to one side. Ahab saw her ripe red mouth parted expectantly, felt her breast move against his cheek as she breathed in and out with excitement.
“Can you make out what they say?” she panted.
“Something about a new king in Phoenicia.”
“Ahab! Is that right? Are you sure? Listen again!”
To humor her, he drew away and concentrated. Yes, he could hear their words now, the words they shouted to the night sky. Ithobaal! Ithobaal was king in Phoenicia. The tyrant Phales was dethroned! The attack of the palace was a success. The king had been dragged screaming from his sleeping covers where he had hidden himself, to form a human pincushion for the spears of the rebels. Ithobaal ruled in Tyre!
He could make out the screams of women.
“Phales’ wives and concubines,” breathed the girl beside him. Her hand dug into his arm so tightly her silvered nails were drawing blood. “They will be raped to death before the goddess!”
Ahab growled in his throat. She turned an amused face to him. “It is the unwritten law of the conqueror. An old law, true—but one which Ithobaal decided to uphold. He wants no unborn child of Phales to rise in later life and plague him.”
He nodded grimly, saying, “Such was the law in the old, old days. Things are different now. We are barbarians no longer.”
She sank her teeth in his earlobe. “We are still barbarians here in Tyre. Tonight, you will be glad of it. Come with me to the Temple. I want to see what happens to proud Shubadad who was queen in Phoenicia before Phales lost his crown.”
He might have refused, might have pulled her down to slake his flesh hunger on her body but there was an excitement about this woman that was like heady wine. Soft, warm, fragrant, her skin smooth to the touch of his hand, she was an allurement he could not resist.
“All right,” he nodded, lifting her to her feet. “Show the way.”
She ran ahead of him along the garden walks—while outside the tumult of the crowd and the screams of the terrified women were growling louder—toward the columned portico of the Temple of Astarte. Ahab found himself caught up in the excitement that flushed her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle.
He gave no thought to the fact that this was a pagan temple, forbidden to him as a worshipper of Yahweh. All he saw was a naked woman under a thin black robe through which he could see plumply quivering buttocks, and when she turned to urge him onward, the bouncing of her ripened breasts. She waited for him before a blue door on which was set the carving of the wheat sheaves which were sacred to the god.
When he came up to her, she moved against him, clutching his shoulders with her arms, her open mouth lifting to his own. He held her, shuddering in the passion that gripped him. For this woman, he would dare anything. All she need do was beckon.
“Come quickly,” she called, catching his hand.
They ran side by side into the darkness of the great colonnade and up a flight of stone steps to a gallery that bordered one side of the temple. Below them in the vast open space before the goddess, men and women were thronging, crying out as the doors opened to reveal armed men in bloodstained mail shirts, their metal caps awry on their heads, as they came forward into the candlelit Room of Altars. They moved forward between the golden pillars past the great ablution bowl in a shouting wave, carrying four helpless females to the gigantic block of obsidian that was the Altar of the Gods.
Ahab stood by the rail, the woman holding him by his arm, staring down in horrified fascination. Two women were being dragged forward between the opening ranks of jeering soldiers, together with two young girls. They had been stripped naked in the palace, he assumed. All the way from the dock-side quays, over the city cobblestones, they had been forced to walk on bare feet. Now their feet left bloody stains after them as they were pushed forward to the altar.
They were not screaming now; their throats were raw and painful. All they could do was roll wild eyes at the grinning men hemming them in. Hands clutched at their loins and their breasts. Voices cried out lewd invitations to them.
The woman in his arm stirred expectantly. Her breath was coming fast and her hips quivered where they pressed into him. “Proud Shubadad,” she whispered. “She who was queen in Phoenicia.”
Ahab stared down at a struggling, writhing woman whose face was streaked with tears and grime. Her hair had become disarranged during the nightmarish walk from the harbor but it showed traces of the gold dust that had powdered it and a few chains still gleamed between her thick black hairs. The greedy hands that had snatched her jewels and garments from her had left her little else.
She mewled in terror as rough hands dragged her to the altar, struggling weakly and crying out against her degradation. Her eyes sought the ivory and gold statue of the goddess looming tall and gigantic in the torchflame and incense smoke rising from the tripods.
“Mercy, great Astarte. Mercy!” she screamed.
A row of priestesses stirred at her words. The foremost of them, a tall woman in a high tiara wound about with jeweled ropes, lifted her arms, palms outward. This was the high priestess, she who officiated at all the sacrificial ceremonies.
“Who is this who comes before me?”
“Shubadad, queen of Phoenicia,” the woman panted.
“No longer queen,” a man bellowed. “Phales is dead by twenty spears. Shubadad is here to be sacrificed that the rule of Ithobaal may be a good one.”
The throng pressed closer, roaring. Unseeingly the priestess stared out over their heads. “Shubadad is no longer queen in Tyre. Let her make sacrifice to the goddess.”
Triumphant laughter rose into the vaulted ceiling. Shubadad screamed, mouth open, muscles strutted against the arms that held her, that turned her across the altar. Ahab saw her legs lifted before she was almost buried by the men crowding about the great high altar.
Shubadad screamed and screamed.
The young woman pressed her buttocks back against him, moved them gently. She whispered a command. Ahab put his hand to her robe and parted it.
“Yes,” she whispered, “yes, Ahab, prince of Israel. Take me now, for I am Jezebel, daughter of Ithobaal—and this night I am a princess, heiress to the kingdom of Phoenicia.”
He gasped in surprise and at the insane pleasure of her flesh. Below them, they were bringing forward the sister of Phales and his two young daughters, throwing them to the ground and falling on them. It was a scene of nightmare, Ahab thought, though only briefly, for he was too concerned with his own delight to be philosophical. Vaguely he felt disgust at what he witnessed but it was a disgust that excited the primal instincts that are in every man.
This