Ahab was constantly finding himself amazed by his bride. He had married her for her physical attractions alone, heightened by the memory of a night spent in her embraces; now he was learning that she was more than a sensualist, that she had a keen mind, quick to leap to judgment, alert to seize at weakness.
Already, she had captivated the cities of Israel by her beauty. The people delighted in her loveliness which she enhanced by the arts of her exotic Tyrian garb, in her generosity which prompted her to unlock the coffers carried on great wagons in the rear of their cortege and to distribute handfuls of silver shekels to the screaming, laughing crowds. The merchants she charmed by her knowledge of their problems, suggesting that they form a private army with which to patrol the caravan routes against robbers and promising to use what influence she might have with Omri to lessen their taxes.
Now she was demonstrating that she understood statehood.
“Leave someone with me you can trust to follow you swiftly and without pause. Zubral, perhaps, who is captain of your guards, or even Aael.”
Ahab nodded. “Rael, then. I’ll need to arrange military matters while I see to the burial of my father and Zubral will be a help.”
No expression touched her face, but inwardly Jezebel laughed. She could have told him which man he would choose to take, which man to leave behind. There had been no need for her even to hint. She would have hugged herself with glee if she had not been so concerned with decorum. This big husband of hers could be managed very easily.
She waited there in the hot sunlight while he called his orders. He came back to her, the white mare dancing sideways, and leaned from the saddle to kiss her pouting lips. Then he backed away, waved an arm and toed the Sheban horse to a gallop.
Jezebel waited until Ahab was a dust cloud to the north.
Then she turned on a cushion and fell sprawling.
Voices cried out in horror. She heard the pound of feet.
Hands were under her arms, lifting her up. She had a brief glimpse of Rael’s tight face, white and drawn, before her head rolled back and she let herself relax more fully into his arms. He held her easily—she was pleasantly surprised at the strength of his slim body—as he carried her toward her litter.
As he put her on the cushions, he said to a man at his back, “I’ll have to examine her. I don’t think she’s too badly hurt, but I want to be sure. Break out the tent. We’ll camp here.”
Rael slipped inside the litter and drew the brocade curtains for privacy. Never before had he been so close to Jezebel. The golden draperies through which the sun shone with an aureate lustre seemed to bound an entire world in which he and this woman were the only inhabitants. His heart was slamming so loudly he could hear its muffled thuds. His forehead glistened with sweat.
He fought to control his muscles.
His hands were shaking fitfully when he stretched them out to the slim white leg bared from red leather sandal to her upper thigh. There was a scratch of blood on the knee, no more; it glistened red and evil against the white skin. His mouth opened. He placed his parted lips to the little wound and drew at it hungrily.
“Oh,” murmured Jezebel.
Rael whispered against her skin, “Sometimes there is infection when the cut touches dirt. Why this should be I do not know, yet it is so. I’ll draw the diseased blood—if there is any—into my mouth.”
He bent to her again and put his palms on her thighs as if to hold her leg motionless. He touched her not as a physician but as a lover, with gentle reverence, and he made a caress of his touching. Jezebel shivered suddenly and moaned.
“Your hands are trembling,” she breathed.
“I have never put hands on a queen before,” he answered. “I am afraid.”
She smiled and put her hands over his. “They are cold, too. Perhaps the physician is in need of his own counsel. Here, let me warm them.”
She drew his fingers upward toward the opening of her embroidered tunic. It was a garment designed to copy the peplos of the Mycenaeans, its linen so sheer that where the diffused sunlight touched it, it seemed to shimmer and vanish. As he looked along her bared thigh, Rael could see the inner slopes of her breasts where the garment had pulled apart.
Jezebel held his wrists in her clutching fingers, lifting his hands to the parting tunic. A moment she paused, smiling into his flushed face, then placed his palms on her breasts.
They were full and ripe, soft yet growing harder as his fingers closed about them. It seemed to Rael that all time hung suspended before the tactile delights of his hands. Her lips fell open to aid her deep breathing and her cheeks were flushed. Lazily she squirmed, making her breasts move in his palms, adding to his pleasure.
“Your hands are warm now,” she whispered.
Before the steady gaze of her eyes and the command in her voice, he let his fingers trail away from her bared breasts, down across her body to her thighs. Now he caressed her tenderly, all pretence gone, and bent to kiss her flesh.
Jezebel smiled. Ahab was her husband, her king. Rael would be her slave.
5.
Since the time of Solomon, Megiddo had been a royal stronghold, an armed fortress fitted out with stables and stalls to house war horses and chariots. In his day, Solomon had brought horses from Egypt to breed and multiply, the finest mares and stallions in his world, paying one hundred and fifty shekels for each animal; with them he had bought chariots, paying six hundred shekels for each one of those light, strong battle-carts.
In the sixty years since Solomon had died, the Egyptian horses had multiplied until now they numbered into the thousands. Israelite craftsmen had copied the Egyptian war chariots, handcrafting them almost as swiftly as they could work adze and awl. The chariot forces of King Ahab made a mobile army which could travel swiftly and easily in any direction.
“But how swiftly?” Ahab asked.
His guards captain could not answer his question. Perhaps no man alive could do that; his chariots must be tested in battle before any judgment could be made on them. Ahab paced the hot spring sunlight, head bared to its heat, clad in iron armor fitted with golden crescents, his feet kicking up puffs of dust at every stride.
The border guards on the northern strip of Israel, that curved northward from the Kishon River and Mount Carmel all the way to Mount Hermon and then down to Judah by way of Dan and the Sea of Chinnereth, reported large bodies of Aramaean horsemen along the border. They trotted back and forth, staring across the river waters into Israel, but they made no hostile move.
For two months they had patrolled the lands of Geshur and Bashan where they touched against Israel, ever since Omri had died in his sleep in his palace at Samaria. Like vultures hovering in the sky above a weak man crawling on the ground, their shadow lay over young King Ahab.
He wanted to hit back, but what man could fight a shadow? He knew that an attack would come. He did not know where, could not know until it was begun. And once under way, it might be too late to defeat.
For the first time in his life, Ahab understood what it meant to be a king. He had seen his father pacing the palace gardens, brows furrowed with worry, but in his youth he had not dreamed that where Omri walked, he too would walk one day. He understood it now. Ah, how well he understood!
He beat his fist upon the curving handrail of an unharnessed chariot. Desperately, he wished that Jehu had not gone to Babylon. He would have put him in charge of the army, let him stake out his patrols, be responsible for the warning and the defense of the country.
Without Jehu, he must stand alone.
Zubral was no help. His eyes slid sideways