THE PROMISED WAR Read online

  “You said you were waiting for me your whole life. What did you mean?” he finally asked her.

  She looked at him curiously, and he realized that while she understood what he said, his accent had thrown her. It was clearly strange and exotic to her ears. He watched her fingers slide down the chain around her neck to the crescent moon lying on her right breast.

  “My grandmother, Rahab, gave this necklace to General Bin-Nun forty years ago when he spied out the land and stayed at our family’s inn,” she told him. “He wasn’t a general then, but young and handsome like you. And cut like you.”

  He realized she was talking about his circumcision. “And your family inn?”

  “Just an inn at the time,” she said. “Bin-Nun assured my grandmother that Moses and the Israelites were coming. She died still waiting. But she lived long enough to see the former Egyptian colonies in Canaan grow more tyrannical, our inn turn into a fertility temple and my mother forced into becoming a priestess. She was only a few years older than I am now when the priests of Molech told her she was getting too old to bless the land. They started me when I was eleven. I built the business, brought in the foreign traders, cut the deals with the priests and the king. Now I run all the girls here—and the officers of Reah too.”

  There was some pride in her voice, and Deker could only imagine the course she had had to navigate to achieve her pinnacle of power and influence.

  “Yet, you clung to your belief that one day another young Hebrew spy might show up at your doorstep?”

  “News of Bin-Nun’s victories in Moab in recent months and the fear gripping Reah told me as much. Your presence in my bed tells me that the attack is coming any day now. And my informants tell me Hamas has his men doing a house-to-house search for you and your comrade at this very moment.”

  Suddenly he felt extremely vulnerable, naked with this woman who held his life in the palm of her hand. Any second she could turn him over to Hamas or the troops searching for him throughout the city.

  “You know my name,” she asked him. “What’s yours?”

  “Samuel.”

  “Son of?”

  “My full name is Samuel Boaz Deker,” he told her, dispensing with pseudonyms or code names, since his name meant nothing in this world.

  She began to nod slowly. “That is very . . . Hebrew.”

  It was, and he had resented it as a child, sticking to “Sam Deker” to anyone who asked. “That’s what I am. A Jew.”

  It was the first time in his life that he had said it out loud to anybody, including himself. He had never hidden it nor been ashamed of his ethnic identity. He had certainly been reminded he was a Jew often enough by his nana with her Auschwitz tattoo, his parents and his peers in L.A. But he had never fully allowed himself to be defined by such an identity. He was always something else too. A Jewish American. A secular Jew. A Jew who didn’t look like a Jew, sound like a Jew or date many Jews. Never just “a Jew.”

  Yet, in this world, that’s exactly what he was and all that mattered to anybody that mattered: the Hebrews in Shittim and the Reahns in Jericho.

  Samuel Boaz Deker.

  Jew.

  “I see sadness around your eyes when you look at me, Samuel Boaz Deker,” she said. “I remind you of someone you lost.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you lose her?”

  “I killed her.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked at him curiously but without judgment.

  “It was an accident,” he told her quietly. “There was a bowl, like the one you keep your coins in on that table.”

  She glanced at the money bowl and then back at him, confused. “I think I misunderstand you.”

  He said nothing.

  “I have lost those I love too.” She was fingering his IDF dog tag. “My sisters. But it was no accident.”

  “Surely it couldn’t have been your fault, either.”

  He could feel her body tremble slightly in his arms. The scent of her hair smelled like pomegranates. For whatever reason, she was as racked with guilt over her sisters as he was over Rachel. Neither he nor she fully understood each other’s guilt. But Deker sensed they shared its depth, each in their own way, and so were linked together intimately and forever.

  Rahab knew it too.

  She began to trace the points of his Blazing Star with her finger, naming the six stars they represented: “Regulus, Altair, Eridani, Sirius, Arcturus, Ceti.”

  Deker rolled onto his back and looked up at the pergola. It was a square against the stars. He realized this was what she had seen every night, probably since she was eleven. The six stars formed a map of the heavens for the prophets.

  “See the constellation of the Hippopotamus?” she asked him, and pointed up to what he recognized as the Big Dipper. “She is the goddess of creation. Tell me what you see inside her womb.”

  He saw a bright star, Mizar. But next to it was the far fainter Alcor, barely visible to the naked eye. They were known as the Horse and Rider, and he knew that the ancient Romans in several centuries—and IDF millennia later—would test the eyesight of their troops by their ability to detect the two as separate stars.

  “I see twins,” he told her. “You call them Israel and Ishmael?”

  She smiled. “Half the archers see only the bigger star. Hamas puts them on spear duty on the lower north wall. The true marksmen he puts in the towers of the upper fortress wall. Our allies to the north and south think they have a range of three hundred cubits beyond the city wall. But Hamas has altered their bows and trained the archers to extend their range to almost five hundred cubits. Best if the Israelites keep that distance when they first surround our city.”

  Deker peered into her eyes. “Why are you divulging this information to me?”

  “Because the stars proclaim the birth of the king of Israel,” she told him. “The king of Reah and all his priests know it, and this is why they are desperate to stop you no matter what the cost.”

  Deker remembered Caleb’s instruction to gauge the morale of the Reahns. He resented that intrusion into this moment, but her question compelled his own.

  “So the people are scared?”

  “Ever since they heard how your god Yahweh dried up the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt forty years ago,” she told him. “But it’s what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings whom you utterly destroyed on the other side of the Jordan, that moved the noblemen to action. They sacked the previous commander of the army and brought in Hamas. Then they began a program to reinforce the fortifications and stockpile supplies in case of a long siege.”

  “What about you?” Deker asked her, thinking of Phineas sharpening the end of his spear back at Shittim even now. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Of you, Samuel Boaz Deker, no,” she said. “But I know that the Lord your God is God, in heaven above and on earth below, and He has given the Hebrews this land He originally promised us. Your army will kill us all. Every man, woman and child. Even our animals. Every breathing thing.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Yahweh is angry with us. We have abandoned him.”

  “You believe in Yahweh?”

  “Abraham was my forefather, too, when God promised him this land,” she told him.

  “Don’t you think Yahweh is cruel for instructing Bin-Nun to utterly destroy Reah and all the inhabitants of Canaan?”

  She looked at him as if he were insane. “Perhaps it is I who have mistaken you for someone else,” she said. “While our Hebrew cousins were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, we Reahns and all the Amorites around us only increased in our wickedness from generation to generation. Even Pharaoh let your people go. But Hamas won’t let us out of Reah, choosing instead to use our people as a shield.”

  Deker was intrigued by the use of human shields this early in warfare and listened to learn if this was perhaps the shadow army Bin-Nun feared. Perhaps that was why he pursued his take-no-prisoners, death-to-all
strategy. But from what Rahab was saying, the Reahns cared less for their own people’s lives than the Israelites did.

  “What of your family?”

  “I have no sisters, only brothers,” she explained. “My sisters were burnt alive as offerings to Molech. I was spared only to serve Molech as a priestess, because my mother could not bear to lose another girl. And the girls who work for me and get pregnant must carry their babies to live births, even if it costs them their lives, because a priestess can have no scars. The babies we bury alive or throw screaming into the fires of the temple. Even the land, the lushest in the desert, is becoming polluted from our sins as a people and will not see another harvest like this one.”

  There was silence as Deker pondered her words. Then he heard the scraping of boots and voices from inside the villa.

  Rahab stood up and put on her wrap. A servant girl came in and spoke to Rahab quickly while Deker buckled up his uniform.

  He couldn’t hear the conversation but knew the answer even before Rahab turned and told him.

  “It’s Hamas,” she said. “They’re here.”

  19

  A minute later the hulking figure of Hamas walked onto the terrace. Deker couldn’t see his face from his position atop the pergola, where he lay facedown between two blankets of flax stalks. But Hamas had taken off his helmet out of respect for Rahab, and through a slit Deker was able to look down and see the long mane of black hair falling over the Reahn general’s broad shoulders. Hamas looked just over six feet tall, with a powerful trunk and legs that moved under the bronze plates and leather joints of his body armor.

  A gruff voice in ancient Aramaic said, “You serviced two strangers tonight.”

  “The king’s cut is in the bowl,” Rahab replied.

  She was dressed again in her wrap and seated on her divan, and Deker now saw that the surrounding tiles of the terrace formed a great mosaic of a six-pointed star that mirrored the heavens. And in the center of that blazing star was Rahab’s bed.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” Hamas said as he nonetheless walked over to the red-and-black ceramic bowl of coins just below the pergola. It sat next to a small, bronze jewelry box. Deker watched Hamas remove a small money pouch from his belt and fill it with coins from the bowl. “Your girls serviced two Israelite spies tonight. Show me their rooms and I’ll make it quick.”

  “I can tell a Hebrew from a Reahn? You’ll have to round up everybody in the house. Then everybody will know you let two spies into the city.”

  Hamas paused in a way that suggested he knew what Rahab was up to and didn’t like it. “The Jordan is at flood stage. Even if Bin-Nun could get his armies across, it would take three days. The king has no fear of imminent attack nor of these spies.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “It’s the traitors inside these walls that concern us more than the Israelites outside.”

  Hamas poured himself a drink from a pitcher at the table. He lifted the bronze cup to his lips and downed it in one long gulp. He poured himself another.

  “Our people who fear the cult of Yahweh are fools. Plagues on Egypt. Parted seas. All lies. My family lived in Egypt at the time. I was five when it happened, Rahab. The waves, the hail, the pestilence and even the gases that killed our firstborn sons who slept on the floor, as was our custom—all were natural consequences of the volcanic eruption of Thera in the Great Sea.

  “Bin-Nun knows this. He knows he can’t repeat these wonders. He can’t even feed his people without raids on farmlands and disrupting trade routes. He can’t occupy a city, so he has to slaughter every breathing thing in it and call it a miracle. This cult of death is Bin-Nun’s only weapon, and he employs it now to weaken the will of our people.

  “He knows if he breaks our will—our true wall—our stones will crumble too. And then where would you be, Rahab? Slaughtered like every other man, woman and child in Reah.”

  Hamas downed the second drink, slammed the cup down and wiped his long sleeve across his mouth.

  “You can never trust a Jew. But you can always trust me to do what I say I’ll do. And you know what I do to the families of traitors. You saw what I had to do to your grandparents.”

  Well, there was the leverage, Deker thought. Not a scratch on Rahab. But death to those close to her. Her soul and his were more similar than he realized, as she had clearly carried the guilt for the loss of her sisters and felt responsible for the safety of the rest of her family.

  “Then you’re no better than Bin-Nun.”

  “Oh, I’m a lot better for you. Look at you, at what you have. You’re the richest woman in Reah. You’re a goddess. We worship you like Molech. Your body cycles with the moon and the crops. You are the heart of our city, not that.”

  Deker could see that Hamas was gesturing to her bed in the center of the blazing star painted on the terrace tiles.

  “Bin-Nun would cut you down like he did those Moabite women who fornicated with his precious Hebrew soldiers,” Hamas went on, going in for the kill. “A blade through that soft tummy of yours, after he cut off your breasts. The Jews can barely keep a dozen of their divine 613 laws. You think they’d let you—a whore who has broken them all—into their company and pull them down?”

  The psychology was brilliant, and Deker could see Rahab cast a glance up at him, her eyes doubtful.

  “I, on the other hand, appreciate your many hidden talents,” Hamas said, and began to loosen his belt. “Your comely womanhood blesses our crops in tandem with your cycles of fertility. And your dexterous tongue loosens those of visiting dignitaries, providing us with invaluable information and even state secrets. All this while you pass along to them the false information we give you. Now, unless I hear something interesting from your mouth, I have a better use for it.”

  Hamas turned his back to the pergola, dropped to his knees and straddled Rahab with his blackened and bulging quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. Then he ripped off her wrap to behold her breasts like the ripest fruit in Reah.

  Deker couldn’t stomach the sight of her about to be ravaged, even if she meant to distract Hamas. Slowly he slid the tip of his sword through a slit in the flax stalks, ready to use both hands to drive the blade down on top of Hamas’ head.

  “If you want to perform your religious duties, Hamas, you’ll have to wait another week, because I’m fertile,” she told him, pushing him away. “You’ve seen how fertile my family is, how many of my brothers serve in your ranks, and how many of my sisters have been killed. Unless you are prepared to bear a child with me.”

  Deker watched her eyes drift up to him in the pergola for

  a moment.

  “Tell me, Hamas. Would you feed your own son to Molech?”

  “My son? No. My daughter? Without a second thought.”

  “Well, you know how it works.” Rahab was all business. “I’m the sacred prostitute priestess who brings forth the crops, the crops bring the money and the money keeps everything going. I’m no good to anybody if I’m with child, and even that is but one burnt offering to Molech.”

  Hamas put his rough hand to her lovely throat and said, “The harvest is already here, and so are Bin-Nun’s spies. Tell me what you did for them, or I’ll snap your neck like the stem of a desert flower.”

  Deker’s grip tightened around his sword, his eyes locked onto hers. She showed no fear, but her eyes widened as she looked over Hamas’ shoulders and saw him move quietly on the pergola roof. Striking Hamas would mean the end of him and his mission to Jericho. But his feelings for Rahab were an irresistible force of nature he could not control. He simply had to protect her—in the way he failed to protect Rachel. He was emotionally and spiritually committed, and there was no turning back, regardless of the consequences.

  But her eyes signaled to him that she was still in control and to back off. He paused, aware of a drop of perspiration rolling down his arm to his hands and the grip of the sword. It trickled down the blade to the point. Any second it would drop on
them and reveal his presence above.

  “Yes, the men came to me, but I didn’t know where they came from,” she said. “They left before you arrived, at dusk, when the city gate closed.”

  Hamas removed his hand from her neck, but seemed in no hurry to get off her. “What did they say?”

  “They claimed to be jewelry traders. Asked about the city population. How many pieces of jewelry they could sell. Thought if I bought some and the girls wore them that maybe our customers would buy some for their wives.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t think wives would want to wear the same jewelry as their husband’s whores.”

  Hamas gave a low, deep-throated laugh. “And then?”

  “Then they said we could tell the husbands to tell their wives that their jewelry was magic and could make them fertile, or even to make them only conceive boys.”

  Hamas shook his head and finally stood up, apparently satisfied. “Hebrew magic,” he complained. “They never stop stealing from us Egyptians. That’s why we’ll slaughter them. I think like Bin-Nun. I know what he wants.”

  “What is that?” Rahab asked as she adjusted her wrap and looked up at Hamas. Deker could tell she was trying not to look at him on the pergola.

  “Bin-Nun wants to know if his magic act of fear has seized the imagination of our population,” Hamas told her, and turned to help himself to some grapes on the table below Deker. “And, thanks to you and these spies of his, he now does. They’ll report this and he’ll decide to try to cross the Jordan even at flood stage and surprise us. He won’t attack right away but will just sit on our trade routes, starve us out and then come in.”

  “You know this?”

  “My spies and scouts tell me that for the past two months Bin-Nun has had his stonecutters building a bridge of stepping-stones across one of the fords in the Jordan. I even know their line of march. It’s going to take three days to cross.”