Three thousand six hundred years ago
in the hills between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea
PROLOGUE
Arodi and Areli knew better than to take their father’s goats into the grove. Basemath, the steward’s junior wife, had reminded them just that morning to keep the goats away from trees, and their father had warned them before he left for the shearing that they should obey her as they obeyed their mother, but they were not obedient children.
Recent rain had brought green to the hilltops. Goats nibbled grass and thyme. The boys were chasing each other around boulders when Arodi saw the dung of two donkeys next to an acacia, and their cousin Jezer running to collect the brown stuff to dry for fuel. Arodi yelled at him and raced with his brother to chase Jezer away and gather the dung for themselves.
“We should look for more dung among the carob trees,” Arodi said. He pulled the top of his long ragged shirt a little higher above his rope belt, baring scratched legs to the knees to make a pouch for the dung.
Areli rubbed his toes in the dirt and objected. “Basemath said to keep the goats away from saplings, because goats eat the tree bark, and that’s like the trees’ skin.”
“These are big trees,” Arodi said. “Goats won’t harm them. Come on. Basemath’ll be happy to have more fuel. Anyway we don’t want Jezer getting dung from so close to our tents. And maybe we’ll find carob pods the girls missed. ”
So into the grove they herded the goats.
They found no donkey dung, but the goats chewed on thistles and Areli was happy trying to climb the highest tree.
Arodi was first to see the man slumped against the farthest trunk. “Ebal,” he whispered. Dawn was long past, but he was not surprised to see the man sleeping. Ebal did odd jobs in their camp, but he was not known for hard work. Nothing for him to do while the men are away at the shearing, thought Arodi. He can’t come into our camp with them gone. They’d kill him when they found out.
Goats bleated. Areli shouted as he jumped at a limb over his head, but Ebal lay still. Arodi wanted to tell Areli to be quiet. If Ebal woke, he was likely to throw stones at them. Keeping his eyes on Ebal, Arodi walked backwards towards Areli. Then his knees began to shake, for he saw the knife hilt sticking out of Ebal’s chest.
Ebal’s left leg was bent under him as if he had been leaning against the tree trunk and slipped down to the ground.
“Areli,” Arodi whispered to his brother. Then he called him in a louder, squeaky voice. “Areli, look. Ebal. He’s dead. Go tell Basemath. I’ll stand guard. Quick. Go.”
Areli ran.
Arodi hoped Basemath would be here soon and be so distracted by the body that she would not yell at him about the goats being in the grove. He took a stick from the ground and chased the goats away from Ebal.
He turned back to look hard at the body. Was a spirit oozing out of the wound? He could see nothing move but flies. He shivered. Arodi had seen other dead bodies. He remembered the look of Shelah’s mother last summer before her funeral rites had sent her spirit to the ancestors. But Ebal was different. That knife. Someone had murdered him. A murdered man’s angry spirit would lurk nearby.
Everyone knew the ghosts of murdered men wanted revenge. Arodi hated being alone in the grove. He wished even Jezer would come by. I’ll yell at him before I chase him away, he thought.
Arodi almost ran away from the grove, but he had told Areli he would stand guard. “Hurry up, Areli,” he muttered out loud. “Hurry up, Basemath.” He turned his back on Ebal’s body, then jerked around to look once more at the fallen man. “I didn’t kill you,” he said out loud. He was sure he heard a moan, not from Ebal, because he was dead, but from his ghost, calling for vengeance. Arodi could scarcely speak. He forced words out. “Someone else killed you.” He wanted to run, if only he could make his legs move. “Come somebody. Anybody.”
Even the one who killed Ebal would be better than a vengeful spirit.
Eighteen years earlier
CHAPTER ONE
Alitum first came up to our hills from the coastal trading route when I was about twelve years old.
On the bare ground outside my father’s three-roomed stone house, I knelt over my loom. When I lifted my eyes to the hill across the valley, I saw the stranger. He stood on the rocky ground away from a grove of carob trees. He had one laden donkey. There on the mounded hill to our west, he paused to look across to the camp beside my father’s house. I knew he was looking for men. A stranger dares not enter a camp where only women and youngsters are about.
From his hilltop, the stranger could surely see our men, for he led his donkey down into the valley and toward us. The first winter rain had brought back greenery, but poppies had not yet bloomed. The ground was dry again, and the scent of thyme mingled with the air.
My mother’s voice called me back to my work. “Look to your weaving, Kitsia. Smoothly, smoothly.” But she stood up from her own loom and went to tell my father a stranger was about to arrive. Word quickly spread that a trader was coming. Boys, and their fathers, were eager to see what knives and other tools were in the packs. I left my work and stood with the women who wondered what we could get in exchange for the cloth we wove.
Besides goods, each trader brought tales we all wanted to hear. My father always listened closely as traders told how far north Egyptian chariots had been seen and which gods had the most power now on the coast. My mother asked after marriages, and births and who had been gathered to their ancestors.
This trader led his donkey along the stony and narrow track into the valley where winter had brought new greenery and up to the hill where Jacob’s tents were pitched as always. Jacob’s clan never built houses, for they sometimes moved with their flocks to northern pastures.
This trader was young, the age of my brother Eliezer who had recently brought a wife home, Ada, only a little older than I was, but now a married woman in charge of her own household. Eliezer had gone to Gezer as a trader and paid a good bride price for her. When she looked at Eliezer she always had a little smile, even when he was busy and paid no attention to her. When Eliezer spoke to Ada, his voice was soft. Later Ada and I became friends, but at that time she was a woman while I was only a girl.
The trader bowed to my father and said his name was “Alitum,” a name from the cities of the east. Like other traders, Alitum knew he must first pay his respects to Jacob, for whom my father was steward as his father had been for Jacob’s father and grandfather. Then Alitum sat on the trading blanket in front of my father’s house. I brought a water skin. Alitum smiled and drank. My mother served fresh bread with olive oil and dishes of white curds topped with fragrant mint.
Alitum laid out his goods. His arms looked strong. The black waves of his beard glistened in the sunlight. My father brought out olive oil, cloth, leather goods, and other items and set them on his side of the trading rug. Alitum looked at a heap of almonds. He ran his tongue over his lips like a young boy waiting for the stew to be cool enough to eat. Soon my father and Alitum were pushing small piles of goods forward, adding to them and taking back until value matched value to the satisfaction of each.
The first time Alitum came to our camp was in that short-dayed month before the almond trees bloom. Everything sits in my memory, the wind, the promising clouds around the sun, the fire, and Alitum’s stories. I wanted his deep voice to speak on and on and for rain to muddy the coastward path, and downpours to make travel impossible. My skin tingled and I leant forward to hear him.
“Why do you listen so closely to Alitum?” my father asked me after the trader left.
“He’s been far away. He tells stories from the east and sings songs from Egypt.”
“All your life you’ve known people who have been to far places, Kitsia.”
“Only north to the summer pastures and back again.” This was not true. My father had been much farther, and even to Damascus, city of his ancestors. Other traders told of the great earthen walls of Laish by bounteous springs whose waters rush over the rocks making a noise louder than the wind, but no other trader had a voice like Alitum’s or shoulders so broad or hair so shiny or beard so curly or eyes like spring’s deep pools in which I would immerse my burning body.
When Alitum left, I walked on the hillside and picked mint for Astarte. I went into the cedar forest where none could see me and found a glade. Under the open sky, the scent of damp cedar strong around me, I sang, “O Queen of Heaven, you alter the fates. Come make Alitum follow after me, like an ox after grass, like a mother after her children.” I rubbed the green mint leaves to release their scented spirit and laid them on a boulder, raised my hands and chanted, “Have pity on me, O Queen of Heaven, beloved of Enlil. Bring my beloved Alitum to me.” I was twelve or thirteen years old and thought my new breasts made me old enough to marry.
I returned to the glade the next day with a leather bag of fresh milk from my mother’s nanny goat. I poured the white liquid onto the boulder, raised my hands to the sky and sang, “I seek your light, make my face bright. For Alitum, make my face bright.” My thoughts flew to Alitum on the road in strange lands of other gods. I made magic for them all. I cried because I did not know the languages they spoke. I crushed rosemary and sprinkled fragrance on my altar.
In summer, when all was dry and brown and prayers for rain must wait, Alitum, large-eyed and broad-shouldered, returned from the seacoast, where he had seen vast water stretch out to the sky, water that could fill our valley and more and more. He told me, “You cannot drink from the Great Sea or water a donkey there,” he said.
“Useless waters,” I said.
“Useful waters.” His beard coiled down to his chest where hairs curled over the top of his long shirt. “Very useful for the fish who drink the brine and that’s useful for us, because we eat the fish.” From the sack slung on his donkey he took salted fish to trade for olive oil. “The waters of the Great Sea carry boats up the coast to Tyre full of wool and bring back cloth dyed purple.”
In the Autumn, Alitum returned and asked my father for me, but my father said I was too young. Alitum offered me a scarf of a color beautiful enough to be a flower, but my mother said I must not accept. Alitum laid the scarf on top of the pile of goods already agreed with my father as a trade for our oil. He bowed to my father, then to my mother, then to me. Rain began to fall. Alitum took his donkey’s lead rein and left the camp. Rain drenched my scarf and mingled with my tears. I watched Alitum until my mother put her hand on my arm and sent me to grind grain.
At night I rose and crept out of my father’s house. The Storm God had blown his clouds to the east. Under the open sky, I raised my hands to the stars and sang softly to the Queen of Heaven, “Who is like unto you, O Beautiful one? Bring Alitum to me as the kid runs to his mother to suck her sweet milk.”
The next day I walked to the witch’s cave to buy a better incantation. I gave her a blue stone I had from my mother’s mother. I wore the stone in an amulet on a leather thong around my neck. With difficulty I unpicked the knot. In return, the witch woman taught me a secret spell, gave me a fragrant powder wrapped in a scrap of cloth, and instructed me in the mystery I must perform.
I asked my mother. “Why didn’t my father ask me if I wanted to go with Alitum?”
“Alitum’s young. He’s new to his brothers’ donkey caravan. The donkey belongs to the three brothers together. He has little that’s his alone. You saw he doesn’t yet know how to trade but shows his desires on the front of his face.”
I remembered the desires I had seen on Alitum’s face and shivered while my soul grew hot with longing. In six months, after the wheat harvest, when our hills had turned to yellow and light brown, Alitum returned. He had learned not to lick his lips when he looked at my father’s goods. But I saw his red tongue when his eyes burned me.
I watched for him. He returned when the day was long and again after the first rains. He visited us once more after we sheared the sheep. He traded painted pots and bronze tools for fleeces. After the latter rains and the barley harvest, he was back again. When I saw him stand with his donkey to survey our camp from the next mounded hill, I ran to Jacob’s tents to tell the others a trader had arrived. My little sister giggled when she saw me come running. “Alitum must be back,” she said. I pretended not to hear her.
Each time he returned to our hills to trade for our olive oil and wool and the green almonds we pickled in the last year’s wine, he asked my father if we could marry. Finally my mother said, “Must your daughter live without children of her own? Kitsia’s heart is foolish for Alitum. She’ll refuse any other husband.” I saw my father listened to my mother. Because of that I kept my own lips shut and forced my words to stay within while my mother argued for me.
Afterwards my father sat me down and told me I would not like to be mistress of no home but to wander between camps and villages, but when my father said, “Will you have that man?” I said I would. My father arranged the bride price and made the marriage feast.
Finally Alitum and I could be together, alone. On the road, when we lay outside, Alitum gave the stars names, putting his head close beside mine on the sheepskin so my sight could follow his along his pointing arm. “Do you see the three stars together like three pebbles sparkling in a cold stream? The ancients called those three ‘Uru-annu.’ In their language that meant ‘the great light of the stars.’”
I felt the stars touch me with chill fingers.
“Others call those stars the shepherd,” he said pulling me tight against his side.
“A shepherd in the sky with heroes and gods?” I giggled and buried my face in the fine curls on his chest. “A shepherd! In the sky!”
“And that beside him is the bull.”
“I’ve heard of bulls, but all our shepherds have are rams and billygoats.”
Now Alitum joined me in laughter. “A bull is a wondrous creature,” he told me.
“So is a man,” I whispered.
“This is a song of the singing women of Egypt,” my new husband told me. When I learned that song he said, “They dance when they sing.” He stood me up and put his hands along my hips and moved them, slid his hands to my breasts and taught me to dance.
Now I was a woman.
Alitum and I joined his family’s donkey caravan. We kept a common household, the oldest brother’s first wife setting tasks for all the women. Alitum’s oldest brother’s second wife was young and beautiful. Conflict sent their husband to the nearest town where he wasted their silver, and the younger woman embittered the life of the older, belittling Babylon, the great city where the first wife had been born. “They say Kish is greater than Babylon now,” the younger wife would say. “There’s nothing new in Babylon. To buy something new you must trade with the sailors who come from the islands.” Like Alitum, the middle brother had only one wife, but she distanced herself from me. They all hated me because my father had taught me the symbols, and I kept trade lists for Alitum.
The coast was different from my hills, the sea so vast and the smells strange with the tang of salt. Even in rainless summer the air was damp along the coast road. Streams ran year round. We stopped at villages where men fished with nets and women put the fish in the fire’s smoke and packed them in string bags. We went to Yafo where men pulled long-oared boats on the sand and unloaded jars of foreign wine and blue-dyed cloth, made from the wool sent north the year before. Behind us, small boys gathered the donkeys’ dung to dry for fuel. So rich was Alitum’s caravan that we bought our own fuel in the markets. Alitum joked we bought our own donkeys’ dung from the last time we had traveled this road. “Even dung’s worth something treated right,” he said.
When the time drew near for our child to be born, my sister-in-law from Tyre said that in her city they knew what was best for giving birth and I should leave all to her. The sister-in-law from Babylon said she knew better. I trusted neither of them. I wanted my mother. We were at the southern end of the caravan’s route, near the fishing village where the headman’s son hoped to marry my younger sister. Alitum went into the hills with a donkey to bring my mother.
When I saw my mother approaching on Alitum’s donkey, and another donkey behind her carrying my father and a third with my younger sister, then I let my pains begin. I shrieked, but my mother kissed me and said there was time enough to ready everything for the birth. She sent my father and sister away with Alitum to negotiate my sister’s bride price with the headman.
“How eager your child is to be born,” my mother said as she walked me along the beach. Waves lapped at our feet. I felt the cool water while the sun warmed the left side of my face. But then pain spread from my back and I began to whimper.
“Breathe in this salty air. Breathe so deep the baby smells the waves.”
I listened to her, felt her hand against my back, and breathed deeply in, then pushed my breath out hard. Soon the pains came more quickly, so long and hard I wished I had never embraced Alitum. I screamed at the waves. Then my mother began the birth songs and took me to the hut with the village birthing stones where I squatted and pushed my baby into her hands.
“A son,” she said.
“Give him to me, oh, give him to me.”
She sang the song for a newborn boy as she cleaned him. I ran my fingers over his soft skin, put my nose against his cheek and breathed his perfume, pulled him to my breast and felt such pleasure at his sucking that my womb shook.
We called our son Udish. Alitum and I rejoined the caravan, and traveled for two more years, with our son. Often men or women walked alongside our donkeys for the protection a crowd provides. We had been to Laish and back and were camped south of Acco when one of these travelers came upon me in a nearby grove. Quickly I walked past him toward our small camp.
He approached too close. I pulled my knife from my belt. Trees blocked my view of the caravan’s camp. My knees shook. He reached for me. I wanted to run to the camp where Udish still slept a nursling’s innocent sleep. I screamed; I shrieked and gasped, “Alitum. Alitum.”
Alitum and his brothers came running and grabbed the man.
“This woman smiled at me,” shouted the stranger. “I didn’t touch her. Let me go.”
But the second wife of Alitum’s oldest brother said. “He would have lain with her. He has attacked our honor.”
I held my knife and panted like a woman in labor. Alitum looked from me to the man and said, “I have to fight him, Kitsia. Your honor is my honor and our son’s honor.”
“No! Don’t fight.”
Alitum stood so stiffly I was afraid to move nearer. “My brothers can’t travel up and down the coasts dishonored.”
I began to shiver. Udish ran to me and grabbed my knees. I almost fell. “No!” I shouted. “Let your brothers travel on without us. Don’t fight. We can go to my father’s house, you and I and our son. Don’t fight.” I said that to him the way women try logic with men.
He said, “Can I live without honor?”
I lifted my hands and shouted at his brothers’ wives, “Alitum should ignore that man.”
“He can’t. This is a matter of your honor.”
I shouted louder, “I don’t care. I don’t want him to fight. I don’t care. I don’t care.’
One of the women ran up to me and put her hand over my mouth. “No words came from your mouth,” said the middle brother’s wife, she who was holding her hand over my lips. “You didn’t say that. You have to care for honor.”
The oldest brother’s first wife said, “If you don’t care for honor, Alitum will have to kill you.”
I pushed aside the restraining hand. I picked up Udish. He put his arms around me and pushed his wet face into my neck. I held him very tight, and he cried louder. “Alitum wouldn’t kill me.” I looked at my sisters-in-law and shouted more clearly, “He wouldn’t kill me.”
“Then our husbands would have to kill you and Alitum both. They guard the honor of the whole family. Alitum must fight.” They turned their backs to me.
Alitum fought.
While the men went at each other with knives, I hid with Udish next to the donkeys. I held him and sang to him, wordless keening songs which did not calm his cries. The donkeys began to bray and pull at their tethers. I sang louder.
Then the wives of Alitum’s brothers came and told me Alitum was dead. The other man was dead, too. Family honor was protected. My sisters-in-law gloated. I hated them all. I hated Alitum’s brothers, so smug in their protected family honor.
I hated Alitum for dying.
That very day, Alitum’s brothers began to whisper. I heard the middle one muttering about the family of the man Alitum had killed. “Don’t worry about blood vengeance,” said the oldest. “Clearly Alitum killed him for family honor, and anyway Alitum’s dead now. There will be no blood feud.”
My sisters-in-law stole my husband’s knives and blankets before he was cold. They whispered about the expense of feeding “the hill woman and her brat.” I hated my husband’s brothers and their wives. What honor would they give a youngest brother’s widow? What honor would they give his son? Too angry to cry, I took Udish and ran away.
Copyright 2015 Jane S. Fox
