It was over, but she didn’t release me. She clung to me and looked into my eyes. “Mazeltov!” She said.
“Mazeltov!” I replied automatically.
“Oy! A kaana hora!
“Huh?”
“Veys mir!” She was looking over my shoulder. I craned my head. There stood Tabari.
There was death on his face, black outrage at finding his queen in such a position with a member of an inferior race, death, black death!
I scrambled to my feet and pulled on my loincloth. Balkis also managed to slip into her garment. Then she recovered enough to address Tabari in their native tongue. I didn’t understand the words, of course, but the tone told me she was trying to brazen it out.
Tabari answered with a torrent of words, his face contorted. Balkis translated for me. “He says you must die,” she told me.
“We’ve all got to go some time, but I don’t really feel ready just yet.”
“You must die for raping his queen. That’s what he says.”
“But I didn’t rape you!”
“Of course you did. I’m black and you’re white. You raped me. It’s the only way what happened was possible. I had to be forced.”
“Nuts! You even implied we were safe because he was busy elsewhere. How come he got unbusy at such an awkward moment?”
Balkis turned back to Tabari. She said something to him and he replied with another torrent of words. When she looked at me again, her own face was angry. “The reason he came here was that he had discovered what drek you are,” she told me coldly. “He wasn’t looking for me. He came to take you prisoner. He just found out that you are an impostor. The man we thought was a spy of Jeroboam’s has credentials to prove he is really the emissary from King Solomon.” She held out her arm and pointed at me imperiously. “You are Jeroboam’s spy!” she announced with conviction. “You came here and seduced me to compromise the treaty with Solomon. But now you’ve been found out and you will die! Yes, goniff, you will die!”
“Can’t we talk this over a bissel?” My protest came too late. Tabori had clapped his hands and two massive guards had latched onto me with more muscle that I could counter. They dragged me through the palace to the courtyard below.
I waited there, the guards standing over me, until Balkis and Tabari came down. There were two other men with them, one white the other black.
Balkis addressed the white man. “You will tell Solomon how we keep faith with him by destroying his enemies,” she told him.
The black man came over to rne and yanked a long hair from my head. He crossed to a large wooden block set in the courtyard and carefully put the hair down on top of it. Then he hefted his large curved scimitar over his head with both hands and brought it down with a vicious blow. He held up two hairs for Balkis to look at, proof of the sharpness of the blade and the accuracy of his aim. He’d split the original hair lengthwise!
The executioner motioned for the two guards to drag me over to the chopping block. Frantically, I twisted one of the dials on my wrist radio. A voice blared forth:
“IS YOUR FAMILY PROVIDED FOR IN THE CASE OF DEATH? INSURANCE IS AN OBLIGATION EVERY MAN . . .”
Tabari jumped back. He pointed at my hand and spoke excitedly to Balkis. She answered him in a soothing tone and then switched to Yiddish for a last word to me.
“Tabari says it is sorcery that your hand speaks. But I have seen ventriloquism before. You will not save yourself that way. Off with his kopf!” She translated this last bit for the benefit of the executioner.
The two guards forced me to my knees and held me so that my hands dangled over the other side of the chopping block and my neck rested on the center of it. Somehow I managed to turn the dial on the wrist radio so that it would transmit. “HELP!” I yelled into it, my head dangling over the block. “GET ME OUT OF HERE! QUICK!”
The executioner hefted the scimitar. His two hands moved way back over his shoulder to deliver the blow. The blade sliced through the air with a mighty swoosh. It was too late to tell myself not to tell myself not to lose my head!
Chapter Three
“Co-o-orne seven!”
“Baby needs a new pair on shoes!”
“You’re covered and it comes up crr-a-a-caps!"
“Forty-second Street!”
“I’ll lay six to five.”
“A fin on the shooter.”
“Thirty-two. Add one! Blow on ’em for luck and add one!”
“Spin ’em and it comes up craps. Ahh! Boxcars!”
“Come on now! Quit smiling! Drop those ivories for seven and out!”
“Shake ’em but don’t break ’em!”
“Double three, double three!”
“And it comes up seven!”
I’d crapped out!
Well, you can’t win them all. I was lucky to be alive, never mind making my point. In case you’re wondering what I was doing in the middle of a crap game instead of watching my head roll off into the Sheban sunset, all I can say is I was wondering the same thing. It would be a little while before I came up with any answers.
Right now all I knew was that one minute I was kneeling with my head on the chopping block, Waiting for that final blow to cure the crick in my neck, and the next minute I was on my knees in the midst of a bunch of crapshooters and rattling a pair of dice. Popping up from nowhere as I had, dressed only in a Sheban loincloth, should have caused quite a commotion. But it didn’t.
There were three reasons why my sudden appearance and garb caused no stir. The main one was the psychology peculiar to crapshooters in any age, any place. Dice players possess a depth of concentration unmatched by any other breed. They have been known to stand steadfastly in the path of an erupting volcano, guarding their bets against a point being made or lost. They have straddled the fissures of earthquakes, laying the odds against a “natural.” They have pursued a stray ivory into the eye of the hurricane to read its spots and never even noticed the buffeting of the gale. Empires rise and fall, but the dedicated follower of galloping dominoes refuses to be distracted by events either large or small. So it was only natural that my materialization should bounce unheeded off the periphery of their concentration.
Add to this the second reason, which was that the crap game was open air and that it was a cloudy, dark night. All eyes were straining to make out the spotted cubes and even those that fell on me saw little more than one murky shadow among many. Besides-—and this was my third advantage—-the eyes were urban, accustomed to the variety of garb found in a great cosmopolis, and therefore used to shrugging off discrepancies among individuals.
Yet my fellow crapshooters were themselves similarly dressed. From their armor, helmets and short tunics, and from the fact that they were speaking Latin, I guessed that they were Roman soldiers. The Latin I’d studied in high school hadn’t exactly prepared me for the situation, but fortunately I’d gone far enough with it to be able to understand the crapshooters’ lingo. I wonder what the stern old Prof who’d crammed Latin into my head in the first place would have thought if he’d known I’d end up using it to urge on the ivories in the oldest established permanent floating crap game in ancient Rome.