“Yes. The Cyclopes. They've probably captured my palace, killed my people, and eaten my sea cows.”
“But Mama, what about the Celestial Vineyard?” you cried. “We’ve left the island of the Goddess. The god of Israel may send us to Sheol.”
“I suspect the Great Mother will still look after us.” It was a doubtful hope; we had angered her once in our northern home and she had sent us wandering to the south. Now, we had left her island for a country where deserts outnumbered forests. But Alecto possessed a genius for survival, and her advice, though unpalatable, was certainly practical.
“Whatever you say, Mama.” You looked, however, with longing at the sea and fingered your stubby wings as if they, like the webs of your feet, must also face the knife.
Alecto smiled at you with sympathy. “I will give you my potion to make you forget the past.”
“Must I forget?”
“Yes, my dear. The memory of Crete, the sea cows and the white bears, would only haunt you in this dismal land. Do you want to stay with me, you and your mother, here by the sea?”
“I think I had better take him inland,” I said quickly. “I rather fancy the Israelites, from what I have heard. I like farmers-men who are close to the earth.”
“I must find you some cloaks before I lose my business. A look at you and your nakedness, Honey Hair, and-well, I would earn silver while you earned gold.”
I had quite forgotten that Bumblebee and I had shed our garments at the start of our swim from Crete.
“Down the beach a way, there’s a camel caravan out of Midian. But first, your toes.”
In Alecto’s tent, I drank of sleep, you of forgetfulness. Awaking, we found the webs removed from our toes. You knew me to be your mother but did not know the past.
“My toes hurt, Mama,” you said, “and I have a pain in my head. Where have we been?”
“You’ve had a fever,” I said. “You walked in your sleep on the beach and stepped on some jagged shells. I ran after you without my sandals.” You did not ask me about the remoter past. It was the power of Alecto’s drink.
She returned at dusk. I thanked her for what she had done to earn the cloaks, the shekels, the provisions for our trip- dates, cheese, bread, waterskins, and a vial of her potion in case I should choose to follow her trade. The cloaks smelled of camel, but they were loose and comfortable against the heat, and our new sandals did not press cruelly between our toes.
We stayed with Alecto for a week. Then, jangling shekels in a money bag, we began our journey to find a home. We traveled by night and rested by day. In seven days we crossed the border into Israel and reached a small village-one of those forgettable and featureless villages of clay and straw-thatched huts clustered around a well-and we lingered in an inn which was little more than a house whose attic was rented to wayfarers. Dressed like the villagers-I in a white ankle-long robe trimmed with malachite-green, with a veil to hide my face; you in a goatskin tunic-we spoke little and seemingly escaped notice. The language of the place was a dialect of the same tongue which was spoken on Crete, in Philistia, and by the Israelites. Daily, at dusk, I visited the village well. On the fifth day a young man arrived on foot, accompanied by a small contingent of soldiers who looked as if they would rather be farmers. Israelites. I could tell from then- pointed beards. In their ill-fitting tunics, they hardly seemed a match for the armored Philistines. But there was earth in their look. They were close to the soil. They were men who could predict the rain by the flight of quail or snow by the thickness of fur on a fox’s back. I liked them, and more than liked their chief, who stared at me as if he were trying to guess the features beneath my veil. I lifted the veil to drink from the well and gave him a generous look. “By Yahweh,” he gasped. “It’s Eve out of paradise!” He walked toward me with purposeful steps. Boldly I met his gaze. A simple man but brave; a man to trust Of course it was Saul.
Her story ended, Ahinoam stared impatiently at her son and waited for him to speak. Have I eased his heart, she wondered, or tortured him with another guilt?
“Did you tell him who we were?” he asked finally. “Or did you give him the potion like Alecto?” Even as the lamplight flickered across his high cheekbones, his faintly slanted eyes, an inner radiance equalled the reflected light of the lamp. It was the bright and wounding light of innocence.
“I told him. After I had won his heart.”
“What did he say?”
“He was too besotted with me for reproaches. I knew that he was horrified-a woman with wings, a Siren! — but fascinated too. He asked me only this: that I should marry him but give you another draught of Alecto’s drink. He wanted you to think him your father-he liked you at once, it seems.
We never spoke of the matter again, not even when I bore him, from time to time, the eggs which hatched to become your brothers and sisters. All of them were human in every way, neither wings, nor webs, nor troubling memories, nor eyes and ears in their brains. They know the legend, of course, that you and I are from Crete. But they know better than to ask questions.“
“Who was my real father?”
“A drone named Meleagros. It was he who gave you the green of your eyes. I loved him more than Saul.”
“But how did Saul explain us to his friends?”
“He said that I was a widow from Ophir and you were my son. The Midianites had stolen us from our house. But we had escaped in the desert and found our way to Endor and the well-and him. No one believed him, I think. But Saul was a king. Who were his men to deny his tale? Except in the whispers which have encompassed the land, and made us, you and me, an intriguing legend which even Samuel does not dare to attack.”
“And you never knew if Myiskos and Hylas were dead?”
“No one has ever survived Goliath’s blows.”
“But they died together, didn’t they? That is something, at least.”
“Yes, and perhaps we will meet them in the Celestial Vineyard.”
“Not Sheol?”
“Not that gray anonymity. Sheol is for the wingless.”
The veins stood blue and prominent on his clenched fist “You think I am like them, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. If you are, I am not ashamed. In the eyes of the Goddess, the only sin is unloving.”
“I loved Nathan, the shepherd. But he was a brother to me, or so I thought.”
“Who can say that any love between the young is entirely of the flesh or apart from the flesh?”
“The sins of Sodom-”
“Sodom was neither better nor worse than any other city in this desert land-Israelite or Canaanite. An earthquake destroyed it, not the hand of Yahweh.”
“It may be true,” he said. “But there won’t be any more shepherds for me.”
“Won’t there, my dear?”
CHAPTER FIVE
The recent victory at Michmash belonged to the scribes. The routed Philistines had returned to ravage the land, and Goliath was now their champion in the Vale of Elah.
Most of the night he had ranged the opposite bank of the stream which divided the two armies and, prodigiously drunk on Philistine beer, hurled obscenities and thick-tongued defiance. He did not know of Ahinoam’s presence among the Israelites. If it were not for Jonathan’s fever-Jonathan whom she had come to nurse-she would have fled on foot or by ass at sunrise and closeted herself in the fortified house at Gibeah. Fear of his lust was a dryness in her throat, like a breath of scorching sand from a sirocco. But he threatened more than her person; he threatened to lose her the trust of the Israelites. Rumors that she had been a queen in Caphtor, the sometime home of the Philistines, had failed to harm her, for her loyalty to Israel was beyond question. But the knowledge that she was a Siren would enrage and terrify a people who believed that women with wings, unlike men and angels, were descended from the cruel and seductive Lilith. She could imagine Samuel inveighing against her: “A witch, a temptress, abhorrent to Yahweh! Stone her before she ensorcels more than the king…” If only they knew how she loathed the beast Goliath! How once, as a girl, she had met him in a forest on Crete and… (Ashtoreth, spare me from memories, she prayed. But Ashtoreth had other concerns)… oak trees grew tall around her, and sunlight dappled her tunic of ibex fur.