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  Saul could not help looking up and around him at the gathered crowd. Had even his own subjects shown him such verbal deference lately? It felt good, this stream of abject tribute from another sovereign, especially one who had shown him and his people such complete loathing in the past.

  Saul looked away at another disturbance approaching on the desert floor. Farmers? Through the quivering desert haze he could make out oxen, sheep, donkeys laden with goods—no, there were Israelite soldiers driving the herd.

  Ah, yes. The spoils of Agag’s household.

  He turned to the captured king. The time had come for a royal pronouncement. He pursed lips and drew his eyebrows together, scrambling to muster the proper eloquence.

  “Agag, your people are Israel’s oldest foe. And a needless one, I might add. We asked for nothing but safe passage when we approached your lands so many years ago. Yet your people murdered our aged, our women and children. Since then you’ve pillaged and plundered our ranks without quarter. Well, I hope you saw the carpet of bodies on your way here today, Agag. It is all that remains—or should I say you are all that remains—of the Amalekite race. My G-d has decreed that your people be wiped forever from the face of the earth.”

  Impulsively he added, “As for your fate, I shall hold you prisoner until such time as I decide whether to slay you personally in obedience to YHWH’s command or merely let the widows of your victims stone you to death. Meanwhile, tonight you can listen to the sound of me ravishing your wife. Begone.”

  He ordered Agag dragged away and chained in a nearby guardhouse, then retired to his tents. It had been a long and weary day. Hard work, all this killing. Such hard labor that he reclined on his pillows and promptly fell into a deep afternoon sleep. When he awoke, the tent stood dark but for a few candles his servants had lit in the corners. He rolled upright and fought to regain his clarity. And then he was reminded of his impulsive threat to Agag.

  I have some raping to do.

  In the intoxicating moments following Agag’s capture, the prospect had stirred him with lewd anticipation. But now, his head swimming with sleep, his senses tinged with nausea, the prospect did not seem as enticing. Maybe he would let the night pass along with the idea. Only the guards would know he had not made good on his statement.

  He heard a shout. “Stop! Stop!” His eyes flew wide open. His heart thundered in his chest.

  He jumped to his feet and raced outside. He saw the retreating forms of soldiers running away into the darkness of a ravine behind the camp.

  “What happened?” he shouted.

  “The Amalekite woman!” a voice cried back from the blackness. Saul thought simply that the women had escaped, which to him was no great disaster. Then the voice finished, “She laid with him!”

  The full import of this revelation grew slowly within Saul like a gradual rising of floodwater. First, that his finest men had been eluded, which was only a slight embarrassment. So the doomed king had enjoyed a final night of pleasure. A trifling jibe for a condemned man, nothing more.

  Then it came to him. This could become a major embarrassment.

  And his heart sank. “She laid with him!”

  What if? What if she’s—? No, no, she cannot be with child. . . .

  4

  All the troubling what ifs in the world did in fact align themselves against the hapless Saul. His soldiers searched all night, but the fleeing woman eluded capture. The next morning Saul gave up on the hunt and moved his camp to Carmel, where he built a cairn in his honor at the occasion of defeating the Amalekites. Then he ordered them on to the tabernacle at Gilgal.

  There he rushed to Samuel’s tent, eager to tell him the news of their ancient foes’ extermination. He found the old man prone on the tent floor in an attitude of supplication. The aging prophet rose slowly and fixed a baleful, tear-stained face upon Saul.

  “Blessed are you of the Lord!” Saul exclaimed. “I carried out G-d’s command concerning the Amalekites.”

  Samuel stood in silence, obviously wincing while his joints straightened. He pointed a bony finger in the direction from which Saul had entered.

  “Why, then, are my ears suddenly full of the bleating of sheep and the lowing of oxen?”

  Saul could feel the blood drain from his face. He had hoped to placate the old man with news of their overwhelming victory. After all, what was a slight deviation—a surviving king, a few expendable wives and some spoils for sacrifice—next to the extermination of an entire nation from the face of the earth? I should have known better, he told himself in a flood of exasperation. That old pain in my side always finds one tiny matter and turns it into some enormous issue.

  “It is no great thing,” he attempted. “The people brought them from the Amalekites. Along with their captured king and a wife. I spared the best of the sheep and oxen for a sacrifice before G-d. But all the rest we’ve destroyed.”

  The knowledge of that escaped woman, full of Agag’s seed, burned inside him, and he looked away from Samuel’s intense gaze.

  In the seconds that followed, Samuel’s features were consumed by the most profound expression of sadness Saul had ever witnessed in another human being. And during that moment Saul realized something he could hardly bear to consider. His stomach began to churn with the knowledge that Samuel had never been the enemy of his reign, for it was now equally obvious that the old man’s heart was in the process of breaking.

  Saul realized something else, as well, from the old man’s shattered look. He, Saul, had just lost his throne. Perhaps not immediately, but for all intents and purposes he had just ceased to be king. And all of a sudden, despite his constant misgivings and self doubt, he now wanted nothing more than to save his crown.

  At that moment Samuel straightened the stoop in his neck and drew to his full height. The grief that had overwhelmed his features suddenly coiled into rage. His nostrils flared and his arm reached far above him, index finger jabbing at the tent roof. Even the towering Saul recoiled a bit before the old judge’s newly imposing figure. “Saul, let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night!” he shouted.

  “Tell me,” replied Saul, trying a placating tone.

  “Although you were once small in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And he sent you on a mission, saying, ‘Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites; make war on them until you have wiped them out.’ The Almighty required a complete purge of this evil, disease-ridden nation. Why did you not obey G-d? Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the eyes of the Lord?”

  “But I did obey Him,” Saul insisted. “I went on the mission the Lord assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag, their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was available, in order to sacrifice them to the Lord your G-d at Gilgal.”

  Samuel shook his head and the skin of his face began to take on the color of a calf’s liver. As he opened his mouth to respond, his jowls quivered with a rage that seemed to instantly engulf his body. “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to His commands? To obey is better than sacrifice! To heed Him is better than the fat of rams!”

  As Samuel’s voice rose in pitch and ferocity, King Saul felt life and strength draining from his entire body. His long limbs, which had once carried him with strength and energy, now sagged into lifeless rags, and he nearly staggered as he stepped backward. Finally he hung his head and replied, “I have indeed sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the people and so I gave in to them. Now I beg you—please forgive my sin and come back with me so that I may worship the Lord.”

  But Samuel shook his head, his rage clearly growing by the moment. “You have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel!”

  Saul felt himself blanch further and slowly shook his head. He could not believe something
as minor as a single prisoner, a matter he had thought Samuel might even overlook, had somehow exploded into the end of his kingship.

  When Samuel was through proclaiming the end of Saul’s reign in a voice full of both anger and grief, he stopped, huffed loudly a few times and turned to a nearby guard. He said, “Soldier, bring me Agag, king of the Amalekites. Drag him into my presence now!”

  Samuel at this moment seemed as alive and possessed with as much vitality as a man half his age. With an impulsive sweep of his arm, he pushed aside a tent flap and marched out into the sunlight to await the prisoner. Saul reluctantly followed.

  A short while later, a cordon of soldiers walked up with the pagan king striding proudly in their midst. As he approached the prophet, it was clear from his confident gait and expression that Agag believed he was about to be released.

  Samuel stepped within a single cubit of the Amalekite’s face and shouted in his best proclamation voice, “As your sword has made women childless, so will your mother be childless among women!”

  Agag had barely enough time to register his miscalculation and utter the words, “No—please . . . Have mercy . . . please!” He sank to his knees with a terror upon his face more abject than he had worn all day—for he no doubt knew from reputation that the old prophet would not entertain further delay or change his mind.

  In a single motion the patriarch wheeled around, unsheathed the sword from a nearby soldier’s scabbard, and without pausing heaved the blade with a mighty two-handed grip. A combined gasp ripped from the crowd of assembled watchers, for the old man’s torso twisted and turned, and with a flash of reflected sunlight the blade whistled down across Agag’s shoulders. Its edge swept through bone with a metallic ring and hissed through his neck’s remaining flesh—the king’s once expressive head toppled almost comically from its perch and fell with a thud in the dust. Without pause the rest of his body crumpled from its knees and sprawled at Saul’s feet.

  Still spewing its crimson stream, the severed head seemed to stare up at Samuel with an almost aggrieved expression of combined sadness and reproach—but the old man neither uttered a word of pity nor halted his grisly work. Bending over at the waist, he swung downward and sloppily cleaved the torso in half, and then, with loud grunts that the bystanders could not distinguish between exertion or rage, he chopped off Agag’s arms and legs.

  Finally, his momentum spent, Samuel straightened and tossed the sword with a gesture of disgust down into the jumble of gore and limbs at his feet. He fixed Saul with eyes as cold as the now-vacant gaze of the dead king. Then, just as quickly as it had overtaken him, the renewed vigor left Samuel’s body, the stoop returned to his shoulders and a moment later he was again a wizened old man.

  The old prophet of Israel shuffled off without a word and departed within the hour for Ramah.

  In light of Samuel’s execution of her husband, those who knew of the escape of the Amalekite queen, fleeing somewhere through the desert canyons of the Negev with the seed of her race alive within her, now felt its portent for evil.

  The truth was, Saul and his men had carelessly allowed scores of Amalekites to live, bands that subsequent kings would be forced to deal with in years to come. But the woman did not know that. She was only aware that she carried the survival of Agag’s royal bloodline within her. And of that she was correct.

  As it came to pass, this woman possessed the hardiness for which her people were legendary, and she survived. With the determination that came from believing she was the last of her kind, she passed herself off as a widowed countrywoman to a band of Kenites whom the Hebrews had ejected from her capital just before their attack. The shepherds eagerly wed her off to one of their unmarried sons, and her survival appeared won. Life became hard but assured. She helped her new extended family tend their sheep until her pregnancy became too ungainly.

  Then, in the spring of the following year, she gave birth to a sickly baby boy. The family accepted this child as the offspring of her dead husband and welcomed him as their own, nursing him carefully to health.

  At night, though, while her new husband was away tending flocks, the young woman would whisper to her son in a language the Kenites would not have understood. She would whisper to him that he was the son of Agag, last king of the Amalekites. He carried not only the royal line within himself but the very survival of their people.

  She whispered something else, too. It was about the Hebrews, the children of Israel. They are responsible for your miserable fate, she would wrathfully breathe into his ear. Kill any one you find, even if it costs you your life. Their death is your blood, your reason for living. Someday one of your offspring will find a way to kill them all.

  That boy would leave the Kenites at age fifteen with a bride from the nearby village. He would sire nine sons, who would themselves father thirty-five. The Amalekite race had regained its Jew-hating foothold upon the lands of the Hebrews. And from that day forward generation upon generation passed upon the earth, each one gathering unto itself increasing levels of hatred and the means to wipe G-d’s people out of existence. Each mother cooing to her baby tales of Hebrew treachery. Each father fanning the flames of his children’s resentment and rage.

  Five centuries later, the right descendant was born not far from where his ancestral mother had given birth to Agag’s son.

  His generation would be the one to stage the ultimate revenge.

  That man was named Haman.

  And I know now that he was leader of the horde that slaughtered my family. I know this because that night I saw one more feature of these murderers, a distinguishing mark that is indelibly etched on my memory. When their “work” was done and they swaggered out the door, I saw the moonlight upon their blood-spattered backs. And beneath the flecks of blood I saw their insignia traced in white—a strange cross shape with each arm broken and twisted in the same direction. For some reason, the sight of that insignia frightened me as much as my own brush with death, as much as the horrible death of my mother, whose lifeless body now protected me. I had never had such an all-consuming reaction to a mere symbol before. Maybe it was the association with evil, cruel and cowardly men. But somehow it seemed deeper than that. I felt as though my spirit had recoiled into a place I had never been before.

  For years I did not see the sign again. That is, until, as a new arrival, I began to catch brief, terrifying glimpses of it around Susa’s Royal Palace, where the sight of it upon some soldiers’ backs made me inexplicably shudder and begin to weep like a baby. Some time later I would learn of these men’s origins.

  And that is how I know.

  5

  WILDERNESS OF ZIN—497 BC

  The poor traders never saw it coming.

  Granted, they were heavily armed with the latest Egyptian bows and leather shields. And they were certainly on guard, for the region they were crossing was a notorious haven for marauders. They were even being escorted by a contingent of local guides, who in addition to steering them through the impossible maze of gullies and ravines known as the Wilderness of Zin, pledged for their fee to offer protection from attack.

  The guides’ leader halted the camel caravan as the path ahead traced a fork-shaped split. His dark eyes darted above the folds of his scarf as though he was probing the craggy rock face for their proper route. But then a pair of vultures noisily took flight from a perch just ahead, and he abruptly lifted his arm.

  Suddenly all six of his men gave a shrill shout and violently kicked their camels into a trot. Before the traders could respond and follow, the guides had disappeared around the first rightward bend. The travelers had no time to dwell on the abandonment, for as soon as their betrayers were gone from sight, a rain of flaming arrows began to pour down upon them.

  Although one of them fell shrieking from his saddle with an arrow piercing his neck, the rest were well shielded. But the arrows’ true purpose soon revealed itself. One of them landed to the side of the one hapless trader’s body, and with a soft thump its fla
me shot forth in a thin sheet of fire a cubit or so above the ground.

  The vapors, thought Majiir Sunwadi, the group’s leader. He had smelled vague odors and seen a faint reflection of sunlight wafting above the path, sure signs of a nearly invisible cloud of fumes, another of Zin’s notorious features. He had heard of these strange mists igniting the night fires of the careless, but he had never heard of their strange properties being used in attack.

  Sunwadi cursed loudly as his camel groaned in terror and reared backward in an attempt to escape the flaming veil. He fell, reached forward and pulled his sword from its sheath. He hit the ground and his ankles roared in pain, first from the impact of the high fall, then from the singe of the flame upon his skin. But the fire only lasted an instant, its fuel just as quickly consumed.

  He rolled over and came up on his knees, holding the sword with two hands beside his face. The trained stance.

  He needn’t have bothered. He looked up into a wall of lances. His band was surrounded by a veritable rampart of hard leather, razor-sharp blades and eyes even harder and colder than the weapons themselves.

  Amalekites, he told himself with a flood of fear and resignation. The remnant spawn of King Agag’s once mighty people.

  He dropped his sword. He motioned for his men to do the same, and the clatter of falling swords echoed across the rocks. One thing he knew: the first rule of survival in these situations was complete and abject surrender. The Amalekites were superb warriors, so fluent in killing that Sunwadi had often inwardly confessed a perverse admiration for their skill. They were swift and expert in their craft, and no one in the Fertile Crescent dared deny it.

  The line of pirates shifted forward, and Sunwadi found himself standing, back amidst his dismounted men and their animals.

  They were marched in a tied-up huddle for several hours. Eventually the ravines played out and they climbed atop Zin’s treacherous terrain, tracing a narrow summit with the desert splayed out for miles beneath them. Sunwadi had just allowed himself his first furtive glance at the land’s beauty below, when they abruptly turned down into a ravine sheltered by a surprising grove of palm and olive trees. Its soothing shade canopy soon blocked out the oppression of the sun, and he could sense his men’s mood lifting. Even their captors began a lively jabber in their strange language, and their gestures grew more animated.