Faith of My Fathers (7 page)

“No, Dinah. Why would I kill you?” He stopped beside the bed and traced her cheek with his finger. “You’ve grown into a very beautiful woman. Do you know that? Who has your father been saving you for? Certainly not for me.” He took off his outer robe and let it drop to the floor, then sat on the bed again.

Dinah shivered all over with fear. “I haven’t been promised to anyone, Your Majesty. If you ask Abba, I’m sure he’ll let you marry me. He’ll be glad to arrange a betrothal.” She would say anything to keep him away from her. For the second time that night she felt like she might vomit.

“I don’t need to ask your father, Dinah. I’m the king, remember? I can have whatever I want.”

“Please . . . not like this. We have to have the wedding first. And say our vows. And—”

“There’s no time for all of that.” He smoothed her hair away from her face. “We were destined for each other, Dinah. Besides, I’m told that the stars are favorable for me tonight.”

Joshua stood on Amasai the Levite’s front doorstep and bowed to him in respect. “Thank you again, sir. Good night, sir.” As soon as Amasai went inside and the door thumped shut behind him, Joshua grinned and raised his fist in the air with a shout of triumph. Finally! After months of waiting, Yael’s father had agreed to their betrothal. He had set a date for their wedding.

Beautiful Yael, with her soft brown eyes and hair the color of embers. She would finally be his wife. No more proper distances between them. No more clinging chaperones or formal good-byes at the door. Joshua would be able to kiss her ivory skin, hold her in his arms. But how would he ever wait three more months?

He started walking the familiar route home, completely unaware of his surroundings, his feet moving by memory. His imagination raced ahead to their future—standing beside Yael under the wedding canopy, sitting beside her at the marriage feast, leading her to their bridal chamber.

In a daze of happiness, Joshua rounded the corner and collided with someone in the darkness, nearly knocking the man off his feet. “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t watching where—” “Master Joshua!”

“Maki, is that you?” In the dim light, Joshua recognized his grandfather’s servant. “What are you doing here? Is it Tirza’s baby?”

“You must follow me, Master Joshua,” he whispered breathlessly. “Hurry!”

Fear filled Maki’s wide eyes. He gripped Joshua’s arm and pulled him into a narrow alley between two houses. Then he started to run at a fast trot, hauling Joshua along behind him. The lane was so dark Joshua couldn’t see his own feet, and he stumbled over garbage and loose stones, stepped in water and raw sewage. The stench nauseated him as his sandals skidded on the slimy pavement. Had Maki gone crazy? They weren’t headed home. They were going in the opposite direction.

“Maki, slow down a minute. You’re hurting my arm.”

“I can’t! We must hurry!”

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Joshua noticed that Maki was not dressed. His feet were bare, and he wore only his linen undergarment. “Maki, why on earth are you—?”

“Shh!”

Joshua was growing breathless from exertion. He felt as if a heavy stone were settling on his chest, making it difficult to breathe. If he ran like this much longer, he would have a breathing attack. They jogged north through the back lanes of Jerusalem along the western side of the Temple Mount until they finally reached the Sheep Gate. Maki stopped in the shadows.

The gate across the open square from them was closed and barred for the night. Four soldiers stood watch. Maki uttered a curse. “We’re too late!” He gripped Joshua’s other arm and started pulling him back the way they had just come.

“No, wait. Stop,” Joshua said, his lungs wheezing. “I can’t run anymore. I have to rest.”

“Not here, Master Joshua. It’s not safe. Come on.”

Joshua had no choice but to stumble after him again, through the narrow streets. He had never been in these back alleyways in daylight, much less at night, and it occurred to him a second time that Maki must have lost his mind. But Joshua was too tired and too winded to fight him. Besides, he had never been very good at physical combat.

Finally Maki stopped at the door of a ramshackle house that was little more than a crude shack. He put his fingers to his lips, warning Joshua to be silent, then opened the door. Joshua obeyed, saying nothing, but it was impossible to silence his raspy breaths or stifle his coughs. It felt as if more stones were being piled on his chest, pressing down.

Inside the single-room hovel, three people lay asleep on straw pallets spread across the floor. Joshua heard a gasp and one of the figures, a teenaged girl, sat up.

“It’s all right,” Maki whispered. “It’s me.”

“What—?” she began, but Maki cut off her words.

“Shh. Don’t light the lamp. Is the cistern empty?”

“Is the cistern—? No, there’s about a cubit of water in it.”

“I’m sorry, Master Joshua. You’ll have to get wet.”

“Maki, I’m not crawling into anyone’s cistern until you tell me what’s going on. Where are we?”

“It’s better for you if you don’t know.”

“I need to sit down.” Joshua glanced around the room as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He spotted a rough, three-legged stool beside a homemade table and sank down on it. The girl sat trembling on her pallet a few feet away from him with the blanket drawn up to her chin. She looked as confused as he was. The two smaller figures, who Joshua assumed were children, remained asleep.

Gradually the tightness in Joshua’s chest began to ease. His mind cleared as the panic that always gripped him during a breathing attack died away. He looked up at Maki and saw that he was shivering. As Joshua removed his own robe and draped it around the servant’s shoulders, Maki’s eyes filled with tears.

“Maki, for goodness sake, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know, Master Joshua, I don’t know.” His teeth chattered together like blocks of wood. “The king’s soldiers burst into your house—dozens of them. They tore it apart, searching.”

“For what?”

“For you, Master Joshua.”

“For me? That’s crazy!” Now he was certain that his poor servant had suffered a breakdown. He had to calm the man, get him into bed.

“Do you have any strong wine?” Joshua asked the girl. She shook her head. “Maki, that doesn’t make sense. King Manasseh wouldn’t send soldiers to tear our house apart if he wanted to find me. I work in the palace. I was there all day. I . . . Maki, for heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” The servant had covered his face with both hands. He was sobbing.

“His blood was all over the floor when they dragged him away, Master Joshua! They just walked through it like it wasn’t even there! They left footprints in it!”

The girl scrambled out of bed and ran to Maki. “Shh, Abba . . . shh . . .” she soothed. She held him, rocking him like a baby.

Dread closed around Joshua’s heart like a fist. He carried the stool to Maki and eased him down on it, waiting until he finally stopped sobbing. “Can you try to start at the beginning?” Joshua asked quietly.

Maki nodded and drew a shuddering breath. “I was in bed, almost asleep, when I heard the soldiers crashing around. I got up, clothed like this.” He looked down at his bare feet and thin undergarment. “The king’s guards were running all through the house, ransacking it.”

“The king’s soldiers? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Palace guards.”

“Go on.”

“They were taking all of your father’s papers and shoving them into sacks, knocking stuff over, breaking things.”

“Why?”

Maki shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know why. When I heard Lady Dinah screaming, I ran to the front hallway. I saw Master Hilkiah lying on the floor, and the captain . . . the captain was smashing Hilkiah’s head against the stones! He just smashed it again and again!”

God of Abraham, this couldn’t be true. Maki had dreamt the entire thing. He must have had some sort of nightmare that had made him go crazy. This had never happened. But Maki’s horror seemed too real for a mere nightmare.

“Then the captain started choking Lady Dinah. He put his hands around her throat, and he said he would kill her if she didn’t tell him where you were. But she wouldn’t tell him, and so he just kept choking her and choking her until all the life went out of her.”

Joshua needed to sit down to absorb this incredible story, but there was no other seat in the house. He leaned against the rickety table, praying that none of it was true.

“They dragged Lady Dinah and Master Hilkiah away. The captain told his men to take their bodies to King Manasseh. That’s when they trampled through his blood and—”

“Maki, are you
sure
they said King Manasseh?”

“Yes,” he answered, wiping his eyes.

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

“There was a lot of confusion—soldiers everywhere—so I crept up to the roof when no one was looking and climbed down the outside stairs.”

“And you came to find me?”

He shook his head. “First I went to Rabbi Isaiah’s house to find Master Eliakim. But there were soldiers at the rabbi’s house, too, doing the same thing, tearing it apart.”

“Did you see my father?”

“He wasn’t there. Neither was the rabbi. Only soldiers. You are in great danger, Master Joshua. You must hide where no one will find you. There’s a cistern beneath the house.” Maki stood and gripped Joshua’s arm again, pulling him toward the corner.

“Wait, Maki. Not yet. I need time to think.”

Maki covered his face and began to weep again. “I’ve worked for Master Hilkiah since I was a boy. He was so kind to me. Such a godly man. They didn’t have to do that to him. They didn’t have to kill him and trample through his blood like he was a dog!”

Joshua let Maki’s daughter soothe him. He walked across the room to a small window in the front of the house and peered out between the rough boards of the shutters into the darkened street. Everything was calm and quiet. No soldiers ran through the street ransacking houses and killing people. There was no reason for them to do it.

Joshua had talked to King Manasseh only a few hours earlier. It was the anniversary of his mother’s death. He was going to visit her tomb. Joshua could recall nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing that would cause the king’s soldiers to break into his house, ransack it, and then kill his grandfather and his sister. But something had upset Maki. Joshua couldn’t imagine what. He heard a scraping sound and turned to see the servant pushing off the lid of the cistern.

“Listen, Maki,” Joshua said calmly, “I think I should go home and—”

“No, you can’t go home! Master Hilkiah died to protect you. You must hide. If they capture you, then he died for nothing. That’s why I’m helping you. I’m doing this for Master Hilkiah!”

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe your story, Maki. There’s no reason for any of it to happen. King Manasseh is my friend. Abba and I work with him. Maybe if I went to the palace and talked to him I could straighten this out and—” “If you walk out of that door, Master Joshua, you are a dead man.”

“I’ll be careful to—”

Suddenly the servant leaped at him, and before Joshua could react, Maki wrestled him to the ground. He was more than a head shorter than Joshua and old enough to be his father, but the servant fought with the strength of a desperate man.

“I can’t let you leave this house,” Maki said as he tied Joshua’s hands behind his back and dragged him toward the opening. “You must get into the cistern. Now!”

———— Dinah lay on the bed, unmoving. Manasseh had finally left her. Now she wanted to die.

The carved bed was inlaid with ivory and spread with fine perfumed linens, but the sheets made her cringe, as if they crawled with scorpions. She trembled at the feel of them beneath her skin. She stood up, nauseated with shock and pain.

The room was dark, but Dinah didn’t search for a lamp. She could hide better in the darkness. She groped her way around the room and found a mikveh, half full of water, behind a latticed screen. The water was cold, but she sank into the bath and began to wash. She was filthy, so filthy. If only she could wash away the memory of him, but the horror was beneath her skin, inside her soul, and no amount of scrubbing would cleanse it. She thought of her mother and began to sob. Mama had been raped, too. But that man had been a stranger, not a trusted family friend. Dinah wasn’t sure which was worse.

When she could no longer endure the frigid water, she climbed out and dressed again. Maybe Manasseh would let her go home now. Abba would hold her in his arms to comfort her and tell her everything would be all right. But she knew that her life would never be the same. She had been disgraced. No one could marry her now except Manasseh, and the thought of marrying him made her want to vomit.

She tried to open the door, but it was locked. So were the window shutters. Dinah curled up on the window seat, hugging her knees, shivering with cold and fear. She closed her eyes tightly, hoping the memory of what he had done to her would fade away, but it wouldn’t. She couldn’t make it stop happening over and over again in her mind.

“God of Abraham, please help me,” she wept. “Please, please help me.”