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Jezebel
Copyright © 1963 by Gardner Fox.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
BOOK ONE: The Book of Ahab
One: The Night Of Revolt In Tyre
1.
A naked woman postured before the brazen statue.
Glowing torches made a carpet of fire below her across the wharfside square as armed men shook their bronze spears and bellowed at her words. The torchflames touched the metal helmets of the warriors, their shirts of chain-mail and the upper rims of their wooden shields where they were edged with copper. There was a madness in the salt air blowing in from the roadstead between the island palace of Tyre and its mainland city, and as men breathed deep of it, set their blood to boiling.
“Baal-Melkart,” screamed the woman.
The torches lifted, shaking. The soldiers roared an answer.
“Baal-Melkart—hear us! Turn your eyes toward us, your worshippers. Give us this night the victory over Phales!”
“Victory over the tyrant. Victory over Phales!”
The great god towered high above them all, its horned head almost in darkness where the torches failed to light it. Baal-Melkart sat upon a golden throne, high on a wagon of massive wooden beams and wooden wheels. The woman—young, with skin the color of dark cream, slim of waist and shapely of legs—threw back her mass of heavy black hair so that it tumbled below the twitching buttocks gleaming in the torchlight. Her arms went wide. Muscles tightened her sweat-wet flesh as she arched her back, proffering the swollen bowls of her heavy young breasts.
“God of all! Father of our race, hear us!”
“Hear us,” roared the men.
“Phales is evil in your eyes!”
“Evil! Evil!”
“Touch our swords, our spears! Bless them with your godhood!”
A thousand points rose into the night sky and were held there in the torchlight so that the jeweled eyes of the mighty Baal-Melkart might see and seeing, bless them with his own omnipotence. The girl stared up at the god, giving herself to its gaze, her loveliness covered neither by scarf nor veil. She was wanton, pagan, as she posed shamelessly, showing her god and any man who cared to look the secrets of her womanhood.
High the image towered, of beaten gold inlaid with silver and lapis-lazuli, grim and silent, in the shape of a man with a great crown upon his horned head. It sat with strongly thewed legs apart, hands on its knees. It had been carved in realistic detail, so that it might indeed be said to hunger for the woman posing so lewdly before it.
In the shadows of the docks that stretched outward into the harbor waters toward the rocky island that held the great stone palace of Phales, king of Tyre, three men pressed their backs against a wall. They were tall men and strong, being clad in mail-shirts and leather jerkins, with military boots on their feet. Each of them carried a long sword in a scabbard at a plain leather belt; over each shoulder, almost hidden beneath the folds of a brown wool cloak, was a small shield.
“Saw you ever such a woman?” breathed the tallest of the three. His face was hard, with high cheekbones; a sparse black beard was trimmed close to the line of his jaw. His black eyes blazed with feral lights under downpulled eyebrows; he seemed about to spring.
The man who stood to his left was shorter, not so bulky through the shoulders. There was no hair on his face and he seemed younger than the others. His hands, where they clasped his belt, were white and their long fingers supple as snakes as he moved them continually in a steady motion over the leather.
He said, “She is perfection, Ahab. Compared to her, my Ruth is like wheat after the thresher has beaten it flat.”
“Well, didn’t you come to Tyre to drop a few oats before your marriage?” rumbled the third man, not taking his eyes from the woman on the great dais that held the golden image.
“But to arrive now—in the midst of a rebellion!”
“You’re too sensible, Rael,” rasped Ahab. “This is the time to strike, when emotions are fever-hot and passions run like water in a spillway.”
“Aye, the women will be weak as newborn kittens,” grunted the third man, who was almost as tall as Ahab but bulkier by far, with shoulders so wide they seemed grotesque. His hairy legs and long arms bulged with muscle. “They’ll tumble to our pull like wool to the shearers’ knives.”
Rael smiled thinly, almost envious of the sheer animal spirits of the heavier, stronger Jehu. He wished in his heart he could be more like him, but there was a sensitivity in him that was absent from his companions. He could admire the beauty of the naked woman posturing above them, yet be aware of his own inadequacy before it. Neither Ahab nor Jehu were so affected; they saw in the priestess only a woman with whom to slake their lusts.
Ahab clamped a powerful hand on his wrist. “Be ready, you two. They’re breaking up—getting ready to cross the harbor.”
“Where Phales waits like a fly for the spider, helpless to escape. Ithobaal is a smart man. He lets his king hole up in the one spot from which there can be no running.”
Rael chuckled. “Always you see things with the eye of a soldier, Jehu. Is there no perception of beauty in your heart? To turn from the sight of a lovely girl to—well, to killing—smacks of an abtuseness which—”
Jehu bellowed laughter and hugged the slighter man against him with an arm like the bole of a cedar. “Rael, you are answered out of your own words. You’re a physician. You see in that shameless little tart a fine body full of health and vitality. Beauty, if you will, since that makes up beauty in your eyes.”
Even Ahab chuckled. “Each to his own. And now, since I am a prince in Israel, I think it’s time I gave the orders. Jehu, Rael—be ready. The men are thinning out. They’re starting across the mole. The girl will be alone with her god very soon, now.”
“Aye, she’s done her work. She’s roused the blood in them.”
“To kill,” commented Rael.
“To kill, to rape—they’re brothers of a sort,” snapped Jehu, still looking at the girl. “Frenzies which overtake a man in his blood heat.”
She was turning away from the statue to stare at the river of armed men flooding into the boats which would carry them across the harbor to the island palace of King Phales. Perspiration covered her slim body; her thick black hair was plastered to her smooth shoulders and upper arms; her jutting breasts rose and fell in rhythm to her labored breathing. In the light from the few remaining torches, thrust into copper holders around the brazen statue, she made a barbaric sight to the three men staring from the shadows.
Ahab sighed and stood away from the wall, tugging his swordbelt around
