cloak and slipped the shield from the thongs that held it suspended from his shoulders.
“No,” he said quickly, without looking behind him.
They made a wedge of mailed flesh and muscle, striding forward. Most of the rebels were being rowed in boats across to the palace; only a few remained and these were gathered about a bronze arm, lifting its harness clamps and fastening them to the traces on small grey asses. In a moment greased hubs were creaking as the heavy ram began to move onto a flat barge.
Ahab waited until the ram was gone.
Then he moved swiftly, approaching the brazen statue, putting a hand on a painted ornament of the wheeled dais, drawing himself upward. His scabbard clanked against its chains; at its sound the woman turned to stare down at him.
“You’re no Phoenician,” she said suddenly.
Ahab grinned up at her. From this position he could look along her sleek thighs upward beyond her mounded belly to the thrusting breasts. Aie, she was a beauty! Lovelier by far than any girl in his father’s palace at Samaria. Or at Jezreel either, for that matter. It was hard to breathe, staring up at her like this.
“Not I,” he agreed lightly and renewed his climbing.
There was no fear in her. She must have seen Rael and Jehu behind him, climbing also—like men pursuing a strange, impossible dream, the thought came to him—as they rose upward to lay hands on this Tyrian harlot.
“Israelites,” the girl said suddenly, and laughed.
Her palms clapped together, imperiously.
The great dais lurched forward, jerkily. It was a wide, broad wagon, that mighty pantechnicon, and inside it was a hollow space. There were men in that space, Ahab realized suddenly; slaves, brawney black men from Africa and bearded Hittites and Aramaeans—war prisoners—whose duty it was to transport the god from the Temple into this city square. Now they were taking it back to the Temple.
The sudden movement of the dais shook his handholds loose. Desperately Ahab and his companions scrabbled for new grips. Pressed to the wood, they fought to keep from falling.
The god-wagon was moving faster. Faster.
Ah, but—
Not toward the Temple! No!
Ahead of the swiftly rolling wagon was a stone wall.
Rael shouted and fell away, landing on a hip, rolling to avoid the mighty wooden wheel that towered high above him. At the same instant he saw Jehu flash past as he leaped.
“Ahab! Jump!” he screamed.
Ahab clung to the wooden dais, knowing his death was upon him. He could not climb fast enough to avoid the stone wall against which the heavy dais, weighted now by the golden image of Baal-Melkart, soon would crash. Nor could he jump safely from this angle as Jehu had jumped, far enough from the rotating hubs to avoid the crushing wheels. He was caught between wall and wood like a grain of wheat between millstone and grinding wheel.
The breath rasped harsh in his throat but he never looked away from the girl bending above him and smiling cruelly. Her black eyes were alive with the lust to kill and her full red mouth twisted into a grotesque imitation of its former loveliness. Forgotten were her breasts and loins, forgotten the silken sheen of her soft flesh and the shapeliness of her thighs. All he could see were those eyes.
He drowned in them, lost in their glistening wonder. It seemed he looked into depths of lust so evil that his skin crawled, not with disgust but with a strange, hot eagerness to know those depths of degradation, those nameless delights which this woman alone could give. She was too far above him to reach or he would have put a hand about her ankle and drawn her down to die beside him.
Her laughter rose mockingly, as though she could see inside his eyes to his mind benumbed by the vision in her own. “You will never know, Israelite,” she breathed. “You die—without knowing.”
The wall was at his back.
“Ahab! My prince!”
The words rose up from the tortured throat of a man who would have given everything he owned to be where the prince of Israel now clung, inches from a grinding death. Rael stared with the horror clear to read in his eyes. Jehu was yanking out his iron sword, running to mount the dais from the side, shouting oaths.
“Prince?” whispered the girl staring down at Ahab.
She cried out suddenly, rising and waving a hand.
Feet slid. Men flung themselves on wooden brakes, to force and hold them against the wheels. There were torturous squeals of wood on wood and smoke came where the friction started tiny fires.
The god-wagon slowed, lurched.
Ahab felt the stones at his back, biting in. The pressure was tremendous; it seemed that Baal-Melkart leaned his golden weight against him so that he could not breathe; his ribs bent and he expected to hear them snap. He was like a beetle crushed between the thumb and forefinger of a scholar.
Held helpless, unable to keep his face from twisting in pain, he watched the girl kneel above him. “Who are you, Israelite? What is your name?”
“Ahab, son of Omri. I am prince of Israel.”
She called down to the men in the dais hollow, “Back, draw it back. Release him. But—be easy. I don’t want him hurt.” She smiled at Ahab then and his senses reeled at the pleasure her smile gave to him.
As the pantechnicon backed from the wall, Jehu and Rael ran between its timbers and the stone wall and began to climb. Their hands reached upward, caught Ahab under his armpits. As he eased the strained muscles that held him to the jousts, they lowered him to the cobbles.
When they looked up, the girl was gone.
They leaned Ahab against the wall of a dockside warehouse that stared out over the harbor waters, letting him get his breath back. Rael was probing his deep chest—his mail shirt and leather jerkin lay on the street—with delicate fingertips, forehead furrowed in concentration. As his fingers moved, the tenseness went out of his muscles and his features eased their hardness.
“No bones broken, for which give thanks to Yahweh.”
“I shall dedicate a dozen golden bowls for His worship, I swear it,” he panted. The sweat stood out on his forehead, ran down into his eyes and along his ashen cheeks; the touch of death was still on Ahab.
He leaned his head against the stone wall and drew deep breaths. Jehu took a corner of his cloak and wiped his face. Ahab opened his eyes and smiled wolfishly, showing even white teeth.
“I will have that woman, that priestess,” he breathed.
“Some other time,” Rael nodded, handing Ahab his garments.
“This night, before the sun rises.”
“Ahab, be reasonable,” protested Rael.
“She thinks she has—beaten me. No woman can do that to me and not—suffer a little in consequence.
