voice made music in his ears.
“I came as swiftly as I could. It was no mean embrace in which I found myself, between that stone wall and the god-wagon.”
Her laughter tinkled. She raised slim arms into the moonlight and made caressing motions with her hands and fingers. Not once had she looked at him; she seemed enchanted by the bottom of the domed roof.
“Come. Let my embrace wipe out the memory of the other. I promise you, though—that mine may be a harder one from which to escape.”
He needed no encouragement. His long legs took him to the couch so that he stood above her, filling his eyes with her loveliness. The silken robe she wore was only a mist over her nudity. Earlier he had looked upon her nakedness and known excitement; now he realized that excitement had been as nothing. Veiled by the black gauze through which the tints of her nipples and the even darker smudge of blackness at her groin could be seen stark against white skin, she was enough to choke the breath from a man.
He knelt and bent his head, touching her warm thigh with his lips through the robe. She made a contented sound in her throat and put a hand on his head. Lazily she ran her fingers through his hair.
“Ahab, do you know my name?”
“You are beauty,” he whispered.
“Oh, sweet. I like that, but—I’m not just beauty, you know. I’m a person. I do have a name, a certain sort of rank.”
“You are Astarte.”
She laughed at that, turning her head to stare at his intent face. “This from you? An Israelite? Your god is my god’s mortal enemy.”
“Gods are never enemies. It is only their worshippers who make them so.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you so wise, so young?”
He grinned at her, nodding. “Like Solomon himself.”
His hand was on her thigh, sliding upward to her belly. Under his fingertips he sensed the smooth fire of her flesh, felt the tremble that showed her awareness of his exploration. Slowly he began to unwrap the robe that only pretended to hide her body.
She permitted his attention, breathing more rapidly when the silk slid away to bare the swollen mound of a breast. Ahab bent to touch its jutting nipple with his lips. Under her breath she whispered words which he could not make out.
“My name, Ahab,” she panted. “Who am I?”
“Does it matter?” he wondered. “You’re a woman, I’m a man. We are together in the gardens of your love goddess. Worship her with me.”
Her fingers caught his thick hair and held his head motionless above her belly. “You are wise with the wisdom of Solomon, as you say. To get what you want you tempt me with my own religious beliefs. Ah, but you! Isn’t it a sin for you to forsake Yahweh in order to slake your desire in the body of a Phoenician girl?”
“I am a prince,” he told her.
Her strength was as nothing against his heavily muscled frame. She was further weakened by laughter. Fingers tangled in his hair, she drew his mouth to the pouting nipples of her breasts, held him to his devotions while her hips squirmed lazily.
“As you say, you are a prince. And I—what shall I be after this night?”
“What greater rank can you have than that of goddess?”
A sullen roar seemed to be his answer. It came from the direction of the royal harbor. The woman drew strength from it, half sitting up and listening with her head tilted to one side. Ahab saw her ripe red mouth parted expectantly, felt her breast move against his cheek as she breathed in and out with excitement.
“Can you make out what they say?” she panted.
“Something about a new king in Phoenicia.”
“Ahab! Is that right? Are you sure? Listen again!”
To humor her, he drew away and concentrated. Yes, he could hear their words now, the words they shouted to the night sky. Ithobaal! Ithobaal was king in Phoenicia. The tyrant Phales was dethroned! The attack of the palace was a success. The king had been dragged screaming from his sleeping covers where he had hidden himself, to form a human pincushion for the spears of the rebels. Ithobaal ruled in Tyre!
He could make out the screams of women.
“Phales’ wives and concubines,” breathed the girl beside him. Her hand dug into his arm so tightly her silvered nails were drawing blood. “They will be raped to death before the goddess!”
Ahab growled in his throat. She turned an amused face to him. “It is the unwritten law of the conqueror. An old law, true—but one which Ithobaal decided to uphold. He wants no unborn child of Phales to rise in later life and plague him.”
He nodded grimly, saying, “Such was the law in the old, old days. Things are different now. We are barbarians no longer.”
She sank her teeth in his earlobe. “We are still barbarians here in Tyre. Tonight, you will be glad of it. Come with me to the Temple. I want to see what happens to proud Shubadad who was queen in Phoenicia before Phales lost his crown.”
He might have refused, might have pulled her down to slake his flesh hunger on her body but there was an excitement about this woman that was like heady wine. Soft, warm, fragrant, her skin smooth to the touch of his hand, she was an allurement he could not resist.
“All right,” he nodded, lifting her to her feet. “Show the way.”
She ran ahead of him along the garden walks—while outside the tumult of the crowd and the screams of the terrified women were growling louder—toward the columned portico of the Temple of Astarte. Ahab found himself caught up in the excitement that flushed her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle.
He gave no thought to the fact that this was a pagan temple, forbidden to him as a worshipper of Yahweh. All he saw was a naked woman under a thin black robe through which he could see plumply quivering buttocks, and when she turned to urge him onward, the bouncing of her ripened breasts. She waited for him before a blue door on which was set the carving of the wheat sheaves which were sacred to the god.
When he came up to her, she moved against him, clutching his shoulders with her arms, her open mouth lifting to his own. He held her, shuddering in the passion that gripped him. For this woman, he would dare anything. All she need do was beckon.
“Come quickly,” she called, catching his hand.
They ran side by side into the darkness of the great colonnade and up a flight of stone steps to a gallery that bordered one side of the temple. Below them in the vast open space before the goddess, men and women were thronging, crying out as the doors opened to reveal armed men in bloodstained mail shirts, their metal caps awry on their heads, as they came forward into the candlelit Room of Altars. They moved forward between the golden pillars past the great ablution bowl in a shouting wave, carrying four helpless females to the gigantic block of obsidian that was the Altar of the Gods.
Ahab stood by the rail, the woman holding him by his arm, staring down in horrified fascination.
