To Dwell among Cedars Read online

  I, however, could not take my eyes off the intriguing object. Even as the soldiers slid it off the end of the wagon, it shimmered in the sunlight, looking like its surfaces were alive and glowing. I had the odd urge to push through the assembly, race to its side, and place myself between it and the rabid crowd.

  Four soldiers lifted the chest with poles that were slipped through loops on the sides and hefted it atop their shoulders. Then they took the four steps up to the temple porch and none too gently dropped the golden box just at the threshold, an offering to the enormous depiction of Dagon within. The chest sat on the porch, looking small and sad between the towering scarlet and blue columns on either side.

  The seren ascended the stairs, his two high commanders at his heels, to confer with some of the priests who’d been watching over the procession in delighted anticipation. My uncle Harrom, the High Priest of Ashdod, was included in the discussion, a smug grin on his clean-shaven face, but I could not peel my eyes away from the shining box.

  “I want to go home, Risi,” yelled Lukio over the melee. No matter that he was tall for his age, my poor brother could see little more than backs and legs and arms all around him.

  “Soon,” I said, drawing him closer. Even if Jacame desired to leave—and the elated expression on her face told me she had no intention of doing so—the shifting, crowing crowd would never allow us to pass through.

  At my other side, Azuvah stood perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the box and her lips moving silently, while her fingers worried at the knotted threads she wore around her wrist.

  My uncle finally stepped forward, then lifted his hands, palms outstretched. A breeze off the ocean fluttered the tall crimson feathers on his ceremonial headdress as he waited for the crowd to settle. When the taunts and hisses finally melted into uneasy quiet, the priest slid a slow and steady kohl-lined gaze over the crowd.

  “People of Ashdod,” said Harrom, a benevolent smile spreading across his face as he gestured toward the seren, who looked over the crowd with regal satisfaction. “Our exalted king and his faithful men have returned with news to gladden our hearts. From the time the gods brought our ancestors across the Great Sea and, in their divine wisdom, led them to these shores, we’ve been fighting for our place in this fertile land. But as you have guessed, our valiant warriors have finally brought the Hebrews to their knees. The victory was decisive and our enemies’ losses extensive. This land is ours!”

  The crowd erupted again, the roar of approval for such news nearly deafening. With satisfaction on his face, Harrom allowed the chaos for a while longer before again gesturing for quiet. Once the people settled down again, he lifted his palm toward the golden box, which sat forlorn and askew before the threshold of the temple that threatened to consume it whole.

  “Behold, people of Ashdod, Dagon has bested the God of the Hebrews,” he bellowed, victory lifting his voice to impossible volume. “Yahweh. Is. Vanquished.”

  Two

  On secretive feet I padded through the adjoining rooms and slipped into an alcove just outside the door to the main hall, lured by the sounds of celebration. A large group of Harrom and Jacame’s family and friends were gathered around the blazing fire on the circular hearth at the center of the grand room, glorying in the downfall of our enemies. My aunt had spent the rest of the day after our return from the temple snapping at Lukio and me for being under her feet and scolding the kitchen slaves for not working fast enough or to her exacting standards, but the moment her guests stepped across her threshold, she’d been the queen of graceful hospitality.

  “The battle could not have been more simple,” said Senamo, the eldest of my cousins, raising a boar-headed rhyton to his lips for a long draft of wine. “There was a small scuffle when the Hebrews showed up with their magical box. We’d all heard rumors about it having great power.”

  Their youngest, Mataro, barked a harsh laugh. “That thing is no more powerful than my left sandal. Those ridiculous Hebrews came out onto the battlefield with it in the lead, blasting horns and shouting all sorts of pompous nonsense. But before the sun reached its zenith, their precious weapon was in our hands. The ones we didn’t slaughter ran off into the hills like squalling coneys with their tails on fire.”

  A round of derisive guffaws followed.

  “You did well to bring the Hebrews’ sacred chest back to Philistia,” said Harrom.

  “What will you do with it, Father?” asked Senamo. “Destroy it? The gold could certainly be melted and used again.”

  The distinctive clunk of pottery hitting pottery followed Senamo’s question.

  “Azuvah,” snapped Jacame. “Watch yourself. You nearly spilled the wine.”

  Disturbed by the excessively sharp tone of my aunt’s voice, I took a chance at peeking into the room through the crack near the door hinge. Azuvah stood next to a large wine krater, head down and her face sufficiently blank, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the handle of the juglet she’d just dipped into the wide-mouthed vessel. A few drops of crimson liquid dripped onto the floor near her feet.

  “Oh now,” said Senamo, the compassion in his tone as false as the Egyptian wig he always wore to appear more powerful—and perhaps to cover the bald spot on his head. “The Hebrew crone is likely just embarrassed by her kinsmen. Aren’t you, old woman? Not much to boast of when your people are little more than a herd of barely civilized she-goats.”

  Azuvah did not respond; she was no fool. She simply kept her head down as the entire room exploded into cackling laughter. Instinct wound tight in my belly. Azuvah may not be a Philistine, but she’d been the only person in the world who cared for Lukio and me since my mother died. I shifted, muscles tensed to put myself between her and their mocking.

  Without moving her head, Azuvah’s eyes suddenly glanced up, pinned on the place where I peered at her through the narrow gap. How she knew I was there, I could not explain, but so slowly that she barely seemed to move, she shook her head once, a clear command for me to stay where I was. I fisted my hands but obeyed.

  “At least we’ve had satisfaction for what your pathetic champion did to the temple at Gaza,” said Mataro, the youngest of my cousins. “Along with the rest of the honorable Philistine lives he wasted before being bested by one of our women.”

  I knew little about the man called Samson, who’d at one time been feared among our people for his vast strength but whose life ended beneath the rubble of the temple after being captured, shorn, and blinded. Although I had heard the whispers that he’d somehow pulled down the enormous twin columns that held up the roof in one final burst of strength after being outwitted by one of our women. Regardless of how many Philistines died in that temple, and she among them, Delilah was still held as a heroine in our cities.

  “Perhaps next time we’ll send you to thrash the Hebrews, Mother,” said Mataro. “They’ve proven to be nothing but a whimpering crowd of little girls anyhow.”

  Grinning, Jacame playfully slapped at her favorite and by far the most indulged of her four sons, even though he was fully grown at eighteen.

  Harrom lifted his cup of wine. “Our ancestors are no doubt looking on with pride in all of you now that you’ve fulfilled their wishes to take this land as our own. And to think, our own sons were involved in finishing the work our forefathers began when they set foot on these shores so many years ago. We are truly blessed by the gods.”

  The group of them drank to the memory of our valiant ancestors and to Dagon, who’d led those brave men and women across the Great Sea from Caphtor to the shores of this fertile land.

  Once talk turned to an unexpected shipment of goods from Sidon that had arrived in port two days before, I slipped away and skittered back down the hallway into my room, overflowing with questions about the golden box that had drained the color from Azuvah’s beloved face and determined to stay awake until she returned.

  Lukio was restless, shifting back and forth on the bed as I sang the same songs Azuvah did each night. However
, my version of the Hebrew lullabies was not adequate to soothe his unease tonight, and neither were my reassurances that she would arrive soon.

  Not only had he been frightened by the crush near the temple earlier, but after Harrom had declared triumph over the God of our enemies, the crowd grew so wild the four of us barely escaped without being trampled. Now, Azuvah’s absence in our room after so many hours had us both unsettled.

  I could not remember the last time she’d been forced to serve Jacame and Harrom so late into the night. And after what I’d seen and heard earlier, I could only imagine what further indignities she was suffering, as voices down in the hearth room had been growing increasingly louder and more slurred. I was grateful that Lukio had not heard Mataro and Senamo mocking her in front of everyone, since he was prone to flashes of temper and loved Azuvah too well to refrain from coming to her defense.

  The relief that poured into my limbs when the door finally opened and Azuvah slipped inside was so acute I let out a grateful sigh. From his place curled up next to me, Lukio sat up, blinking at the light from the oil lamp she held in her hand.

  The flame flickered as she flinched from surprise. “You are both still awake?”

  “Lukio refused to sleep until you returned,” I said, although I had been just as determined to keep my eyes open until she lay beside us, with Lukio in between, just as she had for as long as I could remember.

  Nightmares had plagued me after the death of my mother seven years ago, and no matter how many times Azuvah carried me back to my bed in the middle of the night from the servants’ quarters, she’d always found me back on the pallet next to her and Lukio in the morning. Eventually, she’d given in and the two of them had remained with me. Our father hadn’t cared where she slept as long as she kept the two of us quiet and out of his way. And thankfully Jacame had not argued when I insisted on continuing the arrangement when she took us in.

  After she extinguished the lamp, Azuvah slid between the linens, a low groan coming from her lips as she allowed herself to relax, likely for the first time since her eyes opened this morning. In my father’s house, she’d spent most of her time tending to the two of us children and overseeing the rest of the slaves my father could not bother himself to manage, but in Jacame’s house, she worked from before first light until sundown, tending to a wide range of duties.

  We barely saw her until bedtime most days, but it was in those quiet moonlit times she shared stories of her people with us, whispering in her mother tongue until our rebellious eyes finally fluttered closed. Both Lukio and I understood the language of the Hebrews well since Azuvah had always told her stories using the words in which she’d learned them and had openly spoken it to us within my father’s home. But after Jacame had overheard Lukio asking Azuvah a question in Hebrew and viciously chastised our servant for speaking anything other than the Philistine language, neither one of us had dared to use those words outside of our tiny room in the far back corner of the house.

  However, I spoke it now as I finally asked the question I’d been holding in for the better part of the day. “What was in that gold box the soldiers brought to Ashdod?”

  She waited so long to speak that I wondered whether she’d already drifted off in her exhaustion, but then she turned to peer at me, moonlight washing away the lines and grooves that testified to her many years.

  “I was just a girl when I was snatched,” she said, as if she’d not even heard my question. “Only eleven years old. A year younger than you now, Arisa.” Lukio settled his head on the pillow between us, knowing one of Azuvah’s stories was forthcoming. Already the tension in his small body had lessened.

  “I’d been herding goats with my older siblings,” she continued, her gnarled fingers brushing through Lukio’s curls in a smoothing motion, “and wandered just a little too far from their view. A man came up from behind, slipped his hand over my mouth, and just like that—I was taken. Brought here to Ashdod and sold into your grandfather’s house. I had no idea what slavery was among your people . . . or the indignities. . . .” Her voice trailed off. I held my breath, bursting with curiosity. Over the years she’d told us many stories, but never her own.

  “But when your mother was born a few years later,” she continued, “just after my own child, I became her wet nurse. And she was so beautiful. So sweet.” She smiled and brushed her callused palm over my cheek. “She was a bright light in the midst of great darkness, just like you and Lukio. And after that, slavery was not quite so painful as it had been before.”

  I’d not known that she had nursed my own mother. No wonder she’d held such an honored place among the other slaves before my brother was born.

  “But all throughout those years, I remembered,” she said. “I remembered the stories of my people. I remembered the histories written by Mosheh in the wilderness and the saga of our rescue from Egypt. I told them to myself whenever I was alone, singing the songs of my people under my breath so I would not forget.”

  Azuvah had told Lukio and me many tales of Mosheh, the revered leader of the Hebrews, and how he thwarted Pharaoh with his magical staff and how the entire land of Egypt was battered by plague after plague until Pharaoh finally relented and let them go.

  “And the box?” I whispered.

  “I have never seen it before with my own eyes. It has been in our holy sanctuary at Shiloh for over three hundred years. But I knew the moment I saw it that it is the Ark of the Covenant, the vessel that contains the Ten Words written on stone, along with the staff of our first High Priest, Aharon, and a portion of the manna that sustained our people for forty years in the wilderness.”

  “And the winged creatures on top?”

  “Those are cherubim, the guardians to the throne of Yahweh.”

  A whisper arose in my mind. She must have told me stories about this Ark long ago because I suddenly remembered something. “Your priests carried it, didn’t they?”

  “They did. There are men designated to serve Yahweh who are called Levites. They’ve been given specific instructions on how to carry and protect the Ark with the reverence and fear due its powerful nature.”

  I thought of the way the golden box had been so unceremoniously dumped onto the ground this morning and the forlorn way it sat on the threshold of the temple of Dagon. “How powerful could it be if our soldiers took it in battle?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you. I cannot understand how it was taken from my people. Not when in ancient times it preceded so many successful battles under the command of Yehoshua.”

  “Is that your king?” asked Lukio, perking up at the mention of war.

  “No,” replied Azuvah, “the tribes of Israel have no king. Yehoshua was the commander of our armies when our people came to this land after forty years of wandering in the wilderness.”

  “No king?” Lukio’s small face scrunched in confusion. “No wonder they lost the battle. Our seren is the tallest and strongest of all of the kings.”

  She smiled indulgently at his prideful statement, brushing a knuckle down his nose with affection. “He is a powerful man among the Philistines. That is no question. But we have no need of a king because Yahweh is our God, and it is he who guides and protects us, and he is far more powerful than all the earthly kingdoms put together. There have been times since Yehoshua’s death when we lost our way, years in which we turned to other gods and when foreigners overtook us, but Yahweh has always raised up shoftim to rescue us from our own folly.”

  “What are shoftim?” asked Lukio, on a yawn. I wondered if he would even hear the answer, fighting as he was against the weight of his eyelids.

  “Men and women appointed by Yahweh himself to call our armies to war, to fight against oppressors, and to urge the people to turn back to worship of the Most High God. They are famous among us—Othniel, Ehud, Devorah, Gideon, and many more. They have served as military commanders and wise judges over some of the tribes, but they were not kings and never purported to be.”

  “W
ho leads your people now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Azuvah. “When I was a girl, things were relatively peaceful between the Hebrews and the Philistines. Trade was frequent between us, although there were skirmishes on the outskirts of our territories every so often and, of course, sometimes towns were overrun or people snatched away.”

  Like she had been, I thought.

  “If anything we were far too entangled. Too comfortable with the gods of those among us,” she murmured. But before I could ask about the strange statement, she continued.

  “I have been trapped here in Ashdod for so many years without contact with other Hebrews that I could not tell you what life is like for my people now. But the Ark being here . . .” She sighed, and the sound was full of grief. “With the Philistines in possession of our most sacred object after such a terrible loss on the battlefield, something awful has happened to the sons of Yaakov. Something that I fear may threaten our very existence as a nation.”

  “Perhaps the box simply no longer holds any magic,” I said. “If that is even the same one the Hebrews carried in the wilderness, then it is very old. Perhaps it wore off.”

  “There is no magic in the box itself, Arisa. The power is that of the hand of Yahweh. It is merely a vessel, but one that signifies the sacred covenant between Israel and our God and above which has hovered the very shekinah of the Eternal One.” She shook her head, her tone foreboding. “These Philistines do not know what they have done. They have stolen something that they cannot comprehend or control. But no matter what, Yahweh’s glory will prevail. I have no fear for the Ark itself, only for those who do not handle it with respect.”

  A shiver slithered down my back, so I settled closer to Lukio’s warmth. It seemed he’d lost the struggle against sleep at some point, his breathing now slow and rhythmic against my chest.