Second sight, p.22
Second Sight, page 22
“What language are these inscriptions written in?”
“Hebrew. What if some of the Philistines escaped to Africa, and suppose that Joab, great soldier and Philistine killer that he was, raised an army of Jews and took out after them to finish them off?”
“How could he do that if Solomon had him assassinated?”
“He couldn’t. But the first book of Kings doesn’t say that Solomon actually saw the body. He relied on the word of the assassin, who happened to be one of Joab’s officers. What if he wasn’t assassinated? What if Yahweh saved him at the last minute for this African operation and didn’t tell Solomon? What if the inscriptions in the desert are factual? What if ‘Joab’ and ‘Ja’wab’ are two ways of writing the same name in two different languages?”
Lla Kahina gave him a long look. “What if they are?” she asked.
“Then it’s a hell of a story,” Wolkowicz said. “Because if any of Queen Kahina’s Jerawa still survive, hidden somewhere in these mountains under another name, like Ja’wabi, then God Almighty entrusted them, and them alone, with a secret that they’ve kept for three thousand years.”
TWO
1
WHEN MERYEM WAS A CHILD, THE JA’WABI STILL SPENT SUMMERS IN the mountains with their flocks and winters with their camels in the Sahara. They believed that they were the first people to know the camel. It had never been a wild animal, they said, but had been created to assist them in crossing the desert in pursuit of the Philistines, whom Yahweh had commanded them to destroy. Although they did not eat its flesh as the Arabs did, the Ja’wabi esteemed the camel in every other way. In winter it drank only every eight or ten days and subsisted on the thorns and wild artichokes it found in the desert. Its urine sobered the drunken. Its hair had a multitude of uses: when reduced to ashes it stopped the worst hemorrhages, and in its natural state could be spun and woven into clothes, tents, rugs, and other useful and beautiful objects; its oil was good for the skin. Camel’s milk was always drunk when dates were eaten to counteract the urgent effect of the latter. Although difficult individuals occurred among camels, their character on the whole was admirable. The gelded male worked without complaint. The female, after being covered by the fâal, or stud, invariably fell deeply in love with him and never wanted to be separated from him.
“Yahweh has never made anything better than the camel,” the Ja’wabi said, but they also loved horses. They said:
Horses for pleasure
Camels for the desert
Sheep for Yahweh
When in the desert the tribe lived in tents, traveling continually from pasturage to pasturage on a long, loop-shaped route until, in the early spring when the ewes and she-camels were ready to give birth, they arrived at the foot of the Idaren Draren again. On the outward journey, twelve camels, never more or fewer, were loaded with two large panniers containing about 250 pounds of salt each. These camels were zouzdls, or geldings, chosen for their exceptional docility and obedience. Because the Ja’wabi traveled with about one hundred camels, the twelve plodding geldings carrying the salt were hardly noticeable as long as they showed no signs of temperament. Their good behavior was important, because the salt was the real reason for the winter journey of the Ja’wabi. Their destination was a pair of oases in the Azouâd Timétrine called Oen and Laster. These oases, each containing a spring and date trees, were located one day’s journey apart.
Each year, on arriving at the northernmost oasis, the main body of the Ja’wabi set up camp while twelve men mounted on camels set out for the second oasis, leading the zouzdls by long leather reins. On arrival, just before sunset, they unloaded the baskets of salt and left them beside the spring. Then they returned to camp in darkness, navigating by the stars. The next morning, when they returned, the salt was gone, and in its place they invariably found twelve small bars of gold, each stamped with a thumbless hand on which the twelve finger joints were clearly etched, and the twenty-four empty panniers (arranged in two groups of twelve each, one on either side of the spring) in which the salt had been transported the year before.
This silent trade had been going on for hundreds of years. The Ja’wabi had never seen the people who took the salt and left the gold. They knew only two things about them: that the number twelve was significant to them, and that they did not wish to be seen. If fewer or more than twelve camel loads of salt were deposited, or if fewer or more than twelve Ja’wabi brought the salt to the oasis, the other people left it undisturbed and went away, taking their gold with them. Once or twice, in the remote past, young Ja’wabi men had concealed themselves in the dunes overlooking the oasis, hoping to catch a glimpse of the owners of the gold. In those years the baskets of salt had been left untouched.
The twelve bars of gold were always carried back to the Idáren Dráren scattered among the pack saddles of the twelve zouzâls which had carried the salt to the oasis. Over the centuries the Ja’wabi had laid up a large treasure of the small gold bars. This gold was the reason for the tribe’s survival. With it they had purchased land and built their village of Tifawt in the mountains; with it they armed themselves, bribed their enemies, paid their taxes, and educated their children. The gold was communal property, and any Ja’wabi could ask for some of it, or its equivalent in currency or goods, for any good reason. Such requests were never refused, but they were rare, because the tribe owned nearly everything in common, and its members almost never needed cash.
The place where the gold was kept was known only to one man and one woman in each generation; they passed the secret on to another of their sex before they died. It had never happened that both had died violently before passing on their knowledge of the treasury’s whereabouts, but of course this was a possibility.
While alone in the Sahara, the Ja’wabi lived according to their proverbs, without regard to the scrutiny of others, without calls to prayer, without the mask of alien customs and religion. Religious occasions were observed by animal sacrifices, with sprinkling of blood and the animals being burned in a fire to the accompaniment of prayers before their flesh was eaten.
Every year the exchange of salt for gold was the occasion for celebration. Sheep were slaughtered and eaten, wine was drunk, the camels were given extra rations of grain.. The twelve camels which had carried the salt, and were now carrying the gold bars, were given dates.
It was during this celebration, in the year when Meryem was six, that she saw her first pictures of the future. While her mother was combing and braiding her hair in preparation for the celebration, Meryem, while wide awake, had a dream in which one of the gold-bearing zourtâls was led away into the desert by a rat. She and her mother were alone, inside the tent with the flaps closed. Meryem described what she was seeing as it happened in her dream. Her mother went on combing.
“What did the rat say to the camel?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Meryem replied. “He had the rein his mouth.” “Was the rat stealing the gold?”
“No, he wanted salt.”
That night a tethered zouzâl carrying a bar of gold in its saddle did escape, and when it was found the next day, miles away from camp among the dunes, the rat which had set it free by chewing through its leather tether was still tugging the obedient zouzâd toward the horizon. The boys who recaptured the camel had to kill the rat with stones because it would not let go of the rein; the leather was delicious to the little creature because it was permeated with the salt of human sweat.
After this first experience of clairvoyance, Meryem frequently saw pictures of the future. Usually these were small glimpses of homely details—the color of a stranger’s coat, something spilled, the sex of an unborn child. If the people in the pictures spoke, she heard what they said. These visions occurred more frequently, and the details were more clearly observed, when she was in the desert. Inside the walls of the village her powers were much weaker, though even there she could determine the sex and sometimes the character of unborn babies and make other useful predictions. She knew when storms were coming and when the French were marching over the mountains to collect taxes.
As she approached puberty Meryem began to see and hear scenes from the past, also—people she recognized as ancestors of the Ja’wabi moving through a different, greener desert with thousands of camels and horses and other animals; men slaughtering and burning goats and lambs and heifers in roaring fires on a snowy mountaintop she recognized as Tinzár; a tremendous storm in which the sky suddenly turned aubergine from horizon to horizon and was rent by lightning while hailstones as large as dates pelted people and animals, drawing blood and causing the livestock to stampede.
She said nothing about this vision. By this time Meryem’s family took her phantasma for granted. Although no one in the tribe had possessed the gift of prophecy for a long time, there had been other seers among the Ja’wabi, and these had almost always been females. The tribe recognized the reappearance of the gift in Meryem as they would have acknowledged an inherited physical characteristic, as something to be expected from generation to generation. Very often, they knew, these visions did not last beyond childhood.
Then, just before her twelfth birthday, Meryem dreamed, while wide awake as usual, of a woman with blue tears tattooed on her cheeks who smeared honey over her breasts and told two young men, one of them a Berber and the other an Arab captured in battle, to eat the honey as if they were children suckling at her bosom. “Those who are fed from the same mother’s breasts become brothers,” the woman said. This was a firm belief among the Ja’wabi, whose women nursed each other’s babies as a matter of course, in the conviction that it bound them, and therefore the tribe, together for life. Later in the same dream Meryem heard the same woman, who now seemed to be older, tell the two young men that she had a vision in which she saw her own severed head being handed over to the enemy.
The appearance of the woman with blue tears in Meryem’s dreams produced an entirely different effect on her family and the rest of the tribe, because the older Ja’wabi recognized what she had seen as true episodes from the life of Queen Kahina.
Meryem’s dream was correct in all the essential details: After the battle on the Meskyana River Kahina had adopted a captured Arab warrior named Khaled, telling him, “You are the bravest and most handsome man I have ever seen.” She had bonded her adopted son to her natural son by suckling them with honey (the Arabs said oil and barley flour) as in Meryem’s dream. It was also known that five years later, on the eve of the battle in which Kahina’s army was defeated by the Arabs, the queen had a vision of her own severed head being handed over to the victorious enemy. “Take care of the future,” she told her sons, “for I am as good as dead.” Khaled, the adopted son, urged her to flee into the desert without giving battle, but she refused; evidently she loved him too much to suspect (as the Ja’wabi had always believed) that he was still an Arab at heart, still a Moslem, and that he had betrayed her plans and given the order of battle to the enemy. As she had foreseen, she was killed and decapitated the next day at a place called Birel Kahina, Kahina’s Well. Her sons converted to Islam and were placed in command of twelve thousand horsemen charged with the duty of converting the Berbers by the sword.
After the death of Kahina the Ja’wabi had separated themselves from the Jerawa forever and begun to live apart from all other Berbers and Arabs. Although the existence of Kahina and the details of her battles with the Arab armies were recorded in Arab histories, the Ja’wabi regarded the person of Kahina and her deeds as belonging to their own secret lore.
Because Meryem was not yet twelve years and one day old, the age at which Ja’wabi girls became women according to law, and because the Ja’wabi were strictly forbidden to utter any detail of the tribe’s history aloud, even to one another, except during secret coming-of-age ceremonies in which boys and girls were taken into the mountains or the desert by a single adult and told who and what they really were, it was impossible that she could have known about Kahina’s existence before it was revealed to her in a vision.
2
WHEN MERYEM CAME OF AGE A FEW WEEKS AFTER HER DREAM ABOUT Kahina, an old woman called Ashbeah took her into the desert, and told her who the Ja’wabi were, and how Joab had led them out of Israel in pursuit of the Philistines. According to Ashbeah, Joab was King David’s nephew, the son of David’s older sister Zeruiah and the commander of the combined armies of Israel, which numbered eight hundred thousand men, and of Judah, numbering five hundred thousand.
Joab was David’s right arm. All his life he had carried out the king’s hidden wishes—arranging to let the enemy kill Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, so that he would not learn that his beautiful wife was pregnant by the king; assassinating Abner and Amasa, the commanders of the two armies, so that these armies, and therefore the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, could be combined into one; killing the king’s rebellious son Absalom by thrusting three darts into his heart with his own hand; and permitting David to deny to the world, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted these things to happen.
On returning to the city after the victory over Absalom’s army, the soldiers found David inside his palace, weeping and crying, “My son Absalom! Oh, Absalom my son, my son!” With the dirt of battle still upon him, Joab went inside to the king and said, “Today you have made all your servants feel ashamed—today, when they have saved your life, the lives of your sons and daughters, the lives of your wives and of your concubines!—because you love those who hate you and hate those who love you. Today you have made it plain that commanders and soldiers mean nothing to you—for today I can see that you would be content if we were all dead, provided that Absalom was alive! Now get up, come out and reassure your soldiers; for if you do not come out, I swear by Yahweh, not one man will stay with you tonight; and this will be a worse misfortune for you than anything that has happened to you from your youth until now!” King David did as Joab said.
More than any other man, Joab knew the sins, weaknesses, and secrets of the king, because he had taken them upon himself. When David lay dying with the most beautiful girl in Israel beside him in his bed to keep him warm, he told his son Solomon, child of Bathsheba, that he must kill Joab if he wished to rule Israel and Judah without carrying the burden of Joab’s sins. “You will be wise,” David told Solomon, “not to let his gray head go down to Sheol [the grave] in peace.”
So when he became king after his father’s death, Solomon sent another famous champion, Benaiah of Kabzeel, son of Jehoiada, to kill Joab. Knowing Solomon’s intentions, Joab had taken sanctuary in the Tent of Yahweh. Benaiah knew Joab well. He was a hero of the wars against the Philistines, and he had served as a member of the Thirty, King David’s bodyguard, under the command of Joab’s brother Abishai. Benaiah found Joab clinging to the horns of the altar. He refused to come outside away from the protection of Yahweh, saying, “Kill me here.” But Benaiah, knowing of the great services Joab had rendered to Yahweh, was afraid to execute Solomon’s death warrant.
But Solomon sent Benaiah back to the Tent of Yahweh, saying, “Strike him down and bury him, and so rid me and my family of the innocent blood which Joab has shed … without my father David’s knowledge. May the blood come down on the head of Joab and his descendants forever, but may David, his descendants, his dynasty, his throne have peace forever from Yahweh.”
Benaiah knew that he would be rewarded for killing Joab by being named commander of the army in his place. Yet he loved Joab because of his bravery, because of his obedience to Yahweh which had always been greater than his loyalty to David, and because he had forced the king to acknowledge his debt to the army.
Inside the Tent of Yahweh, Joab said to Benaiah who had been sent by Solomon to murder him, “The army knows the truth about David and Solomon, whose mother Bathsheba has put him on the throne, and if you kill me in the name of the king’s lies, they will not follow you.”
Benaiah knew that this was so. “Then what am I to do?” he asked.
“Ask Yahweh,” Joab replied, handing him urim and thummim, the dice cast by the priests when prophesying.
Benaiah took the dice, saying, “Yahweh, God of Israel, if I am to kill Joab give urim, but if I am to let him go, give thummim.”
Joab seized his hand before he could cast the dice and said, “I am telling you, Yahweh, that if you give thummim, I will pursue the Philistines who have sailed away in ships and kill them all and utterly destroy their temples, as you commanded Joshua to do and he failed to do. But I will kill them all and destroy their god. Now throw.”
Benaiah threw, and it was thummim. Joab picked up the dice and placed them in his girdle. He carried them on his person for the remainder of his life.
To make the king think that Joab was dead as he had ordered, Benaiah wrapped him in a shroud stained with the blood of a goat and carried him to his home in the desert. But instead of burying him, as Benaiah reported to Solomon, he placed him at the head of an army composed entirely of men of the tribe of Judah, descendants of Joab’s ancestor Caleb, whom Yahweh had sent with Joshua and ten others to spy out the land of Canaan, and who, alone among the twelve spies, had obeyed Yahweh completely, and to whom, in reward for his steadfastness, Yahweh afterward gave the land of Canaan.
Joab led this army with its camels, horses, flocks and herds, wives, children, and slaves (but no priests because there were no descendants of Aaron among them) into Sinai and then across Egypt and Libya, killing Philistines where he found them, until he reached the Idáren Dráren, where the Philistines had set up an altar on a hilltop to their god Baal and his companion the bull.
As the Ja’wabi attacked, a curtain of darkness came over the mountains and advanced across the plain with the Ja’wabi in sunshine on one side of the curtain and the Philistines in darkness on the other. The sky turned black, lightning flashed, and hailstones fell on the Philistines like missiles from a multitude of slingers. The horses and camels of the Philistines were terrified and ran away, but those of the Ja’wabi, basking in sunshine, were calm and steady. When the hail ceased to fall Joab and his army charged with spear and sword and destroyed the Philistines to the last man, woman, child, and animal. Then they demolished the temple of Baal as Yahweh had instructed Moses: “You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.”
