At noon, Elijah began taunting them: “Call a little louder—Baal is a god, after all. Maybe he’s off meditating somewhere or other, or maybe he’s gotten involved in a project, or maybe he’s on vacation. You don’t suppose he’s overslept, do you, and needs to be woken up?”
The people laughed, relieved, as the children imagined gods fumbling for their morning milk and waking too late, as they often did. A child suggested a swift rod to the backside would get Baal’s attention, and the children were lost to everyone, giggling uncontrollably. Mothers tried to shoo them out of the crowd to the edges, where they could be silenced with a stern look and threat of this same rod, but Elijah stayed them with one hand upraised.
The priests of Baal, their faces red and pocked with sweat, prayed louder and louder, screaming their request, cutting themselves with swords and knives until they were covered in their own blood. The children stopped giggling and watched in horror. Now Elijah did not stop the mothers from shooing the children from the crowd.
The bloody show continued for over an hour, until the blood of the oxen had turned dark and the blood of the men painted it bright red again. Every prayer, every incantation they knew was flung to the heavens, or called down as curses on the place. The morning had left them, but she was followed by the afternoon, and he proved as quiet. The priests staggered and clung to each other for support. No women danced now or played tambourines. Three years of drought leading to this, a day of draining blood and bleeding prayers, emptied them of all hope. Baal would not accept their sacrifices.
The people murmured, and Ahab felt their disappointment like an accusation pointed at him. There could be no war between gods if none arrived. If Yahweh was reluctant to accept their sacrifice, they would have traveled for days only to die. And Ahab had allowed it, just like he had allowed the drought.
Elijah did not yell. The people were eager to listen, eager for him to act.
“Enough of that—it’s my turn,” Elijah called. “Gather around.”
He laid firewood across the stone altar. Carmel was generous with dead, dry wood, and Ahab watched with sorrow as Elijah stacked the dead reminders of days when the spring had run fuller. Elijah dug next, a trench around the altar. The people watched in silence as Elijah’s back flinched and flexed, his burned shoulders shoving down as the shovel dug into the crumbling red dirt.
The ox was silent as Elijah slit its throat, resting his hands again on the animal’s head, praying with quiet words. The beast fell to its knees, then its stomach, looking at the people in ignorance and awe as it heaved to one side and died. Elijah plunged his dagger deep into the thigh and began cutting, cutting each leg free, clearing away the entrails, laying each dripping piece on the firewood. Ahab was transfixed, and Elijah’s words did not register at once.
“Fill four buckets with water, and drench both the ox and the firewood.”
Elijah waited for a moment before a man to Ahab’s right understood and obeyed. No one else moved. Some of the priests of Baal sat, their stone faces cold and hard, while others laid in the shade of a few last trees that still fought the drought. No priest had the strength to move or curse.
Then he said, “Do it again.”
The man, still holding his side from his labors, exhaled and ran back to his buckets. Elijah counted each load off as it was poured in: one, two, three, four. Elijah was a man who picked his way through rocky paths because he took no pleasure in the softer ways. His faith was more like a taste, a preference bred for another place and time, and he had no patience for the confections men like Ahab lived on. Elijah wanted the hard and narrow path. He always had.
Then Elijah said, “Do it a third time.”
Ahab heard a woman gasp and the priests cluck their teeth, that he would waste a day and make his inevitable humiliation greater. Children licked their cracked lips, seeing so much water flow.
Water brimmed to the very edge of the trench, and Ahab knew the horror showed on his face as water dripped, mixed with blood from the ox. He followed each drop with grim fascination, as if waiting for the one that would cause the trench to spill, and the spill to pick up speed, until they were all covered in blood and salted water.
Elijah prayed loudly, “O God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, make it known right now that You are God in Israel, that I am Your servant, and that I am under Your orders. Answer me, God: O answer me and reveal to this people that You are God, the true God, and that You are giving these people another chance at repentance.”
A star of fire, burning and popping, exploded onto the altar, showering sparks among the screaming crowd. Ahab gripped the sides of his throne and willed his legs to move but could not feel them.
The fire, white at the center but burning blue at its tips, ate it all: the offering, the wood, the stones, the dirt, and even the water in the trench. Hissing steam roiled out and down, enveloping the crowd. Mothers were screaming for their children, who had dropped their hands, and men cried out for wives bent in the mist, searching for missing children. The steam was gone at once, but the fire remained, and they felt it burning something away, something living among them, in them, not a dead thing sacrificed, but something resistant and spitting, pulled away like a gorged tick; and this thing the fire burned before them cauterized the wound before they could cry out in pain.
All fell on their faces, Ahab first among them. He was not humiliated. He was convinced.
“God is the true God! God is the true God!” The words were on all hearts, and their mouths freed the song with relish. Every fiber of their bodies sang, and their ears heard harmony in a world they knew not.
14
Ahab fell as a man and was raised as a king. He felt it in his blood. Elijah’s steady, unyielding face brought him pleasure now, and he knew it was true. The Lord reigned in Israel.
Elijah yelled to the people: “Grab the Baal prophets! Don’t let one get away!”
The priests of Baal had already begun to run, split into panicked flights. Some ran southeast toward Muragen, the name mothers spit, another place where these priests had coaxed children away and given them as burnt sacrifices. Some ran northeast to el-Qassis, an esteemed mound where priests gave offerings of grain and oil. These two places had been their sacred sites here on Carmel and they fled for them instinctively, but the people knew how to track frightened prey and found the unholy ones, dragging them back to the brook under Elijah’s command. The priests begged for mercy, but the crowd swung stones down on their heads without remorse and thrust daggers through robes dried with ox blood.
Ahab walked up the mountain, picking his way through the people’s bloody business. The altar smoked though the flames were gone. The trench was empty and dry, and Ahab set one foot in it carefully as he reached to touch what remained of the sacrifice: tiny embers that shone brightly before their death. He touched the side of the altar, its twelve white stones. How had he come to this place, he wondered, a godless son of a foreign mercenary? How was it that God had called to him at last, in this season of his life, when his path was already decided? What would this God want from him?
A priest screamed, the sound thick and stuttering as he choked on his own blood. Death was never as fast as the dying wished. Ahab shuddered with the memory, for he had been dying for years until today. The name of the Lord and the fire from heaven had sent new life through his veins. Israel was worth dying for, yes, but she was worth living for too. Ahab had never realized how afraid he had been of living.
He was not a stone, he was not of the twelve, but he would sacrifice himself, just like the oxen, to serve them. Whatever it took, he would be the king they needed. He fell to his knees and tried to make praise to Yahweh, but he knew nothing to say and so offered his silence as what worship he had.
A hand on his shoulder did not startle him. It was Elijah.
“Up on your feet!” he said to Ahab. “Eat and drink—celebrate! Rain is on the way; I hear it coming.”
Ahab smiled, his eyes closed, wishing he had always known what it was to have comfort like Elijah’s hand on his shoulder.
Yes
, he thought
, rain is coming
, and wiped at the tears in his eyes so Elijah wouldn’t see.
He stood and faced Elijah, who motioned for him to take up his seat. Ahab’s legs felt unsteady as he picked his way back down and saw the throne as if for the first time.
Elijah commanded Ahab’s servants, who watched him with careful fear and scurried at once to obey.
Ahab ate and drank, roasted grains and thick wine stewed with heavy spices, the last of his supply. It burned going down. He watched as Elijah climbed up the mountain, nimble and quick, his feet finding steady ground between the rocks, his face tilted up toward the top, not caring to see where his feet landed.
At the top, Elijah bowed in prayer as Ahab watched. A boy approached Elijah—Ahab had seen him arrive with Elijah today. Elijah prayed for several minutes before the boy reached him. Elijah said something to the boy, and the boy went away to look to the west. He returned, shaking his head. Elijah sent him once more, and the scene was repeated again and again. Ahab sat up in his chair, wondering what was happening; what was this boy denying Elijah? The boy ran to the western edge again, than ran back shouting. Elijah stood, pointing down to Ahab.
Ahab shoved his bowl back to the servants. He started up the mountain as the boy flew down, stumbling too many times for Ahab’s exhausted mind to bear.
“My master Elijah says, ‘Saddle up and get down from the mountain before the rain stops you.’”
Ahab bowed his head, trying to remember what water felt like when it fell from the skies.
The sun dimmed quickly as a bird screamed, flying across the sky. Clouds veiled his vision, weaving and shuttling across the heavens until the sky was thatched in darkness, the clouds heavy and sagging.
Ahab ran for his chariot, landing in it as the horses jerked forward violently, causing him to clutch the sides as he tried to hang on and find a certain grip. The chariot rocked back and forth over the road, the horses racing under the stinging whip of the driver. The sky darkened, and the air grew cold.
Ahab stood and saw the figure of a man racing ahead of the horses, the lightning illuminating him as Elijah, thunder chasing him but not fast enough. Together the men cut through the gusts of rain, and the horses followed Elijah as he ran along the Kishon River, running straight for Jezreel.
Jezebel
Jezebel’s fingers bled as she waited to hear the news from Mount Carmel. She chewed her nails to the quick, tearing them with the edges of her teeth.
The day wore on. The sun melted across the dry brown landscape beyond Jezebel’s window. Shimmers of heat over brown-and-white buildings made her servants squint to see the horizon. The only visible clouds were clouds of dust stirred by those animals that remained, the ones that had not died or been eaten, roaming the empty streets like crying ghosts, bleating skeletons of the past. The city was quiet. All had gone to watch the gods compete.
The palace was quiet too. Jezebel had never known silence like this before, like the expectant hush before the answer to a question. The servants spoke in whispers, even those from Phoenicia like Lilith. The brown fields beyond her window swayed in the hot breeze as dead stalks rubbed against each other, a raspy accompaniment for the insects who would keen their one note over and over, all night.
She had hated those insects when she first arrived here, hearing only them and not the sound of ocean as she slept, but their true advantage had become plain enough within the first month. They sang this way as long as nothing moved through the grass around them. When predators came near, they silenced. She admired that nature had found a way to stop its enemies. Surely those beasts that ate the smaller ones had not sprung from the same womb as the others. Asherah had birthed men, perhaps, and even other gods, but these smaller hungry things had come from another mother, intent on death. But this Jezebel wondered in secret, for no word had ever been spoken of another goddess. There were only other names for Asherah, not other incarnations. There was much that could not be explained by Baal and Asherah, and Jezebel had learned not to try.
The afternoon sun was still too high to consider going to bed, but there were no servants to amuse her. She sat on the edge of the bed and waited. She stopped chewing her fingernails when the blood ran down her palms and into her sleeves. She felt it drying in the cracks of her mouth and licked at the crusts. It was salty and tasted like the metal of a knife.
Lilith motioned to the servants to change Jezebel’s robes. They seemed alarmed at the blood, and Jezebel laughed at them, smearing her bloody fingertips across a girl’s face, slowly dragging a finger across the girl’s mouth until it dripped red.
“You look beautiful,” Jezebel whispered. The girl trembled, and Lilith pushed her away, scowling at Jezebel.
The other servants worked without words, trying to avoid touching her, slipping a fresh robe on their princess, rubbing away the mineral pigments on her eyes and mouth with a bit of linen dipped in olive oil. They complimented her loudly and too often. They rubbed the green oil then into her face, gentle circles that lifted away the dirt and blood of the day, bringing roses to her complexion and a glow to her cheeks. They moved next to her hands and feet, then smeared a thick perfume paste onto the top of her head. A comb of ivory spindles wove through her black mane, carrying the scent down to the ends, until her hair smelled of frankincense and sage, a rich scent that made her think of hunting in dark forests. She sighed as they left her, bowing as they exited, leaving her in her chamber with its bed canopied in linens, and her tables for the vanities of cosmetics and gods. She had a clay statue of Asherah that she kept in one corner, the face painted as her own, an oil lamp always burning before the little goddess with hollow eyes. Athaliah did not like it and said the stone holes followed her around the room. No, Jezebel had told her, they follow you farther than that. They follow you deep into your soul, and you must appease her or she will see what is in your heart. Goddesses were hungry, angry things. They ate what you loved.