Deker stood there slack-jawed before this girl. And she was just a girl, perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, which was Rachel's age as he remembered her. But even Rachel hadn't been this beautiful, and that alone bothered Deker. He began to wonder what sort of fantasy he now held in his arms. Everything inside him told him to run, but her lips felt warm to his as she kissed him again and placed his hands on her breasts. He dared not let go, afraid she might vanish before his eyes.
She smiled as she lifted one of his hands and used it to lead him to her bed-the king-size divan strewn with pillows of assorted shapes and sizes. And without a further word they began to make love to each other under the stars, as if it were the most natural thing in the universe and they had known each other forever.
Her body moved with a grace and in a way that suggested she had all the time in the world. His body responded in a way that suggested he would accept nothing short of eternity with her. She was bringing him to life, and he suddenly felt more awake than he had in years. He could feel his heart beating again, the blood coursing through his veins and pure electricity tingling across his entire body.
Somewhere deep inside, the hard shell around his soul began to crack, light bursting through. The passion for life he had once shared with Rachel, the spontaneity he thought he would never feel again-that force of nature rose up inside him with a volcanic power that couldn't be contained. He felt his spirit burst free into pure ecstatic flight.
Only when it was over and they were back in each other's arms on her divan beneath the starry sky, her long, soft legs draped over his own, did he realize that Rahab was not, in fact, his Rachel.
Rahab was taller than Rachel, her raven hair a lighter chestnut color instead of the black he had first imagined. And, yes, more beautiful still. That this was what he should first notice deeply tormented him, and he looked into her eyes, bottomless black pools in which any man could easily drown.
"You said you were waiting for me your whole life. What did you mean?" he finally asked her.
She looked at him curiously, and he realized that while she understood what he said, his accent had thrown her. It was clearly strange and exotic to her ears. He watched her fingers slide down the chain around her neck to the crescent moon lying on her right breast.
"My grandmother, Rahab, gave this necklace to General Bin-Nun forty years ago when he spied out the land and stayed at our family's inn," she told him. "He wasn't a general then, but young and handsome like you. And cut like you."
He realized she was talking about his circumcision. "And your family inn?"
"Just an inn at the time," she said. "Bin-Nun assured my grandmother that Moses and the Israelites were coming. She died still waiting. But she lived long enough to see the former Egyptian colonies in Canaan grow more tyrannical, our inn turn into a fertility temple and my mother forced into becoming a priestess. She was only a few years older than I am now when the priests of Molech told her she was getting too old to bless the land. They started me when I was eleven. I built the business, brought in the foreign traders, cut the deals with the priests and the king. Now I run all the girls here-and the officers of Reah too."
There was some pride in her voice, and Deker could only imagine the course she had had to navigate to achieve her pinnacle of power and influence.
"Yet, you clung to your belief that one day another young Hebrew spy might show up at your doorstep?"
"News of Bin-Nun's victories in Moab in recent months and the fear gripping Reah told me as much. Your presence in my bed tells me that the attack is coming any day now. And my informants tell me Hamas has his men doing a house-to-house search for you and your comrade at this very moment."
Suddenly he felt extremely vulnerable, naked with this woman who held his life in the palm of her hand. Any second she could turn him over to Hamas or the troops searching for him throughout the city.
"You know my name," she asked him. "What's yours?"
"Samuel."
"Son of?"
"My full name is Samuel Boaz Deker," he told her, dispensing with pseudonyms or code names, since his name meant nothing in this world.
She began to nod slowly. "That is very… Hebrew."
It was, and he had resented it as a child, sticking to "Sam Deker" to anyone who asked. "That's what I am. A Jew."
It was the first time in his life that he had said it out loud to anybody, including himself. He had never hidden it nor been ashamed of his ethnic identity. He had certainly been reminded he was a Jew often enough by his nana with her Auschwitz tattoo, his parents and his peers in L.A. But he had never fully allowed himself to be defined by such an identity. He was always something else too. A Jewish American. A secular Jew. A Jew who didn't look like a Jew, sound like a Jew or date many Jews. Never just "a Jew."
Yet, in this world, that's exactly what he was and all that mattered to anybody that mattered: the Hebrews in Shittim and the Reahns in Jericho.
Samuel Boaz Deker.
Jew.
"I see sadness around your eyes when you look at me, Samuel Boaz Deker," she said. "I remind you of someone you lost."
"Yes."
"How did you lose her?"
"I killed her."
"Oh."
She looked at him curiously but without judgment.
"It was an accident," he told her quietly. "There was a bowl, like the one you keep your coins in on that table."
She glanced at the money bowl and then back at him, confused. "I think I misunderstand you."
He said nothing.
"I have lost those I love too." She was fingering his IDF dog tag. "My sisters. But it was no accident."
"Surely it couldn't have been your fault, either."
He could feel her body tremble slightly in his arms. The scent of her hair smelled like pomegranates. For whatever reason, she was as racked with guilt over her sisters as he was over Rachel. Neither he nor she fully understood each other's guilt. But Deker sensed they shared its depth, each in their own way, and so were linked together intimately and forever.
Rahab knew it too.
She began to trace the points of his Blazing Star with her finger, naming the six stars they represented: "Regulus, Altair, Eridani, Sirius, Arcturus, Ceti."
Deker rolled onto his back and looked up at the pergola. It was a square against the stars. He realized this was what she had seen every night, probably since she was eleven. The six stars formed a map of the heavens for the prophets.
"See the constellation of the Hippopotamus?" she asked him, and pointed up to what he recognized as the Big Dipper. "She is the goddess of creation. Tell me what you see inside her womb."
He saw a bright star, Mizar. But next to it was the far fainter Alcor, barely visible to the naked eye. They were known as the Horse and Rider, and he knew that the ancient Romans in several centuries-and IDF millennia later-would test the eyesight of their troops by their ability to detect the two as separate stars.
"I see twins," he told her. "You call them Israel and Ishmael?"
She smiled. "Half the archers see only the bigger star. Hamas puts them on spear duty on the lower north wall. The true marksmen he puts in the towers of the upper fortress wall. Our allies to the north and south think they have a range of three hundred cubits beyond the city wall. But Hamas has altered their bows and trained the archers to extend their range to almost five hundred cubits. Best if the Israelites keep that distance when they first surround our city."
Deker peered into her eyes. "Why are you divulging this information to me?"
"Because the stars proclaim the birth of the king of Israel," she told him. "The king of Reah and all his priests know it, and this is why they are desperate to stop you no matter what the cost."
Deker remembered Caleb's instruction to gauge the morale of the Reahns. He resented that intrusion into this moment, but her question compelled his own.
"So the people are scared?"
"Ever since they heard how your god Yahweh dried up the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt forty years ago," she told him. "But it's what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings whom you utterly destroyed on the other side of the Jordan, that moved the noblemen to action. They sacked the previous commander of the army and brought in Hamas. Then they began a program to reinforce the fortifications and stockpile supplies in case of a long siege."
"What about you?" Deker asked her, thinking of Phineas sharpening the end of his spear back at Shittim even now. "Aren't you scared?"
"Of you, Samuel Boaz Deker, no," she said. "But I know that the Lord your God is God, in heaven above and on earth below, and He has given the Hebrews this land He originally promised us. Your army will kill us all. Every man, woman and child. Even our animals. Every breathing thing."
"You don't seem surprised."
"Yahweh is angry with us. We have abandoned him."
"You believe in Yahweh?"
"Abraham was my forefather, too, when God promised him this land," she told him.
"Don't you think Yahweh is cruel for instructing Bin-Nun to utterly destroy Reah and all the inhabitants of Canaan?"
She looked at him as if he were insane. "Perhaps it is I who have mistaken you for someone else," she said. "While our Hebrew cousins were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, we Reahns and all the Amorites around us only increased in our wickedness from generation to generation. Even Pharaoh let your people go. But Hamas won't let us out of Reah, choosing instead to use our people as a shield."
Deker was intrigued by the use of human shields this early in warfare and listened to learn if this was perhaps the shadow army Bin-Nun feared. Perhaps that was why he pursued his take-no-prisoners, death-to-all strategy. But from what Rahab was saying, the Reahns cared less for their own people's lives than the Israelites did.
"What of your family?"
"I have no sisters, only brothers," she explained. "My sisters were burnt alive as offerings to Molech. I was spared only to serve Molech as a priestess, because my mother could not bear to lose another girl. And the girls who work for me and get pregnant must carry their babies to live births, even if it costs them their lives, because a priestess can have no scars. The babies we bury alive or throw screaming into the fires of the temple. Even the land, the lushest in the desert, is becoming polluted from our sins as a people and will not see another harvest like this one."
There was silence as Deker pondered her words. Then he heard the scraping of boots and voices from inside the villa.
Rahab stood up and put on her wrap. A servant girl came in and spoke to Rahab quickly while Deker buckled up his uniform.
He couldn't hear the conversation but knew the answer even before Rahab turned and told him.
"It's Hamas," she said. "They're here."