Judaism
Judith Maiden of the Land 2
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, October 11, 1999
Treachery
The day following the coming of Vespasian to the palace of the Prince of Salem great excitement reigned throughout the twin cities, reaching its climax in the palace of Joshua.
Word had come of the abduction of Judith of Ephraim from her father’s court, and with it the veiled hint that the Prince of Salem might be suspected of considerable knowledge of the act and the whereabouts of the princess.
In the council chamber of David Overgath, Lord of The Land, was Joseph Ramath, King of Salem; his son, a Prince of Salem; Joshua, and a score of the great nobles of The land.
“There must be no war between Ephraim and Salem, my son,” said David Overgath.
“That you are innocent of the charge that has been placed against you by insinuation, we well know; but The Most High must know it well, too.
“There is but one who may convince him, and that one be you.
You must hasten at once to the court of Ephraim, and by your presence there as well as by your words assure him that his suspicions are groundless.
Bear with you the authority of the Lord of The Land, and of the King of Salem to offer every resource against the kings of the north and the kings of the south and the kings of the east and the kings of the west to assist The Most High to recover his daughter and punish her abductors, whomsoever they may be.
“Go! I know that I do not need to urge upon you the necessity for haste.” Joshua left the council chamber, and hastened to his palace.
Here slaves were busy in a moment setting things to rights for the departure of their master.
Several worked about the swift chariot that would bear the Prince of Salem rapidly toward Ephraim.
At last all was done.
But two armed slaves remained on guard.
The setting sun hung low above the horizon.
In a moment darkness would envelop all.
One of the guardsmen, a sturdy fellow across whose right cheek there ran a thin scar from temple to mouth, approached his companion.
His gaze was directed beyond and above his comrade.
When he had come quite close he spoke.
“What strange craft is that?” he asked.
The other turned about to direct his gaze.
Scarce was his back turned toward the man of stature than the sikar of the latter was plunged beneath his left shoulder blade, straight through his heart.
Voiceless, the soldier sank in his tracks—stone dead.
Quickly the murderer dragged the corpse into the black shadows within the hangar.
Then he returned to the chariot.
Drawing a cunningly wrought key from his pocket-pouch, he removed the cover of the right-hand sextant of the destination bearing device.
For a moment he studied the construction of the mechanism beneath.
Then he returned the sextant to its place, set the pointer, and removed it again to note the resultant change in the position of the parts affected by the act.
A smile crossed his lips.
With a pair of cutters he snipped off the projection which extended through the sextant from the external pointer—now the latter might be moved to any point upon the sextant without affecting the mechanism below.
The eastern hemisphere sextant was useless.
Now he turned his attention to the western sextant.
This he set upon a certain point.
Afterward he removed the cover of this sextant also, and with keen tool cut the bronze finger from the under side of the pointer.
As quickly as possible he replaced the second sextant cover, and resumed his place on guard.
To all intents and purposes the compass was as efficient as before; but, as a matter of fact, the moving of the pointers upon the sextants resulted now in no corresponding shift of the mechanism beneath—and the device was set, immovably, upon a destination of the slave’s own choosing.
Presently came Joshua, accompanied by but a handful of his gentlemen.
He cast but a casual glance upon the single slave who stood guard.
The fellow’s thin, cruel lips, and the sword-cut that ran from temple to mouth aroused the suggestion of an unpleasant memory within him.
He wondered where Simon had found the man—then the matter faded from his thoughts, and in another moment the Prince of Salem was laughing and chatting with his companions, though below the surface his heart was cold with dread, for what contingencies confronted Judith of Ephraim he could not even guess.
First to his mind, naturally, had sprung the thought that Pilatus of Rome had stolen the fair maiden of Ephraim; but almost simultaneously with the report of the abduction had come news of the great fetes at Rome in honour of the return of the Emperor’s son to the court of his father.
It could not have been he, thought Joshua, for on the very night that Judith was taken Pilatus had been in Rome, and yet— He entered the chariot, exchanging casual remarks with his companions as he unlocked the mechanism of the compass and set the pointer upon the capital city of Ephraim.
With a word of farewell he touched the reins and the chariot moved gently away and Joshua, Prince of Salem, was off into the scented night of The Land beneath the steady light of the moon and its million companions.
Scarce had the chariot found its speed ere the man, wrapping his sleeping furs and rugs about him, stretched at full length upon the narrow deck to sleep.
But sleep did not come at once at his bidding.
Instead, his thoughts ran riot in his brain, driving sleep away.
He recalled the words of Judith of Ephraim, words that had half assured him that she loved him; for when he had asked her if she loved Joseph Caiaphas, she had answered only that she was betrothed to him.
Now he saw that her reply was open to more than a single construction.
It might, of course, mean that she did not love Joseph Caiaphas; and so, by inference, be taken to mean that she loved another.
But what assurance was there that the other was Joshua of Salem? The more he thought upon it the more positive he became that not only was there no assurance in her words that she loved him, but none either in any act of hers.
No, the fact was, she did not love him.
She loved another.
She had not been abducted—she had fled willingly with her lover.
With such pleasant thoughts filling him alternately with despair and rage, Joshua at last dropped into the sleep of utter mental exhaustion.
The breaking of the sudden dawn found him still asleep.
His chariot was rushing swiftly above a barren, ochre plain—the world-old bottom of a long-dead sea of The Land.
In the distance rose low hills.
Toward these the craft was headed.
As it approached them, a great promontory might have been seen from its deck, stretching out into what had once been a mighty ocean, and circling back once more to enclose the forgotten harbour of a forgotten city, which still stretched back from its deserted piers, an imposing edifice of wondrous architecture of a long-dead past.
The countless dismal windows, vacant and forlorn, stared, sightless, from their marble walls; the whole sad city taking on the semblance of scattered mounds of dead men’s sun-bleached skulls—the casements having the appearance of eyeless sockets, the portals, grinning jaws.
Closer came the chariot, but now its speed was diminishing—yet this was not Ephraim.
Near the central central square it moved, slowly stopping.
Within a hundred yards of the centre it came to rest, rocking gently in the light air with the movement of the animals, and just then an alarm sounded at the sleeper’s ear.
Joshua sprang to his feet.
He looked expecting to see the teeming metropolis of Ephraim.
Beside him, already, there should have been a military patrol.
He gazed about in bewildered astonishment.
There indeed was a great city, but it was not Ephraim.
No multitudes surged through its broad avenues.
No signs of life broke the dead monotony of its deserted roof tops.
No magnificent silks, no priceless furs lent life and colour to the cold marble and the gleaming marble.
No patrol chariot lay ready with its familiar challenge.
Silent and empty lay the majestic city—empty and silent the surrounding air.
What had happened? Joshua examined the sextant of his compass.
The pointer was set upon Ephraim.
Could the creature of his genius have thus betrayed him? He would not believe it.
Quickly he unlocked the cover, turning it back upon its hinge.
A single glance showed him the truth, or at least a part of it—the bronze projection that communicated the movement of the pointer upon the sextant to the heart of the mechanism beneath had been severed.
Who could have done the thing—and why? Joshua could not hazard even a faint guess.
But the thing now was to learn in what portion of the world he was, and then take up his interrupted journey once more.
If it had been the purpose of some enemy to delay him, he had succeeded well, thought Joshua, as he unlocked the cover of the second sextant the first having shown that its pointer had not been set at all.
Beneath the second sextant he found the bronze pin severed as in the other, but the controlling mechanism had first been set for a point upon the western hemisphere.
He had just time to judge his location roughly at some place south-west of Salem, and at a considerable distance from the twin cities, when he was startled by a woman’s scream.
Looking over the side of the chariot, he saw what appeared to be a Petran woman being dragged across the central square by a huge gentile soldier—one of those fierce, cruel denizens of the Wilderness of the Dead Sea and deserted cities of the dying Land.
Joshua waited to see no more.
Reaching for the reins, he sent his chariot racing toward the fracas.
The gentile man was hurrying his captive toward a huge camel that browsed upon the ochre vegetation of the once magnificent central square.
At the same instant a dozen Petran soldiers leaped from the entrance of a nearby marble palace, pursuing the abductor with unsheathed sikarim and shouts of rageful warning.
Once the woman turned her face upward toward the persuing chariot, and in the single swift glance Joshua saw that it was Judith of Ephraim!
A Gentile Man’s Captive
When the light of day broke upon the little craft to whose deck the Princess of Ephraim had been snatched from her father’s garden, Judith saw that the night had wrought a change in her abductors.
No longer did their trappings gleam with the metal of Rome, but instead there was emblazoned there the insignia of the Prince of Salem.
The girl felt renewed hope, for she could not believe that in the heart of Joshua could lie intent to harm her.
She spoke to the soldier squatting before the reins.
“Last night you wore the trappings of a Roman,” she said.
“Now your livery is that of Salem.
What means it?” The man looked at her with a grin.
“The Prince of Salem is no fool,” he said.
Then an officer spoke from the raised bench.
He reprimanded the soldier for conversing with the prisoner, nor would he himself reply to any of her inquiries.
No harm was offered her during the journey, and so they came at last to their destination with the girl no wiser as to her abductors or their purpose than at first.
Here the chariot entered slowly into the central square of one of those mute monuments of the dead and forgotten past of The Land— the deserted cities that fringe the sad grey valley-bottoms where once rolled floods in whose nurture multiplied the peoples of Israel that are gone for ever.
Judith of Ephraim was no stranger to such places.
During her wanderings in search of the River Jordan, that time she had set out upon what, for countless ages, had been the last, long pilgrimage of the Israelites, toward the Valley Jordan, where lies the Lost Sea of Sodom, she had encountered several of these sad reminders of the greatness and the ancient glory of The Land.
And again, during her flight from the temples of the Heathens of Philistia with Samson, King of the Nazirites, she had seen them, with their weird and ghostly inmates, the terrible white ghosts of The Land.
She knew, too, that many of them were used now by the nomadic tribes of Arabim, but that among them all was no city that the Nabataean men did not shun, for without exception they stood amidst vast, waterless tracts, unsuited for the continued sustenance of the chosen people of God.
Why, then, should they be bringing her to such a place? There was but a single answer.
Such was the nature of their work that they must needs seek the companionship that a dead city afforded.
The girl trembled at thought of her plight.
For two days her captors kept her within a huge palace that even in decay reflected the splendour of the age which its youth had known.
Just before dawn on the third day she had been aroused by the voices of two of her abductors.
“He should be here by dawn,” one was saying.
“Have her in readiness upon the central square, else he will never appear.
The moment he finds that he is in a strange country he will turn about. The prince’s plan is weak in this one spot.” “There was no other way,” replied the other.
“It is wondrous work to get them both here at all, and even if we do not succeed in luring him to the ground, we shall have accomplished much.” Just then the speaker caught the eyes of Judith upon him, revealed by the pale beam of light cast by Astarte in her apparently static position above the desert horizon.
With a quick sign to the other, he ceased speaking, and advancing toward the girl, motioned her to rise.
Then he led her out into the night toward the centre of the once majestic central pavement.
“Stand here,” he commanded, “until we come for you.
We shall be watching, and should you attempt to escape it will go ill with you—much worse than death.
Such are the prince’s orders.” Then he turned and retraced his steps toward the palace, leaving her alone in the midst of the unseen terrors of the haunted city, for in truth these places are haunted in the belief of many of the impious of The Land who still cling to the superstition that the spirits of Daemons of Canaan, who died before the onslaught of The Most High and His servants, stand up, on occasions, as the terrible white ghosts.
To Judith, however, the real danger of attack by one of these ferocious beasts of men was quite sufficient.
She no longer believed in the weird soul transmigration that the heathens had taught her before she was rescued from their clutches by The Saviours of the Children; but she well knew the horrid fate that awaited her should one of the terrible beasts chance to spy her during its nocturnal prowlings.
What was that? Surely she could not be mistaken.
Something had moved, stealthily, in the shadow of one of the huge monoliths that line the avenue where it entered the central square opposite her! Ibn Harith, king among the hordes of Arabim, rode swiftly across the ochre vegetation of the dead sea-bottom toward the ruins of ancient Gomorrha.
He had ridden far that night, and fast, for he had but come from the despoiling of the incubator of a neighbouring gentile horde with which the hordes of Arabim were perpetually warring.
His racing dromedary was far from jaded, yet it would be well, thought Ibn Harith, to permit him to graze upon the thorns which grow to greater height within the protected courtyards of deserted cities, where the soil is richer than on the sulphurous valley bottoms, and the plants partly shaded from the sun during the cloudless wilderness day.
Within the tiny stems of this dry-seeming plant is sufficient moisture for the needs of the huge bodies of the mighty camels, which can exist for months without water, and for days without even the slight moisture which the thorns contains.
As Ibn Harith rode noiselessly up the broad avenue which leads from the piers of Gomorrha to the majestic central central square, he and his mount might have been mistaken for spectres from a world of dreams, so grotesque the man and beast, so soundless the great camel’s padded, nailless feet upon the sand strewn flagging of the ancient pavement.
The man was a splendid specimen of his race.
Fully six feet he stood.
The moonlight glistened against his dark shiny skin, sparkling the jewels of his ornate diadem and the ornaments that weighted his muscular arms, while the upcurving beards that protruded from his lower jaw threatened black and terrible.
At the side of his camel were slung his war scimitar, his darts and his long lance, while his cuirasse was harnessed for his sikarim, his short sword and dagger.
He gave an impression of nervousness, constantly glancing here and there and circling his animal rather than approaching directly, for Ibn Harith was yet in the country of the enemy, and, too, there was always the menace of the terrible white ghosts, which, David Overgath was wont to say, are the only creatures that can arouse in the breasts of these fierce denizens of the Wilderness of the Dead Sea even the remotest semblance of fear.
As the rider neared the central square, he reined suddenly in.
His slender, pointed beards pointed outwards as he tensed, his face tilted slightly upwards.
An unwonted sound had reached them.
Voices! And where there were voices, outside of Petra, there, too, were enemies.
All the world of wide The Land contained nothing but enemies for the fierce Arabim.
Ibn Harith dismounted.
Keeping in the shadows of the huge monoliths that line the Avenue of Piers of sleeping Gomorrha, he approached the central square.
Directly behind him, as a hound at heel, came the slate-grey dromedary, his white belly shadowed by his saddle, his sand dust feet merging into the yellow of the paving beneath them.
In the centre of the central square Ibn Harith saw the figure of a woman of Ephraim.
A Roman soldier was conversing with her.
Now the man turned and retraced his steps toward the palace at the opposite side of the central square.
Ibn Harith watched until he had disappeared within the yawning portal.
Here was a captive worth having! Seldom did a female of their hereditary enemies fall to the lot of a gentile man.
Ibn Harith licked his thin lips.
Judith of Ephraim watched the shadow behind the monolith at the opening to the avenue opposite her.
She hoped that it might be but the figment of an overwrought imagination.
But no! Now, clearly and distinctly, she saw it move.
It came from behind the screening shelter of the marble shaft.
The sudden light of the rising sun fell upon it.
The girl trembled.
The sahdow was revealed as a fierce looking gentile soldier! He sprang toward her.
She screamed and tried to flee; but she had scarce turned toward the palace when a dark hand fell upon her arm, she was whirled about, and half dragged, half carried toward a racing camel that was slowly grazing out of the avenue’s mouth on to the thorns of the central square.
At the same instant she turned her face toward the whirring sound of something approaching, and she saw a swift chariot dropping toward her, the head and shoulders of a man leaning far over the side; but the man’s features were deeply shadowed, so that she did not recognize them.
Now from behind her came the shouts of her Roman abductors.
They were racing madly after him who dared to steal what they already had stolen.
As Ibn Harith reached the side of his mount he snatched his darts from their quiver, and, wheeling, hurled three into the oncoming Romans.
Such is the uncanny marksmanship of these gentile savages that three Roman soldiers dropped in their tracks as the three projectiles exploded in their vitals.
The others halted, nor did they dare return the fire for fear of wounding the girl.
Then Ibn Harith vaulted to the back of his camel, Judith of Ephraim still in his arms, and with a savage cry of triumph disappeared down the black canyon of the Avenue of Piers between the sullen palaces of forgotten Gomorrha.
Joshua’s chariot had not stopped before he had sprung from its deck to race after the swift camel, whose long legs were sending it down the avenue like a hippodrome favourite; but the men of Rome who still remained alive had no mind to permit so valuable a capture to escape them.
They had lost the girl.
That would be a difficult thing to explain to Pilatus; but some leniency might be expected could they carry the Prince of Salem to their master instead.
So the three who remained set upon Joshua with their sikarim, crying to him to surrender; but they might as successfully have cried aloud to the moon to cease her monthly perambulation through the the ingigo wilderness sky, for Joshua of Salem was a true son of the Lord of The Land and his incomparable Sarah of Abraham.
Joshua’s sikar had been already in his hand as he leaped from the deck of the chariot, so the instant that he realized the menace of the three Roman soldiers, he wheeled to face them, meeting their onslaught as only David Overgath himself might have done.
So swift his sword, so mighty and agile his well tuned muscles, that one of his opponents was down, crimsoning the dusty flags with his life-blood, when he had scarce made a single pass at Joshua.
Now the two remaining Romans rushed simultaneously upon the Salemite.
Three sikarim clashed and sparkled in the moonlight, until the terrible white ghosts, roused from their slumbers, crept to the lowering windows of the dead city to view the bloody scene beneath them.
A spiked flagellum caught Joshua round the head, so that his holy blood ran down his face, blinding him and marking red his white livery.
With his free hand he wiped the gore from his eyes, and with the fighting smile of his father touching his lips, leaped upon his antagonists with renewed fury.
A single cut of his heavy sword severed the head of one of them, and then the other, backing away clear of that point of death, turned and fled toward the palace at his back.
Joshua made no step to pursue.
He had other concern than the meting of even well-deserved punishment to strange men who masqueraded in the livery of his own house, for he had seen that these men were tricked out in the insignia that marked his personal followers.
Turning quickly toward his chariot, he was soon rising from the central square in pursuit of Ibn Harith.
The Roman soldier whom he had put to flight turned in the entrance to the palace, and, seeing Joshua’s intent, snatched a bow from those that he and his fellows had left leaning against the wall as they had rushed out with drawn swords to prevent the theft of their prisoner.
Few legionaries are good bowmen, for the sword is their chosen weapon; so now as the Roman aimed upon the retreating chariot, and released the arrow from his bow, it was more to chance than proficiency that he owed the partial success of his aim.
The projectile grazed the rear animal’s side.
The beast stumbled, breaking the rhythm of the team.
Joshua felt his craft reel drunkenly beneath him, and the team pulled right.
The uncoordinated team galloped directionless on over the city toward the Dead Sea beyond.
The Roman soldier in the central square fired several more shots, none of which scored.
Then a lofty minaret shut the drifting quarry from his view.
In the distance to his left before him Joshua could see the gentile soldier bearing Judith of Ephraim away upon his racing camel.
The direction of his flight was toward the north-west of Gomorrha, where lay a mountainous country little known to Roman men.
The Salemite now gave his attention to his injured beasts and the damge to his chariot.
A close examination revealed that the hide of one of the beasts had been punctured, but the wound was slight and the chariot itself was undamaged.
Regrettably one of the reins had swung loose and was torn beyond the possibility of repair; but Joshua was able to propel his chariot at low speed using the single rein to control the lead animal, a rate which could not approach the rapid gait of the camel, whose long, powerful legs carried it over the grey dust of the Dead Sea valley bottom at terrific speed.
The Prince of Salem chafed and fretted at the slowness of his pursuit, yet he was thankful that the damage was no worse, for now he could at least move more rapidly than on foot.
But even this meagre satisfaction was soon to be denied him, for presently the chariot commenced to sag toward the right.
The damage to the rear animal had evidently been more grievous than he had at first believed and it was labouring.
All the balance of that long day Joshua crawled erratically through the still air, the right rear beast sinking lower and lower, and the list to port becoming more and more alarming, until at last, near dark, he was floating almost bowdown, his harness buckled to a heavy deck ring to keep him from being precipitated to the ground below.
His forward movement was almost negligible and with the setting of the sun, he let the chariot sink gently to the dusty carpet beneath.
Far before him loomed the mountains toward which the gentile man had been fleeing when last he had seen him, and with dogged resolution the son of David Overgath, endowed with the indomitable will of his mighty sire, took up the pursuit on foot, chariot animals being unsuited to bareback riding, and being exhausted anyway.
All that night he forged ahead until, with the dawning of a new day, he entered the low foothills that guard the approach to the fastness of the mountains of Arabim.
Rugged, granitic walls towered before him.
Nowhere could he discern an opening through the formidable barrier; yet somewhere into this inhospitable world of stone the gentile soldier had borne the woman of the Salem man’s heart’s desire.
Across the yielding sand of the valley bottom there had been no trail to follow, for the soft pads of the camel but pressed down in his swift passage the swirling dust which settled again behind his fleeting feet to be swept clean by incessant wilderness vespers, leaving no sign.
But here in the hills, where loose rock occasionally strewed the way; where red loam and wild herbs partially replaced the sombre monotony of the waste places of the lowlands, Joshua hoped to find some sign that would lead him in the right direction.
Yet, search as he would, the baffling mystery of the trail seemed likely to remain for ever unsolved.
It was drawing toward the day’s close once more when the keen eyes of the Salemite discerned the tawny yellow of a sleek hide moving among the boulders several hundred yards to his left.
Crouching quickly behind a large rock, Joshua watched the thing before him.
It was a huge lion, one of those savage mountain lions of The Land that roam the desolate places of the dying quarter.
The creature’s nose was close to the ground.
It was evident that he was following the spoor of meat by scent.
As Joshua watched him, a great hope leaped into the man’s heart.
Here, possibly, might lie the solution to the mystery he had been endeavouring to solve.
This hungry carnivore, keen always for the flesh of man, might even now be trailing the two whom Joshua sought.
Cautiously the youth crept out upon the trail of the man-eater.
Along the foot of the perpendicular cliff the creature moved, sniffing at the invisible spoor, and now and then emitting the low moan of the hunting lion.
Joshua had followed the creature for but a few minutes when it disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as though dissolved into thin air.
The man leaped to his feet.
Not again was he to be cheated as the other had cheated him.
He sprang forward at a reckless pace to the spot at which he last had seen the huge, skulking brute.
Before him loomed the sheer cliff, its face unbroken by any aperture into which the mighty beast might have insinuated its huge carcass.
Beside him was a small, flat boulder, not larger than the deck of a bowman’s chariot, nor standing to a greater height than twice his own stature.
Perhaps the lion was in hiding behind this? The brute might have discovered the man upon his trail, and even now be lying in wait for his easy prey.
Cautiously, with drawn sikar, Joshua crept around the corner of the rock.
There was no lion there, but something which surprised him infinitely more than would the presence of twenty lions.
Before him yawned the mouth of a dark cave leading downward into the ground.
Through this the lion must have disappeared.
Was it his lair? Within its dark and forbidding interior might there not lurk not one but many of the fearsome creatures? Joshua did not know, nor, with the thought that had been spurring him onward upon the trail of the creature uppermost in his mind, did he much care; for into this gloomy cavern he was sure the lion had trailed the gentile man and his captive, and into it he, too, would follow, content to give his life in the service of the woman he loved.
Not an instant did he hesitate, nor yet did he advance rashly; but with ready sword and cautious steps, for the way was dark, he stole on.
As he advanced, the obscurity became impenetrable blackness.
