Eleanor Jong - Jezebel

‘What is it?’ said Beset, sitting upright in her bed on the floor beside her.

Jezebel clamped her hand over her mouth, her tongue bitter with bile. Beset emptied a water bowl just in time and held her as the sickness heaved through her, drawing her hair back from her face and resting cool damp cloths against her neck and forehead.

‘You rode too long in the sun yesterday,’ the maid said. ‘I’m calling for Daniel.’

Jezebel didn’t have the strength to disagree, and soon she lay still while Daniel gently felt her face and then carefully touched the skin around her belly.

‘Was it the food? The water in that well might not be good so far inland,’ suggested Beset.

‘No one else is sick,’ said Daniel standing up from where he had knelt beside the couch. But he was frowning, and he was slow to soak the cloth from Jezebel’s forehead in the bowl of cold water. ‘How long have you been feeling like this?’

‘Just today,’ she replied weakly.

‘But you said you felt sick last night.’

‘I remember.’

‘Have you woken like this on any other morning recently?’

‘Daniel?’ said Beset in a warning tone. Jezebel shivered, not from feeling so awful but from the strange atmosphere that was building in the tent.

Daniel bowed his head but his expression was confused and he frowned over hidden thoughts Jezebel couldn’t decipher. ‘What is wrong with me?’ said Jezebel, suddenly afraid.

Beset took Jezebel’s hands in hers and gestured to Daniel with a jerk of her head that the two young women should be left alone. He glanced at Jezebel, his face creased with worry, then he slipped out of the tent.

‘Am I going to die?’ whimpered Jezebel.

‘No, no. Well …’

‘What is it?’ Jezebel felt sick once again, but purely from fear. She tried to sit up on the couch and Beset piled cushions behind her, never once letting go of her hand. Then the young maid knelt down on the ground beside Jezebel, looking up at her mistress. Jezebel was comforted by the shadow of Rebecca’s sensible comfort in her daughter’s face, but Beset suddenly looked so grown up that Jezebel felt her eyes sting with tears at how their worlds were surely changing.

Beset, thinking her mistress understood, nodded with relief. ‘That’s right. You are with child.’

Jezebel shook her head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I thought you had guessed for yourself.’ Beset chewed her lip with worry. ‘Those nights of intimacy you shared with Jehu. He has left his seed in you and you are now carrying his child. The early sickness is very common, it does pass, but in eight months or less you will give birth to his child.’

Jezebel grabbed Beset’s hand, gripping it hard as she tried to get up off the couch, but her head was spinning. ‘But I’m not yet married to Ahab. When I give him a child that isn’t his own he will …’ Panic surged through her. He would certainly cast her out, and she’d be lucky to escape with only exile. Death would be swift for the child. And where could she go then? Her father’s anger would be implacable, the shameful stain on the kingdom too great. She wouldn’t be welcome in Tyre, the soiled princess, and foreign kingdoms would view her as nothing but a pariah. She could only shake as if Baal Hadad’s godly roar shuddered through the skies in anger at her foolishness. ‘Oh, dear Gods, what have I done?’ she wailed.

‘Shh,’ murmured Beset, sliding her hand around Jezebel’s shoulders. ‘Daniel?’

The young physician returned to the tent, his face taut and pale in the shadows. He looked almost as wretched as Jezebel felt but she could no longer bear to look at him. When Beset stood up to confer, she curled into a ball, drawing the covers over her head. She didn’t want to hear their fears for her future. She’d known, she supposed, that it could have ended like this, but in those blissful nights it hadn’t mattered. Jehu was going to be her husband and any children would be legitimate. It would have seemed perverse to curtail their passion, churlish even. Now those desires looked very reckless indeed.

Beset tugged the covers aside, leaned again over the bed, her long black hair dangling against Jezebel’s cheek. ‘All is not lost,’ she said. ‘Daniel can make you a special drink that will end your worries.’

‘But I’ve never concocted such a thing before.’ Jezebel could hear the desperate concern in Daniel’s voice and she pressed her face further into the pillow.

‘If you take the life of the child then you are saving Jezebel’s in return,’ Beset replied.

‘I trained as a physician to save all lives, even the ones who haven’t yet known this world.’

‘But you do know how to make the drink,’ said Beset.

‘It goes against everything I believe—’

‘But you believe in Jezebel. Surely you believe in the role she plays for our kingdom?’

Daniel sighed and after a moment Jezebel heard the creak of the lid as he opened his small medicine chest, and with these strangely comforting noises she sat up on the bed and faced him. She lifted her eyes to look at his and saw not judgement, only a sad understanding.

‘I’m so ashamed,’ she whispered. He nodded, silently drawing together powders and dried leaves and mixing them with wine. Then he came to the bed and offered her the bowl.

‘This will purge the child. It will make you sick and you will bleed. You should ride in the carriage and not on the horse today while you take this treatment. But perhaps that is for the best.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘For you cannot ride into Samaria as though you are going to conquer it.’

Jezebel took the drink from him. ‘I don’t know how to thank you—’

Daniel cut her off with a wave of his hand. ‘No one need ever know.’ He closed his chest, picked it up off the floor and left.

Jezebel watched him go, then she glanced wretchedly at Beset. ‘He’s angry with me.’

‘He’s afraid,’ said Beset.

Jezebel looked down at the bowl, the sweet red liquid cloudy and bitter with the poison that would tear Jehu’s baby from her. She thought of the sky beyond the roof of the tent from which last night Kesil the archer had looked down on her. Soon the stars would be the only reminder she had left of the nights she had shared with Jehu. Slowly she lifted the bowl to her lips but the smell made her wince and she retched, the bowl shaking in her hand.

‘Probably best just to drink it in one go,’ said Beset. ‘That’s what my mother always told us to do with medicine when we were little, do you remember?’

Jezebel nodded. ‘Then could you bring me more wine? This smells so awful that I’ll need something to wash it down.’

‘I’ll come straight back.’ Beset disappeared through the tent flaps, and Jezebel let the bowl sink into her lap. Her hand felt beneath the covers for her stomach. There was nothing there yet, no bump, no sign of the baby’s presence except in the sickness in her throat. But she knew in that moment that for all the good intentions of Daniel and Beset, for all the dreadful fear of what would happen if Ahab found out, she could no more end the life of the child than she could put a stop to her longing for Jehu.

She snatched up the bowl and poured the liquid away in the corner of the tent out of sight. Then she curled up on the couch and cried.

‘This city was built to keep strangers out,’ murmured Jezebel under her breath.

The carriage lurched and she clung on to Beset, not daring to look out at how the slopes fell steeply away. They had been travelling for much of the day across the undulating foothills but the city of Samaria now towered above them on a great flattened mountain as if all the Gods had chosen this as their table round which to sit and feast. The city was barely visible from down here, though as the long Phoenician entourage twisted and turned its way up the steep sides of the mountain, Jezebel glimpsed the dull yellow corners of buildings and shallow reeded roofs. The sun was already low in the sky and the air grew colder with every step of the horses’ hooves.