“Move!” Elijah yelled, kicking the donkey’s side.
The animal only flicked its ears back and forth in defiance.
“I said, move!” he yelled, kicking with all his might.
The donkey bucked with a violent upward thrust, sending Elijah airborne. He landed hard. The impact knocked the wind from his lungs and filled his mouth with sand. He spat, cursing the beast, but his anger was a flickering candle against the gale of his exhaustion. After eighteen hours in the saddle, his muscles had seized. His legs gave way, and he sank onto the dune as the heat of his fury drained into the cool sand, leaving only the hollow ache of guilt.
Elijah sighed, his anger dissolving as he watched the donkey’s heaving sides. “You bear the greater burden between us,” he admitted. Rising stiffly, he fumbled in the pack for a carrot and held it out to the animal. The donkey’s nostrils flared, suspicion warring with hunger in its dark eyes, before it finally accepted the peace offering with a gentle tug. “And they say I’m the stubborn one,” Elijah murmured with a wry smile.
The night’s journey beneath the full moon had been arduous, and their progress had been slow. Now, as dawn’s first light broke across the horizon, exhaustion claimed them both. “Forgive me,” he whispered, his palm smoothing over the flank he had kicked so thoughtlessly. “We rest here.” Unrolling his bedding with clumsy fingers, Elijah collapsed onto it and instantly surrendered to sleep.
Sleep offered no peace. He drifted in a shallow grayness as phantom voices asked questions he tried to answer, and the effort of forming his own mumbled words yanked him back toward the surface. Deep slumber was a locked door, leaving him to pace at the threshold. To Elijah, it felt like an eternity.
The sound of cackling roused him.
Elijah pushed himself onto his elbows and listened. More calls answered from beyond the dune—dozens at first, then hundreds, overlapping until the desert seemed alive with them. Ravens.
He crawled up the slope on his hands and knees, sand sliding beneath his palms. The noise grew with every foot until he reached the crest.
Elijah stopped. Thousands of ravens covered the hollow below.
They blackened the sand, crowded the rocks, filled the branches of a solitary broom tree. Others circled overhead in a slow, wheeling cloud. Yet for all their number, there was something strangely ordered about them.
Something lay beneath the tree. A small figure dressed in white.
Elijah rose cautiously and took several steps down the slope. The garment was impossibly fine for this place, pale silk stirring faintly in the desert wind. A small hand rested motionless against the sand. Dark hair spilled across one shoulder.
A girl. She did not move.
Elijah's first thought was that she was dead. But the ravens were not feeding.
They were guarding her.
One descended from the tree and settled gently upon her chest. It remained there for several heartbeats, head cocked, utterly silent. Then it lifted away.
Another took its place. Then another.
Elijah watched, unable to move. Each raven came alone. Each rested upon her for a moment and departed, surrendering its place to the next.
Not feeding.
Not guarding, he realized.
Mourning.
The donkey brayed, “Hee-haw.”
He did not want to take his eyes off what was happening, but he also did not want the donkey to scare the ravens off. Without looking back, he waved his arms toward the animal and whispered, “Shhssssh.” “Hee-haw,” brayed the animal again, louder this time. Elijah was about to turn and deal with the interruption when he noticed that the figure in white had begun to stir. Slowly, it began to sit up.
“HEE-HAW!”
“Can you not be quiet?” The shout tore from his throat, raw and loud in the sudden silence. But the desert was gone, and the rasp of sand was replaced by the whisper of soft green grass beneath his bedroll. He blinked as the morning sun warmed his face. A few hundred yards ahead, the stone gates of Samaria stood clear against a blue sky.
“Hee-haw.” He turned to see the donkey standing behind him.
“What happened?” he asked in amazement, his eyes wide with fear and fascination. The donkey neighed like a horse and shook her head from side to side as if answering Elijah’s question. Elijah scrambled backward on the grass, his heart hammering against his ribs. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the heels of his palms against them until colors burst in the darkness. “This is not real,” he chanted under his breath. “Wake up. Just wake up.”
He heard the donkey neigh again and squinted one eye open to see the animal shaking her head from side to side. “Are you mocking me?” he said, opening both eyes to stare at the creature.
“Heh,” an unfamiliar voice cried. “Are you really talking to that donkey?” He turned and saw a merchant driving a heavily laden wagon.
“No!” yelled Elijah. “I am dreaming! Please just leave me alone so I can wake up.”
Fright crossed the merchant’s face. He snapped his reins, urging the wagon faster to get away from the madman on the roadside.
Watching the merchant hurry away, Elijah realized he was no longer dreaming. Yet he was ten miles farther than he had been when he went to sleep and was just outside his destination. Elijah looked up to heaven. “Thank you.”
But then his mind twisted with one question after another. He looked up again. “Again, thank you. But why did you help me now when I had not asked for your help? And why did you not help me the day before when I begged for more than an hour?”
There was only the rustle of a spring breeze for an answer. “Sometimes, Lord,” Elijah said, looking down at the sandals he had traded all he had for, “You are hard to understand.”
Ahead, he saw the entrance to the palace. He took a step toward the palace entrance, then retreated. He tried again, his feet rooting to the ground. He did the only thing he could: he ducked into an alley to pray.
“I need courage, Lord! Take my fear away and give me your strength. I will do what you ask and more; just please help me. The fear is crushing me!” He thought back to that day in his shop, to the Lord’s crushing, energizing presence. He remembered the feeling of being utterly sustained, of needing nothing, not even the air in his own lungs. That feeling seemed an eternity away from the fear that was crushing him now.
“Give me just a tenth of your presence, Lord,” he prayed earnestly.
He repeated this prayer over and over. The uneven stone surface of the alley compressed the flesh of his knees, and the pressure grew increasingly painful, yet he continued praying.
It was then that a raven landed on his shoulder and startled him. Elijah flinched slightly and instinctively raised his hand to protect his eyes. The bird made no aggressive movements, so Elijah relaxed after a brief moment.
“Are you the answer to my prayers?”
The bird turned its head toward him and defecated on his shoulder.
Elijah closed his eyes and sighed. He waved weakly at the bird, trying to scare it off his shoulder. The bird jumped off but returned just as quickly as it had left. “I should just go and do it, shouldn’t I?”
The raven squawked.
“And you are going with me?”
The raven squawked once more.
He got to his feet and turned back to the palace entrance. When his turn came to stand before the guards, Elijah could not believe what was happening.
The guard wrinkled his nose at the bird droppings on Elijah’s shoulder and looked at him with disgust. “You can go in,” barked the guard as he waved Elijah along. Elijah just stood there and stared.
The guard poked him in the stomach and yelled, “Bird man, are you deaf? I said you can go in!” The raven squawked and gently pecked at Elijah’s ear.
“All right, I’m going,” he muttered angrily, looking at the raven. As he moved down the massive hallway, he saw passage after passage. It dawned on him that he had no idea which way to go, and after what had happened with the guard, he didn’t think going back to ask for directions would be a very good idea.
“I don’t suppose you know the way?” he asked the raven jokingly. The bird flew from his shoulder and landed by an ornate entryway gilded in gold leaf and ruby clusters. It was also where most people passed through. The bird flew back to its perch on his shoulder.
Elijah stared at the bird and narrowed his eyes. “You guessed, didn’t you?” The bird shook its head vigorously.
“I would have figured it out on my own, you know,” he said under his breath as he headed for the entrance. Once again, the bird defecated on his shoulder.
Elijah wrinkled his face. “Can we stop this now?”
He couldn’t help but glance at the mess on his shoulder. The substance glistened with an unnatural yellow-green sheen. “Your diet leaves something to be desired,” Elijah muttered, meeting the raven’s unblinking gaze.
As the pair headed down the entry hall, the sound of a crowd grew louder. There was music, laughter, and yelling. When Elijah entered the large chamber, The smell of rare perfumes filled his nostrils, the gyrations of scantily clad dancers filled his eyes, and the exotic music filled his ears. He fought to regain his purpose and tried to focus on the throne before him. This was it, the moment that would forever change his life and the lives of countless tens of thousands. His pulse beat hard behind his eyes, and he could not swallow.
“Where are you, Lord?” he whispered, trembling.
Ahab was drinking from a large gold goblet when, out of the corner of his eye, he happened to see Elijah. “What is this?” he laughed. He put down his glass and examined this strange man in his throne room. The man wore a dirty cloak with some kind of green and yellow stain on his shoulder, had a large black bird perched on his shoulder, and stood before him trembling with apparent fear. “How did you get in here?”
Elijah opened his mouth, but only a dry, rasping sound came out.
“Do you have a death wish?”
“No more time,” Elijah said, his voice breaking as he used what little force he could muster.
Ahab laughed and cupped his hand to his ear. “No more what? Did Jezebel send you here for my amusement?”
Then movement at the edge of his vision stole that hard-won breath. Two guards carried a limp form between them, a young girl. Behind them stalked Rabah, his face crisscrossed with livid scratches. As they reached the stone steps, the girl’s head lolled to the side, her face turning into the light. The blood-matted hair, the curve of her cheek—
“Miriam!” Elijah screamed, his fear vaporizing into white-hot rage. He lunged, pulling her from the guards’ grasp and falling with her to the floor. He rocked her in his arms. “Miriam,” he cried softly, tears flowing like rain. Her eyes slowly opened, dull and cloudy. His hand, supporting the back of her neck, grew damp with her blood.
“What is this foolishness?” demanded Ahab.
Elijah turned toward him, his eyes blazing, and screamed, “You will be silent.”
The bustling room fell so silent that the drip of wine from a goblet echoed in the stillness.
Elijah turned back to Miriam. She looked up at him, then at the raven, smiling weakly.
“See, Elijah-ebony,” she whispered. As she coughed, a small trickle of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes grew more vacant, and a look of fear came across her face. “Elijah, I can’t see you.”
He cradled her head against his chest, tears falling onto her forehead. “I’m here, Miriam. I won’t leave you.”
The raven lifted from his shoulder in a flutter of black wings and disappeared through the high palace window. As it vanished, the tension in Miriam’s face melted away. Her eyes, though unseeing, widened with wonder. “Oh, Elijah,” she breathed. He bent closer, his ear nearly touching her lips as they formed one final word, barely more than a whisper.
“Elisha.”
With that, her spirit fled, and the light in her eyes died.
Elijah buried his face against her lifeless form and cried uncontrollably. He began repeating something over and over, the words a muffled, rhythmic agony against Miriam’s body. As he slowly pulled away from the dead girl, his voice grew a little clearer and louder.
“No more time, no more time, NO MORE TIME!”
He surged to his feet, a force that drove the courtiers back. “No more time for you, idolater!” he screamed, his finger leveled at the king. The words struck Ahab with physical weight, slamming him back into his throne.
Ahab shrank against the gilded arms, his voice a reedy crack. “By what authority do you dare—”
“By the authority of the God of Israel, before whom I stand!” Elijah’s voice was no longer his own; it was thunder in the hall. “He has sealed the heavens over this idolatrous land. There will be no rain. There will be not one drop of dew. The skies will be bronze and the earth will be dust, until the day I call for them to open.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Rabah began to laugh. Soon, everyone was laughing as well. Elijah merely stared defiantly at him. Rabah held out his hands to silence the crowd. “Baal is the master of the rains, you fool. What kind of God sends one such as you to confront a great and powerful king? You are dirty,” Rabah sniffed. “And you smell.” Again, the room erupted in laughter. Elijah waited patiently for it to subside.
“And what kind of god has a cold-blooded killer of children speak for him?” Elijah turned toward him, his gaze a blade honed on rage.
“Her death is her own fault. She should not have refused me. As the chief priest of Baal, I had the right to take her. She should never have scratched me.”
Elijah’s face grew calm, but his stare remained locked on Miriam’s killer. “I will watch you die, chief priest of Baal.”
“The name is Rabah,” he sniffed sarcastically. “And I will watch you die right now.” The priest motioned to two nearby guards. They drew their swords and advanced on Elijah.
“STOP!” yelled a voice from across the room.
It was Jezebel, Ahab’s lover, wife, and chief priestess of Baal. She was tall, with oval eyes, a piercing gaze, and a perfectly symmetrical face. She was tall, with oval eyes, a piercing gaze, and a perfectly symmetrical face. Her lips were full and moist, and her skin was smooth and soft, a creamy light brown. Her jet-black hair completed this picture of female perfection. “You say that it will not rain again until you tell it to,” the priestess purred softly. She walked over to him and placed her finger on Elijah’s face. Gently, she wiped away the last of his tears for Miriam. Then she placed her damp finger on his chest near the breastbone and drew it slowly downward to dry her finger. Elijah shivered reflexively as her finger neared his navel and grabbed her hand to stop her from going any further. Two guards started quickly toward them, alarmed by Elijah’s movements. Jezebel raised her free hand to stop them. Elijah released his grip, and she removed her hand from him.
“Are you a god?” She stood before him and pouted. “Should I be your priestess?”
“My Lord, before whom I stand today, will keep the rain from falling. I am simply his key, and when the time is right, he will use me to unlock the rains.”
Jezebel bent down over Miriam’s lifeless body and stroked her hair. “A tragedy,” she said with real sincerity. “The poor child did not understand what Baal wanted from her. It is the act of making love that gives him homage and praise, and he rewards us with his tears of life-giving rain. As long as this worship of Jehovah remains in this land, we will never reach our full potential to receive his blessings.”
She turned to Ahab and spoke with determination. “My king, we must let this man live. We must show him to be the fool that he is. All of Israel will know that Jehovah is not God as soon as the rains fall, proving this prophet false.” She turned back to Elijah and smiled. “Tishbite, I want to thank you. You have given me the method by which I will grind your God into the dust.” She spoke without malice or sarcasm, as if she were genuinely thankful.
Elijah looked down at Miriam. “Since you are so grateful, will you grant me a favor? Let me take her with me so that I can bury her according to our God's command.”
“Of course.” She smiled. “It matters little to me, for soon your God will be as dead as this poor, sweet child.”
Elijah smiled back confidently. “We will see, Priestess.”
Something about his smile unnerved Jezebel, but no one except Elijah saw the brief moment of doubt her eyes betrayed. As Elijah carried Miriam out of the chamber, Jezebel called after him, “You know, Elijah, when it does rain, I will have to send men to kill you. Nothing personal, you know.”
Elijah did not stop. He heard her threat, but the words were weightless against his grief. He returned to the donkey and laid Miriam’s body gently across its back. The raven landed on the ground before him, a chip of night against the pale stones. It shook its tail feathers once, then launched itself into the air, flying south. With the raven a dark speck on the horizon, Elijah took the donkey’s reins and followed.