the other side of the Jordan. The road to Jericho is wide and well traveled. Hamas has reconnaissance chariots that regularly patrol it. You will join the road after the last checkpoint to Jericho, so that the main gate will be your one and only inspection. If you pass, you’re in.”
Elezar nodded, and it seemed they were done. But then Salmon slammed his fist on the stone table.
“This is not the plan,” he nearly shouted at Caleb, the words hanging in the night air. “Achan and I were supposed to cross the Jordan and join the barley workers, bring the harvest through the gates of Jericho, spy it out and come back.”
“Yahweh works in mysterious ways, Salmon,” Deker said, and helped himself to the two other wraps, tucking them inside the folds of his tunic.
Caleb sighed and looked at Salmon. “It is what it is.”
Deker then noticed one last little leather pouch that old Caleb fingered under his weathered hand. “What’s that?”
Caleb opened the pouch with great care and presented him with a necklace with a silver pendant in the shape of a crescent moon. “If you get into trouble, you can go to Rahab’s Inn,” he said. “Give her this.”
Deker picked up the necklace by the chain and looked at the crescent moon, the light from the oil lamps dancing like fire across its shiny surface. He watched Caleb’s eyes follow his hand as he carefully put the necklace around his neck next to his IDF tag.
“She’s the whore from the story, isn’t she?” he asked Elezar in English, trying to recall the details of the book of Joshua, if only to prove Hebrew school wasn’t a complete waste of his parents’ money.
“And older than I am, according to tradition,” Elezar shot back, and then addressed Caleb. “It won’t be necessary. We’ll be out before the gate closes and return the necklace to you as you have given it to us now.”
“That’s probably best,” Caleb said resolutely. “There’s nobody better informed about the guard placements and shifts than the women who service those guards. But they cannot be trusted and may turn you over to be killed. Avoid Rahab’s if you can, then, and bring the necklace back to me.”
Deker nodded and then put his hand to Elezar’s back. “Bribes, whores and deception,” he said cynically, pushing Elezar forward to get out of there. “The work of Yahweh must go on.”
10
The Jordan was a stone’s throw away from the base, so a sullen Salmon and curious Achan walked Deker and Elezar over to its swollen banks to see them off. Deker’s heart sank as soon as he saw the silvery surface ripple under the new moon. It had to be a kilometer across—a virtual impossibility in the twenty-first century, even if Palestinians had blown up every dam.
“Remember, it’s shallower in the center,” Achan offered, sensing Deker’s concern but misunderstanding its origin. “Only three or four cubits deep.”
Deker stripped and stuffed everything into the satchel Caleb had kindly provided, as well as two bronze daggers in case things got up close and personal on the other side of the river. Elezar followed suit, and they stepped down the limestone bank. They were joined by a gazelle that had ventured down to the watering hole.
The water was colder than Deker expected, the current stiffer. At any moment he felt he’d be swept off his feet. Deker had never seen the Jordan move so fast. He knew it dropped an average of three meters per kilometer until it emptied into the Dead Sea. But in the twenty-first century, most of that water had been siphoned off by agriculture.
He was getting a bad feeling about this.
He looked back, but Salmon and Achan and everything on the east bank of the river had disappeared behind the mist. Now he and Elezar had to wade through the void on their own to the unseen other side. It felt less like a flight to freedom than an Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange: there was always the outside chance you’d get shot in the back—or the front—before reaching the other side.
He could still feel the pain in his own back from the bronze spearhead that first brought him here, and he suddenly wondered what the wound looked like. Had they sewn him up back in Shittim? Would there be a scar, should he return to his own time? His mind went to a million places as his feet began to touch the bottom near the shallower middle of the river.
And then all of a sudden the current picked up, lifting him off his feet and sweeping him downstream. He started kicking and worked his legs furiously, treating the river like a riptide, swimming toward the western bank, afraid that if he stopped for even a moment he would sink to the bottom and never surface again.
Swallowing some water and choking all the way in, he crawled up on the west bank of the Jordan.
Elezar dragged himself up after him and said, “If the Lord doesn’t part the waters, the Israelites will never make it.”
“We made it. That’s all that matters.”
They ran up and over the bank, moving quickly through the mist into a thick field of barley stalks. There they removed their clothing from their soaked satchels and dressed quickly. The rising sun would dry them soon enough.
Already the horizon was plain to see as the first light of day began to break. As Deker stuck his head above the stalks, he could see some baskets floating over the fields.
“The field workers have already started their day,” Deker reported to Elezar, who was having trouble with his deerskin boots. “Let’s pray to God they’re good old Palestinians and this is the West Bank as we know it. Jericho is only four kilometers away. We can hit the Oasis Casino and grab lunch at The Mount of Temptation Restaurant before noon.”
Deker and Elezar stood up and began to move through the golden stalks, passing curious workers and a few oxen along the way until they finally reached a wide, well-traveled dirt road.
“This isn’t Route 90,” Deker said quietly as he took in the still air. A sinking feeling of dread began to press down on him.
“That’s because there
Deker followed Elezar’s gaze to the northwest and started. Straight ahead in the distance, towering over an oasis of palm trees, were the grim walls of ancient Jericho, soaring darkly against the dawn.
Standing cold and damp, his legs still weak from the strength of the Jordan’s current, Deker realized his hopes of walking into the arms of the modern-day, Israeli-occupied West Bank were shattered.
They had covered too much ground now, from the camp at Shittim to the base at the Jordan and now across the Jordan, to hold on to the thin hope this was all some movie set. Nor could he pass off the megalithic structure on the horizon as some mirage or mental fabrication.
His presence in this ancient world—this time—was as unquestionable as those massive walls before him. And, as with time, there was nowhere to move but forward.
11
The well-worn road to Jericho was on a slight uphill grade, four kilometers beyond the west bank of the Jordan River. Deker was beginning to feel the exhaustion that should have overwhelmed him hours ago. His legs continued to ache even now from that grapevine hold the Israelites had put him into back at Shittim. The crossing of the Jordan hadn’t helped. Bracing himself against the fast current had taken its toll on his already overtaxed muscles. His throat seemed to be perpetually parched in the dry air, and the unfamiliar scents of the field and vegetation on this side of the Jordan inflamed his sinuses, giving him a headache.
On second thought, he had had a headache ever since his torture back in Madaba.
Maybe it was the exhaustion or just the simple lack of plausible alternatives, but Deker had finally accepted Elezar’s theory that they were now living among the ancients circa 1400 BC.
