In Search of Absalom

It was the hottest day of the year. The stones held fire like coals forgotten in a dead hearth, and even the merchants had abandoned their stalls for whatever shade the Ancient of Days had provided. Yet here we walk, this foreign woman and I, through dust that tastes of copper and desperation.

She counts her coins again as we rest beneath a dying terebinth. Third time since dawn. Her fingers shake—not from the heat, though it presses down like a smith's hammer. From fear. I recognize it the way one recognizes the scent of coming rain.

"How much further?" she asks in accented Hebrew, the words careful on her tongue. Phoenician, I think, though she's never said. Her dead husband's people, perhaps. The kind who trade in purple dye and promises, who leave widows with debts that multiply like locusts.

"Before evening," I tell her, though I'm not certain. The road to the hill country shifts in this heat, becomes liquid, unreliable. Like memory. Like hope.

"And you're sure he'll be there? Your brother?"

I pour water over my wrists, let it run dark with dust onto the cracked earth. Such a waste, but the heat makes thinking impossible otherwise. "He sent word. Three days ago."

A lie. The word came a week past, carried by a shepherd boy who couldn't meet my eyes when he spoke it. Something about the way he delivered the message—too careful, too practiced—made my chest tight. But I've learned to ignore such feelings. They serve no purpose except to rob sleep.

She studies my face with the attention of someone who's learned that survival depends on reading what others don't say aloud. "My husband used to send word like that. 'I'll return before the new moon,' he'd say. 'Wait for me.' Always wait."

"And did you? Wait?"

Her laugh sounds like breaking pottery. "What choice did women like us have? We wait. We hope. We make excuses when they don't come home." She pauses, rolls the coins between her palms. "Until one day we stop making excuses and start making plans."

Plans. Yes. I understand this. The careful accumulation of silver, a piece here and there from the household funds. Learning which servants can be trusted with messages, which routes avoid the main roads where my father's men might recognize a king's daughter traveling unescorted. Teaching myself to move through the world like water instead of stone, bending around obstacles instead of breaking against them.

We rise and continue walking. The sun shows no mercy—hasn't for forty days, the shepherds say. The wells running low, the grain withering in the fields. As if the very sky withholds its blessing until some cosmic debt is paid.

"Tell me about him," she says as our sandals find their rhythm on the packed earth. "Your brother."

Where to begin? With his laugh that could make stern men smile? With hands that gentled frightened colts and plucked music from gut strings like prayers from a desperate heart? With hair that caught sunlight and held it, spun gold that made women forget their marriage vows and men forget their better judgment?

"He's beautiful," I say finally. "The kind of beautiful that makes people believe in divine favor. In the possibility that some mortals are touched by the glory of the One Who Sees."

"Dangerous beauty, then."

"The most dangerous kind."

She nods, understanding something I haven't spoken. "My husband was like that. Not beautiful to look at—his nose had been broken too many times, and his hands were scarred from rope burns. But when he spoke of distant lands, of goods that could make us wealthy beyond imagining..." She trails off, lost in memory. "I should have known that kind of dreaming comes with a price."

We pause at a crossroads where three paths converge. To the east, the main route toward the capital, crowded with merchants and soldiers and all the noise of empire. To the west, a lesser road that winds through farming villages where news travels slowly and strangers attract too much attention. And straight ahead, climbing into the hills where the great oaks grow and rebels make their camps.

"Which way did your husband travel?" I ask, though I suspect the answer.

"All of them, at different times. But the hill route was his favorite. 'Fewer questions there,' he'd say. 'Fewer eyes watching how much silver changes hands.'" She hefts her water skin, checking its weight. "Also fewer wells. Are you certain about this path?"

I am certain of nothing except the urgency that drove me from my bed before dawn, the certainty that time runs like water through cupped palms. But I nod and turn toward the hills. Some journeys can only be completed by moving toward what frightens us most.

The road climbs steadily, winding between terraced fields where the grain stands brown and brittle in the heat. Workers have abandoned their labor—only fools and desperate women travel in such weather. In the distance, dust clouds rise and dissipate, might be wind or might be horsemen. In times like these, the distinction matters less than staying invisible.

"Your brother," she says when the silence grows too heavy. "He lives in the hills?"

"For now." The words taste careful, practiced. "Our father... there was a disagreement about justice. About how wrongs should be made right."

Her eyebrows rise slightly. She's heard this story before, perhaps in different words from different women. "Justice. That's what men always call it when they decide who lives and who dies."

Something cold moves through my chest despite the furnace air. "Sometimes justice is the only thing left when the law fails."

"And sometimes," she says quietly, "justice costs more than the original wrong."

We walk in silence after that. The heat presses down like the hand of an angry god, making breath laborious, thoughts thick as honey. My head covering clings to my scalp, damp with perspiration, and I can feel salt forming white crystals at the corners of my eyes.

But still we climb. Past olive groves where the trees have curled their leaves tight as fists, past shepherd's huts where even the goats have sought shade. The path narrows, becomes treacherous with loose stones and hidden roots. This is country for those who know how to disappear, how to live beyond the reach of kings and their justice.

"There," I say when the great oak comes into view, its canopy spreading like a green tent against the merciless sky. "He'll be waiting beneath the tree."

But even from a distance, something looks wrong. The shade beneath the oak should be filled with men and horses, with the controlled chaos of a military camp. Instead, there's only stillness. The kind of stillness that follows violence, that speaks of stories ended mid-sentence.

My companion stops walking, her merchant's instincts reading the scene before her mind processes what it means. "There's no one there."

"There must be." But my voice carries no conviction. "Perhaps they're resting. The heat—"

"No." She points to a carrion bird circling high overhead, then another. "Something's happened here."

We approach slowly, each step a small death. The oak's shade offers blessed relief from the sun, but no comfort for what we find beneath its branches. Scattered equipment tells the tale—overturned pots, broken arrows, dark stains on the earth that might be wine but probably aren't.

And there, wrapped in a travel-stained cloak, the shape I've traveled two days to find.

I fall to my knees beside him, hands trembling as I pull back the cloth that covers his face. Even in death, even with three days of heat working its changes, he remains beautiful. Golden hair matted now with blood and worse things, but still catching what light filters through the oak leaves.

My brother. My protector. My avenger. The one person who saw what was done to me and refused to pretend it didn't matter.

Something crinkles beneath the cloth—parchment, wrapped close to his chest. I unfold it with careful fingers, afraid it might crumble in the heat. His handwriting, still beautiful despite everything:

May you go in peace and return in peace, and may the One who watches over Israel neither slumber nor sleep in His watching over you.

The words hit like physical blows. A traveling blessing, the kind mothers speak over children, the kind he must have whispered over me a hundred times when we were young. But now—now they mock everything they once promised. He who was meant to watch over me lies dead. The peace he blessed me with is shattered. The safe return he wished for will never come.

"I'm sorry," the foreign woman says softly, reading the devastation in my face. "I'm truly sorry."

I clutch the parchment to my chest, these sacred words that have become arrows in my heart. "He blessed my journey. Promised I would be watched over." My voice breaks like pottery dropped on stone. "But who watches over the watchers?"

She kneels beside me in the dust, her own grief visible now—not for my brother, but for her husband, for all the men who promise protection and leave only blessings written on crumbling parchment. "Perhaps," she says gently, "we must learn to watch over ourselves."

Above us, the oak branches rustle in a breeze I can't feel. Caught in the lower limbs, strands of golden hair move like prayer flags, like the remnants of dreams too beautiful for this world. I understand now—they cut him down from here, where his beauty became his snare, where his glory held him fast for the spears of his enemies.

But when I look closer, I see we are not the first to come seeking him.

"Someone has already..." I begin, then stop. Because there, beyond where his body lay, rises a great heap of stones. Cairn-built, shoulder high, the kind of monument that speaks without words. The kind that marks both burial and warning.

My companion sees it too. "The soldiers. They would have needed to dispose of the body before it drew carrion-eaters. Before word could spread of where the rebel prince fell."

I approach the stone heap slowly, each step echoing in the hollow space beneath my ribs. They have built it well, these king's men. Each stone fitted carefully to the next, creating a wall that will not easily be breached. A tomb that speaks of finality, of judgments sealed, of stories that end without redemption.

But also—though they could not have intended this—of something else. Of burdens carried, of weights that must be borne, of the way grief accumulates stone by stone until it becomes a mountain too large to move.

"He's in there?" the foreign woman asks softly.

I nod, though I cannot see through stone any more than I can see through the years that stretch ahead without his voice, his laughter, his terrible beautiful certainty that justice could be carved from an unjust world.

"Should we... can we...?" She gestures helplessly at the monument.

"No." The word comes out harder than I intended. "This is his grave now. This is how his story ends."

But as I speak the words, I realize something has shifted inside me. The desperate urgency that drove me from my bed, that pushed me through furnace heat and doubt and the growing certainty that I was too late—that urgency is transforming into something else. Something that feels like acceptance, but deeper. More final.

I place my palm against the topmost stone, still warm from the day's heat. "Goodbye, brother," I whisper. "Your debts are paid. Your justice is complete."

The foreign woman counts her coins once more, calculating whether her dead husband's debtors will still honor their agreements, whether the silver she hoped to collect ever existed outside his promises. But her movements are different now—less desperate, more thoughtful. As if she too has found something in this place of stones and endings.

"What will you do now?" she asks.

I consider this. I could return to my father's house, resume the careful invisibility that keeps daughters safe. Could pretend this journey never happened, that hope never lived and died beneath this tree. Could wait, as women are taught to wait, for someone else to determine my value, my future, my worth.

Or I could choose something else. Something that feels like the opposite of waiting.

"I don't know," I say, and for the first time in years, uncertainty doesn't terrify me. "What about you?"

She looks at her coins, then at the western road that leads to ports where ships sail for distant lands. "Maybe it's time to stop collecting what dead men owed me. Maybe it's time to discover what I'm owed by the living."

We gather our belongings in the gathering dusk, two women who came seeking different kinds of deliverance and found something else entirely. The heat presses down like the hand of an angry god, but I feel the first whisper of cooler air—not relief, not yet, but the promise that even the longest days must end.

Behind us, wind stirs the oak leaves. Ahead, the western road leads toward ports where ships sail for distant lands, toward cities where women with silver in their ears might find work for their hands and purpose for their days.

It was the hottest day of the year.

And in the branches above the stone heap, a tor calls to its mate.