4. Would it please you more to be murdered?

Obadiah looked out of his chamber window and wondered what to do. Outside, where flowers and grass once grew, layers of grime had settled upon the copestones of his garden wall. Now no more than an enclosure for briars, the stone barrier extended from his quarters to a berm about King Ahab’s palace.

“Natan,” Obadiah said to the man standing beside him, “everything is nearly dead. Do you think it will rain soon?”

“No,” Natan said, a good man and loyal but not skilled at conversation.

“But I feel rain in my bones,” Obadiah said. “It will come in torrents, I think, with thunder.”

“I haven’t seen a cloud in three years,” Natan said. “There are no grapes. Olives are hard as stones and less tasty. A sack of moldy grain now pulls a ransom at the market. The king himself, they say, has begun to doubt his ability to feed the queen.”

“And her freeloading priests,” Obadiah added.

“To my point, sir,” Natan said. “Ahab has sent me to summon you. He desires that you join him on a search in the country to find grass for his chargers.” He stopped to smile. “Can one truly be a king without a flashy team to pull his chariot?”

The two stepped out onto Obadiah’s terrace and looked toward the palace. “Jezebel sits in a window, yonder,” Natan whispered. “She fans herself with an ostrich plume and ponders the empty sky. It’s said she hopes to spot the prophet, Elijah, in a vision so that she might cast a spell upon him. She wants him dead for arranging this drought.”

“As she hopes to murder all who speak for the God of Israel,” Obadiah said. He motioned Natan back inside, removed an etched plaque from the wall and handed it to him. “Sell the thing,” he said. “It’s the king’s. I have no more of my own. Do as you have done in the past with the funds.”

“The prophets you hide from Jezebel,” Natan said, “complain about their caves. They are no longer satisfied to only survive.”

“I do not expect their gratitude,” Obadiah said, “but I’m sure the Lord would be more pleased if they showed common sense.”

“They struggle with both concepts,” Natan said. “Thanks to you and the king’s artwork they have more to eat in hiding than most in Israel who live free. I’ve reminded them of the fates of their peers. I ask, would it please you more to be murdered? Yet they always demand more.”

“It cannot be easy to live in a hole in a mountain with forty-nine other men.”

They nodded in agreement, smiled a little sadly and shook hands. “Go now and buy bread for our ungrateful prophets,” Obadiah said. “I’ll join Ahab in his pathetic hunt for grass.”

*

Ahab sent Obadiah north from Samaria. He had not gone far in that direction before meeting a man in the woods, sitting alone beside a path, making odd noises through his nose and mouth.

Obadiah fell upon his face and asked, “Is it you, my lord, Elijah?”

Elijah answered, “It is I,” and the world began to change.