Once down in the valley, Yashar found the road along which Elijah had run. Beginning east upon it, Yashar passed scores of the same men he had seen earlier on the mountain top, raging fellows hours earlier who had helped butcher Jezebel’s priests, loitering in the rain like children, splashing, spitting geysers and throwing mud.
Night fell before Yashar sniffed the first hint of Jezreel, of any city save Yokneam. He stopped at a tree mound beside the road, wet but free of puddles, and slept that evening best he could. Early the next morning he set out again and, by midafternoon, after only one false turn that nearly took him to Megiddo, he stood at the base of a long, sloped ascent leading up to Jezreel’s gates.
“I expected you hours earlier,” Elijah said.
“Prophet,” Yashar asked, spotting his friend close by, “I thought we were to meet up top in the city. Why do you hide behind a rock?”
“I’m not hiding,” Elijah said.
“And I’m not hungry and soaked to the bone,” Yashar came back.
Elijah doubled over then, he laughed so hard. “Good one, good one,” he kept saying.
It had been a good one! Yashar felt so happy then, so relieved to have found Elijah, so pleased to have made him laugh. But Elijah had been hiding. Yashar asked why, again.
Instead of answering immediately, Elijah led Yashar farther from the road and spoke in a comically low voice. “Call it a stirring in my spirit, boy,” he whispered. “I’ve not felt right since I left Carmel. Trouble is about. I feel it in my bones.”
“What have you to fear?” Yashar asked. “You are Israel’s prophet, Elijah, the man who called down fire from heaven according to the will of God; the same god whose hand rested upon your shoulder while you outran Ahab’s chargers to this place.”
“You misunderstand,” Elijah said, then said no more until he had led Yashar even farther out of sight to a shaded spot with stumps upon which they sat. There he produced several cakes from his pockets—Elijah often seemed to have cakes—and handed several to Yashar one by one, encouraging him to eat slowly.
“I’m as strong as a wild ox,” the prophet said, flexing a bicep, “but my prodigious strength is not the issue. Evil hovers in the air about me, dark stirrings, I say, more natural to another dimension.”
“Yesterday, sir, you laughed in your enemies’ faces,” Yashar said. “You called upon God himself and…”
“Enough, boy,” Elijah said. “Fire, lightning, endurance, rain… I am but flesh like you. We are all puny. God, not ourselves, is behind all the good and amazing things that we may do.”
“You claim to know this, prophet,” Yashar said, “yet you sit here trembling.”
“Like I said, boy, I’m a man.”
“One who will surely perform many more miracles in God’s name!”
“So sayeth the child, Yashar,” Elijah sighed.
They laughed at that but Elijah remained deeply troubled. He pointed up the ascent toward Jezreel. “Big and imposing as it is up there,” he said, “the fortress here is nothing compared to Samaria. You shall see that city too, its tattooed men and women, pagan poles and the big house Ahab built for his queen.” He pointed toward the flats. “The garrison here commands this plain from the Jordan behind us then west to the sea. Horses once grazed here on acres of grass. Chariots drilled, then the earth dried up.”
“What now,” Yashar asked, “with the rain’s return?”
“Chariots again,” Elijah said. “Israel will grow strong again. Ahab will win wars. But I fear the people are doomed.”
“Why?” Yashar asked, but the prophet, as was true too often, had nothing more to say.
*
Elijah and Yashar skirted Jezreel that afternoon to travel farther east, toward the Jordan, not stopping until they reached a wooded spot overlooking the valley.
“So we will be safe here?” Yashar asked.
“I think not,” Elijah said.
“Then why did we bother to come?”
“You cannot quite see the river from here,” Elijah told him, “but I was born about thirty miles from this spot as the raven flies that way, beyond the water toward Tishbe of Gilead.” He pointed north along the ridgeline then northeast. “The south shore of the Kinneret lies seventeen miles or so that way, in the Galilee.”
“It looks beautiful from here.”
“Well, it gets miserably hot.”
The rain had stopped yet the sky coursed with clouds. Birds hopped in the grass and sang in the limbs of trees. Every rock, bush and bud looked washed and clean. “Let’s sleep outside,” Yashar said, “maybe it will rain again!”
“Ah, to be young again,” Elijah sighed. They found a cave and built a fire at its mouth. Once inside, Elijah produced more cakes. That night as they slept, after the fire had faded to embers, Elijah sat up suddenly, pointed into the black night and moaned, “Oh, no!”
“What is it?” Yashar awoke and the gasped.
The prophet spoke in a thin and warbling voice not his, So let the gods do to me and worse if by this time tomorrow I don’t make your life like the life of one of them. He then shook himself awake, pointed into the empty space over the fire and asked, “Did you see it?”
“I only heard you say…”
“Do not repeat it!” Elijah said, standing and beginning to pace. “They were the words of an evil messenger, Jezebel’s words, sent by her, you see? God, for some reason, has allowed me to hear it.”
“Hanging in the air?”
“You know nothing of that woman’s power,” the prophet muttered.
“I know of God’s power,” Yashar said as the prophet ran out of the cave. “I know he preserved you and me. He saved all Israel.”
Yashar listened for an answer but heard nothing.
“I know he will save us again,” he called out loudly, but again he heard only his echo.
*
The prophet had run away. Though abandoned in the forest countless miles from home, Yashar could not help but stop, once out from the cave and into the crisp night air again, to look up at the stars through the rifts in the clouds and praise God. There would certainly be time to be frightened later.
He could hear Elijah running but could not see him. “You can’t be serious, prophet,” Yashar called out, “the queen should be running from you.” The sound of thudding footsteps was his answer. Five minutes of pursuit in the darkness—he fell several times, feeling stupid in the dark—soon became an hour. Did he really hope to catch the same man who had outrun Ahab’s horses? When an hour of chasing in the dark became two, though Yashar understood that his failure to catch Elijah meant he would be thoroughly lost, he quit anyway, falling dead to the world beside a tree.
Birds awoke him the next morning. So lost and fatigued he didn’t care, Yashar yawned and stretched, chose a downhill slope to start out upon again, only because it led downhill, and soon found a stream in which he could wash. There, across the water on the opposite bank, lay the prophet, Elijah, snoring. Yashar called out to him, expecting that he had come to his senses, but Elijah snapped awake, gasped and ran away.
The pursuit continued three more days. Something about the prophet’s stunning cowardice angered Yashar. With his anger came steely determination. Elijah was never able to lose him. God’s hand was in it. They seemed to run and rest at the same times, always headed south, first across the Jezreel Valley then into rough terrain in mountains, through winding passes then finally onto roads, all that time, amazingly, never far apart. Yashar, thanking God for unnatural instincts and endurance, grew certain of success.
*
One day, deep into Judah near a town called Be’er Sheba, Yashar found the prophet sitting on a stump beside the road. “I ran for my life,” Elijah said when Yashar approached, nothing more.
“That much is clear, prophet,” Yashar said. “It was an unattractive thing.”
Elijah seemed entertained by the criticism. “My little man,” he said, messing Yashar’s hair. “I am not at all surprised that you kept pace with me.”
“God did it,” Yashar said.
“He is surely with you,” Elijah sighed, “but now I must say it, boy. You did well, we barely slept, but you cannot follow me farther. My spirit is low and I hope to die. I will soon ask the Lord to make it so.”
During the daylight hours of his pursuit, Yashar had seen budding shrubs, drifting clouds, rushing water and hillsides flecked with shoots of grass. “The miracles you summoned at Carmel have saved the world,” he said. “Why would you want to die?”
While Elijah seemed to pause to form an opinion, the wind rose and the sky began to rumble. “We must be nearly a hundred miles from Carmel now,” the prophet said. He sniffed the air. “Look and listen, boy, by God’s grace comes more rain.”
“Why such sadness, then?” Yashar asked. “Why run like a coward? Why turn from me?”
“Why this? How that?” Elijah said as the wind began to toss his hair. “Do you remember, boy, how we started in Zarephath; you, me, your mother, a handful of meal, a little oil, your false faith and a mountain of doubts?”
“I remember,” Yashar said, “but you have not answered my question.”
“Tell me, boy,” Elijah said, “what troubled you these few days as you pursued me? What was it you were thinking?”
“That’s a silly question,” Yashar said. “I was running, not thinking at all.”
“No concerns of any kind?” Elijah asked.
“There was no time to worry,” Yashar said. “I only hoped to keep pace.”
“That,” Elijah said, standing and pointing skyward, “is how you, young man, shall from this day forth pursue the Lord, your God of Israel, without questions or concerns, only hoping to keep pace.”
It began to rain.
“I do not understand,” Yashar said, and his lower lip began to quiver and embarrass him.
“There, there, my little man,” Elijah said as the sky rumbled and the rain fell harder. He hugged Yashar and kissed his head. “I’m off to the wilderness to die. Rejoice in the Lord and pay me no mind.”
“Please do not leave me,” Yashar said. “What will I do?”
“Even this, my present lack of nerve, is of God, somehow,” Elijah said. “It will all work for good, you shall see. Quit trying to understand.”
“Fine,” Yashar said, “abandon me, then.” He started away but stopped and turned a circle. “I have no idea where I am, prophet, help me. What should I do?”
“You know where Samaria is, boy,” Elijah said, “we passed near it in the hills. You know how to find Jezreel too.” He pointed. “They’re both that way.”
“That’s not helpful at all,” Yashar said.
“War is coming, boy,” Elijah said. “Quit crying and go north. Be brave, have faith. Listen for God’s voice and rely upon it. It’s he, not me, who’s chosen to send you on your own. Go now and make your way.”
“I do not believe this,” Yashar said. “I look different than these people. I speak with a horrible accent. There’ll be situations and encounters. I have no food or money. I won’t know what to do.”
Elijah kneeled, and tore a strip of leather off each of Yashar’s sandals. “That looks better,” he said. “We wear them simpler here.” He yanked Yashar’s tunic forward so it hung farther from his neck then tied a different style knot in the braided cord about his waist. “As for situations,” he said, “remember, always tell the truth.”
“That’s it?”
“It will be your mark, boy,” Elijah said. “One day a single, honest sentence will change your life. Do not forget that. I’m a prophet and I know. God has preserved you for his reasons. You are destined for a higher calling than service to me.”
“What higher calling could there be?” Yashar asked.
“How would I know?” Elijah sighed. “Prophets don’t know everything. But you are a head taller than when we met, son. You’re wiry strong and already, in a boy’s way, growing wise. Listen! Pray! Follow the Spirit! Speak truly! All will go well.”
“Such confidence,” Yashar said, “coming from a man running like a rabbit from a woman.”
“Good one,” Elijah smiled, though not about to change his mind.
“I’ll go then,” Yashar said, “but tell me, Elijah, will I ever see you again?”
“Yes,” Elijah said, “you will.”
“But will we be friends again? Will you continue to teach and support me as before?”
Elijah pointed again and said, “Go, your calling awaits. It’s a good one, child.”
Yashar knew he could not change the prophet’s mind. Elijah waved quickly, smiled unreasonably then turned and splashed away across the many puddles that had formed during the latest burst of rain, headed eastward toward a faint line of mountains at the horizon. Then, as Elijah had demanded, he quit crying and started north.