Bathsheba’s Lament

Allister Nelson

When the cambion child first comes to me, there is David, my captor and husband, wild-eyed at my door. He holds the dark-skinned babe with a face like it has never known a mother’s love, bawling, in rags of ash.

“Bathsheba, I have done a terrible thing,” my David says, blood at his brow, a haze of fiery, gory lust in his eye – like the night he set his guards on me to take me from my bath, and I wept naked, in moonlight, before him. “Agrath bat Mahalath, the wife of Sammael, has tempted me. I do not know what to say, only that this child is hungry.”

I look up from our own nursing son, Solomon, my little prince of the red locks like Esau. “There is room for one more at my breast, my King,” is all I say, though inside, I am burning. Hatred, regret, but sadness, sadness for the newest half-born bastard of David. “What is his name?”

“Ashmedai.”

David hands me this Ashmedai, wipes his hands clean of his sin, then slams the door. I set Solomon down to sleep, then bathe tenderly and change the cloth diaper of the babe. A thick cake of grease and blood, and the sweat of a demoness’ loin, washes off the newborn like ebon silk. Tiny horns poke through little Ashmedai’s coal black hair, and wing buds unfurl from his back.

Solomon giggles in his sleep. I smile tenderly at my newly adopted child. “Oh Solomon, you have a new twin today,” I say, nursing my Ash as rain falls outside on the Kingdom of G-d. Ashmedai latches instantly and puckers his rosy mouth at the sweet tang of my milk. I rock Ashmedai to sleep that night, not letting the poor thing go. Lilith’s companions are not known to be good mothers, after all.

“Ashmedai, welcome home, my gazelle-eyed malakhim,” I tell him as he sleeps beside me, Solomon to my left, Ashmedai to my right.

Solomon snores lightly. Ashmedai stares at the ceiling, reaching for the mobile David carved, on one of the rare days he was sober, and not wrestling like Jacob with G-d. But what do I know of the Lord? I am just Bathsheba. I am just a woman. One of David’s countless wives.

The lot left to me is to pick up the pieces after the men are done.

And oh, what a thing that David has done.

David takes to coming home stinking of the Demoness of the Wastes. He steals pennyroyal tea bags from my spice cabinet, an abortifacient that I give out to the maids freely that David impregnates whom he would otherwise execute for not dealing with his own bastard sons and daughters. Why he let Ashmedai live, I know:

Ashmedai cannot be killed. Ashmedai is two now. Always clutching my skirts. More curious than Solomon, who is a sweet mama’s boy. Ashmedai’s wings have grown, there are scales on his brown skin, a dragon’s tail lashing, and he can fly. Each morning, I braid their hair with meadowsweet, black-red locks on Ash’s head, red-blond tresses on sea-gray eyes over Solomon, and Ashemedai’s gazelle eyes burn gold, and my treasured sons kick their feet patiently.

They play. They plot. They beg for apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah. David, on his sober days, holds his sons high to blow the shofar to welcome in the New Year. It is then, when he lives up to Adonai’s burden, that G-d is pleased.

“Bathsheba, Ha Satan has many wiles. It is G-d’s way for those of us who walk with the Lord,” David begs one day when he misses Solomon’s twelfth birthday. He is covered in love bites and bruises from Agrath. My pennyroyal is all gone. I have had to import delphinium from the Etruscans. Better to prevent pregnancies on me or the maids that David sires, these days, than to prematurely end one.

To hell with any more babes Agrath may birth. I have taken in one and loved him fiercely like my own. The rest of David’s cambions can rot.

Ashmedai speeds into the room, straight into David’s arms. “Papa!” he says. “It is Solomon’s twelfth birthday, only, I am jealous, for you never give me any presents on mine.”

David, without thinking, takes a gold seal ring and places it on Ashmedai’s thumb. “Here is a ring, son. A seal of my love.”

Ashmedai hugs David, hard, then darts out of the room with a wooden sword, on wings like spindrifts of wind.

“We have done the best we can by that boy,” David rankles.

“What do you mean, my King?” I ask, horrified.

David touches the tooth ridge scar, from where Agrath bit too hard last year, on his chest. It festered and infected him with fever for days, and now, he always smells of sulfur. “It is time that Ashmedai goes back to his mother. He is strong enough that he will not die in Gehenna this time.”

“But, my King, he is our son! I love him like my own.”

“Shush, Bathsheba. Obey your King. He is my son, not yours. Ashmedai never belonged to you. You were simply his nursemaid.”

That night, all my delphinium is gone.

I hide Ashmedai in the rushes. That is not enough to stop Sammael’s hellhounds from sniffing him out. I hide and weep as a great demon horde headed by Ha Satan and a demoness who is more bone than flesh – Agrath – heaves into her arms my poor, bawling Ashmedai.

“Mama, mama? Where are you?” Ashmedai screams. “Let me go, monstress!”

Agrath scoops poison from behind her talon and drizzles it into Ashmedai’s nasal socket. Her son slumps, smelling of nightshade. “Oh, my sweetling, how you have grown. And to think, David had me try to eat you. I am your mother, demon child. You will do well to sit on David’s throne, one day. Sammael, let us go.”

Off they ride, in a bone chariot, as the hellhounds bay.

I clutch Solomon to my breast and cry that night. The next morning, Solomon finds his brother’s ring in the weeds. It is stained with Ash’s blood, his half-twin’s claws having scratched a type of cursed star on it.

“I will never forgive father for this,” Solomon’s tiny voice shakes.

Neither will I.

David passes on to Dumah’s court, as drunken, carousing kings with rebellious sons do. Absalom rises and rapes and revolts and dies hanged by his hair from a tree. Tamar weeps of her violation and lost brother. I have no tears left to shed. They ran dry when Ashmedai was stolen.

The kingdom is in chaos.

I get on my knees and beg for Solomon to be crowned at my husband, David’s, deathbed. Solomon is 24, a brilliant mage and alchemist and sorcerer – Ashmedai’s power over those twelve years has rubbed off on his half-brother, my shining child. But oh, how I miss the little malakhim with gazelle eyes and tiny, soft wings.

David, senile, says yes, and grants Solomon the throne. My dying king had so many venereal diseases from rotting Agrath and her ladies that I have to stuff my face in my garden’s sweet flowers and retch up my guts.

I have no idea how the black, bleeding boils over David’s legs are not some kind of curse from G-d for murdering my real husband – the husband that loved me – and raping me, Bathsheba, again and again, over and over, forcing me to raise a demon child I came to love from another woman, only to give Ashmedai away. I still keep a lock of Ashmedai’s black hair in a pendant on my breast, tied and braided with Solomon’s red.

Solomon is crowned. I am Queen Regent. All I ask is that my dear son find his brother and keep my herbs and teas stocked so that I may continue attending as midwife to births and deaths in the palace, and not treat his wives badly, as David did.

Solomon writes them Songs. His thousand comely brides sing. He has the Queen of Shebe walk across a floor of glass to reveal the woolen Seirim legs beneath her skirts and takes a demon lover in his own way – for the Queen of Shebe is Lilith the Younger.

We are all sitting down at dinner - Lilith the Younger, Solomon, and I – when a great wind rips open the door. In comes a great and terrible demon, with wild black curls spinning to his feet, talons on his toes and fingers, dark olive skin, burning gold eyes, and sandstone blush.

“Brother, might I know why I was not invited to your coronation?” Ashmedai says.

Solomon begins to weep, then rushes to Ashmedai. “I always wished you would come back, Ash. This is my head wife, Lilith the Younger.”

Ashmedai looks mischievous. “As great a lover as my mother Agrath was to our father David?”

Solomon blunts like the bloodied end of a worn-out mace. “Do not utter her name, Ash. Bathsheba is our mother.”

“She cast me out, didn’t you, Bathsheba?”

I am crying into my roast duck and river greens. “Ashmedai, you know I did not. You know you were stolen away.”

Ashmedai covers the space between us in a lightning strike. He kisses me, hard, on my lips. “Mother, am I not pleasing? Pleasing enough to keep? Pleasing enough to not whore out to all the shedim, lilim, and seirim as Agrath did to me, a slave to the carnal desires of her brothers and sisters? Fit enough to sacrifice like Abel on Yom Kippur?”

My pulse races. My poor, poor son. How he has suffered. “Ashmedai, that is not godly. I’m sorry.”

Ashmedai spits at my feet, then crosses Solomon’s shadow. “I have no use for the tyrant of my father David.”

Solomon begs, and Lilith the Younger shields him with her magick. “Ashmedai, please, forgive us. I tried for a decade to search for you.”

Ashmedai hardens his heart. “No, I demand retribution. I demand Bathsheba as bride.”

I pale. “What – what did you say, my dearest, darling Ash?”

Solomon looks like his temple is burning. “What did you say, bastard?”

“As you have stolen my birthright of King, Solomon, I will steal our mother to Gehenna. A fair trade, no? You have this… Queen of Shebe to entertain you.” Ashmedai’s gold eyes burn. “I want her. I have always wanted the beautiful Bathsheba, who pitied me when no one else would.”

“Ashmedai, remember yourself, my sweet malakhim. My gazelle. This is not like you,” I plead, weeping at my demon son’s knees. I tear at my hair. I always seem to find myself at a man’s feet, begging, on the floor. “I am 42. I am too old. I am your mother. This is the sin that leveled Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground.”

“Any innocence I had was whored out and ground down to the mill long ago.” Ashmedai scowls, then smiles like a serpent’s tooth, dripping poison. “I am a demon. Sin is my nature. I will not leave until you come with me, Bathsheba. I will force you if I must.”

I am weeping, beyond comprehension, inconsolable. Men, they always take. Even my beautiful, black-haired son. My rapist King David. My shy and nameless first husband, stolen too soon by Malakh HaMavet, to dance in Dumah’s Court of the Dead.

“No,” Solomon and I say in unison, his a command, mine a plea.

“Ashmedai, in the name of YHWH, I bind you with your own blood! Brother’s blood, to do me service, to be my personal demon,” Solomon says through a sheen of tears, holding the starry ring David had given Ashmedai all those years ago, that Solomon wears on his neck always, in remembrance of the brother he only had for twelve precious years.

Suddenly, chains shaped like tefillin sprout on Ashmedai. He cries out, constrained, the prayer chains weighing him down. Lilith the Younger murmurs old magick and adds her purple fire to the binding.

“My son, please, let him go,” I plead with Solomon. “He is your brother. His words are air. He means no harm.”

I watch as Solomon’s heart hardens in turn. There was always too much David in him. “My brother Ashmedai desires you, mother. It is an abomination. I will sequester you in your room, so that my whoring half-brother cannot lay an eye on you. And I? I have a kingdom to build.”

I watch, each morning, day and night, from my sumptuous prison tower room, as Ashmedai hauls stone. He builds a temple in a year. The ring of David is powerful, or perhaps Solomon always had the magick, dark magick, in him. I hear Ashmedai tell Solomon the secrets of the universe on the wind, teaching him how to summon and bind Goetic demons and make them do his bidding. One day, a brilliant gold worm – the shamir – burrows from my chandelier into the floor, then, to the center of the earth – at least, that is how deep the hole seems.

Solomon’s harem grows. I take food and use the toilet in my room. I mourn my lost garden. Babies cry - Solomon is spreading bastards. His harem is insatiable. Lilith the Younger rules beside him, half-time in Solomon’s court, half-time in Shebe.

Until, one day, a great clamoring comes from far beyond my garden walls. Thunder strikes Solomon’s Temple beyond my window. I tremble, nearly wetting myself. It is my 43rd year.

The Temple shifts, rearranging. I see Solomon flying like a bird, cubits and cubits, aeons and aeons, away.

Ashmedai emerges from the inside-out temple. His tefillin shackles are broken. The demons are freed and cavort. They set themselves with revelry upon the palace harem.

Soon enough, Ashmedai is at my door.

There is Solomon’s crown, at Ash’s brow. His brother’s red-violet robes, lined with white, fall to Ash’s taloned feet. There are tears there, too, in my malakhim’s eyes.

“Mama?” Ashmedai asks. There are scars where his body was bound. “Will you do my hair?”

I do. I untangle a year of knots. I massage his torn-up scalp. Solomon has not been kind to Ashmedai in his servitude. Quite the opposite. Finally, after a year, I am let out of my room.

We gather flowers together in my overgrown, year-untended garden. Ashmedai is silent as he weeds, but his tears say it all.

In the end, my demon son holds my hand, tender, and kisses my cheek.

“You are nothing like Agrath, mama.”

Ashmedai is a wise ruler. He takes Lilith the Younger as Queen. I am pampered like never before.

Solomon never comes back. Or does he? That is not my tale to tell.

Lilith the Younger and Ashmedai have many grandbabies for me to cosset and coddle. By night, Ashmedai teaches me to read. David never bothered to educate me. Lilith the Younger instructs me in the playing of the harp that David left behind.

We have a happy life. Who is not to say that Solomon does not eventually come back, and he and his half-brother share a wife and harem, and equally divide a mother’s love?

It would not be so strange a tale.

This is not a world for women, after all.

But sometimes, when I look at Kesil the Hangman, I think I can hear my dead husband, the first nameless husband that loved me so, and he?

My old husband weeps

For me.

It is the closest to G-d a woman can get, you know.

This work reimagines the Jewish historical tale of King David's reign with supernatural and horror elements, told with a feminist bent from his wife, Bathsheba's, perspective. "Bathsheba's Lament" has strong Ancient Israeli world-building, with knowledge of ancient medicine, Kabbalah, and Jewish demonology. I've found myself fascinated with alternative Jewish history as of late, spurred on by Lilith Magazine and the works of Gavriel Savit.

Allister Nelson is a poet and author whose work has appeared in Apex Magazine, The Showbear Family Circus, Eternal Haunted Summer, SENTIDOS: Revistas Amazonicas, Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder, FunDead Publications Gothic Anthology, POWER Magazine, Renewable Energy World, and many other venues. Her most recent publication, "The Tobias Problem," was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize.