Free The Scorpion’s Bite by Aileen G. Baron Page A

grip his shoulder. “Scorpion bit him on the back,” Jalil said. “Inside his cloak.” He dragged Hamud to his feet.
    Gently peeling off Hamud’s cloak, first from one side, then the other, he shook the cloth and tossed the scorpion to the ground. Jalil stomped on it with his sandal, again and again, until it was ground into the sand.
    “Whoever the scorpion bites will reach the grave,” Hamud said, as if fate had decreed his death. He clutched at Jalil’s arm.
    “He wants to go back to his people.” Jalil led the ashen, shivering Hamud to the Buick and eased him inside.
    Jalil started the motor, called out to Gideon to meet him in Azraq, and took off in the direction of Amman.
    Klaus still seemed to be in the mourners’ tent when Lily and Gideon arrived at the Jeep. They waited. Gideon reached into the Jeep, sounded the horn, and they waited longer.
    Lily looked back again at the encampment. Nothing. Klaus was nowhere in sight; she saw only an empty matchbox dancing in the wind along the slope.
    Lily and Gideon carefully examined below the seat for scorpions before getting in. Gideon leaned on the horn, shrugged, and tapped the steering wheel impatiently.
    “Klaus is gone again.” Gideon started the engine, attacked the horn once more, waited, gunned the motor.
    “Let him walk.” Gideon finally put the Jeep in gear and drove off without Klaus, heading eastward into the measureless silence of the desert.
    ***
    They traveled over rolling, flint strewn hills.
    Once, the noise of the Jeep roused a herd of gazelle that danced gracefully from crag to crag.
    Gideon declared, “Behold, he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart.”
    “That’s from the Song of Solomon, isn’t it?”
    Gideon nodded.
    “It seems odd to me that something so sensual, so full of sexual desire, would be in the Bible,” Lily said.
    “There’s a lot in the Bible. Incest. Adultery. Murder. Most of all, love.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “And lust.”
    “You mean it’s a porno book, not a religious tract?”
    “It’s the human story. Everything is there. Cain against Abel; Sarah against Hagar; David with all his flaws, and his whole dysfunctional family. And love. Jacob and Rachel, Abraham and Sarah…it echoes the human condition, exposes the human soul.”
    They watched the gazelles disappear, passing silently behind the hills like ghosts.
    The Bible as ethnography, Lily thought. It fits. There’s an origin myth, genealogies, legal rules, and case studies.
    They rode along without speaking, eastward along the ancient track that led from Qusayr Amra to Azraq, the only sounds the whine of the motor and the clink of tools in the back of the Jeep as it bumped along the rutted terrain.
    “What are we really doing here?” Lily asked.
    “In Trans-Jordan? Observing the area, gathering information about the terrain, doing reconnaissance. And a little archaeology on the side.”
    “We’re winning the war here?”
    “Everything counts. If we don’t defeat the Nazis, there is no future.”
    Lily had seen the future and what it could be. She and Rafi had stopped in New York on the way back from Jerusalem in 1938 and spent a few extra days at the World’s Fair. It was called The World of Tomorrow, all blue and white with fountains everywhere. The trylon and the perisphere as white as clouds, the guides dressed in uniforms as blue as the sky. Lily and Rafi had been interviewed at one exhibit, and the interview had been transmitted, voice, moving picture, and all, to a small glass screen that the interviewer called a “television set” in the next room.
    She had spoken to a robot, and the robot had answered in a strange mechanical voice. They had watched the American world of tomorrow from a moving chair, magnificent cities strung along miraculous highways like pearls on a string.
    They talked about how they would live in a plastic house with a Bakelite telephone