My blood spatters the dry brittle logs. I slash once more, a terrible red dew. The grass around is growing scarlet, wet and unsinged. Feverish beats and the drone of cantamos chants fill the air like heavy smoke and incense. But yet there is no fire. No divine recline into heavens scorching rain. I cannot kiss this beat, this drum until my god comes. The proof of my recluse existence. We are no troublers of Israel, no false speaking idol hugging adulterers. There is power in the name of Baal. Power to light these rocks and logs like his false god cannot.
The dusty earth around our feet grows dark as the sun cleaves from the sky over Mount Carmel. Great clods of orange blood-darkened mud fall from sandals as our feet rise and fall in unison to our man-made thunder. We move as one group, each indistinguishable from the other. Each bald head and white robe shares the blood of our brothers. Two great pires of wood face one another like rivals, and around their base our priests perform worship with prostitutes from the temple. We are all covenanted to god.
“Where is your god now. Surely he is a god? Maybe he is sleeping?” Elijah cries across the mountain top. “Perhaps he is deep in thought! Or maybe travelling?!” Around, score upon score wait with bated breath caught chests for scorched earth in this colossal game of chess.
I have spilt my blood like gold before my god’s throne. What has this Elijah done? Sat upon a rock mocking us, his disdain as plain as my refrain where are you god? Four hundred and fifty of us and not a whisper from heaven. He is so still in this raging wind. He hasn’t even prayed yet. He doesn’t scatter his flesh and blood like a living sacrifice, or utter frantic prophesies up to the sky. They say Elijah was fed by ravens at the Kerith Ravine, that he stretched himself out on the dead til they lived, and that he knew a man who lay with the sin of a nation by his side for forty days and forty nights. As for me and my kin, all day and into this night we have cried for fire, but our desire remains unquenched.
Now he rises, as the last of the daylight lashes like the whip of our defeat.
“Cast water on my pire,” he shouts. “Then I will show you who YHWH is!” We hurl great cisterns of water onto his logs until they begin to seep sodden into one another. Elijah’s confidence is so serene, his countenance disarming. Doubt catches in my throat with bile, bitter and unfamiliar. He steps forward to kneels by the altar. His does not shout or cut deep his veins, but simply lifts his face upwards. How can he be so sure his god will hear him?
“O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
Then the fire of the LORD fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. The sky was alive with fire, with divine caress for but an instant. But in that glorious instant we were prostrate, faces moulded to the earth with tears of joy and fear. Then all at once I am seized. My hands bound with rough cord, chafing against the wounds that I had wrought so deep for my false god. Dragged across the rocks, my fast-starved bones, already brittle, begin to crack. I cannot stand up. Below, the valley of Kishon is littered with stone cracked skulls and blunted blades. It is all that is left after our mountain-top masquerade, a terrible red dew.