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the power you have now. Think how you can use that power to get what you want.”
    Abinadab lay quietly. For some minutes he could not focus on the subject. His thoughts for so long had been on the securing of loans, most of them small, and the proper handling of his business affairs.
    It was a statement of Meor-baal’s, an interruption of his reverie, that sparked his mind. In the dead quiet Meor-baal spoke slowly, with heavy precision: “Those men who dashed madly in their lust worship fertility. They pray for its increase. They wish for power, too, and worship it. But all they need do to worship fertility is to turn their bodies loose. To worship power, they must do more. Power will not come to the man who but worships it, only to the man who exercises it. You gain power through action.” It was Meor-baal’s only interruption through the entire night, but Abinadab caught the words as though they were hung in the air at that point in his destiny by Melkart himself.
    He rolled the words and tasted them in his mind. Faces formed, faces of men who owed him money, faces whose eyes could not see as far as his, faces who had other possessions that, accumulated, meant power to the man who accumulated them. There was Baana, the happy one, whose wife was known for her figcakes and her barren womb. There was Shammah, Banna’s close friend, who lost his wife some months ago, and whose two daughters were almost of marriageable age.
    The faces paraded before his vision, all of them men who owed him money. A plan began to form. As a gesture of good will to the discovery of Baal by Dor’s citizens, he would return each cloak to each man, and he would offer them extra money to buy oxen, more tools, better seed, and storehouses for the produce that would come from the newly-blessed fields. Their fields would be his collateral. He would foreclose immediately if any could not pay. The first foreclosure would be hard, but he would do it. He would be strong.
     
    Chapter Three
    Zebul’s fleshiness was apparent even under his copious priestly garments. His thick, short-fingered hands protruded from huge sleeves, and deep-set eyes peered from shallow caves over puffed cheeks. His heavy beard and long hair covered most of his face and neck. He was a man who had grown confident through years of leadership, for he had come to believe that he really was a cut above the average man.
    His garments were regal. He wore a blue robe, woven without a seam, bordered with blue, purple, and scarlet ornamentation in the design of pomegranates alternated with tiny golden bells. The bells made tinkling sounds as Zebul occasionally shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A vest covered the robe from under his arms to his waist. The vest, scarlet like the ornaments, was interwoven with gold thread. It was held at the waist with a matching girdle. Across his chest was a breastplate, opulently adorned with jewelry. His turban was of simple white linen, pinned at the front with a large jewel that designated his high office. The real high priest in Jerusalem wore in place of such a jewel a gold plate inscribed, “Holiness to the Lord.” Zebul conceded this single difference in dress out of practical deference to the people, who believed there was only one true high priest of the Hebrews.
    He was brooding. Bad enough to be relegated to a seat below the priests of Baal at the king’s table, but to be threatened with expulsion altogether was horrendous beyond words. Zebul was the highest ranking priest in Israel. In fact, he conducted himself as though he indeed were Israel’s high priest in spite of his Judean counterpart. He had risen to his present position because he had a knack both for the mechanics of the priesthood—which functions he carried out with great efficiency—and for the machinations of politics.
    Zebul stood in the shade of the city wall and looked down the north side of the hill of Samaria. He gazed intently at the progress of