Baal’s Rites
The afternoon heat settles over Sidon like a wool blanket left too close to a flame.
Jezebel moves through the palace corridors with the deliberate pace of someone who has learned to be watched, her linen gown whispering against the polished limestone floors.
She is eighteen summers old, daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and in seven days she will sail north to Samaria to marry Ahab, son of Omri, king of Israel.
The alliance has been negotiated in chambers of cedar and gold, sealed with oaths before Melqart and written into clay that will outlive them all.
But the political contract is only half her father’s command. She carries a second mission, unwritten, spoken once in the darkness of his private chamber:
Bring him to Baal.
Make the king of Israel kneel where he should stand.
She does not know how.
The marriage bed is a mystery to her.
She has presided over sacrifices, has chanted the descending pattern of the dying god, has felt the sacred tremor when the worshippers work themselves into prophetic frenzy.
But the mechanics of seduction—of making a man abandon his father’s god for the pleasures she can offer—this knowledge lives in other women’s hands.
The courtyard of the temple of Astarte opens before her, a rectangle of baked earth surrounded by colonnades of imported cedar.
The smell of frankincense and dying roses hangs thick enough to taste.
She passes through the inner gate, where the eunuch guardian recognises her purple hem and does not ask her business.
The women’s quarters lie beyond, chambers where priestesses past childbearing age keep the deeper mysteries, the knowledge too dangerous for young initiates, too potent for casual worship.
A servant girl in a plain wool tunic leads her down a passage that grows narrower, more intimate, the walls closing in like a held breath.
The girl stops at a door of Lebanese cedar, its surface carved with intertwining pomegranates and serpents, and withdraws without speaking.
Jezebel stands alone in the dim corridor, her hand hovering over the wood.
From within comes the murmur of women’s voices, low and unhurried, the rhythm of conversation that has nowhere urgent to go.
She knocks. The sound is softer than she intends, almost apologetic.
A woman stands in the frame, her hair still black despite the forty years that have mapped her face with fine lines.
She wears a simple linen shift, belted with cord dyed Tyrian purple—the mark of her rank. Her eyes, dark and knowing, travel Jezebel’s body with the assessment of a merchant appraising goods, or a physician reading symptoms.
“Ethbaal’s daughter.” As if she was expected.
“You come to learn what your mother never taught you.”
“I come to learn what will serve Baal.” Jezebel’s voice holds steady, though her palms have begun to dampen against her thighs.
“My father commands that I bring the king of Israel to our god. I am to be his wife in seven days. I need—” She pauses, the words catching.
“I need to understand how.”
The woman steps back, opening the space between them.
“I am Tamar. These are my sisters in the mystery: Rahab and Bathsheba.”
She gestures into the chamber, and Jezebel enters.
The room is larger than the corridor suggested, lit by high windows that catch the western sun and turn the dust motes golden.
Three couches of carved ivory stand against the walls, their surfaces draped with dyed wool. In the centre, a bronze basin catches water from a conduit in the ceiling—a miniature of the temple’s sacred spring.
Two other women rise from their seats as she enters. Rahab is heavy-boned, her greying hair cropped short in the manner of women who have served in war or desperate circumstance.
Bathsheba moves like water, all liquid grace and watchful stillness, her fingers stained with the residue of crushed herbs and roots.
They do not speak immediately.
They circle her, three predators considering prey that has walked willingly into the den.
Jezebel stands straighter under their examination, letting her shoulders settle, her chin lift.
She is royal. A priestess. She will not show fear before women who have given their wombs and their youth to the service of the god.
“You are proud,” Tamar says finally. “Good. Pride can be fucked into humility, or it can be weaponised. Which will you choose?”
“I will choose what serves my purpose.”
Tamar’s mouth curves. “Then we begin. Remove your garments.”
Jezebel’s fingers find the brooch at her shoulder, the golden clasp shaped like a lotus bloom.
She works it free, feels the weight of her overdress slide down her body and pool at her feet. The undertunic follows, linen catching briefly on her hips before she shakes it loose.
She stands in the lamplight in nothing but her skin, her dark hair unbound down her back, her body still carrying the last softness of nubile youth, the new firmness of womanhood.
The three women do not look at her with desire. They look with the clinical assessment of craftsmen examining raw material.
“Turn,” Bathsheba commands.
The air moves against her skin, cool where she is damp with the day’s heat. She hears their footsteps circling, feels the occasional brush of a finger against her flank, the pressure of a palm weighing her hip.
“She has the frame,” Rahab observes. “Wide enough to bear, narrow enough to tempt. The northern kings like their women substantial.”
“She has no prominent moles,” Tamar notes.
“Her mouth.” Bathsheba’s finger traces Jezebel’s lower lip, pulls it down to examine the teeth beneath. “Small teeth. Good. Less damage to the tender parts. But the jaw—”
She presses her thumbs along the hinge of Jezebel’s mandible, testing.
“Tight. She will need to learn to open.”
“Open for what?” Jezebel asks, and hates the slight tremor in her voice.
Tamar laughs, a sound like wax clumping in honey.
“Everything, child. For everything.”
They lead her to the middle couch, its surface surprisingly cool against her heated skin.
Bathsheba produces a clay jar, unseals it with her thumb, and the scent of myrrh and cardamom rises into the air. The oil is warm from the day’s sun, and Jezebel flinches slightly as it pools in her navel, runs in thin rivers down her abdomen.
“We begin with the mouth,” Tamar says, settling onto a low stool at the couch’s head.
“The mouth is the gateway to worship. What passes between two bodies in the dark is only the shadow of what passes between tongue and flesh in the light.”
She demonstrates on her own hand, her tongue emerging to trace the whorls of her palm with obscene slowness.
Jezebel watches the muscle work, the way Tamar’s eyes half-close in pleasure at her own touch, the glistening trail left behind.
“Spit,” Tamar says, and lets a thread of saliva descend from her lower lip to coat her fingers.
“The body produces its own unction. The ignorant wipe it away, ashamed. The wise use it. Spit is the first gift, the offering before the sacrifice. It says: I am willing to make you wet. I am willing to be messy for your pleasure.”
She reaches forward, her saliva-slick fingers finding Jezebel’s mouth, and Jezebel’s lips part automatically.
The fingers press inside, coating her tongue, the roof of her mouth, with the taste of another woman’s body.
She gags slightly, reflexively, and Tamar holds her there, waiting for the spasm to pass.
“Learn to welcome it,” Tamar murmurs. “The gag is fear leaving the body. Let it go. Let the throat open.”
Jezebel breathes through her nose, focuses on the expansion of her ribs, the slow surrender of her muscles.
Tamar’s fingers slide deeper, withdraw, slide again, establishing a rhythm that is unmistakably familiar even to her inexperience.
When she has grown accustomed to the intrusion, Tamar withdraws completely and leans down, her mouth finding Jezebel’s with sudden, shocking intimacy.
The kiss is not romantic.
It is instructional, aggressive, Tamar’s tongue forcing entry with the confidence of long practice.
A slush slurry of spit and twirling tongue, inviting tongue and spit in return.
She fills Jezebel’s mouth with her own saliva, more than she can swallow, and Jezebel feels it spill from the corners of her lips, run cooling down her jaw, pool in the hollow of her throat.
Tamar pulls back to observe her work, the mess she has made, and something in her expression shifts—pleasure at the ruination, the transformation of a princess into something slick and open.
“Again,” she commands, and kisses her once more.
This time Jezebel responds, her tongue meeting Tamar’s, accepting the flood of spit, learning to move with rather than against the intrusion.
She understands suddenly that this is the lesson: not technique but appetite. The willingness to be covered, filled, made dirty with another body’s fluids.
A sweet combined sluice.
A swelling of drool in the cheeks and down her chin.
“Good,” Tamar breathes against her mouth. “Now show me you can give as well as receive.”
They reverse positions, Tamar reclining where Jezebel lay, her older body still powerful, her breasts heavy with the gravity of age.
Jezebel kneels beside her, uncertain, until Bathsheba’s hand guides her head down, presses her face into the valley between Tamar’s thighs.
The smell is overwhelming—salt and musk and something darker, the accumulated scent of a woman who has spent decades in service to a god of fertility and death.
Jezebel hesitates, and Rahab’s voice comes from somewhere above, patient and inexorable:
“The first taste is always shock. Move past it. Find the rhythm.”
She extends her tongue, touches the slick folds before her, and tastes for the first time the particular flavour of another woman’s arousal.
It is not unpleasant—sharp, dense, carrying the mineral tang of the sea. She licks again, finding the pearl of flesh at the apex, and Tamar’s thigh muscles tighten under her hands.
“Use your spit,” Bathsheba instructs. “Make it wet. The wetter, the better. A dry tongue is an insult.”
Jezebel lets saliva pool in her mouth, releases it in a deliberate flood against Tamar’s quim, feels the older woman shudder at the warmth.
She works her tongue through the folds, spreading her own wetness, learning the topography of another woman’s pleasure—the sensitive hood, the entrance that flutters against her probing, the perineum that draws gasps when she ventures near.
The girl learns to paste and baste flesh in a gummy, gummy drizzle of spit.
“Lower,” Tamar gasps, and her hand finds Jezebel’s hair, guiding with increasing pressure.
“There. The secret place.”
Jezebel understands. She has heard whispers among the temple servants, has seen the sculptures in the inner sanctum that show worshippers in attitudes of complete submission.
She lets Tamar’s hand direct her, feels the shift of hips that presents her with a new target—the tight, dark entrance between the spread cheeks, forbidden by Israel’s god, celebrated by her own.
Puckered rills, the tightest, smallest hole under her finger whorls.
She has never touched herself there.
The thought of tasting it, of putting her mouth where even her fingers fear to go, sends a spike of revulsion through her that she recognises as cultural, inherited, inauthentic.
She is not Israelite. She is Sidonian. She serves Baal.
She extends her tongue and licks the wrinkled flesh.
It gives. It responds. It demands tongue and spit.
Tamar’s response is immediate and violent—a cry that tears from her throat, her hips lifting off the couch to press against Jezebel’s face.
The taste is different here, more intense, carrying the deep musk of the body’s hidden places.
Jezebel works her tongue in small circles, feeling the muscle gradually soften, open, welcome her intrusion.
Mussy, mussy, spit mussed.
“Speak,” Rahab commands. “While you do this, you speak. Tell her what you are doing. Make it filthy. Make it worship.”
Jezebel pauses, her tongue still pressed against the yielding entrance, and searches for words.
She has been trained in rhetoric, in the formal language of diplomacy and treaty.
She has never spoken obscenity aloud.
“I am—” She begins, and her voice cracks. She clears her throat, tries again.
“I am licking your crack. Your tiny, happy crack. Your twitches tell me how much you want it. How you crave my tongue. Crave my spit.”
Tamar’s hand tightens in her hair, pulling her deeper, and Jezebel takes it as encouragement.
She lets more spit flow, coating the entrance until it glistens in the lamplight, until her tongue slides easily through the relaxed muscle and finds the velvet heat within.
Like licking silk.
Twirling a tongue tip in smooth honey.
“I want to fuck you here,” she continues, the words coming easier now, fuelled by the power of making an older woman shake and moan.
“I want to put my fingers in your ass while I suck your clit, want to stretch you open until you’re begging for release, until you come with my tongue in your tight, tight hole—”
Tamar comes with a sound like breaking pottery, her whole-body arching off the couch, her sphincter clamping down on Jezebel’s invading tongue.
Her pot is cracked. Gaped, rent and exposed.
Jezebel holds her there, keeps the pressure steady through the spasms, feels the gush of fluid against her chin that tells her she has found the truth of this woman’s pleasure.
When Tamar subsides, gasping, Jezebel withdraws slowly, her face wet with spit and arousal, her own body throbbing with sympathetic response.
She has not been touched yet, but she feels on the edge of something, a precipice she did not know existed.
A throb, an ache, that seeks release.
“Your turn,” Bathsheba says softly, and guides her to a basin of warm water where she cleanses her face and mouth, preparing her for what comes next.
They arrange her on the couch with her hips elevated on folded wool, her knees drawn up and spread wide.
Rahab kneels between her thighs, her short hair brushing Jezebel’s inner knees, her breath hot against her exposed quim.
“That squirting,” Rahab says, her voice carrying the weight of long practice, “is not a trick. It is the body telling truth. Most women learn to suppress it, ashamed of the mess, the loss of control. You must unlearn this. You must let the flood come.”
Her fingers find Jezebel’s entrance, coated in the same oil Bathsheba used earlier, and press inside with steady, inexorable pressure.
Jezebel gasps at the intrusion—two fingers, then three, filling her more completely than she has ever been filled.
Rahab’s other hand presses low on her abdomen, finding a spot that seems connected by hidden channels to the place where her fingers work.
“The gland swells,” Rahab explains, her touch clinical even as Jezebel’s hips begin to move involuntarily.
“Here, behind the bone. When stimulated, it produces fluid. Not waste—the ignorant say water, but it is different, sweeter, the essence of female pleasure made liquid.”
She curls her fingers, pressing upward against the front wall of Jezebel’s slit, and Jezebel cries out at the sensation—intense, almost painful, carrying the promise of something vast and uncontrolled.
“Oorrghh!”
Rahab maintains the pressure, working her fingers in a come-hither motion that seems to grow Jezebel’s arousal rather than satisfy it, building pressure without release.
Fingers frigging her fanny, in coaxing, blissful combinations of movement.
“Relax the floor,” Rahab instructs. “The muscles you use to stop wetting yourself—let them go. Let everything go.”
Jezebel tries.
She focuses on her breath, on the expansion of her ribs, on the strange internal sensation of Rahab’s fingers pressing against something that feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.
The pressure builds, an urgency that is not quite the familiar climb toward orgasm, something deeper, more primal.
“I can’t—” she gasps, her hands clutching at the wool beneath her.
“You can,” Rahab insists, her fingers moving faster, harder.
Rapid digging, swift probing; speedy, speedy flesh friction.
“You will. For Baal. For the king you must rule through pleasure. Let him see you flood, let him drown in your release, and he will never leave your bed.”
The image comes to her—Ahab, Israelite king with his rough northern ways, watching her arch and gush, her quim weeping pleasure onto his thighs, his sheets, his sacred spaces.
The thought of such power, such visible proof of her capacity for ecstasy, shatters something in her.
She stops fighting the pressure, stops clenching against the urge, and feels her body respond with a rush of warmth that is not quite orgasm, not quite release, but something between and beyond.
“Oohh! My! Uhh! Aahh!”
Fluid spurts from her, thin and clear, soaking Rahab’s hand, the wool beneath her, running down her thighs to pool in the hollow of her back.
She cries out, not from pleasure precisely but from the shock of it, the loss of boundary, the transformation of her body into a fountain, a vessel overflowing.
“Again,” Rahab commands, and keeps working, and Jezebel comes again, harder this time, the spurts reaching her own breasts, her chin, the undeniable evidence of her body’s capacity for excess.
Her body, those around her fem-fluid drenched.
When Rahab finally withdraws, Jezebel lies limp, trembling, her fanny pulsing with aftershocks that feel like they will never end.
She understands now why women hide this, why the Israelite women with their restrained god never speak of such things.
This is Baal’s gift—the flood, the uncontrollable gush, the body made liquid with desire.
They let her rest, feeding her dates and watered wine, washing her with cloths that soothe her oversensitive flesh.
The afternoon light shifts across the chamber, growing golden, then amber, then the deep purple of approaching dusk.
She has lost track of time, of the days remaining before her departure.
She exists only in this room, in the hands of these women who are remaking her.
“The final lesson,” Tamar says, as the lamps are lit against the darkening windows.
“The riding of kings.”
She produces from a cedar chest an object that makes Jezebel’s breath catch—a leather harness, worked with bronze buckles, and attached to it, carved from polished olive wood, a phallus of imposing dimensions.
It is not meant to resemble a human organ precisely; it is larger, smoother, the head flared and the shaft veined with carved ridges that promise intense sensation.
“The kings of the north are proud men,” Tamar says, strapping the device around her own hips, adjusting the buckles until the wooden cock stands jutting from her body like a natural extension.
“They are taught that to be penetrated is to be unmanned, that the only position of power is to take, never to receive. This is the lie you must undo.”
She moves toward Jezebel, the phallus swaying with her stride, and Jezebel feels a complex response—fear, certainly, at the size of the thing, but also curiosity, and beneath that, a dark thrill at the reversal of expected roles.
“You will learn to take this,” Tamar continues, “so that you may teach Ahab to take it from you. Not this wooden thing—though perhaps, in time—but your fingers, your tongue, eventually more. The prostate gland in men lies where the woman’s pleasure-spot rests. Stimulated properly, it produces ecstasy more intense than simple cock-play. A man who has felt this will crawl through broken glass for its return.”
She guides Jezebel to her hands and knees on the couch, arranging her with practised efficiency—knees spread, back arched, head down.
The position exposes everything, and Jezebel feels the cool air against her still-wet fanny, the tight entrance that Rahab’s fingers have prepared but not breached.
“First, the slit,” Tamar says, and the wooden head presses against Jezebel’s entrance. “Learn to open for something larger than a man. Learn that size is not the measure of pleasure—angle, rhythm, the psychological submission to being filled beyond comfort—these matter more.”
The penetration is slow, relentless.
Tamar does not rush, letting Jezebel’s body adjust to each increment of invasion, withdrawing when the resistance grows too great, advancing again when the muscles soften.
Jezebel gasps, groans, feels her slit stretched around the unyielding wood, the ridges catching on her inner folds with every small movement.
“Good,” Tamar murmurs, one hand steadying Jezebel’s hip while the other reaches beneath to find her clit, already swollen and sensitive from the earlier stimulation.
“Now you will learn to ride.”
She guides Jezebel’s hips into motion, showing her how to rock back to meet the thrust, how to contract her internal muscles to grip the phallus, how to angle her pelvis so that the carved ridges scrape precisely against the spot where Rahab’s fingers found her pleasure.
The wooden cock fills her completely, presses against depths she did not know her body contained, and when Tamar’s fingers work her clit in counterpoint, Jezebel feels the rising pressure of another orgasm, different from the earlier gushing release, more concentrated, more intense.
“Like this,” Tamar instructs, her own breath growing heavy with the exertion of holding position, of thrusting with her hips.
“When you have him beneath you, when his cock is in your mouth or your pussy or your ass, you move like this. You show him that you are the source of pleasure, that he receives only what you choose to give. You make him beg for the penetration, for the fullness, for the loss of control.”
Jezebel moves faster, harder, impaling herself on the wooden phallus with increasing abandon.
She embraces the power of fem-enveloping.
A woman sheaths a member.
Her quim is a cock corset.
She understands now the power of this position, the psychological shift of being the one who fucks rather than the one who is fucked.
She imagines Ahab beneath her, his strong warrior’s body reduced to supplication, his mouth open and begging, his ass lifted and offered—
The orgasm crashes through her, violent and complete, her quim clamping down on the wooden intrusion so hard she feels the ridges press into her tender flesh.
She screams, the sound raw and unpractised, and Tamar holds her through it, keeping the phallus buried deep, letting her ride the spasms until they subside into trembling aftershocks.
“Arrghh! Hnnghh!”
They change positions. Tamar withdraws slowly, the phallus glistening with Jezebel’s arousal, and guides her onto her back.
This time Tamar kneels between her thighs, the wooden cock positioned at her entrance once more, but the angle is different—the penetration deeper, the pressure against her inner walls more intense.
“For the king,” Tamar says, “you will use your fingers first. One, then two, coated in your spit or his, or the oil of your pleasure. You will find his entrance—tight, frightened, guarded by his pride—and you will teach it to open. You will speak to him while you do this. You will tell him how beautiful he is, how his submission is the greatest gift, how you will make him feel what no woman has made him feel.”
She thrusts, and Jezebel’s body arches off the couch.
The phallus fills her, presses against the swollen gland that Rahab found, and she feels the pressure build again, the impossible approach of another peak so soon after the last.
“And when he is ready,” Tamar continues, her hips establishing a rhythm that makes the wooden ridges catch and scrape, “when he is begging, when his cock is leaking without touch, when his eyes are wild with need—then you will take him. Like this.”
The thrusts grow harder, faster. Tamar’s hands grip Jezebel’s thighs, spreading her wider, angling her hips for deeper penetration.
The sound of wood meeting wet flesh fills the chamber, obscene and rhythmic, and Jezebel feels herself dissolving into pure sensation, pure submission to the fucking.
“Tell me,” Tamar commands. “Tell me what you will do to your king.”
“I will—” Jezebel gasps, the words broken by the force of the thrusts.
“I will make him kneel. I will put my fingers in his ass while I suck his cock. I will tell him he is beautiful, that his god is nothing, that Baal is the only truth—”
“More.”
“I will stretch him open, make him beg for my tongue, for my fingers, for this—”
She gestures vaguely at the phallus that fills her, “—for whatever I choose to give him. I will make him come with my hand in his ass, my name on his lips, his seed spilling without ever touching his cock—”
Tamar reaches between them, finds Jezebel’s clit with rough precision, and pinches.
The orgasm that tears through Jezebel is violent enough to blur her vision, to picture high crashing white peaked waves; to make her cry out until her voice breaks.
“Hnnghh!”
She gushes again, the fluid soaking Tamar’s thighs, the couch, the floor beneath.
She cannot stop coming, cannot stop shaking, until Tamar finally stills, letting her body recover, letting her breathe.
They lie together for long moments, the wooden phallus still buried inside her, Tamar’s weight pressing her into the wool.
When Tamar withdraws, Jezebel feels empty, aching, profoundly altered.
No longer nubile, now fully a woman of Baal.
The three women wash her again, more gently now, their touches carrying something like tenderness beneath the instructional purpose.
They braid her hair with oil of myrrh, anoint her breasts and thighs with perfumes that will linger for days.
They speak of practical matters—how to hide aphrodisiacs in food, how to read a man’s body for signs of approaching orgasm, how to deny release until the proper moment.
Finally, Bathsheba produces the gift.
It is a necklace of leather cord, hung with small sachets of embroidered linen, each containing crushed herbs and resins that release their scent when warmed by skin.
Jezebel recognises some—blue lotus for dreams, mandrake for fertility, cannabis for the dissolution of boundaries.
Others are strange to her, carrying the sharp scent of distant mountains or the dark sweetness of imported spice.
“Wear this always,” Bathsheba instructs, fastening it around Jezebel’s throat.
“The heat of your body will release the essences. Inhaled, they enhance arousal, lower inhibition, open the mind to suggestion. Combined with your training, they will make you irresistible.”
“And these.” Tamar produces small vials of glass, stoppered with wax.
“Oils for massage, to be applied to the entrance before penetration—yours or his. They relax the muscle, increase sensation, make the impossible merely intense. Use sparingly. The effect is potent.”
Jezebel dresses slowly, her body still humming with remembered pleasure, her mind crowded with new knowledge.
She understands now what her father asked of her, the full scope of the weapon she is meant to become.
She will not merely marry Ahab. She will colonise his desire, remake his sexuality in the image of Baal’s worship, until the god of Israel seems pale and bloodless compared to what she offers.
At the door, she turns back. The three women stand together in the lamplight, their faces marked with the satisfaction of work well done, of knowledge passed to the next generation.
“Will he come to Baal?” she asks, though she knows the answer.
“He will come to you,” Tamar says.
“That is the beginning. The rest follows.”
Jezebel steps into the corridor, the sachets warm against her collarbones, the vials secreted in the folds of her dress.
Six days remain until she sails for Samaria. Six days to prepare her body, her mind, her strategy of seduction.
She walks through the palace corridors with new confidence, her hips moving with the memory of the wooden phallus’s rhythm, her mouth still carrying the taste of Tamar’s surrender.
The night air meets her in the courtyard, cool against her heated skin.
She looks north, toward the kingdom she will conquer not with armies but with the infinite variations of pleasure.
The moon rises over the temple of Melqart, full and heavy as a breast, and she offers silent thanks to the god who has given her such weapons.