The Demon King Wept and Laughed on the Road to Solomon

They came down the road two abreast, and one of them was in chains. Benaiah ben Yehoyada, who had once gone down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion, walked free. The thing beside him did not. A ring with the Name cut into it bound its wrists, a cord soaked the demon could not snap, and over its shoulders the cedars Benaiah had felled along the way to keep it from twisting loose. Ashmedai, king of the demons, was being marched to Jerusalem to serve a man who wanted his secret. He went where the cord pulled him. But his eyes went everywhere else.

The Blind Man He Refused to Leave in the Ditch

A blind man had wandered off the path and was feeling for it with his feet in the wrong direction. The demon stopped. He reached down with his bound hands, took the man by the elbow, and set him back on the road, gently, the way you would steady something that might break.

Benaiah had been watching for a trick all morning. "Why that one?" he asked.

"It was proclaimed in heaven," said Ashmedai, "that this man is perfectly righteous. Whoever does him a kindness earns a place in the world to come." He shrugged the cedars higher on his shoulders and walked on. The blind man never knew a demon had touched him.

The Drunk He Treated Exactly the Same

Further on, a drunk was staggering into the brush, lurching away from the road with his arms out. Again the demon stopped. Again he reached down and steered the man back, the same care, the same patience.

Benaiah frowned. "You did for that one what you did for the righteous man."

"That one is thoroughly wicked," Ashmedai said. "It was proclaimed so. There is nothing waiting for him in the world to come, so I have done him his one good turn here, that he might not lose everything, that he might collect his whole reward in the world that is." He said it without warmth and without spite, a clerk reading a ledger only he could see. The righteous man and the doomed man got the same hand on the elbow, and the hand knew which was which.

What He Wept At, and What Made Him Laugh

They passed a wedding. Torches, drums, a bride under the canopy, a young groom laughing among his friends. The demon stopped in the road and wept.

"What is there to cry about?" Benaiah demanded.

"The groom will be dead within thirty days," said Ashmedai, watching the boy dance. "And the bride will sit thirteen years waiting for his brother to marry her, because his brother is an infant in a cradle tonight, too small to lift the duty off her." The drums kept going behind them as they walked. The bride did not look up.

Soon after, a man at a stall was haggling with a cobbler. He wanted shoes built to last him seven years, good leather, double-stitched, nothing cheap. The demon laughed out loud, a hard bark that turned heads.

"Seven years," he said. "That one is not sure of seven days." He laughed the whole way down the street.

The Treasure Under the Magician's Feet

Near the city a conjuror had drawn a crowd. He pulled scarves from the air, made coins vanish, named the cards strangers held. People gasped and dropped coins in his bowl. Ashmedai jeered at him, loud, contemptuous.

"Look at him sell wonders for pennies," the demon said, "and he is sitting on a king's treasure buried under the very spot where he stands. He does not know it is there. He performs his little tricks for a crowd and starves on top of a fortune." Benaiah looked at the dust under the magician's stool and saw nothing. The demon saw the gold. Every scene on that road was a verdict already written, and only the thing in chains could read the writing.

The Two-Headed Man He Pulled Out of the Ground

In the end the cord pulled him all the way into the court of Solomon, and there the demon found his footing again. The king pressed him with questions, proud of his own wisdom, certain there was nothing under heaven he had not already mapped.

"With all your wisdom," Ashmedai said, "there are things you have never seen." Then the demon pushed a finger into the floor of the palace, into the stone itself, and drew it back. The ground broke open. Up out of the dark climbed a man with two heads.

He was a child of Cain, of the line that had gone down to live in the earth and become a people altogether unlike the ones who walk in the sun. He blinked his four eyes at the light. When he tried to climb back down into the dark where his kin were, the ground had closed, and it would not open for him. Even Ashmedai who had called him up could not send him home. So the two-headed man stayed. He married. He had seven sons, and one of them came out with two heads like his father.

Years later the father died, and the inheritance had to be divided, and the double-headed son stood in that same court and demanded two portions, because he was, he insisted, two men in one skin. Both his mouths argued the case at once. The Sanhedrin bent over their scrolls and found nothing. No verse, no precedent, no ruling had ever imagined this. They were stumped.

And Solomon, who could judge a baby's true mother and silence the cleverest liar in the kingdom, looked at the man the demon had dragged out of the ground, and prayed. "Lord of all," he said, "when You appeared to me at Gibeon and offered me any gift, I asked neither silver nor gold, but wisdom to judge men justly." The king who knew everything had finally met the one case his books did not hold. The demon king, who could read the death on a dancing groom and the gold under a beggar, said nothing, and watched the wisest man alive go looking for help.