The man comes out of the dark without warning.
No footsteps. No voice. Just hands, finding his throat and his robe simultaneously, and then the ground is gone and Jacob hits the riverbank face first and the taste of blood and mud is immediate. Jacob senses the specific taste copper and earth and the cold of the River Jabbok soaking through his clothes.
His first thought is Esau sent him.
Four hundred men waiting on the other bank. One sent ahead in the dark to finish it before dawn. Before the gifts could work. Before Jacob could manage the encounter the way he always managed encounters. An assassin at the ford.
He does not think beyond this. His body answers.
He gets his teeth into the man’s forearm. Bites down until something gives. The man does not cry out. He wrenches his arm free and Jacob loses a tooth on the way, feels it go, the sudden raw nerve of the socket screaming, spits blood into the mud.
They roll into the shallows. The cold water is a shock across his face. His fingers find the man’s ear and pulls it while the man’s fingers find Jacob’s eye socket and pushes it . The pain is extraordinary, the specific intimate horror of a finger pressing where nothing should press, and Jacob twists away and they are on the bank again, both of them covered in the black mud of the Jabbok.
Jacob’s fingernail tears back to the root on a rock.
He does not stop.
An assassin sent by Esau would have finished this by now. Jacob is fast and experienced and has survived worse than most men in his position. But he is not unbeatable. One man sent to kill Jacob should have killed Jacob in the first ten minutes.
The man is still fighting.
Jacob decides to keeps fighting
