by Stant Litore
There was a soft pressure against his lips—like a woman’s fingers hushing him—a touch cool and soft, a touch of divine fingers. He trembled, his heart beating within the well of his chest. All about him in the air, he sensed God quivering, vitally present, like a vast tree invisible in the night, a deep and inexhaustible well beneath its roots, water drawn upward, cool and quiet, to the full fruit that clung to all God’s branches.
Do not go to the priests in the morning, the voice said, and the invisible branches moved gently in the air. Go to the people, my navi. Look in the streets, look at how my People live, how they keep the Covenant, see what they do in this city. Then, when it is nearly dusk and wind is in the olives, go to the priests. Take my words, Yirmiyahu. Take them to the Temple. I have set you this day against those who lead nations and cities, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Go, Yirmiyahu. That small, small whisper in his ear, soft as wind in trees yet firm with command. Prepare yourself. Take my words and speak them. I make you this day a fortified city, a rooted cedar, a wall. They will fight against you, my navi, they will throw themselves against you, but they will not prevail against you, for I am with you, to keep you and deliver you, nourish you and strengthen you.
A rustle above him broke his thoughts as abruptly as a man breaks a twig; glancing up, Yirmiyahu saw shapes silhouetted coldly against the stars. He called hoarsely for help, heard an echo of laughter again. His tormentors were back. They threw something out over that hole of sky, and it fell. For an instant his heart surged with hope at the thought of food, a bundle of food; then he felt the rush of air and the mass of it hit the mud beside him in the terrible dark. He heard the cracking of bone, and his belly heaved at the sweet and overpowering stench of the rotting dead. The thing stirred, and he saw two glints of starlight—eyes in the dark. A low, shuddering moan filled his ears, surrounding him, echoing in the narrow well.
With a cry, Yirmiyahu lurched back. Stumbling, he fell into the mud. Kicking out with his feet, he scrambled away until he felt the stone wall cold against his shoulders.
The glints of light were coming toward him. A loud slurping of mud as the thing moved, dragging its broken body through the muck. The creature’s moan went on and on. He could not see it in the dark, but he knew it was reaching for him, fingers groping in the dark to seize his leg and pull him toward its teeth. He kept kicking, his heart wild with beating, his breath coming fast. Light-headed with fear. He felt the brush of its fingertips against his skin and shuddered with loathing, as though maggots had touched him in the mud. With a low cry he got his knees under him, the mud cool around his thighs; reaching down, he seized the creature’s hair in its fingers, seized the hair near the roots and hauled the thing’s head away from his leg. It hissed and twisted, trying to bite at his arm; its strength was terrible. With his other hand he snatched his loincloth from about his hips, wadded it swiftly, and shoved it into the creature’s mouth, muffling its low growl.
Yirmiyahu grasped its hair in both hands and forced its head down into the mud. His chest heaved as he panted and wheezed, his arms straining, his muscles screaming with the effort of holding down the corpse. Though the mud closing over its head silenced it, it did not grow still, nor did its limbs flail in panic. It was not a living man. It was an incarnation of raw hunger and need, and it required no air to live; its hands were beneath it, pushing. The creature strained to force its reeking body out of the mud, even as Yirmiyahu strained to keep it submerged. With a gasp of panic, Yirmiyahu felt his arms trembling; in another moment or two they would give out, and the hungering creature would be on him. Leaning his back against the wall for leverage, he lifted his leg with a wild shriek and brought his heel slamming down on the thing’s head.
The blow pressed the thing deeper into the mud, but still it strained to rise. Screaming, Yirmiyahu brought his heel down again and again, with all the force he could, hard blows to the back of the thing’s head. For a few moments, it kept fighting him; then Yirmiyahu felt something hard give beneath his heel, and the thing went limp. He smashed his heel into it twice more before falling back against the wall, moaning with horror. Before him in the dark, he saw the lumpy shape of the corpse’s back above the mud. Yirmiyahu slammed his palms wildly against the stone wall at his sides, screaming through clenched teeth, trying to control his panic.
Dimly, he heard laughter somewhere far above him.
That sobered him. He fell silent, simply leaned against the wall, breathing hard. He didn’t bother to look up; he didn’t care to see the silhouettes of his tormenters leaning in, looking down into the dark, mocking his fight for survival. He growled low in his throat, anger bubbling on the rim of his mind. What people were they up there, joying in the torment of their prisoner? How could these be People of the Covenant, people who shared his city and his God?
His heart began to slow down. He dragged his hand across his eyes, wiping away dirt and muck and sweat. The laughter had stopped; one of them called down something, but the echoes of the well distorted the words. He did not plan to beg them for water or food, or even let them know whether he’d been bitten or not; doubtless they would grow bored in a few moments and go their way. His anger started to fade as fatigue crept over him again. They tormented him, he realized, because they were men without hope for the future. They grabbed at what small-hearted pleasures they could, because they were increasingly certain, somewhere deep in their spirit, that the next morning, or the morning after that, or some morning soon would find them cold and dead—or perhaps lurching, mindless, through a deserted city in search of meat. They had chosen not to hope.
He began to think, using this moment of cold clarity to hold off his fatigue and horror.
His loincloth was likely irrecoverable—but he could not last this night naked. He was certain of that. Hissing through his teeth, he bent quickly to do what had to be done. Shaking, he began stripping the creature of its clothes, fighting not to retch at the scent, muttering a Hebrew psalm under his breath—one of David’s—to distract his mind from what he was doing. He could feel the thing’s cold skin beneath his hands, not hard but terribly soft. He gagged, leaned into the wall a moment, fought for air. That touch—that touch—on his hands. On his heel, on his shin. He moaned. Unclean. He was unclean. He was a levite, and his hands had touched the dead. The words of the Covenant and the Law rang within him, demanding atonement, words of purpose and command that had been established centuries past, when the People were still tent dwellers in the desert, lying awake in their wool bedding and listening for the moan of the dead in the hills:
You shall bury the flesh of the dead, and raise above it a cairn of stones, a warning to any that see.
You shall not touch the flesh of the dead, for the dead body is unclean. If a man touches the flesh of the dead, you shall put him from your camp, and watch him. Seven days you shall put him from your camp.
Those were mitzvot, commandments for keeping the People clean and vital and free of the clinging, hungering dead. Yirmiyahu’s palms stung where his fingernails dug into his skin.
He drew in ragged breaths. Unclean. He should be cast from the People. He had touched the dead. Yet—he was already cast out, already isolated. He glanced up at that circle high above him, with its faint promise of starlight. He was in the dark, he was alone, he was cold; he might well be left here the seven days that the Covenant required for the cleansing of flesh that had touched the dead, and his uncleanness in this well would harm no others of the People. Unclenching his hands, he returned to his work. He would not die here. He had been called to God’s service, and there was still a city to preserve, to call back to its Covenant.
He’d seen so many broken covenants. The priesthood had broken faith with the people, hoarding grain while children starved in the streets and condoning the defilements at Tophet. The king had broken covenant with the people, delighting in wealth rather than in the health and feeding of the city. The people themselves had bro
ken covenant, binding themselves to other deities, who demanded less and promised more than they could indeed offer. Yirmiyahu hissed through his teeth as he peeled cloth away from flesh. Even he had broken covenant—with his wife. He’d sent Miriam away as the city grew violent. He squeezed his eyes shut against the anguish of that memory.
But clean or unclean, he would not break covenant with God. He was God’s prophet, her navi: His task was to speak for her, to gather her fruitful words and bring them, bring that water-rich fruit to a people who insisted they were content with dried crusts. He must do that; he must stay ready to do that, whatever came; he must last the night. He must keep trying. He had been thrown in here, unwilling to be silent; if the king ever let him out, he would not be silent then. But first he must live. The rhythmic phrases of the old Hebrew prayer soared from his lips, the prayer of David, louder and still louder, until the sound of his voice filled the well. Lifting one of the corpse’s arms, he pulled its tunic free, then dropped the naked arm into the sucking mud and staggered back. The fabric he clutched was torn and filthy with blood and viscous fluid and muck; but if he could make it through this night, the next day might dry it. The tunic might be unclean, but it was clothing, it was life. Growling, he wrung out what dampness he could, then draped it over his shoulders. It was not warm but it was heavy, and perhaps that would make some difference.
For a while then he sank to his knees, the mud around his waist, and he shivered in his improvised shawl, fitfully moving from sleep to quiet sobbing, and back to sleep again. He woke in starts from half dreams in which he had felt the cutting of teeth into his arm or his leg. He woke with sharp, desperate cries, certain the corpse had risen from the mud, that it was groping for him. He tried to force himself to move, to reach for it and feel whether it lay still, there in the dark. He reached out his trembling hand, felt cold flesh, jerked it back. He was sweating. His hands kept shaking. He tried to reach out again, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t. It was coming for him, it was coming in the dark. He shrank against the wall and listened, listened for that terrible moan. Heard only his quick heartbeats. Shaking. Unable to sleep, he knelt sobbing, leaning his back against the wall, his own wrenching, human moans repeating one word, the name of his wife. Over half a year since he’d seen her. “Miriam,” he groaned, “Miriam. Miriam—”
Muttering without cease, he called the darkness by its name: hoshekh. Naming it, knowing it, might at least keep it from choking him: hoshekh. The darkness that is darkest of all darknesses, the darkness that hides in the back of caves. The darkness that fills the mind of one who refuses to hear the cries in the street, the darkness that hides behind the ribs of a man or a woman, that eats at everything that is real and true inside them. Hoshekh. Once, the Lawgiver had called a plague of hoshekh upon the people of the cities of the Nile, who had not heard the cries of their slave workers or their wives, the cries when soldiers took their infants and drowned them in the river. And when those unhearing people yawned and lay themselves down for sleep, the hoshekh poured from their mouths like dark milk until their houses and their land was filled with it. When they woke in the morning, they were blind and could not even move from their beds, for the hoshekh was heavy on them as they lay, and heavy inside them, as though they were at the bottom of a pool of dark mud. For three days and three nights they lay moaning in the hoshekh, while the people of Israel ate and sang in the hovels of the slave encampments, where there was light and, for once, no work.
Hoshekh, Yirmiyahu called this darkness in the well that pressed on his skin. The whole city above must be filled with it, this night. Darker than dark, the city. Only the dead could move through it with their slow feet, their leaning bodies scraping against the walls of houses and shops, their fingers reaching over the stone, hungering.
When he opened his eyes, it was still dark. He did not know whether it was the same night or another, or how long he’d slept. His stomach growled like a wild beast fighting to gnaw open his belly. He trembled in his rags and cried out wordlessly. He passed his hand over his face, saw only its outline. His lips were terribly dry, his tongue and throat more so. The stench of death in the well was strong, still too strong to become used to, and he retched into the mud in great heaves, though little came up, for he had already retched up the bread and water he had in him. He was still on his knees, and when he moved them a little he found his legs were numb and stiff; when he moved them a little more, they went violent with pain. Clenching his teeth, he waited for the pain to pass. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes, hot against his cheeks.
He had awakened from an evil dream; frayed tatters of it still clung to him like the clothes he wore, clothes he’d taken from the dead. Waking, he still saw the faces of children, the whites around their eyes, heard the shrieks from their open mouths. Saw the rotting flesh of the hands that gripped them, pulling them down into the pit. Standing in a circle about the pit, men and women with pale faces and their arms at their sides. The pit atop the hill of Tophet. In his dream he screamed at them. “I see the blood of children on your skirts!” he cried, extending his arms toward the women, but he couldn’t reach them.
For just one moment, he thought maybe—maybe—that hill, all of it, had been only a dream. Maybe it had only ever been night terrors and nothing more. Maybe he had dreamed it all, here at the bottom of this cold well. But no: it had been real, terribly real.
In the tense months before the siege began, Yirmiyahu had still lived with Miriam his wife in their little house near the gates of the city. It had been his habit in the afternoons to urge the men at the city gates to petition the priests for bread and grain to feed Yerusalem’s forgotten children; many times he’d lifted his eyes to the hill while he spoke and seen the haze of smoke above its ridge. From the position of the smoke in the hot air, Yirmiyahu could tell that it came from the old shrine on the hill’s far slope—a sign that some of the People had resumed sacrifices to Chemosh, the heathen god who lived at the shrine. Sometimes Yirmiyahu would fall silent in the midst of a heated conversation with a merchant at the gates and stare for a long time at that smoke. Eventually the merchant would turn to look, too. Some of the merchants scowled then and made a sign against evil with their fingers; others took on a thoughtful look. Other times the merchant’s face would darken with shame, and he’d turn quickly and strike up a conversation with some other man who was near, eager for a reason to hide his face from the navi.
The hill troubled Yirmiyahu. For the navi, monotheism was a fiercely ethical matter, in a way that later men in later centuries would rarely understand or remember. To Yirmiyahu’s mind, being covenanted to one woman and to one God taught a man steadiness, the steadiness needed to stand in a strong wind. To have many women or many deities was to be buffeted by winds from many directions; it meant not knowing who one was called upon to protect and worship. It meant being accustomed to a degree of faithlessness, to offering merely a conditional devotion to both God and woman. It meant the ease of distraction, of picking and choosing from one’s responsibilities and relationships, laying down those that were most difficult at a particular moment and devoting more of oneself instead to those that required less work and less truth.
Other tribes saw these things differently, quite differently, but Yirmiyahu was the descendant of generations of levites, and he was watching the city of his People die. His unease with seductive, heathen deities was hot in his chest. Gazing at the smoke on the hill’s summit, Yirmiyahu almost thought he could hear, faint in the day’s heat, the calling of those hungry gods and goddesses whom his People had not brought with them out of the desert long ago but had found waiting for them in this land. Deities who spread their arms wide and moaned: Come to me, I will give you wealth or security or love, or what you desire, only feed me, feed me. I am so hungry; don’t you want to feed me?
Sometimes, as Yirmiyahu looked up at that smoke, the cries of those other gods, who had established no abiding Covenant with the People, rose from a faint moan on the hi
ll to a shriek of urgent, demanding need; at those times he would look away from the summit, shivering even in the heat of day as the merchants at the gate chattered and argued around him. And all the while, Yirmiyahu’s God murmured from behind the veil in her Temple, I am here. If you want me, you must be faithful to me, and you must nourish my children. You must work hard to provide for them. Then I will let you take me in your arms and I will delight you and nourish you. A God of Covenant for a People of the Covenant, a divine spouse rather than a divine lover. That is how the navi saw it.
It would be an easy thing, perhaps, to keep his eyes from straying to that hill. To not ask what sacrifices Chemosh received up there. Yet Yirmiyahu couldn’t stop looking. The sight of that haze gnawed at him. Of all the People’s lovers, he feared Chemosh. Chemosh was a god apart. Astarte’s love was playful and vitalizing; Baal’s was stern and demanding; Dagon’s was tempestuous, overwhelming, and fickle as the sea in which he swam with his fish; but Chemosh—that was a god who would beat his lovers and batter them. And Chemosh would grin darkly in the knowledge that such treatment would only convince his worshippers all the more of his power and his strength to provide for them, keep them, and shield them: that the more he beat his worshippers, the more they would fall to the earth, kiss his feet, and beg for the privilege of feeding him.
In bed at night, with the soft breathing of his wife beside him, Yirmiyahu would wake sometimes, thinking of that hill, trying to persuade himself that those sons and daughters of the People who visited the shrine were bringing only fruit or sheaves of barley to the god. Yet his heart told him it wasn’t so.
Once he came awake with a start, thinking he’d heard weeping. He bolted upright and gazed into the dark, but the sound faded from hearing as swiftly as any dream sound might. Miriam stirred beside him. “What is it, husband?” Her voice heavy with sleep.
