by Stant Litore
Yirmiyahu was breathing hard, the sheets sweaty beneath him. He didn’t look at her; he kept gazing in the direction from which the sound had come, if there had actually been a sound. His ears strained to hear it. With a dryness in his throat, he realized he was staring in the direction of the Temple.
“Yirmiyahu?” A little fear in her voice. There were dead now in some of the alleys of the city. A noise in the night was something to fear.
Yirmiyahu let out his breath slowly. He didn’t wish to frighten her with what was likely only a dream. Turning to her, he saw her eyes soft and liquid in the dark. Her soft form on the bed caught at his heart; he set his hand on her thigh.
“A bad dream,” he murmured.
After a moment he felt her small hands take his, drawing his palm to her lips. He let his heartbeat slow; if God was weeping for something done on that hill—if she needed him—she would call for him. But right now his wife needed him. This had not been an easy year for her, and she was more often the one who woke with bad dreams. The moist warmth of her lips pressed his hand, and he tried to smile in the dark but couldn’t. Couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“Come back to sleep,” Miriam whispered.
He lay beside her and took her firmly in his arms, feeling the warmth of her; the hard bite of his anxiety eased.
Miriam pressed herself to him, kissing his neck once, and stroked his back with her fingers. After a while her hands slowed and were still; her breathing slowed. He kissed her hair and held her, wakeful, while she slept. He kept listening in the dark, waiting to hear that sound of weeping a second time.
Yirmiyahu didn’t close his eyes again that night.
God did call for him—the next day.
As noon approached and Yirmiyahu wended through the narrow streets toward the gates, God whispered to him. There was pleading in her voice. There are things I need you to see, she whispered. There are things you need to know, my navi. Up on the hill. Go to the hill, my navi.
If he had known just how terrible those things would be, what God would ask him to endure, perhaps he wouldn’t have had the courage to climb that hill. As it was, Yirmiyahu climbed slowly, reluctantly. He glanced over his shoulder once at the roofs of the city within its walls, wooden roofs and roofs of brick clay, mixed patches of bright and dark in the afternoon glare of the sun. Then, turning his back, he went to see what it was that he must see, a grimness in his face. He met no one else on the slope; whatever worshippers had been here were not here now. It was a long climb, and when he reached the summit under its brooding oaks, he was nearly out of breath.
There he found the altar, and behind it, the massive statue of the god, a thing of gold under the trees. Yirmiyahu’s eyes took in its distended belly, its bloated, grasping hands, its gaping mouth. The god’s lower jaw hung down to its feet, and through it, Yirmiyahu could see the sacrificial pit, a hole opened in the earth. On the god’s golden lips—the lips of the pit—Yirmiyahu could see stains. He shrank back, turned from the pit a moment to touch the ashes on the altar. Still warm. And two great lamps yet burned at either side of the god, their oil sending up a heavy-scented smoke.
He swallowed. Some of the People had been here, feeding the god, even earlier that very day, though they were now gone. He glanced again at the god’s face. Chemosh’s eyes were small, just tiny notches in the gold statue, and Yirmiyahu did not feel watched. The god was fed, content, and in any case this was not a god of seeing or hearing. This god was all mouth and belly.
Who had been here, feeding it? Olive farmers from the slopes of the Mount on the other side of the city, where olive trees, beloved of the People, swayed in the wind? Or tanners and potters and anxious craftsmen come out from within the city walls? What people were feeding this god? And what was the god eating? A levite who had been raised hearing all the lore of his People, Yirmiyahu knew enough about the hungers of the heathen gods for horror to paralyze his heart. Seeing those stains on the golden lips, he could hardly breathe.
Get a torch. The voice of his own God came in a whisper through the leaves overhead. See what your own People, my People, are doing.
Yirmiyahu refused for a moment, hanging back, dread chilling his body.
Get a torch, my navi. The voice in the air was insistent.
Yirmiyahu cast about, found a fallen oak branch, gasped even as he reached for it—for there, caught on a jagged root of the oak, a tattered strip of white wool lay dirtied on the earth. No doubt it had been torn loose from the hem of someone’s garment. The sight of it tore through Yirmiyahu. He crouched, touched the wool gently, lifted a bit of it between his fingers. He began to tremble. The oak had torn this wool from a levite’s garment; he was certain of it. The weave was fine, and his fingers could detect the pattern that was woven into the hems of the robes worn by every male of the priestly caste. His own hem was woven in the same pattern. His hand shook, and he fell back on his rear, breathing hard.
A levite had been here. His heart grappled with this; perhaps the priest had come only as he himself had, to spy out the doings on the hill. Perhaps it had only been that. But the cold horror that gripped him, tightening his throat, told him otherwise. The levite had been here as a participant. With irrevocable and wrenching certainty, Yirmiyahu knew this.
Getting to his feet and returning, shaking, to the altar, he lit the branch he carried from one of the lamps. He lifted the branch high over the pit, dread closing his throat; a circle of firelight lit the earthen floor below—a floor near enough to leap down but too far to climb back. There were bones there, many of them. Small ones, so small, the bones of children of the People—femurs and ribs, and at least two skulls within the reach of the torchlight. And that stench, rising from the bowels of the god. The horror licked at the bottom of his throat, bile rising in him. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand and kept looking, feeling the presence of his God at his shoulders, like a great terebinth with her branches leaning over him, shading him.
The whisper of God’s voice came to him, soft yet irresistible as wind in the branches. My People try to drink from dried and broken cisterns, the voice whispered, and forsake the well that nourishes; they forsake me. Instead of replenishment, desiccation. Instead of birth and growth, the withering of the young. Instead of my womb, this grave in a god’s belly.
Yirmiyahu peered down at the bones in the flickering light. The reek dismayed him, and the nearness of the god’s statue dismayed him, too. Those bones, bits of digested people in the god’s belly, made him cry out without sound, his mouth open, his insides heaving. He retched at the lip of the pit.
Long ago his own ancestors had sacrificed their firstborn at altars, even as other peoples in the farther parts of the land still did. But one of his People’s oldest stories told of the Akedah, the binding of the firstborn, when God had placed her hand at Abraham’s chest and stopped him from drawing his knife across his son’s throat. When Yirmiyahu had been a small boy, his father had told the tale with horror and panache, and young Yirmiyahu had shivered to think of the upraised hand, the flash of the knife, the cry of the boy.
Abraham had taught this to all his children, and they to their children: We do not feed God, God feeds us. God is sufficient to feed herself and us. To honor her, give back some of the food she has given—fruit of the orchard or the first of the flock—but do not give your own young, for that is an abomination before God who brings all births.
Now Yirmiyahu gazed down into the foreign god’s dark belly, and his insides became cold. He wondered how many of the People had come to worship here, how many had come to feed the god. Was it easier to covenant with a god you’d fed, one you hoped would owe you gratitude, however cruel that god might be, than it was to covenant with a God who fed you?
He stared down at the bones. As the initial bite of his horror dulled (though the stench of the pit remained intense), he tried to understand those remains. Some of the bones were cracked, as though a great beast had
broken them to suck out the marrow. A fresh chill took Yirmiyahu. Gods did not need to break bones to feed. Something mortal had fed on those children the People had tossed into the god’s belly.
The need to understand this horror—the need to know, to see what his God wanted him to witness—that need steeled his heart and limbs. He stared down at those bones in the torchlight, thinking quickly of how he might make a rope—perhaps tearing up his own robe and braiding the strips—to get down there for a closer look. There were just those bones and their terrible riddle, down there. Nothing else. He waited a long moment, trying not to retch. Then—then—
A shambling, leaning figure lurched across the circle of light below. A small figure, no larger than a boy of eight, its head turned to the ground, unaware of the watcher above it. Moving slowly, dragging one leg, but without any apparent pain. It simply limped across his view and disappeared again into the dark beyond the torch’s reach.
With a sharp gasp, Yirmiyahu flung himself back, away from the pit, falling onto his side in the twigs and leaves beneath the oaks. His torch, fallen, clattered over the lip of the hole and disappeared. A breath afterward, a long, low wail from beneath the earth. A shuddering moan. Even the oak branches above appeared to tremble at it. Yirmiyahu threw an arm across his eyes and pressed himself to the earth, unable to breathe. His entire body tensed in wild denial.
The moan faltered. There were a few more after it, several together. There were dead in the pit: walking, hungering dead. He felt the scream building inside him, a scream that caught behind his tonsils and would not come out, would never come out. He felt like choking.
Perhaps one of the dead had fallen into the pit, then fed on the children who were brought to the god—children who then rose to moan and stumble about the pit themselves. Or perhaps one of the child sacrifices had been bitten before the child was brought to the hill, the bite concealed beneath a ceremonial vesture so that the child’s parents might not be dishonored or declared unclean. Perhaps that child had been feverish when brought to the altar and had risen afterward in the earth—to feed later on the other sacrifices. Whatever horror had occurred, the pit was now full of the unclean dead.
The thought struck Yirmiyahu with a clarity as bracing and impossible to ignore as ice water poured, stabbing, at his face. The People, his People, his God’s People, were not on this hill feeding Chemosh, eater of children and protector of cities; they were feeding the dead. The unburied dead.
He couldn’t understand this.
It bewildered him and tore at him and shattered him; he lay on the ground shaking.
He lay there through most of the evening, caught between panic and prayer, tossing in a sickness that was not of the body. A wind stirred the oak leaves above, and there was a quiet creaking of branches. Sometimes, in it, he heard the soothing whispers of his God. Whenever the wind was still he could smell the dead, and he waited for the wind to come back.
Returning to the city before dusk, Yirmiyahu strode in wrath to the levites’ houses in the street of the Temple. He burst into the home of the high priest, shattering the door from its jamb, as furious in his need to get in as though he himself were one of the dead. A woman inside had been slicing roots with an iron knife; now she shrieked at the apparition of this man in priestly robes with his hair flying and his eyes hot with rage.
At the breaking of the door and the scream, the high priest came from the back room, in his prayer shawl. Yirmiyahu seized him by the throat and slammed him into the wall; the priest was not a small man, but Yirmiyahu’s speed and ferocity shocked him into paralysis.
“What have you done?” Yirmiyahu roared.
“What?” the priest gasped. “What?”
“You are the head of our caste in the city, you must know about it! What have you done on Tophet?”
The priest’s eyes glanced to the side.
“Don’t.” Yirmiyahu squeezed slightly, his chest heaving. “Truth, I want truth.”
The priest wetted his lips; his hand clutched Yirmiyahu’s wrist, but the navi did not let him go.
“The People believe if we feed the dead—” The priest’s voice was hoarse from the prophet’s grip on his throat; “—they will not hunger so much for us. Then they can perhaps rest again.”
The words speared Yirmiyahu. Now it was clear—the moaning in the pit, the bones of children, all clear. All terribly clear. Even as a few dead moaned within the walls of the city, the dead now moaned within the enclosure of the pit. The People were tossing a few of their firstborn into the pit at Tophet to suffer there in place of their other children, those they prayed would now be safe in the streets of their city, the hunger of the dead abated and mollified.
Yirmiyahu stared at this priest, the high priest of the People, as at some animal that had lifted up onto two legs and drawn about itself the skin of a man. Always before, in Yirmiyahu’s crying out of God’s words on the Temple steps, he’d thought the high priest a familiar, comprehensible thing, a priest drunk with comfort and prestige, neglectful of People and Covenant. But now the priest seemed to Yirmiyahu’s eyes not merely something far worse but also something unexpected and alien. Yirmiyahu found it difficult to breathe.
“Abomination,” Yirmiyahu snarled. “This is not how we serve God in Anathoth.”
“You’re not in Anathoth.” The priest’s eyes were dark.
Yirmiyahu stood panting, his hand still gripping the priest’s throat, holding him to the wall but without squeezing. He felt eyes on his back—the woman who had been cutting roots. Suddenly he felt closed in, locked in this house with mad people. “I will make sure every levite knows about this,” he hissed.
“Most of them know already,” the priest said.
Yirmiyahu could see the truth of it in the priest’s eyes, hear it in his own ears. In his heart, he reeled. The levites of the city were defiled! The caste was defiled: it had broken Covenant. The very robes Yirmiyahu wore on his body were defiled. “Unclean,” he hissed, his hand trembling at the man’s throat, everything in him shaking, wanting for one wild instant to squeeze and cut off the other man’s breath. “Unclean!”
“You are a fool, Yirmiyahu,” the priest rasped, his throat moving beneath Yirmiyahu’s hand. “A fool who thinks he hears God. God stopped speaking to us generations ago. God no longer hears; God has left the land, and I do not believe there is any navi. The Ark is empty. What is important now is to keep the People calm, make them unafraid. King and People tithe to the Temple and know they will have peace from living enemies. And they bring offerings to Chemosh on his hill, knowing they will have peace from the dead. Why should we object to what happens on that hill? Going there, people don’t have to be afraid. These are small sacrifices, young man.”
“I will find someone to tell,” Yirmiyahu roared.
“Do that,” the priest wheezed. “Spit on your own caste, if you will. Just get out of my house.”
“I will raise this city against you!” Yirmiyahu hissed. He threw the man to the floor and stood over him, his chest heaving; the woman watching from the other room screamed and came at him with the knife, but Yirmiyahu dodged it and then rushed out the broken door and into the street. There was a cry behind him but no pursuit; he ran wildly through the streets, hurrying toward the small house where he lived with Miriam. As he ran, he tore the robes from his back and dropped them into the dust, until he was bolting through the night street in his loincloth, his hair streaming behind him. Window slats clacked shut as he passed. His side burned, but he didn’t slow; he had to run, he had to run, or he would collapse crying again in the dust.
From that day, Yirmiyahu wore no wool that had the patterns of his caste woven into it. Those patterns had been defiled and he could not wear them, not until the caste was redeemed, the tomb at Tophet filled with earth, and the city fed and healed. Instead he took up the brown garments of a common day laborer each morning, then went to the Temple to cry out the words God had whispered to his heart when he rose at dawn from the
bed he shared with his wife.
“I know your ways!” he shouted on the wide Temple steps to a gathering crowd of levites in their white robes, merchants in their red robes, a few laborers in brown, and, in the back of the crowd, a few veiled women in the shade of the sunbaked brick houses of the priests that lined both sides of the street. Many of the priests frowned darkly; some of the merchants looked pale with fear. Some were listening, some looked troubled.
Sometimes as Yirmiyahu spoke a shudder would pass through the crowd, as though a cold wind had swept down the street. None of them spoke or murmured or whispered while the prophet pleaded with them, this man who said he was a navi, his voice sharp in the silence, echoing from the walls of the priests’ houses. His listeners were tense; he knew that even those whose faces did not show it held fear clutched in their breasts. All the city was tense. There were rumors of trouble with Babylon, bad trouble, perhaps even an army on the way. A siege might mean a long time without wares coming or going from the markets. Those merchants in the crowd, when they walked to the city gates to converse with other men of trade, had only to glance up to see the armed men the king had paid to stand on the walls of the city. So most of them did not look up when they went to the gates.
And all they had to do was glance down the back streets as they passed by to see the hunger of the city’s poor and to hear, from time to time, a moan from one of the city’s dead, hungering and eating in the city’s narrowest, darkest streets. So most of them did not look down those alleys.
“These are the words I bring you from God!” Yirmiyahu cried. Though he had stood twice a week on these steps since coming to the city, today his eyes were dark with the knowledge of what he’d seen on high Tophet. He spoke with more suffering and fury than he ever had before. “God says: I know your ways! You say to each other, Peace, there will be peace, for look! The Temple, the Temple of God, the Temple of God is here! All of you are deceived.”
