by Stant Litore
For a long, long time he wept. He sat in a world of wet and shadow, of hoshekh that clung to the skin and seeped inside him. Miriam, he croaked. Miriam.
He would never forget his last sight of her. Those eyes overfull with tears. She had always been overfull with love; in loving her and then leaving her, he had taken hold of her and crushed that love from her, until her tears came out at the eyes like that, a terrible wound he had given her, whom he loved.
His lips formed, almost soundlessly, the words his throat could not make. Adonai, oh adonai. Giver of Life, Sacred Womb, Maker of all that lives and moves. The kings have failed the People. The prophets, too. I failed Miriam. I failed you. I am dying in a dry well. It is over. Who will take responsibility for this People? What navi will be there to preserve whatever can be preserved of the city and the land?
Whether in echo of his own despairing thoughts or in answer to them, remembered words sounded in his heart: Would that all God’s People were prophets. That was Miriam. Miriam had said that. She’d been quoting Moseh, the great Lawgiver who’d led their ancestors out of the desert with many wonders, and given them the mitzvot to keep justice among their tribes and keep the People clean of the dead.
Would that all God’s People were prophets. Spoken as she crouched over a pot making a stew. Yirmiyahu had seated himself across from her that night. He was talking of—things. The walking dead that had begun to appear. The famishing of widows and children in the city outside their small house. It was months yet before the start of the siege. “People do not feel safe,” he was telling her. He’d been younger then, bewildered but confident that the city would be saved, the People brought back to the Covenant. He’d been sure even the levites would listen, if he just went often enough to the Temple steps.
He had not yet seen the hill of Tophet.
“People do not feel safe in their own city. Miriam, my Miriam, there are children starving, alone. Easy prey for the dead. And I think there are more dead in the city than we think.” He chewed on his knuckles a moment—a nervous trait he’d later drop entirely after Tophet, after sending Miriam away, after his heart became smaller and harder inside him. But back then he’d chewed his knuckles often, for though the words God found for him filled him and sustained him, the evil, the hunger, the injustice he was asked to stand and proclaim against bewildered him and filled him with an anxiety and a longing for people to hear.
On the other side of the cookpot, Miriam’s face was aglow, not only with the sweat of laboring over the stew but also, as Yirmiyahu realized later, with the pregnancy she’d just become aware of, the pregnancy she would tell her husband about later that night—a blessing and a joy that, like Yirmiyahu’s faith that the priests could be won over, would be all too brief.
“Miriam,” he murmured, barely aware of the brightness in her eyes, so strong were the doubts seeping into him. He had been navi only a few short months. God’s words still came rarely to him, and still only at night. In truth, Yirmiyahu felt alone, a navi whose words caused gasps of dismay but who, in the end, had only those few words to sway a weary and neglectful People to any active mending of the Covenant. “This is not like the old days. I am not like one of the old prophets. Eliyahu called fire from heaven to cleanse the land; the undead withered and crumbled to ash. And Devora the Old—though no fire fell from the sky, she razed half the vineyards of Israel before the land was cleansed. She did it, though. And there were—healings.”
He shook his head. These tales had been passed down from grandfather to grandson and from grandmother to granddaughter through centuries of levites. Now, for the first time, he wondered whether all of that had really happened, if the navi in the past had ever truly stood before the People or against the dead with anything other than words from God. “Healings, Miriam,” he murmured, his eyes on the stew, on the bubbling, on something that was certain and could be trusted: when you put hot fluid over coals, it bubbled and a pleasant scent went up. It needed no story from your grandfather for you to trust that. Like God’s voice in the night, the boiling in the pot was there, evident, something a man’s own eyes and ears could know.
Yirmiyahu continued reciting the stories, trying to find comfort in the names and acts of each previous navi, each prophet who’d mended the Covenant and preserved the People from the ravenous dead. “Yeroboam’s hand was bitten, his arm gray—a prophet healed him, calling on the name of God. And a Syrian came to Elisa asking to be healed; he was already shaking with it. And Elisa sent him to the river and washed away the bite as though it were only dirt on his skin. And when Menahem the Mad repented and the prophetess Hadassah instructed him to take every walking corpse he could find in the city and impale them on the walls, every last one, until there were eighty-seven in all, writhing and moaning in the morning sun—” Yirmiyahu’s voice grew softer; he was seeing with his eyes the horror of it. “When that was done,” he whispered, “all in the city who’d been bitten but had not succumbed grew hale again.”
“My husband.” Miriam touched his hand with hers.
He barely noticed; his eyes saw other things. “I am no prophet like Elisa or Hadassah,” he said. “I have only words and no other gift, no power to heal the bitten or feed the starving. When I pray—” He bit, and a little blood ran from his knuckles. “When I pray, God only sends more words. What good are words when we need a gift like Elisa’s?” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “What kind of navi am I, Miriam?”
“A dutiful one,” she murmured after a moment, “a man who keeps Covenant and asks others to, a man the People need right now, a man I love.” Miriam gripped his fingers, squeezed them. “You don’t have to contend with eighty-seven dead, as Hadassah did, or with hordes out of the northern cedars, as Devora did. There are only a few dead, and there is grain behind the Temple to feed the city, or most of it,” Miriam offered. “If all the priests and all the merchants in this city were men like my husband, all would be well. What the People need is the gift you do bring from God, Yirmiyahu—the gift of words that are true, when everyone else plugs their ears with words that are not. Would that all God’s people were prophets!”
Her voice was soft, and Yirmiyahu found himself drawn from his doubts to listen; he saw the way her eyes shone, and the sight of it held him, catching at his heart. “If only we all heard the words you hear in our hearts. If only we all listened as passionately, with such suffering, as you do, husband. But most of us can’t, and many don’t want to.” She paused a moment. “I think I feel God in the house sometimes, in the mornings—but I never hear words. Only you do. As a woman,” she added softly, “I know how important it is for someone to hear you, and how hard it is. There are so many places where I cannot speak, even if I had a lot to say, and you as my husband must speak for me. I cannot stand in the street like a man and cry out what is in my heart. God can’t do this either, I think. She needs you to speak for her. Without your words, the priests would keep her shut away behind that veil in the Temple, the way some husbands shut away their wives, or locked into the Ark; no one would hear her.” Her eyes shone above the glow of the fire beneath the cookpot.
“Until all God’s people are prophets, your words are all we have, Yirmiyahu.”
THIRD DAY: WIND IN THE DARK
HE STARTLED, his body lurching out of a sleep that had been deep but of unknown duration. The hiss was near him in the dark and very loud. His vision was blurred, but he could hear it. If it was really there. His hands tightened, and in one of them he felt the slender rib he’d torn from the girl’s corpse. A life gift from a man’s body to a woman’s, that rib could now be converted in the brutality of this well into a weapon. His unclean hand grasping the rib, he again felt feverish with shame, complicit in all the defilements of his city. He hacked from his scorched throat and rolled onto his knees, almost falling into the mud.
That hiss!
The thing had not seized him yet; perhaps it was less mobile even than the last had been. A desire to live roared up inside hi
s chest like a monster bursting into life, fierce and undeniable, though it had not been there a moment before. He blinked desperately, could see a dark form only an arm’s length away. He threw himself at it, certain he would feel teeth cutting into his arm but just as certain that if he delayed but a moment he would find himself half-conscious again, helpless food for the broken thing that would eventually crawl or wriggle near enough to feed.
This was the most terrible of his struggles in the well.
It was a scuffling, a wrestling without sight or even clarity of mind; just two human bodies, one dehydrated and shaking, the other too broken to permit the use of more than one limb—just two bodies tumbling and tearing at each other in the mud and the dark. Brutal, silent, except for Yirmiyahu’s labored breathing and the other thing’s hissing and biting on air. Yirmiyahu stabbed again and again with the sharp rib, piercing perhaps the creature’s neck, upper chest, or even face, but whatever demon gave it the semblance of life did not perish. For one instant that jolted through him like a silent scream, Yirmiyahu felt the thing’s teeth scrape across his bare shoulder, but he was rolling with it on top of him, and a knee pressed up into its belly sent it tumbling to the side into the mud. A wordless, rasping cry, and the navi threw himself back on top of it, driving the rib down like a spear. One dry, cold hand clutched at his arm, pulling his wrist toward snapping teeth; Yirmiyahu caught a reflection of the distant sun in two gray, scratched eyes. That was enough to orient him. With his other hand he grasped the thing’s hair, holding its head still. Its strength was terrible, but he forced his arm up above its jaws and twisted and drove the rib hard between its eyes. The thing bucked under him.
Then it was still. No last rattle of breath in the throat. Only stillness. Yirmiyahu collapsed over it like a spent lover, and for a while everything—the corpse, the mud, the well, the city outside, God—everything simply stopped existing.
He did not even dream.
He woke as dry as though he’d swallowed the sun and it had caught in his throat. For a long stretch of uncounted and unaccountable time, he gazed up the sheer sides of the well. It was difficult to conceive of any world but the cracked stone walls and the still, cold form beneath him and the distant circle of sunlight and heat, as untouchable as a bird and silent as a mirage in the desert.
Desert. That circle of heat was a portent. They had failed the Covenant; God was leaving her city as it became defiled and uninhabitable, leaving to the desert the People she’d once called from it. The city would become a haunt of owls and jackals who, at least, would prove faithful to their purpose and less quick to devour their own. Yirmiyahu wanted to call out to God, but his body was spent, and in weary dread he felt sure his prayers would only echo unheard in the hollowness of the well.
He lay on the dead; he could feel the hard stillness of it keeping him half-propped out of the mud. It was cold, rigid; the touch of its breast against him was like the touch of a stone in winter. He was shivering, though he only just now realized it. He thought about that for a while, tried to muster the strength of will to lift himself.
Somewhere up there the city was dying. He wondered whether the guards who’d come for him had let Baruch go. And what might have become of the children? Baruch had been teaching them when the guards came in the evening; the children had let out cries of dismay. Baruch had just risen to his feet, silent and impassive, a man carved out of a cliff wall. Seizing Yirmiyahu by the arms, the guards had pulled him out through the door, not even bothering to bind him. The navi’s last glance over his shoulder had been at Baruch and the children framed in the doorway: so many eyes on him.
What would become of them all? He had seen dead shuffling along in the alleys they passed as the guards pulled him toward the king’s house. How many were there now? And how long would the city’s walls stand? Would there be only dead within when the Babylonians finally breached them?
He lifted himself up on his hands, sobbing with the effort. He needed to get away from this body. It reeked; everything reeked of death. There was too much death, too much. He wanted only to hurl himself into the cool mud, and if he died there and the slithering things beneath it ate him, it was enough: he would be content. So long as he did not have to look with his own eyes on any more unclean death.
Breathing hard, he glanced down at the corpse.
His breath caught. Everything in him stilled.
For a long, long time, he just stared at the torn, defiled face.
A terrible sound came from his throat, a sound he had never heard a living being make. A low keen, a moan as heavy with yearning as the wailing of the dead. It was like the scream a hare makes when a farmer has caught it and is beating it with a great stick to kill it. That madness scream before the hare falls into the burrow that has no bottom, the burrow that keeps plummeting all the way down to death. Yirmiyahu lifted mud-caked fingers, cupped the dead face in his palm, the flesh of it so cold it sucked the heat from his hand; it was as though a hole had been punched right through him, and now wind was rushing through the dark in his belly. The moan in his throat rose to a shriek that tore up everything in his chest and left only jagged streamers of flesh and spirit.
It was her face. Hers. Miriam. His wife.
It was her face.
It was shattered, it was distorted, the eyes emptied of everything and flesh torn from her, but it was her; he knew that face, he couldn’t be mistaken. It was her.
She’d come back, then. Somehow, before the siege began. She’d come back to the city, or had never actually left—she’d come to find him, perhaps come even to their old house.
But she hadn’t found him; somewhere within the city, the dead had found her.
Yirmiyahu screamed until his throat was raw with it. He fell to his side, his hands cupping her head, pressed his face into her shoulder, unable to look at those dead eyes. He kept screaming, and then he could make no sound at all; and still he screamed, his mouth open without any sound but the rasp of escaping breath.
THIRD NIGHT: AS PAPYRUS BURNS
AT THE well’s bottom, Yirmiyahu lay without waking, his body racked with cold and dryness. In the city above, the walking corpses fed and felt no remorse for the cries or the panic of the living. This was a night of the dead, in a city of the dead. He knew it, he knew it. Hoshekh. Surely God had left the city, fled the People who’d forsaken her, left them to lie in their hoshekh, lost and faithless. Surely everything above him was dead. In this well, in this clammy dark, he couldn’t know if there were any breathing people yet above him. If he were to cry out now, would the guards hear—and ignore—him, or would only the dead hear the cries of God’s navi? He couldn’t know.
To wake fully would be unbearable. Yet what dream or words out of the past could aid him in this moment? His mind fled through memories that were recent but held no comfort.
Zedekiah had held the scroll in his own hands and let it burn. The fire licked and chewed at the edges as he unrolled it slowly over the candle he’d brought to Yirmiyahu’s cell. Letting the flame spread a shadow of crackling darkness across the tiny lines of black text.
It took three men to restrain Yirmiyahu. He screamed and kicked, throwing his torso from side to side as though to wrench his arms loose of their bindings by brute strength, like Samson of old, whom no cords could restrain unless he’d first been held and gentled in a woman’s arms.
Yirmiyahu threw back his head and howled; still the men held him. Still the little scroll burned; the young king unrolled it a little at a time, watching the slow creep of the flames, inexorable and destructive as pestilence. In desperation, the prophet turned his head and seized on the throat of one of the guards, biting, digging in hard with his teeth, his mouth filling with the taste and scent of human blood; the guard cried out shrilly, and in a moment the others had torn Yirmiyahu loose and cast him to the earthen floor. A sandaled foot slammed down between his shoulder blades, holding him still. He growled and spat; a guard shoved the butt of a spear into the back of hi
s head.
Then he lay still, his eyes open, the room unsteady to his gaze. In a kind of stupor, he watched the king feed Baruch’s scroll to the flame, one column of ink at a time. The fire’s hunger was too hot now for the candle’s thin wick; the flame was too high. The candle melted even as Yirmiyahu watched, wax streaming down its sides. It shortened and shrank even as the flames fed upon the scroll, for fire is the only one of God’s creatures that eventually grows thinner and smaller the more it devours.
In the end Zedekiah flicked his fingers, dropping the last crinkling bit of ash onto the earthen floor. Yirmiyahu watched a few flakes of ash drift on the air.
The earth was cool against his cheek.
Sandaled feet stepped into his vision—fine sandals, studded with tiny gems, so that they startled the eyes. He stared dully, hearing the king’s voice above him.
“I want you to make me a vow, Yirmiyahu. I want you to vow you will never again make such a scroll. On pain of death—not for you but for the scribe you hire.”
Without lifting his head, Yirmiyahu wetted his lips and spat on the sandaled feet. Then the hard weight of a spear slammed into the back of his head again, and he fell off the floor and into a dark place.
Baruch had tried to warn him. Scrolls, those children of God’s lips and men’s hands, were as fragile as the children of women’s bodies. They might be devoured as easily, lost as easily, forgotten as easily. If a people could forget the pain in the eyes of children, they could forget God. And if a people could forget God, they could forget the words she gave. If they could forget the words she gave, they could forget the pain in the eyes of children.
