by Stant Litore
To the cast and crew of the good ship Qdoba, who during one critical summer, were quick to offer me a quiet corner in which to write during many lunch breaks.
To the many writers who have moved my heart or inspired my mind, not least among them C. J. Cherryh, for Merchanter’s Luck; Gene Wolfe, for Soldier in the Mist; Max Brooks, for World War Z; Kim Paffenroth, for Valley of the Dead; Orson Scott Card, for Seventh Son; and to the many writers, known and unknown, who have labored across so many centuries to deliver to us here, this day, that magnificent and often bewildering record and love letter we call the Bible.
To my wife, Jessica, and my daughters, River and Inara—it can’t always be easy living with a husband and father whose mind wanders with such frequency into daydreams of the hungry dead, or who leaps often from his chair to scribble a note; if it were not for their patience, their laughter, and their love, you would not now be holding this work in your hands.
And to all of you, my readers—it is you who make these stories breathe.
A NOTE ON NAMES
IN REVIVING these ancient stories, I have chosen in most cases to use the Hebrew (usually Tiberian) for the names of places and people. Hence Yirmiyahu and Moseh. However, I’ve allowed some inconsistency.
For some names I have retained a variant because it sounded better to my ears: hence Samson instead of Simson and Devora instead of Deborah. I have sometimes retained an anglicized version of a lesser-known name (like Zedekiah) because an entire character had long ago grown up in my mind around the English name.
In one case (Yerusalem), I have chosen a hybrid between the English and the Hebrew. The change of consonant allows the city to feel less familiar to the modern reader (which is essential if the reader is to set aside enough modern preconceptions about Jerusalem to enjoy the story) while still retaining some of the cultural significance and power of the name “Jerusalem,” which would be lost for most non-Hebrew speakers if I used the more beautiful and linguistically accurate name Yerushalayim.
In these few cases, I have permitted my instincts as a storyteller to take precedence over my fastidiousness as a scholar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Jessica Fusch, 2008
STANT LITORE doesn’t consider his writing a vocation; he considers it an act of survival. As a youth he witnessed the 1992 outbreak in the rural Pacific Northwest firsthand, as he glanced up from the feeding bins one dawn to see four dead staggering toward him across the pasture, dark shapes in the morning fog. With little time to think or react, he took a machete from the barn wall and hurried to defend his father’s livestock; the experience left him shaken. After that, community was never an easy thing for him. The country people he grew up with looked askance at his later choice of college degree and his eventual graduate research on the history of humanity’s encounters with the dead, and the citizens of his college community were sometimes uneasy at the machete and rosary he carried with him at all times and at his grim look. He did not laugh much, though on those occasions when he did the laughter came from him in wild guffaws that seemed likely to break him apart. As he became book-learned, to his own surprise he found an intense love of ancient languages, a fierce admiration for his ancestors, and a deepening religious bent. On weekends he went rock climbing in the cliffs without rope or harness, his fingers clinging to the mountain, in a furious need to accustom himself to the nearness of death and to teach his body to meet it. A rainstorm took him once on the cliffs and he slid thirty-five feet and hit a ledge without breaking a single bone and concluded that he was either blessed or reserved for a fate far worse. Finding women beautiful and worth the trouble, he married a girl his parents considered a heathen woman but whose eyes made him smile. She persuaded him to come down from the cliffs, and he persuaded her to wear a small covenant ring on her hand, spending what coin he had to make it one that would shine in starlight and whisper to her heart how much he prized her. Desiring to live in a place with fewer trees (though he misses the forested slopes of his youth), a place where you can scan the horizon for miles and see what is coming for you while it is still well away, he settled in Colorado with his wife and two daughters, and they live there now. The mountains nearby call to him with promises of refuge. Driven again and again to history with an intensity that burns his mind, he corresponds in his thick script for several hours each evening with scholars and archaeologists and even a few national leaders or thugs wearing national leaders’ clothes who hoard bits of forgotten past in far countries. He tells stories of his spiritual ancestors to any who will come by to listen, and he labors to set those stories to paper. Sometimes he lies awake beside his sleeping wife and listens in the night for any moan in the hills, but there is only her breathing soft and full and a mystery of beauty beside him. He keeps his machete sharp but hopes not to use it.
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