by Stant Litore
Yohanna reached for his arm, gripped it, and lifted him to his feet. Something nagged at the edge of his mind. Then, as he steadied Yeshua with a hand at his shoulder, the thought burst in on him with a suddenness like a crack in the mast. He gasped.
“I will be back.” Releasing the navi’s arm, he ran for the door. “I will be back!”
He flung open the door, burst through, and slammed it behind him. In the street, he shoved aside Bar Cheleph and another young man who were laying planks of heavy wood beside Rahel bat Eleazar’s doorstep. He hardly noticed them; he broke into a run, and he ran faster than he had ever run in his life, faster even than on the night of the dead when so many young men and women he knew had died. He ran and his heart beat with a hope that was so violent it was like panic.
Yeshua leaned against one wall of the atrium, drinking his water, his eyes dark with thought. Having almost forgotten he was there, Koach helped his mother kindle flame above the coals in the cookpit in the atrium. There was another pit near it, a smaller one, long unused, but Rahel kindled it also, and took a small pouch of spices and herbs and sprinkled them over the coals, and their redolence filled the air. Koach had not smelled that in … nearly a year. The scented fire. The coals on which you would lay a fish’s heart to keep the shedim away.
“I hope it will,” Koach whispered, watching the little flames. He should have been the one to carry Tamar to a tomb. It should have been him. But he couldn’t have carried her with one arm. He should have gone with Shimon, at least.
“I hope it will too, son.” Rahel didn’t need to ask what he meant. The scented fire seemed to them small and fragile, but perhaps it meant no one else would be eaten.
“I thought we’d have to bury you, too,” Koach whispered, blinking quickly. He looked to the stranger, Yeshua, a surge of gratitude and confusion in his heart.
“Don’t tell Shimon,” Rahel said. “Your brother has worries enough.” She closed the pouch and set it aside. “The Sabbath is coming,” she whispered. “This evening. If my sons can rest, really rest, with full bellies …” She smiled faintly. “… That, I ask for. I feel … so weak. Like I might fall over.”
Koach said nothing. He was thinking. For the first time since that cry on the shore—“The dead! The dead!”—he was thinking.
Something had fed on Tamar, but hadn’t eaten anyone else. It had found her on her way to the shore to meet him, and either she’d … stopped … it, or after wounding her it had pursued someone else, following them away from the town. And the attack must have happened some way up the shore from Koach’s own hiding place beneath the boat, because he’d heard no cry from her, nor any moan from the corpse.
He tried to make sense of that.
The corpse might have been missing part of its throat, might have been unable to voice one of the low wails of the dead.
But he should have heard her.
Surely he would have heard her scream for help.
Perhaps Tamar had needed to take the long way through the stone houses, to avoid watchful eyes. Or there might be some other reason she had not been near.
Or perhaps she had been.
Perhaps the thing had seized her, torn into her before she even knew it was there, and perhaps she—who had learned how to suffer beatings in silence—had swallowed her own cry, to keep him from running out to her.
That thought was more than he could bear.
“There are still dead out there,” Koach said.
Rahel’s hands paused in their work, but only for an instant. Then she whispered, as though to herself or to God, “I ask only for rest for my sons. And for me.”
The dying wasn’t over yet.
Koach thought he knew why the corpse that had killed his beloved was not in the town, nor on the shore. Tamar had led it away, in silence, led it away from her lover and her town, before finding some way to slip back unseen by it. And when she had, the fever had already been on her, the fever that would burn her away, leaving her body empty for one of the hungry shedim to make its home in. She hadn’t come to him to say goodbye. She had run to her father’s house, perhaps with dawn already in the sky, to die there.
To protect him.
To protect their town.
She had been the strong one.
Rahel looked at him, and her face softened. “It is all right, my son,” she said. “Sometimes you have to weep.”
He lifted his hand to his face. His cheeks were wet.
“How do you bear it?” he whispered.
Memory flickered in her eyes. “You just do.”
“Does it get better?”
“No. It doesn’t.” She reached for a small basket lined with cloth, something to place fish in. “But you get stronger. The burden is not less heavy, but you are more able to carry it.”
Koach’s face crumpled. “I want her back, amma.”
Her face crumpled too. She held out her arms and he threw himself into them, as he had many times when he was a small boy.
“I know,” she whispered into his hair, holding him tight, “I know.”
A heavy slam of wood against wood interrupted them. Koach gave a start and sprang to his feet.
The door. It was the door.
He exchanged a fearful glance with his mother. Her eyes hardened.
Koach ran to the door and pulled it clumsily open. A plank of rough-hewn pine barred the way at the height of his shoulders, and two men—Natan El and Mordecai—held it in place while Bar Cheleph swung his hammer.
He was nailing it to the doorposts!
“What?” Koach gasped.
Bar Cheleph’s eyes were wide with fear. “Get back, Hebel. All within are unclean. You’ll die, and rise,” Bar Cheleph said. “But we won’t let you break loose to devour the town.”
The men let go of the board and reached for another.
Heart racing, Koach glanced past the men. The street outside had emptied. A few people watched from the doorways of other houses, eyes showing their whites. He caught sight of the silent woman, standing in the shade cast by the nearest wall of Benayahu’s house. She had pressed herself to the wall as though to make herself unseen or unnoticed. Her face was white with terror.
“No one’s unclean within,” Koach said. His throat tightened. “My mother lives.”
“Not for long.” The board clacked into place beneath the other, and Bar Cheleph set an iron nail at one end and drove the hammer against it. The sound was fierce and brutal and loud, the board driven against the doorpost and the doorpost driven against the stone wall of the house. Bar Cheleph kept swinging the hammer, rhythmic blows as though the house were being beaten. Koach shrank back, a wild image in his head of the house boarded up for the ritual seven days, he and his mother and Yeshua dying of thirst within, unless they found a way to leap, unseen, from the roof.
Koach drew himself up, his voice high with fear. “This is my brother’s house—”
“And when he returns, he’ll understand. Seven days to separate the unclean from the living. Then he can go inside and sort out the living and the dead, the clean and the bitten.”
“Don’t!”
“Get back, Hebel.” Bar Cheleph lifted the hammer, the whites of his eyes showing. “We saw the dead girl touch you, saw you touch her cold flesh. I grieve for your mother, we all will. But she is dead. Or will be in moments. We all saw the wound.” He glanced over his shoulder at those who stood at their doors. “Help us! Quickly. Before she rises!”
Mordecai lifted a third board, and he and Bar Cheleph slammed it into place below the others, at waist height. Koach shivered; he was looking now at a wall, a wall of hard wood with chinks of light between the planks.
He ran back into the house’s interior, into the open atrium. Rahel was nowhere to be seen. Koach ran to the stranger, who still leaned against one wall with a nearly emptied bowl of water in his hands and one of Rahel’s blankets about his shoulders.
“Bar Yosef,” he cried.
The man didn’t loo
k up. His eyes stared into some other place.
“Bar Yosef … navi … they’re boarding up the door. Help me stop them. Please!”
Still he didn’t look up.
Koach bit back a shout of frustration. If only he were not hebel, if he were a man like any other, he would be carrying his lover’s body up the hill and Shimon would be here to stop Bar Cheleph. “I have only one arm. Help me!”
“They aren’t boarding up the door. They’ve stopped.” Yeshua frowned. “Or they will stop. In a moment … Can’t you hear them, Koach? The dead, all the dead.”
Koach felt a chill. But he couldn’t think about that now. He looked about the atrium desperately, and then rushed to his secret room. He ducked inside and knelt by the cold wall, his fingers scrabbling at the loose stone. There. He felt the hilt cold in his palm. His carving knife, small but freshly whetted and sharp.
He stepped out of the small room and hesitated, his heart wild in his chest. That hilt in his palm.
Yeshua watched him, his face troubled, but said nothing.
Ice in his heart. “I’ll do what I have to,” Koach whispered.
Suddenly the rug over the door to Rahel’s room was drawn aside, and she stepped out into the atrium and walked with swift purpose toward her outer door. No trace of her earlier struggle, her fever, or her torn and soiled garments remained. Her hair was combed and bound back as though she were preparing to host guests in her home. She wore her cleanest, least tattered gown, one green like the grass by the sea. No kohl for her eyes or adornments for her ears and throat, for she was Hebrew, not Greek. Yet she stood tall and regal. Bar Yonah’s wife, once a power in the town in her own right.
Koach fell in at her side, his knuckles white about the knife.
“I am not dead, Bar Cheleph,” she called out in a cool, clear voice.
Bar Cheleph looked in over the boards and his eyes widened. “Get back,” he said.
“It’s all right,” Rahel said. “I have no fever. I am well. There is no need to board up my door, or to do any violence to my house. Let it stand as it stood when my husband lived in it.”
“Bat Eleazar,” Bar Cheleph whispered.
She met his gaze, then drew her sleeve up her arm to the shoulder. “Whatever this stranger from the inland hills might be,” Rahel said, “he has washed away my fever as I might wash away dirt from this gown. I am well.”
Mordecai gasped and stumbled back.
Bar Cheleph only stared at Rahel’s arm, at the smooth skin where a wound had been. The muscles of his throat moved.
“Tear down the boards,” he said hoarsely.
When neither of the other men moved, he gasped, “Tear down the boards. Now. As you love my father, move!”
There was a great wrenching of wood and the cry of nails being torn free of the doorposts, and then the men cast the planks aside and the door was again an open space. Koach took a slow breath, let it out. Then he slipped the knife quietly into the pocket inside his tunic. He hadn’t needed it. He shivered. If he’d used it to carve flesh, he didn’t think he would ever again have been able to use it for carving wood.
But he had nearly lost his mother today. He would not lose her again. For a moment, just a moment, he understood his brother. Understood his brooding, his brief storms of temper. Understood the strain he felt, protecting their family.
Bar Cheleph’s shoulders were tense. He kept his gaze lowered. Her face stern, Rahel turned and walked back into her atrium.
Before he could either follow or shut the door, Koach was startled by a cry in the street. He saw Yohanna striding down from the direction of the synagogue and his father’s house. In his arms he carried a lean figure in a white robe. His face was strikingly like Yohanna’s, only folded up into wrinkles, his hair and beard the clean white of foam on the night sea.
He was Yesse.
The priest’s father.
Behind them came a great crowd of people—men and women, fishers carrying baskets, and even a few boat people at the back, their faces slack with fatigue and grief and the awareness of the heavy tread of despair stalking the street behind them.
“Navi!” Yohanna cried. “Navi!”
They turned and saw Yeshua standing in the middle of the atrium, his hair hanging about his face, lank and sweaty, half concealing the darkness of his eyes.
“Little time,” he said. “Little … little time. The dead … I can … can hear … All of them, all of them coming.”
YESSE
“Watch the shore.” Yeshua’s voice was as calm as though he were mentioning the color of the sky. “They are coming.”
Bar Cheleph cast a wild glance at his adopted brother and grandfather, and then turned and bolted from the doorstep, racing down the narrow street. The others looked on with wide eyes. Koach swallowed, realizing suddenly what the man’s words might mean—if he were indeed the navi, if he indeed could see the things God could see.
Yohanna didn’t seem even to have heard. He simply carried his grandfather over the threshold, his gaze on the stranger’s face. “Help him, Bar Yosef,” he said. “Help him.”
Yeshua was staring after Bar Cheleph, and he didn’t answer. Rahel glanced from his face to Yohanna’s. “Bar Zebadyah,” she said softly, “will you lay your grandfather by the olive?”
He nodded quickly, and carried him past. Rahel joined him, laying out blankets by the tree.
“I need to be there,” Yeshua murmured. “I need to be there, there at the heart of it … but for what … what do I need to do, what do I need to do …” He let out a groan of frustration and lowered his head. For the briefest moment, his hands seemed to burn, as though he were holding them before a hot fire and the light was shining through his flesh. Koach’s eyes widened.
“Navi,” Rahel called.
Yeshua was breathing hard, as though he’d been straining against a locked door. The light faded, and he glanced up. His face beaded with sweat, as it had been after he had healed Koach’s mother. He walked slowly toward the olive in the atrium, where Yohanna had lain his grandfather gently down. Koach followed. Unnoticed behind him, the people in the street who had followed Yohanna began to step through the door, their faces troubled or awed.
Yeshua knelt by the old man, gazing at the ruin of the elder’s leg, twisted on that night of destruction long past. Rahel sat beside him, while Yohanna stood anxiously by. Yesse gazed back at the stranger with a question in his eyes.
“Help him, navi,” Yohanna said.
“I am already tired,” Yeshua said softly. “Already tired.”
“You are Eliya,” Yohanna said fiercely. “You are the navi. You are the one who takes away the uncleanness from the earth. Ha Matbil said it.”
“The door is too hot,” Yeshua murmured. “And even if I can, even if I can step through, what I will see, whatever I will do, whatever power this is the father has put in my hands, I cannot heal the whole land, Yohanna, not the whole land …” He swallowed, and his voice dropped, and he hung his head. “Yet what else, what else? Listen to the screaming until I am mad? Until it drives me back into the rocks? Into the sand and the wind and the wind and the desert? I cannot do that. I cannot.”
The atrium was filling now with men and women. Rahel cast them a troubled glance but kept her attention on the stranger who had called her back to life with a song and a touch. The others, and Koach with them, looked on silently, waiting, as they had waited to see God’s touch on their town for years, but now their waiting had a sharpness to it, an immediacy. Yesse’s eyes bore that same look. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t exactly hope. Only the demand for an ending.
“Who wounded you?” Yeshua asked without lifting his head.
“It doesn’t matter.” Yesse’s was an old voice, rough and full of memory. “He no longer breathes.” Yesse wet his lower lip with his tongue. “You spoke of the dead, the unclean lurching dead. There was a corpse on the shore, I saw it with my own eyes.”
“More coming,” Yeshua whispered. “I hea
r them.”
“Is it true? Is it true, what my grandson tells me?” Yesse gripped Yohanna’s hand with bony fingers. “That God has sent a navi into the land? When have we needed one more?”
“When have we … you have said it,” Yeshua said softly. His shoulders straightened. Then he said, quiet and clear, “I was raised the nagar’s son, his son, in Natzeret on the hill. I take things that are broken and broken apart and I join them, I join them together again.” Suddenly Yeshua reached for the old man’s other hand and gripped it tightly. His gaze met the old man’s, and his eyes burned with sudden, dark intensity. “This is the truth, the truth, the truth I heard in the desert: all the world is broken and broken and broken apart. But nothing is broken that cannot be remade. Nothing is ill that cannot be healed, nothing captive that cannot be freed. Do you believe this, do you believe it?”
“I do,” the old grandfather whispered, held by his gaze. “Yes, I do. Today I saw nets full of fish. I believe you.”
“Then I can believe it also. Stand, old father,” he whispered. “Stand. Your faith … it has made you well.”
Yesse stared at him, his hands shaking. A strange look passed over his face. His right leg shifted slightly. He glanced at his calf, and his eyes were wild. Yohanna let go of his grandfather’s hand and stood, almost falling over.
Yeshua rose more slowly, bending over the old man, still clasping his other hand; Yesse clung to his fingers. After a moment, Yesse got stiffly to his feet beside the stranger.
