Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  Hurriya shook her head. “I’m not going back there.” She paused. “I don’t care about these visions,” she added after a moment. “Or your God. But help me find Anath.” She swallowed. “And the dead. If you want to help me, tell me everything you know about the dead. You have so many rules about the dead. So teach me.”

  “Girl—”

  “I am no girl. I am Hurriya of Judges’ Well. I have lost my child. Those corpses—they took my child. My child. I have one sister, and that is all I have. I will find her, I will help her stay safe.” She was speaking rapidly now, trembling with urgency. “We are going to a camp of armed men. When—when I am clean—” She mouthed the word with distaste, “help me find clothes. And a knife. And my sister. That is what I ask of Israel’s navi.”

  “I will see that you have clothes. And we will have to find herbs for your fever. If I teach you about the dead,” Devora added after a moment, “I must teach you the whole Law. And you must abide by it.”

  “Your Law.” Hurriya laughed coldly, bitterly. “Always your Law, your strange and terrible Law. You would cast a woman from the tents because a corpse touched her, or stone a woman for placing a bowl of fruit before the goddess.”

  “If necessary, yes,” Devora said hoarsely. “The People must be kept clean.”

  Hurriya turned her face away, shivering in her salmah. “Teach me, then. I don’t care.”

  Devora’s temper flared. “You do care, you impossible heathen!” she hissed through her teeth. “Damn you. Filthy, unwashed—you think your gods and the corpses of your dead are both things to keep in your houses! You bring the dead down on us, bring the blight and the curse and barrenness to the land—and then you lie down ready to die and you don’t care! You do care, damn you!”

  “It was a Hebrew corpse in the terebinths,” the girl whispered without turning her head. “And a ‘heathen’ who saved you. Now I am so cold—please. Let me be. Please.”

  The bitterness had left her voice, only weariness now. Her tone doused Devora’s temper. The girl was feverish and suffering. Of course she didn’t care at times; she hurt too much to care.

  Devora sighed. She had a double obligation to this strange girl—as a supplicant and as the next navi, who must learn from her. She reached for the girl’s waterskin where it lay discarded by the fire pit and held it to Hurriya’s lips. “Drink. As much as you can, before you sleep. We have to cool that fever.”

  Hurriya didn’t open her eyes, but her throat moved as she swallowed. Devora tilted the waterskin, and to her relief the Canaanite drank deeply. “We’ll talk after we’ve slept,” Devora said, then lowered the waterskin and left it by Hurriya’s hand.

  A clack of stone behind her, and Devora turned to see Zadok piling rock upon the pit he’d dug in the earth. The body was out of sight, already in the ground. She breathed a sigh of relief. The corpse had unnerved her. More than that, it had ripped loose the already fragile latches on her memory. A glance at Hurriya showed that the girl had already fled back into sleep.

  Devora too lay down in her bedding; she was shaking again. She could feel the cold of that corpse’s flesh through her sleeves, where it had seized her. She kept her eyes open. All too clearly, she could imagine other dead stumbling out of those trees while she slept, waking her with their low moans only moments before they grasped her and—

  She held herself tightly, turned her back to the trees with an effort, and faced Zadok, who was crouching across the fire from her, making a triangle between the three of them. The back of her neck twitched; she couldn’t stop thinking about what might creep out of the dark behind her. With that vast, menacing hoshekh behind her, the fire was little comfort. She glanced at Zadok’s eyes, saw them reflecting back the fire, tried to summon up her anger at him for leaving their fire. But her anger was like damp kindling that wouldn’t light; the fear was too great.

  After a moment, Zadok lifted his gaze toward the sky, and she followed with hers. Drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. The wind had died and the clouds were drifting apart; there was a great fissure in the sky, like a ravine cut into the darkness, and in it shone bright stars. Devora found herself calming.

  “Bless you, Zadok,” she murmured. He must have seen her glancing often at the sky earlier. Must have known what she was hoping to see.

  She willed her body to relax.

  Closed her eyes.

  Immediately she saw her mother’s face. Vivid as though her mother were crouching beside her, teeth bared.

  Devora’s eyes flew open. She clenched her hands tightly around her arms, breathed deep for another moment. If she couldn’t banish that memory from her mind, sleep would be out of the question. She would end up weeping through the night.

  She watched the stars a few moments.

  At last she sat up. Put her back to the fire and reached for Mishpat. She laid the blade naked across her thighs and looked into the dark beneath the trees.

  “How many dead do you think are out there, Zadok?”

  “Too many.”

  A stick cracked in the fire.

  “Yes,” Devora said. “Too many.” She shivered, gazing out at the dark. She didn’t turn to look at the nazarite. Instead, she watched how firelight and shadow played across the rough stones of the cairn.

  It had been long since she’d slept without Lappidoth’s arms about her, yet now she was here, alone, without him. Desperately she thought of him, wondered where he was. Was he sleeping that deep sleep of his, or was he standing, perhaps outside his tent, gazing up at the same stars in the same sky, praying for his wife? Devora yearned suddenly for the warmth of his body against her back and for the smell of him. Lappidoth smelled of cattle and wind and heather and wild barley, for he would run his hands through the barley that grew wild in the pasture as he walked toward his herds.

  The cold panic was rising in her again. During the day she was in control, she could cut through her fear like her own iron blade. But now, after dark, after seeing that corpse—she needed some way to survive until dawn. With that cairn so near, and the darkness beneath the trees, and no tent over her, no arms about her—she couldn’t do this. She breathed faster. Then an idea occurred to her that was comforting, but it gave her a pang of guilt, too. She didn’t know how to ask for it without it seeming like—

  She wrestled with it.

  “Will you lie beside me, Zadok?” she whispered finally.

  She heard him stir slightly.

  “To hold me, while I sleep?” Her shoulders alone betrayed her tension. “I know we will both have evil dreams tonight. Yet I would like very much to sleep, if I can.” She swallowed. “And not wake screaming.”

  She felt terribly vulnerable, even naked, asking for this. It meant setting aside her dignity as the navi, it meant—too many things. It should be Lappidoth here. She should be asking him.

  Yet Zadok had always had her entire trust.

  She felt the nazarite settle beside her, sitting by her. A powerful, large presence. She didn’t look at him.

  “You miss him,” his voice rumbled in the dark.

  She didn’t have to ask who he meant. “Yes.” Her throat tightened. “I wish he were here.” If he were, if Lappidoth were here to hold her, he only and no one else, she could let herself cry. She could let herself shake apart in terror, until the fear had passed over her like the angel of death, knowing that he would still be there holding her, without judgment, while she put herself back together again.

  “It is a strange thing I ask,” Devora whispered, burning with anger at herself for showing the nazarite how vulnerable she felt. “You can refuse.”

  “I don’t.” His voice softened.

  Devora nodded wearily and lay down, and after a moment Zadok lay behind her, his beard scratchy against her neck. His arms closed about her, warm and strong. She shivered.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He squeezed her gently.

  “Don’t fall asleep.”

  “I won’t, navi
.”

  She lay still in his arms a while, willing sleep to come. The Canaanite had begun to snore softly. Devora could hear from Zadok’s breathing that he was still awake, and a calm settled over her. He would watch. It was all right. And if she woke, his arms would hold her to the present, as her husband’s did. His arms were strange, more muscled than her husband’s. She felt another twinge of guilt, yet it was strangely pleasant being held in them. There was so much of his father in Zadok, so much of Zefanyah. She felt his breath on her shoulder and found her heart beating a little faster.

  “Zadok,” she whispered.

  “Navi.”

  She paused. “In the trees, you called out my name. My name. Not navi.”

  He tensed a little.

  “You called Devora. As though my name belonged on your lips.” Lying in his arms, she was suddenly alarmed at the intimacies the two of them had taken that night.

  “I was frightened for you, navi,” he said. “I intended no insult to you.”

  “Don’t do it again,” she said quietly.

  “Your will, navi.” He sounded weary.

  She didn’t say anything more. She watched the darkness under the trees warily. She wondered if Zadok cared for her. In that way. She’d felt for a moment that she could sense it in his breathing as he held her. And he’d called her name, her own name, freely, even as a husband might call out his wife’s name. He’d never done that before. She wondered how she felt about it if he did feel that. It had been a long time since she was a girl, and pursued. She was not one now.

  And she needed Zadok to be Zadok, the Zadok she knew, the man who stood with his spear behind her seat beneath the olive tree. A man she could trust to perform any task without flinching, whether the task was to spear an infant corpse or hold her while she slept. He had always been reliable, as few men were. What if there were passions, longings, in his heart that she did not know? What if, in the uncertain north, he was to become strange to her as well? If she could not trust Zadok—if she could not trust even herself, even her own heart—what was there left in the land that she could trust? What stood between her and the moaning in the dark?

  She clung to his arm with her own small hands and closed her eyes, forced herself to breathe evenly. Whispered a few words of the mitzvot to calm herself—

  If a living man touch any unclean thing, a corpse, or the carcass of an unclean beast, or the body of any creeping thing, then he too is unclean.

  She thought of the Law stretched like a great tent over the People to keep them safe. She felt Zadok’s chest against her back, strong and sure. Felt his breathing. He was still awake, still watching. One by one, Devora doused the fires of the busy camp her thoughts had made in her mind. She could not allow her thoughts to dance madly in the firelight, like the shadows dancing on the cairn. Right now she needed sleep and someone to watch over her during the hours she was defenseless. That was all that mattered. The rest must wait. She breathed slower.

  Though she barely remembered it, there had been a time when she had not recited the Law before sleeping. A time when she’d had no nightmares to ward off. A time when she had been young, had not been the navi.

  PART 2: SHILOH, YEARS PAST

  THE GIRL WEEPING

  THE FIRST time Devora ever glimpsed a thing that did not yet exist, she was twelve years old and only recently a woman. The vision came to her the day before her mother’s death. It was just after dawn and there was frost on the heather, one of the last frosts of the year. Devora was carrying a ewer down to the stream outside her parents’ camp to fill with water, humming to herself. The frost made little noise beneath her feet, for she’d wound heavy cloth around her sandals to keep her feet warm, and this muffled the sound. Her mind was on the changes and the soreness in her body and the prospect of being permitted to go to the Feast of Tents for the first time later that year. She broke into a run for the sheer joy of it, just to feel the wind in her hair. This was a pure kind of joy, a kind she would rarely experience again.

  Without warning, heat blazed within her as though she’d leapt from the frost right into the smoke above a fire pit. She gasped for air and stopped, almost falling to her knees. Even as she did, she glimpsed across the stream, startling her, a young woman who looked identical to her. A woman who had her face. She was running through the grasses, weeping. Devora held her breath and would have called out, but in a moment the other woman was gone. Just gone.

  WHAT GOD’S EYES SEE

  THE SECOND time, Devora was fifteen, and the vision came to her only moments after her first kiss.

  At that time, Devora lived in the girls’ tent in Shiloh, a vast, four-sided pavilion shielded on one side by a wall of tall terebinth trees, like a green veil between the girls and the tents of the priests. At first Devora resided there as a ward of Naomi’s, a waif who had wandered to Shiloh out of the hills, crying incoherently about the dead. The old navi Naomi had listened to her and sent the nazarites out to find the camp from which Devora had fled. Several of them returned to Shiloh days later, their faces grim, the wooden staves they carried darkened with fresh stains. Devora had watched them enter the camp, wide-eyed, and then had hidden beneath her blankets in the girls’ tent until her trembling stopped.

  The other girls had resented her. She was not one of them. No father had brought her to Shiloh to give her to God along with bushels of wheat or a young, unblemished bull. She had no father at all, and no priest had spoken for her, asking for a betrothal, as had already happened with many of the other dedicates. Devora was a stranger in the girls’ tent. And she often woke them, screaming, from her dreams. The other girls tormented her, and Devora in her misery struck upon an unusual solution. In the middle of one night she got up and knelt in the middle of the great pavilion and pressed her face to the earth and cried out, waking the others:

  Ata adonai, whose hands made earth and sky,

  Who breathed life,

  I bring you a gift,

  a small gift,

  the only gift I have.

  I give to your service and your use,

  this girl Devora of Ephraim tribe,

  this girl is yours,

  consecrated to you,

  kadosh, kadosh,

  she serves you.

  Hannah, the oldest of the girls, gave an indignant cry when Devora finished and lifted her face. “You can’t dedicate yourself!”

  “I just did,” Devora said quietly, and she faced the other girl with a new boldness in her eyes. “No less than you or the nazarites or the navi. I am God’s.”

  Devora had begun running through the grasses that morning of her mother’s death, and though she now lived in a permanent camp, she hadn’t stopped running. In those first summers in Shiloh, Devora fought to banish from her memory the death of her mother and the growling of the dead in that camp. Her memory seemed to her a badly woven basket; things obviously were capable of leaking through gaps left in the weave, for she’d forgotten things before. So she packed her mind with the six hundred mitzvot the way a farmer packs a basket with grain, leaving no unused space, hoping that the more she filled her mind with the Law and the traditions that kept the People safe, the less space there would be for the terrors of the past.

  In the ferocity of her study and her flight from memory, Devora knew she seemed grim for a young woman. The one joy of girlhood that remained to her was to watch the young nazarites on the fighting ground each morning, admiring the way the sun had bronzed their powerful arms, noting the sheen of sweat on their bodies as they danced the spears. Young Devora had a favorite among the nazarites, a man who bested most who came against him. In his strength and certainty, he reminded Devora of the nameless herdsman who had defended his cattle from the dead, that man who appeared often in her dreams.

  The nazarite had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of a spearhead, and the other young men teased him over it. Devora was drawn to him for that. He was not godlike and unreachable; he was like her. He too was nettled by
his peers. Devora admired him with a fierceness in her heart for the way he responded. For the nazarite would clap his brother on the shoulder and laugh. “We will be fighting on some high slope and God will look down out of his wide sky and see us all sweating in the heat, and he will be looking for some man to bless that day. His eyes will notice my shoulder. And God will say, There is my servant Zefanyah, I will bless him. The rest of you will all have to find other ways to attract God’s attention.”

  To Devora’s delight and embarrassment, her nazarite took to watching her in the evenings. He would stand within earshot of the tables where Eleazar the high priest taught the six hundred mitzvot of the Law, one table for the sons of priests and one for the dedicates who might become their wives and thus must know more of the Law than the wives of herders or tanners or caravan merchants. Devora would flush when she felt the nazarite’s gaze, and one evening, for the first time, she failed to answer one of Eleazar’s inquiries correctly. The high priest gave her a prolonged stare, then grunted and moved on to ask a question of the other table, without any reprimand beyond that small, noncommittal noise. But Devora’s face burned as though God had placed a sun in front of her. And the other girls whispered quietly about it, which made her burn even more.

  That night, Devora stayed behind, feeling an embarrassed need to apologize to Eleazar. The apology only made him cross.

  “Get some rest, Devora. You’re only, after all, a woman,” he muttered, waving a hand dismissively.

  Devora’s eyes darkened at the comment. It was viciously unfair—she had a better memory than any of those who sat at the boys’ table—but she didn’t have a response that wouldn’t earn her a beating or a week of chores about the camp, so she turned on her heel and stalked away through the tents, thinking dark thoughts about God’s appointed high priest.