Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  When she was able to stand again, she motioned to them and they helped her to her feet. She stood there in the tattered shift she’d worn throughout her exile from the camp, the shift still stained with brown streaks from her fight with the dead boy in the reeds. She drew in a breath; she reeked of death and sweat and unwashed girl. She wrinkled her nose once, then composed her face and lifted her arms, like Moseh in the desert. She called out the words—the words of the Lawgiver that would summon the People to her.

  The women came stumbling from their tents and the men from their work; they had piled the cairns high, and all but a few were now finished. They gathered about her in a half circle, their faces stained with blood and dirt, their eyes weary. A few gazed at her with cautious hope.

  “I am Devora of Israel,” she said, “and I see what God sees.” She took a breath, her eyes glancing only once to the tent where Naomi had died.

  Then she faced her People and began making judgments, separating the clean from the unclean.

  PART 3: THE HIGH GALILEE

  WATER NEAR THE SKY

  HIGH IN the Galilee, where the Tumbling Water is just a stream one can wade through by brute force, there is a high plateau the Hebrews call Merom, Water Near the Sky. There a small lake reflects back the stars; lilies and other delicate water flowers cover its surface near the shore. Shielded on all sides by a bowl of earth and rock, the lake is far more placid than the Harp-Shaped Sea, and the fish there, though few, are fat and slow, and they sleep as they swim. If the fish in Kinnor are like dancing, leaping deer, the fish in Merom are more like lumbering oxen. They are not as pleasing to taste, but the Canaanites in those hills have many ways of preparing them that give delight to the tongue and gladden the heart.

  The boats that plied this small lake in that time were flat-bottomed and small, nearly coracles; in each, a single man would stand with a spear and a small net for catching the fish he impaled. In the warmer months, the boats would slip out on the quiet water in the dark before dawn and return as the sun rose, each with its cargo of bloodied fish. Salted and dried, the fish would fill great bins; the people who lived in that earthen bowl were well fed. Once, a mighty town had stood there, with a steep slope at its back and a circle of high walls of baked clay. Walls, the Canaanites had named their town, a boast to others who might wish to seize the lake from them. Now the walls were only a ring of tumbled and cracked bricks; not even a wooden palisade of cedar from the hills had been raised in their place. Hebrews had come there, with spears and cries in a language the Canaanites did not know, and they had brought with them a new God who apparently did not care for walls in his People’s path.

  Tearing their way through the walls, the Hebrews—the last of the Hebrews, for other tribes of their People had already found fertile valleys in which to pitch their tents far to the south—these weary and hungry and furious Hebrews set fire to half the town and killed many of the men whether they were armed or not, in their fury to possess this place near the sky. Women were dragged from their dying houses and thrown to the dirt streets, where sweating, ragged men forced them even as the slaughter continued on every side.

  The Law that had been given to the People of the Covenant in the desert forbade this treatment of captives:

  When you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and bring her to your tent, she will shave her head and weep for her father and her mother who are dead, for one full month, and in that time you will not touch her.

  And if you find she doesn’t please you, then you will let her go where she will. You will not sell her or make her an item of trade, for you have known her.

  Those mitzvot the judges had declared in the desert, part of the great Law to bind the tribes to each other and to the God who’d found them thirsting and perishing in the dead-haunted ravines. And often these mitzvot had been followed in the south, where the levites had demanded that the men remember the cost of breaking the Covenant. “Our fathers’ Covenant, not ours!” some of the men would cry. And the levites in wrath would shout: “Is this then your fathers’ land and not yours?

  Hear, men of Israel! Our God in the desert made this Covenant not with our fathers, but with us, with each of us who stand here alive this day.

  And the men, hearing these words, had held back their hungers and heeded the levites. It would not do to break the Covenant and to spurn the God who gives and who takes away even in the moment of taking possession of the land he’d promised them.

  But these last tribes that raged northward after all their brothers and sisters had found land in which to lift their tents—these last tribes were not eager to let any Law restrain them. Few of the women of Walls were given time to mourn their dead. Some were held to the ground, their garments torn from them, even as their husbands or fathers bled to death in the dirt beside them. The screams of the dying and the screams of the survivors tore the air.

  The newcomers, however, did keep the mitzvot that demanded cairns for the fallen. They dared not break those. In the days after the death of the town, many women gazed out of tent flaps, their faces bruised and tear-stained, the numbness in their eyes replaced for a few moments by wonder as they watched the Hebrew men gather massive stones from the slopes behind the town and pile great cairns above each of the dead, both Hebrew and Canaanite, until a forest of stone monuments stretched along the bank of the Tumbling Water where it emptied into their lake from the north. Never had they seen the dead treated so; their own way had been to weight the bodies and give them to the lake, that in time, through the digestion of fish, they might be taken back into the people. In shock, these women watched as the cairns went up, not knowing what it meant, only that it was strange, wondering that the Hebrews took time to tend to their enemy dead as well as their own, and bewildered that they feared the bodies so much that they would pile heavy rock upon them, nor give them to any fish that might be eaten by a man.

  Later, some of the women would weep bitterly for the loss of the spirits of their people, but first there was only shock. The town was gone, the men they had known were gone, their own bodies had been torn and used for the pleasure of others who did not even know their language or their names. Everything was different, everything.

  The winter that followed was the hardest Walls had ever known, for the Hebrews were yet strangers in the land and the land did not know them nor did it consent to feed them. The survivors, conquerors and conquered, squatted in the charred ruins of ancient houses or shivered in their tents; the fish stored in the bins had been squandered by the raiding spearmen, and coracles had to set out on the water even in the bitter cold to look for food. Parties of men began to leave the town, pressing north, farther into the hills, to raid the smaller villages of the Canaanites. Some perished, and some settled where they found food; few came back.

  In Walls, some of the Canaanite women were killed because they could not be fed, but most were not. And when the first caravans came through on their way from the steppes of the Horse People to the cities of the Sea People on the coast, more women were bound and bartered to them for the goods needed to make life possible again along the shores of Water Near the Sky.

  Yet it was just as likely that the desperate men might barter away a Hebrew woman rather than one of the captives, for the Canaanites who had lived uneasily beside the Hebrew women through the winter knew many useful things—including when the caravans could be expected to come through and which goods each carried. So many, indeed most, of the captives remained in the tents of those who’d claimed them. And before a year had passed, the ruins of the town were filled with the cries of infants. These children would grow up with Hebrew fathers and Canaanite mothers, and in them would survive a love of wooden houses rather than tents, and a desire for gods you could hold in your hand, and the wisdom to make the fish taste like a divine gift.

  The grandchildren of those children lived in Walls now, and Walls persisted as a town of scattered houses of wood and thatch. In some, little gods carved
from wood or clay were concealed; in some, they weren’t. In the quiet hours while the lake lay dark, the little coracles set out again upon the water, moving silent as dreams over the lake, and in them stood patient and grim men whose blood was Hebrew or Canaanite or both, wielding the spears the conquerors had brought against fish now rather than men. They were the wealthiest and best-fed settlement in the Galilee, for they had the knowledge of two peoples and the strengths of each.

  Yet they had also the griefs of two peoples, the griefs of desert grandfathers and lakeshore grandmothers. They lived fiercely and drank deeply of barley beer brought up from the valleys of Manasseh and stored in great barrels in the town’s beer-house. They danced Canaanite dances at the full moon and they kept within their houses on the Hebrew Sabbath. They loved fiercely and faced death grimly, the people of Walls. Rarely did any of them send children to serve God in Shiloh, and rarely did any go to the Feast of Tents, to remember the time in the desert.

  Exasperated, Naomi the Old had sent a levite to live among them, to remind them of the Law, and they had tolerated him—it was important, after all, to have someone who could sing the Words of Going after cairns were raised—and in time they even loved him, but they did not listen to him much. Their homes by Water Near the Sky were all the land, and the men and women of their town all the People.

  As Shomar picked his way down from the ridge toward the camp Barak’s men had pitched on the shore of Water Near the Sky, Devora thought the lake very lovely, even lovelier than that larger lake now a day behind them, the one they called a sea and over which cranes flew and beneath which fish apparently swam out of the mouths of gods. Before her on the saddle, in her arms, the navi held Hurriya, whose breathing was a little shallow. Devora could feel the heat of the girl’s fever even through her salmah. The previous night had not broken the fever, though it had not worsened either; Hurriya had wakened with it, exhausted by a long and restless night. Devora herself had wakened earlier, sore from the previous day’s riding, yet strangely relieved of her fatigue; she’d wakened with Zadok’s arms about her, strong and sure. His breathing light, for he was awake. He had not let her go during the night. Neither had he ceased watching. And he had let her sleep until daybreak.

  She had flushed, finding herself held so. She had slipped from his arms gently, not daring to look at his face. She felt his gaze on her as she washed to her elbows, nearly emptying her waterskin, then chewed on a little bread from the store Zadok carried in his saddlebag. Her tension grew. The trees seemed dim and hostile in the morning light. Hurriya still slept, though fitfully; a look at her face and a hand held a feather’s width over her brow confirmed for Devora that the Canaanite’s fever hadn’t broken. The cairn was an ominous presence, reminding her that the dead were near. And Zadok’s gaze made her acutely uncomfortable. What had she been thinking, lying in his arms like that, like a wife, no matter how frightened she had been of her dreams? What if he misunderstood, thought she were seducing him? What if—?

  But she couldn’t spend the morning in turmoil. She needed her strength of mind. She rounded on him, the words on her lips stilled by the amusement in his eyes.

  “Intolerable,” she muttered, and turned her attention to the girl. “Saddle the horses, please,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Your will, navi.” The nazarite’s voice was rough with sleep. He made very little sound as he rose and got to work breaking their camp.

  Devora focused on the Canaanite, seating herself by her and calling her name until she opened her eyes.

  “You’re very ill, girl,” Devora said softly. “You might as well know it.”

  “I know it,” Hurriya said wearily. “Being heathen does not make me a fool.”

  Devora paused, then gave her a quick nod, though she didn’t know whether she meant it as acknowledgment or apology. “I am just tense, girl. There will be more dead today. And more the next day. May God send one of us a vision with some comfort in it.”

  “Does he?” Hurriya rasped. “Those he’s sent me have been like—like nightmares.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He sends visions when they’re needed, and then they are unlikely to be pleasant.” Devora cast another uneasy glance at the terebinths. “And they are needed now.”

  She gave the girl a little water, and as soon as Hurriya had swallowed it she slipped back into sleep, and Devora gazed down at her in dismay. She hoped they did not have far to travel this day to catch up with Barak and his men. Who knew how the girl would survive another day on horseback.

  She went cold inside at the thought of Barak ben Abinoam and what he had either commanded or permitted. But as she gazed down at the sleeping girl—the sleeping navi, she reminded herself—she knew that she had a more pressing matter to attend to than her fury at Barak.

  She rose and went quickly to where Zadok was readying the horses. The nazarite had just lifted Shomar’s saddle to his back; the horse whickered softly. Devora stepped near enough to speak for his ears only. Yet standing so near him—she was more aware of him today than she had ever been before. His strength, his solidity, the way the muscles in his arms moved, the masculine scent of him. She suppressed the shiver this sent through her, felt her face burning again. She forced her thoughts to the matter at hand.

  “Zadok, I want you to watch over the girl’s safety.”

  Zadok stopped, his hand still on the girth strap. “You care for her,” he said in a low voice. Devora could hear the disapproval in it. “I know. I have eyes. But she is heathen.”

  “She is the next navi,” Devora whispered.

  Silence.

  Zadok’s eyes showed his bewilderment, as though she’d told him the sky was made of tree leaves and she expected him to gather them up for her.

  “She is the navi, Zadok. God sends visions to her.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know.” Devora pressed a hand to her temple. “I really don’t know. God’s ways are strange.”

  Zadok’s face darkened. “She is heathen. I will make no covenant with her. You, I will defend.”

  “You’ll defend who I ask you to defend,” Devora said sharply.

  Zadok just growled and turned back to the horse, which flicked its tail.

  “Damn it, Zadok, it’s strange to me too. But the life of the next navi must be preserved. Even if—” Devora swallowed. “Even if I should die. The younger navi has to make it back to Shiloh after this.”

  Zadok moved around the horse, checking the saddle and the bags.

  “Do you trust me, Zadok?”

  “I trust you, navi.” He gave her a pained look, and Devora was reminded sharply that he’d spent the night holding her.

  “Then trust me. This girl is the navi. I don’t understand it either, or like it. But God has chosen her.”

  A pause. “Your will, navi.” His tone heavy with reluctance.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I need you, Zadok.” I need you to stand at my back, she thought but didn’t say aloud. I need you to enforce my will when I make decisions. I need you to trust me. I need you to not mention last night, not act as though I am any other woman, not try to speak to me of it or—or kiss me. I need you to be as reliable and unbendable as that spear you carry, as reliable as you’ve always been.

  “You had better wake your Canaanite again,” Zadok muttered after a moment.

  Devora nodded and watched his face a moment before moving wearily to stir Hurriya from her restless sleep.

  They spent much of the rest of the day in silence, and Devora sorrowed over it. It was as though someone had planted a thicket of willows between them, and they could hardly see each other through the veil of hanging leaves.

  It was also a day of delay, for they stopped often to give Hurriya rest or to grant Devora a few moments to look through the grasses for some herbs that might calm her fever. She found only a few leaves of mint, had hoped for ginger root. She made do with what she had, but it did little good, and she wished bitterly that she h
ad some of Hannah’s knowledge of herbs. Even as girls, Hannah had never been good at remembering mitzvot, but she had always known where to find a particular blossom or a particular root and what to do with it once you found it. For Devora, there had been only the Law.

  In the end, she and Zadok walked their horses, easing their way through the last miles. Perhaps there would be herbs at the camp or at that settlement on the lakeshore—surely at Walls Devora could find a midwife with knowledge of herbs and fevers.

  They had spent the day tense, their eyes on the slopes about them, watching for the dead. Once, only once, Devora saw three human shapes moving along a distant ridge, walking in file like living men yet swaying from side to side like trees in a wind. She rode on without mentioning the corpses to the others, though she suspected Zadok had probably seen them too. It was more important to find Barak’s camp than to pursue a few straggling dead across the hills—but it was long before Devora could tear her gaze away from those distant, ominous figures.

  The fact that they didn’t see more was unnerving; after the attack in the night, Devora had been ready to see herds shambling toward them, moaning and hungering for her flesh. The emptiness of this country, the constant vigilance, Zadok’s tense silence, the shallow, feverish breathing of the Canaanite girl in the saddle before her—all this made Devora so jumpy that she was nearly nauseous. And the saddle rubbed her thighs terribly raw, adding an acute physical discomfort.

  Now dusk was falling and Barak’s tents lay below them by the water. The navi saw the open sky reflected in the lake, and when she glanced to the side she saw the lake reflected in Zadok’s eyes. “Few tents,” the nazarite said quietly.