by Stant Litore
These men needed her.
Yet.
She gazed up the ravine. She was certain she heard moaning now. How many dead? And Barak alone, limping and splashing up that stream, with corpses in pursuit. Ride after me, navi. Ride and find my body.
She’d made a covenant with the man.
In the tents of the north, the Covenant with God was uprooted and torn apart—but she still had her own covenants to keep. If she were to turn now from this riverbank, if she were to leave Barak to the teeth of the dead, how would she be any different from Omri or Nimri?
Still she hesitated. This was a terrible choice.
She thought of Hurriya gazing up at her, her eyes glassy with fever. We are both women.
The decision of one man or woman to stand between another and harm or injustice: that was the foundation of the Covenant. It was the one essential act on which shalom, peace, depended. Without it, there was no Covenant, no Pact between people or between people and God. Hurriya’s eyes had told her that. She had learned it, not in her mind but in her heart, deeply, as she’d sat watching Hurriya die. She could not unlearn it now. She could not betray Hurriya’s memory that way.
And she was done with leaving her own dead behind her, unburied, moaning in her memory, driving her to panic and tears at night.
She made her decision.
“What is your name?” Devora asked the youth, who had followed her to the riverbank. Other men were approaching a short distance behind.
He drew himself up. “I am Gideon,” he said.
That made Devora smile slightly, even in her haste, for the youth was arrogant to name himself without mentioning his father’s name or even his tribe—as though his name might be known in and of itself—but it was an arrogance she liked. If a youth could still be arrogant after tonight, he was strong enough for the task before him. “It’s a good name,” she said. “Gideon, tonight you must lead the men from here, though I have no oil to anoint you.” She saw his eyes widen. “Be strong and courageous, Gideon. Gather the men and raise cairns. Then go to Shiloh; I will follow when I can. Make sure you don’t camp too near—they will not be pleased there with the men of the north. The high priest is a boy; you want to talk to his mother, Hannah. Ask for messages to be sent to every encampment in Israel, both Hebrew and Canaanite. Have messages sent to the Kenites and to any friendly chieftains across the Tumbling Water. Tell them what has happened. Tell them there are more dead, thousands, coming down out of White Cedars. This is the word of the navi.”
“Your will, navi,” the young man breathed.
She hesitated, taking the measure of this young man. “There is one more thing. The men must be checked for bites, all who fought in this field tonight. You remember Walls? The clean and the unclean must be separated. Check them all.”
The young man went white. Seeing this, Devora leaned close, lowering her voice. “Gideon, we won tonight. Don’t forget it. Check the wounded. Keep the men clean. Shelter the stranger and the fatherless. Any covenants you make, keep them. Live by the Law, and God’s hand will be on you.”
He nodded.
Devora turned her attention to the river below, while Gideon watched her. Her face became grim. If Barak had indeed fled upriver, she might find that she needed to get down there to help him or to retrieve his body. The thought of standing between the high, closed walls of the riverbanks, perhaps dragging a dead man with her through the water while the dead lumbered after her like a trapped herd of water oxen—the thought made her dizzy with dread. Clambering down that bank would be like descending into some other place, some dream country that was without Covenant and knew only teeth and blood.
In any case, she didn’t see how she could get Shomar down that bank. With a sigh, she slid from the gelding’s back. She turned to Gideon. “This is my husband’s horse,” she said quietly, “and the finest in Israel. Take care of him and receive a navi’s blessing. Lose him or endanger him, and receive a navi’s curse.”
“Your will, navi!” He looked with awe on the horse, as though the animal had been touched by God.
Leaning her sword against her hip, Devora took the gelding’s head in her hands gently and kissed Shomar’s nose. Shomar, who had borne her so far and through so many perils. “I will see you back safe to Lappidoth,” she whispered, looking in the damp pools of the gelding’s eyes. “I promise.”
Devora gave the youth a stern look, then patted Shomar once more on the neck, took up her blade, and stepped away. She began to walk, as quickly as she could, ignoring stiff muscles. She did not look back. Mishpat she carried unsheathed at her side as she moved along the edge of the bank, watchful of both the water below and the barley grasses about her. Not all the barley had blighted, and some patches of it here by the bank were still full of life; the brushing of it across her arms was strangely comforting as she walked.
For a moment she felt that she was again that small girl fleeing her mother’s camp, leaving behind her a field of bodies and hoping against every fear in her heart that somewhere ahead of her was a refuge and a tent to rest in. After a few moments Devora halted and bent with a moan at the ache in her body. She took up a handful of dirt and rubbed the soil into her palms, grimacing. She didn’t need to be any filthier, but her hands were sweating, and if later she had to climb down that bank, she did not want to lose her grip halfway down. And, with a little satisfaction, she noticed that the dirt on her right palm gave her a better grip on Mishpat’s hilt. Straightening, she resumed her walk and set her mind firmly on her task, on the fulfilling of her covenant.
She could hear old Naomi’s voice as truly as though the woman were walking beside her. You do what you must, you trust the rest to God. Some days, a woman can only save one life.
GOD RISING OVER THE WATER
EVEN BEFORE Barak opened his eyes, he knew he was in trouble. It wasn’t just the pain in his right leg or the ice-cold of water under his back.
It was the moans.
They were many. He forced his eyes open, saw his feet first, one bare and without a sandal. The water, cool and dark. The embankment he’d slid down, perhaps only moments before. He looked up farther, saw the starlit sky and dark silhouettes against it, at the edge of the bank, gazing down at him. Moaning in such persistent hunger that he began to shiver violently where he lay in the water.
Even as he watched, one of the dead leaned out, its hand clutching as though to grasp him, and the corpse toppled down the embankment. There was a crack of bone, and with his heart pounding, Barak saw the thing lurch to its feet perhaps a stone’s throw from him, one arm limp at its side. Two others were already standing in the middle of the creek, lurching toward him.
Panic shot, violent and cold, through him, as though he’d been speared to the riverbed. For a moment he lay there in the water, watching them approach. Then with a cry he leapt to his feet, glancing about wildly for the spear he’d fashioned from a terebinth branch, but it was gone—either left up on the high bank above him or borne downstream on the water, though that seemed unlikely, as the Tumbling Water here looked to be only knee-deep in the middle. Nor did he have his knife.
The dead closed on him; others now were falling from the bank or being shoved by those behind them. Barak stumbled out of the water, half-dragging the leg he’d injured in his fall; his right leg was torn and bleeding, but it was not broken. Vaguely he remembered a desperate fight at the bank and then being shoved over the edge by the press of the corpses. He could hear distant screams and more moans of the dead and a crackling like flame. He couldn’t have been out for more than a minute or two.
He stumbled along the edge of the water, staggering upriver, stubbing his good foot hard against a rock. Pain shot up his injured leg at each step. He could hear the dead splashing behind him, close behind him. Cast a glance over his shoulder, saw them reaching for him. Hissing in pain, he fought to push himself to a run, but his leg felt like giving out. With his hands he tore at his bronze breast-piece and tossed it aside as h
e lurched on. It landed in the water and shone there, would shine there perhaps for years until a patina of green caked to it. It would not have protected him against the dead, and he needed to shed any extra weight. He had to get out ahead of these corpses and climb back up the bank and fight his way to his men. He knew that was what he had to do, but panic coursed through him, urging him to just run, run, until he could find some place to hide. He was unarmed, he was injured. And his next glance over his shoulder showed him twelve dead lunging after him in the water, and more falling over the edge, and still more following him along the line of bank above, shambling along in a grim mockery of his flight and of human movement.
Barak left his leather jerkin on—it had saved him once before—and he forced himself to greater speed, still nearly dragging his right leg behind him, as though he were himself one of the dead. The water was cold about his feet and shins. The muscles of his neck and shoulders tensed, expecting the touch of cold fingertips behind him. He had felt the cold, dry touch of the dead before; if he were to feel it again, he was certain he would start screaming and wouldn’t be able to stop. He tried to remember his words to Yehoyakim, remember the momentary strength he’d felt in his blood as he’d fought the dead in the barley near the bank. As though he’d been a nazarite himself, blessed by his people’s strange God and knowing no life but sweat and the spear and the fall of emptied bodies about his feet. But now, with the river icy about his ankles, he was only Barak the vintner again, a man without woman or child or even any growing field ready for harvest, a man with nothing left but the body he wore. He held back whimpers of fear as he staggered up the river.
He fell once, his face and chest plunging into the water. Sucked in the river through his nose and then heaved himself up on his hands and knees, coughing and spewing out water, shaking with cold. He felt the brush of fingertips across his sandal and the lightest touch on his heel, the first of the corpses behind bending to grasp at him, and he sprang to his feet with a sobbing cry. On he ran, forcing his body on against the pain in his leg.
Once he glanced at the sky. The red moon was not visible between the two cliffs of the bank. There were only the cold stars, the sign of the promise, the sign of the Covenant. Breathing raggedly, he gazed at them a moment, head tilted back as he ran. They had never seemed so beautiful. This might be the last time he would see them; there was a violent stitch in his side, and his breath and strength were giving out. He clung to the sight, needing it, needing that hope. He’d been stripped not only of kin and land, but also of all his certainties; they’d been cast aside as abruptly and completely as that breast-piece. He had tried to command and own the women of his house and the women he needed to use, but with Devora this had proven impossible. He had learned that at Walls. He had hoped to command God also, to control what God might do, or not do, using his keeping of the Covenant, even to the burning of the small gods in his house, to hold God to terms. But God too was ungovernable. Now he had no assurances from God, he had no spear in his hand. He had nothing to lean on nor any weapon. All he had was that sight of cold stars, stars that no blight or unclean death could touch. Those bright points of light gave him the hope he needed to keep his legs moving, to keep running despite the low moans of the dead behind him. Because those stars were one thing at least that could never be removed, and though Barak himself had no seed in the land, perhaps the promise—that the seed of the People would be preserved—would never be removed either. Even if all else he might trust or hope in was gone.
Stooping, he took up a jagged branch from the water, wrenching it free of the silt and river stones. The sand on the bark gave his hand a good grip on it. The wood wasn’t strong or green; it would break. But it was something in his hand. He felt calmer. He looked over his shoulder again; there were no longer dead on the high bank, but there were perhaps thirty corpses in the stream behind him, strung out, those along the edge of the water moving faster, those knee-deep in the river moving slowly and falling behind. Barak fought for breath. He was a little ahead of the corpses, but was no longer any faster than they. He didn’t know how far he had run—far past the barley field, he was certain of that. He could no longer hear screams or the roar of fire. He clutched the branch tightly, certain that his running scramble was at an end. He could press on until his limbs gave out and he lay gasping and helpless at the water’s edge, like a wounded gazelle. Or he could stop and turn to face them.
Whatever God had pierced the sky with those stars and hung promises on them admired courage. He was certain of that at least.
He turned toward the dead and bent, leaning over and panting for air. He drew in heaving gulps of it, sweat pouring down his face even though the water about his feet was cold. Keeping a tight hold on the branch, he watched the dead stumbling toward him, their eyes like small, luminous stones in the starlight. He bared his teeth and straightened, lifting the branch in both hands like a club.
Then it happened.
A warmth on his skin, gentle like the touch of a linen that had been heated by a woman’s body. Then the warmth was inside him, a sense of comfort, the way a man feels when the sun has risen on the Sabbath and he is half-awake but restful in his bedding with his woman still asleep and naked, her head on his chest. Barak thought he heard a whisper, and he turned his head, gazing again upriver. There was a little mist farther up the ravine, concealing the walls of the riverbanks only as much as a thin veil might. Even as he looked, it lifted, and Barak let out his breath in a low sigh, for from one bank to the other the ravine had filled with that pleasant warmth, and he could feel someone whispering to him, though he could not make out the words. But with a certainty as potent as Moseh’s when the Lawgiver looked upon the bush that burned and yet did not blacken or crumple to ash, Barak knew that God was there in the stream.
Slowly, as in a dream, the vintner lifted his weaker foot and tugged his remaining sandal free, then dropped it into the water.
“Kadosh,” he whispered. Holy ground.
In that moment, he was no longer aware of the splashes of dead feet in the stream behind him, or of the sharp and brutal cold of the water on his skin, or of the sweat running like oil down his face and back. There was only the lifting of the mist, and the nearness, the impossible nearness of God. He let his breath out slowly, standing still, arms limp at his sides, watching the mist rise. The God who filled the space between one slippery embankment and the other one was other than he’d imagined, other than he’d believed. Not a cold, aloof woman planting or scything crops, but a warm shekinah, a presence. Like hands cupping his face, like a scent of blossoms from a distant grove, like a strain of pipe music almost too faint to hear, like a whisper carried to him on the wind, like love and light and a woman’s kiss, thrilling everything in him. He cried out suddenly, a raw shout from his throat, a wordless sound of awe and praise.
Then, as gently as it had come, the sense of that nearness, that shekinah, that warm feminine embrace, was gone. And even as his eyes lifted, he saw several tents with a stand of oaks behind them, above the high bank, perhaps twenty feet above him. He stared at them for a long, focused moment. Tents. People. The living. The tents could mean help—a waterskin to drink and other men to stand with him against the shambling corpses.
He heard the moans of the dead close behind him. A glance over his shoulder showed them less than a spear’s cast away, their arms lifted to take him. Casting aside the branch, he bolted, splashing through the water and throwing himself against the far bank, which had a little slant to it; he grasped for roots, rocks, any handhold he could, began pulling himself wildly up the bank. Damp soil crumbled and slid beneath his feet; with a gasp, he pulled himself furiously up the cliff, digging in with his toes and his fingers. The burn of pain in his torn leg became a shriek of fire, and he was screaming in the agony of it. The dead were beneath him now, he could feel the thud of their bodies against the bank below him, felt a fingertip graze the underside of his foot. With a howl, he reached his right arm up and f
ound a tuft of weeds to grasp, began pulling himself higher. He gasped and sobbed with the effort. Glanced up, saw the bank and the overhanging oak boughs and above them now that wild, red moon. Only a few feet more, and he could grasp the edge of the bank, if it didn’t crumble beneath him. He clung helplessly to the cliff; only a few feet more, but his legs and arms were shaking. If he moved, he’d fall. He knew this. He’d fall. The snarls and moans beneath him made him feel as though he were made of water.
Reaching, he grasped a root and gripped it, pulled himself up just within reach of the bank. But the root tore free of the soil and began to swing his upper body away from the wall of the bank. With a desperate cry, he took the root in both hands and pulled himself along it back toward the comfort of earth. But more of the root was pulling out; his heart beat with panic. He reached for some other handhold, grasping desperately, his fingers brushing the wall of the bank.
Suddenly a hand grasped his own, and he gasped, a shiver running through him. But the small, delicate hand was warm with life, and lovely and dark in his own. He gazed up and found a girl leaning over the edge, young, perhaps just old enough to bear a child. A dusky Canaanite girl with the high cheekbones of her people, her dark eyes only a few feet above his own. She was so unexpected, the warmth of her hand and the depth of her eyes so different from the cold, moaning death beneath him, that for a moment he just held completely still, awestruck, as he had been when he’d felt the living presence of God rise over the water.
