Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible)

by Stant Litore

  Barak lifted his hand, saw that it was swollen and dark. He laughed quietly, then coughed from the pain the laugh brought him.

  “Some days a woman can only save one life,” Devora said. “The old navi tried to teach me that, Barak, but I didn’t understand. I do now. When you save one life—when you keep Covenant and save even one life—you save the People.” She paused. “I am sorry I was too late to save yours.”

  Barak just breathed for a few moments. He didn’t know why he’d thought he was baking; now he shivered with the greatest cold he had ever known. “Stay with me,” he rasped.

  Her eyes gazed down on him, unreadable as ever. “I will,” she said.

  All about him were the raiders’ tents and the leaves of the oaks dark against the sky. He yearned for his own vineyard—to die beneath his own vines, amid the scent of grapes and growing things. But his vineyard was already gone; it had died without him, and he was left here lingering in fever like a last cutting from it tossed aside to wither on its own. He kept watching the oak leaves and listening to the quiet fire. He had imagined dying at a spear’s thrust or of old age, not of the bite of the dead on strange soil. But the navi was here, waiting while he died. She would raise a cairn over him. He would be remembered. He took comfort in that.

  “I felt the shekinah,” he whispered. “It rose over the water. And God was neither judge nor wife to me. I do not know what God is.”

  “You were feverish,” Devora murmured.

  “No.” He shook his head, panting. “This was—before. We think we know what God is, but she is entirely strange to us. Stranger than the land, stranger than the heathen. We lie to ourselves when we say we know God, when we judge God or fear God or speak of God. Maybe God can be loved, as the priests do. I don’t know what God is anymore.” He shook from the cold, and his teeth chattered, but he forced the words out. “God gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of God.”

  “Selah,” the navi whispered. Always.

  He felt the touch of a waterskin to his lips, drank a little, choked and spluttered most of it up.

  “The dead,” he rasped after a few moments, his throat sore and violent. “Must put them all—beneath cairns. God has not forsaken the land.”

  “He has forsaken only his navi,” Devora said. “No visions come. No seed I’ve planted has borne fruit.” She gave a small, bitter laugh. “Nor any seed planted in me.” She was quiet a moment. “I violated the Covenant. I killed my mother, twice. Now my daughter too. There is no longer any way to keep the Law. God has forsaken me, Barak. If he has appeared in some way to you, I am glad for you. But all my joy is gone, and all my hope.”

  “Not all,” Barak rasped. “Your girl—the Canaanite. Found her sister. Alive.” He was finding it difficult now to speak, his throat was so dry.

  Devora glanced at him sharply, then her eyes softened. “Oh, Hurriya,” she whispered, then said nothing more.

  Barak coughed a little, then gazed past the oak branches, at the sky. At those same distant stars he’d seen from the bottom of the Tumbling Water’s ravine. He barely heard Devora’s words. He was just focused on those bright stars. His body kept shivering, but he felt again the warm touch of that holy presence in his heart. He was glad there were no sandals on his feet. He wished Hadassah were here, and even her mother, whom he’d sent away to Refuge when the dead came. But especially Hadassah. The things he would tell her. He would hold her, kiss her, and have her, if there was no other way for him to tell her, if he could find no words. All the deeds of his life seemed suddenly trivial to him, but this brought him no despair, only a yearning to hold Hadassah in his arms again, to feel her warm belly swollen with life. And a skin of clear water in his hand to share with her.

  “Didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell the girl about Hurriya,” he said.

  There was silence for a while.

  “I’m glad,” the navi replied at last. “Where is she now?”

  “She rode away. Toward the sea, where it’s still safe. She was so hopeful. So beautiful.”

  “Thank you for telling me that.” The navi’s voice was softer. Even a little vulnerable.

  Barak could feel himself slipping beneath the fever. Everything blurring, even himself. He closed his eyes. “Navi, tell me the stories of our People. I want to hear them.”

  He felt a damp cloth against his brow. Then Devora’s voice, cool and calm in the heated dark. He caught the stories in bits and pieces, moving between waking and sleep, between the world that is real and the world that isn’t. But it didn’t matter. He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

  Devora’s low voice told of his fathers Tubal Qayin, who first discovered the shaping of metal, and Yubal, who made the first music so that the malakhim themselves came out of the sky to listen. And Yabal, who began the keeping of sheep and goats, the herding of cattle, the pitching of tents. He heard of the brothers Qayin and Hebel—how Hebel was beaten across the head with a great stick, then thrown into a narrow ravine, there to starve until he died. How he rose to his feet some days later, hungering and rotting, until he found and devoured his brother.

  Devora told of how the dead filled the land, every land, until God looked down on the hunger and the violence in the earth and was grieved. How a vintner like himself—a man with a wife and three sons, who enjoyed wine as much as any Canaanite—had built a great box of wood, an Ark. Not to carry stone tablets but to carry human lives, which to God’s eyes were no less sacred. Rains fell while Barak ben Abinoam tossed in his fever. Rains fell, and the parched and hungry earth drank them until it could hold no more water and vomited the water back up, and there was mud, then flooding, then a great sea that drowned everything beneath it, and the dead floated in the sea moaning. Waves drove the corpses against the sides of the Ark, and their decomposing hands beat upon the wood. How terrible for the few living hiding within—to hear the thunder and the fury of rain on their roof and the slamming of many hands against their walls. And always the moaning, louder than rain or wind, the ceaseless voices of the dead.

  “God overwhelms us,” Barak rasped, interrupting the tale. “Whatever we do, God is too vast, too deep. I wanted to command God, as I might command a woman.” Barak moistened his lips with his tongue; it was so difficult to speak.

  “You should lie quiet, chieftain of Israel.” Devora’s voice, unexpectedly, held concern. “The fever is burning you up.”

  “God is like—like the land,” Barak whispered. “You can cultivate the land. You can grow fine things on it. You cannot command it or control it or say, Bring me a fine harvest. You have to work it. God is like that. I didn’t understand.”

  He lay shaking for a few moments, unsure if he was speaking to the navi or to Hadassah or to Hadassah’s mother. There was a woman here, he knew that much. “I am sorry I burned your gods.” His whisper almost too quiet to hear. “I thought I could hold God to her promises. But the land makes us no promises. There are no promises.”

  “There are promises,” Devora said sharply.

  “I am sorry,” he breathed, not heeding her. “Sorry I tried to take the Ark. That I sent Nimri.”

  She looked at him dispassionately.

  “Laban,” Devora said after a moment, “would have been the better choice. You should’ve sent Laban. He might have talked Shiloh into it.”

  No time left. He lifted his eyes, hoping to see that mist between him and the stars. There was nothing. Yet he knew—knew the God of his fathers was near. He was not afraid. Not anymore.

  “Sh’ma—” He had to stop. His voice was but a dry croak. He tried to wet his lips, tried to swallow. There was nothing. Then the rush of cool water ove
r his lips and into his mouth, like water from the rock in the desert. Someone was leaning over him, between him and the stars. Someone was pouring water into his mouth. He swallowed, and again, until the water stopped.

  “Sh’ma!” he gasped. “Sh’ma Yisrael adonai eloheinu, adonai echad...”

  Then the heat in him was too fierce for words and he moaned as he slid into the grip of it, burning, burning, nothing left but the fire. Breathing was too great an effort when his throat and his insides were so scorched, so after a while he stopped doing it.

  DEVORA’S VIGIL

  IT TOOK Devora a long time to gather the stones. The windstorm had returned to her heart. When she closed her eyes, meaning to rest for only a moment, she would see her mother’s face or the contorted face of Hurriya’s infant. She’d hear Heber’s words. Thousands, thousands in White Cedars. Then she would jerk awake with a gasp and move on to gather more stones. There was no rest for her in sleep, no safety. There would probably never be.

  Gritting her teeth, she lifted the last great rock to the top of the second cairn (for she’d buried the slave boy first, then Barak), letting the stone fall with a hoarse cry. Then she leaned on the pile of stones, panting. Her eyes stung with salt; in that moment, remembering how Zadok had once placed the stone at the top for her, Devora felt Zadok’s loss keenly.

  All the strength left her limbs, and she wept for a while. It wasn’t that here, alone, she could afford to, but that here, at the utter limit of her strength, she could no longer hold any of it back. The winds within shook and battered her like an old tree in some violence of the air out of the desert. She had raised so many cairns. In a few generations, the stones of these two new cairns would topple or crumble or be overgrown with weeds, and those lying beneath them would be forgotten by all but God. With terrible clarity Devora grasped that the tribes were a transient People, whatever promises they clung to. Transient not only because they lived in tents or remembered living in tents, but because all peoples are transient, and once they move on, the land does not long remember them, even if God does. Even the Canaanites’ walls and cedar houses were a transient thing, a vanity. Canaanite, Hebrew, living and dead, they were all strangers in a strange land.

  A hasty search of the tents and belongings of the raiders revealed little of use to her—a little bread, a few empty waterskins, many items of luxury that a Canaanite might enjoy but that she refused to, and a corpse, another corpse for her to bury. But she did find one thing she took—a small bag sewn from a goat’s bladder, full of small things that clacked together as she lifted the bag and set it by the fire pit. Not coins, but smooth, polished river stones, not yet engraved with any names. She went to sit with her back against Barak’s cairn and emptied the bag of stones between her feet. They were beautiful, not as gems are but as stones are when the river has kissed them, and they were many colors. After a moment she picked out one that was a pallid white like the moon grown old, and another that was dark like Shomar’s eyes. She held them both in her right palm. Her hand was unclean; perhaps the stones would bring her no true sign. Yet perhaps soon no one’s hands would be clean.

  “You showed Barak Hurriya’s sister,” Devora whispered to God. “She lost everything, even her child. But her sister lives. That has to mean something.

  “You gave me an answer in Shiloh. I ask for another. Does your hand still cover the People?”

  She cast the stones.

  In the quiet that followed, she sat with the cairn at her back and looked at a sky so full of stars that it made her eyes ache. She still held the dark urim, the “yes” stone, in her hand. She recalled her words to Hurriya by the shore of the lake. In the silence of God, I must act as though he is not silent.

  Yet perhaps God had not truly been silent at all. He had sent visions to her through the Canaanite, had spoken to her through Hurriya. Devora had been bewildered—what message was it that only Hurriya, only a Canaanite, could bring to the People? Now she realized that Hurriya herself had been the sign, the message. Some part of her had known this since Walls, since tossing that flaming torch into the house of the dead.

  No. Some deep part of her had known it earlier than that. She’d known it from the moment she had seen Hurriya struggling her way up the hill toward the olive tree, naked within her salmah, bruised, carrying the half-eaten remains of her child. Even then, Hurriya’s presence at the olive tree had been a message, a demand for justice, for the strangers in the land no less than for those born in the tents of the People. And the suggestion that even tribes who were strange to each other could teach one another something about preserving life and withstanding the unclean dead, something about God. That even a woman who did not know the Law, a woman who feared the Law, might teach an older navi more about the nature and the demand of the Law than she had ever before known.

  Hurriya had delivered her message. She had done so merely by suffering in Shomar’s saddle and by speaking of her grief and anger. And by dying with her hand clasped in Devora’s own.

  Devora glanced at the stars. She had to believe that God was still watching. That the tent of the Law still covered the land. Otherwise why had Hurriya had visions, and why had her longing for her sister’s safety been answered? Why had the urim stopped rolling before the thummim? Why was Devora herself still breathing?

  Devora leaned her head back and breathed deeply for a few moments. She could not stay here, but she could not stand yet; the grief was too violent within her. After a while she took up a small rock with a jagged edge from beside the fire pit and began to carve hard, deep Hebrew letters into the river stones, one after the other, while she sang the Words of Going hoarsely. She did not sing for Barak only, and his name was not the last that she carved into the stones. She carved Zadok, on a stone the color of fertile earth, and Naomi, on a stone the color of the sky. Then Hurriya, on a stone whose purple hue, though faint, suggested blossoms of heather. Her grief choked her voice when she carved the letters of that strange, Canaanite name that had become so dear to her. The thought of Hurriya’s sister riding somewhere in these hills comforted her a little, enough that she could carve the letters without her hand trembling; something of Hurriya still lived.

  Devora took her time, making sure the letters were well-carved and deep.

  The last stone was simply Am, mother.

  She wished for needle and thread, some means to sew the stones into the shoulders or the sleeves of her garment—for that was how levites carried name-stones, even as the high priest carried the names of the tribes in his breast-piece—but having neither, she settled for taking up the empty goat-bladder bag. But she did not put the five stones away immediately. Instead, she sat looking at them, reading the names again and again; she put them away, one after the other, until only Am remained. She could hear Naomi’s words:

  God will forgive us the lives we cannot save.

  She scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes and looked to the sky; it was no longer so dark. In fact, the sky was nearly the blue of morning, and the stars were going out. And the scab-redness of the moon was long, long passed, as though it had never been.

  “Forgive me for my mother and for Naomi,” she whispered, not lowering her eyes from the heavens. “This time I do not ask you for a child. Only do not forsake me now. Forgive me. For her. And for my daughter, whose life I couldn’t save.” She bit her lip until she tasted blood.

  Holding the Am stone in her hand, she closed her eyes but did not sleep. The memory sprang upon her and this time she did not flee it. She faced it and mourned.

  The pale light before sunrise found Devora still sitting with her back to Barak’s cairn, still awake, with Mishpat lying unsheathed across her thighs. Some of the death-reek had faded from the camp, and a gazelle now walked gracefully among the tents, nibbling here and there at a patch of heather. She was a doe, her striped sides moving gently with her breathing. Devora watched her with the kind of hushed fascination a girl might feel, a child who has never seen a doe before. Amid
the horrors of the north, Devora’s heart had nearly forgotten such grace and beauty could exist. She had nearly forgotten there were such things as gazelles in the world. Once, the gazelle lifted its head and looked at the navi, its gaze focused and unblinking. Devora hardly dared breathe. At last the gazelle looked away and walked past the fire pit, almost within reach, looking for more heather blossoms to eat.

  Devora rolled her shoulders back, breathed deeper.

  The land was not dead yet.

  She watched the gazelle for a while, but then the doe straightened sharply and turned to stare at the stand of oaks. Her ear twitched. Then with a few quick bounds the doe sprang away between the tents and was gone.

  That alerted Devora to the danger. Without taking her gaze from the oaks, she took up some soil from the trampled ground by the fire pit and rubbed the dirt on her palms. What she wouldn’t give for a bath and a safe refuge in which to sleep...

  With a grim look, she rose to her feet and stretched her arms and legs thoroughly, ignoring the protest of her stiff muscles and her soreness from the saddle. She lifted Mishpat and swept the cold iron once through the air, letting her arms feel its weight, letting her body get used to it again. She let her weight rest on the balls of her feet and loosened her hips as though she were preparing to dance before her husband.

  She recalled how Lappidoth had fought the dead that day, when they came for his cattle at that stream that was now so many desperate miles to the south. How he had ducked and darted among the corpses, swinging his hatchet about as though it were part of him. Devora gazed at Mishpat, recognized the cold necessity of her blade, a thing lethal and cruel, yet a thing as balanced, as beautifully designed in its own way as the Covenant itself. “I intend to see Lappidoth again,” she whispered to the sword. “So you and I must dance together, whether we like each other or no.”

  When the dead lurched out of the oaks, arms raised, their skin ashen gray and their eyes wide and unblinking, the navi was ready. She watched the dead stumble toward her. Four of them. Great strips of flesh hung loosely from one’s chest; another still carried a man’s hand in its grasp, chewed off beneath the wrist. One had been male and in life had been a large man and one of some wealth; the tatters of a woolen cloak of many colors still clung to its body. The others had been women. Two were naked, and the third wore a faded green dress and about her waist the blue sash of a midwife. Her gray face was wrinkled; she had lived a long life and had likely brought many lives screaming into the world. Now she took them screaming back out again.