No Lasting Burial (12 page)

There
hadn’t been a fire for cooking fish on the shore since he had been a boy. Since
before that night … He swallowed back some of the saliva filling his mouth,
wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He felt suddenly faint.

The
priest stood on the shore looking about with startled eyes. His gaze moved over
the sand as though he were looking for the footprints of God, looking for some
reason why this blessing had been visited on ruined Kfar Nahum so unexpectedly.

Then
his gaze settled on the stranger. Yeshua had risen to his feet and stood over
one of the baskets, lifting wrapped fish quickly into it.

“Who
are you?” Zebadyah said bluntly, without any note of welcome.

“He
is the one I told you of, abba,” Yohanna said. “He says he called the fish.”

“He
has a mouth. He can speak.” He raised his voice. “Who are you and who are your
kin, beggar?”

Yeshua
glanced up, his face still drawn with memory of pain. He opened his mouth as though
to answer, but at that moment there was a cry from farther down the shore.

“Look!
Look!”

They
all swung about to look.

Some
way to the south, a man was walking up the shore, coming toward them. That was
strange, both because few walked beside the sea—most took their boats to move
from one town to another—and because hardly anyone ever,
ever
came to
Kfar Nahum.

But
he did not walk like one of the boat people. He strode along that shore like
one accustomed to long travel and unafraid of it, though not unwearied by it.

“Who
is
that?” Shimon murmured.

Yeshua
straightened from the basket, and his shoulders lifted as though whatever pain
he had brought with him was abruptly gone. He stood tall and still. His eyes
had that intense, elsewhere gaze again, as though he were staring intently past
them all at something only he could see. “I remember this,” he whispered.
“Father, I remember this. When the father needs a thing done, he brings us
together, all of us, all those he needs.” He shook his head slightly, as though
in wonder. Then he cupped his hands to either side of his mouth and called out:
“
Shalom!
”

The
distant walker lifted his hand in response, and it was clear that he carried
some object in it. He brought it to his face, and suddenly a loud blast rang
out against the hills. A horn call, deep and resonant.
Shimon could feel the call even in his bones.

“My
God,” he whispered.

Yakob
and Yohanna both gazed at the far traveler without speaking, their faces struck
with wonder.

Zebadyah
scowled. “It can’t be,” he muttered.

After
more than a year following the Roman-killer through the streets of the cities
of their People and into wild places in the hills, Bar Nahemyah had come back.

The
newcomer strode with purpose up the shore. Yet his eyes held not just the
fatigue of a man who has walked through the night along the sands, but the
weariness of a man who has walked a year and found no place to rest in all that
time. His shofar was still slung about his neck; he wore a tattered but heavy
cloak, and his clothing was simple and plain though of southern weaving. His
beard had grown long; his hair he wore in a braid down his back. Girded about
his waist was a cracked leather scabbard the length of his forearm, from which
protruded a hilt of polished bone. He carried a waterskin over his shoulder but
no pack; he was lean, his face weathered, bitten by the wind and by the stress
of things he wished he hadn’t seen. He slowed his stride as he reached the men
and women standing on the shingle, then stood with his
hand lifted in greeting.

Zebadyah
spoke first. “Dead have been coming up from the sea. What makes you think you
are welcome here, Bar Nahemyah? You who gave our dead no
burial?”

Bar
Nahemyah’s face tightened. He glanced past the priest. “
Shalom
, Bar
Yonah.”

“
Shalom
,”
Shimon said hoarsely.

Silence. Bar Nahemyah
heard only the gulls’ cries and the beating of the oars against feathered
bodies. Men stood with fish in their right hands and baskets in their left. All eyes on this man who had saved their town and then destroyed
it. This man who’d felled the corpses at the very door of the synagogue,
saving the town’s last men and women, and then filled the sea with their dead
and dying. And who had, a year ago, been taken from them. And who hadn’t come
back. Like all the town’s fathers, like God and Yonah and so many, Bar Nahemyah
had abandoned them.

Here,
facing his town … Bar Nahemyah felt unsettled. He didn’t let it show in his
face. But even as he and his town watched each other, the wind gusted and tore
his cloak aside, baring his left arm. The men at the nets gasped. Zebadyah
cried out. Bar Nahemyah braced himself but made no effort to conceal his arm.
What they saw there had been dearly bought.

“What
have you done?” the priest moaned. “Bar Nahemyah, what have you done?”

Nearly
twenty fine scars, white against Bar Nahemyah’s sun-darkened skin, had been cut
in parallel lines between his left shoulder and his elbow. They were too fine
and too close a pattern to be wounds from a battle; anyone looking knew that
they were a deliberate scarring of his flesh.

“You’ve
defiled your body,” Zebadyah said, his eyes dismayed.

 “No.” He let his voice ring with cold purpose.
“This is a covenant. My body was marked when I was eight days old. That was a
covenant with God. This is a covenant with the unclean dead. Nineteen of them I
have put in the earth since leaving Kfar Nahum, and nineteen marks I bear in my
flesh, to remember.” His voice fell. “Though I don’t think I
could ever forget. I have seen Herod’s ghoul pits.”

The
other men’s faces went white.

Even
in Kfar Nahum, it was known how the old Herod, that desert king hired by Rome
to rule over an enslaved People, had grown old and mad. They had heard how he’d
slain even his own kin. How he had filled the Roman baths in his palace with
the dead, and thrown first his wife and then his own young daughter into the
water to be devoured. How he’d sat on the steps of the baths, watching with
tears on his face as his daughter was eaten. How at her shrieks, all the
blossoms in Herod’s gardens had withered. How he had sealed off the baths
afterward with so many layers of stone that the wailing of the dead could no
longer be heard. How he’d then sat in his bed reeking, unbathed, for the better
part of a month, and anyone who came to him with reminders of affairs of state,
he’d had put to death.

When
Herod had been a young man, he had built great cities of marble on the coast,
cities of Greek design and Roman public spirit, cities to rival any in the
world. Caesar’s City, and Yoppa rebuilt, and a new Temple in Yerushalayim, far
greater in size and beauty than the Temple of the ancients, though this one had
been built with unclean hands. The young Herod had sat in his gardens and sang
poetry and made love to his wife beneath the stars. The older Herod had
slaughtered all the children in Bet Lechem on a whim, and given his family to
the dead to devour, because he believed they were plotting to poison or knife
him in his sleep. When the moaning
shedim
creep into a man’s ears and
his mouth and into his heart, no one is safe.

Herod
had been entombed for years, and his son, the new king, Herod Antipas, hid from
nightmares of the brutalities he remembered, devoting the dark hours of his
nights instead to endless revelry, to feasting and wine and the dancing of
naked young women before his seat of white marble. But Antipas’s bitter-minded
wife found the memory of Herod’s bath useful; she’d had Greek stonemasons wall
up the baths in Antipas’s house, though she bid them open up the roofs to the
sky. Corpses had been tossed in, and Herod’s wife often had dissidents lowered
down to them on long ropes.

Bar
Nahemyah had seen a man, one of Barabba’s, lowered into the stink and the dark,
kicking his legs and screaming as the corpses below reached for him with long,
grasping fingers.

He
had seen
her
watching, standing at the edge of the wall. Herod’s wife. Had seen the slight curving
of her lip, and her eyes shining in the dusk.

He
had turned away and covered his ears against the shrieks.

“I
have seen,” Bar Nahemyah repeated.

Zebadyah
voice was quieter now, less of a shout, yet thick with dread. “What deeds have
you done since Barabba took you? Who have you killed, that you have fled back to
us for refuge? Were you pursued? Have you led the Romans upon us?”

“Pursued, yes.” His voice was
cold. “But I lost them near the Hittim. I have no yearning to witness another
night of fire and fear in my own town. No one has followed me,
kohen.
”
His gaze flicked back to Shimon, who had a desperate look in his face.
“Yet
the day … the last day, when we must rise with knives against Rome’s living
and its dead or die the slow death ourselves, that day
is near. And I do ask you for your help.”

“We
have none to give,” Shimon said.

“We
have nothing to do with Barabba’s knifemen, or with you,” Zebadyah said.

“That
isn’t for you to say.” Bar Nahemyah touched his fingertips to the ram’s horn.
“I still hold the shofar.” The accusation was in his eyes:
coward
. Zebadyah’s
own eyes went dark with rage. But inside, Bar Nahemyah quailed. He had come
back to his own town, his own place, and in their eyes—even in Shimon’s eyes—he
saw that he had come back like Barabba: stranger, killer, one outside the Law.

Turning
away from the aging priest, he approached the gathered people on the shore and
saw for the first time what they were gathered
about
. He sucked in a
breath at the sight of that once-human corpse the nets had brought up, weeds
tangled about its legs. It had been dragged far above the advancing tide, with
a mound of stones stacked beside it ready for burial. Near it stood a strange
man with lank hair and a bruised face, his eyes watery but intense. He wore a
brown robe that clung, soaked, to his body, as though he had walked up out of
the sea. And all around him, the nets,
the nets,
the
fish on the sand thick as pebbles in the hills.

For
a moment he forgot his desperate journey and his dread at the corpse. He walked
toward the fish, his mouth open. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t
believe it. There were so many.

“The
fish,” he whispered.

“They’ve
come back,” Shimon said hoarsely. “Our fathers’ fish have come back.”

The
pang of guilt and hope was sharp as a knife’s twist in Bar Nahemyah’s belly.
“But the fish were gone. They were dead.”

“Nothing’s
ever really dead,” the strange man with the bruised face called out. He stared
not at Bar Nahemyah or at the fish but up the shore at the derelict boats by
the tall grasses at the tideline. “Not dead, not
really
dead, unless we
let it be. I think that is so.”

“I
am Shimon bar Nahemyah. I do not know you. Who are you?”

“Everything
comes back up,” the stranger said. “Everything rises, everything rises, sun and
rain and sun again, and all our dead, all our dead …” His voice fell until
it was too quiet to hear.

“The
town is beset,” Zebadyah cried, “by madmen and heathen!”

“This
isn’t madness,” Bar Nahemyah breathed. “It’s prophecy. He’s seeing visions.”
His heart beat a little faster—for he had heard something like this before, had
heard holy ones in Yerushalayim city, men whom God had touched. He’d heard them
talk in such a way on the Temple steps, while the alley stones behind echoed
with the moans of the dead and with the hard footsteps of men in Roman armor.
And now here, on this northern shore, he found a miracle of fish spilled across
the sand out of some story of his fathers, and man who spoke like a
navi
.
Hope lit like a heathen corpse-fire in Bar Nahemyah’s heart, burning away decay
and despair from his year in Barabba’s caves.

“There
are no more prophets,” Zebadyah said, his tone bitter.

“Ha
Matbil is a prophet,” Yohanna said quickly.

“No!”
The priest’s eyes were fierce. “Enough with your Ha Matbil! El Shaddai preserve me, I have no use for sons or kin who follow killers
or witches into the desert and leave the rest of us to mourn alone.”

“I
did not follow Barabba,” Bar Nahemyah said quietly, not taking his gaze from
the stranger. “I was taken.”

“But
you did not come back!” Shimon cried.

“Those,”
the stranger said suddenly, before Bar Nahemyah could reply, “those, those by
the boats, who are they? Who are they?”

The
stranger took a few slow steps up the sand toward the boats. Bar Nahemyah saw
that a few men had emerged from those broken shelters and stood in the tall
grasses, gazing down the shore at the fish, some of which still flopped on the
sand. The men were ragged and gaunt, their faces gray from illness and lack of
food.

“Scavengers,
Yeshua bar Yosef,” Shimon muttered.

“I
don’t understand,” the stranger, Yeshua, said.

“They
are boat people,” Bar Nahemyah said. The sight of them there, a terrible
reminder of the land’s ruin, made Bar Nahemyah feel even wearier … and old.

“Other
people’s poor,” Shimon said impatiently. “Other towns’.
They come to us hungry like the dead, when there is already so little to eat.”

“No,”
Yeshua whispered. He bent to lift a basket of fish and he nearly fell, but he
caught himself, still muttering. “No one goes hungry, no one goes hungry, no
one goes hungry, not this day, not this day, not this …” One arm around the
basket, he took a step toward the old hulls.

“What
are you doing?” Shimon cried.

At
that moment several of the gulls swooped low, for Yakob and the others,
listening, had let their oars fall still. One of the screaming birds flew at
Yeshua’s head while the others swooped at the basket he held. Yeshua’s eyes
went hot with anger and he shot his hand out against the bird and shouted,
“Enough!
Enough!
”

A
rush of heat nearly tumbled Bar Nahemyah from his feet, as though a fire had
roared into existence. The gulls tumbled back, screaming and beating their
wings, as though knocked aside by a hot wind. Yeshua straightened,
one arm about the basket, the other outstretched and emitting heat. His eyes
were fierce. His hair lifted, but not with the wind.

Another
gull swooped low but veered away from his hand. Then
all
of them veered
away, and in a moment they were gone across the water, wailing, gliding away on
their white wings low over the waves.

There
was silence on the sand.

Bar
Nahemyah fell back, as though winded by what he had just witnessed. He stared
at the stranger, at his wild eyes and his outstretched hand. The others stared
also, standing as still as Lot’s wife, translated from flesh to pillars of salt
by something they should not have been allowed to see.