No Lasting Burial (18 page)

Rahel
drew in a shuddering breath, and her eyes opened. For a moment they remained
glazed as with fever, and then they cleared. Her eyes focused first on Yeshua,
and a light came into them as though she had stepped out of the desert to find
her door open and a banquet in her home, with friends waiting for her whom
she’d thought long dead. Koach had never seen such a look in her eyes.

“At
last,” Rahel whispered.

Yeshua
didn’t speak. There was a sheen of sweat on his face,
as though he were the one who had wakened from fever. He lifted his fingers
from her arm and sat back, his breathing ragged.

The
word “amma” caught in Koach’s throat; he sat staring at his mother. What he had
just seen could not be; he didn’t dare move, didn’t dare find out if what he’d
seen was real or if he was only sitting in the dream country, deceived in
thinking himself awake.

Then
Rahel’s gaze flicked toward him, and she breathed his name.

Koach
let out a cry and flung himself down at her side, putting his good arm around
her. “Amma!” he cried. “Amma!”

“My
son, my son,” she wept.

Yeshua
and Yohanna were forgotten. Koach wept openly against her shoulder, enveloped
in the scent of his mother’s hair and the sharper scent of the blood that was drying
on her clothes.

“What
happened?” she rasped. “What … I was … burning up. I was bitten,
unclean. Son, what has happened?”

He
squeezed his eyes shut and just held her.

“Ah, Rahel.” Yeshua’s voice. “Rahel, Rahel.”

The
stranger stood unsteadily. In a moment Yohanna was at his side, offering an arm
for him to lean on, but Yeshua pressed his hand against Yohanna’s chest and
then stepped away on his own. His face had gone white and his eyes were wild
like a man staring into the great emptiness of the desert, an emptiness that
perhaps not even God could fill, an emptiness that devoured all things, all
peoples.

“I
need air,” he whispered. And he moved out across the atrium, almost stumbling
on the way. Yohanna hurried after.

Rahel
was shaking. “I was dying,” she breathed.

“You’re
all right, amma. You’re all right.”

She
drew in quick breaths. “Yes. Yes, I am.” She lifted herself onto her elbows.
“We have a guest, son. Help me up. We need to get him food and water. Help me.”

Yeshua
sank against the wall of the atrium, breathing shallowly. Quickly Yohanna swept
up one of the blankets from Rahel’s bedding, and drew it about the stranger’s
shoulders. His voice was a low murmur. “
Rabboni
, it will be all right.
Just breathe.”

Yeshua
coughed. “Water.”

Yohanna
brought him some in a clay bowl from the ewer at one corner of the atrium.
Yeshua’s hands shook when he took the bowl, but he drank deeply. A little water
trickled from the corner of his mouth, making Yohanna acutely aware of his own thirst.

Yeshua
lowered the bowl from his lips; the water sloshed in the bowl, cupped between
his calloused hands. “I should’ve … should’ve
asked for … for wine, not water.”

“You
healed my kinswoman, and my friend’s mother,” Yohanna said softly. “I will
bring you all the wine in Kfar Nahum if you ask it.”

Yeshua
glanced down at his hands. “Healed,” he whispered. “How, how
did I do that?”

“You
sang,” Yohanna whispered back.

“I
asked,” Yeshua said. “I could hear her, hear her hurting, hear
her dying. I could hear it so
loudly
. And I asked, I asked, I called out
… Like with the fish. Like with the gulls. Like with …” He groaned.
“For just a moment I
remembered
. I remembered
everything
. Everything. All of it, all of it from the
desert. Every word, every …” His eyes glistened. “What I’m to do,
and why, and what I
am
. And now it’s gone, all of it gone. Why can’t I
hold onto it, Yohanna, why?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “All
those nights, those nights with my back to a rock, a rock in the desert.
All the screams in my ears. And it’s hard, so hard, to
recall anything else but that moaning, that moaning that won’t stop, that will
never, ever stop …” He swallowed. “Help me, Yohanna. Help me up. Help me
stand.”

Yohanna
reached for his arm, gripped it, and lifted him to his feet. Something nagged
at the edge of his mind. Then, as he steadied Yeshua with a hand at his
shoulder, the thought burst in on him with a suddenness
like a crack in the mast. He gasped.

“I
will be back.” Releasing the
navi
’s arm, he ran for the door. “I will be
back!”

He
flung open the door, burst through, and slammed it behind him. In the street,
he shoved aside Bar Cheleph and another young man who were laying planks of
heavy wood beside Rahel bat Eleazar’s doorstep. He hardly noticed them; he
broke into a run, and he ran faster than he had ever run in his life, faster
even than on the night of the dead when so many young men and women he knew had
died. He ran and his heart beat with a hope that was so violent it was like
panic.

Yeshua
leaned against one wall of the atrium, drinking his water, his eyes dark with
thought. Having almost forgotten he was there, Koach helped his mother kindle
flame above the coals in the cookpit in the atrium. There was another pit near
it, a smaller one, long unused, but Rahel kindled it also, and took a small
pouch of spices and herbs and sprinkled them over the coals, and their
redolence filled the air. Koach had not smelled that in … nearly a year. The scented fire. The coals on which you
would lay a fish’s heart to keep the
shedim
away.

“I
hope it will,” Koach whispered, watching the little flames. He should have been
the one to carry Tamar to a tomb. It should have been him. But he couldn’t have
carried her with one arm. He should have gone with Shimon, at least.

“I
hope it will too, son.” Rahel didn’t need to ask what he meant. The scented
fire seemed to them small and fragile, but perhaps it meant no one else would
be eaten.

“I
thought we’d have to bury you, too,” Koach whispered, blinking quickly. He
looked to the stranger, Yeshua, a surge of gratitude and confusion in his
heart.

“Don’t
tell Shimon,” Rahel said. “Your brother has worries enough.” She closed the
pouch and set it aside. “The Sabbath is coming,” she whispered. “This evening. If my sons can rest, really rest, with full
bellies …” She smiled faintly. “… That, I ask for. I feel … so
weak. Like I might fall over.”

Koach
said nothing. He was thinking. For the first time since that
cry on the shore—“The dead! The dead!”—he was
thinking.

Something
had fed on Tamar, but hadn’t eaten anyone else. It had found her on her way to
the shore to meet him, and either she’d …
stopped
… it, or after
wounding her it had pursued someone else, following them away from the town. And
the attack must have happened some way up the shore from Koach’s own hiding
place beneath the boat, because he’d heard no cry from her, nor any moan from
the corpse.

He
tried to make sense of that.

The
corpse might have been missing part of its throat, might have been unable to
voice one of the low wails of the dead.

But
he should have heard
her
.

Surely
he would have heard her scream for help.

Perhaps
Tamar had needed to take the long way through the stone houses, to avoid
watchful eyes. Or there might be some other reason she had not been near.

Or
perhaps she
had
been.

Perhaps
the thing had seized her, torn into her before she even knew it was there, and
perhaps she—who had learned how to suffer beatings in silence—had swallowed her
own cry, to keep him from running out to her.

That
thought was more than he could bear.

“There
are still dead out there,” Koach said.

Rahel’s
hands paused in their work, but only for an instant. Then she whispered, as
though to herself or to God, “I ask only for rest for my sons. And for me.”

The
dying wasn’t over yet.

Koach
thought he knew why the corpse that had killed his beloved was not in the town,
nor on the shore. Tamar had led it away, in silence, led it away from her lover
and her town, before finding some way to slip back unseen by it. And when she
had, the fever had already been on her, the fever that would burn her away,
leaving her body empty for one of the hungry
shedim
to make its home in.
She hadn’t come to him to say goodbye. She had run to her father’s house,
perhaps with dawn already in the sky, to die there.

To protect him.

To protect their town.

She
had been the strong one.

Rahel
looked at him, and her face softened. “It is all right, my son,” she said.
“Sometimes you have to weep.”

He
lifted his hand to his face. His cheeks were wet.

“How
do you bear it?” he whispered.

Memory
flickered in her eyes. “You just do.”

“Does
it get better?”

“No.
It doesn’t.” She reached for a small basket lined with cloth, something to
place fish in. “But you get stronger. The burden is not less heavy, but you are
more able to carry it.”

Koach’s
face crumpled. “I want her back, amma.”

Her
face crumpled too. She held out her arms and he threw himself into them, as he
had many times when he was a small boy.

“I
know,” she whispered into his hair, holding him tight, “I know.”

A
heavy slam of wood against wood interrupted them. Koach gave a start and sprang
to his feet.

The door. It was the
door.

He
exchanged a fearful glance with his mother. Her eyes hardened.

Koach
ran to the door and pulled it clumsily open. A plank of rough-hewn pine barred
the way at the height of his shoulders, and two men—Natan El and Mordecai—held
it in place while Bar Cheleph swung his hammer.

He
was
nailing
it to the doorposts!

“What?”
Koach gasped.

Bar
Cheleph’s eyes were wide with fear. “Get back, Hebel. All within are unclean.
You’ll die, and rise,” Bar Cheleph said. “But we won’t let you break loose to
devour the town.”

The
men let go of the board and reached for another.

Heart
racing, Koach glanced past the men. The street outside had emptied. A few
people watched from the doorways of other houses, eyes showing their whites. He
caught sight of the silent woman, standing in the shade cast by the nearest
wall of Benayahu’s house. She had pressed herself to the wall as though to make
herself unseen or unnoticed. Her face was white with terror.

“No
one’s unclean within,” Koach said. His throat tightened. “My mother lives.”

“Not
for long.” The board clacked into place beneath the other, and Bar Cheleph set
an iron nail at one end and drove the hammer against it. The sound was fierce
and brutal and loud, the board driven against the doorpost and the doorpost
driven against the stone wall of the house. Bar Cheleph kept
swinging the hammer, rhythmic blows as though the house were being beaten.
Koach shrank back, a wild image in his head of the house boarded up for the
ritual seven days, he and his mother and Yeshua dying of thirst within, unless
they found a way to leap, unseen, from the roof.

Koach
drew himself up, his voice high with fear. “This is my brother’s house—”

“And
when he returns, he’ll understand. Seven days to separate the unclean from the
living. Then he can go inside and sort out the living and the dead, the clean
and the bitten.”

“Don’t!”

“Get
back
, Hebel.” Bar Cheleph lifted the hammer, the whites of his eyes
showing. “We
saw
the dead girl touch you, saw you touch her cold flesh.
I grieve for your mother, we all will. But she is dead. Or will be in moments.
We all saw the wound.” He glanced over his shoulder at those who stood at their
doors. “Help us! Quickly. Before she
rises!”

Mordecai
lifted a third board, and he and Bar Cheleph slammed it into place below the
others, at waist height. Koach shivered; he was looking now at a wall, a wall
of hard wood with chinks of light between the planks.

He
ran back into the house’s interior, into the open atrium. Rahel was nowhere to
be seen. Koach ran to the stranger, who still leaned against one wall with a
nearly emptied bowl of water in his hands and one of Rahel’s blankets about his
shoulders.

“Bar
Yosef,” he cried.

The
man didn’t look up. His eyes stared into some other place.

“Bar
Yosef …
navi
… they’re boarding up the door. Help me stop them.
Please!”

Still
he didn’t look up.

Koach
bit back a shout of frustration. If only he were not
hebel
, if he were a
man like any other,
he
would be carrying his lover’s body up the hill
and Shimon would be here to stop Bar Cheleph. “I have only one arm.
Help
me!”

“They
aren’t boarding up the door. They’ve stopped.” Yeshua frowned. “Or they will
stop. In a moment … Can’t you hear them, Koach? The dead,
all the dead.”

Koach
felt a chill. But he couldn’t think about that now. He looked about the atrium
desperately, and then rushed to his secret room. He ducked inside and knelt by
the cold wall, his fingers scrabbling at the loose stone. There. He felt the
hilt cold in his palm. His carving knife, small but freshly
whetted and sharp.

He
stepped out of the small room and hesitated, his heart wild in his chest. That hilt in his palm.

Yeshua
watched him, his face troubled, but said nothing.

Ice in his heart. “I’ll do what I
have to,” Koach whispered.

Suddenly
the rug over the door to Rahel’s room was drawn aside, and she stepped out into
the atrium and walked with swift purpose toward her outer door. No trace of her
earlier struggle, her fever, or her torn and soiled garments remained. Her hair
was combed and bound back as though she were preparing to host guests in her
home. She wore her cleanest, least tattered gown, one green like the grass by
the sea. No kohl for her eyes or adornments for her ears and throat, for she
was Hebrew, not Greek. Yet she stood tall and regal. Bar Yonah’s wife, once a
power in the town in her own right.