No Lasting Burial (2 page)

As
if in answer to the sun’s arrival, an eerie cry sounded over the water. A high, wavering cry, a wail. Shimon stiffened; for a moment
he didn’t know what creature was uttering that scream, though he thought there
were words in it.

“What
was that?” Yohanna gasped.

“A
man,” Yakob said, looking over his shoulder. “There’s
a man on the shore.”

Shimon
glanced where Yakob gestured, even as the cry died
away, leaving his heart beating fast. They were close enough to the shore now
that if Shimon had held up his arm and tried to cover the man with his hand, he
would have needed to use nearly his entire palm.

He
squinted against the sun’s glare on the water. One of the boat people, maybe,
though the man was standing with his feet in the sea. Why one of the vagrants
would walk out into the breakers and risk the touch of the waterlogged dead,
Shimon couldn’t imagine. The man wore a wool robe the color of sand, though it
was torn, dirtied. There were bruises on his face and arms. A vagrant, maybe
one of those men with a demon that made him shriek in the night until the
fishers of Kfar Nahum drove him away.

Yet
that cry, that terrible cry.

Shimon
could not slow the thumping of his heart. The oars slipped in and out of the
water, and the boat moved smoothly toward the shore and the man.

The
man on the shore lifted his hands to his mouth and called out again, and the
cry carried loud and far. Yakob cursed and made the
sign against the evil eye. That high wail as though he were the God of their
fathers in the desert, calling the People to Har
Sinai, the mountain that touched the clouds. Shimon made out one word in old
Hebrew, strangely ululated: the word for
fish
.

“God,
I wish he’d stop that,” Yakob whispered, pale.

The
very air seemed to quiver as the cry went on, and on. Then the boat lurched
hard to the larboard, tilting, nearly tossing Shimon into the sea. He grasped
the bench and his feet scrabbled against the side of the boat as the gunwale
nearly touched the surface. The boat—they were tipping! With a bellow, Shimon
threw himself across and up against the highside. Yakob and Yohanna did so, too,
shouting over the cry from the shore.

“Did
we strike something!

“I
don’t know!”

“Right
the boat!” Shimon roared. He knew from the boat’s tilt that the keel was coming
dangerously near the surface, and he heard water lapping over the low gunwale
as the boat fought for balance. Glancing down, he saw dark water coming over
the gunwale and the nets trailing in the sea, and gasped.

There
the nets were, some way below the surface, and he could see that they were
full, in fact perilously full, of teeming, squirming fish. Musht
and barbels and sardines caught in the tight weave of
the nets. The fish were blue-silver and they flashed in the dawn, like pieces
of living iron. Their thousand mouths opened and closed helplessly, their eyes
dark and glassy as if with shock at their sudden birth and capture, as if
tossed in one slippery instant from God’s hand into the waiting nets.

“
Fish
,”
Yakob whispered. “
Fish.
”

“
Fish
,”
Yohanna whispered.

Then
Shimon was whispering it, too. The word fell from their mouths like a sigh of
awe, like an invitation to wake from an evil dream.
Fish … fish …
Their sigh went out over the water until that word and the slosh of the waves
against the boat and the slapping of the wet scales of fish against each
other’s bodies and against the straining nets became one sound, one hope.

Every
man older than a boy knows this, and likely every woman, too: You cast out your
nets and catch some flash of new life. Then your dead
rise from the waves of your past to wrest it from your hands.

The
boat began to right itself, but only barely. Even as
Shimon looked down into the water, he saw a pale corpse clinging to the bottom
of the net and trying, clumsily, to climb it; its face tilted back, and its
small, lifeless eyes gazed up at the water’s surface and at Shimon above it.
Shimon gazed back at those empty eyes for one terrible instant, his heart
violent in his chest, his body cold with horror that this ruin of a human
being, its insides perhaps crawling with
shedim
,
might seize his flesh, might
eat
him.

Great
strips of flesh trailed from the thing’s cheek, where fish and the water itself
had been at it. Shimon reached for one of the small spears stowed beneath his
bench for incidents such as this, and he took the spear in his gloved hand and
began thrusting it down into the water, cautiously but quickly, knowing he
mustn’t cut the net. Knowing also that the corpse must not
come up
with
the net.

The
face emerged from the water and its mouth opened as though to moan or hiss, but
water poured out instead of sound; the corpse reached one maggot-white,
waterlogged arm toward him. With a wild cry, Shimon drove his spear into its
face; his hook tore through the thing’s scalp as easily as through a fish. In a
moment it hung limp from Shimon’s spear, its eyes still dead and unseeing.

Then
it slid away and sank into the deep. Its face still gazing lifelessly up, it
faded to a dim white form far beneath the water, and then could no longer be
seen.

Shimon
threw his weight back against the far gunwale, fearing the tilt of the boat. He
was breathing hard. He felt a hand clap his shoulder, and Yakob’s
breath near his ear. “It’s all right, Shimon. It’s all
right.”

But
his hands were clenched so tightly around the spear that he couldn’t loosen
them. He just kept staring at the surface of the sea. And then he saw them. Faint in the murk, clinging to the bottom of the nets, beneath the
flashing silver of the fish, other pale figures. The corpses of the sea of Galilee.

In
the next moment, Yakob and Yohanna
glimpsed them, too.

“Holy
God,” Yohanna breathed.

“We’ve
brought them up with the fish,” Yakob whispered.

“Spears,”
Shimon cried hoarsely, his body so shaken with fear he felt that if he let go
of the spear he held, he might retch and fall into the sea.

But
then the boat tipped harder, tugged down by the weight of the dead crawling up
the ropes from the nets. The mast swung down, dangerously near the surface. Yakob and Yohanna didn’t spare a
moment to grab spears; they threw themselves again hard against the highside gunwale, fighting to balance the weight of the
dead. Gazing down with his spear still clutched in his hands, Shimon saw the
nets and the fish beneath him, and the dead breaking the water, reaching with
their long, gray fingers for the gunwale and the warm bodies above it. Their
eyes pale stones glistening with seawater. Shimon stabbed down at them. But one
grasped his fishing spear and pulled, nearly wrenching Shimon out of the boat
and into the lethal water. Such strength. For just a
moment the corpse’s face was only an arm’s length from his, with its dead eyes
and torn flesh hanging loose from white bone. Its jaws opened, spewing water.

And
then, in the dawn light on that dying sea, Shimon did something that he could
never afterward truly believe he had done. Something in him roared awake, like
a lion springing from a cave. So many nights he had failed to bring home fish
for his family, failed though his father had been a boatman envied on every
coast of the Sea of Galilee. So many mornings he had come home to see his brother’s
skin stretched too tight over his ribs, to hear their mother’s voice shrill
with the bitterness that hunger breeds in the heart. How often he had heard
weeping by day in the house nearest his as he tried to sleep despite the growl
of his belly, or seen beggars listless in the shade of derelict boats just
above the tideline, their eyes vague with the nearness of death and their faces
gray as the faces in the water. So many silent nights on the
water, so many empty nets. But not this time.
This time, nothing living or dead would keep him from bringing the fish home.

Shimon
took up an oar and leapt on the gunwale and spun the wooden blade in his hands
to give it momentum and force. He slammed the blunt wood into one of the pale
faces. The corpse lost its hold on the net and was hurled aside into the waves,
where it sank as swiftly from sight as a dream upon waking. Then, roaring as
though furious at the dead and at the sea and the sky and Mighty God himself,
Shimon spun the oar, slamming it into one face after another, dislodging the
dead, in one case crushing the corpse’s skull so that its body went limp as he
sent it back to the sea.

The
last of the dead grasped the gunwale with one hand and with the other, the haft
of the oar, just above Shimon’s own hand. Hissing.
Shimon lifted the oar in both hands, drawing up the dead, water streaming from
the corpse. Shimon caught a brief glimpse of its eyes near his, white gums
drawn back from its teeth, water trickling out from a great gash in its cheek.
All his nightmares made real. His memories given flesh.
With a shout he swung the oar over the water away from the nets and shoved it
out into the air; oar and corpse fell back, attacking the surface of the sea in
a fierce splash. The corpse clung to the oar, but the waves bore it away from
the boat, its dead eyes still watching Shimon. Still
hungering. After a moment its wavering moan called out across the water.

Shimon
fell back into the boat, his chest heaving. Yakob and
Yohanna tried to haul up the nets, heaving on the
ropes, hand over hand. Doubtless, if they could get the fish into the center of
the boat, they could keep the craft from trying to pitch itself into the sea.
But after a moment they gave up, faces pale with strain, and let the nets fall
back into the water. They gave the ropes a little slack and tied new knots,
letting the nets sink deep, and at last the boat righted itself, its slender
mast swinging slowly back toward the sky.

Yakob collapsed onto
the other row bench. “Can’t haul up those nets,” he gasped. “We’ll go under. We
have to drag them in nearer the sand.”

“Only
one oar.” Shimon had caught his breath.

“Two,”
Yohanna said. “I stowed a spare beneath the bench
before the last Sabbath.”

“Then
row,” Shimon growled, forcing himself up and onto the bench.

The
others grabbed up the oars and swung them out and began to row fiercely, rowing
backward so that they could keep their eyes on the shore. Shimon sat with his
hands empty, his face dark and brooding. He could hear the man on the shore
calling to them, but didn’t heed the words. He heeded only the low moan of that
corpse being carried out on the tide, riding its oar back toward the empty
heart of the sea. Its voice was like another he’d heard, fifteen years before.
All those years his past had lurched after him, threatening to swallow him. Moaning for him. He had hidden his heart in cold numbness
and now that numbness had broken open, revealing blood and fury inside. Even as
the boat lurched on the water, each stroke of the oars bringing the fish-heavy
craft near to foundering, Shimon kept his gaze fixed on the stranger on the
shore. This man who had called the fish, and called the dead
up with them.

The
dead feasted in the town that night, devouring Roman and Hebrew alike. Before
they came, Rome’s mercenaries had set up their tents in a half-moon around the
town’s north, as though all the birds of prey around the Middle Sea had settled
here, ravenous, with blades for talons. They all wore Roman armor but their
faces were those of an entire world: faces dark-skinned and white, black hair
and golden, short men and giants. The conscripts of an Empire,
come to punish the town that had hurled a Roman tax collector into a house
filled with the dead. All day they had plundered Kfar
Nahum, and with the fall of dark, they reveled, peeling the town and its people
open like fruit to be enjoyed and devoured.

But
they had not come alone.

Something
more ravenous even than they had followed them down out of the dry hills, perhaps attracted from old battlefields where they’d
stood silent and waiting by the loud clink and clank of strange armor. The
moaning dead fell upon the tents and the houses, and the town filled with
shrieks.

Soldiers
who only moments before had been slaking their hungers with wine or rape were
tugged beneath growling, grasping corpses even as they reached for their
swords. The natives of Kfar Nahum were bewildered at
this judgment that fell upon both oppressors and oppressed; some ran to grab up
fishing hooks to use for spears; others ran for the shore and the boats and the
safety of the dark waters of the Sea of Galilee, that freshwater lake of
storms; others tried to get back to their houses.

Shimon
bar Yonah was only thirteen, short, and as yet
unacquainted with despair. He peered out through a chink in the window of his
father’s house, but could see only dark silhouettes against the fires the
Romans had kindled at the edge of town to light their carousing earlier that
night. He heard screams, heard the wavering moans of the dead. His urine ran
hot down the inside of his leg, and the reek of it filled his nose. He was
never afterward able to forget the shame of his terror in that moment.

The
outer door slammed open, startling a cry from him, but when Shimon turned to
see the man who came to stand at the entrance to his small room, dark in the
doorway, his chest heaving, he was not one of the dead nor any Roman but his
own father. Yonah, the man other fishermen in the
village looked up to. A man who seemed a giant to his son, as
perhaps all fathers do, a man who towered over him and could surely carry a
boat out of the sea on his shoulders.

Yonah was clutching
his left arm near the shoulder. He dropped to one knee and looked into his
son’s face. His voice was raw with pain. “Son, listen to me. Your mother—I hid
her in the
kokhim
. The tomb
of our family. The one place the Romans would not look. You must go
there. Go there now. Run. Don’t let the dead follow you. Go to your mother. Go
now
,
son!”

He
grasped Shimon’s arm and thrust him toward the door. Shimon glanced back wildly
at his father. In one dizzying instant, he saw blood seeping between his
father’s fingers where he clasped his left arm. Shimon hesitated; he felt the
slow crawl of panic into his chest.

“I’ll
be behind you,” Yonah cried. “Run, boy!”

And
Shimon ran.

Shimon’s
heart was a wild, desperate thing in his chest; his side burned as he tore
through the narrow streets of their town, ducking as screaming figures darted
or fell past or tried to clutch at him. Dying men and women lay writhing in the
dust behind him as he ran, and other shapes fell on them with snarls. Once,
Shimon saw ahead of him, at the doorway of a house, a woman screaming in the
street, her belly torn open. He saw her face—the town’s midwife. A man with
only one eye glanced up from the ravaged body with entrails clutched in his
hands, and his eye was white and had no life in it.

Shimon
screamed and veered to the left, ducking as two corpses in the street hissed
and snatched at him; one caught hold of his sleeve at the wrist but the fabric tore and Shimon stumbled and ran on, with the corpses
pursuing. Ahead he saw the door to the weaver’s house, where the Roman
mercenaries had herded all of the town’s small children. An oil lamp still
burned within, and Shimon had a brief glimpse of adult shapes bent over small,
still bodies, large hands pulling entrails and red organs from their bellies.
One of the feasting corpses glanced up and its eyes shone like cat’s eyes in
the light of the lamp. Shimon ran past, sobbing, but the corpses pursuing him
ducked within the broken door and joined the feeding.

Everything
after that was a confusion of snarls and moans and hands grasping for him, and
a man in Roman armor lying in the street, his legs torn away, two of the dead
bending over him, sucking greedily at his insides. His screams as he begged for
help. Shimon covered his ears. He couldn’t stop. He had to get out of the town
and find his mother. He couldn’t stop. Crying, he ran, and ran, and
ran
.

Then
he was through the houses, and his small legs carried him up the rocky slopes
of the hill west of the town. A wind was picking up, and he could hear the
shedim
screeching and howling among the stones and
crags. He hurried for the refuge of the tombs, where no demons could enter and
where the dead were always silent. The family
kokhim
,
and those of the other fishing families of Kfar
Nahum, were chambers dug out of the side of the hill. On shelves carved into
their interior walls were laid the bodies of their ancestors. Once, centuries
ago, the People had piled mere cairns of stone over their dead; now they gave
them beds inside the earth and often left the tombs open to the air so that God
could look in and see the dead, and remember them.

But
these walking dead that had lurched into their town during the night,
interrupting the carousal of the Roman legionaries, were not the dead of Kfar Nahum. Shimon didn’t know where they had come from,
only that their faces were unfamiliar and twisted in savage hunger. Perhaps
they had come down, as a few dead did each year, from the great battlefields
left neglected in wild places. He didn’t know.

Behind him, the light of flames rushing
before the wind.
Parts of the town were dying in heat and fire and screams. His body went cold
with panic as he panted and forced himself uphill toward those dark tombs.
Suddenly, he heard a thin, faint cry—from ahead, not behind. An
infant’s cry. Shimon froze, listening. Then he bolted, running up the
slope to the tomb of his family.

The
kokh
was open and dark, the dead inside silent
on their shelves. Shimon leaned into the opening, the cool of the tomb on his
face, and called out, “
Amma
, amma,
mother, mother!” into the cool, dry night within.

“
Shimon
?”

“I’m
here. Father sent me.” He was shaking.

“Shimon—”
Almost a moan, and Shimon caught his breath, fearing
for her and fearing the dark. He stepped in, stumbled over loose pebbles, and
caught himself on his hands, there at the very lip of the tomb’s round chamber.
Even as he picked himself up, his eyes adjusted and in the faint starlight and
the dim glow of the town’s burning he saw his mother lying on her back near the
wall. Her body was flushed and damp with sweat; the distant glow from the fires
in her eyes. She lay naked on a blanket, her legs parted, the knees lifted, and
Shimon averted his eyes. She was clutching something small to her breast; he
could hear suckling. The woman glanced up at Shimon, her face twisted in fear
and exhaustion—her son stood there and not his father.

Shimon
stood in the door, not knowing what to do. His face flushed as he watched the
small life suckling at his mother.

“Your
brother,” Rahel said after a moment. She sounded hoarse and breathless, as
though she had been weeping. “This is your brother.”

Rahel bat Eleazar had given birth alone, without any midwife to
assist her, and though she had been blessed with a clean birth and a living
baby, she was left weak and shaken. Obeying the words she whispered there in
the shadows of the tomb, Shimon took up a fold of the blanket she lay on and
pressed it between her thighs to stanch the blood. Weakly she touched her hand
with his, pressing slightly, and Shimon held the cloth to her. He listened to
the sounds his brother made. He listened to Rahel’s
breathing, heavy in the dark. And he listened to the cries and moans from the
town below. Whatever entered his heart as he listened to these things, as he
sat where no man or boy was ever permitted to sit, between the knees of his
mother at the place of birth—whatever this moment did to his heart, there was
always a quietness in him, for all his life afterward.

When
his mother slept and Shimon was sure that no blood had soaked through the
blanket, he left the cloth bunched up and pressed to her as best he could, then
took up the waterskin his father had left there for
her—it was empty now—and slipped out of the tomb. He knew his mother would
thirst when she woke, and he knew there was a spring farther up the hill, where
he and the other boys used to go and watch the moon rise over the sea. Standing
on the slope, he glanced once at Kfar Nahum’s stone
houses and the dark murmur of the sea behind. Some of the fire had been put
out, though it still raged near the synagogue. He could just see dark shapes
against it. Somewhere a man was screaming, high-pitched and desperate, in
Latin, words Shimon didn’t know. He heard moaning still, but thought there was
less of it.

Shivering,
he turned his back and crept up the hill, bending low so that his silhouette
would not be seen against the stars. Halfway to the water, he stopped—not
because he had seen or heard anything, but because something had coursed
through his body, cold and sharp, a shock of instinct that he could not have
described or understood. He dropped and pressed his belly to the dirt,
breathing in small gasps of fear.

A
moment passed. Then another.

The
man far below was still shrieking his incoherent Latin words.

Then,
somewhere near, the slide of a foot over the soil. Shimon tensed.

Now a step. Then another
slide, the sound of a foot dragged across the dirt.

Shimon’s
heart set up a panic beat in his chest. He lay trembling.

A
dark shape slouched by perhaps a stone’s throw from where he lay, just a moving
patch of night where no stars shone, a man’s shape or a woman’s, hunched
forward, one arm hanging uselessly at its side. Shimon held his breath, and his
heart was like all the shouting since the world began, ready to give him away.
Yet the corpse didn’t hear it; it just dragged that one foot behind it, swaying
as it walked downhill. The reek of it reached Shimon and he gagged; he covered
his mouth and nose and fought with himself to stay silent.

The
screams in the town seemed faint now, drowned beneath the roar of blood in
Shimon’s ears, but he could still hear them. He could see again the midwife
being eaten, the midwife who might have helped his mother. He could see again
the blood on his father’s hand. A mad urge seized him, to leap to his feet and
shout and throw himself at that corpse, perhaps with a stone in his hand. To
make that shambling, violent corpse
know
that this town it meant to
consume had people in it, men and women like Shimon’s father and mother, people
who lived and loved and breathed. To smash the stone
into its face, if that’s what it took to make it see.

But
he didn’t leap up.

He
held still. He clenched his fist about blades of the coarse grass, as though
holding himself to the ground.

The
corpse was moving down the slope now. It tilted its head back, drew in a long
breath that Shimon could hear in the dark, and then it
moaned
. A low wail of need and demand that wrenched at him. It was
the sound of a man whose tongue had been cut away, and then his mind, and then
he had been left on the shore of the sea with no sight or sound of his wife and
children and all his kin, but only the need to find them and clasp them,
crushing them to his body with strong, stiff arms and consuming them in his
need. That low moan of a man who didn’t know where they might
be found or how he might come to them again. Such profound and
despairing need as Shimon had never heard in a human voice. He shivered in the
grass.

The
moan went on and
on
, far too long. Longer than a living man would utter
any cry, long past when the lungs would burn, for the corpse voicing it felt no
pain or anguish of the body. Or if it did, that was as the bite of a flea
beside the pain of its solitude and hunger.

Then
the moan fell and the corpse passed on down the hill. The sounds of its feet
faded into the noise from the town and the chill breeze carrying the unbodied
shedim
through
the grass. Its shape was distant now but dark against the glow of flame and
easily seen.

Shimon
lay breathing a while, recovering. He knew he had to be brave. Brave for his
mother and her baby. All at once, he got up and ran forward at a crouch. He
rushed; he had to get the water and get back into the tomb before any other
corpse appeared on the hill. The momentary urge for battle had faded; after
hearing that moan so near, he dreaded any further encounter with the dead.

And
he wanted to be there when Rahel stirred. He could not let her wake alone in
the dark.