Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (25 page)

Choking back her anguish, Devora hurried to the furs, knelt there, and tossed them aside, revealing a long, narrow box of plain cedar, no jewelry or adornment, just God’s own wood.

“Do what needs to be done. With that,” Naomi croaked.

Slowly Devora slid the lid from the box. Inside she found a long blade with a hilt of bone. The blade was much longer than her arm. She touched the metal gently, heard her fingernails ring quietly against it. “This isn’t bronze,” she breathed.

“Iron.” Naomi was breathing hard between the words she forced out. “A gift. Sea Coast man—I saved his life. He left me that. Take it, Devora.”

In anguish, Devora turned and gazed at the
navi
, whose eyes seemed glassy now. Naomi kept moistening her lips with her
tongue, as though to fight the desert heat in her skin the only way she could.

“I can’t,” Devora gasped.

“At dusk, the
kohannim
will.” Naomi’s hand twitched on the cushions. “I would rather it were you. Because you are the
navi
. And you have seen the threat. As none of them have, not truly. You took that small boy in your arms—” Her breathing was labored. “It is you, Devora. They will look to you for judgment. Because you see what God sees.”

“I
can’t
,” Devora cried. She had slept little in the past seven nights; now her hold on the waking world seemed tenuous. Her memories crowded upon her, ready to do her violence: the thing that had been her mother looking in at her through the tent flap. Its mouth open in a hiss. The firm, cool surface of a stone pestle in her palm.

She made a little noise, like a whimper.

“
Devora.
” Naomi held her gaze, though now her entire body had begun to shiver violently. “Listen to me. It is kinder for me to die this way than in the lingering fever. I want to know that my body will not stand from these cushions when I am gone. It is kind, Devora. Listen to me. You have seen how God is a father who burns away what threatens his children, and you and I have felt his heat. But God is also our mother. As a woman, I know this. That her heart is a deep, deep lake dousing all wrath and flame. That she kisses us when we are born. Quickens new life within us when we have become women. God made both Adam and Eve, both in God’s likeness. And if this is true, Devora, what I tell you, what Miriam who was
navi
when I was a girl told me, then God who is like our mother and has compassion will forgive us the evils we cannot avoid and the lives we cannot save.”

Naomi moved her shaking hands, folding them weakly over her breast. “Do this for me, Devora.” She closed her eyes, panting softly, her face slick with perspiration. “Do it quickly.”

Devora’s vision blurred. She had seen this. She had seen a vision of Naomi dying. She had foreseen her own grief at her mother’s death. And in neither case had she been able to save either her mother or the mother of Israel. The tears hot on her face. Try as she might, Devora could not think of God as a mother. Distant, delivering visions and then demanding action, and
not
maternal, not one who might embrace or hold a grieving, shattered girl.

Naomi whispered the words of the
sh’ma
and closed her eyes. For a few moments more, Devora stood shaking, the hilt of the iron sword clutched tightly in both her hands. Naomi did not open her eyes or speak.

A great cold settled in Devora’s heart.

This could not be avoided. It could not be delayed. She saw so clearly in her mind the face of her mother, distorted and hissing. If she were to see Naomi like
that
, it would break her; she would collapse and never again stand.

“I love you, mother,” Devora cried, and lifted the blade.

D
EVORA STEPPED
from the tent, drawing the bloodied sword behind her, the blade’s tip trailing in the dust. The levites and the young women parted for her, standing silently to either side, watching her. Devora’s face was terribly cold. All the heat had been sucked out of her and out of the world. As she walked by, one of the levites began to weep quietly. She didn’t look at him.

“We need another cairn,” she said softly.

She walked slowly through the camp, feeling embers crunch beneath her sandals. An occasional metal ringing from the blade as the edge struck some rock along the way. Doubtless there would be some nicks, some damage in the sword; she did not care. She looked about her at the bodies and at the young men already gathering great stones to make the cairns. So many cairns. She looked at them and walked on. Until she stood at the very edge of the camp, gazing out across the reeds by the bank. There
were more bodies in the water, she saw, facedown and caught against some rock jutting into the river or dragged half onto the bank. Perhaps some had not caught at the bank but had drifted free, like leaves blown into the water by a high wind. In the confusion of the night, some of these bodies might have escaped, slipping downstream to pollute the Tumbling Water and the fields of their People.

She did not care.

She stared out at the reeds and the heather on the high slopes behind and the dark, rising ridges of the Galilee hills to the north. She smelled smoke and burned flesh and decay. She heard weeping and low talk among the men at their work. For a while she recited in her mind the names of those she’d known who were now gone from the land: Mikal with her laughter and her love of mischief; Tabitha, who had dreamed of love and rich herds in the lower valleys; practical Leah, whose hands were so clumsy, though she worked harder than any of them. Even Zefanyah, who she had so admired on the fighting ground. Zefanyah, who had kissed her. Who had given her his waterskin. He too had been among the night’s dead.

They were gone. All gone, for all time. The land on which they’d stood had been defiled and filthied; it might be a generation before the stink of the dead was gone from Shiloh.

She recited some of the Law quietly to herself, seeking calm. Most of the
mitzvot
were stored up in her heart, and reaching for one was like reaching for a memory of a beautiful summer day. She had replaced most of her memories with
mitzvot
; how would she ever be able to replace the memories of this night?

“Devora?” A man’s voice. She didn’t turn her head. Eleazar. He was breathing hard; he came to stand beside her. “Devora?”

She didn’t answer. She kept looking at the heather, which was moving now, softly, in a breeze.

“Devora?
Navi?
Has God shown you what must be done?”

“You must wait,” she said.

She said nothing more, and at last the high priest turned back to the camp.

Devora stood there, weak and faint because she hadn’t eaten. Still, she stood looking across the heather. As the sun slid to the edge of the hills, she whispered, “You are cruel,
adonai
, but I understand why you must be.”

The wind picked up in the heather, but there were no words in it. Just the rustle of weeds bending so they would not break.

She turned her eyes to the hills, saw the way their ridges cut at the sky in the gathering dark. “I will judge the People for you, as she did.” Her voice gathered strength. “I will keep the land clean.”

It was the only thing she could give Naomi—or any of them. She covered her mouth with her hand and held her feelings tightly within her. Let loose, they would tear at her and devour her as ravenously as the dead.

She must build a cairn over her feelings, a high cairn, so that she could stand before the People.

When dawn arrived, Devora turned and walked back into the camp. As she reached the Tent of Meeting she stumbled; two levites caught her by the arms before she could hit the soil. She moaned softly; they brought her unleavened bread and mutton, and after washing quickly to her elbows, she held the bread in both hands and tore at it until she felt like vomiting. They brought her water, but refused to let her drink more than a few quick sips at a time. Her stomach lurched within her. She clutched at her belly with a groan, and they stood patiently by.

When she was able to stand again, she motioned to them and they helped her to her feet. She stood there in the tattered shift she’d worn throughout her exile from the camp, the shift still
stained with brown streaks from her fight with the dead boy in the reeds. She drew in a breath; she reeked of death and sweat and unwashed girl. She wrinkled her nose once, then composed her face and lifted her arms, like Moseh in the desert. She called out the words—the words of the Lawgiver that would summon the People to her.

The women came stumbling from their tents and the men from their work; they had piled the cairns high, and all but a few were now finished. They gathered about her in a half circle, their faces stained with blood and dirt, their eyes weary. A few gazed at her with cautious hope.

“I am Devora of Israel,” she said, “and I see what God sees.” She took a breath, her eyes glancing only once to the tent where Naomi had died.

Then she faced her People and began making judgments, separating the clean from the unclean.

H
IGH IN
the Galilee, where the Tumbling Water is just a stream one can wade through by brute force, there is a high plateau the Hebrews call
Merom
, Water Near the Sky. There a small lake reflects back the stars; lilies and other delicate water flowers cover its surface near the shore. Shielded on all sides by a bowl of earth and rock, the lake is far more placid than the Harp-Shaped Sea, and the fish there, though few, are fat and slow, and they sleep as they swim. If the fish in Kinnor are like dancing, leaping deer, the fish in Merom are more like lumbering oxen. They are not as pleasing to taste, but the Canaanites in those hills have many ways of preparing them that give delight to the tongue and gladden the heart.

The boats that plied this small lake in that time were flat-bottomed and small, nearly coracles; in each, a single man would stand with a spear and a small net for catching the fish
he impaled. In the warmer months, the boats would slip out on the quiet water in the dark before dawn and return as the sun rose, each with its cargo of bloodied fish. Salted and dried, the fish would fill great bins; the people who lived in that earthen bowl were well fed. Once, a mighty town had stood there, with a steep slope at its back and a circle of high walls of baked clay. Walls, the Canaanites had named their town, a boast to others who might wish to seize the lake from them. Now the walls were only a ring of tumbled and cracked bricks; not even a wooden palisade of cedar from the hills had been raised in their place. Hebrews had come there, with spears and cries in a language the Canaanites did not know, and they had brought with them a new God who apparently did not care for walls in his People’s path.

Tearing their way through the walls, the Hebrews—the last of the Hebrews, for other tribes of their People had already found fertile valleys in which to pitch their tents far to the south—these weary and hungry and furious Hebrews set fire to half the town and killed many of the men whether they were armed or not, in their fury to possess this place near the sky. Women were dragged from their dying houses and thrown to the dirt streets, where sweating, ragged men forced them even as the slaughter continued on every side.

The Law that had been given to the People of the Covenant in the desert forbade this treatment of captives:

When you see among the captives a beautiful woman and you desire her and bring her to your tent, she will shave her head and weep for her father and her mother who are dead, for one full month, and in that time you will not touch her.

And if you find she doesn’t please you, then you will let her go where she will. You will not sell her or make her an item of trade, for you have known her.

Those
mitzvot
the judges had declared in the desert, part of the great Law to bind the tribes to each other and to the God who’d found them thirsting and perishing in the dead-haunted ravines. And often these
mitzvot
had been followed in the south, where the levites had demanded that the men remember the cost of breaking the Covenant. “Our fathers’ Covenant, not ours!” some of the men would cry. And the levites in wrath would shout: “Is this then your fathers’ land and not yours?