Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (4 page)

Her hands were trembling; she could not still them.

“We must bury it,” she whispered. “And we must hurry.”

S
OME HORRORS
demand that we have words to explain them, but Devora had none. She stepped past Zadok and the girl to gaze down the slope at the ashen-faced supplicants. Behind her, the girl’s sobs became high-pitched and sharp, like the sounds of some small animal dying in pain. Devora took a steadying breath, carefully sewing her heart shut. She did what had to be done.

A wind sprang up, pulling at her hair and her dress. She raised her voice over it. “This hill is cleansed,” she called to them, “and a cairn will be raised.”

“
Selah
,” the supplicants murmured back.
Always.
And the wind took away their voices. Their eyes were wide; they stared into a darkness that was their own fear and their own expectation and their own waking at night. They had come here to stand before the olive tree to receive justice, rather than visiting justice upon each other in blood and heat and the glinting of knives.
Now they were pale. They had heard rumors of the moaning of the dead in the high Galilee and the coming of armed men to seek aid from all the tribes, but the Canaanite woman today had brought that distant terror that they could ignore here to this very hill above the tents of Shiloh and the holy Ark itself. Surely the hunger cry of the dead infant meant some savage and irremediable justice had been visited upon them, upon the land and the People. That God who sat in decision over the Hebrews and over the whole earth had taken away his hand of protection. That they were no longer supplicants but rather men marked for death and burial.

The cleansing and the silencing of this one small, restless corpse brought no comfort. They gazed at the
navi
, awaiting some judgment or vision from God. She felt the weight of their need, their demands on her.

But what could Devora tell them? That she had foreseen the dead moving across the holy valley in great herds and didn’t yet know what God wished her to do to prevent it? They didn’t need to hear that.

“Go back to your tents,” she cried at last. “The
navi
has left her seat.”

They gazed up at her listlessly.

“Go home! Observe the Sabbath. Live by the Law, and the land will be clean.”

Some of those standing or sitting on the slope below her had been there before the sun rose to offer the earth its warm kiss. Some had been months in Shiloh while their cases were debated among those levites appointed to sit in decision over the People, before they’d been referred at last to the
navi
who received special insight from God. Yet now they didn’t complain; they began leaving the hill, one after the other. Some of them walking slowly back to the tents, some quickly as though fleeing. As though they understood that their demands on the Law and on God
were rescinded or postponed. Perhaps, in the days ahead, they would wait in silence to hear whether the valley would fill with the voices of the dead preparing to feed or with the clack of stone against stone as cairns were raised over the corpses to hold them unrising to the earth.

Devora watched for a few moments as they moved away through the heather. Delaying her next task. She lifted her eyes, gazing across this land of promise from her high place, and listened to the wind move in the olive leaves. Softly as the wind, she heard the Canaanite weeping.

She didn’t turn yet to face that mother and the infant in need of burial. She couldn’t. There was little time, but she needed one moment to breathe. She glanced down at the valley, at the mighty flock of white tents perched like cranes by the river. That was Shiloh. A yearning lit in her for a quiet meal and rest in her husband’s tent. But she knew there would be no rest for her tonight, no real rest.

The men from the Galilee had pitched their tents a few miles downriver to the east. She could see them from here. Not a permanent camp like Shiloh, but a hasty one, mostly small tents that could be rolled up and carried on a man’s back. In the high land where those men lived, the dead were feeding, groping through fields of wild barley or along creek-banks, hunting animals or men or women. Or reaching through windows for infants asleep in the cedar houses built by the Canaanites.

Years since she’d seen one of the unclean dead.

Except in her dreams.

Except whenever she lay her head down and closed her eyes and pursued sleep through the weeds and fens of her nightmares.

Turning, Devora found Zadok standing over the infant with his back to her, and the girl still on her knees. She had drawn her salmah back around her, but Devora recalled how thin and exhausted her body had looked, as though the journey to her
olive tree and the ordeal she suffered in her heart had bled the girl’s body of all her strength and health. The Canaanite glanced up at the
navi
with swollen eyes.

“A cairn,” the girl said. “You said a cairn. Please. My child. He needs to go into the water. He’s not a Hebrew. Please. He must pass into the fish, and the fish into the people, so that he can come back.”

Devora went cold with horror at the thought. What if it took only one unclean corpse to defile an entire lake, all the fish in it, all those who ate of the fish? Who could say what would happen? Thirty years ago, the heathen dead had wandered, moaning, into Shiloh camp and devoured much of what mattered to young Devora. She had known since that day what a peril the Canaanites and their customs could be.

“Enough,” she cried. “I’ll have none of your heathen ways, girl. They’ve brought this on us. Your gloves, Zadok.”

When the nazarite didn’t answer, Devora stepped toward him, glanced at his face, and received a shock. That face showed no expression: Zadok simply stood with his dark eyes fixed on the small body.

“Zadok?”

No answer.

Alarmed, Devora approached him, trying to catch his eyes with hers. He didn’t move or show that he’d heard her. His massive body just breathed in and out, his chest moving like a great bear’s, his entire attention on the corpse. Devora’s heart beat faster. It had been a long time since one of these moods had overtaken Zadok. It used to happen every time he stilled one of the unclean corpses—but the last had been nearly ten years ago, and the one before that had been four years earlier.

The worst time, when he was still but a youth, Zadok had stood completely still for almost two days. When he’d come out of it at last, he’d been violent, enraged, lashing about with his
spear. For a few minutes, then he’d collapsed from exhaustion. He’d slept for a day and a half and woken with no memory of his fit, nor any clear memory of the death that had prompted it. Zadok and two other nazarites had been clearing an oak grove of dead, several hours upriver from Shiloh. Some caravan merchant had died there, then risen; he’d eaten his wife and one of his slaves, and the rest had fled, leaving three bodies restless and unburied. The dead had surprised Zadok in the trees, but he’d dealt with them. Afterward, one of the other nazarites had stayed beside him while Zadok stood still as a tree, his memories gripping at his heart. The other had run to Shiloh with word, and had told Devora. After a quick word to her husband, the
navi
had hurried out to the grove, and she had been there sitting by Zadok when he woke at last.

But that had been over twenty years ago.

She had no idea how long this one would last.

The
navi
glanced at the declining sun. Felt the small, sharp teeth of panic. The Sabbath was coming; they had to get back to the tents. But they could
not
leave a corpse on the open ground, with no stones over it. Her breath hissed through her teeth.

She struck Zadok hard across the face.

He didn’t even blink.

Devora’s right hand stung, and she rubbed it with her left. Her heart was pounding now. She glanced about, cursing under her breath. Wishing she’d kept the supplicants at the hill rather than dispersing them. The area was quiet now but for the wind. There were only the three of them—Zadok, the Canaanite girl, and the
navi
. Alone with the tiny corpse.

“What’s wrong with him?” the Canaanite whispered.

“The dead are a shock to anyone,” Devora muttered. She must do without Zadok. She caught the hems of the goatskin gloves at his wrists and peeled them free of his hands, one, then the other, careful not to touch the fingers or the palm, anywhere the leather
might have touched the corpse. Under her breath, she recited the words of the Law. That was a ritual of hers when she needed calm.

You shall not touch the flesh of the dead, for the dead body is unclean. If a man touches the flesh of the dead, you shall put him from your camp and watch him. Seven days you shall put him from your camp, until his uncleanness has passed.

The gloves were much too large for her; her hands felt silly inside them, and she worried they would slip off her fingers, which were damp with sweat. She kept her hands curled to prevent this. She reached for the infant.

“Leave him alone!” the girl whispered, without looking up.

“You brought this child to me,” Devora said. “Now it is my task to do what I must.” The
navi
took the tiny body in her hands, lifting it carefully, not letting the gloves slip. The infant was very light, as though she held a bundle of leaves. She hooked the swaddling cloth with one gloved finger, lifting it from the ground too. She could wrap the body in it later.

For an instant she glanced at Zadok’s spear where it lay in the grass. That bronze spearhead would probably make digging a grave easier. But she shook her head. The spear was Zadok’s. She would leave it with him.

“Come, girl.” She began walking briskly down the slope.

In the lee of the west slope there were cairns in great number, several hundred of them, orderly stacks of flat stones like stunted pillars set in the earth, a forest of monuments. Some of the dead beneath them had died of age or illness, a few from bloodshed, some from a judgment of death by stoning. Set a little apart from
the others—because the bodies beneath them were defiled—a stretch of eight and sixty cairns marked the resting places of those who had died the unclean death on that terrible night thirty years ago, when the walking dead had come to Shiloh.

Carrying the infant’s body at arm’s length, Devora moved slowly among the cairns, weighted down by the crushing burden of the past, which even the Covenant could only partially lighten. Behind her the Canaanite followed numbly.

Devora lay the infant by the cairns of the defiled, and the Canaanite knelt by the body, her head lowered, her hands clutching her knees. Devora left her there and hurried to a bit of scree nearby where a rockslide some years before had exposed the guts of the earth. Beyond the scree and the curve of the hill she could see the white tents of Shiloh again, as alluring to her as a flock of white doves alighting in a dry wilderness. But the tents must wait.

The stones she gathered had to be large ones—large enough to crush the dead to the earth. The corpse’s head had been shattered; it would not hunger again. Yet it was unclean and might spread the blight to anything it touched. You couldn’t know what might sicken from it—living people or living crops. So you pile stone above a dead body, any dead body, no matter how dead or how still the body may look. The time in the desert, when Devora’s ancestors had seen corpses rise moaning to their feet, had taught them to take no chances, none.

Devora felt the strain in her arms as she carried the last of six slabs of rock from the scree to the place she’d chosen beside the other cairns. Sweat began to trickle down her back, making her itch. Devora tried to move quickly, but her fatigue was catching up with her. After more than forty years of life, her body was aging; there were days when she felt no pain, and days like this
one when the weariness was as present as the breath in her lungs. Devora glanced back once to see Zadok standing still as a cairn himself by the olive tree on the slope above. She chewed on bitter words for Zadok in the privacy of her heart, but those words were quickly swallowed in remorse. She’d left him up there, trapped in who knew what darkness of the heart. Spearing the dead had brought back memories for him, too. She should have expected that. She should have taken up spear or stone herself and borne the burden of that act on her own shoulders, even as she was now bearing the burden of this stone. Her face heated with shame; the nazarite’s vow was to defend her life, not to suffer in her place.