Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (47 page)

Devora glanced down at her aging hands, remembered the heft of the pestle she’d lifted, her mother’s own pestle she’d used to prepare meal. She remembered bringing it down, her arm rising and falling, bits of flesh and droplets of dark fluid staining her arms and her nightclothes; she had washed all of that ruin from her body and her clothes much later, in a shallow pool far from the camp. Then she’d huddled in the tall grass by the water while her clothes dried. Her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms about her legs. Her sobs beside that pool had been the last time she had ever let herself weep fully, without any restraint.

A girl had died in that tent as the pestle struck again and again. Devora had never carried that girl’s body to any wide field within her mind, had never piled any cairn of heavy stones above her.

With her sword tip, the
navi
lifted a little of the dead girl’s soiled hair and dropped the strands across her eyes, hiding them. In a hoarse voice, she whispered the Words of Going for them both—the girl who lay here in the barley and the girl who had died long ago in that tent. Sitting her horse in this gore-drenched field, Devora missed that young girl with a yearning that
ached
.

She glanced about the field, saw the men dragging bodies through the barley. There was grieving and ugly work to be done yet tonight, for none of the wounded could be permitted to live. And she could not bear it. Where was Barak? She longed to hand this night to him and rest. She wanted to lie down. She wanted Lappidoth’s arms, or Zadok’s. She wanted somewhere warm to sleep where there was no moon and no reek of the dead—she could smell it now even in her hair—and no memories but ones she chose to recall.

Men began to gather about her, weary but their faces flushed, because this night they had faced the moaning dead and silenced them. Farmers and carpenters and tanners and herdsmen, they stood with their hands clenched tight around the handles and hilts of implements spattered with flesh and decay—hastily fashioned spears, shovels, hammers, fence posts, a few bronze blades. She looked out over their faces and knew that these men looked to her for judgment or affirmation, or for some vision from God to confirm what their hearts hoped—that their work was now done, and after these fires burned down and the sun rose over the smoke, they could return to their homes and rebuild and replant, and lie with their wives and give the People new children to replace the ones that had been lost. Devora saw in their eyes no contempt for her as a woman, only awe. She was the
navi
to them now, truly, the messenger of God, strange and terrible and holy and set apart. A sword in her hand. She wanted to laugh bitterly, for she had never felt less like the
navi
. She was covered in grime and sweat, her body was unclean from the touch of the dead, and her dress hung off one shoulder, torn and disheveled after her struggle with Omri and after the grasping hands of the corpses. Yet the men needed her now, and she didn’t know what to do. The tent of the Law was in tatters; the younger
navi
was dead. What was still holy? What still mattered?

A few of the men around her began to chant, their loud, deep voices opposed to the darkness and filth of the night and the work ahead of them:

Urai! Urai! Devora!

Arise! Arise! Devora!

You have shielded your people,

You have cut apart the foe,

You have taken earth and sky from him,

Urai! Urai! Devora! Arise, arise!

They chanted Devora’s name, and she listened but could not speak. She lifted her blade high, though her arm ached from the weight of it. They needed her. Yet she knew she had to tell them that their work had not ended, that there were more dead to come. And how was she to do
that
? If Naomi the Old stood here in her place, she would have had something sharp and strong to say that would put hearts of hard stone into the men’s chests and stiffen them against what must come. But she was not Naomi the Old. She was only Devora the Old. And she was unclean.

The men who were chanting fell silent. For others were emerging now from the barley and the smoke, and these others were sunken-eyed and wasted thin and carried no weapons. Exiles in their own land, these last refugees from Walls had lost their homes, their kin, their ability to sleep or sing. Their haggard faces were haunted by an anguish greater than any Devora had ever seen. Yet their ordeal had only begun. It would not end. Even if the thousands of dead coming down out of White Cedars were stilled and buried, for these men and women it would never be over.

We will find those who still breathe
, Zadok had told her,
but we will find no survivors
.

One of them—a woman Devora’s own age, but so
thin
—reached and clutched at her skirt, and she found she could not look away from the demand in the woman’s eyes, a demand made without hope but with only the utter necessity of hearing its answer.

“Yes,” Devora said hoarsely. “I have been to Walls.” In those few words, in her tone, in her eyes was everything she had to say and couldn’t. The deaths of the children. The ash in the air. The line of silent cairns by the lakeshore.

The old woman let out her breath, and something seemed to flicker out in her eyes. She understood.

“I—I’m sorry,” Devora whispered.

“Night has fallen,” the old woman rasped.

“Night’s already here.”

“A blood moon,” the woman said, looking past Devora toward the sky. “When God turns his back.”

Devora shivered, then reached down for the woman’s hand and clutched it tightly. The
navi
was unclean. Perhaps the woman was too. It no longer mattered. “You listen to me,” Devora whispered fiercely, leaning close enough for the other woman to hear her. “You listen. God has not turned his back. I promise you. He will lift this blight from the land.
He will.
Tonight is a sign of it. If we do not lie down and die, he will lift the blight.”

“A few seedlings may grow out of these ashes,” the old woman murmured. “But I am old, so old. I have no seeds. Why should I stand like an old tree in an empty field?”

“Who else will give the seedlings shade?” Devora asked.

The woman laughed. It was not a bitter laugh, only a very tired one. “I am going home,” she said, and she turned from Shomar and began walking across the dying field with small, painful steps. Devora watched her go, in anguish.

One by one, the other refugees followed her.

The men of Barak’s camp fell silent, then set down their burdens and parted to let the exiles pass. The starving men and women walked south along the riverbank, back toward the camp, back toward Walls. They stumbled away under the red moonlight, exhausted, spent, the ghost of a people. Perhaps they would make it to the camp and collapse, and those of Barak’s men who had lacked the courage to march tonight against the unclean dead would creep from their tents and bring food and water to these, the barely living. Or perhaps they would not stop. Perhaps they would go on walking, with those same slow, anguished steps. They would walk through the night and on into the next day and on until they came at last to the cinders and ash and the few standing houses and shops that had been Walls. Perhaps they would not stop even then, but would go on, down out of the hills and down the whole length of the promised land, following the steps of Hurriya before them, a silent witness to the violence and the misery in the north. They might pass through the entire land, past Hebrews and heathen who had never seen the dead and who would watch them with wide eyes, uncomprehending yet unable to look away. They might pass out of the green fields into the wide desert and come at last even to the dark earth and the high monuments of Kemet itself, the land of their fathers’ slavery, as though to say with their shambling gait and their sunken eyes and their slack, thirsting mouths,
The People who went out from here have perished; only we have come back
. Perhaps even then they would keep walking, until they died on their feet and their emptied corpses still moved slowly over the wide earth, moaning their anguish, their grief, their hunger for all that was lost.

When the exiles had gone, the Hebrew men stood silent in the barley. Devora caught the eye of a young man, one of Barak’s.
Motioned him close. He ran to her side. He was a youth, really. Perhaps he had not even lain with a girl before, but tonight he’d fought the dead, taking up a torch and a sharp-bladed shovel to fight with, while other, older men shivered in their tents.

“Where is Barak?” Devora demanded once he stood by her horse. “We need him.”

Pale, the youth pointed toward the ravine and the water in it. “I saw,” he said. “The dead had him backed against the water. I saw him,
navi
, he fought like a nazarite! But he fell from the bank, and the dead went over the edge, following him.”

Devora’s heart sank. These men needed their war-leader. Omri was dead, Laban was dead. If Barak was gone, who was to lead these men? Wasting no time in replying to the youth, she drove her knees into Shomar’s powerful sides and sent her horse galloping toward the ravine. She pulled him up almost at the last moment, then peered down at the water and the damp earth and sand. There were several broken, moaning corpses in the water or at the water’s edge, and wherever sand rose above the low water it was covered in footprints. She glanced upstream, but the creek curved too much in its deep bed for her to see far. She thought she could hear distant moaning coming down the ravine, but that might be no more than the sound of her terror.

Devora sucked in a breath through her teeth. Clearly in her mind she could hear Barak ben Abinoam’s voice:

If I should be taken by the dead...ride after me, navi. Ride and find my body. Pile clean stone above me, with your own hands, even if I have been dragged far away.

Those footprints. The dead had not remained here; something had drawn them away. There was a chance that Barak was alive, that he’d fled upstream, pursued by the dead. Perhaps injured from his fall.

The
navi
glanced over her shoulder at the men in the barley. None to lead them. She could perhaps hold them together. She
was
kadosh
, and tonight had proven that being
kadosh
might still mean something—even to men who were kin to Omri of Zebulun tribe. She could urge them toward Judges’ Well, where there might be a wall they could get behind. Or south to Shiloh, to plead again for help from the other tribes. Surely if Devora the
navi
spoke of her visions and shared the warning of Heber the Kenite, surely men of Manasseh and Ephraim and Gad would hear her. Surely they would gather with strength to face what was coming. If she had to go to every encampment herself, with nazarites beside her, to speak with the chieftains—! Surely they would come!

These men needed her.

Yet.

She gazed up the ravine. She was certain she heard moaning now. How many dead? And Barak alone, limping and splashing up that stream, with corpses in pursuit.
Ride after me, navi. Ride and find my body.

She’d made a covenant with the man.

In the tents of the north, the Covenant with God was uprooted and torn apart—but she still had her own covenants to keep. If she were to turn now from this riverbank, if she were to leave Barak to the teeth of the dead, how would she be any different from Omri or Nimri?

Still she hesitated. This was a terrible choice.

She thought of Hurriya gazing up at her, her eyes glassy with fever.
We are both women.

The decision of one man or woman to stand between another and harm or injustice: that was the foundation of the Covenant. It was the one essential act on which
shalom
, peace, depended. Without it, there was no Covenant, no Pact between people or between people and God. Hurriya’s eyes had told her that. She had learned it, not in her mind but in her heart, deeply, as she’d sat watching Hurriya die. She could not unlearn it now. She could not betray Hurriya’s memory that way.

And she was done with leaving her own dead behind her, unburied, moaning in her memory, driving her to panic and tears at night.

She made her decision.