Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (49 page)

Then, as gently as it had come, the sense of that nearness, that
shekinah
, that warm feminine embrace, was gone. And even as his eyes lifted, he saw several tents with a stand of oaks behind them, above the high bank, perhaps twenty feet above him. He stared at them for a long, focused moment. Tents. People. The living. The tents could mean help—a waterskin to drink and other men to stand with him against the shambling corpses.

He heard the moans of the dead close behind him. A glance over his shoulder showed them less than a spear’s cast away, their arms lifted to take him. Casting aside the branch, he bolted, splashing through the water and throwing himself against the far bank, which had a little slant to it; he grasped for roots, rocks, any handhold he could, began pulling himself wildly up the bank. Damp soil crumbled and slid beneath his feet; with a gasp, he pulled himself furiously up the cliff, digging in with his toes and his fingers. The burn of pain in his torn leg became a shriek of fire,
and he was screaming in the agony of it. The dead were beneath him now, he could feel the thud of their bodies against the bank below him, felt a fingertip graze the underside of his foot. With a howl, he reached his right arm up and found a tuft of weeds to grasp, began pulling himself higher. He gasped and sobbed with the effort. Glanced up, saw the bank and the overhanging oak boughs and above them now that wild, red moon. Only a few feet more, and he could grasp the edge of the bank, if it didn’t crumble beneath him. He clung helplessly to the cliff; only a few feet more, but his legs and arms were shaking. If he moved, he’d fall. He knew this. He’d
fall
. The snarls and moans beneath him made him feel as though he were made of water.

Reaching, he grasped a root and gripped it, pulled himself up just within reach of the bank. But the root tore free of the soil and began to swing his upper body away from the wall of the bank. With a desperate cry, he took the root in both hands and pulled himself along it back toward the comfort of earth. But more of the root was pulling out; his heart beat with panic. He reached for some other handhold, grasping desperately, his fingers brushing the wall of the bank.

Suddenly a hand grasped his own, and he gasped, a shiver running through him. But the small, delicate hand was warm with life, and lovely and dark in his own. He gazed up and found a girl leaning over the edge, young, perhaps just old enough to bear a child. A dusky Canaanite girl with the high cheekbones of her people, her dark eyes only a few feet above his own. She was so unexpected, the warmth of her hand and the depth of her eyes so different from the cold, moaning death beneath him, that for a moment he just held completely still, awestruck, as he had been when he’d felt the living presence of God rise over the water.

The girl’s grip on his hand tightened.

“Come on,” she whispered.

A
HEAVE
,
then Barak fell onto the weedy bank, coughing and gasping. He grasped a root and rolled onto his back, straining. Took deeper breaths. The pain had become acute; white fire shot up his leg to his hip, and his breath hissed through his teeth.

The young woman who leaned over him was lovely in the starlight and naked as though she were his lover or his purchase. Her face had the Canaanite cheekbones and that cast to the eyes. He found he couldn’t take his gaze from her; she was so like Hadassah, though younger and smaller. Her own gaze flicked over his body and she muttered, “Not bitten.” She got to her feet.

The moans of the dead at the water below were loud.

Barak scrambled up onto his knees. The girl was walking toward the cluster of tents. A horse was waiting there by a cold fire pit outside the largest pavilion, a small, sleek desert horse so black its hair shone. The girl held in one hand by her leg a wooden
teraph
, a goddess charred by fire yet recognizable as an Astarte, the goddess of planting and birth and harvest and love. Her other arm held a wolf pelt. There was no breeze, and the girl’s hair hung lank about her face and shoulders, caked with dirt. There were bruises on the girl’s cheek, her breasts, her thighs, her legs. To see her so bewildered Barak, who could not understand why a man would beat a girl so severely, especially this girl. To Barak she was beautiful, lush as the wooden Astarte she held, and the bruises on her body as wrong as the red moon in the sky.

“Wait!” Barak cried.

The woman turned, her fingers already curled around a clump of the gelding’s mane. She stood and stared at him. Her eyes caught at him; they shone in the terrible red moonlight. After a moment she swept the wolf pelt about herself, concealing her body.

“Whose tents are these?” he called.

“Heber’s.” He heard the hate in her voice and suddenly understood. She had been a raid captive. “The men are gone,” she said. “A boy was left to watch me, but he is gone too.”

“Who is your mother?” he called softly. It was the traditional call of a man to a village girl he wished to court. “What is your tribe?”

He could hear the branches of the oaks tossing.

“I have none,” she said.

He gazed at her, and in his wonder he realized that she was not the only young woman he had seen these past days who had reminded him of Hadassah. He realized where he had seen this girl’s eyes and cheekbones before. “You’re that girl’s sister,” he gasped. How strange that he should find her here. It seemed miraculous that it should be so, as though this moment had been touched by God. These past days he had seen so few signs of God’s touch, only signs of her absence. Until that mist in the ravine below. Until this bruised girl had reached down her hand to help him up. “You’re Hurriya’s sister.”

Her reaction to the name was immediate. She turned with her eyes bright and her face alight with hope. “You know her?” she cried. “My sister—you’ve seen her! Where is she?”

“She took refuge with my camp,” Barak said, and stopped. The light in the girl’s eyes was beautiful; to see it go out would break his heart. That light—that
hope
—how long had it been since he’d seen that in a woman’s face? In anyone’s face?

He saw the light start to fade as she guessed the worst from his silence. Everything else had been torn from her; even her goddess had been charred and burned, perhaps tossed carelessly by some raider to the edge of the fire. He could not take this from her too. “No,” he said quickly. “She is well. A few of my men—they led her, and others, west toward the Wide Sea. There are walled settlements there, where she’ll be safe.” Where this girl might be safe too.

The light blazed again. He saw the girl shaking. “Tyre?” Her voice was breathless. “Or Sidon?”

“Sidon,” he said.

“I’m going to find her,” the girl said. Clutching the gelding’s mane, she leapt onto the horse’s back. She winced, for her body was badly bruised, but still she clung tightly to the horse, and her eyes had in them a fierce determination Barak had only ever seen in the eyes of one woman before: the
navi
of Israel.

“Wait!” Barak stepped closer. “Tell me your name!”

“My name,” she whispered. She looked distracted, as though searching for the answer to his question. She hummed a few notes of a melody, very quietly, recalling something to herself, something from before her bruises and her pain.

Barak knew the melody well. It was Hurriya’s song, and it was Hadassah’s song that she used to sing to their unborn child, holding her belly. His throat tightened.

“There were standing dead beneath the olives,” the girl said softly. “I found my sister’s hovel empty, blood on the walls. But no
bodies. Just—my sister and her baby were gone. So I went to find her. And these men found me. And hurt me.” Her eyes burned with hate. “In their tents I was Ya El. A joke of theirs. I carried the name of a goddess of my people, so they made me carry the name of their God instead. I hope they are all dead, all of them. I hope they were
eaten
.”

“Then I’ll not call you Ya El,” Barak told her. “What should I call you?”

She bent low over her gelding’s neck and kissed the horse’s ear. “Anath,” she said after a moment. “When the sun comes up, I will be Anath.”

Then, before Barak could say anything more, the girl Anath was riding away, past the tents. He watched her, thinking of that hardness in her eyes, thinking of Inanna riding down the gates of Sheol to rescue her lover in the story the Canaanites told. Half expecting the woman and her horse to crumble away on the still air, a thing of ashes and dreams, not flesh and blood. But still he could see her, galloping away from the riverbank and out over the tumbled, unplowed landscape in the red of the moon, riding up the rising land and into the hills.

When she had gone, Barak listened a few moments to the moaning of the dead in the river below. He hoped the girl found her way safely to the gates of Sidon. She might barter the horse for food and a room. He hoped so. The thought of it made him strangely calm—that there might be escape, for someone, from this long night of the dead.

The low wailing in the ravine seemed suddenly sorrowful to him. So many people had died up here. He could still hear Anath’s song in his ears, and he yearned again for Hadassah, remembering the warmth of her in his arms, how she had taken his hand in
hers and pressed his palm to her belly the night before her death. She had told him she could feel the baby kicking, and though he couldn’t feel it himself, he had laughed and kissed her ear and told her he could, told her that he was glad she was bearing him such a strong son.

Forcing himself to take deep breaths, he glanced about at the tents and the oaks behind them. He was far now from his ruined vineyard and the camp of his men, and he didn’t know how his men and the
navi
had fared against the dead. He hoped the corpses in the ravine below would move on if they could not see him or hear him. He could follow the bank back and look across at that barley field, and if he could do it unseen by the dead, climb down this bank and back up the other. Find and regather his men.

He considered the tents.

He needed meat, something to give him the strength he would need to get back. He could hardly stand, he was so weary. And water. He needed water. Yet he was hardly prepared to climb back down to that corpse-filled stream to get it.

He moved toward the largest of the pavilions grimly. When he drew the flap aside, he could smell the reek of death—that same smell that had surrounded him in the field. But nothing moved within. Nothing shuffled toward him. Nothing moaned at him out of the dark. After a moment, he let the flap fall closed.

A few unsteady paces took him to the little fire, which was just dead coals now, but there was kindling there and dry straw and flints. In a few moments he had a small blaze and was able to make a torch by shoving a short branch into the fire and letting the dry leaves kindle and burn until the fire reached the wood and began to sing and crackle in its joy at sating its hunger to devour all things. Lifting the branch, he returned to the tent. He paused for a while with his hand at the flap, unable to bring himself to open it; he shook and sweated as with a fever. He had seen too
much tonight. He did not think he could bear to see one more of those—those
faces
, lifted toward the torch, gray eyes and a bloody mouth opening in a hiss or a low moan.

Bracing himself, he laid the branch at his feet—he could not bring it too near the fabric of the tent. The whole thing would go up in flames. He drew the tent flap aside, peered within.

One of the dead was there, but it was not moving. A bronze peg, a tent peg, had been driven through its skull. Its mouth was open in a hunger that was both silent and eternal.

Slowly Barak let out his breath.

There was nothing else in the tent but bedding, which smelled of urine and semen—but the scent of decay overpowered the other smells.

It took great control not to retch, but covering his nose and mouth with his hand, he stepped into the tent and crouched by the body and waited for his senses to adjust to the offensive smell of the tent.

The tent flap settled behind him. Outside, the branch flickered and burned; its glow passed through the gap between the flap and the tent wall, and the faint red light fell across the dead face. The face was intact; the brow and the skull above it had burst open like an overripe fruit at the passage of that metal peg.

He crouched there a long time, breathing shallowly through his fingers. Once he reached out and touched the blunt end of the peg with his fingertips. He withdrew his hand quickly.

He thought of Hurriya’s sister, who looked so much like his wife yet was so fierce-hearted. She was the only living person he had encountered in this camp. And her horse had awaited her by the door of this tent. It must have been her hand that had slain the corpse. Barak thought of that girl lying naked and beaten on these very rugs until that hungering corpse drew aside the flap and peered in at her. He shuddered. He thought of her wrenching that peg from the earth.

Devora’s words came back to him.
You must understand this, Barak. The God of our mothers and fathers will deliver the dead into the hands of women.