Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (50 page)

Barak laughed quietly. A woman with a blade no man of the People had ever held. A naked slave girl with a bronze peg. Women had always been strange to him, strange as God herself, unreliable and unknowable. To be wooed, perhaps to be possessed and placed in a man’s tent where they would hopefully stay a while where he put them, where they could be enjoyed and used. But the women he had seen these past few days and nights were stranger than any he’d known. Or perhaps all women were stranger than he’d known. The levites who kept the Law taught that God had made woman to be an
ezer kenegdo
to man, a help, even as God herself was an
ezer
, a help to the People, her arms surrounding, embracing, comforting, lifting up whom they held. Barak felt suddenly a yearning to know what an
ezer
truly was—to know what the levites actually meant. For if a woman could ride at the dead with an iron blade flashing in the red moonlight or drive a bronze peg through a dead man’s skull—and yet weep and lie as weakly as the
navi
had lain in the weeds during their halt that afternoon, then he did not know what a woman was or what a woman was meant to be.

And he did not know anymore what a man was.

He watched the silent face, and a sorrow grew in his heart. He found he could not stand; those lifeless eyes held him. They looked like little river stones with a film of some gray slime stretched thin across their surfaces. His grief for his vineyard and his anger at God suddenly seemed small.
He
seemed small, his complaint and his fear the cry of a small mouse in a wide field. That face—that face, and the faces he’d seen in the barley and in the riverbed—what was happening to the land, to the People? This creature with the peg driven through its brow—he looked at its lips, saw the blood there. It had been feeding shortly before
that girl slew it. He shuddered. This broken thing had moaned with a hunger for flesh that could never fill it, never sustain it, never nourish it. It consumed everything it encountered with a hunger like a god’s hunger but made no covenant with anyone it fed on. It would use the flesh it consumed to make nothing, grow nothing, produce nothing. It would not have any young. It would not grow any vineyards. It would only feed and devour, and give nothing back. It didn’t live: it merely craved.

Yet this had been a man once.

A man who’d tended his vines or his herds, then died. A little circle of tooth marks on his arm told the tale of that death. He was not elsewhere chewed; perhaps he had beaten off the corpse or stilled it, then run into the hills to hide from the People. He had been unclean, defiled; he would have known what his fate would be if the others learned of it. Perhaps he had even hidden his arm beneath a heavy robe for a few hours or a day, even in the heat of the Galilee summer; perhaps he had shuddered each time someone brushed against him as he moved about the tents. In the end, the fever would have grown fierce, burning him from within. He would’ve had to flee. And here, in these hills, perhaps in this very valley, he had lowered himself among the stones or in the wild grasses, and shivered and vomited until he was done. Then he’d lain still, completely still, under the wide sky. His eyes empty, his chest sunken in on itself. Time had passed, a wind moving over him through the weeds. Perhaps a small antelope had grazed near him for a while.

But at some point his chest had moved, filling slowly with air. Beginning to rise and fall. The body had begun to breathe. Then the mouth had begun to move or the fingers to twitch. Only the eyes remained entirely the same, dull and dead. No spirit returning to look out through them at these hills that had known the footprints of God.

How long had the creature lain there, just breathing?

How long before it had climbed to its feet and lurched slowly away through the tall weeds?

That could have been him. Fleeing the dead tonight, only a few strides ahead of their grasping hands, their teeth—that could have been him.

Barak was shaking. “The land has become strange to me,” he whispered, gazing at that lifeless face frozen in its moment of famished need. “I wanted only evenings in my house and Hadassah in my bed, her breasts in my hands. I wanted only my vineyard, only the ripe grapes, the coolness of them beneath my feet, the taste of wine. The long battle with soil and worm is enough for any man of Naphtali. God, you give and you take away, and we are only ashes. We are only ashes.”

T
HE MOON
must have set and the fire must have died down again to coals, for no light fell now on the dead face, and the dark within the tent became oppressive. Barak didn’t know how long he’d sat there. He was numb inside, hollowed out. He tried to recall the comfort he’d felt when the mists rose over the water, the nearness of a God who did not loathe him, a God who might nourish him. He got to his feet and stumbled toward the door of the tent. He had to get back to his camp, his men. It did not matter how bruised and overcome he felt or what kind of God might heal him. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.

He pulled the flap aside, then caught his breath. A figure was standing there in the dark, a little shorter than he was. It must have been listening right at the door of the tent. Even as Barak realized it was there, the corpse grabbed his wrist in its hands, lifting Barak’s hand toward its lips and ducking its head, biting
quickly. The pain was deep and sharp. Barak roared and tried to pull his hand back, but he only pulled the corpse with him.

With a shout, he turned and pulled the corpse toward the fire pit and slammed it down on the ground, crushing its chest down with his knee. The unclean thing held his wrist tightly, kept tearing at his hand with its teeth. Screaming from the pain, Barak took up one of the fist-sized stones from their ring around the fire pit, and he brought the stone down on the corpse’s skull. And again. And again. Its snarling fell silent, and the thing grew still, one side of its head flattened. Its dead eyes did not change; it simply stopped moving.

Panting, his back bathed in cold sweat, Barak dropped the stone and grasped its fingers, breaking two of them as he pulled its hand free of his wrist. Then he tore his hand from its jaws, leaving some of his flesh between its teeth. His face gone the color of maggots, Barak fell back on his rear and sat there by the corpse, gasping. He caught a glimpse of its face; the left side of its face had been chewed almost entirely away. The right side had been the face of a youth, no more than a boy—doubtless the boy Anath had mentioned, the one left to watch Heber’s camp, the one she thought was gone. Barak groaned and leaned back, lightheaded; he glimpsed the stars high above his head. His hand and his arm were pulsing, and he lifted his hand before his eyes, stared at the red gash where a chunk of flesh had been torn free; he supposed that piece of him was still held in the dead boy’s mouth. For a long moment he stared at his hand. Then he began laughing, shaking his head and laughing, as the blood poured down his hand from the bite and ran warm along the length of his arm. It was all too strange, and life too fragile a thing to understand. He kept laughing quietly until he felt too weak to. Then his vision went gray.

Barak heard the sound of sticks cracking and opened his eyes. It was a moment before he could focus. His face felt dry and hot, and his insides were baking. There was coarse cloth wound about his hand. His heart lurched; he could see a human form sitting in the dark by the cold fire pit. Barak was on his back near the pit. The figure glanced at him, and in the dim starlight he recognized her graying hair and the flash of her eyes.

“
Navi
,” he murmured. Not one of the dead.

“You’ve been bitten,” Devora said. Her tone one of cold resolution. She was taking up sticks from a little pile she must have gathered while he lay senseless. She cracked the sticks and arranged a little tent of them over the coals.

Barak lifted his hand, saw that it was swollen and dark. He laughed quietly, then coughed from the pain the laugh brought him.

“Some days a woman can only save one life,” Devora said. “The old
navi
tried to teach me that, Barak, but I didn’t understand. I do now. When you save one life—when you keep Covenant and save even one life—you save the People.” She paused. “I am sorry I was too late to save yours.”

Barak just breathed for a few moments. He didn’t know why he’d thought he was baking; now he shivered with the greatest cold he had ever known. “Stay with me,” he rasped.

Her eyes gazed down on him, unreadable as ever. “I will,” she said.

All about him were the raiders’ tents and the leaves of the oaks dark against the sky. He yearned for his own vineyard—to die beneath his own vines, amid the scent of grapes and growing things. But his vineyard was already gone; it had died without him, and he was left here lingering in fever like a last cutting from it tossed aside to wither on its own. He kept watching the oak leaves and listening to the quiet fire. He had imagined dying at a spear’s thrust or of old age, not of the bite of the dead on strange
soil. But the
navi
was here, waiting while he died. She would raise a cairn over him. He would be remembered. He took comfort in that.

“I felt the
shekinah
,” he whispered. “It rose over the water. And God was neither judge nor wife to me. I do not know what God is.”

“You were feverish,” Devora murmured.

“No.” He shook his head, panting. “This was—before. We think we know what God is, but she is entirely strange to us. Stranger than the land, stranger than the heathen. We lie to ourselves when we say we know God, when we judge God or fear God or speak of God. Maybe God can be loved, as the priests do. I don’t know what God is anymore.” He shook from the cold, and his teeth chattered, but he forced the words out. “God gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of God.”

“
Selah
,” the
navi
whispered.
Always.

He felt the touch of a waterskin to his lips, drank a little, choked and spluttered most of it up.

“The dead,” he rasped after a few moments, his throat sore and violent. “Must put them all—beneath cairns. God has not forsaken the land.”

“He has forsaken only his
navi
,” Devora said. “No visions come. No seed I’ve planted has borne fruit.” She gave a small, bitter laugh. “Nor any seed planted in me.” She was quiet a moment. “I violated the Covenant. I killed my mother, twice. Now my daughter too. There is no longer any way to keep the Law. God has forsaken me, Barak. If he has appeared in some way to you, I am glad for you. But all my joy is gone, and all my hope.”

“Not all,” Barak rasped. “Your girl—the Canaanite. Found her sister. Alive.” He was finding it difficult now to speak, his throat was so dry.

Devora glanced at him sharply, then her eyes softened. “Oh, Hurriya,” she whispered, then said nothing more.

Barak coughed a little, then gazed past the oak branches, at the sky. At those same distant stars he’d seen from the bottom of the Tumbling Water’s ravine. He barely heard Devora’s words. He was just focused on those bright stars. His body kept shivering, but he felt again the warm touch of that holy presence in his heart. He was glad there were no sandals on his feet. He wished Hadassah were here, and even her mother, whom he’d sent away to Refuge when the dead came. But especially Hadassah. The things he would tell her. He would hold her, kiss her, and have her, if there was no other way for him to tell her, if he could find no words. All the deeds of his life seemed suddenly trivial to him, but this brought him no despair, only a yearning to hold Hadassah in his arms again, to feel her warm belly swollen with life. And a skin of clear water in his hand to share with her.

“Didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell the girl about Hurriya,” he said.

There was silence for a while.

“I’m glad,” the
navi
replied at last. “Where is she now?”

“She rode away. Toward the sea, where it’s still safe. She was so
hopeful
. So beautiful.”

“Thank you for telling me that.” The
navi
’s voice was softer. Even a little vulnerable.

Barak could feel himself slipping beneath the fever. Everything blurring, even himself. He closed his eyes. “
Navi
, tell me the stories of our People. I want to hear them.”

He felt a damp cloth against his brow. Then Devora’s voice, cool and calm in the heated dark. He caught the stories in bits and pieces, moving between waking and sleep, between the world that is real and the world that isn’t. But it didn’t matter. He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More
than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

Devora’s low voice told of his fathers Tubal Qayin, who first discovered the shaping of metal, and Yubal, who made the first music so that the
malakhim
themselves came out of the sky to listen. And Yabal, who began the keeping of sheep and goats, the herding of cattle, the pitching of tents. He heard of the brothers Qayin and Hebel—how Hebel was beaten across the head with a great stick, then thrown into a narrow ravine, there to starve until he died. How he rose to his feet some days later, hungering and rotting, until he found and devoured his brother.