Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (11 page)

Devora realized he was kissing away tears. Her face was moist. “Don’t let me go back to sleep,” she whispered.

Lappidoth’s arm squeezed her, a promise. He shifted so that his hip rested on hers, so that his body partly covered her beneath the wool. It comforted her. He was large and warm, and his weight held her to the present, to this specific moment in his tent, in his bedding.

After a moment she put her arms around him, though her hands still trembled behind his back. He didn’t try to make love to her, just held her, occasionally kissing her face, the line of her jaw, her lips. Devora listened to her husband’s breathing, like that of some huge animal in the dark. She could feel his heart beating where his chest pressed to her. She began to breathe more slowly. Full, deep breaths, filling her body with air and life. Her heart stopped racing.

She pressed her face into the soft place between her husband’s neck and his shoulder and breathed in his scent. He had always been a distraction to her, a distraction from everything.

She felt something stir against her hip, and her senses came alert. She moved her fingers slowly over his back, thinking. She held her breath a moment, then decided that if he wanted her again, she would voice no protest, though she also wouldn’t invite it—she wanted only to be held. But lovemaking too would distract her from the past and the future. And she knew with an ache between her ribs that each time he touched her might be the last.

His large, thick hands began to caress her arms slowly, though he made no other movement. His breathing was a little faster. After a moment he murmured her name in that soft growl
of his, and she caught her breath, remembering the night he first said her name that way—repeating it a moment after she made a gift of it.

Some time later, she found herself warmed and content and safe as she lay under him and felt his strong body on her and inside her. She loved the way his breathing felt after he finished. She drank in the smell of him.

“I’ll ride with you,” he murmured.

She gasped, her content fading. “No, you won’t,” she whispered, worry sharp within her.

He lifted himself up on his elbows, and she looked into his eyes in the dark. “I’d be ashamed to stay,” he said. He had faced the dead before.

She lifted her hand to cup his face, felt the roughness of his beard against her palm. He covered her hand with his own. A large hand, a herdsman’s hand. Once strong, so strong. Now so wrinkled, the veins thick like cords, but—so beautiful. Her husband was a man who sat with others in the evening and discussed the Law. He was a quiet man, though furious when roused. For an instant, heat rushed into her, scorching her, not a passion-heat but a God-heat, and she saw her strong, gentle husband in the grip of the dead, many of them,
so many
, the unclean dead tearing him off his horse and bearing him to the ground, their nails and teeth digging into his flesh. She gasped, and the vision left her, leaving dizziness in its wake. The tent spun around her a moment, and to keep herself from spinning with it she clutched Lappidoth’s arms as tightly as she had during their love. She forced herself to breathe, and the world stilled.

Kisses soft and moist on her brow, on her eyelids. His rumbling voice. “Are you all right?”

She kept her eyes closed, fearing the tent would spin again. “Please, husband,” she whispered. “I beg you. Stay, defend your cattle. You have no herds in the north.” She felt the tension in him, but he didn’t speak. “I will be with armed men, I will be safe. I will serve our God better knowing you are here.” She opened her eyes at last, saw the pain in his. It made her ache. Making him promise to stay, when she left and put herself at risk, was cruel. But he was not a young man now. And what she had
seen
!

She spoke softly, hoping to save his pride. Her wonderful, strong, aging husband. The sharpness of worry in her heart. “Please. Stay, and take your best yearling bull to Eleazar. A sacrifice to the Most High, so he’ll give us victory and bring me safe home.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. She let out the breath she’d been holding, and Lappidoth kissed her slowly, warmly. Then he moved within her, making her cry out, startled. It had been long since they’d made love more than once.

This time, it was more effort than passion, but she did not care. She clung to him, felt the warmth of him, kissed his shoulders and neck, and thought, This is my husband, my husband. He was the one thing in the world that was truly hers and that she need sacrifice to no other and to no duty. She drove the visions from her mind, wishing she did not have to leave this tent. For a while—for a little while—she let herself forget everything, everything, and clung fiercely to him, willing this night and the Sabbath day that would follow and the night after to be without ending.

A
FEW
miles away, Barak also endured a restless night. The wind had picked up, and he lay in his pavilion with his eyes open, grateful for the roar of the wind against the canvas. The noise prevented him from imagining that he could hear the moans of the dead.

Hadassah’s mother had known the dead were in the hills before he did, and his vines had realized it even before her. They had even tried to tell him; how many mornings had he stood, his brow furrowed, holding a blighted leaf or a withered stalk in his hand? The grapes had begun to dry up like raisins, right there on the vines that should have fed and fattened them. Even the ground began to look gray rather than that deep, rich earth color he’d always seen before.

Then the moaning began. At first very distant—on the extreme edge of hearing, in the faint hours before dawn when
sleep changes how everything in the world feels, even the air on your skin. He had bolted up in bed and strained to hear, only to have the sound fade like the cry of a heathen god on the high air. He shivered once, but lay back down to sleep. He had imagined it. He must have.

But Hadassah’s mother was certain. He found her each night standing at the door of their cedar house, gazing toward the hills. He had to put his hands firmly on her shoulders and, speaking softly, half-coax, half-force her to her bed.

The blight on the vines grew worse. Such a sickening of the plants was a terrifying thing. If a man’s wife sickened, he could drape a shawl over her shoulders and order her to bed. When a crop sickened...that was an unnatural thing, and he could only stand helplessly by, seeing neither cause nor cure. Praying to God with a dry mouth and a heart clamorous with horror. On crops they all depended, and on God who, fickle as a woman, brought rain or withheld it as she pleased.

One night he heard the moans and was no longer able to ignore them. The dead were nearer now, wandering aimlessly about, perhaps on the slopes of the nearer hills. Shaking, he stumbled out the door to stand at the edge of the vineyard, gazing straight up at the sharp and brittle stars so that he wouldn’t need to look at the dark, brooding silhouettes of the hills to the east.

“God!” he cried in a hoarse, loud whisper. “Is it not enough you took Hadassah? And the child she would have given me?”

There was no answer. He almost felt he could hear the vines withering as he stood there, a dry rustling sound, like brush on a desert wind, very loud in the silence between distant moans. A rage burned low in his belly, though he didn’t know if it was directed at the land that was betraying him or at the dead whose distant moans were now too loud to ignore, or at God, who, like a woman, could not be trusted to keep her promises. Both women
and God might abandon a man one day. Leave him crying amid his vines.

He turned and went inside and slammed shut the cedar bar across the door for the first time in years, the first since the last, worst raids from the Sea People. But he could not shut out the moans of the dead.

Rolling onto his side in the tent, Barak gazed at where his bronze shield and spear and breast-piece were propped against one of the poles that framed his tent—gear he had taken from a Sea Coast raider he’d killed. With a sigh, he got to his feet and began arming himself, strapping bronze greaves to his shins, settling a leather jerkin over his shoulders and then the breast-piece over that, lifting his spear and testing its heft. He didn’t know how near dawn it was, but it was surely near enough.

By the time he stepped outside, the wind had settled again and the camp was quiet, most of the men asleep except for sentries and a few of the chieftains arguing in low voices around a nearby fire. Laban was there, as broad-shouldered as a nazarite, and Omri too. Barak walked toward them, his bronze clinking slightly.

“Get the men ready,” he said. “It’s time to leave.”

Laban gave him an uneasy glance, and Omri looked startled, but they both stood without comment and began moving through the camp, calling out for their men. After a moment, those men began to emerge from their tents, their weary faces drawn with fear.

Barak stood amid the shouts of men gathering their gear without taking much notice of it. He looked to the north, at the silhouettes of hills against the sky. Up there, north of the settlements at Walls and Refuge, was a narrow valley of vineyards and
barley fields and his own homestead, his own house of cedar and thatch. A few days, and he could be standing again at his own door, stepping inside to a warm welcome, Hadassah’s soft body pressed to his, her kisses moist on his throat.

No.

Hadassah was gone.

A fresh pang of grief in his breast, surprisingly sharp. He drew in a shuddering breath and banished both grief and memory. Began moving through the camp. There was much to see to.

A shout made him turn; Nimri was walking toward him in haste, his eyes bright with that fanatical fury Barak knew too well. Barak kept walking, forcing Nimri to fall in alongside him.

“What is it, Nimri?”

“It’s the Sabbath, that’s what.” A snarl in the man’s voice.

Barak’s eyes hardened. “The Law says: if your cattle fall in a ditch, it is no violation of the Covenant to haul them out. I have no cows in a ditch, but I may have dead in my vineyard. No other tribes are coming, Nimri. We’ve wasted enough time here.”

Nimri’s face twisted. “What I’d expect,” he muttered, “from a man who took a heathen girl to wife.”

Barak stopped short, and his voice went cold. “My father was a Hebrew, Nimri. My mother too.”

“I do not deny it.” Nimri smirked, then cast a glance down toward Barak’s groin, and sneered when he lifted his eyes. “Yet you stink of them.”

Barak fought his anger. He had no time for this. His fingers twitched, but he did not reach for the knife at his hip. “Before you insult me again, think carefully about whether you want a battle with
me
.” If his voice had been cold a moment before, it was ice now. “Stay here and wait if you will. I will leave horses, such as I have; you can catch up when you’ve done as we agreed.”

Nimri tried to speak, but Barak held up his hand. “Enough,” he growled, and turned away, walking on through the camp. His
back was tense, but he did not expect a knife in it; Nimri was trouble, but he was no coward. Barak did not look over his shoulder to see if Nimri still stood there or whether he had gone back to his tents. He just proceeded through his own camp, stopping a man every once in a while to give a command or ask a question. Already men were folding the tents. The wind was back, and all about Barak loose canvas flapped in the wind, with a sound like a hundred giant birds all taking flight at once. Strangely, the sound calmed him a little. Surely a camp that could make that much noise would prove large enough to cleanse their land of the dead.

If Nimri had spoken as he had in the hearing of other men, Barak could not have ignored it. But he ignored what he could afford to, for he was used to it. Since the day he had seen Hadassah by the well in Walls and looked into her dark eyes, the day he’d met with her father and taken her to his house, he had heard the jeering of other Hebrews. That he, who had been known as a man raiders from the sea might fear—that he should take a heathen girl as a wife rather than a slave.

Still struggling with his anger, Barak reflected that at least Nimri would be out of his camp for a while. And perhaps Nimri was the kind of man he should leave behind to push at the priests of Shiloh, in any case. A man with a passionate faith in the power of God and his Ark and his Law, but who would not be awed by any other man, even a levite, even a priest. Nimri would not be likely to back down at a refusal.