Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (12 page)

D
AWN’S COLD
light. The Sabbath bride had visited the People for a night and a day. This was now the morning that followed. Lappidoth had already left to see about a horse for his wife. In his tent, Devora dressed swiftly but with purpose; she was acutely aware that what she wore this day, and what she carried with her, might be as important as any words she spoke. Even as she cinched tight the girdle about her white dress—white, the color of the Levi tribe—her fingers faltered an instant. She glanced at the bundles and parcels at the back of the tent, her eyes drawn to one long, slender bundle in a corner, half-concealed beneath the rest, a bundle bound with a red cord. Two things there must go with her as well, two things she had not taken in her hands in a long time. If she was to ride into the north and see fields that were occupied by the hungry dead, she could not leave it to others to carry out her judgments. To do so would be to invite a kind of
blindness. The kind that kept her from seeing the weight that the burden of executing her judgments placed on Zadok’s shoulders. It should have been her hand that silenced the infant, not only her hand that buried it. It must be her hand that attended to the dead.

God had given her visions of things to come. That meant the burden was hers. It was right that it should be. She had never borne a child, but she was a woman of the People and she understood how to bear burdens, she understood how to shoulder those hard necessities required to preserve life. She had once carried a corpse in her arms like a beloved child a mile through dank reeds because it was unthinkable that another should have to.

Devora moved to the goatskin bundle and unwrapped it. Took up the scarlet cord first and held it in her hand a moment. Then she gently drew aside the goatskin, revealing the item it had concealed: a blade longer than her arm, polished to a sheen, slender and feminine in its delicacy. A hilt of white bone. She gazed at it grimly. Both the blade and the cord she held were heathen in origin, yet they were items that had proven useful to the People and had been consecrated for their uses, even as the fields and hills that had once been possessed only by the Canaanites were now places set apart and chosen out of all lands for the Hebrews, places holy in their own way.

“We must have a truce, you and I.” Devora spoke to the sword and to the memories it recalled for her. “I will lift you and carry you with me, because the dead are in the land again and there will be butchery to do before the land is clean. But you mustn’t expect me to use you. Only when I must. You were once unclean with the blood of a woman who was the best woman in Israel, the wisest. I will not like you or the necessity of carrying you. I unbind you and will need you ready to my hand, but don’t think that I carry you as a man would, with any joy in your beauty.”

The blade lay there mute yet eloquent in the shimmer of dawn light on its cold metal. Iron, the only iron blade she’d ever seen. Sea People had smithied it, in their walled towns on the coast to the west. The blade had come to Devora as a gift in the darkest of circumstances. After she’d done what she must, she’d wrapped it tightly in that goat hide and bound it and bound with it the pain of that day. Released now, that pain leapt at her and clawed at her heart as she gazed on the sharp metal.

“I will name you Mishpat,” she whispered to the blade, “the Judgment. That will help us both remember what you are and what you are not.”

A judgment on the dead. A judgment on her. The swift cut of decision, severing what limbs must be severed from the body of the People so that the rest of the body might thrive and not decay.

She considered the blade a few moments, as if watching for some sign of its consent to the name. Idly she wrapped the scarlet cord about her hand, feeling its coarse, aged fiber against her skin. Then bound it about her waist like a girdle. A dark mood fell over her, and she pressed her hand to her belly with a gentleness that would have surprised any who saw her.

She listened for a long moment, but heard nothing there. An ache opened within her, deep as the ravines of the Tumbling Water. There was no life stirring within her after the lovemaking of the past two nights. As
navi
, she would have known if there were; she felt certain of it. Tears stung her eyes; she blinked them away.

She knew her barrenness to be a judgment on her for the choices she’d had to make as a younger woman. As with any shattering of Covenant, barrenness had been visited on her, even as barrenness and blight now threatened the People and the land itself.

“Devora?”

She turned, saw Lappidoth at the door of the tent, peering in. She drew in her breath. She could be vulnerable, here in his tent. Once she stepped outside, she could not be. Out there, where she was going, weakness would be lethal—for her, and for her People.

Lappidoth came to her, sat beside her, and put his arms about her. “I’d nearly forgotten you had that,” he murmured into her hair, and she knew he meant Mishpat. “You are taking it?”

“I am. It has only ever been used for one thing. Where God is sending me, I may need it.” Devora closed her eyes, just feeling his warmth. “Why have you never been angry?” she whispered. “I deceived you when I came to you.”

She had not told him she was barren, or why. Yet he had sheltered her in his tent all these years, not because she was the
navi
but because she was a woman, a woman he loved. Nor had he ever taken a second wife—though this meant his seed would not be passed on. He had once told her there was only one woman he wished to see bearing his child within her.

This morning might be the last she would ever see him.

“You didn’t know.” His voice a rumble at her ear, his presence heavy and strong in the dim light.

“I feared it,” she murmured. Then she shook her head, breathed out slowly, straightening her back, refusing to lean any longer into his arms. She wanted to, so badly, but she could ill afford to begin this morning weak. Tears were a luxury reserved for women who did not have a People in their care. Her eyes hardened again, with purpose and with denial of all weariness.

“Sarah was barren,” she said suddenly. “Our father Abraham’s wife. Her body aged and she bore no child, and bitterness ate at her heart. Then two men came to her husband’s tents beneath the oak trees. Only they weren’t men, they were
malakhim
, angels of
El adonai
our God.”

Lappidoth pressed his face to her neck with a soft sound in his throat, to comfort her.

“They said to Abraham, we bring you
niv sefatayim
, fruitful words from the God in high places. A year from now your wife will give birth to a boy.” Devora lifted a hand as she spoke, moving her fingers gently through her husband’s hair. “Sarah was within the tent, concealed from the sight of men who were strange to her. When she heard the words, she laughed. A cold laugh, for she did not think God could bring anything green and alive out of the desert she felt her body had become.” Devora’s voice fell, became soft. “But a year later, she had the boy. Then she laughed a second time, with tears. Isaak I name you, she said to the boy as he suckled at her breast, Isaak, my laughter.

“I have tried to live a life as holy and set apart, as
kadosh
, as Sarah’s,” she whispered, “but when I was a girl I broke the Covenant twice, and God remembers it.”

Lappidoth’s arms were around her.

“There will be no laughter for me in my old age.” She gave him a small, bitter smile. “And perhaps I will not come back from the hills.”

“You
will
come back,” her husband growled. She could hear in his voice that her words had upset him. He gripped her chin suddenly, turned her face toward his. His eyes were fierce in the dim light. “You have a covenant with me, not only with God. And how can you keep it from beneath a cairn? You will come back.” And rather than wait for an answer, he kissed her.

At that moment there were shouts outside, sharp cries of fear. Devora stiffened, and Lappidoth’s eyes went dark with alarm. Swiftly he rose from beside her. He strode toward the tent door, cast it to the side. Devora got to her feet, had time to cry, “Wait!” but then Lappidoth was already through the door, and gone.

Devora’s heart pounded. She started toward the door, stopped. Glanced back at the blade that lay unsheathed on the
rug. It looked lethal. A moment ago she had been mourning her inability to bear new life. That blade was meant to sever life.

Another cry outside, a scream. This time one of pain.

With a moan of dread, Devora bent and took up the blade, then hurried out the door.

D
EVORA BURST
from her husband’s tent and was nearly trampled down by a man on horseback; she let out a cry and sprang back, tripping. Then the man was past with a glance at her over his shoulder as he rode, and Devora had a shock. For his eyes and his cheekbones were those of the northern tribes. And in one hand he carried a long knife, nearly the length of a man’s arm between elbow and wrist. The knife was red with blood.

Then man and horse were gone amid the tents. Lappidoth was nowhere to be seen. Devora broke into a run, moving as quickly as her long woolen skirt would permit, Mishpat’s hilt cold in her hand. She didn’t understand, couldn’t understand! But she sensed the camp,
God
’s camp, was under some kind of raid. As she dashed through the tents, others began to bolt past her running the other way. There were screams and, somewhere ahead, the clang of bronze striking against bronze. Panic choked her.

The commotion was coming from near the Tent of Meeting. Holding Mishpat out to her side, she darted past the tents, dodging to the side as another horse galloped past her. Caught a glimpse of the rider’s face. Hebrew. Another northern face. Her heart burned hot within her. That Barak—that Barak!—
what had he done?

There were levites on the ground among the tents now—their white robes gashed open and reddened with blood. She ran faster, leaping over the bodies, breathing hard, a stitch in her side. Then she was around the last of the priests’ tents, and she could see the Tent of Meeting and the scorched earth around it and high on its pole near the Tent, the ram’s horn, the
shofar
, untouched, no alarm blown. Had there been no time?

Several northern men were dismounted by the pole, and one was bent over the body of a fallen priest. Zadok and another nazarite were fighting to get into the Tent, the door barred by a lean man whose face was turned away from her; the man held a bronze blade and a round shield. Zadok lunged in with his spear, but the man caught the spear on the edge of his shield and spun the shield in one quick, smooth motion, ripping the spear out of Zadok’s grasp and sending it clattering away. The other nazarite had only a knife in his hand, and he danced in place, awaiting an opening.

Devora had only a moment to take in the scene—the battle at the door, great gashes in the side of the tent, the body in the dirt, and the men moving away from the pole now to flank Zadok—when there was a bellow like a bull’s voice to her left, and her husband leapt around one of the tents with a tent pole uplifted in his hands. Lappidoth ran at the men and drove the end of the pole into one’s face, sending the man sprawling limp some distance away. He spun the pole at another man’s head, but the man ducked. Then Devora was at her husband’s side, screaming loud enough to drown out her fear, and they were facing three from
the northern tribes, tall, lean men wielding staves of cedar. They carried no shields; those staves served them for both attack and defense. The blade wavered in her grip; these were living men, men of the People, and she had only once before in her life raised Mishpat against another’s life. But these men meant to kill
her husband
. They meant to defile the Tent of Meeting,
had
defiled it. And they meant to kill Lappidoth.

Everything in her went cold.

She swung the blade.

The eyes of the men facing her widened in horror at the sight of this white-robed levite woman bearing down on them with a blade of iron that seemed not of this land or any other, slender metal, a white slice of death such as they had only seen perhaps in the hands of men of the Sea Coast during raids from the walled towns in the west. The strangeness of the sight and the hesitation it provoked was lethal; Devora’s blade slashed across the face of the man in the middle. A spray of blood, some of it spattered warm across Devora’s neck and her cheek. The
navi
’s heart was pounding. She screamed again and swept the blade down at the legs of the man to the right, even as Lappidoth blocked the man’s club from striking her; the iron blade slid through sinew and bone as though they were milk, and the man crumpled with a shrill cry.

As her husband faced the last of the three, Devora caught a glimpse of the Tent of the Meeting past the enemy’s shoulder. The second nazarite lay still on the ground, a pool of blood beneath his head. Zadok had taken up the fallen man’s knife and was dancing to the left, then the right, with the kind of grace one sees in desert asps or in the lethal mamba of Kemet, the serpent that strikes unseen from the trees. But Zadok could not get within the northern man’s reach; the man’s war braid and the colored stones he’d woven into his belt declared him a chieftain of men, one who had survived many harsh raids in the north. In less time than the
beat of a heart, Devora’s eyes took in the nazarite’s peril and the great cuts in the side of the holy Tent.

The Tent had been violated; there was at least one man within who had not been consecrated or prepared to enter the
shekinah
and who dared to bear sharp bronze before Holy God. Yet no fire blazed from the Tent to wither the northern man where he stood, which Devora couldn’t understand. But then, these were not strangers in the land who raided the Tent but men who partook of the Covenant and the promise. Perhaps God, whose ways were not the ways of men and women who walk on the earth, was waiting for his Hebrews to clean up the evil of their own. She didn’t have time to think of it—it was only a silent cry of astonished horror in her mind.