Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (40 page)

Sobbing breathlessly, she kept fighting, and Barak wrenched her wrists over her head, pinning them in a grip that she could not escape. With his other hand he wound leather tightly about her wrists and knotted it; a strap perhaps from the leather beneath his breast-piece or from his greaves. She spat and bucked but could not dislodge the man. Felt him lifting her, carrying her over his shoulder as she kicked and pummeled his back with her bound hands.

“Stop fighting me,” Barak whispered fiercely. “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing.”

She kept struggling, barely hearing him. The ground moved dizzily beneath her as he strode, carrying her toward her horse. And still she screamed with the moaning of the dead in her ears. Screamed her throat raw in protest, screamed to Zadok and to Barak and to God who was watching somewhere in his terrible silence.

T
HE MEN
moved north, with Devora tied to her saddle, her wrists thonged to the pommel. Hurriya clung to her waist from behind her. North of Refuge there was no road and no town—just the broad valley of the Tumbling Water, a strip of well-watered earth a quarter mile wide, nestled between steep hillsides. The land leveled out for a while as they followed the water north, and the river here flowed slowly. On the west bank there was a cart track that led them past small vineyards that drank in the hot sun, between water and hill. Behind each vineyard could be seen a low house of cedar or pine, like a tired bear with its back to the steep rising of the land.

In any other year, this might have been a cheerful place. At this season the vines would have been green and lush for harvest, with fat clusters of grapes almost too heavy for a man to lift.

But Devora felt no cheer. She sat her horse rigidly. She was uncomfortable and sore. But that was nothing compared to the humiliation hot in her breast. She rode beside the men, tied to her horse, like any slave. With her wrists bound, she could not lift her hands to cover her face, though she felt their eyes on her. She felt naked. Any grief she might show would be terribly public.

And as she’d told Barak, in all things made or done by God or by men there was a message that could be discerned. The message in the strap about her wrists was clear to her. Surely she would not be respected as the
navi
, not here, not among these men. Not now that Zadok was gone. Zadok’s presence too had been a message, a sign of her authority, a sign that she was set apart. That sign was gone. The men might look at her now and see only a woman in a dirtied, stained white dress. Once Omri even rode to her and sneered, “Just a woman.” She didn’t move or look at him, and she dreaded for a moment that he would grip her thigh as he had done once, but at that moment Barak’s voice came sharp from where he rode a little ahead. “Omri!” And cursing under his breath, the man let her be.

As she watched him go, Devora felt the bite of anger. Only another woman. Prone to tears or hysterical screaming, of value because her body created life, but not to be trusted outside a man’s tent. What if, seeing her so, the men stopped listening to her? Certainly Omri had; his brief moment of awe that night in Walls had not survived seeing her screaming like a slave girl as Barak tied her and tossed her onto her horse. How could she help her People if her words to them were no longer the words of one who sees what God sees, but only the words of a woman who rides without a man beside her?

Her gaze flicked down to Mishpat, which was still strapped to the side of her saddle. The blade had not been taken from her—for she was
not
a slave. And though she could not reach it, the sight of that sword hardened her. She was still Devora of Israel,
whether free with a nazarite and the mighty presence of the Law behind her, or trussed to her saddle like a raid captive.

And even her humiliation, even her grief, were small things compared to her dread at what she now saw before her and behind her and on every side. For this was
not
a lush valley ready for harvest. The dead had been here first. And with them, its sere wings scything through the vines, the
malakh ha-mavet
. Where its shadow had fallen, the vines were withered and dry as brambles; there were no lights in the houses.

Barak grew visibly tense as the slow tread of the men brought them farther upriver, and Devora recalled his words at the lakeside:
I am a vintner who has been eleven days from my vineyard while dead prowl about it, and I fear for the harvest
. This was Barak’s country: the vineyards of the north Yarden, famed in Israel. The people of Walls, Hebrew and heathen, had led the great herd of the dead straight up this valley, where the vineyards awaited them like a long row of riverbank blossoms to be trampled. There would be no harvest.

As they passed up the cart track beside the dying fields, silent as mourners, they came upon strange sights. A walking corpse that crouched amid the vines and dug at the ground with its fingers, with relentless, slow movements that seemed utterly without purpose. The corpse did not even glance up as Omri approached it from behind and drove a spear into its skull.

After that, they found a corpse pinned, half-crushed, beneath a wagon with a broken axle; perhaps the man had died there. Now he lay on his back, the wagon holding him at the waist. The corpse writhed and growled at the men who passed, twisting to the left and to the right, struggling helplessly to get on its belly and crawl toward the living. The men at the head of the line stopped and stared at it a few moments. For once Devora felt nothing seeing the corpse twist and strain to get at them. It was only one more corpse in a land that was itself becoming a corpse.

It didn’t really matter.

After a few moments, Laban strode forward with his axe and took off the thing’s head. The head rolled away from the wagon and stopped with its face toward the sky. The jaws didn’t move, but the milky, dead eyes did. Laban growled and brought the axe down on its brow, swinging like a man splitting wood. Hurriya glanced away with a shudder; Devora just looked numbly on.

As the line of men began to shuffle uneasily past the wagon and the still corpse, Barak detailed five men to make a cairn. Then he rode to Devora’s side and drew a small knife from a sheath he’d strapped to his shin. With calm, measured movements, he set the knife to her bonds and cut them; Devora felt the cold of the bronze against her skin, but Barak was careful and he did not cut her. When her hands were free, she lifted them slowly, rubbing her wrists, wincing as life came back to her numb hands, hurting them.

“I am sorry,” Barak said quietly. He had the grace at least to look ashamed. “He died bravely.”

“He died.” Devora’s voice sounded small to her, and hopeless.

Barak said nothing.

“His body will rise.”

“I know.” The war-leader coughed. “When we return, we will end that and raise a cairn for him.”

“I should never have let him go.” Devora closed her eyes.

Barak rode beside her a moment, as though he were trying to think of words to say. Then he sighed and kicked his horse into a canter and left them. Hurriya squeezed Devora slightly, her arm about Devora’s waist, and whispered, “He died serving those he loved. The gods will remember him. Your God will too.”

They stopped briefly about two hours before dusk, and the men shared some of their diminished rations without fires or means
of heating them. Sore and exhausted, Devora passed Hurriya’s waterskin to her, then lay down in the weeds by the riverbank and looked at the sky. She didn’t want to eat. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t sleep.

After a while, someone settled in the grass beside her, and she felt a hand stroking her arm gently through her sleeve. Soft humming. That go-to-sleep song of Hurriya’s. Devora didn’t turn her head to look at the girl, she just listened. The grief and terror and fatigue of the morning and of the previous night hit her all at once. Withered fields. An entire settlement, gone. That girl who longed to be a woman, leaping to her death. Zadok, her Zadok, dead. Beneath all those feeding corpses. Tears stung against her eyelids; she rebuked them. She yearned suddenly for Lappidoth, for his strong arms about her, holding her so that she could sleep without fear. Letting her hide her face against his chest so that she could weep without shame.

But here she had only Hurriya and her melody and the soft touch of the girl’s hand through her sleeve.

“Thank you,” she said.

Hurriya stopped humming. “We Canaanites don’t let a woman grieve alone,” she whispered.

“Neither do we Hebrews.” Devora reached and gripped the girl’s own arm through her dress, returning the touch. “Did you really see them, girl? Survivors from Walls?”

“Yes. With the dead behind them.”

Hurriya and Devora were silent for a while. Then the Canaanite said, “Tell me about this God of yours, who sends these visions.”

Devora opened her eyes and gazed at Hurriya’s deathly pale face and the empty sky above her. In her dress the girl looked nearly skeletal. Her eyes were weary and glazed with the slow return of her fever, but they held no hatred, only concern. A tenderness for her touched Devora’s heart. The girl was ill and fading
a little, yet she had come to where Devora lay and had hummed that song for her. This was a woman who had already walked the length of the land once, bleeding and carrying a child. Her fever and illness were unlikely to keep her from doing what she felt she needed to do for those who needed her.

And Devora
did
need her.

They were two women alone. And they had been through fire and death and terror together. Only Lappidoth had ever seen Devora’s heart as naked as this girl had seen it.

She should be caring for and comforting and guiding this new
navi
. Instead, she was being comforted
by
her. Devora sighed and sat up, drawing her responsibilities back about her even as she had often seen Hurriya draw that salmah about her thin frame. “We know little of God, even we who see things that only God sees,” she told the girl. “We only know that he’s made promises and that when he’s made promises in the past he’s kept them.”

Hurriya was quiet a moment. “What promises
has
he made?” she asked.

“That we will possess the land always,” Devora said wearily. “That we will have children, as many as stars in the winter sky. That he will dwell here among us.”

Those promises seemed so empty to her now. The land they possessed was reduced to withering fields and ash. An entire settlement had lost its children. And her own womb was barren. Sarah had borne a child out of the aging desert of her body—but that was only a story of the past.

Maybe Sarah had been right to laugh bitterly.

“That your people will always possess this land,” Hurriya repeated, an edge to her voice. “Your God doesn’t love my people. Why then does he curse me with visions? Does he think I haven’t suffered enough?”

Devora could hear the tremor in Hurriya’s voice. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Before they could say more, a short call on the shofar interrupted, summoning the men and the two women to their feet. It was time to move on. The sun above was hot and lethal in the sky, and it was all Devora could do just to get to her feet. Yet she turned and took Hurriya’s arms in her hands, feeling the fever warmth of her through her sleeves, and lifted her to her feet as well. The woman almost fainted from the effort of rising. Devora didn’t think she could have stood on her own. For just a moment Hurriya leaned against her, and Devora allowed it, a protective fire in her heart.

B
ARAK KEPT
the pace quick, leading the men in their long file along the rising riverbank past fields of barley and vineyards that were dying away like weeds in a fire. His shadow stretched out before him to his right now, long like the shadow of a tree. It was late, yet somewhere ahead there might be refugees fleeing the dead—if that heathen girl really
was
seeing things God saw. They had covered a lot of ground this day, and unlike any men and women fleeing Walls, they’d had no need to hide from the dead; they’d slain those they’d passed. No doubt the survivors of that burned settlement had traveled slower, hiding when they had to and always watching for some chance to shed pursuit and double back toward Walls. They might even be within reach this very night.

And Barak had another reason for haste. They were very near now to his own vineyard. And still all the land about them showed
evidence of blight and death. His anxiety clawed at him. He had to know. He had to know for sure. As he took note of whose fields they passed, he ceased to think any more of the heathen girl or her refugees or of the
navi
, or of how Zadok had fought as though he had no fear of any corpse. His whole mind was bent on his vineyard, nearer with each step.

When they reached his vines at last, the sun was already kissing the hills with fire. Though Barak had always loved the sunsets of the Galilee—had often stood outside his door with his wife to watch them before taking her inside to his bed—he did not love this one. The burn of it along the ridges made him think of the fire at Walls. Made him think of the fire that had devoured the gods Hadassah’s mother had cherished. Made him think of the nights afterward when he sat silent by his hearth, watching the coals, grieving for his woman. Made him think of things lost and never recovered.