After Abel and Other Stories

by Michal Lemberger

  Even as she thought it, she felt the litter begin to move, heard the gates pull back. Changing her mind, she reached for the curtain. She would look at her home one more time while it was still hers, but Artakama’s hand clamped down on hers from outside, rougher now than before.

  “You can’t look at it, Madam. It’s just a house now.”

  He gave the order to move, and protected her from seeing the head of each of her sons, spiked through and planted in the ground.

  They didn’t travel far. Clever punishment, she thought, to house her sister here, so close to those who cared for her and then keep her locked away. When the gates, made of thick but unornamented wood, opened she saw how much larger the grounds were than they seemed from outside.

  It was a comfortable prison, though she saw little of it in those first, terrible days. The sound of her sons’ screams still echoed in her head, the feel of her youngest being pulled from her, his boy-soft skin still hot against hers, never left her. She stayed in her room, allowed Vashti to spoon broth into her mouth and stroke her hair.

  She wished for death, but no one would kill her. She wanted to run into another life. When she finally rose, she ran to the compound’s walls, walked their boundary over and over, imagined the life that was passing outside. She heard the thud of horses’ hooves, and the slower plod of slaves’ feet.

  Soon the sounds died down, too. Susa grew silent. She thought they must be the only people left in the world, until Vashti reminded her that the court had probably moved on to Persepolis. “The summer will come soon, sister. You have never known such heat. We will see it through.”

  CITY OF REFUGE

  “Most blessed of women be Yael, Wife of Heber the Kenite, Most blessed of women in tents. He asked for water, she offered milk; In a princely bowl she brought him curds. Her [left] hand reached for the tent pin, Her right for the workmen’s hammer. She struck Sisera, crushed his head, Smashed and pierced his temple. At her feet he sank, lay outstretched, At her feet he sank, lay still; Where he sank, there he lay—destroyed.”

  Judges 5:24-27

  This is the sin of the city-dweller,” her father taught. “To dig stone out of the ground and build a house. Such permanence leads to nothing but problems. First the house, then the neighbor who wants to take it from you, then the wall to protect it from that same man.”

  Yael sat at her father’s feet with her brothers, sisters, cousins, all the children of the caravan. She was entranced by him, the thick braids that fell like ropes around his thin face, the passion that filled him when he taught them the lessons of their people.

  “Remember this. We live in tents so we live free. We make no claim to any plot of land. The entire desert is open to us, and we go where we please.

  “We were here before they arrived,” he continued, “and we will be here when they all pass away from the earth. We make peace wherever we pitch our tents. The desert was ours before these people came, but they have built cities, while we remain in tents. They claimed the land, and we still roam.”

  The caravan had passed through this land every year of Yael’s brief life. The men pitched their tents on the great plain between two walled cities. Her father found a lesson in each place they stayed, pointed to the cities, the fields, and showed the children what their gods demanded of them.

  “We Kenites will always be welcome. City dwellers have no time to learn the old trades, to stoke the fires, hammer the bronze and iron. So long as we make their pots and the tools to drag through the ground behind their oxen, we will go where we please.”

  There was only one law they must not break, he warned. “Never make a sword for an outsider. It is as my father taught me and his father taught him.”

  He lifted the scarab ornament that hung from a cord around his neck to show the children. Curved and intricately carved, it mimicked the pendants every adult around her put on at twelve years old as a sign of adulthood. Yael counted the years in her head until she received her own. It would be smaller, more delicate than her father’s, more fit for a woman, but like his it would be holy and symbolic.

  “We wear these to remind us of our duty to the gods, our pledge to live in peace with those around us. We must never raise our hands against another man. We must never make war with him.”

  Yael grew up with the security of the treaty makers. Just as her father promised, her family’s caravan was welcome wherever it went. Agreements were made with all the leaders they encountered. The Kenites pitched their tents in exchange for the metalwork they provided. They stayed out of the skirmishes that surrounded them, watched as Israelites made war with Ammonites, and Ammonites went into battle with Philistines, who in turn fought the Moabites.

  All around them, men struggled to take what the other had. Yael felt nothing of it. She grew up in a chrysalis of peace, her people’s traditions as steady as the change in season. They moved, made peace, crossed paths with other Kenite caravans with whom they sang their songs to the gods. Before they set off in opposite directions, the young men switched places so they could learn a trade and find wives.

  Heber had come as an apprentice to her father. Yael’s mother had sat with the women of the neighboring caravan, investigated his lineage even as she already knew he was a cousin, as were all Kenites, then welcomed him into their extended family. Heber worked in her father’s shop for two years, sanding pieces of bronze into perfect ovals, rectangles, squares until his fingers calloused and his wrists hardened with muscle. Only then did her father allow him to approach the fire. It was then he taught Heber how to fan the flames, to smelt the iron from the ore. He placed a hammer into Heber’s hand and guided it along the metal.

  By then, Yael had taken Heber to the caves that dotted the Judean hills. Once she received her pendant, she was freer to roam away from the tents. She had found the caves when they first arrived on the plain, then brought him into the cool semi-darkness where she kissed the cords of his neck, his jawbone, his mouth.

  After he forged his first dagger, Heber went to her mother to ask permission to marry. Her mother sniffed, as all mothers do, and pretended to be offended by the thought of joining her precious daughter to this unworthy man.

  She sent him away, as all mothers did.

  He came back, presented her with seed cakes, washed her feet, asked again. She sent him away. Outside the tent flap, he laughed with Yael about their people’s ritual of courtship.

  The third time, her mother looked him up and down. She sighed, as if still troubled. “You’ll have to do,” she said, then rose from her cushion and embraced Heber, whom she had loved as a son from the moment he joined their tents, whom she had pushed Yael to notice from the start. She had encouraged him to dance, even when he was new and shy around the older men. She pointed out his shapely legs and broad shoulders, then found ways to allow Yael to sneak away with him.

  Yael’s life had gone as planned. Her father had hung her pendant around her neck on her twelfth birthday. At fifteen, the women of the caravan piled her black braids onto her head, crushed gemstones to powder to redden her lips, cheeks, and forehead. One year later, she married. By the time her thirtieth year came, she had a husband respected by his neighbors, a tent of her own, and children clinging to her thighs. Until Heber pulled back the tent flap at the end of a long day. “We have to leave,” he said. “They’re going to kill me.”

  The baby Yael was rocking to sleep jerked awake in her arms at the gruff sound of his voice and began to cry. She shushed her down, but looked up at her husband. He was nothing like the timid boy she had first loved. The years had not been kind to him. He’d grown anxious about the future and impatient for success. He’d been one of the first to scorn the old ways and take orders for weapons of all kinds once her father’s generation began to die off or became too old to work, or to object.

  “It’s not our way,” Yael had pleaded when she first saw the swords and spearheads he had forged cooling in the yard. But he had brushed off her concerns. “Those are s
uperstitions and old wives tales. The world is opening to us. We will grow richer than any of our parents could have imagined.”

  “Nomads have no use for wealth,” she said. “We have enough to fill our tents. It is better for us to be righteous than rich.”

  But it was as Heber said. In defying their ancestors’ warning and breaking their bonds with the gods, they had prospered. Business grew brisker than ever. Everyone rejoiced at their newfound wealth, so Yael hid her uneasiness about her people’s work. She watched as they made the instruments of war but still tried to live in peace with their neighbors. The echo of iron beaten into swords resounded all around them.

  But when the Judean ended up dead on Heber’s shop floor, Yael had not been totally surprised. What else is a sword built for except to kill, she wondered, despair pulling her stomach and shoulders down toward the ground. Could it be counted an accident when the man complained about his weapon’s quality and ended up sliced through?

  She wondered what the man had thought, coming in to inspect the sword he had ordered. She believed Heber when he said it was an accident. At least, she tried to believe him. The fragile bonds of treaty between the caravan and their settled neighbors depended on it.

  After the first moments of panic subsided, the men of the caravan went into Beersheva, the closest town, brought back the city elders, and showed them the body, the wound across his stomach and arm. They looked to one another, doubt moving from one face to the next as if passed by hand. The people of the caravan watched anxiously as the Judeans closed into a tight knot, conferred with one another.

  “You have been an honored neighbor to us,” they said when they turned back. “We have all benefitted from your presence here, and we thank you for bringing this unfortunate event to our attention.” It was best, everyone agreed, to proclaim the death an unfortunate mishap. Heber would leave, they decided, to keep the peace and appease the dead man’s family. Judean justice held out some hope for him.

  “There is a city of refuge, Kedesh, in the north,” the elders said. “Go there. You can pitch your tents outside the city wall and still remain safe from the family’s vengeance. No one can touch you so long as you stay there.”

  “Everyone needs a metalsmith,” Heber said by way of apology as Yael packed up their entire life. She resented him, but he was her husband, the father of her children, and every so often, she still thought she could see traces of the boy he had been, who had let her lead him into the cool shelter of a Judean cave. And so she loaded up all she owned: tents, rugs, textiles, deep bronze pots, and left the desert behind.

  Now she walked among the people of Kedesh, each of whom may have spilled human blood, each an accident. No one spoke of past crimes here, but it never left her mind that she lived among killers.

  Those who were burdened with blood guilt carried their misdeeds within their hearts, just as Heber did. The two of them never spoke of the man on the floor, his mouth open in motionless surprise, which is how he left this world.

  Yael was lonely for her family here in the leafy north. Still, she had harbored a secret hope that they would find a more peaceful existence once they arrived in their new home. In her younger years, Yael had wondered if the desert caused men to lose their minds, pushed them into the frenzy of greed and war. But it was the same everywhere. Here, the winds didn’t roll in off the desert, bringing sand and heat, but from the shore of the sea. The breeze was gentler, mixed the scent of conifer with the distant brine, and yet the people to the east and west gave their battle cries and ran back to fight time and again, plundering and being plundered in turn. The wars came as regular as the spring.

  She tried to live the Kenite way, even in this place where the lemony smell of peonies filled her mornings. She taught her children the ways of their people, pointed to Heber, who was welcomed by Israelite and Canaanite alike. And though he defied the gods and his heritage at the forge, he followed the Kenite tradition and made treaties of peace with all his neighbors, even with Sisera, general of the city to the east, who led a warlike people, even more ferocious than the Judeans she had known. There was no justice for his people that did not come at the end of a sword, but her family, she explained to her children, would remain untouched by the violence of the city-dwellers. “Let them fight each other,” she said, her children sitting at her feet. “Our gods have taught us another way.”

  The family, separated from a caravan for the first time in Yael’s life, settled in their new place, the tents secured to the ground. Heber dug a well in front of her tent flap. Yael marveled that she would not have to walk to gather water or wood, but worried that the branches that lay so abundant on the ground would stay too wet to make a decent fire.

  What she could not get used to was the view outside. Every morning, Yael woke to air unchoked by dust. When she stepped out of the tent, blue sky met deep green hills in every direction. The roads she walked were lined with cedars, their branches reaching above her to touch one another, driving her deeper into forested darkness before releasing her outside the city wall, where cyclamens ran riot along the base of the stone.

  And when she passed through the city gates with the vessels Heber made stacked and balanced on her head, the women praised his Kenite mastery and bought her market wares.

  Despite the novelty, she suffered long hours of solitude, which would have been filled with chatter and laughter in her caravan days. At those moments, Yael sent her thoughts south, wondered about her mother, sisters, brothers, all the cousins who walked between tents, their embroidered hems swinging along the ground, the children who ran wild until pulled back to order with a sharp call.

  She missed seeing them, missed having her hair braided around her head by the other women, their hands tugging to pull the strands straight. She missed the feeling of her own hands in another woman’s hair. From this distance, she watched in her mind as they gathered to cook and sing. She watched the men dance in reverence to the gods, their arms raised high above their heads, while the women sent their voices up into the heavens.

  Yael never stopped missing her people, but in time she began to enjoy the north, how the trees absorbed the sound of her passage, unlike the rocky mountains, which echoed her footfalls back to her. Soon enough, though, the world’s tension flared.

  Sisera, always ready for a fight, led his people out into the broad valley. The people of Kedesh followed his army to see what would unfold. They brought jugs of wine and water, rounds of tightly wrapped cheese and soft bread in preparation for the spectacle to come.

  Yael joined them. She walked as far as the crest of the mountain. Across the way, she saw a woman among the soldiers, her arms raised to the sky. Her men massed behind her, ready to battle, but no one moved until, in a single swoop, the woman dropped her arms and released them. The men coursed down the hillsides, ran over the dark earth that was better suited to growing than cutting down. When the two armies collided, the onlookers couldn’t tell who was fighting whom, where one side ended and the other began.

  Yael heard the screams of the wounded, the cries of the dying. They begged their gods to spare them. She had never been this close to such carnage. Before the first wave of men had fallen, she left the crowd of onlookers, turned back for Kedesh. When she reached her tent, she went directly to the well, pulled up jar after jar of water, and scrubbed every part of herself clean, as if enough water could rid her of the bloody images she had just seen.

  Even after the ground was soaked with water, even after she had rubbed the skin raw on her arms and cheeks, Yael still had a sense that nothing was as it should be.

  The trees did their work. They tamped the sounds beyond and below them so that she could no longer hear the battle that raged down the road. She watched their branches bend and straighten in the wind. The only sound she heard was the chirrup of a bird somewhere high above her head.

  It distressed her. Yael wasn’t used to silence. She wasn’t used to being alone, but the paths around her tents that led in and o
ut of the city lay empty. Everyone was there on the ridge watching men throw themselves at death. She didn’t know how to fill her time without the simmer of chores, the comfort of work.

  She walked slowly around the largest tent, looking for rips to sew, but didn’t find any. She checked the fire pit, where she kept the embers smoldering in preparation of the next meal. They glowed, as predictable and orange as dawn. She counted the copper pots she had already counted that morning, then stacked them again. They were ready to be carried to the market, which sat empty now of everyone except the very old or infirm who couldn’t make the walk to view the battlefield. Finally, she went into the enclosure where they kept their animals, lured the goats to her with handfuls of fresh hay, and milked the females one at a time, until she had filled a jug with the steaming milk.

  Yael let the milk stand for a few minutes, until it developed a layer of cream that she skimmed off the top to feed to her children for dinner. She was still there, hidden from the road but able to see it, when she caught sight of a man running toward her through the trees. He was alone, and kept turning his head over his shoulder, as if to watch for someone following him. By the time he reached her tents, he could barely move. He ran through the property as if he had a particular destination, as if he was looking for something. When he found her, he bent over, his hands clutching the sides of his waist, his elbows flared to either side as his chest heaved. Yael watched as his back surged up and down with each breath he sucked in and let out.

  He was looking for me, she realized, although she couldn’t understand why. She didn’t recognize him, although he had come to her home. He was clothed for war, his breastplate still tied around him, but he was a small man, shorter than many women, with stringy muscles running up his arms and legs.