by Lynn Austin
The room seemed to whirl. “I promise, Abba.”
While Hodesh lowered dried fruit, cheese, and bread into the cistern, Jerimoth tenderly laid his hands on Jerusha and Maacah and prayed for them. “Ah, Sovereign Lord, keep them in the hollow of your hand. Take care of my precious girls for me. You saved Jerusha for a reason, Lord. May she find that reason and be a living testimony to your goodness and grace.”
Then he wrapped his arms around them, crushing them to his heart. “My beloved daughters! I wanted to recite the blessing for each of you on your wedding day, but it can never be. Somehow—someday—God will turn your tears of sorrow into joy again. In faith that such a day will come—in faith that one day you will laugh and sing and hold my grandchildren in your arms—yes, in faith I will bless you now. . . .
“May Yahweh bless you and keep you. May Yahweh cause His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May He make you as Sarah and Rebecca. May He bless you with His love and grant you His peace. Amen.”
He kissed Jerusha, then pushed her away. Mama helped her climb into the cistern, then Maacah slid in beside her.
“I love you both,” Abba whispered. “Shalom.”
A moment later he moved the stone into place, covering the hole and plunging Jerusha into total darkness.
Jerimoth wiped his eyes and peered out the door again. The dust cloud on the horizon loomed larger than before, and he heard a rumbling sound, like summer thunder. Four Assyrian soldiers had stopped beside his vineyard and were dismounting. Jerimoth ducked inside the adjoining stable and unlatched the outside gate, then slapped his oxen on their rumps, setting them free to fend for themselves.
When he returned, he drew his wife into his arms, clinging to her in silence. Finally he tilted her face up and looked into her eyes, gently wiping her tears with his callused hand.
“I love you, Hodesh. Don’t be afraid. Yahweh is with us.”
“I know,” she nodded.
“Our girls will live. Yahweh will keep them safe.”
Then, holding his wife by the hand, Jerimoth walked outside into the sunlight and down through his vineyard, silently praising God as he faced the approaching holocaust.
Iddina dismounted beside the vineyard and stooped to examine the footprints he had been following. The trail halted abruptly in the middle of the road as if the girl had floated away. But then he saw a larger set of prints leading up the path through the vineyard. Of course—someone had carried her.
As Iddina stood, he heard the soft whoosh of an arrow and a dull thud as it struck flesh, followed by a startled, agonized cry. In quick succession another arrow swished from a bow, another thump sounded as it hit its mark, and another victim moaned in pain and surprise. Iddina whirled around and saw two bodies sprawled in the vineyard. He turned to his men in time to see one of them sliding his bow back into its quiver.
“Why did you shoot them?” he asked angrily.
“They were coming toward us, sir. I was afraid they might be armed.”
Iddina lifted the soldier by his tunic and hurled him to the ground, then pushed his face into the dirt. “Look at that trail, you fool! She’s here! Those two people probably know where she is. And now you’ve killed them!”
Iddina kicked the soldier onto his back, drew a dagger from his belt and slit his throat. As the soldier lay dying, Iddina turned to his other two men.
“No more stupid mistakes! Spread out and search every inch of this place until you find her.”
Iddina followed a well-worn path through the vineyard, which led to the stone house on the rise. He paused beside the two bodies—a man’s and a woman’s—sprawled side by side in a spreading puddle of blood. He rolled them over, then braced his foot on each chest in turn, jerking the arrows out and placing them in his own quiver. He felt a momentary, grudging respect for the soldier he had just killed—the warrior had shot his arrows straight through their hearts, killing them instantly.
From the doorway of the house Iddina saw the infantry advancing down the road. He would have to hurry before hordes of tramping soldiers wiped out every trace of the girl’s trail. He stormed into the house and began ripping it apart, smashing cooking pots and storage jars, kicking at piles of hay and manure in the stable, slashing through straw pallets and bedding with his dagger. The fire on the hearth was warm, the food fresh, the house recently inhabited, unlike the hundreds of other houses they had searched along the way. Again he cursed the foolish soldier for killing the two occupants.
Suddenly Iddina froze. Two occupants. Yet he had just ripped open three sleeping pallets, two down here and one in the loft. All three had been rolled out on the floor, recently used. With deliberate patience, Iddina searched every inch of the house, examining every crack, testing every stone, looking for a missed clue or secret hiding place. He would find her. The game had become challenging to him again, and he sniffed the air for her scent, smiling with anticipation and delight.
Jerusha huddled in the cramped hole beside her sister and sobbed. Not even a pinhole of light penetrated around the edges of the stone lid or through the plastered walls of the cistern. She couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or shut, and the darkness and confining space terrified her. She whimpered, trying not to scream. She was buried alive!
Maacah squeezed Jerusha’s hand as if sensing her fear. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “No one will find you here.”
But it wasn’t true. Iddina would find her. He never lost his prey. Jerusha wanted to give up and die with her parents, but she knew what Iddina would do to Maacah. For her sister’s sake, Jerusha had to survive. She had promised Abba.
Exhaustion numbed her. Dazed by grief and shock, surrounded by inky darkness, Jerusha longed to sleep. But then she heard the rumbling sound and felt the earth trembling beneath her. “They’re here,” she whispered. “The Assyrians are here.” The noise grew louder and louder until the ground shook like an earthquake.
“There must be hundreds of them!” Maacah said.
“Not hundreds—thousands. Tens of thousands.”
She remembered the numberless hordes of Assyrians—foot soldiers and cavalry, chariots and war machines, stretching across the horizon as far as the eye could see—and Jerusha trembled along with the earth. The noise grew louder still, until it seemed as if the earth would shake apart. She heard the distant whinny of horses above the din and an occasional shout.
“Please, God . . . please, God,” Maacah sobbed.
Sticky with sweat and tears, Jerusha clung to her sister, weeping for their parents. And as they huddled together in the darkness, buried alive, she tried not to envision the horrifying scene above her head.
23
Iddina knelt to examine the flagstone floor of the house, his eyes patiently scanning the stones, searching for the lid to an underground cistern or root cellar. They had hidden her well. The ground shook from thousands of trampling feet as his army approached, but Iddina barely noticed. Clamping his dagger between his teeth, he continued to study the stones.
He hadn’t gotten very far when something heavy struck the roof, and he heard a whoosh of flames as the ceiling beams caught fire above his head. Another torch flew through the open window and landed at his feet. The straw pallet he had ripped apart burst into flames, singeing the hair on his legs. A third torch ignited the hay on the stable floor, and within seconds, flames engulfed the house.
Iddina staggered backward through clouds of choking smoke, groping for the door as flaming beams crashed to the floor. He stumbled from the burning house, his eyes watering, his lungs heaving from the suffocating smoke.
“What fool set fire to this house?” he bellowed. But no one heard him above the thunder of horses and troops.
Iddina’s two trackers hurried up the hill toward him. “Are you all right, sir?”
He nodded, coughing smoke from his lungs. “Did you find any trace of the girl?”
“Nothing, sir.”
Iddina cursed. “She was here—I know she was!”
He remounted his horse, furious with the stupid fool who had killed the two witnesses and with the incompetent archers who had set fire to the house before he finished his search. He spurred his horse, signaling impatiently to his two men.
“Let’s go. Maybe we’ll pick up her trail down the road.”
The noise surrounding Jerusha thundered on and on, and it seemed as if the sun should have set by now. But the rumbling grew no fainter and the ground continued to shake.
Suddenly Maacah stiffened. “Jerusha, I smell smoke! Will they burn the house?”
“Yes! They’ll burn everything!”
“But we’ll die in here if they burn the house!”
Jerusha groped for the waterskin, then felt in the dark for the skirt of Maacah’s dress and soaked the front of it. “Hold the wet part over your face, and breathe through it,” she ordered. She did the same with her own skirt.
The sound of crackling flames and the scent of smoke grew stronger. At first Jerusha tried to stifle her coughs, but as the cistern filled with smoke it became impossible. She could scarcely breathe. The heat was unbearable.
Maacah struggled to stand up. “We’ve got to get out of here! We’re going to die—we’ve got to get out!”
“No, Maacah. Stay here. We can’t escape if the house is on fire. We have to stay here.”
Jerusha held her sister down, fighting her own terror as the dark, airless hole filled with smoke. Fire raged above them, turning the cistern into an oven, slowly roasting them alive. But she knew it was better to die in this stifling pit than to be recaptured.
“Please help us, God. Don’t let us die,” Maacah whispered.
Her sister’s useless prayers made Jerusha angry. “There is no God,” she said. “Save your breath.” But Maacah didn’t seem to hear her.
“Please, God . . . I don’t want to die . . . please . . .”
Jerusha held her sister in her arms, rocking her gently, waiting to die.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the noise and the heat and the rumbling of the earth began to fade. Jerusha was still alive, but she felt groggy and listless as her lungs strained to breathe. She had to let fresh air into the cistern soon. Suddenly she realized that Maacah hadn’t moved for a long time, and Jerusha panicked. She had promised Abba that she would take care of her.
“Maacah! Don’t die!” she begged, shaking her. “Please don’t die!”
Maacah stirred and coughed weakly. Jerusha laid her sister down and groped above her head for the stone lid to the cistern. She would have to gamble that the Assyrians were gone. But no matter how hard she pushed, the stone lid wouldn’t budge. It was too heavy for her to move alone, and she couldn’t gain leverage from her cramped position. She shook her sister again.
“Maacah, you have to help me. We have to get this lid open.”
“Abba—” she mumbled. “Abba will let us out.”
Tears sprang to Jerusha’s eyes. “Abba can’t come this time,” she said gently. “You have to help me. Please try?”
Jerusha helped her sister up, and they groped above their heads until they felt the stone. “Now, push!”
The stone shifted slightly, and a shower of dirt and soot rained down on them. Pale, smoky sunlight streamed in through a crack, and Jerusha saw her sister’s dirt-streaked face. She appeared too exhausted to push again.
“That’s good enough for now,” Jerusha said. “At least we’ll get air and a little light.” She found the waterskin and made Maacah take a drink, then she broke off two pieces of bread for them to eat. “We’ll wait until night. It’ll be safer after dark. Let’s try to get some sleep.” She gathered her sister in her arms, and they soon slept, clinging to each other and to life.
Jerusha awoke to total darkness and to the suffocating panic of being buried alive. She felt her eyes to see if they were sealed shut and saw the dim outline of her hands. It must be night. She moved closer to the faint crack of light and peered out. The roof of their house was gone, and stars shone through a haze of lingering smoke. She listened, but the night seemed eerily silent. The stone lid still wouldn’t budge. She shook her sister awake.
“Maacah—Maacah, wake up. Help me move this stone.”
Maacah stirred and tried to sit up. “Why is it so dark?”
“It’s night. The soldiers are gone. I think it’s safe to climb out now.”
“What about Mama and Abba?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Come on—help me shove the lid off.”
They pushed together until the stone shifted, making enough room for Jerusha to crawl out. Then she helped Maacah. They stood in the center of their gutted home, speechless with shock.
Only the outer stone walls remained standing among the smoldering ruins. A gentle breeze stirred warm ashes beneath her feet. Jerusha looked up and saw a pale sliver of moon and thousands of flickering stars shining in the sky. How could the night be so beautiful, she wondered, when the world around her had been so devastated? She drew a deep breath for the next task.
“Stay here until I’m sure it’s safe,” she told Maacah.
“No—I’m going with you.” Maacah gripped her arm tightly.
Beyond the gaping hole where the door once hung, the ruins of their father’s land lay naked in the moonlight. A charred pile of stones marked his emptied storehouses; his slaughtered oxen lay strewn in a heap of bones and entrails; his ancient olive grove with its centuries-old branches lay trampled and burned. The Assyrians had torn his stone winepress apart and left it a smoldering ruin. His farmland and all his crops lay black and smoking.
“Jerusha—over there.” Maacah pointed to something sprawled along the vineyard path.
“Stay here,” Jerusha said, but Maacah shook her head, still gripping her arm.
Together they walked through the vineyard in the pale starlight and knelt beside their parents’ bodies. A ragged hole pierced Mama’s heart; Abba’s body looked the same. Jerusha closed their staring eyes, then cradled her mother’s head in her arms and sobbed. She had thought she had no tears left to shed, but Mama and Abba were dead, and Jerusha wished she had died with them.
Gradually she became aware that Maacah’s weeping had faded to soft sniffles. Jerusha felt her sister’s hand on her shoulder. “Abba would want to be buried on his land,” Maacah said.
Jerusha nodded in agreement. They worked together for the next few hours to dig a shallow grave beside the vineyard. They buried Hodesh and Jerimoth side by side, then piled stones from the winepress in a mound on the grave. When they finished, the sky was growing light.
Jerusha sat on the stone steps of her house and stared at the desolation before her. The Assyrians had swept across the face of the earth like a merciless plague, killing everyone in their path, leaving a legacy of destruction and death—a holocaust—behind them.
“What are we going to do now?” Maacah asked quietly.
“I don’t know; just survive.” It had been Jerusha’s goal for as long as she could remember, but she no longer knew why. She wished the blackened earth would open up and swallow her.
“Maybe we can plant again next spring,” Maacah said. “We can grow enough food to live on and—”
“I don’t want to live anymore. I’m sick of struggling to survive—sick of it all! Mama and Abba are dead, and I wish it was me. I wish I was dead.”
Maacah turned on her fiercely, grabbing Jerusha’s shoulders and shaking her hard. “Don’t say that! Abba and Mama prayed for you! They refused to leave and go where it was safe because they were waiting for y
ou! They died so you could live! You owe them your life, Jerusha! Don’t you ever talk like that again!” She stopped shaking Jerusha and threw her arms around her neck, sobbing. “Please—please live for them and for me. I don’t want to die.”
“All right,” Jerusha whispered. “All right, don’t cry.”
Somehow she would figure out a way to keep the two of them alive. She had promised Abba. She and Maacah still had each other, and maybe that was reason enough to live.
24
Iddina stood beside the road and stared at the well-worn path that led through Jerimoth’s vineyard. The body of the soldier he had killed still lay beside the road, but the other two bodies had vanished. Dried blood marked the place where they had fallen. He had found no sign of Jerusha farther down the road, and after the army had passed, he returned with his men to where he had lost her trail, hoping to find a clue he had overlooked. Instead, Iddina discovered that the bodies were missing.
If they had simply burned along with everything else, some evidence would remain. But there was none. Nor did he see signs of scavengers. Iddina peered closer and saw a flattened trail, as if the bodies had been dragged, leading through the burnt stubble. When he reached the end of it he found the grave near the winepress, heaped with stones.
Every muscle in his body tensed. “Spread out. Search every inch of this farm,” he told his men. “Someone lived through this.”
With mounting anger, Iddina hurried up the hill to the gutted house, guessing what he might find. Charred beams and rubble lay scattered over the flagstone floor, but in the center of the room a stone had been pushed aside, revealing an empty cistern.
Iddina howled in rage. The little dog had beaten him! And Iddina hated to lose. He no longer cared about his promotion. This was no longer a hunt for sport. He wanted revenge.
He and his men searched every inch of the farm but found no sign of the girl. As the day grew late, Iddina knew that he had to catch up with his troops. He had soldiers to command, the city of Samaria to besiege. For now, he couldn’t waste any more time on the girl. But Iddina silently vowed to find her and recapture her—even if it took the rest of his life.