Strangers in the Land

by Stant Litore

  They gazed up at her listlessly.

  “Go home! Observe the Sabbath. Live by the Law, and the land will be clean.”

  Some of those standing or sitting on the slope below her had been there before the sun rose to offer the earth its warm kiss. Some had been months in Shiloh while their cases were debated among those levites appointed to sit in decision over the People, before they’d been referred at last to the navi who received special insight from God. Yet now they didn’t complain; they began leaving the hill, one after the other. Some of them walking slowly back to the tents, some quickly as though fleeing. As though they understood that their demands on the Law and on God were rescinded or postponed. Perhaps, in the days ahead, they would wait in silence to hear whether the valley would fill with the voices of the dead preparing to feed or with the clack of stone against stone as cairns were raised over the corpses to hold them unrising to the earth.

  Devora watched for a few moments as they moved away through the heather. Delaying her next task. She lifted her eyes, gazing across this land of promise from her high place, and listened to the wind move in the olive leaves. Softly as the wind, she heard the Canaanite weeping.

  She didn’t turn yet to face that mother and the infant in need of burial. She couldn’t. There was little time, but she needed one moment to breathe. She glanced down at the valley, at the mighty flock of white tents perched like cranes by the river. That was Shiloh. A yearning lit in her for a quiet meal and rest in her husband’s tent. But she knew there would be no rest for her tonight, no real rest.

  The men from the Galilee had pitched their tents a few miles downriver to the east. She could see them from here. Not a permanent camp like Shiloh, but a hasty one, mostly small tents that could be rolled up and carried on a man’s back. In the high land where those men lived, the dead were feeding, groping through fields of wild barley or along creek-banks, hunting animals or men or women. Or reaching through windows for infants asleep in the cedar houses built by the Canaanites.

  Years since she’d seen one of the unclean dead.

  Except in her dreams.

  Except whenever she lay her head down and closed her eyes and pursued sleep through the weeds and fens of her nightmares.

  Turning, Devora found Zadok standing over the infant with his back to her, and the girl still on her knees. She had drawn her salmah back around her, but Devora recalled how thin and exhausted her body had looked, as though the journey to her olive tree and the ordeal she suffered in her heart had bled the girl’s body of all her strength and health. The Canaanite glanced up at the navi with swollen eyes.

  “A cairn,” the girl said. “You said a cairn. Please. My child. He needs to go into the water. He’s not a Hebrew. Please. He must pass into the fish, and the fish into the people, so that he can come back.”

  Devora went cold with horror at the thought. What if it took only one unclean corpse to defile an entire lake, all the fish in it, all those who ate of the fish? Who could say what would happen? Thirty years ago, the heathen dead had wandered, moaning, into Shiloh camp and devoured much of what mattered to young Devora. She had known since that day what a peril the Canaanites and their customs could be.

  “Enough,” she cried. “I’ll have none of your heathen ways, girl. They’ve brought this on us. Your gloves, Zadok.”

  When the nazarite didn’t answer, Devora stepped toward him, glanced at his face, and received a shock. That face showed no expression: Zadok simply stood with his dark eyes fixed on the small body.

  “Zadok?”

  No answer.

  Alarmed, Devora approached him, trying to catch his eyes with hers. He didn’t move or show that he’d heard her. His massive body just breathed in and out, his chest moving like a great bear’s, his entire attention on the corpse. Devora’s heart beat faster. It had been a long time since one of these moods had overtaken Zadok. It used to happen every time he stilled one of the unclean corpses—but the last had been nearly ten years ago, and the one before that had been four years earlier.

  The worst time, when he was still but a youth, Zadok had stood completely still for almost two days. When he’d come out of it at last, he’d been violent, enraged, lashing about with his spear. For a few minutes, then he’d collapsed from exhaustion. He’d slept for a day and a half and woken with no memory of his fit, nor any clear memory of the death that had prompted it. Zadok and two other nazarites had been clearing an oak grove of dead, several hours upriver from Shiloh. Some caravan merchant had died there, then risen; he’d eaten his wife and one of his slaves, and the rest had fled, leaving three bodies restless and unburied. The dead had surprised Zadok in the trees, but he’d dealt with them. Afterward, one of the other nazarites had stayed beside him while Zadok stood still as a tree, his memories gripping at his heart. The other had run to Shiloh with word, and had told Devora. After a quick word to her husband, the navi had hurried out to the grove, and she had been there sitting by Zadok when he woke at last.

  But that had been over twenty years ago.

  She had no idea how long this one would last.

  The navi glanced at the declining sun. Felt the small, sharp teeth of panic. The Sabbath was coming; they had to get back to the tents. But they could not leave a corpse on the open ground, with no stones over it. Her breath hissed through her teeth.

  She struck Zadok hard across the face.

  He didn’t even blink.

  Devora’s right hand stung, and she rubbed it with her left. Her heart was pounding now. She glanced about, cursing under her breath. Wishing she’d kept the supplicants at the hill rather than dispersing them. The area was quiet now but for the wind. There were only the three of them—Zadok, the Canaanite girl, and the navi. Alone with the tiny corpse.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the Canaanite whispered.

  “The dead are a shock to anyone,” Devora muttered. She must do without Zadok. She caught the hems of the goatskin gloves at his wrists and peeled them free of his hands, one, then the other, careful not to touch the fingers or the palm, anywhere the leather might have touched the corpse. Under her breath, she recited the words of the Law. That was a ritual of hers when she needed calm.

  You shall not touch the flesh of the dead, for the dead body is unclean. If a man touches the flesh of the dead, you shall put him from your camp and watch him. Seven days you shall put him from your camp, until his uncleanness has passed.

  The gloves were much too large for her; her hands felt silly inside them, and she worried they would slip off her fingers, which were damp with sweat. She kept her hands curled to prevent this. She reached for the infant.

  “Leave him alone!” the girl whispered, without looking up.

  “You brought this child to me,” Devora said. “Now it is my task to do what I must.” The navi took the tiny body in her hands, lifting it carefully, not letting the gloves slip. The infant was very light, as though she held a bundle of leaves. She hooked the swaddling cloth with one gloved finger, lifting it from the ground too. She could wrap the body in it later.

  For an instant she glanced at Zadok’s spear where it lay in the grass. That bronze spearhead would probably make digging a grave easier. But she shook her head. The spear was Zadok’s. She would leave it with him.

  “Come, girl.” She began walking briskly down the slope.

  In the lee of the west slope there were cairns in great number, several hundred of them, orderly stacks of flat stones like stunted pillars set in the earth, a forest of monuments. Some of the dead beneath them had died of age or illness, a few from bloodshed, some from a judgment of death by stoning. Set a little apart from the others—because the bodies beneath them were defiled—a stretch of eight and sixty cairns marked the resting places of those who had died the unclean death on that terrible night thirty years ago, when the walking dead had come to Shiloh.

  Carrying the infant’s body at arm’s length, Devora moved slowly among the cairns, weighted down by the crushing burden of
the past, which even the Covenant could only partially lighten. Behind her the Canaanite followed numbly.

  Devora lay the infant by the cairns of the defiled, and the Canaanite knelt by the body, her head lowered, her hands clutching her knees. Devora left her there and hurried to a bit of scree nearby where a rockslide some years before had exposed the guts of the earth. Beyond the scree and the curve of the hill she could see the white tents of Shiloh again, as alluring to her as a flock of white doves alighting in a dry wilderness. But the tents must wait.

  The stones she gathered had to be large ones—large enough to crush the dead to the earth. The corpse’s head had been shattered; it would not hunger again. Yet it was unclean and might spread the blight to anything it touched. You couldn’t know what might sicken from it—living people or living crops. So you pile stone above a dead body, any dead body, no matter how dead or how still the body may look. The time in the desert, when Devora’s ancestors had seen corpses rise moaning to their feet, had taught them to take no chances, none.

  Devora felt the strain in her arms as she carried the last of six slabs of rock from the scree to the place she’d chosen beside the other cairns. Sweat began to trickle down her back, making her itch. Devora tried to move quickly, but her fatigue was catching up with her. After more than forty years of life, her body was aging; there were days when she felt no pain, and days like this one when the weariness was as present as the breath in her lungs. Devora glanced back once to see Zadok standing still as a cairn himself by the olive tree on the slope above. She chewed on bitter words for Zadok in the privacy of her heart, but those words were quickly swallowed in remorse. She’d left him up there, trapped in who knew what darkness of the heart. Spearing the dead had brought back memories for him, too. She should have expected that. She should have taken up spear or stone herself and borne the burden of that act on her own shoulders, even as she was now bearing the burden of this stone. Her face heated with shame; the nazarite’s vow was to defend her life, not to suffer in her place.

  The Canaanite girl still knelt by the small body. At first, Devora had feared the girl might grab the infant and flee, but she seemed to be in shock. The salmah had slipped from her shoulder, nearly baring one breast, which was so swollen with milk that her skin was red and each vein could be clearly seen. It must have hurt terribly, yet the girl did not appear to notice. Nor did she cover herself. She just stared listlessly at an empty spot of ground beside the infant and did not twitch or do anything but breathe as Devora approached.

  With a groan, the navi let the rock fall to the earth beside that scrap of flesh and bone that had once been a child. Then rested a moment, breathing hard. She didn’t spare the Canaanite another glance. Just listened to the beating of her heart and the breath coming in and out of her body. Calm. She needed calm. She glanced again at the sun, held up her hand—four fingers’ width between that blaze of heat and the tops of the hills. Little time, little time. She didn’t intend to spend the Sabbath on this hill among the cairns, with a weeping Canaanite girl and a nazarite lost in his own private nightmare. She needed to get back. She needed to tell the priests of her vision. Needed the solace of her husband’s arms—she knew well that her own nightmares would visit her tonight, after dark.

  Taking up a jagged rock to use for a shovel, Devora began digging in the soil beside the body, parting the roots of weeds and hollowing out an infant-sized resting place in the warm ground, as though shaping a small womb in the earth for the child’s body to return to. She panted as she worked. A quick glance at Zadok—he had not moved.

  “Don’t put him in the ground,” the Canaanite said, her eyes sore and red.

  Devora didn’t look up. “You can’t take it from the hill,” she said quietly. “Or to any water the People might drink.”

  “You’ve taken everything from us,” the girl said. “Everything. Our men toil like slaves in your fields. Your priests burn our gods.” A quiver of despair in her voice. “Can I not even care for the body of my child?”

  Devora cast the jagged rock aside and reached for one of her stones. Each was roughly rectangular, about the length of her arm and the height of her hand. Grasping the edge of a stone with both her hands and digging in with her fingers, she lifted and tipped, rolling the stone into position. Her back itched furiously, and her arms and shoulders and neck burned with pain.

  “I hate you,” the girl whispered. “I hate you.”

  Devora glanced at the Canaanite girl, a rebuke ready. But she was caught by the girl’s visible anguish and cold defiance. The Canaanite wasn’t the kind of heathen Devora might have expected to meet. She carried in her hand no trivial god of wood or stone. She had no war paint. This stranger in her land was only a girl, one who had suffered and labored in the birth tent to bring one small life into the land to set against all the unclean death. The midwives had pulled that infant wet and helpless from this woman’s own body and handed it to her as it cried in its horror at the strangeness of the world beyond the womb. Devora thought of those moments she’d never known but had witnessed, when the mother and the infant weep together and the midwives press warm, moist cloths to the mother’s exhausted and torn body to stop the blood.

  The grief in the Canaanite’s eyes was so intense it was nearly feral. It took Devora aback; the rebuke died on her lips. She had felt grief before—grief that tore at her in the night. But whatever this stranger was feeling, that Devora had never felt. For a moment Devora pressed her own hand to her belly, and something clenched tight about her heart. She had never brought any child crying into the land. What would it have been like to bear one, from one harvest season nearly to the next, feel it growing inside her, and birth one, and then lose one?

  The Canaanite’s travails had not ended with the lifting of her child to her breast. It could not have been many days later when she’d risen and stumbled all the way here out of the settlements in the high Galilee, carrying that bitten infant, her own body still bleeding from its birth. She must have needed to rest often, near fainting, only to push herself unsteadily to her feet again. Perhaps the infant had been alive and feverish when she began her long, desperate walk. Perhaps it had died along the way, then risen to the mother’s horror with that low cry of hunger. Yet the girl had kept carrying it, kept on her feet, all the way here, to the navi’s olive tree. It might have taken her days. Perhaps Devora’s words of comfort had been colder than she’d realized; perhaps there was no husband. Perhaps it was the husband who had bitten the infant and eaten its leg. She didn’t know. She only knew that the Canaanite girl had come here alone, carrying her infant across a land that had once been hers and her people’s.

  “The cairn is a necessity,” Devora said softly. “It is also a promise. A promise to the dead that the People will not forget. A promise that even God will look down and see the cairn and remember. And a promise to the living and the dead that the unclean death will end here, at these stones, and spread no further. We must bury the child the Hebrew way. Or more children may die.” She wished she might wipe sweat from her face, but dared not lift the gloves to touch her skin. She kept her eyes on the Canaanite, saw that her words meant little to her.

  “Girl,” the navi called softly, “what is your name?”

  “Hurriya.” The girl’s eyes were hopeless. “I am Hurriya. The father was Malachi ben Aharon.”

  “That is a Hebrew name,” Devora said sharply.

  “He was Hebrew,” the girl said. “A laborer at an olive press near Judges’ Well. My father sold me to him when I was twelve.”

  Devora cast an uneasy glance at the cairn she’d raised. The father had been Hebrew. If he were here, he might beg the navi to sing the Words of Going for his son.

  “Did the child have a name?”

  “No,” Hurriya whispered. “He was only seven days old. I knew in my heart you couldn’t help him. But the hope. The hope was all I had.”

  The horror of it made Devora’s throat tighten. On the eighth day, every male
Hebrew child was circumcised and given a name. This infant had perished without name and without any mark of the Covenant upon its flesh. It was not of the People. It was not of any People—it had no name. Yet if no Words of Going were sung over the cairn, this infant and its father would be forgotten. God might see the cairn, but how would God know who was beneath it? The thought of one of the People being unremembered—that was the grasp of a cold hand about her heart.

  She let out her breath and returned her focus to the physical work of raising the cairn. She arranged three great stones in a triangle around the little pit she’d dug—that made a wall, or a frame, for the cairn. Like the foundation of a small house, a house for the dead. She reached for the infant and lowered what was left of it into the small depression she’d made in the earth.

  Muscles that she probably hadn’t used since she was a young girl were screaming at her. She clenched her teeth and lifted one of the other stones. With a groan that felt like her bones were coming loose from each other, she slammed the stone down across the top of the cairn’s foundation, covering half of the small grave, forming half a roof. Her gloved fingers still clenched tight about the edge of the stone, she lay over it, wheezing. For a moment she just lay there.

  Finish. She had to finish this.

  She pushed herself up.

  Only two more stones. One to complete the roof and one to sit atop the cairn, sealing it. Two more, only two. The infant was already half concealed. She could do this.

  But she could still hear that moan, that unliving moan, in her mind. Worse, she could hear the moans outside her mother’s tent, thirty years ago, and the screams. Her hands began shaking again. If she were to close her eyes, she’d be there, in that tent, as a child. She used to visit that tent in her dreams, night after night. But it had been a long time now since she had. She knew she would be there tonight. When that happened, she couldn’t be alone. After so long—she feared the dreams would shatter her, that her body would convulse and clench up and she would sob in her blankets until morning. She couldn’t afford that kind of weakness, that kind of terror. Israel couldn’t afford it. She needed her husband tonight.