by Stant Litore
She spoke softly, hoping to save his pride. Her wonderful, strong, aging husband. The sharpness of worry in her heart. “Please. Stay, and take your best yearling bull to Eleazar. A sacrifice to the Most High, so he’ll give us victory and bring me safe home.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. She let out the breath she’d been holding, and Lappidoth kissed her slowly, warmly. Then he moved within her, making her cry out, startled. It had been long since they’d made love more than once.
This time, it was more effort than passion, but she did not care. She clung to him, felt the warmth of him, kissed his shoulders and neck, and thought, This is my husband, my husband. He was the one thing in the world that was truly hers and that she need sacrifice to no other and to no duty. She drove the visions from her mind, wishing she did not have to leave this tent. For a while—for a little while—she let herself forget everything, everything, and clung fiercely to him, willing this night and the Sabbath day that would follow and the night after to be without ending.
WIND IN THE CAMP
A FEW miles away, Barak also endured a restless night. The wind had picked up, and he lay in his pavilion with his eyes open, grateful for the roar of the wind against the canvas. The noise prevented him from imagining that he could hear the moans of the dead.
Hadassah’s mother had known the dead were in the hills before he did, and his vines had realized it even before her. They had even tried to tell him; how many mornings had he stood, his brow furrowed, holding a blighted leaf or a withered stalk in his hand? The grapes had begun to dry up like raisins, right there on the vines that should have fed and fattened them. Even the ground began to look gray rather than that deep, rich earth color he’d always seen before.
Then the moaning began. At first very distant—on the extreme edge of hearing, in the faint hours before dawn when sleep changes how everything in the world feels, even the air on your skin. He had bolted up in bed and strained to hear, only to have the sound fade like the cry of a heathen god on the high air. He shivered once, but lay back down to sleep. He had imagined it. He must have.
But Hadassah’s mother was certain. He found her each night standing at the door of their cedar house, gazing toward the hills. He had to put his hands firmly on her shoulders and, speaking softly, half-coax, half-force her to her bed.
The blight on the vines grew worse. Such a sickening of the plants was a terrifying thing. If a man’s wife sickened, he could drape a shawl over her shoulders and order her to bed. When a crop sickened...that was an unnatural thing, and he could only stand helplessly by, seeing neither cause nor cure. Praying to God with a dry mouth and a heart clamorous with horror. On crops they all depended, and on God who, fickle as a woman, brought rain or withheld it as she pleased.
One night he heard the moans and was no longer able to ignore them. The dead were nearer now, wandering aimlessly about, perhaps on the slopes of the nearer hills. Shaking, he stumbled out the door to stand at the edge of the vineyard, gazing straight up at the sharp and brittle stars so that he wouldn’t need to look at the dark, brooding silhouettes of the hills to the east.
“God!” he cried in a hoarse, loud whisper. “Is it not enough you took Hadassah? And the child she would have given me?”
There was no answer. He almost felt he could hear the vines withering as he stood there, a dry rustling sound, like brush on a desert wind, very loud in the silence between distant moans. A rage burned low in his belly, though he didn’t know if it was directed at the land that was betraying him or at the dead whose distant moans were now too loud to ignore, or at God, who, like a woman, could not be trusted to keep her promises. Both women and God might abandon a man one day. Leave him crying amid his vines.
He turned and went inside and slammed shut the cedar bar across the door for the first time in years, the first since the last, worst raids from the Sea People. But he could not shut out the moans of the dead.
Rolling onto his side in the tent, Barak gazed at where his bronze shield and spear and breast-piece were propped against one of the poles that framed his tent—gear he had taken from a Sea Coast raider he’d killed. With a sigh, he got to his feet and began arming himself, strapping bronze greaves to his shins, settling a leather jerkin over his shoulders and then the breast-piece over that, lifting his spear and testing its heft. He didn’t know how near dawn it was, but it was surely near enough.
By the time he stepped outside, the wind had settled again and the camp was quiet, most of the men asleep except for sentries and a few of the chieftains arguing in low voices around a nearby fire. Laban was there, as broad-shouldered as a nazarite, and Omri too. Barak walked toward them, his bronze clinking slightly.
“Get the men ready,” he said. “It’s time to leave.”
Laban gave him an uneasy glance, and Omri looked startled, but they both stood without comment and began moving through the camp, calling out for their men. After a moment, those men began to emerge from their tents, their weary faces drawn with fear.
Barak stood amid the shouts of men gathering their gear without taking much notice of it. He looked to the north, at the silhouettes of hills against the sky. Up there, north of the settlements at Walls and Refuge, was a narrow valley of vineyards and barley fields and his own homestead, his own house of cedar and thatch. A few days, and he could be standing again at his own door, stepping inside to a warm welcome, Hadassah’s soft body pressed to his, her kisses moist on his throat.
No.
Hadassah was gone.
A fresh pang of grief in his breast, surprisingly sharp. He drew in a shuddering breath and banished both grief and memory. Began moving through the camp. There was much to see to.
A shout made him turn; Nimri was walking toward him in haste, his eyes bright with that fanatical fury Barak knew too well. Barak kept walking, forcing Nimri to fall in alongside him.
“What is it, Nimri?”
“It’s the Sabbath, that’s what.” A snarl in the man’s voice.
Barak’s eyes hardened. “The Law says: if your cattle fall in a ditch, it is no violation of the Covenant to haul them out. I have no cows in a ditch, but I may have dead in my vineyard. No other tribes are coming, Nimri. We’ve wasted enough time here.”
Nimri’s face twisted. “What I’d expect,” he muttered, “from a man who took a heathen girl to wife.”
Barak stopped short, and his voice went cold. “My father was a Hebrew, Nimri. My mother too.”
“I do not deny it.” Nimri smirked, then cast a glance down toward Barak’s groin, and sneered when he lifted his eyes. “Yet you stink of them.”
Barak fought his anger. He had no time for this. His fingers twitched, but he did not reach for the knife at his hip. “Before you insult me again, think carefully about whether you want a battle with me.” If his voice had been cold a moment before, it was ice now. “Stay here and wait if you will. I will leave horses, such as I have; you can catch up when you’ve done as we agreed.”
Nimri tried to speak, but Barak held up his hand. “Enough,” he growled, and turned away, walking on through the camp. His back was tense, but he did not expect a knife in it; Nimri was trouble, but he was no coward. Barak did not look over his shoulder to see if Nimri still stood there or whether he had gone back to his tents. He just proceeded through his own camp, stopping a man every once in a while to give a command or ask a question. Already men were folding the tents. The wind was back, and all about Barak loose canvas flapped in the wind, with a sound like a hundred giant birds all taking flight at once. Strangely, the sound calmed him a little. Surely a camp that could make that much noise would prove large enough to cleanse their land of the dead.
If Nimri had spoken as he had in the hearing of other men, Barak could not have ignored it. But he ignored what he could afford to, for he was used to it. Since the day he had seen Hadassah by the well in Walls and looked into her dark eyes, the day he’d met with her father and taken her to his house, he had h
eard the jeering of other Hebrews. That he, who had been known as a man raiders from the sea might fear—that he should take a heathen girl as a wife rather than a slave.
Still struggling with his anger, Barak reflected that at least Nimri would be out of his camp for a while. And perhaps Nimri was the kind of man he should leave behind to push at the priests of Shiloh, in any case. A man with a passionate faith in the power of God and his Ark and his Law, but who would not be awed by any other man, even a levite, even a priest. Nimri would not be likely to back down at a refusal.
MISHPAT
DAWN’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, turn
ed 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.
THE SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR
DEVORA 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.