by Stant Litore
They stopped to refill a few of their flasks with water at a small well where a few boys were tending sheep, Zadok asking questions of them. Hurriya opened her eyes long enough to take a look at the boys, then fell back into her sleep. Devora sat her horse near enough to the boys to see the terror etched into their faces, carved there like letters in stone. Their eyes wide. They had seen things, in these hills, recently. They shook their heads when Zadok asked about the dead, as though too afraid to remember. But they did let the nazarite know that many armed Hebrews had passed the well earlier that day.
Devora motioned Zadok to her side and whispered so as not to wake the girl. “We must try to ride at a trot.”
“The horses need rest.”
“I need rest,” she said, her voice sharp with fatigue. “The horses can take us until moonrise, at least. At a faster walk, as long as this wagon track doesn’t vanish.”
Zadok watched her a moment with dark eyes, then nodded. He cast a glance at the boys, who were already beating their sheep away from the water and up toward the slopes. “They saw something, but ran before taking much of a look, I think.” He frowned. “These Canaanites are like mice, always ducking behind a wall or into some hole.”
“They are boys,” Devora snapped. “And they were brave enough not to leave their flock behind.”
Zadok gave her a puzzled look, and Devora turned away quickly, nudged her horse back onto the caravan road, one arm around Hurriya to keep from jostling her.
The navi had startled herself. Zadok was right: these were Canaanites. How strange that she found herself defending them.
HARDLY DARING TO CLOSE HER EYES
THEY HAD ridden only a little way beyond the well when the day’s last faint light was eaten by the sharp ridges rising about them. When Devora tried to press on anyway, Zadok reached out and wound his fingers through Shomar’s mane, his eyes dark against the darker night. “This has not been an easy Sabbath day in your husband’s tent, navi. You cannot ride to confront Barak ben Abinoam or to face the dead, in the dark, so weary that you could lift no hand against them. And you might kill the girl trying.”
She knew he was right. Yet the thought of delaying even an hour—
“The dead are out there, Zadok,” she whispered. “In these hills. Maybe over that next ridge or behind that stand of trees.” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, but carefully, not wanting to stir Hurriya from her sleep. “We have to find Barak’s camp. They’re on foot, they can’t be far. We can’t stop.”
The nazarite did not relinquish his hold on Shomar’s mane, and the horse began to slow his walk. Devora gave Zadok a baleful look, but the nazarite’s face was impassive.
“My covenant is to defend you,” he said. “We will rest for the night.”
“I should have left you in Shiloh,” she muttered, yet she breathed easier. Somehow, with all this quiet, dark land about them and somewhere in it herds of moaning dead, knowing that Zadok was with her was a fierce comfort. Glancing around at those dark ridges against the sky, hearing the snap of branches in the wind, her pulse quickened and she admitted to herself the real reason she didn’t want to stop.
She didn’t want to close her eyes.
She didn’t want to face the nightmares. Not out here, without a tent, without Lappidoth’s arms to hold her and bind her to the present.
“That looks like a stand of terebinths,” she whispered, nodding to the left. “We could take shelter there.”
In a few moments they were setting up camp for the night in the lee of the terebinths, each tree ancient and creaking in the wind. Zadok chose a spot for a fire pit, then lifted Hurriya and laid her near it. Devora took Mishpat, a waterskin, a small bag of grains to eat, and the wool roll of her blanket and then turned Shomar loose to graze, trusting he’d come at her call. After watching the Canaanite wrap her salmah tightly about her body, Devora sighed, took up her own blanket, and covered the girl with it. Hurriya’s eyes watched hers a moment, but her face could not be read. Devora stepped away, resigning herself to a cold night. Her thighs and rear were sore from riding; she supposed Hurriya must be far more sore. She got the bag of grain; the girl would need to eat something, exhausted or not. Taking one of the waterskins, Devora poured a little over her arms and washed them, though she spared no water for her face. She could feel the dust of travel, a coating of it on her skin, and she yearned fiercely to wash it away, but water on a journey in the hot weeks before harvest was not to be wasted. She took the waterskin to Hurriya and let a little run out into her cupped hands. “Scrub up to the elbows, girl,” she said, and Hurriya gave her a look but obeyed.
They ate in silence while Zadok cracked dry branches into kindling, dug a fire pit, and laid the wood within. His rough, powerful hands scooped up dry, fallen leaves, and he covered the wood with them. Hurriya hummed a little of her go-to-sleep tune, the one she’d sung on that Sabbath evening by her child’s cairn. Then she fell silent, eating with her head lowered. Devora felt she should say something to the girl but didn’t know what. So she chewed the grain slowly—too fatigued to put much energy even into eating—and waited for the fire.
She felt the dark close tight about her, pressing in on her heart. She glanced over her shoulder more than once. The wind-talk of the trees sounded ominous now, a portent of death. For a few moments the old primeval prey-fear of a fierce wind at night overtook her—the fear of being caught, helpless, and swept off the earth, or the fear that the wind would bring something predatory and godlike swooping down upon her as she shivered in the grass. Neither moon nor stars were visible, and the dark beneath the trees was like blindness. Like hoshekh, the dark that fills the mouth and nostrils and gets inside the heart until the spirit itself is cold.
She wanted light badly, but considered telling Zadok to stop making the fire. The cracking of branches had been so loud—though perhaps hidden in the cracking the wind was causing in the trees behind them. But the fire—the fire would be bright and visible for a long way. Raiders she didn’t fear; they would not trouble Israel’s navi, and she pitied the raiders who would choose Zadok for a foe. But the dead—what if there were dead near enough to see the fire?
Drawing in her breath, Devora beseeched God silently for a vision of the night to come. She heard wood rubbing quickly against wood and knew Zadok was making fire. Near her, Hurriya had lifted her eyes toward the trees too. For the briefest moment, Devora felt scorching heat on her right side, the side nearest Hurriya, but the heat did not pass into and through her as it usually did. No vision came. Devora sighed. At least that momentary heat was something. God had not forsaken her and her People entirely; he was still here, somewhere. She could still feel the touch of that shekinah, that desert-heat presence. It just wasn’t showing her anything.
“There’s something in the trees,” Hurriya said.
Devora looked up quickly, peered beneath the trees. Glanced at Zadok, saw him setting his spear by his hip, ready to take it up at any sign of movement. For a while they all watched the dark.
But beneath the trees nothing moved, only the branches overhead. Zadok began rubbing the sticks together again.
“What did you see?” Devora asked the girl.
Hurriya just shook her head. “I’m sorry. I must’ve imagined it.”
The fire roared up, and the nearer trees leapt into being. The shadows were dark and strange beyond the circle of light.
“The wind has you uneasy,” Zadok said in that low rumble his voice made when he was tired. “Will you sing, navi?”
“What?” Devora didn’t look at him, her eyes on the wood.
“Sing. There is no kohen here to sing to God and to remind the land and the trees and the night that they belong to God. Will you sing?”
Slowly, forcing herself to deepen her breathing, she turned to face him and the fire. On impulse, she decided to do as he asked. Anyone near—or anything near—would hear the song, but perhaps God would hear her better too.
Ashirah la
hashem ki-ga’oh ga’ah
Sus veroch’vo ramah vayam!
Devora sang softly at first, then loudly, defiantly, the Hebrew words rolling one into the other and then galloping from her like horses riding across an open place, not to be halted or challenged, free and strong and fierce.
And you, God, you breathed on the face of the waters,
Made a dry passage and we passed through,
Water on our left,
Water on our right.
The stranger said, I will pursue the People,
I will overtake them and devour them,
I will divide up their herds among my men,
I will enjoy their women,
I will end them with a bloody hand.
And you, God, you breathed on the water,
The waves covered the stranger, the deep swallowed him up.
Devora let the words rise from her belly and her throat and her lips, out into the night, in a wailing, exuberant cry, the high, screaming song of a woman of a desert people.
Ashirah lahashem ki-ga’oh ga’ah
Sus veroch’vo ramah vayam!
When she fell silent at last, she lowered her eyes, not wanting to share the pain in them with the others. She had sung that song with Eleazar once, thirty years past when she was barely more than a girl and much of the repairing of Shiloh had fallen to her. She and Eleazar had sung that after the cairns were raised, tossing the words back and forth between them, even as their forebears had done on the lethal shore of the Red Sea. Devora pressed her fingers to her lips. The problem with aging was not that death was near, for death was always near. The problem with aging was that a woman began to carry too many memories within her.
“That’s what you sing when you’re afraid?” Hurriya’s voice sounded small and bitter. “You sing about your God killing my people?”
“No,” Devora said wearily. “Not your people. It is the Shirat ha’Yam—the Song at the Sea. The first navi sang it. She and her brother the Lawgiver and their brother the first high priest sang those words on the day of Israel’s deliverance from a foe who killed more of our People than the unclean dead ever did.” She glanced at the Canaanite. “In Kemet, where we were made slaves.”
“Now you are here,” Hurriya said, “and you make my people your slaves.”
“That is not how it’s supposed to be.” Weariness overwhelmed her. She realized her hands were shaking as if with extreme cold, and she held them between her thighs to keep them still. What was wrong with her? She felt as though she’d fallen off Shomar’s back and was tumbling down a long slope. Too much had happened in the last few days. The infant. The raid on Shiloh. Eleazar’s death. Too much.
“Zadok, keep watch, please,” she said quietly.
“Your will, navi.”
“Get some sleep, girl,” Devora called across the fire. Then she lay down in her own bedding. She no longer cared what dreams might come. Sleep was suddenly its own necessity and its own end that justified any terrors it might hold. Devora tilted her head back and gazed at the sky. There were still no stars—she wished desperately that she could see stars. They would be a reminder of the promise that came with the keeping of the Covenant, the promise God had given their fathers in the desert.
Can you count the stars in the night sky?
Even so will your children and your children’s children be beyond counting.
Those sharp points of cold light were a better defense against fear than the bronze points of a thousand spears. The unclean dead never looked to the sky. The dead had no promises, no Covenant. The People, though—they had the eternal promise that their seed would never die in the earth’s dark soil, that they would grow and fill the land, planting after planting, harvest after harvest.
The stars would have been a comfort.
Reluctantly she lay down on her back, folded her hands over her breast, and closed her eyes. Reciting to herself the ten conditions of the Pact written into stone within the Ark, she shut out the crack and sway of terebinth boughs, the sound of the wind, the uneven earth and roots beneath her back, even the soreness of her thighs and rear from the day’s riding. But she found she could not shut out the fear, so she caught it instead and put it in a little wooden box inside her mind and snapped that box shut and held it there in the dark. That is where you belong, she told the fear. If there was anything in the trees, Zadok could watch it. It was for her to sleep, to be rested when God or her People would need her. She slowed her breathing. Listened to her heartbeats. Recited the Ten again. You shall have no other gods before me...You shall remember the Sabbath and keep it sacred...You shall not steal...You shall not bear false witness against another...
Her eyes flew open. She could still hear the silence after her mother’s shrieks and then the wet sounds of the dead feeding. Could still feel the cool clay pestle in her hand, clenched tightly because her palm was slick with sweat and she had to keep hold of it. Breathing hard, Devora struggled to reorient herself. She was lying on her side with a fire before her. Hurriya sat across the fire, her eyes reflecting back the flames. She was singing softly. That same go-to-sleep song Devora had heard her sing before. The melody tugged at Devora; there was something so wistful about it. Like a woman alone in a boat on a lake singing to another woman walking alone along the shore.
Somewhere to the left, Shomar whickered softly. Zadok was not at the fire; he was gone.
Devora wrapped her arms about herself and bit her lip to hold in a whimper. Anger flashed through her, a heat that didn’t warm her. She could not suffer these dreams now. She could not. The People needed her.
“Did I cry out in my sleep?” Her tone was sharp, bitter.
Hurriya stopped singing and shook her head. Kept watching the fire. She had a strained look now that she wasn’t singing, as though it was all she could do to hold back her pain from overwhelming her.
“Where is Zadok?” Devora asked.
“He heard something.”
“What did he hear?”
“A deer. He said.”
Devora looked to the trees. The wind had died down and the trees were no longer full of menace but only mournful. Because they trapped the dark and held it beneath their branches even as some men and women trap it in their hearts.
“A deer,” Devora murmured.
She thought it unlikely that a deer would have drawn the nazarite from the fire.
She shivered, glanced away from the trees, saw the girl watching her.
“He was alone with me,” Hurriya said after a moment, her voice holding a faint hint of relief. “He didn’t touch me.”
“You are unclean,” Devora said, irritated. “And Zadok does not take women unwilling. He’s a nazarite; he’d hardly need to.”
“That’s what Hebrew men do,” Hurriya said.
Devora felt a rush of anger at her and beneath it a touch of pity that she let the anger smother. This girl had endured things she had never heard of a woman enduring before. But she couldn’t afford to think about that. Devora looked away from the girl and watched the fire, wondering where the nazarite was and whether indeed he had heard or sensed the dead moving in the thicket. She shivered, and when she glanced at last at the Canaanite, she saw that the girl was shivering too.
No, she was shaking.
Devora watched her with growing alarm; the girl’s eyes stared just over the fire into the dark beyond it, and her eyes were those of someone staring at things God had hidden before the making of the world and had never intended to be seen by living eyes. Devora rose and went to her side. The navi could feel heat rising from the girl as though she were sitting next to a fire blazing as high as the roof of a house. But after a moment the heat was gone, simply gone. Hurriya blinked, then her shaking subsided.
And suddenly Devora understood. She caught her breath.
“You saw something,” Devora whispered. “Something that isn’t here, not yet. And you did earlier too. When you saw something in the trees.”
Hurriya glance
d at the navi but seemed disoriented.
“Answer me, girl,” Devora snapped. “Has this happened before?”
“Twice,” she whispered. “Twice before this night. While I was with child.”
Devora tried to take this in. It shouldn’t be possible. Could the girl be imagining it? Yet Devora had felt the heat. She knew that heat. God had shown this girl things that usually only his eyes saw. Yet how could this be? She wasn’t Hebrew.
“What did you see?”
“A man, Hebrew, I think. He was beating my sister.” She began shaking. “I would rather die than see this. I wasn’t dreaming.”
“I know,” Devora said quietly.
“Then I saw you. You were sitting beside a dead man. I don’t know who he was. You got up to gather stones.” Her eyes were vulnerable. “What does it mean?”
Devora took a breath. “It means you are chosen to be the next navi of Israel.” Hardly believing her own words. “It means you see what God sees.”
Hurriya laughed that cold, bitter laugh she had. “I’ve been touched by your God, you mean.”
“Yes.” Devora’s voice sounded very small to her.
“I don’t know your God.”
For a moment only the fire was speaking.
There was strife in Devora’s heart. This woman was not of the People.