by Stant Litore
The eater was a woman.
A sound of hooves behind him, then Devora was beside him on her gelding with the Canaanite riding before her. The navi’s face was hard and cold, the Canaanite’s twisted in a hatred that blazed like a flame no amount of water could put out. Together they gazed at the hissing thing, which gazed as fixedly back. Lightheaded, Barak gripped Ager’s mane, fearful that he might slide and fall from his horse, like a boy only just learning to ride.
Slowly the thing that had been a woman rose to its feet, the entrails on which it fed still clutched in one hand, like a tether attaching it to the other corpse’s belly. One of its slack breasts visible through a rent in its garment, swaying as it moved. It bared its teeth at Barak and Devora, took a lurching step toward them, dragging one foot behind it. A sudden breeze brought its reek to their noses.
Barak saw Devora lift her blade and held up his hand to stop her. Though his hand shook. Yet it was he who defended the tribes and their women. He would not send one of those women against the dead—not even a woman carrying an iron blade.
Grimly Barak hefted his spear.
“Be careful,” Devora said. “It’s stronger than it looks. Cut into the head. And remember it is unclean—both the one feeding and the body it feeds on. Don’t let it touch you.”
Barak nodded and raised his arm, readying the spear, then rode hard at the shambling corpse, a scream rising in his throat that he held back and would not loose. His palm was slick with sweat where he gripped the haft of his spear. As he hurtled toward it, the corpse opened its mouth as though to offer a kiss, lifted its arms as though to embrace him.
THE MOANING DEAD
BARAK’S SPEAR took the corpse in the shoulder, spinning it about and nearly unseating the chieftain from his horse. Then his spearhead ripped free of the necrotic flesh. The haft remained in Barak’s hand. Suppressing an urge to keep on galloping until he’d left the corpse far, far behind, Barak wheeled Ager about, and horse and rider threw themselves at the corpse again, though Ager let out a panicked squeal that no man should ever hear his horse make. The thrust of the spear into its shoulder had turned the corpse about, and now it was facing Barak again as he came at it from the opposite direction. It hissed and lifted its arms again. Barak roared in defiance of his fear. The warm wetness down his leg and the sharp scent of urine warned him that he had unmanned himself, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was getting that horrible, lurching corpse to be still.
His spear took it in the jaw this time, and caught; his own velocity tore him from the saddle, and as he fell Ager reared and squealed again and then tore off down the street. Omri wheeled his own steed about and hurried to catch the fleeing horse.
Barak landed hard in the grit of the street, which had been packed firm by generations of sandalled feet. The wind was driven out of him. He rolled to his side, gasped for air. Saw the corpse staggering closer, splayed hands reaching down at him, the gaze of those murky eyes fixed on him. His spear had caught in the thing’s jaw, and the haft was dragging behind it along the ground. The corpse stank, a negation of all life and breath and every touch of God’s fingers on the land.
His heart wild in his chest, Barak ripped his knife free of its sheath on his hip, but even as the walking corpse closed on him, its face burst apart, bits of its head and scalp splashing aside like something half-liquid. The corpse slumped to its knees. The bronze head of a spear protruded through what had once been a face. Barak’s knife dropped from his hand and he clutched his chest, gasped for air.
Zadok rode up, his face grim, and his gloved hand took the haft of his spear and wrenched it free of the corpse with a sound like a foot coming free from clinging mud. The dead woman fell backward to the ground.
Then Zadok stepped his horse over to the lifeless body the woman had been feeding on and stabbed its head with his spear too.
The nazarite swung the spear up so the point jabbed toward the sky, and his dark gaze held Barak’s. “You have never faced the dead,” he said. “Only the living. I see it in your eyes, Barak ben Abinoam. I have faced the dead, and the navi has faced the dead. Now you have also. Render the navi of Israel more respect.” Then he turned and trotted his horse back to where the others waited, leaving Barak heaving for breath on the ground.
Barak found his hands were shaking. He had never known fear like this.
He’d been afraid during the great raid from the west, facing the warriors of the Sea People with their iron blades and bejeweled ears, but usually he’d been afraid only after the battle, when they lay dead around him and he’d turned and retched into the grass, trembling with reaction.
But this—this corpse. It had been a woman. And it—it had come after him like a lion or a wolf, something hungering and mindless, its hands grasping. The way it had moaned—
Still needing more air, he got shakily to his feet, looked for his horse, then remembered that Ager had bolted and Omri had ridden after him. Such was his own terror that he did not think even to be angry at the other chieftain for his flight. Nor did he even flush dark with shame when he saw Devora and the Canaanite girl looking on. Panic still rushed in his blood like winter water.
Suddenly every house in the street to either side held a menace in the dark. Barak stilled his hands, slowed his breathing. He was a chieftain of Israel. He could not afford panic. He swallowed, several times, moistening his throat enough to speak again. “Let’s get out of here. Now.”
“We came here to find the dead, Barak,” Devora said. “Not hide from them.”
“They devoured Walls,” Hurriya breathed. The girl’s hands were trembling where they clutched Shomar’s mane.
“And maybe other settlements too.” The moon had risen over the thatched rooftops, and Devora’s eyes shone in the light. “But take heart, girl. Your sister has not been eaten. You had a vision of her.”
“Not a good vision.” The girl looked faint.
“She was alive in it.”
“Yes, she was alive,” Hurriya whispered.
Devora looked at the corpse a moment, then her gaze moved to the door of the burned house behind the corpse. A great bar of wood had been locked across it, holding it firmly shut. The door was charred, but it stood. “Everything has gone wrong,” she said softly. “Something has torn the Covenant.”
“Who?” Barak said. “Who has broken the Covenant? Who is God furious with?”
Devora shook her head wearily and slid from her horse, leaving Hurriya in the saddle. The Canaanite’s eyes widened; she looked as though she didn’t trust the horse not to bolt away with her alone in the saddle.
“You don’t simply break the Covenant, Barak ben Abinoam,” Devora said sharply, gazing at that door. “You loosen it. Think of the roots of a crop field, intertwined beneath the soil, strong. A hundred tiny acts each day loosen the weaving of those roots. Untruths, betrayals, infidelities, cruelties, blood spilled without cause, bodies left unburied—all of these eat at the roots like the gnawing things you find when you dig up the earth. The roots are the People, the soil is the land of promise, the weaving of the roots is the Covenant.” Devora glanced at him in the dark. “Then a wind comes. A storm. If the roots are loosened, if they aren’t bound tightly together, the wind tears away everything, soil and crop.” She approached the door, touched it a moment with her fingers, drew them back as though she’d been burned. Her voice became distracted. “You won’t find just one guilty man somewhere in these hills, some man we can stone and be done. It is a thousand small evils that bring this emptiness upon us.”
She placed her aged hands beneath the bar and tried to lift it. Barak heard her breath wheeze.
“What are you doing?” he called, alarmed. He didn’t want to know what was in that house—or any of the others. He didn’t want to see anything more. He wanted to get back to the camp, regroup, gather his men.
“Taking a look,” Devora said. “Help me please, Zadok.”
The powerful nazarite dismounted and moved toward her. H
is face was calm, which staggered Barak, and shamed him. Yet he understood it. The nazarite had work to do, had a task, something definite that could be done in this town whose silence mocked all possibility of action. Zadok gripped the cedar bar and lifted it for the navi, then opened the latch on the door and swung it open; part of the door, soot-blackened, crumbled away as he did.
They gazed into the interior. Moonlight came through a high window and through a great gap that had been burned in the roof. It was a great house, two stories; the window was on the second, and there were no windows on the lower story, though the fire had burned away the far wall. All across the floor were dark shapes, and a lingering scent of charred meat. Barak sucked in his breath.
Devora peered in, one delicate, bony hand clutching the jamb. Her eyes glinted faintly, and her hand tightened around the doorframe as though she were dizzy. Zadok gave her his arm to steady her. Barak held his spear in both hands across his chest, reassured by the solidity of its wood.
“Burned,” Hurriya whispered, gazing over their heads at the interior. “Like the levite’s house. They burned this house, with the dead in it.” A touch of awe in her voice.
“Twenty-three.” Devora was tight-lipped. “We do not burn the bodies of the People, we bury them.”
Barak could not count the shapes in the faint light; his eyes could not pick out one from another. But he did not question Devora’s sight. “God of our fathers,” he breathed.
“It is terrible,” Hurriya said suddenly. “But the people of this town found a way to protect their kin from the dead. What right have we to judge them?”
Devora spun to face her, her eyes livid. “And where are those people now? Are they here? Do they live? Do you know?”
Hurriya didn’t answer.
“Did—did this—help any of them?” She waved her hand at the house. “Shut the door, Zadok.”
He did, and replaced the great wooden bar over it, locking the bodies within. For just a moment the nazarite leaned against the door, as though overcome by what he’d seen. Barak just sat his saddle, overwhelmed.
“Look,” Hurriya called softly.
The others glanced up. After a moment Devora saw what Hurriya meant and pointed. Barak saw that a narrow strip of linen hung from the charred window on the house’s second story. By some miracle a little of that linen had escaped the flames, and he could see that it was dyed scarlet; against the charred timbers it seemed garish and utterly out of place. As though someone had decided to hang up fine clothes to dry in the heat of a burning house.
Devora exchanged a look with Hurriya, then gazed at the cloth steadily. “A brave act,” she whispered.
“I don’t understand,” Barak muttered. “It’s a scrap of cloth. What does it mean?”
Devora’s voice was soft in the dark. She sounded awed. “Someone—someone living—led twenty dead inside, so that her kin could slam shut the door and bar it behind them. She must have escaped to the upper room and pulled up the rope ladder behind her so that no dead could follow.” For a moment Devora only gazed up at that window, her face pensive as though struck with thoughts that had never occurred to her before.
“Think of it,” Hurriya breathed. “Just think of it. She stood up there alone. With twenty dead hissing beneath her. Their hands reaching for her.”
“It is not only men with spears who have courage,” Devora said.
“She?” Barak’s eyes had widened in horror. “How do you know it was a woman?”
“Not a woman, a girl,” the navi said. “Don’t you recognize the linen?”
“It’s just a scrap of cloth.”
“Nothing is ever just a scrap of anything, Barak ben Abinoam. Everything made bears the shape of its maker’s hands and can betray who its maker was, even as every hill and thicket in the land bears the imprint of God’s shaping fingers. Everything is clay, everything is marked.”
“It’s a maiden sash,” Hurriya said. “A girl wears it beneath her breasts when she wishes to beg Astarte for her breasts to grow full. For her blood to come. A girl wears it when she tires of being just a girl.”
“Yes.” Devora gazed at the window and its limp linen, and her voice hardened. “This town, also, is more heathen than Hebrew.”
“But brave,” Hurriya whispered.
Barak gazed up at that linen, struck with horror. He tried to imagine standing alone while twenty of those—those corpses—waited below you for your foot to trip. And the flames licking up the sides of the house. “She didn’t burn,” he said, looking at the window. “She jumped out. Led them in, then leapt from the window.”
“She did,” Devora said quietly. “It was very brave. Though she died for it.”
“Died?” Hurriya gasped.
“That rock in the earth there, by the wall—it is smeared with old blood. She cracked her leg there, or her head.”
“Maybe she rose to her feet, and lived,” Barak said grimly.
“There is a wide swath of soil, like a furrow, leading away from the rock. She was dragged away, eaten. Not all the dead were in the house. And the dead caught her right after she leapt—otherwise the neighbors would have come for her first.”
The desire for this to be wrong gripped Barak’s heart so fiercely it startled him. “No, a neighbor saw her wounded—one of the men who barred the door. And came to pull her away. That’s what the marks in the soil mean.”
“Would he have dragged her body along the earth between the houses? He would have lifted her and carried her in his arms. What she did was holy, Barak. God gave her a great task, and she leapt for him. You do not carry an injured holy one to safety by dragging her body through the dirt.”
He winced at the thought. The scene Devora suggested was too terrible. That a girl—a child—might risk so much, and achieve such a victory, only to fall to her death: it was an injustice that blasphemed God and mocked the Covenant. He could not bear it, or accept it. A navi Devora might be, but she did not have that look in her eyes now, the look that meant God was showing her visions. And these were only marks in the dirt. They might mean something else. They might mean anything. It was only dirt.
A cough in the street behind them interrupted, and Barak turned to see Omri walking his own horse toward them, with a tether about the neck of Barak’s steed. In the light of the torch he still held, Omri looked pale. As he drew near, his gaze flicked to the corpse in the street and the body it had been eating. He stopped and sat his horse, staring down.
“Rare for there to be just one,” he murmured.
“Yes,” Devora said. “It is rare.”
Omri stepped the two horses in a wide circle about the body. Their eyes rolled, and Barak’s horse shied, nearly tearing the tether from his hand; at last he was near enough and he tossed the tether to Barak, who caught it deftly out of the air. “Horse nearly galloped back to Shiloh,” Omri said, tearing his gaze from the horror in the street. “I should ask you to barter that breast-piece for him.”
“He’s worth more than a breast-piece, Omri.”
“Then trade me her.” Omri attempted a smile and gestured at the navi, who swung about with her eyes dark and fierce. “She’d be pleasant. Worth the loss of a horse.”
“She’s kadosh,” Barak said, taken aback.
Omri seemed to notice how they were all looking at him: Zadok, Devora, Barak. The Canaanite’s eyes were lowered, but her shoulders were tensed.
“She’d do,” he muttered.
“Touch her and die,” Zadok said quietly.
Devora just gazed at the Zebulunite coldly, which seemed to bother him more than Zadok’s threat.
“You needn’t act like I tried to lift your skirt,” Omri said in a subdued tone. “If a man doesn’t break this silence with a jest, it’ll madden him.”
Barak gestured at a cache he’d spotted to the side of the burned house, a great pit dug into the ground, likely walled with stone, concealed now beneath a great wooden cover. “Break open that cache, Omri. May be supplies we ca
n use. Supplies this town won’t need.” He cast a grim look at the burned house.
The Zebulunite walked his horse toward the cache, grumbling beneath his breath. Omri had challenged Barak for the leadership of the camp while the men were still gathering, days ago. Barak had bested him; now it seemed Omri wanted to show Barak he was still a man. But Barak had no time for this. He stepped beside Devora quickly and growled, “Don’t entice him, woman. I’ll not have the two of you bring shame on my camp.”
Devora flushed dark with anger. “You think—”
“You must have glanced at him,” Barak muttered irritably.
Devora hissed through her teeth, but Barak was already moving, mounting Ager. Stroking the horse’s neck to calm him, he nudged Ager into a trot around the corner of the broken house toward that cache. Even as he did, Omri pried beneath the lid with his spear and levered it up, then tipped it over. That great cedar lid fell back and slammed down against the earth, a sound that echoed up the street between the empty houses, revealing a great hole in the ground. A sickly-sweet stench rolled out, and Barak gagged a moment, cursing silently in his heart. Fool townsmen had stored meat in there. But it had gone bad; surely they’d salted it, at least. He’d hoped desperately to find vats of grain, unfouled grain.
“Whoa,” Barak murmured to his horse, which was shying nervously at the reek. The animal whickered and stood breathing hard. Barak leaned down over its neck. “Good, good,” he whispered in his horse’s ear.
“Navi.” Zadok’s voice was urgent.
Barak glanced over his shoulder at the nazarite and the navi, saw Devora’s eyes widen. A small figure was climbing up narrow steps out of the cache, a silhouette against the shadows. A dull sheen of eyes in the moonlight. Several other shapes were coming up the steps after it. Lifting its foot from the last step, the first moved out of the cache and staggered across the trampled earth toward them. It was small—stood no taller than Devora’s belly. Some of the others climbing out behind it were even smaller.