by Stant Litore
Children.
These were children.
He took a breath. Something unsettled him, but he felt a flood of relief that drowned any uneasiness. Children. The promise of the Covenant, that the People would live and thrive and fill the land, no matter what came. A rush of faith into his heart such as he had not felt since he was a small child, sitting at his grandfather’s knee hearing stories of their People’s escape from the brick pits of Kemet and their taking of the land. This was surely a mighty sign. During the raids a few years ago from the fortified settlements on the coast, it had been common enough for encampments to hide their children in pits or caches concealed beneath thick brush, to be retrieved later once the threat was past. This town had been eaten by the dead, and perhaps its last men and women had fled into the hills with the dead close behind, after first ensuring their children’s safety in that cache.
“Children!” he called to them, the joy in him nearly choking his voice.
At the sound of his voice, the children—so many, climbing out of the cache—lifted their arms in the dark. And with a shock, Barak knew that something was wrong. Badly wrong.
Those dull, glinting eyes.
High, wavering moans as the children lurched out into the street.
Devora let out a wordless, anguished cry, and Hurriya made a small, choked noise. The navi’s cry fell upon Barak’s heart like the stone that triggers a landslide. He lurched into motion, wheeling his horse about. “Back!” he called hoarsely. “Fall back!”
Zadok swore and lifted his spear, moving his horse between the navi and the advancing children. Devora just sat her horse, gazing at the children with a horror as though she were watching the entire land burn. The children were lurching toward her horse; in a moment, they would close about Zadok’s horse and hers like a tide about a rock.
“Navi!” Barak’s voice was too high, like a child’s. “Ride! Ride!”
She didn’t move.
Omri too sat his horse as though frozen.
Zadok let out a battle shout and sent his horse into the dead, laying about with his spear, using it more as a staff then an impaling weapon, knocking the small corpses from their feet with the force of it. It took them a moment to get back up, and Zadok wheeled his horse, spinning his mighty staff as easily as he might a child’s toy. But there were too many. Their moans filled the air, drowning out all thought and hope.
Barak saw two small girls lurch past the nazarite, toward the navi’s horse—he could almost hear words in their moans. He was certain—he could almost hear words. The moans tore at his mind. Barak screamed and drove his own gelding between the navi and the children. His heart beat, cold sweat stung his eyes; he lifted his spear but froze, those tiny, glinting eyes gazing up at him; he didn’t know what to do. Children. Children of the People. He couldn’t spear children of the People.
A hand grasped his calf, closing about the bronze greave, the fingertips digging into the exposed skin at the back and pulling. Panting, Barak of Israel gazed down into a hissing, livid face, a face gashed and darkened with dried blood, the eyes scratched and unseeing though fixed in the direction of his thigh. The thing that had been a small girl hissed like an asp, its teeth stark in the night, gums drawn back.
“El,” he gasped. “El, El, El—” The name of God, over and over and over, like a child’s syllable chanted against some groping terror in the dark. He couldn’t move; he felt the tug on his leg, so strong. The face bending toward his calf, even as the other girl reached and took his foot. Other children—such small, small beings—staggered against his horse, their little hands reaching up at him. The animal trembled violently, its back rippling beneath Barak, but it was well trained. This horse had carried him in a charge against raiders from the coast. The horse shook as with fever but did not bolt.
Devora’s high voice startled him from his paralysis.
“Run, girl! Move! Now!”
Hurriya slid from the saddle and fled, stumbling, for the far side of the ruined house.
Then Devora cried out in a screaming ululation that rose in pitch like a shriek of steel, then fell into words, a battle song, old Hebrew, the dialect of their grandfathers in the desert, when every hand, living and dead, had been raised against their tribes. Devora rode at the children. Her white horse slammed bodily into the crowd of dead, beating aside the small bodies with his great flanks; in a moment the navi was at Barak’s side, her face stern, her eyes cold fire, her hand white about the hilt of that iron blade; her arm swept down, and the weapon scythed through small bodies, cutting away arms, shearing flesh and bone. The girls fell away from Barak’s horse, cut open, hands and arms severed from them—but even as they fell beneath Shomar’s hooves, there was no blood. There were no screams. Only those keening moans of hunger all about them.
Then Devora had ridden past, taking her wide-eyed gelding in a wide circle through the street, her blade slashing and cutting. Zadok fought his way to her side, and the two rode together, spear and blade. Even as Barak shook away his panic and hefted his own bronze spear again in his hand, he saw the two girls lurch back to their feet near his steed. Their arms were gone; one’s chest had been crushed by the hooves. Yet their dull eyes were fixed on him; their mouths gaped in wordless hissing. The stench of them was vile, worse by far now that their bodies had been carved open. They were unclean. They were reaching for him.
With a shout, Barak lunged to the side, driving the spear into one child’s brow. The small, decaying body went limp, but the spearhead had caught in its skull and could not be pulled free; the child’s corpse hung as a dead weight on the end of the spear, nearly pulling Barak from his horse as the girl’s knees buckled. The other came at him, and Barak drove his sandal hard into its face, driving it back a few lurching steps as he fought to pull his spear free. He was drenched in cold sweat; his heart hammered within him.
Devora’s song rose into those high, desert wails, then fell again and again into words, as she rode among the dead. Numbly Barak lifted his eyes to her, saw her bound hair shining in the moonlight, her sword an arc of white in the air, never still. Behind her galloping horse, a trail of bodies, shattered and reeking. A few staggered to their feet or crawled along the ground after her; the rest were still, their heads carved open in terrible wounds. Zadok had ridden now to the edge of the cache, was spearing the corpses as they stepped out. Omri had joined him there and lent his spear to the fight, though he looked ready to be violently ill.
The body by Barak’s horse hissed, and with a curse the chieftain plucked out his knife and drove it hard into the thing’s forehead. He shuddered as it twitched and went still, sliding off the blade and dropping to the earth, on its back. Panting, he gazed down at it in cold horror. It was a girl. Just a small girl. It still wore the dirtied remains of a woolen dress; the cloth had been torn away from its right shoulder, baring a breast as flat as a tablet of stone. Barak ducked his head to the side and vomited, his midday meal rushing up his throat in a steaming flood. He choked and coughed, drew the back of his hand across his lips. His other hand gripped the haft of his spear, rigidly, a child’s body still impaled on the bronze head.
Barak the vintner, war-leader of the northern tribes, sat his horse shaking. He drew from his saddlebag the shofar Laban had brought to him when he first formed the camp. The ram’s horn Othniel himself had blown when he fought the first raiders from the sea, when Barak had been just a boy. Now Barak lifted the shofar to his lips and blew a long blast. He needed his men. He needed God. He needed someone, anyone, to share with him the terrible responsibility of fighting these walking corpses that had once been breathing, laughing children. The call of the horn echoed through the town.
THE OLAH
THE CHILDREN tried helplessly to reach up and grasp at Devora’s feet as she rode through them. They strove to catch her, to pull her from her horse, but their small bodies were no match for either the strength or speed of the gelding Lappidoth had given her—or the savage reach of the navi’s
blade. Behind her by the cache, Zadok and Omri jabbed their spears downward again and again, like Canaanites on the lake spearing fish. The light from Omri’s torch shone on the hissing faces.
A few moments more and it was done. Devora turned and cantered back, taking out the few that were still staggering or crawling along the ground. The blade cut through scalp, skull, and brain. In the end, there was only a street filled with bodies, strewn across the packed dirt from where Barak’s steed stood shying to the open cache.
She rode to the cache and glanced down the steps into it. Small bones lay scattered at the bottom. Bones of children. Bones picked clean and cracked open for the marrow. In the deaths of so many children of her People, whether mixed with heathen or no, Devora could see the death of the Covenant. She could see the touch of the malakh ha-mavet, as though its mighty wing had swept over the town and all those touched by its shadow had died, regardless of promises made or promises kept or promises broken.
She made a high-pitched, furious sound like a beast discovering a trap about its paw, then rode back. None of the children lifted themselves from the begrimed earth to challenge her. Beside her, Zadok dismounted and left the cache and walked slowly among the bodies, making sure each of them had been speared or cut through the head, making sure all were still.
Hurriya made a choked sound from where she watched from the corner of the charred house. Her eyes were round and dark in the dim light. Omri walked his horse away from the cache. For once he did not even look at the women. He had eyes only for the bodies in the street.
Barak still sat his horse in the middle of the street, in shock, the shofar now held in one limp hand. Devora cantered toward him until she was near enough to address him without lifting her voice.
“Do not hesitate again, chieftain of Israel.” Devora’s voice was a shard of winter. “These were not children. These are the dead. Look at their eyes, not their bodies. Whether they wear a levite’s white or a young girl’s sash, whether their face is that of a spearman or an infant, the eyes of the dead hold nothing. They are only bodies to bury.” She kept Mishpat carefully extended, though it tired her arm—for the blade was spattered with unclean gore. “Did any of them touch your naked skin?”
The look Barak gave her was distant, distracted, and her heart skipped a beat. “Barak?” she asked harshly.
“No,” he said after a brief hesitation. “None.”
“Are you sure?”
“They touched only my greave,” he said hoarsely.
She held his eyes a moment, then accepted this as the truth and looked back at the stillness in the street, the unholy stillness. She could not think about what she had seen and done; there were judgments to make. “Before you enter the camp, you must cut a strip from your cloak, Barak ben Abinoam, and wrap that wool about your fingers. Then pluck away the greave and cast both bronze and wool to the earth. Do not touch the bronze with your hand. In this way, you can enter the camp clean and under no judgment.”
“It will be as you say, navi.” He seemed hardly to hear her; his voice was a croak.
She turned from him, holding back her own dread. What had happened this night would rattle any man. Barak seemed frozen with horror now, almost like Zadok had often been, though his eyes flicked from the left to the right; he did not seem unaware of the bodies at his feet or the charred house before him. Dismissing him from her mind, Devora began walking Shomar away.
Omri rode up alongside her, still clutching his guttering torch, his eyes round with fear and wonder. “That blade,” he said.
“Yes, I can wield it,” Devora said sharply. She had no patience right now for the man.
“It—it really is iron,” Omri breathed. His gaze was fixed on the navi, as though wondering if she too were made of some strange, foreign substance of which other women were not. Devora ignored him and walked her horse back down the street. Shomar stepped nervously over the corpses, and the navi caressed his neck softly, whispering in his ear. She met Zadok’s eyes as she passed him; the nazarite straightened and gave a weary nod. It was done, then. The nazarite drew his knife and cut his hand grimly, then sheathed the knife.
She led Shomar to the corner of the burned house and glanced down at Hurriya, who was shaking. After a moment Devora dismounted to stand before the shuddering girl. The girl’s horror pulled at her heart.
“Close your eyes,” Devora said softly.
Hurriya gave a small shake of her head. She stared at the children in the street.
Devora took a saddlecloth and pressed the cloth to the young woman’s eyes. “No, girl,” she said. “There is no ruined house, no town. You are in the olive grove, and there are no dead. You are watching your sister play in the branches.”
“The town,” Hurriya whispered, without trying to remove the cloth. “The whole settlement. Like my child.”
“No.” Devora glanced at the dark hole of the cache. Her body felt cold, everything inside her was cold. “Not the whole town. They probably locked the children in to keep them safe, then lured the dead away, all that they could. They must have meant to circle back.”
“Only they haven’t,” Hurriya whispered. “They haven’t circled back.”
Devora was distracted from answering by the sound of hoofbeats. She glanced over her shoulder. The other men were riding down the street toward them, summoned by the sound of the shofar. Laban rode at their head with that massive axe of his ready in his hand, held as lightly as though it were only a hatchet. They stopped near Barak, looking down at the shattered corpses, their faces stricken.
“It is all right,” the navi called, raising her voice in a shout. “There were dead in the cache, but—”
The door of the nearest house across the street jolted hard in its hinges, then shuddered again, a sound as of bodies thrusting against it from within. Devora swung to face the door, her face white with shock.
The dead. Roused perhaps by Devora’s battle song or by the shofar to stumble about within the house, looking for the living. Perhaps they had been on the second floor and had finally tumbled below. Now, alerted by Devora’s shout to the direction in which they could find her, they had thrown themselves against the door.
“Spears!” Barak rasped. He dismounted and tugged his own spear free, and several of his men left their horses and ran up, one with a spear like Barak’s, the others with poles or rakes or whatever they’d improvised along the journey.
“Break the door,” Barak gasped, unable to find enough breath to make the order any louder. “Let it out where we can slay it.”
The men were as pale as he. Devora heard the breaking of cedar, the sharp crack of the door coming apart; the door splintered and wrenched aside, and dead lurched out into the street, their teeth bared. Their arms reaching for warm flesh. Barak’s men were between her and the corpses, and they shoved their spears hard into the corpses’ bellies and thighs, pushing them back by brute force. But the dead still groped for them and moaned, not heeding the wounds.
“Their heads!” she cried. “Strike them between the eyes! Between the eyes, men of Israel!”
As if wakened by her cry, Barak surged into action, leaping forward and driving the bronze point of his spear into one skull, driving it in by the ear, the flesh parting at the metal’s touch like a rotting apricot.
Devora moved toward the house, but Zadok stepped near and took her arm in a firm grip, peering into her face. “Navi?”
“There are dead in the houses,” she said numbly.
Her hand tightened about Mishpat’s hilt, and she tried again to step toward the door, but Zadok thrust her behind him with one powerful arm. One of the dead had pushed a pole aside and now grasped one of Barak’s men by the shoulder, pulling him toward its jaws. Zadok’s spear drove into its open mouth, and he lifted the corpse free of the door; it jerked helplessly in the air, impaled and writhing with the cold metal driven into its throat.
Devora gasped as Zadok spun, his spear sweeping through the air. The incredible stre
ngth of the man! The corpse came loose and was flung through the air, slamming into the ground. A snap of bone. The corpse got to its feet, one arm limp at its side, and lurched toward them again. Others were still pushing out at the door, being barred only by the long-shafted weapons and the desperate strength of the men. Those men were ashen-faced, panicked, screaming as they held the dead back, the long fingers of the dead catching at their hair, their cheeks, their arms. One man was pulled in close, and a hissing corpse bit down on his ear and tore it away with a long strip of tissue and flesh.
She saw Barak leap away from the door, screaming orders. While Zadok and Laban and a few men held the dead back at the door, four others ran with Barak to the cache and wrenched its massive lid up from the ground. They brought it swiftly to the house and pressed the wooden lid against the door, pushing the dead back into the house by sheer might and barricading the door with it, holding it in place with their own living bodies. The massive lid shook as the dead pounded against it from within.
The house had two stories, one window for each; the lower window was barred with wood, but now Devora could see gray, half-eaten hands reaching through cracks in the wood, some of them missing fingers, tearing chunks of wood free, ripping away the covering over the window. Devora lifted Mishpat and stepped near even as the wood slats came away and a corpse’s face appeared at the window, pale against the darkness behind it. The left side of its face that of a young woman, the right side eaten away almost to the bone. It hissed at her, and Devora thrust Mishpat at it, cutting across its cheek. The corpse fell back from the window into the darkness of the house; she could hear it hissing and spitting.
The men at the door were screaming, Barak roaring louder than any. The door was rattling.