Strangers in the Land

by Stant Litore

  “You chose Lappidoth when I was a boy of eight,” Zadok muttered. “When I was a young man, Lappidoth seemed to me to be very old. I thought he might die, and I might ask you then, after your time of grief. I had a fool’s heart. Forgive me, navi, so that I will be released of this burden I endure.”

  She watched his eyes a moment, saw the suffering there. How like his father he looked in this moment. The hard lines of his face, the depth and uncompromising purpose in his eyes. The only thing different was the anguish. Zefanyah had died before he could know pain like that.

  She shook her head. “You’ve broken no covenant, Zadok, none with me. There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “If you wish me to relinquish my vow—”

  “Stop,” she cried softly. “By the tribes, stop, Zadok. Just—be quiet a moment. Let me think.”

  She lowered her head. She could feel his gaze on her, and it was warm, undemanding. Yet she wanted to flee. The feelings in her heart and the feelings in his—whatever they were—it was too much. Everything she had encountered in this dead settlement was too much. She needed to go up into the hills where the wind was loud and the People were quiet. She needed to find some place to kneel and weep and pray.

  But what did she fear? Zadok was younger than she, but he was not a boy. She lifted her gaze and saw him looking on her with concern. The anguish beneath it was deep but faint, like old coals after a fire had burned down all night. She sighed and stepped nearer to him, took his face between her hands, the scratch of his beard warm against her palms. He didn’t move either to hold her or draw away. A tenderness welled up in her like a spring. She was conscious that the men dragging the bodies from the street could see them, but she didn’t care. This moment was between the navi and her nazarite, and she would not let watchful eyes or any rumor they might start disturb it.

  She looked up at him. “Who do you protect, Zadok, now that the high priest is gone?”

  Zadok met her gaze without flinching. “Israel’s navi.”

  “Then keep protecting her,” Devora whispered. “And Devora, the woman, loves you for it. I am my husband’s, I cannot be yours. But you do not offend me, Zadok. You are so important to me. You have to know that.”

  Zadok caught her hand in his, held it in that firm, unyielding grip. His eyes searched hers. Then he nodded. “I know it,” he breathed.

  “Thank you for sharing your heart.”

  “Thank you for sharing yours,” Zadok rumbled.

  A smile touched her lips. “We’ve grown old, Zadok.”

  “Maybe the navi has.” He returned her smile. “But I can still outrun or outfight any man in Israel.”

  “Beast,” she murmured. She was grinning now. His boasting cheered her. Zadok bore deep pain, but nothing—neither the rising dead nor the hard burden of slaying dead children nor his yearning for her—nothing could still the fire he carried within him. That cheered her. Even the malakh ha-mavet seemed no more than a shadow cast over sunlit ground, in the face of Zadok’s enduring fortitude.

  “It’s good that you never took a wife, Zadok ben Zefanyah,” Devora told him, lowering her hands from his face, regretting the loss of that warm beard against her palms. “You would be too much for her. You and Lappidoth are the only men I have ever met of whom that is true. Other men, women can work with.” She smiled again and turned to glance up the ashen street. Men toiled there, but if they had been watching her, they were not now, and whatever judgment each of them had made on her was locked for the moment within the silent Ark of his own heart. There would be cairns by the water, new ones. She must go and sing over them. She must resume her burdens. She took Mishpat up from where she’d set the blade aside.

  Zadok set a powerful hand on her shoulder. “Navi,” he said. His voice had grown stern again, but it had lost some of its grimness, and the sound of it was a comfort to her.

  “Refuge is where we’ll find any from the town who still live and breathe,” he said. “But we will not find any survivors, navi.”

  BREAKING CAMP

  THE MEN had moved some of their tents to the edge of the burned settlement, raising a forest of canvas around Barak’s pavilion; this had allowed the men to take the work of cleansing the town and raising cairns in shifts. After singing the Words of Going over the cairns, Devora’s mind and heart were so full, so turbulent, that she stumbled toward these tents without a word to anyone. She wanted only to throw herself to the rugs and sleep until the men broke camp and she had to get to her feet again. Devora hardly even noticed the looks men gave her as she stumbled by with Mishpat still clutched in her hand. Their eyes held awe or fear—she had become strange to them. They were not looking at her as they had the evening before when she rode into the camp with a feverish heathen girl before her. Gazing at her now, their eyes still said woman, but those same eyes held alarm rather than desire. They did not know what to think about her or what to do with her. She was kadosh, set apart—as alien to them as God.

  Even the glance Omri cast her as she passed held this strangeness, yet his gaze roved over her body. He stood, stroking his jaw with his hand, his eyes thoughtful and dark.

  Laban was standing at the edge of the tents, sending men this way and that, and he saw the navi and directed her to a massive white tent. It had been his, but it was the levites’ color, and he gave it to her. She didn’t know where Laban meant to rest and did not have the energy to care. Nor did she know where Hurriya or Zadok were; neither was by her tent.

  Inside, Devora stumbled to her knees and held Mishpat upright before her, the point resting on the earth, the hilt before her eyes. Before singing over the cairns—while waiting for the last ones to be raised—she had cleaned the blade and then polished the metal to a sheen; no trace of the unclean dead or of those bitten remained on the immaculate, though dented, metal. Now she stared hard at the blade. And felt things hardening within her.

  She could still feel the slight resistance of each man’s neck against Mishpat’s blade, she could feel the tension of it in her hand. A night of terrible judgments. Not all of them hers. She spoke quietly to God in the dimness of her tent.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Have you truly lifted your hand from us?” Anger tightened her throat. “How have we offended you so greatly? Is it that our People mixed with the heathen? Yet—in that town—many of them fought to live with such strong hearts. Did all they could to preserve their children. As Hurriya did. They were not strangers to the Law—they could not have been strangers to it in their hearts. Why didn’t you bless their acts? Why were those for nothing?”

  Her tent flap drew aside and she glanced up with a sigh, expecting Hurriya or Zadok. But the man who stepped into her tent was shorter than the nazarite, his face hidden beneath a hood, one hand holding a heavy wool cloak closed, the other at his side carrying a bloodied knife.

  She gasped, but the man murmured, “Do not scream, navi,” and she recognized Barak’s voice.

  “What is this?” she hissed, her eyes wide.

  Devora pressed a hand to her breast, waiting for her heart to stop pounding from her moment of fright.

  He could not mean violence against her. That didn’t make any sense. She watched in puzzlement as the war-leader tossed back his hood, revealing a wan face and haunted eyes. She drew in a breath; the man’s hair had grayed. His hair—it had streaks of gray in it, gray as Lappidoth’s hair—but there had been no gray in it before. She gazed at him in horror. “Barak?”

  “I have come to your tent and the men will gossip,” he said quietly. “But in here it must be. I will have no prying eyes for this. Do not cry out; I don’t mean you ill.”

  The man opened his cloak and with his left hand drew out a dove, clutching it by the legs, the severed neck dripping blood onto the ground. “I will make a covenant with you, navi,” he said. Breathing raggedly, he crouched across the tent from her and began carving into the bird with his knife, cutting the feathered body into two halves with a brutal, quick efficiency. Devor
a rose unsteadily, watching him, her heartbeat back to normal, her mind catching up. A covenant? A covenant to do what?

  Barak separated the two halves as far apart as his arms could reach, then set them gently on the ground. He glanced up at her then, his eyes fierce. “I will promise you something you desire,” he said. “You see further than men’s eyes. And you are unshaken by the dead and know much about them, that is clear. I will hear you before the decisions I make. I will let you strike down my word if you know the decision to be wrong, and I will trust you as God’s navi, holding back only those decisions that safeguard the lives of the men.”

  Devora looked at him, assessing him. The man was sincere. However reluctant he had been to acknowledge her or afford her respect, he was sincere now.

  “And what promise do you ask of me, Barak?”

  He glanced down at the two halves of the dove, then back at her. “Can you look, navi, and see whether I will survive the cleansing of the land?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I can’t answer your questions. God sends what he knows I need to see, to preserve what he wishes preserved.”

  He was silent for a moment. “But it’s going to get worse.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Then I ask a simple thing, navi,” he said quietly. “If I should be taken by the dead, my body defiled and half-eaten and rising unclean from the ground—” His hands began to shake as he spoke, and he set the stone knife carefully aside and got to his feet, facing her, his eyes filled with fear such as Devora had rarely seen in a human face. Her throat tightened.

  “If my body should rise,” he repeated, low and intense, “ride after me, navi. Ride and find my body. Pile clean stone above me, with your own hands, even if I have been dragged far away.” He took a slow breath. “I have no seed, no inheritance in the land. If I live, I will take another wife and ensure my seed persists. But I may not live. And I will not wander the land unclean.”

  She gazed at him, and it seemed to her that the tent filled with the scent of ash and smoke.

  “Do this,” Barak said, without any quiver in his voice, though he passed his hand over his brow. “Make covenant with me. And any strife between us is at an end.” His eyes were so terribly earnest, so desperate, it was all she could do not to look away. “You are the first judge of Israel, and you are the navi. Where you tell me I must ride, I will ride. Where you tell me to cast my spear, I will strike. Make this covenant with me.”

  She glanced down at the two halves of the dove. This was no small thing, to make a covenant. What they did here, God would watch, and remember, even if they should forget. Yet she had always been quick to make her decisions. Delay threatened life.

  “I will,” she said.

  The relief on Barak’s face was so naked that she looked aside.

  They passed between the parts of the bird seven times. Each time they recited—first Barak, then Devora—the ancient, simple words of the rite:

  Let it be done to me

  as it was done to this bird, and more

  if I break this covenant

  or fail to keep it.

  When her voice fell still the seventh time, Devora felt the responsibility of this covenant settle over her shoulders like a heavy wool cloak; it was an almost physical feeling. The bond of responsibility between her and the war-leader could not be severed, not by death nor by anything that might happen in life. It was as sacred and as real a covenant as that which she had made with Lappidoth her husband many years ago. It was as real as the covenant the tribes had made with each other, and the covenant they had made with the remnants of the heathen peoples at the vale of Weeping, and the covenant they had made with God on the mountain in the desert. Upon its breaking would follow a curse.

  One did not make a covenant lightly, and Devora wondered what consequences this covenant would have that she could not yet see. Yet she did not regret her act. Barak was bound to her now, and surely what he had asked of her was no different than the responsibilities the Covenant between God and the People had already placed upon her. She was accustomed to being bound to a duty; this one did not frighten her.

  Barak stood, and to her relief, he took the remains of the bird with him. He gave her a nod, then left her tent as abruptly as he’d come. Devora breathed softly in relief and sank to her knees in the silence of her tent. Alone once more. She couldn’t bear having to speak with another person right now. She could not bear the thought of having to carry one more burden.

  Her need for rest fell upon her as savagely as a growling bear, but she shrugged it off and got to her feet. No. She would pace and think. She would not close her eyes, not until she was very far from this place. Not until the moans of the dead were less near in her memory, less loud in her ears.

  When Devora left her tent a while later, the air still smelled burnt, and a film of ash had settled on the surface of the lake, turning the lilies on the water to pale corpses of themselves. All around her, men were breaking camp and preparing for the half-day march toward Refuge. Devora went to Shomar and curried him, then saddled him for the day’s ride, though she winced at the thought of that saddle between her sore thighs again. Barak and the other chieftains appeared to sit their horses without discomfort; riding must be something a woman could get used to. She talked to Shomar softly and listened to him whicker softly back. She began reciting the words of the Law under her breath, to calm the edge of her anxiety:

  And these words, which I command to you this day, will be in your heart: and you shall teach them to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

  “We have raised the cairns,” Devora murmured to God as she patted Shomar’s neck. “We will not forget our promise. And I trust your promises hold true also.”

  She didn’t know if God was listening.

  A sharp crack of wood disturbed her thoughts, and she glanced toward the last wooden houses that stood, their roofs bearing blankets of ash. Devora caught sight of Laban at the door to one of the houses, swinging back his great axe and slamming it into the wood. Three other men stood behind him. Large, lithe men of Issachar with makeshift cudgels ready in their hands. Devora nodded, approving from a distance what they were doing: breaking into the last houses to check for any lurking dead before abandoning the camp and the town. She turned back to her horse, checking his hooves, then giving him water to drink and grains to eat from her small store of them, for this was no time to turn him loose to graze. His eyes were soft and liquid in the midmorning light.

  She listened without watching as Laban and his men went from one house to the next. Once, she heard a man’s scream, followed by the wavering moan of a walking corpse. Devora shivered.

  Then the moan was cut short. Perhaps Laban’s axe had done its work.

  She strapped her waterskin and Mishpat to the side of the saddle.

  She glanced about for Hurriya and at first didn’t see her. Then she glanced toward the burned settlement and was startled to see the Canaanite approaching out of the town, coming from the houses the men had already checked. Zadok walked beside her, and as he looked toward Devora, for the briefest moment she surprised a look in his eyes of yearning and regret that battered at her heart. She looked away, embarrassed to have caught that look. He did want her, then, as a man wants a wife. She sighed. It was clear that he would continue to treat her with great respect. But how was she to treat him, knowing what she now knew?

  The sight of Hurriya distracted her. The girl was carrying a fistful of green leaves that must have come from the herbalist’s shop in the market, and she was no longer wearing her stained salmah. Instead, she wore a thick woolen gown, dyed green. It must have belonged to one of the wealthier wives of the town, and it reflected a Canaanite’s sympathies: a love of bright colors and things that draw the eye in the sun. Devora found her own gaze held; though Hurriya walked with discomfort and though there were dark bruises about her eyes
from nights without rest, she looked suddenly beautiful. And little trace remained of the unease she had once shown around the nazarite. Then the girl stumbled and leaned heavily on Zadok’s arm, and a flame of jealousy lit within Devora’s heart so sudden and so fierce that it shocked her; she damped it swiftly, furious with herself.

  “Those clothes are unclean,” she said as Hurriya approached her with a wary glance at Shomar. Zadok gave the navi a nod without looking directly at her and departed to help the men with the tents. And Devora breathed easier.

  “So am I,” Hurriya said wryly. Her left cheek was full of herbs, and she chewed them slowly. Her eyes had lost their glassy look, but she was still deathly pale. “Why does it matter?”

  Devora sighed. “I’m glad you found clothes,” she said after a moment. “And you look lovely in them, Hurriya.”

  The young woman glanced at her, perhaps surprised to find Devora calling her by her name.

  Everything was strange now. The problems over which she sat in decision this day were very different from those she had judged when men of the People came to her olive tree with broken pacts or broken in spirit. Her own decisions were strange to her—hard necessities that were driven not by the Law but by the panic she saw in men’s eyes and the bursting of the dead through wooden doors. The very sky above her was strange, darkened by ash and by the burning of lives and the burning of the work of men’s hands. Zadok’s heart was strange to her, concealing within it things she hadn’t suspected. Even Hurriya was strange to her, in this green gown. She looked—whole—in it. As though not only the edge of her fever but also some of her weariness and her grief had fallen away, even though her body showed where it had been ravaged by fatigue.