Strangers in the Land

by Stant Litore

  “Did he live?” the boy whispered.

  “No. But we will never forget him. Neither will God.” Barak’s hands tightened about the haft of the spear; its weight was reassuring. He could do this. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of flame. Looking carefully around the bole of the tree, he saw torches moving through the barley. “Look,” he breathed. “The men of the north fight the dead, Yehoyakim. Come with me.”

  The youth shook his head, but Barak could not see him. After a moment’s silence, the chieftain said, “Fine,” and then he leapt around the tree and ran at the approaching dead. Lifted his voice in a great roar, even as his father’s father must have roared at the walls of Yeriho and the burning of Ai, when the People were still newcome to the land and were strong. His blood burned; he lifted the terebinth spear high and drove it hard into the face of the nearest corpse, then swung hard to his right, wrenching the corpse to the side and down. It slid free from the sharpened wood and fell, and the wood did not break. Barak slammed the butt end of his spear backward to his left into the chest of the next corpse even as it closed with him. The corpse sprawled into the grass hissing, and two more were upon him, their milky eyes gleaming in the moonlight. He leapt back and brought up the spear, thrusting toward one’s head, even as the corpse that had sprawled to the side a moment before scrambled back to its feet.

  The air smelled of smoke. In the field near at hand Barak saw fire rising and the figures of his men and of the lurching dead dark against the flame. Barak fought with a ferocity he had never before felt. He did not know anymore if God was male or female, weak or strong, reliable or fickle. But he had seen how Zadok fought before the walls of Refuge. He had seen the nazarite fight as though possessed by a god, as though he were no mere man but whirlwind and fire in a man’s body. Whatever God Zadok had known, whatever that strange God was like, Barak hoped to catch that deity’s attention now. And he knew that whatever God might be watching, that God would respond only to courage.

  TO SAVE ONE LIFE

  DEVORA HAD not seen Barak ride into the field and hadn’t seen him unhorsed. She rode now along the rising cliffbank of the river, dealing grimly with those dead who were pursuing the refugees. She grunted and panted with the exertion, the burn in her arm as she swung Shomar about again, and again. Whenever she had breath, she screamed at the living. “Downriver!” she screamed. “Circle around! Downriver! There are tents. Downriver! Go downriver!”

  Some listened and bolted to their left, darting into the field to try cutting through and heading back the way they’d come, trusting her. Others kept moving north, up the rising slope of the land. In their panic they were no longer men or women but only frantic, darting animals, deer being chased by wolves.

  Then there were dead all about Devora’s horse, and she was sweating in the cold and her arm nearly giving out each time she brought the blade down. Shomar reared in terror, his belly and flanks covered with splatters of decayed flesh. His hooves struck out, but the dead, who did not fear horses, only grabbed at his legs. Without success, for the horse was quick, its body massive and powerful. Yet as Shomar came back down on all four hooves, gray hands reached up, clutching at Devora’s skirts and at the horse’s mane. Devora screamed and carved away the hands, but there were many, and now they were all about her, more of them pressing in, so many eyes red in the moonlight. In a moment, a breath, a beat of her heart, she and her horse together would be tugged beneath them, even as the refugees had been.

  A man’s shout rose above the moaning, a deep-chested roar. A horse with spotted flanks was driven into the dead at her left, and Devora glimpsed Laban’s face. The chieftain of Issachar had his great axe lifted high, and he brought it smashing down, the head of a corpse splitting beneath the bronze. The man held to his pommel with his hand and lifted his right foot, kicking the faces of the dead with a giant’s strength, knocking corpses from their feet.

  “Navi!” he bellowed. “To me!”

  Laban forced his way through the moaning dead, and Devora cut her way to his side. Then they were riding among the dead together, chopping with axe and sword; Devora’s skirts were stained with bits of gray flesh and tissue. In a moment they were free of the clinging press of corpses, free of the intense reek and the clutching of hands at her garment. Their horses took them far out into the barley; then Devora wheeled about. “No!” she cried, and sent Shomar galloping back toward the bank, where there was still a great throng of dead and a few refugees trying to elude them northward.

  “Navi!” Laban roared.

  She glanced over her shoulder, saw him gesturing downriver with his axe. She turned, then she saw it too. Some of the panic eased from her heart.

  The men of Barak’s camp had come.

  They were on foot, and they had lit torches and were now charging into the field, shouting. Devora realized they could see her over the barley—in her white robe on her white horse, with her sword uplifted like a slice of the moon. They were charging into the field for her, because seeing her there, they believed at last that God was here in the field, ready to fight the dead with them.

  The men of Israel drove against the dead, waving their torches before them, and the corpses fell back hissing before the flames. Perhaps eighty, ninety men had come. Devora didn’t know where the rest were—perhaps shaking in their tents. Parts of the field went up in flame as the barley caught, for the men were desperate and they swept the torches before them wildly, their eyes showing their whites and reflecting back the fire as they confronted the snarling faces of the dead. Sometimes one of the corpses went up in flames too, its ragged clothes catching from the barley or from a torch slamming into its head and setting its hair afire. The dark above the faces of the living and the dead was alive with sparks and strangely beautiful.

  Without a word to Laban, Devora sent Shomar into the fray, cutting fiercely with her blade. She kept Shomar moving, rushing among the corpses, some of which turned toward her but too slowly to grasp the fast horse, others of which went down beneath her blade without ever knowing she was there, their faces fixed on the men who were advancing with flame. She heard a scream as one of the men was pulled down, and she turned Shomar toward the cry. One of the dead had fallen, its leg crumpling beneath it. Though the corpse’s back and buttocks blazed with fire, it had dragged a living Hebrew down, its arms wrapped about the man’s legs. The man’s scream rose in pitch as the corpse crawled over him and bit into his face. That scream!

  Riding in, Devora clove the corpse’s face in half, then turned again, and even as several corpses lurched into her horse’s flanks, she grasped Shomar’s mane tightly and leaned out to the side and took away the top half of the Hebrew’s head, cutting off his scream.

  One of the dead got hold of her skirt in both hands, and she clung to Shomar frantically. The cloth tore, but now the dead were pressing into the horse like a wall of cold flesh. Devora heard a shout and knew Laban was beside her, and in another moment he was among those dead with his axe. To her horror, the corpses grasped his axe and pulled the great man from his horse. There was fire in the field all about them now, and the smoke stung her eyes and throat, and she tried to force Shomar through the press of dead to where Laban had gone down, but he was covered with corpses. She heard him roaring, still struggling and fighting beneath the weight of the bodies, even as Zadok had.

  But when Devora finally fought her way to him and struck down at the dead, screaming as she slew, when she cleared enough of a space to look down at the corpses that lay cut and spattered over the ground, there was little of Laban left. His face was gone, his chest torn open and emptied, the dead having pulled everything out of it. One more person she had seen die and been unable to help.

  Devora stared down at his remains, but no scream would come. Wild-eyed, she lifted Mishpat high and wheeled Shomar about, though the horse’s flanks and sides were flecked with sweat and bits of decayed flesh, and the gelding was half-mad with horror. Yet he obeyed when Devora sent him rushing b
ack against the herd of shambling corpses. The navi no longer saw anything about her, not clearly; it was all a fever of screams and moans and hissing, inhuman faces, the faces of the true strangers in the land. She cut and thrust and slashed, and backed her horse free with the dead following her, and cut down and slashed again. And in her mind she saw crowding about her not the actual faces in this field but the faces of her dead: Eleazar the high priest with his eyes turned sorrowful in the moment of his death; Laban roaring as he went under; leering Omri, as she swung her blade toward his neck; Naomi the navi, her eyes glazed, pleading for a swift end and a high cairn; Zadok, her own Zadok, his eyes caring and intense, binding his long hair back before starting his run; her mother, shrieking and clawing at the rugs with her fingernails as something pulled her from the tent; a small infant with only one arm voicing a long moan; Hurriya, lovely Hurriya, frail and thin yet so beautiful in her green dress, dying with her face inches from Devora’s own. The navi screamed and hacked wildly at the dead.

  At last there came a moment when Devora lifted her blade and looked about and there were no more dead on their feet. Just men, living men and women, moaning and crying in the trampled and withering barley. And fires blazing all about them, lighting up the night. The smoke stung her eyes and she shivered, recalling the destruction of Walls. Panting, she walked Shomar across the field, listening to the groans and screams of the wounded and the bitten. Shomar’s breath heaved beneath her; even her husband’s magnificent horse was tired and near collapse. It took all Devora had just to stay upright on his back and withstand the reek of the field.

  She halted and gazed down at a patch of crushed barley. There lay the body of a girl, one who could not have seen ten winters before she began hungering for flesh. Half the girl’s scalp was missing, chopped away. It might have been Mishpat that cut her; the blade, slimy with gore, hung limp from Devora’s hand. The navi gazed at the girl and had no tears. She sat her horse. Breathing. Just breathing. She brushed sweat from her eyes with the back of her hand. That girl who lay dead had never been to the red tent, never heard the laughter of the older women, never learned the secrets they would tell her. She had never grown breasts, never known love or the kicking of a child inside her. Yet she was gone, like wheat cut from its stalk before it had an ear, like the infant whose body Devora had buried on the hill above Shiloh, like Hurriya closing her eyes in that cedar house.

  Another girl, a little older than this one, had once shivered in her tent while the dead fed on her mother just outside. She had not even dared to cry, for her body hadn’t yet learned that tears could be silent. She just hugged her knees and rocked, back and forth. After a very long time, a bloody hand drew the tent flap aside, and a face looked in, a face that was like her mother’s yet torn, one ear chewed away and the eyes gray and empty. Her mouth gaped and she hissed at the girl.

  Devora glanced down at her aging hands, remembered the heft of the pestle she’d lifted, her mother’s own pestle she’d used to prepare meal. She remembered bringing it down, her arm rising and falling, bits of flesh and droplets of dark fluid staining her arms and her nightclothes; she had washed all of that ruin from her body and her clothes much later, in a shallow pool far from the camp. Then she’d huddled in the tall grass by the water while her clothes dried. Her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms about her legs. Her sobs beside that pool had been the last time she had ever let herself weep fully, without any restraint.

  A girl had died in that tent as the pestle struck again and again. Devora had never carried that girl’s body to any wide field within her mind, had never piled any cairn of heavy stones above her.

  With her sword tip, the navi lifted a little of the dead girl’s soiled hair and dropped the strands across her eyes, hiding them. In a hoarse voice, she whispered the Words of Going for them both—the girl who lay here in the barley and the girl who had died long ago in that tent. Sitting her horse in this gore-drenched field, Devora missed that young girl with a yearning that ached.

  She glanced about the field, saw the men dragging bodies through the barley. There was grieving and ugly work to be done yet tonight, for none of the wounded could be permitted to live. And she could not bear it. Where was Barak? She longed to hand this night to him and rest. She wanted to lie down. She wanted Lappidoth’s arms, or Zadok’s. She wanted somewhere warm to sleep where there was no moon and no reek of the dead—she could smell it now even in her hair—and no memories but ones she chose to recall.

  Men began to gather about her, weary but their faces flushed, because this night they had faced the moaning dead and silenced them. Farmers and carpenters and tanners and herdsmen, they stood with their hands clenched tight around the handles and hilts of implements spattered with flesh and decay—hastily fashioned spears, shovels, hammers, fence posts, a few bronze blades. She looked out over their faces and knew that these men looked to her for judgment or affirmation, or for some vision from God to confirm what their hearts hoped—that their work was now done, and after these fires burned down and the sun rose over the smoke, they could return to their homes and rebuild and replant, and lie with their wives and give the People new children to replace the ones that had been lost. Devora saw in their eyes no contempt for her as a woman, only awe. She was the navi to them now, truly, the messenger of God, strange and terrible and holy and set apart. A sword in her hand. She wanted to laugh bitterly, for she had never felt less like the navi. She was covered in grime and sweat, her body was unclean from the touch of the dead, and her dress hung off one shoulder, torn and disheveled after her struggle with Omri and after the grasping hands of the corpses. Yet the men needed her now, and she didn’t know what to do. The tent of the Law was in tatters; the younger navi was dead. What was still holy? What still mattered?

  A few of the men around her began to chant, their loud, deep voices opposed to the darkness and filth of the night and the work ahead of them:

  Urai! Urai! Devora!

  Arise! Arise! Devora!

  You have shielded your people,

  You have cut apart the foe,

  You have taken earth and sky from him,

  Urai! Urai! Devora! Arise, arise!

  They chanted Devora’s name, and she listened but could not speak. She lifted her blade high, though her arm ached from the weight of it. They needed her. Yet she knew she had to tell them that their work had not ended, that there were more dead to come. And how was she to do that? If Naomi the Old stood here in her place, she would have had something sharp and strong to say that would put hearts of hard stone into the men’s chests and stiffen them against what must come. But she was not Naomi the Old. She was only Devora the Old. And she was unclean.

  The men who were chanting fell silent. For others were emerging now from the barley and the smoke, and these others were sunken-eyed and wasted thin and carried no weapons. Exiles in their own land, these last refugees from Walls had lost their homes, their kin, their ability to sleep or sing. Their haggard faces were haunted by an anguish greater than any Devora had ever seen. Yet their ordeal had only begun. It would not end. Even if the thousands of dead coming down out of White Cedars were stilled and buried, for these men and women it would never be over.

  We will find those who still breathe, Zadok had told her, but we will find no survivors.

  One of them—a woman Devora’s own age, but so thin—reached and clutched at her skirt, and she found she could not look away from the demand in the woman’s eyes, a demand made without hope but with only the utter necessity of hearing its answer.

  “Yes,” Devora said hoarsely. “I have been to Walls.” In those few words, in her tone, in her eyes was everything she had to say and couldn’t. The deaths of the children. The ash in the air. The line of silent cairns by the lakeshore.

  The old woman let out her breath, and something seemed to flicker out in her eyes. She understood.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Devora whispered.

  “Night has fallen,” the old woman rasped.r />
  “Night’s already here.”

  “A blood moon,” the woman said, looking past Devora toward the sky. “When God turns his back.”

  Devora shivered, then reached down for the woman’s hand and clutched it tightly. The navi was unclean. Perhaps the woman was too. It no longer mattered. “You listen to me,” Devora whispered fiercely, leaning close enough for the other woman to hear her. “You listen. God has not turned his back. I promise you. He will lift this blight from the land. He will. Tonight is a sign of it. If we do not lie down and die, he will lift the blight.”

  “A few seedlings may grow out of these ashes,” the old woman murmured. “But I am old, so old. I have no seeds. Why should I stand like an old tree in an empty field?”

  “Who else will give the seedlings shade?” Devora asked.

  The woman laughed. It was not a bitter laugh, only a very tired one. “I am going home,” she said, and she turned from Shomar and began walking across the dying field with small, painful steps. Devora watched her go, in anguish.

  One by one, the other refugees followed her.

  The men of Barak’s camp fell silent, then set down their burdens and parted to let the exiles pass. The starving men and women walked south along the riverbank, back toward the camp, back toward Walls. They stumbled away under the red moonlight, exhausted, spent, the ghost of a people. Perhaps they would make it to the camp and collapse, and those of Barak’s men who had lacked the courage to march tonight against the unclean dead would creep from their tents and bring food and water to these, the barely living. Or perhaps they would not stop. Perhaps they would go on walking, with those same slow, anguished steps. They would walk through the night and on into the next day and on until they came at last to the cinders and ash and the few standing houses and shops that had been Walls. Perhaps they would not stop even then, but would go on, down out of the hills and down the whole length of the promised land, following the steps of Hurriya before them, a silent witness to the violence and the misery in the north. They might pass through the entire land, past Hebrews and heathen who had never seen the dead and who would watch them with wide eyes, uncomprehending yet unable to look away. They might pass out of the green fields into the wide desert and come at last even to the dark earth and the high monuments of Kemet itself, the land of their fathers’ slavery, as though to say with their shambling gait and their sunken eyes and their slack, thirsting mouths, The People who went out from here have perished; only we have come back. Perhaps even then they would keep walking, until they died on their feet and their emptied corpses still moved slowly over the wide earth, moaning their anguish, their grief, their hunger for all that was lost.