Strangers in the Land

by Stant Litore

  SH’MA YISRAEL

  THE MOON must have set and the fire must have died down again to coals, for no light fell now on the dead face, and the dark within the tent became oppressive. Barak didn’t know how long he’d sat there. He was numb inside, hollowed out. He tried to recall the comfort he’d felt when the mists rose over the water, the nearness of a God who did not loathe him, a God who might nourish him. He got to his feet and stumbled toward the door of the tent. He had to get back to his camp, his men. It did not matter how bruised and overcome he felt or what kind of God might heal him. There was work to be done and no one else to do it.

  He pulled the flap aside, then caught his breath. A figure was standing there in the dark, a little shorter than he was. It must have been listening right at the door of the tent. Even as Barak realized it was there, the corpse grabbed his wrist in its hands, lifting Barak’s hand toward its lips and ducking its head, biting quickly. The pain was deep and sharp. Barak roared and tried to pull his hand back, but he only pulled the corpse with him.

  With a shout, he turned and pulled the corpse toward the fire pit and slammed it down on the ground, crushing its chest down with his knee. The unclean thing held his wrist tightly, kept tearing at his hand with its teeth. Screaming from the pain, Barak took up one of the fist-sized stones from their ring around the fire pit, and he brought the stone down on the corpse’s skull. And again. And again. Its snarling fell silent, and the thing grew still, one side of its head flattened. Its dead eyes did not change; it simply stopped moving.

  Panting, his back bathed in cold sweat, Barak dropped the stone and grasped its fingers, breaking two of them as he pulled its hand free of his wrist. Then he tore his hand from its jaws, leaving some of his flesh between its teeth. His face gone the color of maggots, Barak fell back on his rear and sat there by the corpse, gasping. He caught a glimpse of its face; the left side of its face had been chewed almost entirely away. The right side had been the face of a youth, no more than a boy—doubtless the boy Anath had mentioned, the one left to watch Heber’s camp, the one she thought was gone. Barak groaned and leaned back, lightheaded; he glimpsed the stars high above his head. His hand and his arm were pulsing, and he lifted his hand before his eyes, stared at the red gash where a chunk of flesh had been torn free; he supposed that piece of him was still held in the dead boy’s mouth. For a long moment he stared at his hand. Then he began laughing, shaking his head and laughing, as the blood poured down his hand from the bite and ran warm along the length of his arm. It was all too strange, and life too fragile a thing to understand. He kept laughing quietly until he felt too weak to. Then his vision went gray.

  Barak heard the sound of sticks cracking and opened his eyes. It was a moment before he could focus. His face felt dry and hot, and his insides were baking. There was coarse cloth wound about his hand. His heart lurched; he could see a human form sitting in the dark by the cold fire pit. Barak was on his back near the pit. The figure glanced at him, and in the dim starlight he recognized her graying hair and the flash of her eyes.

  “Navi,” he murmured. Not one of the dead.

  “You’ve been bitten,” Devora said. Her tone one of cold resolution. She was taking up sticks from a little pile she must have gathered while he lay senseless. She cracked the sticks and arranged a little tent of them over the coals.

  Barak lifted his hand, saw that it was swollen and dark. He laughed quietly, then coughed from the pain the laugh brought him.

  “Some days a woman can only save one life,” Devora said. “The old navi tried to teach me that, Barak, but I didn’t understand. I do now. When you save one life—when you keep Covenant and save even one life—you save the People.” She paused. “I am sorry I was too late to save yours.”

  Barak just breathed for a few moments. He didn’t know why he’d thought he was baking; now he shivered with the greatest cold he had ever known. “Stay with me,” he rasped.

  Her eyes gazed down on him, unreadable as ever. “I will,” she said.

  All about him were the raiders’ tents and the leaves of the oaks dark against the sky. He yearned for his own vineyard—to die beneath his own vines, amid the scent of grapes and growing things. But his vineyard was already gone; it had died without him, and he was left here lingering in fever like a last cutting from it tossed aside to wither on its own. He kept watching the oak leaves and listening to the quiet fire. He had imagined dying at a spear’s thrust or of old age, not of the bite of the dead on strange soil. But the navi was here, waiting while he died. She would raise a cairn over him. He would be remembered. He took comfort in that.

  “I felt the shekinah,” he whispered. “It rose over the water. And God was neither judge nor wife to me. I do not know what God is.”

  “You were feverish,” Devora murmured.

  “No.” He shook his head, panting. “This was—before. We think we know what God is, but she is entirely strange to us. Stranger than the land, stranger than the heathen. We lie to ourselves when we say we know God, when we judge God or fear God or speak of God. Maybe God can be loved, as the priests do. I don’t know what God is anymore.” He shook from the cold, and his teeth chattered, but he forced the words out. “God gives and takes away. Blessed be the name of God.”

  “Selah,” the navi whispered. Always.

  He felt the touch of a waterskin to his lips, drank a little, choked and spluttered most of it up.

  “The dead,” he rasped after a few moments, his throat sore and violent. “Must put them all—beneath cairns. God has not forsaken the land.”

  “He has forsaken only his navi,” Devora said. “No visions come. No seed I’ve planted has borne fruit.” She gave a small, bitter laugh. “Nor any seed planted in me.” She was quiet a moment. “I violated the Covenant. I killed my mother, twice. Now my daughter too. There is no longer any way to keep the Law. God has forsaken me, Barak. If he has appeared in some way to you, I am glad for you. But all my joy is gone, and all my hope.”

  “Not all,” Barak rasped. “Your girl—the Canaanite. Found her sister. Alive.” He was finding it difficult now to speak, his throat was so dry.

  Devora glanced at him sharply, then her eyes softened. “Oh, Hurriya,” she whispered, then said nothing more.

  Barak coughed a little, then gazed past the oak branches, at the sky. At those same distant stars he’d seen from the bottom of the Tumbling Water’s ravine. He barely heard Devora’s words. He was just focused on those bright stars. His body kept shivering, but he felt again the warm touch of that holy presence in his heart. He was glad there were no sandals on his feet. He wished Hadassah were here, and even her mother, whom he’d sent away to Refuge when the dead came. But especially Hadassah. The things he would tell her. He would hold her, kiss her, and have her, if there was no other way for him to tell her, if he could find no words. All the deeds of his life seemed suddenly trivial to him, but this brought him no despair, only a yearning to hold Hadassah in his arms again, to feel her warm belly swollen with life. And a skin of clear water in his hand to share with her.

  “Didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell the girl about Hurriya,” he said.

  There was silence for a while.

  “I’m glad,” the navi replied at last. “Where is she now?”

  “She rode away. Toward the sea, where it’s still safe. She was so hopeful. So beautiful.”

  “Thank you for telling me that.” The navi’s voice was softer. Even a little vulnerable.

  Barak could feel himself slipping beneath the fever. Everything blurring, even himself. He closed his eyes. “Navi, tell me the stories of our People. I want to hear them.”

  He felt a damp cloth against his brow. Then Devora’s voice, cool and calm in the heated dark. He caught the stories in bits and pieces, moving between waking and sleep, between the world that is real and the world that isn’t. But it didn’t matter. He knew all the stories. His grandfather had given them to him when he sat between the old man’s knees as a child. It
was a comfort, though, to hear them again. To call them to mind. All these stories that made him more than just a vintner and more than just a man who carried a spear whom other men were willing to follow. More than just a man who lay dying. The stories made him one of the People, who would never die.

  Devora’s low voice told of his fathers Tubal Qayin, who first discovered the shaping of metal, and Yubal, who made the first music so that the malakhim themselves came out of the sky to listen. And Yabal, who began the keeping of sheep and goats, the herding of cattle, the pitching of tents. He heard of the brothers Qayin and Hebel—how Hebel was beaten across the head with a great stick, then thrown into a narrow ravine, there to starve until he died. How he rose to his feet some days later, hungering and rotting, until he found and devoured his brother.

  Devora told of how the dead filled the land, every land, until God looked down on the hunger and the violence in the earth and was grieved. How a vintner like himself—a man with a wife and three sons, who enjoyed wine as much as any Canaanite—had built a great box of wood, an Ark. Not to carry stone tablets but to carry human lives, which to God’s eyes were no less sacred. Rains fell while Barak ben Abinoam tossed in his fever. Rains fell, and the parched and hungry earth drank them until it could hold no more water and vomited the water back up, and there was mud, then flooding, then a great sea that drowned everything beneath it, and the dead floated in the sea moaning. Waves drove the corpses against the sides of the Ark, and their decomposing hands beat upon the wood. How terrible for the few living hiding within—to hear the thunder and the fury of rain on their roof and the slamming of many hands against their walls. And always the moaning, louder than rain or wind, the ceaseless voices of the dead.

  “God overwhelms us,” Barak rasped, interrupting the tale. “Whatever we do, God is too vast, too deep. I wanted to command God, as I might command a woman.” Barak moistened his lips with his tongue; it was so difficult to speak.

  “You should lie quiet, chieftain of Israel.” Devora’s voice, unexpectedly, held concern. “The fever is burning you up.”

  “God is like—like the land,” Barak whispered. “You can cultivate the land. You can grow fine things on it. You cannot command it or control it or say, Bring me a fine harvest. You have to work it. God is like that. I didn’t understand.”

  He lay shaking for a few moments, unsure if he was speaking to the navi or to Hadassah or to Hadassah’s mother. There was a woman here, he knew that much. “I am sorry I burned your gods.” His whisper almost too quiet to hear. “I thought I could hold God to her promises. But the land makes us no promises. There are no promises.”

  “There are promises,” Devora said sharply.

  “I am sorry,” he breathed, not heeding her. “Sorry I tried to take the Ark. That I sent Nimri.”

  She looked at him dispassionately.

  “Laban,” Devora said after a moment, “would have been the better choice. You should’ve sent Laban. He might have talked Shiloh into it.”

  No time left. He lifted his eyes, hoping to see that mist between him and the stars. There was nothing. Yet he knew—knew the God of his fathers was near. He was not afraid. Not anymore.

  “Sh’ma—” He had to stop. His voice was but a dry croak. He tried to wet his lips, tried to swallow. There was nothing. Then the rush of cool water over his lips and into his mouth, like water from the rock in the desert. Someone was leaning over him, between him and the stars. Someone was pouring water into his mouth. He swallowed, and again, until the water stopped.

  “Sh’ma!” he gasped. “Sh’ma Yisrael adonai eloheinu, adonai echad...”

  Then the heat in him was too fierce for words and he moaned as he slid into the grip of it, burning, burning, nothing left but the fire. Breathing was too great an effort when his throat and his insides were so scorched, so after a while he stopped doing it.

  DEVORA’S VIGIL

  IT TOOK Devora a long time to gather the stones. The windstorm had returned to her heart. When she closed her eyes, meaning to rest for only a moment, she would see her mother’s face or the contorted face of Hurriya’s infant. She’d hear Heber’s words. Thousands, thousands in White Cedars. Then she would jerk awake with a gasp and move on to gather more stones. There was no rest for her in sleep, no safety. There would probably never be.

  Gritting her teeth, she lifted the last great rock to the top of the second cairn (for she’d buried the slave boy first, then Barak), letting the stone fall with a hoarse cry. Then she leaned on the pile of stones, panting. Her eyes stung with salt; in that moment, remembering how Zadok had once placed the stone at the top for her, Devora felt Zadok’s loss keenly.

  All the strength left her limbs, and she wept for a while. It wasn’t that here, alone, she could afford to, but that here, at the utter limit of her strength, she could no longer hold any of it back. The winds within shook and battered her like an old tree in some violence of the air out of the desert. She had raised so many cairns. In a few generations, the stones of these two new cairns would topple or crumble or be overgrown with weeds, and those lying beneath them would be forgotten by all but God. With terrible clarity Devora grasped that the tribes were a transient People, whatever promises they clung to. Transient not only because they lived in tents or remembered living in tents, but because all peoples are transient, and once they move on, the land does not long remember them, even if God does. Even the Canaanites’ walls and cedar houses were a transient thing, a vanity. Canaanite, Hebrew, living and dead, they were all strangers in a strange land.

  A hasty search of the tents and belongings of the raiders revealed little of use to her—a little bread, a few empty waterskins, many items of luxury that a Canaanite might enjoy but that she refused to, and a corpse, another corpse for her to bury. But she did find one thing she took—a small bag sewn from a goat’s bladder, full of small things that clacked together as she lifted the bag and set it by the fire pit. Not coins, but smooth, polished river stones, not yet engraved with any names. She went to sit with her back against Barak’s cairn and emptied the bag of stones between her feet. They were beautiful, not as gems are but as stones are when the river has kissed them, and they were many colors. After a moment she picked out one that was a pallid white like the moon grown old, and another that was dark like Shomar’s eyes. She held them both in her right palm. Her hand was unclean; perhaps the stones would bring her no true sign. Yet perhaps soon no one’s hands would be clean.

  “You showed Barak Hurriya’s sister,” Devora whispered to God. “She lost everything, even her child. But her sister lives. That has to mean something.

  “You gave me an answer in Shiloh. I ask for another. Does your hand still cover the People?”

  She cast the stones.

  In the quiet that followed, she sat with the cairn at her back and looked at a sky so full of stars that it made her eyes ache. She still held the dark urim, the “yes” stone, in her hand. She recalled her words to Hurriya by the shore of the lake. In the silence of God, I must act as though he is not silent.

  Yet perhaps God had not truly been silent at all. He had sent visions to her through the Canaanite, had spoken to her through Hurriya. Devora had been bewildered—what message was it that only Hurriya, only a Canaanite, could bring to the People? Now she realized that Hurriya herself had been the sign, the message. Some part of her had known this since Walls, since tossing that flaming torch into the house of the dead.

  No. Some deep part of her had known it earlier than that. She’d known it from the moment she had seen Hurriya struggling her way up the hill toward the olive tree, naked within her salmah, bruised, carrying the half-eaten remains of her child. Even then, Hurriya’s presence at the olive tree had been a message, a demand for justice, for the strangers in the land no less than for those born in the tents of the People. And the suggestion that even tribes who were strange to each other could teach one another something about preserving life and withstanding the unclean dead, something about
God. That even a woman who did not know the Law, a woman who feared the Law, might teach an older navi more about the nature and the demand of the Law than she had ever before known.

  Hurriya had delivered her message. She had done so merely by suffering in Shomar’s saddle and by speaking of her grief and anger. And by dying with her hand clasped in Devora’s own.

  Devora glanced at the stars. She had to believe that God was still watching. That the tent of the Law still covered the land. Otherwise why had Hurriya had visions, and why had her longing for her sister’s safety been answered? Why had the urim stopped rolling before the thummim? Why was Devora herself still breathing?

  Devora leaned her head back and breathed deeply for a few moments. She could not stay here, but she could not stand yet; the grief was too violent within her. After a while she took up a small rock with a jagged edge from beside the fire pit and began to carve hard, deep Hebrew letters into the river stones, one after the other, while she sang the Words of Going hoarsely. She did not sing for Barak only, and his name was not the last that she carved into the stones. She carved Zadok, on a stone the color of fertile earth, and Naomi, on a stone the color of the sky. Then Hurriya, on a stone whose purple hue, though faint, suggested blossoms of heather. Her grief choked her voice when she carved the letters of that strange, Canaanite name that had become so dear to her. The thought of Hurriya’s sister riding somewhere in these hills comforted her a little, enough that she could carve the letters without her hand trembling; something of Hurriya still lived.

  Devora took her time, making sure the letters were well-carved and deep.

  The last stone was simply Am, mother.

  She wished for needle and thread, some means to sew the stones into the shoulders or the sleeves of her garment—for that was how levites carried name-stones, even as the high priest carried the names of the tribes in his breast-piece—but having neither, she settled for taking up the empty goat-bladder bag. But she did not put the five stones away immediately. Instead, she sat looking at them, reading the names again and again; she put them away, one after the other, until only Am remained. She could hear Naomi’s words: