No Lasting Burial

by Stant Litore

  “Why didn’t you come back?” he asked, more softly.

  Kana’s face darkened with shame. “At first, Barabba kept me bound in a cave, and men came—” He paused, then glanced at the young woman in the stern huddled beneath Koach’s water-coat, the coat that had been Yonah’s. Kana stared at her for a long moment, and then, as if deciding suddenly that if a woman who had seen horrors could bring herself to sing then he could at least speak, he went on. “Men with blood on their hands,” he said. “Not that you could see it, but you could smell it. They came to the cave and spoke with me, one night and then another and another. Told me what Barabba was doing in the land. Not his plans, but their effect. And stories of what Rome was doing. In the long days in the cool of that cave, bound and naked, I craved their return, their words. I can’t explain it to you.” His right hand trembled; he stilled it, and his face became distant, the secrets of his heart buried deep, drifting like restless corpses far below the reflective surface of his eyes.

  “They took everything from me. My coat, my strength. I was thirsty and weak and shaking when the nights came. But they left me with the shofar, at least.” His fingers touched the ram’s horn where it hung at his breast. “And then, when I thought I would live the rest of my life in that hole in the rock, Barabba came to me. He looked bigger, somehow. He said, I need men who will blow the shofar even in the streets of Yerushalayim itself. The dead and the Romans alike will devour us all, if I haven’t such men.” Kana was silent a moment, and then he glanced not at any of his kin but at Yeshua, the stranger. “He took me there. To Yerushalayim. Showed me how our People suffered. Not in Kfar Nahum, not in Natzeret, not in any ruined village of our land, but there, in the very heart of the land God promised us, where people rot where they stand and the moaning fills every street and our people die between the cold stares of the priests and the Roman walls.” His voice went hard and cold. “You don’t know what it is like. You can’t know. What it’s like in Yerushalayim.”

  “I know,” Yeshua said, his eyes unfocused as though he were listening to distant voices.

  And then Kana’s control crumpled.

  The anguish in his face. Shimon swallowed. He wondered if his own face had looked that way, sometimes.

  “You don’t have to tell us anymore,” Shimon said. “You are home.” He took a hard pull at the oar.

  “Home.” Kana gave a small laugh, hardly more than a breath. “I haven’t been home in fifteen years. Since that night. I am an outsider, in my own town.”

  “We’ve all been that,” Shimon murmured.

  Kana nodded, took a breath. “I fought for him for a while. After what I’d seen. Because I had seen, and I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t just run back here or steal some Roman’s horse. Not after what I’d seen. So I stood before Barabba in the hills and he put the sica in my hands. The very knife he’d used to cut my bonds. And I made the first of these.” He brushed his hand over the cuts on his arm, his face still raw with emotion. “I fought with him. Killed. But—” He struggled a moment. “There was a … a woman, and her husband, their daughter. Roman. The man was some petty official under Pontius Pilate. It was … a test. So Barabba would know if each of us could do what had to be done, if we were in truth to rise against Rome and drive the Romans back to the sea. There were four of us, we went into that city. I haven’t seen the other three since, because I left that night and kept moving until I reached this shore.” He met Shimon’s eyes, and Shimon wanted to look away from the pain there, but he couldn’t. “That family, that Roman family, was given into my hand. I was to kill them. In the night, as they slept. With the sica I carried. All three, Barabba said, and any slaves in the house.” He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. When he continued, his voice was hoarse. “I thought I could do it, Shimon. I thought: they were Roman. I could do it. I was in their house, I was standing over their daughter’s bed. The sica in my hand. And I … I couldn’t. She was young. I just kept thinking of the dead I’d seen. And Ahava, my betrothed. I hadn’t thought of her in so long. Do you remember her, Shimon?”

  He nodded, though he had rarely spoken with her as a boy. She had been tall for a girl, he remembered that, and she used to sneeze tiny sneezes that sounded like laughter.

  “Now I see her, every night. Every time I close my eyes.” Kana looked away, his voice unsteady. “I couldn’t do it. We can be torn from our lives so easily. Can be left grasping and moaning for what we’ve lost. All my life I have loathed and feared the dead, and now I don’t.”

  “I fear the dead,” Bar Cheleph muttered.

  Kana said, “I pity them.”

  For a moment there was only the splash of the oars, the chop of the waves against the boat, the duck and roll of their path out onto the uneasy sea.

  As he heaved hard on the oar, Shimon glanced at the navi. His eyes widened.

  The stranger rested in the crook of the prow, his shoulders against either gunwale. His head was bowed almost between his knees, as though he was at the end of his strength after facing the living and the dead. Heedless of the roughness of the sea.

  He was asleep.

  SKY FULL OF DARK

  It was day but the sky darkened, clouds piling onto and over each other, the wind whipping the waves into white fury, until the boat ducked and spun. The storm came on quickly, relentless, as though whatever shedim shrieked over the sea meant to crush this fragile boat carrying Israel’s navi out over the water.

  The boat tossed and heaved, and the hue of Bar Cheleph’s face went green, though the pitching of their craft did not wake Yeshua. The silent woman drew her coat over herself, looking very small in the stern, a bundle someone had tossed there and forgotten. Koach, who had listened pensively to Kana’s story, went to sit by her, his good hand resting on her shoulder.

  Rahel, who had been out on the water only once in her life, stood straight on her bench at the stern, her face cold and controlled; if she felt ill, she revealed no sign of it. At last, she reached grimly for the rope that waited, coiled, beneath her bench. She took it up in her hands and, bending, she reached for the silent woman’s ankle. The woman gasped and drew back.

  Koach touched her shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said softly by her ear.

  “You’re thinking the boat may sink.” Rahel gave the younger woman a stern look. “If the boat sinks on this sea, none of us will see the shore.”

  The girl gazed at the chop and surge of the waves, and shivered. Koach squeezed her shoulder, and she gave a small nod. Rahel’s lips compressed into a thin line; she bent again, took a firm hold on the younger woman’s ankle, tied a loop around it. The other end she fastened to one of the iron hooks set in the bottom of the boat, hooks meant to secure items against a storm.

  “Bat Eleazar is right,” Yakob said. He took up another coil, and began cutting lengths and passing rope to each of those in the boat.

  Rahel fastened a harness of rope about her own waist, and then Koach’s. For a moment he sat quietly while her small, sure hands knotted the rope. His face burned. It was embarrassing to be seen cared for in this way; though she had helped him dress each morning, that had been in the privacy of their house, before no other eyes. Yet it would be more humiliating by far to be seen fumbling one-handed with the rope himself, laboring with careful attention at a task that any of the other men in the boat would have found simple. He especially didn’t want the woman in his father’s coat to see that.

  With a pang of sorrow, he recalled standing naked on the rooftop, with Tamar’s gaze on his body, his every weakness visible to her. He blinked quickly to make the world less moist and blurry. Maybe he would never again feel so safe with any woman. Or maybe he would. He didn’t know.

  “Are you all right, son?” Rahel whispered.

  “No,” he said. He took her hand, stilling its work at the rope. “No more hiding. I’ll do this, mother.” His name must be a lie no longer.

  Rahel searched his face. Then her eyes filled with both pain and prid
e. Biting her lip, she nodded slightly and backed away.

  While Koach wrestled awkwardly with knotting the rope, Rahel took up one of the curved wooden blades that the fishers used for bailing from its place in the bottom of the boat, holding it ready in her hand. Kana relieved Yakob at the oar, and Yohanna tried to relieve Shimon, but Koach’s older brother gave a firm shake of his head and heaved at the oar, though his shoulders were tensed as though they ached. His face was set, as though he were hunting something over that water and would not give up the chase, not though the day ended and the world grew dark.

  But in fact it was not yet noon.

  The beggar woman looked away from the growl of the sea, and after a moment she pressed her fingertips to Koach’s tunic, at his shoulder. He glanced at her, his face twisted in the effort it took not to cry.

  “Miriam,” she whispered.

  He looked at her. The others did also.

  It became very quiet in the boat.

  “Miriam.” She was pale, her face twisted in anxiety, and she held his gaze, her hand at his arm, as though they were siblings or lovers. Her eyes shone with her reawakened desire to speak, to be known.

  “Miriam,” Koach repeated.

  “My name. It’s … my name. Miriam bat Elisa. From Tower. From Magdala.”

  Koach stared at her a moment. She had been silent so long; now the giving of her name seemed a gift of great trust. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  Miriam’s eyes were serious. “I am afraid.” Her voice was halting, betraying how unaccustomed she was to making words rather than hearing them. “Father. Mother. They were eaten. In our house in Magdala. When I lost my words.” She moved her hands as she spoke, touching her belly when she said eaten and placing her fingers at her throat when speaking of her long silence. Her eyes moistened as she searched Koach’s face, then the others’ faces, though whether she was pleading for empathy or forgiveness or only an acknowledgment of kinship, they could not have said—only that her eyes demanded some response. Seeing their own faces reflected in her eyes, they each saw the smallness of how they had treated her and others like her.

  Koach took her hand and gripped it. After a moment, he felt her fingers curl around his and grip back.

  “Need to be here,” she said, her voice so soft it was almost lost in the cry of the wind. Her hair blew about her face. “Need to see. Need to … not be afraid.”

  “Shimon bar Yonah,” Kana interrupted. He was staring up at the wild growl of the sky.

  “I know,” Shimon said, loudly over the wind.

  A moment before, the wind had been only the first roar of a gale; now it was tempest, now it was the sky ready to tear their boat apart. The waves became walls that rose and crashed, and the boat pitched violently.

  The others roped themselves quickly to the iron hooks. Yakob and Yohanna secured the mast and its small sail; Shimon slid the oars under the benches by the fishing spears. He should have tied them down also; they would be no use in this storm, which could only be ridden out, not argued with. But Koach saw the whites of his brother’s eyes and knew his brother did not want to be without spear or oar, something he could lift in his hands.

  “He still sleeps,” Rahel shouted.

  Koach looked and saw that it was true; the man from Natzeret’s face, which had been pale, was now ashen, and his bruises were dark shadows—as though this was not sleep but the first touch of death. Koach shuddered.

  Then the storm buried the last of the light out of the sky, as though a lamp had been covered with earth, and Yeshua was only a silhouette. They all were. What light remained was ghostly, showing the white edges of the waves. Koach’s hand tightened about Miriam’s fingers. She squeezed his hand again. Yet he didn’t know if she meant to seek comfort or to give it. He felt her pressed to his left side, and he wished that he might put his arm about her, but he would not let go of her hand.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he kept whispering. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.”

  “They’re coming,” Shimon shouted.

  The water frothed—not just from the storm but from what was coming up with the storm. Koach gazed over the gunwale into the crashing dark, a small noise of fear in his throat. The sea was full of faces, and there was moaning in his ears that was not wind.

  SILENCE OVER THE WATER

  The dead were rising—not just one, not just a few.

  All.

  They surged and fell back, white as foam on the waves. Already some of the corpses were driven against the boat, their hands beating the hull as the waterborne dead had beat at the sides of the Ark in the old story.

  The sky was dark like the ending of the world, and the air and the sea were black. There was only the dull sheen of their eyes and their silhouettes against the water. And the moaning, a sound that merged with the wind to become the wailing of all the shedim that had ever hunted in the lonely places of a broken land.

  Koach and all the others and their entire town were but a tiny boat, a chip of wood on the wild thunder of the sea, and so many pale hands out of the past were grasping that fragile chip to drag it beneath the waters. These were the old dead, thrown into the sea fifteen years before. The cords about their wrists had parted long since, and their bodies were bloated with water. Some were without eyes or face, sea-eaten. The waterlogged flesh peeled back from their fingertips even as they grasped the gunwale. Their weight began to pull the boat down, down, into the dark, the water sloshing over the side. More of the white dead climbed over those first corpses, clambering over their backs to get at the warm life in the boat. The reek of them was stronger than the smell of the sea, covering that ancient scent the way slick, sickly oil covers the surface of the water. Miriam screamed, shrill and piercing over the moans of the dead, and Koach found he was screaming with her. He had only one hand, only one; he let hers go and snatched up the cold metal of a fishing spear to defend her, and himself, and his kin.

  A horn call rang out, clear and deep, a challenge to sky and sea and everything within them. Those few notes, music raised in defiance of the dead like the voice of all the living deepened and strengthened. The sound woke the others from their horror.

  Kana let the shofar fall from his lips. Then they were all on their feet, taking up hook, oar, or net, whatever they could grab. One of the dead, fat as though it had swallowed the sea, came up over those clutching at the gunwale and slipped into the boat, sliding into the bottom on its belly like a swollen fish, spewing water from its mouth. Shrieking, Rahel threw a net over it. Koach leapt onto its back and drove a fish hook, one-handed, down into the back of its skull. Vaguely, Koach recalled Yeshua’s words about the dead, but in this darkness on the sea with the dead surging into the boat, he had no faith in his ability or anyone else’s to stare the dead in the eyes. His insides were cold and weak with panic. As the corpse beneath him went still, he caught glimpses in the dark, all around him: Yakob and Yohanna thrusting the points of the other two fish hooks into the shoulders and faces of the dead with little effect. Kana with his sica, the pale sheen of it, driving it up through a corpse’s chin, and then another, implacable as the malakh ha-mavet, the angel of death. Each of the corpses jerking once, then going still. Rahel beside him, with a knife out, slashing across the fingers of the dead, cutting away their grip on the boat, so that the dead slid back, pulled down by the grasping hands of those surging up behind them. Water rushed in over the stern. Then the boat righted itself, barely. Miriam took up one of the heavy nets, and Shimon lent his strength; they cast it out over the dead, entangling several.

  Lightning, sharp against the eyes, revealed for one frantic heartbeat all the dead in the water, all of them climbing over each other toward the boat, all of them surging on the wildness of the waves. Koach saw one of the dead half over the other gunwale, its hands gripping Bar Cheleph’s storm coat. Even as Bar Cheleph struggled, flailing, to shrug away the garment, another corpse climbed up over the first, its fingers gripping the first corpse’s face, diggin
g into its left cheek and its right eye, hissing as it fought for purchase. Koach screeched like one of the dead himself. Stepping to the side of that man who had once assailed him and beaten him to the grass, he brought the fish hook down and sliced neatly through one of the dead wrists clutching Bar Cheleph’s coat, half-severing it. The fingers slackened, and Bar Cheleph pulled his coat free of the thing’s other hand and fell across the boat, shouting wordlessly, his eyes white. But the corpse grabbed Koach’s spear with its good hand and moaned. The weight of the corpse behind it pulled it back, and both slid down into that water teeming with pale bodies, pulling Koach over the side.

  With a cry, Koach released the spear, but too late, he’d been pulled right over the gunwale toward all those faces beneath him, all those faces white as rotting fish, their mouths gaping. The rope harness about his chest went taut; their fingers brushed his arm, his hair, and he screamed. Then something pulled him back, something had his belt and he was yanked fiercely back into the boat. Then Bar Cheleph’s arm was around him. Koach screamed and screamed, kicking wildly as the dead came up over the gunwale after him. A flash of lightning, and there, stark against the shadows, a corpse with only one eye, its belly balanced on the brink of the boat, its legs in the water, its hands reaching for him.

  The blade of an oar smacked into its face, hard, the sound of the blow lost in thunder that cracked the roof of the sky. Shimon stood there, bellowing against wind and storm, sudden rain lashing his face and hair.

  That thunder had been right above Shimon’s head, so loud it must have cracked open the world and all the water would now pour out. And it had cracked open time, for Shimon stood with his oar raised, gripped in gloved hands, the rain sharp against his face, and before that oar came swinging down, he stood in a single moment that held an eternity of thought and terror. Then a flash of lightning, the whole world light and dark; as Shimon brought the oar down, his heart wild in his chest, for an instant he could see the others in the boat, all their terrified faces, all of them about to die together. The woman from Tower, weeping as she bent to haul up another net, with Yohanna stooping to aid her in Shimon’s place; Rahel driving her knife into a corpse’s brow even as it clutched at her left breast like some nightmarish lover, seeking some hold to pull her toward its teeth; Yakob swinging the point of his spear hard against the grasping hands, breaking fingers; Kana wrestling with one corpse that had grappled his knife arm, then tossing the knife deftly to his left hand and sliding it up beneath the corpse’s chin and through its head as though it were made of butter and not flesh and bone. Bar Cheleph falling back into the bottom of the boat, clutching Koach to him with one arm, Koach’s rope tangled about his legs. And Yeshua, still, silent, seated in the bow, his face stark like a skull’s in that flash of wild light.