No Lasting Burial (11 page)

The
thing’s jaw was open in gaping, eternal hunger, its eyes sightless. Gazing down
at it now, Shimon felt none of the rage that had surged in him, hot and
violent, when he’d defended his nets on the sea. Only dread, cold in his belly.
One thing to encounter the dead out on the sea, or in the
dark waters of the dream country. Quite another to see
one wash up on his shore.

It
seemed to him that if he were to take his eyes from the corpse for even a
moment, its hands might twitch and it might lurch again to its feet.

But
it didn’t move.

The
corpse just lay there on the shingle like a stain of blood on a garment, one
that could never be cleansed, never be entirely hidden or forgotten.

“El
Shaddai,” Shimon whispered, stepping back. There had always been one or two
that would walk out of the waves and feed on the vagrants under the boats until
they were discovered and stoned. But there had been three already this year.

And then this.

He
tore his gaze from the dead thing and looked out at the cold waves, at that sea
older than humanity that could hold so many dead concealed within it. The dread
in his belly hardened, like a heavy stone to crush him to his knees.

The
stranger was pale. “That … that’s what you were beating at, with spear and
oar, when you stood in your boat.”

“Didn’t
you hear them moan?” Shimon said.

“I
heard them moan,” the stranger said. “Every moment I’m awake, I hear them moan.
All the dead and all the living. Screaming
in my ears.” He let the rope fall from his hands and walked down to
crouch beside the corpse.

Torn
between watching the raving stranger and watching the corpse, Shimon stepped
near and took the net itself in his hands, his muscles bunching, pulling it
away from the hungry tide. For an instant the corpse dragged over the sand. The
stranger gripped the tattered remnants of its tunic in his hand as though to
pull it from the net, but the water-drenched garment peeled away from the
corpse like an old blister, leaving the stranger crouching with it in his hand
and the corpse dragging nakedly after Shimon, the sand sloughing some of its
skin away as though its skin were only a second and equally decayed garment.

The
stranger’s face was so full of pain that Shimon had to look away. He kicked the
corpse’s hand a few times, knocking it loose from the net. Then he left the
stranger and the corpse there, pulling the net with him, leaking fish. The
corpse would have to buried, in accordance with the Law—under earth or hard
rock, so the uncleanness of it wouldn’t spread to blight the plants that grow
in the open air. But that could wait until the fish were brought in. It would
have to.

Soon
the other nets were half up the shore. Shimon, Yakob, and Yohanna ran back to
gather up the spilled fish in their arms and carry those up, too, before the
tide could take them. They had to work fast. There were other boats approaching
the shore but still a ways out. Yakob ran to their own boat up above the
tideline, snatched out an oar and an armful of the sheaves of lake-weed for
binding the fish, then ran back. He tossed the sheaves
into the sand at the others’ feet, then veered and ran down the shore to a
great white rock that was always above the tide and could be seen from some
distance out. He leapt up on the rock and waved the oar, shouting at the far
boats. Out on the water, men stood up against the rock and sway of their craft
and called back to him, their voices thin in the dawn.

Yohanna
and Shimon opened the unbroken nets, and the fish rivered out onto the sand in
a flood of flashing scales. Still breathing hard, Shimon clapped Yohanna’s
shoulder. “Get help from the town. Bring bins, baskets, anything you have.”

“What
about him?” Yohanna nodded to the man still crouching at the water with that
garment in his hand.

“Never
mind him. Don’t you see the gulls? Be quick!” Overhead, the sky was filling
already with white birds, swooping down in wheeling circles, screaming their
hunger. Shimon’s blood roared in his ears. No time, no time.

“There
won’t be much help. We came back earlier than most,” Yohanna said.

“Then
bring the women!” Shimon roared. “We are
not
losing these fish! Not to
the dead. Not to the sea. And not to the birds. Get me
some hands!”

Yohanna
nodded, clapped Shimon’s shoulder in return, and then sprinted for the tideline
grass and the low, crumbling houses beyond. He was the fastest runner in Kfar
Nahum, a man with long legs as though he had Greek blood, but even if he had
been short and slow, Shimon would not have left the
nets himself.

Swiftly,
Shimon crouched beside one of the opened nets and began wrapping the fish in
sheaves of lake-weed. Even as he worked, the fish slick and wriggling in his
hands, the air about him filled with beating wings and hoarse shrieks, and the
gulls descended on him like the host of God. Some dove at Shimon’s face and he
beat them off with an arm; others settled on the nets or on the spill of fish
on the sand, digging in with their sharp beaks. Then Yakob leapt in front of
him and swung his oar about, slamming the hard wooden blade against the birds.
There was a grate of other boats on the shingle, and then running feet, and
other men sprang over the fish with oars in their hands.

A
man knelt by him; Shimon glanced to his side and saw the stranger, his eyes
still haunted. His dousing in the sea had washed away his stink but it could
not wash away his bruises or his desert-tangled hair. Shimon shrank back. The
stranger looked so much like one of the under-the-boat beggars, only he
moved
nothing like them. He took up a fish and wrapped it swiftly. His man’s hands
were free of rope burns and the straight scars that came of cuts from a slipped
fish knife, but they were calloused and rough. He was a man who worked with his
hands, then. Only not with fish. His feet were raw and
scarred and bare, as though he had walked long on this shore or in the hills
without sandals.

He
looked … unclean.

The
stranger reached for a second fish, and Shimon’s breath hissed in through his
teeth.

The
stranger stopped. Hurt flashed in his eyes, but he concealed it quickly.

His
own movements quick, tense, Shimon knotted a bit of
cord about a sheaf of fish, baring his teeth against the storm of feathers
about him.

“I’d
like to help,” the stranger said.

Shimon
ignored him. The stranger watched as he bound a few more musht. The scent of
the fish maddened Shimon’s belly; he yearned to abandon the nets and gather up
one armful of musht, just one, and run with them over the sand and through the
grasses to the stone fishers’ houses, to his mother and brother whom he’d often
left ravenous, as his father never,
ever
had. He longed to cry out at
the door for Rahel to light the firepit in the atrium. Or he might not even
gather up that armful, might not even leave the shore; he might lift the fish
raw to his teeth, even as he crouched here near the water.

The
stranger reached again for a fish—with his bruised, unclean hands—and Shimon
turned on him, his eyes fierce. “Stranger,” he said.

The
man crouched, very still. Watching him.

“Your
accent,” Shimon said roughly. “Are you half-Greek? From Many
Birds?”

“Natzeret. Both my parents
are Hebrew.”

Natzeret
was a small town high on the hill on the road west, above the Greek colony city
that the Hebrews called Tzippori, or Many Birds, because of the brightly feathered
creatures that the Greeks had brought from many parts of the world to sing
among the town’s well-watered trees and marble pillars.

“Those
bruises on your face, your arms …?”

“Stoning,”
the stranger said.

“What?”
Shimon shot him a look of horror. “What were you stoned for?” His voice was
little more than a gasp. This man might be a killer, or a seducer of men’s
wives, a blasphemer, or a witch.

“I
… I don’t know.” The stranger’s eyes were full of raw pain and
bewilderment.

That
was hardly reassuring.

“I’m
…” The man glanced down at the fish. “I’m having trouble, trouble
remembering. There are all these rooms, these rooms in my mind. Some have
people in them, people I’ve known, people I grew up with … mother, father,
brothers, priests, and weavers. Children running and laughing
and singing. And others are empty and cold, as though whoever was there
packed and left and is not there anymore. And there is one roo—” He took a
breath. “There is one room with a rug hung over the door,
and that room burns with light and I can’t see in.” The man looked away. “Maybe that’s where my … my missing memories are, Cephas.”

Shimon
swallowed. That was not the answer he’d expected. No sin confessed or evaded … only these mad words that made little sense.

The
man gazed fixedly at nothing. Perhaps he was walking through that house in his
mind, checking the empty rooms.

“The
gulls,” the stranger said. “And the tide. You don’t
have much time. May I help you?”

Shimon
tossed three more fish into a sheaf, bound it, and muttered, “Why do you call
me that?”

“Call
you what?”

Shimon
met his gaze, boldly, intending to stare him down. But the stranger’s own gaze
was intense, and for just a moment, Shimon thought he was gazing into a mirror,
a dark mirror, where he saw the inside of his heart and the inside of his gut
reflected, and everything he regretted and everything he’d given up. The
stranger’s gaze was direct and unguarded and piercing, uncaring that they were
strangers and might share no kin, uncaring that they might be different.

It
rattled him.

“Cephas,”
he muttered, trying to recover. “You keep calling me Cephas.”

The
stranger just looked at him.

“I
am Shimon bar Yonah.” The anger rose in his voice. “Everyone here knows my name
and my father’s. He was the greatest fisher on this sea. I am Shimon his son.”

“I
am Yeshua bar Yosef,” he said, “and I
know
you. You are Cephas, the
rock. We have met before. Or …” The man looked just past him, his eyes
going cold and clear, as though he were gazing far out over the wooded ridges
and high peaks of Ramat ha-Golan. “… Or we
will
meet. I know this,”
he whispered. “How do I know this? It’s your voice, isn’t it? I heard your
voice … when I was in the desert. I am certain of it. It was your voice.”

Shimon
watched Yeshua out of the corner of his eye. The desert.
If this ragged man had spent long nights out there,
alone
, in the
wilderness of the Essenes, where the wind screamed almost without cease and the
shedim
moaned in their hundreds on neglected battlefields, what
uncleanness might he have brought back with him or within him?

Yet,
whatever his misgivings, the tide was coming in. The
shrieking gulls were swooping low now in numbers that might be too much for
Yakob’s swinging of the oar to keep back. Shimon needed help, and quickly.
“Fine,” he said. “Whoever you are, help.”

The
stranger nodded and bent quickly to the work.

Other
boats slid up onto the shingle, escaping the night hunger of the sea. Men leapt
out, Mordecai and Natan El and others, bringing armfuls of lake-weed to use in
wrapping the fish. Some ran to stand sentinel with Yakob, oars lifted in
challenge to the screaming gulls. One—Natan El—began searching the shoreline
for stones large enough for a cairn, to bury the corpse they’d dragged up. The
water had destroyed the thing’s face, and it was impossible to tell who that
corpse had been, whose kin. No tomb for the waterlogged dead, only a pile of
rock. Other such cairns stood at places along the shore, sun-bleached and
stained with the leavings of gulls.

Some
of the fishers joined Shimon and the stranger at their work, not speaking but
gazing about at the heaps of fish with wild eyes. A few cast wary glances at
the corpse where it lay lifeless on the sand and lifted their fingers in the
sign against the evil eye.

Then,
with a shout, Yohanna came running down toward the shore from the stone houses.
Others ran beside him, women and old men carrying empty baskets. Glancing up,
Shimon saw his mother Rahel, and Bar Cheleph with his bad hip. And, running behind, his gray hair wild in a gust of wind, Zebadyah
the
kohen
, Kfar Nahum’s priest.

“What
has happened?” the
kohen
cried out against the wind. “What has
happened?”

“Fish!” Yakob shouted,
and swung his oar against a bird that had swept too low; the gull wheeled
quickly out of the way. “Fish!”

“Fish!” Bar Cheleph
cried.

“My son!” Rahel cried,
and her eyes glistened. “Oh, my son!”

Yeshua
looked up at her, and for a moment a sad smile transfigured his face.

Soon
the sand and shingle was littered with baskets and lids and rolls of cloth and
bits of cord, and half the town crouched with the sea lapping at their feet,
working swiftly to gut the fish and bind them or basket them. Several women,
their eyes shining, began carrying baskets and sheaves of musht in a line up
the shore toward the stone houses. Bar Cheleph—whose limp seemed to be
bothering him—hung back. Perhaps because Shimon glared at
him. The younger man had beaten Shimon’s brother once, and Shimon hadn’t
forgotten it. His anger was not as strong as his guilt, for when he gazed at
his brother with his useless arm, he saw what Bar
Cheleph saw: a body twisted and unclean, a broken oar on a boat that needed all
its oars. But Koach was his mother’s last child, the last she would ever have.
And no one would lift their hand against anyone his mother loved, not while he
stood near.

Bar
Cheleph moved down the shore a little way, gathering up bits of wood and other
drift as if for a fire. As if he meant to begin roasting some of the fish
right
here
. On the shore, this very morning. That
changed Shimon’s mood quick as a sea wind.