Song of Redemption (28 page)

The noise surrounding Jerusha thundered on and on, and it seemed as if the sun should have set by now. But the rumbling grew no fainter and the ground continued to shake.

Suddenly Maacah stiffened. “Jerusha, I smell smoke! Will they burn the house?”

“Yes! They’ll burn everything!”

“But we’ll die in here if they burn the house!”

Jerusha groped for the waterskin, then felt in the dark for the skirt of Maacah’s dress and soaked the front of it. “Hold the wet part over your face, and breathe through it,” she ordered. She did the same with her own skirt.

The sound of crackling flames and the scent of smoke grew stronger. At first Jerusha tried to stifle her coughs, but as the cistern filled with smoke it became impossible. She could scarcely breathe. The heat was unbearable.

Maacah struggled to stand up. “We’ve got to get out of here! We’re going to die—we’ve got to get out!”

“No, Maacah. Stay here. We can’t escape if the house is on fire. We have to stay here.”

Jerusha held her sister down, fighting her own terror as the dark, airless hole filled with smoke. Fire raged above them, turning the cistern into an oven, slowly roasting them alive. But she knew it was better to die in this stifling pit than to be recaptured.

“Please help us, God. Don’t let us die,” Maacah whispered.

Her sister’s useless prayers made Jerusha angry. “There is no God,” she said. “Save your breath.” But Maacah didn’t seem to hear her.

“Please, God … I don’t want to die … please …”

Jerusha held her sister in her arms, rocking her gently, waiting to die.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the noise and the heat and the rumbling of the earth began to fade. Jerusha was still alive, but she felt groggy and listless as her lungs strained to breathe. She had to let fresh air into the cistern soon. Suddenly she realized that Maacah hadn’t moved for a long time, and Jerusha panicked. She had promised Abba that she would take care of her.

“Maacah! Don’t die!” she begged, shaking her. “Please don’t die!”

Maacah stirred and coughed weakly. Jerusha laid her sister down and groped above her head for the stone lid to the cistern. She would have to gamble that the Assyrians were gone. But no matter how hard she pushed, the stone lid wouldn’t budge. It was too heavy for her to move alone, and she couldn’t gain leverage from her cramped position. She shook her sister again.

“Maacah, you have to help me. We have to get this lid open.”

“Abba—” she mumbled. “Abba will let us out.”

Tears sprang to Jerusha’s eyes. “Abba can’t come this time,” she said gently. “You have to help me. Please try?”

Jerusha helped her sister up, and they groped above their heads until they felt the stone. “Now,
push
!”

The stone shifted slightly, and a shower of dirt and soot rained down on them. Pale, smoky sunlight streamed in through a crack, and Jerusha saw her sister’s dirt-streaked face. She appeared too exhausted to push again.

“That’s good enough for now,” Jerusha said. “At least we’ll get air and a little light.” She found the waterskin and made Maacah take a drink, then she broke off two pieces of bread for them to eat. “We’ll wait until night. It’ll be safer after dark. Let’s try to get some sleep.” She gathered her sister in her arms, and they soon slept, clinging to each other and to life.

Jerusha awoke to total darkness and to the suffocating panic of being buried alive. She felt her eyes to see if they were sealed shut and saw the dim outline of her hands. It must be night. She moved closer to the faint crack of light and peered out. The roof of their house was gone, and stars shone through a haze of lingering smoke. She listened, but the night seemed eerily silent. The stone lid still wouldn’t budge. She shook her sister awake.

“Maacah—Maacah, wake up. Help me move this stone.”

Maacah stirred and tried to sit up. “Why is it so dark?”

“It’s night. The soldiers are gone. I think it’s safe to climb out now.”

“What about Mama and Abba?”

“I … I don’t know. Come on—help me shove the lid off.”

They pushed together until the stone shifted, making enough room for Jerusha to crawl out. Then she helped Maacah. They stood in the center of their gutted home, speechless with shock.

Only the outer stone walls remained standing among the smoldering ruins. A gentle breeze stirred warm ashes beneath her feet. Jerusha looked up and saw a pale sliver of moon and thousands of flickering stars shining in the sky. How could the night be so beautiful, she wondered, when the world around her had been so devastated? She drew a deep breath for the next task.

“Stay here until I’m sure it’s safe,” she told Maacah.

“No—I’m going with you.” Maacah gripped her arm tightly.

Beyond the gaping hole where the door once hung, the ruins of their father’s land lay naked in the moonlight. A charred pile of stones marked his emptied storehouses; his slaughtered oxen lay strewn in a heap of bones and entrails; his ancient olive grove with its centuriesold branches lay trampled and burned. The Assyrians had torn his stone winepress apart and left it a smoldering ruin. His farmland and all his crops lay black and smoking.

“Jerusha—over there.” Maacah pointed to something sprawled along the vineyard path.

“Stay here,” Jerusha said, but Maacah shook her head, still gripping her arm.

Together they walked through the vineyard in the pale starlight and knelt beside their parents’ bodies. A ragged hole pierced Mama’s heart; Abba’s body looked the same. Jerusha closed their staring eyes, then cradled her mother’s head in her arms and sobbed. She had thought she had no tears left to shed, but Mama and Abba were dead, and Jerusha wished she had died with them.

Gradually she became aware that Maacah’s weeping had faded to soft sniffles. Jerusha felt her sister’s hand on her shoulder. “Abba would want to be buried on his land,” Maacah said.

Jerusha nodded in agreement. They worked together for the next few hours to dig a shallow grave beside the vineyard. They buried Hodesh and Jerimoth side by side, then piled stones from the winepress in a mound on the grave. When they finished, the sky was growing light.

Jerusha sat on the stone steps of her house and stared at the desolation before her. The Assyrians had swept across the face of the earth like a merciless plague, killing everyone in their path, leaving a legacy of destruction and death—a holocaust—behind them.

“What are we going to do now?” Maacah asked quietly.

“I don’t know; just survive.” It had been Jerusha’s goal for as long as she could remember, but she no longer knew why. She wished the blackened earth would open up and swallow her.

“Maybe we can plant again next spring,” Maacah said. “We can grow enough food to live on and—” ‘

‘I don’t want to live anymore. I’m sick of struggling to survive—sick of it all! Mama and Abba are dead, and I wish it was me. I wish I was dead.”

Maacah turned on her fiercely, grabbing Jerusha’s shoulders and shaking her hard. “Don’t say that! Abba and Mama prayed for you! They refused to leave and go where it was safe because they were waiting for
you
! They died so you could live! You owe them your life, Jerusha! Don’t you ever talk like that again!” She stopped shaking Jerusha and threw her arms around her neck, sobbing. “Please—please live for them and for me. I don’t want to die.”

“All right,” Jerusha whispered. “All right, don’t cry.”

Somehow she would figure out a way to keep the two of them alive. She had promised Abba. She and Maacah still had each other, and maybe that was reason enough to live.

24

I
DDINA STOOD BESIDE THE ROAD
and stared at the well-worn path that led through Jerimoth’s vineyard. The body of the soldier he had killed still lay beside the road, but the other two bodies had vanished. Dried blood marked the place where they had fallen. He had found no sign of Jerusha farther down the road, and after the army had passed, he returned with his men to where he had lost her trail, hoping to find a clue he had overlooked. Instead, Iddina discovered that the bodies were missing.

If they had simply burned along with everything else, some evidence would remain. But there was none. Nor did he see signs of scavengers. Iddina peered closer and saw a flattened trail, as if the bodies had been dragged, leading through the burnt stubble. When he reached the end of it he found the grave near the winepress, heaped with stones.

Every muscle in his body tensed. “Spread out. Search every inch of this farm,” he told his men. “Someone lived through this.”

With mounting anger, Iddina hurried up the hill to the gutted house, guessing what he might find. Charred beams and rubble lay scattered over the flagstone floor, but in the center of the room a stone had been pushed aside, revealing an empty cistern.

Iddina howled in rage. The little dog had beaten him! And Iddina hated to lose. He no longer cared about his promotion. This was no longer a hunt for sport. He wanted revenge.

He and his men searched every inch of the farm but found no sign of the girl. As the day grew late, Iddina knew that he had to catch up with his troops. He had soldiers to command, the city of Samaria to besiege. For now, he couldn’t waste any more time on the girl. But Iddina silently vowed to find her and recapture her—even if it took the rest of his life.

Corpses—bloated, stinking corpses so numerous that they would never all be buried. Jerusha and Maacah had wandered the countryside for days, scavenging for food, sleeping in gutted ruins and in caves, searching for signs of life, for someone who had survived the destruction along with them. But all they found were smoldering ruins, desolate, blackened land, and the eerie silence of death. They were the sole survivors. With every step Jerusha took, with every dead body she saw, her guilt deepened. She didn’t deserve to be alive. Why had she survived when so many, many others had perished?

Eventually she and Maacah wandered into Dabbasheth, where Jerusha’s long nightmare had first begun. The village lay flattened and burned as if crushed beneath God’s heel. As the wind blew soot through the rubble-strewn streets, even the birds were silent. Jerusha sat on the foundation of Uncle Saul’s house, trying not to stare at the pitiful bodies impaled on stakes around the village, trying not to look into any of the faces in search of a familiar one. Her cousin’s wedding seemed a lifetime ago, part of another world of laughter and song, a world forever lost.

“I don’t know where else we can go,” she told Maacah. “We’ve tried all of our relatives’ houses … all of our friends …”

Maacah didn’t reply. It seemed she had also run out of tears to shed at the horror all around them. Instead she bowed her head and closed her eyes to pray. The futility of her prayers angered Jerusha.

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked. “How can you still believe in God? Was He deaf to the cries of all these people? Is He blind to what’s happening to His promised land? Doesn’t He care about any of this?”

“Jerusha, don’t talk that way. You—”

“Have you gone insane, or have I? How can you pray to God after seeing all of this?”

“But Abba believed, and—”

“Abba didn’t have to see dead bodies piled up like cordwood! He didn’t have to smell the stench of death and decay, day after day, or cry out to God to deliver him from this hell! Go ahead and pray if you want to, but believe me—it won’t do any good!”