Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (9 page)

No, the Hebrews’ God was
el kadosh
. He was a mighty and holy God, and the unclean dead and the unclean living alike would wither if they approached him. At all times he was set apart from the camp, so that if his anger burst into flame, perhaps only a small part of the camp would burn, those tents nearest him. He must be approached with care. His heat could kindle not only against the enemies of the People, living or dead, but against the People themselves. For though the
kohannim
believed this strange God had consented and chosen to dwell among the Hebrews alone out of all the peoples in all the lands beneath the sun, the
kohannim
also remembered that before this God, all peoples, even theirs, were small. If God’s slightest fingertip touched the land, that touch might dry a river or scorch crops. What then
would happen if, looking about and seeing the evil the People too often did to each other, how the People too often failed to care for the living or confine the dead, what if God in wrath should strike the land with his fist? Would not the very hills smoke?

Devora passed the Tent of Meeting as she hurried into Shiloh, and she passed the charred earth beside it, that silent memorial to the night of wrath thirty years past. Her heart hardened at the sight of it. That night it had been Canaanites who had brought the unclean death to the camp. The heathen who could not be trusted to place their dead beneath cairns or to keep their camps clean of dead meat or even to wash their own arms up to the elbows before lifting their fingers to their mouths. The heathen who all but
invited
the coming of the unclean dead.

At the doors of the white tents, the
kohannim
and their wives stood singing, in robes and gowns of white with embroidered hems. The men sang first, deep voices lifted in ululation to greet the Sabbath bride, who came over the hills clothed in the
shekinah
. Even before the men’s voices fell silent, their wives lifted their own, lovely voices calling out their worship of the God who gives and takes away, the God who stirs new life in the womb and closes us each in the womb of the earth when our brief lives have ended.

The men and women of Shiloh camp inclined their heads respectfully as the
navi
passed, and despite her haste Devora slowed her walk enough that she could pass them with dignity—though her white gown was stained and torn in places from her work in raising the cairn, and her feet were sore within her sandals. The song she heard all about her was a comfort; it eased the anxiety that had choked her after the withering of her olive tree. With so many men and women singing a greeting to God, it
was unthinkable that God was not here among them. Perhaps the withering had only been a warning, nothing more.

As she approached the high priest’s tent—her husband’s was still many tents beyond it, in the western part of the camp—Devora halted and looked at the high priest and his wife as they sang outside the door of their tent. She had to tell him, she realized. She had to tell the
kohannim
of her vision.

Eleazar ben Phinehas ben Eleazar ben Aharon was the head of Levi tribe and the one man who might pass within the last veil to speak face-to-face with the
shekinah
, the hot presence that dwelled over the Ark. He alone could give offerings there, sending up a sweet smoke to renew the Covenant between God and People. Among all the People, only he was permitted by Law to speak without the veil between him and the divine ears.

Only he.

Except that God, too, could draw aside the veil. Without consulting priest or levites, the
shekinah
might sometimes fall upon a
navi
, showing the prophet things that otherwise only God’s eyes would see. It was an uneasy relationship, that of the high priest and the
navi
.

Eleazar’s robe was white like the other priests’, but over it he wore the
ephod
, a loose garment gold like the sun. And over that he wore an ornamented bronze breast-piece. It was the sign of his office, the
hoshen mishpat
, the breast-piece of decision. Embedded in the
hoshen
were twelve smooth river stones from the Tumbling Water, on which had been inscribed the names of the Hebrew tribes, and also two stones with no letters on them, one dark as a cow’s eye, the other pale as dead flesh. The
urim
and
thummim
, a last resort, a device for divining God’s will in uncertain matters.

Beside Eleazar stood Hannah, his wife, in a white levite’s gown with the blue sash of the midwives about her hips. Her head tilted back in song. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as the priest; she had always towered over Devora.

“Eleazar!” Devora called out.

The priest stopped his song, and his wife beside him fell silent. They looked at Devora curiously. Disheveled as she was, the
navi
likely was a strange sight to them.

Devora found herself out of breath, trying to gasp out what was in her heart. “
Kohen
, there are dead—the olive tree—it withered—and there are dead. So many.” She swallowed, gathered herself. “God sent a vision.”

“What did he show you?” Eleazar murmured. There was respect in his tone, but wariness too.

Briefly, Devora told of her vision, of the lurching herds.

“This is horrible!” Hannah gasped. And Devora saw in the other woman’s eyes that she too remembered the night of wrath thirty years before. No one who had been there would ever forget it.

Eleazar’s eyes had become windows into a desolate place. “What you have seen is like cold water on my heart,” he said after a moment. “The men of the Galilee sent a messenger here today.”

Devora stiffened. “What did he say?”

“He said the other tribes were refusing to come at Barak’s call. He asked for the Ark.” Eleazar looked grim.

It was said that in the days of Yeshua when the People took possession of lands east of the Tumbling Water, the levites had carried the Ark on stout poles in advance of the host. The few dead walking in those valleys had stumbled out of the fields with their lifted arms and their moaning voices, only to wither before the Ark like dry wheat before a desert wind. So it was said.

“But they have come with only three tribes,
navi
. They cannot take the Ark. They think God does not care if his People are divided or together.”

“Maybe we should talk, all of us, after the Sabbath,” Devora said quickly. “What I’ve seen—if there are so many dead—”

“We are one People,
navi
.”

“I
know
that. But perhaps it’s time to cast the
urim and thummim
, to find out if God
wishes
to go north with the men. Why else would he have sent me such visions?”

“Perhaps. But right now it is time to greet the bride,” Eleazar said, cutting her off. And he turned toward the door of his tent.

“Eleazar, please—”

“We will talk after the Sabbath,
navi
.” He spoke without turning and disappeared into his tent.

Devora stood a moment, afflicted again by a terrible sense of not having done enough. Hannah gave her an understanding look but said nothing. Devora turned to leave, then stopped. Fresh to her mind had come the sight of the Canaanite curled up like a wounded animal in her travel-stained salmah, nothing but a woolen blanket to shelter her body and her grief.

“Hannah,” Devora called.

The priest’s wife had her hand at the door of the tent. She glanced back at the
navi
.

“Hannah, please. After the Sabbath. There is a girl at the edge of the camp. Zadok is tending her. She is weak from childbirth and likely ill. She’ll need ointment, and herbs, and warm water and cloths. You’ll know what else she needs better than I. Will you go to her, Hannah?”

Hannah gave her a curious look. “Who is she?”

The
navi
paused. She could hear the sides of the tent flapping slightly as a wind moved through the camp. It seemed to her that the wind carried to her the sound of a faint moan, as if from the hill. Then a quiet, gasping sob, the grief of a bereaved woman. Perhaps visions came to her ears this day and not only to her eyes. Or perhaps she only imagined it. “A supplicant,” she said. She could not say
a heathen
, nor explain why it suddenly seemed so important to her that someone see to the girl. She had no time to argue with Hannah.

Hannah gave a small nod. “I will see to her. Good Sabbath,
navi
.” She paused. “The other wives are dining with us. Will you join us?”

“Not tonight,” Devora said.

Then she walked swiftly, almost at a run, toward her husband Lappidoth’s tent. All through the camp, the priests’ songs were falling silent; the Sabbath had arrived.

And then Devora
did
run, forgetful of dignity.

D
EVORA HAD
been twelve the first time she had seen him; he had been twenty. She was traveling alone on her way to Shiloh after the dead had devoured her mother’s camp and all her kin. By night she lay in the weeds, shivering. By day she moved with caution, listening for any moaning dead and keeping away from any cart paths or any living men she saw, who might be tempted by a girl alone and without the protection of her tribe. It was easy to tell at a distance whether a figure striding through barley or tall grass was living or dead, for the dead staggered and lurched, but either the living or the dead could be dangerous to her. She was the only one left of all the men and women and children she knew; the fourteen others in her camp were dead. She was weak from hunger, and she hurried from one small pond or mud hole to the next, anxious for water.

The day she first saw Lappidoth was the second day of her flight.

She heard the moaning first, faint but unmistakable over the music of nearby water, and for a long time she stood still, terribly still, in grass higher than her chin. When she moved a little, as silently as she could, she came to a stream and saw the dead—and
him
—on the other bank. He was defending his herd from them. One of the cows had been torn apart; the others huddled in the middle of the stream. There were four corpses attacking. One was naked with a great gash in its side, its ribs white in the sun. Another of the dead had only one arm, yet it clawed at the air with the other as it came at the herdsman.

The young man had cast aside his cloak so that they could not grasp at it to pull him toward their biting teeth; he wore only his loincloth and a cattleherder’s gloves, his body covered in a sheen of sweat. He held a flint hatchet, and he ducked and darted among the dead like a desert fox among serpents. Devora watched, breathless. The herdsman was so careful not to touch them with his hands, not to defile himself. He brought his hatchet down at one of the corpses’ heads, shearing away the ear, then neatly flipped the hatchet about in his hand and swung his right arm back, driving the flint blade into the corpse’s head. Then he leapt back out of the others’ reach; they staggered after him. Devora held her breath, her heart in her throat. The dead hissed, and she could hear again her mother’s shrieks and the shambling feet of the dead in her camp. Devora shrank back, though it meant the tall grass obscured her sight a little.

Even as she watched, eyes wide, one of the dead closed with the herder while his hatchet clove another’s head; leaving the hatchet stuck in the first corpse’s skull, the man ducked beneath the second’s grasp and got his gloved hands on its hips. In a moment he lifted the rotting corpse high above his head and hurled it bodily into the stream.

The corpse in the stream splashed on its back like a turtle trying to right itself in the water. There was no time for the herder to try retrieving his hatchet; the corpse that was still on its feet was reaching for him. He leapt to the side, grasped a fistful of its hair in his gloved hand, and tried to pull it from its feet, but the corpse’s scalp peeled free with the hair and the thing was still grasping for him, moaning, a bared patch of its skull shining in the sun. Devora bit her hand to smother a scream. She wanted to flee, to get far, far away from the dead, but something in her held her there, hiding in the tall grass, watching. Her own camp had been helpless against the dead, but this man wasn’t. Her eyes shone with admiration.

The man stumbled; he fell to the dirt and then rolled fast to his left as the corpse turned and staggered after him. He got up into a crouch and then sprinted across the sand, putting distance between himself and the corpse. The other unclean corpse had risen from the water and was coming at him too. The man ran to the water’s edge and bent and took up two large stones in his hands, one a blunt river stone the size of a clay bowl, the other a jagged rock that had been broken in two sometime before and would serve for a hatchet. With his eyes hard, one rock in either hand, he turned to face the oncoming dead.