Authors: Stant Litore
No Lasting Burial
BASED LOOSELY ON THE EVENTS OF LUKE 4–5
AND ON THE LEGEND OF THE HARROWING OF
HELL
FIRST CENTURY AD
Stant Litore
THE ZOMBIE BIBLE:
FIRST BOOK OF YESHUA
47North
The characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,
is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Daniel Fusch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written
permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
eISBN: 9781477868058
for inara,
my fierce inara
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FATHERS’ SEA
Shimon
took precautions. He asked the town’s
nagar
to
reinforce the door of his house with strong pine. And every evening at sundown,
Shimon gave his crippled brother a curt nod and made sure that his mother
bolted the door behind him with heavy planks of wood; through the door, he
could hear her breathing hard with the effort. Then he walked out through the
storm-battered houses of the fishers and hurried down the grassy tideline to
the boats, to join Yohanna and Yakob,
his uncle’s sons, in readying the boat that had been his father’s for their
night’s long battle with the sea.
The
fish they brought back, a few dancing in wide nets, were just enough to keep
them all alive—never enough for them to buy another boat or gather any wealth.
The sea had been plentiful once, so much so that the fathers had told them that
their fathers had been able to walk across the water from one shore to the next
in calm weather without getting more than the soles of their feet wet—the fish
had been so thick, they had just walked on their backs. The sea had been full
of the blessings of God.
But
Shimon knew, with an ache of grief and old guilt as he pulled the oars and they
went out to sea—Shimon knew the dead had poisoned the water. In the old
stories, the lurching dead had blighted farm and field. Men and women who had
been strong and hale sickened and perished. Perhaps it was the same with the
fish. Sometimes in his dreams, while he shivered in his threadbare blanket, he
thought he heard the emptiness of the sea, a kind of silent cry, like the cry
the womb makes in a young woman who longs for a child and has none. The sea,
once so full, longed for fish.
And
some days, out on the sea, they would haul up one of their too-empty nets and
feel some weight in it, and looking down they would see rising out of the deep
one of the dead tangled in the net, its face lifted toward them, eyes pale and
white like those of a dead fish. Already reaching a hand
toward the surface, its jaw opening.
Shimon
hadn’t slept well in years.
Often,
as he lay in his bedding in the morning hours while Rahel and his brother moved
quietly about the house, he would wake, shaking, remembering. He recalled the
eyes most. It was never the lurching walk or the low moaning from a dead throat
that stirred him from his sleep; it was the eyes, for wherever Shimon hid in
the dream country, those eyes were waiting there for him. He might be dreaming
of having a great house of sunbaked clay, cool inside with many carpets—like
the houses that men of the Law had, in Yerushalayim
far away. He would dream of holding a great banquet there, and many men would
come in clothes so fine that Shimon’s eyes ached seeing them. But always, when
Shimon looked up from his food, he found his banquet guests staring back at him
with those dead eyes. Those terrible eyes, in all their
faces.
Or
he might be dreaming of a woman, her body soft and scented beneath him. He
would slide into her as smoothly as he might slip into the sea, and feel her
clasp him, feel her arms about him, holding him to her; feel her breasts and
her thighs against his body, damp with sweat. Yet as he began to move in her,
she would not moan or cry out, and he would glance down at her face and see her
looking up at him with those same eyes. Those eyes that held
no life.
And
he’d wake, his sweat cold on his face and back. He’d
bite his lip and lie without tears, gazing at the open sky over the atrium
where he and his family slept in the summer—or at the ceiling over his head in
his cramped little side room, if it were winter. In those months, the cold
light from the atrium revealed the stone slabs of the roof laid
over stout wooden beams, but though that wall between him and the vast
unanswerable sky was familiar, it brought him no comfort. Shelter
for the body, never for the heart.
Those
eyes in his memory held no emotion, neither anger nor fear. Yet their presence
in all his dreams was an accusation, a judgment.
Tonight
Yakob rowed them quietly out into the dusk, and
Shimon and Yohanna stood in the boat casting the nets
again, the ropes cold and wet in Shimon’s numb hands, a damp that he could feel
even through his thick fishing gloves. The nets were woven flax and weighted,
and one had to hurl them out over the water; it took a lot of strength and
precision to cast one, and it could take two grown men to pull up a net if it was
full—but the nets had not come up full in a long time.
The
boat creaked beneath them; it was old. In his father’s time, that boat would
have been recognized anywhere on the Sea of Galilee. Now its sand-red paint was
almost entirely gone; the boat had been skinned white by the water, like
driftwood and sea wrack. Shimon and the others toiled on it like survivors
scrambling for food in a ruin, as though they were three brothers who were the
last remnant of their town. But the true brother of Shimon’s own blood sat
broken at home in a broken house, his absence a bitter core in Shimon’s heart.
Above the shore behind him,
all
the houses of Kfar
Nahum were broken, each house a wounded body, burned and scarred and in some
cases empty and boarded up, so many structures of memory and stone maimed years
ago by men, living and dead, who had taken out their anguish, their rage, their
grief and hopelessness on the bodies of others.
They
knew their work, these three. Yohanna had the best
eyes, and he watched the water. Yakob could endure at
the oars the longest. And Shimon could sense the smallest shift in the wind; he
knew when to let the sail fly or when to furl it up tight against the sudden
rages of the
shedim
howling over the water.
“Maybe
today,” Yohanna said, as he always did at the casting
of the nets. He was a man who liked to hope. Shimon might have resented that,
but Yohanna’s hands on the nets were strong, and in
any case Shimon found it difficult to stir the ashes of his anger these nights.
He felt emptied out, like his father’s house. He swung one of the nets, feeling
the pull of its weight in the sinews of his arm. As it came around he lifted it
high and cast it out into the wet dark, letting the rope pay out through his
gloved hands, the cold sound of the water swallowing it. Shimon began the
count.
“Maybe today.” Yohanna glanced at Shimon’s face, and his own fell. He
added in a low voice, “There are blessings left in this sea. We just haven’t
found them yet. We have to keep trying. Until the
navi
heals the land.”
Shimon
ignored Yohanna’s optimism, as he always did, and Yakob changed the subject, as
he
always did. His
hard eyes softened as he looked at his brother. “Tell us again about your
navi
,” he said. Yohanna
had been one of the town’s self-chosen exiles, leaving two years past to seek
out the wild caves in the cliffs above the Tumbling Water, where Yohanna ha Matbil, the baptist, whom men called
navi
,
or prophet, lived in defiance of the moaning
shedim
,
forsaking town and city, living on locusts and camel’s milk and leading men and
women down into the water to wash away their evil.
Yohanna thought for a
moment. Shimon’s count reached twenty and he tightened his grasp on the rope,
stopping its slide. He sat quickly on one of the boat’s two benches—the one nearest
the stern—and knotted the rope around one of the iron hooks set between his
feet. The original hooks had long since needed replacing, and it had cost him
severely. The iron came from Threshing, and the men and women of Threshing
wanted nothing to do with those surviving families who wrestled their hunger in
the emptied houses of Kfar Nahum.
Yohanna cast his own
net, and told his story as he knotted the rope. Shimon took up another net and
swung it out into the night as he listened.
“He
brings everyone up from the water with his own hands; he won’t let any of his
followers do that. He will look into the eyes of a man he’s lifted from the
river, and say things that I still hear in my heart though my mind doesn’t
understand. He would look in your eyes and say,
Prepare
yourself, God is very near.
Or he would say,
We
are all kin. All tossed together by God into this world
.”
“We
are all kin,” Yakob repeated quietly.
“I
asked him about that,” Yohanna said. “One night when
the stars were out and all the baptized slept in their tents by the riverbank.
I went to him and I said,
Rabboni
, my
teacher, my master.
I said,
Who
are my
kin?
And he just looked at me as though I should know the answer without
asking. He is like that. He doesn’t talk much, Yohanna
ha Matbil—unlike me, though we have the same name. He
hardly ever says anything, really, and so he teaches us all to listen.”
“We
are not all kin.” Shimon’s voice was gravelly as he hadn’t used it yet that
night, and it startled him to find himself speaking now. “The Romans are not my
kin. Those Greek-loving Hebrews in Threshing and Tower, they are not my kin.”
Something flickered inside him, then settled, and he
sat back on the row bench, silent and heavy. The others didn’t answer or
challenge his silence, and after a few moments he ceased to be a man and became
a part of the boat again.
Then
there was only the silence and the sea and the starlight. A few times, the men
pulled up the nets for a look, and the few small, lean musht
they caught soon lay glistening in the bottom of the boat. Perhaps
enough to feed the three of them and their families for one meal. When
the nets were back down, they slit the fish open and gutted them and then
wrapped them in sheaves of lake-weed that they kept in a bin behind Shimon’s
bench, a bin filled with water to keep them fresh. Shimon watched the wrapped
fish for a while, numbly; then he lifted his eyes and watched the dark surface
of the lake, that watery mirror of his own heart. There was no wind tonight;
years before, when Shimon hadn’t yet learned despair, he would have been
thankful for that. The wind was to be feared; demons rode it, the
shedim
that wandered in the desert places until
witches called them out of the dark or until the wind picked them up and swept
them into the towns and the stone houses of the People. Sometimes one heard
them howling and keening in the rocks high on the hill of tombs,
and if a man did not live a good life and keep the words of the Law often on
his lips, if he opened his mouth too often to speak blasphemies or untruths,
the wind might blow a demon into his mouth. The demon would inhabit his body as
a man inhabits a house, but would damage the house it dwelled in, casting the
man to the earth in fits or tormenting his mind and making him shriek and curse
at people who weren’t there. Zebadyah the priest
claimed that these same demons inhabited the corpses of the unburied dead and
the unclean and half-eaten, that it was these
shedim
that drove those corpses stumbling to their feet and made them pursue and feed
on their living kin.
So
when there was a cold wind over the water—as there often was, chopping the
surface of the sea and cutting even through his water-coat—Shimon shivered amid
his numbness and his grief, and drew his coat more closely about his body, as
though by keeping covered, he could keep the demons from slipping inside him.
And when the night’s catch brought up a few fish, he was always careful when he
gutted them to take out the heart and wrap it in a bit of lake-weed, tucking it
into his coat. Before sleeping for the day in the empty house that had been his
father’s, he would hand the heart to his mother, who lay it on the coals of the
smaller firepit in their atrium, the one they didn’t
use for cooking. The smoke from the fish’s heart would keep even the most
malicious of the
shedim
away, for their
fathers had taught that the fish were God’s gift to the People, to make them
strong and virile and prosperous.
But
now it was rare to smell the heart-smoke of the fish, and Shimon feared that
each wind brought more
shedim
into the town,
and that even the water itself had become a house for the demons, a dark mirror
of the air that was their usual home. Somewhere down under that dark, placid
surface were many pale corpses, some buried perhaps in the sediment, some
drifting in the water. A soft glow on the far edge of the sea signaled the
coming dawn, yet Shimon felt cold.
“Do
you never think of what waits beneath our boat?” he asked suddenly.
The
others turned to look at him.
After
a few moments, Yohanna cleared his throat. “Fish, I
hope. Somewhere.” He was pale.
“I
never stop thinking of it,” Shimon said. He kept staring at that still,
deceitful surface. “You think you can forget everything in this silence over
the water. You think you can leave your dead beneath the waves. But there is no
lasting burial.”
They
took up their oars and rowed slowly, letting the nets trail behind in the
water, in no hurry to return to their surviving kin with news of another night
lost. Shimon sat in the middle of his despair like a hard gray stone. But then
he glanced up from his oar and saw a single white seabird, the morning’s first.
It skimmed low over the sea with a swiftness that was holy. His gaze followed
the bird’s long glide, and for a few moments the sight of it made his numbness
almost pleasant, the way that the last slide into sleep is pleasant, when a man
loses all feeling but that soft weight of drowsiness.
Even
as the bird lifted into the sky, the sun burst over the water behind them like
the sounding of a shofar, lighting the bird’s wings and the water beneath it,
and blazing against the white walls of Beth Tsaida,
the fishers’ houses by the tideline below Kfar Nahum
town. Those were houses of stone built to withstand the strong winds from the
sea. Houses built to last; only the people inhabiting them had not.