No Lasting Burial (19 page)

Koach
fell in at her side, his knuckles white about the knife.

“I
am not dead, Bar Cheleph,” she called out in a cool, clear voice.

Bar
Cheleph looked in over the boards and his eyes widened. “Get back,” he said.

“It’s
all right,” Rahel said. “I have no fever. I am well. There is no need to board
up my door, or to do any violence to my house. Let it stand as it stood when my
husband lived in it.”

“Bat
Eleazar,” Bar Cheleph whispered.

She
met his gaze, then drew her sleeve up her arm to the
shoulder. “Whatever this stranger from the inland hills might be,” Rahel said,
“he has washed away my fever as I might wash away dirt from this gown. I am
well.”

Mordecai
gasped and stumbled back.

Bar
Cheleph only stared at Rahel’s arm, at the smooth skin where a wound had been.
The muscles of his throat moved.

“Tear
down the boards,” he said hoarsely.

When
neither of the other men moved, he gasped, “Tear down the boards. Now. As you love my father, move!”

There
was a great wrenching of wood and the cry of nails being torn free of the
doorposts, and then the men cast the planks aside and the door was again an
open space. Koach took a slow breath, let it out. Then he slipped the knife
quietly into the pocket inside his tunic. He hadn’t needed it. He shivered. If
he’d used it to carve flesh, he didn’t think he would ever again have been able
to use it for carving wood.

But
he had nearly lost his mother today. He would not lose her again. For a moment,
just a moment, he understood his brother. Understood his brooding, his brief
storms of temper. Understood the strain he felt, protecting their family.

Bar
Cheleph’s shoulders were tense. He kept his gaze lowered. Her face stern, Rahel
turned and walked back into her atrium.

Before
he could either follow or shut the door, Koach was startled by a cry in the
street. He saw Yohanna striding down from the direction of the synagogue and
his father’s house. In his arms he carried a lean figure in a white robe. His
face was strikingly like Yohanna’s, only folded up into wrinkles, his hair and
beard the clean white of foam on the night sea.

He
was Yesse.

The priest’s father.

Behind
them came a great crowd of people—men and women, fishers carrying baskets, and
even a few boat people at the back, their faces slack with fatigue and grief
and the awareness of the heavy tread of despair stalking the street behind
them.

“
Navi
!” Yohanna cried. “
Navi!
”

They
turned and saw Yeshua standing in the middle of the atrium, his hair hanging
about his face, lank and sweaty, half concealing the darkness of his eyes.

“Little
time,” he said. “Little … little time. The dead … I can … can hear … All of them, all of
them coming.”

“Watch
the shore.” Yeshua’s voice was as calm as though he were mentioning the color
of the sky. “They are coming.”

Bar
Cheleph cast a wild glance at his adopted brother and grandfather, and then
turned and bolted from the doorstep, racing down the narrow street. The others
looked on with wide eyes. Koach swallowed, realizing suddenly what the man’s
words might mean—if he were indeed the
navi
, if he indeed could see the
things God could see.

Yohanna
didn’t seem even to have heard. He simply carried his grandfather over the threshold,
his gaze on the stranger’s face. “Help him, Bar Yosef,” he said. “Help him.”

Yeshua
was staring after Bar Cheleph, and he didn’t answer. Rahel glanced from his
face to Yohanna’s. “Bar Zebadyah,” she said softly, “will you lay your grandfather by the olive?”

He
nodded quickly, and carried him past. Rahel joined him, laying out blankets by
the tree.

“I
need to be there,” Yeshua murmured. “I need to be there, there at the heart of
it … but for what … what do I need to do, what do I need to do …”
He let out a groan of frustration and lowered his head. For the briefest
moment, his hands seemed to
burn
, as though he were
holding them before a hot fire and the light was shining through his flesh.
Koach’s eyes widened.

“
Navi
,”
Rahel called.

Yeshua
was breathing hard, as though he’d been straining against a locked door. The
light faded, and he glanced up. His face beaded with sweat, as it had been
after he had healed Koach’s mother. He walked slowly toward the olive in the
atrium, where Yohanna had lain his grandfather gently down. Koach followed.
Unnoticed behind him, the people in the street who had followed Yohanna began
to step through the door, their faces troubled or awed.

Yeshua
knelt by the old man, gazing at the ruin of the elder’s leg, twisted on that
night of destruction long past. Rahel sat beside him, while Yohanna stood
anxiously by. Yesse gazed back at the stranger with a question in his eyes.

“Help
him,
navi
,” Yohanna said.

“I
am already tired,” Yeshua said softly. “Already tired.”

“You
are
Eliya
,” Yohanna said fiercely. “You are the
navi
. You are the
one who takes away the uncleanness from the earth. Ha Matbil said it.”

“The
door is too hot,” Yeshua murmured. “And even if I can, even if I can step
through, what I will see, whatever I will do, whatever power this is the father
has put in my hands, I cannot heal the whole land, Yohanna, not the whole land
…” He swallowed, and his voice dropped, and he hung his head. “Yet what else, what else? Listen to the screaming until I
am mad? Until it drives me back into the rocks? Into the sand
and the wind and the wind and the desert? I cannot do that. I cannot.”

The
atrium was filling now with men and women. Rahel cast them a troubled glance
but kept her attention on the stranger who had called her back to life with a
song and a touch.
The others, and Koach with them, looked on silently,
waiting, as they had waited to see God’s touch on their town for years, but now
their waiting had a sharpness to it, an immediacy. Yesse’s eyes bore that same
look. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t exactly hope. Only the demand
for an ending.

“Who
wounded you?” Yeshua asked without lifting his head.

“It
doesn’t matter.” Yesse’s was an old voice, rough and full of memory. “He no
longer breathes.” Yesse wet his lower lip with his tongue. “You spoke of the
dead, the unclean lurching dead. There was a corpse on the shore,
I saw it with my own eyes.”

“More
coming,” Yeshua whispered. “I hear them.”

“Is
it true? Is it true, what my grandson tells me?” Yesse gripped Yohanna’s hand
with bony fingers. “That God has sent a
navi
into the land? When have we
needed one more?”

“When
have we … you have said it,” Yeshua said softly. His shoulders
straightened. Then he said, quiet and clear, “I was raised the
nagar
’s
son, his son, in Natzeret on the hill. I take things that are broken and broken
apart and I join them, I join them together again.” Suddenly Yeshua reached for
the old man’s other hand and gripped it tightly. His gaze met the old man’s,
and his eyes burned with sudden, dark intensity. “This is the truth, the truth,
the truth I heard in the desert: all the world is
broken and broken and broken apart. But nothing is broken that cannot be
remade. Nothing is ill that cannot be healed, nothing captive that cannot be
freed. Do you believe this, do you believe it?”

“I
do,” the old grandfather whispered, held by his gaze. “Yes, I do. Today I saw
nets full of fish. I believe you.”

“Then
I can believe it also. Stand, old father,” he whispered. “Stand.
Your faith … it has made you well.”

Yesse
stared at him, his hands shaking. A strange look passed over his face. His
right leg shifted slightly. He glanced at his calf, and his eyes were wild.
Yohanna let go of his grandfather’s hand and stood, almost falling over.

Yeshua
rose more slowly, bending over the old man, still clasping his other hand;
Yesse clung to his fingers. After a moment, Yesse got stiffly to his feet
beside the stranger.

Those
watching gasped, an almost sexual sound.

Yesse’s
eyes were wide, his hair adrift about his face. “I …  I …” He glanced about wildly.

“Yes.”
Yohanna’s voice was choked. “You are standing. You’re standing, grandfather.”

Yesse
stumbled—as though his legs were numb from sitting too long—and Yohanna leapt
forward, catching his arm, but Yesse shoved him away with a furious and wiry
strength. “No,” he said. His grandson stepped back, and Yesse recovered his
balance. He took another step. This one was stronger.

Yesse
kept his gaze on his feet. Then he laughed, a short
bark. He glanced up at Yeshua with watery eyes. “You
are
the
navi
,”
he breathed. “The
navi
who will save Israel.
All my life I have waited for you. All my life.”

Yeshua’s
eyes were guarded, as though he were holding up his last shield against the
yearning in Yesse’s eyes. “I want only to sit by a fire, by a fire, and eat
fried fish and talk,” he said. “Or work with the wood, the cedar and terebinth
in my father’s shop. Only I can’t stop the screams. I can’t, I can’t stop my
ears.”

The
house of Rahel bat Eleazar filled with people and with activity. Men lay
baskets of fish about the olive tree, and others threw fish over the coals.
Rahel herself crouched with a knife—a spare from her supplies, not the one she
had used against the dead—and she slit open one of the fish and pulled out its
heart. This she set on the scented fire, and then leaned back and closed her
eyes a moment, breathing in the redolence of it and, with it, the hope of
safety for her house.

The
silent woman—the woman from the boats—slipped into the house last, her face
pale and so thin. But Koach only looked away. He cast aside his small knife and
stepped out through the door. He needed to breathe a moment, and the atrium was
too full of people; he didn’t dare slip through them to his secret place. It would
be like revealing that place to the whole town. So instead he leaned against
the doorpost, his back itching from dried sweat. He felt something against his
shoulder and stepped away from the post, saw a hole in
the wood amid a corona of splinters, where one of the iron nails had been torn
out.

Koach
touched it with his finger, felt the sharpness of the splintered wood. Heard
again Bar Cheleph’s cry,
Board up the house! Board up the house!

“He is
afraid,” he whispered.

For
years, Bar Cheleph had seemed a giant to him: a fierce and brutal man with
heavy fists. But Koach was not so much shorter than Bar Cheleph now. And he had
seen Bar Cheleph’s eyes. The man was only afraid. Terrified.
Trying to live in a world that had tried to eat him.

The
thought troubled Koach. He glanced back toward the street. And
so he was just in time to see Zebadyah round the corner, hobbling toward him at
a pace quicker than most men stride. Yakob was behind him, a net slung
over one shoulder, his eyes anxious.

But
Zebadyah
’s eyes …

The
old priest had a wild, helpless look, as though he were staring over the edge
of a sea-cliff a mere breath 
before plunging in a long fall toward the deep. He all but ran to
the doorstep, his hair wild about his face, bringing with him the heavy scent
of wood smoke from the burning of the boats. Before Koach could step out of the
way or say a word, Zebadyah grasped his weak arm and with strength like a bear
threw him to the side. The priest rushed into the house as Koach struck the
ground with his hip, cried out in pain, and rolled into the street.

Halfway
up the hill, Tamar’s body—which at first had felt as light as a bundle of dry
twigs—became heavy in Shimon’s arms. The sun overhead burned hot, and sweat slickened his face; Shimon clenched his teeth and kept
placing one foot before the other. Though he longed to stop and rest, he did
not want to hold that defiled, coat-swathed body cooling in his arms even a
moment longer than he had to. He wanted to be done with it. And—

And
he could see, so clearly, the grief in his brother’s eyes, the anguish as Koach
gazed up at him and asked him to perform this duty that he could not. His brother, who had never asked him for help before. His
brother, who always asked
to
help. His brother,
whom he had always rebuffed, knowing he would be useless at the nets, at the
oar, at the hauling of the boat down to the sea.

That
look in Koach’s eyes haunted Shimon. Tore at his freshly
opened heart. Though he placed each step with care over the rocky
ground, Shimon shut his eyes a few moments against the sun, shut his eyes
against the turmoil in his heart. The sea wind blew at his back.

So
he did not see anyone approaching, and no scent forewarned him. The first
warning he had was the weight of a body slamming into his right side, carrying
with it the sickly sweet smell of rot.

His
eyes flew open; he cried out as earth and sky tilted. Tamar was knocked from
his arms. Shimon had a confused glimpse of her hitting the ground, her limp
body rolling free of the coat. Then the earth slammed into his back, a jagged
rock cutting his shoulder. Everything above him went dark; the silhouette of a
human head blocked out the sun. Hands clutched at his face and shoulder, the
fingers so cold. Shimon shouted and kicked, his own hands scrabbling at the
thing’s wrists. The creature’s weight fell on him. It snarled. Shimon stared up
into the dull sheen of its eyes, like unpolished iron.

Shimon
had a terrible flash of memory; he was on his back in the sand with his
father’s corpse looming over him. Then he pushed the memory away with a shout
and drove his knee into the corpse’s gut. It didn’t even notice. It hissed just
above his face, its breath on his cheek cold as the sea. He drove the heel of
his left hand hard against its brow, his right hand peeling its fingers away
from his face.

The
corpse bit into his sleeve and worried at his arm like a wolf, trying to tear
away the wool and get at the warm, vulnerable skin beneath. Shimon cried out
and kneed the corpse in the groin. It just kept tearing at the cloth with its
teeth, growling. Panic ran cold through Shimon, like ice water pumped from his
heart out to every part of his body, freezing him more with each heartbeat. All the world constricted to that face, those dull, empty
eyes, the snarls from its throat. It was stronger than him, and it was going to
eat him. Only a thick woolen sleeve held away his death. He was shaking.

Shimon
had a momentary sense of someone looming over him and the corpse. A large hand
gripped the corpse’s shoulder and pulled the creature off him. Shimon had just
time to draw in a shocked breath before glimpsing a flash of bright metal, the
curved tip of a knife catching the corpse beneath its chin and then sliding
smoothly up until the hilt of white bone pressed against the thing’s chin,
sheathing the knife in its head. The knife tip emerged from the creature’s
brow. The corpse jerked once and then went limp.

The
man who had stilled it rolled it aside, and the body lay in the grasses,
unmoving. Bar Nahemyah—Kana—stood bending over it. With a grunt, he set his
sandalled foot against the creature’s collarbone and then gripped the hilt and
wrenched his knife free of its dead flesh. As Shimon scrambled back, kicking
himself away from the corpse, and got unsteadily to his feet, Kana wiped the
blade clean on the tattered remains of the corpse’s garments. Shimon watched
the blade; it was easier to look at that than to look at the dead.

“That’s
a Roman knife,” he breathed.

The
curved blade was nearly the length of Shimon’s forearm between the elbow and
the wrist.

“They
call it the sica,” Kana said quietly, stepping away from the corpse. “You catch
the bottom of the jaw with the point—or you catch the bottom edge of the
helmet, if you are stabbing a Roman—and you set your palm against the hilt and
shove hard. Drive it up through the jaw and into the face. All
the way to the scalp. One swift strike, and the
corpse falls still. Then you do the next. And the next.”

Shimon
gazed at him in horror. The name he’d heard Bar Nahemyah claim—the name
Kana
,
the zealot—rang in his mind, a name of knives and dread.

Kana
began cleaning the blade on a tuft of grass. “The
kanna’im
have taken to carrying these. The fighting priests.
You can’t imagine it, Shimon. What Yerushalayim is like now.
The poverty. The stink in the
alleys. The dead. The Romans keep them down. Sometimes. The other times,
we
do.” His voice went
hoarse, as though he were holding back some great torrent of feeling. “We are
the People, Shimon. The people of Yehuda tribe, the last of
the Hebrews. The other tribes are dead. On all the earth, only we know
the Law and the Covenant. Only we can keep this land, our land, free of the
dead. The Romans bring hunger and slavery, and finally a weary death for us
all.” Straightening, Kana gazed down at the corpse.

“I
said I didn’t want your help,” Shimon said. “Why did you follow me here?”

“I
needed to talk with you.” Kana’s eyes were intent. “It is coming, Shimon. A dark time. You could help stop it.”

“Your
killers in the hills don’t need me,” Shimon muttered.

“
I
need you. This town respected your father. Revered your
father. Your father, who stood against both Rome and
the corpses that walk.”

“My
father is dead.”

“But
you live. And whether you like it or not, Shimon, Israel needs you. All men who
are still true to the Covenant in their hearts wait for you. You could lead the
fishing towns of Galilee to rise up. You could do it. They know your father’s
name.”

But
as Kana spoke, Shimon gazed at Tamar’s body where it lay in a fumble of limbs
like a crumpled spider. The stink of that corpse was worse now. One hand lay
bent, and something had fallen from the sleeve. The object drew Shimon’s gaze:
a small wooden horse, no larger than a clay cup, an object you could hold in your
hand. The intricacy of its mane, the small eyes and mouth, the lines of its
flanks—this was something his brother had made.

Shimon
crouched beside the dead girl. He picked up the horse carefully, ignoring
Kana’s frown. The small wood-carving felt cool in his hand; with an inward
shiver he realized it had been nestled against the cold flesh of the dead. Yet
he did not drop it or hurl it away. He held it, looked at it—the first time he
had really
looked
at one of this brother’s secretive carvings. He suddenly
felt … heavy. Old. The burden of
his People, his Law, his God, his heritage a weight on his shoulders. He
didn’t want to worry about the Law, he didn’t want to
revere his God or the traditions of the father who had betrayed him by being so
long absent. He didn’t want to fight each night for scraps from the sea to keep
his family alive, fighting alongside other men’s brothers because his own was
too weak. He certainly didn’t want to seek trouble with the Romans, or even to
acknowledge that they existed on days other than those on which Zebadyah
collected what few goods the town had to send to the tax collectors in the
Emperor’s City. He wanted only to sit in his boat, cast the nets and pull them
up, and be silent like the water.

But
he had made Koach a promise.

He
would keep that promise.

“My
brother is strange,” he said. “But he is my brother.” He turned on Kana. His
voice heated. “What you’ve said, Barabba has said all this before. And right
after he said it, he rode down my brother in the street. My
brother
,
Bar Nahemyah. He tried to drive a spear through my brother’s body. So
you tell me, ‘Kana.’ What place will there be for Koach, for my kin and my
blood, in this new uprising of yours?”

Kana
was silent, his face cold with remembered pain.

“I
have devoted every night of my manhood to the netting of fish, to the boat, to
bringing home food for my family. And you would have me throw them away? It is
more important to see that my kin eat than it is to hate the Romans.”

“The
Romans hate you, brother.”

“Let
them.”

“Your
father hated them.”

“My
father is
dead
,” Shimon nearly shouted. “I am going to his tomb. He is
dead
,
and we here in Kfar Nahum are all fatherless sons. Get out of my way, Kana.”

Shimon
rolled Tamar’s corpse gently back into the coat and lifted her from the earth.
He made to stride past the other man. Kana stepped out of the way but said
quietly, “You can’t sleep forever, Cephas.”

Shimon
stopped.

“Some
day the Romans will want more taxes than Zebadyah bar Yesse can send. Some day,
there will be nothing left, not even what you have now.”

“What
did you say?”

Kana
looked at him strangely. “I said—”

If
Shimon had not been carrying a corpse, he would have shoved Kana violently in
the chest. Rage surged hot and wild like the sea inside him. “I am
Shimon
.
God of our fathers, what do you all want from me?”

He
began striding up the hill. He could see the
kokh
, the tomb in which his
many dead kin slept the long sleep. Kana called after him: “Cephas is
the
rock
. We want you to be your father’s son, the man our People need. The man
you were born to be!”