Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (36 page)

“Are you serious?” Omri exclaimed.

“I am, and you do not want to argue with me, Omri of Zebulun. I am not in an arguing mood.”

“But
every
body—there must be dozens—”

“At least. See that it’s done. Laban, will you make sure none are missed?”

“If you ask it,” the somber giant said carefully.

Barak gave him a brief, grateful look. “I do ask it.”

“Do you have
any
idea how long that will take?” Omri snarled.

“It is what the
navi
would wish.”

“Since when does the
navi
command the spears?”

Barak turned on him, and his face was lit with such wrath that Omri fell back a step. “The Covenant says to build cairns, we will build cairns!” He was shouting. “Look around you, you fool. Do you want to question God’s ways in this field of ash?” He glanced at Laban. “We will not leave one body unburied! I want none of them left! Am I clear?”

“You are,” Laban murmured. Omri merely gazed at him in shock.

“Gather stones!” Barak shouted. Spun and strode back up the street. Enough of this ash and smoke.

Zadok stood still as a cairn himself amid the ashes and fallen timbers, his spear fallen at his feet. Devora approached wearily until she stood at his side. After a moment she set Mishpat aside near her feet. Straightening, she scrubbed at her face with her hands, trying to smudge away the dirt and ash. Then she just stood there. She watched his chest rise and fall. His eyes were dark pools that gave nothing back when she looked in them. All around them, men with gloves and rolls of tentcloth gathered bodies and shrouded them, bearing them to where Barak was having cairns raised on the shore of the lake. Sometimes the men cast looks at Zadok, and their faces held awe or bewilderment. Those who had seen him the night before had seen how he fought.

“Zadok ben Zefanyah,” Devora said after a while. “I need you.”

Devora reached for the small bronze knife Zadok wore sheathed at his hip. She tugged it free and reached for the nazarite’s hand. Gently she opened his fingers and drew the blade across his palm, making a slit deep enough to bleed for a while. His breathing changed a moment later; it must have taken his
body a moment to feel the pain. Then his head turned, and those dark eyes focused on her.

Devora placed the hilt of the knife in Zadok’s hand, pressing it against the cut, then closed his enormous fingers around it. “If there was ever a man of our People who needed a wife to look after him,” she said, “that man is you, Zadok. Why don’t you have one?”

“I could not defend both Shiloh and a woman.” His voice was deep and hoarse. Hearing it was a relief to her. “A day would come,
navi
, when I would have to break one covenant or the other.”

She nodded and looked out over the ashen street. Saw the men bearing away the last bodies of children. It was too much; she felt as though she were drawing in death through her eyes, aging and crumbling away like ash as she watched. But she couldn’t close her eyes; what waited in the dark behind her eyelids would be far worse.

“What do you see, Zadok? When you close your eyes.”

He watched her for a moment. “They were in the tents.” His eyes shone a moment, surprising her with their moisture. “I ran out to look for my father. They were everywhere. The stench—” He shook his head. “They were crouching over my father, four of them. Outside the Tent of Meeting. They were eating him. Behind them, Eleazar took up the shofar, blew the call. My father had saved his life. I tried to get his body away from the dead, tried to
fight
them—”

He fell silent.

“I’m sorry,” Devora said.

“I failed him. Every time I face the dead, I fail him.”

“No,” Devora whispered. “Zefanyah would have been proud of you. You are the kind of man he would have liked. The kind he would’ve wanted at his side. I know this, Zadok.”

He just looked bleakly out over the ash.

“I need you, Zadok,” Devora said. The pleading in her voice did not shame her; she had to lean on someone, if only for a
moment, or fall over. “I am barely holding it together. Those—children—” She swallowed. “I understand your suffering now. Why you stand still, the way you do. I encountered the dead as a girl, you as a boy. But since, you have gone out time and again to hunt them and raise cairns over them, whenever one has been seen in the land. Wherever Shiloh has sent you. How do you stay on your feet, Zadok? Tell me.”

“I remember who I have to protect,” Zadok said.

Devora laughed coldly, bitterly. Something in her heart cried:
But I am a woman! I am the one who is supposed to be protected
. But she knew better. She was the
navi
. Judge and mother of Israel. It was her burden to bring God’s visions to the People and keep them safe. Her eyes hardened, and she stifled her laugh.

“Did you see it, last night, Zadok?” Devora asked, forcing the words out. “The
malakh ha-mavet
? Did you see it over the settlement?”

“I saw smoke,” Zadok said grimly.

For a moment they both listened to the sounds of the men laboring by the lake.

Zadok wiped the blade of his knife on his cloak and sheathed it. Then bent and took up his spear. “I have taken the nazarite’s vow. It does not matter if God is here or not.” His voice was rough. “Or if the angel of death is here or not.
I
am here. I have taken the vow.”

Devora let out the breath she’d been holding. His words sounded so much like her own words to Hurriya during the previous night. “All right. If anyone made it out of here alive, where did they go?”

“Kedesh. The town of Refuge,” Zadok said. He was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. “...I did want a wife once.”

Devora glanced at him, jarred out of her thoughts.

Zadok nodded, his tone strangely subdued. “A woman who lived in Shiloh, who would always live there. I thought—” He
glanced at her eyes, then looked away. “I thought that any act of mine would defend both her and the tribe of Levi. Nimri’s raid taught me differently.”

Devora’s eyes widened.

“Me,” she gasped. “You wanted
me
.”

He just looked at the lake.

Devora recalled Zadok crying out her name as he rushed toward her through the terebinths. She recalled the way his breathing had changed as he’d held her. Yet—she had known him so long. And she had never known this. With a sudden blush, she wondered if other women in Shiloh camp had known. She who saw what God’s eyes saw—might she have been blind to what other women might see? Had her husband known of Zadok’s heart? Had
she
? Her head spun and she felt a great urge to sit down, but there was nowhere to seat herself that was not covered in the ashes of the dead.

“You chose Lappidoth when I was a boy of eight,” Zadok muttered. “When I was a young man, Lappidoth seemed to me to be very old. I thought he might die, and I might ask you then, after your time of grief. I had a fool’s heart. Forgive me,
navi
, so that I will be released of this burden I endure.”

She watched his eyes a moment, saw the suffering there. How like his father he looked in this moment. The hard lines of his face, the depth and uncompromising purpose in his eyes. The only thing different was the anguish. Zefanyah had died before he could know pain like that.

She shook her head. “You’ve broken no covenant, Zadok, none with me. There’s nothing to forgive.”

“If you wish me to relinquish my vow—”

“Stop,” she cried softly. “By the tribes, stop, Zadok. Just—be quiet a moment. Let me think.”

She lowered her head. She could feel his gaze on her, and it was warm, undemanding. Yet she wanted to flee. The feelings in
her heart and the feelings in his—whatever they were—it was too much. Everything she had encountered in this dead settlement was too much. She needed to go up into the hills where the wind was loud and the People were quiet. She needed to find some place to kneel and weep and pray.

But what did she fear? Zadok was younger than she, but he was not a boy. She lifted her gaze and saw him looking on her with concern. The anguish beneath it was deep but faint, like old coals after a fire had burned down all night. She sighed and stepped nearer to him, took his face between her hands, the scratch of his beard warm against her palms. He didn’t move either to hold her or draw away. A tenderness welled up in her like a spring. She was conscious that the men dragging the bodies from the street could see them, but she didn’t care. This moment was between the
navi
and her nazarite, and she would not let watchful eyes or any rumor they might start disturb it.

She looked up at him. “Who do you protect, Zadok, now that the high priest is gone?”

Zadok met her gaze without flinching. “Israel’s
navi
.”

“Then keep protecting her,” Devora whispered. “And Devora, the woman, loves you for it. I am my husband’s, I cannot be yours. But you do not
offend
me, Zadok. You are so important to me. You have to know that.”

Zadok caught her hand in his, held it in that firm, unyielding grip. His eyes searched hers. Then he nodded. “I know it,” he breathed.

“Thank you for sharing your heart.”

“Thank you for sharing yours,” Zadok rumbled.

A smile touched her lips. “We’ve grown old, Zadok.”

“Maybe the
navi
has.” He returned her smile. “But I can still outrun or outfight any man in Israel.”

“Beast,” she murmured. She was grinning now. His boasting cheered her. Zadok bore deep pain, but nothing—neither the
rising dead nor the hard burden of slaying dead children nor his yearning for her—nothing could still the fire he carried within him. That cheered her. Even the
malakh ha-mavet
seemed no more than a shadow cast over sunlit ground, in the face of Zadok’s enduring fortitude.

“It’s good that you never took a wife, Zadok ben Zefanyah,” Devora told him, lowering her hands from his face, regretting the loss of that warm beard against her palms. “You would be too much for her. You and Lappidoth are the only men I have ever met of whom that is true. Other men, women can work with.” She smiled again and turned to glance up the ashen street. Men toiled there, but if they had been watching her, they were not now, and whatever judgment each of them had made on her was locked for the moment within the silent Ark of his own heart. There would be cairns by the water, new ones. She must go and sing over them. She must resume her burdens. She took Mishpat up from where she’d set the blade aside.

Zadok set a powerful hand on her shoulder. “
Navi
,” he said. His voice had grown stern again, but it had lost some of its grimness, and the sound of it was a comfort to her.

“Refuge is where we’ll find any from the town who still live and breathe,” he said. “But we will not find any survivors,
navi
.”

T
HE MEN
had moved some of their tents to the edge of the burned settlement, raising a forest of canvas around Barak’s pavilion; this had allowed the men to take the work of cleansing the town and raising cairns in shifts. After singing the Words of Going over the cairns, Devora’s mind and heart were so full, so turbulent, that she stumbled toward these tents without a word to anyone. She wanted only to throw herself to the rugs and sleep until the men broke camp and she had to get to her feet again. Devora hardly even noticed the looks men gave her as she stumbled by with Mishpat still clutched in her hand. Their eyes held awe or fear—she had become strange to them. They were not looking at her as they had the evening before when she rode into the camp with a feverish heathen girl before her. Gazing at her now, their eyes still said
woman
, but those same eyes held alarm rather than
desire. They did not know what to think about her or what to do with her. She was
kadosh
, set apart—as alien to them as God.

Even the glance Omri cast her as she passed held this strangeness, yet his gaze roved over her body. He stood, stroking his jaw with his hand, his eyes thoughtful and dark.

Laban was standing at the edge of the tents, sending men this way and that, and he saw the
navi
and directed her to a massive white tent. It had been his, but it was the levites’ color, and he gave it to her. She didn’t know where Laban meant to rest and did not have the energy to care. Nor did she know where Hurriya or Zadok were; neither was by her tent.

Inside, Devora stumbled to her knees and held Mishpat upright before her, the point resting on the earth, the hilt before her eyes. Before singing over the cairns—while waiting for the last ones to be raised—she had cleaned the blade and then polished the metal to a sheen; no trace of the unclean dead or of those bitten remained on the immaculate, though dented, metal. Now she stared hard at the blade. And felt things hardening within her.

She could still feel the slight resistance of each man’s neck against Mishpat’s blade, she could feel the tension of it in her hand. A night of terrible judgments. Not all of them hers. She spoke quietly to God in the dimness of her tent.