No Lasting Burial Read online

  As if in answer to the sun’s arrival, an eerie cry sounded over the water. A high, wavering cry, a wail. Shimon stiffened; for a moment he didn’t know what creature was uttering that scream, though he thought there were words in it.

  “What was that?” Yohanna gasped.

  “A man,” Yakob said, looking over his shoulder. “There’s a man on the shore.”

  Shimon glanced where Yakob gestured, even as the cry died away, leaving his heart beating fast. They were close enough to the shore now that if Shimon had held up his arm and tried to cover the man with his hand, he would have needed to use nearly his entire palm.

  He squinted against the sun’s glare on the water. One of the boat people, maybe, though the man was standing with his feet in the sea. Why one of the vagrants would walk out into the breakers and risk the touch of the waterlogged dead, Shimon couldn’t imagine. The man wore a wool robe the color of sand, though it was torn, dirtied. There were bruises on his face and arms. A vagrant, maybe one of those men with a demon that made him shriek in the night until the fishers of Kfar Nahum drove him away.

  Yet that cry, that terrible cry.

  Shimon could not slow the thumping of his heart. The oars slipped in and out of the water, and the boat moved smoothly toward the shore and the man.

  The man on the shore lifted his hands to his mouth and called out again, and the cry carried loud and far. Yakob cursed and made the sign against the evil eye. That high wail as though he were the God of their fathers in the desert, calling the People to Har Sinai, the mountain that touched the clouds. Shimon made out one word in old Hebrew, strangely ululated: the word for fish.

  “God, I wish he’d stop that,” Yakob whispered, pale.

  The very air seemed to quiver as the cry went on, and on. Then the boat lurched hard to the larboard, tilting, nearly tossing Shimon into the sea. He grasped the bench and his feet scrabbled against the side of the boat as the gunwale nearly touched the surface. The boat—they were tipping! With a bellow, Shimon threw himself across and up against the highside. Yakob and Yohanna did so, too, shouting over the cry from the shore.

  “Did we strike something!

  “I don’t know!”

  “Right the boat!” Shimon roared. He knew from the boat’s tilt that the keel was coming dangerously near the surface, and he heard water lapping over the low gunwale as the boat fought for balance. Glancing down, he saw dark water coming over the gunwale and the nets trailing in the sea, and gasped.

  There the nets were, some way below the surface, and he could see that they were full, in fact perilously full, of teeming, squirming fish. Musht and barbels and sardines caught in the tight weave of the nets. The fish were blue-silver and they flashed in the dawn, like pieces of living iron. Their thousand mouths opened and closed helplessly, their eyes dark and glassy as if with shock at their sudden birth and capture, as if tossed in one slippery instant from God’s hand into the waiting nets.

  “Fish,” Yakob whispered. “Fish.”

  “Fish,” Yohanna whispered.

  Then Shimon was whispering it, too. The word fell from their mouths like a sigh of awe, like an invitation to wake from an evil dream. Fish … fish … Their sigh went out over the water until that word and the slosh of the waves against the boat and the slapping of the wet scales of fish against each other’s bodies and against the straining nets became one sound, one hope.

  FACES IN THE WATER

  Every man older than a boy knows this, and likely every woman, too: You cast out your nets and catch some flash of new life. Then your dead rise from the waves of your past to wrest it from your hands.

  The boat began to right itself, but only barely. Even as Shimon looked down into the water, he saw a pale corpse clinging to the bottom of the net and trying, clumsily, to climb it; its face tilted back, and its small, lifeless eyes gazed up at the water’s surface and at Shimon above it. Shimon gazed back at those empty eyes for one terrible instant, his heart violent in his chest, his body cold with horror that this ruin of a human being, its insides perhaps crawling with shedim, might seize his flesh, might eat him.

  Great strips of flesh trailed from the thing’s cheek, where fish and the water itself had been at it. Shimon reached for one of the small spears stowed beneath his bench for incidents such as this, and he took the spear in his gloved hand and began thrusting it down into the water, cautiously but quickly, knowing he mustn’t cut the net. Knowing also that the corpse must not come up with the net.

  The face emerged from the water and its mouth opened as though to moan or hiss, but water poured out instead of sound; the corpse reached one maggot-white, waterlogged arm toward him. With a wild cry, Shimon drove his spear into its face; his hook tore through the thing’s scalp as easily as through a fish. In a moment it hung limp from Shimon’s spear, its eyes still dead and unseeing.

  Then it slid away and sank into the deep. Its face still gazing lifelessly up, it faded to a dim white form far beneath the water, and then could no longer be seen.

  Shimon threw his weight back against the far gunwale, fearing the tilt of the boat. He was breathing hard. He felt a hand clap his shoulder, and Yakob’s breath near his ear. “It’s all right, Shimon. It’s all right.”

  But his hands were clenched so tightly around the spear that he couldn’t loosen them. He just kept staring at the surface of the sea. And then he saw them. Faint in the murk, clinging to the bottom of the nets, beneath the flashing silver of the fish, other pale figures. The corpses of the sea of Galilee.

  In the next moment, Yakob and Yohanna glimpsed them, too.

  “Holy God,” Yohanna breathed.

  “We’ve brought them up with the fish,” Yakob whispered.

  “Spears,” Shimon cried hoarsely, his body so shaken with fear he felt that if he let go of the spear he held, he might retch and fall into the sea.

  But then the boat tipped harder, tugged down by the weight of the dead crawling up the ropes from the nets. The mast swung down, dangerously near the surface. Yakob and Yohanna didn’t spare a moment to grab spears; they threw themselves again hard against the highside gunwale, fighting to balance the weight of the dead. Gazing down with his spear still clutched in his hands, Shimon saw the nets and the fish beneath him, and the dead breaking the water, reaching with their long, gray fingers for the gunwale and the warm bodies above it. Their eyes pale stones glistening with seawater. Shimon stabbed down at them. But one grasped his fishing spear and pulled, nearly wrenching Shimon out of the boat and into the lethal water. Such strength. For just a moment the corpse’s face was only an arm’s length from his, with its dead eyes and torn flesh hanging loose from white bone. Its jaws opened, spewing water.

  And then, in the dawn light on that dying sea, Shimon did something that he could never afterward truly believe he had done. Something in him roared awake, like a lion springing from a cave. So many nights he had failed to bring home fish for his family, failed though his father had been a boatman envied on every coast of the Sea of Galilee. So many mornings he had come home to see his brother’s skin stretched too tight over his ribs, to hear their mother’s voice shrill with the bitterness that hunger breeds in the heart. How often he had heard weeping by day in the house nearest his as he tried to sleep despite the growl of his belly, or seen beggars listless in the shade of derelict boats just above the tideline, their eyes vague with the nearness of death and their faces gray as the faces in the water. So many silent nights on the water, so many empty nets. But not this time. This time, nothing living or dead would keep him from bringing the fish home.

  Shimon took up an oar and leapt on the gunwale and spun the wooden blade in his hands to give it momentum and force. He slammed the blunt wood into one of the pale faces. The corpse lost its hold on the net and was hurled aside into the waves, where it sank as swiftly from sight as a dream upon waking. Then, roaring as though furious at the dead and at the sea and the sky and Mighty God himself, Shimon spun the oar, slamming it into one fa
ce after another, dislodging the dead, in one case crushing the corpse’s skull so that its body went limp as he sent it back to the sea.

  The last of the dead grasped the gunwale with one hand and with the other, the haft of the oar, just above Shimon’s own hand. Hissing. Shimon lifted the oar in both hands, drawing up the dead, water streaming from the corpse. Shimon caught a brief glimpse of its eyes near his, white gums drawn back from its teeth, water trickling out from a great gash in its cheek. All his nightmares made real. His memories given flesh. With a shout he swung the oar over the water away from the nets and shoved it out into the air; oar and corpse fell back, attacking the surface of the sea in a fierce splash. The corpse clung to the oar, but the waves bore it away from the boat, its dead eyes still watching Shimon. Still hungering. After a moment its wavering moan called out across the water.

  Shimon fell back into the boat, his chest heaving. Yakob and Yohanna tried to haul up the nets, heaving on the ropes, hand over hand. Doubtless, if they could get the fish into the center of the boat, they could keep the craft from trying to pitch itself into the sea. But after a moment they gave up, faces pale with strain, and let the nets fall back into the water. They gave the ropes a little slack and tied new knots, letting the nets sink deep, and at last the boat righted itself, its slender mast swinging slowly back toward the sky.

  Yakob collapsed onto the other row bench. “Can’t haul up those nets,” he gasped. “We’ll go under. We have to drag them in nearer the sand.”

  “Only one oar.” Shimon had caught his breath.

  “Two,” Yohanna said. “I stowed a spare beneath the bench before the last Sabbath.”

  “Then row,” Shimon growled, forcing himself up and onto the bench.

  The others grabbed up the oars and swung them out and began to row fiercely, rowing backward so that they could keep their eyes on the shore. Shimon sat with his hands empty, his face dark and brooding. He could hear the man on the shore calling to them, but didn’t heed the words. He heeded only the low moan of that corpse being carried out on the tide, riding its oar back toward the empty heart of the sea. Its voice was like another he’d heard, fifteen years before. All those years his past had lurched after him, threatening to swallow him. Moaning for him. He had hidden his heart in cold numbness and now that numbness had broken open, revealing blood and fury inside. Even as the boat lurched on the water, each stroke of the oars bringing the fish-heavy craft near to foundering, Shimon kept his gaze fixed on the stranger on the shore. This man who had called the fish, and called the dead up with them.

  15 YEARS PAST.

  THE FALL OF KFAR NAHUM.

  THINGS DYING AND BEING BORN

  The dead feasted in the town that night, devouring Roman and Hebrew alike. Before they came, Rome’s mercenaries had set up their tents in a half-moon around the town’s north, as though all the birds of prey around the Middle Sea had settled here, ravenous, with blades for talons. They all wore Roman armor but their faces were those of an entire world: faces dark-skinned and white, black hair and golden, short men and giants. The conscripts of an Empire, come to punish the town that had hurled a Roman tax collector into a house filled with the dead. All day they had plundered Kfar Nahum, and with the fall of dark, they reveled, peeling the town and its people open like fruit to be enjoyed and devoured.

  But they had not come alone.

  Something more ravenous even than they had followed them down out of the dry hills, perhaps attracted from old battlefields where they’d stood silent and waiting by the loud clink and clank of strange armor. The moaning dead fell upon the tents and the houses, and the town filled with shrieks.

  Soldiers who only moments before had been slaking their hungers with wine or rape were tugged beneath growling, grasping corpses even as they reached for their swords. The natives of Kfar Nahum were bewildered at this judgment that fell upon both oppressors and oppressed; some ran to grab up fishing hooks to use for spears; others ran for the shore and the boats and the safety of the dark waters of the Sea of Galilee, that freshwater lake of storms; others tried to get back to their houses.

  Shimon bar Yonah was only thirteen, short, and as yet unacquainted with despair. He peered out through a chink in the window of his father’s house, but could see only dark silhouettes against the fires the Romans had kindled at the edge of town to light their carousing earlier that night. He heard screams, heard the wavering moans of the dead. His urine ran hot down the inside of his leg, and the reek of it filled his nose. He was never afterward able to forget the shame of his terror in that moment.

  The outer door slammed open, startling a cry from him, but when Shimon turned to see the man who came to stand at the entrance to his small room, dark in the doorway, his chest heaving, he was not one of the dead nor any Roman but his own father. Yonah, the man other fishermen in the village looked up to. A man who seemed a giant to his son, as perhaps all fathers do, a man who towered over him and could surely carry a boat out of the sea on his shoulders.

  Yonah was clutching his left arm near the shoulder. He dropped to one knee and looked into his son’s face. His voice was raw with pain. “Son, listen to me. Your mother—I hid her in the kokhim. The tomb of our family. The one place the Romans would not look. You must go there. Go there now. Run. Don’t let the dead follow you. Go to your mother. Go now, son!”

  He grasped Shimon’s arm and thrust him toward the door. Shimon glanced back wildly at his father. In one dizzying instant, he saw blood seeping between his father’s fingers where he clasped his left arm. Shimon hesitated; he felt the slow crawl of panic into his chest.

  “I’ll be behind you,” Yonah cried. “Run, boy!”

  And Shimon ran.

  Shimon’s heart was a wild, desperate thing in his chest; his side burned as he tore through the narrow streets of their town, ducking as screaming figures darted or fell past or tried to clutch at him. Dying men and women lay writhing in the dust behind him as he ran, and other shapes fell on them with snarls. Once, Shimon saw ahead of him, at the doorway of a house, a woman screaming in the street, her belly torn open. He saw her face—the town’s midwife. A man with only one eye glanced up from the ravaged body with entrails clutched in his hands, and his eye was white and had no life in it.

  Shimon screamed and veered to the left, ducking as two corpses in the street hissed and snatched at him; one caught hold of his sleeve at the wrist but the fabric tore and Shimon stumbled and ran on, with the corpses pursuing. Ahead he saw the door to the weaver’s house, where the Roman mercenaries had herded all of the town’s small children. An oil lamp still burned within, and Shimon had a brief glimpse of adult shapes bent over small, still bodies, large hands pulling entrails and red organs from their bellies. One of the feasting corpses glanced up and its eyes shone like cat’s eyes in the light of the lamp. Shimon ran past, sobbing, but the corpses pursuing him ducked within the broken door and joined the feeding.

  Everything after that was a confusion of snarls and moans and hands grasping for him, and a man in Roman armor lying in the street, his legs torn away, two of the dead bending over him, sucking greedily at his insides. His screams as he begged for help. Shimon covered his ears. He couldn’t stop. He had to get out of the town and find his mother. He couldn’t stop. Crying, he ran, and ran, and ran.

  Then he was through the houses, and his small legs carried him up the rocky slopes of the hill west of the town. A wind was picking up, and he could hear the shedim screeching and howling among the stones and crags. He hurried for the refuge of the tombs, where no demons could enter and where the dead were always silent. The family kokhim, and those of the other fishing families of Kfar Nahum, were chambers dug out of the side of the hill. On shelves carved into their interior walls were laid the bodies of their ancestors. Once, centuries ago, the People had piled mere cairns of stone over their dead; now they gave them beds inside the earth and often left the tombs open to the air so that God could look in and see the dead, and remember them. />
  But these walking dead that had lurched into their town during the night, interrupting the carousal of the Roman legionaries, were not the dead of Kfar Nahum. Shimon didn’t know where they had come from, only that their faces were unfamiliar and twisted in savage hunger. Perhaps they had come down, as a few dead did each year, from the great battlefields left neglected in wild places. He didn’t know.

  Behind him, the light of flames rushing before the wind. Parts of the town were dying in heat and fire and screams. His body went cold with panic as he panted and forced himself uphill toward those dark tombs. Suddenly, he heard a thin, faint cry—from ahead, not behind. An infant’s cry. Shimon froze, listening. Then he bolted, running up the slope to the tomb of his family.

  The kokh was open and dark, the dead inside silent on their shelves. Shimon leaned into the opening, the cool of the tomb on his face, and called out, “Amma, amma, mother, mother!” into the cool, dry night within.

  “Shimon?”

  “I’m here. Father sent me.” He was shaking.

  “Shimon—” Almost a moan, and Shimon caught his breath, fearing for her and fearing the dark. He stepped in, stumbled over loose pebbles, and caught himself on his hands, there at the very lip of the tomb’s round chamber. Even as he picked himself up, his eyes adjusted and in the faint starlight and the dim glow of the town’s burning he saw his mother lying on her back near the wall. Her body was flushed and damp with sweat; the distant glow from the fires in her eyes. She lay naked on a blanket, her legs parted, the knees lifted, and Shimon averted his eyes. She was clutching something small to her breast; he could hear suckling. The woman glanced up at Shimon, her face twisted in fear and exhaustion—her son stood there and not his father.