Strangers in the Land Read online

  She lifted the next stone, straining. A cry ripped from her throat as she let the great rock fall into place, roofing the cairn. As she gulped in air, her palms flat against the cold stone, she felt the slightest tremor in the ground, through her knees.

  She lifted her eyes.

  Three horses were riding up the valley below toward her hill at a swift canter, one well ahead of the other two. They were sleek animals, good ones, probably trades from across the Water. They were riding from the northeast, from the northern camp, and with the sun behind her Devora could see them clearly. The riders were tall men, one broad-shouldered with a thick, dark beard. The other two lean and wiry.

  Taking a breath, she returned her attention to the cairn. It must be finished. The earth was cool against her knees, but strands of her hair had strayed across her face, sweaty from the exertion. Not how she would have chosen to meet men of her People: on her knees, sweaty, and dirtied. She hissed through her teeth. Burying this corpse was more important than her dignity. She reached for the last of the stones. She would finish this, and then she would hear what these men wanted, these men who’d taken up the spear when the dead rose, and ridden out of the north.

  MEN FROM THE GALILEE

  THE FIRST of the riders pulled well ahead of the other two; he rode at a gallop right up the slope, only slowing when he reached the cairns, so as not to break his horse’s legs against some mound of stone. Horses were rare in the land, a gift of God to any who possessed one. Sacred in their own way and not to be risked heedlessly. The man riding this one checked his steed, slid from its back, and strode toward Devora among the cairns without any sign of deference or respect for the navi.

  Ignoring his approach, Devora was fighting to lift the last stone into place, and she nearly passed out from the exertion and from the pain in her back.

  Suddenly the weight was gone, and she nearly fell. Blinking sweat from her eyes, she found that Zadok had taken the stone from her and was raising it to the top of the cairn as effortlessly as though he were lifting no more weight than a full waterskin. The stone settled into place with a reassuring clack of rock against rock.

  Zadok!

  Her whole body lightened with relief.

  The nazarite turned to her, his eyes grim but present. “Navi,” he said quietly.

  “About time,” she gasped, then swayed on her feet. Zadok’s hand caught her arm, and for a moment she leaned against him, just breathing, heedless of the impropriety. But she had no time to rest or breathe; the war-leader was approaching between the cairns. The Canaanite looked numbly on without rising from where she knelt. Devora’s own limbs were shaky, but she forced herself to step away from Zadok and stand without support. Her dress was smeared with soil and sweat; there was dirt beneath her nails and scrapes on her hands. She felt filthy, and vaguely defiled, though her naked skin had not touched the corpse. She longed desperately for a cold river to dip into and dry clothes, but there wasn’t time.

  The stranger stopped when he was near enough to speak without shouting. A lean man, tall with the height of the northern tribes, his hair braided in the war knot. One of his eyelids drooped a little. That would have made another man look sleepy; it made this man look sinister, secretive. His lip had a bit of curl in it. As his gaze took in Devora and Zadok, then lingered on the Canaanite, that curl twisted into a sneer.

  Devora braced herself, not liking the look of this man.

  “A heathen,” the man called out, without bothering to introduce himself. “Even in Shiloh I find the stink of them.”

  The Canaanite looked up from the cairn, and her eyes burned hot.

  “She’s a supplicant,” Devora said quietly. “Let her be.”

  The man spat to the side, and Devora tensed. This was where the dead were buried—how dare he—

  “Who are you, stranger?” she demanded.

  He showed his teeth. His hard, cold eyes glanced past her, at Zadok. “I am Nimri ben Nabaoth, of Naphtali tribe. I lead herdsmen in the hills above Judges’ Well. Why does the woman speak for you?”

  “She is the navi,” Zadok said. “She speaks for God.”

  “Ha. Ask God to choose a man for the next navi.”

  “Perhaps he will,” Devora said smoothly. “You’ve come from Barak’s camp?”

  “I’ve come from my camp. Barak happens to be camping near me.”

  The other two riders were approaching now. They dismounted some distance from the cairns to approach on foot, showing respect for the holy ground where the dead were buried, and for the navi. Nimri glanced over his shoulder at them, tensing slightly. Then he shook his head and shot Zadok a look. “Let them talk to this woman if they want.” Then he mounted his horse. “The high priest—I can find him down there?” He jerked his head toward the white tents.

  “It is nearly the Sabbath,” Zadok said.

  Devora didn’t say anything. Her hands were clenched with rage.

  “After the Sabbath, then,” Nimri said, his tone dismissive. His gaze flicked across them all once, contempt for the woman who spoke for God and a violent hate in his eyes when he glanced at the Canaanite. Then he turned his horse and kicked it into a canter, nearly riding down the other two men. The men leapt to the side, and then Nimri ben Nabaoth was past, and he and his horse tore down the slope as quickly as they’d come.

  “If that is the kind of man mothers raise in the northern tribes,” Devora muttered under her breath, but didn’t finish the thought. The other two were near now.

  One of them stepped forward, his eyes glancing at the nazarite and the two women. Devora took a careful look at the war-leader approaching her. His hands were rough from working an olive press; his legs were long and lean. There were few wrinkles in his suntanned face. Some of that was youth. Devora suspected the rest was that this was not a man who worried much or deliberated much. A great, slanting scar crossed his nose and cheeks, probably a witness to the efficacy of Sea Coast iron and to the youth’s ability to face it head-on, without fleeing. Or, Devora supposed, a witness to this man’s inability to duck.

  She nodded at the man, and he halted a few strides from her. Then the man looked the two women over, appraising them for a moment as he might appraise slaves he wished to purchase for his bedding. The Canaanite didn’t appear to notice; she still knelt by that cairn, her head down, silent in her suffering. But Devora flushed, and her eyes went cold. “Do you also come to insult God’s navi?”

  The newcomer cast a glance back at Nimri, his face amused. “That is a proud man. Nimri insults everybody. Someone will gut him with a spear one day. But we are all proud men in the north.” He looked back at her, grinned. “I like you. They did not tell me the navi was a lovely woman.”

  “The navi has been a woman for three generations.”

  “God’s ways are strange,” the northerner remarked. “They did say you were a woman. They didn’t say you were beautiful. I am told the last navi was a wrinkled old thing. Not every doe ages well.” He glanced at Zadok. “Is she yours?”

  Devora seethed, but Zadok spoke before she could. “I serve her. I have taken the nazarite vow.” Zadok’s voice was calm, but every line of the man’s body was tense, watchful.

  “The hair. I saw.” For the first time, the northerner’s voice deepened with awe. “We haven’t seen you in the north, but we’ve heard. They say a nazarite knows no trade but the spear. They say he fights like ten men.”

  “They are wrong,” Zadok said grimly. “I fight like twenty.”

  “Ha!” The northerner slapped his thigh in appreciation and pointed at the nazarite. “I like you too.”

  Devora lifted her voice. “What is your name and your tribe, stranger?”

  “I am Omri.” He drew himself up. “Of Zebulun tribe.”

  “And what are the chieftains of the north doing in Shiloh valley, Omri of Zebulun tribe? There are no dead here. Does Barak ben Abinoam lie in his tent enjoying his wines while the dead feast?”

  The amusement faded from O
mri’s face. “We’ve come to find what visions God has sent the navi,” he said, the flirtation gone from his voice. “And to ask the kohannim for the Ark.”

  “God sent a vision this very day,” Devora replied. “I have seen the dead lurching through fields of barley and wheat. In numbers greater than the cranes in the marshes. I have seen the whole land defiled and blighted. It is God’s warning. This is what might happen. You and the men in that camp must see that it doesn’t.”

  Omri looked stricken by her words; he fell silent. The other man’s face grew grimmer, colder. Devora considered him curiously. Dark, curling hair about a sun-roughened face. He held in his right hand a tall staff with its top swaddled in wool and its end planted firmly in the earth. That made Devora think of a herdsman, but the man’s hands were stained with red and purple—the juices of grapes. A vintner, then. Perhaps he needed the staff because he was infirm. Yet he did not lean on it. He wore a heavy wool cloak, which was strange in this heat. He did not bear scars across his face as Omri did, but his dark eyes and the set of his shoulders spoke of a wrath and a strength barely restrained. There was something lethal about this man. She would not care to be alone with him. She felt sure she could remind Omri of his place, and hers, but this other man...

  “When we left,” Omri muttered, “there were just a few wandering herds of corpses up by White Cedars. The northernmost encampments were at risk. Nimri’s, mostly. We sent word to other tribes. Set our camp down there—” He waved at the valley. “Where else would we all gather but Shiloh? Though it means leaving our barley and our vineyards undefended for a few days, we need help.” His face flushed with anger. “We need much help, if God has shown you—that. If I am not hearing only a woman’s fears.”

  Devora ignored the comment, focusing instead on what Omri was implying. “How many men have come, Omri?”

  “Five hundred and fifty,” he said.

  Devora started. “So few?”

  “Maybe less now. A few slipped away as we came down out of the hills. They did not want to leave their farms unwatched.” He showed his teeth.

  Fear gripped her heart. “How many tribes?” Her voice breathless with horror.

  “Zebulun and Naphtali have come. A few from Issachar, very few—but Laban is their chieftain, and when he lifts his axe, he’s an entire raid by himself.” Omri’s eyes glinted. “The northern tribes have gathered. But the others...the chieftains of Reuben sent this message to us in the hour before dawn today: Let Barak defend his vineyard, and we will defend ours.”

  Three tribes. Only three. Three could not take the Ark of the Covenant with them, nor the blessing of the kohannim who stood before God for the People. Three tribes out of twelve could not take God with them into the north.

  “Omri, not in all our years in possession of this land have the People risen with so few as five hundred and fifty men.” Devora felt her control slipping. The infant, the weeping of the Canaanite girl, the vision of the dead devouring the land, the shock of Omri’s news—it was too much.

  “The other tribes feel no threat,” he muttered.

  “What threatens one tribe threatens all. Have our People forgotten the desert?” Her fear rose like a river in flood. “Where is Barak? Why hasn’t he come himself? I would speak with him, Omri.”

  “He is here.”

  The man who’d spoken was Omri’s companion, the grim, lethal one. He cast his wool cloak back over his shoulder, revealing a bronze breast-piece, polished though dented from past raids. Bronze greaves strapped to his calves. He took a step forward; as he did, he unwound the cloth about the head of his staff to reveal a lethal slice of bronze that flashed in the lowering sun. A spear, not a staff.

  Zadok took his place by Devora’s side, tall and menacing, and the man did not approach nearer.

  “Barak is here,” the man said. His voice was strange, rasping a little as though he rarely used it, as though he rarely indulged in conversation with other men or with women. Yet his voice rose from deep in his chest and was powerful. “And I would ask things of God’s navi.”

  BARAK

  BARAK WAS a man who liked to have warm earth under his hands, or the cool, healthy skin of green vines. His vineyards were not the best in Eretz Israel, but they were close. His presses gave wine that sold not only to the sons of the People but even to merchants traveling through on their way to the great cities on the coast. Over the door of his house hung a bronze spear and a shield, from the days when he’d led the men of the north in repelling a raid of young warriors from those coastal cities. Though he’d had four hundred men at his back, he’d fought in those days only to defend his own house, which to his mind was his whole tribe.

  His wife, a Canaanite, had died half a year ago in pregnancy, both she and the child, and at times the pain of it hit him so hard he stood still in the middle of his vines under the hot sun, vision gone wet with tears, just waiting to be able to breathe again. He hadn’t taken another wife yet, though he must do so soon or his seed would be lost. Yet his grief was bitter, and he did not forgive Hadassah for leaving him nor God for taking her.

  He would never forget the fire he’d felt in her flesh as she died; she’d been burning up from the inside, and his child had burned inside her. And then, between one breath and the next, she was gone, and what was left of her retained its warmth for a time and then cooled slowly, like a charred coal. He had remained with her body until the sun rose, defiling his hand each time he touched her face to feel her warmth dying away. In the morning, he’d carried her to the slopes above his vineyard. Set her in the earth, raised a cairn above her. Pitched a tent beside the stones that marked her memory and remained there seven days until his uncleanness passed.

  When the seven days ended, he had returned to his cedar house and found his slaves and his wife’s mother with ashes in their hair, mourning by the hearth. Without a word to his mother-in-law, he’d gone to her alcove and dug out her gods from beneath her bedding. He had tolerated them for the sake of his Canaanite wife. Now she was gone. God had taken her. He feared what else God might take from him. He’d made it halfway to the hearth before Hadassah’s mother had flown at him, screaming and snatching at the gods with her aged hands.

  She had screamed and kicked at him, and in the end he’d had to tie her, binding her at the wrists, ankles, and knees. He’d left her rolling on the floor behind him as he’d burned her gods, one after the other. She had shrieked and called him vile things and spat at him, but he had not turned his head or responded, until the flames were licking at the carved face of the last of her gods. By then she was out of breath and sobbing.

  “Burn,” he’d murmured without turning to face her. He had kept his eyes on the flames. “When God is near, everything unclean catches fire. Nothing unclean must remain in my house. I will invite no more fire in my house.”

  He watched the coals long into the night, ignoring the weeping of his wife’s mother. Seven days. His wife Hadassah had been dead only seven days.

  Now, months later, Barak stood before the navi, taking her measure. The navi was aging but lovely; she was not tall, but the way she stood and the hardness in her eyes conveyed presence and command—something he had never seen before or expected to see in a woman. The man standing behind her was a giant, and his legend as giant as he, but unlike his chieftains, Barak ignored the nazarite. After an initial glance, he ignored the Canaanite girl too, though her face pulled at his heart, troubling him; she looked so much like Hadassah.

  But Barak did not like to be distracted from a thing that he needed. He focused on the navi.

  “What would you ask?” Devora’s voice sounded a little hoarse. Good. She was off her guard, then.

  Barak lifted his voice, intending to speak in a way that demanded her submission, but to his own surprise he found that his tone grew hard with anger.

  “Each year, we in the hills send a tenth of our harvest to Shiloh. To feed Shiloh. So you can speak to God, protect us from the dead.” Barak thought gr
imly of the caravans moving south through the hills—and of the screams of Hadassah’s mother as the fire devoured her gods. He had done his part to keep Law and Covenant. “Now the dead have come,” he said. “What happened?”

  “What happened.” Devora’s face tightened. “Each year fewer tithes come. Each year fewer children are dedicated to the priesthood. Each year as I sit in decision here, I hear more offenses against the Law and the Covenant, more lawlessness in the land. And now, this day, I hear that the People have need of spears to protect them, and only three tribes have come. It is not Shiloh that has failed.”

  Barak’s eyes glinted with anger. But he held his tongue. That this woman should take him to task...but the navi was set apart from all women. She was kadosh, she was holy. She was God’s. A man could not strike her. Nor could a man ignore her words.

  “I demand assurances of God.” Barak planted the end of his spear haft into the earth, but he did not lean on it. “I have heard things in the hills that touch my mind with fear. Who is to say El will stride before us against the unburied dead?”

  “Have the men of this land become weak, brittle? Moseh the Lawgiver but lifted his hand, and raiders from another tribe tumbled into the dust—for he knew God was near. Do you and your men know nothing but your own fright, roaring louder in your hearts than anything else you might hear?”

  “I hear you,” Barak said grimly. “And I believe you hear God. If God is with us, navi, I will not fear.” Barak held her gaze. He did not know what he would find when he returned to the north, what he would have to face. But this woman did. This woman could see what would happen, see what God might give and what God might take away. He would not allow himself to lose his temper with her; he needed her. His men needed her. “I’ll not lead men on a raid they won’t survive or to a battle I can’t win. If we have no sign that God is with us, if you will not go with us into the north, then I will go home to my vineyard, and likely each of the men will seek out his own door, to stand in defense of his own home, until the dead come. Let all other men fend for themselves.”