Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) Read Free

the two supplicants by. There were maybe thirty men and women, some standing, others seated on great slabs of rock that past supplicants had pulled free of the scree on the west side of the hill near the cairns of the dead. Beyond the supplicants lay the valley, filled with the white tents of Shiloh. That land was lush with tall grasses and stands of oak and terebinth near the water; faint from the far slopes across the river came the lowing of herds, many of them her husband’s. The slow river wound eastward on its way to meet the Tumbling Water, which ran through all the land from the Galilee hills in the north to the dead sea in the south where no fish were—and where the salt in the water was so thick a man could lie on the surface without sinking. Where the salt on the shore stood in tall white pillars, shaped like tents or women or creatures the Hebrews had not met before even in nightmares. Like so many reminders that the land was strange to them and they still strangers in it, and their possession of its fields and waters a blessing that could yet be revoked, a promise that could yet be rescinded.
    As Devora looked out over the supplicants, she decided she had time before sundown to sit in decision over one more case. It was her responsibility to see as many as she could, yet she was weary. She yearned for a restful Sabbath meal with her husband. The cases of the day had not succeeded in distracting her from her real worry—the armed camp that had set up a few miles downriver around the tent of a chieftain called Barak ben Abinoam, bringing with it news of walking dead in the north.
    Devora searched the supplicants’ eyes—herdsmen, levites, craftsmen—for some sign of an easy case, though only the most difficult were sent to her. A stir among those lowest on the slopedrew her attention. People were drawing together as though to form a wall as a woman approached them, climbing unsteadily up the hill with a bundle clutched in her arms. Her lank hair hung forward over her face, and she was wrapped in a blanket that looked to be coarse wool. A salmah, the poorest of garments. One shoulder was free of the wool, bare and dirtied with the stain of a long and sweaty walk. Devora did not recognize her from the nearby camp at Shiloh nor from any of the herders’ camps in the surrounding valleys. She might have come a long way, wearing nothing but that salmah and her long, ragged hair, and carrying nothing but that bundle she held.
    One of the supplicants, a white-robed levite, stepped directly into her way and must have said something that Devora couldn’t hear from her seat; she saw the young woman—a girl, really—lift her head and spit in the levite’s face. The man lifted his hand but did not strike, as though reluctant to touch with his bare skin this woman who came strange and dirtied to the
navi
’s hill.
    The other supplicants formed a circle around the girl. A few who did not share the levite’s hesitation began shoving her, as though to push her back down the slope. Seeing the girl stumble to her knees, Devora hissed through her teeth. She didn’t want complications; the day had been tiring enough. The seat of decision was hers and there would be no stoning or reviling or barring of any supplicant from her hill unless it was at her word. She wanted to know what was going on, and quickly. She lifted her hand.
    “Let the girl come!” she called, her voice sharp and clear in the late afternoon heat.
    Silence fell over the hill.
    The supplicants stepped away from the girl, a few of them with visible reluctance, and left an open path to the bare, trampled space before the
navi
’s seat. Now all their eyes were on Devora; she felt them, even as she kept her own on the girl who was stumblingthe last fifty paces up to the olive tree. The
navi
put up her hand once the girl had come near enough, and the girl stood there with her eyes lowered, her shoulders shaking, her hands clutching the bundle as tightly as