Read Online No Lasting Burial by Stant Litore - Free Book Online

here, faithfully. Watching the sea.
Awaiting the rock and pitch of the boat’s return on the
waves. His mother had water and grain. He had found her and brought her
and his brother safely home; he’d done his father’s command. Now his duty was
here, at the edge of the sea.
    Once,
while he waited, he heard the call of a shofar and lifted his face. The call
was very beautiful, and it carried over the water, and the hills across the Sea
of Galilee gave it back. Shimon looked to the sea with fresh hope. Perhaps his
father would hear the call and row toward it or run toward it along the shore
if he was already on the land and not on the water. But there was still nothing
on the sea, neither boat nor bird.
    When Bar Nahemyah and other young men,
ten or twelve, began bringing bodies down to the shore and laying them out in a
long line on the sand, Shimon watched without speaking. The sight of
the corpses was horrible, yet he neither flinched nor looked away; he felt
detached, as though this were happening on some other shore and not here. He
could see the rise and fall of their chests; these bodies still breathed. Their
faces were flushed with fever, and they bore terrible wounds on their faces or
their arms. Bites. Some had been torn open, and those
were pale as though emptied out. Shimon bar Yonah knew some of them. There were
old men and young, old women and young women, nearly a hundred. And among them,
a few mercenaries, some dark-skinned, some olive, some white. Hired swords from
every part of the Roman world, broken away from their brothers and then
reassembled into a unit that could be put to the use of Empire, fighting for
coin and glory rather than any bonds of blood or kin or covenant. Shimon did
not understand how such a thing could be.
    “ Shalom ,
Bar Yonah. Will you aid me?” Bar Nahemyah called to him. He had the eyes of a
man who did not remember sleep or rest, and so would not seek either. Gore had
spattered his storm-coat.
    “I
have to wait for father,” Shimon said, his voice distant. “He’ll need me.”
    “All
Kfar Nahum needs you, every man who still breathes.” Bar Nahemyah’s voice was
low and intense. He swept out his arm, indicating the line of unconscious
bodies. “By noon all of these will be dead, and some will have risen, and they
will hunger. They will want to eat our People, what is left of our
People, our kin. Look at them. Romans and heathen, and our
own brothers, our own sisters gone from us. Every one of these
will kill. But that is not going to happen. Let us have justice. I will
see that these unclean monsters suffer for all time, for what they have done
this night. For Ahava my beloved. For
our fathers and our children dead.”
    But
Shimon had turned his head back to the sea, whose waves were louder in his ears
than Bar Nahemyah’s impassioned words.
    When
he said nothing, the other man’s eyes flashed hot with anger. “Your father
understood justice,” he cried. “He would have helped me.”
    Shimon
felt no guilt. His whole heart was pulled by the emptiness of the sea, and he
felt tugged beneath waves of dark terror. He gazed out desperately for some
sight of his father’s boat that he could cling to.
    Bar
Nahemyah’s face hardened. He turned away.
    There
was the sound of Bar Nahemyah exhorting the other youths, a drone in Shimon’s
ears. Then cries as other young men came down to the shore. Yakob the priest’s
son was with them, and he exchanged harsh words with Bar Nahemyah. Heated voices. A fight broke out, men beating each other,
some to protect their ill, others to seek vengeance
for the eaten. For a few beats of the heart, men fought on the sand over the
bodies of the dying. Still Shimon ignored them.
    In
the end, a few ran back to the town, led by the priest’s son. The others turned
the bodies onto their bellies and bound their ankles. They took cloths and
filled these with stones from the shore, then knotted up the cloths and bound
those to the ankles of the