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

bitten. One after another they lifted the feverish
bodies, one youth at the head and one at the feet, and carried them into the
boats, piling them atop each other like fish. And when there were no more, the
boats slipped from the shore, each with two youths at the oars, their eyes hot.
Shimon felt a dull horror as he watched the boats grow smaller on the waves.
    Those
in the boats were not dead. They lived. They breathed … though none of them
were awake or aware, and none would survive the morning. Dimly, Shimon
understood that Bar Nahemyah meant to toss them into the sea, that there would
be no tombs on the hill for these. Yet the horror of it was something outside
of him, like water beating against a rock; the horror inside of him, the
memory of the blood on his father’s hand, the frantic look in his father’s
eyes—that was far more personal and overwhelming.
    Behind
him, the priest’s son came running back with Zebadyah
his father panting behind him. Perhaps the priest had been searching again
among the tents and ruins for survivors; it had taken Yakob a while to find
him.
    And
now it was too late.
    When
Zebadyah reached the shore, he broke to his knees in the sand, his eyes wild.
He screamed at the retreating boats: “No! Come back! Bar Nahemyah, come back!
The dead must be buried! They must be buried! The Law! Come back!”
    But
no answer was called back over the water, and none of the boats turned its bow.
    Shimon
felt someone beside him, and though he didn’t turn, he knew by the sound of the
youth’s breathing that Yakob was there.
    “Amma
is in the house,” Shimon said. He kept his eyes on the water.
    “Yohanna
and I will bring her water,” Yakob promised. He stood by Shimon a moment,
seeming to understand why his friend was here, and whether because he could not
think of something to say or because he knew that there wasn’t anything to say,
he spoke no word but only gripped Shimon’s shoulder. Then he turned and went to
help his father up from the sand. The strength seemed gone from Zebadyah’s
limbs; his face glistened with tears.
    Numb
inside, Shimon gazed always past the boats out across the empty sea, looking
for one boat, one boat that had set out in the dark and not returned.
    Somewhere
out in the middle of the water, as the sun rose hot over the sea, the youths
set aside their oars and stood, their legs spread wide for balance as the boats
rocked. They lifted the bodies over the gunwales and slid them, one after the
other, into the cool womb of the sea. The wrath Shimon had seen in the youths’
eyes as they set out made the reason for their act clear. The young men knew
the bodies would rise, and the memory of the dead devouring their village
during the night was bitter in their minds and hot in their hearts. They needed
someone to suffer for what had been done, for the kin who had been eaten, for
the kin who were dying now. They needed to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth. They could not make the Romans suffer; the Romans were gone, eaten or
fled. They could not make the dead who’d attacked suffer; for they had been
destroyed during the night and the dawn that followed, by Roman swords or
Hebrew fishing spears or by Bar Nahemyah’s hammer and stone. But these bodies
that lay now in their boats would become eaters, too. Unless speared through
the brow or burned with fire, they would walk and moan for years, feeding on
the People.
    Or—dropped
into the sea, their ankles bound, these new dead would writhe in the water,
without food, without breath, their moans heard only by the fish. They could be
made to suffer. The youths hoped this fiercely, and like the heathen tribes
from whom their fathers had wrested the land many centuries before, they gave
their dead to the sea. Not in reverence but in fury and a longing to forget. A
punishment meted out, justice done, and the pain of that night would lie
beneath the waves, never to be spoken of.
    Afterward,
as they beached the boats