Like Flames in the Night, page 4
part #4 of Cities of Refuge Series
At least the remaining Arameans had finally skittered away like the diseased rats they were, tossing aside their arms and fleeing before the forces of Yehudah after we’d laid waste to the once-feared army. Hebron, the final resting place of our forefathers, and a city of refuge, was ours once again. I could not wait to see the look on my father’s face when we told him of the triumph we’d finally secured over our oppressors.
Tobiah had battled the fearsome forces of King Og at Edrei under Mosheh, had been there when the walls of Jericho fell, and rescued my mother, Alanah, from the rubble. He’d fought many battles under the mighty commander Yehoshua as they’d struggled to claim Canaan for Israel. But now as a man of nearly sixty years with a body wearied by war and heavy labor, he’d made the decision to step aside and allow my generation to reclaim what his own had so recklessly lost.
I’d never forget the mixture of pride and envy in his eyes when my five older brothers and I had marched from the valley with the goal of pushing the Arameans from our tribal territory two months ago. The fact that we’d already accomplished a major victory, even though we’d had one sword for every four men, was nothing less than a miracle of Yahweh, one that I hoped would inspire the rest of Israel to rise up and throw off the yoke Kushan had slipped about our necks with far too much ease. With Othniel as our leader, and this first decisive triumph in hand, it finally seemed a real possibility. We’d secured Hebron, Be’er Sheva and Arad were next, and then we would push north until every last Aramean was driven from the Land of Promise.
My cousin Yavan appeared at my side, jamming a sharp elbow in my ribs with a grin. “I don’t know which I am most anticipating: scrubbing this stink from my bones or my wife’s cooking.”
The familiar pang of jealousy struck particularly hard in that moment. Eight years ago when we’d returned from battle, stunned and demoralized by our defeat, the soft embrace I’d been able to fall into had done much to ease the sting. The gentle hands of my wife, Havah, the ones that had aided me in removing my armor upon my return and had wiped the filth from my face as I mourned those who’d fallen, would not be there to soothe my bruised body today. The pang swelled into an ache, one that even seven years after her loss seemed nearly as sharp as it had the day I’d buried her.
Yavan flinched at my expression. “Forgive me,” he murmured, scratching at his wiry black beard. “I didn’t think—”
I slapped his back and forced a smile. “For as much as Nena’s cooking is worth the anticipation, you smell like the corpse of a plague-ridden mule left to rot in the sun for a month. Head for the stream first.”
My cousin and closest friend snatched up the bait. “Me? At least I don’t stink like the hind end of a camel after it’s been grazing on moldy barley.”
Grateful to veer my thoughts away from the past, I returned his insults with a few of my own, each volley becoming more and more descriptive until not only were he and I howling with laughter but my five brothers, along with Yavan’s three brothers, had joined in with a few creative jabs of their own. The fact that every one of us who’d set out from this valley were returning relatively unscathed was yet another miracle. Last time that had not been the case. Two of my uncles, including the one I’d been named for, had been among the thousands of Hebrews to fall the day we’d lost the last of our ground to Kushan’s forces.
Coming around the last bend, we entered the valley, my chest aching at the familiar sight. Olive groves lined the hills all around us, along with numerous vineyards and orchards. Many of the trees bowed deep from the weight of their fruit, the product of my father’s tireless efforts over the years. We’d returned just in time to aid the rest of the family in bringing in the last of the harvest—a provision granted by Othniel, with the expectation that we would return in a month, refreshed and prepared to march on Arad before Aram could muster enough reinforcements to halt our momentum. Perhaps the entirety of Yehudah’s territory would be in our hands before the early rains poured out Yahweh’s blessing upon our thirsty soil.
My greedy eyes traveled past the fertile bounty and toward the grouping of homes that had grown from three to twelve in the years since my father and mother had returned to the valley once inhabited by her Canaanite kin. Although my wife was no longer among the women who awaited us within those dwellings, a pair of brown eyes that matched hers perfectly would no doubt be among the first to spot us. Yavan may be anticipating good food and a washing, but nothing would ever be as satisfying as holding my daughter in my arms. My ears already anticipated her little voice calling out “Abba!” and her tiny hands patting my bearded cheeks as she regaled me with tales of explorations over the weeks I’d been gone.
However, as we came closer to the cluster of mud-brick homes that our family had built over the years to cope with our ever-expanding clan, I noticed an oddity. Not only did Nadina not fly to greet me, but the ever-present sounds of children playing in the orchards were missing, along with the bustle of family members tending the fields or weeding the enormous vegetable garden at the foot of the southern slope. With the exception of two of my brother Lev’s boys herding a few brown-and-white goats atop one of the stone-lined terraces off in the distance, not a soul could be seen. The entire valley seemed blanketed in a hush.
“Where is everyone?” asked Yavan, echoing my thoughts, his tone causing wariness to buzz through my bones. Around us my brothers and cousins had also gone on alert, sensing something was awry. Had there been an attack? Had the Arameans come here after retreating from our forces? My heart took up a stuttering beat as I swept my gaze around the farm. Yet the plows sat untouched, donkeys and sheep ambled about blissfully unaware within the stone corral, and the garden overflowed with bounty that would help sustain our clan through the cold months ahead. Nothing seemed amiss.
The door of the largest house swung open, my mother stepping over the threshold, followed by my father, who slipped his muscular forearm about her waist as they awaited our approach. A rush of relief hit my chest.
My mother’s curls fluttered in the breeze, the red tendrils now faded and interspersed with white, but no less lovely than they had been when I’d long ago made a game of winding the coils about my fingers as she hiked through the wadis, bow in hand, with me strapped to her back. The smile that had sparked from the unbidden memory melted from my face as I realized my parents did not return the gesture and that, although I was walking in the very center of ten men, their eyes were focused on me alone.
My mother stepped forward, her bleak expression making my uneasiness thicken into black, oozing dread. I’d seen that look on her face before—the moment she’d emerged from my bedchamber with my wife’s lifeblood on her tunic and futile apology in her blue-green eyes.
My feet halted, refusing to take another step toward her and whatever horrors were locked behind her flat-pressed lips.
My father pulled her to a stop with a gentle tug on her elbow. “Alanah,” I heard him mutter. “Let me.”
“No, Tobiah.” She pried his hand from her arm with a grimace, her stubborn chin lifting. “I will tell him.”
I’d just spent weeks engaged with the most brutal of enemies, lodging my battle-ax and dagger into the flesh of myriad faceless men without remorse. When the slaughter had been complete and the victory claimed, I’d spent days hauling corpses to burn piles after searching them for any useable weapon on the bloodstained battlefield. But the sight of my mother coming toward me with desolation on her lovely face was enough to make me retreat. My feet took three stumbling steps backward. My eyes jerked away from the pity between her fiery brows to the doorway, where my two oldest sisters stood on the threshold with tears on their cheeks. My throat burned as I searched behind them, desperate for a glimpse of brown eyes, pink-petal lips, and hair the color of roasted barley.
“Liyam.” My mother reached for me, but I tripped another two steps back, refusing to let her touch my skin, rejecting whatever she was going to say before her mouth even opened. “There was an accident three days ago. We sent Beriah to fetch you, but he could not find you in the chaos.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, my head spinning as my mind sped ahead of her words. Not after Havah, surely Yahweh would not be so cruel . . .
“Son. Our precious little Nadina—” Her voice shattered, hitting me with the impact of a thousand arrows slung from her expert bow, driving me to my knees in the dirt. “Your daughter is gone.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
I squinted, attempting to merge the two bleary outlines before me into one man and failing miserably. I tried again, my fingers gripping my quarry’s tunic tighter as I shook him and screamed into both his blurred faces, uncaring that the entire marketplace of Arad was standing witness to my inebriation. “Stand. Still. And tell me who he is.”
The grizzled peddler tried to fold himself down, no doubt retreating from my shouts and my breath, both of which were likely terrifying after two days of drink and grief-induced fury. I did not care. He would give me a name or I’d kill him too. He was hiding a murderer. Everyone is this godforsaken town was. They refused to give me any information that would lead me to the trader who had plowed over my seven-year-old daughter with his horse-drawn wagon nearly a week ago.
“I told you, all I know is that he is Moabite,” whimpered the peddler, cowering. “And he has one eye.”
“Where did he go?” I shouted, shaking him again. “What is his name?”
“I don’t know!” His voice warbled a plea, his palms lifted in supplication. “He was only here three days, selling spices and cloth from Egypt. Then he was gone. Please, I don’t know anything more than that.”
“He killed my daughter! I want his name. I will have his blood,” I snarled, my sight going bleary again and my head swimming. “I will have justice.”
Two sets of enormous hands suddenly gripped my arms, tearing me away from the trembling peddler, yanking me backward until my heels skidded over stony ground.
“Liyam!” said the voice of my brother Shimon. “Stop this. He doesn’t know anything.”
Shimon and Yosef, my brothers closest above me in age, had a tight grip on me. Yavan stood nearby, his brows furrowed. Obviously the three of them had followed me to Arad, likely determined to keep me from doing what I must. But I refused to back down, struggling against their hold.
“He knows,” I bellowed, then swung a finger around at the blur of gawking merchants and customers who filled the town plaza. “They all know who murdered her. And I will have a name or I will burn this market to the ground.”
“That’s enough. Look,” ordered Yosef, jerking me to the right. “There are soldiers right over there, watching you act the drunken fool.”
My head lolled to the side, eyes trying to focus in the direction he’d turned me, but in the past minutes the sunlight had somehow become far too harsh and I saw nothing but glare.
“Bring them on!” I spat, trying to blink the swirling lights away. “They know too. I’ll have their coward blood as well!” I let out a few curses toward the Arameans who still held this town, reminding them that Othniel would be here soon to take it back.
“Cease this foolishness,” Shimon hissed, his face close to mine. “The three of us are not prepared to take on a garrison of Arameans whom we’ve just humiliated in battle. And you are far too gone to even lift a sword in the right direction. This is not the way to bring about justice, Liyam. Assaulting innocent men will not bring her back.”
“Innocent? My Nadina was innocent.” Her name plunged the poison-tipped spear even deeper in my gut while her precious face floated just out of my mind’s reach, as if already fading from memory. “But that didn’t keep her from being left in pieces in the middle of the road.”
A small group of my older nieces and nephews had been with Nadina that day, oblivious to the encroaching danger as they walked home from the market late in the afternoon. The trader’s wagon and team had come from the direction of Arad, barreling around a curve at a breakneck speed. Distracted by a lizard, Nadina had darted after it like the quick and venturesome little thing she’d been, so she’d been unable to hear her cousins’ agonized warnings over the thunder of horsehoofs. All five of them blamed themselves for not keeping a closer eye on her and allowing her to run ahead of them, and they’d each come to me separately with brokenhearted apologies on their lips. But none of them had held the reins that day. Only he was guilty of murdering my only child.
A choking sound from a few paces away made me swing my head around, my vision blurring again from the sudden movement. A stranger, a woman a little older than my mother, sat on a stool next to her table of wares, a palm over her mouth and pity in her eyes. I didn’t need some stranger’s tears. I needed my little girl.
But she’d already been in the ground when I arrived home to crow over my worthless victory. Her precious bones rotted in the dirt. Her lilting voice and laughter silenced. Those tiny hands that fluttered like butterflies as she described all the wonders of the valley stilled forever.
Yavan’s voice was gentle as he moved in front of me. “He’s long gone, my friend. He could have taken any of the trade roads once he left the area. He could have gone east over the Jordan into Moab or Ammon. He could have gone back south to Egypt. Or he could have moved deeper into Hebrew territory. There is no way to know. Besides, he has five days’ lead on us, even if we did know which direction he traveled.”
I growled like the rabid dog I’d become. “Someone had to have seen him. Someone here has to know his route.”
My cousin shook his head. “It’s useless to thrash about screaming at these people, Liyam. It won’t help you know anything more than you already do.”
“I know now that he has only one eye,” I said, conjuring an image of a slavering beast with his sole hooded pupil trained on the last of my earthly treasures before he trampled her into the dirt. “And I know that I am going to dig out his other one with my dagger before I tear him limb from limb.”
My stomach lurched and acid burned a path up my throat before I jerked from Shimon’s hold to vomit on the cobblestones. Doubled over, my chest aching from the force of heaving up two day’s worth of beer, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
Until my own heart stopped beating and I was laid alongside my girl and her mother, I would not stop searching for him. I’d vowed it again and again as I lay on my back, searching the black sky for answers the past two nights. I’d refused to pass over the threshold of my home and take any rest in the place where Nadina had laughed, sung songs, and laid her sweet head down to dream.
“You are no good to anyone in this state, Liyam, least of all Nadina,” said Shimon, his older-brother tone as stern as I’d ever heard it. “How can you expect to honor her memory with your head stuck inside a beer jug? I, as much as anyone, want my niece to be avenged.” He slapped a palm to his chest, making me flinch at the sudden movement. “I know what it’s like to lose a child. But if you don’t pull yourself together and stop harassing these merchants and poking at the Arameans, you’ll find yourself in chains, or worse. You won’t ever have justice for her if you are dead too.”
Regardless of my swirling senses and the rising urge to again empty my belly on the ground, the truth of Shimon’s point somehow collided with the small part of my mind that still functioned properly. He was right. I’d wasted two days guzzling down any drink I could find in the valley, welcoming the sensation of grief being swallowed up in numbness. Then, when the effects had worn thin and none of my family members were willing to replenish my dwindling supply of beer, I’d stumbled the two-hour walk to Arad in search of stronger drink and information about the monster who’d crushed my child.
If the merchants here refused to give me answers, then I would find them elsewhere. And to do that I had to be clear-minded and focused on my mission alone. I was no longer a husband or a father, I was simply a go’el haadam, the next-of-kin who had every right to avenge my daughter’s blood. The one-eyed Moabite would pay, even if I had to search the face of the entire earth to find him.
“This is a fool’s errand, son,” said my father, swatting away the smoke that had shifted on the breeze. He tossed another handful of twigs onto the burn pile we’d built in an open patch near the olive grove. “You will never find him. You are needed here for planting and then in the battles for Arad and Be’er Sheva, alongside your brothers.”
I glared into the flames, arms crossed over my chest, refusing to acknowledge his admonishment. My head still throbbed from my two-day marriage to the lip of a beer jug, and even now the hole in my chest cried for more, but after my brothers and Yavan had dragged me home and forced me to sleep off my inebriation, I’d remained sober, using the full force of my crushing grief as fuel for my single-minded purpose instead of seeking to quench it.
“You have plenty of help, Abba. And one man will make little difference in battle,” I said. “Besides, I have every confidence that our tribe will be victorious with Othniel in command.”
Our scouts had brought back word of rumors among the Arameans that we’d had the Ark of the Covenant on the battlefield in Hebron and therefore their swords had dissolved to ash as we advanced. Of course the Ark was still safe within the Mishkan at Shiloh, but their terror was a gift to Othniel for sure. And knowing how shrewd our commander could be, he’d likely use such fears to his advantage, sending in spies to embellish the stories, layering myths atop truths until the rumors became legends. Soon Othniel himself would be the very embodiment of Mosheh, the great commander who’d brought Pharaoh to his knees and split the sea in two, face shining with the glory of Adonai and his staff spewing a cloud of fire. Israel had little need of my sword, and I had my own sacred duty to fulfill, no matter what my father said.
