When I called his name, Yoav narrowed his eyes as though I had uttered a curse. But I gestured to him, and he recognized me and approached. He stood beneath the dry leaves of the mulberry tree, half-dressed in his silver armor. I wondered if he slept in it, if he dreamed of battles and blood or of my daughter’s beautiful face.
“It’s the day of sorrow,” I reminded him, thinking we might pray together or light a lamp in memory of Zara.
He snorted. I thought of the blindfolded horses of the king, set upon a path they could not see. Some must have protested; they must have reared up, furious to be sightless in the brutal grasp of the serpent that led up the mountainside.
“Every day is that,” said the Man from the Valley, who was still my son-in-law even though I had no daughter. “What should I pray for?”
He seemed both ashamed and furious; there was scorn in his voice at the mention of prayer. Of course he knew the day. He had counted every moment since he’d found her beneath the heavy rocks I’d placed over her so that she might be protected from any other creatures of prey.
“You have two sons,” I reminded him. “They have your wife’s dark eyes.”
Yoav stunned me with a roar of grief. I drew back, uncertain of who was before me, this Man from the Valley who confided in no one and slept with his back to the wall, ax in hand, ready to fight while he was dreaming. “I told you not to speak of her,” he admonished me.
“Or of the boys?”
He faced me, defiant. “This world is nothing to me. Why would you think I care about such things?”
“I came to you because you carry her with you,” I said, reminding him that I had offered him her last breath. He had taken it and now she belonged to him. In exchange for this great gift, he needed to respect me still, no matter how bitter he had become. He nodded, recognizing the bond between us and the sacrifice I’d made. He restrained his temper and listened to reason. The man who was still my son-in-law came to sit beside me under the black mulberry tree. He had never asked how I’d managed to kill those beasts, how I’d lured them to their deaths with bread. Perhaps he resented me, for I had performed the deed of vengeance he was likely ashamed not to have committed himself. But back then he was a man who knew only prayer, while I had already become a torrent of fury.
“There must be something here for you still,” I insisted, trying to speak to the man he’d been, not this violent warrior intent on torturing himself. “The air you breathe, the water you drink, waking each day to see the sun. There must be something you still want from this world.” There was so little that remained of him, but when I looked down into the dust, his shadow seemed the same.
Yoav laughed and shook his head. “You’re asking what I want?”
For a moment I saw the scholar who had come to the Baker to ask for our daughter’s hand, the young bridegroom so overwhelmed on his marriage day that even after the legal contract, the ketubah, had been drawn up and agreed upon, he seemed stunned to realize that Zara was indeed his. When he caught sight of the beauty of his bride, he was speechless, and his friends teased him, vowing he’d been mesmerized.
“Their voices,” he said.
We could hear the warriors who had gone in to their evening meal, breaking their fast, the raucous conversation of young men, some too young to know the horrors they would encounter when they ventured into the desert to defend us. Most of those young warriors looked away when they saw the Man from the Valley, with his scars and his bands of metal, easily convinced they would never become like him, a death-giver maddened by war.
“Can you give me that?” Yoav asked. “I want my boys to speak like any others. Can your God do that?”
It was my wish as well, one I had prayed for to no avail. We were so alike it was painful, two people who had drowned in the same pool. We observed the night and the stars above us in silence. I could not promise him that God’s grace would prevail.
Yoav shrugged when I had no answer. “Exactly,” he said. “Come back to me when they can speak. When the innocent aren’t burdened by a curse, then find me. Until that time, I have no faith. If there ever was a God, He has forsaken us and is no more.”
We sat together with that terrible and reckless thought. The chill light of the falling moon filtered down.
“I’ll fight until there is no one left for me to go up against. Then I’ll lie down knowing I had no God.”
When I left that place, Yoav was still there, beneath the sun-bleached boughs of the ancient tree. All the while we’d made our way to this mountain, he’d possessed the unrelenting brooding of a man stalked by sorrow. Now he was searching for death, wanting to confront it and be done with this world. I knew what he dreamed about, and it was not my daughter. Such a dream would have broken him in a thousand ways. A vision of Zara would have been endlessly more painful than the sharp strands he strung around himself in self-punishment.