No Lasting Burial by Stant Litore Page B

across the atrium and fling her to the ground or
into a room. But at that moment, with Barabba’s hoofbeats still loud in his
ears, Koach barely noticed them. She had a strange face. Her eyes were wide
apart—too wide—but they were fierce with the fire of her heart, and for a
moment he found it difficult to look away from them.
    She
did not look at him with the horror he was used to seeing in girls’ eyes.
    She
pulled hard at his wrist. “Come on!” she whispered.
    Outside,
the hoofbeats went still.
    “God
of Hosts,” she whispered. She pulled him out of the atrium into one of the
small rooms along the wall, drew him in, and let the great rug that served for
a curtain fall closed across the door. Within, shards of light speared toward
the floor from a window long boarded up against the dead, in lines as sharp as
though a man had drawn them there. Koach could see motes of dust flashing into
existence as they drifted into the light, and then fading out of existence
again, each one lit up briefly with fire from the sun. Despite the terror in
his heart, it startled him; it was so beautiful. As the girl stepped through
the light and into the shadows behind it, Koach caught the briefest glimpse of
hair the color of rich earth.
    A
clatter as his heel struck a pile of clay bowls.
    “Hide!”
the girl gasped, and her small hands shoved him down
into a heap of bedding. She began reaching for blankets to pile over him.
    “Why?”
Koach panted. “Why are you helping me?”
    A
small scream, muffled against her closed lips. “Don’t ask questions!” she
whispered fiercely. “Hide!”
    A horse’s whicker at the door. Koach
stiffened.
    In
another moment, there was a hard rap against the wood, as if something blunt
had struck against it. The Outlaw’s sword-hilt, perhaps.
    Another rap.
    Then two more.
    In
the moments that followed, Koach could hear his breathing like a wind over the
sea. He hadn’t known breathing could be so loud.
    “Come
out! If you’re in there, boy, come out!” A pause.
“That’s how you want to die? Hiding? You come out, I’ll let you run.”
    Shamed,
Koach began to get up, only to feel the girl’s hand pressing him back.
    “Don’t,”
she whispered.
    He
shook his head, tried to get up again.
    Her
hands pinned his shoulders. “No, he won’t break the door.” Her mouth barely
made any sound, just the movement of her lips. “He won’t. He won’t defile
another’s house!”
    There
was a harder pounding at the door, and a great crack. The girl’s face went
white. Koach peered past her, through the tiny gap between the rug and the
wall. He saw the outer door half fall to the side, the wood splintered about
its rusted bronze hinge.
    Barabba
stood with his hand still on the ruined door, his expression lethal. For a
moment, Koach’s heart clamored in his ears; he was sure the Outlaw would kick
the door the rest of the way open and come for him with knife or stone, tearing
aside the rugs to reveal the inner rooms, until Koach was found.
    Yet
the girl had been right: even as the door broke, Barabba hesitated. To violate
the sanctity of another man’s house, a man of your own People, to stride in
boldly as though you owned the house and all within, that would invite the
wrath of holy God. That gave even Barabba pause.
    The
Outlaw’s eyes burned. As Koach and the girl held their breath, Barabba visibly
struggled with himself. Then he turned partly away with a snarl. “Hide, then,
in the house of good men!” he called, his voice thick with a fury that had been
building perhaps for years, like a storm piling hot above the sea.
    “Hide, little rat! But it doesn’t
matter how deep you burrow. One day soon, when we’ve thrown the Romans into the
sea, good men will rip you out of your hole, you and every heathen and every hebel and every unclean weakling, and drag you out to be stoned in the open before
the eyes of God. Hide and shiver.”
    “He’s
right,” Koach whispered, barely moving his