Holy War by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Published: 2014-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

33

SUN WARMED THE SNOW and water dripped off the rocks; they had to dig a trench in the mud to keep it out of the cave. Then the wind turned cold, the snow crust froze and the water hardened into icicles. Snow began to fall.

The ground was frigid through their doubled coats. Her hands would not warm even when he held them. “Shivering's good,” she said. “It warms the body.”

With a crunch of steps a man moved past, his head visible through a notch between two rocks, then his legs through another, his rifle over his far shoulder, his boots wrapped in rags, snow like a cloak down his back. Then came another, bent over under his weapons, the wind snatching chunks of broken snow crust from his shoes and scattering it through alleys of stone. Christians, nine in all, filing past like ghosts.

“They've saved us,” Rosa said, “we can go back in their tracks.”

“Tonight. If we don't freeze first.”

She fought her shivering. “How you talk like a Muslim!”

“How's that?”

“A mother's boy, needing reassurance!”

He opened his shirt and cupped her hands against his chest, her fingers like frozen sticks. “Don't be so harsh. I didn't kill them.”

She bit her lip to stop shivering. “Who?”

“Your brothers. They were killed by someone, so you hate everyone.”

“If there's any God other than a completely impotent one, then it’s God who killed them.”

“Trying to make you understand just makes you wilder.”

“The only one who can understand for me is me.” She huddled closer, shivering, her breasts and thighs cold against him. He tried to hold her up on him off the frozen ground but the bullet hole began tearing and he rolled back on his side.

“We could truly freeze up here,” he said.

“Like sleep.”

To get close is to stay warm, stay alive, and if God didn't want us to, He wouldn't make us want it so much. Or is it just to torture us, test us? Her body so little, after all, so slim, such young breasts and such a shame to die.

“When I was a kid I had a puppy,” she whispered. “He used to climb into bed with me. All night so warm beside me.”

It shocked him to think of her as a girl, long innocent black hair down her slender back. “How old were you?”

“I must have been nine. We'd just moved to Mount Hermon. My father got him to help me forget my friends in Nazareth.”

“You had no new friends on the Mountain?”

She shook her head as if brushing aside a hair or his query or the thought of having friends. “In the village there were only boys. Like I told you, they threw stones and called me names.”

He tried to see her hiding in her house, fearing the stones. “What did you do?”

“Helped my mother. Did what girls do.”

He had no idea, he realized, what girls do. “What's that?”

'Keep the race going. While you men tear it apart.”

“But you're here too. At war.”

She burrowed tighter. “I'm cold.”

He was sliding into a delicious peace, couldn't stop.

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