by Tom Pollack
When the two men were alone, Cain began as he always did.
“What news, my friend?” he asked.
“The city has been mostly quiet since you departed for Ergot,” Marek replied. “But there were several instances of discontent concerning isolated food shortages from the recent weak harvests. Further, your kinsman Lamech has caused some disturbance. It seems he killed a man in a drunken brawl. Nothing remarkable there. But then he boasted publicly of the killing. He said that if any of the dead man’s clan dared to attack him in revenge and killed him, that person would be punished, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
“That was not wise of him, Marek,” Cain noted impassively.
“No, sir, but the real concern is the tale Lamech has been spreading about the harvest failures. He asserts that your relationship with the spirit Lorac has been at the root of the problem. He suggests that you are using Lorac to augment your own vitality and youth at the expense of the city’s prosperity. According to Lamech, you are draining Lorac of his power to produce ever greater harvests. While most people think that Lamech is simply arrogant, I must tell you that he is attracting a following with some of his generation.”
Cain listened with seeming detachment, but inwardly he bristled at this budding challenge to his authority.
“Is there anything else to report?”
“Yes, sir. Four days ago, one of my lieutenants met with a traveler from the western region. This man, it seems, wanted to buy some building equipment. Saws, hammers, wood fasteners—that sort of thing. He had purchased such items in Enoch before, but his regular supplier became ill and the business was suspended. He was therefore inquiring who might give him the best terms.”
“I assume we accommodated him in a profitable manner,” Cain smiled.
“Of course, sir. But the next part of the report is mysterious,” Marek continued. “My operative asked the traveler, whose name was Tarn, what the building material was being used for. Tarn told him a strange story about an old man named Noah. This man claims that a great flood is about to occur and that it will wipe out everything on Earth. To save himself and his family, Noah is building an enormous ship of advanced technology called an ark. The ship is supposedly finished, but Noah wished to procure a few more replacement parts. That’s why Tarn was sent to Enoch.”
Cain leaned forward with interest.
“Is this traveler still within our walls?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Do you wish to see him?”
“I think it would be prudent. Have him brought here tonight so I can interview him personally. But do it in a way that does not attract attention, and be certain that Lamech learns nothing of this.”
Nodding assent, Marek stood up and took his leave.
Cain considered these developments. Since the banishment of Ushar, his first wife, his longevity and vitality had simply been attributed to his relationship with Lorac. But now his youthful regeneration was surfacing again as a potential threat to his power. Periodically, Cain wondered if perhaps the mark that God had supposedly placed upon him could have extended his lifespan. The mark, he thought, might be symbolic rather than literal, since there were no unusual physical marks on his body.
If God was capable of such a thing, why would he have done it? So far, living several times longer than all other human beings had been a blessing, not a curse. Cain also remained skeptical of the master of spirits’ claim of credit for his longevity. After all, he did none of this master’s bidding, so why should that supposed master continue to aid Cain? Along with this so-called curse of not aging, Cain had discovered that his body regenerated at a highly accelerated rate from abrasions, cuts, and even occasional broken bones. He seemed immune to infections, poisonous insects, and even snakebites. A by-product of his bodily regeneration was an enhanced memory that permanently recorded every day of his life in perfect detail.
Fortunately, being a powerful ruler meant that no man would dare try to kill him. Thus, he had rendered moot God’s promise of sevenfold vengeance on would-be assailants. Also, the kingdom of Enoch itself was testimony to what he could accomplish on his own. Perhaps humans did not need any god or spirit to protect them or help them through life. Cain certainly didn’t.
The ostensible threat from within his family, Cain thought, was not to his physical well-being, but to his authority. Until now, he had dismissed Lamech’s occasional resentful outbursts as those of a spoiled, impatient heir. But Cain understood that believers in spirits could be as fickle as they imagined the spirits themselves to be. Could Lamech succeed in mounting a challenge to his rule? Cain knew that he could not control the weather, and the kingdom of Enoch for the most part had been blessed with an amazing run of favorable growing seasons. If a truly catastrophic series of harvests came about, Lamech might gain widespread support. He was popular with the younger generation, and silencing him would not be as easy as banishing a treacherous wife.
Perhaps an answer lay with this rumored ark. Could its technology afford access to the remote seas and thus provide the means for a monumental expansion of Enoch’s military and economic might? Cain reasoned that the successful exploitation of distant lands would offer further insurance against the vagaries of local growing conditions. If Cain brought the secrets of the ark back to Enoch, his feat would quickly silence Lamech and any supporters he might gather one day. He determined to quietly investigate the ark on his own.
In his interview with the traveler, Cain learned much. Noah, Tarn said, was eloquent but eccentric. He insisted that there was only one God, and that this deity spoke directly to him. According to Noah, God had commanded him to build a giant ark. The ship would enable its occupants to survive the coming flood. No one in the western region took Noah seriously, but neither did they interfere with the old man’s obsession. If he wanted to prophesy doomsday, so be it.
Cain thanked the traveler courteously and wished him a safe return to his land. In a separate interview, he ordered Marek’s lieutenant to find out all he could from Tarn about the location of Noah’s ark. The lieutenant was even to imply that successful negotiations for further supplies would be contingent on an accurate description of the ark’s location.
Based on the report of Marek’s lieutenant, Cain calculated it would take them ten days to reach Noah’s building site. The patriarch lived near the ark, together with his wife, their three sons, and the sons’ wives. It seemed as if Noah was at least several hundred years old and had been working on this advanced ark for nearly a century. Strange that the news of this ship had only now reached Cain’s ear.
***
A month later, under cover of night, Cain and a handpicked military battalion rode through the city’s main gate. Marek had spread the story that the commander was traveling to Ergot to inspect the mines. In reality, their destination was the western region to find and seize the ark, if it truly existed.
On the day after they left Enoch, storm clouds enveloped the sky and it started to rain. This was odd for the season, Cain thought, but he was accustomed to traveling in any weather.
On the fifth day out, the rain had still not abated. The horses were becoming restive. The force had entered a mountainous region, and the soil there was less hard-packed than the mounts were used to. Their hooves were making deep depressions in the mud, and the pace of the expedition slowed considerably.
On the twelfth day, they entered a vast old-growth forest. It was here, according to Tarn’s directions, that they would find Noah and his ark. Day by day, the rain had been growing harder, and visibility was poor. Still, from the forest craft he had accumulated over time, Cain was confident they would reach their destination.
Toward evening, the expedition was traveling westward along a high ridgeline. In the lead, Cain felt the ground shake and heard an ominous rumble from below. He peered down to his right. North of the ridge, and quite close across a small river, lay a huge ship. It was not a rumor anymore, Cain thought. It was true. He was determined to claim this
ship for his own purposes.
They could see a procession of animals slowly making their way up a massive ramp door that led into the belly of the vessel. From this distance, Cain could make out only the larger animals. There were pairs of lions and a group of ibex, with their recurved, ridged horns. But there were many animals in the procession that he did not recognize.
The downpour increased. The men saw that the river separating them from the ark had begun to rise appreciably, even in the brief time they had been there. If they were to reach the ark, they had to act now. Before their departure, Cain had worked out a plan with his senior officers that provided for a small, elite band of soldiers to accompany him in situations such as this one. He signaled now that the designated troops should follow him.
Spurring their horses into a canter, the men descended from the ridge and forded the stream. Just as the horses found their footing on the opposite bank, a sudden surge of water cut off most of the party on the other side, making their crossing impossible. Several bolts of lightning and loud claps of thunder boomed across a darkening sky. With a shout and a crack of their whips, Cain and his five remaining companions called on their horses for renewed effort to exit the rapidly rising river and make haste to the nearby ark.
They were now within fifty meters of the massive vessel. At the top of the ramp just inside the doorway, Cain spotted a tall, white-bearded man with outspread arms, seemingly in greeting of the beasts as they entered inside. The procession was nearly at an end. After the last pair of animals stepped over the threshold, the huge doorway to the huge ship quickly closed as if on its own power. As they arrived at the ark, the men faced an enormous wall of wood, with no visible way to get aboard. Close behind them, the waters were rising fast.
“Get to the ship and look for a way in,” Cain shouted. “It is our only hope to survive!”
Without warning, the river’s rapid current overflowed its banks and gripped Cain, his men, and their horses. Their mounts screamed in fear. Horses and riders were borne by the current along the side of the ark, with Cain desperately scanning the expertly joined timbers for another doorway, a window, a trailing line of rope—anything that would afford him an entryway or even a toehold. His horse was now swimming with Cain on its back. If he could not cling to the ship somehow, he would be swept away by the current and drown.
In the twilight, he saw three of his men shed their swords and grab hold of a thick, dangling rope that had escaped his attention. Stout veterans of many wars, they started to pull themselves up toward the railing high overhead, kicking one another as they inched slowly upward. Once aboard, Cain was confident they would quickly gain control of the ark.
Cain was now almost parallel to the stern of the ship, where he spotted another rope dangling from the transom. Without warning, an enormous wave propelled him toward the ark, lifting his legs from the doomed horse and thrusting him toward a porthole in the boat’s stern. He could see that the same wave stripped the trio of soldiers from their lifeline and propelled them screaming into the raging torrent below.
He had barely managed to grasp his rope when a broken tree branch whizzed by and tore a large gash in his shoulder. Ignoring the pain, Cain hauled himself up the line and crawled through the porthole, which seemed like the exit point of some wooden tunnel or chute. Heaving with painful breaths, blood streaming down his arm, he lay in the darkness as the great boat began to float on the rising waters.
CHAPTER 13
The Ark
“…on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” (Genesis 7:11, NIV)
CROUCHING INSIDE THE DARK tunnel, trying to collect himself, Cain was suddenly jolted by a violent motion. His stomach dropped as the ark surged upward at dizzying speed, and when the vessel abruptly slowed its ascent he was catapulted against the top of the tunnel. Steadying himself, he crawled to the transom and stared out at a terrifying scene.
Torrential rain fell from storm clouds. Blinding flashes were accompanied by earsplitting thunder, causing the ark to shudder from bow to stern. The powerful wind made the deluge seem almost horizontal. Cain noticed that the nearby hills from which they had descended to the ark were gone, buried beneath the torrent. The ark was already hundreds of feet higher, and the waters were still rising.
Where dry land was still visible, he could see giant, yawning cracks that spidered outward with horrifying speed, like canyons that had taken on preternatural life. Before his eyes, some of these chasms grew to a width of a mile or more. From inside the earth, huge jets of water spewed through the apertures, rising thousands of feet into the roiling sky. The springs from below and the rain from above seemed united with a single objective: the undoing of all creation.
As Cain gaped in astonishment, the stern of the ark began to rotate slowly. The variable gales seemed to have trapped the vessel in a spiraling orbit atop a maelstrom. However, before it had made a full revolution, the ark’s motion diminished, and a break in the clouds revealed an amazing sight—his beloved city, Enoch!
Although he had traveled many miles from Enoch to the ark, the gap in the clouds seemed to magnify his view, and from the ark’s loftier vantage point he was now offered a panorama of the city walls as well as the great pyramid at its center. At that moment the ark’s motion ceased altogether, and Cain saw a gigantic crack in the earth racing toward the city, a crack that fragmented into a spidery web of fissures and surrounded Enoch.
What Cain saw next sickened him.
From beneath the city, an explosive water column of incredible power rocketed his pyramid-shaped palace thousands of feet into the air. Hundreds more clefts created a huge gulf many miles wide. As massive quantities of water spiraled inward, the entire city literally dissolved and crumbled into the belly of the earth.
Cain was now trembling. Where Enoch had stood, a huge whirlpool now spun. But, amazingly, the destruction was not yet complete. The tall, snow-capped mountains, once the perennial source of the city’s water supply, began to topple from their foundations and avalanche into the vortex, burying the remains of Enoch under thousands of feet of rock. His great city of wealth and power and technology—the most glorious of all civilizations on Earth—had been annihilated in a matter of moments.
The ark now resumed a slow spin. Cain, exhausted and mortified, lay back with his eyes closed. He could not begin to comprehend his loss. The torrential rain turned even more violent, as if the entire atmosphere itself was liquefying. If he were outside, he probably could not even breathe, such was the force of this tempest. The noise of the downpour grew deafening, even through the thick, protective timbers of the ark. It was as if a million troops were marching on the vessel’s roof. Any skepticism about Noah and his prophecy was erased by what Cain saw and heard—God most surely was destroying the world.
Overwhelmed by this catastrophic realization, he could barely drag himself through the tunnel to the inside of the ark. Collapsing behind a large support post, Cain hyperventilated for several moments before spinning into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 14
En Route to Naples, Italy: Present Day
THE LONG-RANGE BUSINESS JET had taken off from Van Nuys airfield near Los Angeles promptly at noon on Saturday. Luc Renard instructed the pilot to file a flight plan taking them directly to Naples, where a chartered helicopter would ferry him and his passengers to Ercolano. Since the Bombardier Global Express XRS had no need to refuel en route, Luc anticipated a midday arrival on Sunday. They would be in plenty of time for the transfer of the land title and Monday afternoon’s dramatic press conference.
The fifty-foot-long flight cabin had been laid out for eight passengers, but even so it was only half full. At the front of the cabin reclined Giovanni Genoa, hitching a ride back to his native country and evidently fast asleep. In the row behind Genoa sat Luc Renard, idly flipping through a stack of his company’s glossy magazine Tattletale. On the other side of the aisle, within hailing distance of
Renard should he be needed, was Rudolph Schmidt, Esq., a powerful Beverly Hills attorney who had been brought along to assist with title transfer papers and other legal matters during the trip. Schmidt, a seasoned litigator and passionate jazz fan, was immersed in his iPod.
At the rear of the cabin was Dr. Archibald Walker of the Getty Villa. He had deliberately chosen his seat, both to flirt with the voluptuous flight attendant and to consume more than his fair share of the cocktails that she was winsomely dispensing.
“Another Bombay Sapphire and tonic, Dr. Walker?” the attendant inquired.
“Why not?” Walker asked with a rhetorical grin as he pressed the young woman’s hand. “But mum’s the word, my dear!” he cautioned. “What did you say your name was?”
“Sharon,” she answered with a broad smile.
“Ah yes, as lovely as a rose of Sharon in high summer,” Walker purred. Then he giggled at his own fatuous analogy as the attendant glided away to fetch his drink.
***
Two hours before the plane was due to land in Naples, Walker awoke from his boozy slumber. After tucking in to a scrumptious breakfast of crabmeat Benedict on croissants, he glanced at his watch. Then he used the XRS’s sophisticated communications system to place a call to Silvio Sforza.
Walker dispensed with elaborate salutations. “Silvio? It’s Archibald. I have a surprise for you. We’re arriving a day early. Mr. Renard wishes to inspect the site this afternoon. I expect we’ll be in Naples Airport by eleven o’clock.”
