“Your death,” Ikkesh said. “I want you to die horribly.”
“Don’t be rash, Ambassador. You and I need each other.”
No answer came.
“What will we do?” Naamah moaned.
“Wait him out,” Laban said. “He can’t sail the ship alone.”
“But…”
Laban drew his sword. Naamah shrank from him. He ignored her as he crawled on his hands and knees, hunting for rats, for something to eat.
For countless days, weeks, they suffered in the belly of the ship, living atop the ballast sand. They were always damp, always swaying this way and that. They ate the rats raw and drank the brackish, foul water. At times Ikkesh spoke to them, unmoved by their pleas. Sometimes Laban used Naamah, but in his weariness and despair, he tired of even that.
A long time later Ikkesh pounded on the boards. “Land!” he shouted. “I’ve spotted land!”
“So what?” Naamah whispered.
Laban motioned her to silence.
“Did you hear me? I’ve spotted land. I haven’t seen land for… For a long time.”
“That’s impossible,” Naamah whispered. “It couldn’t have flooded that much.”
Laban glared at her, and he meaningfully tapped the hilt of his short sword.
“We’ve got to steer for the land,” Ikkesh said. “I’m sick of swaying, of riding the giant waves. Do you hear me?”
Laban crab-walked to underneath the hatch.
“Why won’t you answer me?” Ikkesh asked.
Naamah crawled beside Laban, her eyes wild and terrified.
“Are you dead?” Ikkesh asked. “Is that it?”
Laban licked his lips, easing the sword from its scabbard.
“You can’t be dead,” Ikkesh said. “Then I would be alone—and then you could no longer suffer.”
The bolt clicked. Creaking, the hatch rose. Laban shouted in bestial fury as he saw Ikkesh’s beady eye peering down at him.
“Noooo,” Ikkesh said, throwing himself onto the hatch.
Laban drove his sword through the crack. Blood spilled. The hatch closed and snapped the blade. Above, Ikkesh shrieked, thrashing about. Laban shoved the hatch so the lid banged against the deck. He grasped the sides and heaved himself out of the hold. Ikkesh bled profusely as he rolled across the planks, clutching his gory stomach.
“You’ve killed me!” Ikkesh howled.
Laban took two short steps and drove his boot into the dying man’s belly. Ikkesh shrieked. Laban drew back to kick again, when the merchant ship of Pishon crashed upon land with a grinding roar of splintering timber. Laban flew off his feet, striking wood and rolling. Naamah screamed.
Shaking his head, lifting himself as wood splintered, groaned and snapped, Laban peered about. Naamah lay with her neck broken. Ikkesh gaped at the upper deck with dead eyes.
Laban scrambled and half-crawled for the outer hatch as the ship shook and trembled. The roar of waves was deafening. He climbed out of the hatch to a dreadful sight. The merchant ship of Pishon lay at an angle on a huge boulder on the side of a mountain. Waves pounded the boat to pieces as black clouds roiled overhead and jagged lightning flashed in sickening brightness. Laban crawled for the boulder. A cold wave picked him up and hurled him off the ship and over the boulder, slamming him against the side of the mountain, snapping an arm.
Although dazed and with his head ringing, Laban scrambled to his feet. He refused to die. Huffing and puffing, with his left arm dangling at his side, he ran up the mountain and out of reach of the waves. Unfortunately, it wasn’t far to the top.
The rain yet poured, lashing, hurting and mocking him as the shrieking winds hurled the icy sleet into his face. Huddled atop the mountain, with his broken arm throbbing, Laban squatted in misery like some primitive. Below him, the waves pounded the merchant ship, breaking it apart, wood splinters flying like axe-hewn chips. In less than an hour, the vessel was gone, and in that time the seas rose a little higher.
As Laban endured the rain and cold and howling winds, he peered at the broad and shoreless ocean. Dark storm clouds billowed across the sky, lightning flashing in awful majesty. The sea, the endless sea that perhaps covered the entire planet, boiled with white-capped waves. Was he the last man, the last of an evil race, the last of the Antediluvians?
As the freezing rain drenched him endlessly, he thought about a day long ago when Noah had offered him a berth on the Ark. If only he had believed. If only he had taken Noah up on the offer. Then he wouldn’t be here, alone on this last mountain, awaiting a watery death as his stomach ached in futility. And if Noah had been right about the Flood, was Noah right about Jehovah judging everyone after death? He peered at the rain.
Thus, he didn’t see the wave in the distance. The wave that had been built up by the moon’s gravitational pull. The same pull would produce the tides. The bulge of water, the wave, was gigantic and grotesquely powerful. No shores hindered it. There was only a vast, worldwide ocean where it built up size. The velocity of the mighty wave brought it toward the lone mountain at a sickening speed.
At the last moment, as the howling wind stilled, Laban turned. His mouth fell agape. The wave, a wall looming over him, picked him up before he could utter a word.
Later, after the wave—the bulge of water created by the new thing called a tide—passed, the solitary peak was again devoid of life. It continued to rain, and soon there was no longer a mountain. Only water covered the Earth.
16.
The world died as the wrath of Jehovah, the passion of His hatred of sin, unleashed itself in majestic fury. He punished, destroyed and annihilated. A planet seethed under the destruction. It buckled under the fury.
Rain poured forty days and nights, and still the water rose for another one hundred and ten days. Out of the Earth, the great deeps burst their incalculable volumes and seemingly endless volcanoes spewed lava and fumes. Ashy pollutants, propelled miles into the atmosphere, created dark and ominous clouds high in the stratosphere, and cold, the icy touch of space, blanketed the planet. Thus were high and low-pressure systems born, hot and cold fronts. Storms raged because of it. And during it all, water trampled like rampaging elephants, gouging, tearing and burying flotsam under tons of silt.
The heaving waters, the whirlpools and lightning, and vast mats of vegetation, volcanic fire and lava, tidal waves, they seethed and roiled as new and horrible devastation occurred.
The mighty chambers, the now emptied great deeps, buckled under the weight of the water above. They collapsed, and became the new seabeds—or soon they would be. Volcanic action also expanded. New mountain chains heaved upward as the Earth seethed in turmoil. Landmasses rose as others fell. The ancient seas became the soon-to-be new continents.
In the Old World, the mountains had been low and the valleys shallow, and the vast majority of water under the earth. The buckling, heaving planet gained new, higher mountains and deeper, vaster ocean basins. The Earth became rugged and harsh, and the waters rushed toward the growing basins in a swirling, canyon creating mass.
And all the while, as plant seeds rode the upper winds, as corpses thumped upon its wooden sides, the Ark sailed in the North Pole region. Here the wild sea currents were less forceful, the waves not as awesome.
Day after day, night after night, the eight people, under the guidance of Noah, toiled to keep the last crawling and flying animals of Earth alive.
17.
The narrow, gloomy passageway groaned and tilted as the planks creaked. Ham shuffled forward too fast and struck his head against a beam, thudding onto his rump. He moaned, dazed, and leaned against the wall. The dark corridor tilted down, down, as he gingerly touched his forehead. It wasn’t bleeding, but it felt as if a spike had been driven into his head. He panted, and the corridor tilted downward for an indeterminable length of time. Finally, slowly, the corridor began to right itself, all the time creaking and shifting.
They rode rough waters today—the one hundred and twenty-second of
the Flood—and he prowled the bottom deck doing his chores.
The pain that caused his eyes to water subsided to an aching throb. He touched the spot again, touching the knot that had already formed. Oh, if only he had wine to steal the pain, to rob him of the fear of riding across a world devoid of life.
Ham shivered, and struggled to his feet, leaning against the wall as he gained his bearings. The throb in his head seemed to travel to his gut so he felt like puking. He gritted his teeth and waited a little longer.
As he waited, something brushed against his leg.
He shook the glass jar that he’d managed to hang onto throughout his buffet and fall. A leather covering was tied over the jar’s mouth, skin with punched holes. The fireflies in the jar glowed bright, giving him some illumination.
He looked to see a mongoose rubbing against him. Despite his headache, Ham grinned, picking it up one-handed. The long rat-catcher scanned the narrow corridor with alert eyes.
The large supply of stored food naturally brought problems, the biggest being rodents, mice and rats particularly. Gaea had suggested the answer before the trip began and had thus brought aboard several mongooses—they were larger, stronger than cats and more fearless. A small colony of them roamed the Ark, hunting the mice and rats and whatever else had stowed aboard, keeping them in check.
Ham noticed the beam he’d bumped against. Water condensed so a drop dripped. He set down the glass jar and ran his fingers over the beam. Wet. He picked up the jar, ducked under the beam and felt the mongoose squirm. He let go and the mongoose pushed its hind feet against him as it slithered after movement in the darkness. Ham lifted the jar as the corridor titled down again. The mongoose chased a rat, both of them darting around a corner.
The timbers groaned all around him and planks creaked, and he heard the gurgle of water. He held up the jar to hollowed-out bamboo tubing tacked onto the ceiling. The ends of each pipe were sealed with tung-oil and lime, and the entire bamboo line ran throughout the Ark. The system was rather clever, in Ham’s estimation. Oh, they had such systems in Arad. He amended that. The city of Arad had had them. Arad like the rest of the Antediluvian World was no more. In any case, the watering system began with the roof of the Ark. Walls had been built up in the center of the roof to provide them a fresh water cistern, catching the rain. Shem, since it was his task, operated the valve that allowed the cistern water to rush through bamboo pipes and fill various tanks on the first deck and the main reservoir there. Later he opened the first deck reservoir valve and water gurgled to the second deck tank and from there the third and bottom deck. Gravity provided the water-movement, and from the main tanks, bamboo pipes controlled by valves filled the hundreds of water troughs.
Ham shook his head. Moving all the water by buckets would have been a nightmare of a chore. Although the Ark taken as a whole was big, within and everywhere you went narrow, tight confines squeezed claustrophobically. There were narrow corridors, narrow stalls and pens, tight fitting rooms. If two of them passed in a corridor, Ham exhaled and slid hard against the wall and still they brushed one another.
With one hand on the wall, Ham continued checking animals. The third, bottom deck was where they held the bigger beasts, the young elephants, hippos, giraffes, behemoths and great sloths, and the lions, sabertooth cats, cave bears and dire wolves. All the big animals had bamboo-fed water troughs and bulk feeders, so he merely had to lift the glass jar today, inspect that nothing was wrong and then go to the next pen or stall. The gloom of the bottom deck helped keep these animals calmer than otherwise—and of course the narrow confines didn’t allow them room to hurt themselves with thrashing or pacing or too much jostling, which in turn made certain the boards held throughout the journey. In some of the rooms, they had burrowing creatures like moles and gophers, and they loved the darkness. Tomorrow he’d have to feed some of them live mealworms and the larger predators, plump feeder rats.
In one of the last stalls, an eye glittered at him as the beast moaned in complaint.
Ham raised the jar and studied the young hippos. Then he slotted the jar in a holder he’d made, drew a blanket off the beast and fingered it. It was dry. He dipped the blanket in the hippo trough and then flung the wet thing back onto the beasts. Although it was too humid down here, it was also too hot.
Getting rid of excess heat was their biggest worry, as least in terms of air movement. Ham filed that away for later.
He went back to the behemoth stall and wet their blankets too. Both the behemoths and hippos were riverine beasts, using water in the wild to keep their tender skin damp.
The passageways down here—throughout the entire ship—seemed endless and mazelike. But he had long ago memorized the routes. The bamboo pipes didn’t leak, the water troughs weren’t spilling and the feeders hadn’t been blocked. None of the animals had hurt themselves or gotten sick… It was going to be another easy day.
As he threaded his way through the corridors to the nearest stairway, he saw the mongoose trotting with its head high and the fat dead rat in its narrow jaws.
He and Methuselah had once calculated the space within the Ark and the number of animals they could hold. It terms of sheep it had come out to 125,000. The vast majority of the animals of course were smaller than a sheep, more the size of hens. Altogether, with the huge stocks of feed and fodder and “guests” they had room to spare. Some of those spaces had been stocked with civilized goods: papyrus rolls in sealed jars, plentiful tools like hammers, saws, anvils, nails, augers, chisels and oil lamps, tents, pots, octopus ink for writing, animal harnesses, a favorite painting or two, all the things needed to restart civilization wherever or whenever they landed.
He climbed onto the middle deck, stepped into a closet and released the fireflies into a glass pen, setting aside the jar. Enough light filtered from the windows on the upper deck so one didn’t need the fireflies here on the second deck unless one wished to read a book. Ham didn’t. He seldom read, although he had a few papyrus volumes stored away like everyone else.
As he trudged through passageways, he heard a new sound: the rising and falling of water. It added to the constant creak of planks.
He opened a door and immediately felt the suction. He shuddered, disliking this chamber, the biggest on the ship. This was the moon-pool, a hole in the middle of the Ark. The walls extended from the keel and up into the ship where he stood. As the Ark crested huge waves, the water in the moon-pool rose. It rose now, pushing the air.
Ham stared at the water—the water that had destroyed a world. As the Ark tilted and the timbers groaned and the ship slid down the wave, the water in the moon-pool went down, sucking air so hard that Ham felt it rush across his face.
The strain on the bottom hull was relieved by the moon-pool. Not that the Ark was a sailing vessel. The vast Ark had none of those normal ship tensions—it had no tree-tall mast and sail and no V-shaped hull—and thus the strain wasn’t as great as if it had been built like a sailing ship. Still, with the barge’s extraordinary size the moon-pool helped make sure the tension never would become so much as to break apart the ship. The rising and lowering water also helped move the air throughout the rest of the Ark. It acted like a giant piston and helped rid the ship of heat and bad animal gases. The last use of the moon-pool was that it was a safe place to dump garbage such as manure. You didn’t have to go outside where you could get swept overboard, but could stay safely within the Ark.
He left the moon-pool chamber, saw and said hello to Ruth as she cared for hundreds of small animals and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. It was brighter here and the animals more lively. Chirps, squawks, trills, bleats, growls, bellows and other animal noises mingled with the chatter of monkeys and parrots and the Ark itself.
He opened a door and climbed the ladder-chute to the walkway underneath the cubit-wide windows. In a long row, the windows lined each side of the Ark, the major source of fresh air. In each window was a wooden and adjustable slat for partial opening and complete
shutting. Outside, a parapet hung over the windows so rain didn’t slash in; while above them outside on the roof was the fresh-water cistern.
In the middle of the walkway, Noah peered out a window. He wore a warm coat with a hood over his head.
Ham shivered at the chill, having forgotten to put on something extra. His sweat made it worse. Briskly, he strode to his father and refrained from glancing outside. The sight always depressed and, frankly, terrified him.
As he approached, Noah glanced his way and then took to peering out the window again. “Good day, my son.”
“Father.”
“How’s the bottom deck doing?”
“Too hot and humid,” Ham said.
Noah nodded.
The windows were a quarter open, and the wind blew over them and helped move the air. The whistling also made conversation a matter of loud talking.
Noah glanced at him again and his eyes widened. “What happened to you?”
Ham told him about the bump.
Frowning, Noah touched the knot.
Ham winced.
“You need to find your mother,” Noah said.
“I’m all right.”
“No. Find her. Let her look at that.”
Ham nodded.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” Noah said.
“Sure. And maybe you could move us into quieter waters.”
Frowning, Noah glanced out the window.
Ham did too, and wished he hadn’t. A bleak scene greeted him. Dark clouds roiled overhead and in the distance lightning flashed. It was an end of the world scene: Armageddon, Ragnarok and the Apocalypse. The wild, constant sea swayed and threw up waves and whitecaps. At least it had stopped raining all the time. Sometimes local rainstorms poured water onto the worldwide, horizon-less ocean, but no longer a night-and-day torrent.
Wives of the Flood Page 21
