Zimri didn’t answer. He kept focused upslope, watching, ready to shoot.
“Do you think Scyth gave us away?” Thebes asked Minos.
“Impossible,” Minos said. “He salivated every time I showed him the ruby. He’s crazy for it.”
“Here he comes,” Obed said, his hands tightening around his spear.
Thebes glanced over his shoulder at Zimri. “I don’t like this. Something is wrong. Zimri is right.”
Minos laughed. “Now it’s you who are getting nervous. Maybe you’re afraid Beor might hump up the slope with his peg leg and kill you.”
Thebes glared at his cousin.
“Get ready,” whispered Obed.
Minos peered past closely grown pines and down slope. He glimpsed a chariot. Through the many trees, he saw it; it disappeared, it showed up again past other trees. Beor and the Scout stood in the car. They moved at a slow pace. Then the Scout drew rein.
“What’s he doing?” Minos whispered, craning up to see better. “Why is he stopping?”
“Get down,” hissed Thebes, pulling him back behind the boulder.
“Ambush!” shouted Zimri. “It’s an ambush!” He rose and his bow twanged.
Minos whirled around as his bowels threatened to unloose. An arrow thudded into Zimri’s shoulder, spinning him, knocking him back, to trip, tumble and strike his head against a rock. Hidden men upslope yelled. They shouted abuse and sent whistling arrows.
“Ambush!” screamed Olympus. He jumped up and sprinted out of the hollow, staggering along the slope and parallel with the trail. Arrows whizzed past him. One sank into his leg. Olympus screamed, tumbling head over heels.
“This way,” Obed hissed, running bent-over and zigzagging the other way.
With terror clutching his belly, Minos ran after him. Arrows hissed and thudded into trees as his feet slipped and slued. He fell, and he scrambled on his hands and knees. Then he leaped up. In a burst of speed, Minos ran past a slipping Obed. He panted as tears poured down his cheeks. Time disappeared. There was just motion. There were trees, needles, slipping, falling and crashing full into a pine. He lay stunned. Mouths moved in front of him, but he heard nothing. Stinging slaps snapped his head, first one way and then another. Obed hauled him upright, and Minos now heard roaring.
“That way,” Obed seemed to say from far away.
Minos’s thighs burned and his lungs ached. After a time, he realized Thebes ran beside him, but not Olympus and not Zimri.
Later, he didn’t know how much later, they stopped. Sweat poured off him and he wheezed like a dying ancient.
“We lost them,” Obed said, who squatted against a tree.
Thebes grunted. He lay sprawled on the pine needles.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” Obed said. “They might track us.”
Minos’s thoughts reeled. He’d never be able to move again.
“Where are your weapons?” Obed asked.
Minos’s teeth rattled as someone shook him.
“I said, ‘Where are your weapons?’”
“He must have dropped them,” Thebes said.
Minos realized they were talking about him, talking to him. He flexed his hands. Empty. They were devoid of dagger, spear or bow. Then he groaned as they pulled him upright, and they continued to trek out of Magog’s wretched valley.
14.
The weeks passed. In Babel, the last of the pine rafts that floated down from the north were broken apart. Half of them were chopped into pieces, fired in clay domes and baked into charcoal. The rest were bartered for sheep, pigs, leather, beer, barley and such. The Hunters and the twenty young men who had joined them pitched in to strengthen the canals, dams and levees. Then the spring flood arrived, and the Euphrates rose dangerously fast.
No word had come from the seven, from Gilgamesh, Enlil, Zimri and Obed and from Minos, Thebes and Olympus.
“I’m sure there’s a simple explanation why they’ve been delayed,” Rahab told Opis. They had paused in Babel’s main thoroughfare, a long street that led to the wharves on one end and the beginning of the Tower on the other. Between the two extremes stood mud-brick houses, some of them one story and square, a few two stories and rectangular and many of them small huts. The huts held smithies, or were grain storage buildings or held leather goods. A few had been built extra thick for storing vegetables, beer and wine.
Small Opis had wound a rag on top of her pretty head and balanced a jar of river water. Rahab had taken several great-great grandchildren for a walk. They surrounded her, with the two youngest holding her hands.
“I’m worried,” admitted Opis. “I’m sick with the thought of Gilgamesh lying dead on some strange plain. Oh, Great Grandmother, I lie awake at nights wondering what could have happened to him.”
“Child,” Rahab said. “You mustn’t let your imagination run away with you. Nimrod isn’t worried. ‘What can happen to seven Hunters?’ he said.”
“What about a dragon?” Opis whispered.
“They’re all young men,” Rahab said. “All fleet of foot.”
“Yes,” Opis said, “but would they flee from a dragon or try to slay it and die trying?”
Rahab shook her head. “You’re upsetting yourself with these useless speculations. They’re seven skilled Hunters. I suspect they simply chopped down too many trees and the rising river caught them by surprise. Now they’re waiting for the Euphrates to quit raging, as it is will in several weeks, and then they’ll float to us in another armada of rafts.”
With the tall water jar on her head, balanced by her perfect posture and a small white hand on the left side of it, Opis asked, “What if they tried to ride the floodwaters and they all drowned?”
“Opis, that’s a terrible thought. My advice to you is to engage yourself with your chores and have patience. These speculations are fruitless, a waste of your time.”
“Yes, Great Grandmother.”
“And pray. That always helps me.”
Opis had to steady the water jar, for it seemed she tried to shake her head. Once she had the jar balanced again, she said, “I don’t like praying to the angel.”
Rahab glanced about and then lowered her voice, the two small girls holding her hands leaning forward with her. “If you want the truth, my dear, neither do I. But I didn’t mean for you to pray to him. Pray to Jehovah.”
A weak smile crept upon Opis’s lips. “Yes. Thank you, Great Grandmother. That’s good advice.” And with her perfect posture, small, dark-haired Opis hurried home.
15.
With the flood season in full swing, work on the Tower ceased as everyone labored to keep the canal system intact. The river kept rising: three feet from topping the bank, two feet and then one. Downstream from Babel, portions of the plain were submerged. Ten leagues upstream, the Euphrates ran riot, once again creating shallow seas and reed-fringed lagoons. Yet the levees, dams and canals in and around Babel held and controlled the local flooding.
Then a new disaster struck. Unsuspecting, unforeseen and forbidding, it rocked the city and plunged many into despair. As surprising as lightning falling from a cloudless sky, one, two, three homes fell victim to a new and strange disease. A man died, as did his wife and daughter. Panic threatened as some people said the city had been cursed. Jehovah surely disapproved of the Tower. No, said others. The angel is angered because work has halted on the Tower. We must appease him. Then a baby died.
In their fear, some of the people rushed to Kush. “You must pray for us,” they cried. “Sacrifice whatever you have to. Appease the angel. Just don’t let us die.”
Kush privately told Deborah, “I don’t think the angel did this.”
“Does that matter?” Deborah asked.
“Of course it matters,” Kush said. “Why would he curse us?”
“You’re missing the point. The people have rushed to you because you pray to the angel. You’re the spiritual leader of Babel. What’s more, you marshal the teams that repair the canals. If you can check
this sickness by praying to the angel, then no one will ever be able to challenge your authority.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Kush asked. “I don’t think the angel plagued us. So how I can a pray to him and have him lift something he didn’t do?”
Deborah explained it patiently. “It doesn’t matter if he plagued us. It matters what the people think. If you pray and the sickness leaves, they’ll attribute it to your priesthood. That’s providing, of course, you make a great enough show of it.”
Kush scowled. “The angel isn’t a fraud.”
“Of course not.”
“So it seems unwise to build the people’s trust with a lie.”
Deborah laughed. “Husband, is this angel really a messenger from Jehovah?”
He scowled.
“Pray to the angel,” she said. “Make a spectacle of piety.”
“And if the sickness doesn’t leave?”
“Then pray harder. Say that not all of us have abased ourselves properly. A good priest always has a ready answer.”
Kush deliberated with himself, and the next day, with Nimrod’s help, he rounded up cattle, sheep and pigs from the various families.
Meanwhile, Ham prowled the city’s shadowed lanes, pondering, thinking and then observing the stages of the sickness.
The man that had died, Seth, an older cousin of Opis, had simply complained one morning of a severe headache and had redness of the eyes. The following days he had inflammation of the tongue and pharynx, accompanied by sneezing, hoarseness and a cough. Soon thereafter, stomach cramps preceded vomiting, diarrhea and excessive thirst. Finally, delirium had caused him to rave. On the seventh day of the sickness, Seth had perished. His wife had died on the ninth day. Others who contracted the disease and survived the acute stages suffered from extreme weakness and continued diarrhea that yielded to no treatment. At the height of the fever, Ham noted, the body became covered with reddish spots, some of which ulcerated. It was a wretched, disgusting and bad-smelling sickness.
Ham also noticed a vast increase in the number of rats. The vermin stole stored wheat and barley and multiplied at an astonishing rate. He pondered the implications of that. With a cloth over his mouth, he opened the guestroom door of his house.
“Do you remember our initial plagues?” he asked his wife.
Rahab wore a headband and had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She soaked a cloth in a clay basin, squeezing it with her old, wrinkled fingers, using the cloth to bathe the sweaty, pimpled face of young Abel, a seven-year-old orphan, his parents already slaughtered by this dreadful spotted fever.
Even with the cloth over his mouth, Ham was afraid to enter where Rahab sat on a stool. He feared breathing the exhalation of the moaning, feverish lad. He feared contracting the dreaded sickness, and he marveled at his wife’s compassion.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“The fifth or seventh year after the Flood,” he said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Remember when rats, mice and rabbits exploded onto our fields.”
“I remember,” she said, mopping the boy’s pained features, his eyes glazed as if he didn’t know where he was. He kept whispering for his dead mother.
“We have rats in Babel, and in the same numbers as back then,” Ham said.
Rahab paused, before taking the cloth and soaking it in the basin. “I have noticed an increase in vermin. Is it important?”
“Remember years ago. Oh, ten years before the Flood?” Ham asked. “It happened in Thule, they said.”
“Thule?”
“An island city in the Commorion Sea.”
Rahab sat up, glancing at him with a quizzical look. “Do you mean in the Antediluvian Age?”
He nodded. “Thule fell to a ravaging pox, with two thirds of the city slain, and that in a matter of months. When seafarers first landed on the deserted quays, they were amazed by the hordes of rats, teaming legions of them devouring everything in sight, grown so bold they had chased out the city cats.”
“Yes, so?” Rahab said.
“So the seafarers said the rats had carried the sickness that slaughtered Thule.”
Rahab frowned thoughtfully. “Then you don’t think this spotted fever is divine retribution?”
“How am I supposed to know that?” Ham put his hand on the latch, with his other hand still holding the cloth over his mouth. “But I do know what I’m going to do.”
Rahab was about to ask what that was, when the lad began coughing. So Ham shut the door and hurried outside to implement his plan.
16.
Lud, the father of Opis, contracted spotted fever. His wife and sons fled the house. Only Opis, on Rahab’s advice, dared reenter the dark room where Lud writhed in agony. She rushed to her father. Red spots dotted his sweat-drenched face as he coughed, his glazed, red-rimmed eyes shining with fever.
Opis bathed him with a wet rag and changed his sheets. She brought him tidbits of food and helped him drink much water. Day after day, she ministered to him. Then she joined Rahab and several others. They went from house to house, and to people’s astonishment, none of the women of mercy got sick.
At the same time, Kush and Nimrod sacrificed over a hundred animals: bulls, boars and rams. Kush prayed aloud, beating his breast in an imitation of zeal and piety. At times, people surrounded the altar. On one bright day, as the sun shone at noon and as the smoke of their sacrifice curled into the sky, Kush drew a sharp, silver dagger.
“Hear me, O Angel of the Sun! Save us. Save Babel that we might do your bidding.” Kush cut his chest. He slashed once, twice, three times, drawing lines of blood.
Cries of dismay and shock arose around him. Many shrank from the sight.
With his bloody dagger held skyward, Kush lifted his face and intoned, “O angel, accept the ichor of my veins, and turn your fierce anger from us.”
During these ceremonies and afterward, Ham and teams of great grandsons aged nine to fourteen wielded sticks and traps. Hundreds of rats fell to them. They carried the corpses far outside the city and buried them in pits. At night, Ham led them with torches, and bait brought out rats otherwise too cunning to kill.
At the count of a thousand, Ham said, “We’re winning. We’re getting the upper hand. Let’s not tire and quit, however, until victory is ours.”
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the spotted fever flickered out like a guttered candle. Kush accepted praise for defeating the menace. “The angel has heard us,” he said. “Now we must continue to do his will.”
“You mean the will of Jehovah, don’t you?” Rahab said.
“Of course,” Kush said, who spoke from beside the altar, to the crowd around him. “The angel merely acted as a messenger.”
A few people thought the spotted fever had been beaten because of the five women of mercy. “They met it frontally and slew it through their brave ministering to the sick,” Menes said.
Ham shook his head. They spoke in the Menes smithy, Ham working at the stone anvil. “I’ll tell you what stopped it. The lads and I slew over a thousand rats.”
“Rats?” Menes asked. “You mean all those carcasses you buried?”
“We averted the disaster of Thule,” Ham said.
“What?”
Ham told him the story, and Menes left later, half-convinced that perhaps his father knew what he was talking about.
Soon thereafter, the flooding slackened as the height of the Euphrates receded. People began to wonder again, what had happened to the seven Hunters. Meanwhile, work resumed on the Tower. Day followed day, and as spring heated up into summer, three forlorn men staggered into the city. Minos, Thebes and Obed had returned.
17.
In the Hunter’s Compound, Semiramis listened to Minos’s tale of woe. He stood waist deep in a latrine pit that an angry Nimrod had ordered him to dig.
Many weeks ago, the three of them had arrived at the deserted lumber camp in the north. There, they’d found binding ropes and enough logs for several raf
ts. Snow had already begun to melt, and Obed had counseled caution, suggesting they trek home afoot. Minos and Thebes had vetoed the idea, arguing they were in enough trouble. Bringing in these logs might help weaken Nimrod’s rage against them. So, after building a giant raft and pushing it into the swirling waters, they had raced down the Euphrates. Then the raft had smashed against rocks, breaking Obed and almost drowning Minos. Only Thebes’ swift action had saved them. They had waited for Obed’s bones to heal before resuming the trek home afoot, as first suggested.
“Is Gilgamesh dead?” Semiramis asked. Her skin looked shallow, with circles around her eyes.
Minos, who leaned on his shovel, shrugged. “I have no idea, although I dearly hope not.”
“Did Obed give him away?”
Minos seemed astonished. “How do you arrive at that idea?”
“Obed and Zimri run with Uruk. Uruk might wish Gilgamesh to fail. That seems simple enough.”
“Would they give Gilgamesh and themselves, too?” Minos peered past Semiramis. “Look who comes.”
Uruk, with his apelike arms, approached. He wore a hardened leather jerkin, boiled and waxed to armor-like toughness. He had a leather helmet studded with bronze knobs and a stone hammer belted at his waist. With his brutish features and massive thews, he presented the image of an Antediluvian warrior, a proto-giant in the making.
He dipped his helmeted head to Semiramis. “May I speak with you a moment, my lady?”
“I see nothing hindering you,” Semiramis said.
A pained smile creased Uruk’s features. “This is a private matter.”
Semiramis glanced at Minos, who seemed intrigued. “Why don’t we step over here,” she said, moving toward a small hut, a shrine where Nimrod kept Ham-carved figurines of the angel.
Uruk followed, glancing around, glaring at Minos until Minos bent his back and began to pitch dirt. Only then did Uruk face Semiramis. Grim seriousness added to his menace, the feeling that here, indeed, was a killer.
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