Enoch Primordial (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (10 page)

“Or horde,” reminded Lamech.

“Or horde,” said Enoch. The thought was too horrible for him to imagine. He knew things had been getting worse. Evil was spreading across the land. But what use would his calling as a giant killer be to Elohim if Nephilim were organizing and congregating into packs and hordes again? It would be too overwhelming for them. They could take out stragglers here and there
. But packs of four to ten could become very lethal and a horde of fifty to a hundred was invincible for their small team.

Enoch turned to Betenos and the others standing behind her. “What can you tell us about your ambush?”

“The men had gone hunting,” said Betenos, “so it was easy for them to overpower our camp and catch the hunters unawares when they returned.” As the strongest of the survivors, Betenos had became the spokesperson for them.

“They used the women as human shields,” she said.

“Cowardly,” said Enoch.

“Strategic,” countered Methuselah
, He had returned to the discussion, his anger suppressed. “Nephilim have no conscience. They cannot be cowards. They must be hunted and slaughtered like the animals that they are.”

Methuselah bit his lip. He would hunt down Thamaq and Yahipan and slaughter them, if it was the last thing he did before meeting his maker. He was sure his maker would understand. Or would he? Could Elohim know the pain of losing a father or a son? Or was he a distant and removed being without a soul?

Enoch asked Betenos, “Did you hear any conversation that might suggest they belonged to a pack?”

“Or horde,” added Lamech. Enoch gave him an annoyed look this time.

Betenos looked to her fellow tribeswomen. They all shook their heads no.

“Just that they came from a great distance,” concluded Betenos. “They only seemed to be passing through. But I could not tell from where.”

“We had best move quickly,” said Enoch.

Betenos implored Enoch, “Please good savior, may I request
funeral rites for our dead?”

Enoch looked around. “The snow and cold has made the ground too hard to break,” he said.

“My people do not perform ground burial,” she replied, “we perform excarnation.”

“What is that?” asked Methuselah.

“Sky burial,” she said. “We remove the heads and place their bodies in the trees to have their bones stripped by carrion vultures. We then cremate their remains so the soul goes to the gods and the body returns to the earth as dust.”

T
he barbaric ritual repulsed Enoch. On second thought, he realized that no matter how removed from the true God these rural pagans were, their beliefs still dimly reflected the image of God that was in every human. Betenos’ words reminded him of the words that Yahweh Elohim spoke to Adam so long ago in the Garden, “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

“We will respect your wishes,
as far as we can,” said Enoch.

Relief flooded Betenos.
“Thank you,” she said, She impulsively hugged Enoch.

Methuselah felt proud of his father for his wisdom and grace. He was sensitive to the weakness that is humanity.

Enoch’s mind drifted in painful memory to the recent deaths of Adam and Havah. Through the years of Enoch’s stay with the cave dwellers, he had become close to his forefather. Adam had died first, but Havah followed close on his heels, as she always did.

Enoch remembered the burial ceremony of the Sahandrians. They laid the body into a pit curled up in a sleeping posture. This
expressed their belief that death was only a sleep from which they would one day awake. Around the body, they placed various mementos and souvenirs of the beloved’s life. They included fruits and vegetables because Adam had longed for the Garden to the very end. They had prepared the body by mixing red ochre powder with water to create a paste with which to cover the body. For them, it was a token of the red earth from which Adam himself had come. It was the red earth they all longed for in their souls. They had then covered the body with flowers of all kinds; yarrow, ragwort, hollyhock and others chosen for their medicinal purposes in life with hope for the afterlife.

After the bodies of the snow tribe’s dead had been placed in the trees and on makeshift platforms, Enoch and the others
hauled the corpses of the Nephilim onto wagons they had brought with them.

Wagons
came into use by adapting the recent invention, the wheel. Four round pieces of wood attached to axles, and were secured underneath a sled. Towed by a couple onagers, this wagon device could carry heavy loads across great distances in shorter amounts of time than the old sleds had been capable of. Enoch did not know who originated the invention. He wondered if it was from the angels. But whoever had done it should be a king for his brilliance and imagination.

Once they had the corpses loaded, they had to stop.
They were completely exhausted, with no strength left to continue. A death defying battle with rabid giants and then the sky burial of a hundred tribal dead had used every ounce of their strength. Not even the benefit of wheels was enough to help them. They had to rest. even though they would lose more time and risk being tracked down by other Nephilim
.

Betenos, however, had not exhausted her bag of herbal tricks. She gave each of them some special root to chew on that
provided them with a burst of energy. They put their belongings on the wagon and started down the path toward Nippur.

They
wheeled the wrapped Nephilim carcasses through a dozen or so leagues of lush mountain valleys to a river port where they rented boat passage down the Diyala river another sixty leagues or so to the Tigris. From there they took the artificial canals to Sippar on the Euphrates, and then on to Nippur. The bounty on four Nephilim outlaws could carry them for months with supplies and bribery money
.

It was a tiring life to be always on the move, gathering reconnaissance and tracking giants. For Methuselah and Edna it had been particularly difficult being separated from their family for months at a time
. They felt they were missing out on their children’s growing years as the tribe took care of them in their stead. Bringing their favored son Lamech with them had brought some peace of mind, but it had its own stress. He was good at giant killing, but his heart was in Sahandria. He did not like the lonely rootless life of a wayfarer
.

They had left Sahandria with many tears to become nomads. It seemed more appropriate to Enoch’s calling, but it made it harder on everyone, feeling unattached to a substantial community, always unsettled, always leaving.

Though he focused on fulfilling his duty of slaying Nephilim, Lamech often dreamed of being a priest of Elohim for the clan. In this spiritual aspect, he found himself identifying more with his grandfather Enoch than with his father, Methuselah. That brought testy moments of tension between them.

Methuselah would tell Lamech he needed to stop being so sheepish and see himself as the seed of Havah, the special line of God’s own choosing. But Lamech just wanted to serve God in the temple
of Sahandria and minister to its people, whom he loved dearly. One thing was certain, he would not die a wandering nomad. If he could not go back to Sahand, he would build his own city somewhere on the plain. But first, he had to have a family. That was something he did not think much about in his pursuit of piety. What was a mere human family compared to fellowship with the mighty Creator Elohim? There had not been much of a comparison in his mind until now. He had not thought much of females in his youthful interests — until now. Now, he stared at the most vivacious and beautiful of all Elohim’s creatures that he had ever seen. And she was traveling with them to Nippur: Betenos bar Barakil.

Now
I am becoming more like my father
, thought Lamech. It confused and frustrated him. He felt he had two men inside him battling for control: his father, Methuselah, man of earth; and his grandfather, Enoch, man of heaven. Would he forever be tormented by two opposing natures? If this was the burden he had to shoulder to have a family, then he would seek every way possible to avoid it.

Betenos was no helpless victim, nor
would she go down without a fight in this world. She loved life too much. When the Nephilim attacked her, she fought back with the ferocity of a nomad, no matter how futile it had seemed. On this journey, she helped everywhere she could, cooking or cleaning, or even moving the dead giant corpses when necessary. She could drive the wagon or ride an onager free-back. She seemed willing to do just about anything. She was driven to prove her worth to everyone, to demonstrate she was not just another helpless waif in need of saving. Even though she thought the young man Lamech was certainly handsome and strong, she was determined not fall in love because she knew where that would lead her. And she did not want to go down that road again.

Everyone saw the
attraction between Lamech and Betenos. Enoch did not like the idea because Betenos was not a follower of Elohim. She spoke often of the Great Goddess Earth Mother, the
World Tree, and had a hard time grasping the incomparability of Elohim over all other gods. She would argue with Lamech for hours on end about Elohim and his excessive demands of exclusivity against the gods. Lamech seemed to enjoy the challenge. The young man’s fanatic commitment to Elohim was the one thing that comforted Enoch. He knew Lamech had no interest in marrying an idol worshipper. But what if she converted? What then? He knew it was not right, but he secretly hoped she would not convert to save them all the pain and suffering. Enoch could not wait to get to Nippur so they could end this distraction and get moving on without her
.

Edna knew that it was too late. They were already in love.
They were all only observing the discovery process. When Methuselah expressed caution at her youth, Edna reminded him how young they had been when they fell in love. When he brought up Betenos’ gods, she told him it was only a matter of time before Betenos would step over to Lamech’s side. She knew it. Call it women’s intuition or Elohim’s insight. But she prayed for Elohim’s will to be done.

The other women victims of the Nephilim attack were
brought along with the team to be dropped off at Nippur with Betenos. They asked to stay with Enoch’s nomads. Enoch had to inform them that the four of them were a band of warriors on a mission. They were simply not available for protection, and their tribe was too far in the opposite direction for the team to escort them there. The women would journey with them to Nippur and remain there to find a new life on their own.

Edna’s heart shivered. The circumstance
s of these women made her long for her own family back at Sahand. During their years of residence with the Sahandrians, she had borne sons and daughters for Methuselah. She missed them terribly. They were taken care of by the extended family when the team was away on their missions, but her longing for them persisted.

Their years of training
had granted her the blessed privilege of complete and focused attention from her husband Methuselah. Or rather,
almost
complete attention. The training called for an arduous schooling in heavenly weapons and spiritual discipline with high demands. It was not easy to become a giant killer. Once Methuselah fixed on a goal, he would devote his heart and soul to its completion. But at least in the caves, they had been spared the distracting complications and responsibilities of survival on the surface.

Now, their missions
took them away for longer and longer periods of time. She felt guilty about it. Conflict tore at her because she also knew that sometimes holy callings involved a sacrifice that was not required of other servants of Elohim. Still, she sometimes longed to live an uneventful and happily boring life with a stable family and clan in the comfortable caves of Sahandria. She just needed to be attached to someone or some community that would give her purpose. Her parents had provided that for her until she became a sacred virgin dedicated to the gods. When they murdered her parents, she found Methuselah to give her that purpose. The nomadic calling now displaced raising a family in Sahandria. Her identity was constantly being shaken up. She clung to the closest thing Elohim gave her, Methuselah. She sometimes wondered if she was being too needy with him. Whatever the case, she loved to make him happ
y.

For Enoch
, the sacrifice of being a wanderer was not so great as for Edna. He remarried at Sahand and they had five sons and three daughters. But it had never been the same after he lost his Edna. A part of him had died with her and it changed him forever. He was more otherworldly than the rest of the clan. He spent hours in prayer, and treasured his dream-visions. He would talk for hours about spirit and heavenly bodies with a thoughtless disregard for the human bodies right in front of him, including his own wife and children. Edna often felt that Enoch’s grandiose prophetic elevation of spiritual reality resulted in the neglect of his own family.

Methuselah seemed to be his father’s very opposite. Though he loved Elohim with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, Methuselah
’s affections were more this-worldly. It placed him at odds with his father more often than not. He remembered one time when Enoch was pontificating at the dinner table about the need for more mundane food and less preparation, so that they might have more time to devote to the pursuit of their spiritual disciplines. Methuselah got angry and retorted by asking if Enoch was saying Elohim was too worldly, since the Creator devoted too much time to crafting the Garden with its beatific multitude of tastes and exotic foods. It was one of the few ways that Methuselah could actually force Enoch into silence.

Methuselah had let the silent pause sink in, then took a deep bite of roasted meat and with his mouth full, spluttered out the words, “
I am worshipping Elohim as I enjoy this mutton’s glorious heavenly juicy flesh. As I do when I pray or when I hunt or when I make love to my wife. So, I ask you, who spends more time in spiritual discipline, the one who worships in some of his actions or the one who worships in all of his actions?”

Enoch
had left the table and charged Methuselah with dishonoring him. Methuselah apologized in front of the family for his disrespectful provocation. They both realized that spiritual arrogance was just as sinful as fleshly intemperance.

Edna
believed it was Elohim’s sense of humor to place such contrary personalities of extremes within the same family and then use them for his purposes. He had provided Lamech as a kind of hybrid of them both as a further picture of their tension and a rebuke of their imbalance. It indicated to her that Elohim was somehow in control, and not their puny little human wills.

If it were up to us,
she thought,
we would be in hot bitumen
.