Havah (11 page)

I did not know the way back.

“Adam? I must know. Do you think you could find the way back?”

“To what?” Adam looked thoroughly perplexed.

“To the valley. Our garden. Could you?”

He was silent and I knew his answer.

He said, very softly, “The days that I left you in the cave, I ranged as far back as I dared, as far as I remembered. But always I came to a place where I knew neither north nor south, where I recognized neither tree nor shrub nor stream . . . where I could recognize nothing but the way I had just come. And as we have traveled all these days since, I have tried to recall our steps the night the thunder was at our backs. . . .” He shook his head.

And so there it was. We were exiled and did not even know the way to return if we could.

“Let us go back,” I said, hurriedly collecting our things. “Let us go back the way we have come.”

Adam shook his head. “It’s no use, Isha. I have tried. How I tried!”

“We followed the river. We will follow it back. Between the two of us, we will find it. But we must go now, right away.”

“But that is the thing!” he cried. “I am not certain we will come back to the
same
river.”

I sat back, hard, upon the dirt.

I wanted to tell myself that it did not matter. With our perfect memories—we retained that much, at least, even if we had lost the natural union between us—we could surely remember. We would wander the area for as many days as it took us to find it. But even as I thought it, I knew no amount of wandering could help. Despair opened before me like a yawning pit.

Adam laid his hand over his eyes. His face crumpled. This time I felt no impatience or weariness or indifference. For the first time in days, I understood pain that was not only my own. It jarred me from myself even as I clung to the one thing I had clasped about my heart more closely than the pendant that had once hung before it.

“My love,” I said, taking his hand gently away from his eyes. Ah, how I loved him, even as his face was twisted in despair! “Adam . . . Ish. I, too, have something I have not told you.” I lifted his hand and kissed it. “I bear the seed.”

He blinked, dark lashes long in shadow against his cheek.

“I am pregnant with that child. You yourself spoke of it the night it took root in me.”

“And I did not even know it.” Wonder filled his face, his words.

“And yet I do, and I am not afraid of the pain because what a child this shall be!” I went into his arms. “He will strike the head of the serpent, as you have said. Because I know now that the serpent was no common animal—”

“I thought my eyes played a trick. It seemed to me he stood before the One almost as a man—no, as something greater.” We had never spoken of it. Now I felt a rush of relief and gratitude that it was laid plain between us at last. All of it.

“I have pondered this many days, that this is the very thing the serpent wished for us, exactly as it has happened. I am certain it knew, as now we know, evil. But now I bear the seed. Because of him, the day will come when we need no landmark to know the way again.”

I had to believe it. I must. Just as I must believe that as the earth remained intact, the waters would one day recede in our valley garden. Surely the fire must go out. We had seen the areas burnt by our fires, the way the grass had grown in more lushly than before. Surely the garden would heal as we healed from the cuts of thorns and stone.

And then one day we would find our way back.

12

We could not live as we had before. The world was different, and now we had to think of more than ourselves. We wandered the nearby hills, looking for caves. Most of them were filled with the scat of rodents. I wrinkled my nose, but Adam would not be swayed. He spoke little and frowned often in those days. He was frequently alone in his thoughts, speaking only when I questioned him directly. Even then he did not hear me sometimes so that I had to repeat my questions a second or third time. By then my tone was as abrasive as the coarse hair of the boar. How he annoyed me!

Meanwhile we stayed in a series of ill-suited niches—they could not properly be called caves—in the hills for a number of days until he returned one morning to say he had found a cave that we could comfortably live in for a time. At that I threw up my arms and said that the world had been made anew, that the sun and moon had shone in the same day, and surely I was the most blessed of all women.

We cleared away the dirt and debris and laid fresh rushes and grass and even flowers upon the floor. We stacked the baskets with our things, which at the time seemed many, against the wall. When it was done, the tension around Adam’s mouth and shoulders softened, and he laughed a little bit as he had a lifetime ago. I thought,
This is where I will birth my baby. Here, in the cool shade, on the strew.
The One had talked of pain, but I was not afraid of it. I would welcome it. This was the seed of whom the One had spoken, who would visit upon the serpent a greater blow than the serpent had done to me.

I understood now that the serpent, once my wise advisor, was—and always had been—my enemy. I did not know why. I had known nothing of guile then. But I knew something of requital now.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER I wandered west of the cave to the place where the hills, covered in herbs and wild flowers, flattened toward a wide meadow. There were several large, flat stones in the area, and the day before, as I had picked my way between them, I had come upon a snake. Its jaw was unhinged and the tail of a fat mouse protruded, limp, from the gullet stretched around it. I ran away, unmindful of the stones beneath my feet, seeing visions of Adah stripped of her skin, the waning light of the One, and the chrysalis of the serpent upon the ground slithering away like a worm. When I had gotten away, I retched up every bit of my breakfast.

This time when I went back I saw an altogether different sight: The snake—could it be the very one? But there was its belly, still distended—lay dead, its head flattened as though struck by the hoof of an animal.

This I took as my sign.

I sang the rest of the day and welcomed Adam to my arms that night.

“HAVE YOU NOTICED,” ADAM said one day, “how strange the animals have grown?”

I wanted to say of course I had noticed—this was no news. Since before we left the valley, when Dvash had bared her teeth to me, I had known it. But it was not just her. They had been skittish and strange everywhere outside the valley. The jackal ran away, the hare skittered along the ground as though it were a shadow, the deer kept to themselves, and I had not seen a bear in days—and then only from a distance.

“But it isn’t just the animals,” I said. “The ground must be different as well. Everything that grows from it seems not quite as right as it was.”

He was quiet for some time before he said, “The antlers that I brought back in those first days—a buck did not drop them. That day I was near the wood, and I found them.” He did not look at me.

“But you just now said the buck did not drop them.”

He was carving, which had been his habit in the evening as it required no more light than that which the fire gave off—or the moon, when it was full enough.

“The buck was dead, the belly ripped open, eaten to the bone. So much of it was gone that I couldn’t even save the hide.”

I lurched toward the opening of the cave. After I had emptied my stomach on the path outside and taken some water from the basket—it was leaking, I could tell, and tomorrow I must treat it with pitch—I settled back onto my mat and said vehemently, “Good. I want no more of hides.” Couldn’t he see that I hated them? I would throw them away were the wind not occasionally unkind and the nights cooler than we were accustomed to.

He shook his head. “We must have clothes. Haven’t you noticed that the nights are cooler?”

“Of course I have,” I snapped. Had I not come to just the same conclusion? Did he think I had no brain—made of the same stuff as his?

“We need more clothes and coverings for our feet,” he said. “I’ve lost track of the times I’ve cut mine on stones, and there are the insects and creatures.” I thought of the snake. I had not mentioned it to him.

He laid down his carving with a sigh and stretched out on the sleeping mat, his arms behind his head. He was leaner now, the angles of his face sleek, his limbs sinewy as those of the great cat. I, too, had grown thinner, the child in my belly not even making the smallest bump yet.

I moved to lay next to him, to smooth back his hair and peer into his face, searching there for traces of the boy who had given birth to this man. I could not see the blue of his eyes in the dimness of the cave, even with the fire. I wished, fiercely, in that moment that I could.

“Isha,” he said softly. “Is it too terrible? To live here as we do, I mean. I will do anything to bring you comfort, only never lay as you did those first days, as one dying—”

I shushed him softly, stroked back the hair from his face. “No. It is not too terrible.” In that moment I told the truth.

WE RIGOROUSLY STUDIED THE changing vegetation around us. Every day the soil seemed to thrust up strange new life. Some of it was vile to touch, as the nettle, or to eat, as the bitter melon. We found other uses for them eventually. Where once we had eaten anything that came from the earth, we had to use caution now. Where once we had never worried about the supply of food, we began to mark the progression of seasons, the bloom and wane of fruit trees and shrubs and vine.

We dried and parched and stored grain and legume, nut and seed. We had done these things before, but the animals had become thieves; more than once I found holes chewed through the baskets in the back of the cave, our small stores raided by rodents.

We began to find the scat of hyena and wolf closer to the trail leading to our cave. Though we had never feared these animals, it became clear that they were not themselves as we discovered more evidence of their penchant for killing and their newly carnivorous habits. Eventually we built a low bramble fence before the mouth of the cave.

I had begun by now to comb out bits of the lamb’s coat with a thistle, and I used the soft fuzz to line the inside of a basket just the right size—or so I estimated—for a baby. I collected new grasses and retted fibers and broke flax for weaving. What small experiments I had made in the valley before, I began to test in earnest.

Adam foraged as a common scavenger for useful bits of hoof, bone, or antler. He fashioned rope and awls and scrapers and, one day, his first spear. The lovely boy that he had been was gone completely. His jaw had squared, and his shoulders broadened. The down on his cheek thickened, as did the hair on his chest. Though I often missed the boy of the garden, he had every association to all that was perfect to me—how alluring to me were the narrow hips and the ridges of his abdomen, the cords of his neck as they stood out in exertion.
I will make a child like him,
I thought.

Or would I? Now I became intensely curious what this child might look like; though we were Ish and Isha, as alike as twins from the same womb, his lips were thicker than mine, curving into a more pronounced bow. His nose was straight and refined and wide. Mine rounded at the tip. His cheeks were straight and long. Mine were round like the bare shoulders of a girl. His legs were lean and corded with muscle. Mine were as long as saplings. Where once we noted the similarities and differences in animal offspring so that we could even predict the variance in color of wolf pups in a litter, we began to do the same with the son growing inside me.

“He will have your cheeks and my nose.”

“He will have my hair and your feet,” Adam declared.

“Oh, how I hope to the One that he has my feet and not yours!”

We always knew it would be a son. Not, as some have said, because the adam, being a male, came first, since before me he was simply one human in a vast earth. We knew because it had been said by the One on the terrible day that he laid judgment upon the serpent and upon the ground.

We estimated the length of my pregnancy based on the gestation of the ewe and the great cat.

“At least eight cycles of the moon,” Adam said finally. “No more than ten.” I concurred, wondering how long it would be after that until the word of the One was fulfilled. Thinking of it, I could almost bear the stinging nettles. I could even almost suffer the horrid hide garments as the trappings of a life I knew would not last forever.

During this time I set aside my gall at Adam’s betrayal. It seemed a thing done by a boy I no longer knew, who lived in a place where I no longer dwelt—just as I was no longer the girl I had once been. I welcomed the man to my mat to lie with me in ways familiar and alien in this world of silence between us, where we must rely evermore on finding the words to say the things we never needed to speak before. He was cautious with me at first until I assured him that I thought the child held fast within me. Still, pleasure did not come as easily as before. Where we had come together as two halves, we came now as two individuals, imperfectly matched.

Neither did laughter visit us as often as it had in the valley. Ease was something of memory. Our hands were constantly busy. We were on our feet nearly every hour we were awake. We had labored before in the garden, but now the tenor of our work had changed. Every night we fell bone-weary to our mats.

“We cannot stay here indefinitely,” Adam said one night in the darkness. “There will be three of us—and Gada—and we will need to range farther to find the food we want by the season. If not this season or next, then by the one after, it will no longer make sense to stay here.”

“Then we return north.”

“No, we must go south. The land flattens there, and the plain will be lush. I think it will be milder there, as well.”

I was reluctant to go one step farther from the valley, already so far away. “Surely the earth will renew every food we have taken.”

“This isn’t the same earth,” he said dully.