People of the Ark (Ark Chronicles 1) (24 page)

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.

H
am 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.

Ham squinted
. Far away it rained. He took a deep breath. There was no land anywhere on Earth. Only they lived. No birds or creatures that walked on land had survived the dreadful doom, the wrath of Jehovah. Only what remained on the Ark among land animals lived, in the entire world. Sobering, sobering…Ham turned away, shaking his head.

It was always too much.

A hand squeezed his shoulder.

“
It won’t last forever,” Noah said.

“
Why everyone and everything?” Ham asked.

“
Wickedness had reached a dreadful pitch.”

“
It didn’t seem that bad, Father. I-I mean, it was bad, but this?”

Noah nodded
. “None of us is holy, my boy. We’re human. We sin. We’re stained by sin. We don’t realize the awfulness of sin, how terrible it really is. Our very sin blinds us to its wretchedness. But someday… someday there will be no more sin. The Redeemer will pay for our sins. Those of us who believe will thus be saved from Sheol, from the Lake of Fire, the second death, just as we’re saved from the end of our world.”

“
I wasn’t that much better in terms of sin than those who perished,” Ham said.

“
Nor I either,” Noah said, “not when compared to Jehovah’s holiness. It was His grace that saved us, that will redeem us in ages to come. Because you believe in the One to Come, Ham, and have turned from rebellious sinning, repented, that is why you were saved now and will be on that Day.”

For a time Ham was silent.

Noah cleared his throat. “You said it was too hot below?”

“
The blankets on the hippos and behemoths dried out again, while condensation has pooled on the walls.”

“
How much humidity?” Noah asked.

“
I think we should open to half.”

Noah considered it and finally opened his window to half.

“I’ll do the other side,” Ham said.

“
Maybe you should have your mother check your forehead first.”

“
I’ll be okay.”

Noah clapped him on the back and began to work along the walkway, levering open one
half of each of the cubit-wide windows. Ham climbed down the chute, went to the windows on the other side and adjusted each of them.