People of the Flood (Ark Chronicles 2)

Novels by Vaughn Heppner:

THE ARK CHRONICLES

People of the Ark

People of the Flood

People of Babel

People of the Tower

LOST CIVILIZATION
SERIES

Giants

Leviathan

The Tree of Life

Gog

Behemoth

Lod the Warrior

Lod the Galley Slave

HISTORICALS

The Great Pagan Army

The Sword of Carthage

The Rogue Knight

Visit www.Vaughnheppner.com for more information.

People of the Flood

(The Ark Chronicles II)

by
Vaughn Heppner

Copyright © 2010 by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

Pharaoh
’s Palace

1.

Sitting on
a stool in Pharaoh’s throne-room, Ham shook with exhaustion. He was a tired old man, although only half Methuselah’s final age. Something awful had happened because of the Flood. No one lived as long anymore. Nowadays people died
young
, in their fifties or sixties, enfeebled by seeming old age.

Pharaoh stirred
. Ham both heard and smelled the sick man. Disgusting. Maybe for the first time in his life, he was glad to be blind. He was spared the sight of a ruler of Egypt rotting to death with boils.

“
You tell an interesting
fable
,” Pharaoh wheezed.

“
Fable?” Ham asked. “Is that what you think?”

“
Old man, you don’t want to know what I think.”

Ham rubbed his face, having no strength left to argue.

“But tell me this,” Pharaoh whispered. “What was the point of your story?”

Ham bowed his head as if defeated.

“Shall the guard captain take you to the dungeon then?” Pharaoh asked. “There he will pry the point of your tale out of you.”

“
Father!” Princess Taia cried. “You can’t mean that.”

“
He blasphemes Egypt’s gods with these tales,” Pharaoh said.

As
silent mockery, Ham felt Noah’s curse working its grim justice. The curse was an imp, a plague. Oh, if only he could journey back to that day, that dreadful moment in his father’s tent…

“
Old man,” Pharaoh said. “What is your point?”

Ham wasn
’t ready for the final showdown, so he said, “I beg thee, sire, grant me rest. My tale is not yet finished.”

“
You mean there’s more?”

“
Yes, sire, along with a revelation.”

Pharaoh tried to reply, but his own rough coughing interrupted him
. He soon spat into a physician’s bowl. Finally, he asked, “What revelation?”

“
You may yet be cured of your boils.”

“
You lie like the serpent you are, old man, all so you can twist out a few more years of pathetic life.”

“
I speak the truth.”

“
What do you say, Chamberlain?” Pharaoh whispered.

“
Your will is supreme, sire,” the chamberlain said. “All Egypt worships you. Yet not even the magicians know of a cure for your untimely illness. Perhaps this old one has hidden knowledge. Can it harm you to learn his secret of long life?”

“
That’s just it,” whispered Pharaoh. “I don’t want to give him the pleasure of outliving me. For too long, this creature has outlived everyone in the family. The guards should have entered his room when my father died and cut his throat.” Pharaoh wheezed pitifully. “Will I live until the morrow?”

“
Yes, sire,” the high priest of Sekhmet said.

“
Rest then, you old goat,” Pharaoh told Ham. “And you, Guard Captain. If I die tonight, your orders are to enter his bedroom and shove a dagger in his belly.”

“
Yes, Pharaoh,” the captain said.

“
Now take him, Taia. He is your responsibility.”

“
Yes, Father,” Taia said. “Come, Grandfather.”

With his joints popping, Ham
rose and shuffled from the throne room down many corridors. He wheezed, and his heart thudded.

“
It’s just a little farther,” Taia said.

Ham nodded as he fought off exhaustion
. How he hated being old and feeble. He wondered if this was how his grandfather Lamech had felt, dying at the relatively young Antediluvian age of 777.

What he needed was a glass of wine or a bowl of beer
. Beer! He hadn’t had a thirst for beer…for a long time. He grinned. The history of beer was the history of food. In Egypt, as elsewhere, two staples made up the diet: bread and beer, both products of grain. A common laborer ate three loaves of bread a day, two jugs of beer and onions so his breath stank worse than a camel’s. Even schoolboys—lads taught letters by priests—drank two jars of beer a day.

Ham shook his head, trying to clear it of facts, figures and history
, so much history. Then his bedroom door’s hinges creaked, and he soon climbed onto his cot.

“
Sleep well, Grandfather,” Taia said. “Tomorrow, you must finish your tale and tell them about Sarai’s witchery.”

H
am paused a moment. Sarai? Ah, yes, Abram’s wife, the one Pharaoh had taken. With that resolved, his head sank onto the pillow. His eyelids closed, and he wondered why a blind man felt the need to shut his eyes while sleeping.

“
I’ll bring you fresh bread tomorrow. Would you like that?”

Something in her voice drew him back.

“You must tell them about Sarai,” Taia said. “Explain to Pharaoh that this woman is like Naamah, a sorceress.”

He was s
o tired. He could no longer concentrate. He faded…until Taia shook him.

“
What?” he said.

“
Why does Pharaoh hate you? Why did his father hate you, and his father before him?”

The reason shamed
Ham. If he could change anything in his life, it would be that day, that dreadful day of long ago.

Then
Ham lost his thread of thought and fell asleep. But the thread slithered into his subconscious, snaking to the place where it stirred memories. Soon, he began to dream.

Ararat

1.

“
It’s freezing,” Rahab said.

Ham
pulled her up to him on the mountainside and wrapped his arms around her. Clouds fled across the sky. The wind howled, tugging their garments like an angry beggar.

“
Look at the Ark,” he said.

It rested
in a cleft of granite, a monstrous, wooden ship stuck on a mountain. Bare rock and water-scoured boulders barely softened by patches of greenery—the Old World had never seen such bleakness. Life struggled to reassert itself from waterlogged seeds and saplings.

Ham guided Rahab over a bare mountain ridge and into a bleak valley, with loose shale sliding under their feet.

“It’s so silent,” Rahab said.

“
And eerie,” Ham added. “Do you suppose this is what the Earth was like in the beginning, before Adam and Eve?”

“
No. Not so forbidding,” Rahab said, “so savage.” She groped for his hand. “Can we survive here?”

“
We must.”

Lighting flashed and thunder shook them.

Ham grimaced later. “At least I don’t have to worry about a charioteer of Havilah or a Slayer abducting you.”

“
Or a Red Blades for you,” she said.

Despite the cool weather
, sweat prickled his skin as they tramped up the next ridge. There, a strange and dreadful scene shocked them.

“
Oh, Ham, how awful,” Rahab said. “It’s like the Old World’s bones.”

Logs, millions of uprooted trees, many of them monsters from the time of Eden, were jammed and thrust into the val
ley. Mold and fungus made thousands of them look leprous. How many other valleys were like this, filled with the debris and flotsam of the Flood?

The next valley led to a higher mountain
. Halfway up it, they sheltered behind a boulder. There they devoured a package of bread and dried figs. At the top of the mountain, the wind blew hard but the view was fantastic.

“
Oh, Ham, look.”

In the distance, far past the mountains
—“Blue,” he said. “Like the horizon.”

“
It’s the sea, the Floodwaters.”

“
I think they’re still receding.”

“
Can we go back to the Ark now? Have you seen enough?”

R
eturning in time for supper, the Ark’s narrow halls seemed cramped like a tomb.

Japheth and Europa
had been exploring too. They told of a valley like a graveyard, filled with jelly-like corpses: animals, men and great fishes. According to Japheth, the waxy substance must have coated the corpses at some great depth. Those corpses must have only surfaced at the end of the Flood.

“
If they had floated near the surface the entire time,” Japheth explained, “they would have decomposed by now.”

“
They have become food for the Ark’s predators,” Ham said. “It’s a vast supply of carrion for them to feast on.”

“
As the various fungi and molds on the logs you found will supply herbivores with sustenance,” Gaea said.

Noah ended the discussion, saying that tomorrow was going to be a hard day.
They all needed their sleep.

The great release began t
he next morning at dawn. Rats, mice, sparrows, pigeons and pterodactyls fled the Ark together with deer, elk, glyptodons and elephants. Some of the animals wobbled, weak after a year of confinement. Others had mangy fur or sore hooves.

“
We’ll never see this kind of day again,” Ham told Rahab.

A few hours before dusk
, they were done. All the plant-eaters had left the ship, and the majority of those the immediate vicinity of the Ark. A moose bawled at them, then trotted away for one of the many mountain ridges. The reunited ravens wheeled overhead.

“
We made it,” Gaea said, wearily. “We really did it.”

Noah put his arm around her waist and kissed her.

Ham took Rahab by the hand and whispered that maybe it was time to repopulate the Earth. She giggled, and they headed into the Ark.

2.

During the next few days, Ham saw deer munching on stranded seaweed and elephants plucking the first shoots of new trees. A behemoth tore bark off dead logs, and sparrows pecked water-soaked grains. Before the week was out, a fly buzzed past his ear.

“
If the insects have returned, then it’s time to release the predators,” Noah said.

The next morning
, wolves, lions, hyenas, dragons, hawks, eagles and bears ambled, slunk or flew to freedom. The leopards nosed the sheep pen until Japheth chased them away with hounds.

During the next week
, they endured a rainstorm, a sudden drop in the temperature and a howling wind that reminded them of the worst days of the Flood. Then the sun shone, and it warmed up again.

“
What a strange world,” Gaea said. “It’s so unlike the first.”

“
Sin destroys,” Noah said.

They ate lunch aboard the Ark, six of them.

Then the door banged open. A wild-eyed Japheth burst into the room. “The horses are gone!”

There was b
edlam until Noah rapped the table with his knuckles. “What happened?”

“
I walked the horses,” Japheth said, “exercising them. Then a lion jumped out and roared. All the horses fled but for one whose bridle I held.”

“
Did you ride and give chase?” Ham asked.

“
Ride?” shouted Japheth. “I fended off the lion!”

“
Ham didn’t mean anything ill,” Rahab said.

“
He accuses me, doesn’t he?”

“
The lion attacked you?” Noah asked.

“
It roared,” Japheth said. “I thought it would attack.”

“
Did it charge?” asked Noah.

“
It roared.” Japheth paled, as if reliving the memory. Then he spied a cup, draining it until water dribbled down his chin.

“
We need to recapture the horses,” Noah said.

“
They should return,” Gaea said.

“
But if they don’t return,” asked Ruth, “then what?”

“
You said you have one horse left,” Ham said. They had taken seven onto the Ark.

Japheth eyed his brother before slumping into a chair
. “What does it matter? They’re gone.”

“
Father,” Ham said. “Let me take the horse, and I’ll look for the others.”

Noah
frowned. “You can’t go after them now. It’s almost dark.”

“
I’ll take some hounds,” Ham said, “and a spear. I’ll be fine.”

“
Not if the lion shows up,” Japheth said.

Noah pondered the idea.
“First thing in the morning, you can go. We can afford to lose the horses, even if they stay away or if lions devour them. We cannot, however, afford to lose you.”