Sinners and the Sea (15 page)

“At least stop frowning,” I said. Though he obeyed me, it did not improve his countenance. In fact, it made it worse. He stared coldly at whatever it was that approached.

As if just realizing someone had gotten the better of him in a deal, Noah muttered, “
She
is the seventh saved. Not one of my sons but her.”

“What is the importance of seven?” I asked, thinking that I wanted the very best for Ham and wondering how I could arrange it.

“Seven is God’s number and represents perfection. He made the world in seven days.”

He made it in six, and He does not seem to think it is so perfect, seeing as some of His creations have fallen so low in His favor that He wishes to destroy them.
But I knew better than to argue with Noah.

Japheth looked like he wanted to say something, but he could not disobey Noah by speaking. Perhaps he wanted to point out that he was
seven
teen. Poor Japheth. Maybe it was not his fault that he was so fervent about God and the sins of others. Shem’s waywardness drove him to it, and this self-righteousness of Japheth’s forced Ham into a rebellion of irreverence.

Though I loved Shem and Japheth, I was glad Noah and I had not stopped son-making after Japheth. I hated to think of how miserable
we might all be without Ham. Even Japheth. Without Ham, he would have only one brother to look down upon.

I went to my favorite son and put my hand gently upon his arm. I could think of nothing comforting to say except, “She looks like she comes from a powerful family.”

Ham’s bottom lip was trembling. He did not respond. I knew he was thinking of Herai. I was not sure if there was any other boy in the world who would cry because he could not have a girl so much older than himself, one who was thought to be slow because of demons or God’s punishment. But I hoped so.

“I am sorry,” I told him. “I wish Herai could be yours.” And by “yours,” I meant “ours.” Unfortunately, neither Ham nor I held sway over Noah. But Ham at least would one day have his own family, and then he would make decrees instead of following them. It seemed I never would. I wondered who had more control over her life—one of Javan’s prostitutes or me. At least none of them would be forced to put their sons on an ark with a bunch of animals many leagues from the sea.

I had thought myself into a dark state by the time the caravan was within a hundred cubits. Ham, on the other hand, no longer looked like a mixture of emptiness and fury. He was straining to see what approached as if he could not wait until it arrived to know what it was.

At last I could make out the man at the head of the pack.
Surely this is a mirage,
I thought. A mirage so powerful, everyone could see it. The man appeared to be as old as Noah. His beard was so thick that it covered half of his torso and so long it rested on the
strange beast he rode. On the beast behind his was another man, also ancient. And behind him, a little girl.

A little girl. Reins in one of her little hands.

Someone sat behind the girl, holding a parasol between her and the sun.

After this came two more men. All in all, from the tusks of the first beast, to the tail of the last, they were quite a solemn procession. Not a sad sort of solemn but an important sort. Noble men on a noble errand. Their tunics billowed out behind them in the wind like banners, as if they ruled over every place they traveled.

Do they mean to rule over this place?

Though Noah had invited them, he stood stock-still in the middle of the road as if he were going to confront them.

“Cousin,” the first man greeted Noah.

“Welcome, Manosh,” Noah said. The way he said it was not very welcoming. By his tone of voice, I would have thought he was speaking of a great stench. Then his intonation became hopeful: “Did you have any trouble with the sellswords?”

“No. Just as the God of Adam watches over you, so does He watch over us.” Yet a sword hung from Manosh’s belt—sheathed but with blood on the handle. It seemed God had given these men steady hands and swords and left the rest up to them. I wondered how many fewer sinners there were now in the towns to the north.

The girl on the third beast looked young—seven or eight—except that the stiffness of her spine was too great for a child’s.

“Which of these is my wife?” Ham asked.

I did not think the blood on Manosh’s sword bode well for Ham’s
insolence. I moved to step in front of my son, but he held his arm out so that I came to a halt.

Manosh did not move or speak. He and Noah’s other cousins stared at us without emotion, letting any fear we might have mount in the silence.

Then Manosh laughed. “You cannot tell which of these is your wife? You must have inherited your father’s sight.” This caused the rest of Noah’s cousins to laugh as well. You would not have been able to tell they were laughing by their chests or bellies. Only their faces moved. I thought:
They are too controlled to be trusted.

In almost perfect unison, they dismounted their beasts. Age did not seem a hindrance to their strength but, rather, an explanation of it, as if their great stature was due to growing taller each year of their lives. Their noses and ears were not out of proportion to the rest of their bodies, as with most old men.

I realized the woman behind the little girl was a slave. She struggled to hold the parasol over the girl even as one of the old men lifted the child off the riding blanket and set her gently on the ground. Much more gently than Noah had ever touched me.

Even in the shade of the parasol the slave held over her, I could tell that the girl’s skin was as light as any I had seen. Not deep olive, dried brown, or glistening black but a color like sand that had taken in a whole summer of sunlight. I wondered how it was possible for her to be even lighter than the parts of my body that were hidden. Had she never walked out into the sun without a parasol? Had she never seen the sky?

My eyes were filled with the old men, the little girl, and the
huge beasts. But when the slave glanced up for half a breath, I nearly forgot all but her. She had a mark upon her brow. I felt a confounding mixture of compassion and revulsion. I reached up to make sure my head scarf was secure.

When I realized I was staring, I hurried my gaze off the slave’s face. I did not want the others to wonder at any connection between us. Instead, I looked at the men and the little girl. The girl pressed her cheek to the tusk of her great beast, which had lowered its head, as though to be nearer to her. Then she walked, as slowly as if she were floating, to stand with the old men, two on either side. The wind that billowed our tunics and blew our hair into our faces seemed not to touch her. She waited with the men for Noah to approach.

These men looked as commanding as any army. The source of their power was not their stature or the great beasts they rode. It was how they seemed to move as one body. One large body with four sharp swords and eight steady hands.

No one scratched an itch or cleared his throat or shooed a fly from his neck. We were as still as if the next movement might determine all that was to come. Then Ham shook my hand off and began walking toward the girl.

“Son,” Noah said.
“Stop.”

Ham halted. He had some loyalty to his father in the presence of strangers. But he did call out: “Have you torn this little girl from her mother’s breast in order to make her my wife?”

“This is the daughter of the prophet Kesh—our cousin, favorite grandson of our beloved, ailing Methuselah,” Manosh said.

Noah’s face took on the expression of a man being bitten by
gnats and trying not to show it. “Three hundred goats do not make a man a prophet,” he said.

Manosh smiled. “Three thousand.”

“The God of Adam told him of the end of the world before He told you,” another of the old men said to Noah.

“But the Lord has left me here to survive it.”

“He has left Kesh’s daughter Zilpha as well,” Manosh said. He looked at the girl, and she smiled faintly up at him. “We are entrusting you to her and her to you.”

“As a wife or a ward?” Ham asked. I had never once raised my hand to Ham, and right then I thought this a terrible mistake.

They were not accustomed to being mocked. “Ahh!” one of the old men cried. Another banged his staff against the dust.

Manosh looked to Noah to chastise Ham. Noah said nothing and perhaps tilted his nose a bit more toward the sky after this insult to Zilpha. Manosh placed his hand upon the bloody handle of his sword and took a step forward.

Zilpha reached up and lightly touched Manosh’s hand with her own, bringing him to a halt. I wondered how such a little hand could still such a large one, though I noticed that he did not take his hand off his sword.

“Lay down your fear,” she told Ham. Her voice sounded like it contained apricots and cream and all other manner of good things, and after it left her mouth, it seemed to float above us. “My father said I would marry a difficult man, and we would be as happy as two people born of prophets are allowed to be. Though this amount of happiness is small, it will be all we need.”

Ham stared at her as if she had grown a second head, but luckily, he said nothing.

This speech and Ham’s reaction seemed to meet the quota of awe that the girl needed in order to leave her place beside her second cousins. She raised her arm. (I would come to see her do this a hundred times over—every time she was about to walk.) The slave hurried to hold the parasol between the girl’s newborn-looking skin and the sun.

To my surprise, the girl and the slave came to me. Because of the parasol, which was level with my chest, the little girl was not able to come close. The slave raised the parasol above our heads, nearly scratching my face, so the girl could walk forward. As the girl placed her arms around my waist and pressed her head gently to my belly, I stood as still as a stone, unsure what I should do.

The girl stepped back and took one of my hands in both of her own. “Mother,” she said.

Perhaps she called me “Mother” because she had nothing else to call me, but I do not think so. I had never wanted a daughter. A daughter would remind me of what I had made myself forget: My own mother had left me. And I was afraid if I had a daughter, she would be marked and there would be no old man righteous or blind enough to take her in. But I would not need to worry about this with Zilpha. She was more powerful as a girl than I ever would be as a woman. This did not please me.

She let go of my hand and turned to Noah. In coming to me, she had already walked over half the distance between them, and
she must have thought she had done her part. She waited for Noah to come to her.

He did not move a hair’s width in any direction. Even the shock of hair on his head was so stiff that not even the desert wind could stir it.

Enough.
Though the land we stood on was Noah’s, along with the food, the cookfire, and even me, and though it was Noah’s right to invite guests to eat, seeing the girl’s sway over so many men made me bold. As if Zilpha and her second cousins had just arrived, I said, “Welcome! Won’t you gather around our cookfire and eat with us?”

Before anyone could answer, I ran to gather goat meat and lentils.

CHAPTER 21

THE OTHER PROPHET’S DAUGHTER

Z
ilpha and the slave were the first to come to the cookfire. Everyone except Noah soon followed. He remained in the road in the same place where he had stood when the caravan was barely discernible on the horizon. He stared in the direction his cousins had come from, as if he had no interest in us and were waiting for something more important to appear. He looked so ridiculous there that I felt both pity and anger.

The rest of us crouched around the cookfire, all except Zilpha. The slave laid a blanket on the ground for her. “You will know,” Manosh said, “that Zilpha must not go unprotected from the sun.”

“My father gave me this parasol, which he has blessed. It will keep the sun from stealing my years.”

“Have you never seen daylight?” Ham asked her.

Manosh ignored Ham’s question. “You will also know,” he said, “she does not—”

“I saw it once,” Zilpha said. “Surely I will be blind a few years
before I would have had I never looked at it, but I do not regret it. Now I have seen it and do not need to look again.”

Manosh continued. This time he spoke too loudly to be interrupted. “You will also know that she does not squat or needlessly tire herself in any other way.”

“My strength must be preserved for the many years to come,” Zilpha said. She propped her head up on one little arm and tried to drink her stew in this position. It slopped onto the blanket. Surely it would have been easier to drink in a squatting position, but she remained prone on the wet blanket, surely getting no less hungry than she had been when she arrived.

I looked over at Ham to make sure he was not about to say something cruel. He was staring at Zilpha. I could not tell whether he was staring in awe or disgust.

Watching her go hungry caused my jealousy to recede a hair’s width, which was enough that I got some bread for her. “Thank you, my good mother,” she said. Again, “mother.” Perhaps even the daughter of a prophet needs one.

Without Noah near, Manosh looked from one of my sons to another, deciding which one to address, before grudgingly settling his gaze upon Ham. “Zilpha’s father was a great prophet. He told us of this drought we are in now, and of a great struggle between mankind and the God of Adam. Zilpha is his one remaining child. The rest grew old and died, as most people do. Zilpha must carry the blood of Kesh to many sons.”

Though it was considered bold for a woman to ask questions, I ventured, “And Zilpha, how old is she?”

“I am seven,” she said, “and I will live for seven hundred years. This is why Noah wants me with you when the end of the world comes. If I am going to live through it, there is a greater chance that the people around me will too.”

Finally, I had met someone as mad as Noah.

“Blaspheme!” Noah cried from his place in the road. He did not address Zilpha directly. “The girl is a virgin, and that is her worth.”