Sinners and the Sea (23 page)

“
God of Adam, before you kill me, please, let me see my family one more time.
And then I grasped the rope.

“A rope burns without flames but burns nonetheless. I did not
feel it at the time. I felt the wind and the cold, and the smacking of my body against the hull, and then the hands of my family pulling me over the deck wall. Fingers pressed into my aching ribs, and my stomach heaved and sent up pieces of the sea.

“ ‘Japheth?’ I asked.

“ ‘We pulled the fool from the sea, and now he sharpens another spear,’ Ham said.

“
For what?
As soon as I wondered this, the giant must have pushed off the bottom of the sea. The surface of the water, already greatly chipped from the rain and heaving in the wind, now shattered. The giant’s hand reached toward us, trying to grasp the wall of the deck.
Can the ark keep us
and
the giant from drowning?
That was a question for which I did not have an answer. The side of the ark tipped toward the sea with each attempt the giant made. When he finally gripped the wall, his bloody fingertips touching the deck, Japheth rushed forward and stabbed the giant’s wrist.

“First with a spear, then with a dagger, then with a sword.

“The huge hand released the ark. Japheth tried to reclaim his weapons. ‘I command you, let them go,’ Grandpa Noah said. This time Japheth listened. My sons joined together to hoist the giant’s half-lame hand over the wall. The God of Adam must have helped them.

“Now both of the giant’s hands were wounded. I peered over the wall with what little strength the sea had left me. I saw only waves crashing. When the waters stopped thrashing, I knew they had digested the giant. If they could bring down the nephil, I knew
that not only he but all the world outside the ark had been murdered by the sea.

“I lay down on the deck. The rain was like a stampede, and I wanted it to trample upon my head until I could not feel my heart. For a while I did not want to be awake to witness any more tragedies. I heard someone telling me to get up, then telling someone else to get me up. Then I heard nothing.

“But children, I must wake now. There are animals to tend and water to bail. I just wanted you to know, in case I do not make it to the new world, of the great giant. He saved my life. He and all of his kind are gone now.

“Or maybe not. The world is bigger than we can see all at once. Big enough, perhaps, to hide a giant.”

CHAPTER 35

LIFE ABOARD THE ARK

W
hen the sea is rough, you do not wake up in the morning and wonder what to do. You bail water, eat when your stomach allows, and most of all, hold on for dear life. That is, if you are lucky. Or blessed. Often there is no sleep to wake from. Just a long spell of darkness broken only by lightning.

If there is a chance to catch your breath, that is all you do: breathe. There is no time to worry about the ship you have seen in the distance. Well, not usually. When you do think about it, you wonder if it was your imagination, driven by fear and by hope that the eight people on board the ark are not the only ones left in the world.

When it is safe to feed the animals—some of which are injured from the force your sons must use to return them to their cages whenever they break out—you feel a flicker of sadness for them. You do not have the energy to feel it much. You are mildly grateful that when your oldest son corrals the animals too violently, your
second-born—despite his bloodthirst—stops his older brother’s whip because he fears what the Lord will do if one of the creatures He has chosen to save is killed.

You see in flashes. You forget how your husband walks or how your children’s expressions change. Only Zilpha seems the same: nearly motionless, calm.

The one joy God has left in the world is being near Ona when she is on deck and lightning strikes. Her almond-colored eyes are slightly too big for her face, and this awkward, girlish feature makes it hard to look away. We are all in awe of her—all but Shem. Though he grabs at her when she’s nearby, he rarely looks at her. He may not even know that sometimes her eyes turn brown. Her lashes are the longest I have ever seen, shining and black because of the rain. She seems like a creature not altogether human—queen of an unearthly species that is more attractive than ours. One that is more beautiful when wet.

The rest of us are as pleasing to look at as orphans left overnight in the rain. When we are belowdecks and the rain does not fall upon us, still we are wet. Our bones seem to be made of water; the sea tosses inside our heads. I think I am wet down to my very soul.

• • •

A
fter Japheth slaughtered the eighth ram that came to the ark, Noah had him take the beast’s horn. Its sound is the only one that can be heard throughout the ark over the bleating, braying, screaming, and roaring. Noah blows it to call us to the gathering place, on
the second level near the lighter beasts, in a corner where a wall half the width of the ark has been erected to create a room that is open on one side. We burn incense to cover the smell of wounded and infected animals, urine, and dung.

“Not you,” Noah tells Ona one day after sounding the horn. I can see in the dim light from the oil we are burning that her wide eyes are not as wide as they were when our journey began. She’s exhausted, yet still too remarkable to look away from. I suspect that Noah does not want to struggle for our attention. “You will lie on your blankets, so my grandson can take his afternoon nap in a restful belly.”

No one actually knows whether it is afternoon or midnight. Herai’s moon cycle is our only source by which to tell time. She was bleeding when she boarded the ark, so we will know when one moon has passed.

Ona’s moons have deserted her. She should have given birth at least two moons before boarding the ark, yet her belly continues to grow. She cannot balance for more than a few steps before reaching for the bars of a cage or one of us—usually Herai—to keep from tumbling to the floor.

Through the smoke that rises from the oil we are burning, I watch her shuffle away with her hand on the lowest part of her back.

Ona prefers Herai’s company to all of ours, but Herai is falling into a trance of sorrow. She has stopped pressing against the wall of the deck, eyes trained on the waters below, waiting for lightning to illuminate the
people floating upon the sea. There are no more people floating upon the sea. I wonder if I really saw a ship in the distance. No one has mentioned it, and I will not be the first.

Before Noah begins on whatever it is he wants to tell us, I move to squat next to Herai. My hips pop, and my knees feel like they have swollen to the size of my head. To steady myself, I gently place a hand upon Herai’s leg. Shem pinches his nose. As if he smells any better.

“Animals—human or otherwise—do not give off a pleasing smell when wet,” I say.

Noah’s brow furrows. “We are not animals.”

“Some of us are not,” Ham says. He turns to look up at Japheth, who is standing because he cannot squat with a sword in his belt.

I let go of Herai and move between Ham and Japheth. Ham pretends to choke on the smell of me. “Mother!”

I am tired but cannot sleep, starving but too nauseated to eat anything more than a few nuts here or there. Every last shard of me aches more deeply with each breath. The gash across my ear, where the side of my head knocked against the hull while the nephil held me, throbs day and night. “How do you expect me to smell when I alone must shovel all of the lighter beasts’ dung?”

“What sons has the God of Adam saved, who let their mother break her back while they play in the rain?” Noah demands.

“Father,” Japheth says, “I guard the ark at every—” He was going to say “position of the sun.” But there is no sun.

“You will shovel no more dung,” Noah says to me. “Ham and Shem, you will help your mother.”

Ham likes to feed the animals but does not like to deal with
what results. Still, I know that if I had asked him for help, he would have taken the shovel from my hand and bent his own back. I hadn’t wanted to trouble him. As he lowers his head in shame—something I have never seen him do—I regret my words.

We are silent while we wait for Noah to tell us whatever is important enough that no one has been left on deck to guard the ark.

“We must protect the ark at every breath,” he says.

“Good idea,” Ham mutters.

“Neither the sea nor the sinners are done with us.” Noah quickly adds, “God is protecting the ark, but sometimes He does so using our flesh. We must always be ready.”

Maybe the ark in the distance was not just my imagination. But Noah is nearly blind. How could he have seen it?

“And we must keep watch for my second cousins,” Zilpha says. “I do not know why they did not come back to board the ark before the flood came, but I can feel that they are still alive. Have you ropes in place for them to climb aboard?” She has not gone on deck since bringing the mammoth to help save Javan and Herai. She does not clean up dung, and she does not help me prepare and serve dried meat and fruit. She is still, except when she feeds and pets the animals. But because she helped save Herai’s life, I do not think there is anything she could do that I would not forgive her for.

Noah says nothing, but Shem does not miss the opportunity to please one of the few girls left in the world, even though she is many moons from ripeness. “Yes,” he says, “I have seen to it.”

There is actually only one rope. What feels like a whole moon
past but may be only yesterday, Noah wanted to throw it overboard. “Japheth could fall into the sea while defending the ark,” I protested. Noah sighed and walked away, leaving me with the rope and the small hope that if Javan is alive, we can rescue her.

Zilpha looks gratefully up at Shem. “Thank you, brother.”

Noah bangs his staff against the floor to get our attention back. “When Japheth needs to rest—”

“I do not need to rest, Father. God keeps me awake.”

“I am sure He does,” Ham says.

“When Japheth needs to rest,” Noah repeats, “Ham or Shem will be lookout and will alert me at the first sign of life on the sea.”

Everyone goes about his or her business except Ham, who comes and puts a hand on my back at the lowest part. The part that aches worse than any other. He rubs gently before going to shovel dung.

• • •

L
ater, the horn sounds one long note. Noah has a special pattern of blasts for each of us, and this one is mine.

I come to sit beside him, each of us on our own sleeping blanket. Together we listen to the beasts and to the crashing of the sea all around. He does not speak. Yet I do not think he has called me here because he wants company. He has always preferred to be alone.

“Wife,” he begins, “I am sorry.”

“Do not be. Our sons will help me now, and I will no longer have to bend my back over the animals’ dung.”

“I am sorry for much more than this.”

It feels as though a hand has suddenly gripped my heart.
What has happened?
Or worse,
What is going to happen?

“You see, wife, after the first two hundred years, I began to get tired. All those I loved died, and the newness of life wore off; little brought me joy. Since then it has seemed that I watch life but am not truly a part of it. I do not remember what it is like to be in the center of it. Each year I observe from a greater distance.

“And what I observe above all else is evil increasing upon the earth. It spreads from one person to the next like a plague—the worst plague I have ever seen, and I have seen many. There were a few good people, but they have long since passed.

“Then one day God called to me, telling me to rectify the evil upon the earth. I was to call the people to the Lord the way I had been called, except He would not speak directly to them. He would speak only to me, and I would deliver His words.

“I did as He commanded, yet still evil continued to dwell in the heart of man.

“Though people have sinned since the time of Adam and murdered each other since the time of Cain, it has gotten worse each year. People are—
were
—wickeder than their parents, and their children were wickeder yet.”

He leans toward me, trying to see my face. Our noses are not more than a cubit apart. I feel as though I can smell each of the years he has been upon the earth. His skin smells of dirt, desert, sorrow, and the smoke of a thousand fires.

Still we are too far apart for him. He leans even closer and squints at my face. Has he ever truly looked at me? And when I
looked at him, did I really see him? His eyes are full of tiny red veins the same shape as the lightning that cracks around the ark. They have seen enough of what they have seen already. Now they want to see me. I did not realize how much I wanted him to
really
look at me until this moment, when it is too late. I am certain he can no longer truly see anything.

“Wife.” He reaches his old hand, which is as steady as a young man’s, out toward my leg and sets it upon my knee. Even through my tunic, I can feel the cracks and calluses on his palm. “I feared finding wickedness in our sons, so I could not bear to look too closely at them.”

I am too shocked to reply. I thought he did not care very deeply for our sons, but perhaps the opposite was true. He cared too much.

“I was not present for their boyhoods, and you were more alone than you should have been.”

Husband, it is you who were alone.
I do not say this aloud, because I do not wish to wound him. He is wounded already. Yet I cannot stop myself from saying, “Do not worry for me; I was far from alone. I was with our sons.”

He does not flinch at my words, and he does not look away. “You were. And so it brings me a hundred years’ worth of happiness to tell you that since God has seen fit to save our sons, I have hope that they will not be wicked after all. And we must make certain of this, or God may decide to start again.”

“Start again?”

“Kill us all.”