Sinners and the Sea (6 page)

Jank’s laugh turned to a wild scream as he ran at us. The spear hit Noah in the chest, and he was knocked back against me.

“Husband!” I cried. I did not yet love him, but surely I would not survive without him in this land of barbarians.

Noah’s voice came as loud and clear as before, so I knew he had not been penetrated by the spear. “The God of Adam is watching you, boy, with a spear much larger than yours.”

Now Jank’s cry was angry. He drew his spear back and again stabbed at Noah’s chest. Noah fell against me once more. He did not move his hands up to defend himself. The spear glanced off his chest, careening to one side with enough force that Jank stumbled after it.

“You will tire before I do,” Noah told Jank.

The boy came back and jabbed harder, but still the spear did not enter Noah’s flesh.

Jank began to cry big, body-twitching tears of frustration and disbelief. I would not have been surprised if he had screamed for his mother. He stomped his foot, pulled the spear back, and came at us once more. The spear glanced off Noah’s shoulder, so that the boy fell against the donkey. There the boy bit Noah’s bare leg. Still Noah did nothing to defend himself. When the boy brought up a knife from his belt, I moved to block his attack, and his blade opened my palm.

I screamed so loudly that all the gods must have heard me.

Noah kicked the boy with no great force, and the boy flew backward, landing heavily upon his hindquarters. As the boy rose to his feet, he looked at Noah with a wide, incredulous eye. “I will warn all the world of your wife’s demon mark. I will see her burned alive.”

He turned and ran across the flat, sun-scorched earth so quickly that he sent up a cloud of dust. It seemed to pursue him as he got
smaller and smaller and eventually disappeared into it. I hoped this was the last we had seen of him, but somehow I knew it was not.

Bright, bitter-smelling blood flowed from my hand. “There must be an unbloodied swath of lambskin on one of these bodies,” I said, trying to keep the pain from my voice.

“No,” Noah said. “We will not steal, even from the dead. God will give us all we need if we fear Him righteously.”

Noah dismounted. He tore a swath from the hem of his tunic and wrapped it around my hand. The agony in my flesh dulled slightly. I noticed there were only light markings where the boy had bitten Noah and no blood. Though Noah was not looking at me, he must have known I was staring. “God will allow me to be beaten, perhaps bruised, but He will not let me die.”

I was shocked to see that what he said was true. I had never believed that the gods fully watched over anyone, for despite the many animals sacrificed in their names, they were rarely satisfied. My father’s own little finger had not been enough to summon them to his cause. Yet before me stood a man who went unscathed by a sharp spear.
But me?
I wondered.

Noah put his hand on my stomach. “Nor will He let my son die.”

My belly felt no different than it had a few days before. How could I know if I were with child? My mother had not stayed with us long enough to tell me. Though, after all the laboring Noah had done trying to make a son, I supposed that perhaps I was already carrying a child or even two. But whether or not I was
with child, I would do nothing to dissuade him of his belief that I was. I put my hand upon my belly as if I were holding whatever was inside.

Noah looked at it and then directly up into my eyes. “Nor you, my wife,” he said. I held my breath, waiting for him to flinch at such a plain view of the stain. Instead, he nearly smiled. Then he climbed back up onto the donkey, inadvertently kicking my leg and not troubling himself to apologize.

Not more than half a league later, I worked up the courage to ask, “My lord, why have you chosen the desert as your home?”

“God is in the desert.”

I waited for him to say more, but he was silent.

We traveled until the sun went down. “My lord, let us not stop for long,” I said. Surely the God of Adam could not watch over us every second, and I would hate for a band of barbarians to come upon us when He blinked.

And so we only stopped for a short while. If Noah thought I was already carrying a son, you would not have known it. I wondered how many of his numerous years he had gone without a woman.

After our son-making, as we lay in the moonlight, he turned to me. Again he did not flinch at the sight of the mark. “The God of Adam has not made you unfair to look upon.” He quickly added, “Not that I care about such things.”

Perhaps his sight was not good. But maybe it was. I could not help feeling compassion for this man who found me desirable despite the mark upon me. A man who had outlived all those he might have cared for once, only to find each new generation more wicked than
the one that came before it. Why would he allow himself to care for anyone again? Yet for at least a moment that day, he had put aside any bitterness in order to tear off a piece from his own cloak to bandage the wound of a marked woman. I had not really expected any man to care for me, and I had begun to understand that this one would outlive me, in which case would it not be easier for him if he never loved me?

“My lord, will you bestow a name upon me?”

“I already have. Come now,
wife,
onward to Sorum. My flock awaits.”

CHAPTER 5

SORUM

 . . . all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth.

GENESIS 6:12

A
s we came within a league’s journey from what would be my new home, my heart lurched around in my chest like the heart of a prisoner who had just been sentenced to death. My mark had made me unmarriageable in my father’s village and perhaps in any place except the one where we were going—Sorum, the very last town in the world that I would have chosen to live in. Had my father known where Noah would take me? If he had, he must have thought sending me away was the only way for me to escape death, or surely he would not have agreed to it.

Still, I felt like I had been exiled. I was not going to have what I wanted most—an ordinary life.

This was all the more evident as the fields of bodies grew more plentiful. In the light of the full moon, I could see that little else decorated the barren land. No vegetation sprouted from the earth, other than some forlorn-looking scrub brush.

“The God of Adam has withheld tears of joy from the crops of
the sinners and taken the succor from their fruit,” Noah said. He seemed to sense that I did not know what he meant. “There is a drought,” he said.

There was also no shortage of heads on sticks. I soon lost count. Where there were heads on the ground, I assumed someone had taken a spear and left the remains. Over a distant hill, though not as distant as I would have liked, I heard copper swords clashing. Worse than these sounds were the battle cries. I had never heard joy and anguish combined so terrifyingly into one voice. These cries were more savage than any animal’s.

I could no longer remain silent. “My lord, do men battle for land?”

“They are sellswords. They battle much for very little.”

This was no comfort to me. I tried to keep my voice steady. “For Sorum?”

“Girl, did you not hear me say there is a drought? No one battles for Sorum.”

“How do you survive, my lord?”

“The God of Adam provides.”

Again I wondered if I would be included in the blessings Noah’s God bestowed upon him. Had I somehow found favor with the God of Adam, despite the mark upon my brow? Perhaps He would make me welcome in Noah’s town. I doubted the women of Sorum could be as vile as Arrat said they were. “How are the women and children of your town?” I asked. “Are they more righteous than their men?”

“They are mostly prostitutes,” Noah said.

We rode on for a few more cubits before I asked, “And the children, my lord?” My voice trembled.

“I was speaking of them too.”

This cannot be,
I thought. My husband must have gone a bit mad at some point during his many years. But how mad? And was his god also mad?

As the sun rose, we came within sight of the tents. I pulled my head scarf over my brow. While the scarf would have done me no good in my father’s village, where everyone knew of the mark as soon as the midwife left my father’s side to wag her tongue, in my new town I vowed that no one should see it.

A woman caught sight of us and then disappeared amongst a cluster of tents. Soon a horde of neighbors gathered to greet us. “My flock is up so soon after the sun. Perhaps they have not yet retired to their sleeping blankets,” Noah said with irritation.

Instead of walking to either side of the crowd already gathered, people pushed one another to get to the front. Even from a hundred cubits away, I could see two women pulling each other’s hair and hear them screaming things that would have made me blush had I not been so frightened that my blood had come to a standstill in my veins.

The horde was made up of women and children in tunics cinched at the waist with ropes. I was surprised that a few of their tunics had very large neckholes—so large that I could see where their breasts began to divide from their chests.

When we were about fifty cubits away, a woman who had a bald patch on one side of her head yelled, “Make way for the world’s oldest virgin!”

Noah did not speak; nor did his body tense, as it had at Jank’s remark about his “limp old twig.” He leaned slightly forward, as if eager to be among the people gathered before us. I was holding on to him and could not help but lean with him.

Many of the women and girls were quite pretty, but few were without injury. One girl had a leg made of wood. As everyone fought to get a better look at us, a child easily kicked the girl’s leg out from under her, sending her sideways into the hard-baked dirt.

“What have you got on the back of your donkey?” someone cried. This caused the others to stop what they were doing and stare at me. I cowered behind my new husband, afraid that somehow they could see through my scarf. But they hurled only common insults at me.

“I have never seen anything like it,” said a tangle-haired girl with a black eye. “It looks as though the old man impregnated his donkey some years ago and only now brings the product of this coupling out into the light of day.”

Another girl built upon the black-eyed girl’s insult: “Even the part that is not donkey is dreadful.” She was pregnant, had only one hand, and wore a necklace of human teeth. “We should be glad Noah would not rut any of the rest of us.”

“I would still let the old bone collection mount me!” a woman with an X branded upon her forehead yelled. She looked older than the rest. She lifted her tunic above her waist and thrust at us a few times, until laughter overcame her balance.

“God watches you, Javan,” Noah said, “and next time He has to throw you to the ground, He will do it with more force.”

Some small children, most of whom were naked, ran up to us and pawed at the saddlebags. “I’m hungry!” yelled one little boy whose nose bled. He was nearly as thin as my leg.

“My lord,” I said, “perhaps—”

Before I was able to ask if we could spare any of our rations, Noah said, “Because you sin, you starve.” Then he turned his head, and I knew he was looking out over the horde. “But you do not have to starve or suffer at each other’s hands any longer. There is a way.”

“We have heard this already! Have you thought of nothing new the whole time you have been away?”

“
There is a way,
” Noah repeated, his voice suddenly so loud that the raucousness of the crowd died down. “God has called upon me to lead you to righteousness. Put down the dagger you threaten your neighbor with, give back the cloth you have stolen from him, and you will not starve another day.”

Javan stood up again. “Do I look like I am starving?” This time she lifted her tunic not only above her waist but all the way over her large stomach and sagging breasts. When she let go of it, it fell to rest on the upper swell of her belly.

The girl with the black eye yanked it down over Javan’s hips. “You are cruel to make us look upon any more of you than we see already,” the girl said. This seemed to delight Javan, who grabbed the girl by the hair and pulled the girl’s face between her drooping breasts.

While the other children begged for food and untied our sandals, one tiny girl with a flat face and narrow eyes that slanted
upward at the corners reached into my sandal to tickle the bottom of my foot. She smiled up at me. It was the first kind smile I had seen in Sorum. I was surprised to find myself smiling back at her.

“You want my simpleton?” Javan yelled. “I will sell her to you for half an apricot.”

Despite the unruliness of the crowd, they made a narrow path for us as we neared.

“If your God were powerful, He would not have given you such an old wife,” cried a woman with a belt made of bones. I wondered if the bones of her belt were human. She had stepped back with the others, but she was not more than a cubit to our left, and her eyes were level with mine.

The one-handed girl’s eyes were also level with mine. Jank’s threat rang in my ears:
I will see her burned alive.
I did not like how the girl narrowed her gaze upon my brow. She kept her position beside us by slashing in front of her with a dagger.

I pulled my head scarf so low that I could see it and tied it tightly enough that it dug into my skin. When I blinked, my eyelashes brushed the bottom of the linen. The girl watched.

“If the God of Adam has to show you His power, it will already be too late for you,” Noah said.

“Too late for us to
what
?” The woman whose belt was made of bones grabbed Noah’s tunic. “What exactly is it we want to do but haven’t?”

The tangle-headed girl with the black eye stood ahead to our left. She was breathing heavily from her brief imprisonment
between Javan’s breasts. “I, in fact,” she panted, “have done everyone I wanted to and more.”

Now the one-handed girl lowered her head, trying to peer beneath my head scarf.