People of the Flood (Ark Chronicles 2) Read online

  “Is there any possible way to kill them?”

  “Time,” Ham said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you give it a wide berth and wait until it dies of old age.”

  Eel snorted. “How else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What about back then? Didn’t anyone have to kill a dragon?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Well?” Eel said after a moment.

  Ham grinned. “Dragon hunters forged a bronze bow and fixed it to a gopher-wood plank. They called it a ballista. It took a man-sized crank to wind the string, and a six-foot bronze javelin was slotted into the groove. Dragon hunters wheeled the ballista to the location and baited a trap.”

  “What kind of bait?”

  “A sheep or cow.”

  Eel nodded sagely.

  “When the dragon came, they waited until it was almost on them. Only then did they fire. The shooters jumped into nearby chariots and fled like madman.”

  “The dragon didn’t die easily? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Ham’s grin turned nasty.

  Eel studied his grandfather. “We have to tell Beor he’s in danger.”

  “Hurry ahead if you’ve a mind to.”

  “Don’t you care that your grandsons are going to die?”

  “Sonny-boy, as soon as they see the dragon, they’re going to slip away as fast as they can. Maybe Nimrod has delusions, but I don’t think Beor is stupid. Then you and I are going to hoof it back to camp even faster than we’ve tramped out here.”

  “You don’t know Beor,” Eel said after a moment. “Since Old Slow, he thinks he can hunt anything.”

  “I know all about stubborn pride. But I never took Beor for an idiot. Believe me, they’ll run once they see the dragon, and that will be the end of this foolishness.”

  8.

  Rahab stood outside Beor’s door, hesitant, worried, wanting to get this over with and uncertain how to begin. Semiramis daunted her. The girl was simply too beautiful, and too… guileful, cunning, clever? Rahab wasn’t sure what to call it. For Semiramis was no halfwit, but the opposite, quick, sharp, insightful. It was too bad she used it for wicked ends. The gossip Rahab had overheard…

  She frowned. Ham said not to listen to gossip. Gaea, had she been alive, would have said the same thing. Yet how else did one appraise the situation? Rahab sighed. She wasn’t wise like Gaea had been. She was still the little orphan girl, just with many, many years behind her, enough to fool her children and their children that she knew what she was doing. Following Jehovah, keeping their children on His path—Noah had forged the way, and it was their duty to remain on it. Too often, it felt as if the Hamites slipped further and further from Jehovah’s path, as if His ways had become onerous. There was a sickness among them, a rot in the clan soul, if such a thing existed.

  Ham’s drinking didn’t help.

  Yet there was only so much she could do. Her husband was strong but stubborn, hard to influence when he didn’t want to be. And he had become so self-absorbed lately with his ivory carving. It seemed that he retreated into it, fleeing his responsibilities as clan patriarch.

  Rahab sighed, firmed her resolve and knocked on the door.

  Semiramis, a tall girl, with a brush in her hands, opened the door. She wore a light tunic. What a figure this one had, and eyes that bored into you, lovely beyond words, like precious emeralds, green. Her long dark hair shone.

  “Grandmother, this is a delightful surprise. Come in, come in.”

  Rahab entered the house, furnished with well-crafted woodwork: benches, stands, a table and several chairs. A polished bronze mirror hung near an open window. Scattered around a stand under the mirror were various creams, ointments and copper bracelets, broaches and ivory combs.

  They sat. Semiramis offered drink and dainties. They chatted. The whole while, Rahab wondered how to break into her reason for coming. Semiramis didn’t help, but seemed content to spin away the afternoon.

  “I’m sorry,” Rahab said, interrupting Semiramis’s dialogue regarding the antics of a basketful of kittens.

  Semiramis smiled, waiting.

  “This is very painful, and I have no idea how to begin.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Semiramis said.

  Rahab nodded, wishing the girl would give her an opening. Surely, Semiramis knew why she was here.

  “Are you and Beor getting along well?” There! She had said it.

  “Of course,” Semiramis said.

  Rahab bored ahead, willing herself not to tremble, telling herself this was for the good of the clan. “Beor seems agitated lately.”

  Semiramis’s smile became even more innocent. “I haven’t noticed.”

  “Others… Others have.”

  “Really?”

  “My dear, you must realize that we all watch out for one another. It’s difficult to hide discontentment.”

  “Beor has become dissatisfied?”

  “No,” Rahab said. “I think you have.”

  Semiramis blinked, and the smile now seemed pained. “Go on.”

  “This is hard for me to say—”

  “Grandmother, you’re trembling,” Semiramis said, taking one of Rahab’s hands.

  Rahab pulled her hand away, hiding it under the folds of her robe. “You haven’t lived among us long, my dear. But it seems clear to many of us that you aren’t happy with Beor.”

  “Of course I’m happy. Beor is the greatest hunter alive.”

  Rahab willed herself to stare Semiramis in the eyes. It was hard. Those brilliant green eyes, attached to such beauty and a keen mind… “You’ve been seen with Nimrod.”

  The eyebrows arched.

  “Not just once,” Rahab said, “but many times. Some people say—”

  “Ah,” Semiramis said, sitting straighter. “I think I’m beginning to see. People are gossiping about me. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  Rahab shook her head. “Not just gossip.”

  “No? Then tell me, has anyone seen me embrace Nimrod?”

  Rahab dropped her gaze, unable to face Semiramis’s force.

  “It seems not,” Semiramis said. “So this visit is predicated on rumor and innuendo. I’m surprised at you, Grandmother. You’ve always struck me as fair.”

  Rahab looked up again. “You deny seeing Nimrod?”

  “Of course I see him. I see many people.”

  “But—”

  A wolfish smile spread across Semiramis’s lips. “Let me make this easy for you. I love Beor. He is my husband. I could never think of embracing another man. If anyone else but you had said this, I would demand she leave my house at once. What I think has happened, Grandmother, is that those who hate me have spread false rumors. Now, I’ve heard how you were an orphan at Noah’s Keep. So I know you understand what it’s like being the outsider. That’s me. Worse, many men find me attractive. And because of that, some women hate me. It hurts to think that you’re one of those.”

  “Oh, Semiramis,” Rahab said. “No, no, I don’t hate you.”

  “Yet you think these dreadful things about me.”

  Rahab frowned. “I have heard…” She raised her chin. “I’m sorry, Semiramis. I think I’ve spoken hastily. Will you forgive me?”

  Sweetness returned to Semiramis’s smile. “Of course, I will, Grandmother Rahab. I just beg you not to think ill of me. With others, I can bear it. But from you…”

  Rahab rose, and she hugged the tall beauty. And after a few more words she left, uncertain now what to believe.

  9.

  The massive creature, the dragon, swiveled its huge head from side to side, searching, seeking, its belly rumbling. It was bipedal, two-legged, with brown bumpy skin like a crocodile. Also like a crocodile, the dragon was cold-blooded and savage and a titan of monstrous bulk. In later ages, it would be called Tyrannosaurus Rex, tyrant lizard. Unlike its sire and dame, who had lived in the semitropical Antediluvian Era—and perished und
er the raging Deluge—this beast thrived in a comparatively cold and harsh world devoid of the larger prey its parents had formerly feasted on.

  For eighty-five years, the dragon, a female, had scavenged on rotting carcasses or trapped, sick and crippled mammals. Its normal haunt was the plain of Shinar, alluvial grasslands lodged between the Two Rivers. Elephants, antelopes, zebras and wild asses formed its main diet. Unfortunately, the dragon was ill-suited to chasing down such swift mammals. Thus, she became a super-jackal or an ultra-hyena, feeding on what others slew.

  Eighty-five years ago, she had been the first predator on the mud-ball world. She had been first in the New World to scamper down the Ark’s ramp. Back then, she had been smaller than a man, frisky and playful, with a green stripe running down her back and to the tip of her long and balancing tail. Like the other predators, she had subsisted on jelly-like corpses from the Antediluvian World, worms, insects and rodents. Over time, she hunted bigger animals. In many ways similar to the reptilian crocodiles, she had matured across the years and, just like a crocodile, would continue to grow for as long as she lived. At eighty-five, she was a full-fledged monster, one that forever after would linger in the legends of the Chinese and English, and in Babylonian and Egyptian myths. No beast that walked on land could challenge her and win. She was as tall as a tree, with eyeballs the size of grapefruit and sixty bone-crushing, conical teeth, some of which were nine inches long. From her rigid tail to the tip of her nose, she was 40 feet, a nine-ton dragon capable of devouring 500 pounds of meat at a bite! Yet, for all that, she was skeletal and starving, her eyes cloudy and diseased, and her roar more often anguished than prideful.

  The New World hadn’t been easy on her kind. She was a theropod dinosaur, and unlike snakes that were genetically determined male or female at conception, she was heat-sexed like turtles and crocodiles. Heat-sexed meant that male or female would develop as such in the eggs, determined by the temperature during incubation rather than any pre-selection or genetic programming. In the early years after the Flood, before the original male had died from an exploding volcano and been buried under lava, she had laid many clutches of eggs. In the Old World, the semitropical Antediluvian Era, the top layer of eggs would have developed into males, the middle layers a 50-50 ratio of sexes, and the bottom layer into females. Worldwide, volcanism had poured fine ash into the atmosphere, keeping much sunlight and warmth from reaching the planet. The cooler weather had put a premium on warm-blooded birds and animals, which could maintain an even internal temperature, and had similarly hurt the cold-blooded beasts. But more importantly, the cooler New World had insured that the dragon’s eggs had all hatched as males, never as females.

  It had been many years now since she’d seen one of her offspring and over fifty since she’d laid her last clutch of eggs. A clutch she’d seen unburied and devoured by men! Unlike the other species which had exploded into profusion, her kind dwindled from the first few hatchlings. When she died, there would be no more new Tyrannosaurus Rexes. Their breed of dragon headed for extinction.

  Now, however, that was the least of her problems. She loathed the forest because here, prey was small and darting, easily evading her slow rush. And although she could snap most of the trees by crashing against them, it hurt her bruised and half-diseased skin.

  Never built for speed, never having needed it in the Old World, the dragon, with its slow and stately stride of fifteen feet at a step, could run at twice the speed of a sprinting man for short spurts. To catch mammoths, antelopes and zebras with such bursts had never proved enough, but as a scavenger, there wasn’t an animal alive or any pack of them that could keep her from a carcass. Her mouthful of teeth, brute size and savage disposition insured her of that singular ability. It was as a scavenger she had survived.

  She sniffed the air, her huge and much too snotty nostrils twitching, and from her entire lumpy-skinned body came an involuntary shudder. She coughed, stepped left, and the ground shook at her nine-ton tread. Leaves from a nearby ash rustled, and a squirrel chittered angrily, staring from the safety of his tree-hole at the monster invading the peaceful glade.

  Three weeks ago, a grass fire, a horizon-to-horizon blaze ignited by a lightning storm, had driven her eastward. She’d hunted near the edge of the alluvial plains, having followed a herd of elephants. The fire drove her, the crackling roar frightening a beast that seldom knew fear. For hours she ran, the fire catching her and scorching her skin and burning the bottoms of her feet. Pain had consumed her, and she’d lurched up a mountain path that in other times she would have turned from. As the fire raged, she stepped purposefully, her lungs heaving hot air and ashes on her tongue. Over rocks and volcanic shale that cut her legs and badly gashed her feet, she escaped the terrible fire and plunged into a valley lowland. Through reeds, with the constant sucking sound of mud, she’d lurched deeper into the swamp, wading, struggling, her strength sapped by the fight. Then she came upon a floundering, long-horned bull. With two swift bites, she devoured the choice morsel. Thus strengthened, her thirst slaked in a pool of brackish water, she entered an area of cypress trees and hanging moss. She left the swamp and trod through a forest of elms, ash and willow trees, until she neared her fateful destiny.

  Smoke damage gave her an odd cough and worsened the disease that clouded her eyes. Since devouring the bull, she hadn’t eaten, and before the grass fire, she had been starving. Despite her thick, crocodile-leathery skin, her ribs showed, giving her an evil, skeletal look. She moved sluggishly, and there was a scent upon the listless wind, an odd odor that strangely stirred her with fear.

  Fear… It was an unaccustomed feeling. She swiveled her head yet again, peering with her cloudy eyes, grunting because each cough hurt her chest. That odor… she shuddered as a strange sensation filled her, something oily and evil. Strange thoughts tumbled through her pea-sized brain, vicious, hungry, demanding thoughts.

  Her cloudy eyes narrowed. She recalled from long ago the man digging up her clutch of eggs and devouring them, smashing them. Hate seized her. The man had smashed eggs. He’d destroyed the nest. She had to protect her eggs. She had to kill men. The thoughts beat in her dragon brain like a drum.

  Protect the eggs!

  Stop the men!

  Kill!

  She opened her cavernous jaws with its sixty teeth, some of them over nine inches in length, and roared.

  10.

  Nimrod, Beor and Geba crouched behind a willow tree on the other side of the glade at the roaring, snot-dripping dragon. They stared in shock, dread and consternation.

  “Jehovah in heaven save us,” Beor whispered in prayer.

  Rosh slithered from behind a nearby tree, working through tall grass. “It knows we’re here,” he hissed.

  The monster leaned forward and sniffed the ground, mucus plopping onto leaves.

  A terrible feeling overcame Nimrod. It was one he felt whenever his father called on the spirits. It was a cold feeling of evil intelligences.

  “It’s possessed,” Nimrod whispered in shock.

  “What?” Beor asked.

  Sweat slicked Geba’s narrow face. Trembling, he notched an arrow.

  The dragon’s orbs glittered, and the jaws swung open to reveal sixty gleaming teeth, rows upon rows of teeth. It waved pathetically small arms, and yet the arms were bigger and longer than Beor’s. The dragon roared, and it took a huge fifteen-foot stride.

  “Run!” Rosh shouted, jumping up from the weeds.

  Boom, boom, boom! The ground shook as the dragon strode toward them.

  Beor shouted for Jehovah’s aid as he gripped his pike two-handed.

  Geba sobbed and seemed frozen to his spot.

  Nimrod forced his shaking hand to notch an arrow. He couldn’t. Through the soles of his feet and through his back that rested against the willow tree he felt the dragon’s tread. Each step seemed to take forever to fall. Boom. Sweat trickled under his collar as he tried to refocus his vision. Boom. He stared at his hand, his strong dark han
d that had slain rabbits, crows, squirrels, swans, deer, elk, aurochs, water buffalo, wolves and a leopard. Boom. Nimrod tried to turn his head to look at Beor, wondering what the slayer of the great sloth did now. Boom. A hideously scorched brown foot, with three clawed toes as well as a dewclaw higher up that seemed like a kick-spur, appeared parallel with the willow tree. With his neck muscles creaking, Nimrod looked up, way up. A body too huge to be real swung from behind the tree and then the second leg swung forward for an incredible fifteen feet.

  Rosh threw up his arms and screamed louder than any girl Nimrod had ever heard.

  Rosh’s two brothers—the Twins—insanely, it seemed to Nimrod, surreally, as if in a dream, they stepped from behind their tree as Rosh dashed past. Both twins released their bowstrings—it was a brave sight. Slivers of wood sped at the dragon.

  Boom.

  The dragon was fifteen feet closer to Rosh. One arrow caromed off the beast’s lumpy hide. The other arrow, even though the dragon was a vast target, flashed passed it.

  Boom.

  Garbled words roared in Nimrod’s ears as he sat frozen beside his tree. Vaguely he was aware that Beor shouted at him or at Geba.

  Boom.

  The dragon loomed over Nimrod’s screaming cousin, the one with his hands high in the air. The dragon tipped her head from twenty feet up, bringing it down as the cavernous jaws opened wide. Boom. The jaws closed. Rosh disappeared in the dragon’s mouth.

  “Nimrod!” Beor roared, shouting in his ear. “Get up, man! Get up!”

  Boom. Crash, crash, crash! Trees snapped and splintered as the huge beast swiveled and turned toward him.

  Nimrod felt strong hands yank him from his resting spot.

  “Can you hear me, boy?”

  “Leave him,” Geba said as if from far away, from another world. “He’s in shock. He’ll only slow us down.”

  “Like Hell I’ll leave him!” Beor roared.

  Boom.

  Nimrod lost sight of the dragon, although he saw Rosh’s two brothers releasing another flight of arrows. Then all he was aware of was huffing, puffing and feet pounding the forest floor. They were his own feet, he vaguely realized. Behind him, there came another Boom.