People of the Tower (Ark Chronicles 4) Page 13

  “Do you think they worship Jehovah?” Yorba asked.

  Beor snorted. He paced, and his wooden peg clacked against stones as he moved first one way and then another. He kept rubbing his big hands together and glancing at the fire.

  Hilda felt his scrutiny. The other Scouts were uncommonly quiet tonight. They, too, felt her father’s suppressed anger. She threw another twig onto the fire.

  “Where’s Odin,” growled Beor. “Why has he stayed away?”

  “Why?” Yorba said, from on the rock. “Are you serious? You practically promised to kill him the next time you set eyes on him.”

  Hilda stood, dusting her hands. “I didn’t hear about that.”

  Beor snorted again, louder than before, like a beast giving warning. He seemed wild this evening, perhaps why he had wanted to camp under the stars.

  “Did you know that yesterday Beor almost hit Grandfather Ham?” Yorba said.

  “What?” Hilda asked.

  Beor rubbed his big hands harder than ever and he paced a little faster.

  “Your father shoved our blessed Patriarch,” Yorba said. “Then your father spat near his feet. After that—”

  “Enough!” Beor scowled at Hilda. “Where’s Odin? I want to talk to him.”

  “I suspect Odin desires to keep on living,” Hilda said.

  “Ah, so he’s a coward. I thought as much.”

  The words were pulled out of her. She didn’t think about them, just said, “That isn’t fair. He can’t fight you is why he stays away. The reason he can’t fight should be easy to understand. How can he possibly slay the father of the girl he loves?”

  “Slay!” roared Beor. “That spear-carrying fool thinks he can slay me? Oh, how I wish he’d try. I really do.”

  Hilda stamped her foot. “Father, how can you say that? He hasn’t done anything to you. In fact, he’s done everything a good Scout should for over a year.”

  “He hasn’t done anything to me?” Beor asked. “Why, he’s stolen the wits from my daughter. He’s blinded her with fair promises and no doubt with too much familiarity.”

  She decided to ignore the last barb. Verbally defending such things only seemed to convince her father that they were true. “You’ve seen Odin hunt,” she said. “He has courage and ability. I don’t understand why you hate him.”

  Beor rubbed his hands even more furiously, turned away, turned back and frowned at the fire. With a start, he yanked his hands apart. “Hilda,” he said, making an obvious effort to keep his voice low, “I’m only thinking of you. I know you have a soft heart.”

  She saw Yorba roll his eyes, and she wondered why. She did have a soft heart, too soft. Then, maybe for the first time, she wondered if living among the Scouts, practicing and hunting with them, had roughened her? The possibility frightened her, and then the fact of Odin courting her calmed the awful thought.

  Her father still spoke. “I remember when Minos, Thebes and their cousin—when I came upon you. Oh, Hilda, I’m still amazed I didn’t kill the three of them. And then consider Gilgamesh, how he stole the amber necklace out of your very room. I’m worried that Nimrod is up to his old ploys of sending us shills, imposters.”

  “I’m not in love with Odin,” she said, and she shivered as she said it.

  That seemed to calm her father. “Do you see him sometimes?”

  She glanced at Yorba, who now seemed very interested in his bowstring. Sly dog, he didn’t fool her.

  “You told me not to see him,” she said.

  “Yes,” Beor said. “And then yesterday Ham came and talked to me about him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ham said not to worry so much about Odin. That he was a fine boy. That he was very fond of you.”

  “Great-Grandfather Ham said that?”

  Her father breathed through his nose, making the nostrils flare like a bull about to charge.

  “I certainly never put Ham up to it.” Hilda wondered who had: Odin, Great-Grandmother Rahab, somebody?

  Her father looked at her closely. A troubled smile creased his features. “I’m only thinking of you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know, Daddy. I know.”

  He nodded, glanced at Yorba and the others, and then he cracked his fingers and sat on a rock.

  She’d been waiting for that. “I have to take a walk,” she said.

  Her father sat up like a deer hearing a lion in the grass.

  “Nature calls,” she said.

  “Ah,” her father said, relaxing.

  She picked up her javelin and marched out of the firelight, slipping past bushes. She studied the moon, looked to the right, the left and headed for a tall boulder. She remembered back at Festival how Odin had once slipped into their forest camp. That had been when Gog was still alive.

  She stopped, hearing an owl hoot. With a smile, she hurried to the tall boulder.

  Odin stepped from behind it.

  She stabbed the javelin into the ground, and they hugged. “Did you hear us?”

  “I heard,” Odin said, sounding glum.

  She wondered why he never kissed her.

  “I didn’t tell Ham to speak with your father,” he said.

  “No?” she asked, surprised for feeling disappointed.

  “I mean, it was a good idea,” he said.

  “It was a stupid idea,” she said. “My father suspects now that I’m seeing you.”

  “You are seeing me,” he said. “Maybe I should come back into camp with you.”

  “No! The way he is tonight, my father will kill you.”

  “He might try.”

  “Brave, Odin,” she said.

  “I’m not afraid of your father.”

  “Then you’re a fool. You should be afraid of him. I know that Nimrod is.”

  “Well…” Odin said. “Maybe a little afraid.”

  She wondered why he hadn’t kissed her. Gog had by this time. She reached out and touched his beard.

  Odin smiled, not moving a muscle, as if he was afraid to move lest she take away her hand. “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “It’s so soft,” she said. “Not like my father’s beard.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Have you considered my offer?”

  “To be your wife?”

  He kissed her. She threw her arms around him. “Hilda,” he whispered.

  A branch cracked. It was from behind, a ways away, as if someone walked on a fallen one.

  “Hilda?” called her father.

  She broke the embrace and turned in fright. “I’m over here,” she called. “But don’t come too close. I’m…I’m indisposed.”

  “Right,” Beor said. “I’ll wait here. It’s just that the wolves stopped howling and I was worried. You didn’t take any of the hounds with you.”

  “Please, Daddy, this is embarrassing.” She turned to Odin. “You must slip away.”

  He reached under his massive beard and drew something over it and above his head. It was a leather cord and dangling on it was a…

  “This is a rhinoceros horn,” he whispered. “It’s my good luck amulet that I won in the Far North.”

  “Like your rhinoceros hide boots?”

  “From the same beast, yes.”

  She glanced at his boots. They were very tough and very fine. She knew he was proud of them.

  “Here,” he said, pressing the amulet into her hands.

  “I can’t take this,” she said. “My father would know then that I—”

  “Hide it,” suggested Odin. “Please, Hilda, I want you to have it.”

  She smiled. “Yes, of course. Now you must leave before my father finds you.”

  He pressed the amulet into her hands. Then he kissed her again.

  “Hilda!” called her father.

  “Oh, Daddy, please,” she shouted.

  Odin let his fingers linger on her face. Then he slipped behind the boulder, and without a sound, vanished into the night.

 
She hid the amulet under some leaves, picked up her javelin and hurried toward her waiting father.

  10.

  Almost fifty leagues southeast of Babel along the Euphrates River lay the new city of Erech. It was part of the kingdom of Shinar, the four cities of the alluvial plain ruled by Nimrod. The kingdom was composed of Babel, Erech, Akkad and Calneh. City, of course, was a misnomer, but the term tickled the vanity of the king. In reality, Erech held a little over seventy people.

  The terrain was practically identical to that of Babel: a raised riverbank, reed swamps where spring floods had overflowed, with bushes and dates palms here and there, and with dusty plains inland where gazelle and lions dwelt. Near the newly-built brick wall, small canals crisscrossed and sprouted with amazingly abundant crops of wheat, barley and sesame. Within the city was a collection of mud brick homes, a smithy or two, a tiny temple and beside it a two-story mud brick palace. Within the palace lived the governor of Erech, a Mighty Man and a follower of Nimrod: Gilgamesh the Ghost Stalker and his wife Opis.

  This city as well as the others practiced the new form of government. No clan or half clan went to Erech, Akkad or Calneh. Instead, individual families went. Clans as such, in these three cities, had been broken up. All were subjects of the king and as such were oath-bound to give fealty to the king’s servant. Thus, Japhethites, Shemites and Hamites lived in equality in Erech, and most were of the fourth or fifth generation of Noah.

  Gilgamesh was aware of Nimrod’s real reason for building new cities and filling them with equal portions from the three tribes. The stated reason was obedience to Jehovah, obedience to the great command to fill the Earth. The king had nothing against colonization, just not in a helter-skelter fashion.

  “Let us build an empire,” Nimrod said, “united, protected, growing outward in a rational manner, rather than splintering into packets of humanity that live little above the beasts.”

  Through these three cities, Nimrod had stilled the whispers that said he shook his fist at Jehovah. What Nimrod also did was weaken clan authority in order to increase his own. He had chosen younger people to populate these new centers because they were more malleable to the new ideas and because they were less set in the old ways of clan affiliation.

  This morning, Gilgamesh hunted with Ramses, who visited from Babel, having come by foot.

  They presently strolled home across the dusty plain. A small gazelle lay over Gilgamesh’s shoulder. Several hounds with their tongues lolling trailed behind. In his fist, Gilgamesh carried his lance of elm wood. Ramses had a bow. Each wore hunting leathers as of old, but time had changed them. Ramses had developed a small paunch, and Gilgamesh no longer seemed skeletal and wild, as in the days when he had haunted the great southern marsh.

  The only new item to Gilgamesh’s wardrobe was a talisman or amulet. A stone cylinder—a miniature rolling pin—with carvings on it hung from his neck by a leather cord. He owned it as Governor of Erech. Lud, the premier sculptor and seal cutter of Babel, had made it. Its function was single but its uses several. When rolled across wet clay, the seal left a raised picture.

  Gilgamesh’s seal was of a man stabbing a roaring lion. It symbolized the help he had given Nimrod against Black Mane. Other seals left different images. Menes, the grandfather of Ramses, had one that showed a man watering a tree with a shaduf. Nimrod’s seal showed a man shooting an arrow at a dragon. Ramses’s was of a hero chasing an ostrich. Since seal cutters used hand tools and different shapes and sizes of stones, no seal was exactly alike another, thus they became signatures.

  The cylinder seals had quickly become the rage in Babel and in the three new towns. Everyone knew that people had used papyrus scrolls in the Old World. Ham, Shem, Japheth, and even Noah had several such scrolls. To date, however, no one had discovered papyrus reeds to make new scrolls. A few people laboriously made parchment. It took careful cleaning, stretching and smoothing of the skins of sheep and goats. The trouble was ink, which came from octopuses. That meant fishing in the Bitter Sea or in the marsh’s delta mouth. The ink brought over from the Old World had finally run out.

  Then Kush discovered a new medium. As a priest of Bel, he gave praise to the angel of the sun for the idea. It was simple and it used an unlimited resource: mud. With a sharp reed styles on a flattened lump of clay held in his palm, Kush wrote Antediluvian ideograms. He dried it in the sun and now had a permanent record. Soon thereafter, as an easy signature, Lud devised the cylinder seals.

  Gilgamesh rolled his cylinder on each report he sent to Babel. When Opis become suspicious of her maid, she tied a cloth over the mouth of the oil jar and covered the string with clay. Before the clay hardened, she rolled her seal over it. If the seal broke, then she would know if anyone helped herself to the oil. Gilgamesh sealed the temple door. That was a command from Babel, the tablet verified by Nimrod’s seal. Clay and seal had quickly become a lock and key.

  “It is to be war,” Ramses said, as they two of them walked together.

  “War?” Gilgamesh asked. They had been speaking about old times, how they had dashed from Festival and to the great southern marsh, searching for Opis. Each claimed as they hunted this afternoon that in those days, they had been in much better shape. “What possible reasons are there for war?”

  “Do you want to hear the real reason or the one Nimrod gives?”

  “First tell me what Nimrod says.”

  “That the others have grown jealous of the Tower,” Ramses said. “Why else have they preached against it? It can’t be because the Tower is evil. If that were so, says Nimrod, why has Babel been so blessed these past years? Cylinders seals and clay tablets, faience, better ways of smelting, ship building improvements, a central governmental that improves justice and new revelations about Bel and Ishtar, all these gifts of civilization have been granted because Jehovah smiles on Babel’s endeavors.”

  “Potent arguments,” Gilgamesh said.

  “The king is no fool.”

  “Why does he want war?”

  “I’m unsure,” Ramses said. “I don’t know if it’s because Nimrod yearns to lead the Mighty Men in conquest, or—did you know he’s studied the campaigns of Ymir and Laban?”

  “Studied how?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “He acquired a scroll from Ham before Ham left. It was a history of Antediluvian Arad. In it are descriptions of Ymir’s conquests and several of Laban’s. In the past, Nimrod also spoke at length with Ham about those times. I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Patriarch Japheth has arrived in Babel. Nimrod now speaks with him about Antediluvian times.”

  Gilgamesh shook his head.

  “Japheth and Europa, together with Gomer and his entire clan, have moved to Babel,” Ramses said. “They mean to stay.”

  “Does Japheth tell the king all he wants to know about old times?” Gilgamesh asked. “Or is he reticent the way they said Ham used to be?”

  “My grandfather says Japheth is flattered by the attention,” Ramses said. “Five of Gomer’s great grandsons have already enrolled in the Mighty Men.”

  Gilgamesh nodded.

  “It is my belief,” Ramses said, “that Nimrod wishes to emulate Ymir, to outdo the Nephilim.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Oh?” Ramses asked. “Tell me. Who has ever conquered the entire world?”

  “Ah.”

  “The king will send for you,” Ramses said. “Nimrod will want all his heroes with him.”

  Gilgamesh nodded thoughtfully.

  “Look at me,” Ramses said, as he patted his paunch. “I live too well in Babel. But you…you’re still lean like a wolf, still able to race down gazelle and stab them with your lance.”

  Gilgamesh laughed, pleased by the compliment. “Come now, my friend, we’re not at court in Babel. This is Erech. We lead simple lives here. You have no need to flatter me.”

  For a time they paced in silence, and the blood of the slain gazelle soaked through Gilgamesh’s tunic and wet his shoulder. An uneasy feel
ing bit him then, an odd stirring in his gut.

  “Do you believe in premonitions?” he asked.

  “When I’m hunting,” Ramses said. “Why, do you think the war will turn out badly?”

  Gilgamesh tested his stomach. Had he eaten something disagreeable?

  “Perhaps you’re turning into an oracle,” Ramses said. “Semiramis claims to be one. She sits in the temple and sprinkles a strange weed into a brazier. She breathes the smoke and goes into a trance. Then she gives oracles of the future, many of which have turned out correct.”

  Gilgamesh nodded toward the smudge on the horizon, the walls of Erech. “Let’s hurry.” He broke into a jog, seemingly preoccupied.

  11.

  As they neared the city, Minos strode toward them.

  “Why is he in Erech?” Ramses asked.

  Gilgamesh had no idea, and his uneasiness grew.

  Minos wore a rich, blue robe and a crown of garlands. He smiled, and he carried a jug. He strolled from the gate, which faced the plain and was opposite the river. It had no wall, simply wharves that jutted into the Euphrates.

  The last time the dhow had come with Minos and the Singers, Nimrod had been with them. The king had been festive and had taken Gilgamesh downstream to taste of the delight of his Singers. Opis had complained afterward. Gilgamesh had vowed never to join the Singers again. He didn’t want to see that look of pain cross Opis’s eyes, that he had betrayed her with Semiramis’s Singers.

  “She wishes to corrupt you,” Opis had told him afterward. “She’s a wicked woman.”

  The brother wasn’t much better, Gilgamesh knew.

  As he approached, Minos smiled, with his long robe trailing in the dirt. “Hail, Gilgamesh,” he shouted, raising his right hand.

  “Hail, Minos, brother of the queen.”

  Minos nodded, with his smile wide. “She sends you greetings and worries about you.”