People of Babel (Ark Chronicles 3) Read online

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” Rahab said.

  Semiramis seemed to think it over and, after a moment, shrugged.

  As the tip of the sinking sun threw a last ray across the waters, inspiration or a spirit of clarity came to Rahab. According to rumors, Deborah, Semiramis’s new stepmother, didn’t get along with her. Many of the tribe’s women gave Semiramis a wide berth. The inspiration for why Semiramis was here seemed obvious as Rahab thought about it, and she berated herself for not having seen it sooner. The woman was lonely.

  “Why… Why don’t you join us for supper tomorrow?” Rahab asked.

  Semiramis cloaked her surprise, her hand rising in a gesture of indifference.

  “I imagine it is lonely being a Hunter’s wife,” Rahab said, “what with Nimrod’s frequent hunting forays.”

  “Sometimes, I suppose that’s true,” Semiramis said, staring at the river.

  Rahab stood beside the tall woman, and she began to feel the void—the ache. All alone while surrounded by laughing, working people united in purpose.

  She took hold of Semiramis’s hand.

  This third shock softened Semiramis’s features—for a moment. Then she withdrew her hand. “I wish my brother was here. Minos made me laugh.”

  Rahab interpreted it to mean, Minos liked me for me. He was my friend. Rahab smiled. Maybe it was a grimace. Semiramis had always made her uncomfortable. She was so beautiful and self-assured.

  “I think we should head back before it’s too dark to see,” Rahab said.

  “To the city?” Semiramis asked, with a hint of mockery.

  “We’ll walk along the shore.”

  Semiramis agreed, and they moved just above the reeds, soon passing a trio of date palms that had survived the axes. As the city’s many lamps and candles flickered into view, a low sob from some uncut reeds brought them to a halt.

  “Did you hear that?” Rahab whispered.

  “I did.”

  They followed the sobs like retrievers to a wounded duck. It wasn’t wild shrieking, but low moans and sniffling.

  “Who is it?” Rahab called. The sun had gone down, and it was hard to see.

  The moaning stopped.

  “We know you’re there,” Semiramis said.

  In a moment, reeds stirred, parted, and a girl peered at them.

  “Opis!” Rahab cried. “What are you doing here?”

  Drying her eyes, Opis climbed out of the reeds and kept adjusting her dress, almost slipping on the bank. Rahab helped Opis up and wiped away a tear. Semiramis stepped behind her, touching Opis’s back.

  Opis flinched.

  “Who beat you?” Semiramis asked.

  Shocked, Rahab turned Opis around. The dress was torn because someone had used a whip on her. Rahab felt raised welts.

  “Did Uruk do this?” Semiramis asked.

  “Uruk?” Rahab asked, shocked.

  “He’s betrothed to Opis,” Semiramis said.

  “Ah,” Rahab said. “Child, did Uruk beat you?”

  Opis shook her head.

  “Who then?” Rahab asked. “Tell us.”

  “My…my father,” Opis said.

  “Lud?” Rahab asked.

  Opis hung her head. “He…he caught me with Gilgamesh, and he called me awful names.”

  “What were you two doing?” Rahab asked.

  “Talking,” Opis said, her eyes wide. “Gilgamesh is noble, a man of honor.”

  Semiramis made a soft sound, perhaps a snort.

  “He is honorable,” Opis said.

  “Then why did your father beat you?” Rahab asked.

  Opis hesitated, until the story gushed out. According to Ramses, Uruk had talked to Lud. Uruk was furious because the Hunters laughed at him and called him a fool. Uruk claimed his betrothed slipped off with Gilgamesh. He had demanded the practice stop or he’d reclaim his goats and break off the arrangement. Lud had acted swiftly.

  “I see,” Rahab said. “Do you love Uruk?”

  “No!”

  “What about Gilgamesh?”

  “Oh yes, Great Grandmother. I love him very much.” Then, frail Opis wept.

  “You must come with me,” Rahab said, “and tell Ham your story.”

  “I can’t. Father would talk nice to you and Great Grandfather and afterward beat me even harder. I must obey him.”

  “Yes,” Rahab said. “A child’s duty is to obey her parents. But surely your mother—”

  “Please don’t say anything. Mother is frightened, too. It’s all up to Gilgamesh.”

  “What do you expect him to do?” Rahab asked.

  “To save me,” Opis whispered, her eyes shining. “Just as he saved me from Uruk years ago.”

  “Maybe it’s time to save yourself,” Semiramis said.

  Opis blinked with incomprehension.

  “Or, then again, maybe not,” Semiramis said dryly.

  3.

  Ham didn’t see what he could do for Opis, but for the sake of peace in his tent, he shuffled through Babel’s darkened lanes, leaning on his ivory-handled cane. Soon he found himself by Lud’s tent. He took a deep breath and knocked on a tent pole. Ramses poked his head out.

  “Tell your father I wish to see him,” Ham said.

  Ramses ducked out of sight.

  “What’s Grandfather want with me this time of night?” an irritated Lud asked inside.

  Ramses’ answer was muffled.

  Soon, foxy-faced Lud, with his fine hair swept to the left, stepped outside as he threw a woolen cloak over his shoulders, pinning it with a golden broach. He was like many of Menes’s sons, muscular, broad-shouldered and thin-hipped. “It’s late,” he grumbled.

  Ham decided he didn’t like his grandson’s tone. So he poked Lud in the belly with his cane.

  Lud gasped.

  “Restraint is the watchword in my tribe,” Ham said. “Civilized behavior is what I expect. By all means, control your children, but shredding your daughter’s dress with a switch isn’t justified.”

  “She disobeyed me!”

  “At least control your avarice long enough to consider the golden situation you have been given.”

  “What situation?”

  “Gilgamesh and Uruk are two of a kind,” Ham said. “Each saw the angel.”

  “So what?” Lud asked, still rubbing his belly.

  “So, at the moment, one is rich, or has a rich father, while the other has nothing.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  Ham scowled, fingering his cane.

  Lud warily took a step back.

  “Why not play the two against each other?” Ham suggested.

  Lud snorted. “Because Uruk will take his offer back and leave me nothing.”

  “You’re not thinking. Consider the rivalry between Uruk and Gilgamesh, the hatred. Now, if Uruk thinks he might lose Opis to Gilgamesh of all people, why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he offered you even more.”

  Lud blinked until a sly grin slid onto his features. “Say, that’s rather clever.”

  The idea had been planted in fertile soil. So Ham departed, deciding that, despite what he had told Rahab earlier, he had been able to do something after all.

  4.

  Ham hefted a short-handled, bronze-headed pickaxe as Kush spoke to him and the elders inside a new mud-brick home. Kush spoke on the lack of hardwood, stone and supplies of copper ore.

  Shinar lacked all three. The soft palm trees were useful but nothing like oak or elm. Because of these lacks, Babel had become a city of clay or sun-dried mud bricks. To make them, a brick-maker piled clay onto a reed mat and poured water. After scattering straw or dung, he trod it underfoot. That mixture he slopped into rectangular wooden molds open on both the top and bottom. The top was dried in the sun for several days. Then it was turned over. The hotter the sun shined, the faster the bricks dried. Once they were thoroughly dry, a man could build a wall, a house, a shed or a fence.

  As he listened to Kush, Ham gripped the pickaxe i
n his callused hands. With these tools, they had raised walls, built dams and drained flooded land or prepared the land for winter plowing. The pickaxe was a gift from Jehovah, as useful as the adz had been in sheering planks for the Ark. This, he suspected, was his reason for being: to wield such tools, to make, build, construct and fashion from the sweat of his brow.

  Kush sat down, quaffing ale and wiping his mouth with a brawny forearm.

  Put, with his hawk-like visage, rose. Lighter-skinned and more supple-muscled than Kush, he spoke rapidly, gesturing often.

  Winter approached and they had ample supplies of wheat, barley and sesame seeds, a surfeit of cattle, sheep, goats and swine. But stone tools had shattered and the need for extra copper had grown. They needed a source for hardwoods and malachite, and a source for tin, gold and silver.

  Ham set the pickaxe down and nosily blew out his cheeks.

  Put grew silent, and his sons glanced at him.

  “The river flows downstream,” Ham said. “A simple observation, I realize. Viewed another way, it means that if one follows the Euphrates upstream long enough, he’ll reach the hills and mountains that feed it. Oak and elm will surely carpet those hills, as will granite and malachite. I propose to trek there, cut down trees, make rafts and float them back to Babel with a load of stones.”

  Half the Hunters volunteered to go.

  By donkey-train they went, following the winding river through the flat grasslands, the foothills and finally the hills themselves, the watershed catchments already blanketed with snow.

  “We’re near Ararat,” Ham said, when they arrived. “Probably close to Japheth Land.”

  Nimrod and Gilgamesh traded glances. Beor was said to live in Japheth Land.

  For weeks, they hewed trees, raising blisters until they all had leathery palms like Ham. From time to time, Nimrod hunted deer. With a stone, Gilgamesh scraped fat off the skins and Ham tanned the skins with gathered alum and gallnuts. Then he sliced the skins into strips and braiding them into ropes. They bound floating logs with these ropes and rolled granite, flint, obsidian and sandstone onto these rafts, sending off each giant raft with a two-man team using long oars and poles.

  “What about the donkeys?” Gilgamesh asked. “Can they ride the rafts?”

  Ham instructed them to cut reeds. With them, he made large round frames two or three times the length of a man. To these frames, he stretched the last of the deerskins, taut on the bottom, but not fined-off or tapered at the bow or stern. For flooring, Ham lined them with dried grass and then piled sacks of acorns and one or two donkeys apiece. The circular boats carried two paddlers each, one in the front drawing the paddle to him and another standing in the back giving a backward thrust. Just like the rafts, the current helped propelled them home.

  For supplies of copper, tin and gold ore, loaded donkey-trains wound back to the Zagros Mountains, to the settlement where the sons of Canaan lived. Beer, sesame-seed oil and fine pottery were bartered in exchange for the needed ores.

  They discovered bitumen in a smallish river named Is, a tributary of the Euphrates. Great quantities of bitumen lumps were dredged up there. The tarry substance had many uses, among them a new form of ink; another was as asphalt-like coating for reed boats.

  With these boats, Hunters traveled downstream of Babel and into a vast marsh filled with canebrakes and shallow lagoons. Thousands, perhaps millions of migrating pelicans, flamingos, geese, ducks, coots, gulls and terns used the delta marsh. At times, the entire sky seemed to move with them. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers inundated the delta before their waters flushed out into the sea. With nets, bone-tipped arrows and traps, the Hunters captured or slew fowls by the bushel, and thousands of eggs made their way back to Babel.

  The city thrived, and time passed, although the second year proved more harrowing than the first. They had only dealt with the Euphrates during its lower water levels. Beginning in spring, when the snows in the upstream mountains and hills melted, the river began to rise. That signaled the sowing for summer barley, ten days of grueling work. Everyone split into teams, or cooperatives, helping each other.

  Gilgamesh, against Nimrod’s advice, was one of these, borrowing seed grain from Ham. He worked an outer field, carefully following his Great Grandfather’s instructions. First, canal water irrigated his field. “But not too high,” Ham said. Later, Gilgamesh drained the field and drove specially shod oxen over the weeds, trampling them and adding manure. With a mattock, he worked each field over twice. Afterward, he harrowed the ground smooth and ploughed, with boys breaking any remaining clods.

  Sowing meant a plough, with another man with a bag dropping seeds behind it. Afterward, he carefully cleared the furrows of any new clods.

  There would be more soakings—the first when young barley sprouts filled the furrows, the second when the barley covered the ground like a mat and lastly when the stalks reached full height.

  By the beginning of summer, floodtides threatened. The Euphrates had become a raging river, terrifying everyone. The very soil of the alluvial plain, the mud, made the matter worse. The mud was deep, soft and therefore yielding. The canals filled with fresh silt, the canal-mouths choking with it. Some canals overflowed, creating shallow lagoons and nullifying all the hard labor.

  Fortunately, the flooding only struck a few fields, outer ones—Gilgamesh’s among them. Thus, he lost the crop and owed Ham for the seed grain. He was now further behind in wealth than if he hadn’t tried to farm.

  Forestalling further tragedy, Kush ordered teams here and there, digging new canals, clearing old ones of silt and building emergency dams. That proved the most labor intensive of all the varied tasks, for the soft earth readily collapsed. Instead of supporting the shifting silt, it yielded to it, drawn along. Consequently, during the worst floods, rotating teams had to be on hand and alert to a dam’s destruction.

  Farther upstream, the riverbank broke and flooded wide sections of plain. There, reeds sprang to life. In other places, lagoons and shallow seas formed. Ducks and herons came in thousands. Carp, eels and various other fish swarmed the lagoons. With large draw nets, fishermen standing in their reed boats scooped up many of these fish. The upper edge of the draw net floated because of cork, while the lower edge sank due to stone weights. When drawn tight, hundreds of fish flopped and floundered in the nets. Bird-catchers spread similar nets over nesting places or they baited traps and waited for the fowl to nibble bait.

  Finally, the floodwaters receded, and the summer sun caused the crops to leap out of the ground. In gratitude, Kush sacrificed to the angel of the sun. The people settled into the routine of weeding, repairing canals or hoisting water with shadufs.

  Life seemed good to Ham, Kush and to most of the farmers and their wives and children. One man, however, a Hunter, grew frantic as Opis’s fifteenth birthday drew nearer.

  5.

  Nimrod and the Hunters built a large mud-brick hall named the Barracks. Like all such dwellings, first a mound had been shoveled into place and allowed to dry, the theory being that such protected the house from possible flood and damp earth. Then, brick by brick, cemented with liquid clay mortar, the walls were raised. Lastly, palm tree planks overlaid with palm leaves formed the roof, which was covered with a layer of mud.

  Wind and rainstorms, unfortunately, washed away mud and caused leaks. To repair the leaky roof, men had to plaster on more mud. To quick-dry and flatten this new mud, or to simply dry out the old after a rain, a large rolling stone was left on the Barracks roof.

  Many such dwellings had dirt floors. Nimrod tiled the Barracks with brick flooring. In the Barracks lived the Hunters, a few of them with their newlywed wives.

  Semiramis presently moved alone through the dark halls and corridors. Nimrod and a band of Hunters had left two weeks ago. He had made Gilgamesh her watchdog. She smiled. Poor Gilgamesh, he was dying to have Opis, but now he was a maid for Nimrod’s wife.

  She greeted Gilgamesh in the main yard: a dirt field surrounded by a b
rick wall, with straw targets at the southern end.

  Today, he had promised to take her gazelle hunting.

  They headed inland, away from the cultivated fields and canals. Two other Hunters joined them. Gilgamesh explained how they would swing out in a wide arc to beat sticks and scare gazelles toward them. They reached a desolate region of scrub, thorns and dusty grasslands. The two beaters jogged away with several hounds, leaving Semiramis and Gilgamesh alone on the treeless plain. The sun neared noon. Heat waves shimmered on the horizon.

  “Must we march in the heat of day?” she asked.

  Gilgamesh mopped his forehead. His scarlet headband was already soaked with sweat. “It’s hot, but at least the lions won’t bother us. They’re busy seeking relief in the shade.”

  “I wish we did the same.”

  He pointed at a thicket. “We can wait there, I suppose.”

  Soon they crouched in the shade.

  “Can I sip from your waterskin,” she asked. “Mine’s empty.” Gilgamesh passed his over and Semiramis sipped, dropping something into it, capping it and shaking the skin. He raised his eyebrows.

  “Honey drops,” she said. “Try it.”

  Gilgamesh uncapped the skin and guzzled. He nodded, but the water tasted no different.

  She asked about Opis. He shrugged.

  “No, no,” Semiramis said. “I’d like to hear.”

  Gilgamesh talked for a while, frowned, and touched his forehead.

  “Do you feel dizzy?” Semiramis asked, sliding closer, studying him.

  “I do.”

  “I know why.”

  He lowered his hand, looking at her. Her smile was sly and intoxicating. She was beautiful.

  “There’s a little green fly from the delta marsh. A very special fly Deborah told me about. I crushed and mixed it with herbs and date-palm honey.”

  Gilgamesh brought up the waterskin.

  “Those weren’t honey drops, my handsome hunter, but a love draught to loosen your restraint.”