People of the Flood (Ark Chronicles 2) Read online

  “On a peg leg?” Canaan asked.

  “Beor has never backed down from anything or anyone,” Kush said.

  Canaan brooded, bending his head in thought, rubbing his chin with a silver-ringed finger. “Will Nimrod pay no penalty then?”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was under judgment,” Nimrod said.

  “You’ve had your say,” Ham said. “Now let the elders talk.”

  Nimrod glanced at this grandfather before stepping back.

  “Yours is a hard question, brother,” Kush said. “I am baffled. To keep the spirit of unity, I think it is time to split the tribe.”

  “No,” Ham said.

  “I will go to Shinar,” Kush said, “to a land of Antediluvian lushness.”

  “Is that wise?” Menes asked. “Unified, we’re greater than spread out in driblets for the wild beasts to devour. Could we have slain the dragon if it had caught us family by family?

  “I will raise a city as they used to be in olden times,” Kush said. “No dragon will touch us there, nor will any who think to use Noah’s curse against us.”

  “What of us?” Canaan asked. “Will you leave us here alone in the Zagros Mountains, prey to that curse you just spoke about?”

  Kush shook his head. “Join us, by all means. Or wait until time heals your anger.”

  Canaan glowered. Zidon, still clutching his dagger, hissed into his father’s ear.

  Kush faced his youngest son. “This day, I banish Nimrod. He and as many of the Hunters as wish to go with him, will ready the way to Shinar.”

  “Wait,” Ham said. “Reconsider. We must not split the tribe in a fit of anger.”

  “This is to avoid bloodshed,” Kush said.

  “How does this give me justice?” Canaan asked.

  “Yes,” Zidon said. “Nimrod must be punished.”

  “Nimrod has been banished,” Kush said, “the same with Semiramis.”

  “Only to go to a better place,” Canaan said.

  “They will work in hardship for the good of the tribe,” Kush said.

  Zidon pulled his father beside a wooden fence. Ducks waddled in the enclosure, ignoring them as they thrust their bills in the grass, quacking in complaint, as they found little to eat. Zidon whispered, gesturing, showing his father his dagger. Canaan shook his head. Zidon sheathed his dagger, enraged, looking away.

  “I need time to consider this,” Canaan said.

  Kush nodded, and the elder meeting ended.

  12.

  Opis knew something was wrong when she saw Uruk and his father driving goats to their house. She peered around a tree, watching the brute that had knocked her down and then dragged her up and kissed her. His breath had been vile—like onions! If it hadn’t been for his friend, Gilgamesh, drawing his bow on him… and her brother, Ramses, showing up…

  She shuddered.

  She loathed Uruk.

  She thought of him as a troll. He swaggered instead of walked. He had a single thick eyebrow instead of two like everyone else. It grew upon his bony brow like weeds gone wild. He had long arms like a gorilla, and his face was flat, wide, always sneering, always giving the impression that he was superior. What she hated most about him was whenever she was in the settlement, and he spotted her. He would stare at her dead-eyed, making her skin crawl. Lust, that’s what it meant, the glassy look. She wished sometimes that Gilgamesh had drilled Uruk with the arrow. Then she felt terrible and asked Jehovah to forgive her such wicked thoughts.

  Why did Uruk and his father, a fat man with bowed legs, drive goats toward their house? They moved along the trail through the woods, crushing dead leaves and stepping on twigs, snapping them. Every time Uruk switched a goat, the poor animal bleated.

  Opis pitied the goats. But then her brother often said that she was too softhearted.

  Ramses wasn’t softhearted. It didn’t mean that he was cruel. He was, after all, the only person who was really nice to her. But Ramses didn’t let people push him around. He didn’t even let Father push him around. Not that Father was big and strong like Great Grandfather Ham or his son Kush or even strong like that brute Uruk heading to their house. Father was lean like his father, Menes. Father was lean like a hungry wolf, with greedy eyes and a vulpine way of examining everything. He reminded her of foxes in Great Grandfather Ham’s stories about talking animals, his fables that he claimed old Methuselah used to tell him before the Flood.

  The reason Uruk had to trek way out here was that her father lived beyond the settlement, in a log house, where Father practiced many of his various arts. He carved wood, for instance, making things out of them: beautiful tables, chairs, beds, and figurines like Great Grandfather Ham did with ivory. Father also crafted the best pots and clay cups, and he fashioned jewelry that other people loved to wear. He said he needed solitude in order to think, quiet in order to create. She tiptoed whenever she was in the house—even Mother had to be quiet. Usually she ran into the woods, not hunting like Ramses, but to gather flowers, berries or wild grass to make baskets or rope.

  She decided to follow Uruk, the brute switching his goats.

  She dodged from tree to tree, not letting herself be seen, and she came to the conclusion that it was bad that Uruk and his father drove goats to her father. It meant a deal was in progress.

  No one ever got the better of her father in a deal. It’s partly what made him seem so foxy. But why was Uruk along for a deal? What did her father have that a brute like Uruk wanted?

  As she darted to the next tree, her breath coming in gasps, she recalled Uruk’s glassy stare, the way he seemed to undress her with his eyes whenever he looked at her.

  Unease knotted her stomach.

  She was too young to get married. It would be several years before she went to Festival as a possible bride. Yet why was Uruk with his father? Shouldn’t Uruk be frightened to come out here? Father might be slow to anger if there was profit to be made, but her brother Ramses never forgot a slight. He hated Uruk. Ramses had never said, but she knew that he meant, one of these days, to repay Uruk for what he had done to her. This would be the perfect opportunity.

  She froze as she peeked around the next tree.

  Uruk, ahead in an open area, pointed back at her. He said something and his fat father turned, looking.

  She threw herself behind the tree. Then she ran, hiding, panting and trying not to breathe so loudly.

  She dared peek again. The trail was empty.

  She crept home the rest of the way.

  A wooden fence circled their house, which was sturdy and well made. Years ago, the logs had first been peeled before Father fashioned it—many people built their log homes with the bark still on. Tuffs of grass and mud acted as stucco between open spaces between logs, while a wisp of smoke trickled out the chimney. In the yard wandered chickens, several tired dogs and Uruk’s goats. They bleated, sounding hungry.

  She slunk through the gate, through the back door and listened.

  Men’s voices came from the front of the house.

  She slipped through a hall, past Father’s pottery room and past her mother’s storage closet, until she stood outside the door where the men…

  She leaned against the wall, closing her eyes. Her eyes flew open. They talked about bridal prices. She couldn’t breathe. Uruk spoke. He said how much he desired Opis—her!

  Then Ramses interrupted, telling them about that time in the woods.

  “High spirits,” Uruk’s father said. “He meant nothing by it.”

  Ramses made a rude sound. Father told him to mind his manners. These were guests, and Ramses must treat them as such.

  A moment later, the front door slammed. Ramses had left.

  Then Opis heard father shout her name. She blinked in confusion, startled, already moving in obedience before she caught herself.

  “Opis,” her father, Lud, shouted. “Come here. I wish you to meet Uruk.” A pause, then: “Where is she?”

  “I’ll see if she’s back,” her mother said
.

  Opis never knew when the moment of decision came. She couldn’t remember the last time she had disobeyed her parents. Now, however, she fled through the house, even as her mother shouted for her to stop. She ran out the back door and sprinted through the yard, scattering surprised and angrily clucking chickens. She hopped the fence the way Ramses sometimes did and ran panting into the forest.

  She was to be married to Uruk the Troll.

  With a face wet with tears, she cursed Gilgamesh. She cursed him for not drilling the monster when he had had the chance.

  Oh, what was she going to do?

  13.

  Gilgamesh swaggered with his friends down a lane. For days, he had been cooped up in his grandfather’s house. Now that Canaan had agreed to Kush’s terms, he felt free again to show his face. His neck was swathed in bandages where an assassin’s arrow had almost killed him. He wore a belt with a copper buckle—it had been his father’s—and on the belt was a thin dagger he kept razor sharp.

  Gilgamesh and his friends strutted, throwing their chests out and laughing. They threaded past the log houses and various sheds, smithies and wooden corrals where sheep or goats milled. Dogs barked at them, children scampered here and there and girls looked up from their yards as they fed ducks or threw out scraps to squealing piglets.

  The chilly weather didn’t dampen their spirits, for they agreed among themselves that their presence had intimidated the sons of Canaan. Each of them was a Hunter and intended on joining Nimrod in his exile.

  “It’s as heroes we will march to the new land,” Enlil said, a gangly youth known for his quick enthusiasms.

  “Mighty men, Nimrod calls us,” Gilgamesh said.

  “I bet we win lots of treasure,” Uruk said.

  “Treasure?” Enlil asked. “What kind of treasure?”

  Uruk’s sly grin broadened, making his brutish features seem even uglier. Adding to his image was a strange stone axe. Most people worked hard to fashion their stone axes to ape copper or bronze axes—but not Uruk. Most people used reddish colored stone because copper was red, and they polished the stone to make it look as if it had seams like a metal axe. Some even went so far as to counterfeit the ridges caused in a bronze axe by an imperfect fit of the two halves of a mold. Uruk’s axe, however, had what seemed a purposely-blunted edge, making it more a hammer than an axe. The head was of volcanic rock and chipped in the old manner. To give it a smooth finish, Uruk had used a grindstone, rubbing stone against stone, much as a carpenter sharpened a blade. Then he had bored a hole in the center of the stone. He’d used a hollow bone, sand, water and a bore drill. The trick, of course, was that anything sand could scratch it could, over time, cut. The process was to throw down sand, spin the hollow bone with a bore drill and thus grind into the volcanic rock, wetting the sand with water from time to time. After patient, tedious work, he had a hole and thrust the wooden haft into it. Some of the carpenters had similar hammers, used for driving wooden wedges into logs.

  Uruk rested his hand on his hammer and led them to an oxcart several strides from the settlement’s west gate.

  Across the lane was a small bazaar where people traded and gossiped about the latest news. Most of the sellers had thrown down reed mats and sold vegetables in baskets or grain or beer in clay containers. In one basket, a litter of puppies squirmed.

  “You never answered my question about treasure,” Enlil said as he leaned against the oxcart.

  “Yes, what kind of treasure?” Obed asked.

  “And what do we need it for?”

  Uruk snorted. “Treasure buys you a wife.”

  “A wife?” asked Obed.

  Uruk pushed off the oxcart. “Look. There’s my future bride.” He grinned at them, at Gilgamesh especially, and he lumbered toward a blanket covered by clay pots and cups.

  “Say, Gilgamesh, isn’t that Lud he’s heading to?”

  Mouth agape, Gilgamesh lurched upright.

  Uruk shook hands with Lud.

  “I thought Opis hated Uruk,” Enlil said.

  “You didn’t hear?” Obed asked, grinning. He was a close friend of Uruk’s. “Uruk and his father went out to see Lud yesterday.”

  At that moment, Gilgamesh saw Opis crouch by the basket of puppies. They licked her fingers, squirming over one another to be near her.

  Gilgamesh moved like a sleepwalker, his heart beating hard and his mouth dry. He had never forgotten the day Uruk pushed her down and then kissed her, the day he’d drawn an arrow against Uruk. He often thought of Opis. She was beautiful, and she had her hair in pigtails. As he lurched toward her, people seemed to fade. Then, as he wondered how to find a way to talk with her—he cursed his fate that he was so shy—he tripped, stumbling to one knee beside her.

  Her eyes widened. “Gilgamesh?”

  She remembered him! He tried to say something, but coughed instead.

  The pups in the basket squirmed and licked her fingers more furiously than ever. She giggled, and he reached for them, petting them, sidling closer to her. When their hands bumped, a tingle shot through his arm. They both tried to speak at the same instant.

  “Go ahead,” he said, smiling.

  “No, no,” she said, smiling back, “you first.”

  “Oh, Opis, I’ve thought so much about that terrible day. I’m so very sorry I didn’t speak up when your brother came. Uruk was awful, a swine like Ramses said.”

  “You stopped him, though,” Opis said. “That was very brave of you.”

  Gilgamesh found his grin hurting his lips, it was so wide. “I should have drilled him. I would if he did it again.”

  Her gaze darted to the bandage on his neck. “Does that hurt?”

  “It’s a scratch, nothing more.”

  “What a wicked thing it was to ambush you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Aren’t you banished because of it?”

  Pain flared in his heart. “Aren’t you moving to Shinar?”

  “My father hasn’t decided.”

  “But you must,” he said.

  She looked at him closely. “Why must he, Gilgamesh?”

  He was unable to speak.

  She dropped her gaze, whispering, “Uruk’s father bargained with my father?”

  He grabbed her hand. “No! Don’t marry him.”

  She studied his eyes. “What choice do I have?”

  “You can say no.”

  “My father would whip me until I said yes.”

  “Then I’d kill him,” Gilgamesh hissed.

  “Ramses would kill you then, and that would be a terrible shame.”

  He squeezed her hand. “You can’t marry Uruk.”

  “Can you match the price?”

  Gilgamesh swallowed hard. His father was dead, eaten by the dragon. Most of his wealth had gone to his mother, the rest parceled out among his brothers and sisters. He owned very little except the belt he wore. “I can’t match it. But Opis, I—”

  “Hey! Let go of my betrothed.”

  A heavy hand grasped Gilgamesh by the back of his tunic and threw him onto the ground. Suspecting a kick—he knew and hated that voice—Gilgamesh dove, rolled and leaped upright, with a dagger in his fist.

  “Look at that,” rumbled Uruk. “Ready to draw blood on the instant. Just like he did to Beor with his arrow.”

  Lud and his wife stood beside Uruk. Others also looked on.

  Gilgamesh’s face burned as he lowered his arm. He began coughing and couldn’t stop.

  “Opis, come here,” her mother said.

  Opis rose obediently, with her head down.

  “She can’t marry Uruk,” Gilgamesh said between coughs.

  “Will you try to murder us if we dare?” Lud asked, with an angry scowl.

  Gilgamesh sheathed his blade. “Don’t you know what he did to her?”

  “High-spirits,” Lud said. “Isn’t that right, Ramses?”

  Ramses turned, walking away.

  “You must keep away from this ruffian, Opis,” Lud sa
id.

  “She’s my betrothed,” added Uruk.

  “When you get back, she is,” Lud corrected.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Uruk said. He grinned at Opis, even as she shrank from him.

  14.

  The banished Hunters left the settlement and soon threaded out of the Zagros Mountains. In the foothills of the Tigris River—so named by Nimrod—they found a country of steep valleys and wide uplands, and they discovered a pack of dire wolves.

  “Pack against pack,” Nimrod said.

  The dire wolves proved worthy foes, cunning and huge, falling at last to them, all but a lone she-wolf that seemed impossible to track. In the end, she tracked them, slipping into their camp, past several low fires, to pounce on the Hunter who had wriggled into her dirt den and pulled out her puppies. Obed awoke screaming, his head in the she-wolf’s jaws. He fought savagely, holding her jaws open long enough for Nimrod and Gilgamesh to snatch spears. Unfortunately, one of their thrusts took Obed in the chest. Gently as possible, Nimrod sewed the flaps of torn skin on his face, scalp and chest. For three nights, Obed lay in fever. During that time, Zimri, who had fallen asleep on guard duty, prayed fervently for his healing—for Nimrod decreed that Zimri be buried up to his neck and watch Obed as he lay in fever.

  “He couldn’t watch before it happened,” Nimrod said, “so let Zimri watch now.” Zimri prayed or he raved, it was difficult to determine which. But at last Obed’s fever broke and Zimri was dug out of the earth a new man. Obed, however, lost his right eye and two of the fingers of his right hand.

  They entered the alluvial plain, a sea of rich mud covered by swaying grasses and bountiful herds of antelopes, elephants and wild asses. Savage dogs prowled the outskirts of the various herds along with hyenas and lions. Jackals also thrived, together with eagles, vultures and hawks. Spadework discovered few rocks, no metallic ores of any kind and, if dug long enough, seeping water. By smell, they found slime pits, dangerous places of sinkholes and bitumen. Brush and softwoods grew in certain places, but no hard woods.

  One night under the stars, as Nimrod and Semiramis lay on a blanket away from the others, she rolled onto her side, whispering, “What was that?”