Ark(49)

Again he was silent again for a long time. “I—I don’t know that I have any comfort to give, Aresia. I am changed. Losing you, knowing you were given to Sin-Iddim in exchange for my life, the things that happened to me in Ur . . . all of that has altered me. And not for the better.” He said this last in a whisper, his face downcast, his curls obscuring his eyes.

“Then . . . then perhaps we can—then perhaps we can comfort each other.” I shifted a little closer.

He tensed. “Aresia—I . . .” He shook his head, his jaws grinding together so hard I heard them creak. “I cannot.”

I sighed and felt something in my heart crack. “Then why bring me here?” I fought the shattering of my heart, fought the heaviness in my soul. “Why bring me here, just to abandon me?”

He didn’t look at me, just plucked at the grass near his knees, shoulders slumped; the mighty warrior looked . . . defeated. Broken. “I am sorry, Aresia. Truly.”

I stared at him for a long time, trying to summon anything for him besides anger. “You should have left me in Bad-Tibira, then.”

I stood up and walked away, back to the long, low structure of the house, past the skeleton of Noah’s giant, absurd boat, towering like a mammoth skeleton of some long-dead behemoth. My feet hurt from the walk, the still tender soles throbbing but I ignored the pain, returning as quickly as I could back toward the house.

As I approached, the thought of entering that dark, low building filled me with loathing. The thought of sitting in a corner near the small, crackling fire, smoke in my eyes, the roof inches from the top of my head, Sedele and Ne’eletama pretending not to see me, Neses ghosting about in her ever-busy manner, Zara trying futilely to smooth things over . . . I couldn’t do it.

The sun had not set yet so I walked away from the house, making for the boat. Shem was on a scaffold near the top, mallet pounding, the thumping echoing in staccato cracks. Ham was on the ground next to a pile of logs, using some kind of tool to separate the logs into flat boards, which Shem then fixed into place with his mallet and seed bag full of iron nails. Noah was inside the vessel with a bucket of pitch and a thick brush, painting the cracks with the tar to seal it against the water.

None of them saw me, each focused on his work, so I crept past them and found a spot in the shadow of the god-sized vessel, on the far end from where they were working. How tall was it? Forty cubits? Fifty? Hundreds of cubits long, and twice as wide as it was tall . . . a vessel so large it boggled the mind, so vast in scope that I found it difficult to comprehend how he’d even begun to construct it, much less comprehend why. I’d listened to their fireside discussions at night, listened to Noah speak of the instructions of his God. It was something the patriarch did nightly, repeating the words he’d heard. But still, even having heard all this every night for some months, I still didn’t grasp the reason for it all.

The boat was big enough to house the entire population of Bad-Tibira . . . yet I’d heard them say that only Noah’s family would be allowed on. For what reason, then? What did so few people need with a boat this size? What ocean would it sail upon? The closest river was so far away there was no possibility of getting the vessel there, and even if they could, somehow, the boat itself was so immense it would get stuck on the many curves of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It was easier to wonder at Noah’s folly than Japheth’s apathy. Easier to sit here, my back against a naked spar, the sun blocked out by the bulk of the partially finished vessel, wondering at Noah’s madness, than to think of Japheth, refusing to look at me, to even sit close to me.

A shuffled footstep alerted me to a presence nearby; I twisted and saw Noah standing a few feet away, a bucket of pitch in one hand, the handle of the brush sticking out of the top.

He was eying me, warily, angrily. “Why are you here, Nephilim?”

“Why do you hate me, Noah?” I asked, unable to stop the words from escaping. “What have I done?”

He growled under his breath, the mustache of his gray-black beard ruffling from the huff of his breath. “You, in particular? Nothing. It is your kind. All you Nephilim, you sons and daughters of the angels, you are all corrupt and wicked. Elohim sees you all as a stain upon this earth.”

“But I—”

He spoke over me, his voice gruff and harsh. “My son’s spirit is broken. He will not speak of what he endured, but it was for your sake he endured it. That, perhaps, I can lay at your feet.”

“What about what I endured, for his sake? Does that count for anything?” I stripped off my sandals and showed him the soles of my feet, the angry weals of a hundred burns seared into each foot. “This, I endured for your son. Rape, I endured for him. Beatings, I endured for him. I faced death—and wished for it—for him.”

Noah shifts the bucket to his other hand, eying my feet with discomfort. “For him?”

“He has spoken of none of it? Nothing?”

Noah shook his head. “Nothing. We are not so close, even now, that he would confide in me. His mother, perhaps, but not me.”

I lean my head against the spar and stare up at the sky, a blue so deep it reminds me of Japheth’s eyes. “We were lovers.”

Noah scoffed, a brusquely sarcastic sound. “I guessed as much.”

“I never expected it to last as long as it did, or that it would come to mean as much to me as it did.” I close my eyes as the sun peeks over the top of the boat, bathing in me in warmth. “My father hates your kind as much as you do mine. My father saw the necklace Japheth wore, a pendant inscribed with a name of your God, and he was incensed.”