Ark(55)

After a time, she could take no more, and stood, fleeing back to the house. She rolled into her pallet of blankets near the cook fire, but as dawn leavened the darkness with gray and pink, sleep continued to elude her.

As it always had, especially since Japheth had returned, the grip he’d always had on her foolish heart had never left.





13





The Seventh Day





“‘Seven days from now I will make the rains pour down on the earth . . .’” Genesis 7: 4 (NLT)





The ark was nearly complete. The outer and inner surfaces had been painted with several coats of thick black pitch, until every crack and nail hole was filled and sealed against the waters. Inside, the three levels had been finished and divided into stalls and spaces, with a massive door in the side.

I marvelled anew every single day. I watched them all working together to complete construction; Zara, Sedele, Ne’eletama, and Neses all helped as well, most domestic work abandoned now. There was a sense of feverish urgency, propelled in part by the wall of black clouds gathering in the east. The men attended to the construction, while the women worked on the finer details; the men building the door and framing out the stalls and hauling in baskets and barrels of supplies while the women prepared the living space inside the ark. The more urgent the work became, the more alone I became . . . during the day, at least. At night, Japheth spent his time with me under the belly of the ark. He held me, and made love to me, and comforted me, and I soothed him to sleep and we found at least a measure of peace in each other.

I felt Neses out there, however. I knew she was watching us—but I was unsure whether Japheth was aware of her scrutiny.

During the day, Neses avoided me now, our temporary alliance formed out of my loneliness broken when Japheth came to me that night.

Storms gathered in the east, lightning flashing miles distant, echoed much later by grumbling peals of thunder. Those storms approached, and swiftly. Wind blew, now, all the time, night and day, a hard hot breath-stealing presence. The wind was alive, I sometimes thought, as I watched Noah and his family scurry about like mice. The wind blew grit in stinging curtains, crunching between my molars and gathering in the valley between my breasts and sticking in the hollows of my ears and crusting in my nostrils. The wind bent the grass flat against the soil, and in the forests to the north I heard trees crack and shatter and topple which was, I now believed, the breath of Noah’s God, The One God, El.

I heard rumbling, too. Not thunder, but something else. A shuddering under my feet, as if the very earth itself was shifting, as if there was some mighty pressure gathering in the depths of the rock. Over my head, the sky was blue, always blue, cloudless and clear, but the eye was ever drawn to the east, where the thunderheads gathered in mountainous black ranges, obscuring the sky. There in the east, if I peered and squinted, I could see drifting, draping, twisting, wind-blown curtains of rain, like a wall marching ever westward toward this place.

I wondered what the locals in the nearby village thought of the wall of storms, what the cities that blackness had already engulfed were experiencing . . .

I did not doubt Noah. I did not doubt Elohim any longer. I did not doubt the coming of the flood.

But now—as I sat in the back of the wagon, watching Noah work, watching Japheth hauling basket after basket of grain, bale after bale of hay, and endless haunches of slaughtered mutton, watching Shem and Ham settle the massive door into place at the top of the ramp leading up to the middle deck, watching the women gather bundles of clothing and baskets of candles—I heard in repeating echoes Noah’s words: you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives . . .

There was no doubt as to the implication—there is no place on that ark for a Nephilim. I am not Japheth’s wife—neither is Neses, but they were betrothed, and have been since childhood, and Neses is a human.

Zara’s eyes went to me, now and again, filled with sadness.

Japheth—I did not know what he thought, for he worked as feverishly as the rest of his family, only stopping to collapse in my arms long after sunset. He avoided my eyes, even when he moved above me.

He knew what the future held.

Later, when the day’s work was done and Noah and the others slept in the house, Japheth emerged from the darkness, a candle in his hand, its light adding to that shed by the candle at my feet. He moved slowly, stiffly, as he lay down beside me. He reached for me, but for the first time, I denied him, turning my face away from his lips.

“What is it, Aresia?” he demanded.

“What will happen to me, when the flood comes?” I asked.

He rolled away from me, staring up at the stars, his arm over his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Do you not?” My tone was sharper than I had intended, but I do nothing to soften it.

He sighed. “No.”

“There are not so many possibilities, Japheth.” I sat up, placing my back to the wood of the ark’s outer wall. “When the flood comes, you and your family will enter the ark, and either I will be with you, or I will not.”

He sat up too, and I gazed at him. His jaw flexed, tensed, shifting as he ground his molars together, and his thick bicep twitched as he passed a hand through his curls. “I don’t know, Aresia.”

“You do,” I snapped, my voice a whisper. “You do know. Perhaps you refuse to admit it to yourself, but you know.”