Noah (13 page)

Noah wondered if what he was seeing was the inevitable result of long pent-up resentment caused by a lifetime of misery and poverty and degradation, or whether violence had now simply become endemic in all of mankind, and required only the slightest provocation to bring it to the fore.

Whatever the reason, there was no indication that the situation was going to subside. To the contrary, it escalated with alarming speed, like a forest fire spread by a stiff wind. There was a creak and then a crash as part of the fence surrounding the compound gave way. The crowd surged again, shrieking in triumph, baying for blood. Although he did not succumb to the frenzied aggression that seemed to be affecting everyone around him, Noah was nevertheless caught up in the headlong rush, unable to prevent himself being swept toward the gates among the crush of people.

He tried to keep his head above the crowd as he was buffeted this way and that, hoping that he would eventually find a way to escape the madness.

As he was pushed closer to the collapsed fence
he saw soldiers with clubs and swords and axes, desperately fighting a rearguard action. Then, to his horror, he saw more soldiers running from the compound, holding a striped gazelle above their heads. The gazelle—which had presumably been caught on its way to the Ark—was wriggling and kicking, bleating in panic, but to no avail. When they reached the gates where their colleagues were attempting to fend off the frenzied mob, the soldiers hurled the terrified animal into the crowd. Immediately there was another surge, although this time it was toward the gazelle as it scrambled to its feet among the mass of starving refugees and tried to make a break for freedom.

The creature stood no chance. The mob, diverted from their attack on the soldiers—who were now rapidly retreating, closing the gate and hammering the damaged fence posts back into place—leaped on the gazelle en masse, bringing it down. The animal screamed as the crowd clawed and pummeled and yanked at it, literally ripping it apart. Noah was sickened as he saw people reeling away from the heaving knot of humanity, covered in blood, holding chunks of dripping meat in their hands.

But even the slaughter of the gazelle did not satiate their blood lust; in fact, it seemed only to feed it. With the creature dead and the soldiers out of reach, they fell on each other, clawing and screaming and tearing.

The crowd around Noah thinned as everyone surged toward the center of violence. He backed slowly away, utterly sickened. For some reason he himself was not targeted for attack—it was as if he was invisible.

He felt the mud sucking at his boots and looked down. To his horror he saw that the ground was red.

A young boy broke from the melee, coated in blood from head to toe, a chunk of meat in his hand. He dipped his head and tore at the meat with his teeth. But then a dozen more people, equally blood spattered, their eyes wild, broke from the throng and fell on the boy as they had fallen on the gazelle, tearing at him not just with their hands but with their teeth, as well.

Noah spun away, unable to look, the boy’s screams ringing in his ears. His gaze alighted on a woman, her hair matted with red, crouched on the ground, gnawing on a human hand. Then a man smashed her in the back of the head with his fist and snatched the hand from her. Soon several people were fighting over the hand, and over other lumps of flesh, too—flesh that looked all too human.

Noah’s eyes darted over the crowd, taking in horror after horror. Everywhere he looked he saw people chewing, their mouths full and drooling blood, their darting, rat-like eyes full of shame, paranoia, and gluttony.

If this was a lesson, then he had learned it. If it was something that the Creator wanted him to see, then he had seen it. He stepped forward, half-raising his hand, unsure exactly what he was about to do, but knowing only that he wanted no more of this. He wanted to stop it somehow, to put it from his sight.

But just as he was about to shout, his gaze was drawn to a figure in the crowd—one who seemed stronger than the rest. Little more than a flailing blur of movement, the man was fighting his way through the throng, hammering aside his fellow men as if
they were little more than children.

Noah had a feeling that the man—whoever he was—was aware of his presence and was heading deliberately in his direction. Full of apprehension but curious, too, he watched and waited as the figure smashed his way forward. The man’s face was hidden, his head down like a battering ram, his arms swinging, his legs kicking and stomping.

At last he burst out of the crowd, directly in front of Noah. Grabbing a lump of dripping meat from the man beside him, and punching the man unconscious without a qualm when he tried to protest, he raised the meat to his mouth and took an almighty bite. There was a spray of blood as the strong man jerked back his head, tearing flesh from the bone. As he chewed ravenously, blood and grease dripping from his chin, his eyes fixed on Noah.

Noah stared back, appalled beyond words.

Impossibly, the man looked like him.

* * *

Noah cried out in shock, and all at once he found himself alone inside the compound, standing in the heart of Tubal-cain’s camp. In one corner a foundry—in which metal was smelted to create weapons of war—gouted flame and smoke. In another corner there was a pit full of slaughtered animals that stank of death and offal.

Turning this way and that, Noah suddenly realized that flames were sprouting not just from the foundry, but from the entire camp. The makeshift dwellings were all on fire, and looking up Noah was horrified to see burning bodies, twisting and writhing as they plummeted from the heavens like
falling stars about to engulf the world in flame…

This was the wickedness in all men, manifested in horror beyond any he had ever witnessed before.

Without thinking, he began to run.

* * *

He regained his senses on the edge of the forest, still running. His heart and head were pounding, his blood rushing through his veins. He felt hot, feverish, as if he had been poisoned—and so he had, in a way. He had been poisoned by the iniquity of Man. He fell to his knees, and as if it had been he himself who had gorged on the meat, he vomited into the grass, emptying his stomach.

Afterward he sat gasping and choking, enervated by his experiences, hot tears of rage and despair trickling from his eyes. Little by little his shock and despair subsided, and as it did so a new resolve hardened inside him. Using his hands he wiped the tears from his cheeks, the drool from his chin. He took a deep breath and rose a little unsteadily to his feet.

What he had seen was beyond terrible, and although it had shaken him to the core, it had focused his mind, too.

Slowly he began to trudge back toward the Ark, and toward his family. The Creator had shown him the way, and he knew now what was expected of him.

* * *

By the time he arrived back at the Ark, Noah was surprised to find that a pink dawn light was suffusing the sky. He had no idea how much of what he had seen was reality and how much a vision—or more specifically, an insight into Man’s true nature, which
the Creator had allowed him to share. Despite the early hour, Naameh, Ila, and the boys were sitting on the ramp, waiting for him impatiently. They all scrambled to their feet as he strode toward them.

“What happened?” Naameh asked breathlessly, but Noah ignored her, instead gesturing around the clearing at the tools and the various household items lying on the grass.

“All this should be inside by now,” he barked. “The storm is coming.”

The family, and several of the Watchers, too, gaped at him as he stormed past them. And then, recovering his wits, Ham ran after him, catching up to Noah as he reached the foot of the ramp.

“Father,” he said, grabbing Noah’s arm. “What about our wives? Where are they?”

Noah spun around, his face like thunder. “There will be no wives!” he snapped.

Ham froze. His face fell. He looked for a moment as if he might burst into tears.

“What do you mean?” he bleated. “Why not? You said the Creator would give us what we need.”

Without even breaking stride or turning his head, Noah shouted, “Enough! Help your brother!”

Almost on the point of tears, but furious, too, Ham put on a spurt of speed. He caught up to his father again halfway up the ramp, and grabbed the trailing end of his shirt.

“No! Listen!” he protested. “You can’t do this, Father! You
can’t
! How am I supposed to be a man?”

“I said
help your brother
!” Noah roared, and with a jerk of his shoulders he yanked himself free of Ham’s grip.

But the boy was not about to be dismissed so easily. This time he grabbed his father’s shirt in a two-handed grip.

“You can’t!” he cried, almost sobbing now. “I hate you! You want me to stay a child.”

Myriad emotions chased themselves through Noah’s mind. He felt guilty for breaking his promise to his son, and he felt genuine pity and sorrow for the boy. But overriding those feelings was a profound sense of horror at what he had seen, and of what he would be letting into the Ark, and ultimately back into the world, if he brought any part of Tubal-cain’s camp back here with him. Difficult though it might be for his family to accept, Noah absolutely believed—more than that, he
knew
—that in order to preserve and protect the world, and to save those he loved, he had to be utterly ruthless.

Yet expressing all of that to Ham was beyond him right now. He still felt too raw, too traumatized by his terrible vision. He needed time to be alone, to be calm, to collect his thoughts.

Still Ham clung to him and wailed at him and told Noah that he hated him. Noah responded with anger and violence. Without thinking, desperate to escape his son’s clutches, he swung around and roughly shoved the boy out of his way.

Ham staggered backward and fell down on the ramp, stunned but relatively unhurt. He glared at Noah, his expression changing from shock to fury, even hatred.

Noah felt shame at his outburst, but he said, “No. I am asking you to be a man and do what needs to be done.”

Ham glared at his father a moment longer. Then
he turned and began to run, across the clearing, toward the forest.

“Ham!” Ila called after him, but the boy ignored her.

Noah, standing halfway up the ramp, opened his mouth as if about to say something, then abruptly turned and walked away, heading into the Ark.

Ila touched Naameh’s arm.

“You speak to Noah. I’ll find Ham.”

Naameh nodded, and Ila turned and hurried after the boy.

* * *

In his workshop, Noah tossed a piece of tzohar into the furnace and watched it ignite. He sat slumped, like a man overburdened and exhausted, though his eyes, which reflected slivers of firelight, were hard as stones, betraying no emotion.

Naameh ghosted up from behind and sat down next to him. She leaned forward a little, looking into his face, but he didn’t acknowledge her.

“What happened out there?” she asked softly.

For a moment he didn’t answer, and she was preparing herself to ask the question again, more insistently this time, when he muttered, “It’s all of us.”

His lips had barely moved. If she hadn’t heard the words she almost could have believed he hadn’t spoken at all.

“What is?” she asked.

He stirred, sighed, then turned his head to look at her. It hurt her to see him so defeated.

“I was wrong.
We
were wrong. We were selfish and arrogant. But He showed me. The wickedness is not only in them. It is in all of us.”

His words were like a judgment upon them all, a sentence of death from an unforgiving magistrate.

“There is no wickedness in our children, Noah,” she said. “Only goodness. Shem’s loyalty. Japheth’s kindness. Ham’s integrity. They are good men. They would be good fathers.”

He shook his head. “Shem is blinded by desire. Ham is covetous. Japheth lives only to please. I am no better. And you? Is there anything you would not do, good or bad, for those three boys? We would both choose to kill in order to protect our children.”

“Yes,” Naameh agreed, exasperated.

“We are no different. We were weak, and we were selfish to think we could set ourselves apart. We will work, complete the task, and then we will die the same as everyone else.”

She scowled, irritated by his obstinacy, and a little frightened, too. Fear made her voice harsher than she intended.

“These are
our
children, Noah,” she insisted. “Can you show them no mercy?”

He looked down at the palm of his hand.

“The time for mercy has passed,” he said stubbornly. “Now our punishment begins.”

Abruptly he stood, grabbed his tool belt from a nearby workbench, and marched toward the short wooden ladder that led down onto the main walkway of the deck below. Naameh listened to him walking away, the thudding of receding footsteps on the wooden boards, and then she slumped forward, lowering her head into her hands. She felt distraught and angry. If only her husband would talk to her, instead of bearing the burden alone and making decisions for them all, with neither consultation nor
explanation. She had suggested more than once that perhaps the Creator’s messages could be interpreted in several ways, but Noah had consistently refused to entertain the notion.

She wished there was something she could do, something that might convince Noah that the world was not as black and white as he believed.

Then an idea came to her. A desperate idea, perhaps even a foolish one. Nevertheless it invigorated her, filled her with urgency and purpose.

Jumping to her feet, she rushed from the room.

H
am had no idea how long he had been running or how far he had come. All he knew was that, based on the way he was feeling now, it could never be long enough, or far enough.

He hated his father.
Hated
him. The emotion was like a physical pain, like a hand reaching deep into his guts and twisting, twisting. He felt trapped, desperate. He felt like screaming into his father’s face, denying everything his father had been working for, everything he believed in. As a child he had followed his father so faithfully, so unquestioningly, but recently he had begun to wonder.