Noah (17 page)

But it was no use.

No use.

With a thunderous, rage-filled roar, the trees seemed to shudder and tear and collapse behind them, and suddenly Tubal-cain’s advance guardsmen were swarming from the darkness of the forest. To Ham they didn’t look like individuals at all, but like connected parts of a single entity, vast and monstrous, a relentlessly advancing wave of hatred and madness, that wanted nothing more than to rend, to kill, to destroy.

He realized that the horde was composed mostly of refugees, rather than soldiers. He caught a confused impression of glaring, skull-like faces, and wide-open mouths emitting thin, murderous screams. Clothes and hair black and gleaming with rain, hands bristling with makeshift weapons.

He watched the horde, mesmerized for two seconds, maybe three, and then he turned his
attention back to Na’el. With renewed urgency and desperation, he tore at the metal trap, screamed at it, but in vain. Even though it now was a matter of life and death, he couldn’t free the girl he had promised to protect, the girl that he had thought might melt his father’s stone heart, after all.

He looked up again. The horde screamed at him, bore down on him. He screamed back at them. He scrambled to his feet, bitterly cold and shaking all over. Utterly terrified, but prepared to die to protect Na’el.

And then a figure erupted from the trees. Turning to see who it was, Ham’s heart leapt.

“Father!” he shouted, and turned back to Na’el, eyes gleaming. “It is my father. We are safe now. Safe.”

The last time Ham had seen his father he had hated him so much he had wanted him to die. But now, as Noah raced toward him, water splashing up around his feet from the boggy ground, he seemed heroic, invincible, a man of honor and peace, and yet at the same time the most powerful warrior of all.

Noah reached Ham, swept him up in his arms and threw him over his shoulder as if he weighed nothing more than a sack of flour. Ham expected his father to kneel beside Na’el, to wrench apart the jaws of the trap with one effortless show of strength. But to his alarm, Noah immediately turned and began to run back in the direction he had come—back toward the Ark.

Looking over his father’s shoulder, Ham saw Na’el’s prone and trapped form receding from him rapidly.

“No, Father!” he screamed.

Tubal-cain’s troops were still surging forward,
their teeth bared, their eyes crazed, their weapons held aloft.

And so Noah fled back the way he had come, still carrying Ham, but leaving Na’el at the mercy of the advancing hordes.

Ham struggled and twisted, but he couldn’t break free of his father’s grip. The last thing he saw before Tubal-cain’s army swept over Na’el like a raging black sea was the terrified, despairing face of the girl he had sworn to protect.

It was a sight that would haunt him for the rest of his days.

H
ampered by the weight of Ham in his arms, struggling and kicking furiously, Noah was certain that Tubal-cain’s army was gaining on him. Hoping it would aid both himself and his son, he swung Ham to the ground and pushed the boy ahead of him.

But already the front line of the army was at his back, and indeed, even as he ran, the swiftest and fittest of the warrior king’s men began to run alongside him, pulling ahead.

Noah hunched his shoulders, expecting a killing blow, but none came. He was puzzled at first, and then slowly it dawned on him that in the rain and the confusion and the frenzy of battle he was unrecognizable—just another storm-lashed figure, spattered with mud, who was being swept along in the headlong rush toward the Ark. The fact that the dark sky above had cast the forest
into gloom also aided his anonymity.

One thing the gloom
didn’t
aid, though, was his attempt to keep Ham within sight ahead of him. As the front line of Tubal-cain’s army swallowed them up, his son disappeared into the crowd.

“Ham!” Noah yelled, but it was no use. Even if Ham
had
answered him, Noah doubted he would have been able to hear it above the screams of the horde and the roar of the rain.

Then suddenly they were through the trees and bursting into the clearing. Noah saw the Watchers rise like man-mountains to meet them, saw them use their lower arms to pull taut the long iron chains that lay on the ground between them, forming an unbreakable barrier. He heard Samyaza call out, “Watchers, prepare! Mankind is upon us!” And then he saw the Watchers raise their upper arms, so that their clenched fists looked like massive stone clubs.

Many of the men on the front line, seeing the Watchers for the first time, screamed in fear. Yet they couldn’t halt their headlong advance. Propelled by the onrushing masses behind them, they collided with the line of Watchers and were instantly crushed.

Noah, swept along in the throng, saw Samyaza’s huge arms smashing down toward him and the rest of the first wave of humans. As the Watchers’ fists pounded down, raising huge splashes of water and shaking the ground, he barely escaped being pulverized.

Then, though it seemed impossible, Samyaza’s keen eyes picked him out among the surging crush of humanity.

“Samyaza!” Noah bellowed above the rain. “Where is Ham?”

“Noah!” Samyaza replied. “Fear not. Ham is through!”

With one hand he swept aside the men in front of Noah, while with another he plucked Noah from the throng and deposited him safely behind the line of Watchers, directly on to the ramp of the Ark.

Ahead of him, at the top of the ramp, Noah saw his middle son about to enter the Ark.

“Ham!” he called joyously.

But Ham did not reply.

* * *

“He is not here,” Ila said.

Naameh sighed and shook her head, her face troubled. When Ham had run past her into the Ark, she had thought he might head for the Hearth. She had hoped she would find him there, still mad at his father, still brooding about the earlier argument. She had envisaged talking to him softly, coaxing him out of himself. Indeed, she had almost convinced herself that deep down, this was what her son would have been hoping for upon his return—a chance to pour his heart out to his mother.

But Ham was not here. Perhaps the earlier wound, inflicted by his father, ran deeper than she had thought. Or perhaps something else had happened out there in the forest, something about which she knew nothing. If so, she wanted to get to the heart of it, and quickly. In the current situation, it was a distraction that they could do without.

Japheth, who had followed Naameh into the Hearth, said, “Why is Ham so angry, Mother?”

Naameh’s heart went out to her younger son. He was still too young, too unworldly—a state Noah
had been all too happy to encourage. He could not fully understand how his elder brother’s frustrations and desires were affecting his thoughts and moods. She drew Japheth to her and kissed his forehead.

“He is angry at the world,” she said. “At its wickedness.”

“I thought he was angry at Father.”

Naameh hesitated. How could she explain the situation briefly, succinctly, without telling an outright lie? “He is angry with your father because your father stands
between
Ham and the world. He doesn’t realize that all your father wants to do is protect him from its wickedness.”

Before her youngest could ponder on this too deeply, Naameh said to Ila, “Stay here with Japheth.”

Ila nodded.

“Of course.”

“Where are you going, Mother?” Japheth asked.

“I’m going to find Ham, and I’m going to bring him back to us.”

* * *

The rain was getting harder and stronger, the individual drops so compacted that it was becoming almost impossible to see anything
but
rain.

Fighting beside Samyaza, Og narrowed his eyes, trying to penetrate the sweeping, dark-gray veils of water. Though Tubal-cain’s men outnumbered them by dozens—perhaps even
hundreds
—his hope was that this would ultimately work to the Watchers’ advantage. The men were smaller. The water would be up over their shins, perhaps even as high as their knees. This would make them slower, more ponderous, and therefore vulnerable.

Suddenly a light appeared somewhere within the surging mass of humanity that was trying to break through their defensive line. A white, glowing ball, like a small sun. Og peered at it, puzzled. What was this? A sign from the Creator? Then, too late, he realized that the “sun” was getting larger, that it was arcing toward them.

Before he could shout a warning, it was among them, a ball of white flame, crashing down on a fellow Watcher’s shoulder.

The Watcher staggered, his body engulfed in flame for a moment, but he did not fall. Even as the ball of fire fizzled out, extinguished by the rain, more came hurtling toward them. Each Watcher raised a pair of arms to shield their heads, others to bat the fireballs away with their stone fists.

Behind this attack, through the sweeping liquid curtain of rain, Og saw the warrior king, Tubal-cain. He was advancing behind the first wave of his vast army, whom Og had already realized were not trained warriors, but simply half-starved refugees given weapons. A phalanx of the real soldiers, heavily armored and using their raised shields to form a protective wedge around their leader, were moving forward now. Peering through the swathes of rain, Og saw seven other shielded wedges moving into position at different points along the Watcher line. Each wedge protected a separate warlord, all of whom were armed with long metal tubes, wider at one end than the other.

It was from these tubes that the fireballs were coming. The pure whiteness of the fire suggested that the material being used to create the fireballs was tzohar. It was the same material that made up the earthly bodies of the Watchers themselves.

Most of the fireballs were failing to connect, the Watchers ducking to avoid them, but some were not. Og saw another of his brothers take a hit, this time in his chest.

Beside him, Samyaza stepped forward, releasing an angry roar as he smashed a fireball aside with his forearm.

* * *

Standing at the top of the ramp, Noah watched the two armies clash. Seeing the vast army of men confronting the mighty Watchers was like watching a swarm of spiders fighting a pack of dogs, or rats battling with lions.

The Watchers were clearly bigger and stronger and more powerful, and were capable of crushing men beneath their feet or sweeping dozens aside with a single blow from one of their huge arms. But the men had the numerical advantage. Those who managed to breach the defenses—and there were many—swarmed up and over the Watchers’ bodies, slashing and hacking with swords and axes and knives, pummeling with clubs and staves.

And they had the tzohar cannons, too. Already Noah had seen several Watchers sent reeling by well-aimed fireballs. One Watcher, who had already been struck twice, was clearly weakened. His body was almost hidden beneath a blanket of men who were clambering all over him, slashing him with swords and stabbing him viciously with homemade pikes. His six arms were flailing, plucking off the occasional assailant and hurling him aside, but whenever one man was cast away, there was instantly another to take his place.

Then one of the warlords moved into position,
armed with a tzohar cannon. He shouted an order, and suddenly the men crawling over the Watcher’s body began to retreat, dropping to the ground. The next moment a fireball erupted from the cannon, hitting the Watcher full in the face, this time from close range.

Part of the huge Watcher’s head was ripped away in an explosion of stone and fire, and he crashed to the ground, dead. Through the roar of the rain, Noah heard a ragged cheer from the giant’s assailants. But then the cheering turned to consternation, and then to cries of alarm.

The men gathering around the Watcher’s fallen body—like insects attracted to carrion—began to back away. The Watcher’s chest had started to glow. And even more astonishingly, the vertical sheets of rain which were falling on and around him suddenly began to
bend
, to pull back, as though creating a funnel that led directly to the heavens.

Then the cries became screams as, with an earsplitting crackle, a single bolt of lightning shot up out of the Watcher’s chest and into the black, rain-lashed sky. It hung there like a rope of light connecting the world of men to the heavens, lighting up the white, gaping faces of Tubal-cain’s army like a million candle flames. Their screams of panic intensified as the Watcher’s body suddenly exploded into thousands of pieces, sending men flying in all directions.

For a moment the fighting stopped, Watchers and men gazing in astonishment as something white and pure and brilliant began to rise from the debris of the body.

Og, Samyaza, and the other Watchers recognized it immediately, and then Noah knew what it was. It was the Watcher’s true form. It was their brother
as he had been before falling to the earthly plain, transformed once again into an expanding pillar of pure energy. Somewhere within the column of radiance, six great wings unfurled.

And then the Watcher was gone, shooting up into the black sky almost too swiftly for the eye to perceive, his route back to the heavens collapsing behind him, filling with darkness and rain once again.

For an instant after his ascension, nobody moved. The horde was silent.

Then Samyaza raised his head.

“The Creator brings him home!” he bellowed. “Our redemption is secure!” He let loose a wild, ululating cry of victory, of exultation. One by one, the other Watchers joined in.

And then, as one, they waded forward, fighting with abandon now, crushing and smashing Tubal-cain’s men aside, cutting a swathe through the ranks.

* * *

Naameh descended a wooden ladder leading to a narrow corridor that was on the same level as the reptile decks, calling her son’s name.

Huddled in a pile of fresh leaves at the base of one of the artificially constructed “trees,” surrounded by sleeping snakes, Ham heard her but did not respond. Instead he shuffled further down into the leaves, pulling them up and over his body, concealing himself.