Noah (4 page)

He struggled, fought against them, but the hands became tighter and tighter. He felt the life being squeezed out of him…

* * *

Noah sat bolt upright in the darkness. He was still screaming. He could still feel the hands of the dead on him, and he tried to struggle against them, to pull away. But then he realized that the hands were warm, not cold, and that they were stroking him, soothing him.

They were Naameh’s hands. Her voice came to him in the darkness, full of fear.

“Noah?”

He began to calm down, his rapid breathing slowing gradually, the sweat cooling on his body. On the far side of the tent the boys slept on, oblivious, their breathing heavy and even. The baby, too, drowsy with mother’s milk, was undisturbed by his outburst.

“Was it a dream?” Naameh asked softly.

“More than a dream,” Noah said.

All at once the darkness of the tent and the heat of their combined bodies in the enclosed space seemed stifling. Without another word he rose from his bed and went outside. The cool air, sweeping across his clammy flesh, was like a salve. He stretched, looking up at the stars scattered across the night sky. The moon bathed the land in a pale light.

Behind him he heard a ripple of canvas as the entrance flap of the tent was pushed aside and then fell back into place. Naameh’s footsteps were as soft as a mountain cat’s. Then his wife was pressing herself against his back, encircling his body with her arms. She placed one hand on his stomach, the other on his chest, over his heart, as if trying to calm its too-rapid beat.

For what seemed like minutes the two of them stood there, not speaking. Naameh was content to allow her husband the time he needed to collect his thoughts.

At last, in a low voice, Noah said, “He speaks to me.”

Naameh kissed his back. “Who?”

When Noah didn’t answer she said, “The Creator?”

Still he was silent, but to Naameh his silence spoke volumes. Her husband was a man of deep thoughts and few words, but Naameh knew him so well that it was almost as though she could read what was in his mind simply by looking at his eyes, his face, even the way he held his body.

“He speaks like He did to your father?” she said softly. “Your grandfather? What does he say?”

She felt the muscles in Noah’s back stiffen, as if he was bracing himself for something.

“I am not sure. It cannot be, but…”

“But what?”

This time his silence was not contemplative, but ominous. She felt dread, like cold from the ground, creeping up through her body.

“Noah,” she said more sharply. “What did you see?”

He sighed. When he spoke his words seemed to carry a terrible weight.

“He’s going to destroy the world.”

W
hile Noah rolled up the bedrolls and secured them tightly with twine, Naameh moved around inside the family tent, selecting essential items—clothes, food and water, blankets for the baby—and packing them neatly and efficiently into canvas bags.

Outside the boys were folding one of the smaller, more portable tents that Noah took with him when local pickings were slim and his foraging expeditions forced him to go further afield. They laughed as they did so, making a game of it. They had not questioned Noah’s announcement that the family would be undertaking a journey.

Their father’s word was law.

Naameh stole a glance through the open flap of the tent to ensure that the boys were occupied, and then turned to her husband. Noah had curtailed the previous night’s discussion by suggesting that the
two of them should sleep, in preparation for the following day.

“What about us?” she said now. “What about the boys? He can’t mean to destroy us all. It’s… well, it’s just not fair.”

Noah gave a brief nod. His face was troubled. “I agree.”

She sighed. “So won’t you tell me the reason for this journey? I will follow you to the ends of the earth, you know that, but I would still prefer to know
why
I am following you.”

Noah smiled, and paused in his preparations. He said, “I believe there must be
something
that we are meant to do. That’s why He calls. Grandfather will know. In my dream I saw his land. His home. We must go to see him.”

Naameh was surprised. Whatever she had expected it wasn’t this.

“How do you know he still lives?”

“I don’t,” Noah admitted.

She took a long, slow breath, raised a hand to wipe dust and sweat from her forehead. Staring again out at their sons, and the horizon behind them, she said, more hopefully than seriously, “We could take the boys and find a place to hide.”

Noah shook his head. “There will be no hiding. We should have left already.”

“It is a dangerous journey,” Naameh said. “We will need to pass near to the cities.”

“We will avoid contact,” Noah said stubbornly.

Naameh raised her eyebrows. “That may be difficult.”

“Nevertheless we have no choice. There is no more running away. We must go where He leads us.”

* * *

For the rest of that day the family trudged across the flat plain, Noah taking the lead. Each of them carried a canvas bag and a bedroll, balanced on the back and secured around the waist and across the shoulders. Naameh carried the lightest pack, but only because the baby, Japheth, was in a sling strapped to her chest, swaddled against the biting wind and the occasional choking swirls of dust. They stopped infrequently and spoke hardly at all. Now and then Noah would pause to collect roots and herbs and edible plants that he spotted growing among the rocks or in the otherwise barren soil, and would add them to the satchel at his waist.

By mid-afternoon the family had arrived on the outskirts of what used to be a lush forest, full of plants and wildlife. A viciously cold wind descended upon them as they wove a path through what were now merely blackened stumps protruding from the denuded earth.

After fourteen hours of walking, when the sky was darkening and the moon was glimmering on the horizon, they stopped to set up camp. Naameh fed the baby while Noah, aided by the boys, prepared a simple but nourishing stew of vegetables and herbs. Once they had eaten—mostly silently, because they were all so tired—they unrolled their bedrolls, lay down, and slept deeply.

The next day they were walking through mountainous country, and the going was hard. Their bodies ran with sweat, their backs soaked beneath their heavy packs. Around midday, with the white sun high in the sky, they came across an abandoned mine.

Close to the mine there was a deep scar in the ground, the first of many which had been channeled into the rock in order to strip the mountain of its minerals and precious metals. Noah came upon a large puddle of toxic liquid composed of poisons so corrosive that the miners had used it to eat into the rock and so aid their digging. Lying in the puddle, coated in unnatural orange slime, was a dead deer. The slime had burned its way through the animal’s body in numerous places, creating blistered craters of rotting, gangrenous flesh. Fat blue-black flies hovered above the deer’s carcass and it stank so badly that even Noah, who was used to the smell of death, covered his mouth and nose with the sackcloth scarf that he wore as protection against the dust.

He stared down at the carcass bitterly, anger churning in his belly. Thanks to Man’s greed, great swaths of once-fertile land were now dead and poisoned and rotting. This deer was merely a tiny representation of that, a symbol of the greater devastation.

Feeling movement brush past his leg, Noah looked down. Ham walked by him almost as if sleepwalking, heading toward the pool, his eyes wide as if mesmerized by the sight of the dead deer.

“Ham!” Noah barked.

The boy jumped, then halted and turned his head. “Yes, Father?”

“The pool is dangerous. The liquid in it will kill you if you touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to touch it,” Ham said.

The family walked on, Noah leading the way, pointing out more pools of the toxic substance. By late afternoon they began to see huge, half-decayed pipes, many of them jointed haphazardly together,
strung across the sky ahead of them. Ham stared at the pipes in wonder, but the grim look on his father’s face dissuaded him from asking about them.

A little later he had his answer anyway. The family crested a debris-strewn hill, and was confronted with the sight of an entire mountainside torn and blasted to nothing but a crater of charred rubble. In the center something large and black—a group of huts, perhaps—smoldered in a haze of smoke.

They stood silently for a moment, each of them appalled by such a stark embodiment of the destructive depths to which Man could sink. Finally Shem spoke.

“Is that a tzohar mine?”

Noah nodded. His voice sounded as drained and dead as the land itself. “Yes, before they dug it all up.”

“Should we go around?” Naameh said.

Noah considered. Steep cliffs flanked the mine. The climb down on either side would have been treacherous. He himself could have managed it, but he didn’t want to risk the lives of his wife and children. He shook his head.

“No. Let the boys see. They should know what men have become.”

He led his family down the rubble-strewn slope, following a track of sorts through the mounds of charred rock. As they approached the smoldering ruins they realized what it was—a cluster of shabby wagons. There had once been at least six separate ones, perhaps more. It was difficult to tell
exactly
how many, since they had all been wrecked and pillaged before being set afire.

The smoke from the ruins was drifting toward them, making them cough, when they saw the bodies.

They were strewn and sprawled amongst the wreckage as though they were nothing but items of debris themselves, the remains of a ragtag community of malnourished men, women, and children, all of whom had been slashed and hacked to death. This close he could see that they had been gleaners, picking up what the miners had left behind.

Noah tore his eyes away from the horrific scene and looked around at his family. Naameh’s pale eyes were wide as she stared at the corpses, her face white as milk, the fingers of one slender hand pressed to her lips. Shem and Ham had both been shocked into immobility, and Ham’s mouth hung open in disbelief.

Naameh drew a long, shuddering breath and her hand drifted down from her face.

“I think we’ve seen enough.”

Noah nodded and drew Ham to him, half-covering the boy’s eyes with his hand.

“Do you think they’re all dead?” Ham asked, his voice hushed.

“It looks that way,” Naameh said. “They must have been scavenging here.”

“And someone scavenged from them,” Noah added grimly.

Suddenly, from the devastation, there came a single, wordless moan of pain. Instantly Noah was alert.

“Stay close,” he ordered, then he hurried across to the smoldering dwellings, his feet crunching on charred wood. As he moved, he began to search among them.

It was Shem, however, who found the survivor.

“Mother! Father! Here!” he called.

Throwing aside fragments of black and splintered
wood and chunks of debris that were stacked up between two of the dwellings, he picked his way across to a young girl, perhaps eight years old, who was lying among the remnants of what must once have been her home.

A moment later Naameh joined him. As she knelt beside the body of the girl, she felt a pang of maternal anguish.

The child’s eyelids were fluttering as she drifted in and out of consciousness, and barely audible moans of pain were trickling from her mouth. Because of the blood and dirt that coated the girl’s body, however, it was difficult to tell at first how badly she had been wounded. Gently Naameh examined her, carefully lifting aside a torn flap of clothing across her stomach.

Instantly she went cold. The girl had a severe belly wound. She had been slashed with a sharp blade, which had opened her up from hip to hip. It was only because she was lying on her back that her innards had not spilled out through the slit. Even so, the girl had lost a great deal of blood. As a result, her flesh was icy cold.

“Will she live, Mother?” Shem asked.

“I don’t know,” Naameh said. “But we will do our best for her.”

In truth she thought it doubtful. The girl was considerably closer to death than to life. Nevertheless, after handing Japheth to Shem, she opened her pack and pulled out a needle and thread, water, healing herbs, and homemade bandages.

For what seemed like forever, with Noah and the boys looking on anxiously, she worked on the girl, cleaning and stitching up the wound, before applying an herb poultice and securing it tightly with bandages.
From time to time she glanced at the girl’s face. Her skin was gray, her lips almost blue, and cold sweat had caused her hair to stick in worm-like strands to her cheeks and forehead. For all that, she was a pretty little thing, fine-boned with delicate features.

Toward the end of Naameh’s ministrations, as she tied the bandages to make them secure, the girl’s eyes flickered open and she stared with a sort of wide-eyed wonder.

“Are you an angel?” she whispered.

Naameh smiled. “No, I’m just a friend. Do you have a name?”

The girl simply stared at her. Consciousness drifted out of her eyes, then snapped back in again.

“No matter,” Naameh said softly. “You’re safe now.”

She carefully pushed sweaty strands of hair out of the girl’s face. The child tried to pull away, and then cried out at the pain caused by even this slight movement. Spots of blood began to seep through the bandages. Naameh shushed her and urged her to lie still.

“Ila,” the girl whispered. “My name is Ila.”

“Ila,” Naameh repeated, smiling. “That’s a very pretty name. Ila, this is my husband, Noah. He’s going to carry you. Is that all right?”

Ila glanced at Noah and nodded.

“And this is Shem,” she said, turning to her eldest son, who was crouched beside her. “He’s going to hold your hand tight and he won’t let go.”

Shem smiled at Ila, and she smiled back. Naameh stepped back to allow Noah to crouch down, carefully slip two arms under the girl’s body, and lift her up. He was as careful and as gentle as possible, but she
still cried out in pain. Shem squeezed her hand and she squeezed his in return, her eyes flickering toward him gratefully.