The Gods Look Down (3 page)

‘But it happened to be you.'

‘And Hannah.'

‘Yes,' he said, gazing into the distance.

‘I know that people can be spiteful,' I said, wanting to show him that I was no longer a child. ‘I've seen how some of them behave and their petty ways—'

‘You haven't seen what men can do to each other in the name of belief,' he said sombrely. ‘If you threaten that belief you threaten their existence, and many will not tolerate it. They will strike you down and excuse the act in the name of their belief, the Prophet, even God Himself.'

He fell silent, his lean sinewy fingers clasped together in his lap.

I said, ‘Have the elders decided what should happen to the Ark?'

He shook his head and smiled wearily. ‘For all their so-called wisdom they are lost frightened men. They would rather wait a lifetime for the Prophet to come than have him appear in their midst.'

I stared at him. ‘Do they believe the Prophet has come?' My voice sounded peculiar in my ears. Supposing the elders believed … but I dared not say it out loud, or even think it without trembling.

My father turned and looked at me. His face was tight and drawn hard together. ‘They wish to question you and Hannah about the finding of the Ark. You must not say anything that will make them suspicious. You must behave as children and answer them as children, even though you have the minds of young adults. Do you understand?'

‘But they've already questioned us. More than once. We told them everything that happened, omitting nothing. What more, can we tell them?'

‘They believe,' my father said heavily, ‘that the Ark spoke to you. That it gave you certain knowledge which you have not imparted.'

‘Why should we hold anything back?' I said earnestly. ‘For what reason? Everything happened the way we told it. There's nothing more to say.'

‘Nevertheless they wish to question you further.'

I looked at him directly so that he couldn't avoid my eyes. ‘Are they afraid of me? Do they think I know the secret of the Ark, its true purpose, and won't reveal it?'

‘Do you believe you have been chosen to lead our people? Did you receive the Divine Word when you discovered the Ark in the cavern?'

There was a haunted look on his face as he asked these questions. I didn't know what answer I should give: it wasn't clear in my mind whether he wanted his son to be recognized as the long-awaited Prophet or if the idea was so terrible that he had obstinately set his face against it. I needed my father's counsel but he was unable to help me. Without fully understanding why, I said:

‘We must wait for a sign. The Ark has been delivered to us for a purpose, which is not yet revealed. We must have patience.'

‘You have more wisdom than is natural for a fourteen-year-old boy. I am afraid for you, Kish. I am afraid for us all.' His lean windburnt face was closed and passive, hiding his true feeling.

‘What harm can befall me if I tell the truth?' I demanded. ‘I have no reason to lie. I only want the Tribe to find its home in the wilderness. The elders must believe that.'

‘The elders will choose to believe or not believe as it suits them,' my father said. ‘And if there is to be a sign let it be soon – for all our sakes.'

I lay in the tent that night, unable to sleep, my mind overflowing with questions, perplexities, fears. It even occurred to me to wonder whether the spirit within the Ark had in reality spoken to me … if somehow it had communicated certain things which were beyond my comprehension and yet which I was expected to relate to the elders. Was it my appointed task to spread the Word? Had I to prepare the way for the greater glory that was to come? Would the mysterious purpose of the Ark be made plain to me, and through me to all our people?

I had never felt so alone in all my life. My family was close around me, father, mother, sisters, but their physical nearness brought no comfort. They were like the rest of the Tribe, normal people, while I was cut off by the sense that more was expected of me than blind obedience to a way of life that had hardly changed for twenty-eight generations. It was a feeling in my bones that something – I can only describe it as ‘glorious' – was about to happen. Our eyes would be opened and we would be changed far beyond the dead drab ways of our forefathers and of the elders who sought to impose their narrow preconceptions on us – as if by virtue of their extreme old age.

Lying there, wide awake in the chill darkness, I had a vision of the future. It was as much an indefinable emotion as anything else: a powerful inner certainty that we were about to embark on a great adventure. In spite of my father's foreboding I had no real fear. There would be momentous changes but we would survive them. The elders were the last of a dying species, without hope or faith, and in time would be swept aside by their own ignorance. Yet the audacity of these thoughts took my breath away – that a mere boy should question the wisdom handed down through generations. What if this inner certainty was nothing more than a derangement of
the mind, a flight of youthful imagination? I had nothing to fall back on other than a fragile belief which flickered inside me like a naked candle flame in the wind. It wasn't unknown for people of the Tribe to be cast out and left to die in the desert for incurring the displeasure of the elders; and if this was to be my fate could I rely on the spirit within the Ark to protect and deliver me from the wickedness in the hearts of men?

*

The hammer of the sun pounded down upon the camp. The horizon was a shimmering wave of heat, a fragmented and distorted line of unreality encircling us like a trap. We could not escape from it, even at the full gallop of the fastest camel; it was our eternal prison.

The second day of interrogation was well advanced and I was weary with the constant repetition of questions which never seemed to lead anywhere but went on and on until they reached the point where they had started from and began all over again. Our replies were always the same – as they had to be – given that we were speaking the truth as near as we could remember it. The slightest hesitation or discrepancy was pounced upon and flung back in our faces as though we had been caught out in a blatant lie, and on Hannah's face I saw the blank bewilderment of a child wrongly accused of a crime of which it has no knowledge. Several times she said: ‘Tell me what I've done wrong. Was it wrong to enter the cavern? If it was I didn't know, I was curious, there was nobody to warn me – if it was wrong I beg your forgiveness.'

The elders were nine in number. The chief elder was called Ocran. He rarely spoke, watching us with hooded eyes and leaving the endless tirade of questions to the others. I gained the impression that he was the self-appointed judge, weighing the ‘evidence' and then eventually coming to a decision as to our ‘guilt' or ‘innocence'. I had little faith that this would be done dispassionately and without bias.

I was asked why I had sought shelter in that particular cave. Didn't it seem odd that out of all the caves available I should have chosen the only one that led to the inner cavern?

Such was the abysmal level of the questioning.

I answered that I had chosen that particular cave because I had chosen it and for no other reason. There was a storm, I
reminded them, it was as dark as a moonless night and my only thought was to find a refuge until the storm had passed.

‘You and the girl-child Hannah were alone together for a long time,' said the elder Pagiel.

I said yes, that was so.

‘And what did you do all this time?'

‘We talked, then we slept for a while; when we woke up we heard the noise.'

‘You talked and slept,' said the elder Merari, twisting his mouth into an ugly shape. ‘Such innocence. No thought in your childish heads but to talk and sleep.' He looked at the others.

‘Did you cohabit with the girl-child?' Pagiel said. ‘Did you lay down upon her and introduce your semen into her womb?'

I answered that I had not.

‘All that time and you merely talked and slept,' Merari said, shaking his head in mock wonder. ‘What a credit you both are to the Tribe. Not a single wicked thought in your heads. Well well. I am most impressed by your sobriety and self-discipline. Commendable!'

‘Are you able to conceive, child?' Ocran demanded of Hannah. His eyes were as heavy as stones. ‘Has your body prepared itself to bear children?'

Hannah answered shyly that she was of an age when this was possible. ‘Though what Kish says is true,' she added. ‘Nothing happened between us. We didn't do anything.'

‘Then time will confirm your story,' Ocran said, smiling bleakly. ‘Or it will not.'

I said, ‘Is this why we're being questioned? Are we being accused of unlawful cohabitation?' I could feel my face burning.

‘You are not accused of anything,' Pagiel said quietly. ‘However, that tone of disrespect is enough in itself to demand chastisement. You are before the elders, a fact you should keep well in mind.'

‘I do not accept—' I started to say, and checked myself: They were baiting me and it was perverse foolishness to go along with it.

‘You have told us that the object in the cavern spoke to you,' Merari said.

‘I have said that it made a noise. It did not speak. It made the same noise you yourselves heard, like the low moaning of the wind.'

‘And yet you were not afraid. You went directly into the cavern and stood before the object – the Ark as you describe it.'

‘We were both afraid.' I replied. ‘But the sight of it was so miraculous that our fear was set aside. We didn't think—'

‘So it appeared before you as in a divine miracle?' one of the elders interjected. ‘The Lord of Heaven made it suddenly appear in front of your eyes and you knew it to be an instrument of God.'

‘Do you believe you have been chosen to witness this divine miracle?' Pagiel said.

‘Why should the Prophet have selected you of all the Tribe?' Merari said.

‘I don't know if it was a miracle. I never claimed—'

‘Did you not say it was miraculous? Have you not said that the spirit within the instrument of God made you unafraid and you were able to approach it in complete serenity?'

‘Did the spirit say why you had been chosen above all others? Did it speak your name and instruct you to inform the Tribe of its miraculous appearance?'

‘It did not
speak
,' I asserted. ‘It was exactly as you saw it, glowing with light and making the same sound.'

‘And what of its purpose?' Ocran said, his eyes hard and unyielding. ‘Did this miraculous apparition inform you why it had been delivered into our midst?'

‘I don't know how it came to be locked inside the cavern or why it should fall to us to discover it there. Perhaps in time these things will be revealed, by a sign or an omen we can understand.'

‘It told you to expect a sign?' Merari said.

‘Did the spirit tell you what this sign would be?' Pagiel asked. ‘Or where we should look for it?'

‘No,' I said. ‘No—' The frustration of this was wearing my tolerance to a fine edge. They were wilfully misunderstanding every word I uttered. They had it fixed in their minds that the presence of the Ark was due solely to my finding it there; nothing, it seemed, would dislodge the notion. And then I thought I understood: it was envy that drove them, for they
were the elders, and divine manifestations had to come through them and no one else. They had not been ‘chosen' to discover the instrument of God and therefore it was necessary to discredit me in the eyes of the Tribe. They were jealous.

Pagiel said, ‘This object – is it a power for good or evil?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You seem to know that we should await a sign,' Merari said dryly. ‘This glowing droning object, whatever it is, has warned you to expect a further revelation. Are its powers infinite? Has it been sent to serve our people or to harm them?'

‘It has not harmed us so far.'

‘That is not an answer to the question,' Ocran said impassively. His eyes were cold and dead from within.

‘What other answer can I give?' Something occurred to me. ‘The legend written on the hard shiny surface – doesn't that tell us something?'

‘Does it?' Merari said silkily. ‘As you seem to possess the greater knowledge perhaps you will decipher it for us.'

‘I haven't been taught to read.'

‘Yet you knew it was writing of some kind.'

‘That was obvious.'

Merari twisted his mouth downwards. ‘But not its meaning.' He glanced at the others.

I looked from Merari to Pagiel and from him to Ocran. ‘Is it not written in our tongue?'

‘Such innocence,' Pagiel said. ‘It is not written in any language known to any tribe of the desert. The object comes from some distant place, far beyond the desert lands.'

‘And you do not understand what is written,' Merari said, his voice softly insinuating.

I looked at each of them in turn. ‘Your minds are closed to the truth. In your hearts you believe that the object is the true instrument of God but your ignorance makes you afraid. The Tribe looks to you for wisdom and guidance and you cannot fulfil that responsibility.'

Ocran said, ‘You speak rashly, even for a youth.' There was a note of warning in his voice. ‘We have been patient with you, because of your age, but there is a limit to our forebearance and understanding.'

‘I have seen neither forebearance nor understanding. I had
hoped to respect you as the leaders of our people but you are merely old tired men looking backwards into the past. The future is a blank wall to you, one that you will never scale. You tell the people to expect the coming of the Prophet and yet the words are like dead thorns in your mouths, signifying nothing but your own lack of faith. Nothing on this earth will shift you from your cringing bigotry.'