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y father towered over us as he commanded my three brothers and me to climb into the boat. My mother wept as she watched my father push the boat away from our flooding house. I could not stand it. I leapt from the boat and rushed against the water that coursed heavily against my legs. I took my mother into my arms and embraced her, my tiny mother who was barely as tall as my shoulders. I feared I would never see her again. There was only so much room in the boat with the amount of supplies we would need to ride out the storm, so our parents decided we children would be the ones saved. As I held her, she murmured a spell to protect us, a spell my father had taught her.
“Get back in the boat, girl,” my father demanded and I obeyed. I made it back to the boat quickly, the water pushing against me. My brother Joachim grabbed my hand and pulled me in, and it wasn’t ten minutes before the storm carried us out so far that we could no longer see our parents or the home we had grown up in. Though rainwater coursed down our faces, I knew my brothers were crying along with me. Water became our enemy, as it rushed into the boat from the sky and from the sides as we roiled across an ever-expanding sea.
I do not know how long the rain lasted. None of us do. Ananias swore it was at least a month, but it was hard to tell. After a while, night became indistinguishable from day as the clouds thickened and the panes of descending rain blocked light from the sky. It rained so long that water swallowed all the land and even mountains became obscured. We slept in shifts, huddled together for warmth as one of us remained awake to bail the boat.
Ananias was in charge of rationing the food and fresh water, and to his credit, he made it last much longer than Joachim or I could have. We would have succumbed to our hunger much more quickly and squandered the resources, but Ananias’s harder nature ensured we had food and fresh water even as our stomachs churned with hunger. Nathaniel was too young to be of much help but he took as many turns as he could bailing water out of the boat.
The unrelenting rain not only chilled us, but also caused rashes to erupt on our skin, especially where our clothes rubbed along our necks, waists and thighs. Our feet suffered the worst, as constant water exposure caused the skin to slough away in thin, white strips. Salt water from the sea spattered across our faces constantly and Nathaniel could not stop rubbing his eyes. The whites turned bright, bloody red and we did our best to stop him from making it worse, but he rubbed his eyes even in his sleep.
As horrible as those soaked days were, our torment did not really begin until the rain stopped and the sun came out. The rays were relentless. Our skin burned to a bright pink and our hair began to bleach lighter. There was nowhere to go to get away from the glare, so we removed our clothes and arranged them on top of us so that nothing poked out, not even our feet. We slept as much as we could. Near constant sleep also conserved our energy and ensured we ate less. Provisions were dangerously low.
During the first week after the rain stopped, I saw a boat on the horizon. It was a small craft like ours and my heart surged with joy. We were not the only survivors. “Boys, wake up!” I shouted. “Wake up! I see a boat!”
“You’re hallucinating, Rebekka,” Joachim muttered from under his shirt.
“No, it is a boat, I promise you!” I began to poke him until he sighed and sat up. He looked off into the horizon where I pointed and he blinked. He rubbed his eyes and looked again.
“Wake up! Rebekka’s right! There’s a boat!” Such was our elation at discovering the boat that we did not even bother to dress. We paddled furiously towards the boat, naked and unaware of it as our excitement fueled the first bit of energy we had felt in days.
“Hello!” Nathaniel began to shout but as we grew closer to the boat, we could tell there was no one aboard. Joachim looked at the maker’s mark on the side and declared, “This is Araqiel’s mark,” and upon hearing that, our energy drained again. Araqiel was a close friend of our father’s and the boat seemed a floating memorial, for surely Araqiel’s family was lost to the water. Ananias noticed there were wooden boxes and small chests still in the boat—clearly it had not capsized. What had happened to the passengers? Had they grown miserable during the rains and jumped out into the water to end their miseries?
Ananias decided that we should tie the boat to ours, not only to avail ourselves of the supplies on it, but also to ensure we had a second craft should ours fail. Later we encountered three similar boats, though none with marks we recognized. All but one were completely empty and Ananias picked that one clean, adding the provisions to the ones we hauled in the second boat.
Before long, we wondered if we too should throw ourselves into the waters and end our ordeal. The hot sun was evaporating some of the water, but as the water receded, bodies began to surface. The smell from the bloated, gaseous corpses was almost more than we could bear. Nathaniel began to have trouble keeping his food down. It may have been because of the smell, but perhaps it was because he kept looking closely at each corpse, trying to make sure it wasn’t Mother or Father or one of his playmates. He was frantic, trying to look at them all. The bodies floated in the water, stretching out as far as the eye could see. I thought I began to hallucinate because I became convinced the smell was visible, but later Joachim told me he experienced the same thing. The smell of decayed flesh seemed to move around in front of his eyes and he felt he could see the stench as well as smell it.
When the corpses finally burst of their gasses and sank again, we felt less dread, but we floated for days and days before we began to see land surfaces peeking up from the water. Finally, a small island appeared to us as we drifted, and we paddled over to it, resting on land at last. We slept in a huddled mass, still naked, our clothes a common blanket. Nathaniel cried from exhaustion and sadness. Though we had each other, we were incredibly lonely. We said the spells our father had taught us, protection spells and prayers for happiness, but they seemed impotent in the face of so much death.
The next day, Joachim and Ananias pulled one of the boats apart and threw together a makeshift shelter and Nathaniel and I went off to forage. I carried a knife in my hands, forged in steel, both beautiful and sturdy. I was somewhat frightened but eager to see what was left of the world. Nathaniel and I found some trees that had remained rooted and cut down some of the lower branches so we could drag them back to camp. Joachim declared the leaves edible and left the branches to dry so we could make a fire.
Once back in a small civilization, even if it consisted only of us four, we dressed again. We were back in the land of the living and had shelter from the sun. To be naked now seemed obscene, a reminder of our imprisonment on the boat.
One day, Nathaniel cried out that he saw smoke on the horizon. It had been about five weeks since we had made it aground and more and more land resurfaced daily. Joachim, Ananias and I had the distasteful task of pushing dead bodies back into the water each morning as evening tides brought them ashore as we slept. It seemed there would be no end to the constant reminders of death, but the smoke and what it must mean kept our spirits up.
After five days, the water had receded enough between the two landmasses for us to wade across. Though the water came only to our waists, we held our breaths as long as we could, so terrible was the water’s stench. Once out of the water, we walked the long distance quickly, sometimes hand in hand, eager to find the people who made the fire, people we hopefully knew. We dared not say out loud we hoped our parents were in those numbers but I know we all thought it, though our hearts knew it was impossible.
As we closed the distance, we saw an enormous boat on its side. Surrounding it were animals of all descriptions, eating, sleeping and playing. I barely believed my eyes when I saw those creatures frolicking in the sun. Near the enormous boat were eight people—four men and four women—holding hands in a circle, their heads bent. In the center of the circle, tethered to a stake, stood a sleek, black goat. A large fire roared nearby, the fire that had drawn us to them. As we closed the distance, the eldest man looked up and Ananias shouted greetings to him. “Hello! We are the children from the family of Amazarak!”
The old man gaped at us then said to the others, “Take shelter now!” They all let go of one another’s hands and ran behind the boat. Seeing four tiny women running away confused Nathaniel and he broke away from me, running towards the craft. He must have thought one of the women was Mother. It was not an irrational thought—two of the women had long dark hair like our mother had.
Joachim reached out to restrain Nathaniel, but our brother had too much of a head start. One of the women peeked out from behind the boat and began screaming. Confused and afraid, Nathaniel began to cry. He stopped running as he neared the fire, sobbing, his breath coming in short hiccups. Child that he was, he was still taller than the man before us.
“Nephilim!” the old man shouted. “How could this be, God?” he asked, addressing the sky above him. “How could these giant demons have survived?”
“Demons?” I asked, baffled by his insult. I stopped walking, and so did Ananias and Joachim, though I rested my hand on my knife. I looked at the crude spears that leaned against the boat. The craft of Azazel, expert weapon-maker and forger of steel, clearly had not reached this clan.
Joachim took in the animals and the huge boat and immediately knew something was not entirely right about the situation. “How did you have enough time to build such a craft and stock it with so many animals before the flood rains came?” he shouted.
“God told me the flood was coming. He told me to build this Ark and to gather up two of each animal.”
“God gave you notice of the flood?” I asked, sickened by what I was hearing.
“Yes, he did. My kin and I are the last righteous people on Earth!”
“You are hardly a righteous man if you knew in advance of this catastrophe and saved no one but your own kin!” Joachim snarled, angry at the thought of such injustice and selfishness.
“Who are you to question God?” the little man shouted.
“Father!” cried out one of the men who had run behind the boat. “This is a sign from God!” Gesturing at the black goat, he repeated, “This the sign we were asking for. We don’t have to break the pair!”
The old man, whose eyes had been rolling in his head, from fear or disgust I do not know, suddenly looked lucid again. His face became calm and he turned and nodded at those behind the boat. “It is an answer to our prayers. We begged God for a way to show Him our devotion without thwarting His will regarding the paired animals, and this is our answer.”
I looked at Ananias in confusion. What on earth did the man mean? I looked at him and began to speak, but before I could say a word, the three men behind the boat came running out. They each took one of the spears that had been leaning against the side of the boat and rushed at Nathaniel. “No!” I screamed and began to run, as did my brothers, but to no avail. We had let Nathaniel get too far ahead of us.
I screamed as the three men pierced my brother with their spears, all three stabbing him through his abdomen. My father had told me that many primitive men would slay animals on altars, slitting their throats, as a means of appeasing an angry God. Those men, those hateful men whom my father had so loved, were killing his son. My father and the other angels in his order had sacrificed their eternal life in Heaven to bring light and knowledge to men such as the ones impaling my brother.
Joachim reached Nathaniel first, running fearlessly though the three men still had their spears run through our brother. Before Joachim could raise his hands, one of the younger women, one of the women Nathaniel had confused for our mother, raced to join her brethren and pierced Nathaniel too. Her spear ran through him so cleanly and easily that Joachim was also pierced, but only a couple of inches into his flesh. The three remaining women and the old man had also gathered spears, standing at the ready, cowing us into stillness.
I sobbed as I understood Nathaniel was going to die. With stomach wounds so terrible, he would likely have died even with our father’s magic. Had we been able to remove the spears, a spell to relieve his pain would have been the only thing we could have done.
But such simple mercies were not to be for the humans were not done with him yet. I screamed and screamed in the name of my father as the lancers dragged my brother, still alive, into the middle of the large fire in the center of their encampment. One by one they removed their spears until only one was left. Careful to avoid the blaze, the man whose sole spear remained forced the tip of his spear into the ground, bending Nathaniel slightly at his middle, spitting him standing in the middle of the fire.
I had never heard such screams, screams that pierced my ears and made me wish my own belly had been the one pierced if only to spare my brother such pain. As the humans dropped to their knees in prayer, I unsheathed my knife to slit as many of their throats as I could, eyeing the women as my main victims. I knew I would surely die myself in my murderous attempt, but I could not control my rage. What decent woman could look on as such acts were committed against a child? They needed to die for their wickedness.
But as I unsheathed my knife, Ananias took it from me and raced into the fire. He stepped into the low but wide flames with Nathaniel and pulled up his head. Tenderly cradling Nathaniel’s head, he leaned and kissed his face and then slashed his throat from ear to ear. He raced out, and Joachim patted him hard where the fire had taken purchase in his clothes. Ananias’s skin was unburned. Not even a hair on his head was singed.
I cried even harder as I saw what was happening, but I knew why Ananias did what he did. There was no telling how long it would have taken Nathaniel to die in the fire, even with his stomach wounds. By quickly bleeding him out, he saved Nathaniel an even worse death, and he interfered with the sacrificial rites of the humans. Again, he proved himself more capable than the rest of us at making hard decisions.
“Your sacrifice was useless, old man. You may have tried to kill an innocent child, but I ended his life in the name of my father, who is a far better one than yours.” He then spat into the fire, and it erupted into such a terrible blaze that it quickly burned Nathaniel until he was little more than a hunched, blackened framework of bones.
“Your God may have meant to rid the world of us, old man, but here we stand, thwarting even your pathetic efforts at sacrifice. You are nothing against the work of our father,” Ananias said, wiping Nathaniel’s blood across his shirt. “There are more of us across the way,” he lied. “Do not follow us or it will be the death of you all.”
Perhaps it was because it seemed a miracle that Ananias has gotten out of the fire unscathed. Maybe it was the way Ananias manipulated the fire, or the mention of others like us across the thinning waters, but the motley band of eight did not try to pursue us. They had killed one of us, true, but they had killed the weakest when we were not on our guard. The rest of us would not be so easily contained. We thought briefly about engaging in warfare, but we had no idea if there were more of those craven humans, whose crude weapons could prove fatal enough when it counted.
We left the campground and we knew we would not be able to live amongst men again. If the men left behind were so wicked they would slay a child as a sacrifice, we were dealing with people far more deranged than logic or even magic could predict. That night, we took shelter in a cave so as not to sleep in the open. As we lay shivering and miserable again, I did my best to peer out and watch the night sky before I fell asleep. I knew many cold nights in similar caves awaited us as we hid from the humans.
What a cruel joke it seemed. Father and his kind had loved the earth and all those who lived upon it. Half-human myself I did not mythologize the Earth as my father had done, yet I could not ignore the beauty of the land of my birth, the beauty that had drawn my father here. I watched the stars and as I thought of Nathaniel, I did not cry. Dreams of vengeance dwarfed even the brightest of stars. |
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