He managed to pull himself up onto his knees. He was in some kind of pit. There was an overwhelming stench of feces, of rotting flesh. He did not know what else was in the pit with him, and he did not want to know. Frantically he scrambled up the side, climbing, slipping on bones, on ooze, on decaying filth, sliding back, climbing, sliding, slipping, scrabbling, until at last he pulled himself out and up onto his feet and stood there tottering, filthy and terrified.
There was no sign of Sandy. No sign of the unicorn. Or of Japheth and Higgaion. He had no idea where he was. He looked around. He was standing on a dirt path which bordered the pit. Beside it was his rolled-up bundle of clothes. On the other side of the path were a number of tents. He had seen pictures of bedouin tents in his social-studies books at school. These were similar, though they seemed smaller and more closely clustered. It was probably from one of these tents that he had been thrown. Beyond the tents were palm trees, and he staggered toward these.
He needed to shower. Did he ever need to shower! He carried with him the smell of the pit. He ran, barely keeping himself upright, to the grove of palms. Beyond these he could see white. White sand. The desert. If he could only reach the desert, he could roll in the moon-washed sand and get clean.
"Sandy!" he called, but there was no Sandy. "Jay! Jay!" But no small, kind young man appeared. "Higgaion!" He shuddered. If he never saw any human being again, he would not go back to the tent where he had been poked at with a spear, and from which he had been thrown, like garbage.
Racing, he was suddenly out of the grove of palms and sliding in sand. He fell down, rolled and rolled, then picked up handsful of sand and rubbed it over himself, wiping off the slime and filth of the pit. He pulled off his turtleneck and flung it away. Rolled again in sand. His underclothes were filthy from the pit and he tore them off, flinging them after the turtleneck. He did not even realize that he was scraping off his own sunburned skin, so eager was he to get clean. The sand was cool under the daisy field of stars, and he took off his sneakers and socks, flinging them after his clothes. They would never be clean again. He rubbed more sand on his feet, his ankles, his legs, not even realizing that he was sobbing like a small child.
After a while, from sheer exhaustion, he calmed down. Began to assess his situation. He was badly sunburned. He had made it worse by scouring himself with sand. He was shivering, but it was not from cold; it was from fever.
He sat there, naked as Adam, on the white desert, his back to the oasis. The not yet full moon was sliding down toward the horizon. Above him, there were more stars than he had ever seen before. Ahead of him was that strange reddish glow, and then he saw that it came from a mountain, the tallest in a range of mountains on the far horizon. Of course. If he and Sandy had somehow or other blown themselves onto a young planet in some galaxy or other, naturally volcanoes would still be active.
How active? He hoped he wouldn't find out. At home the hills were low; old hills, worn down by wind and rain, by the passing of the glaciers, by eons of time. Home. He began to sob again.
With a great effort, he calmed himself. He and Sandy were the practical ones of the family, the ones who found solutions to problems. They could do minor repairs when the plumbing misbehaved. They could rewire an old lamp and make it work again. Their mother's reading lamp in the lab was one they had bought at a church bazaar and made over for her. Their large vegetable garden in the summer was their pride and joy, and they sold enough of their produce to augment their allowances considerably. They could do anything. Anything.
Even believe in unicorns. He thought of the unicorn, the unicorn he had come to think of as a virtual unicorn, and who had, somehow or other, brought him to that tent of horrible, primitive little people who had thrown him into the pit. The sad, undernourished mammoth evidently had called the unicorn, and Dennys had been called back into being, too. But the unicorn had gone out in a blaze of light. A unicorn, even a virtual one, evidently could not stand the smell.
All right. If he thought that a unicorn couldn't stand the ugliness of the smell, it must mean that he believed in unicorns. Virtually.
Of course there were no unicorns. But neither was it possible that he and Sandy, tapping into their father's partly programmed experiment, could have been flung to wherever in the universe they were, on a backward planet of primitive life forms. Again he looked around. The stars were so clear that he seemed to hear a chiming of crystal. From the mountain came a wisp of smoke, a small tongue of fire.
"Oh, virtual unicorn!" he cried. "I want to believe in you, and if you don't come, I will die." He felt something cool and soft nudging his bare body, and there was the scraggly little mammoth, touching him tentatively with the pink tip of its long grey trunk. And then a burst of silver blazed in front of him, and was reduced to a shimmer. A unicorn knelt before him on the sand. Dennys did not have the strength to mount the unicorn and sit astride. He gave the mammoth a look of mute gratitude, then draped himself over the unicorn's back. He closed his eyes. He was burning with fever. He would burn the unicorn. He felt that they were exploding like the volcano.
Mahlah, Yalith's sister, betrothed to Ugiel the nephil, lay on a small rock ledge, ten minutes' walk into the desert. Her heart beat rapidly with excitement. Ugiel had brought her to the rock, covered her with kisses, and then told her to wait until he returned with his brethren to seal their betrothal.
She heard the beating of wings and looked up, catching her breath. Above her a pelican, white against the night sky, flew in circles which grew smaller as it descended. It touched the ground and raised its great wings until they seemed to brush the stars, and there was no longer a pelican in front of Mahlah but a seraph, with wings and hair streaming silver in the desert wind, and eyes as bright as stars.
Mahlah scrambled to her feet, letting her long black hair swirl about her. "Alarid--"
The seraph took her hand, looking down into her eyes. "Are we really losing you?"
She withdrew her hands, dropping her gaze, laughing a small, self-conscious laugh. "Losing me? What do you mean?"
"Is it true that you and Ugiel--"
"Yes, it is true," she said proudly. "Be happy for me, Alarid. Ugiel is still your brother, is he not?"
Alarid dropped to one knee, so that he no longer towered over her. "Yes, we are still brothers, though we have chosen very different ways."
"And you're sure yours is the better way?" There was scorn in Mahlah's voice.
Alarid shook his head sadly. "We do not judge. The seraphim have chosen to stay close to the Presence."
"But you're too close to be able to see it! The nephilim have distance and objectivity." He looked at her, and her glance wavered for a moment. "Yes. Ugiel told me that."
Alarid rose slowly to his full height. With one silver wing he drew her briefly to him, and she smelled starlight. Then he let her go. "You will not forget us?"
"How could I forget you!" she exclaimed. "You have been my friend since Yalith took me out to greet the dawn and I met you and Aariel."
"You have not greeted the dawn lately."
"Oh--I am learning about the night."
Alarid bent down and kissed the top of her dark head. Then he walked slowly across the desert. Tears fell silently onto the sand.
Mahlah looked down. When she raised her head, she saw a pelican flying up, up, to be lost among the stars.
Yalith hurried into her family tent. "Mahlah is betrothed to one of the nephilim!"
No one heeded her. Her parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law were lying around on goatskins, eating, and drinking wine her father had made from the early grapes. Several stone lamps lit the tent with a warm glow; too warm, Yalith thought. Almost no breeze came through the open tent flap, or the roof hole. The moon was descending, and only stars were visible. She looked around for Japheth, her favorite brother, but did not see him. Probably he was still out looking for the brother of the young giant in her grandfather's tent.
Her mother was stirring something i
n a wooden bowl, intent on what she was doing. A mammoth, well fed, with lustrous long hair on its flanks, lay sleeping at her feet.
Someone had been sick, probably Ham, who had a weak stomach, and the smell of Ham's sickness mingled with the smell of wine, of meat from the stewpot, of the skins of the tent. Yalith was accustomed to all these odors, and noticed only that Ham was lying back on a pile of skins, looking pale. Ham was, in any event, the lightest-skinned in the family, and the smallest, having been, according to Matred, born a full moon early. Anah, his red-haired wife, knelt by him, offering him wine. Languidly he pushed it away, then pulled Anah down to him, kissing her full, sensual mouth.
Yalith went up to Matred, her mother. Repeated: "Mahlah is betrothed."
Matred looked up briefly. "She's not old enough."
"Oh, Mother, of course she is. And she is."
"Old enough?" Matred was preoccupied with what she was doing.
"Betrothed."
"Who is it this time?"
"It's not one of us. It's one of the nephilim."
Matred shivered, but went on stirring, without focus. "Mahlah has changed. She is no longer my merry little girl who was satisfied to see a butterfly, or a drop of dew on a spider's web. She is no longer satisfied to be with us in the home tent." A tear dropped into the bowl.
Yalith patted her mother's arm. "She's grown up, Mother."
"So have you. But you don't go chasing about the oasis at night. You don't run after nephilim."
"Maybe the nephil ran after her?"
"She's pretty enough. But it is not right for me to hear something like this at secondhand. That is not how things are done. That is not how my daughter behaves."
"I'm sorry," Yalith said uncomfortably. "I was walking home from Grandfather Lamech's, and I saw them, Mahlah and a nephil. His name is Ugiel. He asked me to tell you, so that you would not be worried."
"Worried!" Matred exclaimed. "Just don't tell your father, that's all. What's to prevent this Ugh--"
"Ugiel."
"This nephil from coming himself, with Mahlah, to tell me and your father, according to the custom."
Yalith frowned worriedly. "He said that times are changing." Eblis had said that, too. She felt a jolt of insecurity in the pit of her stomach. She did not tell her mother about Eblis.
Matred put down her wooden spoon with a bang. "There are many who think it an honor to be noticed by a nephil and accept their ways. Anah"--Matred looked across at her son Ham's wife, redheaded, still luscious, but beginning to be overblown--"Anah tells me that her younger sister, Tiglah, is being singled out by a nephil for marriage. Anah is thrilled."
"But you're not."
"Tiglah is not my daughter. Mahlah is." Matred turned away. "Child, I am not star-dazzled by the nephilim. They are very different from us."
"They are beautiful--"
"Beautiful, yes. But they will make changes, and not all changes are good."
--I don't want things to change, Yalith thought. And then, in her mind's eye, she saw again the young giant who had bowed to her in Grandfather Lamech's tent, and who was unlike anybody she had ever seen.
Matred continued: "Change is, I suppose, inevitable, and sometimes it brings good things." She looked across the tent to her oldest son, Shem, who was sitting with his wife, Elisheba, eating some of the grapes from the vineyard which were not pressed for wine but kept for the table. Shem was pulling one grape at a time from the bunch, and throwing it to Elisheba. She would catch each grape in her open mouth and they would both laugh with pleasure at this simple, sensual game. It seemed amazingly young and romantic for this stocky, solid couple. "Elisheba is a great help to me. And then, Japheth's wife--"
Yalith looked to where a young woman with softly curling black hair against creamy skin was scouring a wooden bowl with sand. The young woman looked up and waved in greeting.
Matred said, "She comes to us from another oasis, and with a strange name."
"O-holi-bamah." Yalith sounded it out.
"Look at her," Matred commanded.
Yalith looked again at her sister-in-law. Oholibamah was fairer of complexion than Yalith or the other women, even fairer than Ham. Her hair and brows were blacker than the night sky, a rippling, purply black. When Oholibamah stood, she was nearly a head taller than the other women. And beautiful. She always seemed lit by moonlight, Yalith thought. "What about her?" she asked her mother.
"Look at her, child. Look at her."
Yalith was shocked. "You mean you think she--"
Matred shrugged slightly. "She is the youngest daughter of a very old man." She held up the fingers of both hands. "More than ten years younger than her brothers and sisters. I love Oholibamah as though she were my own. And if Oholibamah was indeed sired by a nephil, then great good has been brought into our lives."
Yalith looked at Oholibamah as though seeing her for the first time. After Yalith and Mahlah, Oholibamah was the youngest woman in the tent, younger by several years than Elisheba, Shem's wife, or Anah, Ham's wife. All three of Yalith's brothers had married at unusually young ages, and all three had grumbled at having to take on domestic duties so soon. Shem had protested, "But we are too young to marry. I'm the oldest, and I've barely reached my first hundred years."
His father had replied, "There is a certain urgency, my son."
"Why? And how will you find wives for us when we are so young?"
"You are fine-looking men," the patriarch assured him.
Ham had joined in. "But why the rush, Father? What is this urgency you speak of?"
The patriarch pulled at his long beard, which was beginning to show white. "Yesterday, when I was working in the vineyard, the Voice spoke to me. El told me that I must find wives for you."
"But why?" Ham protested. "We're young, and we need time."
"There are changes, great changes coming," the patriarch said.
"Is the volcano going to erupt?" Shem asked.
"If the volcano erupts," Ham said, "wives won't do us any good."
Their father told them only that the word of El had come to him in the vineyard, and that El had given no explanation.
Elisheba and Anah were easily found for Shem and Ham. The patriarch had a reputation as an honest man. He had the largest and best vineyards on the oasis, and fine flocks of goats and sheep. The fame of his wine had spread to many other oases round about. Matred was a woman of unquestionable virtue and beauty, and her girth attested to her skills as a cook. It was a privilege to marry into her tent.
Japheth was young enough so that no one stepped forward. His face was still smooth and beardless. His body hair was no more than soft down. His eyes were friendly and guileless. But he was on the threshold of manhood. His father went off on his camel one day, and came back with Oholibamah.
Japheth had been at the well, getting water for the animals, when he saw a young girl on a white camel, a young girl of fair complexion, with dark hair tumbling richly against her ivory shoulders. His eyes met Oholibamah's eyes, dark as the night sky between stars, and his knees became fluid. She slid off the white camel's back and came toward him, slender hands outstretched. Their love was a bright flower, youthful, and radiantly beautiful.
Oholibamah. O-holy-bamah. A name as strange as her moonlit beauty. But soon it flowed easily from their lips.
Oholibamah was Yalith's first real friend. They were not far apart in age, both of them barely out of childhood and into womanhood. They were alike, too, in their unlikeness to the others. They saw and rejoiced in what most people of the oasis never noticed. Both liked to leave the tent at first dawn to watch and wait for the sun to rise over the desert, delighting in the calling of the stars just before daylight. It was during one of her dawn walks that Yalith had met the great lion who was the seraph Aariel, and on another walk, when she had persuaded Mahlah to join her, that she had introduced Aariel and Alarid the pelican to her sister. But once Oholibamah came, Mahlah preferred to sleep in the morning.
So Yalith
and her youngest sister-in-law would slip out quietly. When the great red disk of day pulled above the white sand, and the stars dimmed and their songs faded out, scarab beetles who had slept under the sand during the hours of the dark came scuttling up into the light. At the edge of the oasis, the baboons leapt from the trees, clapping their hands and shrieking for joy at the rising of the sun. Behind them on the oasis the cocks crowed, and in the desert the lions roared their early-morning roar before retreating to their caves to sleep during the heat of the day. Yalith and Oholibamah shared a silent and joyful companionship.
Now, in the warm and noisy tent, Oholibamah beckoned to Yalith. "Have you eaten?"
"No." Yalith shook her head. "I meant to eat with Grandfather, but I forgot all about food because there was a strange young--"
Ham interrupted her, calling out from the pile of skins on which he was reclining. "I have a headache, Oholi. I need you."
Oholibamah said sharply, "Let Anah rub your head. She is your wife."
"Her fingers do not have the touch that yours do." And, indeed, Oholibamah had a reputation for having healing in her fingers.
She was still sharp. "If you don't want a headache, don't eat and drink too much." She turned away and went to the cook pot, ladled some stew into a wooden bowl, and handed it to Yalith. The mammoth left Matred and came and nudged Yalith's knee.
"No, Selah," Yalith scolded. "You know I won't give you anything more to eat. You're getting fat." She deftly picked pieces of meat and vegetable from the bowl and ate them, then raised it to her lips to drink the broth. It tasted wonderful, and she realized that she was very hungry.
Beside her, Oholibamah sighed.
"What's the matter?" Yalith asked.
The mammoth moved to the older girl, who scratched its grey head. "I was walking through the town this morning. We needed some provisions. One of the nephilim came out of one of the bathhouses, smelling of oil and spices, and stood in my path." She paused.
"And?" Yalith prodded.
"He said that I was one of them, one of their daughters."
Many Waters Page 5