Noah

by Mark Morris

  Most of Tubal-cain’s troops were gathered around the base of an outcropping of rock, the tallest of several that reared from the earth within the compound itself. On the highest point of the outcropping stood Tubal-cain, a massive, heavily armed and heavily armored figure, framed blackly against the storm-lashed sky. He looked powerful and dramatic as he glared down at his subjects, cradling one of the new weapons in his gauntleted hands. As if defying the rains, he raised his head and yelled at the sky, “I give life and I take life away. As do you. And I am like you, am I not?

  “Speak to me,” he demanded.

  When he received no answer but the falling water, he hefted the pipe-gun he was holding, then slammed the back of it down on to the ground. Immediately there was an ear-splitting crack and a ball of white fire shot into the sky. The people gasped and gazed up at it, en masse. Even as the first fireball was still rising, Tubal-cain roared.

  “Speak to me!”

  When the only response remained the rain, he slammed the weapon into the ground a second time, and another blazing projectile followed the first.

  The people fell silent, awed and shocked, their eyes following the twin fireballs as they sailed high into the sky before fading out. Confident that he had the attention of his people, Tubal-cain took a step forward and raised the metal tube into the air.

  “It has begun!” he bellowed. “Death comes from the heavens. This rain is meant to wash us off the face of the world. But we are men! We decide if we live or die. We are men, and men united are invincible. Do you want to live?”

  There was an almost hysterical roar of assent from the massed hordes. Tubal-cain bared his teeth in a savage grin. He took the weapon that he was brandishing and shook it defiantly at the heavens.

  “Together we will attack,” he bellowed. “Together we kill the giants, we kill Noah—and we take the Ark!”

  As his words rose above the crackling hiss of rain there was a roar of agreement. A sea of clenched fists punched the air.

  * * *

  Hand in hand, Shem and Ila burst out of the line of trees surrounding the clearing—and then pulled up short.

  In front of them, blocking their way to the Ark, was an imposing wall of dark gray stone.

  Then the wall moved, part of it rising, detaching itself from the rest.

  “Og,” Ila gasped in relief.

  Og gestured behind him, at the gap he had made in the wall of Watchers. “Go,” he grunted.

  The two young people needed no further encouragement. Drenched to the skin, they ran past him, through the gap, across the rain-sodden ground toward the ramp.

  Looking up, they saw that the huge door, which now covered the main hatchway, was slightly ajar. Two figures slipped through the narrow gap and hurried down the ramp toward them, taking care not to lose their footing on the rain-slippery wood.

  “Shem! Ila!” Naameh called, her voice shrill with anxiety and yet full of relief. “There you are!”

  Noah grabbed Shem’s shoulder, his eyes darting past him, toward the woods which loomed over the line of Watchers.

  “Where is Ham? Have you seen him?”

  Shem shook his head, water droplets flying from his hair.

  “No, Father.”

  * * *

  Ham and Na’el were sprinting through the forest, bent almost double against the rain which hammered down on their backs and heads. Ham was gripping Na’el’s delicate, finely boned hand as tightly as he could without hurting her.

  They splashed through puddles, slithered in mud. Around them the forest seemed to be roaring, the trees jerking in pain as the rain pounded down. Somewhere at their backs Ham thought he could hear the bellowing battle-cries of men, the crashing and splintering of wood as if a vast army was moving relentlessly through the forest, trampling all that lay before it.

  But he told himself, over and over, perhaps in the hope that he could make it true, that it was just his imagination.

  They passed a cluster of boulders, shiny with rain. He recognized them. He, Shem, Ila, and Japheth had played hide and seek among them many times as children.

  “We’re almost there!” he yelled, putting on an extra burst of speed, dragging Na’el after him.

  All at once she screamed and halted so suddenly that Ham was jerked backward, his feet sliding out from under him. Their hands broke apart and he landed on his back on the muddy, waterlogged ground.

  Sitting up, he looked back. Na’el was lying on her stomach, arm stretched out pleadingly, her wet hair plastered to a face etched with agony. It wasn’t until Ham scrambled back to his feet, however, water and mud streaming from his saturated clothes, that he realized why.

  She had stepped into a metal animal trap, which had closed around her ankle like the jaws of a bear.

  It must have been set by one of Tubal-cain’s men and hidden in the foliage, he realized. It sickened Ham to see where the jagged metal teeth had bitten through the girl’s delicate skin in several places. Blood was flowing freely from the wounds, though as it emerged it was instantly washed away by the rain, creating several red-tinged rivulets.

  Ham rushed across to her, water spraying up around him as he dropped to his knees. He wrapped his hands around each side of the animal trap and tried to pull the slippery metal jaws apart.

  He applied all his strength, grunting with the effort, his muscles standing out in tight knots on his arms, his knuckles white as bone. The jaws of the trap creaked. He managed to pry them apart by an inch. Na’el cried out as one of the jagged metal teeth slid from a puncture wound on her leg, releasing a fresh outpouring of watery blood.

  Tentatively she jiggled her leg, tried to pull it free, but only succeeded in scraping it against more of the metal teeth, which cut deep, bloody scratches through her skin. She was sobbing now, frantic, crying with pain. Tendons were standing out on Ham’s neck as he pushed for all he was worth at the metal jaws of the trap.

  But he was fighting a losing battle, gasping for breath, his arms trembling. Suddenly, with a wail of dismay and frustration, his strength gave out and the jaws of the trap snapped shut again.

  Na’el’s scream of agony was raw and shrill and primal.

  “I’m sorry.” Ham wept. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  He wrapped his hands around the metal jaws again, sobbing and yelling as he tried to force them apart. He knew he wasn’t strong enough, but he knew too that he wouldn’t give up. He would stay and drown with Na’el, rather than abandon her to her fate.

  But then his head snapped up, as sounds began to rise in volume, to push their way through the constant battering barrage of rain. Wood splintering, men shouting, the wet thunder of thousands of approaching feet. He could no longer convince himself that the din was his imagination.

  Perhaps they wouldn’t drown, after all. Perhaps their deaths would come more quickly, and with altogether more violence.

  Na’el’s eyes widened in panic.

  “They’re coming,” she half-screeched, half-sobbed. Her voice was shrill with terror. “Get me out, Ham! Get me out!”

  She began to claw frantically at her own leg, to push at the trap. If she had been able to, Ham had no doubt that she would have gnawed all the way through the flesh and bone of her own ankle in order to get free. He tried to help her, their hands fumbling and slipping over one another, clawing at the wet metal.

  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 screa
ms. 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.

  16

  THE BATTLE

  Hampered 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 fi
zzled 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.