The Sinners and the Sea

by Rebecca Kanner

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  SINNERS AND THE SEA

  “We think we know Noah’s story, but he was not alone on the ark; what was the experience of his wife, his family? Rebecca Kanner’s vividly imagined telling re-creates the world of the Bible, and asks powerful questions about the story and about ourselves.”

  —Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, author of Why Faith Matters

  “Rebecca Kanner brings the antediluvian world of giants, prophets, and demons alive, setting her narrative in motion from the first chapter and never letting it rest. She is a writer of great dexterity, performing tricks at a full sprint.”

  —Marshall N. Klimasewiski, author of The Cottagers and Tyrants

  “Sinners and the Sea is an excellent example of the traditional Jewish method of Midrash meeting the modern writer’s pen. Kanner does a masterful job of penetrating the depths of the biblical flood narrative and weaving in the complicated reality of challenging relationships and longings for personal fulfillment. Her desire to go beyond the traditional midrashic understanding of the lives she explores introduces us to a courageous and insightful young writer whose first book will take its place alongside other exciting modern rereadings of the ancient biblical text.”

  —Rabbi Morris Allen of Beth Jacob Congregation

  “Sinners and the Sea is a rare find—a bold and vivid journey into the antediluvian world of Noah. Kanner’s is a fresh, irresistible story about the unnamed woman behind the famous ark-builder. Compelling and masterfully written.”

  —Tosca Lee, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Books of Mortals series

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  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1: A Marked and Nameless Girl

  Chapter 2: A Trade

  Chapter 3: The Power of the Mark I

  Chapter 4: A Journey Deep into the Desert

  Chapter 5: Sorum

  Chapter 6: Giants

  Chapter 7: My Husband’s Tent

  Chapter 8: Noah

  Chapter 9: Herai

  Chapter 10: Sons and Demons

  Chapter 11: Javan’s March

  Chapter 12: Noah’s Sons

  Chapter 13: Ham

  Chapter 14: Herai and My Sons

  Chapter 15: Humbled

  Chapter 16: Shem

  Chapter 17: Javan’s Proposal

  Chapter 18: Muttering

  Chapter 19: Daughters-in-Law

  Chapter 20: The Caravan

  Chapter 21: The Other Prophet’s Daughter

  Chapter 22: The Ark

  Chapter 23: Zilpha’s Beloved Mammoth

  Chapter 24: The Town’s Laughter

  Chapter 25: The Rudder

  Chapter 26: Helping Hands, Strange Tongues

  Chapter 27: A Sign

  Chapter 28: Countdown

  Chapter 29: Flesh

  Chapter 30: A Question, a Deal

  Chapter 31: The Slave Woman

  Chapter 32: Last Light

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 33: Darkness

  Chapter 34: The Giant Versus the Sea

  Chapter 35: Life Aboard the Ark

  Chapter 36: Beyond the Reach of Light

  Chapter 37: A Ship in the Distance

  Chapter 38: A Missed Moon

  Chapter 39: The Beating

  Chapter 40: Meat

  Chapter 41: A Deception

  Chapter 42: Day 41

  Chapter 43: Manosh

  Chapter 44: The Power of the Mark II

  Chapter 45: Prophetess

  Chapter 46: The God’s Eye

  Chapter 47: The Sea Goes Still

  Chapter 48: Two Birds and a Branch

  Chapter 49: The New World

  Chapter 50: Shahar

  Acknowledgments

  About Rebecca Kanner

  For my father,

  and for all of my teachers,

  in and outside the classroom.

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  A MARKED AND NAMELESS GIRL

  They say it is the mark of a demon. When I was a child, none took their chances by coming close to me, and certainly no one touched me. It looks as if a large man dipped his palm in wine and pressed it to my forehead above my left eye.

  After I was born, the midwife seized the afterbirth and rubbed it over the mark. Then the afterbirth was buried, so that when it decayed, the mark would disappear too. But the mark grew darker. By my second year it had gone from red to purple.

  My father tried every known remedy. He anointed it daily with olive oil, rubbed it with a sheep’s hoof, even offered the gods the smallest finger on his left hand to take it away. But the gods did not accept his finger. They dulled the heat of the fire he set to send it up to them so that it only smoked and did not burn.

  He had not named me for fear it would be too easy then for people to talk and spread lies, and he was glad of this when the gods would not hear his plea.

  There was not another tent within fifty cubits of my father’s. So as not to catch my affliction through their gazes, when people hurried past to catch an errant sheep or child, they looked at me out of the corner of one eye or not at all. Once a man four tents away chased his goat to only a few cubits from my father’s land, then stopped suddenly when he saw me at the cookfire and ran back in the direction he had come.

  The goat was never seen again. It was thought that I had changed it into a newborn, the one who was left outside the midwife’s tent one night. Rocks were tied to the newborn’s hands and feet, and he was taken to the Nile.

  After this, pregnant women sometimes went to stay with tribesmen in other villages so they would not accidentally see me and have their own child marked in some way. I thought perhaps they also feared that looking at me was a death sentence. My father had told me that my own mother had choked to death a year after I was born. Pregnant women, being the most superstitious of all people, likely thought it was me who sealed her throat around the goat meat.

  While I could not tell you what the people of my father’s village looked like up close, the traders were different. They did not fear the mark so greatly. They ventured from the cities along the Nile to haggle with my father for his olives. They brought fruit, nuts, honey, spices, incense, and every kind of grain. They brought flattery, promises, lies, and wine to make my father believe them. He pretended to entertain thoughts of buying large quantities of grain to store in case of a famine, and wool and salted meat in case all the sheep died of the plague that had first fed upon people very young and old, even upon men and women who had been strong only half a moon before their deaths. What he really wanted from them was stories, thinking one might instruct him in how I could be saved.

  The traders squatted around our cookfire and let me serve them. But if I accidentally brushed against one as I went around filling their bowls with goat stew and lentils, the man would jump up, curse, and sometimes run to wash himself where I had touched him. One trader even burned his tunic. So I was careful, because I loved to listen to their tales of other places, imagining one of them might be a place where I would not be thought so strange and dangerous.

  The traders only spoke of one town with fear: Sorum, Town of Women. It was also known as the Town of Exiles. Though some traders would not venture there, many were their stories of Sorum. It was a town of whores and exiles, people whose foreheads were branded with the X of the banishe
d. Unlike the protective mark that the God of Adam had put upon Cain, the marks on these people were not meant to save them from harm. An X upon your forehead meant that you had committed a crime in one of the cities along the Nile and were no longer welcome. I took a great interest in the stories of Sorum.

  An old trader called Arrat the Storyteller told us most of what we knew of Sorum. Whenever he coughed and spat, it meant he wanted to speak. One night the other traders were so raucous, he had to do this over and over again until everyone went silent. Then he rubbed his hand along his beard, rocked forward to his toes, and said, “Sorum. Town of Women.”

  One trader narrowed his eyes, another pressed his lips tightly together, and a third pulled his tunic closer around him.

  “Now, it is that a woman who is a cross between a girl and a boar guards the entrance. Not to keep men out but, rather, to lure them in. She is uglier than a rotting corpse and smells even worse, yet a man who looks upon her cannot stop his feet from taking him to suckle at her breasts. He will give her all his goods, even the sandals off his own feet. After they have joined together just once, he will pine for her demon’s nectar his whole life. He will bring her fruits and nuts he steals off other men’s trees, oxen and mules he kills other men for. And finally, whatever is left of his soul.

  “After she has laid waste to it but before he has fully crossed to the other side, she eats his organs and sucks the marrow from his bones. She does not stop, even though his limbs twitch and he screams for death to take him.

  “Then she fashions the bones into necklaces and belts and gives them to the women of the town. Some wear so many bones, they stumble under their weight as though they were overfull with wine. The boar woman herself is decorated so completely with the bones of the men she has eaten that her whole body, except her teats and sex, is covered. Even with this heaviness upon her, she can run faster than a man. And worse, she is stronger than the biggest mule. No one dares cross her.

  “No one except a crazed man who rides an ass through town, ancient and unseeing. He is as old as the world itself. So old his beard trails along the ground and gets caught beneath his donkey’s hooves. He yells at the women to repent. He wants to make Sorum upright for his god, the God of Adam.”

  This brought laughter.

  “His time would be better spent trying to turn a goat into a dove.”

  “Or grow an olive grove from a whore—”

  “Quiet!” my father commanded, knocking the man’s bowl from his hands. He stood to his full height and gestured toward where I squatted behind the circle of traders, eating my stew after having served theirs.

  My father rarely went into a rage, though he had much to be unhappy about. He had a large olive grove and no heir, along with a daughter who could neither inherit the grove nor entice a match. I had heard a man scream at my father only a few days before: “Not even for every olive upon the earth!” The man stomped the ground so hard walking away that he left perfect sandal marks. He was enraged that my father would think him a match for me.

  I hurried to pick up the trader’s bowl. “I am sorry,” the trader said, not to me but to my father.

  My father said, “Do not think on it any longer.” But he did not buy any of the man’s honey, which surprised me, because eating honey makes a girl more pleasing in nature and shape.

  Gods, see how he has lost hope. Please, I beg of you. Help rid me of this mark.

  This was my daily plea, the same one I had been whispering each morning upon waking and each night before sleep since first seeing the mark in a pot of water ten years before. But I knew that if the gods had not answered my plea already, they probably never would. I was already nineteen, seven long years past when most girls were taken as wives.

  • • •

  Then came Mechem the Magical. All the traders had quick tongues but none quicker than his. To a man who labored to breathe, he would sell some wind that he carried in a sack upon his back. He would sell grains of curing sand to the mother of a child with a pus-filled wound. To the sick, he sold the healing droppings of a healthy doe, to the barren, the miracle placenta of a ewe that had birthed three lambs instead of two.

  And finally, to my father, for half the olives in his grove, he sold the urine of a great beast. One even more powerful than a demon. The beast had tusks sharp enough to spear spirits, hooves heavy enough to crush them, a trunk long enough to slap them a whole league, and ears big enough to hear them as clearly as a fly buzzing on the beast’s own flank. Mechem promised that, after applying the potion to my forehead, the mark would take only a few days to fade.

  “Because of the potion’s great power,” he told my father, “administering it is dangerous. Though I might lose what is left of my life, I will do it for only half the olives that remain.”

  My father and Mechem argued back and forth outside the tent, until my father conceded three quarters of his harvest. He lifted the door flap, and he and Mechem came in. Mechem held a small amphora in one hand.

  “Our troubles are over,” my father told me. His eyes were full of hope and fear. I knew the fear. He was afraid that the potion would not be able to overcome the mark. He looked expectantly at Mechem.

  But Mechem seemed to be waiting. He frowned at my father.

  “You will not even know I am here, unless you should need something,” my father assured him.

  “The potion will not work with so much flesh vying to be purified.”

  “Mine is not in need of purification,” my father said, then quickly looked to make sure his words had not wounded me. “I can stand behind these pots of lentils so the potion is not confused as to which skin to set upon.”

  “No, you must leave. I cannot waste what little I have. Unless you possess another olive grove with which to pay me.”

  My father’s jaw tightened. He narrowed his eyes at the trader.

  “Three men died getting this potion,” Mechem said.

  My father came to stand only a few hands’ width from the trader. He was a whole head taller than the little man. “I trust you will do as you have promised,” he said. Then he slipped out the door flap, and I was alone with Mechem.

  Mechem looked directly at me. “I do not flinch from demons,” he said. Was this the man the gods had sent to answer my plea that the mark be taken from me? His eyes were glassy and wide-set, like a goat’s. His fingers curled and uncurled as he came to stand beside where I squatted at my loom. He leaned down and whispered, “My own seed will master the demon.” The smell of the wine he had drunk with my father lingered in a cloud between us. I did not have to wonder what he meant.

  “But my honor . . .”

  “I have two potions, woman. One to remove the mark and one to restore your virtue when I am done.” He pulled another tiny amphora from a pouch tied to his belt and held it in front of my face.

  I leaned away from him. “My father is already making me a match,” I lied. “I cannot be tainted.”

  “Your father, who did not bother to name you, is now making a match for you?”

  “He did not give me a name so that people could not speak of me and spread lies.”

  He set the potions down and grabbed my shoulder. His nails dug into my skin. “Silly woman. If you do not have a name, people will give you one: Angels’ Bane, Demon’s Daughter, Demon’s Whore—”

  I shook his hand off my shoulder and stood. He pushed up against me, knocking over my loom. “I will take these names out of their mouths when I take the mark from you. You will be a miracle, a woman who overcame a demon. You will have new names: Demon Slayer, Woman of the Gods—”

  “I do not care what they call me,” I said, stepping back.

  He did not advance. He smiled and said, “You do not know how to lie, woman.”

  “I am not as skilled in it as some.”

  His nostrils twitched, revealing the stiff black hairs inside. I knew I had erred in angering him. Even though he was a small man, he was still a man, and I was just a woman who no
one wanted to take for a wife.

  “Please,” I said, “apply the potion only to the mark. All I have is that I am untouched.”

  He reached out a finger and pressed his nail against my mark. “But you are touched, for all to see.”

  “No one but my father and now you looks closely.”

  “People look with their tongues and ears more than their eyes. These very traders whose bowls you fill with your father’s meat and lentils, whose cups you fill with his wine, they do not profit only from their goods. Just as your father has them here so he can hear their tales, so too does he give them one.”

  “One is not so many.”

  “But it is such a good one, it overshadows all the others.”

  “It is nothing that could compare to the story of the boar woman.”

  “The demon-woman tale Arrat weaves is riveting. He says your mark changes from red to black and that, after gazing upon it, smoke sometimes comes from his own eyes.” Mechem pretended sadness. “He does not have to clear his throat twice when he goes back along the river. The people there want to know what is in a village so near to their own, a distance a demon could hop in one breath. Do you never worry that men of the nearby villages will come for you?”

  “Why would they do so?”

  “Who wants to live with a demon so close when there are crops, herds, children, wives, and other property to look after?”

  “You are not a good liar either. You go too far.” But I wasn’t certain he exaggerated.

  “I do not lie about this.”

  My heart beat not only because he wanted to come too close to me but because it suddenly seemed that all the peoples of the world were talking about me in hushed tones.

  “Let me help you. Another man has to show the demon he is no match, that he does not own you. It is other men’s fear of you that keeps the demon’s mark upon your brow.” His fingers circled a lock of hair that had come loose from my scarf, and gently ran down the length of it. “Besides, it is a shame to have this mark upon you when you would be such a sweet sight without it.”