He leaned in close again, so that his nose nearly touched mine, and his breath against my lips caused me to stumble backward. The lock of my hair that he still held stretched taut between us.
“The demon is too strong for a man to survive lying with me,” I said, trying to lie more convincingly this time. “He lifts me from my sleeping blanket in the blackest part of night. Things I touch wither and die. If I even look too long at a bird, she will crumple and fall from the sky.”
“I am not a bird.”
“The demon has infected me with his poison so any man who tries to know me will never know me or any other woman again.”
Mechem took hold of my shoulders. He shoved me to the ground.
I could not roll away quickly enough to keep him from falling upon me. The wine on his breath covered a worse odor from his mouth, that of rot, as when a mouse drowns in a pot of nuts or lentils and is not discovered right away. He looked down the length of my body and grasped my breast through my tunic. I struggled to push him off, but my efforts had no effect on him.
He reached his hand lower still and pressed it to my tunic where my legs met. I bit him with all the strength of my fear. I tasted his dry, salty flesh and felt the wiry hair of his eyebrow against my lips. He recoiled, then thrust his hand against my neck. Though the bitter taste of his blood was upon my tongue, I was surprised by the deep gash upon his brow.
His cheeks flared red. “Let me tell you two things, woman. It was not a demon that gave you the mark. It was your own evil mother, and you will do as I say and tell no one, or I will let it be known in this village and all the surrounding ones that the demon has taken every last drop of your soul and uses your body for a vessel. I will show them my forehead, and they will not doubt me.”
“Do not speak false of the dead.”
“Your mother is dead now?” he asked. “Did she finally drink herself yellow and die?”
“She died a year after she bore me.”
He laughed, and his hand loosened on my neck. “And I am the handsomest man in the world! She fled before being branded with the mark of the exile for birthing you.”
“No, I do not believe you.” But I did. I finally understood why my father looked like he had just been hit with a rock whenever I asked about her.
“Even your own mother did not want you,” he said sadly. “Though I am no beauty, and years past the peak of my virility, I am not without an appetite for a woman’s softness. I will do what no other man would dare to and bring you into full womanhood.” He yanked my tunic up over my thighs.
Sunlight streamed into the tent as the door flap was lifted behind Mechem. Before Mechem could turn around to defend himself, my father knocked him off of me unto the ground.
“Fool!” Mechem cried. “I could bring you to ruin with the slightest movement of my tongue. People would flock from leagues in all directions to tear apart your tent, burn your olive grove to the ground, and kill your worthless demon spawn. Now leave us or I will be gone, taking my potion and my tale.”
“We have already agreed upon the price for your potion. I will apply it to my child myself. If the mark disappears within the next four days, then you will have half my harvest.”
“You will have neither my potion nor my silence,” Mechem said. He picked up the amphora with the urine of the great beast and was moving to where he had left the other potion, the one that would restore my virtue after he had taken it, when my father wrapped an arm around him and tried to yank the amphora from his fingers.
“The demon is unleashed!” Mechem yelled loudly toward the door flap. As there were no tents near ours, I doubted anyone heard him. Still, he began screaming as though he were a man dying a horrible death.
My father put a hand over Mechem’s mouth, trying to muffle the old man’s screams. He forced the trader to the ground and slammed his head down with the full force of his weight. There was a great thud, and the screaming stopped.
My father stared down at Mechem. “Wake up,” he demanded. The trader did not acknowledge my father, and his head and limbs moved lifelessly when my father shook him.
My father looked incredulously at the dead man for a few shallow breaths. Then he dropped his head into his hands. “We are doomed,” he said.
CHAPTER 2
A TRADE
At last my father lifted his head from his hands. He grasped the little amphora, pulled it from Mechem’s fingers, and came to crouch in front of me. His hands shook as he poured the potion into his palm. I could not remember him ever touching the mark.
“It will soon be gone,” he said.
And I will finally be like everyone else, I told myself. But I did not really believe it. If the trader was not powerful enough to keep from being killed, neither was he powerful enough to remove a mark a demon had placed upon me.
After applying the potion to my brow, my father kept looking at me. I knew from his frown that it was not fading.
• • •
He waited until dark to carry the old man’s body out of the tent. He did not tell me where he was going; he said only to crouch behind our pots of lentils and keep a meat knife in each hand. Even as I clutched the handles of the knives hard enough that my arms shook, what I thought of, above all else, was my mother.
“A good woman” was how my father had described her once I was old enough to ask about her. But the only way I had heard of a mother giving her child a mark was to have an evil thought and then touch her own skin. Arrat the Storyteller had said that wherever the woman touched herself was where the mark would be on her child.
What could this thought possibly have been? Did she lust for a man other than my father? Then came a thought even worse than this: Is the man who was going to trade half his harvest to rid me of the mark my actual father, or a man too kind and too full of pity to put another man’s child out to die? I pushed this thought aside, but I could not push aside another, which was that my father would have been free except for me. With a grove bigger than any in our village, he could easily have had many wives. Twice he had paid families so that he might take one of their daughters for a wife. Both times the girls had run away.
Mother, why did you not press wool to my face until my heart stopped beating? If you cared for my father, you would have had no choice but to do so.
A couple of times I pointed one of the knives toward my own throat. But I could not do what my mother had not bothered to. My father’s kindness was too great. I could not throw away the life he had spent his own protecting.
• • •
Just after the sun’s rays hit the eastern side of the tent, I heard footsteps. Someone raised the door flap, and there was screaming.
“It is only me, child,” my father said, and I realized that the screaming was my own. “There is nothing to worry about. All is settled.”
We had withstood the gossip my mark provoked, and the scandal caused by my residing in the same tent as my father so long after my first blood. We would, it seemed, also survive Mechem’s disappearance.
But five days later, Mechem’s body floated to the bank of the Nile on the shore closest us. Neither the crocodiles nor the river would have him.
“It is the first time anyone has seen him since he entered your tent,” Arrat told my father.
They were outside but not far enough away that I did not hear them. “That means little,” my father said. “Mechem has swindled half the world and me less than most.”
“Even the smallest bit of dust means something to your neighbors.”
• • •
Two days after Mechem’s body washed ashore, the potion had not done anything besides cause my skin to itch so terribly that I could not stop scratching. When a tiny drop of blood rolled down into my eye, my father gasped and stepped away from me.
I held my hand up, palm facing him, so he could see the red under my nails and know the blood had not gushed from the mark of its own will.
That night, as soon as the sun set, Arrat the Storyteller came to
stand outside the tent. “Eben. I have news for you.”
My father lifted the door flap to go out to meet the trader, but Arrat said, “No. This news I must give you where none may hear.” My father stepped back, and Arrat hurried in as though being chased. He cast a sideways glance at me, and I quickly looked back down at my sweeping.
There was little idle talk before Arrat whispered, though not quietly enough to keep me from overhearing, “Some say it was your daughter who killed Mechem, and others say the demon did it, because he did not want his mark taken from her forehead.”
“Surely there are more explanations than these, which are really only one,” my father said.
“None that I have heard,” Arrat replied.
“You must know it was I who killed him. He tried to take my daughter’s virtue.”
“That would be a good story but for the one already being passed from one mouth to the next. You cannot compete with a demon, Eben.”
“And what have you come to offer?” my father asked sharply. Whatever trust he’d had in men had disappeared with Mechem.
“To take the woman to a foreign land.”
“To do what?”
“To not be killed by a mob of demon chasers. To not be drowned or burned or worse.”
“To be a slave.”
“To be alive.”
“Leave my tent before I kill you too.”
“You will regret this,” Arrat said.
“It is my lot to be full of regret. The gods must think I am able to bear up under the burden. It is a testament to their faith in me.”
“Though you are too stubborn for your own good, I will do what I can to help you.”
“The quieter you are, the greater good you will do me.”
At that, Arrat spat upon the ground, threw open the door flap, and left my father’s tent.
“You have angered him, Father.”
My father let his shoulders and head fall, and with them his show of bravery. “He wanted to sell you.”
Did not some part of him wish he could let Arrat rid him of me? “I am sorry to have made your life so difficult.”
“My life is not difficult, and what small trouble there is isn’t of your making. It is everyone else. They need to fashion explanations for everything. Often the explanation is more terrible than the thing it is supposed to explain.”
I gathered together what courage I could and asked in a voice barely more than a whisper, “Do not you too believe I am marked by a demon?”
“You may be marked, but after marking you, the demon must have fled, because there is not a drop of evil in you.”
I doubted this. How could I bring my father so close to ruin if I were free of evil? And I was not comforted at the thought that the demon had left me. My mother had left me too. No one wanted to be near me.
Except my poor father, who was too kind for his own interests. “Father, you should send me away and save yourself.”
“No, we will find a way. All will be well. But for now hold on to the knives.”
• • •
The villagers were civil at first. A man came to see my father on the eighth night after Mechem disappeared.
My father put on his sandals and stepped out to speak with him. Before the door flap fell closed behind him, I caught a glimpse of the man’s large frowning face.
“You know why I am here,” the man said gruffly.
“You are here engaging in an abomination of nonsense.”
“None think it nonsense but you, and you are not a reasonable man.” The gruffness fell away, and he said more softly, “We have been brethren all our years, Eben.” I did not recognize the man’s voice, I had never seen his face, and yet I did not doubt that what he said was true. I knew little of my father’s life away from the tent.
“I do not wish you ill,” the man continued. “No one thinks that you have anything to do with the demon. We know it was your wife who invited it in with her wickedness.” His voice dropped, “But now that the demon is here, it is you who is feeding it, allowing it to grow stronger in the creature your wife gave birth to. None of us is safe while you harbor it.”
“You with your silly tales! You are like an old woman.”
“We will take the demon woman if you refuse to deliver her.”
My father’s calm crumbled. “She is no woman, only a motherless child.”
“You endanger us all. But most of all yourself. The demon woman is beyond salvation.”
“And you are beyond any privilege due you to stand upon my land now that you have insulted my honorable daughter. Go from this place and never return.” My father came abruptly back into the tent. He stayed near to the door flap until he was sure the man had gone.
• • •
Men camped outside the tent and kept a fire burning at all times.
“How many are there, Father?”
“Not but a few, my child.”
I did not press him, though at least ten voices tussled back and forth across the flames.
“You gather not more than thirty cubits from a girl you call a demon. How afraid can you truly be?” my father yelled out to them.
“We worry for you, Eben,” someone shouted back. “You would make just as good a vessel for the demon as the woman you keep.”
“Perhaps the spirit moves his tongue even now,” another man said. “Eben himself would not dare yell at his brethren as boldly as this one who has taken his form does.”
After this my father could say nothing that was not looked upon as evidence of my demon taking root in him. If not for my father’s grove, the villagers probably would have burned everything to the ground. Despite what Mechem had said, they could not risk the harvest.
One of the men spoke of storming the tent and dragging me to the pit where they would burn me. But the man let himself be talked out of it. Seizing me was too dangerous, the villagers agreed. The gods must be called upon to help them defeat the demon.
My father’s tent filled with the sickening smell of burning goats and gazelles and perhaps other flesh as well that my father did not tell me of. What he said was, “You see? They are in awe of you. They do not dare come any closer.”
But they did dare to throw torches at the tent. My father had grains of the desert in sacks along the perimeter. When torches hit the goatskin walls, he rushed forth with a mat to beat out the fire, then emptied the sacks of sand on it. “If there were a demon here, fire would not scare it,” he screamed. The villagers probably did not hear him over the crackling of the flames.
On the ninth night, Arrat came once again.
“You are not welcome here,” my father told him.
“I bring news of the miracle I have worked to save your daughter’s life.”
At this my father moved to lift the door flap, but Arrat would not come in. “They watch now and might think me touched by the demon if I enter. I will stay out here in their sight.”
“Speak, then, before I lose patience.”
“I have brought word to a moral and upright man of how you killed a trader for practicing magic. This pleases him, because his god is a jealous one and commands all men and all other gods to abstain from these rites. The man has long been in search of a righteous wife.”
I sneaked closer to Arrat’s voice. I could see that my father had raised an eyebrow. He made no reply to Arrat, who continued, “I will bring about a match between your sweet daughter and this good man I speak of.”
“How many wives does he have already?”
“None.”
“He is a widower?”
“No. He has been waiting hundreds of years for a righteous wife.”
“Hundreds of years? You play me for a fool, Arrat. Have you dug a man up from the ground and brought me his bones that I might give my daughter to them?”
“I meant only that though he possesses many years, he has not found a righteous girl to bear him righteous sons. Until I told him of your precious daughter.”
; “How will we get my daughter to his tent through the mob camped all around us?”
My breath caught in my chest at the thought of journeying through the villagers who were calling for my death. It would be a miracle to escape with my life.
“We need not leave this place,” Arrat said. “I will guide him to you.”
My father started. “Will he come with a caravan?”
“No, he travels alone.”
“He will need strong men of some kind to take my daughter safely from this village. Has he no kin?”
There was silence. Then, as if Arrat had not heard my father’s question, he said, “If we promise the villagers she is to go far away and never return, they will likely allow her to leave unmolested.”
Never return. I could not imagine never seeing my father again. But at least, whether I made it through the mob or they killed me, I would burden him no longer.
“You had best be right.” There was a threatening tone in my father’s voice that I had not heard before.
Arrat faltered for a breath before getting out, “They will. I—I will make certain of this.”
“But what of the people in the village she goes to? Will they not see the stain upon her brow and spread word of it as quickly as a hawk swoops down to snatch up a mouse?”
“The man is well respected. If he tells the people your daughter is his good wife, they will welcome her with friendship and gifts of honey and the finest cloth. They will give her olive oil for her hair, kohl for her eyes, and rosewater to wash with so that she brings her husband to her. The midwife will supply unctions so his seed takes root. You will be grandfather to many healthy boys.”
“What is the name of this well-respected man, and where is his camp?”
“His name is Noah, and he lives five days journey west of here.”
“Have you spoken of him before?”
“Perhaps, though not at any great length. You would not remember.”
“I will try, in any case. Say again what you have told me of him so it might bring him forth in my mind’s eyes.”
“He is very upright. He is a man of God.”
“Which god?”
“The God of Adam.”
The Sinners and the Sea Page 2