The Sinners and the Sea

by Rebecca Kanner

  Noah gestured at the herd. “You will gather their milk and wool,” he said.

  I did not want to be outside the tent long enough to do either. I would have to find a way to get out of these duties.

  “Come,” Noah said. I followed him past a loom and sacks of lentils into the tent. It was dark because of the morning shade of the palms. Noah banged two pieces of flint together and produced a spark much sooner than was natural. He lit a lamp.

  Upon the dirt lay several jars of clay, a pot, and a large spoon. A knife lay on a piece of goat hide beside them. These were the sum of Noah’s possessions.

  After taking in my new home, I squatted to look at the bottom of my tunic. It was dirty and ripped where the horde had grabbed at it.

  “It is best,” Noah said.

  I wanted to know why it was best that my tunic was ripped, but I feared that if I asked him, he might think I was vain, or worse, that I was questioning his wisdom. I reasoned that it was better for my tunic to be undesirable so the people would not become aggressive about stealing it from me.

  “My lord, our neighbors . . .” I said. “I have never met such as them.”

  His eyebrows moved toward each other. I should not have spoken ill of his flock. “At least they do not adorn themselves with finery,” he said.

  I would have preferred they be decorated with jewels instead of human teeth, but I kept my thoughts to myself: something that I would learn one is more prone to at the beginning of a marriage than at the end.

  Noah snorted as I took the riding blanket from him and spread it on the floor in the corner of the tent. As I waited on hands and knees for him, I prayed to his God and others. I asked that they protect the son in my belly, if there were one.

  CHAPTER 8

  NOAH

  . . . Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age . . .

  GENESIS 6:9

  As in my last days in my father’s village, I left the tent only to bring up water from the well and to relieve myself. I drank little of the date juice I made for Noah, so I sometimes managed not to leave the tent for a whole cycle of the sun around the earth.

  Not a day or night passed without the sound of swords clashing, or screaming orgies of wine and flesh. These sounds were often accompanied by the conversations Noah carried on with the God of Adam as he paced inside the tent. I could sometimes make out a sentence or two of his mumbling. Usually he was hopeful:

  “They are not lost to us. Your words stick in their ears, and eventually, they will hear them.”

  “Little by little, my Lord, the wicked come closer to belief. They are on the very verge of fearing You.”

  “It will not be long now.”

  He often paused, and I suppose that was when he was listening for the God of Adam. I do not know if He responded.

  Noah was able to walk only a few steps before changing direction. This was because I had asked him if I might stay within the walls of the tent in order to protect my virtue.

  “God watches over your virtue,” he had replied. But he sounded slightly anxious as he said it, so I continued to stand before him with my head bowed. The silence argued better for me than I could have argued for myself. “But He can watch over it more closely if you are here in the tent,” he said. Thus, everything I needed to perform my chores had been brought inside. Surely, when the neighbors saw Noah carrying in all of our food stores and the loom, they thought he was even more mad than they had suspected.

  A couple of times I even prepared meat in the tent. Flies or worms—not so unlike those that had crawled on the corpses we had seen on our journey from my father’s tent—congregated on the unusable pieces of meat, which I threw out of the door flap, and in the little pools of blood on the ground of the tent. These creatures were preferable to the ones outside; they did not hurl insults at me or wrench my tunic over my knees to peer at my woman’s parts.

  Inside the tent, I also wove clothes and blankets for the people of the town, who were constantly in need of new ones. When Noah had told me that making clothes would be my primary chore—despite that we would not profit from it—he had explained, “I am leading this lost and unruly flock back to the righteousness of the Lord. Immodesty is an abomination in His eyes.”

  On days when Noah lost patience with the sinners, immodesty was one of the many things he complained to God about as he ranted around the loom, through the rows of clay pots full of lentils, over our sleeping blankets, and beneath the nets full of fruit and nuts that hung off lines strung up from one end of the tent to the other. Fornication was another. He did not omit any details when he talked to God about the flock he was trying to bring Him: “Among all the children as much as ten years of age—both male and female—I am certain there are no virgins. Even some of the younger children are no longer pure.”

  I could not keep myself from interrupting him. “What about Javan’s daughter, my lord, the one who is simple? Surely she is a virgin.”

  Noah kept pacing as if he had not heard me. When enough time had elapsed that I had given up on receiving an answer, he said, “Unlikely.”

  During his silence, I had thought about it myself, and I doubted a man had known the child. She had not seemed wanton or harmed by men. She appeared to possess the boldness of an innocent, one who does not yet know the evils of which men are capable.

  So as not to seem as though I were questioning Noah, I said, “This saddens me, my lord. At least the God of Adam has left her heart innocent.”

  “She is not innocent. She is just too depraved to know the seriousness of her misdeeds in the eyes of the Lord.”

  I said nothing. After a few more paces, he continued, “She is Javan’s daughter; wickedness has been sown into the very center of her soul.”

  I knew that was the child’s true crime in Noah’s eyes. He seemed to have a place in his heart for all the sinners but Javan. “Yes, my lord,” I said quickly, hoping to end the conversation. He snorted.

  When Noah was not talking to or about God, he seemed to be at an utter loss for words. Perhaps this was why, when he was not tending the herd or sleeping, he spent most of his time in the road yelling about wickedness.

  One day I put down the lentils I was sorting and watched out the tent flap as he moved slowly down the road on the back of the ass, shouting at the people of the town to repent. “It is not yet too late to atone and find favor in the eyes of the One True God!”

  “This One True God must have a lot of time on His hands, to listen to the ravings of a lunatic,” a man coming out of one of the tents shouted back at him. “Why do you wear His ear out, along with ours, all night and day?”

  “If you did not blather on so much,” another man added, “maybe more than one god could bear to listen to you.”

  Often at night I lifted the flap of the tent window and saw these men in the light of the fires they roasted goats over. Their clothes were tattered, despite the new ones I was always making. A few times I saw a man close enough to decipher the scarring on his face. The more I looked from the window at night, the clearer it became that all the men were marked not only by an X upon their forehead but also by the sword, spear, or club of another man. Broken, bloodied noses, busted lips, small craters where eyes had been—these were the features of the men’s faces. A couple of the men even had holes in their cheeks through which, at a shorter distance and in a little more light, I might have seen teeth or a tongue. Unwieldy gashes jaggedly separated one part of a man’s face from another. Infections ate at their skin, and pus bubbled from their wounds.

  Time had not managed to mark Noah’s face as deeply as battle had marked these men’s. Noah’s skin was thin and wrinkled, yet his features were easily recognizable. I was afraid for Noah and his unscarred face. What if the God of Adam broke from His vigil over him? I thought that surely someday a mercenary would take the opportunity to make his mark upon this unscarred surface, there being so few such surfaces in the town.

  As I worried for Noah, I could not
keep a startling realization from making itself known to me: I had somehow come to care for the strange, self-righteous man to whom my father had given me.

  CHAPTER 9

  HERAI

  One day when Noah had climbed onto his donkey and ridden ever so slowly into town, I heard a strange sound. It was a child’s voice, fearful but without intonation or inflection. Other voices grew louder until I did not know whether the child had gone silent or was being drowned out.

  “I will have this virgin half-wit to earn back the money Javan stole from me when I lay with her.”

  “And I as well!” another man said.

  Javan’s voice was full of rage yet steady. “Leave my simpleton alone, or I will unman you with a dull knife.” I had no doubt she would follow through if the men raped her daughter, but by then it might be too late to save the girl’s good nature.

  Why had Noah not provided me with any weapon other than the wrath of his God? I did not know how to call this God to my aid. Besides, if what Noah said was true and God had crippled the girl’s development for her mother’s sins, why would He help her now?

  I secured my head scarf, lifted the door flap and peeked at the road. A man stood with his back to me, staggering under the effect of too much wine, with the girl held high over his head. A smaller man was jumping up and down, trying to grab at her. “Me first!” he cried. They were less than thirty cubits away. Javan was pounding her fists on the first man’s chest, but the man was too large and too drunk to care.

  I emptied lentils from a large clay pot and brought it to the door flap of the tent. Knowing that people usually hear their name above all other sounds, I called, “Javan!” She peeked her head around the torso of the man who held her daughter in the air.

  Though her daughter may have been slow, Javan herself was as quick as a man chased by fire. I flung the pot along the ground, and she ran to pick it up. The men were still playing keep-away with the child when Javan came up behind the smaller one and slammed the pot across the back of his head. He cried out and went down. The larger man turned around in time to be hit in the neck. He dropped the girl to the ground and reached for Javan. But the strength was draining out of him, along with the blood that flowed from his neck.

  I would have given each of the men a few more wallops to the head, but Javan was confident of the quick work she had made of them. She grabbed her daughter by the hair and pulled her to her feet. “Dreadful simpleton!” she yelled. “Where is the knife I gave you? I should have let these diseased cocks have you. Will I have to waste the rest of my life trying to make up for your slowness?”

  Without thinking, I ran to defend the child, then stopped abruptly. Javan had just injured or killed two men. Why would she not do the same to me?

  “Javan,” I said, “I have some milk for the child.”

  Javan looked at me without any gratitude for the pot I had given her or how I had risked drawing attention to myself to do so. “And for me?” she said.

  There seemed to be no other choice. “For you as well,” I said.

  She let go of her daughter’s hair and followed me back toward the tent. The girl trailed behind her a few cubits. “Come, child,” I called. She looked at me without smiling. I hope it is not too late for her, I thought. She is the only source of joy in this town. I stopped outside the tent. “Wait here.”

  “You keep milk in the tent? Do you also keep mule piss inside?”

  I did not answer. I skimmed the cream off some goats’ milk and put it in a small bowl for the child. Then I poured most of what remained of the milk into another bowl for Javan. When I came out of the tent, Javan was standing on a pile of dried donkey dung, likely for the fraction of a cubit it added to her height.

  I gave Javan her milk first, so that her hands would be full and her attention would be on her own bowl. Then I held the cream out to the child. Hurry, child, I thought, drink before your mother notices your cream. She smiled at me and clapped her hands together before taking it. My heart lightened for the second time in the two moons since I had left my father’s tent. The girl had not been harmed by the drunken men who now lay in the road. Perhaps it was her slowness that kept her from becoming as hardened and mean as everyone else.

  When I raised my gaze from the child’s face, I saw that Javan was eyeing me thoroughly from head to toe. Then she rested her gaze on my stomach. “Is there a brat in your belly yet?”

  “I do not know.”

  She smiled. “But he thinks there is.” She did not so much ask me as tell me.

  I waited for her to finish the milk so I could take her bowl and wish her well, but she left a couple of drops to prevent me from doing this. I kept my hands at my sides and tried not to frown too deeply. I was hoping Javan would not prevent me from looking after her daughter sometimes.

  “What is your name?” I asked the girl.

  She just smiled.

  “She comes to ‘simpleton,’ ” Javan said.

  “But what did you call her when she was born?”

  “It does not matter now.”

  “It does matter,” I said sharply.

  “So then what is your name? Or do you want to go on being called demon woman?”

  “I do not have a name.”

  Javan raised an eyebrow. Had she heard the anger in my voice and the shame beneath it? “Well, do you at least have more milk, perhaps some goat meat?” she asked.

  “No wonder there is so much of you.”

  She laughed. “Yes, there is plenty to make a man comfortable.”

  Before I could think better of it, I said, “Do you do nothing besides copulate all day and night?”

  “Yes. I just killed two men.”

  I had somehow forgotten this, and she must have enjoyed the shock on my face. I suddenly wondered what she had done to earn the X upon her forehead.

  “With a pot you gave me,” she added.

  I got more milk and dried goat meat for both her and the child. “Now tell me the child’s name,” I said.

  “She is Herai.” The girl did not react as her mother said this; she just kept smiling up at me. “She likes you,” Javan said. “Perhaps due to her slowness. I myself prefer whoring to mothering. Men’s appetites can be sated, but children’s grow just as quickly as their bodies do. You will know soon enough.”

  If I have to feed an appetite larger than Noah’s, I do not think there will be much left of me.

  Javan seemed to enjoy talking, and I did not know anybody else, so I asked her, “How does the town sustain itself? I see no crops.”

  “Do not be simple, woman.”

  I would not be checked. “And why do the men fight among themselves while they are here in Sorum, where surely they are not being rewarded?”

  “The men are hired as soldiers by any tribe with enough meat and wine to pay them. When no tribe needs them, the weapons, teeth, and bones of other mercenaries are reward enough for battle. They are gamblers, of a sort. Besides, they know nothing else.” Though she had not answered my first question, she waited for some sort of response from me. When there was none, she asked, “What is it you do when Noah is too far away to rut you?”

  I should not have spoken so carelessly of Noah. But I had not gotten to talk with anyone besides him in two moons, and he did not actually talk with me. He talked at me. “I make clothes that Noah gives away, and blankets he takes from my loom before I have had a chance to knot the last yarns. I never see them again, not even when I look at the people he has given them to.”

  “The men prefer to wear the clothes of the dead. Who would be foolish enough to wear new clothes and risk having his life taken so that his clothes could be cut off of him?”

  “Then what do the men do with the clothes Noah gives them?”

  “Give them away in exchange for the very things Noah is always telling them not to do. The best whores have whole stacks of tunics. Sometimes the whores present them to traders for food and wine.”

  “And what do they do with t
hem otherwise?”

  “Trade them for children that they can prostitute, which is what you could do, should Noah ever tire of you. You like children.”

  I had seen many traders when I dwelled in my father’s tent, and they were all men. Some of them had seemed greedy enough that I could imagine them trading in children. “Men might do such a thing, but not women,” I said. “You lie.”

  “I just killed two men. I do not have the energy to lie.”

  Indeed, she did not seem like a woman who would bother to lie. She did not have the decency.

  “Families come from surrounding towns,” she said, “or sometimes from far away, to trade their children.”

  My husband’s town was hardly better than Arrat’s tales of it. My knees buckled. Sorum was no more than a large brothel for mercenaries.

  “Perhaps you should give each piece of clothing some flaw,” Javan taunted. “Make the tunics too short, or with an odd tear here or there, or spill some grape juice on them. Better yet, soak them in blood. Then the traders will not want your clothes, and our men will not be afraid to wear them.”

  I could not speak. Javan was no doubt overjoyed at the effect her words were having on me. She kicked my knee to make sure I was listening, then went on: “Though pulling the clothes off the dead is great sport. No matter how you damage the clothes you make, still they will not be as lucky to the men as the ones they pull off each other in battle.”

  She kicked me again. She did not kick hard, but I would not have cared if she had. “The men must fight the bodies of the dead for clothes and teeth even as the battle wages around them, because afterward nothing will be left. Not one single tooth. And this is honorable because it is more dangerous than fighting the living—another man can see you pillaging a dead man and kill you while you are distracted.”

  She is mad, as are all the rest who have not fled this place. A small, sweet hand touched my hair and played lightly with it. Except Herai. Thank you, God of Adam, and all other gods, for this one joy.