Japheth’s pleasant features were distorted by anger. “You’ve done enough harm. Get out of here.”
The tent was so small that the three little men were close together, with Sandy, his arms still about unicorn and mammoth, near enough to draw back at the odor of the men from Tiglah’s tent.
“Auk’s nuts to you,” Tiglah’s brother said.
Japheth glanced swiftly at Sandy, then in a reflex so swift it hardly seemed motion, he drew one of the darts from his quiver and jabbed it into Sandy’s arm.
* * *
The two men from Tiglah’s tent shouted in surprise and anger. Tiglah’s father roared, “What happened?”
Where Sandy and the unicorn and mammoth had been there was only a pile of filthy skins.
Japheth replied calmly, “They went out with the unicorn.”
Both men roared in frustration. “Call him back,” the bowlegged man said.
“Or we’ll kill you,” the younger man threatened.
“And what good will that do you?” Japheth demanded. “You’ll never get the Sand back without me.”
Tiglah’s brother snarled, deep in his throat, and lunged at Japheth with his spear, but Higgaion jumped between them, tripping the red-bearded man so that he sprawled on the floor of the tent. He snarled up at his father, “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“Me? What could I do?”
“You let him go out with the unicorn, and our mammoth, too.”
Tiglah’s brother scrambled clumsily to his feet, hefting his spear. “Give us your father’s vineyards, then.”
“No,” Japheth said, and reached for his darts.
But the older man swooped on him with the spear, and despite Japheth’s quick reflex, the spear cut across his ribs, and a trickle of blood slid down his side.
Higgaion lunged at the man, trumpeting in outrage.
But the two men with their spears were too much for Japheth and the mammoth. Japheth clutched his wounded side as the mammoth lunged again and was viciously kicked by Tiglah’s brother.
Suddenly a roar burst over them. “Hungry!” And the manticore stuck his hideous face into the tent. “Hungry!”
“Go away,” Tiglah’s father yelled.
In terror, Higgaion backed up, hitting the skins of the tent, which gave slightly. Japheth, trying to reach for the mammoth, saw that the skins were not pegged securely to the ground. Not many people bothered to set up their tents as well as Noah and Grandfather Lamech.
“Run, Hig, run!” Japheth commanded, and Higgaion backed out of the tent.
“Hungry!” The manticore’s ugly face was followed by his lion’s body and scorpion’s tail.
Japheth was the farthest of the three men from the tent flap. He reached for a dart and his tiny bow, and let a dart fly, to strike the manticore in the forehead.
“Hung—” the manticore started, and fell, unconscious, on Tiglah’s father and brother.
Swiftly, Japheth dropped to his knees and pushed out the opening in the rear of the tent through which Higgaion had left.
The mammoth was waiting outside, whimpering in terror but not willing to leave Japheth completely.
“Run!” Japheth shouted as he stood upright; and they ran. Ran without looking behind them. Onto the desert. And then the illusion that Rofocale had set was broken and Japheth knew exactly where they were. They were at the far end of the oasis, the opposite end from Grandfather Lamech’s tenthold. He hardly realized that blood was streaming down his side as he hurried toward home.
* * *
Admael the camel, Adnachiel the giraffe, and Akatriel the owl left their posts and followed Japheth and the mammoth into the desert.
Japheth, running faster than he had ever run before, suddenly felt dizzy. Everything paled. He slumped slowly onto the sand. Higgaion pushed his feet against rock to slow himself down.
Akatriel flew down to the sand beside the young man, and resumed his seraph form. “He has lost much blood. He is still bleeding.”
Adnachiel the giraffe bent his neck to look at Japheth’s wound, then lowered himself so that he could reach the torn skin with his tongue. Carefully, thoroughly, he licked the wound.
Admael the camel galloped off.
Higgaion hunkered down beside Japheth and the giraffe, whimpering. Adnachiel continued to lick, cleaning the jagged cut the spear had made.
When it was clean, Admael returned with a furry-looking, cactus-type leaf, which he gently pressed against the wound, holding it until the bleeding slowed and stopped.
Japheth, quivering, opened his eyes, to see the seraphim reaching up out of their hosts and into their seraphic forms.
Akatriel, with eyes as wise as those of the owl he had just left, affirmed, “You are all right. You have lost much blood, and that spearhead cannot have been too clean. But Adnachiel has washed the wound and Admael has stopped the bleeding.”
“And you ran much too quickly.” Adnachiel nodded.
“Hig—”
Higgaion touched Japheth’s hand gently with his trunk tip.
“Sand?”
Adnachiel asked, “What happened?”
“I sent him out with the unicorn,” Japheth said, struggling to sit up.
Admael nodded approval. “That was good.”
“Should we call the Sand back?” Japheth asked.
“Better,” Adnachiel said.
Admael asked courteously of the mammoth, “Will you? Or shall I?”
“Both.” Adnachiel was peremptory.
With a light briefly bright as the sun, making them all blink, the unicorn appeared. Sandy’s arm slid from around its neck and he slipped onto the sand. A mangy mammoth tumbled beside him.
Japheth explained, “I used one of my darts on him, but it’s a very short-lasting—”
Sandy’s eyes blinked open, and he sat up.
The three seraphim stood looking at Japheth, Sandy, and the two mammoths.
“Thank you,” Sandy gasped. “Oh, Jay, thank you.”
Embarrassed, Japheth shrugged.
“What’s happened to you?” Sandy demanded. “You’re hurt.”
“I’ll be all right,” Japheth reassured him. “The seraphim have cleaned my wound.”
“Go home,” Admael ordered. “Sandy, you can help Japheth. He is weaker than he realizes.”
“But what happened?” Sandy demanded.
Japheth laughed. “I never thought I’d be grateful to a manticore, but I am now. They’d have killed me if a manticore hadn’t pushed his way into the tent and stopped them.”
The mangy little mammoth pressed against Sandy. “It’s all right,” Sandy reassured. “We’ll never send you back. What happened to them?”
Japheth shrugged.
“Nothing, I suspect,” Akatriel said. “I saw the manticore running away, weeping, a dart falling from his forehead, calling out that he was hungry.”
Japheth laughed again. “I could almost feel sorry for the manticore.”
“Go, now,” Admael urged. “Japheth needs food and rest.”
“Unicorn?” Sandy asked. “What about you?”
As he looked, the unicorn began to flicker, to fade.
Japheth said, “The unicorn knows we don’t need it anymore.”
Where the unicorn had been, there was only a shimmer in the air, and the scent of moonbeams and silver.
* * *
They were united in the big tent that evening. Japheth, hovered over by Matred, lay on a pile of soft skins, pale but smiling, and sipped at the strengthening broth Matred kept offering him.
The starved mammoth had been fed and lay curled up with Higgaion and Selah.
Sandy and Dennys kept grinning at each other in relief, with Sandy repeating over and over his praise of Japheth and Higgaion. “It was a wonderful idea to have Higgy scent for me. I don’t know what would have happened, otherwise.”
Anah looked subdued. “I am so ashamed. That my father and my brother—that my sister should have tried—I thought she liked
the Sand—I don’t know what got into any of them! Can you forgive me?”
“It was not your doing, daughter,” Noah said gently.
“But to think they tried to force you to give up your vineyards! To threaten to kill the Sand and Japheth—”
“Don’t dwell on it,” Matred said, rubbing ointment Oholibamah had given her onto the healing wound on Japheth’s side.
“Is it over?” Elisheba asked. “Or will they try something else? I don’t mean your father and brother, Anah. The nephilim.”
Nobody answered.
Sandy held his bowl out for a refill. “It is so much better than what Tiglah cooked for me—I wonder how I could eat the other stuff, even when it was fresh.” Then he said, “Rofocale the nephil used Tiglah and her father and brother. They are not nice people—sorry, Anah—but I don’t think they’d ever have thought of kidnapping me on their own. If the nephilim are after Dennys and me, they’ll try something else.”
“But why are they after you?” Japheth demanded.
Sandy finished licking his bowl clean. “They know we don’t belong here.”
Noah’s fingers moved against his beard. “But you do. Both of you. The Den made me see that being stubborn was not brave.”
Matred added, “And you both made Grandfather Lamech’s last moons happy ones.”
Noah had tears in his eyes. “You were to him as his own grandsons. He could not have stayed in his own tent without your help. You have become our beloved twins.”
Matred wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “And yet, husband, you have said that there is no room for them in the ark.”
Dennys said quickly, “Don’t worry. We know we don’t belong on the ark. The nephilim aren’t entirely wrong about us.”
Sandy said, “But we’ll be glad to help you build it. We would like to do at least that much for you, because you’ve been very kind to us.”
Yalith and Oholibamah sat close together, hands clasped. Oholibamah said, “We still have time to be together. It will take at least two moons before the ark is finished and ready to stock. And because we have known each other, we can never be entirely separated.”
Japheth said, “As we can never be completely separated from Grandfather Lamech.”
Yalith nodded. Pushed back tears. Sandy was safely back with them. Japheth was wounded, but was going to be all right. This was no time for tears.
Dennys looked at Japheth and nodded. “The night that Grandfather Lamech died—how long ago it seems—Higgaion and I sat out under the stars while Noah was in the tent, waiting for Sandy.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “At the moment that Grandfather Lamech died, the stars held their breaths. And so I knew. And then, because he understood Higgaion and I needed him, Adnarel was with us, saying Fear not, and then he was back in the scarab beetle, on Higgaion’s ear, instead of off with the other seraphim, as he’s been so often lately.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Noah opened a fresh skin of wine. “My love for all of you is too deep for words. Dear twins, we are glad that you have come to us. And now it is time for you to leave, isn’t it?”
Sandy said, firmly, “Not until we’ve helped you build the ark.”
* * *
Sandy and Dennys stayed in the big tent, having been given sleeping skins and a place to themselves across from Noah and Matred. Higgaion and Selah slept with the little mammoth, whose ribs were beginning to fill out, and whose coat was beginning to shine.
Dennys woke up and the darkness of the tent was heavy. Around him he heard gentle snores, and the night sounds of the desert. He nudged Sandy. “Are you awake?”
“Almost.”
“Now what?”
Sandy wriggled into a more comfortable position. “We’ll keep on helping Noah with the ark.”
“And then?”
Fully awake now, Sandy moved so that he could whisper directly into Dennys’s ear. “We’ll take a quantum leap.”
“And how will we manage that?”
“It came to me when the mammoth and I called the unicorn to be in that nasty little tent where I was in prison. The nephilim cannot leave this earth. But the seraphim can.”
“More to the point,” Dennys asked, “can we? Or, rather, can we leave this time and get back to our own? I wouldn’t want to miscalculate and land in the Middle Ages, or the year 3003.”
“I’ll have to speak to Adnarel about it again.”
“You already have?”
“Some. When we first got here. What I think would work for us would be to call unicorns, and ride them, and for Adnarel, or any of the seraphim, to go forward to our time, and then call for the unicorns to come back.”
“Wild.” Dennys whistled.
“Yes, but it worked when the three seraphim called me back onto the desert sands after Japheth and Higgaion came to rescue me.”
“That was space, not time, and a small distance in space, at that,” Dennys pointed out.
“True. But experiments with photons, for instance, seem to show that they can communicate with each other instantaneously, and that means faster than the speed of light. And distance doesn’t seem to be a problem for them.”
“But it’s time we have to worry about,” Dennys whispered. Noah snored a very loud snore, and they could hear him turn over on his skins. Dennys continued, “If I understand Mother’s experiments, an observer is essential in the world of quantum mechanics. I mean, an observer seems to be necessary to make quanta real.”
Sandy moved impatiently. “I don’t understand it. But Mother seems to, and so do a lot of other particle physicists. That’s enough for me. I’ll talk to Adnarel.”
There was a heavy silence. Then Dennys said, “Anything seems to be possible. I hope this is.”
Another silence. Then Sandy asked, “Do you think we could take Yalith with us?”
Dennys did not answer for a while. Then: “No. I don’t think so. We’re not supposed to change history.”
“But she’ll drown.”
“I know. I love her, too.” At last. It had been said.
“But if we love her—”
Dennys’s voice was bleak. “I don’t think we can take her with us.”
Sandy reached for his twin’s hand and grasped it. “A lot of people are going to drown. Would you mind changing history if it would save Yalith?”
Dennys said, “I wouldn’t mind. I’d be willing to try. To try absolutely anything. But I have a feeling that we can’t.”
“I hate it!”
“Shh. I hate it, too.”
Sandy whispered, “It’s going to be dangerous, taking a quantum leap.”
“Dad obviously thinks such things are possible. After all, wasn’t he programming some kind of quantum leap, or tesser, when we messed around with his experiment?”
“So, if he believes in it, it’s not that wild.”
“Sure it’s that wild. It’s got to be that wild in order to work.”
Sandy gave a slightly hysterical laugh. “Our father was not programming unicorns into his experiment.”
Higgaion jerked in a sleeping dream, whimpered. Selah made little murmuring noises, and Tiglah’s mammoth moved closer to the others.
Sandy asked, “What about the mammoths?”
Dennys stretched his arm out so that he could touch, gently, Higgaion’s shaggy fur. “I wonder if they can swim?”
“It wouldn’t do any good. Not for forty days and forty nights.”
Dennys closed his eyes. Listened. Heard the wind high in the sky above the tent, but the words would not come clear. He whispered, “Does—does Yalith know she’s not going on the ark?”
“I think so. I think Noah has told her.”
“I understand that floods and other disasters happen. But if this flood is really being sent by El—”
Sandy said, “If it’s being sent by El, then I don’t like El, not if Yalith is going to drown.”
The wind murmured. “We aren’t sure yet, are we?” Dennys asked. “
I mean, it hasn’t happened yet. Yalith isn’t in the story, so we don’t know what happened to her. Grandfather Lamech truly loved his El. So we can’t be sure. Grandfather loved Yalith. She was his very favorite.”
“Grandfather is dead,” Sandy said flatly. “If we’re going to be any use building the ark, we’d better sleep now.”
The wind wrapped itself about the tent. Sandy slipped quickly into sleep. Dennys lay on his back, listening, listening. The wind’s song was gentle, unalarming. Although he could not make out the words, he felt the wind calming him. Slept.
* * *
“Stupid. Stupid,” Ugiel, husband of Mahlah, hissed.
Rofocale’s contempt came out with a mosquito shrill. “The idiots almost let the manticore get them.”
“Tiglah would have done better by herself,” said Eblis, who wanted Yalith.
Ertrael, sometimes a rat, demanded, “What do we do now?”
The nephilim were gathered in the darkness of the desert, for once conserving their energies. Naamah, still sounding like a vulture, went, “Kkk. Tiglah did not, in fact, do better than her father or her brother. She got no answers. The young giant did not listen to her.”
Elisheth, of the crocodile-green wings, shimmered them in the starlight. “She tried. I would have thought the Sand would find her irresistible. Why did he reject her?”
“Yalith.” Eblis’s beautiful red lips lifted in a sneer.
Ugiel wove his neck in a rhythmic dance, as much cobra as nephil. “You are right. Because of Yalith.”
“But she has no experience,” Rofocale shrilled. “She is still a child. Whereas Tiglah—”
“No,” Eblis contradicted, purple eyes glittering. “Yalith is not a child any longer.” He wrapped purple wings about himself.
“Could we have used her?” Estael, sometimes a cockroach, asked doubtfully.
“If Ugiel hadn’t married her, we might have been able to use Mahlah, Yalith’s sister,” said Ezequen, whose host was the skink.
Ugiel hissed, “We all know she’s Yalith’s sister. And my wife. And the mother of my child.”
Eblis wrapped himself in wings the color of the sunset. “It is time for us to act. Us. Ourselves.”
The Wrinkle in Time Quintet Page 74