Ark

by J. J. Wilder

  “I know I am pregnant, old woman.”

  “Then what do you want with old Mirra? Hmmm? If you don’t summon me to tell you this, you want something else.” Her one rheumy brown eye fixed on me, and the healer shuffled close enough that I could smell the garlic and onions on her breath. “Perhaps you want some different herbs, eh? Not so grateful for this gift of the king, perhaps? Ah, girl, I’ve heard the stories. I know the ways of the king. I’ve been summoned to heal the boys he’s used, and the slave girls as well. More than one bastard child runs the streets of Larsa, unwanted. Yes, girl, I know why you called me.”

  “Then give me the herbs that will take the child back to the gods.”

  “Forgive me, mistress, but I cannot. The king would know I’ve been to you, and he knows the herbs I’d use. He’s a cunning king, that man. If I do what you ask, it would be my head. Old I may be, but I am not ready to meet Ereshkigal, not yet.”

  I wept, then. “Please—please. I will have you taken to my father’s city. I can have you protected, there.”

  Mirra shook her head. “No, girl. If the gods will it, the child will live, and the child will die by their will.”

  I clutched her hand, falling to my knees before her. “I cannot have that monster’s child! I cannot. I would rather die. Give me poison then.”

  Mirra pulled me up. “Just because the father is a demon, does not mean the child will be. I cannot give poison to the queen. You know that. The guards watch, and they report.”

  I shoved Mirra away, roughly, and she stumbled back against the wall. “Fine then,” I hissed. “Leave me to my fate.”

  “I’m sorry, child . . . I wish I could give you what you want. I was married to a man I didn’t love, once. I know your pain.”

  “You don’t know my pain,” I snapped. “Maybe you were married to a man you didn’t love, but did he do what Sin-Iddim does? Did your husband rape you every night? Did he rape you so hard you bled, even though it’s not your moon-cycle? Did he sodomize little boys in front of you?”

  Mirra glared at me, her eyes hard and ancient and unforgiving. She was not intimidated by me, not at all. Her eyes pierced me, sifted through my soul.

  “Bah! What do you know of pain, girl?” Mirra’s voice crackled, as hard as her eyes. She’d seen a hundred lifetimes, her eyes said to me; she’d seen things I could never imagine. “You know nothing. I was not always a stooped and haggard old crone, you know. Once, my back was straight, my hair was dark and thick like yours, and my hips were round like yours and my breasts high like yours. Once, I was beautiful, like you. Once, I was proud, like you and thought I knew everything, like you. Once, I loved a man, like you do.”

  A twisted grin curled the wrinkled corners of her mouth.

  “Yes, girl, I know your secret,” she cackled. “I see what you hide from the king. I see what you hide even from yourself . . . yes, girl, I see it. You cannot hold secrets from old Mirra. Come, sit. Yes, sit here, next to me, and listen. Hear the wisdom of an old hag who has seen a dozen lifetimes.”

  I had little better to do but wait, so I sat beside Mirra and listened to her story.

  “When I was young and nubile and beautiful,” Mirra began, “I loved a man. He was tall, and strong. He was handsome and virile. He kissed me, and the world stopped. He held me, and the stars sang for our love. But the gods—and my father—had other plans for me. You see, my father was a wealthy man, a merchant. There was another man, another merchant just as wealthy as my father who dealt in the same goods, cloth and spices and slaves, and he ran his goods along the same trade routes as my father. You are a smart girl, I’m sure you can see where this led. Two proud, wealthy men plying the same goods along the same route . . . they came to blows more than once.

  “Then, one day, the other merchant happened to see me. I was walking with my servants, coming home from the market. I remember what I wore that day—two hundred years ago or more it was, but I remember the deep indigo of the dress, the richness of the fabric as it lay against my skin, the kohl thick on my eyes, gold on my wrists and opals on my neck. My hips swayed like rushes in the wind, and my hair was piled atop my head in intricate braids. Every man in the market saw me, and every man desired me. Sannin was no different, although he was old, older than my father by a dozen years at least. I had no eyes for him—he might as well have been a wall or an urn for all that I noticed him. I only had eyes for my lover.

  “He was a no one, my Jorin. His father was a poor carpenter, and Jorin had only a spear and a shield to his name, but he was a strong and fierce warrior . . . he was a god, in my eyes, for all that he was poorer than the very dirt underfoot.

  “But you know what happens, yes? My father had a brilliant plan. He enticed Sannin to a tavern, plied him with wine, spoke to him of the merits of joining forces, doing business together. My father had a way with words, and he sold Sannin on the idea. But Sannin had one condition. He would only do business with my father if he could have me as his wife. My father never even batted an eyelash. He agreed right there, without so much as speaking to my mother, much less to me.

  “He wouldn’t hear a word from me about what I wanted or didn’t want. I didn’t matter. I was given to Sannin like a bolt of linen, and for less than that in bride-price. Less than a month passed between the meeting and the wedding. I wept all that day. Sannin, old as he was, still had plenty of sap left in his tree, let me tell you. He plowed my field with all the vigor of a man a hundred years younger, and with all the gentility of an aurochs in full charge. So yes, girl, I know what it’s like to bleed after a man’s been between my thighs.”

  Mirra paused, staring into the past, seeing ghosts.

  “Sannin had a temper on him,” she resumed. “He had quick fists, and he didn’t care a whit if I was in his wife, or a servant. My eye was black and blue more often than not. When I was married to Sannin, Jorin, my lover, was furious. He’d been saving his earnings to pay the price for my hand. He’d saved every single coin he’d earned, my sweet Jorin. He starved himself to marry me. Then, just as he was about to ask for my hand, Father married me off to Sannin.

  “Jorin didn’t take that sitting down, I’ll tell you. Sannin went on frequent journeys to other cities, selling his goods, and Jorin, crafty, stupid Jorin, he cornered me in the marketplace. I tried to avoid him, tried to be a dutiful wife. But I couldn’t help it. Jorin, he was . . . oh, he smelled of sweat and dust and all things male as his arms crushed me against him. I couldn’t help myself. I met him in the market as often as I could, at first merely talking, kissing behind the rug-seller’s wares, snatching a moment or two.

  “Then, one day Jorin laid me down on a blanket on the floor of a dirty little room and he loved me there, hard and fierce and desperate. He loved me as I’ve never been loved before or since. I got with child from that, and my husband found out. He was not a stupid man, my husband. He never confronted me about it. He waited, and he watched. He saw me with Jorin, and then he hired a dozen men.” Another rife pause. “Jorin died a horrible death. He bled out in the dust outside our home, and I couldn’t go to him. Sannin tied me to a chair and sat me facing the window, forced me to watch as my lover and the father of my baby was beaten to death by a dozen men with clubs. Then Sannin turned to me and beat me until I miscarried the baby. When I’d bled the child out, Sannin dragged me through the streets of the city by my hair and tossed me at my father’s doorstep and left me there.

  “My father wouldn’t take me in—he closed the door in my face. My mother snuck out and helped me to a healer, an old woman much as I am now. That old woman saved my life and let me live with her, taught me all she knew, and I became a healer. I’ve not tasted the sweat on a man’s body since Jorin died, and I don’t miss it. Jorin was my one love, and he is gone.”

  She fixed her one rheumy eye on me and pierced me with her sharp, knowing gaze. “So yes, child, I do know exactly what your pain feels like, and more yet that I hope you’ll never know.” She nodded firmly. “This I kno
w, child: you will survive this.”

  Mirra fell silent, but she didn’t take her eyes from me. She took my hand in hers, and her skin felt like dried papyrus that had set out in the sun too long; she smelled of a hundred kinds of herb, and she had a whisker on her chin, dangling from a mole.

  “How will I survive?” I whispered. “How? He is a monster . . . and this child will be a monster. I can feel it growing, I can feel in my bones that if I bear this child, it will be more evil than the father. He will be like my father and my husband combined . . . I—I cannot. I cannot.”

  Mirra didn’t answer. She shook her head, muttered to herself, too low for me to hear. She patted my hand, heaved herself to her feet, leaning on her staff. She took up her bag of herbs and stood over the cup of wine that sat near my elbow. With one long, sad glance at me, Mirra dipped her fingers into the bag and withdrew a pinch of herbs and crushed them into the wine with strong, trembling fingers. She handed the goblet to me and watched me drink it, then placed the bag in Irkalla’s hands.

  “You know what to do, child,” Mirra said to Irkalla. “You have seen this done before, so you know. Be careful to not give her too much, or she could die.” A long, long pause, and then Mirra turned her gaze to me. “The gods have granted me a vision of you, girl,” she said. “You have a purpose yet, and so you cannot die. You will know the love of your man, but not until you have suffered much.”

  Her last words chilled the blood in my veins: “Before this demon is loosed from your womb, you will wish for death.”

  I drank the wine. It was bitter and tasted of oils and herbs and death. My stomach cramped and clenched and my bowels turned to water. Irkalla mixed the wine again the next day and the day after that. Every day the pain worsened, until I could not move from my bed; I screamed until my voice was raw and ragged, and then I screamed silently.

  Still the child remained in my womb.

  Irkalla mixed the wine again and again. I prayed to every god I knew—save one—for the child to die. It was a child—I made no equivocation about that. What I did was as much murder as if I had stabbed it with a knife, but what I had told Mirra was true: this child was a demon, a monster. I could not, would not, bear the child of that evil king.

  After a week of unbearable agony, my loins burst open and clots of blood and tissue flooded the bed beneath me in crimson, stinking waves. If I could have screamed aloud, the sound of my voice would have carried to my father’s ears, hundreds of miles away. As it was, all that emerged from my throat was dry, rasping gasps; all the agony that had gone before was as the trickle of a stream before a flash flood. The pain that I had endured in the preceding seven days was nothing, nothing at all compared to what I experienced at that moment.

  I wept hot silent tears and begged Ereshkigal to take me.

  I begged Enki and Enlil to take me.

  Finally, when I had pleaded with and cried out to all the gods of my people, I begged Elohim to forgive me.

  All I received from all the gods and from The One God was silence.

  The child had no name, no grave. Irkalla burned the effluvia in an urn beneath a window, sprinkling sage on the crackling, foul-smelling flames to dull the scent of burning blood.

  The following week, Mirra’s head was brought to me in a wicker basket by a grim-faced guard.

  5

  Wipe Them Out

  “So God said to Noah, ‘I have decided to destroy all living creatures . . . yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth!’” Genesis 6:13 (NLT)

  Hands fumbled at the manacles binding Japheth to the wall.

  Japheth ignored them, thinking them hallucinations or dreams. Exhaustion, hunger, and thirst had sapped his strength, but not nearly so much as the disgust and horror of the temple prostitute’s death. Japheth had thought himself fairly desensitized to gore and death from a lifetime of making war, but the girl . . . he could still taste her blood in his mouth, could still see her eyes fly wide with shock and pain as her life fountained out of the gash in her throat to bathe him crimson. Those weren’t what caused the nightmares though. What Japheth saw every time his eyes closed was the face of the priest and the black flood of possession spreading through his eyes, occluding the whites and pupils and irises, until there was naught but black shadow in his gaze.

  The hands pulled at Japheth, and a voice buzzed in his ear, but the words were dull and distant and unintelligible. Pain cracked through Japheth’s face as a fist connected with his cheek and sent him spinning to slump against the wall.

  “Get up, you fool!” Japheth heard Zidan’s voice whispering furiously in his ear. “They’ll find us in a moment, so if you want to be free of this house of hell, you’d best get moving.”

  The throbbing in his cheek cleared the haze from Japheth’s mind. He blinked his eyes and staggered to his feet; the body of the temple prostitute was still lying on the floor, her eyes wide and glassy, the blood dried in a sticky pool around her body. Japheth knelt and tried to shut her eyes, but she’d been dead too long. Instead, he tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her dress and laid it across her face.

  Take her soul unto yourself, Elohim, Japheth prayed. She did not deserve this death.

  “Leave the whore,” Zidan growled, “We have to go, now.”

  Japheth span and thrust his face into Zidan’s, eyes blazing. “She died so that demon-priest could send me a message. Show some respect.”

  Zidan was unfazed by Japheth’s fury. “You’ll join her in the afterlife, if we don’t leave. I could only buy so much time, and it’s nearly gone.”

  Zidan tossed a guardsman’s dirty tunic at him, and then thrust the hilt of an iron short sword into Japheth’s left hand and a small buckler into his right. Not waiting for an answer, the mercenary crept out of the antechamber and through the darkened temple. A lone torch flickered on a far wall, and the air was blessedly clear of incense.

  Japheth got dressed and grabbed his weapons. Just as he was about the follow Zidan out the door, a glint of something on the floor caught his eye: his pendant. He caught it up and, in doing so, felt an energy course through his body. Maybe Elohim was watching him after all.

  The temple wasn’t deserted; Japheth could see priests and temple guards roaming along the walls. From behind a thick pillar came a low, feminine moaning and a porcine grunting, and as they passed the pillar Japheth saw pale buttocks flashing with desperate thrusts in the gloom. The pig-snorts of pleasure escalated to a final, feral growl, and the priest dismounted the prostitute, who snatched a handful of coins and scurried out of the temple.

  The priest lowered his robe and cast a furtive glance around the temple, allowing Japheth a brief look at his face in the midnight darkness: Mesh-te.

  Japheth’s blood boiled, and rage tightened his grip on the short sword. Before Zidan could stop him, Japheth was skulking behind the evil priest. The priest was oblivious to Japheth’s presence behind him until it was too late. Japheth lunged like a pouncing lion, one hand clamping around the priest’s mouth, the short sword lifting to press against his jowled throat.

  “Where are your false gods now, priest?” Japheth rasped. The priest grunted and thrashed, but Japheth was far more powerful than the spent old Nephilim. Japheth dragged sharpened iron across papery flesh, holding Mesh-te still until his flailing stopped. Japheth dropped the corpse to the floor and rejoined Zidan in the main hallway, the entire process having taken less than a minute.

  “Feel better?” Zidan asked.

  Japheth watched blood drip from the tip of his sword. “No, but it’s a start.”

  Zidan only snorted in reply.

  Outside the temple, the city was sleeping, dark and quiet and moonlit. Japheth noticed for the first time Zidan’s temple-guard uniform, which explained how they’d managed to walk out without trouble. Zidan was hurrying Japheth down the ziggurat steps and onto the main thoroughfare, getting them as far away from the temple as possible. Mesh-te’s body would be discovered soon, and the farther away Zidan and
Japheth were, the better. They rounded a corner and Zidan paused to discard the temple-guard uniform, keeping the spear, a rectangular shield, and a breastplate, which he gave to Japheth.

  “Now what?” Japheth asked.

  “Now we rejoin the fat little merchant and go back to Bad-Tibira with the sunrise.”

  Japheth finished buckling the breastplate and leaned back against the wall, suddenly tired as the adrenaline left him. “For you, maybe.”

  Zidan shook his head, yanked Japheth back into a fast walk. “Boy, you are a bigger fool than I thought. You cannot honestly think you can rescue your Nephilim princess, do you? She’s a queen, now! And not just any queen, but Sin-Iddim’s queen. You fought against the old demon—you know the kind of forces he’s got. What do you think you could do alone against an army?”

  Zidan shoved Japheth against the wall and held him there by the throat, fury in his eyes.

  “I did not save you from that gods-damned priest to have you throw your life away for a Nephilim, whether she’s a princess, a queen, or a commoner,” Zidan said. “She’s gone, Japheth! There’s nothing you can do.”

  Japheth slapped Zidan’s hand away, then slammed the butt of the spear into the dust, cursing. “Don’t you think I know that? You think I meant to fall in love with a Nephilim girl? Gods . . . I thought I’d tumble her a time or two, and she’d be gone. I killed for her, and I would again. If I have to, I will wade through a river of corpses to get to her.”

  Zidan was silent for once, seeing the dangerous light in Japheth’s eyes. Knowing he had no other choice, he stepped aside and let Japheth go and meet his fate.

  Larsa seemed small and shabby compared to the mammoth grandeur of Ur. Zidan had given him some coin, and Japheth had spent a few nights in an inn regaining his strength and then had joined a caravan heading to Larsa. He had no real plan, only an unformed notion of trying to get close enough to Sin-Iddim to try and kill him. It was a suicide mission, but it was all he could think of. He’d heard rumors of war in the inn’s common room and the other guards in the caravan confirmed that Ur had indeed sent an army against Uruk. That didn’t necessarily mean Larsa would get involved, but even being in the same city meant he might be able to formulate some sort of plan. And, if nothing else, joining the Larsan army meant work, which meant a distraction.