Wives of the Flood

by Vaughn Heppner

  Then he heard: “It’s beautiful.”

  Ham frowned. That sounded like his father.

  Then he heard Shem suck in his breath.

  Beside him, Rahab stirred.

  Ham, no longer feeling the close presence of Jehovah, dared peek up. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The dark clouds had rolled away and the sun shone. And over the Ark, bright, colorful and wonderful shone the world’s first rainbow.

  Ham’s chest felt hollow; and a great welling of love toward Jehovah, of His awesome power and grandeur overwhelmed him. After a time, he glanced at Rahab. Tears streamed from her eyes. They smiled. And they held hands. Together, they gazed in rapture at the rainbow, recalling the blessed promises of Jehovah Almighty and that they had survived the Deluge.

  Pharaoh’s Palace

  Sitting on a stool in Pharaoh’s throne-room, Ham shook with exhaustion. He was a tired old man, although only half Methuselah’s final age. Something awful had happened because of the Flood. No one lived as long anymore. Nowadays people died young, in their fifties or sixties, enfeebled by seeming old age.

  Pharaoh stirred. Ham both heard and smelled the sick man. Disgusting. Maybe for the first time in his life, he was glad to be blind. He was spared the sight of a ruler of Egypt rotting to death with boils.

  “You tell an interesting fable,” Pharaoh wheezed.

  “Fable?” Ham asked. “Is that what you think?”

  “Old man, you don’t want to know what I think.”

  Ham rubbed his face, having no strength left to argue.

  “But tell me this,” Pharaoh whispered. “What was the point of your story?”

  Ham bowed his head as if defeated.

  “Shall the guard captain take you to the dungeon then?” Pharaoh asked. “There he will pry the point of your tale out of you.”

  “Father!” Princess Taia cried. “You can’t mean that.”

  “He blasphemes Egypt’s gods with these tales,” Pharaoh said.

  As silent mockery, Ham felt Noah’s curse working its grim justice. The curse was an imp, a plague. Oh, if only he could journey back to that day, that dreadful moment in his father’s tent…

  “Old man,” Pharaoh said. “What is your point?”

  Ham wasn’t ready for the final showdown, so he said, “I beg thee, sire, grant me rest. My tale is not yet finished.”

  “You mean there’s more?”

  “Yes, sire, along with a revelation.”

  Pharaoh tried to reply, but his own rough coughing interrupted him. He soon spat into a physician’s bowl. Finally, he asked, “What revelation?”

  “You may yet be cured of your boils.”

  “You lie like the serpent you are, old man, all so you can twist out a few more years of pathetic life.”

  “I speak the truth.”

  “What do you say, Chamberlain?” Pharaoh whispered.

  “Your will is supreme, sire,” the chamberlain said. “All Egypt worships you. Yet not even the magicians know of a cure for your untimely illness. Perhaps this old one has hidden knowledge. Can it harm you to learn his secret of long life?”

  “That’s just it,” whispered Pharaoh. “I don’t want to give him the pleasure of outliving me. For too long, this creature has outlived everyone in the family. The guards should have entered his room when my father died and cut his throat.” Pharaoh wheezed pitifully. “Will I live until the morrow?”

  “Yes, sire,” the high priest of Sekhmet said.

  “Rest then, you old goat,” Pharaoh told Ham. “And you, Guard Captain. If I die tonight, your orders are to enter his bedroom and shove a dagger in his belly.”

  “Yes, Pharaoh,” the captain said.

  “Now take him, Taia. He is your responsibility.”

  “Yes, Father,” Taia said. “Come, Grandfather.”

  With his joints popping, Ham rose and shuffled from the throne room down many corridors. He wheezed, and his heart thudded.

  “It’s just a little farther,” Taia said.

  Ham nodded as he fought off exhaustion. How he hated being old and feeble. He wondered if this was how his grandfather Lamech had felt, dying at the relatively young Antediluvian age of 777.

  What he needed was a glass of wine or a bowl of beer. Beer! He hadn’t had a thirst for beer…for a long time. He grinned. The history of beer was the history of food. In Egypt, as elsewhere, two staples made up the diet: bread and beer, both products of grain. A common laborer ate three loaves of bread a day, two jugs of beer and onions so his breath stank worse than a camel’s. Even schoolboys—lads taught letters by priests—drank two jars of beer a day.

  Ham shook his head, trying to clear it of facts, figures and history, so much history. Then his bedroom door’s hinges creaked, and he soon climbed onto his cot.

  “Sleep well, Grandfather,” Taia said. “Tomorrow, you must finish your tale and tell them about Sarai’s witchery.”

  Ham paused a moment. Sarai? Ah, yes, Abram’s wife, the one Pharaoh had taken. With that resolved, his head sank onto the pillow. His eyelids closed, and he wondered why a blind man felt the need to shut his eyes while sleeping.

  “I’ll bring you fresh bread tomorrow. Would you like that?”

  Something in her voice drew him back.

  “You must tell them about Sarai,” Taia said. “Explain to Pharaoh that this woman is like Naamah, a sorceress.”

  He was so tired. He could no longer concentrate. He faded…until Taia shook him.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why does Pharaoh hate you? Why did his father hate you, and his father before him?”

  The reason shamed Ham. If he could change anything in his life, it would be that day, that dreadful day of long ago.

  Then Ham lost his thread of thought and fell asleep. But the thread slithered into his subconscious, snaking to the place where it stirred memories. Soon, he began to dream.

  Ararat

  1.

  “It’s freezing,” Rahab said.

  Ham pulled her up to him on the mountainside and wrapped his arms around her. Clouds fled across the sky. The wind howled, tugging their garments like an angry beggar.

  “Look at the Ark,” he said.

  It rested in a cleft of granite, a monstrous, wooden ship stuck on a mountain. Bare rock and water-scoured boulders barely softened by patches of greenery—the Old World had never seen such bleakness. Life struggled to reassert itself from waterlogged seeds and saplings.

  Ham guided Rahab over a bare mountain ridge and into a bleak valley, with loose shale sliding under their feet.

  “It’s so silent,” Rahab said.

  “And eerie,” Ham added. “Do you suppose this is what the Earth was like in the beginning, before Adam and Eve?”

  “No. Not so forbidding,” Rahab said, “so savage.” She groped for his hand. “Can we survive here?”

  “We must.”

  Lighting flashed and thunder shook them.

  Ham grimaced later. “At least I don’t have to worry about a charioteer of Havilah or a Slayer abducting you.”

  “Or a Red Blades for you,” she said.

  Despite the cool weather, sweat prickled his skin as they tramped up the next ridge. There, a strange and dreadful scene shocked them.

  “Oh, Ham, how awful,” Rahab said. “It’s like the Old World’s bones.”

  Logs, millions of uprooted trees, many of them monsters from the time of Eden, were jammed and thrust into the valley. Mold and fungus made thousands of them look leprous. How many other valleys were like this, filled with the debris and flotsam of the Flood?

  The next valley led to a higher mountain. Halfway up it, they sheltered behind a boulder. There they devoured a package of bread and dried figs. At the top of the mountain, the wind blew hard but the view was fantastic.

  “Oh, Ham, look.”

  In the distance, far past the mountains—“Blue,” he said. “Like the horizon.”

  “It’s the sea, the Floodwaters.”

&nb
sp; “I think they’re still receding.”

  “Can we go back to the Ark now? Have you seen enough?”

  Returning in time for supper, the Ark’s narrow halls seemed cramped like a tomb.

  Japheth and Europa had been exploring too. They told of a valley like a graveyard, filled with jelly-like corpses: animals, men and great fishes. According to Japheth, the waxy substance must have coated the corpses at some great depth. Those corpses must have only surfaced at the end of the Flood.

  “If they had floated near the surface the entire time,” Japheth explained, “they would have decomposed by now.”

  “They have become food for the Ark’s predators,” Ham said. “It’s a vast supply of carrion for them to feast on.”

  “As the various fungi and molds on the logs you found will supply herbivores with sustenance,” Gaea said.

  Noah ended the discussion, saying that tomorrow was going to be a hard day. They all needed their sleep.

  The great release began the next morning at dawn. Rats, mice, sparrows, pigeons and pterodactyls fled the Ark together with deer, elk, glyptodons and elephants. Some of the animals wobbled, weak after a year of confinement. Others had mangy fur or sore hooves.

  “We’ll never see this kind of day again,” Ham told Rahab.

  A few hours before dusk, they were done. All the plant-eaters had left the ship, and the majority of those the immediate vicinity of the Ark. A moose bawled at them, then trotted away for one of the many mountain ridges. The reunited ravens wheeled overhead.

  “We made it,” Gaea said, wearily. “We really did it.”

  Noah put his arm around her waist and kissed her.

  Ham took Rahab by the hand and whispered that maybe it was time to repopulate the Earth. She giggled, and they headed into the Ark.

  2.

  During the next few days, Ham saw deer munching on stranded seaweed and elephants plucking the first shoots of new trees. A behemoth tore bark off dead logs, and sparrows pecked water-soaked grains. Before the week was out, a fly buzzed past his ear.

  “If the insects have returned, then it’s time to release the predators,” Noah said.

  The next morning, wolves, lions, hyenas, dragons, hawks, eagles and bears ambled, slunk or flew to freedom. The leopards nosed the sheep pen until Japheth chased them away with hounds.

  During the next week, they endured a rainstorm, a sudden drop in the temperature and a howling wind that reminded them of the worst days of the Flood. Then the sun shone, and it warmed up again.

  “What a strange world,” Gaea said. “It’s so unlike the first.”

  “Sin destroys,” Noah said.

  They ate lunch aboard the Ark, six of them.

  Then the door banged open. A wild-eyed Japheth burst into the room. “The horses are gone!”

  There was bedlam until Noah rapped the table with his knuckles. “What happened?”

  “I walked the horses,” Japheth said, “exercising them. Then a lion jumped out and roared. All the horses fled but for one whose bridle I held.”

  “Did you ride and give chase?” Ham asked.

  “Ride?” shouted Japheth. “I fended off the lion!”

  “Ham didn’t mean anything ill,” Rahab said.

  “He accuses me, doesn’t he?”

  “The lion attacked you?” Noah asked.

  “It roared,” Japheth said. “I thought it would attack.”

  “Did it charge?” asked Noah.

  “It roared.” Japheth paled, as if reliving the memory. Then he spied a cup, draining it until water dribbled down his chin.

  “We need to recapture the horses,” Noah said.

  “They should return,” Gaea said.

  “But if they don’t return,” asked Ruth, “then what?”

  “You said you have one horse left,” Ham said. They had taken seven onto the Ark.

  Japheth eyed his brother before slumping into a chair. “What does it matter? They’re gone.”

  “Father,” Ham said. “Let me take the horse, and I’ll look for the others.”

  Noah frowned. “You can’t go after them now. It’s almost dark.”

  “I’ll take some hounds,” Ham said, “and a spear. I’ll be fine.”

  “Not if the lion shows up,” Japheth said.

  Noah pondered the idea. “First thing in the morning, you can go. We can afford to lose the horses, even if they stay away or if lions devour them. We cannot, however, afford to lose you.”

  3.

  Ham left the next morning with two hounds, a spear and a sack of barley cakes, heading for the plains. Grasses grew there, and flowers, weeds and the shoots of trees. He saw a snake gobbling carrion and, at a low pool of water, a bear flipping a trapped fish. Worldwide, fish were stranded in pools of receding Floodwater.

  Ham slapped a mosquito later, wishing they had died out. It proved once again Japheth’s theory that insects had survived via eggs in the seaweed mats, or maybe the eggs had been borne by the winds. Certainly, a few of the smaller seeds, like thistles and dandelions, could have been airborne the entire time.

  No trees rose on the vast plain yet. Bare rocks, boulders and undulating terrain made up the world. Anything that moved caught the eye.

  Perhaps an hour later, he spotted the horses, grazing on the edge of the horizon, barely discernible as equines. He galloped toward them. The wind rushing past his face felt glorious.

  Then the six horses broke into a nervous gallop. Two wolves loped into view, giving chase.

  Ham followed until the tongues lolled in the mouths of his hounds, until his mount stank of sweat and the bottom of his breeches were soaked. He drew rein, hobbled the blown horse and collapsed onto the ground.

  Noah had said to come back before dark, but he couldn’t give up now. Besides, bringing them in would show up Japheth.

  At dusk, he bedded down with the hounds. No animals bothered them, although cold rain woke him and obliterated the horse tracks.

  In the morning, he headed back, depressed. The sun crawled across the sky and lowered itself for evening.

  A ridge before the Ark, the dogs perked up. Had the horses doubled back ahead of him?

  A man bellowed and a mighty bird screeched. Ham kicked the horse’s flanks and charged onto an amazing scene.

  Japheth drew a spear from a dead orn. Of its mate, there was no sign. The orn, or phororhacos, was a meat-eating monster, kin to the ostrich. Hunters in the Antediluvian World had rated it riskier than a lion but never the equal of a dragon.

  Ham reined in near his brother.

  Japheth wiped the spearhead on the orn’s feathers before squinting at Ham. “It attacked me.”

  It had been speared in the back, Ham noticed, not in the breast. A nearby, overhanging boulder would have made an ideal ambush site.

  “You know how dangerous orns are,” Japheth said. He stood back, with the spear in his hand, his eyes calculating.

  Ham didn’t know what to say.

  “Of course, we’re all safer now that this orn is dead,” Japheth said.

  “If you kill any more predators,” Ham said, “I’ll be obligated to tell father.”

  Japheth turned away.

  “I won’t tell him if you give me your word not to destroy more predators,” Ham said.

  “This course is the wisest,” Japheth said. “Surely, even you can realize that.”

  “You know what mother and father think. So either give your word or—”

  “Oh, very well,” Japheth said. “On my word, I won’t hunt the predators. I just hope we don’t all live to regret it.”

  4.

  The world continued to seethe with change. The tectonic rippling of the planet’s mantle had not yet reached an equilibrium state. Mountains erupted into ash-spewing volcanoes, and would for many years to come. Pollutants remained in the stratosphere from the original breaking of the Old World, and more effluents continued to join them. This helped cool the lower troposphere, as the ashy particles reflected s
unlight back into space—not all the light, but enough to cool the immediate post-Flood world. This cooling was more prevalent on land and more pronounced during summer.

  Adding to the equation was the ongoing effects of the breaking of the great deep. The mantle’s rippling sent hot lava into the new oceans along with hot water. The bleeding of this excess heat took time. It meant the Earth’s oceans were warmer at middle and high latitudes than they would be in years to come. This warmer water evaporated more easily, and great amounts of vapor—in the middle and high latitudes—hung in the air.

  Cooler summers and vast amounts of moisture in the air effected the world in a bizarre way. The two mechanisms caused first snow to fall and then ice to form. In the high and middle latitudes, the ice became sheets. In time, moving ice-mountains ground their way south.

  In the mountains of Ararat, the snow and ice drove them from the Ark and to a nearby northern plain. Japheth named the ice mountains glaciers, and soon the Ark was buried under one.

  5.

  Driven from the Ark by cold, snow and ice, Ham and the others raised wind-whipped tents on the northern slope region—the so-called plain—and survived off the supplies. Under Noah’s guidance, the sons built stone corrals for the goats, sheep and cattle; and they celebrated the first births of each by offering it as a sacrifice to Jehovah.

  Ham built a low stone fence around his tent, creating a yard for a tanning frame, the hounds, some of the goats, an open fireplace and an oven. He dug a hole, lined the bottom with stones and the sides with dubious clay. For baking flat bread, Rahab stuck the dough to the oven’s sides, lit the wood and closed the top. The surrounding earth provided the insulation for heat.

  Gaea said it would be a good idea to start relearning basic crafts.

  So she, Rahab and Ruth trekked to the nearest river and, after several days of searching, found prime clay, much better than what Ham had used for the oven. At Rahab’s request, Ham took several donkeys and loaded the woven-basket saddlebags with the clay.