Wives of the Flood

by Vaughn Heppner

  The three men seldom spoke and often dismounted to trudge beside their small mounts. At Lake Van, Noah decided to take a new route to the salt lick. He had found it several years ago and came thereafter once every six months. Whenever the urge to explore bit him, he started talking about fulfilling Jehovah’s commission to fill the earth, which he did now as they took this long route around the lake. “We have to know what’s where if we’re going to take Jehovah seriously about replenishing it with people.”

  They fished along the shore, sometimes wading knee-deep in the water to cast their lines. Afterward, they built a fire and ate their fill. Then one morning, as they rode beside the sun-sparkling lake, Noah noticed a fist-sized rock on a gravel shore. He slid off his donkey and hurried to it, returning with a green stone.

  “What is it?” Kush asked.

  “Malachite,” Noah said.

  “The way you ran, I thought it was legendary gold.”

  Noah grinned. “This is better than gold. It’s copper ore.” He tossed the stone to Ham, who examined it.

  “We’ll camp here today and look for more,” Noah said.

  “What about salt?” Kush asked.

  “Today, copper ore trumps it,” Noah declared.

  So, the rest of the day Noah, Ham and Kush wandered the gravel shore looking for green stones. “And blue, if you find it,” Noah said.

  Kush brought him stones with bright yellow pyrites that sparkled in the sun, asking him if this was gold.

  “Fool’s gold,” Noah said. “Worthless.”

  Kush twisted his mouth at the word “fool.” He went back to searching for malachite, clattering the green stones into a growing pile.

  That evening, Noah stretched out, smiling, telling them to keep their eyes open tomorrow for small black stones, tin nuggets. The next morning, the search continued, with each of them becoming more discriminating as to the amount of malachite in a stone that he bothered adding to the pile. Finally, Noah said they had enough. He went through their finds, tossing the best stones into a new pile.

  “Load those,” Noah said.

  Ham and Kush did, until the saddlebags bulged.

  On the way home, Noah explained the art of smelting.

  “Melting rocks,” Kush said. “I don’t understand.”

  On their return, Noah began to dig a pit outside the stone fence surrounding his tent.

  Kush and Ham evaded questions about, “Where’s the salt?” by taking their rhyolite axes, heavy stone tools, and going into the nearby forest to fell trees. The fresh shittim trunks they splintered into logs, and with wedges, they chopped them into forearm-length chunks. By ox-drawn wagon, they carted the firewood to a large clay enclosure, putting the chunks into it, lighting them and sealing the enclosure. The shittim wood partially burned in the absence of air and turned into charcoal. Because it was shittim wood, the charcoal was hard and slow burning. They took the pieces from the oven, filled the wagon and hauled it to Noah’s pit.

  With a granite hammer and a big granite “anvil,” Noah smashed the malachite into smaller chunks. These chunks, he ground down with a mortar and pestle to the consistency of gravel.

  An open campfire couldn’t reach the needed temperatures, so Noah lined his newly dug pit with heavy stones, fitting them together as closely as possible. He kept adding stones, building the circular fireplace to about knee-height. Then he lined the inside of the fireplace with baked clay.

  “We’ll build a proper furnace later,” Noah said. “But for the amount of ore we have now, this will work just fine.”

  Noah filled the clay-lined pit with charcoal and pieces of malachite, about two-thirds full. Pots of water stood, along with three long blowpipes of rolled hide-strips fitted with ceramic ends. Noah lit the charcoal and handed out the blowpipes. The three of them raised the fire’s temperature by puffing steadily into the furnace through the blowpipes. It was hot, sweaty work, and each of them often dipped a wooden ladle into the water jugs to quench their thirst. From time to time, either Noah or Ham sprinkled handfuls of gravelly malachite over the red-hot coals and then added more fuel. In alternating layers, they filled the furnace until it brimmed.

  Kush wiped his sweaty brow, and his eyelids drooped with fatigue.

  “Careful!” Noah said, startling Kush. “Don’t inhale through the blowpipe.”

  “I know.”

  “If you do, it will scorch your throat.”

  Later, when they were all out of breath, Noah motioned them back. “That’s good. The metal should have separated from the rocks by now.”

  In time, the fire died out, leaving the furnace with heaps of slag: blackish lumps.

  “That doesn’t look like copper,” Kush said.

  “I suppose not,” Noah said. He and Ham went at the slag with hammers and chisels, prying out black lumps. These lumps they took to the granite anvil, smashing them to rubble, extracting a pea-sized pellet of copper from each.

  “These,” Noah said, “change everything.”

  Kush blinked, watching the copper pellet. When Noah put it in a leather pouch in order to help Ham clean the furnace, Kush twisted his lips.

  Twenty-four hours later, Noah shouted at Kush while the boy hoed an onion field. Kush dropped his hoe and sprinted after Noah, walking with him back to the smelting pit. Ham was already there.

  “I thought we had already smelted all the malachite,” Kush said.

  “We have,” Ham said. “This is step two.”

  Noah had a charcoal pit ready and filled. In it sat a ceramic pot, a crucible. In the crucible lay the copper pellets. As before, when the charcoal was lit, they blew through the blowpipes, making the charcoal glow. Kush’s eyes widened when the copper began to liquefy. In his surprise, Kush dropped his blowpipe and tried to snatch it back, yelling when his fingertips touched the red-hot charcoals. With his fingers in his mouth, he watched as Noah and Ham picked up soaked, green branches—a modest form of fireproofing. Working in tandem, they pried the ceramic crucible out of the fire. Carefully and moving in unison—one slip could mean agony—Noah and Ham stepped to a stone with a chiseled-out axe outline. With their lips compressed, Noah and Ham tipped the crucible and poured the liquid copper into the mould.

  Noah and Ham glanced at one another. Noah nodded. They dropped the branches and the empty crucible. Ham took out a rag and wiped sweat from his neck.

  “Now what?” Kush asked, watching the mould with the golden copper.

  “Now we wait,” Noah said.

  “How long?”

  “A few minutes,” Noah said. “Here, let me look at your fingers.” After a quick inspection, he sent Kush to Gaea, who tended to the burns with cooling salve.

  Kush returned with bandages wrapped around his fingertips.

  “During the cooling, the copper has shrunk slightly,” Noah said. “By doing so, it’s detached itself from the mold.” He turned the stone mold over so the copper piece fell out. He handed it to Kush.

  “It’s shaped just like an axe-head,” Kush said.

  “That’s right,” Noah said. “And without the chipping and the worrying that it will break like a stone axe sometimes does.”

  “This is amazing,” Kush said, turning the copper axe-head over.

  “Come back in a day,” Noah said, who took back the axe-head.

  Kush did exactly that. By then, Noah had ground the copper axe-head, smoothing out the irregularities. By hammering, he had toughened the edge, and with sandstone had given it a razor’s sharpness. He had also fitted it onto a wooden handle.

  “Be careful,” Noah said, “or you’ll cut yourself.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Kush said.

  “Test it with your thumb then,” Ham said.

  Kush ran the edge of his thumb over the blade. He yelped, with a bright spot of blood oozing from his thumb. He regarded Noah with awe. “You made this out of stones that you burned.”

  “Smelted,” Ham corrected.

  Kush hefted the axe. Then he gri
nned. “Let’s go back and look for more ore.”

  16.

  They returned to Lake Van for salt and more malachite, and each of the sons of Noah built a furnace and smelted copper. Copper was softer than bronze and didn’t hold an edge as long, so Ham quizzed Noah on the black nuggets he’d talked about before.

  “Tinstones,” Noah called them. “You often find them wherever specks of gold are washed into streams.”

  Ham and Kush searched the streams feeding Lake Van, and they indeed found heavy dark nuggets of tin as well as specks of gold. Ham took both and kept them in a special box. The tinstones he planned to mix one to nine with copper in order to make the alloy bronze. For the moment, he smelted copper and cast it into hoes, axes and daggers with bone handles.

  “Not as good as our Antediluvian bronze,” Ham told his boys, testing a sharpened dagger. “But at least we won’t be reduced to just using stone tools.”

  During the interim of finding copper ore and tinstone, his clan had grown again, the youngest a newly born girl named Pandora. The birth of the girl had set Rahab to worrying again about their oldest.

  “How soon until Kush is married?” Rahab asked as they strolled under the stars. A stand of trees towered nearby, while the family tent was hidden behind rolling terrain.

  In the moonlight, Rahab resembled the youthful girl she’d been while nursing him back to health after his battle with Ymir. Smiling, Ham took her in his arms.

  “Ruth says Deborah talks about Kush, how strong he is and how safe she would feel with the best fighter in the world. But then Deborah shows off a copper bracelet Gomer forged for her.”

  “Gomer never forged it,” Ham said. “I saw it the other day. Japheth must have made it and told Gomer to say he did it.”

  “I’m sure Gomer at least helped.”

  Ham snorted. “Japheth is trying to buy Deborah’s favor for his son. He can’t stand the thought of my boy beating his, just like I beat him in his room on the Ark long ago.”

  “Ham. This isn’t a competition between you and Japheth. This is about Kush’s future.”

  Ham brushed hair out of his wife’s eyes, deciding to worry about the coming marriage later. Why spoil a good night? He kissed his wife.

  She tried to add another thought about Kush and Deborah, so he kissed her again, and then again, until finally she returned his ardor. He led her to the stand of trees where he had secreted a blanket earlier. She looked so lovely in the moonlight, and he never had enough privacy in the tent.

  “Oh, Ham,” she said, as he laid her down.

  He grinned, and once more, he knew his wife.

  In the morning, he called Kush, and with the special box under his arm, father and son went to the Hamite furnace. Ham put the laboriously gathered gold specks and lumps into a crucible, melting the gold and pouring into a mold. It shone later, a gold ring and two golden earrings.

  “Gomer was given a good idea,” Ham said, “but like most things Japheth conceives, it wasn’t fully thought out.”

  Kush furrowed his heavy brow, his thick fingers twitching, as if he longed to grab the gold ring and the earrings and dash off with them to Deborah.

  “Are you listening to me?” Ham said.

  Kush nodded.

  Ham laid a black cloth over his open palm and then put the golden ring and the earrings on it. “Do you see how they shine?”

  “They’re like stolen rays of sunlight,” Kush said in a husky voice.

  Ham arched his eyebrows at the poetic thought. “Er… yes, that’s right. Notice, too, how the black cloth heightens their color, making them seem even better than they are. In such a way, you must whet a woman’s appetite.”

  Kush regarded his father.

  “What if you rushed off and gave these to Deborah?” Ham asked.

  “She’d throw her arms around me.”

  “Then what?”

  Kush shifted his feet, shrugged.

  “Exactly,” Ham said. “No guarantees. She might even marry Gomer later, and then the ring and the earrings would belong to his family.”

  The idea caused Kush’s eyes to smolder.

  “Not a pretty thought, eh?”

  Kush shook his head.

  Ham laid the corners of the black cloth over the ring and earrings, before folding the cloth and putting it in his carrying pouch.

  Kush looked into his father’s face. “You’re not giving them to me so I can trump Gomer’s copper bracelet?”

  Putting a hand on his son’s beefy shoulder, Ham said, “You’re young, impetuous like I was at your age. While speaking with her, yearning for those arms around your neck and no doubt lusting for showering kisses, you’d most likely give her these things right away.”

  Kush’s head swayed back, and he wondered how his father had divined his intentions.

  Ham laughed, patting his shoulder. “I go to bargain with Shem, and incidentally to show these to Deborah. I’ll tell her this is a marriage ring and the earrings a wedding present. Let her yearn for these, my son. Let her lie at night and ache to wear such a fine ring and show off these earrings. Soon, her desires will be inflamed, especially such a plotter like her.”

  “Plotter?” Kush asked. “You’re insulting my future wife?”

  “A conniver then, one full of guile. In time, I think you’ll appreciate that in her as she helps you match wits against your cousins, even if now it’s a maddening thing. My point is this, though, in relation to the ring and earrings: Wanting is often more powerful than having.”

  Kush nodded slowly. Just as slowly, a smile crept upon his face. “That’s clever.”

  “Hmm. We’re not Japhethites, mind you. It’s simple common sense.” Ham clapped Kush on the shoulder. “Now, to your chores, my boy. I have to go and clean up if I’m to head to Shem’s today.”

  17.

  Deborah chose two weeks later. Her parents agreed. Thus, a wedding feast was planned for the following week. “But it isn’t over yet,” Ham told Rahab. “Japheth and Europa won’t let it rest. That’s my prediction.”

  “You’ve become obsessed with this, my husband.”

  “Have I?” Ham asked. “I suppose next you’ll tell me that I’m the one who went to Gomer and told him to hide clubs along the trail.”

  “Oh, you’re impossible. Just don’t go overboard with the feast. A modest outlay seems wisest this time around.”

  “What do you mean this time? This is the first wedding in the New World, and for our firstborn. Rahab, we must celebrate.”

  Rahab rocked Pandora in her arms while feeding her.

  “Noah will no doubt insist that he preside,” Ham said. Then he went back to pacing, deciding which sheep to butcher and how much of their stores to use up for the occasion.

  He made the younger boys rake the yard and paint whitewash over the new stone fence, and with Menes, he put up poles and stretched hide awnings over them. It could rain that day, but nothing must to spoil it.

  He found Kush in the fields and gave him fatherly advice on treating a young wife. “Remember that she’s weaker than you.” He took Kush’s hoe and thumped the stone blade into the dirt beside some lettuce. He hit harder each time, swinging and smashing weeds until the hoe broke. He straightened and pitched the broken tool out of the field.

  “What did you do that for?” Kush asked.

  “Do you care that I broke your hoe?” Ham asked.

  The lad shrugged. “I’ll get another one.”

  “Exactly,” Ham said. “A hoe is rough and ordinary. But this.” He pulled a woolen cloth from his carrying pouch and unfolded it to reveal an ivory figurine of Rahab that he had long ago carved in the Old World. “What would happen if someone broke this?”

  “You spanked me once as a child simply for touching it.”

  “This is priceless,” Ham said, “one of a kind.”

  “It’s a treasure,” admitted Kush.

  “Which is why I treat is so delicately.” Ham wrapped the wool around it and put it back
in his pouch. “That’s how you treat a wife, my son. She’s one of a kind, priceless, your greatest treasure. Don’t use her like I used this hoe, but as I treat my figurine of your mother.”

  Kush nodded.

  After passing on a few more tidbits, Ham took his leave to inspect the flock and instruct Menes how to care for those beasts chosen for next week’s feast.

  The days seemed to take forever, and finally Rahab drew him aside and begged him to relax, to let the children do their chores without hovering over them. “I thought women cared more for weddings than men did,” she said.

  Ham scowled and told her they do. After that, he refrained from the times he wanted to tell Kush or Menes or Io how to do this or that. The frustration of keeping silent, however, became too much. So he took his bow and hounds, and he went hunting. He tracked a boar that had been tearing up his field, finding the beast half a day later as he cornered the huge pig.

  It grunted as he hissed the first arrow into it. Despite any fear of man, it charged. The hounds harried the beast as he kept firing arrows, and at the last moment, he leapt aside. By the barest fraction, he saved his leg from razor-sharp tusks. He panted, congratulating himself on his luck. Then he tracked the beast by its bloody marks and slew the boar a league later. He grinned. Here would be a perfect dish for the feast. So he cut branches, made a travois and harnessed the hounds to it, dragging the huge boar home.

  The tusks he broke off, deciding to carve figurines of Kush and Deborah, as mementos of this glorious occasion.

  The wedding day finally arrived. Noah and Gaea came first, dressed in splendid white linen garments. Then Shem, Ruth and their clan arrived. Ham shook hands all around, while his daughters filled cups and passed through the yard with platters of honey-filled pastries. Last, as he’d known it would be, Japheth and Europa arrived with a troop of surely boys but demure girls. Ham admitted to Rahab that the girls behaved very well, considering.

  Ham spread mats, roasted the huge boar over an open pit and told them the hunting tale, even showing them the ripped breeches the tusks had torn.