Flood

by Brennan McPherson

  Mother blinked and knelt to grasp at the hair on the floor. “This has been growing since you were a babe.”

  Father let a breath grate his teeth. “You should have let me take the hatchet.”

  Mother lifted a fistful of hair. “You think that would have made a difference? She’s forced your hand, you old fool. No man would dare marry her now, save the one you call a vagabond.”

  Father turned toward Adah. “Nothing in this world has made me more infuriated than you.” He approached, his voice and gaze sharper than obsidian. “But I would take you over five sons. You’ve no right to claim I wouldn’t.”

  Adah dropped the hatchet and balled her hands into fists. Mother rolled the severed hair between her hands, grimaced, and let it fall. Adah closed her eyes in preparation for what might come next. She had experienced it all too often—the harshness of Father’s voice as he shrunk her actions to shameful little things.

  But Father stepped near, embraced her, and kissed her forehead instead.

  Her breath stumbled on the edge of a sob, though she managed to maintain her composure for she knew these tactics too. Father would humble himself to elevate his rebellious daughter to something more elegant—to anything but what she was.

  She stiffened to show him she was no fool, not anymore. But her throat ached, and in truth, what good would resisting do?

  Her stomach knotted with the realization that part of her, the part that really was still small and weak, wanted his tenderness, wanted to hug her father and weep into his shoulder and tell him she was sorry she couldn’t be what he wanted.

  She scowled and blinked burning eyes.

  Father inhaled as if to speak, but five knocks at the door silenced them.

  The three turned, and the knocks returned, followed by a voice muffled past the pitched wood. “Open, in the name of the God-King.”

  Mother said, “What?”

  “Hush,” Father said, and stared until the knocks became pounding. “Who beats my door at such a time?”

  “Messengers of the God-King.” The voice was deep, throaty. “Open the door.”

  Father turned toward Adah, sweat glistening across the bridge of his nose. “Hurry,” he whispered, “to the cellar. Do not—”

  “They have no right to be here, don’t let them in,” Mother said.

  “You speak of what you don’t understand. If—”

  “Open the door!” The voice came louder.

  “Men such as these do not abide being made to wait.” Father’s eyes grew hard. “Go. These are foreigners.”

  Mother started to protest, but Father cut her off. “Their king has been visiting our city since midway last season. I fear more than inconvenience in this nightly visit.”

  Mother frowned, grabbed Adah’s arm, and urged her back.

  “No,” Adah said.

  Mother jerked her close. “Enough.”

  Adah set her jaw and dug her feet in, but after an insistent shove from Mother, a furious gesture from Father, and more violent pounding on the door, she allowed herself to be marched into the other room.

  The cellar door was heavy on its hinges, and Mother eased it open, careful not to let it creak. When it was wide enough for Adah to slip through, Mother pushed her in, and Adah tripped and caught herself on the skinned lamb hanging from chain hooks anchored in the cellar’s ceiling. She twisted around, glared, and wiped the blood on her dress.

  “Hush,” Mother said, and pressed the door shut.

  All was dark. She reached for shelves but failed to find them. Her belly tingled and she felt uneasy. Chains swayed and jangled as she crouched and hugged her knees. Blood dripped to cold puddles. Wind buffeted the house, bending it minutely, beating moisture from wood. She could hear each beam settling slowly, the weight of their bulk pressing into the earth.

  If her parents thought they could continue treating her like this, they were mistaken. However, Father had never ordered her into the cellar before. Something was wrong, that much she knew.

  Deep voices. She wished she could hear what they said, but the walls were too thick.

  Her head spun. She pressed her hands to the floor to steady herself. An insect scurried up a wall, and she turned toward it, eyes straining.

  Father’s voice overwhelmed the others, warm and powerful at once. The voices grew. Adah’s breaths came and went like the tide, shallower with each pulse.

  Father yelled, a scream tore the air, and the house shook. Adah twisted, her shoulder knocking pots off the shelves. The pots shattered on the floor, spilling spices and pungent oils. Her trembling hands reached for a broken shard. She found one, gripped it hard, struggled to her feet, flung the door wide, and sprang into the light.

  There, in the entryway, lay two strange men. Blood seeped from the corners of their mouths. Though Adah had never seen a dead body, they lay disturbingly motionless. Father leaned against the wall beside the open door, holding the hatchet. Mother shut and barred the entrance as Father pressed his back to the door and slid to his seat.

  Adah trembled, staring at the motionless men. “What happened?”

  Father cursed. “They saw the hair. The hair! They wanted you, Adah. Do you hear me? Thought we were trying to trick them, make them think you were a boy. Gods protect us.”

  “Why did they come here?” Adah said.

  Father offered a glance that said more than words could. “This is not the first house they visited.”

  Mother stood with a knife in her hand and wildness in her green eyes. Adah looked at the men and noticed curved horns sprouting from their skulls. The horns were so foreign her mind hadn’t let her see them upon first glance.

  From outside came muffled shouts. Adah’s skin tingled and her face chilled. She closed her eyes, hoping it was all a dream. But as she opened her eyes, everything remained.

  There came more pounding and new demands. Father leaned against the door and stared at the bodies. Mother wrapped her arm around Adah, who stood examining the knife clutched in Mother’s hand, and the pottery shard in her own.

  Mother said, “Do you hear that?”

  Father moaned, tested his wounded arm, and grimaced.

  “We need to clean that wound,” Adah said, her voice high and brittle. “If we don’t—”

  Mother chopped the air. “Listen!”

  There it was. Crackling. Popping. A low drone.

  “They’ve set fire to the house,” Father said.

  Adah searched for signs of the flames, closed her eyes, and kneeled, holding her head in her hands. “This is all a dream. I’m going to wake up now.”

  “Something must have gone wrong,” Father said. “We knew they were a warlike people . . . but this? I fear our sovereign is dead.”

  “Wake up now,” Adah said. “Wake up!”

  “Stop, Adah!” Mother turned to Father. “We can’t just wait here in the entryway. Why not run? Or hide in the cellar? Irad, what is happening?”

  “The cellar won’t save us. They’re waiting outside, likely listening to us now. My grandfather didn’t build this house cheaply, like the others. The wood is thick and strong. It will take longer to burn, and will look worse than the others while remaining safe. We wait until we can no longer. Then we run. But not yet.” He closed his eyes. “Not too soon.”

  “You’re betting our lives on your grandfather’s woodcraft.”

  Father did not respond.

  “Gods help us.” Mother paced.

  Flames crept through cracks and licked the ceiling. Fire spread and rippled, danced and shifted, filling the house with black fumes.

  Adah’s head spun. She bent to her hands and knees. Sheets of flame rolled and snapped. She opened her eyes against the heat and saw the horned men aflame and her father leaning against the door—a final island in a sea of red. His face was pale and his good hand clasped his throat. His other lay limp on the floor as he coughed in the smoke.

  Mother found Adah’s arm, and they shuffled to the door. Father’s body block
ed it. They rolled him to the side, unbarred the door, and pulled it open.

  Burning air tossed them back. Adah’s hair crackled, and she yelled and smothered it with her arms. She looked up. Flames poured in from the edges of the doorway as if the world had been pitched on its side and down was in and up was out.

  Mother hauled Father through the doorway, then pulled him smoking across the yard and slapped at the flames. Adah struggled to her feet and hobbled out, feeling a burst of wind across her shoulders.

  A voice sounded behind and to her left. She turned.

  Strange men tossed a net over her and she tumbled to the ground, enmeshed. Mother screamed and ran to her aid, but the men kicked her to the ground. Father crawled toward them with sickle eyes brandished, but they laughed at him.

  “Stop!” Adah said. “Leave them alone!”

  She watched the polished surface of their horns reflecting the red and black of her burning home until the wooden end of a spear slammed into her temple and she succumbed to the relief of emptiness.

  Chapter 2

  Lamech found the girl facedown in the dirt between the stones that marked the turn to the stream. The snowcapped mountains held little kindness for wanderers. It was hard terrain, even for wild animals.

  Goats with shaggy coats and pointed horns danced like ghosts across gaps in the cliffside. Hawks preyed on shrews hiding among thistles and skeleton shrubs.

  But a woman?

  Since a child, Lamech had seen but the few who brought him and his father supplies every season. Even then they were men. Not women.

  Never women.

  And never had he seen anyone travel to the peak so late in the season in anything less than thick furs. She wore a thin dress and mud-covered sandals that looked more appropriate for ceremony. But she was still breathing, her chest slowly rising and falling.

  How had she gotten here?

  He tried to still the uneasiness that surely reddened his cheeks, but part of him wanted to indulge the rush, let it fill his chest, fingertips, and toes, and tingle the top of his head.

  Father would be angry. He often spoke of how they didn’t need a woman to be happy. But Father repeated the biggest lies most often, and seeing her broken body gnawed by frostbite and crumpled like sagebrush—how could he leave her?

  It made him think of Mother’s frailness in her final days, though that was nearly all he could recall. The rest had been lost like a mural wind-beaten and crumbled with age. Even though he had no idea who this woman was, or why she was here, he couldn’t let her suffer the same fate.

  He bent close, eased her onto her side, tested her limbs, and studied her face.

  Her eyes fluttered open, and she grunted and twisted away. He hushed her and tried to keep her from moving as he had with the wounded sparrow he’d nursed back to health. “I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said, but she struck him in the chest hard enough to push him off-balance, and he fell.

  She slid away, cradling her ribs, and covered her mouth and coughed, wetness crackling in her chest. She pulled her hand away dappled with blood.

  He sat up and narrowed his eyes as the light shimmered across the red on her fingers.

  She looked away and wiped her hand on her silk dress, which looked as if it had once been a rich purple, though now it was tattered and stained.

  He stood and stepped back. “Are you sick?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  She had obviously been beaten, so perhaps the sickness that stole Mother had nothing to do with it. A slave with an abusive master could conceivably flee up a mountain in thin clothing and sandals.

  But not in a purple silk dress.

  He swallowed. “I’m sorry I scared you. I pass these rocks every day to find the stream. Are you thirsty? Hungry?”

  She flared her nostrils and glared at him as if she expected him to stab her at any moment.

  “If you doubt my intentions, your distrust is misplaced. I will not harm you.” He waited and listened to her silence amidst the wind whistling through the rocky pass. She was injured, and if she resisted him, attempting to care for her would only risk greater harm.

  But he couldn’t help his curiosity. Couldn’t imagine how a young woman could end up alone at the top of a mountain.

  At the top of his mountain.

  Still . . . he could not force her.

  He turned and said, “I pray you find your way.”

  He walked away slowly, and had nearly made it around the bend when he thought he heard her speak. The sound was so faint he thought it could be leaves rustling in the wind. He held his breath and listened.

  “Wait . . .”

  He turned.

  Tears clung to the woman’s cheeks. “Please. I’ve been alone for so long.”

  He returned slowly, foreign emotions churning inside his chest. He thought of her wounds, of the pain she must have endured to arrive in such a state. Of his mother laid pale and lifeless on a grassy knoll. “What happened to you?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t speak of it.” Her tears moistened the ground.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” he said. “You could come back with me, warm yourself, dry your clothes, eat and drink, and rest under shelter.”

  She nodded like one thinking of far-off days. “A moment,” she whispered. “Can we just rest a moment, first?”

  He rubbed his face, nodded, and sat to wait until she was ready. Wounded as she was, movement was likely painful. But she could not wait forever. The marks of frost damage on the tips of her fingers were proof enough.

  Chapter 3

  Adah awoke with the smell of her burning home still fresh in her mind. She knelt alone in a bamboo cage that smelled of blood and urine, and the cage rocked and bucked. Ahead and behind were cages like hers atop wheeled platforms pulled by yoked bulls. Inside the cages were bound women lit by the moon’s star-pricked cape.

  Where were her parents?

  Closest was a young girl she recognized from down the valley. Alvaretta, a farmer’s daughter. She lay on her side. Knees tucked to her chest. Rope around her neck. Clothed in swelling bruises.

  Adah shut her eyes, clenched her teeth, and felt a rush of heat. A sickness churned her stomach. The darkness made the moans and startled breaths from those around her grow more disturbing. Had all these women—so many—been taken from their homes? Thrown into cages like animals?

  Like Adah.

  She reached to comfort the girl, but found her wrists tied to the cage with hemp rope. She stretched against her bonds, jerked, kicked, and threw herself side to side, but the bonds held, and the skin of her wrists was rubbed raw.

  She rested, her breaths coming short and quick. The wagons and women seemed strangely false. As if at any moment she could step through the bars, stand in the weeds, and watch the procession disappear into the dust kicked up by wheels.

  Instead, she knelt shaking for hours. Wind stung her skin. Grasses bowed as they passed. Dust eddies danced across the road and broke themselves upon the wagons. Little breaths come and gone, as if from Father’s lips.

  She couldn’t stop seeing every crease in his face. Every red line running across his smoke-burnt eyes. He had protected her when danger came near. He had been injured protecting her.

  So how could this cage be real?

  She blinked to clear the blur from her vision as the procession crested a hill and descended toward a walled city. Inside the city rose narrow buildings, and roads wove like veins toward a black tower in the center. A tower she had seen only once in her life. But once was enough to prove Father’s fears true.

  Their sovereign had been murdered, and the foreigners with horns had taken the city.

  An orange glow grew as they neared burning pyres outside the city gates. Beside the fires were hastily built wooden platforms. Emaciated men stood upon them and threw bound bundles atop the pyres. As the procession passed, she watched the heat burst the bundles’ bindings and twist what remained inside.

  She
gazed past the snapping flames to one of the men on a platform. The shackle on his leg clanged as he turned and tossed another bundle on the fire. He nodded at her. She nodded back and glanced at the burning bundle.

  Her breath stopped. That was no bundle. It was a person.

  She thought of Father’s hands clenched against the pain of the flames burning their home, and reached uselessly for the bars, screaming his name, though she knew the man in the flames was not her father.

  The procession moved through the gates, and Adah fell back and watched the bars of her cage fade from orange to gray. They passed tall buildings with slatted windows, and Adah twisted, searching for the family she knew she would not find. All she wanted was to see them crouching amidst the shadows. To hear their voices argue, to bear Father’s scorn, to suffer Mother’s chastisement. Instead, she watched dirty orphans run the alleyways and dart around corners.

  The wagons wound through an open courtyard of slippery cobbles. Past meat vendors and bins filled with rotting vegetables that peddlers tried to shove into the hands of nightly passersby. Soldiers stood clustered in little groups, staring at peasants as if searching for a reason to test their proficiency. Women with matted hair clutched babies swaddled in brown sheets and sent furtive glances toward the soldiers. Finally the soldiers and the women also disappeared, replaced by the endless drone of wooden wheels riding the cobbles, and the burning torches of a city whose pulse beat hardest in the shadow places.

  Adah had thought some of those they passed would have offered comfort, but none even glanced their direction. Not the peddlers, not the soldiers, not the mothers. She wondered if it was because they were ashamed.

  The alley opened and ahead loomed the tower lit by moonlight. The snake of wagons turned, and she caught sight of their driver and the horns atop his head. The man jumped down, halted the procession, and stood at attention. From the tower’s side came a line of soldiers who opened the cages and broke the captives’ bonds. They went down the line, freeing and corralling them into neat lines. The ones who didn’t obey were beaten. The ones who still couldn’t rise were cut open on the cobbles.