Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  “Where do we go?” he asked Adrah. “How can we hide?”

  “We can’t. It’s going to be same all over.”

  And so, with slowly growing skill they wallowed out into the center of the harbor, and turned, and began making their way toward the sea walls. It occurred to Manuah to wonder if they would even fit through, but of course he knew the dimensions and spacing of the sea walls very well indeed, and so by looking across the width of the tavitarka, he could see that it would be possible, through tricky.

  “This wind is shit,” he said to no one.

  “I think the sails are blocking each other,” Kop said. “That makes it worse,”

  But the paddles weren’t much good either, except for turning them in circles. At times Manuah felt he was propelling the entire contraption by sculling the aftmost steering oar, and at other times he felt they simply weren’t moving at all.

  And still the little rocks rained down, sometimes disappearing behind the horizon, sometimes splashing and sizzling into the harbor, sometimes very clearly landing within the confines of The City. What would they do there? Were they tossed pebbles, or sling bullets hurled downward with all the might of heaven? And since they trailed fire behind them, would they set wooden roofs ablaze? He did see the red glow of fire here and there, although its sources were hidden from view. The shore was too far away now for Manuah to hear the shouting there, except as a low, indistinct roar, barely audible above the din of goats and chickens and passengers and sailors. He couldn’t tell what was happening back there, and he had a lot to pay attention to right here.

  “All quiet!” he called out more than once, and also “Heads in the boat!”

  People obeyed these commands (more or less), and when they quieted, so (more or less) did the animals, except for one stubborn goat that would not stop bleating. But it was never long before people started talking again, because they were scared and confused and therefore agitated. What was happening? Why was it happening? Where were the gods in all this? Was there a war in heaven, so fierce that its effects were spilling down to Earth?

  It was almost midnight before they got anywhere close to the sea walls, at which point—

  * * *

  The water dropped a foot, and then raised again, making a tremendous thumping sound, like several sixties of gigantic drums. All around them, it turned to foam, and the boats swamped in it, and the foam poured over their edges. Once again, Manuah’s sailors tumbled to the decks, now several hands deep in foam. Once again, large waves began to rock the harbor.

  * * *

  “Bail!” Manuah called out, for the foam was popping and sloshing and turning to water. Lots of water. Without bothering to get to their feet, the sailors dropped whatever they were doing and grabbed the nearest bailers: wooden buckets and fired clay pitchers and small wicker baskets sealed with pitch. Each was for a different type of bailing (the wicker was for getting the last little bits out), but every man grabbed whatever was handy and started moving water as furiously as he could. There were shouts of alarm, because one of the boats in the second row was fully swamped, and sinking, and would have gone down if it weren’t lashed tightly to its neighbors.

  People clung to its edges as apples and empty baskets poured over its sides and into the water of the harbor. The boat might still go down. It might bring all of the rest of them with it! Papyrus reeds were lighter than water, and would float by themselves, but pitch was heavier, and so were the cargo and passengers.

  “Bail!” Manuah shouted again, and then followed his own advice as a bucket floated towards him in the shimmering foam. The task was urgent and consuming, and left little room for thought. And yet he still had time to wonder: what the Giant-Dicked God was that? Had the top two feet of the entire ocean turned to foam in less than a nimisha? What colossal magic could create so much chaos over such a large area, so quickly? And why? The gods must be very angry indeed, but what could human beings have done to make them so upset? Could a human being cause pain to a god?

  They bailed until the water was down to their ankles, and then kept bailing as though their lives depended on it, which of course they did. How many more cosmic events like that could they take? And then finally Manuah commanded them back to their paddles and sails and steering oars, and they began working their way back to the sea walls again. They needed to get out into the open ocean, and thence to the channels of the river delta. He wasn’t sure what they would do then, but that was too many problems from now.

  Crawling, inching, they wormed their way between the walls, and finally, finally, out into the ocean. It had taken all night; dawn was already showing on the eastern horizon, like a streak of blood across the lip of the sky.

  And right away, Manuah could see that lashing the boats together had been a good idea. The ocean was rough, in a sort of confused way, because the wind still wasn’t all that strong. The waves were chopping every which direction, and some were as high as three feet, and were swamping into the boats all over again. However, the tavitarka remained stable.

  Overhead, the shooting stars were tapering off, as the tail of the comet finally set in the western sky, slipping below the ocean.

  “East!” Manuah called out, unnecessarily. “Toward the sun!”

  The dawn brightened, but declined somehow to shift from red to orange.

  “I don’t approve of this!” a child said loudly, only to be answered by the nervous laughter of two dozen men and women who didn’t approve of it either.

  “Steady,” Manuah said quietly. As the laughter tapered off, the whole world had gone quiet.

  And then…

  And the ocean began to sink. More slowly this time, but in a much more pronounced way. At first it was hard to notice in the dawn light, when they were four sixties of feet from the ocean’s flat, sandy shoreline. But the beach was getting larger as the water retreated from it.

  “The tide is going out,” someone said.

  “This is no tide,” someone else said.

  “Gods help us!” shouted a third voice.

  And now there was no mistaking it, because the sea walls were exposed to fully half their depth, and the water of the harbor was pouring out from the gaps between them, and then they were cracking and crumbling, and the tavitarka was being pushed farther out to sea by the current this created.

  “What’s happening?” a female voice demanded.

  “I’m afraid!” said one of the children.

  Manuah felt a fluttering sensation in his stomach and a tickling on the sole of his feet as the tavitarka dropped and dropped beneath him, and then finally paused. And then began, slowly, to lift again. And at this moment he felt that something very awful was indeed about to happen; he felt aware, as never before, of the sheer mass of the water beneath him, surging outward toward the watery horizon and then, just as inexplicably, surging back in toward the shore again. Because yes, that was what was about to happen. This outward current would reverse itself, and the ocean—the entire mass of the ocean—would…

  He screamed: “Paddlers! Sterns! Steer for your lives!”

  This order seemed to confuse the men for a moment or two, but then they felt the boat lifting beneath them, and they understood what it meant. Manuah’s stomach dropped out from under him, and suddenly they were like children playing in the surf. Lifted by a wave and, if they weren’t careful, tumbled by it. The water rose and rose, and if Manuah didn’t bring the stern around to meet it, then the whole tavitarka would roll up sideways, like a floor mat. The wave was that big!

  “Steer!” he screamed, but already the surf was louder than he was. Already the boat was twelve feet above the break line, and the water around them was a churning of black foam unlike anything Manuah had ever seen. His passengers were tossed like rag dolls, and his sailors…well, a lifetime on the sea had taught them how to stay on their benches in rough water, but it was hard to say they were paddling, exactly. Battered by the great steering oar, Manuah lost his feet for a moment, then gained t
hem again, then lost them. The oar couldn’t get a grip in this foam, so he raised it and raised it until it was nearly above his head, and still couldn’t find clean water. Regardless, he pulled for all he was worth.

  And as the wave lifted them, it also rose up behind them—a great pushing wall of water—and they began to slide forward down its churning face, and now they were looking down at the beach, and now the beach was gone, and now the tavitarka was higher than the harbor ridge, and when Manuah looked up he could see the lights of The City.

  Rushing toward them.

  For a moment his mind couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing, of what was happening around him, but really it was only the scale of it that was unfamiliar. His boats were a scruff of coconut wood being rolled ashore by a wave much, much larger than it was.

  Already they were into the harbor, and it seemed the world was bisected: on one side, the low, peaceful waters he had tended and monitored all his life, with a great city hugging ’round. The human world. On the other side, behind and below him, it was the realm of gods, against which human beings, and all the things that human beings had built or ever could build, seemed very small indeed.

  “Steer!” he screamed again, uselessly.

  They were picking up speed, now going as fast as sails had ever carried him, and now as fast as the Great River had ever carried him, and now faster, and faster still. Had any living person ever traveled so fast, or so noisily? Was this what it felt like, in the moments before a boat rolled and flooded and sank and vanished forever? No mistakes, no errors of judgment, just vast forces beyond human reckoning? He pulled on the oar with everything he had, and it did almost nothing, almost nothing at all, and why, oh why had he ever mocked the gods? The gods, who were capable of this!

  And then they were halfway across the harbor, and then two thirds of the way, and The City was still hurtling toward them. But now The City looked small. From his current height, everything was down except the walls of the palace, and the Tower of the Hill of Stars, and the rooftops of a few scattered buildings whose owners had dared to build three stories high. The air was full of the sound of screaming, louder even than the crashing water, and Manuah spared a glance below him, at his tiny boats lashed together and falling, falling, falling down the face of this black wave.

  I love my wife, he thought frantically. I love my children and their wives and all of my brave, hard sailors, and I’m about to get all of them killed. He’d started too late. Believed too little. Trusted too much in the way things had always been.

  And yet, he would not let death take them without a fight. He steered. He did! If the water carried them in a straight line—and why wouldn’t it?—they would smash straight into the south wall of the king’s palace. Not only tall but wide, covering more area than any thirty buildings had a right to, the palace was simply too large a target to miss, unless…Unless he turned slightly, sliding that way instead of this way down the wave. He couldn’t imagine anything more dangerous, and yet it was what needed to happen.

  “Left!” he screamed. “Left! Left! Steer left!”

  In a better moment this kind of aspiration would be broken into a dozen separate commands: Left side hold! Right side dig! Left front draw! Right front pry! Everyone with a steering oar, pull! Don’t push, pull! But here in the realm of gods, it was every man for himself. Did they hear him? Did they figure it out on their own? He could see a dozen sailors doing a dozen different things, but most of them were, in one way or another, struggling to rotate the tavitarka in the required direction. So slowly! So laughably, against the churning madness all around them! But the men—even the boys—held to their stations while chicken cages smashed and apples rolled and tumbling passengers shrieked in terror.

  And it worked; they were going to pass between the Palace and the Tower of the Hill of Stars, with several sixties’ feet of clearance on either side.

  “Good!” He called out, again unsure if anyone could hear him at all. “All ahead!”

  He wanted to get a better position on the wave; less vertical and crushy. When it finally broke, he didn’t want it to be on their heads! But even as he thought this, he could feel the wave flattening behind them. Not breaking, like surf against a shoreline, but merely slumping. The crest of the wave was too big and too heavy to curl over, so instead it slid forward on top of itself in a boiling mass that soon raced out ahead of the tavitarka. And that seemed good for a moment, because who wanted a giant wave towering over their heads? But the next few moments brought a new terror, because they were lower to the ground, now, and there were all kinds of hills and rooftops and ladders and poles jutting up into the space they were about to occupy.

  And then they swept over what must have been the docks and warehouses of the harbor’s northern shoreline. The deep rumble of the water became a hiss, and then a rumble again, and then a cacophony of breaking and crashing and great, glooping bubbles that burst to the surface out of spaces that, Manuah thought, must surely be the insides of buildings. He tried to ignore, up ahead, the sight of people running and the sound of their screaming. So many people! But the wave was much faster than they were, and there was nothing at all he could do for any of them, and the whole situation was so much worse than anything Manuah had ever actually imagined.

  “Right!” he called out to his men. “Turn right! Turn right!” And he braced his feet against the hull of the boat and pushed the steering oar as hard as he could, because the tavitarka was going to collide with a house if he didn’t. That was something he could do: steer his own boats, save his own skin, his own family and friends, or at least make the effort so when he washed up on the starry shores of heaven, he could hold his head up without shame.

  “Right!!”

  Steering the tavitarka was like blowing on a falling feather; it seemed like it ought to work, but in practice the thing did whatever it wanted to, no matter how dizzy you made yourself. Or it was like piloting a boat in the heaviest of river rapids, or it was like being attacked and beaten by a platoon of soldiers. The best the men could do was petition the vessel and the surging water beneath it, and hope to live another few kesthe.

  One of the tall houses swooshed by them, impossibly fast and almost close enough to touch, with a lone, shrieking woman clinging to its roof, and in its wake they were sucked so hard to the left that the tavitarka spun a full circle around before (approximately) righting itself again. Above them the sky was tuning bright red, and by its light Manuah could see that the path ahead was a forest of obstacles and a snake pit of sucking vortices, and there was no way, there was no way they were going to get all the way through it and out the other side without wrecking.

  The river was closer. If they could make it over to the river, they’d be all right until…Until…

  Only then did his heart realize what his gut already knew: this wave really was going to sweep all the way across the face of The City and keep on going. There was something heavy and endless and final about it. It wasn’t really a wave at all anymore; it was the ocean itself, redefining its relationship to the land around it. Manuah hadn’t known it could do that. Would it ever stop? Was this the end of the world? Already the water was full of planks and baskets and robes and loaves of bread—all the stuff of the world—and also with corpses: men and women and children and goats and dogs, and for them it was already the end. Did they see it coming? Did they know what had happened to them, or were they just standing and breathing one moment, tumbling and drowning the next?

  Well, even if it were the end for Manuah as well, he’d still rather meet it in the river.

  “Right!” he called out. Then, more explicitly, “The river! Head for the river! HEAD for the RIVER!”

  And then he had to call out more lefts and rights, as they navigated around the higher points of what had once seemed like a very flat city. But the message and the plan were clear, and through the chaos the paddlers and sterns did what they could to nudge the boat in a generally westerly direction.

&
nbsp; Here and there, strong swimmers carried along in the water would grab the tavitarka as it passed them. Most lost their grip immediately and were swept away, screaming and weeping in bewildered terror, and how could the gods be this angry? What in Hell’s depths could human beings possibly have done to deserve this? But here a lucky soul managed to hold on long enough for two of the women to haul him aboard, naked and bloody as the day he was born. And there another did the same, except this time it was a young woman.

  And then there were no more living people in the water, just corpses and pieces of corpses, and then the tavitarka was picking up speed again, being pulled slantways down a low embankment or waterfall of some sort, and then all seven of the boats dug their prows into the water, bounced and sank and bobbed to the surface, half of them flooded to the rims, and…

  And they were in the river.

  At least, Manuah assumed it was the river; it was much too wide and much too flat, with none of the islands and sandbars and reeds and willows that ought to be here in the delta. It was as wide and featureless as the harbor, and was flowing in the wrong direction, yes. But suddenly there was nothing for them to crash into.

  “Bail!” he shouted, unnecessarily, as the tavitarka spun. Each bench had a bailing implement tied to it, and each sailor knew that water was death as well as life, and if the flooded boats were allowed to sink they would drag everything else down with them, and that would be that. The men set to it with a vigor Manuah had rarely seen. There were fewer corpses here, and less debris, and certainly less sense of immediate peril, and also the sheer scale of this catastrophe had a kind of numbing effect. It was hard to think about anything much beyond the next few kesthe.

  Except that Manuah’s oar station was a standing bench with no bailing bucket attached, and the raft dynamics of the tavitarka were such that he was raised slightly in the air, with no water at his feet. And there was nowhere to steer toward and nothing to steer away from, and so he took a moment to really look around.