Antediluvian

by Wil McCarthy

  This last course of action seemed by far the riskiest, since Manuah had no way of knowing how deep the water was, how fast it was moving, or when it might choose to retreat back into the ocean. If it ever did! Here was the warning he’d brought to King Sraddah, made real and then some. The water was rising, yes, but whatever made him think it must rise at a constant rate? Especially with the gods flinging comets around? For all he knew, it might be the desire of the gods to remake the world, to wipe it away and start it fresh, like a sand table drawing gone slightly wrong. He thought probably not, or there wouldn’t still be hills in the distance, but he was taking nothing for granted, and dropping an anchor sounded like an excellent way to capsize the tavitarka and spill these few survivors into the cold, dark water once and for all.

  In fact, the safest action he could think of was simply to drift along with the current until they ran aground on something resembling actual ground. In a way, that was also the most difficult action, because it was no action at all. And yet…

  “Stow the paddles!” he called out over the roar of the rain. “Raise and lash the oars! If they’re lost or broken, we could be done for! Let’s let it drift for a while!”

  And then, when this was done, he finally consented to leave his own post and seek a drier place.

  * * *

  The people of the tavitarka, like all people everywhere with nothing to do, grew bored. They began—despite the obvious risks—clambering from one boat to the next, rearranging themselves into different groups. Beneath the tents, they were all rain-naked and huddled together for warmth in a way that transcended lust or humor or shame, but at least they would choose with whom they would and would not huddle. And so it was that Manuah’s own family—his wife and three sons, and Sharama’s wife Telebabti, and His Theity Adrah Hasis—all gravitated back to the rearmost boat, where Manuah was. They were joined by Letoni, and by the teenage orphan girl with the complicated name, Na’elta-a-ma’uk, and her brother, Ku’ulta-do-ma’uk—who was one of the sailors Manuah had acquired at the dock. They were both from Larasha, and didn’t seem to know anyone, but Manuah was the leader here, and perhaps they knew him and his family by reputation, and so felt less alienated here than in any of the other boats. Better a known family of strangers than an unknown mob?

  “Welcome,” Hamurma said, more to the girl than to the boy, as they settled in.

  And perhaps they weren’t beyond lust or shame after all, because his eyes lingered a bit too long on her breasts and hips, taking in the torrent-soaked shape of her, until Ku’ulta-do-ma’uk said, “Eyes off my sister! We appreciate your hospitality, Family of Manuah, and the fact that we’re alive. But I will find a different place for Na’elta if this one doesn’t behave.”

  “I’m Hamurma,” Manuah’s son said, holding out his hand for tapping. “And please let me apologize. In here there are only so many directions to look!”

  And that was true; here were nine people huddled under a two-ply sail of unwaxed linen, half of them bailing or looking for dry footing, and the other half trying to stabilize their makeshift roof to keep the rain out, and all of them in shock from the deaths of nearly everyone they’d ever known. Including Chatrupati, their own grandmother! Fortunately there wasn’t much wind, and the rain was just so damned heavy that it fell straight down from the sky. There were goats and chickens out there drowning in it! Even the ducks were drowning!

  “See if you can cover some of those cages,” Manuah said to both Ku’ulta-do-ma’uk and Hamurma, hoping that might form the beginnings of some sort of bond between them. Making peace was generally the right thing to do, but also, also, he could not stop his own eyes from flicking toward Na’elta-a-ma’uk and assessing her as a potential mate for his son. Here in the midst of calamity! If Hamurma and the Larashan boy were friends, or at least allies, it could simplify that process later on. These were rather cold thoughts, as if the girl were no more than a bale of cloth to be traded and sewn, but this kind of thinking had become habitual for Manuah almost the moment Sharama took his first steps and—as someone who was apparently going to survive—received his name. Yes, it was a father’s job to watch the crowds, to listen for rumors, to look at the daughters of his friends and business associates in order to identify the girls that were clever enough and honest enough and kind enough and pretty enough to grow into wives his sons could be proud of. With strong birthing hips, and acceptable breasts, and if this meant Manuah had to ask himself whether he, himself, would want to fuck these girls, well, so be it. Such imagined trysts lasted a few kesthe at most, and Emzananti didn’t have to know, and would probably approve anyway.

  And as these thoughts flitted through his mind, he realized that he now really did believe they were going to survive this, that there was a future long enough and real enough that marriages still needed to be planned for. And that was certainly good news, but also bad in a way, because it meant he was going to have to come up with some kind of long-term plan. But how could he, with the world in flux and the sky raining down?

  * * *

  If the afternoon was miserable, the night was intolerable. The air—which was already cold and damp—became wintery, and the animals bleated and squawked about it while the humans huddled together for warmth. There was no light—no way to make fire, and no stars or moon peeking through the torrents of rain—and so in the darkness of the blind they really were beyond shame. Manuah curled into a ball as best he could in the cramped quarters, and his hands and feet and face and buttocks were pressed against a mass of linen and wool and human hair and human flesh, and he did not know or what part of whose body it was. Amazingly, he did manage to sleep for a time, but when he woke up it was still dark, and when the light of day finally returned it did not bring any warmth.

  When enough people on the tavitarka were awake, and announcing their awakeness by complaining of hunger rather than screaming, Manuah thought it was a surprisingly good sign. He had no appetite whatsoever, and he would have asked his sailors to pass around a breakfast of apples and plums, until he realized the people were already helping themselves. And that was fine for now. They might have to ration later on, but for now it was probably best to let everyone fill their belly that wanted to.

  Sometime into the meal, it was realized that two orphan children had died during the night—one apparently suffocated under living bodies, and the other left too far out in the cold to die of exposure, because nobody was particularly paying attention to them. And so Manuah ordered that any remaining orphans be adopted on the spot, under his authority. But there were no more orphans, unless he counted Na’elta-a-ma’uk. And she was huddled with his family, but he didn’t want to adopt her for obvious reasons, and so he let the matter drop, and ordered the bodies thrown overboard. They quickly drifted off and vanished in the torrential rain, and if anyone wept about it, their tears were hidden among the tears of heaven itself.

  Later in the day, some idiot sailor from Dolshavak’s crews took it upon himself to slaughter a goat. Word spread quickly, and when Manuah heard about it he marched over to the man—as well as one can march when stepping between moving, lashed-together reed boats drowning in rain—and demanded, “What are you doing? You gods-damned idiot, what are you doing? Are you going to eat this raw? Are you going to light a fire on the floor of my boat? Or are you just butchering it for when we beach the boats and camp tonight?”

  When the man said nothing, Manuah continued: “Look around! You idiot, look around you! I’m not surprised Dolshavak let you sail with him, but I don’t let idiots crew my boats. You’ll do no thinking from now on. You’ll do nothing, and I mean nothing, without specific orders from me. If you need to shit, you ask me first. Is that clear?”

  Still the man said nothing, which prompted Kop to hit him across the shoulder with a large clay mug. “Captain asked you a question.”

  “Ow!” the sailor said, his tongue now loosened. “Ow! That really hurt!”

  Not satisfied, Kop hit him again, this time in t
he gut. “I can do this all day, friend, and may the next month be kind. Are you going to listen to our captain, or am I going to throw you overboard? With the captain’s permission, of course.”

  “I’m going to listen,” the man said sullenly. “And furthermore, I apologize for killing a goat.”

  “It wasn’t yours,” Kop reminded him, striking a third time with the mug for good measure. “Now grab a bucket and get bailing, if that’s the pleasure of our captain.”

  “It is,” Manuah confirmed, while thinking to himself, we haven’t heard the last of this one.

  And that was the day’s excitement. The rest of the time was spent huddling miserably, until Manuah could scarcely remember any other form of existence. He napped fitfully throughout the day, dreaming of rain.

  * * *

  They lost three more people along the way, and after that was all over, Manuah would be amazed to realize that they were only four nights and four days on the water altogether—hardly a proper voyage at all. But it felt like eternity, like sixty sixties of years, before the rain finally eased a bit, becoming something more like a natural rainstorm, a little less cold and violent. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  At the same time, visibility expanded from sixty feet in all directions to a quarter kos, and then a few kos, and with this newfound visibility, Manuah could see that there were hills around the river valley. With this sighting he began to feel less like a speck floating above a drowned world, and more like a collection of boats traversing a river, albeit one much greater than the Great River had ever been in the past.

  Manuah ordered the men to bring out the paddles and unlash the oars, but before this operation had really gotten going—as they dragged their stiff, freezing bodies out of whatever shelter they’d been able to find, and started trying to get their fingers to work again—the tavitarka began to lurch beneath them.

  Manuah’s mind took a surprisingly long time to figure out what this meant: the river had stopped. Beneath them it was churning and roiling, not like during the initial waves, but not gently either. Against the hills—several kos away on either side—they were no longer drifting forward. Instead, they spun for a while. The men fussed with leather cords and slender hemp ropes that, sodden with four days of torrential rain, refused to give up their knots.

  “Should we cut them?” one of the sailors wanted to know.

  Manuah thought about it for a long moment before answering, “Not right now. We might need the ropes later, and there’s nothing to steer toward anyway.”

  Indeed, the hills looked surprisingly steep, offering no places to camp or even land properly. They looked barren, too, as though they had also been scrubbed clean by giant waves. Did that make sense? A particularly high tide could sometimes briefly reverse the flow of the Great River as far upstream as Erituak, twenty kos from the sea. How far inland were they now? Manuah could not find any recognizable landmarks, but if they had been traveling upriver for four days then even if the river moved slowly, they could easily have passed Shifpar by now.

  Which was really bad news, because even though Shifpar was a hilly town, no part of it stood any higher above the river than the Hill of Stars had above the harbor. And if the river had flooded this badly, this far north…

  Pulling Adrah aside, he said, “I don’t think we’re moving to Shifpar.”

  “Indeed, I’ve been thinking that for a while now. What are we going to do?”

  “Find a flat spot to camp.”

  “Now?”

  “No, not now, Your Theity. Do you row for Dolshavak or something? Look at these hills. We have to wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Brother, I was hoping you could tell me.”

  1.9

  The question was answered for them about a quarter of an hurta later, when the river started flowing south again. The sailors all noticed right away; a murmur went through the crew, and then, a vimadi later, through the passengers.

  “Praise gods, the flood is over,” said Ku’ulta-do-ma’uk.

  “Doubtful,” Adrah said to him. “All this rain has to go somewhere. It has to drain somewhere. All this means is that four days of rain have finally overwhelmed the ocean. It’s retreating now, but only because it’s being pushed.”

  “How much more water can the sky possibly hold?” the Larashan boy demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Adrah admitted. “I fear the comet may have turned to water.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Who can say? Because the gods desired it.”

  “Did they desire this flood?”

  “I don’t know. Probably, right? The alternative is that it happened without their bidding, or in spite of it. Does that sound right to you?”

  “Well, how big is the comet? How much water are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “You don’t know much,” Ku’ulta-do-ma’uk said, though his tone was not unkind. They had shared the warmth of their bodies for four days, and were still sharing it now.

  Two boats over, the troublemaker (whose name was Ruk) called out, “Are we landing?” No one answered him, or paid attention.

  “I do think the water level is dropping,” Manuah said. Unlike those two, he was standing up and looking around. “The rain has been slacking off for at least an hurta. And yet, we’re picking up speed. With the river this wide and this deep and this fast, just think of how much water it’s draining!”

  “Take it all, sister ocean,” Letoni muttered—an off-color joke to which everyone, even Na’elta-a-ma’uk, laughed.

  And then Manuah said, “I see a village! We are north of Shifpar; these are the Clifflands. And I think there’s a village at the top over there!”

  “Where?” Adrah asked, climbing out from under the sail again. Like all Cleric Astrologers, he had abnormally good vision.

  “There,” Manuah said, pointing.

  There was no smoke rising from it, and indeed through the rain he couldn’t make out much about it at all, except that it looked more like a cluster of buildings than like anything else he could think of.

  “You’re right, it’s a settlement of some kind. I’m not sure ‘village’ is the word.”

  Somehow, Adrah had managed to hold onto his burning crystals, and he now pulled these out and looked through them, moving them backward and forward. They were covered in water droplets, and more rain was falling onto them every kesthe, and yet Adrah seemed undisturbed.

  “That’s a wildmen camp,” he said.

  “Is that good?” Emzananti and Hamurma both wanted to know.

  “At this point, I would say so, yes. I fear our entire Kingdom has been swept into the ocean, and Surapp with it, and perhaps every town in the whole world within ten yojana of the shore. So yes, I’m very happy to see any human beings at all. It means my brother has, in fact, saved us.”

  “Not yet, I haven’t,” Manuah said.

  To which Adrah replied, “Nonsense. You’ve had the gods whispering in your ear all along, or there’s no way we could have made it this far. Sending you subtle warnings, years ago. Sending you dire warnings, days ago! Sending greatfish to block your way! Telling you to lash the boats together. Do you deny it?”

  Manuah wanted to. He didn’t really believe in all that stuff, but could any person really be so lucky? Or skilled? Or did he simply have all the right materials lying around?

  Adrah beamed. “I wanted to be closer to the gods, to know their ways. But who’d’ve thought you’d become their prophet?”

  “Not a prophet,” Manuah said, a bit too sharply. “Just a harbormaster with a fleet of boats.”

  And with that, they ran aground.

  It was a loud and messy affair, with two of the boats snagging on a sandbar or the top of a hill or something, and the whole rest of the tavitarka pivoting around them, and then breaking loose, and then grounding again, this time less gently. Everyone who was huddled beneath a sail got landed on by everyone who was standing, an
d for a vimadi, chaos reigned.

  But order slowly reasserted itself.

  The floodwater was indeed draining around them; whatever hill they’d grounded on, the tavitarka was now bending around it, conforming to its shape. A pair of ropes snapped. People yelped, and some of them started trying to climb to other boats

  “Steady!” Manuah called out to them. “Everyone hang on and stay where you are!”

  That wasn’t necessarily the best advice, but it did calm everyone down over the slow, agonizing vimadi while the water dropped a foot, then another foot, until finally all seven boats were on solid ground.

  Solid ground! A cheer went up: “Manuah! Manuah! MANUAH!!”

  An hurta later, the water had receded enough that Manuah permitted the passengers to climb off the boats for the first time in four days. They were still cold and rain-naked, but they were standing on the mucky ground, and for the moment that was good enough.

  As for the sailors, Manuah called out, “Men! Unlash these boats! Cut the ropes if you have to. We’re going to turn these over and make houses out of them!”

  They were busy with this task until darkness fell, and although they technically had the means for making a fire, they had no dry wood, and so they huddled miserably once again, perhaps even colder this time since their bodies were pressed against wet sailcloth lying on wet mud, rather than against the reeds and wooden decking of the boats. But without the rain pummeling them, they were certainly drier!

  When Manuah slept that night, he dreamed of home, with Emzananti’s voice gently scolding the children (who had become young again) and the smell of fried clams filling the air.

  * * *

  The next morning, the sky was still a deep, flinty gray, and a light, damp fog had descended that made the world seem small and vaguely magical around them, but the rain itself was down to a sprinkle. More importantly, the flood water had receded so much that the river looked more or less like a normal (though still very great) river. Its edges were nearly half a kos away from the boats, and fully sixty feet lower. The ground was littered with shattered, leafless trees.