Abraham Allegiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 4) (7 page)

Six hundred miles away from Babylon, in the Great Cedar Forest of Bashan, deep in the bowels of Mount Hermon, the goddess Ishtar sought a clandestine audience with the creature she most sought to emulate in her quest. In the divine council of heaven, he was called the
satan
, Elohim’s legal adversary. In the Garden he was
Nachash
, the Serpent of Eden. In this postdiluvian world, he was known by other names as well, but Prince Mastema was his personal preference. It had a certain ring of royalty and power that appealed to his pride.

Mastema was the only Watcher who refused to take on the name of a localized deity as the others did. His status as the primal Tempter of mankind was political leverage, and he gloried in his elite status among the Watchers.

Ishtar had engaged in a covert operation of traveling to Hermon with her human consort, Canaan, son of Ham. And now, they were alone in the vast cavernous belly of the assembly of gods awaiting the arrival of her mighty role model.

The cavern was empty. The gods had vacated their headquarters at the request of Mastema. Behind Ishtar and Canaan, the black waters of the Abyss were perpetually alight with flame. The sparkling gem-laden stalactites and stalagmites gave an eerie glow to everything in Canaan’s vision.

A deep bass tonal voice pierced the quiet. “Ishtar, this had better be important. It was no easy task to garner this empty assembly hall.”

Mastema stepped out from the shadows.

He was unusually tall for a Watcher, eleven feet high. He was a Seraph, one of the original reptilian beings that guarded the very throne chariot of Elohim. He had six wings and eyes that could entrance any unwitting soul with hypnotic power. He was gangly, without the muscle mass of someone like Marduk. But he remained influential on the assembly nonetheless because he had borne the title distinction of being the “Accuser” or prosecutor in Elohim’s heavenly court. The other Watcher gods feared him, not as they feared Marduk for his brawn, but because of Mastema’s legal cunning that could wreak as much devastation as ten marauding Marduks. Mastema had figured out the advantages of law-twisting over lawlessness.

Mastema’s reptilian eyes penetrated Canaan’s countenance. Canaan shuddered.

“Do you fancy my little flesh bag of bones?” said Ishtar. “Delectable, is he not?”

“Is he an offering?” asked Mastema, salivating.

Canaan stepped a little more behind Ishtar. The hairs on his neck stiffened. His breath shortened. Mastema could smell the fear.

“Unfortunately, no,” said Ishtar. “But trust me, he has more far reaching benefit than an orgy of torture, rape, and dismemberment could ever provide.”

“Pray tell,” replied Mastema. All his senses tuned in on Ishtar.

Ishtar grinned. She had him in her grip. “I am reminded of a certain prophetic promise in a certain garden so long ago. ‘I will put enmity between your seed and her seed,’ I believe are the actual words, though I could be mistaken.”

“Do not remind me,” grumbled Mastema.

It hung over Mastema like an axe waiting to strike off his head. The Creator, Elohim, had cursed Mastema and engaged a war between the Seed of the Serpent and the Seed of Eve. For generations, the Watchers had tried to corrupt that seedline with their commingling of heavenly and earthly seed. They had sought out the bearers of that bloodline to hunt them down and exterminate them: Enoch the giant killer, then Noah ben Lamech. But they had failed;
the Deluge had crushed their accomplishments under its cleansing waves and frightened them from ever cohabiting with the daughters of men again. And they had lost track of the sons of Noah.

Until now.

Ishtar grinned. “We may not have the Chosen Seed,” she said. “But we do have the Cursed Seed.”

She pulled Canaan forward and cuddled him with a sensual playfulness.

Mastema was only beginning to understand.

“I introduce to you, Canaan ben Ham, son of Noah. Say hello to your master, Canaan.”

Canaan croaked out a trembling response, “M-my Lord, I am y-your servant.”

“Indeed?” said Mastema, stroking Canaan’s head down to his crotch with his finger.

Ishtar continued, “He is the fruit of incestuous rape of Noah’s wife by her son Ham. The Chosen One cursed him.”

Mastema’s scaly brows rose with greater interest. He knew of Anu and Ishtar’s experiments before the Great Flood. He had even known of their test subject, Ham, who was called Canaanu in Uruk. The irony of the name similarity did not escape him.

“So, this one is a carrier of the Nephilim blood?” asked Mastema.

Ishtar answered, “From within the bloodline of the Chosen Seed himself. I know. I performed genetic alteration on his father.”

Mastema was following well. “What better bloodline to create the Cursed Seed from than the line of the Chosen Seed.”

Ishtar added, “And what better location to breed that seedline than here in the Levant? We could call it the land of Canaan after our own chosen one as a slap in the supreme despot’s face.”

Mastema paused. “What about Elohim? The Watchers’ original breeding program brought down the deluge of judgment. If we pursue that agenda again, we risk another cataclysm that will surely imprison the rest of us.”

“But Elohim promised to never flood the earth again with water,” replied Ishtar.

“There is always fire,” countered Mastema, “and other disasters.”

Ishtar disagreed, “It makes the Creator look like an incompetent moron to be destroying and recreating his creation over and over again. He will not risk that kind of foolishness. He is a vainglorious peacock.”

Mastema listened with intent. Ishtar was onto something here.

Ishtar continued, “The problem with our antediluvian scheme was that the Watchers took control and sought to reign
outwardly
. Our breeding program was too bold a scheme. If we avoid fornication with the humans ourselves and simply breed the Nephilim strain through the humans already tainted, then we will not draw undue attention to ourselves. It will take a little longer, but our precious little Canaan here is the key.”

Mastema’s eyes brightened with interest as Ishtar concluded, “It dawned on me that once Elohim prophesied something, it was sure to come to pass. So why fight it? Why not use it to our advantage? After all,
he is
the one who promised there would be two seedlines of enmity.”

“You are cunning,” said Mastema.

Ishtar crowed, “Instead of defying Elohim’s prophecy, we will simply fulfill it as instruments of his own will.”

Mastema grinned. “We will breed his seedline of opposition. We will give him his war.”

Canaan’s knees almost gave out. He realized he was in over his head. He was a puny pawn in a very dangerous game of gods and men.

Mastema noticed. He bent down and said with a calming voice, “Do not be fearful, human. You will be a patriarch, a king among men. You will be completely under the good graces of our protection. What more could you ask for?”

Maybe the protection of Elohim
, thought Canaan. But that was too late. He had already been cursed of Elohim, so this giant divinity was right. He was in the most capable hands of power in the pantheon.

Mastema turned to Ishtar with an interrogating demeanor. And interrogation was his specialty.

He said, “And what exactly do you want as reward for hatching your brilliant scheme, Ishtar?”

“Why to oversee it, of course,” she said like an innocent lamb.

“Of course,” Mastema mimicked with distrust. “But you are correct. My position as the satan in the heavenly court is far too important and public. You are an outcast of the pantheon. You can pursue this without need of the pantheon’s knowledge or approval.”

“It would be our little secret,” purred Ishtar in agreement.

Mastema said, “You should take on the identity of a local deity as disguise.”

“I like who I am,” said Ishtar with a tinge of stubborn inflexibility.

Mastema countered, “Do not worry, the goddess Ashtart fits you well. Same persona, new name, established authority as the Canaanite goddess of sex and war.”

“Well, in that case, Ashtart, it is,” said Ishtar. She had done this before. She liked the idea of being a moving target, too difficult for her enemies to keep track of constantly changing identities.

“I will alert the Canaanite deities so they will not rise up against you,” said Mastema.

“Who are they?” she said.

“The high god El and his consort Asherah, Molech, god of the underworld, and Dagon, god of fertility and the sea.”

“Will the high god’s pride of place become a problem?”

“El is my puppet,” said Mastema. “The old man will not be trouble. And he is stationed in the far northern regions.”

“I defer to your brilliance,” said Ishtar.

“Spare me the flattery, bitch goddess,” said Mastema. “I have just the southern location for you to do it.”

“I am at your command,” said Ishtar. But she thought,
I could slice you in half, you pompous ingrate. If it were not for your devious legal hegemony.

Oh, how she hated the power of law. She knew he would not hesitate to crush her with it if she caused him any trouble.

Mastema said, “There is a confederation of five tribes in the southern Jordan valley of the Salt Sea. It is the most fertile area in the Levant with rich resources, and the tribes are ripe for leadership to unite them into a pentapolis of five city-states. Go there and build those cities.”

“What are the tribes?” asked Ishtar.

“Admah, Zeboiim, Zoar, Sodom, and Gomorrah. They are a particularly debauched people who I am sure will be open to your ‘creative depravity.’”

Ishtar could not help but grin. This was going to be fun.

“Well, we had better get hopping, Canaan” said Ishtar. “We have a seedline to breed — and an army to build.”

Etemenanki, the holy temple-tower of Babylon, took a year to build. The city and its walls were not complete yet, but the temple area was a priority, so Nimrod finished it along with Marduk’s Esagila complex on the other side of the Processional Way. There were other temples throughout the city for Ishtar, Enlil, Shamash, and others, but their construction was deferred to the main temple complex, as well as the royal palace of Nimrod in the northern sector.

Within that year, Semiramis gave birth to a son who was named Mardon.

But also within that year, Nimrod commissioned Terah to establish a school of heavenly wisdom. The school would seek out and train those with sensitivity to the spiritual plane of reality. There were several different institutes for specialized knowledge based on the varying talents of the students. A court of sorcerers and magicians concentrated on enchantments, spells, and other magic. A court of diviners sought interpretations of omens from all manner of sources to discover the future. There was extispicy that studied the position and conditions of eviscerated organs of animals, livers, entrails, hearts, and lungs; auspicy studied the patterns and flights of birds, lecanomancy, the movement of water. Dream interpreters aided the difficult task of understanding the meaning of the king’s dreams. Nimrod was particularly enamored with dreams. As king of Uruk, his mother had instilled in him an obsession with dreams and they had presaged his very future.

But most important of all was the new court of astrologers. Astrology was relatively undeveloped, which is why the god Marduk focused much of his time and attention over this first year in revealing the occult secrets of the heavens to Terah and his court of astrologers.

First, Marduk enlisted the aid of Sinleqi to engrave, “star almanacs” on clay tablets. These tablets were a multitude of charts of the heavens with their constellations and planetary movements. There were seven planets: The sun, the moon, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Jupiter. Since the stars and planets were divine, they exerted influence on the course of history, so it was crucial to study their course in the heavens.

As a consequence of this need, Marduk spent countless hours with the scribal scholar Sinleqi elaborating detailed explanations of omens — celestial phenomena and their meanings as signs for terrestrial events. Marduk would dictate and Sinleqi would engrave in cuneiform with his reed stylus.

These omens would take the form of something like, “When Mercury becomes visible in the east in the region of Virgo, its interpretation is: The harvest of the land will prosper;” or, “If Jupiter remains in the sky in the morning, enemy kings will become reconciled.” Since gods and kings ruled the land, and the commoner was relatively insignificant, these omens related only to royalty and their kingdoms, but not to individual citizens.

Of particular importance in spiritual manifestation was the rare phenomenon of planetary alignment. Every few hundred years, all the planets would be lined up in a near eclipse that would exert unprecedented dramatic historical influence on the earth below. It was a celestial spectacle of great importance. Marduk had only recently calculated that the next alignment was due within a generation.

But there was an additional factor that magnified the significance of the alignment. That was the change of astrological ages that was currently taking place. Every two thousand one hundred and sixty years, the constellations above would move
through the sky such that a new constellation would become dominant in its position and influence. In the same way that the sun would move through the signs of the zodiac over its yearly course, so the signs themselves would move through a “Great Year” of twenty-six thousand years, but in reverse order. The current age was of Taurus, the Bull. This was an age of earth, agriculture, and the Bull of Heaven, something Nimrod was very familiar with in his past experience. The next age to come was the Age of Aries, the Ram. This would be an age of fire and war, and was the portent of Marduk’s own rule through Nimrod of Babylon.

The ages did not stop and start on specific days or years, but rather blended into one another over decades or even hundreds of years. This was called the “cusp” of the age. Thus they were on the cusp of the age of Aries, and the apex of that cusp would occur at precisely the time of the next great planetary alignment.

Marduk knew that this combined cusp and alignment would be the zenith of compounded heavenly forces that would open the new temple tower Etemenanki as a portal to heaven for their plans. Thus, he had told a disappointed Nimrod that the emperor would have to wait another generation before they could consecrate the temple to open the portal and establish it as their new cosmic mountain of the gods. Their plans for world conquest would have to wait another generation.

Such a waiting period was insignificant for the likes of Marduk, whose supernatural being had experienced eons of time. He would simply use the time to labor over concealing all this astrological information behind elaborate religious myths and rituals. It was an ingenious way of embedding his knowledge into the very operations of ancient religion.

But for Nimrod, who was only half god and half man, a generation was like an eternity. Since he knew he could do nothing about it, he would focus on building his glorious city, which would take about as long to finish.

But this anxious interim was to be the least of Nimrod’s concerns, because this very evening, an event would occur that would change the world forever. It would challenge Nimrod’s imperial rule over a godforsaken world given over to its depravity by the Creator.

Elohim was coming back to the land of Mesopotamia.