Storm (11 page)

It’s dawning on them what a problem the herbivores pose. The rest of us can have fish thrown at us. But the herbivores . . .

I reach out and pet the female duiker. She accepts my touch now. Both duikers do. The male accepts it only because moving
out of my reach that fast would hurt his injured leg. But the female seems to like it. She even pushes her hard little forehead against my hand, asking for a scratch, which I willingly give. I don’t want them to die. But even more, I don’t want them to suffer through a slow starvation.

I look at the ladder. There’s nothing there. Whatever treat Shem’s mother made for him is gone. He must have gobbled it up. Too bad.

Whoop. Whoop, whoop, whoop.

These are sounds The Male makes often, but there’s something different in them now. They’re unhappy. What an idiot. The fire danger is past—he should be celebrating.

I turn to look at him. He stands at the side hole with his hands on the lip of it and hops from foot to foot, lifting his knees high. I’ve never seen him do that before. He turns in a circle, then grabs hold of the side hole lip and pumps his legs up and down again.

Queen stands beside him. She throws her head side to side and lopes to the front of our cage. She grabs on to two of the poles with hands and feet and climbs to the top. She smacks her head against the ceiling beams, then slides down, rubbing her torso against the poles in the middle, between her hands, as she goes. When she hits the floor, she climbs up again. She emits a string of noises, over and over, in the same order—whistles and whoops and little screeches. I’ve never seen her do this before either. And I’ve never heard that particular string of noises.

I squat near the poles, and the next time Queen slides down, I whisper, “What’s the matter?”

She shakes her head again as though she’s trying to get free of something and climbs the poles and slides back down.

I look over at The Male. I usually avoid being beside him; I feel safest when Queen is between us. But whatever is going on feels bad to me. I approach him slowly, standing very straight to remind him how much taller I am than he is. “What’s wrong?”

The Male moves aside. This is startling. He seems to be inviting me to look out the side hole. So I do.

The rain has slowed to a drizzle. I don’t get elated, though. The rain slows sometimes, but it always starts up again, blustery and wild. Still, I have to appreciate this thinnest of drizzles, for it’s lovely to be able to see the stars. They glitter almost as sweetly as sunlight. The air is cold, though. It stings my nose.

I look down. My whole self goes slack. Debris. Debris everywhere. We often pass floating remnants of the world that used to be. That’s how we got the serpent, after all. But this is a vast mass of waste that goes on and on, as far as I can see in any direction. It’s as though a town wound up adrift right here, caught in some kind of monstrous gyre, some evil current. An entire town and all the forests that flanked it. And not just any town—an enormous town. Maybe the town everyone talks of—or used to talk of—the town they call fragrant, Reah.

I used to think it might be exciting to travel, and I’d love to visit a city that was known for being fragrant. But robbers abound
on the roads travelers take—or they did. A woman doesn’t travel, not unless a man has come to take her as a wife and is bringing her back to his home country. Or unless she’s a slave, bought or stolen. No sane woman wants to travel. I was crazy to think that way, so I never told anyone. I wouldn’t risk being shunned. I never told anyone even half the things I thought.

Not until I was with Aban. I told Aban anything that came into my head. We talked about traveling along the river south, to the land of his ancestors. We both knew it meant nothing, though. The river didn’t exist anymore—it had merged with the sea. Still, it was good to talk. He felt the same way about fishing that I felt about planting. Sometimes he’d just marvel at the colors of some fish that came up in his net, even when it was a kind of fish he caught every day. And I knew what he meant. I love the first pea flowers of the spring.

I miss talking. I do talk, to Queen and Screamer. But they never talk back.

Hearing the brothers and their father and mother is a treat, even when they scare me. And the talking woman, she’s interesting.

Something emerges from the debris down there. A spray of water. Then a huge bulk—long and rounded at one end. The other end is below the water’s surface. And now I see there are two bulky creatures. One is much larger than the other. My breathing speeds up. Whales. It’s hard to tell color in the evening like this, but I think they are brownish gray. Lighter streaks run
the length of the larger one. When I was small, I heard about whales from visitors.

I watch as the big one presses against the littler one. The big one nudges and makes lots of clicking noises. It goes under, and I see that wonderful splitting tail—so I was right! But it comes back up fast and nudges the little one.

The little one is silent. It moves oddly, as though struggling against something.

Another spray of water, and a third whale appears. A big one. And a fourth comes, a fifth, more and more. The big ones push against the debris. They dive and surface and make those clicking noises and seem to be trying to clear away the debris from around the little one, who is far bigger than me, but somehow I know it’s really young.

It’s a baby.

And the first adult whale is its mother.

Queen and The Male come to the side hole and press against me, but they don’t knock me aside. We watch together. The clicks are loud and frequent and maybe, maybe I sense fear in them.

“The baby’s in trouble,” I say to Queen.

She stares down at the whales. Then she lopes back to the poles and climbs them and bashes her head at the top and slides down and comes loping back, and for an instant she’s on our shoulders, then she goes straight out the side hole, hand over hand down the rope.

I don’t know if whales can be dangerous. But they are gigantic, and Queen is small. Besides, the end of the rope isn’t close to the baby whale. Queen won’t be able to tell much. She can’t satisfy her curiosity, if that’s what this is all about.

The Male makes little moans of worry.

He’s right. Anything could happen. “Call her back,” I say.

But he doesn’t pause in his moans, and his eyes stay fixed on Queen.

Queen is at the bottom of the rope now. She looks out over the debris, then looks back up at us.

The whale clicks come fast and insistent.

Queen leaps from the rope. My heart skips a beat. I stifle a shriek. But she lands on the closest floating uprooted tree, and it doesn’t even seem to dip from her weight. She looks toward the whales again. I can see her body coiling. She leaps again, onto another tree. She can go from tree to tree to the baby whale, I can see that now. But what if the ark moves too far from the chain of trees for her to leap back? I have no idea whether she can swim. She looks up at us again.

“Come back,” I call. What does she think she can do, after all?

She leaps again and again. She’s beside the baby whale now, squatting on what looks to be a turned-over boat. A fishing boat. She whoops and screams.

Only one adult whale is near the baby now—the mother. She gives no sign of noticing Queen.

Queen yanks on something, pulling hard with her whole
body. It’s a net. The baby is caught somehow in a fishing net!

It will die if it stays there.

We need a knife. I can do anything with a knife. Aban and I often thought of what a pity it was I didn’t grab mine before running off to find my brothers.

What else could cut a rope net?

But there is nothing else. I have examined every part of this cage. Nothing is sharp.

Maybe it’s just a matter of untangling it, though.

What am I thinking? It’s Queen down there, not me. She’s brave. I’m a rabbit.

“Come back!” I call.

Queen pulls on the fishing net. She looks tiny and pitiful down there.

I clasp my hands around the rope as tight as I can. I climbed up it. Surely I can climb down. I lower myself out the side hole.

The Male screams.

I hold on with hands and arms and legs. But it’s hard. Ice crystals coat the rope. Already they cut into my hands and scrape my body.

I let loose a hand and lower myself again. My remaining hand gives. I slip downward fast. I can’t stop myself. I’m clutching as hard as I can, but I can’t stop.

Until I do. Midway down to the water. I hold on as hard as I can. Even if I got to the bottom, even if I got to the baby whale and untangled him, I’d never be able to climb up this rope again.

I try to climb upward. I can’t bring myself to let a hand loose to reach upward. I can’t do anything but cling here and pray.
Please, please, don’t let me slip again.

The Male screams from above. He doesn’t stop.

And now I feel the push on my bottom. Queen shoves hard. I dare to reach a hand up. We move slowly, painfully, up the rope.

The Male pulls me in through the side hole.

Queen climbs in.

I stand at the side hole, shivering as I look out. I can’t believe how cold I am. What made me think I could go out into the icy night completely naked? Queen and The Male hug me from both sides. I can’t hug them back. I need both my arms around my own torso. I’m shivering so hard, it takes effort not to fall.

We watch the baby whale struggle. We listen to the mother whale’s clicks. We stay like that, the three of us pressed against one another, until there are no more struggles and the clicks stop.

Q
ueen and I are straightening up our cage. I hum as we do it. Queen makes little whistles. It feels good, like when Mamma and I used to sing as we worked together. There isn’t really much to do, just comb through the straw, fluff it up a bit. It’s one of our games—not as much fun as mimicking, but it fills the time.

Except the game has gotten weird for the last few days, because Queen collects all the dried feces. I watch now as she searches through the pile in front of her. She crushes some in her hands and selects certain parts and eats them. Seeds. All right, that I can understand, sort of. But she eats other things too. Randomly, it seems.

She’s done this ever since the baby whale died.

And she grooms all of us now, everyone in this cage. Many
times a day. The Male protests, especially when she grooms the duikers. He shows his teeth and gets a look I recognize; if they were in the wild, he’d eat the duikers. I’m sure of it. It’s Queen who stops him. She must have decided that existence in this cage wouldn’t be tolerable if The Male was allowed to kill anything he wanted. Maybe she’d like to eat the duikers too. But instead she grooms them. She keeps us civil.

She comes up behind me now, and I stay perfectly still. I know what’s about to happen and I know it’s important to her. Her whiskers brush stiff against my back. Her figgy breath coats my neck. Slowly, searchingly, somehow poignantly, her hands snake around me from behind and rub my belly. She’s so sad. The Male is sad too, but Queen is sadder than him.

I understand her. Or I think I do. It’s as though we had some kind of stake in that baby whale’s survival, as though in some crazy way we even loved him. Queen’s eyes look hollow, and often her face is tear-streaked. My own eyes feel sunken. My cheeks are often wet. We are united in this.

Yet there is something basically optimistic about Queen. Imprisonment couldn’t squelch that. I have to believe that seeing a baby die can’t keep her down for long. I rely on her bright eyes, her constant fascination with everything. If she stays sad, I don’t think I’ll be able to bear it.

Queen finishes rubbing me, and her hands fall limp to the ground. She goes over to The Male and nuzzles him. They curl around each other and sleep. This is what she does after the
belly-rub ritual, as I’ve come to think of it. It’s as though she takes comfort from the ritual and now she can let go of care.

The duikers are awake. They will fall asleep soon, and the aardvarks will wake. But right now it’s only the duikers and Screamer and me awake in this cage. I like this. I don’t have to be on guard; nothing scares me.

Well, that’s not true. Everything scares me. If I allow my mind to wander through all the possibilities, the whole mess we’re in terrifies me. But the immediate moment we are in, this very moment, this one is peaceful.

I throw my own dried feces out the side hole. The brothers rake out our waste daily. Fortunately, they are lazy and rake only what they can reach through the poles, so they never disturb me in my nest near the back wall, and they never get near the area I use as my toilet.

I look over at the cage next to us. Giraffes. That’s the name of those tall creatures with necks that look like someone enormously strong pulled and pulled and stretched them. I’d never seen them before coming on the ark; I know what they’re called only because I eavesdrop when Ham and Shem talk. They know the names of all the creatures. The wild sheep, creatures I’ve always known, they call mouflon. I love them. And I love especially the tortoises with the golden-colored shells, probably because I’ve known them all my life too. The familiar is dear to me now.

I rest against the side poles, and Screamer comes and nestles
on my lap. I scratch him everywhere. He’ll go off on his nightly adventures soon, but for the moment he is content to play my pet. He’s growing sleek and long. He might be the only creature truly thriving on this ark. I hear little cries and yowls from most cages—quick skirmishes that end badly for one or the other. And whenever I see any animal’s eyes lately, they seem haunted, as though they don’t know what to expect next but whatever it is will be awful. Only Screamer is fine. Maybe because he’s not really a prisoner, unlike the rest of us. I don’t know how far he wanders, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s gone up and down the ladders and into every shadowed corner of this ark.

If only all of us could wander free for part of each day, like Screamer does . . . it would help so much.