Storm (19 page)

Bash and I are working our way through all the animals on this deck for the third time. Or the third time for most of them. There are some we have skipped out of protection for ourselves. But we’ve managed very well with the others.

Tonight will be different, though.

While I wait for Bash, I go to the lions. I pick up the blackened stick that lies on the floor outside their cage—the one the brothers use every day at feeding time to keep the lions back. That goes in my left hand. In my right hand is a second stick,
not as long or as firm, but very sharp on the end—a tool from Bash. I poke this stick through the lattice till I spear a piece of fish on the floor in the lion cage where Shem threw it this morning. I drag it toward me. I watch the lions through the little lattice holes and they watch me. I swallow.
Please let this be like other nights. Please let them understand
. I poke the blackened stick in with my left hand, though I have no confidence it can really protect me. Then I force in my right hand and pull the fish out as fast as I can. All right. My hand is whole. So far.

Usually, the lions have pawed the fish to bits. But this piece turns out to be a whole small fish. Sitting like that all day, it has deteriorated enough that I can peel off the skin quick and pick the flesh from the bones easily. Good. This is my job: to make them a gruel. The half-rotted fish flesh comes apart simply by rolling it hard between my palms. When the entire fish is reduced to a sticky pile, I take a fistful and open the window high up in the lattice—the one Shem and Ham throw the daily food through. It is just above my head, so it’s not that high up. The lions could jump at it if they wanted. I hold the blackened stick at the ready, but I don’t shout at the lions like Shem and Ham. I talk, firmly and slowly, like Bash tells me to do.

“It’s coming. Food is coming. You can lap it slowly. You can manage.” I drop the mess into their water trough, which is directly below the window. I do it all a second time, announcing in the same way, exactly the same words in the same order. My hope is that regularity will calm them. I think it calms everyone;
it gives the feeling that you can predict what’s coming next. I do it all a third time.

That’s all the flesh that was on that fish. But several more pieces of fish lie on the floor inside the cage. I shut the window and go back to fetching fish and shredding flesh and dropping it into the trough. Soon the trough water is opaque with tiny bits of fish flesh. I imagine it to be the consistency of thin mud. I lock the window and put my face to the lattice holes to watch.

The male and female lap at the same time. The first night I did this, the male lapped while the female waited her turn. He was slow, nerve-rackingly slow. The second night she waited a long while, but then she couldn’t stand it anymore and joined him. After that they simply both started at once. Just three nights is all it took. Lions adjust fast.

I watch them dip in a tongue and then pause. Then another dip. Another pause. It takes them forever to satisfy themselves. But I expected that. Something’s wrong in their throats. That’s what makes them cough. I don’t know whether something is stuck there or it’s swollen or what, but I know they have trouble swallowing. Only water seems to roll down their throats easily. So they were starving before. But now they’re not. Now they drink their food. Their ribs still show, and they seem to sway on their feet. But an alertness has returned. Enough food is getting into their stomachs to give them that, at least.

“Help.” Bash’s legs come through the porthole.

I rush into our cage to pull him that last little bit till his
shoulders come through. “Tonight’s different,” I say to him.

“Every night’s different, Sheba.”

“Follow me.”

Without a word, Bash falls into step behind me, which isn’t easy for him—he has to take mincing steps because his legs are so much longer—but he does it. I lead him to the other end of the corridor. Sure enough, there’s a ring attached to the floor. I tug on it, and up comes the hatch. I point. “The ladder down.”

“Do you know what’s down there?”

“Huge animals. That’s what Noah said. And horses and zebras. That’s what Ham said.”

“All in cages?”

“So far as I know. They need us too.”

“Right. Me first.” Bash goes down the ladder. “It’s dark as sin down here.”

I climb down and wait for my eyes to adjust. “If we can just get to one of the portholes between cages, we can let in moonlight.”

“What do you mean?”

“They close the hatches over the portholes at night on this level. They’ve been doing that ever since that big storm. That way they don’t have to go rushing down if the waves get wild in the middle of the night.”

So we open those portholes and meet again at the foot of the ladder and look around. Slowly, breathlessly. The outlines of the creatures loom large, but not a one is as tall as the giraffes.
Good. We’ve learned to control the giraffes; we can learn to control these animals.

“Camels first?” says Bash.

Camels are docile. I let out a sigh of relief. “Why not?”

We open the cage, and Bash holds the swinging door high. The camels sit with their legs folded under them and stare at us. They must have been asleep. “Come on out,” I say. They just stare.

“Here,” says Bash. “You hold up the door.”

I take his place, but I can’t hold the door high enough for the camels. This is dumb. This should be his job.

Bash walks off and picks up something from the deck. It’s a long stick. He comes hurrying back.

The male camel scrambles to his feet, opens his mouth wide, and throws up a foul-stinking flood right at Bash. Bash jumps backward, but it still gets his leg. “Foolish animal,” he says. He throws the stick down the corridor into the dark. “I wasn’t going to switch you with it.” He tilts his head. “What moron beat you, huh?”

I had the same question. What’s the point of beating a camel when, if you treat him right, he will do anything you want? “Hold the door,” I say. Bash takes the door and lifts it high. And I sing. I’m not a particularly good singer. But camels don’t care. They always come to a song. Or that’s what my father used to say. I sing and step backward, away from the cage, luring them, I hope.

The female gets to her feet now and the two of them amble out, sedately, almost imperiously, turning their heads to give Bash a good look in the eye. I have the urge to pull him out of kick reach. But the moment is already past; they clomp down the central corridor.

“Deftly done.” Bash lowers the door. “The elephants can go at the same time. They won’t bother each other.”

I walk behind Bash to the elephant cage, my heart thumping hard. I’ve never seen them, but I’ve heard of armies that ride against each other on these huge beasts. They are ferocious war creatures. Bash slows his walk. I peek out. The animals in the cage ahead—these elephants—are wide and enormous, with heads that seem out of proportion and no necks at all. Well, of course—no neck could hold such a head. That long nose alone must weigh three or four times what I weigh.

They move back and forth, back and forth. Not pacing in a circle, even though their cages are big enough for them to turn around. No. They simply rock from front foot to back foot. A kind of dance, almost, but a grief dance; their noses hang limp, they make quiet, throaty, rumbling noises. They are bald, but for a thick bristle protruding here or there.

As we approach, they stop and go on alert. Their massiveness overwhelms me. I can’t do this. I reach for Bash’s hand.

But at the same moment he extends his hand through the poles toward the male.

“Are you crazy?”

“Easy, Sheba. If he hasn’t been beaten, he’s not going to do anything erratic. Talk soft—like me now. Move slowly.” His palm is flat on the elephant’s nose. He moves it up and down.

“Those teeth,” I say in a forced quiet voice, “those teeth could kill you.”

“They’re tusks. He could slash me to death with them. Or squeeze me to death with his trunk. Or stomp me to death with a foot. But I’m counting on him not to. I’m counting on his curiosity to make him hold off till he sees what we’re about.” Bash’s voice comes rhythmically. It fascinates even me. “And what we’re about is giving him a taste of freedom—keeping him whole and sane. That was the point of all this, right? That’s what you explained to me. So be patient, Sheba. Patient and brave.”

The elephant curls the tip of his trunk up and goes for Bash’s face. I hold in a scream. He touches Bash on the nose, the cheeks, the lips, feeling with a little fingerlike protrusion. The skin on his trunk is totally wrinkled, like the skin on the back of Queen’s and The Male’s fingers. Somehow that seems good. It is a good trunk.
Please let it be a good trunk
. Bash is still rubbing that trunk, but on the underside now.

“I’m going to let them out,” says Bash. “Are you all right?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Want to climb on my shoulders?”

“What good will that do?”

“It’s an offer. Take it or leave it.”

This was all my decision, my plan, this freeing of the
animals. It wasn’t hard to talk Bash into it, but it’s still my fault. What on earth have I gotten us into? Bash is already kneeling, though—waiting.

I climb on his shoulders. I have gone crazy. We could both die. But as he stands, I do feel safer. Moonlight catches the male elephant just right and I can see his eyes behind long, coarse lashes. He doesn’t look as though he’s about to kill us. “Don’t kill us,” I breathe. “Please.”

Bash opens the swinging door. The male elephant lifts his head high. He takes a couple of steps backward, knocking into the female, who steps forward and backward and forward and backward, in that crying dance they were doing before. The male’s ears fan out. Little bumps cover them. Some are open sores. They ooze. He throws his head sideways now, and that massive trunk swings. Bash steps back, but he doesn’t drop the door.

The elephants walk out, past us. Just like that. They hesitate a second only, then run down the corridor. The whole deck rises and falls with their thumping feet.

“You can stop squeezing your thighs now, Sheba—or I might suffocate.”

Oh. I didn’t realize I was gripping him so tight. I loosen my legs. And my arms—I’d been hugging his whole head. “Sorry. But I won’t come down.”

“That’s all right. The way you are now is fine.”

For half the night we watch elephants and camels pass one
another. They are capable of destroying us. But they leave us be.

Gradually I grow complacent in my perch on Bash’s shoulders. The smell of this deck is different from mine. Sweet and fermented. It’s heady. Bash is warm and solid beneath my bottom. Peace envelops me. I wish I could stay here forever.

M
y garden is pitiful. I have made a long mound of animal dung along the back wall of our cage and planted seeds at regular intervals. I water them faithfully, which is not easy because I have to save sweet water for them—and that means I have to give them some of my share. But I do it. This is necessary.

Sprouts come up, reliably, within a couple of weeks of planting them. They seem vigorous at first. But then they go limp, weak, and they shrivel fast. The problem is, plants want sun. And even though the sun came out just days after I planted the first seeds, I can’t give them sun. I have to keep this garden against the wall of the ark or it will be discovered—and then I’ll be discovered. No sunlight hits this wall at the back of our cage, no matter how bright it is outside.

I ponder this as I crunch away on the mysterious new food they’ve been feeding us for the past few days.

Clack
.

A sandal on the ladder. Shem is early tonight. I dive into my straw nest.

Clack, clack, clack.

Two sets of sandals. I tense up and peer out. It’s Japheth—the brother I hardly ever see—with his wife, Ada. He waits for her at the bottom of the ladder. She descends, and for a moment her back is to his chest and she presses into him. They look like a pair of saplings—slender and long. Then she hurries to a spot on the center of the deck where hardly any moonlight from the portholes reaches, and she sits.

“Don’t,” says Japheth. He comes to stand over her and offers a hand. “The floor is filthy.”

“I can wash our clothes.” She pats the floor beside her. “Sit with me?”

“It’s so hard to get water.”

“Salt water does fine for laundry. Better even, according to your mother.” She pats the floor again.

Japheth sits. “What did you want to tell me? What’s so important that we had to sneak off like this?”

“I spent all day picking kelp off the fishing nets and stringing it over ropes near the fire to dry stiff. Smell my hands.” She holds them out to his face. “I smell of the sea. I reek. I toasted kelp yesterday, too. And the day before. And the day before
that.” Her hands wave in the air in front of his eyes. “I’ll toast kelp tomorrow. And the day after. And—”

“Ada, don’t.” Japheth catches her hands in his. “Don’t talk about it.”

“I don’t. Your mother forbids us to talk about it. I think she’s afraid of a mutiny.”

“It’s better just to work. Hard. To lose yourself in the monotony.”

“You say that because you have no other option. You’re with your father all day, and he never abides a doubting word about anything.”

“What is there to doubt? Don’t tell me you doubt, Ada. Don’t even use the word.”

“We are husband and wife. If we cannot speak freely with each other, we cannot speak freely with anyone.”

Japheth still holds Ada’s hands. He pulls them to his heart now. “If we weren’t on this ark, each day would still be filled with toil. You’d be gathering wool and flax and working with your hands. I’d be chopping wood and raising animals. What differences does it make that it’s all happening on an ark?”

“It makes all the difference in the world. We can’t look ahead.”

“Of course we can. The sun is out. The waters are receding. We will get off this ark someday.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll build homes.”

“And?”