Storm (26 page)

My belly hardens. “Wait.” I hold up a hand. Bash’s face is tense—he doesn’t know anything—he doesn’t know why I stop him. My belly relaxes. “Now.” I hold my face at the ready.

Bash moves his hands slowly up the sides of my neck. I didn’t expect that. Where’s the kiss? His palms finally cradle my jaw. This is different, so very different from anything I’ve known. His thumb runs across my bottom lip, back and forth until I feel nearly dizzy. He leans in and holds his lips close to my cheek. His lips move across to press light as air on my ear. His warm breath stirs me. I can’t bear waiting any longer. I turn my head to meet his mouth and we kiss. Long and yet gentle. But I know there’s power under there, power in both of us. My thighs shake. Bash is something to look forward to.

And my belly hardens. I pull away.

Bash just looks at me, his face a question.

I take his hand and put it on my belly. He’s felt my belly before. He loves to push on the babe and get a kick in return. So he knows this is different. His eyes widen. “It’s a rock.”

“That always happens. It will pass.” My belly relaxes. “See?”

He looks at the sweet-water bucket. “How much time do we have left?”

I shrug. “Some labors go fast. Some go slow.” I fall onto my back and pull my shift up and struggle to lift my hips so I can keep tugging this tight shift up and up my torso, over my breasts, and finally, finally, entirely off. “Here.” I pass my shift to Bash. He looks flabbergasted. “I’ll keep using your loincloth. You use my shift. This way we can both wring out the fish.”

We wring out fish till the pile is almost gone. And all the while my belly crunches in, or at least that’s what it feels like it’s doing, squishing in upon itself. What must the baby be thinking? Is he afraid? Can he even understand fear?

The bucket is only a quarter full of sweet water—or what we optimistically call sweet water. Bash goes back to fishing, while I wring out fish.

The morning passes. The afternoon passes. Evening looms. No one comes up from the decks below. If they are searching for Bash, they don’t have much imagination. Yes. I’m so glad they are dunces. And yes, Nela has stayed loyal.
Thank you, thank you
.

Bash wrings fish fast. He’s so much stronger than me. He can protect me. Right now I want to be protected. “I didn’t want you to protect me,” I say to him. “I was trying so hard not to have that happen.”

“We protect each other, Sheba. You know that. You’re just feeling crazy because you’re in labor.”

“I didn’t want it because Aban protected me; he saved my life.”

“Aban? Is he your husband?”

“Yes.”

Bash’s mouth twists. He takes a deep breath and looks away.

My belly turns to rock. “Don’t turn away! Help me!”

Bash quick looks at me. “What should I do?”

“Hold my hand.” And I squeeze his hand harder than I ever squeezed fish flesh. My belly relaxes. “Aban saved my life. And then he claimed me.”

“Claimed you?”

“I could have refused. Aban would have accepted that. That’s probably the strongest reason why I didn’t refuse. And then I came to love him. But that was later.”

“Where is . . .” Bash shakes his head.

“He died in the water.” My belly turns to rock. “Help!” I grab Bash’s hand with both of mine. I think all of me is shrinking inward, smashed from the outside, smashed and smashed. Until my belly finally relaxes. “I didn’t tell you about Aban because I wanted to stay the married woman. Because otherwise . . . otherwise maybe everything that happened with me and Aban would happen all over again with you. And that felt wrong. Unfair to Aban. Do you see?” And my belly is hard again. A rock! A stab of pain! An ice pebble shooting through an eyeball and I am that eyeball, I am pierced! I scream, “Help me!”

He closes his hand over my mouth. “Tell me how,” he says.
“But don’t scream. I’ve got your shift here. If you need to, bite it.” He lifts his hand away and then holds up the shift.

“Make it stop!” I’m trying not to scream. “Help!”

He pushes me onto my side and rubs my back. Hard. So hard it almost distracts me from my belly. I kick him.

My belly relaxes. “When the baby comes out, catch him.”

“I will.”

“I need you, Bash.”

“I know. I need you, too.”

My belly crushes me. I will burst. I will go up in flames. I want to die! “Help me! Make it stop!” And he’s rubbing me and I’m pushing him away and grabbing at him and curling around my pain and stretching to get away from it, to leave this hateful belly behind, to escape.

Bash rubs my legs and for a second, one second, I think I have a moment without pain, but then it’s back and it’s stronger. I cannot do this! I cannot! I scream. Bash pushes the shift into my mouth. I bite. Screams fill my head.

And Bash is pushing my legs apart. I can feel his hands slip in the sweat that I slide in.

“His head, Sheba! His head!”

I push with all my might. I push myself inside out. I push till I can’t anymore.

And he’s crying, this new person. A mewling sound.

And I’m crying. My belly is soft now.

“He’s attached to you. There’s a cord.”

“It’s all right. Let it be. Just wash him.”

I twist sideways on my back and watch Bash bathe the boy, one big hand serving as a cradle while the other gently douses him with seawater. He lays the boy on my chest. A ruddy thing with spider legs and arms and a pointed head and crazy eyes that I bet can’t see me at all. “He’s gorgeous.”

“Yes. What now? What about that cord?”

“You hold him.” I hand the boy back to Bash. And I take the knife I had set in the bottom of the seawater bucket earlier. I cut the cord and tie it. Then I splash myself with seawater and press and press on my belly, tears streaming at the pain, until the afterbirth comes out and it’s finally all over.

My baby is born.

I lie back. Bash puts the baby on my chest. He roots around at a breast, then latches on.

Bash sits on his heels beside the bucket. “Are you still my Sheba?”

“I am. If you want me.”

“I do.”

“Come lie with us.”

He settles, with one arm around the babe and me.

“I screamed.”

“I’m here, Sheba. My Sheba. No one will hurt you. No one will hurt this baby.”

And so we lie there, too exhausted to talk more, too excited to sleep, under the stars and stars and stars and stars.

Q
ueen and The Male perch on an edge of the roof, arms around each other, just lazily looking out at the dawn. They come up every night now and go down to their cage when they get the signal.

The signal is Noah, a thoroughly predictable man. He opens the window, declares loudly that the world is not dry enough yet, shouts at the people inside, who protest just as loudly, then slams the shutters with a finality that I can bet cuts off discussion. Noah rules, after all. The Mighty Creator talks to him—not to anyone else.

At the shutting of the windows, Queen and The Male disappear down the rope. I don’t know what they are thinking—I don’t know if this is just something they’ve become habituated to or if they actually understand that the humans may do something awful
if Queen and The Male are not in their cage when the daily chores begin. But I do know that Queen and The Male have minds of their own. They decided when it was time to come up to the roof again. In fact, they forced Bash to let them up.

The first time Bash went down the rope after the babe was born, he entered my old cage only to find that he couldn’t get out of it onto the deck. Someone had secured the swinging door shut with a rope that then ran across the deck to another cage, and the knot holding it all together was at that other cage. Bash couldn’t reach it, of course. And he would never cut through a rope unless he was forced to. Ropes are too valuable.

So the humans were not dunces, after all. Whether or not they believed Ham about being hit over the head by a giant, they were cautious enough to make sure that if any strange being appeared in that cage, it couldn’t get out onto the deck again. Bash was stuck.

Bash fiddled with the poles for a while, trying to figure out another way to get free. By the time he gave up and went out the porthole and up the rope, Queen and The Male had already snuck out before him. They were on the roof, at first all tentative, watchful, jumpy. They whistled and grunted continually, and walked everywhere, touching everything. But then they settled down beside me and simply sniffed at the babe in my arms curiously, but carefully. The best I can figure is that they smelled the babe on Bash—they knew he’d been born. That was enough to make them overcome their fear.

In the morning, Bash chased Queen and The Male down the rope. Then he pulled up the rope and fished off the other side. We passed the day eating fish, drinking fish water, and catching whatever sleep we could between cleaning and feeding the babe.

The next night Bash went down the rope on the other side of the ark and entered the middle deck through a new cage. It turned out to house the wolves. But that’s what Bash was hoping. They knew Bash—all the animals know Bash, but some of them seem to have adapted to his presence quickly and others not so quickly. The wolves were quick; they didn’t bother him.

Bash gave the animals their few hours of freedom and was about to leave when Queen and The Male set to squealing and whooping. They are not loud animals; their calls are high-pitched and sweet, really. But these noises were insistent. And Bash understood. So he went through the wolves’ cage and up to the roof. Then he dropped the rope down the other side of the ark, outside my old cage. Queen and The Male climbed up here instantly.

They come up every night now. And in the morning, they leave on their own—after Noah closes the shutters.

They love the babe. They love Bash and me, too. But they love the babe the best.

I won’t let Queen or The Male hold him. The Male seems all right with that, but I know Queen longs to have him in her arms. She holds her hands out to me, palms upward, begging. But I can imagine her with her own infant, and I’m quite sure
her own infant would hold on to her hair with hands and feet and never fall. Queen might not understand that a human baby doesn’t hold on that way. She could drop him. But I often sit in the circle of her arms with the babe in my arms, so that together we hold him. That doesn’t satisfy her; her chattering tells me that. But it appeases her.

What satisfies her is Bash. He tickles them—both Queen and The Male. He tried it once just out of the blue, and they went mad for it, so he does it often now. They make a hoarse laugh the whole time, and when he quits, they roll away and continue doing it to each other until Queen finally remembers the babe and comes back to watch him. The Male squats behind her.

Their attraction to the babe is formidable. I know that because there’s something else alluring now, yet they always choose to come up here.

That other alluring thing is the earth itself. The ground around the ark is now out in the air. It happened two days after the babe was born. Bash said he knew it. He had to throw the rope far out in order for the bucket on the end of it not to hit bottom fast.

It is clear that we are caught on a mountain peak, as Bash first surmised. There are rocks all around the ark, and they slope downward. Not far below, the sea still laps. Sometimes when the wind blows, waves even spatter against the ark again. But really, there’s no denying that people can walk on the earth again.

And they do. We have to stay low and quiet whenever we
hear them. Apparently they’ve made rope ladders that hang out some of the portholes—I’ve never seen them, but Bash described them to me—and they go down, both the men and the women, to fill buckets with seawater so they can turn it into sweet water. There’s always someone or other fishing, all day long, because it takes everything a person can catch to feed the animals. Others are often scooping up kelp with nets to dry out for the herbivores.

Bash can’t fish in the day anymore, naturally. So he goes down the rope at night and walks to the sea to fill our seawater buckets. And he took the rope that used to hang in my old cage as his new fishing rope. He attaches a bone hook to the end of it and fishes from the shore, such as it is. He doesn’t let the animals out at night anymore; he has no time to do that. But it won’t be long before they are set free anyway. It can’t be long. Noah can’t stay stubborn forever.

We hear Noah open the shutters now. Queen and The Male walk over on all fours and nuzzle the three of us under our whale-skin lean-to before going back to the edge of the roof where the rope hangs, ready to go down. Suddenly they jump backward, as a bird bursts past them.

I sit up, clasping the sleeping babe to my chest. Bash is already on his feet, with a bone ax in his fist.

It’s a raven! He shines sleek and black against the rising sun. He flaps hard and rises quickly, then he soars, wings spread so wide, five feathers on each tip reaching out like greedy fingers.
His joy is visible. Flight. Flight after months and months of nothing. Good heavens, that bird has been locked up more than ten months. He must be rediscovering himself! I clap my hand over my mouth, whether to hold in a laugh or a cry, I don’t know—for I can’t risk those below hearing from their open window.

The raven circles above us, but only once. He flaps off and away, toward the closest mountain peak. I stand, so I can see farther. The raven circles over that peak, but he doesn’t alight. On he flies, past the next peak, and the next. And he’s out of sight. He was here only minutes ago—certainly only as long as it takes to wring the liquid out of a fish. But he’s disappeared now. Gone. Free.

The world changes, just like that.

Flaps come again. A second bird. The mate? But no, it’s a dove. Brown with black-and-white-speckled wings and so small, I’m sure it’s a female. I think immediately of Asherah, the queen goddess who treads upon the sea, the wife of the god El Elyon, father of everything. All at once I understand: Noah is not a dunce at all. He’s asking the gods to tell him when it’s right to leave the ark. Maybe this is what he means by the claim that the Mighty Creator talks to him.