wouldn't let the men come near them.
Glogmeriss tried to explain to them that he was looking for the
Heaving Sea, and ask them where it was. But they couldn't understand
any of the gestures and handsigns he tried, and his best efforts
merely left them laughing to the point of helplessness. He gave up
and made as if to leave, which immediately brought protests and an
obvious invitation to dinner.
It was a welcome thought, and their chief seemed quite anxious for
him to stay. A meal would only make him stronger for the rest of his
journey.
He stayed for the meal, which was strange but good. And then, wooed
by more pleas from the chief and many others, he agreed to sleep the
night with them, though he halfway feared that in his sleep they
planned to kill him or at least rob him. In the event, it turned out
that they DID have plans for him, but it had nothing to do with
killing. By morning the chief's prettiest daughter was Glogmeriss's
bride, and even though she was as ugly as any of the others, she had
done a good enough job of initiating him into the pleasures of men
and women that he could overlook her thin lips and beakish nose.
This was not supposed to happen on a manhood journey. He was
expected to come home and marry one of the pretty girls from one of
the other clans of the Derku people. Many a father had already been
negotiating with Twerk or old Dheub with an eye toward getting
Glogmeriss as a son-in-law. But what harm would it do if Glogmeriss
had a bride for a few days with these people, and then slipped away
and went home? No one among the Derku would ever meet any of these
ugly people, and even if they did, who would care? You could do what
you wanted with strangers. It wasn't as if they were people, like
the Derku.
But the days came and went, and Glogmeriss could not bring himself
to leave. He was still enjoying his nights with Zawada--as near as
he could come to pronouncing her name, which had a strange click in
the middle of it. And as he began to learn to understand something
of their language, he harbored a hope that they could tell him about
the Heaving Sea and, in the long run, save him time.
Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and Zawada's blood-days
didn't come and so they knew she was pregnant, and then Glogmeriss
didn't want to leave, because he had to see the child he had put
into her. So he stayed, and learned to help with the work of this
tribe. They found his size and prodigious strength very helpful, and
Zawada was comically boastful about her husband's prowess--marrying
him had brought her great prestige, even more than being the chief's
daughter. And it gradually came to Glogmeriss's mind that if he
stayed he would probably be chief of these people himself someday.
At times when he thought of that, he felt a strange sadness, for
what did it mean to be chief of these miserable ugly people,
compared to the honor of being the most ordinary of the Derku
people? How could being chief of these grub-eaters and gatherers
compare to eating the common bread of the Derku and riding on a
dragonboat through the flood or on raids? He enjoyed Zawada, he
enjoyed the people of this tribe, but they were not his people, and
he knew that he would leave. Eventually.
Zawada's belly was beginning to swell when the tribe suddenly
gathered their tools and baskets and formed up to begin another
trek. They didn't move back north, however, the direction they had
come from when Glogmeriss found them. Rather their migration was due
south, and soon, to his surprise, he found that they were hiking
along the very shelf of land that had been his path in coming to
this place.
It occurred to him that perhaps the god had spoken to the chief in
the night, warning him to get Glogmeriss back on his abandoned
journey. But no, the chief denied any dream. Rather he pointed to
the sky and said it was time to go get--something. A word Glogmeriss
had never heard before. But it was clearly some kind of food,
because the adults nearby began laughing with anticipatory delight
and pantomiming eating copious amounts of--something.
Off to the northeast, they passed along the shores of another small
sea. Glogmeriss asked if the water was sweet and if it had fish in
it, but Zawada told him, sadly, that the sea was spoiled. "It used
to be good," she said. "The people drank from it and swam in it and
trapped fish in it, but it got poisoned."
"How?" asked Glogmeriss.
"The god vomited into it."
"What god did that?"
"The great god," she said, looking mysterious and amused.
"How do you know he did?" asked Glogmeriss.
"We saw," she said. "There was a terrible storm, with winds so
strong they tore babies from their mothers' arms and carried them
away and they were never seen again. My own mother and father held
me between them and I wasn't carried off--I was scarcely more than a
baby then, and I remember how scared I was, to have my parents
crushing me between them while the wind screamed through the trees."
"But a rainstorm would sweeten the water," said Glogmeriss. "Not
make it salty."
"I told you," said Zawada. "The god vomited into it."
"But if you don't mean the rain, then what do you mean?"
To which her only answer was a mysterious smile and a giggle.
"You'll see," she said.
And in the end, he did. Two days after leaving this second small sea
behind, they rounded a bend and some of the men began to shinny up
trees, looking off to the east as if they knew exactly what they'd
see. "There it is!" they cried. "We can see it!"
Glogmeriss lost no time in climbing up after them, but it took a
while for him to know what it was they had seen. It wasn't till he
climbed another tree the next morning, when they were closer and
when the sun was shining in the east, that he realized that the vast
plain opening out before them to the east wasn't a plain at all. It
was water, shimmering strangely in the sunlight of morning. More
water than Glogmeriss had ever imagined. And the reason the light
shimmered that way was because the water was moving. It was the
Heaving Sea.
He came down from tree in awe, only to find the whole tribe watching
him. When they saw his face, they burst into hysterical laughter,
including even Zawada. Only now did it occur to him that they had
understood him perfectly well on his first day with them, when he
described the Heaving Sea. They had known where he was headed, but
they hadn't told him.
"There's the joke back on you!" cried the man in whose face
Glogmeriss had thrown dirt on that first day. And now it seemed like
perfect justice to Glogmeriss. He had played a joke, and they had
played one back, an elaborate jest that required even his wife to
keep the secret of the Heaving Sea from him.
Zawada's father, the chief, now explained that it was more than a
joke. "Waiting to show you the Heaving Sea meant that you would stay
and marry Zawada and give her giant babies. A dozen giants like
you!"
Zawada grinned cheerfully. "If they don't kill me coming out, it'll
be fine to have sons like yours will be!"
Next day's journey took them far enough that they didn't have to
climb trees to see the Heaving Sea, and it was larger than
Glogmeriss had ever imagined. He couldn't see the end of it. And it
moved all the time. There were more surprises when they got to the
shore that night, however. For the sea was noisy, a great roaring,
and it kept throwing itself at the shore and then retreating,
heaving up and down. Yet the children were fearless--they ran right
into the water and let the waves chase them to shore. The men and
women soon joined them, for a little while, and Glogmeriss himself
finally worked up the courage to let the water touch him, let the
waves chase him. He tasted the water, and while it was saltier than
the small seas to the northwest, it was nowhere near as salty as the
Salt Sea.
"This is the god that poisoned the little seas," Zawad explained to
him. "This is the god that vomited into them."
But Glogmeriss looked at how far the waves came onto the shore and
laughed at her. "How could these heavings of the sea reach all the
way to those small seas? It took days to get here from there."
She grimaced at him. "What do you know, giant man? These waves are
not the reason why this is called the Heaving Sea by those who call
it that. These are like little butterfly flutters compared to the
true heaving of the sea."
Glogmeriss didn't understand until later in the day, as he realized
that the waves weren't reaching as high as they had earlier. The
beach sand was wet much higher up the shore than the waves could get
to now. Zawada was delighted to explain the tides to him, how the
sea heaved upward and downward, twice a day or so. "The sea is
calling to the moon," she said, but could not explain what that
meant, except that the tides were linked to the passages of the moon
rather than the passages of the sun.
As the tide ebbed, the tribe stopped playing and ran out onto the
sand. With digging stones they began scooping madly at the sand. Now
and then one of them would shout in triumph and hold up some ugly,
stony, dripping object for admiration before dropping it into a
basket. Glogmeriss examined them and knew at once that these things
could not be stones--they were too regular, too symmetrical. It
wasn't till one of the men showed him the knack of prying them open
by hammering on a sharp wedgestone that he really understood, for
inside the hard stony surface there was a soft, pliable animal that
could draw its shell closed around it.
"That's how it lives under the water," explained the man. "It's
watertight as a mud-covered basket, only all the way around. Tight
all the way around. So it keeps the water out!"
Like the perfect seedboat, thought Glogmeriss. Only no boat of reeds
could ever be made THAT watertight, not so it could be plunged
underwater and stay dry inside.
That night they built a fire and roasted the clams and mussels and
oysters on the ends of sticks. They were tough and rubbery and they
tasted salty--but Glogmeriss soon discovered that the very saltiness
was the reason this was such a treat, that and the juices they
released when you first chewed on them. Zawada laughed at him for
chewing his first bite so long. "Cut it off in smaller bits," she
said, "and then chew it till it stops tasting good and then swallow
it whole." The first time he tried, it took a bit of doing to
swallow it without gagging, but he soon got used to it and it WAS
delicious.
"Don't drink so much of your water," said Zawada.
"I'm thirsty," said Glogmeriss.
"Of course you are," she said. "But when we run out of fresh water,
we have to leave. There's nothing to drink in this place. So drink
only a little at a time, so we can stay another day."
The next morning he helped with the clam-digging, and his powerful
shoulders and arms allowed him to excel at this task, just as with
so many others. But he didn't have the appetite for roasting them,
and wandered off alone while the others feasted on the shore. They
did their digging in a narrow inlet of the sea, where a long thin
finger of water surged inward at high tide and then retreated almost
completely at low tide. The finger of the sea seemed to point
straight toward the land of the Derku, and it made Glogmeriss think
of home.
Why did I come here? Why did the god go to so much trouble to bring
me? Why was I saved from the cats and the lightning and the flood?
Was it just to see this great water and taste the salty meat of the
clams? These are marvels, it's true, but no greater than the marvel
of the castrated bull-ox that I rode, or the lightning fires, or the
log that was my brother in the flood. Why would it please the god to
bring me here?
He heard footsteps and knew at once that it was Zawada. He did not
look up. Soon he felt her arms come around him from behind, her
swelling breasts pressed against his back.
"Why do you look toward your home?" she asked softly. "Haven't I
made you happy?"
"You've made me happy," he said.
"But you look sad."
He nodded.
"The gods trouble you," she said. "I know that look on your face.
You never speak of it, but I know at such times you are thinking of
the god who brought you here and wondering if she loved you or hated
you."
He laughed aloud. "Do you see inside my skin, Zawada?"
"Not your skin," she said. "But I could see inside your loincloth
when you first arrived, which is why I told my father to let me be
the one to marry you. I had to beat up my sister before she would
let me be the one to share your sleeping mat that night. She has
never forgiven me. But I wanted your babies."
Glogmeriss grunted. He had known about the sister's jealousy, but
since she was ugly and he had never slept with her, her jealousy was
never important to him.
"Maybe the god brought you here to see where she vomited."
That again.
"It was in a terrible storm."
"You told me about the storm," said Glogmeriss, not wanting to hear
it all again.
"When the storms are strong, the sea rises higher than usual. It
heaved its way far up this channel. Much farther than this tongue of
the sea reaches now. It flowed so far that it reached the first of
the small seas and made it flow over and then it reached the second
one and that, too, flowed over. But then the storm ceased and the
water flowed back to where it was before, only so much salt water
had gone into the small seas that they were poisoned."
"So long ago, and yet the salt remains?"
"Oh, I think the sea has vomited into them a couple more times
sincethen. Never as strongly as that first time, though. You can see
this channel--so much of the seawater flowed through here that it
cut a channel in the sand. This finger of the sea is all that's left
of it, but you can see the banks of it--like a dried-up river, you
see? That was cut then, the ground used to be at the level of the
rest of the valley there. The sea still reaches into that new
channel, as if it remembered. Before, the shore used to be clear out
there, where the waves are high. It's much better for clam-digging
now, though, because this whole channel gets filled with clams and
we can get them easily."
Glogmeriss felt something stirring inside him. Something in what she
had just said was very, very important, but he didn't know what it
was.
He cast his gaze off to the left, to the shelf of land that he had
walked along all the way on his manhood journey, that this tribe had
followed in coming here. The absolutely level path.
Absolutely level. And yet the path was not more than three or four
man-heights above the level of the Heaving Sea, while back in the
lands of the Derku, the shelf was so far above the level of the Salt
Sea that it felt as though you were looking down from a mountain.
The whole plain was enormously wide, and yet it went so deep before
reaching the water of the Salt Sea that you could see for miles and
miles, all the way across. It was deep, that plain, a valley,
really. A deep gouge cut into the earth. And if this shelf of land
was truly level, the Heaving Sea was far, far higher.
He thought of the floods. Thought of the powerful current of the
flooding river that had snagged him and swept him downward. And then
he thought of a storm that lifted the water of the Heaving Sea and
sent it crashing along this valley floor, cutting a new channel
until it reached those smaller seas, filling them with saltwater,
causing THEM to flood and spill over. Spill over where? Where did
their water flow? He already knew--they emptied down into the Salt
Sea. Down and down and down.
It will happen again, thought Glogmeriss. There will be another
storm, and this time the channel will be cut deeper, and when the
storm subsides the water will still flow, because now the channel
will be below the level of the Heaving Sea at high tide. And at each
high tide, more water will flow and the channel will get deeper and
deeper, till it's deep enough that even at low tide the water will
still flow through it, cutting the channel more and more, and the
water will come faster and faster, and then the Heaving Sea will
spill over into the great valley, faster and faster and faster.
All this water then will spill out of the Heaving Sea and go down
into the plain until the two seas are the same level. And once that
happens, it will never go back.
The lands of the Derku are far below the level of the new sea, even
if it's only half as high as the waters of the Heaving Sea are now.
Our city will be covered. The whole land. And it won't be a trickle.
It will be a great bursting of water, a huge wave of water, like the
first gush of the floodwater down the Selud River from the
Sweetwater Sea. Just like that, only the Heaving Sea is far larger
than the Sweetwater Sea, and its water is angry and poisonous.
"Yes," said Glogmeriss. "I see what you brought me here to show me."
"Don't be silly," said Zawada. "I brought you here to have you eat
clams!"
"I wasn't talking to you," said Glogmeriss. He stood up and left
her, walking down the finger of the sea, where the tide was rising
again, bringing the water lunging back up the channel, pointing like
a javelin toward the heart of the Derku people. Zawada followed
behind him. He didn't mind.
Glogmeriss reached the waves of the rising tide and plunged in. He
knelt down in the water and let a wave crash over him. The force of
the water toppled him, twisted him until he couldn't tell which was
was up and he thought he would drown under the water. But then the
wave retreated again,leaving him in the shallow water on the shore.
He crawled back out stayed there, the taste of salt on his lips,
gasping for air, and then cried out, "Why are you doing this! Why
are you doing this to my people!"
Zawada stood watching him, and others of the tribe came to join her,
to find out what the strange giant man was doing in the sea.
Angry, thought Glogmeriss. The god is angry with my people. And I
have been brought here to see just what terrible punishment the god
has prepared for them. "Why?" he cried again. "Why not just break
through this channel and send the flood and bury the Derku people in
poisonous water? Why must I be shown this first? So I can save
myself by staying high out of the flood's way? Why should I be saved
alive, and all my family, all my friends be destroyed? What is their
crime that I am not also guilty of? If you brought me here to save
me, then you failed, God, because I refuse to stay, I will go back
to my people and warn them all, I'll tell them what you're planning.
You can't save me alone. When the flood comes I'll be right there
with the rest of them. So to save me, you must save them all. If you
don't like THAT, then you should have drowned me just now when you
had the chance!"
Glogmeriss rose dripping from the beach and began to walk, past the
people, up toward the shelf of land that made the level highway back
home to the Derku people. The tribe understood at once that he was
leaving, and they began calling out to him, begging him to stay.
"I can't," he said. "Don't try to stop me. Even the god can't stop
me."
They didn't try to stop him, not by force. But the chief ran after
him, walked beside him--ran beside him, really, for that was the
only way he could keep up with Glogmeriss's long-legged stride.
"Friend, Son," said the chief. "Don't you know that you will be king
of these people after me?"
"A people should have a king who is one of their own."
"But you ARE one of us now," said the chief. "The mightiest of us.
You will make us a great people! The god has chosen you, do you
think we can't see that? This is why the god brought you here, to
lead us and make us great!"
"No," said Glogmeriss. "I'm a man of the Derku people."
"Where are they? Far from here. And there is my daughter with your
first child in her womb. What do they have in Derku lands that can
compare to that?"
"They have the womb where I was formed," said Glogmeriss. "They have
the man who put me there. They have the others who came from that
woman and that man. They are my people."
"Then go back, but not today! Wait till you see your child born.
Decide then!"
Glogmeriss stopped so abruptly that the chief almost fell over,
trying to stop running and stay with him. "Listen to me, father of
my wife. If you were up in the mountain hunting, and you looked down
and saw a dozen huge cats heading toward the place where your people
were living, would say to yourself, Oh, I suppose the god brought me
here to save me? Or would you run down the mountain and warn them,
and do all you could to fight off the cats and save your people?"
"What is this story?" asked the chief. "There are no cats. You've
seen no cats."
"I've seen the god heaving in his anger," said Glogmeriss. "I've
seen how he looms over my people, ready to destroy them all. A flood
that will tear their flimsy reed boats to pieces. A flood that will
come in a single great wave and then will never go away. Do you
think I shouldn't warn my mother and father, my brothers and
sisters, the friends of my childhood?"
"I think you have new brothers and sisters, a new father and mother.
The god isn't angry with US. The god isn't angry with you. We should
stay together. Don't you WANT to stay with us and live and rule over
us? You can be our king now, today. You can be king over me, I give
you my place!"
"Keep your place," said Glogmeriss. "Yes, a part of me wants to
stay. A part of me is afraid. But that is the part of me that is
Glogmeriss, and still a boy. If I don't go home and warn my people
and show them how to save themselves from the god, then I will
always be a boy, nothing but a boy, call me a king if you want, but
I will be a boy-king, a coward, a child until the day I die. So I
tell you now, it is the child who dies in this place, not the man.
It was the child Glogmeriss who married Zawada. Tell her that a
strange man named Naog killed her husband. Let her marry someone
else, someone of her own tribe, and never think of Glogmeriss
again." Glogmeriss kissed his father- in-law and embraced him. Then
he turned away, and with his first step along the path leading back
to the Derku people, he knew that he was truly Naog now, the man who
would save the Derku people from the fury of the god.
Kemal watched the lone man of the Engu clan as he walked away from
the beach, as he conversed with his father-in-law, as he turned his
face again away from the Gulf of Aden, toward the land of the doomed
crocodile- worshippers whose god was no match for the forces about
to be unleashed on them. This was the one, Kemal knew, for he had
seen the wooden boat--more of a watertight cabin on a raft,
actually, with none of this nonsense about taking animals two by
two. This was the man of legends, but seeing his face, hearing his
voice, Kemal was no closer to understanding him than he had been
before. What can we see, using the TruSite II? Only what is visible.
We may be able to range through time, to see the most intimate, the
most terrible, the most horrifying, the most inspiring moments of
human history, but we only see them, we only hear them, we are
witnesses but we know nothing of the thing that matters most:
motive.
Why didn't you stay with your new tribe, Naog? They heeded your
warning, and camped always on higher ground during the monsoon
season. They lived through the flood, all of them. And when you went
home and no one listened to your warnings, why did you stay? What
was it that made you remain among them, enduring their ridicule as
you built your watertight seedboat? You could have left at any
time--there were others who cut themselves loose from their birth
tribe and wandered through the world until they found a new home.
The Nile was waiting for you. The grasslands of Arabia. They were
already there, calling to you, even as your own homeland became
poisonous to you. Yet you remained among the Engu, and by doing so,
you not only gave the world an unforgettable story, you also changed
the course of history. What kind of being is it who can change the
course of history, just because he follows his own unbending will?
***
It was on his third morning that Naog realized that he was not alone
on his return journey. He awoke in his tree because he heard
shuffling footsteps through the grass nearby. Or perhaps it was
something else that woke him--some unhearable yearning that he
nevertheless heard. He looked, and saw in the faint light of the
thinnest crescent moon that a lone baboon was shambling along, lazy,
staggering. No doubt an old male, thought Naog, who will soon be
meat for some predator.
Then his eyes adjusted and he realized that this lone baboon was not
as close as he had thought, that in fact it was much bigger, much
TALLER than he had thought. It was not male, either, but female, and
far from being a baboon, it was a human, a pregnant woman, and he
knew her now and shuddered at his own thought of her becoming the
meal for some cat, some crocodile, some pack of dogs.
Silently he unfastened himself from his sleeping tree and dropped to
the ground. In moments he was beside her.
"Zawada," he said.
She didn't turn to look at him.
"Zawada, what are you doing?"
Now she stopped. "Walking," she said.
"You're asleep," he said. "You're in a dream."
"No, YOU'RE asleep," she said, giggling madly in her weariness.
"Why have you come? I left you."
"I know," she said.
"I'm returning to my own people. You have to stay with yours." But
he knew even as he said it that she could not go back there, not
unless he went with her. Physically she was unable to go on by
herself--clearly she had eaten nothing and slept little in three
days. Why she had not died already, taken by some beast, he could
not guess. But if she was to return to her people, he would have to
take her, and he did not want to go back there. It made him very
angry, and so his voice burned when he spoke to her.
"I wanted to," she said. "I wanted to weep for a year and then make
an image of you out of sticks and burn it."
"You should have," he said.
"Your son wouldn't let me." As she spoke, she touched her belly.
"Son? Has some god told you who he is?"
"He came to me himself in a dream, and he said, 'Don't let my father
go without me.' So I brought him to you."
"I don't want him, son OR daughter." But he knew even as he said it
that it wasn't true.
She didn't know it, though. Her eyes welled with tears and she sank
down into the grass. "Good, then," she said. "Go on with your
journey. I'm sorry the god led me near you, so you had to be
bothered." She sank back in the grass. Seeing the faint gleam of
light reflected from her skin awoke feelings that Naog was now
ashamed of, memories of how she had taught him the easing of a man's
passion.
"I can't walk off and leave you."
"You already did," she said. "So do it again. I need to sleep now."
"You'll be torn by animals and eaten."
"Let them," she said. "You never chose me, Derku man, I chose YOU. I
invited this baby into my body. Now if we die here in the grass,
what is that to you? All you care about is not having to watch. So
don't watch. Go. The sky is getting light. Run on ahead. If we die,
we die. We're nothing to you anyway."
Her words made him ashamed. "I left you knowing you and the baby
would be safe, at home. Now you're here and you aren't safe, and I
can't walk away from you."
"So run," she said. "I was your wife, and this was your son, but in
your heart we're already dead anyway."
"I didn't bring you because you'd have to learn the Derku language.
It's much harder than your language."
"I would have had to learn it anyway, you fool," she said. "The baby
inside me is a Derku man like you. How would I get him to understand
me, if I didn't learn Derku talk?"
Naog wanted to laugh aloud at her hopeless ignorance. But then, how
would she know? Naog had seen the children of captives and knew that
in Derku lands they grew up speaking the Derku language, even when
both parents were from another tribe that had not one word of Derku
language in it. But Zawada had never seen the babies of strangers;
her tribe captured no one, went on no raids, but rather lived at
peace, moving from place to place, gathering whatever the earth or
the sea had to offer them. How could she match even a small part of
the great knowledge of the Derku, who brought the whole world within
their city?
He wanted to laugh, but he did not laugh. Instead he watched over
her as she slept, as the day waxed and waned. As the sun rose he
carried her to the tree to sleep in the shade. Keeping his eye open
for animals prowling near her, he gathered such leaves and seeds and
roots as the ground offered the traveler at this time of year. Twice
he came back and found her breath rasping and noisy; then he made
her wake enough to drink a little of his water, but she was soon
asleep, water glistening on her chin.
At last in the late afternoon, with the air was hot and still, he
squatted down in the grass beside her and woke her for good, showing
her the food. She ate ravenously, and when she was done, she
embraced him and called him the best of the gods because he didn't
leave her to die after all.
"I'm not a god," he said, baffled.
"All my people know you are a god, from a land of gods. So large, so
powerful, so good. You came us so you could have a human baby. But
this baby is only half human. How will he ever be happy, living
among US, never knowing the gods?"
"You've seen the Heaving Sea, and you call ME a god?"
"Take me with you to the land of the Derku. Let me give birth to
your baby there. I will leave it with your mother and your sisters,
and I will go home. I know I don't belong among the gods, but my
baby does."
In his heart, Naog wanted to say yes, you'll stay only till the baby
is born, and then you'll go home. But he remembered her patience as
he learned the language of her people. He remembered the sweet
language of the night, and the way he had to laugh at how she tried
to act like a grown woman when she was only a child, and yet she
couldn't act like a child because she was, after all, now a woman.
Because of me she is a woman, thought Naog, and because of her and
her people I will come home a man. Do I tell her she must go away,
even though I know that the others will think she's ugly as I
thought she was ugly?
And she IS ugly, thought Naog. Our son, if he IS a son, will be ugly
like her people, too. I will be ashamed of him. I will be ashamed of
her.
Is a man ashamed of his firstborn son?
"Come home with me to the land of the Derku," said Naog. "We will
tell them together about the Heaving Sea, and how one day soon it
will leap over the low walls of sand and pour into this great plain
in a flood that will cover the Derku lands forever. There will be a
great migration. We will move, all of us, to the land my father
found. The crocodiles live there also, along the banks of the Nile."
"Then you will truly be the greatest among the gods," she said, and
the worship in her eyes made him proud and ill-at-ease, both at
once. Yet how could he deny that the Derku were gods? Compared to
her poor tribe, they would seem so. Thousands of people living in
the midst of their own canals; the great fields of planted grain
stretching far in every direction; the great wall of earth
surrounding the Great Derku; the seedboats scattered like strange
soft boulders; the children riding their dragonboats through the
canals; a land of miracles to her. Where else in all the world had
so many people learned to live together, making great wealth where
once there had been only savannah and floodplain?
We live like gods, compared to other people. We come like gods out
of nowhere, to carry off captives the way death carries people off.
Perhaps that is what the life after death is like--the REAL gods
using us to dredge their canals. Perhaps that is what all of human
life is for, to create slaves for the gods. And what if the gods
themselves are also raided by some greater beings yet, carrying THEM
off to raise grain in some unimaginable garden? Is there no end to
the capturing?
There are many strange and ugly captives in Derku, thought Naog. Who
will doubt me if I say that this woman is my captive? She doesn't
speak the language, and soon enough she would be used to the life. I
would be kind to her, and would treat her son well--I would hardly
be the first man to father a child on a captive woman.
The thought made him blush with shame.
"Zawada, when you come to the Derku lands, you will come as my
wife," he said. "And you will not have to leave. Our son will know
his mother as well as his father."
Her eyes glowed. "You are the greatest and kindest of the gods."
"No," he said, angry now, because he knew very well just exactly how
far from "great" and "kind" he really was, having just imagined
bringing this sweet, stubborn, brave girl into captivity. "You must
never call me a god again. Ever. There is only one god, do you
understand me? And it is that god that lives inside the Heaving Sea,
the one that brought me to see him and sent me back here to warn my
people. Call no one else a god, or you can't stay with me."
Her eyes went wide. "Is there room in the world for only one god?"
"When did a crocodile ever bury a whole land under water forever?"
Naog laughed scornfully. "All my life I have thought of the Great
Derku as a terrible god, worthy of the worship of brave and terrible
men. But the Great Derku is just a crocodile. It can be killed with
a spear. Imagine stabbing the Heaving Sea. We can't even touch it.
And yet the god can lift up that whole sea and pour it over the wall
into this plain. THAT isn't just a god. That is GOD."
She looked at him in awe; he wondered whether she understood. And
then realized that she could not possibly have understood, because
half of what he said was in the Derku language, since he didn't even
know enough words in HER language to think of these thoughts, let
alone say them.
Her body was young and strong, even with a baby inside it, and the
next morning she was ready to travel. He did not run now, but even
so they covered ground quickly, for she was a sturdy walker. He
began teaching her the Derku language as they walked, and she
learned well, though she made the words sound funny, as so many
captives did, never able to let go of the sounds of their native
tongue, never able to pronounce the new ones.
Finally he saw the mountains that separated the Derku lands from the
Salty Sea, rising from the plain. "Those will be islands," said
Naog, realizing it for the first time. "The highest ones. See?
They're higher than the shelf of land we're walking on."
Zawada nodded wisely, but he knew that she didn't really understand
what he was talking about.
"Those are the Derku lands," said Naog. "See the canals and the
fields?"
She looked, but seemed to see nothing unusual at all. "Forgive me,"
she said, "but all I see are streams and grassland."
"But that's what I meant," said Naog. "Except that the grasses grow
where we plant them, and all we plant is the grass whose seed we
grind into meal. And the streams you see--they go where we want them
to go. Vast circles surrounding the heart of the Derku lands. And
there in the middle, do you see that hill?"
"I think so," she said.
"We build that hill every year, after the floodwater."
She laughed. "You tell me that you aren't gods, and yet you make
hills and streams and meadows wherever you want them!"
Naog set his face toward the Engu portion of the great city. "Come
home with me," he said.
Since Zawada's people were so small, Naog had not realized that he
had grown even taller during his manhood journey, but now as he led
his ugly wife through the outskirts of the city, he realized that he
was taller than everyone. It took him by surprise, and at first he
was disturbed because it seemed to him that everyone had grown
smaller. He even said as much to Zawada--"They're all so small"--but
she laughed as if it were a joke. Nothing about the place or the
people seemed small to HER.
At the edge of the Engu lands, Naog hailed the boys who were on
watch. "Hai!"
"Hai!" they called back.
"I've come back from my journey!" he called.
It took a moment for them to answer. "What journey was this, tall
man?"
"My manhood journey. Don't you know me? Can't you see that I'm
Naog?"
The boys hooted at that. "How can you be naked when you have your
napron on?"
"Naog is my manhood name," said Naog, quite annoyed now, for he had
not expected to be treated with such disrespect on his return. "You
probably know of my by my baby name. They called me Glogmeriss."
They hooted again. "You used to be trouble, and now you're naked!"
cried the bold one. "And your wife is ugly, too!"
But now Naog was close enough that the boys could see how very tall
he was. Their faces grew solemn.
"My father is Twerk," said Naog. "I return from my manhood journey
with the greatest tale ever told. But more important than that, I
have a message from the god who lives in the Heaving Sea. When I
have given my message, people will include you in my story. They
will say, 'Who were the five fools who joked about Naog's name, when
he came to save us from the angry god?'"
"Twerk is dead," said one of the boys.
"The Dragon took him," said another.
"He was head of the clan, and then the Great Derku began eating
human flesh again, and your father gave himself to the Dragon for
the clan's sake."
"Are you truly his son?"
Naog felt a gnawing pain that he did not recognize. He would soon
learn to call it grief, but it was not too different from rage. "Is
this another jest of yours? I'll break your heads if it is."
"By the blood of your father in the mouth of the beast, I swear that
it's true!" said the boy who had earlier been the boldest in his
teasing. "If you're his son, then you're the son of a great man!"
The emotion welled up inside him. "What does this mean?" cried Naog.
"The Great Derku does not eat the flesh of men! Someone has murdered
my father! He would never allow such a thing!" Whether he meant his
father or the Great Derku who would never allow it even Naog did not
know.
The boys ran off then, before he could strike out at them for being
the tellers of such an unbearable tale. Zawada was the only one
left, to pat at him, embrace him, try to soothe him with her voice.
She abandoned the language of the Derku and spoke to him soothingly
in her own language. But all Naog could hear was the news that his
father had been fed to the Great Derku as a sacrifice for the clan.
The old days were back again, and they had killed his father. His
father, and not even a captive!
Others of the Engu, hearing what the boys were shouting about,
brought him to his mother. Then he began to calm down, hearing her
voice, the gentle reassurance of the old sound. She, at least, was
unchanged. Except that she looked older, yes, and tired. "It was
your father's own choice," she explained to him. "After floodwater
this year the Great Derku came into the pen with a human baby in its
jaws. It was a two-year-old boy of the Ko clan, and it happened he
was the firstborn of his parents."
"This means only that Ko clan wasn't watchful enough," said Naog.
"Perhaps," said his mother. "But the holy men saw it as a sign from
the god. Just as we stopped giving human flesh to the Great Derku
when he refused it, so now when he claimed a human victim, what else
were we to think?"
"Captives, then. Why not captives?"
"It was your own father who said that if the Great Derku had taken a
child from the families of the captives, then we would sacrifice
captives. But he took a child from one of our clans. What kind of
sacrifice is it, to offer strangers when the Great Derku demanded
the meat of the Derku people?"
"Don't you see, Mother? Father was trying to keep them from
sacrificing anybody at all, by making them choose something so
painful that no one would do it."
She shook her head. "How do you know what my Twerk was trying to do?
He was trying to save YOU."
"Me?"
"Your father was clan leader by then. The holy men said, 'Let each
clan give the firstborn son of the clan leader.'"
"But I was gone."
"Your father insisted on the ancient privilege, that a father may go
in place of his son."
"So he died in my place, because I was gone."
"If you had been here, Glogmeriss, he would have done the same."
He thought about this for a few moments, and then answered only, "My
name is Naog now."
"We thought you were dead, Naked One, Stirrer of Troubles," said
Mother.
"I found a wife."
"I saw her. Ugly."
"Brave and strong and smart," said Naog.
"Born to be a captive. I chose a different wife for you."
"Zawada is my wife."
Even though Naog had returned from his journey as a man and not a
boy, he soon learned that even a man can be bent by the pressure of
others. This far he did NOT bend: Zawada remained his wife. But he
also took the wife his mother had chosen for him, a beautiful girl
named Kormo. Naog was not sure what was worse about the new
arrangement--that everyone else treated Kormo as Naog's real wife
and Zawada as barely a wife at all, or that when Naog was hungry
with passion, it was always Kormo he thought of. But he remembered
Zawada at such times, how she bore him his first child, the boy
Moiro; how she followed him with such fierce courage; how good she
was to him when he was a stranger. And when he remembered, he
followed his duty to her rather than his natural desire. This
happened so often that Kormo complained about it. This made Naog
feel somehow righteous, for the truth was that his first inclination
had been right. Zawada should have stayed with her own tribe. She
was unhappy most of the time, and kept to herself and her baby, and
as years passed, her babies. She was never accepted by the other
women of the Derku. Only the captive women became friends with her,
which caused even more talk and criticism.
Years passed, yes, and where was Naog's great message, the one the
god had gone to such great trouble to give him? He tried to tell it.
First to the leaders of the Engu clan, the whole story of his
journey, and how the Heaving Sea was far higher than the Salty Sea
and would soon break through and cover all the land with water. They
listened to him gravely, and then one by one they counseled with him
that when the gods wish to speak to the Derku people, they will do
as they did when the Great Derku ate a human baby. "Why would a god
who wished to send a message to the Derku people choose a mere BOY
as messenger?"
"Because I was the one who was taking the journey," he said.
"What will you have us do? Abandon our lands? Leave our canals
behind, and our boats?"
"The Nile has fresh water and a flood season, my father saw it."
"But the Nile also has strong tribes living up and down its shores.
Here we are masters of the world. No, we're not leaving on the word
of a boy."
They insisted that he tell no one else, but he didn't obey them. In
fact he told anyone who would listen, but the result was the same.
For his father's memory or for his mother's sake, or perhaps just
because he was so tall and strong, people listened politely--but
Naog knew at the end of each telling of his tale that nothing had
changed. No one believed him. And when he wasn't there, they
repeated his stories as if they were jokes, laughing about riding a
castrated bull ox, about calling a tree branch his brother, and most
of all about the idea of a great flood that would never go away.
Poor Naog, they said. He clearly lost his mind on his manhood
journey, coming home with impossible stories that he obviously
believes and an ugly woman that he dotes on.
Zawada urged him to leave. "You know that the flood is coming," she
said. "Why not take your family up and out of here? Go to the Nile
ourselves, or return to my father's tribe."
But he wouldn't hear of it. "I would go if I could bring my people
with me. But what kind of man am I, to leave behind my mother and my
brothers and sisters, my clan and all my kin?"
"You would have left me behind," she said once. He didn't answer
her. He also didn't go.
In the third year after his return, when he had three sons to take
riding on his dragonboat, he began the strangest project anyone had
ever seen. No one was surprised, though, that crazy Naog would do
something like this. He began to take several captives with him
upriver to a place where tall, heavy trees grew. There they would
wear out stone axes cutting down trees, then shape them into logs
and ride them down the river. Some people complained that the
captives belonged to everybody and it was wrong for Naog to have
their exclusive use for so many days, but Naog was such a large and
strange man that no one wanted to push the matter.
One or two at a time, they came to see what Naog was doing with the
logs. They found that he had taught his captives to notch them and
lash them together into a huge square platform, a dozen strides on a
side. Then they made a second platform crossways to the first and on
top of it, lashing every log to ever other log, or so it seemed.
Between the two layers he smeared pitch, and then on the top of the
raft he built a dozen reed structures like the tops of seedboats.
Before floodwater he urged his neighbors to bring him their grain,
and he would keep it all dry. A few of them did, and when the rivers
rose during floodwater, everyone saw that his huge seedboat floated,
and no water seeped up from below into the seedhouses. More to the
point, Naog's wives and children also lived on the raft, dry all the
time, sleeping easily through the night instead of having to remain
constantly wakeful, watching to make sure the children didn't fall
into the water.
The next year, Engu clan built several more platforms following
Naog's pattern. They didn't always lash them as well as he had, and
during the next flood several of their rafts came apart--but
gradually, so they had time to move the seeds. Engu clan had far
more seed make it through to planting season than any of the other
tribes, and soon the men had to range farther and farther upriver,
because all the nearer trees of suitable size had been harvested.
Naog himself, though, wasn't satisfied. It was Zawada who pointed
out that when the great flood came, the water wouldn't rise
gradually as it did in the river floods. "It'll be like the waves
against the shore, crashing with such force ... and these reed
shelters will never hold against such a wave."
For several years Naog experimented with logs until at last he had
the largest movable structure ever built by human hands. The raft
was as long as ever, but somewhat narrower. Rising from notches
between logs in the upper platform were sturdy vertical posts, and
these were bridged and roofed with wood. But instead of using logs
for the planking and the roofing, Naog and the captives who served
him split the logs carefully into planks, and these were smeared
inside and out with pitch, and then another wall and ceiling were
built inside, sandwiching the tar between them. People were amused
to see Naog's captives hoisting dripping baskets of water to the
roof of this giant seedboat and pouring them out onto it. "What,
does he think that if he waters these trees, they'll grow like
grass?" Naog heard them, but he cared not at all, for when they
spoke he was inside his boat, seeing that not a drop of water made
it inside.
The doorway was the hardest part, because it, too, had to be able to
be sealed against the flood. Many nights Naog lay awake worrying
about it before building this last and largest and tightest
seedboat. The answer came to him in a dream. It was a memory of the
little crabs that lived in the sand on the shore of the Heaving Sea.
They dug holes in the sand and then when the water washed over them,
their holes filled in above their heads, keeping out the water. Naog
awoke knowing that he must put the door in the roof of his seedboat,
and arrange a way to lash it from the inside.
"How will you see to lash it?" said Zawada. "There's no light
inside."
So Naog and his three captives learned to lash the door in place in
utter darkness.
When they tested it, water leaked through the edges of the door. The
solution was to smear more pitch, fresh pitch, around the edges of
the openingand lay the door into it so that when they lashed it the
seal was tight. It was very hard to open the door again after that,
but they got it open from the inside--and when they could see again
they found that not a drop of water had got inside. "No more
trials," said Naog.
Their work then was to gather seeds--and more than seeds this time.
Water, too. The seeds went into baskets with lids that were lashed
down, and the water went into many, many flasks. Naog and his
captives and their wives worked hard during every moment of daylight
to make the waterbags and seedbaskets and fill them. The Engu didn't
mind at all storing more and more of their grain in Naog's
boat--after all, it was ludicrously watertight, so that it was sure
to make it through the flood season in fine form. They didn't have
to believe in his nonsense about a god in the Heaving Sea that was
angry with the Derku people in order to recognize a good seedboat
when they saw it.
His boat was nearly full when word spread that a group of new
captives from the southeast were telling tales of a new river of
saltwater that had flowed into the Salty Sea from the direction of
the Heaving Sea. When Naog heard the news, he immediately climbed a
tree so he could look toward the southeast. "Don't be silly," they
said to him. "You can't see the Salty Shore from here, even if you
climb the tallest tree."
"I was looking for the flood," said Naog. "Don't you see that the
Heaving Sea must have broken through again, when a storm whipped the
water into madness. Then the storm subsided, and the sea stopped
flowing over the top. But the channel must be wider and longer and
deeper now. Next time it won't end when the storm ends. Next time it
will be the great flood."
"How do you know these things, Naog? You're a man like the rest of
us. Just because you're taller doesn't mean you can see the future."
"The god is angry," said Naog. "The true god, not this silly
crocodile god that you feed on human flesh." And now, in the urgency
of knowing the imminence of the flood, he said what he had said to
no one but Zawada. "Why do you think the true god is so angry with
us? Because of the crocodile! Because we feed human flesh to the
Dragon! The true god doesn't want offerings of human flesh. It's an
abomination. It's as forbidden as the forbidden fruit. The crocodile
god is not a god at all, it's just a wild animal, one that crawls on
its belly, and yet we bow down to it. We bow down to the enemy of
the true god!"
Hearing him say this made the people angry. Some were so furious
they wanted to feed him to the Great Derku at once, but Naog only
laughed at them. "If the Great Derku is such a wonderful god, let
HIM come and get me, instead of you taking me! But no, you don't
believe for a moment that he CAN do it. Yet the TRUE god had the
power to send me a castrated bull to ride, and a log to save me from
a flood, and trees to catch the lightning so it wouldn't strike me.
When has the Dragon ever had the power to do THAT?"
His ridicule of the Great Derku infuriated them, and violence might
have resulted, had Naog not had such physical presence, and had his
father not been a noble sacrifice to the Dragon. Over the next
weeks, though, it became clear that Naog was now regarded by all as
something between an enemy and a stranger. No one came to speak to
him, or to Zawada, either. Only Kormo continued to have contact with
the rest of the Derku people.
"They want me to leave you," she told him. "They want me to come
back to my family, because you are the enemy of the god."
"And will you go?" he said.
She fixed her sternest gaze on him. "You are my family now," she
said. "Even when you prefer this ugly woman to me, you are still my
husband."
Naog's mother came to him once, to warn him. "They have decided
tokill you. They're simply biding their time, waiting for the right
moment."
"Waiting for the courage to fight me, you mean," said Naog.
"Tell them that a madness came upon you, but it's over," she said.
"Tell them that it was the influence of this ugly foreign wife of
yours, and then they'll kill her and not you."
Naog didn't bother to answer her.
His mother burst into tears. "Was this what I bore you for? I named
you very well, Glogmeriss, my son of trouble and anguish!"
"Listen to me, Mother. The flood is coming. We may have very little
warning when it actually comes, very little time to get into my
seedboat. Stay near, and when you hear us calling--"
"I'm glad your father is dead rather than to see his firstborn son
so gone in madness."
"Tell all the others, too, Mother. I'll take as many into my
seedboat as will fit. But once the door in the roof is closed, I
can't open it again. Anyone who isn't inside when we close it will
never get inside, and they will die."
She burst into tears and left.
Not far from the seedboat was a high hill. As the rainy season
neared, Naog took to sending one of his servants to the top of the
hill several times a day, to watch toward the southeast. "What
should we look for?" they asked. "I don't know," he answered. "A new
river. A wall of water. A dark streak in the distance. It will be
something that you've never seen before."
The sky filled with clouds, dark and threatening. The heart of the
storm was to the south and east. Naog made sure that his wives and
children and the wives and children of his servants didn't stray far
from the seedboat. They freshened the water in the waterbags, to
stay busy. A few raindrops fell, and then the rain stopped, and then
a few more raindrops. But far to the south and east it was raining
heavily. And the wind--the wind kept rising higher and higher, and
it was out of the east. Naog could imagine it whipping the waves
higher and farther into the deep channel that the last storm had
opened. He imagined the water spilling over into the salty riverbed.
He imagined it tearing deeper and deeper into the sand, more and
more of it tearing away under the force of the torrent. Until
finally it was no longer the force of the storm driving the water
through the channel, but the weight of the whole sea, because at
last it had been cut down below the level of low tide. And then the
sea tearing deeper and deeper.
"Naog." It was the head of the Engu clan, and a dozen men with him.
"The god is ready for you."
Naog looked at them as if they were foolish children. "This is the
storm," he said. "Go home and bring your families to my seedboat, so
they can come through the flood alive."
"This is no storm," said the head of the clan. "Hardly any rain has
fallen."
The servant who was on watch came running, out of breath, his arms
bleeding where he had skidded on the ground as he fell more than
once in his haste. "Naog, master!" he cried. "It's plain to see--the
Salty Shore is nearer. The Salty Sea is rising, and fast."
What a torrent of water it would take, to make the Salty Sea rise in
its bed. Naog covered his face with his hands. "You're right," said
Naog. "The god is ready for me. The true god. It was for this hour
that I was born. As for YOUR god--the true god will drown him as
surely as he will drown anyone who doesn't come to my seedboat."
"Come with us now," said the head of the clan. But his voice was not
so certain now.
To his servants and his wives, Naog said, "Inside the seedboat. When
all are in, smear on the pitch, leaving only one side where I can
slide down."
"You come too, husband," said Zawada.
"I can't," he said. "I have to give warning one last time."
"Too late!" cried the servant with the bleeding arms. "Come now."
"You go now," said Naog. "I'll be back soon. But if I'm not back,
seal the door and open it for no man, not even me."
"When will I know to do that?" he asked in anguish.
"Zawada will tell you," said Naog. "She'll know." Then he turned to
the head of the clan. "Come with me," he said. "Let's give the
warning." Then Naog strode off toward the bank of the canal where
his mother and brothers and sisters kept their dragonboats. The men
who had come to capture him followed him, unsure who had captured
whom.
It was raining again, a steady rainfall whipped by an ever-stronger
wind. Naog stood on the bank of the canal and shouted against the
wind, crying out for his family to join him. "There's not much
time!" he cried. "Hurry, come to my seedboat!"
"Don't listen to the enemy of the god!" cried the head of the clan.
Naog looked down into the water of the canal. "Look, you fools!
Can't you see that the canal is rising?"
"The canal always rises in a storm."
Naog knelt down and dipped his hand into the canal and tasted the
water. "Salt," he said. "Salt!" he shouted. "This isn't rising
because of rain in the mountains! The water is rising because the
Salty Sea is filling with the water of the Heaving Sea. It's rising
to cover us! Come with me now, or not at all! When the door of my
seedboat closes, we'll open it for no one." Then he turned and loped
off toward the seedboat.
By the time he got there, the water was spilling over the banks of
the canals, and he had to splash through several shallow streams
where there had been no streams before. Zawada was standing on top
of the roof, and screamed at him to hurry as he clambered onto the
top of it. He looked in the direction she had been watching, and saw
what she had seen. In the distance, but not so very far away, a dark
wall rushing toward them. A plug of earth must have broken loose,
and a fist of the sea hundreds of feet high was slamming through the
gap. It spread at once, of course, and as it spread the wave dropped
until it was only fifteen or twenty feet high. But that was high
enough. It would do.
"You fool!" cried Zawada. "Do you want to watch it or be saved from
it?"
Naog followed Zawada down into the boat. Two of the servants smeared
on a thick swatch of tar on the fourth side of the doorway. Then
Naog, who was the only one tall enough to reach outside the hole,
drew the door into place, snugging it down tight. At once it became
perfectly dark inside the seedboat, and silent, too, except for the
breathing. "This time for real," said Naog softly. He could hear the
other men working at the lashings. They could feel the floor moving
under them--the canals had spilled over so far now that the raft was
rising and floating.
Suddenly they heard a noise. Someone was pounding on the wall of the
seedboat. And there was shouting. They couldn't hear the words, the
walls were too thick. But they knew what was being said all the
same. Save us. Let us in. Save us.
Kormo's voice was filled with anguish. "Naog, can't we--"
"If we open it now we'll never close it again in time. We'd all die.
They had every chance and every warning. My lashing is done."
"Mine too," answered one of the servants.
The silence of the others said they were still working hard.
"Everyone hold onto the side posts," said Naog. "There's so much
room here. We could have taken on so many more."
The pounding outside was in earnest now. They were using axes to
hack at the wood. Or at the lashings. And someone was on top of the
seedboat now, many someones, trying to pry at the door.
"Now, O God, if you mean to save us at all, send the water now."
"Done," said another of the servants. So three of the four corners
were fully lashed.
Suddenly the boat lurched and rocked upward, then spun crazily in
every direction at once. Everyone screamed, and few were able to
keep their handhold, such was the force of the flood. They plunged
to one side of the seedboat, a jumble of humans and spilling baskets
and water bottles. Then they struck something--a tree? The side of a
mountain?--and lurched in another direction entirely, and in the
darkness it was impossible to tell anymore whether they were on the
floor or the roof or one of the walls.
Did it go on for days, or merely hours? Finally the awful turbulence
gave way to a spinning all in one plane. The flood was still rising;
they were still caught in the twisting currents; but they were no
longer caught in that wall of water, in the great wave that the god
had sent. They were on top of the flood.
Gradually they sorted themselves out. Mothers found their children,
husbands found their wives. Many were crying, but as the fear
subsided they were able to find the ones who were genuinely in pain.
But what could they do in the darkness to deal with bleeding
injuries, or possible broken bones? They could only plead with the
god to be merciful and let them know when it was safe to open the
door.
After a while, though, it became plain that it wasn't safe NOT to
open it. The air was musty and hot and they were beginning to pant.
"I can't breathe," said Zawada. "Open the door," said Kormo.
Naog spoke aloud to the god. "We have no air in here," he said. "I
have to open the door. Make it safe. Let no other wave wash over us
with the door open."
But when he went to open the door, he couldn't find it in the
darkness. For a sickening moment he thought: What if we turned
completely upside down, and the door is now under us? I never
thought of that. We'll die in here.
Then he found it, and began fussing with the lashings. But it was
hard in the darkness. They had tied so hurriedly, and he wasn't
thinking all that well. But soon he heard the servants also at work,
muttering softly, and one by one they got their lashings loose and
Naog shoved upward on the door.
It took forever before the door budged, or so it seemed, but when at
last it rocked upward, a bit of faint light and a rush of air came
into the boat and everyone cried out at once in relief and
gratitude. Naog pushed the door upward and then maneuvered it to lie
across the opening at an angle, so that the heavy rain outside
wouldn't inundate them. He stood there holding the door in place,
even though the wind wanted to pick it up and blow it away--a slab
of wood as heavy as that one was!--while in twos and threes they
came to the opening and breathed, or lifted children to catch a
breath of air. There was enough light to bind up some bleeding
injuries, and to realize that no bones were broken after all.
The rain went on forever, or so it seemed, the rain and the wind.
And then it stopped, and they were able to come out onto the roof of
the seedboat and look at the sunlight and stare at the distant
horizon. There was no land at all, just water. "The whole earth is
gone," said Kormo. "Just as you said.
"The Heaving Sea has taken over this place," said Naog. "But we'll
come to try land. The current will take us there."
There was much debris floating on the water--torn-up trees and
bushes, for the flood had scraped the whole face of the land. A few
rotting bodies of animals. If anyone saw a human body floating by,
they said nothing about it.
After days, a week, perhaps longer of floating without sight of
land, they finally began skirting a shoreline. Once they saw the
smoke of someone's fire--people who lived high above the great
valley of the Salty Sea had been untouched by the flood. But there
was no way to steer the boat toward shore. Like a true seedboat, it
drifted unless something drew it another way. Naog cursed himself
for his foolishness in not including dragonboats in the cargo of the
boat. He and the other men and women might have tied lines to the
seedboat and to themselves and paddled the boat to shore. As it was,
they would last only as long as their water lasted.
It was long enough. The boat fetched up against a grassy shore. Naog
sent several of the servants ashore and they used a rope to tie the
boat to a tree. But it was useless--the current was still too
strong, and the boat tore free. They almost lost the servants,
stranding them on the shore, forever separated from their families,
but they had the presence of mind to swim for the end of the rope.
The next day they did better--more lines, all the men on shore,
drawing the boat further into a cove that protected it from the
current. They lost no time in unloading the precious cargo of seeds,
and searching for a source of fresh water. Then they began the
unaccustomed task of hauling all the baskets of grain by hand. There
were no canals to ease the labor.
"Perhaps we can find a place to dig canals again," said Kormo.
"No!" said Zawada vehemently. "We will never build such a place
again. Do you want the god to send another flood?"
"There will be no other flood," said Naog. "The Heaving Sea has had
its victory. But we will also build no canals. We will keep no
crocodile, or any other animal as our god. We will never sacrifice
forbidden fruit to any god, because the true god hates those who do
that. And we will tell our story to anyone who will listen to it, so
that others will learn how to avoid the wrath of the true god, the
god of power."
Kemal watched as Naog and his people came to shore not far from
Gibeil and set up farming in the El Qa' Valley in the shadows of the
mountains of Sinai. The fact of the flood was well known, and many
travelers came to see this vast new sea where once there had been
dry land. More and more of them also came to the new village that
Naog and his people built, and word of his story also spead.
Kemal's work was done. He had found Atlantis. He had found Noah, and
Gilgamesh. Many of the stories that had collected around those names
came from other cultures and other times, but the core was true, and
Kemal had found them and brought them back to the knowledge of
humankind.
But what did it mean? Naog gave warning, but no one listened. His
story remained in people's minds, but what difference did it make?
As far as Kemal was concerned, all old-world civilizations after
Atlantis were dependent on that first civilization. The IDEA of the
city was already with the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the people
of the Indus and even the Chinese, because the story of the Derku
people, under one name or another, had spread far and wide--the
Golden Age. People remembered well that once there was a great land
that was blessed by the gods until the sea rose up and swallowed
their land. People who lived in different landscapes tried to make
sense of the story. To the island-hopping Greeks Atlantis became an
island that sank into the sea. To the plains-dwelling Sumerians the
flood was caused by rain, not by the sea leaping out of its bed to
swallow the earth. Someone wondered how, if all the land was
covered, the animals survived, and thus the account of animals two
by two was added to the story of Naog. At some point, when people
still remembered that the name meant "naked," a story was added
about his sons covering his nakedness as he lay in a drunken stupor.
All of this was decoration, however. People remembered both the
Derku people and the one man who led his family through the flood.
But they would have remembered Atlantis with or without Naog, Kemal
knew that. What difference did his saga make, to anyone but himself
and his household? As others studied the culture of the Derku, Kemal
remained focused on Naog himself. If anything, Naog's life was proof
that one person makes no difference at all in history. He saw the
flood coming, he warned his people about it when there was plenty of
time, he showed them how to save themselves, and yet nothing changed
outside his own immediate family group. That was the way history
worked. Great forces sweep people along, and now and then somebody
floats to the surface and becomes famous but it means nothing, it
amounts to nothing.
Yet Kemal could not believe it. Naog may not have accomplished what
he THOUGHT his goal was--to save his people--but he did accomplish
something. He never lived to see the result of it, but because of
his survival the Atlantis stories were tinged with something else.
It was not just a golden age, not just a time of greatness and
wealth and leisure and city life, a land of giants and gods. Naog's
version of the story also penetrated the public consciousness and
remained. The people were destroyed because the greatest of gods was
offended by their sins. The list of sins shifted and changed over
time, but certain ideas remained: That it was wrong to live in a
city, where people get lifted up in the pride of their hearts and
think that they are too powerful for the gods to destroy. That the
one who seems to be crazy may in fact be the only one who sees the
truth. That the greatest of gods is the one you can't see, the one
who has power over the earth and the sea and the sky, all at once.
And, above all, this: That it was wrong to sacrifice human beings to
the gods.
It took thousands of years, and there were places where Naog's
passionate doctrine did not penetrate until modern times, but the
root of it was there in the day he came home and found that his
father had been fed to the Dragon. Those who thought that it was
right to offer human beings to the Dragon were all dead, and the one
who had long proclaimed that it was wrong was still alive. The god
had preserved him and killed all of them. Wherever the idea of
Atlantis spread, some version of this story came with it, and in the
end all the great civilizations that were descended from Atlantis
learned not to offer the forbidden fruit to the gods.
In the Americas, though, no society grew up that owed a debt to
Atlantis, for the same rising of the world ocean that closed the
land bridge between Yemen and Djibouti also broke the land bridge
between America and the old world. The story of Naog did not touch
there, and it seemed to Kemal absolutely clear what the cost of that
was. Because they had no memory of Atlantis, it took the people of
the Americas thousands of years longer to develop civilization--the
city. Egypt was already ancient when the Olmecs first built amid the
swampy land of the bay of Campeche. And because they had no story of
Naog, warning that the most powerful of gods rejected killing human
beings, the old ethos of human sacrifice remained in full force,
virtually unquestioned. The carnage of the Mexica--the Aztecs--took
it to the extreme, but it was there already, throughout the
Caribbean basin, a tradition of human blood being shed to feed the
hunger of the gods.
Kemal could hardly say that the bloody warfare of the old world was
much of an improvement over this. But it was different, and in his
mind, at least, it was different specifically because of Naog. If he
had not ridden out the flood to tell his story of the true God who
forbade sacrifice, the old world would not have been the same. New
civilizations might have risen more quickly, with no stories warning
of the danger of city life. And those new civilizations might all
have worshiped the same Dragon, or some other, as hungry for human
flesh as the gods of the new world were hungry for human blood.
On the day that Kemal became sure that his Noah had actually changed
the world, he was satisfied. He said little and wrote nothing about
his conclusion. This surprised even him, for in all the months and
years that he had searched hungrily for Atlantis, and then for Noah,
and then for the meaning of Noah's saga, Kemal had assumed that,
like Schliemann, he would publish everything, he would tell the
world the great truth that he had found. But to his surprise he
discovered that he must not have searched so far for the sake of
science, or for fame, or for any other motive than simply to know,
for himself, that one person's life amounted to something. Naog
changed the world, but then so did Zawada, and so did Kormo, and so
did the servant who skinned his elbows running down the hill, and so
did Naog's father and mother, and ... and in the end, so did they
all. The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But
when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down
to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices
they made were real. They mattered.
Apparently that was all that Kemal had needed to know. The next day
he could think of no reason to go to work. He resigned from his
position at the head of the Atlantis project. Let others do the
detail work. Kemal was well over thirty now, and he had found the
answer to his great question, and it was time to get down to the
business of living.
Copyright © 1998 Hatrack River Enterprises Inc.