Enoch Primordial (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (4 page)

Methuselah swung the pear-shaped mace down toward the skull of his adversary, a fifteen-year old girl named Edna. She raised her shield and blocked it effectively, then parried with her own mace.

He barked,
“Excellent, runt!”

Methuselah was a strapping twenty-year old handsome young man.
His unusual blue eyes often drew the teasing of his companions, saying that he was a
Bene ha Elohim
, or more likely a product of their union with the daughters of men. It was not true, but he played along with it because he liked standing out from the crowd. He was a fiery lad with a passion for arguing, not the best of traits for an apkallu in training, since their order was marked by restraint and listening. But Methuselah hungered for knowledge, and loved to study and learn about everything.

At this
moment, though, he was not learning. He was teaching. And it was not an intellectual exercise, but a physical one.

Edna swung again. He blocked
her blow.

“Is that the best you can do, you scrawny little female?”

Methuselah burst into action, swinging one blow after another. Edna could barely keep up with the raining strikes. If she let one get through, it would leave a nasty bruise she would nurse for days.

With each swing, Methuselah verbally challenged her strategy
. “What did I teach you? Have you no counter plan? I am stronger than you, so how can you defeat me?”

With those last words, he
backed her up against the wall of the small practice room, his mace to her neck. He had used sheer strength to overwhelm her.

He
leaned in close to her face and mused, “Now, if I was a particularly wicked soldier, having worn you down, I might take my pleasure before killing you.” He was not teasing her. He wanted her to face the reality of the world.

“Too late,” she said. He looked at her
puzzled.

“Letting you expend your energy on me was my counter plan. While you were worn out and pompously crowing
into my face with your horrible breath, I was disemboweling you,” she said.

He glanced
down to see her hand with knife blade at his abdomen. She shifted it down to his groin and added, “Or severing your manhood if you prefer.”

He smiled. “I am proud of you, Edna.” He kissed her forehead and turned to sit down for a rest.

To him, it was just a simple peck of affection. He did not notice that the soft swift touch of his lips upon her skin almost made her swoon. She gathered herself together and plopped down next to him.

“Why do you talk mean to me while fighting?” she asked.

He smiled. “That is what warriors do. It is mental warfare. Wearing down the enemy inwardly as well as outwardly.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, and added playfully, “you ogre.”

He smiled at her. “You are hardly wet with sweat.” He was drenched from the exercise.

“We women
do not sweat, we glow.” Her look of serious reflection melted into shared laughter.

“Edna,” he said, “You are amusing. You are a girl, yet you prefer the company and roughhousing of boys
. You do not wear makeup or jewelry. You sneak around your superiors to learn sports and fighting — and you are good. You are really good. You are intellectually curious and you want to see the world, yet you are a temple virgin, dedicated to the gods.”

It was true. Edna was a spitfire boyish girl.
Her serious expression returned in an instant. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face. It was a sole loose one that had come out of her otherwise usual tightly wrapped and bound hair bun.

“
Do not tease me, Methuselah. Girls have no choice in their placement in society. I do not want to
be
a boy, I just enjoy doing things that boys do. It is not that I do not have female desires as well.”

He laughed. “That would make you the perfect wife I guess.”

She thought to herself,
Yes! And I would make you so happy
.

He interrupted her thoughts
. “Those female desires will soon be opened up like a flower blossom when you engage in the Sacred Marriage rite with the god.”

She blushed through a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“I wish I could be married to a normal man — like you.”

She gulped. Did she say too much?

Methuselah looked at her seriously. “Me too, Pedna.” It was one of his many affectionate nicknames for her. He would call her “Edna Pedna,” so she had responded by calling him “Methuselah Poozelah,” and they eventually shortened them to Pedna and Poozela.

His whole countenance changed from joy to sorrow. He knew the consequences of being betrothed to the gods. He knew the ultimate end of bearing the Nephilim offspring. It
always bothered him. On the one hand, the gods were sovereign and had the right to their wives. Humans were, after all, slaves of the gods. But on the other hand, how could so gruesome a reality be part of a just world?”

“What happens to the child-bearers?”

“That is the prerogative of the gods,” he said. He could not bring himself to tell her. Instead, his silence and the look of dread on his face spoke loudly.

“Would you let them hurt me, Poozela?”

His heart nearly broke in two. He had been a big brother, even a father figure, to this girl ever since he noticed her special qualities and vivacious lust for life as a mere ten-year old. He had secretly trained her to read cuneiform, fight with weapons, and reason like a sage. She now stood on the verge of her sixteenth birthday, and he was about to lose her forever. He struggled to hold back a flood of tears ready to burst. He did the only thing he could do. He deflected the question.

“We exist to serve the gods, not question them.”

It was the pious response, the proper answer, his duty. And he did not believe it for one second.

“Poozela.”

He kept staring out to space.

“Poozela?”

He looked into her eyes. He could not avoid her tender soul.

“That is not good enough.”

Methuselah was about to break completely apart.

T
he door suddenly burst open. Enoch and the priestess supervisor, a stout woman with a perpetual frown of dissatisfaction stood in the doorway.

Methuselah and Edna froze.

“Edna, I told you to stop this silly interest in sports,” said the priestess. “You have your Sacred Marriage rite tomorrow and we need to test your makeup and try out the new dress!”

Enoch did not need as many words. “Methuselah.”

Methuselah jumped to his feet and followed Enoch down the hallway back to their quarters in the palace.

As a major city of trade
, Sippar sported a hodgepodge of ornamentation. Winding their way through the palace hallways, Methuselah and Enoch passed cedar columns from Aratta, hanging tapestries from the Indus Valley, and stone mason work from the Levant.

Enoch
was a holy man who did not even see the craftsmanship and art that saturated their living environment and absorbed Methuselah’s imagination.

They could not be more different. Enoch received visions from the gods.
He sought to raise his son with the same sense of piety and obedience. Unfortunately, Methuselah was too lustful for life and this earth. Enoch loved prayer, Methuselah loved reading cuneiform. Enoch barely noticed women, Methuselah burned with desire for every attractive woman he saw. Enoch loved the holy liturgy of worship, Methuselah loved a feast of food and good drink. Enoch spent hours of silence in the temple shrine, Methuselah spent hours worshipping the beauty of creation (and especially the gods’ most beautiful creation, the female body). Enoch was a holy man of heaven, Methuselah felt he was a profane man of earth.

It seemed that the only thing his father loved on this earth was Methuselah’s mother. She was Enoch’s one connection with humanity and both father and son adored her. Nevertheless, Methuselah thought Enoch could not understand his friendship with
Edna. His stomach turned with anxiety.

“Are you romantically inclined to this
girl?” demanded Enoch.

“No!
She is devoted to the gods!” Methuselah barked, reflexively. How could he think that? Methuselah might be quite the romantic lothario in his weakness for women, but he would never violate the sacred order to even consider Edna as a love interest.

“She is like the little sister I never had,”
Methuselah claimed. “I do not expect you would understand that.”

Despite what his son may have thought of his holy demeanor, Enoch was not a heartless disembodied spirit. It warmed his heart to see his son care for people, and seek to help them and protect them. And he certainly understood love. He just wanted Methuselah to learn what was most important in life after religion, and that was station. There would be plenty of time and opportunity to choose a wife from the court once Methuselah was established as a bona fide apkallu to royalty.

They arrived at the door to their quarters and entered. Enoch struggled to shake off his
usual thoughts of his son’s future.

“Well, I
do not expect you to understand the spiritual vision I just received from an enemy god.”

Methuselah’s mouth dropped.
He had no idea what in the world Enoch was talking about.

Enoch’s wife greeted him at the door with a kiss and embrace, as she did every day of their marriage. She was a humble woman, unfortunately too often overshadowed by Enoch’s important status and neglected in his royal responsibilities. Yet Methuselah knew that without her, Enoch would be nothing. Enoch knew it as well. She was his strength, his support, his closest counsel and only trusted friend. As passionately zealous as Enoch was, he was also prone to depression. He would often say that in his mountaintops and valleys, his Edna was his steady sea level.

She believed in her husband
, happy to support his high and holy calling. Methuselah would sometimes jest what a miracle it was that the gods would create a woman with enough patience for his father.

Methuselah found it ironic that
with everything about father and son being so at odds, his best friend had the same name as his mother. Methuselah often wondered why his father, who could see spiritual patterns and signs in just about everything, could not embrace this curiosity with a more positive acceptance.

One thing was
certain. The two Ednas were nothing alike. They were as disparate as Methuselah and Enoch. Mother Edna was kind, sweet, supportive, and submissive. Sixteen-year old Edna was spunky, feisty, independent, and stubborn.

Methuselah’s differences with his father
haunted him wherever he turned. The living quarters they occupied were humble compared with other palace servants or royalty. According to Enoch, a wisdom sage was not concerned about the things of this world, but about truth, justice, and heaven. Thus, their living space held only a couple bedrooms, and a small eating and lounging area. The whole dwelling space was no bigger than the average servant’s quarters. They had only the most basic of furniture, stark against bare walls. Methuselah felt it a pity that royalty such as they were should live in such aesthetic squalor.

Methuselah had wanted to change the bleak environment for a long time. To him, beauty
embodied as much a part of truth as philosophy or ethics. In fact, he thought Enoch’s failure to understand this was his father’s weakness. A spirituality that excluded the body was impoverished. Methuselah sought a more earthy spirituality. Austerity might bring more intellectual satisfaction, but it created emotional emptiness. Did not the gods make this world to be enjoyed? It made no sense to create a rose, or a woman’s body and then say, “Ignore the rose and the woman, and the myriad of sensory experiences that make up your daily existence. Just think about abstract wisdom and the unseen spirit world.” That was madness to him.

“Methuselah, I just had a vision of the unseen spirit world that you will probably think is
madness.”

“Try me,” quipped Methuselah, expecting his father to be right. It already sounded crazy and he
had not even heard it yet.

The three of them sat down
together. Edna brought some fruit and nuts for them to eat.

Enoch said to Methuselah, “
Once again, your extracurricular activities drew you away from your responsibility to be with me in the council meeting.”

“Sorry,
father.” They might not be able to understand each other, but they did love one another. Apologies and forgiveness came quickly between them.

“You better be sorry or
I will tan your hide,” said Enoch. Methuselah cringed at the saying. It was a corny phrase his father liked to use — too often.

Enoch
continued, “The first place I looked for you was in the palace garden. You spend too much time in that useless waste of space.”

“
It is not useless, father,” said Methuselah. “Beauty
is
divine transcendence. It connects us to the gods as much as any ritual does.” He shook his head. “You always do that. You miss the forest for the trees.”

“You are wrong, son,” said Edna. “Your father
does not care for the forest
or
the trees.”

It was her way of teasing Enoch without putting him down. A little bit of humor went a long way toward persuasion for Edna.
She had to have a lot of humor with this family of stubborn male onagers.

Methuselah continued complaining, “Do you even know that the temple is laden with garden imagery and ornamentation? The gods are worshipped in a garden!”

“Enough, Son,” said Edna. “The point was made. Listen to your father.” She would never abandon her true loyalty to her husband.

Enoch
sat expressionless, waiting for Methuselah to finish his venting. He continued as if he had not heard a word Methuselah said. “When I was in the garden in my dream vision, I fell to the floor as a dead man, and when I awoke, two archangels stood over me.”

Enoch knew how to tell a good story
, a useful skill for an apkallu sage. Enoch unfolded his experience to his wife and son with such vivid, artistic description that Methuselah felt himself enraptured into the very heaven of heavens, seeing it all with his own eyes. Maybe his father was not all that out of touch.