Havah (9 page)

Struggling not to vomit, I turned my face to the sky, seeking any trace of the One, most loving, most terrible. But the churning dark held no God, no sun, no eye, no ear for us. Lightning—now an unnatural green—flashed in ragged streaks like talons clawing for the dark heavens. The western end of the valley was a hunchbacked beast.

“Go! Run to the eastern gate!” the adam shouted over a distant rumble. “Run!”

Run? My body had rebelled against food and consciousness already—and how should I run wearing this terrible trophy?

“I am going for our things.” He pushed me away. “Go!”

I took one last look at the face I both loved and abhorred and then turned on my heel and ran.

I bolted along the river. It ran with uncanny turbulence beside me. I had the sensation of eyes upon me and thought I smelled the charred and sickly smell of that burnt patch of earth following me in the unnatural air. At least my burst of motion, even beneath a blackened sky, stunted paralyzing gall. I knew nothing but the pounding of my feet, the heaving of my breath, the horrible hide flapping against my thigh, encasing my torso in its unnatural sheath.

Just as I reached the terraces, the skies opened. This was no rain as rains had been known to me—drizzling, sweet and warm—but a deluge, as though the earth would flush itself of all the life that polluted it. It came in droves as though I stood beneath a fall, driving beneath the garment and down my spine.

Impossibly, I ran faster.

The thunder rolled away as though it would take itself to the eastern sea, then doubled back, one wave crashing upon the heels of the last, beating at the skies. Before my inner eye I saw again the rising of the land, the heaving of the mountains, and wondered if the One meant to put them back.

I slipped on the wet earth, and my foot slid into a rock. Pain shot up my leg, startling the breath from me. I skittered but ran on. I could barely see, rain and sodden hair in my eyes. I thought I made out the shape of a hare darting through the brush, and, a moment later, the boar, though whether they were truly there or a trick of the rain and lightning, I could not know.

I scrambled toward the natural terraces. Water sluiced past me from above as I climbed upward, trying to get a view of the valley behind me to watch for the adam. The mount and the range to the north hunched like hulking giants. The river was well over its banks in some places. Lightning flashed, and I recognized one of the ewes struggling in the river, flailing as the current carried her away. I cowered on the terrace, wondering if the valley, roused to monstrous life, would devour the adam as well.

Was this my world now? Was this how it would forever be, never to see the sun again or lift our faces to the heavens without rain driving into our eyes?

Let the adam come quickly,
I begged the One. But if he heard me, I did not know it.

After a while, the rain abated. Where was the adam? There was an outcrop here, farther up, where I could watch for him in the intermittent lightning. I climbed upward, along the rocky path. My foot slipped again and—ah, now there was pain! But I went on, clutching at grass and stone and shrub. The thunder rolled away, the sky flashed in silence.

I came to the outcrop that lay like a great lintel across the crumbling stone beneath. There was a small opening here like a cave. In here I had taken my meal of grapes and licorice root on hot days, watching the deer and lion upon the valley floor. I dropped, grateful to crawl within its low space where I would wait for the adam or God or death.

A low, grinding growl came from the darkness. I halted, wondering if thunder, that anger in the sky, could issue from the earth itself. In a flash of shock lightning, I made out the form of a wolf crouched as far back as she could go, her narrow bite bared, all gums and long incisors.

“Dvash,” I called, recognizing the she-wolf that had licked honey from my fingers. She relented only a little, her lips still peeled from her teeth. But when I moved toward her, she bit out a sharp snap so that I jerked back, hitting my head and scuttling backward out of the opening.

Had the animals turned traitor to us as well? I thought of Adah and her mate.

Or had we turned traitor to them?

I backed out into the rain. Stones and pebbles broke the skin of my knee, bit my palms. My foot throbbed.

I sidled along the outcrop to a smaller ledge and drew back as far as I could, pulling up my knees, shielding my eyes. Below me, tree and shrub seemed to dance to a frenetic rhythm.

BESIDE ME THE VINES shivered, fruit spilled to the muddy earth. And there—ah! There I had lain, arms outspread. Was it only yesterday that this ground had been holy? That I had been holy before the One that Is and God had lavished joy upon my face as one drops kisses onto the head of a babe?

I lowered my head to my arms and wept, my tears carried away by rivulets of rain.

The sky rumbled and the thunder surged back. This time I felt it beneath my feet. It vibrated up through the earth. Stones somersaulted down the hillside. One of them grazed my shoulder. The black sky beyond the mount was veined with lightning like the back of an unnatural leaf. I could see movement on the side of the mountain: creatures fleeing for the lowland—no, they were not creatures but stones.

I scrambled to the outcrop and peered into the darkness. “Come out!” I shouted to Dvash. She snarled and snapped a ferocious bark that sent me jerking back. Did she understand not at all? Did she not know that I told her come out for her own good, this creature that had once obeyed me without a thought, that had licked honey from my fingers and bared to me her belly? “Come!” I shouted, but she shrank back even farther.

I retreated the way I had come up, the cut in my foot forgotten, struck twice by falling rock. Down. I must get down.

Where was the adam?

A thudding crash sounded above me. I craned to see and cried out; the outcrop had closed like a snapping jaw. There was no sign of the wolf at all. I started back, meaning to go to her, but even in my strength, which was considerable, I knew I could not free her. A large stone tumbled past me. I clung beneath a small precipice, knowing I could not go back.

The earth rumbled, and I lost my footing. Sliding, scrambling, I reached the low hills. And then I sprinted, as fast as the gazelle, for the eastern gate.

When I got there, I spun back. The earth shifted again and the river lurched up in the bed. There was no adam.

I tried to shout the holy name of God, which I had known, but when I opened my mouth, it was like something beyond reach, so that I stuttered the unintelligible.

“It is I!” I cried. “It is I!” I began to tear at the pelt, but it was firmly made. Thunder drowned my cries in a roaring clap, and lightning flashed so brilliantly it blinded me for the moment after.

A figure dashed along the river—a she-goat, hair matted to her body. I called for her over the receding echo of the thunder. She veered toward me, and I grabbed her by the neck, somehow avoiding her horns. But she would not be restrained for long, and I could not hold her. She was out of her mind. I pushed her toward the eastern gate. “Go!” I slapped her rump and sent her at a run. The river had risen so high that she had to pick her way along the edge, but she was adroit and soon disappeared from view.

I stared after her, alone again, beaten by rain and terrorized by the skies and the earth beneath me. Lightning struck midway up the sacred mount, and a flash arced out from it. Sparks seared the dark, and a tree caught fire, impossibly, glowing in the rain. Again, the voracious lightning, and another tree flared and ignited, this one slightly farther up, so that the two flames looked like the eyes of the wolf beneath the outcrop, shaggy head tilted to glare at me.

The blaze did not abate in the rain but seemed to lick at the brush around it, sodden though it was, like a fiery tongue.

THE WIND ROSE WITH a howl and fire spread up the face of the mount like the long iris of a cat.

This time when I called for God, it was with a whisper. I fell down to my knees as the valley shook and flooded and ignited to ruin about me. I waited as the earth shuddered again. Waited—to hear that voice bidding me this time not to wake but to sleep.

But the voice that cut through the rain was not the One. It was the adam.

He ran with a white mantle over his neck—no, it was no mantle but one of the new lambs.

“Go!” he cried, waving me before him. I stumbled to my feet and ran to him, relieved to sobs at the sight of him, unwilling to go alone ahead of him again. But he shouted again, “Go, go! See the waters!” And indeed, the river ran even higher than a moment ago.

Lightning struck the vineyard. Flames engulfed the shrubs. Again and again the lightning came like a lashing tongue, unnatural fire in its wake.

“Run!” the adam shouted again, alongside me now, holding fast the legs of the lamb about his neck. I saw now a bundle at his waist, caught up in the pouch of one of my textiles, beating at his thigh.

We ran for the gate, the hillsides aflame behind us, fires like burning fingers pointing accusation from every direction.

But that was not the end of terror. As we ran, I was suddenly aware of the multitude in the sky—those beings we had always known to be there but had never seen. I could not sense them as acutely as before, but I could feel them. Where before they had been as silent observers to our contentment, I felt them rushing down upon us now as the eagle upon the fox.

At the narrowest pass the adam struggled, the lamb flailing upon his shoulders, bleating pitiably into the storm. Beneath us the river ripped up from the bed, spraying our feet, making wet and slick the path beneath us. When we finally broke from the narrow way, lightning struck the high side of the pass, and it burst with fiery sparks into a column of flame.

We ran, lungs burning, as lightning seared the same spot again and again and again.

Later I would remember strange things in the fire: beings with wings like animals and faces as fearsome as those of the serpent before the light of God, glimmering in the flames, beautiful and terrible, seeming to look in all directions at once—always seeming to stare at me. But at that time, I knew only that there was fire everywhere behind us.

We ran. Out toward the basin beyond the mountains. Where the valley had been deserted, here now were a multitude of animals in flight: the goat and great cat, the bear and the deer. We fled with them, not knowing which direction we went—it didn’t matter as long as it was away from the fiery gates of our valley.

We followed the river formed by the abyss waters where they fall down the southern side of the mount. In the place where the hills roll south toward the low plain, we fell down at last, drinking from the muddied waters in our thirst, unable to cleanse the taste of smoke and fire from our mouths.

The wind quieted, and after a while the clouds stopped churning and spread out like a dingy, gnarled fleece. From here we could see nothing of the great pillar of fire or the smoke of the trees, reaching like burning fingers to claw at the sky. Here in the low hills, that life was a league—a world—away.

10

Dawn had the gall to come—unremarkably and plainly. We straggled on, staggering in exhaustion. The adam’s face was a sweat-streaked mask of grime, though his jaw was set in the most determined and beautiful line. I thought then that I could almost forgive him his betrayal, if only for the comforting sight of the staunchness of that jaw.

Sometime around midmorning we stopped. We found the rocky outcrop of a hill and fell down beneath it. I thought of Dvash and the way the lintel had collapsed upon her. I wondered if she could possibly be alive, whining and pawing in the darkness of that tomb, or if all that remained was a form stamped back into the earth from which it had come.

We curled together, untying our garments with numb fingers to lay them beneath and over us as we shivered, cradling the lamb between us.

THAT NIGHT I DID not dream of the cosmos or the deep. I dreamed of fire and of the faces looking all directions at once from within it. Fire, searing the ground in our wake, immolating our steps so that they might never be known again.

By the time the sun had passed her zenith, my foot burned, my every limb ached. I did not move, even at the adam’s urging, to go to the river to drink or to find food. I rose only once, to pass water, and laid back again upon the stony earth.

Where had Adah and Dvash gone, their bodies mangled, bereft of wholeness? Perhaps the roof of the cave would fall upon me as it had upon the wolf and swallow me back to the earth, and I would know.

But it did not. So I lay, half dreaming a sleep of horrors in the coolness of the shade, knowing something already, perhaps, of the tomb. The adam left intermittently, and I heard on occasion the bleating of the lamb as it followed him about, no doubt bereft of its mother. I hated the noise; it reminded me of the absence of the One, who seemed now very far from me, as my valley seemed far from me.

But most of all, it reminded me that I lay there, alive. Sleep overtook me and then fled in cowardly dance. I dreamed in fits—first, that I lay in the full sun of our garden amid apricots and hyssop. A warbler sang the trilling song of the grasshopper, and a hawk wheeled overhead.

But then I dreamed of a darkness like night without benefit of the moon. The entire earth groaned its death cry. When morning came in my dream, it crawled on feeble limbs, and the valley that replaced the vibrant world of my garden was but a shadow of it. In it the animals spoke the language of the deaf-mute, dumb in their existence, creatures feral and instinctive and base. I saw the adam, running with the lamb over his shoulders, staggering over rocks, his face blackened as though from fire. My lovely adam, who was not meant for this crude earth, having been refined beyond it by the breath of the One.

That night he brought me lettuces to eat, but I turned my head away, disdaining, too, the water he had carried most carefully from the river in a bark cup. Eventually I heard him drink it himself. When he lay down at last with a heavy sigh, he did so like a toppled tree felled by lightning and fire.