Sinners and the Sea (10 page)

I did not bow my head, and I did not speak.

“You see that ours is one of the few tents left standing,” he said.

I remained silent.

“Wife, you should know”—he leaned his face down so that his fury-filled eyes were level with mine—“He counts those who lack gratitude among the wicked.”

• • •

T
he goats sniffed at the ground where I’d buried the boys. Noah saw this and went to bury them deeper. When the ground was flattened again into a thick blanket of dirt, I went and knelt over them. I asked the God of Adam and all the other gods I knew of to watch over the children in death better than they had in life.

• • •

M
y anger at Noah and his God did not keep me from him that night. I had to make up for the three babies who had died right where we laid. I could not rest until I did, and neither could Noah.

At dawn he lay panting beside me, muscles shaking from the night’s exertions. “Child,” he said when I reached for him again, “you will make a widow of yourself.” But he did not keep me from climbing on top of him once more.

CHAPTER 11

JAVAN’S MARCH

I
t is not easy to be legendary as a murderer in a town where bloodshed is commonplace. But Javan became renowned.

The legend begins with her lurching into the daylight, dripping blood. The three boys who came out of their mother all at the same time had just died. Javan was blind in one eye and weeping from the other. “I’ll kill you,” she yelled to no one in particular, or maybe to everyone. “But first I will tear your tongues from your mouths and your arms from your shoulders. I will bury you to your necks, pour honey on your heads, and let the ants have their fill. I will tie mice to your hair and call hawks down from the sky!”

Javan was not so much walking as falling forward and roughly catching herself with each step. More monster than woman. The first people she came upon were our closest neighbors, a woman with a daughter and two sons. The wooden poles and stakes of their tent had been snapped in halves, thirds, and quarters, and
so the family was eyeing Noah’s trees. When they saw Javan, they scattered.

The daughter wasn’t looking where she was going—she was looking back at Javan—and she stumbled on a man who lay drunk or dead in the street, one of her feet tangling in what remained of the man’s tunic. Even as the girl fell forward, she stared back at Javan in horrified awe.

“If I let you live,” Javan told the girl, “you will work for me.”

Without waiting for a reply, which surely the girl couldn’t have provided anyway, Javan picked up the dead man’s sword and continued down the road.

Next she came upon one of the few tents that had survived the night’s looting. Inside she found a man and woman. “You have taken half my sight, and I will take all of yours,” she told the man. His screams could be heard for a hundred cubits in all directions.

The second to die was a girl who was trying to comfort the one-handed girl where she lay upon the ground, crying in the burned remains of the tent they had shared. Javan sneaked up on them, which must have been hard to do in the silence she brought with her. When the people of the town saw Javan, they became as silent as they had been for a few shocked breaths the day before, when the three boys were born at the same time.

“It is better this way,” the girl who was about to die was telling the one-handed girl. “The demons that lived within your womb are gone, and there is nothing for anyone to remember them by.”

“Is this why you helped tear them from her arms?” Javan asked as she stepped into view.

The girl spoke swiftly, because she knew how quickly Javan could kill her. Also how slowly. “I was afraid they would be torn in half if the women fought over them, so I gave them to the most nimble and good mothers from among the crowd.” She turned to the one-handed girl. “Is it not true?”

“It was you who called the mob around us in the first place with your talk of a demon,” the one-handed girl replied. “You are the murderer.”

“As am I,” Javan said, and drove a broken tent post through the guilty girl’s chest. As blood flowed out from where the post entered her flesh, Javan turned to the one-handed girl.

“What three men did you lie with nine moons ago?” she asked.

The girl spoke the names of three men. It is uncertain whether they were ones she truly had lain with, or ones who did
not
lie with her and therefore didn’t give her food, wine, and clothing. Men of no worth to her.

In the chaos of the demon frenzy, most of the men had looted what they could and left with it, so that no one else could steal what they had stolen first. But Javan knew that when night fell again, they would be back. She waited, and not idly. She did not sheath her sword.

“You!” she demanded. She had come upon three girls using cloths to rub dirt from their skin before the men returned that evening. One was also rubbing blood off her arm. It was the unusually beautiful girl with long hair except for a patch that was only a few moons long—the one who had said each of the boys must die. This was the girl to whom Javan was speaking.

The girl looked up. She did not seem affected by the appearance of Javan’s mangled face and angry eyes—one wide open with the sight in it and one swollen to the size of a woman’s fist.

“Yes?” the girl said.

“I’ve come to kill you.”

“Good.”

Javan said, “Because you meant to—”

“I do not care why.”

“Then I will kill you in such a manner that you do.”

Javan threatened to cut off the other girls’ ears if they didn’t run away. They could not afford to be badly disfigured, so they rushed from harm’s way and left their friend in Javan’s hands.

Javan knocked the beautiful girl to the ground and fell on top of her so she couldn’t get up. But the girl did not even try. As Javan held the sharpness of her sword to the girl’s cheek, she couldn’t help looking into the girl’s kohl-ringed eyes. Insolent, exquisite eyes. Because the girl did not struggle, Javan did not have to fight with her, which gave her time to continue staring. The girl was too lovely for a seller of women to kill.

“You do not care if you die, so you should not care too much about having to lie drunk on your back while I collect the money,” she told the girl.

Without waiting for a reply, she moved on.

The men were of some value to Javan, though less than her women and girls, because the men mostly passed through and sometimes never came back. But that night, when the men returned, Javan asked around, and she did so with her sword. A few of the boys in her
service asked around too, and they were not as self-possessed as she was. If we were to add in the people who died while Javan’s boys looked for the three men Javan would kill, the death toll would be twice as high. And so this is what the townspeople did when they talked about how many men Javan killed. I heard one girl tell another, “Javan left Noah’s tent and did not rest until her work was done, except to run the blades of her long sword and small scythe along a whetstone until they were so sharp, people bled from just the sight of them.”

Knowing what I know now, of water hungry for sinners, I would rather say the blood on Javan’s hands that day was piled only five lives high and not ten.

One of Javan’s boys told her that the first of the three men she sought was in a flesh tent, and asked if he should kill him.

“No, leave him for me.”

“He is as large as a donkey,” the boy said. “He will not easily be killed.”

“The bigger he is, the more breath he needs.”

Javan, the boy, and two other boys hurried to the tent. The man was not the only one inside. Laughter, talk, and moaning came from all corners. “Show me where he is,” Javan ordered the first boy.

He walked around to the back of the tent, and Javan followed. They soon heard the snoring of a man on his back.

The boys held the tent up as Javan went around to pull the stakes up and hack at the wooden poles that were all that was left to support it. The laughter inside stopped, along with the sounds of pleasure and exertion.

“Now,” Javan said, and they brought the tent down over the man, who had stopped snoring and was trying to roll away. Javan used a club on the man’s legs and torso.

“Whath duth you want?” the man cried through the goatskin pressing down on him. The other people had stumbled from the tent and were rushing away.

“Only your life,” Javan said.

“I have things muth more valuable than thath,” the man said. “I haf the bones of a great cat and a collection of human skullths.”

“So do I,” Javan said.

“You haf not seen my face,” the man said. “Ith dishonorable to kill a man without first seeing hith face.”

“You did not take the time to see your own child’s face. Do you think yours is so much better?”

“None of those demonths were mine, but if they were, you would be wisth not to crosth me.”

“It’s not my aim to be wise,” Javan said. And she smothered the man with the full weight of her body on the goatskin over his face.

The next man was at the bonfire, passing around a jug of wine. Javan sent one of her girls in to offer the man a good price on her comforts. The girl brought him to lie on his back in a ditch lined with sheep’s wool. By this time Javan was tired of talking and she simply rolled a boulder onto the man’s head.

The third roamed aimlessly, but Javan knew she would catch up with him. It was said she had eyes in her heart and a vengeance the strength of a hundred men in her hands. Even without these advantages, she would have found him. One of her boys saw him on the
road leading out of town, struggling beneath the weight of the wine he had drunk and a limp little body slung over his shoulder.

Javan came alongside him. “You should be running,” she said.

He looked at her. “I have paid a good price for your whores. Why should I flee from you?”

“Because I’m going to kill you. Show a little respect for my abilities.”

He did. “The small young bones will make the best necklaces for your girls,” he said, dropping the body. Then he started running. But Javan had slipped a rope through his belt, and she yanked the man toward herself and a dagger she held level with his back. As he died, he asked her, “Why do you care so much about little demons and so little for yourself?”

“I do not know,” she said.

• • •

A
s legend of Javan’s march grew, so did the stories of how she had come to be exiled.

“She took the intestines of one enemy and stuffed them into another.”

“She killed thirty men and ate their hearts.”

“She put so many heads on stakes that there were no trees left for a league in all directions.”

Javan’s march angered Noah more than all of the other transgressions of the townspeople combined.

I was saddened to see my husband distraught, yet I felt much
safer after Javan’s rampage. There was finally some sense of order, however cruel.

One night when Noah was complaining to the God of Adam about her, I interrupted. “Perhaps, my good husband, she is doing the best she can, just as you are.”

He was kneeling on his sleeping blanket, mouth moving, eyes closed. He opened them. It looked as though there were little fires crackling inside him. “Doing her best to what?” he asked. He did not usually ask questions; likening his struggle to Javan’s had roused him to anger. He waited for my response.

I came as close to a good answer as possible: “To avenge those who are too weak to avenge themselves. Is not this what the God of Adam does?”

He sat for a few breaths with the fires crackling madly in his eyes. Then he said, “I have already told you, only He can mete out justice.”

“What is He doing now?”

Noah did not answer this question. Instead, he said, “The God of Adam doesn’t need the help of a woman.”

I was not so certain.

CHAPTER 12

NOAH’S SONS

Noah begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

GENESIS 6:10

M
y belly filled with three sons to make up for the ones Javan and I lost. Because I feared they would have stains upon their brows, I hid my belly beneath a huge tunic whenever I left the tent to relieve myself or go to the well. Only Javan was with me when I gave birth.

Shem was the first, the one who gave me a new name: Mother. But he did not want to do it. He held fast to my womb. It was not until eleven moons had passed that water suddenly gushed down my legs. Even then, as I squatted and had to bite my lip to keep from crying out, Shem clung to me.

Finally, Javan reached in and grabbed him. “The next one will be easier,” she said. Which made me wonder how many children she had birthed and lost, or would have had I any strength left with which to wonder.

When Javan had bathed him and placed him at my breast, I closed my eyes, too afraid to look at his brow.

“He has a face like his father’s, except hundreds of years younger and without the madness in his eyes.”

I opened one eye just enough to peek at his brow. When I saw that it was smooth and unmarked, I cried with happiness.

He always wanted to be held and would cry whenever I set him down. I feared his cries might anger his father, so I held him even as I cleaned and cooked. I rarely squatted at my loom.

My womb was not as tight after Shem, and Japheth entered the world quickly, screaming with rage. I pulled him from Javan’s arms and took a blanket to his brow. He too was unmarked.

We were deafened by his screaming as Javan bathed him. When she returned him to my arms, I hurried to silence him with my breast. Already he had a tooth poking up from the bottom of his mouth. I did not reveal this to anyone, not even Javan. I would not chance my son being thought a demon. As soon as he grew others, he bloodied my milk, and Shem would bunch his lips when I brought him to my breast. So I gave one breast always to Shem and the other always to Japheth.