Sinners and the Sea (9 page)

Before I could think better of it, I said, “Do you do nothing besides copulate all day and night?”

“Yes. I just killed two men.”

I had somehow forgotten this, and she must have enjoyed the shock on my face. I suddenly wondered what she had done to earn the X upon her forehead.

“With a pot you gave me,” she added.

I got more milk and dried goat meat for both her and the child. “Now tell me the child’s name,” I said.

“She is Herai.” The girl did not react as her mother said this; she just kept smiling up at me. “She likes you,” Javan said. “Perhaps due to her slowness. I myself prefer whoring to mothering. Men’s appetites can be sated, but children’s grow just as quickly as their bodies do. You will know soon enough.”

If I have to feed an appetite larger than Noah’s, I do not think there will be much left of me.

Javan seemed to enjoy talking, and I did not know anybody else, so I asked her, “How does the town sustain itself? I see no crops.”

“Do not be simple, woman.”

I would not be checked. “And why do the men fight among themselves while they are here in Sorum, where surely they are not being rewarded?”

“The men are hired as soldiers by any tribe with enough meat and wine to pay them. When no tribe needs them, the weapons, teeth, and bones of other mercenaries are reward enough for battle. They are gamblers, of a sort. Besides, they know nothing else.” Though she had not answered my first question, she waited for some sort of response from me. When there was none, she asked, “What is it you do when Noah is too far away to rut you?”

I should not have spoken so carelessly of Noah. But I had not gotten to talk with anyone besides him in two moons, and he did not actually talk
with
me. He talked
at
me. “I make clothes that Noah gives away, and blankets he takes from my loom before I have had a chance to knot the last yarns. I never see them again, not even when I look at the people he has given them to.”

“The men prefer to wear the clothes of the dead. Who would be foolish enough to wear new clothes and risk having his life taken so that his clothes could be cut off of him?”

“Then what do the men do with the clothes Noah gives them?”

“Give them away in exchange for the very things Noah is always telling them not to do. The best whores have whole stacks of tunics. Sometimes the whores present them to traders for food and wine.”

“And what do they do with them otherwise?”

“Trade them for children that they can prostitute, which is what you could do, should Noah ever tire of you. You like children.”

I had seen many traders when I dwelled in my father’s tent, and they were all men. Some of them had seemed greedy enough that I could imagine them trading in children. “Men might do such a thing, but not women,” I said. “You lie.”

“I just killed two men. I do not have the energy to lie.”

Indeed, she did not seem like a woman who would bother to lie. She did not have the decency.

“Families come from surrounding towns,” she said, “or sometimes from far away, to trade their children.”

My husband’s town was hardly better than Arrat’s tales of it. My knees buckled. Sorum was no more than a large brothel for mercenaries.

“Perhaps you should give each piece of clothing some flaw,” Javan taunted. “Make the tunics too short, or with an odd tear here or there, or spill some grape juice on them. Better yet, soak them in blood. Then the traders will not want your clothes, and our men will not be afraid to wear them.”

I could not speak. Javan was no doubt overjoyed at the effect her words were having on me. She kicked my knee to make sure I was listening, then went on: “Though pulling the clothes off the dead is great sport. No matter how you damage the clothes you make, still they will not be as lucky to the men as the ones they pull off each other in battle.”

She kicked me again. She did not kick hard, but I would not have cared if she had. “The men must fight the bodies of the dead for clothes and teeth even as the battle wages around them, because afterward nothing will be left. Not one single tooth. And this is honorable because it is more dangerous than fighting the living—another man can see you pillaging a dead man and kill you while you are distracted.”

She is mad, as are all the rest who have not fled this place.
A small, sweet hand touched my hair and played lightly with it.
Except Herai. Thank you, God of Adam, and all other gods, for this one joy.

Javan continued, “They never fix their clothes, because why spend time mending something that will tear again? A man can only mount so many whores, and then what else is there to do
besides drink and fight? You see? You see,
simple woman?”
Suddenly she clapped her hands together and cried, “Ah!” as though she had been struck with an idea. “You could make necklaces of teeth! These are stolen so often, there is always a need for more.”

I did not open my mouth or move my eyes to Javan’s face. I reached for the little hand in my hair and squeezed it weakly between my palms.

“Well, if you have no more milk or goat meat . . .” Javan said.

It was a relief when she started walking away, and a heartbreak when Herai drew her hand from mine and ran after her.

Before they had gotten ten cubits away, Javan turned back to me. “Do not fear a mob, demon woman. Your secret is safe with me.” She touched her finger to her brow and continued away.

CHAPTER 10

SONS AND DEMONS

I
t was clear I would never be part of a gathering of women like the ones I imagined in my father’s village. But even in the worst of places, people long for company. Especially in the worst of places. I hoped Herai might come back for milk. After a couple of moons, I grew tired of waiting and decided I would have to go into town to find her. I could not work up the courage though.

One day it was unusually quiet. I heard no people screaming or fighting, only the occasional bleating of one of Noah’s goats. The quiet called up a loneliness so deep within me that I knew there was no son in my belly. I was empty. I felt the loss of my father as deeply as if it had only been yesterday that I’d watched him weakly slap Noah’s donkey and limp back to his tent.
I must see the girl today, before my solitude drives me to madness.

I wore a swaddling cloth under my tunic and left my sandals inside the door of our tent. The sandals were only thin straps of
leather, but still I feared I could lose my feet for them in town.

With my head scarf secured over my brow, my heart beating hard in my chest, and stones piling up in my belly, I went to find Herai. I saw no one until I had ventured at least a hundred cubits. Men and women were gathered with their backs to me around a tent. The tent hung from old wooden supports that leaned toward each other beneath its weight.

Vultures circled above. I heard babies crying, and over their crying, a woman shouted, “We must kill them.”

“No, only two of them.”

“But which two?”

“They are all spawn of the demon that split a man’s seed into three parts. Each of them must die,” said the unusually beautiful girl with a head of very long hair except for one patch that was only a few moons long.

“A demon does not waste time with a woman once a man has left her,” Javan said.

“Then what is it that happened to your daughter? What was it that made her slow if not a demon?”

Javan was silent. I had not thought it was possible to silence her, and I was surprised to find that her silence did not please me. A few breaths later, she again tried to save the babies. “The girl has lain with three men, and they each planted a son in her.”

“Then why has no one else had three at once?”

Again Javan made no reply. I tried to think of something to defend her argument, though I was not sure I had the courage to risk the wrath of the mob. People were starting to raise their voices and
shift around. I was glad when another woman cried out, “If we kill the demon’s babies, will not the demon kill us?”

No one listened to her. Shoulders collided, and elbows stabbed at the ribs of the bodies around them. Shoving broke out. Through the gaps that appeared in the mob, I saw the girl with only one hand lying on a blanket stained with afterbirth. Babies’ cries rang out from either side of her. The arc of the mob tightened.

I called upon Noah’s God:
God of Adam, these babies need your protection.

It would have taken two hands to hold one baby, and the girl was trying to hold on to all three with only one. They were quickly ripped away from her. Each baby was taken by a different woman, separating the mob into three parts. One part came rushing toward me.

I felt something sharp against my head and then warmth. The warmth quickly ran down my neck. I looked down at the rock that had hit me, and then I was slammed to the ground. A foot stepped partway on my head, and another crushed my thumb and forefinger.

I will see her burned alive
echoed in my head. I did not know why I bothered to pray to Noah’s God, but I did:
God of Adam, please help me from this place without allowing anyone to see my mark.
I held my scarf to my brow, stood up, and started stumbling home. A few times someone knocked into me hard enough that I should have fallen, but I did not. Perhaps Noah’s God had heard my plea. Perhaps he was my God too.

• • •

T
hat night Noah raged through the town. “The fury of the One True God grows. It is
His
place to do as He will with the lives of children. Who are you to usurp Him as ruler of all the world?”

I had no way of knowing what had happened to the babies.
Perhaps that is best,
I told myself. Now that I suspected the God of Adam was as powerful as Noah said He was, I would not be able to help being angry at Him if He had let them die. I laid the side of my head that did not ache on my sleeping blanket and hoped I would not wake up for a long time.

I dreamed that the sea fell from the sky and beat upon the earth with fists of rain. The rain piled higher, until it was as tall as a man. People screamed as huge hands made of water pulled them under. No one was spared—children, women, people who had lost a hand or foot, slow people, blind people—all of them were strangled by the sea. But I did not drown.
Where am I?
I wondered.

I was awakened by babies crying. I did not know why these cries woke me when looters ran loose through the town, whooping and screaming. I heard clay pots being smashed and the crack and whoosh of wooden tent poles breaking and dropping their goatskins. Yet it was the babies who woke me.

In the light of the full moon, I saw the figure who held the babies standing in the entryway to the tent, the door flap over her shoulder.

“Sons for Noah,” Javan said between hard-fought gulps of air.

In her meaty, bleeding arms were three babies. Without checking to make sure my scarf was pulled low over my brow, I ran to her and took them one by one. I laid them gently on my sleeping blanket. The first labored for breath more quietly but less successfully than Javan. He seemed to be choking on something, and his eyes were wide with panic. The eyes of the other two were still.

I labored over them for what remained of the night, while Javan stood guard in the doorway with her sword. I took the baby who was still trying to breathe and placed him on his stomach so that he might stop choking. The back of his head was flattened and bloody. I pressed my garment to it, but the blood soaked through the fabric. Javan helped me cut a small swath of goatskin from the tent and I pressed it to the child’s head.

When the looters no longer ran through the town, Javan joined me over the three little bodies. By dawn they were cold and their eyes shiny.

“We have done what we could,” Javan said. Her voice was garbled, but I could still hear the anger.

As we had labored, blood had dripped from her face onto the babies and the sleeping blanket. Now that there was nothing more we could do for the babies, I looked at her. Her face was so badly battered that she was recognizable only by the X upon her forehead and her large sagging breasts, which hung loose from what was left of her tunic. Her lips had swollen around a gash that ran the length of her face, just to one side of her newly crooked nose.

I quickly rose and went to the other side of the tent for water to wash her wounds. She stood too. Her eye—the one that was not swollen to the size of a fist—was as blank as the babies’ eyes.

“I am sorry,” I said. I was sorry for the babies and, I must admit, for myself, but even more for her. She had risked her life to take the babies from the other women, and she must have believed they might live. Only someone desperately hopeful would have believed this.

She did not wait for me to wash and bandage her face. She left the babies on my sleeping blanket and walked out of the tent. I didn’t know, as I watched her leave, that five people would die by her hand before the sun rose again.

• • •

N
oah did not return that morning. I lay with my head upon the ground where my sleeping blanket had been, and I spoke to Noah’s God.
Why did You not send these sons one at a time, so that they might live?
And what was most strange to me:
Why did You protect
me
from the mob and not
them
?

“Where is your sleeping blanket?” Noah asked when he returned.

“It is wrapped around three boys whom your God let die.” I did not address him as my lord. I thought he might strike me, but I didn’t care.

“He will not let their deaths go unavenged.”

“What good is that?”

“You are a child, so your vision is small. When you cry one tear,
you see the whole world through it. I have lived for hundreds of years. In those years, thousands of children have been born and thousands have died. They have been born to good and born to evil. There is more evil now than good, but God will find a way to make us righteous again. He will do it on His time and not that of an ungrateful child.”