Time Quintet 04-Many Waters (11 page)

Yalith, Dennys thought. For Yalith he might be willing to change history.

Sandy could not sleep. Not only was the tent hot, but Higgaion was snoring. Grandfather Lamech was not.  Grandfather Lamech was tossing. Turning. Grunting.

Sighing.

At last. Sandy could not stand it any longer. He crawled over to Grandfather Lamech’s sleeping skins. “Grandfather, are you awake?”

“Urn.”

 “What’s the matter?”

The old man grunted.

Sandy spoke to him as he would have to Dennys. “Come on. I know something’s bothering you. What is it?”

“El spoke to me.”

Sandy tried to peer at him through the dark. Did this mean that the old man was about to die? Right then? That night?

But the old man said, “Great troubles are coming after I die. Terrible things are going to happen.”

“What kind of terrible things?”

Lamech moved restlessly. “El did not say. Only that men’s hearts are evil and hard, and it repents El that he has made human creatures.”

“So what’s he going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Lamech said. “But I fear for my son and his family. El plans to spare no one. I fear for Yalith.  I fear for you. Sand, so far from your home.”

“Oh, I can take care of myself,” Sandy said automatically. But his words sounded hollow.

Yalith and Oholibamah came to Dennys in the deep dark just before dawn.

“You need to get out of the tent into some air,” Oholibamah told him. “You need to exercise. You will not recover until you walk about under the sky.”

“Starlight is healing.” Yalith’s voice was as gentle, he thought, as a small brook. But there were no brooks in this arid land.

He followed them out of the tent. Each took one of his hands, and their hands were small as children’s. They walked past the grove which served as outhouse, which was as far from the tents as he had ventured. Beyond them, the large tent was a dark shadow, with the smaller tents clustered about it.

His bare feet were still tender, and he walked gingerly.  The girls guided him to the smoothest ways, until the sharp dry grasses and pebbles gave way to sand, and they were in the desert. The sand felt cool to the burning soles of his feet.

They paused at a low slab of white rock, which cast a silvery shadow on the sand. “Japheth and I agreed that this is as far as you should go,” Oholibamah said. “Let’s sit here and rest for a while. We’ll take you back to the tent before dawn.”

He sat between them on the rock, leaning back on his elbows so that he could look up at the sky. “I’ve never seen so many stars.”

“You don’t have stars where you come from?” Yalith asked.

“Oh, yes, we have stars. But our atmosphere is not as clear as yours, and not nearly as many stars are visible.”

Yalith clasped Dennys’s arm tightly. “It is frightening when the stars are hidden by the swirling sand. Their song is distorted, and I can’t hear what they say.”

“What the stars say?” Dennys asked.

“Listen,” Yalith suggested. “Alarid says you are able to understand.”

At first, Dennys heard only the desert silence. Then, in the distance, he heard the roar of a lion. Behind them, on the oasis, the birds chirred sleepily, not yet ready for their dawn concert. A few baboons called back and forth. He listened, listened, focusing on one bright pattern of stars.  Closed his eyes. Listened. Seemed to hear a delicate, crystal chiming. Words. Hush. Heal. Rest. Make peace. Fear not.  He laughed in excitement. Opened his eyes to twinkling diamonds.

Yalith laughed, too. “What did they say?”

“They told me—I think—to get well, and—and to make peace. And not to be afraid. At least, I think I heard them, and I don’t think it was just my imagination.” Suddenly he was glad that Sandy was not there. Sandy was pragmatic.  Sandy would likely think Dennys was hallucinating from sunstroke. At school, if Dennys got lost in a daydream, Sandy always managed to cover for him.

“Yes, that is what the stars told you.” Yalith turned toward him with a delighted smile, very visible in the starlight. “You see!” she said to Oholibamah. “It is not everybody who can listen to the night. If the stars told you to make peace. Den, perhaps you will be the one to make peace between my father and my grandfather.”

“A big perhaps,” Oholibamah said.

“But maybe, maybe he can.” She turned back to Dennys.

“What else do you hear?”

Dennys listened again. Heard the wind rattling the palm leaves like sheafs of paper. There seemed to be words in the wind, but he could not make any sense out of them. “I can’t understand anything clearly—“

Yalith withdrew her fingers and clasped her hands together. Shook her head. Opened her eyes. “The wind seems to be talking of a time when she will blow very hard, over the water. That’s strange. The nearest water is many days away from here. I cannot understand what she is trying to say.”

“The wind blows where she wills,” Oholibamah said.  “Sometimes she is gentle and cooling. Sometimes she is fierce and blows in our eyes and stings our skin like insects and we have to hide in the tents until she is at peace again.  It is good, dear Den, that you have not come at a time when the wind blows hot against the sand. You will heal better now, at the time when she is more gentle, and the grapes and gardens grow.”

They were silent then, listening to the dawn noises becoming louder, as birds and baboons began to get ready to greet the day. Tentatively. Dennys reached for Yalith’s hand. She gave his fingers a little squeeze, then freed herself and jumped up. “It is time we took you back to the tent. This is more than enough for a first excursion. How do you feel?”

“Wonderful.” Then, acknowledging: “A little tired.” It would be good to lie down on the soft linen spread over the skins. To sleep a little. To have something cool to drink. He stifled a yawn.

“Come.” Oholibamah held out her strong hands. To his surprise, he needed her help in getting up.

When Yalith and Oholibamah needed ointments and unguents for Dennys’s burned skin, Anah, or Mahlah, if she happened to be home, would take them across the oasis to the close cluster of houses and shops to meet Tiglah, Anah’s sister.

 “I don’t like it,” Japheth said to his wife. “I don’t like your going to such places.”

She bent toward him to kiss him. “We don’t go in. I wouldn’t take Yalith into such a place even if Mahlah—“

Japheth gave a shout of anger and anguish. “What has happened to Mahlah!”

Oholibamah said, softly, “We all have choices to make, dear one, and we do not all choose the same way.”

“Why can’t I get what you need for you?”

“Oh, love, it is a house for women. You would not be welcome.”

“I have seen men coming out. And nephilim.”

“Japheth. My own. Please don’t argue. We’ll be all right. Anah is tough.”

“And Mahlah?”

Oholibamah put her arms around her husband, pressed her cheek against his. Did not answer.

Mahlah went with Oholibamah and Yalith less and less frequently, because she was less and less often in the home tent. And when she was there, she came in late, after everybody else was asleep, then slept late herself, and managed to avoid confrontation with Matred.

Matred. herself, allowed Mahlah to avoid her. She was waiting for her daughter to come to her and her husband with Ugiel, according to custom, but Ugiel did not come, and Mahlah did not speak, and Matred said nothing to Noah of Mahlah’s betrothal to a nephil. Until the betrothal was made formal, and recognized by Mahlah’s family, there would be no talk of marriage.

Marriages were often casual affairs, no more than an agreement between the two sets of parents, with the bride’s mother and father bringing her to the tent of the groom.  Matred liked to have things done properly, not overdone, but well done. Yalith and Mahlah’s two older sisters, Seerah and Hoglah, had been taken to their husbands’ tents after Matred and Noah had prepared a feast, with plenty of Noah’s good wine.

Elisheba, Shem’s wife, had come quietly to Noah’s compound and Shem’s tent, accompanied by her widowed father, and bearing several gold rings, and her teraphim.  the small figures of her household gods. Anah, Matred said, had had a vulgar wedding, with crowds of people, many uninvited. There were musicians, dancers, and far too much wine, inferior, at that—who would dare compete with Noah’s wine?—for far too many days. Such excesses were not only unnecessary, they were unseemly.

Cleaning out the big tent with Yalith’s help, Matred said, “I do not understand Mahlah.”

Yalith shook out a sleeping skin. “Neither do I. I wish she would come speak to you and Father, instead of avoiding you.”

Matred fiercely beat the dust out of one of the floor skins. “If your father knew what she’s up to, he’d be furious. There’s something on his mind, something he’s not telling me about, or he’d have noticed her strange behavior. You think that this Ugh—“

“Ugiel.”

“That nephil—you think he means to marry her?”

“I don’t know.” Yalith scrubbed out one of the stone lamps with sand. “Mahlah thinks so.”

“Speak to her,” Matred begged, “Try to make her see reason. All she needs is to come to us with her nephil and tell us that they are betrothed, and we will make all the arrangements for a wedding feast.”

“I’ll try,” Yalith said, “but I’m not sure she’ll listen.” Mahlah had always been closer to and more like the older sisters than Yalith, the youngest, the different one. “I’ll try,” she reassured her mother.

The next day she went with Oholibamah and Anah to get a fresh supply of the ointment that softened Dennys’s scabs. Perhaps Mahlah would be with the redheaded Tiglah, and Yalith could talk with her then.

Anah walked slowly, with her usual undulating of hips.

Yalith and Oholibamah walked on ahead.

“Tiglah frightens me,” Yalith whispered to Oholibamah. “I know she’s Anah’s sister, and she is probably the most beautiful woman on the oasis, but—“

“Her beauty is for sale,” Oholibamah stated flatly. “But there is no reason to be afraid of her.”

They turned onto the narrow path which ran between low white stone buildings. “I don’t like coming here,” Yalith murmured.

“I don’t like it, either,” Oholibamah said, “but there is no other way to get the salves for the Den. The last of his scabs will be off in a few days. Then we can forget the ointment. The herbal water the pelican brings will be enough.”

“Den is getting better,” Yalith said. “That’s one good thing.”

“Only one?” Oholibamah laughed.

Yalith shuddered. “Everything seems to be changing. Mahlah avoids our parents. And my father keeps hearing the Voice in the vineyards, and whatever it says is upsetting him, but he won’t tell us what El says.”

“What El says is good.” Ohoiibamah smiled. “El said that Japheth was to marry. That is why I am here.”

“You wouldn’t rather have waited?”

“I love Japheth.” Oholibamah’s voice was tender. “I know we were both very young and unready for marriage.  But we love each other. When the time comes, we will have children together.”

Yalith sighed. “I would like to love someone the way you love Japheth.”

“Be patient, little sister. Your time will come.”

They had reached the white house with the brightly beaded curtains at the entry, the house where Tiglah got the ointments they needed, and they stopped to wait for Anah, who made it very clear that she was doing them a great favor in being the go-between- The beads glittered and jangled, and Tiglah came out, followed by Mahlah—

Tiglah with her head of radiant red hair, Mahlah with her cascade of black hair, the two girls startling foils for each other.

“Where’s Anah?” Tiglah asked.

“She’s coming.” Oholibamah looked balk down the path to where Anah was slowly following them.

“Mahlah!” Yalith exclaimed. “I’m glad to see you. I need to talk to you.”

Mahlah raised her hands and pushed back a thick fall of black hair. “That’s funny. I want to talk to you, too.  Shall we go inside?”

 “No.” Yaltth drew back. “Please—“

“I could have your hair brushed,” Mahlah coaxed, “the way Tiglah’s and mine is, so it would look more beautiful.”

“No,” Yalith repeated.

Mahlah shrugged. “We can sit over here then, while Anah and Oholibamah go with Tiglah to get the ointment.” She led Yalith a little way down the path to a low wall. Yalith, with sudden and unexpected shock, saw that Mahlah’s usually flat belly was softly rounding.

“Mahlah,” she urged. “Please, please, you and Ugiel please come to our parents and tell them that you’re betrothed.”

Mahlah’s little hands proudly touched the small roundness. “And will be married soon.”

“Then please come and tell them. Mother will need time to prepare a wedding feast.”

“No, she won’t,” Mahlah said. “That is not how things are done with the nephilim. I will have a nephil wedding.”

“But Mother—“

Again Mahlah’s little hands stroked her stomach. “I’m sorry, really, I’m sorry. But she had it her own way with our sisters. She’ll probably have it her own way with you.  So she’ll just have to let me do it my way.”

“But why? Isn’t the old way good enough for you?”

Mahlah laughed. “Customs change. We have to move with the times.” There was a slight hiss to her speech which Yalith had never heard before. She sounded more like Ugiel than like Mahlah. The sisters sat side by side on the wall, the silence between them becoming more and more uncomfortable, until at last Yalith broke it.

 “What did you want to see me about?”

“Can’t you guess?”

No.”

 “Eblis.”

Yalith looked at her in surprise. “But why—“

“He likes you,” Mahlah said. “He says he has offered to teach you.”

“No—“

“Why not?”

 “I’m taking care of the Den. That’s why we’re here, to get salve for him.”

Again Mahlah sounded more like Ugiel than like Yalith’s sister. “That’s all very noble. But it needn’t stop you from going out with Eblis. Don’t you realize what an honor that is, to have Eblis interested in you?” She sounded strangely sibilant.

“I know he does me much honor.” Yalith’s voice was low.