And another question needles at me, adding extra pinpricks of guilt: Why didn’t I dream of Jorin? Yes, there was that brief glimpse of him at the sheep shearing, but I didn’t see him pleading with me in those days before the storm, didn’t see our parting at the ark doors, didn’t see him drowning, dying—
I don’t even want to think it. Perhaps I didn’t dream of Jorin because we left each other with kind words rather than anger. Yes—that must be it.
I’m afraid to fall back into sleep, to risk another nightmare, but my exhaustion is bone deep and my eyelids grow heavier and heavier, until finally I can fight their weight no longer.
I sleep, with Shai in my lap and Aliye the dove beside me.
I wake to another dim morning, and to relief—relief edged with guilt. For no more dreams have troubled my sleep.
***
Three more days pass—one, two, three slashes on the ark wall behind the spot where I sleep—and we develop a routine of sorts. Since I’m the youngest and strongest of the women save Shai, I spend the morning filling water buckets on deck and hauling them down to the lower level, over and over till my arms ache. My mother, Nemzar, Zeda, and even Shai stay on the lower level, where they alternate watering the animals with the full buckets I bring them, and filling empty waste buckets with animal refuse. They leave the waste by the ladder for me to carry up and toss overboard. In three days I’ve perfected the art of flinging the foul-smelling stuff as far from the ark as possible, without once looking down at the churning waves and whatever horrors they might toss my way.
Japheth sometimes joins me on my trips up and down the ladder, though he’s not much help—he’s merely searching for an excuse to check on Arisi. Unlike the rest of us, Arisi hasn’t recovered from her sickness; every few hours it seems she suffers a spell of nausea so severe she can’t stand, or even sit up straight. We’re all worried, but Japheth most of all. Unfortunately, whenever he manages to sneak a few minutes with his wife, Noah soon notices his absence and calls him back to whatever task is keeping the men busy.
Father tells me the men’s work is never-ending, for any damage to the ark from floating debris, rotting wood or even woodworms must be repaired immediately, lest we all end up beneath the waves. And they’re checking and repairing the animal cages as well, after all the jostling they took during the storm. A tiger or jackal running loose through the ark would be as disastrous as a leak, and Noah is equally concerned with the cages of rabbits and hedgehogs, moles and shrews: he reminds us that one lost creature would mean the death of all animals of that kind, and God has entrusted them all to our care. Again my mind turns to the trader and his tales of exotic creatures—creatures we certainly aren’t caring for—but I know better than to speak of those stories, or even to think them too loudly.
Kenaan’s supposed to be feeding and cleaning up after the flesh-eaters in addition to helping the men, and occasionally I see him meandering through the cages, tossing bits of meat through the bars. Whenever we cross paths, he gives me that lopsided smile Derya once found so charming, as though nothing has changed between us. That smile makes my stomach feel worse than the foul odors and the rocking of the ship combined, but I don’t feel ready to confront him, so I merely cast my eyes away from him and hurry to clean another cage.
Kenaan himself certainly isn’t doing much cleaning: the tigers’ and wolves’ cages are littered with droppings old and new, and I imagine I can smell an extra sharpness amid the general stench every time I near them. I feel terrible for the tigers, and perhaps if I can work up the courage, I’ll clean their cage myself one day soon. Somehow, though, I can’t bring myself to suffer much pity for the wolves and jackals. Their shrewd, vicious eyes remind me a bit of Munzir’s, and their snarls seem to grow in proportion to the shrinking of their bellies.
I hope Kenaan is still tending to his birds and reptiles on the second level at least, for no one else is. But I’m not going to ask him.
Around midday, or as close as we can get—time is fuzzy here, without the sun to guide us—we return to the second level for a short while, where we attempt to recover from the suffocating odor and closeness down below. Those of us who can manage it choke down a bit of bread, and we all gulp down rainwater, the one supply we have more than enough of. It’s not as sweet as our river water, but with our parched throats, it will do. Then it’s back below to feed the animals. We’ve decided that if we feed them later in the day, they’ll be less likely to cry out with hunger in the night, disturbing our own slumber.
There are so many creatures to tend that we’d waste time by working together, so we each take one of the ark’s vast rooms. Even Shai works on her own, caring for some of the farm animals on the left side of the ark. I’ve claimed the room farthest to the right, where the elephants are penned.
It would seem impossible, what with the animal life teeming through the ark and the family I know are only a wall or two away, but somehow the space around me becomes lonesome, even desolate, on these long afternoons. The animal noises fade into a dull, eerie hum, and my body braces as if expecting an ill-intentioned intruder to ambush me at any moment. I imagine Derya’s ghost rising from the waves, flowing like mist through the walls of the ark, and wrapping those cold, dripping-wet arms around me…
But I’m deceiving myself, for I fear I am sensing a prowler in the darkness, someone much more substantial—and potentially dangerous—than a ghost:
Kenaan. We’ve avoided each other since we set foot on the ark, and even before that, since that awful afternoon in the forest. Eventually something will have to give. And if he thought he had some right to me before, then now, when I might as well be the only unmarried woman in the world save his sister…
I’d rather think about Derya’s ghost.
On the seventh afternoon, my worries finally get the best of me. I’m pouring grain for the animals nearest the left wall—porcupines and squirrels, hares and voles—when I hear a plodding footstep on the other side of the wall. I freeze; the footstep stops. I move on, shaking my head, telling myself to calm down; the footsteps continue, two, three, four, almost in time with my own. My heartbeat becomes faster, lighter, mirroring the frenzied scrabble of the squirrels’ claws as I approach their cage.
Of course you hear footsteps, I tell myself. It’s Mother or Aunt Zeda, feeding animals on the other side of the wall. I listen a moment longer, shake my head again, almost as though I’m arguing with myself—these footsteps are much too heavy to belong to a woman. So it’s Father or Ham. But why would they be walking along the interior wall, so slowly and deliberately, stopping when I stop and moving when I move? You’re just imagining that.
Finally I can take it no longer; if Kenaan is on the other side of that wall, I’d rather confront him head-on. Or so I tell myself, though the pulse threatening to fly out my throat seems to say otherwise. I lower my sack of grain to the floor and creep along the wall, toward the doorway, hoping I can peek around the corner and discover the prowler before he knows I’m coming. I'm almost there—three steps, two steps, one—and I hold my breath, bite hard on my lip to stop any sound from escaping as I poke my head through the doorway—
—to find myself a hand’s breadth from the fleshy, smelly open mouth of a camel. My heart gives one heavy thud in my chest, a combination of shock and relief, before it begins to slow again. “What are you doing all the way over here?” I ask the beast. We’ve tied the camels on the left side of the ark, near the farm animals. I inspect the goat-hair rope hanging from this one’s neck to find that he—or she—has chewed through it. “Surely someone should have seen you wandering through and taken you back?” I’m talking to…her, I’ll settle on her…as though she can understand me, more for my sake than hers, trying to convince myself everything’s normal. Or as normal as it can be, under the circumstances.
I grab the end of the rope lead, inspecting the tooth-gnawed edges. Looks like it took some work to chew all the way through, so if I tie her up again, maybe she’ll
stay put for at least a day.
When I tug on the rope and step forward across the ark, the camel follows docilely enough. “What did you want over here, then?” I ask her, expecting Mother or Aunt Zeda to dart out at any moment and grumble about my talking to the air. But I make it all the way to the other end of the ark without a single interruption. They must all be upstairs already, then, and it must be later than I thought. Still, I feel a bit safer now that my menacing intruder revealed herself as a placid camel, and after I’ve tied her back to her post, I decide to bring some extra hay back to the elephants.
The elephants have already eaten all the hay that once lined the floor within their fence, and when I dump this new bale down and begin pulling it apart to make bedding, Enise and Bilal immediately grab trunkfuls and stuff them into their wide mouths. I wish they wouldn’t; I don’t think the wood floor is good for them. I’m afraid some type of sore, or fungus, is creeping up from the soles of their feet, between the cracks of their oddly charming toenails; but I don’t want to look too close, since I have no way to help them.
Bilal butts my side with his trunk, offering me some hay. “You’re sweet,” I tell him, “but I don’t think my stomach can handle—” I break off as I realize he’s holding not hay, but the block of wood I found the other day. “Not this again?” I take the wood from his trunk, turn it over in my hands. “I don’t have the time or energy to—” My words peter out once more as I examine the wood more closely. Surely the remnant I found the other day wasn’t quite so large, and it didn’t have that beautiful reddish-gold whorl near one edge, which would make the perfect elephant eye. I could carve the trunk right there, where the side slopes down, and then the floppy ear… But I don’t even have time to think of all this. And more importantly—
Where would Bilal get a second piece of wood?
***
I’ve put the mystery out of my mind by the time I climb the ladder to the second floor. Arisi is alone in the women’s room, and she answers the question in my eyes before I can voice it: “The others are up in the deck house.”
“Even Shai?”
Arisi shrugs. “Zeda said the air would be good for her. She tried to get me to come too.” I slump to the floor beside Arisi as she continues, “I don’t think they’re letting Shai out on deck, though.”
I close my eyes and attempt to shut out the vision of that great mass of water teeming below the deck, dark and unfathomable as an endless nightmare. An unsettling scuttling sound forces my eyes open again; I’m relieved to find it’s just Aliye, shuffling her way toward me, looking very put out that her wings still refuse to lift her. She bobs her head forward and back as she moves, letting out an occasional squawk, like an old woman clucking and scolding her grandchildren. Maybe she’s not only bothered by her wing—I think she’s annoyed with me for sitting by Arisi rather than in my usual spot beside her nest.
“They’re cooking lentils,” Arisi says. “And an egg,” with such wonder in her voice you’d think eggs were made of gold. Now that we’re not quite so seasick, Noah has brought out the hearthstones and cooking pots he asked Grandmother Nemzar to carry on board, and the deck house has become our makeshift kitchen. We still don’t have enough food—we’re rationing carefully, since we have no idea how long our supplies must last us—but at least we have a slightly greater variety now. We even have a bit of milk from our goat and cow.
“I think Aliye’s hungry too,” I say as the dove reaches me and begins to peck around my hands, where I’m sure she smells the grain I’ve been handling all day. Arisi produces a hunk of rock-hard bread from what appears to be her personal stash, and I do my best to break it into pieces for the bird. Only then do I register what Arisi’s been doing: she has a long coil of goat-hair rope on her lap and is separating it into thinner strands. Judging by the number of separate pieces on her lap, she’s been at it for a while. A flash comes to me of the camel down below, gnawing at her rope, and I can’t help but shiver.
Arisi notices my staring and holds up a few of the strands. “I’m going to knot them together into a fishing net.” She breaks into a sheepish but sunny grin. “Or at least I’ll try to.”
Relief rolls through me, warm and soothing. It will be good for Arisi to have a task, and, as I tell her aloud, “We could certainly use the fish, if there’s any left out there.” It’s hard to believe any living creatures could have survived this destruction, but then fish would find the water a refuge rather than a death trap.
“Noah didn’t ask us to bring live fish on board,” Arisi points out, as though she can read my thoughts. Sometimes I suspect she really can.
“How would we even…” I imagine Kenaan trying to capture all manner of fish in a bucket or barrel, claiming he’s found one male and one female of each type, and then scrambling to separate them by kind before the larger ones eat the smaller. Perhaps I’m just too exhausted and overwrought, but somehow the idea seems so ridiculous, I can’t stop myself from laughing out loud.
And once I start laughing, I can’t seem to stop.
My giggles must be contagious, for Arisi soon joins in, letting out great, desperate heaves of laughter that I worry will exhaust her. I assume she’s picturing a scene similar to the one in my own head. Even Aliye, unwilling to be left out, gives a few chuckle-like chirrups.
“You know what I’m really hungry for?” Arisi gasps out between laughs. She regains control of herself, holding her breath for a long, dramatic moment before she lets out… “Dirt.”
“Dirt?” I laugh even harder.
“Yes, dirt,” she says, in the same awestruck voice as egg. “Just think of it: that rich, earthy, meaty scent…”
“…mmm, yes…” I’d give anything to smell solid ground right now.
“…the rough, grainy feel of it between your hands…” Arisi rubs her fingers together almost greedily.
“Oh, yes,” I say.
“…the crunch and the weight of it in your mouth, against your tongue…”
She lost me there.
“And you know what else?” she goes on, the pitch of her voice rising higher and higher. “Salt. Oh, I could eat an entire barrel full of salt. Those beautiful, glorious, shining white crystals…I’m dizzy with wanting it.”
My stomach sinks, the last of my laughter dying away all at once, as I realize Arisi’s not joking. She really does want to eat dirt—and salt. We could have brought salt onto the ark, if we’d only known, only thought ahead, and then perhaps Arisi wouldn’t be so sick and miserable now.
If we’d only known, if we’d only thought ahead… So many things might be different. Derya and Jorin might be sitting here beside me, instead of… Instead of…
I close my eyes again, desperate to push back the weight of everything I can’t change. Arisi continues to rhapsodize about salt—salt on bread, salt on goat cheese, salt by the handful—until her words become a tuneless lullaby, a nonsense song for children. I focus on the subtle shifting of the ark beneath me, a motion I’m so used to I barely notice it anymore, and I tell myself it’s no more than the gentle rocking of a baby’s cradle.
***
After my encounter with the camel, I thought I’d be able to relax a bit, but by the afternoon of the eighth day I’m on edge again. I just can’t shake the sense that some creature is following me—a creature with two legs, not four—and I swear I feel eyes boring through me. Sentient, self-aware eyes that see me as more than a source of grain or dried meat. I search the space around me as I move through the room, but the ark is so dim, so full of shadowy corners and narrow spaces between cages, so alive with bursts of animal movement, that my efforts seem pointless.
To add to my unease, I keep finding wood remnants near the cages, remnants I would swear weren’t there the day before. I suppose the workers left many scraps behind while building the ark—after all, they never believed anyone would use it—and that these scraps would shift with the movement of the water beneath us. Still, there are so many, and they seem
so deliberately placed in my path, that I find it hard to believe it’s all coincidence. There’s one next to the flower birds—whose feathers are no longer the color of my favorite flowers, but have faded to a dull, tired white—one inside the baby lions’ cage, and another piece by the shrews that’s so large I trip over it and nearly—
Wait. What was that? There it is again: a flicker of movement, a blur of what looks like cloth. As soon as I turn toward the motion, it stops—which only makes me more suspicious. The familiar signs of panic rise up—my breath quickens, my heart flutters like flapping wings—and I quickly force them down. I will not let Kenaan get the best of me.
I take a step forward, in the direction of the movement, and I see yet another flicker, this one farther to the right. I turn to follow, my steps surer now, for I have the advantage here, where he can’t go much farther before ramming into the ark wall. And my knife is still tucked safely in the belt I’ve refused to take off, though the cloth is now more gray-brown than blue. Come to think of it, the transformation of my clothing reminds me of the bit of flower-birds’ feathers.
I’m distracting myself—yes, that’s good. Already my heartbeat has returned to a steady, determined boom in my chest. I take another step forward, then another; the elephants see me and trumpet, but I’m tracking the movement away from their corner, into that dark mass of cages…
“You might as well come out, Kenaan,” I call. My voice sounds surer than I feel, and it gives me new courage. “I know you’re there,” I go on. “We need to talk. We’re going to be on this ark together for a while, and—”
A figure steps slowly forward from between two cages, still in shadow so all I can see is a hint of his ripped, once-white tunic and, above it…a flash of gold? It must be a trick of the light. I take a deep breath, step forward again just as the figure moves closer, and—