People of the Flood (Ark Chronicles 2) (3 page)

“
Does it taste bad?” Ham asked.

Japheth, wiping his mouth and gulping water, shot him a withering look.

Ham bared his teeth. Then he grabbed a piece and shoved it into his mouth. He didn’t try to taste it, just chewed fast and swallowed without gagging. It was salty and very strange. Yet soon, he began to eat with gusto.

“
Let me try,” Kush said.

“
Me, too,” chirped Elam.

“
And me, and me, too,” shouted the other children.

Later in the week
, Ham had an idea. He cudgeled his memories from a time that seemed long ago and began a process that took the rest of the spring and early summer. He made glues out of boiled-down cattle tendons and skin mixed with bones. Then he used animal horn and laminated wood—the process for the wood took several weeks. Finally, he glued and pressed the pieces of horn and wood, steaming them over a hot fire. The wood and horn hardened, or “cured,” into a nearly complete circle, the elements fused together.

It was a composite bow
, and it came out a sinister, shiny black color.

Straining with effort, Ham forced the bow in the opposite direction as its natural relaxed shape and strung it with catgut thread
. He then plucked the string. It was incredibly taut.

In the tent
, he slipped a leather guard over his left wrist. “Walk with me, boy.”

Holding onto the arrow-case, Kush ran to keep up
. The arrows had been made from the strongest reeds, with chiseled flint tips for points and crow feathers to help stabilize the arrow in flight.

Ham stopped thirty paces from a straw target
. Winded and wide-eyed, Kush held up the arrow-case. “Thank you, my boy,” Ham said, selecting a fire-hardened practice arrow. He lifted the bow, notched the arrow and squinted, one-eyed. His arm trembled as he drew back—the “pull” was incredible. The arrow hissed and hit the target.

“
Did you see how fast it went?” Kush said. “Do it again, Daddy.”

Ham
’s lips twitched. Oh, he saw. He was the world’s best-armed man now. He practiced until he backed up sixty paces and hit the center every time. All the children watched.

“
It works,” Japheth said, as he stroked his beard.

“
How could you remember everything correctly?” Europa asked.

“
That is Ham’s gift,” Gaea said. “He has a knack for making things.”

The next morning
, Ham hunted the fields. Rabbit stew became a popular item in his tent, and the creatures learned to stay out of his way.

Shem and Japheth made simple bows from a single length of wood
. Ham showed them how to make catgut thread and fashion arrows. His arrows, however, always seemed straighter, better fletched and with sharper flint tips. Still, theirs slew rodents.

A week before harvest, Noah and Ham strolled through a wheat field with Kush tagging along
. The wind bent the ripe stalks, and Ham spied movement. He motioned to the others, slipped free the black bow and let an arrow fly.

“
Kush, take that home, skin it and give it to your mother.”

“
Do I have to?” Kush complained.

“
Yes,” Noah said. “Don’t you know that a child’s glory is obedience to his parents?”

Kush ducked his head, but Ham saw him scowl.

“Hurry,” Ham said. “Listen to your grandfather.”

Kush loped for the slain rabbit, crushing grain stalks.

Noah turned to Ham.

“
I know,” Ham said. “I’ll tell him when we get home to walk more carefully in the fields.”

“
Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,” Noah said, “but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.”

“
You want me to spank him?”

“
My son, he who rebels against authority is rebelling against what Jehovah has instituted. Rebels thus bring judgment on themselves.”

“
Kush is high-spirited, is all. Better to let him run free for a time like a young donkey, and let him wear himself out.”

“
Do you fear to discipline him?” Noah asked.

“
Of course not,” Ham said. Sometimes, Kush made him so angry that a swift slap on the butt was exactly what the boy got.

Noah snapped a stalk and rubbed the wheat with his fingers, examining the grain
. He began to talk of the coming harvest.

Ham only half listened
. His father seldom criticized Japheth or Shem’s children. He was too busy praising them.

Noah interrupted his own discourse on the crops
. “I only said what I did, my son, because some day Gomer, Elam and Kush will be the patriarchs of great nations. How they are trained will greatly influence humanity.”

Later in the evening
, as Ham chipped new arrow flints, he wondered if their children and grandchildren would war against one another someday. He scratched his cheek. Despite his bad hip, he could defeat either Japheth or Shem. Could Kush do likewise with his cousins?

H
am snorted, shaking his head, telling himself he was stupid to think about war. Such things wouldn’t happen for the next few hundred years. Let the others worry about it when it happened.

6.

As the years passed, their tools from the Antediluvian World wore out, disappeared or broke, and with extra hands came the need for even more tools. The question, of course, was where to get these items. In the good old days, a trip through the forest road to Arad with a sack of silver shekels solved the problem. Or, perhaps, a day at the forge in the old Ark-construction yard casting new tools made good any lack. Arad had vanished, copper ores were scarce or far away, and the needed tin to mix with the copper and make bronze was even harder to acquire. Fortunately, stone, bone, ivory and wood filled much of the lack. Unfortunately, the sons of Noah weren’t as familiar with those substances, at least not as replacements for copper or bronze.

Noah
’s great age, early training and memory came to the rescue. He had been born one thousand and fifty-six years after the creation of the Earth—1056 AC (After Creation). Enos, a grandson of Father Adam and a direct ancestor of Noah, had died 1140 AC, when Noah was eighty-four. Enos’s son Cainan had died 1235 AC. Cainan’s son Mahalaleel had died in 1290. Mahalaleel had been the father of Jared, who in turn had been the father of Enoch, who had been Methuselah’s father. Noah had never met Enoch, as Enoch had been translated to heaven in 987 AC. What all this meant was that Methuselah had known Father Adam well, as Adam had died 930 AC, when Methuselah was 243 years old. Many of Methuselah’s earliest lessons had been in stone, bone, ivory and woodwork. The smelting of ores to make copper and bronze had taken many years of trial and error to learn. Many of those lessons in the old crafts, although nearly superfluous by Noah’s time, had been taught him nonetheless.

Nor was it amazing that Noah remembered such old knowledge, at least not amazing considering
his strict memory training as a youth. On the first day of creation, Adam had named all the animals. In several regards, it was a breathtaking accomplishment. Firstly, the coining of apt names was an art. Adam was the master of it, for Jehovah had created him without flaw. Adam saw a beast and named it. Perhaps as impressive, he remembered what he had named it. The gift of instant and precise memory, like a perfect painting, was at Adam’s command. With man’s fall, such perfection was lost. But the high standards of such gifted memory reigned among early man. By Noah’s time, the art of memorization had been at its keenest pitch. Writing occurred, but infrequently. To unroll a scroll and find a quote without page numbers proved tedious. It was easier to remember facts.

Seth
, the son of Adam, as he did so many things, codified and outlined the process of memory. To train the mind to remember, a person selected physical locations and formed mental images of the things he wished to recall. He stored the mental images in these places and in a certain order. For instance, in a house, he might put an imaginary spear on a doormat and a dove on the table, in that way recalling later to speak first of war and then peace. Such a system worked for all kinds of memory. Continual practice allowed a vast amount of knowledge to be retained by early humanity, feats unimaginable in later ages.

As Enos had once said,
“Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Methuselah had put it: “Memory is the treasure and guardian of all things.” Whether a person was a poet, singer, physician, law keeper or priest, he needed memory.

Noah now passed his
stored knowledge to Japheth, Shem and Ham. With stone, bone, ivory and wood, an assortment of weapons and tools become possible: polishers, mortars, axes, planes, scrapers, drills, lamps, knives, chisels, choppers, lances, anvils, etchers, daggers, fish-hooks, harpoons, wedges, awls, pins and many others.

Not as hard as stone but more resilient, deer antlers became a prime source for tools
. With a flint graver—a stout chisel with a sharp edge—Ham, Shem or Noah cut twin grooves in an antler, slicing out a long, thin triangle fragment. The bottom flat edge or base Ham pried until it snapped, and then he held an antler splinter in his palm, which was never longer than the span of his hand. With a fine flint point that he rotated to-and-fro near the splinter base, Ham bored a hole into the future needle, where Rahab would later tie flax thread. He scraped the antler splinter against a block of sandstone, smoothing it until it was polished like the best metal. Only then did he give it to Rahab, who rubbed the needle tip against sandstone until, as the saying went: “It was needle sharp.”

Needles, harpoon tips and mattock or hoe edges were all fashioned this way.

Japheth, Shem and Ham also used the antlers as picks. In late fall, with the crops in, and before the harshest weather howled down from the north, they packed several donkeys with supplies, gathered their oldest boys and trekked deep into the Ararat Mountains. Steep scree slopes just below the snowline held boulders of rhyolite, a tough stone, perfect for what they desired. Unpacking the donkeys, setting up camp and giving strict instructions to the boys, Ham and Shem trudged up the slopes. At the selected site, they swung the antler picks against the boulders, chipping off slabs of stone.

These slabs they carted to an overhang, sitting cross-legged and laying the rhyolite over harder anvil rocks
. With a well-worn hammer-stone and with shrewd, hard-learned blows, they struck off flake after flake. The flakes they put into leather bags, to fashion arrowheads later. Shem wore gloves. Ham, with horn-like calluses on his palms and fingers, forewent the gloves. He said they interfered with the work, and because of his choice, blisters always formed on his skin.

A day of swinging a hammer-stone made his arms ache with fatigue
. Still, his stone axe-heads were smoother and sharper than his brothers’ were, and he ruined less of them. The trouble was that one wrong blow could chip off too much stone and destroy the entire project, be it arrow or axe-head. The knapper—as a stoneworker had been called before the Flood—used different weights or materials and altered the strength and direction of the blow to vary the depth of his chip into the stone. Last of all, a bone or stone point was used to push off small
spalls
of stone to give the axe-head its final shape.

A day
’s labor usually proved sufficient for their meager needs, never more than two days. The brothers then packaged each finished axe-head in wool, filled the woven basket saddlebags with them and the myriad stone flakes and journeyed home.

For flint knives, chisels and picks
, they journeyed to the Chalk Mounds leagues west of the northern slopes. The best flint came out of a hole ten feet deep.
Quarry fresh
flint was lighter and more quickly worked than stones weathered by wind and sun, and thus worth the extra effort to acquire. Digging out the flint was hot, sweaty work, and as the boys grew older, their fathers introduced them to the various stages of the job. Kush’s first task was holding onto a large flint piece. Ham then chipped it with a bone chisel and hammer-stone, explaining the procedure to Kush as he went along.

As usual, Ham wondered if there were easier ways to do it
. Japheth and Shem simply accepted that if Adam, Seth, Enos and the others had done it this way, it was good enough for them. The others worked at perfecting their skills. By experimenting, Ham learned that baking certain flints improved their flaking quality. Japheth raised his eyebrows when told about it, shrugged, and soon thereafter baked flints like Ham.

With rhyolite axes
, they felled trees; with flint-edged sickles, the sons of Noah harvested the crops. With polished stone adzes, they worked wood and with ground stone bowls that held burning grease, they lit their tents at night. Obsidian teeth inserted into a length of wood made a saw. Scraper-stone shaped like a shell became a shovel or hoe. Rough-edged stones turned into files, and a stone in a sling proved one of the best weapons. Bone and ivory pins and broaches held their cloaks. Pincers, grindstones, pulleys, ladders and levers, their tool-chests grew, as did their armories. Ivory combs, shell necklaces—the shells scattered about the mountains—polished ornamental antler handles, amber and ivory figurines and buttons, the uses of these plentiful substances proved almost as endless as the imagination.

Their former garments also vanished with time
. Soon the woolen tunic reaching Ham’s knees, which he belted at the waist, came from the fleece of his flocks. They sheared them in summer, washing the animals thoroughly two days before the event. That allowed time enough for the fleece to dry and restored some of the sheep’s natural grease, which helped later in the spinning process. When all the wool was collected, it was combed or carded to get rid of the impurities and to align the fibers. Then the wool was put onto a distaff, a long wooden stick, with a weighted whorl attached to the bottom of the stick. With a distaff and whorl, Rahab and the others spun wool. Soon the oldest girls were also doing this, and with the wool, they fashioned the many garments, blankets, and such.

Over his woolen
tunic, Ham wore a cloak, fastened at the shoulder with a bone toggle pin. Around his throat hung a necklet of copper beads, and usually he wore a broad-brimmed hat made of woven straw. Vegetable dyes—yellows, greens and blues—colored his tunics and cloaks, and those of his wives and daughters. The women wore half-sleeved blouses and an openwork skirt well below their knees, with seashell necklaces and knitted lace hairnets.

Perhaps the biggest surprise to Ham was the lack of boredom
. Although the world held only a handful of people, he had plenty to occupy himself with. Too much, he sometimes thought. Then he shrugged and limped to his next task.