The creator of all's Arc

Chapter 9 of 13

The creator went to Noah on a clear morning while the boy, now a gray man with a cup in his hand, sat under a fig tree. The creator did not show a face. He never did. He spoke into the still air between the leaves and said the water was coming, and told Noah the length of the boat, and the width, and the height, and how many animals to take. Noah set the cup down. He listened until the voice was done. Then he walked to the yard and picked up an axe. By the second week the neighbors came to watch. By the second month they came to laugh. Noah cut cedar and dragged it across dry ground where no river ran. Children threw stones at the hull. A metalworker spat in the dirt and asked which sea he planned to sail on. Noah answered none of them. He drank from his cup in the evenings and worked again at dawn. The creator watched the small hands do the small thing, and was satisfied, and turned his attention to the other matter. He called his warrior first. Michael came in his plate with the burning sword low at his side. "Bind them," the creator said. "Azazel. Penemue. The third. Take them under the earth." "How deep," Michael said. "Past root. Past water." Gabriel came next with the message already folded in his mouth. "They will not come quietly," Gabriel said. "No," the creator said. "They will not." The archangels went down into the low country and found Azazel at a forge, hammering an edge into a blade he had shown a man how to make. Michael broke the anvil with one stroke and put the sword to Azazel's throat. Azazel did not lift his hands. "You waited long enough," Azazel said. "I thought you had forgotten." "I do not forget," Michael said. Gabriel found Penemue in a scribe's tent, watching a boy copy a lie onto a clay tablet. Gabriel took the reed pen from the boy's hand and set it down. "Come," Gabriel said. Penemue closed the tablet. "I cannot say why I did it." "That is not the message," Gabriel said. "The message is come." They took the third from a bed he should not have been in. They chained all three in a cell of rough stone with iron in the walls and torches that would not go out. The creator sealed the roof of that place with a canopy of his own fire, a living ceiling that burned without wood and would not let a wing pass. The fallen ones sat under the flame but they did not remain quiet. The creator turned back to the surface. The ark stood half-built in a dry yard. The rain had not started. But the sky above the low country was already changing color, and every honest man who looked up felt his stomach turn.