Noah by Mark Morris

red. They were a little younger than Ila, but almost as pretty.
    The girls were laughing together. They had not seen the boys. Quickly Ham stepped back off the path, indicating with a silent squeeze of Japheth’s shoulder that he should do the same. The boys were used to the forest, and slipped into a nearby clump of thick, flowering bushes with barely a rustle of leaves. Unseen, they watched the two girls approach, and then follow a left-hand fork in the path that would take them closer to the clearing and the Ark. When the girls were out of earshot, Japheth whispered, “Who are they?”
    Ham shrugged, but his eyes were wide with excitement and anticipation. As if he hardly dared believe it, he whispered, “Wives?”
    Japheth looked stunned—and a little alarmed.
    “What should we do?”
    “Follow them,” Ham said decisively.
    His eyes fixed on the spot where the girls had slipped out of sight, he led Japheth out of the bushes. However he had been so enchanted by the girls themselves that he had given no thought to the possibility that they might not be alone. As he steppedout on to the forest path, something moved to block his way, a dark shadow falling over him.
    Ham’s head jerked up to see a grinning man standing over him, with long, yellow teeth and a tangled, filthy beard. The man was raising an axe above his head, with the clear intention of cleaving Ham’s skull in two—but before he could use it, something huge and heavy smashed into the side of the man’s head, crushing his skull.
    The man dropped like a boneless weight, leaving Ham with a confused impression of a wall of dented metal and black leather. A smell of old blood and rank, unwashed flesh filled his nostrils. Instinctively he stepped back and again looked up.
    The man’s killer was even more terrifying than the man himself had been. Clad in scratched and battered armor, massive and scarred and heavily muscled, his face was as brutal and slab-like as that of any Watcher. Various weapons dangled from his belt, and the huge war axe he had used hung from a hand that was encased in a black leather gauntlet, studded with jags of metal.
    Ham looked at the blood dripping from the head of the weapon, and wondered if he was next.
    The man was old—his long hair and his long forked beard were gray and matted. Yet this did not detract from his aura of savage power. He glared down at Ham, and then he grinned. Japheth, standing behind Ham, wheeled and ran away, shrieking, “Father! Father!” As he did, Ham noticed that the man wore a long but shriveled reptile skin wrapped around his shoulders. The man saw him staring and said in a gruff but not unkind voice, “You like it?”
    Ham, unable to speak, nodded.
    The man leaned down a little, bringing his terrible face, pitted and pockmarked with white scar tissue, closer to Ham’s own.
    “Are you afraid of me?”
    Ham nodded again.
    The man chuckled, as if pleased to find that he was a figure of terror. But he said, “Don’t be afraid.”
    Behind him other soldiers, equally battle-scarred, were emerging from the forest—ten… twenty… more. And there were more women with them, too. Ham blushed as they stared at him—or as he
imagined
them staring at him. He was too embarrassed to establish eye contact with them, and still too terrified of the man-mountain in front of him.
    “What’s your name?” the man—their leader—asked.
    For one terrible moment Ham thought he would be unable to make a sound in reply.
    “Ham,” he croaked finally
    The man bashed his armored chest with a gauntleted hand.
    “I am Tubal-cain. Do you know me?”
    Ham shook his head, eliciting a murmur of disapproval from the group of soldiers and women arrayed behind their leader.
    Tubal-cain’s face hardened. He gripped the handle of the axe so tightly that his leather gauntlet creaked.
    “You don’t know your king?” he demanded.
    Terrified, but also fascinated, Ham stared at the axe. He had no doubt that Tubal-cain