The 22 Letters (24 page)

For a terrible moment Nun doubted, and wondered if the High Priest might not be right. He looked at the face of the Chaldean beside him, but in it he saw the last thing that he expected. He saw compassion, and when the sage spoke there was sorrow in his voice. “Farewell again, High Priest of Gebal,” were the Chaldean's words. “Pray to your gods that you may be right. But I fear we shall not meet again.”

Together Nun and the Chaldean made for the land gate of the town, and then up the track among the olive orchards and terraces. As the track became steeper he began to realize what an old man his companion was. He moved slowly and painfully, and Nun, who was no mountaineer himself, had often to help him. But whenever they met families who had settled themselves on the lower slopes, the Chaldean urged them to go higher, higher. Where the pine woods began, they came upon Resh and the aunts resting at the base of a great rock, while Beth stood anxiously looking out from the top of it. Nun was relieved to see them, but the old man cried urgently, “Bid them climb higher, bid them seek the tops of the foothills, the level spaces! There is no trust in the rocks and cliffs now.”

Nun began to protest. “Surely this rock has stood for ages above Gebal! What can be safer?”

But the sage said, “Indeed, that rock may have stood for ages, but when the hour of destruction comes, who knows what rock will stand?”

So Nun urged his family and the other Giblites upward to the rounded tops of the foothills and the flat lands before the mountains themselves began. He settled Resh and the older women on a gentle slope that gave a view of the city below and the sea coast to the North and South, and told Beth that he was going to search for Zayin, and the King.

As he scrambled across the face of the hill toward the South, his heart stood still as he saw a line of hundreds of figures winding across the other side of a valley, with the sun glinting on their armor and weapons. An army! Then he realized it must be Zayin's army coming up from the direction of the Dog River. And yes, at the head of them was a figure mounted on a horse. Zayin must have ridden down the coast and diverted the army up into the hills.

Nun went ahead to meet his brother, meaning to advise him as to the safest places on the hills. In the glaring heat of the afternoon, the population of Gebal was sorting itself out, family by family, over the bare hillside. Mothers were still anxiously asking after children they had mislaid in the exodus from the city, crying children were being led from group to group, looking for their parents. Old people were being settled comfortably on the ground, babies were being fed, women were already wandering in search of water, young boys were running and climbing over the rocks, carried away by the excitement of the moment and pursued by the angry cries of their parents. But those families that were already quietly settled, and lonely individuals who had nothing to do but sit and wait, eyed Nun as he passed among them and asked, “What next, Son of Resh? What is going to happen?” But Nun himself had not yet had time to consider the question.

Zayin was already disposing his troops when Nun came up to him; but on Nun's advice he ordered them to move on up to the level ground, and to make his headquarters with the remainder of the family from where there was a view of all the terrain below. And on their way back they saw, among the latecomers from the city, another party of armed men, accompanied by some gray heads, and carrying a litter.

“Palace guards!” exclaimed Zayin. “It must be the King himself.” And meeting him they directed the litter bearers to the hilltop where the King was ensconced on a throne-shaped rock.

Then a silence seemed to fall over the hills, on which the entire population of the city of Gebal were spread in the hot, still afternoon. The persistent voices of the grasshoppers, crickets, and cicadas seemed to be asking, over and over, “What next? What next?”

Beth, sitting between her brothers, looked anxiously at Nun, and murmured, “There have been no more shocks since the three we felt in the town.” Her voice sounded a question that must have been in many minds. Had all this alarm been over a few minor tremors? Who was going to be first to admit a false alarm? They looked at the Chaldean, but he seemed to be watching the western horizon with such intensity that there was no room for doubt in his face.

Then a mutter seemed to run through the crowd on the northern side of the hill, and people began to crane their necks and point excitedly up the coast. Zayin and Nun stood up to look in that direction. Round the foot of the farthest headland to the North they could just make out a black line, but what really caught the attention were intermittent flashes of reflected sunlight.

“Armor,” said Zayin briefly. “The enemy from the North.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Nun, aghast.

Zayin merely looked at him. At the very same moment a breathless soldier came running up from the direction of the southern wing of the army. “General Zayin,” he gasped. “They come! They come!”

“I have seen the army of the North,” said Zayin curtly.

“No, my lord, the Egyptians! They are advancing from the Dog River. You may see them from that hill.”

The messenger looked at the General, as if expecting an order. Zayin looked at Nun. They both looked at the Chaldean, who still seemed to be standing in a trance, his eyes fixed on the West.

“We are to stand, here, like spectators at a ritual, and see our city occupied?” asked Zayin with a set face. There was no one who could reply “The participants are not yet ready for the ritual,” said Nun, his eyes, too, on the western sea. “We await the Cretan fleet.” With his hand he shaded the sun from his eyes. Were they deceiving him, was he imagining what he expected to see, or were there tiny grains scattered over the taut blue silk of the sea, moving imperceptibly from the hazy horizon toward the shore?

As they stood there, frozen immobile in the hot afternoon, it was Beth who broke the spell. Leaping to her feet she cried, “Zayin, Nun! you
can't
stand there and do
nothing
!” And the two brothers were both on the point of giving way to the same impulse to hurl themselves down the mountainside, had not there come at that moment a great cry from the Chaldean sage. He was standing erect with both arms outstretched toward the western sky.

“BEHOLD! IT HAS BEGUN!”

The sun stood halfway down the sky, in the dead middle of the afternoon. But out of the horizon haze, a little north of west, there was climbing a dense black cloud in the form of a towering Giant. With monstrous speed it reached the height of the sun, solid black from base to head, then continued to spread as quickly across the sky to north and south, until the sun itself was glaring through a reddish-yellow mist, and then was blotted out completely by a blanket of intense black. Now all the western sky was black, and the sea was black beneath it. As the hot rays of the sun were cut off, a deathly chill seemed to fall over the mountainside, and a great wail of terror arose from the Giblite multitude as they flung themselves to the ground and cowered before the awful spectacle.

Then came the earth shock, compared with which the previous tremors had been the slightest twitches of a sleeping Giant. Prostrate against the solid rock, the Giblites felt repeated blows shaking the roots of the mountain, as if monstrous limbs were striking upward through the earth's crust, hacking their way through. All minds were numbed, but what was left of Nun's recalled the western isle and the Giants that were said to be imprisoned beneath it. Indeed, the very mountain chain seemed to be breaking up: cliff faces and escarpments were wrenched loose, and great crags rolled over and over into the valleys or into the sea, and the Giblites who had been unwise enough to settle on hanging rocks or shelter beneath them were carried down to their death or crushed in their headlong course.

After the cloud, and the shock waves, came the sound, and this was like all the thunderstorms a man might hear in his lifetime, rolled together in one incredible moment.

Below, the face of the sea was almost indistinguishable in the darkness, but if anyone had eyes left to see and mind to register, there was still enough light from the eastern sky to see the next messenger from the cataclysm in the west. At first a line of white foam detaching itself from the black horizon, it revealed itself as a gigantic wave rushing with unbelievable speed toward the coast. It seemed to break, to those whose horrified eyes took in the sight, not against the rocks of the shore but against the very slopes of the mountain range, so that the watchers had a mad fear that it would climb and wash them from the hilltops where they lay. The city of Gebal was lost in a smother of darkness and foam, like a child's sand castles swept by the advancing tide.

Then the wind reached them. The Giblites pressed themselves against the rocks, fearing to be lifted and hurled into nothingness by its force, which was indeed the fate of many who were on exposed crags and peaks. In the pine belt, the trees lay down once before the blast, and did not rise again; they had been uprooted or snapped off short in their thousands. The wind continued unabated, and spread the black cloud across the sky even to the farthest East. And after that all sense of time was lost; no one could tell when the darkness of day passed to the darkness of night, no one indeed could ever say whether it was for only one night, or two, or many, that the survivors of Gebal clung helpless to the mountainside while chaos returned to the waters and the firmament, and all light was extinguished save a ghastly red glow from the West that had nothing to do with the sun.

Beth opened her eyes. She saw a gray world—gray skies, a gray sea, gray ashes falling from the sky and covering the rocks. There were other forms around her, stirring from what might be sleep.

She tried her tongue: “We are alive!” she said doubtfully.

“Are we?” came a voice. It sounded like one of her brothers.

“Impossible!” said another voice. It sounded like her father's.

She rubbed the sleep and the ashes from her eyes.

“Father! Nun! Zayin!” she said. Three other forms sat up, and a fourth, which she recognized as the Chaldean's.

“We have been sleeping,” said Beth. “Wake up! We are alive.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Resh, his voice also full of doubt.

“I am here. You are here. Nun and Zayin, we are here, aren't we?” Beth said.

Resh tried to collect his wits. “But what use is there in being alive, when the world has come to an end?”

A great sadness came over Beth. “Has the world ended, Father?” she asked.

“Surely it did,” Resh said. “Is not this the afterworld, where spirits eat mud and ashes?”

Beth recognized that part of her sadness was only hunger. “Eat, did you say, Father? Are you hungry? I am, but we brought food from—” She did not want to say, “From the world.” “We brought food. Here!” she rummaged in a bundle lying near. “Cheese, and olives. And bread—see, it is quite fresh, as if it was baked yesterday. Yesterday! Is that possible?”

“Certainly it was in another world that it was baked,” said Resh. “But let us eat. Zayin? Nun? It is well we took food with us to the afterworld. We need not eat earth yet.”

Zayin accepted the food, but he was standing up and looking around him as he ate.

“What is this talk of the afterworld?” he said at last. “It seems to me that this is the side of the mountain above Gebal where we came before—” He could not finish the sentence. “Look, here are the people of Gebal around us. There are my soldiers. Wherever we are, we are not alone.”

They realized that other families were stirring round them; people were talking in low voices, babies were crying, children were calling for food and water.

“All souls that ever lived meet in the afterworld,” muttered Resh. “We cannot expect to be alone.”

“My body feels as it did,” Zayin said musingly. “I feel—I feel that this body should ache with pain, with the blows it has suffered. But I feel well. More bread, if you have it, please, Beth! I am certainly thirsty. We must find water.”

Then Nun spoke. “Zayin, Zayin, what of the armies, the invaders? And what of the city?”

Zayin struck his head. “Ah! If the world has not ended, what is happening there? Our city!” He strode to the edge of the slope and looked down. They waited in suspense until he returned the short distance.

“Well?” asked Nun.

Zayin's voice in reply sounded distant, baffled. “I can make nothing of this gray world and gray sea. And the ashes!”

“The city, man, the city!” repeated Nun. “Is it still there?”

“Yes,” replied Zayin, sitting down and taking another mouthful. “It is still there. But it seems—dead.”

“The world is dead,” said Resh. “It came to an end.”

“I think I am alive,” said Nun. “I know this bread, cheese, and olives are delicious. Have we survived—survived whatever it was that happened, and are we to go on living in a dead world? Chaldean, eat, pray! Prove that you, too, are alive. But tell us. Tell us what happened!”

Just then a Giblite came over from another group, carrying a waterskin. “We have water to spare, Resh and sons of Resh. Drink, I pray you. And tell us what we are to do, for no one knows.”

They thanked him, drank, then Nun turned again to the Chaldean. “You who foretold the future, interpret to us poor ignorant ones who cannot rightly remember the past or understand the present. Tell us what happened, then perhaps we shall know what we must do next.”

The Chaldean finished eating, drank, and began to speak slowly. “To explain the present may be harder than to foretell the future. To decide what to do is always hardest. You say I foretold what has happened. Indeed, what I read in the stars, together with a voice within me, my foreboding, predicted a great calamity. The stars suggested a time. I traveled until I felt I had found the place. Nun the Seafarer, you will remember the island north of Crete?”