Free In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost

built a basin, a small dam of rocks, sealed with pitch I scrounged from Japheth. I stood watching how, after a long wait, a shallow layer of water formed at the bottom. I was quite taken with the little stream, it was so small and harmless; I tried to imagine how long it would take for it to flood the shipyard and raise the ship. But when I came the next day, all I had to do to fill my jug was to lower it into the water.
    They undressed for me. I stroked their backs, rolled their skin over the second skin, the layer below the outer one, which I never got to see but needed care just as much. The fear I should have felt stood no chance because I was so close to the inventors of the calamity. I became less interested in their secret. What intrigued me was where their muscles were and how their joints turned. I found satisfaction in the certainty that I would be staying with these people for a time. And I listened to their conversations.
    Japheth was talking about the pitch. He had dozens of men helping him. In the evening, they scraped the vats empty and kneaded the leftovers into little dolls they gave to the children. The smell of pitch hung in the valley and made the shipyard intoa place you could find blindfolded. Washing him was a lot of work. The creases in his neck were black. His skin was rubbed red by the time I was finished. The pitch was a scourge for his skin. My oil disappeared into it as into sand.
    Shem’s skin, on the contrary, glowed before I even started rubbing it. This man liked my touch, he did not get tense for a moment. He just kept talking, and thought it was pointless to lower the curtain of his part of the tent while he was bathing. He showed no sign of his brother’s crudeness. All through my ministrations he hummed and talked. The scaffolding was his work. His task seemed trivial, but the structure must not move, not even in a storm. Hence he chose safety and good margins. He used twice as many posts as necessary to hold up his scaffold. If I did not stop him, he would pour all my water out over himself.
    Ham took me the longest. He was so hot, the water must have been a shock to his lovely skin.
    “We’re building a labyrinth,” he said to Put when the child asked him.
    “Why a labyrinth?”
    “No one on board must be allowed to escape. It is better they cannot see one another. We are making a unique structure.”
    I tried to involve Put in everything I did. He missed his father. I did not want him to be distressed. I wanted to embrace him, he was still so small and so charming, a relief after all the other children I had known in the marshes, who always had a nasty look about them; they snatched food from your hands and were sickly because of their strange habit of eating earth and baked clay. While I worked, he looked after my mother, who lay in a cornerof the red tent. He had often assisted me, and now I could see how much attention he had paid: He carefully moved her arms and legs, gave her water, chewed the bread for her, and talked to her like a shepherd to his sheep. She improved rapidly. On the spots that had grown bald during our trek, downy hair started to grow.
    Shem, Ham, and Japheth did not object to Put’s presence. “He is a boy with more than one heart,” they said, and fed him cakes dipped in syrup.
    Months passed, and we got used to the Rrattika. The trouble was, they did not seem to get used to us. By now they had regularly seen my mother by the pond, had long since studied every detail of her finery, but even so they hurriedly looked away whenever they saw her alert eye directed at them. Not a day passed without remarks about our dark skin, our habits, our language. And there was always the feeling that one day we could just be sent away. There was a lot of talk in the shipyard, but most of it I could not understand. It was mostly exclamations and sounds that went with gestures, and never became the proper conversations I so longed for. They looked at us and we at them,