Havah
Author: Lee, Tosca
Date: 2010-07-16T04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group

A passionate and riveting story of the Bible’s first woman. Lee’s superior storytelling will have readers weeping for all that Havah forfeited by a single damning choice.

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

Havah is a novel with boundless imagination.

—Eric Wilson, New York Times best-selling author of Field of Blood and Fireproof

Tosca Lee is the most evocative storyteller to come along in ages. Never has the account of the Fall been so humanized.

—Sharon K. Souza, author of Lying on Sunday

An enchanting story masterfully told by an extraordinary wordsmith.

—Robert Liparulo, author of Deadfall and Comes a Horseman

With beautiful prose and breathtaking description, Tosca Lee has breathed new life into the story we thought we knew so well.

—Jake Chism, FictionAddict.com

Tosca Lee has given us a veritable literary feast in Havah. Her vivid story of the original earth mother nourishes while her delicious, sensuous use of language delights. Devour it.

—Claudia Mair Burney, Christy Award Finalist and author of Wounded

The story of Eve comes alive in this interpretation of the first people of the Bible. Even today, this story of love, longing, and loss offers encouragement.

—Romantic Times

Much has been written about Eve . . . but I doubt her heart has ever been so deeply plumbed as in this lyrical novel by Tosca Lee.

—Historical Novel Reviews

Rich and mesmerizing. Tosca Lee’s prose is breathtaking, her story of grace utterly transforming. Havah is nothing less than a masterpiece.

—Nicole Baart, Christy Award Finalist and author of The Moment Between

Havah is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary woman. Tosca Lee has given us a bold retelling of a tale we all thought we knew.

—Randy Ingermanson, Christy Award-Winning author of Retribution

I have never read a book like Havah. It’s brilliantly conceived, uniquely delivered, and phenomenally profound.

—Lissa Halls Johnson, author of Kirk Cameron: Still Growing

I found myself fascinated by Tosca Lee’s mind, her capacity to spin a story, and the sheer volume of research that must’ve informed this compelling read.

—Mary DeMuth, author of Daisy Chain

Havah is not only a novel full of beautiful prose; it is a book that causes the reader to pause and consider the state of the soul within.

—Kelly Klepfer, Amazon.com Top 1,000 Reviewer

In Havah, Lee demonstrates her ability to develop a character that goes far beyond cliché. Lee dares again to look into Christian assumption.

—Lincoln Journal-Star

Havah is an epic and explosive novel. Stunning prose and evocative imagery hallmark this retelling of life’s beginnings through the heart and voice of Eve.

—Relz Reviews

Lee’s “fiction” somehow doesn’t feel like make-believe at all.

—Michelle Van Loon, author of Uprooted and Parable Life

Evocative, lush. . . . This is not formula “Christian Fiction” and avoids providing easy spiritual answers to the inevitable questions the characters face.

—Synchronized Chaos

Havah has set a very high standard in the realm of speculative fiction.

—Inside Corner Book Reviews

Imagery so real I could see for myself the sparkling, newly formed world.

—Barbara Warren, Amazon.com Top 1,000 Reviewer

I never read a novel twice, but I double-read this one, with intense delight to the last page, both times.

—ChristianBook.com

Going beyond Sunday school stereotypes, Havah introduces us to a gloriously human Eve who reflects the strength and beauty of any woman or man who truly hungers for the presence of God.

—Meredith Efken, author of Lucky Baby

With delicious prose, Tosca Lee captures the passion, innocence, fatal mishap, and tragedy that were our first mother’s life.

—Karen Lee-Thorp, coauthor of the Doing Life Together Bible studies

Tosca Lee’s version of Paradise Lost makes Eve’s far-distant story into a personal tale of loss and love. Lush, lyrical, and deeply moving.

—Lyn Cote, author of Blessed Assurance

A moving story that plumbs the depths of human experience, faith, and spirituality.

—Press & Sun Bulletin, Binghamton, NY

The emotional pull of this story is truly divine. Tosca’s powerful use of language is very moving and the ending is perfectly written. I stand amazed.

—Favorite PASTimes

This is the story of Adam and Eve as it really might have been. The writing is poetic and lyrical, the story compelling and captivating.

—Virginia Smith, author of Stuck in the Middle

Our beginning deeply, richly, beautifully imagined, lifting our hearts in worship to the One that is.

—Louise M. Gouge, author of Then Came Hope

Copyright © 2010 by QUELLE LLC

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-4336-6879-1

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Dewey Decimal Classification: F

Subject Heading: EVE (BIBLICAL FIGURE)— FICTION \ BIBLE. O.T. GENESIS—FICTION \ WOMEN IN THE BIBLE—FICTION

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 • 14 13 12 11 10

For my mother and for you.

Contents

Prologue

The Garden

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

The Fruit

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Exile

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Kayin

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Generations

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Adam

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Acknowledgments

Names/Meaning List

Author's Notes

PROLOGUE

I have seen paradise and ruin. I have known bliss and terror. I have walked with God.

And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.

I still recall my first moment of consciousness—an awareness I’ve never seen in the eyes of any of my own children at birth: the sheer ignorance and genius of consciousness, when we know nothing and accept everything.

Of course, the memory of that waking moment is fainter now, like the smell of the soil of that garden, like the leaves of the fig tree in Eden after dawn—dew and leaf green. It fades with that sense of something once tasted on the tip of the tongue, savored now in memory, replaced by the taste of something similar but never quite the same.

His breath a lost sough, the scent of earth and leaf mold that was his sweaty skin has faded too quickly. So like an Eden dawn—dew on fig leaves.

His eyes were blue, my Adam’s.

How I celebrated that color, shrouded now in shriveled eyelids—he who was never intended to have even a wrinkle!

But even as I bend to smooth his cheek, my hair has become a white waterfall upon his Eden—flesh and loins that gave life to so many.

I think for a moment that I hear the One and that he is weeping. It is the first time I have heard him in so long, and my heart cries out: He is dead! My father, my brother, my love!

I envy the earth that envelops him. I envy the dust that comes of him and my children who sow and eat of it.

This language of Adam—the word that meant merely “man” before it was his name—given him by God himself, is now mine. And this is my love song. I will craft these words into the likeness of the man before I, too, return to the earth of Adam’s bosom.

My story has been told in only the barest of terms. It is time you heard it all. It is my testament to the strength of the heart, which has such capacity for joy, such space for sorrow, like a vessel that fills and fills without bursting.

My seasons are nearly as many as a thousand. So now listen, sons, and hear me, daughters. I, Havah, fashioned by God of Adam, say this:

In the beginning, there was God . . .

But for me, there was Adam.

THE GARDEN

1

A whisper in my ear: Wake!

BLUE. A SEA AWASH with nothing but a drifting bit of down, flotsam on an invisible current. I closed my eyes. Light illuminated the thin tissues of my eyelids.

A bird trilled. Near my ear: the percussive buzz of an insect. Overhead, tree boughs stirred in the warming air.

I lay on a soft bed of herbs and grass that tickled my cheek, my shoulders, and the arch of my foot, whispering sibilant secrets up to the trees.

From here I felt the thrum of the sap in the stem—the pulsing veins of the vine, the beat of my heart in harmony with hundreds more around me, the movement of the earth a thousand miles beneath.

I sighed as one returning to sleep, to retreat to the place I had been before, the realm of silence and bliss—wherever that is.

Wake!

I opened my eyes again upon the milling blue, saw it spliced by the flight of a bird, chevron in the sky.

This time, the voice came not to my ear, but directly to my stirring mind: Wake!

There was amusement in it.

I knew nothing of where or what I was, did not understand the polyphony around me or the wide expanse like a blue eternity before me.

But I woke and knew I was alive.

A rustle, a groan practically in my ear. I twitched at a stir-ring against my hip. A moment later, a touch drifted across a belly I did not yet know I owned, soft as a leaf skittering along the ground.

A face obscured my vision. I screamed. Not with fear—I had no acquaintance with fear—nor with startlement because I had been aware of the presence already, but because it was the only statement that came to lips as artless as mine.

The face disappeared and returned, blinking into my own, the blue above captured in twin pools. Then, like a gush of water from a rock, gladness thrilled my heart. But its source was not me.

At last! It came, unspoken—a different source than the voice before—and then the words thrust jubilantly to the sky: “At last!”

He was up on legs like the trunks of sturdy saplings, beating at the earth with his feet. He thumped his chest and shouted to the sun and clapped his hands. “At last!” He cried, his laughter like warm clay between the toes. He shook his shoulders and stomped the grass, slapping his chest as he shouted again and again. Though I did not understand the utterance, I knew its meaning at once: joy and exultation at something longed for suddenly found.

I tried to mimic his sound; it came out as a squawk and then a panting laugh. Overhead, a lark chattered an extravagant address. I squeaked a shrill reply. The face lowered to mine and the man’s arms wrapped, wombtight, around me.

“Flesh of my flesh,” he whispered, his breath warm against my ear. His fingers drifted from my hair to my body, roaming like the goat on the hills of the sacred mount. I sighed, expelling the last remnants of that first air from my lungs—the last of the breath in them not drawn by me alone.

He was high cheeked, this adam, his lower lip dipping down like a folded leaf that drops sweet water to thirsty mouths. His brow was a hawk, soaring above the high cliffs, his eyes blue lusters beneath the fan of his lashes. But it was his mouth that I always came back to, where my eyes liked best to fasten after taking in the shock of those eyes. Shadow ran along his jaw, like obsidian dust clinging to the curve of it, drawing my eye to the plush flesh of his lips, again, again, again.

He touched my face and traced my mouth. I bit his finger. He gathered my hands and studied them, turning them over and back. He smelled my hair and lingered at my neck and gazed curiously at the rest of me. When he was finished, he began all over again, tasting my cheek and the salt of my neck, tracing the instep of my foot with a fingertip.

Finally, he gathered me up, and my vision tilted to involve an altogether new realm: the earth and my brown legs upon it. I clutched at him. I seemed a giant, towering above the earth—a giant as tall as he. My first steps stuttered across the ground as the deer in the hour of its birth, but then I pushed his hands away. My legs, coltish and lean, found their vigor as he urged me, walking far too fast, to keep up. He made for the orchard, and I bolted after him with a surge of strength and another of my squawking sounds. Then we were running—through grasses and over fledgling sloes, the dark wool of my hair flying behind me.

We raced across the valley floor and my new world blurred around me: hyssop and poppy, anemone, narcissus, and lily. Roses grew on the foothills amid the caper and myrtle.

A flash beside me: the long-bodied great cat. I slowed, distracted by her fluidity, the smooth curve of her head as she tilted it to my outstretched hand. I fell to the ground, twining my arms around her, fingers sliding along her coat. Her tongue was rough—unlike the adam’s—and she rumbled as she rolled against me.

Far ahead, the adam called. Overhead, a hawk circled for a closer look. The fallow deer at a nearby stream lifted her head.

The adam called again, wordlessly, longing and exuberant. I got up and began to run, the lioness at my heels. I was fast—nearly as fast as she. Exhilaration rose from my lungs in quick pants in laughter. Then, with a burst, she was beyond me.

She was gone by the time the adam caught me up in his arms. His hands stroked my back, my hips, my shoulder. I marveled at his skin. How smooth, how very warm it was.

“You are magnificent,” he said, burying his face against my neck. “Ah, Isha—woman, taken from man!”

I said nothing; although I understood his meaning, I did not know his words. I knew with certainty and no notion of conceit, though, that he was right.

AT THE RIVER HE showed me how he cupped his hands to drink and then cupped them again for me. I lowered my head and drank as a carp peered baldy from the shallows up at me.

We entered the water. I gasped as it tickled the backs of my knees and hot hairs under my arms, swirling about my waist as though around a staunch rock as our toes skimmed a multitude of pebbles. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders.

“All of this: water.” He grunted a little bit as he swam toward the middle of the river where it widened into a broad swath across the valley floor. “Here—the current.”

“Water.” I understood, in the moment I spoke it, the element in all its forms—from the lake fed by the river to the high springs that flow from the abyss of the mount. I felt the pull of it as though it had a gravity all its own, as though it could sweep me out to the cold depths of the lake and lull me by the tides of the moon.

From the river I could see the high walls of our cradle: the great southern mount rising to heaven and, to the north, the foothills that became the long spine of a range that arched toward the great lake to the west.

I knew even then that this was a place set apart from the unseen lands to the north, the alluvial plain to the south, the great waters to the east and far to the west.

It was set apart solely because we dwelt in it.

But we were not alone. I could see them after a time, even as we left the river and lay upon its banks. I saw them in sidelong glances when I looked at something else: a sunspot caught in the eye, a ripple in the air, a shock of light where there should be only shadow. And so I knew there were other beings, too.

The adam, who studied me, said nothing. We did not know their names.

THE FIRST VOICE I heard urging me to wake had not been the man’s. Now I felt the presence of it near me, closer than the air, than even the adam’s arms around me.

I returned the man’s strange amazement, taken by his smooth, dark skin, the narrowness of his hips, his strange sex. He was warmer than I, as though he had absorbed the heat of the sun, and I laid my cheek against his flat breasts and listened to the changeling beat of his heart. My limbs, so fresh to me, grew heavy. As languor overtook me, I retreated from the sight of my lovely, alien world.

Perhaps in closing my eyes, I would return to the place I had been before.

For the first time since waking, I hoped not.

I slept to the familiar thrum of his heart as insects made sounds like sleepy twitches through the waning day.

When I woke, his cheek was resting against the top of my head. Emotion streamed from his heart, though his lips were silent.

Gratitude.

I am the treasure mined from the rock, the gem prized from the mount.

He stirred only when I did and released me with great reluctance. By then the sun had moved along the length of our valley. My stomach murmured.

He led me to the orchard and fed me the firm flesh of plums, biting carefully around the pits and feeding the pieces to me until juice ran down our chins and bees came to sample it. He kissed my fingers and hands and laid his cheek against my palms.

That evening we lay in a bower of hyssop and rushes—a bower, I realized, that he must have made on a day before this one.

A day before I existed.

We observed together the changing sky as it cooled gold and russet and purple, finally anointing the clay earth red.

Taken from me. Flesh of my flesh. At last. I heard the timbre of his voice in my head in my last waking moment. Marvel and wonder were upon his lips as he kissed my closing eyes.

I knew then he would do anything for me.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of blackness. Black, greater than the depths of the river or the great abyss beneath the lake.

From within that nothingness came a voice that was not a voice, that was neither sound nor word but volition and command and genesis. And from the voice, a word that was no word but the language of power and fruition.

There! A mote spark—a light first so small as the tip of a pine needle. It exploded past the periphery of my dreaming vision, obliterating the dark. The heavens were vast in an instant, stretching without cease to the edges of eternity.

I careened past new bodies that tugged me in every direction; even the tiniest particles possessed their own gravity. From each of them came the same concert, that symphony of energy and light.

I came to stand upon the earth. It was a great welter of water, the surface of it ablaze with the refracted light of heavens upon heavens. It shook my every fiber, like a string that is plucked and allowed to resonate forever.

I was galvanized, made anew, thrumming that inaugural sound: the yawning of eternity.

Amidst it all came the unmistakable command:

Wake!

2

Blue. Was I made anew? Bird flight perforated my line of sight. I closed my eyes, aware of the form against me, of the slow rise and fall of his chest, the heavy warmth of his arm over me.

I waited for something. I had woken with an ache like hunger that had nothing to do with food.

I need you. It was longing and craving and declaration all at once.

I Am. It came not from the man, but the One whose voice was far gentler and more awesome—a voice for whispering the heavens to life.

I shivered. The man beside me stirred and drew me closer.

After a while I drifted back to sleep, anxious for nothing. Wanting for nothing.

But still, somehow, desiring more.

THE ADAM MADE HIS bed in the foothills. That morning I learned why: the grasses and heath of the valley floor were damp and spongy underfoot as they had not been the night before.

This time he woke before me. Fingertips drifted over my shoulder, my cheek, my brow. The arm beneath me cradled my head.

I opened my eyes. His were already intent upon me. “There is knowledge in your eyes that was not there before.” Wonder sang in his words.

I have seen the making of the heavens.

He drew a sharp breath, lifted my fingers to his lips.

My sustainer, my counterpart. Given as the One has said. To you are known the mysteries of creation!

He jumped up and shouted his jubilance to the sky. He stomped the earth and clapped his hands. I laughed and clapped with him.

I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow I was necessary.

He fell down beside me. “Come, Isha! Will you climb the far hills? Will you eat figs and cucumber? Will you see the onager and the wolf?”

“Yes.” I did not know the onager from the wolf or the fig from the cucumber. Again: “Yes.”

I did not say that I craved two presences above any other pleasure and that as long as they were there I could do anything. But even as I thought it, he gathered me against him, stroked my hair, my side, my hip.

Ah. I drowned in contentment.

That day he took me to the broadest part of the valley. Together we sat beneath the shade of the great oak. I observed the wolf, bounding through the brush. Farther on, wild sheep grazed on the hillside. Far above them a goat stood beneath the sun.

“Wolf,” he said. But I heard from him another name: Yedod.

“Sheep,” he said. But I heard from him: Adina.

He had named them after their kind, but he had named them intimately as well. They were as distinct to him as he had been to them before me.

Levia, the lioness, came and lowered herself to her haunches beside me. After a moment of decorum, she sprawled onto her back.

Scratch!

The adam, arms outstretched upon bent knees, laughed. “For a long time I thought it was the only thing she said.”

Levia lolled, eyes rolling. After a time her mate came down from the hills to drink from a nearby stream. When he lifted his head, his intent for Levia was so strong that I felt the tug of it as surely as though I were Levia herself. It was the same I had sensed from the adam the day before. The lioness started up from beneath my hand and went out to meet him, rubbing her sleek head against his jaw. Pleasure emanated from them both.

I exhaled, keenly aware of the adam’s eyes upon me.

“THERE WAS LAUGH,” I said a few days later. The adam had washed me in the river until my skin prickled. “Not you.”

“There was laughter.” He brushed water from my skin even as the new sun lapped it from the tiny hairs on my arms. “The One that Is.”

The One made us.

Yes. From the earth, Adam. From Adam, Ish and Isha.

Why?

To keep the garden.

The beetles and animals and plants seem to do that well enough on their own.

And to name the animals.

Why are they here?

Who can know but the One that Is?

That he seemed unmoved by these questions only incited more curiosity in me. But then his mouth curved in a lovely smile, and I knew he had wondered as much himself, and that while he had imparted to me many things, many others were mine to learn.

To learn is joy, Isha.

Then he fell silent. Finally: “There is something, though, that I should show you.”

On the western end of the valley where the river runs to the lake, mist loitered long after dawn. The trees, which murmured from the valley to the hilltops, stood mute. The call of insect and bird and creature seemed oddly blunted here, but the underlying murmur of every living thing sharpened in sonance, its pitch more crystalline than I had heard it at any other place.

The adam waded into the river ahead of me. I hurried after him, relieved when he reached for me. But this was no frolicking swim. He pushed into the current, crosswise. Damp enveloped our heads and clung to my hair.

As we swam toward the middle of the river, I began to think that we might never reach the other side. I could not see it through the mist, nor could I make out the bank behind us anymore. Just as I began to wonder if we would find ourselves perfunctorily washed into the delta of the lake, our toes touched the pebbled river bottom.

I caught my breath.

Before us sprawled a small island in the widest part of the river. And in the middle of the island grew a tree with a fruit so singular I knew I had not seen it anywhere else in the garden. It was perfectly round like an oversized berry, larger than the plum. It was the color of the sun as I had seen it blazing between the northern and southern ranges the night before. Heavy on the stem, every one of them seemed bursting with juice, ready to drop at the slightest breeze, though I saw none upon the ground.

My stomach rumbled as we climbed onto the bank. But before I could take two steps toward that tree, the adam caught my hand tightly in his own.

“No!”

I blinked at his vehemence. “Hungry.”

“This one you cannot have.”

It was the first time I heard no uttered from lips—human or otherwise.

“Why?” I considered the fiery-gemmed giant with new appreciation. It seemed ancient, older than any other tree in the valley—already I understood something of time—its branches twined like the horns of the gazelle, pointing toward heaven.

“It is the knowing of good and evil to eat it.” His eyes flickered to the tree and back. His mouth was taut as the skin of that fruit.

He does not want to be here, I thought with amazement. And then: No, he both wants and does not want to be here.

I did not understand this opposition in him. Nor did I know the meaning of good or evil or the conflict behind them—only that it seemed to pulse from the roots of that tree.

Overhead, the sun emerged from a cloud. It gilded the grass and the leaves of the tree and then set the fruit ablaze as though it were not fruit at all, but a wealth of stars snared in verdant constellation. Within seconds the mist was gone.

There is more. If you eat it, you will die the death.

The death? What is the death?

When the adam turned the full brunt of those eyes upon me, they were gentle.

Pleading.

Why do you ask these things, Isha?

Because I do.

The death is an end. An end against the wish of the One.

Almost as one we turned back to the tree.

When I would have stroked those twisting branches, he stopped me again.

“Do not even touch it!”

I did not understand this death. I understood, however, obedience to the One. Had I not woken when the One said, “Wake”? Had I not walked in assurance of those words, I Am? Had I not seen the might of that hand? To think of it struck me with elation and yearning for the man in whom I saw his likeness, as a shadow cast upon the earth by the soaring eagle.

My stomach by now had gone silent. But standing before that singular tree, I suddenly wanted nothing better than to eat until I was filled. Then I noticed the other tree on this small island—a shrub, really, innocuous beside her more glamorous sister. It bore little purple berries.

The adam drew me away as his gaze fled back to the magnificent tree. This time when he touched me, I felt myself ravenous—for the tart apricot and crisp water of the spring, for the voice of the One and raw heat of the sun and the shade of the willow . . . to sink my fingers into the mane of the lion and run my palms against the adam’s side.

I drew his arms around me like a mantle. I tasted the salt of his neck. He groaned and I thought he might fall to his knees. I give pleasure!

And then: Such pleasure will I give him. I did not know all the intricacies, but the One was a whisper in my heart—what secrets should be kept from me?

To learn is joy, Isha. I heard it again, as the man had said it.

Indeed. It would be.

“Not here.” The roughness of his voice was adrenaline and seduction. He pulled me toward the river, his mouth hot on my ear, his fingers bold. Just as we gave ourselves to the water, a rustle sounded from the brush. There—a flash of gold through the branches, daylight refracted by scales so brilliant that they rivaled the fruit of the majestic tree.

“What is that?”

“What?” He murmured into my hair.

I pointed. The creature on the island stared out through the boughs of the smaller shrub at me.

The adam hardly looked up. “Only the serpent.”

We crossed the river, fell dripping upon the bank. He bent to my neck, my shoulder, my navel. I languished in pleasure.

I will satisfy you.

Yes. Agreement. Yes. A plea.

Feel the sun.

I feel it.

Feel my fingers.

I feel them.

How I love you.

I gave myself up to him.

I am the horn of the antelope, twining toward heaven. I am the leaf, twisting upon the stem. I am the sweet water that rushes from the rock, thrilling the hands that dip into it, slipping down the thirsty throat.

THAT NIGHT, AS THE cricket and the frog took over the song of sleeping birds beneath the ascending moon, he wept against my shoulder.

“How I have longed for you,” he said, the lovely voice broken like earth crumbling in water. I held him and my heart swelled like the river that overruns its banks.

How mighty, how great the One must be, I thought, to send the heavens careening, and yet hear the cry of a single heart.

I covered his mouth with my own. We did not sleep until dawn.

I DREAMED I WANDERED through the mist. Grasses licked my calves, their wet blades like tongues as I walked for what seemed an hour. After some time I realized I did not walk on grass at all; my feet were immersed in water. I had found the river and walked into it, it lapped at my ankles and knees.

When the mist began to lift, I saw that I stood not in a river but in a vast landscape of water, blue as lapis, stretching to the horizon in every direction. I raised my hands to the rising cloud and became the expanse of air between—my feet took root in the depths of the sea; my fingertips spanned the heavens.

But now, as I looked down from a mighty height, the water began to move. It roiled one direction and, at the same time, another, so that it seemed it would pull itself apart—and indeed, the ocean produced gaping holes bored down to the caverns of the earth. No, they were not holes at all but dark masses, rising here—there and there!—up through the ocean where it had gathered itself away, pushing up through the water like the horns of the hart in spring. Higher they rose with a great, cracking roar so that the sound must echo to the stars. The oceans rocked and heaved like water in a breaking jar, and the land came together with a mighty crash so that the edge of one mass pushed up onto another, craggy teeth bared like an animal’s to the sky. On their ragged edges shone onyx and quartz and obsidian, like jewels spilled from a broken cask.

There among vibrant sediment: ochre—red, like the blood of all things living, such that ran in the clay-colored flesh of the adam sleeping at my side.

“THE BIRDS,” I SAID one day as we collected the stigmas of the narrow-leafed saffron. “Do they eat the fruit of the splendid tree?” My vocabulary was, by now, rampant. I had exhausted the adam in my pursuit of words—for the sun at her zenith, the trees in their species, each part of a fruit and every kind of seed, for the names for the skins and pulps that defined them. I learned language for quantities and things unseen—the name for waking and for pleasure—for thoughts intangible, scientific, and speculative.

The adam sat back on his heels. “I have not seen it.”

“Do they understand the death?” A day did not pass that I did not think of the mystery of that tree and the death within its lovely fruit. A thing “outside the wishes of the One,” the adam had called it. How could something outside the will of the One exist—in beauty, no less?

“If eating the fruit is against the will of the One, what other things are against that will?”

He studied me with a frank mixture of appreciation and consideration. “I don’t know, though I have wondered the same, myself. Truly we come from the same flesh, you and I!” He laughed softly and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.

“The One has not revealed anything more, or you would know it.” He frowned then. “Before you came to me, I thought often of that place, much as you do. But now you are here, and it is practically forgotten to me.”

But not completely.

“The serpent. How lovely he is,” I said.

“If there is a creature that understands the death, it is that one.”

I wondered at that, curious about the thing that set the serpent apart aside from his obvious beauty—curious, too, about the cloud that seemed to cover the adam’s eyes when he thought back to the time before. We knew nothing of grief or regret. We had cause for neither. But this I knew: he had been less content then. I understood something of that; since swimming to that island, I was conscious of it always. I judged my position on the river by that island’s proximity and by the fringes of the mist that seemed to settle about that place. Gathering licorice root on the hillside, I would look down on it and see in my mind the thing cloaked within the veil. And I was aware, as I had not been before, of the scent of that fruit in the bouquet that was my valley, hearing even the rustle of that tree above the others in the strongest breeze.

THAT NIGHT I SAID, “I want to know about your life before.” The adam set aside the bark he liked to twine into cord.

When he reached for me, I went into his arms, folded into them, nuzzled my cheek against his shoulder. He was silent for a long moment before he finally spoke.

“Once you were a part of me, and I was a human without counterpart. I was the adam, a human, no more. How like a husk they seem, those days, the weeks, the months that I learned the ways of my body and of the animals, and the elements. I learned all things of the green life that sustains us: what part of the fruit to eat, which seeds would grow when I poked them into the soil, and which one would lie as something sleeping for a season. I knew how to harvest the chickpea and chew the pod of the carob tree, how to find the meat at the heart of the almond and the properties of wormwood. The One was always with me, murmuring through the trees and whispering atop the grasses. I saw his face in the majestic mount, heard his sighs rumbling from the heavens, saw his thumbprint in the tiniest mustard seed.

“In those days the animals came to me, to see this adam bearing the likeness of the One. I marveled at their diversity. I scrubbed the mane of the lion and stroked the tail of the nimble fox. I caught the frog up in my palm and touched the wings of the serpent. How lovely you are, Adam, made of the One that Is, they said. And how lovely they were to me. I gave them names, and they knew themselves better for my having known and named them. This went on for days.”

He absently traced the curve of my ear. “It did not take long to notice that though they dwelt in multitudes, there was one of me. They were male and female, but what was I? Both? Neither?

“I applied myself to knowing the way of the animals and my place among them. I roamed the hills and the plain beyond the eastern gate. I learned the hierarchy of the wolves, the gestation of the ewe. I surveyed the mountain and swam in the great lake. But I always came back to roam the hills, to gaze down into the valley.”

I pictured my vantage from the orchard, the island shrouded in mist and the fruit shining like gold upon it.

He whispered. “I was aware of it always. I wondered whether I could understand the evil. I pondered the death. I called on the One who whispered to my heart, and he denied me nothing, but in my loneliness I longed for more.

“One day as I wandered through the reeds—the very place where I first lifted my head—I saw it.” His eyes were shining as he said it, dark blue, the color of lapis from the hills of Havilah. “A footprint, a man’s—but not my own.” Tears slipped from his eyes, and the look upon his face was filled with longing.

“I ran along the bank, crying out, wanting nothing more than to touch that foot, to touch that hand. But even as I did it, I heard a voice saying, I Am, Adam. I Am! I fell down on my knees. It was the first pang of loneliness I had ever known, and it was as acute and sharp as any craving for food or sun or sleep or bliss as I have ever experienced. It came again, like a whisper: I Am.”

He wiped his face with the back of his hand. When he spoke again, his voice broke.

“But when I got up, I could not find the footprint again, though I looked for it all day. I only wanted to touch it. To touch it again—” He lowered his head. After some time he sighed and said, “That night as I lay down, I gazed at the stars, at the very ones you love to trace in the sky with your finger when you think I am sleeping, and cried out my plea to God. That night, the fingers of sleep pulled with long and sweet clutch, stroking me into unconsciousness. I heard in my soul: It is not good for you to be alone. It was voiced with the greatest compassion, the most full understanding . . . the most lovely benevolence and love. Such love!

“I slept in the grip of that love, comforted, thinking I should forget my longing within it, knowing that all was somehow well.” He laid a finger against my cheek. “In the morning, when I stirred, I knew.” His fingers fluttered against my cheek as one touches a thing so delicate as a dream, fearing it might break. “I knew I lay here in my own flesh, but not alone.”

How lovely were the tears of the adam! How beautiful his face because of them, how poignant and masculine at once as they dropped to his cheek and fell upon his lips! He kissed me in mimicry of the first exhale of the One against his mouth. And I heard again his words that first morning and felt again his elation, not from the past, but made new in his heart.

At last! Flesh of my flesh!

I knew then he was as much mine as I was his, that he loved me with every fiber, having longed for me before he knew me or that I might ever exist. As the adam buried his head in my hair, my heart cried out at the extravagance of love and the humility and gratitude for which there were not, nor ever have been, words.

3

My first blood came on a warm morning as I waded among the river reeds. Inspired by the nests of birds, I had begun to weave nests of grass and reed cut from the water’s edge with a flake of flint. Within days I perfected my early attempts and began to experiment with new and complex designs.

That day I was so excited about my newest pattern that I sat down on a large rock and began the base of my new basket right there. A little while later, when I got up, it was there: a red smudge. My first thought was that somehow I had sat on the crushed leaves of henna. But that was impossible; I had been nowhere near them all day. Also impossible because we did not stumble. We did not fumble fruit or stone when we gathered. We were never pulled beneath the water so that we could not breathe. The idea of a misstep, of a mistake, of an aberration in the order of the One that Is or our own dominion in this world was an impossible thought.

So how did the red get on the rock?

Only after examining my hands and my cache of reeds and the sticky surface of the rock did I realize it came from within me.

A silvery trill issued from the bank. I glanced up to find the serpent, resplendent in sunlight, studying me.

How lovely you are, daughter of the One and of man.

And how lovely you are. I meant it with my whole heart. Was there any animal in creation more lovely?

He preened a moment. Your blood has come. Do you know what that means?

I thought of Levia in estrus. Of the adam, twined with me through the night.

Yes. I believe I do.

The serpent tilted his head, seemed to sniff at the air.

How fine for you that you might create, after the fashion of the animals, your own kind. It is the mark of God, creation. How fine for you that he gives so generously of this power.

I flushed at the thought; had I not been entranced by the hare with her young, the ewe with her lambs at the teat? I smiled.

You are pleased?

Yes. If the adam was glad for me, how much happier will he be if there are more of us?

The serpent turned away. Indeed.

BY THE TIME I caught up with the adam, the bleeding had stopped. When I told him about it, and how I had washed it away in the water, and about the serpent, he said, “That clever creature, he is right.”

“Think of it—if I conceive, we will be the adam again, in one flesh, on the day our child is born.”

He stared at me and then reached for my hand. Clasping it against him, he cried, “How great is the design of the One!”

Most of our creative acts were less dramatic; with mundane measures we shaped the life around us. We made cuttings of lilac and honeysuckle—that shrub beloved by the cats—and stuck them in the soil of the southern slopes. We bent down the branch of the laurel, nicking it where it touched the ground, covering and securing it there with stones. The adam began to build us a bower of willow, standing long cuttings in the ground and weaving the ends together. Within weeks they all sprouted leaves.

Sometimes we saw light sear the sky, flashing like a jagged branch, leaving bright images on the backs of our eyelids when we closed them. The first time I saw it, I was amazed until the adam explained that there was fire in the sky and in the elements, too. He could send sparks flying from two kinds of stone struck together, and fire might be made in other ways as well. That night he struck from a grooved stone and piece of quartz a tiny spark that we coaxed to life within a hollow bit of wood filled with tinder.

We dried fruit and harvested almonds and pistachios. We took our meals in the orchard, joined by Adah, the fallow deer, or Chalil, the fox, who came when Adam played the flutes he made from hollow stems. The wolf, Dvash, came to lick honey from our fingers. We brought it often from the long hive we had found in the crook of a tree.

Standing upon the hillside, I could smell the pomegranate ripening on the stem, the bitter sap of pine, the dill and chicory growing among the heath, the grapes sweet and heavy on the vines of the far slopes. I could distinguish the scat of every animal, the oil of any feather, the nectar of any blossom, the airborne taste of their stamens. And every night I lay down to the seminal bouquet of wet earth and salt that was the adam beside me.

I roused from sleep when I sensed his waking. I went to him when I sensed his longing. And we knew we were special in all the earth, so that even the trees and mountains and heavens must watch with wistful sighs.

I RACED ACROSS THE southern hills, leaping rock and shrub and stream. I was a great runner. I lifted my knees high as I hurdled shrub and brush and stream. Laughter bubbled up from my belly as I took to the foothills, past the grazing onager. It brayed after me, and the sound was like laughter. I knew the adam watched me from below and that the exuberance of my legs and quickness of my breath accelerated his heart. I knew, too, when he launched after me, but he was no match for my start or my speed. Only Levia, the lioness, was my equal.

I bounded down the hills toward the valley floor. It was midday, and the sun was hot upon me, and its rays loved me, warming the dark honey of my skin, beading sweat between my breasts and among the hairs at my nape. I was small breasted then, lean as the new colts.

See me! my soul shouted. Watch me run! I ran through the valley like the wind through the meadow in spring. I was tireless, euphoric at my great strength and with the One who had given it to me. I ran faster and faster—faster than I have seen any woman or man run since.

In my soul I heard laughter—first of the adam, from where I left him in the meadow—but more brightly and keenly, of God. Then—oh, great mystery, such a moment! There came a rush of wind and warmth that was not the sun. It was at my shoulder, in my ear and my face: the One that Is, running alongside me, his laughter honey in my ear.

I doubled back beneath the shadow of the great mount and chased the hill to the orchard, pursuing the One through the trees, feeling him everywhere—ahead, near the shrub, no there—beyond that tree! Did I see the curve of a shoulder, of a back just disappearing beyond the willow? I laughed, the music like song, the audible sum of elation, hearing behind and beyond it the laughter of God.

I would have run like that for a day, a week, a lifetime to have only kept it there. To have felt always what I did in that moment.

Eventually I came to the natural terraces of the vineyard. I was breathless, my heart thudding in my ears, the blood in my veins drumming its pulsing song. I plucked my way between the woody, untrained vines, stumped like shrubs—only recently had the adam and I talked of pruning back their shoots—fingering the tooth-edged leaves, plucking idly at grapes the size of plums. I ate hungrily, thirstily, before dropping into a shaded patch of grass, my forearm over my eyes. Sated with the sugar of the grapes, elated from my run, ecstatic from the presence of the One—I drifted to sleep.

When I woke, the sun was in my eyes. No, it was too late in the day for that. I rolled over and found that the brightness nearby was not the sun at all, but its light reflected on gleaming scales.

The serpent watched me with a glittering eye.

How beautiful you are, daughter of God and man. Though the other animals made plain their pleasure or curiosity or intent, none of them ever spoke so elegantly to my inner ear as he. How strange he was, with that aged sense of spirit possessed by none of the others.

And you. In my euphoria and now in my languor, every-thing was beautiful, even more so than normal. I found myself wanting to touch him.

Ah, bliss, he said, standing just outside my reach. How I knew it, once. It came, so faintly: an unspoken exhalation. I knew then that he understood the thing still ebbing like opiate from my veins.

His eye roved over me, watching me as though from a distance and not mere inches away.

How lovely is rapture on you, daughter of man and God.

I sighed. How lovely is the rapture of the One that Is.

You were beautiful even without it. And how intelligent you are! You make yourself over by your search for understanding. By your discoveries, you are daily a new creature. All creation bows down before you. He inclined his head. He would have gone away then, I knew, except that I said aloud after him, “It is because of the One that Is. What am I on my own or you on your own, without the One, after all?”

The serpent’s back stiffened, and it returned its obsidian eye to me.

Indeed, what are you but a part of the adam, and he, a particle of mud? But—he drew closer now. Lying on the ground as I was, he towered over me, as large as a wolf. You became more the moment you demanded to know. When you first lifted your face to the heavens and determined to ascend to understanding. You are more like the One that Is than you realize.

Had I the eyes to see it, I might have noted the moue of distaste. I might have seen the turn of his head as he bowed it. But at the time I was only confounded by his logic, which seemed one moment as opaque as the mists—and in the next as bright as the sun the moment they cleared.

That afternoon when I went down from the terraces, I called the fallow doe, Adah. She pricked her head and came at a gait and together we ran for the river. We plunged full-long into the water and swam so far that we began to drift, Adah, legs churning, I on my back. My hair splayed beneath the glassy surface of the water as I gazed, unflinching, into the sun, thinking of all that the serpent had said.

After a while, Adah picked her way onto the bank. But I drifted until the reeds caught me, until the plop of frogs in the shallows tickled my ears, and I looked up to find the adam crouched at the edge of the water, smiling at me.

He waded in among the reeds and gathered me to him. “How smooth and high your cheek. How strong your legs. How graceful your back. Ask of me anything. Ask of the One that Is anything. Who can deny you?”

That day when he kissed me, I had two loves: one given to hold me and one to woo my soul.

Surely I was the most beautiful creature on earth.

LATE THAT NIGHT, AFTER the insects had come out to take up their chorus by light of the waning moon, I wondered what it must have been to be alone.

I imagined what it was to be without, to see a counterpart for every animal and none for oneself.

Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.

I DREAMED OF DARK heavens, of land pulled from the water, and the great energy everywhere, jittering with life.

But there—a great light careened toward a zenith! It was a fiery globe, molten, throwing warmth onto my skin. There were others, too, peering into the darkness like the opening of a thousand eyes, each of them glistening through the heavens, seeming to stare at me. Behind me, a cooler light, so small in comparison, rose in silence. Then I realized it was no light at all but a small mass of land illuminated by that new, great star.

Now with the rise of the sun and of the smaller mass, a long pull bent the walls of my veins in one great, throbbing tug. Release, and then the tug again: the ebb and flow of the tide. The pulse of every heart and vein. The beckon of every womb.

It came as a chorus. It came as a roar. Now when I looked upon the land, the raw earth and craggy mountains in all their chilly finery had sprung a lush wealth of trees, shrub, and grass—green of every kind, twining toward heaven in whatever direction the sun might wheel. The pulse in my ear came not from me but from that land and the stems throbbing with water and sun and sap.

Wake!

THAT MORNING, AS WE made our water in the stream, I announced: “Beyond this land there is a great body of water, filled with strange life miniscule and giant, and beyond it there is another continent. And another.”

I told him about the mountains with their treasures like charms hidden in a fist, and the marshy deltas that drained into great lakes where hatching flies spewed up from the surface like plumes of smoke escaping the abyss below. Of island mountains heaving up fire to sizzle in the sea. Of the frozen waters, creeping so slowly as to seem never to move.

When I had finished, he gave a slow exhale. “You are truly the daughter of God.”

“You told me once you roamed the place beyond this valley.”

“Yes, beyond the mountain gate, before the great mountain to the east, the origin of our river. There is a wide basin before it, covered with waves of rustling grass.”

My dreaming vision had not played me false—the world was vast. One day we would come out from this gated cradle and discover the secrets beyond that plain.

I did not realize then how very soon that was to be.

4

Gazing at the glimmering sky by night, I saw the drama of the creation of my dreams inscribed in living code. If only I studied it long enough, I thought I might read within its record the account of all that had gone before. There was meaning, I knew, in the strew of the stars, cryptic symbols drawn by the finger of the One in an age before this.

On a night like this I closed my eyes and found myself gazing down again at the thriving vegetation of the land. The tug and pull of the stars drew me out in all directions—toward the sun, toward the cosmos as they churned with such force that I thought I might split apart.

I was aware of those celestial bodies as I had never been before, each of them measuring the passing of seconds and moments and hours, the fulmination of time where before there had been none.

Now when I looked out over the land, I saw movement within the seas. I rushed as the wind upon the surface of the water and saw beneath it the swarm of fish and, beyond them, a great shadow, gliding through the deep. Was there anything so vast as this ocean, so great as this colossus within it, or so powerful as the One who commanded them all, Wake and Swim?

My heart lifted, and I mounted up toward the sky. I cried aloud the name of the One, spoken in secret to me, but it was with the voice of the eagle. The heavens answered in kind with the throats of a thousand birds.

Wake! I heard, and with every fiber of my being I replied:

I live!

WHEN I CAME TO the river after racing Adah to the far vineyard and back, I found the adam waiting for me, jewels of our garden in hand. He poked the buds of roses into my hair. He laid a wreath of laurel upon my head. But it was the thing he offered upon his palm that caused me to catch my breath: a carved bit of alabaster, a miniature form. I turned it over, touched the lines of legs and curve of hip and buttock and breast. Her arms were straight at her side, her face without detail except for the hint of a nose. But it could only be me. He showed me the burin with which he had carved it. He had with him, too, a short length of cord that he wrapped around the woman before fastening her around my neck. I fingered the smooth figurine, wishing there was a way to tie it without shrouding it in cord; I loved the feel of her form beneath my fingers.

“On the day you woke up beside me, this is how you were lying.” His gaze rested upon the figure at my throat.

That day I sat before one of the quiet pools. I studied my wreathed and adorned reflection, my face framed by a fall of dark hair. I touched my cheek in the way the adam liked to do. I traced the line of my nose to its curved tip and round nostrils.

I was a sleeker creature than the adam, if not more beautiful. My jaw was softer, my forehead less broad. We bore little resemblance to each other, which struck me as strange. I suppose I expected more of his unmistakable features upon my face, the curve of his lip upon my mouth.

The watery mirror rippled. The serpent glided into the middle of it, his magnificent wings folded upon his back.

How beautiful you are, daughter of God and man.

You are more beautiful yet.

Do you not believe the One has made you the most lovely and gifted of creatures? His was the most beautiful of unspoken voices, soft and melodious.

I am gifted with every good thing. . . .

Every good thing?

Surely the One withholds nothing from me.

And neither do I. Go and look up upon the precipice, in that tall tuft of grass there. You will see a delight. Soon I will show you another.

He spread wide his wings and took to flight. For a moment he eclipsed the sun.

Within a cup-shaped nest in the grass lay five spotted eggs. I gasped—one of them had begun to hatch. I watched over them for an hour, even after the mother returned fresh from dinner. I stroked her feathers as together we watched the slow progress of the hatchlings. But my mind was on the serpent.

I DREAMED I STOOD on the edge of the earth. I was a giant, towering into the heavens. My heels rested upon the craggy shore, my toes stretched to the sea. A tapestry lay at my feet: jade of glaciers, the desert dunes, the glow of lava . . . trees covered by blankets of moss, mists crawling from valley to valley, the lettuced edges of waves fringing the shore.

But now I realized the ocean was not the only surface rippling with movement. A motion caught my eye upon the savannah. There! A pride of lions. There! The tarpan mob, running like a river upon the steppe! I saw the elk in the wood and every other animal in strange and foreign terrain: the elephant, the tiger, the ostrich, the bear, the crocodile and wild auroch, the boar, and even from this great height the badger, the rabbit, the minx, the mole.

Finally, in the valley so familiar to me, I saw the serpent gliding among the reeds and staring up at me.

THE NEXT NIGHT I dreamed I rushed upon the plain, grasses bowed in my wake.

The roar of the lion and whooping hyena sounded from the distance. The voices of a thousand frogs screamed in chorus, and the wolf howled at midday: songs of homage sung not for me but the One before me, borne on a current greater than the air itself, than the world or any element within it—and more alive.

Behind me came the osprey, the falcon, and the hawk. We crested the mount as dawn spread across the valley. We plunged from its height—down, over pine and cedar, like water running to the sea.

Near the marshy delta, I was restless. I circled to the bank, in the mud, into the water and back, like the wild dog before sleep, like the dervish eddying in the corner of a canyon.

But no, it was not I but another who circled in that pregnant manner, pacing in the mud until the earth began to churn. Water rolled against the bank and a great cloud passed over the face of the rising sun. There, in the shadow of the day, came a queer unrest in the earth. The mud began to bubble up. Steam rose from the simmering earth as from the surface of a hot spring upon the valley floor. It did not drift away with the wind but rose like a phantom into the air.

The river receded from the bank, pulling back her watery skirt to lay bare the fecund clay. Water bugs and frogs fled the naked bed.

Now the clay began to gather up upon itself in great misshapen clods. Once, twice, it sank back upon itself only to rise up, taller, larger—and fall back again as sand beneath a wave.

Silence from the throat of every beast. The air stood still. The earth launched up onto the grassy bank. But this time the mud was no longer formless.

A mist crept into the valley—how could this be, by the light of the climbing sun? It drifted over the form in the grass, nearly obscuring it, seeming to draw all sound into itself. I thought I might burst from the strain of that silence . . . until a single sound shattered it:

The gasp of an indrawn breath.

5

Late the next morning I sat near the marsh peeling fibers from stalks of soaked hemp. I liked to be alone the day after such dreams, so the adam had gone to see the gazelle, several of which were swelling with young.

No, it wasn’t that I wanted to be alone. I wanted to be alone with the One. The One who scaled then careened from the heights of the mount. The One who raised up the man from the mud. The One who fashioned me from a part of the man and knew me more intimately than even the adam.

Fish leapt in the current, jubilant at the sun snared on iridescent scales. Levia’s mate, Ari, lay upon the bank, bemused by the fish, feline brows lifting over great, limpid eyes.

Normally I would have stayed with him, but the restlessness of the churning earth of my dreams had suffused my morning, and I was unable to sit still.

I left my work and jogged upstream in the direction of the terraced vineyard. I climbed upward, the sun on my shoulders like two warm hands.

As I picked my way among vines that already seemed ancient, I almost called for the adam. He was too far away to hear me shout his name but would have heard me with that other sense. But I did not call him.

I wandered farther up the slope, the scent of grapes cloying in my nostrils, practically salivating at the thought of tart, tannin-laden skins. But I had not come for food.

I found a narrow terrace and lay down upon it in the very posture in which I had entered this world. I tilted back my head. My legs sank into the earth. And then I flung wide my arms, palms opened to the sky, as though laying bare every bit of my skin to the air.

It came upon me: the thing that inhabited sun and air, the elements beyond them both, the heavens, and time and life.

Ah! I was filled with joy. I was slain with pleasure! It brimmed through me, galvanized my spirit. I recalled the primal excitement of the animals as the One had blazed across the earth. I lifted my voice in wordless jubilation.

I was more alive than the first day I drew breath. Than the first time I lay in the adam’s arms. I was alive as one can only be in the presence of the One.

Was there air? Was there earth? Was there animal or mountain or river? I was all of these things. I was the ripple of wind through the tail feathers of bird, the soft pad of cat. I was the soul that knows the secret name of the One who fashioned it. In the distance I heard the chatter of the stream, the dance of the needle dropping from the stem, the song of the sun through glaciers a world away, throwing off an orchestra of light.

I am the trickle from the dark abyss, the running of the stream to the river . . . the drop of water that falls from the stem and becomes a mighty roar.

Leaves rustled upon the vine, as loud as a blast of wind in my ear, raising the hair on my arms.

Daughter!

Again, as softly as the light of the moon: Daughter.

Here I am.

Partaker of life. Knower of mystery.

Mystery? I have so many questions.

You will learn answers.

Do not leave me! Stay with me!

I could hardly have stood it had it continued. I could not bear for it to stop. Faintly, and, I thought, with a longing I did not yet recognize as sadness, it came: Until the end of days.

I would see your face!

But I opened my eyes only upon the azure sky. Rolling to my stomach, I covered my face and wept.

I SLEPT BENEATH THE drooping sun, depleted but filled as I often was with the adam, if in a wholly different manner.

After a while I ate sweet grapes from the vine, spitting out the seeds upon the ground. The adam, I knew, waited on the southern hill for me. I plucked several clusters to take to him. But when my hands were full, I sat abruptly back down in the place where I had lain, not wanting to leave.

I closed my eyes and laid down again, clutching the clusters of grapes, aware of the fish in the river below, the kite circling above, of every insect crawling politely over my ankle. Eventually, I realized I was no longer alone.

How lovely you are.

And you.

I did not need to open my eyes.

And how loved by the One you are.

I heard the unspoken voice like the silk of spiders’ webs, saw without looking the sun upon those scales.

Yes.

Are you sated?

Never.

Ah. That is how it is with the One. He made us to crave him, don’t you know?

I lifted my head and blinked at him in the lengthening sun. Indeed?

Of course. By design, all of creation longs for him.

I reminded myself that the serpent had been made prior to both the adam and me. Perhaps that explained the strange sense of his tenure here, as though he had lived a vast lifetime before this.

He preened beneath a wing.

Then it is well for us that he should satisfy.

As always, your logic is impeccable. He stopped, tilted his head. I see glimpses of the One in you.

“Truly?” I said aloud, surprised.

You are like the One, beautiful and wise.

But so are you.

Ah, but I am not so privileged as you, for you were made in the image of the One. So you see, you are more like God than I.

I thought about what he had said long after the adam came to find me, Adah at his heels. The serpent stayed with us, speaking of ordinary things, and I realized how remarkable our discussions were and how singular. I had them with no other creature save the adam, and the serpent had them only with me.

We stayed there after the serpent left, watching the stars emerge from the depths of the darkening sky.

THAT NIGHT, BENEATH THE adoring light of the full moon, the sight of my adam struck me as a thing of immeasurable beauty. I thought of my dream of him, of that first gasp and the inflation of those lungs crafted to exhale words, rumbling laughter, sighs of pleasure. In light as luminescent, nearly, as twilight, I ran my fingers from his shoulder to his thighs. I kissed the mouth that first devoured divine breath. I savored that neck as though it were nectar. Let me shun food forever. There would be only him—the salt of his sweat and pleasure would fill me.

That night, beneath a diaphanous curtain of stars, we strove as though we would meld into the single being we had been, until we were no longer male and female but one creature. There was no grass beneath us, no valley below us, and no earth—no other life upon it but ours, enrapt, alone with the mind of God.

When it was over and we lay exhausted, it was deep night. I curled over, almost onto my knees in the low grass of the terrace, and the adam curled around me. Sometime before morning, he carried my leaden limbs toward our bower in the hills, but then, changing his mind, took me to the river to lie with me beneath the fig tree.

How I wish now that I had fought to stay awake. That I had gazed at the stars, counting the gems of my stellar crown, the brightest of which bore the ineffable name of God.

How I wish I had done that.

Or that I had gone to sleep and never wakened.

THE FRUIT

6

A day does not go by that I do not think of that moment—that handful of moments, that hour—that I lay upon the terrace in the vineyard, my arms open as though to the sun itself, the voice of the One reverberating with that sound that is both roar and whisper at once. A day does not go by without remembering that night with Adam or how I thought to myself, This is how the stars felt upon their creation.

We woke once before the dawn. Sticky as overripe fruit, we slipped into the river, our arms always about one another, entwined as our toes skimmed the river bottom, our hungry mouths finding no food but each other. We washed up onto the grassy bank downriver, not caring where we were, only that the ground was soft beneath us. There we dozed, sodden with pleasure. At some point before dawn, the adam called Levia to warm us.

Let me remember that morning as it was: the crisp air as night stole silently away, the creatures once frenzied by darkness meandering toward bed, the silence broken by birdsong when even the insects had gone to their bower.

I woke with Levia’s heavy head against my shoulder, the adam’s breath rumbling deep in his chest beside me. I stroked back the hair from his face, traced his mouth with a finger, thinking of the murmurs that had escaped those lips so much like two halves of a fruit just ripening.

He stirred, and I pressed him back. “I will bring you food,” I whispered against his cheek. It was taut as the skin of an apple beneath my lips.

This is where I would end my story. Where I would say that we ate and then lay like that forever . . . where I would return in my mind as one does to a birthplace to dwell before dying.

I am the water suspended upon the fall, the unceasing sun upon the grass. I am . . . I am . . .

It is no use. The waterfall cannot halt upon the cliff. The sun cannot deny the night.

I planned to go to the grove but wanted to wash first. I plunged into the river. It was lovely in first light, near silent before the day. I floated, water flooding my ears with the strange language of every animal that dwelt within it. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the current, drifting in a world that seemed to say, Be at peace; know that I Am. And again and again, I Am.

By the time I opened my eyes, the sky had paled. Overhead the fading stars were captured in the leafy net of a tree. A sugary scent more tart than the apricot and more cloying than honey wafted out over the water. I stiffened.

I knew that scent. I knew that tree.

I stood up in the shallows, startled to find myself at the edge of the island, the smell of that fruit filling my nostrils with sweet nectar and dew.

I loosed leafy flotsam from my hair, dwelling between two worlds: the one inhabited by the sleeping adam and contentment and the other inhabited by that tree.

How I wanted to inspect it more closely! Perhaps, as long as I did not touch it . . .

No. I turned away just as a glimmer of strange sun glinted through the thicket of that modest shrub growing near the base of her more spectacular sister.

The serpent.

He preened, his head craned over his back as he rustled beneath a feathery scale. I felt a rush of pleasure at seeing him, as memories of the One—and yesterday—returned to me.

He straightened and cocked his head at me. Daughter of the One and of man. Even unspoken, it was as smooth as a cat’s purr.

How lovely you are. I meant it with all my heart; he seemed more stunning than the sun. And I was more in love with the world than I had ever been, from the strong current of the river to the fading stars, to the lark’s eggs newly hatched upon the hill. If the serpent was pleased, surely it was because he mirrored every pleasure of my own, my joy in every aspect of this life.

I climbed up onto the bank, hair dripping down my back, and, seized with sudden joy and intoxicated by the bouquet of that fruit, twirled, my arms lifted to the sky.

He said nothing as I staggered on the grass, clasping myself with a sigh, and I realized I could not ascertain at all what he was thinking; it was as though he stood behind a veil. What—I had dreamed the explosion of the cosmos yet could know nothing of his thoughts? How clever he is, I thought, wanting to know how he did the trick.

I can do it because I have learned a new way of things, he said at last.

I want to know it.

He paced before the splendid tree so that I found myself measuring the beauty of them both . . . and then of the tree itself. How fine were its leaves, shaped like the laurel’s, tapered to their fine point. How lovely that fruit, the color of persimmon and saffron, so like fire and the setting sun. Every one of them was ripe, not a one was green on the stem or fallen to the ground anywhere I could see. They were near to bursting with juice—I could smell it—and at the peak of sweetness. They were exactly as before: pristine, unchanged. . . .

Waiting.

My stomach lurched and gurgled. I considered the smaller shrub and its dark berries—so plain! Still, I could gather some of those. But if I picked enough to satisfy the adam and me both, I might brush up against that tree—the very one he had bid me not even touch. Even if I managed not to touch it, I had no basket, no way to carry the berries across the river.

I was reluctant to leave, but there was nothing for me to take back from here.

Why do you go when you are clearly famished? He quirked his head at me, his brilliant comb standing straighter.

Surely you know I cannot eat from this tree.

The black eye blinked. God has really said that you must not eat from any tree in the garden?

I cut him off with a short gesture. We may eat from any tree but this one. The One has said, “You will not eat of it, nor even touch it, or you will die.”

The adam and I had pondered the death many times since the day he brought me here. But despite our musing about an end of life and our search for evidence of death among fallen and decomposing fruit and the compost of leaves and the refuse of our industry, which we gathered together to enrich the soil, I understood the death less well than the explosion that had filled the universe at its incarnation. In fact, every evidence of degrading life seemed only to point back to the sustenance of the living so that I grasped the idea of the death less and less the more I meditated upon it.

I sensed the remote stirring of the adam, rousing from sleep. I had meant to have food waiting for him by now—had planned, in fact, to feed him and rouse him once more to pleasure. Yet here I loitered near the forbidden tree. I turned to go.

You will not die the death. The serpent clucked—an odd sound coming from him. The One knows that on the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened.

I hesitated. The river seemed more lively from this vantage. In fact, everything seemed more vibrant and beautiful here. “They are open now,” I said aloud.

Not as a god’s, knowing good and evil.

I stood very still.

God knows very well that the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened.

To know as God. Was it possible? Good I knew. I knew it as well as the earth was gorgeous, as I had known the adam in all the ways that are both good and mighty. But evil—

—Is a thing known to God. Well, and to me, of course.

I squinted at him.

Death. Evil. To know as a god, the serpent said. Had I not craved all things of God, all knowledge?

I lifted my eye again to that tree. This time, instead of seeing the fruit bursting with juice upon it, I saw the answer to every unknown thing, the satisfaction of a craving deeper than hunger.

I couldn’t remember anything so beautiful.

The adam was coming. He was coming, drawn to this place because I stood upon it, knowing every thing that transpired here with me.

Perhaps he would stop me.

How have you known all of this? I said to the serpent.

You might say that I ate this very fruit a long while ago.

And there he stood, very much alive. Indeed, he was more cunning than any other animal.

The adam alone had received the statute concerning this tree, in a time before me. It was the adam who had told me not to eat it, the adam who had said I should not even touch it. The remnant—always the remnant—of a conversation held between the adam and the One in the quiet tones of lovers, without me.

I thought back to the vineyard, to the rapture of those moments with my head flung back and my arms wide, the sun and God bright upon my face. Surely all things on earth had been made for our pleasure. I was filled with the assurance of the beloved to whom every good thing is entrusted.

The serpent disappeared within the bush and emerged on the trunk of the tree, bright claws clinging to the smooth bark. He leapt to a low-hanging bough and, without preamble, sunk his teeth into one of the fruits. Crimson oozed from the wound. I could smell it, the scent more intoxicating than pomegranates or plums. How delicious it must be! And how staunch and beautiful the tree with its emerald leaves, its branches curved out to invoke the sun!

Now I knew what I would not allow myself to think before: that the beauty of every other tree in the garden paled in contrast to this one. Every wild and generous provision of our valley seemed a pittance against the lavishness of this one and what I might gain from it. I, who had been told not even to touch it!

The adam was near. He did not call out, he did not need to. I felt his eyes upon me as keenly as the newly risen sun and knew that he could hear and sense and smell it all, that he hungered as surely as I, possibility having opened to him again like the throat of an exotic flower.

Yes, I say “again” because I knew then with a remnant of some sense beyond my own that he once stood in this very place in a time before my creation.

He emerged from the river to stand dripping upon the bank, as still as one in a trance.

“I know now,” I said. Inexplicably, tears fell from my eyes. “How it was before. I know.”

“Can you?” His eyes were wild.

“Are we so different, you and I?”

“No,” he said, closing the distance between us, pulling me roughly against him. “No.” His hands were in my hair, his mouth twisting against my cheek, the words torn from his heart: Flesh of my flesh.

It came in a torrent the moment he touched me: the moment he had stood in this very place a day, a month, a lifetime before me. How he had held the fruit in his hand until the scent nearly maddened him. The way he had fled across the river to fall upon the bank and shrouded the memory of it in shadow ever since.

“Waking beside you, realizing what you were—ah, how grateful I was!” He held me tight against him, as though he would press me back into himself. “In creating you, the One gave me back a part of myself—a way by which to learn anew every joy, independent of this tree, so fixed in my consciousness as though it had sent its roots through my mind every night as I slept! Even after I brought you here, there was relief. Now I had another with whom to contemplate the meaning of this thing, this death. Another possessed of the same cravings, longing as I for the thing that was not to be taken: to see through the very eye of God!”

I clasped him, loving him more in that moment than ever in my life. “The serpent has said we will not die,” I said. The look in his eyes was like fever.

“We are one flesh. We will live or die the death together.”

“Then let us know all things,” I said, very softly. Around his head the refracted light of the sun seemed suddenly everywhere.

The fruit was warm. It fit perfectly in my palm, its skin so taut that a tooth or nail might split it all the way round. I plucked it with a soft snick of the stem.

I turned to the adam with wonder. What did he see in me now? I had touched it. Was I now like God? Had I died the death? His breath quickened, and I felt his excitement like arousal, the possibility of the unthinkable like adrenaline. I was heady with the idea of this act more singular and exquisite than that which we had performed through the night.

The fruit seemed inordinately heavy, a growing weight, in my hand, nearly unbearable, and I knew I must lift it to my lips and eat or drop it to the ground forever.

Our eyes met as I raised it to my lips.

“Wake,” I whispered, so softly that I knew he heard it only in my thoughts. He might have stopped me.

He didn’t.

I ate.

I, who had come second, went first. I, who had followed in the steps of every living thing before me, walked ahead.

Perhaps my hand trembled as I held it out. Perhaps I already knew. Either way, I ate and then gave it to him.

He ate.

That is it.

We fell upon the tree like hungry locusts, never knowing when the serpent left.

We shared them between us, throwing one away before we finished it, plucking another if only to take a single bite, licking lips and fingers—our own and each other’s. I had wanted him earlier. I claimed him now. We fell together, the night renewed between us by day, twining in the sunlight the way we had in the darkness.

Having done, we lay in the shade of that tree, beneath the climbing sun, and slept the sleep of the dead.

7

So quiet.

I awoke thinking something lay over my ears. We were alone, the adam and I, upon the grass of the island. How queer the air had gotten here, so that sound came as though through water as I had heard it just that morning while floating down the river.

Too quiet.

The water—did it run? It did, but the sound of it was dull. Even the air through the grass seemed feeble, murmuring like an old man talking to himself.

I sat up. The adam, already awake, had a strange look on his face. For the first time since my creation, I could not discern his thoughts.

We had devoured each other. I had had him as I had eaten the fruit after the first bite: greedily, as though I would consume him, my body one great maw, knowing nothing but appetite.

He had used me the same.

It had never been that way with us before.

Too quiet.

Suddenly I realized: the symphony—that blended chorus of all living things that had been with me since the day of my creation—was gone, replaced by a dull drone.

It came then like a squall in a white-hot flush of silent fear and dread: We had done the thing we were not to do. And as though in proof, we had done a thing we had done many times before, in a way it was never meant to be.

The divine mark of God, the serpent had called the act of creation. But there was nothing of the One in the thing we had brought to existence.

Fruit pits and skins were strewn everywhere around us like bodies gored and flung away by the great horns of a beast. They were crawling with insects. An inordinate number of insects. There, then, was the source of that drone: the carnage of this feast had attracted a multitude of flies. They crept over the remains of the pits and the stems still attached to some of them, over torn skins, and one another. The fruit nearest me swarmed with a host of winged black bodies. I flicked it away in disgust. It rolled a little way and came to a stop, the flies upon it startled into an airborne mob before attacking it again more voraciously than before.

I hid my face against the adam’s shoulder, but he did not clasp me. He was trembling. So violently did he tremble that his head seemed to shake upon his neck, jerking back and forth, the blue eyes—no longer the blue I knew when I lay down—wide.

This was the most frightening thing of all, the sight of him, my lover, my father and teacher, like this.

Oh, God, what have we done?

I am the leaf shuddering on the stem before the storm. I am the mountain that tremors before the quake. I am the leaping fish that lands upon the bank.

I surveyed the valley around us. It seemed both alien and strange, a thing not itself, as the adam was not himself. There were the usual sounds, fainter, as though from a distance—thinner, as though through a sieve. If I strained, could I smell the scent of Ari, the cud of Adah, the faint scat of the vole, and the grapes upon the terrace?

I could not!

I must think. I must find sense—the One was the author of order! But there was no order in the stillness of the air or the fruit teeming with flies.

The adam let out a sound, feral and raw, and fell down upon the ground, covering his head. I wrapped my arms around him, my limbs clumsy and disassociated, and realized I could not distinguish my sounds from his.

Make me the grass, oblivious to all but the dew! Make me the rock that is moved by nothing! If nothing else, let me be the soil, fallow and unconscious, knowing none of what I know.

I cannot bear it.

Where was the serpent? He had weathered this act. Surely he would know what was to be done. But even as I thought it, I knew he had bidden me eat knowing what would happen. I was sick. I had adored him, and he had bid me eat . . .

Eat and die.

The golden scales had housed poison.

The clots of flies massing upon the refuse must have tripled in this short time; the island teamed with swarming hordes, darkly iridescent in the sun. I barely turned away in time to heave out the contents of my stomach. What came out tasted acrid and foul and gave off a bitter stench. The adam recoiled, confusion and then disgust plain upon his face.

“What is that? Why are you doing that?” The adam stared, pointing. Flies came to feed on my vomit.

“I don’t know.” I wiped my mouth then scurried to the river to wash. I rinsed my mouth and then my face . . . and then my thighs, and then, giving up on ablutions in this way, plunged myself into the water. I sank beneath the surface, letting it cover me, meaning for it to wash me clean—even my ears and my eyes—so that when I emerged again the world might be as it was before. But as water filled my ears, it only entombed them in stifling silence.

Beneath the water I saw the carp, staring at me with one round eye. He whirled away in a cloud of mud.

I came up, spewing water, letting it run from my ears. Overhead, birds swarmed beneath a dingy sun. Gone was their crystalline sound, replaced by cries dull and feral and stupid.

I could not wash the dullness from my ears. I could not wash the dimness from my eyes. Perhaps the adam, if I could rouse him from his stupor, would know what was to be done. He had lived longer than I. Surely he would know what to do.

But when I returned to the bank of the island, he had vanished.

I stared at the place where he had been, at the mass of flies where I had vomited in the grass.

“Adam!” I cried against the growing avian storm. The dark bodies of a thousand birds threatened to blot out the sun. I scrambled out of the water, my hair sticking to my back and shoulders and breasts, rivulets running down my spine and dripping from my nose. “Adam!”

But he was gone. I could no better sense the whereabouts of the man than I could hear the padding of Ari’s pride or Yedod’s pack.

A moist thud sounded somewhere beyond me. It came again and then again, like the patter of heavy rainfall—or the bashing of soft skulls. I spun, looking for its source, but I was alone on this patch of earth in the middle of the river. Then I saw, from the corner of my eye, one of the heavy fruits of that tree fall to the ground. And then another—and another—in a faded golden rain. Overhead, one of the ravens plunged from the horde and tore into the fallen flesh. It seemed darker than it had that morning and softer than it should have been. The smell of it, fainter to my nostrils than before, seemed overly sweet—rotten.

The flies had not let up in any small manner and massed upon the newest spoils. I could see now bees and beetles and roaches among them. The birds descended, a squabbling maelstrom. The thud-thudding of falling fruit, like the cudgel of a heart, seemed it would never end. Beside that great tree, the bush with the berries seemed as vibrant as ever, but it might as well have not existed for the rabid beaks and maws and vermin surging toward every fruit falling to the ground.

I plunged into the river and swam for the bank, fighting the current. Had I ever struggled so much in water or on earth? Had my footing ever been unsure before in my life? Yet I slipped on the bank and stumbled several steps as my stomach threatened to empty itself again. Behind me the island was in riot; birds mobbed the ground, plunging from a swarm that nearly darkened the sky.

Something thumped to the ground before me: a piece of fruit dropped by an avian thief. It was positively rotting, and a beetle was bedded within the pulp like a tick. I shrunk back just as a fox—Chalil, the flute lover!—darted out from a nearby shrub and began, with no heed for the beetle or the carious flesh, to eat it. The adam and I used to laugh at antics such as these. But even as I took a mote of comfort in the sight of him, a shadow streaked across the ground, talons extended. Chalil went down in a flash of feathers, twisting and snapping. Crimson splashed his fur, and the eagle came away with the fruit—and Chalil’s eye.

I screamed and screamed.

I don’t know how long I stood there, paralyzed with screaming long after the fox and eagle had gone, before the adam finally appeared and forcefully pulled me away.

We ran along the river beyond the cloud of frenzied birds and fell down beneath a fig tree.

“Where were you?” I shouted at him.

His eyes were dull. “I went to find the serpent.”

My heart sparked, but the adam’s mouth, so plush, so beloved, was a grim line. “He’s gone.”

I did not know what to say. There was no word for fear. No word for regret.

I HAD AN IDEA that eating one of the figs might settle my rebelling stomach. But at the sight of my hand reaching to pluck it in the same way it had for that fruit, I quailed and hid my face within one of the great leaves.

There was no ease. Grief was a river without outlet to the sea.

Was this what it was, then, to die the death? Surely I knew evil now.

The adam’s hands closed around my shoulders. Where before they had brought me comfort, now I felt worse—guilty and most culpable. “I have done this,” I cried, not lifting my face. “I have done this to both of us. Were it not for me, you would not have eaten.”

I wanted him to say that he could have stopped me had he wished. That he might have refused. That we were Ish and Isha, one flesh. He said none of these things.

“We will find the way,” he said, sounding not at all resolved. “We must seek the One that Is.”

My stomach lurched. I had willed thoughts of the One aside the moment I lifted that fruit from the tree. Even upon waking with dulled senses, I had thought to resolve that mystery before facing the One again. But the adam was right. We could not put right all that had gone awry without him.

I let go the leaf. When I dropped my hands, one of them brushed against the adam’s thigh where he stood behind me. I flinched away, thinking again of what we had done. When he caught my hand and brought it back to him, I pulled away. We had used each other cheaply. I felt a hot wash of shame even as I felt an absurd flicker of desire.

This, too, the One would know and would gaze upon us in our guilt.

I felt laid bare, a fruit split open to reveal only moldering inside. I turned away from the adam, unable to look at him. I had cleansed myself to no avail; I felt myself a thing ruined. I snatched back the bough, tore free the leaf . . . and then another—and another and another. I tore at the tree until I held a clutch of leaves within my sweating palm.

“Take me to our bower,” I said.

The peace I had felt beneath the willow arches of our bower—where was it now? Only familiarity remained. I found my basket, cord, and tools and began to twine the fig leaves together in the way the adam had once used to make for me garlands and crowns. But if this were a crown, it was the most shameful sort. When I was finished, I held it over my head. There, in the privacy of this bonnet, my face crumpled and hot tears streaked my swollen cheeks.

The adam tried to hold me, but I pushed him away. He pulled me gently back—now I could feel the tremor in his hands—and lifted the leaves from my face. Perhaps with a vestige of that understanding that needed no words, he lowered it to my waist and tied it there, so that the leaves hung over those parts stained by our use of each other.

I wept to see our industry, so joyously applied in gifts and tokens, in experiments and invention, given to such purpose. When the adam had made a similar covering for himself, he pulled me to him, hard against his chest. He did it, I knew, not to comfort me but himself as he lowered his head to my breast.

I held him in silence. We did not know the language for sorrow or apology. We had no words for forgiveness, for it had never been needed.

8

Midday was filled with the cacophony of birds—birds of all kinds, predator and sparrow alike—churning in the sky. The lion, the wolf, the braying onager were silent, gone. I had seen none of the pride, the pack, or the herd. In fact, I had laid eyes on no animals at all except for Chalil, now gone. There was only the endless sea of birds.

By late afternoon they began to recede. I wondered, had they stripped the tree bare? I shuddered to think of that tree, that island now. How many times in the last hour had I wished to undo all that we had done, to take back that thing we had brought forth—to unknow the thing we now knew?

After a time the horde was gone. There came only the intermittent call of the griffon. The hawk. Then silence.

Finally, in the late hour before twilight, a breeze rushed up from the valley floor. It rose as a sweeping wind over the foothills. Now here came the chorus of animals—not as many as there should have been—excited in its wake, raising raucous choir to heaven. The sky clouded over so that the green of the valley appeared more rich in the strange shade, both more vibrant and darkly alive at once.

The feral address came in waves, dying down and rising again, like wind in a storm, whipping to a frenzy and falling back again.

The adam grabbed my hand. We did not have words for “safe” or “unsafe” then. But I, too, had noted the strangeness of the air and the capriciousness of it, the way the winds seemed to rise upward to buffet the mountaintops before gushing down upon the valley. Clasping his hand, I ran with him down the narrow trail of our hillside bower to the valley. On the far hill a lone goat stood, coat blowing in the wind.

My limbs, once so agile, felt leaden, alien, wooden. We veered toward the orchard, but then the adam pointed toward a grove of willow trees along the river. There they bowed over, branch tips disappeared into the earth where we had tucked them beneath the soil and brought them up again so that they formed a kind of cavern where we had lain on the hottest days.

Inside, the willow cavern was damp. We held to each other, fingers clawlike, as wind buffeted the valley, tossing leaves and other refuse into the air.

As I clung to the adam, I was deaf to his thoughts as I had been to the goat on the hill. Did the animals cry out to us, who could no longer hear? What if they needed us? I started for the opening of the willow chamber, but the adam held back, shouting, “Do not go out!”

I didn’t know what was worse: the unnatural storm—unnatural in that there had never been a storm before—or knowing that though we hid together, the adam and I were as separated from one another as though we stood alone.

As the storm became a squall, we crouched in the willow chamber, covering our ears, faces, eyes.

Let me be nothing. If I must be something, let me be the air, which is unseen. Or let me be the earth that runs into the river with the rain, that empties out to sea until it is lost . . .

The wind abruptly died. The air fell utterly still.

The cries of the animals fell silent.

The faintest breeze. A rustle through the trees, as though to shake loose the debris of the blast a moment before. I smelled earth and leaf, the rot of fruit, and thought of flies.

My legs wavered as though pushed by a current. The sound of our breathing filled the air. The sound of our hearts seemed louder than all the world. Where once we had anticipated the appearance of the One and had gone running to find him, now we hid, bidding our hearts not beat, our breath not whisper a sound.

The adam started, violently, as though struck. He fell back, and again I saw the tremor in his shoulders, his head shaking as though at odds with his neck.

“What? What is it?”

He said nothing and started with jerking steps toward the opening of the cavern.

“What are you doing? Don’t leave me!”

When he looked back at me, fear was a creature wild on his face. His lips moved, though no sound came from them. He staggered a step backward and then walked woodenly out, as though his feet moved of their own accord, independent of his will.

I rushed to the mouth of the cavern. The valley floor exploded with light.

I fell back on the damp earth, my arm over my eyes.

When it came, the sound of it was so beloved—ah! Balm and terror at once! And yet so longed for by me.

Where are you?

Oh, God! I die.

Was it only yesterday that I lay in the vineyard—a day, a lifetime ago? Terrified, guilty, but knowing no other comfort in this world—not even the adam, who was undone—I burst from the cavern and threw myself to the ground. Within the intensity of that light, I could see nothing.

“I heard your sound. I was—was afraid.” The words came, choked out of the throat of the adam somewhere nearby. “I knew that I was naked. I—I hid.”

How ridiculous did it sound to say it, here in a light greater than the sun, which lays all bare?

Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to eat from?

Now, in a cry so thin as not to be that of a man: “The woman you gave me—she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”

My very blood, the bile in my mouth, dried to dust. A strangled cry issued from him the moment he said it, but it was too late.

He had betrayed me.

Ah, pain! I am the knife twisting in the flesh, the flint blade that slips and severs. Let me die!

The words, when they came to my heart, were so gentle and familiar—and so very sad: What is this you have done?

I heaved a convulsive sob, doubled over, my forehead on the grass. My words were a stream of bile, like vomit from my lips. “The serpent beguiled me and I ate.”

The sound of it was a spoken horror.

It was the truth.

Now I sensed another presence beyond the adam, the One, and me. I lifted my head and in that fulgent light saw the outline of a winged form, as the moon is outlined by the resplendent sun in eclipse. But the scales, once so lustrous, seemed tarnished. The wings, so incandescent, looked now opaque as rust. Where was beauty? Where was brilliance? He, who had been once my advisor and then my betrayer—would he, too, lay blame at my feet?

The One spoke: Cursed be you of all cattle and all beasts of the field! On your belly you go. Eat dust all the days of your life!

The serpent began to unfurl his wings. They opened and opened, seeming to unfold forever as the serpent himself straightened and then stretched beyond his natural size until he stood—upright on two feet—nearly twice the size of a man. The golden scales around him burst like a split shell and fell to the ground, discarded as though he had emerged from a chrysalis, no longer a serpent at all but something far greater and more beautiful. His wings glimmered as though with all the quartz of a mountain. The thing that had risen to its full height uncoiled wing after glistening wing so that he had not one pair like the serpent, or even two as the dragonfly, but three pairs as no creature known to me. His face, though I knew it to be turned toward the One, seemed to look in all directions—forward and backward and east and west at once. He stood upright with a posture so straight that I marveled he might stand so erect before God. And as he lifted his chin to the Almighty, the face on the back of his head lowered until it fastened upon me.

It was too beautiful and terrible to look upon, so perfect that I thought, Surely I have come from the mud!

The One said, I will set enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and hers.

I heard then a sound more fearsome than that of any beast: a taut strain like a note plucked and held too long, and a low rumble against it. The rumble lengthened, vibrating against that tense sound, at odds with it as laughter in the face of danger.

Laughter.

The sound was sick, the audible sum of premonition and power and dread.

His wings opened and then he was gone.

The chrysalis that had entombed him had shriveled to a long cocoon. As I pushed up with powerless arms to the place where the serpent had been, the chrysalis twitched and then slithered away like an overgrown worm.

Softly now: He will bruise your head, but you will strike his heel.

I did not know what this meant. I knew only that the One was here and that every fiber within me cried out for reconciliation—with the One, with the valley and all that dwelt within it . . . with the adam.

I need you!

I meant to say I would never long for any other pleasure if I might return to my vineyard and orchard and bower. That I would question nothing, ask nothing, seek nothing if only I could have it all back. That I now knew the thing I had done.

But I couldn’t. Because here was the worst of it: Even now, in the presence of the One, he seemed somehow impossibly far away from me as he had never been before. Even as he said, so very gently, I am.

I cried out in a language without words for the One to retrieve, to restore me. But it was too late; I was like the child that reaches up with broken arms.

He said very quietly, I will greatly increase your conceptions; with pain you will give birth to children. You will long for your man, but he will rule over you.

I blinked at the ground, not understanding. Was I not to die the death? Or was this how it was to be done? What care did I have for pain? Could any pain be greater than this?

The One said to the adam: You listened to the voice of your woman and ate from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat.

How deftly the human finger pointed at me was returned to its owner. But greater than that was the sorrow behind it—a sorrow made deeper by a history of love.

So softly: Cursed is the soil for your sake. With toil you will eat from it all the days of your life. It will sprout thorn and thistle for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat bread until you return to the soil from which you were taken.

Did God weep? Was the One capable of tears?

Dust you are . . . to dust you will return.

The light faded like a back that turns to walk away.

I keened, empty except for grief. Pouring out grief like poison, unable to excise it.

I die. I die.

I lay a long time like that, facedown upon the ground. Wretched. Spent. Covered in dirt. Near me the adam lay as one dead; only by the heaving of his breath did I know he lived and that he did so in a grief all his own.

Separate from mine.

I lay exhausted. The adam was silent as a rock. That is when I smelled it. Acrid and sticky in the nostrils. A rancid thing laid open, metallic on the air and reeking of earth and feces and hair and skin.

What I saw in the full moonlight turned my screams to dust in my throat.

Two animals sprawled upon the dirt, the earth darkened beneath them. Their legs splayed out at a most unnatural angle, hooves in the air. Their mouths hung open, tongues lolling in the air.

They had no skin.

Pale and pink and sickeningly sleek, they were covered in bits of white as that which encases the seeds within the pomegranate, as though it had once held a skin in place, a skin that had been sheared—no, ripped—free of it.

One of the forms twitched.

My body cried, Enough! and buckled beneath me.

9

If I wait, there will come that word. I wait.

It does not come.

Smell of skin, skin of the adam. All that is warmth and surety surrounds me. I lie in the bower between my man and one of the fleecy ewes.

A tendril teases my neck. The rest of my hair is lifted away, caught up in a web of fingers as they cradle my head. I am rocked like a babe.

Is it the death? Oh, but it comes sweetly. Where is pain?

My head falls back. My face is turned toward the sun. But no warmth comes of it, no red through the thin tissues of my eyelids. The wind is no caress; bits of dirt pelt my cheek.

“Isha, wake. Wake now!” I am shaken until I bite my tongue.

It is not from the One. Let me die.

But there was no death for me. Blood was acrid in my mouth. I lifted my eyes to the stricken face of the adam, contorted in the broken moonlight.

I struck out at him like a wild thing. I don’t know what I said, though I suspect they might have been the first unholy words uttered. The adam pinioned my hands against my sides.

“Isha, stop!”

I would have none of it. My mind rejected his command as my heart rejected his betrayal, as I rejected the thing I had done that I knew not to do. I beat at him but he clung to me, arms wrapped around me—wombtight, as they were that first day.

Then I noticed the sky beyond his head. Clouds roiled like the torrent of a river, black against the indigo night. The fire was in them, flashing from one end to the other. The trees rustled a violent shudder as thunder rolled beyond the mountains.

What new terror was this?

The adam loosed my arms slowly, as though not trusting that I wouldn’t lash out again. That is when I noticed the pelt wrapped around my torso. What was this hair that was animal but without the weight of animal? Then I remembered the flayed forms upon the ground in their last death twitches, stripped of all natural raiment.

Lightning lit the dark heavens, illuminating the smooth, short hair of the fallow deer, and the markings—I recognized them.

Adah.

I screamed. I tore at the skin as though I would put it as far away from me as the east is from the west. The adam struggled with me, capturing my hands once more but not before I landed him a sound slap to the head. He shook me then until my head wobbled on my neck. “Stop! Listen! Do you hear it? There is a storm coming and we—we are exiled. We are put out from here, Isha.”

His expression twisted, his voice broke, and he shook me again, though I had by now ceased to struggle. “Do you hear me? We are put out—and these, these are most terribly given—”

“No!” I wanted it off me, but it was fashioned with a thong, and I could not tear free of it in the way I might have my fig girdle.

“Stop it!” he cried. “It is given of God!”

“You—do you talk of God?” I screamed at him. “You, who say that you ate what the woman gave you—you, who hold no responsibility for what you put in your own mouth?”

The adam winced as though struck. I struggled with the hated garment, but he gripped my wrists and tugged on my arms so sharply that I thought they might pull from the sockets.

“Look to the sky, Isha!” He yanked me to my feet, and I realized that he was on the cusp of falling down with fear or grief, from which he might never rise. “We cannot stay here!”

The sky had gone black, the roiling mass of it struck through with lightning like white-hot veins. As though to emphasize the adam’s words, two mighty cracks collided above the mount, shaking it to its foundations so that my ears rang. The wind came in like a living thing, clawed at my hair, slapped the pelt against my thigh.

If we wore the skins of Adah and her mate, and if they lay upon the ground as fruits moldering . . . how could they exist without their skins? I craned to see beyond the adam, tried to pull the terrible thing off, to give it somehow, horribly, back. But when the sky flashed, there was only a blackened patch of earth where once the animals lay.

“Don’t look.” He turned me away. “They’re gone.” Then I smelled it—something other than the charred remains of fire. Something not as cleanly burned as dried grass or wood.

Struggling not to vomit, I turned my face to the sky, seeking any trace of the One, most loving, most terrible. But the churning dark held no God, no sun, no eye, no ear for us. Lightning—now an unnatural green—flashed in ragged streaks like talons clawing for the dark heavens. The western end of the valley was a hunchbacked beast.

“Go! Run to the eastern gate!” the adam shouted over a distant rumble. “Run!”

Run? My body had rebelled against food and consciousness already—and how should I run wearing this terrible trophy?

“I am going for our things.” He pushed me away. “Go!”

I took one last look at the face I both loved and abhorred and then turned on my heel and ran.

I bolted along the river. It ran with uncanny turbulence beside me. I had the sensation of eyes upon me and thought I smelled the charred and sickly smell of that burnt patch of earth following me in the unnatural air. At least my burst of motion, even beneath a blackened sky, stunted paralyzing gall. I knew nothing but the pounding of my feet, the heaving of my breath, the horrible hide flapping against my thigh, encasing my torso in its unnatural sheath.

Just as I reached the terraces, the skies opened. This was no rain as rains had been known to me—drizzling, sweet and warm—but a deluge, as though the earth would flush itself of all the life that polluted it. It came in droves as though I stood beneath a fall, driving beneath the garment and down my spine.

Impossibly, I ran faster.

The thunder rolled away as though it would take itself to the eastern sea, then doubled back, one wave crashing upon the heels of the last, beating at the skies. Before my inner eye I saw again the rising of the land, the heaving of the mountains, and wondered if the One meant to put them back.

I slipped on the wet earth, and my foot slid into a rock. Pain shot up my leg, startling the breath from me. I skittered but ran on. I could barely see, rain and sodden hair in my eyes. I thought I made out the shape of a hare darting through the brush, and, a moment later, the boar, though whether they were truly there or a trick of the rain and lightning, I could not know.

I scrambled toward the natural terraces. Water sluiced past me from above as I climbed upward, trying to get a view of the valley behind me to watch for the adam. The mount and the range to the north hunched like hulking giants. The river was well over its banks in some places. Lightning flashed, and I recognized one of the ewes struggling in the river, flailing as the current carried her away. I cowered on the terrace, wondering if the valley, roused to monstrous life, would devour the adam as well.

Was this my world now? Was this how it would forever be, never to see the sun again or lift our faces to the heavens without rain driving into our eyes?

Let the adam come quickly, I begged the One. But if he heard me, I did not know it.

After a while, the rain abated. Where was the adam? There was an outcrop here, farther up, where I could watch for him in the intermittent lightning. I climbed upward, along the rocky path. My foot slipped again and—ah, now there was pain! But I went on, clutching at grass and stone and shrub. The thunder rolled away, the sky flashed in silence.

I came to the outcrop that lay like a great lintel across the crumbling stone beneath. There was a small opening here like a cave. In here I had taken my meal of grapes and licorice root on hot days, watching the deer and lion upon the valley floor. I dropped, grateful to crawl within its low space where I would wait for the adam or God or death.

A low, grinding growl came from the darkness. I halted, wondering if thunder, that anger in the sky, could issue from the earth itself. In a flash of shock lightning, I made out the form of a wolf crouched as far back as she could go, her narrow bite bared, all gums and long incisors.

“Dvash,” I called, recognizing the she-wolf that had licked honey from my fingers. She relented only a little, her lips still peeled from her teeth. But when I moved toward her, she bit out a sharp snap so that I jerked back, hitting my head and scuttling backward out of the opening.

Had the animals turned traitor to us as well? I thought of Adah and her mate.

Or had we turned traitor to them?

I backed out into the rain. Stones and pebbles broke the skin of my knee, bit my palms. My foot throbbed.

I sidled along the outcrop to a smaller ledge and drew back as far as I could, pulling up my knees, shielding my eyes. Below me, tree and shrub seemed to dance to a frenetic rhythm.

BESIDE ME THE VINES shivered, fruit spilled to the muddy earth. And there—ah! There I had lain, arms outspread. Was it only yesterday that this ground had been holy? That I had been holy before the One that Is and God had lavished joy upon my face as one drops kisses onto the head of a babe?

I lowered my head to my arms and wept, my tears carried away by rivulets of rain.

The sky rumbled and the thunder surged back. This time I felt it beneath my feet. It vibrated up through the earth. Stones somersaulted down the hillside. One of them grazed my shoulder. The black sky beyond the mount was veined with lightning like the back of an unnatural leaf. I could see movement on the side of the mountain: creatures fleeing for the lowland—no, they were not creatures but stones.

I scrambled to the outcrop and peered into the darkness. “Come out!” I shouted to Dvash. She snarled and snapped a ferocious bark that sent me jerking back. Did she understand not at all? Did she not know that I told her come out for her own good, this creature that had once obeyed me without a thought, that had licked honey from my fingers and bared to me her belly? “Come!” I shouted, but she shrank back even farther.

I retreated the way I had come up, the cut in my foot forgotten, struck twice by falling rock. Down. I must get down.

Where was the adam?

A thudding crash sounded above me. I craned to see and cried out; the outcrop had closed like a snapping jaw. There was no sign of the wolf at all. I started back, meaning to go to her, but even in my strength, which was considerable, I knew I could not free her. A large stone tumbled past me. I clung beneath a small precipice, knowing I could not go back.

The earth rumbled, and I lost my footing. Sliding, scrambling, I reached the low hills. And then I sprinted, as fast as the gazelle, for the eastern gate.

When I got there, I spun back. The earth shifted again and the river lurched up in the bed. There was no adam.

I tried to shout the holy name of God, which I had known, but when I opened my mouth, it was like something beyond reach, so that I stuttered the unintelligible.

“It is I!” I cried. “It is I!” I began to tear at the pelt, but it was firmly made. Thunder drowned my cries in a roaring clap, and lightning flashed so brilliantly it blinded me for the moment after.

A figure dashed along the river—a she-goat, hair matted to her body. I called for her over the receding echo of the thunder. She veered toward me, and I grabbed her by the neck, somehow avoiding her horns. But she would not be restrained for long, and I could not hold her. She was out of her mind. I pushed her toward the eastern gate. “Go!” I slapped her rump and sent her at a run. The river had risen so high that she had to pick her way along the edge, but she was adroit and soon disappeared from view.

I stared after her, alone again, beaten by rain and terrorized by the skies and the earth beneath me. Lightning struck midway up the sacred mount, and a flash arced out from it. Sparks seared the dark, and a tree caught fire, impossibly, glowing in the rain. Again, the voracious lightning, and another tree flared and ignited, this one slightly farther up, so that the two flames looked like the eyes of the wolf beneath the outcrop, shaggy head tilted to glare at me.

The blaze did not abate in the rain but seemed to lick at the brush around it, sodden though it was, like a fiery tongue.

THE WIND ROSE WITH a howl and fire spread up the face of the mount like the long iris of a cat.

This time when I called for God, it was with a whisper. I fell down to my knees as the valley shook and flooded and ignited to ruin about me. I waited as the earth shuddered again. Waited—to hear that voice bidding me this time not to wake but to sleep.

But the voice that cut through the rain was not the One. It was the adam.

He ran with a white mantle over his neck—no, it was no mantle but one of the new lambs.

“Go!” he cried, waving me before him. I stumbled to my feet and ran to him, relieved to sobs at the sight of him, unwilling to go alone ahead of him again. But he shouted again, “Go, go! See the waters!” And indeed, the river ran even higher than a moment ago.

Lightning struck the vineyard. Flames engulfed the shrubs. Again and again the lightning came like a lashing tongue, unnatural fire in its wake.

“Run!” the adam shouted again, alongside me now, holding fast the legs of the lamb about his neck. I saw now a bundle at his waist, caught up in the pouch of one of my textiles, beating at his thigh.

We ran for the gate, the hillsides aflame behind us, fires like burning fingers pointing accusation from every direction.

But that was not the end of terror. As we ran, I was suddenly aware of the multitude in the sky—those beings we had always known to be there but had never seen. I could not sense them as acutely as before, but I could feel them. Where before they had been as silent observers to our contentment, I felt them rushing down upon us now as the eagle upon the fox.

At the narrowest pass the adam struggled, the lamb flailing upon his shoulders, bleating pitiably into the storm. Beneath us the river ripped up from the bed, spraying our feet, making wet and slick the path beneath us. When we finally broke from the narrow way, lightning struck the high side of the pass, and it burst with fiery sparks into a column of flame.

We ran, lungs burning, as lightning seared the same spot again and again and again.

Later I would remember strange things in the fire: beings with wings like animals and faces as fearsome as those of the serpent before the light of God, glimmering in the flames, beautiful and terrible, seeming to look in all directions at once—always seeming to stare at me. But at that time, I knew only that there was fire everywhere behind us.

We ran. Out toward the basin beyond the mountains. Where the valley had been deserted, here now were a multitude of animals in flight: the goat and great cat, the bear and the deer. We fled with them, not knowing which direction we went—it didn’t matter as long as it was away from the fiery gates of our valley.

We followed the river formed by the abyss waters where they fall down the southern side of the mount. In the place where the hills roll south toward the low plain, we fell down at last, drinking from the muddied waters in our thirst, unable to cleanse the taste of smoke and fire from our mouths.

The wind quieted, and after a while the clouds stopped churning and spread out like a dingy, gnarled fleece. From here we could see nothing of the great pillar of fire or the smoke of the trees, reaching like burning fingers to claw at the sky. Here in the low hills, that life was a league—a world—away.

10

Dawn had the gall to come—unremarkably and plainly. We straggled on, staggering in exhaustion. The adam’s face was a sweat-streaked mask of grime, though his jaw was set in the most determined and beautiful line. I thought then that I could almost forgive him his betrayal, if only for the comforting sight of the staunchness of that jaw.

Sometime around midmorning we stopped. We found the rocky outcrop of a hill and fell down beneath it. I thought of Dvash and the way the lintel had collapsed upon her. I wondered if she could possibly be alive, whining and pawing in the darkness of that tomb, or if all that remained was a form stamped back into the earth from which it had come.

We curled together, untying our garments with numb fingers to lay them beneath and over us as we shivered, cradling the lamb between us.

THAT NIGHT I DID not dream of the cosmos or the deep. I dreamed of fire and of the faces looking all directions at once from within it. Fire, searing the ground in our wake, immolating our steps so that they might never be known again.

By the time the sun had passed her zenith, my foot burned, my every limb ached. I did not move, even at the adam’s urging, to go to the river to drink or to find food. I rose only once, to pass water, and laid back again upon the stony earth.

Where had Adah and Dvash gone, their bodies mangled, bereft of wholeness? Perhaps the roof of the cave would fall upon me as it had upon the wolf and swallow me back to the earth, and I would know.

But it did not. So I lay, half dreaming a sleep of horrors in the coolness of the shade, knowing something already, perhaps, of the tomb. The adam left intermittently, and I heard on occasion the bleating of the lamb as it followed him about, no doubt bereft of its mother. I hated the noise; it reminded me of the absence of the One, who seemed now very far from me, as my valley seemed far from me.

But most of all, it reminded me that I lay there, alive. Sleep overtook me and then fled in cowardly dance. I dreamed in fits—first, that I lay in the full sun of our garden amid apricots and hyssop. A warbler sang the trilling song of the grasshopper, and a hawk wheeled overhead.

But then I dreamed of a darkness like night without benefit of the moon. The entire earth groaned its death cry. When morning came in my dream, it crawled on feeble limbs, and the valley that replaced the vibrant world of my garden was but a shadow of it. In it the animals spoke the language of the deaf-mute, dumb in their existence, creatures feral and instinctive and base. I saw the adam, running with the lamb over his shoulders, staggering over rocks, his face blackened as though from fire. My lovely adam, who was not meant for this crude earth, having been refined beyond it by the breath of the One.

That night he brought me lettuces to eat, but I turned my head away, disdaining, too, the water he had carried most carefully from the river in a bark cup. Eventually I heard him drink it himself. When he lay down at last with a heavy sigh, he did so like a toppled tree felled by lightning and fire.

I have done this to him, I thought. He will die because of me.

But then I remembered the look in his eye as he accepted the fruit from my hand and knew that I had no sooner acted on his behalf than he had on mine but that we had been one. I recalled, too, the sound of his voice disowning me before God. But when I thought, We both have done this! and could almost bear it so that I might not die after all, I thought again of the man, broken before the One, the lovely face covered in grime as he struggled to keep his footing in the mud. So I was resolved anew that I would die. For his betrayal and his pain—and for my own—I would die. And for the burden of his love as he curled around me in the evening, laying his own garment over me and the lamb beside me to keep me warm. For that, too, I would die.

So I closed my eyes and waited for the earth from which he had sprung to swallow me. I could not return to the adam in the way I had come from him, so I would return to the source of his origin.

The voice that had urged me wake was silent.

THE NEXT MORNING I opened my eyes not on the next world, or on oblivion, but on the ceiling of the shallow cave. The adam had gone—to find food, no doubt. He had built a small fire, but rather than comfort, it brought only distress; it contained the stench of the burning trees amid the storm . . . and the faces, both terrible and lovely, that I had seen amidst the flames.

He returned later, the lamb cavorting about him. I wanted to choke the stupid animal. Did it not remember that it once had a dam with sweet milk and that it had come from paradise to exile?

The adam brought me water, but I threw it away from me. I almost regretted it afterward when he looked at me as though I were a creature he did not recognize. I wanted to laugh. I had become like the animals: alien and strange.

But neither did I recognize in him the lover in the garden, the teacher and loyal sibling—only a creature living for some dogged reason I could not understand. I could not divine his thoughts at all—only those which he wore as plainly as that horrid pelt. The thing had begun to smell now, though I could scent also the river on him and knew at some point he had bathed.

I turned away, hating all these differences in him. Hating them because I knew very well that it was all mirrored in me.

Except that I had not bathed. The next day he went out again.

He was gone a long time. When he returned at last, it was evening, and he had brought back several things with him. I did not care to know what they were. I had seen everything in this life, and all that had been good lay behind me. The One had sent us out, and the adam had decried me.

I faced the wall and pretended to sleep. I imagined I felt his desperate frustration directed at me, settling near the base of my spine, pricking its way up my back like a millipede with stinging feet. Perhaps by the next time he returned, I would be dead and need not suffer his glares. Perhaps in the very next moment the death would come upon me, and I would return to that place that I was before—before light exploded in the heavens, before the voice bid me wake, before the day I first opened my eyes on the adam and gazed into those ceaseless pools of blue.

I could feel my stomach, pulled in taut as though drawn to my spine, my hip bones jutting against the rough inside of the pelt. Surely one could not live without eating for three whole days, or without sun or water or pleasure or laughter. Surely one could not live by lying thus, unmoving. Surely.

And what of the adam? Would he follow me to the earth again, if I, his side, should go? Would it doom him as well as sharing my meal had doomed him? Was he not as doomed as I already?

Yet he moved in and out of the cave, recovering vigor after our flight as though he had every intention of living. As though we stood not upon the precipice of death but only a new home.

I tried not to think how that irritated me, how pointless it seemed.

That evening, as the fire died down, I felt him untie his thong and lay his skin over us both, over the one already covering me.

I wanted to weep. Why did he sustain me, who had given him death to eat?

I, whom he decried before the One?

I, who forced no action of his hand or working of his mouth to take the fruit and chew and eat it! Yet here I lay, waiting to die for the both of us, as though he had neither eye nor brain nor tongue!

That was the moment I heard it: the softest bit of a snore. Just a hint of a breath risen beyond the purr that I had once associated with the rumble of the lion, except this time it came inelegantly through the throat and out of a slack-jawed mouth.

I lay in torment, dying the death—and he lay snoring on his side?

With a violent start I threw off the pelts and began to beat at him with my fists. He woke with a shout, no doubt amazed by this burst of life from me.

“If I am such a curse to you, why do you feed me? Why not disown me in deed, or will you only in word before the One?” I shouted, my voice raw. I kicked the pelts farther from me. I would die without that trophy of death upon me. I would die as I had come into this world, in my own skin.

And by the One, I would die without the sound of the adam’s snoring in my ear.

I closed my fingers around the alabaster pendant and yanked it so that the cord, drenched in the storm, dried and brittle now, broke. I flung it against the back of the cave. I wanted his tokens, as his love, far from me. They were too painful a reminder of the man I knew before this maddening creature had come to take his place.

“Why do you feed me? ‘She gave me, and I ate!’ Then go on without me if this woman is such a burden. Let me die!”

I was not prepared for what he did next. With a great wail he pulled me against him and bore me to the cave floor. He buried his head against my breast like a child and said, “You cannot die! Do not leave me! Do not die!”

I hissed, “We are both dying, or did you miss it? So never fear, my love, you are dying too!”

He moaned more loudly, shuddering against me. I felt his tears, hot against my throat, slipping into my hair.

“Not yet,” he wailed, as raw as the earth. “But you lie as though already dead, and I cannot go on without you. Do not leave me. Do not die!”

I felt a grief from him to melt the mountain ice. Grief to drown in. Grief to both rend my heart and mend it at once.

He held me harder against him and stroked me desperately, as one rubs a body to life, cradling my cheek and clasping desperately at my back and then my thighs.

Needfully, he came to me; roughly, he took me. And in grief and in love, I opened my arms, drawing him into them until he strove with me, desperately chasing the unity we once shared. It seemed he would bury himself in me, as though I were a haven of all that was familiar, the lush place we had known together.

When we lay exhausted—for all this while I had not eaten or drunk—his head rested upon my shoulder, and his arm draped over me as though fearful I might run away or in fact die.

“The One said that your seed will strike the head of the serpent.”

I stared into the darkness of the shallow cave and recalled the words of the One with the tendril of perfect recollection. I had not pondered them since the terror of hearing them spoken, through all our flight from the valley.

But the adam had.

“You are necessary to that end, and to me.” His voice broke. “You are all I have of the garden. You are the image of me and of the One. And if you have wronged, then I have surely repaid your wrong twice over.”

He lifted himself, and I knew without seeing that tears streamed down his face. They slid down either side of mine as well, past my temples, over my ears.

“I will protect you all the days of my life. You will be the mother of all who live and the giver of life to the seed spoken by the One—the seed that will strike the offspring of the serpent. The One has said it, Isha.” He kissed me softly on the mouth. “Today I name you Havah because you will live, and all who live will come from you, and you will give birth to hope.”

Even as he said it, I knew there were things from which he could not protect me. Though I knew I would rise up and eat and drink—and I had forgotten until now that the One had said I would bear children—we were surely to die. If not today or tomorrow, then eventually.

He could not protect me from that.

But he had done what he could, naming me after life even in the face of our doom as one whispers a wish into the squall of disappointment.

“Havah.” The name is a breath before speaking and a fiery exhale.

I am vitality borne into the lung; I am existence whispered on the tongue. Like the breath with which the One sparked life into the adam . . .

I live.

EXILE

11

If the One had a name for the adam, it was known only to him or shared between them in secret. If that was the case, neither of them ever told me. So he was always the adam to me, which meant only “human”—this man, my mate without a name.

The night Adam named me, I dreamed of the serpent, regal as he had been, lovely to the eye. I recalled the daylight upon his wings, the iridescence of the scales upon his feet, the golden talons. I dreamed, too, of the way he had magnified into something more, growing wings greater than his wings, unfurling his length to stand impossibly erect, his brilliance putting the sun to shame. Truly he was the most majestic creature under God! I wondered, waking later in the night, what had become of the being that had risen from that wormlike shell. He, who turned a face to every direction. He, for whom I had a hundred questions and a hundred more accusations.

Thoughts of the serpent fled with the morning light; when I rose from my rocky bed, I knew I did it not as one but two.

I had conceived.

WE FOLLOWED THE RIVER south, sustaining ourselves on cresses, radish, garlic, and lentil shoots. We ate sweet plums as we walked on feet sore from stumbling upon stones and strange thorns. We never wanted for food, though I was convinced that the fruits were punier and the leaves thinner and the sweet peas less fragrant than those that grew in the valley. Even the grapes tasted nothing like those in our valley, lacking the brilliance of the One as it had shone upon my face that day. What was the sun to that?

But as I savored the secret of my conception—it was the first time I had something truly to myself—it seemed that I saw in the sun a hint of the amber that once bathed the slope of the mount by late afternoon. That I heard in the river some fragment, if broken, of the song our river had sung.

I clasped the marvelous knowledge of my pregnancy around me like a mantle. In my heart I whispered to the One.

One day, I knew, I would hear his voice again.

“MY FEET ARE TIRED.” In fact, they were not so sore, and the cut upon the one had long since covered itself with a crust that had dried and begun to flake away. The skin beneath it was smooth and pink and new. But I was weary of this unending journey. I had lost track of the days as the foothills of the mount gave way to forest filled with oak and pistachio and hawthorn, almond, pear, and wild cherry, and then to meadow and forest again. By now the last forest had retreated into the distance, and I was worn by the undulating monotony of the hills—and the eternal walking.

I was also tired of watching Adam struggle to make the fire at night. Where once the spark had leapt to the tinder nearly upon his command, now it must be coaxed with what seemed an increasing amount of effort so that many nights I bid him let it be. I had no word of encouragement for him; I could not stand to watch such enervated efforts where before he would never have struggled. So we huddled together beneath the hated hides, the lamb, which I named Gada for the riverbank that we followed all those days, and our frustration between us.

“We will rest awhile,” Adam agreed. “There is a good tree for shade—”

“No. I want to stop. Not just for an hour, or even for a day. I am tired.”

He frowned.

“Why should we keep going anyway? Where are we trying to go? My back is sore from lying on this hard ground. I want to make mats to sleep on.”

We stayed there for three days, weaving mats that we might roll up and tie and sling over our shoulders. I had fashioned already a handle for the smaller basket in which we kept our fire kit. Soon, I thought, I would need a basket strong enough to cradle my baby.

I was converting the rest of our belongings to a new carrier—I had decided to replace the old one while I was making the mats—when I realized my pendant was not among our things. Frantic, I dumped out the basket and searched again. Upon not finding it, I sat back on my heels and began to weep uncontrollably. Adam, who had spent the morning scouring the river’s shallows for flint nodules, obsidian, and quartz, stared at me as though bats had flown from my ears.

“My pendant. The one you carved for me—” Then I remembered: I had thrown it away from me. I dropped my head to my hands and wept afresh.

Adam wrapped his arms around me. “It was a trifle. I will make you another. See here, Isha, a bit of quartz I found today. I will make it from this.”

“No,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “No! I don’t want it!”

I couldn’t explain that I wanted nothing carved from this outside world, no matter how beautiful. I wanted—no, needed—the old pendant expressly because it came from our valley and from a time before this silence we lived in now. But there was more: It was something precious that I might give to my son—something beyond a flint or obsidian flake—brought out from that place, by which I might say, “See and know the place from which we came.”

Because here was the truth: Though I had retraced, over and over, our journey in my mind, I could not be certain of the way we had come from the fiery pillars at the gate of that valley to the cave in which I’d lain waiting to die. I could recall no landmark; we had fled the thunder in darkness and followed first one and then another group of animals in aimless exhaustion.

I did not know the way back.

“Adam? I must know. Do you think you could find the way back?”

“To what?” Adam looked thoroughly perplexed.

“To the valley. Our garden. Could you?”

He was silent and I knew his answer.

He said, very softly, “The days that I left you in the cave, I ranged as far back as I dared, as far as I remembered. But always I came to a place where I knew neither north nor south, where I recognized neither tree nor shrub nor stream . . . where I could recognize nothing but the way I had just come. And as we have traveled all these days since, I have tried to recall our steps the night the thunder was at our backs. . . .” He shook his head.

And so there it was. We were exiled and did not even know the way to return if we could.

“Let us go back,” I said, hurriedly collecting our things. “Let us go back the way we have come.”

Adam shook his head. “It’s no use, Isha. I have tried. How I tried!”

“We followed the river. We will follow it back. Between the two of us, we will find it. But we must go now, right away.”

“But that is the thing!” he cried. “I am not certain we will come back to the same river.”

I sat back, hard, upon the dirt.

I wanted to tell myself that it did not matter. With our perfect memories—we retained that much, at least, even if we had lost the natural union between us—we could surely remember. We would wander the area for as many days as it took us to find it. But even as I thought it, I knew no amount of wandering could help. Despair opened before me like a yawning pit.

Adam laid his hand over his eyes. His face crumpled. This time I felt no impatience or weariness or indifference. For the first time in days, I understood pain that was not only my own. It jarred me from myself even as I clung to the one thing I had clasped about my heart more closely than the pendant that had once hung before it.

“My love,” I said, taking his hand gently away from his eyes. Ah, how I loved him, even as his face was twisted in despair! “Adam . . . Ish. I, too, have something I have not told you.” I lifted his hand and kissed it. “I bear the seed.”

He blinked, dark lashes long in shadow against his cheek.

“I am pregnant with that child. You yourself spoke of it the night it took root in me.”

“And I did not even know it.” Wonder filled his face, his words.

“And yet I do, and I am not afraid of the pain because what a child this shall be!” I went into his arms. “He will strike the head of the serpent, as you have said. Because I know now that the serpent was no common animal—”

“I thought my eyes played a trick. It seemed to me he stood before the One almost as a man—no, as something greater.” We had never spoken of it. Now I felt a rush of relief and gratitude that it was laid plain between us at last. All of it.

“I have pondered this many days, that this is the very thing the serpent wished for us, exactly as it has happened. I am certain it knew, as now we know, evil. But now I bear the seed. Because of him, the day will come when we need no landmark to know the way again.”

I had to believe it. I must. Just as I must believe that as the earth remained intact, the waters would one day recede in our valley garden. Surely the fire must go out. We had seen the areas burnt by our fires, the way the grass had grown in more lushly than before. Surely the garden would heal as we healed from the cuts of thorns and stone.

And then one day we would find our way back.

12

We could not live as we had before. The world was different, and now we had to think of more than ourselves. We wandered the nearby hills, looking for caves. Most of them were filled with the scat of rodents. I wrinkled my nose, but Adam would not be swayed. He spoke little and frowned often in those days. He was frequently alone in his thoughts, speaking only when I questioned him directly. Even then he did not hear me sometimes so that I had to repeat my questions a second or third time. By then my tone was as abrasive as the coarse hair of the boar. How he annoyed me!

Meanwhile we stayed in a series of ill-suited niches—they could not properly be called caves—in the hills for a number of days until he returned one morning to say he had found a cave that we could comfortably live in for a time. At that I threw up my arms and said that the world had been made anew, that the sun and moon had shone in the same day, and surely I was the most blessed of all women.

We cleared away the dirt and debris and laid fresh rushes and grass and even flowers upon the floor. We stacked the baskets with our things, which at the time seemed many, against the wall. When it was done, the tension around Adam’s mouth and shoulders softened, and he laughed a little bit as he had a lifetime ago. I thought, This is where I will birth my baby. Here, in the cool shade, on the strew. The One had talked of pain, but I was not afraid of it. I would welcome it. This was the seed of whom the One had spoken, who would visit upon the serpent a greater blow than the serpent had done to me.

I understood now that the serpent, once my wise advisor, was—and always had been—my enemy. I did not know why. I had known nothing of guile then. But I knew something of requital now.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER I wandered west of the cave to the place where the hills, covered in herbs and wild flowers, flattened toward a wide meadow. There were several large, flat stones in the area, and the day before, as I had picked my way between them, I had come upon a snake. Its jaw was unhinged and the tail of a fat mouse protruded, limp, from the gullet stretched around it. I ran away, unmindful of the stones beneath my feet, seeing visions of Adah stripped of her skin, the waning light of the One, and the chrysalis of the serpent upon the ground slithering away like a worm. When I had gotten away, I retched up every bit of my breakfast.

This time when I went back I saw an altogether different sight: The snake—could it be the very one? But there was its belly, still distended—lay dead, its head flattened as though struck by the hoof of an animal.

This I took as my sign.

I sang the rest of the day and welcomed Adam to my arms that night.

“HAVE YOU NOTICED,” ADAM said one day, “how strange the animals have grown?”

I wanted to say of course I had noticed—this was no news. Since before we left the valley, when Dvash had bared her teeth to me, I had known it. But it was not just her. They had been skittish and strange everywhere outside the valley. The jackal ran away, the hare skittered along the ground as though it were a shadow, the deer kept to themselves, and I had not seen a bear in days—and then only from a distance.

“But it isn’t just the animals,” I said. “The ground must be different as well. Everything that grows from it seems not quite as right as it was.”

He was quiet for some time before he said, “The antlers that I brought back in those first days—a buck did not drop them. That day I was near the wood, and I found them.” He did not look at me.

“But you just now said the buck did not drop them.”

He was carving, which had been his habit in the evening as it required no more light than that which the fire gave off—or the moon, when it was full enough.

“The buck was dead, the belly ripped open, eaten to the bone. So much of it was gone that I couldn’t even save the hide.”

I lurched toward the opening of the cave. After I had emptied my stomach on the path outside and taken some water from the basket—it was leaking, I could tell, and tomorrow I must treat it with pitch—I settled back onto my mat and said vehemently, “Good. I want no more of hides.” Couldn’t he see that I hated them? I would throw them away were the wind not occasionally unkind and the nights cooler than we were accustomed to.

He shook his head. “We must have clothes. Haven’t you noticed that the nights are cooler?”

“Of course I have,” I snapped. Had I not come to just the same conclusion? Did he think I had no brain—made of the same stuff as his?

“We need more clothes and coverings for our feet,” he said. “I’ve lost track of the times I’ve cut mine on stones, and there are the insects and creatures.” I thought of the snake. I had not mentioned it to him.

He laid down his carving with a sigh and stretched out on the sleeping mat, his arms behind his head. He was leaner now, the angles of his face sleek, his limbs sinewy as those of the great cat. I, too, had grown thinner, the child in my belly not even making the smallest bump yet.

I moved to lay next to him, to smooth back his hair and peer into his face, searching there for traces of the boy who had given birth to this man. I could not see the blue of his eyes in the dimness of the cave, even with the fire. I wished, fiercely, in that moment that I could.

“Isha,” he said softly. “Is it too terrible? To live here as we do, I mean. I will do anything to bring you comfort, only never lay as you did those first days, as one dying—”

I shushed him softly, stroked back the hair from his face. “No. It is not too terrible.” In that moment I told the truth.

WE RIGOROUSLY STUDIED THE changing vegetation around us. Every day the soil seemed to thrust up strange new life. Some of it was vile to touch, as the nettle, or to eat, as the bitter melon. We found other uses for them eventually. Where once we had eaten anything that came from the earth, we had to use caution now. Where once we had never worried about the supply of food, we began to mark the progression of seasons, the bloom and wane of fruit trees and shrubs and vine.

We dried and parched and stored grain and legume, nut and seed. We had done these things before, but the animals had become thieves; more than once I found holes chewed through the baskets in the back of the cave, our small stores raided by rodents.

We began to find the scat of hyena and wolf closer to the trail leading to our cave. Though we had never feared these animals, it became clear that they were not themselves as we discovered more evidence of their penchant for killing and their newly carnivorous habits. Eventually we built a low bramble fence before the mouth of the cave.

I had begun by now to comb out bits of the lamb’s coat with a thistle, and I used the soft fuzz to line the inside of a basket just the right size—or so I estimated—for a baby. I collected new grasses and retted fibers and broke flax for weaving. What small experiments I had made in the valley before, I began to test in earnest.

Adam foraged as a common scavenger for useful bits of hoof, bone, or antler. He fashioned rope and awls and scrapers and, one day, his first spear. The lovely boy that he had been was gone completely. His jaw had squared, and his shoulders broadened. The down on his cheek thickened, as did the hair on his chest. Though I often missed the boy of the garden, he had every association to all that was perfect to me—how alluring to me were the narrow hips and the ridges of his abdomen, the cords of his neck as they stood out in exertion. I will make a child like him, I thought.

Or would I? Now I became intensely curious what this child might look like; though we were Ish and Isha, as alike as twins from the same womb, his lips were thicker than mine, curving into a more pronounced bow. His nose was straight and refined and wide. Mine rounded at the tip. His cheeks were straight and long. Mine were round like the bare shoulders of a girl. His legs were lean and corded with muscle. Mine were as long as saplings. Where once we noted the similarities and differences in animal offspring so that we could even predict the variance in color of wolf pups in a litter, we began to do the same with the son growing inside me.

“He will have your cheeks and my nose.”

“He will have my hair and your feet,” Adam declared.

“Oh, how I hope to the One that he has my feet and not yours!”

We always knew it would be a son. Not, as some have said, because the adam, being a male, came first, since before me he was simply one human in a vast earth. We knew because it had been said by the One on the terrible day that he laid judgment upon the serpent and upon the ground.

We estimated the length of my pregnancy based on the gestation of the ewe and the great cat.

“At least eight cycles of the moon,” Adam said finally. “No more than ten.” I concurred, wondering how long it would be after that until the word of the One was fulfilled. Thinking of it, I could almost bear the stinging nettles. I could even almost suffer the horrid hide garments as the trappings of a life I knew would not last forever.

During this time I set aside my gall at Adam’s betrayal. It seemed a thing done by a boy I no longer knew, who lived in a place where I no longer dwelt—just as I was no longer the girl I had once been. I welcomed the man to my mat to lie with me in ways familiar and alien in this world of silence between us, where we must rely evermore on finding the words to say the things we never needed to speak before. He was cautious with me at first until I assured him that I thought the child held fast within me. Still, pleasure did not come as easily as before. Where we had come together as two halves, we came now as two individuals, imperfectly matched.

Neither did laughter visit us as often as it had in the valley. Ease was something of memory. Our hands were constantly busy. We were on our feet nearly every hour we were awake. We had labored before in the garden, but now the tenor of our work had changed. Every night we fell bone-weary to our mats.

“We cannot stay here indefinitely,” Adam said one night in the darkness. “There will be three of us—and Gada—and we will need to range farther to find the food we want by the season. If not this season or next, then by the one after, it will no longer make sense to stay here.”

“Then we return north.”

“No, we must go south. The land flattens there, and the plain will be lush. I think it will be milder there, as well.”

I was reluctant to go one step farther from the valley, already so far away. “Surely the earth will renew every food we have taken.”

“This isn’t the same earth,” he said dully.

I heard the echo of the One: Cursed is the ground because of you.

“Then let us cultivate what we need, wherever we will.” We had done it in the garden, and our knowledge was vast. I had already begun to select the best of the wild grass seeds for just such a purpose. They were tough and, like everything else, less delicious than they had been in our valley, but when I ground them between two hearthstones, I produced a gruel I could mix with water and cook on stones closest to the fire. I had begun to lay a store of other seeds as well. Soon I would plant a garden. There I would recreate a vision of the hills and orchards and even the terraces of that place at the foot of the mount. Perhaps there I would lay among the grapes and dream of the One that Is and what had been and what must surely be once again.

“Farther south the river will have spread her silt, and the rain will not run away from the uneven ground or settle in pools as it does here.”

Though I was impatient to return north, I told myself this, too; I could bide until the day our son led us back.

Adam began his search the very next day. Though I went with him at first, after a while I became impatient to be productive. We both needed coverings for our feet if we were to keep this up, and I could only think to make them out of the hides we wore, which meant we needed more textiles to supplement our wardrobe. Adam had less patience for this kind of work and was less neat of finger than I. He insisted that his feet did not pain him, no matter that they were tough and dirty and even cracked in some places. And so I left the business of surveying this new land to him, knowing he would have toil aplenty once he had found it.

He was gone entire mornings and then full days at a time. He took with him a basket, and when he returned, there were new vegetables and green shoots, small berries and grasses heavy with grains, interesting stones, and bits of eggshell. We found uses for nearly everything. He brought with him the bones of a fish once and the hollow wing bone of a bird. He plucked as much flesh from it as he could, but still it offended me until he dried it and, by boring tiny holes along one side, made it into a tiny flute.

He brought back pieces of horn, which he carved into cups. He made also a three-pronged comb to tame the tangles in my hair. I cherished that gift nearly as much as I missed the carved pendant he had given me in the valley and promised I would never let it go from me.

He brought diseased or malformed leaves and stems and anything strange or unknown to us. He even brought dry dung, which we broke apart to learn the diets of the animals. Sometimes we burned it in the fire. It put off a foul smoke; where even the scat of animals had been filled with the pure waste of leaf and stem, it now contained the foul rot of flesh.

At times I was appalled. Here was the adam, who named the animals, reduced to scavenging bits of horn and bone like a hyena eating the remains of a carcass, or the jackal sniffing at the droppings of another. His boundless energy for pleasure seemed gone, the worries of this new life settled between his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. I cherished his fortitude and vulnerability even as I secretly and occasionally disdained it compared to the man he had been. One day I said, “Do you see the clouds, pulled thin as a bit of Gada’s fleece? They were the same the day I first opened my eyes upon the world.”

“That was a lifetime ago.” He looked away.

The sadness in his voice stung me deeply. For the first time in days, I wondered what might have happened had I never been created that day or, worse, if I had eaten alone from the tree. I wasn’t sure it was even possible; we had shared one accord between us. But lying awake on my mat at night, I could not help but terrify myself with the thought of it. Would the One have cast me out alone to die the death without even the promise of the seed?

“Perhaps you wish you had never been burdened with me,” I said with inexplicable bitterness. I got up to go to the river, but he pulled me roughly into his arms and breathed deeply of my neck.

“Sometimes,” he said, hoarse, “I swear I smell the flowers of the olive from our valley in you.” He buried his face against my breasts, and we forgot our work for the day.

13

One morning Adam prepared to leave on another of his explorations. This time he took a length of rope.

“What will you do with that?” I asked.

“It’s for the goats.”

“Goats?”

“The goats on the long hills that I saw yesterday.”

Annoyance prickled the inside of my chest. “What goats?”

“That I saw on the hill yesterday.”

“You say it as though I should know what you are talking about. How should I know that you saw goats on a hill?”

Finally, he said, “I don’t know.”

In that moment I thought he looked as dumb as an ass.

“Then how should I know?” I said, pressing the matter. I wasn’t sure at whom my wrath was aimed: him for not knowing, myself—again, as always, for my part in all that had caused his not knowing—or the One. This last thought surprised me, and I shrank back from it and fell silent.

That night he did not come back. The sun waned in the sky and spilled its colors along the horizon. It was an extravagant display, the first sunset I had truly appreciated since our flight. I wondered if Adam saw it too.

When the sun had gone and the insects had begun their evening drone, I sat by the fire, morose, regretting my terseness of earlier. When he came tonight, I would welcome him back with every pleasure I could summon with rough fingers and dry lips.

But long after the moon had ascended in the sky, he had not returned. I ate my meal, closed the thorny gate, and lay down alone.

Was he not to return? Would morn come and see me by myself? I lay awake waiting for the sound of his foot upon the path. It never came.

It rained through the night and into the morning. When the clouds cleared and the sun returned, it did so without Adam. That evening, as I fed the fire bits of wood, and the stars I once fancied my crown appeared beyond the lip of the cave, I was miserable with anxiety. Lying upon my mat, I strained for any sound of him, but there was only the howl of a distant wolf, long and lone in the night.

Was he angered by my irritation with him? Could he be so angry as to leave me? Where would he go? What would I do alone with this child? Could the word of the One be fulfilled if we were separate in this world? Surely not! I became despondent and then angry. How selfish of him for not thinking of this!

Had he come to some harm? But what could harm the adam—what would dare? Though the animals had turned feral, one upon another, Adam had been regent over all. Surely all the earth would intervene before it would allow harm to come to the image of the One.

But the earth was indifferent toward the one who had ruled it. The fire no longer blazed when the adam wished it to blaze. The wind came whether we wanted it or not. The skies had rained the displeasure of the One upon us like a torrent of tears.

Now here was fear!

I fretted through the night. If he did not come by morning, I would go look for him.

Sometime after dawn spilled her paltry light, I woke to Gada’s bleating. Steps sounded on the rocky path outside the cave. The briar hedge was pulled away, and Adam appeared at the entrance. I scrambled up, admonishments and tears at the ready, but I hesitated at the curious sight of him. A strange, brown shape lay over his shoulders and the basket upon his back. He pulled it away, and I saw that it was a stiffening goat hide.

“An animal—a lion, I think—got to it before I did,” he said, dully. “I salvaged what I could of the hide and some of the fat, though it wasn’t much.”

I shuddered, but I understood the practicality; though we scraped and pulled any pelt we came across to make it pliable, we had yet to match the suppleness of those tanned by the finger of the One himself.

“I am glad you are home,” I said, suddenly emotional.

“No tears, Isha. I know just the thing to cure that—come see the yearlings.”

He made another trip, and then another after that, returning each time with animals: once with a goat and her suckling kid, and the other with a squealing wolf pup.

He brought back as well the skins of two rams. “I found them in a ravine,” he said. “Their horns were locked together. One had broken its back, and the other had two broken legs.”

Broken its legs? We had seen rams face off in the rut, but none had ever suffered from it except from lack of propagation.

“Would they not . . . mend?” I said. He shook his head. I wondered if the animals had died the death from their injuries or been helped by Adam’s knife.

I did not ask.

The pup, fuzzy as a bear cub, I kept in a large willow basket, which she chewed mostly to shreds. I fed her little bits of gruel mixed with milk from the goat. She was nearly a month old, I thought, because her eyes were open, and she imitated my howls with squeaky yowls of her own. I named her Reut.

Soon Adam announced he was going again. “I will be gone for several days.”

My stomach tightened. He had gone so often, surely he had seen all that there was to see in every direction.

“Then I will go with you.”

“No,” he said, too quickly.

“Why not?”

“There is no place for you to sleep except in the open.”

I laughed, the sound brittle as flint. “I slept in the open before we came here, or did you forget?”

“I am making for us a cave.”

“Nonsense. Even you cannot make a cave. Only the One may do that.”

He smiled, and I saw the inkling of a secret in his eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen that. In that instant he was so handsome! More handsome than he had seemed to me in days. How capricious I was!

“Isha,” he said, cupping my face in his hands. “Listen to me. There is everywhere evidence of animals stalking and killing others.” We did not yet have a word for predator.

“You must stay here where you are safe. There is no other Isha. I have no other wife.”

I found his last statement insanely funny. He smiled and covered my lips with his own.

That night I went to sleep, dispatched with pleasure to leaden the limbs. But I dreamed of blood. Blood, like Adah’s spilled in the garden. Blood on fallow deer. Blood on the gazelle. Blood on the white fleece of a lamb. But it was not the blood of the lamb. In my dream the lamb frolicked away.

It was the blood of Adam, ravaged beyond all recognition.

“Isha!” The adam shook me. I had cried out in my sleep.

I dug my nails into the dark skin of his shoulders. “Do not go tomorrow!”

“Isha. Havah . . .” He held me away from him. “Your vision was sent by the serpent. Put it away from you. You are wise to his guiles.”

But I was haunted through the night and lay in a sweat upon our pallet, my hand resting on my belly, over the child inside. No harm can come. I bear the seed spoken of by the One. The words became a mantra in my mind. But Adam had done his part in creating this child. If he should be killed by a predator as though he were a lamb, the child was already in me—what more did destiny need of him?

The next morning I clung to him again. “Stay yet another day.”

But he grew impatient. “See now? I will take this knife that I have made. I am strong, Isha, or did you not notice last night?” I smiled the best that I could, and he took his pack and his knives with him and left.

He left with me his spear, which was to keep me somehow safe against a world changed more every day into something unrecognizable to us. When I protested that he needed it more than I, he claimed that most animals ran upon sight of him and that he need only raise his voice for them to flee. Rather than comfort me, it only enforced my fear that harm might come to him and that none could come to me. But he insisted, saying I had the animals, coveted by predators, and so must keep it near me.

I wove and cooked hard cakes and chased Reut away from the store baskets, and then the pallet mats, and then the store baskets again. In the afternoon I ranged the hills with Gada and the goats.

Two days later I became impatient with the endless grazing of my little flock and decided to leave them while I took Reut and went searching for haws. I wanted to dry some of them for seeds for my future garden.

By late afternoon we ranged out of sight of the hill where I had left the goats and Gada to piddle about. That was when we came upon it.

I smelled it before I saw it: flesh. Somewhere an animal lay dead and open to the air. I turned away. The very notion of a body that lived no more offended me.

But as I did, Reut broke into a run. I gathered her up—I had seen her investigate lamb dung in the field, which is how much sense she had. But even as I carried the wriggling pup back the way we had come, the idea of the carcass nagged at me. A carcass might mean a pelt. We had become by now far too aware of our needs and had begun to horde anything we might need; an item in hand was one we need not go in search of. It meant time given to tools or food preparation or weaving. Or an hour of rest, if nothing else.

What would Adam think if I presented a fresh pelt to him upon his return? He had left me with the animals and a babe in my belly and a spear to protect us all. Fine. I could provide as well as he.

I dropped Reut to the ground and followed her in search of the carcass.

We found it lying beneath a clot of vultures. We did our best to chase them off, and then I cried my dismay: It was one of the gazelles. It had already been made a meal of—the eyes were gone, as were the mouth and tongue. Something had chewed through the skull to feast on soft brain. Even the hooves had been carried away with the legs. Of the hide there was only a piece barely large enough to cover a child’s feet.

I knelt down with my basket and got out my knife. Reut crouched near me, crunching contentedly on a rib. My stomach churned, and the smell threatened to choke me. The hide was a paltry bit of nothing, though I did salvage the horns. Watching Reut so preoccupied, I decided to take away a rib and the one remaining shoulder blade. If nothing else, Reut could amuse herself with them in lieu of our stores and bedding if I could only stand to have them nearby.

Suddenly, I despised myself. I had gone from ruling the animals to scavenging like a hyena.

It was, by now, late in the afternoon. I had lost track of the day in the midst of my find. I pulled Reut away from the carcass by the scruff—she would have kept at it until there was nothing left, I thought—and hurried away with her in my arms. She licked her jaws in a way I found disgusting. I could smell flesh everywhere and vowed I would wash in the river even in the dark if need be.

When I came to the knoll where I had left the animals, they had only grazed as far as the next hillock. Even so, they would not come when I willed it, or even when I called to them, and I was forced to trudge all the way to them to bring them back, Reut chasing at their heels.

The sun dropped, twilight stretched into a moonlit dusk. How strange, the earth by moonlight that night. The hair of the goats and lamb seemed very white, as though washed clean of briar and dirt. The hills lay in repose as jackals cried in the distance. The air, smelling crisply of grass and damp earth, stood still as though lost in thought.

There is beauty still. In the loveliness of this night, I could believe that the seed would make right our wrong, that the earth would one day return to the thing it had been. Surely there would be restoration for it and for us.

When we returned to the cave, the fire was completely out. I sighed and tethered the goats to a bush that they had long ago nibbled to nothing more than a stand of twigs. I fumbled in the darkness of the cave for my fire kit and pulled apart the unraveling fibers of a basket that had been eaten through by rodents. When Reut came in to investigate I pushed her away, and she went out, sniffing at the ground, most likely to pester Gada.

At last a tiny flame leapt to life. How much more quickly I made the fire than Adam did of late! When it finally began to devour the tinder, I searched in my basket for the spoils of the day, realizing that I was ravenous. My fingers encountered the bit of pelt and, inside its loose package, the cool, raw flesh of the gazelle. I jerked back as though stung by an insect. What had I been thinking to bring this abominable pile here? The bones might even prove a liability, attracting unwelcome company.

I drew out the horns and several bundles of hyssop and a few haws as I thought about what to do with the animal flesh. So absorbed was I that I forgot about bringing the animals in and putting up the briar fence.

With a remnant, perhaps, of that sense I once possessed, I felt the presence before I heard the first nervous bleat of the goat.

Alarm came as a sick prick against my spine. The goats bleated, more loudly, almost in unison. When Reut set in with a fit of bravado, I grabbed the remains of the ruined basket and held it to the fire. Leaping up, I ran out of the cave toward the bush where I had tethered the goats.

Reut crouched in front of the bush in a warbling, growling stance that I would have found adorable had I not just spied the object of her attention: a lion less than ten paces away. Reut, hunched low, jinked forward, but the attention of the lion was firmly on the goat and her kid, skittering nervously on the tether.

I ran without thinking toward the lion, the grass basket blazing in my hand. I thrust it out, and the lioness drew back then circled in again. Why, she was so thin she was hardly more than a sack of bones! She paced nervously to the side and back, her eyes never leaving the kid.

That is when I recognized her.

Levia.

How pitiably thin she was! And then I saw the reason: her jaw was wrong, the angle of it off. Broken. Now, when she turned and paced back again, I could see her distended belly.

She was pregnant, and she was starving.

I whispered her name and then spoke it more loudly, but her eyes were those of a wild thing. She circled, confused by Reut’s racket and the grass torch now burning my hand. But her eyes were on the kid. Just then, Gada, closer to the river, bleated.

Levia hesitated, then started toward the river, but I threw the burning basket toward her. She shrank back, and the basket rolled away, flames sputtering against the ground. Weaponless, empty-handed, I ran for the bush where the goats were tethered and, with a strength beyond my strength, tore free half of it from the ground. I dashed forward, brandishing it with a shout, my heart having shriveled like something forgotten in the sun. I swung the thorny bush and with all of my spirit willed her to run. I could not bear to hurt her—she obviously suffered already. How much I would have liked to have comforted and helped her. But cognition had long since fled her eyes, and I was with child, too.

She paced, staggering once, and then fled. Reut chased after her on oversized paws until I shouted for her to come back. To my surprise, she obeyed.

I stared into the darkness long after Levia disappeared. In the distance the whooping call of the hyena—so close! I forgot the endless dusk that I had gathered like a blanket about me earlier. I stayed like that, beneath the beautiful indifference of the moon. A mist was coming in, rising from the river toward the bank. I could feel its cool fingers twining through my burned ones.

The world knew nothing of peace.

14

In my dreams I saw her: the scarred and craggy head once so smooth beneath my palm, the broken jaw that once tilted to the sun as I scratched her neck, the lean frame gone gaunt as the babe in her belly leached the last of her strength.

She staggered as she left, and I knew she would not survive long. The hyenas that whooped through the night waited for her—and the cub inside her, too.

The next day I did not weave. I did not gather food or rushes. I took up Adam’s spear and left, Reut at my heels. I followed her prints—there was no scat—south along the river. Though I moved with purpose, my heart was a weight in my chest.

Just before midday, I saw vultures circling beyond the cresting bluff that overlooks the river.

I broke into a run though I dreaded more than anything what I was soon to come upon. I shouted and waved the spear overhead. The avian gathering—how I hated the circling of birds!—fluttered, resettled, and scattered to watch.

Her body was gutted. Nothing remained of her unborn cub. Nearby lay the mauled carcass of a hyena.

So she had had some fight in her after all. I covered my mouth.

I am the moon that sees without blinking. I am the stars, which look away. I am the eye that stares at them both and sees nothing.

To what lengths we have come.

Where had she gone? Was she nothing now but the workings of a body—flesh and bone and hide—that, when damaged beyond repair, simply ceased to be?

Where was the spark of her, like the latent flame within the rock, that part of her that had once commanded me, “Scratch”? Did the One keep some great valley in another place for such creatures when they left this one?

I thought for the first time in months of the ones in the air who had played silent witness to our lives in the valley. I had seen none of them since then, but surely they existed yet in planes unseen by me.

And so I hoped that Levia did, too, and her unborn cub with her.

It was my only comfort as I scraped the new pelt long into the night.

ADAM RETURNED SEVERAL NIGHTS later, his basket on his back, beneath the rising moon. I heard him on the path and hurried out to meet him. He was humming.

Humming.

Levia’s vacant eyes haunted me by the hour. And he was humming.

“Husband.” I reached for his basket. It was the first time I called him that—it had been our word for the mate of a female animal. He looked at me with surprise but said nothing as I took the basket from him. Reut danced excitedly at his feet, and even Gada bleated a greeting. I felt strangely betrayed by this show from them and by his great attention to ruffling Reut’s fur and biting her on the ear when she began to tussle with him.

But then, watching them, I could nearly pretend I had not seen what I had seen. First the gazelle—Reut had dribbled diarrhea all over the front of the cave after devouring every bit of flesh from those bones and parts of the bone themselves—and then Levia. I had not let Reut near Levia but had shoved her away from the carcass that day, calling her hyena and worse.

Adam ate the remains of my evening meal by the fire. I had not been hungry for days. At some point he took note of the baskets neatly stacked along the wall of the cave, mended or replaced if they were damaged beyond repair. They contained all the possessions we had in the world. It seemed a very great amount.

“Good,” he said when he finished. “We go the day after tomorrow.”

Something welled to a head within me. “Is this your opinion? Or have you made a decision for my mind as well?”

He blinked up at me. It was the same confounded look Levia had given me by light of the moon.

I turned away with a sob.

When he just sat there, staring like a fish, I said, “You come back, telling me that we will go here or there, not caring what has happened to me while you were gone!”

When he came, clearly puzzled, to lay his arms around me, I began to weep—for the gazelle, for Levia’s eyes, vacant as a skull’s. For her cub, too. I had remembered sometime in the night as I sat scraping fat and membrane from her hide, the day that Ari had planted that life within her.

Lastly, as he held me in silence, I wept for us.

After a while I thought that his limbs slackened as though he might drift to sleep even on his feet and drew back to look at him. But his eyes were open, and I saw by the light of the hearth the fatigue etched in them. He was so young, but how old and worn he looked to me in that moment!

“I don’t know what happened, Isha. I have not known. Tell me.”

I lowered my head to his shoulder, feeling like an unreasonable wretch. It was not the first time I had been angry with him for not knowing my mind. “It is my wrong. It will wait.”

I wished I had not seen the relief so plain upon his face as he said, “Come then and lie down.”

I did, and he fell asleep at once.

I gazed at his profile in the light of the embers. His hair was dirty and untamed. His beard seemed to have thickened in the short time he had been away. I searched his face, slackened in slumber, for any indication of my trials. But there was none.

I lay again in his arms feeling very much alone.

The next morning, as sunlight flooded the entrance to the cave, I showed him the hides of Levia and the hyena and the smaller—much smaller—piece of gazelle hide. When he made a hoarse sound, I knew that he had noted the markings on the lion’s hide.

“What have you done?” Horror was plain on his face.

“Levia is dead,” I said with dull voice. As I told the story first of the gazelle and then of Levia’s appearance outside the cave and of my search for her carcass the next day, his expression changed to one of confusion.

“I did not know,” he said, blankly. “I did not know.”

I had never felt more acutely the chasm that lay between us.

A DAY LATER WE made the journey down the river. I had not wanted to go before, but now I was glad to leave. After a few hours of walking, I felt better than I had in days and found myself wanting to run. It would have felt like leisure to stretch my limbs, to test them fully for the first time in what seemed years, to feel the hard flex of muscles cramped too often around the hearth. But we had all of our possessions and the animals with us, so I contented myself with the feel of the air blowing off the river and through my hair and the sun on my shoulders and face.

The adam walked with his spear, occasionally jogging off toward the river to inspect a cache of stones. Gada and the goats meandered everywhere so that Reut nipped occasionally at the heels of one or another before wandering off for a while to occupy herself with I knew not what.

At least the world can hold wonder for her.

I felt the adam’s eyes upon me often through the day. Finally, he said, “It is not good for us to be alone. We should not be separated again.”

“I agree, though it may not always be practical.” Secretly, I agreed for different reasons; I still feared more for him than for myself.

The river bent far to the east and then widened and shallowed into spreading waters full of reeds and birds. Willows stooped near the bank, and olives grew upon the hills of the western horizon. The scent of lavender wafted from across the water. We took our rest beneath a stand of poplars before he led me to a place away from the river—though not so far that it would take more than minutes to run to it if I wished—on a low terrace beyond the floodplain. There I saw his industry of the last days: he had built up a low house of stone covered over with green sapling boughs. As we came closer, I saw that many stones were in fact mud fashioned into loaves, apparently mixed with grass.

“I will build a more permanent roof and have already thought of better ways to make the mud loaves for the next one,” he said, with a critical eye toward his work. But the old smile tugged at his mouth.

“It is a wonder,” I breathed. As I stood there, I could nearly hear the sounds of voices—human like ours but not our own. “And here we will raise our children,” I said.

Together that night we made our bed, laying the pelt of Levia over our sleeping mats and lying naked beneath our garments. In darkness lit only by the glowing embers of our small fire, I gazed up through the sapling roof at the sky. The jewels of my crown, forgotten to me for days, peered through the ceiling back at me.

One day we will again lie beneath the stars. One day we will leave this place and find our way north to the valley again.

We would have no need of any landmark to find our way then—only the compass growing in my belly.

Lying beneath the sapling roof, the knowledge of our return before me, I knew I could be content here until then.

WE DESIGNATED A MIDDEN, dug into the earth. We had not had one near the cave until the day I realized that the pervasive stench outside it was not the earth or any strange fissure in it but the evidence of our bellies turned foul. Now we dug a pit well away from the house.

Gada and the goats were mindless—nothing at all like the animals we had known so long before—and I finally stopped expecting them to have a brain in their heads. We tied them to a bit of shrub by day, or else Adam or I took them grazing in the hills. We brought the animals in with us those first nights, but soon after, Adam began to build them a pen of stone and mud. It need not be wind-fast, he said, but only enough to keep out the hyena and the fox, the jackal and the lion. Soon after it was finished, Adam captured a pregnant ewe, and so our little flock continued to grow.

About that time the babe began to move inside me. The first time I felt it, it was a gentle flutter against my abdomen—then against my bladder—as though to say, I am here.

I had put my hope and expectations upon this child. Now, with a great, irrevocable rush, I gave it my love. Was it possible that I could love anyone more than the adam? That I could love a thing that was a part of me but not a part of me, eventually to be two where there had been only one?

Adam had.

Now for the first time I understood.

Flesh of my flesh.

Over the next weeks and months my belly grew: first as a hard bump, then long under my ribs, and then larger, rounder, and crossways from side to side. I was fascinated with the changes in my body. My breasts darkened around the nipples and swelled larger than I had thought possible. The adam was fascinated too, though I couldn’t bear at times for him to touch me. At night as I curled against him, I felt the growing presence between us and thought, for the first time since our expulsion, that all was well in the world.

Of course, it wasn’t. Rodents ate much of our seed stores. Strange rot ate the rest. Reut dragged half-eaten remains of hares and birds and other animals home on occasion or buried them near a tall poplar by the house. Occasionally, the food we ate loosened our bowels. Mosquitoes plagued us near the river.

The days of the valley seemed like another life. Not forgotten—I could conjure in dreams the smell of apricots and hyssop, the taste of licorice, and even the crispness of the waters of the abyss drunk straight from the narrow falls and streams. But it seemed harder now in waking hours; there was ever before us the work of gathering, retting, cooking, tool-making, weaving, grazing, and milking. Sweat ran in rivulets down the neck and back of Adam as he cleared a small area for our garden. Here we would plant vegetables, cresses, herbs, garlic, chickpeas, lentils, and flax. He cleared another for an orchard and a vineyard.

We gathered pitch for glue and burned out the middle of wood pieces that we would later carve into bowls. We took apart and reinforced the house with new bricks baked in the sun. We spent our evenings eating and working by the light of the fire. Those were long and weary days for me; I was ungainly and uncomfortable and ravenous. I criticized and then snapped at and then clung to Adam, never wanting to be alone but unable to abide his company. I was irritated when he spoke and then by his silence—by his inattention during the day and his arm over me at night.

One morning he announced that he was going to look for more animals.

“Then I will go with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

“You have to stay with the animals here, and you are too heavy now to move quickly enough to be any help.”

My irritation flared, but for the first time in days, I said nothing. I worked, sullen, through the day after he left, entertaining a hundred complaints—and only fifty apologies—and napped in the afternoon as I was more and more wont to do. By the time I heard his step outside that evening, I knew he had found no animals.

He came in without a word or any explanation. He left again the next morning.

When he returned that night, empty-handed again, I said, “What is this that you say about not being apart? How is this not keeping apart?”

His blank expression instantly maddened me. “I come back at night.”

“Yes, but you are gone all day! I thought we were done with that when you found this place for us!” I could feel the hot tears welling in my eyes. I threw myself down on my pallet, confused at my own emotions. I knew in these moments that he saw in me a creature as alien as the minds of the deer and onager and hawk.

“Havah . . .” He came to put his arms around me.

“Go away!”

He went out and left me alone. I lay miserable through the night.

The next day he returned with a young he-goat. We lay together that evening, naked beneath our pelts, speaking not at all.

That season we planted our seeds. Upon sight of the first shoots of our garden, we clasped one another and laughed. The One sustained the world yet.

15

My breasts ripened like heavy fruit in the sun. A dark line grew down the front of my belly. I exclaimed upon it one day as I uncovered myself to lie in the shade. Gone were the days when the stirring breeze or lazy afternoon flight of the dragonfly made me want to run toward the hills and throw open my arms. I wanted only to lie in the cool shade or float, weightless, in the river.

Hearing my exclamation, Adam laid down his hoe—a scavenged shoulder blade hafted upon a long stick, too macabre in my opinion for the tilling of food—and came to sit with me. His hair had grown long down his neck. It dripped sweat as though he had come not from laboring in the sun but from the swim I had craved all afternoon. He drew his forearm across his face.

“The sweat of your brow.” It has come to pass. I was troubled, thinking this. Hadn’t the One also said, “Dust you are. . . . To dust you will return”?

I had begun by now the obsessive habit of needing to know always where Adam was. I knew he chafed at it.

He drew a finger down the line of my belly. “Perhaps this is a reminder,” he said, tilting that beautifully shaggy head. “That we are two halves. As you are two. And we are one, as you and the man inside you are one.”

My philosopher, my love.

“Or else it is only that the child is splitting me in half,” I said.

He laughed and brushed the back of his fingers across my flattened navel. “How ripe you grow, my love.” The look in his eyes smoldered like the sun.

Just then Reut came bounding across the garden, a hare—still squealing—in her jaws.

“Make her let it go, or kill it quickly, at least!” I could not abide the sound of it or even of the mice that Reut sometimes toyed with too near the house.

Adam gazed lazily after the wolf, who had gone off in the direction of her favorite burying ground. “It will be dead by the time I chase her down.”

In disgust at them both, I stalked off, my wrap in hand.

THE DAYS LENGTHENED AND I grew great and cumbersome. I was uncomfortable, relieving myself all day long. It seemed I could not drink a drop before needing to squat in the grass.

One night, as the honeysuckle flowered on the stem beneath the moon and I lay tossing upon my mat, I dreamed of the serpent. I saw him, standing taller and taller before the One, unfurling wing after brilliant wing. The next morning I knew no peace. Had I not dreamed of the serpent the night my son was conceived? What should it mean, then, that I should dream of him now, when that son was ready to burst from the womb? I recoiled at the thought that the serpent should have anything in common with my child!

It plagued me through the morning until, nearly out of my mind by afternoon, I fell into a fit of weeping.

“What’s this, Isha?” Adam asked with a sigh.

I wished, immediately, that I had run to the garden or the river to gather myself alone.

I drew a slow breath and told him, in as measured and reasonable a tone as I could, about my dream the night I conceived. “I dreamed the same dream again last night,” I said when I finished. “What if it should mean—what if it means that the serpent has somehow influenced the conception of this child? What if—”

His brows drew together. “Isha, you know one creature does not conceive the child of another. You trouble yourself senselessly.”

“But—”

He captured my hands. “But nothing. You are Havah, the mother of all living. From you a multitude will spring.”

My son concurred with a swift kick.

I WOKE TO THE gurgling of my bowels. Beside me, Adam was gone away to the land of visions and did not notice when I lumbered from my mat, taking up his spear from where it leaned by the door.

Outside, the dawn had only begun to tinge the thick air gray. Mist had rolled in from the low banks of the river so thick that I could not see the tips of my fingers if I held my arm out in front of me. Sounds might carry very far within it, as though all the earth had been enclosed in a single house. Other times, it seemed to mute the sound of everything.

As I made my way toward the midden, I thought I heard a muffled footfall behind me.

“Adam?” There came no reply. I called again. Nothing.

I went on, the familiar shapes of lavender shrub and poplar solidifying out of the mist as though they were the only real things in all the world. I stopped at one of the poplars and leaned heavily against it, the spadelike leaves brushing against my cheek. My lower back was so stiff this morning—stiffer than it had been any other day. The ache in my legs seemed to emanate heat up through my groin.

A soft footfall sounded again. I straightened, despite pain.

“Adam?” But I knew it wasn’t him.

I turned and faltered a step. There! Just ahead—the form of a man passing by! But it was only his back, as though he walked across my path too far beyond me in the mist for me to see clearly. “Wait!” I hurried forward, suddenly lithe for the first time in weeks.

Then, with a flash, I knew that back, the curve of that shoulder suggested but never fully seen by me. I cried out with a broken sound a word that I had nearly forgotten, hardly known to my lips because it had been voiced always from my heart.

“Adonai!”

I fell to my knees and leaned heavily on the spear. A sound that is grief and relief and pain and love all at once came from my throat like the cry of an animal. I held out my arms. I could have wailed. I could have laughed. I cried instead.

A breeze billowed through the mist, and it began to separate. I cried again, “Adonai! Adonai!” not knowing if I cried it aloud or with every fiber of my spirit. I forgot the valley. I forgot our exile. I forgot the impending child heavy in the womb as an overripe fruit upon a thinning stem. I forgot even the adam.

I knew only the One that Is.

But the mists swirled and cleared, and there I was, on my knees, fluid rushing down my thigh, my bowels demanding release. Terribly mortal, horribly human, in as low a state as a human might be.

Where was he? Where had he gone?

I fumbled to my feet, stumbled several steps to the place he had been.

But there was no one.

In a daze I made my way to the midden as the first light of dawn burned away the mist.

Squatting there, dirtying my nostrils with the stench of my bowels, feeling the ache more pronounced in my back by the moment, I felt as wretched as I ever had. I was near to bursting and emitting all manner of foul matter. No wonder the One had turned away!

I moved with slow resolution back toward the house, the pain in my lower back like fire. And then I understood. I was not abandoned. By the help of the One I had conceived this seed. Now, by the omen of the One, I would deliver him.

I bent through the doorway as Adam, just stirring, glanced at me with sleep-laden eyes.

“I need the mat,” I said. I had made a mat of tightly woven rushes for this purpose. He stared at me for a dull instant before springing to life. He pulled the mat out from the cache of our things and laid it on the floor. Then he came to help me to my knees.

Was there pain? Of course. There is always pain. I cried out at first in surprise—and later in agony. It was by then terrific, near blinding, searing. My head hung down as the fallow deer when it has run too hard, too far, before it drops.

In the last of those moments, I sagged in the adam’s arms, but I was not there. I had returned to the mists, to hear again my cry after the One, to see again the form of that shoulder, of he who went ahead of me.

I am the mystery of the gate. I am the consort of every living thing. I hear! I live!

It is said that he rent me in two. That he split me apart with a violent birth. That I howled in agony for days, knowing what would come from him. That is not true. I have seen few women in my life deliver so smoothly a firstborn child—without even the songs or sympathy groans of other women to soothe them. Women now have all the comforts of mother and sister in their bed. Of women learned in herbals to ease them.

I had none of these but relied on the midwifery of Adam, whose gentle hands had delivered countless animals.

The truth is this: in the last moments before the birth, I felt a burst of euphoria—like that which comes from running long distances, that dulls pain and makes us think we have grown wings. In the last moment, I lifted my head. I bore him in pain, yes. But I bore him in strength as well, knowing I took part in the mystery of this creation. The plants and the animals, created by God, created in turn after their own kind, in a reflection of the character of the One.

And now, so too, did I.

“It is a male!” There was awe in Adam’s gaze. I was in awe of myself as well.

“I have gotten a man,” I repeated softly, as we did not then have a word for boy.

I inspected him as I first gave him suck of the golden milk coming from my breasts. I was taken with his pudgy thighs and his downy hair, his tiny penis and the faint lines upon his feet, entranced by this miniature of his father. He gazed back at me with eyes that, I was certain, had seen the One face-to-face only moments prior. They were not blue, as Adam’s, but brown, practically black as mine. I searched them for a sign of the Creator. He gazed at me as one astonished, unknowing what he sees.

An appropriate expression for one coming from the bosom of God.

I named him. Adam had named every living creature, but this one was mine. The adam took him in his arms, called him by name, and greeted his son.

I had fretted about my dream of the serpent. But now, as I held my child and stroked the crown of a head already covered with curls a lighter shade than mine, as I held the fingers complete with their tiny nails, I knew that the serpent had infringed not at all, that I had gotten this child with the help of the One, having partnered with God in the making of him.

Kayin, my begotten.

Such hopes, such expectations, we laid across his tiny shoulders.

Too many.

16

The fawn, in the hour of its birth, stands up to walk. But Kayin could not lift his own head, let alone stand upon his legs. The very act of squalling sent a tremor through his entire body. So he came, mewling as a kitten, with his eyes open but just as helpless.

Had we ruined him in our mortal state? Had we caused malaise upon what would have otherwise been a stronger child? But no, he seemed normal after a fashion, and I soon accepted that this must be the way of children.

That night I dreamed that I laid Kayin in a basket of rushes. In my dream, I thought, I have been given such a gift. Let us give a token in return. But as soon as I thought it, I saw again that terrible day that Adah and her mate lay bereft of skin, twitching upon the grass.

But this time I saw something else: blood. I saw the blood of those animals running into the ground, into the earth from which the adam had been taken.

The next morning as we took our breakfast, I said, “I have had a dream.”

At this Adam chuckled. “When do you not dream, Isha?”

“I have had a dream,” I repeated. When had my dreams not carried portents or meaning of some kind?

“And this dream?”

“I dreamed—I dreamed that—” I wondered at the thing about to come from my lips.

“Yes?” he said, calling Reut to him.

“That we should kill an animal,” I said all at once. “That we let blood spill as blood was spilled from Adah and her mate for us.”

He straightened very slowly.

“Two animals were sacrificed so that we might have their skins to cover us as we wear them now. I think we should give back to the One . . . the blood of an animal.”

“You’re raving,” he said.

“Am I?” I asked, half wondering if I was. “My dreams have proven always so false then?”

“This one cannot be true. The One would not wish for the death of an animal.”

“Are you so sure?”

“Even if I agreed, are animals so abundant to us now that we can afford to kill one? Would you kill Gada? The new lamb? The milk ewe? The goat with the hair you like to weave?”

“You could find another, as you found these,” I said. Kayin had begun to fuss. I opened the front of my garment and put him to suck.

“Just to kill it, to give it to the One as you say, as though the One has want of it?”

Suddenly I felt foolish indeed. It had been a strange dream, and I found I no longer had the certainty or the logic to defend it.

“Or so it seemed,” I said lamely.

He went out from the house without a word.

All that day and into the evening, I did not see or speak to him. I wondered if indeed I had seen strangely or false, if perhaps the serpent had never loosed his hold on me but continued to fill my mind with strange logic.

That night Adam acted as though all was forgotten. I waited to dream but saw nothing as I slept.

The next day as I laid Kayin in his basket and prepared to grind grass seeds from their glumes, Adam came into the house. With an odd look on his face, he took up a length of new rope and went back out.

“What is it, husband?” I ran out after him, alarmed at seeing him like this.

“There is a lamb caught in a thicket near the river.”

“And this is amazing?” Sheep were stupid animals, more stupid than the remaining intelligence of any animal, it seemed. They would fall into a hole and never have the sense to get out even if there were a way. “Well, I should like to have a few more animals for their hair, though a milk goat might be better—”

“No,” he said, pulling the rope through his hands. “It is only the lamb. And it is as handsome a creature as I have ever seen.”

He went away like one in a trance and came back a little while later with the animal. When I came out from the house, I stopped short. It was indeed a lovely creature—fleecy and white and without flaw.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we give it to the One.”

I felt a sudden prickle of alarm. “But as you said, it might have been only my dream. Surely so fine a creature we ought to keep.”

But he shook his head and began to lead the lamb away, saying, “No. It is for the One. I, too, dreamed of it. Last night.”

The next day, as the lamb stood placidly munching on a tuft of herbs, we built a platform out of stone and cut saplings, piling them high so the One might at least have a look at the grisly work we had done before any scavengers could come drag it away.

There was little preamble. Adam drew the animal near as I stood, Kayin in one arm, a wooden bowl in the other. He tied the animal’s legs and laid it atop the altar. It never kicked or bleated even once, and I had to wonder if we were on the cusp of some grave error. But before I could say anything, Adam raised his obsidian knife and slit the throat of the lamb so that I could do nothing but hurry to catch the blood in the bowl. I was so close that crimson droplets speckled Kayin and me both, and I swallowed hard at the sticky metallic scent. Kayin waved his little arms, and blood spattered one of his hands. I staggered at the sight of the dark crimson of that blood on those tiny fingers and would have dropped the bowl had Adam not taken it from me.

We had agreed that we should remove the skin. It had been so removed for us on that awful day and given to us, so we would keep it now. Adam began the work of separating the skin from the carcass.

I turned away.

When he was finished, he left the bowl of blood alongside the carcass on the altar and came away. He wiped his hands on the grass several times, and still they were bloody. We stood there like that, Adam with his dirty hands and gory knife and me, holding a smattered Kayin, uncertain what to do. We had no ceremony—what should we know of that? We once communed directly with God himself! So I simply thought,

It is done.

But I wondered what exactly had been gained by this.

As we prepared to return to the house, a hot blast burst upon the altar, bringing us back around in shock. The animal burned. I could see and now smell it, engulfed in orange and blue flames.

We stood there for a long time, amazed. How much like the fire on those trees struck by lightning it was! Even Kayin stared, transfixed.

The fire consumed the animal quickly, burning lower and then lower until it seemed to crouch down to the stones amid the crackling bones and embers. Then it burned out as subtly as a small flame dying without tinder.

When we inspected the altar, I gasped; the blood had burned out of the bowl without harming the bowl itself. Upon the rest of the stones were only the charred remains of bones, as though they had burned days ago. In fact, no heat came off the remains at all, though I had felt the blaze from where I stood. The stones themselves, however, still told the tale; they were hot to the touch.

“We have done well,” Adam declared, and I silently concurred—and hoped that we need never do it again.

OUR GARDEN PROSPERED. WE worked diligently through the day, tilling, harvesting, sowing, drying, and storing. The trees and vines we planted were still young, so we spent days ranging through the nearby hills, gathering fruit and grapes in such abundance that now our problem became one of storage.

During this time we realized the one new skin from the sacrifice would not be enough. We had need for more items supplied by animals: bladders and stomachs for water containers, skins not only for wearing but with which I might cook grains over a fire. So one day Adam took his spear and went to hunt the deer and the hare. He brought back sinew and bone and fat, and brains to tan the hide, which I refused to touch.

Kayin lay between us as we slept at night. I kept him near and suckled him whenever he began to whimper. By day I worked in the shade so that he would not be scorched by the sun. Adam offered to wear him in a sling around his shoulder, but I was jealous for the child.

As the months passed, Kayin began to cut his first teeth and, as curious as ever, insisted on putting anything he could find into his mouth: sticks, his father’s tools, clods of dirt, insects.

A curious thing occurred during this time: my bleeding did not return. At first I did not recognize it, but after several months, I mentioned it to Adam.

“Perhaps it will not until you have weaned the child,” he said. I was content with this idea. It hardly seemed possible that I should need the cycles anyway—the seed had been born. When Adam and I did come together, we did so for our own pleasure, however we could have it and however easily. The days of our sleepless nights, of our hours awake spent striving, seemed a thing of the past.

But during the ninth month after Kayin’s birth, my milk dried and though he tried to suckle, I could no longer satisfy him. One day, as Kayin tried to nurse, I pulled him away. “Enough!” I said, very loudly. He stared at me in astonishment, his fat cheeks framing the circle of his mouth. His lips were an elegant bow even at that age. Shocked at my outburst—he hadn’t even been biting—I put him back, guilt pouring tears down my cheek. But I had no more milk for him and began to feed him gruel. During those days the vomit came back to me again. The most bland meals sent me out of the house to retch.

That was how I knew I was with child again.

17

That spring, when the flowers were on the almond tree, I went into labor. It was two weeks early by my count, but already I had begun to seep pink fluid. Through the day I worked in the vineyard, stopping only to take a little food. By nightfall I will hold my new son.

But night came without him. I lay down, expecting to wake to painful contractions but was woken only by Adam’s snoring.

Remembering the night of Kayin’s birth, I went to the back of the house, but my bowels had not churned, and they did not release. When I came to lie down again, I saw Kayin gazing at me from his place between us with his somber, too-knowing eyes.

“Sleep, my love,” I said, smoothing back his curling hair, leaning awkwardly to kiss him.

“Baby?”

“Soon, my son.”

But he studied me with such a look of concern that I tilted my head. “What is it, Kayin? Why can’t you sleep?”

“See the baby,” he said, on his side, gazing at me. How I loved him like that, his little naked shoulders so soft against the woven mat, his hair like a dark halo.

“Perhaps in the morning.” I paused and then said, “You know you will need to help care for your brother. And you must love him because he is younger than you.” I had recently begun to worry for Kayin, so much the center of our attention until now. We had spared nothing for him, giving him the best of everything we had. And though he had my best love—surely it could not be possible for me to love any other as much as he—there would be another now to need me. At least Kayin had spared me the two of them nursing at once, for which I was grateful.

“Love him,” he said sleepily. I kissed his brow and lay back, sighing heavily.

The next morning Adam instructed Kayin in the use of his spear. The boy tried to placate him, but Adam walked back and repositioned it in his little hand again—and then again, impatiently. I knew he feared for him if he should ever need to defend himself. Finally I called out, “Peace, Adam! He looks fearsome to me.” The moment I said it, Adam turned a baleful look on me. Yanking his larger spear up from the earth where he had stuck it, he stalked away.

Kayin just stood there, his small spear in hand, waiting to see if his father would return, holding it steady over his head until at last I went to him and lowered his arm.

His chubby face seemed too solemn, too seeing. Too very adult. He stood there for a long time, spear in hand. It would be some time—many years, in fact—before I realized that he had meant to protect me in his father’s absence.

Late that afternoon my back cramped and my bowels began to gurgle, and I knew that the hard back-labor with which I had borne Kayin was imminent.

I went out to relieve myself, commanding Kayin to stay in the house and away from the fire. I was near the midden when my first great pain came and I doubled over. This child had been active all the last part of my pregnancy—did he mean to kick his way out as well?

Upon the ground a slow, sinuous creature slid between my heels as though through the gate of a mountain pass. At first I thought I had started to lose consciousness and that the glowworms at the edge of my sight had turned dark and snaked their way through the middle of my vision. But that was not the case; I was very conscious when I recognized the chrysalis.

It wound its way out from beneath my shadow toward the sun and the field beyond. I watched it, willing my attention away from the tight contraction only now releasing me, and as I did, a ray of light caught its scales: gilded, so sleek they seemed to be one great smooth surface rather than a collection of individual plates. The world around me seemed to fall away. His scales were so brilliant now that I could see now my own form reflected in them. They refracted queer light—not the sun—so bright that I raised my arm before my eyes, my shadow thrown behind me where it had been beneath me only a moment ago. It was as though the creature emitted a light of its own, casting every shadow in reverse. But there, what was that in my hand before me as I shielded my eyes? Something mangled and glistening. . . .

The core of a fruit.

I screamed and threw it away from me. The serpent darted out, lightning quick. It coiled around it, unhinged its jaw, and began to devour the object whole. From somewhere now came the words of that creature: How was he to know that you loved him unless you had a choice?

In those words was the pain of my every disappointment, of my ache at every misplaced word between Adam and me, of the betrayal of his disowning me before the One.

I lashed out with a foot, stomping on the chrysalis with my bare foot, digging it into the ground, grinding it into the dust so that it should die the death, surely, that I now died.

Rending pain. Pain, like the smoke of a fire, choking out any sweet and clear air. A boy’s scream—Kayin? Kayin! Where was my son? My Adam? I was awash in pain and floating amid visions of the valley, of that tree, of that winged animal that had, in the last moment, grown as large as a man and much greater—and then of the vile thing at my feet, taunting me even as it died.

If not a perfect God, if not a serpent who could no more control my actions than he could control my own arm, then there is only one wrongdoer here. In my delirium my heel fell not upon the snake but broke through the smooth surface of a pool that reflected the sky and the one who peered into it: me.

There I did not see the dark-skinned beauty hand-fashioned by the One, whispered to life by God, nor the athlete, the seeker, the sleek-limbed child of bone and breath, but something that eclipsed that beauty, covering my image like a pox, staring out from the dark holes of my eyes.

It is the death. I die. Oh, Adonai, I die.

I LAY IN THE house. A squalling, red-faced creature lay bundled against me. There, leaning over me on the other side, was my dark cub.

“Mana?”

The fire. I hated the smell of it. I needed fresh air. “Open the door flap.” My voice cracked. “Can you?”

Kayin moved and squatted, pushing aside the hide a little bit. It was just enough. A faint breeze came in, and it seemed I could smell the night mist gathering near the river. I closed my eyes. I drew the bundle closer to me, turning toward my side. I opened the soft pelt around him and, after first inspecting him in the firelight, held him against my breast. He found the nipple with appetite.

He was a petite child—due to his early entry to the world, no doubt. He seemed as impatient to eat as he had been to come forth. His head was covered in black down, and his face was red and scratched. But he seemed well and hale, shaking his fist intermittently before falling into a fit of sleep.

Footsteps outside, heavy. A larger form moved aside the hide and nearly collided with Kayin’s smaller body. It was a vision I would recall in years to come. But at the time Adam said only, “There, Son, where were you off to?”

“I needed air,” I said.

Adam knelt near me, and Kayin’s smaller version of Adam’s face peered around his arm, his hand resting on my leg.

“It is my error that I left. I should not have gone.”

“The child came early,” I said, still in a fog, my every limb as though made of oak.

“By the time I crested the first hill, I could hear Kayin half out of his wits even from there. He found you near the tree. You stepped on a snake.”

“The serpent.”

He shushed me, glancing at Kayin, but I insisted. “It was the serpent.”

“Hush. It bit you, and you fell into a delirium from the shock. Your foot is swollen twice its size but it will heal. Meanwhile, this one came faster than the first.”

Indeed, my leg felt sore to the knee and my foot throbbed as though with a heart of its own. Kayin came and lay down next to me.

“Come, hold your brother.” I tried not to think of the pain, showing him how to hold the baby’s head. My own head hurt, and my throat seemed swollen and dry.

Kayin took him carefully, and my heart swelled to see it. What a good man he would become, my Kayin, and what a good helper he would have in his new brother.

I thought of the mists outside and the fog into which I had fallen in delivering him. I knew Kayin’s place in this world well, though the destiny of this new one seemed obscured to me as something shrouded by the mists of the river at night.

“Hevel,” I said.

“Will I ever name one of these fellows?” Adam said, quirking a smile at me. How much I had missed that. How lovely he was.

“The next one will not be a fellow,” I said, before falling into an exhausted sleep.

BEFORE YEAR’S END I was pregnant again. I named the girl Lila. She bore the likeness of the babe I never was. Finally, I had representation among my offspring. I sang the night she was born and swear to this day I felt no pain in birthing her. At the moment of her arrival, Kayin held her and called her beautiful and said he would marry her.

“But not for a long time,” I said. For a while, at least, she would belong to no one but me.

HOW SHOULD LOVERS GET away to know one another, to remember the terrain of each other’s bodies, to discover new scars and scratches and sunspots on one another, with children underfoot? I despaired that I would ever be with Adam as a woman again. Adam, who occupied his days with furrow and seedling, and in building the new oven that we had engineered together. In it, I could cook cakes of flour ground from grains and acorns mixed with the oil of seeds and olives.

I was devoted to keeping food ready at hand and in the mouths of my children, a task that seemed to grow daily with the boys’ appetites and then in great leaps as Lila began to wean, though she still came occasionally to the breast even well into her second year, especially when I held her on my lap and sang songs. Hevel, jealous of his sister, would come to nurse at the other one though he was too old to truly want it, and Kayin had no qualms in telling him so.

Sometimes, as I worked by the river forming pinch pots, I gave Kayin some of the heavy river clay to mold into shapes and dry in the sun. In showing him how to do it, I formed several small figures—“little adams,” I called them. The boys loved them and spent hours playing together in the yard. Lila had no interest in the clay people, preferring bundles of hide tied together to look like women and smaller, egg-shaped ones that she called her babies.

I enjoyed making the little men for my sons, which I did with no small bit of mysticism, for in shaping these miniature men, I enacted the part of the One. I have made men with the help of the One, I thought, thinking of my sons; since the moment Kayin had come into the world, I believed I labored in service to the legacy of the One within us.

One night when Kayin shushed his brother for shouting, Hevel got angry and threw one of Kayin’s clay men into the hearth fire. Hevel was always the young ram, having barged his way out of the womb and into his brash existence, he was temperamental and rash. I gasped at this—the toy was the image of Adam himself. It was my first experience of sacrilege, of blasphemy, and I tried to pluck it out, but the fire was too hot.

“Hevel!” Kayin said, and it was the first time I saw him truly upset.

Hevel hated being chastised and turned away, mussed his own hair in frustration, and began to howl. But when Kayin tried to console him, Hevel turned on him, pelting him with his little fists. Kayin pinned them without a word, but I saw color in his cheeks.

The next morning I drew the clay figurine from the ashes. I dusted it off with my fingers, and noticed a strange thing: the clay had hardened. Beyond the way it might harden in the sun, it had baked into a solid form. Adam and I had both known and understood the properties of fire—on food and water and wood. Now as I held the figure in my hand, I remembered another occasion when I had lined a temporary hearth with clay and found, after several fires, that it had hardened. Turning the clay man over in my hand, I considered the skins and baskets that we kept for water that seemed to be forever leaking, the pots that dried and crumbled.

I began to fire my pots after that.

THIS IS THE TIME of our exile that I remember with the most fondness—when my first children ate of an earth where God once walked, reared on sheep’s milk and goat cheese and honey.

True, the stench of soiled baby napkins was everywhere so that even Reut was no longer curious about these things. And when I wasn’t in the midst of cleaning up some sodden or stinking mess, it seemed one child or another was always demanding something to eat from breast or hearth. But at night as I lay surrounded by the soft breathing of tiny chests, by the smells of baby curls stuck to warm foreheads, and the familiar form of the exhausted Adam smelling of sweat and wild wheat beside me, I was content.

Our fledgling flock multiplied to five sheep and eight goats. Each birth was attended with excitement, the boys the first to announce the fullness of the ewes’ bellies, with many excited false alarms. Adam was no longer there for each of them as he had been with the animals of our valley, so Kayin, gentle with his hands, took over the birthing by the time he was nearly ten years old.

For every action like this, Kayin confirmed my conviction of his destiny. He was good. And though a mother would like to believe that all her children are good and that they are brilliant and kind and gifted, I knew Kayin was good. I loved him for all of these reasons and because he was my firstborn. I loved him in a way that I kept in my heart and spoke nothing about, that a mother might feel guilty about for loving one child more than another.

And though we said nothing to him of the words of the One and spoke not at all about the place from which we had come, there was always something in his eyes that seemed to accept and shoulder without asking our one need of him: that he bear the burden of hope.

KAYIN

18

Mother, come quick!”

Hevel ran on legs as graceful as a doe’s. He was nearly ten and at that age where the beauty of a boy might surpass that of a girl even though he wore his hair tied back in the way of his father and brother, which made him feel more the young man. He already rivaled Kayin in height and seemed to fly when he ran, putting me in mind of the lion and the gazelle—and of myself—at every turn. In his strong body I could recall my adolescence, which had also been my childhood and infancy and the time of my marriage bed in the bower of Adam. How coltish and lean my legs had been—much as his were now—though mine had grown more shapely in the years since. Even Kayin, in his burgeoning pubescence, had begun to mark the differences between his young sisters and me with silent eyes.

That summer I bore twin girls that I named Zeeva and Ashira. They were as different as the wolf and the songbird, the one howling at every moment, hungry and needful, the other content and pretty, winsome even in her infancy, flirtatious nearly from birth. Lila attended their births with fascination, wanting to pull Ashira out even as she began to crown.

Though he made her stand back for Ashira’s birth, it was into Lila’s hands, supported by Adam’s, that I delivered Zeeva. Lila appointed herself mother to the twins after that in all but the most practical ways, bringing them to me to feed in turns.

Kayin had long ago been relegated to following the flocks, which was a great burden off of us; there were so many now that they must be taken to graze upon the far hills. He did it in good humor, knowing in that way he always seemed to know, that he must do as he was asked and do it well. So he took Reut with him and went to the pastures, often with his brother tagging along behind.

Hevel escaped my jurisdiction—and that of his matronly and bossy younger sister—as quickly as he could. Unlike Kayin, he made no graces about it, calling Lila a goat and telling her to make him something to eat until she threw her shuttle at him. He wanted to be with his brother in the hills, throwing stones and practicing with his spear. He had less talent for the weapon than Kayin, who had fashioned by now a full-sized one for himself, improving even upon the design of his father—much to the surprise of Adam. But it didn’t matter to Hevel as long as he was out of the house and, in the very least, tussling with his older brother.

At times they did more than tussle, though it was rarely done in anger. The first time that happened, it was over a bit of antler Adam had fashioned into the likeness of Reut. They were jealous of each other for it because Adam had not had the foresight to make two of them. When I heard their shouts and slap-stinging blows, I ran out of the house, pulled Kayin off his brother, and admonished him out of pure shock. “What is this? How can you behave this way?” I remember the astonishment on his face and the dogged look of Hevel as he waited for the same. But I had not given it to him, having been disappointed only in Kayin. Only later did I intercept Hevel near the midden that he so rarely chose to use to tell him that he must be gentler with his brother, whose size he almost matched already.

“You cannot understand this now, but your brother has a destiny.”

“It is my wrong, Mother,” he said, studying his toes. Then he squinted up at me. “What is a destiny?”

“A purpose, my dear love, my wild cub. Because of that, harm must not come to him by you. Can you understand?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Now say you will never speak of this. I only tell you because you are a man now and can understand these things.” Of course he was not a man at all. But he stood straighter and somberly nodded.

“No, Mother. I will never speak of it.” My dear, sweet Hevel.

So that day when he came running, narrowly avoiding a collision with a rack full of fruit drying in the sun, my heart twitched in my chest as a fish upon the bank. “What is it, my son? What has happened—where is Kayin?”

“He’s with the flock,” Hevel said, breathless. “Come, Mother. Hurry!”

“What has happened? Tell me now!” I said, with growing alarm. It was not like Kayin to cause a stir.

“Kayin sent me to fetch you.” The color was in his cheeks, and his eyes were bright as he said, “Come and see!”

I came out of the house just as Zeeva broke into a wail. I felt a tinge of selfishness as Lila cosseted her and I realized I was glad for the chance to escape and stretch my legs.

We started for the hills and then broke into a run. How good it felt! My knees seemed to be always bent near the fire, or over a child, or the pegs upon which I was teaching Lila to weave. My heart drummed as we raced, strong and hard in my ears, and I outran my son. Hevel pumped his arms, always the competitive one—I saw the way he tested himself against everyone, including his father, whether they knew it or not. But there was still no one alive, other than the adam, perhaps, who could outrun me. I laughed, glad for the air in my loosening hair, feeling like a girl.

When we found the flock, my eye automatically sought out the tall form of my eldest.

He was in the late stages of a lovely boyhood, growing into the lean and long-limbed beauty of a man. He reminded me so much of the adam of the valley, full lipped and lean of thigh, that I found myself stumbling and calling him by his father’s name often. Somehow I thought this displeased Adam—and even Kayin, too—though neither of them said so.

As we got closer, I could see the sheep clustered together, acting strangely. But their number was right and all seemed in order. So where was Kayin? When I repeated the question, impatient now, Hevel pulled me around a large tamarisk. There I found him, my young hunter, squatting on the ground near an animal, blood on his hands. I cried out at sight of it, but Hevel shook my arm, saying, “It is a jackal, Mother, and Kayin has killed it with his spear! See? The blood is not his.” There was adoration and hero worship in his voice. And in fact, Kayin was already in the process of skinning the animal. When he smiled up at me, it was macabre; he had gotten some of the gore on his face. I drew back. Seeing this, the smile vanished.

“Mother,” he said.

“Wipe the blood from your face!” When I was satisfied that he was unharmed, that, in fact, none of the blood was his, I examined the carcass at his feet.

It was a not large creature but a young adolescent.

“Well done, my son,” I said, sitting down between them. Hevel was too excited to be drawn into my arms, so obviously the vicarious hunter. With great vigor he recounted the story so that Kayin could hardly tell it himself: The jackal had been stalking the flock now for days. But Kayin killed a hare just that morning, purposefully laying out the carcass so that it would draw the predator. He had kept hidden a little ways away until the jackal appeared. When it did, he ran out after it, throwing his spear and wounding it.

“He finished it with a rock,” Hevel said, pointing to the place on the animal’s skull. “Like this!” He got up, pulled a stone from a pouch at his waist, and threw it at a shrub twenty paces away, almost hitting it. “Almost like that. Like this!” He threw another, striking the top of it.

Studying the limp form of the jackal, I felt none of the vestigial sorrow I once did on these occasions. There had been a time that I knew the markings of each individual animal, that I could recite each of their quirky preferences—for scratching themselves on the lowest branch of the hawthorn or being the best at catch and seek, which we loved to play in the valley.

Now our games were played out by our children, with much more dire consequences.

Hevel made me watch as he emptied his entire pouch of stones at the hapless shrub, and I had the faintest vision of something similar once, as I had run the length of the valley with the breath of the One that Is in my hair.

Watch me run!

Had I been this exuberant? Had the One been as doting and patronizing—or as proud—as I was today?

Hevel ran off to retrieve his stash of stones, and Kayin said, “This pelt is yours, Mother.” Though I needed nothing in the world, my heart swelled. My son had slain a predator in protection of his flock. One day he would slay the serpent as well.

That night I cooked a feast complete with sweet honey cakes. Reut feasted, too, on the kidneys of Kayin’s kill, which she devoured without decorum.

As we sat down to our meal, Adam inspected the pelt and handed it wordlessly back; I knew his thoughts had taken a turn similar to mine upon the hill earlier that day. But Kayin did not know that.

“It is a fine pelt,” I said, trying to prompt him. But Adam was lost to his own thoughts.

Only I saw Kayin’s countenance fall as surely as a mud brick crumbling in the sun. I said, hiding my annoyance at Adam, “Only ten summers old and you have killed the jackal, my love!” Hevel, oblivious, reveled in the moment as though it were his own, eating every crumb that Kayin left untouched, squabbling with Lila for the last.

Later, as the hearth embers mellowed to ash-crusted coals, Kayin lay with his head in my lap, carving a small figure of a wolf out of bone. Adam had gone out with Hevel to repair a portion of the pen. The twins, recently nursed, were asleep on Lila’s mat. I stroked back a wisp from Kayin’s dark face where he lay, his cheek upon my knee.

Hevel, as much as I loved him, was not moved to indulge me these kinds of moments, preferring to stay on the hill with the animals or, when he could be coaxed indoors, to keep to his pallet, working on tanning a bit of hide to absolute softness until he fell asleep with it in his hands, his mouth open. Sometimes Hevel stayed in the pen with the animals, which I could never understand, though Kayin, I knew, snuck out to join him sometimes after he thought we were asleep. At this moment, though, I knew he stayed for my sake, and I loved him the more for it.

My young hunter. My warrior seed.

Adam returned, stooping through the door. When he saw Kayin with his head against my knee, he frowned. “You are too grown a boy to lie in your mother’s lap.”

Kayin got up. As the air touched the place his head had lain, a hot flash of resentment toward his father struck me.

“Yes,” I said, handing him the bit of thong he had loosed from his hair, “You have killed a jackal now and are nearly a man.” I looked at Adam. “But no child of mine shall ever be too grown to lay his head in my lap.”

I was angry. Angry that he had not praised his son’s kill, angry that he should criticize or contrive to keep him ever from being as near to me as possible. I knew Kayin felt my anger and felt it keenly, as one feels a draft of cold from beneath the door flap.

Adam must have noticed it too. His eyebrows drew together, but he said nothing. But by then it was too late; I would not look him in the eye the rest of the evening.

A few days later I made a point to take a midday meal to Kayin and his brother. When I could speak to Kayin alone, I said, “Your father sees that you are not a child anymore, and he is right. But you will always have a place in my arms. No man may deny or come between a mother and her child.” I knew that among the animals there were females that staved off their mates once they bore young. We had even found evidence of males killing a mother’s young to keep her from suckling them so she might go into season. I had been horrified and angered by these new discoveries, and though I knew there was no true comparison, Adam’s response the night of the jackal reminded me of it. We had become enough like the animals already—were we to join them in this contention as well?

“I know, Mother,” he said, leaning into me, his young arm going around my waist. I smoothed his hair, grateful for his good heart, hoping his softness might last just a year longer.

Hevel crested the hill at a run, his hair wild and untamed. Newly inspired by his brother, he carried a spear—no longer a small one, but a larger one closer to Kayin’s length. He also carried a length of leather hanging from his waist. When he saw me, he said, “Come, Mother, and see what I’ve done!”

He took us to a small cairn of rocks surrounded by a smaller pile of pebbles. Selecting a few of them and backing several paces away, he pulled out the braided leather from his waist and laid a stone in the strap.

“He has been at this since the day he realized he could not best me in throwing,” Kayin said, in an undertone.

Hevel missed the top of the cairn with every attempt, but there was no doubt that he had come upon something; he had slung rocks in every direction—once just missing our heads—with better force than he could throw one.

“Take care, Son, that you do not practice when others are about, lest you do more harm than good.”

“Yes, Mother.” Hevel hardly looked at me as he scurried to gather his stones. He had a renewed mission for shepherding, though I think it had more to do with killing predators—or any animal that came close enough to serve as a target—than protecting the flock.

He ran back again, hands full of stones. “That lion will have no chance, soon enough!”

When I said, “What lion?” he froze and then deliberately shrugged. He was a terrible liar.

“We’ve seen a lion in the foothills,” Kayin said. “It does not come near, especially when there is a fire, and it does not like Reut.”

I was uneasy. The boys had ventured farther and farther from the house, staying out sometimes overnight. How had I become comfortable with this? My boys, only yesterday at the breast, out here with no more than two spears and a few ill-aimed rocks! Though I had lauded Kayin for his kill, I admitted to myself that I regarded it a lucky stroke, more than anything a sign to me of his destiny, if not his skill as a hunter.

I felt his great brown eyes upon me—so like a girl’s, rimmed with lashes that made Lila tease him and call him “pretty”—as he said, “It’s nothing, Mother. Only an old loner.”

“Still,” I said, shaken, “you will bring the animals in by the setting sun, especially tonight and tomorrow with the dark moon upon us. I’ll have no more of these evenings in the dark.”

Hevel chuffed, and I knew his adventure had been spoiled, but Kayin nodded and said they would obey.

ADAM DID NOT AGREE with me. “You’re cosseting them. How are they to learn this way?” he said. “Kayin has proven his arm. No danger will come to them if they stay out, especially together.”

“Will you put them so casually in danger?” I flared. But what I wanted to say and did not because someone was always within hearing distance was: Will you chance the life of our hope?

He knew my meaning and did not challenge me again, but I cursed him in my mind for his thoughtlessness, for his selfishness and shortsightedness. While I was at it, I cursed also the line of his mouth, drawn down in disapproval, the feet that walked away from me when I would speak to him, and his back turned toward me as we lay down that night.

19

In the course of one year, Kayin grew a hand’s span, his legs lengthening so that no matter how much I fed him I couldn’t seem to keep him from growing lankier by the day. Hevel had just entered the stage of smooth-faced boyhood where the fat still clung to his arms and cheeks. In a way I wished that Kayin might return to those days even as I welcomed the man he was becoming.

One night, as flat cakes cooked on the stones around the hearth, I recounted, as I had nearly every year at this time, the night of his birth.

“The mist comes in,” I said, “and I must go to the midden. So I take up the spear and go out of the house.”

“This is why you carry your spear everywhere,” Lila said knowingly to Kayin. She was holding Zeeva, feeding her bits of honey from her fingertip, as though it were a nipple. Zeeva sat in wonder, her mouth open in shock at the sweet, her pink tongue sticking out between the circle of her lips.

“I never thought of that,” I said, wondering again, as I had many times, how much a child might know of life through the experiences of the mother who carried him. I wondered how different it must be to come from a woman and grow into being—rather than being fashioned on the spot.

“The mist comes in,” Kayin prompted.

“The mist comes in,” I said, “and my back is aching. I know it must be very soon. But the mist is so thick that I can hardly see. So I walk with the spear before me, so I don’t stumble.”

“Like this!” Hevel said, jumping up, leaning on his spear like an old man, though he had never seen an old man in his life—nor had any of us, for that matter. He hobbled along, holding his back. Kayin laughed, and even Lila, normally so austere, did too.

“A sound comes from the mist. ‘Adam?’ I say. ‘Adam?’”

“It’s the One!” Lila said. The twin in her lap grinned, understanding nothing but the exuberance in her voice. Ashira, sitting beside them, babbled excitedly.

I nodded. “It is the One indeed.”

“What is it like to see the One?” Kayin looked from his father to me.

I fell silent.

The truth is I hoped the One would have revealed himself to the boy by now—would have caught him on the hill or in the field, on a day when he might at first think that the light on his face came from the sun. Or on a cloudy day, so that he would have to know such light came from no other source. Sometimes, when Kayin returned to the house, I searched his face, wondering if today had been the day that he would come in, beatific, to tell me that he had lived the greatest moment of his life—or that his life had truly begun. I waited to hear him say he knew now for what purpose he had been born. Perhaps on that day I would feel the presence of the One vicariously from the light still shining on his face. Perhaps he would say that he vanquished a shining creature and that he saw, afterward, a vision of a valley and knew the way to go there and knew, too, that the way would be open to us.

But nothing of the sort had happened.

So I clung to the hope that the One might yet whisper by day or in secret by night to this son of mine who kept his own counsel—already his brown eyes held a sorrow and compassion that was too deep, I knew, for any boy his age. Until then I was resolved to continue in faith that it would come to pass and that we must only wait—and survive—until then.

Hearing this question from him now, though, I was disappointed. I looked down, waiting for the adam to answer him. When he did not, I said, not looking at Adam, “Ask your father. He was in the presence of the One before I came to be.”

“Father?”

Adam, naked to the waist and crouched near the hearth, did not look up. When I thought he would not answer, he said at last, “It is like being in the presence of one you know better than anyone, who also knows you better than anyone. So that you need not speak. So that you need say nothing because you are cut from the same hide, and two came where once there was only one.”

I was moved and not a little appalled—he had not spoken of the One at all. He looked across the hearth at me then with such sadness and longing and—yes, hunger—that tears gathered on my lashes.

“How can one feel like that and not even talk?” Hevel blurted, shattering the moment.

“There is no need,” I said, gathering myself. “It is like being in the sun—a sun that warms greater than the sun. Like bathing in the sweetest stream—”

“Like honey?” Lila said, with soft awe. The girl sought mystery in all things—in the eyes of the twins, so newly come from another place, as though she would read them like runes; in the stars, which she had taken to reading as I never had, finding in their alignment meaning known only to her. In the flowing of water, the song of crickets—in all things—she found evidence of a god that she had never seen or heard as I had. I envied her, the purity of her belief that might find communion with the One in the mere evidence of his existence.

“Like honey but not so thick. Like sun, but warm without heat. Like light, but greater than that. Like—”

I had to stop. There were no words. Words had never been needed. Tears blurred my vision, and I wiped them away.

“And so, in the mists,” Kayin said gently, “you fall to your knees, and they clear.”

“They clear,” I said, grateful. Across the fire, Adam turned away. “And I rise and return to the house, to your father, who is ready with the mat.”

“He knows because he has delivered the animals,” Lila says, having been interested in the process of birth since the twins’ appearance. I knew she watched closely the interaction between her father and me, alert to any signs that the twins would be joined by siblings in the near future.

I told the rest of the story with more perfunctory haste than I had any year prior.

Later, as the twins lay sleeping and Lila lay drowsing beside them, Hevel said, “Tell us again the story of your dreams, of the making of the world.”

“Ask your father,” I said, for the second time that night. I was tired of carrying the weight of my visions and of Adam’s silence.

“My dreams are not the same as your mother’s,” he said, the sound of his voice dull.

“He did not need dreams,” I said. “The One told him many things before ever I came to be.”

“Tell us the story, Mother, of the dreams,” Hevel prompted.

“Another night.” I felt very tired.

“Mother?” Kayin said, from where he lay. “Why did the One make you and Father and no one else? Why not many people, as the animals?”

I once wondered the same thing and concluded that we would never have learned to be together had we not been alone. But I did not care to speak this in front of Adam and said, with uncharacteristic curtness, “I don’t know, Kayin. Who can know the mind of God?”

“You, Mother,” he said, very softly.

If only he knew.

“One day,” I said, lying down upon my side, gazing at them both, but more specifically Kayin, where he lay behind his brother, “You will ask the One for yourself.”

That night, as I closed my eyes to the soft drone of Adam’s snores, I knew that Kayin lay awake in the dark, gazing at me. I held out my arm to him, and he rose, silently creeping over his brother, who lay sprawled on his mat between us. He lay down against me, and I curled my arm around him as though I were a cocoon, turning my face into his hair. In it I smelled the hills and the earth, the sheep and goats, hearth fire and the garlic we had eaten with our dinner mingled all together with the scent that is uniquely that of a young man—part wild boy, reeking of sweat, and part child, sweet yet.

“May the One give you vision, my son. May you know his voice. Blessings on your eyes and ears,” I whispered. He laid his arm over mine and drifted almost immediately to sleep.

I lay there a long time, feeling the rise and fall of his sides against me. Sometime later, as I drowsed, it seemed he stirred—no, not him, but Hevel beyond him.

“Are you thirsty?” I asked, but he did not seem to hear me. He coughed, and I repeated the question, but he grabbed his middle and doubled over.

“Hevel!” I said, trying to rise to get to him, but Kayin’s arm over me was like a boulder, and I could not move at all. I cried out again and then for Adam, who lay deaf as the rest of the children—except for Kayin. Kayin lay between Hevel and me, on his back, gazing dispassionately up at his brother. As Hevel fell to the side, choking and contorted, a trickle of blood stained the corner of his mouth. Then, with a great convulsion, he vomited up a stream of crimson.

Kayin, lying beneath him, did not move as the blood spattered his lovely face, speckling his cheeks and temples and hair. I shouted and tried to push him away, to take Hevel in my arms and staunch the blood from his lips, but I couldn’t move. I watched with horror as Kayin silently opened his mouth, and the blood of Hevel flowed into it—

“Mother.”

I jerked at the sound. Kayin leaned over me, smoothing back my hair from my face. I half expected blood to fall from his mouth. I pushed him roughly away. His eyes widened as I fell across him to seize his brother, who lay in the same splayed position as before, his mouth slightly open. I shook him, and then shook him harder, until he sat halfway up, blinking at me.

“Hevel!” I clasped him, slapping his cheek. By now Adam was awake and frowning. One of the twins woke up and began to wail, at which my milk came in. But I had no care for that, even though I could feel it leaking down the front of my garment.

“Mother?” Hevel said, drunk with sleep. I pushed open his mouth, examined his lips, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He came more awake, stared at me as though I were out of my mind.

“Are you well, my son?” I asked, my heart pounding, feeling sick.

Adam leaned up on an elbow, “What is this?”

I was half crushing Kayin, having lurched over him to get to Hevel. I fell back to my mat. I covered my face with my arm and tried to recall and block out at once the vision I had seen.

“An ill dream. I feared for—I thought Hevel ill.”

“I’m well, Mother.” His lips trembled, no more a young man in the making but only a boy of ten after all. For all his brashness he was confused and sleepy enough that he looked as though he might cry. Kayin turned toward him, his lean body stretched along its side. Sinuous as a snake, I thought, and was instantly appalled at myself.

“A dream,” he said to Hevel. “Go back to your snoring.” I heard the grin, forced from Kayin’s lips, saw his halfhearted shove and Hevel’s answering cuff before he dropped almost immediately off again.

Adam said nothing though I knew he did not sleep. Kayin lay waiting for a word from me, I knew. But I could not bring myself to comfort him or even to touch him. “Mother,” he whispered at last, leaning against me.

“Stop it, Kayin. You are almost a man,” I said. “Go back to your own mat.”

The next morning I left Lila with the twins (what did I do before I had a child to take care of my other children?) and went out to Adam where he was clearing a new field so that one might lie fallow for a season.

I had not liked watching my sons go out that morning. Hevel ran ahead, throwing rocks to the left and right of the flock to keep them from wandering all directions. But Kayin turned once to gaze back at me, and I knew that had I given the least indication, he would have come running back to stay with me and Lila and the children through the day. I had bruised him with my sharp words, but I had not been able to comfort him and even in the bright light of morning could barely look at him.

I wondered how a mind could conceive of such terrible images. Perhaps it is part of the death that ill images should replace those that were formerly lovely and good.

I found Adam resting upon a stump and knew, without his saying so, that he had been waiting for me. I meant to relay my dream directly, even to be angry with him—lately every word from him seemed to rankle—but seeing him there, beloved by the sun, his long hair upon his shoulders, I threw myself into his arms, weeping, instead.

“There, Isha,” he said, into my hair. But even as he said it, I heard the worry in his voice. “All will be well.”

“How can you know?” I demanded.

He hesitated and then said, “I can’t.”

“Then how can you say, ‘All will be well’?”

“I can’t. But the One knows all, and surely all must be well in the end.”

“Must it?” I pulled away with a brittle little laugh. “We are living in the wild! The animals would harm us if they could, as they harm one another. The river cares not where we plant our field, nor does the sky; it might strike lightning to the entire field at whim. There is no certainty! God has promised us what—what? That my seed will strike the serpent. Fine then! Where is he?”

I was in shock at the things coming from my mouth, at the vehemence of them, at every dark thought to have sprung out of the fearful soil of my heart.

Adam’s expression was mottled with resignation. I regretted my words, but it was as though I was no longer in possession of myself. I felt my frustration welling in the absence of reassurances that I wanted him to speak. Why did he not reassure me? Had he no word—either from himself or from the One?

“What do you think? What will the One do?”

“I don’t know, Isha,” he said faintly. The arm around me seemed devoid of strength.

“You should know! It was you who walked this earth before me. It was you to whom he spoke the secrets you harbor between you, that you have not shared with me—don’t think I don’t know that you have not spoken everything to me!”

He looked startled, and I thought with a spiteful triumph, Ah! So it is true! But even as I thought it, I hated the sound of my own accusation. I might as well have slapped him; I knew in my rational mind that he would have never withheld anything from me—even those most secret moments—had I wished them from him.

“Why—why do you say this to me?”

“Have you spoken of them all, of everything whispered between you?” I sounded like a jealous lover but justified it in that, if only I knew all that had passed before my existence, I might now know what to do with these horrible portents.

“No—”

“You hardly acknowledge that we have changed—that our lives are so different now, that I cannot know even half, or a tenth of the time, what your thoughts are or what direction they might roam!”

Here at last was the source of my frustration, that I, who constantly contemplated the past and the meaning of it and of our plight and of all that had happened, and who mulled over the words of the One as though they were a fine weave in a fabric by which I might divine the future, did it all alone. Why should I burden myself always in looking for meaning as though I were the only thinking human on earth? When he went off by himself to find land or sheep or goat, what did he do all that time? I saw no evidence of newfound wisdom or tortured seeking—how could he walk blindly into the life before us? Why did he avoid my gaze and my questions, taking to the field when it seemed I might want to lay all bare between us, though we must slave to do it with words unnatural and inadequate?

“You are upset,” he said at last, as though trying to happen upon the exact thing to say to assuage me.

I got up, but he grabbed my wrist and drew me back. “Tell me what happened last night.”

I wanted to rail at him as once again he eluded me, as the One in the grove eluded me.

“I dreamed that blood flowed from Hevel’s mouth,” I said, wanting to see the resignation replaced by alarm, the silence by action.

Adam’s brows drew together. “Why, and so it did, the day he fell into your cache of pots, knocking his mouth against one of them. You dream of what has happened.” Relief was in his eyes.

He thinks he has solved the puzzle! As though it should be so simple!

“Do you think I would be hysterical over only that? Then I should be frantic every day with the way he knocks about. I tell you: There was blood like a fountain, flowing as it flowed from the veins of the lamb at sacrifice!” I hated even to commit it to words. “It was like that, pouring out of his mouth into the mouth of Kayin, who seemed to devour it. What can it mean?”

He said, very calmly, so that I wanted to strike him, “You have had a dream of the sacrifice. In your confusion, you have thought of your sons. Perhaps it is only that it is time for another. We have a fine family. Perhaps it is only that. Nothing is as clear as it once was. Should your visions be, also?”

I shook my head. “It isn’t that. It is something more, I know it! What can it mean?” I waited for a word from him, any word, to give it meaning or give me ease.

Once he had known how to do that. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Well, that’s an end to it then!” I said, pulling up angrily. “Thank you, husband, very much, for your counsel. Now can I go back to tending our children—”

I was cut short by a quick jerk of my arm. His hand had tightened on my wrist, and he pulled me hard so that he wrenched my shoulder.

“Stop this nonsense. You are beside yourself, seeking answers from me as though I have hoarded them from you. I don’t know what it means, but that does not mean that something cannot be done.”

I fell quiet, ashamed of my outburst, wondering what was wrong with me. I was behaving like a woman half out of her mind with the upset of her body at the first stages of—

Well then.

“Then what—what should we do?”

Adam sighed. How I had come to loathe the abject resignation of that sound. “I am not the one given to dreams. Tell me plainly what you think it means.”

I said in a small voice, “That Kayin will consume the life in the blood of Hevel. I know I speak madness. I know it is not possible.” It was unfathomable. If the One had eyes, surely they looked like Adam’s. But if all the sorrow and knowing that we had brought into the world had a face, it was Kayin’s.

“This is what you fear?” he said, frowning deeply.

No. I could not voice my greatest fear: that Kayin was not the one we thought him. Because to think that would render all the world a rudderless ship and us afloat only on a sea of chaos.

I nodded.

He stared at the earth as though waiting for it to sprout some word to inspire him.

“Then we will keep them apart except when we are near.”

I laughed and threw my arms up. “How can we do that?”

“Hevel is capable with the flock. Besides, I think he prefers to be alone. He does not suffer from time apart as Kayin does.”

“And what of Kayin?”

“He will help me. The greater our family grows”—and here he gave a meaningful glance toward my belly that fair smoldered and set my thighs to tingling. Ah, so not all is severed between us after all. “We will need to enlarge the garden. There is much to be done there. Kayin understands the selection of grains as he does the breeding of animals. I could use his strong back.”

I knew, hearing this, that Adam would be a difficult master, as he was a demanding father. I foresaw, with a bit of waking vision, that Kayin might suffer because of it—but better that. Better that than the foreboding of my dream.

“Yes,” I said. “Let us keep them apart.”

He pulled me into his arms then, hungrily, my outburst, my anger, and his dull looks that had caused them forgotten between us. We had become furtive in our lovemaking, forgetting it as a man might forget a meal, devouring one another as soon as any emotion sparked realization of our inadvertent fast.

I saw Lila over Adam’s shoulder when she walked into the clearing. I saw the way she stopped and watched us, eyes upon her father’s back. Just when I would have said something, she quietly stole away. So I said nothing to either of them, though I noted how her gaze searched mine and followed Adam for days.

The next day Adam called Kayin to the fields, where he worked every day after.

20

As Hevel succeeded on the hills, Kayin succeeded in the fields; within two years we had our greatest yield ever. Adam attributed it to the sacrifice of a lamb that we made soon after my dream. Hevel had been particularly attached to the animal. In tears he helped to bind it tight, but he turned his head away when Adam showed Kayin how to slit its throat. At some point Hevel slipped away from the altar, no doubt to take solace in the hills. Even when he brought back the flock that night, he kept away from the house.

On the second night I found him behind the pen, eyes red rimmed and puffy. He surprised me, though, when he said, “It is good that the One that Is should have Leetom with him.” I don’t know why I was surprised to hear that he had named the creatures individually—had not his father done the same an age, a lifetime, ago?

“Is it?” I drew him into my arms. He would never have permitted it had I not found him alone.

“Yes,” he said, sniffling, wiping his nose on his arm. “Because now he will be with the One, and perhaps he will be happy there.”

My heart swelled and tears filled my eyes. “You are good and noble, my love, my young ram. Surely the One will love you all the days of your life and protect you because you have done so well. Blessed be your eyes and your heart and your hands and the work of them,” I said, kissing him.

See how my heart swells with pride and deflates again with grief! I am the cyclamen that blooms and then shrivels, the fruit that bursts its skin before withering.

In those days we had great awareness of the world. I had seen more of it than anyone in my sleeping visions. But even those places we laid our own eyes upon grew more and more vast. We began to devise a map of the area. It was important to Hevel, who had an adventurer’s heart, but important to Adam and me for altogether different reasons. We marked on clay the northern hills and the river that ran south toward the lush steppe and alluvial plain, and the easterly bend where we had made our home. Hevel thought the river must empty into a great bed of water, and I knew he was right. We added the other rivers, most of them discovered by Hevel: one that ran gold as the Pishon and another rich in minerals.

We did not speak of our valley, Adam and I, but marked the landmarks we knew in silence. We added more as we recalled them, which was sometimes only after dreams; our memories, still fantastic, were not as they had once been. The children, for their part, knew we came from the north and assumed we had followed better soil or water to come here—there was irony!

We never mentioned the serpent or the fruit.

When we added something new, we remade the tablet, transcribing it and allowing it to bake in the sun. In this way we kept a record of the land as we knew it. There were, of course, the oceans and the other mountains and the plains and the deserts seen by me in my dreams, but I knew not in what directions they lay—only that they were there and that the world was great yet and yielded mighty things among the fearsome ones.

Lila became proficient with fibers of any sort, having taken to the solitary and silent practice of twisting animal hair and flax into threads and weaving them before she was even a woman. She was a finer weaver than I by the time of her first blood. Inspired by the working of birds’ nests and spiders’ webs, she wove baskets that never spilled water. When she began to dye her threads, I dismissed her efforts, saying the work of weaving was too time-consuming on its own to add vanity atop it, but as she grew faster and improved her method, and the fabric that came from her pegs flowed with subtle and skillful pattern, I recanted. I threw off the hated pelts and swore I would never again wear them as my only garment—and I never have.

Zeeva, my hungry girl-twin, took special interest in the preparation of food. Through her mistakes and my observations, we began to throw dough against the sides of the oven to bake it. She was as brashly featured as Hevel, so that as she grew older she looked more Hevel’s twin than Ashira’s. When Hevel was at her cook fire—as he often was, since he was voracious as she—I thought they looked like two halves of the same person even more than the adam and I. They were so alike, so headstrong, sampling every simple pleasure without worry for the mysteries that seemed to pique me and Lila and plague the thoughtful Kayin.

Zeeva’s twin, Ashira, grew more pretty by the year, with her wide hips and long, straight hair, outpacing her sisters in loveliness. She seemed to be always singing. She was unique in her coloring, her skin more golden than any of ours, whereas Zeeva’s was as dark as Kayin’s when he had been in the fields all day. Ashira took even more interest than Lila in each of my pregnancies and came to sing to me with her lovely voice and stroke my hands as I labored. How she loved to hold and sing to each baby from the moment of birth. She sang a new song for each of them the moment they were in her arms, and it was the same song she would sing to comfort them when they fell down or, much later, when they were in their own pregnancies, or—for some—when they died. Because of her eagerness and growing skill, Adam became less and less present at the births of his youngest children. I think those young ones nearly thought of her as their mother, having opened their eyes upon her first.

My next child after the twins was also a girl, and I grieved for that; secretly I wished for another boy, a companion for my sons. Though I loved my daughters and yearned for the company of other females, I felt an affinity for men. I had known a man before any other human. My first children had been boys. Their needs were simple though their fears were myriad and complex. How fragile in their own way they were, too. I have always contended that girls are the sturdier of the genders and wondered in secret if the One that Is might not best be identified with the strength and creativity of the female heart.

Renana, who came after the twins, was a keeper of wisdom and a storyteller. By the time she was eight, my youngest children were always to be found in her lap. She made up stories for each of them, different ones for different children, which she continued in segments when they pleased her, like little bits of cake pinched off a bite at a time.

My children were all innovative and clever and, compared to their descendants, I daresay they were geniuses. But none was as clever, in my mind, as Kayin.

It was to him that Lila ran with shining eyes to display her handiwork once she had dutifully shown it to me. He saw with a fine and appreciative eye the innovation and skill with which she created her fabrics. It was he who inspired Hevel’s first attempts at hunting with his unconventional sling. It was to him that Zeeva went with her finest flour cakes, which rivaled and surpassed mine, to smile at him through her lashes.

It was a wonder to me, the way the girls looked at him. How strange! Had I ever looked at Adam the same way? I watched their silliness, the way they took pains over small gifts for him in ways different from what they did for their other siblings or their father or me. The first time I saw Lila, who was not given to flirtation, touch his arm and lean in toward him, I was stunned, as though I had seen a three-legged heron draw a lion from the river. Zeeva was less adept at flirting, nor did she need to be; plenty of men through the years followed their stomachs to her hearth. Ashira, however, was most gifted in this particular skill never learned by me. The first time I saw her cast down her lashes before Kayin and then Hevel in the same day, I was amazed—and more so at the expression on Kayin’s face, and later, the color high in Hevel’s cheeks. Kayin went to Ashira when he wanted to lie down to the sound of singing—until Hevel began to give him baleful looks and Lila fell silent.

One day when they were both young, a quarrel broke out between Ashira and Renana over who should have the new cloth Lila had woven on her pegs—as though Lila herself would not make the final decision. “Go!” I said, ordering them from the house, tired of their wearisome competition.

“Take it to Kayin, and let him arbitrate you harridans.” Besek was at the breast, and my nipples were sore and my back as well. My legs ached to stretch, to remember that they were made to run—far from the noise and smells of this place.

“I should have it because Lila made her last one for Hevel, and I am the next eldest,” Ashira said.

“No!” Renana shouted, already impervious. “Me! Lila promised.”

“Lila never promises but makes everyone wait, you stupid donkey!” Zeeva burst out.

“Out!” I shouted, waving them out.

Besek raised his hand in imitation of me, laughing. Zeeva made a face after the two of them as they stormed out together, calling for Kayin, heels flashing.

When they returned a scant half hour later, the scowls were gone, and they came into the house together.

“What is this?” I said, still cross. “You come back now with peace?”

Renana swooped down next to me and retrieved Besek from my lap. “We gave it to Kayin.”

I raised my brows.

“He said, ‘What, have you brought me a gift, sisters?’” Ashira said, smiling prettily. “And we started to tell him about our argument. Well, he looked so downcast—”

“He loved it so much,” Renana said. “Hevel already has one, he said, even though he was only second oldest. So we let him have it.”

I felt the wry smile on my lips. So clever, my son.

That night, when Kayin came in wearing the piece over his shoulders, I saw the way his sisters beamed at him, bouncing to sit near him and tell him that yes, indeed, it was handsome on him—no doubt to remind him of their generosity. I knew, though he had not told me, that he would keep it until the next one flew from Lila’s pegs, and then give it to whichever of them did not receive the new one.

At times I was frankly amazed that such a creature might have come from me. He was a dark-skinned beauty, my Kayin. His eyes deepened as he matured so that one might never know where the black of his pupil ended and his iris began. He was beautiful as obsidian is beautiful, sharp as it is sharp . . .

And like the edge that, struck too fine, crumbles in the end.

IN THE TWENTIETH YEAR after our exile, I was a great matron. I had by now eight children. Noise was everywhere: gossip and arguments, instruction or storytelling. Voices raised in song, complaint, or laughter. I was by then both delighted and alarmed by the spectrum of emotion in my brood—delighted at the way laughter could spark the same in anyone else nearby, alarmed at the wrath in even tiny children. Too many times I had seen a child strike out at another in anger.

In all this time we told the tale of the One’s creation of the world. We told it accurately and diligently as remembered from my dreams. We spoke of truth and untruth, of right and wrong.

But we did not speak of the fruit. That tale we did not tell.

For all that our children knew, we were created free-thinking and fallible, to forge our life here amid struggle. For all they knew, this was the way it had always been. We taught them to keep the teachings that we gave them: Honor the One. Never tell untruth. Never raise a hand in anger. Never assign blame for one’s own actions. This one, most particularly, I emphasized.

Perhaps I had not forgiven Adam completely, after all.

I feared for the day one of my children or children’s children would ask why the One should create creatures that might do harm or say unholy words—this seemed an obvious question to me. But it was long years before that happened.

Meanwhile, our children grew in stature and intellect, maturing over the years in a way much slower than today. Yet, despite our contentment, life had become one long drone for me: the days filled with the same tasks, surrounded by the same voices and cries and tantrums.

By the time Lahat was weaned, I had begun to feel a bone-weariness that no food or rest could satisfy. It was as though each of my pregnancies had leached vitality from my very bones. Kayin often came to me after evening or morning meals, saying he wasn’t hungry, pressing the best portions of his food upon me. I ate them to appease him; he thought me thin, though I think it was only because he was so accustomed to seeing me full of child.

Well, I could change that.

I announced to Adam that, as the field, I would lie fallow for a season. Though I did not shun him completely—he understood these cycles as well as I, and those fertile days within them—opportunity was rarely at our disposal when we wished it. So the pleasure of our lovemaking, furtive and impulsive as it was, was replaced by the pleasure of feeling nothing but my own weight within my body, a flat belly and breasts that were solely mine once more. Now, I thought, perhaps we might talk as we once had. We might take our pleasure in the afternoon or swim in the river beneath the moon.

But that did not happen.

For as much as he sought me out before—which was to say, not often, as we hardly ever had time to ourselves—he sought me less often now.

Fine, then. I would not suffer for it.

I worked outside the house. I went with Hevel to the high pasture. I waded in the river with Lahat.

Surely Adam would miss our stolen time. But he came in from the fields at the end of the day—sometimes after having gone to the river with Kayin to wash. He ate. He slept.

I stopped speaking in the evening. He did not seem to notice. We went entire days without exchanging a word. The pleasure that had kept us conscious of each other, if only for the reference to our own needs, had been replaced by utter silence.

Was this as it would be, then? I had waited for a return to the days of the garden, thinking the adam and I would go back to our former intimacy. But as days passed into months, I told myself I did not care about the intimacy we had shared practically as children ourselves—only that we return to our valley. There I might run by myself or with my children. I might roll with the wolf in the grass. It would not matter to me.

But it did. And silence—and the prospect of more silence—injured me deeply. We had had our moments before, though we never discussed them in front of the children. This time we did not need to; their eyes cast between us, from one to the other and back, as we came in and out of the house, as we took our meals and got up to tend the fire or chores without a word.

The lives of my younger children, of course, were filled with larger concerns: who got to eat what, how evenly the cakes were divided, who would sleep next to Ashira, who Renana had made her newest flute and drum for, when Hevel would show them the new lambs dropped in the night.

But Kayin noticed it all. One day he drew me out of the house to a stand of poplars—the very ones I once sat beneath even as I carried him. I remember it well: the sun through the fringe of his lashes like light through the branches of a tree.

“I do not like the way Father treats you.”

For a moment I thought I might weep—whether for my distance from Adam or for the sweetness of my son’s heart, I did not know. But I dared not give tears space upon my cheek.

“Kayin, my love. He treats me as any sibling. That is what we are. Do you not have your tensions with your sisters?” Even though I knew I disguised the truth, I did not think I could bear to discuss this with him.

“Mother, I know that you have . . . visions of a destiny for me . . .”

I looked at him sharply, with quick hope—had he seen the One? Had God revealed himself to him?

But his face registered only anguish as he said, “I know it, though you will not say what it is. But by the One, let me never disappoint you!”

“Shush, stop. You do not disappoint.” My fingers covered his lips, but he took them in his hand.

“You are perfect to me, Mother, in every way.” How earnest, how naked was his face. “It is no secret to anyone, least of all to me, that there is some great hurt between you and Father. So I mean to say that should you ever wish to, need to . . . should you ever feel that you would leave, go away from here, know that I would care for you—”

“Nonsense,” I snapped. “Why would I do that? Stop this now.” My head hurt; I could not think through the implications of what he was suggesting or the position of his heart except that I knew he loved me more than he would love any woman ever. I was the first woman, the first he had ever seen, and the epitome for every woman after. I knew that what was beautiful in a woman to him was only lovely insomuch as it resembled me. Surely that was only natural.

He said quickly, recapturing my hands, “Please, Mother, if you knew how I love you—”

“My son—” But I was unable to speak. My mother’s tears, always near the surface, came too readily. I lowered my head to his shoulder and wept.

“Mother, please don’t cry.” His voice was musical as the running brook, rich as the purr of the lion. “I didn’t mean to upset you—only to reassure you that I am yours. Oh, how you break my heart!” He dropped my hands and drew me into his arms.

Then Adam happened to find us: Kayin holding me, his hands around my waist and nape, my head upon his shoulder.

“What’s this?” he demanded. Kayin stiffened against me. “Will you cry on the shoulder of your son when you should be teaching him to be a man?”

I stared at him. “How dare you!”

“Kayin, it is time you took your own woman rather than hiding your face against your mother’s hair. Would you sleep with your face in her bosom, too?”

My anger blazed. “Do not say these things! What would he do with his own woman? Ignore her? At least he would not leave her always alone!” I knew the moment I said it that I should not have.

Adam spun away, and I watched him go, hardly daring to move in case I should tremble. Not even in his betrayal of me had I felt this kind of anger.

Kayin’s jaw set in a hard line—ah! So like his father! “I will go talk to him.”

“No. You will not. You will be a man. He is right: It is too long that Lila has kept her own counsel. Do you not see how her eyes follow you?”

I might have said it of any of my daughters. For the rest of his life, women would follow Kayin—with their eyes, their thoughts, their feet. Though I knew I might wound him, I could not help myself now.

“Would you let your younger brother bear first fruit of this family? I am tired of bearing! You must do your duty. Or not. It won’t matter. Oh, why will the One not come to you! Have you not sought him, have you not beseeched him? You must!”

He cried out, “I have sought him! I have sought him, and I have beseeched him! Every time I am alone, my words are only for the One. Perhaps this destiny you wish for me is not mine to bear but another’s—”

I slapped him so fast and so hard my palm stung.

I had cuffed my children in their tantrums and occasional insolence. But never like this. I had never struck any of them in anger or in fear. I gaped at him, at myself.

He blinked at me, his dark eyes filling like great indentations in the ground after a rain. Turning, he bowed his head slightly and then strode swiftly away.

I moved in a daze through the rest of the day. Adam came in late and went directly to his pallet. I loitered near the fire, listening for any sound along the path from the field or the direction of the foothills. I excused myself to the midden to empty my bowels, loosened from nearly the moment that I had walked on shaky legs home from that conversation.

Kayin did not return that night.

Adam did not speak to me. Well, wasn’t this fine! What—was I to be shunned by both of them through no doing of my own? Or perhaps he was as aware of me as I of him, each of us too stubborn to give any indication. But soon I heard, as I had once in that cave so many years ago, a soft snore from his pallet.

I wanted to kick him.

Never mind him. Where was my son?

“I will find him, Mother.” Softly, from the darkness. Hevel. He worried; I knew it from the sound of his voice.

“Go,” I said, ashamed and indebted to him at once.

I lay by the fire for a long time after that, knowing that if I only went to the fields I might find both my sons throwing stones at a mark in the darkness, in the way of brothers who need not speak. I knew that if I found them I could tell Hevel to go back to the house, and there on the hill might draw Kayin into my arms, my firstborn, my love, and that he would weep against me and I could whisper that I am so sorry, and that I love him so greatly, and that I have put too heavy a burden upon him even from the moment he was born, allowing him no moment of humanity or fault. I knew that with a few words I might remove from him that blight as one incises a boil.

But I could not. He was our one hope. He must not bend like the reed in the water though I strike him or his father belittle him out of his own frustration and jealousy.

So Hevel went and I lay by the fire in the house. I do not know what was said between them, but when they returned the next day, well after we had broken fast and their father had gone to the fields, the rigidity was gone from Kayin’s shoulders even if the smile was gone from his eyes.

“Mother, forgive me.” He bent over me near the hearth. I did not move as he kissed me but gave only a slight nod.

Not until they had gone, and after Ashira had taken the children out with her, did I cover my face and wept.

FOR THREE YEARS I lay as the fallow field, feeling lighter and, slowly, rejuvenated. I wandered the orchards and picked fruit in the sun and went to the river to bathe almost every day. In my liberty I know I left my younger girls to carry Lahat with them, but there would be time enough for me to take up the nursing sling again and time enough for them to run wild before they had children of their own. Zeeva, round faced and pleasant to everyone, had already declared her intentions to Besek—at which Lahat had wailed, saying there was no wife for him.

“Nonsense. There is Renana,” Ashira said.

“No.”

“No? And why not, silly goat?”

“She wants to marry Father,” he said, snuffling.

AFTER ALL THOSE MONTHS of nothing but the most perfunctory words, I made my peace with Adam. I found him in the orchard, keeping his own company. When he saw me, he made to rise.

“Wait.” I came up behind him, slid my hands over his shoulders.

We made up in our way.

We did not share words of endearment. Spent, we retreated in silence. I knew there were things on his heart he would have laid plain another day, a lifetime ago, but did not now. Neither did I. I wanted to speak to him of Kayin, and though I meant to broach the topic with the best and purest of intentions, I knew it would disrupt the uneasy peace between us. It could wait.

21

When I returned to the house, I was met by Renana’s accusing stare. New to pubescence, filling into an earthy beauty, she was the one who resembled me the most. I even imagined I saw Adam’s eye stray to her on occasion. But of course, she was near to the age I might have been, had I an age, when I first came to his arms.

“Where have you been?” She had Lahat by the hand and looked for all the world like a young mother scolding a wayward girl.

“That’s no worry of yours.”

“Lahat has been crying for you. He fell and scraped his knee and cut his lip.” She thrust the boy toward me.

“Children fall down,” I said, annoyed with her. Was I allowed not one moment of pleasure? It already came at such a cost that I must bind my tongue and say none of the things that in another time would have already been known. How tiresome, the binding together of two accords to construct one!

I took Lahat as Renana went out in the direction of the field.

WE HAD HARMONY FOR a time after that. The adam and I kept our peace, and though I did not keep myself from him, I did not grow heavy with child that year or the next. Perhaps I am done bearing, I thought. It was the way of animals, I knew, to bear only for a time.

In the summer of the third year, Ashira’s belly grew round. Hevel shone like a dark sun and walked often with his father and even spent more time at the house, sending Zeeva or the sullen Renana with the flock instead. I was relieved for the reprieve from Renana and unmoved that she claimed to suffer out in the sun all day, so glad was I to have Hevel near me by day for the first time in many years.

Zeeva was delighted to be gone from her chores, to spend the day gathering herbs and roots and even the licorice that I loved on the hills. She came back singing and spent those evenings enthusiastically pounding the pulp out of some poor root or another. We all reaped the benefits of her good humor.

“Something must be done about this house,” I declared to Adam one day. We had already expanded it three times; it could not continue to stretch indefinitely, like a woman carrying a litter of children. He agreed, and that year, after the grain was in and the vines were tended, he and Hevel and Kayin began planning the work of a second home. Hevel had by then already chosen a parcel of land across the hills.

“It’s so far!” Lila proclaimed upon his announcement. Her outbursts were rare and abrupt when they happened, like a clap of thunder from a blue summer sky.

Hevel laughed and took her hands. “You can run the distance in three breaths. Or is it that you are growing slower now in your age? What, are those donkey knees I see?”

I chuffed. What did they know of age—what did any of us, for that matter? We had begun to note the new slowness of Reut, who moved about as one always tired since her last litter of pups. She chased them when they returned from the hills with Hevel or Renana but no longer went with the flock, preferring, instead, to stay near the house. Though we knew something of the slowness that overtook the limbs of aging animals—and age progressed more slowly then than now—what did we really know of age?

“Kayin,” I said, loud enough for Lila to hear, “one day you might build on the other side of the orchard, and then we will shout to you so you can send to Hevel’s house when we want him!”

Lila slid me a sidelong glance.

That fall we made the procession to Hevel and Ashira’s new home. They carried with them their mats, all of their belongings, and several stores of food. We had long ago built a storehouse, and there would always be a ready supply of food there, but Adam had separated a portion for them for the beginning of their own. He also gave to Hevel half the flock, from which Hevel gave several milk goats and two lambs apiece to Besek and Lahat.

“See,” Hevel said, “I will mark your lambs like this.” He showed them the ear of one of the lambs, “So you can know which ones are yours. With these you will make a flock of your own.”

“What is that mark there?” Lahat asked, pointing to one of the others. Indeed, they all bore the mark of a circle and a line except for the youngest, whitest lambs, which would, according to his way, remain nameless—and I assumed unmarked—until they had grown past the age of sacrifice.

“That is my mark, so everyone knows who the rest belong to, you see?” Hevel drew it in the dirt.

“Everyone knows who they belong to,” Renana said, droll.

“What does it mean?” Lahat asked.

“This is my stone, that I hurled to kill the fox. Do you remember that?” Besek shook his head. “What? My brave deed?”

“I was very young,” said Lahat, who was only six.

“And so very difficult to impress.” Hevel laughed. “Well, this is the stone that I used to kill the fox. This line, this is my sling or the line of the rock in flight. I’m not sure which.”

“Why didn’t you kill it with your spear?” Lahat asked.

“Because a spear,” Renana interrupted, “is a chancy weapon. One likely to get the owner eaten.”

They were Adam’s words. He had called it chancy upon Kayin’s first leopard kill. It had nearly crushed him, who had brought back the pelt for me, so proud, looking only for a kind word.

“Well, a spear requires more bravery,” Hevel said, ignoring his sister, who turned on her heel and left. “You see, I am quite afraid.” Hevel mussed the boy’s hair and then made a face after Renana’s retreating back. Lahat found this hilarious and chased Renana for days with a protruding tongue.

Hevel’s house was solidly constructed of sturdy mud brick. How it reminded me of the day Adam had brought me to our first home. I wept to think of my hearth without them, but Ashira embraced me with a smile.

“As you said, Mother, you need only send Kayin shouting.” It had been exaggeration to say Kayin might shout at them beyond the orchard, but it was still only a good walk—or short run—away.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Kayin said, “and who knows. Perhaps I’ll stay on for a bit. What? You might as well get used to not being alone with that child on its way.” He grinned.

When we left, he did not come home with us but went to see to Hevel’s flock. It was the time of year after the grain harvest and before the rains when Kayin went near to mad looking for work for his hands. Soon there would be pelts and fat and sinew and new hides aplenty, chancy weapon or not. No one could throw a spear as well, or as accurately, as Kayin.

Not even Adam.

THAT WINTER LILA TURNED out her finest fabrics yet, and Zeeva’s bread grew impossibly more delicious. Ashira, waddling late in her pregnancy, came to crush the juice of grapes with her sisters, which we left to ferment in the sun. On tense nights after long days, the wine eased our nerves.

I delighted in my children and even in the adam on occasion—especially on those nights when the crickets chanted their loudest, their trill reminding me of a time when even the insects knew song, when I could look up at the sparkling gems of my crown and know that not so much had changed, at least in the heavens. Did not the sun keep the same course, though it shone hotter by the year, and did not the moon keep her courses—and mine?

Heavens, trees, earth, and water . . . all things seen and none unseen. Hadn’t there once been a populace of beings there in array, a host? Perhaps I imagined it. As I listened to the swaying boughs of the willow at night, I wondered if the One had forgotten us, having gone away to another place, and to more obedient children.

ONE DAY SOMETIME AFTER the birth of Ashira’s daughter, I went to the field to bring food to Adam and Kayin and the strapping Besek. Such a young buck of a man, my Besek! He was the tallest of us already, due in no small amount to Zeeva’s doting feeding of him. Lila was ever in the house, twining her threads and yarns, and Lahat was with his brother in the hills. As I passed the orchard on my way to the fields, which were full with golden grasses carefully selected through the seasons for the best and heaviest seeds, I heard voices ahead. I stopped short, surprised to see Adam and Renana. They stood close together. I could see now that she was beaming up at him, something in her hand held close against her breast. It hung from a cord around her neck. On Adam’s face was a smile I had not seen in many years.

I stood there and stared. When they eventually noticed me, they fell apart, and Renana started quickly in the direction of the house.

“Husband?” My voice sounded clear as a bell, though I knew Renana was already beyond earshot. “I was coming to you in the field. I brought food for midday.” It was still only late morning—no wonder they had not expected me so soon.

“Thank you.” He took the basket from me. “I was coming anyway.”

I did not want to ask what he said to Renana; somehow I felt it beneath me. But I was piqued by the look on his face and by her hasty exit.

“I made her a necklace,” he said, awkwardly, gesturing in the direction of the retreating Renana. I was put in mind of the one he had given me once, so long ago, and stunned by a sharp spike of jealousy.

“Well, that’s all fine. She’s already impudent. Now she’ll be insufferable!”

Whatever it was he made for her, she wore it beneath her tunic so that all I could see was the cord around her neck. I imagined she did it on purpose. I studied her sidelong, comparing the girl I had seen peering out from the pool upon the valley floor with the girl before me. Yes, had I an age, it might have been the same as hers now. Indeed, how very alike we looked.

“What is that necklace you wear?” I asked one day as we cut reeds at the river’s edge.

“Nothing,” she said, not looking at me.

“Then let me see nothing.”

She straightened with a sigh and took her time wiping her hands and moving aside the plait of her hair. When she lifted it from beneath her tunic, my heart stopped.

A woman on a cord.

So very much like my own.

She slipped it back inside and went back to work without looking at me.

“How lovely,” I said, forcing the words.

It plagued me like a boil. Perhaps it was only that she reminded him of me at that age. Perhaps he had wanted his work to be more appreciated than I had appreciated it that day I had thrown it from me in the cave. I did not like any other direction my mind went.

They were scrupulous in my sight and hearing, nearly as much as Kayin and Lila. I could say nothing.

Kayin and Lila, at least, had nothing to hide. Theirs was a language of gestures and silence, of small tokens and kind deeds. He carved new pegs to her specification when she needed them, and his tunics were made with painstaking skill, often bearing the first experiments of a new pattern or subtle color. Though one would need to watch them as carefully as one watches the movement of the sun through the day to know they were intimate, I envied their communion.

LATER THAT YEAR KAYIN did indeed build a small house on the far side of the orchard, but Lila would not go to live there. So he went there sometimes by himself, but he was never gone for more than a day or two and always returned to his sister, speaking no audible words of love, but lying down together at night.

Kayin’s house did not fall to disuse; Besek and Zeeva snuck away there often. One day they announced that they would go live there to keep it. Even as I said my blessing, I was relieved for Lila’s staying near because it meant that Kayin would never be far, though Adam seemed none too pleased.

One day Adam said, “He should go to live in his own house.”

“Why should he? A man follows his woman. She is his flesh.” It was never a question. We were the only precedent we knew.

“Then Lila should go. They are old enough to be on their own twice over from the age that we were.”

“We do not know the age that we were,” I said, though he was probably right.

ONE DAY I ASKED Lila, “Why do you not go to live in Kayin’s house? Clearly he loves you.”

She laid down her shuttle. By that, I knew this to be an answer of some weight. “Because I am not his first choice. And he will not dishonor me by pretending I am or by giving second gestures to me.”

The plainness with which she said it brought me pain and admiration for her at once. “Besides, I don’t think Kayin really wants to live in his house. He would be here, in his home, with his mother and father.”

I knew the “father” part to be a pretty fib.

“But if you went, he would follow.”

“I know,” she said, glancing at her hands. “But his heart wishes to be here.”

I sighed—not the sigh of the weary but of the one who catches her breath at beauty. Now I understood how fitting they were for each other. How I had not seen it before!

“Besides, you will need me.” Lila picked up the shuttle and bending over the warp.

“Indeed? And why is that?”

“Because you are pregnant again.”

22

Sufa was born rear first, with a mighty rending that left me abed for days. It was the first such injury I ever had. When I tried to rise from my mat in the days following, Lahat went running for Ashira, who walked over, heavily pregnant herself, to admonish me in person. Renana sang her chants over the squalling child, playing a drum that startled the baby with every beat. Sufa let out a great wail every time Renana struck the drum; her lungs were robust from the first day.

Not long after I had recovered enough to go about my work once again, Ashira bore her second child. Hevel and I delivered him together, and Lila wrapped him in a new linen cloth. Ashira named him Nave and gave him over to his older sister, Kanit, showing her how to hold his head. I was glad, having had boys first, that Ashira should have a girl firstborn. It confirmed for me a strange balance in the world, an equation that I thought ever changing but balanced—where one creature died, another was born; where one field flourished, another was eaten away by locusts—the mystery of which was known only to the One.

How strange and natural at once it was, to hold the children of my children in my arms. I had seen children in Ashira’s arms and lap ever since she was old enough to hold them, but to see Kanit and Nave, born of her, filled me with pride. I said to her that day the same thing I said on the day she bore Kanit: “And now you know what it is to create with the One.” This time I added, “You have gotten a man with the help of the One that Is.”

“And with a little help of Hevel.”

“Yes, a little.” I gave my son a sidelong wink.

Renana came to chant the name of the child. “You will carry on the name of your father,” she said, rocking the baby in her arms.

I left after that, having little patience for her company, the rhythmic sound of her consonants still in my ear.

The season droned on. Renana went to live in Kayin’s home, which seemed to pique Lila none at all even though Besek and Zeeva seemed none so enthusiastic. They tried to live alongside the demands of their sister, who said often she was sick and could not work, until they ignored her completely.

Eventually she left to live with Hevel. Hevel was the very image of her father and too good-natured to be stern with her, but Ashira would have none of her impudence and smilingly struck her hard once across the mouth for saying something none of them would ever tell me, before telling her she was welcome to stay so long as she minded the children and improved her cooking.

Adam was often away from the house in those days. It was the sowing season.

THAT YEAR THE WHEAT grew tall in the field and yielded its kernel more willingly than I ever remembered. Adam and Kayin were exultant. I looked forward to the fruit crop, to the new oil pressed from olive and almond and the pressing of the grapes. One night, I thought, Surely these are the joys of an old woman.

And I did feel old, as redundant as the grinding stone and as worn away. I cheered the achievements of Sufa as she learned to use the midden—Lila was by now an expert in training the children in this way; she was tired of seeing even her coarsest cloth used for napkins. I praised Zeeva for her skill with food that far surpassed any of mine. I communicated my love to Kayin in quiet ways and embraced Hevel when he would let me. I tried to show my love to Besek and Lahat and to coddle Ashira’s children whenever I saw them.

But I was weary.

One night before the grain harvest, Zeeva and Besek came to eat with us and lay down after dinner together. They were giddy from wine—I could smell it on them. I was restless on my mat, disinterested in sleep. When the snore Zeeva was known for issued from her direction—harmonized by Besek’s—and I was certain Sufa would not wake up, I got up, gathered my cloak and sandals, and went out.

Outside the mist was rolling in from the river. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The air was crisp, not so cold—I could warm myself quickly if I wanted. I left my cloak outside the house and walked along the path toward the orchard and the fields beyond.

In the orchard I stopped and considered the sky through the trees. In an orchard like this, the One had come upon me. On such a night as this, my promised seed had been born.

With a sudden motion I flung wide my arms and broke into a run. I dashed down a row of apricots. I chanted my name, as Renana, my lovely, impudent daughter had done once. I never told her I had loved the sound of it on her lips.

Havah!

A huff of life, an exhale followed by the vibration of life itself—there, from tooth and lip. I shouted it aloud, knowing my children, if they could see me, would think me mad. I chanted Adam’s name, hard and staccato. “Adam of the earth, ruddy as ochre,” Renana said once. Remembering, I was delighted by her for the first time in what seemed years.

I stopped then, in the middle of the plum trees, as I realized she had given no name to the One.

The One. The One that Was and Is and Will Be. His name is a sough, a breath upon my tongue. A whisper spoken to my sleeping soul.

“How I long for you,” I said, softly, into the dark air. How long had it been since I had seen the curve of that shoulder? How long since I had felt that presence upon me? “Adonai,” I whispered, into the night. “Adonai.” And then again: “Adonai! See me! Watch me run!”

Like my youngest, running for any adult who would watch, somersaulting for any audience that would laugh, I broke through the orchard toward the open field, feeling the full stretch of my legs with delight. They were stiff as rope wound for a season, but they remembered—they woke at the air in my ears, the lashing of my hair behind me as my plait came loose. I heard a sound, wild and trilling, and recognized my own laughter.

When I had gone as far as the fields and found myself up to the knee in ripening wheat, I slowed, fingers drifting over the wheat heads, my heart drumming against my chest. Alive! So alive beneath the shining disk of moon. It was so bright here, away from the mists, that it might be twilight.

“Adonai!” I shouted. It was jubilant.

Answered only by silence, I cried out, “Adonai! Will you forget your daughter? Where is the serpent that my son should strike him? Bring him to me! Where is the one that I saw rise up before you? Let him come, that my son will defeat him!” The words were a growl, a promise, a plea. I stretched out my arms to the light of the moon and threw back my head.

I have created with you in the womb and have brought forth life from my lungs to those of my children. I have remembered you. Do you remember me? Do you look upon my face? How long will you turn away? Have you no word, at least, for the seed of her whom you made?

I fell down among the wheat. Surely here I might hear the step of the One. Surely I might wait until he came. No parent can ignore a wailing child.

But the night stood still, and the moonlight offered no warmth. After a while, I wound my arms around myself, shivering, wishing for my cloak.

In the silence I felt dull, bereft of the joy I had thrown about me like mad petals flung into the air. I got up and plodded, my feet like clods of mud, cold and numb. I walked the long way out and around the field toward the orchard, shivering. Tears began to fall from the tip of my nose. They slid to my lips and into the crevice between them.

Where was the One? How long would this go on? I was so weary of this life, of these seasons, of the harvest and replanting, even of pleasure and birth. I was weary of the hearth and even the sun in the morning and the moon at night. I had thought to be back in the valley by now, that the adam and I might put behind us the ugliness of every terse word—and the silences, too, which were far worse.

In that place the rift between Adam and Kayin might be mended and Kayin’s heart put to rest. Perhaps there I might appreciate all of Renana’s loveliness without wanting to slap her. Perhaps Lila would smile without the heaviness she wore about her brows. How I longed to raise up my children and children’s children that they might know that place.

But in my heart I longed most of all to return to the One and to the adam. To be again only Ish and Isha. I covered my face with my hands and wept the tears of the guilty, of the mother who berates herself that she should long for anything other than the pleasure of her children. But I did.

I was so miserable and cold by then that I did not realize where I went. The mist was more dense than before, and I slid down the side of a small slope, scraping my leg and scratching my fingers.

Well, this was a fine mess. Here I was, running off in the mist and wandering in the mud like one of my own children! I turned this way and that, thinking how ridiculous this was when I knew every stone and tree and protruding root of this area. I set out in one direction, assuming that I would come to some landmark or another. But I walked on, recognizing nothing, growing more cold by the moment.

Finally I squatted down on the cold earth. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself. There were sounds in the fog, and I recognized them for my own: sobs.

“Will you forget me so easily?” I did not feel like a matron but a child bereft of father, mother, God.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. I was beside myself, unable to stop. All the long years—the births, the days and months in the house, the grinding, the cooking, the making of pots and baskets, the carrying of water and changing of soiled napkins and washing them in the river—had worn me down like water wearing away a rock.

I had not wanted this life. I did not mean for it. I had found joy in my hope, but my hope was as suspended as the mist.

Eventually the mists began to clear, and the sliver of moon emerged from the clouds. Shivering, cold, and exhausted, I went home.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, ASHIRA, Lila, Zeeva, and I stoked the fire for the oven to bake the new pots we had formed over a pile of melons. When the pots were in the oven, we discussed who would check on the fire through the day. As we did, Lahat came back from the field.

“Ho, what’s this—firing day?” He bent to peer into the oven. Just then, a shattering sound issued from within it, which was nothing unusual—we lost several pots in every firing—sometimes, on bad days, entire batches. Lahat staggered back from the opening, hands over his face, blood running through his fingers. Zeeva screamed.

It took all of us to hold him down and clean the socket of the eye that had dribbled out like the insides of an egg and the hot shard that had put it out. Lila packed and covered it with clean linen as Zeeva fetched her strongest wine.

That night, as Lahat tossed and moaned until dawn, as I changed the bandages when they seeped their foul liquid, I was guilt ridden. Were it not for this life, for this place, for my actions, my son might yet have two eyes. That night Adam held me for the first time in weeks.

“There are some things that happen of their own,” he said.

I could not, would not, fully accept that.

Please, I begged the One, put back his eye. But he was deaf to me yet.

Not a month later Ashira came running across the field. She had a limp form in her arms, and I wondered if it was one of Hevel’s newest kills. Hevel, Kayin, and Besek were by now proficient hunters. Truth be told, Renana was as well, though the boys rarely included her. At any rate we never wanted for skins or new bladders, sinew or fat. And though the thought of eating flesh was repugnant to us yet, we acknowledged that the pups and the aging Reut thrived upon it. Even the One consumed it upon the altar, Hevel pointed out once, though it had been a long time now since our last sacrifice upon those stones.

But as Ashira got closer, I saw that she carried no animal and that this was not the proud gait of the hunter’s mate. She hurried too fast and too frantically. Her expression was tight, her breath coming fast from between her lips. Now I saw, dangling from her arms, the dazed figure of Kanit.

Kayin dropped his scythe and ran to meet her, but I got to her first.

“She ate the dark berries,” Ashira cried. The girl, panting like a rabbit, stared at me as though at a horror, her pupils bloomed to black orbs.

“Kayin, fetch water,” I ordered. Adam was there and took the girl in his arms, hurrying toward the house.

We poured water into her mouth until she vomited, fed her bread and wine. At last, by morning, the color returned to her face.

“What would have happened had I not found her?” Ashira whispered, her eyes round.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But she is recovering. That is all that matters.”

“Would she have stayed like that always? As Lahat, with his eye?”

I thought of the death and of the unmoving bodies of animals. Could the poison in a plant kill a human? All that grew had been food for us. Already we labored long and hard for every meal we ate. Would the earth now reject us completely?

I wandered out of the house that night to gaze, silently, at the sky.

How long? How long will you wait? Haven’t you punished us enough? See how marred now is my love with Adam, clouded as mud in water that once ran clear. See my son, living with one eye! See the child of my child, who lay unmoving through the night! What more punishment would you have—exact it now, I beg you!

I think back often to those words and wish I’d never prayed them. That my mind had never fathomed them. That any one of my children or the adam had bashed in my skull before ever I formed them.

23

We should make a sacrifice when the crops are brought in,” I said to Adam the next day. I had gone to him at the river, where he went to wash at the end of the day. He quirked his brow.

“Have you had a vision, wife?”

I hesitated. I had seen my children lie, bold faced—and had beaten them near to senseless for it on several occasions. I had no tolerance for untruth. Still, I had lied by omission more times than I could count. But I could not lie to the face of Adam. Even then, even with so much behind us and with such great stakes before us, it was like lying to my own face, and I was certain he would know.

I made my voice light. “Is not the abundance in the field and orchard vision enough? It is a living vision of prosperity, and we are as greedy as the vultures if we should pluck it all and eat the best flesh of it for ourselves.”

I instantly regretted this metaphor, but it was too late. He considered this, looking to the sky. I found myself holding my breath, and for a moment resented that I should stand here like this, as one of my own children awaiting permission to follow Hevel to the pastures or to swim downriver.

“I’ll think on it.” He untied his tunic and waded into the water. I stared at his naked back.

“I have just said that it is time,” I repeated.

“And yet there is no sign, other than your love for that boy, as though he were the first and last man on earth. I said I will think on it.”

Anger exploded in me. “Am I a child to ask your permission to run to the high hills? When I say that it is time, will you cast aside my counsel?”

He sloshed back. “Oh, indeed, you say it is time. But I am not certain that it is!” There was fever in his eyes and spittle on his lips. I blinked at his sudden vehemence, not knowing the man who wore this face. I wondered, not for the first time, if in working upon the earth, by so exercising his physical strength more than any aspect of his great intellect, he had become somehow more base because of it, as though more ruled by emotions stored within his muscles as the calendar of time kept within the rings of an oak.

“Why should you doubt me, husband?” I hated the tremor in my voice.

He looked away, but I heard him clearly, even from under his breath. “Rest, Havah. Will you let it rest? I will tell you my answer soon.”

“No, I will not let it rest! If you are not certain, then let us counsel together. What is this, that I come to you for arbitration in my own thoughts? Where is the man who ran with me in the valley?”

“He ate of his wife’s hands.”

He might have struck me. He might have flattened me to the ground or held me beneath the water. He might have struck me with the hoe that rested near his tunic or cloven me in two with it.

It would have left me more alive.

PERHAPS IN APOLOGY TO me, perhaps in penitence, Adam asked Hevel within earshot of me to mark in his flock a lamb for the altar. I felt my son’s eyes upon his father, and then upon me, as he said only, “Yes, Father. I know the one.”

I was relieved, if still sore from our exchange by the river. I turned my face away from him when I lay down. I rose before him in the morning.

Where was God, my arbitrator? Would he allow this to go by without remark? For the children there was always Kayin, wise in mediating his siblings. But who was there for Adam and me?

I walked alone in the evening, shunning house and hearth. He had consented to the sacrifice, I reminded myself. It was all that mattered. If all went as hoped, I might walk like this beneath the drifting clouds. On that day I would not ponder pain or shame or hurt or rage. I would forget, as one forgets upon waking from a dream, the poison in my heart, the look of his eyes, the sound of his accusation.

But then I went back again to my every reason to be furious: he knew as well as I the truth of what had befallen us there! He had not stayed my hand. I had not forced him to eat or beguiled him. We were of one will and that one free.

How dare he hold it before my face now? Thinking that, I was angry all over again.

The ways we hurt one another. I am the thorn upon the bush. The nettle, unseen, that works its way beneath the skin.

Hevel came to me that evening. I remember now how surprised I was that he should come to me like that, though I should not have been; it was the shepherd in him that observed so well, that understood better than his siblings the nuance of relationship, that went in search of any missing animal to keep the flock whole and sound.

I felt chastised and humbled by his presence even as I thought he ought to be speaking with his father instead.

“I think,” he said quietly, looking off toward the place the sun had set along the horizon, “that a day will come when it will not be like this. When words will be unnecessary, and we will not struggle to find them. Perhaps we will not need them at all.”

Ah! So wise, my young ram! If only you knew. I turned my face away. I would not let him see me weep. It seemed all I did of late.

“Do you know, Mother, sometimes when I look at Ashira, I can know what she is thinking? By how she chews at her lip or presses her temple, I can know the set of her mind.”

“You are a good boy, Hevel,” I said, even though he was a father now and not a boy for many years.

“I can see the same sometimes with you. By the set of your brow and of your mouth, the direction of your mind.” After a pause he said, “And also with Father.”

I said nothing.

“There is a direction of his eyes, askance, at nothing, when I know that he is thinking back. He thinks often of the place from which you came. Every day my entire life I have seen that look cross his face, for as long as I can remember. And I know he thinks of you because sometimes when he does it, he smiles. Just a little bit.”

I covered my face with my hands.

I should have known then. I should have known by his nature and assuaging words. His presence was like water soothing a burn. I might have known then, had I only looked. But my eyes were closed.

He put an arm about me and leaned against my shoulder. He was never as tall as I. “I don’t know what it is Kayin must do. But I know that it pains Father that whatever it is that Kayin is meant to right, he cannot right himself. Perhaps that is the friction between them, that each of them would do anything to see you eased and happy.”

“I feel very old,” I said, which was nothing at all what I was thinking. I was reeling from his revelation, which I knew to be true.

“You, Mother? Old?” He smiled. “You are but a girl. Do you think I have not seen you running through the orchard?”

That night, as we lay within our home, I wound my arm over the form of my husband. A part of me hated myself; I felt I paid dearly out of the store of my dignity. But a part of me longed to be near him at any price.

He made no movement at first, but as I pressed close against his back, curling myself against him, his hand covered mine.

BY LATE SUMMER I was pregnant again. Only a couple of weeks, but I knew it. The closeness was back between Adam and me, and I determined that when my son was born—and I knew that it would be a boy—I would call him Asa because he was like the salve that heals.

As soon as it became common knowledge—and of course, Lila knew it nearly as soon as I, as she was uncanny that way—Kayin was more often absent from the house.

He is preparing for the sacrifice, I thought. Indeed, he had never worked so hard. Everything rested on him. No one said it, and I had never explained it, but if Hevel’s words were any indication, every one of them knew.

In spite of his labor, Kayin slept only in fits, turning from side to side and starting awake with incoherent exclamations that woke others from their sleep. Adam and I never spoke of it to him but did what we could to keep him well fed so that he might tend solely to the work at hand.

I half expected to meet the serpent in my dreams. In the dawn, as the light crested the eastern hill, coming in through the roof cracks and crevices between the bricks of the house, I imagined his lustrous scales.

It was one such morning that Lahat, drawing with a sharp stick on a piece of clay, stopped my blood cold. He had not worked much since the accident and had only recently begun to take an interest in things around him once more—most particularly potting, of all things.

“Look.”

“How nice,” I said absently. I was carrying a basket of grain, but when I looked, I nearly spilled it all. There in the clay was a creature like a dragon, with wings and a long tail. The talons were exaggerated, and the scales had been drawn with careful detail. But it was the head that made my heart beat like that of the swallow, so rapid in my chest: it was a human’s.

Though the serpent I had known had no human head, I could not forget the sight of him growing greater before the One, sprouting wings, again and again, standing up on two legs as his front pair lengthened to the size of arms . . . looking up at the One with one face . . . and down at me with another.

“What—what is that?”

“Only some creature I made up,” he said. “Do you like it?”

“I think,” I said, steadily, “that you should take care to save it and show your father.”

That night Adam drew me aside. “What tales have you told the boy, that he should draw that serpent in the clay? I would not have it, or any rendering of it, so close to the house—or anywhere on this earth, for that matter!”

“I told him nothing! But now what more proof do we need that this is the time? Surely it will come back to strike his blow—as though he has not had victory enough already—but this time Kayin will kill him. It is time! Then perhaps . . .”

I could say no more. I was almost superstitious in my hope. For the next day Adam said little to me, frowning slightly whenever I saw him, lost to his thoughts.

No matter.

We said nothing to Lahat about his drawing—only that we did not think it proper to give a human head to an animal as though it could be part one and part the other.

“You are a man now, too old to be given to fancy.”

His expression around his eye drew down when I said it, but he did not disagree. Nor did he do it again in my sight.

Kayin kept to himself more and more and began even to stay in his own home. I thought he was exhausted and worried about waking us with his restlessness at night. But then I realized, as he left the house whenever I entered it, that he was merely avoiding me.

“My son!” I said to him one day as he prepared to leave after I had come in. “Will you not stay? Have you no word of love for your mother?” I laid my hand against his cheek. He flinched as though it burned him.

“What is this—are you ill?”

He looked away and then back at me. “No, Mother. I am not ill.”

“Then why do you keep to your own? Are there words unspoken between us?”

Now he lowered his gaze, fixing it solidly upon my belly, but he would not speak. I felt my heart and expression soften. “What now, are you jealous for a son of your own?”

“No, Mother,” he said, with sudden vehemence. “I mean, yes, if the One should will it. It is only that I cannot stand the thought that his seed should fill you after such vile words as I know he spoke to you.” His mouth twisted as he said it. “How should I look on that, knowing how he has pained you, when I have loved you greater—”

“Stop!” Shock coursed through me at his open admission. “He is your father and my husband. What is this presumption of yours? The child is a blessed sign! Do not forget that!” I was shaking, and I realized I had raised my hand.

“Will you strike me again, Mother? Then strike me because I love you so well.” Tears were in his eyes. “Strike me, but never let him pain you again as I have seen. It is enough that I have stolen from him a portion of your love—oh, I know how he thinks. It is enough that I must portion out my place in the field upon the ground with which he works. He looks at me as though every furrow I scratch in the ground is in his own skin, and so he criticizes everything I do, jealous for it, as though there is nothing good enough in his eyes! But all this I can bear, all of this I bear gladly, if it means that I will do this thing, whatever it is, that the One will ask of me because I know it will soothe you. But do not ask me any longer to gaze with love upon the seed he has planted, knowing all the grudge he bears every work of mine.”

I had not known. I had not known until that moment the extent of the resentment between them. For the first time I understood, and great was my pity for him. Still, he must bear it. I was his mother, not his sibling. He must bear it and bear it well, for all of us.

“You speak to me as you should not speak to your mother. I will not hear it. He is your father. You must follow him in all that you do. You are also the seed of your father and of my womb. And you might do well to take your planting to heart as well. Lila is all these years without a child, with only mine to carry in her arms. If you would not look upon mine, then see to the getting of your own.”

Even as I walked away, I knew I had done him more hurt than ever the adam had done to me. But I did it, as I had done all things, for love.

Or so I told myself.

THE SUMMER WORE ON. The barley grew gold on the stem. An argument broke out between Zeeva and Renana that sent Besek scuttling home, his head lower than I had ever seen it even as Renana’s lifted higher. We made space for him, as always, and he stayed close to the house—or at least away from both Zeeva and Renana, who continued to come to the house under some guise or another.

“That girl is up to no good,” I said one day to Lila but would not speak of it to Adam. My pride would not allow it. Lila only nodded, going about her work, saying nothing, and it was all I could do not to press her for whatever she knew, she, who knew more than she ever spoke, the most silent of all my children. Only the furious flight of her shuttle ever indicated her agitation.

I left my children to arbitrate themselves, and Adam stayed more clear of their conflict than was his wont. Eventually it was not Kayin, as I expected, who intervened, but Hevel. Whatever he said to Besek, he went back to Kayin’s home two days later. Renana kept her home with Hevel and Ashira, and I did not see her again for many days.

Kayin could not have been called upon in those days to arbitrate much at any rate; he worked all day, returning at night with slow gait, staying only so long as it took to eat a meal, sometimes to play with Sufa or replace the flint blade of his scythe. He did not stay at my hearth but slept in his own house.

I should have known it then. I should have seen, by the measured gait of Kayin, careful and graceful out of habit for anyone who might be watching. I should have known by the counsel he kept only with himself, measuring out his words as one shows only his best side or his best handiwork to another for inspection.

I should have known by the way Hevel shook his head and then chuckled at his sisters even as concern wrinkled his eyes. At the way he sought the approval of none, saying what he would, regardless of what it was. The way he bared his arms to deliver the ewes. By the way he gave extravagantly to his brothers, from the best of the animals for their own flocks, even as Kayin gave after much consideration, seeking with silent need the smile of thanks for his work.

How much Kayin wanted to please. How much he knew he must. How quietly Hevel lived his life, hiding often behind his easy laugh so that only those few of us who had known him as a child might know that he was like the river with its hollows and depths beneath its reflective surface.

One night before the sacrifice, I dreamed.

I stood at the mountain gate of our valley. Before me on either side was a pillar of flame. I felt the heat of them and stood back as though they would burn me but could not bring myself to look away. As I gazed into them, I began to see shapes in that golden flame—the shape of a man within each pillar. And I saw that they were each holding an object like a spear, but they were not spears. Nor were they made of wood but of the metals that are found in rocks, shaped like long knives, the tips lifted to the heavens.

Around each of the men curled two sets of wings lifted up off their shoulders as though they had dropped from heaven, their wings trailing like the long hair of a girl. So brightly they shone that I lifted my arm but still could not look away. Ah, how they wore such beautiful consternation on their faces! I imagined that in the midst of the inferno, tears coursed down their lovely cheeks. Even as their faces tilted down toward me, the backs of their heads lifted up toward the heavens—just like the serpent! But they were not the serpent. They were utterly alike, with one accord shared between them, where the serpent, unique and more beautiful than these two, had had only his own.

I shouted to the flaming ones. “Will you let me by?”

“Daughter of the One and of man,” they said, speaking with a voice as of many, as though in a chorus, their mouths forming the words as one. “You will not pass through this gate.”

“Where is the serpent? The one who is so like you?”

“What is the serpent to us? What is the serpent but a creature of the field?”

“But he had wings, as you do, and a face that looked at me as his other looked up to God. Surely you know he was like you!”

“These are matters greater even than you.” Their mouths moved as one. “Blessed are you and the seed of your womb.”

I woke, my throat parched as though I had breathed in an oven.

The next morning Hevel came to me. His eyes were tired, as though he had not slept in days.

“Have your children kept you up through the night?”

He gave a weary shake of his head. “No, it is not that. How I dream, Mother! And I come to you wanting to know what it could mean.”

I felt myself draw back as though within my own skin.

“I dreamed that I stood in your valley, and I knew it was your valley from all that you have told me; it could have been no other place.” He raked his hand through his hair.

“And was it a beautiful place?” I asked, carefully. Was there longing in my voice? Was there hope?

“It was. Or might have been. But as I stood there—and there must have been a river because though I did not see one, I could hear it behind me—I found myself in what seemed a cave of willows.”

I stared, trying not to visibly recoil.

“It was dark in there, and I came out to stand in the light in a clearing. But I came to the clearing, and there I saw two forms that I had never seen before. Creatures, flayed for the sacrifice.” He came close to me and laid his hand against my arm. “And so tell me,” he said, with an intensity I had never seen in him. “Have I dreamed truth?”

I wavered on a narrow precipice. I did not know what else he had dreamed. Had he seen his naked mother and father, trembling before the One?

“What does your heart tell you, Son?”

His eyes were wild. “Is this how it was and what you saw and how it was done?”

I looked beyond him as though I would see again that clearing, though I had no desire to see it ever again, even in memory.

“Yes,” I whispered.

He looked troubled after that, but when I asked him why, he would not tell me but said only that he must think on his vision now that he knew it was true.

SEVERAL DAY LATER ADAM and Besek began repairs to the altar. Lila scoured and oiled the wooden bowl, which I had kept all these years, sacred and vile at once as it was to me.

The children prepared as though for festival. Every harvest had become a great celebration for them, and they stayed out at night eating and drinking long after dark, sometimes sleeping around a fire. Lila revealed several new tunics that she had made for Sufa and Lahat. Ashira made a wealth of cheese to accompany Zeeva’s sweet-smelling cakes. Adam laid his arm around me, his hand upon his son in my belly. Kayin did not rest through the heat of the day but labored straight through it, toiling in the sun.

I celebrated with them, though not for the harvest or the sacrifice, but because soon, I was convinced, we would stand before that mountain gate.

Hevel brought the lamb to the house the night before. I watched the way he got down before it, stroking its fleecy head and scratching its neck in silence. Vaguely, I wondered if he communed with those animals in ways long forgotten to us.

Would that I had asked.

Watching him, I thought how much he resembled the boy he had been. My children idolized Kayin and stood a half step apart in awe of something about him that he wore about his shoulders as heavily as a mantle, but with Hevel there was neither awe nor burden. There was only the man that loved each as they came to him, who always had a moment for his youngest siblings—and now his children—to crawl upon his lap, and who gave from his own plate and of his own belongings and of his own energy in all patience and love, to anyone who asked.

“Hevel, do you remember the first lamb you gave up for the altar?”

He smiled slightly. “I do, Mother. I cried for three nights afterward.”

“You must have thought us cruel to take him in that way. You couldn’t look at it when it was being done but turned your face away, against my leg.”

He shook his head slightly. “I couldn’t bear to see it done. But I knew he was going to the One. And, I have never told you, I think a part of me, knowing the mystery even at that age, envied him just a little.” His face registered a slight awe, shining in his eyes.

“Ah, my good boy,” I said with a soft chuckle before going inside.

Laughter amid tension, smiles before the chasm. We are the new shoot before the storm, the shelter before the flood.

WE WENT AT DAWN. We did not always do it then. We did as seemed to be given us. We did as seemed best . . .

We did as seemed best.

We gathered around the altar: Kayin carried a basket of finely ground flour in one hand, a jar of oil in the other. Behind him came the procession of his sisters: Lila bearing wheat and barley, Ashira bearing flax, and Zeeva carrying a wealth of vegetables. They had not been harvested first but allowed to grow to such size and beauty that these were, I was certain, the best specimens I had ever seen.

Only I knew the tension in his shoulders, how his hand trembled as he set down the basket.

He wore nothing that dawn but linen tied around his waist. I was shocked at how lean, how stringy his muscles had become. How fine he was! Was there ever a more handsome man except for his father?

He laid the baskets upon the stones, arranged them beautifully. He took the oil and poured it out. I petitioned in my heart that it should be the fragrance of every pleasing thing, that it should remind the One of every delight in our valley and that the One might long to walk with us within it again.

When he turned back, I saw the look upon Adam’s face: pride. And though Kayin chafed every moment he was in his father’s presence, his face lifted as I had not seen it do in all these recent years.

If Adam could look upon him with approval, how should the One resist?

I knew Kayin looked next at me, but I kept my eyes fixed stolidly upon the altar.

Would that I had given him any kind word. Would that I had motioned for him to come to my side. But I did not. Even then I had no small mercy for him.

Every man must stand before the One alone.

In my heart, however, I poured out my love like oil. Hevel would not sacrifice the lamb himself but gave it over to Adam. He always stood back and hid his face; he would not come to the altar with tears. Adam sliced the throat of the lamb. I held out the bowl.

For the first time I welcomed the flow of blood into that vessel, and through the process of flaying the animal, I sent up my hopes to heaven.

When Adam laid it upon the altar, I set out the bowl of blood. As I did . . .

Did I see false? A phantom line of skinless animals seemed to stretch out before me.

Blood and oil. Grain and flour. With it we laid out our every hope.

A blaze shot up from the bier. I thought I saw again the fiery pillar, the golden wings stretching up toward heaven, shielding the sword as though it were a flame.

I clasped Adam’s hand as if in doing so we might return to the thing we had always been: one flesh.

Soon.

I dropped back my head. It was the same thing I had felt every time the One was near. I almost expected that evening breeze here, in the light of dawn, or the feel of the sun, too bright for morning. I opened my eyes and saw, beyond the fire of the altar, the bright morning star, undaunted by the blaze.

Yes. Come, Great Initiator, Beginning and End.

Though I knew my children were here around us, in that moment it was only Adam and I. The ground beneath us might be an alluvial plain or the foothill of a mountain . . . or a fertile valley. All of it was holy. All of it was good, for it had all been made by God.

I was torn from the moment by a strangled cry: Kayin’s.

He lurched toward the altar and reeled back from the heat of the fire. Adam let go my hand and tried to haul him back, but Kayin tore free and snatched one of the sheaves of wheat from atop the altar. I watched in confusion as he held it toward the holy fire as one does to light a torch. And then I saw why . . .

One side of the altar burned in bright conflagration. The other had never properly caught. It sent great, reeking coils of stench into the early morning sky so that the burning animal seemed clean and fragrant by comparison.

Adam pulled him back. “Do not interfere with the fire of the One!”

Ashira’s son, Nave, pointed. “Why, the other side isn’t burning at all!”

Ashira hushed him, pushing down his finger and covering his mouth. Kayin cried out in one last desperate push for the altar, but Adam held him fast. It was too late by now anyway; the fire over Hevel’s lamb was burning lower and lower, until it was the flickering fingers of one burning hand. And then the carcass—what was left of it—glowed as a timber that has been burnt through . . .

The fire went out. The form of the animal collapsed upon itself, only ash.

Hevel stood with head bowed, swaying slightly, saying nothing, looking at no one. His lips moved, though no sound came from them.

The lamb was gone, consumed utterly. Even the embers were gone, the ashes already stirring in the air.

But the once-feast on the other side of the altar continued to smolder, ruined, the smoke horrifically foul.

Kayin slumped in Adam’s arms, and, when his father continued to hold him fast, pushed him away with a violent shove. Adam staggered back.

“The One will do as the One will do,” Adam said. But even I wanted to cry out that the sacrifice, the bounty, had been perfect.

Lila, normally so reserved, covered her eyes with a great wail, but Ashira silenced her.

“Hush. The One has done as the One has willed. That is all.”

At that, Kayin shot his sister such a look of venom that she actually backed a step. I hurried to him and took his arm, trying not to look at the altar. “Come away. Let it be.”

He jerked away from me and, with a howl, lunged for the altar. He pushed the vegetables, stinking and smoldering, into the ashes of the lamb. But even then they did not catch fire though they lay, half toppled, in the very place where fire had consumed the lamb. When Adam pulled him gently away a second time, Kayin staggered, his eyes darting this way and that. He groaned, tearing at his hair, and stumbled off, not looking back.

“What does it mean?” Zeeva whispered, too loudly. Ashira began to usher away her children and gently laid her hand on Hevel’s arm. He seemed to have slipped away to another place, though his body stood rooted to the ground. When he lifted his head, I caught my breath at the expression on his face. It was beatific. My heart lurched.

How could this be? Oh, God! I sank to my knees.

For as much as my heart hurt for Kayin, my heart should have swelled for Hevel. But I could only think: This is not how it was supposed to be.

Hevel turned away, still in a daze. Renana started in the direction of Kayin, but Lila stopped her. “Do you think he needs a chit of a girl to comfort him?”

“I will go after Kayin,” Adam said. His heart, too, longs for the One, I thought with sadness. I am not the only one.

“No,” said Hevel slowly, seeming to rouse from reverie. “I will go.”

Adam reached for me, and I clasped his hand tightly. Kayin and Adam had been enough at odds already. Kayin would, I knew, never forgive his father for holding him back when he would have attempted to light the fire over his offering.

Hevel kissed Ashira on the forehead and went after his brother.

24

Just before dawn there came a rustle outside the house. I opened my eyes, instantly alert with the keen sense of a mother. I sat up, my heart quickening. Perhaps my sons were back. Oh, the questions I had for Hevel! And how I wanted—needed—to comfort Kayin.

When Kayin slipped through the door, I felt instantly relieved. I almost chuckled, so furtive was he, like a child with a secret. I opened my mouth, but upon seeing me he gestured frantically. Only then did I see his disheveled hair, the dirt on his face. Across the room Lila stirred. Kayin shrank back, out the doorway completely. I got up and dressed, even as Lila sat up, alarm in her eyes.

“It is fine. Rest a bit longer.” I put on my sandals.

Once I emerged outside, however, I could not find him until I went around the side of the house. There he was, bent over as though ill, his face twisted. He tugged at his hair, threw himself toward me, and then immediately shrank back.

“Come, my son.” I lay my arm around him. I had wronged him. How greatly I had wronged him! “Come away from here and we will talk.” How my heart ached for him. “Where is Hevel now?”

He gave a strange, rasping laugh. “Again, ‘Where is your brother?’ You used to send him after me! Should I now be the shepherd of the shepherd? Ah, God!”

The laugh became a cry and then a thick sob. He threw himself down to the ground and embraced my feet so that I nearly lost my balance.

“What is this? Stop it now.” I tried to pull him to his feet before he could cause a scene and wake the whole house. I could smell the wine upon him. Well, I could not fault him; of course he was undone. We had fostered expectation and the veneer of controlled perfection in him and here it was, cracked as any pot too long in the fire. I could only blame myself. How I must pour out my love to him now!

I pulled him away from the house; I desperately did not want him encountering his father. Not yet. “Come away now,” I said, drawing him with me. Had Hevel not put him to rights? I had assumed through the day and evening he would make all well between them—would make well many things, in fact.

“Forgive me,” he said, crying like a boy, going wherever I pulled him. His nose ran, leaving slippery tracks in his grimy face as it had when he was a child. He smelled foully of earth and wine and smoke—the smoldering smell of burnt grain and oil. There was something else, too. Grime caked his hands up to the forearm. It had smattered his face.

Abruptly, he pulled away and shouted, “Do not look on my face! I cannot look upon yours!”

“Kayin! What are you saying?”

“Mother, Mother—do not remove from me your love! Please do not take your love from me!”

A growing unease in my bowels. “I would never! It is not your doing that the One chose whom he—”

He was staring at me, and the look was filled with horror. His eyes seemed painfully white against the dark gore of his face.

“Kayin.” My hands had begun, inexplicably, to tremble. “Where is your brother?”

At that, he fell to the ground with wild wails, beating at his chest and face and shoulders. His voice was none I recognized—raw and like an animal’s. Cold seized my chest. I got down, grasped his shoulders.

“Kayin! Where is Hevel? Where is your brother?” But he only beat at himself, clawing at his face and hair. I shook him hard, with more strength than I knew myself to have, until the whites rolled up in his eyes. “Where is Hevel?”

All at once, he lay still.

“Come, Mother,” he said in a small voice, wiping at his face with the back of his forearm. I heard a sound behind us, and Kayin started as Lila came out of the house, her face stricken. I could see now the form of the adam moving inside, hurriedly dressing.

“Do not let her see me! Do not let her come!” His hoarse cry sounded as though he had shouted all through the night.

I pulled him up and hurried with him across the yard, dragging him with me, feeling ill. As though the motion had brought order to his brain, he faltered. “Please, say you will not stop loving me. Please, never remove your love. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear it. I can barely bear to live—”

Fear was a cord around my lungs. “Tell me! Tell me what happened!”

He would have fallen to the ground again, but I caught him and shook him once more.

“I have heard the voice of the One!”

I halted, confounded. “What?”

“I heard the voice of the One, Mother.”

“What did—what did he say to you?” Why did those words, so long hoped for, feel so horribly wrong?

“The same as you, Mother, just now.”

“What?”

“He said that sin crouches at the door.”

I thought of Kayin, crouching, himself, at the door only a short time earlier.

“What cryptic tale is this?” Nothing made sense: the son before me covered with grime; the One, addressing the man whose sacrifice he had no regard for after so many years . . . the whereabouts of Hevel.

Where was Kayin’s brother, favored of God?

We neared the far field. I hesitated, but Kayin walked stiffly on.

I had a sudden recollection of the young Hevel running to me.

Mother, come quick!

Impossibly, as though he knew the turn of my thoughts, Kayin said, “You never knew. You never knew that the jackal I slew that day on the hill nearly slew me first. It came at me in a rush and would have had me except that Hevel threw a stone at it and stunned it. I was such a coward, Mother! ‘Get it, Kayin!’ Hevel shouted at me. I went to it on legs near to falling. Only when it lifted its head and began to get back up did I kill it with my spear.”

“Why do you tell me this?”

“Hevel would have finished it, except that I told him to get away because I feared for him—I did, truly—but I also knew I could not go to you having let Hevel kill it. It fell to me. It always fell to me. I could not bear that he should come to you having saved me, and so I made him swear never to tell—”

His voice broke, and he fell to sobbing again, quietly, into the crook of his arm.

“Please do not hate me, Mother. Father’s hatred I can abide, for he hates already that I share your love though I would remove myself from your heart and from this very earth if I could!”

I stopped walking and pulled him round to face me. “Kayin, where is Hevel?” When he stared at me, wild eyed, I screamed, “Where is Hevel?! Where is Hevel? What have you done to him?”

He started to wail, and I hit him then, hard across the face. I was sobbing and did not know why.

He spoke at last, dully, as though I had not struck him at all, “He always loved to be apart. Perhaps all this while he was communing with the One.” He pulled away and walked as one in a daze.

As we came to the edge of the field, I could no longer help myself but ran ahead of him on weakened legs. “Hevel! Hevel!”

Kayin stopped and would go no farther.

“What? What?” I looked wildly about me. He raised a shaking hand and pointed to a nearby ditch. He had been in the process of moving stones there for a low wall. At first I saw nothing but the field beyond it through the scrim of the mists, but then . . .

I saw a dark form in the earth.

I seemed to run forever, my feet not my feet, having no feeling in them, heavy as logs. I did not hear the breath, ragged from my lungs. I heard none of my own cries as I dropped down upon the dark form splayed upon the earth. Grotesque shapes took flight all around me.

Hevel.

I gathered him in my arms. “Hevel, Hevel! My son! Wake!” He was a dirty mess, smelling of earth and blood. Blood—

In the morning light I saw blood everywhere. Like the lamb before the altar. He was slippery, the back of his head too soft. I slapped his grimy cheeks. “Hevel! Hevel!” I shook and shook him.

Kayin was beside me and tried to put his arms around me, but I shook him off as savagely as though he were a carrion bird.

My hands roamed my son’s body. I saw his injuries and recognized, too, the work of vultures: his lips, so beautiful always, had been stabbed at so they were ragged and crusted, registering a toothy grimace on one side.

Like the wolf, scowling beneath the outcrop. I screamed and screamed, shaking him.

He did not stir.

I did not understand this great error, this terrible misunderstanding. “What—what is this that has happened? What have you done?”

Kayin wailed, letting loose a cry to chill my blood. He fell over his brother’s body and moaned and then began to vomit. Red. He vomited up red. The stench was wine, but it was the color of blood.

The mists were lifting, burned off by the morning sun. How could the morning come at all? How could the sun show its face?

Now by the light I saw red everywhere: upon my arms, upon Hevel’s tunic, upon Kayin’s tunic and arms and thighs. Red like the earth the adam came from.

I fell over Hevel and pummeled Kayin with my fists. “You came from the same womb! You sucked the same breasts!”

Kayin moaned, not raising a hand to ward me off.

I gathered Hevel again in my arms, cradling him and rocking him as though I could bring life to those limbs a second time.

“He offered me a lamb for my own sacrifice. As a gift. And I told him to keep it! That I had the work of my own hands. Would that I had taken it!”

There came now other sounds, though I did not hear them until they were nearly upon us. And though my heart had dried to dust within me, I said, “Run. Run! Before Adam finds you here. Go, lest I lose you both!”

He stumbled to his feet, and for a moment I thought he would not go, that Adam would be upon him. But then with a furtive glance he staggered several steps and then broke into a wild run.

I clasped Hevel to me even as Adam came and fell down on his knees, crying out a sound as awful as the lifeless body in my arms.

25

I am told that even as they lifted me up and took me to the house, I would not let go of him. That I held my dead son against the one growing in my belly and cried to heaven, cursing the One that Is, demanding that he give my son back.

Lila gave Ashira a cache of red ochre, saying that it would take the place of the blood gone from Hevel’s body. Ashira said nothing, silent, her eyes swollen, but painted the ochre upon Hevel’s clean palms, saying that he would have back the blood on Kayin’s hands, saying also that she coated him with the red earth of his father from whence he came. At this my heart cried, He came from me! But I could not speak. We laid on him the fleece of the lamb he had given in the sacrifice and returned him to an earth not yet ready to accept him.

Adam spoke hardly at all. He did not ask after Kayin or why he had run off at his coming.

When I slept, I dreamed such dreams as no heart has the strength to endure—dreams of siblings raising arms against one another and of words hurled like stones and spears that kill and draw blood until the earth runs with it.

I remembered Dvash, crouched beneath the outcrop that would become her tomb. I am as unhinged as that wolf.

They say I woke and cried out Hevel’s name.

Even waking and knowing he was dead, I half expected to open my eyes and see him kneeling near my bed. Memories of him in life came back to me in acute, painful detail in his death: Hevel as a baby toddling into Lila’s pegs. As the child who dragged Kayin’s toy spear around whenever his brother wasn’t looking. As the man with the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. As the one who stood before the altar, his face raised to heaven.

When I could bear it no more—the sleep, the visions, the face of Lila, drawn and pale, and of Ashira, who had come to the house with her children, leaving them with Zeeva so that she might go sit by the grave of her mate—I got up and went out to the field and sat down with my daughter.

It was five days now since Hevel stared, unseeing, at the sky.

Ashira lay her head in my lap, and I crooned to her as I had when she was a child, as unable to comfort her as I had been unable to comfort Hevel in his death or Kayin in surviving . . . unable to do anything but pour out grief for which there is no word.

I grieved for my dead son. I grieved for my living son, undone. I grieved, too, for the ruin of my hope, as void as the sweet face of my Hevel, his head smashed in like an overripe fruit.

That afternoon, when Ashira had gone, I lay down in the grass near the fresh earth. How simple the sky was in its blue. How impervious the clouds, understanding nothing of the sorrow beneath them. How oblivious the breeze, which caressed my cheek as it did on that day in the valley when I had first opened my eyes. The sounds of this world had been laden with mystery once. Now I lay by the grave of my son.

Sometime before sunset, Kayin came to me. He was grizzled and gaunt and carried a spear. His clothes were stained but seemed to have been washed, and he, himself, looked washed. His hair was unbound and pulled down over his forehead. He sat down near me, collected, silent. Eventually, he spoke.

“I must tell you, so you know, what the One said to me.”

My heart constricted, but I nodded.

He bowed his head. “When I left the altar, I wandered through the fields. I shouted at the heavens. I sobbed. When Hevel found me, I told him to come to the field. I wanted to show him the area I had consecrated to this work so that he might know my heartache, my bitter defeat in all of it. I wanted him to see.

“He came and we drank together, and he laid his arm across my shoulders and said, ‘Brother, I do not know the burden you carry, but now I am sickened that you might not have needed carry it, for the One has taken my sacrifice. And how you have suffered all of these years.’”

He drew a ragged breath. “I could not stand it! To hear it from his mouth, to hear and know it was true!”

I looked away and covered my face. I had worn a linen cloth over my head to keep it from the sun, and I drew it down over my eyes so that they might look on nothing. At least that much of the world I would block away.

“I could have borne it. I thought I was even relieved. But then Hevel said that he was going to leave, that he could take his flocks anywhere and graze them . . . that he would leave so that he did not hurt me. . . . I could not bear the thought of him going away from me or for being the cause of his going from you. Most of all I could not bear the thought of him being followed by the One that I had pursued so ardently, if only to win the love of you and of Father.”

His voice caught. When he had collected himself, he continued. “I flew against him, railing, shouting at him that he would not deprive our parents of the thing they had waited for, that he must stay no matter the pressures of it. I was so angry I wanted to hurt him—his nose was bleeding, but he did not fight back. Hevel, who was always stronger. He did not fight! Why did he not fight? But he would not.”

He was weeping now, as was I.

“Surely he would be alive if he had, for he was the stronger of us. He was more true with his sling than I ever was with my spear. He would have taken that jackal that day bare-handed to protect me, I know—” He sobbed quietly.

I, who wanted to comfort and to shun him, to hold and to beat him, sat unmoving, unable to do either.

After a little while he drew a trembling breath. “I walked through the night—I don’t know where. Sometime before dawn I heard the very thing for which I know you have petitioned all these years. ‘Where is Hevel your brother?’ It was like a voice known to me from a dream that I have never dreamed before. I said, ‘I do not know.’ Part of it was insolence because in that moment I hated that voice and the One it belonged to. I had sought it all my life, and now it had all come to this! But the rest was simply that I did not know where Hevel had gone, only that he stared at the dark sky—”

He shook, covered his face with his hands. “Ah, have I sent him beyond the reach even of the One, that he asks me where is my brother? Do you know, Mother? Have I?”

“I don’t know,” I said woodenly because if I thought on it too much, I might go mad. Perhaps to soothe only myself, I said, “I do not think there is any reach beyond God.”

“But then, most terrible, he asked the very thing you asked: ‘What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out from the soil.’ Ah! It is too great, too terrible! And now I am cursed! Cursed for the soil that took my brother’s blood! It will no longer yield to me its strength. And so I cannot stay. I have tried and cannot grow even a mustard seed! It lies in the soil as though dead, even on the third day.”

Now I raised my face and uncovered it. Already Adam had been cursed to toil with the earth. Now Kayin was to be cursed from even that, exiled from the land of our exile? What could there ever be for him? Adam had toiled for every abundance from the earth, and now Kayin would toil and receive nothing—he who had raised up in pride the best fruits of his efforts, only hoping that they would be good enough! I had had the dream of this event and had kept him to the fields! How great then was my guilt in this?

I drew him into my arms, and he burrowed against me. He clung to me, and I clasped him as hard as I could, knowing, perhaps in the way of my dreams, that I was soon to lose him.

He could not remain here.

After what seemed a long time, when my back was sore and my legs numb and my face bloated from weeping—when did I not weep?—he raised his head. For the first time I saw a strange thing there, on his forehead.

“What is this?” I brushed his hair aside.

He caught at my hand. “Don’t.”

“But what is it? It almost looks like—” And there, indeed, was the circle and the line—the mark Hevel had used with his flocks!

He covered it again. “I know I am going away. I know I cannot stay here. The One has said that I will wander now, ceaselessly. And so I will go to the Land of Wandering.”

“What land is that? And what will you do?” Was I to lose everything?

“It means only that everywhere I go, that shall be my land.”

At his bitter smile I remembered how lovely he had been only days before. Now I barely recognized this haggard stranger before me.

“As for what I will do, I was a shepherd before I tilled the earth. Do you remember, I once roamed these hills with Hevel and our little flock?”

“Then take the best sheep and of the—”

“No,” he said, gently, “no, Mother. There are sheep in the hills, and the land to the east of here is fertile. Hevel and I have seen the beginning of it on the long treks we once took together. I will go there.”

“Alone?”

He lowered his head. “I do not think Lila will want to go with me. I came to her at the river when she was bathing, and she looked past me as though I were a shape in the mist and would not see me.”

I mourned for them both.

“But Mother, there is more.”

“What more can there be? It is already too much!”

Bitterness crossed his face. “I said so to the One. ‘I can’t bear it,’ I said. To be gone from this place and from the presence of the One—it is with you, I see that now—and to be gone from you, it is too much. And what is more, what is to stop any one of my siblings—and some day there will be a great many, spread out from this plain to mountain—from visiting upon me the same fate I handed to Hevel?”

“No! None would dare!”

“None will. Because the One set the mark upon me that you have seen and—” his voice wavered—“I have looked within a still pond and know what it is. Ah, Mother, it is too terrible!”

He did not stop me this time when I moved his hair aside. Indeed, it was Hevel’s mark, the one all of his flock bore. A mark known, as Hevel himself had said, to everyone, though there were so few of us then. But now as I gazed at it, something strange happened—it seemed to waver before me on his forehead, like a ripple of water passing over skin.

Suddenly I saw not the face of my son but a hand I recognized as my own, reaching toward a fruit. How lovely, how beautiful were both! But in the next instant I was filled with shame and drew back as one burnt.

His mournful words pierced me. “I do not know what you see, but when I looked in the pond at the reflection of it, I saw my hand raised to my brother, and I turned away from my own image as you have now. This is my bitter mercy. This is my bitter protection: the shame of others. I wish, I hope that someday I might lose it. Perhaps then another hand will put an end to it all, as I so deserve.”

“Do not say such things!”

He drew his hair down over his forehead again. Silently I handed him the linen head cloth from my hair. He took it in a rough hand.

Even then I loved him. Even then I wished I could undo every memory of hurt for him. That I could give birth to Hevel again, knowing that in his second chance, Kayin would never resent him. Perhaps even then the One would still reject him, but at least we could let be, knowing that the One did as he pleased, whether or not we knew the reasons.

“When will you leave?”

“Soon. This very night.”

Too soon! Too soon! But if not today, then tomorrow, and it, too, would be too soon for me.

I made him come back with me. He trembled as I held on to his arm, clutching the head cloth in his hand, and I knew it was not for the cloth itself but for its maker.

Lahat, sitting outside, making a new pot—he had become skilled, of late, as a potter—fell still. Sufa, playing nearby, exclaimed aloud, “Kayin! Kayin!” and went flying into his arms. He lifted her, bowing his head to her shoulder, and carried her the last of the way to the house.

From another direction came Adam.

“Kayin!” The sound of that name was terrible.

My son stopped, and I let go of him as he turned to face his father.

Adam’s face was bleak, stark with the furrows of grief. Grief and love.

I thought the adam might turn on his heel. I thought he might walk away. And I felt, prematurely, Kayin’s hurt and acceptance for both. But when Adam did not, Kayin rushed forward to fall down before him.

“Father!”

Adam stood rigid before his hand came to rest, trembling, upon that dark head. And I saw the face of my brother, my husband, my father, contorted toward heaven, as though he might see there some answer, twisting until I thought he would call out for the One, as I had on so many times. I covered my mouth.

This was the man who had named the animals and cried out over me, who tilled the earth without complaint, in faith and weariness, a man without his own mother’s or father’s knee to lay his head upon or from whom to seek counsel or keen out his grief.

At last Adam said, “You have struck the image of the One.”

I knew that I had done, on other occasions, the same though it had never amounted to such grave outcome.

Movement near the house: Renana came running but stopped cold at the sight of her father and brother in the yard. Lila, I knew, must still be inside. But if she was, she did not come out. Only Ashira stood in the doorway, pale, her face like stone.

At last Kayin raised his head. “I am going, Father. I do not ask your blessing. I do not ask for your love.”

Adam did not speak. I do not think he could have. As Kayin rose, his hair fell back so that now Adam stared at Kayin’s face. His eyes widened slightly. After a moment he turned away with a hoarse cry as though from a flash of lightning.

“I go,” Kayin repeated in a whisper. He lifted the linen cloth then and tied it over his head, covering his forehead and the mark upon it.

“You must take with you provisions. Food. Tools,” Adam said, more solidly, not looking directly at him.

Kayin shook his head. “I will not take from your stores. The One has said I will wander, and so I expect that I will find a way to eat, if indeed, I am to live.” He turned slowly, walking woodenly toward the house. Lahat embraced him, fiercely, worriedly, and asked him some question I could not hear. My eyes were fastened on Ashira, who stared at him as one would at a hyena. When he came toward her, she spat on him.

“Do not think to take anything with you. Take nothing! Go, go and see if God will have mercy on you—go!” She doubled over, and when he would have bent to her, she struck out at him with a screech, nails flashing. He reeled back.

Kanit, inside the house, tried to come out, but Ashira held her back.

He backed another step, staring at the house, and then, nodding slightly, turned to go. Just then Renana came running into the yard, a basket on her back, her sturdy sandals on her feet.

“Renana, what are you doing?”

Ashira cried the same words as my heart. Adam strode quickly toward her, but she backed a step toward Kayin.

“I will go with my brother. Lila will not see him, let alone follow him. Let me go in her stead, and I will bear children in her name, for she will have no other man all the days of her life. She has said so to me; I swear it.”

She came to clasp and kiss my hands, and there was on her face such earnestness and ravaged hope as I had never seen in her. Toward Adam she only nodded before she returned to Kayin’s side. Bewildered, Kayin looked from her to the rest of us.

They walked away together, leaving our settlement forever.

I watched them go, my feet leaden, my heart dull in my chest. My arms hung as limply by my sides as my unwashed hair down my back. We had forged of our foibles our destiny and were all at the mercy of the One.

I called out after them: “Blessings on your feet! On the ground beneath it! On your eyes and hands as you forge your lives!” They did not turn back.

I am the pod that loses its seeds, borne aloft on the breeze, not knowing where they go.

GENERATIONS

26

One spring evening Besek came into the house, saying that several of the ewes were near to dropping and that he would stay out through the night.

At my request we had expanded our home in the year after Hevel’s death. I wanted my children near. So Besek and Zeeva had come back to live with us, though Ashira stayed staunchly away. Besek scrupulously kept Hevel’s flock and marked each lamb and kid accordingly, as though one day he might give account for how well they had prospered. I never knew why he did that. We did not ask. Neither did we speak of Hevel’s symbol upon Kayin’s forehead; I do not think we could bear to speak of the things we had seen lest we learn we were the only ones to see ourselves at our worst. So we said nothing, explaining to the young children that it was only a sign of our family and that it must always be honored.

Lila began to teach her craft to Kanit, showing her first how to break the flax and twist thread. Her own techniques were so advanced that it took Kanit years to gain even half of her skill, though it seemed Lila pursued her craft with less vigor than before. More often I saw her gazing into the fire as though it were a pond-mirror or staring at the threads of her pegs as though the future were written there. Sometimes I fancied that she studied Adam, though that was common enough with my older children. His face and Hevel’s had been so similar, it was easy to look at him and wonder how Hevel might look were he living. Sometimes I still expected my son to come in from the high pastures with the sheep, saying he was starving and good-naturedly teasing his sisters for food.

Adam was increasingly quiet. When he did speak, it was about the garden or the animals or the house. He had begun to dig small ditches to carry water from the river, and this turned into a great experiment for him and Lahat.

He should have a son closer to his own age, I thought, seeing them together. Lahat is barely a man and has only one good eye. But the boy had a mind for design and for engineering the making of things and for patterns—whether they were in water or soil or earth or on the pottery he had grown to love.

Ashira, once so bright and animated, never shed the dullness of grief. Nor did she once, since Kayin’s leaving, mention Hevel’s name. She came to life only when she was delivering children. I watched the way she scanned each face at a birth, as though looking for signs of recognition there. I wondered if she waited for Hevel to somehow return to her and know her on sight.

I never thought it would work that way; we had never been intended to die. I did not think we would be brought back to die and die again. But I did not say anything. The hope on her face was the only joy I ever saw in her after that terrible day.

Sufa I never felt I understood, my temperamental child who tore me at her birth. Though I loved all my children well, I know I understood and therefore fancied that I loved my oldest daughters better. In that way I told myself that surely the One had loved Kayin, but only differently.

But in my heart I also knew that some children were easier to love.

“Why did the One allow Kayin to kill him?” Asa asked me once, when we told him the truth of his brother’s death and his other brother’s exile.

I did not know what to say to that. I had never entertained the idea of the One interfering in our actions. Always we had done what we would, always we had chosen for ourselves.

“Because, my love, if I make it so that you can only do one thing, then do I ever know that you are obedient because you choose to be?” How should I explain what it had taken me a lifetime to understand: that there is no morality without choice?

“No, you might never know. But was there a time before the first bad thing was done?”

“All people do wrong. But we are at our most noble when we do right. Now here comes your father. Fetch some water and help him wash his feet.”

I left that conversation shaken. None of my children had ever asked this question or hit upon the truth so closely. And we had never told them of the tree or of any of the events that had happened before or because of it. Perhaps Hevel had some notion. Perhaps Kayin, most of all. But we had never spoken of it, even to them.

How, after all, does one tell one’s children that their hearts are defective because of their parents’ failing?

Meanwhile I mourned the dream of the seed. I had borne two children in the last nine years. My daughters were grown women, their hair long down their backs, their children at their breasts and fires. Ashira’s eldest might soon take a man. One day I would hold my first great-grandchild.

Thinking of it made my back ache. It was, by then, more than four decades past the time of the garden. In all that time I had reaped only questions and no answers.

That summer I went out to Adam in the field. “I had a dream last night, husband.” When his eyes met mine, I did not miss the wariness within them. “Never worry, I call for no sacrifice!” My tone was sharper than I intended. He had seen to it that every sacrifice since had been only an animal from the flock, done, I knew, in honor of Hevel though he said it was only because the One obviously preferred the lambs. I was not consulted in these matters, only informed of them afterward. Yet I longed for peace between us, though it happened only in silence. The fewer words we spoke, the better. So I learned to say nothing, hoping we might recover in silence what we could not with words.

“What is this dream?”

“I saw Kayin and Renana.” He stiffened at the mention of their names.

“Indeed?”

“I saw them in a tent of hides, surrounded by three children.”

He nodded stiffly and I left him alone. He did not know that I watched him from the edge of the field as he set down his hoe and gazed up at the sky. It was the first time I had seen him look to the heavens since the day Kayin had left. He did not tell stories of the One except to answer his children’s questions. He did not speak of the garden to me. He spoke less and less of the One—until he spoke of God not at all.

As I watched, his shoulders fell forward. His chin lowered to regard the earth. And then he laid down the hoe and walked away, a hand over his eyes.

I tried to wash that image from my mind, as one might scrub out a cooking pot, but I was never able to scour it completely away.

That night I plied him with the best of Zeeva’s cakes. When we lay down, I wound my arm around him. There was much that neither one of us would speak in the interest of peace. The adam had been to me as sturdy—if as stubborn—as the onager; he did what must be done and did it with constancy and reliability. But seeing him as I had earlier had put a new fear in my heart.

“You said to me once,” I whispered near his ear, “do not leave me.” He lay unmoving, silent but awake. “I say to you now: please, never leave me. One day we will return. One day, let us never forget. And I promise you, as promised to me, that you will not die the death without seeing that place again. As you ate from my hand, so you will see it by my hand, I swear to you.”

Though I had recoiled at the times he had laid the blame for his actions at my feet, a part of me could not forget the sight of my own hand holding out that fruit, as I had seen it in the mark of Kayin.

When he did not respond, I squeezed him gently. “Husband, have you nothing to say?”

“The children can hear you. Go to sleep.”

THAT YEAR, FAT COATED my bones for the first time in my life. “How lovely you look, Mother,” Ashira said one day. “The earth has fed us well.”

“The One has fed us well,” I gently corrected.

She smiled politely. “As you say, Mother.”

We spoke too soon. Drought came the following year. Lahat and Adam scratched out their lines in the dirt, and we dug for days upon end to bring water in meager little furrows into the field where we could. We carried it in pots from the river, we were so desperate. But then the river dried nearly to nothing. Only a late rain saved any of the garden or the orchards, but even so the harvest was so meager that we searched the hills for every edible thing. Eventually, out of sheer hunger, we took to eating fish from the river. By the end of the year, there were two lambs missing from the flock. No one asked what became of them.

The next spring, as Zeeva carried her fifth child, the river flooded its banks. It was a spring to make up for the lean season before, raining in the afternoon, the dew heavy in the dawn. The trees and shrubs grew more lush than I had ever seen them. We looked to the heavens and gave our thanks that the One had not forgotten us.

One day, as the plums were heavy on the stem, Mazor, my youngest son, came running to the house.

“Mother! There is a strange shadow over the sun!”

“Perhaps it is going to storm. Bring your things inside.”

“It is not a storm cloud, Mother, but a dark shadow that comes quickly this way!”

Lila got up with an exasperated sigh but then halted upon the threshold. “Strange omens!”

“Don’t be foolish,” I snapped. The year that Hevel was slain, a ewe died. We found that its entrails were twisted, and Ashira, ever superstitious, had infected her siblings with her talk of portents.

But I stopped just behind my eldest daughter, my hand clutching her shoulder. “Mazor, call your brothers.”

The boy took off at a run in the direction of the fields, shouting, as Lila and I brought in the grapes drying in the sun. By the time we finished, Adam and Lahat were still afield. I ran—how I ran!—to find them. They were there, staring at the sky, prepared to defend the crops, though by what means I had no idea.

“What can it mean?” Now I could see them. In the thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—flying through the air.

“Run!” Adam said. “No, not to the house. It’s too far. To Kayin’s.”

I was stunned to hear him speak the name at all, though he never realized he did it. He pushed Lahat and me before him. As we got there, the sky came down, raining locusts.

When we emerged, it was to a different world. The trees were rendered skeletons, no more. Here and there one of them remained untouched even though its neighbor had been devoured seemingly whole.

The wolves—descendants of Reut’s brood—pounced on those stragglers that remained and chomped them down greedily.

The following spring we delved into our seed store, nearly depleted after the drought. But that was a lean year. All season we foraged for what we could, taking the flocks to far pastures where green herbs and grasses remained untouched, relying heavily on their milk—and then upon their meat.

That summer Besek and Lahat left together for several weeks on errand for their father. When they returned, they sat with him for a full afternoon. The next day Adam announced that we would prepare to move.

“The land to the south is rich, filled with the silt of floods. There the riverbanks are lower, and we will dig greater canals to water the fields from them.”

“This is like saying that we do not believe the One will feed us.” I did not like the idea of moving—how should Kayin ever know to find us if he should ever return this way?

Though I did not voice it, there was another reason for my reluctance: I did not want to go farther south than we already had from the gates of that valley. But when I said it in private, Adam sighed so heavily that I did not bring it up again.

“Still,” I said, when I had gotten him alone, “can it be right to wander farther and farther, to make for ourselves the water for our crops as though we would control the rain itself?”

In fear more than in faith, we laid the best lamb we had upon the altar. Perhaps the One could be reminded of our needs. If not reminded, perhaps he could be placated. For a moment, when Adam had finished bleeding and flaying the animal and laid it upon the stones, I felt a surge of panic. What if the fire did not come?

But the fire consumed it, in silence. So much silence.

Perhaps we should bring a lamb each year, Lila said.

Always we had moved by the signs that the fullness of time was upon us. But we had grown fearful and superstitious.

All the next year we harvested every shoot or seed as though we went to a place with no vegetation, as though we were the One planting the greenery of the earth anew. We sacrificed from the flock in thanks and petition.

Perhaps, Besek wondered aloud, if we gave enough and often, the One would be moved to bounty. A part of me protested this way of thinking, as though the One could be bribed with the very things of his own earth!

Another part of me—that part which knew fear—said nothing to disagree.

THAT AUTUMN WE PACKED our baskets full and prepared to make the trek south. Already Lahat and Adam had made two trips to stake out settlement and orchard and field. They were excited, anxious to go. But I was less ready; this was where my children were born. This was where my son was buried. But Lahat said that if Kayin should come, he would know the way to find us; we would leave one of our clay maps, burned hard, in the old house.

When it came time, Ashira refused to pack her belongings. She stood in the doorway of her house. “Take my daughter with you. But I will not leave the body of my brother. I will stay here.”

Panic rose in my chest. I could not lose any more of my children!

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Adam said.

I echoed her father, relieved in some small part of my mind to be in agreement with him on at least one thing. “How will you feed yourselves? How will you do for your family all of the things we have done together? What if something happens to one of you?”

Adam, his mouth set in a rigid line, went in to talk to her but came back out shaking his head an hour later.

“Ashira! Daughter! Please don’t do this thing.” I stood in her house and held her hands and cried tears upon them. “Who will bring forth the children? Who will turn the babes in the womb? What is there for you here but memories of a man who walks upon this earth no longer? Would Hevel have you live in a wasteland, in a memory? Did he ever dwell on the past at all?”

She sagged, and I could not hold her up. Now, after all of these years, her grief exploded over the banks of her reserve like a spring river in flood. She cried for a day without ceasing or eating. When it was done, we packed her things. The next morning, as the mists were still drifting through the old field, we laid our packs upon our backs and upon the onager.

We stopped once on the edge of the field to gaze at the place where Hevel lay. It was grown over and only a rock, broken open to reveal a wealth of crystal within it, had been laid to mark the place. Not that any of us could ever forget it. Ashira stood over the place and gazed at the earth for a long time, saying nothing. Then we began our journey south.

27

We cleared new fields in time to plant that spring. Besek took after his brother, taking the flocks to the far hills, seeming to thrive with the time to himself, though sometimes he took Asa or his eldest son with him. They were all three nearly as skilled with Hevel’s sling as Hevel himself had been and had long trained Reut’s descendants to go with them. Reut herself had died many years before, and I had always been glad that she had preceded Hevel to that place, wherever it was.

Within three years our gardens and fields—larger than before—flourished. Lila wove nets that the younger boys took to the river, and they brought back fish, which we ate regularly now, baked over fire and in soups.

When the adam and I spoke, it was always about the children or the gardens or the season or the improved wheat. Once, when I pointed out that I had not been consulted in the placement of the vineyard, he snapped, “You weren’t here, so Lahat and I had to make the decision alone.”

“You might have consulted me.”

“There wasn’t time.”

“Then you might at least prepare a new one where I want it. Besek and you might prepare a new one in a day if Lahat laid it out.”

He looked on me then with such forbearing—it was the same look that any of his children might have from him if they tested his patience too long. “Havah, I am not going to do that now.”

I went from irritation to seething anger. “I remember a time when you harkened to my suggestions and desires because you saw the reason in them.”

“Oh, indeed, as I harkened to your hand when you fed me whatever you would?”

Anger, hot and molten, shot up through my veins. “As though you did not share the same mind! Will you ever admit that you, too, wanted it, or will you claim always that you were too weak to hold your own with your woman?”

He struck me then. So fast—and so unexpected—that I stumbled back. I was not stunned. I had known that if I spoke my mind I would incur his wrath, held ever more in check. That thought alone sent my anger racing like adrenaline, hot in my veins, again. “You strike the image of God! Is that not what you said to your son when he came to take his leave of you?”

“I was made in the image of the One!” he roared, his face dark, cords standing out against his neck.

“As was I!”

“You were made in my image, for me!”

“Oh, for you? Now here is the truth of your conceit! I once thought it poetic that you called me flesh of your flesh, but now we know it was only vanity! And were my children, formed of my body and the mystery of the One, were they formed in your image as well? Flesh of your flesh? Is it all about you, husband? Was Kayin, your firstborn, of your image as much as Hevel, or was he mine?”

“I do not know whose son he was. Are you certain that he was fathered by me?”

I flew at him, beating at him with my fists. “Who else would it have been, except for the child fathered only by God? He was God’s then and not yours!”

“Was he not the serpent’s, that you communed so well and secretly with?”

I opened my mouth but found no words. How should he bring up that dream of the serpent, dreamed by me even as Kayin took root in my belly? How many times had I wondered in the recesses of my mind, unlit by logic, whether it might indeed be a child fostered by that thing the serpent had been and became?

“A serpent indeed, this child of yours.” His lips curled back as he straightened. “And how much he has shown it, that he should kill the brother of my image. How appropriate, Havah.”

I gazed at him as one dead, eyes fixed, unseeing. Did I know this man at all? I recognized the form of his shoulder, his strong fingers, his eyes. How well I knew them. I felt tears falling from my eyes and hated them and myself for shedding them, but I mourned—mourned for the man I had known, as seemingly dead to me as Hevel. Because surely this was not him.

I wiped my lip where my tooth had cut it when he struck me. “I would say that the only serpent I see is you, but surely the serpent—as I—would not disown our actions as the bidding of another, even before God. No, it takes more courage to own the full brunt of one’s doing rather than pass it off like a namby child on his sister. Oh yes, I see that you will strike me again. Well, do it! And will that also be the doing of another upon you? Whose deception and fault will it be this time?”

He shook with the effort not to strike me as I stood there, braced for it, goading him. I had provoked it, knowingly, willingly, in ways that would not please the One and did not please me, truth be told, except in the release of that moment.

So I had his attention. “Your hatred of Kayin has infected your heart.”

He flinched. Good! I would strike the soft vital points as often as I might if only to know that he lived, that there was indeed a man inside him who might hurt as I hurt and grieve as I grieved. My eyes had overflowed more times than could be counted.

“Get away from me.” His voice was very low. He made to leave, and when I went after him borne upon my anger—I think I could have railed at him all day—he spun on his heel and said, his face in mine, “Get away. Do not speak to me. Your wiles have cost us all too much already. It is one thing that I should lose my place in paradise. But it is another that I should lose a son and our children a brother—not one, but two, for I do not expect ever to lay eyes on Kayin again. Let me alone.”

I watched him stalk away. I called out after him, though it cost me my dignity to do it for the tremor in my voice, for the hurt breaking now on the surface, for the fact that I wanted nothing more than for him to take me in his arms.

“This is all my doing? As though I had such power over the world! Would that you had always been alone then. You might have been happier, to hear you tell it. Or better, would that I had been fashioned first!”

He did not look back.

ADAM AND I HAD gone without speaking on many occasions. We had lain down with our anger as though it were our most staunch bedmate and risen in our silence. But our silences and our anger had been nothing compared to this. Those had been days of cracks and fast breaks, like pottery that has not been properly fired.

This was a simple seething, a simmering that went on as our hurt cooked down to a thick and concentrated broth.

He did not come back to the house but stayed in the smaller one built for Besek and Zeeva, who seemed to prefer their privacy. My children watched me with silent glances and sidelong looks but did not speak of it as night after night he took his rest there.

I recruited Lahat and Asa to work my vineyard. What was Adam to do—stop me? To forbid it? I would laugh at him. I would do as I pleased.

At night I missed only his body to curl against, if not his presence. How much resentment had piled between us! Without him there, I slept the sleep of the dead and dreamed, even, a little bit. I saw Kayin, his face dark and tanned by the wind in ways it had not been by the sun, standing upon a knoll, looking out at a flock of sheep and goats and another animal with a great humped back. In the distance I saw a tent, pegged into the ground. I heard the sound of young voices and saw the bright weavings of colors on the entryway, waving in the sun, and from somewhere, the sound of Renana, calling for boys to use the midden and not the back of the tent. In my dream I smiled. How many times had I said the same?

The next day as I went to the river to wash my arms and feet and face, I thought of them and smiled. And then my heart was swallowed up with such an ache that I doubled over with a groan. How I missed him! Even Renana, my exasperating daughter, so fiercely lovely and sharp-tongued. How I longed to see and set my hands upon the faces of these children, these unnamed ones I had seen only once, in passing, in the land of dreams.

But I told myself it was enough that Kayin lived and prospered and that his family grew as his flocks. I prayed to the One to carry my blessing on the easterly wind: upon his head, and his eyes, and his feet, and upon his children.

As I was walking back to the yard, I saw a form on a far hillock. I knew by the long braid, twined with colored threads, and the way she wrapped her mantle over her shoulder, that it was Lila. She faced out, toward the north. Was she thinking of Kayin? Did she wait for him? Did she speak to the One? I stood and watched her for several moments, afraid she would turn and see me—Lila, who noticed everything. But she did not.

How I admired my shrewd daughter, who waited on no man but her youngest brothers and bestowed the favor of her skill where she willed it and when she would. My lovely daughter, so staunch in her unwavering escape of this weft for the one she wove upon her pegs, instilled with mystery known only to her.

“SUFA!” IT WAS ONLY morning, and I could not take any more of her clay flute. Because it had at first put me in mind of Renana and her drums, I had encouraged her. But unlike her sister, the girl had no talent for it, and I could not abide it.

“But Mother, listen.” She pouted her pretty pout, her fingers poised over the holes. How like none of my children she was, my stormy girl, who blazed at her brothers when they trod too near her and tempted them back to kiss her when she held sweet cakes in her hand. She made a syrupy-sweet compote of figs and dates for Zeeva’s bread when there was no honey to be found and shared it with whomever she would as one of her favors. Small wonder she had a special habit of pitting one brother against the other. Already her legs were shapely and strong as a woman’s.

“Enough. I am having a headache from it.”

“Perhaps you’re pregnant again,.” she said, putting the flute in her pocket.

“She’s not pregnant,” Lila said.

Just then Zeeva’s youngest came shouting into the settlement. I was accustomed to alarm on a regular basis—one crisis or another—but there were hysterics in the girl’s voice.

“Matnan! Matnan! He’s gone into the river, and it washed him away!”

We stared at her for an elongated instant and then sprinted to the river. I ran and ran, Sufa at my heels. Lila had gone for help to search downriver, and now I realized how little sense it made for us all to go flying to the place where little Matnan had fallen in if he had washed very far already.

We ran downriver, shouting his name, the sound of my voice and Sufa’s hardly audible over the hammer of my heart. I could not lose another child, whether it be mine or the child of my child. I could not bear one more heartache. I was a vessel, filled full with sorrow, brimming over already.

For hours we searched, joining Lila and Zeeva farther downriver. Lahat and Adam and the children of Ashira waded out into the river calling and shouting for him. All day we searched, wandering farther and farther downriver, past idle eddies and fickle currents. It ran faster here than it had near our old settlement, and more than once Adam and Lahat lost their footing and were carried part of the way down. Each time, seeing that a grown man could barely keep his own in the current, Zeeva moaned and cried out, tearing at her hair and shouting anew.

As the day waned and Besek, in from the hills at last, came with his wolves at his heels, we were all of us worn and hungry and numb.

Finally, as twilight fell down like a veil over the day, a shout issued from the far bank where Besek had crossed some time ago. He cried out again, and I saw him get down in the reeds and slowly lift out a small, lifeless body.

Did I wail? Did I scream? I heard the keens and wild howls of Zeeva, even of Lila.

Besek had to travel upstream before he could find a place to cross, and we ran, searching desperately for a place slow and shallow enough to meet him. But even from here I could see the blue face and splayed limbs, the way they jittered, limp, as Besek shook him. I saw the expression on my son’s face, twisted, as he was finally, on shaking and exhausted legs, met by his father and brother.

We tried to breathe and slap and pinch and shake him to life. But life, once surrendered, cannot be regained. Somehow, during that time that was all one nightmarish mire to me, I stared at his small lifeless body and saw in him the same lifelessness I had seen in Hevel. I thought, So once the adam must have been and still the One breathed life into his lungs.

In my heart I offered every paltry thing I had within my possession if only the One would fill again the lungs of Zeeva’s child. The child of my boy. The child of my child. But what can one woman offer to God? Only tears and pain and fear and promises. I offered them all.

But his body lay still, his eyes open and turned toward the dark heavens.

ZEEVA TOOK AWAY MATNAN’S body and would not let anyone touch it for days as she washed it and sprinkled it with sweet herbs. Ashira, who had delivered him, was allowed at last to paint the ochre upon his hands. He had not lost his blood, but it was the only ritual we knew for the giving of one back to the soil.

For weeks Zeeva’s oven lay cold. For months afterward it produced only bitter and flat bread. Not until the next year, when her belly quickened, did she bake her sweet cakes again.

In all this time I had no comfort from Adam—nor did he receive any from me. We remained apart, each of us to our own grief, each of us to our own thoughts and questions and railings at God. If ever I needed proof that we could exist, one without the other, I had it now; we might as well have dwelt on two sides of the world.

Zeeva’s child came, wailing to life. She named him Goral for the lucky chance of his conception so soon after Matnan’s death and would not let him, even as a child, out of her sight. Her house was full of the sound of children, for it seemed she bore one nearly every other year after that.

But one day every spring her oven lay cold and her hearth without fire.

28

Every time a child slipped from the womb into Ashira’s hands, I looked into its eyes and wondered if just the moment before they had gazed upon God. But if they had any memory of the One, it was gone by the time they could speak. Sufa’s eldest claimed that she had memories of being held in Ashira’s arms after her birth, but that is the closest thing to a memory of the womb I ever heard.

Ashira eventually took young Lahat—not so young anymore—to her home. With his one eye he seemed to see in her all that was lovely, and she had in him a mate who had known the brother she loved.

In those years there seemed to be noise everywhere, of music and industry and bartering by the edge of the settlement. Adam and my eldest expanded the fields and the storehouse. Children quarreled and took ill. Sometimes they injured themselves in falls and fights, breaking limbs and taking fever. Kanit, who had once nearly died this way, became the most practiced medicine woman of our growing family, combining her knowledge of herbs with her mother’s midwifery. All others sought her for remedies for everything from toothache to infertility to bad dreams.

Eventually Adam and I came together—in silence. And this aging body surprised me yet as I continued to bear children. How easy was my burden now. They slipped from the womb with nary a pause. How much I had labored in those early days! And where once I fed and clothed and disciplined each of them, it was the hands and breasts of others—in my house and in the houses of my daughters—that did so now, so that all of their sisters and nieces were like mothers, and all of their brothers and nephews were like fathers.

But life, between such stunning moments, held fewer and fewer revelations. And as the years went on, I began to despair that the One had indeed forgotten us, though we had by then built a high altar upon which we made our sacrifices. Every year Adam drained the blood of the animal and flayed it. Every year I saw in my mind Kayin throwing himself on the pile of his offering. Ashira, who always fell silent for a day after the offering, seemed to retreat a little less each time—especially after Lahat came to live with her. Lila, who spoke less and less through the years, went off on her own in those days, and no one could find her. She always came back, and when the little ones would ask where she had been, she would say only that she was listening to the wind. And perhaps because that was no stunning story, they would not ask any more except what the wind had said. To which she replied that it was a secret meant for her alone.

Most of the time life was a chain of monotony spent contemplating those things that could not be reconciled. So many lengths of woolen thread went into thinking through where the adam and I had begun to lose each other. So many new pots went into remembering everything I had ever said to Kayin to lay the burden of our hopes upon his shoulders. So many meals went into remembering each of Hevel’s gestures and expressions.

In all this time the One was silent.

Within twenty more years our settlement grew so large that something had to be done. Disease had begun to spread too easily among us; already that spring several children had lain ill with fever. Lahat, with his mind for engineering, designed the systems of streets and even sewers, transforming a rough collection of dwellings into a city. But his improvements had no effect on another disease that had broken out among us: strife.

Sufa had created her own troubles years prior, turning two brothers by Zeeva against each other in vying for her. When she announced she was pregnant, the brothers met by the river, and a fight broke out. With visions of Hevel and Kayin before us, we appealed to them to stop, calling enough men to the scene to force them to, if necessary. At last they ended their feud, and the older brother eventually took one of his sisters to wife.

Sufa rejected the other brother after that and never said which of them had fathered her baby. The next spring, Ashira delivered her a daughter, which she named Tzukit. Later that year our settlement divided. Ten families left.

Two years later my son Mazor and one of the eldest sons of Zeeva and Besek came to our house to sit before the adam and me, to say that they were leaving, going south to find lands of their own where they might begin their own settlement. They had traveled there and found fertile land and, farther south, a great marsh where there were many fish.

We watched them go with their wives and somber hearts. Sufa hid her face from Mazor as he left and never spoke his name again. Later she bore a son to Asa, her brother, who came to live in her house the rest of her days.

Eight or nine years after that, word came for the first time of Kayin. A small party of only four people—two men and their women—came to us, having found us by the clay tablet left in the old settlement so long before. Several of Kayin’s offspring, quarreling—was it a universal affliction?—had left the wandering way of life and gone south and settled there, they said, repairing the old house and plowing again the fields that had lain fallow. Kayin himself was well, they said, and his flocks flourished.

I did not ask about the mark on his head, and they did not speak of it.

My children’s children were increased by two more generations before we heard further news of my son. This time a large party of Kayin’s children and their children came to visit us.

“I am Hanokh, the son of Kayin,” the eldest one said. And indeed, I saw both of his parents in his face. He motioned to the others in turn, saying, “This is my sister, Sivan, and my brother, Dedan, and his sister, Atalya.”

They had kept to the same way, I noticed, of calling one’s sister-wife one’s “sister,” when indeed they were all siblings.

“And this is my son, Irad.” He indicated the third man with them. They came with children, too, though what I remember most is my fascination with the variance of their coloring, of their eyes and the shapes of their heads. I had looked at the birds once and remarked at the great diversity of God. But never had I thought to see such variety in my own brood.

When I learned that Hanokh was Kayin’s eldest son—there were sixteen siblings by now and forty-two children of these children—I asked that he tell me everything that he remembered of his early life and of his mother in those days, up to this day. He spoke of the flocks that numbered in the thousands, as Kayin and his sons were capable herdsmen, and of the chants of Renana, which had become the anthem of his entire clan.

Hanokh said that when he returned he would settle in a place along an eastern river and put to use all of the great store of Kayin’s knowledge of cultivating to build a great settlement. He did not seem to carry the curse of his father, and he meant to settle in a place where life might be easier than the wandering life of Nod.

“We lost two children to the fever last summer. Father mourned for months, eating little and crying out in his sleep with the name of his brother.” He rubbed his face. I saw the grizzled look of his father in him and the bowlike lips—and the shape of Renana’s eyes. “I never wish to report the death of a young one to him or any sibling again.”

They stayed with us for several months, making music with their strange instruments around the fire. And in their songs and chants, I heard Renana and the drums she once played. Such a gift she had passed on to them! Within their music I heard the sound of cicadas and frogs and of locusts and the running of water from mountain to river.

That night as we danced by the fire, I danced the dance of the mother pushing forth her children into the world and of the woman who knows the generosity of her hips and nourishment of her breasts. I danced the dance of the orchard and vineyard and of wheat swaying on the stem. I danced the dance of the one who places her hopes in one place, like a bird laying her egg in a high nest, who later finds it crushed. I danced the dance of Kayin, wandering like the sands, and of Hevel, whom I missed that night with such intensity that, when at last I was out of breath, I went away from the fire and the music and the dancers and mothers holding sleeping children and wept against a willow. I wept for my children and, most ashamedly, for myself.

Something had changed; I knew now I would no longer give back my life to have it all as it was, as it had been before. My children were too many, and I knew no other way of life. The valley I craved seemed little more than a dream that I did not even remember most nights.

There Adam found me. He said nothing but caught me up in his arms. He kissed my tears, and there were so many that he kissed me for what seemed forever—on my eyes and face and cheeks and lips and neck. They had run like water from the high abyss to wend around the foothills. And then he lay down and spread out his tunic beneath us.

“I can still taste it,” he said, hoarse with emotion. “In you.”

“What is that, my brother, my love?”

“The valley. I taste the earth of it in you, the soil that was once my father and mother, sweet as it was, pungent and rich as it was. I can taste it still, in you.”

We came together, if not truly one, as we had once been, as much one as we had ever been since. When we lay exhausted, I knew that I had conceived. Where my last pregnancies had been realized belatedly and acknowledged by me with a sigh, I covered my belly and gazed up at my crown and wished for the smile of God. Nothing more. I asked not for that return, nor the reconciliation for which I had lived my entire life—as one on a journey thinks always of his destination so that he misses the land around him.

I asked only for blessing. It would be enough.

AS HANOKH PREPARED TO leave, I said to him, “Tell Kayin your father that his mother is bearing him a brother.” Though I did not say it, I knew he would understand that this was the one to stand in the place, after so many years, of Hevel. Hanokh smiled and bowed his head. And then I drew him aside to speak to him privately.

Never once had he mentioned anything of a mountain gate or a valley. I had listened without asking, thinking it a better sign if he might mention it without my asking, but now he was about to leave, and I could wait no longer.

“Have you ever gone west of Nod, my son?”

“Of course, Mother, we have roamed in many directions. Father was most anxious that we should do this very thing. He seemed to search as one does for magical waters.”

If only you knew.

“Did you go through the mountain pass, toward the great mount that yields the waters of the abyss?”

He frowned. “We went through many passes, though I do not know this abyss you speak of. We have passed, however, between the rivers to the place where their source is one. But beyond that we have not gone. Thunder and great lightning roll off the distant mount in ill omens, and we dare not pass.”

My skin prickled. “Was there . . . a pillar of gold light, as though two giants with wings pointing to the heavens stood by the gate?” I lowered my voice, knowing I sounded as fanciful as one of my storyteller daughters entertaining her audience of children.

His brow wrinkled. “On occasion the lightning comes down, and sometimes it is not white but green or even the uncanny color of fire. Is this what you speak of?”

“Yes.” Hope sprang to life in my heart. “But you saw nothing else in that place? Not even the valley through the pass?”

“No, Mother. The storm was great and the lightning too bright. And now that you mention it, I am not sure there is a pass at all but only a river that flows from that place with nowhere to pass on either side of it. Are you sure there is a valley beyond it?”

“No.” Not anymore.

I bid him farewell that day with troubled heart. But had he said that they had found the valley, had walked in its waters and eaten from the trees, I would have been filled with jealousy and envy of my own grandson and would have begrudged him every joy he might have found there.

No. We must be the ones who find it, if it exists at all. We are the ones who kept and ruined and fled it. We must be the ones who return—if it is not by now just the frayed fancy of an aging woman.

The next year Shet was born. I called him “replacement” because I had been weeping for Hevel when Adam came to me. Where I had given many of my later children to their siblings and nieces to suckle for me, I nursed this one myself, much, I know, to the jealousy of some of his older brothers and sisters. And though he had Hevel’s same gusto for life, he looked nothing like the brother he had never known—though he caused just as much trouble.

Adam held him with a rare light in his eye, with much the same look I had seen on his face at the birth of our first sons. He began to come in earlier from work to see his son and to make him new spears and slings and tell him stories. I felt in those days almost as though we revisited those early years—except for the audience of growing numbers around us.

I had not thought it possible, but I am happy again.

Although we came back together in those days, Adam did not mention the One. Shet heard the stories of our sacrifice and of my dreams of the beginning of the world from Ashira’s songs or his siblings or, sometimes, even from me. But I didn’t really have the heart to speak of it. My faith then was a tender little flame, carefully shielded in the last refuge of my heart, and I would not expose it even to my son, for I had begun to worry that it might go out.

When Shet was four, Zeeva called for a bad omen. She had seen a sign in the entrails of a goat. That spring, the river flooded its banks, seeping into the fields and the settlement, ruining houses and crops and stores. The mosquitoes became unbearable, laying eggs in the still ponds and puddles of water that seemed to be everywhere, and soon many within the settlement fell ill. Three children died that year.

Several years—nearly ten—later, traders came down from the north, and with their goods of copper and cloth brought word that Kayin and Hanokh had indeed founded a settlement, the fields of which were rich.

“Tell me, my son, of your forefather, my son Kayin,” I said when Adam was gone from the house.

“He does not stay long near the settlement when he comes,” the man said, explaining that his flocks were too large and his tents too full not to be a strain. The man himself was young, perhaps only forty, and his hair was lovely, falling in ripples to his shoulders. He traveled with a brother that I could not guess for older or younger. Both of them had dark eyes and full lips and reminded me so very much of Kayin that I wanted to hold them to my breast and tell them stories of those first days.

They were careful when they spoke of him, and I sensed that there was something else, a strange unease. I knew then that they must all know the mark of Hevel upon him. And indeed, when they presented me with gifts, there were among them metal objects that bore the mark of the circle and the line. I wept when I saw it, and though the men saw, they said nothing.

Traders brought goods from the city of Hanokh almost by the year. Strange metal knives and tools, and news. Irad was a great-father by then of more than twenty children, and his city flourished.

That night I gazed at the stars and tried to picture so many people at once. I could not. I grieved that I had not laid eyes on each of them and told Adam that one day we must go to this settlement that was by then a city.

A strange phenomenon happened in those years, so gradually that it was a long time and several generations before I noticed it. Even then, Adam had to point it out to me.

“Do you see the bird symbol on each of their pots?” he said one day as we perused the wares of a new party of traders from Hanokh. “Does it put you in mind of the hawk you once drew for Asa as a symbol of God?”

Indeed, now that I saw it, the resemblance was clear. When I asked one of the men about it, he smiled and said that indeed, this was the hawk spirit that is the messenger of God. But by the next time, many years later, when I heard it being explained to a young girl, it was no longer the messenger but the god itself. At that I had raged, calling it falsehood and the teller a liar and an idiot and several more things, breaking every pot and other image of it I could find.

They would not stop me, the Lady of the Rib, the Great Mother, as I was called, but several merchants never returned.

The greatest shock of all came the first time I saw the insignia of an all-too-familiar creature on a finely made pot. It was winged like a bird but had four talons and a tail. And then I realized that the rendering of its feathers were not feathers at all but scales.

“Where have you come by this image?” I pointed with a trembling finger.

“It is the symbol with which our master marks his pots.”

I remembered for the first time in more than a century the image that Lahat had drawn into the dirt. He had been the master of the potters’ trade for decades now, spawning new masters in turn in other settlements. I turned away from it, repulsed, feeling that it mocked me, feeling, too, betrayed by my son.

I should tell him. We should tell him. We should tell them all. They do not know the thing they celebrate. But even now we had not spoken of it, letting them know only that we came from another place and that we had erred in myriad ways all the journey of our lives along the river, trying to please the One with our offerings and deeds, waiting for the day that all would be made right.

Between the two of us, Adam and me, I no longer knew if we could bear to tell them the truth.

29

Generations passed. Young fingers that were once meddling, curious, and questing, chastised and slapped for their mischief, became the hands upon the plow and the loom and the grindstone, holding back new and younger hands from trouble. Eventually, those hands became the hands that rested on knees and upon chests in repose near the fire, corded and sunspeckled and traced with veins.

I became increasingly enamored of art, and it began to spring up with great abundance. There had been little luxury for it in the beginning, when Adam had carved his pendants and we had made our marks in the clay and upon the dirt, when Lila had woven her patterns into her textiles, and Renana had recited her poetry and chants and Ashira her songs. But now there came a great swell of creativity in music, and great innovation in its instruments: drums of rawhide, lyres, and flutes and rattles. Every time traders came in with their musicians, especially from the northern city of Hanokh, the music was more brilliant than before, bringing to mind more vivid images of the land from which it came and of the sky and even the insects.

How I loved these nights, for though I might still run as swiftly as any young person, nearly, I found my legs better suited in these years to dancing. After food and enough sweet wine, I inevitably found myself on my feet. Sometimes I saw Adam, watching me from across the fire, and knew he found me—despite everything—lovely yet.

But not as much as before. One of those years I paused to consider myself in a bronze mirror—a gift from the city of Hanokh. I touched my face, searching the image of the crone for the girl that had once peered from the water at me. How lovely you are, daughter of God and man, the serpent of half-truths had said. He had told truly, as he had told truly that we would not die—not that very day, at least.

I did not like the way girls preened of late. They wore ornaments of bone and leather and metal, putting beads in their hair and stringing them sometimes through their ears and around their ankles. They painted their hands and mouths and necks as one adorns a jar. They put tattoos on their foreheads and feet and breasts.

I owned by now many ornaments, and my storehouse of adornments grew by the season from every visitor to come to our settlement. I wore them when it suited me, but it was not for them that people gazed at me with admiration yet. My hair was still black, not having sprouted the gray that Lila’s had. My skin was firm, for I healed better and faster still than many of my children. My legs were strong, my hips were fine. Other parts of me . . . well.

ONE SPRINT, WHEN I was nearly six hundred years—there had been a time when I had not even known to count so high—there came word of killings. A feuding clan had invaded another and wiped them out nearly to the man and child.

Adam declared that we would not eat, that we would fast as one mourning, for three days.

He did not need to declare it for me; I had no appetite. Soon after, he gathered to him Lahat and Asa and Besek, saying he was going to talk to these southern clans.

“Do not go!” I clung to him. “They are not in their right minds.”

“They will not harm me. They wouldn’t dare, lest every hand remaining on the earth turn upon them in return.”

“Is that the only thing that would stay them, this fear of death visited upon them?”

“It is the only language they understand.”

“Let me go with you then.”

But he shook his head. “You are needed here.”

Again, he would leave me as he had in those early days! But I heard the unspoken half of that statement: In case anything happens to me. And I knew there was real danger.

“Give them this message,” I said. “Wisdom does not seek to shape the future with frail, human hands.”

How we should know.

He was gone for almost a year. But I knew he was well and hale. I would have known it if he were not.

SOMETIME AFTER ADAM’S RETURN—after the clan had committed themselves to fasting and ascetic life in atonement, strange news came from the north. Irad’s great-grandson had taken two wives. And while I had seen it done that one woman gave another to her husband, or that a man—or woman, in Sufa’s case—should leave one love and go to another, these were the days where ceremony and social rite had begun to surround the forming of these unions.

More and more couples sought the advice and blessing of the patriarch and matriarch of the city. More and more couples—and their parents and grandparents and siblings, sometimes—came to my house to talk of union. I tried my best to talk about it as though I were an expert. But what had I ever known of this kind of thing? There had been no ceremony for us. We had done all that we could to destroy our union!

But these children knew none of that. What was there to bind them but flimsy declarations and the idea of obligation as one family portioned off a piece of the harvest or the flock? What did these ninnies know of anything, sitting here with their wide eyes, beaming at me as though the sun shone through the tops of their heads and out their rear ends? Forty and sometimes thirty years old—barely out of puberty—I thought their families were probably just glad to get them gone from the house, or for another set of hands to help.

But I blessed them, thinking all the while of my own children—they were all my own children—hoping that they might seek more happiness in this life than a full belly and children underfoot. What a great surprise it would be to them when the day of redemption came.

But that day did not come. There was no apparent seed, and the only serpent I saw was the one that formed the potter’s mark. Among my children there were indeed leaders, both male and female, and their triumphs were victories in art and innovation.

But their lows were also among the most grievous and depraved of humanity.

IN ALL THOSE YEARS I carried a void within me. I longed in silence for my son. By night I dreamed of Kayin, with his dark hair and slender hands, calloused from the plough and the hoe.

“I want to go to Hanokh,” I said one day to Adam. I did not need to say that I wanted to be near my son and the children of my son or that I longed to lay eyes upon Renana.

It had been too long.

Shall I tell you of that journey, of the sounds of that city, of the mud dwellings and the altar in the temple? Of how I did not recognize their god as my own? Or how I met, at last, the artisan that was Tuval-Kayin, who was renowned by then for his work in metals—for their beauty and practicality . . . and later for their deadliness?

Upon that journey we visited the settlement that we had once called our own. It overflowed now with houses—more than eighty. We stayed there for a little while on our way to Hanokh and escaped to the field where Hevel lay. It was grown over now, as though there rested no body there at all, and I supposed by now that there did not, that he had become, as his father once—only earth. But there was a marker near it, and gifts and tokens. One among them caught my eye: a metal depiction of a sling marked with a stone in flight.

When we arrived in Hanokh and said our names, the man at the gate sent a boy running into the city. Soon after, an aged woman came flying down the street, her skirts lifted like a girl’s though her face was worn with the scores of the sun and of the wind and of every hardship and struggle.

“Mother! Father!” She threw herself into my arms, and I wept with her, not for the distance or the years, though I mourned those, too, but because of my pride in her.

“Where is Kayin?” I asked when she brought us into one of the houses and Hanokh, whom I had not seen for many years, and Irad came to join us. A cloud passed over her eyes. So she knows something of strife.

“He is gone again, and who knows when he will return. I said I would not go with him this time. I am weary. How weary I am. How my bones ache. I am no longer young—forgive me, Mother, for you are preserved among women, but how harsh the years have been upon me. No, I wish to be near my children and hear the sounds of the city rather than the goats and the herders who keep them, and the dreary sound, always, of the wind. It never seems to bother Kayin. He stands as one who listens, as though he would hear news or a word.”

I thought of Lila, standing on the hill, waiting and listening.

“We had a famine here last year, and several children and even nursing mothers died. Now there are young ones without mothers and mothers without children. At least one might comfort the other. But now, enough of that. Speak to me of Lahat and Besek and Ashira and the new little ones.”

We talked through the day. At some point Hanokh took Adam off to the fields, and my daughter and I talked through the afternoon in the fine house, taking our meal, brought to us by some young child or another I did not know.

We stayed for nearly a year, seeing everything, the fields in the countryside, the shops. I wanted, in particular, to meet Tuval-Kayin.

He lowered his head when I came in with his mother. “Great-great-mother, I beg you, bless me.” I laid my hands upon his head, and he gifted me with bracelets and beads and a wealth of other items.

The other reason for our extended stay was that I hoped in time Kayin would return to the city. But it might be months or years before anyone saw him, and in all the time of our stay, his flocks were never sighted on the high hills. Just before our departure Renana sent out runners to see if they could spy him anywhere, but they came back shaking their heads.

During that time the high altar in the middle of the city burned often with sacrifice. I could hear music on those occasions, and more than once I said, “Let us go and observe the sacrifice.”

But Renana would stay us. “No! Let us go out to the perfume shops today, for you have seen many a sacrifice,” or, “Let us go see the master weavers.”

Only later did Adam tell me that their rites were strange, that they called upon the One by names unknown to us.

By the time we left, I had met as many of the town’s occupants as I possibly could. And I did the thing I despised in other mothers: I took stock of the younger men without women of their own and spoke beamingly of my great-great-daughters.

Yes, I know. But with age comes the option not to explain ourselves and to change our minds.

When we left, I longed to go west, felt it like the pull of water falling from the mountain.

But I said nothing. There were too many of us. And I think a part of me feared that we might not find the way, which would only confirm the thing I feared most: that the valley no longer existed.

So we traveled south again, from the foothills to the plain along the river, keeping our code of silence, the adam and I.

We held hands like children. We walked away from our camp at night and made love by whatever water we could find.

When we returned home, Adam went out to the fields, moving no less well and working no less long than the youngest men there. On the days that I took him meals, I still thought that of all the men who worked and gathered together in the adamite city, there was no one like him. More than once I saw the gaze of young girls stray to him and wanted to tell them, This is the kind of man you seek out. Not one of those pampered babies that women raise now.

My chest swelled and I felt pride again, as I had not for so many years, at being his companion in the inheritance of all that was this world.

But still I looked for the seed among my children. I could not help but wonder when I saw a young boy dashing across the settlement, Could that be him? But there was no restoration in sight.

That year, in my age, I conceived a child. I had not had a child for many years and wondered if I would bring it to healthy term or cast it forth as I had seen some of the younger girls do. Their wombs seemed to me at times defective, unable to keep children within them. There were more and more ills in those days—ugly and unsightly marks that marred the skin, a man with a spine that curved in his aging, young men with weak eyes who could not hunt well because of it. Already there were women among my children who had ceased to bear, who had lost the courses that marked their fertility like waves on an ocean.

As the child grew fast and strong in my womb and my belly swelled, other women looked at me with amazement and envy.

Heh. Let them look.

30

Little stirred me to shock in those days—not the crowding or corruption of the world, where Kayin’s act no longer stood distinct among grievous acts, or the wrong that had evolved into new, complex, and vibrant hues.

I was shocked instead by beauty. By kindness. By love. They were far more rare.

Sometime after my six hundredth year, a girl came to serve me. She must have been, I think, my great-great-great-daughter or some such. Her name was Naarit. She hung her head and did not look me in the eye. She winced if I said that I wanted for something, as though I expected her to know my thoughts without my having spoken them. There was once a time for that, but that day was done.

One day as she waited upon me and upon Lila, I said, “Are you happy, child? Are you happy with your mate?”

She gave me a look like that of a caged animal. I had seen it before in a woman who had fended off the blows of her husband’s anger until one day he died and pestered her no more. No one knew how the poison got into his food.

There were no bruises upon this girl, but one day in passing her house—I meant to call on her to give her a copper bracelet, thinking it might raise her spirits—I heard a man shout, “Don’t be such a baby! Why can’t you stop asking so many questions? You act so unhappy, skulking about. Everyone talks about you and how difficult you are. As though your life is so bad. Why do I keep you?”

I went inside that house and put the bracelet on her arm.

“Mother!” He bowed nearly to the ground.

“I have heard what you said, and if she is such a burden to you, then let me have your castoff.”

“No, no, Mother, please, take anything, the best that I have!”

“I am.”

I took her from there forever, and Naarit lived with Lila and me after that.

The following spring I went into labor. Ashira was there and Kanit with her. But as the night wore on, longer than any other labor of mine, her mouth, less full now than it once was, set in a line.

I was exhausted. This child would rob me of all of my remaining vitality. After six more hours I was certain it would rob me of my life. Such a thing had happened more than once in our city just in the last five years.

I sweated and pushed. The lamp wavered before me, and I thought I saw the faces of many within the tent.

“Who are you? What do you want here?” But I spoke only to apparitions, faces I did not know.

Through a daze I saw Ashira sit back on her heels and wipe bloody forearms across her face.

The next time I opened my eyes, Adam was there. He held my hand and whispered, “Do not leave me, Isha. Let the child go if he must. Let him return to the One to be held in the arms of Hevel. But do not leave me.”

The strange faces—sometimes human, sometimes too lovely and terrible at once to have been born of anything so base as earth—wavered before me for hours. At last strong arms pulled me into a limp-limbed squat and the voices of my daughter and daughter’s daughter rose in urgent chorus for me to bear down. With a mighty rend, my pelvis tore open. The child heaved onto the floor, and I fell forward.

When I opened my eyes, the faces were gone.

IT WAS THREE WEEKS before I could leave my bed, before my hips could support me again.

Elied was put out to nurse with one of the women who had milk enough for both our children; mine had not come in, and I was too weak to suckle him even if it had. Naarit, whose cooking was improving, fed me the broth of a lamb.

On the twentieth day, I said, “Let me hold my son.”

I was 601 years old. He was my thirty-third son and my fifty-sixth child. My courses did not come back after that.

My breasts are plums withered on the branch, my belly an empty wineskin. I am the husk, left only now to dry in the sun.

THE FOLLOWING YEAR WE were hart hit. The locusts returned. The next spring, rot settled in our stores and seed. Children weaned early grew sickly and died. That was the season when Shet’s eldest son, Enosh, became ill, and we feared for his life. Shet came to me one night, throwing himself into my lap as though he were a child, sobbing.

“What shall I do? How can one invoke the mercy of the One—where is the One in all of this?”

I wanted to ask the same. “I don’t know, my son.” I stroked back his hair from his face.

In a whisper, he asked, “How can the One give such strife, such hurt as this, such suffering? Why? To what end?”

“Do you think suffering is the doing of the One? Have you listened to none of our teachings? All good comes from the One. The strife comes from our own hearts. Do you think the One created murder? Do you think the One gives anything other than perfection? A human hand ruined it!”

“But how could that be? And who would have done something so foolish as that?”

I looked down at my hands. “Someday, my son, you will have answers.”

“But there are too many things that I would know that make no sense. And too many things that are not fair. I cannot lose Enosh, my firstborn!”

I sighed. “You must make your appeal to the One. Go make a sacrifice on the altar and surrender everything—even your son—to the One’s keeping.”

“And what if,” he whispered, his eyes red, “the One should take him?”

“The mind of man cannot know the fairness of God. I cannot tell you anything to soothe you—only that the One knows what the One will do. And if you try to force his hand, it will bring you only to disaster.”

He did as I said, lying prostrate for two days before the altar. On the third day, Enosh woke and called for his father and for food. Shet arose, his face shining.

My heart leapt upon seeing it—could it be? But I did not ask. If it was to be, if this was the seed promised by the One, it would come about in the fullness of time. Still, I hoped it was soon. The adam already moved more slowly than before. And we had lost so many.

The next fall, fever went round the settlement again. I was relieved for Shet that Enosh remained strong. But Ashira caught it and lay in bed for weeks, her daughter going out to tend the mothers in delivery. Ashira recovered and began her practice again but never was as healthy or as strong after that. The next winter Ashira caught another fever, this time in her lungs, and died.

Lahat closed his one eye in grief, then disappeared after she was buried. We all worried for him. He was always a slight man, a thinker more than ever a hunter or farmer. But he returned three days later, his beard grizzled, his feet caked and split, his hands scraped, and his hair torn. And when he had washed himself and put on a clean tunic, he did not speak of it again. He never took another woman but dedicated himself to the engineering of canals and the making of ovens. He never made another pot, either, which was just as well with me.

That season, as the first storms of spring threatened rain, Lila stood up abruptly from her loom. She pulled the pegs from the frame with a violent tearing and threw them, one by one, out the door. Elied, playing underfoot, started to cry, but Lila did not bother to shush him.

Nor did she ever weave again.

At dawn I might find her standing near the river. Sometimes someone would sight her upon a hill. But no one asked her what she looked for. And my heart mourned because I knew for whom she waited.

How strange is the One, who hears the cry of our hearts always but hearkens to it sometimes not at all and other times in ways we cannot fathom.

A YEAR LATER A small band of travelers came from the north. They carried with them the strange hawk insignia of their god, offensive to me. But most important, they bore the message I had hoped, it seemed, all my life to hear: Kayin was coming.

I did not know my heart could take such flight. And even the adam’s step—stiffer of late—fell more lightly than I had seen it in decades. We gave orders for an area to be cleared for his people and animals. They were not coming in their great numbers, but we made room for them all and prepared for a feast. Choice lambs were marked for sacrifice, and others for food. Gone were the days of eating no flesh. The flesh that had sustained us in drought and famine had never left our diets but only fattened us now in times of plenty.

I wondered if Kayin would find it strange that the men were in the field and with the hunt and flocks, the women weaving and cooking. The trophies belonged these days to the men, who struck their deals without a woman’s opinion, even trading among themselves for wives.

One day, shortly before Kayin and his clan arrived, I overheard a woman telling a story near the well.

“The first brother was haughty and proud. And the second brother lovely and humble. And the first brother did not want to give to the One his due—that is, the flesh of a lamb, as the One must have flesh to live. Instead, he was proud and came boasting to the altar of his own work, but the younger one brought the lamb. So the One favored the younger one and let him hear his voice. And he was a great saint, and his brother was jealous—”

I intentionally passed between her and the well.

“Mother!” She bowed her head.

“Kayin wanted only approval. And Hevel was no saint,” I said. “Only a man.”

For days I lived in a heightened state, waiting for one of the young men Adam had sent to say they had been sighted—that my son was coming.

On the day the young man came shouting, I thought my heart would burst. As families gathered on the edge of the settlement, I was filled with anticipation and anxiety—and forgiveness and love and hope.

At my side stood the adam, plainly aware of nothing but the approaching figures on the horizon. An old man walked at their head, a walking stick in his hand.

At sight of him, Adam cried out and started walking quickly toward them. But before he had gotten twenty paces, he broke into a run. His breath was ragged in his chest, his voice coming out in panting gasps. I know, because I found my legs churning beneath me as I broke into a run at his side. As we got closer, the figure at the front—wind-tanned with wild hair and beard—hesitated, almost stopped, and then hurried forward several steps before being engulfed by his father’s arms.

I had not heard such sobs, such sounds from Adam, in centuries. He clasped his firstborn, arms wound around his neck, and I thought he might lift him up off the ground. I did not know if he laughed or cried as I gained them, hands pressed to my mouth as I watched them together.

Surely the dwelling-house of God is like this.

At last Adam released him, and Kayin lifted his head. It was grizzled, his face worn into crags like a rock cliff by the wind, every hardship, every heartache, every long day and lonely year of his solitude etched into his skin. His hands were no longer the slender and beautiful hands of the man I knew but gnarled and bent. His clothes were rich, but it was as finery hung on the leathery bark of a tree.

Anyone seeing them together would have thought Kayin the father and Adam the son. I cried not only in my joy at seeing him but in my sorrow for the obvious burden of his life upon him.

Upon seeing me, his expression softened, some of the lines lessening around his eyes as he clasped my hands and dropped to his knees before me.

“Mother.”

I am the waterfall that gushes without reserve, pouring out in one torrent her love and life and sorrow without cease.

We walked back, the three of us, my arm around my son, Adam removing his fine cloak—the last woven by Lila—to lay it over his shoulders. I did not think I could be happier. I did not think it possible—except had Hevel been with us.

Kayin’s head was wrapped in such a way that the mark was covered on his forehead, but even so when I looked at him, I felt a twinge of shame. Seeing me flinch, he looked away.

I resolved never to let him see my reaction again. Of course by then it was too late.

We came back into the settlement surrounded by a multitude. As we arrived at the house, we were met by a shadow, silent and slender, a white streak in her hair. She stood in the doorway. I remembered anew the day that Kayin had come to our settlement and Ashira had spat at him and Lila had not looked up from her pegs. But now her pegs were gone, her art left to the hands of others. As we drew nearer, she came out of the house, walking slowly.

How lovely she is, still, I thought.

Her hair was down past her knees and unbound, free from the plaits in which she normally kept it. She wore a simple garment of her own design, and there was none on the earth to rival it. Her feet were bare. How slowly she came out to stand before her brother, to take in the lines upon his face, the dark tanning of his skin, the weariness in his eyes.

“Brother.” Her voice was still silken—I had nearly forgotten, we had heard it so seldom of late. Behind her Naarit held Elied by the hand.

“Lila,” Kayin said, his voice as dry as the desert.

“Come in and refresh yourself after your long journey.”

I knew she did not mean his travels here. She took his arm and led him inside, as young Elied watched with wide eyes.

I considered those who had followed us to our house. I saw how their eyes followed him, but they stared as much for the fact that Kayin himself was our eldest son as for the legend about him. Here was the dark firstborn, the son of strife. And now he was a grizzled old man.

I forgot my responsibilities, leaving them on the shoulders of others, jealously hoarding time with my son. When we sat alone by the river to eat the cakes and cheese Naarit had prepared for us, there were no accusations from Adam. There was only contentment—made richer because it was fleeting—such as we had not known in years.

I took him back by way of the burial ground, which was filling slowly with the bodies of my children taken by famine or accident or strife. There lay the body of Ashira. I did not look as he fell down over it. I could not bear the sound of his cries, which he made no effort to mute. “Forgive me, my sister! Forgive me!”

He came back late that night, haggard, ate nothing, and lay down to sleep.

The next day he told us that Renana stayed in her home, preferring never to leave it. I sensed relief and resignation on Kayin’s part.

It is not easy, being a woman. He knows it from my life but not from hers.

Kayin’s children were wealthy, all of them, not only in animals but in crops and tools and ornament, so much so that artisans in the city might stay at their wheel or loom or forge and trade their work for bread.

“But there is strife where there are so many,” Kayin said. “And there are outlaws who are punished and sometimes killed. Many of them run off before they can come to justice—south, to live and hide in the marshes.”

How surreal. How strange to hear of discord, of brokenness, from this one.

Asa came in just then and came to sit with us. Kayin turned to him. “How are your flocks, Brother?”

I saw the younger man’s chest lift a little, though his eyes were wide upon Kayin before him.

After that, Lila came to the door of the house, and Kayin got up and excused himself to go out with her.

31

Kayin had brought only a small band with him, some twelve of the more than forty that usually traveled with him. In their manner, in the way they moved, I saw the staunch limbs of those who stand against the wind and then move with it. Who live and grab at happiness with abandon and desperation, seeking pleasure in whatever form it may come. They were watched, curiously, sometimes with slatted eyes and sometimes with envy, by everyone. Some in our city held back their children or ordered them to go inside, thinking we couldn’t hear them whenever we walked by. Others bowed to him and called him “Brother” or “Father.” As strange as it was to hear this of him, I supposed it was true.

At night Kayin’s clan shared their music and wine. For the first time in years, I drank, no longer so austere. I was an old woman, and I would make my excuses only to God. That night I moved, borne on the flames of the fire. I was young again, invigorated by drink and feasting and music but borne aloft by the presence of my son, first of my womb, the embodiment of Adam and I as one. I danced the dance of the girl who ran in the orchard. I danced the dance of the mother who cradles the lifeless body of her son in her arms.

“Mother?” Strong arms—stronger than I had thought them—enveloped me, and a grizzled head bent to whisper. “Mother? Are you all right? You are weeping.”

“I am well. I am well. I am borne down by the sorrows—but also the joys—of too many years. I am happy to see you, my son, before I die.”

“Don’t talk so! You will live forever.”

“No, my son, I will not,” I said gently, touching his cheek. “Nor would I wish to.”

Not like this.

WE GAVE A SACRIFICE on the altar, and Kayin, though he stood reverently by, would take no part in the ritual at all. His companions did likewise, until the fire came and digested the lamb. When they went away, I saw in their eyes the wonder of what they had seen.

Had they no idea of this worship of the God of their fathers?

There was a woman among them, a storyteller, and I could tell by the way she spoke and moved that she was revered for this art and that it was the reason for her placement among Kayin’s immediate companions. Their stories were not the same as any I had heard before, but one night and one story in particular set my heart beating at a quick trip: a tale of mountain gates, with a river like a vein that flowed between them, the waters rising out of the volcanic abyss. Beside the river lived elemental gods—fire, storm, lightning, and earthquake—which protected the gate and kept all men at bay.

I knew these were not gods but the guardians of the valley, sent by the One.

“What is this place that your storyteller speaks of,” I asked Kayin, drawing him aside.

“It is only a legend, Mother.”

“As are you, and yet here you stand.”

“Yes, but men have laid eyes upon me.”

“And surely someone has laid eyes upon the gates she speaks of.”

“Do you believe in the gods of thunder and earthquake and lightning, Mother? You, who heard the voice of the One as surely as I once heard it?” Bitterness crept into his eyes, and I saw the same look that he had given once to his father. “And yes, they have laid eyes on me. I see the way they fear me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“They do. Even Father fears me a little bit. He was always jealous of your love for me and of my longing for you.”

“Stop this.”

“Even now, Mother?” he sighed. “And so we will make pleasant conversation, and I will tell you about the exploits of my great-great-sons instead, though many of them are lawless—lawless as only the sons of Kayin can be—and others are brilliant and genius artists. Shall we talk of that?”

“Do not mock me. Oh, Son, do not let us talk like this!” I lay my arm around him. “Only tell me, because I must know, of this mountain pass.”

He spoke gently then. “I have roamed every bit of the land north of here, to the mountains until they are impassable, and east to the sea. Did you know how blue the ocean is, Mother? But I suppose you have seen it in your dreams, as you told me long ago. I have roamed as far west as the desert, and there are many passes. And I remembered your stories, and I have looked long—so long!—for this land you speak of, until I came to think that it might only be a legend after all, something that does not exist, if it ever did, in this world.”

“It does exist!” But even as I said it, I wondered.

“Very well, then, if you say. But I have not found your valley. And the mountains to the north—there is always thunder and often earthquakes, and there is lightning like fire.”

Just then Lila appeared on silent feet. How gentle—and grateful—were his eyes upon her. I went away, leaving them alone, my heart unsettled.

Less than a month after Kayin’s arrival, he began to fidget when he was sitting and to sit for shorter periods of time. He paced and went away to the river often.

I found myself trying to distract him, bringing new relatives that he hadn’t met yet or showing him gifts from the city of Hanokh, the likes of which he had surely seen before.

Out of the same desperation to keep him, if only for a few more days, his father took him to the wall to talk about the restructuring of it, for it needed to be expanded. The next day Kayin took Elied with him to the pasture, and I thought it might stay his wanderlust, but that night he fell silent before my hearth. The embers glowed orange upon his face, casting shadows under his eyes.

“In the morning, Mother, I must go.”

I held still. “If you must, Son.”

Very softly: “I must.”

I fell down to my knees beside him. “But why? What is it that compels you to go rather than stay? Only three more days. At least that, if you cannot more.”

He shook his grizzled head and said roughly, “I am chased by ghosts. By specters of the past and by shame. My only relief is to move. I wonder if I might be mad—I saw a madman once at the gate of Hanokh, talking to himself and batting at the air, muttering about serpents, of all things—”

I blinked.

“And I wonder that I am not the same as that man. Besides, I see the way that everyone looks at me, and though I have long ceased caring, it wearies me. The mark—it burns, Mother. It burns, and only the air can relieve me of it, but I dare not uncover it before strangers. I cannot bear to see their faces, the way they cringe back in horror, as I have seen so many times. Even when a man has raised his arm against me to strike me, and another his spear to kill me for a murderer and to keep me from his settlement when I would have had only water from the well, I saw the way they fell back when I pulled off my covering, and covered their own heads as though burned.”

My heart ached for him. I would have taken the burden of the mark from him and taken it gladly. I would have taken the guilt of his murder, even, had I been able, if only to give him a day’s relief. Barring that, I thought for the first time that it might have been a mercy after all had the One not given it to him. At least then he need not suffer.

The next day Kayin came for our blessing. How readily we gave it. Lila was at his side, in her sturdiest sandals. Her pegs lay in the house, abandoned.

“Blessed be your feet, though they carry you from me,” I said, through tears. Though I was glad for her, I mourned for myself.

We walked them to the edge of the settlement. Though we stood together, advancing no farther as they walked toward the horizon, my heart ran after them. I knew that the spirit of the adam had already gone on with them, though he stood rooted to my side.

I thought I should be grateful for the children surrounding me, of Asa and Shet and Elied. They are the children of this life. Of my older age. But Kayin and Lila were the children of my first life.

I heard, when the traders came a year later, that Renana welcomed her sister. But less than a month later she threw herself from the city wall. She had been unwell, they said, and I thought only, in the wild grief of my heart, that something, an evil spirit, had surely taken her. No normal person would do such a thing. I wailed and beat my breasts and cried for my children.

It is not right, it is not natural, that any parent should survive her children.

THE YEARS PASSED. I relived my every moment with Kayin. Sometimes I thought of Lila, too. Perhaps now, in her old age, she would have her rest—rest in the land of Nod.

I hoped, in the vanity of my heart, that I would see them again. Perhaps next year we will journey to Hanokh and send ahead runners months in advance, so that Kayin might stay near. But the year fled by, filled with rumors of violence.

One day a group came from the north to tell me that Kayin had died. Lila, they said, mourned for him until his body was laid in the earth. After that, she went out from the city and never came back. I think she must have gone looking for the spirit of her brother. Perhaps she found him again.

Or perhaps she walks, as I once walked, with the One, her body the fabric now of the soil and the trees, interwoven with last year’s leaves.

I do not recognize this world. I am the seed, uprooted from another garden. A tree of that place, planted in foreign soil, the bough of heaven that withers in earthly mud.

Peace came for a while after that. For nearly ten years I did not hear of any violence or killing. The fields were rich and the animals fecund.

Perhaps now the One will restore us, I thought one day. Perhaps now the One remembers. I have cast enough seed, at least, for him to choose from, certainly!

I wondered sometimes that we were never lonely before, but we were not. There was the wind through the grass and trees, the call of animals and insects. But in the days of my age there were voices—of children and the aged, raised in anger or gossip or argument. There were songs of women and of the workers in the field and fishermen at the river. Everywhere there was sound.

Surrounded as we were by our multitudes of descendants, we took pains to be alone. The adam held to me as never before, cleaving in ways he had not in his youth. He held my hand and asked that I not leave him, and I did not except to call on my children. But even then I did not leave for long.

I was long past bearing, and I was relieved. I did not recognize the world, overrun with noise and the marks of thousands of feet, and I withdrew often to the comfort of my hearth.

ONE SPRING SHET CALLED the council together to say he’d had a vision. There would be a sacrifice, and, what was more, they would build a house for the giving of them. I was not sure how that would work when the sacred fire came, but who was I to question the One? Nothing had made sense to me yet.

As for Shet, himself, he shunned the work of the artist and wore only simple robes, saying he would put his faith in God and not in the work of his hands. I thought that was all noble and good, though I wondered who would support this holiness. A man had to eat.

He was also determined to record the tales I told him. We spent many days sitting together as I talked about the first days of the world and about the garden. He brought a man to record it all on a clay tablet, an arduous process that went on for months.

“There is a portion of this tale that you do not know, that I must tell you,” I said one day.

He frowned. “How can that be when I have been reared on every tale?”

“Not every tale. But now let me tell you about the night of Kayin’s birth.”

That night I told Naarit to go, that Adam and I would take care of our own meal. I wanted to be alone with my husband. She smiled sidelong at me—little imp!—and slipped out as the stars appeared in the sky. They had not changed, except that a part of my crown dipped below the horizon. The wind rustled the trees, pressed against the door flap, and it was night again.

I lay down next to my husband, nuzzling him. His arms were thin, his back bent from the plow. He murmured in his sleep as my hands roamed all the familiar places. I had nearly died with my last child, more than three hundred years ago. Yet, had I my courses, I would have chanced it again.

“Wake, husband,” I whispered, the years husky on my tongue. “Let us make life.”

We settled for love instead.

FOR MANY NIGHTS NOW in a row, I dreamed I ran through the valley, the gazelle at my side. Everything was in motion: the gazelle, the water running alongside us, the wind rushing over the tops of the grasses and playing through the fruit trees.

“I have had a dream,” the adam said to me one morning. “We were in the garden. How sweet was the wind, and the water, and the grass, and the earth.” His eyes welled; he cried more easily than ever before. I comforted him and drew him to me.

Sometimes in those days our bodies failed us. We could not strive together as well as we once did. But we lay together in contented companionship as Naarit served us breakfast and our children attended us. We had no need to work any longer, only to go to the council sometimes, but even that we had given over to Shet. What a man he had become, with eighteen children of his own.

Well, that was his problem and his blessing.

As for me, I thought the world noisy. I did not know each face as once I did. One day near the river a young boy ran past me.

“Hevel?” I cried. “Hevel!” I stumbled after him, my heart pounding. His mother collected him and brought him to me, calling me “Great Mother.” She asked me for a blessing, telling me his name. I gave it, still stunned by the boy’s resemblance to my lost son.

How we age. I am the oak with many rings, the rock worn away by the wind. I am the leaf that cannot drop, but deadens on the bough.

I WAS OLD ENOUGH, and my children aged enough, that I could pass among them in another settlement or city and not be known. Adam was as wrinkled as the clay baked in the sun. But so was I. I was indignant of this, I told him, because I was not made of the clay but formed of living tissue and so should not bear these creases. I had to say it loudly, and when I did, he laughed and laughed.

Sometimes as Adam sat by the fire, he nodded his head, as though listening to something unheard. When I asked him once what he heard, he just looked at me as though waking from a nap, as a child looking up from singing a song to unseen others.

There came a day when I went walking and passed by a group of children. The older children were teaching the younger ones, and as I neared, I heard in their songs the word game the adam had used to teach me to speak. It was not exactly the same as he taught it to me, but I heard the pattern and the singsong and knew it.

I will tell Adam, I thought, not knowing whether it would bring a smile to his mouth or water to his eyes. But when I got home, the house was quiet, and there was Adam, lying in disarray after a terrible fall.

He declined steadily after that. When he moved upon his pallet, it was as one in pain. Soon he became so ill that he could no longer rise from his bed. I sent Naarit to fetch Shet. When he came, his face was white, and I knew he believed his father already dead.

“He lives, but not for long, I fear. Go, get your men and pack animals. Make a litter. We have to leave.”

“What is this? What can you mean?”

“He will not die here. God has not intended it. Go! Do as I have told you. And when we are going, I will tell you at last the thing you must know.”

When Shet and Naarit had gone, I leaned over the adam. “Fear not, husband. I have sworn to you that you will see the garden again. You will see it. I am taking you there.”

As tears trickled down his cheek, I knew my words were as much in defiance of the One as they were for Adam.

“Rest now, my love. Ish. Tomorrow, we will begin the journey to paradise.”

THAT NIGHT AS WE prepared to go and Adam lay weak upon his mat, the serpent returned.

ADAM

32

I run through the water toward the island. The water is cool against the hot backs of my knees. When I plunge in, I feel it running against the insides of my thighs, which are sticky as overripe fruit. Upon the opposite bank, I step up onto the grass, muscles rippling in my thighs and buttocks. I am strong, and there is no woman stronger because I am the only one.

The serpent waits beneath the tree. The fruit is dark and ripe, and I can smell it, sweet on the breeze. How beautiful it is, how delicious it smells!

How lovely you are, daughter of God and of man, the serpent says. But as he does, his wings fold back, creaking like the breaking of bones. When they unfold again, they are so great that they are taller than I. The serpent’s scales, so gold, smooth out until I can no longer detect them or even the iridescence upon them, so that they are like one sleek skin. Where once there were the taloned legs of a reptile, there are now lean legs and arms. Now I see that face, flattening and smoothing, and ah! How lovely it is! But it looks at me not with admiration or warmth but with contempt.

“You have forfeited your birthright. The realm you were meant to rule is mine.”

I realize as he says it that I stand not as one but two; I am Ish and Isha. I am the adam when he had no woman to delineate him male, and I am the woman taken from him.

“For a time. Only for a time. Deceiver!” I cry with a mighty voice.

“Unworthy! Base!” He roars, stretching himself to his full height now so that he towers over me. And now I see at his feet the skin of the serpent, the chrysalis he has shed as readily as a snake molting its skin.

“Accuser!” I cry, even as I feel my body begin to harden as though it were coated with clay and drying in the sun. I am no longer standing as one stands in the spirit but as a human, on shivering legs and unsteady feet. My skin has begun to wither on the bone and I cried aloud: “Adonai!”

Now I see in sharp detail the shrub beneath that tree, the one I ignored that day with its hard little berries, in favor of the more beautiful fruits of its sister. With new clarity I know that to eat from it will give life again to me—and the adam. But now as I mean to run to it, to snatch its fruit from beneath the great legs of that shining being, the serpent-that-is-not-the-serpent, I fall back.

Before my foot is an endless chasm. There, on the other side, comes the smell of flesh, and I scream. Before me is the form of Adah, flayed of her skin, the blood running from a horrible wound and filling the soil—the soil from which came Adam, and ultimately, I.

Now, as I lift my eyes from the soil, Adah is not Adah at all but a man, the adam, made new. As I stare, he plucks from the shrub the small fruit and holds it in his hand.

I WAKE WITH A cry so loud that it rouses the adam. I tell him to hush and rest some more as I make ready to travel.

What does it mean? Surely not that we should lay a man upon the altar in sacrifice!

Or could it be that after so many sacrifices, the adam is ready to be renewed, as he was meant to be?

I do not understand the One! The serpent lied after all; I have not become as God at all.

Shet comes with a sturdy litter and a group of five men ready to accompany us. They have loaded food and provisions and tent upon three donkeys and upon their own backs. Adam smiles as we lay him on the litter, as though we are taking a trip to Hanokh.

“I will go see Kayin,” he says.

I do not have the heart to say otherwise.

I dream every night of the garden—different dreams but always, always, of the garden. Sometimes the trees rustle in the breeze. Other nights I hear the coming of the One and my heart lifts. I say to Adam, “He comes!” Adam smiles, but his face is not turned toward that sound, but to me.

And I know that though we both longed for the One, Adam also longed always for me.

As we travel, I begin my story anew. This time I hold back nothing.

On the day that I tell Shet of the serpent, his eyes well.

“I knew,” he says. “I knew there must have been a time when all was well and all was perfect, as only God could have it.” The look on his face is ecstatic.

“Are you angry, my son? Can you forgive me?”

“I forgive you, Mother.” He smooths my hair back as though I were a girl.

On the seventh day, he asks where we are going.

“To fulfill a promise.” Even as I say it, I do not know which promise I mean: the One’s for us or mine to Adam.

We travel in hope. In faith. At night I lie down and send my pleas to heaven: If there is no time, then take me and give my remaining days to him. Let him not return to the soil without seeing your face one more time.

The One has been silent, but surely he cannot deny Adam, his first child, to whom he gave his strange and holy language before ever it was profaned by human use. Surely he cannot stay silent to him forever.

On the fourteenth day of our journey, Adam is feverish. He drifts in and out of consciousness. We bathe his forehead and put up the tent for him in the noon sun, and travel by night.

During the day I go off by myself. I cry to the One—not for my sake anymore but for the sake of my brother, my lover, my father.

How desperate these days! My heart quickens between hope and despair. We pass the old settlement without stopping; there is no time. I want to go to the grave of Hevel, but it is nothing now but a patch of earth.

“ARE YOU AFRAID, MOTHER?”

I do not know how to tell Shet that I have no fear of the death, for I have been dying it for nearly a millennium. I do not fear it because I return to the place my sons have gone. There, even in the earth, I will wait—surely the One is faithful. Surely the One is good.

I do not tell him that I wait for the birdsong to seem somehow more heavenly and ethereal at once, as though from a throat that never devoured anything so base as a worm. For the air to smell of apricot and peach, for the sound of a river fed by the waters of the abyss. I start at the stir of every breeze, at the whisper through the stunted grass on the plain. It cannot have been a lifetime ago that I heard the sound of the One that Is in the garden, that I waded in the reeds and wandered through the grove.

But there is no birdsong other than the warbler, and the air on this most stifling of days does not stir at all except with the buzzing of flies.

We are farther beyond the settlement than I have ever been since those first days. I search memory as one does a moldering basket in the back of the storehouse. I know this place—it is the one we came to after our flight from the valley. It is the place I first wished to die.

We stop along the river and water the animals, and my eyes have fastened upon a hill overlooking the bend ahead.

“Stay here a while,” I say, hurrying away from the river. There are signs now of refuse. We are not the only ones to have ever come this way. I make my way along the hillside, my eyes scanning every shape, every tree.

It is the narrowest scrape of path, just barely worn from use—another’s, not mine. There now, I see it—the mouth of the cave. My heart springs within my chest, though I would never have thought that I should rejoice to see this place. I run up the path, skittering on rocks, my feet less nimble than they once were, but briefly remembering what it was to be agile.

I enter the cool of the cave. The sound of the air, circling at the entrance, is like an old song. The sun, descending in the west, floods the back of the cave.

With my shadow upon the back wall, I think, It might be a day in that same year, and I might be coming here for the first time, not knowing how to cook food, never having touched meat, repelled by the skins that I wore, lying on the floor. There! That rock was my pillow as I waited to die.

Seized by impulse, I lie down.

No wonder I hoped to die. How had I ever abided any bed such as this? But I lay here three days until the adam’s snore roused me. I chuckle, but the sound catches in my throat. How strong was the man who had clung to me like a child, begging me not die. Now here I am, willing him to live only long enough for me to beg entrance, a miracle, anything, from God.

I sit up, seeing some small signs of use of this place—I think I recognize some of our hearth stones, scattered, burnt on one side. Brushing through the debris, I find some small pieces of flint. They are just splinters now. Suddenly, I wonder—

I crawl upon my hands and knees toward the back, feeling against the wall, beneath every crevice. I search like that for long moments, like a crazed woman, frantic.

I lift a smooth bit of polished stone.

The cord has rotted away, but there, unmistakably, is the figure of a woman—worn, but still perfect.

It is a sign. As we have come out this way, now we retrace our path. As one reentering the womb, we go back the way we have come.

Shet is looking for me by the time I return. I know my face is shining, beaming.

“Mother! Where were you? What is that, a cave there?”

“Come away, Son, and tonight I will show you a wonder.”

That night, as one of the men makes our simple meal, boiling gruel in a skin over the fire for the adam, I draw Shet near me and show him the thing in my hand.

“You cannot know what this is, but it is a miracle.” I tell him the story of the day that his father gave it to me, and Shet weeps upon hearing it.

“Then—then this comes from that place.”

“It does.”

“It is a real place.”

“Of course. It has always been a real place.”

The next day I swear I have found the place where we fell, exhausted, near the river. Here, we sprawled among the onagers and the deer. Where I searched for it painstakingly before, memory floods back as effortlessly as a second twin slipping from the womb.

We journey north. As we go, I point out familiar landmarks—there, that hill where I fell down and thought never to rise again. And here, where his father put down the lamb before hoisting it back onto his shoulders and running as thunder struck from the heavens again and again.

Today my heart hammers in excited staccato. “Very close now!” I shout, like one of my children. And then, “Very, very close—this is the mouth of the opening, the place the river came out! There, let us climb that hill and look down upon it.”

But upon cresting the hill, I am stunned. Below us, on this side of the river, is a small settlement.

“Who are they, Mother?” Shet asks.

“I don’t know.”

We climb down. As soon as the people of the settlement see us, they come out. I see the wariness in their posture. Shet goes ahead, and by the time we get there, slowed by the litter, they have come to help carry it.

“Great Mother!” the man who comes to meet us calls out. He wears a strange headdress with feathers on either side of it, like wings. Upon his tunic are many small metal disks, nearly like scales, hammered flat. “We are the descendants of Hanokh who have left the city to live in the wilderness. But here now lies the Great Father of us all. Let us give you shelter and comfort in the hour of his death.”

“No!” I say, desperate. “No, we have come to return to the valley.” He squints at me. His skin is dark and his nose slightly hooked. In this way he looks almost birdlike. Indeed, I suppose he bears some resemblance to Irad as I remember him. “We have come to return to the valley. Surely you have heard the tale. Well, I tell you it is true, and I have promised the adam on the promise of the One, the Great Creator, that I would return him.”

I feel tears in my eyes. “Can you tell us the way to the valley, where comes this river, and there are mountains, as these, on either side? Is this the pass leading to that valley, where there are fruit trees in bloom, and grapes on the vine, and pistachios that grow wild—” I catch my breath, remembering the first time I ate pistachios and how the adam had chuckled, drawing out the shells from my mouth.

The man, their chieftain, turns to point upriver with his staff. Now as he turns his face away, I see there, fastened against the back of his head, a mask crafted without eyes, so that they look out like something empty and soulless. My skin chills, then prickles. I stare, not hearing at first what he says. Perhaps Shet does, too, but the effect cannot be the same for him as for me. He has not seen the being I have seen, even so recently, in my dreams, gazing down at me with one face and up at God with another.

“Beyond this gate is another mountain pass, and the mountains are as you say. And there is water that flows down on either side—”

“From an abyss?”

“I do not know, lady. Because there is thunder and lightning and sometimes fire there, so we do not—”

“Yes! Yes! Please, as your Great Mother and one hand-fashioned by the One, I ask you to take us there at once!”

He frowns, his face drawing down. “There is no good passage into that place, Mother.”

“There must be. Either way, I must see it. Perhaps I can find it. I must see it with my own eyes.”

“Pilgrims come, even the great father Kayin, to find this place that you speak of, and they have all gone away disappointed. Only visions of fire have they seen but even then, only in dreams.”

I gasp. Yes, it might look like fire, the beings lit up like hot metal on either side, as the lightning sparked the sky and the thunder crashed overhead.

“Take us.”

“Will you not rest first?”

“We cannot. We dare not. Adam dies.”

We trudge along the river, and my senses are like the wolf’s, smelling everything, sharp as the hawk, seeing everything. Do I know this bend? Did I pass it in the terror of our flight beneath a blackened sky? Do I know this shape of the mountain from here, as I looked back to see it outlined in obsidian and lit up by fire?

We travel through the afternoon, never slowing. I know they are amazed at me, at my strength and sure-footedness, but in fact, a heaviness is in my chest. I feel it in moments when I stop, but then my heart buoys me up and I forget. I feel no pain. Not even the blisters on my feet.

Adam opens his eyes for a while, and Shet walks beside him, shielding him from the sun with an outstretched part of his mantle.

“Ah!” Adam says. “The sky, how blue!”

“Yes!” I say, coming to walk next to him. “Yes! as your eyes, my darling, my love. The first time I saw them, I thought they were the sky. Did I ever tell you that?”

He smiles at me, saying nothing, and a short time later he naps.

We pass the first gate near the settlement. It is a small settlement, perhaps only a hundred people. As we go, I ask the leader, whose name is Abarja, “What is this headdress you wear—what does it mean?”

“It is the Kerub, the winged creature like a man that we worship.”

I stare at him. “You know the winged men? The golden men?” Now I can see as the sun reflects upon the scales of his tunic how he gleams in the most crude representation of that resplendent creature. That terrible creature.

“No, lady, but we came here after a lone traveler told a tale of two great kerubs with shining wings and faces within the flame at this very place you seek to go. He said they forbade all entry, and anyone who looked upon them was struck with fear, and some even died of it.”

“Nonsense, or I would not stand before you.”

He gasps, eyes wide. “You have seen this creature?”

“Do not forget who I am or who Adam is! We were there at the beginning of the world, when you and your father and his father were not even a thought! I have seen this creature, and he is terrible, and you do wrong to worship him. He is a great being, and surely he is divine, but he is crafted by the most high, for I have seen him kneeling before the One that Is.”

“Then surely he is a god that kneels before the One, for who can see the Great One in the flesh and survive?”

“I can. And I tell you, you do not do well.”

He says little after that, the feathers of his headdress ruffling in the wind. But I do not care what he does. I care only that we find the entrance.

At last. At last.

We walk for hours. The sun is sinking by the time we come to the place. I recognize it from a great ways away, and now, as we draw closer, there is a distant rumble from the sky.

“There, Mother. You see the river that comes from that place? But you see how it takes up the entire gorge. There is nothing else.”

I cry out and rush forward and break into a run. No. No. There must be the garden. The One promised. All these years I have waited. All these years I have lived with the promise, clung to it.

But as I stagger forward, I see he is right. The river comes out of the pass, wide and moving quickly. As I run to its edge, I can see nothing beyond it but more water, joined by trickles and falls in some places down the mountain—yes, yes! They are the same! But where there had been a garden, there is only water now. The gorge is deep here. There are no beings on either side, as in my dream, though the mountains are the same.

The island is gone and the trees upon it—surely, they are in the river, buried, dead, and washed away. I recognize the slopes above the water—and there, where they opened up, the outcrop that had collapsed when we had fled, burying, crushing the wolf.

Thunder sounds from far away.

“Mother, we must stop,” Shet says. “Father—we are losing him.”

HE IS SLIPPING AWAY. And we have come, we have found the place—but it is no more. I run from the camp and scream as loudly as I can, “Adonai! Adonai!” Again and again, until I am hoarse with it. When I fall down, Shet is there, holding me up as I sob my grief—not for the death, for this we knew would come, but for my failure to give to Adam the thing I had promised.

We are banished. There is no hope. We die.

We die.

I wail and beat my breasts.

“Come now, Mother,” Shet says, “And recover yourself. He is slipping away. You must come. It is close.”

He supports me as we walk back, and I try to wipe my face with my hands.

“My husband,” I whisper. “I have failed you. It is no more.”

He squeezes my hand, faintly, weakly. “It is my wrong,” he says, his breath a rasp.

“How can you say that?”

“Had I not eaten, perhaps the One would have forgiven you to keep us together. Had I kept . . . Had I watched . . . better. Had I stopped you as I could have—”

“If not for the transgression, we would not know redemption.” But the words are hollow in my ears.

“Then I am glad . . .” His voice trails off, and his breath is slow to regain its strength. “But, Isha—” and now tears squeeze from his eyes—“I am sad to leave you here.”

I show him the pendant, close his thin fingers around it. His eyes widen, and a small sound escapes his lips as he clasps it.

“For your sake the world was created,” I whisper. “And together we filled it.” Imperfectly, with imperfect results, but the best we could.

I stay with him as Shet comes to receive his blessing. He kneels with his father’s hand upon his head. The others are kneeling, too, though Adam does not, I think, know or even see them.

And then we sit in silence, listening to the rise and fall of his chest. In the last moment, upon his last breath, his eyes widen and he gasps. His face is transformed by wonder.

And with that hope he dies.

33

He dies at the time of day that was once his favorite: the cool of the waning afternoon. I hold him in my arms, and the wind sighs through the trees. I think I hear the breath of the One, which never stops and never stills but continues forever.

I understand. And I know now the last look upon Adam’s face—it is the same beatific bliss that I once saw on Hevel’s and upon Shet’s. The same that I wore once, so long ago.

And so the One had not needed me. Having made his promise, he has carried it out in his own way. Somehow beyond the dark water, Adam has found his garden again.

Now here I am, an old woman—the oldest person on earth. And I wonder if anything matters as much as I thought. I used to think that every action, every lifting of the hand, every notion, sent ripples into the universe, unseen by us, to rise to invisible waves a world, a league away. If an act such as eating might reverse the entire fortune of the world, what might be scratching a nose? Or laying a kiss upon a forehead? Or spewing a curse, or turning a back?

Now mark this, my sons and my daughters: God does not work by the laws of this realm. He has created it and can create it anew. To the question of a lifetime I now know the answer, but it has taken a lifetime to learn it. Now, at last, I can say to the One, “I know. I understand.”

“But what of the seed and the promised strike to the serpent? You said you saw the serpent in a dream and that he lives,” Shet says. His eyes are red from weeping.

“I saw him in a dream, and I saw the adam restored, though it was not the same Adam. I do not know how it will be.” But I know that my dreams have always been true.

I know, too, that for every child I birthed and raised up and watched go his way, aching for his hurts and longing for his heart, so, too, has the One. As I never left them, neither has the One left me.

“Stay here awhile,” I say to my son. “I am going into the mountains for a time.”

“Let me come with you.”

“I would be alone with my husband.” He nods, thinking he understands. But I do not mean Adam.

I roam these precious hours and rest when I am weary. I think of the pendant, clasped in Adam’s hand. I have no more need for it or for any token. This is my last great gift, this time with the One. It is mine, as the days before my making belonged to the adam.

Adam once said to me, “You were always concerned more with things greater than the world, with the future and things not of this realm. Perhaps it is because I am taken from the earth that I am base.” But he was never base. He was crafted for the company of the divine.

They are looking for me, I know. Even from here I feel Shet’s grief and concern for me—and his mystery, too. He will be a great spiritual man someday, I think. Perhaps he is the seed. It no longer matters to me to know who—only to know that it is true.

It is enough.

They are looking for me. They have not seen the direction I have gone and will worry because it is dark. I must remember to tell them to bury Adam here, in Eden, nearest the place from which he came. How strange to walk away from him. Shet is bent over his body. I see it as though I stand there. But Adam is not there. He came before me to life. He goes before me to that other place. Hevel waits for him—and Kayin and Ashira and the others. All my children before and to come.

Even now I feel him near me as I make my way toward the mountain. Perhaps I will look down on the watery valley with the dawn. It is cold tonight; I should go back. But then I do not feel the chill so much.

At last I sit down and rest. I am suddenly weary—my legs, my feet, my heart, so very weary. And there is pain, pain in my chest, and I do not know—is it grief? I am struck with it and fall to the ground. But this is Adam’s earth. It is the body of my lover.

I once feared death but now consider it a grace not to be trapped in this life or this body forever, with its wrinkles and ravages and this searing pain, with its aging and heartbreak. That is what this is: heartbreak. It is the last sadness, the last failure—no, the last joy—that bursts the vessel in the end. I lie upon the ground, thinking, Yes, it is right that I should be buried here, where the crickets will make their same song, as they did after Hevel’s death, and Kayin’s, and as they do now. And the wind, which knows no other song, will rustle the trees with my name.

Havah.

The name is a breath before speaking and a fiery exhale.

I am the daughter of God and of man. God has not forgotten me. The One that Is has never been wrong. I have been naive, grabbing up with human hands what I could not trust the One to do. How I see it all now!

Sleep—I can see the earth as it was, the green without the fire, the lightning, the river flooding it. See? The waters have receded and meander along the valley floor, east to the plain. And my spirit runs along the river, knowing that place—and there is the island, and it is lovely, and there are gazelle, running along the bank. I feel the speed of them with me, the herd around me. Warmth on my face—faster, faster—did I ever run so fast before?

My legs are strong and tireless. I wear the stars, I am clothed in light. Watch me run. Watch me run!

There is laughter, and it is mine. My song rises to heaven. For I know tonight I will lie in Adam’s arms.

The voice comes, as it always has.

Wake!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If you ever want to feel humbled and grateful at once, I tell you: write a book.

You will find yourself the recipient of the kindness of strangers willing to help you for no other reason than they like what you write. Or they like you. Or maybe they feel a little bit sorry for you even. But mostly you will be overwhelmed by the generosity of faceless new friends, industry veterans, new fans, and helpful others willing to invest in your mission and in you.

You will also find yourself the object of much criticism and occasional attack. That’s why these people are so important.

Thank you to my incredible agent, Steve Laube, and hero editor, Karen Ball. Julie Gwinn, thank you for your amazing ideation. B&H, it is a privilege to know and work with you. Thank you also, Joyce Hart, Jeff Gerke, and Reagen Reed for making this book possible.

During the course of my research, I have managed to stymie pastors, frustrate academics, and incite head-scratching in general with my questions of literal and elaborate speculation. I owe thanks and apologies to: Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Joel Kaminsky of Smith College, Vern Steiner of the MIQRA Institute, Tim Johnson of New Covenant Church in Lincoln, and Warren Wiersbe. Thank you also to Luann Finke for sharing your love of horticulture with me.

Meredith Efken, you are a gift to me. I am so grateful for you, Brandilyn Collins, Eric Wilson, Anne Rice, Randy Ingermanson, John Olson, Stephen Parolini, Angie Breidenbach, Kacy Barnett-Gramckow, and Steph Whitson for your support through this project. A multitude of other names belong here—writer friends and others who encourage me.

Thank you to my sister, Dr. Amy Lee, my parents (all of them), long-suffering friends, Tim Hodges, the “Demon Dames,” the Beckenbachs, Chad Bring, Katie Weaver, and Kristin Nelson.

Reviewers and bloggers, and readers who take the time to write to me, I am grateful for you (yes, even if you hate my book, though I like the ones who like it just a little bit better).

Rick, I love our three-ring circus. Thank you for showing me the stars.

Most of all, first and last of all, great thanks to the One that Is, who says to me every day, “Wake!” and shows me what it is to truly live.

I’m sure I have forgotten many I should have mentioned. And so thank you to you, too—for your understanding on top of everything else.

NAME/MEANING LIST

Abarja: Most strenuous (Persian)

Adah: Adorned, beautiful

Adam: Man, human being

Adina: Noble, delicate, gentle

Adonai: Lord

Ari: Lion

Asa: To heal, or healer

Ashira: I will sing

Atalya: God is exalted

Besek: Lightning

Chalil: Flute

Dedan: Low ground

Dvash: Honey

Elied: My God is witness

Enosh: Man, human being, mankind

Gada: Bank of a river, shore

Goral: Fate, destiny

Hanokh: Initiated, dedicated, disciplined

Havah: Life

Hevel: Breath, vapor

Irad: Descent, descending

Ish: Man, male

Isha: Woman, female

Kanit: Songbird, reed warbler

Kayin: Begotten or acquired; some say Spear

Lahat: To burn, glow, blaze up, flame

Levia: Lioness, lioness of God

Lila: You are mine

Matnan: Present, gift

Mazor: Bandage, medicine

Naarit: Maiden, young woman

Nave: Dwelling place, pasture

Renana: Song, exultation, prayer, chant

Reut: Friendship, compansionship

Shet: Appointed

Sivan: Season, time

Sufa: Storm

Tuval-Kayin: Metalsmith

Tzukit: Singing bird, thrush

Yedod: Spark

Zeeva: Wolf

The majority of these came from The Complete Book of Hebrew Baby Names by Smadar Shir Sidi, HarperOne, 1989.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Like Demon: A Memoir, I wrote Havah to revisit ideas so ingrained in our pop and religious cultures as to be cliché.

The problem, though, was that I simply had no idea the scope of the project I had undertaken or what I was getting myself into. In planning this book’s writing, I found myself confronted by a growing list of questions. Among them:

• Where was Eden?

• What’s that about a talking snake? (Did other animals talk?)

• Was Adam tempted to eat the fruit before Eve’s creation?

• Where was Adam when Eve ate it?

• After eating it, did they know immediately that something had changed?

• How long were they there before the fateful fruit-eating day?

• When they fled, did they ever look back or attempt to return?

• How did they learn basic skills such as growing, harvesting, storing food, fire-making, and tool-making?

• What guidelines would they have for living in the absence of role models or law?

• Why did God not favor Cain’s sacrifice?

• Did Cain know he was killing Abel?

• What was Cain’s mark?

• Where was Nod?

• How many children did Adam and Eve have?

• Were Adam and Eve faithful to one another?

• What was the population of the earth at the time of Adam’s death?

• Did they ever see Cain again?

• What secrets remained to them alone, that they might not have passed on?

I think I single-handedly drove at least one pastor, two scholars, and one theologian crazy.

Three resources I found to be invaluable: Amy-Jill Levine’s Lectures on the Old Testament (The Teaching Company, 2001); Genesis, Robert Alter, ed. (Norton, 1996); and The Bible as It Was, James L. Kugel (Belknap, 1997).

Other sources that never left my desk: The Jewish Study Bible (Tanakh translation, Oxford University Press, 1999); Word Biblical Commentary: Vol. 1, Genesis 1–15, Gordon Wenham (Word, 1987); The Pentateuch as Narrative, John Sailhamer (Zondervan, 1992); The New International Commentary on the Old Testament: The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1–17, Victor Hamilton (Eerdmans, 1990).

References of additional interest: Biography: Adam and Eve (A&E Home Video, 2005); The Learning Channel’s In Search of Eden (2002); A&E’s Mysteries of the Bible: Cain and Abel (1996); A Biblical Case for an Old Earth by David Snoke (Baker, 2006); Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic texts, including The Apocalypse of Moses, The Book of Jubilees, The Books of Adam, and the Midrash.

In addition to the questions with which I plagued academic and theological thinkers alike (“If the no-death-before-the-fall thing applies to animals, wouldn’t the earth have been overpopulated if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the fruit?” “Uh, is it possible that the garden might have existed but in another dimension, and that’s why we can’t find it?”), were other questions of translation (Did God increase Eve’s pain in childbirth or her pregnancies? Was she Adam’s helper or his sustainer?), and even whether to include rain or meat-eating in the antediluvian world—a matter of significant theological importance to some.

If one assumes a literal garden and literal first couple, there are many things we simply cannot know.

There is also no way to determine the kind of language an adam might have spoken with his god. Some Midrashic sources assume it to be Hebrew, but the Torah was written in the vernacular of the Israelites. I did choose Hebrew names for my characters and nontransliterated names for the principals mentioned in Genesis, simply to help escape the felt-board Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. I wanted to examine them anew.

I used the adam for most of the book because, as Havah notes in the story, Adam was never properly named. Ha-Adam means merely “Man from the (red) earth,” or “earthling.” Additional sources reason that the adam became distinctly male (Ish) only after Isha was created from him. Dozens of great morsels like these—too many to list here—are within the footnotes of Alter’s Genesis and the other sources listed above.

“Eden,” or the “fertile plain,” was the place within which the garden was situated—but not the garden itself. I have refrained from openly basing the garden of this book on any one location, but found Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation by David Rohl (Arrow, 2000) and investigation into the theories of American archaeologist and Middle East specialist Juris Zarins fascinating. Regardless of the compelling nature of these and other theories, if one believes in a literal Eden, we can safely assume that we know more about the terrain of Mars than we do about Eden’s garden today.

It is my opinion that we have placed far too great a weight on English translations of the Scriptures. It is my personal belief that those of us who base our conduct on biblical principles even do ourselves and our relationships potential harm by not investigating the more complex subtleties of the Hebrew Scriptures. We also miss out on the delightful intricacies, poeticisms, and even puns of the text by going no deeper than our English versions.

Last, and from my heart, I think we are remiss if we do not examine the nature, meaning, and equality of genders as designed by God, recorded by the Genesis author, and influenced—for good or ill—by the world. Too many poorly applied translations of this story have fueled the subjugation and even abuse of women throughout history (and to this day). I do believe it is possible to seek the heart of God with the best of intentions and still grossly miss the mark—and injure ourselves or others in the process.

I was challenged and encouraged by Katherine Bushnell’s God’s Word to Women (Christians for Biblical Equality, 2003) and Susan Greiner’s article “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” (Bible Review, August 1999).

Whether you subscribe to a literal or figurative Eve, a young or old earth, one thing remains unchanging: the aspects of our nature formed in the image of the One—the propensity to love, to create, to feel pain and joy.

In that way we are all the same.

Selah.

To learn more about Tosca and her books, please visit www.toscalee.com.

For additional bonus material on Havah: The Story of Eve, go to: www.pureenjoyment.com.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Garden

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

The Fruit

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Exile

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Kayin

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Generations

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Adam

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Acknowledgments

Names/Meaning List

Author's Notes