“I’ve never been in your tent.” Sandy was confused. “I’ve only been out of Grandfather Lamech’s tent to work in the garden. —Oh. Maybe you mean my brother.”
She opened her eyes wide. Her lashes were long and dark and beautiful. “Your brother?”
“My twin brother,” Sandy said. “We do look very much alike.”
“You haven’t been staying in one of Noah’s tents?”
“No. That’s my brother Dennys.”
“Oh. Who are you, then?”
“I’m Sandy.”
“Well, then. Sandy, I’m very happy to meet you, and I’m glad you’re being nicely cared for.”
“What’s your name?” Sandy asked.
“I’m Tiglah. I’m Anah’s sister.”
“Anah?”
“Ham’s wife. Noah’s daughter-in-law. And I’m Mahlah’s friend. Do you know Mahlah?”
“No.”
“Mahlah is Noah’s daughter, the next-to-the-youngest.Yalith is the youngest. Mahlah is the beauty of that family. We’ve been giving Yalith and Oholibamah salves to help heal your brother. Oh, dear, this is confusing. I mean, I was really startled to find you here, instead of at Noah’s, and then you aren’t you at all, I mean you’re not the one who appeared in my father’s tent that night and who . . – Giants who look alike! And have no wings . . .”
Sandy sighed. “In our time and place we’re not anywhere near as tall as giants. We’re just tall, and we probably haven’t even finished growing.”
“You aren’t as white of skin as the nephilim, and you don’t have wings, but you’re as tall as they are. And as handsome, in a different sort of way.” She reached out and stroked his face. Then she bent closer, and he was half-fascinated, half-repelled by the strong odor of perspiration mingled with heavy perfume. She had rubbed something red onto her lips and over her cheekbones. It looked like the juice of some kind of berry. She bent closer and brushed her lips against his.
“Hey!” Sandy protested.
“You’re sweet, you know,” she said. “You’re really sweet. You’re young, aren’t you?”
Sandy said, stiffly, “We’re adolescents.”
“What’s that?”
“Teenagers.”
She shook her head. “The nephilim don’t have any age at all. They just are. But they’ve been around. There isn’t anything they don’t know.”
Sandy sighed. “Well, I’m not like the nephilim.”
Her lips touched his again, warm and fruit-smelling.
A bird’s scream cut across the sky. Above them was the shadow of two dark, flapping wings, then a thud, and a nailing of a long, ropy tail, as the griffin landed. Out of the beak came a negative squawk which was quite evidently “No, no, no.” And another squawk which sounded very like “Tiglah.”
Tiglah leaned against the trunk of a tall palm, stretching her arm up to reveal her figure to perfection. “Go away, griffin. I like this young giant, and I think he likes me.”
The griffin cried an eagle cry and pushed herself b-tween Tiglah and Sandy. Her beak opened. “Go, go, go.”
“No, no, no,” Tiglah mimicked. “He’s just fine right here with me to tend him. The other one that looks like him has Yalith and all those other women hovering over him. It’s only fair that he should have some female care, too, isn’t it. Sandy?”
Before he could answer, the griffin had gently but firmly pushed Tiglah toward the path.
“You’d better not hurt me!” she shouted indignantly. “Rofocale is my friend.”
From the griffin’s beak came a sound very much like a mosquito shrilling. Tiglah kicked at it, hitting just where eagle and lion joined. Her toenails were long and sharp. The lion’s tail flicked back and forth in irritation. Then the griffin pushed at Sandy, urging him toward the tent.
“I don’t want to go in yet.” Sandy looked at Tiglah’s smiling green eyes.
Tiglah’s voice was cajoling. “Wouldn’t you like to come with me to one of the bathhouses?”
“Bathhouses with water?” Sandy asked eagerly. Dirt from the garden was deep in his nails, and he could not clean it all off with sand.
“Water? Whatever for?” she asked.
“To bathe in.”
“Goodness no!” She sounded shocked. “What an unhealthy idea! We bathe by being rubbed with oil, and we have lovely perfumes that cover all the bad smells.” She giggled. “Whoever heard of bathing with water?”
Sandy felt himself being propelled toward the tent by the griffin. He was not sure how he felt about bathhouses with no water, and where perfume covered the bad smells, any more than he was sure about Tiglah. There was nobody remotely like her in school or in the village. She gave him a pleasurable prickly feeling. And, as she had pointed out, Dennys was being tended by Yalith.
The griffin pushed him into the tent.
Grandfather Lamech was waiting for him with a bowl of soup. He looked smaller than ever, and incredibly ancient. His hand, holding the bowl. shook slightly. Sandy looked at him anxiously.
He said, “Sand dear, you’re late.”
“Sorry. Grandfather Lamech. I was talking to a girl.”
Grandfather Lamech asked, suspiciously, “What girl?”
“Her name is Tiglah, and she’s the sister of one of Noah’s daughters-in-law.”
“Anah’s sister,” the old man said. “Be careful, Sand.”
“She’s beautiful,” Sandy said. “I mean, she is absolutely gorgeous.”
“That may be,” Grandfather Lamech said. “But it is not enough.”
Sandy thought the subject had better be changed. “I’m thirsty. The soup was great, Grandfather, but is there anything cool to drink? Water?”
The old man shook his head. “I can give you some fruit Juice. Water is too precious to waste it in drinking. You do not have wells where you come from?”
“Sure we do,” Sandy said. “There isn’t any town water where we live, and we have an artesian well.”
“And your water just keeps on coming?”
“Well, in the autumn when it hasn’t rained for a while, we aren’t allowed to take long showers, and our parents warn us not to flush the toilet every time we use it—“
“The what?”
“Sorry,” Sandy apologized. “I keep forgetting.” Grandfather Lamech was tidier about his body’s needs than many of the people on the pathways near his compound. Sandy had been requested courteously to go to a small grove which drained onto the desert, whenever he needed. But many people used no special place at all. When Sandy had wandered away from Grandfather Lamech’s, and onto the public path, he had seen that the streets were full of human dung as well as camel dung, goat dung, cow dung.
Perhaps the fierceness of the sun burned away things that would cause disease. He’d have to ask Dennys. Dennys knew more about sanitation and viruses and germs than Sandy did. Although, if he went into environmental law when he grew up, he’d have to learn about such things.
Grandfather Lamech gave him a bowl of still-unfermented grape juice, and Sandy drank it thirstily. He sniffed at the pot sitting in the banked embers of the fire- Grand-father Lamech cooked in the cool of the night, then set the pot in the ashes, where it kept comfortably warm.
“Smells good. Grandfather Lamech. What is it?”
“Pottage,” the old man said.
“What’s that?”
“Lentils, onions, and rice, well seasoned.”
“Hey, I’m going to have to tell my mother how to make that when I get home.” A brief wave of homesickness enveloped him as his mind’s eye saw the lab, and a casserole of pottage cooking over the Bunsen burner.
Higgaion, too, sniffed. He had his own bowl, and he ate the same food as Sandy and the old man.
Grandfather Lamech seemed daily more tottery. If Dennys came to the tent, would it be too much for him?
But now that Noah and Lamech were reconciled, Noah not only came to Lamech’s tent to talk, he brought great kettles of food, skins of wine, bunches of grapes. And the two men laughed and cried, and Noah hugged his father. “Oh, my father, you must live forever!”
And Lamech did not answer.
In the end, Dennys was to cross the oasis on a camel, a white camel with a long, supercilious nose, sneering rubbery lips, and extraordinary gentian eyes, shaded by long lashes.
Noah had cut his foot on a sharp stone, and Matred forbade him to accompany Dennys. “Now that you and your father are reconciled, do you want to spoil everything with an infected foot? It is healing well, but the public paths are full of filth. You are not to leave the tent until it has healed.”
“Women,” Noah grunted. But he obeyed Matred.
“Our Den will be all right,” she reassured him. “If he is in the care of the seraphim, he will reach Grandfather Lamech safely.”
Alarid, the seraph whose host was the pelican, and who brought water to the tent for Dennys; Alarid, who had warned him not to change anything, came with another seraph. This one had wings of pale blue, and eyes like moonstones, a deeper, brighter blue.
“So,” Alarid said to Dennys, not quite accusingly, “you have already made changes.”