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Naog himself, though, wasn't satisfied. It was Zawada who pointed
out that when the great flood came, the water wouldn't rise
gradually as it did in the river floods. "It'll be like the waves
against the shore, crashing with such force ... and these reed
shelters will never hold against such a wave."
For several years Naog experimented with logs until at last he had
the largest movable structure ever built by human hands. The raft
was as long as ever, but somewhat narrower. Rising from notches
between logs in the upper platform were sturdy vertical posts, and
these were bridged and roofed with wood. But instead of using logs
for the planking and the roofing, Naog and the captives who served
him split the logs carefully into planks, and these were smeared
inside and out with pitch, and then another wall and ceiling were
built inside, sandwiching the tar between them. People were amused
to see Naog's captives hoisting dripping baskets of water to the
roof of this giant seedboat and pouring them out onto it. "What,
does he think that if he waters these trees, they'll grow like
grass?" Naog heard them, but he cared not at all, for when they
spoke he was inside his boat, seeing that not a drop of water made
it inside.
The doorway was the hardest part, because it, too, had to be able to
be sealed against the flood. Many nights Naog lay awake worrying
about it before building this last and largest and tightest
seedboat. The answer came to him in a dream. It was a memory of the
little crabs that lived in the sand on the shore of the Heaving Sea.
They dug holes in the sand and then when the water washed over them,
their holes filled in above their heads, keeping out the water. Naog
awoke knowing that he must put the door in the roof of his seedboat,
and arrange a way to lash it from the inside.
"How will you see to lash it?" said Zawada. "There's no light
inside."
So Naog and his three captives learned to lash the door in place in
utter darkness.
When they tested it, water leaked through the edges of the door. The
solution was to smear more pitch, fresh pitch, around the edges of
the openingand lay the door into it so that when they lashed it the
seal was tight. It was very hard to open the door again after that,
but they got it open from the inside--and when they could see again
they found that not a drop of water had got inside. "No more
trials," said Naog.
Their work then was to gather seeds--and more than seeds this time.
Water, too. The seeds went into baskets with lids that were lashed
down, and the water went into many, many flasks. Naog and his
captives and their wives worked hard during every moment of daylight
to make the waterbags and seedbaskets and fill them. The Engu didn't
mind at all storing more and more of their grain in Naog's
boat--after all, it was ludicrously watertight, so that it was sure
to make it through the flood season in fine form. They didn't have
to believe in his nonsense about a god in the Heaving Sea that was
angry with the Derku people in order to recognize a good seedboat
when they saw it.
His boat was nearly full when word spread that a group of new
captives from the southeast were telling tales of a new river of
saltwater that had flowed into the Salty Sea from the direction of
the Heaving Sea. When Naog heard the news, he immediately climbed a
tree so he could look toward the southeast. "Don't be silly," they
said to him. "You can't see the Salty Shore from here, even if you
climb the tallest tree."
"I was looking for the flood," said Naog. "Don't you see that the
Heaving Sea must have broken through again, when a storm whipped the
water into madness. Then the storm subsided, and the sea stopped
flowing over the top. But the channel must be wider and longer and
deeper now. Next time it won't end when the storm ends. Next time it
will be the great flood."
"How do you know these things, Naog? You're a man like the rest of
us. Just because you're taller doesn't mean you can see the future."
"The god is angry," said Naog. "The true god, not this silly
crocodile god that you feed on human flesh." And now, in the urgency
of knowing the imminence of the flood, he said what he had said to
no one but Zawada. "Why do you think the true god is so angry with
us? Because of the crocodile! Because we feed human flesh to the
Dragon! The true god doesn't want offerings of human flesh. It's an
abomination. It's as forbidden as the forbidden fruit. The crocodile
god is not a god at all, it's just a wild animal, one that crawls on
its belly, and yet we bow down to it. We bow down to the enemy of
the true god!"
Hearing him say this made the people angry. Some were so furious
they wanted to feed him to the Great Derku at once, but Naog only
laughed at them. "If the Great Derku is such a wonderful god, let
HIM come and get me, instead of you taking me! But no, you don't
believe for a moment that he CAN do it. Yet the TRUE god had the
power to send me a castrated bull to ride, and a log to save me from
a flood, and trees to catch the lightning so it wouldn't strike me.
When has the Dragon ever had the power to do THAT?"
His ridicule of the Great Derku infuriated them, and violence might
have resulted, had Naog not had such physical presence, and had his
father not been a noble sacrifice to the Dragon. Over the next
weeks, though, it became clear that Naog was now regarded by all as
something between an enemy and a stranger. No one came to speak to
him, or to Zawada, either. Only Kormo continued to have contact with
the rest of the Derku people.
"They want me to leave you," she told him. "They want me to come
back to my family, because you are the enemy of the god."
"And will you go?" he said.
She fixed her sternest gaze on him. "You are my family now," she
said. "Even when you prefer this ugly woman to me, you are still my
husband."
Naog's mother came to him once, to warn him. "They have decided
tokill you. They're simply biding their time, waiting for the right
moment."
"Waiting for the courage to fight me, you mean," said Naog.
"Tell them that a madness came upon you, but it's over," she said.
"Tell them that it was the influence of this ugly foreign wife of
yours, and then they'll kill her and not you."
Naog didn't bother to answer her.
His mother burst into tears. "Was this what I bore you for? I named
you very well, Glogmeriss, my son of trouble and anguish!"
"Listen to me, Mother. The flood is coming. We may have very little
warning when it actually comes, very little time to get into my
seedboat. Stay near, and when you hear us calling--"
"I'm glad your father is dead rather than to see his firstborn son
so gone in madness."
"Tell all the others, too, Mother. I'll take as many into my
seedboat as will fit. But once the door in the roof is closed, I
can't open it again. Anyone who isn't inside when we close it will
never get inside, and they will die."
She burst into tears and left.
Not far from the seedboat was a high hill. As the rainy season
neared, Naog took to sending one of his servants to the top of the
hill several times a day, to watch toward the southeast. "What
should we look for?" they asked. "I don't know," he answered. "A new
river. A wall of water. A dark streak in the distance. It will be
something that you've never seen before."
The sky filled with clouds, dark and threatening. The heart of the
storm was to the south and east. Naog made sure that his wives and
children and the wives and children of his servants didn't stray far
from the seedboat. They freshened the water in the waterbags, to
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