Nod

By J. M. Stephen

“And Cain left the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” – Genesis 4:16

Nod is never mentioned again in the Bible. Where was it? Where did the people of Nod come from? What became of Cain? Now we have the story of Nod, as told through the eyes of Lailah, the first person to encounter Cain outside of his family. The story of Cain and Abel is brought alive, and the aftermath examined in a way never before told. But more than that we get the story of a primitive people becoming aware of the world around them.

About the author:
J.M. Stephen is an author and educator with a penchant for mythologies of all kinds. She loves the woods, secluded places, reading Virginia Woolf and being out in nature. She has taught writing, literature and publishing at The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and The New School. Her articles and short stories have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in New York City with her family. Her first novel, Into the Fairy Forest was published in 2019.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DX Varos Publishing
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781941072752

J. M. Stephen

J. M. Stephen is an author and educator with a penchant for mythologies and history. She loves the woods, secluded places, reading Virginia Woolf and being out in nature. She has taught writing, literature and publishing at The Gotham Writer's Workshop and The New School. Her articles and short stories have appeared in numerous publications. Aside from her young adult series, she is also the author of the adult biblical fantasy, Nod and four works of literary fiction. She now writes for newspaper The Deerfield Valley News in the southern Vermont town where she lives with her family.

Book preview

Nod

J. M. Stephen

Copyright © 2020, J. M. Stephen

Published by:

D. X. Varos, Ltd

7665 E. Eastman Ave. #B101

Denver, CO 80231

This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual figures past or present is purely coincidental.

Book cover design:

ISBN: 978-1-941072-74-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-941072-75-2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Table of Contents

ONE

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

One

We have always been here. We have always lived this way.

We were together, tightly compacted and then something shattered and went skipping about into so many fragments and it started. They call it time now. It fell from the great expanse that hovered above us like rain, like wind, it wasn’t and then it was and we move through it now. It started when they came, those who have walked with Giants, the first second ticking into the next and the next and the next and we have been forever bound by it. Before we delved into that soupy mix of time, before our hands ran through the thick sludge of matter, of dirt, of earth and ground, before thought, when we did not grow old and we did not grow, before we were, we were here. We have always been here. We have always lived this way. They were not of this world.

After the Fall they came, those who have walked with Giants.

Before, in the Long Away, there were tents made from animal skins and great pits where we tended the Heat. There were women who made tools out of twigs and dried leaves to carry berries and wood and men who fashioned sitting instruments from branches and bark. We ate from the animals Ram hunted in the woods to the east, (we always went east, there was nothing to the west. They created the west). We ate berries and leaves, drank water from the rains and the river. When they came they wanted more and so we made more.

A river runs through This Place, cold like alone in the middle of the night when the white rock hovers in the great black expanse above us. The land around it is wet and black, we wash our eating tools, we bathe further up the river.

We did not see them when they came but something plunged from a very high place. We heard sounds to the west but Ram said, There is no west. We don’t go there. And so whatever it was, when it started, we did not believe in it.

First it was the great expanse. The sky (he called it sky when he came and it was so) went dark gray like clay, it swooped over us and there was the Whiteness. The Whiteness blew over our heads as if it could touch us, a blanket of brightness and we saw faces, our faces, skin the color of earth, black hair, deep, peering eyes. We saw ourselves and knew what we were. We saw the thin, rocky world, trees in the distance, water beyond it, the river rushing through us. We did not know what it was, but we knew that it was, that it had always been and that we had used it. But it was also as if we had never seen the world before. The great expanse lit up like white heat and they came.

Nothing had ever happened before.

We had been outside when the rain started. Not a single, steady flow, but flashes and sound that sent us running from our tents to the great cave on higher ground. We did not know what had happened. We did not think that the gods were angered. There were no gods. There was no anger.

I was standing in a field, the trees in the distance. It was the first time I had seen the trees, how beautiful they were. It was the green, and I wanted to run to them as the great expanse lit up and the earth rumbled as if it too were living. There had never been light before and so we’d only lived and never really seen anything until the Fall. We could feel the land shake under our feet and I saw a man in the distance, strong and tall with long gray hair and I knew that he was Doriav, my father. I ran to him as his muscled arm pointed toward an enclosure in the rocks above us. I knew it was the cave as he channeled us in. There were so many of us. I could not count then, I did not know numbers, but there were more than single, more than two. We were a group, a crowd, a town; he would call us when he came. But he had not come yet, he who came from those who had walked with Giants. He who would come and name such things.

I knew to head for the cave, into a rush of dark and damp, into mud at my feet and bodies, all our slimy shoulders and legs pressed against each other as my father ushered us in. He came in last, after the final bodies, Gaia, followed by Ram, entered. Gaia carried a large floppy leaf over her head as Ram shielded her with his large muscled shoulder. My father walked calmly in shaking his great mane of white-gray hair and he was like an animal, one of those four-footed beasts I had seen in the tree-cover. He gave a mighty roar and we were silent.

Calm! Quiet! he shouted and they looked at him with vacant eyes, eyes that could not be happy or sad, that knew only lust and hunger and fear. We wait here, this will pass. We knew that he knew more and so we listened.

The White in the great expanse, Ram demanded. He did not ask, his voice was as large and as strong as his thick chest and massive shoulders, as a mane of dark, stringy hair hung in his face. It will hurt us. He picked up a rock from the floor of the cave and pounded it against the walls. The sound bounced and made a thin, flat noise.

There is no white, my father said, glancing at Havel (and I knew he was Havel, that Ram was Ram and Gaia, Gaia, like a dream when you just know because the dream tells you). Havel was my father’s brother’s son who had been like my brother since Havel’s parents had gone. People came and went in This Place. We knew not where they came from, where they went, we did not mourn them. It was not that we were cold or unfeeling, or maybe it is that we were the essence of cold and unfeeling, but so much so that it didn’t matter. We did not consider the dead. Dead. Another word he brought when he came to us.

Havel held a wooden bowl of leaves and berries in his hands as if he knew something no one else did. The expanse is changing, it is finding its place and when it is over we will go outside.

The land will have changed, it will stick to our feet, Ram argued. It will not be the land before.

Before, he said the word and we knew it. We felt it, tasting it on our tongues a cry ran through us and we knew what it was. Before. It was part of us, like our arms and legs. We knew all of this with one word. Before. I do not claim to know when time started but I knew when we felt it. With that single word. Before. Ram said it and it was true.

My father stepped down, shocked by this Before, this time. He shifted to the side, letting Havel stand guard at the way out. No one moved to go, light still came from the expanse, the rumbling still crashed and some of us closed our eyes, some of us held our hands over our ears as if to hear it, to see it, to simply sense it, was a crime.

When can we go back? I asked, knowing there was a ‘back’ to go to.

When the rain is over and the great expanse settles, Lailah, my father said, placing a gentle hand on my arm. He grasped me; I felt that human touch and closed my eyes. Lailah, he said my name as if he had always known it, as if it too was an inherent part of my being. He called me Lailah and it was so.

Where are we? What is this?

My father shook his head. I don’t know if we should ask such questions. He closed his eyes, thinking. And there was thought.

A shriek came first, piercing but dainty accompanied by a crash from inside the cave. It was not the great expanse, it was something else and we knew it, instinctively we recognized it. It was guttural and human, it had come from us and we turned to find Ram and Pivel locked together, Ram’s hands around Pivel’s neck and Gaia near him, looking away. Do not touch her! Ram cried, forcing Pivel against the rock. More men came, one reached for Pivel, the other for Ram, as still more of us stood between them. Hands were clenched, fists thrown, men tussled on the ground as women stood shrieking.

It took time before the scuffle ended and we who were not a part of it waited. The men stopped and only Ram and Pivel remained locked together, Pivel still against the rock of the cave. We did not see it then that his head was bleeding, but Havel came. He placed a hand on Ram’s arm and Havel was so delicate and Ram so hard, but Ram looked at Havel’s hand as if it had authority and he let Pivel go. He looked back at him and placed an arm around Gaia. Gaia stared at Ram, her long red hair, her lighter eyes, her paler skin a revelation to us all.

We stayed in the cave. We could feel the new creature, time, as it moved in front of our faces, like the gray stone of the walls, the dirt under us. The earth did not shake anymore and then the rain ceased slowly, first to a slight drizzle and then a fine mist and leaving the cave we walked outside into This Place.

And with those first steps words came and we knew that the smoldering rock and wood piles were Burnt Out Pits, we knew they made the Heat we would call the Hot Cracking Red (though he would come and call it fire). Wood, rock, tree, we knew it all and we knew not from where these ideas, these words, had come. The world had changed, that we knew the way a child knows not to touch the Heat, the way a four-footed animal cautions at a rushing river. We did not know yet that they had come, or what they’d brought with them. They were people from the west. They came blessed and cursed and with them they brought time and matter and something else. But, we did not know that then, we only knew that there had been a shift, a gentle turning and our world, whatever it was, before, in the Long Away, was gone.

I looked out and Havel stepped near me. Doriav, my father, had gone off with the rest to look around at this new, wet world of damp earth and darkened rock, of our fierce galloping river and wet grasslands. I looked out and I could see it. I did not know what it was, but it was there, a solid thing in the distance, something to the west as if the west had just been formed like the skins we made from animals to drape over our bodies, as if animals did not have skins until we made them.

After the storm, after the rain and the lights and the shaking of the earth, after blood had been shed, after the Fall, we went outside, we looked up and out and knew that Before, the Long Away, was gone and in its place was This.

We have always been here. We have always lived this way.

Two

We slept that night and awoke the next morning. Night and day were new things but we quickly accepted them. We knew not to question. The land was empty and hot, a parched, empty reddish brown I could have run the cut bone my father used to pierce our animal skins over it and made a pattern in the dust. Green flickered in the distance unreachable, but most of our land was sandy, brown, what might have been better called Earth (and so that is what he called it when he came).

We came out of the cave knowing our way of life was entirely new and yet it had always been. We knew how we lived, that we lived. It all appeared and we had words, water, fire, rock. They were words used for speaking one idea to another. We knew how to use rocks for our Burnt Out Pits. We wore animal skins and ate meat killed from the creatures in the east and berries and leaves picked near the woods farther from This Place. We did these things, we always had, as if they had been given to us, handed right over like Havel handed over the herbs and berries he used to help heal the sick.

We slept in tents made from animal skins, hollowed out and dried, seven or eight sewn together. There were large Burnt Out Pits every few feet, communal structures where we made and maintained the Heat mostly for food but sometimes it got cold and we huddled around them for warmth. There was wood. There was a river that raged in the middle of This Place, where a single tree, dead and rotting but sturdy enough to walk on, connected both sides.

There were trees in the east and I knew we had been to them, where else would we have gotten the wood? They stood a majestic distance away, but I could see the green and wondered why we did not live among them. It wasn’t until later that I realized we were afraid of the woods. They grew dark at night and strange sounds called from them; they were heavy and mysterious and when there was no light we got lost. After the Fall there was a story that one of us, we don’t know who since he didn’t have a name, went into those woods and never came out. Never came out…the idea terrified us. We preferred the open air. And then there was the river – the living water, water that did not sit stagnant in our hollow pools or fall dead from the great expanse. We needed the river for its water and its cleanness and so we lived among it even though we knew it had taken some of us away, we knew it could grow large and destroy all we had. Still, we needed the river and we lived among it, a tenuous relationship that terrified both sides.

As I walked toward the tent near the cave, where Doriav, my father, lived, Gaia emerged from the cave with a group of women. They surrounded her as she pulled a white jagged bone through her long red hair. I had not noticed before how her hair shined in the sun, falling against her tanned skin. The women looked up at her, one of them reached to touch her hair and Gaia shrieked at her to stand back. The women all looked the same, tall but not as tall as the men, slim, not muscled like Havel or Ram, they had big dark eyes and long dark hair running down their shoulders to their breasts, which were covered with the raw hides of animals. I assumed, since most of them, other than Gaia, looked the almost same, that I resembled one of them, though I could not recall ever seeing myself. The very idea was preposterous. I was a pair of eyes looking out. There was nothing in the other direction.

Ram approached the women dragging the raw body of an animal behind him. A boy followed lugging a large wooden club across the ground, it made a shallow indent in the earth as Ram swung the kill over his shoulder and roared at Gaia, who laughed, covered her face with her dainty hands, and looked longingly at him. The women surrounding her vanished, scattering like little birds as Ram approached. They scurried on delicate feet toward one tent or another as Ram roared once more and Gaia covered her face, feigning fright as he draped a giant’s arm around her.

I walked past such displays toward Havel kneeling near a Burnt Out Pit next to Pivel, who was lying back, his hand on his head. Havel looked up at me and back at the bowl of berries and herbs he was working with. Pivel’s eyes were closed as he moaned. I looked down at him and saw a gash of red.

What’s wrong? I asked Havel.

When he hit his head last night, in the fight with Ram, he was hurt. He bled last night and now the back of his head is bigger. He keeps falling asleep and I’m afraid that if he goes down he will not come back up, Havel said.

Should I get my father? I asked, knowing this was not what my father did. This was what Havel did, taking care of the body as my father took care of us.

No, I have herbs, they’ll make his head small again. I just need to keep him awake…. Havel’s mind drifted and I saw that he had more important things to deal with than my questions. Creak, he called a boy over, the same boy who had been carrying Ram’s club. Creak come here, watch this man. He called loudly since the boy was far away and I cringed. A booming voice on Ram was natural, even on a man such as my father, but Havel was not like Ram, he was not like my father. Havel was meant for other things and the sound of his voice was to be carefully conserved like water when it had not fallen from the great expanse for days. Havel knew his voice was special and he did not raise it unless something very urgent had happened.

Pivel moaned, the sound of his voice a trickle, water running into the earth and lying dead there. He turned his head and I saw the red gash, not like the one on his face, this was larger, thicker, bumpier, it was black and bright red, trickling down his neck. I shrieked and stepped back. How could Havel stand to treat such an injury?

The herbs will help him, Lailah, was all Havel said as he turned to Pivel when the boy approached. He will get well. He said it so simply that I could only believe him.

I walked away from Havel and toward the cave. I had to cross the river. The fish sometimes made us sick and so we were wary of them. We knew the river was not solid, we could not live on it, we could barely eat from it and though we needed its water, there was something dark, something powerful in it and so in all things pertaining to the river, we used caution.

I stepped across the fallen tree. It was thin and shaky; we lost the fallen trees frequently. The river swallowed them whole occasionally and so we did not bother to make anything sturdier to go across the river. I passed the bridge and walked toward the cave where my father stood outside, his hands thrust from his body directing one group to move toward the Burnt Out Pits, another off into the woods we were afraid of. The groups left him, nodding, murmuring, but not speaking as he told them to go every way around This Place. Some went to find food, others to build structures, others he simply told to go every way but west. We did not go west. It had not existed in the Long Away. I looked out then and the west shimmered and flickered a great, deep brown, a rich golden color further out. I stopped and watched it and never had I seen anything so beautiful. I wanted that place the way Gaia wanted her comb, the way Ram wanted meat and Havel wanted Pivel to be well.

My father smiled as I approached, eyes downcast in familiar reverence. He walked more quickly from the cave; the people dispersed from him and he marched back to his tent. My father had always lived by the cave. His tent was larger than many of the others. Some tents we could not stand in, some we could barely sit in, but in Doriav’s, as with mine, two people, maybe four or five, could stand comfortably. There were three wooden sitting tools facing each other in a circle around a Burnt Out Pit. I saw skins on the walls with red and deep green, dark blue and light yellow smudges on them. Light filtered through a hole in the tent and I ducked, walking inside as I took a seat on a wooden box that creaked, shivering slightly under my weight.

Pivel was hurt last night by Ram. We should do something, I said outright. My father’s long gray-white hair ran past his shoulders and his beard moved as he spoke.

Pivel was trying to take Gaia. She wanted to stay with Ram, but Pivel was going to take her. We cannot stand for that and if Ram had not stepped in…people must know; men must know that there are consequences to grabbing women like that. If anything like that had happened to you, if Pivel had tried to take you off into a dark corner, I would hope Ram would do the same to help you. I’m sorry Pivel is hurt, but I have spoken to Havel and he thinks he’ll heal, he’ll be unwell for days, but soon healed, and now he will have learned. We do not simply carry women off into darkness. I did not know what this meant, darkness, learned, and as I watched my father’s face, I knew he didn’t fully comprehend these things either and yet he said them. They put words into our mouths when they fell, those from the west who had walked with Giants. They buried these ideas into our very being and ideas we never would have recogonized became commonplace.

I wanted to talk about the storm, I said. We have had them before?

We have had them before, my father confirmed. I don’t know what brought it, but it is not the storm we should be worried about, it was the light we saw. The orb was out, do you remember? It was day, and then there was light, the light that made day seem like night, like there had never been light before. The light stole our day and made it nothing and it took the entire night for our eyes to adjust, for us to remember the day. It is that light that concerns me. Where did it come from and where has it gone? It came from somewhere else, Lailah, and I cannot name it, I cannot remember it. But it wasn’t right, it did not belong here.

The light, I said, remembering. As it drew across my mind, the image of that light I’d seen out in the field, even then it was pulled from my head and I could not see it entirely, like I lost it as soon as I tried to see it. The light was not for us. We were not meant to see it. I tried desperately, as if my body was slipping from a cliff and I had to fight to stay on solid ground, but I could not remember the light.

They taught us to remember, those from the west, but they also made us forget.

It was the light we should be concerned with. I don’t know what it was. I spoke with some today and they cannot remember it either. They speak only of the storm. I don’t think everyone remembers the light.

There are other parts of the land, I offered. To the west now, there was nothing in the west, but now there is. It had been so golden and shiny and beautiful and just then I wanted it, that flickering sun-filled image, it had been so large that I wanted to hold it in my hands just as Ram had taken Gaia and held her.

There is nothing to the west, Lailah. I saw that he believed this and was disappointed. He should have known better than the rest. Why did I know and no one else?

But we should see. I should go, if not west then further east, up to the high places in the distance to see what I can see there.

Doriov rested his eyes on me. Yes, daughter, curious one, he finally said. You should scour this land, see if you can find something. Anyone else, anywhere new we might hunt, more trees, another river. After the light it is possible there is more, but east, go east, there is nothing to the west, I don’t believe it. And if there are others…we have been here so long, and I do not know why we do not know if there are others. If This Place is so vast, if we cannot see beyond it, then why have we not met others?

I had never seen him question. Something grappled inside his mind as if a great, many-limbed animal twisted within him. He shook himself loose from it, looking at me as if to hold in his strength, as if he knew he was the leader of This Place and it was not his job to question himself and what he knew. I can’t go with you. As much as I’d like to see the land beyond, I was just speaking with Cole and Tebbits and Tarmic and Shula and they have so many needs. I can’t go with you, but you should go, Lailah. You know to ask questions and so you should go.

I’ll leave at once, I replied, not considering that there might be things I would need, something to keep me warm, food, water, clothing. I had never needed those things. I had never wanted them. Before, in the Long Away, we did not think about needing, less food felt different, less water, more rain, but we bore it like the orb of light in the great expanse, which we did not question.

As I left my father’s tent I looked out at This Place, it was brusque and barren, a few pits here and there, tents scattered like the twigs that blew in the wind. I saw people. There were not many, but I could not have said what many was then. The very idea that people could fill up this world, that there would ever be too many for a single spot, that there would ever be not enough, hadn’t occurred to me.

I walked among our people as I left. They were busy. Ram and Gaia were eating the food Ram had brought as four or five women sat around them watching and waiting for Gaia to throw the scraps away. One of them held Gaia’s bone comb, fingering it delicately as if she wanted to run it through her own tangled hair. There were people near the trees, pointing to them, but not daring to enter. I saw Havel tending the sick and Pivel still lying in the dirt with the herbs on his neck.

I marched out, first among them and then past, I stepped across the river at the rotting tree bridge, it shook under my feet and I held my fists tightly together, jumping the last steps as if I were making an escape. The river rushed hard and wild under me and I shuttered as it lapped at its banks. I walked by Ram and Gaia and he nodded at me, his giant’s body rough and hard as Gaia daintily smiled. She held a slab of meat for me to take and I declined, not considering the journey I was about to embark on. Ram sat away from Gaia, near a mass of wispy Heat, The Hot Cracking Red, as the meat hung inside it. He pulled meat out of the smoke and it dripped blackened, but no longer bloody.

I walked away from the Hot Crackling Red, intent on my journey and as I looked out and saw the end of This Place in the distance I shuddered. The land did not simply end, there were no gates or towers or walls (those would come later) but in a single moment I knew that I was standing where no one from This Place had stood before, that I had gone beyond where we had been. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and it was Havel.

Where are you going? he asked, concern in his big, green eyes. You can’t go there. What is there?

My father told me to explore the land beyond, I said simply. He said to go east, but there is nothing to the east. West, we have to go west. I said I’d go east but I’m going west.

Why? he asked and there had never been such a question before.

Something is there. I know it.

There are trees and water, we’ve been to the east and there must be more beyond that. More of us, if there are more trees and water, there must be more of us. Why go west?

There is nothing new in the east.

New? Havel said the word as if his eyes could not picture what it meant and I realized that most words we said had pictures, images attached to them, but these new words I had been thinking, time, before, Long Away, did not have the same pictures and so they were harder to explain to people.

Havel looked out and Pivel murmured once more. Good luck, he said, turning back to his wounded man. If you find any berries, anything you haven’t seen before, bring them back. I nodded that I would, unsure of what they were for, though I knew Havel had just sent me on a task as important as the one my father had sent me on. Havel’s berries cured the sick. My father wanted information. It was my job to bring these things back.

I walked for a while until I heard grunting and saw a small four-footed animal. I knew to be afraid of the large ones but this one came to below my knee and had tiny ears shaped like leaves and a flat snout. I reached out for it when it came closer. It sniffed for a second, it’s brownish back covered in dust and dirt. Hello, I said to it and immediately wondered why I would talk to it. Animals were food for our bellies and clothes for our skin, they were tents we lived in. We did not say hello. I reached a hand out and the small four-footed animal sniffed once more. Then it made a great sound, a roar like when my father cried out to keep order, and I wanted to cover my ears. It ran at me then, roaring again as I was toppled over into the dust of the ground. I tried to get up as it held me down. It snorted right into my face and my arms went instinctively to it’s middle, pushing it hard. I started slapping it, and then I made fists and hit it again and again until it tumbled off me. The animal gave a whimper before crawling off me. When I sat up it turned to look back at me before