The Pearl That Never Set and the Year Noah Never Slept

Outside, the world was drowning. Inside, there was no sun to prove that morning had ever existed.

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Noah had sealed the last door on the seventeenth day of Marcheshvan, seven days after the animals filed in two by two, and when the pitch dried over the final seam the ark went black. No window opened on anything but rising water. No lamp could be lit near so much straw and fur and terror. For a year and more, the only thing that told him whether it was day or night was a pearl.

It hung from the roof of the ark, a single stone the size of a fist, and it glowed. Not the sour flicker of an oil wick but a clean, steady light, like a small sun trapped under the beams. When it burned bright, Noah knew the sun stood somewhere above the drowned sky. When it dimmed to a low ember, night had come to a world with no one left to see it. That pearl was his clock, his calendar, and his one companion that never asked to be fed.

Everything else asked to be fed.

A Schedule With No Morning

Under the pearl's light Noah learned a thing no man had ever needed to know. Every creature ate on its own hour. The beasts of the day woke when the pearl brightened and cried for their food. The beasts of the night stirred when it dimmed, and cried for theirs. There was no hour that belonged to Noah. He climbed between the tiers of cages with baskets on his back, and by the time he reached the last of the day animals the pearl was already fading, and the owls and bats and pale night-crawlers were waking hungry beneath him.

He had penned the males on one side of the ark and the females on the other, so that in the ruin of the world nothing would breed and multiply what he could barely keep alive. It kept a kind of order. It did not lighten the work. It doubled the distance he walked.

Many years after, his son Shem would try to explain it to a traveler named Eliezer, servant of Abraham, and the old man could find only one phrase plain enough for it. "We had sore troubles in the ark," he said.

The Worm Bred for a Single Mouth

There was a small creature the household called the zikta, and it nearly broke him. Noah brought it grain and it turned away. He brought it fruit and it turned away. At last he split a pomegranate and set it down, and as the red seeds spilled a worm dropped out of the fruit, and the zikta struck and swallowed it whole. So that was its hunger. Not the fruit. The worm.

From that hour Noah kept bran in a corner and bred worms in it, so that one small animal would not starve while the earth was being scrubbed clean of every other living thing. He fed the zikta by the pearl's light and moved on, because a hundred other mouths were already calling.

The Lion That Burned With Fever

The animal he feared most gave him the least trouble. The lion lay in its pen and would not rise. Its eyes ran, its breath came hot and shallow, and a fever burned in it the whole voyage long. A well lion in that dark would have been a horror, roaring for meat it smelled in every neighboring cage. This lion only shivered and dozed and let its food sit untouched, too sick to be a king. Noah tended it and did not curse the sickness. A quiet predator was the one mercy the ark offered him, and he took it.

The Bird That Would Not Wake Him

Somewhere in the second half of that endless year, the work began to kill him. His hands blistered and split. He could barely tell one dimming of the pearl from the next. He walked the rows in a daze, terrified that some small breathing thing would go silent in the dark before he reached it. Every creature that would ever live again on the earth was locked in this hull, and all of it hung on whether one failing old man could stay on his feet.

One turn of the pearl toward darkness, he came to a corner and found a bird he had never fed. The urshana lay folded in the shadow, so still he thought the thing he dreaded had finally happened. He knelt and asked it, quietly, why it had never called for food like all the rest. Did it want nothing to eat?

The bird lifted its head. "I saw how much labor you carry," it said, "and I did not want to add to it."

Noah wept over a bird. He had not wept over the drowned world, but he wept over this one creature that had chosen to go hungry rather than cost him another climb through the dark. He laid his hand over it and spoke a blessing, the only wage he had left to give. "May it be the will of the Lord," he said, "to keep you alive forever." And the blessing held. Death was loosed on everything under heaven that season, and it never once came for the urshana.

The rain had stopped long before, but the water held the ark aloft for months more, and Noah kept climbing. Day by the bright pearl, night by the dim one. Grain, worms, water, up and down the sundered rows of males and females, until the day the hull ground against something solid and the light of a real sun, almost forgotten, cracked in through the opening seam.