The Ravens of Mastema and the Boy Who Cleared the Sky

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The World That Forgot the Maker

The water had barely dried from the earth when the killing started again. Men who had ridden out the Flood in the same ark now sharpened iron against one another. They built strong cities and threw up walls and raised towers, nation against nation, city against city, and they taught their sons the trade of war before they taught them anything else. In the plain they captured towns and sold men and women off like sacks of grain, and every hand learned to take what another hand had made. The world had been washed clean and rinsed itself filthy inside a few generations.

Serug Carved Gods in Ur

Into that age a boy was born whose name itself meant turning away. Serug grew up in Ur of the Chaldees, and there, among the kilns and the smoke, men had begun to pour metal into molds and fall down before whatever cooled in their hands. Serug worshipped idols. He married into a household that served them, took Melka the daughter of Kaber for his wife, and when she bore him Nahor, the child opened his eyes on the same shelves of graven images his father had carved. Serug taught his sons what his own hands knew. The knife that shapes a god. The smoke that feeds it. The bow of the head that costs nothing and buys nothing. Nahor stayed in Ur, and the next generation was born already kneeling.

The Prince Who Loosed the Spirits

The men did not fall alone. Something pressed at their backs. Malignant spirits moved through the cities of the plain, and they did not merely tempt. They seduced, they corrupted, they drove hands toward blood. Over them stood a prince, and his name was Mastema. He exerted himself to ruin the whole earth, and he sent out the spirits under his hand to do every wrong, to shed blood, to make the ground itself unclean. The molten images multiplied. The graven shapes multiplied. And in the din of hammer and prayer, the name of the One who made the sky slipped out of the mouths of men, until almost nobody on earth remembered there had ever been a Maker at all.

The Boy Who Would Not Kneel

Almost nobody. In the house of Terah a child named Abram was watching. Terah taught him his letters, and the boy who could now read could also see. He understood the errors of the earth, that everyone had gone astray after graven images and after uncleanness, and the sight sickened him. He was two weeks of years old, fourteen, when he made his choice. He drew apart from his father so that he would not bow where his father bowed. Alone, away from the shelves of idols, he turned his face toward the Creator of all things and begged to be saved, that he not fall into the vileness that had swallowed everyone he knew. No voice answered out of the sky. The boy kept praying anyway, and the prince of the spirits was not finished with the earth.

Mastema Sends the Ravens

Mastema struck at the one thing the plain could not live without. When the farmers went out to sow, he loosed the ravens. They came in black clouds that blotted the light and dropped on the furrows before the plough could cover the seed, and they tore the grain from the ground kernel by kernel. Season after season the birds ate the harvest before it began. Men scattered seed and reaped nothing but hunger, and the fields that had fattened the cities of the idol-makers went bare. It was famine engineered out of the air, and no wall a king could raise stood tall enough to stop it.

Seventy Times He Turned the Sky

It was sowing season again when the cloud came down on the field where Abram stood. The others waved their arms and shouted and lost. Abram ran straight at the descending flock. He did not throw a stone. He lifted his voice and spoke to the birds as though they could be reasoned with. "Descend not," he cried. "Return to the place whence you came." And the ravens broke. The whole black cloud wheeled in the air and climbed back into the sky it had dropped from. Seventy times that day the flock returned, and seventy times the boy turned it away, until the sun went down on ground where not one seed had been stolen. Where Abram kept watch, the earth held its harvest. A lad of fourteen had stood in a field owned by Mastema's birds and taken it back with nothing but words, and the age that had forgotten its Maker began, one field at a time, to turn.