His face was slack with confusion. “Mary, the Ark is a place for Christians, for the blessed who have accepted Jesus—”
“Then if I’m not a Christian, they’ll turn me away?”
“I… yes. We’d have to, because only—”
“Then you should be grateful Rachel and I didn’t refuse to let you in at Amarna until we were sure your philosophy agreed with ours. You’d be dead, Luke, and swept out to sea with the crabs eating your carcass!”
He stared at her, then looked down at the Bible, contemplated it a moment, and his chin came up. “That was different. You’re not sick. You come to the Ark as my future wife; you’ll be part of the Flock.”
Mary finally shrugged, reminding herself that it didn’t matter, all this literalist drivel. She had come this far because she had no choice. She was doing what she had to do. And if it would satisfy Luke…
“My mother made sure I was baptized properly in a proper Christian church, Luke. Isn’t that enough?”
“You were baptized?” he asked eagerly. “The Lord be praised! Then you’ve been consecrated to Jesus. But you must make that commitment anew, you must be reborn into the love of God and His only-begotten Son. Mary, you must do it! Come—kneel here before me.”
Something in her balked still, but she shifted position until she was on her knees facing him. Let him do his mumbo jumbo. It didn’t matter.
“Pray with me, Sister! Pray with me!” He took both her hands in his and with his head tilted heavenward, eyes squeezed shut, he exhorted his god to accept this poor sinner who longed for his grace and his love and for eternal life in the wonder of his presence. He exhorted at length and in repetitious detail, while Mary knelt, staring at him, hands numbed in his tightening grip as he droned on and on, and there was in his voice a hypnotic cadence enhanced by the flickering light of the fire. The flames blinded her, surrounded Luke with darkness in which nothing could be seen to exist, and at some point—she didn’t know how she reached it— she found herself weeping, heard her voice responding with Luke’s, and she didn’t know what she was saying, what he was saying, and her knees ached, every muscle in her body ached, and she cried, “Yes, yes, yes!” And finally Luke’s voice rang out with a last “Amen!”
In the sudden silence Mary heard the murmur of the sea. I am here… I am always here…. And she sought in the darkness the pale light of the surf, but her fire-dazzled eyes recorded only illusions of flame.
Then Luke’s arms closed around her, and she turned into his embrace. He said, “Mary, oh, my sweet Mary, I love you.”
She lifted her face to his, whispered, “Then make love to me, Luke. Tonight. Make love to me if you love me.”
He pulled away from her, gently but uncompromisingly.
“The Doctor will marry us when we get to the Ark.”
Mary felt those softly spoken words as she had his slap on her face that June day at Amarna. She got to her feet, stared down at him.
“I suppose now it’s fornication!”
He fixed his gaze on the ground. “It’s just not right….”
“Why was it right at Amarna? Not once, but many times it was right!”
“Mary, that was different,” he mumbled.
She walked out of the firelight to her sleeping bag, unlaced her boots with shaking hands, then got inside the bag, jerked the zipper closed, bitter words on her lips crying to be spoken. But she held them back. She heard Luke getting into his sleeping bag, the zipper buzzing.
She lay facing away from him, toward the sea, and pressed a hand to her body, wondering again if that useless organ within was becoming a womb.
If not, would she have to wait for a sanctioned visitation from her sanctioned husband? The thought brought a sardonic, silent laugh.
“I can’t hear it.”
Mary pushed the bandanna away from her ears and looked back along the dirt road cut through a stand of second-growth Douglas fir. Alders, vines, and grass encroached on the road. The morning sun fell in misted shafts through the trees. The only sound she heard was the chromatic warble of a bird she and Rachel had identified only by its call and named the mad bird for the manic edge in its repetitive song.
“You can’t hear what?” Luke asked.
“I can’t hear the ocean.” The words were like the closing of a door.
“No, it’s at least two miles behind us.” With one hand on her cheek, he turned her face toward him. “You’ll miss the ocean, won’t you?”
She looked up at him, reveling in his solicitude. Yet she recognized behind it the anticipation he couldn’t contain. Luke was coming home. After a year, two months, and ten days, he was coming home, and from the moment he woke her this morning with a gentle kiss, he had been so full of joy for his homecoming that she had warmed to it, held on to it, hoping to make his homecoming her own.
“Come on, Mary, just a little farther, then there’s a view of the Ark.”
And he set off down the road with long strides. She hurried to catch up with him, and when they reached the viewpoint, he stopped, the tears in his eyes at odds with his smile. “There it is, Mary. There’s Canaan Valley. Oh, Lord, praised be Thy name!”
They stood at the top of a steep slope shorn of trees in an old clear-cut. Caught somewhere between fear and hope, Mary looked southeast into a valley cradled between two low, forested ridges. The valley had an east-west alignment, with the river Luke called the Jordan trailing along the south boundary, the sun flashing on its dark waters between the barred shadows of the trees on the far bank. At the center of the valley, arranged in a circle perhaps four hundred feet in diameter, stood the twelve households Luke had described, all built of peeled logs, roofed with hand-split shakes. Each household had three small, shuttered windows on its long back wall and a brick chimney against one of the shorter end walls. The air was veiled with their smoke. Rock-lined paths led from the households to the center of the circle like twelve spokes toward the hub of a wheel. At the hub stood the church. It was also built of logs and shakes, the entrance facing west beneath a steeple that thrust high above everything around it and pointed a long shadow toward Mary and Luke.
But Luke hadn’t told her about the palisades of vertical logs that connected the households at their outside corners, that made a fort of the circle, and she wondered what enemies those walls were built to exclude.
All of the valley was fenced. Barbed wire, perhaps; she could only see the evenly spaced fence posts from here. A road emerged from the forest in the northwest at an angle toward the southeast, passed a gate on the fence line, then continued at that angle until it reached the median of the valley, where it turned east toward the open gate of the Ark. South of the road lay a huge garden and a greenhouse. Across the road on the north was another garden, and east of that, an orchard, and farther east, a cemetery. Near the river, a barn presided over a corral and a cluster of smaller buildings. In the pasture at the northeast end of the valley, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats grazed. The southeast end was fenced off for a hay field; pyramids of curing hay dotted the pale stubble. And apparently the Flock was successful at growing grain of some sort this far inland. The tawny field at the west end of the valley was ready for harvest.
Mary released her pent breath in a sigh of satisfaction. The orderly arrangement of fields and fences and buildings seemed inevitable and right. She found Luke’s hand in hers, and knew the future hung suspended for them on a golden thread, and there was beauty in it.
And there were people.
At first she didn’t recognize the tiny, dark objects moving about in the gardens and fields, and she wasn’t prepared for the exhilaration galvanized by that recognition.