So it would be with Rachel, too.
She went into the forest and took the path up to the top of the ridge, there was a fallen tree there on which she used to sit and look out. From here you could see the river, and beyond it the side valley where, on clear days, you could make out the glacier that covered much of the mountainside that closed it off.
And then you could see the cherubim. They were clearest at night of course, but it had been many years since she’d been here so late. The morning was her time, and it was in its changing hues that she saw the cherubim’s flames, burning with varying intensity depending on the time of year. Sharply and clearly in the autumn and winter, pale and almost translucent in the spring and summer.
This morning something was different. At first she didn’t know what it was, but then it struck her that the light from the cherubim had altered in some way.
Wasn’t it higher up?
Yes, that was it.
The light from the cherubim was higher, and as she stared at it, she saw that it was moving too. It rose, and slowly separated itself from the ridge. Soon it hung quite discretely in the sky. Then she saw that it wasn’t one light, but four. The four lights rose slowly in the western sky and appeared to move faster the higher they got, twinkling like stars, smaller and smaller, until finally they had vanished completely.
She hurried home, woke Javan, and told him what she’d just seen. At first he didn’t believe her. The cherubim disappearing was as unlikely as the moon disappearing, or the sun. But when he went up the hill with her at the back of the house to see, he realized she was right: the light from the cherubim was no longer there.
That this was a bad omen, neither of them doubted. Nor that it must be connected to the unceasing rain and the steady rise in the river level. The water already covered more than half their fields, something that hadn’t happened since the great flood more than a hundred and fifty years before, and it was still rising.
They looked hard at each other. But there wasn’t anything they could do, other than keep going as before and hope for the best. While she went in to wake her sons and make breakfast for them, he went down to the village to find out if anyone there knew more.
The rumor of the cherubim’s disappearance had spread rapidly. When he got down to the village, a dozen people had already collected on the rise above the clusters of houses. Silent and shabby, they stood there looking up toward the light that no longer shone above the ridges in the west. Opinions about what it signified were divided. It wasn’t necessarily a bad omen, said one. Possibly the cherubim’s task was over now, maybe that was why they’d left them.
“But they guard the tree of life,” someone else put in. “How can their task be over?”
“Perhaps it doesn’t need to be guarded anymore,” rejoined the first. “Perhaps the Lord trusts us at last.”
“What about all this rain?”
“Well, what of it? It’s raining, what’s so unusual about that? In our great-great-grandfathers’ time the water rose right up to there,” he said, pointing to a mark on the stone monument that had been set up in the field below them at the time.
His words lightened the mood. He was right, the water had risen up to there at its highest, it was a well-known fact. Someone else reminded them of the fiery sphere that had slowly passed across the heavens one winter in their childhood, with a long train of light behind it. This new celestial body, combined with the extreme cold, which froze not only the river and falls but also the sea, which all that winter was icebound far beyond the outermost islands, had caused similar doom-laden thoughts to spring up. But the sphere passed away without anything happening, the cold gradually released its grip on the world, and in the spring everything was back to normal.
“The world didn’t come to an end then, and it won’t now,” he said. “We ought to be able to put up with a bit of rain!”
Everyone agreed with this. They ought to be able to put up with a bit of rain. And, if they couldn’t do anything about the weather, there were measures they could take to limit its effects. They decided to construct an embankment along the whole of the swollen riverbank, in order to keep the water away from the buildings. The work commenced the very next day. It was as they were standing there on the rise that the suggestion that they light a new fire was also made, to general approval. On the top of the mountain, above the pass, a beacon several yards high was to be built, with a fire that was to be kept constantly burning. The responsibility for keeping it going, it was decided, would be shared by the various farms in the valley on a rotational basis. This, too, was begun the following day. At about lunchtime, through the thick, low-lying cloud, those of the village men and women who toiled in a line across the field, shoveling the transported heaps of gravel, sand, stone, and earth, could see the faint blush of an orange glow some way up in the grayness. Ragged applause broke out, interspersed with the occasional halfhearted cheer: the rain poured unstoppably down, they were utterly drenched, and the work they were facing seemed insurmountable even to the eagerest and most determined among them, so it was difficult to muster any great admiration for the bonfire, despite its obvious symbolic value. When darkness fell some hours later, the light from the flames became clearer, but they were still blanketed by the mist and remained so over the coming weeks as day and night, the cloud cover lay thick over the valley, the people hadn’t even a glimpse of blue sky during that time. Like dark shadows they wandered about in the gray, gloaming days. Everything around them was wet. The dampness even got indoors: the bedclothes were damp, the tablecloths were damp, the piles of clean clothes were damp. Probably no one had ever longed for winter more than them. With the air thick with steam from the clothes they were trying to dry before the fire, they sat in the evenings and fantasized about ice and snow and cold. Ah, crunching, cold winter days, when the sun is so heavy with retained light that it can hardly rise above the horizon, and the blue of the sky is as clear as crystal, and the whiteness of the snow as crisp as paper! Oh, frozen rivers and lakes! Oh, frost! Oh, frozen soil! Oh, dry, powdery snow! Oh, sledges! Oh, skates! Oh, skis! Oh, snowshoes! Oh, big fur coats and furry bearskin hats!
But no winter came. And the temperature rose during the autumn. The problems the endless rain brought with it grew. It was as if everything solid began to give way. They threw down planks so that they could go dry-shod between the buildings, but after a few days the planks had disappeared into the mud. The bridges across the river got swept away; for a time they crossed it using their boats, but then the current got too strong, and the inhabitants of one part of the valley were cut off from those in the other. Although the embankment temporarily held the river water back, all the fields were still underwater, it wasn’t deep, but deep enough to hamper all movement.
That was the state of things. It rained and rained, and everywhere the water rose.
Then, suddenly one day, it stopped. The rain stopped, the clouds lifted, and from the open sky pure, clear sunlight came flooding in. For the first time in months they could see the countryside around them and the colors in it. The green conifers and the yellow and red deciduous trees on the wooded hillsides, the shining water reflections in the fields, which in some places showed the sky’s blue and the clouds’ white, and in others took their color from what was underneath them, either a greenish tinge where grass grew or brownish where the earth was bare.
Soon steam began to rise from the forest. Like some great beast it lay there between the mountains drying in the sun. And it was easy to imagine the despondency of the inhabitants doing the same thing: the depression that had filled them over the past months evaporating in the sunlight. Excited and chatty they stood in the yards outside their houses and gazed across the landscape. There was no longer anything threatening about the mass of water that covered the fields, on the contrary, it looked beautiful as it twinkled in the sun. For the moment they didn’t bother worrying about spoiled crops and depleted food stocks, sure in their knowledge that this was a turning point. Soon the water level would fall, the water in the fields would run out, some into the sea, some would filter down into subterranean reservoirs, some would evaporate, and little by little all would return to normal again. The winter would be hard, that was obvious, but not impossible: weren’t there fish in the lake, birds in the air, animals in the forest? They’d manage, of course they would, if for nothing else than to be able to tell their descendants about the year when water had covered the entire valley, the battle they’d fought to get through the succeeding winter, just as their forefathers had once told of their trials, which still loomed large in their consciousness: the great landslide, the great spring flood, the great forest fire. Dysentery, when more than half the population of the district died, all in the same terrible manner — first their glands would swell up, then they began to cough blood and were racked by terrible convulsions, and less than a day later they were dead — the terrible winter when packs of wolves had come right down into the valley and lost their fear of people, the great rock slide when an entire mountain crag had fallen and crushed the farms beneath it.