note of hysteria has edged into his voice.—A man has to be born capable of such a thing. No one can teach him how to do it if he is not ready in his own heart.
The boy looks about to start crying.—That’s not true, he blurts.—I never thought of anything like this until I heard about you. Then I said if he could do it to his own brother, what’s wrong with me? I said nothing’d stop me and nothing did. I used a rock.
Cain is silent. There is no point to speech. The fire crackles merrily: laughing even in death, Cain can’t help thinking.
Still the boy gabbles on.—And you know what? It wasn’t like I was alone when I did it. You were with me the whole time.
—Your imagination is making me tired, Cain says, which is nothing less than the truth.—I’m going to sleep. It’s all the same to me whether you stay or go.
—So the thing is, it’s not my fault, says the boy.—I never would of known how, if you hadn’t shown me. If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive right now.
—Sleep well, Cain mutters. He lies on his side with an elbow over his ear.—I’m not interested in hearing any more.
—Yeah, he’d probably be in this hut right now, talking to you, instead of me.
Cain is wide awake but pretends not to be.
—So in a way, the boy says, it’s like you killed him too.
For a long time Cain stares at the orange firelight flickering against the walls of the hut. The shadows carry images of his brother. Cain watches them wearily, trying to call up the rage he once felt so reliably. And fails.
When he does finally manage to sleep, his dreams are profoundly unpleasant, and he wakes up more than once, sweating and disoriented.
•
In the morning the hunt is silent but for the patter of drops on the roof. Overhead the jays mutter. Was it all a dream? he wonders. He hopes it was. Just an illusion, a metaphor of some sort.
No, it wasn’t.
Cain sits up. The boy is curled into a ball by the entryway, as if wrapped around a treasure he clutches to his midriff. Cain decides to forgo breakfast, choosing instead to step past the boy and make his way out into the drizzle. He does not know where he is going. All he knows is what he is trying to get away from, to leave behind. It is all he has known for quite a while now.
33 the years previous
Thereupon follow Cain’s long years of exile.
In a way, the entire rest of his life is an exile, but these first years are the most difficult. Later he will meet Zoru and beget Henoch and plan the city that will bear his son’s name. And although those years will not be without trial, they will not lack joy as well. Fleeting as a firefly’s burst in the night, but real all the same.
These first years, though, there is no joy at all. Why should there be?
That might be the worst part of all: that he himself cannot argue with his fate. He is a murderer, a fratricide. The blood is still wet and warm on his flesh. He trembles when he thinks of the moment, the stone in his hand, his brother half turning to him, mouth open as if about to speak.
Cain carries that picture before him always. He sees his brother’s face in stone outcroppings, in the dust of the trail, in a cloud. Always the living image, the bland joyous righteous infuriating face. Never the dead face, half-collapsed, unrecognizable, attracting ants and crows where it lies jumbled and broken at the bottom of a ravine.
Cain’s own face burns with the mark. He avoids pools of standing water, troughs and rain barrels and still ponds. There is nothing he wants to behold less than the sign of God upon him.
•
He walks east, encountering few people at first. In this still-new world there are few enough people to encounter. The world is raw and freshly scrubbed, barely adolescent and very nearly empty. As he wanders, his meetings with strangers are rare and pass without incident. The odd solitary shepherd, a pair of young girls bathing in a stream. The occasional caravan or goatherd. On two occasions he spies people having sex. Everyone he meets is young. This is something he will remember, later, when he himself is aged and aching: in his youth, there were no old people. Nobody is older than his parents, themselves barely into middle age.
For some months he wanders through rolling grassland that gives way to low mountains, then more grassland. The weather cools. He is reduced to hunting small rodents and scavenging their burrows for hoarded nuts. He has never been fat, but now weight melts off him and he becomes lean and stringy. Despite his trials, his eyesight grows acute and his arm steady: one morning he fells a gazelle with his spear and feasts on roasted flesh for five days. He is thankful for the cold then for preventing the carrion from turning foul.
After this, Cain becomes more confident in his ability to survive. He raids beehives at night, while the furry mass of insects is sluggish, and enjoys comb and honey for his efforts. He surprises nightjars roosting on the ground and snaps their necks, gobbles their eggs raw. He collects locusts and fries them in fat. Their legs snap as he chews, pieces dribbling from his lips as if still trying to leap free.
Once he encounters a boy leading a string of goats along a river.—Hello, he says.
The boy sees the mark upon him and bolts. Reluctantly, Cain takes the string of animals and continues on. The goats treat him like their trusted uncle and keep him alive through the winter.
By spring he has reached the edge of an enormous inland sea. He tastes the water: salt. Turning southeast, he follows the shoreline. Surviving is easier now that he can dig mussels and clams along the beach, pull crabs from tidepools and net fish in the shallows.
The summer sun bleaches his hair into spun gold. Salt and wind abrade his flesh to a freckled pink-brown. Still he sees no one. The sun burns in the sky like a fever. He walks on.
After a time the sea falls behind.
One day he realizes with a jolt that he is following a trail, a thread of worn earth winding among grassy hills. Has he inadvertently returned home? But no, he quickly decides this cannot be. It is impossible to determine whether the trail is worn by human feet or by animals, but he turns his steps to follow it. Late in the day he tops a rise and looks down upon a village.
His shock is considerable: Who are all these people? Who begot them?
There are a dozen huts in a straggling line, hand-formed bricks piled into uneven walls. Stone fences and animals pens and a dusty lane running through the middle of it all. Cain squints at the silent, scared faces peering at him from doorways and shutterless windows. By all rights they should be his family—nephews and nieces, if not brothers and sisters—but he sees no kinship here. They are small people, pale with black eyes, and though there is recognition in their faces, it is not the recognition of fellowship and welcome. It is the pinch-lipped recognition that says: Plague begone from our houses. Leave us be or we’ll chase you out. Keep walking if you know what’s good for you.
Cain ignores these unspoken commands. He is curious about these people, and it has been a long time since his last conversation. How long exactly? A year, two? Five? He cannot remember.
He
