Abraham Allegiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 4) (9 page)

A few miles to the west of the city of Ur, there was a freshwater lake surrounded by rocky shores. Large buttes interwove with each other, creating a small maze of cliffs and streams.

Two cloaked figures, carrying reed baggage on their backs, trod around the lake and into the maze of rock. They turned down trails and pathways with navigational precision until they came to a secret cave within the labyrinth of sediment and sandstone.

At the cave entrance stood a very old man and his wife, evident residents of the cave awaiting their visitors’ arrival with much anticipation.

The cloaked figures came to the entrance and pulled back their hoods. It was Terah and his wife Amthelo. She was a beautiful woman of dark skin and black hair, about ten years younger than Terah.

Terah looked at the old man and his wife. They appeared ancient, though not decrepit. There was an otherworldly quality about them.

Terah said haltingly, “Noah ben Lamech?”

“In the flesh. Not dead yet,” Noah responded. “And neither is my wife Emzara. And you are Terah ben Nahor?”

Terah smiled, “And my wife Amthelo.”

Terah walked up to Noah and embraced him, proclaiming, “Do you mind if I call you Grandpappy? There are too many “Greats” to put before Grandfather.” Terah had calculated about seven, but he was not sure anymore. All he knew was that he was in the direct lineage of this heavenly man and his angelic spouse.

“Only if you call her Grandmammy,” teased Noah. Emzara slapped Noah playfully.

Terah had never met his distant forefather before this. He had heard the legends surrounding him. How they had settled after the great flood and how there had been some sort of terrible incident, and he and Emzara had left for some magical island on the distant sea. But he had only recently discovered from his great great grandfather Peleg that Noah had returned to hide out in these caves. It was a family secret that was kept from the public because they thought Noah was engaging in another enterprise called by a god.

“Are you building another ark?” asked Terah.

Noah burst out laughing, which ended in a coughing fit.

Emzara said, “My dear, Elohim promised to never again flood the earth as he did the first time. We can be sure he keeps his promises.”

She noticed Terah’s look of confusion and realized what was going on.

“Oh dear, you are not very familiar with Elohim are you?” she concluded.

Terah said, “I am well acquainted with the pantheon of gods. I study the occult, astrology, divination, and all manners of the mysteries of the heavens. But I have never heard a mention of this god, Elohim. Who is he?”

Noah and Emzara glanced at each other. Sumer had been heavily fortified against the knowledge of Elohim. They were surprised at how quickly suppression of the truth happened after the flood. They had better deal with this later. Emzara changed the subject.

“Amthelo, you look so lovely.”

“Thank you,” said Amthelo.

“How old are you?” Terah asked Noah.

“Far into our nine hundreds. We stopped counting decades ago. But we are still alive and kicking.”

Amthelo said to Emzara, “May I say you do not look a day over five hundred.”

Emzara shooshed her with a wave of her hand.

They all chuckled and the four of them became aware of the need to immediately address the reason for their coming.

“Well, you have a precious little package for us?” said Noah.

Amthelo smiled and lifted off her reed basket on her back. She opened it up and pulled out the squirming little baby boy who was cooing and drooling.

“Ohhhhhhh my!” exclaimed Emzara. “Come to Grandmammy, you little cuddly bear cub!”

Amthelo spoke to her infant as if he could understand, “Abram, meet your ship of refuge, Grandpappy Noah and Grandmammy Emzara.”

Emzara held him with glee, and felt life returning to her old bones as the little infant stared at her in open-mouthed wonder.

When Terah brought the child to Nimrod for execution, he did not actually bring Abram, but another newborn child from one of their servants in the household. Nimrod never found out that the child he killed was not Abram. Fortunately, Marduk had not been with him that day as he usually was, because he would most likely have sniffed out the deception.

Terah said, “We want you to raise little Abram and teach him your wisdom. We could not keep him in our household without the truth eventually getting to Nimrod. The king would kill our entire family bloodline in revenge.”

“He is the Chosen Seed,” said Noah looking into baby Abram’s scrunched little face.

Then he added with a wry smile, “It takes one to know one.”

Emzara said, “So this is why Elohim called us back to this infernal land of evil.”

“You see, woman,” said Noah. “And you accused me of having bad hearing.”

“Yes, dear,” said Emzara, rolling her eyes.

Noah mused to her, “I wonder if this means an old friend will be showing up. You know — of the guardian angel persuasion?”

Emzara smiled with fond memories. Noah was alluding to Uriel, the slightly smaller sarcastic archangel who had been the guardian of Noah before the Flood. He had been annoying to Noah, but eventually grew on him and the two became best of friends through a lifetime of adventure and danger.

Emzara shook herself out of their reminiscing and said to Terah and Amthelo, “You two must be famished.”

They shared a meal together as was the custom of hospitality. As they ate, Noah and Emzara tried to explain to Terah and Amthelo about the call of Elohim on his son Abram’s life. They tried to explain that Elohim was the Creator God who required complete and exclusive loyalty to his kingship over all creation. They said that the gods were actually fallen Watchers, rebels from Elohim’s divine council in heaven, playing roles of deception to accomplish a diabolical war against God’s chosen seedline. And this little child was the seed through which an anointed king would one day come and achieve victory over the gods of the people, and bring back all the nations under the allotment of Elohim.

But Terah stopped them. He did not want to hear such blasphemy. He was too entrenched in his world of the pantheon, sorcery, magic, astrology and the occult. He even started to physically tremble at the talk of an anointed coming king of the seedline.

When Terah threatened to take Abram back with him if they continued in their proselytizing, they stopped.

Noah concluded by saying, “We only love you and want to see you on the right side of the war that is coming.”

“Coming?” said Terah. “You have really been cut off from civilization out here in these caves. The war
is already here
. And if what you say about this War of the Seed is true, then the General of this Elohim’s enemy is Nimrod of Babylon.”

They finished their meal with some uncomfortable tension. But Terah and Amthelo filled their water skins for the secret journey back to Ur before returning to Babylon upriver. Terah had come down to the region under the pretense of spending a vacation in his old hometown of Ur. He had maintained his previous domicile for such visits.

Terah and Amthelo spent a minute with their infant, hugging him and kissing him. They would probably never see him again.

Amthelo could not stop crying. Terah had to pull her away. She grasped the little blanket in her fingers.

Emzara was empathetic to Amthelo’s pain, having lost her own family. She assured her, “We will guard him with our lives and will raise him to be a mighty man of valor.”

Amthelo whispered, “Thank you,” and Terah led her out of the cave and back onto their pathway home and to a new life without their precious son.

A generation passed.

Through these years, Nimrod used his mighty army of Stone Ones to strike terror into the hearts of the entire world. And the city of Babylon had become the center of that world. Everyone spoke one language and worshipped in one religion under the supreme empire of Nimrod the Mighty Hunter.

The time had finally come to consecrate the temple tower as Marduk had planned. In only a few months, the planets would be aligned, the climactic cusp of the Age of Aries would have arrived, and the gods of the pantheon would all be present to open the portal of heaven and establish this as the new cosmic mountain of the gods.

They would perform the ceremonial ritual during the Akitu New Year Festival, the twelve-day extravaganza that celebrated the arrival of spring during the vernal equinox. This was the point at which the sun ascended through the constellation of Aries. On the final day, a great processional of the gods through the city would culminate in their ascension into the temple and its portal opening to connect heaven and earth.

So much had happened in a single generation. While Nimrod was focusing on military expansion abroad, Semiramis was concentrating on the administration of the city of Babylon. It was a mammoth task to make the government of so vast a kingdom run smoothly. And Semiramis had done so with obsessive detail.

Nimrod did not want to be bothered with the minutia of bureaucracy. He was a man of action. He would leave the petty worries of controlling citizens through taxes, regulation, and dependency to his queen and their son Mardon. He would busy himself with asserting his military prowess and kingly presence to
maintain the fear and awe required to control so vast an empire. It was not easy being the world’s first potentate.

But that would prove to be Nimrod’s biggest error. While it was crucial for a ruler to maintain his status in the eyes of the people, Semiramis had come to see that the real power over the people was in the mundane details of controlling every aspect of their daily lives. A king could evoke fear with his military display, but a queen could evoke devotion and dependency through control of shelter, food, and income. It was the latter that was more primal in human nature, and therefore of more importance to the exercise of true power.

Semiramis had schooled their son Mardon in the craft of government details and political diplomacy. He had become shrewd and cunning in manipulating the system to his advantage. Queen Mother and Prince had together turned the majority of their kingdom — the peasants, workers, and slaves — against the wealthy members of society. They encouraged hatred of the rich for their ostentatious conspicuous consumption. All the rich, that is, except for the royal family, whose wealth was needed to rule beneficently.

Then they confiscated most of the wealth of these “greedy” rich through excessive taxation in the name of spreading the wealth around, so that “all would be equal.” But the rich were ruined and could no longer afford to employ the poor and the commoner in their fields and storehouses. The government then had to confiscate the means of production and place all citizens in their care as wards of the state. So commoners ended up not much different than slaves. They were dependent upon the government for their daily bread, their shelter, and even their health. The daily survival of the citizens was completely in the hands of Semiramis and Mardon.

Sometimes the queen and prince would even go to the granary and oversee the handing out of daily grain to the citizens so as to be personally equated with their daily sustenance. They would withhold the purse strings from any sector that became belligerent in performing their duties to the state or late in their taxes. And they controlled the funding of all governance, including the military, through a convoluted labyrinth of financial accounting that Nimrod could not begin to understand. More and more funds were siphoned from the military in order to “remodel” or build up broken down sectors of the city, and provide food for the inhabitants. It seemed the plans of building a glorious city of Babylon would never be completed, as a perpetual stream of money poured into sinkholes of unending construction and remodeling. And this is what caused Nimrod the most concern because the power of armed forces was quenched through strangled funding. The queen had even manipulated Sinleqi away from Nimrod and to their favor through blackmail regarding his personal use of government funds for temple orgies.

Nimrod was not stupid. He knew Semiramis and his son Mardon had an unnatural relationship that would prove to be a tangled web of corruption. That they had become incestuous lovers. And Mardon was obviously a tool of Semiramis’ ambition. But Nimrod felt the fool for not addressing it in the early years as he turned away from his wife and child to accomplish his greater purposes of worldwide empire.

The worst of it was that queen and son had become divinized for the people, she as queen of heaven, and he as divine son. So it would not be advantageous to Nimrod’s reign to eliminate them, as their demise may very well cause an uprising amidst the people who had become their loyal and slavish dependents. Nimrod was counting on the anointing of Etemenanki as the new cosmic mountain and official establishment of Marduk’s reign to bring things back into line where they ought to be.

He had contemplated having mother and son sacrificed on the altar of Marduk during the Akitu Festival climax. He would have to
wait and see if he would have the political pull with the population to be able to perform such a bold and daring move. Time would tell.

Semiramis stomped into the torture room looking for Mardon. She knew she would find him there. He spent too many hours in what he called his “playrooms,” a series of rooms for rapes, sorcery drugs, and torture. The torture rooms were specifically for experimenting with new means of extracting information or punishing insubordinate vassal rulers. The goal was to discover ways of keeping the victims alive as long as possible in order to inflict the most amount of pain humanly possible on another creature, for as long as possible before sending them off to Sheol.

The achievement of this goal required practice in order to perfect the techniques for maximum effect. But Mardon enjoyed torturing anyone, even without reason, so he had to find a source of disposable humans upon which to exercise his craft. The logical choice was slaves. He would tell them in a soothing tone that this would be their ultimate offering of service to the king and his kingdom before he subjected them to the most barbaric acts of cruelty.

Today found one of the rulers of a city, he could not remember which one now, that had been two days late in his delivery of harvest taxes to the king. Mardon put the vassal ruler “in the tub.”

“Sitting in the tub” as they called it, was a gruesome torture. The vassal was in a wooden tub covered over with only his head exposed. They would regularly feed him large amounts of gruel. But he was not allowed to leave the tub. Which means that he would be sitting in an increasing pool of his own excrement until his flesh rotted from the exposure. It would take weeks before the sufferer expired. The purpose of the cover was more than a form of restraint. It was to keep the stench from gagging the torturers and keeping them from their duties. Sometimes the process would be exacerbated
by covering the victim’s face and head with honey and milk to draw flies.

But today, Mardon was experimenting with his dismembering technique. He had pulled an unwitting male slave from the ranks of brick makers and brought him to his playroom to practice cutting off extremities. The goal was to maintain minimal blood loss and unconsciousness through the use of tourniquets and cauterizing. The current slave had already had his genitals, ears, lips, and nose removed. And Mardon was deciding whether he should gouge out the eyes first or cut out the tongue. It was a difficult decision. He had killed several prematurely by cutting out the tongue, choking them on their own blood.

He stared at the moaning victim with emotionless curious eyes. He was like a reptile. He had no conscience, no sense of empathy for other human beings or their pain. He was as cold as stone. He did not even get “pleasure” from his practice. It was more of a pursuit of perfection that drove him. The perfect torture could accomplish the perfect royal objective, the maintenance of a healthy loathing, dread, and horror from the subjects of the kingdom. This would ensure the royal reign that he was planning to inherit.

Oh, the plans he had when he took over his father Nimrod’s rule. He smiled at the thought of it. To have absolute power was an aphrodisiac to him. And it might even be sooner than he thought because he was starting to think his mother was planning a possible assassination of the king.

“Mardon,” said Semiramis, interrupting his pensive thoughts. “I told you we have an audience with your father. Have I taught you nothing? Never disappoint the king, it breeds distrust, you fool.”

She walked into the room and saw the victim he was experimenting upon. Without losing stride, she grabbed a knife from the table of instruments and plunged it into the heart of the victim, killing him instantly. He let out a cry before giving up his breath.

“Mother! I worked for hours on that frog!” complained Mardon.

He called the humans frogs, lambs, and other animal names.

It disgusted Semiramis how twisted her son had become. The proverb came to her mind,
From the wicked goeth forth wickedness
. This was more than an apt description of this vile offspring of Nimrod. She wanted to raise a tyrant that she could control. But there was something darkly removed and sinister about this one. It led her to wonder if she would lose that control upon his ascendancy to the throne. Once he had absolute power, would he simply put her to death to take her out of the way? Would all her plans for the past generation be obliterated in an instant because she failed to recognize the true essence of this perversion of nature? Well, she could not worry about that now. She would have to plan for it later.

She wiped blood off Mardon’s cheek, like any nit-picking mother, and said, “Get cleaned up and meet your father and me in the throne room within the hour.”

“Yes, mother,” replied Mardon. He was subservient to her. He so appreciated the care with which she raised him to become an effective emperor. She had educated him about religion, politics, and the craft of court intrigue. She had taught him the fine art of treachery through diplomacy and getting your way. She had taught him how to rule a people through fear. He actually enjoyed the overbearing and domineering personality she exerted over him. It was an opportunity to feel a bit of what his victims felt, which would give him greater pleasure in their pain. Like father, like son.

It also satisfied his sexual hunger to be submissively beaten by her and abused in their acts of incestuous coitus. It was the only moment he could ever engage in the release of complete surrender, something he would never allow in any other circumstance. Surrender was an alien sentiment of other humans, an oddity he sought to understand like a scholar studying a tablet. And he could experiment with the curious activity of surrender during their
fornication because he knew that she would never let him be hurt, let alone die. He was her salvation. He was her hope for the future.

It was a pity that she would have to be eliminated once he rose to power.

Oh well,
he thought.
From the wicked goeth forth wickedness
.

Mardon arrived in the throne room dressed in his royal attire. Nimrod and Semiramis sat on their thrones, waiting for him.

Nimrod was impatient and annoyed. “So sorry to take you away from your garden of earthly delights, Mardon, but I have a kingdom to run, and you will accompany me and Terah on a tour of my cities.”

Mardon glanced at Semiramis. She nodded, and he stepped forward to kneel on one knee. He said, “Yes, my father.”

Nimrod held back his contempt. He could see Mardon was more the son of the queen than the king. Of course, he had no one to blame but himself as he had neglected his son once he noticed that he was not right in the head. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he thought he would make the best of it now and try to exert some influence on the reprobate scoundrel before it was too late. Though Nimrod was a Naphil, half-human, half-god, he was not getting any younger. He was over a century old. Even Nephilim die. Becoming the first world potentate would not be of much value if he could not establish a dynasty of power that would last for generations.

Mardon was the heir of that dynasty.

Nimrod announced, “We will start at Elam in the south and from there travel to Ur before coming up to the northern cities of Nineveh and her sisters.”

“A wise course, father,” said Mardon patronizingly.

Mardon knew that of all the vassal kingdoms that served Nimrod, Elam was the most restless. Its king, Chedorlaomer, had
been a prince of Nimrod’s host before being given the city-state of Elam to administer. Chedorlaomer had become very successful and comfortable with his new identity as monarch, and Elam was becoming quite a powerful entity. The king started to show signs of independence and because Chedorlaomer had served so closely under Nimrod, he knew the emperor’s ways intimately. That meant he could anticipate Nimrod’s behavior should Nimrod decide to use force to bring Elam under more control. It was a touchy situation and Nimrod knew that personal presence was always superior to surrogate proxy when it came to political diplomacy. So their first stop would be Elam.