Noah Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1: The Snakeskin

  2: The Hound

  3: The Dream

  4: The Girl

  5: The Watchers

  6: The Mountain

  7: The Seed

  8: The Fountain

  9: The Doves

  10: The King

  11: The Mammals

  12: The Camp

  13: The Pit

  14: The Blessing

  15: The Storm

  16: The Battle

  17: The Story

  18: The Sickness

  19: The Silence

  20: The Raft

  21: The Birth

  22: The Rainbow

  About the Author

  Noah: The Official Movie Novelization

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783292561

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783292578

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2014

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright ©2014 by Paramount Pictures

  NOAH™ & © Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  Cover images © Paramount Pictures

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  TITAN BOOKS.COM

  1

  THE SNAKESKIN

  The ancient stone shrine, set atop a hill, was exposed to both the stars and the wind. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, close to a small fire, a thirteen-year-old boy, gangly, lean and dark-haired, gazed with rapt attention at a middle-aged man standing at the edge of the fire’s glow. The man was dressed in simple linens, and the soft orange light lapped at his bearded features, transforming his face to a mask of bronze, albeit one that wore an expression both wise and kind. A small wooden box rested on the ground next to them.

  The man was Lamech; the boy his son, Noah. For a while now Lamech had been hinting that Noah would soon be old enough to claim his birthright, and it seemed that the time had come.

  Noah was nervous, he couldn’t deny that, but he was excited, too. He trusted and loved his father. Like many boys, he believed incontrovertibly not only that his father was right in every decision he made, and that he always spoke the truth, but also that he was indestructible. He listened now to his father’s words, concentrating on them so hard that he barely flinched when a fierce gust of wind sprang up, throwing dust into his face and causing the flames of the fire to twist crazily in response, and shadows to cavort around the stone walls of the shrine like dark spirits.

  Despite the commotion, the cadence of Lamech’s voice didn’t alter. Gentle and soft, and yet at the same time deep and authoritative, it was the voice of a man at peace with himself and his beliefs.

  “And these are the generations of Adam, whose blessing comes down to us today,” he told Noah. “Adam begat Seth. And Seth begat Enosh. Enosh begat Kenan, and Kenan begat Mahalalel…”

  Noah glanced at the wooden box. Despite the fact that it was weathered and chipped and scratched, its edges worn smooth by time, he knew the box was somehow important, and that his father would come to it in his own good time.

  Now Lamech leaned forward and picked up the box, continuing to speak as he did so.

  “And so down to us the blessing passed,” he said. “To my father, Methuselah… and then to me…”

  Almost reverently he lifted the lid, pausing for a moment to peer at what was inside. Firelight danced in his deep brown eyes, and Noah fancied he saw something like rapture there. Lamech reached into the box and carefully drew out something delicate and shimmering. At first Noah thought it was a length of material, something that, although still glossy, had become wrinkled and a little withered by age. But then, as Lamech put the box aside and began to wrap the item slowly around his arm, Noah realized it wasn’t material at all…

  It was a snakeskin.

  Before his astonished eyes the snakeskin began to shimmer more brightly, as if responding to the beat of life within Lamech’s flesh. It seemed to curl up and around Lamech’s arm and body of its own accord, undulating as it did so. As if drawing warmth and vitality from Lamech, it began to pulse and glow with life, luminous and beautiful.

  Noah became frightened. He looked at his father, but the calmness in Lamech’s eyes and the smile on his lips reassured him. Lamech stretched out his scale-wrapped hand.

  “Today that birthright passes to you, Noah, my son,” he said.

  Noah slowly uncrossed his legs and stood up. He didn’t know whether to take his father’s hand or wait to be instructed. He gazed up trustingly into his father’s eyes as Lamech pointed, his index finger hovering an inch or less from Noah’s forehead.

  “The Creator made Adam in His image, then placed the world in his care,” he said. “This is the path we follow, Noah. This is your work now, your responsibility. May you walk alongside the Creator, in righteousness.”

  Noah’s eyes focused on the tip of his father’s pointing finger. Like a snake’s forked tongue, the reptile skin began to flicker across the gap. He braced himself, clenching his fists tightly, wondering what the living skin would feel like against his flesh…

  But all at once they heard a disturbance nearby. Not the wind this time, but the cries and shouts of men, voices raised in anger. Noah glanced at his father, saw the consternation on his face.

  “Men,” Lamech said. “Hide!”

  Noah needed no further bidding. He scuttled away and ducked down behind a nearby rock.

  Crouching in the shadows, peering out from behind the rock, he watched as a score of what he knew to be miners, their skin filthy and their clothes torn and bedraggled, crested the hilltop, flanked by eight armor-clad warlords. Behind them, in the distance, rose the slender, spire-like skyscrapers of a city, among which smokestacks belched out fire and plumes of choking, poisonous smoke.

  The leader of the warlords was a giant—or so it seemed to Noah. The man who strode arrogantly forward was huge, monstrous, his heavily muscled body bulked out further by his battle-dented armor. His arms and legs, scarred and mud-smeared, were like tree trunks, his long, unkempt hair and straggly beard flowing from a brutal, heavily-featured face. Gazing at him in terror, Noah saw a nose that was bulbous and crooked, cheeks and forehead striped and mottled with scar tissue, eyes that were steel-gray, cold, full of pride and cruelty.

  Ignoring Lamech, the enormous man strode forward and rammed something into the ground. Noah recognized it as an auger, a tool with a corkscrew-like device on the end for boring holes. No sooner had the giant shoved the tool into the earth than he twisted it and yanked it out again. He examined the plug of earth that the auger had extracted, then grinned and showed it to the group of hard-bitten miners and soldiers standing expectantly behind him.

  “Pure tzohar,” he said.

  The group nodded and muttered in appreciation. Still concealed behind his rock, Noah scanned their faces and shivered. He couldn’t see an ounce of kindness or mercy in a single one of them.

  Terrifying though the intruders were, Noah saw his father stride f
orward, outraged and unafraid.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  The giant turned and regarded Lamech with a kind of lazy curiosity, as though he was nothing more than a vaguely unusual insect.

  “I am Tubal-cain!” he declared. “What is it to you, old man?”

  The name was familiar to Noah. His father had told him the story of how Cain had struck down his brother Abel and killed him out of greed and jealousy.

  “This is the Creator’s land,” Lamech said in answer to Tubal-cain’s question. “It is not—”

  But he got no further. Almost casually, Tubal-cain backhanded Lamech across the face with a heavily gauntleted hand. As Tubal-cain’s companions laughed, Lamech staggered backward, blood pouring from his split lip, and tumbled to the dirt.

  “The Creator?” Tubal-cain sneered. “My mines run dry, my city withers and must be fed… and what has your precious Creator done? He cursed us to struggle by the sweat of our brows to survive. Damned if I don’t do everything it takes to do just that.”

  Suddenly he spotted the snakeskin glimmering on Lamech’s arm. His eyes lit up with greed.

  “And damned if I don’t take what I want,” he said.

  Crouching beside Lamech’s body, he pinned the older man down with one hand and tugged the snakeskin loose from around his arm.

  As soon as the snakeskin was deprived of its contact with Lamech’s flesh, it lost its luster. It became dull and lifeless once more, nothing but a length of dry, shriveled, ancient reptile flesh that looked as though it might crumble if handled too roughly. But this deterred Tubal-cain not one iota. Laughing, he draped the skin around his shoulders—a victor’s prize, a spoil of war.

  “This relic belongs to Cain’s line now,” he roared. “The line of Seth ends here!”

  Noah saw his father push himself shakily to his knees.

  “May He show you His mercy, Tubal-cain…” Lamech said, extending a hand toward the huge warrior, as if to bestow a blessing upon him.

  Tubal-cain’s face twisted with contempt. He spat on Lamech. “I do not need it.”

  And then, without hesitation, the huge warrior pulled an axe from the belt around his waist, swung it round and smashed it down on Lamech’s skull.

  If he had been able to draw the breath to do so, Noah would have screamed. His entire being blazed with horror and hatred and disbelief. But he could only gape as Tubal-cain kicked his father’s body aside and roared, “This land is ours! Now dig!”

  Noah, still shocked beyond measure, stared at his father’s body. His faint glimmer of hope—that his father might merely be injured—evaporated in an instant. Lamech’s skull had been crushed, and Noah could see that his eyes were already glazing over in death.

  Tubal-cain disdainfully wiped the blood from his axe on Lamech’s garment and re-sheathed it. As he grinned once again at his men, Noah rose shakily to his feet, turned and began to run, moving as silently as he could and keeping the ancient rock shrine between himself and his father’s killers to avoid detection. It anguished him that he would not be able to bury his father, nor even kiss him on the forehead, close his glazed eyes and murmur a prayer in his honor, but he was certain that Lamech would understand.

  He ran and ran, and he didn’t stop running until he had descended one hill and crested another. Only then, surrounded by the silence of the night, did he turn and look at what he was leaving behind.

  It was a scene his father would have hated. The city, driven by Man’s greed and iniquity, its vast chimneys belching out smoke and flame, lit up the sky like a funeral pyre.

  Noah, now a homeless orphan, fell to his knees and wept.

  GENESIS 6: 5–6

  The Creator saw that Man was completely sinful in the World, their deepest thoughts were nothing but evil. And He regretted that He had made Man and it grieved Him at His heart.

  2

  THE HOUND

  The earth was gray and dry, the dust-filled air diffusing the light of the low-hanging red sun. All was dead for miles around, aside from occasional clusters of straggly, colorless shoots that fought to stand up straight against the pitiless force of the swirling wind. The monotony of the endless plain was broken only by occasional clumps of pockmarked rock formations forming valleys and canyons, and a hazy row of mountains on the distant horizon. There was no discernible life here. Nothing moved.

  Or did it?

  Even an airborne predator would have had to swoop close to spot the suggestion of movement among the jagged, black rocks of the deepest of the canyons. A man and two boys, who patiently scraped lichen and herbs from the rocks with stubby blades and collected them in satchels resting on their hips, wore clothes so colorless and so caked with dust that they might have been rocks themselves. Their skin, too, was ingrained with dust, though the father’s was of a deeper hue, darkened to a leathery toughness from years of exposure to the sometimes-merciless sun. The man and the two boys worked quietly and tirelessly, although when a single drop of rain landed on the ground next to the man, causing him to pause and look up, the strain was all too evident on his face.

  In a little over a quarter of a century the gangly, wide-eyed boy that Noah had once been had become a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  He frowned up at the sky, which, although gray and dull, contained not a single cloud. Puzzled he looked at the spot where the rain had fallen, no more than a hand’s span from his foot, but already the dry earth had sucked up the moisture, leaving nothing but a tiny crater behind.

  Noah turned to the closest and oldest of the boys, whose hair was dark, almost black, like his mother’s.

  “Shem?” he called.

  The boy looked up. “Yes, Father?”

  “Do you feel rain?”

  Shem glanced at the sky as Noah had done, then shook his head.

  “No, Father.”

  Noah frowned. Shem, a lithe nine-year-old, tall for his age, returned to his work. Noah turned to ask his younger son, six-year-old Ham, the same question—and was just in time to see Ham about to drop a small white flower into his satchel.

  “Ham!” Noah said, perhaps a little too sternly.

  The boy froze. Unlike his brother, he was small for his age, his cheeks sunken from lack of nourishment. He looked up at his father, a mischievous expression on his face.

  “What are you doing?” Noah asked.

  Ham opened his hand, revealing the small white flower. “It’s pretty.”

  Noah sighed and took the flower from Ham’s palm. It was plain and rather bedraggled, but compared to the weeds and the dust and the black rocks it was a thing of beauty. Looking across to where Ham had been working, he saw several clumps of the white flowers clinging precariously to fissures in the rock.

  “See those other flowers?” he said. “How they’re attached to the rock? That’s where they should be. They have a purpose, you see. They sprout and they bloom, the wind takes the seeds and more flowers grow. We only collect what we can use—and nothing more. You understand?”

  Ham nodded. “Yes, Father.”

  “Good boy.” Noah smiled and ruffled his hair.

  Ham scampered happily off. Noah watched him go, the smile stretched across his dry lips fading all too quickly. He looked up at the cloudless sky again, then sighed deeply and turned back to his work. But just at that moment another raindrop, seemingly out of nowhere, hit the ground at his feet.

  This time, however, the drop wasn’t immediately absorbed into the dry ground. Instead, a small white flower, identical to the one that Ham had picked, sprang from the earth. Noah gaped at it, then looked at his sons. They had seen nothing. He opened his mouth to speak, when, with a scrabbling of claws, an animal suddenly careened around the corner of the outcropping of rock thirty steps to Noah’s left.

  Fearing for the safety of his sons, Noah leaped forward to confront the creature, knife upraised. It was a scrawny, long-nosed hound, its flesh plated in thick scaly ridges. Its eyes were wild and foam dripped from
its panting jaws as it ran. Despite its fearsome appearance, it scrambled to a panicked halt as soon as it saw Noah, dust puffing up around it.

  Although he was gripping his knife in one hand, Noah raised his other to calm the beast. He knew these hounds. They were wild but generally timid creatures, which would only attack if driven half-crazed with hunger. If tamed they made good pets. They were loyal, and intelligent, too. They were generally pack animals, but this one seemed to be alone.

  Noah had a way with animals. They responded to him. On this occasion, however, the creature was clearly too skittish, too frightened, to be soothed by his soft words. He had barely begun to speak when it turned tail and fled, disappearing into a narrow crevice between two rocks. Only as it did so did Noah see the reason for its panic. The hound had a broken spear shaft sticking out of a wound in its shoulder, which was pouring with blood.

  At once Noah turned to his boys.

  “Shem!” he barked. “Men!”

  Shem understood and obeyed his father instantly. Grabbing his frightened brother, he ducked into a shallow aperture in the canyon wall and pulled his gray cloak over both their heads. Completely covered by the cloak, which was exactly the same color as the landscape around it, the boys froze. Noah allowed himself a grim smile of satisfaction. He had trained his sons well. Now they were perfectly camouflaged, nothing more than another outcropping of rock.

  Casting a quick glance at the opening in the rock from which the hound had emerged, Noah set off in pursuit of the injured animal. A seasoned tracker, perfectly at home in his environment, he followed its trail easily, moving so quickly and sure-footedly that he was almost a blur, his dark cloak flying behind him. He leaped over ravines, skipped around rocks, and slid through natural tunnels as though he was made of wind.

  After a while he began to hear the animal up ahead, its breathing labored, its speed hampered by its injury.

  Finally he entered a canyon that he knew from experience became increasingly narrower until it culminated in a cul-de-sac. The rock face beyond was jagged enough for an animal—or indeed a fit man—to climb, but Noah knew from the sounds of distress that the hound was making, and from the amount of blood it had shed on the dusty ground, that it would be incapable of such a feat. He slowed to a walk, moving silently now on the pads of his feet. The hound was trapped and desperate and in pain, all of which could make it dangerous.