In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost

from one so ill, but emphatic and compelling, as if he was steeling himself for something that was inevitably going to happen.
    My father bowed and thanked him again.
    The flat-faced dwarf said nothing, he just stared suspiciously at me and at my mother on her stretcher. I hardly dared move. I was terrified he would see I was not a boy. I kept my eyes averted, but my mother looked back at him frankly. Both of them had a look of horror in their eyes, like two demons who recognized each other. He looked inside our pots and jugs and walked to the waste pit where the carcass of the duck lay. “Look!” he said in a thin voice, picking up the bones that had been carefully chewed clean. He took them over to the sedan chair, stretched up, and gave them to the Builder.
    The Builder did not flinch when the bones dropped in his lap. He simply said, “You are not one of us. Your customs and traditions are strange, even repulsive.” Not many of his teeth had survived the ravages of time, which caused spittle to escape his mouth. But the absence of teeth did not make him hard to understand — on the contrary, we would clearly remember every single word he spoke.
    The Unnameable had not granted permission to eat animals, he said, and consequently, whoever did so would be punished. As he spoke, more water birds flew over the shipyard. They disappeared behind the cliff and landed somewhere past the clay pits, deep in the hills. The Builder was not distracted by the sound of their wings. He had a string of pearls in his hand that he passed through his fingers with a clicking sound. “The living creatureswere created on the fifth day,” he said. “We on the sixth. We were given dominion over them, but not permission to kill them, except as a sacrifice.”
    My father understood the import of his words much sooner than I did. The old man had not come to thank my father. He hadn’t even come to reprimand us. A much more drastic sentence awaited us, the carrying out of a threat that had been hanging over us all this time. My father could feel it coming. Quickly he went to stand close to the Builder, moving so abruptly that the pieces of wood on his belt rattled, and said, “Do not send us away, lord! We are already being punished! Our being here is our penance!” His voice was hoarse. The cough behind his hand was not to gain time, but a spasm of fear. “We did not kill the duck in order to eat it. This duck deserved to die. He took everything from us. He crippled my wife, and after that we had to move away from the edge of the marshes because she was going mad with fear.”
    The old Builder had not expected a reply from my father. He had come to make an announcement, not to listen. But what my father said seemed to capture his attention. The servants stopped shuffling their feet. There was not a breath of wind, not a cry from an animal or a child to break the silence that followed.
    My father hesitated. Never before had he told my mother’s story, because she did not want him to. She would hold her breath till she went blue in the face, she managed to make her lungs whistle, and with her glance forbade him to say another word. But this time, she was as quiet as a mouse. She listened as to someone else’s story.
    “Before she was paralyzed, she bred mallard ducks,” my father said. “She clipped their wings almost as soon as they had come out of the egg. She would heat up stones that she replaced constantly. She picked up the chicks one by one and pinched off the tips of their wings with a small pair of pincers. She fed them until they were grown.” I remembered how my mother would wake me up when the eggs were ripe and the squeaking coming from them became so intense that we knocked cracks into the shells with our fingernails. “The chicks thought she was their mother. Once they were grown up, she did not kill them. She used them as decoys. She used to laugh at them because they could not fly. She said they stuck to the water