Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
It began the way of all rumours. Coming from nowhere, permeating the air like smoke then gaining form and substance from repetition until it became truth, or at least Fact. Someone had said it in the marketplace, or a prophet had come down from the hills. Then there was the printed sheet, blown up against a hedge, which bore a picture of a great fish in the sky. Inside the fish were the sun, moon and five planets. A cone of light streamed from its underbelly, illuminating the tops of houses and steeples and men’s faces drowning in water. Pieter, who could read, told Marthe what the lettering said, which was that in February 1524, there would be a grand conjunction of all the heavenly bodies in Pisces. Pisces was a water sign, and so the world would end in flood.
Everyone knew that the magic of print turned words into truth. And the end of the world had been prophesied before, not only by astrologers, but priests and monks and those in secret societies where wisdom had been passed on since biblical times. Or even earlier, translated from the tongue of angels.
Pieter could remember that in 1499, his father had been told the world would end in fire. He had rowed his entire family out to sea in two boats laden with provisions. Marthe could not remember this – in 1499 she was still an infant.
‘What happened then?’ she asked.
‘After a while he rowed us all back again.’
That surely proved, Marthe said, that these prophecies could not be trusted. But Pieter said it was only a matter of time. The Second Coming was long overdue and the fish, as everyone knew, was the symbol not only of Pisces, but Christianity. The Age of Pisces, he said, would end in a flood that would wash away the sins of the world. Then Jesus would walk across the waters towards them, bringing his disciples with him and all the company of saints. And those who had done evil on the earth would be swept away in a torrent but those who had pleased God and obeyed his Holy Word would float to the surface and walk across the waves with Christ, to meet their Maker.
‘I thought evildoers were going to burn,’ said Marthe but Pieter seemed not to hear. He was gazing out to sea where rays of light fell between the clouds, forming a transparent curtain that did look as though it might part at any moment to reveal heavenly glory. Pieter’s eyes reflected the light, sweat shone on his upper lip.
He drank from the jar she passed him then climbed back up the ladder to the platform he’d constructed. Marthe thought of saying, maybe it won’t be like that, but as though he’d heard her, he said, ‘It is written, there will be a new heaven and a new earth,’ his words punctuated by the hammer’s ringing blows.
More and more these days he spoke in the language of prophesy, he hadn’t washed for weeks.
No one had asked Marthe if she wanted to marry a prophet. He hadn’t been a prophet then, just a young man with dreams. Now here he was, unwashed at the top of a pole, waiting for the end of the world. Sure that the universe was communicating with him in its secret language.
Marthe turned away from him, towards her younger son Kit, who was attempting to climb a rock. Her older son, Jolyon, was throwing stones at a gull. She held her belly as she hurried towards them, hoping her next child might be a girl.
*
Already the men were hauling timber from the woods, lopping off branches, shaving the trunks into posts, then driving them into the ground.
There was the question of how high the houses would need to be, how long the posts on which they would stand. Pieter reminded them that in Genesis it said, fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail. Fifteen cubits was roughly the size of a medium beech trunk when trimmed and driven two cubits into the earth. And since no one knew how to join two trunks together so they were stable enough to bear a house that would stand against strong winds and storms, the length was agreed without too much debate.
Of course it also said in Genesis that the mountains were covered, which made no sense unless mountains were much smaller in those days when the earth was young. But Marthe had always been taught that when there was no answer to a question it was pointless, even harmful to ask it.
Pieter seemed to have become the leader. No one knew how this had happened, but the other men were following him. Although the question of how many posts, and the distance between them, caused a quarrel between him, Aart and Jan. Pieter’s brother Hans stood with him as he always did, and Bastien also, while Kurt hung back looking sullen. The argument turned into a bitter row which delayed the building work by a day because they couldn’t start to dig without deciding. Pieter said the houses should be an equal size to make best use of the land but Aart and Jan said their families were bigger and they couldn’t all live in one room since no one knew how long the flood might last. In the Bible it said forty days and nights, but that was then. And even forty days would be impossible with them all crammed together in a one-roomed hut. Bastien said they should not use more wood than they had to because they would need to rebuild after the flood, and Hans said there was no time to fell more trees and shape them into posts; Aart and Jan would have to manage the same as everyone else. This caused Aart to ride off into the woods with Jan following.
Pieter wanted Kurt’s opinion but Kurt only asked what they were planning to do about the horses.
No one, it turned out, had thought about the horses. The sheep and pigs would be slaughtered, of course, and maybe the hens, though some hens might be taken into the huts with the families. But who wanted to try hoisting a horse up into a stable on stilts, with enough hay to keep it for however long it took?
No one could face the prospect of eating their horses, although that would have been the practical solution, and no one wanted to see them drown.
In the end Pieter got angry, which was always the case when he didn’t know what to do. He said there were enough problems without creating more, and some things would have to be dealt with when the time came.
There were always nay-sayers, he said, who stood aside, while everyone else did the work.
Kurt said nothing to this but watched Pieter’s retreating back. Then briefly, his eyes met Marthe’s.
*
In the old country, Marthe had been a weaver; now she made fishing nets. Throughout the summer she collected nettles from the part of the meadow which had proved too difficult to till, twisting them together with the fibrous inner bark of trees. Now she sat on the sand, her hands making the familiar movements as they knotted the strands into ropes. They seemed like the hands of a much older woman, the knuckles like walnut shells.
The weather was unseasonably warm, the sea like a silken sheet smoothed over the sand. Gulls wheeled above it, dipping and swooping, calling to one another, Keow Kow ow wow ow
It was hard to imagine this same sea as the vehicle of their destruction but Marthe knew how rapidly it could change. She’d seen a blue sky turn green in an instant, the light vanish and the sea swell and roar, veined and flecked with foam or even ice.
She always thought of the sea as a live thing, restless, moaning. Sometimes she would see a tremor or quiver run through it like the flank of a beast when a fly settled, or a haze like a sweat above its surface, and then she knew a storm was coming, or that a fog would descend, erasing all the world.
As a child she’d had to be taught to fear the sea. She used to run in and out of it like a sandpiper, following the broken arrow of light made by the sun across the waves. She would go further and further, the water passing her shins then her knees.
But her mother would drag her back with a slap, telling her the sea wasn’t a toy, it would kill her in a moment if she strayed too far. Did she think the sea cared for bad little girls like her? She was nothing to it.
Of course Marthe knew the sea didn’t love her the way she loved it. And she knew it wasn’t alive. But it had its own empire of life, its own herd of beasts hauled by its tides.
Also, it had its own language, which Marthe tried to learn by lowering her face into it. Listening to the ssshoosshing noise, then the silence. The taste of the water was cold and salt. When she opened her eyes in it she could see a different world, of waving seaweed and tiny creatures that may or may not have been fish.
But her mother would come running again, squawking like a gannet. How had she been cursed with such a child? Could she do as she was told, for once, instead of dreaming on the sands?
Marthe could hardly hear her for the sea rushing through her blood.
Her mother would shake her and ask when would she ever grow up?
Which meant drawing a line between what was real and unreal. Or at least accepting the line that was drawn for her by others.
Couldn’t it mean something else? she’d asked about the picture of the fish. Her husband had looked at her as though she was mad. What else could it mean? he’d asked. It was there printed in black and white for everyone to see. In February 1524, a deluge would wash over the earth, destroying every living creature on it.
Shaking his head at her, he went back to his hammering.
Still, she tried.
‘We don’t know who wrote it,’ she said, ‘or why.’
Pieter stopped hammering. He looked at her with hatred. ‘Can you read?’ he asked. ‘Can you?’
Marthe shook her head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘so.’ And he went back to his hammering.
Grievance made him cruel. These days he was always aggrieved, chin tilted at the world as if to say why him? Why were there not more crops, better weather? Why were only his children ill? Why had his father died early leaving him, a child, to provide for his family? Why had they been driven out of their native land to this inhospitable shore?
He seemed to feel a kind of justification, or satisfaction in this final doom. For once he hadn’t been singled out for misfortune, everyone would be similarly afflicted.
But Marthe thought, if the words hadn’t been there it would be possible to see a different picture. The fish giving birth to the world which poured from its underbelly in a stream of light. As though all things had come from the sea, even the sun and stars. Wasn’t the fish a symbol of Christ, and Christ the image of God?
Marthe knew not to speak such thoughts aloud. It would be like saying that God was a great fish, or that mankind was no different from other creatures that crawled from the sea.
Such thoughts were heresy, and heresy was punishable by death.
*
In any case, there were other signs. A man with yellow eyes had been seen slipping silently into the woods on all fours. Further along the shore another man had hauled in a catch of fish with no faces, no eyes or mouths. It should have made the gutting easier, not having to look at them, but he was so disturbed by the blind blunt nubs where their faces should be, their weakly flapping fins, that he ran away from them leaving them on the sand.
The farmer on the moor swore his cockerel had been suckling its young. And one morning two ravens hovered above the meadow croaking for a full hour, the shadow of their great wings chilling the earth.
Marthe hadn’t seen any of these things. She’d noticed nothing strange or marvellous, just that it was still unnaturally warm for February. In the mornings the sea mist clung like a sweat to her face. In the meadow she could hear the sawing song of frogs. The hazel catkins were out already, and the blackthorn blossom appeared on stark branches like a frill of snow.
Pieter thought such unseasonal warmth was a sign in itself, bringing, as it would, pestilence and famine in its wake. It was the beginning. The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, he said, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind. And the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire.
Marthe had always wondered how a merciful god could consign his people to eternal damnation. But then, who wanted an afterlife without punishment?
That was what it was all about surely, some form of redress.
*
The position of the posts caused another argument. As soon as the pits were dug, it was possible to see how the earth was mixed, with stone in some parts and water in others. And there was the tide to consider. What would happen if the rain fell for more than forty days and nights?
In the end they decided on six posts for each house in two rows of three. Pieter said wattle and daub weighed less than timber, although the framework would be made from wood, and the roofs would be thatched.
So materials were collected, trunks split, mud mixed with straw, turf left out to dry. More ladders were made, and platforms so that each man could work on his own house. The ropes Marthe had twisted into nets were now to be used for pulleys. She sat on a wooden crate unknotting the nets, thinking, it’s real, it’s really happening. The child that swam in her now would be born in the floods, in a small house on stilts, while the waters roared around them. One night she dreamed it had fins like a fish. It opened and closed its mouth at her then swam away.
*
Finally the houses stood like strange wading birds on tall legs above the shore. They faced out to sea as though watching for what would come. Each had a window and a door which could be battened down against the storms with canvas sacking soaked in tallow. There was a space in front of each door for a water barrel. Because what would it be like, Pieter asked, to be surrounded by water, without anything to drink or cook with?
Hooks were affixed to the sides of the houses for their boats. Because when the waters began to calm they would need to fish, and then sail to dry land.
In the early days they had considered building an ark; one large boat to contain them all with their animals. In the end it had been too complicated, no one had been quite sure how, so instead there were these tall huts overlooking the shore. They hadn’t moved further away because Pieter had said there was no point, since all the earth would be flooded.
The roofs were made from tightly-woven reeds, steeply pitched so the rains would run off, but in each roof there was a small hole for a chimney, and in each house a rough hearth made from mud and stones. Although Marthe wondered how they would light a fire once the floods came.
‘Do you plan on cooking without one?’ Pieter asked. ‘Or staying warm? What about washing the baby’s linens?’
More and more these days, he spoke to her as though she was stupid, perhaps because she was pregnant. She wanted to scream at him that he was the foolish one, imagining that if the world came to an end they could somehow survive in these teetering huts.
What would it be like to survive the end of the world anyway? Perhaps she didn’t want to, but there was the baby. Marthe touched her swollen stomach, glancing towards Kurt. She was not so keen as Pieter on the idea of retribution.
Then she realised Kurt was coming towards her. Dragging one sack behind him, carrying another over his shoulder. He stopped at a respectful distance.
‘We don’t need all the barley,’ he said. ‘I thought, perhaps, you could use some – when the baby comes.’
He spoke without looking at her, then slung the sacks into the space between them. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
He wouldn’t return her gaze. As she looked at him, she could sense him becoming curbed, retreating inwards. She wanted him to say something but he only nodded and walked away.
`*
The pigs were slaughtered first. They screamed and bolted while the men attempted to corner them. The children ran away, hands clamped over their ears, apart from Jolyon, who wanted to watch. Anneke and Jehane cried, which set Kit off so Marthe had to hold him, while the smallest pig ran around the pen squealing, a bright spray of blood from its throat.
Pieter wiped his hands on his apron, and said the sheep could wait until tomorrow. Every part of him was stained. There were flecks of blood in his beard, his eyebrows.
The smell of it, blood and tripes, would remain on him for days.
Marthe held Kit close as he strode past her, breathing in his biscuity smell of sweat. ‘You baby that one,’ Pieter said. But Marthe remembered how as a child he too had cried at the killing of the family pig.
That was a long time ago.
*
After the slaughtering the loading began. Sacks and bales, boxes and jars. The insides of the huts already looked like warehouses or barns, frightened hens chittering and dropping possets of shit on the floor, stacks of wood piled against the walls. The beds were straw mattresses. It was too difficult to haul the frames up through the narrow door, so they had to be chopped into firewood. Marthe’s first attempt to cook over the fire filled the hut with smoke, they had to climb down the ladders again, each clutching a hen.
At first the children loved climbing up and down the ladders, Jolyon swinging from the rungs until his father clipped him, but gradually they grew sullen, understanding that they would stay in these huts leaving everything behind. Jolyon wanted to bring his sling, his hoop, his bow and arrows, Marthe said there wasn’t room.
‘What will you throw stones at, here?’ she asked, and Jolyon said he would shoot a seagull for dinner, and Pieter laughed and said, ‘Let him try.’
But Marthe had had enough of killing. She would never forget the cries of beasts champing and roaring against their fate, the scream of their horses.
But it was done now, they were ready to move. In three days’ time, according to the prophecy, the world would end. Marthe stood by the single window, wondering whether the child in her womb would even get to be born, and what kind of world it would be born into.
Just now, the air was keen with ice but the waters were still. The sky was white with the whiteness of naked birches. Gulls circled in diminishing arcs, black winged gannets plunged into the waves. Far below, fish swam in their blue prison, the only way they could leave was in the beak of a seabird.
So God had created the world, hungry, needy, cruel. Only man saw damnation in it, in his own instincts. But God had also made a promise to man, a covenant, that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.
When she’d said that to Pieter, he’d shrugged. God, of course, was free to change His mind.
Their boys were running the length of the hut, jumping on the straw mattress and scattering the straw. Marthe turned to scold them.
*
That night, the first they spent in their new home, Marthe couldn’t sleep. The hut swayed and creaked in the wind, the baby kicked against her pelvic bone. In the end she got up.
An ice moon had risen. Scarves of cloud drifted across it, bruise-coloured. The sea churned softly. Marthe shivered. There were only two more days to go.
This moon was also called the hunger moon. Marthe had no way of knowing how long their stocks would last. How long they might have to stay in this hut, which stank of old blood and chicken shit and creaked as she moved.
Already she missed the land, the wind rattling the dead leaves left on trees, the black-green pellets of sheep dung, the wide paw marks of badgers. The way water oozed from the earth as it thawed, horse-back brown. Yesterday, she’d seen casts of ice in the old hoof marks of cows. She wondered whether she would ever see them again.
Not the cows of course, they were all slaughtered now. If she closed her eyes she could remember the way they nudged her with their noses, their warm breath on her hands. The steaming, pulsing sides of a new-born calf that had to be coaxed to live.
She’d asked Pieter whether they were acting in defiance of God. Why shouldn’t they drown? But Pieter said God had given them free will. And He had singled out Noah to live, by building his ark.
So here they were in these creaking huts, all their animals slaughtered.
Why would God want such a thing?
Then she thought, it wasn’t God, but Man. Each generation of man grew more and more powerful in his determination to survive until he became like God. The frightful God of the Old Testament, jealous and vengeful.
Behind her, on his straw mattress, Jolyon whimpered and stirred. Marthe went to him. A bar of moonlight passed over his face but his eyes remained closed. She could kill both her children now, she thought, leaning over them, and save them the Terror that was to come.
At the back of the room a hen stirred, making a bok-bok noise and Marthe straightened slowly. Her back was aching. She stepped over her sleeping children and began the cumbersome process of lowering herself down towards her husband.
*
Jolyon saw it first; a huge cloud fringed with gold advancing towards them. Pieter picked him up and Marthe held Kit while they watched. The cloud was massive with light on the top side, heavy and dark beneath. Like a bloated leviathan ready to release its stormy doom.
Pater noster qui est in caelo, Pieter murmured.
Marthe’s voice seemed stuck in her throat. This is it, now, she thought, and she felt a pure, liquid terror. Her bones seemed to turn to water, there was fluid in her mouth. When she closed her eyes she understood what it would be like to drown, her lungs bursting with salt water, the currents snapping her spine impersonally as a blade.
They stood staring at the cloud as though they expected God Himself to walk out of it. Then Pieter sprang into action, pulling down the tarred cloth over the window, fastening the locks on the door. All the light was extinguished at once.
Marthe wanted to say, Surely a God who can drown the whole world isn’t going to be stopped by a canvas sheet? And, if something was coming for her she would rather see it, she didn’t want them to wait blind as moles in the darkness. But then a strange calm came over her. She lit two candles, and sat in a circle with Pieter and her boys. ‘I’m cold,’ Kit whimpered. He started to cry, and for once Pieter didn’t scold him but picked him up and stroked the brown-blonde curls, his face all hollows in the candlelight.
*
After the storm there was nothing in the sky but light. There was so much silence you could hear the water speaking.
Pieter said February wasn’t over yet, no one could leave. So they stayed in the huts, the boys uncharacteristically subdued, Jolyon trying to teach Kit to play knucklebones. Marthe went out only once, to the barrel outside the door where rainwater had collected. She felt unsteady, as if the platform were swaying like the sea. Smaller clouds were forming now, like malevolent cherubs. Gulls flew out from the oblique faces of the cliffs, their shadows stood out sharply on the water.
Marthe looked for further signs, but there was nothing, so far as she could see.
It was the kind of light that made boundaries disappear, and everything seem unreal. The gull’s flight, the wind and the sea were one and the same, the cry not separate from the gull nor the gull from the wind or the wind from the sea. The sky and sea blended together invisibly on the horizon.
Only words made them separate.
The sea could not be known or used in the way that men use the things they know, but only in the way that unravelled you in the knowing. You would never know it if you saw it as a separate thing.
Jolyon called for her and Marthe went back inside to try her luck at cooking on the hearth once more.
*
Generations later, little remained of the huts on the cliff. Nothing of Marthe or Pieter, Jolyon or Kit or Kurt, or the baby that was born that spring.
All that was left of was driftwood, inscribing its unintelligible message on the sands.
____
Livi Michael has written novels for adults, young adults and children. Her most recent novel, Reservoir, was published in March 2023 by Salt and Elizabeth and Ruth will be published by Salt in February 2026. Her short stories have been published in various places including Granta, Confingo, The Interpreter’s House, The Lonely Crowd and the Manchester Review. Her play, Singers Not Sinners was performed in Oldham in 2022. She currently runs a podcast about short stories with the writer and translator Sonya Moor.