“My love,” he turned his attention back to the scroll, “I’m truly busy.”
She looked down at the writing as well but did not move. “How are things going with Asar?” she asked at last.
Zaphenath unrolled the scroll further, frowning. “Just today, he was so good as to speak to me about the matter of popular prejudice regarding those of Asiatic origin.”
“Probably because I married such a handsome one.”
“You certainly married an older one.”
She sat there quietly before she said, “I want to see your brother.” He didn’t respond. “You haven’t seen your family for twenty years—”
“My brother,” Zaphenath said, eyes flicking over the characters as he read, “is the reason I haven’t seen my family for twenty years.”
“Mama!”
Asenath and Zaphenath both looked quickly over to the entryway, where a small, quivering Ephraim stood with his little body partly hidden in the curtains, clutching a trembling fist to his mouth. Asenath was quick to her feet and across the room.
“What’s wrong, little one?” she asked, bending down and putting her arms around the boy. “Bad dreams?”
Ephraim nodded with a shuddering intake of breath, and Asenath scooped him up as he let out a little wail. Zaphenath set the scroll aside and got to his feet.
“It’s all right,” Asenath said, looking over Ephraim’s little shaved head, but Zaphenath reached out, taking the child from his mother and holding his son gently in his arms. Ephraim curled up against him.
“It’s all right,” Zaphenath murmured. Asenath rubbed the little boy’s back as Zaphenath held him. Slowly, their son’s breathing began to gentle, and Ephraim’s eyes closed. He rested his head against his father’s shoulder.
“He’s a vivid little dreamer.” Asenath glanced at Zaphenath. “I suppose he gets that from you.”
Zaphenath’s dark eyes met hers, and he looked down at his sleeping son, cradled in his arms. “Benjamin was hardly older than our boys,” he said, softly, “the last time I saw him.”
“Maybe he has sons of his own.” Asenath smiled. “Imagine how big your family has become.”
“My family,” Zaphenath said, “is right here.”
Asenath looked back down at her sleeping son. “But you have a brother.”
Zaphenath shook his head. “Benjamin would barely remember me.”
“You have a brother here.”
He shook his head. “In twenty years,” he said, his voice quiet and hard, “not one of them ever came to find me.” He would not meet her eyes. “I have no other brothers.”
“Zaphenath.” She laid her hand on his arm. “I want you to find peace.”
“And you think,” Zaphenath said evenly, “that going back into a prison is going to do that?”
Ephraim stirred, mumbling something before growing still again.
“I’ll go put him back down,” Asenath whispered.
Zaphenath shook his head. “Let me take him.”
He brushed through the curtain leading out of the room, and Asenath stepped out after him, watching as her husband walked down the shadowed corridor with their son resting quietly in his arms. And she stood there, waiting, in the candlelit darkness, until her husband returned, slowly drawing closer until, close enough, he looked at her, and she looked at him.
“You are everything I have,” he whispered.
She leaned in against him, feeling how tightly he held onto her. Closing her eyes, she whispered, “I love you too.”
Chapter 19
Simeon
“Tjaty.” The surprised guard of the royal prison stepped aside with a bow.
The vizier held up a hand in thanks to the guard on the night watch, and the woman with the vizier—surely it couldn’t be his wife, but who else would he bring here?—smiled, her face partially hidden by the shadows. Leaving their own contingent of guards outside, the vizier led the way into the small inner room that was the holding cell for royal prisoners, lit only by the faint flicker of torches.
“Over here,” he said and moved closer, peering in through the small opening in the cell’s wall. Two men lay stretched out on the ground within, while a third sat leaning against the opposite wall, head lolling. Then he turned back and pointed to one of the men lying curled on his side.
Asenath stepped closer and leaned up on her toes, gazing in at the foreign man’s bearded face, his peppery hair streaked with age, his skin lined with years of travel beneath the sun, and his tall, lean body folded in protectively as he slept. His woolen garments were dusty with the dirt of the cell, and he slept with his head propped against the crook of his elbow.
Turning back, Asenath looked over her shoulder at her husband. He had already moved away. His hands were clasped lightly behind his back, his bearing every whit that of a dignitary.
She thought, You’ve slept here too.
She turned once more toward the desert man who lay in the dirt, curled into the dreams that hopefully gave him some escape from the grim and strange life that had overtaken him. Then she glanced over her shoulder again.
“He’s an old man,” she said, speaking almost too quietly to be heard. “Is he being taken care of?”
“Of course.” Zaphenath glanced back at the guards. “All the prisoners here are treated well.”
She looked back at the sleeping man. “He doesn’t look anything like you.”
“Did you expect him to?”
She touched her fingers against one of the rough wooden poles driven through the tiny opening, guarding the men within. “Tell me his name again.”
“Simeon.”
“Simeon,” she repeated, moving her mouth over the foreign sounds. “Why him?”
“My own reasons.” She heard her husband take a slow breath. “Have you seen enough?”
But she was still gazing in at Simeon.
And then Simeon, who until then had lain unmoving, began to stir, stretching out one arm and rolling over onto his back. Asenath stood absolutely still, watching as Simeon lifted a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes before rolling back onto his side, fluttering his eyes open, yawning.
He blinked, squinting in the dim light.
He saw her.
She knew it from the way he stared, suddenly perplexed, as if trying to understand what it was he saw standing there, watching him in the darkness.
Zaphenath, hearing the rustle from within the cell, moved closer and took his wife’s arm.
She glanced back as he touched her, just as the prisoner raised his head. And for a single, suspended moment, she stood between them like a balance—her husband’s hand on her arm, and his brother’s fixed gaze extending out from within the cell—and the two men looked past her from opposite sides of the bars, one in regal dress, the other filthy and exhausted, and they saw each other.
Zaphenath stared at his prisoner, seeing the hesitation and the way he held himself back from the full embrace of the flickering torchlight. This man, whom he had seen only in the shadows, had a stranger’s face, with a faded beard and dirty foreign clothes, and the years in the desert had drained away so much of what should have been familiar—and yet, couched in the worn lines and the fleeting expression, the wry, flickering eyes and the darting gaze, were vestiges of the brother he had known.
Did I expect the desert to make them immortal?
In his mind, they had never aged—they were still the strong, hot-headed bullies who had beaten him, not old and frightened men. Time had been cleft out there in the desert, seizing them all in a frozen and unchanging spasm, for time and all eternity, after the Joseph who had gone to seek his brothers had been murdered and torn apart like the betrayed Osiris. And he had somehow believed that his brothers, his family, and all the world that was had also died in that moment, trapped forever in the unforgiving embrace of broken time, left behind in the desert never to grow old, never to return home, to remain forever in that single moment from which there was neither redempti
on nor release. The violence of that day should have sealed them all with the desert’s unchanging, unblinking memory of who they had been when the universe was violated and tilted, spinning wildly and irrevocably away from the known world, and neither mercy nor time could undo what had been done.
But time had undone it.
Zaphenath saw it, in the face of this stranger who had been his brother, now a man who had lived a whole life of which Zaphenath knew nothing. Simeon—the young fury, captured forever in Zaphenath’s mind in that moment of terrible rage—had no relation to the dirty prisoner who cowered before him. Yet this prisoner, who now also could not comprehend what was happening to him, was Simeon—and in that moment it was as if the universe tilted again, and the rift that separated who he was from who he had been came rushing back together, and here they were, staring at each other, reunited on the other side of time.
Zaphenath could have spoken to him. No one in that small room besides the prisoner who lay on the ground would have understood the words. In all of Kemet, there was no other being who carried the memory of who Zaphenath had been in that other life in the time before time split, no one who could speak to that other part of him, no one who could cross over and bring that severed half back to life by acknowledging that it had once existed.
But he did not speak.
Asenath felt his touch fall away from her arm.
And then she heard him speaking softly to one of the guards.
“ . . . released tomorrow morning,” he was saying, “and have him brought to my house. We will hold him there until further notice.”
The guard acknowledged the command.
Chapter 20
Genesis 43:15; 39:1
A young boy went scampering toward the edge of the camp, hurrying toward the stomping congregation of camels and followed in close pursuit by his younger brother.
“Papa!” the child called out. “Papa!”
Facing toward the rough tents that stood encamped together like an island of refugees, Benjamin smiled, bending down to catch his sons in their tumbling embrace.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised, hugging them, “and we’ll bring plenty of food for you. Now,” he reached out, putting one hand on each of their shoulders, “you’ll watch over your grandfather for me.” They nodded solemnly.
Jacob was standing beside Benjamin, and the aged patriarch’s robes billowed out around his body, carried on a dancing spiral breeze that rose out of the desert. He looked out over his sons, all men now with sons of their own. They were all his hope of the future, all that remained of the women he had loved, all the fulfillment of the ever-elusive promise of his birthright. Now they would go down together, disappearing over the horizon into an unknown and hostile land, carrying Benjamin to barter for their survival.
And Jacob could not but think of his own grandfather Abraham, who also had been asked to put his son on the altar of promised future prosperity, who had been asked if he were willing to lose him forever for the sake of the covenant.
Rising back to his full stature, Jacob’s youngest son, the child he had named in his greatest hour of sorrow, turned to him. “You can rely on your grandsons while we’re gone.”
Jacob smiled. “Do I have need yet that they should watch over me?”
Benjamin smiled too, shaking his head. “You watch over all of us, Father.”
Jacob took Benjamin by the arm and looked intently into his face, seeing, as he always did, the shadows of Benjamin’s mother and brother in the way his son smiled. “The Lord watch over you,” he told him.
Benjamin nodded, clasping his father’s arm in return.
How many years, Jacob thought, how many years since I stood here with your brother?
They embraced.
Do not forget yourselves, Jacob had told his sons. Kemet is a powerful place. Be safe. Be wise. Do not forget whose sons you are.
Still holding his last child to him, Jacob closed his eyes.
“I’ll come back,” Benjamin murmured. “I promise.”
Jacob nodded and released him. “Yes,” he said, “God willing.” He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Father.” Judah glanced past Jacob toward Benjamin. “The provisions are prepared.” He paused, then looking at Jacob, he added, “We’re ready to leave.”
Jacob nodded. Benjamin tried to smile, then turned and moved toward where his camel and its burdens waited, his young sons trailing after him. Judah stood beside Jacob as Jacob watched him go.
“On my life,” Judah said quietly, “I’ll bring him back to you.”
Jacob turned and looked at Judah—at this son who, alone amongst all his sons, had offered to protect Benjamin with his own life, bartering himself for the survival of their family and their father—and Jacob reached out, resting a hand on Judah’s arm.
“If I be bereaved of my children,” Jacob said, “I am bereaved.”
Judah met his father’s deep, rich eyes with his own eyes, the same eyes.
“I cannot go with you to save our family,” Jacob said. “You will go in my place.”
Judah nodded. “We will return as soon as we can.”
“Judah.” His father’s eyes were focused intently upon him. “You will go in my place.” Judah looked at his father, and Jacob held his son’s gaze. “God watch over you.”
Judah put his hand over Jacob’s. “For your sake, Father,” he said quietly, “I believe He will.”
The man named Given-of-Ra—so named by his father, who also carried the name he had bestowed on his eldest son—sat cross-legged in his private chamber with his head bowed over an open scroll.
I answered, Here am I.
And he said, Behold it is I, be not afraid, for I am before the world was, a strong God who exists before the worlds, and a mighty God who has created the light of the world.
Bring me a pure sacrifice. And in this offering I will show you the Aeons, and reveal to you that which is secret; and you shall see great things you have never before beheld; for you have loved to seek me, and I have called you my friend.
The man traced his finger along the characters, so carefully copied down from the original text kept by the priests at the place called Iunu, the great Temple of Ra, the holy site commemorating the first moment of creation—where heaven and earth and gods and men could be joined in symbol as they hoped to be joined, someday, in eternal realities.
His own copy of this text was a rarity, presented to him as a gift when he too was admitted into the secrets of the priests. It was a strange document, written by a desert sojourner who, he’d been told, was no mere symbol or child’s story concocted to ease the transmission of some abstract or difficult teaching. On the contrary, he had it on authority from his own father that the man had actually existed, had actually seen things and spoken in his own flesh to the priests, and they had written those things down and kept them and studied them, until the time when the text had been given into his care to be studied and searched and pondered over.
His eyes turned back to one passage in particular that he could not get out of his mind any more than he could understand its significance:
Bring me a pure sacrifice. And in this offering I will show you the Aeons . . .
What secret was hidden here, couched in such a straightforward command? What sacrifice had this man offered that had so unlocked the heavens as to show him great things never before beheld—to reveal the sweeping secrets of creation? What was this strange offering that the gods so desired that they would barter the revelation of their handiwork with a mortal man?
And what mortal was capable of offering such a gift, such a sacrifice?
His own name, Given-of-Ra, was evidence that gifts, including a man’s very life, proceeded from the divine to men. His two younger brothers and younger sister had also received such names from their father—the second son being designated Son-of-Ra, and the third proclaimed Born-of-Thoth, the god who communicated the intelligence of Ra and represented the heart
of all things. His mother had wanted to call his dark-eyed little sister Beautiful One, for she had been beautiful even as a baby, but his father desired more than beauty for his child, and she became Daughter-of-Neth, named for the goddess of creation and the mother of Ra himself.
The lives of all of them were gifts, and all of their identities spoke of his parents’ conviction of the divine moving among men. But how might men move among the gods?
Given-of-Ra, his father’s eldest son, had read over this particular scroll many times since his father had presented it to him, but he was yet to discover any further hint to what this sacrifice might be or what ceremony was required in its offering. He was acquainted, of course, with the rites performed by the sun-priests to appease and entreat the powers of Ra in the god’s eternal sustaining course. But he knew of no ceremony that might open the very secrets of how the sun was set in motion or the purpose of its particular orbit, or how to so justify a man as not only to be brought into the presence of the divine but to share in the governing secrets of the worlds.
The possibility that a man might hope for an eventual joining with Ra, passing through the horizon to the place of judgment and on into the eternal realms, had long been captured and recorded in the sacred writings of the priests. But this particular writing seemed to speak of something deeper, something further, to hint that at least one man had traveled beyond the horizon in his lifetime and had propitiated the gods sufficiently to allow him not merely to serve and worship but to be admitted into actual fellowship.
Could such a thing be possible, he wondered, not just once? Might it be sought again by another? Was it simply an isolated occasion of vision, or had this man left more than simply a record of what had been—left, perhaps, a pattern to be followed, with secrets to be discovered in emulation?
His father had never told him what the document really was, whether a record or a pattern, a personal history or a ritual text, and his time with his father had been brief after receiving it. But the questions taunted him, teased at him, as if they wanted him to follow, to seek them out, as if they meant to haunt him until he did.
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