The Eleventh Brother

by Rachel S. Wilcox

  Chapter 36

  Sacrifice

  “What’s going on?”

  Zaphenath turned from where he stood in the garden of his estate, peacefully paused beside the reflecting pool, gazing toward some unknown piece of sky.

  Asenath stood, hands on hips, waiting. “Well?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Amon has gone after your brothers. All the servants are talking.”

  Zaphenath shrugged. “I sent him.”

  She shook her head. “What more do you want from them?”

  “Benjamin.” Zaphenath looked at her. “I won’t send him back to be killed in the desert once my father is gone.”

  She looked at him, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “How do you know they want to hurt him?”

  “You don’t understand life outside of Kemet.” He crossed his arms. “Here, you honor life, but out there . . .” He shook his head. “Benjamin will have no one to protect him.”

  “It may be,” she said, “that your brothers have not changed, but you don’t know that.” She held out a hand. “Think of what you did for Djeseret.”

  Rarely, very rarely, had Zaphenath heard his wife speak that name.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, after a long pause.

  Asenath moved closer. “Because,” she said softly, “you knew, then, what mercy was.”

  Zaphenath looked away.

  “I did that,” he said at last, “because there was nothing else I could have done.”

  Asenath shook her head. “No one is merciful because there is no other choice.”

  “It was for my sister.” Zaphenath’s voice was quiet. “And for your brother.”

  “And Potiphar has no greater respect for any man,” Asenath said, her voice softer still, “because you spared someone what had been done to you.” She rested her other hand on his arm. “You were willing to set the world right again.” She gazed up at him. “You are not the boy they put in the pit. You are a new man, now. You were changed by what you did.”

  Zaphenath looked at her, and she heard the tightness in his throat. “I can’t let them hurt Benjamin.”

  She looked at him. “Benjamin had no part in what was done. They did”—she pressed a hand against his chest—“and you did. Keeping Benjamin here will not heal you. You know that.”

  “I can’t send him away and never see him again.”

  She slid her hand down her husband’s arm and took his hand, intertwining their fingers. “Then don’t,” she said softly, and leaned up, very gently, and kissed him.

  “Make way,” Amon called out, “make way,” startling the other pedestrians aside and leaving them to stare at the bearded man being led under guard and the—how many were there, nine, ten?—men trailing along behind, marched down the road by armed escort. Whatever brief words might have been exchanged between the captive brothers dwindled into silence as the sight of the vizier’s ornate villa came into view. The gently swaying palm fronds above the whitewashed walls created a strange visual disconnect from the devastation that awaited them within.

  The warmth of the day, or perhaps just the events thereof, had been sending trickles of sweat down the back of Judah’s neck. He looked over toward the River, where boats of near-naked passengers sailed briskly along with the current, their bodies open to the cooling breeze off the water. Anywhere he looked, it seemed, the condemning reminder was there.

  You are not one of us.

  The brothers shuffled in through the estate’s opened, waiting gates, and their animals were taken by somber-faced, cold-eyed servants. Judah handed over the ropes to his own camel with a certain calm resignation. He knew he would not see the beast again. But let that be as it may, there was no freedom, he knew, in roaming the world at the price of a brother.

  Go home, Benjamin, he thought, go home, and our father will live, and our family with him.

  Benjamin would not be the required offering for the family’s survival. Nor was there any reason that he, the youngest and most innocent, should bear the price of this strange and devilish retribution that had come lashing like a blinding sandstorm across a twenty-year chasm. Judah had come to understand it first from a young Canaanite woman in the flickering darkness, but he had come to understand it again now—there was no place where the memory of the desert did not extend.

  And mercy without sacrifice could not be.

  As he followed his brothers onto the grounds of the estate, he raised his eyes. It was almost as if he could hear Tamar’s voice, speaking out of the darkness—

  The sin is lifted.

  “This way,” the steward ordered. The front door into the villa was pulled open, and the soldier escorting Benjamin proceeded within. The other brothers followed behind, silently stepping back over the threshold they had so recently crossed in a passage of absolution, freed of all accusation and proven worthy to return to their father in triumph. Now, they were returning to witness their most innocent brother’s condemnation—the required vengeance, it seemed, for a crime that his brothers had committed in the desert before the boy’s real memory had even begun.

  Judah glanced up toward the sky, seeing a bright flash of blue and hearing the call of a reeling, circling swallow, soaring effortlessly between heaven and earth. A slight smile came to his face.

  “Come on,” one of the guards grumbled, and although Judah could not quite understand the expression, the nudge was sufficient to communicate.

  He stepped over the threshold.

  Their accuser was waiting for them. In the same room where, just the evening before, they had been his guests, the brothers now slunk in like a row of the condemned. The vizier stood, arms crossed, watching from across the courtyard as they entered.

  “There,” the vizier’s steward ordered, pointing, “wait against the wall.” The brothers moved away, while Benjamin was brought forward, alone, with his hands behind his back. The soldier indicated that the prisoner should kneel. Benjamin knelt, lowering himself with a certain graceful dignity that struck Judah as oddly reminiscent of the mother Benjamin had never known and the brother who was more a composite of other people’s memories than of Benjamin’s own. Perhaps it was the boy’s birthright, somehow, also to be sacrificed—as his mother had been to bring him into the world and as his brother’s blood had sealed up a terrible unity amongst his bickering brothers.

  But a birthright, Judah knew, could be given to another.

  Chapter 37

  Genesis 39:21–23

  Darkness, and a strange damp cool in the midst of the heat, captive to the sounds of the shadows and the movements of men who carried swords and crossed in and out, marking the passage of days by their comings and goings. The new prisoner, it was whispered, had been an important member of an important household. Some scandal had brought him here, some betrayal. He had been brought in late one night on order of the captain of the guard and, though foreign, was apparently a proper citizen of Kemet rather than a common slave. There were no official charges, simply an order that he was to be kept at the royal prison. The guards, who were used to dealing with sensitive and confidential crimes, did not ask for details.

  Mostly, the prisoner sat alone, staring sightlessly into the shadows. He did not make any trouble, although most of the prisoners who came here were men of reasonable enough breeding (or at least exposure to it) not to make much trouble. They were usually those who had the misfortune to be accused of crimes in high places, of intrigues or embezzlements, and there were rarely more than a handful of them in the central cell where they remained until their fates were decided. Some would be released back into the world, cleared of their crimes (or with friends powerful enough to secure the repayment of their debts), while others were taken away to other places, unknown places.

  Only the very highest forms of betrayal—plotting against the king or the state—were likely to face the possibility of execution. Life was honored here in Kemet, but those who would risk catastroph
ically unbalancing the delicate fabric of ma’at, or the government that held it in place, could not be left free or, in some cases, alive.

  It was not at all clear, therefore, what crimes this foreigner had committed. One or two of the other prisoners thought at first that he looked familiar but could not quite place where they might have seen him. The unshaven stubble around his jaw was growing by the day into a new dark beard, and his shaven head had sprung up rich, curling shoots across his scalp. It was as though his very flesh had already begun to forget him—shifting away from the face of Sasobek, steward of Potiphar (the man, he eventually heard, who was now the vizier of all Kemet) to the face of an unknown desert man, an anonymous Asiatic of no family or name. In his captivity, he was powerless to hide it.

  And so the days passed, and no one came either to absolve or confirm whatever accusations had brought him there. He was a foreigner clothed in the simplest dress of Kemet, a free man who had become a servant who had become a prisoner, belonging to no household, and no country, and no people.

  He had fallen between all distinctions, belonging to no one at all.

  At first, he believed that Potiphar would come for him, just as he had once believed his father would come. Djeseret would speak to her husband, or he would speak to her—and she would weep and repent, unable to stand what she had done to the man she had once cared for, perhaps more than any other. Perhaps a certain amount of time had to pass, the proper days or weeks of observance, and then someone would be sent. He would be told there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding, that time had passed and there was no shame in returning to his former position of influence and belonging.

  But even as he clung to the lingering memories of Potiphar’s house, his changing appearance carried him steadily toward his new reality, as if in revelation of the person he now was, and paying no heed to his dwindling hope, or his wishing, or his dreams.

  Yes, the dreams, the dreams that came in the darkness were confused jumbles of flashes and snatches of words that he couldn’t understand—the broken vision of his life, the distorted monsters of a future he could not see. He would wake in the same darkness that had lulled him to sleep, feeling no change, no transition from sleeping to waking or night to morning. Where once his dreams had been the transport of a bright future or whispered insights from the troubles of his days, it was as if even his dreams no longer knew how to make sense of so senseless a life.

  Once he dreamt of his father and saw his father’s worn, weary face and wondrous white beard, but he awoke in Kemet, and he was still alone, and still no one came for him. No one had ever come for him. Who would come? He was nothing, no one—not a son, not a brother, not even a slave.

  As the days drew on, and his hair grew, and his flesh lost its bronzed strength, he began to drowse to pass the time. And as he began to drowse, no longer coiled so tightly in his own anger or submerged into a grief beyond despair, different dreams began to come, dreams that allowed him to slip gently between sleeping and waking, like a crocodile floating in the River. He smiled as he, who had been called Sasobek, thought of it. The dreams came in washes of sound and sensation but few images—he would find himself surrounded entirely by landscapes or splashes of color, bright and indistinct. The dreams were warm, like sun on the sand, and they let him drift, unbothered.

  It was in those dreams that the words began to come.

  At first, they came only in snatches and in a voice he did not recognize—hardly a voice at all, more like a passing thought or a whisper drifting in from a word spoken to someone else. The first time, he was standing in the desert, far beyond the borders of the Black Land, looking out toward the horizon, and he heard a word that he recognized as the identity that he had been given before he came to Kemet—

  Joseph—

  He awakened, still hearing the echo of his name.

  And the name came back to him again, always in that in-between moment of sleepiness, where he was not quite conscious but somehow not fully asleep, and somewhere else—somewhere amidst the colors, in the splash of desert landscape where he could stay without fearing the nightmarish collision of images and sounds that came from the deeper dreams.

  And then, early one morning, he heard the words he had read with his father and then with Potiphar.

  Joseph, Joseph—

  He was standing in the desert, looking out over an empty, windswept plain, and he heard the narrative that he surely should have known by now, down to his deepest core.

  —my name is Jehovah, and I have heard you, and have come down to deliver you.

  He stirred, surfacing again into consciousness. He was not sure whose voice it was, for it was not a voice that he knew, but it was one that brought him a strange, calm comfort, like the sound of a forgotten friend. He was also quite sure, as he thought about it, that it was the same voice that had spoken out his name before. He realized that he felt oddly comforted to know that someone else in the universe, whether in his own mind or not, would still call him Joseph.

  From that day on, he no longer introduced himself to the new prisoners that drifted in and out of his cell as Sasobek, Son-of-the-Crocodile. He told them that his name was Joseph. And instead of just asking their names, he began asking about their homes, their people, and the worlds they had left behind. There was another steward, and a servant from the king’s court, and a scribe accused of thieving from his master. They were with him only a few days, though, before the missing items were recovered, and the scribe was released, and the steward was quietly sold off to another household, and the servant was taken away to work in the fields.

  But Joseph remained behind.

  There were days when criminal activity appeared to have dwindled in the upper echelons of society, and the prison grew quiet. Joseph, who had still received no direct sentence one way or another, was left to himself. He did not provoke much attention from the guards beyond the occasional suspicious glance from the new ones, who seemed curious as to why he had been kept there without any seeming resolution. But with the appointment of a new vizier, the more senior guards explained, it was easy for prisoners like this one to slip through the bureaucratic cracks. Since the foreigner caused them no trouble, they caused none for him either.

  Joseph began to drowse again during the day, and the dreams returned, though now the bright colors of the horizon had faded, blurring, the way a fresh gray morning hovers over water. He stood within the mists, turning, looking up and around, but he did not know where to go. So he began to walk—effortlessly, moving through the mist over soft, solid ground but at times losing sight of even his own hands stretched out in front of him.

  It was when he awoke from the first misting dream that he heard the voice distinctly. The voice did not pass through his ears, and there was no particular sound or timbre that would identify it as male or female, but it seemed friendly. He was blinking himself awake from his wanderings, wondering what had happened to the bright colors of the desert, when he heard it.

  You’re not there anymore, said the Voice.

  Joseph paused, not aware that he had intended to respond to his own half-thought question. But the response had come with such swiftness that Joseph nearly looked around the shadows to see what invisible old meddler had interjected himself into his private contemplation. He paused and then, as if not really meaning to, asked—

  Not where?

  Not there, said the Voice. Do you understand?

  Joseph didn’t especially understand.

  You remembered your name, said the Voice. That’s a good beginning.

  Thank you, thought Joseph, feeling a little strange.

  You’re welcome, said the Voice.

  And so began their acquaintance. Joseph could not seem to summon the Voice according to his own will, and sometimes it became very quiet, especially if he was stewing about Djeseret, or when he suddenly saw a flash of his terrible brothers or his father, and he started working himself into silent, frothing anger over the injustice of his situat
ion.

  Sometimes, though, it did speak to him right then, though usually without words, especially when the weary weight of his own frustration began to gape and give way, chasm-like, to a sinking, bottomless despair, hollowed out through fear. At those times, he felt the Voice come and sit beside him. It usually didn’t say anything, but he was glad to have the company.

  And so, day by day, he began to make friends with the Voice. It most often spoke to him as he woke from his dreams and was always willing to talk as he lay awake in the deepest hours of the night. When he had been Sasobek and was first shut into the prison, he would have brushed the Voice away, finding it an aggravating annoyance and certain it was nothing more than the frenzied workings of an aggrieved mind. But he had been in the darkness long enough that he was not quick to dismiss any company that came to him, and he knew the darkness well enough to know that the Voice was a pleasant respite from the shadows.

  One day, almost jokingly, he asked, Are you trapped here too?

  Of course not, said the Voice. I’m here because you are.

  And how long will I be here? Joseph wanted to know, but the Voice said nothing more.

  Another day, Joseph asked, Why did you call me Joseph?

  Because that’s your name, the Voice said, as if Joseph ought to know.

  It was about that time, when Joseph began to feel as though the Voice were waking him up from a long and strange night of dreams and he had begun to come to himself again, that the keeper of the prison began to notice how this mysterious prisoner was developing a way of bringing out an ease and comfort of confidence among his fellows. Several times the keeper had overheard prisoners who growled staunch denials of their guilt open up to this quiet foreigner, confessing household intrigues and pressures that had driven them to become involved in whatever entanglement had landed them in prison. Other times, prisoners had continued ardently to insist upon their innocence until the man—Joseph, he called himself, a proper foreign name to go with his bearded countenance—had a private word with the keeper and assured him that he was quite sure the accused was indeed innocent, or unfairly burdened by pressures, or truly quite bad.