Brothers

by Angela Hunt

  Mandisa flinched when a sudden splash cut into the silence. She scanned the river, her body rigid, until she spied the commotion in the water. Massive jaws churned the surface as a monster chewed its catch, and Mandisa released her breath. The beast floated by her, a dark shadow with golden eyes, a stonelike snout and a wide body. His massive tail, as long as Mandisa was tall, whipped back and forth through the quicksilver river, propelling the creature forward.

  Sebek. The crocodile god. Idogbe had been a devout follower of Sebek. A crocodile statue stood outside the door of their small house and once a year her husband had journeyed to Crocodilopolis, one of Sebek’s sacred abodes, to worship the crocodile who supposedly emerged from the watery chaos at the moment the world began.

  But Idogbe was no longer a part of her life, and Sebek was no god. Why couldn’t anyone else see the futility of worshipping stone and carved wood?

  Despite Zaphenath-paneah’s allegiance to El Shaddai and his forthright insistence that the Almighty God preserved Egypt from ruin, the Egyptians had not hearkened to the voice of their vizier. Tuthmosis IV, the present Pharaoh’s father, had listened to and respected Zaphenath-paneah’s words, but though the new king honored his tutor-vizier, he did not possess the courage to shelve the ancient cults and the priests who also advised him. Plus, Mandisa mused, Pharaoh probably preferred to maintain the old religions because doing so insured that he would remain at the head of Egypt’s pantheon of gods. According to the old beliefs, the king reigned over his people as the incarnation of the god Horus. As such he was divinity himself, and only he had the right to petition the gods in prayer.

  “Not so,” Mandisa murmured, her eyes growing heavy. “For I have seen the provision of the Almighty One. He has heard Zaphenath-paneah’s voice, and He will hear mine.”

  Mandisa took a long, deep breath of the cool evening air. It was good to have one God, and logical that only one could be supreme. She had seen the hand of El Shaddai in the reunion of Zaphenath-paneah and his brothers, and He had bountifully provided for her and Adom in the past few days. So why couldn’t she understand His will regarding her and Shim’on?

  Surely she had been right to leave Thebes, for how could she face Shim’on when he returned? He refused to love her; he looked for every reason to avoid caring for her. And she could not love a man whose heart had been hardened and carved of hatred and jealousy.

  “Almighty God, wherever You are—” she opened her eyes to the darkening sky above “—keep Your hand on us as we journey to our new home. Comfort Zaphenath-paneah in his sorrow, and Efrayim and Menashe. But especially Shim’on, O God…heal the hurts of his heart.”

  Under the vast and endless plain of evening, Mandisa slept.

  Watching from a small boat floating in the lazy river current, Idogbe recognized the woman who had been his wife. He had been haunting the river for days, moving from village to village, counting on Mandisa’s instinct to flee in the opposite direction of Canaan. The wilderness was no place for a single woman and a young boy, and he knew she would not want to face her people with a son and no husband. With nothing but desert to the east and west, she could only have gone southward.

  Paddling silently, without even a ripple in the windless calm, Idogbe urged his papyrus skiff closer to shore. The boy lay on the ground next to her, one arm resting idly in her lap. Idogbe’s mouth puckered with annoyance. She ought to take better care of his son, especially a boy who had spent nine years in the house of a vizier. Undoubtedly the lad was bright; perhaps he had already picked up a rudimentary knowledge of writing. At scribe school the boy could learn more, and within a few years he would prove himself able enough to serve in the temple of Sebek at Crocodilopolis.

  A man needed a son to provide for him, to see that he was properly supplied for the afterlife. Until the day he’d learned the boy existed, Idogbe had worried that he might die unknown and unmourned, that his immortal soul would vanish like a puff of steam. But he had a son, a bright boy who might be offered in service to the fierce and strong Sebek to insure bountiful rewards in this life and the world to come.

  Idogbe’s gaze drifted from the sleeping boy to the mother. He smiled, thinking about the first time he had seen her. Always restless for fresh horizons, he had been a wanderer even then, one of many merchants on an expedition to the lands of Shinar. The caravan had stopped outside a compound of tent dwellers, and he saw Mandisa standing by the well. She wore a brightly patterned Assyrian garment, a stark contrast to the bleached linen garments of Egyptian women. Her dark hair, so different from the neat, tidy Egyptian wigs, had tumbled carelessly down her back. One escaping curl fell over her forehead, mesmerizing him.

  He had never considered taking a woman for his own, but in that moment he knew he would have her.

  He scarcely knew how he found the words, but an interpreter led him to her father’s tent. Within the hour he had offered the herdsman ten deben weight of silver; before sunset that afternoon he had set the girl on one of his pack animals and turned toward Egypt.

  Though the girl was beautiful, an aura of melancholy surrounded her even in bright sunlight. She wept frequently and her lustrous eyes widened with alarm every time he approached. Her tongue proved quick as she learned the Egyptian language. Within six months after Idogbe installed her in his house, Mandisa had become like other Egyptian women, complaining that he spent too much time away from home. So when she told him she expected a child, he paid a priest of Sebek a handsome amount to look into a divining bowl and predict the child’s sex.

  The priest lied. Perhaps Mandisa had bribed him, or perhaps the man had his own reasons for misleading Idogbe. But rather than father a girl and be responsible for two whining women, he had gathered his silver and left Thebes, preferring to let Mandisa think him dead than to return and let himself be nagged into an early grave.

  Now he studied her in the moonlight and recalled that she was not often unpleasant. Her ivory shoulders, barely visible through the linen gown she wore, evoked memories he had long since buried. Her hair, shorter now but still curly, was still as black as a starless night. Even from this distance he could see the hollow of her neck, filled with moonlit shadows. How rewarding it would be to kiss them away…but he had not come all this way for her. And if he were to succeed in his intention, Mandisa could not know that Idogbe still lived. She must believe that her son had vanished without a trace.

  He would have to plan carefully. He stroked the surface of the water and looked at the shore ahead. A small lagoon, used in more plentiful days to irrigate the fields of an entire village, lay off to the west. He rowed forward until the skiff lanced its way into the still waters of the waiting lagoon.

  Chapter Forty

  “L ook there, Father!” Zevulun, who drove the oxen pulling Yaakov’s wagon, pointed toward the south. “Mizraim! The Black Land!”

  Straining against the beating of his own heart, Yaakov pushed himself up from the pile of furs where he had been reclining. For several days they had been traveling through desert as gray and lifeless as a tomb, but now a ribbon of green appeared in the distance. A blush of pleasure burned his cheeks. How good of God to provide fertile fields and Yosef, too!

  Re’uven, who rode beside the ox-cart on a donkey, lifted his head and pointed in the same direction. “What’s that?” A line of Egyptian war chariots bordered the wide green plain, then one chariot pulled away from the others and came forward, churning up the dust of the desert as it raced toward Yisrael’s caravan.

  “Who rides at the front of our train?” Yaakov demanded, his stomach tightening. “Is it Binyamin?”

  Re’uven strained to look ahead toward the beginning of the caravan. “Yehuda rides there. Have no fear, Father, I’ll see that all is well.”

  With his legs pumping against the sides of his donkey, Re’uven set out. Yaakov sat up and folded his hands, his stomach churning with anxiety. Though El Shaddai had told him not to fear Egypt, the thought of entering a pagan land aroused old apprehension
s and uncertainties. Avraham had nearly lost Sarah here and Yosef had disappeared into the bowels of this dark place for over twenty years. What if Yaakov and his people were totally absorbed, eaten alive? They might never emerge as a distinct and separate people again.

  But God had told him not to fear. The Almighty had spoken even through Rahel, who had thought she was only being witty when she named her firstborn Yosef, the word for “add,” which sounded remarkably like the word for “remove.” “God has removed, asaf, my reproach,” she said as the midwife lifted the squalling child from her womb. “May Shaddai add, yosef, another son to me!”

  “Ah, Rahel,” Yaakov murmured, his eyes stinging at the memory of her life and love. “God removed our Yosef, and then added him again. As he will remove our people from Canaan, then bring us back. I will not fear.”

  “Father!” Re’uven called, trotting back from the front of the caravan. “Yosef has sent these chariots to intercept us. They will lead us to Goshen where he waits to welcome you.”

  Yaakov held up a hand, not trusting his voice to answer. As the oxen started forward again, he settled back into his furs, wrapped in a silken cocoon of euphoria.

  Four hours later, a different company of Egyptian charioteers darted toward them, the horses’ hooves drumming the dry desert like a herd of thundering elephants. Onward the Egyptians came, dizzyingly swift, resplendent in white kilts and gleaming chariots pulled by elaborately harnessed stallions.

  Yaakov stirred uneasily. What would he see in Yosef’s face? An idolatrous Egyptian or the son he had taught and loved? For so many years he had struggled to accept the fact that his beloved, handsome Yosef was dead. Now he struggled to imagine Yosef alive, forty years old and an Egyptian ruler. Would this Zaphenath-paneah still possess the dear qualities that had made Yosef so special? Yaakov was not certain he could handle the disappointment if the mature man did not resemble the valiant, beautiful youth.

  Three chariots pulled away from the oncoming company. They turned sharply in a V formation, then two followed as the leader moved steadily down the line of Yisrael’s caravan. Yaakov frowned, squinting into the bright glare of the sun. Two men rode in the first chariot; one held the reins while the other stood tall and straight, his hands upon the rim of the conveyance, his eyes intently studying the wagons. The tall, olive-skinned man wore a wig in the style of the Egyptians, a flowing crimson cloak and a spotless white robe.

  Abreast of Yaakov’s wagon, the first chariot halted. As the tall Egyptian leaped out of his conveyance, Yaakov stared across the distance between them, his heart pounding.

  The Egyptian leaned into the wagon, then his warm hands clasped Yaakov’s. “Father,” the man said, his voice husky with emotion. Before Yaakov could respond, the weeping Egyptian fell on his neck and kissed him.

  Yaakov blinked with bafflement. “Yosef?” He pressed his hands to the Egyptian’s shoulders. When the vizier of all Egypt lifted his face to within inches of Yaakov’s, the father searched for signs of his missing son.

  The paint-lengthened eyes, the wig, the oiled skin—none of these meshed with the Yosef of Yaakov’s memory. The man’s face shone with a sort of beauty beyond the reach of a seventeen-year-old boy. But there was something in his eyes…

  A hot, exultant tear trickled down Yaakov’s cheek as he pressed his trembling hand to the Egyptian’s cheek. He felt his heart turn over the way it always did when Rahel looked at him with that same pleading, loving expression. “Rahel’s eyes,” he murmured, feeling the vizier’s tears on his fingertips. “You have Rahel’s eyes.”

  If a man dies, will he live again?

  Yes! Praise be to God Shaddai.

  “Father,” the Egyptian exclaimed again, and this time Yaakov wrapped his arms around the son he had long thought dead.

  “Now let me die, since I have seen your face,” he whispered, relishing the feel of Yosef in his arms. “Now I can die, knowing you are alive.”

  Yosef’s trembling limbs clung to his father; he had no desire to back out of that longed-for embrace. God was so good. His father still lived, a miracle in itself, and Yaakov’s eyes had known him, had welcomed him as if they had been parted only a few hours instead of more than twenty years.

  “You shall not die, Father,” Yosef said, still holding tight. His tone was playful, but his meaning was not. “You shall live with me in Egypt. And God will give you many years here, so we may fellowship with one another. And you shall know my children, and understand why God Shaddai wrought all these things.”

  At last, reluctantly, they parted. Without shame, Yosef palmed tears from his face, but his eyes never left Yaakov’s. “You were always in my heart,” he told his father, so choked by emotion that he could barely lift his voice above a whisper. “I never forgot the things you taught me about God Shaddai.”

  “Praised be His name,” Yaakov cried, his arms closing around Yosef again.

  Tears of joy came in a rush so strong that Yosef sobbed in his father’s arms, but Yaakov held him close, crooning the soft words that a father gives to a much-loved son.

  Yaakov met Efrayim and Menashe that same day, then Yosef himself led the children of Yisrael into the land of Goshen, the place prepared for them. “I will go up and tell Pharaoh that you have arrived,” Yosef told his family. “He knows you are shepherds.”

  “Will he expect us to mingle with his people?” Yaakov asked, still uneasy about living in a land of idol-worshippers.

  A smile nudged itself into a corner of Yosef’s mouth. “The Egyptians detest herdsmen. Those who keep livestock are an abomination to them.”

  “As they are to us!” Levi laughed. “Let them stay away. I have no urge to visit their sinful cities.”

  “We will remain here, in this well-watered land of Goshen,” Yaakov answered, silencing his headstrong offspring with a stern look. He turned back to the magnificent man who was his son. “And as for you, my Yosef, am I to meet the mother of your sons?”

  A look of tired sadness came over the vizier’s face. “My lovely Asenath was laid in her tomb a few days ago, Father. You will have to wait and meet her in the Otherworld.”

  Yaakov nodded, appraising his son’s silent pain. Yosef’s despair seemed genuine; he had truly loved the Egyptian woman he mourned. Just as Yaakov had loved Rahel—and Lea.

  “It is enough, my son.”

  Yosef gave his father a smile and placed his hand on Yaakov’s shoulder. “It may be that Pharaoh will come to visit you, out of respect,” he said, the warmth of his smile echoing in his voice. “If he comes and asks your occupation, tell him again that you are herdsmen. Thus he will leave you alone here, and you and your people will not be molested in any way. You will be free to live, work and worship as you please.”

  “And what of you?” Yaakov asked, taking his son’s hand. “Must you continue living in Thebes?”

  The vizier’s large black eyes, so like Rahel’s, seemed to fill with shifting stars. “God has set me in another place,” he said, his voice gentle, but firm. “Though my heart is always with you, I must do the work Almighty God has called me to do.”

  As his heart sank with swift disappointment, Yaakov gave his beloved son a smile and an encouraging nod. “Then go with God,” he said, holding Yosef’s hand until the last possible instant.

  Chapter Forty-One

  S him’on was pleased to discover that Goshen suited his family well. Bordered by the Mediterranean Sea, called the Wadj-ur or “the Great Green” by the Egyptians, the delta that supported the region of Goshen was part of Lower Egypt. The fertile land, well-watered by seven river branches of the Nile, was heavy with layers of effluvium and silt, perfect for fields, flocks and herds. The vast area, inhabited by few Egyptians, was blessed by continued moisture, gentle winds and solitude.

  Yosef proved himself generous beyond all imagining. He provided the children of Yisrael with food, the tools with which to construct shelters like those they had known in Canaan and additional livestock to replace the animals
that had died on the journey. The vizier of all Egypt lived with them in a tent for the first week after their arrival, eager to make certain his father and family were content and settled in their new home. And though Yosef was welcomed with open arms, Shim’on sensed that he would always remain apart from them. In a way he was still Yosef, Yaakov and Rahel’s son, but the aura of his glory kept them at arm’s length. Even Yisrael, who had once scoffed at young Yosef’s dream that his parents and brothers would bow before him, prostrated himself at Zaphenath-paneah’s feet and called him “my lord.”

  Perhaps because he had been imprisoned so long in the vizier’s house, Shim’on was the least awed of all his brothers. Two weeks after settling his sons into their new home, Shim’on said farewell to his family, mounted a donkey and rode upriver toward Thebes. Ostensibly he had undertaken the journey to bring a report from Yaakov to Yosef, but privately he yearned to know if Mandisa would grant him a chance to speak with her.

  So much had happened since he had last seen her. He had heard the voice of El Shaddai, and the angry fires in his soul had been quenched by his confession to Yaakov. If only she would listen to him long enough to hear his heart…

  At the vizier’s house, Ani greeted him like an old friend, and even Tarik had a smile for his troublesome former captive. “So, Shim’on the mighty Destroyer of Furniture has returned,” Ani said, stumbling over the unfamiliar Canaanite words. “What do you intend to break on this visit?”

  “Nothing,” Shim’on answered, happy to meet the smile and the welcoming hand Ani offered him. “And you can speak Egyptian. I have learned enough to manage in this country.”

  “After a year in this house, you should speak it as well as the master,” Tarik joked, slapping him on the back. “But if you’ve come to see the vizier, you’ll have to wait. He is with Pharaoh at the king’s house, interviewing emissaries from Babylon. A king of that city wishes to marry his daughter to our divine Amenhotep.”