I found myself rocking my brother back and forth, just like I saw mothers around the camp comforting a whimpering child. Only I wanted someone to comfort me. As my father lifted my mother’s body from the rug, I wished I could hold this final moment forever, all of us here together, for the last time.
We walked silently through the empty desert—our only listeners the rocks and ravines and a flaming ball of orange overhead. Half a mile away, nestled below the buttress of a cliff, my father had chosen a shaded spot for the grave, protected from the worst of the hot winds. Slowly, he lowered my mother’s body into the hole he’d been digging while I dressed her for burial. Staring down at her lying in the shadow of that hollow, he ripped another section of his cloak, letting out a wail as he flung his head back to stare up at the expanse of empty sky. I followed his gaze and saw a cloudless, sharp blue. A cutting brilliance that hurt as if designed to hack at my heart.
He dropped to his knees beside the open grave, his face in his hands. My chest tightened into a hard knot as I knelt beside him and put Isaac into his arms. Tears streamed down my father’s sunburned skin as he pressed the baby to his face, not wanting to let go of his only son. Finally, he placed Isaac into my mother’s arms, arranging the folds of the blankets with tender hands.
Taking the last of our silver coins from my pocket, I placed them on top of my mother’s closed eyelids. A silk shawl went over her head to cover her face and I knotted the ends with shaking hands. A shiver ran down my neck despite the brutal sun. Imagining dirt and scorpions seeping in through my mother’s mouth and ears and nose was too awful to contemplate.
When my father threw the first scoop of dirt into the grave, Leila ran screaming back to the tent, seizing Sahmril to her chest. I winced, but it was just as well. There was nothing Leila could do here and it was a relief to have her gone.
Tiny shards of gravel covered my mother’s feet, then her knees and hands and arms, obscuring the threads of red, violet, and yellow that she had painstakingly sewn into the dress she’d made last year for Brasia’s wedding. Could we have ever dreamed that it would become her burial gown? Sitting beside my father as he shoveled dirt, I felt as though I’d aged ten years.
And yet, only a few hours ago we’d danced and celebrated and laughed. Only hours ago, my mother had held my hands and kissed me and assured me I’d have a good life. She’d beamed at my first solo dance. We’d rejoiced that new life was coming, and made plans for my wedding.
When the soil began to cover Isaac, I glanced at my father, worried, but didn’t speak. A never-ending stream of grief flowed over his cheeks like so many precious raindrops.
I turned my head toward the vacant desert, noticing that our tent was not visible from here.
After my father packed down the dirt, we rose to gather rocks, not speaking, just piling the biggest stones we could find on top of the grave to ensure its protection from wolves or hyenas.
When we were finished, he put his arms around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. “The sun is at the zenith,” he said quietly. “We must leave within the hour.”
“I’m coming,” I answered, but I couldn’t seem to take a step to follow him. The burial felt unfinished; it was all happening too fast. “Father!” I called to his retreating figure.
He looked back at me, his figure stooped as though he carried the weight of all sorrow upon his shoulders.
“Will we forget where they’re buried?” The hot breeze snatched at my shaky voice. “This bluff, this spot?”
My father shook his head, giving me a sad smile. “Don’t fear, Jayden. I know the desert like I know my own hands. And I could never forget where your mother is.”
He turned, and as he disappeared over the sandy rise that hid our camp, I was all at once aware of what I needed to do. There were no other women or neighbors to share this enormous, battering grief, but I had to do something. I couldn’t leave my mother alone under the brutal sands with only wolves and beetles for company.
Raising my arms, I slowly clapped my hands to a silent drumbeat, swaying my body in the flowing hip circles. The noises of the desert, hot wind and shifting sand, the soft drone of insects and rustling lizards filled my ears like familiar music. The heat and pulse of the earth rose through my toes.
Digging my heels into the dirt clinging to the edge of the grave, I sensed my mother’s sudden presence. In my mind, I could see her hands kneading a lump of dough beside the hearth.
Hands stripping milk from a camel’s udder.
Fingers gliding a needle through a piece of fabric.
Palms caressing her rounded belly in eternal hope of a new child.
My mother’s proud smile as I opened the gift of jewelry she had purchased for me so many months before.
Memories swept through me and I danced in remembrance of all the many things my mother had done for me. If her spirit still lingered, I hoped she would see me dancing all the love I held for her. Sobs spilled out my throat. How could I bear this crushing burden laid on my soul?
My body dripped with sweat, but I couldn’t stop dancing. I wanted to dance forever, to never leave this moment in time. Why couldn’t last night’s celebration have stretched out forever so that this day would never come?
I raised my arms to the sky, my palms opened in prayer as I danced and danced.
Tears finally dried on my cheeks as my hips slowed. My spirit began to calm, and I felt a strange moment of comfort.
All at once, an eerie, prickling sensation ran down my legs and arms. A wild thought jolted through my mind. I had the distinct feeling that I was being watched.
Lowering my arms, I flickered my eyelids against the harsh sunlight.
Up above, on the crest of the bluff, a young man squatted on the rocky shale, staring straight at me, as if the desert had conjured him out of thin air.
His robes were made of a fine, dark-brown material. A cream-colored head scarf had been wrapped about his lower face, exposing only his eyes and the straight, dark hair that fell past his shoulders. The stranger’s left arm hung casually over his crouched knee, his right hand gripping the sword at his belt. I knew instantly that he was not from my tribe. The cloth of his cloak was much too rich and the patterns were all wrong.
Fresh fear rolled over me. He’d been watching me for some time. And strangers in the desert were never a good sign.
I reached through the folds of my dress to retrieve the small kitchen knife on my right leg, the one I used to cut twine and dig splinters out of youngsters’ hands.
But the knife wasn’t there. I’d left the weapon lying next to the bag of linens when I prepared my mother’s body for burial. My stomach plummeted straight into the sands.
Perhaps I would die before I ever got a chance to leave the valley at all.
5
I was too far from camp to scream for help. The wind would merely fling my cries across the emptiness and my father would never hear me. I wavered on my feet, exhausted, the midday sun burning me up from my toes to the top of my head. My insides were torn asunder from all the tears and grief. Why did we bury Mother and Isaac so far from camp? All was wrong with this day. Half my family dead, the tribe vanished into the desert like a mirage.
I scanned the hills where the boy crouched, wondering if he was a scout for a raiding party. If our camels were taken, we’d never be able to make the journey north.
There would be only one thing to do. Dig fresh burial holes, lie down, and wait for death. Or perhaps I could just scratch my way through the dirt of my mother’s new grave, and crawl down into the earth to lie beside her and my tiny brother.
The stranger rose from his crouched position and I backed up against the rocks and sand, my heart an anvil against my ribs. A whimper rose in my throat and I choked it back.
As he stood on the cliff’s edge, his robes swirled around his legs, the color and fabric exquisite. I knew the marks of all the surrounding tribes, friend or enemy. My father had taught me these things when I was sma
ll. These facts meant survival. But I’d never seen clothing such as his before in my life.
The stranger straightened, tall and magnificent. Imposing. Then he began to scramble down the bluff. I had mere seconds to make my escape, but trying to run was not an option. He would cut me down before I’d gone a few steps. I would not die with my back to my enemy. I thrust my hand down my leg, pretending to grab a knife. Then I held my arm behind my back. “Come no closer!” I cried.
As he strode nearer, I noticed he was younger than he’d appeared from his perch on the ledge. Perhaps no more than eighteen or nineteen, nearly the same age as Horeb.
I stepped backward, uneasy at his proximity. The stranger’s black eyes studied my face. I couldn’t see the lower half of his face, but I could have sworn he was smiling at me.
“How wicked to laugh at one’s intended prey,” I cried in a loud voice to mask my fear. “Especially when I’m nearly half your size, and female. The least you can do is kill me with dignity before stealing our last few camels.”
His cloak whipped about him in the hot wind, one hand at his knife belt as he continued to close the gap between us, silent and staring.
“You stand on the sacred ground of the dead. Be gone! I warn you that I am armed.”
“I believe you are bluffing,” he finally said, speaking in an unfamiliar accent. Slowly, he lowered his head scarf and I held myself rigid, terrified to have him within a foot of me, and bracing for the moment his sword sliced my throat.
I tried to take another step backward, but frozen with terror, I couldn’t get my legs to move. Holding his gaze, I willed myself not to move, not to speak, in an effort to buy some more time.
His face was strong and narrow, with a straight nose and high cheekbones. The beginnings of a beard showed on his dark skin, and his eyes, so dark, but with a curious kindness and warmth brewing in them. When he spoke, I felt his breath cross my face and it had a warm, exotic smell.
I broke his gaze. “Stay back!” I shouted as I hurried to retreat, but I was too late, and he was too quick. The young man swiftly reached around and grabbed my arms. Twisting away, I tried to keep my arms hidden, but he wrenched my hands forward and peeled open my fists to reveal their emptiness.
“So I am correct. You have no knife.”
I screamed and lunged to the side to flee, but he cut off my scream, clapping a hand to my mouth. Spluttering, I tried to wrestle from his grasp, but he was too strong and I couldn’t move. I tried to kick him, but he caught one of my legs with his own and I was off-balance. I didn’t want to fall to the ground, so I stopped struggling and hoped for a better moment of opportunity to get away.
In my ear, he growled, “I’ll take my hand from your mouth if you promise not to scream.”
I fixed cold eyes on him, resenting his intrusion into my life and my grief. Terrified of this stranger who shouldn’t be in our lands and what he might do to me and my sister or father. I had no way to warn them. Neither of us moved for several long moments, but finally I nodded.
He lifted his hand, testing my word.
“If you intend to violate me,” I spit out, “I will scream again. My father is on the other side of that ridge.” Since the hillocks of sand and the ridge hid us from view of our campsite, my father was within a five-minute walk, and yet he wouldn’t be able to see or hear me, but I said it anyway, hoping the stranger wouldn’t know.
He nodded. “I believe you.”
“Then why—” I held my tongue and stared back at him. Who was this boy? He wasn’t an Amorite from the north, or from the kingdom of Babylonia to the east. I didn’t sense that he was a Canaanite, or an Egyptian either. I’d heard Egyptian spoken in the marketplace at Akabah and this stranger didn’t have the same accent at all.
The only places that were left were the deserts of the South. Lands I’d never seen, but had heard of through stories from neighbors or traveling merchants. But how had this boy crossed hundreds of miles of barren land by himself—an empty desert where no rivers or oases bubbled, only the sands that ate men and camels alive?
The stranger gave a slight bow, holding it for a moment, another sign of his foreign roots.
“Tell me your name,” I demanded, stalling for time.
“Are customs so different here that you demand my name before formal introductions?” He grinned, looking up at my face with a flash of his dark eyes and then standing straight again. “Take me to your father’s tent and I’ll explain everything.”
“How do I know you don’t have a band of raiders with you?”
“If I did I would never have bothered coming down the cliff to speak with you. I would have already attacked.”
The obvious logic infuriated me.
“I also know that your home is just a short walk from here,” he added.
“Why didn’t you obey the customs and go directly to the tent?”
“To get to your father’s tent I needed to cross this cliff. You were in the way.”
“So instead you decided to watch me?”
His eyes widened as though surprised I would accuse him of this. Then he grimaced with a sudden spasm, but it was so fleeting I wondered if I’d imagined it. Still, I wasn’t going to let him get away with his bad behavior. Evenly, I said, “You shouldn’t have been watching me.”
“I wasn’t . . . really. I just wondered what you were doing in the desert alone, unguarded.” He glanced at the fresh mound of earth where my mother and baby brother were buried.
I could still see them in my mind’s eye, my mother in her beautiful red dress, cradling my baby brother, who was swaddled in the last of our white linen, their bodies buried under sand and dirt and rocks, lying in the blackness of the earth. I choked back the stone of tears in my throat, but the effort made my eyes burn.
“You’ve been burying someone,” he whispered, and respectfully dropped his chin. “Someone you loved.”
I didn’t want him to see the swift rise of tears in my eyes so I pulled my scarf over my head, wishing I could hide my face from his searing stare.
“You should have turned away, Stranger!”
His eyes held something I couldn’t define. Empathy, contrition? I recognized a sorrow of his own in his face, and felt a pang in my chest, which I quickly pushed away.
“You’re right, and I hope that you can forgive me.” He paused. “But I was compelled by a power stronger than my own.”
“That’s no excuse. Have you no restraint?”
“I’ve never found it difficult to restrain myself before now,” he answered, staring at me.
His words confused me. What was he implying?
“I’m going back to my father’s tent, and if you must call on your men and horses from the mountain, then you must. Only I warn you, we’ll fight until our deaths!”
“That won’t be necessary,” he replied, unruffled by my outburst. “I am alone.”
As if to prove his words, the stranger unbuckled his sword from his waist belt and handed the weapon to me. I was completely astounded. When I took the hilt in both hands, the weight of the weapon dragged at my arms. Wrenching it higher, I stared at the markings in the bronze handle, hundreds of swirls and lines in a display of unusual and intricate patterns. I’d heard of such coppersmithing in the city of Damascus to the north, but never seen it before.
“If you wish, you can now cut my throat.” He lowered himself to his knees, turned his neck, and exposed his skin. He didn’t even flinch.
“You’re taunting me now—making me believe you’ll let me kill you, instead of you killing me.”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life. Death might just put me out of my misery.”
“Why do you speak in jests?” I scanned his body to see if I could spy any other hidden weapons. Giving up his sword to prove his innocent intentions could just be a trap.
Still kneeling, the young man suddenly dug his fingers into the sand and scooped it up. He threw the sand into the air, showering his head and shoulde
rs, sprays of gold shimmering in the sunlight.
Throwing sand was a sign of peace. The universal gesture of friendship and submission. A sign all desert people used when approaching an unknown tent in which they wished to lodge or if they needed help. “Have I convinced you now?” he asked. His action knocked the breath from me. If the sign of peace was ever used to deceive another person, the law of the desert was to enact justice and instantly cut the person’s throat and leave them to die. Surely, he’d meant what he’d done.
“Where are you from? Where did you learn that?”
“I’ve spent the last five years with my uncle’s household, but my father was originally a desert dweller two weeks’ journey from here. South of the Midianites near the coasts of the Red Sea.”
I was astonished but kept my guard up. “You can tell your story to my father, and he will know whether you speak the truth or lie.” Using both hands, I lifted his magnificent sword to his chin, experimenting with the grip, startled at its weight and shining edge. He sat on his knees unmoving while I stared back at him. His eyes seemed to draw me in with a strange power, and I couldn’t keep myself from touching the tip of the sharp blade to his skin ever so lightly. A tiny spot of blood appeared.
“Oh!” I cried out, not intending to cut him.
“I was going to suggest you show me the direction to your tent, and I would go and you could follow with my sword”—throwing back his head, he dabbed at the blood, then held up his finger to show the red smear—“but I think this works out better.”
“What are you talking about?”
“To harm a traveler within your own borders is to create a bond of friendship that cannot be broken, isn’t that correct? Or are you not aware of that custom?”
“No! I mean yes!” I said, and felt my face flush. What a fool I was to prick his skin. “Go!” I ordered, trying to cover up my careless actions. But why did I care what this stranger thought of me? He was nothing, and still a potential enemy. “That way,” I added. “Quickly!”
I held the sword straight out, keeping it brandished. If he came at me, I could run him through in two seconds. And I knew I wouldn’t hesitate. I couldn’t completely trust him until my father had interrogated him.
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