Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge))

by Orson Scott Card

  “Oh, indeed I do! No more of his foolish refusal to take part in society! No more of his—”

  “It’s that kind of talk that got you here to this camp, with your house closed up and your daughters playing with sheep,” said Sarai. “Keep talking that way and you’ll find yourself growing old and dying in a camp somewhere.”

  “So that’s it. I have to lie to my husband and pretend I don’t wish him to become a better man, and if I’m a convincing enough liar, he’ll return me to my home, is that it?”

  “I said nothing about lying,” said Sarai. “I merely suggest that you refrain from insisting he change. Give him the freedom to be himself, and he’ll give you the same freedom. Isn’t that what you want? All you have to do is give him the same thing.”

  “Men have freedom. They don’t get it from women.” But this time Qira’s response was half-hearted, a mere reflex, parroting the ideas of the women of Sodom. Even as she spoke, she seemed to be contemplating what Sarai had said.

  “Surely there’s some way,” Sarai said, “for you and Lot to share the city and the camp. A season of one, a season of the other, each of you rejoicing that you can make the other happy.”

  Qira sighed and rose to her feet. “I can see that you have nothing to suggest except that I become the kind of brainless please-your-husband-no-matter-what-it-costs-you kind of wife that you are.”

  Sarai held very still until Qira left the tent.

  When she finally unclenched her hands, Sarai found that two of her fingernails had cut into her palms. Blood seeped from the shallow wounds.

  Well, it would be worth the pain if this conversation led to Qira making amends with Lot. For she had listened, at the end. It was what she had always done in childhood—if someone made a suggestion that she intended to follow, she had to lash out and insult the person whose idea she was planning to use. That way she could maintain the illusion that she had come up with the idea herself.

  It was an illusion that only Qira herself believed. Indeed, it was quite likely that the only person in the camp who did not see through Qira’s pretenses was Qira herself.

  Hurry home, Abram. It’s time to find a way to get Qira out of this camp before someone kills her.

  Chapter 15

  Abram came to her tent that night, but Sarai could see that it was conversation he wanted more than affection. Emboldened by Sarai’s agreement, Bethuel and Eliezer had apparently laid before him their desire for a separation of the camps, and Abram was dismayed. “Before you say more,” said Sarai, “I must tell you that Eliezer came to me already to see what I thought. I already told him that I think it’s the right thing to do, and for more reasons than the quarrels between herdsmen loyal to different masters.”

  Abram looked glum. “So I’m alone in wanting Lot to stay with me.”

  “My love, you’re so happy to be with Lot during your daily work that it would be a cruel wife indeed who did not wish you to keep your brother beside you.”

  “And yet you lend your voice to the forces of division.”

  “You and Lot are together during the day, doing the labor that you love, roaming this beautiful land, talking with men who know the beasts as well as you do, caring for animals that you understand better than people. You have the wind and the sun and the stars, the bleating and lowing and braying—of animals and of people.”

  Abram chuckled. “You almost make it into a song.”

  “The joy that you know in the field with Lot is not matched by any pleasure here in the camp.”

  Abram gave that a little thought before he answered. “Lot speaks little of Qira. But I know that he was not happy when she followed him to the camp. It shocked me, in fact—that he left her in the city in the first place, and that he wasn’t relieved to have her prove her love for him by coming.”

  “If he really wanted her to stay in the city,” said Sarai, “he would not have closed up the house that provided her position in society.”

  “Yes, well, there you are. I think he doesn’t know how to feel about her. But . . . I know she causes ill feeling. I hear about it from Eliezer and Bethuel—in fact, Bethuel told me that the one thing Lot’s herdsmen and mine agree on is that my wife is the queen of women, and Lot’s wife is . . . not.”

  “She’s in a constant rage here,” said Sarai. “I think her fury is completely unjustified, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s decided to feel this way.”

  “Decided?”

  “It’s her choice to dwell on these feelings and not make the best of it. It’s her choice to lash out at everyone. She sprays insults like a dog shaking off water—no one around her stays dry.”

  Abram chuckled again. “She’s always had a temper.”

  “Everyone has a temper,” said Sarai. “But Qira was never taught to control hers. If my mother had lived, she might have raised Qira differently. But then sometimes I think that it is Qira’s deepest nature to behave as she does. Whatever she wants is the only thing that matters, and the desires of others are either obstacles or steppingstones. She’s always been that way. She won’t change, Abram.”

  “Lot does love her, though,” said Abram. “So she can’t be entirely awful.”

  “Yes she can,” said Sarai. “My own sister, so this is disloyal of me, but then, Lot is my brother now, too, isn’t he? And who knows Qira better than the sister who had to grow up dealing with her? She knows how to be charming—how to make alliances in order to achieve her goals. But she also knows how to punish those who don’t give in to her charms. As long as Lot did what she wanted, she was lovely to him, and so he loved her.”

  “Lot said to me a few days ago, ‘How could my wife and yours come from the same house?’ Qira sees nothing, Sarai, and you see everything.”

  “Qira sees as much as I do. The difference is that I care about the people around me.”

  “Harsh,” said Abram.

  “I’ve put the best face on it up to now, Abram, because I could bear my sister’s petulance and nastiness for the sake of your happiness with your brother. In truth, I’ve been happy with Lot here, too—I’m used to Qira and I can shed her cruelties without noticing them. But she’s growing impatient. She’s not content merely to insult me and criticize me. She’s accusing me now of plotting against her. Even though everyone detests her, when she accuses me openly it weakens my place in the camp.”

  “Nothing could weaken your place here,” said Abram. “If she attacks you, your patience with her only makes you seem more of a saint in the eyes of all.”

  “A saint, but a weak one,” said Sarai. “You know that even a beloved leader is weakened if he tolerates insolence. You would never put up with it, and neither would I, except that when it’s my sister and my guest, my ability to control her is limited. And today it came to blows.”

  “You gave her a beating?”

  He sounded so delighted that it shocked her. “I did not!” she said. “I don’t even beat the servants! I would hardly beat my sister.”

  He laughed. He’d been teasing her.

  “Abram, this is serious. She hit me. Only a glancing blow, but she meant it to hurt. I had to throw her to the ground before she finally stopped. And this was outside my tent, where all could see. I’m surprised you didn’t already know.”

  “There are some things that people are reluctant to tell me,” said Abram. “You’ve said enough. Qira has to go.”

  “Easily said.”

  “I’ll get Lot to reopen the house in Sodom and send her back to it.”

  “And keep him here with us? I think not.”

  “He’s done with her, Sarai. She makes his life unbearable in Sodom, constantly pressing him to take part in a society that makes him sick at heart and sick to his stomach. He can’t live there again.”

  “He’s not tempted by their sins, is he?”

  “Of course not. But from the king on down, the men of Sodom are entirely given to debauchery and cruelty, and they don’t have much tolerance for men who don�
��t join in. When he stands aloof, they accuse him of judging them. Apparently the only sin that Sodom doesn’t embrace is the sin of choosing not to sin. And they’re right, of course. The fact that a man like Lot even exists is a constant affront to them. Because he’s there, all can see what a man of honor and decency acts like, and the contrast is clear.”

  “When I ask her about Sodom, Qira says that all men are like that in their hearts, and that it’s hypocritical to pretend otherwise. When I tell her that you’re not like that at all, nor are any of the others in this camp, she just rolls her eyes and says, ‘They spend weeks and months on end away from their women, with only the sheep and each other for company. Don’t fool yourself, my dear.’ As if that somehow proved her point.”

  Abram’s face reddened. “She accuses even me?”

  “She’s repeating the story that the women of Sodom tell each other in order to make their lives bearable.”

  “But she needs no such story—her husband is not like that.”

  “If she said that to them, then wouldn’t they mock her for her blindness? Besides, she’s weak, she’ll believe whatever her friends believe, or say that they believe. Abram, I know that Lot’s life in Sodom is unhappy. But if he sends her back and doesn’t return at all, it’s an insult to Qira, to me, and to my father’s house.”

  “Less of an insult than if he sent her back to your father’s house.”

  So Lot had talked about divorce. “Abram, all I ask is that Lot keep up appearances. Spend enough time in the city to keep a good face on things. Then he can return to his herds. A few days in each month should be enough.”

  Abram sighed. “Until Qira decides that he needs to be in attendance on her at a banquet or a feast day.”

  “If Lot can be forceful enough to close up the house and come here—”

  “Sarai, Lot was not forceful when he did those things. He fled. He hides from her even now. The only way he can have peace in his life is not to see her at all.”

  “And what does that do to the girls? To have their father gone all the time?”

  “What does it do to them to have their mother constantly criticize him and demean him?”

  “She does that whether he’s there or not,” said Sarai. “But if they see him, they can make their own judgment and realize that their mother is wrong. Abram, there’s no happy solution to the problem. If Lot decides not to live with Qira, I’ll try to make my father understand. Certainly I’ll understand. But the trouble is that my father may end up paying the highest price.”

  “Your father! If Lot sent Qira home to him, then he’d pay dearly.”

  “When Qira and I both married into the greatest of the herding houses, it gave my father prestige—which gave the king of Ur-of-the-North a reason to continue to support my father’s pretensions to royalty. But if that same great family repudiates the marriage and treats the daughter of the deposed King of Ur-of-Sumeria as worthless, then my father is weakened. Enough that the king of Ur will turn him out? Probably not.”

  “But it’s the beginning of the end for him,” said Abram. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “If Sodom is truly dangerous for Lot, then don’t send Qira back, either. We’ll make things work.”

  “What if we divide the camps and Lot simply takes Qira with him and deals with the problem on his own?”

  “No!” cried Sarai.

  “Why not? It’s his problem, ultimately. He said as much to me.”

  “Because she would turn all his men against him, Abram. Some would become her tools in undercutting his authority and giving her whatever she wants, and the rest would turn against him because they despise a man who can’t control his wife.”

  “So let him control her.”

  “How?” said Sarai. “She doesn’t respond to reason—she doesn’t hear it. She always has an answer, a foolish one, but it’s an answer. So what does he do, beat her? Is Lot the kind of man who can beat his wife bloody and call it love?”

  “If he were, she’d already be crippled by beatings.”

  “Or he’d be dead—after the first time he beat her. Abram, if Qira does not return to Sodom, she has to stay here with us—in a place where she has no authority.”

  “No,” said Abram. “Because what you don’t know is that the quarrels between Lot’s herdsmen and mine seem to be Qira’s idea.”

  “What?”

  “She’s constantly at his steward and his most trusted men, making snide remarks about how Lot’s herds aren’t really his, they’re just a gift from me. She says things like, Be careful how you treat those sheep, Abram may want them back someday. Or, Don’t get in the way of Abram’s men, they have real work to do, herding isn’t just a hobby for them.”

  “I had no idea,” said Sarai. “Though why not? She’s so angry that if she thinks of something nasty, she’ll say it.”

  “She knows what she’s doing,” said Abram. “She never says such things in front of you or me. Or Bethuel or Eliezer, either, for that matter. But she shames Lot’s men. Makes them feel second-rate. Naturally they’re more belligerent.”

  “The only reason she has the power to do so much evil,” said Sarai, “is because you and Lot are so good. Lot is too patient with her, and you’re both too loyal to me to do anything that would insult my sister.”

  Abram laughed. “Don’t call it virtue, my love,” he said. “If I were really loyal to you, I’d have thrust her out of the camp into the desert the first time she made one of her vicious little remarks about how she is a mother and you don’t know anything.”

  Tears leapt to Sarai’s eyes. “I didn’t know you heard those things.”

  “She never says them in front of me, if that’s what you mean,” said Abram. “But the men and women of this camp love you to distraction. Do you really think that I don’t hear an outraged report of every insult she offers you? Don’t you understand that if anyone but your sister had said such things in this camp, his life would be forfeit?”

  Sarai pressed her face into Abram’s chest and wept. “If only her insults weren’t the truth,” she said.

  “You are more of a mother to every child in this camp, and every grown man and woman, too, for that matter, than Qira is or ever can be. All she did was what any cow or cat can do—give birth.”

  “The one thing I can’t do.”

  “I only told you that so you’d understand that our loyalty to you is a reason for getting her out of the camp, not keeping her here. No, Sarai, they love you, they honor you—not as much as I do, but only because they don’t know you quite as well. No one thinks ill of you. We all know that you’ll have my children when God wills, and not sooner. And in the meantime, we all rejoice in the great blessing of having you as my wife, as the mistress of this camp. And they have never loved you more than since Qira has been here to show them just how awful life could be if you were a different kind of woman.”

  Sarai laughed through her weeping. “So Qira’s doing wonders for my reputation.”

  Abram held her tighter. “You are the wise one, as usual. I’ll lay your suggestion before Lot, and I think he’ll do it. A few days in Sodom, a few weeks in the field—and he can visit here, too, without bringing Qira. It wasn’t a mere coincidence that his defiance of Qira finally came just after we returned from Egypt. The time we spent there was very hard on him. He had nowhere to go then. But if he knows that he can come to see us, then he can visit Sodom, too, and spend most of his time there with his daughters. It’s still not a happy life, but sometimes happiness consists of nothing more than finding the right balance of misery.”

  “And is love, then, finding the right balance of loneliness?”

  “Love is you,” said Abram. “Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you.”

  “Oh, Abram, that’s how I feel about you, but I have no idea what I have that you could ever need.”

  “And one of the things I love best about you is
that you are completely oblivious to your own virtue.” He kissed her. “And back on the subject of having children, do we intend God to give us sons by miracle alone, or shall we do what we can to help?”

  That was the end of conversation for the night. And the next day, Abram and Lot walked for a few hours in the first light of day. When they came back, the plan was set. The herds would be divided. The long drought had ruined most of the great herding houses. Now rain had returned, the great grassy plains and hilly pasturages were almost empty. Abram gave Lot the choice, and he decided to keep his herds here, east of the Jordan. It was farther from most cities, but closer to Sodom, so he could more easily stay in touch with his men when he was in the city.