Are you coming?”
Eben crouched next to me. His hand brushed down my arm, bringing with it the heat of a lightning bolt across the night sky. His fingers entwined with mine, and I bathed in the indulgence of the obvious delight in his eyes before I answered.
“Where to?”
Mischief cocked his brow, and he pointed his bearded chin at my tent. “Not far, bring your lyre.”
Jumo was seated across the Senet game box from me—one of the many gilded treasures given to Eben by Akensouris. We had been playing for hours, both of us trying to ignore our mother’s uninhabited seat by the campfire. Jumo was a master of the game, always quick to block me, as if he could predict which move I would play next. I had won only a couple of games so far.
“G-Go.” Jumo waved a hand, as if to brush me away.
I narrowed my eyes. “You just want me to go because I am winning.”
Jumo unsuccessfully tried to smother a small smile, and a tiny spark of life, one I had not seen in days, glinted in his dark eyes.
To my surprise, he seemed to simply accept Eben and me together, and by the hints he’d dropped all day, he’d known much more than he had let on all along. My brother—always perceiving so much more than he could vocalize. Once again, a pang of regret that he could never truly tell me all he wanted to say, stung my heart. What would my brother say if he had been born with the ability to freely express his deepest thoughts?
I retrieved my precious lyre from the tent, and Eben led me to a place nearby where we could sit in the shade of a large oleander bush yet still within sight of the camp. The reminder of our last day together, before the attack, was acute, and I hesitated when he asked me to sit, overcome with memories and regrets.
Compassion filled his gray-green eyes; he seemed to understand.
I chewed the inside of my cheek to keep tears from forming, wishing there were not witnesses to my grief all around us.
“Tell me.” Tenderly, he smoothed a hand down my hair.
“My fault.” My voice hitched on gulps and sobs. “If we had not left Egypt . . . or if I had kept her in my sight . . . or . . .”
“No. No. No.” His hand gently met my cheek. “Your mother is not gone because of you any more than my father is gone because of me.”
Did Eben blame himself? “I thought Egyptians killed your father.”
“They did.” He blinked slowly and released a shuddering breath. “But I had a hand in it as well.”
He gestured for me to sit. I settled the lyre on the ground next to me and waited for Eben to sit as well.
Instead, he stood, half turned away, as if he could not face me.
“My father was the best of men. Twice the musician I am, able to hear and play anything without practice. He told me Elohim sang songs directly into his heart. They poured out of him. His stories were our bread; we lived on them, day to day.”
He gazed toward the rock, which still gushed fresh cool water from the depths of the earth. “I loved my father, but I was young and foolish, more interested in running wild with my friends than sitting at his knee. I apprenticed with him but stayed at the shop only as long as was necessary before running off to find mischief with the other boys.”
He stopped and smoothed his beard with his knuckles, seeming unsettled by the story he had to tell.
“I was twelve, eager to prove myself as a man and angry with the overseers who took pleasure in humiliating us. Even more so with Hebrews who lightened their load by doing the overseers’ bidding.”
Thoughts of Latikah flooded back, and again I wished that I had stayed with her that night, forgiven her, instead of leaving her to her fate.
“One man was known to be a well-rewarded traitor and lived at the edge of the Hebrew quarter. My friends and I waited until he was gone and then broke into his home and vandalized it. We ripped his clothes, spilled his food onto the ground, and slashed his linens. And careless as I was, I dropped my knife.”
He patted the ivory handle now back in its sheath at his side. “The traitor found it when he returned home and knew immediately whose it was; my father was known to have carried it long before he gifted it to me, and a carved ivory dagger at the hip of a Hebrew drew attention.”
I covered a gasp with my hand, anticipating the end of his story.
He nodded. “Yes, you guessed correctly. The Hebrew turned my father over to the Egyptians, and he was imprisoned. It was only two days later that so many of our men were rounded up to be slaughtered, my father among them.”
Eben lowered himself to the ground, sorrow in his expression. “In the heat of my reckless twelve-year-old fury, I confronted the traitor the next day. The man was actually remorseful when I told him it was me that had destroyed his belongings. He returned the dagger, vowing that he would not have turned my father in if he had known what would happen.”
“So”—he pulled my hand into his—“now you see. Without my destructive choices, my father might be alive now. And as much as I tried to lay the blame at the feet of the Egyptians, at my core my anger was directed at myself. It took friendship with your brother and falling in love with you to face it.”
He ran a finger down my cheekbone, and I stifled a sigh.
“When I saw you talking to Sayaad, when your wagon broke down, it was all I could do not to sling you over my shoulder and run off with you.”
“Truly, you knew even then?”
His finger moved to caress my lips. “Yes, my love. I was half mad with jealousy.”
“No wonder Jumo was smirking at me.”
His brow quirked.
“Jumo always knows.”
Eben laughed. “Yes. That he does. He teased me mercilessly from that night on. But I am glad he did, because it helped me to admit that it wasn’t you I was angry with, or even your people, but myself and my foolishness.”
“But you were only a child. You could not have known what would happen.”
“That is true; my father may have been rounded up had I not done what I did—evil men do evil things and even Yahweh’s people are not immune to suffering. You did not know what would happen to Nailah, either. You were following the path Yahweh made for you, here into the wilderness with me. And your mother loved you; she would not hold you responsible.”
I missed my mother so much, ached to hear her voice again. There were so many things I had never told her, questions left unanswered, memories yet to be made. She would never see me married or hold a grandchild in her arms. I longed to tell her of my love for Eben, and of the experience I had on the floor of the tent when Yahweh surrounded me in love. Her face on the morning the manna appeared—“I asked for bread, and he provided,” she had said—she must have understood, at least in part. But still, I had only begun to know her, to see her not as some goddess far above my reach but as a fallible and lovely human, weak in some ways and strong in others.
Would this chasm inside me ever be filled?
Eben gazed into my eyes. “Would you like me to play for you?”
I nodded and handed him the lyre, then folded my knees under my chin and wrapped my arms around my legs.
He played the song he had sung at the campfire by the sea, a lament that matched the heaviness pressing against my ribs yet brought with it also the memory of the night I had fallen in love with this fascinating and talented man. If he truly meant what he said, that he would stay by my side, then perhaps the pain might be easier to bear.
Shira had questioned, all those months ago, whether Yahweh was preparing me for something. Now I could see that it was true. Yahweh had brought me here into the wilderness to free me, to show me how to leave my idols behind, and to meet the man I would spend my life with. Yahweh cared enough to bring me out of slavery and ignorance, protect me in the desert, and to reveal himself to me in a tent during the middle of a battle.
The God who parted the sea could surely mend the rift in my heart.