Chapter 19

Simeon

“Tjaty.” The surprised guard of the royal prison stepped aside with a bow.

The vizier held up a hand in thanks to the guard on the night watch, and the woman with the vizier—surely it couldn’t be his wife, but who else would he bring here?—smiled, her face partially hidden by the shadows. Leaving their own contingent of guards outside, the vizier led the way into the small inner room that was the holding cell for royal prisoners, lit only by the faint flicker of torches.

“Over here,” he said and moved closer, peering in through the small opening in the cell’s wall. Two men lay stretched out on the ground within, while a third sat leaning against the opposite wall, head lolling. Then he turned back and pointed to one of the men lying curled on his side.

Asenath stepped closer and leaned up on her toes, gazing in at the foreign man’s bearded face, his peppery hair streaked with age, his skin lined with years of travel beneath the sun, and his tall, lean body folded in protectively as he slept. His woolen garments were dusty with the dirt of the cell, and he slept with his head propped against the crook of his elbow.

Turning back, Asenath looked over her shoulder at her husband. He had already moved away. His hands were clasped lightly behind his back, his bearing every whit that of a dignitary.

She thought, You’ve slept here too.

She turned once more toward the desert man who lay in the dirt, curled into the dreams that hopefully gave him some escape from the grim and strange life that had overtaken him. Then she glanced over her shoulder again.

“He’s an old man,” she said, speaking almost too quietly to be heard. “Is he being taken care of?”

“Of course.” Zaphenath glanced back at the guards. “All the prisoners here are treated well.”

She looked back at the sleeping man. “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“Did you expect him to?”

She touched her fingers against one of the rough wooden poles driven through the tiny opening, guarding the men within. “Tell me his name again.”

“Simeon.”

“Simeon,” she repeated, moving her mouth over the foreign sounds. “Why him?”

“My own reasons.” She heard her husband take a slow breath. “Have you seen enough?”

But she was still gazing in at Simeon.

And then Simeon, who until then had lain unmoving, began to stir, stretching out one arm and rolling over onto his back. Asenath stood absolutely still, watching as Simeon lifted a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes before rolling back onto his side, fluttering his eyes open, yawning.

He blinked, squinting in the dim light.

He saw her.

She knew it from the way he stared, suddenly perplexed, as if trying to understand what it was he saw standing there, watching him in the darkness.

Zaphenath, hearing the rustle from within the cell, moved closer and took his wife’s arm.

She glanced back as he touched her, just as the prisoner raised his head. And for a single, suspended moment, she stood between them like a balance—her husband’s hand on her arm, and his brother’s fixed gaze extending out from within the cell—and the two men looked past her from opposite sides of the bars, one in regal dress, the other filthy and exhausted, and they saw each other.

Zaphenath stared at his prisoner, seeing the hesitation and the way he held himself back from the full embrace of the flickering torchlight. This man, whom he had seen only in the shadows, had a stranger’s face, with a faded beard and dirty foreign clothes, and the years in the desert had drained away so much of what should have been familiar—and yet, couched in the worn lines and the fleeting expression, the wry, flickering eyes and the darting gaze, were vestiges of the brother he had known.

Did I expect the desert to make them immortal?

In his mind, they had never aged—they were still the strong, hot-headed bullies who had beaten him, not old and frightened men. Time had been cleft out there in the desert, seizing them all in a frozen and unchanging spasm, for time and all eternity, after the Joseph who had gone to seek his brothers had been murdered and torn apart like the betrayed Osiris. And he had somehow believed that his brothers, his family, and all the world that was had also died in that moment, trapped forever in the unforgiving embrace of broken time, left behind in the desert never to grow old, never to return home, to remain forever in that single moment from which there was neither redemption nor release. The violence of that day should have sealed them all with the desert’s unchanging, unblinking memory of who they had been when the universe was violated and tilted, spinning wildly and irrevocably away from the known world, and neither mercy nor time could undo what had been done.

But time had undone it.

Zaphenath saw it, in the face of this stranger who had been his brother, now a man who had lived a whole life of which Zaphenath knew nothing. Simeon—the young fury, captured forever in Zaphenath’s mind in that moment of terrible rage—had no relation to the dirty prisoner who cowered before him. Yet this prisoner, who now also could not comprehend what was happening to him, was Simeon—and in that moment it was as if the universe tilted again, and the rift that separated who he was from who he had been came rushing back together, and here they were, staring at each other, reunited on the other side of time.

Zaphenath could have spoken to him. No one in that small room besides the prisoner who lay on the ground would have understood the words. In all of Kemet, there was no other being who carried the memory of who Zaphenath had been in that other life in the time before time split, no one who could speak to that other part of him, no one who could cross over and bring that severed half back to life by acknowledging that it had once existed.

But he did not speak.

Asenath felt his touch fall away from her arm.

And then she heard him speaking softly to one of the guards.

“ . . . released tomorrow morning,” he was saying, “and have him brought to my house. We will hold him there until further notice.”

The guard acknowledged the command.