Chapter 36

Sacrifice

“What’s going on?”

Zaphenath turned from where he stood in the garden of his estate, peacefully paused beside the reflecting pool, gazing toward some unknown piece of sky.

Asenath stood, hands on hips, waiting. “Well?”

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Amon has gone after your brothers. All the servants are talking.”

Zaphenath shrugged. “I sent him.”

She shook her head. “What more do you want from them?”

“Benjamin.” Zaphenath looked at her. “I won’t send him back to be killed in the desert once my father is gone.”

She looked at him, and when she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “How do you know they want to hurt him?”

“You don’t understand life outside of Kemet.” He crossed his arms. “Here, you honor life, but out there . . .” He shook his head. “Benjamin will have no one to protect him.”

“It may be,” she said, “that your brothers have not changed, but you don’t know that.” She held out a hand. “Think of what you did for Djeseret.”

Rarely, very rarely, had Zaphenath heard his wife speak that name.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, after a long pause.

Asenath moved closer. “Because,” she said softly, “you knew, then, what mercy was.”

Zaphenath looked away.

“I did that,” he said at last, “because there was nothing else I could have done.”

Asenath shook her head. “No one is merciful because there is no other choice.”

“It was for my sister.” Zaphenath’s voice was quiet. “And for your brother.”

“And Potiphar has no greater respect for any man,” Asenath said, her voice softer still, “because you spared someone what had been done to you.” She rested her other hand on his arm. “You were willing to set the world right again.” She gazed up at him. “You are not the boy they put in the pit. You are a new man, now. You were changed by what you did.”

Zaphenath looked at her, and she heard the tightness in his throat. “I can’t let them hurt Benjamin.”

She looked at him. “Benjamin had no part in what was done. They did”—she pressed a hand against his chest—“and you did. Keeping Benjamin here will not heal you. You know that.”

“I can’t send him away and never see him again.”

She slid her hand down her husband’s arm and took his hand, intertwining their fingers. “Then don’t,” she said softly, and leaned up, very gently, and kissed him.

“Make way,” Amon called out, “make way,” startling the other pedestrians aside and leaving them to stare at the bearded man being led under guard and the—how many were there, nine, ten?—men trailing along behind, marched down the road by armed escort. Whatever brief words might have been exchanged between the captive brothers dwindled into silence as the sight of the vizier’s ornate villa came into view. The gently swaying palm fronds above the whitewashed walls created a strange visual disconnect from the devastation that awaited them within.

The warmth of the day, or perhaps just the events thereof, had been sending trickles of sweat down the back of Judah’s neck. He looked over toward the River, where boats of near-naked passengers sailed briskly along with the current, their bodies open to the cooling breeze off the water. Anywhere he looked, it seemed, the condemning reminder was there.

You are not one of us.

The brothers shuffled in through the estate’s opened, waiting gates, and their animals were taken by somber-faced, cold-eyed servants. Judah handed over the ropes to his own camel with a certain calm resignation. He knew he would not see the beast again. But let that be as it may, there was no freedom, he knew, in roaming the world at the price of a brother.

Go home, Benjamin, he thought, go home, and our father will live, and our family with him.

Benjamin would not be the required offering for the family’s survival. Nor was there any reason that he, the youngest and most innocent, should bear the price of this strange and devilish retribution that had come lashing like a blinding sandstorm across a twenty-year chasm. Judah had come to understand it first from a young Canaanite woman in the flickering darkness, but he had come to understand it again now—there was no place where the memory of the desert did not extend.

And mercy without sacrifice could not be.

As he followed his brothers onto the grounds of the estate, he raised his eyes. It was almost as if he could hear Tamar’s voice, speaking out of the darkness—

The sin is lifted.

“This way,” the steward ordered. The front door into the villa was pulled open, and the soldier escorting Benjamin proceeded within. The other brothers followed behind, silently stepping back over the threshold they had so recently crossed in a passage of absolution, freed of all accusation and proven worthy to return to their father in triumph. Now, they were returning to witness their most innocent brother’s condemnation—the required vengeance, it seemed, for a crime that his brothers had committed in the desert before the boy’s real memory had even begun.

Judah glanced up toward the sky, seeing a bright flash of blue and hearing the call of a reeling, circling swallow, soaring effortlessly between heaven and earth. A slight smile came to his face.

“Come on,” one of the guards grumbled, and although Judah could not quite understand the expression, the nudge was sufficient to communicate.

He stepped over the threshold.

Their accuser was waiting for them. In the same room where, just the evening before, they had been his guests, the brothers now slunk in like a row of the condemned. The vizier stood, arms crossed, watching from across the courtyard as they entered.

“There,” the vizier’s steward ordered, pointing, “wait against the wall.” The brothers moved away, while Benjamin was brought forward, alone, with his hands behind his back. The soldier indicated that the prisoner should kneel. Benjamin knelt, lowering himself with a certain graceful dignity that struck Judah as oddly reminiscent of the mother Benjamin had never known and the brother who was more a composite of other people’s memories than of Benjamin’s own. Perhaps it was the boy’s birthright, somehow, also to be sacrificed—as his mother had been to bring him into the world and as his brother’s blood had sealed up a terrible unity amongst his bickering brothers.

But a birthright, Judah knew, could be given to another.