M andisa swallowed hard and squared her shoulders, willing herself to walk yet another fifty paces. At her right hand the river gleamed pale and gray beneath a silvery path of light cast by the moon. “Only a little farther, Adom,” Mandisa said, her voice sounding worn in her own ears. Adom did not complain, though they had been walking all day. She felt as though she had been walking her entire life.
Two full weeks had passed since they left the vizier’s house, and in the past twenty days they had wandered through Hierakonpolis, a city nearly as bustling and prosperous as Thebes, and half a dozen smaller villages. Any one of the towns would have been a good place to settle, but she had decided to take Adom to Elephantine, an island city near the river’s first cataract. When El Shaddai again blessed the earth with floodwaters, Elephantine would be the first community to receive the benefits and blessings of the Nile’s annual inundation.
Though an emerald strip of river grass still bordered the Nile, Mandisa yearned to see green when she lifted her eyes to the east and west. The emmer fields, from which the sun used to drink steam, now lay empty and barren. Even the skies had changed in the years of famine. The flocks of wild geese, pintail ducks and wigeons that used to swarm over Egypt had vanished as if they knew they could no longer nest in the bosom of the land.
Beside her, Adom yawned, and Mandisa felt a flash of sympathy for her son. The poor boy would have to adapt to life outside a luxurious palace, for there would be no garden or servants or maids in whatever household Mandisa could afford to furnish for him. Yet she was glad she had left the vizier’s house while Adom was young. He was nearly old enough to choose a trade for himself, and a practical, ordinary outlook would be good for him. She would have to learn to make her own way in the world; Adom would, too.
As the sun sank toward the west and lengthened the shadows along the riverbank, Mandisa pointed toward a small huddle of trees. “There, Adom, is a sheltering place,” she said, studying the riverbank to make certain no hippos or crocodiles had decided to beach themselves at the same spot. Since the drought had lowered the river’s water level, the water creatures had become hungry and restive in their confinement. More than once Mandisa had been warned that dangerous animals lurked in the river grasses, waiting for a passerby to stumble and fall in the dark.
But the sparse stand of trees lay thirty paces from the river’s edge on a high mound of gray earth. “Here, Adom.” Exhausted, she found a sheltered spot under the branches of a still-green acacia. She cleared the ground with her sandal, checking to be sure no spiders or scorpions hid among the dry brush at her feet, then sat down with her back against the spindly tree trunk. Adom sat next to her, hugging his knees. She knew within a few moments the boy in him would overpower the emerging man. Funny how worry and weariness made children of men. Shim’on had behaved much the same way.
Adom’s breathing slowed and deepened; his head fell upon her shoulder. Relieved that he slept so soon, she looked up at the sky above. Silver moonbeams laced the branches of the acacias; a quarter moon the color of dappled stone hung in the eastern sky. The dense papyrus beds along the edge of the river vibrated with insect life; beyond them, the silver water of the Nile shimmered against an endless sky. Mandisa closed her eyes and thanked God Almighty for another day of survival.
For it was El Shaddai who had brought her safely through the land, and no other god. None of Egypt’s divinities had the power to predict the famine or provide the food she and Adom had eaten. They had found dates overlooked by harvesters, grapes growing wild on vines by the riverside. One merchant, about to toss the crocodiles his leftover shat cakes, had changed his mind and given them to Mandisa and Adom instead.
No, none of Egypt’s gods could provide like El Shaddai, but they were as plentiful as fleas on a dog. As she and Adom had traveled down the riverfront, Mandisa marveled at the many temples, statues and shrines along the riverbank. Some of the elaborate shrines were made of stone and decorated with festive paintings; others were as simple as a small statue concealed within a hut of sticks and twigs.
She supposed her years in the vizier’s house had dulled her memory of Egypt’s pantheon of deities. Though Ani and a few of the household servants held special reverence for certain gods, Zaphenath-paneah had not allowed graven images in his private quarters or his temple.
Apparently the famine had invoked a national resurgence in personal piety. Every city, town and village had erected a statue of its patron god or goddess at its gate in order to keep harm and want outside the city limits. In addition, each house had at least one replica of a favorite deity standing guard at the doorpost.
Mandisa flinched when a sudden splash cut into the silence. She scanned the river, her body rigid, until she spied the commotion in the water. Massive jaws churned the surface as a monster chewed its catch, and Mandisa released her breath. The beast floated by her, a dark shadow with golden eyes, a stonelike snout and a wide body. His massive tail, as long as Mandisa was tall, whipped back and forth through the quicksilver river, propelling the creature forward.
Sebek. The crocodile god. Idogbe had been a devout follower of Sebek. A crocodile statue stood outside the door of their small house and once a year her husband had journeyed to Crocodilopolis, one of Sebek’s sacred abodes, to worship the crocodile who supposedly emerged from the watery chaos at the moment the world began.
But Idogbe was no longer a part of her life, and Sebek was no god. Why couldn’t anyone else see the futility of worshipping stone and carved wood?
Despite Zaphenath-paneah’s allegiance to El Shaddai and his forthright insistence that the Almighty God preserved Egypt from ruin, the Egyptians had not hearkened to the voice of their vizier. Tuthmosis IV, the present Pharaoh’s father, had listened to and respected Zaphenath-paneah’s words, but though the new king honored his tutor-vizier, he did not possess the courage to shelve the ancient cults and the priests who also advised him. Plus, Mandisa mused, Pharaoh probably preferred to maintain the old religions because doing so insured that he would remain at the head of Egypt’s pantheon of gods. According to the old beliefs, the king reigned over his people as the incarnation of the god Horus. As such he was divinity himself, and only he had the right to petition the gods in prayer.
“Not so,” Mandisa murmured, her eyes growing heavy. “For I have seen the provision of the Almighty One. He has heard Zaphenath-paneah’s voice, and He will hear mine.”
Mandisa took a long, deep breath of the cool evening air. It was good to have one God, and logical that only one could be supreme. She had seen the hand of El Shaddai in the reunion of Zaphenath-paneah and his brothers, and He had bountifully provided for her and Adom in the past few days. So why couldn’t she understand His will regarding her and Shim’on?
Surely she had been right to leave Thebes, for how could she face Shim’on when he returned? He refused to love her; he looked for every reason to avoid caring for her. And she could not love a man whose heart had been hardened and carved of hatred and jealousy.
“Almighty God, wherever You are—” she opened her eyes to the darkening sky above “—keep Your hand on us as we journey to our new home. Comfort Zaphenath-paneah in his sorrow, and Efrayim and Menashe. But especially Shim’on, O God…heal the hurts of his heart.”
Under the vast and endless plain of evening, Mandisa slept.
Watching from a small boat floating in the lazy river current, Idogbe recognized the woman who had been his wife. He had been haunting the river for days, moving from village to village, counting on Mandisa’s instinct to flee in the opposite direction of Canaan. The wilderness was no place for a single woman and a young boy, and he knew she would not want to face her people with a son and no husband. With nothing but desert to the east and west, she could only have gone southward.
Paddling silently, without even a ripple in the windless calm, Idogbe urged his papyrus skiff closer to shore. The boy lay on the ground next to her, one arm resting idly in her lap. Idogbe’s mouth puckered with annoyance. She ought to take better care of his son, especially a boy who had spent nine years in the house of a vizier. Undoubtedly the lad was bright; perhaps he had already picked up a rudimentary knowledge of writing. At scribe school the boy could learn more, and within a few years he would prove himself able enough to serve in the temple of Sebek at Crocodilopolis.
A man needed a son to provide for him, to see that he was properly supplied for the afterlife. Until the day he’d learned the boy existed, Idogbe had worried that he might die unknown and unmourned, that his immortal soul would vanish like a puff of steam. But he had a son, a bright boy who might be offered in service to the fierce and strong Sebek to insure bountiful rewards in this life and the world to come.
Idogbe’s gaze drifted from the sleeping boy to the mother. He smiled, thinking about the first time he had seen her. Always restless for fresh horizons, he had been a wanderer even then, one of many merchants on an expedition to the lands of Shinar. The caravan had stopped outside a compound of tent dwellers, and he saw Mandisa standing by the well. She wore a brightly patterned Assyrian garment, a stark contrast to the bleached linen garments of Egyptian women. Her dark hair, so different from the neat, tidy Egyptian wigs, had tumbled carelessly down her back. One escaping curl fell over her forehead, mesmerizing him.
He had never considered taking a woman for his own, but in that moment he knew he would have her.
He scarcely knew how he found the words, but an interpreter led him to her father’s tent. Within the hour he had offered the herdsman ten deben weight of silver; before sunset that afternoon he had set the girl on one of his pack animals and turned toward Egypt.
Though the girl was beautiful, an aura of melancholy surrounded her even in bright sunlight. She wept frequently and her lustrous eyes widened with alarm every time he approached. Her tongue proved quick as she learned the Egyptian language. Within six months after Idogbe installed her in his house, Mandisa had become like other Egyptian women, complaining that he spent too much time away from home. So when she told him she expected a child, he paid a priest of Sebek a handsome amount to look into a divining bowl and predict the child’s sex.
The priest lied. Perhaps Mandisa had bribed him, or perhaps the man had his own reasons for misleading Idogbe. But rather than father a girl and be responsible for two whining women, he had gathered his silver and left Thebes, preferring to let Mandisa think him dead than to return and let himself be nagged into an early grave.
Now he studied her in the moonlight and recalled that she was not often unpleasant. Her ivory shoulders, barely visible through the linen gown she wore, evoked memories he had long since buried. Her hair, shorter now but still curly, was still as black as a starless night. Even from this distance he could see the hollow of her neck, filled with moonlit shadows. How rewarding it would be to kiss them away…but he had not come all this way for her. And if he were to succeed in his intention, Mandisa could not know that Idogbe still lived. She must believe that her son had vanished without a trace.
He would have to plan carefully. He stroked the surface of the water and looked at the shore ahead. A small lagoon, used in more plentiful days to irrigate the fields of an entire village, lay off to the west. He rowed forward until the skiff lanced its way into the still waters of the waiting lagoon.