Counted With the Stars (14 page)

A
lthough his eyes remained closed and the back of his head against the wall, Eben's long, tapered fingers tapped against his thigh, an indication that his relaxed pose was merely pretense.

Fear seized my heart, and my breath quickened. What would happen at midnight? Was Eben waiting for some signal to take up arms against Egypt tonight? Would it be the sword lying on the floor next to him that spilled the blood of our firstborns—of my brother? Eben had made it clear that he was anxious to avenge his father—had I led Jumo into the enemy's hands?

As if he could feel my gaze on him, Eben's eyelids fluttered open. Instead of the anger and bitterness I had expected to see, his expression portrayed only confusion and curiosity.

Intensity vibrated in the air, causing a flurry of nerves to swirl in my stomach and dispelling the idea that Eben would hurt my brother. Afraid that someone might notice the screaming tension between the two of us, I looked away, grateful that the lamplight was dwindling and no one would see the effects of my overheated face.

As I worked to avoid glancing toward him again, minutes
dwindled away and silence settled over the house. No one slept, except for the youngest children. I strained my ears, listening. I felt the entire land of Egypt was doing the same, waiting, listening, fearing that a night of desolation lay ahead of us—one more terrifying than three days of darkest night.

When the lamplight flickered low, casting dimmer shadows on the wall, Zerah's strong voice startled me. “Sing something, dear one.”

I did not know who she was addressing, but there was no mistaking the voice that cut through the silence. I had never heard Shira sing. She sometimes hummed wordless tunes while we attended to our water pots or bathed in the sunshine at the river, but now her clear, sweet voice filled the room. She sang a verse by herself and then others joined in, their voices growing stronger with each line.

They sang in their own language, a beautiful, lyrical tongue, a tongue I had no knowledge of. When I had heard the language in the marketplace, it seemed foreign and awkward to my Egyptian ears. But as Shira's voice rose and spun higher, I understood the beauty, the complicated dips and swells of the words swirling together to form a poetry beyond anything I had ever before experienced.

There was no need to understand the words. Every syllable rang with clear meaning. It was the song of her people, desperate for their God, crying out to him in their bondage: the plaintive cry from a broken heart, from a nation of broken hearts. The cry rose in one verse and fell in another, as the tide of hope grew and receded. Over two hundred years of bitter bondage had seen the rise and fall of the Hebrews' hope, time and again.

The last verse, however, was full of joy—a strange irony on this night. More than once, the name of Mosheh wove its way into the fabric of the lyrics. I expected the melody to end on a melancholy note, to echo the fear and dread around us, but it
was full and high and sweet. The other voices faded as Shira held the last note.

It hung there, resonating in the darkness.

When this last note of Shira's masterful song faded, no one moved or spoke. Everyone, it seemed, felt as I did, that the spell would be broken by the slightest of whispers, as if any movement would be an affront to the magic Shira's voice wrapped around us.

I thought she had begun singing again when a sound met my ears. But the voice was not from inside this house. Instead a high-pitched keening rang out in the distance, the shrill wail rending the silence. The hair prickled on the back of my neck.

The sound was all too recognizable.

Death.

The lone voice remained solitary for only a moment, then others joined its lament, and then still more. Soon a cacophony of lamentation surrounded us on all sides, as though the entire land of Egypt grieved with one loud voice.

Most jarring were the shrieks from homes shockingly close to Shira's. The sounds of mourning were familiar. I had always hated the dreadful ululating of the professional mourners as they led the processions of the dead to their resting places—but this was different. The wailing and shrieking made my bones ache with icy horror.

My mother's frozen hand slipped into mine and, as the sound grew, she trembled more and more. Or was it my own hand shaking? My whole body tensed to flee, but there was nowhere to go. Death surrounded us on all sides. Would anyone survive this unimaginable terror?

A loud knock thudded on the door. We all jolted, eyes wide, but no one moved to open it.

Had Pharaoh sent his army to kill the Hebrews? Had I doomed not only Jumo but my mother and myself by putting our lot in with these foreigners? My heart lurched and flailed, and nausea rose in my throat.

Another knock . . . and then pounding. “Open up, you have to leave!”

Eben stood, tucking the short sword into his belt but keeping a grip on the hilt. His hand paused on the latch a moment before he opened the door.

A small group of Egyptians surrounded the doorway, two men and five women. Tears and kohl streamed down their faces. The men were on their knees, and two of the women lay prostrate in the dirt in front of the threshold.

One of the men crawled forward and pushed a large bundle at Eben's feet. “Please. Take this—take it and go. We cannot endure any more. We will all die if you Hebrews do not leave our land.”

Eben did not move to pick up the bundle. “What has happened?”

“They are all dead. You killed them all.” He sobbed, gripping his chest. “My son. My only . . .”

“All of your firstborn are dead,” Eben said. It was not a question.

“Every one, every house. Even the firstborn of the animals are gone, and our slaves. Not even infants were spared . . .” The man's voice quavered and broke.

“Please.” The woman who stood at the back of the group spoke up. “You have to go, all of you. Egypt cannot survive any more of your sorcery.” She caught sight of me and my family, behind Eben. Without blinking, her expression transformed from sorrow to malice. “Go, and take the traitors with you.” She spat on the ground, muttered a dark curse, and turned her back on us.

W
hat will we do?” My mother's whisper tickled my ear. “Will they kill us?”

Eben's sword sliced through my thoughts, but I had every confidence in Shira. “No. We will go with them, as Zerah offered.”

My mother's eyes widened, and she leaned closer to me. “With these Hebrews? Why? Can't we just settle in another town? Where no one knows us?”

“If we stay here, everyone will know that we took refuge with the Hebrews, Mother. You saw how that woman reacted. Just the fact that Jumo survived tonight—we will be deemed conspirators.”

She was silent, conflict playing across her features. “But we could go somewhere else. Where no one knows us. Start over.”

Shaking his head, my brother reached out and patted her hand. “No . . . we . . . go.”

Her eyes tightened as she looked at him, but then her shoulders sloped, and she nodded. She would deny Jumo nothing. She knew as well as I did that there was no other choice but to go. We had no home. No gods. No country. We must place our
fate in the hands of a faceless god that I still was not convinced even existed, except in the minds of slaves.

A new commotion in the narrow street caused Eben to step outside, and we waited in silence for minutes that seemed like hours, all eyes on the wooden door. When it swung open, a rush of chill night air rushed in with Eben.

“It's time,” he said. “We are going.”

A flurry of commotion swirled around us. The neighbors and the couple with their twin boys left. The boys slept against their parents' shoulders, blissfully unaware of their brush with death. Shira and her mother scurried about, packing the last of their meager belongings into baskets. My mother, Jumo, and I stood helpless in the middle of the room. My heart felt like an anchored boat being tossed about in the middle of a rushing river as I watched Shira's family, liberty now within reach after hundreds of years. I felt the pull, the call of freedom, yet I felt moored to Iunu, even in her destruction.

But I would not stay. I could not. There was nothing for me in this town but chains. And shame.

When the last of their family's meager belongings had been packed into their cart, Eben pulled our donkeys around to the front of the house. Both animals were skittish from the turmoil in the street. Hundreds of Hebrews were doing the same as Shira's family, loading their wagons and pushcarts. Some with bright faces and laughter, others in silent solemnity.

I had never seen this many Hebrews before tonight, and the differences among them shocked me. I had expected most of them to look like Shira and Eben, but many women wore painted eyes, and many men sported clean-shaven faces. There were numerous stooped backs, some crisscrossed with the markings of whips, echoes of the brick teams charged to build the magnificence of Iunu for Pharaoh's sake. Until Shira had told me of this heavy burden of her people, I had barely considered
how many slaves it had taken to build my beautiful city, or their misery in the hot sun each day under the cruel oversight of their masters.

Jumo pulled himself onto the black donkey, and I waited, nervously shifting from foot to foot. My mother leaned against my brown donkey, as if needing something to hold her up as she surveyed the chaotic scene around us.

Just as our caravan began to move away from Shira's home, a wagon, pulled by a magnificent horse, skidded to a stop in front of us.

“Eben!” a voice called out.

Akensouris, the man I recognized as Eben's master from the music shop, jumped down from the wagon. He enveloped Eben in a hug. “Thank you. Thank you, my friend,” he said, kissing Eben's cheeks. “Without your warning and instructions, my little son would be dead. I owe you his life—and mine.”

Shira's low voice whispered in my ear. “My brother told Akensouris how to protect his family. He has been good to us for many years.”

“What protected you . . . us?”

She pointed at the doorway behind us. The torchlight illuminated a glimmer across the lintel, on both sides of the doorway and across the threshold that I had passed over now twice. “We killed a lamb and painted its blood around the doorway.”

A threshold sacrifice, like the one held every year in Osiris's honor when a pig was slaughtered at every door in Egypt. A chill crept up the skin of my arms. “Did that keep the Spirits of Death away?”

Her eyes tightened. “Because we cut a covenant with Yahweh, one marked by the spilling of innocent blood, we were spared from the judgment.”

The conversation between Eben and his master caught my attention, an argument over whether Eben should take the
magnificent black horse and the wagon. Akensouris was insistent that it was a small sacrifice for what Eben had done to save him and his son. He vowed to serve Eben's god the rest of his days and teach his children to do so as well.

After the man walked away, having won the debate, the wagon was revealed to contain gold, jewels, and stacks of linens, along with food, clothing, and many beautiful instruments, made, I assumed, by Eben himself.

Years of slavery, both Eben's and his father's, paid for in full.

Before the shroud of night lifted, we were on the move. A large group—hundreds in front of us and perhaps a thousand behind—merged on the northeasterly trade road. A large contingent of foreign slaves, Syrians, Semites, and Kushites mingled among the Hebrews, all seizing this opportunity to escape their shackles. Many of these fugitives would no doubt disappear once they were free of the most populated areas and return to their homelands.

A few Egyptians traveled among this throng. Some seemed to be part of Hebrew households, perhaps joined by marriage. Some traveled alone. A couple of them noticed me staring, mirrored curiosity in their kohl-rimmed eyes.

So many dead
. If all firstborn sons in the land were indeed annihilated, how could Egypt ever recover? Millions of men and boys had vanished into the underworld. Priests, soldiers, government officials, fathers, brothers, sons, infants—wiped out in one malevolent breath. What kind of a deity would do such a thing?

My father was among those millions this morning, without a doubt. On his boat far down the Nile, my father, the firstborn son in his family, breathed no more. Did he know what was coming? Did he fall asleep in peace? Or did fear for Jumo
fill his last thoughts? Had he even thought of me since he'd signed my life away?

I had avoided thoughts of him since the day he turned his back on me and left me devastated on the floor, but now memories welled up, unbidden.

Only once had I been allowed to go on a trading run, aboard one of his graceful river boats. Anxious to experience the places I had visited only in my father's stories, I pleaded, cajoled, and used all my ten-year-old charms on him until he could do nothing but comply from sheer exhaustion.

We traveled only to Thebes—my mother would allow me to go no farther. But the sight of the grand palace, even through childish eyes, was unforgettable. The giant temples guarded by towering granite gods and past Pharaohs, the buzz and hum of trade in the never-ending marketplace, the towering limestone cliffs that launched Ra into the morning sky—I drank it in, grateful that my imagination did not do the grand city justice. It was so much more.

My father's strong hand enveloped mine as he navigated the maze of stalls and tradesmen hawking their wares. Older than my mother, silver already streaked his brows and neatly trimmed black hair, but he was tall and handsome in his daughter's eyes. I waited patiently as he dickered, always getting the best trades for the wines, linens, and other goods we brought from Iunu. Never raising his voice and with gentle care to keep their pride intact, he haggled with the tradesmen. As young as I was, I understood my father was talented as a trader, and pride swelled in my little breast as I watched him that day.

That evening, my father and I sat together on the boat, our feet dangling over the side, watching the sun blaze red, orange, and purple across the horizon. He told me of the tombs there on the western bank, of Pharaohs and Queens cradled within,
enjoying the pleasures of the afterlife and the riches buried with them.

“But how can someone take things with them into the afterlife, Father? Don't you become a spirit? Your ka parted from your body?”

“I don't know, sweet one. I have often wondered it myself.” He shrugged, looking off into the distance. “I guess we must trust the priests, and thereby, the gods.”

The water glittered, reflecting the vibrant palette of the sunset.

“How can I believe something that I cannot see?” I rubbed my temple with two fingers.

He did not answer. Instead he studied my face intently until the strangest expression flitted across his features; it seemed to be a mixture of shock, surprise, and anger.

With an abrupt move, he stood and told me to lie down in the tent on the deck and go to sleep. Confused and seized with an anxiety I could not comprehend, I complied. I listened to the lap of the water against the hull for a long time, thinking of the spirits that roamed the western desert without their gold and silver and wondering why my father had seemed so upset. Finally, rocked in the gentle cradle of Mother Nile, I fell asleep.

Never again did my father take me with him.

He blamed me, I had decided, that my mother had almost died when she carried me. If not for skilled midwives, she would have, but my mother would never again bear a child. Jumo would be unable to care for our parents in their old age, and no other male heirs would be born to carry on my father's name. The disappointment behind his eyes had been palpable, and it grew with each year, as did his relentless drive for more riches.

Did my mother know he was now gone? She'd made the choice to leave with the suspicion she might not see him again. And with the death knell of Egypt's firstborn still hanging in
the air, it was confirmed. With surreptitious glances, I watched her as we walked. Her dry eyes were enigmatic. I could not tell if they held sorrow or relief in their depths.

My heart was strangely absent of grief. In truth, I had grieved the loss of my father since that trip to Thebes. In that at least, today was no different than any other day. But I wondered: did my father enter the afterlife with a light heart? Or did Osiris find that his misdeeds outweighed his goodness? Could a man who sold his daughter be counted among those who deserved the pleasures of the afterlife? For that matter, what of a daughter who did not grieve her own father?

Annihilation covered the land. Carcasses of hundreds of animals bloated in the sun. Most were nearly rotted away, destroyed during the plague of the beasts, but many lay along the road, their breath stolen only a few hours ago, glassy eyes staring into the void.

Gone were the lovely date palm branches that used to line this road. Their wasted trunks stood like ghostly sentinels now, guarding a ravaged city. What the hail and fire hadn't destroyed, the locusts had finished. Only bleakness and desolation met my eyes.

My heart ached for the beauty and the lushness of my home from only a few months before. The former jewel and envy of the world, Egypt was no more. Barren now, she lay naked, stripped of her beauty, her children, her pride, and her power—the entire world witness to her violation and despair.

She was a desert, her golden-green fields now gray and desiccated. Tumbleweeds and sand already encroached upon my beautiful Iunu. The city of Ra, the city of jeweled gods and of the golden temple, now was only a city of despair, home to defeated deities and defeated people.

We walked for hours without rest, traveling the trade route running alongside a wide canal, thousands of feet churning up a haze of dust. I pulled a linen cloth from the wagon bed to drape over my head and keep the grit out of my mouth and nose.

As the road climbed, the ghosts of palm trees destroyed by hail and locusts became more and more sparse. Only hardy scrub brush and the occasional skeleton of a yew tree ushered us out of the Valley of the Nile.

When we reached the top of the ridge that offered our final view of the river, I slowed my steps and looked over my shoulder at the beautiful land that was no longer beautiful, nor bountiful. All that was left of my home was a wasteland, stripped of her green trees, her thriving farms, and the spirit of the people who worshipped her once-fertile soil.