After Abel and Other Stories (11 page)

So he did, and then they waited, dozing and waking, their skin slicked with sweat that evaporated in the dry air the moment they stood up from under the tree's shade to stretch their limbs. She fed him more bread and water, drank some herself, and when she felt a slight shift in the air, took his hand and continued
heading south.

She thought they would have to walk until it got too dark to see and then find a place to sleep. Hagar looked around. They would need firewood. She was thankful to have her knife then, used it to cut sticks from thick bushes along their path that she bundled and draped over her boy's small back.

“It's heavy,” he complained. “I don't want to carry these.”

“It won't be for long,” she said, thinking that they had spoiled him, his two doting mothers, that this trip would be good for him, teach him the lessons her own mother had passed along—that we live in a great web of stars and earth and sea. That there is a line through everything, holding it all together. We can't see it, but the gods know it's there. It tethers them to the ground. That's why they like the sacrifices that people bring, because they get hungry and can't range out to find meat on their own. But her mother showed her that everything in life was like that. Carrying water from the well to the house, which was dry, brought water and land together. Rain was the heaven's way of reuniting with the earth.

And now, carrying those sticks, the boy became part of it. They would burn the wood to ash and watch the smoke rise, the earth connecting with sky.

Hagar told the boy all this as they walked. He had
never heard any of it, because his father, her old master, worshipped a God who didn't like the gods of her youth. Hagar had heard her master teaching her boy about his own God, how He had spoken to her master, intervened on his behalf with men and nature, and so they must worship Him and love him.

But she was going home now, where her master's God didn't live, and her mother's did. So the boy had to know. He was so young, but already he understood more than she did. He would have to learn so many things when they got home. The least she could do was tell him the stories she remembered.

He wouldn't listen. Every time she stopped talking he said, “They'll come to look for us. They'll catch us and take you back and beat you for being so bad. My real parents won't let you get away with this.”

“Oh, my love,” Hagar said, wondering how long it would take for him to forget that other mother, the one who had already replaced him with a better son, “They won't come. The gods will hear me. They will keep us on our narrow road.”

They slept that night, huddled together against the cold, his head cradled in her arms for the first time since he weaned. Hagar felt chilled through. She worried that she wouldn't find her way. She was scared of what kinds of people they might meet along the way, but she felt that some god—either her master's or her own—must
be protecting them, because the boy's warm breath against her collarbone, his hand curled under her arm, were the softest things she had ever felt. It's true he had cried again, “I want my mama. Not you. You're not my mother. I want my real mother. And my father.” He picked up small rocks that lay on the ground and threw them at her, stomped his feet, his face turned red and angry, his voice louder and full of the pain only a small boy can summon.

“I want to go home,” he said again, but Hagar didn't understand. “We are going home,” she said, trying to make him see, and she thought of the papyrus growing six feet tall by the edge of the river, the deep black mud of its banks in winter.

He'd cried for a while after that, but for all his complaints, she was known to him, familiar as his own skin, and when she pulled him into her lap, some memory of infancy must have flooded his body, because he allowed his limbs to relax, his breathing to slow, and he slept, cradled by the mother he had long ago rejected.

They rose early the next morning, the boy still half asleep when Hagar set him on his feet and led him by the hand down into the valley ahead of them. That first day, they stopped at every well they passed. Hagar refilled the jug, and they both drank deeply. In the morning, a woman took pity on them and let them rest in her barn. At night, they found a cave to sleep in.

The next day, they walked until the land began to slope down. By midday, they had left the craggy mountains, crossed into the desert of the Negev, where the sun, unmerciful before, became a source of torture. Few people traveled here. Even caravans were scarce. And, Hagar noted, their water was running low. She would have to find a well, but there was no sign of one nearby, no hint of green along the ground that would betray an underground spring.

So they kept walking. During the worst of the heat, they hid under the sparse shade of an acacia bush. By evening the water was gone. But they had another night's fire to warm them from the ice the desert sent through them once the sun went down—and they woke to walk again well before the sun had time to stretch and rise.

It was harder that day. Hagar still carried the jug, hoping to see a well to replenish their store and feed her boy, who had cried himself to sleep again the night before but seemed to wither as the day wore on, too worn out to complain or berate her, too weak to carry the sticks she cut whenever they passed a bush with limbs that would burn well. She began to see things. Cows lying dead by the side of the road that turned out to be bits of twig and dust. Twice she thought she saw a well and ran to it, only to find that it was nothing, just a shimmery spot on the horizon, a trick of the light or the gods. But they
wouldn't toy with her like that, she thought. Not when she was trying to get home, to take her boy away from the pain he was sure to know in the future.

They kept walking, the earth beneath them cracked and dry. The only other beings they saw were scavenger birds circling above and a snake sunning itself. Even the snake would burrow underground when it got too hot, she knew. It would find a patch of cool under the ground to wait out the heat. And the birds would roost somewhere or find an animal the desert had killed and feast.

Eventually, the boy couldn't walk anymore, so Hagar tied him to her back again, felt how he labored to breathe, his skin as hot as the ground, and how he mumbled, cried out for his father, though Hagar could tell he wasn't aware of his own words.

Finally, she had to put him down. She felt too weak, too thirsty to keep going, and too angry that the gods would put the notion of running away into her head only to kill them here in the empty expanse of desert. The boy was almost dead. She could see that well enough, though she couldn't bear to watch the breath actually leave him.

She found the fullest bush she could and lay him beneath it. His eyes looked sunken, and when he turned his face to hers, she felt as if he was already looking past her into the afterlife. He was her prince, but there were
no water lilies here to adorn his body. No water to wash away the grime of human life. She had nothing other than an empty jug to send with him on his journey. She set it down next to him, and hoped he'd find water when he got to where he was going. She turned her back, sat down just close enough to chase away the buzzards when they started to swoop in to investigate the scene.

Surely, Hagar thought, some god will hear me. Surely, if I cry loudly enough, my master's God or my mother's will listen to my plea. Her mouth parched, voice barely a croak, she called out. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” and saw another shimmer on the horizon. There was a man standing beside it. Or above it. Her master, or her master's God. Hagar couldn't tell which. She wondered how he got here so quickly, when she had to walk for three days, always thinking their destination was around the next bend, but still there was no sign of her river home.

The man didn't speak, but she felt him beckon to her. Afraid she would be punished, Hagar sat still, staring at the shimmer, then the man, then the shimmer again. Then she knew he was like the dead cows, a sign that would disappear the closer she got. She hadn't understood those, and she didn't understand this one. She was scared and alone, and the expanse of sandy rock all around hurt her eyes.

“You won't trick me again,” she shouted as loudly as she could manage. “I know your ways now. But I am a poor woman with nothing left to give you. So take my boy and love him better than I could.” Except the spot in the distance kept shimmering, and though she thought it would be another patch of dry ground, Hagar felt pulled by thirst and the man who beckoned to her. She dragged her tired body on hands and knees. She had to be sure this was a deception, the last one, she knew, that would ever be played upon her.

On any other day, she would have noticed that her palms and knees, though they started on hard rock, were soon cushioned by a thin layer of moss, that the ground was springing back up under her weight, if only a little. That day, though, she felt her attention split in two—the mirage ahead of her, the boy behind—so that she felt the moisture touch her fingertips before she registered what it was.

“Water,” she said, amazed. She bent her head and lapped at it like a dog, scooped it in her hands and ran to rub it on her son's hot brow, the back of his neck. Then she grabbed the jug, ran back to the small puddle, filled it as high as it would go, and ran back to her son, who still lay dying under the bush. Hagar poured the water over his head, down his back, and ladled it into his mouth, trying not to let any drops slip through the spaces between her fingers.

Slowly, the color returned to his cheeks. He vomited once, then again, opened his eyes and looked at her, confused but no longer delirious. “Mama?” he said. When he saw who was with him, that it was Hagar, he began to cry. At first, Hagar laughed in relief to see tears form in his eyes and fall down his dusty cheeks. He would live. The gods did listen. They saved him for a reason, she thought. She looked at her boy with a new sense of wonder. There is greatness coming to him, she knew, and she had played a part in it. She chased the vultures away for good and laughed again as she felt the wind moved by their enormous wings.

She looked back over to the shallow well, thought she saw the outline of the man who had been so clear just a few moments before, and finally understood. She had no past. It had been erased by the bag of coins the trader had placed into her father's hands. All she could do was be with her boy, teach him to live with the family he had been given, the one she had been given no choice in joining, but whose fate was his, and now her own. Hagar filled her jug again, set it on her head, lifted her son, and turned north, for the long walk back home.

ZERESH, HIS WIFE

“There Haman told his wife Zeresh and all his friends everything that had befallen him, ‘If Mordechai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish stock, you will not overcome him; you will fall before him to your ruin.'”

Esther 6:13

W
here is that tutor? she wondered, as her sons chased each other through their gardens, jumping over the low walls that snaked through the property.

“Just don't pull down the vines,” she called after them, watching as they grabbed onto anything within reach to give themselves a boost. Let them laugh now,
she thought. They'll have to be serious soon enough. The sons of the king's chief advisor have to live up to very high expectations, even the littlest one.

“It's not fair. I can't climb over this part. Wait for me!” Poor boy, trying to keep up with his brothers, but how can seven-year-old legs move fast enough to keep up with the older ones? She could see the tears begin to well in his eyes and how quickly he tried to suppress them. He'd be another little man before long. She had given her husband a house full of sons, but she wanted this one to stay with her, a boy with smooth skin and a high, little voice.

Childish anger is the funniest kind, she thought not for the first time, but I shouldn't laugh. Poor thing. Stuck here on the wrong side of the wall with a woman and servants.

The boy was too young and angry to see what she did, how good it was to be back in Susa, her favorite court city, after a long summer. Everyone else marveled at Persepolis, but she felt relief when they left each year. The buildings and art were magnificent there, but they were built on a scale fit for gods, not men. Things were simpler in Susa. Winter here promised citrus trees, climbing ivy on the fortress walls, figs dropping seamed and sweet onto the ground.

A breeze blew through the courtyard. Her head man, old enough to have served in her grandfather's house,
ordered his workers around with the rigid authority of a man half his age. His spine was still straight. His mind and eyes were clear. He was, she thought, a marvel. Proof of the Creator's goodness, although she'd never share that with anyone else. He was, after all, just a servant, and not even a Persian by birth.