Wayward Son (23 page)

A distant staccato series of barks from Ruby startled Amanda, and she fumbled the locket. She watched in horror as it bounced onto the dock and disappeared through the crack between the weathered planks.

“No!” she cried. Instinctively, she tried to snatch it back in time, but the faint splash sent a chill down her spine. Squinting through the small gap, she watched helplessly as the locket offered only a tiny last glimmer before she lost track of it.

In a panicked reaction, she rose and leaped feet first into the chilly water. She could not disappoint her dad by losing her priceless gift. Her jeans and sneakers felt heavy, but she was trying to get her mom back—and she wouldn’t fail. She inverted her body and kicked downward toward the bottom, fortunately only six or seven feet below. Opening her eyes, she couldn’t see the locket amidst the underwater forest of weeds, but she guessed it must have dropped straight down through the calm water.

Her searching fingertips produced clouds of silt that completely obscured her view. After what seemed like a full minute of frenzied clawing through the mud and weeds, Amanda was becoming desperate for air when her left hand felt the contours of the locket. Success! She clutched her prize, planted her feet on the bottom, and thrust upward with all her might.

That was the last thing she remembered from that day until she regained consciousness on the shore. But now the older Amanda watched from above as her younger self broke the surface of the lake, her head impacting with a dull thud on one of the dock’s low-lying crossbeams. Moments passed as she floated facedown, completely motionless.

Then came another bark from Ruby, who was chasing after a man sprinting out of the woods toward the end of the dock. He reached down and secured the twelve-year-old beneath both her shoulders and effortlessly lifted her out of the water. Swiftly, he carried her back up the dock and laid her on her stomach in the tall grass at the shore. Turning her face to one side, he touched the spot where she’d hit her head and then began pushing gently on her back. Lake water gushed from the unconscious girl’s mouth.

The man then looked up and smiled in the direction of the older Amanda, who immediately recognized his face. It was Harris—the limo driver who had brought her from Villa Colosseum to LAX three nights earlier! What was he doing in New Hampshire sixteen years ago?

Harris stood up, petted Ruby, and then ambled up the bank and disappeared into the woods. Ruby began licking Amanda’s face, urging her back to consciousness.

A minute or so later, Amanda sat up. Soaked and starting to shiver, she did not remember swimming to shore, but she must have. She opened her hand. There was the locket and gold chain! Out at end of the dock, her dad was pacing back and forth, scanning the lake and calling out her name with concern. Wiping the wet hair away from her face, Amanda prepared to answer him.

Before doing so, she opened the clasp on the delicate chain and secured the locket around her neck. Amanda thought for a moment. No, she couldn’t possibly inform him of the mishap with the gift he’d given her. Nor could she explain to herself, much less to him, her memory lapse between finding the locket and ending up on land. She decided to tell him that she’d accidentally slipped off the dock and swam ashore.

“Daddy! I’m over here!”

CHAPTER 28

The Mediterranean Sea, circa 1230 BC

CAIN FELT A VAGUE sensation of being pulled by the hair. Some time later, he heard a woman’s voice and felt strong hands compressing his chest firmly under his ribs. Someone was trying to coax him back into consciousness.

“I think we have revived him, Father,” said the voice.

Cain opened his eyes. He lay on the deck of a boat, with a robe decently covering his nakedness. Over him bent a young woman with long brown tresses. Her gold necklace, intricately studded with semiprecious stones of carnelian and jasper, instantly revealed to Cain that she was a Phoenician. At his gaze, her full, round lips spread open in a dazzling smile.

“My name is Tanith,” announced his rescuer. “Our lookout saw you struggling in the storm just before we almost ran you over. Luckily, I was able to drag you to safety. What were you doing alone in the middle of the sea?”

Cain grimaced but found himself unable to speak as a coughing spasm took hold.

“No matter,” said Tanith. “You are safe now. My father, Ahiram, is the captain of this vessel. We are
Phoenicians
, from
Tyre
. We will care for you. Can you understand me?”

Gratefully, Cain signaled comprehension, closed his eyes, and let himself drift to sleep.

***

The Phoenicians, Cain found, were as good as their word. By the time they reached their homeport of Tyre, he had fully recovered from his ordeal at sea. Naturally, Captain Ahiram and Tanith had inquired about his past in Egypt. Cain summarized his experiences, saying that he had led a successful career as a merchant before becoming unwittingly caught up in a plot against the pharaoh. Judged guilty of treason, his life had been spared because of his previous services to the monarch. As a reduced punishment, he was flogged and then consigned to the sea.

As he recounted this narrative several days after his rescue, Cain could see that Tanith hung on his every word. If she had a husband, he thought, she would surely be living in Tyre, and probably supervising the household and raising their children. So it was very likely that she was still unmarried. But why, with her gazelle-like grace and voluptuous figure, would she still be unattached?

Learning that Cain had some experience in seafaring and in trade, Captain Ahiram gladly showed the castaway around the ship. A round boat merchant vessel, she was about eighty feet in length and powered by a single bank of oars and a small sail. Her professional crew numbered twenty: fourteen oarsmen, a cook, and five marines. Tanith was attended by a single maidservant. At the stern were two oars that served as a rudder. Attached to the stem post at the prow was a large clay container called an amphora, which held an ample supply of drinking water. Most of the deck space was occupied by similar ceramic containers, held in place by sturdy railings. Inside these vessels was the ship’s reason for being: the trade goods that had made Phoenicia one of the wealthiest civilizations in the entire region.

Ahiram explained that they were returning from the western edge of the
Nile delta
, when they rescued Cain. It had been a prosperous journey. Outbound from Tyre on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, they had been laden with cedarwood, embroideries, fine linen, wine, salt, dried fish, and glazed pottery. Now the cargo containers held papyrus, ivory, spices, and incense—all of which could be sold in Tyre for a handsome profit. Despite his recent debacle with the pharaoh, trading was in Cain’s blood, and he listened eagerly to Ahiram’s recital.

It took them ten days to cover the route to Tyre. Although they hugged the shoreline for the journey’s later stages, Ahiram was not at all reluctant to shave off the distance by plotting a more direct course on the open sea and by traveling at night. He explained to Cain that the Phoenicians had steadily improved their navigation techniques, using a detailed knowledge of the night sky at various seasons of the year. Listening politely, Cain recalled the years of his great wandering during which he had learned to navigate by similar means.

As Cain spent more time with his rescuer, he discovered that he had a great deal in common with the beautiful young woman from Tyre. Like Cain, Tanith had traveled far and possessed an innate curiosity about other cultures and customs. She entertained him with amusing stories about the ports she had visited, and he regaled her with some tales of his own about life on the Nile. The economics of trade were second nature to Tanith, and Cain quickly recognized a merchant mentality akin to his own.

While Ahiram was communicative, even chatty, on the subjects of seafaring and trade, he remained somewhat aloof when it came to Cain and Tanith’s growing attachment. They seemed to be in constant company during the day and, Ahiram suspected, for much of the night. Ahiram was too much of a realist to believe that he could rein in his daughter. Even as a child, she had displayed a forceful, independent spirit. But Ahiram was also privately skeptical of Cain’s account of events in Egypt. Why had Ramesses spared his life? Plots against the pharaoh, in Ahiram’s experience, were always punished with death. Ahiram suspected there was another dimension to Cain’s past. Perhaps he had even been a Hebrew slave. After all, when his crew pulled him from the water his body clearly bore the marks of a severe flogging. Who was this mysterious man for whom his fearless daughter had dove into the sea?

No such misgivings troubled Tanith, though. Both she and Cain sensed that their shipboard romance was ripening into deep attachment. Yet their intimacy was not unfettered. Cain did not confide the secrets of his past, and neither did Tanith speak of the ill-fated, arranged marriage that had been dissolved in Tyre seven years before when it was discovered she was barren. A wife who could not produce an heir was unacceptable in Phoenician culture, and Ahiram was forced to bear the shame of taking his daughter back to live under his roof. The short-lived marriage was one reason why father and daughter spent as little time as possible in Tyre. They preferred a seafaring life, where wagging tongues could cause them less pain.

Besides their conversations about enchanting ports of call and the economics of trade, Cain and Tanith also delved into several lengthy discussions of the new Phoenician alphabet. It had been many decades since Cain had been in contact with Phoenicians, although of course he had visited their city-states on some of his Mediterranean excursions as a trader. Now he learned, to his amazement, that they had invented a writing system vastly superior to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, he,” Tanith drilled him.

Cain promptly repeated the names of the first five Phoenician letters, and then used a makeshift stylus to inscribe the symbols on a papyrus sheet.

“You have an excellent memory!” Tanith complimented him.

“You are an inspiring teacher,” he diplomatically replied.

“All right, my handsome pupil. Write me the symbols for the next five, and say the letters aloud.”

Cain pronounced the letters as he wrote them:
waw, zayin, heth, teth, yodh.

“Who invented this marvel?”

“If it was a single individual, he or she is not known,” Tanith replied. “But for my part, I think it was a woman.”

“How so?” Cain asked with a hint of teasing.

“Because women are more economical than men. Look at how much papyrus our alphabet saves!” she glowed.

Once they put in to the island of Tyre, Ahiram courteously invited Cain to stay with the family for the week’s layover. The city’s twin harbors, one on the island’s north side and the other to the south, had made it one of the great trading centers of the Mediterranean. Contact with Egypt had commenced soon after Tyre’s foundation, some fifteen hundred years before. Perhaps its best-known product was Tyrian purple dye, derived from the shell of a native sea snail. Outlandishly expensive and produced only in Tyre, the dye had become the exclusive emblem of royalty and nobility, for only the extremely wealthy could afford it. The purple powder had even given the Phoenicians their name, courtesy of trade with Greece, where the word
phoinike
meant “the land of the purple.”

Cain and Tanith spent the days exploring the city and its environs, while Ahiram attended to commercial transactions, winding up affairs from the previous voyage and preparing for the next one. The city had grown considerably since Cain’s last visit. In the bazaar, for example, there were now literally hundreds of food stalls. Grilled fish with garlic, large tureens of steaming lentil soup, and baskets heaped with freshly baked bread emitted mouthwatering aromas. The busy hum of a thousand conversations was punctuated by the shrill cries of vendors hawking their wares. Stately men, attired in their belted, pleated skirts with multicolored, embroidered borders, strolled among the stalls. Even in the warm sunshine, they wore their cone-shaped hats. Women wore long tunics tied at the waist with tasseled belts. Like Tanith, they braided their hair down the back with two shorter braids on each side. But Cain saw no woman who could compare to Tanith in his eyes.

Cargo for the new venture began to accumulate in short order, as Ahiram’s crew loaded grain, Phoenician glass, and gaudily embroidered textiles onto his ship. Cain helped with the purchasing, and his negotiating ability was welcome to the captain, allaying his apprehensions somewhat about the new addition to his team. This would be the longest expedition the captain had ever undertaken. In addition to Cyprus, Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, the island of Crete, and the Greek mainland near Athens, Ahiram had set his sights on the western Mediterranean, where the prize commodity was silver from Spain. After that, if all went well, he would venture outside the inland sea, all the way northward to Britain, in quest of tin. This metal, smelted with copper from Cyprus, had already yielded bronze for the Phoenicians, another mainstay in their prospering economy.