“I will grow up and kill Egyptians the way Moses did!” cried Joshua.

  “No!” said Nun sharply. “Be wise! When Moses killed an Egyptian, God abandoned him and let him be driven out. If Egyptians are to die, God can kill them. What God needs from us is to keep the covenant of Abraham.”

  Joshua, who had seen the circumcision of his baby brother, looked at his father with wide eyes, and his hand drifted inadvertently below his waist.

  “That is only the beginning of obedience,” said Nun. “As Jacob obeyed, we must obey. Did he kill his father-in-law when he kept him unfairly in bondage? No, he labored more, and won two wives and a dozen sons. When Joseph saw visions, did he conceal them from his brothers to save his own life? No, he spoke boldly what God gave him to say, and lived a life of marvels.”

  “Did Moses disobey God?” said Joshua.

  “Who knows?” said Nun. “What God sends into the desert, God can bring back from the desert.”

  Chapter 6: Sheep

  When Zeforah and her sisters were younger, it used to take three of them at least to move the stone cap off the well. Now any but Keturah could do it alone, if they had to, and if sheer stubbornness could move rock, Keturah could probably open the well without using her hands.

  Still, though she was fully grown now, Zeforah didn’t enjoy moving the capstone. Despite the calluses on her hands, it was rough work, and she often scraped herself till her fingers bled. But that was why she insisted on moving the stone herself, and without help. No reason for the others to get scraped up before they had to. Soon enough Father would bow to the inevitable and find some miserable specimen of masculinity for her to marry. A few sheep for a dowry. Standards were low in this clan of the Midianites. There were so few women that Zeforah could almost pass for a beauty. But no matter how few men there were, not a one of them could pass for a wit.

  And when Zeforah said things like this, Father always said, “Well, who’s telling you to get married? It’ll cost me a ram and several ewes, and after the wedding I’ll have one less daughter to help me.”

  “One less mouth to feed,” someone else would say—usually Sarah. And Keturah would leap to Zeforah’s defense until there was a pile of sisters on the rugs fighting with each other like swarming bees. In vain did Zeforah explain to Keturah that those smart remarks of Sarah’s meant nothing. “Why get upset when it doesn’t bother me?” To which Keturah would reply, “That’s why.” Neither of them seemed able to get the other to comprehend what she was talking about.

  It was an odd combination—Zeforah, the eldest, and, as her constant companion, Keturah, the youngest, a sweet ten-year-old who had a mouth that could provoke an angel to rage, Zeforah was sure of it. Hadn’t she spent Keturah’s entire life getting her out of trouble with the other girls? And yet it wasn’t because Keturah meant to be provocative. She just had a way of saying exactly the thing that would get a rise out of Hamar or Sarah, and then Zeforah would have to intervene. “Try to curb your tongue around the prickly ones,” Zeforah insisted, “so they won’t kill you. It would confuse Father terribly, old as he is, if he had to learn to count to some number other than seven.”

  “Then does that mean you’ll never marry?” asked Keturah.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then Father will have to learn to count to six, after your husband takes you away.”

  “My plan is to take my husband away from wherever he was and get him started working with me as a shepherd.”

  “It won’t be the same,” said Keturah.

  To which Zeforah had no reassuring answer. When she married, there would be a separate household, and Keturah wouldn’t find Zeforah so ready to talk to her. Especially if she were to be married to someone from another clan, which Father kept threatening to do whenever Zeforah argued with him.

  Marriage. Zeforah refused to think any more about it today. Instead she put her energy into moving the capstone off the well and drawing up water for the sheep. The other girls were keeping the flock nearby, not that it took much effort. Even sheep were clever enough to know when they were thirsty and to realize that only water would satisfy them.

  But not clever enough to line up nicely and take turns. It could be quite a job making sure each animal got plenty to drink. As Zeforah and her sisters threaded their way among the jostling sheep, Keturah began to chatter. “Sheep are stupid!”

  “It took you this long to realize it?” said Sarah. Of course it was Sarah.

  “Well, if sheep are stupid then lambs must be stupider because they have to grow up to be sheep, right?” said Keturah, oblivious to Sarah’s snideness.

  Hamar started talking in baby talk to a lamb which was not really a baby anymore. “Does this poor little lambkin need to cry now? Did mean old Keturah hurt his little feelings?”

  “Am I the only one who’s insulted by this?” said Keturah, addressing the others as if she were trying to make a point at a village council.

  “Hamar’s just making a joke,” said Zeforah.

  “Not Hamar, who listens to her?” said Keturah. “I mean Father.”

  The others were baffled now. “When did Father insult anybody?” Zeforah asked.

  “Today, when we left! Every day! Every morning, every night! He calls us his little lambs.”

  The others burst out laughing. “He’s always done that,” said Hamar.

  “But why?” said Keturah. “Sheep are stupid, smelly, filthy, clumsy—”

  “Oh,” said Sarah, “that part only started after you were born.”

  “What does Father mean?” Keturah insisted.

  Zeforah didn’t answer, though she had had precisely this conversation with Father many years ago and knew what his response would be. She wanted to hear what the others would come up with.

  “Look at Zeforah being wise,” said Sarah. “She thinks she knows the right answer and wants us to make fools of ourselves before she makes a speech out of it.”

  As always, Sarah found exactly the thing to say that would leave Zeforah completely flummoxed.

  “Well, am I right or what?” said Sarah.

  “I really do want to know what you think,” said Zeforah.

  “Come on,” said Sarah. “Here, I’ll help you start: ‘Father says. . . . ’ Now you go on from there.”

  Keturah, who had endured Sarah’s sneers as if she didn’t hear them, now sprang hotly to Zeforah’s defense. “If Zeforah tells us what Father says it’s because she sees us forgetting the rules. And because she’s too modest to speak as if the ideas came from her.”

  “Someone has a little disciple,” said Hamar.

  “Water the sheep,” said Zeforah. “I didn’t ask the questions and I didn’t offer any answers, so I don’t know why we’re arguing about the way I boss you all around since I hadn’t even gotten started.”

  “All I want,” said Keturah, “is to know why Father calls us sheep!”

  “Because Father likes sheep!” Hamar said. “And Father likes them because he doesn’t come out here and watch them every day, he sits home in the shade copying those scrolls, over and over again. So for him sheep are just something he shears and occasionally butchers or sells. The stink of them isn’t in his nose all the time.”

  Zeforah, already stung, kept her silence despite how angry she was at Hamar’s diatribe. Besides, Hamar was looking at her, waiting for a retort, which made it almost fun to smile benignly and say nothing.

  “He doesn’t shear us,” said Keturah. “He doesn’t butcher us either.”

  “But he’d sell us off one by one, if he could only find a taker for Zeforah,” said Sarah sweetly.

  “A blind man whose first three wives are all old,” suggested Asa. “Because Zeforah is so handy with the chores.”

  “Another bird chirps,” said Hamar.

  “Don’t tell me you’re criticizing Asa because she doesn’t talk as much as you, Hamar,” said Zeforah.

  “Nobody talks as much as Hamar,” said Sarah.

  “Except you,” said Asa.

  “All right, who taught the younger ones to talk!” said Sarah. “Why can’t they all be more like—sheep!”

  “I didn’t say a thing,” said Dinah.

  “You never do,” said Hamar. “You don’t think of anything to say until you’re falling asleep at night. I hear you murmuring all the clever things you didn’t think of during the day.”

  “Enough,” said Zeforah.

  “Watch out, everybody!” cried Sarah. “Here it comes! ‘Father says. . . . ’”

  Zeforah had to bite her lip to keep from saying what she had been about to say. For it did, indeed, begin with “Father says.”

  “I wish I were as smart as Zeforah,” said Hamar, her voice drippingly sweet. “She always knows just how much is enough.”

  And then, as always, when Zeforah was just on the verge of losing her temper, she felt something give way inside her and the anger just flowed away. She looked at her sisters, saw that Hamar was cross and Sarah never really felt in good health, so that every day was hard for her, and the younger girls were trying to decide whether being grown up meant acting like Hamar or acting like Zeforah and—and Zeforah loved them anyway. It was better sometimes to be alone than to be with them, true enough, but with a job like this, watering the sheep, it took all their hands, and if being snippy was how they entertained themselves, Zeforah could endure it.

  “Oh, look. Now Zeforah is going to be sweet,” said Hamar nastily.

  Zeforah only smiled and looked away. Looked, in fact, for Keturah, who was angrily—but silently—untangling a bramble bush from a lamb’s wool. “You see how the sheep follow each other along a path,” said Zeforah.

  “I think a lesson is coming!” cried Sarah.

  Keturah was listening, though.

  “Father wants us to follow him that way. He steps here, so . . .”

  “So I step there,” said Keturah.

  And at the sound of Keturah’s voice, the others fell silent, for they did, in fact, love their baby sister and didn’t want to make her feel bad. Zeforah sometimes envied Keturah the comfort of being youngest. Everyone had held her as a baby and loved her; nobody had ever felt that way toward Zeforah, except Mother, and she was gone.

  “How can I follow Father on the path of life?” said Keturah earnestly. “He’s a man, a reader of books, a leader, a ruler, a judge, and I’m only a girl and the best I can ever be is—”

  “Is a daughter of God,” said Zeforah. “Father can teach you, but he can’t save you if you don’t keep the commandments yourself. It’s between you and God. Between me and God.”

  Keturah smiled and turned away.

  “Was that wrong?” asked Zeforah.

  “It just—all the commandments have to do with how we treat other people.”

  “Not all of them,” said Zeforah.

  “But the hard ones,” said Keturah. “It’s between me and God, but what God wants me to do is not pitch a stone at some village boy when he makes a crude remark. So at that moment, it’s between me and that boy.”

  “What does she think she is, a prophet?” asked Sarah. But her mockery was affectionate, and Keturah laughed.

  “Oh, was I being deep?” asked Keturah.

  “You sounded like Father, that’s all,” said Asa. “Always thinking about things the next layer deeper. You should have been a boy, except that would have ruined everything.”

  They all looked at her in surprise. “Having a brother would ruin everything?” said Keturah.

  “He’d be the boss of everything, then, even if he was the youngest, wouldn’t he? Because someday he’d be the owner of Father’s flocks, and we wouldn’t. So it wouldn’t be just the sisters.”

  “Maybe that would be better,” grumbled Hamar. But nobody agreed, not even her. And the thought of how a brother would have changed things—happiness for Mother and Father, but a loss for the sisters—made them solemn and, for a while at least, less grumpy with each other.

  The sun beat down, and the sheep drank as the sisters took turns drawing from the well.

  And then, as the routine was at its most peaceful, a man leapt from behind an outcropping of rock and ran at the sheep, screaming, flailing about with a stick, scattering the animals and shocking the girls into screaming.

  He wasn’t alone, either. There were four of them, not villagers, but rough men living wild who had probably heard that in Midian there was a flock tended only by women. Zeforah took up her cudgel and she saw that the other older girls had kept theirs close at hand as well, but what could they do? The men weren’t after them, they were after a couple of lambs they could run off with and butcher and live for a few weeks.

  Hamar was thinking the same way. “Zeforah, don’t hit them, if we leave them alone they’ll take a sheep and—”

  “And be back again and again,” said Zeforah grimly. “I’ll break their heads in!”

  “They’ll kill you!” screamed Keturah.

  But Zeforah was not going to let that tall one get away with a yearling like that, or any sheep at all. “Put it down!” she screamed as she ran at him. He paid no attention to her until she landed a blow with her her cudgel in the small of his back.

  He bellowed, dropped the lamb, and fell to the ground. “She broke my back!” he cried.

  The others stopped their pursuit of various lambs and gathered around their fallen comrade, helping him to his feet. He was still in pain, but she hadn’t broken anything, much as she might have wished to. They looked at her with cold anger and now she was really afraid.

  “All we come for is meat,” said the oldest of them. “But if we have to teach a lesson, we can do that too.”

  And now Zeforah realized what she had done, exposing not just herself but all her sisters to immediate vengeance. Only Hamar and Sarah were big enough to make any kind of stand, and already they were standing beside her, Hamar giving orders to the younger girls to run back home to tell Father what was happening. But Dinah and Asa were too frightened to do anything but cower.

  At once one of the men ran to block their path down the valley. “No need to worry your papa,” said the leader. “Half a dozen daughters? I bet he’d be glad if we took four of you to marry with. Take a couple of sheep each as a dowry and bring you on home to do for us.” He smiled. “Without those big old sticks though. Why don’t you just put them down before you get your arms broken?”

  Zeforah was about to answer—bravely, but in a conciliatory tone, if she could figure out how to do all that while her voice trembled and her knees shook—when there came another voice from behind her. A man’s voice, and with a strange accent and a very formal, educated tone.

  “You’ve had your . . . fun for the . . . day,” said the man. “Now put down the . . . sheep and . . . leave.”

  “We aren’t . . . here for . . . fun,” said the leader, mocking the way the stranger hesitated as he spoke. “And we aren’t af-f-f-fraid of you, either.”

  Zeforah didn’t take her eyes off the enemy, even as the stranger gently threaded his way between them to take his place at the forefront. He wore a sword at his waist. A beautiful, polished sword. Because he was so finely armed, it took a moment for Zeforah to realize what he wanted as he reached one hand behind him and waggled his fingers, clearly asking them to give him—what?

  It was Hamar who understood, and put her cudgel into his hand.

  “You picked the wrong people to rescue,” said the leader. “We got to eat and there was no call for her to go breaking a man’s back with that stick, was there?” His tone was mild, but Zeforah could see how he crouched, ready to spring; how the men spread out, inviting the stranger to come closer and be surrounded. She wanted to tell the man to watch out, to be careful. Only he didn’t walk into the middle. Instead he sidled around by the rock, so they were only on one side of him. And they responded by trying to maneuver around him.

  In the process, the ruffians began to get rather close to the girls, and Zeforah, seeing the danger, herded them back out of the way, keeping her own cudgel ready in case they tried to attack their weaker opponents.

  Suddenly the stranger darted forward—it seemed to be a single leaping step, like a cat pouncing—and struck the leader a sharp, hard blow just below his right shoulder. The man howled and dropped his stick. “It’s broken!” he cried. And it was true. The arm hung useless, and Zeforah could see from the rubbery way it dangled that there was a new, painful joint between shoulder and elbow. One blow, and his arm was broken? What kind of man was this!

  “If I have to . . . hurt you all, you’ll . . . starve,” said the stranger.

  “Kill him!” cried the leader, even as tears of pain ran down his cheeks.

  The others moved forward, but with far more caution than before. They seemed about to give each other a signal to rush the stranger when he leapt again, not in the direction he was looking, and swept the legs right out from under the youngest and smallest of them, who was no bigger than Zeforah herself. The boy rolled on the ground, howling and grabbing at his ankle.

  “Half done,” said the stranger. “Just the right number of healthy . . . men to help the . . . broken ones . . . get away from here.”

  They did the arithmetic in their heads and, after a while, mathematics prevailed. The two unbroken ones helped the others limp and stagger off into the rocks.

  Now, the fight over, the younger girls began to whimper or wail. Hamar and Sarah comforted them but the stranger paid no attention to them. At first he seemed to be following the men, but there was no fight left in them, and so the stranger turned at once to gathering the scattered sheep. He wasn’t terribly good at it, and the sheep could tell that he was inexperienced and took merciless advantage of him, so it took him twice as long to round up the few sheep he was able to bring in. Zeforah set the girls to gathering the rest; work calmed them more than words of comfort ever could.