“Now, now, Moses, don’t fib,” said Jethro. “Bad harvest, wicked people.”

  Moses looked at him sharply, then smiled in defeat. “You’re right, of course. Kings are as good as . . . priests at the game of . . . putting blame on others.”

  “The true God,” said Jethro, “holds men responsible for what they choose. Not for the outcome, but for the intent.”

  “That’s the mercy of God,” said Zeforah. “For men are weak, and fail, but God judges us by our will to obey.”

  “So then if a man does . . . good, but his intention was to . . . deceive his enemy. . . .”

  “Then God counts the goodness as a sin, because it was a lie.”

  “But how does a man tell the difference?” asked Moses.

  “A man doesn’t,” said Jethro. “God judges.”

  “Men have to judge, too,” said Moses. “I sat in judgment . . . day after day. Especially in . . . command of an army. Two men have a . . . dispute, they lay it before me. I have to . . . decide.”

  “But your judgment is imperfect. Sometimes you’re wrong. God is never wrong.”

  “Then it would be . . . kind of him to . . . give us hints.”

  “That’s what was written in the book of remembrance!” cried Jethro. “God’s teachings! God’s hints.”

  Moses shook his head. “But that book is lost.”

  “Lost to us,” said Jethro. “Not to God! He remembers. Every word we write down is written in the mind of God. If all my scrolls were burnt today, if every copy of these books were lost, God could put the words into the mind of a prophet whenever he chose, and have the book written down again.”

  “So why write it at all?”

  “Because not all men are prophets,” said Jethro, “but all men need to hear the word of God.”

  “Are you a . . . prophet?” asked Moses.

  The silence in the tent was painful. Tears came to Jethro’s eyes, and slipped down his cheeks. Moses was appalled that his simple question should bring such ready emotion. He was about to apologize, when Zeforah intervened.

  “Moses,” she said, “my father is not grieving. He weeps for the love of God in him, for he’s about to tell you something sacred.”

  Jethro smiled and touched his daughter’s hand, drew her down to kneel beside him. “I’m not a prophet, my boy,” said Jethro, “because God doesn’t need a prophet for these people—a priest is enough. But from time to time, I have felt the presence of God in my heart. I’m reading, and a passage from the scripture lights up in my mind as if I heard a voice speaking it. Prophets hear the voice of God, full and loud. But a man like me—I hear the whisper of God. He is alive, not made up by priests or kings to serve their purposes, but alive and guiding his children.”

  “Who are his children?” asked Moses.

  “Whoever will follow him,” said Jethro. “Abraham was promised that his descendants would be the children of God. We men of Midian take that to include us, for our ancestor, Lot, was Abraham’s adopted son and heir during all the long years before Abraham finally had sons of his body.”

  “The adopted son was then . . . cast aside?” asked Moses. The question was pathetic, he knew that, since the central fact of his life was his own adoption by Pharaoh’s daughter. But he could say it in front of this man and this woman, because . . . why? Because there was no shame in showing weakness in front of them.

  “The adopted son was wealthy in his own right,” said Jethro. “But Abraham assured Lot that his children, too, could partake of the promise if we lived in obedience to God.”

  “Are the Israelites the . . . children of God as well?”

  Jethro nodded. “If they’ll obey God, then yes, they are.”

  “Yet the children of . . . God are slaves in Egypt.”

  “The children of God are in school,” said Jethro.

  “I grieve for how they must be suffering, now that I’ve . . . brought shame on them.”

  “I thought they weren’t really your people,” said Jethro. “I thought you were Egyptian.”

  “I didn’t choose to be one of them,” said Moses.

  “You did when you killed an Egyptian rather than let him kill an Israelite.”

  “I saved a helpless old man from a . . . cruel lout of a . . . taskmaster. I acted as Pharaoh’s . . . son, not as an Israelite.”

  Jethro shook his head. “Deceive yourself if you want, but you don’t deceive me.”

  “I spoke from my heart.”

  “You acted as a son of God,” said Jethro. “Pharaoh’s sons have done all kinds of abominations over the generations. The man who is being made Pharaoh even now, you said he was involved in poisoning his own father.”

  “He wasn’t . . . taught to act that way by Pharaoh,” said Moses.

  “Wasn’t he?” said Jethro. “Didn’t you tell me that his father became Pharaoh because his mother poisoned the true sons of Pharaoh, the sons of his queen? Sounds to me as if that’s the way the sons of Pharaoh act, killing for their own advantage, or at least taking advantage of killings done for their sake. While you acted very differently, killing a man for the sake of justice and mercy rather than advantage and ambition.”

  “Those men and their mothers were . . . corrupt,” said Moses, “but the ideal of Pharaoh’s house is pure.”

  “The ideal of Pharaoh’s house is but a pale shadow of what it means to be in the house of God,” said Jethro.

  Moses looked at the tent walls around him. “Is this the house of God? Does he dwell in a tent?”

  “If the children of God dwell in tents, then God would not be ashamed to dwell in one,” said Jethro. “I know his spirit has been here.” Again tears flowed down his cheeks. “Oh, Moses, let it be true that God thinks of this as his house.”

  Moses did not look away, for Jethro did not seem ashamed to weep. Nor was he proud of it. He didn’t even seem to notice that he was weeping. Rather the man was filled with joy, and his body could not contain it.

  “Do the words in these scrolls teach a man to be as good and happy as you are?” asked Moses.

  “Yes,” said Zeforah. “They do.”

  “Teach me to read them,” said Moses. “I would like to be happy. I would like to be such a man as you.”

  Jethro took his hands, drew him into an embrace. “As I said when you first came here, Moses—God has given me a son.”

  “People keep saying that when they meet me,” said Moses. “They aren’t always glad of it later.”

  * * *

  Young Joshua couldn’t understand why the family was leaving their home near Karnak. “How can we move when you aren’t done with the writing?” he asked his father.

  Nun tried to explain. “They don’t need me to write on the stone anymore.”

  “But you’re the best.”

  “I’m the best, but I’m an Israelite, and all the Israelites have to move to Lower Egypt and make bricks.”

  “But anybody can make bricks,” said Joshua. “Only a few people can write.”

  “Pharaoh has decided that Israelites are brickmakers now.”

  “Are you sad, Papa?”

  “Not really,” said Nun. “If I stayed, they’d make me write lies. I’d rather make true bricks than write false words.”

  When Joshua remembered the move later, he could barely picture their old house or the village by the Nile or the great buildings. What he remembered was his father’s face, and the words: I’d rather make true bricks than write false words.

  * * *

  Zeforah watched Moses with fascination, and not just because she knew that Father intended her to marry him. Moses was interesting for his own sake. The body and bearing of a captain of thousands, but the stammer and eagerness of a child. He showed no shame at ignorance, no resentment that Zeforah could read the scrolls easily while he still made them out word by word, guessing often at what vowels should be understood among the letters, struggling to learn nuances of words, or words that weren’t in Hebrew any more at all, so their meaning was lost. He was willing to learn from her, a woman—though the one time she asked about this, he looked at her as if she were insane for asking.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. “My . . . mother was a woman. I understand that everyone’s . . . mother is.”

  “You speak as if it’s natural for a man to learn from his mother,” said Zeforah. “You need to look at some of the village boys. They don’t think there’s anything they need to learn from women.”

  “Then the . . . shame is theirs. And their . . . fathers’.”

  “You have to admit that your mother wasn’t typical, either. She taught you skills most women don’t have.”

  “Not that these are useful skills to me now,” he said, laughing. “Unless you think the villagers would like to have a . . . king. A sort of . . . toy Pharaoh. I could make them . . . take turns at being ambassadors to the next village to negotiate . . . treaties.” Though he was mocking himself, she could see a glimpse of the life he had expected to lead, and realized that he was probably very good at it, that Egypt could have done much worse than to be governed by this man.

  And yet God had brought him here. To Zeforah, this seemed to be proof that God had not struck Moses down from a high place, but had rather turned him away from a wrong road. So God was not punishing him for his sins, but rather giving him another school to learn in. And this was the school! Here in the shadows of the craggy mountains, in the upland meadows where sheep were more plentiful than men, and snakes more plentiful than sheep. A man great in the eyes of the world, but now he must become great in the eyes of God. And it was to my father that God brought him!

  She tried saying these things to Sarah, but Sarah only looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “You cannot possibly know or even guess what God is doing,” said Sarah. “You don’t even know what Father is doing from day to day.”

  “He’s teaching this man the holy books,” said Zeforah.

  “It would be more helpful if somebody would teach him a little more about sheep.”

  “He won’t be a shepherd all his life, Sarah.”

  “No, not at this rate. You can’t be a shepherd when all the sheep are dead!”

  “He hasn’t killed a single one.”

  “Because we’re always watching him. He’s more trouble than twenty sheep.”

  “No!” cried Zeforah. “He’s being prepared for greatness. I think he might even . . .”

  But she couldn’t say it. Not to Sarah, not to this practical, sharp-tongued girl who would laugh at the thought and throw it back at her endlessly.

  “He might even what?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “Liar,” said Sarah, and the accusation could not be denied. “You’re just not going to tell me.”

  “That’s right,” said Zeforah.

  “He might even . . . be your husband!” said Sarah.

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “He might even . . . get bitten by a snake one of these days if he keeps walking around muttering to himself like a madman.”

  “I was definitely not going to say that, though he really should be more watchful—”

  “He might even be crazier than Father,” said Sarah.

  This was beyond joking. “That’s not funny,” said Zeforah.

  “It’s what they say in the village.”

  “They wouldn’t know wisdom or holiness if it was announced by fifty angels.”

  “Oh, fifty? I think they’d know it with fifty.” Sarah laughed. “Oh, Zeforah, why must you be so solemn all the time?”

  “I laugh as much as anyone.”

  “You laugh sometimes, yes, but not as much as anyone, and it doesn’t last long, and there’s always something solemn inside you watching everybody laugh and not taking part in it, not really.”

  The accusation stung, though perhaps it wasn’t an accusation at all, but rather a mere observation. Sarah couldn’t help it that everything she said sounded just a little snide.

  “I was just trying to tell you what I was thinking about,” said Zeforah.

  “And I was telling you what I thought of what you think,” said Sarah.

  And that was that. Zeforah told no one her speculation. But she knew Father had to be thinking it, too. Some of the more obscure passages in a scroll that had no name because the first few columns were missing—how many, no one could guess. Father got it from his great uncle along with some books in much better condition, and when Zeforah asked why it was so much older and in so much worse condition than the other scrolls, Father showed her how difficult the language was. “I don’t know a lot of these words,” he said. “And the letters have changed form. I don’t even know what this one is. Do I sound it? Or not? This word might be the word for angel, but it might not.”

  “What language is it?” Zeforah asked.

  “Hebrew, I think, or I couldn’t read it at all,” said Father. “But not Hebrew the way we speak it now. A very old Hebrew, or a version of the language as it’s spoken and written in a faraway country. Or both. So I’m never sure if I’ve read it right. But look, there are sections that tell some of the same stories in the book of Abraham. And some things that might be from the prophecies of Enoch. And see where it ends—when Noah comes out of the ark. Yet it isn’t a history at all. It’s more like a series of songs. But the songs have stories hidden in them. But are the stories of the future or the past? The language is so different that I can’t be sure if words that seem the same have the same meaning at all. So I don’t think it’s worth your while wasting time trying to read this one.”

  Father might as well have smeared it with honey in order to keep flies away—it was the only book Zeforah could read for weeks. Father was right, of course, it was unreadable, or at least it was impossible to be sure whether she had read it aright. But there were tantalizing glimpses in it, hints of great knowledge that had been lost.

  “Whatever was in there is lost, all right,” said Father. “But whether it was great knowledge is hard to say. The previous possessors didn’t value it enough to preserve it or copy it.”

  “But only because they couldn’t read it easily,” said Zeforah.

  “Whoever made this copy understood it.”

  “How do you know that? Maybe they copied it letter by letter, and never understood it at all.”

  “And you’ll succeed where they failed?” asked Father.

  Stubbornly she continued to read it and it was plain to her that Father was rather proud of her for trying. He enjoyed discussing it with her, too, and that’s how they emerged with the idea that whoever the writer of the scroll might be—and she speculated that it might have been Noah himself, though Father told her not to guess because it might just as easily have been some lonely shepherd with poor spelling and a penchant for writing down his incoherent dreams—whoever the author might be, he had clearly believed that there was a figure of prophecy who would come someday, and he would be known as the Son, and the power of God would be in him, and he would deliver the people of God from their most awful enemy. The writer even said that the Son stood between men and God, protecting men from God’s wrath, and trying to teach men to be worthy of God’s love. Only if he carries them will the words of our prayers be heard in heaven, the writer wrote. So we must pray to God in the name of the Son, as if it were the Son speaking for us . . . or so Zeforah thought the scripture said.

  Father told her she was wrong to reach conclusions when the book was so unclear. But ever since then, she had surreptitiously murmured the words “in the name of the Son” or “let the Son carry these words” before she uttered her closing amen. If the others noticed her extra mumbling they never spoke of it. She was sure Father must know what she was doing. If he thought she was definitely wrong, he would stop her. So she took that as a sign that he did not think her understanding of the nameless book was completely wrong.

  Moses had only been here a few days before it occurred to her for the first time that perhaps the fulfilment of that prophecy was happening before her eyes. Didn’t his name, in Egyptian, mean “son”? And it wasn’t just a part of his name, the way “mose” was a part of the name of Tuthmose. It was his whole name. And more than that: God had been guiding his life from the beginning, had seen to it that he was born of Abraham’s lineage, and yet was given great power in the most ancient of kingdoms, and had learned all its learning. When he had received all that Egypt had to offer him, Moses was removed from his lofty place in a matter of hours. And where did God send him? To a desert where there just happened to be the perfect man to teach Moses about God. That was why Moses had been given the chance to learn Hebrew as well as Egyptian, so that he could speak to Father and, when he came to the holy books, he could learn to read them relatively quickly.

  Everything pointed to the idea that God had a great purpose for this man. And Zeforah could guess what that purpose might be. Wouldn’t the prophecy be fulfilled if Moses went back to Egypt at the head of a mighty army and delivered the children of Israel from slavery? The Israelites were groaning and praying in their bondage, but only when Moses—Son—carried their words to God would they at last be heard and a deliverer sent to them. Oh, it was so plain to her, so plain. Moses was the fulfilment of prophecy!

  But she dared not say this; even her halting, hinting comments to Sarah had come to nothing. Father rebuffed her the moment she started trying to ask him about it—she had only to mention the nameless book and he jumped all over her. “Don’t try to distract Moses with that book now! He’s like a baby, just learning the simplest ideas, still struggling with his letters! Why give him a puzzle that even great scholars like you and me can’t figure out?”

  Great scholars indeed! Father didn’t realize how it stung her when he teased that way. He thought he was including himself in the joke, but of course she knew that he really was a great scholar, while she . . . if she went to any gathering of wise and learned men, and tried to open her mouth and say, “When I was reading in the book of Abraham,” they would scorn her as an imposter. Reading! What kind of fool does this maiden take us for? So Father’s little joke had too much sting to it.