He found a meadow in a sheltered vale on the mountain’s slope. He labored several hours pulling brush and stones together to make a fence to keep the sheep from straying away from the grassy place. He knelt among the animals and prayed for God to lead him where he was supposed to go. Then he began climbing, through ever steeper, ever stonier terrain, until he was clambering by hands and toes, knees and elbows, up small cliffs, along narrow ledges, going wherever the mountain seemed to be leading him, going ever higher into the mountain.

  He should have been weak from fasting, but his hands still had their grip, and he watched his own body as if it were another animal, climbing mindlessly on. He was thirsty and his mouth was dry, his lips cracked with the dust of the climb, but the dryness in his mouth and the soreness of his lips were only interesting facts that he took note of, but cared little about.

  The ground leveled out on a shelf of land perhaps six paces wide. The air was cooler here, he had climbed so high, and the leaves on the bushes were green even though it was high summer. Life grew from every crevice in the rock. He stopped and looked around him. Below him the rocky land spread out like a carpet carelessly thrown, looking softer from this distance than it ever did close up. The air was so clear that he could see the blue water of the arm of the Red Sea that separated this land of Sinai from the true land of Midian across the water. Somewhere on the other side of the mountain, across another arm of the Red Sea, lay the land of Egypt. He did not want to look that way. He felt no nostalgia for the place, or for the prideful, fearful, arrogant, stammering man he was when he lived there.

  He felt something behind him. Warmth, perhaps, or just a presence. He turned. Far along the ledge there was a bloom of fire enveloping a green bush.

  “It burns, and yet it lives,” he said. “Lord, is this the thing you brought me here to see?”

  A voice came to him then, though he wasn’t sure he was hearing with the ears of his body, for the sound seemed to come from all around him, from inside him, making him tremble throughout his body, dropping him to his knees. And yet he was not afraid. The voice was not violent. The opposite: It was gentle, yet so strong, so irresistible, that it weakened his body just to hear it. He knew that if the voice were not restrained so tightly, his body would die from the sound of it, for this voice, if it ever shouted, would shiver the stones of this mountain into dust.

  “Moses,” the voice said, and his own name sounded strange to him, hearing it spoken by the voice of God. “Moses,” God said again.

  “Here I am.” His own words sounded weak and foolish, like the shoddy imitation of a voice, for he had heard what a voice could be, and now his own was nothing.

  He tried to rise from his knees and walk toward the burning bush, but the voice came again and stopped him. “Come no closer. Take the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

  Moses sat in the grass and unlaced his sandals. The silence while he did so was overpowering. God was waiting for him to take off his shoes.

  At last he was done, and knelt again, so weak he had to lean on his staff, hardly daring to look at the bush, hardly daring to look away.

  “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. I have seen the misery of captive Israel, I’ve heard them crying to me under the whip, I know their grief, and I’ll deliver them. I’ll bring them to a land that flows with milk, that runs with honey, to Canaan, broad and fine. For they are mine, and you, my son, are mine.”

  In his heart, Moses heard these words with rejoicing and with dread: rejoicing, because the longed-for day of deliverance was now at hand; dread, because the Lord would not be telling him if he were not expected to do something to help bring it about.

  “Go to Pharaoh,” said the Lord, “and bring my people out.”

  Not me, he wanted to cry out. “Will Pharaoh let them go for the asking?” he said.

  “He will stand against the will of God, but he will break.”

  He, the Lord said. So Pharaoh was a man. Hatshepsut was dead. Moses felt a pang of regret, but then relief as well. She had lasted for many years after Moses went into exile—or came out of exile, as he thought of it now. He hoped her death, when it came, was not bitter to her.

  “I’ll stretch forth my hand,” said the Lord, “to strike down Egypt with my wonders, and you will leave with the wealth of Egypt, not stolen, but freely given to you by the Egyptian people, if only you will leave and take the anger of God away from them. It will not be the hand of men that delivers Egypt, but my hand, and all the world will say, The Lord God remembered Israel.”

  He wanted to say, You can do this without me, Lord. With all your power, what am I needed for? But what he said was, “I’ve been gone so long, the Israelites won’t know me. They never knew me, I was never a man of faith among them, they’ll ask me, Who are you, that the Lord would speak to you?”

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  Moses had to look. “A staff.”

  “Throw it to the ground.”

  With so little strength, Moses could only let it drop. At once it turned into a snake, a large one of the most poisonous kind. Fear gave him strength he hadn’t thought he had, as he scrambled crabwise away from it.

  “Take it by the tail.”

  It took a moment, but he conquered the fear. If the Lord told him to take hold of the tail, then either no harm would come of it, or it was the Lord’s will that he should be bitten, and it would not be harm in that case, either. So he got back on hands and knees, approached the snake warily, reached out to its tail and took hold.

  It was his staff again, the cool smooth wood that he had polished himself.

  “Put your hand inside your robe, to touch the skin of your chest.”

  When Moses drew his hand out, it was white and scaly. Leprosy. He held the hand away from him, knowing that what the Lord had done to him the Lord could heal, but still frightened by the numbness in his arm. It was as if the hand he saw were someone else’s, because he could not feel it.

  “Put it back in your robe.”

  At first he was reluctant to touch himself with the unclean hand, but then, knowing that this was how it would be healed, he moved eagerly, and when his hand emerged again the skin was clean.

  “If these two signs don’t convince them that you come from me, then take up the water of the Nile and pour it on the ground, and it will turn to blood.”

  But it would not be enough to overawe them. They had to know that he came in fulfilment of their faith, not as a new prophet wiping away all that had been taught before. “The elders will ask me, If you have spoken to God, what is his name? I don’t know how to answer them, Lord.”

  “I am that I Am,” said the Lord. “Tell them that I Am sent you to them.”

  Moses had no idea what these words would mean to the Israelites. Such a phrase did not exist in the scripture Jethro had. But then, if it were written down, it would not be secret.

  Moses knew that he would obey, if the Lord really wanted him. But there were so many men whose whole lives had been dedicated to serving the Lord, committed to freeing Israel. Compared to them, Moses was a latecomer. They would resent his being placed ahead of them. “Lord, you could give these powers to any man. I’m not the one to send. You want a prophet, a man of mighty words, an eloquent man! When I speak to strangers I stammer, I’m slow and hesitant. People grow impatient listening to me. How will Pharaoh hearken to the Lord if his messenger is ridiculous?”

  “Who made man’s mouth? Who can heal the dumb or the deaf? Who makes some men see, and some blind? Go and my voice will go with you and give you words when you need them.”

  Moses knew that the Lord could open his mouth and give him speech—hadn’t he done it before? Wasn’t it already a gift of God that he no longer stammered when he spoke to his family? He didn’t doubt God’s ability to give him words; but why not send one who wouldn’t need such help?

  “Send someone else, Lord. My brother Aaron wanted to be the savior of Israel! Or anyone else, anyone—whoever you want, you can make him your messenger. I’m the last man who should show his face before Pharaoh. He’ll refuse most adamantly because I’m the one speaking for Israel.”

  Only then did it occur to him that this, too, might be part of the Lord’s plan, for Pharaoh to humble himself before the man he had resented and envied all through his childhood.

  “I’ll bring you your brother Aaron to be your spokesman,” said the Lord. “You’ll give him words to say, as I give those words to you, so that you will be to your brother as I am to you.”

  Moses saw at once that having Aaron speak for him as if Moses were God and Aaron the prophet would make it even more galling to Pharaoh. Well, it was the Lord’s errand. And it would indeed be a miracle if Pharaoh didn’t have Moses and Aaron dismembered the first time they even attempted to enter his palace.

  But the first miracle would be persuading Aaron to take a role subservient to his younger brother.

  “What should I say to Pharaoh? How will I even get to see him? Tuthmose hated me before I left.”

  “Why do you fear for your life, Moses? No one can raise a hand against you while I am with you. Say to Pharaoh, The Lord God says, Israel is my son, even my firstborn. Let my son go, that he may serve me. If you refuse to let him go, then I will slay your own son, your firstborn.”

  Moses imagined himself standing before Tuthmose and saying to the man with all the power of Egypt in his hands that if he didn’t obey God, his firstborn son would die.

  To his own surprise, once he imagined himself doing it, the last fear fled from him. For it would not be Moses challenging Pharaoh, it would be the Lord God of heaven and earth commanding Pharaoh, and if there was a quarrel it was between them. As long as he remembered that he was God’s servant in this, God’s messenger, and not speaking for himself, then there was nothing to fear. All would happen according to God’s will. Moses might never see his children again, but that also lay in the hands of God: the children were God’s gift to him in the first place, as was Zeforah, and what God gave him so bountifully, the Lord could take away if it were his will that Moses’ life should end.

  Though he did not say it aloud, the Lord heard the thoughts of his heart, and answered him. “Let this be an assurance to you: You will come here again, with the host of Israel, and serve me together upon this mount.”

  And with that, the voice let go of him, and left him empty, and the fire surrounding the bush faded, leaving it vibrant and green. Only when the fire left the bush did he realize that what he was looking at was more than fire, was not fire at all, but was the presence of the Lord, if only his eyes had been pure enough to see. Yet burned into his heart was the afterimage of the face of God. Moses felt as if all liquid had been drained out of his flesh, leaving only a dry husk, weightless as chaff. Yet he felt as if the fire from the bush burned inside him, sustaining him, filling him up with light instead of water, instead of blood. He went so easily back down the mountain, for his body had no weight, he had no fear of falling, he moved as gently among the rocks as goosedown gusting in the wind.

  He would do what the Lord commanded him to do.

  The sheep waited patiently for him, and when he walked among them, they gathered around him. He did not need to speak to them, or drive them. Rather they followed his footsteps wherever he walked. They knew, he was sure of it, they knew whose voice had filled him today, and they followed him as if he were the Lord.

  He spoke to the sheep as he led them along the ridge, back toward home. “Now I know that man is nothing, which I never had supposed. I have seen the Lord in glory, I’ve had his glory in me, and the Lord did not despise me.” And the final realization, that he had been given the gift of the prophets—with joy he announced it to the flock: “I have seen his face.”

  Chapter 9: Reunions

  It was only a dream. Aaron wouldn’t even have mentioned it to Miriam, except that he thought she might find it amusing. “I’m dreaming of Moses now, too,” he said.

  “Oh.” She didn’t seem all that interested. “What was he doing in your dream?”

  “He came out of a sandstorm in the desert. His face was so covered with sand that I couldn’t see who it was. I gave him water, and he washed his face, and it was Moses.”

  “Then you must go meet him.” Just like that, from his dream to her assumption that he must go off on some mad errand. But Miriam was sure that it was a true dream, given by the Lord. “It was too clear,” she said. “It couldn’t have been one of the normal dreams of sleep. God is bringing Moses back out of the desert, out of obscurity, and it is you who must meet him and reveal him to the rest of Israel.”

  “How am I supposed to find him?” asked Aaron. “There’s a lot of desert, and since I’m an Israelite slave, I probably can’t even get to the desert.”

  “Don’t be absurd. As long as we meet our quota, they don’t mind if one Israelite or another goes off on errands here and there.”

  Insane errands, he wanted to add. Except that the dream was different. She might be right. “That doesn’t change the fact that Moses could be anywhere.”

  “Aaron. You’re deliberately trying to be stupid. He went into the desert from the border outpost at the head of the Red Sea. Where else would he come back?”

  “So I go there and sit around for a week and finally give up and come home.”

  “A week? You’ll wait until he comes,” said Miriam. “When God gives you an errand, you don’t decide it’s over until you’ve completed it.”

  “If you’ve misunderstood my dream, that could be a long wait,” he said. “I have a wife and children, you know. Elisheba doesn’t like it when I’m gone too long. I have responsibilities.”

  “Then don’t go,” said Miriam. “All these years, you tell me you wish God would speak to you the way he speaks to me, show you things, give you something to do. All these years, you plot to raise an army to overthrow Pharaoh, you devise these elaborate plans that would only end up getting somewhere between a hundred and a hundred thousand people killed. And now God actually calls you to act, and you remember you have responsibilities.”

  The scorn in her voice stung him, but that wasn’t what made him go. It had been an extraordinarily clear and memorable dream, and he wanted it to be from God. Besides, it made a kind of sense. Moses’ name might have been expunged from every monument and every book, but he was well-remembered by Israelite and Egyptian alike. If God wanted to liberate Israel, he could do worse than bringing Moses back from exile. No one could galvanize Israel more quickly, unify all the tribes, and strike fear into the hearts of the Egyptians.

  Not that Moses would want Aaron’s counsel—he never had before—but it had to mean something that God sent Aaron to meet Moses. Aaron wouldn’t have to wait for Moses to invite him to take part—he had his own call from the Lord.

  So after two days of walking, Aaron showed up at the caravanserai near the desert outpost where Moses had taken his leave of Egypt. Most caravans came through the northern border outpost, the one at the Sea of Reeds, the marshy land on the Mediterranean shore. That was the best route into Egypt if you came from Canaan, and most people did. This southern entry served only the caravans from deepest Arabia, south where the frankincense was harvested. Thus there was little traffic, and the soldiers soon noticed Aaron and asked his business.

  Waiting, that’s what he told them his business was. Waiting for my brother to come through.

  Are you sure he’s coming this way? What did he say in his letter?

  He didn’t send a letter.

  Oh. Someone came ahead of him, then. What did his messenger say?

  And what, exactly, could Aaron say to that? He wasn’t sure at all that he was waiting in the right place. Nor was he sure that he had understood the message, or that it even was one. So he shrugged at the soldiers’ questions and, when he ran out of food, he began working for them, doing chores in exchange for meals. At home he would have been making bricks all day; here, he was digging whatever they wanted dug, and building whatever they wanted built. It made no difference to him. He was waiting for Moses. Or despair.

  Moses came first. One day a caravan was sighted in the distance, and the soldiers made ready. Aaron worked beside them, taking orders from everyone; the soldiers offered him encouragement. “Maybe your brother will be with this one.”

  The dromedaries, loaded with bags of precious spices, came through at their stately pace. Aaron looked at the men who walked along beside the animals. As desert travelers did, they all had their heads covered, and all the men of any age had long, full beards. When Aaron saw him last, Moses had been clean shaven. Would Aaron recognize him if he saw him face to face?

  It turned out that he recognized Moses before his face was visible. Though Moses was still many rods off, a bearded man dressed in wool homespun bringing up the rear of the caravan, Aaron recognized his bearing, his stride. Moses walked with the strength and vigor of a soldier, and with the boldness of a man who does not think anyone is his superior. All these years gone, and nothing changes.

  Aaron strode out to greet him. “My brother! My brother, is it you?”

  Moses smiled, threw wide his arms, and when they reached each other, Aaron found himself folded in a vast embrace. Moses must have been this tall and strong when he left—Aaron hadn’t known because they had never embraced as adult men.

  “So the Lord found you and brought you here,” said Moses.

  “I could say the same to you,” said Aaron.

  “I’m not the man I was, Aaron,” said Moses. “Now I know that you were right—I’m a man of Israel, not of Egypt. Nor of Midian, where I’ve lived these past few years.”

  “Are you married? Do you have a family?”

  “God gave me a splendid wife who is my teacher in everything, and we have two sons and three daughters. My wife and children came as far as the last caravanserai with me, but I sent them home to my father-in-law.”

  Aaron lowered his voice into a conspiratorial hush. “I’ve been careful not to tell anyone the name of the brother I was waiting for.”