“Yes, well . . . but bread on the ground like dew! Well, it doesn’t matter. Time for you to pack up. The day is young, and we can reach the camp of Israel before noon tomorrow.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “It isn’t two tents and a dozen shepherds, Zeforah. It’s a million people, more or less. And all their herds and beasts of burden. We’ll smell them before we see them, and we’ll see them from many miles away. They can’t exactly hide, at least not from those of us who know this land.”

  “But . . . Moses hasn’t sent for me.”

  “A husband doesn’t have to send for his wife. You know he wants you there. You belong there at his side. And his children need to see their father being the Lord’s servant and the leader of this multitude. They need to learn what it means to be Israelite.”

  “But it’s not safe for a woman and her children to travel alone.”

  “Who said anything about alone? I said we would reach the camp of Israel tomorrow. Do you think I’d miss this? Moses needs me to tell him what he’s doing wrong.”

  Zeforah was horrified. “Father, you aren’t going to criticize him in front of everybody, the way you used to do here!”

  “Give me credit for a little tact,” said Jethro.

  “I would if I’d ever seen you use any.”

  “I was joking. I’ve been priest for this village most of my life, and the one thing I’ve never lacked was villagers willing to provide me with long lists of my faults and failings. The one thing Moses won’t need is one more person telling him what he’s doing wrong.” Jethro made a show of suddenly thinking of something awful. “Oh no! A man who doesn’t need criticism, and I’m bringing him his wife?”

  “Very funny,” said Zeforah. “We’ll be ready in three hours. Two, if you can get any of my sisters to help me with the tent.”

  * * *

  Visitors came to the camp of Israel every day, on foot, mounted, alone, with company. It bothered Joshua that no effort was made to secure the boundaries of the camp. He brought this up with Hur and Aaron, and both of them looked at him with some puzzlement. “The Lord watches over Israel,” said Aaron.

  “Well, shouldn’t we try to do some things for ourselves?” Joshua asked.

  “Like what?” asked Hur.

  “There’s gold in this camp,” said Joshua, “and people make no effort to hide it. And since it belongs to no one in particular, no one has even tallied it so if half of it was stolen we wouldn’t even know.”

  “Who would steal it?”

  “These strangers! Gold has value, even here in the desert—and if they had enough gold, a good number of these people might well leave the desert.”

  “If it can change their lives,” said Hur, “then aren’t they welcome to it?”

  “No, Joshua has a point,” said Aaron. “A man in need is not helped by becoming a thief. We shouldn’t be tempting people.”

  “And it’s not just the gold,” said Joshua. “There are children who’ve lived in trust of their neighbors all their lives. What’s to stop some desert vagabond from kidnapping one or two and selling them into slavery? Things can be bad enough in Egypt for slave children, but there are worse places, I’ve heard.”

  “These are all good points,” said Aaron. “I’ll take it up with Moses, as soon as I get a chance.”

  “No,” said Joshua.

  “No?”

  “I don’t want to wait until Moses has time to talk to you. He never has time, he spends every waking moment judging disputes and answering questions.”

  “He’s the prophet,” said Hur. “He can’t help it that he’s busy.”

  “This won’t wait,” said Joshua. “You’re his brother, Aaron. You give me permission, and I’ll organize the young men in every tribe into boundary patrols.”

  “Soldiers? What do you know of soldiering?”

  “Nothing,” said Joshua. “Neither did Adam. Somebody had to be the first soldier. We have all these young men who spent every day hauling clay or bricks or water, and now they have nothing to do and they’re getting quarrelsome. I bet half the problems laid before Moses come from some stupid dispute because people are irritable and feel useless. So I’ll give them something to do—walking the boundary, two by two, questioning all comers and escorting them to you, so they never get to wander the camp without someone watching them.”

  “Sounds like you thought it all out,” said Aaron.

  “No,” said Joshua, “I’m making it up as I go along. But I think it’s a good plan anyway.”

  “Go ahead and begin,” said Aaron. “I’ll check with Moses, and if he wants to make changes later he can. I think the Lord put this idea in your mind.”

  Joshua laughed. “I’m no prophet,” he said. “I’m just as bored as any of the other young men. Moses used to have time to teach us. Now I spend my days wandering around, trying to think of some reason why a woman would want to marry me when I have no land, no wealth, no trade, and no future.”

  “You have a great future,” said Hur. “What are you talking about?”

  “We have a great future. Israel has a great future. But what makes me worth noticing? Women don’t want to marry a man, they want to marry a man who’s going to provide for them and be a good father and husband, and I have no way of showing them I’m worth anything. That’s when I came up with this idea.”

  Aaron and Hur broke up laughing.

  “It’s serious to me,” said Joshua. “You’re already married.”

  So it was that Joshua began to distinguish himself in the camp of Israel. In a single day he got more than two thousand recruits, and instead of picking among them, he took them all. He divided them into four shifts to cover the four watches of the day and night, and the division was not by tribe, but arbitrarily, so that each shift contained older and younger men and the eager boys who insisted on being included. The boys were used as messengers between the patrols and the elders of each tribe, and the young men who weren’t on duty would train together, practicing with such weapons as were included with the wealth brought out of Egypt, as well as clubs and tools, stones and slings. They had all seen Egyptian soldiers and had some idea of what soldiers had to do—they all mastered the swagger and brag of a soldier from the first.

  His patrols had been on duty not many days when a particularly rude and surly group of armed men showed up at the camp. The leader proclaimed himself to be Amalek, and he declared that the land where the Israelites were camped belonged to him and his people. Instead of arguing, the patrol was cheerful and began to lead the men to Moses, meanwhile sending messenger boys to assemble all the off-duty soldiers and alert Moses to what was happening. By the time Amalek and his men reached Moses, all two thousand of the patrol were gathered around, armed and watchful, and clearly well-organized into companies that obeyed their officers promptly and completely. Amalek’s tone remained belligerent, but his men didn’t have the same contemptuous grins they had worn when they arrived.

  Moses explained that Israel was here on the Lord’s business, heading for the holy mountain. “We aren’t eating your food, our animals are grazing only a small portion of your land, and the spring we’re drinking from didn’t exist until the power of God broke it out of the rock that confined it. We’re causing no harm and we mean to move on peacefully. So I can’t think of a reason for there to be a quarrel between us.”

  Amalek was surly but he agreed to tolerate the Israelites’ presence. Most of the patrol surrounded his men and peacefully escorted them to the borders of the camp. Moses turned to Aaron and said, “I didn’t know we had an army.”

  “Joshua asked me if he could organize a patrol for the boundaries of the camp. I thought it was a good plan.”

  “I don’t know what the Lord plans,” said Moses, “but this Amalek is plain enough to understand. He’s going to come back with a large group of armed men, intending to raid this camp. He’s the kind of man who lives by raiding, we’re the richest prize that’s ever come through here, and he saw that our soldiers were young and untrained.”

  “I doubt his men are particularly well-trained either,” said Aaron.

  “But they think they are. And they aren’t used to seeing civilized self-restraint. We look weak to them—numerous but weak. So they’ll be back.”

  “What will the Lord have us do?” said Aaron.

  “I don’t know,” said Moses. “I only know that whatever we do, the Lord’s people will prevail. But in the time we have left before they return, it would be foolish if we didn’t train these men in battle.”

  As soon as Moses took a personal interest in the training, the number of soldiers swelled to nearly four thousand, but Joshua took this in stride, and as he learned what Moses wanted them to do, he drilled the soldiers ruthlessly until they had a kind of rough skill. The few swords they had, they passed around until everyone had some skill with that weapon; the plan was that anyone who fell, Israelite or Amalekite, his sword was to be taken up and used. In the meantime, they had the more boyish weapons—staves, slings. They had the massive strength they had built up during their slavery in Egypt. And they had faith that God would deliver them from these ruffians as he had delivered them from Egypt.

  One morning the early watch reported that armed men were picking their way more or less secretly among the rocks near the camp of Ashur. Immediately Moses gave his instruction to Joshua. “These Amalekites will fight with no subtlety at all—man to man, by brute force. But they’ll be determined, and won’t give up easily, and they have more skill than any of you. So tell your men that I will stand on that hill, where all can see me, and as long as I hold my hands high, Israel will prevail in battle by the power of God. It wouldn’t hurt if you made sure the Amalekites knew this, too.”

  Joshua went to his men at once, and within minutes their officers had passed Moses’ words along to the whole army. Then, with their ragged arms and unskilled awkwardness, they advanced to meet the Amalekites on open ground.

  Amalek laughed aloud at the sight of them, for though they outnumbered his force greatly, they were young, lightly armed, and lightly dressed. “What do you girls plan to do, spit at us until we drown?” he taunted them.

  Joshua answered calmly but in a voice that all the ruffians could hear. “The prophet of God stands on that rock. As long as he holds his hands high, the power of God will be with us and we will prevail.”

  And so it happened. The Israelites with swords fought at the front, but behind each of them were at least two men with staves, who watched closely and jabbed low and poked high and swatted down at the Amalekite so that he could never aim well at the poorly trained swordsman facing him. It was almost comic, but the Amalekites became angrier as the battle wore on and they seemed to make no headway against these dancing lightweight boys. More and more they began to cast their eyes up toward Moses, seeing that his arms remained high. It must be the power of God thwarting them, they realized, and their attack became less confident, more timid, and they gave ground. Some even threw down their swords and ran—and when they did, on the instant there was a young Israelite with a blade in his hand.

  Up on the hill, however, Moses was becoming almost frantic as he called in vain for Aaron, for Hur, for someone to come help him. Finally Miriam heard him and summoned his two closest counselors, who hastened up the hill. “My arms are growing tired,” he said. “I didn’t expect Amalek to fight so stubbornly, giving ground so slowly, and when they see my arms grow slack, they take courage and attack and our men fall back.”

  Immediately Aaron and Hur brought a large stone for Moses to sit on. Then they stood beside him and each held one of his arms, keeping it high, so both sides could see that God was still with Israel. The battle lasted a good while after that, but finally the power of the Amalekites was broken. A large group of Israelites threatened to cut them off from their line of retreat into the hills, a good number of their comrades had been killed while hardly an Israelite was even injured, and it seemed like a good idea to go somewhere else seeking easier prey.

  Finally they were gone. The Israelite soldiers were better armed, better trained and more experienced than they had been before, and while some of them had taken painful wounds, not one was killed, and even among the wounded none would be maimed. Moses knew enough of battle to recognize a miracle when he saw it. Yes, his arms in the air, that had been a device to terrify the enemy and give confidence to his own men; but the fact that the Amalekites hadn’t been able to stop one Israelite from journeying on to meet the Lord at the mountain—that was only possible because of the intervention of God.

  He said as much to the soldiers when he addressed them by the light of the pillar of fire over the camp. “You did fight bravely, and you learned something of war today, but what you did not see was the horror of having your comrades die or be maimed beside you, because the Lord protected you. As long as you’re faithful to God, his power will be with you. But when you rely on your own strength, or when you fight in wickedness, your strength will be no different from any other man’s, and what happened to those dead Amalekites can then happen to you. Don’t ever come to love war, you sons of God. Love your Lord, the God of heaven and earth, and fight only in his cause, when he fights beside you.”

  But he could not keep his voice from showing how proud of them he was, and they couldn’t keep from smiling back at him, so he dismissed them with thanks and joined with his closest counselors inside his tent.

  This time, though, there was a difference. Joshua didn’t lurk outside the tent, hoping to get invited in—Aaron and Hur practically thrust him through the door. He had earned his place at council.

  A few days later, Hur had occasion to notice Joshua practically fleeing from a young woman of Gad. “What’s the matter, Joshua? I thought you wanted to distinguish yourself in the eyes of the young women.”

  “I get no peace,” said Joshua. “I have fathers and mothers practically throwing their daughters at me. I have women talking to me as if we were planning to have children together. I never get a chance to have a normal conversation with any of them. How can I possibly choose a wife when they’re all acting like that?”

  Hur couldn’t answer, he was laughing so hard. Joshua gave up in disgust and fled the scene before two more young women converged on him, each trailing a chaperoning relative behind her.

  * * *

  Joshua avoided his new popularity by immersing himself in duty, working three shifts a day, walking the perimeter with team after team, getting to know the young men, asking them for ideas, listening to their experiences. Some of them had been quite shaken by the experience of fighting, and not just the ones who had killed or drawn blood. Some worried, Am I a coward? Others asked, Will God forgive me for having killed a man? Some thoughts were more random: I wonder if my father might have looked like him, if he had lived long enough for me to know him. Were these men married? Why did they want to kill us? Joshua didn’t pretend to have answers, though sometimes he promised to pass a question along to Moses. What he offered was his attention, proof that their thoughts and observations, their questions, their lives mattered to someone in authority. Perhaps more than anything else, more even than the battle experience, it was Joshua’s attentive leadership that kept the peace among these men. Everything else could be borne if they knew that their lives had meaning beyond the moment.

  After all, that was what Joshua needed, too.

  Sometimes, though, he walked the perimeter alone, and sometimes walked out beyond, into the trails made perhaps by animals, perhaps by marauders, perhaps by shepherds. Maybe Moses walked here with his sheep one summer, thought Joshua. Maybe the Lord spoke to him here, or heard his prayer. He even thought of praying here himself, but then scorned his own thought. Was it the stones he knelt on that made a man a prophet? Not likely. It was the purity of his heart. And Joshua knew his heart was not pure, that it was filled with such a mixture of desires and dreams, not all of them noble, that he doubted the Lord thought much of him at all. Instead of trying to become like Moses, the best he could do was try to be useful to Moses in trying to accomplish his work. If only Joshua could understand what, exactly, that work was supposed to be. Israel was out of Egypt, yes, but what now? Why were they going to the holy mountain? The Lord had obviously chosen the Israelites as his people, but was that an end in itself, or were they supposed to accomplish something in his name?

  He was on one such contemplative, self-doubting walk when he came across an old man, a middle-aged woman, a donkey bearing a tent and supplies, and a flock of children, the oldest of whom was a twelve-year-old boy.

  “Peace be unto you,” said Joshua.

  “And to you,” said the old man, “peace.”

  “My name is Joshua, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim in the house of Israel.”

  The old man’s smile broadened considerably. “Israel!” he cried. “Then we’re here!”

  These didn’t look like ruffians—indeed, they looked like people who needed protection from men like Amalek’s crew. “You haven’t told me your name, friend.”

  “Jethro. I’m a priest, a Midianite. I serve a village not far from here as the crow flies, but several days’ journey when you take back trails to avoid the robbers who prey on travelers.”

  “You’re not a half-mile from the camp of Israel,” said Joshua. “I can lead you there.”

  “Do you know Moses ben Amram?” asked the old man.

  “We all know him,” said Joshua. “He’s the prophet of the Lord God of Israel. He leads us and judges us in the name of God.”

  The old man and the middle-aged woman exchanged smiles. “Well, Joshua, son of Nun, I’m bringing you some stray children of Israel.”

  “Of Israel? Israelites, already here in the desert?”

  “Israelites who have been waiting for their father to come home, and now he’s here, and they’ve come to join him.”

  “Who is he? I can take you directly to him, if I know his tribe.”