Chapter 26 · Chapter 26

The warmth of the infant settled against my chest, his faint breath stirring against the linen of my tunic. Beside the low wooden frame of the bed, the elders of my mother’s tent gathered their shawls, their eyes measuring the quiet man who had brought me from the trials of the northern waste to the red hills of the valley.

In the custom of the tribes, a child belonged to the lineage proclaimed before the council fires; without an undisputed mark of paternity, the murmurings of distant kin would linger like dust carried through an open doorway.

Shimon did not leave our protection to the shifting memories of men. Turning from the threshold, he moved toward the cedar chest that guarded his remnants of Egypt—the worn keepsakes borne through wilderness, drought, and wandering. From its cloth wrapping he drew a smooth sheet of papyrus, pale gold and stiffened by years, alongside a reed pen and an earthen well of dark lampblack ink.

"The clans of these sands leave their covenants to voices that fade with the wind," Shimon said in a low, measured voice, his eyes resting upon me as he smoothed the sheet across a flat slate of stone.