The men were gone after Lot. I felt it calling for me in the night again and knew it would make me answer. I laid down in my tent, and darkness took me.

When I opened my eyes, the walls of the sky were shivering. Blackness blazed at the mouth of the tent and danced with the silver torches of the stars. A voice was calling through the veins of the body of the giant sky. A voice made of silence. It called me Sarah and I arose.

Everything shimmered and shook. The whole night was alive with the God within it. The trees whispered with voiceless power. The rocks quivered beneath their lord. Then the stars vanished. Like a man in a dream, I knelt and closed my eyes. When I looked again, the stars had vanished. A torch blazed in the heart of the sky.

Sarah, the voice said. Here I am, I whispered. The voice said look upon me.

I felt my skin dissolved, and my eyes were filled with flame. The whole of the night sky heaved in its bed and turned upwards, like a black palm, and at its center it cupped the torch, which expanded to engulf the heavens. The Earth felt warm and pliable beneath me, like skin. Fire filled my vision. And in the orange flame moved writhing angels.

My lord, I whispered.

My heart was lifted from my body by the hand of an angel and placed on a scale. God blew upon it, and it glowed hot red like an ember from the fire.

Do not fear, Sarah, said the voice of the wind, and the trees and the sky. I, who can count the stars and know the name of each grain of sand, tell you that so many will your children be. And you will have sons.

The sky shimmered now through the tears in my eyes, the refracted flame rebounding again and again towards my heart. Sons. In a night black and wide like a hand holding the Earth I fell to my knees beneath the giant ladder of the stars.

I felt them all standing around me then, children and grandchildren, and the spirits of my ancestors, the whole human family filling the world like dancing embers from the flames. When they found me I was laughing, laughing, yitzhak…

We rejoiced at Lot’s rescue, but I was not surprised when after very few weeks he told me he was leaving again. It seemed a decision he was not happy about, there were lines around his eyes and his shoulders slumped as he told me. I smiled and clapped him on the back and told him to eat oven roasted meat for me. Off he went to, I later learned, the city of Sodom, then a prosperous metropolis.

It was no more than ten days after Lot left us again that a messenger arrived in our little encampment with a message, he said, for me.

This was in every way a surprise. That anyone knew that I was here—that anyone had any reason to wish to find me, Abram, who had been absent from anything most men consider civilization for more than a decade, that was the initial shock. But the messenger—such a horse I had rarely seen even in Ur, caparisoned with jewels all over its harness. Carnelian and turquoise, even glass. I could not even imagine that any man obviously so important, so wealthy, could have anything to say to me himself, and that he claimed to be sent on an errand by a master was so unbelievable that for a moment I wondered whether there might be another Abram in the camp, though I knew , of course, that there was not.

The messenger smiled at me, and not in a cruel way. He asked me would I hear the message—I realized I had been staring at him for several moments, without saying anything. I shook myself out of my daze and tended to his horses, brought him inside, and gave him water and milk.

He told me he came from King Melchizedek of Salem, which city I had heard of even in Ur. It was prosperous one in the south of Canaan. Melchizedek, he said, wished to meet with me. The king had said that he and I had much to discuss.

Perhaps this messenger took my unthinking disbelief that such a thing could possibly be true as hesitation, or worse, refusal. He leaned in very close then, almost whispering, and said the king wishes me to say that He who sent you to the wilderness sends you now to the king. He looked me steadily in the eyes, and asked me, slowly, intently, will you go.

I told him that the king’s wish was in every respect my command. He smiled, and with no more words, and not even a meal, went upon his way.

II

BIRTH


The Hebrew verb Pachad is often used translated "remembered". It is used almost exclusively in stories in which previously barren women have their prayers answered by God and give birth to a long-awaited son. God remembered Sarai, for example, using the verb Pachad: Elohim Pachad et-Sarai.

But "remembered" isn't the only thing that Pachad means. It can also mean "visited"

Pachad Elohim et-Sarai.

In the dying day, as a decade ago, I saddled my mule, ready to begin again. Leaving, again, from a place I had come to love, this time from nowhere to nowhere.

It may seem strange to you that it did not surprise me when Sarai told me she was not coming with me. I did not even, as I suppose I might have done in retrospect, fear for a moment that she meant something permanent, and it was not permanent. In truth, in those days, for all people, separation was nothing to be wondered at. There were many things that must be done, by nearly all men, in the farther fields and abroad—royal emissaries, for example, could more or less expect to be kept by the king to which they were sent as a kind of hostage, until another should come. Tradesmen often had to travel far to sell their wares. And, too, the world was dangerous. There was no way to be certain when those who left could, or would return—caravan routes were dangerous places, only slightly less dangerous than the trackless, the unknown wilderness. And if a man is detained in another kingdom for another years, might he not find a life he likes as well?



I was anxious indeed, but not about leaving. In truth something like this had been on my mind for some time, bidden or unbidden. There were many reasons for it, including the fact that I had less and less place here as our little settlement had grown into a kind of tradesman’s oasis. There were blacksmiths, and glassblowers, potters and carpenters. And I? I was a sheepherder without sheep, without pastureland. I was the leader of an enclave that needed no leader, indeed, in my mind, should no longer have one—man does not live forever. If something has been begun which should live, there comes a time when the beginner must step aside so that what has been created will not share his fate.

Yet some part of me knew too that the wilderness had taught me what I needed to learn, that this world had served, for me, its purpose. The next part of my journey, whatever it was, wherever it ends, lay elsewhere. It came to me like a faint calling in the air, something I had to follow. It sounded like the angel’s voice, it sounded like something I knew but had never seen on Earth. It sounded like the sea. That time had come.

I kissed my wife on the cheek, and told her that I loved her. I began north-east towards the darkening horizon. Behind me the falling sun imprisoned itself in the tattered ropes of tufa and gorse, encasing them in rubies, and the whole world blazed with a low and dying fire. The noise of my past surrounded me with howled blessing.

I listened, again, as I have always been listening, and heard the giant sea sighing upon itself, reaching arms for what it cannot grasp and gathering its enormous strength to try again.

For the first three days that Abraham was gone, I waited. I had stayed because I knew I had to stay, and I was waiting for whatever it was I was supposed to be staying for. There were two of us here now, in the little shelter in the wilderness, myself and Hagar, my Egyptian maid. Sometimes, turning quickly from some task or another, I caught her watching me with strange eyes, the color of the moon. Even when she saw that I saw her, she did not always turn away. A strange light shone around her, sometimes, in the corner of my vision. She did her work well, but she was not an easy companion. Still, I was glad to have her.

Was I frightened to be alone, or at least, as alone as I was? No, I was not. I have never truly been afraid, in the normal sense of the word, afraid for my life or person. I do not know how to better say it than to say that there is something about being alive which I have never truly been involved with. The sounds of the world are, to me, always an intrusion into something else. But there are certain things I have learned not to speak of.

On the fourth day I awoke to something on the wind, a kind of crystalline sound, as if something had shattered. Hagar snored, still, on the low pallet beside me. I rose, put on my robe, and stepped softly to the entrance of the tent. The dawn chill pebbled my skin.

There is something about my eyes. They are fine for most things, but ever since I was a little girl I have seen things that aren’t there. Sometimes, I see things that are there, that others cannot see, though I never know which is which -- and so I saw the way their strange dark skin, under the dark robes they wore, flowered and gestured at the white air around them. I saw behind them in the air the trace of fluttering wings.

They were dressed like humble shepherds, staffs in their hands, only their hair was silver. Not white like an old man’s, but silver, true silver. And their eyes shone. But they acted like humble shepherds, with no obeisance made to the fact that they clearly had with them no flocks. Ours was a large tent, for my husband had become an important man. There was a chamber set aside for meeting, planning, discussion. I was never barred from these, neither did I have any particular interest. But mindful of my sleeping maidservant, mindful of my duty to my guests, it was here I conducted them.

They told me their names were Gabriel, and Raphael, and my hands trembled. I did my best to smile, I offered them goat’s milk, water to wash their hands, and they gave every sign of gratitude in reply. My relief, at being able to leave the tent even for these errands was barely suppressed. I walked slowly to the pole where we stabled our few goats, desperately trying to still the quivering of my body. The time had come, as I knew it would.

When I was a young girl, a voice had spoken to me, over the empty fields and I had heard with the eyes of a child. Something promised, something taken. I had waited all my life, first for Abraham, and he had taken me away. I was happy to go away, in truth, I did not like the city with its noises and smells, where I had come to be aware was in the fields and forests. This wilderness was a new place but there was something in it that had always made it seem to me more of a return than a journey. But always behind the thin white clouds, always behind the small shrubs and open spaces, lay the voice. Always there was the fact that I knew I had to go anyway, that something was waiting for me here. Now it thundered.

These men, I knew, were here for something, had something to offer me. A choice perhaps, or perhaps not. They had come from the one who sent me here, and who knew what they would ask of me.

The pail was full. I took a deep breath and returned inside.

We sat, and I waited while they drank. They looked at me. They said nothing. The wind rose outside and sighed through the dried riverbeds around our camp, shook our tent walls. I waited for them to speak. The wind filled me with fire, emptied me, took everything that was mine and replaced it with something terrible and glossy and new, something flat and glittery. My heart stopped beating. I closed my eyes, and waited for them to speak.

As I travelled through the wilderness a strange thing began to happen. I felt myself dwindling, the world growing vaster around me. I knew that I walked on ground but it seemed to me, more and more as if I did not walk on Earth. A strange feeling for a man alone, or perhaps not so strange. Are we not held to this world by our relations? Are we not connected to Ur, when we are from there, by those parts of Ur that have special meaning to us through those we know there—our own cities are as foreign as a strangers when in strange parts.

I felt the sky watching me again. This time, I listened.

Some ancient instinct which I had always trusted, lately more, made me leave my donkey with my friend Eshcol, an Amorite who lived near the lush oaks of Mamre. I continued on foot, the sun hot on my back. I continued the way I was going, waiting for the message I knew I was about to receive.

At last I came to a small road, carved into the trackless soil by the passage of men, beginning where the plains of Ai rose into the mountains of central Canaan. There I saw an old man leaning on a staff. He smiled at me, and asked if I was headed for Salem. I told him I was, and he asked whether I desired any company on the voyage. I looked into his eyes and saw within them a deep well of light, like the stars in the sky. I said I did, a shiver shooting down my spine. He smiled again.

Without another word we continued on together, only it did not seem to me as if his feet touched the ground.