Think back, he said to me, quietly. I shuddered. I remembered that day very well. The priest had taken my hand, and led me up the steps of the great ziggurat of Ur. I was very small, and the stairway seemed to stretch forever but when we looked from the top down on the city it did not feel as if we were in the sky.

I remember, it did not seem like a beautiful thing at all. It was ugly and brown, like a stain spreading on the Earth, and it seemed so unfair that it stood so close to that sparkling river whose fingers stretched as far as I could see.

He told me then of a dark underworld, not at all comforting, such as our people believed in. Where as long as a person is remembered, they may eat, but when they are forgotten they crumble to dust. Where the divide between king and commoner is even more pronounced than it is in this world. There was nothing comforting there, nothing I could reconcile in my mind with the bright soul that had been my mother.

That night I dreamt of her surrounded by the slow gray shapes of ancestors, dissolving as if into dust. The look on her face was one of indescribable pain.

What I first felt, in those next few days, was a sadness that slowly grew into horror. It stayed with me, and I became fey. My father, too distracted with his own feelings and the work he had to do let me go. I began to spend my time in the fields around the city, to speak to no one and neglect my schooling.

Out there, something stirred in me and it was anger. First, for a few days, at my mother for leaving me. But then, more directed, white-hot, at the child who had taken her life. Alone, and unguided, six years old, I could not avoid the thought. If that child had not been born, my mother would have lived.

If only I had had someone to talk to, if my father had paid attention, if I’d had someone to keep me from what was the natural reaction of a six year old girl to the destruction of her world, my whole life might have been different.

Out there alone in the fields I began to hate my mother’s unborn child. My brother or sister. My own flesh and blood.

Birth had stolen my mother from me. Death had opened up and seized her even as she prepared to deliver another to its store.

Do you understand? I had seen it. A fellow playmate I had, perhaps, looked forward to playing with, my mother whom I loved. And I had seen it, in that last instant, the bloated entrance from life into death. These worlds of light and darkness, opposite to most, were to me, one.

Birth was death. Before Abram and I were married, I made him promise me one thing, and one thing only. That he would never force me to have a child.

I do not deny him my bed, nor any part of my affection. But my people know many ways of avoiding conception. And Abram has never complained, nor seemed to regret his choice.

I had never truly thought of it but it occurred to me suddenly that though my husband had left behind Ur and all that that meant for us, I did not know what he still believed, and still feared. In our old faith, if you have no heirs, you have no remembrance. And if you have no remembrance….

I shuddered then at the thought of my husband dooming himself to an eternity of gray ash for my sake.

I looked up then, across the table, at the man with the strange golden eyes. He smiled a strange smile and nodded.

“Sarai,” he said, “you are going to have a son.” He glanced sideways, at Hagar, still deep in conversation with the other man. “Two sons. “