“Greetings to you!” Karim shouted, waving his arm. “Don’t be alarmed! I come in peace!”
The man looked up, his hood dropping back. The face beneath was lean and puckered with blemishes, his hair dark brown and curly.
The young man’s brow furrowed. “Brother?”
Karim couldn’t believe his eyes. “Gamil? Is that you?”
It can’t be. When I left, I could have sworn he was still just a boy!
Karim sped down the hill while the shepherd shoved his way through the herd toward him.
“My god, itisyou!” Karim cried.
Gamil nearly knocked him over with his embrace. “Karim-sen—where have youbeen? Babu and Hager came back saying the most terrible things, and when you didn’t return, we thought you were dead!”
Karim stuck out his lower lip and tilted his head. “Well, you weren’t far wrong…” Instead of launching into what would have been an extremely long story, he held Gamil at arm’s length and studied him. “Let me have a look at you, sen. What is that on your face, hey?” He poked at the patchy beard growing on his brother’s jaw. “A bit of dirt?”
Gamil swatted his hand away and gave Karim a shove. “You’re just jealous because I’m taller than you now.”
It was true. In a matter of weeks, Gamil had shot up like a reed. He was gangly and his face still hadn’t quite grown into his mouth and nose, but Karim could clearly see the man his brother would become peering back at him. A man who looked remarkably like their father. Karim swallowed.Half his childhood was stolen when Father died, and the other half I took when I abandoned him.
Shame struck him like an open palm.
Once a thief, always a thief.
It had been easy to forget about his family in the face of oracles and magic and monsters. Perhaps a bit too easy. He’d barely spared a thought for them—in fact, he’d tried his very best to avoid thinking of what might have happened to his family during his absence. He was too afraid of what he’d find when he returned.
Gamil looked all right—though Karim was surprised to see him holding a shepherd’s crook instead of a blade. Karim dared to hope that perhaps the rest of his family was fine too.
“Come! Come! We must tell the others that you’re back!” Gamil tugged on his arm, his face bright with childlike excitement.
Karim smiled.There’s my little brother.
Gamil led him past the herd before Karim remembered the Hudjefa. “Wait a minute, sen,” Karim said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Gamil didn’t seem to hear him. “Dima! Faiza! Look who I found!”
A large tent stood nearby, one that Karim recognized instantly. Two girls looked up from their work milking a pair of ewes in front of it. When they saw the brothers coming toward them, they jumped up in astonishment.
Twelve-year-old Faiza screamed. As the youngest sibling, she did a lot of that—regardless of whether an event was good or bad. She raced over to them and threw her arms around Karim’s waist, her round cheeks already streaming with tears. Karim reached down to pat her wavy hair.
“It’s all right, sena, it’s all right,” he said, trying in vain to calm her.
Faiza continued to wail as if a jar had been unstopped and its contents were pouring out.
Dima, who was thirteen but behaved as if she were twice that, did not approach them. She was an ample-figured, serious girl—much like their mother. Instead, she crossed her arms and leveled Karim with a critical frown. “So? Did you?” she asked.
Karim cocked his head, trying to hear her over Faiza’s ceaseless blubbering. “Did I what?”
“Did you really kill Djet for treasure?”
“Dima!”Gamil chastised.
“It’s a fair question.”
“It’s not!” Gamil retorted. “How can you ask our brother if he would do such a thing? He loved Djet! We all did!”
“The brother I know wasn’t a murderer,” Dima said, her voicelow. “But the brother I know also wouldn’t have left us.” To Karim she said, “At least when we thought you were dead, you had a good excuse for being away.”
