The Priest
Chapter One
AARON sensed someone standing close as he broke loose a mold
and put the dried brick aside. Skin prickling with fear, he glanced
up. No one was near. The Hebrew foreman closest to him was
overseeing the loading of bricks onto a cart to add on to some
phase of Pharaoh's storage cities. Wiping the moisture from his
upper lip, he bent again to his work.
Through the area, sunburned, work-weary children carried
straw to women who shook it out like a blanket over the mud
pit and then stomped it in. Sweat-drenched men filled buckets
and bent beneath the weight as they poured the mud into brick
molds. From dawn to dusk, the work went on unceasingly,
leaving only a few twilight hours to tend small garden plots
and flocks in order to sustain life.
Where are You, God? Why won't You help us?
"You there! Get to work!"
Ducking his head, Aaron hid his hatred and moved to the
next mold. His knees ached from squatting, his back from lifting
bricks, his neck from bowing. He set the bricks in stacks for
others to load. The pits and plains were a hive of workers, the
air so close and he ... read full excerpt from The Priest ebook
