Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge)) by Orson Scott Card

were starving. They were devouring the inheritance of the children Sarai had not yet borne.
     
    “What if,” said Abram one hot afternoon, sprawling wearily beside her on the rugs piled in her tent, “what if we went to Sodom with Lot?”
     
    “You love the city life so much,” said Sarai.
     
    Abram sighed. “Sodom least of all. A vile place. But I don’t have connections anywhere else.”
     
    “My father’s city,” Sarai reminded him, then realized her error at once. “I forgot. He has no city.”
     
    “Ur of Sumeria is in the hands of his enemies, and Ur-of-the-North is full of mine,” said Abram. “Ah, Sarai, I’ve already written to him, asking what’s possible there. This drought is too much for me. Already we stray so far out of our range that the risk of war is constant. We’ll come to a well where they’ve never heard of me or my family, and those who think of the water as their own will draw swords, and what then? Will I spend my life with my sword against every man, stealing water from them in order to keep my own herds and house?”
     
    “Surely the drought will pass soon,” said Sarai.
     
    “I hear that often,” said Abram, “but it isn’t so. This drought has already lasted longer than I’ve been alive.”
     
    “No, Abram, there was rain often in my childhood.”
     
    “No, Sarai. I know what the rainfall has been for the past fifty years.”
     
    “How can you remember what happened before you were born?”
     
    He shook his head. “A woman who can read and write, and still she wonders.”
     
    “Your family kept records of the rain?”
     
    “So do priests in every city,” said Abram. “They learned their duties from my ancestors—how could they pretend to be priests if they didn’t do what we did? This is the same drought that killed my brother Haran, Lot’s father, all those years ago, choking his life out in the dust that filled the air day after day, month after month. This is the drought that killed the grasslands and drove the Amorites from the desert to conquer your father’s city. This is the drought that emptied the cities of Canaan and left only herdsmen to wander the half-buried streets.”
     
    He made the desolation of the land sound like poetry. “But there are good years,” said Sarai.
     
    “There are years not quite as bad,” said Abram. “My father remembers a day when the land was green as far as the eye could see. You could stand on a mountain and see herds of deer and antelope running free right along with the herds of cattle. There were even elephants then—giant beasts like hillocks. The most daring goats would take shelter in their shadows in the afternoon. There was land and water enough for all in those days, and no one envied the people of the cities, huddled in their little huts, digging ditches for the river water because their crops couldn’t live from the rain, even though it came as regular as daylight. In all our lives, we’ve never seen such times, because they’re gone. The world my father knew is gone. And I don’t know if we can hold on to such a way of life for another year. It isn’t about the cattle anymore. I have all these people in my house. I can’t hold them here, where their children live ever closer to the edge of starvation, of death by thirst when the next dust storm buries the last well.”
     
    “They’ll stay with you.”
     
    “I don’t doubt that,” said Abram, “for a long time, anyway. But when I say I can’t hold them, I speak of my duty, not of their obedience.”
     
    “What of the dangers of the city?”
     
    “I know,” he sighed. “What good is it to save the lives of their children, only to lose their souls in Sodom?”
     
    Sarai realized now why he had chosen this moment to come to her and say these things. “Eliadab is back from Sodom,” she said.
     
    “I saw his red cloak far off,” said Abram. “He’ll have letters from Lot and Qira.”
     
    “From Qira.” Sarai could