The Exile by the Tomb (part 5/7)

More about The Exile by the Tomb (part 5/7)

I met him on my second return through Kashmir.

We had come from the west this time: from Ugarit and Byblos, our packs heavy with resin cakes and coils of pinewood for shipwrights in the east. I carried sealed jars bearing the universal script:

Jar + mountain + shining disk → gold from Kashmir, now owed to a house in Mari.

Jar + tree + dripping sign → resin owed from Byblos to a house in Harappa.

At the edge of the city, near a quiet shrine with a small stone building attached—a roza, as the locals called it—I found a man sitting beneath a chinar tree.

He was not old, but his eyes held centuries.

His skin was sun-darkened like any of the people in the valley, but his features… there was something of the western deserts about him. His robe was rough, patched many times. Around him, children played. Beside him sat one of our Black Bone jars, used now only to hold water.

“You’re far from home,” I said, in the Akkadian that most long-road traders shared.

He answered in a dialect I had only heard once before, in a Jewish quarter near Mari. Then, seeing my confusion, he shifted his words, as traders do.

“I am always far from home,” he said quietly.

They called him Yuz Asaf in those parts. A bringer of stories. A healer of wounds. Some whispered that he had once been condemned to die in a western city, nailed to wood, but had survived and walked east until the mountains welcomed him.

I did not know what to believe.

But I watched him one evening as he drew in the dust with a stick. Not letters, not our trade signs, but shapes:

A fish.

A shepherd’s crook.

A lamp.

“The One God is like this,” he said, gesturing. “He speaks in pictures before he speaks in words. The people here have their gods, the people there have theirs. But pictures—we can share pictures.”

I felt a shiver, recognizing his thought. It was the same principle that animated our guild logograms: a visual theology of trade, a way for meaning to cross tongues without being forced into one.

“Then you are also of the Guild,” I said. “Not of clay, but of… souls.”

He laughed softly. “If your jars can carry debts and cancel them, perhaps my stories can carry burdens and cancel them too.”

Debt and forgiveness. Jar and shattering.

I thought of this many times after he died.

Years later, when I returned again, the small stone building by the shrine had been expanded. They said Yuz Asaf lay within, his body washed and laid in a sarcophagus of stone. On a slab nearby, some devotee had carved feet, with strange marks at the center.

Old scars, they said. From nails.

I am a trader, not a priest. I do not know if the man was the same as the one the Jews of Mari spoke of, the one crucified by the western sea. But I know this: