Moses (10 page)

“Not freely; only to you,” Moses answered.

“Why should you trust me?”

“I don't know,” Moses shrugged, “and when you come down to it, Neph, I don't much care.”

“You're too young not to care, and when I tell a story, Moses, kindly let me tell it my own way.” And then, as if there had been no exchange of confidence, he went on, “As I was saying, he whose name is wiped out and whose memory is cursed—he had pity for these starving beggars from the desert and he let them pasture in the Land of Goshen. So, many desert tribes made it their home and grazed their goats and sheep there. It was a good arrangement for us. These desert Bedouins had no art of metal-work, only stout knives that they made from fragments of flint, and for cheap bronze daggers and knives, they supplied us with cheese and wool. So they lived in their own ways, worshipping their own gods—but when the God Ramses came to the throne, we had to make a slave people out of them.”

“Out of the stranger among us? Him whom we took in and sheltered?” Moses asked incredulously.

“Many things are not what you are taught in school, Moses. Yes, out of the stranger among us. You see, in the older times Egypt was not the land it is today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Moses, the God-Kings Khufu and Chephren and Mycerinus built the great pyramids at Giza, and I often think that never again, as long as the world lasts, will men build with such grandeur and skill. Today, people have forgotten the old science and the old knowledge, and because they are ignorant and superstitious, they say that Osiris sent his servants to build the pyramids with magic. So it is today—everywhere this cursed magic of spells and incantations, because when ignorance triumphs, people become afraid of the truth and take magic to their hearts. But we who are engineers know better, and it was no god but plain Egyptian engineers like myself, and honest Egyptian workmen, who built those stone mountains—even though two and a half million blocks of limestone were required to make the largest one.

“In those times, Moses, there were few slaves in Egypt and few priests, believe me, and the peasant was a free man who owned his own piece of land. He was not taxed for half of what he produced and he did not have to see his family die of hunger and misery. He was a proud man, who did not have to bear the priesthood and the nobility on his back. I talk like this to you because so did you talk to me a little while ago. We can trust each other and we will say what we think.

“Well, in those times when the Mother Nile was in flood and all the land lay under the water, renewing itself, the God-King called the
corvée
. And because they were like brothers to each other and to the land, the Egyptians came from the whole length of the Nile. They came by the thousands, their tools over one shoulder and a bag of bread over the other, and they laughed and sang, for here was the whole land together to do one thing. That way, in each floodtime, they raised up the pyramids and the splendid temples and monuments. But that was a long, long time ago, Moses, and if the God Ramses were to proclaim the
corvée
today, who would come? The sick and broken serfs who work for the landlords and are left scarcely enough to keep body and soul together? The healthy men, the strong men, are in the army, and even there we have all too little, and must perforce hire mercenaries wherever we can. The beggars and loafers from the city streets? And if the beggars and serfs were called, would they heed the
corvée?
How willingly would they work, with all their hate and misery? No—today we can build only with slaves, and such is the God Ramses' lust for building that there are never slaves enough. He took ten thousand slaves in the war against the Sea People in Libya, and five thousand more from the land of Kush, and still it is not enough. Thousands of our own people are sold for debt—but never enough, never enough. So it was that some twenty years ago his soldiers went into the Land of Goshen and told the desert people there that the God Ramses had taken ownership of them and now they would work for him without pay. At first some of them resisted, but when a few hundred were hanged and a few hundred whipped, the resistance came to an end. Some of them fled back into the desert, but not many—for it is a long time since they lived in the desert and they fear it and have forgotten its ways. And soon they will forget that they were ever free people and they will be content to be slaves. So it goes, Moses.”

“But they were strangers and they lived among us,” Moses said. “Will the gods forgive us for this?”

“The gods forgive all kinds of things, Moses, and for my part, I am a builder and I need workmen.” He shrugged and smiled narrowly. “A man who broods about right and wrong will soon take leave of his own senses. The world is what it is, Moses.”

But Moses, on his part, felt that he was coming to know less of what the world was; or perhaps it was the world that was taking shape before his eyes for the first time—a real world, boundless and chaotic and so far meaningless. One day in the market place had washed away his own sense of being grossly misused, and had given him a measure against a world where not all were princely; and now the slave, to whom he had never paid much attention was becoming a symbolic and constant factor in his thoughts.

Thus he passed away the hours while the barge slid through one twisting waterway and then another. So often were they lost, seemingly, in a wilderness of marsh grass and bulrushes that Moses came to think that the helmsmen steered by some magic code; yet beyond that he realized the true answer—that here he was among men of wonderful skill and knowledge whereas he, as a prince of Egypt, had only a smattering of reading, writing and arithmetic, a store of mixed history and legend, some skill with weapons, and perhaps a hundred themes committed to memory from the
Book of the Dead—
none of it of great practical use. How often he had been warned to stay out of this great marsh, where one could so easily be lost for ever; yet to these men it was as familiar as the corridors of the palace were to him.

Even Neph had forgotten him now. The four engineers had spread plans upon the deck, and their discussion of this and that problem went on endlessly. Left to himself, Moses went to the bow and curled up there, one arm hooked in the bronze mooring ring, and there he remained until Neph called him to share their morning meal of bread, figs and wine. He discovered he was very hungry and ate all they gave him, indifferent to their smiles at his wolfish appetite.

While they were eating, they came in sight of their destination, a flat island about two acres in size. The granary already thrust up its brown brick walls from six to ten feet above the land, and here and there, on rough scaffolding, bricklayers were at work. The bricklayers, Moses decided, were Egyptian; but other men, unloading bricks from a barge tied up to a makeshift dock, must have been from the slave people Neph spoke of, for not only did they wear unkempt and tangled black beards and long hair gathered by a knot of leather, not only were they lean to the point of emaciation, but here and there among them overseers stood and watched their work, overseers who carried swords in their belts and on thongs around their necks three-foot leather whips.

As the oarsmen eased their barge up to the dock, Moses noticed many other freight barges drawn up on the muddy shore of the island, and from these more bearded slaves were unloading crushed stone and additional bricks. Each man had on his back a wooden rack, an open box that he grasped by two handles which extended over his shoulders. His fellow slaves would fill the box to capacity with bricks or stone or bags of mortar and, barely able to walk, every muscle rigid and tight, the man would make his way over the plank that extended from the boat to the shore—bricks and mortar to the bricklayers, the crushed stone to be emptied into a deep ditch that circled the entire island.

Moses followed Neph and the other engineers ashore, and since they became immediately concerned with their own business, talking to the overseers and the bricklayers and examining the work in progress, he decided to wander about by himself and see what he could see.

The slaves interested him because he had never before heard of the people of Goshen whom Ramses had taken as his servants. If he saw his own high-boned face among these slaves, it was not with any recognition or understanding; he walked slowly around the island, watching them at their work and wondering whether they could continue to work like that as the hot day wore on, or whether they would fall to the earth and die.

They, in turn, paid no attention to him, if indeed they saw him at all; and when he gazed straight into their bloodshot, sweat-filmed eyes, he felt that there—was a veil they used to thrust the world away from them. Indeed, they were not to be admired—unkempt, unshaven, naked and barefoot and stinking with their perspiration, filthy with the eaked mud of the morass, a string for a belt and only a dirty piece of cloth or leather to keep their parts from the shamelessness of exposure. When they spoke to each other they were stingy of words, having little breath to spare from their labour, and then they spoke in their own tongue—strange and hard to Moses' ear, a curious consonantal language that cut the words sharply and lacked the soft flow and flavour of Egyptian. Yet they also spoke Egyptian, as Moses noticed when the overseers addressed them, an Egyptian that was accented and hardened into what seemed and sounded like a translation of their own language.

When Moses felt Neph's tread at his side and heard his grunt of greeting, he said,

“Why, Neph, do they live on? Isn't it better to be dead, to die quickly and with some honour than to be worked and beaten to death like a beast?”

“No,” Neph answered shortly.

“I don't understand. I would die and welcome the dark lord Osiris.”

“No, you wouldn't,” Neph said.

“But I tell you I would!”

“Ah, yes, you tell me that. When life is full and sweet and young, as it is with a prince of the Great House, then the thought of surrendering it becomes an easy abstraction. You have so much life that you can be prodigal with it, Moses. But when life hangs by a thread, then by all the gods that be, it is nothing you give up easily! Life is the reason for life, as you will some day learn, and reason enough, you may be sure.”

“I don't understand you,” Moses replied.

“No. Better that you don't, I think. Come now, Moses, and I will tell you something of houses and how we do the impossible. First of all—you see how hard the ground under your feet is, and it will be harder still when we pave it with limestone.”

Moses nodded.

“And yet a year ago, it was the same soft, oozing mud that you will find on any of these swamp islands. That is why we dug this ditch all around. The first problem was to drain the ground. We do that by ditching and letting the water seek its level, and we leave the ground high, after which it is baked hard by the sun. Now we are filling the bottom of the ditch with crushed stone, so that it will act as a dry well and not silt up. We will line the sides with slabs of rough stone, lead run-offs into it, and roof it with stone. Since we have already raised the ground level at least two spans, we can be assured of permanent dryness.”

“All that just to dry the land?” Moses said unbelievingly.

“That was not a problem, Moses, but a matter-of-fact business that Egyptians have been practising for two thousand years. That is why Mother Nile is our servant and not our master. The problem was to build a warehouse in this damp swamp that would not sweat and rot the wheat.” As they talked, Neph led Moses to the building and inside the walls; where slaves mixed mortar in flat troughs and carried it up the scaffolding to the bricklayers. “You see, Moses,” Neph went on, “in our land, where the public granaries mean the difference between famine and survival, we have always built these storehouses of stone. Since they were built in the desert, they not only stayed cool, but dry as well. But when you build in stone here in this morass, the inside or cooler surface of the stone will sweat—that is, the dampness in the morning air will turn into water and rot whatever grain you have inside. Even if we lined the stone with cedar planks this would still happen, for the wood then turns wet and sour. So, after thinking the matter through, we decided that we would build with brick and we set the slave people in Goshen to making bricks out of the clay pits there, mixing the clay with chopped straw, which gives it great firmness and lasting quality.

“First we had to experiment with a small structure to see whether the brick would sweat in this climate. It did not sweat. Brick is a marvellous building material, as the Babylonians learned long ago; for while stone is dead, so to speak, brick lives and breathes and adjusts. Well, first we drove piles into the ground while it was still wet; then on the piles we laid a limestone foundation, bringing the dressed stones here on barges and fitting them into place. Then, on the limestone, we laid a floor of mortar to seal it, and on the mortar a second floor of brick. The brick walls will rise twenty feet high, after which we will line the walls in a veneer of cedar. We will roof the granary with cedar beams and planks and then weatherproof it with pitch, which we must bring from the bitter Sea of Canaan, even as we must bring the cedar from the mountains of Lebanon. So, Moses, you will know that it is easier to look at a house than make one, and while the God Ramses waves his hand and says, ‘Let it be done', there are others who must do it. If you are ever the god-king, I hope you will remember this day,” he finished lightly.

“Why do you say that, Neph?” Moses asked, his face tight with annoyance and misery too.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to give you hurt.”

“Don't say it again.”

“Then I will never say it again, Moses. I told you that I have a provoking tongue. Don't let it come between us.”

“I won't,” Moses agreed, less upset at Neph than at himself and the depression into which he had been cast through watching the slave people of Goshen at work.