Moses (14 page)

“Their god,” Amon-Teph told Moses now. “The snake of fertility, to which they made the sacrifice of the child. A very ancient and common practice—even among our own people two thousand years ago. The same snake that you will see curled around the legs of Isis—a superstitious and ignorant cult.”

“Who were these people?” Moses whispered.

“One of the slave peoples of the Land of Goshen,” Amon-Teph shrugged. “They are all much the same, Bedouin wanderers from Sinai and Canaan who received sanctuary in the grasslands during the great droughts of a century ago—and whom Ramses enslaved. These called themselves the children of Levi, who was one of the children of Israel, for they keep an endless record of their ancestry. This was part of the tribe—I imagine there were six or seven hundred in the whole tribe—and they said they were related to other tribes who also came from the children of Israel and who had remained in Canaan and Sinai when these went to Egypt. They spoke Egyptian of a sort, as well as their own tongue, for you must remember they have lived long among us. I learned a good deal about them; it was some time before we left there.”

“Tell me what they looked like, Amon-Teph.”

The old priest was tiring, and he seemed annoyed that the story must still continue. “Dirty, bearded, ragged—maybe they would have looked like you, Moses, had they been raised in the Great House; but they were skinny, dirty slaves, ignorant and superstitious.”

He wanted the story to end; perhaps he, Amon-Teph, was now impatient for the end of many things. He was tired, and he wanted to lie down and be alone with his sorrow. The rest he told briefly, and his listener, dulled with too much emotion, sorrow and heart-sickness—and the death of pride in birth and blood; for who could grow up among the lords of the Great House without such pride?—and the heart-hurting knowledge that he was a waif, a nobody, a nameless offspring of slaves, thrown by these slaves in their blind ignorance and superstition as a sacrifice to a water snake—yes, his listener also desired the story to end. He heard how Amon-Teph had challenged these people to produce the mother; and when they lied and denied that it was their babe, he told them that a royal barge of the Great House lay a stone's throw away, and that if they insisted upon provoking him, he would return the following day with a squadron of soldiers. Then he went among them until he found a woman whose full breasts were so wet they stained the front of her gown, and he ordered her to come with him.

“My mother,” Moses said dully.

“Enekhas-Amon was your mother,” the priest answered him harshly. “All your life I refused to tell you this, and I could have died with it as easily. Not because you were born a slave, but because you have in all truth become a prince of Egypt, have you forced this out of me. I made this woman come with me on to the boat, where she gave suck to the child—to you.”

Then came the rest of it—how a pavilion was set up on the shore for Enekhas-Amon, the mother and the child; how two slaves of the house were left to guard her while Amon-Teph went back for supplies and to make arrangements; how they remained there at the edge of the morass for five days, until Amon-Teph found an Egyptian wet nurse whom he could trust; how all of the slaves who were with the barge were sold in the markets of Hatti—for, as Enekhas-Amon said when she returned to the City of Ramses, after four months of quiet hiding in Memphis, the child was hers; and how, with a full measure of wit, gold and threat, the secret was kept.

“But not entirely kept, Moses, my son. No secret is—and while you had a mother, the question of a father remained. Enekhas-Amon would never name a father-she could have—myself, or others of better blood and station who loved her—but she would not. She held that Aton was your father.”

“And she believed it?” Moses asked.

“I think so,” the old man sighed. “We all believe what we want to believe or what we have to believe. just as I think that Ramses, the God-King”—his scorn was mixed with fatigue and disinterest—“believes that you are his son.”

“No!” Moses cried. “Spare me that!”

Amon-Teph shrugged. “There is much that I would have spared you, but this is the way things are. Ramses, from all I could gather, believes that Enekhas-Amon was waiting for the moment when it would be ripe to proclaim you. Ramses did not wait.…”

“Wéll, there it is, all of it; and as for you, my dear son, my dear son”—he had to fight to control his voice; the tears were running from his eyes now, falling strangely upon his loose, pouchy cheeks—“live.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. “Live and be strong and good and just. You have been all the life that your mother left to me, and you two gave me what to love and what to live for. You are as noble as any man in Egypt, and when it's finished, as it is now for me, you realize that we are all brothers, all of the same wit and folly—slave and freeman, noble and peasant. You are what we who loved you desired you should be, and it is the poor, foolish pride of Ramses that makes him claim you for his seed. Let him think so, Moses, and he will not stain his hands with your blood; for whether he faces Osiris or Aton, such a stain would destroy him. Live,” the old man gasped, “so that your mother and I can live in you.”

Then he kissed Moses and left him; and Moses stood there watching the priest walk slowly and uncertainly into the night.

[17]

“SO I AM the son of slaves, of the dirty, dying wretches who live in the Land of Goshen,” went through him, hour after hour, day after day, cutting apart his grief, filling him with anger and frustration and hatred of himself-and building resentment against his dead mother. Yet there was something in him, a core of solidity that allowed him to fight this resentment, to cling to the image of his mother as his mother—and not to turn against her the corroding humiliation that was eating out his heart.

He wanted to retreat into himself, into a cave, into shelter against the whole world. However, there was too much to be done. The woman who died was his mother to the world, and he lived in the world. To him they came—and he had to talk to them. The business of death was not a simple matter in his land, and the higher one's station, the more complicated did death become. Sulking, hurt, filled with pity and grief and self-pity, reverting to the boy who was still so much a part of him now, at seventeen and a half, he would imagine himself raging at them, “I am a slave, and such matters don't concern me! Do what you wish!” This he left in his mind; he remained a prince of Egypt, and he did what he had to do.

All of the hours during the days after his mother's death were filled with the funerary proceedings. He had to discuss with the royal embalmer the details of the process—a procedure which, if normally consoling, was now disturbing and distasteful to him. A dutiful son was expected, in the way of lasting love and concern, to observe some of the steps of funerary preservation; but to Moses the thought of seeing his mother's body disembowelled, the skull empty, floating in the stinking tanks of subcarbonate of soda deep under the Great House, the place of horror and frightened whispers in his childhood, was more than he could tolerate. Let the ghouls, of which there were always a sufficient number, exhibit the preoccupation with the soaking and washing and stuffing and binding that went under the name of piety. When the royal embalmer suggested eight weeks of soaking and then began to enumerate the various herbs he would use—the myrrh, cassia, balsams, peppers—brought from the Ganges Valley at such cost and trouble, as he pointed out—he seven salts from Arabia, Kush, Libya, and on and on, like a lessons in geography—Moses told him coldly to do what had to be done.

“But the arteries,” he insisted. “There are three methods of injecting the arteries. I never fail to discuss the advantages of one method, the disadvantages of another, with those responsible for the deceased. Forgive me, Prince of Egypt, but the responsibilities of those beloved of the deceased do not end with death; rather, as our holy scribe and teacher, Kafu-Re, put it in the time of Amon-em-Het, the deceased finishes one trial to be ordained into another. My own
justice
forces me to put it to you thus. Now, the injection of the arteries—”

So Moses bowed his head and listened to the discourse on the manners of injecting the arteries of a corpse. There was no escape; and more and more he was beginning to realize what Amon-Teph meant when he spoke of the prisons men build for themselves—from which a key or a door provides no exit.

With the master sculptor, he had to discuss the finish of the stone sarcophagus which Enekhas-Amon had ordered ten years before. It bore her likeness, but the final finish remained to be completed. Did he, the divine prince of Egypt—and may the gods will that he never be troubled with such details in his grief—desire a natural finish of unsurpassed smoothness? And with or without a worked plate of bronze? On the other hand, some in the Great House preferred enamel with the stone? Further, would the body be placed in the sarcophagus here or at the tomb?

Vaguely Moses knew that the tomb of his mother was in Upper Egypt, somewhere near Karnak. He would have to discuss that, too. Meanwhile the sculptor would have to meet with him and the coffin-maker. The chief of the staff of royal artists would also be concerned—and of course, one Seti-Moses, the major-domo of the Great House.

He was a relative by blood—a first cousin two or three times removed—to the God Ramses, and it was often said that while Ramses was God-King of Egypt and the Empire, Seti-Moses was god-king of the Great House; and himself, Seti-Moses was wont to describe as the busiest man in all of Egypt. Which perhaps he was, for with a staff of almost a hundred scribes and clerks, he kept the famous papyrus rolls upon which were listed not only the nobility and priesthood of Egypt, but their wealth, their land-holdings, their estates and mines in foreign places, their slaves, their horses, their cows and sheep and goats, their gold and silver and bronze and iron and linen, their sons and daughters and wives and concubines, and—as some wits held—their performance in bed and out of it and their innermost thoughts as well. All this was kept up-to-date with an incredible number of entries and deletions each year—and even a scribe in the service of Seti-Moses was a man to be feared and reckoned with.

Moses did not doubt the industry of the pig-eyed, enormously fat man who waddled into his chambers and confronted him after the death of Enekhas-Amon, for in all his life he had never before spoken to Seti-Moses and he had seen him closely only once, on an occasion when the major-domo was leaving their apartment. To Moses' eyes, he had not changed; time left him untouched, and as he entered, a scribe and clerk following, his huge face fixed in an expression of influential condolence but devoid of sorrow—as if he, so close to the gods, would see that things went well—his huge body swathed in transparent linen, Moses experienced a final capitulation to pomp and circumstance.

Seti-Moses settled himself in a chair that swayed uneasily under his weight, and the clerk and the scribe squatted on footstools. Always a diplomat, knowing that kings are mortal in this world if not in the next, well-aware of the conflicting rumours of the origin of Moses, and not unaware of the one which held him to be the son of the God Ramses, he opened by reciting his praise of Moses, of the prince's bearing, intelligence and nobility—and then he explained his appreciation of a son's grief.

“Yet, even as one steps into life eternal,” he pointed out, “those unfortunates who remain behind must deal with practical matters. Ah. yes, practical matters, Prince of Egypt, which we would gladly dispense with, but which stand between ourselves and chaos. The barbarian eats and drinks for the day; a civilized person lays aside a little of his substance, so that those loved ones who remain may not know want and sorrow. I suppose you know you are a very rich man?”

“I know that my mother had enough for her wants. As to my own wealth, I care little.”

“There speaks inexperience,” Sed-Moses chided him, wagging a fat finger in front of Moses. “The fly dies with the cold weather, but the bee waxes fat and happy in its own honey.” He was a man fond of maxims. “One hundred and. fifth verse,
Book of Horus
. Fortunately you are a rich man, for your mother was wise in her overseers. I have here a full accounting of your holdings, which I shall read you. All accounted for. No cheats. Your blessed grandfather, the God Seti, cleansed us of administrative cheats.” He ran a pudgy finger through a fold of his neck. “Then we shall discuss the apartment—which you may use freely if you desire. Being precise in my methods, I like to prepare an enumeration of the effects you will place in your godly mother's tomb; also, what animals you see fit to slaughter. There is also the question of approval or disapproval of the management of your property. Also, your own needs in gold reckoning—”

His authoritative, rasping voice droned on and on, on and on, as the hours passed, on and on until darkness came, and then he made an appointment to see Moses the following morning.

There was Neph, too, to make it plain and simple that he remained a friend, come what would.

“The trouble is,” Moses said, “that I don't care very much what comes.”

“All right. Now you're shocked and bitter and hurt. That will pass, Moses. You're young and strong-and wealthy,” he added. “And you're a prince of Egypt.”

“And your God-King murdered my mother!”

“So long as you say such things only to me,” Neph told him, “you are simply being impetuous. If you talk like that to others, it will be more unfortunate. But I didn't come here to scold you. I came to tell you that I have a leave from the major-domo to go to Karnak and prepare your mother's tomb. I found the location and the plans in the funerary hall, and there doesn't seem to be too much to do. In any case, I can take that burden off your mind, and you can rest assured that when I finish and when Enekhas-Amon is entombed, no one will ever find her resting place. I think it's best that way. I am taking a hundred workmen, and if you want me to take her household effects, I will prepare a barge for that.”