Moses (21 page)

When the hobble was off, Moses said, “Get up and follow me, Nun.”

The slave rose and walked after his master out of the slave mart. Thus it was that Moses came by a man and servant, whose name was Nun.

[6]

WHEN MOSES CAME to the parade ground with Nun the following day for the slave to receive his first instructions in the management of a chariot team, Seti-Keph, the Captain of Hosts, motioned for him to wait. As before, Seti-Keph stood in a little crowd of his captains; now he left them and walked over to Moses, where he observed both the prince and the slave thoughtfully. Then he told Moses to send the slave to the stables, but to remain a moment himself, so that they might talk.

Nun went in silence. He had not spoken a dozen words since the day before. He had taken what was given to him, a hot bath, his hair freshly dressed in the same heavy braid—for Moses knew how sacred hair and beard were to the people of the desert-clean loincloth, kilt and sandals, salve for his bruises, and a heavy leather belt with loops for weapons; but he asked for nothing. He had been given a room to sleep in and the door was left unlocked; and Moses, his own room close by, had lain awake for hours; fearing he knew not what-that Nun might try to kill him, that he would run away; but when he finally rose and walked softly to Nun's room, he saw the Bedouin sleeping soundly in the moonlight that streamed through the open casement, sleeping loosely and easily as a child sleeps.

In silence, he ate his breakfast; in silence, he went to the stables now; and there was a new expression on SetiKeph's face as he watched the slave obey Moses' command. When Nun had gone, Seti-Keph indicated that Moses follow him, and they walked over to the shade of an olive tree, far enough from the officers not to be overheard. The Captain of Hosts reached no higher than Moses' shoulder, yet Moses did not think of him as a small man. In the shade, Seti-Keph squatted on his heels and motioned for Moses to do likewise.

“Well, Prince of Egypt,” he said, “you are one of the young gods of the Great House, if temporarily out of favour, and I am just a peasant who has butchered his way to success; but if you are to ride a chariot under me, you must acknowledge my command.”

“I know that, Seti-Keph.”

“Good. I see you are not one of those young bloods who chew a grudge and can only smooth it out with blood. Neither am I, so maybe we will get along. I am a plainspoken man, as your godly father knows only too well—”

“The God-King is not my father, Seti-Keph,” Moses interrupted.

“Be that as it may, I am still a blunt man and I say my piece, for better or worse. I was upset yesterday, and if ever in the future you should be unfortunate enough to be shouldered with the responsibility of assembling and provisioning and arming and marching two thousand chariot and ten thousand foot to the end of the earth, then you will know why I was upset.”

“Please don't apologize, Seti-Keph,” Moses said uneasily.

“By all the gods, I am not apologizing! I am explaining. I spoke to you harshly, Prince of Egypt, but it was not because I bore you animosity or because you are out of favour with the God-King. I would have spoken that way to any of your brothers. I blow hot, but the heat cools quickly. That's the sort of a man I am. Now you are with me, and perhaps you will be more of a soldier than a burden?” The last was half a question. Seti-Keph had been tracing lines in the powdery earth with a twig as he spoke; his keen black eyes peered at Moses from under his shaggy brows.

“I will try,” Moses said.

“I heard you won a slave.”

“I've had slaves before, Seti-Keph.”

“Not like this one. I don't like brawlers, prince or peasant. War is something else. You don't fight with your bare hands—”

Once again, he peered questioningly at Moses, who said nothing. “I spit at them,” he went on, “with their talk of your holy kilt. You can wipe your behind with your kilt, for all that it matters to me. The gods are holy, not a kilt that a prince sits on, and I revere the gods and worship them wherever I am. You were right to comfort your man when he was hurt, and if your kilt was all the cloth you had—well, you used it. You tamed a beast and now he's your beast. But when your enemy is hurt and bleeding, I expect you to put a knife to his throat—”

Again the inquiring look from under the brows.

“—War is a butcher's business, O Prince of Egypt. It is not like life in the Great House, nor is it as good as the warmth of the mud hut where I lived as a child. It stinks, O Prince of Egypt, but like other things that stink, it is necessary. There was never a time without war and there never will be such a time. I tell you that he who makes war well and wisely has power and wealth; and he who loses, vomits in the blood of his wife and child. So we will make war well and wisely, and you may believe me that there is a lot to learn about war. I know. War served me well and I serve the God-King well; both together. In our land today, there are two orders, the high and the low-and the low live like the beasts in the field, only worse. I know, for I have lived both ways. And among the high, unless you are born of the Great House, what else is there but to be a priest, a scribe or a soldier? Out trade is a hard one and it calls for hard men. Not now, but remember my words a year from today, O Prince of Egypt, and you will find their meaning. Meanwhile, I see that you have fallen in with Hetep-Re. He knows his trade, but he is a dirty snake, so watch him.”

“I have not fallen in with Hetep-Re. He helps me, and I pay him for his help.”

“You will find that whatever you pay him, you don't pay him enough. As for driving horses and a chariot, you and your slave will learn that in time or break your necks. Now tell me, O Prince of Egypt, have you a mind for war and killing?”

“It is what the God-King wanted, so here I am, Seti-Keph. I will tell you what I have a mind for—to get away from the palace and the whole conniving stink of the City of Ramses.”

Now Seti-Keph slapped his thigh and laughed heartily. He was a peasant now; there was no gloss over the man, no manners, no veneer—and perhaps for this as well as other things, Moses found himself liking him. He was to learn later that no one becomes Captain of Hosts out of his own wit and skill without having the power to make other men like him.

“Fight like you brawl, and fight with sense and without fear,” grinned Seti-Keph, “and I will put you over a host before you are through with the black men of Kush.”

[7]

SINCE THE TEN thousand footsoldiers would come together at Karnak, on the upper Nile, they had been marshalled and dispatched from the various cities of Egypt for better than sixty days now. Each host and there could be a hundred to three hundred men in a host was the responsibility of its own captain in terms of leadership; but the manner of raising a host and equipping it varied. Karnak and Tanis were a long distance apart, and if the Kushites or the Libyans took a sudden notion to raid the rich and beautiful cities of Upper Egypt, it fell to the powerful lords of the border marches to meet their attack and thrust them back. For this reason, they traditionally built and fostered their own armed strength—and, traditionally, they were feared and watched suspiciously by the god-kings of the Delta.

Yet niggardly as these lords of the South were when it came to lending their men to Ramses for his marauding sorties into Hatti and Philistia and Canaan and Mesopotamia, they did not hold back when it came to war against Kush. They had no other enemies to compare with the dark menace of Kush; and other enemies could be defeated and broken, whereas Kush poured out of the eternal and endless forest and jungle and wasteland of Central Africa, where no man had even been and where the power of the gods of Egypt was as nothing.

So their hosts would assemble at Karnak, and also to Karnak would come levies from Giza and Memphis and Lisht and other cities of Middle Egypt. In the Delta itself, soldiers were and had been recruited from the once vigorous and numerous peasantry who tilled the thousands of acres of black and fertile soil; but of late the harvest had been thin indeed, for the peasants who came out of the army were of no disposition to go back to digging the muck, and without too much urging, they sold their land to the speculators and rich priests—who in turn set up broad plantations worked by slaves.

For this reason, Ramses had been forced increasingly to rely upon mercenaries for his footsoldiers, and was thus trapped in a vicious circle, mercenaries to make war and more war and more war to find the gold to pay the mercenaries. For this particular expedition, Seti-Keph had been forced to hire three and a half thousand footsoldiers of foreign origin, a thousand spearmen from Hatti, five hundred from Philistia, some hundreds from Libya and some hundreds of the Sea Rovers, who had magic ears when it was on the wind that war and loot were in the offing. The King of Babylon, who had sent Ramses slave women and two of his plentiful stock of daughters as princely gifts, now sent him six hundred archers at a tidy price.

So it was that from here, there and everywhere, the army was recruited and put together. It was one thing for the God-King to lift his sacred sickle and say, “My patience with Kush is finished. Now, with sword and flame, we will teach him that the gods of Egypt are not to be despised in the South.” It was another thing entirely for Seti-Keph to carry out Ramses' anger and lust for wealth in practical terms.

Full seven months before, three of the most trusted captains of Seti-Keph had been dispatched to Karnak, there to begin the organization of supply wagons, work horses and pack donkeys, and to begin to collect and store the tens of thousands of pounds of grain that would be required to feed the expedition in its march through the desert. Water was not a problem, for they would follow the course of the River Nile, but hundreds of boats had to be found or built. Nor was it possible to use any of the great fleet of river boats that plied the Nile between Karnak and the Delta, for only ten days' journey above Karnak was the First Cataract, and from there on, the boats would have to be dragged upriver as well as overland. A thousand more details would go into the expedition before it was ready for war, and all of these Seti-Keph had to decide. If victory came out of his planning, it would be known far and wide that the mighty God-King of the holy Land of Egypt, Ramses II, beloved of Re, had smitten the pagans of Kush with his hard hand; but if defeat came, it would only be known that a peasant dog named Seti-Keph had betrayed his master.

So it was that the last of the footsoldiers had taken ship for Upper Egypt before the chariots were ready to march. Whatever else was necessary to an army, in the time of Ramses, the chariot had become the weapon of Egypt—and all else was conceived only as support for the chariots. Never before had the world seen such a weapon, and indeed when the Egyptian foot soldiers first encountered it, in the time when they tried to bar the way of the Hittites, they fled in screaming fear and disorder; for it took a hardened man to stand up to a line of these thundering wooden carts with their massive four-foot wheels and their spinning, flashing axle-knives. And when the power and the productivity of mighty Egypt was combined with the inventiveness of Hatti, then the individual chariots of the hero-warriors became masses of wheeled death that nothing on earth could resist.

On the fourth day after he had spoken with Moses under the olive tree, Seti-Keph gave the order for the march to begin. He had by now assembled twenty-two hundred chariots with driver and fighter, and fourteen hundred reserve horses, which would serve as pack animals until needed for replacement.

[8]

MANY TIMES HAD Moses sailed south from the Delta into the main body of the River Nile. Like all Egyptians, he had from his earliest childhood heard reference to the river as “the good mother,” “the holy river,” “the sacred mother of Egypt” and it was difficult for him, in spite of the teaching of Amon-Teph, not to approach any journey upon the river with superstitious awe as well as excitement. He had been to Giza on the river several times, and once beyond there to Memphis and Lisht, and recently all the great distance upriver to Karnak in his mother's funerary procession.

But now he was leaving the City of Ramses and the Great House and all the memories and associations of his childhood, good and evil, for ever; for, as he told himself, who knew that he would return? He was young enough and healthy enough—and enough in love with life to think lightly of death, and the thought that he might be struck down in battle and die in far-off Kush troubled him not at all.

It must be admitted that he felt cocky about the way he had handled himself. Let the city gossip that he had blasphemed by wiping his slave's blood and dirt with his holy kilt; the fact was that he had subdued a beast of a man and tamed him, when no one else could—and if he knew men so little as to think so simply of the silence and brooding obedience of his slave, that bit of ignorance did not trouble him either. He had also, he told himself, won respect from the Captain of Hosts, and all in all, he was more anticipative and more pleased with himself than ever before in his young manhood.

The Nile was like a golden road beckoning into his future, and all the deep sorrow and pensive complexity of the past few months had been cast off. The very fact of being a part of the expedition was giving him a sense of membership, of belonging to a social unit of power and importance; and this was a feeling he had never experienced in the Great House, never so long as his memory went back. He felt—and quite wrongly—that here in this great army, it would matter little if his fellow officers knew that he was no prince of godly blood but a cast-off of a wretched slavetribe in Goshen.

Now that he felt in the process of belonging, he also sensed a driving need to belong, and he no longer fostered and cherished his own singularity. To the contrary, he was resentful of singularity and all manner of separateness—as he now felt—that had been imposed upon him; and when, the night before the morning of departure, sacrifices were held and the gods were invoked for the fortunes of the army, Moses participated eagerly, with only a twinge of conscience over Aton and those good priests he had known who had given their lives in the service of Aton. Like a boy, he would not permit himself to think about such matters, and when Amon-Teph took form in his mind's eye, Moses said to himself petulantly,