Moses (28 page)

Never had Moses imagined that this was the face of war, this interminable and awful marching or crawling, as it so often became, a whole day taken to move the army five miles—nor could he believe that anything worth fighting for might exist in this stark and terrifying desert, where all life ceased a dozen feet from the river gorge. As with so many others in the army and in spite of his recent exultation, he found himself becoming increasingly depressed and short-tempered with the heat, sand and monotony—given to long spells of silence and short, bitter retorts. There had been forty priests with the army, but weeks past they had decided to remain at the southernmost temple of the gods of Egypt, a small and ancient building dedicated to Amon in remote antiquity, and now the army marched in a wasteland where the gods of Egypt had no power. This sense of being forsaken combined with the heat and monotony, and tempers flared and blood was spilled daily. Sokar-Moses and his black bullwhip flayed the column like a vengeful fury, and where there were quarrels, he was merciless, not caring to hear any of the background of the dispute, but making it plain that they would fight Kush and not each other.

Perhaps more than others, the mercenaries suffered, for they had come so far that all hope of ever again seeing their homelands disappeared; they would group together and sing sad songs of the cool and lovely memories they cherished—and listening to them, Moses would reflect increasingly on the grand madness of this game of war that kings played. On his part, the situation with Nun had worsened, and he found his toleration for the slave turning to hatred. More and more implicit was the promise of murder in the looks they exchanged. If they had spoken little before, they spoke hardly at all now, Moses only to give an order, and Nun to grunt a reply.

Now the river turned north and east in a great bend, and the feeling that they must march double and triple distance increased the bitterness and depression among the men. For weeks, they had marched where there was no life except for vultures and lizards; the unvarying ration of hard, dry bread was no longer enhanced by fruit and fresh meat purchased from peasants, for there were no longer peasants or villages or fruit trees, not was there a piece of grass upon which an animal could graze. Here, instead of flooding, the river foamed and roared through a channel gouged out of the desert, and while the desert could not conquer the river, neither could the river give life any real foothold upon the desert. In the whole army, there was not an ounce of surplus flesh left; the men were hard and dry and bitter and even the horses had become skinny. When Seti-Keph took his chariot down the line of march, he nodded in grim approval, for he knew that men in such condition will fight like devils, and with the strength of devils, for little or nothing at all.

They turned south again, and when they passed the Fifth Cataract, the landscape began to change. For weeks they had been mounting slowly towards the tableland of Kush, and now the ascent increased a little. The river ran more smoothly now, and when they had passed the legendary Sixth Cataract, it seemed they had once again found the River Nile of Egypt. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the desert landscape was changing. It was no longer the hellish, sun-seared rock-and-sand surface that they had gazed upon for weeks and weeks. Little clumps of dry grass appeared. The dawning and sunset were softened by a flow of violet and pink colour, and now and again they saw in the distance herds of delicate gazelles that bounded away like feathers on the wind. It was still dry and arid country, but the days were not so hot as they had been and the nights were cool enough for a man to wrap himself in his cloak before he slept. The prevailing wind was from the south, and it had a sweet, clean taste to it.

It was now that Seti-Keph told Moses to leave the host of Hetep-Re permanently and to join him in the vanguard. Moses was glad enough to go, for the march had removed from Hetep-Re the few graces he possessed and had turned him into a snarling and bitter man—who pressed his prerogative of intimacy with Moses to the breaking point, making remarks of envy and malice so frequently that Moses wondered whether he was not intent upon provoking a quarrel between them. The truth was that physically the march was less trying for Moses and Nun than for many others. Not only were they possessed of excellent health, but they had youth and strength beyond ordinary measure—and this was gall and wormwood to men like Hetep-Re, who suffered not only the despair of wanderers beyond the age when wandering brings any fulfilment, but physical anguish as well.

Moses was astonished to see how apparently untouched by the march Seti-Keph was. Evidently, he bad long since mastered the art of conserving his strength, and though he had shared all the rigours of the journey, including a diet in no way different from that of his men, he appeared cheerful, rested and relaxed. He greeted Moses with the royal salute, touching the fingers of both hands to his eyes, and cried out warmly,

“I find you in good case, O Prince of Egypt! Do you still like our way of life—the butcher's market of warfare, as they call it?”

“I like it well, Seti-Keph, and I have had plenty of dust and mud and heat, but I have yet to see this butchery you all talk about.”

“You will have a bellyful of that, never fear. But between the two, it is the march that takes a measure of the man more than the battlefield. It is one thing to go berserk with a sword in your hand, but something else to keep your senses during the sixty days we have just seen. I like your way with dirt and monotony, Prince of Egypt, and now I want you alongside me with your chariot, as part of my own staff.”

Overwhelmed with joy and pride, Moses protested that he had done nothing to earn this honour; but Seti-Keph assured him that there would be time enough. And turning to Sokar-Moses, whose chariot paced his on the other side, he asked whether his opinion was shared?

“He's young but promising,” Sokar-Moses answered drily.

“How have your chariot and horses fared?” Seti-Keph asked.

“Well enough. The horses are skinny, but their feet are good.”

“Tomorrow, we will encamp and rest for three days,” Seti-Keph told him. “We will hold a war council, and you may join us, Prince of Egypt. The chariots will be repaired and checked and the horses will be turned out to graze—even this dry grass will be a healthy change from the small measure of grain we have been feeding them. For in so far as there is a boundary or measure to the Land of Kush, you might say that now we have entered it.”

[16]

ON THE AFTERNOON of the second day of the encampment, one of the sentries, who were stationed in a circle around the encampment, each of them some four hundred paces out on the plain, sounded the call to arms. Moses, running to be with Seti-Keph, saw Nun racing in from the plain with the team of chariot horses, astride of one and leading the other—and, even in the excitement of the alarm, had to reflect upon the coolness and efficiency of this Bedouin slave who hated him so. While Nun harnessed the team, Moses, armed with spear and shield, took his place alongside Seti-Keph and his staff, ready to fight on foot and without armour if what was approaching descended upon them too quickly. The whole encampment was in turmoil, captains gathering their hosts for action, officers roaring orders, men shouting with sheer excitement and release from the unbroken tension of months of journeying, horses catching the excitement, rearing, backing, sending their own nasal trumpeting into the wind—and among Seti-Keph and his staff, a calculated and cool observation of what the sentry had sighted.

“It's no army,” Sokar-Moses finally decided. “What do you think it is, Seti-Keph?”

The Captain of Hosts, shading his eyes and squinting over the plain, shook his head impatiently. He leaped on to a chariot, that he might see better, and then be said, “I know what that is. I've seen it before. It's a baggage train. A big one, too. When a Kushite army moves, they carry their supplies in this way, and here are their supplies, but where is the army? I see half a hundred spearmen at most—and there must be ten times that number of bearers in the baggage train.” He jumped to the ground, his short, muscular body throbbing with energy and excitement, and flung his orders in staccato rapidity: “I want two hundred chariots ready to action-fanwise, fifty on the left, fifty on the right, the rest clear at the centre, five abreast! I raise both arms—it signals the whole attack, centre and both wings to kill! I raise one arm, my left-it means gather in! My right arm for the wings to move out to circle! Let the footsoldiers and the rest of the chariots stand to case and wait orders. But keep all chariots in the clear. Meanwhile, Sokar-Moses, Atepher, you—you and you”—pointing to officers—”come with me. Shields but no spears. And Sokar-Moses, take twenty archers of Hatti and have them string their bows and stand ten paces behind us. If any weapon is lifted to us, let them shoot that man down.”

Moses was impressed by the speed with which SetiKeph's orders were obeyed, the ability of the Captain of Hosts to make decisions which appeared to require almost no thought or considered judgment. For himself, he was pleased to be with the commander, and it was with pride and pleasure that he accompanied the group of officers forward to meet whatever was coming. By now, Moses could see the approaching men clearly and his pulsebeat quickened when he realized that they were truly enough the black men of Kush.

First, at the head of the long column, marching in two files, were the spearmen, tall black men with high bonnets of feathers, yellow leopard skins cast across their shoulders, carrying round shields that were painted white, and seven-foot spears. Behind them and between their files, two black men bore a litter, and upon this, under some sort of hood or shade, a child or a woman seemed to be sitting. Moses could not makeout which, the distance still being great, but it seemed too small a figure to be a man. And behind this litter, seemingly to the horizon, stretched four lines of black men, each one of them carrying an enormous bundle of stuff of some kind upon his head.

Walking forward with the officers, Moses tried to guess what this might portend. All his fancies of war, as it would come on this campaign, were of a sudden, howling barbaric attack, and while he knew that his concepts of war were coloured by the panoply of lies that war breeds in all ages, he could not conceivably imagine that this was a hostile force coming to attack them. He could already make out that the porters were unarmed, and now he realized that the figure in the litter was neither woman nor child, but a small and very old man. This old man sat cross-legged under a canopy of woven feathers that was supported by four rods of gold. The litter was adorned with the short, furry tails of some animal, and the old man himself wore a bright cloak of yellow and white feathers and upon his head a thin circle of gold. A gold necklace and gold bracelets further bedecked him, but otherwise, except for his loincloth, he was naked. Both litter-bearers were huge men, taller than Moses, and they bore the litter and the old man without effort. On either side of him walked a black man, each with a leopard skin over one shoulder, each with a circle of gold for a headdress, each unarmed except for a dagger.

When the procession was about fifty paces away, SetiKeph and his officers halted and waited—themselves about a hundred paces in advance of the encampment, and a moment or two later, the bowmen of Hatti took their places behind them. Meanwhile, one of the two men who walked alongside the litter held up his arm, giving the signal for the procession to stop. The other unarmed man shouted a series of orders in a strange tongue. The spearmen spread out, and the porters began to lay down their bundles, one against the other, directly behind the litter. The porters were barefoot and naked except for loincloths, strong, wiry black men, and as each of them laid down his burden, he made obeisance to the old man and then went to one side to squat patiently. Moses noticed that the porters each had one ear sliced away and he concluded that they were slaves, since he had heard of similar ways of marking slaves among the barbarians.

Along with Seti-Keph, who waited in curious silence, and the other captains, Moses watched the area of bundles grow, until presently it began to give the effect of a huge quilt spreading out over the plain. The black spearmen leaned loosely upon their weapons, and the two men with the litter—they were well past middle age, Moses noticed—helped the old man to his feet. His movements were the slow, arthritic movements of old age, and he winced a bit with the pain of his joints as he stood erect. He was a very old man, past eighty years, Moses guessed, his head bald under the gold crown, his skin loose and flabby. But there was an evident and winning dignity about him as he came forward towards Seti-Keph, and his toothless smile of greeting was direct and charming. He looked from face to face with the disarming courtesy of a good host, and then he spoke in a resonant and musical voice that was at odds with his wrinkled little face.

The two men who had walked on either side of his litter had advanced with him, and now one of them said, in understandable but strangely accented Egyptian,

“He greets you with the words—peace and plenty, and may your stomachs not know the pinch of hunger. It sounds strange in your tongue, but it is our greeting, our word-embrace. I am Kudelga, a prince as you would say, and this old mail is Irgebayn, King of the Baynya, who are the people you call Kush.”

To this, the old man listened with a sort of astonished amusement, as if he were unable to accept the fact that his own son spoke this incredible tongue; and Moses, watching the king, was in turn amused by his mixture of courtly grace and down-to-earth intimacy. Finding the old man attractive, his reaction was to wonder whether Merit-Aton and her father would also like him—such had been his reaction to many things lately.

Meanwhile, Seti-Keph had stepped forward from the others and said, “I greet Irgebayn,” but with no warmth in his voice. “I am Seti-Keph,” he went on, “Captain of Hosts, commander of this army, and the hard instrument of the King above Kings, the Ruler above Rulers, the God-King of the Great House of Egypt, the god whose justice is beyond all justice, whose anger is beyond all anger, and who leaves no wrong unrighted.”