Moses (34 page)

So it could be said that when he left the city of the Kushites to journey south, he began a search and a wandering that was to be the expression of his life. Not that his life moved thereafter in any sort of direct line. He was still to taste the dregs and bottoms as well as the heights, and he was yet to know degradation and true nobility.

Still, he was different, and no longer and never again the handsome, golden child of the Great House. He who had been the highest-born prince in all Egypt had to live with the fact that he was no prince at all but a Bedouin waif; and he whose life had been sheltered and guarded on every hand had lived for almost a year and a half now with an army of dark-minded and blood-stained men. He had killed without reason in all the blood-madness of killing; he had sacked a city; he had made pillage and ruin; and like another beast, he had shared the thoughts and company of men who were like beasts.

Nevertheless, however he might scorn the Delta, it was his home and his memory; and to set his face away from it, perhaps forever so far as he knew, was no easy thing. He and Nun would go where no Egyptians had ever gone before, except those who were legends, and if he laughed at Nun's fear of the edge of the earth—where the fires of Gehenna, black flames sixty times as hot as any earthly fire, burned and seized all who came near—he could find no comfort in his own belief that the earth was round. Terror of the unknown swallowed him as well as Nun.

He had been like a child with Nun and now he became like a father to Nun. His own lonely terror was submerged in the responsibility of command—and as the terror dwindled, a sort of hard, cynical pride took its place.

They set out by chariot, travelling south with the Nile. “How far will we go?” Nun asked, and Moses replied, “As our lord, Sokar-Moses, the Captain of Hosts, has instructed me, we will journey south for a hundred days, and then, if we find nothing, we will return.” “And if we find what we seek?” “Then we will also return and bring the Host to destroy what we have found.” His flat bitterness was not encouraging, and Nun asked no more. Moses took his black Kushite staff—the same staff with which he had fought Ramses-em-Seti, and named not because it was a weapon of Kush but for its colour—and cut a tiny notch into it. So was the first day marked, and each morning thereafter he notched it.

*     *     *

For a time, they found wheel-space for the chariot, and they travelled as best they could, following the course of the Blue Nile which veered eastward from south. Each night they made camp by the riverside, lighting a roaring blaze against the highland chill and roasting fresh meat when they were able to kill a bird or an antelope. Youth and the bondage of their loneliness brought them together, and in this time they became closer and they talked a good deal. It was during these evenings that Nun began, bit by bit and almost without conscious purpose, to make Moses familiar with the tongue spoken by the desert tribes and the herders of Canaan. The language of the Kushites had defied Moses completely, but between the Semite desert tongue and Egyptian, there was a haunting and elusive relationship—as if both languages had in the long-distant past a common ancestor. Also, it was similarly inflected—which made the verb forms easy to master. The part of the two young men that clung to boyhood took pleasure in another tongue in which to cry out or berate each other, and though no one else was near, it gave them a necessary added sense of intimacy. The estrangement that had sprung up between them after Hetep-Re's murder could not persist. As the days passed, they began to smile, and then to laugh.

It was also in this time that Moses made the discovery of Nun's ancestry. It came out during one of Nun's meandering discourses on gods and ancestors—for the deeper into the mountains they went, the more Nun feared the strange gods who dwelt on the peaks. He explained to Moses that every high place had its Baal—and he reacted in fear and anger at Moses' smile of amusement. “You would do better to fear the gods,” he told Moses. In his own mind, he imagined the loss and despair he would feel should strange and vengeful gods strike down the Prince of Egypt. He could no longer bear the thought of being alone. “It is not that the Baalim are fierce,” he explained to Moses, trying to imitate his master's method of logical presentation. “They are sly and tricky and they are afraid of Nehushtan—all of them, that is, except Yavah, who is a fierce and terrible Baal.” “And who is this Yavah?” Moses wanted to know—whereupon Nun explained that Yavah was the great Baal of Midian, a notation less than meaningful to Moses, who had never heard of either Yavah or Midian.

It was plain that Nun feared Yavah, but even a fierce and terrible god was impotent in terms of the distance that separated them from the Baal's place. Nun pricked off his ancestry. There was in the beginning Abraham, or as he said it, Av-Ram, a mighty desert chief who came into Canaan in the long, long ago; so long ago that perhaps even Egypt did not exist then.

“Yet he had an Egyptian name,” Moses interrupted maliciously. “Av-Ram—could such a name be anything else but Egyptian?”

Nun snapped back that all things good and admirable were taken by the Egyptians as their own; but his desire to expound his knowledge won out over his petulance. Like all Bedouins, he liked to talk of religious dogma and complexity, a part of which was genealogy, for as with all tribes, the most distant ancestor and the god himself were hardly separable. He was not certain whether Abraham had turned into the holy serpent Nehushtan, but in any case, the next great chief was Isaac or Yitz-Hak, and the son of Yitz-Hak, in his speech, was Ya-Kob, or Jacob, whose secret holy name was Israel, or as Nun sounded it, Yis-ra-el.

As Nun talked on, the names fascinated Moses; and like the words of Nun's own tongue, they seemed to flutter upon the edge of the Egyptian language. Then the image of the serpent caught him and excited his imagination. He plumbed his memory for what he sought, staring at the flames of the fire, overcome suddenly with nostalgia for the past and with desire for memories of the past to come alive again. So reminiscing, he once again heard AmonTeph tell the tale of the serpent in the box—the serpent was Nehushtan!

Moses stared at Nun as if he had never seen him before. Nun spoke of the sons of Ya-Kob, Yo-Seph, as he said Joseph—and now Moses did not interrupt to remark that this too was an Egyptian name in its sound; in all truth, he did not hear the names at all, but asked Nun softly and desperately,

“My friend and blood brother, of what tribe are you?”

The deep and pressing formality of address startled Nun, and suddenly he became conscious of the drawn face of Moses, the firelight gleaming on the high, bony ridges. “I am of the Tribe of Levi, who was a child of Israel,” he said.

Moses nodded. The whole world embraced the two of them, crouched before their fire in the wilderness. “Are we truly brothers at that?” Moses wondered with awe.

[5]

THE THOUGHT CAME to Moses that they had been driven out of the world of man and mankind, for day followed day, and of man or his work or his habitation, they saw nothing. Not too long after they left the Land of Kush, they had been forced to abandon the chariot. The Nile had become a narrow, rushing mountain stream, pouring its white froth over rocks, churning through rapids, and leaping from ledge to ledge; and it was impossible any more to find wheel base for the broad axle of the chariot. They unharnessed the horses, loaded them with what supplies they could carry, and went on. After Moses had shown Nun the few simple tricks of maintaining his seat, the Levite rode well, and they made good time then on horseback. They had entered a region of grand, spectacular mountains, giants that rolled on endlessly to the south, and there they took their way, following the river through a series of deep and beautiful green valleys. It was the month after the end of the rainy season and the mountains were still green with such a richness of verdure as Moses and Nun had never seen before. The air was sharp and clean, the days pleasantly warm and the nights frequently so cold that they would build double fires and sleep close in the heat between the blazes.

It was a country of many animals who had not learned to fear man. Bands of baboons barked at them from the hillsides and followed them curiously. Families of lions watched them without fear, and spotted leopards lay upon rocky crags in the warm sun and observed them go by. Monkeys charged at them through the rocks and brush, screaming noisily and foolishly, and their cry was taken up in the bizarre lament of hyenas. Birds of bright plumage flew across the valleys, and the hillsides swarmed with game, from the tiny antelope that appeared to soar through the air as they leaped down the slopes, to beasts as big as horses with straight horns four feet long. White goats perched on the crags, and often in the distance they saw what appeared to be cattle of a sort, a wild breed that was wary of them.

They did not have to go out of their way to hunt, but chose their targets in the morning when the animals came to the river to drink. So little fear did the animals have of them that they were able to fell game with javelins, and since there was so much fresh meat to be had, they could conserve their precious store of bread. They also found berries in plenty and they speared fish in the river.

A lion killed a horse. The wild dogs would gather around their fire at night, so they tethered the horses close; but a lion leaped from the darkness one night as they slept and dragged down a horse. They were awakened by its screaming, and each of them grasping a javelin, they found their target in the moonlight, pinning the lion to earth with the force of their casts. The horse was dead, but the excitement of the lion-kill made them proud and cocksure, and next day they took the other horse, the beautiful yellow horse, Karie, that Moses had bought in Buto, loaded all their goods on to him, and set forth on foot. Moses was in high spirits now, full of a sense of boldness and daring and achievement, and Nun caught his mood and reflected it. Both of them had been reared in lands where lions were rare and invested with an aura of kingliness, and the pursuit and killing of lions was the sport and privilege of kings.

Two days later, they went out of their way to stalk a lion and they killed it with their javelins. But the third lion took both their casts without stopping and bore Nun down, before Moses clove its spine with his sword. Nun was unhurt except for claw marks on his chest that he would bear to his death, and they were both fortunate to learn proper respect for lions so cheaply and painlessly.

The yellow horse stepped into a snake-hole and broke his leg, and they had to cut his throat and leave him to die. It was not an easy thing for Moses to do. Karie had been his first freedom—together they had tasted the adventure of youth, and there had been as much love between them as may be between a man and a beast. The past was dying-but it was doubly hard to kill the thing he loved so. Forty-nine notches were marked on Moses' Kushite staff when they left the horse behind; from here on they would have to bear their burdens on their backs. To carry their war shields was out of the question, so they took each a single javelin, sword and dagger, laminated bows with thirty shafts apiece, and Moses his black stave, and Nun made a burden of all the bread left to them. The rest they buried, raising, a stone cairn to mark it.

The Nile forked, and they followed the bend that took the southernmost direction—and still they saw no sign of man and his works. Day after day they went deeper and higher into the soaring mountains, which began to lose their softness and became ranges of high cliffs, rock crags and towering stone peaks. And as the Nile grew narrower and more shallow each day, there dawned on them the realization that they were approaching the mysterious and legendary source of the Nile, the fearsome place from which no traveller had ever returned; and the thought depressed their high spirits—as did the knowledge that there could be so much of the world in which no human made his dwelling. So great was the distance they had come that the very idea of retracing it terrified them. Nun pleaded with Moses that they had come far enough.

“Master, this is the end of the world,” he said, pointing to the brown, forbidding peaks, their points shrouded in purple clouds. “There is the smoke of Gehenna. Must we die because your father wants us to die? Now is the time that any man of sense would turn back.”

Moses had become short-tempered and irascible, and he vented his anger on Nun because there was no one else to vent it on. “I am sick to death of your whining and snivelling and of your wretched superstition! I am sick of your Gehenna and of your rotten desert gods! Don't you think I want to turn back? it's little enough you know of men like Sokar-Moses. The God-King of all Egypt said that I must travel a hundred days, and if we return sooner than two hundred days, it will be to death. There is no returning for us, and I am lost here with an ignorant, cowardly slave!”

Nun accepted the tongue-lashing and the badge of cowardice, and that night, while lightning played among the mighty peaks and thunder shook the chasms, he sat at the fire and wept openly and unashamed. Moses now understood his terrible and uncontrollable fear, and with all his heart he desired to comfort him; but his pride would not let him apologize to a slave. Instead, he was silent, and for three days they went on in silence.

Now the Nile had become a brook, flowing through a thick jungle-forest growth that lined the bottom of the chasm they followed. Moses no longer knew whether this was the source of the Nile or simply some lesser branch. Legend held that the river had its source in some great lake of marvellous beauty, but surely this sluggish stream did not mark the outlet of a great lake. In the afternoon of the third day of silence, Moses was bitten by a snake, which he killed with his sword even as it sank its fangs into his calf. Nun gave a terrible cry, drew his dagger and shouted wildly for Moses to lie down. Moses obeyed him without thought; he was going to die, and his heart was icy-cold, a receptacle for fear. He sprawled on his stomach, wincing with pain as Nun cut the skin where the snake had bitten. When Moses twisted his head to see what Nun was doing, he saw the Bedouin sprawled at right angles to him, sucking at the open cut. That was the last thing Moses remembered, and a moment later he lost consciousness.