Moses (39 page)

“I would imagine the gods were hardly pleased with Pro-me-tus,” Moses observed.

“No—they were not pleased,” Neph said thoughtfully. “According to the Sea Rovers, they chained Pro-me-tus for ever to a rock, and there the birds tear his flesh and there the sun burns him and scars him. It's an interesting fable, since we Egyptians do very much the same to any among us who gives fire—so as to speak—to his fellow man. Yet somehow it seems to me that we are never as bad and as unrepentant as the gods we make for ourselves.”

“And even my good friend Neph, who is wise and practical, believes in the gods,” Moses smiled. His smile was a warm and generous thing, and here was the first time on this trip that Neph had seen it. Neph shrugged and smiled back. “Distinguish, O Prince of Egypt, between wisdom and the desire for it. First things first. You have still not told me what wisdom you sought in your long journey south and what wisdom you found.”

“Precious little, except for the hocus-pocus of an old witch-doctor called Doogana.”

“Who I was happy to see the last of,” Nun put in. “I don't like magic, and I don't like old men who can read your mind. I have enough trouble trying to understand my own few thoughts without worrying about someone else's digging in them. But I tell you, Egyptian, your story about Pro-me-tus is not so strange. We have a tale among our own people of how at one time man was naked and happy—perhaps because he was too ignorant to be unhappy. He ate the fruit of the trees and knew no shame, but there was one succulent fruit, the fruit of knowledge, that was forbidden to him by Nehushtan. But Nehushtan came to him and tempted him to eat the forbidden fruit, and when he had eaten it, Nehushtan punished him by sending him out of the good land into the desert. Thus we children of Israel became desert-dwellers—”

“Nehushtan,” Moses nodded, “is as unreasonable and as stupidly vindictive as any other god. You see, Neph, I have no more love for him than for Osiris, although I suppose I should. We have been speaking the truth here, with nothing withheld. If I am an impostor with everyone else, I can't be with you. Like Nun here, I am a Levite—who had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you look at it, to be offered as a sacrifice to this same Nehushtan at a moment when Enekhas-Amon desperately resented her childlessness. So there, once and for all, is your prince of Egypt.”

“I have known all this for a long time,” Neph nodded. “Amon-Teph told me; he asked me to show you the Levites in their bondage, so that you would never envy the people whose blood you carry. They were the people you saw on the island, building the granary.” He paused and watched Moses' bewilderment. Then Neph said, “Whether he was right of not, I don't know, O Moses of the half-name. He and your mother dreamed that you would one day become the God-King of all Egypt, and then restore Aton to his throne above all other gods.” He shook his head, an expression of sudden sadness passing over his face. “No—not Egypt or Aton for you. You are a man now, Moses, not the boy who went away. You have seen war and you have known love and loneliness and guilt. Some day you will know anger—”

“And then?” Moses whispered.

Neph shrugged. “We will see.”

[13]

LONG AND SLOW and gentle as the journey down the River Nile was, it came to its end at last, and Neph's barge shipped its oars and scraped against the stone wharves of Old Tanis, the City of Ramses. To the dock-workers, the sailors, riggers and fishermen, the chandlers and merchants, the spare, grey-haired figure of Neph was familiar enough, but no one saw or recognized the Prince of Egypt in the tall, wide-shouldered and scarred soldier who accompanied him; and as for Nun, he walked no longer like a slave, and for all of his beard and braided hair, his striped kilt and the firm set of his massive shoulders marked him more as a Babylonian or Canaanite than a desert tribesman.

To Moses, leaning on his black Kushite stave and allowing the emotions of this homecoming to flow through him, the place had dwindled—it lacked the size and grandeur he remembered. Everything was less massive, less glittering, less impressive—and he was shocked by his awareness of stench and filth. His memories had not included the litter of fish heads and scales on the docks, the violent motion and shouting, and the nauseating smell of the place. Even the Great House of Ramses, its walls looming a few hundred yards up the river, was in no way so gigantic as his memories of it—and when he remarked upon this to Neph, the engineer nodded and said he knew the feeling well. It was less a physical change than a mental one, for even in the greatest of palaces the horizon is narrow and blunted, whereas the land to the south was limitless, with mountains as high as the sky. The very fact that he was back here once again made the recollection of those spaces and distances more awesome to Moses, and he could not shake off the feeling that a part of himself had been lost and left in the tangle of mountains where the Nile had its sources. How clearly he could picture Doogana smiling at him so knowingly. “What happens to a wanderer?” Moses asked Neph. “Does he ever come home?” And Neph answered ruefully that wanderers were those who sought their home—not those who left it. The cryptic intent was not lost on Moses, and when Neph asked him how he felt, he replied, “I am a stranger here.” Neph wondered where Moses would not be a stranger, yet there had once been a place to come home to, the white house over the cataract; but that was no more.

During the trip down the river, Moses had learned a good deal about Neph. He heard the story of the girl Neph had once married, who had died in childbirth—as Neph tried to ease the hurt of Moses with his own hurt. “You never possess,” he told Moses then. “For us, as for all men, there is only change, and if something is good and beautiful and we can look at it and be with it for even a little while, then that is enough.” Moses asked bitterly, “Even for a day?” “Even for a day, my son.”

For years after his wife's death, Neph had lived in his studio in the Great House. His wants were few. He ate the fare of the maintenance men at their common table and he spread his sleeping pallet on the floor. More often than not, he spent his nights at the various jobs. But with Moses gone and with Amon-Teph and the other priests of Aton dead, the Great House became intolerable, and he bought a house for himself at the river's edge above the palace.

It was there that he took Moses and Nun when they left the barge. The house was a simple structure of whitewashed mud brick, containing five rooms, a porch for eating and an outhouse for a kitchen. The roof, which was reached by a staircase on the outside, was floored with fragrant cedarwood, so that it might be used for sleeping in the hot weather, and aside from a garden of olive and fig trees, the roof was the only vanity the house possessed. “You would think,” he remarked to Moses, “that having built so many houses for others, I would put my experience to work and build something more elegant than this for myself. However, like yourself, I have yet to come home, and this serves my purpose.” But, as he told Moses, he had hoped that some day they would share the place, and at least it contained enough rooms for the requirements of privacy. His staff was small but adequate, a cook, a houseman and a gardener. Moses would have made no moral judgments had Neph kept a slave girl or two as concubines, for the practice was common among unmarried men and not uncommon among married men; but he was pleased that this was not the case.

The day after they were installed in the house, Neph had to return to the desert, where his men were at work on the colossus of Ramses. Though Neph had assured Moses that all in the house was his, the momentary poverty of the prince placed both him and Nun in a difficult position. He could not wear Neph's clothes, and during his time at the inn, he had lost all that he and Nun carried, gold and jewels and weapons too. Not even a dagger was left to him now, not even a pair of sandals to replace the ones he wore—which were falling to pieces. He had to be shaved with Neph's razor, and unless he desired to go naked, to wear one of Neph's kilts when his was being washed. To someone who in all his life had never questioned the availability of wealth and who had never been denied the means with which to satisfy any need that gold might fulfil, it was an interesting but irritating situation.

In any case, he was indulging a fantasy to pretend that he could live here in the City of Ramses without revealing his presence, and after two days of loafing in the garden, unwilling to venture forth on the streets in his tattered condition, he decided that he would go to the palace and talk to Seti-Moses, steward of the Great House and watch-dog over half the wealth of Egypt. He went alone, without Nun, full of the bittersweet of childhood memories as he approached the gates of the enormous building—and both amused and annoyed by the reaction of the officer of the guard when he was recognized. “It is not as if you are yourself here, O Prince of Egypt,” the man said wonderingly, “but someone like yourself and reminding me of yourself.”

The officer of the guard, as Moses knew, was an unproven bastard son of the God-King, and thereby a degree below the proven bastards, who swarmed and grew in the palace itself. His godly manner was diluted with obsequiousness, yet he was dubious and curious concerning this already legendary prince of the half-name, supposedly the only true son of the godly children of Seti I, father of Ramses—and, as gossip had it, hated and feared by his royal father for his great strength, his devilish skill in battle and his demonic temper. All unknown to Moses the years of his absence had created a legend and image of himself. The taming and subduing of Nun, the slave, had been embroidered beyond recognition, even as his blasphemy of the sacred kilt had become a dangerous defiance of the gods. Rumour had it that three of his brothers had died by his own hand, that scores of his royal sisters had given birth to his bastards.

Nor did the living presence demean the legend. The Royal Guard was composed of the youngest sons of the noble houses of Egypt, and for some reason homosexuality had become the fashion among them. The pampered, plump, overfed young men were preened in a manner that had become traditional: their armour and shields were faced with gold, and under their golden helmets they rouged their faces and painted their lips. Now they stared, with a mixture of distaste and respect, at this large-boned and lean man who loomed over them. Bare of gold and jewels, they saw him as one whose social defiance was the equivalent of nakedness. His threadbare kilt and disintegrating sandals mocked their finery, and his great shock of black hair, threaded through with grey, crudely cut to length but untouched by the skill of a real barber these many years now, gave him a wild and threatening aspect, all in keeping with the stories told about him.

Moses was indifferent to them, and to the officer of the guard. He said that he desired to see Seti-Moses, the steward, and that he would wait for him on the high terrace, to which he walked without another word. Was he a stranger here too, he wondered? He stood on the terrace, looking down into the courtyard where he and the royal progeny had exercised at weapons for so many years. A new generation of children were standing with rigid and trembling arms, loosing their arrows at the targets. A younger man trained them, and Moses wondered whether old Seti-Hop was dead. The memories returned like disconnected parts of a story someone had told him, rather than as events in which he himself had participated, and he found himself disturbed by the vagueness of it. Where was Amon-Teph? Where was his mother? He tried to bring Enekhas-Amon to life and being in his memory, but her face and voice and form remained nebulous.

Now he saw people in the gardens looking up at him and pointing to him; news travels like a shout. Suddenly he was overtaken by a great and lonely nostalgia; though he stood in the sun, the sunlight of childhood was gone for ever, and he experienced a brief but overwhelming longing to be like others. Let Neph talk—Neph was Egyptian; Neph belonged; amid justice or injustice, rebellion or acceptance, Neph was of the land. He, Moses, was a pretender, a stranger, a Levite, claiming, with the pathetic pride of the landless Bedouin wanderer, to descent from some desert herder named Israel. Shame hid his origin; shame would always cloud and confuse it. Amon-Teph had advised Neph to take Moses to the slave people. Let him look at the filthy, crippled mockery of human beings that had given seed to him, and then he would never know regret for being parted from them for ever. How contemptuous of Amon-Teph and Neph, yet how hard to blame them! Where was the nation anywhere that did not spit out the word
Bedouin
like a curse. They come and they go; their home is nowhere, and the dirt of the desert is on them. They came once, long ago, begging for food, and they remained to be slaves. What is a Levite? He will put a knife in your back; he is ignorant but crafty and shrewd—and withal superstitious and degraded, with a snake for a god. Nehushtan vomited on to the back of a turtle, and lo, man appeared. And this was he, himself, Moses, the whole heart of the jest contained in the fact that not only had he been raised as a prince, but all Egypt whispered that he was the prince among princes, the child of a royal brother and sister in the ancient manner.

Lost in his thoughts, he only now realized that Seti-Moses was crossing the terrace towards him. If the chief steward had changed, it was only to increase his substance, his stomach more enormous than ever, his shanks ringed with bracelets of fat, his arms quivering with their overlay of obesity. He walked more slowly and puffed more, but his tiny eyes had lost none of their shrewdness, and it was with a calculating and thoughtful glance that he measured Moses. In the large, prominent features of the Prince of Egypt, the high forehead and deep-set eyes, the highbridged nose more hawklike than ever, the jutting cheekbones over which the brown skin stretched so tightly, the wide, fleshy mouth and the sharp chin, Seti-Moses saw nothing of either the God-King, Ramses or his sister Enekhas-Amon; and he became more convinced than ever that Ramses' delusion that this was his natural son was completely without foundation. There was little that went on in the Great House that escaped Seti-Moses, and he too had heard it whispered how this man, as a child, had been dragged from the River Nile, where he had been cast by the slave people. Yet, like others, Seti-Moses was a prisoner of his own contempt for the Bedouin tribesmen of Goshen, the wretched, inferior creatures who toiled for Ramses. More likely, as he often thought, the tall and arrogant prince of the half-name had originated in the region of Karnak and carried not a little of the blood of Akh-en-Aton, the hated of the gods. For while the physical resemblance was not with Akh-en-Aton, the face was a face of Karnak.