Moses (43 page)

Another old man now pushed his way among the women and faced Nun, and placed his approval upon him with an embrace of his skinny arms. He was, as he explained, Nephi, brother to Ephala, the father of Nun. Ephala had died two years ago, he informed Nun; he had slipped or fallen out of sheer weariness from a scaffolding, where he was carrying bricks. His baby brother, Ephala was, the child of his mother's age—even as he, Nephi, had been the child of his mother's youth. Thus he embraced Nun, who was alone, his mother dead of worms a month later, his sister dead in childbirth, his brother dead of the fever that had swept through them the year before. “Life is burden and misery,” the old man intoned with sorrow, and the women began to weep. They wept because Nun was an orphan, because his own eyes remained dry and thoughtful, and their weeping rose in a passion of grief at their own lot. They all kissed Nun and they took him back to the shade of their hovels, leaving Moses as forgotten as if he had never existed.

But the children remained with him, and since his slave had been welcomed and embraced at last, they accepted the master. They crowded around him as he walked towards the village, and when he sat down in the shade of one of the houses, his back against the mud wall and facing him a stretch of gardens where the Levites attempted to grow some crops with almost no irrigation, the children stilled the last of their fear. Skinny and scabious they were, but also beautiful, with their long brown eyes and their silken black hair. The oldest among them could have been no more than ten or eleven years old, perhaps some of the girls a little older, and Moses realized that their childhood was brief; older children were taken to work with the labour gangs. Where were the men of the tribe now, Moses asked them? But they were vague as to work and direction; the men would return at sunset; they were more interested in his shining hunting knife, and when he demonstrated that the polished iron of its blade was sharp enough to slice a hair he plucked from his head, they looked upon him as a magician. They had never seen iron before.

Among themselves, they chattered in their own language, but with Moses they used the same sharply accented Egyptian that Nun spoke; and to Moses it was fascinating and enjoyable to talk with them. The truth of the matter was that never before had he put himself in such a relationship with a group of children. He was annoyed with himself, that he had allowed Nun to persuade him to put away all his trappings and jewels—they would have made gifts for the children; and he told one little girl that he would bring her a necklace of pearls to put around her neck. She did not know what the word
pearl
meant, and when he explained, they all took it as a great joke. He strung his great war bow, and they took turns trying to bend it, and then murmured with awe when he drew the string to his check. The little girl he had promised the pearls to crawled into his lap and asked him what his name was.

“Moses,” he answered.

They all giggled. “Oh, Egyptian,” the little girl said. One of the boys was bolder and said, “No one has a name like that.”

Another put in, “Moses is half a name. What is the rest?”

“That's all there is,” Moses laughed.

“Then what should we call you?”

“Are you my friends now?”

They all nodded seriously but one, who wanted to know whether they could be friends with an Egyptian. Moses said he thought they could be because he was a different kind of Egyptian. “Is that why you have half a name?” He nodded, and then they asked him what kind of Egyptian he was, and he told them that he was a prince of the Great House. It was the greatest joke of all, and the children shook with laughter and delight, for they had never met another man who said such things, even to make them laugh. But they still demanded to know what they should call him, and he answered them,

“Call me Moses of the half-name, for that is what people without fear call me—”

So he was hardly aware of Nun's absence, and the time passed and the shadows of the afternoon grew longer. When he heard Nun's voice he stood up, and then when Nun appeared with some of the women, the children scattered as if they had done something wrong. Nun announced with assumed obsequiousness,

“I was too long, O my master. Forgive your slave.”

Moses nodded, and together they departed. As they walked back the way they had come, Moses asked Nun,

“What did you tell them about me?”

“I told them that you were a captain of chariots who was now resting and hunting in the marshes for amusement. I told them you were an easygoing master, and because I had fought well in the wars, you had promised that I could see my people.”

“Are these all the Levites?”

“There is another village not far from here, but here I was born. We were a great tribe once and we still boast a proud heritage, but now how many of us are left? Eleven or twelve hundred at the most, and we die quickly, even as slaves die.” His voice was full of resentment, and Moses asked him, almost apologetically,

“What did you tell them my name was?”

“I gave you the name of that old priest you talk about so much, Amon-Teph.”

“I told the children my name was Moses.”

“Oh?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that even a wise man can be a fool,” Nun blurted out, and Moses suddenly turned on him and cried,

“You forget you're a slave, Bedouin!”

“I forget,” Nun whispered. “Forgive me.”

They did not speak to each other again until their boat approached Neph's landing at Tanis. Then Nun offered, half-hesitantly, the information that the woman named Miriam was the sister of Moses. Moses shrugged. It meant nothing, and he could not connect the acid-tongued, bitter and hostile woman he had seen and heard, to himself.

[18]

HE TOLD NEPH of his trip to Goshen, and he said, “I am coming to the end of something. I hope it isn't my life.” To which Neph answered,

“How old are you now, Moses?”

“Not far from twenty-three years.”

“The oldest time of youth, isn't it?” Neph smiled. “Now you are at the moment when you have lived for eternity, and you must cherish that, because it will never return. From here on, the days and the years move faster and faster, and soon you will ask where is yesterday, while today slips unheeded through your fingers, and you will understand what is always so difficult for us Egyptians to understand, that there is always an end of something and a beginning of something. Don't clutch too hard, boy, and don't pity yourself.”

“I don't pity myself,” Moses protested.

“I think you do,” Neph disagreed, still smiling to take any hurt out of his words. “Do you never tell yourself that you have seen all there is to see and suffered all there is to suffer? You have loved and lost, and you have seen war and slaughter and the death of a great nation. You saw an evil man murder your mother and teachers, and you have been with the noblest as well as with the most degraded of mankind. You have ventured to go where perhaps no Egyptian ever went before, and you saw the holy Mother Nile dry up to a trickle. That is a good deal, Moses, but not all—the great, terrible pain that life judges us with, you have not yet tasted. If this is an end, it's a beginning—as with our old, old Egypt, which thoughtless people deem to have lasted for ever, never giving thought to how many times it perished and rose again from the ashes. Now tell me, as you went among the Levites, did you have it in your heart to return to them?”

“That puzzled me most,” Moses said.

“Yes?”

“I stood aside. I watched, and I didn't care. I thought I would be moved greatly, and that something knowing would pass between us, but that was not the case. I told you the story of how Seti-Keph took me to the house of Aton-Moses, the white house that you built on the escarpment. When I saw it—just seeing it and no more—my heart was filled with so much joy and expectancy that I wanted to weep. I felt that finally I had come home, and there was nothing like that feeling when I went to the Land of Goshen.”

“In the first case,” Neph answered kindly, “you were not yet nineteen years old, and now you are twenty-three. What happens at nineteen can never happen again, as you know, Moses. And also, let us remember, the house of Aton-Moses typified all that was best in Egypt, the pure worship of Aton, not as a sun-god but as the source of all life and beauty. In the house of Aton-Moses, sweet reason prevailed, and it was full of the heady wine of scepticism and doubt—and there you found a lovely woman who was a joy to look at, to speak to and to be with. But it was not the world, Moses; it was a dream, a retreat, a pretend-game that Egypt's past was not the past and that Egypt's dead were not dead. No—such fancies and dreams are not for you and me. We are plain people, and our feet are dirty with the good mud of Mother Nile, and even if we found such a white house on a cliff, we would not be happy there. Aton-Moses used to berate me with my willingness to bend my skill to any nonsense and conceit that Ramses dreamed of—to build monuments, tombs and temples for fat priests to store away what they stole from the people—while my dream of a dam to harness the Nile was tossed out like so much rubbish. But that was because, for all his wisdom, he never comprehended that unless you are a part of the world of men, your life has neither meaning nor justification in any full sense. I am a builder and I must build—that is essence.”

“And what am I?” Moses wondered aloud. “You were already learning your trade when you were a child.”

“I think you have another trade, Moses of the half-name,” Neph nodded, a trace of a smile, thoughtful, speculative, on his weathered brown face. Almost surprisingly, Moses became aware of the nest of wrinkles that cradled his dark eyes, the deep lines on his cheeks and the whitening of his close-cropped hair. How old was Neph now, he wondered? He had never thought overmuch of the difference in age between Neph and himself, and now he was trying to recall when they had first met. That day in the bare, light-drenched studio where Neph stood over his drawings-was that nine or ten years ago? Then Neph would be close to fifty years of age now—old, as age went in Egypt of that time; and for all his wisdom and thoughtfulness, the ultimate knowledge had eluded him. No answers were his to tell; no mysteries his to reveal—

“A different kind of a trade,” Neph went on. “We are very different, Moses of the half-name, for it seems to me that I was always much as I am now; but in you there is a process at work, something else. You move in leaps and bounds, and sometimes you seem to be as witless and wild and unpredictable as any young blood out of the Great House. And then, the next moment, there shines out a quality that makes men love you and turn to you. We live in a time that makes me feel, when I am depressed and miserable, that here is the end of all goodness and hope—for under the stone and the gold, Egypt is dying, not going down to defeat before an enemy, to rise up again as in the past, not tearing herself open with civil war, so that the wounds may heal cleaner and better as they have in the past—but being sucked dry of all her blood and strength by these pigs of the House of Seti, who will leave only an empty shell and memory of all we have been. So it is the end of a time, an epoch and a whole world, and maybe that is the way it was all ordered, the way it must be. Amon-Teph and Enekhas-Amon raised you to be a king, and who knows that they were so wrong?”

“That I know, Neph,” Moses laughed. “I tell you I would take my dagger and stick it in my heart before I'd ever sit on the throne of Ramses in the Great House. I know the Great House too well. Ramses hinted that it could be mine; he flattered me by comparing me with his sons—and whichever unlucky one it is, he will have a hundred siblings waiting to put a knife between his ribs. Let Ramses reap his harvest! If Egypt must turn to a nameless Bedouin, a slave-born Levite, then may whatever gods there are weep for Egypt.”

“Only a few of us weep for Egypt, Moses—not the gods, who have no hearts, but plain men with eyes to see and ears to hear. But Egypt is not the world, and there are other thrones and different lands. Listen to me now, for these are strange things we speak of and things men say to one another rarely. I am more than twenty-five years older than you, and you are as much of a son to me as my own blood would be. That is why I kept you near me when I could and endured your petty stubbornness, your recklessness, so unworthy of you, your wild humours, your fights and quarrels, your childish pride and boastfulness, which you would cover up with false humility, your sense of being superior, born of the gods, which you denied with words and lived and practised at the same time, going among the plain, poor, hard-working people of Egypt as if they were dirt and now and then condescending to bend your stiff neck an inch or two. No—listen to me, for I haven't said this before and I won't say it again. Remember how you found Nun, a story all Egypt knows now, a prince fighting a chained slave—and put yourself in Nun's place. Would you be so ready to forgive and love? Yet he does—because all this is only one part of you. Yet when will you put it away? You went to see the place of the Levites—and yourheart was like a piece of ice. Who put the ice there? Whose heart is it, yours or another's? The Levites are enslaved to me. I bring them to a job to labour with stone and bricks, and I watch the overseers spur them on with the bullhide whips. This is the way it is and I know of no other way it can be, but I don't close my heart to it. I let a part of me cry out for men in such toil and hopelessness, because if I closed that part I would stop being a man. Did you see nothing in the Land of Goshen? Does it mean nothing that your blood is their blood? You are as strong and tall and fair and blessed as any man in Egypt—had you no tears to weep for your brothers and sisters? Do you think that some god blessed you and damned them? Couldn't you look at them and say—There go I, Moses, but for a freak of fortune?”