Moses (44 page)

Brokenly, Moses cried, “That's enough—and now I know! Now I know what you think of me! Worthless, cold, heartless—oh, yes, Neph, you have judged me. It's good to have things clear and open between friends! Why did you let me think—”

“Stop that!” Neph snapped. “You are twenty-three, not thirteen. You are a man—so listen to me like a man! Why do you think I kept you beside me, worked with you, talked to you, became a teacher to you and fought with all my wit and wisdom to make you look at the world with clear and open eyes? Why do you think Amon-Teph adored you so—or did you never know that he worshipped the ground you walked on? Was he only a fat old man to you? Do you think he ever deceived himself into believing that the harebrained schemes of your mother would be successful? I tell you, he did not! He loved you for your own sake, even as all the priests of Aton loved you and cherished you and overlooked all you did that was witless and irresponsible. They gave you the holiest thing on earth, their knowledge and learning, the lore of the skies and the stars, of time and the calendar, and above all the concept of one god, warm and gentle and unknowable, who sent his own son to earth to redeem us all. They gave you Aton, who meant so little to you, so occupied were you with your own hatred of the gods of Egypt and with your wars against them. And when they paid with their lives for this, beheaded and thrown to the swine, you had no tears to shed for them. Yet this I understand—and perhaps more—about you than you imagine. Have you ever thought about what this legend of Aton means? By sending down his son, Aton told us that only man can redeem man. That is why the priests loved you—because they saw something else, a hunger for justice, for right, for truth—the
macaat
that was once the glory of Egypt and is no more; they saw a little flame and dreamed that it could be nursed into a great fire. They saw that, as I saw it, as Nun sees it—”

“And it's a lie, a deceit,” Moses whispered brokenly.

“Is it? I don't know, Moses. Time will tell.”

[19]

MOSES AND NUN went to the village of the Levites a second time, and Moses told his slave that he would talk with his sister, the woman called Miriam.

The children ran to Moses; they remembered him. This time, Nun lacked the courage to tell him to set aside his symbols of rank and godhead—and Moses pointed out simply that he would not take off here what he wore in the streets of Tanis. If he was prince by edict of Ramses, he told Nun, because he feared to take off the kilt and jewels where the priests and clerks of Ramses could see him, should he come to his own people in nakedness and shame? Nun had reasons and the wisdom of caution as well, but like his master, Nun also felt that he was riding a new and strange wind that would take them where it willed.

Neph should have seen him with the children. They were not the children of love and of promise; from mothers and fathers who are slaves, there are only blows and curses and the sharing of the misery that is and the misery that is expected—so where, one might have wondered, did they keep their hunger for love and their hope that it might be returned? The tall Egyptian was different now. He wore a pleated kilt of fine white linen and the sandals on his feet were decorated with gold and silver. A thin band of gold bound his hair, and upon his breast hung a great neckpiece of beautifully worked gold links and plates, each separated from the other by a white pearl or a bead of green jade. He carried no weapons with him now, only an ivory-hafted dagger in a golden scabbard at his waist. Yet in spite of the difference, the children were not awed.

“Here is Moses of the half-name!” they called out to each other.

He sat with them and showed them his jewels and bangles and laughed with them, while the women and the old men gathered apart in deep and troubled silence, only whispering to Nun,

“Why did you lie to us? The children told us—and this is Moses of the half-name, who will some day, as they say, sit on the throne of Egypt.” “Why did you bring him here, to laugh at us in our misery?” “What have we to do with princes of the Great House?” “What does he want from us who are slaves and dirt under the feet of his father?” “We are not round and desirable, to be whores for his father. Why does he look at us as he does?”

To which, for Nun, there were no answers, except to say “He desires to talk to Miriam, the daughter of Amram.”

Miriam came to face Nun, and as he looked at her, he realized that the blood and the flesh were knit; for she had the same proud, lean look that her brother wore; the same high-bridged nose, the same long limbs. But beauty, if it touched her, had touched her only briefly. Older than Moses, her belly was loose from childbearing, her breasts flat from hunger and illness, her face pocked with disease, pinched with hunger, drawn with frustration. Her mouth was thin and tight to lock in her sorrows and lost hopes, and her uncombed, lustreless hair was tied back with a string of old cloth.

Now fear took hold of her. “What does he want of me?”

“Only to talk to you. Why are you afraid of him? He is my master, and I know him. Look how the children are gathered around him! Do they run to a bad man?”

“I have done nothing. I tell you I have done nothing. What does he want of me?” A thought occurred to her, and she cried out, “Where is my daughter? Hide her!” Her daughter, a thin child of fifteen or so, had been standing only a few paces away. She stepped forward now, trying to smile to reassure her mother, who slapped her across the face and cried, “Whore! Would you go to the king's bed—to the whoremaster of the whole world! First I would see Nehushtan swallow you alive!” The child fled wailing to the mud houses, and Nun put in,

“Miriam, daughter of Amram, believe me, for I swear it on Nehushtan and the Holy Ark that contains his presence, this prince of Egypt means only good and no harm. He doesn't want our women or our children. There is nothing to fear from him.”

“Then why does he come here?”

“Because his heart goes out to our people and to their suffering,” Nun told her. “Because he has seen our tears and heard our cries of misery. Because he has watched us labour and die.”

“What is it to him?”

“This is for only him to say. Let me bring you to him, Miriam, daughter of Amram.”

She followed Nun, her shoulders bowed with the inevitable, and he took her aside to the well and the palm trees. Moses left the children and came to Miriam and Nun, and when he was close to them, Miriam fell upon her face in the dust, lying there and begging,

“Prince of Egypt, we are slaves, we are nothing, we are the dirt of the ground. Have mercy on us. I have only one daughter, I hold her to my bosom, she is my whole life. My husband, Epher, labours for the glory of the God-King, but there is no strength left in his loins. Two sons I lost in childbirth, and my father and mother are dead. Even my brother was taken as an infant by the god for sacrifice—and how much more must I suffer! Leave my daughter to me and I will lay down my life for you. I will be your slave. I will go out in the streets of Tanis and lay with men to bring you money. Only leave my daughter to me.”

Moses was unable to speak, throat and heart choking him; and as he lifted Miriam to her feet, Nun said, not without annoyance,

“Woman, take hold of yourself 11 told you he doesn't want your daughter and he means no harm to you!”

She stood before Moses, her coarse, sacklike dress covered with dust, splotches of dust on her face, grimy where the tears had mixed with it, her lips trembling; and Moses said,

“Do not fear me, Miriam, please do not fear me.”

“I am your slave, O Prince of Egypt.”

“I am Moses,” he said gently, “who was born to Jochebed, who was taken to wife by Amram, the Levite. I am the child who was put in an ark and cast into the waters of the river. I was lifted out by the mercy of Enekhas-Amon, a princess of Egypt, and by her I was taken to the Great House in Tanis to be her son. You, my sister, are a slave, to chew the bitter cud of slavery, but by some fate which I cannot understand, I eat the food of the God-King and wear the linen of Egypt. I have come here because a man who is torn from his people and his memories, must either find them again or be a homeless wanderer for ever. So dont be afraid of me. We are brother and sister—”

As he spoke, he watched her face and realized that there was no connection between them, no comprehension of a statement so fantastic and unbelievable that to her it could only register as some strange and cruel mockery, as mysterious in its meaning as were a thousand and one other mysteries of the terrible, beautiful, cruel and powerful Land of Egypt. His heart went out to this plain, dirt-stained and work-worn woman as it had never gone out to anyone before, opening with love and a compassion that saw and embraced all the ugliness of the life of these people, the dark and barren ignorance, the vile superstition, the truncated hopes and blocked horizons, the meanness, the selfishness, the ignominious brand of slavery and degradation. That he and Nun were also of the same blood did not leaven his despair; and the thought in his mind that he would bend and kiss this woman, his sister, was blocked by the knowledge that such an action would terrify her and make the puzzle even more unanswerable.

It was with a sense of defeat and despair that he took a gold bracelet from his arm and gave it to her. She held it in a trembling hand and whispered,

“Are you taking my daughter now, O Prince of Egypt?”

“Let us go—quickly,” Moses said to Nun.

Nun paddled the papyrus boat and watched his master weep. Not since the climax of the great battle in Kush had he seen Moses shed tears, but now the tears flowed freely, the Prince of Egypt's body racked with sobs, with the deeprooted grief of man.

[20]

THESE DAYS, NEPH lived at his project, ate and slept there and, as Moses knew from the times he was with him, often awakened in the middle of the night and went to look at the work in the light of the desert moon. It was not easy for Moses to comprehend the fascination and spell exerted upon Neph by the colossus, for Moses could only guess at the power of the wedding between a builder and his work. He knew that Neph hated and despised Ramses, perhaps more than he himself did—for the depth of feeling that had existed between Neph and Amon-Teph was only now being revealed to him—and he also knew that Neph had only contempt for the ego that would perpetuate itself for ever as a giant mass of stone.

But given that, Neph could discard the meaning and purpose of his work and immerse himself in the problem. The purpose mattered, but the problem was all; and Moses had come to understand that this grave, ascetic man burned with a fierce, unrelenting passion to know, to discover, to reveal another little bit of the truth, to demonstrate a new law of mechanics, of mass, a new possible way to cope with the impossible. He had once watched Neph solve a problem that no other engineer in all Egypt could unravel. Ramses had taken a notion to build an obelisk on a pinnacle of stone which the weather and time had separated from the Nile escarpment. The pinnacle, which was seven feet lower than the edge of the escarpment and at least thirty feet apart from it, was too slender to permit the building of any bridge that might carry the great cut stones that would form the obelisk, since Ramses had specified that the pinnacle and the obelisk should form a solid union: For months, the engineers on the job pondered the problem—until at last Ramses impatiently summoned Neph from the granaries he was constructing. Moses had gone with Neph, watching the engineer scribble endless diagrams on bits of papyrus—and when they arrived, he had the solution.

Neph ordered a huge mast of cedar to be brought up the Nile to the escarpment, where it was mounted upon a stone swivel. One end of it was lashed to the base of the obelisk; and on the other end of it, great bags of woven rope were attached. These bags were filled with stones until the weight of them made a balance with the base stone.Then the cedar timber was gently put into motion, swinging in a circle on the stone pivot. When the base stone was over the pinnacle, the bags were lightened until the mighty piece of limestone settled into place.

It was so simple that no one thought Neph either a great innovator or a great hero; but Neph himself was drunk with the achievement, with the knowledge that he had solved a new problem, done something that no one had ever done before. So it was with the colossus in the desert—a mass of stone higher and more imposing than any figure of a man in all the known world.

He sent a message to Moses, telling him that the raising of the sections had begun and asking him to come and see it; and Moses recognized this as in effect something of a greeting, an embrace, Neph saying, “Come and look at my own vanity, for all men preen themselves and wear their pride for all to see. Soften your anger.” But there was no anger to soften, and since returning a second time from the Land of Goshen, Moses had longed for the presence and comfort of Neph, for his sober counsel and for his ability to relate a moment of time to all of time. Nun too was relieved that the message had come, for since the incident with Miriam, Moses had not set foot out of Neph's house but had lived tightly with his misery, leaning morosely and silently on the sill of the window that looked out over the Nile and the marsh islands of the Delta.

They had bought a new chariot that Nun was eager to try, and two fine, strong horses from Philistia, but the horses remained stabled and the chariot idle in the dust and sun. Now Nun smiled happily with his good memories, and sang Levite chants as he greased the axles and polished the bronze handrails of the chariot. The horses pranced and reared as he brought them to harness, and he called out to Moses,

“Tell me, O master, is it not like old times? I only have to close my eyes to hear the camp waking up around us, the men grumbling and swearing at each other, the fights breaking out among the Sea Rovers, who must fight among themselves until they could fight in earnest, the captains shouting, each one louder than the next, and that great bull of a Sokar-Moses with his black bullwhip. I tell you, master, I do not think there is a man in the world I am afraid to match my strength with, but I would think twice and three times before I got into a scuffle with Sokar-Moses. Now what? Tell me—shall I throw some javelins into this pretty wagon and we are on our way to Kush?”