Moses (9 page)

The harshness of his voice was eased by the twinkle in his eyes; for in spite of all his interest Moses would have bridled. No one except the God Ramses had ever taken such a tone with him before, and if he was an unusual prince among the princes of Egypt, he was still one of them, bred and trained in the acknowledgment of his own divine origin.

“And what kind of a house is it?” Moses wanted to know.

“A granary,” Neph said.

“The first one you've built?”

Neph snorted. “No. Prince of Egypt, I am not building my first granary. I have built at least ten—but I built them in the dry desert, where common sense would suggest grain should be stored. But since the war with the Sea Rovers and since their attempt to invade from Libya, your uncle, the God Ramses, has felt that the desert granaries could be destroyed. Whereupon, he has instructed me to build granaries on the mud islands in the Delta, where they will be secure against attack.”

“In the slime out there?” Moses wondered. “In the morass? is it possible?”

“It is impossible,” Neph answered sourly, and faced back to his work. “But I am doing it,” he added. “When the God Ramses instructs, you do it, and whether it is possible becomes incidental.” He resumed his work, Moses watching him again, and after a few minutes of silence, Neph asked,

“Moses, would you like to see how we do the impossible?”

“I would, please, Neph,” Moses said eagerly.

“Then be at the palace quay before sunrise tomorrow. Be there on time, because we depart in the hour before sunrise. Now, please leave me alone. I cannot work with anyone in the room.”

[11]

IN THE MIDDLE of the night he was awake, his heart pounding with the notion that he had overslept and that Neph had left without him. He rolled out of his couch, fastened on his loincloth, thrust his feet into a pair of sandals and buckled on his silver dagger belt. Without stopping to cleanse himself or make his libation, he ran softly from his chamber and then plunged through the darkness of the palace, letting his feet find the way they knew so well. The corridors, except where they were open to the sky, or fitfully lit by the passing torch of a night guard, were like pools of black ink; and though ordinarily be would not have been at ease in the great warren at night, now he thought only of getting to the quay in time. When be reached the river terrace, he ran full into the arms of one of the guards—who drew back in surprise at the sight of a prince plunging along through the night.

“Tell me,” Moses gasped, “when will it be dawn?”

“Prince of Egypt,” said the guard, “there are four watches through the night. Mine is only the third. There are at least two hours before the light comes.” He held his torch toward the prince, consumed with curiosity but not dating to ask; and thanking him, and now walking, Moses felt his way down the stone stairs to the quay.

Here the starlight, both from above and reflected from the still surface of the great river, let him see the shape of the place, the boats tied up to the bronze rings and the boatmen sprawled out asleep on the decks and curled up in the cordage. Never before had he been out at the riverside so late at night—or so early in the morning—and the silence, the stillness, the glassy surface of the water, the lack of even a breath of wind—all of it combined to give him a sense of awe mixed with a little fear and a little excitement. Keeping his hand clenched over the pommel of his dagger, he walked softly back and forth—feeling that he was the single living, thinking creature in all the world.

But presently he began to feel drowsy, and he stretched out on the quay, pillowing his head against some hempen cargo sacks that had a tantalizing smell of black cumin and coriander. He lay there looking at the brilliant spread of stars strewn through that clear, close sky, wondering whether they were the gods or the torches of the gods or perhaps the playthings of the gods—wondering whether a man might build so high that he could look upon them and touch them—wondering dreamily about this and that; watching the course of a meteor, the thin trail of fire, and speculating whether some god had cast out a star, if there were gods, and not, as Amon-Teph and his friends said, simply one mighty force contained in the fire of the living sun. He wanted to believe Amon-Teph, because he loved him and honoured him; but if he did, then the God Ramses became only a man, and all the sombre gods of the night must die—if indeed they had ever lived—and even the spark of the divine that he himself possessed as a prince of Egypt would go out, and he would be no different from any peasant.

With all these thoughts flowing through his mind, he finally closed his eyes; and in that same moment, it seemed, he heard Neph's voice “Wake up, Prince of Egypt, for now we must go!”

Startled, he sat up—in a grey world, the river gone, and the quay hanging over an endless field of white mist. Neph stood before him, a cloak over his shoulders, and as Moses shivered in the morning chill, Neph took his cloak and placed it about the boy's shoulders. Moses tried to protest, but Neph smiled with that strange tenderness that so many men have in the hour before dawn, and shook his head. “Wear it, I am warm, and soon the sun will rise. But you will be chilled, and I don't want to bring you back sick.”

“Thank you, Neph,” Moses said, and then the engineer led him over to the edge of the quay, asking whether he had spent the night there. “But I didn't want you to sail without me.”

“Strange Prince of Egypt,” Neph thought, and asked, “Could we sail without you, Moses, when I had given my word?”

Moses was puzzled and not wholly awake, glad for the warmth of the cloak and feeling gauche and foolish. The boat was drawn up at the quay, two of the oarsmen holding it to the docking rings. It was a broad galley-barge of shallow draught, eight oarsmen on each side forward, and a little deck about seven feet square in the stern, and then the usual stern outrigger for the steersman and his long oar. On this deck, three men stood, two of them holding long, leather papyrus quivers under their arms, and the third with an armful of curious equipment, angles and tripods and folded measures and hollow brace tubes.

Moses and Neph climbed into the barge and picked their way among the oarsmen to the stern deck, Moses noticing that while the towers were slaves, they were not chained to the seats as were the seagoing galley slaves; and he concluded that in this small craft their lot was not so hard as to impel them to run away.

The barge was already moving out when he reached the deck, the oarsmen skilfully pushing off and swinging the bow out to the river and then falling into the long, even stroke that they would maintain for hours. Moses stood back towards the helmsman, away from the four engineers, who were already discussing their problems—a discussion so full of technical words that Moses could not follow it with any real sense of meaning. He could see that they were all plain-looking men, lean, with knotted muscles and short-cropped hair, disdaining even the kilts of the middle class and wearing only loincloths, leather sandals, and leather belts to support their tools and pouches.

The whole adventure excited him far more than he dared reveal. He would have liked to ask the helmsman how he could possibly steer so confidently in the mist and grey half-darkness, but he did not want to display his ignorance. He stood there, silent and happy, watching the rhythm of the oars and waiting for the first edge of the sun's disc in the dawning. They passed a fishing boat making out to the sea and Moses noticed, not without envy, how casually the engineers exchanged greetings with the fishermen.

Neph joined him and said, “Watch now, Moses, in the east over yonder,” pointing with his arm, “for any moment now, we will see the edge of the sun.” As he spoke, the sky in that direction began to lighten rapidly and a breeze from the sea broke the mist and set it running in long streamers. Lighter and brighter grew the sky, until presently an edge of fire showed over marshy islands and many-fingered water. They were entering the marsh-delta, a world in itself, broad, still wild in places, filled with innumerable islands and a labyrinth of winding waterways, undulating with papyrus and marsh grass and bulrushes, painted here and there with large patches of lilies.

Close as it was to the City of Tanis, to which Ramses had now given not only his name but an importance beyond that of any other city in Egypt, it was still another world to Moses and an unknown world as well. He had accepted the fact that his city was in the Delta, and though the river upon which it was built was called the Mother Nile, he knew that the Nile had other branches into the Delta—but he had never been in these wild eastern reaches. He had never seen the Delta this way, so wild and strange and untouched, flooded with the fiery pink light of morning, endless, without house or human being.

“Have we come far?” he asked Neph.

“Not far, Prince, but we go further—three hours more, almost to where the floodwaters cease, almost to the Land of Goshen, where the slave people live.”

“Where they live? You mean there is a nation of them there?”

“No—no, Moses,” Neph said, looking at the boy with some amazement. “You mean you don't know these things? How do you grow up, you of the divine blood—as prisoners? No, don't be angry. I'm a plain man with plain speech, and if we are to be friends, you must take me as I come.”

Moses grasped Neph's arm. “I would be your friend.”

“Better my son,” Neph thought, feeling the twinge of pain of a man who has once had and lost a son. “If you want me for a friend,” he said, “I'll be that, although I'm old enough to be your father—and you must be patient, for I have never seen a prince of Egypt before that I could tolerate, much less love.”

Moses grinned at that, and Neph noticed how sweet the boy's large-boned face could become.

“We were talking,” Neph said, “of the Land of Goshen, which lies to the east of here at the edge of the Delta. It is not a large land, but grassy—and rich; yet out own people never favoured it and will not live there. For one thing, it is unevenly in flood. The Delta is not like the rest of the river, but a living, changing thing, and the land around it floods unevenly. Sometimes in Goshen five years will go by without inundation, and then the soil, which is rich in good clay, becomes rocklike and cannot be ploughed, even though the grass still grows. And unless our Egyptian peasant can turn over the land and plant a crop, he will not abide in a place. Secondly, when the wild shepherd kings and later the cruel men of Hatti came down into our blessed land, there was no hope of protection for anyone in Goshen. So it is not a place where Egyptians like to live …” His voice trailed away. The whole sun hung above the marsh now, and he was caught and silenced by the beauty of the morning. And Moses, for once, felt with his heart instead of his head what the religion of Amon-Teph meant to those who believed. In this moment, he believed, and in the face of that wanning, beneficent ball of fire and splendour, all other gods became dark and mean and insufferable. He closed his eyes and let the sun blaze upon his face, and with apprehension and wonder prayed to Aton; but his very fear overcame him, and pulling his face aside, he demanded of Neph,

“But the slave people?”

“Ah … yes….” Neph returned to his thoughts more slowly, and for a moment Moses believed that they had both been at the same worship—a thought much too dangerous and one, therefore, which he immediately thrust away.

“The slave people,” Neph said thoughtfully. “They were desert people, wild and ignorant and superstitious, many tribes of them, but all of them speaking the same language more or less, which is like the language of the Phoenicians, only cruder. They say it was about a century ago that they first appeared. There was a terrible drought that killed all the grasslands in the desert, and when their flocks were dying, and when they themselves were little more than skin and bones, they swallowed their fears and came from the desert to beg that our frontier guards would let them pasture in the Land of Goshen. Whereupon a messenger was sent to the king of Egypt—he whose name is wiped out and whose memory is cursed—”

Moses could not help himself, and with the horrible feeling that he was speaking through some direction, he asked softly, “Why is his memory cursed, Neph, when he was good and did good; when he was just and lived in justice? His name is not wiped out. His name is Akh-en-Aton.”

The fear, the surprise and shock on the face of the engineer was the last thing Moses had expected, and as Neph's hand gripped the boy's arm, his eyes darted to the other engineers. But they were sprawled out on the deck, eyes closed, warming themselves in the morning sun, and they gave no evidence of having heard. Neph shook his head and begged Moses to forgive him the violation of touch, to which Moses replied that since they were friends now, there was to be no more talk of violation.

“You talk too freely,” Neph sighed. “Boy, will you help your enemies destroy you?”

“My enemies! You mean you know too!”

“All Egypt knows of the prince who is alone.”

“Alone!” Suddenly, Moses grasped Neph's hand. “Do you know why… if you could tell me why—”

“I would tell you if I could, Moses. I don't know. If you were only cursed, you would not be a prince of Egypt. You are also blessed in some way. If the God Ramses hates you, he also fears you. You are in some kind of balance, and I imagine it will not be long before you know. We are a people fond of mysteries, we Egyptians, too fond, I often think. And when you find this one out, it will be neither terrible nor very mysterious. That I can tell you.”

“How do you know?”

“Well—how does one know? One lives and sees and thinks, and in my case I have come to the conclusion that a man's life, like a house's structure, must obey certain rules. Don't make your life miserable, Moses, with this kind of fruitless speculation. But at the same time don't upset that balance by delivering yourself to them because your tongue wags freely.”