Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  “Are you jealous, then?”

  Miriam glared. “I am glad for him. But what use am I, the last of all his daughters, when he has menchildren to prove that he’s a man?”

  “Well,” said Nofret, “for one thing, you’re the eldest who’s still alive, the one who’s known him best. You loved him enough to let him die to Egypt. You’ve pleased him in no little degree since you came to him in Sinai.”

  “What, I, the one who turned on him after he was gone, and brought back the old gods? I, the bitter one, the one whose face can sour a festival?”

  “You, the clear-eyed seer, the mirror of his god.”

  “You sound,” said Miriam, “exactly like Leah.”

  Nofret blinked.

  “She rallied me endlessly,” Miriam said. “Rebuked me, remonstrated with me, made it abundantly clear that I was a self-pitying fool and a waster of the god’s gifts. Of which she said I had many. I never saw them, or knew what they were. In the end I think she despaired of me.”

  “Hardly,” said Nofret, “if she made you her successor.”

  Miriam’s mouth twisted. “That was her revenge on me for being so intransigent.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nofret said.

  “You may think as you please.”

  “Why, thank you, your majesty,” said Nofret.

  Miriam regarded her in incredulity too perfect even for anger. “Will you never forgive me,” she asked at last, “for having been your queen?”

  “Never,” said Nofret.

  Miriam pondered that: her eyes were dark, turned inward. After a while she nodded as if in agreement. She lay down, her back to Nofret, and wrapped herself again in blankets.

  Nofret did not know what she was feeling. Not satisfaction, she did not think. Certainly not regret. She had seen wounds pierced when they had begun to suppurate, the evil pouring out of them till the clean blood ran. Then the wounded one recovered—unless the lancing came too late, when at least he died in less pain and squalor than if he had been left alone.

  She could hope that Miriam would not die of the truth; that she might heal, if only a little. Her wound was old and very deep. Deep enough that scars had thickened over it, but it was as bitter as ever beneath.

  Maybe Nofret was wounded, too, by years and neglect, anger and old resentment. Miriam had struck close to the bone when she spoke of being forgiven for having been Nofret’s mistress. For having kept her as a slave, and never, of her own will, set her free.

  Egypt would heal them both, or it would kill them. At that particular moment, Nofret did not even care which.

  Fifty-Seven

  Ancient Memphis had changed but little since Tutankhamon was king. Its white walls were perhaps a shade or two whiter, polished anew by the new king. The great tombs beyond its western edge were very slightly more worn by the passage of years. And of course the name carved and painted on decrees and proclamations had altered: no longer Nebkheperure Tutankhamon as it had been so long ago but another, just lately crowned, Menpehtire Ramses who had been high minister under Horemheb.

  Horemheb had had no son to be his heir. One might think that that was the gods’ justice on the man who had taught Egypt that a king, like any mortal, could be killed for a man’s convenience. He had gained the throne he sought, but sired no son to take it after him. He had, like Ay, like Tutankhamon himself, to surrender it in death to a man who—for all anyone knew—had wished him as ill as Horemheb had wished Smenkhkare .and Tutankhamon.

  Nofret drew a long breath of relief when Miriam read the name on the cartouche of the new stone that had been set up before the gate of Memphis. She had not believed that Horemheb still lived. News of his death had run down the trade-roads, as had the news of a new line set up to rule in the Two Lands, a line that did not take its king-right from the daughters of Nefertari.

  That much of the old law Horemheb had submitted to. Ramses had cast it aside perforce. There was no living child of Nefertari in Egypt, that anyone knew of.

  It was astonishing how much Nofret remembered as she walked beneath that gate, trying not to shrink from the guards with their spears and their expressions of settled boredom. It even mattered that a king of Egypt should have broken the line and begun a new one, with a son to hallow it.

  The gods of Egypt, it seemed, looked with favor on the new Horus. The people had an air of gladness that Nofret had not seen in them before, a lightness, as if a great weight had left them. The world, old as it was, had been made anew under its new king.

  There was a protocol for embassies, even a ragtag gathering of savages from the desert. The faces of the palace servants were eloquent of contempt, lips pursed and noses lifted as if in disgust at the stink of goats. The Apiru in their best finery, washed meticulously in a traveler’s lodging, combed and anointed with sweet oils, lifted their own noses even higher and swept into a palace of such grandeur as only Johanan and Aharon, Miriam and Moshe, had ever seen.

  No nose could be raised more haughtily than an Apiru’s, except perhaps a Hittite’s. They put the Egyptians to shame.

  The Egyptians yielded to it. Their manner did not soften, but when they spoke again thereafter, they spoke with decent respect, all things considered.

  Aharon spoke for the Apiru in his pure Egyptian accent with its intonation of princely Thebes. That subdued the servants even further and won his companions admittance to a lodging of somewhat greater consequence than they might have been judged to deserve.

  It did not win them immediate audience with the king. Even a royal embassy from Hatti or from Punt would not be granted such a concession.

  oOo

  They settled to wait. The elders had studied patience, and were unabashedly glad to rest in such luxury: rooms as wide as half a dozen tents laid end to end, and if possible higher; a garden to walk in, with fountains, and trees laden with fruit; servants alert to their every need. The young men, separated from their weapons, and not willingly either, allayed their restlessness by roving the city.

  Moshe seemed oblivious to anything but the voice of his god. Memphis had been no capital of his, nor had he ruled from its palace. It could mean little to him even if he had cared to remember what he had been.

  For Miriam it was torment. She had been queen within these walls. Here she had known both her greatest happiness and her greatest grief. And the palace did not know her. It had forgotten her as it forgot all those who died to it. It could do no other, as ancient as it was, overburdened with memory.

  Nofret saw that she suffered, but there was nothing that anyone could do. To speak might be to betray her. To admit that she should care where she was, she who was known in this life as the prophetess of the Apiru, would be to recall the one who had died, who must not be allowed to live again.

  For Nofret it was a life remarkably like the one she had lived in Egypt before: waiting on her lady, who was mostly too stunned or too sullen to speak, and watching Moshe wander about in a god-begotten fog. The Apiru were a difference, but they were inclined to keep to themselves. They did not eat as people ate here, and they prayed to their god in their own way, going apart to do it.

  Johanan did not seek Nofret’s company. Nofret made no effort to look for him. She supposed that he kept Jehoshua within sight. She did not know. Her son did not visit her, either, or send to see how she did. Their quarrel had grown in silence till it was like a wall, dividing them on the journey and sundering them here in Egypt

  She told herself that she did not care. There was an emptiness in her, a hard cold stillness. The outside of her was as it had always been, in Memphis as in the desert: walking, talking, eating and breathing, waiting on her lady. She had no desire to wander afield, not even to explore Memphis. For all she knew the beer-seller was still there, still brewing a stronger brew than most, and serving it in the same battered cups.

  It was not as if her whole self depended on Johanan’s goodwill. He could be as massive a fool as he pleased, cast his own son—her son—into danger, kill th
em both and be damned to him. She had lived well enough before she married him. She could live as well again, in Egypt as easily as anywhere else.

  She felt strange, thinking that. As if there was no stretch of years ahead of her. Every morning came like the edge of the world, shifting just enough that she did not fall. What was beyond it, truly beyond, she did not know.

  In Sinai she had thought she knew how the years would pass. They would be many, she could hope, and long; her children growing up, marrying, presenting her with grandchildren; the round of the year with its journeys from pasture to pasture. Death in the end, of course, but not before Johanan, when both of them had come to a great and venerable age. Egypt had been no part of it, or dying still almost young, or losing Jehoshua before he was even a man. His beard was no more than a shadow on his upper lip; his voice had barely broken; and he was strutting about like a lord of warriors.

  So for that matter was his father, who should have known better. She nursed her quarrel with fastidious care. It kept her from making a fool of herself, chasing after a pair of heedless men and begging them to take her home.

  Where was home, if they were not in it? She was not Apiru except by courtesy. Egypt knew nothing of her. Hatti had forgotten her. She had nowhere to be but here, nothing to do but stand companion to a woman who neither needed nor heeded her.

  Nofret despised self-pity. She knocked it down and trampled it. Still it kept rising again, taking her by surprise, laying her low.

  oOo

  In the fullness of time a messenger came to the Apiru. The king would see them in audience among the rest of the embassies that had come in since last the moon was full. There were a surprising number, most come to welcome the new king to his throne and to take his measure on behalf of their own kings and chieftains.

  They were all gathered in the hall of audience, ordered according to the whim of an august official with a goldenheaded staff. He had not been the minister of protocol when Ankhesenamon was queen, but Nofret knew him. He was much older and more portly than the lithe young underling that he had been. He still had the cast in his eye, and the way of tilting his head that he thought concealed it.

  She kept her head down and her veil up. It had been slow to occur to her that she and not her lady might betray them all. Servants were invisible, true enough, but the queen’s Hittite, her chief of servants, might actually be remembered. Nofret had to hope that her veil was concealment enough, and that no one would ask how an Apiru woman could be grey-eyed.

  No one seemed to see her. She was only one of a throng of foreigners. Those from Punt were much more notable, women and men, naked, coal-black, ornamented with feathers and hung about with amber and ivory. There were tattooed Libyans, bearded and brocaded princes from Asia, even a company of thickset, heavy-muscled men from Ashur with a gift of lionskins.

  No Hittites. Hatti was slow to know that Egypt had a new king, or else bided its time, waiting to see how he would conduct himself toward a nation that had been both ally and enemy.

  The hours passed slowly. Each embassy brought forward its gifts or its tribute, delivered its speeches, offered its respects in the fashion of its country. The Apiru, well back in the ranks, could see little but a forest of pillars and the heads of the embassy in front of them. They could not crane into the aisle: the king’s guards prevented them. They were expected to keep their places, to advance in their proper order, and not, under any circumstances, to object.

  It was one of the more grueling ordeals that Nofret could remember, more so even than the day she came to Akhetaten and was presented as tribute to its king. Either she had forgotten how tedious it was to wait on kings, or there was a difference in the tedium when one was privileged to stand at the head of the hall among the royal attendants. One could slip out then without colliding with an armed guard, and rest or relieve oneself, eat or drink, and return with no one the wiser.

  The king was so privileged, but those who came to his audience were not. When he took his recess they remained in their ranks, hungry, thirsty, yearning for a privy. Nofret heard a whisper behind her that sounded very much like Jehoshua, hissing loud enough to be heard across the hall: “God of Hosts, but I have to go!”

  Another whisper, a fraction less penetrating, responded, “Water a pillar. Who’ll notice?”

  Someone else hissed them into silence and, Nofret hoped, restrained them from committing a violence to the sanctity of the hall. That would be Johanan, she supposed. She refused to look back, to be certain.

  This king was old, though she had not seen him yet, and needed to excuse himself remarkably often. While he was gone, time stretched to an image of eternity.

  She caught herself wondering if the courts of judgment were like this in the life after Egyptian death. So many bodies crowded together, such a reek of sweat and unguents, wool and ill-washed flesh. Even as airy as the hall was built to be, the sun held at bay by a mighty thickness of walls, the atmosphere was close, too warm for the swathings of desert robes.

  Nofret dared not shed hers, though she itched formidably. The Asiatics ahead of them were not clean. It would be like the gods’ humor to have afflicted her with fleas, and when she had just bathed, too.

  She glanced at her companions. The elders had settled in a circle. Some of them were snoring gently. The young men were on their feet, and Moshe leaning on his staff, and Miriam. They all seemed lost in a trance of waiting, even the young men, though Jehoshua had a faintly mulish look.

  If any of them had been apprehensive, that was long lost in boredom. What Moshe would say, what he would do, no one knew, not even Moshe. The god would guide him, he had said. It might well be the god’s intention to betray him in the heart of the kingdom that he had once ruled, before the face of its king.

  She should have bolted while she still could—or stayed in their lodging, from which at least there was some hope of escape. Here there was none. Every door was guarded. There was no way out except past the king.

  At long last they made their way to the front of the hall. By degrees Nofret could see the high ones in their places, rank on glittering rank, and all their attendants, from the little naked maids to the haughty chiefs of servants.

  She had leisure—far more than she wanted—to study faces. Many were familiar, too many not. Not all were too young to have stood in court when Tutankhamon was king. This new king had brought his own people to power, friends and allies who had been too lowly or too far out of favor to stand before Tutankhamon.

  The king himself sat on the dais in the place that was most hauntingly familiar. His throne was new, but it stood where a throne had been since Memphis was a village on the banks of the river.

  It stood alone, no queen’s throne to bear it company. His queen was dead, nor had he taken another, though it was said that his lesser ladies were numerous. Likewise his daughters, many of whom stood among those nearest him, and one, the eldest, only a little less near than his young and surprisingly attractive son. The woman was old enough to be the boy’s mother, but that was not said of her, that she had borne a son to her father.

  They both bore a notable resemblance to the king. Nofret had known him vaguely, more a name than a face in the following of Horemheb. Pa-Ramses, he had been then, one of the general’s many allies, ambitious as most of them were. He had been a chief of works, she recalled from some deep font of memory, a great builder in the Delta, much given to proposing new cities and renewing old ones.

  He must have been not much younger than Horemheb. He seemed as old as Ay had been when he took the Two Crowns, gone to flesh as many did in Egypt, but condemned by custom to wear the garments that needed a young man’s body to set them off. His dressers had done what they could in binding his kilt tight and somewhat high and adorning him with a splendid mass of jewels: bracelets, armlets, a pectoral as broad as a general’s breastplate. None of it could disguise the soft swell of his arms, or the veined hands that clutched the crook and the flail.

  She looked las
t at his face. It was the familiar royal mask under the two tall crowns, White nested within Red; painted like a woman’s, heavy with white lead, the eyes drawn large and long with kohl and malachite. Still she saw the heavy jowls, the downward turn of the mouth, the deep lines clotted thick with paint.

  He was much more beautiful on his stelai. But then all kings were, except Akhenaten, who had taken a rebel’s pride in his ugliness.

  oOo

  The Asiatics delivered their gifts and their speeches, both profuse and prolix. The king actually yawned in the middle: subtle, disguised as an inclination of the head, but Nofret had learned in youth to penetrate a king’s subterfuges. This king was less subtle than he might have been had he been born to it, less practiced in his deceptions.

  After an endless while the Asiatics were ushered out, one of them still trying to babble. The Apiru drew taut, rousing from a near-doze to sudden, fierce alertness.

  Moshe barely waited for the king’s minister to call him forward. The space before the dais was the brightest part of the hall, so lighted that the king had clear vision of any who stood there.

  Moshe entered it with his head up and his stride firm. His hair shone silver-bright, his beard flowing white on his breast. His robe was his best, woven of new wool, pure and undyed. The only color in him was in the head of his staff, the serpent’s head glowing, gold washed thinly over bronze.

  Aharon behind him, his robe striped with crimson and gold, seemed somehow the more subdued. The rest in black were like shadows, a guard of honor as it were, arranging themselves in a rough circle.

  They brought no gifts for the king. That was uncommon enough to raise the royal brows; the court muttered, naming them ungracious, a company of savages, to come empty-handed before the Lord of the Two Lands.

  Unless of course the company of young men was the gift, or the staff in the elder’s hand. Nofret saw how they stared and speculated, as idle minds will.

  Moshe sharpened their attention by failing to fling himself at the king’s feet. He stood erect, did not even bow; looked up at the man on the dais with such focus and such intensity that the king actually seemed to recoil. Nofret, edging round till she was almost among the courtiers, saw enough of Moshe’s face to know that it was calm, that it even smiled. The god was in his eyes.