by Judith Tarr
Out of the stink came something new, something unlooked for. It wriggled in the new-cleansed pools. It seethed in the river. It hopped and croaked out of the crowded water onto the land. It was in every place where the water had run red as with blood: wells, cisterns, fields and channels.
Frogs. Frogs of every size and shape. Frogs no larger than a lady’s fingernail. Great deep-croaking frogs that would barely have fit onto a platter at a king’s feast.
The water bred them. They were born of blood and reeking death. They overran every house in Egypt.
Every house but a house in which Apiru were living. They were even in the king’s palace, filling his water-jars, teeming in his bed. A white-faced, trembling-handed servant brought Moshe to him with some of the embassy behind, stepping gingerly lest they set foot on a wriggling body.
The frogs seemed to shy from the feet of the Apiru, but they fairly leaped to sacrifice themselves beneath the Egyptian’s sandals. They made an appalling noise as they died, half croak, half scream.
Nofret found herself taking pity on him. Egyptian he might be, servant of a king who would not give the Apiru what they wanted, but he had done no harm in himself.
The god of the Apiru did not seem to understand pity. She followed his prophet, thinking her own thoughts, resolving to make her own bargains with the gods she knew.
oOo
The king was in his private receiving-room. Only a few servants attended him, and a handful of his daughters, and a guard or two.
The room had been a pleasure-chamber when last Nofret was in it. The walls still carried their painted image of the hunt: a supple young king in his chariot, bringing down lions to the lively admiration of his queen. Miriam, Nofret saw, glanced once at the walls and then away. Her memories must be bitter.
The king who sat in the tall carved chair was nothing like the one whom Miriam would be remembering. He was dressed as a king at leisure, his kilt plain, his ornaments few. He wore the Blue Crown, the cap in the shape of a helmet that marked a warlike king, or a king who wished to be in comfort beneath the burden of his office.
It was little enough comfort, with frogs hopping everywhere about the room. His servants were hard put to maintain their dignity. More than one strangled shriek marked a frog that had done its best to climb a man’s leg. There were frogs even on the dais, and frogs about the throne. One great wise-eyed green-and-brown-spotted creature sat in state at the king’s feet. As the embassy approached, it stirred once from its stony immobility: darted a blinding-swift tongue, snared a fly, subsided once more into stillness.
The king ignored the great frog with teeth-gritted determination. He addressed Moshe as soon as the prophet had come before him, wasting no time in waiting for an obeisance that was not forthcoming. He said, “Remove this curse from us, and I will set your people free.”
Someone near Nofret let out a long sigh. Nofret was still holding her breath. So, she noticed, was Moshe, till he had to speak. “Indeed, my lord,” he said. “Will you abide by your word?”
“Just rid me of these monsters!” snapped the king.
Moshe inclined his head. “It shall be as my lord wishes. My God will remove the curse. You will free our people to offer him their sacrifice.”
“Just do it,” the king said, biting off each word.
“Indeed, my lord,” said Moshe, “it is done.”
The king opened his mouth as if to speak again, but no words emerged. The floor that had writhed with life went slowly still. The silence was immense. Nothing croaked, nothing screeked.
With utmost care, in taut-drawn revulsion, the king stretched out his foot. It touched the great frog. The creature did not stir. He kicked it with sudden force. It flew from the dais and fell at Moshe’s own feet, pale belly uppermost, stiff and lifeless.
Moshe looked from it to the king’s face. “Tomorrow,” be said, “we depart for Pi-Ramses. When we come there, our people will follow us, out into the desert.”
The king said nothing. Moshe left him so, sitting on his throne amid the heaped corpses of frogs.
oOo
Between the stink of rotting fish and the stink of rotting frogs, the air in Memphis was foul beyond belief. It was clean only within the walls of the guesthouse. There was no reek more pungent there than well-worn wool, and the scent of flowers from the garden, faint and sweet.
The young men were laughing and dancing, singing the victory. Ephraim was in the center of them. He had become one of them, taking to their freedom of speech and movement as if he had been born to it. But then, thought Nofret, all Apiru were heart-free. None of them was fit to be a slave.
The elders were a little silly themselves, giddy with triumph. All but Miriam, and Moshe who had retreated to his meditations. Miriam kept no festival. She ate and drank sparingly and went early to bed.
Nofret followed her. She was awake, lying on her back, hands folded on her breast.
“You haven’t packed yet,” Nofret said. “Shall I do it for you?”
“No,” said Miriam.
Nofret hesitated on the verge of speech, shrugged, sighed and said nothing. She gathered her own belongings, as few as those were: a clean undergarment, a second pair of sandals, a bag of oddments. She had bought nothing in Memphis, nor did she intend to. She would leave as she had come, traveling light.
“I wouldn’t trouble,” Miriam said.
Nofret paused. “What are you saying?”
“I wouldn’t bother,” said Miriam.
“Miriam,” said Nofret, “the king said—”
“A king need not be honorable,” Miriam said.
Nofret sank down on the heap of her possessions. It was barely enough for a cushion between herself and the floor. “He’s not going to let them go.”
“He only wanted to be rid of the frogs,” said Miriam.
And once he was rid of the frogs, he had no need to honor the bargain. Nofret laughed weakly, without mirth. “Such innocents we are, to trust him.”
“We trust in the Lord,” Miriam said, “who is more powerful than any king.”
Indeed. Was the king wondering as Nofret did, whether it was the Apiru god at all, or a mingling of luck and sorcery? Rivers had run red before. Frogs might well be born out of the foulness, and die as they had come, poisoned by their own fecundity. There might be nothing divine in it at all.
Sixty-One
In the morning when the Apiru readied to depart, they found the doors barred and a double complement of guards in front of them. The king had broken his word. No slaves would be set free, nor would the embassy be leaving Memphis. They would stay, heavily guarded, and among the guards a company of priests to protect against the threat of sorcery.
Moshe was as serene as ever, trusting in his god. Some of the young men gathered themselves to escape, but Aharon forbade them. “The walls are doubled and trebled,” he said. “Can’t you smell the stink of magic?”
“I smell the stink of death,” said Jehoshua, gagging on it. “Feh! The whole country reeks.”
It was worse on the roof, to which they were allowed to go since the wall was too high for escape. People were raking the dead into heaps, burying some, burning the rest. The city had come to a standstill. Its markets were a charnel-house of frogs. Its streets were thick with them.
“Your god does nothing by halves,” Nofret said to Miriam, who happened to be standing beside her.
Miriam nodded slightly. “More will come,” she said, “again and again till Pharaoh sets our people free.”
oOo
Hard upon the frogs came a plague of stinging gnats and a plague of flies. The burial-parties knew it first: black and swarming clouds, blinding them, pursuing them as they fled.
The cattle suffered worse than the men who tended them. Their bellowing reached even to the palace walls, the stamping and furious squealing of horses, the blatting of sheep, the braying of donkeys driven to madness. No house was safe, no door or window proof against the swarms. Gnats buzzed and stun
g. Flies crawled on every surface. No one could eat without swallowing a mouthful of flies, or drink but that the cup was full of them. They were ravenous, voracious: the gnats for blood, the flies for anything that could be eaten or drunk.
Still the king would not yield. The Apiru were held prisoner in the guesthouse. From its roof they could see Egypt through a cloud of buzzing, stinging tormentors—tormentors that never came close to them or troubled them. Their house was a haven of clear air in a kingdom gone foul.
As the gnats wearied of their endless assault and the flies dropped sated, too bloated to take to the air, the beasts in the fields began to move about erratically, lowing or blatting or braying. First one and then another stumbled and fell.
For a while they struggled to get up. Then they grew too feeble even for that. They lay gasping, tongues protruding, blackened with sickness; and after a further while they died.
The Apiru’s donkeys lazed in their stable, untouched by the pestilence that beset the rest of Egypt. Nofret went down to see, breath held against the stench of death. But the only scent in the stable was that of dung and donkey, cut reeds spread for their bedding and sweet fodder in their mangers. She stood rubbing the withers of the one that had carried her tent from Sinai, a pretty dove-grey creature with exceptionally large and well-formed ears. It glanced at her now and then as it nibbled on its dinner.
Nofret let herself rest against its warm solidity. “Even supposing,” she said to it, “that the river was about to turn to blood by some force of nature, and Moshe happened to have word of it from far to the south and exploited it for his own ends—even supposing that, and concluding that the rest was an inevitable consequence of the river’s fouling—there is still the fact that we suffer nothing while Egypt rots and dies. The king can see it as well as we can. How long before he acts on it? How long before he has us killed?”
“He won’t touch us,” Johanan said behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder. Johanan was alone. She was a little surprised. She might have expected Jehoshua to be with him. Then they could both have gloated that they were here together after she had been so insistent that they be parted.
That was not charitable. She made herself look on Johanan with a calm face. “Don’t tell me that the Lord defends you. I’ve heard that till I choke on it.”
“Very well,” he said. “I won’t. I’ll say that the king is trapped by his own pride. If he has us killed, it’s an admission that we’re to blame for Egypt’s troubles.”
“Where’s the shame in that? It’s the truth.”
“He maintains,” said Johanan, “that our prophet has a trick or two in his arsenal, no more. He’s done nothing that any sorcerer can’t do.”
“If a sorcerer did to Egypt what your god is supposed to have done, that sorcerer would be executed in the most public way possible, an example to any and all of his kind who might think to cow a king with their arts. Black arts,” said Nofret. “Arts that destroy. Does your god care nothing for Egypt?”
“Egypt defies him,” Johanan said.
“Egypt’s king refuses to free an army of useful slaves. Should his people suffer because he’s too stubborn to give way?”
“The king is Egypt,” said Johanan.
She stared at him. “I don’t know you,” she said after a while. “I wonder now if I ever did.”
He met her stare without flinching. She looked for any regret, any softening, but there was none. He was as much his god’s slave as Moshe himself. They all were. All but Nofret.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “no matter how much I see. That he’s a god, I know; I feel his strength. But there are other gods. He’s not alone.”
“He is above all gods,” said Johanan.
“I don’t know that,” she said. “I’m not one of you. If I went out there I’d be eaten alive by gnats. My cattle would die. I’d be in no better case than any Egyptian.”
“Then why don’t you go?”
She showed him her teeth. “Because I’m a coward.”
“Oh, no,” he said as if he meant it. “Not you. You do believe, I think. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Your god won’t admit it, either. He’s not a forgiving god, is he? He wants all of a man’s soul, not just the part of him that’s left when the other gods are done.”
“The other gods are lies, the children of men’s minds. Our god is the true one, the one who is above gods.”
“So I’ve heard before,” she said. “So far he hasn’t done anything that any god can’t do.”
“But,” said Johanan, “has any god tried to stop him?”
That made her pause. But an answer came to her. “The gods don’t meddle. They let the world go as it will.”
“That’s not what the priests say.”
She shook her head to clear it. “You say your god is meddling. The king says your prophet is taking advantage of a run of ill fortune. I don’t know what I should say. Maybe Egypt’s gods agree that Egypt’s king needs humbling.”
“That would be unusual,” he conceded: “gods allowing their own people to be destroyed because it suits their purposes. Suppose that that were so. Our god is still our god. He’s still working great wonders to sway the king’s mind, to win his people free.”
“But the king won’t be swayed. He doesn’t want to be. He’s saying all that I’ve said. There will be priests hung from spikes before this is over, for letting this go so far without their gods’ intervention.”
“Priests have already died,” Johanan said. “The rest are praying night and day, trying to fend off what they persist in seeing as a work of magic.”
“And it isn’t?”
“Magic is what men do to force the world to their will. This is greater than magic. This is the work of a god.”
“But it looks like magic,” Nofret said. “It’s nothing that a sorcerer can’t do—or a whole tribe of priests invoking their god in temples from Nubia to the Delta.”
“Here,” he said, “it’s one man.”
“One man, yes,” she said. “A man who once was Egypt. What if he still is? What if he can do this not because his god is greater than the others, but because he himself was a god?”
Johanan did not want to hear that. His eyes narrowed; he shook his head. “That’s all past. He died.”
“Egypt remembers,” said Nofret. “What if it becomes a contest not of a king against a tribe of slaves, but of king against king? Kings are gods here. If the elder king and god is alive and raising the power in Egypt, what’s to become of the later king? Is he really king at all, or only a pretender?”
By now he was not even listening: she knew that shuttered look, that set of the jaw. But she had to say it, all of it. “He’s done nothing so far that a king can’t do. He’s set his hand on the weaving that is Egypt and plucked out a thread, and all the rest has unraveled. That’s a king’s power, Johanan. That’s what a man can do who is the heart and soul of Egypt.”
“It is what our God can do,” Johanan said, low and tight. “You call him unforgiving—and say things that only a god would be great enough to forgive.”
“I say what I see,” said Nofret.
“You’re as obdurate as the king,” he said.
She raised her brows. “Am I? Indeed. Which one?”
That rid her of him. He walked away without another word.
She was glad—or tried to be. The center of her heart was a dark, cold thing. But then it had known neither light nor warmth since she quarreled with him beside Mount Horeb.
Sixty-Two
Pestilence begot pestilence. Foul water, plagues of frogs and gnats and flies, murrain on the cattle, all so poisoned air and land that no man was either safe or clean. Amid such filth, so many carcasses, first those compelled to dispose of them, and then their wives and families, and in time the princes set over them, were laid low with such eruptions of the skin that no one was free of them.
Except the Apiru. They were immune
as always, clean and in comfort, their bodies unmarred.
It was strikingly evident as the guards burst in one white-hot morning, seized them all and brought them before the king.
He was on his throne in the great hall, as if he could do battle with splendor against the open weeping sores that disfigured him as they did every other man and woman about him. Paint was no protection. Courtiers of both sexes hid behind feather fans and wrapped their bodies in heavy linen, robes of a fashion more apt to the desert than to the court of the Black Land.
The king himself had resorted to an older fashion than was his wont, a robe like a priest’s, with a mantle over his shoulders and arms. But there was no concealing the hands with their suppurating wounds, or the face, the black eyes staring out of it from a mask of scarlet and stark white. His head could not bear the weight of a crown; he wore the light headdress that was permitted the king, with the uraeus-serpent on the brow.
They all saw how the Apiru walked without flinching, and how their hands and faces were free of sores. The murmur that ran through the court had a distinct edge of anger.
The king’s speech was slow and somewhat slurred: his tongue too suffered. “We are told,” he said, “that your people are spared even the lightest brush of every curse that has been laid on us.”
“It is so here,” said Aharon. “I trust that it is so in Pi-Ramses.”
“It is so wherever your people are,” said the king. “They walk safe. Their water is clean; no vermin beset them. Their flocks and herds continue to prosper while ours die in pain.”
“Surely,” said Moshe, “that would prove to you that our God is angered at Egypt, that it will not permit his people to worship him in his holy place.”
“And may they not worship in the city that they build?” the king demanded. “I never forbade them to give their god such honor as they pleased.”
“But our god’s honor requires that they be free,” said Moshe, “and able to travel into the desert where they can celebrate his rites under the sky.”