by Judith Tarr
“If we let them go,” the king said, “what surety have we that they will ever return?”
Moshe was silent at that.
The king stretched his bleeding lips over teeth that had seen much better days. It was not a smile. “I think that your god would like to trick us into sending away the best and strongest of our slaves. He lays a potent curse, I grant him that, but not potent enough that I’m willing to surrender my will and power. Our gods in the end will triumph as they have before.”
“But at what cost?” Moshe asked him. “How far must my God go before he convinces you to yield?”
“You told me before,” said the king, “that your god makes me obdurate so that he can prove his power. If this is his doing, then let him play out the rest of it. If this is not, then let him test us till our own gods rise up in wrath.”
“Take care,” said Aharon, “that that wrath is not directed against you. Egypt has not fared well through your resistance.”
“The fault is yours,” the king said. “You forced me to it. The gods know. They’ll see that you pay.”
“Egypt has already paid,” said Moshe, “and will continue to pay until you yield.”
“I am Horus, Great House, god and king, Lord of the Two Lands. I will not give way before the likes of you.”
oOo
The worst of it, Nofret thought, was that the court did not turn on him for this pride that was destroying them. They were all proud to folly. Egypt would not surrender to the will of any foreign god. The Apiru were sent away as before, with their petition refused, their people still bound in servitude.
She wanted to scream at them, to shake them till they saw sense. Was it so impossible a thing to set a few hundred slaves free, turn them loose in the desert and tell them never to come back? They were no great nation, no tribe of warriors who would turn on Egypt and conquer it as the Shepherd Kings had done before them. They only wanted to wander the desert, tend their flocks, worship their god.
Well, and maybe some of them wanted more. The young men talked a great deal about a place of their own, a kingdom, cities and all the rest of it. They had some claim on Canaan, from what they said. But not on Egypt. They did not want it. They only wanted to be free of it.
It was no use for her to say anything. She was a foreigner to all of them, Egyptian and Apiru alike. She kept her thoughts to herself, did what needed doing in the guesthouse since the servants had vanished—nursing their wounds, she supposed, and cursing the people who had inflicted them.
Sometimes she thought of simply walking out. The guards, having brought the embassy before the king, had not returned to their post. She could leave if she pleased.
It might be worth it, even if she fell prey to the Egyptians’ curse. There might be somewhere that she could go. Maybe she should begin brewing beer, set up a stall, sell it to anyone who was left when the god of the Apiru was done with his smiting of Egypt.
She was almost ready to do it when Moshe himself went out. He did not go in front of the king this time, but walked into the city with Aharon close behind him. The elders, tired or frightened, stayed in the guesthouse, but most of the young men followed, and Miriam, and Nofret last of all. She nearly did not go, but she had already made up her mind to walk out. She shrugged and went
People who might once have sprung on the Apiru and destroyed them were now so weakened as to fall back in fear. A few approached, crying out for relief. They were brave, or too far gone in pain to care what became of them.
Moshe did not pause for them, seemed unaware that they existed. It was Nofret who said over and over, “Go. Make yourself a salve. If you can find oil of aloes, or an unguent made of it, it will ease the pain.”
It was less than nothing, but people seized her hand and wept on it, incoherent with gratitude. She had to pull herself away and run to catch the rest of the procession.
Over and over, surreptitiously, she inspected her hands. They were the same as ever, whole and unharmed, except for a bruise where one man had pressed too hard.
Moshe went as if led by the hand, straight to the temple of Ptah. The chanting of priests rolled forth from it, and clouds of incense, and the cries of beasts brought to the sacrifice. Fools, Nofret thought, to kill the few healthy animals that were left. The gods could not be pleased by that, unless they were greater idiots than she had taken them for.
There was power in that place: a thrumming under her feet, a prickling of her skin. She had felt no such thing through all the evils that had fallen on Egypt. They grew out of the land and the air, as inevitable as corruption in a corpse. This that lay on Ptah’s temple was power clear and distinct: power apart from the common run of earth. Magic.
As Moshe drew near to the great gate of the temple, the power thrummed deeper. The chanting rang louder, as if with desperation. He wavered not at all, nor seemed to notice that there was a great working raised against him.
The air where he was was quiet. The ground where he walked was still. Magic might not have existed, for all the power it had over him.
None of the Apiru seemed to know what they did. They followed Moshe, that was all, gaping at the temple. It was vaster than the palace, and more imposing. Egypt built nothing on a merely human scale. Everything was immense, like the work of a god.
Their god, the Apiru would say, needed no such pretenses. He was great in himself. Those who believed in him need fear no other god, no other power, not even magic.
Moshe halted on the porch of the temple. A crowd had gathered in the great square, men following him as blindly as a sheep follows its shepherd.
He turned to face them, leaning lightly on his staff with its bronze serpent. Their faces, blotched and glistening with sores, might have touched even his cold heart: his face was somber, his eyes dark with what could have been sorrow. When he spoke, Aharon echoed him, playing the herald in that glorious deep voice.
“People of Egypt,” he said. “Your king will not be moved. He persists in his pride; he delights in his obstinacy. Till now my God has been gentle with him, and with you who are his servants. Now he is moved to anger.”
No one spoke. No one begged to differ. No one even contended that their suffering till now had been remarkably like the wrath of a god. They were mute, caught by the spell of his words.
They were not particularly eloquent words, but they had a certain power in their simplicity. “My God grows angry,” Moshe said. “He tells me now that for your king’s great folly he will smite these two kingdoms as they have never been smitten before. Take shelter, people of Egypt, with all your servants and children, and your flocks and herds that survived the pestilence. See that your roofs are strong against the storm that my God will raise.
“For you see,” he said, “my God is merciful. He will take the life of no man in Egypt, not if that man is wise and obeys his warning.” He raised his voice, and Aharon his own in turn, till the sky echoed. “Go! Protect yourselves! See my Lord, how he comes!”
He flung up hand and staff. People craned, turning their faces to the sky.
The sky in Egypt was a changeless thing, a vault of cloudless blue by day, a vault of stars by night. Now and then it suffered the presence of a cloud or two. Once in a great while there were more clouds than blue; and sometimes, though it was a rarity, it rained.
Storms when they came were swift and violent. That which gathered now was swifter than Nofret had ever seen in any country, even Great Hatti where the storms came often and could be terrible. These clouds boiled like water in a cauldron, black shot with the deep blue of lapis, fanged with lightnings.
“Go!” Moshe’s voice was a shriek, Aharon’s hardly less shrill.
The people milled like a flock beset by wolves. Some at length mustered wits to bolt out of the square. The rest streamed after.
A chill wind had begun to blow. It smelled of rain in the desert: a hot, dry smell, more dust than water. Moshe walked calmly through it, but he was not walking as slowly as he might.
> It seemed a very long way to the palace. The streets were choked with people. Most of them lacked the sense to take shelter, or were caught far from their houses. Among them, to make it worse, were the doubters. “It’s only a storm,” they said. “Only rain. It falls every day in Asia.”
That was an exaggeration, as some people pointed out. Too many listened, and hindered those who would not.
The confusion in its way was as deadly as the storm. Moshe did not let himself be stopped, nor did he yield the way to anyone. The palace gates were open, the guards beset with people trying to crowd in. Moshe penetrated the throng, sweeping his people behind him, even Nofret the doubter, who lacked the courage to escape while she still could.
oOo
Even in the guesthouse the wind’s voice was distinct, a rising howl interspersed with the drumroll of thunder. If the wrath of a god had a voice, it was that: wind, thunder, crack of lightning.
Then came the rain, and hard on the rain the hail. This time their house was not spared. Maybe the god did not choose to; maybe it was too much trouble amid so terrible a storm, to pass by one smallish roof. It was like a battlefield, a mighty clatter and clamor, a rain of stones as great as a man’s fist. Any man or beast caught out in it would fall stunned to the ground and die, beaten as if with cudgels.
Even the Apiru were cowed by that relentless buffeting, struck to silence, huddling together in the center of the house. If the roof broke above them, it would fall on the upper floor, and the hail with it. The second roof, the ceiling directly over them, was sturdy, but they shot frightened glances at it, the more frightened the longer the hail fell.
It fell for the half of an age. It was an hour, perhaps, from beginning to end, but that hour was as long as years. They were deafened, pummeled by the sound alone, beaten down by the wrath of their god.
Only Moshe held himself erect. Only Moshe betrayed no fear. But he was paler than Nofret had seen him before. Maybe even he had not known how truly terrible his god could be.
Sixty-Three
The silence after the storm was immense. Nofret emerged with the others, climbing up on the roof that had borne the assault with only one breach, a stone the size of a man’s head that had pierced the westward corner. They blinked astonished in sunlight, looking on a world that glittered with hills and mountains of crystal.
Already it was melting, running with clear water on the parched and tormented land. The wall of cloud had run away down the river, north toward the Delta—toward Pi-Ramses, thought Nofret. She wondered if the Apiru there would be safe, since the prophet and his people in Memphis had not been. No doubt their god would warn them, and see that they were all in shelter when the storm struck.
Here in Memphis was devastation. Houses in the city had fared well enough, but the huts of farmers along the river were beaten down. Any who had been caught in the fields was dead or dying. And the crops, the flax in bud, the barley in the ear, were pounded flat, destroyed. Only the spelt was safe, for it had not yet sprouted. There would be precious little linen spun in Egypt this year at harvest time, and bread and beer only from stores that had been laid aside in case of famine—if the storehouses had not been breached, their contents ruined by rain that had fallen amid the hail.
The sun seemed a mockery, the sky cloudless blue once more, the heat rising after the chill of the storm. It had done one good thing for Egypt: it had cleansed the land, and washed away the stink of death that had lain on it for so long.
oOo
It was only a respite. The king would not be moved. His priests strove even more strongly to raise their magic against the power of the Apiru’s god.
Nofret could have told them that their efforts were useless. No matter how great their working, no matter that now it thrummed from end to end of Memphis and arched above the city like a vault of light, it could not touch the god who was beyond all mortal magic. His prophet and his people could not be touched by it, neither harmed nor diverted from their course.
Maybe it was that Nofret was Hittite that let her know what the magic was, yet kept her from succumbing to it. Her skin tightened in its presence and her feet tingled when they touched unshielded earth, but her mind was unclouded. She could think as well as ever, for what that was worth.
She had gone beyond rebellion to a kind of fixed and steadfast incredulity. She disbelieved because she did not know how to believe. What she saw about her, what she felt, touched her body and her wits but not her heart. A madman from the desert had walked into Egypt and defied its king and gods, and they did nothing while his god destroyed the land with a sheer and bloody ruthlessness that no man could match.
Such a god might in time win her belief. But she could not love him. Far better the little gods that the Apiru said were the creation of men’s minds. Those could be appalling, some beyond all reason, but there was a certain humanity in them: a part of them that she could touch, that was like herself. This One True God with his insistence upon no other before him was nothing that she could talk to or lay hand on or understand.
When she could be by herself, when she was in the room she slept in and Miriam was elsewhere, praying as the Apiru did at every opportunity, she unplaited her two amulets from her hair and held them in her hands. They had never been much more than glass and stone somewhat crudely carved, cool in her palm and smooth. Yet they comforted her.
oOo
It was well she had something to cling to. Her kin were sundered from her, those in Hatti and those in Sinai and those who were here in Egypt. She had no friend; certainly not Miriam, who had retreated again into herself, too far for Nofret to follow.
The memory of the hail was fading, though it would never vanish from the mind of anyone who had lived through it. The flax and the barley were lost. The spelt however sprouted and grew, and those fields at least were green again, a fragile and tentative green that farmers nurtured as tenderly as their own children.
But the king would not give way. Of a morning then, just when the crop was high enough to be strong, a new cloud came out of the south. It came swift and dark, with a humming in it like nothing else that Nofret had ever heard. Something of it was like the humming of flies, but flies grown huge.
Egypt, so terribly battered and yet unyielding, wailed in a wholly new despair. The old remembered and the young had been told often enough of this new scourge, this plague that came out of the south.
The locusts came in swarms so thick that they darkened the sun, so vast that they filled the sky. They came and they paused and they settled. And where they settled, they devoured.
They ate the crops in the fields. They ate the fruit from the trees, what little the hail had left, and the leaves, and such branches as were tender enough for their taste. The carcasses of cattle that remained, dried to leather in the sun, they stripped to the white and gleaming bone. They ate everything that could be eaten—even, it was said, the kilt from a man’s body.
They ate the earth bare, scoured it clean, left not one thing that was not walled and barred from them. Even the granaries were their prey, those that the hail had pierced, or that had not been secured in every cranny. They were merciless as only a god, or a god’s instrument, could be.
oOo
In the humming of locusts, in the sound of uncounted jaws grinding as they devoured everything that could be devoured, a maidservant came to the Apiru in their guesthouse and asked for the prophet’s sister. She was scarred with sores, trembling, barely able to speak. But she made it clear that she came from Pharaoh’s daughter, and that the prophet’s sister, by whom she meant Miriam, was not to come attended. The other woman could come, she said. No more.
The Apiru did not like the sound of that at all, but Miriam took up her veil and prepared to go where the maidservant led.
Nofret followed in silence. She scented nothing of a trap, in spite of the men’s outcry. The king held hostage the whole nation of Yisroel in Egypt. He did not need any more of them, even if they were close kin to the pro
phet.
The maid led them as Nofret had expected, to the palace that had been the queen’s and belonged now to the king’s daughters. Only one of them was waiting, with maids in attendance. Nofret knew her from their audiences with the king: the eldest daughter, the one who looked most like her father.
It was not a fortunate resemblance. The woman’s body carried the weight of flesh with somewhat more grace, but the face with its heavy jowls would have been better suited to a man. Her name was Nefer-Re, Beauty of Re: a commentary on the god, surely, and not on her own loveliness.
She did not try to feign what she did not have. She wore the paint and the wig of Egyptian nobility, and the linen gown and the jewels as befit her station, but there was no excess of ornament. She seemed in fact a solid, practical woman.
She received the strangers with courtesy, without either fear or effusiveness. She bade them sit; she offered wine, cakes, whatever they wished. Miriam refused. Nofret was neither hungry nor thirsty. The buzzing of the locusts had set in her bones. It left no room for anything else.
Nefer-Re spoke first, since neither of the others was inclined to. She was direct as her father was, brusque for a fact, for all her careful politeness. “I asked you to come here, lady—ladies—to talk to you as women can talk even when their men are quarreling. My father is caught, you see, trapped by his office, bound to do what he’s been doing. He can’t yield, or in his way he’s given up the rule of Egypt.”
“He may think so,” said Miriam without expression.
“He knows so,” said Nefer-Re. “His heart weeps for his people—but how can he give way?”
“Easily,” Miriam said. “Let our people go. Forget them. Devote himself to the restoration of the Two Kingdoms.”
“Nothing is so easy,” said Nefer-Re, “or so simple.”
Miriam raised her brows but said nothing. Nefer-Re poured wine into a cup, drank deep. She filled it again and sipped more slowly. The color had risen to her cheeks. She shook her head. “You don’t understand. How can you? It takes a king to understand, or a king’s daughter. The kingdom lives by the king’s strength. Can you see how this spate of dying, these plagues and pestilences, set all that he is at naught, and prove his kingship a mockery? He says that you intend this. I don’t think you do. I think that all you see is your people’s slavery. You want them free, no more and no less. You don’t care what you have to do to bring it about.”