Moses

by Howard Fast

  “No, my mother, tell me your news.”

  She sucked the juice from a grape and then delicately removed the skin and seeds from her lips and dropped them into a dish on the little table beside her couch.

  “Tomorrow, my son, the God-Emperor will receive us and he will look upon you with his own eyes and talk to you, and—who knows?—perhaps give you his blessing.” It was then that his fear aroused her impatience rather than her sympathy. Afraid of Ramses!I Her own father, Seti-Mer-ne-Pteh, was a man to fear. Even so recently as her own youth the times had been different and the customs had been different, and while there had been many children, there was no such teeming throng as now peopled the palace. Her father was a cold and bitter man who regarded himself as the angry arm of the god whose name he bore. He had little use for Egyptian women except to plant his royal seed in, and little time to spare from his frenetic conquering and building. Not love but fear was responsible for the thousands of Egyptian children who were eagerly given his name by their parents. Not so was his son, Ramses, her brother; here was a bull, a cock of the walk who could not see a woman without desiring her. He boasted that he could populate a land with his own seed and, often enough, when Enekhas-Amon saw the children pouring like a noisy river through the palace corridors, she believed his boast.

  These were the companions of Moses, and little enough his mother knew of their endless discussion of a hundred forbidden matters—including the question of Ramses divinity, which they tended to equate with immortality. In this they both believed and disbelieved, feared it and mocked it, prayed to it and blasphemed against it—and clung to it, because each of them—the short and the tall, the fat and the skinny, the runny-nosed brats and the strutting bullies—each of them believed that he or she carried a part of the divinity. Except Moses; he walked among them as an interloper; he blasphemed less than they did, and accepted the divinity of the great emperor more out of fear than faith. His mother had never sensed how deep and unshakeable this fear was; nor would she have been able to comprehend it if he had explained. She had behind her two thousand years of divinity, and with it the practical knowledge that it brought neither surcease from illness nor any particular happiness. The sickness that was robbing her of health and beauty was in no contradiction to the fact that she was in some measure immortal; but in the thoughts of her son Moses life and death, divinity and immortality, were tangled with all the uncertain threads of his short life.

  When he said, “No, no, please, my mother, no. I don’t want to. Please …” she could not know how vivid in his memory was the recollection of something that had happened only a few weeks before. It was in one of their playtimes, between teachers or priests or military instructors, and they wound through the palace with increasing relaxation and louder and louder bravado. In the mighty pillared corridor that connected the two enormous wings of the great structure, two of the princes challenged each other to climb the side hangings. These linen draperies, painted and decorated with bright colours, hung from rings slid on to poles laid from pillar to pillar, on top of each. The stone columns were forty feet high, and to Moses and the other children they were even higher than their massive reality. Moses was not the only one among them whose bravado gave way to fear as the children scrambled aloft. But they climbed like monkeys, with the agility of monkeys, each one clutching one end of the huge drapery, hand over hand, and each fighting to be the first. And he who was first, a skinny lad of eleven years, a Ramses of the true blood and divinity, had just reached the top, barely visible in the high, deep-shadowed ceilings, when the drapery at his end tore loose from the bronze ring, breaking his hold and casting him down to the floor. Over and over he turned in what seemed to Moses an endless length of time before he struck, screaming with fear; and then he struck on his head in a ghastly, bloody mess that made the children take up his screams as they looked at the horrible little heap that remained of divine immortality.

  This is what Moses thought of as he pleaded with his mother, bringing back her petulance and annoyance.

  “Well, I don’t know what to say! I don’t know what has come over you.”

  “Please, my mother.”

  “Foolish boy!” she snapped at him. “Hurt me! Cut my heart out! That will satisfy you, won’t it?”

  “No … no, my mother.”

  His dark eyes filled with tears, and she was somewhat mollified by that. It wasn’t many boys who, in these loose times, cared that much about their mothers. “And if I died and went to lie at the feet of Seti, would you weep for me? Don’t you understand? If the God Ramses commands me, and I say to him, ‘Oh, no, my brother, oh, not at all. You wish to see my son, Moses, but he doesn’t wish to see you? What then? Am I not dead? And whose hand struck me down?”

  “Not mine, my mother. Please don’t say that.” Now he wept in earnest, the tears rolling down his flat cheeks, and he looked so beautiful and tall and compassionate that, in spite of herself, her heart went out to him and she opened her arms and cradled his head against her bosom, tenderly wiping away his tears.

  “Come now,” she whispered, “no more of that. You will come with me tomorrow, and receive the god’s blessing. No one in the palace is as handsome as you are and I can hardly wait. Tomorrow morning I will send Rea, my own hairdresser, to dress your hair and powder your curls with gold dust. On both arms you will wear the sacred bracelets of Amon, my own from my mother—and now I give them to you, my only child. They will always be yours; they are not to go in my tomb. You will wear only a loincloth, for I want him to see your whole body in its nakedness, to see how fine and perfect you are; but on your feet, your silver sandals. I am having them polished for you. You will also wear my golden neckpiece, for we are now of a size. Then you will be a prince such as this palace has not seen before, and the god will recognize that. Let him be a god, he’s still my brother and he won’t forget that so soon—not while I live. There, my son. Will you be afraid on such a glorious moment? What on earth is there to be afraid of?”

  He drew away from her and stood up and said slowly but desperately and seriously, “He will cast me back into the water.”

  “What!”

  He saw the doubt, the fear, the anguish that had suddenly seized her face, but his own fear forced him to repeat what he had said. “He will cast me back into the water.”

  “Who told you that?” she whispered hoarsely.

  He shook his head.

  “Moses, tell me!” she almost shrieked. “I command you to.”

  Again he shook his head. “I pledged my word, my justice.”

  “And my own justice?”

  “My justice,” he repeated miserably.

  “A priest? Some dirty priest of common, jealous blood. I know. They’re everywhere now—listening, plotting, conniving. Well, I still know the difference between a priest and a princess of Egypt! I’ll cut his throat with my own hands!”

  “Not a priest,” he begged her, terrified now at this unprecedented outburst.

  “Then one of those miserable whores’ brats that my royal bull of a brother sires every night!”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She suddenly reached out and grasped his arm so tightly that he cried aloud with the pain, and she said, with the coldest anger he had ever heard in her voice,

  “Well, it’s a lie, my son—a vicious, filthy lie. You will learn some day how much and how easily they lie. So wipe it out of your mind for ever. You will grow up now—your childhood had to end some day. Listen to me. I have never told you who your father was. I am not telling you now. For this I have my own reasons. But I will tell you this. The God Ramses is a man like any other man. I know it. I am his sister. I lay in bed with him. Do you understand what I mean, my son?”

  Moses nodded miserably.

  “But the one thing I insist upon—you must not fear. Ramses. In the old days,” she went on, with a sort of desperate intensity, “they would have believed that he was born a god. Some still believe that he will die a go
d and go to sit on Seti’s throne with him. That may be, but who has come back to bear witness? And remember: he has more to fear from me than I have from him, be assured, more than you have. Now go and play—and leave me.”

  Still he stood there, gripped and held there by his own torment, and when she questioned him, he managed to ask, with a desperation that equalled hers,

  “Is the god—the king—is he my father?”

  Her face was tired and haggard as she said with a calm that completed his terror, “I’ve said all I am going to say. Never again ask me that, my son. I am your mother, but I am also a princess royal of the Great House and no one, not my son, not any man on this holy soil of Egypt, shall dare ask me a question to provoke me. Now go away and play. I am tired of you, foolish boy. Leave me alone.”

  Then he fled, bursting through the hanging, leaving doors swinging behind him, racing past the rows of looming columns out into the sweet air and the sunshine; and behind him, his mother wept. She wept for the way fate had dealt with her, for herself, for her lost youth and beauty, for her ever barren loins. She wept out of jealousy and hatred for her brother, for the concubines who so eagerly graced her brother’s bed, out of hatred and resentment against every living person in the great palace except the one child who now exacted the total small measure of love that was hers to give.

  [2]

  ALMOST AT THE sunlight, with the bright gardens spread before him, the voice caught him, soft, silky, “Moses, Moses—whither so fast and furious? Look behind you, boy.” He swung around and saw the priest sitting on a little stool in the pleasant shade of a column, a white robe over his fat jelly-like bulk, a thin, mocking smile on his moon-shaped face. “Oh, come over here, boy, and stop jittering like a mare that smells stud. What could frighten you that wouldn’t frighten me? If I ran twenty like that, I’d drop dead and there’d be something for the embalmers to tackle. Eh, Moses? Do you want me to call you the prince who was afraid?”

  “No—no, your holiness, please don’t.”

  The priest found this amusing, for he began to chuckle, sending waves of mirth rolling over the layers of his flesh. His robe fell open, and Moses forgot his fear in the fascination of the great heaving stomach that was revealed.

  “And don’t call me ‘holiness,’” he chuckled. “Only the dead are holy, and it takes a thousand tons of rock to keep them that way. You know my name, which is Amon-Teph, and your own foolish name is Moses. I knew your mother, the goddess Enekhas-Amon, before you were born, when she was young and beautiful and I was young enough and slim enough to look twice at a beautiful woman, even a princess. Yes. You see, I remember names and you don’t, because I am a priest of Amon and you are an empty-headed boy—as empty-headed as all boys. Now what frightened you, Prince of Egypt?” He stopped chuckling and looked keenly at Moses, a gleam of warmth and liking in his tiny eyes.

  “Nothing,” Moses answered, almost absently.

  “Nothing?” the priest repeated, watching the boy shrewdly. “A wild nothing? A horned nothing? Boy, listen to me—I am a good friend to you, and if you weren’t just an empty-headed young wastrel, you’d put a value on a friend like old, fat Amon-Teph.”

  His words had no meaning to Moses, who had enough sophistication to suspect a household priest trying to curry favour with a prince. For the first time, he was aware of a sense of his own cleverness and he asked the priest as casually as he could,

  “Then, Amon-Teph, you must have known my mother when she was in birth with me?”

  Mirth and warmth went out of the fat face and suddenly the priest was cold and indifferent. In the voice of a stranger, he said, “The palace teems with brats. What am I, Moses, a midwife, to remember every cub that was whelped? Go and play, boy!” But when Moses had taken a dozen steps, the priest called after him,

  “Prince of Egypt, when do you think you will be a man?”

  “I’m a man now,” Moses answered angrily, thinking, “More of a man than you, you fat old fool.”

  “You’re a snivelling, empty-headed boy,” the priest said cuttingly. “When you think you’re a man, look for me, and I’ll have something to say to you.”

  [3]

  AT THIS TIME, although he was only forty-three years old, Ramses was in the twenty-sixth year of his kingship, and already the plain folk, the peasants who tilled their little plots of rich alluvial soil up and down the River Nile, were saying that no god like Ramses had ever graced the throne of Egypt before. Unlike his father, Seti, who had exercised his justice—that ancient sense of conscience which was the most precious character description an Egyptian could refer to—with cold fury and merciless judgment, Ramses was a man simple people could understand and love, perhaps because kingly insensitivity was misread as kindly simplicity. Along with that, he expressed human qualities which were always reassuring in a god. He bragged and lied without shame. He was a large, powerful, good-looking man, who did things hugely and lustily. He ate enormously, with gusto and relish, drank vast quantities without ever losing his head, and engaged his manhood in a manner that more than anything else convinced his subjects that his divinity was founded in fact. If his apparently inexhaustible virility—or lust, as some would say—had been laced with sadism, a quality not unknown among former kings of Egypt, or had been petty and sick in its manifestations, the people would have simply tolerated it and accepted it as they accepted the inevitable aberrations of godhood on the throne; but here it was, so vast, so unprecedented, so all-encompassing that they took pride in a reputation already recognized all over the known world.

  This pride had to include an acceptance of Ramses’ broad and catholic taste. It was true that the old order of things, the everlasting and unchanging stability of Egypt which extended back into the cloudy mists of time, was passing away; nevertheless, it was not in the manner of Egyptian god-kings to haunt the city docks where the ships from far places tied up and to dicker personally for new bedmates. It was one thing to set a pattern where no attractive Egyptian woman he laid eyes on could escape his bed; it was another for Ramses to take as his concubines the women of every nation—strange, heathen women, black and white and brown, women of such far and littleknown places as Philistia, Dardania, Hatti, Sicily, Crete and Sardinia, Kush and Babylon, Pedesia and Arzawa, Ugarit and Megiddo and twenty other cities and tribes and nations—and to honour the royalty of every brat these strangers dropped. But whatever Ramses did was mixed with the knowledge that he did more of it and more splendidly than any of his royal ancestors.

  He was not content to take the ancient title he bore—Pharaoh, which means great house—figuratively, as others before him had done. If he was to be known as the lord of a great house, then such a house would come into being; and he took the city of Tanis in the Delta, renamed it Ramses for himself, and set about making it a place such as the world had not known before. In the midst of it he built his own palace, a literal great house, a structure so vast and of so many rooms, apartments, corridors, terraces and gardens that it was held that one could live in it for a decade and still not know all of it. No palace like this had ever been in Egypt before, or anywhere else for that matter, nor was there another city like Ramses. The king built docks and warehouses that became focal points for the world’s commerce, and to Ramses, from near and far, came the ships of every people that trafficked over the seas. The king also built great monuments and tombs and commissioned stone sculpture that dwarfed anything in Egypt.

  Indeed, stone and stone structures became a driving passion with the king. The connection between the immortality of stone and the immortality of man was old and deep in the Egyptian consciousness, and with Ramses, nothing was enough, not was there ever enough labour to build what he desired to build. Everything, finished, was belittled in his eyes. Even the great throne room where he held court and passed judgment now seemed insufficient to house a god; although to Moses, who saw it this day for the first time, it was a chamber of such size and over-whelming splendour as to make him feel like a frog
dropped into the River Nile, lost and unnoticed.

  Actually, the royal chamber was about a hundred feet in length and about sixty feet broad—by no means the largest room in the palace. The floor was of black basaltes, the beautiful hard marble that Moses had seen so often floating slowly down the Nile on great rafts of cane, from the distant land of Kush where it was quarried; the throne platform was of white limestone inlaid with silver and gold, and the throne where Ramses sat was in the old style, a large carved block of the palest alabaster with a back only six inches high. The side hangings of the room were of white linen, suspended between granite columns thirty feet high and embroidered with a hieroglyphic and far from truthful account of the glories of the king’s reign—and including a remarkable description of the great war with Hatti. Behind the king himself there was a brick wall covered over with a bright mosaic, which depicted him in his chariot, laying about him with his mace, his horses rearing on a field carpeted with Hittite dead.

  The king himself sat in the attire of the sun-god Re—a dress which he affected increasingly, and one which in its simplicity well suited his strong, muscled body. His complete lack of adornment—not a necklace on his shoulders, not a bracelet on his arms, not a ring on his fingers—was a telling contrast to the ostentatious and glittering display made by everyone else in the throne room. As with Re, what jewel could enhance his glory?—And he, the master of all jewels, made the effective point that he need burden himself with none. On his head he wore the golden crown of Re, a simple and undecorated band of gold which circled his head just above the brows and flared out to a height of five inches—very much like a truncated, inverted fez; and in his right hand, lying in his lap, he held the traditional golden sickle. For clothing, he wore only a plain, pleated, knee-length kilt of white linen. His feet were bare, his legs bare of covering or adornment.