Moses

by Howard Fast

  “Such is education in the royal school,” Neph shrugged. “What do they teach you—that we build houses by throwing the stones in at random? Do you know that everywhere in the world Egypt is known as the land of the stones—because we have built in stone as no others have? Do you think we build at play? For every house, every tomb, every plaza, every temple—yes, for every monument or statue of fountain or pool, for the stone benches for the idle to dally on or the wharves where the ships tie up or the warehouses where they store their cargo—for all of it and for each part of it, there must be a plan like this one, a plan drawn to careful scale, with every measurement of the utmost precision. Only when the plan is complete to the last tiny detail can we calculate how much material and how many workers we will require—and then actually get to the building, which also requires the plan for every step of construction. As to why it is all open and flat—I am not one of your palace decorators, titillating the eyes of nobles. I must see all of the building at once. When it stands complete, then the roof and the walls will be where they belong.”

  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.”

  “Not freely; only to you,” Moses answered.

  “Why should you trust me?”

  “I don’t know,” Moses shrugged, “and when you come down to it, Neph, I don’t much care.”

  “You’re too young not to care, and when I tell a story, Moses, kindly let me tell it my own way.” And then, as if there had been no exchange of confidence, he went on, “As I was saying, he whose name is wiped out and whose memory is cursed—he had pity for these starving beggars from the desert and he let them pasture in the Land of Goshen. So, many desert tribes made it their home and grazed their goats and sheep there. It was a good arrangement for us. These desert Bedouins had no art of metal-work, only stout knives that they made from fragments of flint, and for cheap bronze daggers and knives, they supplied us with cheese and wool. So they lived in their own ways, worshipping their own gods—but when the God Ramses came to the throne, we had to make a slave people out of them.”

  “Out of the stranger among us? Him whom we took in and sheltered?” Moses asked incredulously.

  “Many things are not what you are taught in school, Moses. Yes, out of the stranger among us. You see, in the older times Egypt was not
the land it is today. Fifteen hundred years ago, Moses, the God-Kings Khufu and Chephren and Mycerinus built the great pyramids at Giza, and I often think that never again, as long as the world lasts, will men build with such grandeur and skill. Today, people have forgotten the old science and the old knowledge, and because they are ignorant and superstitious, they say that Osiris sent his servants to build the pyramids with magic. So it is today—everywhere this cursed magic of spells and incantations, because when ignorance triumphs, people become afraid of the truth and take magic to their hearts. But we who are engineers know better, and it was no god but plain Egyptian engineers like myself, and honest Egyptian workmen, who built those stone mountains—even though two and a half million blocks of limestone were required to make the largest one.

  “In those times, Moses, there were few slaves in Egypt and few priests, believe me, and the peasant was a free man who owned his own piece of land. He was not taxed for half of what he produced and he did not have to see his family die of hunger and misery. He was a proud man, who did not have to bear the priesthood and the nobility on his back. I talk like this to you because so did you talk to me a little while ago. We can trust each other and we will say what we think.

  “Well, in those times when the Mother Nile was in flood and all the land lay under the water, renewing itself, the God-King called the corvée. And because they were like brothers to each other and to the land, the Egyptians came from the whole length of the Nile. They came by the thousands, their tools over one shoulder and a bag of bread over the other, and they laughed and sang, for here was the whole land together to do one thing. That way, in each floodtime, they raised up the pyramids and the splendid temples and monuments. But that was a long, long time ago, Moses, and if the God Ramses were to proclaim the corvée today, who would come? The sick and broken serfs who work for the landlords and are left scarcely enough to keep body and soul together? The healthy men, the strong men, are in the army, and even there we have all too little, and must perforce hire mercenaries wherever we can. The beggars and loafers from the city streets? And if the beggars and serfs were called, would they heed the corvée? How willingly would they work, with all their hate and misery? No—today we can build only with slaves, and such is the God Ramses’ lust for building that there are never slaves enough. He took ten thousand slaves in the war against the Sea People in Libya, and five thousand more from the land of Kush, and still it is not enough. Thousands of our own people are sold for debt—but never enough, never enough. So it was that some twenty years ago his soldiers went into the Land of Goshen and told the desert people there that the God Ramses had taken ownership of them and now they would work for him without pay. At first some of them resisted, but when a few hundred were hanged and a few hundred whipped, the resistance came to an end. Some of them fled back into the desert, but not many—for it is a long time since they lived in the desert and they fear it and have forgotten its ways. And soon they will forget that they were ever free people and they will be content to be slaves. So it goes, Moses.”