by Howard Fast
“But they were strangers and they lived among us,” Moses said. “Will the gods forgive us for this?”
“The gods forgive all kinds of things, Moses, and for my part, I am a builder and I need workmen.” He shrugged and smiled narrowly. “A man who broods about right and wrong will soon take leave of his own senses. The world is what it is, Moses.”
But Moses, on his part, felt that he was coming to know less of what the world was; or perhaps it was the world that was taking shape before his eyes for the first time—a real world, boundless and chaotic and so far meaningless. One day in the market place had washed away his own sense of being grossly misused, and had given him a measure against a world where not all were princely; and now the slave, to whom he had never paid much attention was becoming a symbolic and constant factor in his thoughts.
Thus he passed away the hours while the barge slid through one twisting waterway and then another. So often were they lost, seemingly, in a wilderness of marsh grass and bulrushes that Moses came to think that the helmsmen steered by some magic code; yet beyond that he realized the true answer—that here he was among men of wonderful skill and knowledge whereas he, as a prince of Egypt, had only a smattering of reading, writing and arithmetic, a store of mixed history and legend, some skill with weapons, and perhaps a hundred themes committed to memory from the Book of the Dead—none of it of great practical use. How often he had been warned to stay out of this great marsh, where one could so easily be lost for ever; yet to these men it was as familiar as the corridors of the palace were to him.
Even Neph had forgotten him now. The four engineers had spread plans upon the deck, and their discussion of this and that problem went on endlessly. Left to himself, Moses went to the bow and curled up there, one arm hooked in the bronze mooring ring, and there he remained until Neph called him to share their morning meal of bread, figs and wine. He discovered he was very hungry and ate all they gave him, indifferent to their smiles at his wolfish appetite.
While they were eating, they came in sight of their destination, a flat island about two acres in size. The granary already thrust up its brown brick walls from six to ten feet above the land, and here and there, on rough scaffolding, bricklayers were at work. The bricklayers, Moses decided, were Egyptian; but other men, unloading bricks from a barge tied up to a makeshift dock, must have been from the slave people Neph spoke of, for not only did they wear unkempt and tangled black beards and long hair gathered by a knot of leather, not only were they lean to the point of emaciation, but here and there among them overseers stood and watched their work, overseers who carried swords in their belts and on thongs around their necks three-foot leather whips.
As the oarsmen eased their barge up to the dock, Moses noticed many other freight barges drawn up on the muddy shore of the island, and from these more bearded slaves were unloading crushed stone and additional bricks. Each man had on his back a wooden rack, an open box that he grasped by two handles which extended over his shoulders. His fellow slaves would fill the box to capacity with bricks or stone or bags of mortar and, barely able to walk, every muscle rigid and tight, the man would make his way over the plank that extended from the boat to the shore—bricks and mortar to the bricklayers, the crushed stone to be emptied into a deep ditch that circled the entire island.
Moses followed Neph and the other engineers ashore, and since they became immediately concerned with their own business, talking to the overseers and the bricklayers and examining the work in progress, he decided to wander about by himself and see what he could see.
The slaves interested him because he had never before heard of the people of Goshen whom Ramses had taken as his servants. If he saw his own high-boned face among these slaves, it was not with any recognition or understanding; he walked slowly around the island, watching them at their work and wondering whether they could continue to work like that as the hot day wore on, or whether they would fall to the earth and die.
They, in turn, paid no attention to him, if indeed they saw him at all; and when he gazed straight into their bloodshot, sweat-filmed eyes, he felt that there—was a veil they used to thrust the world away from them. Indeed, they were not to be admired—unkempt, unshaven, naked and barefoot and stinking with their perspiration, filthy with the eaked mud of the morass, a string for a belt and only a dirty piece of cloth or leather to keep their parts from the shamelessness of exposure. When they spoke to each other they were stingy of words, having little breath to spare from their labour, and then they spoke in their own tongue—strange and hard to Moses’ ear, a curious consonantal language that cut the words sharply and lacked the soft flow and flavour of Egyptian. Yet they also spoke Egyptian, as Moses noticed when the overseers addressed them, an Egyptian that was accented and hardened into what seemed and sounded like a translation of their own language.
When Moses felt Neph’s tread at his side and heard his grunt of greeting, he said,
“Why, Neph, do they live on? Isn’t it better to be dead, to die quickly and with some honour than to be worked and beaten to death like a beast?”
“No,” Neph answered shortly.
“I don’t understand. I would die and welcome the dark lord Osiris.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Neph said.
“But I tell you I would!”
“Ah, yes, you tell me that. When life is full and sweet and young, as it is with a prince of the Great House, then the thought of surrendering it becomes an easy abstraction. You have so much life that you can be prodigal with it, Moses. But when life hangs by a thread, then by all the gods that be, it is nothing you give up easily! Life is the reason for life, as you will some day learn, and reason enough, you may be sure.”
“I don’t understand you,” Moses replied.
“No. Better that you don’t, I think. Come now, Moses, and I will tell you something of houses and how we do the impossible. First of all—you see how hard the ground under your feet is, and it will be harder still when we pave it with limestone.”
Moses nodded.
“And yet a year ago, it was the same soft, oozing mud that you will find on any of these swamp islands. That is why we dug this ditch all around. The first problem was to drain the ground. We do that by ditching and letting the water seek its level, and we leave the ground high, after which it is baked hard by the sun. Now we are filling the bottom of the ditch with crushed stone, so that it will act as a dry well and not silt up. We will line the sides with slabs of rough stone, lead run-offs into it, and roof it with stone. Since we have already raised the ground level at least two spans, we can be assured of permanent dryness.”
“All that just to dry the land?” Moses said unbelievingly.
“That was not a problem, Moses, but a matter-of-fact business that Egyptians have been practising for two thousand years. That is why Mother Nile is our servant and not our master. The problem was to build a warehouse in this damp swamp that would not sweat and rot the wheat.” As they talked, Neph led Moses to the building and inside the walls; where slaves mixed mortar in flat troughs and carried it up the scaffolding to the bricklayers. “You see, Moses,” Neph went on, “in our land, where the public granaries mean the difference between famine and survival, we have always built these storehouses of stone. Since they were built in the desert, they not only stayed cool, but dry as well. But when you build in stone here in this morass, the inside or cooler surface of the stone will sweat—that is, the dampness in the morning air will turn into water and rot whatever grain you have inside. Even if we lined the stone with cedar planks this would still happen, for the wood then turns wet and sour. So, after thinking the matter through, we decided that we would build with brick and we set the slave people in Goshen to making bricks out of the clay pits there, mixing the clay with chopped straw, which gives it great firmness and lasting quality.
“First we had to experiment with a small structure to see whether the brick would sweat in this climate. It did not sweat. Brick is a marvellous b
uilding material, as the Babylonians learned long ago; for while stone is dead, so to speak, brick lives and breathes and adjusts. Well, first we drove piles into the ground while it was still wet; then on the piles we laid a limestone foundation, bringing the dressed stones here on barges and fitting them into place. Then, on the limestone, we laid a floor of mortar to seal it, and on the mortar a second floor of brick. The brick walls will rise twenty feet high, after which we will line the walls in a veneer of cedar. We will roof the granary with cedar beams and planks and then weatherproof it with pitch, which we must bring from the bitter Sea of Canaan, even as we must bring the cedar from the mountains of Lebanon. So, Moses, you will know that it is easier to look at a house than make one, and while the God Ramses waves his hand and says, ‘Let it be done’, there are others who must do it. If you are ever the god-king, I hope you will remember this day,” he finished lightly.
“Why do you say that, Neph?” Moses asked, his face tight with annoyance and misery too.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you hurt.”
“Don’t say it again.”
“Then I will never say it again, Moses. I told you that I have a provoking tongue. Don’t let it come between us.”
“I won’t,” Moses agreed, less upset at Neph than at himself and the depression into which he had been cast through watching the slave people of Goshen at work.
[12]
YET MOSES WAS as little given to depression as he was to fancied slight or insult. Life and health burned too strongly, and if his cousins made no friend of him, they did not exclude him from their pack-like testing of manhood. With a dozen of them he took the long journey across the Delta to the ancient city of Buto, which was once, long ago, the capital of Lower Egypt, but now a poor and provincial place given over in great part to the breeding and sale of horses. There was also in Buto, to entertain the horse merchants and buyers, a great house of prostitution, known throughout Egypt for the variety and beauty of its women, who were purchased by special agents in the slave markets of Philistia, as well as in those of Egypt.
There, for the first time, Moses chewed the famous khat of Arabia, drank wine with it, and spent the hours of darkness in a nightmare of wild debauchery, drugged dreams and drugged lovemaking. His recollections the following morning, filtering through a splitting headache, filled him with shame and despair. The young man he saw, staggering through the night with his divine relatives, treating women with brutal, even sadistic lechery, firing himself with aphrodisiacs and wine, proving his manhood with blows and foul oaths—this young man was himself, seen now with hatred and disgust. He crawled out of there in the light of morning, hiding his face from the disc of Aton. Staggering, pitching drunkenly, he found a patch of white sand and lay face—down until at last he fell asleep. But while he slept, he dreamed, and in his dreams, his godhood left—and he shaped his dreams to provide the worse penance and torture he knew: to be cast down and turned into one of the slave people of Goshen, to work in the festering swamp under the blazing sun till at last, racked with pain, he collapsed from a fatigue too compelling for even the overseer’s whip. It was only then that the burning rays of Aton became soothing and beneficent—and he, in turn, still in his pain, repeated the psalms of Aton that Amon-Teph had taught him. And when he repeated the most sacred psalm to Aton, the hymn to the god of all gods, then gently and lovingly his pain disappeared. He woke with his lips moving and speaking,
“Oh, Aton, how manifold are thy works,
Though some are hidden from the sight of man,
Though art the single god, no other like thee,
And thou hast created earth as thou desired.”
It was past midday, and a tall monument cast its shade upon Moses. He rose, stiff and sore in every limb, and went to the barber, who washed him, anointed him and combed his hair clean. Then the barber shaved him, for already his down was turning into dark beard; and while shaving him, the barber commented upon the fact that so many of royal and godly blood had been his customers this day. “Such an honour is rarely done me, O Prince of Egypt,” he prattled. “I have a little wealth set aside, and perhaps if I pay for an embalming and good linen wrapping and a modest tomb, this divine contract will act as a spell to put off the wicked and jealous gods of that other place and give my soul sanctuary. Do you think so, Prince of Egypt? I cannot tell you how I have dreamed of immortality—which, of course, is something that you who are godly take for granted. But as a simple barber, it is another matter entirely, and I cannot tell you how often I have lain awake at night trembling with the fear of death and extinction. A poor man must accept such things and, believe me, I tried to. But now—now—well, tell me, what do you think, O holy one, O Prince of Egypt?”
“I think you are an idiot,” Moses said petulantly, “and your talk makes me sick.” But the moment it was out, Moses felt ashamed, and he despised himself for taking out his own misery on this pathetic little man—who, in fear that he had angered one of the young gods, hastened to say,
“You have said the truth, O Prince of Egypt. I am a fool and an idiot. So my wife tells me each day. Even my children say so. Thank you, O lord, for telling me the truth out of your own unselfish sense of profound justice. When you leave here, I will do obeisance and prostrate myself and kiss the ground where you walked. Only forgive me my presumptuous insolence.”
Moses’ eyes became wet and his stomach tightened as he listened to the barber, who pressed the point out of increasing fear,
“Will you forgive me, God-Prince?”
“I forgive you,” Moses forced himself to say.
“I thank you and seven generations of my blood will venerate you, O God-Prince.” His gratitude continued, as verbose and flatulent as all else he had said, and Moses escaped from him and his shop with relief.
From there he went to the corrals, where he found the others of the royal party. They appeared to have made a better recovery than he, for they were hungrily munching bread and dried fish even while they argued on the good and bad points of the horses in loud, boastful terms. The only other customers present were a party of landed noblemen from Upper Egypt, who, Moses noticed, looked upon the princes with distaste and no little contempt; whether because of their bad manners, or their obvious ignorance of horses, or a still strong and bitter hatred by most of Upper Egypt for the dynasty of Seti, Moses did not know. But as he chewed the bread and fish his cousins gave him he watched these hard-faced lords of the Upper Nile with interest and curiosity, for it was in their land that Aton had come to power over all the gods. They wore the wide and heavy golden collars of the South, bright-red linen kilts that fell to below their knees, and high-laced sandals; and they carried iron swords and wore polished iron bracelets as a sign of their power. Their physical resemblance to himself was immediately apparent to Moses, though it was less precise a resemblance than that of the slave people of Goshen, for while they were similar in the long cast of head and the thin, high-bridged nose, they had none of the hawk look, the flaring nostrils and wide mouth that made Moses’ face so unusual in Egypt.
Then Moses forgot them, for one of the slaves of SetiPash, the owner of this breeding farm, brought into the corral a yellow horse that took Moses’ heart so quickly and complete that he knew he would have no peace until he owned it. It was large horse, much larger than any of the Egyptian breed, broad of girth and with a long, cream-coloured mane of hair that swayed like a banner as the horse pranced and reared in the full excitement of life and strength. It had no sooner appeared than Moses vaulted the fence and ran to it, that he might claim it first. But he was alone, and he saw his cousins watching him with smiles of derision for desiring so unorthodox a beast.
But Seti-Pash also ran to welcome the sale and bowed low to Moses, telling him not to heed the sneers of those who did not know the difference between a horse and a donkey; for here was such a horse as came rarely into the hands of an Egyptian dealer, a three-year-old bought by a Phoenician trader from breeders on the i
sland of Crete, whose horses were legendary the world over. Yet its price was only a little more than the price of a fine Egyptian animal.
“I want it,” Moses said shortly, opening his pouch and taking out a handful of plain rings. “These are pure gold, made to a measure of six to an iron sword. How many for the horse?”
“O godly one, I should give it to you out of my reverence for the Great House, but I am a poor man who somehow must always sell for less than he buys. I ask only twenty rings.” He looked up into Moses’ angry eyes, still full of the bitterness the prince felt over the night before, and began to plead a justification of his price. Sick at the man’s deceit, Moses took a handful more from his pouch, more than the twenty requested, and threw them down on the dirt and horse dung. As he led the horse away, he snapped,