Moses

by Howard Fast

  “I will not haggle with you. Clean the dung off twenty and give the rest to your whores!”

  As he took the horse through the corral gate, he saw the lords of Upper Egypt approaching him, and they asked him if they could examine the horse. He nodded, and they walked around it, noting its points and discussing it. Then one of them said to Moses,

  “It’s a strange but fine horse, O Prince of Egypt, yet I wonder that you took him. Your godly brothers seem amused at your choice.”

  “They are not my brothers but my cousins, and I care little whether or not they are amused.”

  “Oh? You seem an angry man, O Prince of Egypt. We are noblemen of the city of Karnak, so we have had some dealings with angry men, and we are here in the Delta to buy horses and iron bars for forge work—and we noticed you, if I may say so, O Prince of Egypt, not only because of your height and godly bearing, but for your appearance. We do not see many faces like yours in Lower Egypt. Is it then that the God Ramses is not your father?”

  “I am the son of his divine sister, the Princess Enekhas-Amon,” Moses replied, seeing no reason not to tell them who he was, since they were courteous enough and interested in his horse, now tugging at the halter and champing at the ground.

  “Oh?” again. “You will forgive me, O Prince of Egypt, but the name of your godly mother surprises me. Amon is a name of Upper Egypt, indeed of my own region, and I have been led to believe, perhaps falsely, that such names were forbidden in the Great House.”

  “They are not forbidden,” Moses answered slowly, wondering what the man was driving at, “but I suppose they are frowned upon. There is no other name like it in the royal family, but a few people are named from Amon. I am sure you know that here on the Delta, our god of the sun is Re—not Amon, as in your land—and my divine grandfather, Seti, is a god of power and worship in our land.”

  “Yes, of course,” the man nodded, looking at Moses with additional interest. “My name, O Prince of Egypt, is Amon-Moses, so you can understand my curiosity. Would it be your own divine pleasure to tell us your name?”

  Moses shrugged. “My name is Moses.”

  “Yes—the child is given—but of what god, if I may ask?”

  Moses smiled without humour. “My name is Moses, man of Karnak—no name or half a name, as one pleases. It is my name and enough for me. If you would make more of it, I am at your disposal, and perhaps you will find that here on the Delta we are not inferior to the men of your land in settling a quarrel.”

  “All the gods forbid that I should seek a quarrel with you, O Prince of Egypt. If I have said anything that I should not have said, then I beg your forgiveness, and I will abase myself before you if you should desire.”

  “It is for me to beg your forgiveness,” Moses said unhappily. “I am so filled with anger at myself today that I turn it on anyone and everyone I meet. Let us part in love and justice.”

  “So let us part,” the men of Upper Egypt said, bowing before him.

  Then he led the yellow horse around the corral to where his cousins were still buying and bickering. They began to snicker as he approached, and they exchanged what they considered to be clever remarks about Moses and the horse, pointing out that since both had strange qualities, to put it gently, they would make an interesting and compatible pair on the streets of the city of Ramses. Thin-lipped, his nostrils quivering with rage, Moses led the horse up to them and said quietly but coldly,

  “Go on then, you royal bastards, and I’l kill the next one of you who makes a remark about me or my horse!”

  They became silent and still—the slur so incredible, so utterly blasphemous, that at first no reaction was possible. At last one of them, the same Ramses-em-Seti whom Moses had laid hands on in the war-court so long ago, found his voice and said,

  “A strange insult to come from you, nameless one. We have tolerated you a long time, but that time is over. Get away from us now before we shed blood.”

  Leading the horse, Moses walked away—walked on and on, like a man in a dream, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his mind blank and thoughtless. When he came to himself he was on the outskirts of the city and the sun was dropping into the horizon. From a peasant he bought four loaves of bread and a sack of clean water. The bread of that time, baked in flat, hard cakes about eight inches in diameter, was pierced in the middle and strung on a rope of braided grass. As did the peasants, Moses slung the bread and the water from his neck, mounted his horse, and, bareback, rode on into the night. He stroked the horse as he rode—and the horse appeared to respond to his need for friendship and comfort. When it became too dark to see, Moses dismounted, tethered the horse to a scrubby tree, ate a piece of bread and drank some water, and then found a dry spot of warm sand, where he lay down and fell asleep.

  So in two days he made his way across the Delta, sometimes in mud, sometimes on the dry, baked surface of the king’s road, forded branches of the Nile that were mere trickles in the dry season, had himself and his horse ferried across the wider branches, and finally arrived home in the City of Ramses.

  [13]

  HE SOMETIMES THOUGHT, in the afteryears of recollection, that the year which followed his purchase of the yellow horse was the lonely year of his life, an empty year; but in that, he was wrong, for this year which brought Moses to his seventeenth birthday was a year of transition and change in a manner Moses hardly knew.

  He was isolated as never before, even the girls turning from him, friendless except for Amon-Teph and Neph, the builder—but they were two good friends, and he spent many long hours with one or the other, hours on the observatory listening to the tales and legends and dogma of Aton—the one god who was all gods. From Neph he soaked in other lore, though he would not return with the engineer to the island of the morass and the slave people of Goshen—and in time he spoke to Neph of Aton.

  Neph was hardly surprised, and indicated that he had anticipated something of the sort. He told Moses that many men in Egypt held a part of their hearts for Aton—the gods of the night being easier to destroy than the great, golden orb of Aton. Moses, however, argued in the theological terms of his training that after all, even the mighty Aton died each night, to be reborn the following morning and, such being the case, who ruled during the hours of night?

  “Moses,” Neph smiled, “do you know how Aton dies?”

  Of course he did—as who in Egypt did not?—and he proceeded to repeat to Neph, in the same schoolboy fashion in which he had memorized it, the story of the goddess Nut, whose body arched from horizon to horizon and formed the sky, her mouth in the west, her groin in the east; and each night at sunset she swallowed the sun, which rolled down her body into her womb, from whence it was born in labour each and every morning.

  “It’s a pretty story,” Neph admitted, “and I liked it when I was a child; but truly, Moses, do you believe this foolish legend?”

  “I don’t suppose I do. But I don’t know any more what to believe.”

  Neph said that a good way was to believe what your eyes told you, and if practical men did not do that, there would be neither engineers nor builders. He asked Moses whether he had been at the seashore, and Moses nodded.

  “And have you ever seen a ship put out to sea?”

  “Many times,” said Moses.

  “Then you have noticed that after the ship has disappeared, the masts and banners and sails still show?”

  Puzzled, Moses nodded, a strange, wild idea forming in his mind.

  “Why?”

  “Does the sea bend?” Moses whispered.

  “Ah! Then why doesn’t the water flow downhill away from our shores? And Moses, if your goddess Nut keeps her face on the horizon, then why does the horizon move away from us—no matter how far we go? I have been to Hatti and Canaan—yes, even to Babylon, which is an unimaginable distance from here, and yet, wherever I go, the horizon goes away before me. Have you seen the hills at Giza and Memphis?”

  Moses nodded cautiously.

  “And you
see them as far off as you are. First you see the top—then more and more as you approach. Now, Moses, consider, could there be a horizon if the land were flat?”

  Moses stared at him, wide-eyed and bewildered, and then said, “But if the land is curved, why don’t the rivers and seas run off?”

  Neph smiled with the satisfaction of one who makes a simple but extraordinary revelation. “Because all the world is a ball, Moses, a ball that floats in the sky-bigger than you could imagine—but still a ball; and if you travelled to the west or the east and went on and on, in time you would return to your starting place. Here in Egypt, among engineers, builders and men of science, this has been known for centuries—as even the Chaldeans have known it for many years. We keep our peace because the priests will have none of it—and how many people would believe?”

  “I can’t believe it,” Moses said. “If the earth was a ball, we would fall off, our houses and rivers and soil—all of it.”

  “So we would,” Neph nodded, “were it not for the glory and goodness of Aton. He made this earth, and all the days of mankind he circles it from east to west. It is his breath, his desire, that holds us to his earth. Never does he sleep or rest, since time began, and always he watches and sees, for we are his children. This is the true glory of Aton, Moses, and there are no other gods, because there was only he at first, and all that is or was or will be, he made. So I tell you, but keep this counsel. Don’t even tell the priest, Amon-Teph. I have put my life in your hands now.”

  Belief or disbelief—he didn’t know. It was better to be out with his yellow horse, whom he had named Karie, the Egyptian name for the legendary land of the yellow men, where all silk was made. It was better to race across the hard clay of the river flats, to course over the endless sand hills; to seek out the forgotten and beautiful monuments of antiquity, half-covered with the drifting sand, yet still beautiful; to ride curiously through the endless peasant villages in the rich flood valley; to journey south to the always wonderful pyramids; to run free and unattended, dreaming all his dreams.

  He was more with his mother, too. It was only in this year that he began to understand the strange and woeful complex that was Enekhas-Amon, the courage mixed with her pathos, the gorgeous plans and fancies that existed side by side with her pettiness and selfishness—and the single-mindedness of her love for him. Now Moses had tasted enough of young manhood to begin to comprehend the tragedy of a woman so revered, so beautiful, so courted that her whole life pivoted around the fact of her beauty—and the loss felt by such a woman when her beauty vanishes and with it all that beauty brought her. There was still much about Enekhas-Amon and himself that he did not know—the dream which she hinted at so mysteriously—but here and there a piece of the puzzle would fall into place; and the very fact that he himself could only unravel ends and bits made him comprehend how widespread and desperate the plot of which he, Moses, was the pivot actually had become. But for all that, he had no faith in it or its outcome.

  He tried to pay court to the ageing, sick and tortured woman who was his mother—to satisfy a little of her half-forgotten need for attention and adulation. He persuaded her to walk with him on the lovely balconies that overhung the river, to sit in the gardens with him, to watch the evening homage to Osiris with its procession of white-robed, shaven priests and veiled virgins; and even if she hated Osiris and all he stood for, the pageant and the music were rewarding. Yet always he was conscious that she lived—not merely for him—but for the intricate plot and web she was spinning.

  So the year went and came to its end, as all things must, and sometimes, when Enekhas-Amon looked at the tall, broad-shouldered young man who was her son, she would turn away quickly to hide the tears in her eyes—for to her hungry eyes, never had a prince of Egypt been so much a prince.

  [14]

  AMON-TEPH TOLD MOSES that his mother, Enekhas-Amon, had decided to submit to trepanning. The priest was becoming an old man now; the flesh on his face dropped in heavy folds, and his hands trembled. His reddened eyes were wet with emotion.

  “I’ll soon put an end to that,” Moses said.

  “No—” The priest shook his head. “All our plans have come to nothing. We have played out our game, my son, and when that happens, old people like ourselves have the right to make our own decisions. It’s not for youth to decide, because the last thing youth can comprehend is what it means to be old and defeated.”

  “Isn’t it high time you told me about this game you’ve played?” Moses demanded angrily.

  “Be patient, my son,” the priest said, smiling wryly. “We’ve made it a mystery where there really isn’t any, but only to protect you. Soon enough you’ll know everything, but not yet. Trust me. And as for your mother—that too, all of it.”

  “But she’s not going to be trepanned!”

  “Why, Moses? Is life so sweet that she should cling to it? Do you know the pain she lives in? Anyway, I’m afraid the choice is not hers, for a few days ago the God Ramses called her to him and spoke to her. He said that he had heard about the severe headaches she suffers, and he noted that such was frequently the case when people had too much pent up in themselves—adding that he felt it was time to let the foul vapours escape. In all of this he was talking figuratively, but she understood him completely; and when he said that he had decided to ask for a trepanning, what could she do? She asked only one thing—that the God-King’s hand would not be raised against you, and to this he agreed. I believe him, my son, and for this I am happy; for I tell you, Moses, you will be such a man as is made for great destiny—whatever our beloved Aton decides that our destiny should be. And never misjudge Ramses; he is a strange and terrible man, but also one of the most remarkable men Egypt has ever known. I say this because it may well be that your life eventually will be pitted against his and your wit against his wit. Respect him, Moses.”

  Yet Moses scarcely heard the priest, for his mind was racing and planning, and finally he burst out, “Tonight, Amon-Teph, the three of us will leave this place. I’ll buy a chariot today, and we’ll head for Upper Egypt, perhaps for Karnak, where we may find shelter. I know horses now, and weapons, too—”

  Amon-Teph interrupted him with the same wry little smile. “Moses, Moses, what a lot you have to learn about people, You can never run away from yourself, and such adventures belong only to storytellers. Nothing you say can make your mother change her mind, and if you talk in such a fashion, you will only disturb her. Now you must be a pillar of strength to her. Be gentle, be wise and understanding. All these past seventeen years of her life were dedicated to fearing a great prince. That is all she wanted, and from that she believed all else would flow. Show her that she was not wrong and that she did not fail.”

  Moses stared at the priest, the tears running down his cheeks; and Amon-Teph wiped away the tears with a corner of his robe. “I never saw you weep before, Moses,” he said softly. “Tears are for children, and you are a man, and a great prince of a great nation. Recall, how often I have told you about the ka, the soul of a human being—which like a mirror of truth reflects man as be really is. You know that we of the priesthood of Aton have learned, perhaps from our suffering, to put little trust in this mummery of embalming and entombing—yet for that very reason we have come to know the truth about the ka. Perhaps in some dream Enekhas-Amon has looked at her own ka, looking into a mirror that showed the past and the future at once. The ka is deathless, my son, and if you wonder that I talk this way, then consider—many men loved your mother, too many men and the God Ramses loved her, perhaps the only woman he ever truly loved, but no one loved her the way I did. The ground she walked on was holy, her smile was a benediction, and for a kind word from her I would have gone to my death. It may be that only Aton should call such love forth from a man, and it may be that I am paying a price for this; however, I am not sorry, and this love never changed. She changed, but to me she remains the divine and perfect princess of the Great House. Sometimes I think I see something of the
ka, but again this can be the meandering of an ageing man. Let it be, but be kind to her, Moses, and if god is willing, she will survive the trepanning.”

  Unable to speak, Moses nodded and went to his mother.

  [15]

  ONE OF THE many pictures of this time that was imprinted upon the mind of Moses indelibly, to be remembered clearly in a future when so much of life in the Great House had become confused and blurred, was that of the royal surgery when he brought his mother there.

  Since the lamps of the time were so poor, surgery, like other important work, was performed only in daylight; and now, as Moses and his mother and Amon-Teph walked through the long corridors of the palace, it was just past the noon hour. They had to traverse a central hall of some four hundred feet, which connected the various wings of the enormous palace, the hall of the towering pillars, where Moses had long ago seen his childhood companion dashed to his death; and since there was no slave or cook or sweeper in the Great House who did not know that this was the day Enekhas-Amon’s skull would be opened, hundreds of eyes were fixed upon them.

  The mother walked like her son, straight, head up and eyes fixed ahead—eyes which moved only to glance occasionally at her son, upon whose arm her hand rested. She had scorned to cloak herself, but walked dressed as a royal princess, wearing a sheer skirt that just touched the ground, a belt of gold bars set with pearls, and a great collar of thin gold plates that fell to the edge of her bare breasts. Her shoulders were held firmly back that her breasts might not sag, and her face was the result of a whole morning with the finest cosmetic artists in the land. With creams and rouge and putty and little bits of tape, they had filled in the wrinkles of her skin, shored up the loose folds of flesh, covered the black circles under her eyes, used drops that made her eyes shine like a girl’s. They had fixed long lashes to her puffy eyelids, so that the curve and shadow hid the flesh itself, and had rouged her mouth and delicately blended colour into her checks. Her hair was covered by a magnificent wig, dressed in the royal fashion, with the stiff, barlike wedges on each side; and not by prerogative but because she knew that now, still alive, she walked in her own funerary procession, she wore the thin circle of gold that is worn only by those who rule Egypt as gods.