by Howard Fast
The effrontery brought forth gasps of shocked surprise from the onlookers, and Moses could hear the angry whispers from the clusters of priests and magicians who watched them from the shadow of the columns; but even if it meant his own death during the next few minutes, he would not have bad it otherwise; and he had to struggle within himself to keep from weeping with sorrow, joy and pride for this strange, many-sided woman who all his life had been a sickly and petulant mother, but was now more the queen of Egypt than any of Ramses’ wives and concubines.
As for Amon-Teph, like Enekhas-Amon, he was walking in his own funerary procession. He had taken his leave of life and also of fear. A lifetime of dreaming and plotting bad come to nothing, but now it seemed to him that he had lost little and perhaps gained a great deal; and as he walked along, feeling inside like a young groom and lover with his bride, he reflected that perhaps it was so with all men—unable to judge the importance of anything until the goal has been reached or lost for ever.
So they walked to the royal surgery—a broad, highroofed room, open entirely on one side to the gardens below and with the long curtains drawn back on the other side. Here were many court functionaries, priests and magicians to support the doctors with their spells—and nearly the entire medical staff of the Great House; for the trepanning of a member of the royal family was no small matter. To Moses, the whole aspect of the occasion was macabre and hateful, the marble operating tables covered with white sheets, the stone basins to catch the flow of blood, the rows of bronze instruments, scalpels and knives and drill-bits, the laminated bows for drilling, the hundreds of flasks of drugs and medicines, the mortars and pestles for grinding herbs—and of course the surgeons with their priest-like shaven heads, gathered in learned intimacy and talking their important mumbo jumbo—the endlessly reiterated and distorted fragments remaining from the long-past time when medicine had been a living, groping science in Egypt. Seti, his paunch greater than ever, his legs more spindly than ever, rushed forward in his capacity as personal physician, but a glance from Moses kept him at his distance; and Re-Kophar, the priest who was chief and overlord of all medical matters in the realm, made his obeisance to Enekhas-Amon, and said,
“Divine sister of the God-King, all is ready, and in a moment the chief surgeon will be here.” He was a tall, sourvisaged man, and he made his face even longer and more dour as he said, “Compose yourself, for not only will you be in the hands of skilled physicians, but even at this moment, the gods are being informed of your troubles. I myself will watch every step of the operation—”
“I am composed,” Enekhas-Amon smiled. At this point her head was a furnace of pain, and her whole body ached and throbbed from the strain of the walk; but she was determined, since all else was lost, that her son should retain a memory of her that would recompense him at least a little for the years of complaint and petulance. Seeing that in spite of himself the prince’s eyes were fixed on the silent insult of the golden crown, she removed it carefully and handed it to him, saying lightly,
“It is only a piece of metal. But when I wore it men like yourself could not take their eyes from it and therefore looked less keenly at my face, which, for all that cosmetics can do, is still the face of an old and sick woman. Take it. It won’t burn you, Re-Kophar.”
Then, still smiling, she said, “If this must be good-bye, Moses, my son, bear yourself well and proudly.” She did not trust herself to say any more, and all the carefully composed sentences that she had prepared for this occasion melted away. She saw that Moses was at the end of his control, so she simply raised herself on her toes, kissed his lips, and touched his cheek with her fingertips. Then she turned and walked into the surgery, where the barbers were waiting to wash her and shave her head.
Moses remained motionless, a person in a trance, until Amon-Teph took his arm and led him a little distance away. “You can watch the operation, my son,” Amon-Teph said. “Do you wish to?”
He shook his head.
“I will watch it,” the priest murmured. “I don’t want to leave her now.”
“Watch over her, Amon-Teph.”
“You will wait here?”
“Yes, I’ll wait here. Will it hurt her?”
“No. They will give her a potion to put her to sleep, and if she feels pain, she won’t remember.”
“Go to her, please,” Moses said.
When the royal surgeon entered, the hangings were closed behind him, and then the curiosity seekers, the gossips and the idlers drifted away. The hours of the operation were too long to wait, and Moses was left alone in the corridor with his thoughts and the hum of voices from the surgery as his only companions. His thoughts moved slowly—disjointed memories and fancies. The corridor was lit by open vents to the roof, and down through these vents came bars of sunshine, a line of golden bars in the distance; and near Moses—was one of those pillars of sunshine, the yellow light filled with dancing motes of dust. He remembered afterwards the way the dust motes danced and eddied in the sunlight, but little else that went through his mind then could he remember.
And when at last they brought Enekhas-Amon out on a great wooden stretcher carried by six slaves, her eyes closed, her head swathed in bandages, Moses felt completely drained of all emotion. Next to Amon-Teph, he followed the slaves back to the apartment where he and his mother lived, and when they had set down the stretcher in her bedroom, he told the slaves that they might go.
“She must be kept very quiet,” Amon-Teph said, “and always someone must be at her side.” The three old slaves who tended her were fluttering around and Moses told them,
“I’ll remain with her. Leave us now.”
It was late afternoon, and through the broad window of the chamber Moses could see the shadow of the Great House creeping out over the Nile. The boats of the fishermen were pushing slowly upstream, back with their day’s catch, and across the river the bent figures of the peasants were scraping at the soil. Another day was ending in the endless march of the days of Egypt.
He turned back to Amon-Teph, who was holding Enekhas-Amon’s wrist, feeling for the pulse. Moses felt strangely unmoved as he looked at the waxlike sunken face of his mother. He felt no recognition. He would only remember the women who had smiled as she took off the crown.
“I can’t feel her pulse,” Amon-Teph said.
Moses took a silver hand-mirror from her dressing table, wiped it on his kilt and then held it in front of her open mouth. He put it carefully back where he had taken it from and said hopelessly yet calmly to the priest,
“My mother is dead, Amon-Teph.”
The priest drew the sheet up over her face. Moses walked to the window and stood looking out and as he stood there he heard the old man pleadingly intoning,
“Which thou, oh god, seek the western horizon,
the land lies in darkness, in death,
and the lion stalks forth from his den,
the creeping beasts strike.”
“Day comes and you light the horizon
and drive away the beasts of darkness,
so that men may awake and stand on their feet
the world over, they do their work.”
“Oh, Aton, how manifold are thy works—”
[16]
TOGETHER MOSES AND Amon-Teph left the bedchamber of Enekhas-Amon and walked through the darkening corridors to one of the many balconies that looked out upon the river. They were alone on the terrace and they stood at the stone balustrade looking out into the night.
“I had thought to go to the observatory,” the priest said, “but I am afraid that death came there first. Since I have despised Osiris during most of my life, I should have no great fear of him afterwards; and I am impatient to be with your mother. All that notwithstanding, I cling to life and I am afraid to die. God praise your youth, Moses, for the older we become, the more jealous we are of our little spark of life.”
Out of his own thoughts, Moses sighed and wondered why the God Ramses should stoop to trep
anning. “Why didn’t he kill her and be done with it?” he asked Amon-Teph, his voice so cold and awful that Amon-Teph shuddered.
“When you have loved a woman once, Moses, and have taken her to bed with you, are you ever rid of her?”
“He’s rid of her.”
“Yes—possibly, I don’t know. We are a strange, tortured people, Moses, and the mind of the simplest peasant is a maze that you would lose yourself in. Your mother was in constant pain. Of their own accord people have their skulls opened to relieve the pain, and often enough they live.”
“Are you defending Ramses, Amon-Teph?”
“I’m defending you, my son,” the priest answered sadly. “Why don’t you weep and let the hatred out of your heart?”
Moses shrugged. “No more tears, as you said. And don’t be afraid for me. I will bide my time. I begin to find qualities in myself that I never suspected. I think I can be patient. But now we are going to talk, Amon-Teph, and no more mysteries. Look where you have come with your foolish mysteries.”
In something close to a whimper, the old priest said, “I can stand all that awaits me, but not your contempt, my son.”
Moses turned suddenly and clasped the old man to his bosom, telling him, “No, my father—not contempt.” His voice choked, and he shook his head. “Not contempt, my father, my teacher. I am trying to be a man. It is hard.”
“I know.”
The first edge of the moon arose now about the dark flat edge of the Delta. They remained silent for a time, each struggling with his own emotion, until Amon-Teph was able to say,
“Ask what you wish, and I will answer you the best I can though I think you know most of it. You bore half a name because the other half waited. You would have been Aton-Moses.”
“I suspected as much. But I think I’ll remain Moses. There is little point in strutting and posturing now, and I haven’t enough vanity to take a name that means my death. There are many reasons why I want to live, AmonTeph, not only because life is good and sweet, but because I have a score to settle. To tell the truth, I am tired of the gods. You destroyed my fears of Osiris and his creatures of the night—and for that I will be everlastingly grateful—and if Aton is the only god, just and loving, he will not need me to carry his name. I know that you and my mother and perhaps some others dreamed for many years of seating me on the throne of Egypt—well, who am I to judge, as you have made plain to me? But the choice was a poor one, my dear friend. I am not an Egyptian, am I?”
“No—you are not,” Amon-Teph admitted. “But Aton warms more places than the River Nile.”
“Be that as it may, who am I?”
The priest stared long and thoughtfully at the moon before he answered, and then he turned to Moses and asked him searchingly, “Are you sure you want to know? Can I judge whether you should know?”
Moses cried, “I must know! Can I live in emptiness—out of nothing, no past, no memory?”
“You have the memory of Egypt.”
“No! No longer! I want my own! Let me be the judge!”
“Very well,” the priest sighed. “But to understand it, you must understand what it meant when the holy Ahk-en-Aton proclaimed Aton as the one living god. He, Ahk-en-Aton, lifted Egypt out of despair and defeat, and brought in a brief age of light and hope—of art and science and fearless inquiry—as in the ancient times when Egypt shone for the whole world like a light in the darkness. And it was his son who raised to the throne beside him Enekhas-Aton, his sister, in the old way of the god-kings. But Tut-ankh-Aton was not the man his father was, and even while be sat on the throne, the glory was fading. The whole great tribe of priests who lived like leeches on the back of the people and who were cast out when Aton triumphed—they were already at work planning and organizing the revolt that overturned the kings of Aton and finally placed Seti on the throne. That you know, and you know how mercilessly Seti destroyed every vestige of Aton worship. Before Seti, Tutankh-Aton succumbed to fear and changed his name to Amon-his wife’s to Enekhas-Amon, and some bitter whim, of Seti gave that name to your mother.
“So think of her, Moses, a girl of great beauty, great birth, the sister of Ramses—I will not call him god again—and beloved of Ramses. He wanted to make her his queen, but she could bear him no children and she bore children to no man. The soothsayers and magicians told him that this was the curse of Aton, and that if she would change her name, she would become fertile and bear him a son. But this, for some reason, for some streak of iron inside her, she could not do. They had terrible, violent battles and he came close to killing her—and her own love for him turned into a malignant hatred. It was at that time she found me out and came to be instructed in the worship of Aton—and because I loved her and had adored her face from the first time I saw her, I could refuse her nothing, and embarked on this venture that ends here.
“In those days, she began the retreat that ended in her seclusion, and very often she would take her barge and go out for days into the endless waterways of the Delta; and sometimes, perhaps because she pitied my doglike devotion, she would allow me to come with her. Thus it was that we went, one day, along this channel and that one, almost to the Land of Goshen, which lies, as you know, on the eastern edge of the Delta. We were drifting along, the slaves dipping their oars just enough to give us headway in a channel so narrow that the oars brushed the marsh grass, your mother curled up on a mass of pillows in the bow, singing softly—she still sang then—and I standing beside her, when we saw something floating in the water ahead of us. Understand, Moses, there were only the two of us in the boat, and the slaves at the oars, and the helmsman, who was both a slave and a Delta pilot. The thing in the water was a basket, smeared inside with hard clay mixed with bits of cloth, with a child inside it—a child no more than two weeks old. When we picked up the child, the basket was already sodden and beginning to sink. You were that child.”
Moses said nothing. He simply nodded and waited for the priest to continue.
“It doesn’t disturb you more than this?” Amon-Teph asked gently.
“It has disturbed me since I can remember. I feel better now. Now that I know, I can think about it without being afraid. Where did the child come from, Amon-Teph?”
The old priest spoke slowly, for he had to tell it in his own way now, as if he were compelled to make all of it alive and present; the royal barge lying there in the reeds; the princess under her canopy clutching the child to her bosom; the baby, red-faced from its exposure to the sun, wailing in discomfort and hunger; the princess snapping at him,
“Don’t stand there watching, Amon-Teph—find someone to give the child suck before it dies of hunger!”
“But where? Where, in this wilderness?”
“Where the child came from, you fool! Take off that foolish robe of yours and find out where the child came from!”
Amon-Teph nodded as he recalled it for Moses. “I thought I would sink and perish in the morass, but as she willed, I did. Naked in a loincloth, thigh-deep in mud, I waded perhaps a hundred yards along the side of the channel, and then the ground became firmer. The reeds were seven or eight feet high above the water, so I could not see where I was going; but suddenly I was through the reeds on dry ground and there before me were perhaps a hundred men and women and children—who scattered in panic when they saw me and began to run away, leaving behind them the remains of a little fire in which they had burned some incense and leaving behind them, too, a carved cedar box.”
It was the carved cedar box, Amon-Teph made clear, that brought them back; for when they realized that they had left it behind, they stopped running and began to return. They had been surprised, but the sight of one muddy Egyptian, a priest, by his shaven head, did not serve to sustain their fear.
“All of you come back!” Amon-Teph shouted. “I’m not going to burn you! I’m a priest of the Great House and I want to talk with you!”
So they returned, warily, and two of them leaped forward and seized the box and dragged it with
in their ranks. Afterwards, Amon-Teph told Moses, they let him see what was in the box. It was a large, black water snake.
“Their god,” Amon-Teph told Moses now. “The snake of fertility, to which they made the sacrifice of the child. A very ancient and common practice—even among our own people two thousand years ago. The same snake that you will see curled around the legs of Isis—a superstitious and ignorant cult.”
“Who were these people?” Moses whispered.
“One of the slave peoples of the Land of Goshen,” Amon-Teph shrugged. “They are all much the same, Bedouin wanderers from Sinai and Canaan who received sanctuary in the grasslands during the great droughts of a century ago—and whom Ramses enslaved. These called themselves the children of Levi, who was one of the children of Israel, for they keep an endless record of their ancestry. This was part of the tribe—I imagine there were six or seven hundred in the whole tribe—and they said they were related to other tribes who also came from the children of Israel and who had remained in Canaan and Sinai when these went to Egypt. They spoke Egyptian of a sort, as well as their own tongue, for you must remember they have lived long among us. I learned a good deal about them; it was some time before we left there.”
“Tell me what they looked like, Amon-Teph.”
The old priest was tiring, and he seemed annoyed that the story must still continue. “Dirty, bearded, ragged—maybe they would have looked like you, Moses, had they been raised in the Great House; but they were skinny, dirty slaves, ignorant and superstitious.”