Moses

by Howard Fast

  “But if it doesn’t leave me alone?”

  Neph shook his head and said nothing.

  [5]

  IT WAS STILL the world’s morning, that time when Moses walked in the old streets of the old City of Tanis, which in his day had been renamed Ramses; and in many places it was a time of coming alive after a long sleep. It was the time of the merchant, and the whole Mediterranean world was quick with the knowledge that what you had to sell, another would buy. It is true that the caravan merchants of old Akkad and of far-distant China had crossed desert and mountains with their wonderful wares, but that was only a trickle. It needed the inland sea and men of ships, and ships and more ships to turn the trickle into a mighty torrent; and so quickly did these merchants smash the barriers of fear and superstition, sailing through the Pillars of Hercules to Britain and Ireland and even Norway, and through the Hellespont into the Black Sea and up the great rivers of the wild land of the Caucasians—so quickly did this come about that there was not time for someone to invent money.

  Yet a sort of money there had to be, and among the Phoenicians pearls and precious stones became the units of trade and measure. The Sea Rovers of the Achaean Islands used balls of tin and gold and silver, and the people of Hatti used the most precious metal man had ever found, iron, in cubit-long bars. Among the Egyptians, yardage of linen and sacks of wheat had become too cumbersome for the ever growing commerce of the City of Ramses, and finger-rings and bracelets of copper, tin and gold were becoming set units of value. Nowhere on all the known earth was there a place where the Egyptian ring had not found its way, and there was no movable product of the earth that had not been unloaded at the stone docks of Ramses.

  Thus it was that Moses went to the slave market with a leather pouch of gold rings hanging from his belt, and a good deal of uncertainty as to how one buys a chariotdriver. The slave mart was at the far end of the water front, where the cries of pain and fear, the stench and the horror that was matter-of-fact in slave markets could not disturb the people of the Great House. Here, where the stone quays ended, the river edge was mud and muck, protected from the floodwater to some extent by wooden piles and horizontal palm trunks, but never dry, and used by the fishermen as a place to clean and scale their daily catch.

  A long, brick-walled, thatched-roof shed had been built and lately improved by the slave-dealers, who worked in a loose association of some forty families and had a monopoly throughout the Delta of slave purchase and sale. Slaves taken captive in war belonged to the God-King by right; but slaves brought by merchants from other lands, and Egyptians sold into slavery for debt were bought and sold in the main market. Until the time of sale, the slaves were kept in chains in the long shed, men, women and children indiscriminately bound together, except for the virgins, who were kept separate. Once each day, they were fed a meal of dry bread and salt fish, and now and then a little fruit to ward off sickness. They made their toilet in the river muck behind the shed, and each morning, to clean them for the day’s market, they were dragged through the river bottom by the servants of the dealers. Since the dealers stinted on food, every mealtime was fight and fury and screams and recriminations, and since the floor of the shed was damp, packed mud, there was a good deal of sickness. Very often, half in pity and half in contempt, the fishermen would throw the ravenous slaves the entrails and heads of the fish they cleaned. Some of the slaves disdained to go near the foul scrapings, but others ate them eagerly, and sometimes mothers would plead with their children to eat the raw and ugly stuff, knowing out of their own distant tribal experience that it had the ingredients to ward off diseases.

  But the bad went with the good, and often enough the quick decay of such rotten food would set some slave to screaming with pain, while others joined in sympathetic keening and moaning, recalling memories of home and family and weeping in hopeless frustration. When this happened, the servants of the dealers would invade the sheds, plying their bullwhips to the left and to the right, and thereby bringing quiet and peace of a sort.

  This was not entirely cruelty; slaves were slaves; they were a part of life, and even a young man as sensitive and thoughtful as Moses could not actually imagine a functioning society without slaves. Nevertheless, he felt distaste and annoyance at having to go to the slave market.

  He told himself that he hated the place because it stank so, and his discomfort at having to look at people whose lives were so miserable was not without arrogance. He differed from his brothers and sisters, the cousins of the palace tribe—and more so since he had discovered the secret of his birth—in that he could not be indifferent to creatures of low degree. However, he condemned the dealers in human flesh, not because they bought and sold mankind, but because they were greedy and avaricious in driving their bargains. Like so many people who had access to inexhaustible stores of wealth, the anxiety that produced greed and miserliness was not part of Moses’ understanding. Because the necessity had never faced him, he considered the craving for the goods of life to be mean and despicable.

  Yet, for all their meanness, there was little that went on in the City of Ramses that these dealers did not know. They knew the truth that was sacred and the truth that was profane. They knew the mother, abandoned by a feckless husband, who came to sell herself that her children might eat. They also knew the scribe who sold them his son that he might buy jewels for a noblewoman he was enamoured of. They knew the high priest who purchased virgins of a particular physical structure of which he was pathologically fond, and they knew precisely what type of woman Ramses would pay any price to take to bed with him. They knew the secret of the religious fanatic who, in pursuit of a custom done away with centuries in the past, had bought four slaves to kill in his wife’s tomb, that his dead spouse might be well served as she entered the afterworld; and they knew not only who purchased slaves for the houses of prostitution, but who patronized these houses.

  They also knew Moses, the prince of the half-name, and they knew the rumours concerning his being sired by the great God-King. They knew why Ramses had banished Moses for three years. They knew the wealth of Moses almost as well and in as much detail as Seti-Moses, steward of the Great House. They knew that Moses came to purchase a driver, for Hetep-Re had come himself to explain and to demand a commission—a commission that the dealers indignantly refused. They knew that the prince would pay well for the best, and therefore they had delegated one of their number, known for his delicate manners and his ability to deal with godliness without giving too much offence, to act as agent for all of them-all of them to profit, whatever slave was selected.

  The name of this dealer was Kotophar, and he was standing at the end of the row of large granite auction blocks, apart from the crowd of shrilling traders, when he saw Moses approach. He had never seen the son of Enekhas-Amon before, and like many others who saw Moses for the first time, he was struck by the singular quality of the prince, the large-boned yet not ungraceful frame, the high-ridged face, and the wide shock of black hair. The arrogance of his bearing, his palpable distaste for his surroundings, and the lack of friendliness in his greeting to the polite and amiable dealer made Kotophar increase the price immediately, even above the previously agreed-upon figures.

  Kotophar greeted him with many bows, many selfdeprecating observations, and with the assurance that he had no other purpose in life than to serve him. He then demonstrated his slyness by dwelling on the beautiful maidens in stock—it being understood that such an errand would most usually bring royal blood to this ill-favoured corner of the city.

  “Where, alas, we are forced to pursue our livelihood,” Kotophar sighed.

  “I want a man, not a woman,” Moses said shortly.

  “Ah? A body-servant? A bearer? A cook?-we have two cooks from far-off Edfu, men of distinction and talent. Or perhaps a eunuch? We have a number—”

  “You needn’t go into all that,” Moses stopped him. “I want a man to take with me to Kush as a chariot-driver. I want a man of my age, more or less. I
want a strong man, without disease, with all his teeth—and one who is not submissive but hates the fate that made him a slave. Preferably, a man who can drive horses and knows how to care for them, but give me the other qualities and he will learn that.”

  The slave-dealer nodded sagely, his face creasing in a troubled frown. He continued to nod through long moments of silence before he sighed and announced,

  “You ask a good deal, O Prince of Egypt.”

  “I am not in the mood for games or bickering—your name is Kotophar?”

  “Your holiness, your godliness, my name is Kotophar. I am dirt under your feet, nothing and less than nothing, so I have a name of no distinction, O Prince of Egypt. Yet it is ennobled on your lips, so I thank you.”

  “Then you know who I am, and if the price is within reason, I will pay it. Show me the slave and spare me the rest of it.”

  “Ah—believe me, godliness, I would lay down my life to spare you the pain of a pinprick. But what you ask requires some thought. It requires some thought. If you would be good enough to come this way, O Prince of Egypt.” He led him past the crowd to the other end of the sheds, all the while explaining that the best and strongest slaves were the prisoners-of-war, and they were reserved for the God-King—not for any purpose that required such fine flesh, but to dig ditches, pump water and drag stones. Of course, that did not mean that there were no unusual and often exquisite items to be found here in the greatest slave market of any civilized nation. There were indeed. But chariot-drivers?

  They had walked the length of the noisy crowd, buyers not only from Egypt but from Philistia and Hatti as well, driving their bargains at the top of their lungs, each one trying to outshout the others and the dealers attempting to roar over the noise of all of them. How anything in the way of purchase or sale could come out of such chaos, Moses did not know; and to make things worse, donkeys and camels and pack horses made their own noise on the outskirts, and slaves unloaded piles of goods that would have to be measured or weighed before being bargained and fought over to arrive at the proper price-exchange for the slaves purchased.

  But none of this appeared to trouble Kotophar, who shrugged and commented that they were lucky that today was an off-day. “It gets a little out of hand,” he said, “when the men of Upper Egypt come down to replenish their beds or their pantries. I was thinking, O Prince of Egypt, that the Hittites have a way with horses universally admired, and it comes to mind that we have an excellent young man from Hatti, strong and healthy, who wassold out of the king’s guard because he had the misfortune to pick a quarrel with the lover of the queen’s sister-in-law. There is also, if my memory serves me, a giant of a fellow from Kush, but whether he knows horses or not, I can’t say.”

  “And you would give me a Kushite to fight against his own people? Let me see the man from Hatti!”

  Now they were at the end of the long shed, far enough from the crowd to converse in normal tones. Even in the warm sunlight, the interior of the shed was dark. Moses had the impression of many men, chained to posts or rails at the back of the shed, some of them sprawling on the floor, some standing, some crouched. Two Egyptian slaves, wearing the bright-red loincloths of the dealers and branded across the face, squatted on a granite slab—and then leaped to do Kotophar’s bidding when he told them to bring the Hittite.

  Moses had seen men of Hatti before, but his impressions had been formed by rich traders and diplomats at the court of the Great House. They were not at all like the bearded, tattered and gaunt young man they dragged before him now.

  He crouched like an animal, his small blue eyes squinting to keep out the bright light of the sun, his long, tangled, honey-coloured hair like an animal’s pelt over head and face. He still wore the Hittite trousers, ragged and dirty now, but from the waist up he was bare, and Moses drew back in disgust from the network of half-healed whip scars that encased him like a shirt.

  “I assure you, Prince of Egypt,” the slave-dealer said, “that he is strong and young. Look at the muscles, not at the scars. Scars heal.”

  “His spirit is broken. What would you sell me, a whipped dog to go to war?”

  “He’s a chariot man, through and through—”

  Moses did not know that this was a programme of contrasts, that Kotophar had already decided which slave he would buy and was merely laying a proper groundwork for his price. The transgressor from Hatti was taken away and another Hittite appeared, a man of about thirty, welldressed in the stained but still impressive robes of a courtsier, his hair combed under his felted hat. When Moses turned on Kotophar in anger, the second Hittite was replaced by an Egyptian criminal, redeemed from a death sentence by the slavers, a short barrel of a man whose pig-eyes gleamed in murderous hatred. He was quickly removed for a brown-skinned Libyan who swaggered defiantly but whose face wore the dull mask of an idiot. This brought them to Kotophar’s choice, a Sea Rover from Mycenae, who was the sole survivor of a ship that had foundered off the Delta, and who was found by the fishermen and sold to the slavers.

  He was a tall, well-built and handsome man, his long brown hair hanging in two thick braids down his back, his face covered with a curly brown beard, his hands large and capable. Almost convinced that he had found what he was looking for, Moses asked,

  “Can he talk our language?”

  “Holiness, he was only taken three days ago.”

  “Slaver, what do you take me for—a fool?” Moses cried. “We march for Kush in a few days and you would sell me a man I cannot speak to! I am tired of all this!”

  Kotophar apologized with a mixture of frustration and sorrow. He begged Moses to forgive him and begged him to understand that it was not as easy as it might seem to furnish what he desired at a moment’s notice. If the Prince of Egypt could only wait a day or two, then the request could be satisfied to the last detail.

  “I have no time to wait,” Moses answered sharply. “Have you Bedouin slaves?”

  “Bedouins?” Kotophar repeated in amazement.

  “Yes. We will be going through desert much of the way, and they know the desert, don’t they?”

  “Forgive me, Prince of Egypt, but you are a young man and you have lived most of your life in the Great House. I have lived mine where mercy ends and knowledge begins. I tell you-you cannot trust a Bedouin. He will smile at you while he plots your death, and sooner or later, he will put a knife in your side—”

  “Spare me a lecture on personal mannerisms and tell me whether you have a Bedouin slave who will suit me?”

  A strange expression came over the face of the slave-dealer, and he nodded slowly, almost with pleasure. “Perhaps I have, but as to whether he will suit you, O Prince of Egypt, that is for you to say.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Moses wondered.

  “What could I mean, holiness? This Bedouin is young and strong and his spirit is not broken. He comes from a slave gang engaged upon public works at the edge of the Delta, and they have capable overseers, believe me. If they could not break his spirit—well, see for yourself.” And he called to the two slaves and gave them their instructions. At first, they did not move but looked at him in fear-until he shouted, “What are you afraid of, you dogs! The man is bound and hobbled!” And then apologized to Moses, explaining that their own slaves here at the mart were without spirit. The Prince of Egypt put such a store on spirit; and like a well-fed, sleek cat, Kotophar watched them drag a twisting, struggling slave up to the stone, and then when he would not mount it, attempt to drag him on to it. This was beyond their strength. It was not only that the slave was strong—Moses had seen strong men before—but he moved like a whip being cracked; and as if in answer to Moses’ unspoken thought, Kotophar said,

  “The amazing thing is his reserve of energy. Nothing destroys that. He is like an animal. He has been whipped more than that Hittite you saw before, but you won’t see him cringe. And his strength!”

  Suddenly, the Bedouin stopped struggling and leaped on to the stone, flinging off the
two slaves as if they were children. He stood there, his hobbled legs spread, stating at Moses—at the prince’s golden trappings and glittering jewels. He was not a tall man, at least a head shorter than Moses, but he was very broad, his trunk barrel-like, his arms and legs wrapped in mighty casings of muscle. His neck was so heavy that it made his head seem smaller than it actually was. His face was flat and broad, covered with the curling beard of a young man, and his long black hair hung behind him in a single thick but tangled braid. Like many of the Bedouins, he had a short, thick nose, and his dark eyes, deep-set under a broad brow, watched Moses with a mixture of contempt and amusement. Suddenly, he said to Kotophar in a strangely accented, nasal Egyptian,

  “Who is this gilded popinjay—a customer? Tell him he’ll be cheated if he buys me!”

  “This is a prince of Egypt, you dirty cur!” Kotophar shouted. “You stinking, filthy desert scum—this is a god you face! To be bought by him would be the greatest honour ever done you in your rotten life!”

  Moses, all the while, was watching the Bedouin with fascination. He was naked and barefoot, a bit of rag serving as a loincloth. His trunk and legs were hairy-more so than with any Egyptian Moses had ever seen—but even through the hair Moses could see the whip scars that latticed his flesh. And for all his dirt and savageness, he had a certain winning quality, making Moses feel that here was a man other men would follow willingly and love greatly.