Moses

by Howard Fast

  The son translated, his voice sombre and full of defeat, and when the old king heard the verdict of Seti-Keph, his face contracted in sadness and hopelessness. His words were slow and heavy as he answered, and his son asked,

  “Is not peace the measure of justice and love?”

  “For a soldier,” Seti-Keph said dryly, “it is honour that must be measured, not love, and we have come to teach Kush to be humble, not to be generous. Therefore, I take these things not as gifts, but as the spoils of war—and as for your father, he is my prisoner to do with as I think best!”

  “No—no!” the son cried. “For myself and my brother, yes, but my father is an old man and he came to you of his free will. How can you say that he is your prisoner? You spoke of honour, which you Egyptians hold so highly—”

  “Enough of that!” Seti-Keph shouted.

  The other son, who had remained silent until now, dropped his hand to his dagger; and Sokar-Moses, in a single swift motion, drew his sword and cut him down. The interpreter reached for his own dagger, but Seti-Keph, moving with a speed Moses would not have believed him capable of, plunged his dagger into the black man’s heart. It had happened so quickly that the spearmen had not yet reacted—but the old king stumbled forward and fell upon his son’s body, caressing his face and weeping like a little child. He had not long to weep. Sokar-Moses brought his sword down and the old man’s head rolled upon his son’s body and then on to the sand, a wrinkled little ball grinning up at the blue sky. And then, as the spearmen sounded a wild, fearful cry of hate and anger, Seti-Keph raised both arms and the archers of Hatti began to loose their deadly shafts. Half the spearmen fell before they could move from where they stood, and the others had moved only paces when the chariots thundered upon them.

  For the first time, Moses saw a war chariot of Egypt in battle, and he realized why Kush would go down before this army. The spearmen made no attempt to close their shields and form a wall. Each man fought for himself, and the horses and chariots thundered over them or tore them open with the spinning axle-blades. Meanwhile, other chariots thundered after the fleeing porters, cutting them down that none should leave there with the story of what had happened.

  A single spearman broke through to the officers, and as he hurtled upon them, crying his war cry, Sokar-Moses seized the man’s spear and ran the point into the earth, while a dozen swords were buried in the Kushite’s flesh.

  [17]

  FROM NUN, THE slave, as they made their chariot ready for the match, there came a comment to break the silence, “Yes, Prince of Egypt, I have seen Egypt at war, and they fight bravely and with honour,” using the word macaat, the expression of the soul of Egypt—and smiling at Moses as he spoke. “Kill him too?” Moses’ thoughts asked, while his silence defined the coils of his own agony wrapped around him. War is death, the negation of life, the violation of civilization and hope and mercy—but this was his career, chosen by the royal god, So do the gods, on earth and elsewhere, make war. Why then was he surprised? He had lost Seti-Keph, whom he would never be able to face with an open heart again, and would he not, in the same way, lose every man in this army? Until they were joined in battle, and he himself was struck down by the hand of this hateful, mocking Bedouin? Yet so savagely had every joy of life and living been crushed and dulled within him that he cared for nothing, not for the woman he had pledged his heart to, not for life and not for death.

  The army marched. Seti-Keph and Sokar-Moses, fierce and implacable men now, had put down and settled an angry situation among the officers, who wanted to parcel out this first spoil among the ranks. It would go to the God-King, Seti-Keph decided. Were they fools to dream of taking what was signed and deeded to him? Did they think that because they were so far from the Great House that the Great House had ceased to exist? Did they imagine that if they stole the fair spoil of the king that no one in the army would speak the truth to the God-King one day?

  So the goods were loaded into empty supply boats and sent down the Nile. The dead of Kush were left lying on the plain, and the army advanced. But now they advanced in battle order, and from hour to hour and from day to day they looked for the hatred of Kush to appear before them. In spite of the speed of the chariots, a handful of the thousand porters had escaped, fleeing into the wild river gorge and hiding themselves in rock clefts until darkness fell. Their feet would be winged with fear and horror, and soon enough the people of Kush would learn how their king, Irgebayn, had died.

  The army marched: the best spearmen first, then the archers and slingers, then the ranks of chariots, and then the bulk of the footsoldiers—and in the rear, the slaves and the herd of extra horses. The footsoldiers had donned the heavy armour that was dragged up the Nile in the baggage boats, and as they marched under the hot sun, their armour and weapons burned with heat. The chariots were geared for battle, a dozen javelins racked and rattling in each one, the arrows out and ready to hand, the big laminated bows waiting to be strung. The whole army became tense and silent, an ominous and oppressive mantle upon them that would be lifted only when they were released from themselves, their fears and their own dark thoughts.

  So they moved southward, day after day, and day after day they ascended the slope to a great tableland. Clump grass, dry and tough that it might exist on desert fare, became greener and more abundant—and presently the clumps became patches and the patches broad stretches of rippling grass. The nights became increasingly cool, and every so often in the daytime they would see high white clouds laced across the sky. Trees began to appear, at first only an occasional twisted desert shrub, then taller single trees, and then stands of trees. They saw herds of tiny antelope in the distance and large flights of birds would appear out of the south and circle above them. They sent out a hunting party once, but the little antelope were too fleet to be approached, and once, when a lordly, black-maned lion and three sleek lionesses stepped out of a thorn thicket to observe the army, the captains pleaded with Seti-Keph to allow a lion hunt; but he would do nothing to break their ranks or halt the even progress of their march.

  Moses bad never seen country like this, and in all Egypt there was nothing to approximate it—its great stretches of fertile plain, its cool winds, and its faint backdrop of purple mountains, far to the south. It broke through his depression, for it was a country to rejoice the heart and soul of man.

  It also gave Moses a sense of the insularity of Egypt. They Who spoke so glibly of ruling the world had only the vaguest notion of the world. Even the monstrous betrayal of Seti-Keph became petty brutality in this enormous expanse—and the sight of the mountains, still so far away, gave indication that this too was only the beginning of something far larger….

  And then one morning, as the army began its march, they saw the enemy—far and small in the distance.

  [18]

  AFTERWARDS, MOSES TRIED to remember—but could not-who it was had told him that no one person sees or directs a battle. A general may begin it with order and precision, and after the heat and fury have begun to wane,he may, if fortunate, gather the strings of organization together again; but battle itself is a hell unto itself, and no man, but fear and fury alone, rule it. Battle is a spasm, a seizure, a fit of madness sanctioned and legalized for the victor and punishable upon the vanquished as the victor sees fit. Battle is all that man is not and was never meant to be, and when he enters battle man becomes something awful, less and more than the pattern that made him man.

  Kush came to battle with grief and hate. While they were still in the distance, and Seti-Keph was coolly and methodically marshalling his order of defence and counterattack, Moses heard their cry. It was like no human sound he had ever been witness to before. It was a deep, vibrating roar of rage from thirty thousand throats, and it boomed like a terrible drum. He heard their war drums too, a low and frightful pulse, but the roar of human rage sounded above the drums and blanketed them and cried death to the skies and the distant horizon. So awful was the cry that Moses believed that if th
ere were birds in the sky, they would have been struck dead by it. Never before had Moses heard or imagined such a sound, but on many a night to come, it would wake him from his sleep, sweating and sick with the same fear he felt when he heard it first.

  Were they all afraid—these soldiers of Egypt—as he was afraid? His chariot, in the guard of Seti-Keph, was being drawn by the trotting horses to the close flank, and the other chariots, host by host, were drawing away eastward across the plain, a curving flank like a scythe flung back for the reaping. His driver, Nun, did not appear to be either afraid or disturbed, swinging his horses in position carefully and intently, looping the long thong of his bronze chariot hammer around his neck, where it would be to hand if he was called on to beat off an attack.

  Could Seti-Keph be afraid, so intent on his work as he thundered back and forth across the front in his gleaming chariot? His plan of battle was simple, direct and obvious. Two lines of heavily-armed spearmen were forming shoulder to shoulder, making a shield-wall about two hundred paces across, one end of it anchored to the edge of the rocky river-gorge, the other end reaching to the curved scythe of waiting chariots. In front of the shield-wall, the archers of Hatti and Babylon and the slingers of Canaan had taken their places, a line of them covering the shield-wall entirely. They would drive their shafts and fling their stones until the attack was upon them, and then they would fall back through the shield-wall to support it wherever it might be broken. Behind the shield-wall were the remaining footsoldiers, each host ready under its captain. If the shield-wall held, they would wait until the Egyptians took the offensive; if the flank of the shield-wall was turned, they would extend the wall in themselves, and if the wall was broken through, they would enter the battle at the gap.

  As for the chariots, they would strike the flank of Kush when the attack was joined. So Moses knew, and with Nun, he had fixed the razor-sharp cutting swords to his chariot’s axles, secure in the knowledge that nothing human could stand before them. Yet he was afraid. The short, heavy javelin he held was wet in his hand and his heart hammered in his chest. He was silent, as was the whole Egyptian army, held as it were in the spell of the terrible cry of hate that came from Kush.

  Kush was close now. Their front was perhaps a hundred men wide, and the black warriors had painted their faces white in their colour of mourning and death and they wore white feathers upon their heads. They advanced at a trot, their spears over their shoulders, ready to be dropped to the level when they were close enough for the final charge; and from his vantage point in the chariot, Moses could see rank upon rank of them stretching into the distance—an army so vast that it seemed to turn the show of force by the Egyptians into a pitiful mockery. And in front of the first rank, the drummers trotted, their short wooden drums slung from their necks in front, their fingers beating out a threatening tattoo. They advanced close to the gorge of the Nile, their single plan, apparently, an attempt to break the shield-wall there and go in behind it. His mouth dry, his feeling of horror and unreality ever increasing, Moses watched; and he noticed that Nun watched too, staring in silent fascination and concentration at the great river of black men.

  Kush was a good three hundred paces away when the archers of Hatti began to shoot, their powerful laminated bows filling the air with a singing swarm of arrows that could be heard even above the screaming anger of Kush. The drummers fell first, and then the first rank of spearmen dropped their lances and broke into an incredibly swift run. But before they had gone twenty paces, they lay upon the ground, skewered with arrows, while the rank behind them leaped across their bodies. Now all the archers were shooting as quickly as they could lay arrows to their bows and draw and loose, and behind them, the slingers, legs spread wide, were spinning their slings and loosing a deadly hail of rocks.

  The second rank of Kush went down and then the third and then the fourth; but to Moses, watching, shifting his weight as Nun struggled with the suddenly nervous and rearing horses, the charge of Kush seemed hardly interrupted, for each rank leaped over the sprawling bodies in front and each rank was coming closer. The black warriors disdained to cover themselves with their shields, swinging them by their sides to lessen the wind resistance as they ran—and now Egypt found voice and screamed back its own hate, defiance, fear and celebration of death. The two floods of voice mingled and rose to a searing crescendo, and the horses reared wildly and added their own trumpet of violent sound. The archers, loosing low and short and without aiming now, momentarily halted the charge with a squirming, bleeding breastwork of black bodies, but like a dammed river that overflows, the black men poured over their own dead and the archers threw down their bows and raced for the cover of the shield-wall. Most of them went through, but some were impaled on Egyptian spears as the shield-wall braced for the shock.

  By now, Kush had lost all order; the broken lines of spearmen made no effort to form themselves; and the massive, roaring black tide hurled itself upon the spear-wall with a crash of sound that finally cemented the screaming of the soldiers into a single terrible noise.

  Yet, to Moses, it retained the quality of a hideous dream, for aside from the rearing of the horses, no movement, no change, had taken place in the long half-circle of chariots that stretched from the flank for almost a mile. Apparently the black men had decided to stake all upon smashing the footsoldiers, believing that to be central to the decision—nor could Moses imagine what might be the fate of the chariots once the footmen were destroyed.

  It did not seem that anything could save them from destruction now. For just minutes, the shield-wall held—and then it bent inward like a thin sheet of copper under the hammer of the craftsman—and then it broke here and there, the screaming warriors of Kush pouring through.

  That was the last impression Moses had of the battle of the footsoldiers; for, seemingly without signal or order, the chariots were in motion. He awoke from his dream, his fear departed, the sweat on his skin was like ice. Nun was lashing the horses and shouting at them in his own Bedouin tongue—and far out on the plain, the whole massive line of chariots was wheeling around, using the shield-wall as a pivot, and driving in upon the army of Kush. Then Moses’ area of sight narrowed. He glimpsed Seti-Keph for a moment, the little man waving a javelin above his head, and he tried to tell Nun to keep the commander in view. But no sound, no words, no meaning, could be communicated in the hellish noise of the battlefield.

  His area of sight narrowed still further and his concentration mounted as the chariot thundered ahead. First, a single black man tried to spear a horse and Moses drove a javelin through his chest. Then two more, and Moses hurled his second javelin and fended the spear of the other with his shield. The man had come too close, and his howl of agony bit through all other sound as the axle-sword ripped out his guts. Nun whipped the horses, and suddenly they were within the thickness of the army of Kush with the black men on every side of them—but already the pounding, half-mad horses, drawing their great wooden carts, had cast their own peculiar terror before them. The black men gave back, pressed upon each other to get out of the chariot’s path, and howling his own paean of excitement, Nun drove the horses over them and through them.

  Hanging on to the rail of the lurching chariot with his shield arm, Moses cast his javelins into the press of bodies. He could not miss, and as they fled from the chariot, packing themselves and making themselves defenceless in their panic, he saw his heavy javelins pin two and three men together. And when another chariot sent them against him, the spinning axle-swords ripped through body, arm and leg, increasing the panic. They fled but there was no place to flee to. They fell upon the ground to avoid the terrible axle-blades, and the bronze-shod horses and the huge, bronze-bound wheels thundered over them. Some tried to fight, to spear the horses, to climb on to the tailboards of the chariots; but these men of Kush were few, and nothing to the fire of panic that raged among them. By the hundreds, they cast down their long spears, threw off their shields and tried to flee—only to come up against the
thousands of their own men who had not yet reached the boundary of battle.

  The chariots did not go unscathed. Moses caught glimpses of chariots turned over, of horses lying on their backs, trying to kick out of the harness—but these were few. So long as a chariot could be kept in rapid motion, it had a good chance of remaining unhurt.

  As for Moses, he was without thought or fear or horror or remorse; he was without heart or soul or conscience or concern. A red flame burned in his brain, and it burned away all that he had learned and knew of love among men, all that he had learned or knew of the whole process of belonging to humankind. The words which man had made to tell his fellow man of love and hunger and need and work had disappeared, and in their place, there issued from his mouth a meaningless scream of sound that joined the other sounds of rage and anguish. He existed not to create but to kill, and every motion his lithe body made was to kill and kill and kill.

  He had cast all his javelins now, thrown off his shield and seized his bow. For an instant, the chariot broke free from the crush, and lurching and jolting, raced across an open space covered with the dead and wounded of Kush. The horses, trained not to shy from the bodies of men, caught in the tension and fury, half-mad with their own fear and excitement, galloped upon living and dead alike. All around them, the chariots raced and circled and drove into the panic-mass of Kush; but for a moment, Nun drove parallel to the black men, and Moses, braced on the swaying chariot, loosed arrow after arrow into the dark mass. The panic reversed itself and surged toward them, and with the other chariots, they thundered through it, Moses loosing his arrows without aiming or thinking. Two hundred shafts were in the quivers fixed to the inside of the chariot, and Moses loosed and loosed until his arm was flayed raw, the blood running down over his bow. Both he and Nun had been wounded, but he had no memory of how and when; their bodies were coated and streaked with blood and the floor of the chariot was slippery with blood and both horses were mantled with blood and foam, but Moses felt no pain and no fear. Time had disappeared and space was shapeless and directionless. It seemed that at one moment they had been in the thick of a limitless, massive and uncountable host of Kush, and then of a sudden, the great black host had broken and was fleeing in every direction, thick clumps of men at first, and then twenties and tens and then twos and threes and then a flood of panic-stricken men in flight, each for himself, spreading over the broad, grassy plain—and behind them and on them the chariots killing and killing and killing.