Moses

by Howard Fast

  They did not have to go out of their way to hunt, but chose their targets in the morning when the animals came to the river to drink. So little fear did the animals have of them that they were able to fell game with javelins, and since there was so much fresh meat to be had, they could conserve their precious store of bread. They also found berries in plenty and they speared fish in the river.

  A lion killed a horse. The wild dogs would gather around their fire at night, so they tethered the horses close; but a lion leaped from the darkness one night as they slept and dragged down a horse. They were awakened by its screaming, and each of them grasping a javelin, they found their target in the moonlight, pinning the lion to earth with the force of their casts. The horse was dead, but the excitement of the lion-kill made them proud and cocksure, and next day they took the other horse, the beautiful yellow horse, Karie, that Moses had bought in Buto, loaded all their goods on to him, and set forth on foot. Moses was in high spirits now, full of a sense of boldness and daring and achievement, and Nun caught his mood and reflected it. Both of them had been reared in lands where lions were rare and invested with an aura of kingliness, and the pursuit and killing of lions was the sport and privilege of kings.

  Two days later, they went out of their way to stalk a lion and they killed it with their javelins. But the third lion took both their casts without stopping and bore Nun down, before Moses clove its spine with his sword. Nun was unhurt except for claw marks on his chest that he would bear to his death, and they were both fortunate to learn proper respect for lions so cheaply and painlessly.

  The yellow horse stepped into a snake-hole and broke his leg, and they had to cut his throat and leave him to die. It was not an easy thing for Moses to do. Karie had been his first freedom—together they had tasted the adventure of youth, and there had been as much love between them as may be between a man and a beast. The past was dying-but it was doubly hard to kill the thing he loved so. Forty-nine notches were marked on Moses’ Kushite staff when they left the horse behind; from here on they would have to bear their burdens on their backs. To carry their war shields was out of the question, so they took each a single javelin, sword and dagger, laminated bows with thirty shafts apiece, and Moses his black stave, and Nun made a burden of all the bread left to them. The rest they buried, raising, a stone cairn to mark it.

  The Nile forked, and they followed the bend that took the southernmost direction—and still they saw no sign of man and his works. Day after day they went deeper and higher into the soaring mountains, which began to lose their softness and became ranges of high cliffs, rock crags and towering stone peaks. And as the Nile grew narrower and more shallow each day, there dawned on them the realization that they were approaching the mysterious and legendary source of the Nile, the fearsome place from which no traveller had ever returned; and the thought depressed their high spirits—as did the knowledge that there could be so much of the world in which no human made his dwelling. So great was the distance they had come that the very idea of retracing it terrified them. Nun pleaded with Moses that they had come far enough.

  “Master, this is the end of the world,” he said, pointing to the brown, forbidding peaks, their points shrouded in purple clouds. “There is the smoke of Gehenna. Must we die because your father wants us to die? Now is the time that any man of sense would turn back.”

  Moses had become short-tempered and irascible, and he vented his anger on Nun because there was no one else to vent it on. “I am sick to death of your whining and snivelling and of your wretched superstition! I am sick of your Gehenna and of your rotten desert gods! Don’t you think I want to turn back? it’s little enough you know of men like Sokar-Moses. The God-King of all Egypt said that I must travel a hundred days, and if we return sooner than two hundred days, it will be to death. There is no returning for us, and I am lost here with an ignorant, cowardly slave!”

  Nun accepted the tongue-lashing and the badge of cowardice, and that night, while lightning played among the mighty peaks and thunder shook the chasms, he sat at the fire and wept openly and unashamed. Moses now understood his terrible and uncontrollable fear, and with all his heart he desired to comfort him; but his pride would not let him apologize to a slave. Instead, he was silent, and for three days they went on in silence.

  Now the Nile had become a brook, flowing through a thick jungle-forest growth that lined the bottom of the chasm they followed. Moses no longer knew whether this was the source of the Nile or simply some lesser branch. Legend held that the river had its source in some great lake of marvellous beauty, but surely this sluggish stream did not mark the outlet of a great lake. In the afternoon of the third day of silence, Moses was bitten by a snake, which he killed with his sword even as it sank its fangs into his calf. Nun gave a terrible cry, drew his dagger and shouted wildly for Moses to lie down. Moses obeyed him without thought; he was going to die, and his heart was icy-cold, a receptacle for fear. He sprawled on his stomach, wincing with pain as Nun cut the skin where the snake had bitten. When Moses twisted his head to see what Nun was doing, he saw the Bedouin sprawled at right angles to him, sucking at the open cut. That was the last thing Moses remembered, and a moment later he lost consciousness.

  He learned afterward that for the day and a half that followed, he lay in a delirium; and that during that time he had periods of convulsion that racked his body from head to foot and brought him to the very door of death. He also learned, in good time, that Nun knelt over him without sleep or rest, wise in the lore of the snake, keeping his body cool and wet when he had the convulsions, holding his teeth apart with a soft cloth, lest he bite off his tongue, comforting him and soothing him. In his delirium, Moses talked and talked, and there was little of great importance in his life that he did not speak of. Thus Nun learned of the truth of his birth, that Moses was the sacrifice of the Levites that a priest of Egypt had taken alive, and that he and Moses were kin by blood. This and much more Nun learned, and there were long hours while Nun pondered the strange circumstances that had thrown them together, himself the slave and Moses the Prince of Egypt, each so different from the other and so alike.

  Because he felt that Moses would die, he distilled the knowledge with his tears and sorrow. He wept for himself, but he wept more for this strange, tall, pensive and curiously sad prince—who was at one and the same time so wise and so ignorant, so sophisticated and so innocent, so gentle and so hard, so strong and yet so helpless. In all of his life and experience, Nun had never come to intimate knowledge of anyone like Moses, and even the tale told in pain and delirium could not wholly rob Nun of his conviction that the blood of gods flowed in Moses’ veins. He wept also because his relationship with Moses was the one certain, safeguarded thing in his life.

  But most of all, Nun wept because he knew that he would also die, for he knew that it was Nehushtan who had put the yellow horse’s hoof into a snake-hole and he knew that it was Nehushtan who had struck down Moses. Moses must die because he had blasphemed against Nehushtan and killed the snake, and he, Nun, must die because he had defied Nehushtan’s will in his attempts to save the life of Moses. Nor did Nun care very much, for here, without Moses, it was better not to live.

  Even while he laboured to save Moses, he felt in his belly Nehushtan’s fangs, cold as ice, the death fangs of the serpent-god. Nehushtan held him in pledge, so to speak; and Nun knew that it was only because Nehuhstan was away and because his, Nun’s, love for Moses was so great, that death was postponed.

  So he nursed Moses and saw the poisoned leg swell enormously and turn purple. He waited for Moses to die, but Moses lived, and on the following day, with the eventide, the delirium passed and Moses weakly asked Nun for water. As Moses drank the water, his hands trembling so they were unable to hold the cup which Nun had to set to his lips, Nun told him what had transpired and also bade him farewell.

  “Are you going to leave me now, Nun?” Moses whispered in sudden fear.

  Holding Moses’ right hand, the tears r
unning down his cheeks, Nun shook his head and cried, “I will never leave you, master, never. I had thought that you would go first and I would follow you, but now I must go alone. I am dying.”

  “Nun—dear brother, what a selfish fool I am. I didn’t know that you were bitten.”

  “I was bitten,” Nun said dolefully, “not by such a snake as bit you, but where it leaves no mark, inside my belly, by the god Nehushtan. Now I must die.”

  “What?” Moses raised up on one elbow to stare at the Levite.

  “I am pledged to the god and I must die.”

  “And you are not pledged to me?” Moses cried. “Where was your Nehushtan when I paid out good gold for you, and sealed a bargain and bought you to serve me or to die by my hand?” The astonished and shocked expression on Nun’s face assured Moses that he had taken the right path, and he continued, “Pledged to Nehushtan! I spit on Nehushtan! This is not his land and he is no god here! And anyway, what god has the right to break a sale and contract between two men, when gold crosses hands? Answer me!”

  Nun shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I bought you as a slave,” Moses said tiredly. “Nehushtan must deal with me before he claims your life. That’s the law. Now leave me alone. I want to sleep.”

  Moses rolled over and almost immediately fell into a deep, healthy sleep. Exhausted, unable to cope with the direct argument Moses had hurled at him, Nun lay down beside Moses and pulled their cloaks over both of them. They slept deeply until the rising sun awakened them. Then Moses was ravenous with hunger, and Nun was so busy building a fire, softening their bread in water, and eating with an appetite to match his master’s that Nehushtan’s claim was postponed. They ate enormously, finishing the last of their bread, and then they lay beside the fire and Moses talked long and gently to Nun.

  He told him that a snake was a snake, a very poor sort of animal, and he repeated the teachings of Amon-Teph, that in the childhood of all nations and peoples a time comes when they worship a snake as a god. There was no great mystery to it, he explained to Nun, for man did not always know that it was his sex-organ that brought life to the female womb. When he discovered that fact, it was new and wonderful, and because the sex-organ itself was in the form of a snake, if one cared to think of it thus, he made a god of the serpent. So it was even with the Egyptians in the olden times, Moses pointed out, and said to Nun,

  “Tell me, Nun, how is it among your people when they make a pledge, a son to a father, let us say?”

  Nun shook his head. “It is shameful to the Egyptians.”

  “There are Egyptians and Egyptians, and this thing our priests know about and we learned it in school as children. For a thousand years ago, it was done among the Egyptians.”

  “They lay hands upon his loins and take hold, of the organ,” Nun whispered.

  Moses nodded—and then, bit by bit, he splintered the pillar of Nun’s faith. He was fighting for Nun’s life, as Nun had fought for his; and he recognized that this was a different, more delicate and more difficult battle than any he had known before. He had heard how, among the Bedouin tribes, there were sorcerers who could put a spell upon a man, so that he wasted away and died in the conviction of his own doom, and he had heard of Bedouin witches who could sing their victims to death. He had heard Neph say, once, that among the forces of the earth, there is nothing so powerful as an idea that has taken root, and he understood now what had been then no more than a cryptic remark.

  So during the days that followed, he worked and reasoned and fought for the soul of Nun—and in the end he triumphed.

  In the course of this, in the wonder of a man, a slave, a friend who would put his mouth to a poisonous wound to suck the poison, to give his own life for the life of another, he opened his heart to Nun and told him that which Nun already knew, the story of his birth and childhood. Then he asked Nun who he, Moses, was—if Nun knew?

  “If you are indeed the child who was taken by the priest, then I know,” Nun answered thoughtfully. “We are a small people, we Levites, and smaller since we became a slave people, and each of us knows all the others. The father of the child was Amram, but he is dead, and his wife Jochebed may be alive or dead, I don’t know. Two of their children are alive—Aaron, who was once a strong man and a good worker, and his sister Miriam, who has a sharp tongue. Jochebed was a woman of the family of Sephir, but Amram is blood-cousin to my father, so if you are that child, we are kin twice—” But Nun believed nothing of what he said, in the full, deep sense of belief; and Moses shrugged his shoulders and murmured, “Who knows!” The Delta was another world, far, far away.

  It was five more days before Moses could walk comfortably, and then they set out for the south once more.

  They had had enough of the heavy growth around the sluggish brook that was once the Nile or a branch of the Nile, and filling their water bags, they struck out over the high ground. Now it was climbing in earnest, and they moved straight for the high barrier ridge to the south and west. It took them three days to climb it to the pass, and then they beheld, to the south of them, range after range of the same awful peaks. In the distance, at the bottom of the valley, they saw a’ little river sparkling in the sunlight like molten silver. They reached it the following day and followed it south against the current, still climbing. Moses cut fourteen notches on his ebony stick while they followed it through valley after valley, until it seemed that they and the churning stream must be climbing to the very roof of the world. At last it revealed its source, a beautiful little lake nestled against a cliff and fed by a thin tracery of silver spray that fell from some two hundred feet above. This cliff they skirted, climbing wherever the face was broken enough to afford foot-space—until, late one afternoon, they reached the top.

  To the north of them, behind them, from whence they had come, range after range of mountains rolled away into hazy distance—so great a spread of peaks and valleys that they could hardly comprehend that they had crossed it. To the south of them, there was a veritable paradise, an unending stretch of green parkland, the waving grass waist-high and trees scattered throughout, as if some mighty gardener had dropped them about to suit a fanciful but admirable taste. Through this parkland, the little river flowed to the cliff’s edge, and in the distance there seemed to be a broad lake which was its source. All over the parkland, herds of game grazed, antelope and great horned beasts and incredible little horses striped black and white and big horned cattle like oxen and, in the distance, giant grey figures with long tusks, which Moses recognized as the fabled elephant, paintings of which he had seen but never the animal itself.

  And wending across this parkland, perhaps a mile away, they saw a line of black men, carrying the spoil of the day’s hunt slung from poles.

  “So we come to Gehenna,” Moses thought, but like Nun he was speechless and for a long while could only stand and look.

  [6]

  LONG AFTERWARD, WHEN Nun or Moses would tell the story, they would speak of the village of Doogana, but that was not the name of the village and neither was Doogana its ruler or chief or king, but just a witch-doctor, an old, old man, old as the hills and the rocks, wrinkled and small, with a loose, round belly hanging in front of him as he sat cross-legged upon the ground before his hut. There he sat all day long, baking his old bones in the sunshine, with his dish of the water-of-time in front of him, a broad copper dish, with his mortar and pestle on one side of him and his clay jars of herbs and unguents on the other. There he sat, small, old, black as Moses’ Kushite staff, naked except for his loincloth—and there to Doogana, the hunters brought Moses and Nun.

  For the hunters were not people of war or hatred, but tall, easygoing men full of smiles, black people, but different from the people of Kush and speaking a different tongue, too. They were courteous and smiling, and they made the gestures that people make in lieu of language. Their animated delight with Moses and Nun spoke plainly of a people who saw few strangers and had no reason to fear them. They carried fine throwin
g spears tipped with long, slender bronze points, but no shields, and they had bows of beautiful, polished yellow wood. They were barefoot and their loincloths were of coarse cloth woven of grass. Some wore copper bracelets and others necklaces of the claws of beasts. Their bronze knives were hafted with finely carved ivory, but not all of them had knives, and they carried no swords and no iron.

  They were full of hospitality, giving the wanderers fruit from their bags and for drink a sort of wine tasting of berries and carried in clay flasks. Then they led them to their village, a matter of two hours’ walk through the enchanting parkland.

  The village was without a wall or any other protection, a cluster of hive-shaped, mud-and-grass huts set among fields of waving grain, and as they neared it, women and children as well as men came running to see who these strangers were. But all were full of smiles and laughter and curiosity, the adults respectful, but the children coming close to finger the stained, torn kilts the travellers wore, to stare at the golden neckpiece that encircled Moses’ throat, and to touch their long iron swords. They were also fascinated by Nun’s great black beard, for they were a clean-faced people; and they chattered among themselves, undoubtedly making highly personal remarks, and laughed deeply at what they said—but all in such simple good humour that offence was impossible.

  And so they brought Nun and Moses to Doogana, who watched them approach quizzically and thoughtfully—and then motioned to them to be seated on the ground in front of him. This they did, and then water was brought to wash their feet, and more fruit and wine and flat, fresh-baked cakes of bread were set in front of them.