Moses Read online

  Moses, who had seen the king from a distance a number of times but never so close as now, was both disappointed and puzzled by the drabness of his costume. Everyone in the throne room—priests and stewards and royal attendants and various ladies of unstated position and relationship, and captains and administrators and royal progeny grown to manhood, and foreigners who fascinated Moses with their strange hairdress and clothing, and the Princess Enekhas-Amon, and indeed Moses himself—everyone was dressed more richly and ornately than the king; but Moses could not comprehend that only one powerful and kingly could dispense with ornamentation. For the first time he had doubts about the omnipotence of the living god of Egypt, and this helped him keep his fears under control; also, his absorption in the pageantry and colour of the scene, the perfumes and spices that tickled his nostrils, the tale the hieroglyphs unfolded to his well-trained eyes, and particularly the huge, bright picture behind the throne—the romantic scene of battle, the dead Hittites, the champing, rearing horses-helped take his mind away from his rapidly ebbing fears of the king.

  As time passed, he was able to look at the king steadily and notice the resemblance to Enekhas-Amon—the wide jaw, the full, fleshy mouth, the arched brows, and the small, thin nose. It was incongruous to see the familiar head set on the heavy, muscular shoulders. Even as his mother whispered to him, “Moses, don’t stare like that!” the king’s eyes met his and then lifted to recognize Enekhas-Amon. Without any of the manner of the god that Moses had imagined, he smiled thinly and nodded for her to come to him, and then said a word or two to dismiss the priest who was talking to him. As the priest backed away, Moses noticed that no one came closer than twenty-feet from the throne platform without the king’s beckoning nod—and he also heard his mother whisper quickly.

  “Remember, at the platform, prostrate yourself—and then crawl forward slowly until you can put your cheek against the god’s feet. Flat on the ground then, and you remain there until he tells you to rise.”

  Walking stiffly, as he had learned was the proper way for a prince to walk in ceremonial circumstances, Moses gave no indication of hearing her. He was conscious that the babble of voices had stopped, and though he dared not look behind him, he was certain that every eye in the place was fixed on him and his mother. Even the guards who stood behind the throne platform were watching him curiously, and when he ventured to glance at the king, he felt that the black, deep-set eyes held the same curious interest. As he knelt down and crawled up the cold steps of the throne platform, he saw his mother’s legs marching firmly forward; but for his part he was glad that he had to lie flat on the floor and wriggle pronely toward the god. Not only did it provide—to his trembling soul—a sort of protection, but it relieved him of the necessity of seeing the god’s face. Yet, as he crawled, he could hear them greeting each other.

  “Well, my sister—as young and beautiful as ever. Welcome.”

  “That’s nonsense, and you know it. I am neither young nor beautiful, and I lie in a corner of this palace sick and suffering. I’m as lonely and as forgotten as a woman can be.”

  “If I had only known …”

  “That’s neither here nor there, my brother, and I have a notion that no illness of mine would bring any pain to you. But I didn’t come here to quarrel with you. We’ve done enough quarrelling, and for my part I want to forget it. I came here because you promised me five years ago that on the day of my son’s tenth year you would look at him and give him the god’s blessing.”

  “Did I really?”

  “It’s a small matter to you, my brother, but it’s a large matter to me. You did, and I remember quite well.”

  “You always had a good memory, Enekhas-Amon, and my own is rather poor. So this is your son?”

  Moses lay before him shivering, his cheek pressed against the god’s bare foot, his breath choking on the heavy fragrance of perfume, saying to himself, “Please, please, dear god, let me crawl away, but don’t make me stand in front of you.”

  But the god was otherwise disposed, and he said, not unkindly, “Get up, boy, and let me look at you.”

  Moses tried to rise, but strangely enough the will to motion was somehow not communicated to his limbs and he lay there paralysed, begging himself, his legs and his arms to respond to the occasion. Ramses nudged his face gently with his foot.

  “Come, boy. Get up! No one’s going to harm you and there’s nothing to be afraid of.” And to Enekhas-Amon he said,

  “How old did you say the lad is?”

  “Ten years, and you know it, my brother. Now, Moses, get up!”

  His mother’s tone released him from his paralysis and, blushing with shame, Moses managed to get to his feet, to see Ramses chuckling with more amusement than the sight of a frightened boy would seem to warrant. He hung his head in mortification as Ramses said to Enekhas-Amon,

  “My dear sister; accept an apology. I do remember. The name brings it all back—the name, of course. Who else but my own dear sister would defy a thousand years of revered practice? Moses indeed! Now, boy,” he said to Moses, who took his only comfort in the fact that Ramses kept his voice low so that he could not possibly be heard by any except those on the platform, “stop hanging your head like a silly, blushing girl. Straighten up and let everyone see that we have a prince of Egypt here with us. I’m not going to eat you, boy!”

  “Yes, your holiness.”

  “And don’t call me ‘holiness,’” he said, almost precisely as the fat priest had. “That name’s in great favour in Egypt these days, but not among our family. It doesn’t sit right, and I’m far from holy; I’m a licentious old goat, as your mother will tell you if you give her half a chance.”

  It was some sort of contest between Ramses and his mother which Moses could not comprehend but only feel in terms of death winging down on them. Surely after what had been said neither he nor Enekhas-Amon had any hope of leaving the throne room alive, and his whole heart pleaded silently with his mother to take heed and bridle her tongue. But far from reading his thoughts, she replied indignantly,

  “Never, and you have no right to say that, brother! Where is your justice, your heart? I have taught him only reverence and devotion to the god who sits on Egypt’s throne.”

  “My dear sister, I was only amused by his name, and now you’re making me out to have all sorts of evil notions. Never have I seen a sick woman as full of vinegar as you. Put your hand in mine.”

  More confused than ever, Moses saw his mother take Ramses’ hand, all the while smiling at him with a mixture of contempt and respect—or so it seemed to Moses, who had seen his mother smile so rarely of late. In any case, it gave him back enough of his courage for him to ask,

  “And what is the matter with my name, Lord Ramses, my father?”

  “See, Enekhas-Amon,” he said, waving his golden sickle, “the lad has a tongue and uses it smartly, if I may say so.” And to Moses, “Nothing is wrong with your name as a name, sir, but it’s only part of a name, and where is the other part, we ask ourselves? I am amused, not at you, but at my royal sister who does things that no one ever thought of doing—a disturbing quality in a woman, Moses. As for your name—what it says is fine—a child is given.” He turned to the woman now, “But where is the rest of it, my sister?” a note of gentle mockery in his voice. “In all Egypt—there is no other Moses—because Moses is not a name at all. It is a question, my sister—and a rather insolent one, at that.”

  Enekhas-Amon shook her head, her eyes narrowing dangerously. If Moses had been watching her now, all of his fear would have returned, but he was staring fascinatedly at the king, who shrugged and said,

  “I’m just making a little jest, lad. If you were Tut-Moses, Amon-Moses, Anubus-Moses or any one of twenty other Moses, no one would raise a brow. As a matter of fact, I like Moses—as it is. A child is given, and that’s enough. Stop looking at me that way, my sister—because I had the feeling that we had both cleansed our hearts of that sort of thing. Kneel down, Moses, and I wi
ll give you the blessing of the gods of Egypt. They will look kindly upon you, and they will turn arrows from your neck and knives from your heart. And perhaps they will even fear you a bit, so that when you cross over into their land they will not deny you the life everlasting which is the heritage of a prince of Egypt.”

  As Moses knelt and felt the king’s hand on his head, he could only sigh inwardly with profound relief that it had ended as well as this. He was too young to be concerned about life everlasting, but old enough to want to live at least until he got out of this unpredictable man’s presence.

  [4]

  IT WAS SURPRISING how quickly he forgot his fears. A boy, even in the palace of a god, remains a boy, and for Moses there was more happiness than unhappiness. His life then was a full one, and if at times from the walls of the great palace he saw and envied the peasant lads, the street urchins, the river waifs who ran as wild as leaves tossed in the wind, who went as they pleased and slept where and when they pleased, he also had enough wit to sense that their abandon was short lived and that his own lot, whatsoever lay behind it, was a lucky one. And even for the royal progeny there were hours of abandon and aimless play, though there were more hours of school, of endless instruction in the use of the tools of war, of rigid instruction in the art of making and using hieroglyphs, of composing poems according to the classical style, of memorizing those spells and rituals from the Book of the Dead considered necessary for the cultural equipment of a prince of Egypt; of likewise committing to memory the psalms and prayers considered most salutary, of learning the process of mathematics and the elements of astronomy, or practising the measured precision of five dances, of becoming expert in the hundred rituals of manners that would always reveal in an instant who was highborn and who was lowborn—and finally, of instruction in the development of that strange and jealously held property of Egyptians, their macaat, which Egyptians would hesitate to render into other languages, holding that the quality existed only in Egypt and was therefore unintelligible to foreigners, but which Moses would translate in later life as the word “justice” although, growing into it, he felt it sometimes as “truth,” sometimes as “order,” and sometimes as a hunger to be a little better than he or any other man was.

  It was a full life, and if the days did not lag, neither were they counted. Afterward for Moses this time would have no beginning, although it ended, as so much of childhood does, with the first pain and grief of maturity. Each day blended into the next, and the day past was blurred into the timelessness of the present. It was a land where the sun shone everlastingly, where all that was always had been and always would be—and when, with his royal brothers, he was taken up the Nile in one of the splendid palace barges to view the shining Pyramids of Giza, the incredible mountains built in the ancient past by kings half-forgotten, and still standing so bright and clean with their surface of coloured and glazed tile undisturbed—the absolute of Egypt was proven to him beyond the power of words. Even more strongly than when a teacher-priest read to them, in the ritual singsong, passages from the Book of the Beginning telling how the gods created Egypt and Egyptians so that their own godly selves might endure. Yet when his pride rode too high and free, the maggot of his own doubt sucked at his insides.

  The innuendos and thrusts of his brothers he could possibly explain away as normal envy of the son of the god’s sister, the only son; for the complexity of the God Ramses’ marital and extramarital existence made for difference and distinction among the royal children. There was a strange streak of devotion in the king that would not permit the disenfranchisement of any product of his loins, but as the condition of his mates was varied, so was the status of his sons. The children of the virgin slaves whom Ramses took to bed lived together in a single dormitory, for more often than not their mothers were soon sold into foreign places. As for the concubines, they lived in the royal harem, and while their sons might remain with them even up to the age of seven or eight, they were then given over to the palace priests to live with them and to be raised by them.

  Only the few who were actual wives of the God-King had apartments of their own in the Great House, slaves of their own, and households of their own—and of these, few if any possessed either the wealth or independence of Enekhas-Amon.

  So, envy and pique and bitterness Moses might well expect, but the half of a name which he bore—and which became the target of so many taunts—this he could not escape from, Even in the child there were two persons—the prince of Egypt and the Moses, a child given, not as other children are, given, but through some mystery, which to a child spells horror and foreboding—and thus the one rode on the shoulders of the other.

  Yet not so heavily that the boy didn’t laugh and play with the fullness and fortune of his youth. Circumstance declared him a prince, and as the sun-drenched days became weeks and then months, he grew with the strength and bearing of a prince—a tall, full-muscled boy, supple of movement and with a promise of great power in the wide spread of his shoulders. His face began to change, and bit by bit the comforting resemblance to the people of Upper Egypt left him. His high-bridged nose, so typical of the families of Thebes and Karnak, became thinner, more hawklike, and his nostrils widened, began to curl slightly. The baby flesh fell away from his high, prominent cheekbones and his chin hardened and sharpened, with none of the gentle, soft beauty that the royal family prided itself upon. But the change came slowly, as slowly as his growth and maturation.

  [5]

  AT THE HOUR of noon, when the sun stood highest overhead and would therefore not glare in their eyes, the princely children were exercised in the use of arms. Afterward they would clean their steaming bodies in one of the many pools and fountains that graced the gardens, frolicking naked in the pleasure of their health and their youth, and after that they would anoint themselves with scented oil and eat their midday meal—figs, grapes, crisp, flat biscuits of fresh-baked bread and goblets of water. In a manner, it was the best time of their day, the time when they felt most manly and most conscious of the admiration of their sisters, who watched them from the broad balcony which encircled the war-court.

  But for this they had first to pay a price, and the grim, scarred war captains who trained the children of Ramses showed them no mercy for, as they pointed out, the spear cast in battle cannot distinguish between royal and common blood, and even gods who live in this world die and leave it as easily as the poor mortals who serve them.

  The princes were divided into groups according to age, and every day each group practised with one or another of the weapons—the dagger; the sword and shield; the spear or the long, black Kushite stave, polished ebony, and as long as the man who carried it. But as the boys grew older, there was more and more practice with the bow, which was the weapon Ramses loved best.

  There was a time once, as Moses and the others had been told, when the Egyptian weapon had been a light bow of cedarwood, a bow that a woman could draw; and for ages it had served to hold back the black men of the Land of Kush and the savages of the Libyan desert. But when the war with Hatti began, more than two centuries before, the Egyptians faced a mighty, five-foot war bow made of layers of laminated horn and with enough force to drive through a wooden shield as if it were paper—or through a man and into the heart of the man behind him. With this bow and with their terrible war chariots, Hatti conquered the sacred Land of Egypt and even for a space sat upon the god’s throne. But when the craftsmen of Egypt learned to make the laminated war bows and turn them against the conqueror, it was short shrift for Hatti—who was driven back across the desert and penned like an animal in his walled cities in the Land of Canaan.

  So the war bow became the walls of Egypt, but the royal children had little cause to love it, for every day their arms and backs ached and practice with it was relentless and unending. Yet as they moved toward manhood, the bow began to bend to them instead of they to the bow, and more and more they felt the elation of their arrows driving truly into the target.

 
As on this day, when the shooting was good, and when old Seti-Hop, their instructor, gave less grudgingly of his praise than ever before. The boys stood in one long line facing the courtyard wall before which their row of straw targets was placed, a target for each of them and each target bristling with arrows. Next to Moses stood Ramsesem-Seti, one of the few boys as tall as himself, strong and ripening in the arrogance that was already replacing the childhood good will of the princelings. He was a skilled bowman, perhaps the best in the group and with each shot he whispered some carefully insulting challenge to Moses. “Watch that, crow-nose,” or “Dry your fingers before you shoot,” or “Your arrows fly heavy, my lad—wet feathers?”

  The insults, from others as well, were not new. Moses lived with them; and he was now old enough to tell himself that if the insinuations were untrue, they were beyond the notice of one whose blood was as high as any god’s who had sat on the throne of Egypt; if they were true, he would only hasten the inevitable by responding to them. Himself, he shot calmly, easily, with a natural feel for the spring of the bow and the line of the arrow, ignoring the boy next to him. He was able to judge his target by the feel of the bow braced against his stiff arm, the curve of the parabola already instinctively gauged and calculated by his brain. The same awareness extended to the bows of the boys on either side of him and, noticing a slight upward shift in the point of Ramses-em-Seti’s arrowhead, Moses wondered why he planned to top his target. In that moment he saw a little child of five or so, the naked brat of one of the war-court slaves, hidden in the shrubbery at the base of the war-court wall, only his round face visible and smiling with delight at the sight of so much royalty bending the tools of war.

  Action coincided with recognition, and as Ramses-em-Seti loosed, Moses thrust him forward so that he went sprawling, his arrow quivering in the ground a dozen paces ahead of him. Livid with rage, the boy sprang to his feet and demanded who had touched him. The shooting stopped; a deadly, tangible silence spread among the princes; and in that moment the child leaped from the bushes and ran howling from the court. Old Seti-Hop watched the slave brat with a thoughtful eye and then walked toward Moses, his face sad and serious—and Moses in turn dropped his bow to the ground and nodded to his royal cousin.