Zipporah, Wife of Moses

by Marek Halter

  “Perhaps he didn’t plan to be gone for very long,” Zipporah suggested.

  “I doubt it, sister.”

  “Why?”

  “The day before yesterday, we were joined by a group of armorers returning from the quarries on the mountain. They said they’d seen a man on a camel riding away from the road to Yz-Alcyon.”

  “Going west,” Jethro muttered.

  “Yes, straight to where the sun sets. At first, the armorers thought it was a thief wanting to steal metal from their quarry. One of them turned back and followed him for almost half a day. Of course, we can’t be sure it was Moses.”

  There was a silence, while everyone mulled over what had been said.

  Hobab ate a little meat. “He’s gone off the road to Yz-Alcyon,” he said, in a pensive voice. “If he doesn’t get lost, and if he doesn’t fall off a cliff, he might be able to go round the mountain and get to the Sea of Reeds. It’s a long journey, though, and not an easy one for a man on his own.”

  “He’s going back to Egypt!” Zipporah and Sefoba cried at the same time.

  “Yes,” Jethro agreed. “Egypt, of course!”

  “’Of course?’” Orma cut in. “Why ‘of course’? If he killed a man, why go back to Egypt and face punishment?”

  Jethro clicked his tongue. “Moses is on his way to Egypt. Right now, he could be on a boat in the middle of Pharaoh’s sea.”

  “If he can handle his camel,” Hobab said.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Orma squealed. “What’s he going to do in Egypt?”

  Hobab laughed. “See Pharaoh, perhaps?”

  They all looked at each other. Zipporah suspected that beneath his mockery, her brother had another thought in mind. “You know something!” she said, angrily.

  “Don’t make those lioness eyes at me, sister,” Hobab joked.

  Jethro raised his hand to interrupt them. He nodded at Hobab. “Tell us.”

  IT had happened the day before Moses disappeared. At the hour when the sun was about to reach its zenith, Hobab’s caravan had met some Akkadian merchants returning from Egypt with a long column of about a hundred heavily laden camels and an equal number of other animals that were not yet fully grown. They were on their way back to the opulent cities on the banks of the Euphrates, which they had left a year earlier. The saddlebags on the camels’ backs were full to overflowing with fabrics, graven stones, wood from the land of Cush, even cane boats such as were only made in the land of Pharaoh.

  As was the custom, both caravans had halted and pitched their tents for the night. Then they had sat down to drink and exchange news. When the merchants discovered that the armorers were with them, they had been keen to buy weapons with long iron blades, and were disappointed to learn that everything had already been sold in the markets of Moab and Edom.

  “I was as disappointed as they were,” Hobab sighed. “I’d have liked to exchange the weapons for some of the young animals they were offering. Gray-haired she-camels from the delta of the Great River Iterou, far more beautiful than ours. When they saw how downhearted I looked, they promised me they’d pass this way one day and then we’d be able to do the business we couldn’t do this time.”

  “But what of Moses?”

  “Ah, yes, Moses . . . He’d been with us for nearly a moon. He sat down with us to drink milk with the merchants. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even seem particularly curious, but listened, even smiled whenever the merchants cracked a joke. When everyone had spoken, he asked if the merchants had any news of the sacred cities to the north of the Great River. ‘Yes,’ one man said, ‘every day new walls of stone go up, palaces for the living and the dead, and the slaves are working harder than ever under the whip of the new Pharaoh. He’s young, but he’s more terrible than any Pharaoh before him.’ ‘A young Pharaoh?’ Moses asked in surprise. ‘Are you sure Pharaoh is young?’ ‘The people in Egypt say that the last flood of the Great River designated him. He’s been destroying the statues of the previous Pharaoh.’ Hearing that, Moses stiffened. He questioned the other man as if he’d forgotten us. ‘Did you see that with your own eyes or is it just hearsay?’ ‘No, no,’ the old merchant protested, ‘I saw it with my own eyes! I was in the city of the kings during the last great flood.’”

  The merchant had explained how he had traveled along the Great River Iterou as far as Waset, the city of the kings, to sell the blue stones from the mountains of Aram that were so prized by the princesses of Egypt for their jewels. When he got there, he found out that he was unable to practice his trade before the following season. Pharaoh had just succeeded his old wife, who was also his aunt, and had herself been Pharaoh before him, and strangers were not allowed inside the palaces.

  “What are you saying?” Jethro exclaimed. “His wife was a Pharaoh?”

  “That was what the merchant said,” Hobab said, amused. “The new Pharaoh was first the nephew, then the husband, of the old Pharaoh, who was a woman. He mentioned her name, but I couldn’t repeat it. Everything seems very complicated in Egypt.”

  “A woman?” Jethro repeated, his face a picture of curiosity.

  “Yes,” Hobab laughed. “But listen to this. Before she became Pharaoh herself, this woman was the daughter of one Pharaoh and the wife of another Pharaoh, who was her brother. May Horeb laugh with us, Father! That’s how the rulers are in the land of the Great River Iterou.”

  “But what of Moses?”

  “Well, none of this seemed to surprise him. What did surprise him was when the merchant of Akkad said the people of Waset hadn’t seen any more of Pharaoh’s former wife, that she’d been confined in a palace of the dead but hadn’t been given the tomb she was entitled to.”

  Moses had stood up, gripping his staff. He had looked pale, and his eyes were shining. He had asked the merchant if he knew the Egyptian language. When the other man said yes, he had questioned him in that language. His voice was harsher now, and he spoke more quickly. The merchant answered, sometimes at length, with the respect that men of trade display in their dealings with those in authority.

  Hobab and his men, of course, could have taken offense at being prevented from following the conversation because it was in a language that made it impossible for them to understand. But they were discovering a new Moses, confident, authoritative, solemn—and emotional, too—and nobody had thought of protesting.

  “When they stopped talking,” Hobab said, “it was as if Moses had swallowed poison.”

  “And you have no idea what the merchant was saying?” Orma asked, no longer feigning indifference.

  “As I said, he spoke the language of Egypt.”

  “Didn’t you ask Moses what was upsetting him like that?” Sefoba asked.

  “I didn’t like to.”

  “And the merchant,” Orma insisted. “You could have questioned the merchant afterward—”

  “Hobab did the right thing,” Jethro cut in. “Such curiosity would have been out of place.”

  “Moses isn’t a man you ask questions,” Zipporah said, stony-faced. “He’s someone who says what he means. He showed us that.”

  Hobab threw her a sharp look, then smiled and nodded. “You’re right, sister. Anyway, after remaining for a moment in thought, he stood up and apologized for speaking in a language we couldn’t understand. ‘I know I’ve been rude,’ he said, ‘but my knowledge of the language of Midian is still very poor, and I wanted to be sure I understood what I was hearing.’ He bade us good night, and the next day at dawn, he was gone.”

  “Hmmm!” Jethro said. “It was only a pretext. Moses knows our language quite well by now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Hobab looked directly at Zipporah. “It means that whatever he wanted to hear from the merchant, he didn’t want us to know about.”

  The She-Pharaoh’s Son

  The summit of Horeb’s mountain had long since vanished, shrouded in the clouds that moved endlessly southward like ash. From time to time, Zipporah had to lift
her veil to protect her face from the sand and dust rising off the road. She held tightly to the jar of beer balanced on her shoulder. The folds of her tunic flapped around her hips and thighs. She had to lean forward to resist the fury of the wind.

  Coming over a crest of scrub-covered rock, she found herself below the village of the armorers.

  Cradled in the hollow of a long fault that snaked from cliff to cliff at the foot of the mountain, the village was something like a vast, elongated circle in shape. Its walls of rough bricks and roofs of palm leaves covered with earth blended into the rocks and ravines around it. But the courtyard, five or six times as large as Jethro’s, was alive with noise and activity, visible through the smoke of the fires and forges, the stench of which caught Zipporah by the throat. The smoke curled in the wind, as if rolled around an invisible finger, before dispersing into the turbulent clouds.

  The perimeter wall, onto which all the houses backed, had only one door in it, a heavy wooden door coated with earth. The village was really a small fortress, closed to all except those the armorers wished to enter, anxious as they were to guard the secrets of making precious weapons from iron, which were much sought after by rulers from the Euphrates to the Iterou.

  In between the gusts of wind that flattened the thornbushes, Zipporah heard the first blows. With a firm stride, she turned onto a path in which the recent rains had left gullies. Immediately, the grave, piercing sound of a ram’s horn rang out, announcing her approach. She continued her descent, pushing her shawl back so that her face was clearly visible. When she reached the foot of the slope, she walked past the pen where the mules—powerful, long-haired beasts capable of carrying heavy loads of wood or ferrous earth from dawn to dusk—were kept.

  The door in the perimeter wall opened, and two men came out, clutching long iron swords. The door closed behind them. Zipporah took a few steps forward.

  “Zipporah! Daughter of Jethro!” the shorter and fatter of the two men cried, his toothless mouth open in a wide smile, revealing his pink tongue and gums. “Welcome to the armorers’ village!”

  “Greetings, Ewi-Tsour! May Horeb preserve your smile.”

  Ewi-Tsour stared shamelessly at the jar of beer on Zipporah’s shoulder. “Zipporah! What a joy to get a visit from you! Especially as you never come empty-handed!” He laughed, and slapped his companion’s shoulder. “Go on, then, relieve Zipporah of her burden!” Then he turned to the door. “Hey, you in there!” he cried. “Open the door. The daughter of Jethro the wise wishes to regale us with her father’s beer.”

  A moment later, Zipporah was crossing the great courtyard. Wives and handmaids appeared in the doorways. Children came running, recognizing her and calling her by name, jostling each other to take her hand. She reached inside her tunic, took some honey cakes from a canvas sack, and distributed them amid cries of joy.

  Ewi-Tsour shook his head. “You certainly know how to make yourself loved!” he said, with pretended mockery, and chased the children away.

  “My father informs you that we have jars of honey for you.”

  “Your father is wise and good,” Ewi-Tsour said approvingly, screwing up his eyes. “But I don’t suppose you came here just to give us beer and honey?”

  In a few words, Zipporah explained the reason for her visit. Ewi-Tsour nodded and pointed toward the north end of the huge courtyard. “Follow me,” he said.

  The furnaces stood in the eastern curve of the courtyard. Like the silos used for storing grain and oil, each was covered in a thick layer of red clay, but had an opening at the top, like the neck of a jar, from which emerged coils of brown smoke and, from time to time, explosions of sputtering flames, so bright as to be almost transparent. All around, men were moving, pushing hollowed canes through the holes at the base of the furnaces and then breathing hard into them. In front of a larger hole, from which a beak of charred pottery protruded, two men in leather tunics were using long stalks with flat ends to guide a glowing thread of molten iron into hollowed stones.

  Twelve paces away, under a vast canopy, other armorers, also dressed in leather, but with their black arms bare and glistening with sweat, were beating with sledgehammers on shapeless ingots that lay on burning embers as part of the annealing process. The sound of the hammers was so loud that Zipporah felt as if it were going through her chest. She was tempted to put her fingers in her ears, but did not dare. The stench of burned earth was so strong that the air was barely breathable. From time to time, sparks spat from the furnaces, butterflies of fire that the wind dispersed in threatening arabesques into the gray sky.

  Ewi-Tsour saw Zipporah’s grimace. “You’re out of luck,” he shouted to make himself heard. “It’s really stinking today! The boys are making coal in the well.”

  He pointed to a small group of young men bustling around a brick coping from which coils of thick brown smoke emerged.

  Ewi-Tsour smiled, uncovering his pink gums, and led her to a half-open door. Beyond the door, men sat on the floor of a large room, polishing iron blades with sand and strips of ox hide still dripping with grease. They looked up when Zipporah entered. The greetings over, Ewi-Tsour turned to one of the men, still young, half of whose face had been consumed by fire. The skin on that side was taut, cracked in places and strewn with monstrous, hardened swellings, making what had once been lips, cheek, temple, eyelid, and ear quite unrecognizable. As the man had a beard that only grew on the intact part of his face, seeing him was like being confronted by a creature with two heads, one ordinary and the other like something from the underworld.

  “Elchem,” Ewi-Tsour said, “Jethro’s daughter wants you to tell her where you saw the stranger from Egypt.”

  “You told Hobab, my brother,” Zipporah said, making an effort to sustain the gaze of the man’s one eye. “He thinks that when you saw Moses, he was heading for Egypt.”

  Elchem grunted in assent. Ewi-Tsour made a gesture to urge him on. With a slight tension of his upper body that seemed habitual to him, the man turned, so that only the more attractive side of his ruined face was visible. “Yes, I talked to Hobab,” he said. His voice surprised Zipporah, being youthful and clear. “I followed the stranger. He was leading his camel away from the roads. I thought he was a thief. There are often thieves lurking around our quarries. But, in fact, he went right past the quarries. Your brother, Hobab, thought he was going north, hoping to cross the desert to the land of the Great Flood. It can be done, if you’re very brave. But he must have given up, because I saw him again the day before yesterday, on the road to Yz-Alcyon.”

  “You saw him?”

  Elchem nodded, half opening his mouth in what must once have been a beautiful smile. “He was a thousand paces from me. He wasn’t on his camel, but walking next to it. He must have tired the animal out.”

  “That’s a long way from here,” Zipporah could not help murmuring.

  The man stared at her insistently with his single eye. “The sky was gray, there was a lot of wind, and I have only one eye. But, as everyone will tell you, it’s the good one. It was him, you can take my word for it, daughter of Jethro. Ask them.” He indicated his companions, who grunted their assent.

  “Have no fear,” Ewi-Tsour said. “Elchem’s words are as solid as the metal we make.”

  “He was bare-chested, like an Egyptian!” Elchem went on. “None of us would go around like that. Especially not in this cold weather.”

  “I believe you, Elchem. I’m just surprised. So he’s back on my father’s land?”

  “No, he wasn’t going in the direction of Jethro’s domain. He was heading straight for the sea. For the great cliffs.”

  A big smile appeared on Zipporah’s face. “Yes, of course! You’re right!” She gave a joyful little laugh and, in a gesture that impressed the rough armorers and made them lower their eyes, bowed, seized Elchem’s hands, and lifted them to her brow. “May Horeb give you rest from his wrath, Elchem!”

  SHE heard Moses’ voice.

  A low murmur, like a h
um.

  She came to a halt on the path, a few paces from the terrace outside the cave.

  She had to catch her breath before she could allow Moses to see her.

  She took a few steps back, until she touched the cliff. Below, on the beach, the sea, alternately flashing green and gray with spindrift, made a regular crunching sound as it washed over the shingle.

  Afraid of being dizzy, she closed her eyes and placed her palms flat against the rock. The wind was blowing, hard and relentless, sometimes bringing her Moses’ voice loud and clear, sometimes obscuring it. She realized that he was not speaking the language of Midian. The sounds he was making were long ones, both urgent and gentle. Moses’ voice was suddenly very close. She opened her eyes.

  He was there, three or four cubits from her, advancing toward the edge of the terrace and the void beyond, his eyes closed, his forearms—adorned with the heavy gold bracelets—held out in front of him, his palms open. She almost screamed in terror at the thought of seeing him topple over into the void.

  He stopped a few steps from the edge and stood there in a curious posture, with his chest thrown out and his back arched. His eyes still closed, he resumed his droning, in a throatier, more ardent voice, as if trying with all his might to project his prayer beyond the sea.

  He’s speaking the language of Egypt! she thought. He’s praying to the gods of Egypt!

  He had not yet become aware of her presence. She felt ashamed to be watching him like this. But she was too fascinated to leave. Fascinated by his face, by the newfound clarity of his features. She had never seen Moses’ face like this. He had shaved! Clumsily, though—there were small cuts on his cheeks and chin.

  For the first time in her life, she saw a man without a beard. Moses’ face looked unexpectedly and attractively youthful and vulnerable. And so shameless! She lowered her eyes, thinking with some embarrassment of how soft those hairless cheeks, which exposed chin and neck, would feel if she touched them with her fingertips.