Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  The silence thrummed deep. Nofret could feel the force of it in the earth. She had not felt anything so strong since she came to Thebes where the gods of Egypt were, when the Aten had cast them all down and sealed their temples.

  There was godhead here. The air was ablaze with it, a scent like heated bronze, a light too fierce to bear.

  She should not be here. She was alien, interloper. The fire would destroy her.

  But she was whole, and remained so. She could not hear the god’s words, if truly he spoke any. Only the words of his prophet.

  “My lord,” he said. “What you ask . . . I have no strength. My tongue stammers; my voice is frail. I had never the gift of leading men, even—when—”

  His voice faded. He sank down. He was trembling. “My lord, they will never believe me. None of them will follow me. You know how I tried, how I failed. My city is dust already, my name and my laws forgotten.”

  But not here. Nofret heard it as clearly as if a voice had spoken it. Not in Sinai. The Apiru believed him, and knew his god.

  “But will they follow me?” cried Moshe.

  The air rang like a shield smitten with a spear. The god smote his prophet to the ground, weak protesting mortal that he was, all kingship and godhood long since gone from him.

  But Moshe had a little strength left, and enough resistance to gasp, “Lord, I beg you. Send another man!”

  Moshe was the one whom the god had chosen. Nofret, cowering in her inadequate shelter, knew it as clearly as he. No protests, no weakness, could shift that crushing burden from Moshe’s back. He was a weakling, a coward. He had fled from Egypt when he grew weary of it to take refuge in Sinai. Now Sinai proved itself no haven. The god had seized him and would not let him go.

  She did not even know what the god wanted of him. Something dreadful, no doubt. Something divinely appalling.

  She knew the moment when the god left that place. The blaze of light had grown but little less. The air was still fierce with heat even so far up the mountain. But the terrible weight, the odor of hot bronze, was gone. The earth was earth again, holy because a god had touched it, but freed from the god’s presence.

  Slowly, creaking like an old woman, Nofret got to her feet. She could barely see; when she turned too quickly, spots danced in front of her eyes. Fear stabbed, fear that she would be blind.

  It nearly drove her away. But Moshe was lying where the god had abandoned him. His breath came harsh, with a rattle in it that she did not like.

  Time was when she would have left him there, and never mind pity. But she was friend to his wife, and she was deeply fond of his sons. They loved their father to excess; if they discovered that she had left him alone on the mountain, maybe to die, they would hate her.

  For their sake and not for his own, she made her stumbling, half-blind way to the man who lay at the foot of the rock. From there, looking up, she could see what he must have seen: the thicket above, the branches that for so endless a moment had caught and held the sun.

  His breathing had quieted. There was a fever on him, but she had known worse in one of her children. She laved his brow and cheeks with water from the skin that she carried, and persuaded him to drink a little.

  As she withdrew the waterskin he came to himself, or as much of himself at least as he had shown in Akhetaten. He did not seem to see her at all. His eyes were full of light. He struggled up, groping for the staff that had fallen when he fell. He found it with a cry and clutched it, clasping it to his breast as if it had been a living thing.

  His steps when he began to walk were weak, wavering. Nofret set her shoulder next to his. He saw her no more clearly than he had before, but he accepted her steadying hand.

  She thought more than once, and nastily, of letting him fall. But she lacked the fortitude to do such a thing. It was a failing in her character. She got him down off the mountain, and a long bitter road that was, and not a glance or a word of thanks did she get for it. His god possessed him utterly. He saw, heard, knew nothing else.

  She did not even know for certain what it was that he saw. The god had not seen fit to speak to her, only to Moshe. She could be bitter, she supposed. Or she could shrug and do as the god clearly intended her to do: look after his prophet as women had been looking after men since the world was made, and see that he came safe to the camp of the people.

  Servitude at least she knew, though she had got out of the habit of it. “And don’t think you’ll get this from me every day,” she said somewhere along the way, half to the man she led, and half to the god who dazzled him.

  The man did not hear her. The god did not choose to.

  Very well, she thought. She would know soon enough what it was that so frightened Moshe that he lost all sense of where to put his feet. It was not a war, she hoped, or something equally disruptive of the women’s peace of mind.

  Fifty-Five

  It was not war. It was, if anything, worse.

  The god, Moshe declared to the gathering of the elders, had bidden him return to Egypt. Not, he was swift to assure them, to be king again, Never that. But the god had grown weary of the cries of his people, the tribes and clans left behind, children of those who had come with Yuya out of Sinai. The god had in mind to set them free, to return them to the desert, far away from the power of Egypt’s king.

  “But why now?” the elders demanded. They had gathered willingly at Moshe’s summons, expecting some revelation from the mountain, some new word of the law that Moshe brought down from the hand of the god. This was as far out of their reckoning as it had been out of Nofret’s.

  “Why does he summon you now?” they asked him. “Why so late, when you’ve had so many years among us? Why not when you were in Egypt already, and in a position to set all of them free?”

  “The Lord told me,” said Moshe, stammering as badly as Nofret had ever heard him, “that I—I must—” He had to stop, to master his tongue, before he could go on. “Now is the fullness of time. Now, and not then. Now that I’m one of you, bound in heart and soul to this land and these people.”

  “It’s got worse, hasn’t it?” That was Johanan, come in late and from the hunt, in the tunic he wore to hunt in, with his hair bound up in a fillet. He had left his bow and quiver outside the tent of gathering, but there was still a knife at his belt. He set himself in front of Moshe, fists planted on hips. “It was bad when I left—Lord of Hosts, has it been ten years? Fifteen? How much worse could it be?”

  “Very much worse,” said Moshe. “I was given to see . . .” He closed his eyes, swaying. Hands leaped to prop him up. He eluded them with surprising, boneless ease. “Horemheb is dead.”

  The sound of that name, even after so long, could freeze Nofret where she sat, far on the edge of the gathering. She had no proper place there, but she had brought Moshe down off the mountain; she was determined to hear what he would say.

  Horemheb was dead. How strange to hear such a thing. He had become king after Ay died; had won at last the throne and the crowns for which he had intrigued for so long. He was a strong king, harsh as many said, but after so many years of weak kings, Egypt was glad of him.

  Now he was gone. He had had no son. That had been a great grief to him, no doubt, if not to the Apiru.

  His successor had been, like Horemheb himself, an ambitious man who seized and held the office of minister for the Two Lands.

  “Ramses,” Aharon was saying. “That would be his heir. A hard man, they say, as hard as Horemheb ever was.”

  “Hard indeed,” said Moshe, “and strong, and no lover of our people. They remind him that our god endures, the god of the horizon, the one who is above all gods.”

  “And I suppose,” said Johanan, “he finds them stiffnecked and often difficult, but strong workers, too skilled to lose.”

  Moshe regarded him without comprehension. Gods did not care for the concerns of practical men. “They must be set free. The Lord has chosen me to do it. He hears none of my objections, nor any that you may raise. I
must go. I must lead the people out of Egypt.”

  “Alone?”

  Moshe turned to face Aharon. “No, my brother. When I cried out to him that I am weak of mind and body, stammering of tongue, unfit to lead men or to speak before them, he gave me one to speak for me. One who has the voice that I lack, and the presence, and the cleverness with words. He gave me you.”

  A murmur went up at that. But Aharon was smiling. “Did he indeed?”

  Moshe nodded. He looked hardly fit to cross the tent, let alone make the long journey into Egypt. “I asked him,” he said, “why, if you were to speak and lead and do all the rest that I lacked the strength or the wits to do, you could not simply be the one, the chosen of the Lord. He replied in his ineffable wisdom, ‘I chose as I chose. Go now into Egypt, and take your brother with you.’”

  None of them showed the least sign of objecting to their god’s high-handedness. They accepted that he would send his prophet where he pleased, with a prince of the people to fetch and carry for him. The cry that went up was for those who would follow the two of them: every one of the elders, if they had their way, and half the women, and most of the tribe behind them.

  It was Johanan who shouted them down, who beat as much sense into them as anyone was going to. There would be an embassy, it was decided: Moshe, Aharon, a handful of the elders, and a company of young men under Johanan, to defend them and to give them consequence.

  “And what of your wives? What of your children?” Nofret was driven out of all caution. She faced Johanan in front of the elders. “Will you simply abandon them?”

  “Beloved—” Johanan began.

  “We will go,” said a clear cold voice. Miriam had been silent throughout that long strange council, shadowed and all but invisible in a corner. Now she gathered them all to her as she had learned to do when she was queen: caught their eyes and held them. “Those of us who came up from Egypt—we will go as you go.”

  “But,” said Johanan. “The children—”

  Nofret leaped on the words. “Exactly! Are you going to abandon your sons, and your daughter who loves you?”

  “Are you?”

  Miriam stepped between them. “The children will stay among the people. Zipporah, Korah, Elisheba—they have mothers in plenty, and sisters and brothers, as many as they could ask for. They’ll be well looked after.”

  Nofret found that her mouth was open. She shut it. The last thing that she had ever wanted was to see Egypt again. She had been happy in Sinai among the Apiru. Egypt was slavery, misery, death.

  “It will know,” she said, “who comes back to it. The dead walking. Forgotten king, long-vanished queen returned alive—the land will rise up against you. Unless . . .” She paused. “You don’t actually intend to—”

  “I laid down the crook and the flail,” said Moshe. “I’ll never take them up again. I belong to the people of God. He bids me lead them out of Egypt.”

  “What if someone recognizes you? What then?”

  “I think,” he said with surprising gentleness, “that I may have changed since I died in the Two Lands.”

  It was difficult to deny that. The man who had sat enthroned in golden splendor, crowned with the Two Crowns, bearing the crook and the flail, bore no resemblance to this prophet of the Apiru with his flowing white beard. The long disdainful mouth was hidden, the long nose shrunken between luxuriance of beard and curling fullness of hair. As for the eyes, and the voice with its light timbre, its frequent hesitations . . .

  “It was long ago,” Miriam said, “and long forgotten. Egypt will know the prophet of the Apiru, but never the one who died in Akhetaten.”

  “It does have to be you,” said Johanan. “Doesn’t it? Because Egypt will never let so many go, not as valuable as they are. But because you were what you were, both of you, you can compel the land itself, and the gods, and even the king.”

  “Or they’ll kill you.” Nofret looked from one to the next. Not one would meet her eyes. They could argue freely among themselves, and would, when it came time to prepare the journey. But they would not contest the will of their god. He had chosen. They would do as he bade.

  Johanan, too. Johanan most of all. “I never knew,” she said to him, soft, for only him to hear, “that you hated Egypt so much.”

  “Not hate,” he said. “Inevitability. What was done to me before I left Thebes—that was a small thing. Some of our people have died for the whim or the malice of their masters.”

  “People always die,” said Nofret.

  “Not that way,” he said. “Not my people.”

  She knew that look in his eye, that set to his chin. There was no shifting him. He would go.

  She nodded abruptly. “Very well. There’s much to do. Are you going to stay here blathering, or will you help me with it?”

  He seemed briefly ready to remonstrate, but something stopped him. Maybe she wore the same expression he did: the same immovable obstinacy.

  oOo

  Once Nofret made up her mind to a thing, she could do it without hesitation and with as little regret as she could manage. She prided herself in that. But she had never had to do a thing so difficult. To go away from the place that had become home. To abandon her children.

  That was even harder than she had thought it would be. The twins did not weep. They had seldom cried even as babies; and now, as they made clear to their mother, they were much too old for tears. Ishak had been hunting with the men for a good handful of years. Anna was becoming a woman. All too soon she would be wanting to marry.

  Not so soon, Nofret told herself sternly. She would have returned long before her children were grown.

  Jehoshua presented a wholly separate difficulty. He was grown, at least in the eyes of the Apiru. He had reached the years of manhood and been taken among the young men. As his mother and father gathered their belongings for a journey of indefinite length and no little danger, he betrayed remarkably little dread of their departure. He was even lighthearted, coming to their fire at night and sharing their supper as he still did more often than not—his mother’s cooking, he was fond of saying, was a fair deal better than the fare at the young men’s fire.

  Nofret ought to have been comforted, if somewhat dismayed. Her eldest was a man, and conducting himself with manly fortitude. Instead she was suspicious. She watched him with what she hoped was well-veiled wariness, listening to the things that he did not say. He was the image of his father at that age, all knobs and angles, with eyes that had never known how to lie.

  She caught him by the fire on the night before they were to leave. By chance there was no one else about. The twins were with Aharon’s brood, playing with a lamb that had been orphaned and was being raised as a pet. Johanan was with the elders, arguing no doubt, as they had been arguing since Moshe came down from the mountain. It had got down to the matter of how many donkeys the embassy was to take, and which, and whether they should wear their best harness out of the camp or wait to put it on till they were in Egypt.

  Nofret intended to walk, not ride a donkey. Her beast of burden had a perfectly decent harness that would do very well both in the desert and in the court of the Egyptian king.

  She had already sat through the discussion of which robes for the embassy and when, and how many jewels, and how soon to put them on. She was glad of the peace of her own fire, the pot simmering over it, a rich scent rising from it. In a little while, when the light was out of the sky, they would all be gathering in the middle of the camp, where an ox was roasting, and a fat sheep.

  This end of the camp was almost empty. Everyone was crowded round the roasting-pit. Some people had got into the wine; they were singing, and a skein of them wound in a dance.

  She was a little surprised that Jehoshua stayed with her. He had come ostensibly to fetch his hunting horn, which made a fine accompaniment to some of the young men’s songs. He lingered to poke his nose in the pot and investigate the cakes baking in the ashes. She slapped his hand when it crept toward one tha
t was done and cooling on the good bronze platter.

  He looked at her with big starving eyes. “Just one?” he begged. “To see if they’re fit for a feast?”

  Nofret snorted. “The day one of my cakes isn’t fit for a king’s banquet, you’ll be sure it’s time to wrap me in my shroud.”

  His hand flashed, casting aside the omen. Nofret eased another cake or two from the ashes, and shifted the rest to catch the best of the coals. While she did that, she kept the corner of her eye on Jehoshua.

  He squatted on his heels to watch her as she watched him. He had grown again: his limbs seemed inordinately long, his coat rather excessively short. Nofret would have to—

  She caught herself. Someone else would let out the sleeves and add a strip to the hem. She was going to Egypt with his father.

  He got up after a while, darted past her, snatched a cake and bolted laughing. She shook her fist at him, but her heart was not in it.

  oOo

  “He’s not grieving,” she said to Johanan. They were wrapped in each other’s arms. The twins slept near them, or pretended to. In a little while she would get up and stir the fire for the last breakfast that they would take together. She did not know that Jehoshua would come. No more did she know that he would not.

  “He’s too full of himself,” she said. “You’d think he didn’t believe we were going.”

  “He believes it,” said Johanan. He had not been sleeping any better than she had. The nightlamp showed the hollows under his eyes, the deepening lines from nose to mouth. She smoothed them with her fingers.

  He darted a kiss at them, but his mind was not on it. “Do you want him to weep and wail and make a spectacle of himself?”

  “No,” Nofret said. “I want him to stop acting as if he’s coming with us.”

  Johanan widened his eyes. “What makes you think—”