Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  The king’s minister of protocol was the first to recover from the general astonishment. His brows were knit, his mismatched eyes almost equal in their focus, fixed on this man who refused to behave as a petitioner should. He had raised his staff of office, might even have struck Moshe with it, had Moshe not raised his chin a fraction and said,

  “My lord of Egypt. Do you know who I am?”

  Nofret’s heart stopped. Her glance leaped to Miriam. There was nothing to be read at all in a face veiled to the eyes, and those eyes wide, blank, completely without expression.

  But nobody cried the name of Akhenaten, or even the titles that they had given him after he died in his city: the fallen one, the rebel of Akhetaten. No one named him king and god, still less a god who had died and presumed to return to the house of the living. The king regarded him in haughty astonishment, the hauteur rather clumsily played to eyes that knew the true royal pride.

  Such eyes were rare here, or did not accept the truth. Moshe stood as a king stands, looking this king in the face, saying lightly, serenely, “I see that you do not know me. You hold my people captive, my lord of Egypt. They build your city for you, your Pi-Ramses, who once built tombs for kings and princes.”

  The king’s eldest daughter leaned close, whispering in his ear. The king’s frown deepened even further. He was perhaps being advised not to speak: Nofret saw how his jaw tightened.

  The woman saw it, too. She drew back with an expression that said clearly, On your head be it.

  The king spoke abruptly in a harsh, old man’s voice, much louder than Moshe’s but no more penetrating. “Yes, I do know you. You would be the prophet from Sinai, the one who brings visions to the tribes. Have you brought me a vision? Is that your gift to me?”

  “Perhaps,” said Moshe. “Our god is given more to words than to images. He feels the want of worshippers; he bids you set my people free to go into the desert, to celebrate his feast and his sacrifice.”

  “What,” said the king, “your god commands? Who is this god, that he should set his will on the Great House of Egypt?”

  “He bids you let them go,” Moshe said, “to serve him as he decrees. Three days’ journey, he bids you, three days into the desert, to worship him with prayer and sacrifice, or he will strike his people with pestilence.”

  The king snorted explosively, nearly dislodging the Two Crowns. “That is preposterous! What is this god to me, that I should disrupt the building of my city, put my overseers out of work, and set my slaves free to roam where they please? Does he take me for a fool, then, that I’ll expect any of them to come back once their festival is over? They’ll vanish into the desert, every last man and woman and child of them, and leave my city unbuilt,”

  Moshe bore the king’s temper with remarkable aplomb. When it had sputtered itself out he said, “My god is greater than you can know. Will you defy him? Have you no fear?”

  “I fear nothing that comes from the desert,” snapped the king.

  Moshe nodded slowly. “You have your own gods. You think that they protect you. But my god is stronger than they.”

  “So strong, no doubt,” said the king, “that he drives you mad before my face.”

  Moshe smiled. It was a sweet smile, with nothing gentle in it. He beckoned. Aharon came forward as if drawn by the hand.

  Moshe gave him the staff. The serpent’s head seemed to stir, its hood to widen. The gilt was less bright now, the bronze more darkly distinct. Its shape and curve mirrored exactly that of the uraeus-serpent in the king’s crown.

  Aharon flung the staff at the king’s feet. It should have clattered, but it fell soft, as if it were a living thing and not a shape of wood and gilded bronze. As it lay on the paving, it seemed to writhe.

  The court gasped. There were shrieks, and not all of them were women’s. The king drew back as far as the throne allowed.

  A strong voice called out from among the king’s attendants. His was a new face, and young, but the linen robe and the emblem of Amon named him priest, and a high one at that. He spoke with the strength of his god, and no little mockery in it. “What, prophet! Is your god so feeble? That’s a trick as old as Egypt. See, we match it.”

  Every priest who could come forward cast down his own staff. Many of them laughed as they did it. The things writhed as they fell, seemed even to hiss.

  Trickery. Jointed wood, cleverly forged bronze, a bit of priestly subterfuge.

  Moshe smiled. Aharon spoke, but not to anything human. “Go,” he said. “Feed.”

  Moshe’s staff coiled as if it were alive, and struck as swift as a snake strikes: here, here, here. It ate the priests’ staffs one by one, swallowed them whole. When the last was gone, it sank down on the paving. It died, one might almost have thought: went stiff and still, was simple wood and bronze again. And no other staff anywhere, though the priests searched with mounting urgency.

  “Clever,” said the king. “Entertaining in its fashion. Shall we hire you for our banquets, then? A diversion between the meat and the wine, a bit of sorcery to make our ladies shriek and tremble?”

  “My god is not mocked,” said Moshe, cold and clear. “Will you set my people free?”

  “What, no word now of a rite or a sacrifice? Is it freedom in full that you ask for?” The king shook his head. “You are mad, sir. Amusing, but quite mad. Will you go, or must I have you removed from my presence?”

  “I will go,” said Moshe. “But my god is not finished, nor will he be until his people are freed.”

  “Then it’s fortunate,” said the king, “that gods live forever.”

  “But kings,” said Moshe, terribly gentle, “do not.”

  Fifty-Eight

  Moshe the prophet had threatened the Great House of Egypt. There was no other way to regard it, and no hope for it, either.

  And yet he was not hauled off in chains. He was allowed to walk out of the king’s presence as he had walked in, free and unhindered. He went to the place of their lodging with the others straggling behind him, shocked into silence by the words he had spoken.

  Fools, thought Nofret, and in that she included herself. They should have known that Moshe would do the unthinkable.

  He secluded himself deep in the guesthouse. The others huddled in the gathering-room, even Aharon, who looked wan and old. Nofret had not till then remembered that he was older than Moshe. Now she saw it in his face.

  “We should go elsewhere,” Nofret said when the silence had grown huge enough to suffocate. “We’re not safe in the palace. If the king takes it into his head that we mean to attack him—”

  “We’re safer here than anywhere.” Those were the first words Johanan had spoken directly to her since they left Mount Horeb. “These are strong walls, and guarded. The king will spy on us—he’d be a fool if he didn’t—and that will put his mind at ease. Whereas if we pack up and go elsewhere, he’ll know that we mean him harm, and follow us, and dispose of us somewhere suitably secret.”

  “He can dispose of us here, and no one the wiser.”

  “The whole palace would know,” he said. He prowled the edges of the room. The others watched him, trapped in immobility as he was in restlessness.

  Nofret seemed the only one with wits to speak. “The palace may not care if we live or die. They’ll be laughing at us now, if they’re not in a rage: a gaggle of desert savages who vexed the Great House with insolence. Even our magic is a tawdry thing, a charlatan’s trick, as common as bad beer in the market.”

  “The Lord commanded,” said Aharon wearily. “We did as we were told.”

  “Does your god intend for all of us to be laughed out of Egypt?” Nofret demanded.

  “Inscrutable is the mind of the Lord,” said Aharon, “and incalculable his ways.”

  The others murmured pious agreement. Nofret shook her head in disgust and thrust herself to her feet. She refused to pace as Johanan did. She went out instead; it did not greatly matter where.

  oOo

  There were guards
outside the door, big burly Nubians in the king’s livery. They understood no Egyptian, or none that they would admit to. She could pass, they made it clear, but only if one of them went with her. For her own safety, of course.

  She retreated, snarling to herself. The garden at least was empty of armed men, its walls too high to climb. She had not noticed before how small it was, how circumscribed its limits.

  She was not remarkably surprised to find that she had a companion. Johanan was less restless here than he had been within, but still too restless to sit. He stood in the shade of the pomegranate tree, looking up at the branches, searching for ripe fruit maybe among the green.

  “It’s too early,” she said to him.

  Johanan glanced at her. His eye was cold, as if he were a stranger. He could hold a grudge, too, damn him. “Maybe it’s too late,” he said, “to win our people’s freedom.”

  “Maybe they should never have come to Egypt.”

  “They hadn’t much choice. There was drought, famine. Our pastures were bare. Egypt had grain for our flocks, and water enough from its river to keep us all alive. And our kinsman was here, the man whom the Egyptians called Yuya, brought to Egypt as a slave and raised to be a prince of the realm. He offered us sanctuary.”

  He spoke as if he had been alive through all of that. But it was all done before he was born: born in Egypt, a prince of his blood, forced from birth to labor for his living.

  “We were not slaves,” he said. “We owed our livelihood to the king, yes; we had a debt which we undertook to pay. But he never owned us.”

  “Then how,” asked Nofret, “did your people come to this?”

  He dropped down under the pomegranate tree. For a moment she saw not the tall princely man with the glint of silver in his beard, but the long-legged boy he had been. He spoke more than half to himself.

  “We are a fecund people. Even in exile, even bound to a king by a debt that seemed to grow larger the more we paid it back, we were fruitful; we multiplied. Our children had to be fed. They needed roofs over their heads. Somehow we had to pay for that. So we sold ourselves, not only our labor but our bodies that performed the labor.”

  He caught the flash of her eye. “No, I didn’t! But when I went back to Thebes after I’d been in Sinai, I found that there were no free men left. All my people were bound—for convenience, the overseers said. To make it simpler in ordering this tomb or that. Then after I left, the tomb-workers were told to pack up and go. They were needed; there was a city of the living to build.”

  “Pi-Ramses,” Nofret said. “Ramses’ city. So he owns you all.”

  “So he imagines,” said Johanan.

  “You don’t really think he’s going to set you all free just because you ask.”

  “He would do better to give way,” Johanan said.

  Nofret looked at him as if she had never seen him before. “Even you believe that? Two dozen boys and a handful of elders and a pair of priests who know the trick that every priest in Egypt learns in his cradle—what in the world makes you think that you’ll move the might of Egypt?”

  “That trick,” Johanan said with a slight curl of the lip, “was simply to prove that yes, our priests are priests, too. It was only the beginning.”

  “It may well be the end,” she said, “after what Moshe said to the king.”

  “I doubt that,” said Johanan. “He must be as incredulous as you are. Maybe he’s even diverted, now his temper’s had time to cool. He’ll be curious to see what else we can do.”

  “What, more tricks? The leper’s hand that the priests of Set and Sobek use to horrify the gullible? Water to wine, maybe, or to blood if you’re ambitious? There’s nothing you can do that will convince him to free so useful an army of slaves.”

  “You think so?” Johanan stood. “I’ll lay you a wager.”

  “I didn’t know you gambled.”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “I came to Egypt twice. I married you.”

  “Well then,” she said. “A wager. If I win, we die here. If you win . . .”

  “If I win, we go free. Either way, we do it together.”

  “Only if you send Jehoshua back to Sinai.”

  The air that had warmed between them went cold again. “It’s too late for that,” he said. He left her sitting there, glaring at the place where he had been.

  oOo

  On the day after the audience with the king, a messenger came to speak, as he put it, to the priests from Sinai. He was a priest himself, the young man of Amon’s following who had matched the trick of the staff with a trick of his own. His name was very long; he gave them leave to call him Ramose—Ramses, like the king.

  The message that he brought came direct from the Great House. “My lord Horus had pondered upon your people’s plight,” he said in his beautiful voice. “He has considered what he best may do to honor your request. It grieves him to lose workers of such excellence, so numerous and so splendidly suited for the work of building his city. Yet if your people wish truly to be free, it is a simple matter to assure it. You need but pay the price of each of his slaves, such as they would fetch in the market of Memphis, so that he may purchase new laborers in the place of those whom he must lose.”

  He stopped while they unraveled the elegance of his speech, those who spoke princely Egyptian translating for those who did not. Nofret heard Johanan convey it most succinctly, almost spitting it. “He says that we can free our people if we simply buy them back.”

  One or two of the elders brightened at that. “So simple? A ransom only, and they are ours?”

  “A ransom indeed,” said the priest Ramose, thereby betraying his knowledge of Apiru. He spoke in Egyptian, however, as if he understood the language of the desert but did not trust himself to speak it. “For every man, woman, and child, at such value as each would fetch in the market of Memphis.”

  They all fell silent. Some counted on their fingers. Nofret watched the truth dawn on them, and with it dismay. “That would take a king’s wealth in gold!”

  “But you see,” said the priest, “they are a king’s wealth. How can he lose them?”

  “They belong to our god,” Miriam said. Moshe was still shut up in the inner room, but she had come out, heavily veiled, at the priest’s coming. Her voice was as cold as it could well be. It was hardly human.

  The priest seemed unperturbed. “Your god, then, gave them into our king’s hands. He will sell them as he is entitled to do. But he cannot give them away.”

  “Our god lent them for his own purposes, for his glory and the glory of his people. Your king too is an instrument. See, priest, how our god hardens his heart against us. That is to temper us like iron in the forge.”

  “Our king and god,” said the priest of Amon, “submits to the will of no mere spirit of the desert.”

  “Indeed,” said Miriam. “His own pride serves our god’s will.”

  The priest seemed much amused. “I see that your god turns every chance to his advantage. Still, lady, he would do well to offer greater signs than we saw before the king. Such things are the stock-in-trade of any petty godlet. A great god, a true god, must do more.”

  “Our god is greatest of all,” said Miriam. “And so you shall see.”

  “I shall be intrigued,” he said, smiling, bowing to her as if she had been—still—a queen.

  Fifty-Nine

  While the Apiru were shut up in the guesthouse of the palace in Memphis, receiving messengers and idlers of the court and waiting for Moshe to finish his fasting and praying, another messenger came under cover of night. He had traveled hard and far, nor had he eaten, or drunk more than a sip of water by the wayside. There was no mistaking what he was: he had the face of the Apiru, and his back was more deeply scarred even than Johanan’s.

  His name was Ephraim. He had had word of the Apiru in Memphis. “Slaves have nothing but know everything,” he said with a wry humor that he kept even in his fear and exhaustion.

  For he was afraid: terri
fied. Fear had brought him to Memphis, even into the king’s hands if so the god willed it, to speak to the prophet of Sinai. “I don’t speak for the elders in Pi-Ramses,” he said, “even if all of them had tongues to speak, which too many don’t: they protested the latest outrage and were deprived of the means to protest further.” He did not wait to hear their gasps of outrage but went on, “I came because I could escape, and because the Lord allowed it. I came to ask the prophet a question.”

  “The prophet is praying to the Lord,” Miriam said. “Is this a question I can answer? People call me the seer of the Apiru.”

  Ephraim shook his head. “I have to ask the prophet.”

  Nor would he budge for any persuasion. They fed him, bathed him, rid him of his vermin as best they could, and put him to bed in the young men’s barracks. He slept there as if he had not slept in days out of count, safe in the protection of his kin.

  oOo

  Ephraim in daylight, rested and fed, was thin and drawn but not likely to fall over dead of weariness and starvation. “They feed us just enough to keep us working,” he said as he broke his fast with all of them but Moshe. “If we slacken we’re flogged. Not to death, not nearly—that’s not what’s wanted of us. We’re more valuable alive, they tell us. The king needs us to build his city.”

  “And the women?” Nofret asked. “The children? Do they suffer, too?”

  “The women work beside the men,” he said. “The children too, if they’re old enough. If they’re not, their mothers carry them on their backs. Or—” He broke off.

  “Or?” asked Nofret.

  He did not want to say it, but the force of all their eyes was too strong for him. “Or they’re sold. The boychildren, the ones who are born strong, once they’re old enough to be weaned—they’re taken. Older ones, too. Up to the boys who are almost men, but not quite. They’re taken away. There are too many of us, the Egyptians say. They can’t feed all of us. So they sell the ones who will fetch a good price, but who are too young to work as well as the men grown.”