by Judith Tarr
Small wonder, thought Nofret, that he had hesitated to speak. Slavery was terrible enough, and anger enough even for her who had been a slave. But that the menchildren should be taken and sold, that was more dreadful than simple servitude.
“They’re taken from among the kindred,” Aharon said for them all, “and raised among strangers—people who know nothing of our way or our god.” He flung back his head as if he were under the sky and not shut within a roof, and cried out, “O Lord, my God, how can you endure it? How will we find them?”
“I would imagine,” said Miriam, soft after that great outcry, “that the Lord will guide us to them, or them to us, when the time is come.”
“Sometimes I weary of trusting in the Lord,” said Johanan, half wry, half deadly serious.
His tone matched Ephraim’s expression. “I remember,” Ephraim said, “when it wasn’t so bad to be building a city. We were slaves, to be sure, and some of us were a little too well acquainted with the lash. But we were fed, and we had houses that were better than some the free men had, and no one kept us from worshipping our god as we chose. I don’t even know when it changed. It was slow. A little here, a little there. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe when Pa-Ramses knew he was going to be king?” Nofret asked.
“Maybe,” said Ephraim. “He used to be the king’s builder. You know that, I suppose. He lived in Pi-Ramses. He’d come out to watch us. Sometimes he’d ask us questions: how we did, were we getting enough to eat, did we want a day free to worship the Lord. Sometimes he gave us what we asked for. When he didn’t, for all we knew he couldn’t. But when the king grew older, the king’s builder stopped coming so often. He was with the king, we heard, making himself secure so that he could be king himself.”
“And one of the things he did,” Nofret said, “was to prove to Horemheb that he could be harsh enough when he needed to be. Even sell your children if he reckoned there were too many.”
Ephraim nodded. “We knew the old king didn’t love us. Our overseers were supposed to watch us, because we might be rebels like the king whose name no one remembered—the fallen one, the servant of the Aten. We had to be careful that we didn’t talk to Egyptians about our god, or say anything that might make him seem too much like the fallen one’s god. That wasn’t easy. All anyone needed to do was call him the One, the only god.”
“I should think,” said Nofret, “that you’d be no threat to the gods of Egypt. They conquered the Aten, destroyed him completely. Why would they fear your god? He’s not even one of theirs.”
“Fear doesn’t have to be comprehensible,” Miriam said.
She was safe with Ephraim to sit unveiled as Nofret did. But he did not stare at Nofret as he did at Miriam. Nofret was a rather ordinary woman of a certain age. Miriam was beautiful as the old royal blood could be. Her remoteness only made her beauty the greater.
He was gaping at her. She did not seem to know it. “One can be afraid,” she said, “and know no reason for it, except that it is.”
“Memory would be reason enough,” Johanan said. “Gods don’t forgive. Even when they’re strong, they can be afraid of others who are stronger. They know—and their servants fear—that our god is not only greater than the Aten ever was; he’s greater than they.”
“But if they don’t exist—” Nofret began.
Johanan turned on her. “The god who is above gods simply is. The gods of men live in men’s minds, feed on men’s fears, live by men’s belief. If one of them loses his worshippers, he loses himself. He ceases to be.”
“But—” said Nofret.
“There is fear,” Johanan said. “Fear for one’s very existence. And if a king is one of those gods, then his fear is a real and present thing. Such fear can enslave a whole people.”
“Such thinking would mark a madman in most parts of the world,” said Nofret.
“Then our whole tribe is mad,” said Johanan.
“I don’t doubt it,” Nofret said dryly.
oOo
Moshe came out of his seclusion with the air of one who wakes from a long and restful sleep. He found them all still together, the remains of their breakfast in front of them. They stayed where they were, knowing better than to ask him what had come of his vigil, but Ephraim scrambled to his feet.
It was Jehoshua who pulled him back down again. He struggled, but Jehoshua was bigger than he was, and stronger.
Moshe took no notice. He sat where there was a space in the circle. The man nearest him reached for the basket of bread and pushed it toward him. Someone else fetched the bowl of fruit and the cheese, and the last of the lamb from the night before.
He ate with care as one learned to do who fasted often, but his hunger was clear to see. He drank, too, water cooled in an earthen jar, and a little of the thin Egyptian beer.
When he had eaten and drunk as much as he dared, he seemed to come to himself. He looked about. He saw the stranger in the ranks. Ephraim, who at first could not meet his eyes, after a little stared boldly back and said as if he had said the words over and over to himself and could no longer keep them in, “I came to ask you. Why do we suffer so? Why does the Lord allow it? We belong to him.”
“That is why,” said Moshe. He never had been offended by difficult questions, not even when he was king. He received this one calmly, as if he had expected it. “No one else can hear him, you see. Only our people. Every other tribe and nation shut its ears to him long ago, invented its own gods and forgot how to listen to his voice. Only we can hear.”
“Then,” said Ephraim, “the Lord should protect us. He should smite any man who does us harm.”
“So he does,” Moshe said. “So he intends to do.”
“He should have done it long ago,” Ephraim said.
Moshe spread his hands. “The Lord does as he wills. Who are we to judge him?”
“We belong to him,” Ephraim said. “He named us his own.”
“And should a child question its father’s will?”
“If that will causes pain, he well should.”
“But if the pain has a purpose beyond that child’s understanding—what then? Should the father give way to the child?”
“The father should teach the child to understand.”
“If the child’s understanding is sufficient, so he should. But if the child is too young or his wits too frail, best then that the father simply say, ‘Do it, because I will it,’ and the child obey. So are we with our God, who surpasses human understanding.”
oOo
The Apiru capacity for theological argument surpassed Nofret’s outland comprehension. She swallowed a yawn and began to gather plates and cups and bowls. The servants, hearing the clatter, came hastily to do their duty.
She would have withdrawn then, but Moshe, for a wonder, had said all that he intended to say. She had never known him to be so brief. He washed his hands in the water-bowl and stood, and beckoned to Aharon. “Come,” he said.
The others followed, some so quickly that they left behind their sandals. Even Ephraim went in his borrowed shirt, barefoot and astonished.
The guards on the door drew back before so many of them, but fell in behind as they had been commanded to do. Some of the young men seemed to regret the loss of their weapons, but they offered no insolence. Moshe’s presence quelled them, and the authority of his stride, leading them all through the courts and corridors of the palace.
They went by the straightest way to the gate, and no matter what anyone might think of that. Moshe was a prophet. Prophets had their gods to guide them; they knew where all roads led, and how to follow them.
No one ventured to stop them. The king’s guards had orders only to watch them. Moshe, surrounded from birth by armed men in royal livery, must have found nothing odd in such an escort.
He led them down to the river. It was high morning, the ways of the city thronged as always. There was a great crowd by the water, with music and the chanting of priests.
Nofret was mild
ly startled to recognize the pattern of the ceremony. They were marking the end of the river’s flood, the point at which it had completed its inundation of the Black Land and returned to its winter bed. A like ceremony marked the height of the flood, when they measured it on the great column and proclaimed the extent of its blessing.
Now that blessing was all given. The waters had receded. The rich black mud had dried; the time of sowing was long since begun, the fields already growing green. The priests and their king gave thanks to the god of the river for his ancient gift, and honored him with prayer and sacrifice.
It was not permitted to any common person to approach the gathering of priests and princes. And yet the Apiru came to stand full beside them on the still-damp bank. Here the reeds were cleared away and a platform set up for the high ones, to keep their feet dry. The Apiru stood in the mud and reeds, taking no great heed of it as it sifted through their toes.
Nofret kept watch for crocodiles. She had never known them to attack so many people crowded together, but crocodiles were unpredictable creatures. Her hand slipped beneath her veil to the plait of hair wound about her amulet of Sobek.
The rite on the dais wound to its end. The people on the bank applauded, crying homage to the king: “Thousands and thousands of years! May you live forever!”
The king, who had stood to offer the sacrifice, had returned to his throne under its canopy. His bearers took their places and bent to the carrying-poles.
Aharon’s great voice halted them as they stooped. “My lord of Egypt! Will you still defy our god?”
Amid the general astonishment, the sheer white shock that anyone would dare address the king, Moshe sprang up on the platform with Aharon on his heels. White-bearded elders that they were, they moved like boys. Aharon towered over the priests and the princes. Moshe, tall for an Egyptian, stood above anyone near him.
The king’s guards, recovering their wits, surged forward. Moshe raised his staff. “No,” he said mildly. They stopped as if at a wall.
The priests and princes likewise seemed to lack the power to move. Moshe smiled at them, a deadly sweet smile, but addressed his words to the king. “My lord king, Great House of Egypt, Lord of the Two Lands, do you yet mock the Lord of Hosts?”
“I do not know your god,” the king said. His voice was harsh, grating, as if he had lost the power to sweeten it.
“You know him,” said Moshe, still softly, but no one seemed unable to hear him. “He has spoken to you night and day since you made his people your slaves.”
“I do not hear him,” said the king.
“You hear,” said Moshe. “You refuse to acknowledge him. He frightens you. And well he should, who is mightier than all the gods of Egypt.”
The king raised the hand that held the flail. Either that gilded symbol of kingship was wrought of stone, heavier even than gold, or his hand struggled against some unseen weight. But he lifted it and pointed it at Moshe. “Strike him,” he said. “Strike him down.”
No one stirred to obey. The guards could not pass the wall that Moshe’s staff had raised. The priests either could not or would not move.
A deep crimson flush stained the king’s cheeks under the paint. “Your spell will fail,” he said to Moshe, “as all spells do. Then you shall die.”
“Spell?” Moshe seemed baffled. “I am no sorcerer. I serve my God, no more. It is his hand that lies upon you.”
“Your god is a lie and a dream. I invoke Amon against you. I invoke Ptah and Thoth, Osiris and Isis, Horus, Set . . .”
Moshe heard the litany of gods with unruffled composure. When the king had run out of names to say, Moshe said, “My Lord is One, and mighty is his name. Will you set my people free?”
“I do not free slaves who are yet of use to me.”
“It is the Lord who makes you intransigent,” said Moshe. “Look. See the proof of his power.”
“What,” the king demanded, “more tricks? The leper’s hand? The water into blood?”
“Ask,” said Moshe, “and it shall be given you.” He turned to face the river, and bent his staff along the line of it. “See.”
For a stretching while there was nothing to see. If the guards could have fallen on Moshe, they would have done it. The priests gazed where Moshe pointed, as if their wills were subjugated to his.
Only the king was strong enough to resist. He had half risen from his throne, battling the hand of power that was on him, when a long murmur ran down through the crowd.
Those that were farthest upriver had begun it and others, farther up, who had not come to the king’s ceremony. For all Nofret knew, that sound, half groan, half cry, ran all the way down from Nubia.
The river, eased from its flood, flowed blue under the sky and brown in shadow, a deep brown, the color of the Black Land. Sometimes, under trees or among reeds, it was green; once in a great while it was grey under clouds or white-flecked with wind.
Now a new current ran in it. The cry from upriver came clear as it drew closer: “Blood! The river is turned to blood!”
It was, she supposed, more nearly red than brown. She had seen earth so colored, red earth; and seafarers spoke of the sea running red in certain seasons. Fish died, she had heard them say, and men who ate of them died too of a griping in the belly.
“Water into blood,” said Moshe, quiet yet clear under the outcry of the people, “is, as you say, a simple trick, a charlatan’s trick.” He paused. “Will you set my people free?”
The king’s eyes were fixed on the river, set in a kind of horror; but the clearest emotion in them was rage. “No,” he said. “I will not.”
Sixty
All water that flowed in Egypt flowed from the river. Its fields were watered from the river, and its wells were filled with the river’s water. Every well and cistern therefore, every field, every channel, was filled with water that was red, like blood.
It lacked the thickness of blood, but it had the iron stink. Only the water that people had chanced to draw before the river changed was still clear, still untainted. Those few jars and waterskins were all the water in Egypt that was safe to drink, all the water that anyone would have for themselves or their animals, until the God of the Apiru saw fit to lift his curse.
They were saying as much in the city and even in the palace. Nofret caught rumors of it. She had left the riverside with the rest of the embassy, walking behind Moshe. It would not have surprised her if the crowd had fallen on them all and rent them to pieces, but no one moved. A path was open for them as for a king’s procession, all the way from the river to the palace.
She would not have chosen to go back there of all places, but it was Moshe who led them, and Moshe who seemed unable to understand why the palace might not be the best refuge. It was his upbringing, she thought. Palaces had always sheltered him. He could not see the use in going anywhere else if there was a king’s house to rest in.
oOo
They were not harmed. No one approached them, no one stopped them. When, much later that day, she happened to look out of the door, there were no guards standing in her way. That whole part of the palace seemed deserted except for the Apiru.
The water in the guesthouse was clean, likewise that in the cistern behind it. Jehoshua, foraying afield, came back with a string of fat geese, plucked and cleaned, and word that the rest of the palace was not so fortunate. The geese were a gift, he said, from a frightened functionary. “He wants us to take the curse off his well,” he said.
“The Lord will do as the Lord pleases,” Moshe said. He had prayed for a while, alone but for Aharon, but then he had come out to talk to Ephraim.
No one asked him what he had done to the river, or how. No one needed to. They were Apiru. They worshipped the god who spoke through him.
Nofret did not know what to think. She was stubborn, she knew that, and not much less intransigent than the king. If she had been Ramses, she would have been no more willing to give way to a pack of desert bandits.
The king�
�s men were abroad in the Two Lands, reassuring the people, praying and propitiating the gods who, they said, had visited this trial upon the kingdom. They spoke no word of the god of the Apiru.
Moshe maintained his serenity. “The Lord has only begun,” he said.
oOo
For seven days the river ran red, the water fouled beyond hope of cleansing. Men hoarded what little clear water they had. There were battles in the marketplace and in the fields. Cattle ran wild in search of water, for they would not touch any that came from the river.
In the river itself the fish died, and the water-birds died of eating them. Only the crocodiles seemed proof against the foulness. They ate the fish and the birds. They drank the water and seemed to take no ill from it.
At dawn of the seventh day a new cry went up along the river. Nofret heard it in the depths of a dream-ridden sleep. At first she thought it another dream, a confused murmur as of wind in trees or a battle far away. But the wider awake she was, the clearer she heard it.
She thrust herself up from her bed beside Miriam’s. Miriam was gone. So were the rest of the embassy. She found them on the roof of the guesthouse, which backed against the palace wall. From there they could see the river and the crowd of people along it. Some of them were in it—splashing, shouting, defying rotting fish and crocodiles.
The water ran broad and brown as far as she could see. The blood-tinge was gone. It would be gone, she suspected, from Nubia to the Delta, from all the wells and cisterns, and from the fields that stank of long-dead fish.
People were dancing, singing, praising the gods. None of them looked toward the palace, or toward the foreigners on its wall. Nofret was glad of that. Better to be ignored than to be blamed for their suffering.
“It is not over,” said Moshe.
oOo
The river flowed clear again, but the numbers of fish that had died were too great even for the crocodiles to dispose of. Farmers made the best of it: there was no better fodder for young crops than the corpses of fish. The stink was indescribable.
