by Judith Tarr
Miriam still did not speak. Her eyes had flickered when Nefer-Re addressed her as if she were a commoner, a child of slaves, but she was wise enough not to betray the truth. In this life she was a child of the desert, a stranger to palaces.
Nefer-Re seemed undismayed by the silence. “Suppose that I could bring my father round to your way of thinking. Would you be able to take away the curse?”
“I have no such power,” said Miriam, “but my father does.”
Nefer-Re’s eyes widened slightly. “Your—?” She broke off. “I was told that you were his sister.”
“He has no sister,” Miriam said. “I am his daughter. Your father has given you leave to treat with me, it seems. Mine has done no such thing. I can only be a messenger. I can promise nothing.”
“Nor can I,” said Nefer-Re with the ghost of a smile, “but I have a certain degree of influence. And Egypt is suffering.”
It was difficult to see whether she honestly cared for that. Her face and manner were not suited to the expression of delicate emotion.
“Then this is no better than a gathering of women by the cookfire while the men hold council in the tent,” Miriam said.
“But women can sway their men,” said Nefer-Re, “and my father listens to me.”
“Mine listens to his god,” said Miriam.
Nefer-Re leaned toward her. “Your father is asking that your people be allowed to go into the desert to worship your god, yes? My father refuses, partly for pride and partly for suspicion. How can he be sure that his slaves will come back once they’ve done their duty to their god?”
“If we give our word,” said Miriam, “we will keep it.”
Nefer-Re nodded. “Yes, I believe that. I also believe that my father can be persuaded—if your people are willing to make one small concession.”
Miriam sat still. Her eyes had sharpened, Nofret noticed, but her face was as serene as always. She refused to ask the inevitable question.
Nefer-Re, unperturbed, asked it for her. “Yes, what concession? It’s not a great one. It’s even wise, if you consider the danger of bandits, lions and jackals, storms in the desert.”
She paused. Miriam watched her in silence. She let it out perhaps more quickly than she had meant, and more bluntly. “Leave your children behind. Let them stay in Pi-Ramses while their elders worship the god. They’ll be safe, protected, well looked after. No one will threaten them. And no one,” she said strongly, as if it were a telling point, “will remove them. They’ll be there and waiting when their kin come back.”
Nofret’s back tightened. There was nothing of reason in it. Those were nearly the precise words that she had spoken when she left her children behind in Sinai—that she had flung in Johanan’s face when she saw that her firstborn would come with them into Egypt. It was a greater pain than she had thought it could be, a sharp and stabbing anguish, a yearning beyond measure for Anna and Ishak. She could see their faces as she walked away from them, brave as befit the children of Yisroel, but with eyes full of tears.
The pain was so fierce that for a long moment she neither saw nor heard. When she was aware again of where she was, Miriam was speaking. She knew that soft, bitter voice far too well. “Do you think that we will abandon our children to your tender mercies? Swear any oath you please. Give us your word from here to the ends of the earth. We’ll never trust you. We’ll never give our young ones to you who have already sold the best of them away from their people.”
Nefer-Re seemed taken aback. People always were when Miriam let slip the mask she wore, the gentleness that ran no deeper than the skin.
“We have no reason to trust you,” said Miriam. “Not your honor, not your good faith. You took our people who had been servants of the king, free men who worked for wages, and made them slaves. You sold their children into a deeper bondage. Now you ask that we go away from those of our children who are left, abandon them, leave them ripe for your plucking.”
Nefer-Re had been startled, but her wits were quick. “You would only say such things,” she said, “if you yourself were prepared to break your word. You want your children with you, because you don’t intend to come back. Once you’ve gone into the desert, Egypt will never see you again.”
Miriam met her eyes. There was no mask now, no pretense. She was imperious, and queenly proud. “Do we owe you honor who so dishonored us?”
“If we are to speak of honor or of owing,” said Nefer-Re, “then what of Egypt stripped bare, our people facing famine? Slaves you might have been, you Apiru, but we never starved you.”
“No. You whipped us, tortured us, sold off our children. You make our laborers labor with bare hands, without the tools they need, or compel them to forge those tools but give them no time for the forging. Whatever they do to satisfy your overseers’ demands, you add to those demands without taking away. You do your best to break my people. All for a petty vindictiveness, a memory of a time when the gods of Egypt were subject to one great god. If our people worshipped half a dozen false divinities, they would still be free men building tombs in Thebes and herding flocks in the Delta. They would not be penned together in Pi-Ramses, building a city for a king who both fears and hates them.”
Nefer-Re rose slowly. “You are a stiff-necked people,” she said. Her voice was carefully controlled. “You are proud, nay arrogant. You are all that my father condemns you for.”
“Certainly,” said Miriam. “We’re very like him."
For a breathless instant Nofret was sure that Nefer-Re would strike Miriam. But a lady, even a lady as manly forthright as this, did not resort to blows. Her weapon was the tongue. “I see that you are no better than your father. Go, exult with him over Egypt’s suffering. Praise your god of cruelty, your jealous god who will have no other god beside him.”
“You too,” said Miriam, “are your father’s image. If you would but set us free, Egypt would be spared its suffering. All that it endures, your father has laid upon it with his intransigence.”
Nofret discovered that she had been holding her breath. She let it out slowly. The two of them, princess now and queen who had been, stood face to face, eye to burning eye.
There was no remedy but surrender, and it must be absolute. Kings or queens, they were all the same.
Wives, too, and husbands. War was the way of the world. Even gods fought one against the other.
Miriam parted from Nefer-Re with remarkable civility. That was an attribute of kings. They would speak softly to those whom they would destroy, and offer royal courtesy to their enemies, and end a battle with the strict forms of politeness. If Nefer-Re wondered where the seer of the Apiru had learned such things, she did not speak of it.
oOo
When there was no green thing left in Egypt, a wind came out of the west and blew the locusts away, swept them clean, all the way to the sea that lay between Egypt and Sinai.
But the wind itself was a terrible thing, like the hand of the god. With the locusts it blew the black earth of Egypt, the gift of the river that was the wealth of the Black Land. Mingled with it was the Red Land itself, a storm out of the desert, dry as dust, dry as sand, alive with lightning.
Black Land and Red Land had gone to war along the river. For three days the sun could not pierce the cloud of dust and earth. The only light was lightning. All else was darkness. Night was but a fraction darker than day; day was a dim brown glimmer, a hint of the brightness that shone beyond the cloud.
Then at last the king broke. Maybe his daughter had a part in it. Maybe she had no need.
He was still proud; he would not come to Moshe like a beggar at a king’s door. He had Moshe brought to him as before, in a company of guards, with a prince of servants to guide him. The hall was ablaze with lamps, the court huddled as close to one another as they could be. They had even brought their dogs, their golden-earringed cats, their pet monkeys and gazelles and their birds in cages, all their living chattels, as if this were a city under siege.
“I yield,”
the king said to Moshe. “I yield to your god. Your people may go.”
The young men of the Apiru grinned at one another. They had grown cocky in the darkness, determinedly undismayed by it, calling it the Lord’s cloak and walking boldly abroad in it. Now they were proved right: the king had given in. Their people were free.
“Nine times your god has spoken,” said the king. “Eight times I have defied him. No longer. My kingdom is in ruins. We look on famine, on starvation, all by your god’s will. Let it be as he commands. Let your people take their belongings and go. Let them go far, and let them go long. Let them worship him as and where they well please.”
“My lord is generous,” said Moshe, “and ultimately reasonable.”
“What choice have I?” the king asked bitterly. “Go. My boat is waiting to carry you to Pi-Ramses. When you come there, gather your people. Take them out of Egypt.”
“So we shall,” said Moshe. But he did not turn, nor did he go, though he had clearly been dismissed.
It was Miriam who spoke for him, and not Aharon, who seemed as pleased as the young men. She spoke delicately, with exquisite politeness, in her pure Theban accent. “Your boat, my lord? Surely you mean your boats. We have baggage, and beasts to carry it.”
“Ah,” said the king. “Yes. But you see, we need those animals. Your god has destroyed the great part of our herds. There are too few oxen for the plowing, too few asses to bear burdens; the sheep and the goats are sorely depleted. I’m afraid we must keep any that we can, whether here or in Pi-Ramses.”
Miriam regarded him without surprise. Her eyes did not shift to the woman who stood among his attendants, Nefer-Re, erect and expressionless. Whether this was her doing or her father’s own, there was no telling.
Miriam said to the king softly, reasonably, “We must have our herds. They are our livelihood. Without them we will starve.”
“Surely,” said the king, “your god will provide.”
“Our god provides only what we fail to provide for ourselves,” said Miriam. “We are shepherds and keepers of flocks. We cannot live without them.”
“Neither can we,” said the king, “and we are more numerous and more deeply in need. Your people may go—isn’t that what you wanted? I’ll not even ask that you leave your children behind, as might have been safest. But the animals that you keep, that alone escaped the pestilence, those we must have. Our children are starving, lady. Without those flocks and herds, they die.”
“They are ours,” Miriam said. “Our god has preserved them for us.”
“You too are intransigent,” said the king. “Will you deny your people freedom for the sake of a few goats and sheep?”
“Those few goats and sheep,” said Moshe, “are the life of our people, their sustenance in the dry land. Their wool weaves our tents and covers us with our mantles and our robes. On their meat and milk do we live. And,” he said, “their unblemished young are our sacrifice to the Lord of Yisroel.”
“Ah,” said the king. “Your god, your lord of wrath and vengeance. No, you must not anger him. I leave you one goat, then, for every household, and one lamb for sacrifice. The rest we must keep. Your god took away our own. We will have yours in recompense.”
“We cannot do that,” Moshe said. “The Lord has been most clear. All of us must go, and all our goods and chattels, our herds, everything that is ours. Nothing less will content him.”
“Then you are a fool,” said the king, “and your god is a monument to avarice. You may go, I set you free. But your flocks will stay.”
“Without our flocks we cannot go,” said Moshe. “The Lord has forbidden us.”
“Then stay!” roared the king. “Stay and be damned!”
Sixty-Four
From every other audience Moshe had come forth almost serene, wearing his god like a cloak. From this one he came shaking, though whether it was anger or terror, Nofret could not tell. When he sat down in the guesthouse and wept, it was the kind of weeping that besets a man when he has come to the end of his endurance: dry and hurting-hard.
He did not seem to notice that the others hovered and fretted. He spoke to no one that Nofret could see, with none of the forms or gestures that other men used in converse with their gods. He simply spoke as to another man, albeit one older and higher than he, a father perhaps, or a master of slaves. “O Lord, my God, how much longer will you test us? How much more must the Two Lands suffer? When will you set us free?”
There was no answer that Nofret could hear. She was tired to the bone. The darkness had crept into her heart and settled there. The sun would never shine again. They would all live and die in the dark, without even stars to comfort them.
oOo
Nofret woke from a heavy, sodden sleep. At first she did not know what had roused her. There was light—lamplight, but unnaturally bright. She sat up blinking.
Sunlight. Daylight. The darkness was gone from the sky.
Indeed. But not from her heart. It was as deep there as ever.
She got up, pulled on what garments came to hand. Her body felt like a stranger’s. It was heavy, stiff. Moving it was like moving a wooden image.
She walked out of the room in which she had slept, into tumult. All the embassy were gathered together, and all their baggage. She saw her own among the rest—numb and blind, she must have been, not to see that it was gone.
“What—” she tried to say.
Jehoshua appeared in front of her. He had a white, wild look. “Come,” he said. “Come quickly.”
She did not have to dig in her heels to keep him from dragging her off. She was made of wood, of cedar from the Lebanon. She was much too heavy for him to lift. “Tell me why,” she made herself say.
His head tossed with impatience. “Mother! We have to go. We have to go now. The Lord says so.”
“Moshe says so.” That was Johanan with a pack on his back. “The king summoned him again when the sun came up. There was shouting and worse. We’re ordered to leave Memphis or die.”
“But where—”
“Pi-Ramses,” said Jehoshua. It was like hearing an echo, the son so like the father that if she let her eyelids fall half-shut she could not tell them apart. Johanan was bigger and his beard was blacker, thicker and longer. She must remember that.
“The Lord is angry,” Johanan said. “Truly angry. The land and its creatures have suffered and died for the king’s obduracy. But no man of Egypt, no woman or child, has been slain at the Lord’s hand.”
“That mercy is ended,” said Jehoshua. “Mother, wake up. Hurry. We have to be in Pi-Ramses when the Lord’s wrath falls.”
“We have a little time,” Johanan said. He caught his son’s eye. “But not much. Come, beloved. We have to go while we still can.”
oOo
There was a boat waiting for them on the river, a barge to carry their beasts and their baggage. The bargemen had Apiru faces though they wore the loincloths that were the only sensible working-clothes under the sun of Egypt.
The Lord had provided the boatmen, Nofret supposed, as he provided the food and water that were on board the barge, and protection from the king’s guards. Some of those were watching from the walls or the bank, but they did not interfere.
By the time the boat had cast off from the shore, Nofret was fully awake, though her body still felt strange. She sat under the striped linen canopy with the elders and Moshe and Miriam. The young men and Johanan, and Aharon with them, took turn and turn among the barge’s crew. She did not ask acidly, as she thought to do, why the Lord had not given them a swift sailing ship and a crew of oarsmen. The lovely sleek river-ships could not carry a herd of donkeys in comfort.
They went swiftly enough with the aid of current and sail. Where the bank was level, the young men sprang out and rigged lines to tow the barge. Night’s coming did not stop them, although they slowed, guiding themselves by starlight and lanternlight and, for all Nofret knew, their god’s light that she alone of them all could not see.
/> They said little, and most of that was prayer. Silence in the Apiru was an alarming thing, like meekness in a lion or abstinence in a crocodile. Their silence had weight. It dragged her down.
Moshe’s was most massive of all. His god-inspired trances had always had in them an element of exaltation, of being lifted up. When he chose to die to Egypt, to set aside his kingship and become the prophet of Sinai, he had gone to his seeming death with something close to joy.
Now there was no joy in him. He was about to win the battle to set his people free, that much Nofret understood. But the thing that his god would do, the things that his god had done, were rending him with grief.
oOo
When Tutankhamon was king, Nofret had ridden on the river or taken the road beside it, traveling from Memphis into the green lands of the Delta. She could remember still how rich the country had been. Pastures full of flocks and herds, fields of barley and of flax, orchards, vineyards, great wealth and beauty. The air had been full of birds, the water teeming with fish.
Now it was all barren. The green was devoured. The black earth was turned to dust and blown far away. The once-great herds were shrunk to a heap of white bones in the blackened remnant of a field, and a lone emaciated heifer lowing pitifully beside a farmer’s hut.
The god of the Apiru had done this. Egypt was laid low. Its people huddled in their villages, staring bleakly at ruin.
Moshe’s stare was no less bleak. Sometimes Nofret heard him murmuring to himself in Egyptian. “O my kingdom. O my people. How you have fallen!”
