by Judith Tarr
Johanan came to stand beside her, face turned to the sky. The stars were clear again, the shadow gone, if in fact it had ever been. “It’s past,” he said. “We all felt it go.”
“You were too far gone in wine to feel anything.”
“The Lord is stronger than wine,” said Johanan. He was close, almost touching. He did not presume to lay an arm about her shoulders.
They had not stood so near to one another since they left Sinai. Nofret fought compulsion, but in the end she yielded; she circled his waist with her arm and leaned lightly against him.
He did not stiffen, she noticed. His arm settled where it belonged, around her shoulders. She sighed. “If Jehoshua comes to any danger, any whatsoever, before we come back to Sinai, I honestly will never forgive you.”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” he said.
“It’s not fair at all,” said Nofret. She completed the circle of her arms, burying her face in his breast. She could see nothing, not even stars, but the night was less dark, the wings of death less softly terrible as they fell upon the firstborn of every living creature in Egypt.
He carried her down from the roof into the guarded fastness of the house. Everyone was in the hall; the singing had shifted from hymns to songs more secular by far. The sleeping-rooms were empty. Even the servants were partaking of the wine, holding off the night and the fear.
If the Lord of Yisroel objected to such comfort as two people could find on the night of his wrath, he forbore to smite them for it. “He bids us be fruitful,” Johanan said somewhere in the night, “and multiply, and have joy in it.”
“I don’t remember the joy,” she said, “when that law was declared to the people.”
"It went without saying,” he said.
Sixty-Six
The Apiru crept out in the first light of morning, venturing one by one through doors on which the blood had gone dark at last. Their quarter was deathly quiet, but beyond it they heard the sound of wailing.
The Lord had done as he promised. In every house the eldest child, the firstborn, lay dead, struck down by the hand of the god. The king sat on his throne with his firstborn in his arms, his daughter Nefer-Re whom he loved. He would not let her go. But the people who had caused her death, the slaves whom he had held captive for so long, he sent away in a great howl of rage and grief.
“Go!” he cried to Moshe and to the few who had been brought to the governor’s palace in the first hours of the morning. “Go, and never come back!”
The children of Yisroel took him at his word. Obedient to their god’s command, they burned the leavings of the feast, gathered all their belongings, their flocks and herds, and went out of Pi-Ramses. The gates were open for them. The guards were dead or fled.
No throngs accompanied them, no crowds of the curious ran behind to see where they went. No one had heart or leisure for such a thing. Every house in Egypt was a house of mourning.
Only the Apiru were glad. They went forth singing, driving their beasts before them. They were a great multitude, a whole nation freed at last from its captivity.
oOo
Nofret was in front with Moshe and Aharon, Miriam and the rest of the elders from Sinai. For all their gladness, for all the Egyptians’ prostration, Johanan and Jehoshua had mustered the armed men and set them on guard to front and rear and sides. They traveled from the city as their kin wandered through the desert, armed against attack.
They had been slaves. They understood caution and knew the uses of wariness. But most had little acquaintance with wandering, nor knew how best to preserve their strength or their provisions. Nofret saw how many of them were prodigal with their water, drinking much too often from their families’ supply, and spilling it as if they needed only to walk down to the well for more.
That would have to stop once they came to the desert. Here they were still in civilized country, on the road through the outposts of Egypt. They could not take to the open desert with so many people, so many of them children or the old.
The eastward way, the way into Canaan, might have been simplest, for there were cities, and oases between, and no lakes or seas to cross. But the people there would not take kindly to the coming of a whole nation, a tribe in arms that might be taken for an invading army. Therefore they went south and east on the desert road, the road that led to the eastern sea.
That was Moshe’s doing. No one sane would have done it, and no one sane would have followed anyone else who led the people that way. But Moshe was the prophet of their god. The god guided him, he said. Therefore they followed.
So many people, so little accustomed to the ways of wandering in the desert, traveled much more slowly than the tribes in Sinai. By midday they were still in sight of the green shimmer of the vineyards about Pi-Ramses. By sunset they were on the desert’s edge, looking out across the Red Land.
They camped there. Some of them had still enough strength to sing. Most were weary and footsore, the children whining, begging to be carried, but they were happy. They were free.
oOo
There was dancing round the fires that night. The young in particular were resilient, and with a little rest and a sufficiency of water and food they were apt for another night’s revelry.
Tonight the stars were clean. No death walked the dark. They needed no protection but their own young men, archers and spearmen set on guard as was only sensible in the desert.
The elders were either sleeping deep or dancing with the young men. But Moshe and Aharon and Miriam held council instead of festival. Nofret was of a like mind. So, she noticed, was Johanan; and Jehoshua, having proved to the youths of Pi-Ramses that he could leap twice as high over the fire as any of them, came to drop laughing at his mother’s feet.
His laughter died quickly. They were eating sparingly, drinking watered wine. “Tomorrow,” Johanan said, “these people will learn the beginnings of wisdom. We’ll gather all the food and water, set men in charge of it—”
“Women,” said Miriam. “Let women command the food. We have to cook it, after all.”
“Women, then,” Johanan said amicably. “We’ll choose the elders and those with authority, and set them to meting out a set portion each day. There’ll be fighting else, and hunger and thirst among the improvident.”
“Some will be out of water by tomorrow,” Jehoshua said. “I saw one man bathing in his. He’d dug a basin in the sand and lined it with goatskins, and was swimming in it like a pharaoh in a pleasure-pool.”
“No one stopped him?” Nofret asked, incredulous.
“Who would know to? People laughed and asked if they could go after him. They don’t understand that water’s not to be had for the asking, not here.”
He did not understand such people, he who had been raised in the camps of Sinai, but he was trying. Nofret was proud of him.
“They’re going to learn,” said Johanan, “that they’re not people of the cities, not any longer. They belong to the desert, and to the Lord of hosts.”
Moshe nodded by the fire. Miriam, beside him, said, “There may be no need for any of that. We have escaped the city, but not yet the king.”
“The Lord has laid him low,” said Jehoshua. “He’s let us go.”
“Grief laid him low,” Miriam said. “Pride will master him once more and send him in pursuit of us. He had no love for us before. Now he hates us. Now he has his daughter’s death to avenge.”
“His son and heir still lives,” said Jehoshua. “Surely he doesn’t—”
Nofret cuffed him, to his startlement and sudden anger, and said to him, “If you were a girl, my fine young lion, I would be no less devastated to lose you.”
He was growing abashed, she could see, but he was stubborn. She cuffed him again. “Open your eyes, child! He loved his daughter and valued her: she was the chief of his counselors. Without her he has a son to inherit the throne, but no mind to match his.”
Jehoshua looked down, not at all willingly, but he was at heart a sensible young m
an. “Very well. So you think the king is going to come after us.”
“I know he is,” Nofret said before Miriam could speak. “He’ll think to trap us by the sea, since we chose this of all roads.”
“The road into Canaan is a warrior’s road,” Johanan said. “We aren’t a warrior people, not as many as we are.”
“Nor are we gods or spirits, to walk dry-shod across the sea,” said Nofret.
“The Lord will guide us,” Moshe said.
Not even Johanan believed that. But it silenced him and drove Jehoshua into speechlessness. When next anyone spoke, it was Jehoshua, calling back to one who had called to him from another fire, leaping up and running to the dance.
oOo
Moshe wept for Egypt. He alone of them all had wept when they left Pi-Ramses, wept as he had done on the river out of Memphis, for the dead and for the sorely battered kingdom. While his people sang, he mourned. He knew no delight in the victory, only grief.
Some of the elders from Sinai came to him that first night, warm with wine and laughter. They had a new plan, a plan that they reckoned inspired. “Egypt is weak,” they said, “and the king is gone from Memphis. Let us go there and take the city and be kings in it.”
“That,” said Miriam, “is the wine speaking. Go, sleep it off. We leave at dawn.”
They paid no heed to her. They pressed close around Moshe as he sat by the fire. “Don’t you want to be king again? Isn’t it time and past time, since you’ve shown the might of the Lord? We can rule as the Shepherd Kings did, but more strongly than they. After all, our king will be king by right in Egypt.”
“We told you long ago,” said Miriam, “that a king who has died cannot be made to live again.”
She was outside of their circle, invisible, inaudible, disregarded. “Lead us to Memphis,” they said. “Isn’t that what you’re doing, taking us south instead of east? Let’s turn west. Let’s go to the king’s city.”
Moshe rose, startling them. He walked straight through the circle and out into the dark.
They gaped. One or two rose as if to follow, but met large and glowering obstacles: Johanan and Aharon, barring their way.
An elder needed no courage to hold the office, nor even much wisdom, simply the good fortune to have outlived his agemates. These were brave enough to enter Egypt, but not to face two men both tall and strong. Aharon and Johanan stared them down, sent them slinking back to their own campfires and the solace of the wine.
“They won’t ever stop that, will they?” Nofret said to Miriam as the elders beat their retreat.
Miriam shrugged. “When we’re out of Egypt and away from temptation, likely they’ll forget this silliness.”
“Is that what it is?” Nofret asked her. “Aren’t you tempted yourself? You could be queen again if you cared enough to try.”
For a moment Miriam’s face was open, the mask of indifference laid aside. Nofret saw the raw longing, the pain of memory, the regret that, in the end, was less than it well might have been. “I don’t care to try,” she said, soft and steady.
“Truly?”
Miriam’s eyes glittered, but she kept her temper. “Not enough, my friend. Not nearly enough.”
The name of friendship took Nofret slightly aback. She had not thought of them as friends; but what else could one call it? Not lady and slave, certainly. They had a certain comfort in each other’s company. They knew the quality of one another’s silences.
They shared no confidences as women did among the Apiru. But then they did not need to. They had known each other from childhood. None not kin had known Nofret for as long as Miriam had known her; Nofret had known Miriam since she was a small naked princess, the third daughter of forgotten Akhenaten.
They looked at each other in the firelight. Miriam nodded slightly, turned, went into the tent that she shared with her father.
Nofret did not follow her. If Miriam needed to weep, she would want to do it in solitude. Difficult as it had been for Nofret to return to Egypt, it had been more than bitter for that one who had been queen and goddess and was become nothing but air and a voice.
Nofret turned slowly on the edge of the light. Aharon and Johanan were sitting again by the fire, talking quietly. Jehoshua was dancing with the young men, leaping high and then higher, laughing as he did it. Some of the girls from Pi-Ramses were watching, giggling behind their veils.
Of Moshe she saw nothing. And yet her bones knew where he had gone. He was walking in the desert, wrapped in his god as in a cloak. The night spirits walked wide of him. The creatures of the dark shrank from his presence.
It dawned on her that she was seeing and perceiving things that were hidden, that simple human eyes could not see. She had always been able to sense the presence of gods and powers; magic had been as clear to her as fire in the dark. But this was a new clarity. It was more a knowing than a seeing, less of the eyes than of the bones—not wholly then the gift that Leah had had, that Miriam seemed to have. Nofret was something other than they. But then she was a foreigner, no kin to the Apiru.
Time was when she would have refused this gift, turned against it with all the power of her native obstinacy. But here in the Red Land, on the road from Pi-Ramses, she was emptied of resistance. She could not say as the Apiru might, “The Lord’s will be done.” But she could bow to the inevitable.
She wandered a little way from the fire, on the track that Moshe had taken but not in pursuit of him. She went only far enough to escape the light.
The clamor of the camp was muted. She heard the cry of a jackal. The gods of Egypt were there, watching, lifting no hand against the interloper from Sinai.
There was someone else, too, someone who believed himself to be both king and god. He was still in Pi-Ramses, but he had given the order: in the morning his army would march. Every man of it mourned a kinsman or a friend or a comrade in arms. There were gaps in the ranks, men who had been the first of their fathers’ children.
The king’s daughter had been taken at last to the house of purification. Ramses wept for her, shut up in his chamber, sleepless and raging. The pride that had brought his kingdom such sorrow was stronger in him than ever. It possessed him as a demon will, beyond reason or logic. The god of the Apiru had resorted to murder. The king of Egypt would destroy the people who worshipped that god.
It would be a just execution, he was thinking. He was past caring that in slaying so many, he was destroying the wealth of a nation in slaves. They had destroyed the land’s wealth of Egypt, and the wealth of its eldest-born.
Nofret returned to herself with a shock, as if she had plunged into deep water and come near to drowning. Nothing that she had ever done was like this. There were tales, whispers of the priests’ arts, spirits that could wander wherever their master directed. If this was what it was, then it was simpler than the priests would ever admit.
She turned back blindly to the light. The camp had quieted, abruptly it seemed, till she looked up at the stars. They had wheeled a whole hour’s span in the moments since last she had seen them.
Her breath shuddered as she drew it in. Her body shook with shivering. Somehow she got herself to the fire and huddled by it, drawing from it all the warmth she could.
Johanan’s arms folded about her. Slow warmth seeped into her. She sighed.
He did not ask her why she was so cold in the desert night. Even when she said, “Pharaoh means to follow us. He’s in a deadly rage.”
He nodded, unsurprised. Of course: Moshe and Miriam had foretold it. When he gathered her up, she protested only feebly. He carried her into their tent and laid her in their bed.
There at last she was warm enough. She almost forgot, for a while, what she had seen and foreseen.
Sixty-Seven
The king would not come upon them that day, or the next, or the one after that. He was too far away, had waited too long to take his army out of Pi-Ramses. Duty shackled him, and kingship, and the offices of mourning. But when at last he could set out,
he could not fail to know where the Apiru were: they left a track as broad as the river of Egypt.
They were if anything an even more untidy mob as they broke camp than they had been in departing from Pi-Ramses. Two nights of carousing had left too many of them barely able to move. Already some were going thirsty: they had wasted all their water.
There were loud outcries when it was brought home to them that there would be no water on the road, and none where they were most likely to camp for the night. A smaller company or a swifter one might have found one of the oases, but not this whole nation.
The worst of the stragglers were those who refused to leave camp at all. They would stay, they insisted. If the king came in pursuit of them, which they preferred to doubt, maybe he would pass them by. They did not seem to understand that their god had destroyed any hope of their remaining in Egypt, nor could they ever return there. They could not go back, only forward.
They needed the overseer’s whip. Instead they had their own young men and the men from Sinai with swords and spears, lifting them if they stumbled, carrying them if they resisted. The whole nation of Yisroel went out of that camp in the dry land, whether it would or no.
The day before, they had marched in a haze of wine and joy. Now people were waking and realizing where they were and how they had come there. The way was hard. The sun beat down. No one knew for certain where they were going. Sinai, they supposed, but Sinai to most of them was a dream or a myth.
“Desert,” some said. “Nothing but sand and rock as far as anyone can see, with a high mountain in the midst of it, where the Lord lives.”
“No, no,” others argued. “It’s a land of beauty, green and rich, overflowing with milk and honey. Our flocks will grow fat there; our herds will prosper and multiply.”
They disputed as they marched, till their mouths grew too dry for speech. Only one thing they agreed on: that this country was dreadfully harsh, and that there was not enough water.
