by Judith Tarr
Those who dreamed of green pastures looked about them at the Red Land and despaired. Those who foresaw nothing but desert places and lives of hardship were loudly convinced that this was only the beginning. “We’ll wander in the desert forever,” they said. “We’ll never see green grass or running water again.”
“You will when we come to the sea,” Nofret told one of them.
“Yes,” the woman shot back, “and how are we going to cross that, I ask you? Will there be boats waiting for us? Is there a bridge?”
Nofret had no answer. Moshe did, but it was the same as always: “The Lord will provide.”
oOo
The nation that called itself Yisroel, that being the name of the ancestor from whom they all claimed descent, was the most stubborn, argumentative, indomitably muleheaded collection of people that Nofret had ever run afoul of. And yet somehow it managed to keep marching, even to keep some semblance of order. People—not enough, but a surprising number—were beginning to measure out the water that they had left, and to be less prodigal of their provisions.
By evening they were well ready to stop and rest. The vanguard of Johanan’s troops—mostly his own men from Sinai, with the rest scattered among the rearguard—had gone ahead to find a camping place. When the rest of the marchers came to it, they found the young men waiting, ready to take charge of the packtrain, the water, and the provisions. People were to pitch tents, build fires as they could, see themselves settled. Then they would be given the wherewithal to eat and drink.
The complaints were loud and long, but no one was lively enough to rise in revolt. That would happen later, Nofret suspected, when they were rested and toughened to the rigors of the march. For now they grumbled, and some even tried tears, but they did as they were told.
oOo
“That’s wise,” she said to Johanan when he came to the fire at last, tired and ruffled and more than a little surly. “Set your will on them when they’re too tired to fight, and by the time they’ve rested it’s too late; they’re in the habit of acting like an army instead of a ladies’ walking-party.”
“They’ll never be an army,” he said grimly. “I’d settle for a reasonably decent tribe of desert rovers.”
She set a cup in his hand, filled with heavily watered wine, and fed him roast kid wrapped in bread and herbs. He had little appetite at first, but after a while he grew hungry.
When he had eaten as much as he would eat, he looked about in some surprise. “We’re all alone here.”
She nodded. “The elders are in council again. Moshe’s laying down the law. Better now than later, he says. This has to be something other than a rabble by the time the king finds us.”
Johanan leaped to his feet, or tried. He stumbled with weariness. She steadied him, and held him when he tried to pull away. He scowled at her. “What are you doing? I have to be there.”
“You can rest a bit,” she said. “They’ll be blathering for half the night.”
“I have to blather with them. We’re going to have a revolt if we do again what we did tonight. We had to do it, mind you, and quickly, but after this, people will want a say in whatever we do.”
She could not stop him by force; he was too much stronger than she. She let him go, but followed, toward the middle of the camp and the largest fire, where the elders were gathered.
There was no carousing tonight. The camp was almost quiet. Many were sleeping, some where they had fallen after pitching their tents. Most of those who were awake were somewhere in sight of the elders’ fire, craning to hear whatever they could.
It was blather, as Nofret had known it would be. Most was a continuation of the argument on the march: green pastures against bleak desert. The elders from Sinai seemed to have roused at last to the understanding of what they had done in bringing so many hundreds out of Egypt, all of whom needed to be fed and housed and provided with the means to live. Their own country supported, with difficulty, those who were in it already. Now a whole new nation was coming to live among them.
Moshe was saying nothing. Nor was Miriam. At first Nofret could not even see them, but they were there, not far from the fire but in shadow, silent, seeming oblivious to the clamor around them.
It was Aharon who said, “The Lord has taken thought for this. Wait and be patient. First we get out of Egypt; then we go to the country that the Lord has prepared for us.”
“And where is that?” one of the elders demanded. Nofret knew the voice and the face: Shmuel from Pi-Ramses, as contentious as ever. “I say we go back to Egypt. It’s clear enough that we can’t leave it—either we have to fight our way out or we have to learn to swim across a sea.”
“We can’t go back,” Aharon said. “The Lord has made sure of it.”
“The Lord has shown the king how strong he can be. The king needs us to build his city. He knows that we won’t be beaten and starved, and we won’t have our children taken away from us. Let us work for him as men do, for wages. There are no better builders than we are—if there were, would he have refused for so long to let us go?”
“The king was too proud to let you go,” said Johanan, shouldering in beside his father. “That pride will kill you if you try to go back. He wants you dead now, dead and rotted, for what the Lord has done to him and to his kingdom.”
“Kings’ memories are short,” Shmuel said. “The works of their glory are long and dreadfully expensive. He needs us, and he knows it. Without us he’ll be hard put to finish his city in the time he’s got left to live.”
Johanan flung up his hands. “Go then! Go back to him. He’s not a day’s journey behind, with soldiers and chariots. Go and throw yourself at his feet. All the easier then for him to hack your head off and name you first in the count of Egypt’s revenge for its firstborn.”
“I always said,” someone muttered not far from Nofret, “that that was going too far. Plagues on the land and the livestock are very well, but killing people’s children—”
The rest was overrun by a babble of voices. Everyone was shouting at once, some for going back, some for going forward, some—still—for taking Memphis and setting up a king.
A great bull-bellow rose above them all. It did not quell them, but that was not its purpose. Men came running from all over the camp, some dressed and armed, others hastily pulling on tunics and unsheathing swords. Another roar of command from Johanan and they were in ranks, the men from Sinai leading, those of Pi-Ramses following in reasonable order, advancing into what was rapidly becoming a mob.
Nofret took what shelter she could. It was only the patch of shadow where Moshe and Miriam were, and neither of them seeming to notice anything but the visions that formed and faded behind their eyelids. But it was an island of calm in the torrent. No one entered that shadow, nor did anyone try to seize one or the other of the prophets and hold a hostage.
Soon enough, though it seemed horribly long in the doing, Johanan’s men had restored order. Shmuel himself was gently but firmly restrained by his own son.
There was much glaring and no little muttering, but the shouting had died. Those who had come to blows were held apart from one another, no matter how they struggled.
Johanan regarded them all with fists on hips, eyebrows raised. “These,” he said with astonishing mildness, “are the wise men of Yisroel. Two days out of captivity and already you’re at war. Have you all forgotten why it is that we are here and not safe and soundly flogged in the king’s treasure-city?”
Eyes lowered at that, and some of the muttering faded.
“My people,” he said. His voice was almost tender, as it could be when one of the twins had done something appalling and been thrashed for it, but he could not help but betray that he loved them still. “O my people, if we are to live until we come to Sinai, we must be strong together. We can’t be fighting over every step and every choice. The Lord leads us out of Egypt and into our own country.”
Several voices rose at that. His eyes flashed on the speakers, sile
ncing them. “No, it might not be in Sinai. Yes, we have to go through Sinai in order to come there. We can’t turn back. We can’t throw ourselves on the Egyptians’ mercy. There is none. The king of Egypt is behind us, my people, and he is angry. When he catches us, he will do his best to kill us.”
A wail went up, a cry of sheer wordless terror. Johanan’s voice lashed across it. “Stop that! We are in danger, yes. Some or all of us could die. But we are the Lord’s people. He chose us. He guides us. While we are strong, he will not let us die at the hands of the Egyptian king.”
“And if we can’t be strong?” Shmuel again, as truculent as ever.
Ephraim answered for Johanan. “We have to be. There’s nothing else we can do.”
“Lord of hosts,” sighed Shmuel. He shook himself out of his son’s grasp and raised his arms. “Then pray, my people. Pray that we’re not all mad, and led by madmen!”
First a few, then several, then a great number of those about him began to pray as he prayed, arms lifted, swaying, crying aloud to the Lord. It was a hideous discord, a clamor without either beauty or coherence, and yet it had power in it. The power of desperation, perhaps, but power nonetheless.
One sound, nearer than the rest, startled Nofret into speechlessness. Miriam was laughing. Softly, as if she could not help it, but without a doubt.
When the gust of it had passed, Miriam looked up at Nofret, smiling such a smile as Nofret had never seen in her. It had tears in it, but they were tears of mirth. “Such people,” she said. “Such persistence. Who else would obey a god so perfectly but with such a mighty outcry?”
“We would,” Nofret said.
Miriam laughed again. “So we would! Is this our punishment, do you think? Are we here among them because we deserve them?”
“I think,” said Nofret after a pause, “that their god has a finely honed sense of fitness, and a broad streak of cruelty.”
“No, not cruelty,” said Miriam. “Humor. I never laughed, you see, when I was young. Now that I begin to grow old, I’ll laugh or die. That’s the doom he’s laid on me.”
Nofret sat on her heels beside Miriam. The praying went on in the light. Moshe, sitting beyond his daughter, was as immobile as a stone.
His god held him captive. He would not be let go until morning. She was as private with Miriam as if they were alone.
“You think we’re going to die,” she said.
Miriam regarded her in something like curiosity. “Do you think so?”
Nofret opened her mouth to snap that she did, but closed it again. Did she? Slowly she said, “I don’t know what I think. I know the king is on our track. He’ll find us when we come to the sea. We’re numerous, but most of us are women and children and men too old to fight. He can run right over us with his chariots and his bowmen.”
“So he can,” said Miriam. “He can certainly try. Don’t you trust the Lord to save us?”
“Do you?”
Her own question, turned back on her. She shrugged under the weight of it. “He has before. I hope he will again.”
“I don’t even know what I know,” said Nofret, “still less what I believe. If I look ahead, I see water and I see dry land. I see Sinai and the mountain of the god. I see years, Miriam. Years in the desert, always wandering, never stopping, hunted wherever we go. No one wants us. We’re too many; we need too much. The only hope for us is to take and take again, whatever we must, however we may. Or to die on this side of the sea, at the hands of the Great House of Egypt.”
“Death is hope?” Miriam pondered that. “I suppose in its way it is. Maybe the dry land that you see—that I see—is the land of the dead. They wander forever, it’s said, unless they’re so blessed as to have been buried in houses of eternity. There will be no such thing for us. We’ll bleach our bones under the sky.”
She did not sound as horrified by that as she might have once, when she was Egyptian, raised to believe that the body must endure so that the soul might live. She was the seer of the Apiru now. The Apiru set no value on the body once the soul had fled from it. They buried it, mourned it, forgot it.
This whole nation might die on the shores of the sea. Nofret had walked the edge of death’s country before, had seen far too many who stepped over and could not return. This was different. This was an entire people, a tribe and a nation, escaped from captivity only to fall into danger of death.
Did Nofret want to die with them?
She did not want to die at all. If she had to…better here than alone among strangers. Her husband and her son would die with her. The rest of her children were safe if their god allowed, far out of reach of Egypt’s king.
It could be worse. She shrugged, sighed, got to her feet. Miriam wanted to stay and pray. Nofret needed to sleep. Soon enough—tomorrow or the next day or the next—they would come to the sea, and the king would come upon them. Then she would need all the strength she had, to fight or to die.
Sixty-Eight
The nation of Yisroel rested a long night in their second camp. They slept well into the morning, by their leaders’ decree. When at last they rose and broke camp and readied for the march, Aharon said to them, “The king is behind us. He has chariots; we have flocks and children. From here we march in the night as well as in the day. We must reach the sea before him.”
Sleep had weakened their resistance. Fear roused them to an effort that a day ago they might have refused. By taking turn and turn riding the pack animals that were not too heavily laden, and by stopping for long enough to eat, drink, sleep briefly, they pressed on swiftly toward the sea.
Moshe led them as always. Sometimes Nofret fancied that she saw a guide ahead of him, a bank of cloud by day, or a column of smoke; by night a pillar of fire. She could not always see it She would have thought that she imagined it, except that she heard others speaking of it, calling it by the title that they gave their god: Adonai Elohenu, the Lord, the One.
It had been as strange as this when she first escaped from Egypt, when there were only the four of them: Johanan, Leah, her lady, herself. Now as then, she felt as if they had gone out of the world that simple men lived in. They were in the gods’ country, with a god in front of them, showing them the way.
The way was no easier for that, the sun no less hot, the stones’ edges no less sharp. Sleeping in snatches, marching in the dark as in the light, she lost all sense of where she was or what she did. She marched, that was all. Fear drove her as it drove the rest. She more than most had reason to be afraid: the dark behind her eyes was full of blood and slaughter, the vision that was in the king’s mind, the thing that he would do when he caught them.
He was refining it as he pressed in pursuit. Now he would only destroy the men, and such of the women and boys as resisted him. The rest would be brought back to Egypt and bound in deeper slavery even than they had been before. He particularly desired to take Moshe alive, to torment him until he died: and part of the torment would be to see his daughter killed as the king’s daughter had been, but never so swiftly or so mercifully.
Nofret tried to shut her eyes to that, but the eyes of the mind had no such escape. Waking and sleeping, the king’s thoughts followed her, the king’s hate and his yearning for revenge.
Sometimes she had relief when Johanan could walk with her, or when he could be spared from guarding the camp and roving with the scouts to rest for an hour beside her. It was all she could do to keep the pace of the march. He was tireless, commanding the armed men, sending out companies before and behind, helping to choose the places where they would pause. His god sustained him, or he was simply too stubborn to admit that he was exhausted.
“When we’ve crossed the sea,” he said, “then I’ll sleep for days. But not before.”
“You still don’t know how we’re going to do that,” she said.
“I trust in the Lord,” said Johanan.
When he was not with her, somewhat to her surprise Jehoshua was. Her son had been much caught up in his young manhood, his
training in arms and his place among the fighting men. On this march, when he was not needed on guard or among the scouts, he chose to walk with his mother. He never said much. He had that habit of silence from her: certainly no Apiru could keep quiet for as long or as comfortably as he did.
Somewhere between Sinai and this desert, he had grown taller than she. Rather notably so. He looked as his father had when she first met him, all arms and legs and angles. Watching him, she remembered a great number of things: the color of the sky over Akhetaten, the scent of its air, the grit of sand underfoot as she walked from the city to the laborers’ village. She even remembered the horrible great he-goat that had been a terror to the town. He was long gone to dust, as Akhetaten was.
As she grew more weary, she stumbled more often. Jehoshua was always there to steady her steps. The latest of many times that he did it, she lashed out at him. “What, do you think I’m too infirm to walk by myself?”'
“I think you’re too tired to see where you’re going,” he said with some of his father’s maddening complacency. “Or you’re seeing things. You are, aren’t you? Miriam looks just like you. But she’s steadier on her feet.”
“She’s had longer to learn how to do it,” muttered Nofret.
He did not ask what it was that she saw. That was the Apiru in him: she could never have swallowed her curiosity so easily. An Apiru simply knew that it was something to do with the god, and left it at that.
“I don’t want to be a prophet,” Nofret said. “I thought I did once, when Leah died and left her place to Miriam. Now I know I don’t want it at all. I’d rather be a plain woman of the people.”
“You were never that,” Jehoshua said. “You’re the Hittite woman, the one who sees the truth.”
Nofret shook her head so hard she staggered. “I’m not seeing it now. I’m feeling it. It’s in me. She’s the one who sees—Miriam, who is what Leah used to be. I just know things in my bones.”
His hands were strong, holding her up. She looked into wide brown eyes. His father’s eyes. The light that dawned in them was blinding in its brilliance.
