by Howard Fast
“You then—you profaned me! You struck my flesh!” the angry boy cried.
For the first time in his life Moses experienced the dead frustration of a just but unprovable position, and he knew how futile and self-defeating it would be to try to explain. He had struck divine flesh without cause or reason, and the dishonour of his act was not lessened by his own divinity. He had behaved not like a prince but like any lowborn waif of the street or the river; and when Ramses-em-Sed walked up to him and expectorated full in his face, his body became as rigid as forged iron, unmoving and unbending. But in his heart a red flame of anger burned and grew into such a murderous hatred that he had to close his eyes and pray to all the gods he remembered that he should be given control of himself—and not act to stain himself and his mother and all of his godly ancestors with an act of fratricide.
When at last he opened his eyes, he was alone except for Seti-Hop and he turned his head away so that the old bowman would not see his tears of rage. Seti-Hop put his hand on Moses’ shoulder and said with curious warmth and almost in pity,
“Go now and forget all this, Prince. A man commands himself before be commands others, and if I am not mistaken, you are beginning to be a man—and something of a bowman, too. I only wish that at your age I had the eye to judge your brother’s target as keenly as you did. As for what you did, some will say a slave’s life is worthless, and others say different. You will have to find your own answer, Moses.”
[6]
MONTHS LATER, MOSES was reminded of the incident—a memory he would as soon do without—when, returning to his mother’s quarters, he encountered Amon-Teph, the fat priest.
It was at twilight, when the setting sun grasped the tops of the giant roofless columns in its rosy clutch, bathing the pale granite in an unearthly radiance that only Egypt in all the world knows—and only Egypt at sundown. Moses was standing in the dark forest of stone, staring up at the beauty above him, the black pillars turning bloody and then rose-red against the blue lavender sky, and then the great strokes of rich purple to herald darkness, and the blood colour creeping up the pillars as rose-pink became crimson and then black. Moses never saw this—and it was never the same for two nights—without experiencing a mixture of rapture and melancholy, rapture beyond expression, and melancholy to make him feel that in himself he knew and measured all of the world’s joy and sorrow since time began. Adolescence had only recently begun for the boy, but it was a land where fruit ripens easily—and perhaps perishes early too. As Moses watched the darkness deepen, a knowing, rasping voice spoke out of the deep shadow and said,
“Well, Prince, what do you think of such beauty? For my part, I think the gods put it there, to delude us and to make us envious—and if we look too hard, to make us sick.”
Startled at first, the boy realized it was the priest, Amon-Teph, and was able to relax and recall that a long time ago he, Moses, had come off second best in an exchange of words. So he answered now with youthful but firm authority, attempting to hold his voice low,
“I don’t think, Amon-Teph—or at least it doesn’t seem to me—that beauty can ever make a man sick. I have heard that it is one of the seven fruitful blessings; and since the gods have wished it so, it brings comfort and peace.”
“Ha! So that’s what you heard, is it?” the old priest snorted from the darkness. “Where did you learn that kind of talk, Moses? Are you trying to prove that the language is dead—dead as all the mummies that stink up the desert?”
“Oh!” cried Moses.
“Oh, what? If you mean blasphemy, say blasphemy. Not oh. I told you to come and talk to me when you were a man, but you sound like a snivelling schoolgirl. You don’t even sound the man you were when you knocked a god on his holy face and saved a very unholy slave brat—”
“How did you know that?” Moses gasped.
The priest came out of the darkness, a formless shape that took Moses by the hand and said, “Walk along with me, boy, and keep an old man company.” He drew Moses along with him, walking with a step so sure and definite that it seemed to the boy the old man’s feet had owl’s eyes of their own, and explaining meanwhile that little went on in the Great House that he did not know. If you kept an ear to the ground, he pointed out to Moses, you could even hear the locusts rustling their wings; and the thing he had meant to ask Moses was whether he, Moses, considered a slave brat’s life worth a blow on divine flesh and all that might follow from that.
“I didn’t consider,” Moses replied. “I did it before I had a chance to think.”
“And you truly felt that just by noticing his arrow point you knew where he was aiming?”
“Yes, Amon-Teph—that isn’t so hard once you get the feel of the bow.”
The old man sniffed and acknowledged Moses’ future as a bowman. He then added that he was more troubled about the prince’s future in other directions, and he ventured that common sense might also be useful equipment.
Not knowing whether to take this as an insult or not, Moses protested that his mother would be looking for him and that he would have to be going.
“You’re a funny lad,” the priest said, and from his voice Moses guessed that he was smiling. “You have the arrogance of a prince, but not the assurance—which I prefer to the stupid snobbery of your brothers. Your mother is not looking for you, Moses. I left her on the river terrace, and she will remain there until the moon comes up over old Mother Nile, who is neither hateful nor arrogant but has enough love and compassion for everyone, myself and you and Enekhas-Amon too.”
“Why do you … why do you say such things?” Moses asked.
“You mean the terrible blasphemies and insults to the living gods—why, Moses, those are silly words that a priest comes to at one point or another. Otherwise, he cuts his throat and goes to see with his own eyes what is true and what is false in the Book of the Dead—which I am not quite ready for yet. You see, Prince of Egypt, when you marry a woman and lie with her, many of the romantic illusions you felt about her pass away—perhaps for ever. It’s not too different when you marry the gods.”
“Was my mother weeping again tonight?” Moses inquired.
“No—not when I was with her. Be patient with your mother, Moses. It is hard to remember that you were once the most beautiful and desirable woman in Egypt when so few others remember it. A great many men loved your mother, and some of them would kneel down and touch the ground she walked upon.”
They had come out now into a broad inner court, where already the darkness was diffused and lessened by the first starlight—reflected and increased by the polished white limestone of the courtyard floor. “Don’t look at me,” the priest went on. “I am too old and fat to contemplate any such foolish memory in personal terms. I’m going to the observatory now, Moses. Have you been there?”
Moses said that he had—was there a corner of the palace where he had not been?—but never at night; and the priest remarked that an observatory had little significance except at night. They crossed the courtyard and mounted the stone stairs that ran up the farther wall, the priest walking slowly and breathing hard with the effort.
The stone platform of the observatory was about twenty feet square, railed in by a marble balustrade, with Isis and her husband Osiris cut in stone and guarding it from opposite corners. In the starlight the two immortals, one the moon and the other her husband, lord of the dead and the lands of the dead, looked amazingly alive. Four whiterobed priests stood as a bias line between the two gods, and their soft, lilting chant, the “Psalm to Night,” filled Moses with awe and not a little wonder—for as often as he had heard this sound drifting over the palace as darkness gathered, he had never known either its source or meaning.
Now, Amon-Teph stopped Moses, with only the boy’s head above the last stair, whispering to him, “Wait until the Psalm is finished, for the music is sweet to the gods of the night, and from it they know that we are here to learn and acknowledge, not to bring harm to the heavenly bodies.” When the
psalm was finished, they mounted to the platform, and when one of the priests looked at Moses inquiringly, Amon-Teph said, “Don’t you recognize him? Moses, the son of Enekhas-Amon.”
“Prince of Egypt,” they greeted him gently. One of them, a small old man, came over and peered into Moses’ face, but without hostility. “You will learn things here,” he said, “that your teachers are too ignorant or too frightened to teach you if you wish to learn.”
Moses nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and sensing that here was mystery that few were permitted to share.
“With respect. There is no learning without respect, boy. In the old, old times, there was respect for learning and honour for those who knew. Not today. Today the young gods are filled with arrogance and blood lust, and what else do your brothers want but to go forth to war? Is that what you want, Prince?”
Perhaps it was a combination of the circumstances that went with the question—the silver starlight, the sweet, clean desert air, the stone platform hanging so high in the night, the highest pinnacle of the palace, the white-robed priests—reminding Moses of the ancient meaning of the word priest, pure in the old Egyptian—the music with which they greeted Isis, the moon, making him feel that these old men who served Isis and her kindred in the night sky were different from the plotting, conniving clericals he knew so well; or maybe it was a moment he had been awaiting this long, long time. Howsoever it was, when asked if he wanted what his royal brothers wanted—war and glory and power—he had his sense of the answer, a new feeling in his life, for never before had his whole soul and being yearned for the plain accomplishment of knowing, of unlocking mysteries unending, of knowing the whole reply and solution. But this he could not put into words or even into thoughts that made sense; he could only experience the feeling in a flush of blood and passion that made his heart beat faster and his whole body tremble as he shook his head.
“Not that? Gold and silver and precious jewels, Prince?”
Still he shook his head.
“No tongue, boy? Come now, Prince of Egypt, speak up!”
“Ah, let the boy be,” Amon-Teph said. “I brought him here. Can’t you see that he is frightened, as who wouldn’t be, with such a set of old rascals as you gathered around him, ready to steal the clothes off his back? Let him be,” Amon-Teph laughed, and the others joined him, and then, still giggling, they walked across the observatory leaving Moses alone, then put their heads together and began to whisper.
For his part, Moses was relieved not to be the object of their attention, and he began to drift along the rail, elated by the height at which he stood and by the wonderful view of the fitfully lit palace, the gleaming Nile spreading southward into the Delta, and the whole sprawling City of Ramses, the finer buildings and minor palaces with lamps to light their windows and courts, the poorer dwellings merged into the darkness. “How splendid,” he thought, “to have a place like this for your own and to be able to mount here each evening to such a height that you could almost reach up and touch the moon-goddess”; and with this thought he stretched out his arm and heard Amon-Teph grunt behind him,
“You’d need a long arm to reach her, Moses.”
The boy turned, surprising the priest with the glow of excitement on his long, aquiline face; and the fat man asked Moses whether he liked the stars so much?
“I feel happy,” Moses said, uncertain of cause or source.
The priest nodded and placed one arm over the boy’s shoulder, gesturing toward the sky with the other. “A great, strange mystery, Moses, and one of the innumerable factors that make it difficult for a priest to live up to his name. In the old days, they say, we were honoured and honourable, perhaps because we were less greedy and more credulous—or more devout. I am still very devout, mind you, but I permit myself the luxury of bewilderment, which my own teacher—when I was a boy like you—told me is more of a pitfall than gold, women or power. But I only share the bewilderment of an Egypt that snivels over ancient glories and compensates itself with the unbelievable luxury and power that the great God Seti and the God Ramses, his son and your uncle, brought to us. For that, we give humble thanks to our mother Isis, whom you can now see rising over the reedy wilderness of the Delta.”
“I don’t understand that,” Moses said, feeling a strange sense of freedom and the right to speak anything that might come into his thoughts.
“No. I don’t suppose you do,” Amon-Teph said. “While you suspect that I am being blasphemous, you can’t quite put your finger on the core of it. But you see, Prince, all of us who spend our hours up here watching the stars become a little blasphemous, because the stars and the sun make man humble, and I am afraid that humility and blasphemy are not as far apart as you might imagine. Were you thinking that I praise Isis for less than virtue?”
Thoroughly bewildered now, Moses shook his head, and the priest said gravely, “The moon is Isis or Isis is the moon—yes, Moses? And lovers look at the moon after they embrace; but the peasant who tills his field and brings forth the ears of wheat that keep you and me alive—as well as the lovers—and put spring and strength in your long limbs and warm my old, tired bones—he wants to feel the sun on his brown back, and when he feels its heat, he knows that life stirs everywhere. Tell me, young Moses, you who are a prince of Egypt and were educated so well that, as a lord of the Nile, you might be the equal if not the greater than equal of any man on earth—tell me, what is the name of the bright fire that warms our days?”
This returned the boy to reality, and thankful that now he grappled with what he understood, he answered, “That anyone knows, Amon-Teph, for the blessed Re stands with Osiris cheek to cheek, the lord of death and the god of the sun, together!”
“The cold and the warm, Moses?”
“Precisely,” Moses nodded eagerly, “for alone, each would fade into no substance, but together—”
“Ah, Moses,” the priest sighed, “don’t argue matters theological with me, for I can only promise you the short end. I see that you were well taught, and I am sure you can recite more paragraphs from the Book of the Dead than I can, the way my memory serves me. As a matter of fact, your answer shows devotion to your studies. He is the god of the sun, is he not? Sun-god, river-god, heavenly-god, flood-god—oh so many of him from so far back. Did it ever occur to you, Moses, to wonder why the ancient folk built those stone mountains at Giza so high?”
Moses shook his head. The pyramids were high; why they were high had never occurred to him, and who on earth would ever think of asking such a question?
“They were more simple in the olden times,” the priest smiled. “Each king considered that he would build a platform to set him on a level with the god Re. They were simple, and Re was simple, too. Do you know, Moses, people grow wiser and their gods grow a little wiser too?”
“I don’t understand you, Amon-Teph.”
“No. But you will begin to—because understanding comes slowly, Moses. You have told me the name of the sun-god, but the name of the sun, this you haven’t spoken at all.”
“The sun is the sun,” Moses said slowly, half as a question. “It has no name.”
“And you are the son of Enekhas-Amon, the daughter of Seti the god, and yet you have a name-perhaps a bit unusual, perhaps only half a name—still, it serves. Is the sun less, Moses?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even I, fat old Amon-Teph, have a name, and my pet cat has a name—but the sun? Moses, have you ever heard the word Aton?”
“I don’t remember,” slowly and half-afraid, he answered. The night was closing in on Moses; and now the moon, the silver disc of Isis, the mother, the sister of life and death, was up over the horizon, gazing full upon him, challenging his justice, searching his soul for what horrible thoughts he might think in the next moment. Looking about him, almost wildly, almost like a trapped animal, he saw that the other priests had forgotten him or were deliberately ignoring him, bent on their own business. They had long brazen rods, with a loop at eithe
r end, and through these loops they seemed to be tracing the course of the stars. Sometimes they laid down their rods to make notations on strips of papyrus, and again they put their heads together for whispered consultations.
“Magic,” Moses whispered.
“Nonsense, boy!” Amon-Teph snorted. “We have no truck with this new fad of magic here! We are doing our work—and at the moment mine is to open your dark eyes a little.”
“Why?” Moses asked in half a whimper.
“Why? You want to know all at once. You will know soon enough. For the time being—I can tell you no more than your mother will permit me to tell you. But rest assured, my child, that you have a vital place in our dreams—and they are not always to remain dreams. Now think no more about it, let the future rest. For you, Prince, there is only tomorrow, but my tomorrows are far, far away. Are you afraid?”
“I don’t want to be.”
“But when I said Aton, your heart turned over. I am an old man, Moses, and not fit to frighten any child, much less a prince of Egypt. And you—are you enough of a man yet to know a beautiful woman when she passes by, or is beauty still a word?”
“I’m not a child,” Moses answered sullenly.
“And perhaps not a man either. But if you saw all the beautiful women in Egypt today, you would never see one so fair and lovely as the Queen Nefertiti. Does her name frighten you too? And what of the god who shared her throne, the King Akh-en-Aton?”
“Cursed be his name,” Moses whispered.
“Ah boy, boy,” the old man sighed, placing a hand on the prince’s shoulder and touching his cheek lightly with the other. “So quick to curse. And if they taught you to curse our mother, the River Nile, you would do that too—or the sweet morning wind? Curse it? No—no, Moses,” he said gently, softly, winningly, “we will come closer than curses, and we will learn something, you and I. You’re not too young, and I’m not too old. Do you think it is lightly that I place my life in your hands? Old, I am, and fat and ugly, but still life is sweet and the life of my brothers here—that is also sweet. And what will happen if you go to your godly uncle and tell him that here I spoke the name of Akh-en-Aton?”
