by Howard Fast
[14]
A LITTLE AFTER THIS, as Moses approached the verandah of the house, he heard Seti-Keph and his host talking, and a momentary feeling of fear and guilt made him hesitate. Having heard the first few words, he found himself unwilling to go forward and unable to retreat out of hearing. With the moon down, he himself was evidently invisible, and he could distinguish the two men only as dark forms against the white stone.
A querulous note in his voice, Seti-Keph was saying, “All of us guess at this and that, but if you were to ask me how Hatti wars and how Babylon wars, I could tell you. I can tell you when a chariot can be used and when it is a, deathtrap. I can tell you where to put your bowmen and where to put your spearmen. I can tell you the precise number of paces to a roving shaft from a laminated bow and a roving shaft from a cedar bow. And I can tell you when a spear should be thrown and when it should be held and when it should be stocked in the ground. This is my work, and I know. I don’t say—I guess, I think, I hope. I don’t say that—”
“You are not a doctor,” Aton-Moses sighed.
“And if I were—”
“My dear old friend,” Aton-Moses interrupted gently, “if you were a doctor, you would be a better one than I. No—no, don’t stop me. I know that. I know my own limitations, and I know you, Seti-Keph. You are my friend. How many friends are we granted in this little space of time we walk on this earth? And I am doubly unfortunate, for those I love come by and pause only briefly. Perhaps for that reason I must know them better and more quickly than another man—and I think I know you. That is why we open our hearts to each other and we uncover our souls almost carelessly, as it were—only such things are never done carelessly, are they? You are a very great man, my dear friend, for you walked out of the black mud and made empires bow down before you—and never did you go mad for power, as so many conquerors do. That is why I spoke to you plainly and bluntly and told you the truth. The bond between us is an ability to face the truth. And yet when I vouch for the truth, I can vouch only for what I know.”
“You know more than you are willing to say,” Seti-Keph’s voice came petulantly.
“No. No, my dear friend. How far can I go alone in this thing called medicine? There was a time, eight hundred, a thousand years ago, when we Egyptians were beginning to evolve a study of medicine that would have made mankind’s life very different had it continued. But it did not continue. Something happened to us, and for centuries no one dared shatter another image or open another closed door. The old scrolls were copied over and over and over, until they became ritual magic instead of knowledge and science. Only when the God-King whose name you on the Delta have made a curse—only when he came to the throne and when Aton was worshipped, did we begin to inquire again. My grandfather was a doctor, as was my father, and there was a brief flash of glory which is over now. The little I know—well I guess and I speculate; what else? My father was the first man in Egypt to whisper that perhaps the heart is a pump, and that endlessly it pumps the blood through our veins. I also believe that—but why the blood spurts from one vein and flows from another, I do not know, as I do not know what makes the heart beat and what stops it from beating. For thirty-five years, I have been putting my ear to the human chest and listening to the heartbeat. This, my father taught me—always the heartbeat, for there is the centre of life as we know it. So I came to know the beat, and when a man whose beat I knew died, I would go to the embalmer and examine the heart when he removed it. Later, here in my home, I set up my own operating room, and when Libyans and Kushites and poor peasants who cannot afford to be embalmed for that life eternal the priests promise us died here, I would open their bodies myself. In time, I found certain changes I could detect and connect with certain types of heartbeats—one in particular being a weakness in the great vein that leads from the heart. Under certain conditions, this will burst. You tell me of pains in your chest—and of one terrible pain that racked your whole body a year ago. And I say-all I can say without looking into your body-that the weakness is there. You must avoid excitement, stress and, of course, the awful fury of battle. If you do not—”
“I will die. You can say it. You ask a soldier to avoid battle and excitement. And if we were to go into battle tomorrow, would I die?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know, but a violent effort—”
“Ah, why am I angry at you?” Seti-Keph said. “Why not at myself—and I suppose that’s where my real anger is. Only, one never expects the dark gods of death so soon. One expects them to come when beckoned—and in one’s own good time. After I have finished my tomb and chosen my embalmer and written my will-ah, well. Tell me, old friend, do you believe this afterlife business?”
Standing in the darkness, waiting for the reply perhaps more tensely than the Captain of Hosts waited, Moses’ thoughts were a turmoil of conjecture and sorrow. Death as well as love graced this beautiful house, and so it was with life and living, a meaningless labyrinth of the tragic, the comic, the ugly and the splendid.
The moments passed. Aton-Moses was not given to glib unguents, and when finally he said, “Who knows?” his voice was flat and sad.
“I don’t want to live for ever,” Seti-Keph mused. “It would become a bore and a damned burden. It’s just another year, another floodtime, one more project finished. You don’t like to stop in the middle of what you are doing, and there are always a few things you should have done that you just never got around to. Ah. well, no use brooding about it at this hour. Sleep, my friend?”
“Go ahead, Seti-Keph. You know your room?”
“Even in the dark.”
“I am not tired. I’ll wait for the prince of Egypt.” Again, a long pause, and Moses felt the nervous anticipation of one who expects to overhear talk about himself. But if there was such talk, it bad taken place already, and Moses saw the dark shadow that was Seti-Keph lift himself tiredly from his chair. Aton-Moses also rose, and when Seti-Keph had gone, the physician walked down to the balustrade that separated the terrace from the edge of the cliff and stood there, contemplating the black river gorge. At Moses’ step, without turning, he said,
“It has been a long and late night, O Prince of Egypt. For you, I think, a happy one—for me—”
“I have imposed upon your hospitality, Aton-Moses, and kept you awake as well.”
“No—I don’t think a guest can ever impose upon his host, for we are only whole and human when we open our doors to a stranger.” Now he turned around to look at Moses, and looking at him, waited. Not knowing what else to say or how to say it better, Moses plunged to the point, telling him,
“I love your daughter, sir. I love her with all my soul and being, and she is the first I ever loved in all my life. I don’t know how to describe what I feel for her. The only thing I can say is that I love her.” He finished hopelessly.
“Well?” Aton-Moses asked, not unkindly yet not warmly.
“I ask you for her hand in marriage, Aton-Moses.”
“Oh?” The doctor looked at Moses thoughtfully, and Moses wished he could see the man’s face more clearly than the darkness permitted. “And is it thus that you woo all maidens, Prince of Egypt, in a few hours as you pause on a journey?”
The blood rushed to Moses’ face, and such was his sense of outrage and injustice, the accusation breaking as it did into his transport of purity and dedication, that he could hardly reply at all and only manage to say, “It’s not-no, I never wooed another—never!”
“Then I misjudged you,” Aton-Moses said carefully. “You must understand, O Prince of Egypt, that the circumstances here are unusual. You come from the cosmopolitan centre of the world, from a great court and palace where all the sophistication man knows has been put into a way of life. And from what I hear, the Great House of Tanis is hardly a place where decency or integrity are the rule; quite to the contrary—I have been assured that there is no iniquity man discovered or devised that is not practised at the Great House, and that no woman, black, white or brown, is safe
from the maniacal lust of its master. To you, having lived your life there, those practices may be a matter of course and hardly worth commenting upon, but we in Upper Egypt have different standards of judgment, and there are still a good many of us who feel neither love nor reverence for the God-King. Here, on the other hand, is my daughter, who lives in this lonely and forsaken place—and lonely it is, no matter how many sick find their way here for treatment—and whose best company of her age has been her dreams. Then, one evening, a tall prince rides up to her door. What would you expect, Moses? What would you expect?”
Still smarting from the challenge to his integrity, still writhing with indignation, Moses answered hotly that he had not created the Great House or the conditions there. He was in love for the first time in his life, and he was in love, purely and forthrightly.
“And is love so light a matter, Prince of Egypt, that it can flower in a few hours?”
Moses said that he was not able to put what had happened to him into words. How could he say what he felt in words? “But when I saw her, I knew,” he told the physician. “Would a year, five years have increased my knowledge? Do I mean evil to you, Aton-Moses? I would lay down my life for your daughter—and for you, too; for it was here in your house that I found my life for the first time.”
“How old are you, Moses?” the physician asked.
“I will be nineteen in half a year.”
“Yet in the Great House, as I understand, a prince is betrothed in his childhood.”
“My mother would never permit a betrothal to be pledged for me.”
“May I ask why?”
The silence lengthened as Moses stood there.
“You will not tell me why, but you ask me to believe you on faith?”
Suddenly, Moses was tired, and his own life, as it seemed to him now, was a tangled skein of misuse, misdirection and misbegotten hopes and dreams. He sounded very much a boy, a frightened and troubled boy, as he said to Aton-Moses,
“It is a long story and the night is late. I told some of it to Merit-Aton. I think I must tell all of it to you.”
The note in his voice touched the physician, who said, “Only if you want to, Prince of Egypt.”
“I want to, and I must.”
“Then come and sit and rest yourself—and if we don’t sleep this night—we will sleep on other nights when we cannot talk.”
The sky in the east was pearl grey, with a thin edge of pink showing above the desert rim, when Moses had finished speaking. He told the whole story now, leaving nothing out, told of his birth and who he was. Not once had the doctor interrupted him. Finished now, Moses wondered how it was that he felt calm and undisturbed; for be was not at all certain that he had not, in the telling, lost the woman he loved.
For at least ten minutes after he had finished, they sat in silence, watching the beautiful birth of the new day. When at last Aton-Moses spoke, his voice was tired and gentle.
“I have many secrets, Moses. Every physician has. No one will hear this from me—not my daughter, no one. You are a prince of Egypt, and who knows but that if your poor mother had seen her dream and you had mounted the GodThrone, we would not have light and justice in our sorry land once again? Who knows? It would be pleasant to believe that Aton, who will soon rise above the horizon, plans and orders these matters, but I am afraid the sun is as little concerned with our affairs as we are with the insects whom we thoughtlessly tread on. Or so it has seemed to me. Now, I think this, my son. You will go this morning in the next hour, for Seti-Keph is determined to depart early, and it is better that you don’t see my daughter now. Three years is for ever to youth, but it passes. Yes—more quickly than you imagine. You will be a man grown then, and there is much you will have learned, good and evil. If you still feel then as you feel now, come to us, and if my daughter loves you, you can join hands in marriage.”
“Three years,” Moses said hopelessly.
“Yes—but it will pass. It’s the only way, Moses.”
[15]
THE MARCH OF the army to the south began again, and after a dozen days of the increasing heat and blazing sun, the flies and the oozing, drying mud, the rocking, bumping chariot—the white house on the cliff became as blurred and indistinct as the rest of the past. As much as Moses attempted to retain the memory in a pristine vision of all he had seen framing the lovely woman to whom he had pledged himself, it faded and became confused in retrospect. Only the flood of wonderful and pure emotion that had passed between them stayed intact—and indeed became clearer and more precious during those nights when he lay upon his back before sleep, watching the starry magnificence of the desert sky.
And yet they went on, and the dozen days became twenty and thirty, and the soft Nile mud hardened and then crumbled into a powder that rose about them in clouds, coating skin and horse and chariot, irritating the lungs and the already frayed nerves of men who began to believe that they had marched for ever, out of the world and beyond the world—into the vague nothingland of the dead. And were it not for the presence, always beside them, of the cool and familiar Nile, they might well have taken leave of their senses. They reached the Second Cataract and the Third Cataract, great stretches of jagged rock where the tranquil river became a foaming, churning torrent, and where the slaves had to remove both boats and baggage from the river and transport them overland to a point above the rapids. At each cataract, this process would require extra days, and the angry, heat-tortured footsoldiers cursed and grumbled because they were drafted to work with the slaves.
Now the heat increased to a point where Seti-Keph ordered night marches on those nights when the moon was in the heaven—and this was better, for the men could sleep during the day in the shadow of the jagged rocks of the river valley.
Never had Moses imagined that this was the face of war, this interminable and awful marching or crawling, as it so often became, a whole day taken to move the army five miles—nor could he believe that anything worth fighting for might exist in this stark and terrifying desert, where all life ceased a dozen feet from the river gorge. As with so many others in the army and in spite of his recent exultation, he found himself becoming increasingly depressed and short-tempered with the heat, sand and monotony—given to long spells of silence and short, bitter retorts. There had been forty priests with the army, but weeks past they had decided to remain at the southernmost temple of the gods of Egypt, a small and ancient building dedicated to Amon in remote antiquity, and now the army marched in a wasteland where the gods of Egypt had no power. This sense of being forsaken combined with the heat and monotony, and tempers flared and blood was spilled daily. Sokar-Moses and his black bullwhip flayed the column like a vengeful fury, and where there were quarrels, he was merciless, not caring to hear any of the background of the dispute, but making it plain that they would fight Kush and not each other.
Perhaps more than others, the mercenaries suffered, for they had come so far that all hope of ever again seeing their homelands disappeared; they would group together and sing sad songs of the cool and lovely memories they cherished—and listening to them, Moses would reflect increasingly on the grand madness of this game of war that kings played. On his part, the situation with Nun had worsened, and he found his toleration for the slave turning to hatred. More and more implicit was the promise of murder in the looks they exchanged. If they had spoken little before, they spoke hardly at all now, Moses only to give an order, and Nun to grunt a reply.
Now the river turned north and east in a great bend, and the feeling that they must march double and triple distance increased the bitterness and depression among the men. For weeks, they had marched where there was no life except for vultures and lizards; the unvarying ration of hard, dry bread was no longer enhanced by fruit and fresh meat purchased from peasants, for there were no longer peasants or villages or fruit trees, not was there a piece of grass upon which an animal could graze. Here, instead of flooding, the river foamed and roared through a channel gouged out of the
desert, and while the desert could not conquer the river, neither could the river give life any real foothold upon the desert. In the whole army, there was not an ounce of surplus flesh left; the men were hard and dry and bitter and even the horses had become skinny. When Seti-Keph took his chariot down the line of march, he nodded in grim approval, for he knew that men in such condition will fight like devils, and with the strength of devils, for little or nothing at all.
They turned south again, and when they passed the Fifth Cataract, the landscape began to change. For weeks they had been mounting slowly towards the tableland of Kush, and now the ascent increased a little. The river ran more smoothly now, and when they had passed the legendary Sixth Cataract, it seemed they had once again found the River Nile of Egypt. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the desert landscape was changing. It was no longer the hellish, sun-seared rock-and-sand surface that they had gazed upon for weeks and weeks. Little clumps of dry grass appeared. The dawning and sunset were softened by a flow of violet and pink colour, and now and again they saw in the distance herds of delicate gazelles that bounded away like feathers on the wind. It was still dry and arid country, but the days were not so hot as they had been and the nights were cool enough for a man to wrap himself in his cloak before he slept. The prevailing wind was from the south, and it had a sweet, clean taste to it.
It was now that Seti-Keph told Moses to leave the host of Hetep-Re permanently and to join him in the vanguard. Moses was glad enough to go, for the march had removed from Hetep-Re the few graces he possessed and had turned him into a snarling and bitter man—who pressed his prerogative of intimacy with Moses to the breaking point, making remarks of envy and malice so frequently that Moses wondered whether he was not intent upon provoking a quarrel between them. The truth was that physically the march was less trying for Moses and Nun than for many others. Not only were they possessed of excellent health, but they had youth and strength beyond ordinary measure—and this was gall and wormwood to men like Hetep-Re, who suffered not only the despair of wanderers beyond the age when wandering brings any fulfilment, but physical anguish as well.
