by Howard Fast
But it was the dream of others, not his, to be Captain of Hosts; and the walled City of Kush had walls of mud brick only twenty feet high. Who was to defend them when the flower of the men of Kush had perished on the battlefield? So they took the city of Irgebayn, smashing down its wooden gates with battering-rams, and what was done there by the men of Sokar-Moses is not the sort of thing anyone remembers in detail. The gods of Egypt were half a world away and the gods of Kush were overthrown and humbled.
The chariots of Egypt were stabled in the temples of Kush, and the women of Kush wept. There was a scribe in the Host of Egypt who made a song of it, but his song was neither new nor old. “Weep, O you women of Kush,” said the song, “for your men have perished and your gods are humbled. Weep, for the glory of Kush is gone, and Kush is a beggar who crawls on his knees. Weep, for all the wealth of Kush has been scooped into the bags of Egypt, and only a dry bone will you gnaw. Weep, for it will take a river of your tears to wash the blood from the streets of Kush.” It was a common song and without originality, but it was expressive.
It is also told in the old legends that Moses took a black woman to wife and sat her on his throne beside him; but the truth is that the women of Kush were herded into the market place of their city like cattle until they stood shoulder to shoulder, clinging to their babes and their children, and then each man of the Host was allotted his portion to keep or sell as he pleased—even as the God-King, so far away, was also allotted his own portion, a full thousand of black women with babe and child to fare down the Nile as slaves to Ramses. But who is to say who were most fortunate, those who went or those who remained in the ruins of Kush? The Host of Egypt made the city their quarters, and a house was given to Moses and Nun, even as houses were given to the others; and to Moses, because his blood was godly, they gave Irga, a daughter of Irgebayn, to lie with him.
[2]
IRGA HAD SEEN eighteen years, but in the way of reckoning in Kush, or Baynya, as it was called by its own people, she was almost nineteen years old; for they regarded the day of conception as the onset of age. She was the child of her father’s old age, the very last child to be given the spark of life from his loins. In Kush, a man took only one wife, so it was that of seven children only Irga now lived; her brothers and sisters were dead, and also dead were her father and mother. In Egypt, the breasts of a woman were often left uncovered, and in Kush, no woman covered her breasts; for they were things of beauty and who would not look at them? The beauty of Irga was the beauty of Kush. She was taller than any Egyptian woman Moses had ever seen, just as the men of Kush were so much taller and heavier of bone and muscle than the men of Egypt, and her skin was purple-black, the colour of a ripe and sweet plum. She carried her head as a swan does, and when she walked, her whole body rippled with grace and ease. She had a small, thin nose, heavy, sensuous lips, and she wore her tight-curled hair high like a crown upon her head. As with the other women of Kush, her garment was a knee-length kilt of brightly striped wool, woven as fine and soft as pure linen, and when the weather was cool, she wore a cloak from her shoulders. It was no wonder that every man in the army envied Moses his prize.
But Irga was something else, as Moses came to realize. The most revered gods of Kush were women, and the legends of Kush were filled with a yesterday when life was golden and men lived as brothers—and in that time, five women, who were called Mganas, ruled Kush. In the time of the Mganas, there was no war and no hatred, and no man lifted his hand to another. And now, in this bad time, the legend was revived, and the women of Kush called Irga The Mgana and they knelt as she walked by on the street. Sokar-Moses had some of them whipped, but still they knelt when they saw her.
So Sokar-Moses said to Moses, “Keep her off the streets, because the gods of Kush are dead. Next they’ll decide she is divine—and that’s the last thing we need. No god of Egypt would come here, this terrible distance, where we have not even raised a temple or altar—and where we have no priest among us. The Hittite soldiers are raising an altar to their Baal, but they are fools to think that the stink of burning flesh will waft far enough to be sniffed by one of the Baalim of Canaan, of whom there are as many as there are hills in that wretched little land. The Sea Rovers are whispering that the mother-goddess in Kush is the same as their Demeter, and they want to make peace between these two mother-goddesses. I won’t have it! The gods of Kush are dead. I can handle living things that I can see and talk to, but I want no trouble with gods. We are alone here, almost half a year’s distance from the Delta, and we have destroyed the gods of Kush, and destroyed they must remain.”
He was not like Seti-Keph, either in wit or ability, and he had a heavy, plodding manner of approach to all problems. He still carried his bullhide chariot-whip on a thong from his right wrist, and he never hesitated to dispense discipline personally. Among the soldiers, he was respected and feared, but he inspired neither love nor excitement. His attitude towards Moses was a mixture of respect and admiration, not unmixed with resentment—the respect that anyone of low birth had for a prince of the Great House, and admiration not only for the conduct of Moses in battle but the awe of the illiterate for one who could read and write. Yet he resented the haughtiness that he chose to see in Moses, and he was firmly convinced that Moses looked down upon him. Knowing his own need for financial security, his own lust for wealth to put away against an always uncertain future, he was confused by Moses’ total disinterest in spoil and booty. Unable to comprehend the attitude of a man who had always been wealthy beyond measure or thought, he took this contempt for material things as a sort of insult directed against himself.
Now, Moses listened tiredly to his lecture on the gods, feeling a sense of embarrassment and disgust that was more and more becoming his reaction to this kind of childish superstition. At such moments, he would think of Amon-Teph, of Neph and Aton-Moses—and he would experience a desperate yearning for people who used their minds and their wits. He answered,
“Why don’t you send her to the God-King, Sokar-Moses? Whereby you will be rid of her, and the God-King will have new entertainment for a night.”
But this Sokar-Moses feared to do, for whatever Moses said, the Captain of Hosts could not believe that he would not earn the prince’s hostility by removing this magnificent woman. Yet the truth was that Moses saw no woman except the one who lived in his mind’s eye. His whole being was in love with Merit-Aton, who had so strongly affected the fabric of his youth and hope; and the legend that he made a wife and queen of Irga and ruled with her upon the throne of Kush was spun of the same thin tissue as most legends. The daughter of the King of Kush sat in Moses’ house and said nothing, but her eyes followed him. Day after day, her silent accusation made him increasingly ill at ease. She spoke no Egyptian, and the language of the black people of Kush was so alien to the Egyptian ear, so interminably inflected and so soft in its vowel sounds—the very opposite of the consonantal sharpness of Egyptian—that no one in the army learned more than a few nouns in the Baynya tongue. So between Moses and Irga, there was no language at all.
Nun feared her. “She is black and the black ones are evil,” he told Moses certainly. And when Moses asked him how he knew this quality of black people, he replied, “Otherwise, why are they black?” an argument which, in his mind, settled the matter, and he went on to assure Moses that she would seek out an opportunity, sooner or later, to kill him.
Moses shrugged this off, although he had developed an increasing respect for Nun’s judgment of people. More and more were they growing together, Nun once more the confident, sardonic and infinitely capable man Moses had met in the slave market. At peace with himself, now that his vendetta with Moses had been resolved, less a slave than the vizier of the prince and the major-domo of the house, he directed servants, purchased food, and attended to all the odds and ends of the household. He had bartered with the Babylonians for one of their fringed kilts, and with his beard cut and curled and oiled, his thick black hair dressed and braided, he looked
not unlike a Babylonian. His language was similar to theirs and he had an excellent ear for other tongues, having picked up during their long journey not only a usable amount of the strange language of Hatti, but a smattering of the talk of the Sea Rovers too.
Moses might have done better to heed him, for there came a night finally when the woman of Kush crept into his bed. He had been too long without woman, and for a healthy young man of his age, dreams were not enough. She came when he was half-asleep, and the pressure of her warm flesh, the scent of her body, the necessity of her trembling eagerness—as he thought—broke down all his resistance. His hands flowed over her back and buttocks; his lips met hers, and even as he kissed he felt the entering cut of the knife in his shoulder. She had misgauged in the dark, and he flung himself away with a cry of anger. In the darkness of the room, he saw only her shadow as she threw herself upon him, and it was sheer luck that he managed to grasp her wrist. Yet even then, after he had forced her to let go the knife, she fought him like a wildcat, and when Nun came running, it took the strength of both of them to subdue her.
They bound her and Nun got a lamp lit to examine Moses’ shoulder. It was a deep cut, but in the flesh, and after Nun had cauterized it and bandaged it, he asked,
“Well, master, what do we do with her? Shall I lie with her and then cut her throat?”
“Stop being a Bedouin for a little while. Let me think.”
“You always call me a Bedouin when I do something or say something that doesn’t fit nicely with the ideas of an Egyptian gentleman and his macaat.”
“I call you a Bedouin when you act like a Bedouin,” Moses said sharply.
“And you think, master, that she performed unlike a Bedouin tonight?”
“How would you perform if you felt that I had killed your father and murdered your brothers? Sometimes, Nun you demonstrate as much intelligence as an insect.” Moses took his dagger and cut her bonds. Nun said, “I thought you had come to your senses, but this—” Moses wasn’t listening. Irga rose, trembling, shivering, but staring at Moses bitterly and defiantly. He pointed to the door. She hesitated a moment, and then fled into the night.
“Sokar-Moses will be confused about this,” Nun sighed.
“Then let me unconfuse him,” Moses said. “Just keep silent about what went on here.”
“Naturally. I don’t want people to imagine I’m owned by a madman.”
[3]
IT WAS A strange, close and complex relationship that came into being between Moses and Nun. For Nun to love Moses as his master was impossible, for the love of a slave for his master is not in the deep and true sense of the word love: it is more akin to the feeling of the animal whose spirit is broken after enough beating; it is a fusion of deependence and hate and fear, and in its deep content it is always without dignity. Love only can exist without fear, and if the human soul can be purchased and sold at whim, fear is never quieted. Nun did not fear Moses; they had declared a truce, master and slave, and the truce would be a long, long one; and they had an obligation to each other that was sealed in the primitive rite of blood.
There was no moral implication in their relationship. It had never occurred to Nun to speculate as to whether slavery was right or wrong—some men were slave and others were free. Indeed, Moses, who had never been enslaved, had far more disgust for the condition than Nun. He had the free man’s horror of a condition so much more miserable than his own; and, plagued as he was by the concept of a wise creator who in his wisdom and goodness had created all men, and taught as he had been to inquire in a logical sense, it was Moses, not Nun, who asked himself why this one should be slave and that one free?
In all ways, he and Nun were different, and it brought them peace of a sort that each saw in the other what he lacked and desired. If Nun did not yet love Moses, he had enormous respect for him. Of the things Nun knew, Moses was a good deal ignorant, for one had been raised in the filth and the other in a palace; still the knowledge of Moses was not a set thing, but a thing in motion that filled Nun with wonder and, often enough, with terror. He said to Moses once, pointing to one of the great mountain peaks that ranged south from the Land of Kush, “What would one see from that high place, master?” The gods, the Baalim, abode on the high places, as both he and Moses knew, but Moses answered that they would climb the mountain and see for themselves. To this Nun reacted with terror, and pleaded with Moses not to do so and not to force him to do so, and Nun could not fail to note how amused Moses was with his, Nun’s, concern.
Nun was ignorant and superstitious, but in one week he knew more about the Kushites and their city than Moses would ever learn, and where Moses would have starved, he could eat well. But, at the same time, he believed that it would bring worms to gnaw a man’s belly if he raised his left arm and pointed at the sun at midday; he believed that salt was holy and that one must always bury a pinch in the soil before partaking of one’s food; he believed that Egyptians, because they were circumcised, were swallowed at death by a giant serpent; he believed that a woman with an eye out of focus was a witch; he believed that every hill and mountain was the abode of a god; he believed that if he put his hand on another man’s sexual organs, he would for ever have to obey that man’s orders; he believed that all gods were born of serpents and that all snakes were holy—and the first time he saw Moses shear off a snake’s head, he trembled with terror and apprehension for days—he believed that snake blood smeared on the door of a house would protect the owner of the house from evil spirits; he believed that to know the secret, forbidden name of a man would give you the power of life and death over him, and he believed that only Nehushtan knew the names of all men, and therefore had over them the power of life and death.
These were only some of the things he believed. Nehushtan was the god he bowed to, and he once explained to Moses that Nehushtan was the lord of all serpents and all Baalim, and a great serpent himself. But as to whether the Baalim, who lived upon the high places, were serpents themselves, he was uncertain, for he had been born and raised in low, flat country where no mountains could be seen and he knew of the Baalim only by hearsay. He had a notion that a Baal was in part a snake and in part a woman, a winged creature with the face and breasts of a woman and the skin and form of a serpent; but this Moses recognized as a corrupted version of a sphinx, which was one among the very ancient and half-forgotten gods of Egypt.
It was after the affair Of the Kushite woman that Moses and Nun talked a great deal about these things. The Princess Irga was found hiding in a great urn in the ruins of the Kushite temple, but Moses would not have her back and Sokar-Moses was not minded to send his master, the God-King, a woman who was so quick with a knife. So he gave her to his officers, who rolled dice for her, and she was won by Hetep-Re, who had a reputation for winning at dice more often than a man should within the normal bounds of luck. Three days after that, Hetep-Re, drunk and raging at her unwillingness to become a part of his joy, beat her to death—a matter which did not enhance his reputation with either his fellow officers or Sokar-Moses.
The Egyptians buried Irga secretly, but it got out, as such things will, and the Kushite city seethed with rage and hatred for the conquerors. Egyptians were poisoned and murdered in the night, and in return Sokar-Moses exacted punishment and death, recognizing the need to impress the population anew with his power and justice. Hetep-Re, in all this, began to whisper about that Moses was at the bottom of things, that he had deliberately freed the black princess and had incited her to revolt, so that he, with her, might rule over the Land of Kush. And more than this, for Nun said to Moses one day,
“I have heard, O Prince of Egypt, that a certain captain of chariots is saying things that shouldn’t be said.”
“Whenever you call me Prince of Egypt with that unctuous Bedouin whine in your voice,” Moses replied, “I know that it is some new insolence and affront.”
“Well,” Nun shrugged, “that’s as may be. You always choose to think the worst of a kindness from a m
iserable slave. But the fact is that Hetep-Re is saying it would be a good thing for all concerned if you were dead.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“No—a Bedouin is a liar, of course. Only Egyptians tell the truth.”
“Stop that, you fool! He wouldn’t dare.”
“No? Then did you know, master, that a courier came yesterday with letters from Egypt, and that Hetep-Re seems to know that even though we have been gone from Egypt more than a year, the God-King has not forgotten you and expressed the hope that perhaps you would not return at all? And that Hetep-Re feels there might be gold and advancement in it for him to make certain you do not return?”
“Where do you hear all these things?”
“Slaves talk. They even talk to each other. And women talk. I’m just a dirty Bedouin slave to you,” Nun smiled, “but you would be surprised at how well I get on with women.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Anyway,” Nun said, “I think you would do well to kill Hetep-Re before he kills you.”
“You think and talk very lightly of killing, don’t you?”
“No more or less than others. There is a lot of killing goes on when you come down to it. I don’t hold with beating a slave to death. Maybe because I am a slave. But I think no one will weep if Hetep-Re dies.”
“I won’t have that kind of talk about an Egyptian officer!”
Nun shrugged and spoke no more, but he determined to take the matter into his own hands. There were no compunctions to be overcome by Nun; it was simply the question of preserving one life by eliminating another. The fact that he hated Hetep-Re as a man and an Egyptian made the decision less onerous, but it would have been no different if he had not hated Hetep-Re. Moses had become more than a part of Nun’s life; he was the central pivot of the slave’s life.
