Moses

by Howard Fast

  The prostitutes who plied their trade in the water-front taverns learned that he was not to be approached until he had soaked up sufficient wine to become amiable and free with his little plates of gold. They saw that he could be gentle and considerate or wild and terrible. A burly riverman who resented his woman’s attentions to Moses drew a knife and came at Moses. The whole room heard the snap of the bones in the man’s wrist as Moses twisted it and flung the man away, as one throws a sack of wheat. They were wary of him after that. His speech was the speech of a gentleman, but he was dirty and unkempt, covered with filth that was blasphemous in a land of ritual cleanliness, unshaven, his black mop of hair tangled, uncombed, full of the lice and dirt of the water front.

  Nun was gone for better than three weeks, and in those three weeks Moses ate little or nothing, lived on the sour wine against which his stomach rebelled, vomited it up and rilled himself with it again and again, woke from sleep in the mud of the riverbank, in brothels.and hellholes, in evil dens where murderers, thieves and pimps made common cause. Bearded, stinking with his filth and drunkenness, robbed of his pouch and weapons, he was found by Nun at last in the mud under the piles of the water-front tavern where they had their lodgings—unconscious, in a stupor of alcohol and exhaustion.

  Nun was not alone. With him was Neph—for that had been Nun’s previous purpose. Recalling that Sokar-Moses had told them that Neph was combing the villages around Abydos to find stone, Nun had sent a messenger to the engineer with news of what had happened at the white house on the cliff. Neph bad taken his own barge and had reached the house only hours after Nun arrived.

  As Nun told Moses afterwards, he would have known Neph easily enough, for Moses’ life had become an actual part of his own. Nun told Neph the story of Moses’ first visit to the white house more than three years before, and of the love that had come so quickly to the Prince of Egypt and Merit-Aton. Neph listened with interest and wonder, and then, when he and this heavy-muscled Bedouin who had become so intimate a part of Moses finished their work at the white house, which Neph closed up as a tomb for the family who had lived there, they returned to Karnak together.

  So it was that Nun easily raised the huge figure of Moses in his arms and, tenderly as one carries a sleeping child, bore him to where Neph’s barge was moored. They placed him on a sleeping pallet in the stern, and after the barge had cast off, they washed his body with olive oil and a soft mixture of ashes and talc and then with the water of the River Nile. Through all this he slept, stirring only now and again and sometimes talking in his sleep. Nun shaved him and cleaned and combed his hair, and still he slept—through all that day and the night that followed.

  And all night the barge slid over the silver-black surface of the river. With nightfall, the slaves shipped their oars, ate their supper of bread, olives, figs and water, whispered for a while and then stretched out on the floorboards to sleep. So did the crew sleep and the workmen Neph had brought with him from the City of Ramses. Neph himself took the tiller-oar and stood at the helm with Nun; and Bedouin though he was, Nun could feel the warm and secure embrace of the Land of Egypt, with its endless length of sheltered river—where all was order and peace and security. For the first few hours of the night watch, they spoke little, Nun only in answer when Neph talked of Nun’s master and asked the slave,

  “Why is it then your ‘master,’ when you told me how you mixed your blood on the battlefield and swore an oath as blood brothers?”

  Nun did not answer the question glibly. He thought for a good while before he replied, “We are both of us strong men.” He told Neph the story of the snake bite in the riverbottom jungle. “We exchanged lives. I gave him back his, and he gave me mine. He cursed Nehushtan, who is the god of my fathers, and he showed me how to be stronger than Nehushtan. Should one ever part from such a man? But we can’t be together as brothers; each one of us is too wilful. It was my headstrong will that made them take me out of the work gangs in the Land of Goshen. They tried to kill me and I was too strong for them to kill, and they broke their rods and their whips on my back while I laughed at them. But this man I love, and I will be his slave because there is no other way for us to be together. He is a prince, and I am a Bedouin, a Levite, a child of darkness and superstition, as he so often reminds me. Well, he is right.”

  Neph waited, but there was no more that Nun could explain, and then Neph asked, “What did he look for, there in the South? Surely, he knew there was no city of gold in that wild land.”

  Strangely enough, Nun answered without hesitation, “I think, Egyptian, that he looked for gods. You Egyptians are drunk with your gods, and you love them or hate them. For my part, Nehushtan was my god, but I cursed him and put him away. It was no easy thing, but once done it was done, and I can live well enough without gods. Not you—I saw the Egyptians in Kush, where the gods of Egypt were far away. They behaved like animals. But for this man, my master, all gods are hateful, and his face is against the gods.”

  “Did he look for gods to hate?”

  “I am not sure,” Nun replied slowly. “It may be that he looked for gods to love.”

  [12]

  AT THIS TIME, it was said among the people who lived along the River Nile that if you brought your troubles to Mother Nile, she would wash them away; if you brought your fears, she would quiet them; and if you brought your hurts, she would heal them. To Moses, the long, gentle and uneventful trip to the Delta was necessary and important, for it allowed the scars inside him to heal slowly, and it took the painful edge from his great guilt. Many were the hours when he sprawled on the warm wooden deck, watched the green shores slip by, watched the play of morning and evening colour on the desert escarpments, watched the freight barges and papyrus boats go by—and was able to look into himself, and he tried to grasp the meaning of himself, a single man, as posed against the immensity of the earth, the aimlessness of human ways, and the random cruelty and meaninglessness of human existence.

  At other times he talked to Neph, very often with Nun stretched on the deck, silent but listening. All three of them were interwoven in a process of change, but perhaps the change was deepest in Nun, who said the least of any. Several times, Moses told Neph the story of the terrible battle where the army of Kush was destroyed, as if Neph could explain why men destroyed each other; and once Moses picked up an insect that was crawling across the deck and crushed the life from it between his fingers. “This is what we are to the gods,” Moses said thoughtfully. “Do I know or care what the hopes and dreams of this stain between my fingers were?”

  “Men are not insects.”

  “To the gods? How do you know, Neph?”

  “Because the insects did not make us. We made the gods, Moses.”

  “The priests say otherwise. The gods made man.”

  “Nehushtan ate the eggs of a tortoise,” Nun interjected, “and vomited upon the tortoise’s back. He saw little things moving and crawling in his vomit, and these were men. He gave them the tortoise’s back for the world and he killed the tortoise and set fire to its flesh, so that the flesh would burn for ever from each end of the tortoise shell, and this was Gehenna. And when the flames of Gehenna have softened the tortoise shell enough, Nehushtan will swallow the whole thing, and that will be the end of men and the world.”

  Neph smiled, and Moses said, “The gods work less crudely, for, given enough time, man will destroy himself and save Nehushtan the trouble.”

  “We’ve lasted a while,” Neph shrugged, “and we may last a while longer. In spite of the gods, Nun. I remember a story of the Sea Rovers, who have among their gods one called Pro-me-tus, or something of the sort. They have many gods, but he was the only one who took pity on man and learned to love man. You see, the Sea Rovers are blunt and forthright people, as becomes men who make their way through life by trading when they can’t steal and stealing when they can’t trade, and they are very ready to admit that the gods have nothing but contempt for mankind. Man, they hold, is a toy, and the
more the gods can torture him and bewilder him, the more delighted the gods are. This is their amusement, or so the Sea Rovers say. But for some reason this god, Pro-me-tus, came to admire and love man, and he stole the sacred fire from the great mountain where the gods live and gave it to mankind—and with it, of course, warmth and knowledge and skill in working metals.”

  “I would imagine the gods were hardly pleased with Pro-me-tus,” Moses observed.

  “No—they were not pleased,” Neph said thoughtfully. “According to the Sea Rovers, they chained Pro-me-tus for ever to a rock, and there the birds tear his flesh and there the sun burns him and scars him. It’s an interesting fable, since we Egyptians do very much the same to any among us who gives fire—so as to speak—to his fellow man. Yet somehow it seems to me that we are never as bad and as unrepentant as the gods we make for ourselves.”

  “And even my good friend Neph, who is wise and practical, believes in the gods,” Moses smiled. His smile was a warm and generous thing, and here was the first time on this trip that Neph had seen it. Neph shrugged and smiled back. “Distinguish, O Prince of Egypt, between wisdom and the desire for it. First things first. You have still not told me what wisdom you sought in your long journey south and what wisdom you found.”

  “Precious little, except for the hocus-pocus of an old witch-doctor called Doogana.”

  “Who I was happy to see the last of,” Nun put in. “I don’t like magic, and I don’t like old men who can read your mind. I have enough trouble trying to understand my own few thoughts without worrying about someone else’s digging in them. But I tell you, Egyptian, your story about Pro-me-tus is not so strange. We have a tale among our own people of how at one time man was naked and happy—perhaps because he was too ignorant to be unhappy. He ate the fruit of the trees and knew no shame, but there was one succulent fruit, the fruit of knowledge, that was forbidden to him by Nehushtan. But Nehushtan came to him and tempted him to eat the forbidden fruit, and when he had eaten it, Nehushtan punished him by sending him out of the good land into the desert. Thus we children of Israel became desert-dwellers—”

  “Nehushtan,” Moses nodded, “is as unreasonable and as stupidly vindictive as any other god. You see, Neph, I have no more love for him than for Osiris, although I suppose I should. We have been speaking the truth here, with nothing withheld. If I am an impostor with everyone else, I can’t be with you. Like Nun here, I am a Levite—who had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you look at it, to be offered as a sacrifice to this same Nehushtan at a moment when Enekhas-Amon desperately resented her childlessness. So there, once and for all, is your prince of Egypt.”

  “I have known all this for a long time,” Neph nodded. “Amon-Teph told me; he asked me to show you the Levites in their bondage, so that you would never envy the people whose blood you carry. They were the people you saw on the island, building the granary.” He paused and watched Moses’ bewilderment. Then Neph said, “Whether he was right of not, I don’t know, O Moses of the half-name. He and your mother dreamed that you would one day become the God-King of all Egypt, and then restore Aton to his throne above all other gods.” He shook his head, an expression of sudden sadness passing over his face. “No—not Egypt or Aton for you. You are a man now, Moses, not the boy who went away. You have seen war and you have known love and loneliness and guilt. Some day you will know anger—”

  “And then?” Moses whispered.

  Neph shrugged. “We will see.”

  [13]

  LONG AND SLOW and gentle as the journey down the River Nile was, it came to its end at last, and Neph’s barge shipped its oars and scraped against the stone wharves of Old Tanis, the City of Ramses. To the dock-workers, the sailors, riggers and fishermen, the chandlers and merchants, the spare, grey-haired figure of Neph was familiar enough, but no one saw or recognized the Prince of Egypt in the tall, wide-shouldered and scarred soldier who accompanied him; and as for Nun, he walked no longer like a slave, and for all of his beard and braided hair, his striped kilt and the firm set of his massive shoulders marked him more as a Babylonian or Canaanite than a desert tribesman.

  To Moses, leaning on his black Kushite stave and allowing the emotions of this homecoming to flow through him, the place had dwindled—it lacked the size and grandeur he remembered. Everything was less massive, less glittering, less impressive—and he was shocked by his awareness of stench and filth. His memories had not included the litter of fish heads and scales on the docks, the violent motion and shouting, and the nauseating smell of the place. Even the Great House of Ramses, its walls looming a few hundred yards up the river, was in no way so gigantic as his memories of it—and when he remarked upon this to Neph, the engineer nodded and said he knew the feeling well. It was less a physical change than a mental one, for even in the greatest of palaces the horizon is narrow and blunted, whereas the land to the south was limitless, with mountains as high as the sky. The very fact that he was back here once again made the recollection of those spaces and distances more awesome to Moses, and he could not shake off the feeling that a part of himself had been lost and left in the tangle of mountains where the Nile had its sources. How clearly he could picture Doogana smiling at him so knowingly. “What happens to a wanderer?” Moses asked Neph. “Does he ever come home?” And Neph answered ruefully that wanderers were those who sought their home—not those who left it. The cryptic intent was not lost on Moses, and when Neph asked him how he felt, he replied, “I am a stranger here.” Neph wondered where Moses would not be a stranger, yet there had once been a place to come home to, the white house over the cataract; but that was no more.

  During the trip down the river, Moses had learned a good deal about Neph. He heard the story of the girl Neph had once married, who had died in childbirth—as Neph tried to ease the hurt of Moses with his own hurt. “You never possess,” he told Moses then. “For us, as for all men, there is only change, and if something is good and beautiful and we can look at it and be with it for even a little while, then that is enough.” Moses asked bitterly, “Even for a day?” “Even for a day, my son.”

  For years after his wife’s death, Neph had lived in his studio in the Great House. His wants were few. He ate the fare of the maintenance men at their common table and he spread his sleeping pallet on the floor. More often than not, he spent his nights at the various jobs. But with Moses gone and with Amon-Teph and the other priests of Aton dead, the Great House became intolerable, and he bought a house for himself at the river’s edge above the palace.

  It was there that he took Moses and Nun when they left the barge. The house was a simple structure of whitewashed mud brick, containing five rooms, a porch for eating and an outhouse for a kitchen. The roof, which was reached by a staircase on the outside, was floored with fragrant cedarwood, so that it might be used for sleeping in the hot weather, and aside from a garden of olive and fig trees, the roof was the only vanity the house possessed. “You would think,” he remarked to Moses, “that having built so many houses for others, I would put my experience to work and build something more elegant than this for myself. However, like yourself, I have yet to come home, and this serves my purpose.” But, as he told Moses, he had hoped that some day they would share the place, and at least it contained enough rooms for the requirements of privacy. His staff was small but adequate, a cook, a houseman and a gardener. Moses would have made no moral judgments had Neph kept a slave girl or two as concubines, for the practice was common among unmarried men and not uncommon among married men; but he was pleased that this was not the case.

  The day after they were installed in the house, Neph had to return to the desert, where his men were at work on the colossus of Ramses. Though Neph had assured Moses that all in the house was his, the momentary poverty of the prince placed both him and Nun in a difficult position. He could not wear Neph’s clothes, and during his time at the inn, he had lost all that he and Nun carried, gold and jewels and weapons too. Not even a dagger was left to him now, not
even a pair of sandals to replace the ones he wore—which were falling to pieces. He had to be shaved with Neph’s razor, and unless he desired to go naked, to wear one of Neph’s kilts when his was being washed. To someone who in all his life had never questioned the availability of wealth and who had never been denied the means with which to satisfy any need that gold might fulfil, it was an interesting but irritating situation.

  In any case, he was indulging a fantasy to pretend that he could live here in the City of Ramses without revealing his presence, and after two days of loafing in the garden, unwilling to venture forth on the streets in his tattered condition, he decided that he would go to the palace and talk to Seti-Moses, steward of the Great House and watch-dog over half the wealth of Egypt. He went alone, without Nun, full of the bittersweet of childhood memories as he approached the gates of the enormous building—and both amused and annoyed by the reaction of the officer of the guard when he was recognized. “It is not as if you are yourself here, O Prince of Egypt,” the man said wonderingly, “but someone like yourself and reminding me of yourself.”

  The officer of the guard, as Moses knew, was an unproven bastard son of the God-King, and thereby a degree below the proven bastards, who swarmed and grew in the palace itself. His godly manner was diluted with obsequiousness, yet he was dubious and curious concerning this already legendary prince of the half-name, supposedly the only true son of the godly children of Seti I, father of Ramses—and, as gossip had it, hated and feared by his royal father for his great strength, his devilish skill in battle and his demonic temper. All unknown to Moses the years of his absence had created a legend and image of himself. The taming and subduing of Nun, the slave, had been embroidered beyond recognition, even as his blasphemy of the sacred kilt had become a dangerous defiance of the gods. Rumour had it that three of his brothers had died by his own hand, that scores of his royal sisters had given birth to his bastards.