by Howard Fast
Nor did the living presence demean the legend. The Royal Guard was composed of the youngest sons of the noble houses of Egypt, and for some reason homosexuality had become the fashion among them. The pampered, plump, overfed young men were preened in a manner that had become traditional: their armour and shields were faced with gold, and under their golden helmets they rouged their faces and painted their lips. Now they stared, with a mixture of distaste and respect, at this large-boned and lean man who loomed over them. Bare of gold and jewels, they saw him as one whose social defiance was the equivalent of nakedness. His threadbare kilt and disintegrating sandals mocked their finery, and his great shock of black hair, threaded through with grey, crudely cut to length but untouched by the skill of a real barber these many years now, gave him a wild and threatening aspect, all in keeping with the stories told about him.
Moses was indifferent to them, and to the officer of the guard. He said that he desired to see Seti-Moses, the steward, and that he would wait for him on the high terrace, to which he walked without another word. Was he a stranger here too, he wondered? He stood on the terrace, looking down into the courtyard where he and the royal progeny had exercised at weapons for so many years. A new generation of children were standing with rigid and trembling arms, loosing their arrows at the targets. A younger man trained them, and Moses wondered whether old Seti-Hop was dead. The memories returned like disconnected parts of a story someone had told him, rather than as events in which he himself had participated, and he found himself disturbed by the vagueness of it. Where was Amon-Teph? Where was his mother? He tried to bring Enekhas-Amon to life and being in his memory, but her face and voice and form remained nebulous.
Now he saw people in the gardens looking up at him and pointing to him; news travels like a shout. Suddenly he was overtaken by a great and lonely nostalgia; though he stood in the sun, the sunlight of childhood was gone for ever, and he experienced a brief but overwhelming longing to be like others. Let Neph talk—Neph was Egyptian; Neph belonged; amid justice or injustice, rebellion or acceptance, Neph was of the land. He, Moses, was a pretender, a stranger, a Levite, claiming, with the pathetic pride of the landless Bedouin wanderer, to descent from some desert herder named Israel. Shame hid his origin; shame would always cloud and confuse it. Amon-Teph had advised Neph to take Moses to the slave people. Let him look at the filthy, crippled mockery of human beings that had given seed to him, and then he would never know regret for being parted from them for ever. How contemptuous of Amon-Teph and Neph, yet how hard to blame them! Where was the nation anywhere that did not spit out the word Bedouin like a curse. They come and they go; their home is nowhere, and the dirt of the desert is on them. They came once, long ago, begging for food, and they remained to be slaves. What is a Levite? He will put a knife in your back; he is ignorant but crafty and shrewd—and withal superstitious and degraded, with a snake for a god. Nehushtan vomited on to the back of a turtle, and lo, man appeared. And this was he, himself, Moses, the whole heart of the jest contained in the fact that not only had he been raised as a prince, but all Egypt whispered that he was the prince among princes, the child of a royal brother and sister in the ancient manner.
Lost in his thoughts, he only now realized that Seti-Moses was crossing the terrace towards him. If the chief steward had changed, it was only to increase his substance, his stomach more enormous than ever, his shanks ringed with bracelets of fat, his arms quivering with their overlay of obesity. He walked more slowly and puffed more, but his tiny eyes had lost none of their shrewdness, and it was with a calculating and thoughtful glance that he measured Moses. In the large, prominent features of the Prince of Egypt, the high forehead and deep-set eyes, the highbridged nose more hawklike than ever, the jutting cheekbones over which the brown skin stretched so tightly, the wide, fleshy mouth and the sharp chin, Seti-Moses saw nothing of either the God-King, Ramses or his sister Enekhas-Amon; and he became more convinced than ever that Ramses’ delusion that this was his natural son was completely without foundation. There was little that went on in the Great House that escaped Seti-Moses, and he too had heard it whispered how this man, as a child, had been dragged from the River Nile, where he had been cast by the slave people. Yet, like others, Seti-Moses was a prisoner of his own contempt for the Bedouin tribesmen of Goshen, the wretched, inferior creatures who toiled for Ramses. More likely, as he often thought, the tall and arrogant prince of the half-name had originated in the region of Karnak and carried not a little of the blood of Akh-en-Aton, the hated of the gods. For while the physical resemblance was not with Akh-en-Aton, the face was a face of Karnak.
In any case, he approached a marked enemy, potentially powerful, but isolated and unaware of his own potential; and he reflected upon how much simpler it would have been if the prince had died in the Land of Kush. Moses, on the other hand, was full of an awareness of himself, and he looked upon Seti-Moses, as he did upon so many Egyptians, with a sense of apartness. The hard and lean feel of his own body was accentuated in the face of the other’s grossness, and his poorly hidden distaste was not uninfluenced by a habit of judging men by their physical potential in war and hunt.
Seti-Moses was formal and correct. “Prince of Egypt,” he said “I greet you and welcome you, and the Great House is honoured and enlarged by your presence. Your return will bring joy and happiness to all who love Egypt; for we have known that you left Kush, and we have been waiting for you these many weeks. Thus it is that my master, the God-King instructs that you be brought to him, so that he may feast his own eyes upon you, directly you appear.”
“That’s all very moving and heart-warming,” Moses nodded, “but I did not come now for an audience with Ramses. Look at me! I came because I need gold, clothes, shoes. I am not complaining about the cost of the years in Kush, but a prince of the Great House cannot walk the streets of Tanis in rags.”
Spreading his arms, the chief steward rolled his tongue in honey. He was a man of tact and presence, and he said, in the most conciliatory of tones, “Rest assured, O Prince of Egypt, that your wealth has not lessened a shekel’s worth. Rather has it increased, and there is no measure to what is yours. It is yours to take. Your mother’s chambers have not been disturbed, and there is gold enough for all your wants. But first you must see your father, for that is his command.”
“As I am?” Moses demanded, pointing to his kilt and sandals.
“As you are. Do you think the God-King is swayed by baubles and perfumes? You are a soldier come back from the wars. You must come with me, O Prince of Egypt.”
Moses shrugged and nodded. “Very well, then.” And he went with Seti-Moses into the Great House.
[14]
EACH TIME HE approached the throne of the God-King, Ramses, it was different; yet it was also the same, for he walked through the bright and glittering throne room with ghosts beside him—his mother, so bold and beautiful and defiant, himself as a youth, himself as a child—as if all the epochs of his life had been and would be marked by his approach to this man, the greatest and most powerful ruler in all the world. Moses would have had to be insensitive indeed to fail to comprehend that the contest was between himself and the man on the throne; nor did the knowledge that he was no prince at all lessen his own sense of royal importance—not would it, until he had suffered much more. Enough of the influence of the gods—so much a part of every Egyptian-remained on him for him to play with the notion that something more than fate and circumstance had arranged their opposition. That the ruler of all Egypt could still claim—and believe—him a son was no longer an irritation to Moses; but rather a cruel yet pleasant mockery—for he had neither love nor pity for Ramses, but only an account to settle. And that he would some day settle this account, he had no doubt.
But now he had learned patience; the feeling of childhood that tomorrow does not exist had left him. If out of loneliness, pain and sorrow, Moses had learned that no human being is alone, he had also learned that the chain of life was interlinked. An
d the blow the man on the throne had struck at Kush—out of his lust for power and wealth—reverberated for ever; and as Moses strode towards the throne of godhood, he thought, “Our score is doubled now, O Ramses, for the two women I loved most in this world died by your hand. I learned little, but I learned enough not to blame Kush for the hatred that begets hatred.”
Yet he himself had ceased to hate. There had been born in him the seed of a notion—that justice does not reside in the pliable and willing macaat of an Egyptian’s soul, but exists as a thing apart, created out of man and man’s agony, and powerful beyond belief. It partook of patience, and it waited its time, and in its own good time it was ready at hand for men who loved and feared it. It did not—and would not for long to come—occur to him that he had found a god to worship, but more and more he sensed a staff to lean on, a stronger and taller staff even than the black Kushite stick of ebony, which alone of all his weapons he had brought back to Egypt with him.
So now, as he approached the king, he noted with no small pride and pleasure his own lack of fear. The little boy, Moses, the powdered, festooned and jewel-encrusted child of Enekhas-Amon, who trembled so with terror of this almighty and all-powerful personage, clung to his strong legs and was comforted—for the Captain of Kush walked across the throne room with the arrogant assurance of a barbarian who has not learned and never bowed to the rituals of power. In his own thoughts, he said to himself and yet to them, “Look at me, you fat and pampered scribes and priests and clerks of Egypt. I am Moses, the Levite, son of Amrarn the Levite, and thus you wanted me and thus I am!”
And indeed they looked at him with wonder and distaste, for his stride was too long, his shoulders too wide—and the whole aspect of him physical and threatening and without respect. Not in their memory had a man entered the audience chamber of the God-King without adornment or badge of rank, and that a prince of Egypt should come thus, naked except for a threadbare kilt and worn sandals, amounted to blasphemy. Most of the court officials who stood in the hall remembered the prince of the half-name, but the memory fitted poorly to this sunbrowned, scarred and defiant man.
Ramses, perhaps, thought otherwise, for to his way of thinking he looked at his son who was no longer a boy but a man—and if he watched with foreboding, he also watched with pride and felt that he had reared a stout adversary. It was no wonder that this Moses returned from far places that had swallowed others!
The God-King nodded at Moses, smiled thinly, and motioned for him to mount the platform and come close to him.
Ramses himself had changed less with the years than had Moses. Now in his fifty-fifth year, he had sat for thirty-eight years upon the throne of Egypt—yet his face was fleshy and youthful, his bear-like and powerful body retaining the vitality and vigour of youth. Only the older generation of Egypt remembered a time before him, the reign of his father, Seti; for the others, Ramses was as eternal as the River Nile, and the priests made little effort to destroy the legend of immortality that had sprung up around him. He had created a far-flung empire such as the world had never before seen, and his building in stone was refashioning the face of Egypt.
His restoration of the full flush of Egypt’s power and glory had closed the eyes of the people to the fact of the land in itself: the enervated and impoverished peasantry, the dwindling population, the empty and abandoned cities of Upper Egypt—and the disease of mass slavery that fed on the body of the land like a swarm of insatiable maggots. The power and the glory and the glitter of gold were his, and now, as he turned his face and greeting to Moses, it was the God-King, lord of all other kings, who spoke and said,
“So the Captain of Kush returns. Is it true, as they say, that you found the source of the Nile?”
“O Lord of Egypt, I greet thee,” Moses said flatly and formally.
“I am glad to see that you have retained your manners if not your jewels. However, as I told Seti-Moses, I am not impressed by baubles, and it is easier to see the man if he is not overlaid with gold plate. You’ve become a man, Moses of the half-name, and you have the look of a captain of Kush—or of one of those arrogant dukes of Karnak. However, you have not answered my question.”
“The priests say that the Nile has its source in the fountains of the gods,” Moses answered carefully.
“Be damned with what the priests say! I ask you, not them!”
Moses nodded and replied thoughtfully, “We followed one branch south, where it dwindled and became a brook, and we returned north by another branch, but neither was large enough to be the true source.”
“So? And when you say we?”
“My Bedouin slave, Nun. He and I made the journey.”
“The animal you tamed in the slave-market?”
“Yes, O King of Egypt.”
“And you found no golden cities?”
“We found no cities at all, only a few savages who live in grass huts and hunt their food in the field.”
The God-King of all Egypt looked at Moses, measuring him and putting him in the balance; and he bulked large, even in this great and colourful chamber. Three years before this, an archer had brought down a stork winging south and had taken it to the priests for augury. In the bird’s crop they found a black stone, which was a warning from the gods to their own—and the priests warned Ramses to kill the man he feared. He had to ask himself now whether he feared Moses. He had more sons than he knew the names of, but none were of the breed of this tall, strange man who stood before him. In his eyes, the wild and the unfamiliar clung to Moses; if he had sired this, then he had sired an heir worthy of the throne—but one who would never wait for death to give him his turn—as Ramses thought. A wall of hatred and fear had been erected between them, and to all of the king’s advisers, this dark man was an abomination, an enemy of the gods, a blasphemer and a secret worshipper of the hated one, Aton.
And Seti-Moses had said to him, “What will Egypt have of this man who hates the gods?”
So Ramses sat on his throne, his palm supporting his broad, fleshy chin, and studied Moses, and all around the great hall, the ambassadors, the priests and clerks and stewards, the captains and princes, stood in silence and at respectful distance, their eyes fixed on the lord of Egypt and his tall son, for they could comprehend the defiance of Moses only as the defiance of one of true birth and blood and right. And, at last, Ramses sighed and said, without anger,
“If you had loved and honoured me, everything would have been different.”
“I loved and honoured my mother,” Moses replied.
“And now you sit like a maggot in my flesh, waiting only to eat my heart.”
Moses shook his head.
“Then why did you come here to the Great House?”
“Only for gold that is mine—to buy bread and clothes with. Shall I walk the streets of your city as I am?”
“I don’t steal from my children!” Ramses said harshly. “The gold is yours, and Seti-Moses will give you what you need.”
“Thank you, my Lord King.”
“I want no thanks from your voice when there is murder in your heart.”
“There is no murder in my heart,” Moses told him quietly. “Of killing, I saw enough in the Land of Kush, where your army went to teach a nation justice and left it dying and bleeding, and never again in my life do I want to raise my hand to anyone, least of all to you. There are other ways in which justice works, and if I have an account to settle, I have learned to be patient.”
“And you dare to say that to me!” Ramses cried.
“Yes, I dare.”
Trembling, Ramses leaned forward and whispered, “What god protects you?”
“I ask nothing from the gods.”
“Then ask, for there is a question as to whether you will leave this room alive.”
“Would you let Egypt and the world know that as you murdered your sister, so will you murder her son?”
Ramses lay back in his chair, breathing slowly and heavily. He was quick to anger and quick to ca
lm. He waited until the rage passed, until he had full control of himself, before he spoke. “Why do men love you, Moses of the half-name? If you were with me instead of against me, I think the whole world would lie at our feet. Is that a bad dream?”
“For me, yes.”
“You speak boldly and wildly, my son,” Ramses said bitterly. “You try my patience. The priests say to kill you, and you provoke me and talk to me as no man on earth ever has. How do you dare?”
“Because you are afraid of me,” Moses answered simply. “I don’t know why, but you are.”
“How far will you go?” Ramses wondered. “You know you are safe. I would never sleep again with your blood on my hands. I would cast you into a dungeon and let you rot, and then I would lie awake thinking of what Seti-Keph wrote to me, how he would change places with the meanest peasant on the land if he could have a son like you. And Neph, my engineer, perhaps the greatest engineer in all the world, risks his life and fortune to shelter you and help you. You will accept this from them—why not from me?”
“They are not the God-King,” Moses answered, for the first time feeling a sense of pity for the man who faced him.
Ramses shook his head and smiled; he was wholly in control of himself now, and he told Moses, without rancour, “You have the look of a man, but the tongue and impulsiveness of a foolish boy. What do you know of a throne that you cast it aside so lightly? Do you know what it means to hold in your two hands all the power there is on earth?” holding out his short-fingered, powerful and broad hands, palms up, the fingers curled. “Here is the power! Who is there on earth to deny me or say me nay? What I want I have, and what I take it into my head to do, I do—and the lords and the dukes and the kings kneel to me and kiss my feet. Do you know what that means? Do you know what power is? How sweet it tastes? No wine is like it, no woman, no jewel—look!” He rose to his feet, clapped his hands, and cried,
