Moses (22 page)

“I did not ask for his teaching. Who was he to turn me away from everything my own people hold sacred?”

My own people
remained, like a bone in his throat. More and more had he been coming to dream of the knowledge of his birth revealed, the whole world mocking him and himself in chains and whipped. No prince, no prince! they screamed at him. Or in the dream, the skinny, dirty Bedouins would gather about him to claim him.

So he walked in the shelter of the chanting of the priests, his eyes fixed upon the hundreds of golden torches that exercised a hypnotic effect upon him, his body sheltered under the thin shroud of linen that was his holy garment. All about him were the chariot captains, each shrouded like himself; and he thought of them as men of strength and power and dignity, very different from the spoiled royal progeny of the palace. When the priests lifted their voices in the “Hymn to Set,” the god of the Great House, Moses joined in the singing of the banal words, forgetting how he and Amon-Teph had smiled so sadly over the superstitious obscenities the hymn contained. And when he was disrobed and stood naked under the moon for purification, he invoked Isis and Osiris as did the others….

And in the morning, in the grey light of morning's beginning, be came with Nun to the parade ground, Nun leading Katie, the yellow horse, which was carrying not only his share of baggage but extra weapons, bundles of arrows and an extra shield and iron sword, these to be stored in the chariot itself. Nun dragged out the chariot and harnessed the horses to the chariot-trace, as Hetep-Re had taught him to—and Moses could not but remark on how easily and well he learned. Katie, bewildered with the weight of inert baggage he carried, was transferred to the reserve herd. Moses and Nun guided their chariot into position behind Hetep-Re, who led his host.

Almost every soul in Old Tanis turned out to watch the chariots move through the city to the docks; the procession was a gallant and wonderful sight. The clashing of cymbals, the shrilling of silver pipes and the beating of the big bullhide war drums infected man and beast with the excitement of the moment, and the horses pranced and reared, sending the crowds in the narrow streets into gales of laughter and surges of pretended panic. The horses wore headbands of gay, bright feathers, and colourful ribbons streamed from the spears of the warriors and the bronze handrails of the chariots. Many of the hosts had painted the spokes of the huge chariot wheels a common colour, bright yellow in one case, crimson in another, black and white and purple, and both driver and warrior wore their best of armour and ornament.

And all along, women ran with the chariots, wives and mothers and sisters and sweethearts and prostitutes, weaving a mixture of endearments, accusations, tears, pleading and lusty talk to a point where many a man would have leaped from his chariot, had he not known that the savage and iron hand of Seti-Keph was already over the Host—and that from here on any infringement of discipline would be punished without mercy.

And among these chariots, Moses and his slave Nun went to war with Kush, went down to the stone docks where chariots, men and horses were loaded on to great, broad barges—to be rowed upstream by thousands of slaves to Abydos, where they would disembark and go overland to the assembly point at Karnak.

So war began for the shining-faced and eager prince of Egypt—who had yet to learn that war is many things, but mostly waiting and boredom.

[9]

IT IS SAID of man that when he grows old, his recollection of the settled course of his life is less well remembered than its interruption by crisis and journeying; yet in years after, Moses would recollect only two incidents during that long, apparently endless journey up the river from Tanis in the Delta to Abydos, which was just below Karnak, and not far from the assembly area of the army, ten miles to the south of Karnak.

The first concerned a conversation with Seti-Keph, Captain of Hosts, and it came about this way, out of the sense of belonging that Moses wanted so desperately from the chariot captains….

For some dozen days they had been moving upriver: that mighty fleet of almost a thousand barges, the motion of the tens of thousands of oars making a sound like a giant waterfall, the talk and laughter of the men, the endless days—so quickly lost to counting—under the timeless yellow sun of Egypt, the immediate bazaar atmosphere of the little river towns where they tied up to buy fresh fruit and fresh meat and drink every drop of wine the peasants had put by, the tough soldiers swaggering drunkenly in the streets and debauching in each place a whole population of girls who had come to growth since the last army came by on its way to Kush.

But Moses was bored and restless. They tied to shore at the little city of Em-Akad, actually no more than a village, but containing a rather imposing temple sacred to Mut, the mother and fertility goddess. Long since had the fertility cults, in any overt form, been abandoned in the Delta, where the priesthood was powerful enough to overcome any female domination of the major rites; and in the more important temples of Tanis and Sais and Busiris, women were tolerated only for certain rituals sacred to Isis—and then under the seal of silence. But upriver, where the cosmopolitanism of the Delta hardly touched the changeless peasant life, the old gods were still revered; and when the ebb of the flood laid its new black coat of rich mud and fertility on the fields, the peasants came to worship the gods of creation-and above all, the fertility mother, Mut.

It was the time now. The fleet poured its unexpected thousands on to the muddy, oozing shore, and the alluvial strip of rich land, a day's journey up and down the river, poured its maidens across the land to the temple. The priests had set up phallic symbols of carved wood, and a naked matron wearing the brazen snake of Mut around her loins led the worship. The maidens were naked too, except for snake symbols painted around their bodies in the raw red-earth pigment that these people ground out of desert stone and mixed in an olive-oil base; and the young men who accompanied them wore red loincloths, dyed with the same raw pigment, and carried wooden wands, light strips of cedarwood that were roughly painted in imitation of a serpent's scales.

Night was close on when the soldiers of the fleet came ashore—the slaves were not permitted to leave the boats-and the priests were now handing the maidens twisted torches of oil-soaked papyrus. The girls and young men, already caught up in the slow, hypnotic rhythm of their dance, only smiled or laughed at the soldiers; but the priests, half in fear and half with greed of potential profit, made them welcome, begged them to partake of the worship, and sent the temple slaves to fetch goatskin sacks of wine.

As night fell, the papyrus torches were lit, the rhythm of the dance quickened, and the chant shrilled higher and higher, led by the wild, screaming voice of the naked matron who stood on a stone pedestal before the temple. The maidens danced past her, into the temple, lighting the long corridors between the massive pillars—and the young men pursued them, striking them with the cedar wands, lightly at first, and then harder and harder.

To Moses, standing together with a group of captains, taking great gulps of the wine whenever it was passed to him, this was a strange, barbaric and fascinating sight. He had heard, of the Fertility Assemblies, as they were called, but he had hardly believed that they were practised in any part of Egypt in this enlightened age. The sight of the temple lit with hundreds of waving torches, the naked maidens being beaten by the young men—the screams of pain mixed with rapture-and the sound of the now almost unbearable chant heated his own emotions to a fever pitch. He was also rapidly becoming drunk on the strong, sour, peasant wine.

The night was hot and humid, for all day long the alluvial mud had been steaming, and now this mixed with the scent of the incense being burned in the temple. It was as if a cloak of hot, palpable sexuality had filled the place, and as the screaming maidens ran from the temple, the youths beating them, the soldiers broke loose, forgetting religious devotion in their suddenly aroused frenzy. Where the village youths stood in their way, they were flung aside, and the night was filled with screams of laughter and real fear and simulated fear as the soldiers seized the not-unwilling girls. A group of the maidens, waving their arms in mock terror, fled laughing to the protection of the chariot captains, who received them with no hesitation.

So the night began for Moses, a wild, drunken night and not unlike a previous night that brought him sorrow afterwards. In the hour before dawn, Hetep-Re and another captain dragged his sodden, mud- and vomit-covered carcass back on to the barge, where they let him fall on deck and sleep there until the hot sun awakened him. The fleet was already under way when he woke up, opened his eyes and saw Nun standing by him, observing him with an expression half of disgust, half of hatred….

Of this Seti-Keph spoke, having called Moses the next day to his barge, the lead barge of the fleet, and the largest. The front third of this barge was built up with quarters for Seti-Keph and his staff, roofed over with a deck from which he could observe and command the entire fleet. Now he had sent away his officers, so that he might talk alone with Moses; and when Moses appeared, the Captain of Hosts was sitting glumly on a little three-legged stool. He rose to greet the prince, and nodded for him to be seated on another similar stool.

For a while they sat in silence, Seti-Keph studying the fleet which trailed for almost a mile behind him, and Moses unwilling and unable to start the conversation, knowing only too well what the subject would be, and filled with dread and shame and misery.

Where, he asked himself, was his joy and pride of only a few days before? Was he to be an object of contempt and mockery here too, as well as in the Great House?

As he sat there, Seti-Keph glanced at him occasionally, wrinkling his brow uneasily. He had difficulty in saying what he felt he had to say. Seti-Keph had dragged a king of Hatti in chains from the tailboard of his chariot; he had executed a prince of Phoenicia with his own dagger; and he had forced into his bed, with blows and oaths, the sister of a king of Babylon; yet for all that, he remained in his innermost being an Egyptian peasant—and to an Egyptian peasant of that time, the royal blood was godly. He found himself thinking—“And suppose I am spared to die in bed and be embalmed, and this young fool of a prince opens the doors of the other world to me? How then?” He bent his head characteristically, peering at Moses from under his heavy brows and said, surlily,

“Among my own folk, one was a man at twelve and tilling the soil—and at fourteen one took a wife. How is it with the folk at the Great House?”

Moses stated at the deck in silence.

“Suppose you were a soldier, O Prince of Egypt,” SetiKeph shrugged, “and suppose you had scar marks all over you out of five campaigns. Then I might say, he has earned his right to play the fool.” He straightened up suddenly and shouted, “No! I wouldn't even say it then!”

“I was with the other captains,” Moses muttered.

“Ah—the other captains. And what are they?” he snapped. “Pigs, scum of the earth! A lot of dirty butchers who can think no further ahead than a whore or a gold bracelet they'll cut off the hand of a Kushite! Are they men because they can bend a bow or cast a spear? Is that what you want, Prince of Egypt, who came from the gods of the Great House?” His voice softened now, and Moses raised his head to see that a strange and lonely expression had come on the flat, ugly face of the Captain of Hosts. “Well, Moses,” he sighed, “what am I to say to you? We are all drunken wanderers, when you come down to it, and each one does his butchery in his own way. I sucked my mother's milk, but had no heart when my men slew the mothers of Canaan-and now I will show them in Kush what the anger of the God-King is. Huh? I have no pride, so I look for pride in you, because you are noble, born with the blood of the gods in your veins. And at night,” he went on slowly, the agony of his thinking twisting his mouth and tightening it, “when I can't sleep for fear I will die before morning, I am sick with the heresy that there are no gods at all. Heresy—who is free from this heresy, except fools who have seen nothing of life or the world? But in the morning, I make libations to Re and I believe again. I must believe. Otherwise, what is the sense of life that is only a moment—as you will see, some day, O Prince of Egypt—a moment between the awakening and the final sleep? What sense, unless a man cherishes the gods? And when a god becomes drunk and dirty and rolls in the river mud with some stinking, painted peasant girl—”

“As the others did,” Moses attempted.

“You're not the others! Do you think, because I'm a hard old butcher with no manners and no graces, that I know so little of men? Do you know what a leader is? A real leader, who has to win it himself? To know men and to make them respect you! I know men. I know you, O Prince of Egypt, and I know what a man you will be—if you want to find manhood? Do you?”

Unable to face him, Moses stared over the river hopelessly.

“Do you know what you want, O Prince of Egypt? Of wealth, you have enough. Then what do you want? Power? Glory?”

Moses shook his head.

“Then what?”

Striving desperately to keep back the emotion that was choking him and the tears that were pressing his eyelids, Moses managed to say haltingly, “I don't know, I don't know—except if it be to find out who I am, and why I am—”

“You are too young to want to chew the most bitter cud of all,” Seti-Keph said, not unkindly, “for there is a desire that is never fulfilled. Go back to your barge now, for we have talked enough, and it is possible that I have talked too much. In time, we will make war, and there you'll find a bloody linen cloth to wipe your mind free.”

The second remembered incident of the water journey took place a few days after this, when Moses turned to Nun—the silent, waiting Nun—and asked him,