Moses (3 page)

Moses nodded miserably.

“But the one thing I insist upon—you must not fear. Ramses. In the old days,” she went on, with a sort of desperate intensity, “they would have believed that he was born a god. Some still believe that he will die a god and go to sit on Seti's throne with him. That may be, but who has come back to bear witness? And remember: he has more to fear from me than I have from him, be assured, more than you have. Now go and play—and leave me.”

Still he stood there, gripped and held there by his own torment, and when she questioned him, he managed to ask, with a desperation that equalled hers,

“Is the god—the king—is he my father?”

Her face was tired and haggard as she said with a calm that completed his terror, “I've said all I am going to say. Never again ask me that, my son. I am your mother, but I am also a princess royal of the Great House and no one, not my son, not any man on this holy soil of Egypt, shall dare ask me a question to provoke me. Now go away and play. I am tired of you, foolish boy. Leave me alone.”

Then he fled, bursting through the hanging, leaving doors swinging behind him, racing past the rows of looming columns out into the sweet air and the sunshine; and behind him, his mother wept. She wept for the way fate had dealt with her, for herself, for her lost youth and beauty, for her ever barren loins. She wept out of jealousy and hatred for her brother, for the concubines who so eagerly graced her brother's bed, out of hatred and resentment against every living person in the great palace except the one child who now exacted the total small measure of love that was hers to give.

[2]

ALMOST AT THE sunlight, with the bright gardens spread before him, the voice caught him, soft, silky, “Moses, Moses—whither so fast and furious? Look behind you, boy.” He swung around and saw the priest sitting on a little stool in the pleasant shade of a column, a white robe over his fat jelly-like bulk, a thin, mocking smile on his moon-shaped face. “Oh, come over here, boy, and stop jittering like a mare that smells stud. What could frighten you that wouldn't frighten me? If I ran twenty like that, I'd drop dead and there'd be something for the embalmers to tackle. Eh, Moses? Do you want me to call you the prince who was afraid?”

“No—no, your holiness, please don't.”

The priest found this amusing, for he began to chuckle, sending waves of mirth rolling over the layers of his flesh. His robe fell open, and Moses forgot his fear in the fascination of the great heaving stomach that was revealed.

“And don't call me ‘holiness,'” he chuckled. “Only the dead are holy, and it takes a thousand tons of rock to keep them that way. You know my name, which is Amon-Teph, and your own foolish name is Moses. I knew your mother, the goddess Enekhas-Amon, before you were born, when she was young and beautiful and I was young enough and slim enough to look twice at a beautiful woman, even a princess. Yes. You see, I remember names and you don't, because I am a priest of Amon and you are an empty-headed boy—as empty-headed as all boys. Now what frightened you, Prince of Egypt?” He stopped chuckling and looked keenly at Moses, a gleam of warmth and liking in his tiny eyes.

“Nothing,” Moses answered, almost absently.

“Nothing?” the priest repeated, watching the boy shrewdly. “A wild nothing? A horned nothing? Boy, listen to me—I am a good friend to you, and if you weren't just an empty-headed young wastrel, you'd put a value on a friend like old, fat Amon-Teph.”

His words had no meaning to Moses, who had enough sophistication to suspect a household priest trying to curry favour with a prince. For the first time, he was aware of a sense of his own cleverness and he asked the priest as casually as he could,

“Then, Amon-Teph, you must have known my mother when she was in birth with me?”

Mirth and warmth went out of the fat face and suddenly the priest was cold and indifferent. In the voice of a stranger, he said, “The palace teems with brats. What am I, Moses, a midwife, to remember every cub that was whelped? Go and play, boy!” But when Moses had taken a dozen steps, the priest called after him,

“Prince of Egypt, when do you think you will be a man?”

“I'm a man now,” Moses answered angrily, thinking, “More of a man than you, you fat old fool.”

“You're a snivelling, empty-headed boy,” the priest said cuttingly. “When you think you're a man, look for me, and I'll have something to say to you.”

[3]

AT THIS TIME, although he was only forty-three years old, Ramses was in the twenty-sixth year of his kingship, and already the plain folk, the peasants who tilled their little plots of rich alluvial soil up and down the River Nile, were saying that no god like Ramses had ever graced the throne of Egypt before. Unlike his father, Seti, who had exercised his
justice
—that ancient sense of conscience which was the most precious character description an Egyptian could refer to—with cold fury and merciless judgment, Ramses was a man simple people could understand and love, perhaps because kingly insensitivity was misread as kindly simplicity. Along with that, he expressed human qualities which were always reassuring in a god. He bragged and lied without shame. He was a large, powerful, good-looking man, who did things hugely and lustily. He ate enormously, with gusto and relish, drank vast quantities without ever losing his head, and engaged his manhood in a manner that more than anything else convinced his subjects that his divinity was founded in fact. If his apparently inexhaustible virility—or lust, as some would say—had been laced with sadism, a quality not unknown among former kings of Egypt, or had been petty and sick in its manifestations, the people would have simply tolerated it and accepted it as they accepted the inevitable aberrations of godhood on the throne; but here it was, so vast, so unprecedented, so all-encompassing that they took pride in a reputation already recognized all over the known world.

This pride had to include an acceptance of Ramses' broad and catholic taste. It was true that the old order of things, the everlasting and unchanging stability of Egypt which extended back into the cloudy mists of time, was passing away; nevertheless, it was not in the manner of Egyptian god-kings to haunt the city docks where the ships from far places tied up and to dicker personally for new bedmates. It was one thing to set a pattern where no attractive Egyptian woman he laid eyes on could escape his bed; it was another for Ramses to take as his concubines the women of every nation—strange, heathen women, black and white and brown, women of such far and littleknown places as Philistia, Dardania, Hatti, Sicily, Crete and Sardinia, Kush and Babylon, Pedesia and Arzawa, Ugarit and Megiddo and twenty other cities and tribes and nations—and to honour the royalty of every brat these strangers dropped. But whatever Ramses did was mixed with the knowledge that he did more of it and more splendidly than any of his royal ancestors.

He was not content to take the ancient title he bore—Pharaoh, which means
great house
—figuratively, as others before him had done. If he was to be known as the lord of a great house, then such a house would come into being; and he took the city of Tanis in the Delta, renamed it Ramses for himself, and set about making it a place such as the world had not known before. In the midst of it he built his own palace, a literal
great house
, a structure so vast and of so many rooms, apartments, corridors, terraces and gardens that it was held that one could live in it for a decade and still not know all of it. No palace like this had ever been in Egypt before, or anywhere else for that matter, nor was there another city like Ramses. The king built docks and warehouses that became focal points for the world's commerce, and to Ramses, from near and far, came the ships of every people that trafficked over the seas. The king also built great monuments and tombs and commissioned stone sculpture that dwarfed anything in Egypt.

Indeed, stone and stone structures became a driving passion with the king. The connection between the immortality of stone and the immortality of man was old and deep in the Egyptian consciousness, and with Ramses, nothing was enough, not was there ever enough labour to build what he desired to build. Everything, finished, was belittled in his eyes. Even the great throne room where he held court and passed judgment now seemed insufficient to house a god; although to Moses, who saw it this day for the first time, it was a chamber of such size and over-whelming splendour as to make him feel like a frog dropped into the River Nile, lost and unnoticed.

Actually, the royal chamber was about a hundred feet in length and about sixty feet broad—by no means the largest room in the palace. The floor was of black basaltes, the beautiful hard marble that Moses had seen so often floating slowly down the Nile on great rafts of cane, from the distant land of Kush where it was quarried; the throne platform was of white limestone inlaid with silver and gold, and the throne where Ramses sat was in the old style, a large carved block of the palest alabaster with a back only six inches high. The side hangings of the room were of white linen, suspended between granite columns thirty feet high and embroidered with a hieroglyphic and far from truthful account of the glories of the king's reign—and including a remarkable description of the great war with Hatti. Behind the king himself there was a brick wall covered over with a bright mosaic, which depicted him in his chariot, laying about him with his mace, his horses rearing on a field carpeted with Hittite dead.

The king himself sat in the attire of the sun-god Re—a dress which he affected increasingly, and one which in its simplicity well suited his strong, muscled body. His complete lack of adornment—not a necklace on his shoulders, not a bracelet on his arms, not a ring on his fingers—was a telling contrast to the ostentatious and glittering display made by everyone else in the throne room. As with Re, what jewel could enhance his glory?—And he, the master of all jewels, made the effective point that he need burden himself with none. On his head he wore the golden crown of Re, a simple and undecorated band of gold which circled his head just above the brows and flared out to a height of five inches—very much like a truncated, inverted fez; and in his right hand, lying in his lap, he held the traditional golden sickle. For clothing, he wore only a plain, pleated, knee-length kilt of white linen. His feet were bare, his legs bare of covering or adornment.

Moses, who had seen the king from a distance a number of times but never so close as now, was both disappointed and puzzled by the drabness of his costume. Everyone in the throne room—priests and stewards and royal attendants and various ladies of unstated position and relationship, and captains and administrators and royal progeny grown to manhood, and foreigners who fascinated Moses with their strange hairdress and clothing, and the Princess Enekhas-Amon, and indeed Moses himself—everyone was dressed more richly and ornately than the king; but Moses could not comprehend that only one powerful and kingly could dispense with ornamentation. For the first time he had doubts about the omnipotence of the living god of Egypt, and this helped him keep his fears under control; also, his absorption in the pageantry and colour of the scene, the perfumes and spices that tickled his nostrils, the tale the hieroglyphs unfolded to his well-trained eyes, and particularly the huge, bright picture behind the throne—the romantic scene of battle, the dead Hittites, the champing, rearing horses-helped take his mind away from his rapidly ebbing fears of the king.

As time passed, he was able to look at the king steadily and notice the resemblance to Enekhas-Amon—the wide jaw, the full, fleshy mouth, the arched brows, and the small, thin nose. It was incongruous to see the familiar head set on the heavy, muscular shoulders. Even as his mother whispered to him, “Moses, don't stare like that!” the king's eyes met his and then lifted to recognize Enekhas-Amon. Without any of the manner of the god that Moses had imagined, he smiled thinly and nodded for her to come to him, and then said a word or two to dismiss the priest who was talking to him. As the priest backed away, Moses noticed that no one came closer than twenty-feet from the throne platform without the king's beckoning nod—and he also heard his mother whisper quickly.

“Remember, at the platform, prostrate yourself—and then crawl forward slowly until you can put your cheek against the god's feet. Flat on the ground then, and you remain there until he tells you to rise.”

Walking stiffly, as he had learned was the proper way for a prince to walk in ceremonial circumstances, Moses gave no indication of hearing her. He was conscious that the babble of voices had stopped, and though he dared not look behind him, he was certain that every eye in the place was fixed on him and his mother. Even the guards who stood behind the throne platform were watching him curiously, and when he ventured to glance at the king, he felt that the black, deep-set eyes held the same curious interest. As he knelt down and crawled up the cold steps of the throne platform, he saw his mother's legs marching firmly forward; but for his part he was glad that he had to lie flat on the floor and wriggle pronely toward the god. Not only did it provide—to his trembling soul—a sort of protection, but it relieved him of the necessity of seeing the god's face. Yet, as he crawled, he could hear them greeting each other.

“Well, my sister—as young and beautiful as ever. Welcome.”

“That's nonsense, and you know it. I am neither young nor beautiful, and I lie in a corner of this palace sick and suffering. I'm as lonely and as forgotten as a woman can be.”

“If I had only known …”

“That's neither here nor there, my brother, and I have a notion that no illness of mine would bring any pain to you. But I didn't come here to quarrel with you. We've done enough quarrelling, and for my part I want to forget it. I came here because you promised me five years ago that on the day of my son's tenth year you would look at him and give him the god's blessing.”