Moses (30 page)

Moses bad never seen country like this, and in all Egypt there was nothing to approximate it—its great stretches of fertile plain, its cool winds, and its faint backdrop of purple mountains, far to the south. It broke through his depression, for it was a country to rejoice the heart and soul of man.

It also gave Moses a sense of the insularity of Egypt. They Who spoke so glibly of ruling the world had only the vaguest notion of the world. Even the monstrous betrayal of Seti-Keph became petty brutality in this enormous expanse—and the sight of the mountains, still so far away, gave indication that this too was only the beginning of something far larger….

And then one morning, as the army began its march, they saw the enemy—far and small in the distance.

[18]

AFTERWARDS, MOSES TRIED to remember—but could not-who it was had told him that no one person sees or directs a battle. A general may begin it with order and precision, and after the heat and fury have begun to wane,he may, if fortunate, gather the strings of organization together again; but battle itself is a hell unto itself, and no man, but fear and fury alone, rule it. Battle is a spasm, a seizure, a fit of madness sanctioned and legalized for the victor and punishable upon the vanquished as the victor sees fit. Battle is all that man is not and was never meant to be, and when he enters battle man becomes something awful, less and more than the pattern that made him man.

Kush came to battle with grief and hate. While they were still in the distance, and Seti-Keph was coolly and methodically marshalling his order of defence and counterattack, Moses heard their cry. It was like no human sound he had ever been witness to before. It was a deep, vibrating roar of rage from thirty thousand throats, and it boomed like a terrible drum. He heard their war drums too, a low and frightful pulse, but the roar of human rage sounded above the drums and blanketed them and cried death to the skies and the distant horizon. So awful was the cry that Moses believed that if there were birds in the sky, they would have been struck dead by it. Never before had Moses heard or imagined such a sound, but on many a night to come, it would wake him from his sleep, sweating and sick with the same fear he felt when he heard it first.

Were they all afraid—these soldiers of Egypt—as he was afraid? His chariot, in the guard of Seti-Keph, was being drawn by the trotting horses to the close flank, and the other chariots, host by host, were drawing away eastward across the plain, a curving flank like a scythe flung back for the reaping. His driver, Nun, did not appear to be either afraid or disturbed, swinging his horses in position carefully and intently, looping the long thong of his bronze chariot hammer around his neck, where it would be to hand if he was called on to beat off an attack.

Could Seti-Keph be afraid, so intent on his work as he thundered back and forth across the front in his gleaming chariot? His plan of battle was simple, direct and obvious. Two lines of heavily-armed spearmen were forming shoulder to shoulder, making a shield-wall about two hundred paces across, one end of it anchored to the edge of the rocky river-gorge, the other end reaching to the curved scythe of waiting chariots. In front of the shield-wall, the archers of Hatti and Babylon and the slingers of Canaan had taken their places, a line of them covering the shield-wall entirely. They would drive their shafts and fling their stones until the attack was upon them, and then they would fall back through the shield-wall to support it wherever it might be broken. Behind the shield-wall were the remaining footsoldiers, each host ready under its captain. If the shield-wall held, they would wait until the Egyptians took the offensive; if the flank of the shield-wall was turned, they would extend the wall in themselves, and if the wall was broken through, they would enter the battle at the gap.

As for the chariots, they would strike the flank of Kush when the attack was joined. So Moses knew, and with Nun, he had fixed the razor-sharp cutting swords to his chariot's axles, secure in the knowledge that nothing human could stand before them. Yet he was afraid. The short, heavy javelin he held was wet in his hand and his heart hammered in his chest. He was silent, as was the whole Egyptian army, held as it were in the spell of the terrible cry of hate that came from Kush.

Kush was close now. Their front was perhaps a hundred men wide, and the black warriors had painted their faces white in their colour of mourning and death and they wore white feathers upon their heads. They advanced at a trot, their spears over their shoulders, ready to be dropped to the level when they were close enough for the final charge; and from his vantage point in the chariot, Moses could see rank upon rank of them stretching into the distance—an army so vast that it seemed to turn the show of force by the Egyptians into a pitiful mockery. And in front of the first rank, the drummers trotted, their short wooden drums slung from their necks in front, their fingers beating out a threatening tattoo. They advanced close to the gorge of the Nile, their single plan, apparently, an attempt to break the shield-wall there and go in behind it. His mouth dry, his feeling of horror and unreality ever increasing, Moses watched; and he noticed that Nun watched too, staring in silent fascination and concentration at the great river of black men.

Kush was a good three hundred paces away when the archers of Hatti began to shoot, their powerful laminated bows filling the air with a singing swarm of arrows that could be heard even above the screaming anger of Kush. The drummers fell first, and then the first rank of spearmen dropped their lances and broke into an incredibly swift run. But before they had gone twenty paces, they lay upon the ground, skewered with arrows, while the rank behind them leaped across their bodies. Now all the archers were shooting as quickly as they could lay arrows to their bows and draw and loose, and behind them, the slingers, legs spread wide, were spinning their slings and loosing a deadly hail of rocks.

The second rank of Kush went down and then the third and then the fourth; but to Moses, watching, shifting his weight as Nun struggled with the suddenly nervous and rearing horses, the charge of Kush seemed hardly interrupted, for each rank leaped over the sprawling bodies in front and each rank was coming closer. The black warriors disdained to cover themselves with their shields, swinging them by their sides to lessen the wind resistance as they ran—and now Egypt found voice and screamed back its own hate, defiance, fear and celebration of death. The two floods of voice mingled and rose to a searing crescendo, and the horses reared wildly and added their own trumpet of violent sound. The archers, loosing low and short and without aiming now, momentarily halted the charge with a squirming, bleeding breastwork of black bodies, but like a dammed river that overflows, the black men poured over their own dead and the archers threw down their bows and raced for the cover of the shield-wall. Most of them went through, but some were impaled on Egyptian spears as the shield-wall braced for the shock.

By now, Kush had lost all order; the broken lines of spearmen made no effort to form themselves; and the massive, roaring black tide hurled itself upon the spear-wall with a crash of sound that finally cemented the screaming of the soldiers into a single terrible noise.

Yet, to Moses, it retained the quality of a hideous dream, for aside from the rearing of the horses, no movement, no change, had taken place in the long half-circle of chariots that stretched from the flank for almost a mile. Apparently the black men had decided to stake all upon smashing the footsoldiers, believing that to be central to the decision—nor could Moses imagine what might be the fate of the chariots once the footmen were destroyed.

It did not seem that anything could save them from destruction now. For just minutes, the shield-wall held—and then it bent inward like a thin sheet of copper under the hammer of the craftsman—and then it broke here and there, the screaming warriors of Kush pouring through.

That was the last impression Moses had of the battle of the footsoldiers; for, seemingly without signal or order, the chariots were in motion. He awoke from his dream, his fear departed, the sweat on his skin was like ice. Nun was lashing the horses and shouting at them in his own Bedouin tongue—and far out on the plain, the whole massive line of chariots was wheeling around, using the shield-wall as a pivot, and driving in upon the army of Kush. Then Moses' area of sight narrowed. He glimpsed Seti-Keph for a moment, the little man waving a javelin above his head, and he tried to tell Nun to keep the commander in view. But no sound, no words, no meaning, could be communicated in the hellish noise of the battlefield.

His area of sight narrowed still further and his concentration mounted as the chariot thundered ahead. First, a single black man tried to spear a horse and Moses drove a javelin through his chest. Then two more, and Moses hurled his second javelin and fended the spear of the other with his shield. The man had come too close, and his howl of agony bit through all other sound as the axle-sword ripped out his guts. Nun whipped the horses, and suddenly they were within the thickness of the army of Kush with the black men on every side of them—but already the pounding, half-mad horses, drawing their great wooden carts, had cast their own peculiar terror before them. The black men gave back, pressed upon each other to get out of the chariot's path, and howling his own paean of excitement, Nun drove the horses over them and through them.

Hanging on to the rail of the lurching chariot with his shield arm, Moses cast his javelins into the press of bodies. He could not miss, and as they fled from the chariot, packing themselves and making themselves defenceless in their panic, he saw his heavy javelins pin two and three men together. And when another chariot sent them against him, the spinning axle-swords ripped through body, arm and leg, increasing the panic. They fled but there was no place to flee to. They fell upon the ground to avoid the terrible axle-blades, and the bronze-shod horses and the huge, bronze-bound wheels thundered over them. Some tried to fight, to spear the horses, to climb on to the tailboards of the chariots; but these men of Kush were few, and nothing to the fire of panic that raged among them. By the hundreds, they cast down their long spears, threw off their shields and tried to flee—only to come up against the thousands of their own men who had not yet reached the boundary of battle.

The chariots did not go unscathed. Moses caught glimpses of chariots turned over, of horses lying on their backs, trying to kick out of the harness—but these were few. So long as a chariot could be kept in rapid motion, it had a good chance of remaining unhurt.

As for Moses, he was without thought or fear or horror or remorse; he was without heart or soul or conscience or concern. A red flame burned in his brain, and it burned away all that he had learned and knew of love among men, all that he had learned or knew of the whole process of belonging to humankind. The words which man had made to tell his fellow man of love and hunger and need and work had disappeared, and in their place, there issued from his mouth a meaningless scream of sound that joined the other sounds of rage and anguish. He existed not to create but to kill, and every motion his lithe body made was to kill and kill and kill.

He had cast all his javelins now, thrown off his shield and seized his bow. For an instant, the chariot broke free from the crush, and lurching and jolting, raced across an open space covered with the dead and wounded of Kush. The horses, trained not to shy from the bodies of men, caught in the tension and fury, half-mad with their own fear and excitement, galloped upon living and dead alike. All around them, the chariots raced and circled and drove into the panic-mass of Kush; but for a moment, Nun drove parallel to the black men, and Moses, braced on the swaying chariot, loosed arrow after arrow into the dark mass. The panic reversed itself and surged toward them, and with the other chariots, they thundered through it, Moses loosing his arrows without aiming or thinking. Two hundred shafts were in the quivers fixed to the inside of the chariot, and Moses loosed and loosed until his arm was flayed raw, the blood running down over his bow. Both he and Nun had been wounded, but he had no memory of how and when; their bodies were coated and streaked with blood and the floor of the chariot was slippery with blood and both horses were mantled with blood and foam, but Moses felt no pain and no fear. Time had disappeared and space was shapeless and directionless. It seemed that at one moment they had been in the thick of a limitless, massive and uncountable host of Kush, and then of a sudden, the great black host had broken and was fleeing in every direction, thick clumps of men at first, and then twenties and tens and then twos and threes and then a flood of panic-stricken men in flight, each for himself, spreading over the broad, grassy plain—and behind them and on them the chariots killing and killing and killing.

His arrows were gone, but the chariot thundered on to kill. The sun was overhead, so he knew fitfully, as much as he could know anything, that hours of battle had been—and motion slowed. The horses were tired. He saw a horse of another chariot go down on its knees, dying from earlier wounds, the chariot flung on its side, the men in it thrown like balls; but his thought process was unable to consider such matters. He was to kill, his long Hittite sword in hand, and Nun, his bronze hammer swinging from its bloody thong, was also to kill. They followed the men of Kush, hunting them like hares, and they killed and killed. They killed until Moses could hardly lift his arm and the horses could no longer run. They were far out on the plain now and the silence was paralysing and frightening. The battle was out of sight, and the noise of what remained of the battle came only as a murderous whisper. Here and there in the distance they saw chariots, and here and there they saw the fleeing men of Kush, but the will to kill was draining out of Moses. Life and the knowledge of life was returning, and it welled up inside of him as sickness and nausea….

The horses walked, and Nun dropped the reins and the whip and turned to face his master. He began to laugh mirthlessly, his face twitching, and without warning he swung his bloody hammer at Moses. Moses pulled away and the hammer whistled past his face, and then Moses struck with his sword, catching Nun a glancing cut on the brow, striking him full with the flat of the blade and cutting open a gash in the skin. For a moment, Nun stood there, the blood pouring down his face; then he took a step toward Moses, attempting to raise the hammer; then he stumbled, staggered and fell upon the tailboard, rolled over on to the ground and lay there. The horses continued to walk, and as the chariot moved away, Moses stared trancelike at the man he had struck down. The space between them increased. Nun attempted to raise himself, wiped the blood from his eyes and looked at Moses. Their eyes met, but Moses was without thought or reaction, empty—and bereft of hope or anger.