Moses (33 page)

Nun was ignorant and superstitious, but in one week he knew more about the Kushites and their city than Moses would ever learn, and where Moses would have starved, he could eat well. But, at the same time, he believed that it would bring worms to gnaw a man's belly if he raised his left arm and pointed at the sun at midday; he believed that salt was holy and that one must always bury a pinch in the soil before partaking of one's food; he believed that Egyptians, because they were circumcised, were swallowed at death by a giant serpent; he believed that a woman with an eye out of focus was a witch; he believed that every hill and mountain was the abode of a god; he believed that if he put his hand on another man's sexual organs, he would for ever have to obey that man's orders; he believed that all gods were born of serpents and that all snakes were holy—and the first time he saw Moses shear off a snake's head, he trembled with terror and apprehension for days—he believed that snake blood smeared on the door of a house would protect the owner of the house from evil spirits; he believed that to know the secret, forbidden name of a man would give you the power of life and death over him, and he believed that only Nehushtan knew the names of all men, and therefore had over them the power of life and death.

These were only some of the things he believed. Nehushtan was the god he bowed to, and he once explained to Moses that Nehushtan was the lord of all serpents and all Baalim, and a great serpent himself. But as to whether the Baalim, who lived upon the high places, were serpents themselves, he was uncertain, for he had been born and raised in low, flat country where no mountains could be seen and he knew of the Baalim only by hearsay. He had a notion that a Baal was in part a snake and in part a woman, a winged creature with the face and breasts of a woman and the skin and form of a serpent; but this Moses recognized as a corrupted version of a sphinx, which was one among the very ancient and half-forgotten gods of Egypt.

It was after the affair Of the Kushite woman that Moses and Nun talked a great deal about these things. The Princess Irga was found hiding in a great urn in the ruins of the Kushite temple, but Moses would not have her back and Sokar-Moses was not minded to send his master, the God-King, a woman who was so quick with a knife. So he gave her to his officers, who rolled dice for her, and she was won by Hetep-Re, who had a reputation for winning at dice more often than a man should within the normal bounds of luck. Three days after that, Hetep-Re, drunk and raging at her unwillingness to become a part of his joy, beat her to death—a matter which did not enhance his reputation with either his fellow officers or Sokar-Moses.

The Egyptians buried Irga secretly, but it got out, as such things will, and the Kushite city seethed with rage and hatred for the conquerors. Egyptians were poisoned and murdered in the night, and in return Sokar-Moses exacted punishment and death, recognizing the need to impress the population anew with his power and justice. Hetep-Re, in all this, began to whisper about that Moses was at the bottom of things, that he had deliberately freed the black princess and had incited her to revolt, so that he, with her, might rule over the Land of Kush. And more than this, for Nun said to Moses one day,

“I have heard, O Prince of Egypt, that a certain captain of chariots is saying things that shouldn't be said.”

“Whenever you call me Prince of Egypt with that unctuous Bedouin whine in your voice,” Moses replied, “I know that it is some new insolence and affront.”

“Well,” Nun shrugged, “that's as may be. You always choose to think the worst of a kindness from a miserable slave. But the fact is that Hetep-Re is saying it would be a good thing for all concerned if you were dead.”

“I don't believe that.”

“No—a Bedouin is a liar, of course. Only Egyptians tell the truth.”

“Stop that, you fool! He wouldn't dare.”

“No? Then did you know, master, that a courier came yesterday with letters from Egypt, and that Hetep-Re seems to know that even though we have been gone from Egypt more than a year, the God-King has not forgotten you and expressed the hope that perhaps you would not return at all? And that Hetep-Re feels there might be gold and advancement in it for him to make certain you do not return?”

“Where do you hear all these things?”

“Slaves talk. They even talk to each other. And women talk. I'm just a dirty Bedouin slave to you,” Nun smiled, “but you would be surprised at how well I get on with women.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Anyway,” Nun said, “I think you would do well to kill Hetep-Re before he kills you.”

“You think and talk very lightly of killing, don't you?”

“No more or less than others. There is a lot of killing goes on when you come down to it. I don't hold with beating a slave to death. Maybe because I am a slave. But I think no one will weep if Hetep-Re dies.”

“I won't have that kind of talk about an Egyptian officer!”

Nun shrugged and spoke no more, but he determined to take the matter into his own hands. There were no compunctions to be overcome by Nun; it was simply the question of preserving one life by eliminating another. The fact that he hated Hetep-Re as a man and an Egyptian made the decision less onerous, but it would have been no different if he had not hated Hetep-Re. Moses had become more than a part of Nun's life; he was the central pivot of the slave's life.

So Nun did what he had to do in the simplest and most direct terms. Unobtrusively, he watched the coming and going of the Captain of Chariots, and then late one night he waited for him. As the Egyptian passed, Nun stepped quietly behind him, hooked an arm about his neck and, with his other hand on his wrist, closed a vice that snapped Hetep-Re's neck like a reed. Then Nun let him fall to the ground, where he was found the following morning.

Nun's dread then was that Moses would know and vent his anger—or more—upon him; but Moses gave no evidence of such knowledge to Nun. And to an extent-lacking only the proof that makes knowledge absolute—Moses did know, and knew surely that no other man in the army had the terrible strength required to kill a man in such a fashion, before the victim could either struggle or resist. It was not an easy thought for Moses; the fact that he had killed in battle with his own hands did not, strangely, lessen his horror of murder; yet that horror was balanced by the awareness of Nun's devotion—a devotion both wonderful and frightening.

Nor was Moses alone in his suspicions and conclusions. The mantle and symbol of his godliness protected Nun; but now the two of them could not live on in the city as they had before. Thus it was that Sokar-Moses had a long and serious talk with the Prince of Egypt, getting down to the fact that when a flame of this kind of trouble started, it was hard to find enough water with which to put it out. Looking at Moses thoughtfully, his heavy face troubled with need for a solution that was beyond his wit and understanding, he tried at one and the same time to talk to a prince and god-and to a man in his command. It made an uneasy combination, for while it was quite true that Ramses was not eager to have Moses back in the Delta—which Sokar-Moses knew—it was also true that the death of Moses in any circumstance which the Captain of Hosts could have prevented might well require, as a symbolic measure of justice, the death of Sokar-Moses himself. So while, as he pointed out, he could not blame Moses for killing Hetep-Re, who was not much good for anything anyway, the dead man did have friends.

Moses replied that it was not his custom to go around killing people and that he had not killed Hetep-Re. How he despised these petty plots and counterplots! Here they were, a great army of conquerors, camped in the ruins of a city of mud-brick houses and stricken, hate-filled people, with no other occupation than to pick it clean of every thing of value it contained and cultivate boredom and discontent. He sensed well how each day there would be more plots hatched, more hostility and greed and corruption—until in time it would take all Sokar-Moses' brutal discipline to keep the soldiers from destroying each other. Day by day, parties went out to raid whatever little villages they could find, but mostly the villages were empty; the people had fled, taking with them all they could carry—and leaving precious little booty. But it was not to the God-King's way of thinking that a vast army should be dispatched so far at such expense without exploiting every possible avenue to profit.

It was the beginning of Moses' wisdom that he reflected upon his growing contempt for his own species instead of giving way to it. Yet the more he saw of them, the less able was he, in any way, to admire his own kind. Greedy, lustful, treacherous, boastful, ignorant and superstitious, they were animals without the simple and straightforward dignity of animals; they killed for the simple thrill of killing. Mercy was a word without meaning to them, and honour—it had come to a point where the very word
macaat
turned his stomach.

They held a city whose young men had been massacred, and they turned it into a slave and a whore. They took children to bed with them, and they killed women as casually as men stepped on insects. Their talk was foul and unbridled, and if they had been wild men under the gods of Egypt, they were even less of mankind now that their gods were far away and powerless. They went out of their way to urinate and drop their faeces in the temple of the mother-goddess of Kush, for had they not dragged down her image and smashed it—just as they had overthrown all the other gods of Kush?

Never before had Moses seen the gods so clearly as now. Far away they were, but their image was in these men and what they did; and alone, where he could not be heard, Moses defied the gods aloud, cursed them, and challenged them to do their worst with him. “Pay for the acts of your worshippers,” he would say to them. He became what the Egyptians and their neighbours called
leshbed
, which means an enemy of the gods, and thereby a madman. But Moses was hardly mad. And when he passed by the temple of Kush and saw the wanton wreckage and smelled the foul stink of human waste, he did not pity the gods of Kush, who, be felt, were no better or worse than the gods of Egypt, but instead told himself, “Wait, you gods of Egypt, until this is done to you.”

He wrapped his princely aloofness around him like an invisible cloak, and he lived with his dream of Merit-Aton; but Sokar-Moses told him bluntly, as bluntly as he could, that they were a goodly distance from the Great House. “I suppose you want to go back,” he said.

Moses shrugged. His own vision was of a white house on an escarpment overlooking the high reaches of the River Nile.

“The God-King doesn't want you back—for whatever reason he has. But I suppose you know that?”

“I know it,” Moses nodded.

Sokar-Moses went into details concerning the expedition and the God-King. Ramses was disappointed at the amount of loot that had been sent back to the Delta—just as the soldiers and captains were disappointed at their own share. It would be no victory triumph to return now, nor did Ramses desire the army back. The point was—here they were, and the God-King expected gold.

“I don't know what we can do about that,” Moses said, “We can't make gold.”

“But we can find it,” Sokar-Moses said, and then went on to specify his admiration for Moses as a man of military parts, a warrior and a killer. He reminded Moses that in the one glimpse he had had of him during the great battle where the manhood of Kush perished, he had seen a veritable god of hate and fury. “Seti-Keph knew his men,” he said. “How I wish he was here with me now!”

It had to be said, and this man made his point directly and thoughtlessly; and it cut like a knife through the veneer of righteousness the young prince was building around himself. It would have taken a more sensitive man than Sokar-Moses to realize how complex and deeply confused Moses was; the commander could only grapple with simple virtues, simple defects, as he saw them, and he told Moses that he understood the other's desire to return home. He could also smell the fear Ramses might well have of a son like this, a young man so tall and commanding in presence, terrible in battle, and seemingly lonely and given to brooding upon his own inner ambitions. A man who wore half of a name in defiant mystery.

“You will go back in good time,” the Captain of Hosts assured him. “You have the God-King's own sentence of exile for three years, and already half of the exile is over. And believe me, it weighs as heavily on us as on you, for your godly father is bitter enough about the small gifts we have sent him.”

Moses no longer bothered to deny his parentage every time it was raised, and now he answered only that all the wealth in the world would still leave Ramses bitter and dissatisfied.

“I pass no judgments on the gods,” Sokar-Moses said evenly. “The God-King, however, suggests that this City of Irgebayn is not the City of Kush at all—not the city of which our legends tell, where the walls are covered with gold and where there is a statue of the mother-goddess all of gold and silver and one hundred cubits high. And much more, as you know.”

“These are stories for children,” Moses said. “How can you believe them?”

“I am repeating your father's words. He holds the city to be at the source of the Nile, where no man in our time has ever been—deep in those mountains to the south of us. But if we take the army there on a long chance of finding it, how will we protect our rear? And if we lose many men in the south, how do we know that we would ever fight our way back?”

“In other words,” Moses smiled, “the Lord Ramses advises you to send me to the south to find a city that never existed, and if I don't return, no one will weep?”

Sokar-Moses was a direct man, and honest according to his lights. “More or less,” he agreed.

[4]

SO, IN TIME, Moses and Nun set out to find the legendary City of Kush. Lost cities and legendary cities, cities of beauty and peace and wealth beyond calculation, were an important part of men's thoughts in those days. And Moses sensed that it had to be so. Whether it was Nun or Sokar-Moses or some Hittite mercenary, there was in every man a spark that pleaded for love, companionship, understanding; a spark that, no matter how overlaid it became with brutality and hostility, could not be snuffed out. So that when men looked upon their cities and saw the slums, the filth, the misery, the hunger, it was as if they looked upon what had happened to themselves. That they compared this reality with a dream that had no likelihood of fulfilment was something Moses had never before considered with any degree of thoughtfulness. Now he did, and almost to a point where he hoped he really would find a golden city to the south. For if honour,
justice—
the precious
macaat
of the Egyptians—had been proved completely hollow, he could console himself with the memory that
macaat
was a word he had never heard from the lips of Amon-Teph and Neph. Quite the contrary; they had accepted, as one accepts the day and night, the fact that the man of reason dwells in a world of unreason. But while so much of the fine edge of Moses' youth had been hammered dull, his optimism and eagerness remained with him. Already he had known wholeness and infinite knowledge during his one night of love and enchantment with Merit-Aton; somewhere, he could believe, there was a promised land where reason blended with unreason—where men lived without murder, filth and deceit.