Moses (38 page)

The change in themselves was not anything they considered consciously, yet they were not unaware of it: Manhood in all its fullness had come to a prince and a slave in various islands of battle and wilderness and exile; now they were taking their maturity back to civilization. Moses let Nun bedeck him. For hours, Nun had polished every bit of gold and silver with a mixture of fat and ashes. The great golden collar lay high upon the massive chest of Moses and tight around his neck, and he recalled the time he had first worn it in the audience chamber, when it covered his shoulders and weighted him like the oppressive prescience of doom. This morning it lay lightly on the white scar-tissue of battle, and though all the rings and bracelets were commonplace to him, they seemed to Nun to make a wall between the two of them. The girdle of gold plates set with rubies that encircled his waist and held a tiny symbolic hammer of royalty would have bought the lives of a thousand like Nun. The Bedouin wore a striped Babylonian kilt of soft wool that Moses had purchased before they left Kush; and if as a slave he could not wear the royal colour of gold, the silver belt Moses had given him was the finest thing he had ever put on. Yet it accented rather than lessened their difference.

It was still before noon when they finished their preparations. They left the dugout high on the bank. Moses went without weapons, for even a dagger would have marred him today, and Nun wore only belt weapons, sword and dagger. Thus did they set put for the white house, high on the cliff and a good distance from where they had halted.

As they climbed the escarpment they lost sight of the house, nor did they see it again until they were almost upon it; but first they saw the little temple where Merit-Aton's mother worshipped. She would worship there no more. Stone from stone, the temple was violated and it lay as a ruin of anger and violence. Moses and Nun approached it slowly and neither spoke, but in Nun's thoughts the gods of Kush had been here. The bodies of two children who must have fled to the temple for shelter lay there, the children of the houseslaves, and on the little bodies the flesh was dry as leather.

Moses looked at Nun wildly and wordlessly, his eyes full of fear, and Nun was afraid to speak. The house was still ahead of them, but close as they were now, they saw its ruin. All the vegetation had withered for want of irrigation; there was rubble around the house; one wall had been broken down and fire had raged through the outhouses at the back. The verandah was littered with rubble and dirt, and there had been no rain to wash away the black mark of blood.

“Master, stay here and let me look,” Nun pleaded, but Moses heard nothing. They found the doctor first, a body without a head; the head had been taken away to make embalming impossible, but not so with the women. Merit-Aton lay in the sand on her face, a long Kushite spear still in her back, pinning to earth the sand- and sundried thing that had been her body, as if still screaming, “So did ye to the women of Kush!” Thus had she lain there, even as the shrivelled remains of her mother lay huddled beside the verandah.

It was Nun who dug the sand and buried the bodies. Moses stood on the verandah without moving or speaking, and finally Nun had to take him by the hand and lead him away. “They will not change in the sand, master,” he explained, “and you can make arrangements at Karnak for the embalming. More than two years do I reckon they have been dead. Let your grief out, master—let it out.” But Moses remained mute and heard nothing.

[11]

IT WAS THE engineer Neph who, much later, out of his wisdom and sympathy said to Moses, “Did you slay her then? For life and death are a coming and going that we are never far from, and unless one can look at death, he cannot look at life either.” “I slew her,” Moses answered—and to that Neph said flatly that Kush had slain Aton-Moses and his family. Kush was mortally hurt. “So all that bore the name Egypt was a target for Kush, and we ride a wheel of war that we turn like terrible and foolish children.” But that was nearly a month afterward, when Moses came to see Neph again.

To Karnak down the River Nile, he was silent, but Nun could see the hurt and guilt swelling and festering inside him. He spoke a word or two when he had to speak, but no more, and they made the passage in silence, divested of every joy.

Once they were in Karnak, he gave Nun some of his jewels to sell to pay for funerary services. But before Nun returned up the river, he attended to a mission of his own. He was quite insistent about this—certainly his master was in no state to pay much attention to a sudden purpose on the part of his slave—and only when he was sure it was accomplished did Nun embark with the embalmers.

Moses was not entirely clear as to his own motives for proceeding with the embalming. Long ago, it seemed to him, he had divested himself of any real belief in the mumbo jumbo of tomb and body and
ka
and afterlife, yet the ritualized memories of childhood remained. It had even occurred to him that once Nun departed with the embalmers, he would know some peace; but instead grief and anxiety and guilt filled his mind.

In the riverside tavern where they had found lodgings, he began the process of drowning his misery in wine. He sat on the common bench at the dirty wooden table and consumed mug after mug of the sour southern vintage. So far as the innkeeper and the fishermen, the boatmen and stevedores who frequented the tavern, knew, he was just another captain of chariots on his way back to Tanis from the conquered and occupied Land of Kush, and he was of such a size and appearance that no one bothered him. His white scar-traces, his stubble of beard and his great spread of shoulder invited neither companionship nor interference. He paid for his wine with the little plates of gold that he had broken off the royal neckpiece—the bulk of which he kept in his pouch—but all manner of gold came from Kush, and where gold was concerned, men were open-minded and understanding.

The prostitutes who plied their trade in the water-front taverns learned that he was not to be approached until he had soaked up sufficient wine to become amiable and free with his little plates of gold. They saw that he could be gentle and considerate or wild and terrible. A burly riverman who resented his woman's attentions to Moses drew a knife and came at Moses. The whole room heard the snap of the bones in the man's wrist as Moses twisted it and flung the man away, as one throws a sack of wheat. They were wary of him after that. His speech was the speech of a gentleman, but he was dirty and unkempt, covered with filth that was blasphemous in a land of ritual cleanliness, unshaven, his black mop of hair tangled, uncombed, full of the lice and dirt of the water front.

Nun was gone for better than three weeks, and in those three weeks Moses ate little or nothing, lived on the sour wine against which his stomach rebelled, vomited it up and rilled himself with it again and again, woke from sleep in the mud of the riverbank, in brothels.and hellholes, in evil dens where murderers, thieves and pimps made common cause. Bearded, stinking with his filth and drunkenness, robbed of his pouch and weapons, he was found by Nun at last in the mud under the piles of the water-front tavern where they had their lodgings—unconscious, in a stupor of alcohol and exhaustion.

Nun was not alone. With him was Neph—for that had been Nun's previous purpose. Recalling that Sokar-Moses had told them that Neph was combing the villages around Abydos to find stone, Nun had sent a messenger to the engineer with news of what had happened at the white house on the cliff. Neph bad taken his own barge and had reached the house only hours after Nun arrived.

As Nun told Moses afterwards, he would have known Neph easily enough, for Moses' life had become an actual part of his own. Nun told Neph the story of Moses' first visit to the white house more than three years before, and of the love that had come so quickly to the Prince of Egypt and Merit-Aton. Neph listened with interest and wonder, and then, when he and this heavy-muscled Bedouin who had become so intimate a part of Moses finished their work at the white house, which Neph closed up as a tomb for the family who had lived there, they returned to Karnak together.

So it was that Nun easily raised the huge figure of Moses in his arms and, tenderly as one carries a sleeping child, bore him to where Neph's barge was moored. They placed him on a sleeping pallet in the stern, and after the barge had cast off, they washed his body with olive oil and a soft mixture of ashes and talc and then with the water of the River Nile. Through all this he slept, stirring only now and again and sometimes talking in his sleep. Nun shaved him and cleaned and combed his hair, and still he slept—through all that day and the night that followed.

And all night the barge slid over the silver-black surface of the river. With nightfall, the slaves shipped their oars, ate their supper of bread, olives, figs and water, whispered for a while and then stretched out on the floorboards to sleep. So did the crew sleep and the workmen Neph had brought with him from the City of Ramses. Neph himself took the tiller-oar and stood at the helm with Nun; and Bedouin though he was, Nun could feel the warm and secure embrace of the Land of Egypt, with its endless length of sheltered river—where all was order and peace and security. For the first few hours of the night watch, they spoke little, Nun only in answer when Neph talked of Nun's master and asked the slave,

“Why is it then your ‘master,' when you told me how you mixed your blood on the battlefield and swore an oath as blood brothers?”

Nun did not answer the question glibly. He thought for a good while before he replied, “We are both of us strong men.” He told Neph the story of the snake bite in the riverbottom jungle. “We exchanged lives. I gave him back his, and he gave me mine. He cursed Nehushtan, who is the god of my fathers, and he showed me how to be stronger than Nehushtan. Should one ever part from such a man? But we can't be together as brothers; each one of us is too wilful. It was my headstrong will that made them take me out of the work gangs in the Land of Goshen. They tried to kill me and I was too strong for them to kill, and they broke their rods and their whips on my back while I laughed at them. But this man I love, and I will be his slave because there is no other way for us to be together. He is a prince, and I am a Bedouin, a Levite, a child of darkness and superstition, as he so often reminds me. Well, he is right.”

Neph waited, but there was no more that Nun could explain, and then Neph asked, “What did he look for, there in the South? Surely, he knew there was no city of gold in that wild land.”

Strangely enough, Nun answered without hesitation, “I think, Egyptian, that he looked for gods. You Egyptians are drunk with your gods, and you love them or hate them. For my part, Nehushtan was my god, but I cursed him and put him away. It was no easy thing, but once done it was done, and I can live well enough without gods. Not you—I saw the Egyptians in Kush, where the gods of Egypt were far away. They behaved like animals. But for this man, my master, all gods are hateful, and his face is against the gods.”

“Did he look for gods to hate?”

“I am not sure,” Nun replied slowly. “It may be that he looked for gods to love.”

[12]

AT THIS TIME, it was said among the people who lived along the River Nile that if you brought your troubles to Mother Nile, she would wash them away; if you brought your fears, she would quiet them; and if you brought your hurts, she would heal them. To Moses, the long, gentle and uneventful trip to the Delta was necessary and important, for it allowed the scars inside him to heal slowly, and it took the painful edge from his great guilt. Many were the hours when he sprawled on the warm wooden deck, watched the green shores slip by, watched the play of morning and evening colour on the desert escarpments, watched the freight barges and papyrus boats go by—and was able to look into himself, and he tried to grasp the meaning of himself, a single man, as posed against the immensity of the earth, the aimlessness of human ways, and the random cruelty and meaninglessness of human existence.

At other times he talked to Neph, very often with Nun stretched on the deck, silent but listening. All three of them were interwoven in a process of change, but perhaps the change was deepest in Nun, who said the least of any. Several times, Moses told Neph the story of the terrible battle where the army of Kush was destroyed, as if Neph could explain why men destroyed each other; and once Moses picked up an insect that was crawling across the deck and crushed the life from it between his fingers. “This is what we are to the gods,” Moses said thoughtfully. “Do I know or care what the hopes and dreams of this stain between my fingers were?”

“Men are not insects.”

“To the gods? How do you know, Neph?”

“Because the insects did not make us. We made the gods, Moses.”

“The priests say otherwise. The gods made man.”

“Nehushtan ate the eggs of a tortoise,” Nun interjected, “and vomited upon the tortoise's back. He saw little things moving and crawling in his vomit, and these were men. He gave them the tortoise's back for the world and he killed the tortoise and set fire to its flesh, so that the flesh would burn for ever from each end of the tortoise shell, and this was Gehenna. And when the flames of Gehenna have softened the tortoise shell enough, Nehushtan will swallow the whole thing, and that will be the end of men and the world.”

Neph smiled, and Moses said, “The gods work less crudely, for, given enough time, man will destroy himself and save Nehushtan the trouble.”

“We've lasted a while,” Neph shrugged, “and we may last a while longer. In spite of the gods, Nun. I remember a story of the Sea Rovers, who have among their gods one called Pro-me-tus, or something of the sort. They have many gods, but he was the only one who took pity on man and learned to love man. You see, the Sea Rovers are blunt and forthright people, as becomes men who make their way through life by trading when they can't steal and stealing when they can't trade, and they are very ready to admit that the gods have nothing but contempt for mankind. Man, they hold, is a toy, and the more the gods can torture him and bewilder him, the more delighted the gods are. This is their amusement, or so the Sea Rovers say. But for some reason this god, Pro-me-tus, came to admire and love man, and he stole the sacred fire from the great mountain where the gods live and gave it to mankind—and with it, of course, warmth and knowledge and skill in working metals.”