Moses (42 page)

As to what they were, he had no illusions. He had heard then, and their ways described by Amon-Teph, erudite, sophisticated and knowledgeable—the civilized man who tried to keep the loathing out of his voice and judgment. He himself, Moses, had watched them labour under the whips of Neph's overseers—the good and gentle Neph who was like his brother and father in one—yet neither to himself nor to Neph had it appeared wrong that the long whips of plaited bullhide should nag and tear at the mud-coated skin of these bearded Bedouins. For if slaves were born human, once put out to work under the sun upon the mighty creations of Egypt, they soon were divested of their human qualities.

Not yet on earth had the thought taken root that men were equal in the eyes of the gods, under the sun, or under the starry sky.

So Moses knew what they were, and a thousand times had worn the mental badge of their shame and misery on his own smooth and healthy skin. Perhaps if the course of his own life had gone differently, if he had learned to love the sheen of gold and the glitter of jewels, if he had developed a taste for power, a lust for domination—if he had been able to have contempt and anger towards Enekhas-Amon, that vain and ambitious woman who was the only mother he had ever known—if he had never come under the spell of Amon-Teph and the old priests of the high tower, if he had not one day walked into a room where an engineer planned the glories of man's civilization—perhaps if these things had not happened to him, he might have been able to wipe away the image and memory of who he was and from whence he had come.

But had the memory gone, he would not have been Moses of the half-name. This was, in good part, his own speculation and reverie as the boat was steered through the papyrus labyrinth; and he wondered, as he had so often before, what force traces and maps the paths of men. During the formative years of his life, he had been steeped all too deeply in the dualism that exists between gods and men in the Egyptian theology, not to seize, if inadvertently, upon symbolism as explanation. These waterways in the papyrus were a mysterious network in which a man could be lost for weeks, yet Nun knew his way, and every turn and twist of the canals was imprinted somewhere in his mind. Howsoever he might appear to deviate, his destination remained firm and unchanged.

So then, it appeared to Moses, that his own wanderings had led him here, not home; because he had come to believe as did Neph that there could be only search but no true destination for people like himself. In his own way and within the crippling limitations of his own time, Moses had become a rationalist—but it was a rationalism limited and stunted within the implacable framework of the gods; and now he saw himself, the enemy of the gods, as the captive of the gods too.

He realized that it might have been different, had not the men of Kush, their hearts filled with hatred and grief, destroyed the entity of the white house on the escarpment. If he had wed Merit-Aton, he would have wed Egypt—the old, proud Egypt of the Upper Nile, and then too he would no longer have been Moses of the half-name.

Yet the sorrow that remained was for the lovely woman, not for the circumstances lost. He had no resentment against the path the boat was taking towards the Land of Goshen, for the pathways had already been defined, and neither the oarsman nor the boat—as Moses thought—did anything but follow the current.

“So be it,” he said to himself, almost with relief, almost with peace. “I am tired of pretending, tired of aping, tired of being a stranger in a strange land. Let it come as it may.”

Yet he knew well enough that he would also be a stranger in the Land of Goshen.

[17]

HE STEPPED INTO the water to help Nun, and together they drew the light papyrus boat up on to the grassy bank. When the ebb of the river flood began, Goshen and the other lands that rimmed the Delta were as green and lovely as anything in Egypt. But these places had no canals or irrigation works to store the water and retain it, and as the ebb continued, the face of the land hardened and parched; the grass yellowed and died, and the dust gathered and rose in puffs and clouds with every breath of wind. The land was hot and the stink of the marsh blew over it. Only the waterbanks remained green and lush.

They walked; an Egyptian in a loincloth, with hunting weapons, and beside him, a bear of a bearded man whose long hair was braided in a heavy plait. They walked in a silent land, a sorrowful and hot land, and the dust eddied around their feet.

“Is it far, the city of the Levites?” Moses asked.

And Nun snorted mockingly, “Cities? Are we a people for cities? Are the mud hovels we live in houses? We lay our heads away from the weather as an animal does.” He had changed; the fetid air of the place worked in him like poison; he was full of apprehension and anger, not at Moses, but at nameless things and at himself too.

“There is a city of the slave people,” he laughed, pointing to a heap of rubble and mud brick, abandoned, with only a few lizards running in and out of the debris. “Is that what we seek?” Moses wanted to know, and Nun shook his head and laughed bitterly again. “There are more slaves than the Levites in Goshen.” They went on. They saw a few goats chewing at the yellow grass. The goats were scrawny and sick-looking, and Nun explained that when the goats were sleek and healthy, the Egyptians took them. Moses himself was not defined; whether he came here as Egyptian or Levite, he did not know, yet he murmured, “So Egypt steals from slaves.” “Their lives—so why not their goats?” “And if you ruled a land, Nun, would there be no slaves?” The Bedouin was silent, with no answer to a question he never posed for himself.

They came to an old well with a few palm trees growing around it, and there they paused to rest and shelter for a moment from the heat of the sun. Three naked children, very small and thin, perhaps six or seven years of age, played in the shade, and they looked up and saw Nun before they saw the man behind him. He spoke to them in the tongue of the Levites and their eyes widened, fixed upon the silver bracelets that circled each arm above the elbow. They did not reply, but stared at him wide-eyed and immobile, as children do when curiosity struggles against timidity. Then they saw behind him the tall figure of Moses, the clean-shaven face and the neck-length cropped hair; and their curiosity turned into panic and they fled, whimpering and running as fast as their skinny little legs could carry them.

“The Children of Israel,” Nun shrugged, gloom fastening upon him like a weight on his shoulders. “Why did we come here, O master?” he asked Moses. Not unkindly, but pointedly, Moses again asked his slave, “Where is the city of the Levites?” And Nun pointed beyond the palms to a cluster of mud-brick hovels. There, the children ran, and he and Nun followed. If Nun walked slowly and uncertainly, Moses had the added uncertainly that those he approached would fear him, and in his mind begged them, “Look on me with a little kindness, for I have a particular grief.” But he was too Egyptian, and Egypt was in the upright pridefulness of his walk, in the clean-shaven brown skin of his face, in the shock of black, banged hair, in the grace and health of his smooth muscles. They would be afraid of him as the children had been afraid, and he lagged behind Nun, dragging his feet. He suddenly regretted the long hunting knife that hung from his belt, his quiver of sharp arrows and the great, ominous laminated Hittite war bow. So did Egypt come, weighed down with the weapons of death, and now they were heavy as his own thoughts, which pleaded, “But look only on my Kushite stave, where the notches beyond counting are the exile Egypt imposed on me, and that is not all that Egypt did to me as well as you.”

They had a well there, outside the mud hovels, with a thatch of papyrus to keep the sun off the water. A woman drew water at the well, and to her the three children ran, burying their frightened faces in the ragged, shapeless woollen dress she wore. Another woman, sitting crosslegged beside the well, climbed to her feet, and still more women and children emerged from the hovels and from the alleys between them as the two strange men approached.

The Woman at the well looked up in fear, for her face had been cast and shaped by fear, not by joy or anticipation—a thin, weatherbeaten face, dark-eyed and hollow-cheeked—and she fixed her eyes on Nun, who spread his arms in a gesture of peace and called out in the speech of the Levites,

“I am not to be afraid of, Sarah, daughter of Jabed. I am Nun, the son of Ephala, the son of Zilpah, and you are kin to me by my mother and my cousin, Ephrel, so where is the need to look at me thus, as if I were strange to everything here?”

“You are not Nun, the son of Ephala, who was taken away and whipped to death because his back was proud and unbending,” the woman replied with a kind of certain knowledge and haughty defiance.

“Then look at me again, woman, and call the others to look at me.”

“Nun is dead. The dead do not walk with silver bangles and fat on their flesh. And who is that tall Egyptian behind you?”

“He is my master, and he allows me to come back to look at the place where I was born.”

“Oh ho—such sights for an Egyptian lord to see! And what do you want of us? We have not a bit of gold or bronze or food for you to take. Leave us in peace, whoever you are.”

Now the other women were coming forward, slapping their children back, squinting through the sunlight at Nun. A handful of skinny old men pushed through and past them, cackling authoritatively. Moses halted twenty paces away, watching Nun go up to them. He had been able to follow the drift of the conversation between Nun and the woman called Sarah, until it became a quick give-and-take, and then it lost him. Now, no longer speculating or wondering, but face to face with his blood and birth, he had a feeling of relief, of the breaking of a tension as old as his consciousness. He leaned upon his stave, listened and watched, but made no movement and said nothing. “Let Nun handle it,” was in his mind. Nun would know what to do, and he would do what was best; and as for himself, Moses—it seemed to him that he cared very little. He had ceased to be one thing or another; he was not a prince of Egypt and neither was he a Levite. In that time when nations were still a network of clan and tribe and family, when a man who stepped from among his people stepped into chaos, Moses was alone and, as he now argued to himself, indifferent to his aloneness.

One of the old men hobbled forward and peered into Nun's face. His rheumy, red-rimmed eyes blinked painfully in the bright sunlight, but he studied Nun conscientiously and then sneered at the women with contempt. “What do you know, you clucking fools? Old hens! This is Nun, son of Ephala. His mother, Zilpah, was the daughter of Pashur, who was sister by marriage to my own mother. Her father was the Midianite Hushur, who was circumcised by the Egyptians when they took him from the Bedouin traders. He always claimed that his great-grandfather was the Sheik Jacob, holy be his name, who held great power in the Land of Canaan, but a Midianite is a liar—who can believe them? The truth is that Sheik Jacob had more sons than you can count, for he was potent the way this dog on the throne of Egypt is potent, and every miserable Bedouin tribe calls itself the Children of Israel. It is not enough that the Midianites claim Midian was born from Abraham and Keturah and begot Epher and Hanoch and all the rest of their swarm, but they must weave into their swarm Reuben and Gad, so that they too are the Children of Israel, and even the Amelekites, those dogs who join with Midian and deny Nehushtan, will have it that Abraham was kin by Zefra, who had one eye but could see around objects with that one eye, which was—”

Moses, who had, with great difficulty, caught the thread of the words, realized that the old man had forgotten what he had set out to prove, and also saw that his amazing genealogical monologue could continue until his rasping voice gave out. He was surprised that Nun made no effort to interrupt, for Nun was always impatient and easily annoyed by too much talk and nonsense; but in this case, his patience was more than that of the women. One of them, who might have been younger than she appeared and even lovely once, interrupted harshly and said,

“Enough of that, old fool! It's Nun, the son of Ephala. We see that. He has come to good fortune and good times. What do you want of us, Nun?”

“Call, me old fool!” the old man cried, his voice rising in a shrill whine. “I'm old enough to be your grandfather. I held you on my knee and you wet all over me. I slapped your bare behind, rotten brat without respect! A curse from Nehushtan! May his slime gather over you and rot your flesh!”

“Leave it alone, Miriam,” another woman said tiredly. “The old fool is crazy. You'll start him on his curses. He'll curse us all day long.”

“Time was when there was respect,” the old man whined. “Respect for the old, honour from the young. Before we were slaves in Egypt. What is a slave? A slave is dirt. A slave is filth. A slave is an animal, like an ass in the field. What does a slave know of honour or respect? Before we were slaves in Egypt, it, was different. Oh, yes, I tell you it was different. A woman didn't open her mouth then—”

“Oh shut your own mouth already, old man,” another woman put in.

“Go back to your hole, old man,” the woman called Miriam said tartly. “There is too much sun on your head. It will make you even more foolish than you are.”

Moses realized that they had forgotten him entirely, all except the children, who were losing their fear and edging towards him, their eyes fixed on his great war bow and the shining silver handle of his hunting knife. He also realized that, in some curious way, they were using this interruption in the bleak and hopeless monotony of their lives to gain a little excitement, a little variation of their unchanging daily routine. The imprecations, abuse and curses flung back and forth were without body and evoked neither fear nor anger, and Nehushtan was referred to without respect or awe—and sometimes with contempt. He realized that Nun had attempted to justify himself in terms of religion, but here was no religion in the sense that Moses knew religion, but rather a sort of magic such as Doogana practised, degraded by the pervading degradation of slavery.