Stone tables, p.10
Stone Tables, page 10
The man’s wife screeched in fear. The Egyptian himself was slower to understand what had happened, but gradually he realized that a tall, strong Israelite that had just suffered a beating now stood before him with his own heavy walking stick in his hand. Moses could kill him with a blow, the man knew it.
But Moses grasped the walking stick in both hands and broke it across his knee. He had done the same with javelins and lances, stouter weapons than this. Then he handed both halves to the cowering Egyptian. “You can tell your neighbors,” said Moses, “that you broke it . . . on my back.”
Moses saw understanding finally reach the man’s face. Angry as he was, the Egyptian wouldn’t dare tell his neighbors that a slave had disarmed him in his own house. He would rather lie and have others think him master of his own house. The Egyptian backed away, holding the two halves of his walking stick, and said, “Get out of here.”
“May the Nile bless this house,” said Moses, invoking the standard water prayer. “May Anubis pick up someone else’s scent.”
Apparently they weren’t used to having Israelites offer prayers in the Egyptian language—or parodies of prayers, like his Anubis remark. They retreated even farther from him.
“Get out,” the woman pleaded. “Please, we’re sorry. My husband never meant to hurt you.”
“He never . . . cared whether he . . . hurt me or not,” said Moses. Then he slipped out into the darkness of the street, stooping over and scurrying away as he imagined a man might do who had just had a walking stick broken across his shoulders.
In the night there wasn’t much else to see. People were inside their homes, except for those who were at taverns, or were slipping home from visits—not much traffic, just a few people who regarded him with suspicion, mostly because of his height and obvious strength. The woolen clothing itched maddeningly, especially as the night breeze cooled the sweat he had worked up, carrying the water from the river. He wanted to get rid of it and run home, naked if he had to, run home and put back on the white clean linens that he was entitled to as Pharaoh’s son. He had never known how much those linens were like armor, protecting him from blows.
Coward, he told himself. You came to learn and you’re learning. Hatshepsut stopped the Egyptians from killing Israelites at birth, but Aaron and Miriam were right this far: The bondage of Israel was still real and hard to bear. They were right to wish for freedom.
So . . . I’ve learned that, and now I should go home.
You’ve learned nothing, he told himself. A little touch of helplessness. Does Aaron have some different way of walking and talking when he’s out here among the people? In the palace he puts on arrogance as if it were his own skin; but out here, surely that attitude would earn him many a beating! No, Aaron must also have learned some style of cringing that would persuade surly Egyptians not to beat him.
But instead of gloating, instead of wishing to see Aaron humiliated like that, Moses was glad he had never seen it. Only a few hours ago in the palace Moses would have laughed at the thought of Aaron being put in his place. Now, though, Moses had a different perspective. He wasn’t an Egyptian out here, dressed like this. He wasn’t an Egyptian at all, in the eyes of the Egyptians.
I can never be Pharaoh, he realized. Mother’s as foolish as I have been, to think we could bring it off. They’re already restive under the rule of a woman. Give the double crown to an Israelite, and there’ll be mutiny, revolt . . . bloodshed. Moses might put down such revolts, but at what cost? Egypt had suffered under the Hyksos rulers. They would believe that through sheer trickery it had happened to them again. They would not bear being ruled by a slave, and that’s how they would see Moses’ ascension to the throne.
He found a heap of straw behind a stable. It seemed clean enough, by moonlight. He lay down on it, pulled some over his legs and body for warmth, and lay there thinking about how he could tell this to Hatshepsut, and what they might do. Tuthmose had to die at once, of course. He was too dangerous to leave alive. One of the other sons. But how galling, to let any of Mutnefert’s grandchildren ascend the throne.
No other choice, thought Moses. For the good of Egypt, for Mother’s good, I have to step aside and let someone else be named heir. I can teach him, perhaps. Train him to be the Pharaoh Mother always meant me to be.
Feeling noble, wise, and self-sacrificing, Moses went to sleep.
And woke, still in darkness, though the first greying of dawn was visible in the east. What had wakened him?
“You broke my eggs!” came the cry again. “They were worth more than your life, you filthy old slave!”
Moses rose quickly from his bed of straw and saw an old Israelite man on his knees, a basket of eggs spilled at his feet. Why so many eggs?
“What will I feed my guests?” demanded the Egyptian. A tavern owner.
The old man mumbled something, a plea for forgiveness. No, a prayer.
“Hear, O Israel,” he murmured.
Another blow fell.
“The Lord our God.”
Another.
“The Lord is one.”
He fell over onto the ground, barely able to curl himself into a ball. It wouldn’t help him, for Moses could see that the Egyptian was poised to land the next blow hard on the old man’s bald head.
It couldn’t be borne. Moses took the cudgel from the man’s hand as easily as he had taken the walking stick the night before.
But this man didn’t shrink away. He bulled right into Moses and knocked him down, sending the cudgel flying.
It took only a moment for Moses to recover, and before the tavernkeeper could get to his feet to fetch the cudgel, Moses tripped him and then leapt upon him, covered his mouth with his hand. “Make no sound,” said Moses, “and I’ll let you live.”
But the man wasn’t a screamer. His hand came up with a knife in it. Moses was trained for this. It took no thought at all. As the man stabbed at him, Moses caught his hand and drove it downward into the man’s own heart. He died in a moment, having never made a sound.
Moses didn’t mean to kill him. He was a soldier, one who fought with his own hands and trained hard with his men, and his reflexes had taken over.
But he didn’t have any reflexes for this situation. One night living as an Israelite and he had killed somebody. What would be the consequences? If Moses ran away, the fact would remain that an Egyptian had been killed while beating an Israelite. The old man that Moses had tried to save might be blamed for it. Worse, it might trigger a riot, with Egyptians killing their helpless Israelite neighbors.
It’s a good thing I wasn’t named Joshua! Look at the sort of deliverance I’ve brought to Israel.
The body had to be hidden. Let them think he had wandered off and fallen in the river.
Moses hoisted the body up onto his back, hooking the dead man’s arms with his own arms so the blood would run down the corpse and none of it would get on Moses beyond what was already on his hands. The river wasn’t far. Moses’ first thought was to take him there. But no, that would be insane, the body would float and be found. Instead Moses carried him the other way, toward the desert. No one saw him, he was sure of that. The farmland was only a narrow strip near the water; he reached desert sand very soon. With his bare hands Moses dug furiously down into the base of a low dune, then rolled the body into the depression he had made. It was a simple matter to pull down sand from the dune to cover him. The prevailing winds blew from the west. The dune would keep shifting over the body and bury it under tons of sand. By the time the body emerged from the other side of the dune, no one would remember that the tavernkeeper had ever lived, or even have a guess as to whose the body was or how he died.
It was sunrise when Moses got to the river to wash the blood off his hands and lose the knife in the water.
I’ve learned enough, Moses thought. A man has died. Perhaps I saved the old Israelite’s life in the process, but that doesn’t change the fact that my being here is a mistake. I’m an oaf out here, I don’t know how to survive as an Israelite.
He took off his sandals and began to jog along the road toward the palace.
“You keep your wife’s nose out of my wife’s business and I’ll leave her alone!”
Moses heard the argument before he rounded the corner.
“It’s everybody’s business!” came the answer. “I think it should be your business, the things your wife is doing!”
Moses arrived at the scene just as one man roared, picked up a much smaller man, and hurled him against the rough brick wall of an Israelite hovel. A woman screamed and ran to cover him with her body.
“Nobody calls my wife an adulteress and—”
Moses shoved him and sent him sprawling before he could lay a hand on the woman.
“Doesn’t Israel . . . have enough enemies, without . . . fighting each other?” Moses demanded.
The man picked himself up off the ground, sizing Moses up as he did.
“What, Moses, are you going to kill me like you did that Egyptian?”
Moses was stunned. Who could have seen him? Who could have known who he was? And how could word have spread so quickly?
He knew the answers as soon as he thought of the questions. The old man who was being beaten must have seen Moses kill the tavernkeeper. And the glyph-painter who gave him these clothes last night, he knew who Moses was, and word would have spread, at least among the Israelites, that Moses was abroad that night, along with a description of exactly how he was dressed. So when a tall stranger, dressed as he was reported to be dressed, did the unthinkable and fought with an Egyptian and killed him, there would be no question it was him.
The real issue now was whether he could trust Israelites to keep his secret.
“You aren’t fit to judge me,” the man said scornfully. “You’re an Egyptian, not an Israelite. Go back to your palace and sleep with that Ethiopian whore you brought back with you.”
And that was his answer. There were doubtless plenty of Israelites who didn’t think they owed Moses any loyalty at all.
Without another halting word, Moses returned to the road and kept on running. The taunts of the Israelite filled his ears long after he couldn’t possibly still be hearing his actual voice.
* * *
The story reached the house of Aaron before he could leave for the day’s work. He laughed aloud in triumph when he heard it.
But Miriam soon came from Mother’s house and she wasn’t laughing. “We’re all in danger now,” she said.
“We’re always in danger,” Aaron said. “But now Moses has cast his lot with us! I knew if we could provoke him into coming out among the people, he’d remember who he really is!”
“And what is he really?” asked Miriam.
“An Israelite!”
“Aaron, you poor goat-brained boy,” she said, “he doesn’t even know what an Israelite is.”
“He killed an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite. It’s the beginning of our resistance, the beginning of our revolt!”
“Hold off on your war plans,” said Miriam. “This is the opposite of the right way for your revolt to begin. Who will be Moses’ army? Who will obey him, when he’s now proven himself to be one of us?”
“We will!”
“Yes, there are so many trained Israelite soldiers. And we have so many bows and arrows, so many trained spearmen.”
Aaron looked at her with consternation. “Then why did God make this happen? What was this morning all about?”
“It was the first step,” said Miriam. “God has a lot of work to do with that boy before Moses is truly useful.”
Chapter 5: Sand
Hatshepsut heard Moses’ story without letting herself show any emotion. He told his tale the same way. Wanting to observe the people—no, he said his people, she noticed that, it stung her—he borrowed Israelite clothing and wandered out among them, passing for a slave. An old man being beaten, Moses had to intervene, though he had no soldiers behind him, no visible authority. Had he come back later, he could have punished the wrongdoer, but no, he had to act in the moment, had to stop that moment of mistreatment as if that one slave had some particular value. Oh, stupid, stupid, the whole venture from the beginning. Pharaohs are not prepared to be common men.
She heard him out. She kept her silence. Even when he was done with his sorry confession, she kept still.
“Mother,” he whispered.
“Am I?” she asked.
“Are you what?”
“Your mother?”
“You are my Pharaoh,” he said. “And my mother. You lifted me out of the water.”
“But you plunged back into it today.”
“It was sand I was into, up to my armpits.”
She was not amused. “You killed one of my people,” she said.
“He was about to kill another of your people.”
“No, of your people.”
He did not protest, he did not deny. He only looked away, ashamed.
“Yes,” she said, “today you chose. Today they took my son away from me.”
“I was your true son,” he said.
I was your son, he said. I was.
“You taught me not to . . . tolerate injustice,” said Moses. “Didn’t you?”
“I taught you that it was vital to preserve your own position first, so you would have the power to help others later.”
“But if I always . . . preserve myself first, when will I ever dare to act?”
“So. You acted.”
Again silence filled them and spilled over into the room.
She saw him now as if for the first time. Not the child anymore, so bright, so eager to talk to her after a day of the business of government, asking about this, commenting about that. Not the adolescent, either, fierce in his weapons practice, sweating from exercise in the blazing sun, smelling more like a man than poor Tuthmose II ever had, and yet she didn’t send him away to bathe, indeed wouldn’t let him go, she made him stay and talk to her about what he was learning as a warrior, things she had never learned herself. But neither of those sons of hers was there, they were gone, not dead but buried anyway, lost within the body of this man who, though stricken with grief and fear and remorse nevertheless stood tall and unbending, unwilling to mourn for what he could not alter. Or perhaps not mourning. Perhaps not remorseful, either. He had made his choice. He had been her son, but was no longer. The Israelites had kidnapped her little boy, her strong young warrior, and in their place left this changeling. They were his people now, not Egypt.
Nonsense. She refused to accept such a ludicrous notion. He was young. He had been overcome by the romantic notion of going out among the people in disguise. He had cast himself in the hero role and now wanted to play it to the hilt, the way young men always did, but if she took charge of this, she could bring him back to his senses. She did not have to surrender so easily. He was still her Moses, once he woke up to how irrevocably his future would be decided today.
“What I must do,” Hatshepsut said, “is declare you to be Pharaoh right now, today. The way my father did with me. Raise you up beside me. Affirm that you were doing my will when you went out among the people. That you did justice in my name.”
“No,” said Moses.
“Why not?” she said.
As if it were a lesson, as if he were the child again, trying to prove what he had learned, he recited his answer. “Your position is already weak. A woman as Pharaoh. And waiting for his moment is a son of a male Pharaoh who has already been consecrated.”
“I’ll have him strangled at once.”
“Strangle an Egyptian Pharaoh in order to . . . protect an Israelite? Yes, that will . . . firm up your position, won’t it.”
“Don’t be sarcastic with me.”
“Mother, it was already impossible. That’s what neither of us understood. Even before I . . . dodged out of the palace, the Egyptian people had . . . made up their mind. If I ever became Pharaoh, they would regard me as a hated enemy, an overseer from . . . foreign lands. You, your father, and the . . . gods might regard me as a true son of Pharaoh, but the . . . people don’t. I’m still a son of slaves to them. That’s why I call the Israelites my . . . people—because your people have . . . determined that that’s all I can ever be.”
She shook her head. “It was a change inside you. It was a choice you made.”
He said nothing. This stubborn stranger. Who was he, and what had he done with her child?
“You’ve walked away from injustice before, when it served no purpose to intervene,” she said. “When you raised your hand to save that old man, you chose him to be your father instead of your subject.”
“I never meant to hurt you,” said Moses.
She laughed at him. “Hurt me? You have no power to hurt a god.”
“Then it won’t hurt you when I leave.”
The words cut her so deeply she couldn’t breathe.
“Where?” she whispered.
“Exile. I won’t tell you where because it’s your . . . duty as Pharaoh to hunt down a slave who . . . killed an Egyptian.”
“I never said that! Such a law could never apply to you!”
“Either I was the son of Pharaoh or I was the . . . son of slaves. If you affirm me as a son of Pharaoh, you’ll fall. If you declare me to be the son of slaves, by my own choice, by my own act, then you’ll . . . show yourself to be the true Pharaoh, loving Egypt more than your own son.”
“You are my general,” she said. “You are my right hand. You have cut off my hand.”
“You’ll find another.”
“The only other man who can fill that role is Tuthmose, and he can only do it if I affirm his consecration and raise him to his father’s place.”
“Then do it.”
“He’ll betray me.”
“Not tomorrow, and not next week. You’ll have time.”
“Time will work for him, not for me.”
“I can’t help that, Mother! Do you think I don’t want to undo what I did today? But I can’t. I’ve already . . . betrayed you. If you try to save me you’ll . . . destroy yourself now.”
