Moses Read Free

numbers, each of them was princely and royal.
    Like the others, what could he possibly want, unless it was that blasphemous notion that occasionally wrenched his heart—the notion that he would want not to be a prince? How often would he and his royal brothers hang over the wall of the great terrace swept by the Nile itself and there watch the ships poling up from the wide sea and the great rafts of tied bulrushes drifting down from Upper Egypt, down from the distant mystery of cataracts and mountain, the carefree—as it seemed—families that lived upon the rafts, and the naked brown children as wild and free as the birds in the sky! Little enough awe of royalty these children had, for when a raft drifted near to the terrace wall, they would shout a familiar greeting to the royal progeny, a shrill, unmannerly greeting not unmixed with contempt, and they would shout about the wonders they had seen—the painted black men of the South, the lions and the leopards and the giant elephants next to which a man was no larger than an ant, and the monkeys and the bright waterfowl and the endless herds of antelope—and much more that was a mixture of truth and fancies and lies concocted out of envy and frustration. But this Moses and the others did not know.
    â€œNo, my mother, tell me your news.”
    She sucked the juice from a grape and then delicately removed the skin and seeds from her lips and dropped them into a dish on the little table beside her couch.
    â€œTomorrow, my son, the God-Emperor will receive us and he will look upon you with his own eyes and talk to you, and—who knows?—perhaps give you his blessing.” It was then that his fear aroused her impatience rather than her sympathy. Afraid of Ramses!I Her own father, Seti-Mer-ne-Pteh, was a man to fear. Even so recently as her own youth the times had been different and the customs had been different, and while there had been many children, there was no such teeming throng as now peopled the palace. Her father was a cold and bitter man who regarded himself as the angry arm of the god whose name he bore. He had little use for Egyptian women except to plant his royal seed in, and little time to spare from his frenetic conquering and building. Not love but fear was responsible for the thousands of Egyptian children who were eagerly given his name by their parents. Not so was his son, Ramses, her brother; here was a bull, a cock of the walk who could not see a woman without desiring her. He boasted that he could populate a land with his own seed and, often enough, when Enekhas-Amon saw the children pouring like a noisy river through the palace corridors, she believed his boast.
    These were the companions of Moses, and little enough his mother knew of their endless discussion of a hundred forbidden matters—including the question of Ramses divinity, which they tended to equate with immortality. In this they both believed and disbelieved, feared it and mocked it, prayed to it and blasphemed against it—and clung to it, because each of them—the short and the tall, the fat and the skinny, the runny-nosed brats and the strutting bullies—each of them believed that he or she carried a part of the divinity. Except Moses; he walked among them as an interloper; he blasphemed less than they did, and accepted the divinity of the great emperor more out of fear than faith. His mother had never sensed how deep and unshakeable this fear was; nor would she have been able to comprehend it if he had explained. She had behind her two thousand years of divinity, and with it the practical knowledge that it brought neither surcease from illness nor any particular happiness. The sickness that was robbing her of health and beauty was in no contradiction to the fact that she was in some measure immortal; but in the thoughts of her son Moses life and death, divinity and immortality, were tangled with all the uncertain threads of his short life.
    When