Moses Read Free Page B

desperately and seriously, “He will cast me back into the water.”
    â€œ What! ”
    He saw the doubt, the fear, the anguish that had suddenly seized her face, but his own fear forced him to repeat what he had said. “He will cast me back into the water.”
    â€œWho told you that?” she whispered hoarsely.
    He shook his head.
    â€œMoses, tell me!” she almost shrieked. “I command you to.”
    Again he shook his head. “I pledged my word, my justice .”
    â€œAnd my own justice?”
    â€œMy justice ,” he repeated miserably.
    â€œA priest? Some dirty priest of common, jealous blood. I know. They’re everywhere now—listening, plotting, conniving. Well, I still know the difference between a priest and a princess of Egypt! I’ll cut his throat with my own hands!”
    â€œNot a priest,” he begged her, terrified now at this unprecedented outburst.
    â€œThen one of those miserable whores’ brats that my royal bull of a brother sires every night!”
    â€œI can’t tell you.”
    She suddenly reached out and grasped his arm so tightly that he cried aloud with the pain, and she said, with the coldest anger he had ever heard in her voice,
    â€œWell, it’s a lie, my son—a vicious, filthy lie. You will learn some day how much and how easily they lie. So wipe it out of your mind for ever. You will grow up now—your childhood had to end some day. Listen to me. I have never told you who your father was. I am not telling you now. For this I have my own reasons. But I will tell you this. The God Ramses is a man like any other man. I know it. I am his sister. I lay in bed with him. Do you understand what I mean, my son?”
    Moses nodded miserably.
    â€œBut the one thing I insist upon—you must not fear. Ramses. In the old days,” she went on, with a sort of desperate intensity, “they would have believed that he was born a god. Some still believe that he will die a god and go to sit on Seti’s throne with him. That may be, but who has come back to bear witness? And remember: he has more to fear from me than I have from him, be assured, more than you have. Now go and play—and leave me.”
    Still he stood there, gripped and held there by his own torment, and when she questioned him, he managed to ask, with a desperation that equalled hers,
    â€œIs the god—the king—is he my father?”
    Her face was tired and haggard as she said with a calm that completed his terror, “I’ve said all I am going to say. Never again ask me that, my son. I am your mother, but I am also a princess royal of the Great House and no one, not my son, not any man on this holy soil of Egypt, shall dare ask me a question to provoke me. Now go away and play. I am tired of you, foolish boy. Leave me alone.”
    Then he fled, bursting through the hanging, leaving doors swinging behind him, racing past the rows of looming columns out into the sweet air and the sunshine; and behind him, his mother wept. She wept for the way fate had dealt with her, for herself, for her lost youth and beauty, for her ever barren loins. She wept out of jealousy and hatred for her brother, for the concubines who so eagerly graced her brother’s bed, out of hatred and resentment against every living person in the great palace except the one child who now exacted the total small measure of love that was hers to give.

[2]
    ALMOST AT THE sunlight, with the bright gardens spread before him, the voice caught him, soft, silky, “Moses, Moses—whither so fast and furious? Look behind you, boy.” He swung around and saw the priest sitting on a little stool in the pleasant shade of a column, a white robe over his fat jelly-like bulk, a thin, mocking smile on his moon-shaped face. “Oh, come over here, boy, and stop jittering like a mare that smells stud. What could frighten you that wouldn’t frighten me? If I ran twenty like