Pillar of Fire Read online

  It was like a sickness; but sweet—honey-sweet. “I want all of you,” she said. “Every living part of you.”

  “It’s been yours since we were children,” he said.

  “No,” said Nofret “If I didn’t know, you couldn’t, either.”

  “Some of us are slower than others,” he said.

  He was laughing at her. He usually was. Damnable, maddening man. She kissed him so deep he gasped, and bit him—but not quite hard enough to draw blood. He kept right on laughing.

  oOo

  Leah knew, of course. Ankhesenamon knew nothing, no more than she had since Nofret found her by the river in Memphis. Neither of them said anything. In the days they kept to the tent and Nofret lay with Johanan in what shade they could find, sometimes no more than their two mantles draped over the skeleton of a bush. Once it was merely the donkey’s shadow as it dozed hipshot in the sun.

  However slight the shelter, it was always enough. They made it so.

  In the nights they walked hand in hand. Often a jackal guided them, servant of Egyptian Anubis in the wilderness of Sinai. They were happy, there in the desert where it seemed no living thing could endure. Yes, even Nofret, who had been certain that she would never be more than vaguely content.

  Fifty

  One night as they walked under a moon that had swelled to the full, they followed it and their jackal-guide straight into the dawn. There in the wan light was a hollow in a hill of stones, and beyond it the loom of a mountain. In the hollow was a cluster of tents, a dog or three, a flock of goats and sheep. Their center was a green place, a tree, a well ringed with stones as carefully carved and joined as any in Egypt.

  Nofret halted on the camp’s edge, caught in confusion. Johanan’s hand had slipped from hers. The jackal was nowhere that she could see. The dogs came barking and clamoring, but there was no snarl in it, no flash of teeth. They were all leaping about Johanan, who was laughing, ruffling the ears of a grey-muzzled bitch, while the others—her pups, no doubt—sniffed eagerly at his robes.

  He turned still laughing. “Grandmother, Nofret, look! It’s Tirzah. She remembers me.”

  “So I see,” said Leah. She had gone wrapped and shrouded in veils since she left Egypt. They were lowered now, and she was smiling. She looked as young as Nofret had ever seen her, tired though she was and worn thin with traveling.

  People were coming out of the tents, drawn by the dogs’ barking. They were familiar people though Nofret had never seen them before: tall, most of them, and strongly built, with proud faces. Apiru faces. But these were not the slaves of the tombs. These were the wild tribesmen, the people of the desert.

  They flocked about Johanan as the dogs had, sweeping his grandmother with them, chattering too fast for Nofret to understand. She was left outside of them, a stranger, alone and forgotten.

  Somehow she had got hold of the donkey’s rope. Her lady sat mute on the beast’s back, staring as she had stared for days and nights out of count, seeing nothing but her own dream.

  Nofret knew the instant when her eyes changed. When she drew herself erect. When she saw.

  A man was coming down off the mountain, walking through the camp. His stride was long and easy, the gait of a man who walks often and far. He carried himself erect, so that he seemed much taller than he was. Not that he was a small man, not by any means, but compared to the one who walked behind him he was no more than middling tall.

  Nofret would not have known him at all without his companion. Johanan grown older, beard grown to his breast and shot with grey, would look exactly so: just as Aharon did, and not so much different than he had when he left Egypt. The other man could only be her lady’s father.

  He was profoundly different. His hair had grown long, and his beard, concealing the long narrow skull, the long jaw. The stubble of them had been black when Nofret knew him; now they were whitened to silver. The nose was as long as ever and as haughtily arched, with the same scornful flare of nostrils. So too the eyes, long, heavy-lidded, seeming to regard the world down the length of that royal nose.

  But their expression had changed beyond recognition. They were awake; aware. They had lost their dreamer’s look. They saw clearly, a clarity that was no more sane and no more simply human than their vagueness had been before.

  This was not a king who refused to be a king. This was a seer of the desert people, the prophet of Sinai. People murmured as he came through them. “Moshe. Moshe the prophet.”

  Ankhesenamon made a sound, not a word, nothing so coherent. She had slid from the donkey’s back. She stood beside it, swaying but erect. Her face had come alive, but the life that was in it was terrifying: half anger, half horror. “You are dead,” she said in a clear and carrying voice. “You died.”

  “Here in Sinai,” he said, “I live.”

  His voice was more like his old self than any of the rest. It was still light, still too weak to carry far. He still stammered, though less than before. Death, it seemed, could alter a man’s face, but not the voice the gods had given him.

  The gods. His god. The Apiru had drawn back, leaving him face to face with his daughter. He took no notice of them.

  She noticed them too well. She looked about in incredulity, as one who wakes from a long and sodden sleep to find herself transported to a place so strange as to be incomprehensible. “Who are these people? How did I come here? Have I died?”

  “You were brought here,” her father said. “The god led you. He guarded you. He guided you to me.”

  Ankhesenamon shook her head. “No. I’m still in Memphis. I’m dreaming this. Or I died. Is this my punishment for a life ill lived? Am I to spend my death in this desert, among these savages?”

  Nofret trampled in, though she knew it was folly. “You haven’t died. You aren’t in the land of the dead. You’re in Sinai. We brought you out of Egypt before you were killed or worse.”

  Ankhesenamon rounded on her. “What is worse than death? Than this?”

  “Slavery,” Nofret shot back. “Servitude to the will of a man you hated, who had killed kings to gain the kingship. Imprisonment in your palace, surrounded by people who had no love for you. Danger—”

  Ankhesenamon shook her head. Her face was closed, her eyes flat. “You abducted me. You laid a spell on me. Treason—betrayal—”

  This was worse than Nofret had feared. Shock, yes, she had expected that. Anger, certainly: she had robbed the queen of her queenship and taken her away from all that she had known. But this cold and royal fury was out of her reckoning.

  “Take me back,” said the queen of Egypt. “Take me home where I belong.”

  “There is no going back,” said the king who had died and come to live in Sinai. Moshe, they called him here; Moshe the prophet. Nofret must learn to call him that.

  Ankhesenamon shook her head. She was set in her fury, blind with it. “I do not wish this. Take me back!”

  “No one can take you back,” he said, gently inexorable. “You are dead by now in Egypt; dead and vanished. They would have found a scrap of your garment in the rushes by the river where the crocodiles come to feed. They’ve taken you out of the count of the living. They’ve mourned you, transformed you into a memory. You’ll not live again in the Two Lands.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re lying to me. You’re envious, you who are dead. You hate me because I am alive. Because I keep my name when yours is all forgotten.”

  “You’re as dead as I,” he said.

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon. She said it over and over. Her mind was breaking—if there was anything left of it to break. Nofret moved to touch her, shake her, rouse her from her stupor. But Moshe was there before her. He laid his hands on his daughter’s shoulders.

  She struggled. He did not seem to move, but nothing she did sufficed to win her free. When she subsided, gasping for breath, his hands were on her shoulders as they had been before, and his eyes were fixed on her face. “Child,” he said in the gentlest of voices, and no stammer in it. �
��Child, look at me.”

  She who was no child, who reckoned herself still a queen, resisted his compulsion, but he was too strong. “The god led you to me,” he said. “He brought you out of Egypt, from the shadow of your death. He preserved your life against the terrors of the desert. Have you no thanks to offer him? Are you bereft of gratitude?”

  “I am not grateful,” she said through clenched teeth. “I do not thank him for robbing me of all that was mine.”

  “You loved him once,” her father said.

  Her head shook hard. “I never loved him. I loved you, but you are dead. I have forgotten your name.”

  “My name is Moshe,” he said.

  She stared at him. For the first time she seemed to see him: not the voice, not the eyes, but the man who stood in front of her. The stranger, the man of the desert. She reached up with a hand that trembled just visibly, and touched him: half on the cheek, half on the bristle of his beard.

  She began to shake, not only her hand, but all of her. She looked about. Her eyes were wild. “I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to be dead!”

  He folded his arms about her. She shrank in them, but she did not try to escape. The strength had gone out of her.

  Her knees buckled. He lifted her as lightly as if she had been the child he called her, cradled her as he must have done when she was small. “Come, child,” he said. “Rest. Have peace.”

  oOo

  He carried her away to a tent that stood apart from the others. Nofret took a step to follow, but could not make herself take the next, or the next. She was still attached to the donkey. She could not see Leah. Johanan was half hidden in a crowd of people and dogs.

  She had no place here. All of them, even Ankhesenamon—they belonged here. Not she. She was a foreigner, no kin to them at all. She had brought her lady where the god willed. Now, for very truth, she was free.

  She looked back toward the desert. North and east somewhere was Hatti. The donkey would keep her company. It did not seem overjoyed to have come to this camp, nor overmuch eager to linger. Dogs vexed it. Children were deplorably inclined to swing from its tail. It would be glad to go back to the wilderness.

  She turned its head about and began to walk.

  A hand closed over hers on the donkey’s rope. A body made a wall of itself between Nofret and the desert. Johanan demanded, “Where are you going? Won’t you even stay to greet my father?”

  “I’m going home,” Nofret said.

  “Home is here,” said Johanan, “at the feet of our holy mountain.”

  “For you it is,” she said. “Not for me. I come from Hatti. Now it’s time I went back there.”

  He was not laughing now, or looking on her follies with lordly amusement. He was afraid—bold brash Johanan, afraid. “Do I matter so little to you?” he asked her. His voice was almost gentle.

  “You matter the world to me,” she said. “But I don’t belong here. There’s no place for me.”

  “There is a place,” he said. He laid his arm about her shoulders. “Here, where you were meant to be.”

  “I was not—” Nofret broke off. That was not true. But it was not all of it, either. “I can’t be one of your modest women. I was never made to be.”

  “You are what the god made you,” he said.

  She pulled free. “I have to go.”

  “What is there for you in Hatti? Will you be any less a stranger there than you are here where you have friends who love you? Where you have me?”

  She could feel herself wavering. She stiffened her resolve—but for what? For misplaced pride?

  For shyness. For fear. If he came in front of his people and named her what he insisted on naming her, and if they rejected her—

  “They will accept you,” he said, reading her heart as he always had. “I told them long ago that I had chosen my wife, and that she was a woman of the Hittites, a foreigner and an unbeliever.”

  “Were they angry?” she asked.

  “Furious,” he said. “For a while. Then they grew resigned to it. After a while they even convinced themselves that they wanted it. They’re waiting now to welcome you. You’re the guest they’ve long awaited.”

  “I, and not my lady?”

  “Your lady, too, but for a different reason. I won’t be marrying her,” said Johanan with a flicker of his old humor.

  Nofret’s breath caught. “Oh, gods! Her father—when he went away, he was—her—”

  Johanan shook her till she stopped babbling. “Hush now. Hush. All that is forgotten. Better than that: forbidden. He brings laws down off the mountain, the word of the god to us his people. One of them is that no father take his child to wife, and no son may wed his mother. He’ll not break his own law, beloved. Even if he had another law before.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” she said.

  “Believe it,” said Johanan. “The man who was king in Egypt is dead. Moshe the prophet welcomes his daughter as daughter only, beloved and protected. He’ll teach her to be whole again.”

  “I don’t know if anyone can do that,” said Nofret. She was walking under Johanan’s gentle guidance. Away from the desert. Toward the camp of his people.

  Strangers. Foreigners.

  And had she ever known otherwise since she was taken out of Hatti?

  Strangers, yes. And kin. And beloved.

  She looked up past the tents to the slope of the mountain. Mount Horeb, that was its name: the mountain of their god. The sun had topped its summit at last and leaped blinding into the sky.

  In Egypt it was god and king. Here in the wilderness it was another thing, both lesser and greater: no god itself but servant and creation of the god who ruled the Apiru. They knew one god only, and no other before him.

  “You are no god of mine,” she said to him, “and your people are no people of mine, except that they will it so. But for love of your servant, and of my lady who needs me still, I will stay. I will do your will—not because you wish it, but because I choose.”

  The god did not blast her where she stood, or strike her blind. Nor did he drive her any madder than she was already. He knew that he would gain no more of her than that, nor compel her to serve him in any greater capacity.

  It was enough. She linked arms with Johanan and firmed her grip on the donkey’s rope, and led them both into the camp.

  PART THREE: THE LORD OF HOSTS

  The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare for him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

  —Exodus 15:2

  Fifty-One

  Ankhesenamon was in no way resigned to her exile. She had not willed it. She had not chosen it. The arrogance of her servants had thrust it upon her, snatched her away from everything she knew and flung her headlong into a place and a position she hated.

  For she did hate it. With all her heart. Nofret was in no doubt of that. Ankhesenamon made it abundantly clear with each morning’s waking. She demanded that she be served as a queen was served, however difficult that might be in a camp of wandering tribesmen. She would do no work in the camp, though every hand was needed, even that of Moshe the prophet. He was one of their herdsmen, guarding the flocks that grazed on the slopes of the mountain.

  “How have the mighty fallen,” said Ankhesenamon with a delicate sneer, when it was made clear to her that her father himself undertook to be of use to the tribe.

  “The crook that the king carries in Egypt is a shepherd’s crook,” Nofret reminded her.

  She arched a brow. “The Lord of the Two Lands is a shepherd of men. Not,” she said, “of smelly sheep.”

  Nofret told herself that Ankhesenamon was shocked to the bone, taken out of place and time and made to be something that she had never desired to be. The god had not called her, not in any way she would accept. Even her father was no longer the man she had known.

  The first day in the camp she discovered how different he was, when he carried her to his tent. No
fret, coming later, found Ankhesenamon crouched against the far wall, staring at an Apiru woman as if she had been a cobra reared to strike. It was an utterly unremarkable woman, swathed in veils as they all were, but with her face uncovered here in the shelter of the tent. She had no beauty at all, and no distinction. A plump naked boychild clung to her skirts, fist in mouth, brown eyes wide. From the curve of the belly under the robes, there was another coming, and not long for it either.

  When Nofret came in, blinking in the sudden gloom after the dazzle of daylight, Moshe was saying, “This is Zipporah. My wife. And this,” he said, swooping down, swinging the child laughing into his arms, “is my son. His name is Gershom. Gershom, greet your sister.”

  The child mumbled something around his fist. Ankhesenamon shrank back even farther, blankly and starkly appalled.

  Time was, Nofret thought, when the very thought of a son for this man would have sent his daughter into transports of joy. But now, when he was dead to Egypt and she was dead also and against every wish of her heart, to see him happy, possessed at last of an heir, and from such a mother . . .

  Zipporah seemed a shy brown mouse of a woman, but she had a core of strength. She would have to, to be married to this man. She said in a soft voice, a voice that was beautiful as her face was not, “Lady, I welcome you to the tents of my people.”

  Ankhesenamon flung up her head. “Who are you, to welcome me?”

  “My father is a priest of the people,” Zipporah said calmly, “and I am the eldest of his daughters, wife to the prophet of Sinai. You, lady, I know. You are most welcome here.”

  “I do not wish to be welcome,” said Ankhesenamon.

  oOo

  No more did she. She demanded and received a tent to herself. She expected that Nofret share it with her.