Pillar of Fire Read online

  Nofret chose for a while to humor her. Johanan did not like it, but he had his own duties, his own place among the tribesmen. Nofret was not surprised to see that it was a high place. His father was what they called a Levite, a member of the priestly caste, and he stood high in it. Johanan, as his eldest son, performed the office of the heir.

  For long and long he had been the only son, born of a mother who died bearing him. But Aharon in Sinai had taken not one but two wives. They were sisters; by some intricacy of Apiru law he had had to marry both if he was to marry either. They seemed quite pleased with the arrangement, and were happily presenting him with a tribe of sons. There were half a dozen that Nofret counted, and another coming.

  She grew to know all of them, and well. Ankhesenamon could not keep her shut up in the tent for every hour of every day. She had to go out at least for water, and gather and prepare food, and wash her own and her lady’s clothing in the little river that ran through the field of the flocks. She managed thereby to be out of the tent for most of the day while Ankhesenamon sat inside it, immobile as she had ever been upon her throne, refusing to move, or to speak except in command.

  “It’s a great shock for her,” said Korah. The younger of Aharon’s wives was also by a little the prettier—though they were both very pretty, round and ruddy like ripe apples, and apt for laughter. They did not laugh at Ankhesenamon. They pitied her.

  “Poor thing,” said the elder, Elisheba. They were all washing clothes that day, beating them on the rocks. Some of the women were singing. The rest were gossiping with the comfortable air of women who knew everyone and everything and had an opinion on it all.

  Elisheba tucked a stray curl under her veil and scrubbed at a particularly stubborn stain. “Poor lost lady, she went to sleep a queen and woke up a desert savage. All her world’s turned upside down.”

  “I could be less charitable,” said one of the other women, one whose name Nofret had not yet learned. “She’s obviously too good for the likes of us.”

  “And isn’t she?” asked Korah. “Remember who she was.”

  “I know what she is now.” The woman shot a glance at Nofret and shut her mouth with a snap.

  The others were less shy of the Egyptian woman’s servant. Everyone knew that she would marry Johanan when the time came for marrying. If there were objections, Nofret did not hear them. It was too clear to most people, as Zipporah had explained, that the god meant the two of them to be mated.

  The god was everywhere for these people. He oversaw everything, knew everything, missed nothing. He was like every god that Egypt or Hatti had, all together and in one. Nofret wondered how he could bear to be god of everything and anything that was.

  He seemed not only to bear it but to revel in it. He would have no other god before him, the women told her. Any who tried was promptly put in his place—even, they whispered, destroyed. People could fashion no image of him, or even call him by name. He was simply Adonai, Lord. He was more powerful than any name.

  “Does that mean he has none?” Nofret asked.

  “Of course not,” said Zipporah. Women could not be priests here, no more than they could in Egypt, but they were allowed to share some of the secrets. The men could hardly prevent them—not if they wanted their clothes washed and their meals cooked and their children tended.

  Zipporah was the eldest daughter of a priest who had no sons. She was the one who knew about the god. She did not make a brag of it, nor did she chatter idly about him, but when Nofret asked she would answer. “He has a name,” she said, “but only the chosen may know it. None may speak it. Its power is too great. With it one can shatter a world.”

  “One would think,” said Nofret, “that men might go to war to gain the power of that name.”

  Zipporah’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no,” she said. “No man would dare. A man who misuses it, you see—he dies the death.”

  There was a pause. Its heart was chill. Nofret broke it with an effort. “Such a god would be too terrible for me. I’d rather one who was a little more human—who had some mercy on his servants.”

  “The Lord is merciful always,” said Zipporah. “Even his justice he tempers with mercy.”

  “Except when someone makes free with his name.”

  “Then he is just,” Zipporah said.

  oOo

  Ankhesenamon saw no justice in anything that she suffered. When she woke in the camp she had awakened wholly, not only to awareness but to sanity. It was a cold, harsh, bitter clarity for her who had been lost for so long in a dream.

  Bitterness first made her silent, then drove her to speech. Nofret had never heard so many words from her as she did once the dam had broken. Bitter words, furious words. Words that poured out of her in reckless profusion. More words than Nofret had known she knew, and not only in Egyptian, either. Before the camp she knew no other language. Within the tent she spoke Apiru quite as well as Nofret did, perhaps even a little better.

  She remembered every moment of her life in Egypt. Princess and queen, daughter of the apostate king, Great Royal Wife to him and to his successor and to the one who came after, she ran through them all. Sometimes she wept. More often she sat in a tight knot of anger, spitting out the words, counting the memories like beads on a string.

  Nofret stopped listening early on. She could go about her business, even sleep, while the recitation unwound itself. It lulled her to sleep of a night, woke her in the morning. If Ankhesenamon slept in between, Nofret did not know of it.

  She did not know how tired she was becoming until they moved camp. Apiru were wanderers; they went from pasture to pasture and from stream to well as the moon wore on its round. Who decided it, and how, she did not yet know. The elders, maybe, who met in council—mostly to sit about and drink date wine and gossip as the women did at the riverbank, but sometimes to decide this matter or that.

  However it was done, one morning everyone moved at once to fold the tents, to load them on the backs of donkeys or of strong women. The herdsmen gathered the herds and drove them milling and bleating in the track of the tents. By full light the whole camp was in motion, the fires shut up in the firepots, and only the trampled ground to show where they had been.

  Ankhesenamon did not want to go. Nofret had to strike the tent around her, load it on the donkey that had carried her out of Egypt, and gather everything else she could.

  Ankhesenamon sat throughout, immovable as a stone. “I will stay here,” she said in the most maddeningly royal of voices.

  “No, lady,” said Johanan, appearing out of nowhere. “You will not.” Before either of them knew what he was doing, he had swept Ankhesenamon up and deposited her on the donkey, and slapped it on the rump to startle it into a trot. Ankhesenamon had to cling to its neck or be flung off.

  The donkey slowed when it reached the herd of its fellows. Nofret, cursing, sprang in pursuit.

  Johanan caught her arm and brought her up short. “Let her go,” he said. “She’s safe enough. The whole tribe will see to it.”

  “But she’s my—”

  Johanan cut her off. “Not for the moment she’s not. Here, walk with me. I haven’t seen you in half of eternity.”

  “You saw me last night,” said Nofret impatiently. “I fed you bread that I’d baked myself.”

  “It was good bread, too,” he said. “Will you bake more for me tonight?”

  “It there’s any way to bake it,” she said, “yes.”

  He wound his fingers with hers, matching her pace, falling in among the last of the Apiru on the march. Her eye, anxious, kept seeking and finding Ankhesenamon among the people on donkeys. She was hard to mistake, as straight as she sat, and as rigid with anger.

  “Everything she does is angry,” said Johanan, “and every thought she thinks is bitter. She’s a massively spoiled child. If I were her father I’d take a stick to her behind.”

  “One does not take a stick to the behind of the queen of Egypt.” Nofret said it as stiffly as was proper, b
ut her heart was a traitor: it agreed with him. “One has to pity her. All that she was, all that was taken away from her—”

  “—was a madness of grief, and certain death.” Johanan scowled at the figure on the donkey. “She wasn’t going anywhere but into the river the night she was taken away. We gave her life. We gave her the freedom to be furious.”

  “Maybe you should have let her die.”

  Johanan stopped. Nofret, handlinked with him, stopped perforce. “Maybe we should have,” he said. “I think not. The god has more for her to do than to sulk in her tent and bewail her lost throne. The sooner she sees it, the happier we’ll all be.”

  “I wish . . .” said Nofret. But she did not go on. She was still her lady’s servant. There were still some things that she could not say, even to Johanan.

  He said them for her. “We all wish she’d get on with it. Pity only takes us so far; compassion is wasted on a woman who spits on it. Maybe, after all, that stick to the behind . . .”

  “No!” Nofret tried to pull free, but he was too strong. “You can’t talk like that. No matter what you think of her, she’s still queen and goddess. She can’t be anything else.”

  “She won’t,” he said. “In the end she’ll have to. Even if it kills her.”

  “You think it won’t?”

  “I admit,” he said, “sometimes I hope it will. She was never a very likable creature.”

  “She never knew how to be.” Nofret found that if she walked with sufficient determination, she pulled him along with her. Only the rearguard of the tribe was behind them now: the young men with their bows and spears, on guard against raiders, either animal or human. Johanan himself had a bow slung behind him, and a quiver of arrows.

  She felt safe, if exasperated. Exasperation edged with a peculiar, distant grief. “One doesn’t like a princess. One worships her. How could she ever know how to make people like her?”

  “Some people come by it naturally,” Johanan said. Once he was set in motion he stayed there, walking easily beside her, matching stride for stride. So they had wandered through the wilderness, with the same equality of pace, the same comfort in one another’s presence—even at the moment, when they were close to quarreling.

  “I am,” Nofret admitted after a few dozen strides, “tired. I could be happy if I weren’t bound to serve my royal lady.”

  “Are you?” Johanan asked her. “Are you bound?”

  “I gave my word,” said Nofret.

  “When? When you were given to her as tribute? She’s no longer a queen. You’re no longer her slave.”

  “Except in the heart,” Nofret said. “I can’t abandon her.”

  “No more will you. But if she’s to grow out of herself, she has to be left on her own. You can’t nursemaid her. If she wants to eat, she can earn her bread, and bake it too. If she wants her tent set up, she can set it up. If she wants her clothes washed, she can wash them. She can do everything that any other woman does among the people.”

  “Men don’t do any of that,” said Nofret.

  He flashed a grin at her. “So, then. If she doesn’t want to be a woman, she can be a man. She can guard the flocks and fight off lions and defend the people.”

  “And sit in the tents at night, drinking date wine and telling extravagant stories.” Nofret shook her head. “That might suit her better, but I don’t think she’d want to spend her days in the sun. It would ruin her complexion.”

  “There, you see. She’ll have to learn to be a woman instead of a queen.”

  “She won’t learn.”

  “If she has to, she will.”

  Nofret fell silent. Johanan did not press her. That was one of his great virtues: he knew when to be quiet. They walked the road that the Apiru had walked since the world was young, following the flocks from pasture to pasture.

  Fifty-Two

  Ankhesenamon learned what she was forced to learn. That first night, when Nofret did not go to set up the tent, it was as bitter for Nofret as for her.

  She was too proud to send a messenger. Nofret turned again and again toward the edge of the camp where the small figure sat erect and alone, waiting to be waited on. Each time, Johanan’s eye caught hers, or Leah called her to a gathering by one of the fires, to settle a dispute over something small but pressing.

  Ankhesenamon slept on the ground that night, cold and supperless. No one brought her a blanket. No one fed her. Someone—not Nofret, who was prevented each time she tried—set a waterskin where she could reach it if she exerted herself.

  In the morning they moved camp again. It was three days’ journey to the place of the green pastures, Nofret had been told. She dreaded to discover that Ankhesenamon was not among the people, but when she looked, the erect small figure was sitting on the donkey, riding as she had ridden the day before.

  That night she set up her tent. She was sore taxed by it, though it was a small tent, and light; she had never troubled to learn how best to go about it. Nofret had to sit on her hands to keep from hastening to help, even when it was clear that Ankhesenamon would only eat if she humbled herself to approach the nearest fire and ask for bread. Water she had, and a few dates that Nofret had gathered the day before they left the mountain. If she ate them, she did it in the tent where no one could see.

  No one spoke to her. It was not a thing that anyone decided to do; it was accepted, that was all. She must speak if she wished to be spoken to. She would earn her place or have none.

  It was not in her to weep, even when she felt cruelly used. She presented a proud cold face to the tribe. When at last she asked for bread, she did so with frigid courtesy. She was given it with warmth that was a rebuke, and an invitation to tarry by that particular fire. It happened to belong to Korah and Elisheba. Aharon was not with them: he was sitting with Leah and Johanan and Nofret, sharing a haunch of gazelle that Johanan had shot on the day’s journey.

  The other haunch roasted over his wives’ fire. They offered Ankhesenamon a choice cut of it. She refused, drawing back, retreating to her cold fireless tent and her haughty solitude.

  Aharon, watching, shook his head and sighed. “It’s hard to be human,” he said, “when one’s been a god.”

  “One learns,” said Leah, “or one dies.” She was watching another fire altogether. Moshe sat by it with his son in his lap and a handful of the elders about him. He was talking as he usually was, undeterred by the stammer that had been his curse from childhood. The elders nodded at whatever he was saying. Sometimes they argued, but at the moment they were all in agreement.

  He was talking about the god again, Nofret supposed. When they argued, it was usually because he had bethought himself of some new law that his god would wish to decree, and they took issue with it. Apiru were wonderful people for arguing, even with their god or his prophet. Only when he talked directly about the god did they fall silent and listen. The god spoke to everybody, they believed. But he spoke most clearly to Moshe the prophet.

  Nofret, denied her lady’s tent, found shelter in Leah’s. Johanan had his own, but she was not allowed in there. It was not proper. They were betrothed as the Apiru thought of it, but until they married they were not to share a tent.

  There was nothing to prevent Leah from lingering by the fire with others of the women, or Johanan from slipping under the back of the tent and into Nofret’s blankets. The first time he did it, she almost thrust him out again for startlement. He was ready for that: he wound his long arms about her and held fast till she stopped struggling. By the time she thought to cry out, he had stopped her mouth with a kiss.

  It was a long while before he would let her speak. When he did, she was laughing too hard at first to begin. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh, you! Is this at all proper?”

  “Not in the least,” he said cheerfully. “But it’s perfectly well expected.”

  “So when do we make it proper?”

  “Well,” he said. “That’s a bit difficult. In the ordinary way of things, you see, my father wou
ld approach your father and offer him a reasonable price. He’d turn it down, of course, and propose one that he reckoned more reasonable. My father would howl at the enormity of it, and so they’d go on, till they settled on the sum they both knew they’d come to before they began. Then they’d hammer out the marriage contract.”

  “That’s like enough to what I remember from Hatti,” said Nofret. “But since I have no father here to speak for me, and no brothers—” She sucked in her breath. “Johanan! You’re not telling me we can’t marry.”

  He kissed her so hard she gasped. “There now. Stop that. Of course we’ll marry. Grandmother’s going to speak for you. She drives a wonderfully hard bargain. She’s only waiting for the time to be right and proper.”

  “Which could be never,” she said sourly. “But suppose it does come—what then?”

  “Then they seal the contract and Father pays the bride-price, whatever it may be: sheep usually, and fine fleeces, and a tent for us to live in, with all its fittings. Then we have the wedding.”

  “Gods,” said Nofret. “What are we thinking of? A wedding. Do we have to be so hideously obvious?”

  He laughed so hard he rolled out of the heaped rugs and fleeces and lay naked on the floor. She scrambled after him with as many of the rugs as she could gather, flung them all over him and herself with them, clamping a hand over his mouth. “Stop that! The whole camp can hear you.”

  He took his time, but in the end he stopped. When he could talk again he said, “You’d better get used to it. I don’t intend to be one of those husbands who spends more time with the sheep than with his wife.”

  “I should hope not,” she said tartly. “I should also hope that you can preserve at least the appearance of dignity.”

  “What, must I?”

  “You know you do.”

  He sighed heavily. “O hard taskmaster. If you’re so cruel now, what will you be when you’re a wife?”

  “Worse,” said Nofret. “Infinitely worse.”

  oOo

  The place of the green pastures was breathtakingly true to its name. It was a deep valley in the barren hills; a river ran through it. There were orchards and vineyards, and a village of Apiru who remained settled there and did not wander.