Pillar of Fire Read online

  She was content. More than content. Happy.

  It was becoming an accustomed state, one that would have seemed so strange once as to be impossible. She stretched again in the warming sunlight, loosening the kink in her back that was there more often since the twins were born. Maybe she would bathe in the river, in the pool that the women had claimed for themselves. A bath would be pleasant. If she washed her hair, too, and scented it with herbs, then tonight . . .

  She shook her head ruefully. She knew too well where that led. Another daughter, maybe. Everyone wanted sons, but she was odd in that as in everything else. Sons went to their father when they were old enough. Daughters stayed with their mother till they were women themselves. If she was lucky the friendship endured even after they were married, when they went to their husband’s tent and set themselves under the authority of his mother.

  Nofret slipped into the tent to gather the things that she needed for bathing. As she came out with the bundle in her arms, she nearly fell over someone who was sitting in front. At first she thought it one of the children, a girl new come to womanhood and wearing a woman’s robes and veil. But the face that turned upward was not a child’s face.

  Nofret stopped short. “Lady!” She had never got out of the habit of that, nor seen why she should. “You startled me. Have you come to visit the children? They’re asleep now. Zillah’s looking after them. If you want to go in and see—”

  “No,” said Miriam. Her familiar word, her familiar soft remote voice. “Leah asks to see you.”

  Nofret’s mind did not want to shift. “Leah wants to see the children? If she waits till tonight, we should have a gazelle, or if my husband’s luck fails, the black-spotted kid—”

  “She wants to see you,” said Miriam. “Now.”

  Something in her expression stilled the rest of Nofret’s babbling. When she rose and walked quickly away toward the edge of the camp, Nofret followed.

  oOo

  Nofret had visited Leah only a day or two before. Or three days, maybe—the twins were teething, it was hard to remember. Four days? Five? Not so long. Not long enough for Leah to have changed so much.

  She had been old since Nofret first knew her. She was very old now, but had been still hale, still able to follow the tents and the herds. A season or two ago, some of the elders—men and women of grey age themselves, but younger than she—had tried to persuade her to stay in the valley. She had laughed in their faces. She could outwalk them, outlast them, outdo them in any feat they chose.

  Somehow, in the few days since Nofret was in her tent, drinking date wine and eating the wonderful sweet cakes that Leah made with raisins and honey, she had grown shrunken and frail. Her skin was waxen, her hands shriveled. She lay on her bed of rugs and blankets, and even her eyes had grown dull. Till Nofret knelt beside her: then they came alive, as darkly bright as ever, but with a look in them that Nofret did not want to know.

  Unfortunately for her own complacency, Nofret had never been adept at clouding her own sight. What she saw, she saw clear. In those eyes she saw death.

  She took Leah’s hands in hers. All the strength was gone out of them. “How?” she asked. “How so soon?”

  “It’s a gift,” said Leah in a thread of a voice. “The Lord gave it to me from a child: to be strong to the end, but when that end came, to go quickly.”

  “No,” said Nofret. “Quickly is in your sleep, between one breath and the next, and no failing of strength till all strength is gone.”

  Leah smiled. “So it is. But one should have some warning, you see. Time to settle one’s affairs. To say goodbye.”

  Nofret’s eyes were burning dry. She was no better at weeping now than she had ever been. “What if I won’t let you?”

  “You wouldn’t be that foolish.” Leah tightened her fingers on Nofret’s. “Listen to me. I’ll see the sun go down— I’ve been promised that. But there’s much to do before then, many people to see. You’re the first, except for my daughter here.”

  Nofret glanced where Leah’s eye slid, at Miriam sitting on her heels just within the tentflap. Miriam wore her old royal mask, the one that could hold steady even when her heart was breaking.

  Leah was still speaking, wasting strength on words that she need not have said. “You too were a daughter to me, a granddaughter, beloved of my grandson whom I loved. It gives me joy to see you now so happy, so beautifully content.”

  “I know all that,” said Nofret, not graciously, but she had never lied to Leah. “I don’t want to hear it. I want you to get up, walk out of here, be as you always were.”

  “I don’t,” said Leah. “I’m going home. The god is calling me. He’s held back for so long . . . Did you know that all my family are dead, all who were alive when I was young? I’m the oldest in the tribe. The elders themselves were born after I grew into a woman.”

  “You’re not as old as that,” Nofret said. “Aharon can’t be more than—”

  “Aharon was the child of my age. He was my Ishak: the impossible one, the one who was born when I should have been past bearing.” She laughed, a catch of breath, no more. “Don’t look so shocked, child! It’s not indecent to have a baby when you’re past forty. Simply . . . unexpected.”

  “You can’t be that old,” Nofret protested.

  “But I am,” said Leah. “They thought I was barren, did you know that? And so did I. My husband took two other wives, and they bore him sons, and they were his heirs. Then Aharon was born, our beloved, our prince of the people. He was our great joy. My husband died in the fullness of his age, but I lived to see my son’s son and his grandsons. Few women are given such a gift.”

  “Then why are you giving it up?”

  “Because,” said Leah, “it’s time. The old order is gone, the one that went into Egypt with Yuya and his brothers, and the one that lives here by the mountain of God. Both of them were sundered. Now they’ll be one again. Moshe will lead them, and Aharon, and our Johanan. Your Jehoshua, too, your savior of the people.”

  Nofret’s skin was cold, a cold that had nothing to do with the air of Leah’s tent. That if anything was too warm.

  “I’ve seen it, too. A little. None so clearly that I could be sure of it.”

  “You will,” Leah said, “when the time comes. Your children absorb you now, and so they should. Your husband needs you to love him, and not to give yourself up to the people.”

  “But if I have to,” said Nofret, “if it’s laid on me—since I can see—”

  She did not want to say it, but it was not a matter of wanting or of not wanting. This had been coming on her since first she met Leah in Akhetaten, when she learned that she could see what others could not see.

  “It is not laid on you,” Leah said. “Not yet.”

  Nofret stared at her. “It’s not—”

  “In your time,” said Leah, “you will be a seer of the people. But the time is not now. Now you are the wife of Johanan ben Aharon, and the mother of Jehoshua and Anna and Ishak. They bind you. They cloud your sight on behalf of the people.”

  “But I have it,” Nofret said. “I do have it.”

  Nor had she ever wanted it, either—but it was there. It was hers. Who was Leah to take it away from her?

  “I take nothing from you,” Leah said, reading her as she always had, with effortless ease. “I give you a gift, a blessing. A life of peace while your children are young.”

  She wanted that. Oh, she wanted it. But she was angry nonetheless, with the perfect lack of reason that seemed to be the lot of the human creature. Especially, Johanan would tell her, human woman.

  Johanan could be insufferable when he chose to be. So could his grandmother, even dying. “What if I don’t want the gift?” Nofret demanded.

  “It’s not yours to accept or refuse,” said Leah. “Do be sensible now, and think.”

  “I am thinking,” Nofret shot back. “I think that the people need you. That you can’t just abandon them.”

  “Of course I
can’t,” Leah said. “There is one to follow me.”

  “But you said that I—”

  Nofret broke off. Miriam had not moved, had done nothing at all, but Nofret’s eyes had fallen on her and held.

  Clouded the sight might be, shrunk to the compass of her own near kin, but it was clear enough to see what sat in front of it.

  “She doesn’t have the eyes,” Nofret said. “She never did.”

  “The queen of Egypt saw only her own kin and kind,” said Leah, disturbing echo of Nofret’s own thoughts. “When those were gone, then her eyes opened and she could see.”

  Nofret’s throat constricted. What she felt did her no credit at all. Sheer sea-green jealousy. She was jealous of her own poor exiled lady, her lost queen whom she had taken out of Egypt. The one she pitied when she took time to think of her at all. Who was to be the prophet of the people, the seer of the Apiru, because Nofret was not ready.

  It was hard to face that, harder to face herself. She did not like what she saw. Time was when it was right and proper that her lady be set over her. Had not the gods done it since they both were born?

  She had grown proud among the Apiru. Married to one who was as close to a prince as they had, mother of his children—she had come to think of her lady as the lesser. The god of the Apiru had little patience with mortal pride, and less with mortal foolishness.

  This was gentle as such things went. The ill spirit in her wanted her to get up and walk out without another word. Plain sense held her where she was. It made her say, “Lady. I—”

  “Miriam,” said her lady. “I’m called Miriam now. I’ve no more rank than you have.”

  If, it was clear, no less. Miriam had lost nothing of pride, either, since she was queen of Egypt.

  Nofret smiled thinly. They were more equals now than they had ever been. She wondered what Miriam thought of that. No more, probably, than she herself did.

  “Miriam,” she said. “Are you whole, then? Heart-whole?”

  “No,” said Miriam. “But it will do.”

  Nofret bent her head, raised it again. She understood. She was still holding Leah’s hands. They were thin and cold. Colder than they should be. She gasped. “Leah!”

  Leah’s eyes flickered under lids gone near transparent. She drew a breath, another. She swam up as if from deep water, looked into Nofret’s face, smiled. “Go, child. Your children are calling you.”

  Her children were sound asleep. She opened her mouth to say so, but closed it again. She bent, kissed the hands that lay so limp in hers, laid them gently on the shrunken breast. “May your god keep you,” she said.

  Fifty-Four

  Leah died at evening in sight of the holy mountain, cradled in the arms of her son, with her kin about her. It was a good death. They mourned her for the full length of their rite, and buried her on the mountain, in a place where the sun shone bright in the morning. A spring bubbled from a rock not far from her grave, covering it with green, and in spring with a carpet of flowers.

  It was a blessed place. Nofret went there often, and sometimes her children with her. There was no daughter after the twins, after all; but she did not grieve too much. She was not past bearing yet, nor would be for a while.

  Miriam proved to be a strong seer of the people. It should not have surprised anyone: a queen in Egypt was remarkably like a prophetess of the Apiru. She did not have to believe in their god, either, that Nofret could discern. It was Moshe who was the god’s slave in heart and soul. Miriam served the gift of her own sight, and the people on whose behalf it was given her. She said nothing of any god or spirit.

  Nofret could hardly quarrel with it, since she would have been much the same. They had even less to say to each other now than they had before. Miriam moved among the councils of the elders. Nofret’s place was among the women and within her family’s tent. When she departed from it, it was to go up to Leah’s grave, or to walk the paths of the desert with one of Johanan’s dogs to guard her.

  She did not think of these wanderings as anything unusual. She had always gone off by herself when she could. Apiru women did not do it, but their men often did. They heard their god more clearly, they said, under the sky.

  Nofret was not listening for a god’s voice. She went for the silence. There was never any of that in camp, even in the deep night: there was always a baby crying, a goat bleating, a dog whimpering in its sleep. Away from all of that, in the desert or on the mountain, there was no sound but the wind’s song, and now and then the call of a bird.

  Once in a great while she met Moshe out wandering, too. He had no dog to guard him, nor carried any weapon but the staff that he had carved for himself soon after he went out of Egypt. It was a remarkable thing, a straight stave of some dun-golden wood, its head carved in the image of a cobra reared to strike. It was the same serpent that guarded the crown of Egypt, the uraeus-serpent, defender of the Lower Kingdom. No one seemed to think it odd that the prophet of Sinai should carry such a thing as if he were still the Lord of the Two Lands.

  When they met, they sometimes spoke. He lost his stammer in speaking to one woman alone, but he kept his old courtesy, his princely politeness that let him ask after herself and her family. She could be startled into answering him, and thence into conversation. He was saner than she ever remembered, more honestly human: a man, not king and god. Only when he spoke of his god was he the man that he had been in Akhetaten: bound, enslaved, obsessed.

  But it was a gentler enslavement than it had been. There was less desperate urgency in it. Here the people believed as he believed. He was not a king imposing an alien faith upon a reluctant people, but a prophet among the chosen of his god.

  She was not disconcerted therefore to be clambering up a particularly interesting slope, the year they went late to the mountain pasture because the rains were late in coming, to come upon Moshe clambering ahead of her. He had gone all grey since she came to Sinai, and his beard was of noble and venerable length, but he was as nimble as a young man. He needed his staff only rarely to steady his steps.

  She had been moved of late to explore beyond her wonted paths. A restlessness had been growing in her, mildly preposterous in a woman of forty, mother of children who grew tall, and the eldest already a man in the eyes of the Apiru.

  She could not say that her sight was growing any clearer. Miriam was still incontestably the seer of the people. But something was changing. Maybe it was only her body, warning her that her days of childbearing were ending.

  If that was what it was, then she was some distance yet from proof of it. The Apiru had a custom of setting their women apart during their courses, which had come on her a handful of days ago. Rather than go into the house of the women, she had chosen to wander on the mountain. Tomorrow, that being the end of the time that the Apiru called unclean, she would go back down to the camp.

  She should not be following Moshe now. He was become so perfectly Apiru that he would reckon himself stained by her presence. But he climbed with such concentration and such clear sense of purpose that she could not help but scramble after him.

  She had never climbed so high. The Apiru did not go up on the mountain that they called the mountain of God, not unless they were summoned. As far as she knew, only Aharon had ever had such a summons, and of course Moshe, who had been known to dwell for days on or about the summit, communing with the god.

  What the god would think of an unclean woman in his holy place, she could too well imagine. But if he had not wanted her here, would he have let her see his prophet, or tempted her to follow him?

  The slope that Moshe chose was one of the steepest. He did not seem aware that he was followed. He had a fixed and eager air, as if someone were calling him, beckoning him to the mountain’s top.

  In fact he stopped short of the summit. The slope grew ragged there, and on one side a great jut of rock reared up against the sky. There was a twisted knot of brush on top of the rock, clinging grimly to its high perch, bent and tangled by the force of
the wind. The sun, rising above the mountain, seemed caught in the branches.

  Moshe had stopped at the foot of the rock. Nofret, near blind with the effort of matching his pace, nearly ran him down. She dropped just in time to the dubious shelter of a tumble of stones.

  She could have danced around him and flung sand in his face, and he would not have noticed her. All his being was focused on the slope above him. The sun was dazzling. Nofret narrowed her eyes against its glare, shading them with her hand.

  Moshe was a shadow in the brightness, but she could see that he stared straight into it. He was talking to it. He spoke the language of the Apiru as he always did now, reckoning it the only fit tongue for addressing the Apiru god.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  His head tilted as if he listened. He moved toward a track that wound up along the rock.

  The glare had grown blinding. Nofret’s eyes streamed with it. She had to lower her head and draw her veil over her face. But she did not leave. She was too stubborn.

  “I’m here,” Moshe said again. He bent. He was taking off his sandals, she saw, setting them tidily side by side. She thought he would go on up the rock, but he stayed where he was, face bared and eyes wide open to the sun.

  Through the screen of her veil she could see well enough. Moshe was sidewise to her. Expressions played across his face like light on water, each of them remarkably clear to read. Intent concentration; slow dawning of understanding; incredulity. “But,” he said then, “my Lord, who am I, that I should do this?”

  Nofret could have answered that herself: the prophet of Sinai, who was once king in Egypt. Maybe the god said the same.

  “And you?” Moshe asked the immense and speaking silence. “By what name shall the people call you? I knew you in the Two Lands, or I thought I did. Here I am a stranger. The people will never name you to me. They say that I know your name; there’s no need to ask it, or ever to speak it.”