Pillar of Fire Read online

  She surged up. “I knew it! You knew. Damn you, Johanan, you can’t let—”

  “Hush,” he said. “You’ll wake the children.”

  She lowered her voice a fraction, but she did not abate the force of it at all. “You will go out there now and tell our son that he is staying here.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Johanan.

  She nearly hit him. “You are his father! You can command him. He has to obey.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “Jehoshua’s bidden to come.”

  “By whom?”

  “By the Lord,” he said.

  “By Moshe,” said Nofret. “It’s Moshe, isn’t it? He thinks he’ll keep us happy, let us have our firstborn with us, let us watch him—die—”

  “Jehoshua will not die in Egypt,” said Johanan.

  “You don’t know that,” Nofret said. “Get out there and forbid him to go.”

  “No,” said Johanan.

  She drew away from him, muscle by muscle. It had been clear for longer than she would admit, that Jehoshua expected to go to Egypt with the rest of them. Certain knowledge of it moved her remarkably little. But that his father knew, and would not deny him—that, she could not accept.

  “You know,” she said, “that I want my children here. No matter what it costs me, no matter how long I’m forced to be away. They’re safe here. No one is safe in Egypt.”

  She hoped, prayed, that he would not say the one thing, the thing that she would not forgive. Of course he said it. He was Apiru.

  “The Lord will protect him,” he said. He believed it without question, who questioned everything else under the sun.

  Nofret’s throat burned with bile. “You are blind,” she said. “All of you. Stone blind.”

  “You needn’t go,” he said. “If you’re afraid—if you don’t believe—”

  “What does believing have to do with it? I’ll go. Jehoshua will not.”

  “Jehoshua must.”

  She looked at him as if she had never seen him before. There was a core of stone obstinacy in every Apiru. It was buried deep in Johanan, but now she saw it clear. For anything else she asked of him, he would yield. For this, no. Not if his god compelled him.

  She should forgive. No Apiru would go against his god. Even for his wife. Even to protect the life of his son.

  She had never worshipped this god. She acknowledged his existence—she was no such fool as to deny it. But she would not name him sole and only god, and no other before him. There were other gods in the world. She had felt their presence, heard their voices.

  None of that would matter to Johanan. He knew just as surely that his god was one and alone. That was the prayer of his people, the children of Yisroel as they called themselves before their god.

  She had lived for fifteen years among these people. She had married one of them and borne his children. She did not know them at all. No more did they know her, to think that they could take her son as they had taken her husband—as they had taken her. Her son would have no part of this.

  What could she do? He wanted it, the idiot boy. No one else would stop him. She could try, but she had bound herself to go. Short of knocking him down and sitting on him, she would never keep him here. He was as stubborn as both of his parents put together.

  Defeat had never come easily. She got to her feet, stiff and aching, as if in that brief moment she had grown old. Johanan might have said something, reached for her—something to lessen the cold distance that had opened between them. She did not hear, nor did she see.

  Morning was coming. The camp was rousing, groaning, sodden with wine and dancing. Women stirred up the fires, set the bread to bake. Over by the westward edge, the embassy had begun to gather: the guards with their weapons, the pack-animals, the elders dressed to travel, with their finery packed away till they came to Egypt.

  Nofret moved with deliberate slowness. She did the things that she did every morning: waking the fire, baking the bread, milking the she-goat and filling the cups with warm rich milk. The twins came stumbling out, rubbing sleep from their eyes. She sent them to wash and comb out their tangles. Ishak protested. Anna looked stubborn. Nofret overpowered them both with a glare.

  They would do nothing differently now than they ever had. Not till the moment when the ram’s horn lowed, calling them to the gathering.

  At the sound of it Nofret froze. Johanan was on his feet, the last round of bread abandoned, bow and quiver in hand, half-running toward the muster.

  Nofret would have gone slowly even if two solid young bodies had not flung themselves on her. They still refused to weep or plead. The weight of their unshed tears dragged her down.

  With all the strength she had, she tore herself free. She must remember why she went. If there was a reason—if it was not plain obstinacy, and refusal to let her husband out of her sight.

  There was more to it than that. This embassy of madmen and visionaries needed someone whose eyes were clear, whose mind was unblinded by the light of their god. Maybe it was a summons of its own, this conviction that she must go.

  oOo

  Jehoshua was standing among the young men, armed as they were, full of himself as they all were, lifting his chin as her eye caught his. His expression dared her to call him out, to forbid him to go.

  She would not give him the satisfaction. She had no particular, ordained place in the caravan, but there was one that seemed proper: beside and a little behind Miriam, who walked in front with her father. Johanan was well back with the guard where he belonged, as she belonged here.

  The twins, bless their good sense, did not run yelling after, pleading to be taken as their brother was. Nofret could see them through the blurring of sudden tears, two tall and upright figures in the midst of a flock of children: Aharon’s, Moshe’s, a shifting crowd of others. She saw no tears on their faces. Only a white, stark stillness.

  Brave children. Braver than their mother, who was within a hair’s breadth of bawling like a bullcalf.

  People were singing as they went out. They were glad, or pretending to be. They sang praise to their god in sight of his holy mountain, naming him the holy one, the mighty one, the one who would bring his people out of Egypt.

  Nofret had no song in her. She walked grimly out of the camp, away from her joy and her freedom, back into slavery. Not because any god called her. Because she was a fool. A headstrong, purblind, gods-blasted fool.

  Fifty-Six

  Fool or not, Nofret was set on the road to Egypt. She had nothing to say to Johanan. If he had anything to say to her, she did not hear it. She shared a tent with Miriam, walked with her, waited on her in a pattern that she thought forgotten. It came back with disturbing ease.

  They went by far less secret ways than Johanan had taken in bringing the queen out of Egypt. They took the royal road through Sinai, traveling openly as an embassy well might. By night they camped in oases or in encampments of their people, and as they reached the royal road, in garrison towns and in caravanserais among other embassies and among the traders passing back and forth. They did not trumpet their errand to all who could hear, but they did not conceal that they were an embassy from the tribes to the king of Egypt.

  This country in name was Egypt. It had been conquered long since, secured with garrisons that ran in a skein along the border of Canaan. But it was not Egypt proper. Egypt was the Two Lands, Upper and Lower. Its shape was as a lotus blossom on a stem that stretched from Nubia to Memphis. Its flower was the Delta, the many mouths of the river that opened on the sea.

  All else, and Sinai itself, was conquered country. Egypt, Red Land and Black Land, was the heart of the empire. Its gods were strongest there. Its earth was different underfoot.

  Nofret knew when they passed into Egypt proper. The desert was desert still, bleak Red Land. The Black Land and the river that begot it were far away. But this was Egypt.

  It knew who had come back to it. Moshe, who wore his god’s light like armor, felt nothing that Nofret cou
ld discern. Miriam frowned as she walked, but then she always did. Only Nofret seemed to notice how the air quivered, how the sun seemed to peer closer, marking the dead who had returned.

  In the desert of Sinai they had gone as all travelers did, on guard against thieves, falling into company with other travelers as occasion warranted. The beasts of the desert shunned them, even among their tents at night.

  In Egypt they had companions on the road—not human companions as they had had before, but creatures of the desert. At night a tribe of jackals was always about them.

  The guards would have driven them off, but Johanan stopped them. “They do no harm,” he said. “They might even help. Anyone who tries to break through their circle will get such a welcome as to rouse the whole camp.”

  No one seemed to find it odd that they were so accompanied—so guarded. Some of the Apiru seemed to decide that Egyptian jackals were a kind of wild dog, and to treat them accordingly.

  Nofret kept her tongue between her teeth. If those who ought to know better did not see fit to enlighten the innocents, she was not about to do it for them. Egypt’s gods were here, watching. The god of the Apiru might be stronger than they, or he might not. That war was not for Nofret to fight.

  Egypt bided its time. She perforce did the same. She wore again the amulets that she had kept for so long hidden in her tent, the little images of Amon and of Sobek, the blue glass and the green stone, plaited into her hair. She doubted that either would care if she invoked him, not with the company she kept, but she felt safer with them than without.

  Moshe in the Red Land lost little by little the humanity that had been his in Sinai. Without his wife to woo him with her gentleness, without his sons to draw him away from contemplation of his god, he became as Nofret had known him in Akhetaten: dreamer and prophet, remote and more than a little mad. He could be coaxed out of it, particularly by the young men, who asked him endless questions and argued happily with the answers. But the closer he came to Memphis, the more distant he seemed.

  Miriam at least was as much herself as ever. Nofret had had no hopes of this journey, nor was she disappointed that Miriam offered none of the intimacy that an Apiru woman would have done, sharing a tent and a cookpot, night after night. Miriam preferred silence to the easy chatter of women. She did not expect servitude, or servility either, which suited Nofret perfectly well. They were two women traveling among the elders and the young men, sharing company but not confidences.

  Nofret did not know that Miriam had ever had the art of friendship. It was late for her to begin. Nor would Nofret help her, or press her to be other than she was.

  oOo

  The elders lacked Nofret’s circumspection. They had all heard Moshe’s declaration before the mountain, that he would not be king again in Egypt. Now that they were come to Egypt and were soon to come to Memphis, they pricked at him, urging him to reconsider.

  “Just think,” they said. “Here you are, and here is the kingdom. The man who rules it is your heir only by distant courtesy. The line of kings has broken. Won’t you restore it? You even have sons to inherit after you.”

  Moshe seemed not to hear them. He was sitting cross-legged by the fire under the vault of stars that in Egypt was thought to be a goddess’ body, listening to the song of the jackals. With firelight on his face he looked nothing at all like the king who had ruled in Akhetaten: that long-chinned strange man with his mouth set forever in disdain.

  “If you could see,” they went on, talking as much to hear themselves as to be heard. “Our people are beaten down by kings who both fear and despise them. If one were to come, to proclaim himself king, to set our people free to rule beside him—”

  That had gone too far. Miriam spoke with more warmth than Nofret had heard in her since Tutankhamon died. “You do not know what you say. Egypt will never endure a foreign king or the rule of a foreign people. It suffered the Shepherd Kings—and it has never forgotten it. Why do you think this king sets his foot so heavy on the people’s necks? He remembers that Egypt was conquered once, and could be again.”

  “Is it conquest,” asked one of the elders, “for a king to come back to the throne that is his by right of birth?”

  “If that king is dead,” she answered, “and he comes back leading a tribe of foreigners, yes, it is conquest.”

  Heads shook round the circle, beards wagging, chins setting firm against her too excellent sense. “Why would a king trouble to free slaves who are both numerous and useful, even if their kinsmen come to beg him? How much better if that king were disposed of and one set up in his place who has reason to favor our people.”

  “The god has commanded no such thing,” Miriam said with a snap in her voice. “We are bidden to free the people from the hand of Pharaoh, and to lead them out of Egypt. Not to claim Egypt’s throne.”

  “Yet,” said the elders, “if we did—”

  “You will not,” said Miriam. “I was driven into exile because I tried to set a foreign prince on the throne beside me. If I were to come back from the dead, and my father with me, and a pack of shepherds at our backs, Egypt itself would kill us, without need for its king to raise a finger.”

  The Apiru did not believe it. None of them but Aharon and Johanan had lived in Egypt. They were all men of the free desert, innocents in the ways of the Two Lands. They argued it over and over, while Moshe ignored them and Miriam stalked away in disgust.

  oOo

  Miriam kept her anger even when she had gone to her bed in her half of the tent. She was quiet, but Nofret felt it: a heaviness in the air, a tautness like a bowstring about to snap.

  Nofret spread her blankets, slipped out of her clothes, lay down in the dim light of the lamp that hung from the tentpole. She could see Miriam wrapped in her own blankets: a tousle of hair, a small closed face in the center of it, eyes open, dark, staring at nothing.

  “I would think,” Nofret said after a long while and much thought, “that you would be glad to hear them talking so. Don’t you want to be queen again?”

  Somewhat to her surprise, Miriam answered her. “What I want is of no consequence whatsoever.”

  “So you do,” Nofret mused. “But not badly enough to think you can have it.”

  “I want nothing,” said Miriam, “but to do what I’ve been bidden to do, and to get it over.”

  “And then to die?”

  Miriam’s eyes flashed to Nofret’s face. Nofret withstood the heat of them with the fortitude of a woman married to a man with a temper, mother of children with worse tempers yet.

  “What else is there to do?” Miriam demanded of her.

  “Live,” said Nofret. “Be happy. Worship your god if you choose.”

  “Nothing is ever so simple.”

  “Sometimes it is.”

  “For you, maybe.” Miriam set in that all the arrogance of a daughter of kings.

  Nofret laughed, which was not wise, but she could not help it. “You make everything so complicated. No wonder people think the god has forbidden you to smile. If you do, they say, you’ll be afflicted with leprosy, or something even worse.”

  “That is nonsense,” said Miriam.

  “Isn’t it?” Nofret propped her head on her hand. “I think you’re afraid to smile. Your face might crack. Or someone will smile back. What if it’s a man? What if he’s good to look at? What if he takes your heart out of the mummy-jar that it’s been pickled in for so long, and warms it, and brings it to life again?”

  “My heart is not—” Miriam’s mouth snapped shut.

  “I should have said this to you years ago,” Nofret said, more to herself than to Miriam. “You’re mummified, do you know that? You live and walk and breathe, but you’ve been dead since your young king died.”

  Miriam lay still. Nofret had driven her behind her barriers. They were high, as high as years could make them.

  What was behind them, Nofret could not know for certain. But she hoped suddenly, out of nowhere, that it was a young girl, the thir
d princess of Akhetaten, naked and supple and endlessly curious. That princess had not yet learned to be a queen, to wear a mask that was proud and hard and cold. She was young; her heart was whole, if still a green unripened thing.

  There was little to be seen of her in this quiet bitter woman with her beauty that had never faded or grown stale. Strange, thought Nofret, how the beauty endured even after the heart had withered.

  “You’ve forgotten how to live,” Nofret said. “Now you can’t even remember what it is to want to. This madness of your father’s, that you abetted him in—you hope he’ll fail, and you’ll be killed.”

  “I do not,” said Miriam. There: Nofret heard the child, petulant maybe, but present. “You are presumptuous.”

  “Aren’t I?” said Nofret “I always was. You gave me permission to be, long ago. Do you remember?”

  Miriam did not answer.

  “I was the one who could say the things that you couldn’t because you were too proper a princess. Now let me say what you won’t say. You won’t mind in the least if you die in Egypt.”

  “Do you fault me for that?”

  Nofret sat up and clasped her knees. Her hair, plaited for the night slipped over her shoulder. She noticed distantly that it was shot with grey. Miriam’s was still as black as ever.

  Some women had all the luck.

  “Look at you,” Nofret said. “The rest of us show the weight of years. My hair’s going white, my breasts are starting to sag, my bones ache in the mornings. You’ve hardly aged a day since you were a girl. You’re still as lissome as ever, your hair’s still black, your face hasn’t gained a line. And you want to die. Why? What’s the use in that, except to make a beautiful corpse?”

  “What have I to live for?” Miriam demanded.

  She thrust herself up in her blankets, facing Nofret across the width of the tent. Nofret was surprised to see how much animation was in that face, even if most of it was temper.

  “I thought you had your god,” Nofret said, “and your prophecies. And, if they aren’t enough, your father.”

  “My father doesn’t need me. He has sons.”