“The law obliges me to have you killed,” she said.

  “Do you think I haven’t . . . considered that?” said Moses. “If that’s your . . . decision, I’ll make no effort to resist you. Do your will with me.”

  “Tell me why Pharaoh shouldn’t execute justice upon you.”

  “Because I just got home from Ethiopia. Did the gods give me . . . victory there or not?”

  “I would have to accuse you of plotting directly against me.”

  “No doubt Tuthmose and Isis would be happy to . . . tell the world how I conspired to . . . kill their beloved father and husband and arranged for his . . . murder while I was still coming down the river from Ethiopia.”

  “I don’t need their perjury!” cried Hatshepsut. “It’s me you killed! My body you buried there in the sand! I won’t last ten years, five years with you gone! You fool! You disloyal, selfish, slave-hearted, ungrateful, stupid . . .” Hatshepsut was shocked to find so much rage in her own heart. She was about to lose the only person she had ever loved besides her father and brothers. Only this time it wasn’t the gods taking him, or a murderous concubine. The boy had done it to himself, had done it to her, and it infuriated her. “Take a chariot to whatever border fort you choose. Take a letter with you, giving orders for your own execution if you attempt to return, but forbidding them to pursue you into the desert. Give it to the captain of the border guard as you leave. I’ll put my seal on it.”

  “You’ll let me write the orders for my own . . . banishment?”

  “Aren’t you listening? You’ll write the order for your death. That’s the sentence I pass on you. Death. For treason. You deserve it.”

  “I know.”

  “You have killed me, Moses. I raised you up and saved your life, and you—”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  She burst into tears. “Yes, I should! I would never have been Pharaoh without you. The gods gave you to me and gave me a kingdom in the same moment. Because I had you I had a son and so I could be Pharaoh. The gods put me in this place, and now they take it all away from me, they take you away from me.”

  “It isn’t the gods, Mother. I did it.”

  “You—oh, yes, you planned it this way from the start, is that it? Your spies told you that a tavernkeeper would be beating an old Israelite before dawn this morning and you chose to be there alone in time to kill him with your bare hands—”

  “The gods do not . . . control my life!”

  “And you paraded in front of the walls of Saba in order to provoke that poor foolish girl into betraying her family, her kingdom, out of love for you—the gods had no hand in that, either!”

  “My choices, my . . . mistakes, Mother.”

  “No, Moses. It took the rage of a god to make a mess this terrible.”

  Again Moses looked away from her.

  “What!” she demanded. “What is it you’re not saying, when you avert your eyes that way!”

  “Miriam told me that the Israelite . . . God was controlling my destiny.”

  “Oh, now, there’s a powerful god, every single person in the world who worships him is a slave, you know he’s the mighty one.”

  Moses turned to her with anguish in his eyes. “Set them free, Mother.”

  “What!”

  “Get them out of Egypt.”

  “Who?” Tuthmose? Isis? What was he saying?

  “The Israelites, of course! It’s their god who’s doing all this. Get them out of here and he’ll . . . leave you alone. Maybe even reward you by . . . protecting your throne.”

  His words astonished her. “When did you become a believer in this barbaric tribal superstition?”

  He looked embarrassed. “If it isn’t the Israelite god, then what . . . god is it that’s . . . taken control of my . . . life?”

  So he wasn’t serious about the Israelite deity. She was relieved. “You know I can’t get rid of the Israelites,” she said. “I thought of it myself before you learned to speak, and my father explained it to me, and I taught it to you. The labor that they do can’t be replaced. Every Israelite laborer frees an Egyptian to be a soldier. Besides, the people wouldn’t stand for letting them out of their bondage.”

  He turned and looked her in the eye, and his voice was suddenly different, stronger. “Mother, Egypt will recover from the . . . loss of the Israelites more easily than it will recover from . . . keeping them.”

  His tone frightened her. The change in him. Was he in fact possessed by some god? “What kind of nonsense is this? Where do you get such foolish notions?”

  It seemed that Moses only then realized what he had just said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just . . . it just came . . . to me.” He laughed nervously. “My brother . . . thinks he’s a revolutionary, my . . . sister thinks she’s a prophet. Madness runs in my . . . family.”

  “When I die,” said Hatshepsut, “it won’t be the Israelite god who kills me. It’ll be Tuthmose III.”

  Moses shuddered. “Don’t call him that.”

  “By this time tomorrow it will be his name,” she said. “After what you’ve done, I’ll be so discredited that I’ll have no choice, you know that. I’ll need him to legitimize my own rule. And then it’s just a matter of time.” She looked at the pain in this beautiful stranger’s face and it broke her heart. For there was no sign of remorse now. He pitied her, but he would do nothing to help her. “Get out!” she cried. “Don’t make me look at you!”

  He took a few steps away from her, then rushed to her, knelt before the throne, clung to her legs, laid his head on her lap, and wept as he murmured, “Mother, Mother, I’m so sorry.” For a few moments she petted his cheek, his hair, remembering the child, remembering the joy of having him around her always, the symbol of her power, yes, but more than that, the gift of the gods to him, the child who could extend her rule of Egypt beyond her own death, and now he’s ruining everything, the stupid, stupid . . .”

  “Get out!” she wailed again.

  He rose to his feet.

  “I sentence you to death!” she whispered furiously. “Let your chariot fly if you want to live!”

  He bowed to her; tears dropped from his eyes as he did. Then he turned and strode on those mighty legs that had once toddled along these halls as she held his hand. On those legs he walked to the door and out of her life.

  “You’ve murdered me!” she wailed after him. And she felt that it was already true. Not some future event, not some day when Tuthmose III would decide he was strong enough and strangle her—poison would not be his way—but now, right now, she was dead, her heart was dead within her because her Moses, her true son was gone.

  * * *

  Moses took a charioteer with him because without one he would look like a man of no rank, and for the sake of a swift journey he needed to look like what he was, the leader of the armies of Egypt on an urgent errand. He had to race faster than any other messenger so that the news of his crime and his exile could not possibly precede him. He could not stop to sleep. Last night when he pulled straw over himself to stay warm, he had never imagined that it would be the last night of sleep he ever had in Egypt.

  His one consolation as his chariot flew over the road toward the head of the gulf of Suez was this: At least Aaron and Miriam wouldn’t get their way, either. If he couldn’t fulfil Hatshepsut’s dreams, at least he’d have the satisfaction of knowing he wouldn’t help Aaron or Miriam fulfil their mad plans, either.

  “Is there to be a battle at the Red Sea?” asked his charioteer. “Are the people of Canaan attacking us?”

  But Moses explained nothing, just stood behind the driver, holding on to the sides of the chariot so he didn’t fall as it bounced along the smooth royal road.

  * * *

  “The fool!” shouted Aaron. “He saves one old man’s life and gives up the chance to free a nation! He flees into the desert when he should have led a revolution!”

  Miriam and Jochabed let him rage. He ranted so loudly that soon half the Israelites in the village were gathered around their house, some of them remonstrating with him to be careful, careful, lest the rage of Hatshepsut descend on his house, on their village. It took hours but at last his rage spent itself. His clothing torn—for he tore it in his grief at the news of Moses’ exile—he finally staggered away from his mother’s house, the people clearing a path for him, for fear that if they touched a man of such fire their hands would burn.

  “He’s so selfish,” said Miriam, when the last echoes of Aaron’s voice finally left the corners of the house. “All he thinks about is the collapse of his own foolish plans, when his own mother weeps because she’ll never see her younger son again.”

  Only then did Miriam realize that Jochabed, though weeping, was not grieving. No, she was smiling.

  “Mother, have you gone mad?”

  “Not today,” said Jochabed. “Give me a few more years of scenes like this, and I’m sure I will be, but for today, no, not mad at all.”

  “Why are you smiling?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” said Jochabed.

  “Because your younger son is now in exile!”

  “How can he be in exile, when God is with him? God is his native country, Miriam, and as long as God goes with him he is home everywhere.”

  “But you won’t see him,” said Miriam.

  “Ah, but you forget, we’re the ones in exile, not Moses. We’re the ones who are servants in another people’s homeland.”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten that,” said Miriam. “Are you really that faithful, Mother, that you can be happy when your son loses his high station and becomes a fugitive?”

  “High station?” said Jochabed. “I never cared about his high station. I put him on the water to save his life, not to make him Pharaoh. That was God’s plan, and I’m sure God is simply taking the next step.”

  “The next step to where? Moses is gone.”

  “What a foolish question!” said Jochabed. “You really are a foolish girl, Miriam.”

  Stung, Miriam started to leave the room. She stopped when her mother started saying something. Only Mother wasn’t speaking to her. She was murmuring as if comforting a baby in a cradle. She was talking to Moses.

  “God’s hand is strange to us, Moses,” she said. “He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever.”

  She was almost chanting. Her words ebbed and flowed like the songs the old men sang, tales of Abram and Sarai, of the father at Mount Moriah preparing to sacrifice his son, of the servant of Abraham meeting Rebecca at the well, of the rivals Jacob and Esau and the seven years of service, of Joseph the dreamer and his many-colored coat. The words came out of her with the same holiness. Miriam’s eyes were opened. A woman could find a song of God in her heart.

  “You’ll be driven until you learn to freely reach for his hand,” said Jochabed. “God has shaped you to the man you are. He made you choose which people yours would be. But you yourself chose to keep the covenant.”

  Was that what Moses did this morning, when he killed a man and buried his body in the sand, thinking no one saw? Was he somehow choosing? Or was he merely driven by accident and impulse? Miriam tried to understand.

  “And now God’s hand will make you the man of God to set this people free.”

  Miriam shuddered with a thrill of joy. Ah, Lord, is this prophecy coming through my mother’s lips?

  “Look for his hand in the road behind,” said Jochabed. “And when you’ve learned to see it, then look for his hand in the road ahead. Take his hand, follow his hand. Only in his hand will you be free.”

  And then her chanting stopped and Mother broke down and wept. “Only God will bring you back to me,” she said. “O Lord, bring him back to me.”

  I fear that’s a prayer that God won’t grant you, Mother. When Moses returns, you won’t be here to see it.

  But I will.

  Miriam knew this with her whole heart. She wasn’t sure whether it was God promising it to her, or her promising it to God, but she knew that it would come true. Moses would return, and Miriam would be there to greet him.

  “I’ll be ready,” she whispered to God. “As far as my voice will reach, people will hear it every day, every day from now until he comes again. God will not forget his people. He will send someone to save us from bondage and take us to the land that was promised to our fathers. We’ll all be ready for him when he comes.”

  * * *

  The wind was rising when Moses reached the border fort. An east wind, a storm wind, raising sand into roiling clouds, into a fog of sharp, cutting grains.

  “What are you thinking of, Great One?” asked the poor confused captain of the border guard. He had only seen Moses once, in a parade several years ago, but he knew his reputation, knew of the triumph in Ethiopia. “There’s nothing so urgent out there that you have to risk death by traveling into that sand!”

  “You think not?” asked Moses. For a moment he thought of giving the man his orders now—but he didn’t know this captain and wasn’t sure how he’d react if he knew that Moses had fallen from power. Some men would think that they might curry favor with Pharaoh by killing Pharaoh’s fleeing enemy. And despite all that had happened, Moses was determined not to get himself killed. His life might have no value to the gods—to God, if that’s who was destroying him—but it still had value to Moses, if only to keep God from having the satisfaction of breaking his pride.

  What was this god, anyway, this God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Nothing like the gods of Egypt, that was certain. No majesty like Horus in flight, no grace of life-giving Isis, no resurrecting power like Osiris in the underworld, no light like Amon. This god was more like the madcap gods of the Cretans, who had built their city in the Nile delta under the protection of the Pharaohs and there worshiped a bizarre pantheon of feuding adolescents that they called gods. Such disorder! If those gods were real, it was a wonder mountains weren’t shifting in waves like the sea, a wonder that down didn’t switch places with up three times a day. That sort of primitive, uncivilized god was as barbaric as the people who worshiped him. The gods of Egypt had dignity and well-ordered kingdoms. They did not quarrel among themselves. Those who studied the Book of the Dead knew the orderly passage into the next life. Egypt’s gods asked little and gave much: order, safety, predictability.

  The Israelite god didn’t even have the passion and fire of the golden calf that had won a devoted following during the Hyksos domination—including more than a few Israelites, who envied the divine madness of those who danced before the calf. No, the Israelite god did nothing but reach out and make bizarre, pointless changes in Moses’ life. Including forcing him to flee into a sandstorm.

  If you meant to swallow me up in the sand, why wasn’t I the one to die this morning, and let that tavernkeeper bury me instead of the other way around? The gods are all tricksters, bringing up winds out of strange quarters, sometimes warm and sweet, sometimes filled with rain, sometimes filled with sand like a billion knives. Abraham was promised that his descendants would be like sand. But which sand? The inert sand by the water, moving only when the sea roiled it in the turbulent belly of the wave? The dry sand of the desert, lifeless and sterile until the wind picked it up and hurled it at stone with such force that the stone gave way, bit by bit, before the onslaught? It hardly mattered either way. Gods had their way with men.

  A day ago, a year ago, Moses would have laughed at such thoughts. He thought he could build walls so strong that the wind of change could never get in at him. He let them fly wherever they’d blow. He was like a stone, which the wind could never pick up and move. Others ran around, panicking whenever change came upon them. But Moses was unmoved. Immovable.

  And now he had become a grain of sand himself, picked up and hurled wherever the wind of God chose. Hatshepsut and Jochabed had both taught him that he was destined for greatness. But no, he was just another grain of sand among the billion grains, to be flung against stone whenever some god or another decided. He had no destiny. Only the whims of the gods. Or of God. Did it matter to the sand which breeze picked it up?

  Well, here’s some news for you, God, or gods: You can kill me, but until you do, you don’t own me. I make my own choices, go my own way. The storm will pass. The sand drops back down to the floor of the desert. And then you’ll find out I was never sand at all, but a seed, and out of death I’ll make life. You can’t break me. And whatever plan you have in mind, you can’t make me.

  * * *

  Nun came down from his scaffolding, the paint still wet on the stone behind him. As soon as he reached the bottom, the stonecutters climbed up to where he had been, and began chiseling off the inscription he had been painting. The account of Moses’ “birth” from the river, a gift of the gods to Hatshepsut: the story, no longer true, had to be expunged from memory. What did it matter that the people of this time knew the truth, that an Israelite had lived to adulthood as a son of Pharaoh, that he had conquered Ethiopia? In a generation it would be gossip; in two generations, legend; in three, myth; and in four, forgotten. Only what was on the stone would last, and so Moses had to be erased, if not from this time, then from eternity.

  This meant nothing to Nun, for even though he stirred the paintpot and plied the brush, he despised the illusions of the Egyptians. They thought they could touch eternity with inscriptions on stone, but what man chiseled off in a day, God would chisel off in a hundred thousand days, using the irresistible chisel of sand in the wind. But what God engraved in the hearts of his chosen people, that would never be forgotten.

  At home that night, Nun took his little Joshua on his knee and had him recite again the words from the stone. Joshua had it like a song. And other songs, too, the tale of the garden, the tale of Abraham and Isaac, Lot and the angels in Sodom, Noah and the ark. And in other houses, those tales were also known and told, perhaps in slightly different words, perhaps including some different passages, mixing things up a little (or was Nun’s version mixed up?), but substantially the same tale. Including the tale of Moses, who proved that, once redeemed from bondage, a son of Abraham could be the greatest of princes. Pharaoh, angry or fearful, cut the name of Moses from the stone, but this only engraved his name deeper in the hearts of Israel.