“O Pharaoh Hatshepsut!” cried Moses. “If I struck like . . . lightning, it is because . . . Pharaoh is the sky. If I flowed like a river through Ethiopia, then Pharaoh is the . . . sea to which this river flows!”

  The people cheered. Hatshepsut found it so endearing, the little pauses in his speech. The onlookers had no idea that during these pauses Moses was trying to get control of his stammer. That he must have spent his whole voyage down the river memorizing these speeches so he could utter them at all. Poor boy. It was a good thing that Pharaoh used spokesmen for most public declarations. But they had agreed before he left that if he came home triumphant—when he came home triumphant—they would have just such a meeting in the open air, on the very steps where she had taken him out of the river.

  “Pharaoh, god of Egypt, ruler of . . . Nubia, if I have glory, you gave it to me!”

  And he bowed. No, laid himself out on the stairs like a slave. Well, the boy might stammer but he knew how to stage a scene as well as any of the actors in a temple pageant.

  Well, she knew how to play her part in such a scene. She descended from her lofty place. At her first downward step, the crowd gasped. Pharaoh, descending to meet a supplicant?

  “Down these steps I walked, to bathe in the holy Nile!” she cried.

  They fell silent again, listening to the play she acted out for them.

  “A baby rose up out of the water and into my hands. I named him Moses and took him as my son!”

  She reached down, took Moses by the hand, and raised him up to his knees.

  “He was adopted also by Pharaoh my father, even as my father adopted me to be his son. So Moses became son of his body, son of his daughter, and son of his son, all on the same day. Thrice the son of Pharaoh, then, is the truly-named Moses! Lifted up by the gods as now I, god of Egypt, lift him up!”

  She raised him all the way to his feet. Tall! He stood two steps below her and yet they were eye to eye, and she was not a small woman. Ah, but she loved him, her beautiful boy, her creation. She had made a god of him.

  * * *

  Moses was exhausted, but of course that would mean nothing to Aaron and Miriam. And, just as predictably, they had brought along old Jochabed. For his old nurse’s sake, he couldn’t make them wait until they got tired of it and went home. Even as they used their own mother to manipulate him, they still misunderstood why it worked. They thought it was because he felt filial devotion to his mother. They thought he still felt like an Israelite. But he didn’t. His mother was Hatshepsut, who had taught him everything, who had lifted him up and made him great. Jochabed gave birth to his body, of course, but what did that mean? The courtesy he showed her was because she was his nurse, his childhood teacher. She was tender and kind with him and he still loved her—but one thing she had done to him that he found it hard to forgive. In his infancy she had taught him the Israelite language right along with the Egyptian, so that he thought easily in both, and passed back and forth between them with such ease that he almost didn’t notice which language he was speaking.

  Almost . . . and yet he had never made a mistake. Had never spoken to Hatshepsut in Hebrew, never addressed his soldiers by that barbaric language. Yet he had to stop himself and think, did I just say that in Hebrew? Was I about to speak in Hebrew? Sometimes he was quite sure it had to have been that watchfulness, that fear that had caused his stammer. He was fluent in both languages, but could not speak fluently in either without memorizing a set speech so he could know that he was not going to make a mistake and slip from one language into the other.

  It was as Mother had told him when he was five. “You’re Egyptian, not Hebrew. It’s useful to know Hebrew because you will often have to give commands to Israelites, and you want your understanding to be perfect. But don’t ever, ever speak Hebrew to an Egyptian. For if you give them the slightest excuse to call you an Israelite, you not only end your chance to be Pharaoh, you may very well destroy me as well.”

  Perhaps she didn’t realize how deeply Moses took her words to heart. But he could date his stammer from that day. And his stammer weakened him. How could it not? Yet his consolation was this: Because he paused so much, spoke so slowly, framing each word, checking it and doublechecking, he always said exactly what he meant to say. Words never slipped out, the way they did with other men. Almost that made up for not being able to speak freely and easily.

  He loved Jochabed, but had often thought, If only I had never learned Hebrew, how much better off I’d be. If only I hadn’t had to grow up knowing I was born to slaves and foreigners.

  And now my brother and sister and . . . mother . . . insist on reminding me of my low birth. Aaron will harangue me. Miriam will utter cryptic wise annoying proverbs and then smile as if she knew the secrets of all the gods. And Mother will weep to see me and embrace me with pure love and take me back to my childhood so that I’m helpless before her.

  Mother—not Jochabed, Hatshepsut—Mother is right. I’m not ruthless enough. I could keep these people out of my life. Just utter a word to Mother that I didn’t want to see them again, and they’d never be allowed anywhere near me. But instead I continue to let them steal hours of my life in useless conversation. I do this because I am stupid and weak.

  “Mother,” he said, for there she was, waiting in the middle of the room for him. “Jochabed” is what he wanted to call her, but it would hurt her feelings. She embraced him, as expected; wept all over his chest, as always; kissed his cheek and said, “God has been so good to me, to let me live to see you once again.”

  She’d been talking that way since he was an infant. God was good to her, because he let her see Moses again. If her god was so good to her, Moses wanted to ask, why did he let her remain a slave? Why wasn’t she free? For that matter, why had her second son been born under sentence of death, if her god was so good?

  But he said nothing of this. He bent and kissed her, let her prate on like a baby, the words meaningless to him but the sentiment of love perfectly acceptable.

  The other two were in the room, but they knew from experience that they shouldn’t interrupt Moses’ reunions with Jochabed. He permitted them to tag along with her, but he had warned them that if they didn’t let him have time alone with his old nurse, then these visits would have no value to him at all. In short, if they intended to speak with Moses, they had to wait in silence until Jochabed had stopped weeping and relaxed her hold on him.

  Finally she said, “I have to sit down, Moses. Where can I sit?”

  As he led her to a bench near the wall, they pounced.

  Aaron first, of course, trying to be friends. “All of Israel is proud of you, Moses. You wouldn’t believe how eagerly everyone waited for the news from each messenger that came down the river.”

  And then Miriam, asserting her superiority. “Of course we knew you would have a victory, because God has chosen you.”

  He hated it when she said that, but this time, with Jochabed still resting her hand on his arm, Moses did not rise to the bait.

  “I’m glad to see you’re in . . . good health,” he said. “You don’t want for anything, do you, Mother?”

  “You’re such a good and careful son,” said Jochabed. But there was a twinkle in her eye. That bothered him, when he saw that. As if she knew that he wasn’t really half so good or half so careful as he pretended. But didn’t he see to it that they had every necessity?—though not any kind of luxury that would lead people to think he was recognizing them as his family. Maybe Jochabed recognized how carefully calibrated all his gifts were.

  “I wish I could stay and . . . talk with you,” Moses began, but as usual his stammer made the words so slow to come out that before he could get to the next phrase—“but I must . . . bathe and sleep after my journey”—Aaron was already on him.

  “I wish you could go home with us. Go to the Israelites! Meet your people, let them show you how they love you!”

  “Is that what you call it?” said Moses. “Love?”

  Aaron looked annoyed. “What, you think they’re pretending?”

  “If you would tell them the . . . truth, that I’m Egyptian and not Israelite, they’d no more . . . love me than they love any Egyptian, particularly . . . Pharaoh’s son.”

  “Is that the truth?” asked Miriam.

  “It’s what he thinks is true,” said Aaron.

  This was unbearable. “Do you think I don’t know what I am?” Moses shouted. “Do you think I don’t . . . know my own heart? If I say I’m an Egyptian then I am!”

  Miriam laughed. “Until the first time you do something that the Egyptians don’t like.”

  Her laughter was as infuriating as Aaron’s smugness. “Every time I let you in here to . . . talk to me, I’m doing something that Egyptians don’t like.”

  “Oh, how brave of you,” said Miriam.

  Aaron added his own sneer: “You marry your way into a victory at Saba and then you whimper about letting your own family in to see you.”

  “You disdain my . . . victory? I have the respect of the men who . . . face death in battle.”

  Aaron had no answer—and what man could, who had not tasted combat? But Miriam cared nothing for the marks of courage. “You have the respect of men. It might be better if you earned the respect of God.”

  “You call it the respect of . . . God, but what you really mean is I should . . . do what you say.”

  “What God says,” Miriam insisted.

  “In your theology, Miriam, is there a difference?”

  “Oh, be quiet, all of you,” said Jochabed. “I know you didn’t grow up in the same house, so you couldn’t bicker and quarrel when you were little. Does that mean you have to make up for it now?”

  Moses snapped back at her, “They call me a . . . coward and a liar and a fool, you treat us all as equals and think you’re fair.”

  “I don’t think I’m fair,” said Jochabed. “I think I’m bored. Aren’t you?”

  “Come without them sometime, Mother,” said Moses. “You I’m glad to see.”

  “Only because she doesn’t expect anything of you,” said Aaron.

  Miriam was not so calm. “Do you know how Israelite women are treated, when they go anywhere alone? The insult, the danger? Is that what you want for her?”

  “It wasn’t my decision when she . . . moved back into the village,” said Moses.

  “Back to her own people,” said Miriam. “Where you belong.”

  “No,” said Aaron. “He belongs here, in the palace—where God put him.”

  “Can’t you two even agree on what you want to . . . force me to become?” said Moses.

  “And still you go on,” said Jochabed.

  “No, let’s not go on,” said Moses. “Let’s finish it. Tell me what you want from me, what you . . . think you have a right to have, as my . . . birth family. I’ll give it to you if I can, deny it if it’s beyond my power, and then we’re finished. Do you understand?”

  “We’ll never be finished,” said Miriam.

  “We already are finished. You’ll never come to this . . . palace again. So ask for what you want and have done with it.”

  “We don’t come here for favors, you fool,” said Miriam.

  “So . . . your wish is to call the . . . son of Pharaoh a fool and not be punished,” said Moses. “Very well, I grant your wish. I pardon your treason. Now it’s your turn, Aaron.”

  “We are trying to save you from destruction,” said Miriam.

  “I’m not,” said Aaron. “I’m trying to save Israel.”

  “Israel’s out there, scattered through the . . . villages of Egypt,” said Moses. “Working as scribes and artisans all over the . . . kingdom. A few herdsmen . . . keeping up the old ways, but mostly your people are just like other Egyptians except you insist on . . . keeping your own language and you insist on . . . keeping your own . . . god. In another generation or two even those . . . differences will be gone. You’re trying to save a . . . people who don’t want to be saved.”

  Miriam and Aaron looked at each other in obvious amazement. “He’s not a fool,” said Miriam. “He understands completely.”

  “He misses the point,” Aaron retorted. “Some Israelites are getting swallowed up in Egypt, it’s true, but they’re only fooling themselves. The Egyptians never allow foreigners to become Egyptian. In their eyes we’re always barbarians. And we in particular are slaves and will remain slaves. Whenever they want, they’ll turn on us and destroy us. They killed our babies at the time when you were born. They’ll strike against us again, if they can.”

  “That’s why we have to get Israel out of Egypt,” said Miriam. “Back to Canaan where we belong.”

  “No,” said Aaron. “God has chosen us to be the greatest nation in the world. Egypt is an unworthy, idolatrous people. Now God has raised up an Israelite to be Pharaoh someday. God has given him triumphs in battle, the acclaim of the Egyptian people. It’s time for Moses to raise the Israelites out of slavery and set them in their proper place, as rulers and judges, kings and priests.”

  Moses burst out laughing. “You really are children. You have no idea of how . . . power works, or who has it, or what you can actually . . . do with it.”

  “I know that when Joseph was in a position of power, he raised up his brothers to share that power with him, even though they had done him wrong,” said Aaron. “While you treat your family and your people with contempt, even though they have done you no harm at all.”

  “Joseph’s brothers weren’t slaves,” said Moses. “And the Pharaoh of that time was not Egyptian. And there were only eleven . . . brothers, not the thousands of people who call themselves Israelites now. And Joseph wasn’t . . . thrown into the river as a baby and adopted by the . . . daughter of Pharaoh and raised in the . . . palace as her son!”

  Jochabed struggled to her feet, filled with rage. “How dare you! Thrown into the river!”

  Moses regretted his words at once. “Forgive me, Mother, that’s the way Hatshepsut speaks of it and I—”

  “Does she tell you whose edict passed a sentence of death on you?”

  “Her father, of course, in response to the people’s—”

  “In response to the people! What kind of king is that, who makes his laws to fit the most evil whims of his people?”

  “The only kind of . . . king that stays in power,” said Moses.

  “How would you know?” said Jochabed. “You’ve never seen another kind. You’ve never seen real leadership.”

  “And you have?” said Moses.

  “I’ve done it myself!” Jochabed answered. “I was pregnant with a baby that God had told my husband would be a boy. He was going to be killed if I didn’t do something. So I prayed, and an idea came to me. Noah! The ark! To keep you safe from a flood of hate! I put you on the water, I trusted in the Lord. Others told me I had killed you with my own hands, but I paid no attention to them. I did what God put it in my heart to do.”

  “I can’t see what that has to do with the . . . power of kings,” said Moses.

  “You see perfectly well, you just don’t like it,” said Jochabed. “And you don’t like it because I am holding kings to a higher standard than your precious Hatshepsut will ever even try to measure up to. I don’t think she even knows the standard exists.”

  Moses burned with anger and part of him wanted to lash out, silence her with words. But there was another part of him, the perpetual student, the unrelenting questioner who had often reduced Hatshepsut and his teachers to consternation as they found that he could always take them to the limits of their knowledge with his demand for answers. Jochabed was saying something interesting, and he had to hear the end of it. Unlike Aaron and Miriam, who were forever singing the same tune, Jochabed rarely spoke anything but affection to him. So he did not interrupt her words, outrageous as they were.

  “A true leader finds out what will be good for his people,” said Jochabed, “and then shapes laws that will help achieve that good purpose. If the people don’t understand what he’s doing, he persuades them if he can. If they refuse to be persuaded, then he acts for their good anyway. And if doing this costs him his power, then he would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office.”

  “If only things were ever that . . . clear,” said Moses.

  “Oh, I know where the problems are,” said Jochabed. “Most of the time you don’t know what’s good for the people. You make your best guess, but you know you might be wrong. But there are times when you do know, as I knew what God expected me to do for you, and then I bent for no one, not my husband, not the elders, not even my own heart that could hardly bear to put you out on the water and let you drift away.”

  “Miriam and Aaron are . . . telling me God’s will?” asked Moses. “They can’t even agree . . . between them what I ought to do. Send Israel out of Egypt or raise them up to be overlords over the Egyptians! Both of these are . . . foolish dreams. To attempt even to free Israel from . . . slavery would mean the end of Hatshepsut’s reign as Pharaoh. Don’t you understand how . . . precarious her position is? The priests of Karnak would . . . cease to stand with her. She would have to bring a man onto the . . . throne beside her. The most likely . . . candidate for that role is a conniving little snake named Tuthmose, who showed a talent for war when I was . . . teaching him as a child. The soldiers . . . love him but he grew up nursing a deep . . . loathing for me precisely because I am an Israelite. If Hatshepsut weakens enough that she has to . . . share her throne with him, I will no longer be heir. If I’m not strangled or . . . poisoned, I’ll become a . . . servant of the household, and when Hatshepsut . . . dies I’ll be lucky if I’m allowed to go on living as a . . . slave.”