Moses by Howard Fast Page A

too. When night fell, they would slip down the outside stairs of the palace to the stone quays where the royal barges were docked, drop noiselessly into the warm water, and swim out—the moment tingling with the possibility that they might encounter a crocodile that had come up out of the wild marshes of the Delta.
    Sometimes the bolder among their sisters joined them, and it was thus that one night a girl called Neftu-Isis, round and ripe and budding in her womanhood, swam next to Moses. Something real or fancied frightened her and she threw her arms around him, the two of them sinking beneath the water; and he, returning her embrace, finding it like no other touch of a woman’s hands, new and wonderful and causing his whole body to tremble, held on to her even when they rose above the water again, reassuring her that there was nothing to fear—and anyway here he was, Moses, and a match for anything.
    â€œYou’re so strong,” she said, as if those words were never spoken by a woman before, and he replied, treading water with calculated ease,
    â€œOh, I don’t know. I suppose I swim fairly well.”
    She herself swam like a fish, having been raised in and out of the palace pools and fountains, but she hastened to declare, “And I swim badly, Prince of Egypt, don’t I? And I tire so easily.”
    He thought her modest and enchanting, her long black hair spreading fanwise around her head in the water, and for the first time the sight of a girl’s breasts excited him. He begged her to rest on him, and with long, easy strokes he swam back to the quays. He was not sure that chance brought him to a different quay than they had embarked from. It was closer, in any case, and as the night air was cooling, he put his arms around her to warm her. They lay side by side on the stone floor of the quay, the rocks beneath them still warm from the sun, and it never occurred to Moses that she knew so much more of making love than he did. Yet she was not backward with her knowledge and, since he knew practically nothing to speak of, he was filled with worship and adoration. Though he was younger than she—she was past fourteen, some nine months from the age of marriage—he took her to his heart, decided that she was the only woman he would ever love, and lived for at least a week in a transport of joy.
    It was not long before he overheard some of his royal cousins talking about her, and heard too that she had been betrothed some six months to a duke of Philistia—for Ramses used his daughters, as he did so many other people, to build political bridges. His broken heart somehow healed, but not without aid from one or another of the many princesses; and since in their code of living no store was set on virginity and because so much love had been pent up inside him, he loved generously and easily.
    But he loved without being in love, and the singular wonder of the first moment was not repeated. Yet he was not like some of his royal cousins who drove themselves after women—perhaps in imitation of or perhaps in competition with their godly sire; Moses was an anomaly in, the Great House of the king, a prince with a very small store of arrogance; and perhaps for that very reason, women turned to him with a regard his age hardly warranted.
    But this modestywhich—won him not only the love of women but also the friendship of some of the gentler, if usually younger, of his royal brothers—did not spring fullgrown; it was helped to develop by the princely astronomers who had, in a measure, made him their ward. Whatever the ultimate goal they planned—the ultimate destination they chose for Moses and for themselves—it remained unrevealed to the boy; and as circumstances developed, it would so remain for many years. He accepted their apparent love for him or the strange reverence they bore him because they were gentle people and the creed they taught him was a gentle creed.
    They