Moses by Howard Fast

are never slaves enough. He took ten thousand slaves in the war against the Sea People in Libya, and five thousand more from the land of Kush, and still it is not enough. Thousands of our own people are sold for debt—but never enough, never enough. So it was that some twenty years ago his soldiers went into the Land of Goshen and told the desert people there that the God Ramses had taken ownership of them and now they would work for him without pay. At first some of them resisted, but when a few hundred were hanged and a few hundred whipped, the resistance came to an end. Some of them fled back into the desert, but not many—for it is a long time since they lived in the desert and they fear it and have forgotten its ways. And soon they will forget that they were ever free people and they will be content to be slaves. So it goes, Moses.”
    â€œBut they were strangers and they lived among us,” Moses said. “Will the gods forgive us for this?”
    â€œThe gods forgive all kinds of things, Moses, and for my part, I am a builder and I need workmen.” He shrugged and smiled narrowly. “A man who broods about right and wrong will soon take leave of his own senses. The world is what it is, Moses.”
    But Moses, on his part, felt that he was coming to know less of what the world was; or perhaps it was the world that was taking shape before his eyes for the first time—a real world, boundless and chaotic and so far meaningless. One day in the market place had washed away his own sense of being grossly misused, and had given him a measure against a world where not all were princely; and now the slave, to whom he had never paid much attention was becoming a symbolic and constant factor in his thoughts.
    Thus he passed away the hours while the barge slid through one twisting waterway and then another. So often were they lost, seemingly, in a wilderness of marsh grass and bulrushes that Moses came to think that the helmsmen steered by some magic code; yet beyond that he realized the true answer—that here he was among men of wonderful skill and knowledge whereas he, as a prince of Egypt, had only a smattering of reading, writing and arithmetic, a store of mixed history and legend, some skill with weapons, and perhaps a hundred themes committed to memory from the Book of the Dead— none of it of great practical use. How often he had been warned to stay out of this great marsh, where one could so easily be lost for ever; yet to these men it was as familiar as the corridors of the palace were to him.
    Even Neph had forgotten him now. The four engineers had spread plans upon the deck, and their discussion of this and that problem went on endlessly. Left to himself, Moses went to the bow and curled up there, one arm hooked in the bronze mooring ring, and there he remained until Neph called him to share their morning meal of bread, figs and wine. He discovered he was very hungry and ate all they gave him, indifferent to their smiles at his wolfish appetite.
    While they were eating, they came in sight of their destination, a flat island about two acres in size. The granary already thrust up its brown brick walls from six to ten feet above the land, and here and there, on rough scaffolding, bricklayers were at work. The bricklayers, Moses decided, were Egyptian; but other men, unloading bricks from a barge tied up to a makeshift dock, must have been from the slave people Neph spoke of, for not only did they wear unkempt and tangled black beards and long hair gathered by a knot of leather, not only were they lean to the point of emaciation, but here and there among them overseers stood and watched their work, overseers who carried swords in their belts and on thongs around their necks three-foot leather whips.
    As the oarsmen eased their barge up to the dock, Moses noticed many other freight barges drawn up on the muddy shore of the island, and from these more bearded slaves were unloading crushed