"Put no trust in a brother, acknowledge no one as a friend, do not raise up for yourself intimate companions, for nothing is to be gained from them."
-The Teachings of Amenemhet
"'Who made you a ruler and judge over us?'"
-Exodus 2:14
Rameses tries not to remember the days and weeks following Moses's flight. He tries not to remember the new creases and lines in Father's face, Mother's puffy eyes and seclusion, Hotep and Huy's poorly concealed delight. Moses might have been safer, had he stayed. It was doubtful Father truly would have his beloved son executed over the death of one taskmaster. But if Moses had survived the desert and desired to come home…Even Father had no answer for what would happen to him, then. And Father had fewer and fewer answers as the days wore on.
By the time his father could not rise from bed any longer, Rameses was accustomed to sitting in his favorite statue's lap, brooding over the horizon. Most of his memories from this time are the sights of Thebes and the waning phases of the moon rising above the city. If he looked far enough, if he sat long enough, perhaps he would see Moses stumbling up the palace stairs.
But life and death went on, the only things they knew how to do. And Moses did not return, lost to the desert storms.
The days following Father's death were long.
Rameses had gone to pay his respects in the final days. His father, weak in illness though he was, had been strong and unafraid until the end, ready for the next world. He had searched for Rameses's hand, and Rameses had been quick to place it in his father's dry palm.
"I know you will do well by the Dynasty," was all that the pharoh said. Father had retracted his papery hand then, and at Mother's nod, mother and son left him to his rest. The falcon had flown to heaven three days later, and Rameses had not time to be bitter. He had a throne to ascend.
It was the first and only time he had let his beard grow, mourning a father he had never managed to impress. When the palace gates closed and Rameses set out on his grand Nile tour of the kingdom, his heart was calm. He had been born for this. Divinity was his calling. Not Setau's. Not Mehy's. Not even Moses's. And he would bring their proud history even greater glory. Father, in the next world, would see and smile.
The coronation itself took place in Thebes, on familiar soil, once the tour was complete, at the end of the Season of Harvest. Stony-faced, Rameses allowed the purifying waters to wash over him, felt the oils anoint him, let himself be transformed from man into god. Had Hotep, had Huy seen godhood pass through him and possess him while they performed their duties? Rameses had surely felt it. By the time the eight crowns of Egypt adorned his head, after the inheritance of Horus, after releasing the birds into the four cardinal directions, by the time the banquet began, Rameses felt ready to usher in a new dawn for Egypt. The funeral was still a long way off, but the future would not wait.
"The justice of Ra is powerful—chosen of Ra."
"Ra has fashioned him, beloved of Amun."
"The strong bull, beloved of right, truth."
"Protector of Egypt who curbs foreign lands."
"Rich in years—great in victories."
"Rameses II."
His new names, rather than weighing him down, filled him with hope. He had been chosen. He was divine. He had survived, beaten the odds, to claim this right.
He wishes Moses could have feasted with him. He wishes his memory had included his second-hand second-born reclining on his chair, shoveling ox meat into his mouth chased by beer, rejecting any napkins servants attempted to offer him. He wishes they could have sneaked off at some point to torment the priests one final time, maybe by—maybe by—
Rameses has no idea what they would have done. Moses always knew how to make him laugh. And Moses had not been there.
Moses would have been married, too, by the time Nefertari was confined for childbirth. Several potential wives had been introduced to him in his later teen years, but none of them had lasted. Rameses and Moses were too excitable, out swimming or hunting in the marshes or with other prettier women, and Moses had the impatience of youth. He was not ready, Father always said, but with a certain fondness that he seemed to reserve only for his second son.
Rameses could have used Moses's wit and easygoing nature while he waited to hear the news. From his knowledge of the priesthood, both in his studies as a child in the kap and from his brief time as Prince Regent, he knew of the charms, the spells, the medical procedures involved in childbirth. But reality was another story, and images of Hotep and Huy sabotaging the birth in the name of petty revenge haunted him as the hours passed.
But it had not gone that way. She had survived. And his son—a son!—had survived, as well. The fourteen days he had to wait to see them were excruciating. Then, he cared so little for news of the Sherden pirates attacking their cargo ships, for repressing slave revolts, for reviewing masonry orders of his great building projects. When Huy appeared with a greasy smile and informed him that Nefertari and the child were ready for him, it took all of Rameses's self-restraint to keep his steps measured, his shoulders back and head high.
He has never forgotten his first sight of Amun-her-khepshef, his small face blinking intelligent dark eyes at him from nestled in Nefertari's arms. While the feeling, the memory of his soft baby skin has shifted as his son has grown and strengthened into a fine young boy, that first blink, that first slow yawn and quiet mewling cry is burned into Rameses's ears and eyes.
He is not a man to cry, and he did not. New children are now familiar to him, a continuous masculine pride and a dwindling anxiety. But giving Amun-her-khepshef his first blessing, the blessing that his own father must have given him once, brought him to a new understanding of emotion.
As Ra is the father of mankind, Rameses is the father of Egypt. His children would know their father's love and pride until the end of days. He will not make his own father's mistake.
He did not think of Moses when he asked Nefertari if he could hold his son. But in this volley of recollections storming the gates of his brain, this memory comes to mind all the same.
When the day of Seti I's funeral arrived, it came as a certain peace. After the initial funerary procession, it had taken much longer than the traditional seventy days to prepare the body for burial. The cold acceptance in Rameses's chest of his father's death had, as the hundredth day come on, shifted into nervousness, then, after the birth of his son, descended into impatience. As long as Father remained unprepared for the afterlife, there was still a chance that his ka would continue to haunt his first-born son.
The day of the funeral dawned sweltering hot. As the men poured milk on the path of the procession, the soil soaked up the libations within seconds. The dust the mourners heaped on their heads in between wails crumbled in their fingers, and Rameses's own tongue sat in his mouth like a dry leaf. He willed cool breezes, channeled the wind, but sweat trickled down his forehead all the same under his khat headdress. The air would not bend to his will.
Frustration accompanies this flash of memory. His eyes darted everywhere: first to the mourners, beating their chests and keening; then to the offering stalls set up along the route, the air sizzling with sunlight and roasted duck; then to the slaves bearing the boat; then to his father; then back at the mourners. It was a whirlwind to his senses, and it never seemed to end. He remembers it taking an eternity and a half to reach the Valley of the Kings.
Seti I's mummy, raised upright to greet the sun, takes up the whole of Rameses's remembrance at this time. He cannot remember the muu-dancers whirling around his father's body, in front of the tomb, around Hotep and Huy. He cannot remember how he coughed when sand whirled around the mummy and blew into his mouth—a good omen, some priests later said. He does remember staring into the blank eyes, taking deep breaths, clearing his energy of resentment. The man is dead. Rameses will not have to see him for a long time. And when he does, he will go with a light heart and a new legacy.
The opening of the mouth is what he remembers most.
Rameses was the sem priest for this ceremony, and it was a role he relished. He touched his father's nose, to breathe in the afterlife. He touched his father's mouth, to speak, to yell. He touched his father's ear, to hear the Egyptian people cry for him, sing praises of his son. He touched his father's eyes, to look upon a new history from afar. Father would go into the afterlife aware of what is beginning.
When Rameses descended into Father's tomb, once the workers had placed the mummy into the sarcophagus, the sun warming his back gave him strength, peace of mind. It was now his turn to rule. And someday, when he is laid to rest in the tomb he has already been consulting the architects to design, he will go to the other world with even more contentment, the satisfaction in knowing he has ruled well.
He had brought more offerings than needed. Moses would have liked him to do so, for him, Rameses imagined.
He stepped out of the tomb, the last mourner to do so, and the workers sealed the entrance behind him. The sun was unrelenting, but perhaps more bearable than it was earlier. The reign of Rameses II had truly begun, Ra smiling his scorching praise on Egypt, and all was as it should have been.
Rameses does not truly remember the Battle of Kadesh, but his people will not let him forget it. There are steles, etchings, stories, songs for a battle that did not end well. Rameses cannot decide if he should be affronted or infuriated by the sheer amount of material circulating his kingdom, or if he should be pleased that his people view him as a peace-bringer. He would rather be thought of as a warrior, he thinks.
But the fear that had clenched his heart when he stood, alone save Menena his shield-bearer, surrounded on all sides by Hittite charioteers, that fear had not been the fear of a warrior. He does not think of this moment often.
When the support troops finally arrived, Rameses had turned that fear into action. His own throat was hoarse for days upon returning to his longed-for palace, partly due to smoke, partly due to his own war bellows and fervent shouted prayers to Amun. The blood sticking to his body splattered red on his blue armor must have made him a godly sight as he reproached his first army, the cowards who had not risked joining him. What had he said?
"Have I not done good to any of you, that you should leave me alone in the midst of battle? You are lucky to be alive at all!"
He had screamed something like that, something furious, something that he hoped had not betrayed his fear. Rameses had demanded his loyal horses eat with him at mealtimes in the palace for weeks after that, with Menena welcome to join the royal family, for standing true and strong by him in his darkest hour. It had been, perhaps, a fit of frightened madness that had compelled him to keep the stablemaster bringing his mounts up the monumental stairs of the palace for so long a time. But it had kept his soldiers in check, as munition and training went on in Pi-Rameses, formerly the summer palace of his and Moses's youth, whose design and building he has slaved over for years. They would never dare to abandon their pharaoh again.
That fear, that terrible, suffocating fear of being left alone, vulnerable and almost mortal, had never haunted him so profoundly. In his youth, he had never been one to cry out for company in the darkness of his rooms in the kap; that had been Moses's weakness. Rameses had been the source of comfort for Moses; for Setau; for the half-sisters; once, even, for Mehy. He had hushed them quickly and quietly. When Moses, sobbing at the age of seven after a nightmare of fire and living trees, had sought him out even though he was too old for such nonsense, Rameses had let him sleep in his bed with him, humming the tune Moses always seemed to whistle, the one from the wet nurse he can no longer remember. Solitude had never been Rameses's greatest discomfort.
But when Rameses returned home from Kadesh with his troops silent and diligent behind him, when he set the Blue Crown of war aside in the privacy of his own chambers, it was not long before he felt the sensation of loneliness sinking its claws into his spine. He wished—
He could not have shame. He was Pharaoh, Egypt, the morning and the evening star. With an even stride, he made his way to the kap. As if sensing the divine presence of his father, Amun-her-khepshef was standing in the main foyer, hunched over a problem set on his slate. Rameses took a measured breath, smiled, and the slate clattered to the tiles as his son raced into his arms.
But Rameses is not trapped in the past. He is here, seated on his throne, his son by his side. It is the present, and it is now when the memories assault him.
In bursts like sunbeams, these memories flash through Rameses's mind, flitting one after another, surges of emotion and color too quick to remember with the proper lingering care. It is his son's birthday, and the chaos of music and movement and the cheers of the crowd is equal parts delightful and distracting. But what is the most disconcerting, the thing that sends these confusing remembrances coming into his mind all at once in a flurry of painful hope that Rameses has long thought he had outgrown, is a guest. The dancers weaving their way through the banquet hall keep giving him glimpses of a man, but every time their colored banners twirl, he can only make out fragments. A sun-beaten wrist. A red robe. A shepherd's staff. A curly beard.
By the time the dancers and musicians stop their relentless motion, Rameses is certain. His heart is so full he fears it will choke him to death, burst in his chest like a fig between teeth. He dimly becomes aware that his son has inclined his head his way, wishing to ask, but Rameses is already stampeding down the throne steps, undignified with electric skin.
His blood feels like it wants to burn his veins dry.
The dancers scurry out of his way as he calls out to his brother, his brother, it must be him. He can't contain his smile, his lips about to crack. This is beyond happiness. This is beyond elation. This is joy, the impossibility of reality fighting back a decade of nightmares and visceral hypotheticals.
"Rameses?" And yes, it's his brother's voice. It is Moses, his face scraggly like someone has died and he is in mourning, his hair curling around his ears like a peasant, his heavy robes ridiculous and dripping sand on the tiles, but it is his voice, and his face, and those are his brother's arms around him. Rameses is embracing the dead, and in this moment, he forgets where he is. His people watch the pharaoh become human, and he has no care for their shock. They are chattering at each other, heedless of the eyes and ears, like little boys again, and Moses laughs, and it's the holiest music.
They are older now, more lines in their faces—his, at least—and Moses's is weathered, but both are smiling, happy to be alive. Rameses wants to know all, but that is a time for later. He will hold another banquet tomorrow afternoon, and tonight there will be revels—
Hotep and Huy clear their throats behind him, and Rameses is in such high spirits he does not have time to be irritated with their clear disdain for a prince of the blood returned home. "Be still," he commands, but his voice is light-hearted. "Pharaoh speaks. I am the morning and the evening star," he says, more memories flying from his lips. He holds up a hand to stop Moses's modest protests. "It shall be as I say. I pardon forever all crimes from which he stands accused, and will have it known that he is our brother," the word chokes him for a moment, "Moses, prince of Egypt."
There is silence from the crowd, awed by Pharaoh's mercy. There is silence from Moses. It is not a grateful silence. Rameses's hands still grip Moses's shoulders, the smile waiting on his face.
"Rameses," Moses says, drawing in a deep breath, and it is only now that Rameses looks behind his brother to see a woman, her face vaguely tapping at his memory, "in my heart you are my brother. But things cannot be as they were."
"I see no reason why not," Rameses laughs, but the smile is beginning to freeze on his face, like it has been held there for too long.
Moses's eyes are unfamiliar to him like this, serious and without a trace of mirth. "You know I am a Hebrew," he proclaims, loud enough for the guests to begin murmuring, and shock ripples through Rameses's stomach, "and the God of the Hebrews came to me."
"What?" His hands, at last, slip from his brother's shoulders. The words have not registered, but Moses has not finished.
"He commands," Moses says, the look on his face hard and closed, the face of a secret-keeper, "that you let his people go."
The guests are not subtle in their murmurs, his joy slipping into cold confusion. "Commands?" Rameses steps back and recoils, does not realize he has done so. His hands are on his hips, disdain rolling from his frame, and this is not a position he has taken for a long, long time. The last time he had stood like this, he had been eleven and Moses had been eight, and Moses was throwing a tantrum because Rameses had broken his favorite spinning top. "I demand an apology!" Moses had cried, tears and snot dripping down his face, and Rameses had laughed to see such a disgusting sight, to hear such an outlandish request of the successor to the Egyptian throne.
Moses must recognize the pose, but he does not flinch. "Behold," he says, raising his staff, his voice so somber that Rameses wants to laugh all over again, "the power of God."
Rameses watches, suitably unimpressed, as the shepherd's staff slides from Moses's grasp and looks like a serpent. Whatever crazy nomads' god Moses has found while wandering the desert or marshes or who-knows-where, Moses has given his body, soul, and salvation to it. Rameses takes a deep breath. If Moses had succumbed to madness in the years since his presumed death, things would be much harder and much more embarrassing. But rebellious, temporary blasphemy is to be expected.
Rameses ascends his throne once more and sets Hotep and Huy to task. They will not impress Moses, who always had the same contempt for them as he. But they will calm the gossiping crowds, and the magic will entertain his son. As he gestures for Amun-her-khepshef to sit by his side, he takes the boy into the crook of his arm and gives him a single, reassuring squeeze. With his elation cooling into something that tastes almost like disappointment, he can remember once more that it is his son's birthday.
The two of them watch the spectacle with pleasure, and by the time Rameses gestures for Moses to follow him, the banquet is in fine spirits once again.
He forces himself to laugh once they are behind closed doors. "I know you," he says, confidence growing with each step. This man he calls brother is the only person beyond himself of whom he can claim understanding. Time means little when it comes to immortal family. "What's this really about?" The air is cooler when he removes his khat, a quick bite of fresh air restoring sense to the world.
And Moses cannot join the real world. He disparages the rising walls of the large temples, the distant colossal statues almost complete, the visions of a growing and thriving kingdom, and does not see the greater Egypt, the expansion upon what Father had accomplished. It is his shortcoming as the second-born. It is petty jealousy. It is a thing from childhood, and Rameses laughs it off, when the truth is he and Moses are too old for games such as these.
Another memory coursing past his eyes. He can almost see it as Moses stands in front of him.
"I have to maintain the ancient traditions," Rameses explains slowly, before the memory can get the best of him. He has explained this before, to his son. And his own father had explained it to him, countless times. "I bear the weight of my father's crown."
"Do you still not understand what Seti was?" Moses accuses him, and the word, the disrespectful naming of their father digs somewhere deep in his chest.
"He was—" it is easier to admit in public, but he is unused to such conversations with his brother, "—a great leader." His father's ka must surely smile on him.
But when Moses accuses him of being like his father, the father whom he has just been forced to praise, Rameses sees red.
Perhaps Moses had not put it into such terms. He must have been going on about the plight of the Hebrew workers, something he seemed obsessed with. He has probably tormented himself for a decade, after hearing somewhere that he is a Hebrew. But to say that Rameses is causing suffering the way his father had, to compare the two of them without raising Rameses up…
Moses knows this is a low blow. Moses knows this is a point not to be touched, like his big ears and childhood shaved head. And yet, and yet, and yet.
The memories assault his vision. This is not the Moses he knows. But only Moses could aggravate him in such a way. Only Moses could know where to stick his sharp little nails. Only a brother's love could twist into a brother's cruel revenge.
Moses did not come here, however, to be a brother. That much is clear, now. And it hurts, and the pain makes him angry.
"So," Rameses finally manages to say. "You have returned…" He cannot remember the face of the murdered taskmaster all those years ago. "Only to free them."
It is a long moment of silence that stretches between them, their shared history and diverging paths buzzing in the space that separates their bodies. Slowly, painfully slowly but much too fast, Moses removes the turquoise ring that Rameses has only just noticed still on his finger—no, not any longer. It jangles, abrupt and loud, onto his father's old throne.
"I'm sorry."
A thousand times Moses has apologized for stupid, inconsiderate things. A thousand times Rameses has forgiven him, sometimes with a playful slap on the cheek, other times with an arm slung around his shoulder. The apology irritates him now more than any other slight could have. With a ginger, delicate touch, Rameses picks up the ring, holds it in front of his eyes. Turquoise and gold from another life, another banquet, another memory juxtaposes against Moses's downcast expression from where he hides behind it.
Memories bombard him, howling their joys and their sorrows and their laughter and their screams and their tears and the cacophony of sensation, emotion for a moment spins the room. Moses is as still as a statue, like the mummy in Father's sarcophagus, like a carving in a wall that will one day be rubbed out by an overambitious king. Rameses's stomach lurches, then boils, his fingers trembling around the ring that should have stayed in Egypt for the rest of time, but a pharaoh cannot show weakness, a pharaoh cannot cry. "Yes…I had hoped—"
But no, not yet. A lifetime passes before him, then begins again. The sounds and smells of Egypt accost him, and Moses is standing still, and the turquoise is sickly green-blue like a drowned corpse. It is just an instant, it is two brothers' entire lives spinning ahead of them, each in opposite directions, and if he stares long enough, perhaps he can pluck out Moses's secrets from his mind, find out what has changed him these past ten years, who that woman he left in the banquet hall is, why he must come back, come home, after all this time only to send a sword through his heart—The thoughts are too loud, the memories too constant—
Be still!
When Rameses finds words, rises, it is Pharaoh who speaks. "I do not know this God," he says, voice like a raised scimitar. He places his khat back on his skull, finality in the gesture. He stalks over to Moses, and in a remnant of their childhood, the part of Rameses that could never resist a final punch long after the matter was settled, he shoves the man's chest. "Neither will I let your people go."
"Rameses, please, you must listen—"
"I will not be the weak link!" Rameses shouts, voice cracking, whirling around to stab an accusing finger at the infuriatingly peacemaking Moses, a joker who has never been to war, a man who has never had such responsibility, such pressure, such anything. A man who is no brother Rameses has ever known stands in front of him, stepping on the memory of their dead father. Rameses is pharaoh now, and neither man holds power over him now. He pushes open the doors. The banquet stretches out before him, dance and laughter and pleasing melodies humming their way towards him. Normalcy. Joy. Family.
What are these things, now?
"Tell your people," he says, struggling to calm his tone, speaking of slaves he has not thought of twice these past thirty-three years, "that as of today, their workload has been doubled, thanks to your God. Or is it thanks to you?"
With the parting words of a child winning a fight, Rameses slams the door behind him, hiding Moses's shining dark eyes, unfamiliar garb, magician's staff, curling hair.
Rameses does not know him, this man he once called brother. But he does know his heart has been hardened, smooth like the walls of his palace and five times as durable. He will not admit that only a brother can tear down walls as easily as Rameses can build them.
[end]
